Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Her legs by now had eely varicose veins up behind her knees. Her black hair had a wing of white. The shadows round her eyes had always been dark but they were no longer matched by her high colour. She had much disliked a year spent cleaning clams on the gutting floor, the clattering shells and pluggy, featureless creatures.

  ‘At least fish have an expression. A clam has no features. There is nothing to get to know,’ she said to Alec, a remark he only now, as he thought of her under this shady heated afternoon’s remembering mood, recognised as either dangerous or sad. She would have been horrified had he suggested to her that she was implying a wish to gut only creatures familiar to her.

  It was rather that she was casting about for something to meet her eye. She was lonely in a way that is part of the sort of marriage she and his father made. Alec was no companion for her. In her idea of him, her ambition for his future, she had, with considerable sacrifice, resigned herself to his life’s betterment, as she saw it, at the expense of their closeness. She wanted him to become the sort of young man who did not know women like herself, although she also wished him to retain in himself her backbone and steely standards.

  She was not, either, a demonstrative woman. Tears she retained by working in her house until their time had passed over.

  Alec took pennies from his father and mother, from small stores hidden in places unknown to the other but known to him. He could smell out pennies anywhere with their copper and verdigris tang.

  Mairi collected pennies from the time of the young Queen Victoria, whose profile appeared on them with a wispy ribboned bun at the nape of her slender neck. The name for these pennies was ‘bun pennies’. They were smoother, naturally, than more recently minted coins. Their smoothness gave them a silky warmth.

  He stole these treasured pennies from his mother for their face value, to buy sweets and squibs. The money he took from his father Alec took from his one coat’s hem. He regularly made a hole in his father’s left-hand pocket that his mother regularly mended. He took pennies from him at the shop, too, muffling the ping of the till with a hastily dropped pint of mussels or, which must be worse, he thought, a song.

  Mairi had a chipped front tooth, the left rabbit-tooth as you looked at her. The enamel was gone in a grazed dip that did not reflect light. She chipped this tooth on the stone of a peach. Jim bought her this peach when she was expecting Alec. He got it from out of the box where they put the bruised fruit at Rankins the superior greengrocer. Fordyce Macrae, his partner, had heard that fresh peaches cured the morning sickness. With just the few fresh peaches to go by in her pregnancy, Mairi could never be sure, she said, if they’d held down the sickness, but she did enjoy the flavour, around the bruises.

  ‘So I bit right in to the first peach in my life and inside I meet this chunk of wood that takes a piece off of my tooth. White they are, so they’re soft with it, my teeth, made of sugar.’

  She was fond of sweets though she had chosen not to work at the chocolate factory that had been the other place to work near enough to home when she was a girl. She’d a cousin who had worked there as long as she herself had with the fish-gutting. The cousin reported that you went off sweets early on. She took to drinking vinegar water to whisk the sugar-spinnings out of her tubes. Satin cushions were a favourite with Mairi, snips of sheeny boiling in shades of shot pastel, plump and cornered like film-stars’ pillows. She more often was able to afford an ounce of cherry lips or a McCowan’s chew, a rubbery ingot of toffee sold three for tuppence, in a twist of greased green-and-red tartan paper.

  The continuity in the names of sweeties eaten by Scots children is considerable to this day, Alec thought as he stubbed and blotted the flakes of stale croissant from his teeth in the shop-shed in Moorea. The most doted-upon sweets, the penny treats babies start on to bring out their sweet teeth, are named not for their industrialist overlord or by committee, according to market forces; they are named with deference to the addiction that is as strong as the addiction to sugar among the Scots – a nostalgia for the nation’s happy childhood.

  Happy childhoods return to haunt self-deceivers mostly. Those who have had them seem to sink into an adulthood that is a state of depletion, or to advance without consciousness of their luck into a happy adulthood. In childhood, the moments of consciousness that we later recall occur precisely when we are not happy, but those high moments transform themselves by a miracle into a memory of happiness, as though stones had hatched. What makes them sweet to us is that they took place during a time we have forgotten but which is part of ourselves. Memories yielded by that time are as from a golden age, although their gilding has almost certainly been subsequent.

  He thought of Mairi, and her fondness for old-fashioned sweets: soor plooms she relished, sugar greengages like the eyeballs of ginger cats, and Berwick cockles, red-and-white pellets tasting of face powder and mint, puffing to dust against the gums, leaving toothpastey mastic between the teeth. Old English was the unlikely name of a sweet she favoured, a dense pack of Spangles with several peculiar tarry and spicy tastes like cargoes, wrapped in pyjama-striped papers. Their smell lasted as long as tobacco’s.

  She accumulated small scars, at home and at work. The cuts were all on her left hand, the burn marks on her right. Her inner right arm had a four-inch burn scar from the iron. The burn-blister puckered and swelled with water like syrup in a balloon, till it burst. Alec had enjoyed kissing that scar, which, untypically, she would allow. Perhaps she thought all that education was making a healer of him. It was like kissing a flattened mouth, puckered and thin-skinned.

  Her cleaning habits led to fingers fraught with hangnails and a right index-finger bent over in a curve from rubbing and rubbing the washing up and down the drubbing board, the polish cloth over the stairs and down in under the banisters. The cleaning she gave to it was more dignified than the house itself, the gardens of crystals diluted and sluiced down the tremulous plumbing and over the thinning linoleum, the creamy cakes of beeswax smoothed over and fed into the few limping chairs.

  Furnished in the fifties, the house contained a random sample of the design tics of those dingy-fancy years. Geometric but disunited, cocktail-hour shapes, nothing to do with his parents’ way of life, lay in chips on floor-coverings, floated on the fabric of curtains, encountered one another in indifferent swarms on the paper coating the walls. Whatever the materials might have been, his mother did not question. She cleaned. For her the essence of things was what counted. The appearance was of little consequence. By cleaning she made the house good. She fed the household gods with Chemico and Parazone and spirit vinegar.

  The oblivious are blessed, being in a state of nature. Alec lost this grace and emerged into the open-eyed struggle at the age of five.

  They were in the fish van, all three, the family. Alec was comfortable in the back, sitting wedged between the slatted shelves with his arms around his knees. It was early evening, rainy, the street lights burrs in a mist that was an atomised dampness berried by the fat warm raindrops. The ceaseless windscreen wipers making gulls’ wings on the screen, the van’s heater, the road sign that told him it was five miles till they were back in the city, all held him in a rich suspension. He rocked with the movement of his father’s decorous but over-careful corner-braking. He looked out through the back windows of the van, two squares of night decorated with a few distant lights making ribbons. They had been at the sea, which exhausts small children and rocks them down to sleep.

  Alec must have looked as though he were asleep. His mother turned to look at him and for once allowed her face to pour love. Her profile was rueful, as though she had put someone dear out to sea on a bad night in an open boat. He tried to introduce a holy look to his, he knew, already appealing features. I may have let a tear swell between my lashes, he thought, tasting his behaviour as the dusty flake of stale croissant.

  He enjoyed her access of love that was worship, almost. He had not yet come to mind being claimed. He liked being nowhere, enclosed, unhe
ld but cared for, being driven from somewhere to somewhere in the warm, distantly fishy back of the van repeatedly but irregularly rocked without risk as the gears and brakes engaged and bit. From within his own piece of darkness he liked seeing without being seen, knew that he liked it, knew that for the present he should hide how much. He stood outside himself as though he had unzipped and stepped out of it. The sense of separation from part of himself was satisfactory. He felt like the golden entire yolk that has been scooped free of the clinging indefinite albumen.

  Elspeth had finished beating the matting over the side of Ardent Spirit. She chose the side off which the wind was blowing so that no dust blew on to the hull. She swept the boat below, having first dusted, though it seemed to her that salt was the dust of the sea more than dust itself, and set the matting down again. Being a woman who preferred large cooking implements and a kitchen through which she could walk, leaving sheaves of flowers and bowls of eggs about on its tables, she did not much like the seven-eighths proportions of the galley, nor its satisfying, expedient, but somehow smug dovetailings. At sea it was useful. At ease it was an impersonation of a thoroughly workmanlike kind of something she would prefer to be rather less practical and more forgiving. She was a mistake maker, also a mistake rectifier, but the sea does not allow for mistakes.

  ‘Tea, Sandro?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Which was yes, not no.

  ‘Will you come?’

  ‘I’m bad for time,’ he said. She was unsure whether she should distract him. She set the weighted mug down on the deck behind the gathered field of sail.

  ‘Ahoy,’ called a voice, ridiculously.

  She replied in the same way, not to offend.

  A hand rose up from the starboard gunwhale, holding from the base like a bunch of flowers an ornate, dappled, shiny-throated seashell twenty inches long. Within something slow-stirring seethed and a few bubbles came. She looked into it, expecting at least a face.

  ‘Take it, or don’t you want it?’ said the voice. ‘In exchange let me aboard. I’ve got the family.’

  ‘You’d better come round to the steps,’ she said. If she put the shell down would it walk? Was it a snail, and if so did sea snails make marks? How would she explain silver paths over the decking to Logan?

  ‘Talk is you have a fridge aboard and the kids haven’t seen one of them since Home,’ said the whippy man before her. ‘This is my better half. Doesn’t say much for me.’

  ‘Home’ had been spoken importantly and she took the lead.

  ‘Where’s Home?’ she asked.

  ‘The old country. Same as yourselves.’

  On her stern Ardent Spirit bore her name and her port of registration, Aberdeen.

  ‘Scotland, then?’ asked Elspeth, although she did not think it likely. The man had a southern voice overlaid by the bark of the sea.

  ‘No. England.’ He had been abroad a long time, Elspeth thought, if he could make that foreigner’s error, thinking Scotland part of something calling itself England.

  Two children with red hair whose curls met like bubbles in a bowl looked wretchedly at Elspeth. On their boat, moored, she now observed, perhaps fifty yards away, a dog was howling and jumping up. The guard-rail was netted. The red dog kept leaping and muttering, wagging its tail all the time. The arm holding the shell was getting tired and Elspeth held the mollusc out to the children.

  ‘No fear. We want to see the fridge,’ said the children. Miraculously, although they had come from another boat, they seemed to have shoes as grubby as children who have come in from a garden. How foolish of her not to have waited before doing the cleaning, so that her gesture made for Logan might also be received by him.

  ‘I’m Elspeth,’ she said to the wife, whose clothes were much more respectable than her own dusty pareo and laddered swimsuit. This woman was decked out for a refreshing meeting of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty; she had repressed hair and ankle socks. Her eyes were brown, unhappy, but even then not beautiful. She had a sweet smile.

  ‘I’m his wife,’ she said. So there was to be no trade of names.

  ‘Got any drinks from a tin?’ asked the larger child, a boy.

  Elspeth had to do something with the shelled creature. She was aware of the living movements inside its hard whorl, as if someone had handed her a newborn in a cone.

  ‘I’ll deal with he,’ said the dominant visitor in his facetious voice, as distinct from his formal voice, or the voice he used for his wife, ‘and you help Elspeth with the makings,’ he instructed his wife.

  Had it been a kitchen on land, Elspeth would have invited the woman to sit down while she made her a cup of tea. As it was, the woman stood just outside the galley and watched Elspeth. She emerged at last with relief only to find the two children having left the fridge door wide open and several sampled cans of sticky drinks left around the saloon, even on the chart table. An open fridge is a dying engine, she thought. He has often told me that on his patrols of the house for spilt electricity or overblown light. She shut the door of the small inset cabinet fridge, allowing herself one deep draught of its delicious artificial cool. She would have to dispose of the cans later and alone or the waste would be discovered.

  When it was not lonely, the sea could provide an imprisoning gregariousness of heightened bourgeois anxiety, Elspeth knew, except for those free spirits who either had nothing or held things as nothing. The tiring appetite to collect and possess, that should be swilled away at sea as it is in the desert, could sometimes become a terrible itch, especially among wives who were losing heart for the life and children who had not asked for it.

  ‘She’s gorgeous. Just gorgeous.’ Elspeth smiled at the mother of the two children in thanks. Perhaps if it was a long time since they had been in England the children would like biscuits too. The serious-mindedness of British biscuits is not accurately reproduced by any other nation. She brought from the lead-lined dry-goods store some digestive wheatmeals and a roll of ginger snaps.

  ‘These two here were just one and two when we left, you see,’ said the husband. Elspeth could not see the shell, but did not like to ask. She put down the tea tray in the shade of the awning. Now she saw that the mother had red curls too, but something had caused them to lose spirit.

  ‘We teach the kids at sea, away from bad influences. Milk and two sugars. When in Romania, I always say.’

  ‘And they learn a lot from places we visit,’ said the wife. ‘Plus there’s a school on the air.’

  Elspeth pictured a shoal of flying fish in the sky.

  ‘The radio is truly excellent in that respect. All over the two great oceans are little children at their lessons. Magnificent service. On the same lines as the system in the outback. Of Australia.’

  ‘Only wetter,’ she said.

  The wife looked at Elspeth. It was a look between admiration and fear. Elspeth knew how that look felt on her own face.

  For some time the husband discussed radio frequencies. At the end of periods of talk, receiving no response from either his hostess or his wife, he set springs for himself. ‘You will say that I am dogmatic perhaps in saying that . . .’ ‘Contrary to what is generally thought to be held to be the case . . .’

  Elspeth made two more pots of tea. The two children had joined Sandro up in the bow where they did what they were told among the swathes of folded sail. She could hear Sandro instructing them to fold the sails, and saw the soft geometric dance sixty feet from herself and the excruciating tea party she was holding in spite of herself as something ideal and free, an abstract epitome of what was mysterious, childlike and full about life under sail as against the life of occasion and adult ceremonial.

  ‘You may not agree here . . .’

  Elspeth did not like to be rude, was not normally so, but she thought she heard the Zodiac and she knew that she feared more to irk her own husband than this one. She interrupted.

  ‘That beautiful shell. Where is it?’

  ‘I’ve set it up for you, never worry, just
off the stern.’

  ‘Set it up?’

  ‘You’ll be wanting it for a trophy. It’s not after all the stuff of which pets are made.’ It was the facetious voice. His wife laughed. Elspeth didn’t. She was short of time.

  ‘I got the bugger to stick its head out and I hooked and weighted it. Sooner or later it’ll part company with its shell, you can flush the thing out with a strongish scouring substance. I often as not use soda crystals. And there you are, a conch to call your own.’

  Off the stern rail, sure enough, Elspeth saw a line hanging, from which must be dragging the shell and its ever more taut body, losing suction with every minute.

  He sensed not her disgust but some misgiving.

  ‘Of course it does smell a bit. It’s the length of time taken, cardinally.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Elspeth.

  The Zodiac sound had gone. Smoke was going up at points among the green crevasses of the island, soft blue amid the blackening green. The sun was starting to fold the pale sky away in preparation for the stars. The others must have found a good beach. Perhaps that would keep Logan banked and protected against the pain his ill-temper inflicted upon him.

  ‘A week or so. But no worries, you can continue the operation under sail.’

  The creature she had hardly seen within its squint-mottled spire had been mottled too, in an orderly, glamorous way, as only animals or the rarest primitive textiles can be. Two soft probes about the size of a small child’s fingers, but extensible, had emerged – the horns, she assumed, such as a snail has. Did she not recall that these were eyes? The sheer pearly mouth of the shell must be being battered by the silent boneless creature as it was dragged out of its one lodging, that was part of itself.