Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  But at this moment, even if she could be persuaded to be still for a second, the light is changing all the time as dusk comes, the sky racing and dancing with new clouds knotting themselves out of vapour, now pale grey, now lambent, now dissolving into the sun-soaked blue, like her eyes, and the portrait would bear no resemblance to this afternoon’s memory, even as it forms and fades.

  Thursday

  ‘Let’s have some more stories, then,’ she said last night as we lay by the fire, guzzling wine. ‘I want to know more about these magical women of yours, getting all the attention.’ If only she knew it is quite the reverse – how my mind is irresistibly drawn out to her on the shore … I trawled for something to tell her. Tales of sea-serpents. Beautiful Lamia, who only wanted to be alone with her love, exposed to the cruel eyes of Apollonius’ reason and revealed in all her awful glory, shining, pale, dumb; her Lycius, besotted, who would show off his prize, and die for the loss of it. Melusine, denounced by her husband as a water-snake before his court; in despair, transformed, forsaken, unable to change back, she leaps from his battlements into the ocean. Both twisted into coils by the word, by being named serpent. Foolish French Raymond, senseless Lycius. Why not let it lie …

  It seems I effected some transfiguration, for she woke with a wet thrash in the night and said she’d been swimming in her sleep, long-tailed; she’d fallen or flown from the cliff-top before the flood could reach and take her, and turned in the air and twisted into a limbless rope and plunged in a long dart through the sea, through the weeds and corals, down to where it’s dark and she shone in the murk, she said. ‘I was silver, shining, scaly,’ she said. ‘And I swam through the dark, and there were weeds trailing on me, and then something grabbed me and I tried to break free, but I’d lost my tail and I couldn’t swim or breathe any more at all. And I woke up.’ She was breathless still, her heartbeat hard against me, but she seemed exhilarated as much as she was frightened and pulled me to her as much as she clung; an urgency in her voice and hands and mouth which I could do nothing to resist. The strength of her, her long legs and arms around me … She twisted around and beneath me and I held fast to her as she thrashed.

  I lay awake until I was sure she was peaceful, drifting contented beside her, feeling the cooling of our spent heat; I think I dreamed of fishes.

  I was woken late by a prod in the ribs from her sharp and insistent toe. I was face down, sprawled, I fear slack-jawed – the pillow under my cheek was wet. I opened one eye to see her by the bedside, performing a curious ballet, one prodding leg extended while she balanced a tray in her hands. ‘I made coffee!’ she said. ‘And toast!’ My first breakfast in bed with her. ‘I burned the toast a bit,’ she said. ‘But I scraped it off.’ That scent in the air, acrid and yet somehow homely. She clambered in beside me and we crunched in contented silence. I yawned between mouthfuls. ‘Did you sleep badly?’ she said through her last mouthful. A little, I said. You? ‘I don’t know, I was having weird dreams again …’ Yes, I said. I remember. ‘Oh … did I wake you?’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ I don’t mind, I said; but I am starting to wonder if I’ll ever sleep through the night again. Have you always had these nightmares? I asked. She made a non-committal noise and rolled over onto me, lifting the plate to the floor in one motion. Her mouth tasted of burnt toast crumbs and butter.

  The sea is lively and inviting this morning and splashes up the beach, reaching for her, whispering brightly. She is out there already. She is building, I think, a sort of primitive castle, not unlike the ancient brochs left abandoned all about these isles. Lacking tools and manpower, she is simply hollowing the sand with two cupped palms onto a growing tower, which she smoothes and rounds as she goes. It is emerging less as a castle than as a single turret, Elaine building her own prison to await her Lancelot. Existing only in a mirror, all the world shrouded, half-sick of shadows. The low winter sun casts them long on the beach.

  Yes, there, she has formed rough battlements for the roof and drawn down a single long window in one side. Now she beds in bands of seashells, patiently fortifying her walls with purple shards and shining stones and sea-smoothed glass. Intent upon her task; as precise and careful as a child.

  I grew up near the sea. Have I told her that? Not near enough to walk to; but we had a car, and my father would drive us, the three of us, on summer weekends, until by the end of every August I had accumulated a shoe-box full of half-eaten sticks of rock, carefully kept for later. Each one with my name struck right through the centre, ‘RICHARD’, revealing itself as a streak of blue beneath the pink where I’d sucked off the coating; and this sticky log pile growing stickier by the week and finally, alarmingly furred over with a fluorescent green mould of a hue that no organic thing would ever take upon itself to cultivate. An acid taste at the back of my tongue, now.

  I would build complex sandcastles, armouring the walls with cockleshells and the long, much-prized razor clams; how sprawling and crenellated those ramparts, in comparison to hers. All pomp and ceremony, and animated with imagined pageants. I would dig a moat and then a channel so that the incoming sea would fill it, and then sit down safe within my fortifications in the forecourt, looking out at the approaching tide. The solitary sea-king of the castle.

  Eventually it would be time to go for fish and chips. And later, looking out from the car as we drove along the front, sucking on my stick of rock, I would try to find my castle there on the sand; so great a citadel I had built that it must surely be visible from the road, from space perhaps. But there was never any sign, not so much as a tattered and lonely pennant, all that splendour already washed out by the tide.

  And now she is standing … And quite without warning, has lifted her skirt, drawn back her high-booted foot, and kicked the tower down in a gleeful little dance that makes me laugh, although I can’t say if it’s for my benefit. She stands with her hands on her hips, admiring the wreckage of her own handiwork. The tilt of her chin is triumphant; soon those sorry ruins, too, will be effaced.

  *

  I went out to her at lunchtime and found her flat on her back on the sand as if sleeping, a picture of repose, her palms turned up and eyelids only just closed, quivering; as I drew nearer she opened her eyes and said, ‘Hello, Richard,’ although I was sure I had made no sound. I moved closer, until my shadow covered her. What are you up to? I said. ‘Just listening to the water, enjoying the sunlight,’ she said. ‘I’m just happy, playing in the sand.’ I liked your tower, I said. ‘I kicked it down before the tide could take it.’ Yes, I saw, I said.

  She sat, and ruffled her hair, rimed and sea-stained and raggedy, her skin salt-stung, her hair stuck with damp sand; strands of fine seaweed clung to her clothes, the miraculous survivor of a wreck. I told her so. She said, ‘Oh, brave new world, that hath such creatures in it!’ But you are more, perhaps, the sprite, I mused; my tricksy capricious Ariel; ‘and you the wizard that freed me?’ Yes, better. But … ‘into willing bondage,’ she assured. ‘Don’t you worry about that. I’m all yours,’ she said, taking my proffered hand and allowing me to pull her up before giving a little curtsey and planting a briny kiss. ‘Your willing servant.’ And she laughed.

  Very well. Let me play the old conjuror. Let us raise a tempest about us; only let us be alone, our own island. But no. Even this barren place, here at the world’s end, is far too populous. We have had a regrettably sociable afternoon.

  I said I was going to the shop. ‘I could come with you,’ she said, putting an arm through mine and setting off at a happy jog. She wanted to buy ‘some stuff’. What sort of stuff? I asked. I can get it for you. ‘I don’t know, really,’ she said. ‘I just thought I’d have a poke about.’

  I felt strangely reluctant to subject her to Mr Begg’s inspection, as if he might be some Orcadian Apollonius, coldly unweaving rainbows in his back room; but I could hardly say no. I can’t lock her in, or chain her to a rock. So we sauntered along the road to the little town; or rather, she sauntered, I trudged.

  As I fea
red, the ting of the shop’s bell drew the keeper from his cavern, and while she ‘poked about’ his hoard, oblivious, his hard eyes never left her: this sprightly, bright young woman in a chunky woollen hat, the glint of her teeth as she smiled. He watched her as she turned over this and that: picking over the fruit and taking an apple; opening tins and boxes of paints and settling for a soft sketching pencil and a pad of cartridge paper; testing a lipstick from the small cosmetics stand on the back of her hand, eventually selecting a scarlet one that made her look, at the hotel bar this evening, positively vampiric, positively wanton, in a way I find both unsettling and arousing. My red-mouthed virgin Lamia …

  She approached the counter with her haul and set it down, then scanned the jars of sweets behind the counter, biting her lower lip with her crooked tooth, taking her time, Mr Begg staring all the while. Only when she had asked for a bag of ‘soor plums’ in an impressive, and I think unconscious, Scots accent, and he had measured them out, scarcely taking his eyes off her; only when he had given the bag his practised little twist at both corners, and rung through her other choices, along with the ground coffee and bottles of wine I’d picked up, did they both turn to me expectantly, like allies. ‘That’s thirty-nine pounds thirty, then,’ he said. I took out my wallet and handed over two notes. ‘I’ve got the thirty!’ she chirped, and dropped two silver coins into his hand, produced from some mysterious pocket in the many folds of her clothing. In turn, he placed a pound coin in her palm, with unnecessary deliberation, I thought, so that his rough fingertip must have grazed her skin. ‘Have a good day!’ she called as we left. ‘Aye,’ he nodded.

  Outside, she offered me a sweet from her little bag. ‘I just made seventy pence off you, it’s the least I can do,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to buy me things. But thank you.’ I wonder how many silver pieces she has secreted about her person. I’ve never seen her with a purse. My pleasure, I said, or almost said, the end of the word coming out as a cough as I choked on a slew of acidic saliva. These are terrible, I said. ‘I know!’ she said cheerily. ‘My dad used to buy them when I was little, for a treat. He used to have them when he was a bairn, he said.’ And felt that he should visit the same punishment upon successive generations? I asked. ‘Maybe,’ she said. And shrugged, and crumpled the bag closed and off she skipped. These curious scraps of herself that she offers, just as quickly snatched back.

  I caught up to her and we set out for home; the sun was setting, pale yellow like chilled, smooth-churned butter behind new pleats of cloud. Leaning on each other, a little giggly with sugar. When we reached our turning, I suggested instead we continue along the road to the hotel for a drink. She looked dubious; the night was frosting over, closing in. But I was keen, suddenly, to have her on my arm, to show her in society, such as it is in these circumscribed parts, and she complied.

  We walked with our arms wound around each other, as if taking part in a three-legged race, lagging hopelessly ever further behind as we grew ever more entangled. By the time we’d reached the hotel, a fifteen-minute walk, it was almost dark. We arrived a jolly pair, bursting through the door of the lounge, bringing the chill in with us and quickly shutting it behind. The sudden enclosure of an ordinary room, of carpets and curtains and electric light, which we had seen from afar as we walked, growing brighter by the minute as the dusk crept in. There are no lights on the roads, here, and coming in from the night I felt like some mediaeval interloper, a pilgrim, eyes adjusting to a new, futuristic world. Although this was not quite even the present, perhaps; not as we know it. I shouldn’t think a great deal has changed in that room for thirty years or more: the wallpaper, the boxy TV, the dusty fake flowers on the mantel, the choice of drinks – some of the bottles themselves, I shouldn’t wonder, those exotic untouched spirits growing sticky, syrupy, clagged with dust. It was hot, stifling after the snap of the outside air, and she pulled off her hat, flushed, eyes bright, her mouth startling red with the lipstick I had not seen her apply.

  The family we saw on the cliffs were sitting at the largest of the five tables; their conversation halted as we came in, turning and nodding a hello before turning back inwards. Perhaps they hadn’t been talking in the first place. The mother staring vacantly at the switched-off television in the corner; the father, still in his pocketed combat-green body warmer, scrolling through pictures on an impressive digital SLR, quite incongruous in that environment, like the technology of a distant age. The boys, as before, sullen, offering the occasional grunt when their father held out the screen to show them. The bar was unattended, but within a minute or so a woman appeared from a door marked ‘Reception’, and nodded to us as she took her place behind it. Neatly turned out in a white blouse and black skirt, blocky heels, blocky ankles, and a face like a soor plum. The father rose to buy more drinks; his glass perhaps had been empty some time. ‘Evening,’ he said. ‘Chilly out, isn’t it? What’ll you have? Can I offer you and your …’ He looked at her properly then, the usual masked surprise, not staring but glancing over her again, her eyes, her skin, and her silver hair, her scarlet lips; ‘your … what are you drinking?’ I introduced myself, and pointedly, my wife. He said his name was Jim, or something like that. I wasn’t listening. I was trying to silently convey, in answer to the urgent non-expression behind my wife’s clouded eyes, my apologies. We couldn’t say no. It would have seemed rude, to keep apart from them in what was more or less a sitting room. After five long seconds or so of this unspoken stand-off she managed a smile and asked for a gin and tonic. I said I’d have a Highland Park and he said he’d have the same. The landlady nodded approvingly. Her scowl returned, quite rightly, when he asked for ice. I helped him carry the drinks over and we pulled up rickety dining chairs to join them. Hers was especially crooked; she rocked, gently, from the front left leg to the right back, as if on a ship, quietly creaking. There was an exchange of handshakes and greetings followed by half a minute’s awkward silence.

  ‘What a week for weather, eh?!’ exclaimed Bill suddenly. Or Jim, was it. ‘I’ve been to this place in all seasons and it’s always the same, sunshine one minute and chucking down the next; and the wind! I should hang on to that slender wife of yours, Richard, she’ll be blown away!’ His elder son blushed. His wife hid a frown. My slender wife made her red mouth smile in a way I am glad I have not seen before. It would be a terrible thing, to have that smile turned on me.

  ‘What brings you two here in October?’ he asked then. Our honeymoon, I said. ‘Lucky you,’ he said to my wife sarcastically, as if I’d dragged her here by the hair to satisfy some perversion, when we could have been sunning ourselves in the Algarve or wherever people like him expect honeymooners to sun themselves. ‘My fault, actually,’ she said. ‘I wanted to come here.’ What on earth for, they didn’t ask. And yourselves? I asked instead. ‘For the birds,’ he said, and actually winked. I thought I heard the older son mutter ‘Oh, God.’ ‘I’m a birder. It’s a great place for it. The sandpipers were out on the rocks today. And we spotted some Greenland geese the other day, didn’t we …’ he said, to no member of his family in particular, it seemed. I wondered how long this monologue might go on for, at what point it might become a slide-show – he seemed the type, he was fidgeting with the camera, and I saw his son glance balefully at it. ‘And the shrikes are flocking, too …’

  ‘So, how did you two meet?’ interrupted Linda, with the rudeness that only years of marriage can breed. How often, as a confirmed bachelor, I observed it and sneered. But no, we’ll never stale into sniping and contempt, I can’t imagine it. And besides we haven’t the time, we haven’t the luxury of years …

  These thoughts do tend to creep up on me, in her absence. Sitting in my chair like an invalid in pyjamas. She is clattering around in the kitchen, from whence I have been banished; there is a salty savoury steam in the air and salt on my mouth, from hers. I am listening to her humming to herself and to my own heart slow, recuperating – she has just lately risen from my lap – the beat of it brittle within
the hollow murmur of the sea … I inhale, exhale, hearing the tide out there in the dark. Brittle heart beating. It seems foolish to spend a beat of it anywhere away from her, to waste a moment of marriage when there may not be many remaining. How long can it last?

  Enough of that.

  ‘I think we saw you, yesterday, on the cliffs,’ said Linda – this apparent non-sequitur a way of making known that she had observed already that we are lovers. I wanted you to see, I thought. I saw you watching. And maybe you’re thinking now, an older man … a man like that, with broad shoulders and big hands, and a little experience, would know what to do with me.

  But again I digress. And would much prefer not to think of my hands upon thwarted, bitter-mouthed, stout little Linda, dressed up for the evening in a horrid pink blouse.

  We were thrown together, I said, in the fruitiest tone I could muster – why not play the role? – by the gods of pedagogy. The younger boy stifled a snigger, at a nudge from his smirking brother. ‘By …?’ said Linda. ‘At university,’ my wife cut in hurriedly. ‘That’s how we met. I went to his lectures. I graduated this summer.’ We were married just a few days ago – well after her graduation, I said soothingly. I’m on sabbatical this term. ‘Oh, a sabbatical. Yes, I see,’ said Linda, not at all sure that she did. The older boy taking an interest now, I thought; sipping his half-pint of cider and watching her from under long faun’s lashes. Pretty in a way that will be featureless when he’s grown. Not her type, I nearly snarled.