The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Bea shook out a shower of hair-pins from her hair, reached across for her comb. ‘I remember one of those storms—a really dreadful one. You were four and a half at the time—or was it five? We were staying down in Devon, near the sea and the whole …’

  Morna picked up a stray hair-pin from the floor. It wasn’t going to be easy to give Bea a résumé. The whole thing was too complex, too far-ranging. She tried again.

  ‘It’s really a question of—well—how we see the world. I mean, he said the miraculous was close to the absurd in that both sort of bring us up with a start and shake us out of our …’ Morna broke off. How could she explain the Absurd to someone like her mother, make Bea see it was not irrelevant for David to have brought in Lear, Ionesco, even Alice Through The Looking Glass? He had reserved his greatest passion for St Abban, talked of him like a friend or even lover, kept returning to his life, quoting from his sayings. ‘We don’t know much about him,’ he had told her yesterday, and then proceeded to fill a morning with him—his ideas, ideals, his prophecies, his visions. She had been stupid enough to feel a twinge of jealousy—though crazy to be jealous of some seventh-century anorexic whose idea of bliss was to stand up to his neck in icy water. Wasn’t that the trouble, though? David was attracted by such extremes of self-denial and she could hardly rival them herself. She had been peeved at breakfast just because the toast was burnt, compensated with double Sugar Puffs. She glanced down at her thighs spreading on the bed, the swell beneath her blouse. Too much unpunished flesh.

  Bea was combing out her hair, coiling it up again. ‘Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it, darling. It’s nice to see you smiling. You’ve been a wee bit … mopish, recently.’

  Morna shifted on the bed. ‘It’s only this place. It gets me down a bit.’

  ‘No, I meant before that—long before. You haven’t really been yourself since the … er …’

  ‘Divorce?’

  Bea nodded. She never used the word. ‘You don’t mind me saying, do you, darling?’

  ‘N … No. Of course not.’ Morna escaped to the window, tweaked the curtain back. She did mind. Why should her mother probe old wounds just when she was feeling good for once? Bea, like the priests, could always make her feel guilty, simply for turning out a disappointment. She should have been a different sort of daughter, one who would have filled the gaping hole of Bea’s own widowhood, provided her with the horde of Catholic babies she couldn’t have herself; one like her friend Anne—a real Anne who also boasted three other Catholic names—Anne Patricia Mary Thérèse. You couldn’t get more orthodox than that. Anne still had her husband and her God, shared her life between them—Mass on Sunday mornings, golf Sunday afternoons, evening prayers at the bedside before her nightly rites with John. She had produced six children so far, took them all to tea with their Grandma twice a week. That would have made Bea’s life—a devout Catholic son-in-law to drive her to church, eight bowed heads beside her in the pew.

  Morna stared out at the green enamelled grass. Why were all close relationships mined and strafed by guilt—mothers, daughters, husbands, even dogs? She saw Joy’s reproachful eyes again as she left the lead hanging where it was, switched on ‘Panorama’ in preference to a walk.

  She unlatched the window, opened it an inch, let the scent of crimson glories cut across the fug; watched a squirrel streak towards the copper beech, turn tree trunk into lift shaft.

  ‘It’s a pity Joy’s not here,’ she said, returning to the bed. Dogs were safer than divorce. ‘She’d make mincemeat of those squirrels.’

  Bea removed a clutch of hair-pins from her mouth. ‘I miss her. I couldn’t sleep last night worrying about her meals. That Vera doesn’t bother.’

  Another stab of guilt. Morna had opened tins for Joy herself, watched with a sort of triumph as the dog wolfed soya chunks and gristle with far more obvious relish than Bea’s home-cooked breast of chicken. It was Chris who wasn’t eating well. She had complained in her last letter that Madame’s cooking was as lousy as her English. Was Chris unhappy? Hungry? Aching to come home? Her period was due this week and she always suffered badly. She had had her very first one just a fortnight after her father left—had connected them with crisis ever since. As if to bear her out, the periods were painful—stomach cramps and floodings every month. Morna had taken her to three separate doctors, but none could find anything physiologically wrong. Chris called menstruation the ‘curse’ and meant it. Both words had been forbidden at Morna’s school. ‘Curse’ was wicked because every period meant the chance of bearing another soul for God, which was a blessing not a curse; and ‘menstruation’ sounded blatant and unladylike. ‘Monthlies’ was the permitted term.

  Morna scooped up another hair-pin, bent it out of shape. Perhaps she should have written to Madame, explained the situation, asked if Chris could have some time off during ‘monthlies’, but her daughter would have hated that. She tried to force the thoughts down. She didn’t want to be a mother at the moment, but friend instead—one of those intense ardent adolescent friendships where you stayed up all night to thrash out life-and-death questions and dilemmas: did mind exist, and, if so, how did it relate to soul or brain; or how, if everything were both relative and subjective, could one ever reach any truth at all? David would excel at those.

  She wished her watch was larger, so she could check the time without her mother noticing, read the tiny figures. What was David doing? Surely the workshop would have started now? He might well decide to leave whilst the coast was clear, dodge all those fond farewells. If she didn’t slip out soon, she might never see him in her life again, miss her chance to say her own goodbye. Bea was discussing Joy’s digestive problems. She was more worried about David’s. This was the ninth day of his fast.

  ‘Look, Mummy, if you’re really feeling better, why don’t you get up and come and meet him?’

  ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘The speaker. Mr Anthony.’

  ‘Whatever for? He wouldn’t want to see me.’

  Her mother was probably right. Would he want to see her, either? It suddenly seemed imperative that Bea should make his acquaintance. ‘You could … er … ask him a question.’

  ‘But I didn’t hear his talk.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Ask him anything.’

  Bea smoothed the counterpane, clasped her hands on top of it. ‘You’re just trying to get me up, dear, aren’t you—like those nurses at the hospital? Every time I closed my eyes, it was ‘‘Rise and shine’’.’

  Morna grinned. ‘Come on, then—rise and shine.’ A nice phrase—one which expressed her mood exactly. ‘Put on your greeny dress. I want you to look nice. You can ask him if he thinks Joy has a soul.’

  Was she crazy, dragging her mother off to see a man she hardly knew and who preferred seclusion anyway? She had never behaved like this before, running after people, acting like a teenager. In the five years since Neil had left, she had been wary of men, tried to keep her distance, stay uninvolved. Her confidence was bruised enough without risking a second wound. If a partner of fourteen years’ standing deliberately sought out another mate, in bed or out of it, why should any other man desire his reject? She was surprised, then, when they pestered—even her girlfriends’ husbands, or other married men whom she had naïvely regarded as loyal and faithful souls, now expecting her to leap between the sheets with them simply because Neil had disappeared. It made her still more uneasy, more confused. She had weakened only once—and that time with a widower—a disastrous affair which had started off with snapshots of the deceased, and ended up with demands that she do it in the marital bed wearing the dead wife’s nightgown. Since then, she had kept herself to herself. Safer and less hurtful.

  She pulled the covers back, coaxed Bea out of her bed. So why change now, risk problems, complications, inflict herself on a man who was obviously as wary as herself? Except this was different, another thing entirely. It was David’s mind which attracted her—the sheer range and reach of it—the excitement she felt hear
ing him explode new and startling subjects into life, or watching him push back the fences round the world. He had breached her own defences, got through to her own mind, kindled it, aroused it, made her realise how long it had been since she had enjoyed the cut and thrust of intelligent conversation—not just since the divorce, but years before it. Neil had had no patience with speculation, theorising, what he called intellectual waffle. Her daughter was bright enough, but often reticent, saving her discussions for her peers, perhaps.

  She fetched Bea’s towel, ran some water for her in the basin. It was ironic, really. When she had been adolescent (and even afterwards), she had done her best to keep all male friends as far away from her mother as she could. Too few ever passed Bea’s scrutiny—certainly not Neil. Yet here she was, actually pressing David on her. She had no choice. Either she stayed in this stuffy sickroom and David slipped away for ever, or she took her mother with her and gleaned one more conversation before he put a hundred odd miles between them. The real twist was that David was the only man she had ever met who might actually win the Conyers’ Seal of Approval—the product of a devout Catholic family and a minor Catholic public school, well spoken, well mannered and with a good degree from Cambridge. Neil had left his secondary modern at fifteen, and his parents were low Anglican which didn’t count in Bea’s book. Maybe her mother could even break David’s fast, suggest they all had lunch together.

  ‘Now you’re up, Mummy, why not stay up and eat in the refectory? You’ve had enough of that soup and stuff on trays. You need something solid for a change.’

  ‘What is for lunch? Did you see the menu?’

  ‘Toad in the hole.’

  ‘Well that should be solid enough, judging by their last attempt at batter.’

  ‘And jelly to follow.’

  ‘What, again?’

  ‘Don’t be fussy, Mum. We’re going to celebrate and jelly’s better for that than sago. You’ll have to imagine the champagne.’

  ‘Celebrate what, I’d like to know?’ Bea was struggling with her stockings, rolling them over pale and veiny legs.

  Morna looked tactfully away. ‘Anything. Everything. Your getting up. Miracles, if you like.’

  Or maybe just the simple fact she felt better for the first time in five years.

  ‘So what did you think of my mother?’

  ‘She’s … charming.’

  ‘She missed you at lunch. She saved you a piece of toad-in-the-hole with more toad in it than hole. That’s quite a feat here.’

  David smiled.

  ‘Still fasting?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Fancy another walk?’ Morna weighed his hesitation. Perhaps he was too weak to walk. Wouldn’t fasting sap his energy? Yet he had seemed fit enough this morning, showed no sign of any fatigue. ‘Just a very short one. I know you’ve got to leave soon. I wanted to ask you another question, actually.’ Intellectuals could rarely resist a question, especially one in their own field. ‘If you’ve got the time, that is?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, you know you said the Druids believed in an afterlife? I wondered if you could explain how …’

  Was it just his mind which attracted her? If so, why was she so aware of him as man, noticing every detail—the fact that he had removed his tie, had Biro on his fingers, an almost faded scar running down his left thumb; aware of his body, tall, stooping slightly, overshadowing hers. She tried to walk slowly, to save him extra exertion. She had sausages to fuel her, mushy peas; he only ideas. Yet he appeared to be the energetic one—kept striding ahead, then slowing down to wait for her, only to accelerate again as if to keep up with the outflow of his words.

  ‘You see, Morna, the Romans were very different in that respect. They regarded death as something which brought an end to the troubles of this life, whereas the Druids looked forward to a paradise, not in a gloomy underworld, but somewhere in the setting sun or …’

  They had left the house behind, passed the orchard and the vegetable garden, reached the wilder part of the grounds where the grass was tangled and untidy, the trees no longer pruned and tamed. David was still talking.

  ‘Shall we have a breather?’ Morna asked at last. Could he really be fasting and still have so much stamina? It was an effort to keep up with him, both literally and intellectually. She could feel her thighs perspiring, chafing together beneath the full skirt, breasts sticky in the heat. She flattened a patch of grass, lay back against the bank. He squatted down beside her, still developing his argument. He seemed almost unaware of his surroundings, was sailing with the Druids to the Happy Isles.

  ‘I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why the pagan Celts understood the Christians’ love of lonely island sites. They must have seen them as sort of … stepping stones which led to their own Blessed Isles.’

  She had to bring him back, lure him away from the cold Atlantic Ocean. She saw him ready to run on again, jumped in first. ‘When’s your train?’ she asked, leapfrogging fifteen centuries.

  ‘3.19.’

  Less than fifty minutes. ‘Are you going home or only back to London?’

  ‘Home.’

  She picked a plantain, decapitated it, tossed the head away.

  David was still squatting on his heels. ‘Actually, I’ll only be there for another couple of months. You see, I’ve finished most of my researches now and I’m almost ready to write them up, start on the actual book. I’ve decided to do that on the island.’

  ‘What, St Abban’s?’

  ‘Mm. I need complete peace and quiet for it, and I can’t think of anywhere less distracting. Also, I’ve never been there in the winter—always stuck to the summer months. That’s a bit of a cheat. I mean, how can I understand what it was like for Abban and his monks, if I don’t experience the cold and gales myself? I’ve booked the cottage from late September. That’ll give me a month or so to acclimatise myself before the real squalls blow up. Mind you, you can’t be too exact with dates. It’s a question of when wind and tide are right. I’ve known people hang around for weeks waiting for a boat. It’s a treacherous coast with riptides and …’

  ‘Does anybody live there, or will it be just you and your dead saint?’

  ‘Six brave souls. There’s the crofter and his wife who are renting me the cottage, another elderly couple, a retired spinster schoolmarm, and a fierce old man who lives on his own and is reputed to be mad. They’re all well over sixty. It’s the same on most of the islands. The young people leave. They’re too cut off and the life’s too hard for them. There are no roads, no shops, not even electricity. The crofter has a boat, but half the year the weather’s too moody for him to take it out very far.’

  Morna pierced the plantain stalk with her fingernail. Not a hundred miles—five hundred—and a wild sea flung between them. David seemed already lost to her. He needed no friend, had already found his soul mate, his companion in prayer and fasting—a seventh-century monk. He might be David rather than Father, but his life was still vowed to Abban as exclusively as a priest’s was to his God—a life full enough without her—recording miracles, translating prayers, poring over ruins, structuring a book. Someone believed in him enough to fund him. He believed in himself and his saint enough to subsist on a primitive island, starve and freeze in the cause of history. She lived in the smug and glossy suburb Neil had selected as reflecting credit on him, ate three balanced and nutritious meals a day, yet she was the one who was starving. Only David had made her see it. She felt restless, somehow, dissatisfied. Her own work couldn’t compare. There were frequent barren spells, especially in the summer, when no one seemed to want her services. And even when she landed a job, it was often something vacuous. She had no boss, no office, no fixed routine—just herself sitting in Neil’s ex-study trying to Polyfill the gaps between different languages.

  She lay back again, feeling the long grasses tease and prick against her neck. Right, she had forty-seven minutes left of David—less than that, if she subtracted the time he
’d need to get to the station. She had better make the most of them.

  ‘You don’t look too comfortable,’ she said, squinting up at him against the sun. ‘Why not sit down for a moment? The grass is so dry here, it’s almost turned to hay.’

  He sat, reluctantly. His body looked awkward, even clumsy—long legs sticking out in front of him, one shoelace half undone. She watched a meadow brown spiral between white clover and blue harebells; heard the muted boom and sob of the chapel organ descanted by a thrush’s song. It was a lazy languorous day, too hot to walk or work, a day for simply lolling on the grass, watching the play of sun and shadow, or closing one’s lids and seeing black kaleidoscope to scarlet as the sun beat down on them. David seemed to contradict the mood. He was sitting bolt upright still, one hand clenched, the other threshing through the grass, dishevelling daisies. There was a tiny burr sticking to his corduroys. She wished she could be free enough and friend enough to reach across, remove it, but his shyness seemed infectious. Couldn’t he simply relax, open up a bit? She longed to know more about him, exchange confidences, opinions, but she had noticed on their earlier walk how quickly he clammed up once she moved to matters personal. She searched for a neutral subject.

  ‘They’re … er … marvellous grounds, aren’t they?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Do you have a garden, David?’

  ‘My parents do.’

  ‘That’s what I meant.’

  Silence.

  What was wrong with him? Was she that much of a drag? All right, she couldn’t match his intellect, but at least she had a degree, an eagerness to learn. And as far as looks were concerned, she wasn’t downright hideous. In fact, if they had run a Miss Hilden Cross contest for the retreatants (instead of a Chain of Prayer), she would have won it sash and crown. She might be five years older than he was, five pounds overweight, but she didn’t wear yellow plastic hair-slides, or have swags of flesh drooping from her upper arms or a full moustache, like some of the females here. The woman JP had even called her beautiful.