Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  As bores will, the visiting husband became suddenly bored. It was always a matter of regret to him how ungrateful people could be. This was a classic case, now. This woman didn’t know when she was lucky. He looked at the pointlessness of Ardent Spirit, and allowed himself to congratulate himself, just for once, on the tight ship he ran for his family.

  The biscuits were finished.

  ‘It’ll be torn loose from its muscle plug by now at any rate, so it’s only a matter of time before it’s a goner,’ he said. He could not resist it. Only a woman with nothing much up top would get precious about a big snail with spots. He could see that was it. Never had a moment’s pain in her life, he supposed. Which reminded him.

  He gave his wife the angle of his face and back that expressed his want of entire gratification. She stood, and smoothed her lap. Crumbs fell to the deck. In places were the footmarks of the children.

  ‘It’s been pleasant. I hope also for you.’

  The red dog began to howl now. There was a breeze that ruffled the water. Spars of sunlight tightened about the sky. It was like being within a shrinking parasol the translucence and colour of rice paper. The green of the island was black now, the blue smoke white. Even the red curls of the children had lost colour.

  At the steps down the side of Ardent Spirit, Elspeth said goodbye to this family, hoping to convey to the mother that she wished her well in her lonely enterprise, to the children that escape would be easier for them one day than it ever might be for their mother, and to the father that he would run out of victims one day.

  She was ashamed because she did not know whether to unloose the tormented sea creature or whether Logan, reflecting that it was already harmed beyond help (he was good to animals and things that did not speak), would wish to keep the shell for its undoubted handsomeness.

  In order to put off her thought, she repeated her cleaning operations of the morning. In his cabin, Sandro was playing the harmonica, old, melancholy, predictable ballads of the sort that had convinced her, when she and Logan met first, that at last she knew love as other people understood it, a great thing binding them not to one only but to many others, all swayed by eight notes and about fifteen words. She had not, before she met Logan, heard popular music.

  ‘Cherry, Cherry, baby,’ wailed and hummed together the buzzing windy sound of the mouth organ, while Elspeth set to doing what she had already done.

  By noon and after two Hinano beers Nick knew a bay that had never known a shark attack and was not private. Keeping fairly tight to the shore, he steered the Zodiac and the passengers, more slowly now, so that the shopping was not soaked by the bow wave, along the coast of Moorea until he came to the sixth inlet on. It was hardly a beach, more an ingress. Leggy mangroves stood over it on webbed legs sunk hard into the beige sand.

  Logan, Alec and Nick jumped into the surf and pulled Gabriel in with the rubber boat until it was two thirds up on the sand, then handed her out and pulled the Zodiac clean up, making her fast to a mangrove that held up its hands in a histrionic soothsaying gesture, pulling down the air.

  Among the mangroves, along the fiery sand and even into the shade, white crabs the height of cats tiptoed and suddenly sank. Their swift incomprehensible movements made the noise of many pencils used by keen but apprentice writers on paper shot with slub. Several of these crabs lay dead and emptied of flesh, blowing light as paper bags among the rooted mangroves. From time to time a coconut fell.

  ‘They split your brain if they land on you. Never sleep under a coconut palm,’ said Logan.

  ‘Hard not to.’ Nick looked up. High before the sky it was all palms unless you were almost in the water.

  ‘Split your brain, I mean it. The remains would be two poached eggs in a bucket of blood, should one of these,’ Logan picked up a coconut still in its case of copra, and palmed it as if affectionately like the head of a mastiff, ‘one of these happen to light upon you.’

  ‘Not light,’ said Gabriel. Logan and Alec laughed immoderately. Nick seemed to know they were playing a game in which he had been dealt no cards. He sat on a palm tree that grew parallel to the ground and two feet or so above it, and wrote in his small spiralbound notebook, the size of a book of stamps, with a thin pencil of chestnut brown. Sometimes he made longer lines and paused; he was drawing the deserted armour of a sand crab.

  ‘Have some disgusting picnic,’ said Logan. ‘Pitch in.’

  Beer, rum, limes and the ropelike shadows of the mangrove limbs made a crazed mirror of the hot hours they were there on the beach. Nick had gone, no one was clear when. They relied on him to return at a sensible time because he could tell where and when he was from looking at the sky, understood the imperatives of tides and never kept anyone waiting. Logan could do these things but preferred to have them done; he saved himself for extremity.

  Alec slept, his head wrapped in a towel through which he continued to hear the scratching sound of the crabs as they pencilled incessantly and suddenly sank beneath the sand. Through the towel he heard sighings, rattlings, whistlings and moans he took to come from vegetation. There was a sweet caving in and a regular hard thocking as though a man unseen but close were cutting down a resistant, fibre-clothed, slim tree. He could not hear Logan and Gabriel in any familiar way.

  Although he had seen it in others, his own death was still theoretical to him. Even in his sleep he knew he slept and enjoyed the knowledge. When he imagined death, he did so in terms of life, of what would be gone then and how brightly in the shadow of death these things shone. Not graveyards nor funerals could put him in mind of death: the yards were too full of personalities and irreverent energy, and the constant threat of being moved, by the entablature over a mother, the small sarcophagus of a child, the garrulous encomium of a mason aslop with words even in stone.

  Funerals were too close to parties and to family life, with their social constraints and embarrassments, to aspire to touching on the abstraction at their heart, the missing person. What he had felt at every funeral he had attended was a kind of common human love, almost a reaffirming inclusion, that had reassured him that he like other men had a heart. He had felt this sense equally with those greatly loved lying in the bare box and those cared for in a mild way. He had not tried the funeral of a stranger, which might be a form of theft.

  If any places struck him with the transmitted sense of death, museums and libraries did. So richly did they seem to throb with what he loved that he felt them imperilled by what is deathly. He feared the death of imagination as a devastation. To him the end of the imagination would pour salt into any meadows that remained fertile on the earth, and plough it in so that there would be an end to things for all time. The annihilation of his own imagination he knew would come; that of some men somewhere on the abandoned earth he had to believe would somehow continue to burn. That was his faith and he had never confided it to another; for that reason he held a form of conversation with the principle he had to believe was not his only, coming closer than he recognised to prayer.

  It irked Alec that the sorting through of his thoughts was akin to prayer, but always so conscious, as though he were reciting. He had hoped that the relinquishing of land for sea would bring prayer or some closer than before approximation out from himself, like music.

  His thoughts choked him with their words.

  If each man – thanks to the aching cauliflower we carry in our skulls – is walking along a tightrope in his life, I am the man who cannot move when most he would. The reason is my eyes; they paralyse me with all they tell. My eyes show me the glistening narrow wire I must walk, but they show me other such slung paths, stretched above me or below, and they reveal to me also the declivity below, and the distracting faces of those who watch and hold their breath.

  About me I see the confident forward movement of those who look straight ahead, travelling along their apportioned slim wire in company with wives and children. Where is their courage from? What visor have they come to wear that holds their fixed gaze
ahead?

  Far beyond where my own gaze tires are the ropes that at heart I wish to walk. They are not lit. They are invisible, taking their colour from that which surrounds them. Occasionally perhaps someone who has found and trodden one of them has left a trace, an emblem you might call it, of himself. These paths are scattered with faint, tactful, discouraging, and beautiful symbols of holiness or art. I do not want quite to be holy, too uncorporeal for a painter, a Scot at that. But I do want to be good. Not good at what I do, which I judge almost impossible beyond a certain disheartening competence, but the still harder thing, good.

  The difficulty with goodness is that it is severely practical as far as I can see. It’s a case of practice making perfect. The daily, hourly, minutely demands that the practice of goodness must make sit athwart certain aspects of my nature and my habit. The only way for goodness to be carried out is with the unconsciousness of habit. But I cannot put my consciousness to bed like a bird under a cloth. So I stand at the commencement of the wire in a bright spotlight that is half conscience and half vanity and I hold my breath, and freeze.

  I should be halfway at least across the wire by now but I stand looking, frozen, uncommitted, not warmed even by fear. I am not afraid, I am conscious. If I could set one foot before me, the stillness and chill might be stirred, my life take its first breath, my virtue awaken. As it is, my habits of control and distance hold it cold, unborn. My eyes inform me, freeze me.

  It is so that they also feed me.

  A painter must live by his eyes and the messages they impart. I do not feel, however, that I fully inhabit my life and days. I am within and yet without myself. The painting seems to be a superficial matter, a trick I can perform that will delude a number of people but not myself. I seem not to be capable of much more than looking and recording; what I wish for my work is that it should bespeak an achieved moral ease I cannot pretend to possess. If those who watch and comment upon me do not see the safety net, I know it is there and I know too that I must rip it away or at any rate test it.

  Each of us has his own safety net. It is often as not self-deception, yoking itself companionably to false need. In the North (by which I mean Scotland) it can be sentiment and it can be wrath and it can be a God who combines the two. My own (and I will be deceiving myself here very likely since we all have more than one of these nets) is an ironical non-involvement interwoven with that solution of all cowards, a long perspective.

  I also – but for how long? – have the constitutional tendency to hope that characterises fairly young men on the hunt for a mate.

  Should I jump, it will be worse for me than death. I will be caught for the rest of my life in the safety net, condemned to a life of disengagement.

  Minds meet in meaning, and I have met no one as close as the person I have harmed and who is not yet dead, so I can’t think of her at peace.

  For an exile, there are no continuities, merely succession. I am at the middle point and I must move. I burn, but the only light I see by is the light of that burning. I fear in the night sometimes that I have no soul. Should I wait for love or bring it about? Stevenson, who played as a child on the same brown river as I did, said that to marry was to domesticate the Recording Angel, that after marriage, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.

  Eighty feet above Alec, the palm leaves rattled. Along his body the sand conveyed a minutely concessive crystalline heat. The crabs scribbled from left to right over the continually rubbed-over sand, their writings erased by winds that could not be felt by skin.

  Once he heard a dog whimper. It seemed to be out at sea. Later in his reverie, it may have howled, almost like a woman, although that seemed to be on land, even close by. The water threw its voice.

  At the funeral of his mother, there had been a trick: never to look at the box itself, and always to comfort others before they might broach you. She died without ease, sweating herself into a pool of salt and bone in the bed where his father continued to want to sleep. After his mother died, she was very clean, there was no more swabbing and filthy linen to be taken out. They burnt the last sheets, his father and he, ashamed of what she would have said about the waste, but unable to bear the truth that might come to them if they once more washed these sheets: that she was not alive to make them once more dirty.

  All through her sudden dying, the vengeance her body took on her lifelong cleanliness was brutal. Gore came from her when all she wanted was to rid herself of waste. Her ears and nose marked pillows overnight as though she leaked bitter secrets. Her throat was black with deposits as though she had used filthy words all her life.

  So for the first twenty hours after she died it was a honeymoon. Alec and his father, gently and with no sense of who was bridegroom, washed her and calmed her face into forgetting the hard last breath that had come from its mouth like a saw. They washed her hair with a little bowl of suds and dried it in muslin, folding and pressing the hair till it was dry between the layers of cloth. The nightdress was white, long, cotton, maidenly. Inside it they had settled her for peace and dignity, padded against the loosening of all the body’s last shames, that had tormented her late days. From the garden they brought two bunches, one of lavender, one of rosemary, and that was the end of each bush for these hot herbs decline in the wet of the North.

  Alec assumed, and it was so, that his father would want to stay that night with his mother. When he took tea to them in the morning, he forgot and put two cups on the tray. When he remembered, outside the door of his parents’, now his father’s, room, he stopped and wondered if he should take off his mother’s cup.

  He did not do so. When he went into the room the air was not perfectly sweet. His father was talking to his mother, nagging her about her neglect of herself. He seemed to be bossing her about the journey she was to take.

  ‘It is not far. You will not feel it. I will be here. The boy is good. Will you listen to me at last.’

  The cryptic link between these two hard workers, his dead mother, his living father, seemed to grow flowers from its hard wood before his eyes. But he cast them down for fear of being seen to listen with his eyes to secrets he had not been invited to hear.

  He had not seen it because they were old and ordinary and his parents. His mother looked on the bed in her nightdress no age at all, and his father turned to him like a young man. The two of them had been still far off old age. His mother late in her forties, she would not tell him how late and he would make certain not to learn at the funeral, for that would hurt her feelings, his father fifty-two and all muscle and pep and opinion.

  They took her off on a stretcher. It was the first time her face had been covered and he feared her shape, shrouded, also the steepness of the turn around the landing on the stairs, when the stretcher had to be jolted and turned at angles only feasible for the dead.

  When the undertakers had gone, his father said, ‘I’ll be sure to die down the stair.’

  Outside there were gulls in the air, large-footed, greedy, white as snow. Alec and his father, who ordinarily ignored the birds at the docks when they came to crop carrion and nab good fish, went indoors and fetched every scrap there was and threw it on the lawn for the birds. The party of the gulls was loud and abrupt. Their clamour and their careless appetite eased the silence that had filled the house. The white birds with their yellow feet and rapacious bills seemed literal and firm against the wraiths Alec did not wish to allow into his life, the insubstantialities of a life with his mother gone. He did not cry. He tried to by saying the words, ‘My mother is dead,’ in various forms to himself. All it did was make him realise that he would never make an actor.

  His father wept abundantly and these tears took him soon to the bosom of Alec’s second mother, his mother’s sister, the arrangement practically a formal dedication of her pain and his father’s. The habits of his new mother, Jean, were not precisely those of his first mother, but the sisterhood gave a consoling slant of resurrection – or haunting – to the sway
of his aunt’s marriage to his father. He did not use the word stepmother because they all agreed it was a hard word and one that his first mother would not have liked to be used of her sister.

  The gap of time was nine months. Had the woman been unfamiliar to him this might have pained Alec. As it was, he saw his father sheltered by his aunt, and in his turn sheltering her. At twenty-six, Alec was too old to feel the unmerciful, wholehearted, puritanism of youth. At first he was unsure of his own reaction. Was it right that he did not mind? Was he deficient in love to his father, secretly relieved to pass him once more to the care of a thrifty, provident, sober, woman?

  He could not answer his own suspicions. He was glad only to see his father calm.

  When he began to wait to watch his stepmother lift the washing tin or to stretch up to pin damp clothes to the line, to check whether her clothes rode up as his mother’s had, over flesh creased like petals by the elastic and buttons of matronhood, he saw nothing to it but a sort of zoological enquiry.

  He began to seek a new place to live when he surprised himself by spending an afternoon off work going through her clothes and smelling them. Some of the clothes Jean wore were her sister’s, kept. The anger set about Alec with unclean heat.

  He was rapacious. An unnatural murderous lust assailed him not with his second mother’s differences from his mother, not her particularity, but her resemblance to his mother. The acknowledgment was sickening. He was isolated and conforming to the myth he least recognised.

  Still he did not cry. If he might slam his second mother into his arms, beat her into his father’s tidy bed, then he would cry, perhaps. He would not let it happen, must protect them both, his father, his second mother. By failing to weep for his mother, his controlling mind forced his body to seek another kind of outburst with her near-effigy, her sister.

  ‘She is a second mother to Alec,’ said his father, of his wife and sister-in-law who was in her sister’s kitchen chopping vegetables with a little knife she’d herself gifted Jim and Mairi even before they were engaged. ‘A second mother, the very same.’