The sugar came in jars with beaks that dispensed suitable quantities. At tables all about were ladies who could take the day broken into small pieces only. Muriel knew her good fortune was not to be one of these. She was never alone in the way a more apprehendably feminine woman of her time might have found herself. Her appearance had never distracted her from life into dissatisfaction. A mural of toiling harvesters of the cocoa pod struck her with its impracticality. So merry were the pod-gatherers at their labour that they looked not at the pods and the activities involved in their harvest and processing but out at the sippers of cocoa, merry smiles filling their faces with bare teeth.
The bitter smell, thought Muriel, the bitter smell is what I remember of chocolate when we took it in Mexico with Mother and Father.
‘I’ll have tea, if I may,’ she said to Lorna, who had nevertheless been right to bring her here. It was full of young people and even children, though the general tone was a little too fast for the main body of Edinburgh motherhood.
‘Tea, then, please, for two, and a Freezing Hot here.’ She indicated Alec by letting her hand drop on to his. He started. The woman at the next table disapproved, checked to see whether the gaze of her son was with her own and then, seeing that it was, bestowed a long squeezing gaze of tender indulgence upon Lorna and Alec.
She was going to be denied every mother’s rightful reward, a daughter-in-law. Even that ugly old besom – she looked at Muriel – had someone to punish. Grey-headed, the daughter-in-law was, she noticed, conning Lorna for other marks; the old woman must be a force to reckon with.
The Castle’s hard hem was to be seen through the window. Drumming and the crack of boots came and bent away under a cloud of pipe music that lingered after it ceased to be audible, become part of the ear’s fluctuations and balances as sea legs stay with you back on shore.
‘A grown man and you can’t finish an ice,’ said the mother at the next table. Her son would not eat the last cherry for some reason she made no sense of. He had seen her put it into her mouth and extract it whole once more, never noticing what she did, as a woman will pull out her chewing gum to kiss a man and put it in again; but this was the other way about.
Freezing Hot was an item from a part of the dessert menu entitled, ‘And now let Us tempt You’; the ice-cream was ginger flavour, the hot bit. It came with two wafers.
Alec observed the man and the woman at the next table. Only between a mother and her son could good manners have offered such offence. He saw the son take up and emphasise each unconscious gesture of the mother. The isolation of the two and their sentence one to the other was set and ingrown as some unkind graft of skin. Unless she died soon he would have to make his own way out, that son.
‘I am not ready for it yet,’ said the mother, ‘but when my time comes I know you will see your way to doing the right thing.’
He did not know what she was talking about. Nor did she. She sometimes spoke like this to pass the time, in the unsurprising formulae of domestic speech. From her son’s response to whatever it was that she said, his state of mind might be gathered. For example, had he said, ‘Oh no, mother, you’ll live a long time yet,’ she would know he contemplated murder. If he were to reply, ‘Things can be perfectly comfortable for you for a long while yet,’ she would know he had in mind a retirement home where they would feed her on kitekat and ground glass.
She repeated a sentence she had heard at another table, to check whether her son was listening at all: ‘Miss Livingston-Learmont is of the old school and makes sure never to take tea indoors.’ Perhaps she would find out from her son the meaning of this mysterious pronouncement.
Her son said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know her.’
The mother resumed her staring match with the cherry in the depths of the sundae glass.
Lorna and Muriel each took a bit of Alec’s ice. He loved seeing them spoon it up. The happiness shed by small treats had never bloomed quite freely for his mother, who would not please herself at all for fear of the wolf within. No appetite aroused was safe; she feared consumption of the mildest sort as though it were its namesake, a disease that burnt you up. In consequence Alec had, and knew he had, a greedy, appetitive, streak. He had a first twitch towards quantity that filled him with a mouthwatering impulse to give in. Sometimes softness seemed so easy that it made sense until he contemplated its sad habits. Luxury had been to his mother an abstract noun, a vice the colour of seamy finery. It began with arising from your bed when you wished and ended God knew where.
Very likely the Chocolate House.
The last place Lorna had taken Muriel Bruce that first afternoon of her return from her brother’s death had been the establishment of a milliner, up on the lateral ridgeback boulevard of George Street, among shops selling ironmongery made with the care of jewellery, selling ladies’ gowns and school uniforms, and all presenting themselves as though these transactions were as much of a social pleasure for the assistants as they were for the patrons of the establishments.
The hat they bought went into her last home with Muriel Bruce. Mr James the milliner took his time looking at the face that had improved with age, becoming undeceived and open where it had been apologetic. He told no lies.
‘I do not need it to last, Mr James,’ said Muriel.
‘I rarely consider lifespan when it comes to hats. It is so short.’ It was clear he meant the lifespan of hats. That of humans interested him less. It was an age of time. It was like asking a butterfly collector to watch the teeth of a crocodile grow in.
‘Something cheerful and not over-useful.’ Muriel looked around the room. On pegs like giant pins perched hats you would not see in a street unless they should be flying along looking for a flock of parakeets in which to hide.
The eventual hat was not much, a wisp, in fact, just a kind of lettuce made of black net, dotted in places with beauty spots of plush, also black. The effect was Edwardian, elongated, quizzical. It took three weeks to make, during which time Mr James sought and found a hatpin of Whitby jet that was cut like a star. He threw it in with the hat, a festive mourning gift.
The stairs at Nelson Street began to be too much for even the few journeys Muriel was obliged to make. Lorna had given up her room in the flat behind the Parisian curlicues of iron, and was living with Alec.
The two of them set to finding a place for Muriel to live. The Infirmary gave them addresses. They visited each recommended home together, without Muriel, and came away in the first three cases glad they had not brought her.
She knew of the plan, mentioning it often as though inoculating herself.
‘What sort of old lady is she?’ asked the keepers of the first last home. ‘Cheerful, friendly, down-to-earth, incontinent?’
‘Oh yes,’ lied Lorna desperately before the question’s end. Then she was glad to have bothered her complacent questioner.
The second place was full of whimpers. There were no men, who make old people’s homes smell but also give the old ladies something to live for beyond spite. On the walls were strung messages of Life Beautiful, penned in the prose of girlish serfdom and laminated. The bathroom contained an old woman being washed when they were shown around. When Alec withdrew to save her feelings, the woman sponging her said, ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know the difference.’ By then Lorna was out too. The confiscation of privacy seemed to kill the old ladies more quickly than widowhood and bitter winters.
The third home was in the country, by Gogar. It had been a real house; that was in its favour. The house was a central octagon with two short but graceful wings, faintly curved.
Within the octagon the space had been partitioned like a cake. The soundproofing consisted of softboard. The place was like a hellish carousel. From one room came the cry of an abandoned woman, without once stopping except to collect air to start again, ‘Oh God, get me out of here, Oh let me die, please, God, Oh God, get me out of here, let me die.’
‘They stop it after a bit,’ said an orderly, fixing t
he lid on to a beaker. An old woman with a hairband was rushing around calling, ‘I love you, I love you,’ now in the voice of a child, now in a hot voice that chilled. In each of these places Alec was bursting to pee but could not. He was moved by the unfairness of the paraphernalia from second childhood producing none of the fondness the kit of a baby evokes. The fragility of the old women in their triangular rooms, the old men kept away from temptation in the wings, seemed to interest no one, to hold no use and to exact no honour. Age had one thing above all other states, its abundance of the past, but the past no longer had a place.
Muriel grew ill. She wanted to go to a place where she might lie in a bed and look out on water. In the end, Alec asked his father and Jean if she could come to their home to die. The move shook some life out of her, and the rest she surrendered quietly one evening. The hatbox with its weightless contents was under the bed. The stuffed Dunvegan had not made the journey. Alec had set up a sprinkler mechanism on the garden hose. It was a kind of view over water, to be carried to a window to see water fan-dancing among lupins and over shining grass.
‘I see a bird come for me. At the window.’ Alec’s heart stopped at the words. He looked down at Muriel. He wanted to remember this time in which he either saw the Holy Ghost or saw someone who saw it. When he turned he saw what the woman herself and her life should have led him to expect, a seagull, watching for food to snatch. It was a bird of appetite, not of the spirit.
‘You were my chosen son,’ said Muriel.
He had not thought of it. The tastes of his own adulthood, its habits and adaptations, had been sheltered by the Bruces quite as surely as they grew from the enthusiasms and anathemata sown by his parents.
‘I will see you later, with tea. We will read.’
‘I think not,’ said Muriel, very clearly.
But again he did not hear it until after he had to, wishing not to set an edge to life.
Chapter 4
The boat emerged from the gap through the reef, out into the darker water and away from the air about Moorea that smelt that morning of macaroons.
‘To be certain we were covered for anything that could happen, we’d have to have spares of everything. It would mean sailing in convoy with a double, another Ardent Spirit down to the last pin and cleat.’ Logan was streaming the Walker log, a geared mechanical tally of miles hung over the side into the water, simpler than almost any device on the boat, just a long bit of string attached to some spinners that clocked up nautical miles.
His gestures were calm. He was entering the life that best suited him, where the thinking, if necessary, was quick, its effects external.
Leaving places fixed them in his mind. He would be happy never again to be tied up in the boulevard Pomare in Tahiti with the cars honking all night. The fishermen carrying fish yoked over their shoulders on a stick through the gills, a silver fan of fish over each shoulder, he had forgotten. The place had failed him in not being far enough from home. Like America Tahiti’s capital was full of borrowings; like Scotland it was afire with sullen endurance, set with the tinder of unbridled wrath in drink.
Logan was not prepared to look at the living confusion travel and cash had brought the town and to be amused by the mix of habits and cultures growing there, too stirred together to extricate, as hard as unravelling a tapestry on to spools of different-coloured rewound wool. A place that offered flying-fish pizza in a neon-lettered bar named Chang’s Gaff, a meal for which one paid in francs before taking a bus to a neatly labelled site of human sacrifice; this could not amuse him. In such confusion he saw not energy but degeneration. He wanted a place to be like itself, or what was the point of going to it? His own part in the modification he did not see. He arrived in the most silent way, on a breath, under sail, and gave more than he took, as he saw it.
He shared with money itself a powerful transforming knack; he could weigh heavy on the earth in hard coin or evaporate and move invisibly between lands. At sea he most respected himself for something free at last of money. His loneliness was strength at sea, his strange longsightedness in matters of personality not at all disabling. On land only strong flavours reached him, and fewer places tasted of themselves unmixed now than ever.
He would have said that it was time he did not have. Sentimentally, he might admit that there was no price he would not pay for more time. In truth he had enough but did not invest it.
‘Life’s too short,’ he said, meaning that increasingly a gap was coming between himself and life, the gap children feel and recognise as boredom. His introspection had been done in the adolescent years when he had been sick for certainty; he had not needed to look in again, for, like a grown boy, he was strong but still sheltered. His temperament was more burdened and intricate than his harsh understanding gave him the means to interpret.
Any offence he gave to men his open way dispelled; the offence he gave to women was received differently, often as intimacy. Since he found women becoming, like small countries, increasingly similar, he took advantage of the reputation he had for charm without needing consistently to show it. Certain women will take it upon the word of another that a man is desirable; it is a matter of publicity. With such a man as Logan, for these women, between whom he sometimes could not tell the difference, the retrospect was what they held on to. So they became women who spoke of him in a way that intrigued the next woman. It is a process that holds regimes in place.
‘We’ll start with watch-partners as in cabins and see how that takes,’ said Logan. ‘Two to six to ten to two to six. No breaking of the pattern, no matter how she’s creaming, or we can go off course. If we get weather I’ll spread the strength.’
The wind freshened, its strength uniting evenly behind and into the mainsail. White sail became one half of the sky. Gabriel sat at the high point of the tipped aft cabin, peeling carrots into a bowl that filled her lap. Below, Elspeth was laying out the log book.
She came up to sharpen Logan’s pencils over the side. Thinking of the company, not of the wind, she turned the pencils in the sharpener as she talked with Gabriel.
‘Now it’s almost beginning, our time at sea,’ she said. The pencil rotated sixty degrees of the sharpener’s bird’s-eye circle at a time.
Gabriel was too young to enjoy such loose conversation that relied upon drift and exchange and comparison. Elspeth did not seem to have much to show for her life. Gabriel imagined how she would wear such a life. She scraped the carrots with an artistic look on her face.
‘There is a bit of a swell always deep in the Pacific,’ Logan said. ‘It’s long so you don’t always notice it. Spit it out if you need to chuck at all, Gabriel.’
Then he smacked at his eye, remaining turned round from the wheel at the waist.
‘Hornet, or something sharp in my eye.’ He started to pull at his lid with his right hand, steering the course with his left. Elspeth vaulted over Gabriel into the aft cabin to get his antidote. The carrots spilt and rolled down the deck. Some stayed in the white gutter under the gunwhale. Most went under the sea and then like matchwood were there again but soon left behind.
‘That antidote has to be where I am,’ said Logan. ‘Not near by or somewhere you know it is safe.’ His voice was raised so that Elspeth could hear. Everyone else, as they do on a boat, heard and naturally listened. Tension on a boat is like the wind and touches everyone aboard.
The mainsail began to flap a little at its most distended point, then it beat and whipped where it was tightest to the mast. The reefing ropes that had been hanging from it at exact angles, as safe as a fringe, seemed to trace some panic. They acted as tell-tales.
A gulping long wave moved sidelong under the hull, just enough to take the wind momentarily away from the smooth mainsail. The flapping began to punch and distort the sail. The boat began to twist.
‘Nick, get up here, come and winch her in,’ called Logan. He did not speak angrily of his boat, sounding calmer than before.
Nick grabbed the heavy winch-handle fr
om the cabin pocket, one of four slots aft of the wheel, wed it to the winch and wound till he felt the tension sit tight. It was not quite right. The poised silence that should have come was forestalled by something. He looked up at the mainsail. Somehow part of its head was folded on to the spreader. He could have torn the big sail.
‘Sandro, will you let her out easy and I’ll lift her off?’
They were all there, waiting for the sail to be reunited with the wind. Nick climbed the mainmast with the intelligence of a lemur, looping his feet on to cleats and soft bolls of rope. When he flicked the heavy mainsail off the spreader, the tension among them was such that the release of the sail was like that of a living thing. Sandro retensed the rope that held the wind at its best point for their use in the long white pouch of sail.
Logan, who had forgotten to die during this manoeuvre, remembered his hornet sting. Elspeth was dithering about with the syringe, he could feel it at his back.
Putting up his hand to his eye, he pulled from beneath it several tiny rough splinters.
‘I’ve got a splinter,’ he said, part of his brain calculating which foresail to put up.
‘Shall I get you a needle?’ said Gabriel. Really, she could be a useful girl.
‘Not in fact. It’s for my eye,’ he said.
Elspeth began to laugh in an uncontrolled way.
‘All we need is a camel.’
‘Was it you who was sharpening pencils into the wind?’ her husband asked her. ‘Do I have to tell you again that on a boat everything you do affects everything everyone else does.’ The voice he used for the talkings-to he gave Elspeth was less loving than the voice in which he spoke to the boat. He was severe with Elspeth when it was warranted and on principle; others saw the tough but fair way he dealt with her and thought before crossing him themselves.
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