Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  ‘I’ll let you get to work then – the poets await,’ she said and, with a kiss, went out.

  So I have taken up my station, and she is in her place, looking out. I glance from the window to the page as I work. Her view is encompassed by mine; it is not merely the sea that I see, it is the sea that she is seeing. Something at last takes the empty place at the centre of my perspective. Where I would have been happily confined to my office, deep in the School of English with a view to the red brick wall of the window well, content to grub about in dusty corners, there is now this breadth of vision, this depth and freshness to each breath, this widening space; only her and the horizon. She has brought me the sea and the sky and arranged them around her.

  We are quite alone in our little bay. The cottage is an old farmstead built on the flat scrubby links which lead down to a shallow bank, from which it is a short hop to the rocks that slope in turn to the pale sandy shore, bordered with squelchy polypy seaweed and scattered with pebbles, shells, sea-oddments – a scrap of netting, a rubber boot. To the north-east, the land rises rapidly in a series of heightening coves in which hundreds of sea-birds roost, riddled with caves like so many ways into the underworld. Fissures that might widen to swallow her in a torrent.

  There is a lighthouse, concealed from our view by the cliffs; at night, we can just see the beam of it swing across the sea. To the west, the black rocks stretch out in a treacherous promontory; the water sprays into crevices, and washes over the flat, square slabs, leaving hundreds of white runnels behind like an offering poured on an altar. Looking out in this direction, the shape of that other uninhabited island hulks in the distance, hazy today in the damp bright air. There are no trees. The islands are a herd of cragged beasts, their scurfy backs just breaking the surface of the water, limbs and bellies and tiny primordial heads far, far beneath; snoozing away the centuries, sleeping their ancient, uninvaded sleep, heedless, while sheep and cattle graze on the tough short crops that grow like moss upon them.

  Ours is a snug little lair, built in the low bleak style of these parts, laterally arranged so that the bedroom, kitchen and sitting room each have a large window facing the sea. A paisley-patterned green, cream and red rug on a reddish stone floor that is warm underfoot. There is a comforting clutter of knick-knackery. Framed embroidered samplers and local watercolours of lighthouses on the rough, whitewashed walls. Native seabirds painted on decorative plates and shards of slate; candlesticks and old oil lamps are ranked upon the fireplace; blankets and cushions are piled on the sofa. There is another of these ubiquitous tartans at my back, warming the worn leather of the armchair that I have found so accommodating. Linen lace-edged cloths on the many little tables; there is no want of places to rest a mug or a glass. My notebook, pen, pile of books and fresh cup of tea make an admirably humble still-life on the round table to my side.

  I read, and write, and look out to my wife, and to the sea beyond her.

  The pale-blue tide is turning, now, roiling and foaming into boiling milk as it comes in. If I shift my reading glasses to the end of my nose I can just make out, from here, the dark torpedo-shaped seals, lifted in the waves, their heads popping out briefly to watch her like cautious periscopes. She sits in her place, beyond the sea’s reach, her arms around her legs, quite still, narrow, contained. She could watch the sea for hours, she says. Last night I ran a bath for her, and when she came into the living room, pink and softened, and sat with me by the fire I had ready for her, I took between my fingers the hem of the strange old-fashioned cotton nightgown that she favours, and I drew it up and inspected her knees. I inspected very gently, with fingertips and kisses, because I wanted to tease her and this is where she tickles – these two knobbles like a schoolboy’s. She wriggled and pressed my hands flat to stop them, so that those two precious kneecaps were cupped wholly in my palms. ‘What are you doing?’ she laughed. You were out on the beach so long, I said. I’m checking for barnacles.

  Her knees cupped in my hands, the cool of the bone, under warm skin.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said, laughing. ‘Barnacles. Like a grotty old whale.’

  Not at all, not at all, I said, sliding my hands over her; it seems you are perfectly smooth. Silken.

  And warm, up and over her skin and within.

  She stands, looks back, too quick for me to lower my head, push up my glasses and pretend I wasn’t looking, peering professorially at her over the rims as if awaiting an answer. She smiles and waves, blithe, bonny girl, pushing her hair from her face, then turns and sets off away from me, along the shoreline, towards the rocks. Later perhaps she will have tales of shells and seals and seaweed to tell. Perhaps she will have found something she was looking for. Perhaps, although she has left me behind, she is thinking of me; perhaps she will bring something back for me.

  Yesterday she brought me a gift, a flat black oval from the beach, chosen from the hundreds that scatter the sand, knowing by her weird instinct the one that would perfectly fit my palm. It has dried now to a deep blue-purple like a storm cloud, and next week, when we come to leave here, I will stow it in our luggage and take it home with me and use it as a paperweight, perhaps.

  I think of my desk, the battered stained wood buried under all those papers that have strewn my life, ring-stained with the mugs I have used in the absence of this smooth and satisfying piece of stone. How odd, to think of it sitting there in my shut-up office without me. Matthew Stevens has his eye on that desk, I know – it’s been there a long time, as long as I have, a lovely old oaken thing that I have stubbornly refused to relinquish through a half-dozen refurbishments, and it is the envy of all the younger cohort who must make do with beech-veneered MDF. I’m coming back, Matthew, I said, catching him stroking a covetous hand as he stood over it. There’s no question about that. I have no doubt there was talk, over horrible instant coffee in the common room: ‘Surely he’ll bow out early, now?’ As if I were an old magician in a tattered robe, turning tired tricks to an empty hall. They’ll find I have a few more up my sleeve yet. I have committed no sin, no solecism even as far as I’m concerned, and see no reason to feel I must go. I’m sure that I can cope with a few more snickers and whispers at my back.

  He blustered, ‘But of course you will. I don’t know what we’ll do without you this term as it is. The place will fall to bits.’ Smarmy Professor Stevens, Head of School and fifteen years my junior. ‘But you must work on your book. Which I know will be tremendous.’ Well, I do what I can, for the sake of our place in the league tables, I said. We must all do our part. I enjoyed your bit in the Quarterly, by the way. ‘Oh, you read that?’ he said casually. There was a copy or two lying around, I said. ‘They’ve picked up a longer piece for the summer, actually,’ he said. ‘I’ve a couple of ideas I’m starting to think through …’ That’s splendid, Matthew, I said, splendid. If you’ll excuse me, I must just finish clearing up my desk and get home. ‘Yes, yes, I expect you must,’ he said, backing out with a mild leer that I chose not to rise to.

  Of course, at that time, she wasn’t there to get home to, whatever Stevens was inferring – she only moved in on Friday. I’ve yet to have the pleasure of finding her there waiting for me. But now, now we are married and she will share my little end-of-terrace – how full the days will be; how satisfying. She has galvanized me. With her at my side, working with me, waiting at home for me, always in my thoughts, I shall produce a work of magnitude. This little anthology of mine might yet soar into a flight of brilliance, weighted to the world with this, her gift to me, this comforting solid stone now couched in the palm of my hand.

  Yes, all very well. But will she be content as my amanuensis? I picture us building this legacy together, but those whispers and titters will follow her too. We talked once of her working on her doctorate with me, but that would be impossible now. She hasn’t mentioned it, and neither have I. I am putting off the moment when I must part with this part of her, for the sake of what I have gained.

  I wonder if I could stand t
o see her working under some one else. I wonder if I could bear it, in a few years’ time, watching her scan her lecture notes over breakfast, waving her off, knowing that a horde of hungry undergrads would soon be slavering over her. And I left at my desk reading fairy-tales. Will I be willing, when the time comes, to give her over to the world?

  I turn my flat stone over and over and look out to her there, on the beach, where she

  Ah, she has moved again. There she is, walking further off, hands in pockets, head bent; intent, she scours the sand. The seals, too, turn their heads to track her progress, their mournful eyes never leaving her. She seeks, she discards. She selects a shell, perhaps, a pebble, a piece of treasure; inspects it; tosses it to the water, a careless offering.

  The distance seems unbroachable, from here to her, the glass between us and the stretch of hard shoal. I know now what it means, to miss someone; for there to be a before and after, a without and a with; to have something to look forward to and so feel the lack in the hours between, the bitter-sweetness of anticipation (I lick my lips and taste marmalade, from her mouth); to feel time passing for the first time in – how long has it been? How much time has slipped from me, neither with nor without? All those years, and suddenly I was sixty and still, after so many untended and unchronicled months, unloved. And not loving. I couldn’t say how long it has been since I had something to count the hours for, some reason to differentiate the days. How long I have spent at my papers, thinking myself contented. Or if, indeed, I have ever felt this absence, this need of another being before, in quite this way before. The bodily yearn, of course, but not only that; when I was a smoker, I would sometimes think of lighting a cigarette and realize that I already held a lit one in my hand. As if the craving would always far outreach its satisfaction, as if it was only ever a meagre substitute, an insufficient means of fulfilling a greater and unknown lack. And this is how it is with her; each single instant can never be commensurate to the constant want of her.

  But I couldn’t give her up.

  I’d like a cigarette now. It’s been years.

  Naturally, I have had lovers. How many? Is there a need to enumerate? Enough. Too many. A sufficiency. More than twenty, less perhaps than thirty. An average then of one every two years, or thereabouts. Such mean numbers being meaningless, naturally – I did not toss about with another toddler in my cot. What a thought. I was, in fact, perhaps predictably a late starter. At eighteen the fat of my lonely, greedy adolescence fell from me and I emerged, lean, hungry, quickened, lusting for learning and love, for brilliant friends and eager bedfellows. I regret that I rarely considered the two to overlap. If ever I catch myself wishing I were forty years younger, I remind myself of this. In truth I’m no better than the doleful clots who followed her at a distance around the campus; I have only eminence on my side. Had I known her then, I wouldn’t have known what to do with her. Much as now.

  At her age, I had adopted a persona I thought both enigmatic and urbane, and spent my evenings either in the dingy bar of the students’ union, talking about girls and poetry over pints of warm weak ale, or else sitting on the narrow beds of said girls, talking about poetry and drinking cheap red wine, quoting Rimbaud and Rilke and smoking slim brown continental cigarettes – yes, my student years were one long unfiltered affectation – running a hand through the poet’s mane I’d cultivated, declaiming my own no doubt abysmal verses; all of which would, today, make my wife laugh out loud.

  She is out there on the beach this very moment smiling to herself, no doubt. A smile I can’t prise open. She has her back to me, but I can tell. Of all those irrelevant women, she is the only one to teach me and to tame me. And I’ll be as savage as she wants me, but should she turn her back I’ll always be following doggedly behind her, muzzle bowed.

  The light is almost faded. Winter is coming, the nights draw in; it is dark as midnight by late afternoon, and cold. She turns to come home; in the dimness I can’t make out her features, just the pale of her face. The tide is retreating into itself again, folding back into the clouded horizon, leaving her behind on the shore.

  *

  She came in chilled from the sea-mist that I felt on my cheek, in turn; she stroked the scrapey shadow that by five comes upon me, grizzled old bear that I am. The smell of the water-soaked air clung to her. A vibration in the dusk about her, a deep-sea coruscation, bright, unseen. She had left her mind looking out, I think. Her eyes were still full of it; slowly, slowly she seemed to see me again, from a depth.

  The way she sat this evening: staring into the fire, the glow of her skin, her eyes dark and lively as they followed the flames. She might have been looking into the future, or the past, or through to some other realm entirely. What are you thinking of, I asked. She was silent. I put a hand to her hot cheek; she twisted her mouth to kiss my palm. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘Just fireside thoughts. Bonfires. Chimneys. Chimney-sweeps. Chestnuts. The burning of letters; Shelley’s heart in the flames. Shipwreck wood, oak and pine. And so on.’ Her voice mesmeric, monotone, as if speaking each flicker as it flared and died, as if listening to the crackle of her own mind kindling. She recited: ‘A ruddy shaft our fire must shoot O’er the sea: Do sailors eye the casement – mute, Drenched and stark, From their bark –’

  … And envy, gnash their teeth for hate O’ the warm safe house and happy freight – Thee and me?

  She and me. I and she. Safe within, the dark sea outside, and the poor envious sailors who long for home, who cannot have her; the heat of the skin of her chest, her shoulders, as I slid from them shawl and sweater; the small of her back quite cool, the soles of her feet, folded under her, frozen. I clasped my hands about them; the only part of her skin that has toughened, my barefoot urchin. As I warmed my hands before the grate, the better to administer to her chilled extremities, she unfolded herself and splayed her toes before the fire – yes, they are also just a little webbed, so that each tiny membrane glowed orange, like a frog’s foot in the firelight. I pushed my fingers into the gaps and rubbed the knobbles of her big toes with my thumbs. She laughed. ‘I hate people touching my feet. My weird feet. Except you. Since you seem to have accepted your frog princess.’ No, no, not a frog, I said, wondering if she had been listening to my thoughts as well as her own. I adore your dear, funny feet, I said, kissing them.

  Her toenails are still painted red from our wedding – our wedding just a few days ago. A hesitant and shy affair, with her silk-clad at the centre of the hush, so insubstantial that I thought she would vanish with the kiss that sealed it; but no, for all the sniggers and hoots that I imagine my erstwhile colleagues are still enjoying, here she is still, her thin, cool body still in my grasp. My bride, carried off on the north wind, leaving that snide small world behind us.

  She sings in the bath. I hear her, splashing happily in her own safe little sea and humming.

  We have been telling each other the tale of our great romance, as I suppose all newlyweds do; refining the details, spinning it out, combing and weaving the threads of it. I insist, and will persist in doing so, however inconceivable it may seem: she chose me. She turned her obfuscate eyes upon me and enthralled me for ever. In a corner of the seminar room, listening quietly, it was she who first smiled, as if we shared a secret joke. It was she who laid a hand upon my arm, as if careless of her gestures. It was she who sought me out.

  We met, I told her, that September afternoon; one by one you all shuffled into that dingy basement room and took your seats; remember? The scratched wood, the smell of stale instant coffee and radiators and books, a library damped and then dried in the central heating many times over; the old ribbed brown carpets, the dust. The familiar new-term feeling. She entered last, a tall impossible girl with bright silver hair hanging in tangles to her waist. We watched her, the other students and I, as she took her seat haughtily in the corner. She didn’t speak. When I checked their names, she only nodded, raised her eyes and nodded, and for a moment I faltered, even then.

  You came i
n last, I told her, and you took your seat far away from me, in a corner. You brought the cold in with you, the crisp of the first frost and the leaves already falling; they were tangled in your hair – ‘They were not,’ she said, with a little shove, ‘I’m not a vagrant’ – but so I saw you, darling, an autumn sprite, come in from the first chill. You wore a purple sweater, the colour of the heather on the heath …

  ‘Heather blooms in spring,’ she said. ‘And I have never owned a purple sweater.’ As if you’d just come down from a hilltop, I insisted, as if you’d just conjured yourself out of the north wind, dressed in heather, and your eyes all clouded … ‘It was green. I’ve never had a purple one. I’ve had it for years, it’s one of my favourites. I remember wearing it. Sometimes I think I could remember what I wore every Tuesday of that term, because I always chose carefully. For your seminar. For you.’ I was touched, and I confess a little surprised; she seems quite without regard for her apparel, seems to cover her nakedness in whatever misshapen garment comes to hand; but also, I was bewildered. How could she scratch out, so easily, this image of her I had so treasured and thought indelible? How, after a year of existing in that guise in my mind, how can she possibly say: I have never been thus; I have never owned, much less worn, a purple sweater?