The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

‘Yes, I have gone too far. Too far to come back to you, old man.’

  He makes to lay a hand on her arm and she casts it away. ‘I wish I had never come back. There’s the truth of it, Ólafur. I should have stayed away with my infidel son forever.’

  He crumples back on to the edge of his bed, winded. She rushes out of the house and runs without stopping.

  36

  The fisherman has taken his time laying out the cod on the high ledge. No need to hurry. It’s pleasant to be out on an April evening like this, when the afternoon rains have cleared and you can feel the sun on your face and hear the new-returned birds fussing in the hummocks. It is gusty still – good drying weather for the fish. He wipes his hands on his trousers and slithers down the crag, taking care over some of the sharper outcrops. He is not as fast at this as he used to be, though he likes to think he could still put a younger man to shame. Then he lopes homewards over the lava heath.

  In the distance a full-skirted figure is running headlong down the Ofanleiti slope as if she had a pack of dogs behind her. She crosses the heath well ahead of him and is soon stumbling across the pitted grass towards the sea. She loses her footing often among the lava stones, but is quickly up and off again. Lengthening his stride, the fisherman alters direction.

  By the time he reaches her, treading softly on the grass, Ásta has arrived at the cliff edge. The hem of her skirt is lifting a little in the gusts and her hair, which has thoroughly escaped its cap, is trailing in wind-blown tendrils down her back. There is less gold in it than there used to be, although her neck is still shapely. She has neither a shawl about her shoulders nor – he has just noticed – shoes. Above him a male snipe is practising its dives. Down it goes, long bill pointed earthwards, its wings humming in the wind, then up again, and off on another fluttering circuit of the sky. The fisherman wonders whether, for all his good intentions, he should let Ásta see him, or just pass on.

  She takes a step nearer the edge and his heart misses a beat. What on earth is she thinking? One big flurry of wind and she’ll be over. She can’t … Surely she can’t …

  Without another thought he lunges forward, thrusting out an arm to seize her. At exactly the same moment, she turns around.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It’s you.’

  Well, he might have hoped for a better welcome.

  She doesn’t look as wild as he would have expected in a woman about to throw herself off a cliff. Drained more than anything. Empty. Perhaps he had her intentions wrong: he really is not very good in these situations. But this dull look she is giving him – no surprise, no interest – is not flattering. Surely he has not changed that much? A trifle less hair perhaps, and more of it on his chin – but she might at least offer a spark of recognition.

  ‘Yes, Ásta, it is I,’ he smiles. ‘It’s a long time since I met you before. I was dripping with fish, as I recall.’ He was hoping to raise a smile in return, but her expression remains indifferent. ‘You placed a finger on my lips. Do you remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ she says, still in that tepid tone, but not removing her eyes from his face. Her blank scrutiny is becoming uncomfortable.

  ‘We were both young then,’ he ventures, for something to say, feeling as awkward in this moment as he ever did then. He is like a man who has stepped boldly into the shallows and finds the water up to his neck.

  Ásta does not shift her gaze. How ill at ease he is still. How warm and cheerful his eyes are.

  ‘I was thinking when I saw you,’ she says, as if he had asked, ‘that I would just take another step. It’s a dreadful sin, isn’t it? But I have committed so many that one more should be of little account. Everyone would think the wind had carried me. And then, you see, I just wanted to look at a bird in the sky one more time.’

  His stomach plunges straight to his feet to realise he was right the first time. ‘Ásta, Ásta,’ he says softly, ‘is it so bad to be back?’

  ‘I am lost,’ she says, still in the dull voice that seems to be talking to itself, but gazing the while at his face with a gathering intensity much more reassuring to his vanity. ‘I belong nowhere and there is no one who knows me. Forgive me. I sound as if I’m pitying myself.’

  The light from the late sun shining across the water is rimming her hair with gold of its own. He cannot stop looking at it.

  She shrugs. ‘It seemed important somehow. To be known. More important than … anything.’

  ‘I know you, Ásta,’ he says, startling himself. Why on earth did he say that?

  ‘Why do you say that?’ The first glimmer of interest has sparked in her eyes. He even detects – he knows her face so well – a tiny glint of amusement.

  ‘I don’t have the faintest idea.’

  She smiles then, and it reaches her eyes, and the lines around them crease most beautifully. And he relaxes. Just like that, the fisherman relaxes. The nerves vanish and in that instant he knows why he is here and what he must do.

  ‘Perhaps what I mean to say is that I have been near you for a long time over the years, before you left and again this last year since your return. I have seen you around the place – you know, here and there – and seen your unhappiness and given much thought to who you are. Who you, as it were, really are.’

  She nods slowly, thinking about this.

  ‘I was a little bit in love with you once, you know,’ she says.

  ‘And I with you. Still am. Madly.’

  At this he laughs in such a merry, open-faced way that she is amazed to find herself relaxing too. He can hardly believe he has said this, but continues to feel wonderfully at ease. Gazing at each other fondly, they stand not a foot from the cliff she had meant to step over and chuckle.

  ‘Do you really?’ she says.

  ‘Do I really what?’

  ‘Still love me?’

  ‘Yes. But not, perhaps, madly. That’s the wrong word, because I have not lost my wits. In fact, I find my wits to be at this moment more than usually present.’

  She is listening. Funny, how hearing him speak soothes her jagged spirits like a mother’s song. She takes a small step towards him and he responds with an equally small and, he hopes, barely perceptible step back: she is too close to the edge yet. The snipe is still whirring above them and there is a plover whistling in the grass close by. Ásta cannot take her eyes off this man. The evening sun has cast a mellow glow on his face, which is rough and wind-creased. His beard is a tangle of flame and there is no sign of the youthful curls; in fact, she would be surprised if there is much hair at all under the tatty woollen cap.

  ‘Which is why,’ he continues, easing backwards a fraction again, as if trying to tempt a wary beast to follow, ‘it seems right to remind us both that there are different kinds of love and different ways of loving. The deepest ones bring pain, always, and it cannot be otherwise. Love and suffering, as you may recall from your catechism, are what all worlds are founded upon.’

  It is not precisely how she remembers the catechism.

  ‘But I am more sure today than ever, Ásta – and you may be certain I have given a great deal of consideration to this – that we cannot live in two worlds. And in lamenting too long what belongs in the other we will bring upon ourselves and others only destruction.’

  She gives him a scouring look. ‘Of what worlds are you speaking exactly?’

  ‘That is as much for you as for me to say,’ he replies, hoping this sounds wise without requiring him to commit himself. There are worlds aplenty in her story, and in Ólafur’s, and at least a couple in his own. And so many realms of being that even she, who is more sensitive to them than most, would not believe it.

  She is studying him now with the half-serious, half-amused appraisal he remembers from the last time they talked. For a while they stand so still and silent that a second plover, breast splashed black with summer plumage, is emboldened to join the other on a rock behind them. Half hidden in the encircling grass, the birds regard them politely.

  Ásta, as she did a
ll those years ago, reaches a hand to his face.

  ‘I see you have a beard now,’ she smiles, running a finger through it. ‘It reminds me of the seaweed on the shore that time, all fiery reds and oranges. Do you remember?’

  ‘And white. You will notice how much there is of that, too.’

  ‘Of course. It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Yes, I have grown older. As have you, Ásta, lovely as you still are. And you will become older yet, if death spares you as long as I think it will.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ she says, tensing again.

  ‘I am saying that you are known, Ásta. You are deeply and at every age and for all time known. And you have it in you to know also.’

  He lets her ponder that. Going over the encounter later in a cold bed, rubbing her frozen feet against each other in a frenzied attempt to bring some feeling back to her toes, she will wonder (being alert to her own propensities) how much of all this she imagined. Yet it does feel most profoundly real. It feels like having a prayer truly heard, like being embraced and held fast by some deep, ancient goodness.

  ‘Now’ – he has never felt so masterful – ‘I want you to let me kiss you.’

  She looks immediately wary, but he leans towards her, strokes away a greasy clump of soft-lit hair and presses his lips gently to her forehead, which feels like ice. It is the most feathery of kisses, light as a snowflake, if also one he allows to lie a while. When he stands back, her eyes are closed.

  ‘Now go and put some socks on,’ he orders cheerily, and her eyes spring open. ‘If your feet are as cold as your forehead, it’s going to take you hours to thaw out. It is time I went home for my dinner.’

  She looks at him carefully to make sure she has understood. Then she grabs his two hands in hers, brings them to her lips and kisses them.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  When she reaches the bottom of the Ofanleiti hill, Ásta turns and looks back. There is nobody there to see, but she raises an arm in salute all the same. She climbs the slope, picking her way between stones and wondering what possessed her to run out without shoes.

  Ólafur is already in bed. He is lying on his side, turned to the wall. As Inga, the serving girl, informs her in hushed, scandalised tones, he did not even say the household prayers. Just pulled the covers around himself without a word.

  ‘He looked terrible after you went out,’ she whispers with relish. ‘I’ve never seen him so pale. He hasn’t moved since.’

  Ásta creeps into her own bed, where she spends most of the night testing her toes and mulling over the tumultuous emotions of the day. It is the strangest thing to have come upon the elfman like that when she was so out of herself, so nearly at the end of everything. And then to have felt none of the old stirrings of youthful desire but only safe and comfortable and – he was right, he was right – profoundly known. She wonders, as sleep arrives to muddle her senses, if it might feel something like this to be understood and restored by your maker, the maker of all things, whom for this lovely moment, shivering in a damp bed with cold feet, she has the fleeting notion of understanding in turn.

  With a meal in him and a hard day’s work behind, the fisherman is long asleep. In the morning he will lie awake, listening to the sounds of his family getting up around him, and be glad he did not do anything silly. To know with complete certainty that you have said and done exactly the right thing for the person you love most in any world, with no consideration of the cost, does not come to a man often in life. His heart will feel uncommonly light all day.

  37

  Ásta wakes to the rustle of paper at her ear. A pale light from the membrane window has mottled the room grey. Pulling herself blearily on to one elbow, she looks across to Ólafur’s bed. Empty. Beside her head on the pillow lies a neat pile of unbound papers.

  ‘Did Ólafur leave this, Thorgerdur?’

  Thorgerdur is hauling children out of bed with determined verve. ‘No,’ she snaps, with unconcealed hostility. There is no such thing as a secret quarrel between husband and wife in a badstofa.

  Still propped on her elbow, Ásta picks up the first page and looks curiously at Ólafur’s careful scrawl: The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson. Below the title he has inscribed: ‘Captured by pirates in 1627’. Ásta has noticed the work on his shelf. In fact, she spotted it the day she arrived home, her eyes ranging hither and thither in the gloom, heart sinking. She could not bring herself to read it. He has not asked it of her.

  ‘Well, then’ – she pursues Thorgerdur’s implacable back – ‘how did these papers come to be on my pillow?’

  Her stepdaughter has thrust an infant on to Ólafur’s bed and is stripping off a fruity overnight cloth. Children are milling about the room, bickering over socks. Behind the curtain at the back Gísli’s snores rumble on.

  ‘Did you put them here, Thorgerdur?’

  Lifting up the baby, Thorgerdur wheels around with a glare. ‘The shelf required dusting. Perhaps you would be so kind as to do that and then replace the book. Assuming you can fit in some work between walks today.’

  Placing the papers on Ásta’s pillow was an impulse Thorgerdur would normally have scorned. The gesture feels like weakness when Ásta deserves to be straightforwardly throttled for the way she spoke to her father yesterday. Thorgerdur was shocked at how he looked when he left the house at first light, refusing to wait until the fire was lit in the kitchen, his face ashen and his hand shaking on the latch. If Ásta does not read the book now, Thorgerdur may feel obliged to hit her with it.

  Ásta smoothes down her dress, pushes aside the duvet and eases her torn feet to the floor. She thinks wistfully of washing and a change of clothes, but no more than usual and perhaps with a shade less resentment, since she has woken refreshed and is feeling rather mellow. The Reverend Gísli Thorvardsson staggers out in time, scratching his backside and ruffling her hair affectionately as he passes. Once the children have been hustled outside to work and Thorgerdur can be heard safely thumping about the dairy, she pulls Ólafur’s battered table to the side of her bed, places his travel papers upon it and begins to turn over the pages.

  The island is still muffled in morning mist when Ásta leaves the house. She walks with little thought of direction, her own mind occupied by what she has just learned of Ólafur’s, her heart still strangely expanded by yesterday’s experience at the cliff edge, which felt like an epiphany. She is surprised when she realises she has wandered as far as the shore. Keeping an eye out for rockpools bloated with yesterday’s rain, she picks her way along the black shingle. The mist has shrouded the islands, hiding everything but a few feet of sea. Across the water a seal is calling. Woo-ooo-ooo, it cries above the whoosh and suck of the waves from a rock she can’t see.

  Why did Ólafur not tell her? Why is it only in words written for others that she is permitted to glimpse her husband’s soul?

  She stops walking to listen to the call of the seal sounding mournfully through the mist. Shakes her head. Sighs to herself. All right, Oddrún. You too. What is it you have for me?

  Oddrún was right about the king. Christian did say no. Or at least, according to Ólafur’s agonised memoir, he did not say yes. Carried by nothing but hope through the perils of the journey home, Ólafur was near felled by his failure. This Ásta has only this morning understood. His writing made her weep for him. As one calamity followed another, Ólafur had tried to convince himself that all that had happened must be as God wished it, because it could not be otherwise: the pirates ravaging the island, the pasha choosing Egill, the soldiers hauling him from his family without time for farewell, the king saying no. Over and over he writes that eternal life will repair all separations, even as he surely suspects it may not mend the ones that matter most to him. Ever more painfully he tries to reconcile his own lived experience with what the Church teaches. Only he never quite succeeds. Ásta sees that. She sees how his sorrow kept getting in the way of the strong word he longed to preach to others.

&
nbsp; Yes, Ólafur did ask a question. His whole book is an argument with himself. She has known as little of what he has become as he has known of her.

  He writes of the swan (this is what most moved her most), which is said to sing most beautifully when it is sick and close to death. ‘But my nature is not that way. I let myself get distressed.’ Ólafur, Ólafur. Always so easily made happy and so quickly brought low. ‘In this I imitate not the swan but the raven, which cries the same way when he is crushed and dying as when he lives.’ These were the words she could not read for tears.

  But perhaps it is not a song that Ólafur lacks. Has he not better needed someone to make him laugh? Someone to tell him he should forget swans and ravens, since they belong to the mythmakers, and remember the kind of bird he really is. Someone to remind him of the time long ago when they were out together with the fowling net, the grassy cliff-top heaving with puffins, and she grabbed his sleeve and made him lay down his net.

  ‘See them strutting in their priestly black coats, so busy with important concerns,’ she had said. ‘Yet when they turn around, what do we see but a soft white breast and a striped orange beak that nobody observing that sober, upright back would expect. Orange, Ólafur. You keep trying to be black, but I saw from the very first day I came to Ofanleiti that your colour is orange.’

  ‘You and your fancies, Ásta,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘This is a fine thing to be telling me when I am about to pull a dozen little priests from the sky and break their necks.’

  ‘And the voice, Ólafur,’ she teased. ‘They have your voice exactly.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’ll have to do better than that.’ He was laughing now. ‘The puffin makes hardly any noise at all. I think we can both agree that has never been my problem.’

  ‘No, but they do growl, Ólafur. Just place your ear to the burrow and you will hear yourself in the pulpit. Pray try it sometime and learn what the rest of us suffer.’