Moominpappa at Sea (17 page)

Moominmamma got up and went up to the attic. When she came down again she had found three bags of dye, brown, blue and green, a tin of lead paint, a little lamp-black and two old paint-brushes.

So she began to paint flowers all over the wall. They were large, substantial flowers because the brushes were large, and the dye soaked right into the plaster and looked intense and transparent. How wonderful they looked! This was much more fun than sawing wood! Flower after flower appeared on the wall, roses, marigolds, pansies, peonies… No one was more surprised than Moominmamma herself. She had no idea she could paint so well. Near the floor she painted long, waving green grass, and she thought about putting the sun right at the top, but she had no yellow paint.

When the others came back for lunch she hadn’t even lit the fire. She was standing on a box, painting a little brown bee with green eyes.

‘Mamma!’ exclaimed Moomintroll.

‘What do you think of it?’ Moominmamma asked, feeling very pleased with herself as she carefully finished the bee’s second eye. But the brush was much too big, she would have to find some other way of doing it. If the worst came to the worst, she could paint over the bee and put a bird there instead.

‘But it’s all so life-like!’ exclaimed Moominpappa. ‘I can recognize all those flowers! That one is a rose.’

‘No it isn’t,’ said Moominmamma, very hurt. ‘It’s a peony. Like the red ones we had at the bottom of the steps at home.’

‘Can I paint a hedgehog?’ cried Little My.

Moominmamma shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is my wall. But if you’re good, I’ll paint one for you.’

At lunch everybody was very cheerful.

‘You can lend me a little of that red-lead,’ Moominpappa said. ‘I must paint a low-watermark on the rock before the sea starts to rise again. I really must keep a serious check on the level of the water. You see, I want to find out whether the sea works to a system of some kind or whether it just behaves as it likes… It’s very important.’

‘Have you made a lot of notes?’ asked Moominmamma.

‘Yes, lots. But I need a lot more before I can start writing my book.’ Moominpappa leaned across the table and said confidentially: ‘I want to know if the sea is really obstinate, or whether it obeys.’

‘Obeys whom?’ asked Moomintroll, opening his eyes wide.

But Moominpappa was suddenly very busy eating his soup, and muttered: ‘Oh… something… rules of some kind or another.’

Moominmamma gave him a little red-lead in a cup and he went out immediately after lunch to paint a low-watermark.

The aspens had turned quite red, and in the glade the ground was covered with a yellow carpet of birch leaves. When the south-west wind blew it carried both red and yellow leaves out over the water.

On three sides of the hurricane lamp Moomintroll had painted the glass with lamp-black, just like some
villain up to no good. He left the lighthouse by a roundabout way. It seemed to be following him with its vacant eyes. Evening was falling and the island was beginning to wake up. He could feel it stirring and hear the gulls crying round the point.

‘I can’t help it,’ he thought. ‘Pappa would understand if he knew. I don’t want to see the sand moving tonight. Perhaps I’ll go to the eastern end of the island this time.’

Moomintroll sat on the rock and waited, with the hurricane lamp turned towards the sea. The island behind him was lost in the darkness, and there was no sign of the Groke.

Only Little My saw him. She saw the Groke too, sitting waiting on the beach.

Little My shrugged her shoulders and crept back under the moss. She had often seen people waiting for one another in the wrong place, looking foolish and lost. ‘Well, there’s nothing to be done about it,’ she thought. ‘That’s how it is.’

The night was overcast. Moomintroll could hear invisible birds flying overhead and the sound of splashing behind him in the black pool. He turned, and in the ray of light from the lamp he could see them. It was the sea-horses, swimming below the cliff. Perhaps they had come here every night and he had known nothing about it.

The sea-horses were giggling and splashing each other with water and they made eyes at him from behind their fringes. Moomintroll looked from one to
the other; they both had exactly the same eyes, the same flowers on their necks, and they both had the same saucy little heads. He had no idea which of them was his sea-horse.

‘Is it you?’ he asked.

The sea-horses swam towards him and stood at the edge of the water so that he could just see their knees.

‘It’s me! It’s me!’ they both replied and giggled like mad.

‘Won’t you rescue me?’ one of them asked. ‘Won’t you rescue me, my fat little sea-urchin. Do you gaze at my picture every single day? Do you?’

‘He’s not a sea-urchin,’ said the other one reproachfully. ‘He’s a little egg-shaped mushroom who’s promised to rescue me if it gets stormy. He’s a little egg-shaped mushroom who collects shells for his mummy! It’s charming, isn’t it. Charming!’

Moomintroll felt himself blushing.

Moominmamma had polished the horseshoe with silver polish. He knew that one of the silver shoes was much brighter than the others.

And he knew, too, that they wouldn’t lift their hooves out of the water, and that he would never know which of them was
his
sea-horse.

And they waded out to sea. He could hear them laughing, and as they got farther and farther away the sound of their laughter seemed to be nothing more than the wind sweeping gently over the beach.

Moomintroll lay on the rock and stared at the sky. He couldn’t think of his sea-horse any more. Whenever he
tried to he could see two sea-horses, two little sea-horses, both laughing and both exactly alike. All they did was leap up and down in the sea, until his eyes grew tired of looking at them. And there were more and more of them, so many he couldn’t be bothered to count them. He just wanted to go to sleep and be left in peace.

Moominmamma’s mural was more and more beautiful, and it stretched as far as the door. She had painted big green apple trees full of flowers and fruit, and the grass under the trees was full of windfalls. There were rose
bushes all over the place, most of them red – just like the ones that grow in everybody’s gardens. And each of them had a border of little white shells. The well was green and the woodshed was brown.

One evening when the sun was streaming into the room, Moominmamma was painting a corner of the veranda.

Moominpappa came into the room to have a look.

‘Aren’t you going to paint in some rocks?’ he asked.

‘There are no rocks,’ said Moominmamma absently. She was in the middle of painting the railings, and it was very difficult to get them straight.

‘Is that the horizon?’ continued Moominpappa.

Moominmamma looked up. ‘No. It’s going to be the blue veranda,’ she said. ‘There’s no sea here at all.’

Moominpappa looked at it for a long time, but said nothing. Then he went and put the kettle on.

When he turned round again, he saw that Moominmamma had painted a large blue patch and above it something that was obviously meant to be a boat. It didn’t look right at all.

‘That’s not so good,’ he said.

‘It didn’t turn out quite as I meant it to,’ admitted Moominmamma sadly.

‘Well, it was a very nice idea,’ Moominpappa said consolingly. ‘But I suggest you try to change it into a veranda after all. It’s no good trying to paint something you don’t want to paint.’

From that evening on Moominmamma’s mural began to look more and more like Moominvalley. She
found it difficult to get the perspective right sometimes, and sometimes she had to take something out of its proper setting and paint it all by itself. The stove and things out of the drawing-room, for example. And it was quite impossible to include every room. One could only paint one wall at a time, and somehow it looked unnatural.

Moominmamma found that the best time to paint was just before sunset. The room was empty then, and she could see Moominvalley much more clearly.

One evening the western sky was on fire with the most beautiful sunset she had ever seen. It was a tumult of red, orange, pink and yellow flames, filling the clouds above the dark and stormy sea with smouldering colours. The wind was blowing from the south-west towards the island from the sharp, coal-black line of the horizon.

Moominmamma was standing on the table painting apples on the top of a tree with red-lead paint. ‘If only I had these colours to paint with outside,’ she thought. ‘What lovely apples and roses I should have!’

As she gazed at the sky, the evening light crept up the wall, lighting up the flowers in her garden. They seemed to be alive and shining. The garden opened out, and the gravel path with its curious perspective suddenly seemed quite right and to lead straight to the veranda. Moominmamma put her paws round the trunk of the tree; it was warm with sunshine and she felt that the lilac was in bloom.

Like a flash of lightning a shadow passed across the
wall. Something black had flown past the window. An enormous black bird was circling round and round the lighthouse, past one window after another, the west, the south, the east, the north… like a fury, beating its wings relentlessly.

‘We’re surrounded!’ Moominmamma thought in confusion. ‘It’s a magic circle. I’m scared. I want to go home and leave this terrible, deserted island and the cruel sea…’ She flung her arms round her apple tree and shut her eyes. The bark felt rough and warm, and the sound of the sea disappeared. Moominmamma was right inside her garden.

The room was empty. The paints were still on the table, and outside the window the black bird went on circling round the lighthouse. When the colours in the western sky disappeared, it flew away across the sea.

When it was time for tea, the family came home.

‘Where’s Mamma?’ Moomintroll asked.

‘Perhaps she’s just out getting some water,’ Moominpappa said. ‘Look, she’s painted a new tree since we went out.’

Moominmamma stood behind the apple tree and watched them making tea. They looked a little misty, as though she had been watching them moving about underneath the water. She wasn’t at all surprised by what had happened. Here she was at last in her own garden where everything was in its proper place and everything was growing just as it should grow. Here and there something hadn’t been drawn absolutely right, but it didn’t matter. She sat down in the long grass and listened to the cuckoo calling from somewhere on the other side of the river.

When the kettle boiled for tea Moominmamma was fast asleep with her head leaning against the apple tree.