by Kirsty Gunn
They locked the car and headed into the opening in the bush that marked the beginning of a track. The bright day closed instantly behind them like a door. They were used to it by then, of course, from all their walks, the darkness, the close growth of the vegetation in this country that blocked out all the light. It had its own smell, its own particular damp and musky odour. You needed the tracks to be well marked or you’d be lost in a second, the low ferns and trees pushing in at you as you went deeper in and the high totaras, they were called, those amazing old and massive trees that grew not like trees growing in the woods at home exactly, but seeming to rise up out of all that other bush that was banked up around them … They made Elisabeth think of that line from another poet, nothing like Burns – ‘Darkness visible.’ Because that was what it was like there, looking into the dark, seeing the dark as your eyes adjusted, but as they walked on she didn’t mind it either, Karl’s back up ahead of her as the path inclined a little as though rising to a hill then flattening again. Certainly it had been an easy enough walk. The description on the board in the car park had not exaggerated the time it would take and after about twenty minutes she’d seen slices of bright water through clearings in the bush, the glinting reflections of the sun and then they’d stopped, Karl had, and she came up behind and he’d said, ‘There it is’, and there it was: ‘The Secret Lake’.
Later, years later, once Elisabeth had started reading again and knew where ‘darkness visible’ came, in Book Two of Paradise Lost and why she’d always loved Milton, she’d found an essay by Rebecca West where she wrote about this lake. That had been like a secret, too, discovering that someone else knew about that place and had written about it. And she recognised the feeling that was described in the writing, of the surprise of seeing those sudden flashes of bright blue amongst the dark bush and then stopping and suddenly there it all was, this large and flat expanse of lakewater lying in the centre of the country, at its secret heart, wrapped around by ponga and totara and manuka all those trees and bushes she’d memorised the names of while she’d been there … A clear wide open lake of blue in a place that anywhere else in the world would have picnickers gathering on its little beaches, boats pushed off on the water’s surface or waterskiers criss-crossing one side to the other – but here was completely hidden from view.
They saw the Memorial statue immediately – down one end of the lake and set like a jewel on a green lawn that had been created for it especially. They walked up towards it, skirting the water when the path took them down to the sand and then turning back into the bush for the final corner where they came out to stand on the grass. It seemed both bigger and smaller when they got there – the poet standing legs apart, hands on hips and his head upturned as though to catch the sun, high enough that you couldn’t make out an expression on the face but low enough that the whole thing was of a scale that felt lifelike and real … Weirdly present, somehow, the figure of the famous Scottish poet set down here in this faraway country, polished and shining, with his own green lawn about him, even with the dark growth ever closer at his back, and the hidden lost water coming lapping over the sand towards the base of his pedestal where the dates of his birth and his death were marked, and those words again, after a few lines of his verse, ‘Scotland’s Most Loved Poet’.
Immediately she’d wanted to take off her jacket and stay. It was warm, now they were out here in this clearing, in the sun, the statue threw a clean dark shadow on the bright grass and Elisabeth had lain down alongside it, stripping off her top and trousers, the feel of the bright sun on her head and face and body like a pulse, a beat, the centre of the day above her and before her only blue … It did feel like summer, no matter what anyone in that country said, no matter what Karl said as he’d stayed standing there above her, alongside Robert Burns, refusing to lie down, to sit even. So she’d just stretched out, relaxed completely, the shadow of the poet beside her like a companion, her body long and lean and full of sun lying there on the grass.
She’d wanted to stay for the whole afternoon. She’d wanted to lie in the warmth and hear the lap, lap, lap of the blue water against the little beach, listen to the silence all around and the little sounds of birds she’d never heard before collecting in the tall trees. She’d wanted to stay all through the rest of the morning, into the afternoon, all through the day, let the sun come down and still she would stay … Not think about the next place they had to go to, or the next map to see … Not answer questions or make decisions, just keep herself whole in this state of absolute arrival she felt herself to be in now, like she’d felt in the car before with Karl asleep and she’d taken any turn she wanted, seen the sign and just followed it with her eyes. So it was like Karl may as well be asleep now. Like he wasn’t even there. And she realised the little hard feeling in her stomach from before, that little bit of indigestible nut, like metal or bone, was gone and everything felt light and easy and warm.
*
That experience, she knows now, looking back on all this, of getting ‘lost’ on that holiday as Karl had said they were when he’d woken up to find himself somewhere unexpected, was of not being lost at all. It was the feeling, at the minute of letting it fall over her and claim her as she lay on the grass, of herself, of who she was, what she wanted, what she didn’t want. That she didn’t want to be pulled to her feet as Karl pulled her. Didn’t want to go back into the bush and leave it all behind her, the bright open secret of the lake with its strange statue that had been like some kind of a marker, to make her feel that all was tended, the grass cut around it and the ironwork polished and cleaned so it glinted in the sun …
Still she had let herself be taken, her jacket draped back around her bare form, her trousers put into her arms. She’d looked at the brand new ring on her finger and she’d started getting dressed, Karl calling ahead of her, ‘Come on! Come on! This whole crazy thing has been a complete waste of time!’
But the recognition of what that day had meant did come at last, and in full, thirteen years later with the second statue and on a wintry hill in Scotland, the only ‘proper place’, Karl had said, on that last walk they ever took together, ‘for a statue of Robert Burns to be’. And there he was, she thinks now, and she’s pretty sure it was the same statue, remember? Is how this all began. Only the second statue was not cared for and polished like the other in that other secret place, but had lichen smattering its tired body and on the base of the stand the words not clear nor the numbers for the dates as they’d been worn away by weather, all those details gone. A sort of fence had been put up around it, why? To stop people getting too close? To stop them harming the statue in some way? Who knows, but whatever the reason there was to be no lying down here in its shadow. No peace of silence, of bush and then the water and then the green.
And that’s when she said to Karl, like she should have said to him that day long ago by the water, ‘No.’ He was still talking. Talking as he stood. As though she’d never spoken. Talking like he’d talked all the way on the walk across the cold hills, still making his confession, but saying over and over they would make a ‘go of it anyhow’ – wouldn’t they? Old friends that they were, such great old friends. That they had that to remember, no matter what. All the interests they had, the hobbies they shared. It’s what they had to hold on to, to go on with, what they had to keep …
But then she said it again, like she should have said it before, no. Finally saying it so he would hear. No. No point in remembering. No point in going on. And no, as well, to hold on to. And no, as well, to keep. No. No. And No. No, no, no, no and again no. Like the books in the bookshelf between the two bookends that stood like little statues either side might all have pages inside them all filled with the single word. No. She’d twirled her ring, dropped it on the grass. And Karl was down on his hands and knees to hunt for the speck of stone in the heather while she was walking away.
*
Dick
I was still fresh from my parents’ divorce when my father ga
ve me a car and taught me to drive. It was just before school broke up for the summer and getting hot, and I was too young to be out on the road on my own but my father knew all kinds of people in our small town and he had, as he put it, ‘conversations’. Like he had them with his ladies and his friends, certain conversations about money deals and business debts, so my father could get what he wanted in his life, so he could get his way.
Until that time of the car, though, these kinds of things hadn’t occurred to me. I was somewhat held back, you might say, was the reason – made younger than my years by my father and the way he carried on. That’s what my brother Michael said. We were both pretty wrecked, Michael said, he and I, by our old dad and our mother leaving home and moving abroad and it turned out we wouldn’t see her again for another fifteen years. So I may be living in the world now like everyone else with my own profession and my little tidy flat, but part of me is still that same girl from back then, learning to use the clutch then go first gear, second. Slowly driving on my own down the street where we lived.
*
There was a boy next door who I used to watch from my bedroom window and dream that one day he might look up as I came carefully past him, practising in that too-fancy brand new convertible of mine. He had a car of his own, an old lovely car, and would be out the front of his house working on it, an older boy with long blond hair that straggled down his back and the way he stood there in the sun in those beaten-up old jeans he wore and T-shirts that hung just anyhow … Even now the feelings I have about him mean I could never say his name.
My father didn’t know anything about this. He just had the driving instructor pick me up after school each day and start the lesson there – as I turned the ignition and put the car in gear. Then we drove back to the house and my father paid him and made me go up and down the streets myself, around the block and over the hill by the shops. Certain times he even came with me, my father, that’s how much he wanted me to drive. He’d be sitting right beside me in the tiny seat of the fancy car he’d bought for me as a gift, telling me this way or that, giving instructions on what to do at a set of lights … But always looking at his watch, too, and wanting to get back – ‘to some little chickie he had waiting upstairs’ were my brother’s words. Or something else he needed to do. Still, those few times with him were times I felt close, when he said ‘clutch now’ or ‘reverse’. And even on the days he didn’t come, I thought I could sense his affection in the way he would wave me off goodbye. As if he was pleased to think that soon I’d be in that car for ever and I’d be driving away.
So the two weeks passed before school broke up and twice I went out and the boy in the street was waiting, kind of – is how I wanted to believe it was. Hanging around by his car as I drove past him in my own. And twice I saw him look up as I passed, push the yellow hair back clean from his face as I went from second gear into first while time seemed to slow down and then stop, with the blue of that tall boy’s eyes upon me. Me thinking, in that moment, how it might be to get someone to love you. To let your mouth go wide open so another person could come in.
But I didn’t see the boy in the street after that – or if I did, I don’t remember. Because something went wrong with the car – something, my father said, that was to do with the engine and that it would need to go into the garage straight away. ‘There are often problems’, he said, ‘with these little convertibles. You can get a bit of trouble with the brakes and stopping suddenly.’ I remember exactly how he looked at me then, my old handsome dad. He was on his way, I remember, out the kitchen door. ‘I’ll take it into the garage today,’ he said, ‘and you can pick it up later, after school. Dick’s a friend of mine. He does the work himself on all my cars. He’ll do yours in a day and you can drive it home after on your own.’
*
That was a long time ago, a morning when everything changed for me like it had changed for my brother before me but he never talked about it, he just never left his room, stayed in there with the light on in the dark. A lifetime, you might say, and a day with all of my life locked inside it, a secret I would never tell. Even my mother, when I finally saw her, was not someone I could reveal myself to, to show myself that way. When we met each other, after all that time of her being gone, we were both of us strangers. But I do remember how she said, ‘You don’t surround yourself with certain kinds of people and not feel the consequences.’ Is what my mother said. ‘Except your father, well … He just found a way of not letting himself know the effects of anything he did. Or what those so called “friends” of his might do.’
She was right, of course. For the last time I drove was that day coming back from Dick’s garage, and my father as long as he lived never did ask me why. Though he was the one who’d fixed it, that it would turn out for me that way. He’d given me the car after all, when I was too young, arranged that it would need to go into the garage that day, and that the garage would be empty, with no cars at all, no men, no customers around when I walked into the empty yard. There was the sign ‘Richard Clarke and Co.’ over the entrance but only one man there in the dark office waiting. Dick’s a friend of mine. ‘And I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.
And so I’m left here with the memory of it, fitting in the pieces, all grown up now and old, and my poor brother still in that place where they keep him like he’s a child. And my father long dead and the girlfriends gone and my mother, after she spoke with me that day, never did come back … And you try to understand, don’t you? They say: Write down your stories and you’ll come to a kind of learning. Write all the way to the end. Read the story out loud.
But what I’m left with now is no different to what I had when I began: A set of keys, a ‘conversation’. A gift. Some kind of start but really with no words to follow. And so you know why there’s something wrong with me by now, why the boy in the road is a dream, why my brother stays inside. Why I don’t go up to people, don’t get close. Something that comes from that mess all over my clothing that day, of oil and other stuff, and my father walking down the hall towards me when I got home … After all that happened, all that he let happen … Calling out to me and smiling …With some fresh lovely shirt on, and he says, ‘Hi honey? Everything gone okay?’
That comes from knowing then what he knew – that he’d given me too, I was one of his ‘gifts’, my old powerful handsome dad – but was never, ever going to say. What price had been fixed. What debt I’d paid. What Dick had done.
*
Infidelity
The morning, when she stepped out into it, felt new minted, as though everything the day would need had been printed fresh. The grass was that bright green you get in the very early morning sunshine, and the leaves on the trees, each one seeming particular and exact, glistened like pieces of tin, the sky the kind of blue that looks as though someone had taken a cloth to it and polished it, rim to rim.
‘New minted’ – that was the phrase that came to her, precisely, the minute she stepped outside. The little house was dark at her back, Richard inside sleeping. But here on the front porch the whole day presented itself to her and all at once, the river beyond the gate a delicious slip of silver in the brightness of the early light.
Her thought had been – what? To go swimming, just that. To get straight into that delicious water that she’d known was flowing along there, right outside the front of the house. Yes, that is what she’d intended. She’s writing all this down now, years and years after, the children are at school and she gives herself this time, three mornings a week, to work on her fiction. The class she goes to is all about that: Regular writing time, setting aside a particular day, a particular place, and returning, over and over, to that established routine. Her professor, a woman in her mid-sixties with a rope of long grey hair running down her back in a thick plait, is possibly the most inspiring person Helen has ever met. ‘Regular writing time!’ – that’s her mantra. ‘You’ll get nothing finished, you’ll be nothing but talk, if you don’t find the time, reg
ularly, through the week, to start and work through a project.’
So – ‘Here we go!’ Helen says to herself now, thinking about that, getting the title down, ‘Infidelity’, and that first line about the morning. She knows exactly what the story will be about. It’s not a story at all, actually, but something that happened to her seventeen years ago, the first day of her honeymoon, right after she and Richard got married. She might have to change the names in the story later, she’s thought about it in advance, switch around a couple of things. And there are scenes she can surely add that will turn the whole thing into fiction, in the end. She can do that. She will certainly do that.
*
For now though, let the lovely morning run. How beautiful it had been. Late June and the weather is always beautiful in the Highlands then. She’d got up very, very early and slipped on a dress, not bothering about underwear or shoes. Really? Yes, really, ‘not bothering’, though it seems extraordinary that she could go out that way when she was always so careful about everything, so thorough. But then, it really was the most extraordinary day. There had been rain in the night, she’d heard it after Richard had gone to sleep. They’d been up, late as late, fooling around. Having a laugh actually. Sex on your honeymoon, after all – the whole thing was so corny and sweet. As had been the wedding before it, the huge, huge wedding, that big wonderful fuss. Finally it had been over and they’d managed to get away, driven up here, got in around midnight.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she’d said to Richard when they’d arrived. The countryside was so dark where they were, a remote part of Scotland way off on the west coast. The roads were impossible, they wound and narrowed. Up hills, down hills. Looming mountains off there somewhere in the distance, and somewhere else nearby the sea. There wasn’t a single village, a street with street lights; there wasn’t a single light for miles around.