The Applecross Spell
Page 18
She walks on and sees the blue body of Skye dreaming in the Atlantic, and the light that comes up to her is a great silver wheel.
Three thousand miles away, she thinks, my mother walked into this same ocean because she was dying and could not cure herself. And she hears her mother then, through the whispering in the spaces of the cairns: “This is your marriage. Only this.”
As Suzanne stands there on the edge of the world, she inhabits again the proud tower begun in her adolescence, the keep compounded of the four elements. This earth she stands on that is purest rock, this ocean that lies stretched beneath her, and the unbounded sky above. And the fire out of which all things are born. That is in her now, fierce and yet controlled.
Not a fire I allowed to be outside, lit at my feet and climbing my thighs and making me writhe. That false fire was only lust between me and Murdo. The false flame of his hair and his heart and his meretricious show of suffering. This is my marriage, she thinks, as she kneels down to lay a cool grey oblong stone atop a cairn. I am restored to myself.
When she stands up, she sees Callum walking toward her, his slim body utterly at peace with this place. He touches her face, then passes her helmet for the journey down, where she and he and the bike will hug the earth and all its nested spells.
Epilogue
She has whitewashed the outside of the house to better catch and cast back the light from the sea. To protect her herbs from the whip of the wind and the flung salt air, she has mended the low stone wall bordering her garden
Suzanne has heard that there is a prehistoric forest somewhere in this cluster of islands. Otherwise, there are no trees. There is earth, and there is unyielding rock that moves nonetheless, working its image into her mind.
Last night, in a sheltered cove near the sea’s edge, she lit a fire of garden brush. Then she paced out a square, recalling the proud watchtower of her adolescence. She has sought out this place where the Elementals congregate in full force. Her mother’s words are a cloak against the eternal wind that haunts her new home: “Weather made the first gods.”
Suzanne has begun to build a cairn. A stone for Gemma, who is now in Nigeria, working in a women’s co-operative. One for Callum, who has had another exhibition and fallen in love with a young journalist he met through Jeremy. He has sent Suzanne a photograph of them together. Round their image she has cast a protective hoop, floating and invisible.
It was Callum who showed her how dramatic a leap was needed to escape Murdo’s field of force. Suzanne wonders now if Murdo’s obsession with the make-up of the stars was the root cause of his undoing. “Their density exceeds the average density of matter by a factor of ten to the twenty-seventh power.” It was a fact that so fascinated him, he would repeat it like a mantra. Here was a number whose vastness Murdo’s mind could perhaps entertain. But the idea of that unimaginable density hung about her body like lead.
“There are those whose very field of being can sicken or madden us.” So her mother cautioned her when she was very young. Now Suzanne sees that the most pernicious of those human fields are innately duplicitous; they attract us through a projected image that is as irresistible as it is false.
“It is often not their fault, poor dears,” said Ada. What mattered most was that Suzanne make her own intuitive body an instrument that could read where danger lurked.
One of her tasks here is to recall in full, and more vigilantly practise, her mother’s counsel.
This morning Suzanne found the stone she recognized at once as Ada’s. When wet, it is aquamarine. Dry, it turns a flecked grey-blue. An ellipse, smoothed by the endless churning of the sea, yet not completely so. The stone has a slight roughness which not even time and the sea have subsumed. As Ada had a grittiness, a singularity that could not be quelled.
Last night, Suzanne knelt by the cairn. In the hollows between the stones, the wind off the sea made a spirit song. Can there be such a thing as jubilant lamentation? That was the nature of the song.
She knows whose song this is. It is to them she will dedicate her book.