Morna tried to bundle her hair beneath the collar of her jersey, to stop it clawing in wet strands at her face. Her shoes were soaked, her feet numb. A damp and heavy chill clung around her body like a sodden blanket. Yet there was exhilaration in the speed and heave of the boat, the tugging wind, the sense of space shouting all around her. All one. All one. She looked back at the island—only a blur now, the jagged cliff softened into shadow, the churlish rocks swallowed up in mist. It was as if someone were rubbing out its contours even as she watched. She strained her eyes, could no longer tell cliff from cloudbank, land from sea; even the far horizon lost in dark and haze. One bird was still following the boat, flying from the direction of the island—a white bird with wide wings, keeping pace with them. She scrabbled in her pocket, found David’s silver coin, rubbed it up on her sleeve. She could just make out the Pillars of Hercules, beneath the encrusted grime and scale—regarded by the ancients as the ends of the known earth. Hercules had won immortality—at last, at cost—in return for all his labours, found a new earth and heaven with no known ends. She smiled to herself, held the coin to her lips a moment, before tossing it into the sea. She must return it to David, as her tribute to him. The bird swooped down, thinking it was food, soared up again, flew higher, higher, until it seemed to touch the first faint stars strung like harbour lights on some second darker sea. She peered towards the stars, trying to pick out Venus as they had done in California on Neil and Bunny’s patio. ‘The same energy which holds those planets up, keeps them going round and round, is inside of us as well. We’re part of the whole goddam thing. Doesn’t that just freak you out?’
She heard Bunny’s raucous laugh puncture the silence like a rock thrown in the water. She laughed herself, out loud. The boatman’s son slouched over.
‘All right, Miss?’
She nodded, let him guide her down into the cabin, back to light and warmth.
Copyright
First published in 1985 by Michael Joseph
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Wendy Perriam, 1985
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The Stillness the Dancing Page 59