Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam Page A

her clothes, modest, practical and apt as an apron. Her hair was tied up and fixed with a jawed clip. The freckles glowing below brown skin would soon join up to make her the colour of a hazelnut. Elspeth was untidy even in one single piece of cloth; her pareo seemed ill cut. There was an incoherence to the various colours of her skin, tan back, red shoulders, white legs and undersides, that was pitiful, infantile. The high bones of her face were overdramatic for her apologetic demeanour and insistent self-effacement. As two feminine types, the certain and the unsure, they seemed, if only physically, exemplary. The subtle expression of character and habit in feature had begun in Elspeth, being older; Gabriel’s character was apparently of a piece with her wholesome body and face.
    Nick was holding the tender to the side of Ardent Spirit . At the back of the solid rubber boat a powerful outboard engine was clamped to the wooden transom, and resecured by ropes. Disaster beyond the small accident was foreseen on the tender as on the big boat. The extreme provident caution that must accompany adventure is cousin to the theoretical pessimism parents deploy.
    ‘Who’s coming?’ Nick called up to the deck.
    ‘We need oranges and needles.’ Elspeth hung over the wire rail. She was hovering and would not commit herself until she saw what each other person was doing.
    ‘I’ll stay and put up the awning and housekeep the sails. I’ll swim in later, could be, and catch a beer,’ called Sandro who had been to Moorea before and knew it as well as he liked to know a place.
    Logan came up. A silence lay over the others. They waited under his decision.
    ‘I’ll take in the hills one more time,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll do the shopping.’ Gabriel spoke crisply.
    ‘Could we take the Zodiac?’ Alec was not yet familiar enough to state what he wanted without asking what was done in such a place.‘And find a beach maybe and look at fish?’
    Logan looked at him as though assessing a difference between face and market value. Then his own face loosened, and he smiled.
    ‘Sandro, get the diving gear, and pass it to us.’
    Alec had dived before, in grey sea off Kintyre; he had hated it. The complete severance from others, which he had not thought to fear, shocked him. He was surrounded by a greatness to which he was nothing, but not as one is nothing under the stars; under the sea it had been for him like an unmourned death. Down there, he longed to hear words again, to use them, as he had never longed before. Below the upper surface he realised how his inland taste for solitariness was reliant upon the presence of absent others.
    ‘He might prefer a snorkel.’ Elspeth was looking in a deep compartment aft of the life rafts. In it were oxygen canisters, wetsuits, spears, flippers. The snorkel she pulled out, and the little mask, seemed like bath toys. ‘The fish will be pretty right at the top. You can almost just stand and stare at them.’
    She passed the snorkel and mask down to Nick. Her slow soft body met the wire and marked at once, once at the shin and once on the right forearm. In her skin, shine was replacing glow.
    ‘Astonishing how you can pass up what’s really challenging,’ said Logan, ‘but it’s different for women.’
    He was pleased with some timidity in his wife, not having intuited, as she had, Alec’s misgivings about diving.
    ‘The horrendous thing when a person gets the bends,’ he resumed, responding to something in the air he did not know he felt, ‘is the angles they get into in their pain. A guy could snap his arm out of its socket and not feel it. The pain is that bad. They can dislocate a limb.’ All the time he had a rapt look on his face. He looked like a child telling an important lie. His tone was one of grave reiteration, a tone of amen.
    Everyone who was by the rail listened to hear if he had more to say. When his statements had ebbed, Gabriel, in an exhilarated voice, said, ‘Have we the