Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  I tried, but slowly, sneaking under the threshold of awareness, the knowledge came to me that I could not make him happy. I was failing, faking the role of a good Catholic wife and mother less and less convincingly. I could never seem to communicate that I wasn’t failing on purpose. That lack of faith in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all the rest of it, wasn’t for want of trying.

  I had been brought up with an ambiguous relationship both to religion in general and Christianity in particular. My parents had first met in the early 1960s at a dinner party organized by Mensa, the society for people self-diagnosed with high IQs. In the Mensa Members Register for 1963/4 my father lists atheism, computers, politics and chess among his interests; my mother just describes herself as an Anglican and a psychiatric social worker. My father was separated, with a son and a daughter in their teens: he didn’t want any more children, but my mother refused to marry him unless children were at least a possibility. Though no longer a regular church-goer she always took the religious impulse very seriously and had an ongoing, slightly sentimental, love affair with High Anglicanism: Cranmer and George Herbert and the Authorised Version. She was drawn towards the Quakers but she couldn’t stomach pacifism: some battles couldn’t be dodged. ‘We had to fight Hitler,’ she would say sadly, resigned to the inevitability of evil. She and I developed a private tradition of sneaking off to Midnight Mass at St Margaret’s Westminster, that bastion of the Established Church, with the chimes of Big Ben a hundred yards away marking the transition from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. My father, in contrast, was reluctant to set foot in a church, even as a sightseer – ‘he’s worried,’ my mother hissed to me once, ‘they might get him.’

  I have read a lot about atheism by writers who have a triumphalist, sneering approach, more or less explicit. Religion is a con trick, they imply, imposed by manipulative powerbrokers – bishops and kings in the Christian Middle Ages – and adhered to by wish-fulfilment-addicted fools. There may be truth in this. But I want to read more by atheists like myself, who feel the tug of faith and yet cannot believe. Not long before he died even my godless father, crippled by strokes and almost blind, told me what a comfort he thought faith would have been to him in the aftermath of my mother’s death nearly a decade earlier. He and I were closer in that moment than at almost any other time in our lives.

  Faith is such a charged word. It has so many positive associations: I have always wanted to be faithful, not an infidel committing all kinds of infidelities. Faith is so close to trust, and I’ve never found trust easy either. Not long after I arrived at my boarding school we had to do a trust exercise which involved falling back into the arms of another student. I couldn’t do it; I was simply physically incapable of leaning away from my toes, rocking on my heels, letting the weight of my head and shoulders pull me backwards, and going past the point of no return. Faith is tied up with loyalty too, and here we get into the semantics of unquestioning obedience to the loi, the law. The triple vow taken by monks and nuns consists of poverty, chastity and – hardest of all – obedience. It’s not that I don’t understand the theory: I can remember – in one of the periods when I was performing such a good simulacrum of Christianity that I had us all fooled – I can remember arguing that perfect obedience is perfect freedom. ‘Thy will be done,’ we say in the Lord’s Prayer, in the words of Mary when she learns of her pregnancy. But now I think it’s just another way of dodging blame.

  We who lack faith and long for it are the children out in the snow, noses pressed to the sweet-shop window; the would-be club-goers, dressed up and ready to party, turned away at the red velvet rope by an implacable bouncer for lacking the one vital accessory. I have known so many wise and thoughtful Christians, people whom I admire from the bottom of my heart. I have experienced such overwhelming emotion before an icon of the Virgin Mary; lit candles at Anglican and Catholic and Orthodox shrines; shouted ‘Christ is risen’ at midnight while Holy Saturday turns into Easter Sunday as the lamb roasts and children throw fireworks in Greek mountain villages. I still reflexively cross myself if I hear of a death on the news, dip my fingers in a stoup of holy water, bob my knees as I pass the altar.

  But no traction results, the cogged wheels don’t engage, there’s no miracle for me.

  And maybe that’s good, because there’s a dark side to faith, one that’s missed by the people who say, ‘Faith must be such a comfort.’ We’ve talked about hell. If I’ve understood, it’s not brimstone and pitchforks and BDSM devils, it’s an eternity spent in the awareness of God’s love and the knowledge that you have consciously chosen to reject that love. It’s a full understanding of all the pain you have caused and all the damage you have done. It’s total self-knowledge and public humiliation – there’s an Anglo-Saxon sermon which describes souls at the Last Judgment as being like clear glass, with every little sin on show. I think of an aquarium, all the warped and dark thoughts, words and deeds swimming in suddenly clear and spotlit water. But what sort of god rejects someone for an honest inability to believe? This god has a clipboard and biro: he’s ticking his boxes, tallying my errors, marking me down, shaking his head at my wilful failure, my inability to love enough. His eyes are genuinely sad. His penalty is the withdrawal of approval.

  I don’t want to sit this god’s exam, even if heaven is the reward for passing. I’d rather dissolve into nothingness, in the way the little mermaid was supposed to, burst like a bubble, lost in the anonymity of a thousand million other bubbles on the crest of the waves.

  The little mermaid and the prince are an impossible story, lovers who cannot naturally survive in the medium the other breathes, as alien to each other as frog and princess. My husband and I had so much in common, but there were fundamental incompatibilities, lethal off-shore skerries that only became visible once the emotional tide began to retreat. I was in love with medieval Christianity – not just the patterns and structures of theology, but the architecture and the music and the poetry. He mistook that love for faith, and to a lesser extent – to my shame – so did I.

  I was in love. We see what we want to see.

  But I’m a historian, and a novelist: I need to understand medieval Catholicism if I’m to have the faintest hope of getting under the skin of the people about whom I write. My husband introduced me to the modern Church. He challenged me on many of my most deeply held beliefs, on abortion, homosexuality, women’s claims to the priesthood. He was much better informed. I was ashamed to realize how little I knew about the teachings of the Church, the law of the land, or the hard facts. I had no idea, for example, that more babies are aborted every day in the UK than come up for adoption every year. I knew almost nothing of the technicalities of abortion procedures. But maybe it never occurred to him that, even after I knew the facts in all their distressing detail, I would still assert a woman’s right to choose; I would still ask awkward questions, and claim that doubt has its own validity. It certainly never occurred to me that my doing so would be a problem. But there is no halfway house when creatures from two different mediums meet.

  I began to perceive, in terror, that honesty about my lack of belief would mean the end of the marriage.

  This unwanted knowledge sat for a long time in a dark corner of my mind, like the stain of damp in the corner of the room that keeps reappearing no matter how many times you bleach it, treat it, paint or paper over it. At some point, you move a big piece of furniture into that corner and pray no one notices, but it’s still there, still spreading. You can smell it.

  Any marriage whose very survival is predicated on dishonesty has already ended.

  *

  I just got out of the sea. Air temp 7, sea 13 (felt WARM!) Heavy rain, very high tide, breakwater almost completely submerged. I went in the water to the west of it, was aware there were seals around, in the shallows, dark moving shadows, their backs occasionally breaking the surface. One popped up the far side of the breakwater, maybe 8 yards away, selkie (grey seal), lovely dapple-grey
throat and chest. We gazed. He sank. I shifted round. And there was a seal right behind me, maybe 6 feet away. NEVER been so close. I yelped – I couldn’t stop myself. He gave me a long liquid reproachful look and sank calmly, none of the usual ‘Ooh, you’re not a seal!’ splash-flurry. Then they resurfaced just beyond the breakwater – three of them, all selkies – and lay on the surface for a while, rolling a little, swimming a little but mostly just bobbing on their sides, raising an occasional front flipper, crooning from time to time. Happy, relaxed, looking over at me sometimes. I felt privileged, safe, protected even.

  *

  Danish hav (havfrue, sea-woman, mermaid) is cognate with Orcadian haaf. In the Scandinavian languages and Icelandic hav or haf just means sea or ocean, but here in Orkney it has the more precise connotation of the deep or open sea, as opposed to the inshore waters. The grey seal, the selkie, is also the haaf fish. Mermaids as such are rare in Orcadian tradition, although both land and sea are swarming with otherworldly creatures. Grey seals are said to be able to take on human form, and there are many stories of sexual union between a true human and a selkie. The selkie-wife stories, in which a man wins a bride by stealing the selkie’s sealskin when she is in her human form, are the best-known, but there are a host of others. Selkie-bride stories do the job of mermaid tales in Orkney: the haaf fish filling in for the havfrue. Both narrative traditions are about terminal incompatibility, yearning for the impossible, exile from one’s true home, true self.

  What has the little mermaid’s prince done but look pretty and enjoy extraordinary privilege? Why should he deserve this passionate, physical, imaginative young woman? And why does Andersen so insist that she is little? She is a woman for most of the story, not a child.

  ‘The Little Mermaid’ is also a tragedy of mistaken identity. The mermaid loves the prince primarily because he reminds her of the marble statue of a handsome boy salvaged from a wreck to adorn her garden. She has a vision of what love ought to look like, and no reality is strong enough to shatter it. The prince cannot love the mermaid because his heart is already given to a girl he glimpsed just once, whom he believes rescued him from drowning. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the rescuer he dreams of is the mermaid, but he cannot recognize her, and has no idea who she truly is.

  As my students perceived, the narrative slips uneasily back and forth between erotic and religious modes. It is so tempting to read it through the lens of Andersen’s own complex and unhappy sexuality; and to note that he wrote the story in 1836, the year his dear friend Edvard Collin got married; but the story has poetic insight at its heart that transcends context-specific gender politics. It explores the stubborn compulsion of the mermaid, with her random, hormone-fuelled, inappropriate erotic fixation. In the first part of the story she is so active, wilful, desiring, contrary. So powerful, but with such a tenuous grip on social and biological reality, the epitome of a teenage girl. How does she imagine she and the prince will have sex, with their incompatible genitalia? And, of course, they don’t: she becomes a woman and achieves the right organs but at the cost of being able to tell him what she wants, and how she feels. Her body becomes the locus of pain not pleasure. And she ends a virgin.

  Jungians have had a field day with this story, suggesting that while the mermaid may be the main character, it is really the story of the prince. He is the animus, the masculine principle, associated with daylight, the upper regions, the sun, strong warm colours, life. The mermaid, in contrast, is the feminine anima: a creature of water, death and the dark. He cannot be healthy and complete unless he acknowledges and is reconciled with his anima. He is the conscious, she the subconscious. In this reading the mermaid and the human princess who looks so like her are one character, both embodying the female principle, and the story has a happy ending as animus and anima retire to their couch in the shipboard tent of purple and gold to consummate their marriage. The broken-hearted mermaid throws the masculine dagger into the feminine sea, which turns red, representing both death and the loss of virginity, as though they are one and the same thing. This reading, eloquent though it is, annihilates the mermaid’s autonomy. She only exists to allow him to achieve wholeness: and I can’t bear it.

  Andersen should have had the courage of his original vision. She should have turned into foam. Simply to dissolve, to let go, to become one again with the elements, without an immortal soul, without even a grave: why should this be a tragic ending? But instead the mermaid’s grandmother speaks wistfully of the human soul:

  … which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.

  The old mermaid queen has no more experience of those regions than does the poet of The Wanderer when, at the end of a bleak poem which dissects all earthly consolations and shows how they fail, he offers the trite consolation of the heavenly home, the one foundation. And yet they sound so sure.

  I wish I knew where they get their conviction from.

  *

  I went for a run up the track soon after sunrise – a vision of islands: Rousay, Eynhallow, Gairsay, Eday, glimmering in the hazy sea – larks, wrens, lapwings – then down for a swim at the Sands of Evie. Lots of eider ducks. I swam out to the end of the breakwater, then turned, and there was a seal between me and the beach, maybe four yards from me. Usually they look startled and splash off, but this one – a small common seal – just swam steadily, watching me – I could count every whisker, see the whites of its eyes. Then it dived, and surfaced a bit further away, with a friend. They stayed about 30 feet away the whole time I was in the water, tracking my zigzags, watching me with hopeful puppy eyes. Young ones, I think. Very curious as to what I was up to. The eiders kept up their gossipy chorus of disapproval throughout.

  *

  Over my two decades’ dreaming of moving to Orkney I envisaged long walks along the cliffs, birdwatching, playing on the beach, creating a garden, exploring the hills, getting to know the archaeology intimately. Even swimming in the sea, in the summer of course, when the water is less cold, less wild; though only if I can find a beach where I feel safe.

  But in many ways life here has turned out to be no different from life anywhere. Bills still have to be paid. I am trapped, sedentary and deskbound in ways I never foresaw. Both my employed and my freelance work involve long hours at the keyboard. We live around fifteen miles equidistant from both Kirkwall, the capital, and Stromness, Orkney’s second city. It’s not a long commute compared to what I was once used to, but nothing’s in walking distance, and far too much time is spent in the car. For several weeks either side of Christmas I drive to work in total darkness, sit hunched over the computer in artificial light, and return home in the dark again.

  Nor did I foresee the way my body would mutate into an alien weight I hauled around after me: those painful feet, the shoulders set in concrete, the stabbing pains in the small of my back, losing the knack of sleep, the relentless wave of tension headaches eroding the shores of joy and sanity. It was as though I’d moved into an unfamiliar house in which all the doors jammed in their frames, the banisters wobbled under my hand, the roof leaked; always stubbing my toes on the furniture, banging my head on sloping ceilings. Marriage, I told myself. Middle age. Motherhood. The human condition, right? No big deal. Keep muddling through. Stiff upper lip.

  An image haunts me, of a lobster entering a creel, beguiled by the bait; turning to leave only to find it’s the wrong shape, all bristling claws and wild antennae, to fit back through the narrowing, netted tunnel. A friend tells me of the anger felt by Orkney’s lobster fishermen when they haul up their creels only to find them empty: that a seal has broken in and stolen the bait, rendering the trap useless. I listen, and nod, keeping my facial muscles quiet to hide what I’m really thinking. The seal may not know it’s saving the lobster, but that doesn’t make th
e salvation any less real.

  We have already been living here for three summers when I first start swimming in the sea regularly. I need more exercise: I am still hobbling from the plantar fasciitis, and the swimming pools have very limited opening hours.

  It’s Helen’s idea. This being Orkney we know each other in several contexts – we have both worked in local tourism and are connected with the college; our daughters go to the same tiny school. Her background’s in marine biology; she’s a great person to go rock-pooling with, and I have always admired her practical energy, the glow she has about her. She and Barbara, whom I first meet as another mother of young children, whom I get to know better as a rangy, feral thrill-seeker, have come up with the project of swimming off the slipway in the little harbour nearby at Tingwall every Saturday: the Tingwall Polar Bear Club! Why not? The idea gains traction, around half a dozen of us come along regularly; it becomes the high point of my week, both the plunge into summer-cold water, and the flasks of tea and the companionable blether which come afterwards. We meet in the car park by the little shack that houses the ferry office, gather on the slipway, walk down the weed-slick slope into the sheltered harbour. We swim around the pier and the rocking fishing boats, climb out again on the rusting rungs set into the concrete. My back unlocks; the cold water is bliss on painful feet. After a few weeks of this I find I’m standing taller, breathing more deeply; long-disused nerves and muscles stretch and furl in the dark, reaching after sunlight, oxygen, water.