Sarah Hall - The Beautiful Indifference - Stories

She kept pulling hard. Her grip on the oars was firm. Tenderness to her palms, which would mean blisters. She leaned forward, pushed back. She was making good time. It was not very long since she had lost sight of him. The oarlocks rotated. The paddles washed. She pushed away the image of a sallow indistinct form drifting under the surface. She would find him. He would be stranded on the island. He would be pleased to see her. Or, if he was in difficulty in the water, the sight of the boat coming would sustain him; she would arrive and help him in. She would give him her dry shirt to put on. She would kneel in the hull in front of him and hold him. She would tell him that she was in love with him, because she had not yet told him this, though she had wanted to for weeks, though he must see it, mustn’t he, whenever she came alive under him, pushing him back so she could see his eyes in that driven, other state, their concentrated pleading look, or when she suffered that peculiar tearful euphoria in climax, with its physical gain, its fear and foreknowledge of loss. This is all I want. I can’t be without it .

Her strokes became heavier. Her technique was slipping, or she was tired from rowing earlier. It sounded as if the lake was splashing up against the prow more and more. She would have to break, so that she could recover and realign. She slackened the tight grasp of her hands, flexed her fingers. She turned around to look for him again. Inside the boat was a pool of rusty water.

For a moment she did not understand. A leak. There was a leak. Shit . How had it gone unnoticed? Had the bottom been punctured when the boat was moved, either up or down the bank? In the centre of the hull was a small black eye. A small black hole. No . In the rush to launch she had not fitted the bung. It was still in the small locker by the pontoon. It was her fault that the vessel was not watertight. Or, most likely, it will be an unforeseen event, manufactured under the auspices of technological advancement, which finishes humanity . She let go of the oars and shunted forward on the seat. She cast her eyes around the boat. Rope. The little three-pronged anchor. A sponge. There was nothing with which to bail. She could take off her shirt; stuff it into the hole. But she knew that would fail. The cotton would balloon. The twist of fabric would slip out. She was about half a mile into the lake.

Everything was so quiet.

Suddenly she knew how it would all play out. The boat would continue to take on water and would lug down as she tried to row back, its debilitation unstoppable, and then it would submerse. She would make it to the shore, because she could swim well enough, but it would be ugly and ungraceful, it would involve swallowing water and choking because of the desperation. The rescue would be aborted. He would never make it back. Though she would pick her way along the green shoreline to the Finns as quickly as she could, and bang insanely on their door, and beg to use their boat, and listen as they spoke to the emergency services in their pure, impenetrable language, they would not find him or his body. He would be lost. She would be complicit. She would not ever love in this way again.

She heard herself whimpering. The scenery passed out of focus. Her fear was bifurcating; she could feel the fibrous separation in her chest, the intimate tearing, so uncomfortable she could hardly bear it. Then, without any pain, she sealed, and the fear was singular again, for herself only.

She looked out over the water, and thought, just for a second, that she might see him swimming casually along, close enough to come and help her. If he converted his easy breaststroke into a crawl he could get to her before the boat took on too much water. His presence would somehow ameliorate the crisis. Alone, her chances would be worse. She stood up and the boat rocked. A small oblique tide rolled against her ankle, and withdrew. Where are you? Please . She scanned the water. The lake was empty. It was full of the night-resistant sky. She sat down and the seiche came again across her feet. The pool settled. It was four or five inches deep. Something else was in it. That colour. And though she felt overwhelmed by the foreign character of this place, by not understanding its substance, the instinct to fight against it was immediate and furious. A desire that tasted bloody in her mouth. She reached for one oar and then the other. She searched the shore and at first could not differentiate between the tiny cottages. Which was it? Which? The first red-roofed one. With the separate outhouse and sauna. And the little beach. And the meadow that had been left wild, where there had once been a wolf. She turned the boat with her right arm, and began to pull heavily in that direction. In winter , Anna Sutela had said to them, there are twenty hours of darkness. The snow reaches the cottage roof. We do not come here .

Thanks to Peter Hobbs, Lee Brackstone and Mary Morris for reading and editing several versions of these stories. Thanks also to David Watkins, Clare Conville, Lisa Baker, Jane Kotapish and Damon Galgut for critical feedback, and to Trevor Horwood and Jem Poster for copy-editing. Thanks to Elizabeth and Anthony Hall, Anna Sutela, Joanna Härmä, Fiona Renkin and Richard Thwaites for help with research. A special thank you to James Garvey.

The Beautiful Indifference is a work of fiction. Characters, events and place names are products of the author’s imagination, or, if real, are not portrayed with geographical and historical accuracy.

SARAH HALL WAS BORN IN 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South Asia and Europe region), and the Prix Femina-Roman Etranger, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize. Hall lives in Norfolk, UK.

RECENTLY I WAS ON TOUR IN IRELAND, home of some of the best storytellers ever to have lifted a pen or spun a yarn, and I was in a discussion with the audience after a reading. A hand went up. A gentleman asked me what constituted a good short story. What was a good short story made of? Ah yes, I thought, that question gets down to the bottom of the glass. I mulled it over for a while, and he waited for an answer. So much of writing is intuitive, inexplicable, even as society insists on scrutinising literary proclivities and processes, as well as the finished article. It’s hard to excavate those subterranean levels of creativity and creative awareness, let alone understand function. Why has a style or language been employed? Why is a particular form essential for a particular subject? How do words convert into gold, into electricity, into mysterious, highly charged matter, the stuff readers require? I admire when a writer, under heavy interrogation, shrugs, as James Salter did in the Paris Review , “The Art of Fiction № 133.” “I like to write,” he said. “I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyze it beyond that.” Salter was, however, in the middle of one of the most articulate and illuminating interviews I’ve ever read. The handoff was simply him taking a breath before reengaging with intellectual business and exquisite expression. Or perhaps it was the apex of truthfulness; this declaration of the unknowable, the unwillingness to attempt to quantify.