The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  She had to thank Ruari, share her relief with him. She turned slowly round, still crawling on her hands and knees, watched the boat in horror. It had already reversed and was edging its way back between the obstacle course of rocks, which seemed to be closing in on it as waves and currents fought each other in a seething churning brawl. It looked pitifully small, a bobbing cork, a paper toy which could be crumpled up, submerged. Its owner had risked his life for her, and she had been petty enough to resent the sum he charged—a sum which had seemed excessive from the snug safety of the mainland, but which now she saw was trifling when set against the dangers, the fact he had to face them all again. She clutched at a stump of metal, barnacled and rusting, tried to stop her trembling, shout her belated thanks. But her voice was as weak and feeble as her legs, fell like a small pebble into the sea. Anyway, Ruari had already dwindled to a pinhead, dwarfed by the cliff which reared above them both. She had assumed he would escort her to David’s cottage, at least point out the way; had imagined a safe and easy stretch of beach, or the secure refuge of a harbour like the one they had departed from. Nothing had prepared her for this wildness, desolation—only rock, crag, cliff, sea, sea.

  She struggled to her feet, wincing at the pain from her bruised and bleeding knee. Her case was soaked, broken at one corner. She picked it up, tried to lug it up the steep and stony track which led off from the quay. Impossible. She needed both her hands, would never keep her balance against the wind. Even the string bag of provisions was proving an encumbrance. She hooked it over her shoulder, concealed the case in a cleft of rock. It was unlikely that anyone would steal it. There wasn‘t anyone—or no one human. One black shag was perched on the rocks beneath her, a shrill of gulls wheeling overhead. A rabbit darted away as she climbed to flatter ground, pulling herself up on the handholds of rock. A white stone scared her by turning into a sheep. She gasped as she reached the top, gazed around her. On all sides pounded the wild and braggart sea, slamming at the rocks, stretching to infinity, moat to her island’s castle.

  One used the word island so indiscriminately. Greenland was an island—all eight hundred and forty thousand square miles of it; so was New Guinea, and Britain itself. The dictionary definition was bald and unimaginative—a piece of land entirely surrounded by water. Yes, here was the piece of land, and an unimpressive piece in terms of size or fruitfulness, bare granite grimacing through its thin and stony soil. And there was the water entirely surrounding it—as grey and bleak as the land itself—the swirling Atlantic, youngest of the oceans, according to Martin, a mere one hundred and fifty million years old. Yet the two together, scrap of land and green-horn sea, could produce this sense of awe, this wonder smudged with fear. You could shout or rant up here, dance naked on the cliff top, sing paeans to the seals. No one would complain or lock you up. No one would even see you. This splinter of land was like a fragment which had fallen off and got forgotten, while the rest of planet Earth was being planted, painted, civilised. No crops, no colours, almost nothing to show man had ever been here. And yet there must be dwellings somewhere, since six islanders still eked out an existence. Crofters, David called them, but what could they harvest beyond peat and stone?

  The wind was so strong now she could barely stand against it, strands of salt-stiff hair flailing at her face, oilskins bellying out like a ship under sail. She struggled on, bent half double, turning left along the sheep track which followed the line of the coast. David’s cottage was on the west side of the island—that she knew—close to the ruins of St Abban’s monastery. The whole island was barely two miles long, so even if she had to check every dwelling on it, the task was not impossible. She walked faster, trying to thaw her stiff and frozen limbs, stumbled down an incline, pounded up again, glimpsed a house on the far side of the hill. Could that be David’s? She jogged towards it, dispersing frightened sheep, admiring its position—sheltered in a dip, yet fronted by the sea, crowned by a vast and rolling sky. She drew nearer. The cottage looked sturdy—strong slate roof, low-set like frowning brows, walls dungeon-thick, windows small and sparse to bar the elements. It would be warm and dry inside—a fire, perhaps, a cup of tea. She panted up to the door, peered through the tiny window on the right. The room was bare, totally deserted, no stick of furniture, no covering on the rough earth floor; only cobwebs, an empty lemonade bottle mouldering on a shelf, a few fragments of peat in the cracked and rusting fireplace.

  She backed away. Where was the family who had bought that lemonade, laid that fire? Dead? Drowned? Mouldering themselves? The harsh cry of the sea birds sounded like their requiem.

  She returned to the path, tramped on, admiring each new vista as she followed the curve of the island round, she and the sheep continually startling each other as she came upon them huddled beside boulders or sheltering in dips. The colours were unchanging—dark cliff, grey sea, white and dazzling spume—but the rocks themselves were endlessly varied in their twisted shapes, sculpted by the waves into proud distorted heads or milk-plump breasts.

  She could see a second cottage, set back a little from the path, half a dismembered wheelbarrow rusting in front of it. That one couldn’t fool her—it was obviously a ruin—its door-frame black and gaping like Ruari’s toothless mouth, its only garden a bent and stunted gorse bush. Even the granite had succumbed to wind and weather; the toughest rock in the world reduced to a pile of scattered stones.

  She stopped to rest a moment, tired already, tried to block off memories of cushy holidays—smiling couriers holding open taxi doors, obliging drivers whisking her to the most luxurious hotels. Here, she was on her own against the elements—no transport, not even any road, no shelter, no Mediterranean market stall selling pain sucré or dolmades. Her stomach growled with hunger. Where were the angels, the ambrosia? She broke off another hunk of bread, frowned at the mangled loaf. Supposing David were fasting? And even if he weren’t, would he really welcome a soggy loaf with all four corners missing, two squashed misshapen cheeses, a pound of pulped bananas? Would he even welcome her? She stared down at the torn and flapping oil-skins, her sodden trouser-legs in their squelching pink-striped shoes. A scarecrow, and a female one. St Abban would have fled from her as a demon. Would David feel the same? She had come to help him, but how could she be anything but a hindrance when she had arrived with no warm clothes, no wellingtons, not even any warning; inflicted herself on him when he was still little more than a stranger, and one who valued privacy?

  She put the bread down. She must be crazier than she realised, not only doing a bolt from California, but now compounding folly and impulsiveness by chasing a man who had deliberately chosen to live in peace and silence. She had craved that peace herself, but how could she have been so crassly confident that he had any wish to share it? Yet what could she do now? She was stranded on this chip of rock, might be trapped for weeks. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ Chris had urged so blithely, meaning a week or two at most.

  And what about her mother, who would be counting on seeing her when she returned from Hilden Cross?

  The only boat was Cormack’s—the crofter who rented David his cottage, fetched his supplies. But he was elderly, suffered from bronchitis, might resent her, a stranger and a southerner, appearing out of nowhere, barging into his day. Even if she made it worth his while to take his boat out, the wind might well have changed, the tide be wrong. She had heard all the stories of those capricious winds. St Abban’s could be cut off from the mainland for a month or more, especially in the winter. Anyway, she might not even find the crofter. He lived up in the north end with the other five inhabitants, quite some way from David who had complained in his letter that it was a hell of a tramp to ask a simple question or borrow a twist of salt. Not that they were free with anything, be it provisions or advice. David had described them as wary and suspicious, and knowing his politeness, that might well be translated as downright hostile.

  She picked up her bag, trudged on. She couldn’t face hostility, and at least David’s would
be tempered by good manners. She would have to lie again, invent some story about being in Scotland anyway, on a visit to a relative, deciding to suprise him. She hated lying, most of all to David; somehow wanted him to know she had travelled all that way on his account alone. If he were threatened by that fact, angered by her presence, then he would have to help her leave, go grovelling to Cormack for a boat.

  The path was steeper now, and harder going. Icy blasts of air were knifing down her neck, sneaking up her trouser-legs, flaying every inch of flesh which they could reach. Morna thrust her numbed hands into the folds of her oilskin, pulled the hood right down; strained against the hill, caught her breath as she breasted it and gazed down at the scene below—St Abban’s monastery spreading in a heap and haunt of stones.

  She had seen David’s photographs, made copies of his sketch-maps, but nothing had prepared her for the wonder of the place, not even for its size—especially considering the confines of the island and its early date, when building was still simple and austere. At Lindisfarne, the Early Christian monastery had been built in wood or wattle, a huddle of rough and primitive huts which centuries ago had rotted into the ground. St Abban, not long after, had built in rugged stone. Most of the dry-stone wall which had once surrounded the site had fallen into ruin or had been carted away to build walls or houses elsewhere on the island, but one stretch of it remained, standing almost waist-high in places. The remains of three or four monks’ cells, now worn by wind and weather and open to the air, were still defying time, protected by the shelter of the hillside. The foundations of the oratory had been buried beneath a succession of later buildings, themselves a waste of scattered stones, but if you shut your eyes you could almost reconstruct the site, your inner eye completing its fragmented geometry.

  Morna kept her eyes closed. She could see the monastery inhabited and working, the monks filing in to worship after hours of lonely prayer in their tiny cells; breaking bread together, planting grain, harvesting and threshing; Abban himself gaunt and haggard as he goaded his frail body past its limits. She could hear chanting from the oratory, deep male voices mingling with the bleating of the sheep, the more profane babble of the pilgrims who had arrived in their jostling hundreds to beg for cure or favours, the sudden shout of triumph as a festering limb was healed or a dying child revived.

  She opened her eyes, looked down. No one. Nothing babbling but the stream which wound between the fallen stones at the bottom of the slope; the only disturbance two black-backed gulls tussling over a mouldering rabbit carcass. She jumped as a sheep lurched up from its knees, lumbered bleating past her. They were the only congregation now, those black-faced, white-cowled munchers—they and the lonely sea birds perched like statues on their plinths of rock. She scrambled down the slope, picked her way between the butts and bones of granite, Abban’s last remains. The saint would have been shocked to see the place deserted, his monastery in ruins when he had raised it as a proud and lasting monument to an immortal faith; the faith itself, then fresh and green, now considered fusty and irrelevant by the blasé inheritors of its near two thousand years. Yet the holiness was there still, lying so thickly on the stones you could scrape it off like lichen. There was some presence here, some power, which made the place the centre of the island, not geographically but in some more vital sense. It seemed wrong to wander as a tourist, trying to date walls or reconstruct the site; rather she should be on her knees.

  She walked towards the holy well—once famous as a place of miracle in Abban’s time and centuries afterwards—knelt beside it. Defeated kings or barren queens, wounded heroes, women with sick children, had all braved the stormy crossing to drink its waters, bathe their limbs. Now rabbit droppings clustered where they had lain their offerings, left their bandages. Just six months after Abban’s death, a wealthy noblewoman possessed by seven devils had been totally immersed, held down by force as she kicked and screamed; emerged so purified she went on to endow a monastery herself. Another woman, blind since birth, had had her sight restored. The first thing she laid eyes on were two huge white sea birds which opened their beaks and joined with her in singing God’s praises and whom St Abban identified as cherubim.

  Morna plunged her own hands in the icy water, wincing as her grazes stung and smarted. She, too, was in need of cure, or at least of rest. Her whole body ached with tiredness, her bruised knee throbbing, her feet swollen and rubbed raw. She sank back on her heels, let the peace of the place engulf her, its magic go to work. Those miracles no longer seemed so far-fetched. David might regard them as metaphors or symbols—inner blindness healed by faith, devils as one’s doubts or faults of character, yet, for all his caution, his world still soared beyond the rough-hewn stones of dates and facts. He refused to live blinkered in just one single creed, or tied to one interpretation. In fact, the island attracted him because it had been a cradle and a cemetery of many different beliefs, had been considered sacred, numinous, centuries before St Abban’s time. There had been two archeological digs in the 1920s which had discovered extensive remains of early Bronze Age cist burials. They had even found a skeleton buried knees to chest in the small stone cist with his dagger and his wrist-guard and a ritual beaker containing an alcoholic drink flavoured with meadowsweet. There had also been a later Bronze Age settlement which had left arrowheads and traces of post holes and another impressive grave containing a decorated food vessel. David had told her that all these primitive peoples believed in an afterlife and this could be the reason why they were buried with their possessions and some sustenance to keep them going, equip them for the other side. The strength of their faith seemed to linger in the air, intensify the light; the strength of all the faiths since man first landed here was almost palpable, as if it, too, had left its traces, charged the whole atmosphere.

  Morna picked up a loose stone, one of the ancient weathered ones which edged the holy well, held it in her palm. Its history weighed heavy. This well had been sacred to the Celts before Abban Christianised it, pagan legends of death and resurrection fusing with his own miraculous cures. David had shown her all the papers, let her read the excavators’ notes, tried to share his own excitement with her. But it was only now she fully understood his awe and wonder at the place, could actually experience its strange other-worldly quality which seemed to take it out of time. She gazed around her at the sweep of the horizon, the stark glower of the cliff standing guard above the lonely broken splendour of the worship stones. The monks had built simply—no soaring arches, towering walls, but the grandeur of the buildings was supplied by sea and sky, which could never fray or fade—a vast painted mural of white-stippled waves, silver-shadowed clouds. There was nothing of the twentieth century here, nothing which marked the passing of the ages. St Abban himself would still have felt at home; even Bronze Age man perhaps recognised the landscape.

  She walked on to the largest of the cells, stood within its crumbling circle. A circle within a circle. David had explained how an island could be seen to symbolise the closed nature of a soul like St Abban’s vowed to God. All he had ever told her now seemed to crystallise and kindle, as if the stones themselves had power to teach. She stooped down, ran her hand along the rough uneven surface of the granite. The stone seemed darker now, shadowed by the huge clouds brooding over it; the oyster-coloured sky smirched with purple. She had lost all track of time, hardly realised that light and day were fading. She sprang to her feet, strode back up the slope. The hill had served as windbreak, the stretch of wall protected her, but now she hit the full force of the wind again—a bad-tempered wind which made rude swipes at her clothes, tried to push her over. She stood her ground, watched the changing colour of the sea, the dense sky pressing down on it like a piece of blotting paper mopping up any excess gleam or colour. She ought to hurry. It would be dark in half an hour or less.

  She sprinted back to the path, tried to put a spurt on. Dark! The word was terrifying, meant something entirely different from the cosy well-lit dark of Weybridge. Here, the
re were no lampposts, no car lights, no electricity at all; not even any lighthouse to throw its reassuring beam across the ocean. She plunged along the path, watching the soft purplish gloom begin to shroud both land and sea. She was powerless, could no more halt the stealthy tread of night than dry up the ocean bed. If she didn’t find David’s cottage soon, she would be left floundering in the pitch black on a treacherous cliff with a sheer drop to the ruthless depths below. Perhaps she shouldn’t chance it, return to the monastery, shelter there till dawn.

  She glanced behind her—ghosts of buildings, ghosts of monks. In David’s view of things, ghosts were not simply white-robed spooks from some haunted house or Disneyland to be denied or laughed to scorn, but real presences confounding reason, confounding time, suggesting some mysterious continuity between age and age, mind and mind. Was ancient man in some way present still, his soul surviving like a standing stone? And what about Abban and his monks, buried higher up the slope, where the soil was fractionally deeper and where they were closer to the heaven they aspired to? Did they wander earth as well, haunt their former cells? She shivered. There were more recent deaths. A wreck had foundered here, just yards from the monastery ruins, the bodies of the Baltic sailors smashed on to the rocks, never buried. She tensed, stood petrified, hands damp with sweat, every nerve and muscle strained. What was that strange shadow, that whitish blur just ahead of her? She stifled a scream, tried to calm her breathing. She could hear someone else’s breathing, slow and laboured, a faint whistling sound as each heavy breath was haltingly let out. Was it just the wind, or …?

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she shouted, fled along the path, tripping on loose stones, fighting off the shadows with her hands. She ditched the bag, needed all her strength just to keep pounding on. Her feet burned, her legs ached; her heart was thudding so loudly it sounded like some madman on her trail, his heavy footsteps drumming in her ears. She lost her balance suddenly, sprawled full-length on the ground. The path had descended sharply and she hadn’t even seen it. She hauled herself up, touched her forehead gingerly, flinching at the pain. Another bruise. She would have to go more slowly, despite her fears. Things were blurring now, losing their clear outlines. Soon nothing would exist at all as grey deepened into black, kidnapping all landmarks.