Time and Tide

 The old fisherman stared out to sea with tide turning and him remembering a different kind of tempo. It was of a time when all was well within his world and also within hers. It was a time when they tied themselves to dreams of sailing the oceans and weathering the approaching storms, but that was such a long long time ago.

At first Meg had been a good wife, a mere slip of a girl when they married, when the twenty year gulf seemed like nothing and they were both young and strong and fearless. He had been skipper of a small fishing fleet before the hard times hit and the stocks dried up. That was when she left, scooping up her babe like a precious shell and running off to a younger man. It broke him into terrible pieces.

She said she’d had enough of waiting for him to come home and warm the marital bed. She said the cold winter wind had got inside and hollowed her out. All those nights waiting for the light of the boats in the darkness, all that worry had taken its toll. It had put years on her; years that she didn’t want, but couldn’t return. It stole into the crevices beside her eyes and dulled their light; it invaded her body and hunched her frame as if protecting her very soul. And all she wanted was to turn the clock full circle, turn it back to happier days. She wanted her youth restored and she didn’t want to be with an ancient mariner any more.

So she moved to the town and left Sam all alone with the wind moaning in at the windows and his heart ripped out of his body. He wanted to die then, coming home and finding her gone and not knowing where and to whom.

‘Only time will tell,’ whispered the villagers, so sad for his plight, and impotent with their help. But twenty years stands as a mighty chasm for a young girl who had only been just past her teens. So every night he would walk down to the harbour wall and cast his eyes to the sea and will her in his mind to come home and bring back the child to him.

She would be well into middle age by now, Sam thought as he made his way to his nightly vigil as the clock struck its dutiful hour. Then he saw her, a shadow known, leaning against the wall wrapped in a homespun shawl twisted tightly around her slight body. She’d not changed one jot, what kind of trickery was this he asked? That curve of her cheekbone, which he knew so well; the clarity of her skin, the fall of the wave in her chestnut hair, just the same, as always. 

He approached with fear and whispered her name as it snagged on the wind so that she almost didn’t catch at his voice.

‘Meg?’ he ventured. ‘Is it really you?’

‘I’m Gem,’ she replied turning to face him. ‘They call me Gemmy.’

It was then that he fell to his knees and his heart hit his chest with a thud. Gemmy, his babe, his only child. The years had been kind after all.