Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
Pages From a Harbour Lodging
A lodger in a harbour-front room keeps a diary of the sea sounds that come through the wall at night, and the sounds begin to sound like a family arguing in the room next door.
- dated: Three weeks in late February
- narrator: Walter Hine, lodger
- reliability: reliable
Week one. Took the back room at the Gull and Cask on Wharf Street, twelve shillings a week with breakfast. Landlady is a Mrs Duffy, large and kind, with a voice that sounds like she has been shouting over waves for forty years. The room is above the cellar and the wall on the left is damp. I have been warned.
Week one, night. Heard voices through the wall at about one in the morning. A man and a woman. They were not shouting. They were talking about the rent. The woman said she could not manage another month and the man said the sea would provide. I thought it was the next room. Knocked. Silence. Then the talking started again, very low, as if they had been waiting for me to stop.
Week two. Asked Mrs Duffy who was in the room next door. She said nobody had lodged there since her husband died, and she kept it locked. Asked her again about the voices. She looked at me for a long moment and said the walls at the Gull were thin, and that the sea talks to itself at night, and that I should not answer it.
Week two, night. The voices again. The woman was crying now. The man said something about the boat, about how it would be fine on the next tide. There was a sound like a chair being pushed back. Then, very clearly, a child's voice, asking if it was time to go down to the water.
Week three. Went out on the quay during the day to see if I could find the family. Asked at the chandlers. Nobody knew of a couple with a child in the harbour. But an old fisherman, mending a net, said there had been a boat called the Pennant that went out in a February gale thirty years ago, with a man and his wife and their little girl aboard, and never came back.
Week three, night. The voices came through the wall once more. This time they were calm. The man said, "All right then," and the woman said, "Tell him goodbye for us," and the child laughed, and I heard the door of the next room open and close, very softly, and then the sea came up against the wall of the Gull and nothing else was said.
I have packed my things. Mrs Duffy has not asked for the rent.