Peter Dickinson: Earth and Air

The failure didn’t seem to matter. They spent their eight days together in a state too deep and broad and solid-seeming to be called excitement, too electric with the passing seconds to be called just happiness or contentment. Kissing Dick good-bye at the barrier, turning away, walking through the passport check, Mari felt as if she were putting herself into a coma until she next saw him, able to move, talk, eat, think, but no longer to feel as she had felt while with him, technically alive only.

Superstitiously, Mari hadn’t told Doctor Tharlsen of her engagement before her visit to Scotland. Though emotionally certain what she wanted, the sheer irrational force of it seemed to put her into a realm where there are powers that must not be taken for granted, or they will suddenly withhold what they had seemed to give. She and Doctor Tharlsen had assumed that she would be staying on after completing her degree, to work for a Ph.D. on some aspect of the Frählig MS, and thus continue to help him. Why bother him with the unsettling news before it became a certainty in the rational, bread-and-butter world?

Outwardly he took it well, congratulated her, grasped her hands and kissed her gently on the forehead. Without thought she released her hands and hugged him, as she and her family had hugged each other when she had told them the same news. After a few seconds he eased himself from her grasp and sat down. His mouth worked painfully for a moment or two, but he controlled it.

“I am happy for you,” he managed to say. “Very happy. All this”—he shrugged towards his littered desk—“is nothing beside it.”

Mari dropped to her knees and took his hands again.

“Oh no!” said Mari. “No, please! If I thought marrying Dick meant I couldn’t go on helping you, I . . . I don’t know what I’d have done.”

This, she realised with a shock, was literally true. Her love for Dick filled and suffused her world. It was the light she saw by, the smell of the air she breathed. But so, more gently, odourless as oxygen, a waveband beyond the visible spectrum, did the Frählig MS. Without either one of them, she would become someone else. Someone less. Moreover, though there was no logical or causal connection between them, through her, inexplicably but certainly, they were interconnected.

“You’ve got to finish it,” she said. “You’re nearly there. It’s just the Gelfunsaga now.”

He drew a large yellow handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and smiled at her.

“Yes,” he said in his usual voice. “We will finish it. Between us. And you will take your children into your lap and read them our Gelfunsaga. ”

Dick found their house. It had been a ghillie’s cottage, but had fallen into ruin. New owners of the estate had started to do it up for holiday lets, but had overstretched themselves and their bank had called in its loans. It wasn’t actually on the market, but Dick had spotted it, fishing, asked about it, and found that the receivers of the estate, to get a minor problem off their hands, would let him have a three-year lease provided he completed the repairs and refurbishment. Mari dropped everything to fly over and see it, and having done so couldn’t then imagine wanting to live anywhere else.

She brought photographs to show Doctor Tharlsen. Though they continued to address each other as formally as before, something had happened between them since she’d told him she was marrying Dick, an unspoken acknowledgement that they were now more than colleagues in the Frählig enterprise. They were friends. Mari guessed it was a relationship unfamiliar to him, and she was careful not to strain it, but he seemed positively to like to hear something of her life and interests outside their work, and they’d fallen into the habit of chatting for a few minutes before they began.

“That’s what you see when you come out of the door,” she said. “The river’s fuller than usual, Dick says, because of the snow melt, though it’s nothing like we get here, but there’s always plenty of water in it. They’ve had terrible fishing seasons in a lot of the Scottish rivers for the last few years—hardly any water at all , but this one’s fed by several tarns up in the hills—they’re using some of them for the plant Dick’s building. The fishing isn’t all that good, actually, not enough pools and spawning grounds, which is why he could afford a day on it in the first place. And he’s not going to get a lot more days like that, poor thing, till we’ve finished doing up the house. The receivers are being very tough about that, and it’ll take every penny we’ve got.”

He looked with appropriate interest at the rest of the photographs, and then they settled to work. But after their next session, as she was leaving, he handed her an envelope. There were three words on it in Old Norse, in his meticulous script. “A season’s fishing.”

The envelope was unsealed, so she opened it. The cheque inside was made out to Richard Vesey for thirty thousand krone.

He interrupted her protests.

“I beg you, Miss Gellers. I have made enquiries as to the cost. It would give me the greatest pleasure. I have little use for my money, and I needed a suitable present for your husband, that he can enjoy immediately, since you will have to wait for yours. It will give me an incentive to finish.”

She telephoned Dick, who, of course, was appalled.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to take it,” Mari told him. “My present’s going to be his Gelfunsaga. That matters to me almost as much as it does to him. He doesn’t think he’s got that long—his liver’s getting worse—and if you don’t accept this it’ll be a way of telling him we don’t think he’s going to get it finished. Taking it is an act of faith, if you see what I mean. And listen, the very first thing you can do by way of saying thank you to him is get that telephone line in, so we can be on line from the moment we get back.”

“Doubt if we’ll get broadband this far out.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

They returned from Iceland to, in Mari’s case, thrilling news. While they had been away Doctor Tharlsen had been in Yale, where a new and improved image-enhancer had revealed great stretches of hitherto indecipherable text. He had emailed Mari some of the results. Baffling half-phrases had leaped into sense. Fresh overlaps between the Latin and Norse had made obvious what must have lain in the remaining lacunae. Doctor Tharlsen of course would not bring himself to suggest that the end of his task might now be in sight, but between the lines of his dry text Mari could read his excitement.

Dick had less welcome news. Some results of the seismographic survey had come in, showing an apparent rock fault running across a stretch of the hillside upstream from their house. There was a tarn there that he had planned to incorporate into the hydroelectric scheme. They walked up a winding hill track that evening to look at it. When they reached it Mari caught her breath and stood, staring.

In front of her lay a strange feature like a miniature volcanic crater half way up the hillside, holding in its hollow a still, dark tarn that brimmed almost at her feet. The tarn was fed by several streams from the sunlit hills beyond, and spilt out down to the valley by way of a waterfall. Mari could both see and feel that this was a magical place. Dick, in his very different way, had seemed to sense so too.

“There’s something pretty big in here,” he’d said. “I’d like to have a go at it some day.”

“How can you tell?”

“Just a hunch. You get them. They seem to work.”

“What will your scheme do to this? I hope it doesn’t spoil it. It’s perfect now.”

“We’ve got some very stringent guidelines from the conservation people. We’re running everything underground as far as possible, but there’s bound to be a bit of upheaval while we’re working on it, especially if we have to find a way of filling the fault in. I’m going to have to go into that in detail.”