Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  And now here we were in a church, unfit for a ceremony, without guests, without priests, without gowns and roses and lilies, but still, here was the solemnity we’d missed; still I took her cold hand and asked again if she would take this man, if she would promise me again to be my wife. There before the broken old stone altar; there under the wind-blown gulls; there within sight of the sea, I asked if she would still have me. And she said yes. She didn’t laugh at me or evade my eyes. She just said, ‘Yes’. And held my hands for a long time.

  As we reached the cemetery gate, we passed a woolly huddle of an old man, crouching by a weathered stone; he cannot possibly have been grieving, as old as he was, at that ancient grave, the occupant centuries dead. He raised his eyes as we passed, watching her go. Our only witness.

  On the path back she found a little lower jawbone, belonging, I think, to some hapless rabbit. The bottom tooth jutting, wobbly in its gumless hole. She has strung a ribbon through it, and hung it from her neck. You grow stranger every day, I’m sure, I said. ‘Ah, you hardly know me yet,’ she said. My strange wife, arranging her talismans about her. You don’t wear jewellery, I said. ‘It’s hardly jewellery. It’s not exactly diamonds,’ she scoffed. No, I said. Quite right. There it hangs alongside the rings I gave her in troth, tiny, fragile and sharp, just below her collar bone, which is also fragile and sharp.

  The sea quiet, calm, ungrasping, and the air clear; light twinkling on the water, the breaking glimmering surface, cohering at the horizon into a sheen of pale gold. Beside me, she shone, as if filled with it, the light from the sea numinous, a grace to meet her own. We watched the light scintillate until it dimmed, until only a sparkle or two remained, as if signalling, until darkness had fully fallen. It does fall, here, it falls softly, in a blanket of night-colours, deep brown and green and viscous blue; nothing like the false, city-stained night we are accustomed to, held at bay by streetlights. It has settled all about the house, softly.

  Tonight she laid me down, my head upon her outstretched legs, supine, and I balanced a glass of whisky on my belly while she stroked at my temples, where the lighter grey meets the black, where I am almost distinguished. All through the evening I spooled out stories for her, going back over my gatherings of the day. I told tales of island sorcery. The Sirens, Sycorax; Circe and the pigs she made of men. She snorted in recognition.

  I don’t question, I don’t want to know about the swine that have snuffled around her. It doesn’t matter to me; I do not know or wish to know of those she has, in the past, enchanted, those shambling lovelorn louts that circled her from a wistful distance. I know enough. I know, because she’s told me, and because I found it for myself just four nights ago: she was waiting, all that time. Waiting for her one true love, she says, sweetly, sing-song – there is none like her, none. At twenty-one, still patient, still waiting. And yet so eager, and yet so shy; her instinct, unpractised, guiding her hand. My Lamia, a virgin purest lipped, and yet of love deep learned to the red heart’s core.

  I told of Vivien, or Nimue or Niviane; the huntress, the sometime Lady of the Lake … I grew expansive, settling into the old routine, gesturing in the air above me as if casting grandiloquent spells, and she stroked, stroked at my temples, and it was I who was spellbound.

  ‘I know Vivien,’ she said, ‘I know this one.’ Oh yes? I said. ‘Yes, you’ve told me this before.’ Am I beginning to repeat myself? I wondered. When? ‘Oh, you couldn’t have known. It was before you met me.’ She bent her head, whispered, ‘I followed, but you marked me not.’ What are you talking about? I asked, thoroughly confused; she seemed to be enjoying herself. She laughed. ‘Why don’t I tell you our story, from the beginning this time,’ she said. ‘It was summer. I was warm, so I was wearing, I imagine, a T-shirt. Let’s say it was grey. Or green. I sat at the back.’ When, when, what can you mean? I asked. ‘Your lectures. I came to all of your lectures, in my second year, in the summer term. The first was Tennyson, it was the Idylls of the King. Merlin.’ And, of course, his Vivien … She stroked at my hair, and I submitted, lying back, bemused. How could I not have seen you?

  ‘I often wondered. You ignored me utterly,’ she teased, and I must have looked wounded, because then she laughed. ‘Like I said, I sat at the back. You wore your glasses, to read your notes; I was at best a greyish blur, I expect.’ Is there any knowledge so touchingly intimate as this – the limits of the vision of a spectacle-wearing spouse? And how quickly she has learned my range. Awful, to think of her sitting there, unseen. ‘My own notes were hopeless, all over the page, I couldn’t write fast enough to catch everything, and I couldn’t bear to look away from you,’ she went on. Why have you never said? I asked. Why did you never tell me, that you were sitting there, all the time? ‘I was … I don’t know. I was embarrassed,’ she confessed. ‘I didn’t want you to think it was the only reason I’d chosen your class the next autumn.’ But was that the reason, then?

  She was blushing now, unless it was the warmth of the fire; I could smell her, warm salt-spice. A young woman’s smell. I no longer sweat as I used to. Papery thin dry skin. Crimpy hair standing out like a wire brush when I lift my arm.

  Was that the reason? I asked. ‘Well, yes, sort of. I mean, not just because I liked you – I mean, liked you liked you …’ I smiled. ‘I mean, I liked your lectures. I was there in the first place because I liked the poems. I kept coming back to hear you read them. I liked the way you spoke, but also the things you said and the way you said them. When I went back to the page, I heard your voice. It was part of why I liked you.’ Why you liked me liked me, I clarified. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘Liked, liked, admired, adored.’ And now? I said. I am … what? Tolerated? Forborne? ‘Oh, stop,’ she said, with a little nuzzle-nudge. ‘Now I just love you. No more … circumlocution.’ Her fingers tracing circles on my temples.

  ‘And then I went to your seminars and planned clever things to say days in advance and then didn’t dare to say them half the time, and was furious when I did and they talked over me, those stupid know-all boys; I hated all the others,’ she said, ‘talking on and on; because I wanted you to know that I’d been thinking of you, of your class. Of you.’ Those boys, I said, those fawning boys, always following, fussing about you; didn’t you see? ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I can’t say I noticed at all. I loved you first; as Vivien says, that warps the wit.’ She stroked my stubble. When did I last shave? How long have we been here? I wonder, shall I grow a great sagacious beard, for my retirement?

  First, truly? I asked. I like to hear her say it. She merely smiled. She might be your kinswoman, I said, the Northumbrian princess. Merlin’s last folly.

  Tennyson’s Vivien is a wilful, scheming, vengeful soul, who by her sulks and seductions at last deceives a melancholy Merlin into revealing the spell that will confine him. In other versions of the legend, under other names, it is Merlin who pursues her, who teaches her everything he knows, as a gift; whose obsessive, possessive love so exhausts her that at last, in a desperate bid to be free of him, she tricks him and traps him.

  But she says it is neither one. ‘I think old Alfred gets it wrong,’ she said. ‘It isn’t so simple, it isn’t just a power struggle. Why shouldn’t they really be lovers?’ So in her version they are complicit, she is his scribe and his student, and Merlin knows, knows from the start that he has doomed himself by giving her his heart; knows that she will outstrip him, and resigns himself to his fate. Almost as if he is simply tired, I said, and wants only a little love to warm him at the last, and is ready for his endless unseen sleep. ‘Oh, stop,’ she said. ‘It’s not time to sleep just yet.’ She pressed upon my chest, pressed me down and lay beside me, one long thigh across my legs and her lips by my ear, murmuring, and tickling, and teasing. So will you, in the end, bewitch me, I asked? Will you leave your old teacher imprisoned, lost to life and use and name and fame? ‘Well,’ she said, considering me carefully. ‘Will you yield?’

  And she laughed her soft and mocking laugh, the
laugh of a much older woman, rich in the ember darkness; and reached over my head to put her glass down, and I raised myself up to meet her and turn her under me but she eased me back down, a hand on my chest and the other stroking my brow.

  Well, she may mock. Still there have been times, as I grew older and my hair greyed, that I wondered what I was waiting for; but now I know, now I know, I look up and she will be there on the beach, my nymph, my northern girl, my Niviane.

  Wednesday

  She saw a flood coming, in the night. I woke to a grasping, blind kiss, her mouth to mine as if to give or steal breath. Before I knew where I was or who, I knew her; already I grow accustomed. Her body, her mouth, her gasp.

  I held her until she calmed. ‘I was at the window and the tide was coming in, these huge waves coming closer and closer to the house, and there were silver fish, all leaping about in it, and … and goldfish too, bright orange against the green,’ she said, and then laughed a little with the relief of the dreamer who, recalling the single absurd detail in the safety of waking, knows now for certain it was only a dream. ‘The sea came right in and covered us, and the fish were all swimming around us, and we were all red and gold and silver, all scaly, and there were lights in the water like fireflies and I felt so … lithe, but then I saw’ – and here she paused, catching her breath, lost in the torrent, and pressed her mouth on mine again, her fingers curling and tugging at the hair on my chest – ‘you couldn’t breathe! And when I realized it, I realized I couldn’t either … and you were saying my name, trying to say my name, and …’

  And it was just a dream, I said. Listen, I said, the sea is far off, and quiet. Shhhh, I said, stroking her hair until she gave in to the sleep that would erase all memory of her waking.

  I have always been a deep and dreamless sleeper; it is unlike me to lie in late and drowse in the day. I have had many years of regular routine and unbroken rest. I must try not to resent the loss of this bachelor’s privilege; I am glad to be beside her, staying close to the surface in case she needs me. If I could go into that ocean with her I would; I can at least be ready to hold her when she wakes. I listened to the sea all through the night, the sh-shhh-shhhh of it, consoling, and took a somnolent pleasure in thinking myself adrift with her on a raft in the shallows. My dreams, unlike hers, leave barely an impression and washed from me as I woke this morning, wanting her, savouring her warmth and the sound of her breathing before I reached for her and discovered she was already up, and there was no one there to reach for.

  I found her in the kitchen, slicing bread at crazy angles. I boiled eggs. We sat at the table in a companionable silence; she bothered an old crossword, the last few clues of which have for days eluded us. She outlined the unfilled squares, over and over, each unsolved answer becoming ever more emphatically blank and funereally bordered. I had a vision of her then as she was in my seminar room, curved into her chair behind the fold-down desk flap, her left pen-hand curled covetous around her own page; her narrow wrist emerging from a striped open shirt cuff, the other cuff hanging long from her forearm. A man’s shirt. It used to be her father’s, she told me later (that elusive, long-armed man; did he abandon his whole wardrobe and flee?); at the time, I found myself wondering if she’d rolled into it out of some boy’s bed that morning. Remembering those mornings long ago when I’d sat in a lecture hall, yawning, self-satisfied and smelling of sex. I wondered this, in fact, with a pang in the chest that I put down hopefully to the possible onset of angina. Because it couldn’t be, at this time of life, nearing the peak of my moderately illustrious career, it couldn’t be love. The thought was risible. And yet there she sat, right hand shoved into her tangled hair to hold her own head up like a trophy, Hercules and Medusa in one, and bent over the page, her long legs crossed at the ankle in front, short trousers and sandals revealing the long bones of her shins and feet (toes compressed together, hiding the webbing that I would much later discover). And I, watching the jut of her joints, I felt my heart burn and hoped it was only heartburn.

  And yet, and yet, there she sat at our conjugal breakfast table, all these months later, in the very same pose, her curved wrist and hand as white, strong and vicious as a swan’s neck, the pen stabbing at the page. ‘Still stuck,’ she said. Her pen spiralled in the margin, the line curling about itself in eddies. She filled the whole space with scrolling waves, working into the pattern so that it grew ever darker. An impenetrable mass of currents, contradicting. The side of her hand, as ever, smudged with biro. ‘Give up,’ she said, with a resigned smack of the pen on the table. ‘We’ll get it eventually.’ And she yawned and stretched, having all the time in the world. It’s the last clue, but I can’t think what the word might be, either.

  She turned her attention to her egg, dipping each toasted soldier with military precision. When the last of the white was scooped out, she quite suddenly plunged her teaspoon through the bottom of the shell, a resounding crack in the quiet kitchen. Then she reached over, took mine, and did the same. ‘So the witches can’t sail in them,’ she explained. Another of her habits, added to the store.

  ‘I had such a strange dream last night,’ she said then. Did you, my darling? I asked.

  It occurs to me that I think of us, when I imagine our life together, at a perpetual breakfast table, with a long, bright day ahead of us and no need to rush, all the long morning to listen to her dreams, to murmur ‘pass the milk,’ to ask ‘another cup?’, to mutter ‘six letters, something O something O something something …’, reading out clues in playful competition. But of course, come January and the new term, I shall have to rise early for work and leave her; these lazy breakfasts will have to be reserved for the weekends until, in a few years’ time (not so very far off, now), the weekends will stretch out into a long, sun-filled retirement; a retreat from the world, she and I.

  And why should she be ready to retire, before even entering the field? Might she not want to embark upon her own career? What does she mean to do with her future? That future ever encroaching, in only a few days’ time … We are, it seems, avoiding such questions as, What shall we do? And how shall we live? Will she be content to make her home in my home, to cross the threshold for a last time and remain there? I try to imagine her, on my sofa, in my chair, at my sink drying my dishes – as I have seen her before – but it is a question of the word ‘our’ and how that might be accommodated. Is there space for a second desk in the study? Or will she take to the dining room table and cover it in papers? Or will she weed the garden and learn to bake? Unlikely. Will she fill the place with rocks and stones and shells and bones, and all the fragments she finds washed up on the shore?

  I did ask her, once: where do you hope to be, a decade from now? Less than a month ago, yet it seems an age has passed since that moment of late summer madness – that moment when her answer made me ask her to marry me.

  She arrived at my door one day at the end of August; a manuscript illumination, bright against a cobalt sky. She arrived from nowhere, without explanation. It had been a long, pointlessly hot summer, numb and grey with her absence, with the knowledge of her ongoing absence; the thought of the term, the year, the life ahead – the lectures, the books, the staff dinners, the ceremonies – all rendered meaningless, and hopelessly mundane. The thought of class after class without her.

  I had to assume she’d abandoned academia, and me. I’d sent her an email but her university account had lapsed. And then there she was, a miracle on my doorstep, as radiant as the day, as if fallen out of the depthless blue heaven. ‘I was passing,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d drop by. I’m glad I remembered the house. From the party?’ Ah, of course, I said, as if I had been wondering, as if I could have forgotten it, that last time I’d seen her. I thought you’d all gone home for the summer, I said. But you’ve decided to come back? To study? ‘Not sure yet. Thought I’d use the library while I can,’ she said. I invited her in, half-crazed, thinking the sun must have made me delirious. My eyes adjusting to the dimness of the hall
and expecting to find her resolved into a shadow, a delusion, a trick of the light. But there she was, apparently substantial. Where have you been all summer? I asked her. ‘Nowhere in particular,’ she said. ‘Aestivating. I burn easily.’ I have still not quite determined where it is she was hiding; where exactly is nowhere? In any case, from out of it, out of a blue nowhere, she came to my door that Tuesday, and we drank tea in the garden and talked poetry. That Friday, I bumped into her at the library – that is, I lay in wait for three days, haunting the stacks, until I found her – and we went to a café in town. I watched her crumble a piece of carrot cake to crumbs, and stick them back together and eat it a pinch at a time. She went ahead of me when we left, I reached around her awkwardly to open the door, there was a near collision in which we didn’t quite touch. Then I didn’t see her for days, and I realized I had no means of reaching her. She made no further appearance at the library and I fretted and moped, and then there she was on my doorstep again. I invited her in. We drank white wine this time – I think she brought a bottle with her, or perhaps it was I that broached it; in any case, it was after six o’clock, and a mellow, liquid evening, meant to be filtered through a glass as the shadows lengthen. A draught of vintage, tasting of flora and the country-green; O for a beaker full of the warm South! I cried, as the last drops went down. ‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,’ she said … and, for the first time, her hand brushed my arm. I lay in bed that night, my own hand gripping the bare dry skin where her cold fingers had been.

  And then there she was another day, and another, always unannounced: a series of portraits framed in the doorway, the same pose recurring, with a bottle of wine, with leaves in her hair, with the rain running off her, with spaghetti and sauce. Where have you been? What have you been up to? I would ask; and she’d say ‘here and there’ or ‘this and that’, arresting lightly all further enquiry. How easily she seems to slide the past from her shoulders like that. The future, too. And the present is only precariously balanced, and might dislodge at any moment.