Debatable Land Page 3

  The relief from my mother’s clarity offered by such a girl set my life’s habit, he thought. Have I always to take the longer road? My parents worked to give me everything that made me strange to them. I hanker now for the simplicity you can no more work for than faith, which it seems to me they had.

  Light was changing its weight and pulling the sky out down towards the edge of the sea at the end of that first day out of Tahiti. At the bow of the boat the anchor chain girned with a faint but surprisingly serious sound, as though the stone knight on a tomb were waking and beginning heavily to stir in his burdensome carapace, the stone conjunctions of his armour beginning painfully to grate into articulation. In the fo’c’sle it was less easy to forget the boat’s vulnerability. Although he felt he would settle into the sleep-fracturing watch system after only a few days of it, Alec was still constantly nervous aboard, with two forms of unease. Among people still strange to him he felt a protracted and almost physical unease that was the tense social pain of a term begun, or a long stay in another family. The greater unease was a fear of falling short of some still-unpresented ordeal. In trying to keep himself ready at all times to respond to some practical mishap that might smite the boat, Alec chafed at and wore down the distance he kept habitually between himself and others. He wondered if the utter unfamiliarity he had forced upon himself would not merely force himself more into his own company.

  An excited, thin-skinned hypochondriacal trance, like the sensation that precedes flu, enclosed Alec during his first days at sea among the Society Islands. That there was a right way to do things in this ordered, constrained community was clear, but he watched so closely and so much that the other men did not feel easy with him, and he was overcome by the self-distaste of the intelligent mimic. He had hoped that intelligence and practical ability would tell him what to do, but many of the words were new. Nothing could release him from his fearful sense of impersonating a man on a boat at sea. He felt a gap in himself where instinct should have been, a gap intelligence took time to fill.

  He awoke to a roaring that seemed to pull downwards, and a looser crunching grinding, accompanied by the hard sudden noise of a big rebellious engine thrown into reverse. His open-mouthed dreams had been full of talk and tinkling and the booming of men; he realised these sounds came with the peaceful down-hauling of sail.

  What was afoot now though was not peaceful. In the bow the anchor had thundered down, but there was a twitching in the boat. Her anchor was dragging, poiseless and lame. The engine was holding the boat off rocks or coral. So much he had picked up from listening to the talk.

  Had they left him to sleep because he was no use? No one could have remained asleep, and Alec could not pretend to have. He went above, emerging from the companionway with a face full of feigned alertness. Between the shrouds of the tall mast he saw, perfectly set and disorderedly edgy like an uncut gem, doubled in the milky sea, the raked sides and cleaving shadows of the island of Moorea.

  ‘It’s holding,’ said Logan. In these moments of expert flurry, his American accent came through, manly, assertive. Solid behind the wheel he spun to perfection even with his left hand, he set his white beauty of a boat to rest in the skirts of the high island.

  Elspeth looked from time to time at her husband with a peculiar air of rehearsal and artificiality. It was not possible to imagine that this boat was in any way hers. Gabriel seemed more adult although she was by perhaps eighteen years the younger, as she sauntered yet executed the right moves under Logan’s and Elspeth’s eyes, that watched her without either watcher engaging the other’s regard.

  The sun was yellow and oval, dropping visibly as the sky turned thinly green. Towards the sun moved wide lavender shadows on the smooth sea, stepping towards a rim between the sea and the sky. The sides of the island shivered with rich, defined vegetation of a green now almost devoid of yellow. Three hundred yards from them, the island’s shore seemed to pull the darkness in towards the land, reining veils of shadow in from off the sea.

  The sun was sucked down to the sea in the last degrees of its declining, just falling as the air tipped and formed into drifts of breeze.

  The green flash will come now, Alec thought to himself, and I will know I am in the south. The sun should fall down through the sea and show a momentary stripe of light behind the ocean, as though you could cut down through the sea with a knife of light. He hoped to see an orderly cross-section of teeming ocean, laid bare and rational like past history set down to be understood.

  What he saw was the sun, yellow in its moment of joining the briefly ultramarine horizon. The sun fell into the sea, shooting through from behind it a deep beaming triangle of burning green, a green flash through the long water it had fallen far within. Though cool, the green was blinding and it lingered in yellow lashes of light behind the eyes. A red sunset would have soothed; there was no setting to this sun, just a hot falling and then whole darkness, momentarily black and full of the aftermath light that had gone, without, yet, new light.

  The sky returned to purple and the island became a profile only. Venus came up, red Mars behind it. Dim Jupiter began the night.

  Inside the reef, Ardent Spirit hung in the water bright like a star in the sky, but held in her place, at last unmoving.

  Nick began to put down hooks for night lines to get fish, as they would every night they anchored, to keep up food supplies without using storage space. He put a heavy hook down you could have hung an ox’s carcass from, baiting it with a phosphorescent rubber squid.

  ‘Outside the reef there are sharks. In Nuku Hiva there are more fishermen with one leg than with two. Some of the kids there are stitched all over, cobbled really, you’d say.’ Sandro’s New Zealand voice kept his remarks light. The continual interrogative in his tone made the words buoyant.

  ‘I’ve seen a leg took down to the bone by those rows of teeth,’ said Logan, ‘and I never wish to again. It’s the way the shark’s skin snags and draws blood that gets me, every bit of the shark made to draw blood. I’ve seen a man . . .’

  ‘Let me get you a drink,’ said Gabriel, something nurselike in her tone. The plain words in the star-enfolded place seemed to make briefly a family of the individuals at sea.

  ‘Tonight, and as long as we stay here, we sleep all night in preparation for the open ocean. After that, once we’re making long passages, it’s on to the watch system, in pairs, four hours on, eight off, unless the weather comes and we need all hands,’ said Logan, pouring out naval rum. Its high alcoholic tang and sugar-and-tar smell filled the night, overlaying salt even.

  Later, when Alec got up in the night, he did not know the hour, but he pulled himself up on his hands through the fo’c’sle hatch. Just six feet from him in the bow leaned Logan looking up at the stars like a man making a vow.

  Or he could have been counting, Alec decided, back in his own cramped berth in the fo’c’sle. He did not know why he had this gentle but piercing impulse to trim Logan’s heroism, his romantic scale. It was the satirical deflation of a son towards a father, the snobbish non-combatant squeamishness he felt towards soldiers, heroes and other romantics. How else, though, to face the sea?

  When Alec was eight he went through into a dark room, the dark room, the Camera Obscura. It was on a shepherded school trip to the heart of Edinburgh, the cooler city of the seven hills. Their destination was up by the Castle which sits aslant its defunct volcano, set across a small valley, containing the railway, from the main eighteenth-century thoroughfare, Princes Street. Small shoals of schoolchildren in coloured blazers moved constantly through the ‘sights’ of the city. A city so rich in itself could be said to be all sights.

  They were learning their history, the history Scots learn with different heroes and different victories from the English. They were taught to expect perfidy and misprision from an Englishman, should they meet one. Alec knew how they talked, from off the wireless and from imitating them. They spoke as though their chins were noses, like horses.

 
; Alec was in a group of clean small boys in shorts, their socks held up by strong elastic, their temperaments pugnacious, impressionable and not yet priggish. As an identifiably bookish child he had more enemies than committed friends but he was not soft. Already he had learnt the self-reliance of the only child and the banked arrogance of the single-minded one. Boys are more loyal in childhood than girls, something to do with girls’ rehearsing for change and adaptation and boys’ preference for consistency in practical matters, so Alec had at that point the friend he had known all his life, who lived next door. In the street the boys were not so close, for Hector’s physical dash outstripped Alec’s own, but at school Alec solved Heck’s work since he found it uncomfortable to concentrate.

  Hector was an adept at childhood, I realise now, thought Alec, and I had not the knack. He was a sprite, with thick red hair that stood up like a crown of leaves. Will that hair be white now, or fallen? Red hair burns out so young. Alec poured more water into a toothmug. It tasted of mint and cigarettes, not salt.

  The many steps up to the dark room were themselves dark and the boys bumped up them bouncing their satchels, more interested in being out of school than in being where they were. Alec had no idea of what they had been brought to see. Heck had a metal musical instrument, called a kazoo, which he had been told would be confiscated if it appeared again. It was a flat, squared-off tube about five inches long, with a circular mesh hole an inch from the top, out of which, if you equipped it with a disc of hard lavatory paper and hummed, an amplified version of the humming came. Heck would give kazoo performances on the street, writhing and dipping and leaning back from the waist, darting forward suddenly like a striking snake when he needed applause. The only pleasant sensation whatsoever produced by the kazoo was a faint buzz against the lips of the hummer, a kind of first-kiss ache, it now seemed to Alec as he recalled it, the thin skin prickling with too much minute sensation.

  Heck had the kazoo in his blazer. Alec knew it was there and that his friend relished offending where he most especially should not. Alec’s lifelong reluctance to disobey rules was already itching at him, so he was edgy as the group settled in the cramped upper room, the Camera Obscura.

  In the dark they stood around a low white bowl, about a yard wide, while a tubby man, dressed in the civvy uniform of a commissionaire, tried to get the measure of them, like someone shaking a bag of sugar for lumps.

  ‘Here in this room you will see your own home town, brought by a periscope and mirrors down into this white dish. I shall indicate the places I mention with the baton I hold here in my hand.’ He tapped the white stick thrice in the bowl, into which light at once fell from a tight point above it so that the children stood about an inverted cone of light. The light was not electric or warm. It was the light of day. It seemed refreshing in that room that smelt of serge and boys.

  ‘Very well. The mirrors, Ian, please.’ A cranking sound came from a corner. A small man in the brown overall ironmongers wore at that time looked up with the furtively busy movement of a rodent. He was turning a handle whose noise described its effect, the circular motion pressing up into, disengaging and raising metal bars attached to plates that moved with a squeaking sigh and a more precarious, delicate sound, like teeth in one’s own head.

  ‘Thank you, Ian. That’ll be the mirrors marrying now. Tighten up there, Ian, till I see it clear. There we are. The city of Edinburgh, boys, laid out in a bowl.’

  Not the whole city at once, but parts of it in turn spilt down by the mirrors into the bowl, a tour the boys could not have accomplished on their inattentive feet. The colours were the same as when the boys had left the world outside of the Camera Obscura. The quality of high brightness they had was on account of the darkness from which the eye looked. There was no impression of the idealised colour of film, its incipient sunsetty glow. The colours were true to the tabby, pewter, lilac and soot of the slate and smoke of the city.

  ‘One mile in length runs Princes Street whose stores are used by the highest in the land. Over here the North British Hotel, whose clock you will observe is a punctual five minutes fast. Passengers at Waverley Station therefore,’ he waved the baton, ‘are less likely to miss their trains. The two great galleries of Scotland are here at the foot of the Mound, sorely in need of a clean as you will observe from the state of the Queen.’ The baton flicked a youthful coal-black Queen Victoria seated on the roof of a low-columned building on whose black steps a man scraped at a fiddle. No noise, of course, came.

  ‘The Scott Monument further down Princes Street is a memorial to a great son of Scotland the Laird of Abbotsford. You will see him at his books inside this,’ he took a breath as though about to use a phrase from the French, ‘highly ornamented example of the neo-Gothic.’

  Ian turned his crank again and the sound came as a shock. It was peculiar to see the town alive but not to hear its life. As though taken over by the invasive silence to be found in involuntary church going, the children redoubled their silence, if you can double nothing.

  Alec began to ache, not with boredom so much as concentration. The spin of the greasy iron sounded like the chain of a playground swing, slowed only just bearably. Alec was nervous in the comfortable way a beloved child of regular habits feels hunger. He was about to know how to allay what ailed him.

  The man in his uniform began again. The decorations on his chest were slim bits of colour like a girl’s dress caught in a door hinge each time he bent forward into the cone of light.

  ‘Here of course we have Princes Street Gardens, open to all for recreation. The world-famous floral clock may be seen just here, giving the correct time in many colourful blooms, kept fresh by careful replanting. Only in the depth of winter does it rest. Are there any questions now?’

  Since a couple were embracing next to the congested planting of the floral clock, one of the boys had to speak, to release the tension.

  Heck asked, ‘Is it the flowers keep the clock going or the other way about?’ At that moment the door of a small house on a stick set behind the floral clock burst open and a stiff wooden bird was ejected. It bobbed three times. The sound it made, inaudible to the boys, apparently shocked the couple whose deep embrace they had been following in detail. The man had his hand behind the woman’s head as though he was injecting her with his face. When the bird sprang out, they leapt apart as if they had just found out they had been making a mistake.

  It was a surprise to Alec to see that neither of these people was distinguishable as a person who had recently been kissing. He thought it must show somehow.

  ‘The gardeners keep the clock going. And here we have the Mound itself, aye, Ian, right you are, heated underground in winter, boys, as you may know, by a warm blanket lying just beneath the surface, recently installed at no small cost.’ A maroon City of Edinburgh bus was straining like a beetle up the steep hill towards the Old Town, leaving the Castle off to its right. It was a cold mistless day with a hidden glare of sun that from time to time flashed off glass or metal as they made their cooped tour of an airy city into which they had never roamed so far, whose sea they saw at the one reach of their Olympian view, whose lion-shaped presiding hill, Arthur’s Seat (Why is Holyrood? Because it looks up Arthur’s Seat. Alec thought the riddle before he meant to, out of habit laid too long to wipe out), and dark crags at the other.

  At some point during that afternoon a ladybird blundered on to the dish where the city displayed itself tantalisingly bowlful by bowlful. Alec realised that he had been walking about the streets with the same unaware confusion as the insect now showed, marching through and over people, houses, churches, gardens, schools, law courts, graveyards, libraries, as though only it was real and they were just light thrown by a mirror. It stood unaware among the thorny arms of the crown on top of the High Kirk of St Giles. It meandered down the wide, granite-laid streets of the New Town, before falling over the edge and out of his sight into the daytime darkness.

  Most peculiar of all was the silence from these
streets, whose surface was of setts, blocks of stone laid brickwise, a surface that, outside of the Camera Obscura, gave richness to the sound of vehicles and a stony literal accompaniment to the progress of people or horses.

  Here was their city, voiceless, displayed. The silence kept Alec’s attention and enclosed him. When Hector took out his kazoo and began to polish it on his backside, Alec was for a moment in terror of the noise he knew must come, as though he had made a decision for life to choose sight above hearing.

  Under the boat the water divided and remet itself around her keel. The two lappings of the water on each side of the boat were separately audible, and beneath them the deeper licking the sea made at the island’s hidden reaches ushered a lower and graver sound over the sea’s surface, under the talk and human movement on the boat.

  By the time there came tugs on the night lines set for a night catch, everyone slept, Logan in the sail bin among his floating beauty’s robes and veilings, and his wife in their cabin with a book, open, over her wet, shut face.

  Alec’s withheld, inland demeanour began young. Not long after his visit to the dark upper room, the Camera Obscura, he started to take an interest (as a man might take a drink) in places. The habit was not one he was brought up to, and at first he did not know how to look or what to look at, but shortly he realised that Edinburgh was full of secret places.

  These places were the first rival of his mother. In them it is possible that she felt the first move of her son away from herself and her own controlled despairs. His interest in houses and things she could not separate from what she feared to be an interest in the complex, subtle, fierce life of property and those who had it. She feared the lullaby the handsomeness of property might croon to his conscience.

  ‘Will I not come with you?’ Mairi asked her son sometimes, though she did not want to look all day at grey buildings that glinted in the same dead way as mountains of fish. Going up to town suited her for an ice or an outing, but not for tramping up hills and staring down them and asking sour old women to get a look at their ceilings.