by Ann Swinfen
A Running Tide
Ann Swinfen
Shakenoak Press
Copyright © Ann Swinfen 2010
Kindle Edition
First published in the United Kingdom in 1996 by Century
First paperback edition published in 1996 by Arrow
Ann Swinfen has asserted her moral right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified
as the author of this work.
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For my sister
Marilyn Pettit
with love
Remembering Maine
Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles... all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living centre of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance... Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves.
Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk)
The air is sharp
The rocks many
The grass little
The winter cold
The summer hot
The gnats in summer biting
And the wolves at midnight howling
Written by an early woman settler in New England
1
Prelude
Scotland: Winter 1980
Tirza Libby’s life had rolled her, unexpectedly, into this remote corner of north-west Scotland, and she had grounded here like a sea-washed stone come finally to rest. The very blood in her veins had thickened and slowed. Her island lay a quarter of a mile offshore – west and slightly to the south of the mainland village of Caillard. No more than a few rocky acres thrust up from the sea, it supported a thin layer of salty turf, some gaunt bushes of thorn and whin and broom, and a small central hillock almost bare of vegetation. Once, generations ago, some desperate family had tried to farm here, though it could have supported no more than a handful of sheep, and no crops. The Atlantic gales whipped across its surface, scraping like pumice stone.
Birds, though, felt at home here. The short stretch of cliffs facing the sea rang in the nesting season to the raucous cries of black-headed and herring gulls, and in the small pockets of turf above them puffins made their burrows. Sandpipers swarmed at the tide line. In a corner of level ground at the foot of the hillock, where a meadow might have grown in a kinder place, there were other birds – curlews, thrushes, blackbirds, pied wagtails – so that the seeming desolation was always full of bird cries and the flight of wings across cool, forbidding skies.
The island was nameless, yet its terrain was strong, spare and confident. It had withstood the batterings of wind and tide, of erosion and time. It carried no soft flesh, but its bones were good.
This coast is looped and fretted like some elaborate piece of antique lace – pleated and scoured and pounded into its final form. Fragments of it have broken away and lie strewn for miles offshore: large islands and small, old worn boulders smoothed into submission and jagged rocks around which the tides rip and fling passing ships carelessly. When Tirza first encountered this place it was with a sense of recognition and kinship. The curious nature of the ocean currents brings a climate surprisingly kind for a place so far north, but in winter, when the winds howl down from the polar icecap, even their influence cannot entirely vanquish the cold, and the winter darkness settles over the soul.
It was barely light when the letters arrived, though it was past nine. Tirza sat at her solitary kitchen table drinking a third cup of strong coffee amongst the watery reflections cast into her cottage by the long arm of the sea loch. She knew she drank too much coffee, but since she had given up smoking it provided the impetus to her mornings, which began sluggishly. It was hard to recall childhood when she had sprung from bed eager for the day. Or those times, later, when she had barely slept, alert even in half-sleep for sounds which might threaten danger.
The pile of envelopes landed on the doormat with a heavy thud. More than one letter, then, but probably nothing of interest. Most of her correspondence related to business. She was in no hurry to read it. Angus Maclean, the postman who came over by boat, passed the window and raised a hand to her. Though they had barely exchanged a word for days, he always waved. She could hear the crunch of his boots in the snow as he headed back to the landing stage to take his boat round the headland south of Caillard to the crofts lying on its further shore – easier to reach by boat than over the frost-broken track. Tirza shivered and turned up the collar of her sweatshirt. Cold as the winters were here, and the days pitifully short, she had known much more bitter times in her childhood, and accepted them philosophically.
The letter – lurking amongst several bills, a leaflet on double-glazing, and an envelope bearing the address of her agent in London – was postmarked Edinburgh.
The owner of a gallery in George Street was proposing an exhibition of her work. A retrospective. Tirza did not think herself quite ripe for a retrospective, but Colin Tennant was persuasive:
I have long been an admirer of your work, from the early days of your photo-journalism during the Vietnam war. The power of your vision remains with me to this day. Your work in Africa and the Indian sub-continent, portraying both traditional life and the disasters of flood and famine, marked another phase in your career. Now that you are living in Scotland and have turned to photographing the dramatic landscape of the Highlands, we seem to be witnessing yet another stage. I would like to propose a two-month exhibition, with a large private view to launch it, major media coverage, and various spin-offs – books, prints and so on.
Damn, she thought. What is Max Prescott thinking of, giving away my private address? She ripped open her agent’s letter. As usual it was brief and to the point:
Colin is a very old friend and will do us proud. I’ve taken the liberty of giving him your address so he can contact you directly. There isn’t much time if we are to organise things for an April opening. Frankly, Tirza, you need the publicity. Since you buried yourself up there and started photographing wet sheep, commissions have dried up. You have to earn enough to eat, whatever else you may be up to.
Angrily, Tirza pushed back her chair so that it squealed on the flagstones, and grabbed the telephone from the wall.
‘This is not the kind of thing I can do with just now, Max,’ she shouted into the phone. At the other end of the line she could imagine him holding the receiver away from his ear and raising his elegant eyebrows at his secretary.
‘Tirza,’ he said, ‘I don’t see your problem. This will mean a good boost to your income in return for practically no effort on your part. You know you need the money. You’d be a
fool to turn this down.’ For Max he sounded momentarily almost cross. ‘You would buy that God-forsaken island and bury yourself up there, but you can’t run away from life. Or from your own reputation. Accept graciously and let me look after things.’
Tirza bit furiously on her thumbnail.
‘What would I have to do?’
‘Well, of course, Colin would like you to select the pictures for the exhibition yourself. I’ve a fair collection in your files here, but you must have hundreds more stored away. He’d like you to be involved in setting things up, if you are willing – deciding whether the display should be chronological or thematic, for example. He’d quite like some of your juvenilia, if you’ve kept any. You know, family shots...’
Suddenly aware that he was treading on forbidden ground, he hastened on.
‘You’d have to attend the private view. And give one or two interviews – national press, radio, TV.’
‘I am not,’ said Tirza between her teeth, ‘going on any TV chat show.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said soothingly. ‘Nothing like that. But the interviews and the launch needn’t use more than a week of your time, then you can go back to taking snaps of the wee stag at bay amongst the braw heather.’
This was an area of conflict for them, but Max would not learn to leave it alone.
‘Promise you’ll think about it at least, eh?’
‘Oh, all right,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I’ll think about it. But I’m promising nothing.’
She had been planning to take her boat out to the rocky islet just offshore in the bay of her island, as soon as the light was suitable. When she had woken this morning it had seemed the perfect day for it; the sea was relatively calm, the wind light, the sky, filling with dawn light, as clear as it ever would be in winter. There were empty nests on the islet from last summer, and she had an image in her head of how she would shoot them – huge, abandoned, daubed with white bird droppings, but hanging on doggedly to the rough cluster of rocks amongst the breakers. From one angle she could set them off against the light-reflecting sea, from another she would photograph them from slightly below, with the staggering rocks rising up behind. Max declared himself aghast at what she had been doing for the last eighteen months, but she was steadily putting together a collection. It might make a book, but she was still keeping that idea to herself.
A bad case of malaria and dysentery had brought her back two years ago from Bangladesh to recuperate in London, her long-time base. In the past she had never spent more than a few weeks there. Busy developing and printing her films, meeting editors, arranging future commissions with Max, she had never had time to notice the cramped and dingy surroundings of her small flat. Three months of convalescence there, confined, claustrophobic and boring, had determined her to move out of London, and on a whim she had driven up to the west coast of Scotland, urged on by a compulsion to see the Atlantic again and to fill her lungs with its winds.
Fate or coincidence landed her at a small dour-looking hotel at Caillard on the mainland, overlooking a cluster of islands spattered along the mouth of the sea loch. In the bar that night she discovered that the only habitable one, with a house, a dock, a water supply, a telephone line and electricity, was for sale. Had been for two years. Bought by a German brewery owner in pursuit of some romantic dream, it had been provided with these luxuries to make the primitive life tolerable for a man accustomed to the comforts of his Bonn apartment and his Bavarian country house. He had endured his dream for two bitter weeks in spring; by the end of the month the island had been put on the market. After her one visit in May 1978, Tirza bought the island, and moved in two months later.
She untied her boat from the mooring post at the end of the short pier and stepped firmly down amidships. The weight of her cameras, one resting against her hip, the other on her breast-bone, always obscurely comforted her. On the rare occasions when she did not carry them, she felt undressed. She dropped the oars into the rowlocks and pulled steadily towards the small island, no more than a lump of broken rock poking up from the waters of the bay. For the short journey across to the mainland she had recently bought a small outboard motor, but she preferred to row whenever she made her way coastwise around her island.
The air was icy, and her hands turned blue despite the rowing. She began to wish she had brought the fingerless gloves she sometimes used for winter work, but it was not worth going back now. She would lose the light, which was so fugitive on these brief February days. The wind was getting up, too. The Atlantic swell was broken by the Outer Hebrides before it penetrated to this narrow neck of the waters – the entrance to a long sea loch reaching miles into the uninhabited mountains up behind the coast. But the ocean swell always lurked, treacherously hidden, as a powerful undertow. When the wind drove on shore, as it was doing today, it gave the waves an extra lift, so they regained some of their diminished strength, heaving and foaming about the dangerous rocks and half-submerged islets which dotted Tirza’s bay.
She landed on the bird island and made fast the painter around a spur of rock. It was difficult to find a footing amongst the slippery boulders, but she made her way cautiously, changing between cameras – one loaded with black and white film, one with colour. She worked quickly. War experience had taught her that. You shot your pictures fast or you were dead. She hadn’t learned the art of slowing down, of lingering over focus and exposure. She went in fast and trusted her eye.
Even so, it was nearly three o’clock by the time she pushed the boat off again and headed back to the landing stage. Ragged bands of orange lay smeared across the horizon and were flooding upwards, tinting the undersides of the cumulus. She was hungry and aching with the cold, but satisfied with what she had achieved today. Out on the water, amongst the lonely rocks, she was filled with new strength. Tomorrow she’d spend shooting along the mainland cliffs and the next day developing the films.
The letter from the Edinburgh gallery lay accusingly on the kitchen table where she had thrown it down that morning. She tried to ignore it as she opened a tin of soup and made herself a cheese sandwich, but it obtruded itself on her vision, the logo in the letterhead – a stylised Viking ship – staring up at her like an eye. It was an irritation and one which couldn’t be ignored, like a stone in her shoe. She was still too tired, too discouraged, to make the effort of an exhibition. Ever since her illness it took more energy to get through a single day than it would once have taken to trek upcountry through the jungle, crossing and recrossing enemy lines. The excitement of those days, the ever-present threat of death, had seemed to empower her. Now, she would leave dirty dishes piled on the draining board for days until she ran out of clean ones, too weary in spirit, more than in body, to fill the sink with hot water.
She pushed the letter away, but it continued to glare at her, naggingly. Max was right. She did need the cash. It had been a crazy extravagance, buying the island. It had used all the money from the sale of the remaining ten years’ lease of her London flat, and most of her savings as well. Since moving to Scotland she had had almost no income, apart from an occasional fee for one or other of her more famous pictures. And before that she hadn’t worked for nearly six months, although the income from the Bangladesh piece had tided her over. Now she was living off capital, and it was running out fast.
With a sigh, Tirza poured herself a small shot of whisky. She was still feeling cold, and it would be colder still in her photographic store. The white-washed outbuilding, with its massive stone walls, stood separate from the cottage and had probably once been a small barn. The German brewer had made it over into a wine-store, freshly painted and fitted out with shelves and shelves of wine racks. Tirza could not imagine how he had supposed he was going to consume so many bottles out here on this remote coast, in a cottage which would barely hold three people. She had torn out the wine racks but retained the shelving. It now held rows of box files – the harvest of her life’s work.
She switched on the light, closed the door against th
e darkness and the wind, and set her glass down on the shelf just inside the door. Conditions were ideal here for the storage of her prints. The small building was cool and dry, although she had taken the precaution of packing sachets of silica gel amongst the files. She did not keep her negatives here. They were stored in controlled conditions on the premises of a major London photographer. She had known Jimmy and Edna Kelansky for years. They had facilities she did not, and kept her negatives in store for a reasonable annual fee. She took photographs for them occasionally too, when they were overrun with assignments. As they were mainly society photographers, the work did not much appeal to her, but she amused herself by thinking of the empty-faced girls and overweight young men as prey, and stalked them at Ascot and Henley, at charity concerts and hunt balls, as if she were back in the jungle. As well as the irreproachable photographs she presented to Jimmy and Edna, she had a separate portfolio of comic and slightly compromising shots she kept to herself. Should she put these on show?
Tirza shook her head irritably. She was already thinking of the exhibition as an accepted fact instead of a proposition. She need not be bullied into this.
The kitchen sink might be a mess, but her photographic store was meticulously neat, each file labelled with date, place and general subject matter, the shelves arranged chronologically. Inside every file a typed sheet gave detailed information about each of the numbered photographs, with exposure, shutter speed and light conditions whenever she had had the opportunity to make a note of them. She walked round the shelves, trailing her fingers over the files. This was her whole life, bottled up. She had no husband or lover, no children, no intimate friends. Everything she had felt and experienced in her life was captured here, like so many insects trapped on glass slides.