Away

by Jane Urquhart

  “And your friend, Quinn? Is he still developing his intellect … with your help, of course, and that of the Supplement to the fifth, sixth, and seventh editions?”

  “He visits once a month or so,” Brian was unconsciously stabbing the ground with the pitchfork he carried in one hand, “and we talk some about the Supplement, for which we’re very grateful,” he added, touching his hat nervously.

  “His people are well?”

  “They have lost their potatoes.” The schoolmaster examined the sky. “They have some corn but there is hardship among them.”

  Osbert said that this year’s harvest would set things to rights, and Granville maintained that crop failures never occurred two years in a row. Neither mentioned the new National School or the empty hedge school where the unattended wattle had begun to sag, and the thatch was full of mice and birds. They complimented the schoolmaster on his improvements to the farm and continued on their way. By the time they reached Lough Crannog the light was absolutely perfect.

  Mary was beginning to leave the house behind. It had sheltered and protected her early in her marriage, throughout her pregnancy and childbirth, and while she was nursing the baby. It had kept its stone arms around her while she learned to read and while the first awkward nouns were scratched by her on the slate. The new world of books was kept dry and safe by it. Its fire had bloomed daily as a result of the plentiful supply of thatch provided by her husband. She had come to love its two lamps and four napkins, its stone flags and simple table. The sheets, the pillows, the small panes of glass in its few windows. The six rush-seated chairs and the one flat stone at its threshold. She loved the iron pots she used for cooking and even the troublesome hens that ruined the thatch by nesting in it. She loved the corners and the broom with which she removed the dust that collected where the walls met the floor. The drowsy sameness of each day. The comfort of binding oneself to the maintenance of life.

  But as the first winter following the crop failure progressed, the change began to nudge her towards other activities, the way small animals nose their young in the direction of the wider world. Brian was a torn man. His crops had failed, his school had weakened and eventually died. He spent his days guiltily building and tearing apart his few drystone walls – improving the farm – or sometimes he worked on into the night angrily cutting turf, though his modest barn was filled to capacity. Mary saw him in the distance, hunched over his own father’s turf spade, obsessed, as if this one tool from the past, alive in his hands, could make the present disappear. He did not speak to her about his discontent.

  Liam thumped the door with his small fists and clambered up onto the stool to slap his palms against the window glass when his father left for the field until, at last, his mother dressed him warmly and allowed him out into the physical world where he watched, mesmerized, Brian’s love-dance with labour. Eventually the child, himself, began to dig in the earth, caking the undersides of his delicate new nails with mud. He is no longer all mine now, thought Mary. The field has claimed him as it claims all the men … those who are not chosen by the sea. She looked at the curve of his miniature back as he crouched over a pile of dirt and said to herself, “This is the way his life will be, bent, under a darkening sky.”

  When it came time for the spring sowing Mary rose in darkness with her husband and followed the light of his lantern to the field. Lights from neighbours’ lanterns speckled the hills, and the coming dawn was a red ribbon where the land rose up to meet the cliffs. As they silently shovelled the earth into small hills, or placed the seed-potatoes into the ground, an apprehension began to grow in her that some sudden calamity would take hold of them in the midst of this cold, dark calm. The gradually increasing red light that struggled across the soil, the broken earth at her feet did not dispel the fear and she continually looked over her shoulder to the cabin as if she expected the thatch to be ignited by the expanding crimson. Reflected in the panes of the window, the sun looked like fire and Mary clutched Brian’s sleeve instinctively, then moved her hand away again when she realized what it was. The face he turned to hers in that moment was dispassionate. He appeared to be anxious to return his attention to the soil as if his soul were being stitched, with each planting, into the earth.

  Mary sensed that the soil was inert; asleep in a way that it never had been before. Pebbles were coated in an oily moisture that did not clear in the morning light and that caused the coldness of buried things to cling to them. On the island, Mary remembered, there had been places so barren that fields had to be created, over time, out of living materials: dung and sea-weed and the spines of recently eaten fish. It was the grass that grew in the sea that made the best soil, and as Mary stooped to make another planting, in her mind she saw the island men and women moving up from the strand with their dark, glistening burdens on their backs.

  Liam, with his small face blurred by sleep, called her from the cabin door and she went to him to give him a cup of milk. Later, as she dressed him, fitting the trousers over his warm, sturdy body, she began to want to think of ways to put some life back into her husband’s field.

  It wanted a touch of the sea in it, Mary thought; a touch of the sea’s long hair.

  She rose in the dark and moved across the room, searching for her shawl. The child whimpered and Brian unfolded into the warm spot she had left in the bed. Through the window glass she saw the moon hugging the horizon. The latch fell behind her like a penny dropping into a jar and she stood still in the wake of this sound with her hand extended as if to stop it.

  As she walked to the sea with the wicker creel on her back, light began to touch the growth beside the path, and the lakes below her – one with its circular island – rose up silver and alive.

  She felt that she had never walked here before.

  There was only the field in her mind and the sea plants she must gather to feed it. It was a mile from the cabin to the cliffs.

  Though she didn’t know this, the knife that she carried had lived indoors for two centuries after serving as a weapon in Cromwellian times. The creel was one woven in sorrow by Brian’s grandmother when she was mad with grief over the death of her first-born son.

  All of that quieted now, by time. The passion and even the memory of the passion, forgotten.

  The knife scrabbled against the floor of the basket as she descended the cliffs through the cut in the rocks named Grey Man’s Path, the long view opening before her. This coarse beauty – the ragged island offshore and the dark tumble of difficult coastal landscape – was implanted in her bones, making her sure-footed on its surfaces. The tide was out, as she knew instinctively it would be, and large boulders clothed in ribbons of weeds stood awkwardly exposed.

  The pale sky shone on the knife. She worked steadily, listening in the stillness to sea birds and the grating sound of metal on rock, her back to the waves whose skirts spread across the sand, her own skirt drenched by the dew through which she’d passed. Her discarded shawl lay like a corpse at her feet.

  There was an air of sorrow about this work which involved a series of gestures that caused her to resemble a woman pleading for mercy then letting her arms drop in resignation and helplessness. But the basket filled quickly and soon she paused to press its contents towards the earth with her palms so that water drained through the weave and disappeared into the sand.

  When she was finished she bent down to pick up her shawl. Then she straightened her spine, placed her hands on her lower back, and lifted her face to the sky. There had been a roof over her for so long, the complexity of the clouds startled her in ways the landscape hadn’t. She turned, then, tentatively towards the sea, squinting as if she expected it to strike her. But as it showed her nothing but water, and none of its sounds spoke to her, she squatted to fit the creel’s leather straps over her shoulders. Then, using the muscles in her back and legs, she slowly lifted her burden and, with her body bent at the waist, she began the long climb upwards. Twenty minutes later, by the small lake with the isl
and – the water closest to her cottage – she saw him standing in the reeds near the shore.

  As she moved through the grass, bent under her load that smelled of the sea, the word “Moira” moved with her, its two syllables becoming clearer as she lifted her face to the lake. She saw that he who called her swayed like the reeds and shimmered in the early-morning sun, and she slid the straps from her shoulders and walked towards him with her spine straight and her throat open to the air. In her arms he was as cool and as smooth as beach stones, and behind him the water trembled and shone.

  When he entered her she was filled with aching sorrow. His cool flesh passed through her body and became the skin she would wear inside her skin. She heard the rocks of lakes and oceans rattle in the cavity of his skull and then in the cavity of her own skull. A battalion of young men, their bright jackets burst open by battle, their perfect ribs shattered, their hearts broken apart, marched in his mind and then in her mind, and so she came to know all the sorrows of young men as she lay on the earth; their angry grief, their bright weapons, their spilled blood. Then across his forehead and hers sailed a pageant of all the ships, proud and humble, rough and fine, in which young men departed for the violence of the sea.

  There were any number of ways for young men to die. Some had been flung by vicious currents against granite, some had watched the ocean’s ceiling close over them while the fish they had caught swam free of the nets, some had died violently out-side taverns after singing songs of love. Some took up arms against injustice and had been killed publicly on scaffolds or privately in ditches at the hands of oppressors, the poetry of politics still hot on their lips.

  Dancers, poets, swimmers. Their distant blood ran in Mary’s veins until he who lay in her mind slipped back into the water.

  As she walked towards the cottage she looked back once. The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun. She lifted her basket and moved across the field.

  And yet, like the landscape, there was nothing smooth in her.

  SOME weeks later, Osbert, tired of views and vistas, and stirred by the mania for natural history that was sweeping like an epidemic through England, began to collect the strange, delicate life-forms that existed in the coastal tidepools. He would place these fragile treasures in a bucket of sea water, and then carry them home to his new aquarium where they would survive for almost a week while he drew and painted them leisurely, in the relative comfort of the musty Puffin Court library. After eight days or so, however, these enigmatic creatures would rise to a scummy surface and begin to smell in such an unpleasant manner that he would be forced to pitch the whole putrid soup into the rose garden and head for the shore to search for fresher specimens. Granville had responded to his brother’s new interest by writing a poem entitled “Lament for a Sea Mollusc Trapped in Osbert’s Aquarium.”

  When he was engaged in this activity Osbert paid little heed to the gorgeous small world he was disturbing. His specimens would gain significance and reality only when he got them home, put them under the microscope, and accurately reproduced them on paper. But by then, of course, they would be dead.

  Today, as always, he worked carefully, scooping the creatures out of the pool with a glass jar. He lost some, those of such fragility that they came apart when subjected to anything other than the ebb and flow of the sea water that replenished their habitat. He cursed, then, quietly under his breath, and reached for a larger, stronger example of the same species. The day was not warm and his hands were becoming numb from exposure to water. He thought, with great affection, of the fire he had left burning at Puffin Court, and then, intermittently, of the carriage he had left at the top of the cliffs.

  He heard the woman before he saw her. He might have missed her altogether, the hiss of the sea covering most other noise, but the knife rasping on rock was an unfamiliar-enough sound to catch his attention and he turned just at the moment when her shawl, which might have disguised her, was blown back from her copper-coloured head.

  Although she was thirty or forty yards in the distance, he knew immediately that she was the woman who had been away, and she for her part, sensing his scrutiny, held still, her knife in one hand and a dark mass of hanging weed clasped in the other. Across the sand, he could tell, she was looking steadily at him.

  Osbert was greatly excited. Granville, he knew, would have been even more so. Whatever it was she was doing did not interest him at all, but he sensed that it might be a key to communication. Were this communication to take place he would desperately want to take notes, but had, alas, neither pencil nor paper with which to make a record of what she would say, if she would speak at all. In his agitation he dropped the jar he was holding in his hand and several sea anemones were left to perish on the sand. Without pausing to retrieve it, he walked across the beach towards the woman.

  When he was close to the rock she stood near, Osbert smiled brightly. “Madam,” he said, “may I perhaps be of some assistance?”

  “Assistance?” she asked.

  Osbert was caught off guard by the fact that she had answered his question with another question. He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, “I thought I might help.” He looked at the seaweed in her hand. “You are, I believe, removing specimens of this particular kind of seaweed.”

  “Sir?”

  “You have so large a quantity here, I thought …” Osbert looked down at the basket, then back towards the woman, “I thought … why do you have such a large quantity?” he blurted despite himself.

  Replicas of Mary had gathered seaweed along the coast for hundreds of years, singly, and at certain seasons, in groups. She knew suddenly that this man had been blind to them, her people. “It’s for the field, sir, the patch … to make the plants grow properly.” She lowered her eyes and, remembering her shawl, brought it back up to cover her hair.

  Osbert was greatly surprised by this piece of information but felt it prudent, under the circumstances, not to show his reaction. Instead, he assumed a sympathetic expression. “They haven’t been growing properly, have they?”

  “No, sir,” she answered quietly.

  This was not the direction that he had hoped the conversation would take, and he had virtually no idea how to move into the area where he would be able to glean some useful information for his folklore collection. He clasped his hands behind his back and began to rock from his heels to his toes. “Ah well,” he said, “things can only get better.” And then, when she said nothing in reply to this platitude, he abruptly asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered quickly, “you are one of the gentry from up at the Big House.”

  “Yes, yes … that’s it. And you, I believe, are O’Malley’s wife. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A terrible silence followed this, during which Osbert felt it necessary to cough several times. Sea birds called overhead and, for no reason that he could fathom, they reminded him of the Hill of the Screaming on the silent, calm island that dominated the sea beyond this strand. Osbert had rarely felt so uncomfortable in the presence of another. He stared at the sea with great concentration as the woman stood patiently in front of him.

  “Well then –” he began.

  But, to his astonishment, she interrupted him. “Please, sir,” she said, “what was it that you were doing?”

  “Doing?” he repeated. Curiosity was not a state of mind that he associated with these people. Imagination, superstition … but certainly not curiosity. For a moment he wondered if her question might not be impertinent, but before he could clearly define her behaviour, he found himself answering in much the same way that he might have had she been someone of his own class.

  “Doing? Why, I was collecting specimens of sea anemones to observe and study … and to draw … when I take them home. Little creatures, you know, that live in tidepools.” There, he thought, there’s an end to it. Perhaps he could just come out and ask her directly, Do you have a daemon lover? Bu
t, to his increasing amazement, she persisted.

  “Excuse me sir,” she ventured, “but why do you do that?”

  “Why do I do that? Why do I do that?” He rocked again nervously on his heels. “I do that,” he answered finally and emphatically, “because I like to do that.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “It passes the time,” he added, feeling foolish and then slightly piqued that he needed to justify himself to her. Not one of his tenants had ever questioned him like this. “Well, then,” he said, again, most anxious now to be gone, “I suppose –”

  She interrupted him again. “Sir,” she said, “I’d like to see them, the creatures you are talking about.”

  He was almost annoyed. “Whatever for?” he demanded.

  “To see why you search for them and look at them there in the water.”

  Osbert had a brief, inexplicable memory of himself as a child, standing in a large, cold room with a smoking fire at one end, holding up a single sheet of paper towards his mother who was giving it but cursory attention. “What has Granville been doing?” she had asked. The drawing had been of a tenant’s cabin with a corpulent chicken dominating the roof. His mother, he now realized, was interested in neither the subject matter nor her child’s rendering of it. “Why,” she had asked, “have you not been drawing your Cave Walk?” There was something in the open, questioning face of the woman before him that brought to mind the child that he had been then.

  “There are many different kinds,” he said, “and they can be very difficult, sometimes, to see.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if in agreement.

  They squatted together on the sand within a rocky enclosure, whispering and pointing to things that were almost invisible, this strong communication between a peasant woman and a gentleman being so nearly impossible that neither thought consciously about it until later. Osbert told the woman, whose name he discovered was Mary, the Latin names for the many species that he knew, and she listened attentively, then asked, to his great private delight, if the Romans themselves collected and drew tiny sea creatures. He wondered how she, a poor woman, knew about the Romans at all, but he answered that there was one, the first great natural historian, who would have been interested.