I TOOK BORGES his breakfast on a tray: a plate of burnt bacon, boiled eggs, toast, a mug of tea, and a couple of blue pills, which I warned him to parcel out carefully.
He swallowed both of the pills at once, downing them with a gulp of tea. “I don’t need to parcel. You nearly drowned me yesterday,” he said. “I felt as if I floated through the night. I woke this morning like a beached whale.”
“You look fine.” I reached for his wrist to feel for his pulse. “It’s ticking.”
“It is Big Ben. Gong, gong, gong.”
“Will you be all right here by yourself?”
“I savor a quiet night without interruption,” he said. “One should realize I’m far too old for dangerous boats, for monsters like Grendel!”
I looked out the window at the lake, trying to collect my patience. “I’ve gone out of my way for you, Borges. I put aside a full week of my research. You might have badly hurt yourself when you fell off the road in the mountains or nearly drowned yourself—or me,” I said. “It’s a good thing that little accident happened close to shore.”
“I must apologize—you’re quite right. You were valorous in the lake, reaching into the depths to retrieve me, though you nearly strangled me.” He touched his neck with one hand. “Are there marks from your fingers?”
There was no way around him, I realized, and sighed. At this moment he reminded me of no one so much as my mother.
“I worry about you, Giuseppe,” he said, turning the blank yet burning headlamps of his eyes toward me. “Is something wrong? I can’t see you, but you look terrible.”
In truth I’d had a wretched night, feeling guilty about Bella for no reason, and instead of being excited about the trip with Ailith or the meeting with Mackay Brown, I had begun to rummage through a number of pathetic old poems in my notebook, most of them about unrequited love. “My life is fucked up,” I said.
“Nothing in Spanish quite conveys the tang of this American phrase, its thoroughness of feeling.”
“Sometimes I’m lost. I don’t know…”
“Una selva oscura.”
“What?” Would I never stop asking what?
“I refer to the opening lines of the Commedia. We find ourselves in Dante’s dark wood, again and again. We must each of us, one by one, descend into hell through layers of blackness. Of course, I admit to envy of Paolo and Francesca, the whirling lovers. They feasted on the body of the beloved. Let me confess I have never had this pleasure. The banquet of the gods was never offered. My marriage, it has been a sham.”
Oh, Borges, please stop! I wanted to say.
“I’ve had no physical pleasure in this union.”
“I’m sorry. That’s sad.”
“Sad, yes. And you are a virgin, too, I believe.”
“Yes,” I said, too ashamed to say more, being (as Alastair had wryly noted) the last twenty-two-year-old virgin in the Age of Aquarius.
“This is purity,” said Borges. “It moves me. My own virginity and yours, but mostly yours.”
I picked at the lint from my trousers, a result of its recent spin in the Viking Inn’s dryer. “I hate purity.”
“You’ll be a fallen man before long, I assure you. Miss Law is your revelation, your path,” said Borges. “Climb her ladder to heaven, as Plato suggested.” He paused to nibble on a burnt length of bacon. “But I will admit, dear boy, that it’s probably not with Bella that your life will become…unfucked up. Is this an expression?”
Before I could respond, a knock came at the door. It was Ailith. She wore a colorful tam with blond curls streaming below it, a thick Arran sweater, and black jeans. Her work boots needed a polish. I didn’t especially like the rough tomboy look but admired her ease of being, the insouciance.
“You must have a good day and a wonderful night,” said Borges, raising his hand like a bishop to bestow a blessing.
“He’ll be fine with Da’,” Ailith said when we stood outside the hotel. “He’s responsible. More or less.”
“I’m not worried.”
“You look worried.”
“I’m not.”
But I was. My caretaker instincts quickened, and I didn’t want Borges to feel abandoned. I hated to abandon anyone, as when I had left my mother that first time in New York in her bewilderment and grief. I felt guilty then. Now I felt guilty about Borges! (“If you were a Jew,” Jeff had recently said, “it would be Yom Kippur every day.”)
“You’re too good to him,” Ailith said. “I want a husband like you.”
“I’m available,” I said.
This drew a wry smile, and I felt a lightening. We would get along well.
“I know your man, by the way,” she said, “George Mackay Brown. I read a book of his stories last year.”
“Really?”
“I can read, yes.” She put a hand on my arm to say, Not to worry. “It will be good to meet him. Even better to meet Orkney.”
As we drove off together, there was a feeling of freedom combined with a delicious anticipation about being alone with Ailith. I’d never been in a confined space with an attractive woman—not in circumstances as intimate as this. And Orkney beckoned, with the prospect of meeting a man I had admired from a distance for several years. The deeper I’d moved into writing my thesis on Mackay Brown, the more I had idealized his life on a bare and beautiful island. And the more I had grown to envy the way he’d managed to cut himself off from the greater world and its distractions. It buoyed me to think that within hours I would stand beside this man who until now had seemed like a character I’d brought to life in the accumulating pages of my thesis, not a flesh-and-blood person.
“Are you nervous about meeting Mr. Brown?” Ailith asked.
“I guess so.”
“You’re afraid of him. I can tell. Remember, he’s only a man.”
“Jittery and skittish. That’s me,” I said.
She reached across the front seat and seized my hand, which had settled on the gearshift, and I felt a mysterious thrill. Was she only being kind? Did she wish to comfort me? She withdrew the hand but looked quite happy beside me throughout the trip to Thurso Bay, where the Orkney ferry would set off. I’d have given more than a penny for her real thoughts, but I didn’t want to interfere with the sweet happy silence filling the car like sunlight as we drove north. The fine balance between us was an applecart I had no wish to upset.
By early afternoon we had arrived at the postage stamp of a harbor, with its cluster of activity around the ferry. Leaving Rocinante in the car park above the docks, we filed onto the ship with half a dozen others. I didn’t like the look of the sky, however, with violet-and-black clouds pushing from the northeast. A low-voiced driving wind ruffled our hair, the flag on the ferry snapping.
“Expect weather in the Firth,” said Ailith.
It would be a journey of about two hours on this rusty nautical bucket named the Saint Ola, which had made this crossing a thousand times, in every sort of weather. We stood on the high aft deck, where we could wave to the crowd on the pier below, if there had been a crowd. This afternoon only a single old man with a peaked cap signaled to a jowly woman in a slicker who wept beside me.
“Parting lovers?” Ailith whispered.
“He’s a bit old for that.”
“So the urge vanishes? I don’t think so.”
The remark was frank and unabashed, and it surprised me. Her blunt cheerfulness was appealing, too, creating an atmosphere of no-nonsense affability. That she had chosen to live at the Viking Arms and look after her father was in its way admirable—a sign of character. I thought of her as a woman with firm, clean, inviolable lines.
In the bar on the ferry, off the aft deck, Ailith seemed quite excited by the prospect of our little adventure. “I’ve wished to see Scapa Flow,” she said, “where fleets have anchored for centuries. During the Great War, the Germans scuttled their ships rather than let the British have them. During the last war, the Germans sank the Royal Oak—a huge defeat for the British navy.”
“You know your history,” I said.
“Don’t patronize me,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Didn’t mean isn’t good enough.”
The sea darkened suddenly, with a black wing overhead, and the waves began to churn. According to the bartender, who gathered glasses and cups into a basket for safekeeping, we were in for “a rocky passage.” The waves, he estimated, were already at six to ten feet.
Almost at once I felt decidedly unwell.
“I should wander to the rail,” I said to Ailith, flashing a look of worry.
On the back deck again, I leaned over the rail and puked into the sea. Some of the vomit splashed back onto my shoes and trousers: a rank smell. Ailith stood beside me with a hand on my back.
“Can I help?”
“I think I should go below,” I said. “It might be steadier.”
“Are you sure?”
I was quite sure, and climbed in a wavering fashion down a metal stairway to a large public room, where two or three liverish passengers slumped at wooden tables. I joined them, burying my head in my hands, trying to absorb the shock of the ferry’s side-to-side roll, which had grown more exaggerated. Cups of tea or coffee spilled onto the floor, and a young woman at the next table heaved into a brown bag. A rancid smell hung in the air, and one large woman wept loudly in a chair beside me. “I want to die,” she said.
This crossing could not, in my opinion, end soon enough.
The sky still looked miserably dark as we approached Orkney, a scowl on the horizon, with the ship edging past a stone breakwater into the well-protected harbor at Stromness. Any number of vessels lay at anchor, and it was a relief to see the smooth surface of the water. I could feel the backwash of the propellers as our ferry slowed and docked with a thud. A dozen men in blue overalls and boots leaped into action, and lines were tossed and tied. Chains rattled, and the gangplank was lowered into place.
Once we were in dock, my seasickness disappeared, so I’d not be retching over the rail in front of George Mackay Brown. The stench of vomit rose from my jeans, and my shoes were stained. I couldn’t hide these signs of my recent distress, but at least I was returned to the world of the living. Maybe this was me in the Jonah role, coming back to life? But how many times must I be swallowed and spat out?
“You sure you’re okay?” Ailith asked as we disembarked, stepping onto the solid pier.
“Is anyone ever sure of that?”
I tried to wipe the worst of the vomit from my shoes, but no amount of wiping could erase that odor.