Spiderweb

by Penelope Lively

  Seals sing. She had not known that. They make this plaintive eerie musical sound – woo-woo-woo – which floats unearthly from the shore. Later, her head is full of this, and the bird cries and the waves creaming on to a crescent of silver sand. She thinks also of Alan Scarth’s question. But she thinks of it in drowsy comfort, not as a challenge but as an endorsement or her presence here. She feels as though she were a roosting bird, come homing in to this bare, stark, glorious place of wind and water. She has a little stone house in which she burns peat of an evening and lights the oil-lamp. She has oyster-catchers and curlews outside her windows and her nearest neighbour is half a mile away, a farmer by name of Alan Scarth.

  A great bear of a man with a flaming mane of hair. Even his eyebrows are ginger-gold, and the hairs on his arms.

  Hair, indeed, unites them on their first meeting. He interrupts Stella’s queries about island practices to point at her head – a stubby, calloused, peremptory forefinger. ‘You’ve an Orkney look about you. Were your parents from the north?‘

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ says Stella. Noting as she speaks that she is in some obscure way apologizing for this. And she has only been here a week. Such is the power of the place.

  He seems to fill the room, that first time he ducks under the low lintel to ask if she is getting along all right. He sits there at the table with the old webbed yellow oilcloth, accepts a mug of tea and extracts from her an account of herself while she is barely aware of giving it. He is there – huge, intent, his blue eyes fixed upon her – and then he is gone. ‘I’ll be seeing more of you,’ he says from the door.

  He is a farmer. But he is also a polymath, she is to discover, a Jack-of-all-trades. He is an archetype, the stuff from which farmers are made, a man free in time and space. He can turn his hand and his strength to anything. He is Hercules, he is a Viking. He can plough a field, row a boat, cut peat, mend a tractor. He can tell what the weather will do, and when and where the sea is safe. He knows about beef and sheep and crops, about plants and birds, about the ancestry or this green slab of land in a shining sea. Give him a piece of machinery and he will perceive at once how it works and see how to fix it if it doesn’t. He is a man who comes from other times, Stella realizes, from worlds where you had to be able to do anything or you would not survive. He is the frontiersman, the pioneer. If required, he could have discovered the North-West Passage, trekked to California, colonized Australia.

  Stella seizes the day. The summer days in Orkney, which are twenty-four hours long, where sunset blends with dawn. She learns to love the weather. The wind and the mist. The sun that paints the sea with bands of turquoise. The rolling clouds that sweep great veils of rain across the island. She decides that heat and dust are not necessary adjuncts to study. One could become addicted to the social anthropology of a cold climate.

  ‘In the winter,’ says Alan Scarth, ‘you get the big sea fogs. There’s darkness at noon, in winter, some days. Then we light the lamps and read a book. You’ll like that, Stella.’

  There are many books in Alan’s farmhouse. Rows of big solid sober books he had from his father. Dog-eared paperbacks that cascade from tables, that line the staircase. There is a kitchen with a stone-flagged floor on which the farm dogs slump, a dresser with ranks of flowered plates that belonged to his grandmother.

  ‘Alan, I’ll not be here in the winter,’ says Stella.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ says he. ‘Terrible racket this old stove makes. Maybe I’ll get a new one. Now a Rayburn’s the thing, they say, isn’t it?‘

  They say, too, that Alan Scarth could have had his pick or the girls. Stella learns this because those who are generous in response to her questionnaires, are sometimes so enthusiastic that the information given spills far beyond the parameters of the questions asked. Thus she hears much that is in theory irrelevant to her researches. She hears how young Annie Flett sneaked on to the boat and got herself to Kirkwall, aged ten. She hears how there’s been quite a few set their cap at Alan Scarth, but here he is, forty-five and still on his own.

  ‘Marry me,’ says Alan. This is the third time.

  ‘No,’ says Stella.

  He stares at her, as though willpower might do the trick. As well it might – she looks away.

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ says Stella. ‘Can’t you see? I don’t belong

  here.’

  ‘You like it here. You like me. Don’t you?‘

  ‘Yes,’ says Stella. ‘Yes and yes. But that’s not enough.’

  ‘You’ll go south,’ says Alan. ‘And that’ll be that.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ says Stella. ‘We’ll always be friends.’

  Alan laughs. But he is not amused. ‘I don’t want us to be friends. I want us to be married.’

  Alan Scarth has been south. He has been to university at Aberdeen, which was well enough, he says, the books he enjoyed and the beer wasn’t bad, but he didn’t stay there a minute longer than he had to. When Stella hears this, she nods in agreement. Of course, it could not be otherwise. She tries to imagine Alan in Aberdeen, in the grey streets. Like a great young bull he must have been, pent up.

  And then his father had died, not long after, so he had to take over the farm. And his mother moved to Kirkwall, to be near her sister, who had married a Kirkwall man, way back. So there he was in the big farmhouse, on his own, with the girls eyeing him, and it, and the dresser with the flowered plates (this he does not state but it can be inferred).

  Nothing like this has ever arisen before. It is a complication passed over in the textbooks, in the classic accounts of field-work. Nowhere does it say that emotional involvement with the subjects of study is inadvisable. Unprofessional. Indeed, nowhere does it say that you cannot marry them, should the question come up.

  Furthermore, Stella cannot help but note from her gathering piles of notes, of cards, of names and dates, that incomers are indeed digested into this place. The extent and manner of this digestion is, after all, central to her project. People arrive. Not all of them leave again. And those who stay become a part of the texture of the place, in one way or another.

  So?

  She recognizes that she has landed at one of those alarming junctions in life, where decision is treacherous, where alternative existences stream into an unimaginable future. So she tries to avoid the issue by living from day to day, with relish, with fervour. She brims with energy, she could walk over the horizon, she feels.

  On many of these days she is with Alan Scarth, as the summer pitches ahead, open-ended, perilous.

  ‘Listen,’ says Stella. ‘If I married you, we’d be eyeball to eyeball, day in, day out. With both of us the people we are. Think of it.’

  There is a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. A foxy look. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘That’s what I want to hear. If …’

  ‘Purely hypothetical,’ says Stella. ‘I’m merely trying to make you see why it’s got to be out of the question.’

  ‘You’re failing entirely,’ says he. ‘And you with all that academic training. Now I’m just a simple man, but I know a good proposition when I see one.’

  Simple, indeed, thinks Stella. Simple my foot. Clever, resourceful, ingenious. Straightforward. Complex. At this precise moment – disarming, persuasive.

  ‘Look,’ she says. ‘I work. What would I do here?’

  He has thought of that. He is one step ahead. You could come and go, he tells her. Go south when you need to. Do your field trips. Come back up here for your writing, your studying. I’d settle for that.

  She pounces. Maybe you would, she says to him, but would everyone else? It’s not the way things are done up here and you know that. I’d be the weak link and you’d suffer for it.

  ‘Then I’ll suffer gladly,’ says he. ‘If need be. But I think you’re wrong. You’d fit here well enough.’

  ‘Look at us now,’ says Stella. ‘We’re quarrelling.’

  ‘All married people quarrel,’ says he.

  ‘Why me?’ she asks him. ‘W
hen there’s half the girls in Orkney after you. Or so I’m told.’

  ‘Because you’re not like any woman I ever met. Because you’ve got red hair, so you belong here anyway.’

  Occasionally Stella reminds herself that the rest of the world exists by writing a letter, or a postcard. She writes a letter to her friend Judith, who is digging up the past somewhere in Turkey. She sends a postcard to her friend Nadine. There is a choice of three cards in the island shop: sunset over Scapa Flow, puffins on a crag, or female seal with pup. She selects the seals and writes a message on the back which may or may not stir in Nadine a memory of a conversation they once had, way back, time out of mind ago, when they were quite other people, when all the roads lay open, when choice was so prodigal that it held no terrors.

  Sometimes when she is with Alan Scarth the air is taut with what is not said. Sex is unspoken, but it is ripe between them. It is a sizzling force-field to be skirted, it is the silent sub-text. Marry me, he says, and he means it. Come to bed with me, he does not say, because this is more important than immediate gratification and he has the long view in mind. But she can feel him reined in, tense with control. And sometimes it is as much as she can do not to reach out, to put a hand on his burning flesh, to say – yes, me too, you are not alone in this.

  Does she love him? All she knows is that some cautionary instinct tells her it would never do, it would come undone, it would scupper them both. In the midst of all this heightened time there is a sane and fatal voice which tells her, no. You wouldn’t last, not the way you are. The two of you would never last, with him the way he is, with this place the way it is.

  ‘So you’ll not marry me,’ says Alan Scarth.

  She is silent. Time has run out. The summer has fetched up against autumn. She has her bags packed, her notebooks, her card indexes. She would pack what she is feeling, too, if she could, this hard cold lump in the belly.

  ‘You’ll regret it,’ says he.

  ‘Possibly. Probably, even. But we’d both regret it even more if I did. Believe me.’ She cannot look at him so she looks instead at the sea cliff, from which the birds are now gone, the mob, the multitude, that teeming life. Just a few left, floating against the rock face, skimming the waves.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. The words break in the middle – she hears her voice as though it were someone else’s.

  He reaches out to her. The first time. He takes her hand in his. ‘There it is, then,’ he says. ‘There it is, then, Stella.’

  When Stella thought now of those months, they had still that sense of a continuous present. And Alan Scarth was frozen in her head as he was then – that fiery, potent giant of a man in the prime of his life. Herself she could not see, because that Stella was eclipsed entirely by subsequent Stellas and above all by the Stella of today, who confronted her from the mirror, features distorted by age, body softened and sagging. Very occasionally, she would be shocked to think that he also, if he was out there still, must now be thus.

  She had never been back to the island. For a year or two after that summer they had exchanged occasional letters, and then the exchange had shrunk to anodyne postcards written by Stella, to which he ceased to reply. And it was better so, she would think. By now one of those opportunist local lasses must have got her way, and good luck to her. More fool me, perhaps.

  Except that she had known herself to be driven by some submerged wisdom. She could mourn that lost experience, the vibrancy of that summer, the person that she had been, but she could not anguish over a mistake. The time shone out now as one of heightened living, not as lost opportunity.

  There it is, she thought. As he said. There it is. I had my chance to belong – to belong to someone, to belong somewhere. And passed it up. For good reason. Knowing myself. Knowing the expectations of a place like that, which I could not have met.

  She drove away from Kingston Florey with her head full of that other community, far more inflexible, far more impregnable. She had been intending to go back to the cottage, where the dog was shut in and would be desperate for an outing. But as she reached the entrance to the track, she changed her mind. It was hot, a walk up the mineral line seemed suddenly unappealing – overgrown at this time of year and the bracken full of flies. The dog could wait until later in the day. She would visit Judith at her dig.

  The Hiscox boys on their bikes were just turning into the track as she passed. She smiled again and lifted her hand from the wheel in greeting. They swung their heads sideways and glared at her. She remembered the mocking adolescents. Poor little tykes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There’d been a bunch of them on the green – two people from school and others they didn’t know. And girls. Stupid cows. Michael and Peter tried to get past quickly but the others saw them. They’d known what would come and it did. Shouting things about their fucking bikes. And about them, too. And the girls hearing and laughing. Silly fucking cows. And then they’d seen the woman from the cottage and she was grinning away too and saying something.

  Afterwards they told each other that they should have ridden into her. Given her something to think about.

  They didn’t give a shit about girls anyway. Some of the boys at school went on about it all the time. Who they’d done it with, how often they’d done it. So what? What was the big deal?

  Stupid bitches.

  They rode back and then just before they turned off the road into the lane, there she was again, the woman from the cottage, driving past. Looking towards them and pointing. Grinning. Pointing at their bikes.

  She didn’t turn in to go home but went off down the main road and when she was out of sight, Peter looked over his shoulder at Michael and said, ‘You seen that? You seen what she did?’

  ‘Yeah. She’ll be sorry. We’ll see to it she’s sorry.’

  They went to the cottage without really knowing what they were going to do, except that she wasn’t there, so there’d be something they could do. She’d driven off, so it was safe enough. They walked around to the back, thinking that they’d maybe break a window. The stupid dog was scrabbling away at the glass doors into the garden, barking. Peter rattled at the handle to get it worked up and to their surprise the door opened. It wasn’t locked. The dog flew out, barking and jumping up. Michael kicked it, as hard as he could, catching it a good thump in the belly and it belted off, squealing. They watched it run into the lane. And then Peter shut the door again and they made off. They knew suddenly what they were going to do. They didn’t even have to talk about it.

  ‘I’m really glad you’ve come,’ said Judith. ‘I was feeling somewhat pissed off. I can see the end of this dig looming, for one thing. It seems impossible to screw another penny from anywhere and the building society is starting to breathe very heavily indeed. The pin-stripes are running out of patience and polite interest. Trouble is, I can’t guarantee to come up with anything persuasively crucial in the immediate future. Burial ground? No such luck, I’m afraid. We’ve got the basic plan now, and some tiles and other bits and pieces, and they’re going to close in on me and insist on their wretched squash court going ahead. I’d need weeks and months to be able to prove that there’s more that should be excavated, which there probably is. So I can see the whole thing fizzling out, which is a shame. Other thing? Oh, well … life in general, I suppose, put it that way. I’m getting to the point where … Here, I’m not going to pile any of that on you … So how are things? Good, good. You’re looking very buoyant, if I may say so. Positively glowing. All in the mind, you say? Well, bully for you. It certainly suits you, whatever you’ve been mulling over. Hang on, I’ll tell the kids they can take a break and we’ll go to the pin-stripes’ canteen and get a bite to eat.’

  Michael shot the dog. They found it again quite quickly -stupid thing was wandering around by the track up to the hill and when it saw them, it came rushing up, tail wagging and all. Michael was the one holding the gun, so it was he got to shoot it. The first shot didn’t kill it and it was thrashing
around screaming, so Peter took the gun and gave it two more. They didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing because their mother had gone to Taunton and their father was out on a job up on the Brendons.

  Then they didn’t know what to do. They felt good and they’d be one up on that silly old cow for ever now, but they could see this might mean trouble, one way or another. They couldn’t leave the dog where it was, so they carried it a little way up the mineral line and stuffed it into the overgrown ditch. The woman would think it had just got out and run away. Got done for by a car or something.

  But they’d know what really happened. Like they knew about other things.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Stella. ‘I’m not talking about nostalgia, sentiment – that stuff. What I mean is … fishing out good times and … having a sort of re-run. It can give you such alift … the peculiar way it’s all still there. Not you? Oh, come on, it’s just because you’re feeling down. Think of Malta, that year. No, I wasn’t, as it happens. Another time and place. Well, yes, someone else, if you like. No, the list of my past loves is not inexhaustible, what nonsense. Definitely finite. And in this case … But the point is this business of emotion recollected in tranquillity. Contradiction in terms? I disagree. Though, all right, maybe it’s not tranquillity, exactly … Clarity, more. You see the thing clearly, which you don’t at the time, when it’s all helter-skelter feelings. I don’t know why I’m going on like this. Well, you started me off … Anyway, I must go – I left the dog shut in and he’ll be frantic. No, he’s not a mistake, I like him, and anyway he gives me street credibility. I have a house, I have a significant domestic relationship, I’m a paid-up citizen for the first time in my life. And listen, I’m sorry about this dig folding up. It’s really too bad. And whatever else it is you’re … anyway, look, keep in touch, right?‘

  ‘Dogs do not open doors,’ said Stella. ‘Someone has been here.’