‘You don’t like it in green?’ she asked. ‘I don’t wear purple. I never do. I wear green. And grey. I hadn’t realized you’d married me for sartorial reasons,’ she said. ‘If that’s the case, well …’ and her naked shoulders rose within her tartan toga, ‘sorry about that.’
No, no, it’s not that, you are beautiful whatever you wear, I said, but the heather, the heather all about you and the north wind and the warm wool drawn about your neck … ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘With leaves in my hair and a cobweb for a shawl and so forth. All ready to cast my spell on you.’
So she arrived in my seminar room, and so began the chaste months of our unspoken courtship. Yes, chaste; there were no sordid trysts in my office, no indecorous desk-top wrangling. What followed was rather a tormented year of glances; chance meetings in corridors or the common room, where I had never previously deigned to venture, and yet now found myself frequently passing through, hoping to find her reading there: long legs folded up under her, her shoes discarded, her rough heel encircled by a balded patch of sock so that I longed to poke it with a finger. Ten or fifteen times a day I’d drift down the stairs, pausing on the landing to survey the sofas, a hopeless ghost, and she was more often absent than not. Sometimes a week would go by without her, and sometimes it was all I could do not to go to her usual perch in the bay window, to seek out some last warm hint of scent; and sometimes that was more than I could do, and I’d idle over, take up some journal or paper from the table, lean casually with a hand on the place she might lately have been curled. And if I found that precious trace there then the comfort of it could barely compensate the ache of her recent departure, of coincidence just missed, or the possibility that it wasn’t her warmth at all.
But there were times when she was there, and times when she would look up from her book and smile, and cup her heel in her palm and blush. I would hover over her, do my best to string out a passing comment about her last essay, or a book I thought she’d find interesting or useful, or the weather, God help me … What were her holiday plans, was she looking forward to Christmas, to Easter? And she’d shrug, not impolitely, and stare unblinking up at me as I foundered and flailed like a schoolboy. In seminars, she kept her chin lowered, blushing quickly when I caught her looking; in lectures, she was not so coy. I watched her hand curl over the page while her strange eyes never left me, as if she was entranced, and I found myself performing for her, embellishing, all the old stories invigorated – without quite admitting the reason, I found a new energy for material I’d thought long worn thin by repetition. She laughed at my quips, she lingered after classes to clarify a point, but never long enough to leave us quite alone together. Sometimes as I left for home and locked up my office I would think I’d seen a flick of silver, disappearing around the corner of the corridor.
As the summer term drew to a close, she came to see me of her own accord. A knock and there she was, twisting her hair in the doorway. She wanted to talk about postgraduate study, or that is what she said, and I had no reason at the time to doubt it. It was natural that she should ask me to supervise her work, an obvious fit of research interests, nothing more. Preposterous to hope for an ulterior motive, I thought, or rather didn’t allow myself to think. We spent an hour in my stuffy office, I in a pose of pretended ease, swivelling gently on my chair, she perched on my baggy sofa with her bare knees bent level with her chest. She rubbed a hand down her sharp bare shinbone, she twisted her hair and ruffled it at the back and lifted it from her neck. All this, and the promise of a further year or more of her made my scalp throb in a way I was still ignoring. As she talked through her ideas, she was more animated than I’d ever seen her; ambitious, articulate, and something crackling behind her eyes, distracting me from her bare skin, her long shins, the hair stuck to her neck. It was not only all that; I didn’t only want her, although by then I could hardly deny I did; I also wanted, very much, to work with her, to catch the spark of her. I urged her to apply. She said she was still thinking about it, she’d need to look into funding, or something similar, something non-committal, and shrugged and seemed extinguished. If there’s anything I can do, I said, emphatically, and meant it. I would have done, would do, anything. I walked her to the door and took the tiny, scintillating liberty of putting a hand on her shoulder. She thanked me, suddenly shy again and rather formal, and I told her, ‘Call me Richard.’ She only smiled. Blushed, perhaps; perhaps not. It was hot.
She says it with a hesitancy that delights me, after so many years of being only ‘Professor _______’, that name now also her own. I seem somehow to have always fallen in to that division of the faculty known by their proper titles, even before these venerable last years of seniority; the younger lecturers, with their haircuts and jeans and open shirts with affected, Bohemian cravats (Dr Evans, that ass), were ‘Matthew’ or ‘Mark’ or even ‘Felicity’, but no one ever ventured a ‘Richard’. I have always been Professor _______, Prof to the cocky ones. And now I am her Richard, and how I love to hear her say my name.
A strand of scented steam has crept from under the bathroom door and through the cottage so that the air smells of her skin, biscuity salt and sweet underlying the woodsmoke and the draughts of sea-air that can never be quite excluded. I am left alone now, surrounded by our discarded garments, and have pulled a blanket about me and can hear her splashing.
Yes, it is such a pleasure to dwell on the tale alone, while she is in her bath, and not here to interject with her nonsense about not wearing purple.
I opened my house for her, on the last afternoon of the summer term. Such depths of subterfuge I sunk to; I invited the whole lot of them, my graduating class, to a late buffet lunch, just for her sake, just to see her one more time. And I fretted for a week beforehand like the old fusspot I am, losing sleep over how to marinate the chicken, and where to buy my cheeses, and did she like olives (and would she come?), could she eat nuts (would she come?), did she drink red or white or both or neither (would she come, would she come, when she’d said she would come?). I’d a fine dessert wine imported from Spain, it was heady, clover-scented stuff; we’d drink it with strawberries on the lawn, if she would only stay long enough to let them stain her lips … these, and others like them, were the thoughts that beset me every night for a week, until dawn. I was up at the crack of it, that morning; I cleaned and tidied so aggressively that the place looked unloved, unlived-in. I messed it up again a little, scattering a few books and papers. There was little else to create the illusion of contented clutter.
But in the light of that exhausted morning, with the clarity of vision that comes with sleeplessness or fever, I saw how shabby it all was: my one sagging armchair the only comfortable seat in the room; the cushions too stiff, small and formal, and not quite matching the sofa. I tried pulling across the nets that hung behind the old blue drapes, but that only made things worse – they wouldn’t quite meet, and trapped the sunshine in a single shaft of terrible light, all the dust, all my flakey skin-scurf hanging suspended in it, illuminating with that single beam the truth, that this was unmistakably the burrow of a bachelor, a fading, thinning old man. But no. I am, as she says, only sixty, and have a full head of hair. Run a hand through it to be sure, Richard.
I pulled the drapes back and told myself that in the late afternoon, in the evening, the light would be kinder, a wine-softened, end-of-term light. And this, with the French doors thrown wide to the garden which, despite or because of a want of attention, was luxuriant, created I hoped just the right impression, a shambolic and mature and cosy setting for the evening’s host, the wise, welcoming Professor. And they all came, and the light was indeed gentle and the wine well chosen and the mood deferent, and I started to think I should have made this a tradition long ago after all – I started to enjoy it, revelling in their esteem.
She was the last to arrive, or so I recall; possibly there were others, after, rendered irrelevant by her arrival. The agony of waiting and the heart-stopping doorbell announced an endless
stream of chumps and braggarts, nonchalant bigheads and idiots, and I did the rounds with Pimm’s and lemonade to start, with a kick of good gin. And at last, when it seemed my humble sitting room and its little garden couldn’t possibly accommodate one more pair of broad rower’s shoulders, or even one more of the alternative, skinny long-lanky variety, at last she arrived. She took me by surprise, I was mid-debate with some clod with an opinion, she’d rang and no one answered so she’d come round the back, she said, finding the gate open, and materialising there in my garden from behind the roses, Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls … Come in, I said, come into the garden; the brief night goes by in babble and revel and wine, I recited wryly, or pompously or hysterically possibly, reeling. She had brought a bottle, sweet girl. A surprisingly good white Bordeaux.
She confessed to me, later, that she knew nothing about wine and had wanted to impress me; she had entrusted her eight pounds to the helpful chap in Oddbins and he’d chosen, I suppose, a fail-safe; yet how she smiled with a knowing grace when I thanked her, how she dissembled good taste!
I brought out my fine sweet wine and the strawberries, dropping one in each glass as I poured, and I could see no way to circuit and end at her side and so had to pass her, and move on with a wrench to the next. And then found a vantage point from which, while I nodded and thoughtfully frowned and guffawed on cue, I could watch her. I trembled, I had to set my glass down between mouthfuls, I realized I was drunk, now, drunk with the glow of her skin and her bright hair in the low light and with wine. I watched as she sipped and chatted, chatted and sipped, and every time that nectar touched her lips it brought a little private smile to them, a honeyed intoxicated smile, and a flush spreading, and as I saw her drain her glass I rushed to her side to refill it, or attempted to rush, halted as I was by a hundred frustrations – pleasantries, platitudes, gratitudes and top-ups – and as I drew closer I saw her dip her two fingers into her glass to fish for the strawberry at the bottom, wine-soaked, and succeed at last in retrieving it just as I reached her side, so that – delicious! – she turned to see me just as it met her lips, and blushed that most becoming strawberry-red, and said, ‘I love this wine! And your house, and your garden … This is so nice of you, such a nice way to end the term – Richard.’
And now she is calling me from the bathroom: ‘Richard!’
I love to hear her call my name.
Tuesday
We had a visit, this morning, from our Mrs Odie. She’d brought eggs with her; she peered around my bulk and spied my wife skulking shyly behind me. ‘A guid braykfast, yir lassie needs,’ she said; ‘hid’s a muggry day the day.’ Or something to that effect. I took six and flashed her my most wolfish smile.
Mrs Odie it seems will drop by now and again to ‘do for us’, as I believe they used to say, although perhaps not here, but in more decorous places; this morning she swept and dusted around us, and made the bed (which we had left rumpled and faintly damp), and washed the dishes in the sink disapprovingly. In fact, she emanated disapproval throughout her interminable visit, during which my wife remained serene and silent like a dozing cat curled on the sofa, while I hovered anxiously and always, seemingly, in precisely the spot that required sweeping, dusting, or otherwise bringing to rights.
I am, on the whole, a man well-liked by strangers. By lovers, colleagues, acquaintances, less so. I believe my wife is the only one who loves me. But in the lecture theatre, the seminar room, the conference hall, I know how to impress. I have held audiences rapt, weaving stories and teasing them out again while they look on, as if gathered about a fire in the darkness. I am of a type: literary, stentorian; steely, black-browed, broad; a deep-set eye with a glint perhaps of mischief – and this has in the past served me well, with students, with strangers. Alas, it seems my wiles and charms are quite toothless when put to work upon the unassailable Mrs Odie. I cannot tell if it is we who disgust her, our way of life – mine, that is; the girl is surely blameless, a captive victim – or if it is life in general, the process of living, the persistent dirtying and sweating and shedding of skin and crumbs and sand, the helpless traces we leave behind us.
When she’d gone, at last, with a farewell frown at my growling stomach – again, I tried to compensate with a grin – I scrambled the eggs and piled them on toast and placed them on the table before my wife. She scraped them off the toast, so that she could pull the bread apart with her fingers before shovelling the eggs back onto each torn fragment with a fork held in her right hand. She eats intently, with a concentration that makes dining with her, more often than not, a sedulous, concise, and largely silent affair. I find watching even this compelling. The last morsel gone, she brushed her fingertips together and smiled at me and said, ‘Yum. What a nice woman.’ In what way, in what way do you think so? ‘Well, I don’t know. But eggs are nice for breakfast.’ I must remember, I thought, to always have eggs at the ready, and to always plate them on the side of her toast.
She roused me early this morning by hoisting the blind, a ritual that evidently I have previously slept through, unaware of her rising and standing there, unaware of the new space beside me. This time, however, I woke, to a stream of mote-bright early light falling upon her empty white pillow, Zeus seeking out his Danae and finding only an aging don, clutching the bedding to my pale and sparse-furred pectorals. She was at the window, gazing out at the gloaming, or its opposite; whatever the dawn word is for that purple dusk – I would like to say gladdening. And it was, to see her, pale nymph in her nightgown, and a band of turquoise across the horizon, and the maiden moon fading at the sun’s approach, creeping behind the thickening clouds. But she was hugging herself, her shoulder blades sharp under the cloth, and when I said her name I saw her take a long breath in and let it out and shudder a little as if shaking something off before coming back to bed, and resting her cheek on my chest, wetly. ‘I was dreaming again. I dreamt of a wave,’ she said quietly, apologetic. ‘The water coming for me. I was backed up against the rock, against a cliff, pinned there, I couldn’t move and the water was coming, licking at me like a creature, wrapping itself round my legs, winding up me, and then I was pulled from the rock, something pulled me in, and under, and out, and I couldn’t … I let it take me, I couldn’t fight.’
Should I have acceded to her wish, to bring her to this sea that so disturbs her sleep – and mine? My poor Andromeda. You haven’t slept properly since we got here, I said. ‘I know. It’s exhausting,’ she said.
The sea, this morning, does indeed have a gathering look, as if something swells and darkens beneath the flat, wind-flecked surface, which surges and sheens like a leathery hide. I feel I should keep watch, in case the beast should heave out of the water to claim her, but there is no sign of any Kraken broaching the surface, and I believe we are safe for the time being. The sky, however, is bulking out, bloated purple, tumorous. Out on the sand, my wife seems untroubled by the fine, constant drizzle in the air – a ‘driv’, says Mrs Odie – heavier than mist but not quite falling, it being, as mentioned, a ‘muggry’ day. My vocabulary is expanding with words I would prefer to have no use for.
She’s pulled her hands inside her coat sleeves, curled up and hibernating damply in their burrows. Despite the weather, she does not give up her vigil. Waiting for a sail, perhaps, a sign. I declined to join her out in the driv. I certainly have no inclination to abandon my cosy tartan vantage point. But I must go shopping; she seems happy enough in her own company, and it is my turn to cook.
At her suggestion, we will take it in turns to prepare our evening meals. I have tried to insist that she mustn’t trouble herself. I have been entertained by her before, if that is the word for it, and have sampled already the fruits of her labours. She has a gift for the contrary, for transforming innate qualities into their opposites: crisp leaves turn to mulch, the most tender meat toughens, what might be moist stales in her keeping to become heavy and dry; even tinned custard, in her custody, somehow becomes lumpen. Rock cakes you could bui
ld walls with; eggs scrambled to a single, solid wad of brown rubber. Once, she made a chicken pie that made me want to weep; I had never thought to taste its like again. Thick lardy pastry, still grey and raw at the centre; white fat on the bacon; stringy greyish meat dissolving into a sauce bound by long strands of watery burnt onion; she might have learned to cook in my school kitchen. I was transported, I was thirteen years old again and consumed by the familiar savourless taste of boredom and hunger and fattishness; one evening after another tasting of that same brown seep of onion; that cold, furtive dorm room, every night always just a little too chilly, and too long. Poor, portly Richard, gobful of sadness and gloopy chicken pie. I finished the plateful in an orgy of masochistic nostalgia, and fear that now she will consider it a favourite.
Last night she attempted sausages. Each fat finger both blackened and bloody, thrust like a swollen fist into an impossible mountain of pale grey mash I couldn’t hope to conquer, awash with bilgy gravy; and of course, as always, too much salt; as if the air here were not already laden with it, as if it weren’t already crusting every crevice and crack. I took a cautious mouthful, squeezing a smile between my bulging cheeks, sparing myself, for a moment, the gluey ordeal of swallowing, while she watched hopefully. I slathered on mustard. She watched as I hacked up and choked down two of my four sausages, each chunk dutifully ploughed into the pasty potato, which showed no sign of diminishing in quantity. Eat, I said, it will get cold, although it had arrived on the table barely tepid to begin with; did I want her to share my tribulation? Pay penance for inflicting this last indignity upon a poor defenceless pig? She edged her knife tentatively into the stodgy pile on her own plate, and pulled it clean between her lips – somehow I have never minded these dreadful manners of hers. She looked for a moment almost stricken, almost shocked, and reddened and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s awful, isn’t it.’ I closed my hand over the back of hers, which was still holding the knife she’d licked. I tried to think of something reassuring, and said yes, I’m afraid so. You have excelled yourself. She bit her lip, shamefaced, and I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Don’t,’ she said ruefully, ‘it really is vile.’ Yes. Putrid. She smiled a little. ‘Turgid,’ she concurred. Rancid. ‘Obnoxious.’ Stomach-churning. ‘Emetic!’ she cried, laughing at last. And we abandoned our plates and retired to the sitting room, with bread and cheese, and wine and stories.
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