Читать книгу The Valley at the Centre of the World - Malachy Tallack - Страница 13

THURSDAY,

11^TH FEBRUARY

Alice was on her hands and knees, turning over stones, examining what lay beneath. On the bank, close to the burn, she leaned forward and lifted a flat rock, balancing it on one pointed corner, then peered below. An earthworm concertinaed itself out of sight in the mud; a tiny black beetle scurried into the grass; a cluster of white blobs, eggs of some kind, were tucked into a cranny in the stone. Nothing else looked alive. She laid it down, gently, exactly where she’d found it.

It had been raining for the past twenty minutes or so. It wasn’t heavy, but her clothes were now thoroughly wet, and her hands were cold. She felt disheartened. Since setting aside the mammals a fortnight ago – she had a few more observations to gather, but otherwise the chapter was complete – she had started to think about insects and other small creatures, and had begun almost immediately to feel overwhelmed.

She’d known all along that things would get tricky at this stage. The task she’d set herself with this book was a big one: ambitious but achievable, she thought, at least within certain parameters. But it was here, in the realm of the invertebrates, of the beetles, the flies, the worms, spiders, bees and wasps, moths, molluscs, mites, midges, caddisflies, hoverflies and lacewings, that those parameters reared up and threatened to capsize her entire project. For these creatures, these tiny, insignificant creatures, were enormous in number, and Alice didn’t yet know what to do about them.

Recently, on her daily walks, she’d been exploring parts of the valley that hadn’t previously held her attention: the shadowed nooks, the burn banks, the ground beneath the heather stalks, the dirt and the damp corners. That experience had proved enjoyable in its own way. She liked to see this place from new angles, to look at it from ground level or even deeper. She’d bought a little magnifying glass, a loupe, that she now wore on a string around her neck at all times. She carried tiny plastic boxes to bring specimens home for identification, though she hadn’t actually brought anything back yet, as she wasn’t sure where to start.

February was not the season for insects. There wasn’t much in the air at least, though down on the ground there was still plenty to see. More, in fact, than she knew what to do with. From the window of her front room, this project had always looked achievable. The place, she thought, could be contained satisfactorily in words. There were just a handful of houses, plus the ruins of two more on the southern slope of the valley – abandoned in the nineteenth century. The history could be learned from books and from observation, at least as far as was necessary for her purposes. Most of the natural history also seemed within grasp: the mammals, the birds, even the plants. But here in the mud Alice felt the weight of her own ignorance, and the enormity of all she could not put a name to. As she lifted another stone and saw the inhabitants of its shelter shrink away into the darkness, she knew that she could never learn even a fraction of what was here. The closer she looked, the more the valley would expand. Whatever she held a magnifying glass to would grow to fill the lens, whatever was minute would become momentous. Here, she was struck by the vertiginous thought that the world beneath her was in fact infinite, that the more she looked at it, the more there would be to see, and that everything she saw, every atom of it, was its own centre.

Alice was not easily deterred by detail. Research was the part of writing she had always most enjoyed, and getting to know this place as well and as closely as possible had been, in large part, the purpose of this book. Back when she was writing fiction, she would spend months in preparation for each novel, reading up on subjects necessary to bring the books to life. She studied forensics, analysed police procedures, learned about the science of decay – the little details that made the big picture complete. She wanted to write books a detective could read without becoming irritated and frustrated by inaccuracies. Secretly, she wanted to write books a criminal might read and wonder, Why didn’t I think of that?

Reviewers often assumed that, because she wrote crime fiction, plot was her primary focus. But that had never been the case. For Alice, the detail always came first. She gathered information, gathered facts and photographs. She wrote everything down, then let it brew and meld together. The narrative emerged later. It germinated from the material she collected. It grew almost organically out of that material. She built a world, piece by piece, until, within that world, a story became possible, or even inevitable. It doesn’t make sense to ask, Where am I going?, she once told an interviewer, until you’ve first asked, Where am I now?

And that was precisely what she had asked herself when she began writing this book. What kind of place is this? Of what does it consist? Those were the questions that had got her writing again, after Jack’s death, and those were the questions that had led her, after four years, to be crouching in the mud, with rain soaking her back and cold stiffening her fingers.

She sat down on a rock and tried not to think for a moment. She closed her eyes. It was easy, there, to blank her mind. The fussing of the burn on its way to the sea, the rush and giggle of the water, was all that she could hear. It wasn’t loud – the land wasn’t steep, and the burn was narrow – but it was enough to cover the usual noises of the valley. She couldn’t hear the waves on the beach or the rain hitting the earth. She couldn’t hear the sheep in the beach park. Nor could she hear David start his pickup outside Gardie and begin the short drive up the road. Alice only heard him a minute or so later, as the vehicle came parallel with where she sat, then pulled into a passing place and stopped. She opened her eyes as David got out of the pickup and slammed the door.

He waved. She waved back. He shouted something, but she couldn’t make it out, so shrugged her shoulders and lifted her palms skyward. Anybody else, thought Alice, would have driven on and phoned her later if they needed to speak. But David wasn’t like anybody else. She watched as he pressed his hand on a fence post and stepped over the wire, then began striding down the field in his boilersuit, towards the burn.

‘Aye aye,’ he shouted from thirty yards away. ‘Du’s meditatin, I see.’

‘Something like that,’ Alice called back, smiling.

‘Well, dunna git up. I winna buther dee for lang.’

He reached for the peak of his cap and pulled it lower against the rain, turning his head one way then the other, not speaking or looking at Alice again as he walked, though Alice didn’t once take her eyes off him. She was fascinated by David, and always had been. He was like an invented person, a character, and yet was somehow more real than anyone else she knew.

‘Hit’s a fine day for a picnic,’ he said, as he stopped a few metres away, on the other side of the burn.

‘It might not look like it,’ grinned Alice, ‘but I’m actually doing research.’

‘Aye,’ David nodded seriously, ‘dat’s whit I tell Mary sometimes when I hae a peerie sleep in the efternoon.’

Alice could hardly imagine anyone less likely to sleep in the afternoon than David, but she laughed out loud at the joke.

‘So, what can I do you for?’ she asked. ‘Or is this just a social call?’

‘No, I normally do aa me socialisin oota da rain,’ David said. ‘But I saa dee and I thoght I might just hae somethin at would interest dee. For dy book, lik. An I didna want ta forgit.’

Alice wasn’t entirely sure what David or her other neighbours thought about her writing, or about the book itself. She’d told them about it, of course, and explained what she was trying to do, but the response had been muted. Nods of heads, a polite question or two, then the subject changed. Either they disapproved or they weren’t interested, she thought. Or both. She was aware that it might seem patronising, this project, or presumptuous. She was an incomer here and, to them, a newcomer. She was aware, too, that her neighbours might worry what exactly she was writing about the valley – about them, for instance. She had done her best to reassure, in her explanations, but it was hard to tell if she’d done enough. So Alice was pleased and relieved to hear David’s offer.

‘Well, du kens Ah’m clearin oot Maggie’s hoose eenoo, fir Sandy to move intae, hoopfully. Shu’s left ahint a few things at micht be o interest ta dee. Things at shu wrote, I mean.’

‘Okay. What kind of things?’

‘Diaries, journals, dat kind o thing. Dere’s letters an so on at shu haed fae idder fok, but dat’s probably nae use ta dee. But shu wrote a lot, it seems. Just recordin whit was been happenin. Some o it’ll be braaly dull, I reckon, but du micht fin some o it ta be o use. I dunna ken. Unless du can fin oot aa du needs fae dis rock.’

Alice laughed again. ‘No, thank you, that sounds great. I’d love to have a look through some time, as long as you don’t think it’s too personal?’

‘Nah, I’m haed a peerie look, an it dusna seem ta be lik dat. Mair aboot da wadder an wark as aboot hersel, I think.’

‘Oh right, well that sounds like it might be useful. Do you want me to come and pick them up?’

‘Nah nah. Ah’ll drap dem aff at da hoose sometime. When I hae a chance.’ He turned and looked down the valley, his eyes following the burn towards the wedge of dark sea beyond. ‘Well, Ah’ll let dee git back ta dee research. Ah’m needin ta research me denner, I think.’

‘Thanks, David,’ she smiled. ‘Thanks for thinking of me.’

‘I could hardly no think o dee when du’s sitting oot here in da middle o da valley lik dis.’ He winked and nodded, then turned his back. ‘See dee later,’ he shouted, without looking behind him.

‘Cheers, thanks again!’

Alice watched him go back up the valley with the same unhesitating stride as he’d come down it. His hands, as always when he wasn’t carrying something, were clasped behind his back, as though he were merely out for a stroll. He paused at the fence. It wasn’t so easy to cross from this side, but lifting one leg then the other he stepped over without a problem. He started the pickup, then was gone.

Alice was aware of a pain in her backside. The rock she was sitting on was not ideally shaped for the purpose, and one sharp lump in particular was pressed into her right buttock. The other buttock seemed to be numb. She didn’t want to get up just yet, but an urgency and insistence had developed in her lower body. She stood and leaned backward, stretching, with her hands on her hips, then stopped. She felt, suddenly, exposed where she stood. Usually she didn’t think for a moment about who might be watching, but the conversation with David had left her aware. At this spot she could be seen from every house in the valley, if anyone was looking. She couldn’t see them, but everyone could see her.

Uncomfortable then with that thought, she began to follow the burn back upwards, almost parallel with the road, then cut across through the upper park towards the house. She kept her head down, watching her feet as they squelched into the damp soil, feeling the cling of wet trousers and the grip of wet boots. Back inside she stripped off, then switched on the shower. She stood beneath the hot water, eyes closed, until the chill had left her body, then dried herself, put on clean clothes and went in to the study. She sat down at the desk and looked at the pile of papers, the books and folders, then out of the window.

There were chinks in her thoughts now, after David’s intervention. Earlier, she was fretting. The problem of how this next chapter might be constructed, how it might be made to contain all she wanted it to contain, had consumed her. Sometimes, details amassed would take a form of their own, like piled sand. They would direct her and insist on choices without the need for choosing. But this time there was just too much, and it threatened to bury her within a vast, shapeless mound.

What the spiders and the ants and the flies were telling her, in their sheer volume, was that this project was indeed approaching some kind of conclusion. She simply couldn’t write about invertebrates in the way she had written about birds and mammals. There was no possibility of what she produced being anything like comprehensive. She could list those creatures she learned to identify, but what would that achieve? A register filled with holes. She could spend the rest of her life learning the names of insects and make a much longer list, but she still would not eliminate those holes entirely. This was the point, then, when her will for completeness came up against her acknowledgement of the impossible. This was the point when a limit imposed itself.

Her fretting had ceased. The recognition of this limit, which had come not as a moment of clarity but, like the dampening of her clothes through the morning, gradually and unignorably, had brought with it a feeling of relief. She knew now what she could not do. And that relief allowed other thoughts to nag.

Alice had always assumed that the final part of her book would focus on the contemporary human story of the valley. It seemed the only proper way to end. But she had not yet given real consideration to how it might be done. When the time came, she figured, she would know what to do. There would be plenty of information available from the past hundred years or so, from the local archives and from David, that would allow her to bring it to life. Photographs, names, dates: the specifics would be important.

She saw the book much as she saw the valley itself: consisting of many layers. The present day could not be understood – it couldn’t even be seen properly – without understanding the layers upon which it rested. Like a mountain, with its ribbons of shale and gneiss, and its seams of quartz and iron, each piece was necessary to the whole. If any piece were different, it would be another place altogether. But simply detailing the history, the geology and geography, the flora and fauna, was not enough. Alice wanted her final chapter to show the valley as it was, containing and comprising all those things, standing upon them. She wanted readers to see the place, finally, as one might see a clock properly for the first time, having watched it be taken apart and then reassembled.

But David’s offer had planted another thought: the thought of Maggie. Alice hadn’t known the older woman well, which had always disappointed her. They would say hello and chat sometimes, but these conversations were never as friendly or as intimate as she’d hoped. Maggie had lost the energy, perhaps, to make much of an effort in welcoming new people. She didn’t feel the need to bring them into her life. That was understandable, but Alice would have liked for it to have been different. She would have liked to have known her better.

When Maggie died, Alice tried not to be affected. She went to the funeral, of course – it would have seemed impolite not to – but she avoided talk of what had happened and did her best to push the old woman from her mind. After all, they had not been friends, not even close, so the great welling of grief inside her at the thought of Maggie seemed somehow insincere, somehow dishonest.

This had been the first death she was close to, physically, since she arrived in Shetland. It had been the first since Jack. After more than four years, that loss had loosened its throttling grip on her thoughts, but it was still there, always, like an ache, and to be once again in the presence of death had been difficult.

But grief is an untamed thing, and it rose, still, at unexpected moments. Alice found herself transfixed by it sometimes, not only when the memories came back unbidden or unwelcome but at the very process of memory itself – the gradual disappearance of things that once had been so clear. There were occasions when she’d tried to call her husband’s face to mind, for company and for comfort, and had found he was not there, like a book missing from a shelf. She was panicked then, and angered by the realisation that having lost him once she would now have to lose him a second time, piece by piece. In those moments she would close her eyes and shake her head, ransacking her thoughts in desperation, until, again, he would return.

Jack died of bowel cancer when he was thirty-eight, two years younger than Alice had been at the time. He was thirty-five when he was diagnosed, not long after they had started trying for a baby. ‘It’s now or never,’ she remembered saying, her uncertainty at the thought of motherhood finally overcome by his enthusiasm and her age. ‘Now or never.’

For almost three years, they lived with the disease between them, first with hope – the statistics and his youth were on their side – and then without. By the time he was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread to his lymph nodes and was on its way to his liver. Once there, the conclusion had been decided. The chemotherapy slowed but did not prevent it. He would end up on the wrong side of the statistics. He was ‘one of the unlucky ones’, the consultant said, when their fears were finally confirmed.

When someone you love is going to die, when you know they are going to die and there is nothing you can do to stop it, life splits. Half of you continues as if everything were normal. You get up in the morning, eat breakfast, brush your teeth. You do your work, see friends, watch television, go to sleep. You function. The other half, though, is always looking forward. It sees beyond the dying to the dead. It anticipates the absence that is to come. And yet somewhere there, between those two halves, the automaton and the seer, you must continue to love and to care for the one who is not gone yet, who is still there, temporary but real.

Alice lived like that for more than two years, and she did so as well as could be expected by anyone looking in from the outside. She continued to write – with increasing reluctance – and she continued to care for her husband, who remained at home until the last few weeks of his life.

‘I’m dying,’ he would say sometimes, looking over at her, as though surprised anew by the realisation. He used to tell her he loved her in precisely the same way. The thought came to him, urgently, and needed to be spoken aloud. Her own love for Jack swelled with the imminence of his loss, and continued to swell even afterwards, as if that love might somehow grow and fill the space that he had left. But of course it could not.

On the day he died, in late July 2011, she was called in to the hospital not long after lunch. She’d spent most of the morning with him, then come home to get a little rest. They’d told her a few days earlier that it could be any time, and she’d struggled to sleep since then. When the phone rang, she hardly needed to answer it. She was already reaching for the car keys, she was already on her way.

Alice sat with him for several hours, until he was gone, then longer, until the nurse came and touched her on the shoulder, asking if she needed more time, and she wanted to say Yes, I need more time, I need another few minutes, another day, another decade with my husband, is that okay, can you do that, can you make that happen? But she said nothing. She stood and let go of his hand and went through to the waiting room, where a television was switched on in the corner, silent, showing fire engines and ambulances and smoke and wounded people, crying people.

She looked at the screen for a long time, struggling to understand what was happening there, to separate it from what was happening here, in this pale-blue room on the fourth floor of the hospital. She read the ticker-tape of updates as it scrolled, describing the attacks in Norway, in Oslo and Utøya, explaining where the bomb had exploded and the shooting had happened, how many were feared dead, how many were injured. She saw people on stretchers and children wrapped in white blankets, shivering. She had a feeling, then, that she was entirely still, and that the world was galloping around her, fixed in its trajectory and yet spinning with a kind of madness, like a rollercoaster out of control, running faster and faster on its rails, threatening to come loose at any moment and plunge into the empty air. She, Alice, was at its centre, utterly powerless and yet somehow the purpose of it all, as if the spinning, wild, crazy turning of the world were a performance put on for her alone. She was paralysed. To move from where she was would be to step into the madness that surrounded her. The only way to avoid being caught and dragged into that storm was to be at its heart and to let it rage all around her. She stood, then, until she couldn’t stand any longer.

For the next two days, Alice stayed at home, watching the aftermath of the attacks on television, the scenes of destruction and death repeated hour after hour. And as she watched, gripped by it all, she saw her own horror and outrage mirrored there on the screen, her own loss broadcast back to her in the loss of others. She felt crippled, disfigured by what had happened, as though she herself were one of the injured. She felt, too, a kind of resentment towards those people, for the sheer publicness of their suffering, and the sympathy that it brought. What about her and this private suffering? Where were the tributes to Jack? Where was the coverage of his death? Fixed to that screen, hypnotised by it, her grieving fed upon a universal grief. It was everywhere.

For those first couple of days, nobody bothered her much. They put food in front of her, some of which she ate. They didn’t ask too many questions. But later it became clear there were responsibilities that were hers. There were choices to be made. She wanted to leave everything for her in-laws to decide. She couldn’t find the will to care what coffin Jack would need, what kind of flowers they should buy, or what songs should be played as his worn-out body lay among them for the last time. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Every question seemed obscene. How could anyone think of such things? Whenever she was able, Alice would slip away to the company of the television, until, eventually, even the news reporters lost interest in the dead children of Norway. Alone in front of the screen, she felt dizzied by the passing of time, straightjacketed by the endless motion of the world.