Debatable Land (9 page)

‘Only wetter,’ she said.

The wife looked at Elspeth. It was a look between admiration and fear. Elspeth knew how that look felt on her own face.

For some time the husband discussed radio frequencies. At the end of periods of talk, receiving no response from either his hostess or his wife, he set springs for himself. ‘You will say that I am dogmatic perhaps in saying that . . .’ ‘Contrary to what is generally thought to be held to be the case . . .’

Elspeth made two more pots of tea. The two children had joined Sandro up in the bow where they did what they were told among the swathes of folded sail. She could hear Sandro instructing them to fold the sails, and saw the soft geometric dance sixty feet from herself and the excruciating tea party she was holding in spite of herself as something ideal and free, an abstract epitome of what was mysterious, childlike and full about life under sail as against the life of occasion and adult ceremonial.

‘You may not agree here . . .’

Elspeth did not like to be rude, was not normally so, but she thought she heard the Zodiac and she knew that she feared more to irk her own husband than this one. She interrupted.

‘That beautiful shell. Where is it?’

‘I’ve set it up for you, never worry, just off the stern.’

‘Set it up?’

‘You’ll be wanting it for a trophy. It’s not after all the stuff of which pets are made.’ It was the facetious voice. His wife laughed. Elspeth didn’t. She was short of time.

‘I got the bugger to stick its head out and I hooked and weighted it. Sooner or later it’ll part company with its shell, you can flush the thing out with a strongish scouring substance. I often as not use soda crystals. And there you are, a conch to call your own.’

Off the stern rail, sure enough, Elspeth saw a line hanging, from which must be dragging the shell and its ever more taut body, losing suction with every minute.

He sensed not her disgust but some misgiving.

‘Of course it does smell a bit. It’s the length of time taken, cardinally.’

‘How long?’ asked Elspeth.

The Zodiac sound had gone. Smoke was going up at points among the green crevasses of the island, soft blue amid the blackening green. The sun was starting to fold the pale sky away in preparation for the stars. The others must have found a good beach. Perhaps that would keep Logan banked and protected against the pain his ill-temper inflicted upon him.

‘A week or so. But no worries, you can continue the operation under sail.’

The creature she had hardly seen within its squint-mottled spire had been mottled too, in an orderly, glamorous way, as only animals or the rarest primitive textiles can be. Two soft probes about the size of a small child’s fingers, but extensible, had emerged – the horns, she assumed, such as a snail has. Did she not recall that these were eyes? The sheer pearly mouth of the shell must be being battered by the silent boneless creature as it was dragged out of its one lodging, that was part of itself.

As bores will, the visiting husband became suddenly bored. It was always a matter of regret to him how ungrateful people could be. This was a classic case, now. This woman didn’t know when she was lucky. He looked at the pointlessness of
Ardent Spirit
, and allowed himself to congratulate himself, just for once, on the tight ship he ran for his family.

The biscuits were finished.

‘It’ll be torn loose from its muscle plug by now at any rate, so it’s only a matter of time before it’s a goner,’ he said. He could not resist it. Only a woman with nothing much up top would get precious about a big snail with spots. He could see that was it. Never had a moment’s pain in her life, he supposed. Which reminded him.

He gave his wife the angle of his face and back that expressed his want of entire gratification. She stood, and smoothed her lap. Crumbs fell to the deck. In places were the footmarks of the children.

‘It’s been pleasant. I hope also for you.’

The red dog began to howl now. There was a breeze that ruffled the water. Spars of sunlight tightened about the sky. It was like being within a shrinking parasol the translucence and colour of rice paper. The green of the island was black now, the blue smoke white. Even the red curls of the children had lost colour.

At the steps down the side of
Ardent Spirit
, Elspeth said goodbye to this family, hoping to convey to the mother that she wished her well in her lonely enterprise, to the children that escape would be easier for them one day than it ever might be for their mother, and to the father that he would run out of victims one day.

She was ashamed because she did not know whether to unloose the tormented sea creature or whether Logan, reflecting that it was already harmed beyond help (he was good to animals and things that did not speak), would wish to keep the shell for its undoubted handsomeness.

In order to put off her thought, she repeated her cleaning operations of the morning. In his cabin, Sandro was playing the harmonica, old, melancholy, predictable ballads of the sort that had convinced her, when she and Logan met first, that at last she knew love as other people understood it, a great thing binding them not to one only but to many others, all swayed by eight notes and about fifteen words. She had not, before she met Logan, heard popular music.

‘Cherry, Cherry, baby,’ wailed and hummed together the buzzing windy sound of the mouth organ, while Elspeth set to doing what she had already done.

By noon and after two Hinano beers Nick knew a bay that had never known a shark attack and was not private. Keeping fairly tight to the shore, he steered the Zodiac and the passengers, more slowly now, so that the shopping was not soaked by the bow wave, along the coast of Moorea until he came to the sixth inlet on. It was hardly a beach, more an ingress. Leggy mangroves stood over it on webbed legs sunk hard into the beige sand.

Logan, Alec and Nick jumped into the surf and pulled Gabriel in with the rubber boat until it was two thirds up on the sand, then handed her out and pulled the Zodiac clean up, making her fast to a mangrove that held up its hands in a histrionic soothsaying gesture, pulling down the air.

Among the mangroves, along the fiery sand and even into the shade, white crabs the height of cats tiptoed and suddenly sank. Their swift incomprehensible movements made the noise of many pencils used by keen but apprentice writers on paper shot with slub. Several of these crabs lay dead and emptied of flesh, blowing light as paper bags among the rooted mangroves. From time to time a coconut fell.

‘They split your brain if they land on you. Never sleep under a coconut palm,’ said Logan.

‘Hard not to.’ Nick looked up. High before the sky it was all palms unless you were almost in the water.

‘Split your brain, I mean it. The remains would be two poached eggs in a bucket of blood, should one of these,’ Logan picked up a coconut still in its case of copra, and palmed it as if affectionately like the head of a mastiff, ‘one of these happen to light upon you.’

‘Not light,’ said Gabriel. Logan and Alec laughed immoderately. Nick seemed to know they were playing a game in which he had been dealt no cards. He sat on a palm tree that grew parallel to the ground and two feet or so above it, and wrote in his small spiralbound notebook, the size of a book of stamps, with a thin pencil of chestnut brown. Sometimes he made longer lines and paused; he was drawing the deserted armour of a sand crab.

‘Have some disgusting picnic,’ said Logan. ‘Pitch in.’

Beer, rum, limes and the ropelike shadows of the mangrove limbs made a crazed mirror of the hot hours they were there on the beach. Nick had gone, no one was clear when. They relied on him to return at a sensible time because he could tell where and when he was from looking at the sky, understood the imperatives of tides and never kept anyone waiting. Logan could do these things but preferred to have them done; he saved himself for extremity.

Alec slept, his head wrapped in a towel through which he continued to hear the scratching sound of the crabs as they pencilled incessantly and suddenly sank beneath the sand. Through the towel he heard sighings, rattlings, whistlings and moans he took to come from vegetation. There was a sweet caving in and a regular hard thocking as though a man unseen but close were cutting down a resistant, fibre-clothed, slim tree. He could not hear Logan and Gabriel in any familiar way.

Although he had seen it in others, his own death was still theoretical to him. Even in his sleep he knew he slept and enjoyed the knowledge. When he imagined death, he did so in terms of life, of what would be gone then and how brightly in the shadow of death these things shone. Not graveyards nor funerals could put him in mind of death: the yards were too full of personalities and irreverent energy, and the constant threat of being moved, by the entablature over a mother, the small sarcophagus of a child, the garrulous encomium of a mason aslop with words even in stone.

Funerals were too close to parties and to family life, with their social constraints and embarrassments, to aspire to touching on the abstraction at their heart, the missing person. What he had felt at every funeral he had attended was a kind of common human love, almost a reaffirming inclusion, that had reassured him that he like other men had a heart. He had felt this sense equally with those greatly loved lying in the bare box and those cared for in a mild way. He had not tried the funeral of a stranger, which might be a form of theft.

If any places struck him with the transmitted sense of death, museums and libraries did. So richly did they seem to throb with what he loved that he felt them imperilled by what is deathly. He feared the death of imagination as a devastation. To him the end of the imagination would pour salt into any meadows that remained fertile on the earth, and plough it in so that there would be an end to things for all time. The annihilation of his own imagination he knew would come; that of some men somewhere on the abandoned earth he had to believe would somehow continue to burn. That was his faith and he had never confided it to another; for that reason he held a form of conversation with the principle he had to believe was not his only, coming closer than he recognised to prayer.

It irked Alec that the sorting through of his thoughts was akin to prayer, but always so conscious, as though he were reciting. He had hoped that the relinquishing of land for sea would bring prayer or some closer than before approximation out from himself, like music.

His thoughts choked him with their words.

If each man – thanks to the aching cauliflower we carry in our skulls – is walking along a tightrope in his life, I am the man who cannot move when most he would. The reason is my eyes; they paralyse me with all they tell. My eyes show me the glistening narrow wire I must walk, but they show me other such slung paths, stretched above me or below, and they reveal to me also the declivity below, and the distracting faces of those who watch and hold their breath.

About me I see the confident forward movement of those who look straight ahead, travelling along their apportioned slim wire in company with wives and children. Where is their courage from? What visor have they come to wear that holds their fixed gaze ahead?

Far beyond where my own gaze tires are the ropes that at heart I wish to walk. They are not lit. They are invisible, taking their colour from that which surrounds them. Occasionally perhaps someone who has found and trodden one of them has left a trace, an emblem you might call it, of himself. These paths are scattered with faint, tactful, discouraging, and beautiful symbols of holiness or art. I do not want quite to be holy, too uncorporeal for a painter, a Scot at that. But I do want to be good. Not good at what I do, which I judge almost impossible beyond a certain disheartening competence, but the still harder thing, good.

The difficulty with goodness is that it is severely practical as far as I can see. It’s a case of practice making perfect. The daily, hourly, minutely demands that the practice of goodness must make sit athwart certain aspects of my nature and my habit. The only way for goodness to be carried out is with the unconsciousness of habit. But I cannot put my consciousness to bed like a bird under a cloth. So I stand at the commencement of the wire in a bright spotlight that is half conscience and half vanity and I hold my breath, and freeze.

I should be halfway at least across the wire by now but I stand looking, frozen, uncommitted, not warmed even by fear. I am not afraid, I am conscious. If I could set one foot before me, the stillness and chill might be stirred, my life take its first breath, my virtue awaken. As it is, my habits of control and distance hold it cold, unborn. My eyes inform me, freeze me.

It is so that they also feed me.

A painter must live by his eyes and the messages they impart. I do not feel, however, that I fully inhabit my life and days. I am within and yet without myself. The painting seems to be a superficial matter, a trick I can perform that will delude a number of people but not myself. I seem not to be capable of much more than looking and recording; what I wish for my work is that it should bespeak an achieved moral ease I cannot pretend to possess. If those who watch and comment upon me do not see the safety net, I know it is there and I know too that I must rip it away or at any rate test it.

Each of us has his own safety net. It is often as not self-deception, yoking itself companionably to false need. In the North (by which I mean Scotland) it can be sentiment and it can be wrath and it can be a God who combines the two. My own (and I will be deceiving myself here very likely since we all have more than one of these nets) is an ironical non-involvement interwoven with that solution of all cowards, a long perspective.