Orkney by Sackville Amy

Author:Sackville, Amy [Sackville, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847086662
Publisher: Granta
Published: 2013-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

She turns, moans, sighs. Pulls the bedding about her in a cocoon. A body wrapped in a sail for a winding sheet.

She murmurs. I can’t make out the words.

There is this extravagance to her always – she wanders beyond reach, beyond meaning. I trace the moon on her skin and cannot understand it. I turn it over, like the paperweight stone in my palm: why did we come here? Is this far enough?

Friday

She is wearing a particularly erratic outfit today, a baggy pair of linen trousers tucked into chunky socks and boots, a cable-knit sweater pulled in at the waist with a belt stolen from my cords, a silk scarf bunched at her neck and her green coat over it all. She does always wear green, and grey. It’s true. Yet I can’t quite shake the image of her in purple. Coming into my seminar room dressed in heather; or drenched … It’s been a week, here, and already all else is receding. My little landlocked dark brown study seems another, smaller world, and I cannot imagine the heavy silence of the sea’s absence, the thick heat, the dust. Everything is refigured in the air here. So now I am remembering her, in the sunlight last week in her silk, and the picture is diffused in this island’s mist. I remember her sliding out of her silk on our wedding night, and think of her this morning at the mirror, pulling her gown over her head. Bleariness at the margins of sight; I am tired, not altogether unpleasantly.

All through the night she twisted and slithered, swimming about on the sheets without waking, without rest, and the night seemed to stretch for hours, and I listened to her murmur half-words and moan until the dawn. She rose early, stirring me from some kind of sleep; I felt her move away and made a grab for her but she stood up into a long stretch, escaping my grasp. She’d dreamed of being called into the water: ‘there were arms, pale arms reaching for me,’ she said, ‘they pulled me under, down and under and out; way down into the dark.’ She was looking at herself in the mirror, as if seeking evidence of a transformation; I watched through half-open eyes as she turned away, lifted her nightgown, hesitated, pulled it over her head, looking askance at herself with her shoulders turned inward as if trying to hide while she looked for clothes. Her long, pale arms protecting her body. What are you hiding from? I said. Just look at you. ‘You look,’ she said. She stepped out of her reflection and squared her shoulders to face me, blushing, defiant. Come here, come here, but stay so I can see you … We’ve been married a week, I told her. Term will be starting on Monday, without us. Can you believe it’s a year since we met? Do you remember, last autumn? How you came into the room out of the wind, the rain … ‘With leaves in my hair,’ she smiled.

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