Debatable Land (16 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alec, ‘I hadn’t meant to be as rude as I was. I lived with a woman for a long time.’

‘What is she doing?’

‘If she and I were still together, I would say the answer to that would be crying. Or drinking. She’s a nurse. A Scot.’

‘Does that explain it?’

Having said even so much about Lorna, Alec was swamped with feelings of disloyalty. He was a weak man, a seizer not of the occasion but of the easy way.

‘Nurses
see
so much, as they call it. And we had seen a lot ourselves. All usual stuff. But she died, almost, of not taking herself seriously.’

‘That’s not the way these days.’

‘Lorna and I are older than that, just. We were the lot that took other people seriously in a rather priggish way and then got selfish.’

‘You have children?’

‘Not ours. Hers. One.’

‘She was married before you?’

‘No.’

‘And when the fridge is thoroughly dismantled, I suppose I should give it a good clean with some strong but not alpine disinfectant. Dettol is a fine standby, available in many of the islands of the South Pacific, though Izal has taken hold in Noumea . . .’

‘No, she wasn’t married before me.’

‘Can you feel that biffing? It’s something biffing the boat, a big fat wrasse or something. This hull is like skin, you feel for her, held back by barnacles and rubbed by things that may be the size of her. But the barnacles, though less dramatic, can weigh hundredweights; each of them’s like a little stone lentil. When a boat with a long keel like this one gets careened, she must lose a third of her weight.’

‘She and I lived together for many years. I deceived her in the usual ways and allowed myself the upper hand in most things. She found a way round this that I did not notice until it was too late. Meanwhile I had set up an excellent system that excused me however I strayed. I was so strict, you might say ascetic, at home that there was a snowy uprightness to it. Home after all is the example for the next generation, although there were none of those. Also, I suspected that Lorna was more adroit at having fun than I was. There were nights I had, all Scotsmen do, when I feared I was turning into a Scandinavian. I saw the bones in things only because I so feared the flesh taking me over.

‘Lorna was beautiful, more so as she got older, and I would not let this be seen. She had wanted to show herself innocently, but I made a vice of it. I did not confine her to our home but I belittled the light sides of her life. A
nurse
, for God’s sake, and I grudged her lightness.

‘I found a way in which to make her unsure of her beauty if it was due to be taken out into the hungry eyes of others. I encouraged her, pampered her, helped her find soap for the bath after work, washed her like a cat, fixed on the ear-rings I least approved. And before we entered whatever room it was I looked at her from top to bottom, slowly, till I withered her. I could take her from full summer to a frost in those looks. She loved me more, in a way no fair man can live with since it holds a hard mirror to his face, the more I cut her down. At her work all the time this went on there was the giving out that had to be done. She did come home like a dead star, no light left. Sometimes I invented jamborees for the two of us so that I could spoil them, in so doing, so I liked to think, teaching her the folly of diversion.

‘After I had frozen over the life we shared, I went for the axe. I began to see other women is the Scots term. The English say seeing to, very dative.

‘Most of the letters I kept at my place of work. The surgical tidiness and order I had made the rule at home did not leave room for strange letters on coloured, often pink, paper. I was not happy, of course, but did not know how to stop it all. The sternness I had set around my home like ice was what gave my outside wooings electricity. The women were often greedy and materialistic, animal in every way but the one. Lorna continued to love me. Her hair . . .’

Alec stopped. Not even Lorna knew this story, after all.

‘It had been grey since our earliest time. An old woman died, whom I had loved. She was my other mother. My other other mother.’ He spoke to himself. ‘Lorna carried me, as she carried the death by smoke inhalation of her – only – mother, old but not to blame, curtailed by the insurance fire of a warehouse-holder a street away. Her hair took that day to go white. I watched it. I suppose thaw is the opposite of what it did: the white did not so much slip from it as slip into it. It got softer. Her beauty remained in the more serious form I have seen come to women who are monogamous. Women are renewed by new love – any promiscuous woman will tell you she is fighting time by being remade again and again in the eyes of men.

‘Lorna was not like that. The shortness of life was not a thing she conceived of being fought off by numbers of men, when it would not answer to good medicine and the knife. She grew beautiful in a different way, not from new attention, but out of a nature that was firm and at last emerging. She became quieter and more sure of her thoughts. Sometimes I saw what I had had and asked of myself how I could continue to live by repression at home, repression clothed in the garb of principle, and do what I liked, which by now I did not like, away from home.

‘Lorna began to have bruises, even a contusion on her hip, but patients could hit and kick, even bite. I was often ashamed to look at her in case she saw in my eyes the little white body of the last woman they had looked at.

‘She became so poised that I suspected something. A portentous formality came into her speech. Sometimes she explained things to me that she knew I knew. She asked for the same information repeatedly. But the real sign was that, for the first time in over a dozen years, she seemed to have found a way of eluding the hurt I knew how to give her. She began to answer me back. The respect I had not earned was not being paid. She smiled a lot, and drank tea. In the night I found her drinking tea, the pot by her side.

‘It was cold, of course. Full of vodka. Tea also, mixed with it, so profoundly did her years of obedience to me connect with her desperate need to get away from me.

‘I actually wondered whether to exploit this new strength in Lorna, pretending that under her sudden grace there was not a wretched paddling with the feet below the water. Then the teapot went, and all shame and concealment after that were mismanaged. I had humiliated her and must suffer. We went nowhere together.

‘I marked bottles with a pencil, a Chinagraph like yours. In small ways she was cunning. She bought her own pencil. This was our life. Although I did not give up the other girls, I was with her more than I had been for years. I was with her like a jailer. She was happy when she drank for about half a sentence, like a lifted eyelid. Then the eyelid closed again and the dark came down.

‘She said that, when her hours allowed her, she was happy drinking alone. It was I who made the pain. We were leaking money. Spirits cost more than fuel. It had to be spirits. It is a national passion with Scots, to ride the world having taken ardent spirits.’

‘Coming on this particular boat was for that reason?’ asked Nick.

‘It is a beautiful name.’

‘Not rash?’

‘Can they know its meaning? Logan and Elspeth?’

‘At least one of them, I think, yes. And you have missed out the child.’

‘The child she used to save us. And to punish me.’

‘Did you not want it?’

Like fumes a green dawn was joining with the spindrift from the reef to make a forest of rising light around them. The stars were pale, receding, falling unnoticed now by this turned cheek of the world.

‘I am fond of children. I love this one.’

‘Yes.’ He waited.

‘She cannot remember who the father is. It took place outdoors. In the town. She does not know who saw. Do I not know that there are people who live like that, watched even as they lie on the pavement together, she asks me. Asked. Am I so clean I can wash off these thoughts, so noble I can ignore what is right there in my own house, so pure I cannot see dirt? She asked me these things with pleasure. It was as though she were repainting our walls, with filth on a wide brush.

‘The two things were excesses, my asceticism like a frozen sea, her wild dance with the spirits. For the time she carried the baby there was nothing much, the occasional woozy afternoon. But Lorna has that speaking trait, the feast-or-famine gene that afflicts Celts, so she was mainly off the drink until after . . .’

‘He, I suppose?’ A comforting normality in Nick’s voice seemed to lift the pain of the telling.

‘Yes, he – how did you know? – until after he came.’

‘He is her present to you, a fresh start. It was natural it should be like that.’

‘Look at the sun. I am cold now it’s warming up.’

‘Go and sleep. I hear the others. What is his name?’

‘It’s Sorley.’

‘You can tell me more later if you want. Or no more. This watch is busier at sea.’

‘Is it possible?’ Alec did not want to meet anyone below so he did not go down the companionway. He went up into the bow, prised open the fo’c’sle hatch that was ajar, and lowered himself into the tiny cabin that fitted, as he collapsed into his bunk, close around his soft tissue like a shell.

Chapter 5

‘It’s nothing, it will go away,’ announced Gabriel, causing more worry when she did not name the pain she had introduced to them all by moving as though she had swallowed a batten. Her voice too had become stiff. When she spoke, the others deferred by at once falling silent. Even Logan seemed to do this.

Clearly she was ill, if not as ill as her fierce denials of any need for attention were set on suggesting. Being young she remained in the state when discomfort can be curtailed. She was new, and did not care to share her body with illness.

Her hair had sunk like a wet cat’s, her skin looked hot.

‘We can put in at Raiatea,’ said Logan. ‘There will be a
pharmacie
.’ He emphasised the French accent. ‘Look in the Ship’s Captain, Elspeth.’

Elspeth took down
The Ship’s Captain’s Medical Book
.

‘What shall I look up, Gabriel?’

‘I’m aching really, and hot and cold, I suppose. Giddy.’

‘She needs something more specific, Gabriel,’ said Sandro. ‘Swellings or green vomit.’

‘I think I’ve got it.’ Not Elspeth, but Nick, spoke. ‘Look at her hands.’

Gabriel held them out in the nail-polish-drying piano-player gesture. Her left hand was a softer thing to look at than her right. The skin seemed to have been gently inflated so there were no tendons visible.

Nick stroked the back of this hand with his middle right finger.

‘Hurt?’

‘A bit; numb more than anything.’

‘It will hurt,’ said Nick.

‘Oh fine.’

‘You’re lucky. With some coral cuts you get no warning, just the fever and not much hope. This will be fine. You’ve a septic hand.’

Gabriel did not like the ugly name given to her romantically fevered state.

‘I’d hoped to save the drugs till we got out to sea,’ said Logan. It was an unnecessary remark. They had all known this was his intention. He rather liked mentioning the dangerous drugs in the safe: the fallen bowels, torn ears, uprooted scalps the drugs presided over. He spoke of these wounds like a war veteran.

‘It’s nothing like that bad,’ said Nick. If he did not stop Logan now he would tell the poor girl how septicaemia swept through a boat he’d been on once and a brace of right hands had been thrown overboard after a double amputation conducted with just a gag and a brandy bottle. He could not trim his conversation.

Purgation and entertainment lay close in Logan’s talk. He had less time for conversation, associating it with women. To signify this sort of talk he and his intimates had a gesture; the right hand was folded over and made to yak like a set of false teeth.

‘If we get to Raiatea fastish, we can get it cleaned up. Otherwise I’d’ve suggested we boil it, but no need.’

At ‘boil’, Gabriel sat with her forehead pinched in her hand. A solicitousness close to flirtation, now she was diagnosed, came over everyone on the boat, not only the men. Knowing little, pretty, a little difficult, Gabriel combined traits that encouraged attention of the happy sort that pleases the attention-giver. Her innocence without her wide smile and fresh eyes might not have been enough; without that innocence, pleasing her would not have offered so much pleasure.

‘I’ll make you a canopy over the afterdeck and you can lie in the air and shade. Feeling crook can take it right out of you,’ said Logan.

The boat was on an easy reach, her angle cradling, not steep.

Elspeth went below and squeezed the green grapefruit. The juice of one fruit half-filled a jug. Seeing the jug made her think of ice, and although she knew that ice-making tired the refrigerator’s burning lungs more than any other function, she put some ice in Gabriel’s weighted glass.

‘Good idea, ice for Gabriel.’ Logan spoke to his wife in a warm voice as she took the drink to the girl. ‘Get me a glass, Elspeth, and I’ll help her with that jug. If this wind tightens up and sets we’ll take her to the chemist in style under a spinnaker.’