Now Paul sounds annoyed with me.
I take the feather. Even in the grey basement, and under the artificial glow of the desk lamp, the blue is shockingly bright. The Jock Scott has a lot of different feathers, which is why it is such a complicated fly to tie. The wing section, which we are about to embark on now, and which gives the fly its shape, is composed of a marriage of peacock, swan, bustard, florican, golden pheasant, summer duck and mallard feathers. The endangered bustard is being substituted by a snippet of dyed turkey wing.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of odd, using a bird to catch a fish?” I ask.
“Isn’t a fish just another kind of bird?” he answers. “Isn’t swimming a bit like flying?”
I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but Paul has a point. The overworld and underworld, flight above and below us. There must be so much freedom in both of those realms. Our land-based bodies are so cumbersome and slow, so much more limited.
“You haven’t answered my question,” says Paul.
“I’m thinking about it.”
I’m worried my hands are too sweaty to tie in the delicate piece of kingfisher feather. I wipe my palms on the front of my jeans. Megan used an open lipstick tube to place her feathers on, so that they would be ready for use, held in place by the stickiness of the lipstick, although she would have to wipe any trace of colour from the feather before using it.
“I’m following several different avenues of inquiry,” I say, which makes me sound like a TV detective. “The problem is that Megan Boyd was, more or less, a solitary being, and I need her to be in a relationship in order to make a story.”
“You don’t know that she wasn’t in a relationship,” says Paul. “Just because she never married or had children.”
“Yes, that’s the avenue I’m pursuing.”
“And there’s always the fish,” he says.
“What about the fish?”
“Well, she was in relationship to the salmon, because she was fashioning a way to kill them.”
19.
IF I BRING GRAHAM BACK, IT HAS TO BE IN A more regular way. He can’t merely be a Sunday boyfriend, reached by a long car trip for a few hours of pleasure and company. No, he must be a more integral part of Megan’s everyday life. He should live nearby and work as a gillie on one of the rivers. This would give him the means to show up at Megan’s shed whenever he needs to order flies for his customers. This would give him a perfectly legitimate cover, because I still think he has to be married. Although, after I’m home from Paul’s, I seriously entertain the idea of making Graham a widower, and a recent widower at that.
So, here goes.
Graham comes by in the afternoons usually, while his clients are on an early dinner break. He sits in the corner of Megan’s shed, on a rickety wooden chair, watching Megan tie flies. He has brought along his flask of tea and has poured her a capful, but she finds it difficult to pause from the momentum of her work to drink it.
“Once I get going,” she says to Graham, “I find it hard to stop.”
“You work too hard,” he says, which isn’t really helpful to Megan, because she knows this already.
So, what can happen on Graham’s visits that will keep the thread between them taut and alive? They don’t fall so easily into bed anymore, because this isn’t a new relationship and for some reason, I can’t seem to make it one. No, Megan and Graham have finished with courting. They are familiar with each other now, and it is not that the romance has entirely gone out of the relationship, but it is a more watered-down feeling from what it once was. This is partly because Graham is a familiar figure to Megan, even when the affair was in its first flush. He is a gillie like her father and she understands most of what there is to know about him from this information, from her knowledge of his profession.
I think he tells her stories while he is sitting in her shed, drinking tea and biding his time before he will head back out to the river. He tells her stories of the fish his clients are catching with her lures, or of something unusual that happened that morning, or of the animals he has seen near the water and the kinds of men (for they are mostly men) who have hired him for that particular day.
“Right toff this one,” he says. “Wears gloves to fish and all.”
“What does he do when he catches one?”
“It’s me that takes it off, isn’t it? Me that gives the salmon his last rites.” Graham mimes bashing the head of the fish with his flask as a stand-in for the traditional “priest” truncheon that salmon fishermen use.
“Careful with your talk of toffs,” says Megan. “Don’t forget that I know HRH.”
And this is true, Prince Charles is one of Megan’s customers, and someone who visits her in her cottage, sits in the rickety wooden chair where Graham is now sitting. In fact, when she is older and losing her eyesight, it is Prince Charles who arranges for Megan to see a specialist in London and takes her to her appointment. On Prince Charles’s recommendation, when Megan Boyd is fifty-six, she is given a British Empire Medal by the Queen, but Megan writes to the Queen to tell her that she can’t attend on the day of the ceremony because she is unable to get anyone to look after her dog. Later, Prince Charles presents her with the medal at his fishing lodge in Scotland.
I’ve wandered away from Graham to talk about Prince Charles and his friendship with Megan. This is because, really, I don’t think there is enough between Graham and Megan. It always feels like an effort to put them together. And here’s the thing about writing and love, a thing they have in common: If you have to work too hard at something, then chances are good it isn’t working. Love and writing rely on an indefinable energy to keep them going, a momentum that comes naturally and isn’t a result of trying too hard. For lack of a better description, it’s a kind of “magic,” and it’s either there or it isn’t.
The reason I have to start Graham and Megan in the middle of their affair is because I can’t imagine the beginning. I can’t imagine the unguarded moment. Or rather, I can’t imagine it for Megan.
Graham comes to her shed one day and stays longer than usual. He seems reluctant to leave. He keeps clearing his throat and saying he has to go, but he doesn’t go.
Megan is at work while he is there, so she isn’t looking at him. If she turns away from her vise, she can see him in the corner, on the chair, but she doesn’t often turn away from her vise. She can tie a fly without looking, but it is always easier to look. But finally, she does turn and sees that Graham has his hands up to his face, sees that he is crying.
“What’s wrong?” She gets up and goes over to him, puts a hand on his shoulder, and he buries his face against her chest, in the scratchy wool of the jacket that covers the softness of her breasts.
This is Graham’s unguarded moment. His wife has died and he is bereft. Megan comforts him. She genuinely cares for him and feels bad that he is suffering. But this is not the same as desire, and this is where the problem lies. I need Megan to feel desire because desire is an engine and will move the story along without effort.
Desire is the increased heartbeat, the slow burn, the sudden flicker of hunger that makes itself known, coming out of nowhere and taking all the oxygen.
Megan comforts Graham, and when he turns his face up to her, she bends to kiss him, and this is where it all begins. But she is feeling sympathy for him, not desire. To feel desire, she has to be a little bit out of control, and I can’t imagine she is ever out of control with Graham.
And here, I have to think that her style of dress does matter. It does mean something that she dresses like a man, that she takes the male parts at the country dances. It is not just about ease. It is because she identifies more clearly with the male role, whether she has thought it out or not. And to feel desire for Graham, she would have to be more comfortable in the woman’s role, or Graham would have to be a different sort of man—which I don’t think, given the time and place, he can be. So, Megan would have to be a more conventional woman. She would have to f
eel the difference between them, to be excited by that difference, and instead, they are more or less equals. She understands everything about the man and his job, and while she may be delighted with the stories Graham brings to her, I can’t see that she is erotically charged by this act. They are friends. If they are ever lovers, it is fleeting and accidental.
So, it’s work to keep Graham on that chair in Megan’s shed, to think of what stories he could tell her that she would be enchanted by, to think of a way she could respond to him that wasn’t purely empathetic. And now, after deciding that I needed to bring him back, I realize that I’m going to have to let him go.
My friend Ruby calls while I’m agonizing over Graham.
“Come to the farmer’s market with me,” she says. “We’re going to get you some food. I don’t think you’re eating properly.”
“I am eating.”
“What?”
“Well, fish mostly,” I say. “Salmon.”
“God,” says Ruby. “You’re not a method actor.”
“Can’t I be a method writer?”
“I’m picking you up in ten minutes,” she says and puts the phone down. Ruby can be very decisive. Depending on the day, I either love this about her or find it aggravating. Today, I am relieved to be interrupted from my endless considerations of Megan Boyd’s imagined love life. I’m out on the lawn before Ruby even gets there.
The farmer’s market is crowded and full of wasps. Ruby wades through the wall of people in front of the tables, brandishing vegetables for me to nod or shake my head at.
“Now I’m going to cook for you,” she says when she has a bag full of tomatoes and greens.
“That’s not necessary.”
“Not necessary, but nice perhaps?”
The dog loves Ruby, loves when Ruby comes to cook for me, because she is a sloppy cook and is always accidentally on purpose dropping morsels on the kitchen floor for the dog to snap up.
“Oh, how clumsy of me,” she’ll say, letting go of a heel of bread or a nugget of cheese.
I sit on a stool at the counter, drinking a beer and watching Ruby slice an onion. The late afternoon sun slants in at the window and the kitchen glows like a lantern. If Graham were cooking for Megan, wouldn’t she feel the same contented happiness that I’m currently feeling? Maybe that would be enough in the end? Maybe she doesn’t need to feel desire at all? But shouldn’t she have at least felt desire in the beginning of the relationship?
“Why are you so quiet?” asks Ruby, turning from the stove to begin chopping tomatoes. “What’s going on in your tiny mind?”
“I’m thinking about which suitor to give my main character. Or more precisely, which suitor to take away from my main character.”
“Doesn’t it get boring to think about your book all the time?”
“No, actually.” The truth is that I am never bored when I’m writing or thinking about writing. “I enjoy the challenge of it. It’s like a big puzzle that I have to solve.”
“Hmmm,” says Ruby, which is a noise that means she is bored of hearing about my novel. She works in finance and doesn’t see much point in an inner life.
“Oh look, I’ve dropped a bit of sausage.”
The dog looks up at her with adoring eyes.
We eat at the table, something I never do when I’m alone, preferring, or finding it easier, to just have my meals on the couch. But Ruby is a stickler for formality.
“You have to keep practising being human, or else you forget how to do it,” she says, putting out the water glasses and the napkins, lighting the candles. “Manners are what keep us civilized.”
“And art,” I say, because I believe that making and appreciating art is the best thing that human beings do.
“Mostly manners,” says Ruby. “Not everyone likes art, but everyone likes the door opened for them. Everyone likes a please and thank you.”
I feel buoyed up from Ruby’s visit, and after she goes, I sit down to make some notes about love and desire.
I wonder if a lover needs to be the solution to the problem that each person represents, an antidote to them? Because all of us instinctively put up barriers to intimacy. All of us naturally shrink rather than expand. For someone to want to know us and love us, they have to be able to see something about us that we can no longer see for ourselves. It’s a kind of X-ray vision. A super power.
Graham, no matter how much I twist and turn his character, will never be that person for Megan. But Evelyn might.
20.
MEGAN BOYD RODE A MOTORBIKE. SHE LIKED speed. She dressed in khakis and roared through the streets of Brora, followed by a gaggle of young children cheering her on. She was, apparently—on the motorbike and in her car—a terrible driver. But “terrible” in this case just means going too fast, taking risks and sometimes crashing.
For years, I also rode a motorcycle, and I know the exhilaration of experiencing the countryside this way. I know the exact pressure that the steady push of air exerts against your body as you sit in the saddle, how the smells of the earth rise up to meet you, and how the temperature of the land you ride through is constantly changing. There is coolness down in the hollows, heat on the hills. There is a beautiful recklessness in surrendering to the lean through the corners, accelerating quickly out of them.
One of the things I used to like when I rode a motorcycle was the notion of counter-steering. This is a method by which you can manoeuvre the bike swiftly around an obstacle—to be used in emergencies, if a deer steps into your path, or there is debris or a pothole on the road. You press down on one side of the handlebars, and the front wheel pivots either left or right and then is brought up in the opposite direction by the motorcycle’s natural inclination to remain upright. It is a quick way to avoid hazards by relying on the bike’s balance, and it works in opposition to how you think it should work. For example, if you want to avoid a pothole, you head directly for it and, at the last minute, put pressure on either the right or left handgrip and the bike will deke around the pothole.
I was taught counter-steering by an older friend I would sometimes go riding with. I wonder who taught Megan how to ride? And I wonder how good a rider she really was, if she knew about such things as counter-steering. She got her bike during World War II and kept it after the war was over. It was standard army issue, a BSA, which was also the type of motorbike my father once rode. Decommissioned bikes went cheap after the war.
My father rode his bike during his youth in England, around the same time as Megan Boyd. He had worked picking peas for two summers as a young man, saving up to buy the BSA, which he crashed pretty soon after buying it. He broke his pelvis, some ribs and his left baby finger. The finger was badly crushed, and the doctors removed the joint closest to the fingernail. I remember how that finger didn’t move as easily as the others on my father’s hand. I can still imagine his hands, and it seems to be a fact of death that while the dead no longer have bodies, the living can recall the details of their absent bodies clearly.
Just like lovers can be the cure for each other, Megan Boyd’s need for speed was in opposition to the quiet, steady work of tying a salmon fly. I can imagine that her energy was stoked up during those long hours of sitting still in her fly-tying shed, and that when she was finally able to take a break, she charged out of that shed, changed quickly into her riding gear—for she continued to wear army khakis even after the war was over—stomped down on the kick-start of the BSA and fishtailed down the country lane and out onto the main coastal road. There would have been the smell of the salt water and the blur of roadside vegetation, the texture of the road’s surface, experienced as tremors through the bike’s frame and Megan’s body.
Where is Megan going?
While working on a magazine piece about Megan Boyd and her salmon flies, the interviewers for the article had invited Megan to have dinner with them that evening at the local hotel where they were staying during their time in Brora. They received a phone call while they were waiting
for her there to say that she would be late because she was helping a friend with her mousetraps.
Evelyn leans against the door frame of her farmhouse, watching the cloud of dust that is Megan’s motorbike get closer. There is something so satisfying about watching your lover move towards you, and Evelyn likes to see Megan arrive, partially because it is often dramatic, but also because she wants to savour the moments before they are together, because she has thought about these moments so often and for so long.
Evelyn’s husband is at work in a neighbour’s field and won’t be home until the evening meal. Her children are at school. The house is quiet and peaceful and will be hers alone for the next few hours. She had wanted to wear her new dress, put on a bit of lipstick, but Evelyn also knows enough not to draw attention to the day, not to mark it as special or different from any of her other days.
She has tried to break with Megan. They have tried to call it off. But each time, one of them relents and they exchange meaningful looks while at the butcher’s, or they partner up at a ceilidh, even after they tearfully vowed never to do it again. The trouble is that Brora is too small a place not to run into each other somewhere, and so, even when they are on the outs, they are also constantly looking for each other. The only real solution would be for one of them to move away, and that is not going to happen any time soon. Really, they are back together again because they simply can’t stand to be apart.
Megan roars into the farmhouse yard a little too fast and skids to a stop just short of the roses. Slapping the dust from her khakis, she lurches off the bike.
“Got them,” she says, patting the front of her jacket, where she has stuffed the mousetraps.
When she rips off her goggles, there are rings around her eyes, making her look like some exotic jungle animal. There is dust in her hair and she smells like gasoline as Megan leans into Evelyn, neither kissing nor embracing, because neither is allowed, but her body wants to be close to Evelyn’s and her approach is one of instinct rather than sense.
Machine Without Horses Page 6
