Debatable Land (17 page)

The sea slid over itself in scales, shining. Nick and Sandro set the poles for the spinnaker and attached the guys. A breath seemed taken by the air, and held. The thin vast foresail went up light as a bubble, rearing out at the front of the boat that no longer roared along but moved as though pulled by a swan, so full was the silence.

The sun through the spinnaker glowed, spilling a light pure as the light that glows through the thin white marble windows of some old churches, warm without colour.

Under the bow, as you would expect when a boat was set upon the healing of a maiden, dolphins played, bounding out of the sea in a unison people cannot achieve, three by three, water falling off their glossy backs to itself.

Once at the
pharmacie
, Elspeth had bought the anti-inflammatory creams. The white-overalled assistant told her, after looking at Gabriel’s hand with resignation, ‘It will grow fatter and pain more.’

As Elspeth had up till this remark been speaking French, she was confused by the collision of courtesies. Also she wondered why the
pharmacienne
did not speak to Gabriel.

‘But your daughter will be well soon as long as she keeps it clean and lays on the unction.’

Elspeth’s own age, that had not much interested or worried her before, came to her.

‘I was seventeen when I had you, not impossible.’

‘Sorry?’ said Gabriel. She had been looking at skin creams in jars like little silver clams, unscrewing them and breathing up the pap inside.

She must be homesick, it was natural. Elspeth thought that Gabriel might even have been thinking of her mother, smelling the complexion creams; she wondered how she might include Gabriel more, make her into part of the family. Perhaps to do so would make Elspeth herself feel as though it were a family. She would ask Logan to have an eye to Gabriel.

Out of the white-and-silver
pharmacie
they turned. It was strange, among the palms and leaf-thatched huts, to see the islanders, open-faced and black-haired as their ancestors, carrying in one hand a pineapple by its stalk, like a head, in the other a Prisunic bag. The walk of the women was still comfortable, alluring before motherhood and capacious thereafter. Their heads have been meddled with, not yet their feet, she thought.

A woman approached them. Before she drew near, the street changed its dozy buzz. A beauty sheds a light before herself so that the world is prepared. Bandbox and animal together, a topaz-coloured woman in white linen sauntered along holding by the hand a child with skin dark grey-brown-green and hair the white-green of blonde babies who live by salt water. On crocodile pumps, the siren walked in triumph, her hair five-sixths the length of her white dress.

From the grocer’s shed, came the voices of Logan and the other men. The disloyal instincts Elspeth underwent when with her own kind in other places grew worse the louder the voices of the men. They could always be heard. This she resented, it was true, but would she not have been pleased to hear this commanding boom were it dark and she afraid?

Alec was there, his voice, being Edinburgh, making different assumptions from Logan’s. He was eating slices of salami off a penknife. The whole shop was full of a chewy darkness like spores.

Strung from every slat that braced the palm-fibre walls were dehydrated shrunken organs and vegetables. Watered, these might swell to yield a menagerie, a congregation of monkeys, a ten-acre market of soft fruit and hard tubers; there were fish so dry they would crumble, shrunk perfectly from a size greater than that of a man. The detail on them was fossil-neat, like all reductions impossible to see completely, so that you had to take much on trust.

‘Raoul here says,’ Logan began, ‘we should get you some peel of the fruit of love for that hand. I know it sounds like queer gear but you can’t lose.’

If he did, Raoul did not show he understood, unlike the girl in the pharmacy. A man like Logan may insult but he reassures, too. A woman like Elspeth subtracted certainty from the simplest acts.

‘It’s orange peel,’ said Nick. ‘It can be very useful stuff. Don’t eat it in large amounts, though.’

‘Hardly,’ said Gabriel. It looked like dried tongue-skin.

‘We’d best be going.’

‘Bora Bora?’ asked Raoul, a wide, heavy man in a sarong over a stomach round and hairless as a melon.

‘Yes indeed,
certainement
,’ replied Logan.

The beauty of Bora Bora was mentioned everywhere in this part of the Pacific.

‘I’ll tell you something about Bora Bora. It won’t be free,’ said Logan as they set off. He pulled the outboard throttle on the Zodiac for emphasis.

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 composed 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.