The Beautiful Indifference

by Sarah Hall

  She could no longer see him in the water so she kept her eyes on the spot where she thought he would probably get out. The foliage mossed together the more she looked. Birds circled over the lake. A bird was calling nearby, within the forest, the notes hollow and looping, a song that did not seem diurnal. Now that she could no longer see him it was hard to remain focused. Her mind wandered. She thought about his sounds of arousal, surprise and relief as the soft obstruction yielded, finding a way inside, acute pleasure in those wet recurring motions, the stunned intervals. They were now experts in the act, which was a series of steady, humid acts. He was becoming more vocal. He would speak to her of what he desired. His assertions, his voice, worked her as if she were being touched. The world before and after was incredibly vivid.

  The bird in the forest let up. The fluttering in her chest stopped.

  She thought about the blue Arabia crockery they had seen in the antique market by the quay in Helsinki. The city’s Russian architecture: the Uspenski cathedral with its golden domes and the sentinelled railway station. The quiet Finnish underlay, restraint and elegance, design that would always oppose corruption. Helsinki was attractive, a clean blend of modern and historic. It lacked people. The drive to the cottage had taken six hours, the arboreal view varying only slightly once outside the city. Road signs were impossible. It was a language so unexported the pronunciation could not even be guessed. It sounded similar to and was possibly rooted in the oldest human language, a cross-continental language, she had read. There were sixty thousand lakes. Theirs was called Vuotjärvi. It was situated between two bigger lakes, towards the dialect of Savo. The GPS unit had led them off the motorway, down minor roads, then along seventeen kilometres of gravel track, past glimmers of water, almost to their destination. The lane to the cottage was overgrown, its entrance easily missed. They had found the place by calling the owner on her mobile phone, hearing her real voice behind the froth of bushes, and walking towards it. Anna Sutela was delighted to meet them and to lend the cottage. It was older than most of the lake cottages. The previous owner had seen a wolf in the garden. She had prepared a salad for their supper and would eat with them before driving back to Kuopio.

  He had been gone forty-five minutes, probably more. The lake had a dark tint to its edges, underneath the tree line. There were small white bars at its centre where the wind was freer. Or a current was moving, flows between the two larger lakes. Time had seemed irrelevant, their circadian rhythms were gone, yesterday they had eaten at midnight, but it was now definitely evening. She searched the little island for his intrusive shape. Perhaps he had arrived and was walking its circumference. If he was still swimming there it meant the exercise was not as easy as anticipated. If he was still swimming there he would need more stamina.

  The sky and the lake transferred topical yellow patches between each other. Such eerie empty beauty. She began to feel a little uncomfortable. She should have been watching more carefully, consistently. That was really her only duty. She strained her eyes. There was no sign of him. There was no point calling his name, the distance was too great, and the neighbouring Finns might hear and think her disturbance improper. She stepped to the edge of the pontoon, as if those few extra inches might provide enough clarity to locate him. The wooden structure sank slightly and water lapped across her toes. She stepped back, turned, walked off the pontoon and made her way round the little beach above which the boat was moored. She began to unknot the line tied around the tree trunk.

  The sensible thing was to row out. Not because she imagined he was in trouble, just in case. He might be struggling. He might have cramp and be treading water, or be floating in the recovery position. Perhaps he was sitting on the island, tired, having underestimated. Or he might already be swimming back to the cottage and she could accompany him, companionably, encourage him if he was flagging, make sure he was really all right and not in any jeopardy. She should have rowed alongside him from the beginning, not because she thought he wouldn’t make it, she did think he would make it, but because the boat would be a handy back-up, eroding none of his achievement, simply ensuring the safety of the swim. Why hadn’t she gone? Why hadn’t she acted more responsibly? She had been too blasé about the whole thing. The possibility of disaster had not really occurred to her, not in a valid way, a way to make her officiously oversee the exercise. Suppose he was in difficulty, now, beyond her field of vision, somewhere in the water.

  She tugged at the mooring. He had knotted the rope earlier that day. The knot looked slack but seemed very stiff and loosened out of its synthetic coils and links only a millimetre or two. Her fingers felt too weak for the operation. This was not supposed to be the hard part. The hard part would be moving the boat from its position up the bank where they had dragged it together, down onto the beach and into the lake. She became frustrated and began to yank at both ends of the line, without regard for its undoing. A horrible feeling was trickling into her. A sense that as she fought, uselessly, he was vanishing. Fucking thing. Come on. A small, aggravated cry left her. She stopped for a moment and took hold of herself. She looked at the inelaborate shape in her hands. Then she pushed the standing end of the cord through the tuck. The knot released, and the plastic length buzzed as she pulled it loose. She slid the rope from the trunk and threw it into the boat.

  The boat was moulded fibreglass rather than wood, but it had still felt heavy when they’d moved it out of the water before. She was uncertain about managing now, alone, even in reverse, with a downslope. She had not put on shoes. Her shoes were in the porch of the cottage, on the other side of the meadow, too far away and timewasting to retrieve. She tried not to notice how vulnerable her feet felt. She had on a thin cotton shirt, bikini bottoms. She took a breath, leaned against the prow of the boat and pushed. Her feet dug into the ground. Plush earth, twigs and thistles, pebbles where the bank became beach. The vessel resisted, shunted forward a notch or two, then stuck. She pushed again, got traction, gathered momentum. The boat ground across the stony apron of the beach and slid into the water. The first time she had launched a boat. The first stage in a successful rescue, a solo rescue. Already a positive retrospective was forming in her mind. How it might later be told. She felt a source of energy packed within herself. And adrenalin, like a lit taper.

  She lifted an oar, steadied it, fitted the metal ball on its underside into the oarlock, then did the same on the other side. She waded the boat out to thigh level, climbed in, took her position on the seat and pulled with her right arm to turn the boat. She remembered the action. Now it was easy. Now it was simply speed, how fast she could row. She turned and looked at the island, imagined her trajectory, began to pull on the oars. The oars, charming and narrow and traditional when they had tested the boat initially, now seemed impractical. She worked her shoulders hard, exaggerating the strokes, improving them. The water was uniform. Though the boat seemed not to be moving locally she was in fact passing new sections of shore, passing the cottage of the neighbouring Finns and noticing, because of the new angle, their electric-green lawn and jetty with bathing steps, passing the promontory, its congestion of trees, its rocks stepping down towards the glistening surface, passing away from the land. Then she was in open water.

  She kept pulling hard. Her grip on the oars was firm. Tenderness to her palms, which would mean blisters. She leaned forward, pushed back. She was making good time. It was not very long since she had lost sight of him. The oarlocks rotated. The paddles washed. She pushed away the image of a sallow indistinct form drifting under the surface. She would find him. He would be stranded on the island. He would be pleased to see her. Or, if he was in difficulty in the water, the sight of the boat coming would sustain him; she would arrive and help him in. She would give him her dry shirt to put on. She would kneel in the hull in front of him and hold him. She would tell him that she was in love with him, because she had not yet told him this, though she had wanted to for weeks, though he must see it, mustn’t he, whenever she came alive
under him, pushing him back so she could see his eyes in that driven, other state, their concentrated pleading look, or when she suffered that peculiar tearful euphoria in climax, with its physical gain, its fear and foreknowledge of loss. This is all I want. I can’t be without it.

  Her strokes became heavier. Her technique was slipping, or she was tired from rowing earlier. It sounded as if the lake was splashing up against the prow more and more. She would have to break, so that she could recover and realign. She slackened the tight grasp of her hands, flexed her fingers. She turned around to look for him again. Inside the boat was a pool of rusty water.

  For a moment she did not understand. A leak. There was a leak. Shit. How had it gone unnoticed? Had the bottom been punctured when the boat was moved, either up or down the bank? In the centre of the hull was a small black eye. A small black hole. No. In the rush to launch she had not fitted the bung. It was still in the small locker by the pontoon. It was her fault that the vessel was not watertight. Or, most likely, it will be an unforeseen event, manufactured under the auspices of technological advancement, which finishes humanity. She let go of the oars and shunted forward on the seat. She cast her eyes around the boat. Rope. The little three-pronged anchor. A sponge. There was nothing with which to bail. She could take off her shirt; stuff it into the hole. But she knew that would fail. The cotton would balloon. The twist of fabric would slip out. She was about half a mile into the lake.

  Everything was so quiet.

  Suddenly she knew how it would all play out. The boat would continue to take on water and would lug down as she tried to row back, its debilitation unstoppable, and then it would submerse. She would make it to the shore, because she could swim well enough, but it would be ugly and ungraceful, it would involve swallowing water and choking because of the desperation. The rescue would be aborted. He would never make it back. Though she would pick her way along the green shoreline to the Finns as quickly as she could, and bang insanely on their door, and beg to use their boat, and listen as they spoke to the emergency services in their pure, impenetrable language, they would not find him or his body. He would be lost. She would be complicit. She would not ever love in this way again.

  She heard herself whimpering. The scenery passed out of focus. Her fear was bifurcating; she could feel the fibrous separation in her chest, the intimate tearing, so uncomfortable she could hardly bear it. Then, without any pain, she sealed, and the fear was singular again, for herself only.

  She looked out over the water, and thought, just for a second, that she might see him swimming casually along, close enough to come and help her. If he converted his easy breaststroke into a crawl he could get to her before the boat took on too much water. His presence would somehow ameliorate the crisis. Alone, her chances would be worse. She stood up and the boat rocked. A small oblique tide rolled against her ankle, and withdrew. Where are you? Please. She scanned the water. The lake was empty. It was full of the night-resistant sky. She sat down and the seiche came again across her feet. The pool settled. It was four or five inches deep. Something else was in it. That colour. And though she felt overwhelmed by the foreign character of this place, by not understanding its substance, the instinct to fight against it was immediate and furious. A desire that tasted bloody in her mouth. She reached for one oar and then the other. She searched the shore and at first could not differentiate between the tiny cottages. Which was it? Which? The first red-roofed one. With the separate outhouse and sauna. And the little beach. And the meadow that had been left wild, where there had once been a wolf. She turned the boat with her right arm, and began to pull heavily in that direction. In winter, Anna Sutela had said to them, there are twenty hours of darkness. The snow reaches the cottage roof. We do not come here.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Peter Hobbs, Lee Brackstone and Mary Morris for reading and editing several versions of these stories. Thanks also to David Watkins, Clare Conville, Lisa Baker, Jane Kotapish and Damon Galgut for critical feedback, and to Trevor Horwood and Jem Poster for copy-editing. Thanks to Elizabeth and Anthony Hall, Anna Sutela, Joanna Härmä, Fiona Renkin and Richard Thwaites for help with research. A special thank you to James Garvey.

  The Beautiful Indifference is a work of fiction. Characters, events and place names are products of the author’s imagination, or, if real, are not portrayed with geographical and historical accuracy.

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & more …

  About the author

  Meet Sarah Hall

  About the book

  Sarah Hall on Short Fiction

  Read on

  Have You Read? More by Sarah Hall

  About the Author

  Meet Sarah Hall

  Richard Thwaites

  SARAH HALL WAS BORN IN 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South Asia and Europe region), and the Prix Femina-Roman Etranger, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize. Hall lives in Norfolk, UK.

  About the Book

  Sarah Hall on Short Fiction

  RECENTLY I WAS ON TOUR IN IRELAND, home of some of the best storytellers ever to have lifted a pen or spun a yarn, and I was in a discussion with the audience after a reading. A hand went up. A gentleman asked me what constituted a good short story. What was a good short story made of? Ah yes, I thought, that question gets down to the bottom of the glass. I mulled it over for a while, and he waited for an answer. So much of writing is intuitive, inexplicable, even as society insists on scrutinising literary proclivities and processes, as well as the finished article. It’s hard to excavate those subterranean levels of creativity and creative awareness, let alone understand function. Why has a style or language been employed? Why is a particular form essential for a particular subject? How do words convert into gold, into electricity, into mysterious, highly charged matter, the stuff readers require? I admire when a writer, under heavy interrogation, shrugs, as James Salter did in the Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction No 133.” “I like to write,” he said. “I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyze it beyond that.” Salter was, however, in the middle of one of the most articulate and illuminating interviews I’ve ever read. The handoff was simply him taking a breath before reengaging with intellectual business and exquisite expression. Or perhaps it was the apex of truthfulness; this declaration of the unknowable, the unwillingness to attempt to quantify.

  There are many ways to begin to think about what a good short story is or might be. Tight structure, inelaborate architecture, narrative propulsion or switchback or chasm, entrance and exit strategy, disturbance of the quotidian, experimental psychology, metaphysical miniaturism, a fun run for the soul’s voice, dose of pure biological world, an act of moderate civil or moral heresy. I don’t really know, I said to the gentleman questioner, sorry. This did not go down well. I looked like an avoider of difficult questions, which I suppose I was, though the evasion was not meant to be chary. Better might have been to give examples of stories by writers I admire (Mr. Salter, Faulkner, Kevin Barry, Tessa Hadley, to name just a few). That way I could have illustrated what I think a good story is or can be.

  Like many unanswered questions, this one stuck in my brain. Not because I feel I’m not equipped to intuit and analyse—I trust that I can sense what a good story is, even if I can’t fully, unmetaphorically describe it. Some days I myself would like to fathom exactly what that golden, electrical, particle-reactor core is. Because the short story remai
ns exceptional, doesn’t it? Radiant? Dangerous? It is a device of inordinate power. It’s easily as powerful as a novel, perhaps more active and potent than a novel, for its scope within strictures, its concentration, its resourcefulness in the face of austerity and minimal apparatus.

  What I can say is that I love writing in the short form and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been writing novels. My work has a tendency toward the episodic, the cinematic, the disquiet of looking through the locked door’s keyhole, the flip side—all of which suits this fictional mode. I don’t claim mastery—I’d point to the previous list of names for that—but this collection has been ruthlessly cut and curated, honed to the pieces I feel achieve a certain standard. Of beauty, significance, catastrophe, eroticism, even epiphany, which some would argue is rare in life and therefore not relevent to craft: those moments when our strange, vexing, mutable existences momentarily come into focus.

  The couple of years leading up to this book’s production were very challenging for me, and involved illness, loss, travel, and love, the kind of love that mortifies and elates, that creates a hyperreality. The safety nets come down. Suddenly everything is acute and consequential. You know the feeling. My response, my management, was a series of tales, not tales of me—I’m a reconstituter rather than a diarizer—but tales within which these matters feature. The plots reveal such, and on other levels there are signs too; in the landscape, in animal totems and ferality, in human priorities. Redness in a lake. A bolting horse. Hunting equating with loving. A speculative book about the end of the world. Survivals of the self, and assertions of living. In one of the stories, set in Mozambique, a woman notes that sometimes you find yourself in a situation, physical or emotional, where the extreme meaning of being, and of being mortal, that underlying sharpness, ruptures through the calm surface, obliterating the order we strive so hard to create. What occur are brief moments of messy honesty. Chaos passes. Darkness lifts or the sun finally sets. Life stabilises. But perhaps these are the times when we truly inhabit ourselves, when we are made manifest. Likewise, I suspect that is what a good short story is or can be.