Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  My wife looked at me solemnly then, her hands in a prayer over mine; and then with a little leap, turned tail and pelted down the hallway, into the kitchen and out the other side, bounced once on the sofa and up and off she went again, leaving no impression behind; I followed her round and about, tracking her, like a dog sniffing after traces, room after room, hunting through the house. I caught up to her in the bedroom at last, panting and pretending I wasn’t breathless, listening for her, knowing she was in there although I couldn’t see her. I caught a brief gleam in a looking-glass and she leapt on me from behind the door and I snatched her up, and for the second time in our married life, I laid her down.

  I put my tongue to the palm of my hand now and think I can still taste her, the salty tang of her skin. I look out to where she stands and, for just a moment, she glances back at the house shyly. She makes no gesture. The sun is low, it fills the window, and perhaps from beyond she cannot see me for its glare.

  Later in the evening I brought out the champagne that I had carried all that way; train-rattled, air-pressured, sea-rolled, it opened with an irrepressible pop and spill, into the tumblers that were all I could find in the cupboard. She curled up on the sheepskin before the fire, and I took my seat beside her gamely, with a gamey crack of the knees, stiff from a day of sitting. And we toasted each other and polished off the bottle with some thick beef sandwiches in quiet, travel-worn contentment; and she went off to the bathroom to wash and brush her teeth, and I enjoyed the fire a little longer, pouring myself a dram from my flask and savouring the spice of it, feeling the heat of it over my chest, and deeper in me the warmth of anticipation. But when I went into the bedroom she smiled drowsily out of the burrow of blankets she’d made about herself, and by the time I returned from my own ablutions, she was quite, quite asleep, and so sweetly that I couldn’t wake her, despite my want.

  But a few hours later she woke anyway, shocking me into consciousness with a great and frightening gasp as if she had been hauled from the depths. She dreamt of a deluge, she said, and she was drenched by it. Her gown stuck to her damp skin, her face shining in the dark. She said she’d dreamt that she stood on a high cliff, and as she looked down she saw the water rushing back, and the shells and the jellyfish and the urchins and the skeletons, whales and ships and men, all bleached to bone, all exposed on the sandy seabed, the sea pulling back for miles and miles; and then gathering, mounting, as if some invisible giant had rolled it all back like a carpet, and then let go. She saw it rushing towards her, tumbling over and over itself, and pushing all the bones and waste and wreck before it, smashing against the cliff she stood on, and she felt the spray of it, she saw it rushing up the wall of rock, and just as it breached the edge, just as it hit her, she woke with that gasp, as if it had knocked the breath out of her.

  I held her by the shoulders and promised she was safe, but she wouldn’t meet my eye; she went on staring out to the sea that still assailed her in the darkness. So I pulled her to me, and felt her ribcage hard against my side, and still she would not look at me; I covered her cheek with my hand and she allowed her face to be turned, passive as I kissed her, grasped her, eased her rigid body back upon the bed and covered it with mine, seeking out her frightened eyes, which stared and stared beyond me as if she couldn’t quite surface. And then at last she let them close and held to me as if for life.

  What is it that makes her cling so? I have perfect circular bruises on my arms and thighs from her fingers and heels, and pressing them now, matching my fingertips to the blue shadows of hers, I know she loves me. She’s told me as much. Looking out at her there at the tidemark, and looking down at the paling grey hairs, the dry skin of my forearms, I wish I had something more than a bruise and her word. But it seems there is no other convincing explanation.

  This morning, our first on the island, I left her sleeping; the blind, which I was sure I had lowered before getting into bed, was open to the dawn, so that I had the impression of waking very early, and rose with a sense of vigour as I went about the making of coffee, the slicing and toasting of bread. And only when I glanced at the kitchen clock, as she wandered in rubbing still-sleepy eyes, did I see that it was past nine; how far we have turned from the sun, so far north. How long the nights. Hello sleepyhead, I said, kissing the pale pink skin just visible at the centre of her crown. How are you this morning?

  ‘Such a strange dream,’ she yawned; ‘of a tidal wave, and the beach was all covered in bones …’ And she told me the dream over, as if she had no recollection of waking and telling me in the night, as if I had not held her as she shivered, as if I had not warmed her, as if she had not even woken when I, when we, when she … well.

  That gasp of hers.

  She sat at the table, ruffling her hair into a fluffed cloud, squeezing shut her eyes as if to clear them of salt water, rubbing her fair brows into disorder with strong fingertips, and then looked up at me apparently revived. I felt a rush of fondness, then, for a morning ritual that I could already imagine watching and still adoring, years hence; the sight of my wife rejoining the world.

  Mrs Odie had provided butter and milk, and I found marmalade in a cupboard, left by a previous guest I suppose, with a quaint hand-written label, possibly decades old, possibly an antique. Do you think this will be okay? I asked. ‘It’s a preserve,’ she said. ‘Clue’s in the name.’ But surely even preserves must moulder? She put out her hand for it, twisted the lid, the sinew of her wrist tautening to turn it, sniffed inside. ‘I should say well-preserved. Mature.’ Pungent? I said. ‘Ripe,’ she said, reassuringly. She cut a chunk of cold butter and mashed the surface of her toast with it, trying to spread the unspreadable, and slathered on the dark, bitter unguent from the jar, and pulled the rags of this mess to bits with her fingers and ate it at the window, taking small bites from first one torn half, then the other, dropping crumbs into the sink and looking out.

  ‘I’m very pleased with our island. Do you think it’s cold outside?’ she asked. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Yes, let’s, I said. I’ll just wash up. I could make us a thermos. ‘I can do that,’ she said, ‘you made the toast …’ But she was already pulling her boots on eagerly. Go ahead, I said. I’ll catch up. So she kissed me stickily, dark and bitter, rich and sweet, wrapped herself in her green coat and a green shawl, and went.

  I saw her walk into the morning’s thinning mist, down to the rocks that edge the sand, rising in a series of green-slippery black slabs. Undaunted, she hitched her skirt and made her way across them, carefully planting one foot at a time and testing it would hold before shifting weight on to it. I saw her bend down and pick up some sort of stick, washed up from some distant, arboreal shore, an anomaly; she looked back to the window and waved, gestured for me to come out and join her, swept a hand to encompass the sea, the shore, the rock-pools around her. She hunkered down, peering into the clear water; I saw her poke at something.

  By the time I’d made a flask of tea and found a jumper in the pile of clothes she’d upended from our shared suitcase, she had reached the beach; it was low tide, the coarse white sand glowing faintly in the wan sun. She linked my arm and led me along the shore, swinging her legs so her long skirt swooshed about them, carefree. I asked her to tell me of her investigations. She’d found an anemone, she said, like a pale pink chrysanthemum. Is that what you were prodding at, I said, the poor creature, and she reddened, because she hadn’t wanted to tell me the ugly part. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but then it sucked into itself, all the petals folded and it looked like’ – she blushed deeper and said quietly – ‘a bottom.’ Quite right, I said. It excretes from whence it eats. It has an arse for a mouth, and vice versa, I said. I meant to make her laugh but she looked so disappointed and I haven’t since seen her poking with her stick.

  At the end of the bay we circled back and, drawing level with the house, she sat down, looked up at me, and patted the sand beside her. So I sat. I poured out tea and handed a cup to her and nestled contentedly until the cold seemed to
seep into me from under, my fingers growing stiff and toes numb in my brogues; she showed no signs of feeling it. I shivered. Shall we … I started to say, but she spoke at the same time: ‘Are you cold? You should go in, you have work to do. You don’t need to keep me company,’ she said, ‘I won’t stay out long,’ and she was smiling and she squeezed my gloved hand with her bare one kindly but nonetheless, it seemed I was dismissed.

  No matter; I am content to watch her, here at the big picture window; my joints I fear are anyway too old for the haar. Oh, very well, I exaggerate. But I cannot deny the faintest senescent ache.

  It is not the honeymoon I might have imagined, perhaps, once upon a time. If I ever imagined such a thing at all; certainly in recent years it hasn’t crossed my mind. It is not the honeymoon I would have imagined someone of her age would imagine, either. But it was she who asked to come here, after all, and she says she’s pleased to be here, and with me. And it is cosy in the tattered chair that I have pulled to the window, and I have been reading, working, making notes; a series of index cards, a pile of books, poring over illustrations in muted storm and woodland hues. I am writing a book of enchantment. Not, that is, a spell-book, a grimoire, not some leather-bound and gold-tooled tome with a creaking spine, but rather a work of academia – the culmination of a long career. It has been a long time in the making, this book, a long time promised. Just because we are on honeymoon, I can’t neglect the terms of my sabbatical; it was all arranged before I even met her, and I have a deadline to keep and much to do before the spring. I tell her I hate to neglect her. She says she doesn’t mind. There’s the rest of the world to think of, she says, a sweet exaggeration. In fact she’s delighted, can’t wait to read it; she’s read all my books, or so she says. I like to think of her with a stack of them, curled up snugly in a carrel in some dim corner of the library, underlining. And now I am drawing it all together into one great compendium, all the strands of forty years’ thought: enchantment narratives in the nineteenth century. Transformations, obsessions, seductions; succubi and incubi; entrapments and escapes. The angel in the house become the maiden in the tower, the curse come upon her. Curses and cures. Folktales and fairy-tales retold. And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties, and aporia. Do I wake or sleep? Fantasy and phantasm. Beautiful terrible women. Vulnerable lonely cursed women. Strange and powerful women. It’s an old obsession. I still remember those first febrile encounters: propped up in the corner of my bed, scribbling away late into the night, in the old cheap editions I still have somewhere. And I have never outgrown that undergraduate ardour – Lamia, La Belle Dame, the Lady of Shalott. ‘Always the women,’ she says. I’m afraid so, I say. Her precedents.

  If I am to spend some of these precious hours of our honeymoon lost in stories, drifting through myths and listening for echoes, then I could hardly have asked for a better retreat. This place not quite certainly present in either sense, this place of mists and changes, the barren scrubland, the wild sea – yes, it seems fitting, to do this work here. I believe it will be a very suitable, very comfortable arrangement. Glad of the peace, dozing a little, I woke up forty minutes ago befuddled, to find the sun already setting. And she is still staring out. And so I have turned away from my work, just for a moment, to attend to her. All those subtle serpents and slippery fishtailed maidens I have been trying to get hold of; for now it seems foolish to labour over fairy-tales when out there on the shore I have one of my own. I sit quietly here, adding to my endless index of her, observing as she becomes a silhouette.

  She is Protean, a Thetis, a daughter of the sea, a shape-shifting goddess who must be subdued; I hold her fast and she changes, changes in my grasp … But I am no prince and cannot overwhelm her; she will consent to marry but goes on shifting no matter how tight I grip. Her hair falling like a torrent of water in which her fingers flick and twist. I dabble in her shallows and long to dive the depth of her.

  She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand, carved patiently, for comfort; she is a spined and spiky urchin with an inside smooth as polished stone, as marble; she is a frond of pallid wrack, a coral swaying in the current, anchored to the sea-bed; she is an oyster, choking on grit, clutching her pearl to her.

  She was my most gifted student, and now she is my wife.

  And now, as promised and against all odds, she is returning; and so, I hope, soon to bed.

  Monday

  This morning again I woke before her; and again, the blind was open, revealing a chalk-blue sky, a powdery opaque light dusting the sea and her body. The blanket of her swaddled sleep discarded, she lay flat on her back, limbs sprawled, and quite naked, defenceless, washed ashore and barely breathing. Her breasts flat against her chest, the dip of her breast bone between them; the ridge of each rib; her hips jutting, casting the faintest lilac shadows on her skin in the pallid morning. A bruise by her hip, as if a thumb had pressed into its hollow. I wondered how it got there. She bruises easily, she says. Her palms turned up and curled gently, as if they had lately released something precious. The high flat plains of her Nordic face. The brows so fair they’re almost invisible, like an animal’s fur, bunching thicker there on the bone. A faint, faint snore.

  ‘Are you awake?’ she asked in the night. I wasn’t quite, but I heard her; she called me out of my sleep.

  What is it? I said, reaching a hand behind me to grasp for her. Can’t sleep?

  ‘I had another dream,’ she said. ‘That the cliff was leaking. I was standing on the beach below and the sea was glittering and the face of the cliff was running with waterfalls … but then I heard a crack, and I saw a massive seam opening in the rock, and the water rushed through and caught me, I couldn’t keep my feet beneath me and I had to struggle up out of it and as I came up I saw the whole cliff, the whole island crumbling, all pouring on top of me like an avalanche of water.’

  And then?

  ‘I woke up. Or I drowned. Both.’

  I squeezed again at her thigh; I said there won’t be any drowning here. She was silent. I asked what is it, what is it you’re afraid of? Why are you scared of the water? And she mumbled something I couldn’t understand and I said I promise, I won’t let you drown, and was on the point of turning to gather her into me but then, to my surprise (for I had imagined her to be an independent sleeper, as I am), she moved in towards me closer still and curled herself about my back, her sharp knees tucked in behind mine, her breasts cold against me, her breath damp between my shoulders, and seemed to fall immediately asleep with a last sigh. And that animal warmth was so intimate that I would not have peeled my skin from hers for all the world. I shall stay awake forever, I thought, I won’t waste another moment of her closeness; but then it was morning, and the blind was open and she had detached herself from me in the night and was lying beside me as I found her, marooned on the bed.

  Now she is sitting with her knees drawn up on the glinting sunlit white sand, the seals bobbing in the waves, the sea sapphire-blue, as if this were a Riviera – were it not for the cold and the long skirt she has wrapped around her shins against it, and her long boots. The sky clear but for a glairy thickness at the horizon which might be haze or fog or just a trick of the light, a water-sky. The sea is about to turn and has pulled right back, leaving a weedy wet band behind, and comes in flat and sidelong to the shore in unbroken ripples like silk. Further out, a band of darker grey-blue covered in tiny crests, a shelf in the sea-floor perhaps, and beyond that, further still, flat and silver-blue again, some darker striations, out to the earth’s curve. Another pale and sun-washed day. It’s beautiful, this barren place, in its way.

  ‘Take me north,’ she said, and here we are. I had thought it a whim, a nostalgic or romantic wish to return to her wind-swept birthplace, but now we are here I wonder what it is she watches for, if there is some attachment that goes deeper, drawing her back. Is she looking for something she might recognize, out in the waves? A pattern or a colour that speaks of an old home?

  She does
n’t remember anything. Your house? I ask; the island? ‘None of it,’ she says. ‘Only the sea, the sound of the sea, in the night.’ These restless waves that wash through her sleep. Like the mermaids’ children, I teased, haunted by the sound of the sea in their dreams. Is that it, do you think? Some atavistic affliction, my little half-breed? ‘Could be, Professor. Could be my inheritance. For all I know about it,’ she said, and I regretted my lack of tact.

  She left, she says, when she was too young to remember anything else. There is no trace of an accent, although she says she learned her first words from her father, borrowing his rounded vowels, his consonants, the roll of the tongue like a wave on the shore. Where did he go, I wonder? I find myself unable to ask her, when and why and how could he leave you? He left when she was little; that’s all she’ll say.

  He must have wanted to come back one day, I ventured this morning. She has not, in the past, been forthcoming on the subject.

  ‘Yes, probably,’ she said. ‘But not with us.’

  She stared into her mug, swirled the leaves in the bottom, seeing nothing that she cared to share.

  ‘No,’ she said eventually, to herself, still swirling and staring; then abruptly looking up, with a strange and unconvincing smile: ‘no, wherever he went, he’s long gone.’ Then she started washing up, which is not, as far as I have observed in our few weeks of close acquaintance, an activity she is much inclined to. ‘I might go out for a bit,’ she said when she was finished, wiping her hands on a tea-towel and tossing it on the counter; ‘just to get some fresh air. Do you mind?’ Of course, I said, of course I don’t mind. Evidently I was not invited.