Debatable Land (6 page)

‘So there is an old man also?’ said his mother.

‘Blind,’ said Alexander.

Mairi wondered whether this was better or worse.

‘For eyes he has a brindle dog name of Dunvegan,’ replied Alec, trying out some ways of talking he had heard that morning.

His mother prepared herself, as she watched her son, pink and white and black like a fruit tree in spring before hardening into leaf, take the last meal of his simpler life. Gently, she untied the first string between them.

In Nelson Street (it was ‘in’, not ‘at’, for the flat was his first great house, apprehended as somewhere not home and, more than that, a site where things were possessed for a reason) Mairi sat on the sofa with her feet on a zebra skin. When the afternoon seemed to be about to upset her balance, she looked down at the stripes, bringing first the black stripes, then the white, forward into her eyes, moving focus precisely in alternation as a person will do to reorientate herself after a swoon.

The room was dark, but Commander Bruce got about without harming the tottering arrangements of objects.

‘It has been here since we were children, almost all of it in this room, though we have added to the other rooms some things we have found.’ The oldness of the things ceased to be their only trait. Much of the stuff was so old it had returned to childhood. A cavorting ostensible ugliness led the taste of the Bruces towards the purchase of large, heavy things that had they been animals would have been buffalo, okapi, iguana, beasts disproportionate, ungainly and on further contemplation affectingly expressive of a human past without self-consciousness.

The sugar came in an ostrich egg, halved and set on a foot of blackened silver. The room hardly shone, though it did glint, with slipping velvet, tormented horn, snapped ormolu, and colours made to be flattered by dust, to shine through grease – coral, amber, the slick internal pink of shells.

On the top shelf of a red-and-gold set of shelves cornered like a pagoda with bells was a giraffe-coloured shell the size of a bugle. Its point was jauntily to one side, the pearly throat the conclusion of a series of angled spirals abstract as a puzzle.

The Commander said, ‘We bought it for the story it told.’ Alec saw a speech bubble come from the mouth of the shell, a cartoon thing anyhow for its size and markings.

‘South seas, all that. Here he lies, you know, where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from the sea. Or home from Edinburgh.’ The Commander tweaked at both his trouser knees and smoothed them, making as much noise as he could with his quiet tweeds in the company that was not getting his drift. He regretted that he had lost his visitors with his words.

Dunvegan crossed and recrossed his front paws in his sleep, as though anxious to change the subject. His black claws tapped on the floorboards. He shook his ears with a wet sound.

‘Robert Louis Stevenson, a fine man, a writer, was he not, Mrs  Dundas, I believe you are right, was a child not far from here. The junk shops around are surprisingly full of items that he might have used as an inkwell. Or might not.’

Neither Alec nor his mother knowing whether to agree, to laugh or to give up as one does when looking for something that does not really matter, kept quiet.

‘You would like to see the instructional tortoise, perhaps?’ Miss Bruce said to Alec. ‘And we ladies must leave the men. I have a question to ask your mother, in the sewing room. It concerns something most important to do with trimmings.’ Tact, irony, speech taking no account of a child, combined to confuse Mairi while she was allowing herself to be charmed, that is, manoeuvred, albeit in this case for her own good.

The instructional tortoise was disgusting, frightening, not that clean, and never forgotten by Alec. The small purposeful animal sat, varnished in the laborious throes of taking a step, on its cretonne grass, held down by wire loops over a middle nail on each foot. From one side, though too smartly finished, like a shoe never worn, the tortoise was as you would expect, whorled shell, leathery weak pits at the entry of limbs between the domed shell and the plastron (the Commander passed on the words he had heard as a boy; they were part of the instructional tortoise). When you turned around the tight glass-and-wood case, the other side of the tortoise was its self within. The taxidermist, observing the evening-dress mimicry of nature on the first side, had exactly halved the shell and divided the comforting outer parts, leaving only the right-hand side of the tortoise clothed in shell and skin. The left-hand side was clean bone. Dry as lace-bobbins, the small bones were set in a lively, halted, recreation of a step that could not arrive. The skeletal side of the tortoise, being at least apparently frank, was more lively, when you were used to it, than the overdressed seeming right-hand side. The most painful part was the harsh division down the centre, from which fixed line the tortoise could hide nothing of its secret, witty, vulnerable and complicated most internal workings. It seemed rational, like a watch that might be set going, but of course it might not; the life had been explained out of it. The instructional tortoise was a curiosity, a confident attempt to reveal and to teach, more usually displayed in illustration on paper where liberties are more easily taken without pain.

‘It has a glass eye on the right-hand side,’ said the Commander, ‘about the size of a young pea. Remarkable. I saw it when I could see. I was younger than you are. A man came to our parents’ home to rejuvenate the stuffed animals. He was a vet, with a sideline. He supplied pelts all over the east coast and was known for his lifelike mounting. The motor car, when it came in, was at first apparently of some use to him, but it is not a clean killer.’

Alec was in surroundings wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by incomprehensible plenty, addressed in a confusingly courtly manner by an old man who spoke in a way he had not heard before. The things to be seen in the flat were not such things as he connected with something like money; would you buy old things?

The cold dark communal stair, a feature of the city’s palatial streets, built behind swooping façades as flats from the beginning of the New Town two hundred years before, had been a reassurance to him. There must be countless such different ways of life going on all over the town, unknown to him, unknown to one another, behind doors leading off unheated stone stairs, flight after flight.

‘There are many gardens, all about the town,’ said his mother, returning to the room, with Miss Bruce. Later, when he thought of his mother, trying to collect all he remembered of her before it blurred, he remembered sharply she had sung these words, in a high voice full of assurance and contentment. Beside Miss Bruce she seemed a girl.

That was before he had his other mother, who came next.

In Moorea, the morning sun melted the last mist, closer to the last resting place of Stevenson than to his birthplace, but heaped high in stone like it. Only a purple cloud stayed as though caught by the island’s teeth. Alec awoke from dreams of high heaped buildings, the dream he associated with Edinburgh, and heard two things.

Gabriel was talking into her tape recorder, though he could not hear the words. Nick was leaning down through the fo’c’sle hatch with a pronged piece of white metal like a short crowbar, an inch thick. There remained only a faint bend in the fish hook that had once bent like the elbow of an arm wrestler. Something had been powerful enough almost to pull it straight while they slept.

Not knowing he knew the words till he said them, Alec said, ‘God knows the breaking strain we had on that line.’

The people on the boat had become ‘we’ in the face of the sea.

Chapter 2

On the boat, Elspeth was thinking out loud. ‘So they introduced a snail to Moorea and the idea was that it would gobble up the huge edible snails that had been introduced artificially themselves, twenty years ago, for food. The giant snail ate everything, not just what it was supposed to. The second wave of foreign snails was even worse, and carnivorous. Species of plant and insect grew scarce as they were eaten up. Now the first, indigenous, island snail is endangered and people come from America and all over to try to track it down and beef it up and train it to fight back in the name of biodiversity. People are wishing they had the old wee nuisance back.’

‘What a lot you do know,’ said Logan. He did not like the way she, having perfectly good information, made it implausible in the way she set it out. He did not look women in the face unless he was explaining things to them or setting out to seduce them. Otherwise, in a beautiful voice, he gave orders. He did not need to pitch them high. He was a man for whom people did things, for their own reasons.

‘The ecology of islands is fragile that way,’ Nick said, but it was not annoying. They even hoped he would continue. He did not have the polymath’s trick of talking in brightly formed sentence-long paragraphs. He went on eating Weetabix, feeding himself from the front of the spoon. It was a large spoon, no different from a small spoon to him in the matter of eating; had it been an engine part he could have gauged dimension precisely. ‘In small enclosed places with highly organised finite interdependencies you can’t afford to unbalance a single thing.’

Elspeth and Gabriel were coming by now, the fourth full day in Moorea, to seek one another out. The forgettable conversations that distinguish the domestic female day could not take place at sea, where there were no shopkeepers, no bus drivers, no familiar strangers. Gabriel, being younger than Elspeth, did not need and had not established so many of these links, but Elspeth realised each time she went to sea how she missed such small advances into disinterested warmth.

The escape provided by these secessions from life on dry land was more partial for the women. The sense of being away and free can shade with a change of wind into the sense of being caught and trapped, painted in to a picture one did not choose to be part of.

The chopped time of watchkeeping, twenty-four hours divided into six stretches of four, quickly establishes itself. The body adapts by cutting off the dawdling sleep that is rich in enquiry and reconciliation with the day just gone. Even in the deepest sleep, too, the body is attuned to the boat. All through the sleep on a boat, by day or by night, you listen for some clue from the air as to what it intends to do. On a sailing boat this speculation is the medium of all preoccupation. The wind breathes into everything. If it is not there, its absence is felt like a distant but fresh bereavement.

The company on board were between the land and the sea in their sleeping habits as well as their anchorage; they had not yet begun to work fully on the watch system, although Nick and Sandro tended to split the night between them to listen for dragging on the anchor chain. Nick hoped to see the fish that stripped the hooks each night. All they had caught was a shark pup that was more interesting to gut than to eat. It had fed with such uninvolved gusto that its belly spilled out fifty-seven unmarked silver wrasse, shiny like foil birdscarers.
Ardent Spirit
was anchored a few hundred yards out from the island; as the day began, the sound of mobilette engines could be heard from the land, and sometimes a papery chopping, palms being cut by machete blades. The flat sea took the noise straight over itself from the high island. There was no modifying shore. Beyond the boat, over the reef, the water crisped and broke, caught from beneath continually, combed to shreds and flung again.

Gabriel, wound up in a pareo of flowered cotton, seemed nonetheless unexotic, her bare shoulders fine, not private or suggestive. The cloth wound round her was not introspective and alluring like a sari, but to the point, as an Englishwoman will have her clothes, modest, practical and apt as an apron. Her hair was tied up and fixed with a jawed clip. The freckles glowing below brown skin would soon join up to make her the colour of a hazelnut. Elspeth was untidy even in one single piece of cloth; her pareo seemed ill cut. There was an incoherence to the various colours of her skin, tan back, red shoulders, white legs and undersides, that was pitiful, infantile. The high bones of her face were overdramatic for her apologetic demeanour and insistent self-effacement. As two feminine types, the certain and the unsure, they seemed, if only physically, exemplary. The subtle expression of character and habit in feature had begun in Elspeth, being older; Gabriel’s character was apparently of a piece with her wholesome body and face.

Nick was holding the tender to the side of
Ardent Spirit
. At the back of the solid rubber boat a powerful outboard engine was clamped to the wooden transom, and resecured by ropes. Disaster beyond the small accident was foreseen on the tender as on the big boat. The extreme provident caution that must accompany adventure is cousin to the theoretical pessimism parents deploy.

‘Who’s coming?’ Nick called up to the deck.

‘We need oranges and needles.’ Elspeth hung over the wire rail. She was hovering and would not commit herself until she saw what each other person was doing.

‘I’ll stay and put up the awning and housekeep the sails. I’ll swim in later, could be, and catch a beer,’ called Sandro who had been to Moorea before and knew it as well as he liked to know a place.

Logan came up. A silence lay over the others. They waited under his decision.

‘I’ll take in the hills one more time,’ he said.

‘I’ll do the shopping.’ Gabriel spoke crisply.

‘Could we take the Zodiac?’ Alec was not yet familiar enough to state what he wanted without asking what was done in such a place.‘And find a beach maybe and look at fish?’