Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Rushes in the corner of a bend might indicate a loch to come, a thin forearm of water reaching inside a fold of land, blue-feathered and abruptly brown-feathered again as the light fell. The greater lochs they passed turned to black when you could see their mass, though the rims were brown and a coal blue shone out of them before they seemed like huge clouds themselves to remove all the colours, until Elspeth would suddenly see, against all that flickering deep black, something small and natty, a heron dipping and withdrawing its filled beak, or a clump of yellow flags, blowing with the white bog cotton. Trees save those planted like soldiers for a game of war, battle formations in evergreen, had given up, though around big houses tough windbreaks flowered a washed-out purple, the ineradicable stain of ponticum. In the heart of such thickets a tall house with small eyes and silver towers might wink. Smaller houses clustered together around roadsigns, barrels of old rain at their sides, the daffodils of the second spring she had seen that year just turning to paper. In the borders they had been gone for three weeks, in the South for over six weeks.

  The sky even as it darkened over Loch Ness was full of light, right up to when her mother put her to bed at the bed and breakfast in a village outside Inverness.

  ‘I know what the little one will have,’ said the woman whose house it was, smiling in agreement with something they had begun to see. Into a jelly glass she decanted half a tin of strawberries, purple and loose in the red juice, then sugared them amply and poured on milk from a tin.

  Elspeth sat up in bed late with this treat, watching the sky through a window recess two feet deep. When she took the cover off the bed, whitewash rubbed from the wall on to her arm. She rubbed her hands on the wall and transferred the bloom to her cheeks. In the propped dressing-table mirror she saw the good effect tinned strawberry juice and whitewash had upon her lips and skin. The grass and reeds and leaves and rocks outside shone with all the water they held. She watched them through the deep window with her new face. Then she lay down and shut her eyes. When her mother came to see her, she went away leaving her shoes behind so as to make less noise and came back with Elspeth’s father.

  ‘It’s not what we’d hoped for, Callum,’ she said, ‘but she is beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said her father, who may have known fine that she was not sleeping, ‘she cleaned her teeth.’ Elspeth heard him pick up the jelly glass and the spoon off the crochet runner by the bed.

  ‘Bring your shoes, we’ll go a walk,’ he said to her mother. ‘We’ve two hours of light.’ It was half-past nine at night, she’d seen it on his wristwatch as he bent to look at her and she peeped at him as she had learned to do from watching dogs at work in their sleep.

  She woke later, when they came in after their walk, their cheeks that they laid to her own cold in different ways, her father’s like a leather book and her mother’s like a satin cushion that should not have been left out. When she looked out of the deep window she saw the sun’s last whiteness lie so close to the land that all the water held in it seemed to rise and glisten to hold the sun from departing, while its skin of light showed every blade of vegetation sharp and doubled by reflection.

  The morning came too soon for a family used to the darker-for-longer nights of a Borders spring, not stretched open by the Arctic Circle.

  It was a wet sky. There was little to be seen beyond one’s hand. Such days are not to be trusted. Within half an hour they may disrobe and let the eye pierce the thin air as far as Perthshire.

  ‘Culloden this morning, I think. Vile weather’s ideal for that.’

  ‘An open space, no cover, a child.’

  ‘Ideal. Do you want to honour such a place in comfort?’

  The reverence Callum Kerr had towards his own Scottishness came out in his speech, which held on to Scots usages in an accent barely Scots except to the ear attuned to the Borders bite at words. He also wanted to keep the past alive; though his intelligence suspected that much of the tradition owed itself to nineteenth-century invention and a wish in the Scots to be other than the Irish, his heart swelled in a way he could not stop at the old songs and stories. This access to something he could not describe but that filled his heart when he heard, for instance, the word ‘Locheil’ or the talking crackle of heather burning, he wanted to pass to his child. He supposed he wanted her to have those things he could not describe but knew he did possess, loyalty and a sense of place, as a father with faith might show the way to his child. They are things only taught over days and without speeches or set pieces or the child will smell a rat. It is this passing over of things neither generation can easily name that is lost to an absent parent, and lost to the orphan.

  Culloden was the day’s destination, then, because it was a place where a horrific thing had happened in the history of Scotland, and because he was a pacifist and hoped that there would never be a need again for his daughter to take that decision, but, if faced with it, to decide as he had, against war. He decided too late, after participating in war; not fear made him see it, but pity. He saw his friends’ faces in the water, merry with terror, already like skulls, baring their teeth in burning water, drowning in and under fire.

  Each time Callum Kerr had visited the field of the Battle of Culloden it had not been a place to put you in mind of glory, but somewhere so haunted that you might as well have seen the blood. Now he wanted to see if its effect upon him lay in his knowledge of the place or if his daughter, who, at six, knew nothing but how to please, would feel it too. His wife, he knew by now, would cleave to her scepticism; her principled atheism left her no room for atmospheres, though in this case she did allow for plenty of unacceptable facts.

  Their Popular was two-tone, two shades of green like the contour lines on a hillock as shown on an Ordnance Survey map. It had not been what they selected at the showroom but it was undeniable what the attendant had said while he watched Callum write out his unprecedentedly large cheque: ‘A green car in the two shades will fit in wherever you go touring.’ It was a nice car, with a set smile to its face like some tolerant deaf person, and it took them about, no trouble. Like most men of his age, Callum drove in a way he had found out for himself; he was reliant on the brakes and turned round to talk to whoever was in the back with complete trust that his hands and feet would carry on regardless, never mind the whereabouts of his head.

  ‘Lemon, rug, boots? Raincoats? Sunglasses? Jumpers, headscarf? Kodak, map, knife?’

  Callum was poking his head in through the window at his wife and daughter to whom this list was addressed. They did not nod or interrupt until he had stopped entirely mentioning items. Elspeth wondered when these lists would begin to include things they could never need. The lists were the worried voice of domestic concern. Her mother did it back when they each set off to work, she with her music case and warm cardigan: ‘Hat, gloves, coat, pencils, paper, cough candy (if it was summer, Extra Strong Mints), ruler, petrol, keys, galoshes, graph paper, newspaper.’ With that list she could burden him with love, still mentioning only the necessities of his day at the map publishing house up in Edinburgh, to which he caught the train every day of the week.

  ‘It’s a pleasant journey, right enough. You can never tire of such multiplicative greens. And when you speed along the sea that’s a holiday in itself. Imagine, what a great thing it must be to go to sea in time of peace. The journey gives me time, I always say, not takes it from me; anything I do on the journey has an extra aspect. I think: I’m doing two things at once. I’m riding on a train and I am drawing the riverbed of the Esk, which is gaining new wiggles from the juddering of the train. I am reading Herman Melville and I’m riding on a train.’

  The drive to Culloden was slow as they grew closer. A herd of small black cows belted with white walked without interest towards the next part of their day. They did not look to be dairy cattle. The straggler turned and showed the white edge of her eye to the Kerrs sometimes and once, as all cows must when watched intently, she let fall some cowpats without breaking s
tep. The car was warm inside, the cows and the low mist also insulating. The combination of pastoral and comfort did not much suit Callum’s idea of arriving at a place of blood. Elspeth was giggling at the cows’ nonchalance.

  Abruptly, the cows were gone, turned after their leader through a gate hard on the road, and hidden behind a dry stone wall now in some yard. All there was of them was a newsy mooing.

  In the mist there seemed now to grin a little colour. There was a white centre to it somewhere ahead of them that sent out light. The grey seemed to cook out of the mist, like water out of an ironed sheet. It thinned. What had been solid became layers to be passed through and then swivelled to become layers to pass between, horizontal, lifting, light layers that with no hurry were gone, leaving a day shining like the inner face of an eggshell, exposed.

  The yellow shorn glen on either side dried off tawny and began to stir under a wind. The mountains held a blue to their sides near the sun that ran down them where the clefts made shadows. Higher up, they were black and shone where snow was melting at a torrential rush that was from the green Ford Popular slow to invisibility.

  Elspeth was not feeling sick. No one had asked if she felt sick, either.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked, which was the other way of getting attention.

  ‘We are.’ Her father shut off the car with the key like a man shutting a cupboard. ‘Put on your overshoes, Elspeth.’

  These were thin boots with a flat button. It was like having each foot down the throat of a fat dead fish.

  ‘Out you hop.’ Callum did not want to influence or load his child’s impression of Culloden. He wanted to know if her skin crept as his first had when taken as a child to Glencoe where the Macdonalds were murdered as they slept, a fact he had not known when he began to shake with cold in that bleak glen in 1934. His sense of evil left behind to float free and reestablish itself was strong; he, at the age of six, had identified his feeling. He felt as though, just out of sight, there were wolves, grey among the rocks, brown among the bracken, furred but not warm, just covered to perfection.

  What a dull old place anyway, thought Elspeth. Flat, brown, dull. The sun was out now though the ground was wet. Her hair was taken up and shaken by the wind. There was slapping noise as some rooks got up from a stone some yards away, making it into the air with slow flaps. They were ugly, bald-cheeked birds with a smell like cats’ breath.

  The ground, she noticed, was not still. A minute shaking filled it. Something below was stirring or something very close by but silent was passing so close to them as to make the ground tremble. She had not imagined the solid earth might shake. She knew it rotated only as she knew her parents would die one day, as a rumour put about by people who had no proof to offer her.

  The shaking under the earth seemed to be intensifying, forming itself around Elspeth. Could her mother and father feel it? Her father was writing in a notebook, her mother watching him with great interest while feeling in her bag for something. More of her mind is in her handbag looking for a cigarette than is with my father, thought Elspeth. She knew she was right. Her mother took out a cigarette and put it in the middle of her mouth, then turned with her back to the wind to coax a flame from her lighter. The dirty smell of lighter fuel spoiled the perfume of tobacco. Her mother put the cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand and moved her mouth towards the hand, not the other way about. It made her look like an elegant lifesize doll. The smoke she seemed to drink, eat and then breathe out when she had taken all the goodness from it.

  Neither parent, apparently, was receiving the persistent throbbing from under the earth. It was now beginning to steam up out of the ground, a beating without sound but reverberant, terribly reminding her of things she had heard of but did not want to understand. Most of all she feared that she was about to be shown something that would change her life. She did not want a changed life. She liked the one she had.

  The shaking was not only in the air but in her own bones. Rumours of something she was unprepared to look in the eyes trembled through her legs, up through the basin of her pelvis, making her want to pee and cry at wanting to do so. She wondered if she was going to be sick, but it was not that. The trembling was distant and also inside her, not a fluttering but a deep redistribution of the rhythms of her organs. Something breaking out from below the earth or laying an unbearable burden on it was approaching, and it would arrive through her. She shook. Her face was alive with a concentration that was what Elspeth could in these moments accumulate of prayer, she who had been taught that prayer was not just useless but wrong. Feeling what she took to be the devil, she took up the only remedy she had heard of.

  It had to be Elspeth who spoke first.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she said to her parents, believing them omniscient still, and knowing them good.

  ‘Why did you bring me to this place? It is bad.’

  Callum Kerr shook himself for experimenting upon his child. He took her by the hand and walked towards the stone the crows had flown up from. Seeing what he had thought a stone was a dead sheep on its side, the head a bare trophy hanging skew off the sodden fleece, he turned her and they walked a different way. How had the Highlanders marched, men unused to flat fighting in company, preferring the hand-to-hand of skirmish, swordsmen not gunmen?

  ‘There was a battle here.’

  ‘Is it that I feel?’

  ‘It may be. Mother would say not.’

  ‘Doesn’t she believe in evil?’

  ‘She would say not. I fear I do. But I know there is good, more certainly.’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘You should be. I have the rug. Will you sit on it?’

  Callum spread the rug. It was made of mohair and bubbled under its soft long fibres with reassuring stitches that were raised like poodle fur. Elspeth lay down and slept for perhaps ten minutes, stroking a fold of rug again and again. The familiarity of the rug leaked in to her; when she awoke she was no longer trembling.

  The sky was too clean, the earth too bare, to hold the complicated terror she had felt. She looked up.

  The pouring song of the lark, hardly audible but quite clear, came down to them.

  She and her father walked hand in hand over Culloden Moor, telling its inches and the weak parts yards wide where a man who fell would be drowned in black mud, and at half-past three in the afternoon, after eating the paste-and-tomato sandwiches provided by their landlady, they came upon what they could not have expected, the nest of the lark. They saw it from six feet away, noticeable though perfectly camouflaged, exactly because of the perfection of its needlework and fine freckling among the darned and mottled turf of Culloden. They left it alone.

  That was the first time I consciously saw a white lie, and it was told by a bird, thought Elspeth, on the boat. The lark that was not singing but guarding the nest ran to and fro holding its wing at an odd angle as though it was broken, just to make the predator it thought we were take it and leave the eggs in peace. A white lie made for its nestlings.

  Gabriel is not yet hatched, she thought, rocking in her berth inside the boat her father never saw and would have feared for its competence. He had been a man with superstitious, inhibiting misgivings about things that worked; he preferred the gentler challenge of things requiring a bit of going-over before they could be encouraged to splutter into life. He found something a little fascistic about things that worked first time.

  The throwing away of a tool or machine because it did not work was decadence itself in his eyes. Something could always give its constituent parts to something else; nothing that was broken could not be saved with time and patience. The execution of the boat would have shocked him with its directness. Machines that worked lost a beauty for him.

  ‘You sound almost like you are on his side,’ Logan would say, when she defended an underdog, even sometimes a villain, when she pleaded for reprieve for some person or thing that had fallen short of perfect function.

  ‘
I can’t help it, I am like Dad.’ She had not realised it before.

  ‘Yes, you are. And he is a failure.’ The faint shame about her father she had felt intermittently for years fell away for good on hearing those words. What Logan had said was true for a world that his judgement on her father freed her from for good. The failure of her father struck her as pure and incorruptible, new and flexible and responsive. Success was a metallic thing with a brassy note, failure more modulated, harder to tune, but an instrument for the mutuality of man.

  Each extremity of her conclusion was artificial and misleading. She had replaced success with failure as the right way to set about the world.

  ‘You either ride the tiger, or get eaten,’ Logan said. ‘And your father would get eaten. In the real world.’

  ‘The Real World’ was the place Logan knew and Elspeth did not. It was home to almost everyone who lived ‘Real Life’, people who understood how the world worked and could explain it to you in sixty words or fewer.

  ‘My father would get eaten, but the tiger would get tremendous indigestion,’ said Elspeth. ‘He might have to change his stripes.’

  ‘A leopard changes its spots, not a tiger its stripes. Your father is an idealist.’ Logan left the conversation at the point where it could sink no lower.

  ‘“Your father is an idealist,”’ repeated Elspeth to herself, almost ready to sleep, testing Logan’s sentence pronounced upon her father in her own game of sentences. It was not offputting enough to get anywhere much in her game of offputting first sentences, addicted novel readers having a taste for reading about failure, whose implications are so free and aerated beside the certainties of success.

  Gabriel lay in her bunk, talking into the tape machine, cupping her hands around it as she had cupped her hands around her schoolwork as a girl. Neither secrecy was, or had been, needed.