T. Boyle - Water Music

At breakfast, Fiona throws open the windows to birdsong, golden Light, an eariy hatch of mayflies. Tim Dinsdale is there, Donald MacDonald, half a dozen repentant Ramsays, Ewan Murchison, Sir Adolphus Beattie, Miss Mary Ogilvie, Betty and her preacher, Mrs. Quaggus, Fiona and Georgie. Everyone — even Reelaiah Ramsay — seems to be smiling, feeling chipper, talking about a ride or a walk around the grounds, a picnic or a match of croquet. The only topic of general concern is the weather. “Oh, it’s a real pippin of a day,” Mrs. Quaggus says, buttering her bannocks. “Wally,” offers Sir Adolphus, looking up from his eggs and rashers, “really first-rate.” Tim Dinsdale says he hasn’t seen it this warm in April since ‘81, the year it snowed in July. “It’s a blessing, is what it is,” Fiona sighs. Ailie couldn’t agree more.

Afterward, Georgie takes a seat beside her on the porch. In his simple brown suit, silk shirt and riding boots he almost looks elegant, uncoiling his long frame, throwing back his head and crossing his legs with an easy, self-confident air, proprietary and unassuming at the same time. His ears still stick out, his wrists insist on protruding from the jacket sleeves, his nose is like something you’d carry into battle — but does it matter anymore? Aren’t those the things that a child would notice?

Georgie shifts in his chair. “Well, Ailie,” he says after a moment, “it’s your last day. Would you like to take a turn on the loch?”

“Rowing?”

He nods.

Fiona and Thomas are marching around the parlor, beating on kitchen pots and singing Haytin foam, foam eri at the top of their lungs, Betty and her preacher are strolling through the garden arm in arm, and Mrs. Quaggus, surrounded by Ramsays, is eulogizing her late husband over her sixth cup of tea.

Georgie is studying the side of Ailie’s face. She turns to look him in the eye. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Beached at the mouth of Divach Burn, oars poised in the locks, the rowboat could be the remains of some fantastic form of life, a colossal insect washed ashore or the hollow exoskeleton of a prehistoric crab — but for the fact that Fiona has painted it cherry red — for visibility— and whimsically christened it The Kelpie . The boat lies there in the undergrowth, an advertisement for civilization, while birds flit in and out of the reeds and midges hover over the water. Georgie hops from one leg to the other to remove his boots, drags the boat into the whisky-stained water and gallantly hands Ailie into the stern. Then he lifts in the picnic hamper (three bottles of wine, smoked salmon, sliced tongue, cheese, bread, radishes and linen napkins), gives the boat a reasonably athletic shove and they’re off.

There’s barely a breeze, and the air — it must be seventy-five or eighty degrees — melts over them like butter. Ailie throws off her scarf and hat, loosens her collar, and watches the reeds fall back in the distance and the great battered tower of Urquhart Castle loom up on her right. It’s glorious. The day, the scenery, the company. She feels girlish and silly, the blood gone light in her veins. Georgie strains at the oars. She wants to reach out and tweak his nose.

“Shall we move in close for a look at the ruins from down here?” he puffs, swinging the boat toward the castle promontory. He is facing her, three feet away. Their legs are touching.

“Yes,” she laughs, everything funny, everything perfect. She’s drunk already and they haven’t even uncorked the wine. “Yes,” she repeats, and then, just as quickly, “no.” Georgie, obedient as a dray horse, drops the oars. “I mean, we’ve seen the castle. Let’s strike out for the middle of the loch, make the shore a speck, have an adventure. We could just drift along out there, drift all day.”

He grins a big horsey pleased grin. There is nothing he’d rather do than ferry her around the lake — take her anywhere she pleases, drift till the sun goes down. He leans into the oars with a vengeance, gobbling up the feast of her eyes.

The boat rides out over the waves, the sound of the oars rippling like wind chimes, and Ailie throws back her head, eyes closed, feeling like the heroine of a medieval romance, like Una or Iseult the Fair. Here’s Georgie, the sweating hero, there’s the castle and here the lady in distress: all they need is a dragon. She laughs out loud at the thought of it and Georgie joins in, his grin as wide as the horizon.

An hour later they’re riding the loose abdomen of the lake, dead centetv shore to shore, the boat gently lifting and swaying with the almost imperceptible breath of the great still body of water. The sun falls over them like eiderdown, hot and luxurious. Georgie’s jacket is draped over the bow seat, his shirt has fallen open to the waist; Ailie has removed her shoes and stockings, trailing her feet in the water like a country maid. Tongue and bread and radishes are spread out on the perfect blanched field of the linen tablecloth, and two empty wine bottles he on the floor, softly rocking with the rise and fall of the loch. They are laughing, Ailie and Georgie, over old times.

‘Those poems you used to write me! The Blushing Morn of your Cheeks / The Foaming Billows of your Breasts’. . they were so, so ridiculous.” She chokes on her laughter, gasping for breath, the mechanism gone autonomous, laughter like hiccoughs.

Georgie is laughing too. He was ridiculous. He admits it.

“And, and — the way you used to play that recorder, and, and sing—”

Her face is flushed with wine and blood, two points in the back of her skull throbbing from the force of her laughter.

“I admit it,” Georgie laughs. “I was preposterous, pimply-faced, a moonstruck adolescent.” Suddenly he’s not laughing anymore. “But I mean it, Ailie. I loved you. I loved you then and I love you now.”

It is as though someone has suddenly dropped the curtain, changed the script. She was laughing half an instant before, in control, the joke on Georgie; now she’s tense and riveted. His words dig at her like fingers in clay, softening her, making her blood beat like a parade of drums. Stop, she thinks, stop. And then: go on, go on.

He’s on his knees now, between her legs, his lank knuckly hands rubbing fitfully at her thighs as if she’d drowned and he was trying to revive her. “From the first time,” he says, “I swear—” but she puts a hand over his mouth, cradles his head, strokes the stiff yellow spectacle of his ears. The sun, the wine, the romance of the loch, the hoary castle, a year and a half of celibacy , she is on fire.

Worshipful, reverential, without a hint of clumsiness or uncertainty, he presses himself to her, a votary, the secret ceremony as smooth and proper as if it had been rehearsed. Her skirts, the undergarments, the buttons of his trousers. And Ailie: her mind has gone dead on her, she’s a creature of sensation, of electricity, of stroking and smoothing and caressing, her eyes closed, caught up in the rhythm of it, the boat swaying, Georgie’s shoulders trapped in her palms, his face in hers, his tongue. .

Her eyes blink open, close, open again. Over his shoulder: what is that? Screened by his hair, the stiff geography of his ear. She’s delirious. Delirious. He moves in her, but her eyes are open, she’s craning her neck. It arches over the boat, rearing up, slick and muscular and wet — impossible, it can’t be — a face at the tip of it, serpent’s eyes, the shadow falling across her flushed cheeks like a swift stinging slap.

No. It can’t be.

She shuts her eyes and holds on tight — as if her life depended on it.

♦ WATER MUSIC (REPRISE) ♦

It is sometime in early April — the fifth? the sixth? — he can’t be sure.