Orkney Read online

  Orkney

  Sackville, Amy

  Granta (2013)

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  * * *

  Orkney

  AMY SACKVILLE

  For my grandparents, Nancy and Joseph

  … the portrait of a story attacked from all sides, that attacks itself and in the end gets away.

  Hélène Cixous, Stigmata

  ‘Oh, she’ll be back. That dear one

  Is gold of our corn,

  She’s Orkney rain and spindrift …’

  George Mackay Brown,

  ‘Gossip in Hamnavoe: About a Girl’

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Acknowledgements

  Also By Amy Sackville

  Copyright

  Sunday

  She’s staring out to sea now. My young wife. There she stands on the barren beach, all wrapped up in her long green coat, among the scuttle and clatter of pebbles and crabs. She stares out as the water nears her feet and draws back, and when that soft and insistent suck of the tide gets close enough to slurp at her toes she shuffles herself up the shore. Soon the beach will be reduced to a strip of narrow sand and she will be forced to retreat to the rocks; and then, I think, she’ll come back to me.

  In the meantime, I watch from the window, as she stares out to sea.

  Where shall I take you, I asked, when we are wed? ‘The sea,’ she answered. ‘Will you take me to the sea?’ Oh, I said grandly, oh I will pour out oceans for you. I will take you to the vast Pacific calm, California, Japan; or to the warm waters that Asia cradles; Indian, Atlantic, which would you like? We can go to the centre of the old known world, sail the wine-dark seas Odysseus sailed and lose ourselves among the islands, and in the evenings we’ll come ashore and eat on a terrace by the beach, simply and well, with our fingers. We’ll swim together naked in the last of the sun, as the long day sets, like innocents … But at this, her patient smile was frozen and she stopped me, horrified. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I won’t go in. I can’t swim. I’m scared of the water. I can’t go in.’

  I kissed her head, smoothed her smooth white hair. Well then, wherever you want, I said, undeterred; we’ll seek out the softest snowy sands of the tropics, and you can lay out upon them, paler still; or we’ll float upon the surface of the Dead Sea and let salt leach our skins and have no fear of sinking; or we’ll sail the unfathomed fjords in the chill dawn, and admire their depths from the safety of the deck; wherever you wish, that’s where we’ll go. ‘North,’ she said, ‘take me north.’ Very well, I said, with a deep bow that she laughed at, with a courtly kiss of her fingers; if that be your bidding. Where the waves rush in iron-grey and unforgiving, like the cavalry of old wars. Very well. North.

  She was born here, she says, on one of these tiny ragged islands. But she says nothing remains of her father’s family, and she left when she was still a child, crossed the strait and moved south of the border; and when we came to choose our Orkney she couldn’t say which it was she hailed from. And so, trusting to predestination, eschewing tourist offices, internet searches and travel guides, she took a pin and, eyes screwed tight shut and neck straining to prove that her head was turned, circled above the map laid out on the table and without hesitation came down on our chosen isle, our fate decided by a child’s game or a witch at play. Not once, I think, did she fear that she might plunge us into the ocean with that gull’s dive of her pointed hand; it did not occur to her that she might miss land altogether and send us smashing into the waves, forced to make our honeymoon among the seals and the fishes. Her aim was unerring, and with that blind leap she brought us here, to surely the loneliest, the rockiest, the most desolate island that has yet been mapped, in this or any other water. The rusted mauve of the flattened flora, the dark grasses on the treeless earth. And this house just as she hoped for, on an unsheltered shore, creaking and rattling and whistling with the wind off the sea, whispering and moaning. A hulking ghost of another island somewhere in the mist to the west, and looking out to the north, nothing but the bird-scattered, crashing ocean, and beyond to where it meets the sky; a line called the hilder, she says, in these parts; a line sometimes luminous, sometimes obscure.

  Just as she is – luminous, obscure. There she stands.

  Yesterday morning, at home, I woke beside her for the first time. Well, that is not quite true; last night I slept beside her for the first time, but by dawn I had woken beside her a dozen times, a hundred times, sometimes from a sleep so shallow I couldn’t call it waking. Again and again I turned to find another body in my bed, an unfamiliar warmth alongside my own, and wondered where I was and what I had done, before remembering and sinking again into a grateful doze – only to wake again moments later. Each time, as the brown abstraction of my surroundings resolved into the ordinary shapes of my own bedroom, there was still that body beside me, a living residue of an impossibly optimistic dream. All night, the rise and fall of her form, the snuffle and snore. Once, she muttered something I couldn’t understand; she muttered and rolled and even giggled, twice. A secret amusement, a private joke. She slept with the covers pulled to her chin. And finally, I checked the bedside clock and there was only ten minutes before the alarm was due to sound. I watched the little frowns that crossed her brow, pale in that colourless hour before dawn; the pucker at the corners of her lips, the halting sigh of her dreaming. I wanted to let her sleep on, this stranger in my bachelor’s double bed, sagging on one side from too many years of unequal use, the other half buoyant under her body. But it couldn’t be helped; we were to rise early to catch our train. I switched off the alarm before it rang, and woke her gently a few minutes later, with a kiss and a cup of tea ready and a whisper in her ear. Time to get up, Mrs ________.

  ‘Good morning, Professor,’ she mumbled. What were you dreaming? I asked, sitting on the bed and stroking her hair back. She turned her face up from the pillow, rubbed a wrist across her nose and eyes like a child, bleary, surfacing, accepting the cup with a smile. ‘Jellyfish, I think,’ she murmured. ‘Lots of jellyfish. All pale and round like fringed moons. I was floating in among them. They were tickling.’ Ah, that was it, I said, that was what made you laugh. ‘Did I?’ she said; and then, suddenly accusatory: ‘Was it you? Tickling?’ I? No! I replied, mock-innocent; in truth I wish it had been, and not some lunar interloper, slinking over her unconscious skin. Pulsing and falling all about her, the silver tendrils of her hair twining with theirs. I can’t bear to cede even an inch of her in flesh or thought, now that I have her; it seems cruel that there should be these unconscious hours that I can take no part in. How ridiculous, to envy this flotilla of dream-figments. This fluther. She taught me the word; I suspect her of making it up. She swears it is true. ‘A whole fluther of them,’ she said. She was delighted to have remembered it; it pleased her all the way to the station, a little tickled smile playing over her mouth, a little giggle as I tickled in the back of the taxi.

  Shall I sneak out there now, over the rocks and onto the beach, sneak up behind her and tickle her? But perhaps her mood has changed. I can’t tell if she wants to be alone or if she’s hoping I might join her. I haven’t yet learned how to gauge the hours apart. We’ve been happily trammelled up together for two days now. It’s possible she wants a little solitude.

  She keeps a safe distance between herself and the water; but sometimes a wave will surprise her, building under the surface
and suddenly breaking tall just as it comes to the beach and making a grab for her, and then she leaps back and stands a little further off. I cannot tell from here, from the angle of her head, if she is curious, amused, watchful, thoughtful, thoughtless. Not a thought in her head, perhaps, just the sound of the sea, just the wash and glint of it.

  We came to our island by land, by air, by sea, setting out early on the east coast route to Edinburgh. She grew quiet on the train as we left the gentler moors behind us, her forehead resting against the window. As we passed through Northumberland, her mother’s country, I watched her eyes skitter as her gaze caught and was repeatedly torn from some stricken root or crag or hollow. This hard, sparse corner of England she once called home. She left for the last time this summer and has no intention of going back, she says. I asked if she misses it, but she didn’t answer, only looked out as if at any moment her ancestral queens would breast a ridge and ride out of the blue mist; whether wistful or apprehensive I couldn’t determine, having only the curve of her turned cheek to go on.

  She was quiet, too, as we made our way through the airport; we were, I think, a little shy of each other. There are so many of these commonplace rituals we have yet to share. For my part, wishing to seem at ease, well-travelled, adept in the shedding of jacket and belt, the flip of identification, the casual presentation of boarding pass. Perhaps she felt the same. Perhaps she had some other reason to be pensive. I found myself unable to ask, or to reassure her; we seemed exposed, unreal, or too real, in the shadowless glare. I kept a hand on the small of her back and guided her, unspeaking, through the terminal until we reached the deserted departure lounge, at the furthest end of the building. She was smiling but preoccupied as we made our way onto the tiny plane and held my hand with quick, nervous glances at the three other passengers, all travelling alone, all keeping to themselves; two wiry middle-aged women and a stocky blond man with a reddish beard, his face set, it seemed to me, in a permanent, averted leer. I made sure we sat behind him, and away from all eyes. On the runway, accelerating, I felt the tendons of her wrist wind tighter until I thought she might snap beside me; as we left the ground she let out a breath, kissed me, and whispered excitedly, ‘Orkney!’

  Once airborne, she became animated, chattering and charming, looking out of the window and turning to me to exclaim over what she saw – I barely know what it was that so thrilled her, her low voice muted by the loud whirr of the turbines. But I watched her and I felt the grip of her hand on my wrist, and lip-read a discourse on firths and mountains, I think, on low and highlands, snow and islands … and I circled the pit of her palm with my fingers and watched her mouth moving, absorbed in the bite and flash of her teeth, quite disregarding the view. And at last I could not resist bending to her ear to ask, are you happy? She drew back, beaming, leaned in to reply: ‘Happy? I’m exulting.’ Effervescing. Jubilant. ‘I’m in raptures,’ she cried, ‘I’m rapturous. I am,’ she said, with a gesture at the window and the bright silken skeins of cirrus below, ‘as they say, on cloud nine.’ And low in my ear, a murmur against my jawbone: ‘Ecstatic.’ I conceded the game, I could think of no better word. I wonder, is there any word at all to come near her? She looked back to the window and I watched her, ecstatic, as we began to descend over a jigsaw scatter of low-lying islands.

  At the Mainland harbour we found a little ferryboat with a captain who would take us to our own island, the last leg of our long journey, as the wintry sun was sinking. A thin, gaunt man with a gloomy demeanour, and the darkness of the ocean in his glower. As I talked, he kept his eyes on my wife; she, in turn, seemed to subject him to a subtle scrutiny, from lowered blue lids. I showed him our map, described the cottage on the shore, hoping that he might be willing to take us to this end of the known earth. ‘Aye, the noust hoose, ah know it,’ he said, as if many others had ventured there before us. Which I find impossible to believe is true.

  He peered at her face as he helped her on board – my bold lass barely faltering, and not looking down. She was wearing a hat, pulled low, her hair tucked up in it. ‘Is this yir dochter?’ he asked. My wife, I said, she is my wife. Only yesterday, she stood at my side and gave her hand, and we emerged together into a cold, bright October afternoon, I raffishly resplendent in my old tux, she shivering in silk. How lovely she was in the autumn light, her skin opalescent, her clavicle sharp with the cold that tensed her shoulders, and a flush on her chest despite it; her hair ablaze in the sun. Her silver head beside my grey one. I imagined the people passing on the pavement, in cars, thinking us a sweet old couple, catching a better glimpse as they drew near enough to make her out and puzzling over it as they went by. I held her closer and indulged a gloat. No family on either side. Mine all gone, hers uninvited, and all mention avoided; her father wasn’t there to give her away. He gave her away long ago, she says. But no matter. We have no need for others, now.

  I said nothing of all this to the boatman. I said simply, she is my wife. At this, his tremendous eyebrows, which swept like the wings of a great seabird over his forehead, almost touched his hairline. She smiled her most glittering smile, and I thought I caught for a moment, in the flash of his glare, a lust as if he coveted the silver in her eyes. But then, he turned back to his boat with a frown, tamping his pipe with a jab of his square-tipped finger. A pipe, I thought. Of course. Why not.

  And it should not surprise me, his taciturn censure; how we must look, after all. I towering, twice her size across the shoulders, cragged and steel-grey; she almost as tall but so slight and young, so strange and pale. Her unlined face turned to me, attending only to me; doting, even. As absorbed as she ever was in the lecture hall, and I proud and perhaps a little proprietary. Ours is a marriage of minds, I wanted to tell him. But why should I feel the need to excuse it? She is a grown woman. If she can see past the forty years between us – almost forty, not quite – if she can love me for them, even, and not in spite, then the rest of the world can go blind, for all that it matters to me.

  She wears both rings on a chain about her neck, hidden under shirt and jumper and high-buttoned coat collar – a diamond solitaire and a silver band. Both were slipped on with great ceremony, and slipped off again as soon, I think, as it seemed polite to do so. She apologises. It is uncomfortable, she says, for her to wear a ring. She splays her hand; between each of those narrow, knuckly, fine-tapered fingers, there is a trace of webbing. A blue-veined membrane stretched between. You were born for the sea, I tell her. ‘And yet I can’t swim.’

  So I bought her a silver chain, and so it is that my wife goes into the world unbanded on my arm, which lends credence to the common assumption that she is my maligned, molested daughter, not my spouse; and I am a monster to flaunt it in their faces … well, she is not my daughter, and she is a grown woman, and I shall flaunt it and be damned. I tilted her chin up and kissed her; I kissed her neck, her collarbone, and nuzzled up under the rim of her hat to kiss the hidden place behind her ear, and we tangled into a knot of limbs and scarves and twining fingers. I cast a glance at our captain. Ours is a marriage of minds, indeed, but of much else besides, I thought. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  He cast off and I felt the grip of those dear webbed fingers on my sleeve, and the other hand twisted through mine as if she’d break it, and she stood there at the rail, rigid, and stared straight ahead to the horizon, not looking down. Her pointed pale profile and her hair escaping, strands of it whipping in the wind, and her eyes wide like whirlpools; and I imagined some Kraken, dripping slime and black ooze and sea-wrack, roaring out of his deep green sunken grotto to claim her. These pen-and-ink visions, an illustration from some glossy colour plate; she could be lifted out of my library. She infects me with a fin-de-siècle fever, her streaming eyes, bloodless cheeks, high colour rising at the temples.

  After half an hour, we began to list and rock, the sea heaving under us and shrugging us off; the light that seeped through the layered cloud from the setting sun was a late, jaundiced yellow. ‘Yin’s a
skyuimy lift, aye,’ said our captain, nodding at the sky. ‘Is yir yink trowie?’ I begged his pardon. ‘The wife. She’s no weel,’ he translated; and it was true that her face, in that light, had a sickly hue. ‘I’m fine,’ she said through clenched jaw, lips set in a grim line, her eyes fixed on the island that was at last approaching. A solid mass of black, emerging from the glinting darkness of the water. We rounded a high headland and came to the northern shore; a few sparse-spread yellow lights beckoning, offering warmth and sanctuary, and one of them our own. And so we arrived at our honeymoon island, bidding farewell to the captain and stepping unsteadily on to the little dock as the evening purpled into gloaming, a slip of crescent moon rising, and the boat roared off until the sound of the waves drowned the engine. And then the sea was all that we could hear, and she assured me she felt better, and we stood for a moment listening in the violet darkness, and then raggled up the beach, ready for bed after a long day’s journeying. Despite her brave insistence that she would not stumble, I lifted her and carried her to the door triumphant, revelling in her lightness and my own abiding strength. New wives, after all, must be lifted over the threshold. Like witches, so I’m told. She is an endlessly fascinating fund of such trivia.

  We were met at the cottage, as promised, by a Mrs Odie. Her bright wind-hardened eyes had tracked our progress. ‘Just a peedie lassie …’ she muttered as we drew nearer; I growled under my breath a little, feeling the pin-pricks of her peering as she moved aside to let us in. An old Orkney woman with the face of a weather-beaten bannock, and that gimlet stare out of poked holes in the dough. I set my wife down over the threshold, and she followed us in what I took to be mute moral outrage. But after all, the fire was lit, and there was brisket and bread and thick warm lentil soup, and her exit was gracious enough in her own stumping way. And then we were left alone.