Morna picked up a flat and heavy stone, tossed it into the sea below, watched it swallowed up in a ricochet of spray. Suddenly she sprang up from the ground as if the stone had been hurled into her mind and the ripples were still circling, exploding out. Could she not take on David’s work herself? She swung round, started scrambling back to the cliff top, clawing at the rocks, grazing her hands as she tried to run away from the idea—one so damnfool obvious she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before—weeks and weeks before. No. It wasn’t possible. Obvious, yes, but quite impractical—even frightening. She wasn’t qualified. It wasn’t even her field. She might make errors, miss crucial points, reveal herself a bungling amateur. She didn’t have the stamina, let alone the scholarship. It would take years and years if she worked to David’s standards but without his skills, laboriously double-checking every phrase, scouring all his sources, cross-referencing each footnote. There would be problems, endless problems, not least of which was that she would have to brave David’s parents, wrest all the books and papers back. They might even suspect she was trying to steal his work, make capital (and cash) out of a dead man’s name and status.
She stumbled on along the path, blind to everything but the conflict in her mind. Why prejudge his parents? Might they not be glad that their son, their scholarship boy, could live on in his scholarship? After all, the basic work was done. David had planned and structured the whole book, written a good half of it already, discussed its aims and outline many times. She needn’t do it entirely on her own. His publishers would help and she could always beg support from one or two of the historians who had been in correspondence with him, fellow scholars who knew the period, were conversant with its problems. It would take time—but she had time—had often longed for some real work of substance, something to fill her life. She had always respected David’s view that one should give everything one had to work; admired his own patience and perfectionism, shared something of them herself. They had both been raised to discipline, schooled from earliest childhood to do every task as well as possible, as if they were doing it for God. Couldn’t she do it not for God but for David—the gift she had promised on her birthday? By October, she would at least have made a start, have something to offer him, and by the October after that …
She already felt excited, her strides getting longer and more vigorous as the idea took shape, seemed less impractical. In some ways, she was ideally suited to the job. Her training as a translator had made her used to working on her own in the absence of the original author, yet striving to be faithful to his aims and style, serving his work with her own. She would be translating not only Abban and Dubhgall, Yves Le Goff, but also David himself, searching out all his subtleties of meaning, scrutinising her every phrase so that it should reflect what he intended, yet adding perhaps a lustre of her own. All right, so she didn’t have his intellect, his depth and breadth of knowledge, but what was the alternative? To leave his work as dead and cold as he was; go on translating trivia for those dairy con-men in Trier who were quite happy to twist the facts about the rôle of saturated fat in heart disease, in order to sell more butter? That was what Neil had done as a career—earned his suburban villas selling lies. At least there were no deliberate distortions in David’s work. In fact, he had spent his life quarrying for one small grain of truth in one tiny fragment of history, aware of all the problems in history itself, aware that truth was elusive and subjective, changed its shape even as he tried to sketch its outlines, yet never giving up.
She tripped on a rough patch in the path, stumbled to a halt. How could she kid herself that she could interpret all those subtleties, even detect them in the first place? Every discussion she had had with David had thrown up more uncertainties, increased her awareness of the hazards of the task. The very first time she had met him he had emphasised the problems—made her realise that myth and miracle were often masquerading as fact in Abban’s time, that evidence of any sort was scanty; that you had to search for jigsaw-puzzle pieces, not only from history, but from related fields such as archeology and palaeography. Wasn’t it presumptious to assume that she could cope when David himself had found the going tough? Any scholar she approached would soon point up her own inadequacies. Better, surely, to entrust the work to one of them, or leave it to the publishers to find another author, one with some of David’s expertise.
Anyway, she couldn’t really afford to do the job. David’s research grant would hardly revert to her, and he had long since spent his small advance. She would be paid if she completed the book and if the publisher accepted it, now written by two hands, but both those ifs were uncertain. She could continue with her own work, subsidise David’s that way, but then she wouldn’t have the time to lavish on it, the energy and freshness it demanded.
She missed her footing, almost fell. The path had petered out, blocked by fallen scree. She had blundered right across it, stubbed her toe on a piece of jagged rock. She eased her shoe off, remained crouched down on the ground, rubbing her bruised foot. Why not simply accept that she was beaten? She limped over to a boulder stained green and brown with lichen, sat on the damp stone, seeing nothing but the bare kitchen table in the cottage, cheap wood like David’s coffin, empty like his bed. She looked back in the direction of the cottage, as if to see that bed, reach out and touch that table. Nothing there. Nothing behind her but the pale grimace of rock in scrubby grass, the fold of hill on hill, the scimitar-curved horizon of the sea. She was astonished at the distance she had come. She had been walking like a robot, lost in thought, while her feet tramped on towards the monastery as if pre-directed there. Only one last hill to breast and she would see its stones—ruins like David’s book.
She jammed the shoe back on, trudged on again, shading her eyes against the reddening sky as she panted up the slope. She hadn’t even noticed her surroundings, yet the setting sun was scorching the whole hillside, as if someone had lit every lamp and fire and beacon-flame in heaven and left them blazing until they licked down and kindled earth. She pulled herself up the last few yards, stopped stock-still at the top. The stones were no longer grey, but glowing pink and gold in the fierceness of the light, the granite softened, the whole site flushed and flaming. She had only seen sunsets as fierce as that in California, sun on glass fifty storeys up. She could feel that sun flooding through her body as if she, too, were glass, stained and coloured glass, letting in the light. She was the colour, was the light. She sank down on the grass, stunned by the stab and shout of red. The sea breeze was tugging back her hair, tempering the hot fire of the sun. Wind and fire. Pentecost. She closed her eyes, watched David’s sacrificial fire leap into flame behind the lids, the fires of every rite and every century blazing back to prehistoric man, further back to the first kindling of creation. She could hear creation crackling into life, she part of it, no longer separate, pointless, random, but burning with its force and power.
She opened her eyes a crack, glimpsed only gold and scarlet, the whole sky ablaze around a raw red molten sun. She reached out her hands to try and block it off, seemed to lose her balance, was suddenly plunging round and round on a roller-coaster ride, spinning in its orbit. The sun was too close, swelling even brighter as the ride lurched on and down, piercing through inner space. That was the red sun of the nucleus, infinitesimally small, yet huge, overwhelming, as she herself shrank in scale. She could hear the booming voice again, distorted on the soundtrack, could make out no clear words. She tried to grab the rail, feel the reassuring confines of the cab. Her hand closed on nothing. Nothing above her or below her but spinning whirling void. Million upon million of orbiting electrons were vibrating all around her, their glowing hazy paths tangling and interweaving until she was dizzy from their endless dance. She was part of that dance, her own boundaries dissolving, every atom stretched and magnified to its smallest smallest particle, yet one unbroken whole. She could see the entire universe in one plane, in one dimension, yet with no planes, infinite dimensions, as if the gum
of time and space had melted, everything fused, merged, co-existent, unified. David’s fifteen thousand million years were no longer laid out chronologically, but formed one unending present. The caveman was venturing out to stalk his prey at the same moment as the astronaut took his first tentative step on Planet Mars. The sun was rising on Ancient Greece, Abban quarrying stones to build his cell, David bawling into slippery life in the midwife’s hands.
Morna groped out her own hand, touched the hard rim of the earth’s crust, felt the tailwind of its satellites blow back in her face. Naked earth. Naked mind. Everything had fallen away—fear, flesh, granite, sea. She held infinity in her hands, felt its lightness, its simplicity; knew she was part of it, woven into it; that light-dark, life-death, were all one, all one.
She breathed in the silence, the silence before creation, the silence after the last y of history had crumbled into dust. She herself was history—evolving, growing, overthrowing, shifting and in flux, yet unchanged and ever now. This was the eternal now, this one astounding moment out of time, this joy, this lightness, all-embracing being. No shadow and no end …
Morna opened her eyes, blinking against line and shape again as the world shook back in place. Sunset. Long shadows trailing like pennants from the pink-tinged stones, sky stained gold and purple, damask sea reflecting it. She stared at her shaking hands. How much time had passed—a second or a day? She tried to struggle up, aware again of ordinary sensations—the brash wind in her face, the booming of the waves below. Her body was returning, cramp in one leg, both feet sore and aching, her stomach rumbling vulgarly. Had she merely fainted from lack of food, lost consciousness a moment?
She groped to her feet, walked slowly down the slope, still half-dazed and stumbling, stopped at the circle of St Abban’s cell. The rays of the setting sun cut it like a radius. She could see the other cells clustering around it, the oratory set back a little. The buildings were still whole, still proud. Only time had blocked them from her view, as just one branch of one bowed and stunted tree could block out the whole sun or moon. There were other worlds, other modes of being, which she had fathomed for that one stupifying instant before time and space closed in again. She couldn’t explain it, didn’t have the concepts. If she were a philosopher, a physicist, she might have tried to coin them, but if she compromised with suspect terms like vision, revelation, most people would scoff, tell her she was imagining things, going out of her mind. Or make a joke of it, defuse mystery and immensity with a guffaw or a jeer.
Not David. She clutched at the crumbling curve of stones. Had David known what she had sensed just now, grasped it all along, been struggling to put it over to her, somehow find the words? There were no words. Yet he had done his best to grope towards them, find vague approximations like grandeur, terror, unity—which she had failed to understand.
She picked up a loose fragment of the granite, held it warm and solid in her hand. This was a stone which Abban might have laid himself, part of a cell which had stood for thirteen centuries. Stones lived on. So did words. She could see Dubhgall’s words on the last page of his book. ‘Pray for me, Dubhgall, that I may have eternal life’. His prayer had been granted, not only through his Life of Abban, but through the chain of scholars after him—scribes and copyists, historians and scholars. David was one more in that chain. She had to complete his book—she knew that now—join the ends of the chain to form a circle, a circle like the soul, this cell, this island—the structure of life and time itself, revealed to both of them. All the conflicting arguments had faded, the problems somehow dwindled. She had received the gifts she needed for the task—Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Ghost—no longer cloistered Modesty or Mildness, but Understanding, Fortitude, Patience, Longanimity; the Gift of Tongues. That last she had already—the gift of languages—the power to bring a book, a work to life.
She looked towards the sea, still gilded by the sun, its glaze of colour seeming to calm its swell, turn it into a lake of golden oil. Further up that coast, she and David had sung to the seals when they beat the bounds of the island. She could hear the echo of his baritone carrying her weaker voice along with it. ‘Tu devicto mortis aculeo’. That was the only way to overcome the sting of death, to make David and this island live again.
She walked towards the holy well, tossed the chip of granite in, heard the splash of healing water. The grass was lusher here, fulmars nesting in one crumbling cell. She sat by the stream, dabbled her hand in the water—a ringless hand which still looked strange without its wide gold band. The mark had disappeared, though—the third finger no longer different from the rest. She was single again, free to work, to lavish time and love on a project she believed in, without Neil’s imprimatur. She was also free to finance the work any way she chose—sell her house and buy a smaller one, maybe not buy at all, just rent a place, live simply, even frugally, be willing to experiment, reforge all her values for herself. She grasped one hand with the other, as if to test their strength. Her septic finger had healed, new pink skin formed around the nail. She hadn’t even noticed till this moment. She squeezed it, felt no pain.
The wind had dropped, the air almost still in the shelter of the ruined wall, and scented from the clusters of wild thyme which pushed between the stones. Medieval herbalists had prized the plant, believed thyme inspired courage, banished melancholie. She picked a sprig, stuck it in her buttonhole. She needed courage. Her doubts might well flood back once she started on the book, her loneliness return. Yet there was no more hesitation in her mind. David’s work was hers now.
She could feel his presence still, not only in this spot along with Abban’s, but woven into the whole vast chain of being, transmuted from life to death to life again. She hadn’t been hallucinating. What she had witnessed had left faint traces in her mind like the streaks of palest amethyst still bruising the sky after the wound and shock of sunset. She glanced around her. No flame left, no breath of wind. The terror and the grandeur had both diminished now—stones solemn grey, hills turning from burnished gold to pewter.
She eased up to her feet, walked slowly back up the slope, waves breaking on the shore again, soft shadows smudging sea and sky together. Dusk was falling, birds gliding in to roost like shadows themselves, floating on the air with no sound, no movement of their wings. She swung south along the cliff-path, watched the sea submerge the sun, water closing over fire, the last glints and sparks extinguished. The waves chafed up and back, up and back, hissing into the crevices of rock, sucking out again with an ugly grating noise as if one rock were grinding on another. The light was fading as she rounded the southernmost tip of the island, turned northwards to the landing point. She could see the boat veering towards her, cutting a sharp white furrow through the flagging blue; watched it grow slowly larger, hatch two yellow daubs, and then two faces.
She used both her hands to scramble down the cliff. She was chilled now, damp with the spray that exploded from the charge of wave on rock. Even in June, this sea could not lie still, was bullying the boat, trying to turn it back. She jumped the last few steps of rock to the concrete landing slip, waves pummelling and pouncing at it, the whole wild expanse of water ripped by currents. The steep curve of the cliff-face lowered like some huge dark beast from another ruder age. Darkness was closing round her—vast night, vast sky—she only an ant beside an Everest, a matchstick on an ocean. She felt no fear. Great and small were mistranslations, meant nothing any longer, darkness only the underside of light. The nuns had taught the Order in the world, but had seen only a narrow and restricted world, every part of it nailed in place and labelled—good or evil, past or present, true or false. How could she ever explain to Mother Michael the simultaneous wave of creation, transformation, annihilation—all things interacting, no either-or, life-death? Even now, the faint pattern of the ever-changing motions of the electrons’ dance still circled in her mind—a circle which enclosed and defined all things.
She stepped forward as the boat nudged between the molars of sharp
rock, the retch of diesel engulfing the rank smell of rotting seaweed. The Blackman’s son was standing on the gunwale, gesturing to her to jump. She paused a few seconds to judge the swell of the waves, sprang towards the deck, was steadied by a tanned and tattooed arm. The deck was slippery, stank of fish. The boy said nothing as he helped her in, he and his father talking only between themselves, as they had done on the outward journey, in a dialect she couldn’t understand. She stared down at their catch—writhing silver mackerel, one large salmon, bloody at the mouth, a few smaller fish she didn’t recognise. The Blackman was steering out between the skerries, working with the currents, his full attention on the wind and tide. He jerked a thumb towards the tiny cabin where there was bread and tea, an ancient wood-fired stove. Morna shook her head, lurched forward, clinging to the side as the boat pitched and rolled beneath her. She stood in front, bracing her feet against the wind, watching the prow cleaving through the swell. Despite the cold, it was almost mesmerising, wave following wave as the boat ripped and broke each curve, the backwash billowing out along both sides of the boat. Sea and sky were grey now, yet every wave erupted in glints and strobes of green, purple, turquoise, fringed with white, before rolling on to grey again.
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