Read The Visitor for Free Online Page B

Nicholas is good at those kinds of games. She often forgets where she really is, lost in the things he can make her believe. She falls over then, or gets caught on gorse, or wipes her muddy hands down her dress without thinking. She’s as untidy as a seagull.
    â€˜Can’t you keep your skirts clean at least?’ her mother said last night. Pearl came home dripping seawater and with dirt rubbed deep into her hems. ‘That dress has got to last you. You’re twelve, not a child anymore. I’m not chasing after you with a scrubbing brush only for you to go clambering with those boys.’
    Even when she tries, Pearl can’t seem to look as nice as her older sister Polly. Polly has lovely pale skin and long brown hair she keeps neat in plaits that never fall out. Pearl’s hair is somewhere between blonde and brown but so full of knots she can’t work her fingers through it for plaits. Her face is tanned. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick and permanently lined with dirt. Polly somehow keeps her hands clean and smooth, despite being old enough to salt the fish in the palace when they come in. It must be something to do with being friends with Sarah Dray.
    Sarah is Polly’s best friend. She has long, thick hair as black as coal. Her mouth is usually set in such a way that it seems she’s sneering, or that she has a secret about you she won’t tell. She’s beautiful though, and never gets dirty. Polly becomes even more beautiful and clean when she works with Sarah Dray in the palace. It must be catching. Some of the artists have asked Sarah to pose for them and they offered good money too. The one from the north, Mr Michaels, wanted her on the beach with a creel of fish, looking out to sea as if waiting for something. But when Sarah’s father found out he was livid and shouted at Mr Michaels on the seafront, in front of Miss Charles, the teacher from the art school. There was a sermon about it at chapel. Pearl hasn’t seen much of Mr Michaels in the fishing quarter since, but Sarah has a new smugness about her, tossing her black hair even more, which makes Pearl less inclined than ever to spend time with her. She follows Nicholas and Jack comes too. Morlanow has many places for games and for hiding.
    On the beach they have to dodge the stinking dogfish innards that litter the sand and the diving gulls that fight for them. When the tide begins to slink back in between the harbour wall and the cliff, the three of them retreat to the streets, or the drying field as long as it isn’t washday. There’s hellish fuss if the children clamber over the whites laid out in the sun. Sometimes the boys go to a place she doesn’t like called Skommow Bay. She plays by herself then, or sits in the backyard talking to the chickens until she hears the boys come home.
    Skommow Bay is a cold place. It’s not a bay at all but a rocky shelf on the other side of Morlanow, where wrecks are left to rot. The broken ships and boats frighten Pearl so she stays away, but there’s rich plunder if you scrabble around the tilting hulks and are brave enough to climb the ruined hulls. That’s where the boys get scraps to make their little boats. They are making a grand one today.
    â€˜No, Jack. Like this.’ Nicholas takes the knife from Jack’s podgy fingers. Nicholas has long, thin fingers, what Miss Charles from the art school calls ‘elegant’. Not everything about Nicholas is elegant though. He is tall, towering over her and Jack. His knees seem huge in his legs. ‘The keel needs be sharper or she won’t turn,’ Nicholas says.
    Jack scowls, folds his arms and looks away. The three of them are sitting on the seafront wall, their legs dangling over the edge. There’s the chop of thick knives cleaving dogfish and the prattle of Alice Trelawn on the sand below them. She’s a fallen woman, Pearl’s mother says, which is why she’ll see to