Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam

Author:Candia McWilliam
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

‘There’s one with a beautiful neck,’ Lorna would say, as they did the shopping in Stockbridge, or walked out by Salisbury Crags. ‘Look at that shining hair.’ She managed neither to sound like a procuress, as women can when love has become dull to them, nor to make him feel that he must at once turn to her and say, ‘But you have a beautiful neck, your hair is lovely.’ Praising the beauty of others did not seem to diminish her sense of her own light-eyed handsomeness.

He had begun to act upon his curiosity, damaging his home and almost never gratifying himself beyond the first touch of new skin. The oath not sworn to Lorna, but held to, that he would be loyal, if not faithful, became a snake that coiled about his whole life, squeezing the air from it.

‘See that one for her straight back and hard profile,’ said Lorna. They were queuing with a jug at the Italian shop on the way down to Leith and the sea, to give lunch to his father. They would fill the jug with red wine and fill a basket with some of the foods the old man, very surprisingly, had taken to; long hard bread full of holes, cheeses like the soles of sandshoes, strange vegetables that lived in a tank of oil and were lifted out in tongs, dry yellow cake, and the wine, even. The shop had become part of the city’s growing cosmopolitan life. On Saturday mornings, people were starting to visit it the way that Europeans shopped, in order to find what was good on that day, or to pass time. For Edinburgh, it was new; a certain bohemianism had grown up around the Saturday queue. Alec recognised other painters, a woman weaver of Italian blood, a sculptor. The affinity between Scots and Poles, Scots and Italians, may have to do with the old religion; it is also concerned with food.

That day the sun lay as it can in Edinburgh so slanting and insinuating that even the grey stone of the terraces and the old paving stones were warmed. Women wore dresses and sandals, without stockings. The housewives at their doors had on aprons over blouses as they wiped off the Brasso at their doorbells. The city whose life was lived for the most part indoors was trying its own streets. Seagulls tramped along among the shoppers. At the docks a foghorn once in a while blared. Strangers fell into conversation, made bold by the oddness of being in a queue for food, a queue that they had chosen to be in.

Old men, the grandfathers of the two families of the shop, served food and conversed at a pace combining commercial and theatrical timing. They passed among the crowd, offering on small plates a piece of Parmesan (‘Cheese, it’s cheese, tell them’), some sugared violets, a plate of purple olives and pink tuna. The old men were attended by their dazzling grandsons, who climbed ladders to reach

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