Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Muriel outlasted the Commander.

  ‘It was as one might have wished,’ she said, over tea a week after her brother had been gathered. ‘If it had been me the first to go, he could never have set a tray.’

  The dog Dunvegan was long dead, but not gone. Alec’s most enthusiastic taxidermist friend from the museum had compromised between his own affection for nineteenth-century anthropomorphism and the respect in which his owners held Dunvegan; the dog was as solid and hard-packed as he had been in life, the height of a nursing chair, and he stared out of glass eyes on to the decline of human powers, his black-lipped jaw set in the smile his owners swore he had in life. He was a ton-weight and had not been lifted since being placed at the foot of a curtain in the window’s bow. His presence, ugly, heavy, not very clean, had been a continuing comfort.

  When Muriel Bruce spoke of her brother after his death, she used the words ‘My dear brother’. She put herself to this test, as she also maintained standards of dress, changing into a blouse with a fichu for tea, and for supper, that was rarely more than a cup of tea and a biscuit, into the shoes whose buttons had to be captured and secured with a silver hook on a pearl handle carved like a fish.

  The tinnitus came to her soon after and to combat it she resumed the playing of the Scots harp, the clarsach, whose echo reproduces externally the inner sting of tinnitus’s constant ring, with the blessing that it fades.

  Songs written for the clarsach have been of a melancholy or a triumphalism that are generally held to pass away from us as we grow old, so it was a strange sight, Miss Bruce at her harp, extracting a Jacobite lament from it or the reproaching helpless song of love for a faithless man. If he heard the sound from the next room, Alec could believe it the celebrations of the house’s ghosts, as he believed he heard their talk at night in the streets. He had seen a woman in Ann Street set her patch aright and pat her high wig before giving her arm to – he looked no further, lest it be a man in a suit.

  The town was hospitable to those who wished to live in times generally gone. Edinburgh was ever behind the times, in some ways cruelly, in some tiresomely, but sometimes, too, beneficently. A man might live in a folly, eat gralloch and oats and do nothing but read and paint, if he could get money for his making.

  The blind Commander died in May. By July, Alec wished to take Muriel out of the flat in Nelson Street for the first time. He had been shopping for her, and the neighbours watched to see that her milk bottles had been taken. It was a lie, the shopping list she gave him, but filling his basket at the slow, unexciting shops to which she gave her custom was part of the piety he owed for the rescue and constant education the old people had given him since the first morning at the Wreck.

  Alec could not imagine the outing that might best lift Muriel’s spirits, without causing her anguish when she reflected that her dear brother was not able to join in.

  Alec was with Lorna by then, whose lighted window he had seen from his own, unlighted. Lorna was able to fix a car for the day, borrowed from her landlord, who was a careful man, discreet, a closer of shutters against the night, but who in this case understood the call for a car.

  Alec met Lorna the usual way. He broke his window one night, forcing up the lower section so he could hang out and look into the distant window he had chosen for his beacon, and it came crashing down on him like a guillotine, shedding glass for good measure. Across his back were stripes made by the downward slice of seasoned wood.

  He went to bed after a bath in Dettol and woke up stuck to the sheets with long straps of hardened blood. Tucking the sheet about him, he cycled to the Infirmary.

  The late watch had brought in the driftwood beached by drink and the windy fights it brings about. Alec sat reading a book that he had chosen for its dullness, hoping to numb himself; the wait, he knew, would be long.

  ‘Curatorial Obligations in a Modern Context’, read the drunk opposite him from the spine of Alec’s book. Drink gave him words for everything, a benefit greatly enjoyed by Scots. In Glasgow the mode of polylalia is an unceasing mock-heroic deflation through magnification, the fantastic development of grand themes. In Edinburgh a mort of information is discovered in the mind’s back room by the gallant torch beam of the drink.

  ‘Will that be curatorial as regards,’ the talking drunk man seemed happy. He was better dressed than Alec though half his face was blown up like a pudding, ‘as regards some limited modern’ (he said modren the Edinburgh way though his eyes were going like Yo-Yos) ‘context or do we have here as it might be the entirety of our context, id est things in general, the world as it is outside of ourselves, including all that therein is, fish, fowl, good red herring, lampposts, pipettes, stills, small beasts and vermin, millinery, honey bees, mustard, gas, mustard gas, tarpaulin, cigarettes all brands, and here we are not yet begun on the mineral kingdom or my wife’s bedside table. What you will, what you will.’ He collected himself and resumed his list of all phenomena. Alec was attempting to assemble some drift to the list. ‘Evening pumps, the feet of a grouse mounted and set under glass, dogs, of course, and spindles, kidneystones, mirrors, sheepswool and if you must that of women, a kiln, worms, a rowing boat empty, onions again, I said them did I not, worms . . .’

  ‘Come on, he’ll be OK for a while. He’s feeling good.’

  Alec, who had thought he heard something behind the words, turned in some impatience to the nurse. Her eyes were green or blue depending on how you caught them, pale in a pale face. The main part of her hair was the lively grey that runs in families, strikes young and emphasises youth, a grey without yellow and carrying its own light. Her eyebrows and lashes were black and in the sockets of her eyes lay olive-purple shadows.

  This was still in the days of belts and starched hats. Alec concentrated on her belt while she bathed, pressed, unpicked his shrouded cuts. There were all but thirty of them. Two hours later she lifted the sheet away from him and set to the cleaning of the naked cuts.

  ‘It’s too late to stitch you.’

  Alec was coming round from the blush that had covered him when she took the sheet from him. He’d on his trousers, as well.

  When he left, he asked her name.

  ‘Sloops, columbaria, wrack, matter that can neither be created nor destroyed . . .’ The list was growing, could never stop.

  And her address. Worse liberties must have been taken in this ward. His pretext was that he must return the hospital overall she lent him for the cycle ride home. If she didn’t want to give it, she could tell him to get lost and come to the hospital.

  Lorna Agnew, she wrote, and the address.

  As he made his way stiffly three days later to the place, he knew more certainly with each street that it was she who had been the cause of the accident that had brought him to her, she at whom he had been staring through his weak-sashed window all this time, she whose life, imagined so wholesomely in his own less wholesome evenings, he had lifted the glass to watch. He had been awaiting rescue from the trap of his perversity, his unnatural feelings for his stepmother. What could be more natural now than this impossible coincidence? The circumstances made of these untidy, uncomfortable events, a predisposition in Alec to be at once in love. The encounter in the hospital was soon a story, then a turn, then a game between them.

  The misery that Alec had diverted and banked up in his shame, the grief for his mother that had appeared to him indecent while he tore his aunt’s clothes in his dreams, came slowly from him over Lorna’s table in the months that followed, and he wept eventually into sheets they took together to the launderette, a new place down by Canonmills where it was cheaper than the pictures.

  It was Lorna’s fixed notion that they must take Muriel Bruce out today for three things, sustenance spiritual, bodily and inessential.

  They helped Muriel down the stairs at Nelson Street slowly. At the bottom the journey seemed to Alec to have taken so long that he knew something of the extraordinary achievement a sustained life is in age, leave alone further responsibi
lities. Alec got into the back of the green Austin, so that Muriel might have the view and be soothed by Lorna’s driving, which she undertook without drawing attention to herself and with confidence.

  He tugged down the arm in the middle of the seat and leant on it like a man about to tell a story. Muriel settled herself and put up her left hand to hold the leather loop that hung there solely for reassurance, with no pretence of life saving.

  ‘Are we all here?’ said Lorna.

  Alec rolled his eyes, irritated at what he feared might hurt the old woman as she recalled her absent brother, having to express it and hoping also that Lorna had not felt it. She was driving, she had planned the day out, she was entitled to some clumsiness.

  ‘Oh yes, my dear,’ said Muriel Bruce. ‘All of us indeed. My dear brother also.’ Alec was disappointed; was Muriel going to succumb to the afterlife? She had always been rational. With most manifestations of the other world she was brusque. Alec had not liked to confide his own notions about the streets’ ectoplasmic strollers, nor the listening he did at old eaves; she would, he thought, have pricked his whimsy before he’d tied on the string.

  It was a striped July day, the streets marked by shadows, the gardens in the squares a full midsummer green, tossed by the wind that set the sun chasing clouds so that you could not keep up with the changes of plot in the air. The drama of such summer weather is high in Georgian streets expressly built for silhouette, proportion and gravity. An exaggeration emerges that shows another side, something baroque, akin to the secretive, tall, but more humanly featured Old Town. Detail, blown up by the sun’s angle and thrown black to the ground by the shadow, comes to dominate. When this happens, pastiche and caricature, the fast effect of a stage set, preponderate. The impression is high, melodramatic and festive, more than elegant. Add to this the salt that loads the air in an Edinburgh summer when it is not falling in rain.

  The green Austin lent by Lorna’s landlord smelt inside as Alec imagined the instructional tortoise might. They took the road out to Penicuik and to the cliffs at the Esk where lay hidden the small castle of Hawthornden and the less hospitable-looking castle of Roslin.

  Lorna turned the car into a muddy entrance and parked before a building that seemed to have been cooked at different temperatures over much time.

  ‘Have you been to the chapel before?’ she asked Muriel.

  ‘Twice. My Christening and my dear brother’s.’

  ‘Does it spoil it for you to come now? Might you be sad?’

  ‘I have no true idea of it, only the stories that go with it.’

  ‘It always rains here,’ said Lorna, ‘and then the sun shines and it rains again.’

  They went through the old door into a dense plantation of stone trees. They were observed, it seemed, by faces hidden everywhere as they are hidden in the movement and angles of branches in a summer wood. No single simple holiness struck Alec as it did in white kirks or cathedrals full of light and turned repeatedly to the cross. This building was a chapel but the term was a plain one and not comprehensive.

  History salted down with story and fables had lain here and fermented until it had the light and dark, the packed murmurous involutions, of an old wood. Under the chapel the Catholic Kings of Scotland lay buried. On the flange of one of the columns, some ribbed as cardoons, others topped with acanthus, was carved a fruit that no man had recorded at that time five centuries ago. The Earl of Orkney of that old century was said to have, in effect, discovered America.

  Muriel spoke of the chapel’s past; its stories, rich beyond accuracy, were part of her life’s own story.

  ‘The angle a person takes to time, that may tell you about their life and its end. In the corner is the Apprentice Pillar, held to be the finest of all the different stone trees you see. The Master Mason left it for his apprentice to complete, came back and found it too good.’ It was ornate certainly and deeply corded with ornament. ‘In his jealous rage, the Master smote the apprentice, who died from that smiting.’ The old unused word sealed the story’s freedom from reliability. ‘Up there you see the apprentice, there his wailing mother, small in stone. In the pillar it is said there are shards of the Grail. Such stories rush to each other and cling together. I do not find it the loveliest pillar, in fact. The whole place seems never to settle for one to be able to decide for certain.’

  Alec looked up at the ceiling of the chapel’s body. He shed the earlier resistance he had held like a lost man holding a map. The drum of the stone was chiselled in clear sections, each studded with repeated emblems, stars, lilies, roses. The ceiling was less naturalistic than all the other turbulent, peopled, seething stone, but it had the formality and indifference of sky and weather, and, for those who take Him, God. The small scale of the chapel intensified its sway, the stern devotional ebullience of the carvings, green men, cabbage and plum and chameleon-shaped bosses, moved through work to art without insulting craft. Unconfined nature under the dropping stone stars of the chapel echoed a rectitude nothing to do with repression.

  ‘You might say the place was pagan,’ said Muriel. ‘It is certainly forgiving. The marks of the Masons are everywhere.’ She pointed to signs shaped like fish hooks and the feet of birds. ‘In time they will say there are dragon’s teeth in the graveyard. Beside the font there are some tender words for a more recent descendant by marriage of the High Kings of Scotland, a Russian lady. I used to listen to my father speak of the unlighted tiny refuge in the crypt where lepers came to die on holy ground, and I held my limbs to me with a will. Under us now men have died who can bear to be looked at only by God, and then in the dark.’

  ‘I found you in the register,’ said Lorna, ‘both of you. I am sorry that he was the younger one, too.’

  ‘No, it was better. That way he had my life about his own at either edge of it. I was born before him and have lived beyond him.’

  The wind began to get up outside the chapel. The shifting of small panes in their leads and the peaty cold of the place made it like a cave now within a wood. It seemed surprising that the stone creatures held still inside their stone boles and knots. The impression was of verve, mischief and the ascertainable.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Muriel. She stood back from the rail of one of the tiny chapels, each the size of a desk, and traced along a column a row of merry-making skeletons. ‘The bit they never let you see. More danse banale than danse macabre to me, though not so to you. The bones seem to me the least of it. Quite smart really. Let me sit alone for a bit.’

  Alec took Lorna down the stair into the crypt, and they stood together outside the cell of the lepers. He said to her the hard words he had seen cut in a lintel in the museum, the letters clean and whiskered with the cursive energy of the chisel: ‘Abbas, Episcopus, Princeps. Pulvis, Umbra, Nihil.’ He sounded frightened and thrilled together.

  She knew only the echoes of the words but was too shrewd for him. She knew the flavour of gloom and glory was too easily sucked.

  ‘I love you also,’ she said, her pale eyes in their dark sockets feverish with health.

  Sure enough, there was rain to meet them as they left the chapel and walked towards the car.

  ‘Shall we find somewhere to dry ourselves, now?’ asked Lorna, though she had it planned. Muriel was leaning back in her seat, eyes shut.

  ‘Do you hear anything?’ she asked them.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The usual. Wipers, engine.’

  ‘Your answers distinguish you. Alec is idle.’

  ‘And I am dull.’

  ‘No, you are truthful. Do you wish to hear something? The noise in my head is gone. I left it behind at Rosslyn.’

  The tinnitus that had tired her with its whine, perforating the silence she wanted, had left her at last like an earwig taking its leave.

  ‘Can you walk if we park in Charlotte Square? Or will I drop you?’

  ‘Better the walk, today.’

  Once they had parked the car back at the peak of town, tucked in below the stepped
pavement, the three of them set off towards Princes Street, past the linked rhythmic frontages of the grand square, with their princely but rational abundance of glass shining from raised lunettes like brows over some of the plain high windows. In the octagonal garden that filled the square within, trees tossed wide sections of green and showed grey beneath. From the far side of the square came the buzzing sound of stone being cleaned, the persistent trickle of strong solutions over flayed detail and harmed subtlety.

  But the square was still an almost perfect sequence of confident order, free of self-importance, enlightened, accommodating.

  The three of them made it to the Chocolate House. The Johnsonian name was misleading. The place was as up-to-the-minute as the grey-and-primrose Terylene button-down smocks of the waitresses, the only spot in town to serve hot mocktails and small savouries all day. The floors were pierced at intervals to admit the penetration of iron cocoa palms, built at blistering expense by a gang from Clydeside with experience in tropical themes. The wallpaper showed cocoa pods in cross-section.

  Hot chocolate came in cups to be set in stainless-steel holders and with heatproof straws that did not guarantee a heatproof mouth. In the roof large carved pods were tied to the rigid fronds of the palms that appeared to brace the flimsy restaurant. On each floor of the Chocolate House a crucible of chocolate breathed out steam. Tinny tubes and electrical whisks modified the beverages accordingly. A hum of sugar-powered conversation filled the three floors.

  Lorna found a table between a palm trunk and an old woman staring with vigilant dislike at a younger man. They shared an ice without touching long spoons. When something notable loomed, such as a cherry or a stratum of syrup, the woman held back and allowed the man to do his worst. Then she regarded him with an expression of satisfied distaste. Her scarf was the pelt of some animal with six legs and two adjacent heads. On her locally woven shopping basket was sewn in raffia the untruth ‘Sunny Italy’.