The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Martin speared a chip on his fork, dunked it in a pool of ketchup. ‘You’re shivering again, Chris. You’re not cold still, are you?’

  ‘No, just excited.’ She seemed to have been shivering all day, with chill or panic, and now sheer raw elation. She hadn’t admitted her initial fears to Martin, had shrugged them off, along with the resentments, irritations, unfair comparisons, petty carps and moans. All right, so Martin hadn’t been to Marlborough, would never get to Cambridge, (nor had she), couldn’t afford to take her to the Ritz. Who cared? He was an adventurer, explorer, with more guts and nerve than any of the creeps she had met. A real man wore a wet suit, not pseud white jeans or scarlet running-shorts. Anyone could drive a Porsche or even throw a discus. It took a special sort of skill to be a diver, an instructor—one who had got distinction in his theory tests, completed his training in half the usual time. And yet Martin hadn’t been rash or taken any risks, not once been impatient with her or used his greater experience to make her feel stupid or a drag. He had treated her like glass, observed every possible precaution, shown care, consideration, even a tenderness which she had rarely seen before and which made her feel quite choked. Gerry would have left her on the rocks, twirling her baton and kicking up her frilly skirts while she cheered him on, cutting piles of sandwiches to feed him when he surfaced. Martin had shared the sea with her, lending her his eyes and all his knowledge, making her an equal and a partner. The sea had become part of them, part of their relationship, a threesome with no jealousy. She had wanted romance, excitement, and now she had them—a whole vast oceanful.

  ‘Oh, Martin …’

  ‘Eat your omelette. It cost enough. They’re 30p cheaper at Roxy’s and that’s got class.’

  Chris glanced round the shabby workmen’s caff with its steamed-up windows, its scuffed linoleum, the bored and scraggy waitress smoking over the cupcakes. The ketchup had been watered down with vinegar, the bread was yesterday’s, curling at the edges. ‘It’s a smashing place—the best meal I’ve ever had.’

  Martin hooted. ‘Better than the ones in California, I suppose, with your ice-buckets and half a dozen waiters.’

  She tried to remember California. It seemed as far away, as deeply buried as the waters of the abyss. How could she have made it so important, let a month of gloss and glitter give her sunstroke, a few macho men unsettle her, so that she had forgotten the thrills of diving, the thrills of Martin’s finger, forgotten she belonged here—and with him? She fumbled for his hand, laid her own palm on top of it. ‘I’m glad I came back,’ she whispered.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘You’re not just saying that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not planning to … run off again?’

  She shook her head, said ‘Uh-uh’, changed it into ‘No.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘No.’

  He pushed his chair back, wiped his mouth, fiddled with his knife. He seemed embarrassed suddenly, rummaged in his pocket, cleared his throat. ‘I … er … bought you this.’ He drew out a twist of plain brown paper. ‘Sorry about the box. I mean, there isn’t a box. I bought it off a bloke—you know, privately. Couldn’t afford a jeweller’s.’ He passed it across. ‘It’s not tat, mind you. I wanted something decent, so I mugged up all the advertisements—Exchange and Mart, local papers, cards in shops. I saw a lot of rubbish and a lot more cons. This was the best—no question. You may not like it, of course, but …’ His voice tailed off.

  She stared down at the ring. A diamond—a real fat swanky one. She didn’t like diamonds. Never had. Didn’t want a ring. She wanted Martin, but they were bonded already, didn’t need the Kohinor to prove it to the world. Anyway, how in God’s name had he bought it? Martin couldn’t afford diamonds, even second-hand ones.

  ‘Martin, no. I … I can’t. It must have cost a bomb. And I know you’re short of cash. I mean, you said only yesterday that …’

  ‘It’s okay. Put it on. I want to see how it looks.’

  ‘It’s not okay.’ She pushed away her omelette. ‘We’d better take it back, quickly, before …’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. We can’t. Not now.’

  ‘But I don’t want you in debt, or paying interest to banks and things or …’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She tried to calm her voice, sound less graceless and ungrateful. ‘Look, Martin, darling, I don’t like to be rude, but I know you can’t afford this. I mean I’ll only keep on worrying that …’

  He picked up the last chip with his fingers, swallowed it whole, mumbled through the mouthful. ‘If you really want to know, I sold my stereo.’

  ‘You what?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t need it.’

  Now he was really lying. His stereo was the most precious thing he owned after his diving gear. His only rich relation, a bachelor uncle in Ilford, had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday—a Sanusi, a posh one with a graphic equaliser. All the groups who jostled on his walls would be silenced now, just one-dimensional posters mouthing wordlessly, like when you turned the sound off on the telly and singers and guitarists dwindled into dumb and jerking puppets.

  ‘B … But, Martin, all your records—you’ve been collecting them for years and …’

  ‘I sold all those as well. It’ll give us a bit more space.’

  She remembered now, the room had seemed less cramped, yet she hadn’t realised why. She had been so self-absorbed, so busy with her jet lag, her puny little problems, she had allowed her … her fiancé to lop off a bit of his own life and hadn’t even seen the scar. True she had gone to Bea’s after that first wild night with him, slept with Madonnas looking down on her instead of Iggy Pop or Talking Heads, but she should at least have noticed that he hadn’t offered to play her a disc or raved about a new one. Selfish bitch she was, when he was faithful, generous beyond belief.

  Martin picked the ring up. ‘Well, aren’t you going to put it on?’ He slipped it on her finger, hands still greasy from the chips. It jammed halfway. ‘Shit! It’s too small. I was scared of that.’

  ‘You can always get them … altered.’ Chris tugged it off again. Her words sounded reluctant, even grudging. Why should she feel relieved that it didn’t fit? She couldn’t explain, not even to herself.

  ‘Yeah, but I wanted you to wear it—now.’

  They stared at each other. He looked so crestfallen, Chris wanted to weep for him, felt humbled, dazed, by what he had done for her. She had thought Love was duels and violins and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and it had turned out to be a line or two in Exchange and Mart, a scrawled card in a window, a month of harrying and haggling to buy her a ring the hard way, wasting precious time and petrol on wild-goose cons and rip-offs.

  ‘I know—’ Martin stopped picking at his nails—‘You can wear it round your neck. Have you got your chain on?’

  She shook her head, had brought no jewellery with her.

  ‘Wait a tick.’ Martin stuck his hand down the collar of his sweater, came up with a piece of string which he had been wearing round his own neck, something dangling from it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just a couple of O-rings, fathead. You’ve seen them often enough.’ Martin pulled them over his head. ‘I’ll stick ’em in my pocket and you can have the string.’

  ‘No, leave them.’ She grabbed them from him, string and all, slipped both the washers on her wedding finger. They fitted, went right down. Engagement ring, diving ring.

  ‘Nutcase,’ Martin grinned.

  She took them off again, undid the knot in the string, threaded it through the diamond, tied it round her neck, peered down at the necklace. A solitaire flanked not by useless sapphires, but by two tiny rubber pressure-seals which played a vital rôle in maintaining the diver’s air supply, could make the crucial difference between going down and staying up. She wanted to go down, as often and as far as he would let her. No need to be ner
vous when she had had her honeymoon already, found it wonderful, ecstatic. This ring was her passport to a hundred and thirty-nine million miles of ocean, so how could it restrict her?

  Martin was jabbing his spoon against the hardened rock of sugar in the bowl. ‘You do … er … like it, don’t you, Chris?’

  She took his hand, held his own wedding finger in the encircling ring of her linked thumb and index finger—the ‘okay’ sign in diving. ‘It’s great,’ she whispered. ‘It’s absolutely great.’

  Chapter Twenty One

  It was Morna’s turn for emptying the privy pail. The wind was making her eyes water as she battled along the cliff path, whipping her hair against her face, tugging at the ends of David’s scarf. She turned north, lugging the heavy bucket towards the jutting piece of rock which they used when the wind was a southwesterly. It seemed crass and anti-social to empty sewage into the open sea, but the ground was too shallow to dig cesspits. There was deeper soil around the stream, but they had no wish to contaminate their precious water supply. Cormack and the other islanders could dig more easily in the boggy softer north end. Not that Cormack bothered. David had told her the crofter simply squatted down behind his hen-house, or turned his own house wall into an urinal.

  The whole subject was embarrassing. She hated to think of David emptying the pail. Something so crude and basic had no place in their delicate relationship, one fragile still despite three idyllic weeks together. Even using the privy had caused some awkwardness—unpleasant smells, overlapping times; things abhorrent to them both. Neil would have stated baldly ‘I need a crap’, and gone ahead and had one, leaving her to empty all the pails. She and David tried to pretend they had neither bowels nor bladders. It was roses she was carrying, or bread to feed the gulls.

  She stopped a moment to rest her arm, gazed out at the ocean. It was the first day she had seen it blue, the sky streaked azure and white above it, despite the early hour. True spring weather, fitting for St Valentine’s. Hadn’t Chaucer said this was the day that the birds picked out their mates; Shakespeare, too, talked about woodbirds coupling once St Valentine’s was past?

  Did sea birds couple later? David had told her that several species were still wintering in mid-ocean. It humbled her to think of them—kittiwakes and petrels riding out the howling Atlantic gales, sleeping on the wing or not at all, flying thousands of uncharted miles, guided only by the sun and stars. But breeding time was coming round. She had seen fulmars beginning to gather on the cliffs, the first gannets gliding in. In a month or two, the sky would be clouded with their threshing wings, the air rent with cries of mating.

  She wouldn’t be there to watch, couldn’t stay till then. It wasn’t fair to her mother, or to Chris, if she were back. She kept worrying about them, wondering how they were, had never intended leaving them so long. When she first set out from Oban, she had planned to return before Bea’s retreat was over, be there to welcome her back, the Oxshott house springcleaned in her honour, flowers on the table, all her shopping done. Instead, she had written to her mother, a brief evasive letter, which Cormack had posted when he took his boat to the mainland for supplies. She should have been on that boat herself, returning home to duty. The problem was she had come to prefer her duties on the island. There was something deeply satisfying about working with David, cut off from the distractions and complexities of home, even from the news. She hadn’t read a paper since the Los Angeles Times, felt guilty sometimes that she had no idea how many bombs had exploded in Armagh or whether the Middle East was still a battleground. Would she even know if someone pressed the nuclear button and the rest of the world went up in a mushroom cloud? Their island was a sanctuary, a monastery. The more they worked on Abban’s Life, the more they seemed to move towards it themselves—a simple almost spartan diet, strict periods of work and rest (with work preponderating), rough and practical clothes, no luxury or ostentation, no hint of what Abban condemned as fleshly lust. Most of the day was spent in silence, though a companionable silence, while they sat together at the kitchen table—David writing up his book or struggling with problems of chronology or interpretation, while she finally solved the mysteries of the French professor’s shorthand, revised her translation in light of them, helped David in the general structuring of his book. When they talked, it was to discuss the outline of a chapter or the ramifications of a word. They had worked out a schedule and a timetable almost as if they were living under a rule. But she no longer felt the novice to David’s abbot. They were equals now—sharing the chores, both automonous, yet never arguing. At first, she had tried to cushion his way of life, cook more ambitious meals, introduce more comforts. Gently, he resisted, refused to let her change his standing order which Cormack brought over from the mainland when wind and tide allowed. Instead, she had become an expert with the tin-opener—beans, soups, pease pudding, canned spaghetti, but not the Spam. Somehow they had both turned vegetarian. They hadn’t discussed the issue, it had simply happened. She suspected it was Abban’s influence again. The saint seemed so forceful sometimes, it was as if they were living as a threesome.

  She switched the bucket to the other hand, clambered down a yard or two where there was a firmer flatter foothold. She had read about a contemporary of Abban’s, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who had made his own lavatory out of a driftwood plank set across a sea-washed chasm in the rocks, when he had been living as a hermit on Farne Island. It must have been risky if the waves which slapped the east coast were as insistent as the ones which thundered here. She watched them smash against the cliff, froth back around the smooth black rocks like lace. In just three weeks the sea had become a presence, one you could never ignore nor overlook, like a new intractable member of a family, a mercurial adolescent quick to change its mood, always making a racket, always demanding attention. Yet you had to respect it as both provider and destroyer, supplying food and driftwood, threatening lives and craft. David had told her that one or two of the older islanders started their day by doffing their caps to the ocean, to salute it and acknowledge it. She was wearing no hat, but she bowed her head, paused a moment before moving to the edge of the ledge. She uncovered the bucket, turned her face away as she tipped the contents out. Why were human beings so defective—excreting, smelling, dragging down their higher selves? It must have been worse in Abban’s time, with no deodorants, no Blue Flush. Did Abban have his sea-washed plank, or did some ministering angel or friendly seal bear away all excrement? His biographer had said nothing on the subject.

  She scrambled back to the path which zigzagged steeply to the cottage, wished she passed a newsagent’s en route. She hadn’t missed the papers until this morning. St Valentine’s day was different—she always bought The Times, then, read the passionate messages in the personal column, the doting dotty avowals, displaying ardour or despair, jealousy or lust; the in-jokes, the pet names, the fantastical inventions—sometimes four whole pages of them, nearly forty columns. For the rest of the year, the paper reverted to its usual staid agenda—politics and war, diplomacy, disasters; ignoring love, demoting it, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a perennial force throbbing under wraps until St Valentine’s allowed it to break out.

  Nice to phone the editor and spell out a message for David—a declaration of love from Walt Disney to F.R. Leavis, or from Simone Weil to a seal. They had their in-jokes now.

  She wrapped his coat around her, ran the last few yards, stopped outside the back door of the cottage to remove her wellingtons. Cormack had bought those from the mainland (for a fee), along with woolly gloves. She was still sharing David’s sweaters, even his vests. She could hardly stock up with new clothes when she kept saying every day that she must leave. It had become a sort of formula, a ritual to assuage the guilt, but which she didn’t act upon. She had her reasons—kept trying to shine them up, make them sound less selfish, more convincing. No point in rushing back to an empty house if Chris were still away in California. And as for Bea, well there was always Madge and
Vera, Father Clarke. And if Chris did return, then Bea could act mother, invite her to stay. That would take care of both of them—her mother purposeful, her daughter in good hands. It wouldn’t be for long, in any case. She would leave next week, for certain, or the week after that, or …

  She unlatched the door, sniffed the air. There was a heady smell of baking, richer than David’s usual soda bread. He had got up very early, started on his cooking before she was awake. It had astonished her at first, his solemn sessions in the kitchen, the way he kneaded dough or sautéed vegetables with the same prayerful intensity he brought to his intellectual work. Now she simply accepted it, tried not to interfere.

  She watched him for a second without him knowing she was there, his tall dark figure stooping over the range. Strange how every time she saw him she felt a sort of jolt, as if he were a naked cable conducting energy. On the surface, he seemed quiet and safe enough, self-sufficient, engrossed in what he did, courteous to her always, generous to a fault, yet there was some dangerous undercurrent which he appeared to fear himself, as if he might explode should she come too near or touch him. She remembered an old wives’ tale which said that the first unmarried man you spotted on St Valentine’s would be your sweetheart for a year. He had assured her once that old wives’ tales were often true. She crept up on him, smiling to herself as she risked electric shock, grabbed him round the waist.