Away (11 page)

As she moved through the grass, bent under her load that smelled of the sea, the word “Moira” moved with her, its two syllables becoming clearer as she lifted her face to the lake. She saw that he who called her swayed like the reeds and shimmered in the early-morning sun, and she slid the straps from
her shoulders and walked towards him with her spine straight and her throat open to the air. In her arms he was as cool and as smooth as beach stones, and behind him the water trembled and shone.

When he entered her she was filled with aching sorrow. His cool flesh passed through her body and became the skin she would wear inside her skin. She heard the rocks of lakes and oceans rattle in the cavity of his skull and then in the cavity of her own skull. A battalion of young men, their bright jackets burst open by battle, their perfect ribs shattered, their hearts broken apart, marched in his mind and then in her mind, and so she came to know all the sorrows of young men as she lay on the earth; their angry grief, their bright weapons, their spilled blood. Then across his forehead and hers sailed a pageant of all the ships, proud and humble, rough and fine, in which young men departed for the violence of the sea.

There were any number of ways for young men to die. Some had been flung by vicious currents against granite, some had watched the ocean’s ceiling close over them while the fish they had caught swam free of the nets, some had died violently out-side taverns after singing songs of love. Some took up arms against injustice and had been killed publicly on scaffolds or privately in ditches at the hands of oppressors, the poetry of politics still hot on their lips.

Dancers, poets, swimmers. Their distant blood ran in Mary’s veins until he who lay in her mind slipped back into the water.

As she walked towards the cottage she looked back once. The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun. She lifted her basket and moved across the field.

And yet, like the landscape, there was nothing smooth in her.

S
OME
weeks later, Osbert, tired of views and vistas, and stirred by the mania for natural history that was sweeping like an epidemic through England, began to collect the strange, delicate life-forms that existed in the coastal tidepools. He would place these fragile treasures in a bucket of sea water, and then carry them home to his new aquarium where they would survive for almost a week while he drew and painted them leisurely, in the relative comfort of the musty Puffin Court library. After eight days or so, however, these enigmatic creatures would rise to a scummy surface and begin to smell in such an unpleasant manner that he would be forced to pitch the whole putrid soup into the rose garden and head for the shore to search for fresher specimens. Granville had responded to his brother’s new interest by writing a poem entitled “Lament for a Sea Mollusc Trapped in Osbert’s Aquarium.”

When he was engaged in this activity Osbert paid little heed to the gorgeous small world he was disturbing. His specimens would gain significance and reality only when he got them home, put them under the microscope, and accurately reproduced them on paper. But by then, of course, they would be dead.

Today, as always, he worked carefully, scooping the creatures out of the pool with a glass jar. He lost some, those of such fragility that they came apart when subjected to anything other than the ebb and flow of the sea water that replenished their habitat. He cursed, then, quietly under his breath, and reached
for a larger, stronger example of the same species. The day was not warm and his hands were becoming numb from exposure to water. He thought, with great affection, of the fire he had left burning at Puffin Court, and then, intermittently, of the carriage he had left at the top of the cliffs.

He heard the woman before he saw her. He might have missed her altogether, the hiss of the sea covering most other noise, but the knife rasping on rock was an unfamiliar-enough sound to catch his attention and he turned just at the moment when her shawl, which might have disguised her, was blown back from her copper-coloured head.

Although she was thirty or forty yards in the distance, he knew immediately that she was the woman who had been away, and she for her part, sensing his scrutiny, held still, her knife in one hand and a dark mass of hanging weed clasped in the other. Across the sand, he could tell, she was looking steadily at him.

Osbert was greatly excited. Granville, he knew, would have been even more so. Whatever it was she was doing did not interest him at all, but he sensed that it might be a key to communication. Were this communication to take place he would desperately want to take notes, but had, alas, neither pencil nor paper with which to make a record of what she would say, if she would speak at all. In his agitation he dropped the jar he was holding in his hand and several sea anemones were left to perish on the sand. Without pausing to retrieve it, he walked across the beach towards the woman.

When he was close to the rock she stood near, Osbert smiled brightly. “Madam,” he said, “may I perhaps be of some assistance?”

“Assistance?” she asked.

Osbert was caught off guard by the fact that she had
answered his question with another question. He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, “I thought I might help.” He looked at the seaweed in her hand. “You are, I believe, removing specimens of this particular kind of seaweed.”

“Sir?”

“You have so large a quantity here, I thought …” Osbert looked down at the basket, then back towards the woman, “I thought … why
do
you have such a large quantity?” he blurted despite himself.

Replicas of Mary had gathered seaweed along the coast for hundreds of years, singly, and at certain seasons, in groups. She knew suddenly that this man had been blind to them, her people. “It’s for the field, sir, the patch … to make the plants grow properly.” She lowered her eyes and, remembering her shawl, brought it back up to cover her hair.

Osbert was greatly surprised by this piece of information but felt it prudent, under the circumstances, not to show his reaction. Instead, he assumed a sympathetic expression. “They haven’t been growing properly, have they?”

“No, sir,” she answered quietly.

This was not the direction that he had hoped the conversation would take, and he had virtually no idea how to move into the area where he would be able to glean some useful information for his folklore collection. He clasped his hands behind his back and began to rock from his heels to his toes. “Ah well,” he said, “things can only get better.” And then, when she said nothing in reply to this platitude, he abruptly asked, “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered quickly, “you are one of the gentry from up at the Big House.”

“Yes, yes … that’s it. And you, I believe, are O’Malley’s wife. Am I correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

A terrible silence followed this, during which Osbert felt it necessary to cough several times. Sea birds called overhead and, for no reason that he could fathom, they reminded him of the Hill of the Screaming on the silent, calm island that dominated the sea beyond this strand. Osbert had rarely felt so uncomfortable in the presence of another. He stared at the sea with great concentration as the woman stood patiently in front of him.

“Well then –” he began.

But, to his astonishment, she interrupted him. “Please, sir,” she said, “what was it that you were doing?”

“Doing?” he repeated. Curiosity was not a state of mind that he associated with these people. Imagination, superstition … but certainly not curiosity. For a moment he wondered if her question might not be impertinent, but before he could clearly define her behaviour, he found himself answering in much the same way that he might have had she been someone of his own class.

“Doing? Why, I was collecting specimens of sea anemones to observe and study … and to draw … when I take them home. Little creatures, you know, that live in tidepools.” There, he thought, there’s an end to it. Perhaps he could just come out and ask her directly, Do you have a daemon lover? But, to his increasing amazement, she persisted.

“Excuse me sir,” she ventured, “but why do you do that?”

“Why do I do that? Why do I do that?” He rocked again nervously on his heels. “I do that,” he answered finally and emphatically, “because I like to do that.”

“Oh,” she said.

“It passes the time,” he added, feeling foolish and then slightly piqued that he needed to justify himself to her. Not one
of his tenants had ever questioned him like this. “Well, then,” he said, again, most anxious now to be gone, “I suppose –”

She interrupted him again. “Sir,” she said, “I’d like to see them, the creatures you are talking about.”

He was almost annoyed. “Whatever for?” he demanded.

“To see why you search for them and look at them there in the water.”

Osbert had a brief, inexplicable memory of himself as a child, standing in a large, cold room with a smoking fire at one end, holding up a single sheet of paper towards his mother who was giving it but cursory attention. “What has Granville been doing?” she had asked. The drawing had been of a tenant’s cabin with a corpulent chicken dominating the roof. His mother, he now realized, was interested in neither the subject matter nor her child’s rendering of it. “Why,” she had asked, “have you not been drawing your Cave Walk?” There was something in the open, questioning face of the woman before him that brought to mind the child that he had been then.

“There are many different kinds,” he said, “and they can be very difficult, sometimes, to see.”

“Yes,” she said, as if in agreement.

They squatted together on the sand within a rocky enclosure, whispering and pointing to things that were almost invisible, this strong communication between a peasant woman and a gentleman being so nearly impossible that neither thought consciously about it until later. Osbert told the woman, whose name he discovered was Mary, the Latin names for the many species that he knew, and she listened attentively, then asked, to his great private delight, if the Romans themselves collected and drew tiny sea creatures. He wondered how she, a poor
woman, knew about the Romans at all, but he answered that there was one, the first great natural historian, who would have been interested.

“It’s lovely,” she said, “a garden like this. Colours I’d never thought about. See how calm and clear … like a mirror with our faces in it, except that behind our faces there’s a whole world of things alive and being beautiful.”

Osbert decided that he would remember that line about the mirror and the worlds for Granville. Then, uncharacteristically, a desire came over him to keep the knowledge of the line to himself.

The silences between them as they looked into the pool were comfortable now. The woman, it seemed, was enchanted by the fragility and gracefulness of what she saw so that words came to her slowly. “See how that one moves,” she said, once, “as if it were unfolding some great secret there in the water.”

Osbert looked, and it was true, the anemone was unfurling itself, tentacle by tentacle, its movements a slow dance, as if it were revealing each mysterious aspect of itself ceremonially, and for the first time. The landlord was on his hands and knees now beside the pool where he could see, not only his face and that of the woman reflected, but also the shadow of her hand passing back and forth along the floor of the tiny pond. “It’s remarkable,” he agreed.

“Small weeds,” she said, moving her hand, here and there, tentatively across the top of the water now, “in the same current. They know each other, I think, these weeds and these creatures.”

Osbert smiled at this suggestion. The rough weave of a shawl such as the woman wore had never been in such close contact with Harris tweed, but Osbert did not think of this. Everything about him had been manufactured somewhere else, in another country; everything, including his bones and the cellular
construction of his flesh. She, however, had been built out of the materials of this country. She’s like a child, he thought, the way she looks at things.

“I would like,” she said, “to be able to walk in a field like this. These colours. These dances.”

“I will capture some specimens for you,” announced Osbert, generosity rising in him like a tide, “and you may take them home with you and watch them there … for a while.”

The woman did not answer but rose, instead, to her feet. Then she shook her head. “Why would I take this world apart so that it could never be again?” she asked, looking down at Osbert, at the tidepool. “If I could go into this world I would go and come away again and leave it all undisturbed – the small caves, the beautiful creatures. I would take none of that away with me.”

Osbert, who had been left by her in a ridiculous posture on all fours, rose with as much dignity as he could muster and began to brush sand and other detritus from the knees of his trousers. “Well, then …” he said, embarrassed.

But she laid her hand on his arm. “Please,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a curse I used to have that I thought was gone … these speeches. It’s just when I saw the little pool … I’m sorry.” She looked at him with such earnestness and genuine concern that his heart, much to his surprise, warmed to her again. “And,” she added, “I’ve never looked like this, at a tidepool, and you took the time to show me. I’m grateful.” And then she added, “Sir.”

She bent to lift the creel and walked away. When Osbert looked at the strength of her back and shoulders, admiration passed through him for the pride in her. It did not occur to him to be in love with her but a totally unfamiliar emotion stirred in him so that he wanted to call her back, to put his hand on her shoulder, to acknowledge the brief flash of understanding
she had granted him. But it was useless, he knew – their worlds divided the second that she had stepped away from him. Half-heartedly he knelt again to remove a few more specimens from the pool, but her words stayed on his mind; not what she said, exactly, but the way she had spoken of visiting the closed world of the pool, its dances, the landscape of it. When he looked up again both she and her basket were gone.