Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

Alec, momentarily misinterpreting, wondered who had most lately conquered it, then heard the words at their proper value, converted into figures.

  After his confessional night with Nick he was slow and tired. He seemed to have talked all through those first hours of the day. Had he also said anything?

  ‘All the time I am lying to you,’ Lorna had said to him, ‘I am free.’

  These hard words lay under his skin and pained him. He looked at Gabriel’s coral cuts. The hand was coming up now, filling with liquid like a goat’s udder. The places where the coral had cut, hardly visible this morning, were the bluish red of meat on the turn. For anything to touch the hand would be painful. At night, Nick said, she would have to sleep with her hand in a cage of some sort.

  He would try to fix one by the time she wanted to sleep.

  ‘Shall I take over your watch?’ asked Nick, after he had held Gabriel and swung her up between the guard-rail posts from the steps up from the Zodiac.

  It’s odd, thought Alec, how I am beginning to pine for certain things; they aren’t the things I would have imagined.

  I thought I would miss solitude more than I do; that may be the good fortune of sharing that tiny cabin with Nick.

  I used to require space, a cubicle of my own at the museum and no one near me when I painted, even to begin to think. But now there is no space and I am thinking all the time. The proximity is so close on a boat, there is a drama to it. The unities are forced upon us.

  Did the sea count as space although it was outwith the boat? Surely it was more an outer space, its extent too great to be comprehended as a quiet room in a house can be, or a studio. If he had been alone upon it, he knew, he would go mad and conjure mirages before the end of the first week.

  The solitariness, he supposed, must have been a fear of having people know enough of him to encircle him, to include his life somehow within their own, like babies in whose bodies are found an embryo of their weaker sibling. He had not wanted someone to know so much about him they could put him in a bag and draw it tight.

  Being here on the boat he was aware at last that it is rare ever to reach that stage. Up close against one another, people continue to disappear behind distracting clouds or to hide behind some self who is only their protecting double.

  The solitude he had made important to himself, driving people off in the process, was a luxury. It had been nothing like loneliness, a condition that seemed to worsen in crowds, and nothing at all like being alone. The solitude he made was a worldly thing, dependent on people being there in order to be walked away from. He was not gregarious, he knew that, but he was dependent.

  That word was not so bad now that he thought about it. His best paintings had, he must not deceive himself, been made of places empty of people, while he lived up against others. The distraction and clutter forced him to clear and reorder his mind and its translation of the world into paint. The asceticism he had forced upon Lorna that had left her gasping like a fish in a drained loch and thirsty like a fish too, that asceticism had chilled him.

  He missed newspapers. In his life on land, he had almost ceased to look at them. He knew he was not one of these people who are attached to the papers in the almost physical way that makes them smooth out the page of yellowed paper that falls out of an old drawer or tweak apart the balls of paper that pad the china in a house move.

  Equally he was certain that he was not, unlike Logan, who listened whenever he could to the radio news, a man who needed to know what the world had done in the last day. News was murderous gossip and men who could talk of nothing but news thought their preoccupation profound because of the solemnity of death and the horror of human pain; but in frivolous fashion, men who did not share this suffering were buying it to legitimise their old prejudices. The news of a day, properly contemplated, would make you wish not to see another day.

  Newspapers knew this and weighted their material accordingly, this much civil war, this much marvellous meals with mince. It was for this shameless packaging that he craved a newspaper now. The awful faultiness and garrulity of newspapers seemed to him charming; before, it had seemed meretricious. He remembered the intimate dislike in which certain columnists were held, the slithy tricks of the superior broadsheets in holding on to readers, their Chaucerian technique of announcing, ‘It will never be our way to describe how a certain contemporary monarch has been seen dining alone with a tiger . . .’

  The horrible self-deceit of newspapers came to him and he laughed. His spirits were high.

  He passed through the saloon and Gabriel and Sandro’s cabin. Gabriel lay on her bunk, talking into the tape recorder.

  ‘. . . did not seem to like the idea of being my mother. Anyhow, she couldn’t be. She never knows what I’m thinking, not like you. There were some face creams like you have and I did get sad then. Hello, Alec. This is Alec, Mother.’ She pressed off the small machine and said, ‘Say hello, Alec.’ She pressed Record, with her right ring finger, idly.

  ‘Hello.’ The tape was still going. He saw that the blanket was raised over her left hand, so he lifted it, as you open a door carefully to see an animal.

  ‘Leave my blanket,’ she said in a friendly voice.

  The hand was inside a basket woven of some vine.

  ‘What was in there?’

  ‘Grapefruit.’

  ‘It’s pretty,’ he said. Untypical gallantry, prompted by the breathy listening purling of the tape recorder, made him go on, ‘though not as pretty as what’s inside.’

  She looked so bored by his remark that he had to kiss her. The engine of the boat was at that moment engaged, so she turned off the tape.

  ‘We’re motoring to Bora Bora,’ she said. The sea was taut, flat, directionless, faintly sloppy astern. At the head of the bunk below Gabriel’s own, Sandro’s rosary swung from a small brass hook, making a scuttling noise.

  The closeness of the cohabitation Gabriel and Sandro were sharing was, Alec realised, what hindered any romantic attachment between the two. No mystery was open to them. The illusions that wrap even the most direct and straightforward of love affairs had never had the distance in which to flourish and shed their veils. Yet it was probably also true that they knew nothing of each other at heart, having established personae inside which to live and a mutual co-operative propriety about their physical selves. Alec could imagine feigning incuriosity. He could imagine feeling indifferent to someone forbidden – since enduring his discomforting morbid thirst for his second mother he flinched from reawakening that pain.

  To sleep, however, twenty inches apart from a young female body lying over one’s own, to dress and undress at dark junctions of the night with that body, at the beginning or end of a watch, would seem like a long frustrating dance leading, predictably, not voluntarily, towards some resolution. Yet the two were like infants, living in that first pod of self-absorption.

  In the days when they had shared a life without secrets, Lorna had fed his own curiosity. This was characterisic of her practical intelligence. She recognised his wildness and let it sniff and stare at other women, reaping it for herself.

  The voyeurism he cultivated in himself was applied to everything he saw. He saw secrets not only in bodies. The heart of his painting was its penetration to what underlay what he saw. He stripped back the land, the flowers, the faces that he was to paint, without sadism, curiously. Voyeurism had an ugly reputation as though its hidden motive was to humiliate its object. Alec wanted only to watch and to see. To have caught another soul in an act of pure kindness would thrill him as much as a glimpse into the lushest Turkish bath, he believed.

  The life on Ardent Spirit combined two rich genres to observe, the domestic interior and the human body in its classically heroic mode. He found the sight of Nick and Elspeth pouring dried beans into canisters in the saloon at evening intensified by the outside bulk of water, the infinity of sky. When the men were hauling in the reacher, or Gabriel straining at a winch, their purposeful eyes and focused strength comp
osed a picture he would use as a source, pared free like lay figures of everything but action.

  ‘There’s one with a beautiful neck,’ Lorna would say, as they did the shopping in Stockbridge, or walked out by Salisbury Crags. ‘Look at that shining hair.’ She managed neither to sound like a procuress, as women can when love has become dull to them, nor to make him feel that he must at once turn to her and say, ‘But you have a beautiful neck, your hair is lovely.’ Praising the beauty of others did not seem to diminish her sense of her own light-eyed handsomeness.

  He had begun to act upon his curiosity, damaging his home and almost never gratifying himself beyond the first touch of new skin. The oath not sworn to Lorna, but held to, that he would be loyal, if not faithful, became a snake that coiled about his whole life, squeezing the air from it.

  ‘See that one for her straight back and hard profile,’ said Lorna. They were queuing with a jug at the Italian shop on the way down to Leith and the sea, to give lunch to his father. They would fill the jug with red wine and fill a basket with some of the foods the old man, very surprisingly, had taken to; long hard bread full of holes, cheeses like the soles of sandshoes, strange vegetables that lived in a tank of oil and were lifted out in tongs, dry yellow cake, and the wine, even. The shop had become part of the city’s growing cosmopolitan life. On Saturday mornings, people were starting to visit it the way that Europeans shopped, in order to find what was good on that day, or to pass time. For Edinburgh, it was new; a certain bohemianism had grown up around the Saturday queue. Alec recognised other painters, a woman weaver of Italian blood, a sculptor. The affinity between Scots and Poles, Scots and Italians, may have to do with the old religion; it is also concerned with food.

  That day the sun lay as it can in Edinburgh so slanting and insinuating that even the grey stone of the terraces and the old paving stones were warmed. Women wore dresses and sandals, without stockings. The housewives at their doors had on aprons over blouses as they wiped off the Brasso at their doorbells. The city whose life was lived for the most part indoors was trying its own streets. Seagulls tramped along among the shoppers. At the docks a foghorn once in a while blared. Strangers fell into conversation, made bold by the oddness of being in a queue for food, a queue that they had chosen to be in.

  Old men, the grandfathers of the two families of the shop, served food and conversed at a pace combining commercial and theatrical timing. They passed among the crowd, offering on small plates a piece of Parmesan (‘Cheese, it’s cheese, tell them’), some sugared violets, a plate of purple olives and pink tuna. The old men were attended by their dazzling grandsons, who climbed ladders to reach the top shelves of the narrow, high shop, and their granddaughters, gold hoops in their ears, who used lazy-tongs to bring down hard sacks of ground coffee or sachets of pink-and-white almonds. The third generation spoke pure Scots though they were entirely Italian; they interspersed their Edinburgh speech with fast-squashed Italian, falling into operatic Italian-English to flatter, wheedle, or declare large totals. Their upbringing had been strict; the grandfathers were bringing up the boys to be as shrewd and charming as they were, to carry on the bringing of oil and heat and flattery to the cool city and its evasive, bridling, seducible citizens.

  ‘Is she Italian herself, d’you think?’ Lorna asked.

  The girl Lorna had pointed out was tall and narrow, straight-backed and somehow prancing, with heavy hair and the drooping, half-sneering, half-swooning profile of a Greek head. Her forehead, pale yellow like all her skin, as Alec knew, was edged with down such as grows on the calyx of some flowers that can tolerate a life near the sea. She banged her basket against her legs, this girl, puffing her skirt out each time behind as the basket hit the front of her calves. Each time the material returned to her legs it clung more, until it was creeping in a fold back through between, sucked by the basket and blown by the wind that is always passing down Leith Walk on the way to the sea. In a town the size of Edinburgh a man will identify the beautiful women who are resident over the years as he takes the gauge of the crowds he walks among; from among these he will eliminate some as being impossible. To others he will aspire, and he will dream of them. Some he may arrange to meet. A few he may come to know. One or two he may learn more of privately. Having seen this girl in the queue, Alec would have decided to course the streets for her, had he not already been spending afternoons with her in the dark, with the shutters folded to the window and oranges in a bowl by the bed.

  When it came to the tall dark girl being served, one of the grandfathers deliberately beat the other to it.

  ‘And, bella Signorina, for you today?’

  ‘Butter, half a pound, unsalted, please.’

  ‘It is my pleasure. Isabella, presto.’ He kept the grandsons away with other errands, the decanting of capers, the measuring out of crystallized citron, the chiselling of torrone off its sticky block.

  The granddaughter near the butter-barrel took a knife, cut out a wedge of butter, set it on a paddle, paddled it into a pat, and then stamped it with a wooden mould that she drew from a zinc bucket of iced water. With her hands covered over by a muslin cloth, she lifted the thistle-badged butter on to waxed paper and folded it up with attention, not too tight.

  ‘And mortadella, enough for two.’ The medieval woman had seen Alec and was tormenting him. He knew her husband liked the bland, oversized sausage. Or perhaps she really had not seen him and just wished for mortadella.

  ‘He is truly fortunate,’ the Italian grandfather began, as civility demanded, ‘who shares this meat with you.’

  The people in the queue were enjoying the compliments themselves; it was a matter of national honour that such a beauty lived among them. Only a superb and heartless flatterer can achieve this effect of scattering his sweets.

  ‘Yes, now, and bread, half a long loaf, if you would.’

  ‘I myself will eat the other half, dear,’ said the old man, forgetting and becoming less exotic as his sentence ended.

  ‘Isabella, bring a little extra for the Signorina. You accept?’ he asked. It was clear that Isabella knew where to get the little extra; a store of small tokens, chillis, muscatel raisins on the branch, small wedges of panforte, sticks of Edinburgh rock, even, had been accurately measured and wrapped for timely spontaneity.

  ‘And I’d like a wine if I may. Bottle.’

  ‘What will you have today?’ He said ‘today’ often to his lady customers; they felt their presence marked. Newcomers believed themselves included. In these cold northern countries many women had become invisible by the time they reached the age of shopping for foods; he knew it from the vivacity that they learned to show him, their obedience, their willingness to learn. He was teaching the women of Edinburgh to shop, to eat, to cook to please their husbands and sons, in short he was teaching them how to be women, so he thought. He trained them.

  ‘A wine we do not say. The wine, or a type of wine. A wine is like to say,’ he became truly continental, ‘a true love. Love it exists, a great thing, like the wine. The true love, not true love. Is not something you can find, just like that.’

  Lorna was shopping now, asking the other grandfather for her messages: ‘A loaf, a whole one, please, and three tramezzini.’

  ‘Certainly, dear. And?’

  ‘Parma ham.’ An inconvenient thing to ask for on a Saturday morning, thought the grandfather, motioning one of the young men to hook down a dry mighty haunch and impale it ready to be sliced by the whizzing malicious machine in the corner.

  ‘How much?’ asked the grandfather who was dealing with Lorna. ‘Nine slices, please,’ she said, unromantic, truthful, practical and precise.

  Comparing the two women in whose beds he had been in the past week, who were now shopping before his eyes, Alec reflected how you might make a town impossible for yourself if you continued in this way. No human could surely endure the accruing interest on debts of guilt and systems of lies?

  The wine had been chosen for the dark girl, wrapped in tis
sue, probed snug into a long brown paper bag with secure string handles anchored by metal barrels like cufflinks.

  ‘See you next Saturday. Ta Ta. Arrivederci,’ sang the grandfather who had served her. Set up by his encounter, he would be able to wheedle the next twenty women with flattery whose sincerity would be meant for the sinewy neck and white flat teeth of the tall dark girl.

  She turned and, not knowing Lorna, saw Alec.

  ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘I should have thought it. Want a bit of mortadella?’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  Lorna had not turned when the name Alex had been called. She did not use that name for him. She was in the corner of the shop, being shown a postcard, apparently, by the man who was serving her. She had a bag of biscuits under her arm. On the shiny paper was a putto of about eight, Caravaggiesque, eating a biscuit of the type in the bag with an expression on his face expressing all the deadly sins but the one most easy to identify with biscuits. The temperament of the many Italians who had settled in Scotland after being prisoners of war, often staying on to wed and to fill the Scots with ice-cream, met and blended with the Scots nature as naturally as ice and sauce mixing in a bowl, the one just mutually chilled enough, the other just sufficiently intersweetened.

  ‘Such a lot I don’t know about you,’ said the girl, ‘but I mustn’t tell the world.’

  At this, the queue fell quiet. Edinburgh is a city fond of hearsay.

  Lorna continued to listen to the old man, who was indicating the shelves that bore tinned tomatoes, a panel of them three feet wide, twenty high.

  Alec said, ‘I’ll be off, Maria-Fiona, it was good to see you.’

  That could not but be true.

  ‘Paint me!’ Maria-Fiona cried out. ‘Paint me!’ The verb was passionately enunciated, lasciviously imperative.

  He left the shop, noticing as he did so the incidence of brogues and expensive ladies’ pumps among the shoes of the customers of the shop. His own mother, not a slattern, had often enough gone over the road to fetch the messages in her bedroom slippers.