Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  I smash at the pan.

  When I look up, she has moved beyond the frame of the window, but he is still watching; she must be in his view, still.

  Existing for him and not me.

  I smash, smash.

  *

  At last, his father gave him a nudge and turned to go, and after a few reluctant seconds, he followed. I went back to my pan, although in truth the contents were thoroughly pulverised. A minute later I heard her come in, and stubbornly refused to answer her call, as if the prawns could spare none of my attention. I heard her drop her bag down by the door with a familiar clatter, like a set of bagpipes, the old worn leather and the wooden handles. That bag, I remember it from the seminar room; she’d come in with her haul of books, the thing was all corners, poking at the leather, stretching and yellowing. And she’d rummage about in the depths for a pen, pulling out notebooks and hankies and apples and paper-scraps, and one book after another stacked on the floor until at last she reached the object of her dig. All those books, scrawled all over, the narrow thread of her thoughts winding between the lines, filling the white space with ripples and eddies and waves. Her hand stained blue.

  Now her bag sits there like a sad old emptied skin. She carries her pencil, her sketchpad, and whatever detritus she’s gathered from the beach. The sand must be silting all through the lining, where it’s torn.

  She called; I didn’t answer; smash, smash.

  ‘Richard!’

  She came in to the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek. Ah, you’re back, I said, as if I hadn’t heard her. ‘I am,’ she said. How is the sea today?

  ‘That family were up on the cliffs, did you see?’ she said. I grunted. Bird-watching, as leery old Bob would no doubt have it. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. I think you’ve revived the boy’s interest in ornithology, that’s all, I said, still desultorily fixated on the pan. At least in a certain silver-crowned sea bird. Or marine biology, that was his thing, wasn’t it. He thinks he’s spotted himself a mermaid.

  I live in fear of holiday friendships, of having to invite our fellow travellers in for awkward cosy fireside chats. I have never been one for casual acquaintance. Why, simply because we find ourselves stranded together on this island, should we presume to form a community? Why should I have anything at all in common with a man who drinks his whisky ‘on the rocks’? Well, he won’t find any in this house. The best I could muster is a handful of pebbles. Or he’s welcome to sit out there on them. Today I haven’t got it in me to be gracious. I didn’t sleep well.

  ‘Well, they’re leaving tomorrow anyway,’ she said. Oh yes? I said. How do you know? ‘They were down on the beach,’ she said. When? I didn’t see them. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe you weren’t looking. I assume you don’t spend all your time just watching me.’ Of course not, I muttered.

  When was this? Can she not be left for a moment?

  ‘I gave him my email address,’ she said. ‘He’s thinking of applying to the old alma mater after all …’ Don’t they have an alumni network for that sort of thing? I snapped. ‘I am an alum. Don’t be such a curmudgeon,’ she said. I harrumphed.

  ‘I am an alum,’ she said again, ignoring me, musing. ‘Why does that word make me think of onions …? Allium. I am an onion.’ I refused to laugh or forgive her, but couldn’t resist the game. No, I said, you are a budding flower; a pom-pom of blossom. ‘Smelling of garlic,’ she said. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  Fish stew, I said, bashing, until she put a hand on my arm to stay it. ‘I think they’re dead now,’ she said, peering into the bright orange mess of legs and burst beaded eyes and celery and shell.

  So, this boy of yours, I asked. Will you write to him? ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, with a sigh of indifference, or impatience. ‘He’s not “mine”.’ Perhaps you could exchange poetry, I suggested. He seemed to have inherited his father’s taste for it. In Xanadu … I intoned. ‘Oh, don’t be cruel,’ she said. ‘That poor man. He wanted to impress you.’ I rather think he wanted to impress you, I said. She snorted, rolled her eyes, shook her head. And did he? I asked, trying not to sound pettish. Impress you, I mean. ‘Richard,’ she said. ‘Really. What do you think?’

  I stirred, needlessly, banged the spoon needlessly hard against the pan. I don’t have your email address, I said pathetically. You’ve never given me your email address. Not your private one. (She always addressed me formally, ‘Dear Professor _______, please find my essay attached,’ and I would scour the screen for some other meaning, a hidden kiss; she signed off ‘Yours …’, not sincerely or faithfully, and I had to make do with that – simply mine.) ‘Oh, poor Richard,’ she said. ‘Do you want it? You can have it, you know. You can send me emails from the next room. You can be working in the study and I’ll be in the sitting room and you can write “Tea? Smiley face,” that sort of thing.’

  What does she mean to do there, lounging on the sofa while I work, I wonder? How will my muse amuse herself?

  You’re making fun of me, I said. And I don’t do smiley faces. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve noticed. Not today, anyway.’ And she put her thumbs to the corners of my mouth and pulled them up, as one inspects the gums of a dog.

  Now the stew is eaten, the last of the juices mopped up with torn bread, staining our cuticles orange. As I cleared our plates and put them in the sink I asked, am I really a curmudgeon? She nudged me out of the way with her hip, turned on the tap, picked up the stained rolling pin and pointed it at me. ‘You’re my curmudgeon,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think that’s what I shall call you. If I am your Ariel, your Vivien, your Melusine, etcetera, you can be my curmudgeon.’ I said, I think I’d prefer … Prospero? Merlin? Some other old man at the end of his powers? Foolish, cursed Raymond? I think I’d prefer Richard, I said. ‘Oh, very well,’ she sighed. ‘Richard it is.’ And I stowed the last plate in the rack to dry, and made for the sitting room. ‘If you’re going to be curmudgeonly about it,’ she said, behind my back. When I turned reproachfully, she seemed absorbed in sponging the cutlery clean, all innocent, as if she hadn’t spoken. Her teasing, I suppose, will keep me young. I live in hope.

  ‘Did you miss me this afternoon, Richard?’ she said, following me a few minutes later and finding me sulking quietly on the rug, staring into the fire. She put two glasses down on the hearthstone, and pulled me back to rest my head on her knees. ‘Is that all it is? I’ve come back, see? I’m all yours.’ Do you promise? I asked, as she circled my temples; ‘all mine? You’ll stay with me?’ and she bent her face over so her hair fell on my chest and my head was enclosed in the cave of her curved body, the smell of the sea on her, a thick dark salt heat, she kissed me and I took it for her answer gladly.

  We sat in the fire’s glow. I scribbled at my notebook and she sketched, with her new pad and pencil. I didn’t know she liked to draw. She says she hasn’t ‘for ages, not since school’. The compression of her ‘ages’. Like the difference between history and geology. Her youth as recent as the turn of the last century, and mine long since become a fossil. Well. I scribbled and sipped my drink and she sketched, her gaze intent; every now and again I’d glance up and she’d smile and then frown, because I had disturbed her composition – but first she smiled, as if she cannot help but smile when she meets my eye. Silent, but for the sound of our hands on the paper, little incremental shuffles in the struggle to make record. As couples spent evenings of old.

  She was very still, only her shadowed eyes flickering and the curve and dart of her left hand. The firelight cast her cheekbones, her wide pale brow, the line of her Grecian nose, the point of her chin in high relief; the deep hollows of her eyes and cheeks; a momentary portrait, an exercise in chiaroscuro. If I had canvas and oils, a palette of red, umber, gold, for the pale flame of her hair lit by the embers, a dab of ochre and white for the dip of her cupid’s bow; if I had an artist’s cap, an artist’s eye; if I had world enough and time I would have made of this an endless sitting. But tonight, I was her subject.

&nbs
p; ‘There he sits,’ I imagine her thinking. ‘My husband, wise and kind and vigorous, with his dark eyes hooded, his brow just so’ – her pencil flicks over the page – ‘the scrape of his chin which juts just a little; his hair, which is wiry, become jagged where he has wiped his brow with his forearm, sweating over the stove, so that it stands in a comical coif. Shall I mock him? Has he had enough teasing? Or shall I smooth it softly and kiss him, and call him my curmudgeon, tenderly?’

  But she did neither, just went on sketching intently, and flicking her eyes over my hairline and back to the page. And perhaps she was recalling her suave and sleeked Professor of three terms hence, and perhaps she was merely thinking, ‘Who is this unkempt old man? Must he slurp his wine so?’

  No, it may not be long before the morning when she, watching me over breakfast, thinks ‘who is this absent-minded, woolly old man, with jam on his sleeve’ – I cannot deny it – ‘pushing his specs up his nose, pursing his lips?’ Will she come to despise these breakfast-time gestures as ardently as I adore hers? Will she dread each night, sitting up reading, her husband peering at the page beside her, longing for a touch but not his? The sight failing, the body failing. What will go first? Heart, liver, lungs? How many years from now? She in the fullness of her fertility, tucking a blanket to swaddle her incontinent husband. And when it comes to it, she will be a lovely widow, she will be lovely still. Oh, it is unfair, it is unjust – that there she will stand, by the graveside, grieving, still existing when I am gone and cannot watch her, and some boy on the edge of the graveyard can.

  But no, she showed me her work, and she has made me handsome, savage and dark; it seems I glower as I read. It is a good likeness; or a pleasing likeness, at least. Which, for the vainglorious sitter, amounts to the same thing.

  Saturday

  I woke this morning to her calling me from the bathroom, ‘Richard?’ I was half-asleep still, drowsy; her voice distant, so that I couldn’t be sure I’d heard her. Some siren calling me out of a dream, from a far shore. I struggled upwards. Again, ‘Riii-chaard,’ I heard her, calling across the water; then sharply: ‘Richard!’ and I woke. Impatient imp.

  I rose, and found the door to the bathroom ajar, and went into the sweet-salt steam of her lair; she was in the tub, full almost to brimming, chin-deep in honey-scented bubbles, smiling shyly. And then she sat forward, and raised a smooth leg pink from the water and soaped it, and as ever I felt the shock of her woman’s body, which spends its days in such formless garb that I forget, under the men’s shirts and shapeless nightgowns and knitwear is this long, muscular, shapely form, marmoreal. The sheen on her shin, her long feet. My Melusine rising from the water.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Did I wake you? Richard,’ she announced, ‘I must learn to swim.’ Must you? I said. I hope you’re not planning to make your leap any time soon, my little water snake. Not in that sea, I said. It’s perishing.

  ‘I mean it, Richard. Don’t make fun of me. You have to help me. I’m scared of the water, I can’t go under. Will you hold me under?’ And she took my wrists then, quite suddenly and with a surprising grip, and placed my palms on her shoulders and looked at me, beseeching, with those great eddying eyes of hers. My darling, I said, hold you under? I was unnerved, ready to laugh, seeing she was serious. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘I can’t do it alone. You must. I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying half an hour now and I can’t force myself under.’ And it was true, her hair was stuck a little to her dewed forehead, it hung in wet hanks and clung to her shoulders and her breasts, but the crown was quite dry.

  She took a great deep breath and pinched her nostrils and her eyes widened, huge, before she squeezed them shut, and I felt her tense under my hands, and so help me, if only to break that tension I pushed her under, forced those bony shoulders under before I knew what I did. And as soon as she was under her eyes flew open again, I watched her face through a frame of bubbles, and her body bucked, but her grip on my right wrist stayed firm so that she almost held herself there, with my hands. And feeling her flesh tremble, and seeing her young body twist with the torsion of an electric eel, and meeting those wide and scared sea-green eyes, I felt my blood rise for her then; so strong her grip and her frame so narrow.

  And then, she went rigid and still, and even when I no longer held her, she stayed under, would not relinquish my wrist, and it seemed hours I spent there, watching her, in her grasp, wanting her, fearing her a little, until at last I could stand it no longer, I broke before she did and hauled her up, I gripped her shoulders harder and pulled her back into the world, and I think if I hadn’t she might have stayed there. And she gasped, as if waking, struggling for air; she gasped and laughed and kissed my palms and thanked me. ‘I’m fine! I’m still alive!’ she cried. Only just, I said. How long did you plan to stay down there? ‘I didn’t feel like I needed air at all!’ she gasped. But you do, you do, you must remember to keep breathing, you must come up for air, I said. And I kissed her, her wet lips, and she pulled me down, pulled me into her, underwater.

  She looks back now from the beach and sees me with my books and thinks I am gainfully employed, still wrestling mermaids. But all I can think of is her eyes under the water, her hands on my wrists; and the squeak of elbows and knees against the sides of the bath, and the bruise surely forming at the top of her spine where it pressed into the enamel, and her chin bruising the tendon of my shoulder; I am a mass of distraction, anxiety, desire. How could I have held her under so easily? Her euphoria, dizzied, oxygen-starved, infecting me; her body pinned in my hands and yet escaping me, impossible to pin down. What is it she’s afraid of, that she would go to these lengths? When I ask, she says, ‘Of drowning.’ As if it were obvious. Last night she dreamed a new nightmare, of a shipwreck; she was trapped in it, she found a man drowned and she couldn’t get away, she said. She couldn’t tell me more but sat up in the dark, shivering, unwilling to go back to sleep; feeling herself on the threshold, the sea waiting to swallow her again. I stroked her back, fought to stay awake and soothe her, I held her, hushed her, until, exhausted, she consented to lie back down and I whispered you won’t drown, who drowned? But if she answered I was already sleeping.

  When she told me she dreamed of the sea I had imagined some benign subconscious realm; is it only proximity that has raised the monsters from the bed? And why, again why, then, have we come here? Or perhaps, all the while, when she sat in my seminars, in my office, in my garden, as we lay together in the sunshine, on the grass – perhaps she was haunted all the time by it. Did she go into that darkness every night when we were parted? I try to recall a sign, some shadow around the eyes, and cannot, or think I can, but can’t quite place it; a shadow or a flash of silver.

  Mermaids and water nymphs; all those tearless, tongueless, soulless creatures, their mysterious submerged lives … I look back to my books and still, all I can see is her eyes under the water, her eyes full of the sea.

  Out on the shore now, she bends to retrieve some shard or shell that will no doubt be added to the collection on the table; she has made a sort of cairn, a small burial mound of sea-relics, a memorial to some tiny, lost thing. She leaves little in the way of traces, apart from these shells, pebbles, drifts of sand; an occasional bright hair trailing. Each day she brings her offering, not knowing how precious is the privilege of merely having her return, be it empty-handed or bearing gifts. They are warm on the sill as I sort through them, disturbing the arrangement of a spell, perhaps.

  Her latest finding: A fragment of bone, from a sheep I’d guess from the scale. It is a rusted grey, sea-smoothed to stone, but hollow and porous and rough to the touch within like ossified sponge. Long since stripped of blood and marrow and life. Except that one might imagine, in those tiny hidden holes, a riddle of worms writhing, or tiny insects, picking it clean.

  I pick up the bone and watch her through it, like a primitive, useless telescope. It makes the brightness brighter, enamelled; it arrests her there for a moment. And then she moves
beyond it, suddenly gone from the circle.

  *

  Last night’s terrors and this morning’s strange antics have been smoothed away by her unwillingness to acknowledge them as such. It seems a dream now, or a game, which should be easily forgotten. I was chary of her over breakfast until she asked, ‘Is something wrong?’ with such innocent concern, as if she couldn’t think what might be, that I said I was preoccupied with work and wanted to just pin something down; a lie, and a regrettable choice of phrase but she didn’t register it. She simply left me to it. So I went back to my books and my watery women, then, for the sake of appearances. Undine; poor Undine. The knight Hildebrand or Huldbrand falls in love with the water nymph’s wayward, elemental beauty. Girlish, giggling, and then suddenly wilful; younger than her years, naïve; and then again knowing, and unknown, and utterly remote. She marries him, and gains a soul; exchanging immortality, willingly, for love. Eventually, inevitably, she is betrayed, and resolves again into water … Will I tell her this one, I wondered? Would she like it? Perhaps not.

  Every line I write now is written to fit her, and none will suffice.