by Katie Munnik
Then Stanley took my hand and kissed my mouth.
Beyond everything else, the vows we made in the manse, the ring, even my pleasure in the dark, beyond it all, that was the moment our marriage started. His lips were dry, his mouth open as if in speech. Or as if he would drink from me and be filled. And we would fill each other. Everything begins from there.
2
I MIGHT START WITH MARRIAGE, BUT STANLEY WOULD begin with stone. Ancient Archaean gneiss, limestone muds and Hutton’s unconformity. Places where the rock was laid bare and the age of the earth could be seen. Then he would list the eras. Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian. Storms that lasted for millennia. Landmasses emerging, shaped by mud and sand, pulling and gathering oceans. Layers in rock grew like tree rings. Wide alluvial plains stretched. All these first facts Stanley taught me in the cool evening air, his mouth on my neck, whispering, the hollow of my throat filled with the names of ancient lands. Laurentia who would be Scotland. Avalonia, her southern suitor. They pulled apart four hundred million years ago, then crashed together again, a compelling marriage. Folding, faulting, uplifting, eroding. Inland sand dunes, the building of hills.
Perhaps foundations are important, too.
When we first met, I was standing on a ladder, counting boxes of powdered milk. There had been a recipe in the newspaper for rice pudding that used powdered milk and the Marchmont mothers were all coming by to pick up a box. I’d spent the morning repeatedly shuffling stock to the front of the shelf to make it look full. When Stanley came into the shop, I was up the ladder again and I’d taken him for an undergraduate, standing there with a book under his arm. Thin, clever, looking like someone who thought too much. He smiled as he called up to me, a great wide grin that made me worry my hem was caught up in my knickers.
‘I’m looking for chocolate,’ he said. ‘An Aero, if you have them.’
‘Flakes are better. You’ll find them over there,’ I said. ‘By the counter.’
He gave Mrs Kerr the money and put the chocolate in his jacket pocket. On his way out, he stopped again by my ladder. ‘I’ll have to remember,’ he said. ‘This is a good place to buy chocolate. The shop with Fry’s on the window.’ Then he smiled at me and I smiled, too, but Mrs Kerr laughed when the door closed behind him.
‘He’ll remember all right, I believe. But he’ll also find that every third shop around here says Fry’s on the window. And it was a Rowntree’s bar he was looking for. Young men!’
The second time I saw him, I was crossing Bristo Square. The evening air was cool and I hurried home, heading south to the Meadows. Funny how quickly you can recognize someone. The shape of his shoulders, the length of his stride. A wind blew up suddenly towards me across the square, tossing his hat into the air, taking it up and out of reach, then dropping it down at my feet and playing instead with the folds of my skirt like a cat. I picked up the hat and held it in my hands as he walked towards me, grinning.
‘It’s the chocolate girl again. What a lucky wind to blow us together like this.’
‘Is it?’
‘Absolutely. Now I don’t need to pop back to the shop for another bar of chocolate. I can save my pennies and ask you directly if you’d like to come out to the films.’
‘That’s a funny way to put it.’
‘Maybe … maybe I’m a funny fellow. Do you like Laurel and Hardy?’ He stuttered a little, the words coming out nervous and uneven which made me smile.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit sudden. I’m not sure I even know your name yet.’
‘It’s Stanley.’
‘Like Laurel.’
‘I hardy know him. I’d … I’d like to know you, though.’ He grinned awkwardly, standing as tall as me, and his teeth were squint but the lines around his mouth handsome.
‘You’re a funny man, then.’
He laughed and took his hat from my hands. ‘Only when I’m nervous. Ach, I’m sorry. I’m not used to this.’
‘Me neither. Funny men don’t usually make passes.’
He told me he was a geology lecturer at the university, and I told him I read Literature.
‘Well, that’s a relief. I was worried you were in medicine and would think I was entirely too frivolous to pass the time of day with.’
‘Poetry is serious.’
‘No, no, of course. I don’t mean to offend. Not a jot. I’ve just had a recent run-in with a chap from medicine and came out rather wanting. Geology is a wee bit hard to defend in terms of its contribution to the common good. I worried that my feeble reputation might have gone before me and scuppered my chances with you.’
‘And Laurel and Hardy wouldn’t? I wonder if serious men have good taste in films.’
‘Likely no. But I like a good laugh. It’s good for your heart. Like poetry, I’m sure. Highly salutary.’
So I went along to the film. All up lifts, down ladders, dropping boxes, lighting pipes. It was ridiculous, all this falling about and confusion, all this absolute inanity and the fat and the thin of it. And I laughed. Stanley clapped his hands and doubled over laughing.
Afterwards, he walked me home slowly past the big houses in Morningside and tried to explain why geology.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘a perfect day is spent somewhere outside picking up pebbles. How can you do better than that? Spend the whole day wandering, just letting your eye rove around. You never know what you might find. It’s terrific! You should come sometime. If you like.’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know much about stones.’
‘Well, Edinburgh is a … a nice teacher.’ He always seemed to speak with a twinkle in his eye.
‘I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.’
‘Only a terrible old pun, I’m afraid. A failing of mine to mention it, not yours to miss. Geologists. Really – you should keep away. But nice sounds like gneiss. It’s … it’s a metamorphic rock. A lovely layered thing.’
‘Changed from one thing into another,’ I said.
‘That’s it. Like me – from interesting to rather pathetic in an instant.’
I laughed and he shrugged a little, and smiled, too.
‘But I meant it,’ he said. ‘Edinburgh is rich in good rocks. Volcanic substructures and plenty of interesting layers.’ He told me about the black basalt under the castle, the layers of cooled lava and ash on Arthur’s Seat, and the thin stony soil near the Crags where the gorse grows thick. A well-built city, he said. Slow and evolving. Geology takes time. Stone builds slowly.
So does poetry, I told him. It, too, needs to be sequential. You can’t take it all in at a glance.
‘I suppose you can’t. I like that. Poetry like lines of sediment.’
‘Do you read poetry?’ I asked.
‘Some. The Greeks at school. And Lawrence. I like him.’
‘I like him, too.’
‘See? We’ll get on swimmingly then. You and me.’
Mrs Kerr was impressed when she heard he was teaching at the university. ‘A university man. Well done, Jane. And out at the new King’s Buildings, too. Very smart. It must be that red hair that gets you a dashing modern man.’
* * *
A grey day and we climbed the city’s hills to see the shape of the land. Stanley told me how the Forth was a fjord, a sea estuary scraped out when the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago. The Romans called it Bodotria and to the Norse, it was the Myrkvifiord. He talked of slow erosion and volcanic geology. Time, deep and slow, and all the interruptions. He said the Salisbury Crags were formed from steep dolerite and columnar basalt and they used to be sharper until the Victorians quarried them and sold the stone to London to pave the streets. A sudden change in the city’s shape.
Stanley spent his days lecturing and his evenings at the art college, watching Alexander Carrick carve Scottish stone. For the past decade, the artist had planted memorials for the Great War up and down the country. He had no classical education, no credentials as a gentleman modeller, just a deep knowledge of Scottis
h stone. To the students in his evening classes, Carrick preached on his preference for freestone from the Cheviot Hills – fine-grained, soft enough to chisel cleanly, but as durable as standing stones. It would take the weather, he said.
Stanley sat on the hard art school benches, listening to the song of Carrick’s stories. The sculptor had been a soldier in the Great War, and served and sketched in Belgium, just north of Ypres. He told of a day when a shell exploded prematurely in his own battery. He’d been untouched by the shrapnel, but something broke, the chisel slipped and he could not continue. The higher-ups refused to stick him in the military hospital to recover his wits, what with epidemics sweeping through and so many of the bleeding needing beds. Instead, they left him in the house of an old Belgian woman and she just let him sleep for days on end, time fallen away and the guns always booming in the distance like breakers on the shore. Stanley was touched by the story and tried to tell me why. But all these conversations were eras ago. And then there was love.
At first, a swooping, flying fear inside. Needing to know what he was thinking, where he was in the city and when he’d come to see me again.
What was love? New, of course. Yet hadn’t love come before? Who can ever say it hasn’t? So yes, I suppose, when I was younger. Love or something like it. How’s that for an answer? There was a boy in my class, Donald, whose fingernails were always nice and his knees were bony and strong and he was the fastest runner by far. One day after school, he held my hand, which was embarrassing and nice and I thought I liked him. Then another day, I knew all at once that I needed him. Couldn’t breathe without him. My heart, oh what does a heart do? Thump? Ache? Gallop? Words were rubbish and hearts were just a handful of muscle, clenched, unclenching, but I needed him. For four years, I was certain. It wasn’t unrequited. We held hands, on and off, throughout high school, and even risked kisses, but we were always good. Almost good. I was lucky. A lot of girls didn’t get to stay around for high school, or at least not all of it. Some girls made mistakes. A lot of families needed their girls to work. My friend Jeanie had to leave. We’d been close. Jeanie and Jane – and she looked like me, too. Some people even asked if we were sisters. Idiots. She left at fourteen. Hoped to find work in a shop or at least something clean. She said to me, on the last day she was in school, that I was lucky. To get to study, I knew that’s what she meant, but also to stay with the boys. She looked at Donald as she said it, all swoony. That’s when it stopped for me. Like an unwound watch. Flat stopped, out of love. Donald was just another long-faced boy in the hallway. I didn’t need him any more. Relief. A little grief. A small pause and oh, Donald, I hope Jean did chase you and catch you up. Everyone needs something like love.
Because after needing comes want. And want is stronger. I can be stronger wanting. Want is hunger and hunger must be fed. Hunger is the openness that makes you strong. That’s what I have learned since things started with Stanley. How hunger works and how strength lies across the fault.
Carrick didn’t come to Aberlady. Stanley said the village decided to save money and use the old memorial – the one they had paid for after the Boer War. Sensible, he said. There was still space, and women came regularly to leave flowers. And, of course, there were two blank sides yet.
Stanley left for war on a Tuesday at the end of May. The paper said there would be rain soon. He would take the train from Haddington, heading south.
He held both my hands and looked into my face.
‘Don’t make this harder than it is,’ I said. I didn’t need last words at the doorstep, or worse, by the kirk where everyone gathered to say goodbye.
In the evening, when the lights went out in the village and all the way down the coast and the sky turned charcoal black, I disappeared, too. The door closed on its own, the rented house beyond it changed. The walls were rough, the floor unsettled as I walked invisible, without pattern or pride, indistinguishable from everything else. The windows were blind and there was nowhere to look, no stars to see.
After love, I am not ready for loneliness.
3
LYING IN BED ALONE, I LISTEN FOR THE SOUND OF THE waves. I wait for the roar in every silence, holding my breath, willing my heart to hush, but I am never sure. Maybe the house is too far from the water. A hundred years ago, ships sailed right up to the village, and rested at low tide on the soft clay bottom by the burn, safely unloading their cargo of cotton, coal and timber for Haddington. Practical wealth for town living. Even Aberlady had its weavers then, and five alehouses – a surplus, the minister believed. It is quieter now. The bay has silted up, and the shore lies out across a meadow, far beyond the kirk.
I’d read the local history in one of Mrs Hambleton’s books. Before he left, Stanley had moved a box over to the rental house, full of village memoir and history. Celts and Saxon stories. Coastal plant life, wild flowers and pebble identification.
‘In case you get tired of your school books,’ he said.
‘Good students push through.’
‘Well, you might consider these the invigorating cups of tea that I won’t be able to bring you over the next spell. How’s that, then?’
Stanley has been away two months already, and this doesn’t feel like home. I stay up late reading and listening for the sea. The sea is familiar, though the village isn’t. My mother used to bring us here, just a little further along the coast, for two weeks each July. We’d come by bus, all together, bouncing about like peas in the pan, she said. We took the same cottage each year. My father stayed in town, away from the sand and the cottages, but we came every summer, even the grey ones. This is the weather I know and the summer seas. Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry. And always the cottage and a cup of tea to warm you up again. Dust the sand from your hair, stomp your feet outside the door, properly now, then come in and warm up by the stove.
In August, we’d go home again to Edinburgh and the full flat, the air always starched with the waft of boiling tatties, and us folded back into school clothes. My mother rolled her sleeves down, straightened her skirt and joined the ladies from the kirk for tea and missionary projects, respectable and proper, her hair pinned in place.
When I met Stanley’s mother last year, I wondered if I should mention our summers in the cottages. I didn’t know what the local people thought about us, traipsing out from the city to walk barefoot on the sand. Stanley said she might be interested, but I stayed mum. We ate a quiet luncheon in the kitchen, spring sunlight flooding in across the floor, and the glass water jug casting a bright reflection on the cream tablecloth. While his mother turned to refill the teapot, Stanley set his hand on my knee, warm, so warm, the kettle whistling, his mother in profile smiling by the stove, the plate of bread and butter white white white. After lunch, she wouldn’t hear of help to clear the things away, no she wouldn’t and the day was so fresh we’d best make use of it, so out we went into the wind and down to the sea.
‘Watch for Jova, will you?’ she said. ‘Might catch a glimpse on a bright day like today.’
‘We’ll keep our eyes open, Mum. Shall I give him your love?’
‘Wheesht, you,’ she said, kissing his cheek. She reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘Just enjoy the light. It’s a good day for a walk. Clear the cobwebs away.’
Along the road, the trees were tall, their wind-bent branches sketched against the startling sky. When Stanley and I crossed the bridge, the water was high. Troll-drowning weather, he called it, and said there were times when the bridge itself was covered, only the handrails sticking up. More than once, he’d splashed across it with the waves coming in.
Stanley led me down the path, past the Marl Loch and out across the plain where the grey-green grass and the buckthorns grew. The larks flew up before us, singing high above our heads in the bright air.
‘Why do they do that?’ Stanley said. ‘You only ever hear them singing in flight, don’t you? Do you think the ground muffles their song?’
‘Trying to distract u
s, I think. Lead us away from their precious nests.’
‘Maybe. But they fly straight up, don’t they? Never even a pace away from where they begin. Not very clever. Maybe they’re used to fooling the angels.’
‘So that’s your mother’s Jova then?’ I asked. ‘An angel?’ I held out my hands to Stanley, the larks only pinpricks now above us.
He laughed. ‘No. He’s just a story she grew up with. And her mother before her, too. Must be a scrap of truth somewhere like as not, but it’s hard to tell. Story goes that there was a hermit named Jehovah Grey who lived out here along the shore. Or he might have been Joseph or Jock. Or Jova or Jovey, as the storyteller likes. They say he kept an eagle in a cage. I can’t think why. You don’t see many eagles out here. Maybe it was blown off course or injured. Or maybe he was lonely.’
‘You wouldn’t put an eagle in a cage for company.’
‘Company is hardly what you’re after if you choose to live out here. No one ever walks out here. Most just call it the Point and keep to the streets in the village. Those over in Gullane don’t even know it’s here. But some in Aberlady still call it Jovey’s Neuk.’
That afternoon, we found the outline of his cottage, when the slanting afternoon sun cast long shadows across the grass. We could just make out the limits of its two small rooms. One for him and one for his cow, Stanley said.
‘See? It’s the mushrooms. Continually prolific wherever there’s been dung.’
‘You’re telling tales.’
