Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  I began to dread going out, in case I should miss her. I began to stock up on groceries – potted shrimp, antipasti, good bread, figs – that I could throw together into the semblance of a simple, yet sophisticated, impromptu supper for two. One Wednesday she arrived with a bag of shopping and made terrible, overcooked, salty pasta and, as we sat twirling it on our forks into one sticky, glutinous lump almost too heavy to lift, she suggested that perhaps I could teach her to cook, and I blustered and said there was no need, this was delicious, and she said I was sweet and leaned across and kissed me on the cheek and almost tipped over in the flimsy garden chair, righting herself with a bang and a laugh. For a second I felt it, her soul’s warmth on my cheek in the cooling evening; I am sure that this happened, however unlikely. Unless it was I that gave her that first quick peck, in gratitude and after too much wine, bidding farewell at my door one evening. In any case it became our habit to embrace, briefly, and exchange brief kisses on meeting and parting, as friends do. As an old ex-student might her tutor, after years of supervision. And yet she’d never been demonstrative with any other person, so far as I had seen; and I found myself suspecting, hoping, and having to quell at every touch this unthinkable hope.

  Once, she took my arm as we walked through the town, and saw Dr Jones, who’d taught her Jacobean drama in her second year; he nodded and failed not to stare as we passed, but she only hooked on tighter, linking her hands. And once, as we lay on the grass outside the library, taking a break, looking up through the deepening beech leaves, dappled, dazed in the green light, I asked what she’d been working on that day, and she said Browning, and we talked for a while about transience and half-rhyme, and then she was quiet for a time and I turned to see her eyes closed, the green-veined lids, and longing to kiss her cheek I murmured, I pluck the rose, and love it more than tongue can speak; and she sighed a little with her eyes still closed as if she might be sleeping, and smiled. ‘No need to speak,’ she said. I thought I had been subtle; she says now that I might as well just have kissed her. But that kiss is sweeter still in memory for remaining unkissed.

  That was the night we went to dinner, and she licked lobster from her fingers, and then licked mine.

  That, at least, is how I remember it. She won’t have it. You licked my finger, I told her last night. Remember? You took my finger to your lips and licked it.

  ‘You put your finger on my mouth,’ she said, indignant. ‘I said, you’re only sixty, and you said hush and put your finger on my lips and I licked it.’ No, I said, no, you took my hand and drew it to you. ‘No, you hushed me. You reached over the table and said hush, and your finger tasted of butter so I licked it.’ Of butter? ‘We’d been eating lobster, remember?’ We? ‘We shared a lobster. I wanted to watch you eat so I’d know how to. So I wouldn’t make a mess.’ She looked down, away. She was quiet for a moment, chewing a hang-nail, sitting on the end of the bed in her nightie; and then: ‘But I think I’ve made a mess anyway,’ she blurted. ‘Just look at the mess I’ve got you in to. Is it going to be awful for you when you go back? Will they say nasty seedy things about you?’ I expect they will, I said, trying not to sound pleased. ‘Well, you’ve only yourself to blame,’ she said.

  My life was far too tidy anyway, I said. I couldn’t care less what they say about me, you know that. I shall revel in the mess. I couldn’t be happier, stranded here, cast adrift on the edge of the world without a library, without resources, without an internet connection, worn out by your dreams and your demands, getting nothing done. However, I teased, if there were a blame to be apportioned, I would blame you. You came to me, I reminded her. You called me Richard, you came to my house, you licked my finger. She said, wide-eyed, ‘I was innocent until you put your finger to my lips. Until you touched me. Until I tasted you.’ I hushed her; she opened her mouth and closed it over my thumb.

  But she dissembles. I could not possibly have forgotten it, how she took my hand and twisted. How she appeared from nowhere in my office, in my garden, at my door. Otherwise how could I possibly have been so bold?

  No matter: after the lobster, a week later, or a few days later, I promised her the sea if she would marry me. A day of undeserved sunshine, a last warm dreg of the season, with the faintest freshness of a new one in the breeze. A coolness in the shade that hadn’t been there a week before. So what are your plans, I asked. What do you mean to do with your year? Where, in ten years, do you hope to be? I pulled up grass and dropped it on her belly, like a teenager. She threaded daisies into chains with her quick long fingers. She said, ‘With you.’ With that flush at her temple, the bright dark depth of her eyes when they meet mine entirely, she said: ‘Reading. Working with you. I don’t know, anything; but with you.’ Oh, my sweet girl. And what shall we do, and where shall we go? I said, making a game of it, not wanting to break this precious hint of a promise. ‘Anywhere. I don’t care. Near the sea.’ Is that all? I asked. ‘Just you, and a sea view,’ she said. And then? I did not ask – and then and then? And after then? After I am seventy, after I am eighty? I didn’t ask, and still, I do not ask this. Instead, at the time, without a moment’s forethought, I asked her to marry me.

  I split a daisy, carefully, carefully, and pulled it through itself to make a ring, and offered it to her, to complete the set – she was already crowned and garlanded, a faery queen, and I her swarthy Oberon. She splayed her left hand and smiled when I chose her ring finger. I kneeled before her. ‘Do you mean it?’ she asked. If you do, I said; I’ve gone mad, I thought. Of course she doesn’t. ‘You want to stay with me?’ I do, I said, light-headed. ‘You love me?’ she asked. So she made me ask three times, to seal the spell. I do, of course I do. I kissed her, at last. She kissed me. The low sun, the gold light, her silver hair, her eyes. Vertiginous, unreal.

  We lay on the riverbank like old-fashioned lovers. ‘Courting’ she called it, ‘it’s still called courting, where I was brought up. That’s what my mam would say, if I told her.’ I’ve no idea what her mother did say, when she did tell her, if she did; I haven’t exchanged a single word with the woman. I wanted to ask for her hand, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said it was already her own, to give as she pleased. That was the last we spoke of it.

  So it was that last Friday morning, she arrived at my door once again, bundled and belted into her coat, to cover her dress until the ceremony; bad luck, she said, for me to see it. She arrived with everything she owns, she said, dumping it all down in the middle of the sitting room. All her worldly goods: three meagre bags and a box of books. Two of the bags also full of books. My little ascetic. No ornaments or photographs, no keepsakes. No jewellery but for the ring on a silver chain around her neck, soon to be joined by the second, and now the jawbone talisman. She has no love of adornment.

  She shooed me out of my own house and made me wait at the registry office in town for twenty minutes, and as each one of those minutes passed I felt a greater fool, until I had convinced myself that she would never turn up, had never intended to; I imagined myself returning home jilted, jagged, drunk. I’d reel in the door to find – what? An empty coat like a discarded chrysalis; everything precious robbed, the bookshelves bare. And I wouldn’t even care.

  And as the minute hand ticked the last minute and somewhere a church bell chimed, as I turned in the direction of the pub I’d already picked out to drown my shame and sorrow in, there she suddenly was, in silk, shivering, her hair combed out straight and long, toenails red on her bare feet (was she barefoot? Surely not). When we tumbled giddily home that afternoon, I found a pile of her clothes on the sofa, make-up a clutter on the sink; she’d ranged her little library on the shelves, alongside my own, stowing books lengthways on top where they wouldn’t fit and leaving little stacks along the mantel.

  And now she is waiting for me on the shore. She is looking out to sea, but she is waiting for me. I am meant to be working but it is again a bright, braa day as they say here, the water glinting in the cold clear air, the sea-mist aglitter with the
sunlight that glitters too in her hair, and half an hour ago, as I took my place here, she knocked shyly on the open door to the living room and said we should go for a walk, a picnic, today. I accepted the invitation with alacrity. It is a pleasantly novel sensation, an indulgent sort of guilt, to leave my desk and let my schedule slide. I see what a creature of habit I’ve become, having nobody to answer to, no other soul to accommodate; and old men are creatures of habit. So I said I would just finish up here but instead I’m just watching her, remembering, making her wait.

  I will simply refuse to grow old. She who has bewitched my heart must surely have some spell to preserve me. My Nimue. She, at least, will never age. Or at least, I will never see her aging, which amounts to the same; wrinkled and fallen, hair fading, eyes dulled. No, I shall live perhaps just long enough to see the corners of her eyes crinkle with the years of laughing, that line between her brows deepen just a little with care, with crosswords; her hair no longer quite so remarkable, not quite so incongruous, ripened to the shade of a barley husk. Yes, I will perhaps see the onset of autumn; that is all. But the pale green veins I trace from collar to breast, from finger to wrist, from sternum to clavicle and back, so close to the surface of her skin – they will not burst or clot or swell or purple. My fingers follow the meander of them, like a network of underground rivulets, meeting, joining, branching. With a fingertip or the tip of my tongue I follow the long river running from the back of her knee, winding up inside her thigh and into the hollow of her, where her salt blood is hottest. Listening to the beat and ebb of her pulse, eddying out to her chilly extremities and swirling back into the hidden, unknown depths, the strong and secret currents of her heart.

  *

  I have spent the afternoon stretched out on tartan, on a cliff-top, with my wife beside me and a hamper, a thermos; holidaymakers from a bygone decade when I was a child and she years from conception in thought or deed. How far I have come, how long it has been since those awkward afternoons of my youth. We were not a convivial family. We would sit on our worn beach towels for as few hours as seemed mandatory, maintaining a gritty silence behind our respective reading matters of choice (wind-torn broadsheet, hardback history from the library, orange Penguin). And now on this northern shore, far from any dirty old striped-awning beach on the south coast of England, although we do not bask in bathing suits, although we are well-wrapped and woolly and her nose pink with the frost in the air, how broad and new and possible life seems. The wide-winged grey-white birds all about us, soaring over, rising on the air and rounding, crying and dipping for a flash of silver, the bright, crisp sunshine, the shush of the waves, and our blanket between us and the scoured grass.

  The path rises up, up from the cottage and then rubs itself out; we climbed over scrubby, warreny, rabbit-and sheep-soiled grass and nubbins of dried out sea-flowers, which seem to imitate the spongy sea corals below – far below, ever farther below. We walked a good way, she striding and skittering up the steeper sections, and I following after, trying not to puff, my eyes watering easily in the wind. Then, just as we could climb no further, we came to a great square chunk hewn out of the cliff, a geo she called it, with a hard g, a word from an ancient language that she half-knows or understands.

  I went first, trying to reassure her, but a metre away from that fatal drop, swaying with the wind and dizziness, I dropped to my knees and went on all fours until one trembling hand, then the other, reached the sharp-cut edge, and I brought my head between them and looked down, down into that deep well, the land incised by a dark fissure, running with unseen torrents of fresh water hurtling hundreds of feet into the salt sea. I turned back to see her bravely crawling until she laid herself out beside me; summoning my last scraps of courage, I lifted my hand from the solid rock to close it over hers. High, black-grey-white banded cliffs, the sea crashing below, rushing through a long-eroded archway and white-whirling against the dark rocks; birds perched on every tiny ledge, and at the very top, the two of us clinging, daring ourselves and each other to look down. The sea boomed and bellowed in that echo chamber, gathering secret, hidden force under its surface to crash against the rocks in a great spout. I felt the spray of it on my cheek. Watching her watching, I saw her face transformed, at once fearful and compelled, so that I hardly knew her, her eyes as crazed and fathomless as the depths below, her mouth a little parted as if with desire.

  She turned to me, breathless. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘there in the centre where it’s still: turquoise, emerald; and where the waves rise, the inside of them, dark, almost black, but …’ Obsidian, I said. A sheen like cut stone. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Like an old knife.’ And then when they peak, sapphire, ‘into azure, into aquamarine …’ And all dissolving into foam, scouring out the caves below, or rushing through the narrow channel of the arch, or dashed again and again against the rocks, which seem now so immutable but will in time give way, give in, and be carried off by that same sea to become sand for some other distant shore.

  We raised ourselves with care, taking very small slow steps away from the edge as if vertigo might hurl us over. ‘My legs are shaking,’ she said, and I put an arm around her shoulder and drew her close and kissed her woolly-hatted head, and did not say that I, too, was a little awestruck, a little terrified, and glad of her strong frame to lean on, feeling again the height of her, feeling bowed and humbled and trying to unclench my spine. We walked on, the ground again descending, until we came to the jut of a precipice that seemed comfortingly low and gentle in comparison to the cliff’s height, with a substantial grassy patch upon which to make camp a comfortable six feet from the edge.

  I had thought we were the only ones foolish enough to venture here for a holiday in this inhospitable season, but no. Below us, on the pebbled bay that the cliff face embraces, a family: two roistering teenage boys, their father in well-worn hiking gear, the mother just about bearing up. They were bird-watching on the opposite cliffs; I watched them pick out a treacherous path down the stepped stone and scrub, the boys goatish, skidding and hopping with all the invulnerable stupidity of adolescence, the father doing his best to keep up, already outstripped by his sons, anxiously gripping his binoculars against his tub of a belly. Their mother bringing up the rear step by hesitant, quavering step, clutching the rocks with one hand, the other left to grasp at hat, scarf, handbag all at once, in a dance of agitation. Now they have reached the shore. The boys throw stones, as boys do, into the water. It is, really, a marvellous day: the sea dark blue and no doubt freezing in the depths, and empty all the way to Greenland or the end of the earth, cloudless out to the horizon; no other colours in the world but silver and blue, the deep sea and the bright of her hair. I lie on my belly, propped on my elbows, ignoring the twinge at the base of my back, watching her. She is at the cliff’s edge now, a hand shading her half-closed eyes, scrying the sky as the birds wheel and cry above her. She says that seagulls are the souls of dead sailors. Their cries seem to speak of fearsome seas: ‘look-away, look-away’ they seem to cry, and she does not.

  Perhaps she will tell me, later, what they told her.

  The father skims a stone across the sea, which comes in flat and placid in the shallows of the cove; the boys pretend that they are not impressed and go on with their graceless lobbing, but I see them five minutes later, when their father’s back is turned, trying their skill at the same game, until the older one, with an elegant twirl, bounces his missile five, six, seven, eight times and cannot restrain a victory shout. The father turns, and they reassume postures of boredom; one shoves the other, half-heartedly, on the shoulder. The mother is sitting on a flat rock, with a book open unread on her lap. She turns and looks up at us, staring shamelessly. How much can she see of us, I wonder? I believe, from down there, we would make a handsome pair, if I were to stand and join my wife now. Tall. Refined. Silver and tin. There is a breeze stirring, coming in off the sea; the tide, I think, is advancing. It will be up to that woman’s ankles, soon. It is almost three o’clock. I think I s
hall open our wine. I think I will pour two glasses and go to the cliff’s edge and make a show of toasting my beautiful young wife, and pull her shawl tight around her, and linger over the salt on her lips.

  I wish I could preserve her, just as she is this afternoon; but when I try to take her picture, she whisks her shawl in front of her face like an exotic dancer – a Salome dressed in jeans and long socks and vests and jumpers, layer upon layer over her nakedness. In every photograph I have ever taken of her, she has looked away, or shaken her head, or run beyond the frame even, so that I could compile an entire album of phantoms, of nondescript backgrounds peopled by silver glimpses, by smears of semi-features, by the white flash of a vanishing ankle against an otherwise unremarkable stone wall. The first time, it was evening, a slow late summer evening that we had whiled away at a bar by the river; a peaceful, scented, drowsy evening, a deep gold light fading, calling for a long exposure. But when I took the shot she turned her head to look out at the water glittering behind her, so that all I caught was the blur of her turn and behind her, an unfocused swan. She doesn’t object or grow angry when I point the camera. Sometimes she makes a play of sitting quite still, posing, pouting, and at the last minute ducking, diving, hiding. It has become a game, catch me if you can. What I would give to make a portrait, a record, to capture every nuance, her guises, her guilelessness; to attempt to exhaust the inexhaustible store of her variety in a single likeness. To make of this moment a keepsake – so that I am able to recall, one Wednesday five or twenty years from now, how on this now long-past afternoon she was thus: her sleeves thrust up, ink on her fingers, a hand to her brow as she reads the horizon. As if she will not outlive me, which of course she shall, by many years; as if I will one day, in the agony and the emptiness of her permanent absence, have need of such paltry morsels.