Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘I am longing to be at home with you, Mum, and forget everything about this voyage,’ said Gabriel into her machine, and began to cry for herself and her home in a field that was green and flat and never moved. She thought of every wrong thing her parents had done and saw that it may have been right. With each watch that passed she grew older in months not in hours.

  Logan in the height of his possession by the storm was alluring to her, a hero, but she scented something frightening to which she did not want to consign herself yet, if ever. He seemed to give off electric shocks. He was full of fire and salt.

  The theatricality that is so deep in Logan is dug into him by an oppression that has lain over him all his life, thought Elspeth. It is I who am the more balanced one, after all, and my choice is to leave him and save myself or to stay with him and work at it with the dedication of a woman panning for river gold and spinning it. She did not see that he was burning himself up like a man in a fever, that he was the one, not she, who hoped to find clarity in disaster.

  Now all she wished for was the chance to die in many years’ time and in bed. When it was not her watch, she tied herself into her lee-cloth and prayed, no matter if God did not exist, no more did the fair and just society her parents had taught her would certainly come about. It is not religion that will help us now, she thought. It is, if anything, faith.

  She chose to pray and she chose to read A Winter’s Tale. When she did not sleep she did one or the other. She felt around for words that might be comfortable in which to pray, and when she found her prayers too stiff or too familiar, she read the play aloud and offered it as a prayer. It was the enduring best of human making.

  The chaos that had been the greatest personal fear for Alec came and tormented him whenever he could snatch sleep. He dreamed of the destruction of paintings and manufactured things, the end to pointlessness and decoration, of human rationality and ebullience blown out by the wind and consumed by the waves. His fear had ceased to be personal. He now feared the end of the world, that he had always theoretically feared and now, with Logan as its conductor, he did fear.

  Where does he keep the combination of the safe? thought Alec, suddenly, in his sleep. He did not know where the thought had come from.

  It was late in the third day of the storm’s height. The boat was heavy with water. She seemed to be moving more slowly, though the wind had not dropped. For half an hour they had all wondered at the silence; it had not been silence, but a different note in the wind, more soothing, steadier, the call of a siren. For that hour the wind had held near hurricane force.

  Later the wind rose again, returning to the screaming panicky bullying of the boat it had kept up for days. It’s a great tinnitus outside us all, thought Alec. He thought of Muriel Bruce, the Commander, his mother, his father and his second mother, of Lorna, of Sorley.

  He had left Lorna in order to navigate by some star he dimly saw. If he returned, what would he take back to her? A few tales she would regard as tall and a lame story about not falling in love with a woman in spite of a homesickness that was killing him. Homesickness, he thought, must often be a motive for adultery.

  ‘Tell me something to make me happy,’ he said to Nick, who had come into the fo’c’sle on his hands and knees to get a towel to keep the sea from tipping in down his neck.

  ‘Sorley is your son,’ he said.

  Sandro was on the wheel. The sea was white. Some of the waves groaned and creaked and had the stately profile of icebergs. Can’t be ice; growlers don’t come this far north, Sandro thought. He had a literal mind that served him and the others aboard well.

  ‘You go in and get us hot tea. You look dead,’ said Logan.

  Sandro turned and in that instant one of the tall grey waves cracked down over the boat like dynamited stone. The vang on the main boom burst off it. The boom swung free, loose, heavy, its freed weight weaving like the head of a dead horse. Another wave came and kicked Ardent Spirit in the other direction from the first.

  ‘Look out,’ called Logan, and Sandro, holding the companionway grips like a child trying to get a view, got the boom to the side of his head hard as stone on the skull. The noise was single and tidy, a sharp report amid the warring shriek of wind and baying and sighing of sea. The boat seemed sunk between streets of tall grey water that were falling in on them. There was no order. The waters threw themselves up higher, becoming towers, castles, cathedrals, rocks, and then sank away with a low sound of explosion without settlement. The air was gritty with cold and salt. The wind wailed its warning that had not stopped for days. All the grey water massed like a town with no windows or stillness, a place not fit for fragile human lives.

  Gabriel had unclipped herself and gone below before Logan told her to.

  ‘Nick, Alec, come now, Sandro’s hurt.’

  They found Logan at the wheel, Sandro lying on the wheelhouse deck, his eyesockets weeping blood.

  ‘Don’t move him until you have done what I say. Check his pulse. His breathing. Is he breathing? Good. Here comes another of these brutes.’

  Logan, instead of attacking the wave, pressed across it a little, unravelling its sharp peak and deflecting its force. He lost the wave’s danger but used its progress. He was calm. He spoke quietly.

  ‘Find the combination for the safe, Alec. It’s below. I keep it in my desk behind the rolling panel. I’m pretty sure.’

  ‘I know the number,’ said Alec. He suddenly realised that he did. The circumstances of his being with Logan by the safe had been so extreme, his nerves had been so primed, that he remembered the number. It was as it had been when he went to buy fish at the docks with his father; he could recall long numbers when he was excited, remembering them flat and unrationalised, like numbers off a rubber stamp. It was the pattern they made that he held.

  Logan was gentle as he spoke to Nick, who was testing Sandro’s reflexes carefully on the slamming deck, the thrashing boom held awkward but firm by a temporary rig he’d fixed from the bust vang and five yards of nylon rope from the cockpit pocket.

  Alec lifted out the broken tantalus from its socket in the silky panels, pulled forward the concealing door, and spun till he got in the numbers he wanted: 0315561374.

  The barrels settled back at one pull. Elspeth was standing there. ‘How odd Logan is. That’s my father’s last telephone number.’

  Do we do nothing for no reason? thought Alec.

  ‘What is it with Sandro?’ she asked.

  ‘It could be a fractured skull, I suppose.’

  ‘Help me down here with him. He is a light boy.’

  Elspeth’s old enough to be his mother, for God’s sake, thought Alec. That is what she wants, a child. That is what I cannot give her though I will always regret, if we live, not having been homesick enough to hold her in that bleak hotel when she tried to seduce me with good soap.

  They went up on deck. Sandro lay like a young man in abandoned sleep under the shade of a tree. The mast rattled in the wind. There was no end to the wind and the rain.

  ‘You’ll have to move him. I don’t like it, but you will have to,’ said Logan. ‘Elspeth, go over his head with your eyes, don’t feel for it, but go over again with a torch to see if there’s a mark or contusion.’

  The raving exalted hero figure who had been all risk and mania ten minutes before had gone. In itself this was the passing of a storm. Logan seemed to have found the courage to be quiet.

  They got Sandro to his bunk. The radio had ceased to function, saturated by the sea to uselessness, or impotent against the desert cities of waves. They had no clear idea where they were. Yet Alec felt relieved completely of the thoughts of death that had been with him.

  ‘Does he mean us to give him morphine?’ he asked Elspeth.

  ‘No, there are other less extreme painkillers in there. It’s like Logan not to tell you. He likes extremes.’

  Yet he is a kind of hero of calm when an actual horror occurs. That is his balance, thought Alec. He is unfit for normal li
fe but he is fine in battle. He finds battles to fight. He is a type the race does not like but needs when blood is let. He is the inland man, not I. I never want to be alone as that man is happy to be. He abhors people, but is kind. He will make trouble in peace. But he is brave, and courage is as important as faith.

  Elspeth was going through Sandro’s hair with the torch. She found no breaks in the skin, but a rising egg on the top of the skull where the boom struck him.

  ‘You look as though you’re hunting headlice,’ said Alec. The boat lurched and righted itself a little. They heard a shout from aloft.

  ‘How do you know about that? Headlice?’ Elspeth asked, lifting Sandro’s eyelid. She was calm in the aftermath, although around them and above and beneath them there was no calm from the air. Sandro began to stir and mumble, punching the air.

  ‘I have a wee son.’

  That moment there seemed to begin for both of them a life beyond the cramped wet fear they had shared in the past days. It was not a life that they would share, but they would each remember that it began by the bunk of the reviving boy, under the ocean, but moving towards land that, all at once, could be believed in.

  Another yell came from up aloft. Elspeth wiped Sandro’s eyes with distilled water.

  When he fully opened his eyes, both whites were red.

  ‘My mother,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s Elspeth. Logan’s wife.’

  ‘I mean, what will she say? She’s coming to meet me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know, but she’ll be there.’

  ‘She won’t mind that your eyes are red if that’s all.’

  ‘My mother’s Italian. She notices what I look like.’

  Seeing he was not broken, Elspeth kissed Sandro for being less injured than he should have been, and for frightening her husband so that he had had to find true courage.

  Nick was in the saloon. His calm was natural, as it had been all along.

  ‘How do you work that out about Sorley?’ asked Alec.

  ‘She made him for you. Take him. Or are you still so attached to letting life go? It’s Lorna you were hunting down, like it’s Scotland you found at the back end of the Pacific,’ said Nick. It took the clear sight of an outsider to show him his own future.

  Logan slammed down the companionway hatch and yelled, ‘Is anyone interested? By my reckoning, it’s thirty miles till we hit land.’ He stood with the albatrosses behind him at the wheel of his boat, disappointed once again in having found what he was aiming for.

  Like a head of seeds, blown, the tight-packed boat would scatter the six back out over the world.

  Alec looked at Sandro, a combination of two Souths, Italy and New Zealand. He held his arms out to Elspeth, ‘I’m to the North,’ he said.

  She came into his arms and there felt to him already like the past.

  She returned to Logan, up among the hard weather, at the wheel of his boat.

  ‘Stay with me for a time,’ he said, ‘if you would like to.’

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to William Kirk for permission to reproduce his lettering for the memorial tablet to Colin McWilliam in the Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, and to the Trustees of Hawthornden Castle, where parts of the book were written.

  CANDIA MCWILLIAM was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir, What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness.

  By the Same Author

  A Case of Knives

  A Little Stranger

  Wait Till I Tell You

  What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness

  First published in Great Britain 1994

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Candia McWilliam 1994

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