Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  The father, too, clearly fascinated, leering out of the corner of his eye at her; envious, no doubt, and determined to maintain his position as alpha male, as paterfamilias – and wishing perhaps that Linda hadn’t worn that blouse, or was another woman entirely. In the fuggy heat of the room, my wife had pulled off her coat and the voluminous sweater that she has stolen from me to slouch about in, revealing a wide-necked green top that shows off her collarbones, her long neck, stretched now as she turned up the perfect, cat-sharp V of her jaw, echoed by the chain pulled out taut from her throat as she dragged the rings on it from side to side distractedly, scanning the bookshelves that ran about the room at picture-rail height and evidently finding nothing of interest.

  ‘What Uni?’ asked the older boy abruptly, and blushed; ‘I’m applying this year.’ This boy who seemed to me a child, I realized, is almost her contemporary; only a few years between them, born in the same decade. Being seventeen must be fresh, to her, whereas to me it is merely a notion, an age that I must assume happened to me, once. I watched him, sipped my whisky, tried to mask my irritation at this attempt to form an alliance of youth against balding decrepitude (the balding, at least, only on Bob’s part. I raked a hand through my hair). I wondered if she’d take up the offer. But she answered dismissively, glancing at him only for a moment, offhand.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about going there. But it’s a bit, uh, a bit rah, isn’t it?’ he asked, pleased with himself. ‘A bit,’ she said. ‘I went there for the course. It had a good reputation.’ A pause. The silence strained further. Ice cubes stirred with a straw. And then, out of boredom or kindness, she asked: ‘What are you thinking of studying?’ ‘Uh, biology,’ he said, the dark blotches of blush spreading. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘You like plants. Or animals. You like life, or looking at it. Slides and cells and microscopes. Or is there more to it?’ She was smiling, in a way that could have been encouraging or cruel, and for a moment I felt sorry for the boy, who seemed unsure if she had asked him a real question. ‘I’ve been trying to get him interested in the birds, haven’t I, Mart?’ said his father, loudly. ‘But he’s got more of an eye for the pondlife.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Plenty of that about on campus.’ And she went back to studying the spines of the books. So cool; in his sense of the word as well as mine, perhaps. Pale, detached.

  How she strode, through the high columned forecourt of the library; in that hall of marble, how she shone. I rarely saw her in a crowd; even with her classmates, even in the midst of chattering, she was never link-armed, never a casual clasp of the arm or a squealing hug – she was set apart. They flittered and skulked around her, and she remained remote, aloof, tall, unacknowledged; how she shone.

  ‘So … what about you?’ said the boy to his half-pint glass. ‘What did you study?’

  ‘Yes, what is it you teach?’ said Bob, to me, almost speaking over him. My wife turned to me, eyebrows raised, in mock-deferral. I allowed a dignified pause and said, grandly: Literature. Nineteenth century. Romantic to Victorian. It was Tennyson, I believe, that drew her to the lecture hall. ‘Tennyson, eh? That what tickled you?’ he said knowingly, as if this meant something – speaking as if to a precocious, just-budding girl. I believe he winked again. I wondered if she would like me to hit him. But no need, I think, for me to play monkeys.

  ‘“In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree …”’ he declaimed. Sitting back smugly. Looking about his family as if for applause, his eye at last resting, again, on my wife. ‘Close enough,’ she said, coolly, with a smile for me. He continued to look at her, a little discomfited now. A light went on, somewhere in a dusty schoolroom in the dim recesses of Linda’s mind. ‘Isn’t that Coleridge? “Where Alf, the sacred river ran …”’ (She most certainly said Alf. I could see her thinking, funny name for a river, that. Bit old-fashioned. Like Fred.) Well, yes, I said. But I teach that, too, sometimes, I said, to reassure old Barry that he was right, in a way, after all. Amazingly, he bought it, and took a complacent sip from his icy dram. There was a companionable silence. ‘“Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea”,’ said the older boy suddenly, portentously, his empty pretty eyes full of meaning. Good lord. It seemed the entire family had now missed the point.

  ‘How’s the cider, son?’ asked his father. ‘Fine,’ said Mart, acidly, with a look that said, you never call me son. The littler one, who had been playing with a handheld console of some sort throughout this exchange, was now kicking at the bar under the table, bored no doubt by a competition he couldn’t begin to understand and was perhaps quite unaware of; kicked and kicked so that our drinks trembled as if at the approach of a beast. ‘Stop that, Will,’ hissed his mother.

  I put my hand on my wife’s knee, gave it a little squeeze. Take note, young Martin; take note Bob, or Jim or Bill or Barry, or indeed Alf or Fred as it may be; she is with me. She chose me.

  Will, who had sulkily desisted, was now staring at us in a way that I felt might also warrant a reprimand. ‘How old are you?’ he asked. ‘Will,’ said Linda. ‘That’s not a question to ask a lady!’ – with a simper that seemed a bid for sympathy. ‘Why is your hair white?’ he persisted, wilfully oblivious. My wife leaned across the table and confided: ‘I’m a hundred and twenty-one,’ and sat back, smiling. ‘It’s the sea air,’ she said breezily. ‘It does wonders for the complexion. You should have seen me a week ago. Richard here, for example, is well over six hundred years old.’ We all laughed, awkwardly, unsure who was being made fun of; little Will went red and looked confused and went back to kicking the table, and Linda this time left him to it.

  The hilarity subsided. I drained the last drop of whisky. I said, Well, we should be going. ‘Gosh, yes!’ she said, the first time I have ever heard her use this exclamation, looking at her wrist as if she wears a watch, a little pantomime all her own, as if there were some pressing engagement that we must attend to. Some submarine rendezvous perhaps. ‘Oh, really? What a shame!’ said Linda, not sorry at all. I helped my wife into her coat and wound her scarf around her neck and she kissed me, with the relief of departure, kissed me with her red mouth, the sharp sugary sourness of the sweets mingling with the bitter gin on her tongue.

  ‘Well, maybe we’ll see you around,’ said Bob. Not if I see you first, I didn’t say. I wonder if I should invest in a telescope. Mr Begg will surely have one in stock. As I held the door for her I saw the older boy give an unacknowledged wave, which became a self-conscious tug at the flop of his fringe; his father said something I didn’t hear, and they all laughed, and Linda said ‘Bill!’ indulgently and they turned back to his camera, somehow reunited.

  ‘I thought they seemed nice. A nice family,’ she said, when we got home. Had those boys been on her mind all the way back, then? Did you think so? I said, dismissive. ‘Well, they seem a normal family. Nicer than mine.’ This was more interesting. A way in. Mine, too, I suppose, I said. Cautious; not wishing to push this confessional mood too far. I followed her to the fireside, bottle in hand. I thought of my parents, either side of their faux-marble fireplace, the gas turned high, all of us breathing the same air over and over. So much of my childhood was spent indoors, stifling; even when we went out we seemed insulated.

  I imagine you an elfin child, I said, barefoot and ragged, running about with sand in your toes, with leaves in your hair. But, ‘I was neat and clean,’ she protested, accepting a glass and settling. ‘My mother ironed everything. My clothes were starched into two dimensions. She ironed my school tie. She ironed my knickers. It made me feel guilty, to fill those clothes with substance. She’d be furious with me if I came home dirty or creased.’ Poor girl; skin, hair, voice, all pressed flat. These days she is perpetually tangled. ‘It wasn’t her fault, really,’ she said. ‘She didn’t expect a baby so late. She never got over having me. The milk turned sour inside her.’ Like love, it curdled, and no amount of beating could smooth it back to cream. Her young skin, creamy and beaten, and bruised so easily. My pr
ecious girl. Go on, I said gently, wary of breaking this spell of revelation; she has never given away so much.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘she’d stay in her room and not come out, and then I’d play in the garden, by the pond, I’d play with the frogs and the fish, with a bucket, in my pants and a vest, I’d make potions with pond water and petals and spit.’ Little witch. Were you lonely? I asked. On your own like that, with only the frogs? ‘I suppose I was. I didn’t know any different. But I’d like to have had a brother. Or a sister. Would you?’ she asked. ‘I had books, instead of friends.’ Myself, likewise, I said; and I was most glad of them, when I discovered how effective a barrier a book can be to unwanted acquaintance. Or, indeed, a retreat when acquaintance palls; how many women have been exasperated by this tactic? This, of course, I kept to myself.

  ‘If I had been asked to choose, then, I would happily have never read another word, if I could have had a sister. I would be illiterate, for a sister,’ she said, almost vehement. But without books, we would never have been lovers, I did not say. But you are my bookish and studious and brilliant wife; if you didn’t read you would be none of those things. We would never have met. If there were no books, how could you have found me? Would you love me at all if it weren’t for poetry, for stories? Do you take it so lightly, to be my wife? I said none of this. I said only: is that true? Illiterate? and tried not to sound horrified. She laughed. ‘Well, maybe not. I don’t know what use a sister would have been if I couldn’t talk about books with her.’ What a relief.

  I pulled her close to my side, a warm, comforting, encouraging hug. Tell me more, I said. I want to know everything about you; tell me about your home, I urged, tell me about where you came from. She dismissed me as always: ‘Oh, anywhere. Nowhere.’ But tell me, I said, holding down her shrug with a hand on her shoulder. Tell me about that bright-haired girl, growing up in the cold north. ‘In Morpeth,’ she said. ‘We moved to Morpeth, when I was a baby.’ Yes, I said. What a name for a place. ‘A path where a murder took place,’ she said. ‘That’s where I lived. Once a man was murdered and they built a town to mark the spot.’

  Tell me about that town, named for a forgotten crime, I pressed … She sighed. ‘It’s just a place,’ she said. ‘Unhaunted. Made of stone. Far from everywhere. Not far enough.’ Unwilling to excavate that cold, unyielding home that she shared with her hard, unyielding mother. Another part of her buried in darkness. Far enough from what? I asked. She didn’t answer.

  Where, then, where is far enough? I asked. Here? Did you miss it? Did you want to come home, to your father’s island? She shrugged. I don’t know if she no longer cares to find him, or if she cares too much. She fell silent and looked through her glass into the fire, hugging her knees to herself; I couldn’t read the sadness that I thought I saw, hollowing her eyes. In the classroom she was always bright, crystalline, apparently impervious; did I miss it, then, or is it coming to this place that has shivered something in her? Or perhaps it is just that, as she says, I am only now getting to know her; only now, here, seeing the shades and angles of her, cast into relief by the watery daylight and the soft dark.

  In bed, now, her spine a long shadow lit by the faint moon, her lips a little parted; I kiss the splay of one webbed hand. She turns in her sleep and sighs, that heavy night-sigh like a last contented breath. The covers have slipped from her shoulder. I kiss the light on it and she pulls the blanket closer. All I can see of her skin is the barest pale crescent of her ear.

  She turns, moans, sighs. Pulls the bedding about her in a cocoon. A body wrapped in a sail for a winding sheet.

  She murmurs. I can’t make out the words.

  There is this extravagance to her always – she wanders beyond reach, beyond meaning. I trace the moon on her skin and cannot understand it. I turn it over, like the paperweight stone in my palm: why did we come here? Is this far enough?

  Friday

  She is wearing a particularly erratic outfit today, a baggy pair of linen trousers tucked into chunky socks and boots, a cable-knit sweater pulled in at the waist with a belt stolen from my cords, a silk scarf bunched at her neck and her green coat over it all. She does always wear green, and grey. It’s true. Yet I can’t quite shake the image of her in purple. Coming into my seminar room dressed in heather; or drenched … It’s been a week, here, and already all else is receding. My little landlocked dark brown study seems another, smaller world, and I cannot imagine the heavy silence of the sea’s absence, the thick heat, the dust. Everything is refigured in the air here. So now I am remembering her, in the sunlight last week in her silk, and the picture is diffused in this island’s mist. I remember her sliding out of her silk on our wedding night, and think of her this morning at the mirror, pulling her gown over her head. Bleariness at the margins of sight; I am tired, not altogether unpleasantly.

  All through the night she twisted and slithered, swimming about on the sheets without waking, without rest, and the night seemed to stretch for hours, and I listened to her murmur half-words and moan until the dawn. She rose early, stirring me from some kind of sleep; I felt her move away and made a grab for her but she stood up into a long stretch, escaping my grasp. She’d dreamed of being called into the water: ‘there were arms, pale arms reaching for me,’ she said, ‘they pulled me under, down and under and out; way down into the dark.’ She was looking at herself in the mirror, as if seeking evidence of a transformation; I watched through half-open eyes as she turned away, lifted her nightgown, hesitated, pulled it over her head, looking askance at herself with her shoulders turned inward as if trying to hide while she looked for clothes. Her long, pale arms protecting her body. What are you hiding from? I said. Just look at you. ‘You look,’ she said. She stepped out of her reflection and squared her shoulders to face me, blushing, defiant. Come here, come here, but stay so I can see you … We’ve been married a week, I told her. Term will be starting on Monday, without us. Can you believe it’s a year since we met? Do you remember, last autumn? How you came into the room out of the wind, the rain … ‘With leaves in my hair,’ she smiled. Where on earth did you come from? I said. She didn’t answer, but laughed, and climbed back onto the bed and crawled up the length of me. ‘Happy anniversary, Professor,’ she whispered, stretching out beside me, and pulling me down to her, into her dream.

  I woke a few hours later and couldn’t remember her leaving; only a slippery memory of her pale arms, reaching out to me; something watery, something shining, swum out of her sleep into mine. This morning as I look out to her and my mind blanks, I feel them again reaching.

  She has her face turned towards the sun, where it trails and tingles the water. Listening for the wash of light. The air luminescent and she glowing with it. She seems at home here; she belongs. ‘Take me north,’ she said. And so it seems that my honeymoon is to be occupied by a series of seascapes with a woman at their centre: sometimes a girl, sometimes no more than a brightness quivering against the coming rain; or in the sudden northern sun, with a halo of white fire and her hair flaming; with her hair blown back; standing with her palms by her sides, turned out to feel the sea-mist borne in on the wind; with her chin resting on her clasped hands.

  I want to retrieve and store every flake of skin that she chews from her lip and so carelessly spits out to the mercy of the wind. Yet when she is not right beside me, when I think of her in her absence, I am able to catch at only the smallest of scraps, as if a picture frame were placed about her elbow, the left one, with a freckle on the sharp bone; or the stab of her ankle and her long, spiny foot; or sometimes for an instant, the grey-green of her iris catching the sea’s light; or the twin dips at the base of her back; or her crooked eye-tooth that gives her grin its glint; but all of these things seen only for a moment distinctly before vanishing, and if I try to reconstruct her from these known facts – her tooth is crooked, the freckle is just there, her eyes are sometimes green or sometimes grey or sometimes the nameless colour of clouds gathering or … well, the task is hopele
ss. I can only endeavour to keep her in view, and be assured of her presence for these moments at least. There she stands, bright, defiant, only just or almost manifest, between the sea and the sky. So I would have her remain, in just that pose; I close my eyes to fix her there.

  When I open them she has already wandered off along the shore.

  Those boys are with their father out on the cliffs, our cliffs, looking down on our bay. I recognize Bob’s blue windcheater, his sons’ lope and slouch, the silly baseball cap that the younger one wears and Martin’s grotty parka. I can see them, passing binoculars and book between them, following the swoop of the gulls as they dive. As I look out, watching from the kitchen window while bashing prawny brains for tonight’s fish stew, I see my wife pick her way over the rocks and seaweed, hair salt-frazzled, poking out in dry hanks from under her hat.

  She surveys the horizon from the tide line, a bizarre pirate scoping the sea and the shore; seeing them above, she sweeps off her hat in an extravagant gesture so that, perhaps, they can’t mistake her (as if they ever could), and waves it in the air. The older boy gives a half-wave back, binoculars trained on her, this rarest of species.

  For a horrified moment there I thought they would descend, or worse, that she would climb up to them; but she glances back at the house, and she waves, in turn, at me in the window. She gestures for me to come out and join her, but I shake my head and brandish the brain-stained rolling pin, so she returns my shrug with a pout before pulling her hat back on, casting a last wave up to the cliff-top, and turning to walk the other way, along the shore. The boy still watching. I imagine her there in his glass, as if he were pressed up against her, breathing hot and urgent down her neck; the fibres of her hat, her hair swept round in the silk, the worn seams, the warm nape. That old hormonal jolt. Oh I remember that, Mart.