Silver Bay(57)
Author: Jojo Moyes

She had been carefully explaining the different flies in her little fabric roll and attaching them to her line when, not ten feet from us, making no sound except the gentle breaking of the waters, a huge black and white head surfaced. My breath lodged in my throat and my heart was thumping so hard that I thought the terrifying creature would hear it.

‘Aunt Kathleen,’ I whispered. My mother was asleep on a berth, her lipsticked mouth slightly open. I remember wondering fleetingly whether it was preferable to be asleep when you were killed so you wouldn’t know what had happened.

‘Wh-what’s that?’

I honestly thought we were about to be eaten. I could see what I thought were its teeth and its huge, assessing eye. I had seen the old engravings of malevolent sea creatures, had seen the broken-backed Maui II in the museum, testament to nature’s fury with man. This huge creature appeared to be weighing us up, as if we were some tempting seaborne morsel.

But my aunt just glanced behind her, then turned back to her bait. ‘That, sweetie, is just a humpback. Pay it no attention, it’s just being nosy. It’ll go soon enough.’

She paid it no more heed than a seagull. And, sure enough, some minutes later, the huge head slid back beneath the waves and the whale was gone.

And this is what I love about them: despite their might, their muscular power, their fearsome appearance, they are among the most benign creatures. They come to look, and then they go. If they don’t like you, their signals are pretty clear. If they think the dolphins are getting a little too much attention from our passengers, they will occasionally come part way into the bay and jealously divert them. There is often a child-like element to their behaviour, a mischievousness. It is as if they cannot resist discovering what’s going on.

Many years ago the early whalers referred to humpbacks as the ‘merry whale’ for the way they performed – and when I began working the boat trips five years ago I discovered the nickname held true. One day I would call up the other whalechasers on the radio and find a whale swimming upside-down on the surface, one flipper waving. The next I would come across one launching fully out of the water with a 360-degree breach, like an oversized ballerina pirouetting for the sheer joy of it.

I’m pretty sure I could never be described as ‘merry’, but Kathleen once told me she suspected I felt such a bond with the whales because they are solitary creatures. There is no male-female bond – not a lasting one, anyway. The male plays no parenting role to speak of. She didn’t add that the females are not monogamous – by then she hardly needed to – but they are admirable mothers. I have seen a humpback risk beaching itself to nudge her baby into deeper water. I have heard the songs of love, and loss, breaking into the silence of the deepest parts of the ocean, and I have cried with them. In those songs you hear all the joy and pain of any mother’s happiness held captive by their baby’s heart.

After Letty died, there was a period when I thought I would never be happy again. There is nothing redemptive about the loss of a child, no lessons of value it can teach you. It is too big, too overwhelming, too black to articulate. It is a bleak, overwhelming physical pain, shocking in its intensity, and every time you think you might have moved forward an inch it swells back, like a tidal wave, to drown you again.

If you can blame yourself for that child’s death, the days when you can get your head above water are even fewer. I had trouble, in those early days, remembering that I had two daughters. I can thank Hannah for my existence now, but in the weeks after we got here I was so lost that I had nothing to give her. No reassurance, no physical comfort, no love. I was locked somewhere untouchable, my nerve endings seared with pain, and it was a place so ugly I half think I wanted to protect her from coming too close.

That was when I saw the sea as my one opportunity for release. I eyed it not as a thing of beauty, of reassuring permanence, but as an alcoholic views a secret stash of whisky: savouring the fact that it was there and the potential for relief that it promised. Because there was no relief from Letty’s absence, not from the moment I woke or during my disjointed, nightmare-filled sleep. I felt her resting against me, smelt the honey scent of her hair and woke screaming when I realised the truth of where she lay. I heard her voice in the silence, my head echoed with the last wrenching screams of our separation. There was a hole in my arms where her weight should have been, which, despite the presence of my other daughter, grew into an abyss.

Kathleen is no fool. She must have guessed my intentions when I expressed interest in that boat. My depression insulated me from the idea that I might be transparent. One afternoon, when the two of us dropped anchor round the heads, she secured Ishmael, turned away and said, with a bite in her voice, ‘Go on, then.’

I had stared at her back. It was a bright afternoon, and I remember thinking absently that she wasn’t wearing sun cream. ‘Go on what?’

‘Jump. That’s what you’re planning, isn’t it?’

I had thought I was numb to feeling, but it was as if she had kicked me in the stomach.

She turned, and fixed me with a gimlet stare. ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t look. I don’t want to have to lie to your daughter about what happened to her mother. If I don’t look I can pretend you fell overboard.’

I let out a coughing sound then. Air kept expelling itself in little gasps from my chest, and I couldn’t speak.

‘That little girl has been through too much,’ Kathleen continued. ‘If she knows you didn’t love her enough to stay here for her, it will finish her off. So, if you’re going to do it, do it now while my back’s turned. I don’t want to spend the next six months living on my nerves, wondering how I’m going to protect her from it.’

I found myself shaking my head. I couldn’t speak, but my head moved slowly from side to side, as if I was telling her, telling myself, even, that I wasn’t going to do what she had predicted. That somehow I was making a decision to live. And even as my body made that decision for me, some small part of my mind was thinking, But how do I live? How is it possible to exist with so much pain? For a moment the prospect of having to go on, with all that inside me, seemed overwhelming.

It was then that we saw them. Seven whales, their bodies slick with seawater as they rose and fell around Kathleen’s boat. There was a kind of graceful rhythm to their movements, a flowing continuity that told us of their journey. After circling the boat, they dived. Each emerged briefly, then vanished below the waves.