Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘What about Ganesh?’

  ‘More awe than affection for me in spite of the trunk.’

  ‘Anubis?’

  ‘All awe. The poise.’

  ‘Did you go ever to the Royal Scottish Museum?’ They had been avoiding their shared country. Talking about Scotland so far from it would be like starting on a bender; they might end up where they did not wish to.

  ‘I saw my first mummy there, first scarabs, first stuffed animal, experienced my first vertigo in the central hall.’

  He would ask it. ‘Where are you from?’ He dreaded that her reply would make them caught in some way, related by coincidences that would need servicing for the rest of the voyage, explaining to the others.

  ‘Oh, the Borders.’ So she was wary of it too.

  ‘And you came up to Edinburgh sometimes?’

  ‘As girls from the English counties go to London; for haircuts, dances, book shopping, the theatre. Miss Middleton for brushing up the waltz, Greensmith Downes for sensible dresses.’

  ‘We had different cities, then.’

  ‘Of all the cities I know it must be the one whose buildings go furthest towards fairness. Maybe Rome, too. It’s the past, I suppose, the concentration of things. And it’s the seven hills. If you walk among these things you don’t forget them.’

  Far from their homes, they were each struck by the fullness of their hearts. Each thought they saw the confusion a less intelligent person might make between homesickness for a country and a prospect out down and over the hills ahead into love. Congratulating themselves on their lucky escape they walked back to the hotel, never touching. They spoke about Edinburgh and about the abbey, sacked at the Reformation, by the village where Elspeth was born. It was arches and air now, on the bank of a river over which thin birch trees grew and shook their small leaves. The Borders had the hardest skies to paint. They changed, Alec knew, six times an hour, taking the greens with them. It was the country of black skies, white light, black sky, and the slowest arriving blue on earth that opened like eyes.

  ‘Do you know what I most miss at sea?’ said Elspeth. ‘The walking. And the looking at things that are made by men.’

  ‘I don’t know yet what I most miss,’ he said.

  The password Logan gave Alec for the bank had been ‘gull’.

  Chapter 7

  Alec and Elspeth were in the wooden airport boat that wallowed in the dark over a sticky sea; its driver was holding the tiller, his mate shining an Ever Ready torch over the bows as they steered like blind men making lace through the coral reef.

  They were listening to three elderly women who sat together on a banquette discussing a film-star for whose children one of them seemed to be a governess. They were comparing travel arrangements in Oregon with those in French Polynesia. Slowly it became clear that the governess used these flat-bottomed wooden boats as often as she might have used buses. Her destination was beyond Bora Bora, on the remote island where her charges lived. She spoke in the dark, not whispering, where the roaches could be heard walking over one another, of the order she had put at the tabac in Bora Bora for a regular newspaper from home to be kept to await collection by her employer’s boat; the yacht club were very good and kept Nesquik for her and Pilsbury ready-makes that she kept in an Eskimo till they got back to the island and set to bake up in the microwave. She missed nothing but company, she said, and that wasn’t everything. Her two friends, who were nearing the end of a long, probably unfamiliar journey, agreed with her. Although they were three old women with white hair and flat rubber shoes, it was possible to feel their strength of personality, their curiosity and impatience with fuss. They reminded Alec of gorse, tough workaday stuff that holds the turf together, flinging out under sun a honeyed, dusty, homely smell.

  It took him years before he realised that Lorna would speak to him through the remarks she chanced to make about plants and flowers. She did not want to talk about herself, feeling it burdensome, but if she went round the flat twisting off souring leaves or washing the plants with a cloth, she was hiding something under her nipping orderliness. If she remarked on a drooping clematis in next door’s area, or observed the grappling spread of a hard-wearing cotoneaster close to a softer plant dear to her, he had to untwist her meaning, that even she didn’t know, that had wound itself around the stem of what she said.

  So what was he saying by his reaction that the old women reminded him of gorse? That Scotland had come once more to the fore of his sensuous memory, and, perhaps, that the place had laid down his first and deepest means of comparison. The Bruces, his first companions to introduce him to adults who were both worldly and forgiving, would have enjoyed these islands, would have been old enough to indulge and understand the reason for their vulgar exploitation of their own traditions, their only resource but beauty that could go in a flash.

  ‘Of course, he’s world famous, but here he’s just another person,’ said the governess.

  Provincial fame cuts the world into parishes, thought Elspeth. It can only be entirely entertaining for very self-important people, distinguished men of letters holding court over mint tea in a café of the souk for two hours before the heat of the day, playboy drug addicts hoping to score from passers-through although they have settled in shacks where only cormorants share the garden. Logan’s life in contrast has been burdened by his sense of fiscal importance.

  The greatest man I ever met was free of himself also, an old thin man in a dressing gown in a room with a bare bulb and a bed as narrow as a pallet, all the walls of the room covered frame to frame with drawings bought for shillings throughout a long life, dedicated with single-mindedness to the appreciation of lines, in chalk, in pastel, in conté. The blessing of such innate certainty relieves people of themselves, thought Elspeth. Perhaps saints were only people of freak aptitude.

  Yet certain kinds of intelligence are one-dimensional, exhausting for the possessor often, and sometimes invisible to the world because their application is so rarefied. She thought, as she considered, of the crowning repugnant dish that her grandmother had served on high days, potted head. That was exactly what the unrounded intelligence ended up as, ugly, unpopular, spurned, lost to its body, and passed by other people from hand to hand, at a loss where to stick in the fork: potted head.

  The sea was moving less. They had turned into the creek. She saw the lights on Ardent Spirit and prepared herself for the reunion with her husband and the look he would give her, like someone threading a needle. He is a man reduced by riches, she thought, and prepared to return to him all balm, to soothe him into feeling, with her, rested, ordinary. Ever since they had first been together, she had felt this optimism just before seeing him. Who, after all, she wondered, has a life that is whole? We are handed broken plates and must fit them together.

  What is worst, thought Alec, is that my work has grown in its control, almost classical control, as my life has disintegrated. Does it follow that the classicism must be corrupt, just a cold mineral deposit made by the steam my life gives off? If I see disaster will my work free itself, while holding on to form? But you cannot choose disaster. Will horror heat me through?

  The stars seemed to move among themselves, coming forward and receding in brightness.

  The wooden ferry moored at the jetty opposite Ardent Spirit. Nick was waiting there for them, holding the painter of the rubber boat as it flopped up and down in the ferry’s wake.

  ‘I can see the lights of just the one boat besides Spirit. Who is she?’ asked Alec.

  ‘The tub out of Panama.’

  ‘The other’s gone then?’

  ‘This afternoon. Bound for Samoa. Maybe Papua New Guinea after that if they can get the papers.’

  ‘Might you join them?’ asked Alec.

  Elspeth looked surprised. She did not speak because she did not want Nick to take any conversational interest she showed for something more, making her her husband’s spy.

  ‘Could be. I won’t force it. You can always get a lift
round here if you’re ready to work.’

  ‘Glad to hear you say so.’ Logan spoke from the deck above them, just as Nick brought the Zodiac alongside. It was extraordinary how much you could hear over water.

  ‘How was it, Alec?’ he asked. ‘I rang London and told them to get the bank in Papeete tuned up for you.’

  If he could ring London, why did he send me? thought Alec. Was not the point of having an unfair amount supposed to be that it simplified life? Yet Logan set up complications like a man putting nails in his own mattress.

  Gabriel was on deck, leaning against the mainmast holding a book against her breasts like a napkin after a small but good meal. She wore her white nightdress. In the breeze its collar lifted, a turning page.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ called Sandro.

  ‘I grounded him because we sail tomorrow,’ said Logan. ‘He was out all night the night before.’

  So may Nick have been, thought Alec, the last night with his wife till they meet by accident again. The randomness of Nick’s life briefly seemed more rational to him than the planned lives of those who never spend a night apart. Yet were Sandro’s and Nick’s absences random or had they been organised as his own had been? Logan had not struck him as a man with an interest in that sort of plotting; it was too untidy, too connected with the personal. He could not see in Logan a bent towards romance of this kind, machinating to secure a night with a pretty girl.

  Alec wondered, uncomfortably, if there were some sort of pact between Elspeth and Logan, an arrangement whereby reciprocity cancelled blame. He wondered if he had fallen short and if she would now be in trouble because she had done nothing wrong and thus failed to absolve her husband.

  The reef sucked at the edge of the night.

  ‘How is your hand, Gabriel?’ said Elspeth. ‘I hope you rested.’

  ‘It’s gone,’ said Gabriel, and giggled.

  ‘Your hand’s still there, goose.’ Logan spoke in a voice Elspeth was surprised to remember that she knew. He was happy at a certain point with a woman, where he had found her weaknesses and remained unchallenged by her strengths.

  Elspeth, leaning over the side to get her breath ready for a new stage in her life, held on to her handbag. For one moment she had almost let the earthly thing, containing all the papers that placed her precisely where she was placed on the globe, age, place of birth, credit rating, nationality, into the sea. Letting go was easy if you did it so fast.

  Would she fight what seemed to have happened? Did she mind? As she cleaned her face in their cabin, she suspected herself of caring more for the short-term peace on the boat than for her own life in the longer view. She preferred not to think of her life over years, either with him or without him. She was, though she did not know it, awaiting a disaster.

  Logan slept on deck that night, though he came below to see her. She was wrapping the shoes she had taken to Papeete in tissue and then in polythene, to preserve the leather from the salt that got everywhere.

  ‘How was the hotel?’ he asked. ‘I chose it for the name.’

  ‘You couldn’t have chosen it for anything else.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She told him, exaggerating a bit, describing the roach that lived in the towel, the flush that trickled into your hair, the bath that filled from the plug up, very slowly throughout the day, with the water from the air-conditioner’s cooling system. She translated the slight things she found funny into broad slapstick for him. The result was that she did not introduce him to her way of seeing, but to some cruder intermediary world. This comforted him but left him unsatisfied too in a way he had not the time to track down.

  ‘How was Alec?’

  ‘He’s a nice Edinburgh lad.’ Not mentioning the painting, she protected Alec.

  ‘Should suit you.’

  ‘We talked about museums.’

  ‘That’s good then. You’ll’ve liked that.’

  ‘We visited a museum.’

  ‘What?’ He sounded both angry and offended.

  ‘Gauguin, you know. It’s pleasant, but it’s not a museum.’

  ‘You said it was.’

  ‘It’s called one.’

  ‘Then I suppose it is one.’

  ‘Not in the way you mean.’

  ‘Oh. What do I mean by museum? In actual fact?’

  She wondered whether to head off the exchange that was coming but couldn’t see the difference it would make if she did, so continued: ‘A dark boring place full of old things you can’t have,’ she said.

  ‘You have made something out of me I am not. And if I am, that is your fault,’ he said.

  Elspeth lay very calmly on her back until the tears had seeped back into her eyes. The difference between the reunion she had imagined and the uncomfortable encounter that had taken place mocked her. How she had failed. The only kind of married love that works is patient without end, she said to herself, yet I gratify myself by jabbing again and again at things I don’t even much mind, and he makes himself feel better by having the last word.

  Logan did not have his wife in mind as he lay looking up at the stars, arms under his head. Gabriel had flitted along the deck with a cup of tea with a slug of rum in it, and had had the sense to disappear without a word.

  He sang to himself the words of the Skye boat song, allowing his rather sweet voice to blur and insert grace notes. He made a handsome picture, Gabriel thought as she watched him unseen, or if not unseen, unwatched. The picture of loneliness he made at the apex of labour he represented enslaved her, as she was ready to be enslaved.

  Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,

  Onward the sailors cry.

  Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,

  Over the sea to Skye.

  Soothed, as he slid through the verses, giving strong emphasis to the theme of death and betrayal, by the vague thoughts of grandeur that came to him in this mood, he contemplated the stars and acknowledged to them, and only to them, his own unimportance.

  His wife heard his voice, slack but still sweet like a pear on the turn, and rued her foolhardiness and haste. Nonetheless, she knew not to go to him.

  Many’s the lad fought on that day,

  Well the claymore could wield.

  When the night came, silently lay

  Dead on Culloden’s field.

  He would be angry, thought Elspeth, that the bar on shore had put on a loud tape before he had come to the end of the refrain. He did not like the atmosphere he was emanating to be broken. The song from on shore was ‘Tiger Feet’. She did not know the meaning of the title though she welcomed the song’s repetitive beat. ‘Tiger Feet’ sounded like a poem by William Blake. She began to play the game that put her to sleep faster than any other, the invention of first lines of books she wouldn’t want to read. For the whole of this voyage, her favourite had been: ‘Mother had given up attending evensong these light evenings and substituted for her devotions some undivided digging.’ But she remained awake, finding herself many sentences later into the book, apparently a preferable reality to her own.

  Logan was humming the song now, stopping to sip something. At one point he made the gasp of satisfaction that beer advertising had taught men to make after drinking.

  Elspeth lost the safe thread of the soporific novel and remembered her own first visit to Culloden, where Butcher Cumberland slaughtered the Jacobites. It was the first place she had been to in her life whose air seemed heavy with grief. She was six at the time and did not know much about the battle though it shocked her how numerous was one side and how small the other. She thought battles must be fair. The thought of the big Englishmen on horses and the small Highlanders in their leg-rags and plaids was so obviously wrong that she did not see how the battle had been allowed. Why had someone not, seeing the unevenness in might, called it off? She experienced the ageing realisation that no one can stop things after a certain point. She also thought, and could not remember being told this on that day that she and her mother and father visit
ed the battlefield of Culloden, that believing something a very great deal must kill either pain or fear.

  They had driven north to Inverness from Kelso, over roads often not metalled and sometimes blocked by a fall of shale. Her mother drove, looking into the back in the mirror to see she was not getting sick. When she did get sick, which was about once an hour, her mother pulled in at a passing place on the single-track road, held her bent over at a wide angle so that she did not splash herself, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, gave her the water-bottle for swigging, and handed her back the lemon to smell. Every long journey required a lemon. A man off the MTBs in the war had told her father lemons were excellent against seasickness. On that MTB her father had not had a lemon, of course, but even the thought had helped, he assured Elspeth. She loved lemons but the smell had become associated for life with vomiting.

  After being sick, the sense of lightness and the airy head were almost worth it. As they drove further north, there were heather and bog cotton and bog myrtle growing in the roadside, and the puddles on the road were full of bright blue sky. She had seen no blue like this blue of the Highland sky, a thin colour without any weight in it and full of wind like a sail or a bell. The country was brown and gold on either side of the road and up ahead where the same road curved back and over at the summit of the lower range of peaks she could see; along huge stretches it was purple, then tawny, and through it off all the slopes cut clefts within which water ran.

  Sometimes the sides of the mountains had fallen away and the blue or black or green stone shone in the sunshine or deepened the shadows that rushed over the land. A flash like quartz or mirror glass at intervals shot out, a deep pool of standing peat water catching the sun. Sheep lay on the road and got up on their knees and then their hoof-tips to teeter off. There was blue snow at the heads of the furthest mountains and the air seemed to grow wider all the time.