Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  The policeman comes by to deliver no news. He asks questions I can’t answer, and leaves seeming defeated. I am not to leave the island. He says he will be back.

  I try to read but can’t make my eyes focus for sleep or whisky or tears. I go through my notes and shuffle my index cards and can find neither purpose nor meaning. These men bewitched and bereft; they sicken me. This grand anthology, my gift to posterity … I have nothing more to say on the matter.

  One by one I feed my pages to the fire, and by their light I read the book that she was reading:

  A stranger came in

  So beautiful

  She seemed to be a woman from the sea

  Perhaps one day she’ll walk in, calmly, soaked to the skin and dripping, hair in wet ropes and streaming, and she’ll sit down in the corner as if there is nothing amiss at all. The latch lifts

  No.

  I take her place on the beach and imagine her watching me, from the window, as if we’ve changed places, but I turn and there is no one there, there is only an empty, blank hole. Nothing within, and nothing beyond. All I can make out is the reflection of the sea.

  I watch its shifts and changes. It is powder-blue, it is amethyst, it is black, bruised, blood-purple, garnet; calm and flat, harmless, or biding its time. It is a clear night, tonight. The soft dimming into evening; all the old, dead ghosts of stars, haunting the clear sky, brightening against the dark in the glimmerans. Lovely islanders’ word for twilight. How she’d love that. Or was it her I had it from?

  The sky periwinkle, with a sketching of graphite clouds, the barest pencil-trace; lilac where it meets the sea, deepening up to the apex, mussel-blue. That was hers. I am trying to hear her voice say it. Prussian blue. Ink-washed. Indigo. Lovely, hollow words, without her. Bedtime blue, Richard, she says. Bedtime blue.

  I stand in numb bare feet, the cold gnarling the swollen joints, and I think of swimming out but the water is bitterly cold and I quail at it, I haven’t the heart, the courage to go in, to go under.

  I’m sorry, I say.

  All I have left is this act of empty rhetoric, this endless address to an absence. What if we …? I try to recall a single conversation with clarity and cannot. I cannot remember the last thing she said, what it was that she murmured to me or to the night. The last time we made love, she was already vanishing, slipping from me, dissipating.

  I can almost, almost recall the salt of her skin. Her gasp, her last gasp.

  Perhaps there is nothing left of her but an old man’s sigh.

  The searchers’ torches have been extinguished for the night, the caves left to their darkness. The tide is close. The beach is empty. I don’t think, tonight, that she’ll swim out of the water in her pale skin. I am cold, shaking. I must go in.

  *

  Burnt toast and whisky. How long should I wait – for nine days to pass, for a full moon? In a year and a day will I still be here watching? There is nothing to go home for. I could go back to my work, after all, and bury myself, and try not to hear the curious gossip, the laughter, or even worse the pity; no, I don’t think I can. At some point I will have to write to them, and resign. Or perhaps I won’t bother. I wonder how long it will take them to notice that I’m not there, how much longer to give me up. Eventually I suppose they’ll clear out the office, box up the books that I can see no further use for, haul the desk out through the narrow door.

  I have no place there. I am a cancelled man. I cannot see what I should do with the days ahead; I cannot see tomorrow morning even. Taking the ferry, the plane, the train, and coming back to my house in the darkness and sitting in my one comfy chair and festering, hoping she’ll return, if nothing else to retrieve her bags, that sorry pile still sitting, presumably, on the living room floor. I shall hold them hostage, I shall wait for her to come and collect her books, all scrawled in the margin with her marks; I shall try to decipher the message there, I shall try to follow the scroll of her thought. But perhaps the pages when I turn them will all be unmarked, like the book she left behind her, or blank altogether, white and silent; or perhaps I’ll find the bags filled with nothing but wrack and sand.

  The wind in the flue. The fire has gone out.

  I have found at last a mark in that book of hers, a last blue line of biro underlining. It is just this: ‘Best leave the paper blank.’

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my excellent editor Laura Barber for her sympathetic and intelligent reading, and my agent Jenny Hewson for her understanding, reassurance and patience; and to all at RCW and at Granta.

  Catherine, David, Jonathan, Patrick, Ruby, Francis, Gemma, and Justin, thank you for reading fragments of this over the past few years and for all your perceptive comments. Scarlett Thomas and Rod Edmond, who read an early complete draft and asked some very useful questions, as well as saying some lovely things – thank you both.

  The Arts Council of England kindly awarded a small grant to enable me to travel to the beautiful Orkney island of Westray and to spend some time writing this book.

  Thank you to my wonderful family, especially my loving parents, grandmother Nancy, and brilliant sister Lucy. Thank you to the Thorpe family for their support. And thank you Ali for listening, and giving me space and time to work, and much else besides.

  ALSO BY AMY SACKVILLE

  The Still Point

  Copyright

  Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London, W11 4QR

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2013

  Copyright © Amy Sackville 2013

  The right of Amy Sackville to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

  All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. The author’s use of names of actual persons, living or dead, and actual places is incidental to the purposes of the plot and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84708 666 2

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Acknowledgements

  Also By Amy Sackville

  Copyright