I have a handful of top shells now, pretty enough to be mermaid’s buttons if mermaids were fool enough to wear clothes, but as yet I’ve found none of the shells I’m really always looking for: the cowries, groatie buckies. Buckie is a Scots word for shell, but no one seems sure what the groatie part means. Groatie buckies are common enough to be worth looking for; rare enough that it’s always a thrill finding one; said to bring good luck. There are two species in Orkney, Trivia monacha and Trivia arctica, but only monacha has spots on its shell. (I’m told another way of differentiating between male monacha and arctica is by comparing their penises, monacha’s being cylindrical and thin while arctica’s is leaf-like and broad, but that’s not much use when all you have is the shell, and besides, I feel it would be a little impertinent.) There is such a contrast between the animal, a vivid yellow snail which holds its siphon up like an elephant’s trunk, and its home, a cool dove-grey shell with a blush of pink, an intimate, furled little shape that nestles in your palm. The ridges on the back of the shell look like fingerprints, or a ploughed field, or the pattern left in the sand where the water has pulled it back and forth. Turn them over and they’re smiling at you. Cute as they are, they’re carnivores, night-time scavengers. The shells are much the same colour as the Evie sand, easily missed; the best way of looking for them is not to look, just let your gaze drift over the fragments of bleached coral, the little pebbles and scraps of weed, until the ridge-and-furrow curve snags your consciousness like a half-forgotten face seen in a crowd.
Groatie buckies aren’t born with ridges: the babies have smooth white shells, incredibly fragile and much more noticeably spiraliform, which give them buoyancy as they swim. Slowly the shell hardens, gains bulk, darkens, the ridges develop, and the adult settles on the sublittoral seabed. All mollusc shells are designed around spirals, but often you must look at the shell in its earliest stages to see the truth of this.
Trivia are not the true cowries, which belong to the genus Cypraea, although they are distant relations. The true cowries have smooth, not ridged, shells. In the garden up the road I have a pile of weathered, faded Kenyan shells, giant clams and textile cones, spider conches and bull-mouth helmets, and several tiger cowries, gathered on the beaches around Mombasa and lugged around the world by my parents, somehow always getting tucked into a box when we were packing up. The name of the tiger cowrie (Cypraea tigris) used to confuse me: they’re spotted, not striped, but it’s another name given by Linnaeus in that first flush of scientific labelling, and in 1756 the distinction between big stripy cats and slightly smaller spotty cats was maybe not as clear as it is today (though surely Linnaeus of all people should have known). Leopards and tigers were both big and scary and far away.
There is no confusing exotic Cypraea tigris and our little Trivia monacha, though, even if both have spots: the tiger cowrie is not only smooth and lushly patterned but the size of a big lemon, while I’ve never found a groatie buckie bigger than my little fingernail. The Romans called cowries ‘little sows’, porcellae, which ultimately gives us porcelain, from the smooth translucence which both share. Porcella is a euphemism for vulva, and presumably Linnaeus had this in mind when he called the true cowries Cypraea, shells of Cyprus, the birthplace of Venus. In contrast monacha means a solitary, though it’s still a feminine word. A ‘monkess’, a nun, an anchorite. It suits these demure little shells, folded in on themselves, self-sufficient as clasped and praying hands.
Linnaeus thought there was only one species of Trivia. He was proved wrong by Emmanuel da Costa, who showed that spotty monacha and immaculate arctica were distinct, and gave monacha its name. Da Costa was an eighteenth-century London antiquarian with a free-and-easy attitude to other people’s money, but scrupulous where conchology was concerned, and a self-righteous prude when it came to Linnaeus’s incorrigible habit of drawing analogies between the forms of molluscs and human genitalia, scattering labels like labia majora and mons veneris around like confetti. ‘Science should be chaste and delicate,’ Da Costa tutted. ‘Ribaldry at times has been passed for wit; but Linnaeus alone passes it for terms of science.’ Da Costa awarded Trivia monacha its pious little name in protest against both Linnaeus’s predilection and the ancient association between the cowrie and the human female genitalia.
Trivia means commonplace, which seems unfair. It comes ultimately from Latin trivium, a place where three roads meet, more than just a fork in the road, not quite a crossroads. Something that’s trivial is gossip, the kind of information you might pick up on street corners. But Sophocles had Oedipus kill his father at a trivium on the way to Delphi: the three roads embody fate, past, present and future. The Greek goddess Hekate had three faces, personifying these aspects of fate, and the Romans called her Trivia. She’s associated with Persephone in the underworld, Artemis the huntress on earth, and Selene the moon in the heavens. Not so trivial, after all.
(I’ve been chasing up another reference, another Latin name for cowries, matriculi. Little matrix, little womb, little mother. It’s cited in books on mother goddesses, sea goddesses, the eternal feminine. But the search runs into the sand: I can trace it back as far as a catalogue of Indonesian curiosities published in 1741 by the German botanist Georg Rumpf, and Rumpf says he found the term in the works of Ennius, the Roman poet. Among the surviving fragments of Ennius’s work is a poem in praise of seafood, including scallops, mussels, oysters and sea urchins, but I can’t find matriculi anywhere. As with most quests to return to the womb, this one seems ultimately futile.)
I am so focused on not-quite-looking for the groatie buckie which I feel sure must be hiding somewhere in this litter of shells that I almost miss the shard of sea-washed pottery. It’s late-Victorian, kelp-brown transfer-ware, a pattern of leaves and flowers, its curve and incline suggesting that it came from the rim of a dinner plate. Like most of us I find sea-glass and sea-china irresistible. I have a basket of smoothed shards at the house, picked up for their intrinsic appeal, retained partly because they remind me of my mother. She collected and dealt in china as well as silver, in a small way: weekends at the local street market, the occasional fair. A lifelong hobby, acquired from her father, put on hold when we were in Kenya, resumed with enthusiasm once she was back in London. I never paid enough attention when being dragged round Camden Passage or Brick Lane or Bermondsey markets: only just enough to learn how hallmarks worked, or to tell Chelsea from Spode. But something must have sunk in. Invited to dine once at one of the older Oxford colleges I was impressed enough with the attractive dinner service to turn my plate over without even thinking what I was doing, looking for the pottery’s mark. From halfway down the long, polished table came a cheery shout: ‘Are you from Stoke too?’
In later life, my mother fell in love with restoration: now her quest was for the imperfect rather than the flawless, the Regency bone-china plate that had been valued enough to be badly mended with clunky Victorian rivets. She would soak it, dissolve the old glue, extract the metal staples, reattach the broken fragments and paint over the cracks and any damaged part of the decoration. She learned to rebuild plates with chipped rims and jugs with missing feet. The problem was always the final painting; the colours were never true enough to please her, the restored surface too matte to match the original glaze. And yet at the same time she wrestled with the dishonesty of restoration: she was unhappy with the idea that someone might be misled by her work, put a higher price on it than it was worth. We talked about how the damaged pieces were uniquely valuable, the ones which could tell something of their story, and how her work on them was simply the adding of another chapter to the biography.
After my father died, nearly a decade after my mother, it was time at last to clear the house. Bone china and earthenware emerged from every corner, stacked in the bottom of cupboards, tucked into bookshelves. The unsold stock from the last antique fair she’d ever been to, years earlier, still crated, still wrapped in that distant weekend’s yellowing newspapers, with prices attached, and the
little notebook in which she recorded sales. Solid brown Doulton jugs, Mason’s Ironstone phoenix-pattern plates, huge blue-and-white platters, tiny translucent tea-cups with gilt rims. I couldn’t have sold her collection even if I had wanted to: some was valuable, all was precious; much was damaged, nothing matched. I certainly couldn’t keep it, though I have hung on to far too much. I could have thrown it away: I had a vision of driving to the sea and tipping the whole lot in with one glorious almighty crash. But in the end I advertised online for people to come and help themselves. I set as much as I could out on my mother’s dining-room table, as though for a fantasy banquet. Strangers came and marvelled, and swapped stories, and left as friends. I wept to see the treasures leave, and then I set the dining table again.
When I turn up sea-china in my beachcombing I can hear my mother at my shoulder. Right now she’s pointing out a detail I hadn’t noticed: the slippage in the wreath of brown flowers where the transferrer, the specialist craftswoman responsible for applying the design, has laid down two abutting sections of pattern-paper slightly askew.
The treasures I find along the Evie shore are quotidian, mundane: even the pottery is mostly very utilitarian, thick shards of cream- and brown-glazed stoneware from the jugs and jars and bottles that were the staple vessels of Orkney crofts. As today, there is the occasional piece of blue or green or brown transferware; occasionally the blue-and-white stripe of Green’s Cornishware; sometimes an extra kick of pleasure comes with the discovery of a fragment of Scottish spongeware, thick jewel colours overlaying crackled cream, a pattern of daisies or thistles smudged on. There’s always a thrill when a shard has text on it, even if it’s only ‘Burslem’ or ‘ade in Engla’.
But somewhere out there in Eynhallow Sound there is a real treasure. Scramble west from here along the rocky foreshore, past the Knowe of Stenso, and the next mound you come to is the Broch of Burgar. There is a tangle of stories about this place, but at their heart is a gold and silver treasure which was found in 1840 by the laird, a Mr Gordon, and – to Gordon’s fury – subsequently claimed on behalf of Queen Victoria as treasure trove. Piecing together the different versions of the story is rather like reassembling a pot from worn and broken fragments, but by patient processes of elimination and comparison a shape emerges. The treasure was never drawn, and we only have an amateurish inventory. Silver pins, brooches, chains and bowls, and amber beads: a combination which is only matched elsewhere in Scotland by Pictish hoards. There were silver combs as well, which have no parallels. Gordon is said also to have found two gold arm-rings, which may have been Viking Age. In response to the Crown’s claims, he wrote that:
A private Individual, who chooses, for his own amusement, to be at the expence and trouble, of searching for relicks of antiquity, upon his own property, is not bound to deliver up, for behoof of Her Majesty, what he may find, as ‘hidden treasure’, until adequately indemnified for his labour and expences.
Gordon never did give the queen the treasure. He claimed he had already sent it to the Earl of Zetland, and that the ‘ancient relicks’, which had all fallen to pieces anyway, were worth no more ‘than a Groat of Scottish money’. Some bureaucrat backed down in the face of all this bluster, accepting the story and letting Gordon keep the treasure without ever checking with the Earl; and no reference to the treasure has ever turned up in the Zetland papers. Other eye-witnesses muttered that Gordon was lying about the value of his hoard, and after his death stories circulated in Evie that he had gone to the top of the cliff and thrown it into the sea in a fit of self-righteous pique. I am reminded of the closing episodes of Beowulf, when the hero enters an ancient barrow and kills a treasure-hoarding dragon but dies himself in the fight. His grieving people enter the chamber and take the treasure; they tip the dragon’s corpse over the cliff and raise a mound over Beowulf’s cremated remains, together with the dragon’s hoard – ‘and there it lies’, the poet says, ‘just as useless to men as it was before’.
I like to think that Gordon’s treasure is all still out there, if sea-changed: the fragile embossed bowls remaining defiantly intact despite the force of the roaring rost that tumbles boulders as big as buses; the amber beads rolling in the tug and pull of the water, camouflaged among the golden-brown holdfasts of the kelp; the brooches growing thick and blurred with barnacles. Perhaps one day a rogue wave will roll ashore the silver combs and pins, the natural companion of the mirror carved on the Sands of Evie symbol stone.
What’s that gleam, down by the tideline?
*
I swam this morning at 7. Moon huge in the SW, sea and western sky nacreous, eastern sky a crucible of molten dawn. Air temp 8 C, water 12 C. Much bird activity, four shags ducking and diving, gulls, a flock of turnstones, crows, an endless stream of noisy rooks like smuts blown from a bonfire. Curlews ululating. One common seal, cruising slowly by, curious, diving leisurely with a great arc of dark back. Returning, coming closer, closer, then at about 5 yards from me was startled, vanished in a huge splash, resurfaced amid the shags, who took off in outrage. I tore myself away just as the sun was lifting over the edge of the world.
*
My mother died on the Tuesday of Holy Week, in 2002.
I just typed, My other died…
‘No man is an island…’
‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
Just over two years earlier, she had begun to realize that the tickle in her throat was more than the aftermath of a cold. She began, discreetly, to make enquiries, visit specialists. I was finishing my doctorate in York, my sister flying for Air Mauritius. Neither of us was to be worried. Months ticked by. The tickle became a scratch. I knew, vaguely, she was concerned about whether her voice would be capable of delivering a paper at a conference in Budapest: I said something glib drawn from my own fledgling academic experience. I don’t remember what. Make eye-contact, probably. Swallow. Keep breathing.
In the summer of 2000, she was briefly hospitalized with a deep vein thrombosis, nothing to do with the tickle. When a specialist was flicking through her notes, he said, ‘I understand you’re also being monitored for motor neurone disease.’ That was how the news was officially broken to her. But she had been nursing her suspicions for a while: a lifetime in the social services, latterly in hospice work and bereavement counselling, meant that she knew what MND looked like. However, no matter how hard-headed you are, some truths are difficult to confront, some shapes easier to perceive with averted vision. In its early stages her version of the condition, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, flies under the radar. Who thinks a tickly throat is a death sentence, or for that matter a slight weakness in your grip, or a nasal quality to your voice? She had been letting the idea unfold slowly, but the doctor’s moment of indiscretion made her look her terror in the face. She was catapulted in that instant from one side to the other of the professional divide. Having spent many years working with doctors on how to care for the dying patient, she was now that patient.
She was still determined not to worry us. But my sister went to see her in hospital, and overheard another indiscreet conversation, another reference to motor neurone disease. Straight home and on to Google.
Rapidly progressive, she read. No treatment. Invariably fatal.
Amyotrophic means the muscles are not being fed. Lateral refers to the areas on the sides of the spinal cord where the motor neurons are found. Sclerosis is hardening.
Motor neurons look like seaweed, genus Laminaria, kelp, tangles, daberlack. They have a sprawling star-shaped head, with dendrites like the fronds and blades of kelp growing out of the cell nucleus at one end, a stipe of the axon coated in its myelin sheath, and the axon terminals, like a holdfast, emerging at the other end. They cling on to the muscle. The task of the motor neuron, like a seal’s vibrissae, is to receive information about movement. It then passes the information on, from the brain to the muscles.
No one has yet told me, but I know something’s up. Something.
I am shocked beyond speech, beyond tears. Orcinus orca has risen from the depths, rammed me, flipped me over into tonic immobility.
I’m a historian, an archaeologist, I deal in stories and patterns and symbols. I’m supposed to be the expert on death and dying. Where can I go, to understand the story of what is happening here?
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was first identified by Jean-Martin Charcot, in 1869, and is therefore known in France as la maladie de Charcot. Motor Neurone Disease – MND – is too cold and clinical a label for what’s happening here and now, to the most important person in my world. La maladie de Charcot gives me a narrative, something to grapple with, a way of thinking about the unthinkable. I need ways of connecting this violent alien in our midst with my familiar worlds.
Jean-Martin Charcot was the ‘Napoleon of neurology’, responsible for the accurate identification of multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease as well as MND, and he argued for the reclassification of hysteria as a psychological rather than a physiological disorder. There is a famous painting by André Brouillet, Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, of Charcot lecturing on hysteria. Some thirty attentive, black-clad and gravely bearded men stand around taking notes, while Charcot gestures at the subject, a fainting woman supported by another male doctor. She is an island of creamy white in a sea of charcoal-black; the light haloes her pale face, her closed eyes are in shadow, her marmoreal bosom gleams. Charcot’s heavy, thoughtful face is turned away from her, towards the room and the men; it’s hard to identify the source of the light that falls across his cheek and brow, unless it’s the woman’s lambent breasts.
Swimming with Seals Page 20
