— Care to come along?
The emptiness weighed. After the morning hours, after the dripping of the rain, the sun invited purpose. There was shopping to be done along the quay—but that too would be lonely. So that simply for the sake of a companion, the girl found herself agreeing. At least some sort of conversation would pass the time. She had come to that place for a holiday, with hope. But quickly, after a day’s examination of her fellow-guests, and those others in the small town, she had given this up. Now her day depended on the arrival of the steamer from the mainland. The morning steamer had come and gone. No one had landed.
At once, as she agreed, Rose regretted his invitation. Quickly he said:
— I’m going a fair few miles, you know. Up above the woods, up to the high ground. It’s very boggy.
In spite of her disinterest, such a small assault on her pride had instantly to be countered. She yawned and sighed:
— I can always turn back if I feel like it. If I want. I’ll just go up and get some shoes.
Thus Rose was left alone. It occurred to him even then that he might slip out alone, leave a message with the porter. Then he shrugged. It was appalling to be landed with this Anne-Marie—that title in itself was irritating, Anne-Marie, why two names? And what was the surname … MacDougal, MacDowell? Yet as soon as it occurred that he might still go out alone, the emptiness weighed down again and the idea of a companion became preferable. The vacant morning reimposed itself. From nine until eleven standing by the bedroom window, eyes near the window frame where the raindrops hung in a wet line, where the blind cord flapped its monotony, where dark mornings in the empty house of childhood shadowed his memory. The tide had been full—flat deep grey water rose to a few inches from the promenade level. Rain and this brimming full water made a fresh-water lake of the sea; the railings and a line of lime trees planted along the little tarmac promenade made it more of a rainwashed lakeside. No salt invigoration. It was full flat water, grey, wet, drenched.
So that with relief, almost pleasure, he saw Miss Anne-Marie Mac-something descending again the stairs.
Out on the quayside, in the clearing air and the warm sun, his last regrets evaporated. A small place; a shallow crescent of houses lining the small inner curve of the anchorage; stone houses of classic proportion, and several of them painted bright black with cornerstones scalloping white up the sides. Now patches of blue intruded high in the clearing sky—and the deep water of the anchorage, belted with trees down to its edge, began to show a rich opaque Prussian green. Anne-Marie had kept him waiting up in the hotel. And now among the water-front shops she remembered a little shopping. At first he was resentful. But the delay scarcely mattered. he leant on the quay-rail and felt the late blossoming of fair weather, A deep-sea liner, buff against the green water, sent a launch spidering shorewards with passengers. Several stick-masted yachts swung slowly at anchor. Otherwise the water was empty across to the mainland mountains. Gulls filled the air—swooping, feathering the water, yelping like lonely puppies; one in the distance dropped its white like a torn letter against the deep green of the trees. Rose liked those trees, there quickened in him always an unexplained excitement when the land-locked trees grew their green leaves down against the salt water’s edge.
Finally the girl was ready and they started. They walked off the promenade, up among the trees towards the higher moorland that lay beyond. They talked little: and then at arm’s length. There was the intent of their feet to keep them occupied, to fill the silence with purpose. All they said was ready-made, expected question and expected answer. Perhaps Rose said, knowing it well:
— That liner, that’s from Liverpool, isn’t it? Cruising out to the Outer Hebrides?
— Mm. She comes every ten days.
Sometimes they smiled. But never as close friends might—in delight at the strange and beautiful things they passed; instead they exchanged the manufactured, the familiar. Anne-Marie said:
— Rain before eleven, fine before seven.
— It’s an old Scottish custom.
— Spanish, not Scottish.
A pause, for Rose to digest that. Then:
— Anyway, the rule doesn’t hold here. It’ll rain any time.
Thus together, eyes more on the road than the passing scene, he the set brown-haired Londoner, she the loose-boned chestnut Scot, both tweeded and mackintoshed, they passed to the end of the quay where rose the mottled stones of a distillery and where the warm vegetation began. Passed the skeleton of an old boat cradled like a midsummer dreamer among tall yellow irises formed exactly round its sunken shape; passed from the harbour and entered the northern tropic of trees and moss and shrub, lushly wet. There in a sheltered part of the Mull island warm air from tropic America fanned into being a secondary hothouse—rhododendron, wild iris, giant foxglove, the chinese drip of fuchsia flowered among ash and beech and fir and the great mosses that suckled high up their branches. A thick motionless colloquy, sparing no morsel of soil, green with aquarium magic scentless and odoured only with the decay of rain-logged wood shredding softly into earth.
Yet out of this soon they walked, to higher land where a belt of corn grew and a light wind played, where the fields were marked with grey stone walls and meadows of sorrel and marguerite smeared the green with soft pink. Why hadn’t Miss MacDougal gone with the others to Iona? MacDowell, please, was her name. He was so sorry, he was at times a trifle deaf in one ear: the war. Oh, had he been in the war then? Indeed he had—in France and Holland and Germany…. So to the steady swing of their bodies, in the cleared air up towards the moorland, they talked of the war. Miss MacDowell, who was thirty-five, listened to his story with uneasy awe: she saw it as a sheel-torn field of Flanders mud, mud of the first war muddled with air-raids and the names of new German generals. They passed up to the higher, wilder ground: passed two solitary hikers with long bare legs and huge boots and pale plastic cloaks, passed the last stone wall and met their first black-faced sheep; passed the last flowers, tall bells of vampire foxglove praying among the grey bones of a dead bramble.
It was after they had walked a mile out on to the moor, up the rising hills and down into shallow valleys, across wet bogland and skirting small precipices of rock, that quite suddenly the clear sky filmed over, lowered itself, and threw down a splashing of rain. The rain came at them on the wind as if a shower of water was thrown, obliquely, the thin spray from a bucket tossed.
— That’s torn it—
— Better get to shelter, said Miss MacDowell.
But looking round they saw there was neither tree nor wall nor hut—only the gentle raise and fall of the moor. Then the rain burst down, thrashing and drenching: yet in the next minute it was blown on, there remained no more than a light, misty drizzle. They stood bowed in their mackintoshes, hoping for it to stop, standing close together. It did not stop. But down came the sky—and gently, gently they were drowned in mist. The prospect round them faded slowly—so slowly one was not sure whether it was the mist or a raindrop in the eye that blurred the view. Soon they could see only for a dim hundred yards around them. The wind had dropped, it was very quiet. The deep echoing boom of a siren came ploughing up from the Sound. It ceased, the echo died. Again the silence.
— Well, said Rose.
They both laughed. It was shocking and peculiar—one moment sunshine, then rain, then such a sudden mist. At that time, too, there was wonder in the abrupt desolation—wonder at the disappearance of the world and a sense of awe that they and they alone stood on what was left. Rose looked round and struck again the bright note. His voice, even to him, sounded lonely and amplified, it seemed refracted from the muffling lonely wall wreathing round them:
— Nice day for a walk! You know—you should have turned back before.
— What’s done’s done. Anyway, you can say you’ve seen a real Scotch mist.
— I think it’s more than that, it’s cloud.
And she to whom also these island mists were strange, also
peered round. She frowned and pulled her mackintosh closer.
— You never know when it’ll lift. We’d better start off back.
— Anything you say, you’re the native.
— Not of here I’m not.
They started walking: but after two or three paces stopped and looked at each other. Each intently had taken a different bearing: they were faced roughly in the same direction, but now a yard apart. The girl pointed, she was sure it was their way. Rose looked for a moment down with doubt at a group of white moss-mounds that seemed to have been his mark. Doubtfully still, but thinking that she was more used to the country than he was, he followed where she began again to tread. The ground was soft with bog, sponged with water: once off the drier hummocks and one was in—ankle-deep, knee-deep, perhaps more. They went picking their way down one long slope and then up another. They stood at the top and looked round. It seemed exactly the same. And then from somewhere down and far off—it seemed this time from a greater distance—the steamer siren sounded again. Rose peered towards the echo:
— Hello, that’s moved.
— She must have reached the pier—that was the putting-off siren.
— May not. May have been a freighter from Oban. Is there a late-morning passenger-boat?
— I don’t know.
— I thought you did.
— I’ve only been here two days. You’re not being sarcastic, are you?
— Wouldn’t think of it.
He paused. Then:
— Anyway, we don’t know where it came from. It’s no guide. And this place looks like the last. Are you sure we’re right?
She waited before answering—and then a sense of growing loneliness overcame what might have been obstinacy.
— Tell the truth, I’m not. Only I think—
— Not much use thinking in this lot. Look, let’s try over here, there might be something we remembered.
They trudged then off at an angle, again down into some declivity and up a further hill. Once more they stood peering, but once more there was no landmark, nothing they remembered. It seemed, too, that the mist was closing in.
There was nothing to do but try again, and then again. They stopped talking—from the effort of walking that difficult ground, from a need to listen, from a feeling for the oppressive silence itself. The silence became a presence. Once Rose raised his voice suddenly and called: the call vanished into the mist, drowned and muffled, so that he felt it went no further than the misted wall beyond which stood no one, nothing. It was absurd, demeaning—he never tried again: the sound of his voice enclosed them further. At length, tired from the struggling blind walk, they stopped.
— We’ll have to wait here till it lifts.
She nodded, saying nothing. And for a while they stood listening. Both listened for the note of a steamer, for anything to confirm the existence of a world that must have lain close at hand but seemed now to have vanished forever, nor indeed ever to have been. But now no steamer called: the Sound might have been miles away or near—beneath a precipice falling off just at the edge of what ground they could see. Weary, silent, smelling only the mist-smell, seeing only the sour-green bog—for the first time they realized how the white curtain made a circle round them. Until then they had possessed a direction. Now there was none, they had turned all ways, there remained not even an imagined idea. And all around, bellying a little but most regular, there hung the circular blindness. It edged the ground. It hung domed low overhead. They stood under a domed lid, and wherever they looked it was circular and perpetual, round and round, and round overhead. It seemed too—but gently, slowly—to be thickening still and closing in. But perhaps that was the illusion of their eyes straining for some point of definition—any mark for their human eyes. They moved a little, a few paces: but wherever they moved they remained still in the exact centre of the circle, it was impossible to get away from the centre.
From the grass grew only pale hummocks of sphagnum and the white bog-cotton. The cotton on its thin stem came to look like wisps of wool mist, the huge sponged moss-lumps like fog-clouds heavy on the ground. Rose began to count the hummocks—hoping for some relation between them that he might remember. As he counted, he noticed that the girl beside him was shivering. It was not cold.
He hesitated, then raised his arm to comfort her. An arm on her shoulder might help, she would be afraid. And just then as he touched her he felt the breath of a need to protect her, the lonely woman, the weak small-boned one. But just then too he saw on the edge of the mist a sudden shape, a defined shape of rock grey against the white mist. His arm feeling towards her changed to a shaking, pointing arm:
— Look!
They stood held for a second in hope. Then abruptly the ground beneath them began to recede, they were rushing headlong back, slipping with the earth itself at the speed of avalanche. Rose’s arm swung back and clutched the girl, her hands gripped into his raincoat. Then as suddenly they stopped, the ground held firm—and from the direction of the stone, the stone now disappeared and distant, they heard a plaintive gargling baa-sound. A sheep had been moving forward.
But this time there was no laughter. Their hearts pumped relief, they simply stood and after some seconds came to realize they were still embraced. But still neither moved. Only Rose after a while took gently the edge of his open raincoat and pulled it over her shoulder, so that she was closer to him and protected within his cloak. He muttered again, less to speak than to soothe, that the only thing was to wait and that it would be all right in the end.
They were both of the same height, perhaps of the two she was the taller. But now close to him instinctively she had slacked her figure, so that in fact her head was inclined on his chest and beneath his throat, she was resting snaked against him and his head felt towered and capable above. Damply her hair-smell rose—it was fresh, feminine, lightly stirring. His protective hand held her thin brittle shoulder: poor bones, with a pathos of slight flesh trying to cover them—but warm. Careful not to seem abrupt he drew her closer; his hand shaking with tension felt how simply its muscle could break such bones; his mind above the hand felt a wave of chivalric honour that it could control such an impulse, that it could be trusted not to hurt but to protect. And with this sense of chivalry, remembrance of romances read inspired him to feel his circumstance—he felt how she must be smelling the manly tweeded smell of his coat, and how he stood like some literary knight with his embracing raincoat proof against not merely the frightening mist but all high peril.
In fact, there was no danger that could not simply be avoided. They had simply to stay there until the mist lifted. Only a restless wandering, an unlucky precipice or a lapse in the peat could hurt them. Rose knew this quite well; he chose to stay. But safety of the body is no haven for the mind: that sheep had baa-ed close, it had sounded the nearness of other living things. It made no further sound. The silence thus dropped down more than ever intensely, it became possible—a dangerous suspicion quickly dismissed, quickly recurrent—that the sheep had never been.
It all closed in absolutely. Pocketed, will-lessly drifting, a thickness came upon them and even their domed periphery was gone. Now, nothing but the white. It was easy to breathe, but it looked difficult. The stuff wreathed about them slowly, at times opening a little to frame a hopeful vista of a few yards, then closing. All the world gone, the map Rose knew contorted restlessly near—Loch na Keal, Salen, Tobermory drew nearer in his mind; but at the same time it grew possible to fear they had never existed. The whiteness enveloping bore down its pillow on their eyes—their nerves in such a steady loneliness stretched for some sign, some relief, anything at all by which things might be known. But nothing. And to Rose peering the nothingness began slowly to wheel, there came the heave of the beginning of an infinitesimal rotation—and quickly he looked down at the head beneath him. Her eyes were pressed close in under his raincoat. He saw the hair, the extraordinary intricate hair, and a gratitude for its presence filled him—he bent down
his lips. Even then it occurred to him that he should move away, make some gesture of separation. But his lips touched her hair and the girl made one small clutching movement at the jacket she was gripping—she who probably with open eyes in the darkness of his jacket reversed exactly his comforting romance, smelled the myth of his tweed and knew how she offered the scent of her hair. Rose pressed his lips deeper.
He began to take off his raincoat—somehow one arm after the other, so that they were never parted—and let it drop down on the moss. Close together, she with her head curiously bowed, they knelt down, fumbled the mackintosh straight on the soft yielding hummocks, together sat and then stretched themselves down. The silence that had drummed them gradually receded—with faces pressed together a closer world was made intimate with the other drumming of blood-pulse and heavier-growing breath, of the rustle of clothes and all other small sounds.
Once—perhaps minutes, perhaps much later—the mist tried to reassert itself. A roaring sound whispered up from nowehere, a thunderous sound that grew huge and filled all the air round—but sounded to Rose’s intimate ear as distant as a sound in a dream. For a moment its intensity woke him, alerted some faint pull of reason: Thunder? Lorry? Whirlpool—the flat waste of milling water, the dark hole hubbing round its roared descent? … he opened for a moment his eyes and saw vaguely that the sound had stopped and that above, incredibly high in the mist, peering through with kindly outraged interest, hung the great curved neck and head of a horse. Apocalyptic, pagan, a classic lordly beast—it disappeared. Not ever fully awake to it, he closed his eyes and sank back into what was of stronger presence.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 17