‘All the more reason not to creep up on me like that,’ she answered tartly.
‘You sold all the fish?’
‘No, I gave ’em away to anyone who asked.’ And then, as if realising she wasn’t being very nice, Daisy moderated her tone, adding, ‘What’s the matter anyway? I’m sure you must have better things to do than to wait for me to come back from Boldon.’
‘Not really.’
Alf Hardy was a typical fisherman, barrel-chested with massive forearms and a body that looked as though it was built for endurance and would be capable of seemingly boundless energy, but now he appeared almost bashful.
Daisy stared at him. She had grown up treating Alf as one of her brothers - he was her youngest brother’s best friend after all and eight years older than herself - but lately she had sensed a subtle shift in their easy relationship. It had been enough to cause her to become aware of him in a way she hadn’t been before, and now, as she gazed into his mild hazel eyes, she noticed his perennially red ears were glowing even more brightly than usual. He was embarrassed. Alf was
embarrassed
. And suddenly she was too, and for the life of her couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘I . . . I wanted a word with you, without all the others around.’ Alf shifted uneasily, and his fingers - spatulate and with the evidence of tar and scar tissue from where they had split when pulling the nets up and down as a young lad - bunched together as he began to wring his hands before suddenly stuffing them into his deep pockets. ‘I’ve bin tryin’ to see you alone for weeks but it’s like attemptin’ to get an audience with the old Queen herself.’
Daisy forced a smile. He liked her, Alf liked her - in
that
way. Suddenly everything became crystal clear. But how did she feel about him? She wasn’t sure. He was just . . . Alf. Dependable, kind, funny Alf. He and his old mother, who was a great friend of her grandmother, were almost part of Daisy’s family. She could barely remember her own mam who had died of the fever when she was a little bairn of three, just the misty memory remaining of a warm pair of arms and a soft voice singing her to sleep at night, along with the vague recollection of her father holding her very tight as she had cried and cried on being told her mam had gone to talk to the angels in heaven. It had been Alf’s mother who had stepped into the breach then and kept the household running for some years when it became obvious that the illness which had taken Daisy’s mam had also badly weakened her granny’s chest.
Daisy couldn’t remember a time when Alf and Mrs Hardy hadn’t been comfortably familiar figures by the fireside on those evenings when the fishing boats weren’t out. The two old women would gossip over Mrs Hardy’s homemade blackberry wine which she always brought with her, and Daisy’s da and brothers and Alf would smoke their pipes and down a pint or two of the bitter beer her da made and served from the old Grey Hen, or stroll along to the public house for a tankard of ale.
Even now, when all her brothers except Tom were married and spent their evenings by their own firesides, nothing seemed to have changed. But it had, she just hadn’t seen it till now. Tom had his eye on a lass in Whitburn, she’d heard her brother mention something to her da about it only the other day. And Alf liked her . . .
‘You must have guessed how I feel about you, lass? Everyone else has.’ Alf rubbed his nose, his voice rueful. ‘I didn’t want to say anythin’ afore but you’ll be sixteen come summer an’ plenty of lasses have bin courtin’ for a year or two by then.’
Daisy shook her head, blushing as she said, ‘I didn’t know.’
He wasn’t surprised she hadn’t known despite what he’d said. Hadn’t he argued as much when Tom had urged him to make his feelings plain? ‘She don’t think of me in that way, man. You know she don’t. Looks on me the same as you, as a brother.’
‘Then it’s high time you changed the way she thinks.’ Tom had been quite militant. ‘Years you’ve waited to speak, an’ that was right an’ proper with her bein’ so young an’ all, but she’s a grown lass now an’ bin runnin’ a household for years, don’t forget. Me da always said she’d be a beauty an’ he weren’t wrong, there’ll be plenty of lads sniffin’ about our Daisy. I know me an’ her always meet head on but you bring out the best in her, the softer side, an’ marriage’ll be good for her. An’ you, eh?’
‘Aye, but there’s more to bein’ wed an’ such than runnin’ a house. What if she don’t like me? You know, as a lad.’
‘Aw, man.’ Tom had been irritable with what he saw as his friend’s lack of gumption. ‘You’ve got your own boat an’ there’s only you an’ your mam in your cottage; I know any one of a number of lasses who’d jump at the chance to walk out with you. An’ your face wouldn’t crack no mirrors neither. Talk to her, for cryin’ out loud, you know she thinks a bit of you.’
Alf looked at Daisy who now had her head lowered as she scuffed the snow with the toe of one boot. Aye, she thought a bit of him, same as she did Tom and the rest of her brothers. But there were many different kinds of love, and never had this truth become so apparent to him as in the weeks and months since Daisy’s fourteenth birthday. He had given her a little wooden box with a seahorse pared on the lid. Six months he’d been working on it in any spare moments he got, whittling away after he’d found a suitable piece of wood until it was all smooth and shiny and as bonny as you’d buy in one of the fancy shops in the towns. And all his work had been worth it for the delight she’d shown. Fair barmy she’d gone.
And then she’d kissed him on the cheek. Just a bairn’s kiss, nothing more, but suddenly he’d known why he couldn’t work up an interest for long in any of the lasses who made it clear they were willing. He’d sat and looked at her that evening, all the time pretending everything was the same as normal but it wasn’t, not for him. And there was no going back.
Alf took a deep breath and then said evenly, ‘Well, lass, now you do know, what’s your answer? Can you see yerself learnin’ to look at me as a’ - he had been about to say ‘man’ but changed it to - ‘lad?’
There was silence for a moment, and then Daisy glanced at him as she said quietly, ‘I don’t know, Alf. I’m sorry, but I don’t know.’
He nodded. He’d hoped for more but at the bottom of him had been scared it would be less, that she would refuse him outright. ‘Aye, well, that’s all right. We’ve time.’ He raised his eyebrows and smiled weakly at her. ‘If me mam was here she’d add “God willing” to that, wouldn’t she?’
Daisy smiled back as she nodded, glad he wasn’t upset or angry.
By, but she was bonny. Alf’s eyes moved over the face in front of him, its texture as smooth as satin and its colour like warm honey with a blush on it. She’d been daintily appealing as a bairn, and as different in build from most of the big-boned fishergirls as chalk from cheese, but now . . . He gazed at her hair, her grey eyes, her small straight nose. Apart from her granny he had never seen anyone with truly grey eyes, but it wasn’t just their colour or their thick fringe of lashes which made them so bonny. They carried a luminescence, as if they were lit from within somehow.
‘I . . . I need to get back.’
‘Aye, ’course you do.’ Daisy’s voice had been nervous and made Alf belatedly aware he had been staring.
Had he frightened her? That was the last thing he wanted to do. He turned, beginning to follow the path which led to the village and talking as he did so. ‘I looked in on your granny afore I come up here. Made up the fire an’ left her suppin’ a drop of hot barley me mam sent.’
Daisy hesitated for a moment before falling into step beside him, acutely aware of the height and breadth of him and the overall maleness of his hard compact body. As Alf continued to talk she remained silent, but her head was whirling.
He wanted her. Alf wanted her. It made her feel funny. But he’d called in to make sure her granny was all right, and that was nice of him. But he
was
nice, she’d always known that. In fact, Alf hadn’t got it in him to be anything other than nice. Look how he had always listened to her. He had understood when she was sad because she had to miss so much schooling what with looking after her granny and the house and everything. Her da and brothers had said that learning was no use to a fishergirl, but if Alf had thought that he hadn’t said so. When she had told him she wanted to know things, to understand more about words and numbers and subjects like history and geography, he hadn’t guffawed and tweaked her chin and called her doo-lally like Tom had.
‘Don’t worry, lass.’ Alf was looking at her again but now it was the old brotherly Alf, not the young man with hot, hungry eyes. ‘I’m not goin’ to keep on at you, you take all the time you need. But I felt it was right I made me feelin’s plain, that’s all. You understand?’
Daisy nodded. Yes, she understood, of course she did, and it was only to be expected that a good-looking presentable man like him with his kindness and sense of humour and all the other things which made him Alf, would want to find someone and marry and have a family one day. It was the order of things and right and proper, and if she’d had her head screwed on she would have wondered why he hadn’t made his choice before this. And she wouldn’t have liked it if he
had
said he was going to wed someone else.
This moment of self-knowledge came as a shock, so much so that as they turned a corner and Daisy looked across the white fields in front of her and beyond to where the sea - hypnotic, beguiling and lethal - shimmered silver-blue and calm, she didn’t experience the usual rush of pleasure that told her she was nearly home. If she didn’t want Alf to court any other lass - and she didn’t - why hadn’t she agreed to start walking out with him?
Daisy continued to wrestle with her thoughts as she and Alf followed the path towards the village. Depending on the season this could prove an arduous struggle through thick glutinous mud, or at the height of summer be baked hard and dusty with buttercups and wild thyme at its edges, or yet again - like today - a mass of frozen ridges of black ice and snow.
It was another five minutes before they reached the sloping sand dunes, an enchanted place in summer when fringed with delicate spiky grasses and tiny bright flowers. Now the cottages were in front of them, looking, Daisy always felt, to be somehow strung together like rows of herrings in the smoke house. They faced the wide expanse of the North Sea, with nothing between to cushion the worst of the elements.
The track widened to a rough road and as Daisy walked down it with Alf she was experiencing an emotion hitherto unknown to her, that of shyness. It suddenly seemed wrong - no, not wrong, that wasn’t the right word, Daisy told herself silently, but she couldn’t think of one that fitted how she was feeling. But walking together like this, where folk could see them, made her feel that everyone knew what Alf had asked her.
Apart from one or two boats the small fishing fleet was in, and most of the fishermen were either seeing to damage on their craft or repairing their nets with big wooden needles threaded with cotton treated with creosote. Daisy hated using this cotton when she helped her da with the nets. If it wasn’t properly dried out her hands would be black in no time, and she would have to scrub them until they were raw to get the strong-smelling oil off her skin, and even then the smell would linger.
‘Bad couple of days with that storm blowin’ up out of nowhere.’ Alf’s eyes had swept down the higgledypiggledy line of boats, some pulled close to the cottages and others at varying distances from the water’s edge. ‘The boats took a beatin’ but we were lucky not to lose any.’
Daisy nodded. ‘Me granny was worried. Not that she let on, mind, but when you all didn’t come back the first night she had the candle burnin’ from dusk the second.’
‘Aye, well . . .’ Alf raised his hand to one or two of the fishermen who had called to him. ‘Likely it gives her a bit of comfort, same as me mam, but I’ve a mind it’d take more than a candle burnin’ to stop old Neptune havin’ his way if he decided your time was up.’
‘Alf!’ Daisy was shocked. She believed wholeheartedly in every one of the superstitions her mother had passed on to her with her milk, like her own mother with her. Everyone knew you couldn’t wash clothes on a day the menfolk went to sea in case you washed them away; same as a woman whistling was unlucky and watching the boats depart meant you’d be waiting for ever to see them come back. None of the old fishermen would allow a clergyman near their boat before it sailed - something Daisy had always secretly thought very strange, because weren’t the clergy supposed to be God’s ambassadors and go around doing only good? - and she had known from a small bairn never to mention the word ‘pig’ in front of her da or any of the other fishermen.
But the
candle
, that was the most important thing of all; it lit the way home for the boats, everyone knew that. Every fisherwoman in their village would make sure she had a candle in readiness for when her menfolk sailed, even if there was no food in the cupboard and she didn’t know where the next penny was coming from.