Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  ‘Well don’t breathe your germs over me.’ Hetty held her hands up to guard her face. ‘I nearly died of pneumonia once. I was on life support in Houston for a week. I’ll make sure I keep warm. Let me borrow it anyway.’

  Hetty stood up and cupped her hand under the long cylinder of ash.

  ‘Where are your ashtrays?’

  Ella gave her a cracked ashtray and paused in the doorway.

  ‘Actually I was thinking of taking that nightie with me when Donny and I go away on our honeymoon, but I haven’t got the dates yet so maybe I’ll hang on to it. I’ve got other pretty ones I could lend you. I’ll go and find them.’

  ‘Do you want a white one or a blue one?’ Ella came back into the room unexpectedly and caught Hetty with the Victorian nightie half-stuffed into her bag. Hetty took it out hastily and threw it on the table.

  ‘Oh, what am I doing? Sorry sweetie. I’m all over the place. I’ve been having trouble with my ears again. I wasn’t thinking.’

  Ella ignored Hetty’s sleight of hand with the nightie. What was pressing on her mind was Donny and the robberies. In the end she sat down and confided in Hetty.

  ‘It’s not just Donny.’ Ella enjoyed being the melodramatic one for a change. ‘The other guys in this house are revolutionaries. Donny has done it to help fund whatever they’re doing. Don’t tell a soul but I’m sure they’re involved in these bombings.’

  Hetty’s forehead puckered as if someone had pulled a fine thread to cause a frown. She responded with the pragmatism of a practised illusionist.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone about that, honey. If there is anything going on when you’re married you can’t be asked to give evidence against Donny. Now then, have you got everything ready for the wedding? I insist you give me that nightie. I’ll bring it back before the big day.’

  *

  In the wedding photograph, Donny and Ella are standing on the steps in front of the registry office. Donny’s chestnut hair is collar-length. He has rust-coloured sideburns and a heavy bandido moustache. He is standing with his head cocked slightly to one side like a bird. The sleeves of his suit are too short, exposing his wrists below the cuffs. He is wearing a silver tie and squinting a little as if the sun is in his eyes. Ella is wearing a white lace minidress and a hat with a big pink rose pinned to the wide brim. She is directing a wide, vague smile at the camera. There are only five people present: the married couple; the witnesses Cyrus and Hetty; plus Alice de Vries, who is wearing her best suit with a shot-silk scarf and a hand-made hat with flowers cut from blue felt.

  Ella looked at the marriage certificate.

  ‘I didn’t know your name was Dughall. I thought it was Donald.’

  ‘They called me Donny to distinguish me from my dad. It’s Gaelic.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Fuck knows. Dark stranger, or something.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  They had to wait for their honeymoon until there was a break in the ballet company schedule. Donny had grown more relaxed and affectionate in the weeks since the wedding.

  It was late summer and they travelled north towards the light. They travelled by bus because it was cheaper than the train but as they crossed the border into Scotland Donny became fractious. His legs were cramped and it was several hours before they would reach their destination. The rain started as the bus came into Inverness. By the time they reached the bus station the rain was biblical. Two destroyers grazed on the grey loch. Great sheets of water fell from the sky. They clambered from the bus to the sound of water trickling and gurgling through the city’s pipes, drains and stone gutters, as if all the rivers, canals and lochs in Scotland were plotting the ultimate conquest of the land, running in secret through cities, making their own connections, their own plans and conspiracies for a final flood.

  Ella and Donny waited by the bus station for a smaller bus that would take them on to the Western Highlands. The wet weather seemed to have revived Donny and he was revelling in the downpour, looking around him, taking in deep breaths of the fresh air. Ella sheltered in a shop doorway encased in a transparent plastic mackintosh with a hood. He came over and pushed the hood back from her face and gave her a kiss.

  ‘You look like a boil-in-the-bag fish, Mrs Lady.’

  He moved a few yards away then called to Ella: ‘Come and look at this.’

  A small boy of about three, dressed from head to foot in a Batman costume, was standing under an arch gazing out in a trance towards the mountains, and humming the Batman theme tune in a soft but persistent voice: ‘Na na na na na na, Batman.’

  ‘Magic, eh?’ said Donny, squeezing Ella’s arm.

  *

  There was a huge rainbow and then the rain stopped as they travelled westward. The small bus meandered through wide purple brown valleys where there had been no rain and everything was dry. Sullen mountains looked down on them from either side. Then the bus turned a bend in the road and Ella caught her breath. A curdled silver junket of sky stretched far into the distance. Everything was bathed in silver light and the low mountains, lochs and distant islands seemed to float ahead of them. By the time the bus trundled into Lochinver it was eight in the evening and they were the only passengers left on board. The bus dropped them off by a forbidding stone church and abandoned them to silence as it disappeared into the distance.

  ‘Come on Spike,’ Donny picked up their bags. ‘Let’s find somewhere to stay.’

  After an hour of trudging around the village they stood facing each other outside the last bed and breakfast to turn them away. There was no accommodation available that night.

  ‘It’s summer. I told you we should have booked somewhere.’

  ‘Give me your bag. I’ll work out something.’

  They walked for half an hour to the cliff top. Up there, what felt like a gale-force wind was blowing. The grass streamed in the wind.

  ‘Fucking hell. This wind’s near tearing me face off,’ Donny said with pleasure as he walked. The wind whipped the sea. There were white frills on the waves. Ella tried to shelter behind him, following in his footsteps like the page behind King Wenceslas.

  ‘Wait here a minute.’ Donny took the bags and disappeared along a path that led down through some rocks. He shouted from somewhere below her. She trod gingerly down the hillside to meet him. He had found the ruins of an old stone croft on the hillside. He whistled merrily as he laid out their mackintoshes on the ground, fixing them down with stones. Ella was tired. The stone walls sheltered them from the wind. There was no roof. Children must have set light to the place at some point because portions of the crumbling stone lintels and the grass were black and charred. They tried to make themselves comfortable on a floor littered with sheep droppings. A plane passed overhead, its light flashing like the regular sparking of a flint. Donny’s eyes were alive with excitement.

  ‘This is better than some old bed and breakfast, isn’t it?’

  There followed a session of Nordic love-making on a bed of stone blocks strewn with straw. It was too cold to undress. Their rough clothes kissed everywhere except where the flesh joined. Donny’s tongue poured down her throat like a long stream of syrup. The dark night sky slipped between her thighs, followed by a river of burning water. All spent and in a tangled embrace of clothes they rolled away from each other. She sat up and began pulling on her woollen leg-warmers beneath her cotton skirt. Within minutes Donny was asleep, with his head cocked against the stone wall as if his neck was broken. She held her breath. In the moonlight his face had a terrible beauty. The only time she could gaze at him properly was when he was asleep. It puzzled her that even when she was with him she felt this yearning for him. His eyes shot open.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Well don’t.’ His eyes drooped shut again.

  When he woke each morning one eye always blazed open with intense curiosity to find out where he was and start the adventure of life afresh.

  Ella was unable
to sleep. After a few minutes she stood up, straightened her skirt and left the croft to tread over the coarse animal pelt of the hillside towards the cliff top. Overhead was a wilderness of clouds. The wind had dropped a little. She went to the cliff edge and peered over until she could see the silver ocean fingering deep into the crack of the black mountains. The sea hissed on the beach below. Ella felt calm and refreshed, reborn like a snake that has shed its transparent coil of skin. Then she turned to look up at the sky behind her. A vertiginous attack of terror overtook her. The moon was reeling stark naked through the clouds like a mad woman looking for lovers. Unnerved, Ella ran all the way downhill back to the ruined croft.

  By five in the morning it was light again and they were both awake, uncomfortable and stiff with cold against the raw stones. Ella suggested that they find a room somewhere. She began to count out their money. Donny became fretful. He started a quarrel.

  ‘The trouble with you is that you want everything to be safe. You say, “I’d better not do that, I’ve got to pay the rent.” I say, “Fuck the rent, let’s just see what happens.”’

  At Ella’s insistence they found a place to stay in a house in the village. The room, at the top of narrow stairs, was tiny and smelled musty. Even the pale ridged wallpaper was damp to the touch. The floor creaked every time they moved and the bathroom boiler was difficult to light. Donny grew bad-tempered. Ella tried to distract him as they lolled on the bed.

  ‘Have you noticed the landlady’s dogs? They’re gorgeous.’

  There were two dogs in the house with long hair the colour of dried bracken. They lounged by the grate of the hearth, rolling their amber eyes at visitors. Donny made no reply. He stared into space.

  ‘Are you going deaf?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘No. My brain is just refusing to accept your crappy conversation.’

  She kicked at his legs. He stretched and got up.

  ‘Come on, then. Let’s go out.’

  Donny decided he wanted to walk along the ridge of the mountain tops. Ella stayed below, keeping him in sight silhouetted against the blue sky. Every now and then he waved down at her. She began to run along the small track in the valley below, leaping over stones and patches of flooded ground. After a few minutes she took off her shoes and ran barefoot. The mossy grass and peat underfoot made the ground springy. She ran without stopping or feeling tired. It was as if she were powered by a tremendous energy, buoyant and indefatigable. For half an hour she ran with no awareness of the stones or puddles beneath her feet. Only when she saw Donny begin to make his way down the mountainside towards her did she stop and wait for him. And then it puzzled her that she was not short of breath at all. All was quiet except for the insects buzzing around her in the heather. The silence pressed on her ears.

  ‘I could live here.’ Donny stood in the ruddy brown scrub of tangled gorse and heather looking around him at the mountainscape with satisfaction. He slashed at the brambles with his arm.

  ‘What would you do? How could you earn money here?’

  He examined his forearm where a bramble had made a deep scratch.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d rob and steal. I’d go marauding. Marauding for meals. I’d put on black glasses and a black coat and get a big knife and go up to the sheep and say, “Puss. Puss. Puss,” and lure them to their deaths.’ Donny stood laughing against the sun.

  ‘But really. How could you live? How would you manage?’

  He looked exasperated.

  ‘Look. I don’t think about tomorrow or next year. Never did. Never will. I can’t think about that. There is no fucking past and there is no future. People are always asking me for explanations. I give them whatever explanations will suit them – to the romantics I give a romantic explanation. To those who need an economic explanation I give an economic one. I create explanations. But there is no fucking explanation.’

  They ate sandwiches sitting in bracken next to a tan river with a silver lace of froth on its surface, and then lazed in the sun until late afternoon. Donny wanted to return to Lochinver skirting the black hump of Suilven. That would make it late evening before they were back home. They walked in silence.

  Between the two horns of another mountain they came across a lake. The sun was setting in a red volcanic eruption along the horizon casting a dull fiery glow over everything. Around the edges of the lake the ground was marshy. The wind made a herring-bone pattern on the surface of the water. Ella broke off some reeds and tried to throw them against the wind into the lake.

  ‘It’s a shame I have to be back for rehearsals on Thursday. We could have stayed another week.’

  ‘I’m not coming back with you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He was standing outlined against the strange red waters of the menstruating lake like some prophetic vision from the past.

  ‘Because I’m going for a wander.’

  Back in the rented room Donny lay on the bed naked from the waist up, fiddling with a small portable radio trying to get a signal. His shirt hung over the back of a chair. Ella looked at the white bluebell-veined arm with its deep bramble scratch and ruby-clotted blood.

  ‘Do you want something for that arm?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘When will you come back?’

  He stared at the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t know. Soon.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How do I know? Look. I will be back very soon. I just want to look around for a bit longer. Can’t you see I’m already travelling?’

  *

  Hetty stood in the grounds of Chatsworth House. It was five in the morning. She stood at the edge of the field in a black vintage silk dress with a bubble skirt and smoked a cigarette. She had walked some considerable way from the house, until she could no longer hear any sounds of music or gaiety. There was a very light white morning dew or frost on the grass. Her shoulders were bare. One long black strap from the front of the dress crossed over her left shoulder to meet the back of the dress halfway down. After a short while, she continued walking alongside the white picket fence which marked the end of the grounds at the bottom of a valley. As she walked through the grass her footprints darkened. An hour earlier her fabricated story of British ancestry and wealth had unravelled. She was deflated. Someone had denounced her for lying and publicly humiliated her. Her imposture had been exposed. Imitation, the key to nature’s cipher, was Hetty’s forte. She was an expert in camouflage. Her new aristocrat boyfriend, shocked by the deception, had stared at her on the ballroom floor like a naturalist startled to find that he has been looking at an animal rather than a patterned flower.

  The decision taken, Hetty threw her cigarette into the whitened grass and made her way back to the car park of the great house. She chucked her bag into the back and drove to London.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Ella returned on her own from the honeymoon. She was dispirited. In the daytime she rehearsed then went home to mooch around the house. The atmosphere there had changed. A steady stream of young men and women in jeans and burdened with rucksacks came and went. Both Mark and Hector were back from Milan, although Hector was spending most of his time in Kent with his new girlfriend. Donny turned up a week after Ella. Disgruntled, he slung his bag on the bed. The honeymoon had made him more restless than ever. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t like buying fucking return tickets. In any circumstances.’

  But Mark was in good spirits. There was even a vestige of colour in his cheeks: ‘It’s great having all these comrades from other countries coming to visit us. That way we can link up all across Europe.’

  Most of the visitors were from Italy. Several were members of Lotta Continua. Some had links with the Brigate Rosse. German militants leaned across the kitchen table to insist with vehemence that the current crop of German industrialists were nothing more than the reincarnation of the Nazis and must be attacked. They explained their fear that Nazism had not been rooted out of high p
laces, and insisted that there was considerable support for the militants throughout Germany.

  Donny referred to all these visitors as ‘The Totallies’.

  ‘You know,’ he would say with amusement, ‘fascism must be totally eradicated. Fuck idealism. All idealism is untruthfulness.’

  In fact Donny worked hard. If Ella was not performing in the evening she would cook and wait for Donny to return, listening for the sound of his work boots coming up the uncarpeted wooden stairs.

  ‘What’s to eat? I’m knackered.’ He flung his toolbag in the corner.

  ‘Don’t you want me to give you a kiss?’ Ella was laughing as she went to hug him.

  ‘Kiss, no. Egg sandwich, yes. A frog kissed me once and look what happened – I turned back into a common lout.’ He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa. Ella came in with two plates of mince and potatoes on a tray.

  ‘Ah, fucking magic, hen.’ He sat up and rubbed his hands together at the sight and smell of food.

  Most of the time Donny and Ella ignored the comings and goings below and stayed upstairs in their flat, curled on the sofa, watching television.

  ‘Poverty is OK,’ announced Donny. ‘The best thing is to have a great idea about making a fortune and then not bother to follow it through. Put the telly on. It’s Caligula.’

  *

  Hetty arrived and spent two hours talking to Ella with an intensity unusual even for her. Her eyes were swimming with distress. Ella sat next to her on the sofa. Hetty touched up her lipstick, put the lipstick in her handbag and breathed out a sigh.

  ‘I have to go to the pharmacy for my medication.’

  Ella flashed her a look of sympathetic worry.

  ‘Should you be taking medication if you’re pregnant?’

  Hetty held her hand briefly to the top of her breast-bone, as though suddenly breathless. She ran both hands through her hair, tossed her head back in a way that showed off, with apparent innocence, her cheekbones and gave that familiar brave smile.