The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Morna peered down at the sea. That, too, would be exploding with new life, teeming with plankton, swarming with fish and crustacean eggs, million upon million, hatching into larvae, providing food for other fish, for birds. Fish eating fish, bird devouring bird—the food-chain of the island—the chain of life. And death.

  She slumped down against a spur of rock. It was two months to the day since David’s death. She had come to the island on impulse —a sort of ritual journey in his honour. She hadn’t planned the trip, had been sitting quiet at home, caged in the tinselled emptiness of a Bank Holiday weekend—jolly voices on the radio, local paper packed with fêtes and shows, and she on her own doing nothing much at all. Chris and Martin had gone diving down in Portsmouth; Bea was helping to run a Whitsun Festival of Prayer and Renewal at Hilden Cross. Morna hoped they would include a prayer for those in danger from the sea, for divers, especially young ones, those still unmarried and untried. The fear was always there now—fear of the sea, its greed. She had made herself get up from her plush and idle easy-chair, work out some plan of action, something tedious but time-consuming which would stop her worrying, fill the whole weekend. She would shampoo every carpet in the house, reorganise her filing system, or have a real blitzkrieg on the garden—weed all the flowerbeds, prune the spiraea, uproot the stubborn suckers at the base of the lilac bush, grub out the plantains in the lawn.

  She went into the bedroom to change into old clothes. Her oldest clothes were David’s jeans which she had worn on her last crossing from the island. She sank down on the bed, buried her face in them, smelt salt herring, tar, David’s smell of woodsmoke and strong carbolic soap. Suddenly, she was packing her bag, flinging in stout shoes and waterproofs, her thickest sweater, collecting up all her money, phoning British Rail. It was crazy, absolutely crazy, would cost her far too much in terms of cash and effort for just a day or two. She might not even get there—the sea too rough, the tide wrong.

  The sea was calm, the tide poised between low and high, the perfect time to cross. The only problem was she had forgotten what Sunday meant to pious members of the Scottish Free Church—free, it seemed, in nothing except name. It was a sin to work on the Day of Rest—even to use a chain saw or do a bit of washing—a crime to take a boat out. She stood on the quay at Oban wondering why all the nets were empty, all the boats tied up and unmanned. When she enquired in the hotel bar if someone could take her over to St Abban’s, the silence was oppressive. One man even spat. She left the bar, confused. Down in the South, the Thames would be thick with boats, commerical companies cashing in on the tourists and the three-day break. She stood just outside the open door, watching the men jostling at the counter, ordering their nips and pints, gulped one after the other, the beer washing down the whisky. Strange that the Scottish God should disapprove of boat trips on the Sabbath, yet not of getting drunk. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and most of the bars still open, at least in the hotels. Those same boatmen who had cowed her with their contempt looked none too steady on their pious Sunday legs.

  A young lad sidled out to her, gestured to her to follow him. ‘Try the Blackman,’ he muttered, when they were safely out of earshot from the pub. ‘He disna bother aboot the Sabbath.’

  ‘I … I beg your pardon?’ Morna had seen no one coloured in Oban, not even an Indian or Asian.

  ‘He’s no from here—disna belong. He’s an incomer, works for the money.’ The lad was still talking in a whisper as if he feared a lynching should anyone overhear. ‘Yu’ll find him at The Clachan.’

  The directions he gave were confusing as well as near inaudible. Half an hour later, Morna found the so-called Blackman who turned out to be English with blue eyes, although his skin was sallow and his hair a greasy brown. She had heard almost his whole life history by the time she’d tracked him down, learnt that he was regarded as an alien, although he had lived and worked in Oban all his life—a foreigner twice over—first in that he had been born in Newcastle, and secondly in that his mother was reputed to be a tinker which accounted for his swarthy skin. He was obviously disliked. Only an outsider and a heathen would take his boat out on the Sabbath Day at the whim of some disrespectful woman as foreign and as godless as himself. Worse still, he also took his nets with him and his eldest strongest son, planned to do a bit of fishing while he waited to pick her up again, maybe compound his crime by hawking a fat salmon round the more profane hotels.

  Morna shaded her eyes against the glare of sun on water while she looked back at the boat. She could just make out the Blackman and his son, their yellow jerseys a tiny splash of colour against the smudged blue-grey of the sea. A few months ago, she had eulogised that sea, used words like majestic and sublime. Her adjectives were different now. She watched the waves breaking on the cliff-face just below her, sweeping back with a sullen roar before hurtling crashing forward again. A body would have no chance. The chain of women widowed by the sea edged the British Isles like a black border. She could hear their wailing underneath the lashback of the waves, a thin and hopeless sound.

  She wiped her face with her sleeve. Spray was stinging her cheeks like tears, even halfway up the cliff. Was she crazy to return here when she had settled down so well, tried to put death behind her, devote herself to Bea and Chris? David had always made her act impulsively. She should have stayed at home, continued with her new translation work, a market research job for a German dairy agency based in Trier. She could have swamped the weekend in cream and butter, distracted herself in plotting the statistics of milk consumption in Koblenz or the rise in yogurt sales. Except she had been working at it, off and on, all week, was jaded now and stale. Even at school, Whitsun had been a holiday. They had had Battenburg cake for tea instead of bread and marge—squares of pink and yellow fenced by damp and heavy marzipan. And after tea they had gone up, one by one, to the wooden dais where Reverend Mother sat presiding over two large blue china jars—a sort of spiritual bran tub or tombola. You knelt between the jars, shut your eyes, and pulled out a piece of folded paper from each jar—the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Ghost. Whichever Gift and Fruit you received was your personal message from God, never random but intended, pointing you in the direction of the virtue or attribute He judged you needed most. In all her years at school, she had never received Peace or Joy or Wisdom, always Fear of the Lord or Chastity, Piety or Counsel.

  She clambered on up the cliff, surprised by the force of the wind as she reached the top and encountered it head on. The showers had ceased, the sun emerged from cloud, yet there was still that fierce southwesterly blasting in her face, trying to bore right through her—a wind like the one in the Epistle of Whit Sunday Mass. ‘And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind …’ The new translation was tamer—‘A noise from the sky which sounded like a strong wind blowing.’ Sky or heaven—there was a world of difference. She had wrestled with that problem in her own translation from the French professor’s work. ‘Ciel’ meant both. She looked up. Ciel azur. Voluptuous puffy clouds, pawed by the wind, ogled by the sea; not a day for grief, but one for poets, lovers. They had told her in Oban that the island had been swept with storms—three days of lash and roar—but today was calm, precariously calm, what the locals called ‘peace in the mouth of the beast’.

  Morna took off her jersey, warmed by the climb, the spring sun on her back. Although it was now evening, the day seemed newly-fledged still, the colours strong, no hint of night or shadow; only two weeks away from the longest day of the year. The birds hadn’t gone to roost, nor the sheep ceased their steady rhythmic munching. One stared at her, still chewing, topaz eyes in mottled white wool face. She approached it softly, watched it startle away. Those sheep had been in lamb during all her weeks with David; everything fruitful, burgeoning with new life; only she barren, moribund.

  She tied her sweater round her waist, set off across the heather. She wouldn’t take the long way round the cliff path; quicker and more direct to strike straight across the islan
d to David’s cottage. She needed one last look at it, yearned to see David again in his possessions and his memories, gather up his things and make a funeral pyre of them, hurl her grief on top, hope it would burn out and leave her purged.

  When the cottage came in view at last, she was out of breath with throbbing blistered feet. She had forgotten the roughness of the terrain, the sudden dips and climbs, the lack of any proper paths except the rough track trampled to the cottage door by its hundred years of tenants. She stopped to rest a moment, faint from lack of food. She had come to the island fasting. It had seemed appropriate, an offering to David, some tiny ritual in his memory. Although she was weak and empty, it would have been impossible to eat in any case—not now, when she was standing just five yards from his door and on the coast where he had drowned. The accounts in the local papers seemed to surge into her head again, the words jumbled and grotesque, the papers themselves torn and stained with sea-water. ‘The stump of boat was found maimed and bloated, bursting out of its clothes …’ ‘The stench of rotting oars, the puffy swollen life-jacket, the buckled face …’ No—all lies. He hadn’t had a life-jacket, hadn’t had a face—not when he was found.

  She made herself walk on, crept up to the cottage as if David were working still and she feared to interrupt his chain of thought. The door was boarded, two stout planks wedged diagonally across it to form a barrier. Had Cormack assumed the cottage was unlucky, decided to lock the evil spirits in to prevent them running loose? David’s spirit was in there, nothing evil. She heaved at the boards, pitting her whole strength and force against them; clawed one loose, then the other, pushed at the stubborn door, jolted forwards as it opened suddenly.

  She stepped inside. Spring disappeared; winter chill took over. The rooms were cold and gloomy, smelt of damp. She had been remembering the cottage as filled with light, even in the murk of January. In fact it was dark—in June—and almost bare. Cormack had stripped the shelves and cupboards, taken down the curtains, removed half the furniture. She peered into the parlour. The sofa bed had gone, a patch of green mould sprouted on one wall. The hearth was empty save for a handful of black ashes. She walked upstairs, feet echoing on the wooden boards, opened the bedroom door. The bed was still there, but without its mattress or its covers—the bed where she and David had first …

  She sank down on the floor, pressed her face against the bare wood frame. It reminded her of his coffin, that narrow wooden oblong with nothing in it. Worse, in one way. More final. End of hope. One stupid childish part of her had never quite believed that he was burnt. The outward casing had been confined to the flames, but David himself had escaped and slipped back here. She had imagined him lying on this bed, or wooing the kitchen range, kneading dough for sun bread. At least something of him would be saved—his shabby sheepskin jacket, his piles of papers with their energetic writing which looked as if it were leaping off the page, his scarlet toothbrush which had nuzzled hers in the mug beside the sink. But nothing. Nothing. Not an odd book or glove, not even a stray button. Not the echo of his voice or a greasy rim around a baking-tin.

  She jerked up from her knees. Fool she was, thinking she could waltz in after a fatal accident and expect things to be unscathed. The police would have searched the place, rifled through David’s every last possession, bundled them back with the corpse only when the case was closed. Death by simple drowning. No foul play. Body, books and clothes released, parcelled up like jumble to his parents.

  She limped downstairs, blundered into the kitchen—once dining room and workroom, study and powerhouse, now coldest room of all, with its dead black range, its one broken chair left tipped against the table. That table had always been piled with books, documents and scribbled notes surrounding them even when they ate there. She ran her hand across the bare cold wood. David’s work had died with him; those years of painstaking research now mouldering in a drawer with salt-stained jerseys, boyhood photographs, old school prizes, the cuttings about his death. His parents owned St Abban now and had coffined him in some chest of drawers or bureau along with the relics of their son, his Life unfinished, his miracles unsung. They would never understand the importance of the work—might revere it as a kind of fossil, something precious but dead—not as the growing budding struggling thing which she herself had helped to bring alive.

  She pulled a stool up to the table, sat with her head in her hands, remembering her hours with pen and paper. Of all the jobs she had ever done, it had proved the most fulfilling, not only because it was a shared task with David, but because of its very continuity, the sense of something expanding and developing, as they laid brick on brick, line on line. They were building something which had a future and a public, unlike her own trivial translation jobs which were mostly filed into oblivion, or simply chucked into the waste-bin when they had served their puny purpose. She was part of the book herself now, her suggestions and her phrasing woven into it, her translation serving it. She had helped, in fact, not just with the French, but with the final polished version from Dubhgall’s Latin. She and David had often argued passionately about shades of meaning, or word order, or even the use of semi-colons. She remembered one chapter in particular, when Abban had first landed on the island, found it barren and deserted, begged God to help him feed his few devoted monks. She could recall the passage almost word for word, still disagreed with some of the phrases David had chosen in preference to her own. She hunted around for a scrap of paper—wanted one last try, perhaps a compromise between their two contrasting styles, David’s plain but never casual, hers always more informal. She searched the dresser drawers. There must be paper somewhere. David had had stacks of it—piles of foolscap, scores of virgin notebooks, jumbo-pads from Smith’s. Now there wasn’t a single sheet remaining, no smallest pencil stub.

  She tipped out the contents of her handbag. No paper there, either, except her diary—a scarlet satin monstrosity which Bunny had given her when she first arrived in California and which she had been forced to swap for her own small and unobtrusive businesswoman’s diary which was bound in neat black leather and contained useful facts and figures. (She had left that one with Dean.) She leafed through the gold-edged pages, rose-tinted Bunny style, but mostly completely blank—not just the remaining part of the year from June to December, but even April and May which had already passed. You didn’t fill a diary with cooking meals for a daughter, chauffering a mother to chiropodist or pet shop, or even completing a translation on soft-spread margarine.

  She turned back to the first week of January, began to write under the few printed headings, ‘New moon’, ‘Ephiphany’: ‘And Abban said to God: ‘‘I have nothing to eat, but if it is your will that I remain here, I know you will provide me with food and drink.’’’

  David had put ‘sustenance’ at first. She had opposed it as too formal, since he was aiming at a simple childlike style. Perhaps too simple. She jotted down the next few lines. ‘And God tested his saint, keeping him parched and hungry for three days and three nights …’ ‘Hungry and thirsty’, she had urged, instead of ‘parched’. David had overruled her there, arguing that ‘parched’ suggested greater suffering and perhaps even a further dimension of spiritual deprivation as well as simple thirst.

  Yes, he was right; she could see it now. She turned the page—no longer blank. The second week of January was packed with entries, expeditions. ‘Exposition Park’, she had jotted, ‘Country Museum of Art’, ‘Huntington Library’. She had gone to all those places on her own, wandered around California’s tourist traps, aimless, killing time. Only David had given her life a shape and purpose. She picked up her pen, a gold-plated ballpoint which came gift-wrapped with the diary, scribbled another line beneath ‘Universal Studios’ and ‘Forest Lawn’. ‘But in the morning of the third day …’ David had never allowed her to miss the symbolism. Christ rose again on the third day and morning stood for light and hope, a new start. ‘When Abban was praying in his cell …’

  Morna put the pen down. Wha
t was the point of all this senseless scribbling, this search for better words, when David was dead, the work aborted? She flicked swiftly through the pages of the diary, stopped at October—October 16th. That was her birthday, when she had promised David gifts, a special meal. Instead, she would be alone, Chris at university, her mother at the convent. Bea had already put her house on the market and Chris and Martin spent more and more time away. How could she delude herself that she was living for mother and daughter? She was simply killing time again, ticking off the days until her own death.

  ‘Dead’, she scrawled in the diary under 16th October, turned the page. ‘Mort’, she wrote. ‘Tot, morto, muerto’, then tossed it into the corner where the waste-bucket had stood. She wouldn’t need a diary any more. There wasn’t any future.

  She let herself out, banged the door behind her, dragged the heavy planks back, re-formed the barrier. Cormack had been right to board the cottage up. It was full of evils—lost work, wasted talents. She turned back south. Dangerous to walk the other way and come face to face with one of the islanders, even Cormack himself. She was a suspect here, intruder, had only brought bad luck.

  It was warmer out of doors, the sea deceitful blue. She walked to the cliff edge, clambered down a yard or two, sat on a jutting ledge of rock. The sun was lower in the sky now, the bleating of the lambs less shrill. Still an hour or so to sunset, though, when the boatman had promised to return for her. She might as well wait here as anywhere. She had nowhere to go, nothing else to do. She held up her hand against the sun, saw the veins, blue-gold, running down her wrist. Those veins were conveying blood to the heart, the arteries pumping it back again—she alive and David dead. It was the wrong way round. He had more to live for, something to achieve. She clenched her palm, opened it again, as if to prove it closed on nothing. Even the birds seemed to resent her presence here, hostile like the islanders, the grating ‘kee-er, kee-er’ of the terns cutting across the raucous screech of skuas. Some of those migrant birds had flown more than half a million miles in a single lifetime, taking their bearings from the sun and stars or the earth’s magnetic field. David had told her about an experiment in which two Manx shearwaters had been taken to New York from a small rocky island north-west of St Abban’s and when released, had winged straight back in the direction of their home, reaching it in under fourteen days. He had made her see the order in the world, the amazing power of nature, the complexity of things; had told her once that if you compressed the entire lifetime of the fifteen-thousand-million-year-old universe into a span of a single year, then all recorded history would take up the last few moments of its final day—the whole chronicle of homo sapiens from caveman to astronaut, unfolding in sixty seconds to midnight on December 31st. Facts like that lodged in her mind, nudging and disturbing her. He had shown her a truth beyond confining commonsense and rationality, had refused to draw straight and rigid lines between earth and heaven, vision and so-called fact. Even in his book, he had speculated on the nature of truth and reality itself, using Abban as a link between two worlds, two points of view.