Spiderweb (16 page)

‘I’ve picked up the throttle cable,’ said Richard. ‘I could stop by and fit it one day next week, if that suits you. So … how are things with you? Excellent. Oh, not too bad … My self-imposed schedule. The days are filled, one way and another. A determined assault on old papers, at the moment. A task I’ve been postponing. Including things of Nadine’s I felt unable to deal with when … at the time. Apropos of which, there is the occasional communication from yourself. I’ll bring them along, shall I? Ah … right, then, I won’t. You, too, are de-accessioning – I believe that’s the archivists’ term. I will consign to black sacks. Mostly postcards from exotic locations, anyway. One from Orkney with picture of seal and pups and cryptic message on the reverse – “Time for a five-year check? Long days to be seized up here.” No doubt you could deconstruct. I read it – hope you share my view that postcards are in the public domain.’

‘The thing about life is to have a strategy,’ says Nadine. ‘Ultimate aim, fall-back position. The aim right now is Magdalen Commem with John Hobhouse, but if he doesn’t ask me, then I’ll have to settle for David Phelps, who will if I throw out a hint. And here are you in the fifth week of term with no strategy at all. Do you want David if I don’t need him? I could probably fix it.’

‘No thanks,’ says Stella. ‘At the worst I’ll pass up Magdalen Commem. And in any case I entirely disagree. The thing about life is to act expediently and creatively. Seize the day. See what comes up and act accordingly.’

‘Fatal. Drift theory. That way you get stuck doing things you never meant to do and you end up married by accident to the wrong person or not married at all when you’re
thirty.’

‘Or,’ says Stella, ‘you proceed from one glittering opportunity to the next and are mercifully still available for grand passion when the moment strikes.’

‘We’ll see,’ says Nadine. ‘We’ll see. Wanna bet?’

‘Bet on what? How are we to decide who is coming off best?’

‘Five-year checks,’ proposes Nadine. ‘Absolute honesty on both sides. I chalk up strategic success and you prove opportunistic gains.’

Peter said to their father, ‘Where was I born? And Michael?’

‘What d’you mean? In a hospital, of course.’

‘But where? What town?’

‘Dunno. Can’t remember. Wherever we was then.’

‘Did you have that garage when we were born?’

‘Maybe. Shut up asking stupid questions and do something useful. You can start changing that wheel.’

Like you’d slammed up against a brick wall. He’d always been like that, their father, but even more now. Not a word, most of the time. Eat, go out to the sheds, go off on a job, come back, eat.

Her, you knew about, because she told you, when she felt like it. She’d been on that ranch in America and she’d been at a college and she’d done racing driving and run businesses with a turnover of thousands. At least, that’s what she said. Their father, you didn’t know anything.

‘And us,’ said Peter. ‘We dunno where we were fucking born. Not even that.’

‘Yeah.’

They couldn’t have said why it mattered. Simply, they lacked something. There was nothing they could cite. Other people came from round here, or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they knew where they’d been. The boys saw that they were without a history, though they were unable to identify the perception.

Nadine searches for Stella in the Radcliffe Camera. She sweeps past the desks wearing her red crossover jersey and her flared grey flannel skirt, causing heads to lift, distracting keen young minds from the significance of the Exchequer under Edward I, from the role of Ship Money, from the rise of Chartism. She beams at friends and acquaintances. She locates Stella. ‘
There
you are. Come and have coffee. I’ve got things to tell.’

Nadine has been to the Oxford University Appointments Board. ‘The woman went berserk,’ says Nadine. ‘I was honest and straightforward. I said, I just want a nice interesting job for a couple of years because I intend to get married shortly. And she blew up. I’m planning on having children in good time, I said. And she said, you haven’t been expensively educated here for three years in order to have children.’

‘No, she didn’t,’ says Stella, who knows Nadine.

‘Well, that’s what she was thinking. “What sort of job did you have in mind?” she asked. Clipped voice. Freezing stare.

And I suggested something where you meet lots of people and there’s opportunity for travel.’

‘Air hostess,’ says Stella. ‘Package-tour guide.’

‘Certainly not. Marry a diplomat, possibly. So then she wanted what are apparently called my credentials and I don’t seem to have any. Apart from the degree that we sincerely hope I will indeed get. You’re supposed to have run for President of the JCR or written for
Isis
or been a stage manager for OUDS. She wanted to know what I was interested in.’

‘So you said – men.’

Nadine giggles. ‘She gave me more of the cold stare and said, I advise you to do a course in shorthand and typing. So
I
gave
her
a look and said, surely I haven’t spent three years being expensively educated here in order to become a secretary?’

‘Spot on!’ says Stella, admiring. Just occasionally, Nadine can score a bull’s-eye.

Stella had not at first realized that there was a fifth person living at the Hiscox bungalow. But then she once or twice caught sight of a white head in the back seat of the red car. Someone’s old mother, presumably. Occasionally the two boys would also be in the car, but generally speaking it was rare to see members of the family except in isolation – an expressionless profile hurtling past in car or tractor or pick-up van, the boys hunched over the handlebars of their bicycles. Stella was faintly bothered by the thought of this concealed old woman, stashed away there like an obsolete piece of furniture except for these infrequent airings. She thought of old people in the Delta village or in Malta, intently monitoring local life from a chair outside the front door. Far more rewarding than the television set in a nursing home. Or whatever fetid family life was experienced by this poor old soul.

A life that must be at its most intense now in late July with the school holidays in full swing. The Hiscox boys were more in evidence than usual, mooching up and down the lane on foot or on the bikes, tinkering with a tractor on the track to the bungalow. Indeed, the whole landscape seemed to run with young, like fields in the lambing season – every recreation ground swarming, gangs of children erupting round corners, silting up the village newsagent in pursuit of snacks.

There was a group of adolescents eddying around the phone box on the green as she headed for the car after visiting the shop. Half a dozen boys and a clutch of girls, grouping and regrouping, several of the boys equipped with sleek cycles on which they made occasional flamboyant circuits, like cock birds displaying. The girls tossed their hair, preened self-conscious bodies, draped themselves against a fence. The air crackled with sexuality. Stella observed, amused. So it goes, she thought, the world over.

And now their collective attention was diverted. They were watching two boys who had emerged from the newsagent’s, mounted bikes and started to ride away. Ah, the Hiscox lads. Who were not, it would seem, part of the gang, for they pointedly ignored the group on the green, a ploy which at once provoked a response. The girls clustered together, giggling and staring. Jeering derisive shouts from the boys. A cat-call, a whoop. The general tenor of rejection was clear enough. The Hiscox boys were approaching her now, pedalling fast, their expressions tense and sullen. She smiled, in a sudden access of sympathy. ‘Hi, there!’ she called out. No reply. Black scowls and they were gone, rattling away down the road. On the green there were gusts of laughter; the sexual parade had resumed.

The village green was a triangle. Stella had read somewhere that its shape echoed the structure of the original medieval settlement, with an enclosed central area in which animals could be safely penned. Today, one end was laid out as a children’s playground with swings and slides, while the telephone kiosk commandeered by the adolescents occupied the apex of the triangle. Facing on to it were the pub, the garage, the Minimart, the chemist, a diminutive branch of Barclay’s Bank, a sprig of the West Country’s main estate agents and a solicitor’s office. The green was always the scene of various concurrent actions, most of them mutually exclusive. The adolescents ignored the group of mothers with small children, who were in turn impervious to Stella, passing them on her way back to the car. She herself, she realized, should find an affinity with the several other visible grey heads. The retired, the settlers, the colonizers.

But I do not, she thought. Cannot. Nothing in common except physical condition. Flung into proximity by circumstance, like children. But then I have never had much talent for belonging.

Most people require a support base – family, community. Everyone does, perhaps. The extension of oneself that allows ‘me’ to dissolve into ‘us’, that supplies common cause and provides opportunity for altruism and reciprocal favours and also for prejudice, insularity, racialism, xenophobia and a great deal else. Most people are either born into this situation or achieve it, by hook or by crook.

Except for me, thought Stella. Unwed, peripatetic. By choice and by chance. Spending my time taking stock of how others deal with proximity, while avoiding it myself. So am I a freak? Dangerously deprived? I passed up the offer of both, once.

‘Marry me,’ says Alan Scarth, ‘and you’ll see this every year of your life.’

The sea cliff to which the island rises has sprung alive. It has bloomed with birds. They are nesting – the kittiwakes and the guillemots and the razorbills and the fulmars. They pack each ledge, each slope, each pinnacle. The entire sheer surface of the rock is studded with ranks of white, with clusters of black. More birds float alongside, sliding on the wind, swerving and twisting, rising and falling. The sea and the air are spawning birds, they lift from the waves, they surge from the spray.

‘You promised you wouldn’t say that again,’ says Stella. ‘You’re a man of your word, I thought. Known for it, I’m told.’

‘I had my fingers crossed,’ says Alan Scarth.

He is also a man of absolute propriety. He has never touched her. Even here, side by side on the turf amid the thrift and the sea-campion, he keeps a clear space between them. Once he laid a hand on her back to steady her over a stile. She seemed to feel its burning imprint for hours.

‘Teach me which are what,’ says Stella. ‘Is that big dark one a skua?‘

‘Marry me and I’ll teach you.’

‘No,’ says Stella. ‘I’ve told you why. It would be the ruin of us both. Where are the puffins?‘

‘You’re an obstinate woman and opinionated with it,’ says Alan. ‘There are some puffins left of the big stack in the centre. Track past those kittiwakes, then go down to the next level.’

‘I’ve got them,’ says Stella.

She is intensely conscious of his solid presence, a foot away. As stable as the rock, as assured as his tenure of this place. He occupies it like the birds – by right, by nature. Am I making a terrible mistake? she wonders. Could I be like that, too?

The summer days flow one into another through the brief hours of dusk that pass for night. Just as the great skies melt into the sea and the land on cloudy days, a symphony of grey, no distinction between the elements. Time is on hold, it seems, its passage marked only by hay-making, by harvest. The people or the island work and Stella works alongside, with her notebook and her queries, her lists and her charts. The summer unfurls for her not in weeks or months but by the way in which she is subsumed into the lives of these people, by their kindly acceptance of what she does, by their interest. They are mildly amused to be the objects of study. They, too, ask questions, which give pause for thought.

‘And how will this make the world a better place?’ asks Alan Scarth. Tongue in cheek, perhaps. Back in the early days, back when he was just another face to be learned and filed away in the head, another name for the card index.

She has explained to him that her project is an element of a wider study that aims to gather data on the absorption of immigrant arrivals into isolated and enclosed communities. Communities such as townships in remote parts of Canada and the United States. Societies such as those of the Hebrides or of this Orkney island to which, over time, outsiders have come. To this end she must plot the network of relationships, she must seek to understand the structure of the society – its attitudes, its assumptions, its codes.

It won’t do anything to save the world, Stella replies. Or only in that it might be a tiny contribution to the process of understanding why human beings carry on as they do.

‘Well, never mind all that for now,’ says Alan Scarth. ‘It’s a beautiful evening. Come for a walk and I’ll show you the seals.’

Seals sing. She had not known that. They make this plaintive eerie musical sound – woo-woo-woo – which floats unearthly from the shore. Later, her head is full of this, and the bird cries and the waves creaming on to a crescent of silver sand. She thinks also of Alan Scarth’s question. But she thinks of it in drowsy comfort, not as a challenge but as an endorsement or her presence here. She feels as though she were a roosting bird, come homing in to this bare, stark, glorious place of wind and water. She has a little stone house in which she burns peat of an evening and lights the oil-lamp. She has oyster-catchers and curlews outside her windows and her nearest neighbour is half a mile away, a farmer by name of Alan Scarth.

A great bear of a man with a flaming mane of hair. Even his eyebrows are ginger-gold, and the hairs on his arms.

Hair, indeed, unites them on their first meeting. He interrupts Stella’s queries about island practices to point at her head – a stubby, calloused, peremptory forefinger. ‘You’ve an Orkney look about you. Were your parents from the north?‘

‘I’m afraid not,’ says Stella. Noting as she speaks that she is in some obscure way apologizing for this. And she has only been here a week. Such is the power of the place.

He seems to fill the room, that first time he ducks under the low lintel to ask if she is getting along all right. He sits there at the table with the old webbed yellow oilcloth, accepts a mug of tea and extracts from her an account of herself while she is barely aware of giving it. He is there – huge, intent, his blue eyes fixed upon her – and then he is gone. ‘I’ll be seeing more of you,’ he says from the door.

He is a farmer. But he is also a polymath, she is to discover, a Jack-of-all-trades. He is an archetype, the stuff from which farmers are made, a man free in time and space. He can turn his hand and his strength to anything. He is Hercules, he is a Viking. He can plough a field, row a boat, cut peat, mend a tractor. He can tell what the weather will do, and when and where the sea is safe. He knows about beef and sheep and crops, about plants and birds, about the ancestry or this green slab of land in a shining sea. Give him a piece of machinery and he will perceive at once how it works and see how to fix it if it doesn’t. He is a man who comes from other times, Stella realizes, from worlds where you had to be able to do anything or you would not survive. He is the frontiersman, the pioneer. If required, he could have discovered the North-West Passage, trekked to California, colonized Australia.

Stella seizes the day. The summer days in Orkney, which are twenty-four hours long, where sunset blends with dawn. She learns to love the weather. The wind and the mist. The sun that paints the sea with bands of turquoise. The rolling clouds that sweep great veils of rain across the island. She decides that heat and dust are not necessary adjuncts to study. One could become addicted to the social anthropology of a cold climate.

‘In the winter,’ says Alan Scarth, ‘you get the big sea fogs. There’s darkness at noon, in winter, some days. Then we light the lamps and read a book. You’ll like that, Stella.’

There are many books in Alan’s farmhouse. Rows of big solid sober books he had from his father. Dog-eared paperbacks that cascade from tables, that line the staircase. There is a kitchen with a stone-flagged floor on which the farm dogs slump, a dresser with ranks of flowered plates that belonged to his grandmother.

‘Alan, I’ll not be here in the winter,’ says Stella.

‘I can’t hear you,’ says he. ‘Terrible racket this old stove makes. Maybe I’ll get a new one. Now a Rayburn’s the thing, they say, isn’t it?‘

They say, too, that Alan Scarth could have had his pick or the girls. Stella learns this because those who are generous in response to her questionnaires, are sometimes so enthusiastic that the information given spills far beyond the parameters of the questions asked. Thus she hears much that is in theory irrelevant to her researches. She hears how young Annie Flett sneaked on to the boat and got herself to Kirkwall, aged ten. She hears how there’s been quite a few set their cap at Alan Scarth, but here he is, forty-five and still on his own.

‘Marry me,’ says Alan. This is the third time.

‘No,’ says Stella.

He stares at her, as though willpower might do the trick. As well it might – she looks away.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ says Stella. ‘Can’t you see? I don’t belong

here.’

‘You like it here. You like me. Don’t you?‘

‘Yes,’ says Stella. ‘Yes and yes. But that’s not enough.’

‘You’ll go south,’ says Alan. ‘And that’ll be that.’

‘I’ll come back,’ says Stella. ‘We’ll always be friends.’

Alan laughs. But he is not amused. ‘I don’t want us to be friends. I want us to be married.’

Alan Scarth has been south. He has been to university at Aberdeen, which was well enough, he says, the books he enjoyed and the beer wasn’t bad, but he didn’t stay there a minute longer than he had to. When Stella hears this, she nods in agreement. Of course, it could not be otherwise. She tries to imagine Alan in Aberdeen, in the grey streets. Like a great young bull he must have been, pent up.

And then his father had died, not long after, so he had to take over the farm. And his mother moved to Kirkwall, to be near her sister, who had married a Kirkwall man, way back. So there he was in the big farmhouse, on his own, with the girls eyeing him, and it, and the dresser with the flowered plates (this he does not state but it can be inferred).

Nothing like this has ever arisen before. It is a complication passed over in the textbooks, in the classic accounts of field-work. Nowhere does it say that emotional involvement with the subjects of study is inadvisable. Unprofessional. Indeed, nowhere does it say that you cannot marry them, should the question come up.

Furthermore, Stella cannot help but note from her gathering piles of notes, of cards, of names and dates, that incomers are indeed digested into this place. The extent and manner of this digestion is, after all, central to her project. People arrive. Not all of them leave again. And those who stay become a part of the texture of the place, in one way or another.

So?

She recognizes that she has landed at one of those alarming junctions in life, where decision is treacherous, where alternative existences stream into an unimaginable future. So she tries to avoid the issue by living from day to day, with relish, with fervour. She brims with energy, she could walk over the horizon, she feels.