Debatable Land (10 page)

I also – but for how long? – have the constitutional tendency to hope that characterises fairly young men on the hunt for a mate.

Should I jump, it will be worse for me than death. I will be caught for the rest of my life in the safety net, condemned to a life of disengagement.

Minds meet in meaning, and I have met no one as close as the person I have harmed and who is not yet dead, so I can’t think of her at peace.

For an exile, there are no continuities, merely succession. I am at the middle point and I must move. I burn, but the only light I see by is the light of that burning. I fear in the night sometimes that I have no soul. Should I wait for love or bring it about? Stevenson, who played as a child on the same brown river as I did, said that to marry was to domesticate the Recording Angel, that after marriage, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.

Eighty feet above Alec, the palm leaves rattled. Along his body the sand conveyed a minutely concessive crystalline heat. The crabs scribbled from left to right over the continually rubbed-over sand, their writings erased by winds that could not be felt by skin.

Once he heard a dog whimper. It seemed to be out at sea. Later in his reverie, it may have howled, almost like a woman, although that seemed to be on land, even close by. The water threw its voice.

At the funeral of his mother, there had been a trick: never to look at the box itself, and always to comfort others before they might broach you. She died without ease, sweating herself into a pool of salt and bone in the bed where his father continued to want to sleep. After his mother died, she was very clean, there was no more swabbing and filthy linen to be taken out. They burnt the last sheets, his father and he, ashamed of what she would have said about the waste, but unable to bear the truth that might come to them if they once more washed these sheets: that she was not alive to make them once more dirty.

All through her sudden dying, the vengeance her body took on her lifelong cleanliness was brutal. Gore came from her when all she wanted was to rid herself of waste. Her ears and nose marked pillows overnight as though she leaked bitter secrets. Her throat was black with deposits as though she had used filthy words all her life.

So for the first twenty hours after she died it was a honeymoon. Alec and his father, gently and with no sense of who was bridegroom, washed her and calmed her face into forgetting the hard last breath that had come from its mouth like a saw. They washed her hair with a little bowl of suds and dried it in muslin, folding and pressing the hair till it was dry between the layers of cloth. The nightdress was white, long, cotton, maidenly. Inside it they had settled her for peace and dignity, padded against the loosening of all the body’s last shames, that had tormented her late days. From the garden they brought two bunches, one of lavender, one of rosemary, and that was the end of each bush for these hot herbs decline in the wet of the North.

Alec assumed, and it was so, that his father would want to stay that night with his mother. When he took tea to them in the morning, he forgot and put two cups on the tray. When he remembered, outside the door of his parents’, now his father’s, room, he stopped and wondered if he should take off his mother’s cup.

He did not do so. When he went into the room the air was not perfectly sweet. His father was talking to his mother, nagging her about her neglect of herself. He seemed to be bossing her about the journey she was to take.

‘It is not far. You will not feel it. I will be here. The boy is good. Will you listen to me at last.’

The cryptic link between these two hard workers, his dead mother, his living father, seemed to grow flowers from its hard wood before his eyes. But he cast them down for fear of being seen to listen with his eyes to secrets he had not been invited to hear.

He had not seen it because they were old and ordinary and his parents. His mother looked on the bed in her nightdress no age at all, and his father turned to him like a young man. The two of them had been still far off old age. His mother late in her forties, she would not tell him how late and he would make certain not to learn at the funeral, for that would hurt her feelings, his father fifty-two and all muscle and pep and opinion.

They took her off on a stretcher. It was the first time her face had been covered and he feared her shape, shrouded, also the steepness of the turn around the landing on the stairs, when the stretcher had to be jolted and turned at angles only feasible for the dead.

When the undertakers had gone, his father said, ‘I’ll be sure to die down the stair.’

Outside there were gulls in the air, large-footed, greedy, white as snow. Alec and his father, who ordinarily ignored the birds at the docks when they came to crop carrion and nab good fish, went indoors and fetched every scrap there was and threw it on the lawn for the birds. The party of the gulls was loud and abrupt. Their clamour and their careless appetite eased the silence that had filled the house. The white birds with their yellow feet and rapacious bills seemed literal and firm against the wraiths Alec did not wish to allow into his life, the insubstantialities of a life with his mother gone. He did not cry. He tried to by saying the words, ‘My mother is dead,’ in various forms to himself. All it did was make him realise that he would never make an actor.

His father wept abundantly and these tears took him soon to the bosom of Alec’s second mother, his mother’s sister, the arrangement practically a formal dedication of her pain and his father’s. The habits of his new mother, Jean, were not precisely those of his first mother, but the sisterhood gave a consoling slant of resurrection – or haunting – to the sway of his aunt’s marriage to his father. He did not use the word stepmother because they all agreed it was a hard word and one that his first mother would not have liked to be used of her sister.

The gap of time was nine months. Had the woman been unfamiliar to him this might have pained Alec. As it was, he saw his father sheltered by his aunt, and in his turn sheltering her. At twenty-six, Alec was too old to feel the unmerciful, wholehearted, puritanism of youth. At first he was unsure of his own reaction. Was it right that he did not mind? Was he deficient in love to his father, secretly relieved to pass him once more to the care of a thrifty, provident, sober, woman?

He could not answer his own suspicions. He was glad only to see his father calm.

When he began to wait to watch his stepmother lift the washing tin or to stretch up to pin damp clothes to the line, to check whether her clothes rode up as his mother’s had, over flesh creased like petals by the elastic and buttons of matronhood, he saw nothing to it but a sort of zoological enquiry.

He began to seek a new place to live when he surprised himself by spending an afternoon off work going through her clothes and smelling them. Some of the clothes Jean wore were her sister’s, kept. The anger set about Alec with unclean heat.

He was rapacious. An unnatural murderous lust assailed him not with his second mother’s differences from his mother, not her particularity, but her resemblance to his mother. The acknowledgment was sickening. He was isolated and conforming to the myth he least recognised.

Still he did not cry. If he might slam his second mother into his arms, beat her into his father’s tidy bed, then he would cry, perhaps. He would not let it happen, must protect them both, his father, his second mother. By failing to weep for his mother, his controlling mind forced his body to seek another kind of outburst with her near-effigy, her sister.

‘She is a second mother to Alec,’ said his father, of his wife and sister-in-law who was in her sister’s kitchen chopping vegetables with a little knife she’d herself gifted Jim and Mairi even before they were engaged. ‘A second mother, the very same.’

Jean wore overalls in flowered cotton. Her body did not smell as his mother’s had, of fish and the emetic scouring toxic stink of cleansers. She smelled of gum and human hair and acetone, the materials of wig-making. He smelled it in her clothes when he pulled them from the washing basket pretending he had lost a sock of his own, then fell into a handful of his aunt’s strait cottons like a dog on meat.

The other people working at the museum were relieved that Alec, by his abstracted air, was clearly up to something with a lass; it was the best way after a death. Bed is the only answer to a grave.

Alec longed to be free of his aunt. To this end he began to read and look at words and pictures he hoped might divert him into preoccupations more natural. The artifice and dated domestic insistence in even the lewdest set pieces (rolling pins, a Kenwood mixer more luxurious than anything his mother or aunt ever might have had, rollers, bedroom slippers, even a slippery looking eiderdown with a brushed-nylon underside such as he had seen in an Embassy Coupons catalogue) tended, as all symptoms will, to confirm his fever. He looked for his aunt among these girls and women and because she had been a girl and was now a woman, he found her there. He could place her, knowing all he did of her modest nature, in these scenes, and believe it. He could mask her, strip her, harm her.

He worked hard, ineffectively. This was put down to bereavement. When he found the flat, it was in the centre of town, not far from the Bruces, now in their eighties, a high flat with the one big room and a view over the city that fell down to the sea, over to Fife, and included many gardens.

When he left home, he explained that he had stayed too long anyhow and then stayed on because of his mother’s illness, and now that his father was settled it was time to set up on his own.

Jean said, ‘You’ll visit, then?’

Was she after all in the same mind as he was?

He calmed himself. ‘Often enough. You two newlyweds need time to get to know one another.’ It was a dreadful thing to say, the remark of a dirty old man who did not know either of the people he addressed.

She kissed him goodbye and where the overall brushed his coat he felt a scorching come through to him. His father hugged him, also, during which operation his conscience throbbed like a cut corn.

The city provided him with a distraction from his paining heart during the first year his mother passed in the earth. He watched the crowstepped tall closes clamp about the night and heard the tenements settle like trees full of children. The castellated schools, turreted also for good measure, like as not, became castles by night, with maybe the one window lighted. Across the city the gas lamps were succumbing to a less hesitant form of lamp, and the renovators were setting to the buildings with chemicals to clean off the Industrial Revolution. He lamented the occlusion of glittering grime by explicit lighting and shadowless sandstone. He watched the amelioration of Edinburgh from his window by day and was relieved when darkness returned the city to its secretive, undeclaring self. Cranes were up over the town, three of them, high on hills. Often he cycled behind lorries labelled, ‘Forward-Looking Demolition Our Speciality’.

Through the Frenchified haircomb of wrought iron worn by the civic building two streets beyond his own, he watched a window, idly but repeatedly. It was lit at about seven these winter nights and the shutters were never set in place until the resident, a woman, had looked out up to the stars and over across the jagged city.

‘Not a bad fit,’ said Logan, some feet from Alec who was surprised the first voice he heard was that of a man, so deep was he in a maze of preoccupation with the women who had indirectly led him to this beach.

Gabriel, turned black and shaped like a rubber doll, looked down at him.

‘We’re diving, d’you want to snorkel?’ The impression was of playtime, with different games. Alec enjoyed the cheap exclusivity of feeling left out.

After Logan and Gabriel had taken the Zodiac out to the blue, he watched them fall back off its edge into the water and briefly envied them their belief in other elements than thought and feeling.

Once snorkelling, he was again a child, and happy. The gaiety of the bright world so close below was unstopping, a continual dazzling display as though flowers could gossip. Drifts of pompous-faced black fish with eyes like pugdogs pouted at each other, followed by haughty blue fish long as an arm with inbred noses and blots on their shield-shaped gills. Some shoals moved like the light on waves in a painting and were gone, others were electric bars the size of a textbook underlining. The silent bustle and fierce colour held him happy as he forgot everything and listened with his eyes.

Inland, but aware of the time, Nick carefully drew the pursed mouths of the three, various, gastropods he had tracked down.

In the deeper water, Logan stroked the blue lips of a velvety black clam the size of a chair and moved away each time they closed their helpless distended frill. Close to his face, stretched open into an expression of ecstasy by the mask over her eyes and nose, was Gabriel’s. Her eyes obeyed his own as she watched him pull away from the passive, clenching, clam.

Chapter 3

The graffiti on the huts and cafés off the road that made a circuit between the mountains of Moorea were in the rounded, looped writing that is taught in French schools. Occasionally romantic, the words were more often resentful of the distant administration that had formed the very way they were set down. ‘
À bas la France!
’ was written on one maroon stuccoed wall that yellow and pink plumes of hibiscus brushed in the evening wind; the letters were as assuredly French as the script in the first Babar books.