Free Signals of Distress by Jim Crace Page B

touched or kissed him in return.
He’d had to serve himself. There was no happiness in that. Yet Miggy – who, so far, refused to kiss – made Ralph Parkiss feel as fragile as a blown egg. And happy too. He
didn’t mind her boyish clothes, her chilled, unsmiling face, her lack of decoration, her stillness and her secrecy. Such rapt, unconscious gravity was irresistible. Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.
    ‘What will we do then?’
    ‘You can help me if you want.’
    He helped her pull the cow out from the rocks and coax it down the incline to the path. He used a strip of gorse to beat the cow forward. He even risked a playful gorsing of Miggy’s
thighs. Try as she might she couldn’t stop her smiles. Miggy had two creatures captive on her rope, the heifer and the man. She felt as mossy as the ground. She’d give Ralph a kiss of
thanks when she got home for helping with the cow. Where was the harm in that? Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.
    They were halfway to the safety of the cottage and thinking only of themselves when Aymer Smith, touting his Duty along the coast, caught sight of them. He was in a cheerful mood. What a relief
it was for him to be free of the bells, the guests, the corridors of the inn, to walk, and contemplate the fascinations of the coast. He had noticed, as he progressed away from Wherrytown, how one
mile differed from the next, how landscape could transform in minutes from welcoming to inhospitable, how vegetation changed from rich to meagre, how time appeared to wind back on itself so that
the 1836 of Wherrytown, its modest comforts and its steadiness, seemed a hundred years away as he approached Dry Manston. There weren’t many trees for shelter now. And what trees there were,
compared to those around the town, were angular. They shrank and thickened; they turned their trunks against the wind, and wore more bark. The people did the same. Aymer could regard himself as
lean and willowy compared to them.
    He called to Ralph and Miggy to wait for him, with a directness and informality that in a town would be considered improper. A morning out of Wherrytown had taught him that the diffidence and
the reverence that marked the Spirit of the Age when strangers of two classes or two sexes met on city streets had not yet migrated here. The kelping families he’d encountered hadn’t
been paralysed by such a visitor. They didn’t gape or turn away. They spoke to him openly, shook his hand and asked unsolicited questions. Boys and girls – children in nothing else but
size – investigated him, pulling his clothes, pressing the leather of his boots, and treated Whip, Aymer’s new companion, to strips of fish, yet didn’t offer Aymer anything to
drink.
    He rehearsed with their parents the innovations in the soap industry, and what it meant for kelpers. ‘We’ll manage without kelp, God willing,’ they said. ‘The
fishing’s good enough these last few years. There’s pilchards up tonight and we’ll do well.’ Aymer wondered why he’d come so far, with such a conscience, if the damage
to their lives when the patronage of Hector Smith & Sons was withdrawn would be so inconsequential. Perhaps, if they had offered some brief signs of dismay, he would have felt less
slighted.
    ‘You’ll miss the money, surely?’
    ‘Hah! Mr Howells has most of it!’
    The kelpers took Aymer’s shilling and some bars of soap, and called their daughters for inspection, the ugly and the lean, the comely and the plump, the sour and the sweet, and all of them
smiling wildly. This Kitty, fourteen years of age, was healthy and hard-working. She’d make a decent maid. This Mary, only ten, was useful round the house and would be glad of any work in
Hector Smith & Sons. This Janie, seventeen, could work as hard as any man, ‘Look at her muscles, Mr Smith!’ and she could wet-nurse, cook or scrub. Did Aymer know of anyone who
could offer