She is outside on the sand. A sad slump, looking out on her last day here as if it were her last on earth.
I have little recollection, now, of how we came to be outside at midnight, in our nightclothes, by the diffuse light of a moon just one inhalation away from fullness. I recall meeting her in the doorway, emerging from her bath’s mist, calling to me, laughing; saying, ‘Let’s dance with the selkies!’ and taking my hand.
I recall her eyes, widening, wild.
I recall laughing at her as she twirled barefoot on the sands, in her nightdress; she was singing, and drinking a whisky older than she is from the bottle, and spinning, her face tilted to the fuzzy stars. Then she ran away from me as I went to her, she set off at a run towards the sea, flailing the bottle behind her for me to take, and I struggled to catch up to her and at last I caught at it and took a swig, like a teenager in a park; and when I lowered the bottle I saw she’d reached the water’s edge, and she didn’t hesitate, she ran right in, laughing, and then she dived under, and for a moment I couldn’t see her at all, and then I saw a white billow a few yards out where she was lying upon the water. And I rushed out then into the shallows in my slippers, they are sodden, I don’t remember feeling the cold, but I remember her face, I reached her and saw that she was face up and smiling, her nightdress soaked and bulging about her like a jellyfish, clinging about her hipbones, her lilac-tipped breasts. For a moment I stood and watched her, the water up to my thighs, everything restored to a tide-lapped silence after the uproar of my clumsy splashing; she seemed entirely at peace, in her element. As if she’d waded out into her nightmare and found it after all only a dream. She looked so strange and beautiful, floating pale in the moonlight, her hair sinking strand by strand as it grew heavier with the water; I don’t remember how long I stood there for, won dering, entranced, but I know that at last I came to my addled senses, and scooped her out and lifted her, so light, not feeling the cold, and she clasped my neck with a shiver, laughing. I brought her in and peeled her gown from her in front of the fire. I felt a kind of freezing, shocked fury, and rubbed at her almost violently with a towel until the goose bumps at last subsided and the colour came into her cheeks. And then she looked at me contritely, child-like, and I forgave her everything, and yet tried to be a little stern: I will have no drownings, I said, however picturesque. That is what I imagine I said, wry and measured like that. And yet when I think of her lying there on the water, I start shaking, as if only now I can feel it, the cold of the sea and the thought that it might take her, and the thought that she might let it.
I carried her to the bedroom and laid her down, meaning to let her sleep.
This has all been coming back to me in fragments, through the dark brown fug of a whisky hangover.
She says she doesn’t remember anything. For a moment I doubt myself: can I have dreamed it? But my soaked slippers, stuffed with newspaper, are there before the fire; her nightgown a silty, salty bundle in the sink; a glass by the chair by the window, with a drop of whisky not yet dried.
I look out at her there, and fear to take my eyes from her, and I think of her laughing, of the lightness of her, and of the gleam of her eyes, and I shake, my hands shake.
I took her to bed but I didn’t let her sleep. I didn’t want to let her leave me, I didn’t want to let her go back under. I may have been a little rough with her; when it was over and the blood cleared from my eyes, I saw her face was once more sea-stung with tears. I brushed at her cheeks, I kissed her, I may have wept; I cannot remember ever, since I was a grown man, crying, but it comes back to me now, the salt, the shaking, the cold. A convulsion of lust, of fear. She whispered, ‘Don’t, don’t.’ Oh, my darling, I said, you can’t swim! The waves will take you, if you let them, the sea can be sudden and wild. I won’t let it take you. To which she replied, ‘It didn’t want me.’ And laughed a strange laugh that sounded half a sob, and closed her eyes. And then, then I let her sleep, but I couldn’t myself for thinking of her, and got up and went to my chair. I put my forehead on the cold glass of the window, rolled it from one side to the other, and realized I was looking out for her, but she was nowhere to be seen for as far as I could see along the beach. She was safe in bed sleeping, of course. I thought I saw something moving, in the moonlight, out in the water; but it was only a seal, I supposed, wondering where his new companion had gone. I felt dispirited, disturbed, by the moon, the mist. I sat at the window, pulled the blanket about me. I poured myself two fingers from the bottle beside me for warmth; the burn of it all there was to convince me it wasn’t a dream (and again I feel it now in my throat and know it couldn’t have been). I sat and stared at the dark and sleep seemed far away, far out in the night, withheld from me, and I watched the sea and felt the chill of it, thought of her floating there, and poured another, shaking, and maybe another, and don’t remember my eyes closing. But then I heard her call me from the bedroom, and I went back to her, and found her sitting up in bed, tearful, her hair still damp and hanging in locks over her naked shoulders, shivering, and she asked where I’d been, she said she’d woken and I wasn’t there. She said she’d been frightened and she’d called and called.
I couldn’t sleep, I said, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you. I held her. I said, There’s nothing to be frightened of. What were you frightened of? But she wouldn’t answer, and could not be consoled, and sighed sorely, and swiped at her glistening dripping nose and chin, and rubbed her face sweetly on my flannelled shoulder. I soothed her until she slept but she woke again and again in the night and I soothed her, again and again. I put a hand to her head and it was moist but not hot – I feared a fever, but her skin was cold, perhaps too cold. I murmured and stroked, I whispered What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what frightened you, and held her and swore once more to be her barricade against that dreadful sea; I closed her poor swollen eyes with four kisses, each in turn, one eye and then the other, and again one then the other, then the cold tip of her nose and pointed chin. I stroked her hair and watched her drawn features in the dark. I watched her all night, wondering what it was that she couldn’t say or speak of, what it was she’d seen; this wildness in her; thinking of her mad dance and her shivering, her body spinning and shivering, her body floating in the water, her soaked hair and skin; I thought of crossing thresholds, carrying her into my home and into this house, my wife, this girl so light in my arms. Her past, her future, and this point between, the impossibility of her presence. I watched her all night and through the dawn, and she was still there in the morning, and I was still watching over her as the sunless world at least grew lighter. And as the darkness paled, at last her face was restored to smoothness, the tears drying and leaving a salt-rime, so I imagined, upon her lashes and about the pinkish nostril-rims.
I saw her eyelids flicker and reached for her. I rolled her onto her back and held her under. Her drowning eyes. ‘I have a headache,’ she said, but relented in the end.
I left her sleeping again and rose to a drab day. She found me an hour later, recumbent in my chair, pallid, loitering, feeling grainy and grey with tiredness. She stood beside me and stared rather sadly at the obscure sea. I put an arm around her waist, pulling her to me, and offered to make breakfast and she turned her head away from the window with what seemed an effort, and looked at me uncomprehending for a moment, as if replaying what I’d said in order to decipher it. She seemed etiolated; her eyes bruised with purple rainclouds, the skin over her cheekbones shining as if stretched thin.
I boiled eggs and toasted bread; the first slice I cut, righting the angle left by her last, tapered to a sliver. I reserved this piece, unavoidably burnt crisp at the bottom, for myself. Such are the sacrifices I make for her. I turned, holding it up, to tell her as much, to lighten the silence, but found she had drifted out of the room. I called and she didn’t come. I went into the bedroom to find her nesting at the centre of a ragged eyrie, of jumpers and socks and tights; she had pulled them around her from all corners. She was wearing one of her vaste
st cardigans, the sleeves flopping disconsolately from her wrists like two useless tentacles. Her head was retracted into the hooded collar, her nose and eyes peering over the wool. It seemed she was being ingested by a seaweed-green monster with toggled buttons, against which she had long since given up struggling; she was utterly forlorn, shoulders sagging, eyes mute and mournful in the depths. Are you all right? You’re not ill? I said. She shook her head, mournfully, as if whatever ailed her was far worse than a sickness. ‘I hate packing,’ she said.
I smiled. Come on, you, I said, with forced jollity. Eggs is ready. She said, ‘Oh good. Eggcellent.’ This, anyway, is how I chose to hear it. That’s a rather poultry pun I said, ripely. She laughed through her nose, rolled her eyes and shook her head. Humouring me. Doing her best.
At the table, she tapped the top of her egg thoughtfully, repeatedly, for longer than was necessary, before at last setting the spoon down and peeling off the fragments. Four and a half minutes, I said; again, she looked at me blankly. I boiled it for, I explained. ‘Perfect,’ she said, again with a forced smile. I put a hand out to her forehead, pushed her hair behind her ear gently. You’re tired, I said. You didn’t sleep well. ‘Not really, no,’ she said. I waited.
Bad dreams? I prompted, after two quiet minutes, in which she ate a toast soldier at an agonising pace, pausing after each protracted movement as if just the dip into the slowly congealing yolk were enough to exhaust her. I felt bereft. Where had she been in the night without me, what had so devastated her, that she was unwilling to volunteer? ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Every time I fell asleep, I went under.’ This remorseless tide in her. The sea? You were dreaming of drowning? ‘No, I don’t know … I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘Just the sea. Black and cold.’ Raven, sable, pitch, I ventured. ‘Black and cold,’ she said.
After another long, hollow silence, I asked, Are you okay? Not wanting to ask. She scraped at the inside of the egg without eating. Are you happy? I said, despite myself. She made a sort of moaning, sighing noise, rubbed her face with her hands, working the fingertips into her pale brows and pulling them down so the tiny line between them was pulled flat, her closed eyelids stretched. I love that tiny line, that little track of contemplation, in seminars the appearance of that line was my triumph; I cannot imagine it now, I can’t think of a single intelligent thing I might have said to elicit it. She slid her hands down so that her fingers cupped her cheekbones and her palms met at her mouth, pursing it. She sat like that for a little, quiet while as I looked on, helplessly attentive to this gesture of despair. I got up to make coffee. I’m sorry, I said, trying not to sound wretched.
‘It’s so early to be asking, is all,’ she said. ‘Am I happy, am I sad. Am I this or that. I’m not sure I’m anything before at least 11 o’clock. I just didn’t sleep well, that’s all. Are you making coffee? I think I’ll have some.’ But you don’t drink coffee, I said, a little alarmed at this volte face. ‘Well, never too late to try a new trick. Not an old dog yet.’ And then, too brightly, as if it had occurred to her that I am just that: ‘It smells delicious!’ One of life’s great, perpetual disappointments, I said, lugubrious, as the thing began to gurgle and spit on the stove. The taste of coffee will never live up to its fragrance. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Anyway, it does smell good. It always smells bitter, when I make it.’ A realization. ‘It must be awful.’ Oh no, I said. I relish it. You mustn’t think so. And again, brightly, as I set the cup down before her and she sniffed at it, ‘Delicious. You’re in charge of coffee, from now on. It’s my turn when it’s tea.’ Which of course, she over-brews, mashing the tannins out with a spoon; which of course, I didn’t say. She heaped sugar in, filled the mug to the brim with milk, bent her head to sample it without lifting it from the table; put her lips out to it like some cautious proboscoid insect, sipped noisily, and smiled. ‘No bad,’ she said, in her best Orcadian accent. We have learned that this is the highest praise the islanders can offer. It might come to be an old joke between us, in years to come. How is the lobster, the caviar, the champagne? A solemn nod: ‘No bad.’ What an indulgent, epicurean marriage it seems I envisage; and how will I pay for that, on a pension? I am already resigned to the idea of my retirement, but have no notion what it might consist of or where it might take place. I have no notion of what to envisage at all, away from here, after this. After and elsewhere have become increasingly tenuous concepts. It seems somehow unlikely, somehow increasingly incredible that there is any land beyond this shore. A world of industry and administration and ordinary things. That there could be any distance greater than that between here and her, and the edge of the sea.
And yet we leave tomorrow; Mrs Odie says she has arranged for our ferryman to collect us; we are to be ready on the dock at eight o’clock. Twelve hours later, we will be back in my little sitting room. Our sitting room. The one comfy chair and the piles of papers and books. I can almost picture it; almost. I’ll call for take-away and we’ll drink some wine and eat pizza and we’ll be married. We’ll go to bed and make love and she’ll sleep through the night, away from this sea, which is so black and cold. And we’ll wake up and we’ll be married. And every morning thereafter. For as long as we have.
Are you sad to be leaving? I asked. We can come back again, I said. For our anniversary, perhaps. Would you like that? She said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.’ Let’s go for a walk, I offered. Let’s walk by the sea. She said, ‘My head hurts.’ Mine too, I said. Fresh air will do us good. Just don’t let those seals lead you into a dance. I don’t want you wandering off into the water. She looked at me strangely. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’ I can’t imagine, I said.
She said, ‘I might go out on my own, actually. If you don’t mind. Just for a bit. I won’t be long. I won’t go far.’ Of course, I said. Of course I don’t mind. And she went.
She did warn me of this, at least, before I married her. She told me she was a solitary soul; I said I, too, am a lone wolf, but realize now that in my case this is perhaps out of happenstance, out of habit, rather than choice; that I had hoped we might be alone together. But even when she is with me and gives herself wholly, she seems at the same moment to slip free. This ache of the space between us, which I can only fill with desire, which only aches because of it, because I want so much to own just some small part of her, for a moment, entirely. I sometimes think I know nothing at all about her. And sometimes I think there is some particular thing that I will never know, that I can never hope to know, for all my probing.
Her shoes and socks make a little mound behind her on the beach. She’s been staring out for hours, and I, within, go on staring out at her. Just as it has been since we came here. My young wife on the shore. I should go to her; I don’t know what it is that prevents me.
Tomorrow we leave; what will she do, without the sea to watch, without the sound of it? What will she do with all her hours? How will she sleep, what will she dream?
The mist is thinning, lifting off the sea and brightening, or perhaps we are drifting clear of it.
She stands at the tide-mark and does not draw back from it. It laps at her toes and she allows it, allows the sea to kiss her bare feet without disdain; and it flows over the fine bird-bones of her toes, her rough torn toenails with their chipped paint, and up to the sharp jab of her ankles. She gasps silently, holding her breath.
No, of course I could not know this, she is too far from me to hear that tiny intake. And yet I think I do.
A silvery path shimmers into being on the water like a spell; it shivers up the beach, picking out the glitter of scattered stones and winkle-shells, all the way to her feet. She takes a hesitant step forward. She walks the silvered path out from the water’s edge; I should go to her, I should hold her, I should hold her back, but don’t; I find myself paralysed, fascinated, unable to move as I wait to see what she will do; I can only stand by helpless and watch, unable to turn away from her even for a second, powerless behind the window. She stops in the shallows, the
water almost to her knees, and I can only will her not to go on, the sea silver all around her, my hands against the glass pressing out to her and she goes no further for a minute, for two, she goes no further and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, and it steams the glass and when I swipe it away I see that she is squatting, now, her skirt hitched up and trailing, and she is reaching her hands out; I can do nothing but watch as she plunges them into the silver, she splashes her face with the pearly water, she pulls her hands back over her hair; she crouches there now, hands splayed before her as if waiting for a transformation. She stands.
The illusion folds. The silver fades back to grey. There’s a transparency to her; I can almost see through her, to nothing. I breathe her name and she vanishes behind it.
She doesn’t hear. I trace her name in the mist of my breath but it’s gone before I can reach the last letter, and there she still stands.
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