‘Grandad’s back?’ asked Dot, heart leaping.
No reply. Celia’s footsteps receded.
Dot took hold of her bedframe and pulled herself up. There was a small, green phial of tonic on her bedside table. She took a sip. The acrid medicine pinched her throat but, after a moment, her limbs lightened. The room ceased spinning and she stumbled mildly, righting herself with the dexterity of a girl used to traversing the earth as if it were a boat bouncing upon a choppy sea.
Dot took a flannel from her bureau and wiped her face. A slight dizziness clung to her, but she steeled herself and went out into the kitchen.
‘There’s my girl!’
In spite of her sickliness, Dot grinned. ‘Hello, Grandad.’
Archibald Walcott ambled forward to give her a gentle hug. Dot’s grandfather was shorter than her and stocky in his old age, but his eyes twinkled. He had the Walcott nose: large and aquiline, its bridge rising high in a rounded bump. This, he had passed down to Dot and none of his other grandchildren.
‘Why issheyour girl?’ asked Celia, pulling potatoes from the oven.
‘You both are,’ said Archie, but when Celia’s back was turned, he winked at Dot. He spoke with the faded accent of his homeland, which clipped his vowels and softened his ‘r’s. He’d been twenty years old when he had stumbled off the boat from Eyre, changed his name and bought the land on which they now lived. What a different country Calléum had been then, before the cinema and the radio and the Prohibition on magic.
‘Good haul this time,’ said Archie. He prodded a parcel wrapped in brown paper on the counter beside him. It was ambergris, freshly procured for Dot from the South Sea. ‘Year and a half’s worth of tonic right here.’
Dot’s smile faded.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you have to—’
‘No,’ said the old man, ‘won’t hear none of that.’ He patted her on the shoulder and turned to take a bowl of steaming cockles from the counter. ‘Teatime now.’
The seven of them sat at the table. Her mother, Martha, and father, Patrick, down one end, Willard and his young wife, Florence, at the other. Celia, with a plate of mostly potatoes, sat opposite Dot and Archie, reading a novel.
It was very nearly a table of eight. Florence, with her bulging belly, was due in only a few days. That had to be the reason for Willard’s mood – the stress of a baby he wasn’t sure he wanted. Still, he seemed content enough now, his arm on the back of Florence’s chair. Dot watched him chuckle as Florence whispered in his ear, her hands on her belly.
‘Make sure you’re eating, Dot.’
Archie rolled his eyes at his daughter-in-law. ‘She is eating, Martha.’
‘Dad,’ said Dot’s father.
‘Yes, Patrick, my boy?’
The two men stared at each other, caught in the kind of unspoken tug-of-war that can only exist at the family dinner table. Patrick Walcott, the headmaster of the local school, was a quietly terrifying man, quick to anger. All it took was a stern look from him to put the fear of the Saints into any of his students – and into Dot. Patrick shot her one of these glances now, and Dot skewered her carrots and shoved them in her mouth.
When her plate was cleared, she turned to her grandfather.
‘So,’ she said, ‘did you find them?’
Archie grinned. This was their tradition. A question repeated every time he returned from the sea.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We did find some fossils off the Island of Calbris. Getting closer, Dottie.’
Celia looked up from her book. ‘You’ve been “getting closer” for years, Grandad.’
‘That’s better than getting farther away,’ said Willard, and Florence let out a snort of laughter.
‘How close are you, really?’ Celia asked her grandad.
‘One day, Cece, my love, you won’t be sixteen anymore and everything won’t seem so terribly inconvenient to you.’
‘I was seven when you started looking for the South Sea cuttlefish,’ said Celia. ‘Seven! Miss Harris told me off for fibbing, remember? Because I told the other girls so many times they weren’textinct.’
‘You remember all that,’ said Dot’s father, ‘but you can’t remember to clean up after you make your porridge in the morning?’
