Authors: Candia McWilliam
‘The last man who remembers seeing one of those before him on a branch of Douglas Fir. That’s me. It was a nicer relation of the mink, I seem to think. I’ll have another, but half only, thanks, that’s all I imbibe till sunset.’
Also in that milkbar Alec and Elspeth together had met a dandy of over seventy who should have been in Capri, not in Tonga. His monocle and connoisseurial complexion, the thin cane set with a band of chipped nacre at the top, his unrealistic gait and astounded eyebrows were all signals it was doubtful many of the people to whom he spoke were attuned to. He bore out the theory that scientific discoveries or philosophical movements are transmitted through space by some telepathic means, often occurring almost simultaneously in different places. He had created for himself an idiom that was just expiring in Europe, but he had done it alone and having started out as the son of a medical missionary in the Cook Islands. The trait he seemed to have failed to evolve was predatoriness, so it was not likely that he would perpetuate his species by the grimy waters of Nuku’alofa. When Alec watched him watching the tough, good-looking yachties, he saw a taper unlit, a passion less vehement than the other man showed for the pine marten.
‘We’ve done this lot justice,’ Logan looked at the plates of claws and whiskers, ‘even if it wasn’t cat.’
‘The prawns were perfectly OK, Logan,’ said Elspeth. ‘I’m off. Come on, Gabriel.’
Alec looked at Logan to see how he reacted to this. He did not. Women had things to speak of that frankly did not interest him.
‘I thought we might take a rougher road home, you and I, Alec, later,’ he said. Alec was reminded of the safe and the wrapped morphine. There might be no menace to the man, but his methods relied on one not knowing this for certain.
Alec heard Elspeth yell and he ran to find her down the drop from grass on to rocks. What had Gabriel said to her? He knew how the words of the innocent can hurt, the innocent and stupid much more.
Elspeth and Gabriel stood together on a table of rock that was the start only of great grey-blue steps and landings of rock arranged with a rounded stacked precision like old silver plates made ready in a burial chamber. Vaults in the rock below them boomed and from below also came the walrus-slapping of hard waves breasting the giving rock. The water was forced up through holes it had worn like a drill through the rock by persistence and repetition, each abrasion painless, the effect of a million of them a perfect bore-hole through solid rock, through which water shot in jets straight up like poplars. The jets did not have the Italian water engineer’s timing that the great renaissance gardens use to shock and thrill, but they showed the power and beauty of water, the invasive neutrality that makes it desirable to us, and fearful. These forcing jets standing for a moment forty feet in the air then falling back over stones shaped by themselves were only extreme examples of water finding its own level.
The jets rose and fell in no order. So artificial or so divinely inspired did their display seem that it was not possible to believe they fell without reason. Alec stood on the furthest stepping stone he could reach so as to see as many jets as possible at once, to crack their system. When two shot from the rocks close together, they gave each other rainbows.
The rock throbbed from below. When the waves receded, the stones minutely settled. On the wave’s returning throw, the tall pipes of water, white all through with the force of the shoving green water from below, stood for that moment in the air, and subsided. Their logic was the logic of the waves, forced through rock.
Elspeth’s teeth were chattering and she was grinning as if embalmed. Dazzled by what she saw, she was rooted by the thrumming through the rock that she associated with terror and the depths of human pain. Inside and under the rock, packed tighter by each advancing wave, and then thrown to charnel by the swilling recessional of the water, she saw bodies of souls lying in the earth on this island, only one island in an archipelago, that archipelago only one in an ocean full of islands.
‘I love this throbbing,’ said Gabriel. ‘It’s like the start of something coming closer.’
I might even welcome disaster, thought Elspeth, looking at Gabriel and finding it hard to fix upon her, so small and benign did she seem among the piled rocks with the rooves of coloured beach huts behind; perhaps disaster breeds certainty. I am not sure I believe in certainty, but perhaps I should try it.
‘This is a sight worth sailing all these miles for,’ said Logan.
Alec looked at him. A man that unironic would be valuable in war.
‘It’s like fountains,’ said Gabriel. She was so free, thought Alec, of having to find the word or the line, exactly to represent something. She saw, and responded. Her words were almost always a weakening of her response. In his painting he tried to show the response with no interval of transition, and it was impossible. Why not give up and be innocent like Gabriel, who likened this inhuman force of water to things men made to adorn parks, those humane places.
She is an intact personality, intact, thought Elspeth. How can I compare? He wants a new thing to break. I thought we could be like many people who are happy, both broken, but he does not care for that. I sent my heart to him like a falcon but it came back with air in its talons and now it is starving.
‘Just like a fountain,’ said Logan. ‘How stupid we are not to have seen that.’
The bicycle ride for Elspeth and Gabriel was as it had been earlier in the day. They rode side by side, unless a vehicle approached, in which case it was Gabriel who hung back, and Elspeth who, as a mother would, took the lead.
In fact I feel maternal towards Gabriel. It is not only her age but the risk she is running that make me want to protect her. It cannot be unknown in a wife to feel protective to the woman who is trying out her husband. She may even be afraid of me. Why do I not fight against what is happening? Do I want it to happen? Or do I feel that I cannot stop it and might as well fight some neutral natural force as enter battle with Logan?
What Logan and I can never lose is having been married. It is like cigars in curtains, you can’t air it out; when a new cigar is lit, the old ones are resurrected in the room, their scent shaking out of the cloth to join the newly burning leaves.
‘Did
you
meet Logan on a boat?’ asked Gabriel, anxious to talk about what she thought about, and being as subtle as she could. She did not say ‘too’. Only with a girl as young as this could such a circumstance be so drastic, so perilous to a marriage. A man taking up a girl so innocent had to protect her.
‘I met him on a bit of land so small it might have been a boat. We met on an island. In Scotland.’
‘Oh, Scotland.’ People speak of places they love in a way that suggests that here is a subject for resting on. Gabriel did not speak like that.
‘It is the great thing we share.’ I am a fool, thought Elspeth, I have told her the truth.
The road curved past three trees full of flying foxes. They made noises like children getting ready to flit, rustlings as of wrappers and subdued squeaks. The trees leaned together to form a triangle beneath which had been placed a sturdy bench, made for the support of solid bodies. A massive couple sat on it. They were young, their hands were linked, but their bulk denied their youth, bestowing on them qualities more permanent than slippery beauty and enchantment; they seemed welded, married, made moral by their bulk, not light of love, in a world where there was no longer the time to give yourself for life to another person.
If she says anything inept about Scotland I shall find the energy to dislike her, perhaps, thought Elspeth.
‘It must be very nice.’ It was safe enough.
‘I love it.’
‘How did you meet – on this island?’
‘I was moving sheep so that he could land in an aeroplane. I was up there making drawings of remains.’
‘Human?’
‘Stones. Buildings.’
This was not a story that so far offered much to Gabriel.
‘Why were you doing that?’
‘It was my job. What is yours?’
‘Cooking on a boat. At the moment.’ She spoke without malice.
I am put in my place, thought Elspeth.
‘And the sheep?’ Gabriel went on.
‘You have to move sheep off a field so a little plane can land. Also cows off a beach. They land on beaches too. Planes, not cows.’
‘What does a cow do at the beach?’
‘On the beach a cow stands and cools her legs against flies in sandy pools. Sometimes they sit down and look odd with the waves and the seagulls. It is part of the place.’
‘And the
sheep
?’
‘They are used as markers on the runway while the plane is descending. They tie them down to four pegs, red sheep to the left, green sheep on the right.’
‘I know I’m ignorant.’
‘You are right. It isn’t true. The sheep are everywhere and the plane lands anywhere. When you see it coming you shoo the sheep and pen them if you can. Anyhow, that’s how I met him. It was an island with one long meadow they used as a landing strip, and a beach used more often unless the tide was in and it was an emergency.’
‘So it was an emergency.’
‘No. Logan just does what he wants. He wanted to see the Scottish islands from the air. He was flying low, flew lower, saw me and made a few circles, asked the coastguard for permission to land, and did.’
The emergency had been love at first sight, for which he was ripe after Hortense’s death. Such melodrama was the pitch at which he lived or he did not believe in himself. He feared to take life plain. Reared to mistrust all artificial savour, Elspeth had fallen at once for the intensity, and later had come to hope they had wound down a little, to a palatable decent compromise. She had paid for the delusions she had swallowed in the early days and anticipated some lightness in casting them off.
‘What did you do then? After the sheep?’
‘He parked the aeroplane and shouted at me.’
She was giving truthful answers because she had not thought about the encounter for so long that it had failed to get wrapped up in ways of turning it into romance. They had walked through a graveyard with turf like brocade. It was a Catholic island. The graveyard was full of angels, some of them reading books. Flowers lay on a rich compost heap within a stone wall, thrown away and renewed by the families of the dead. In these graveyards by the sea there are few names, repeated over and over, Euphemia, Colum, Ella, Angus, and fewer last names yet. The dead lie in families. Many of those who are mentioned in the stones are very old, kept at work into their eighties, eating modestly, living a hard life. The dead babies are many, and the drowned men. These are fishermen and the unnamed. Men without names have been washed up on the shores of the Western Isles after battles at sea since there was fighting. It was the place for us to fall in love, thought Elspeth. It filled our hearts with our respective indulgences, love of death and love of place. And there were flowers. He loves death as I love flowers.
The two cycled on. I should ask her about herself, it is the kind thing to do. And it would be kind to him. I can’t let him go to someone who will not look after him, thought Elspeth.
‘Are you fond of children?’ she asked. It would not matter either way. If she really wanted him she would take his strictures.
‘Yes.’ It was an agreement made as though there could be no other answer. It was the answer Logan would want as a sign of good nature in the girl. He would take it no further. He would never give children life.
A pick-up went by, four children sitting in the back with a disdainful pig, the curl of whose nose showed him the most spoilt member of the family. One of the children had her arm around the pig, another scratched its back. The pig smiled like a drunk woman.
Alec and Logan took a longer way back to town. They started to count churches, then became dispirited by a guilt they did not discuss. Alec felt ashamed. Logan defected within himself from his American to his Scots blood. He felt the American missionaries had been the worst, taking tithes from the people to build the churches that seemed to mark the half-miles.
Half his childhood he spent in a big black house with small rooms, once outside the city of Glasgow but now within it. In the rooms there hung dark paintings of men in frock coats and women with the faces of misers. The paintings had been bought with the house by his Glasgow grandfather who had made the American fortune; he bought it without looking at it, on the number of its rooms and the reputed splendour of its great stair. To accommodate the staircase, the rooms of the house had had to breathe in. They never let out that breath in Logan’s experience. The staircase had a balustrade of steel that shone like guns in the dark and the banister was ebony, inlaid with the knucklebones, his father told him, of fallen Englishmen. There could not have been so many ivory-handed men even in a country so decadent as England.
The drum of the great hall of the black house was eighty feet high, a blaze of knives and longswords, dirks, daggers and cutlass. Some of the blades were set like the rays of metal suns, some inwards like the irises of staring eyes. There was a panel of interwoven swords the height of the room and six feet wide, each sword being the length of a big man’s arm. Pikes were crossed over each barrelled door out of the hall. Once a year for a fortnight four men came from Sheffield to sharpen the swords whose present aim was decoration and whose edges were mortal. At the same time the balustrade of the stairway was cleaned by three women with guncotton. This was the most companionable time in the year at the House of the Mearns, when the weapons came down to be sharpened and polished and made useless again in starry arrangements on the walls.