The sun was bright but we were cold. The best thing to do was run out quick and warm yourself like a lizard on one of the rocks higher up which got the sun. That’s what I did. When I looked down to find Evie she looked so funny I had to ask her what the fuck she was doing. What do you mean? She was cross. You look like some creature crawling out of the primordial soup. It was true. She was crawling over the rocks on her belly but with arse and legs tucked under. Trying to show as little of herself as possible. So I stood high up on my rock and stretched my beautiful arms out to the sun and lifted my breasts to the sun and turned up my beautiful face to the sun and said, Here, this is what a woman looks like, and she looked up at me from the rocks below. That is what you look like. And what do you look like? I said. She slowly stood up from her horizontal crouch. Long, white feet, strong white legs, flat hips, a fluffy, tea-coloured bush, concave belly, long waist, small low breasts with large pink nipples, wide shoulders. I can’t say she has a body I want, but I’ve had people with bodies I wanted less. And I cannot say I wanted her because she was nothing I wanted, not sassy or cute or strong or sly or ironic or teasing or searching or dangerous or pure or delightful or feral or any of the other things that have made me look past a body I don’t want to the force of the person within. She is clumsy, awkward, bizarre, self-absorbed. But I like the way she looks at me. And there is always one thing. One thing to want about someone. Her sides, her long waist and flanks, like a boy’s, I liked, I decided. And so I reached out my hand, and she climbed up the rocks, upright this time, and took it.
We must have looked like a painting to him, the young guy out walking his dog who saw us in the distance, me and Evie holding hands. Another woman would have squealed instead of the sound Evie actually made, a kind of surprised bark like a seal. Before I knew it she had shoved me into a bush and fallen in on top of me.
I was held in suspension. It hurt to move.
When the knowledge of the branches became old I became aware of Evie’s weight on my back, her breasts pressing into me, and a softness, her bush, on my arse. And close to this, suddenly, barking — the dog. Honey! Away home! A smile in the guy’s voice. The dog yelped with disappointment as her master dragged her off, whistling. We stayed there a while. Evie’s breath in my ear, first a sound, then a warmth. Then, very slowly, she started to move on me. The branches needling but she didn’t care. Slowly, I felt her getting wet, slippery, faster, her breath hot in my ear, her lips not quite touching me, and me suddenly wanting to feel a kiss and what I got then was a lick, she was licking my ear and she was grinding, pressing me into the needles, and then that sealbark again and she was still.
What a joy! To copy Damaris’ diary, to type out words no longer my own, leaves me feeling calm. My whole being throbs sweetly. Every now and then I pause to gaze around the attic, at my skylight, which gives off a white luminousness, and then at the piles of papers, of which Damaris’ diary is just one among many, barely distinguishable from my other objects. And yet those papers, which until recently I have thought of as just another kind of object, decaying in the moist air, like the rest, seem to take on an enormous importance. They seem to emit a special kind of radiance. I can think of nothing better than to take them in my hands, spread them out on my desk and rifle their precious contents — not so much because of what they say, but because they contain thousands of words to transcribe.
We got our clothes back. We dressed without speaking. On the way home, she was quiet again, but not self-conscious at all this time. No, self-absorbed, dreamy. This made me angry. When we got into the cottage, I felt like punishing her. I brought her into the front room. Evie, I said. What you did in that bush. She smiled. You hurt me, I said. I sat on the edge of the couch. I slipped off my knickers and pulled up my dress. I lay back and opened my legs. You need to soothe me, I said. And she kneeled down before me, and I took her head in my hands and I guided her mouth to my cunt.
Later this evening. She’s a terrible cook. She thinks adding lots of cream to the dish (a mixture of chicken, red wine and orange juice) will improve it. It hasn’t. But it could have been my being in the kitchen. She seemed clumsy. Horribly shy. My glance was caustic to her. When she poured in the cream, she dropped the tub and it went everywhere. I got up and took her hand and licked it off. Then in between her fingers, slowly.
When you are drunk and you fall it doesn’t hurt, not until the drink’s worn off. Then you feel tender and offended at gravity. You feel more mortal than you did before. And so it was with this salt air, and Evie, I think. It made her drunk. And drunk on that she’d touched me all over in the branches and only now was she starting to really feel me. With my creamy lips, my creamy tongue, I kissed her. I knew from this great feeling she gave off of … What was it? Relief? Gratitude? I knew then that no one had touched her like that before. I could feel how much she was feeling. And the more she felt, the more I realized I had never felt anything like that myself, starting so young and so casually. And that no matter how good it was with someone, it always felt rehearsed. I’d never had my touch received like this before. And to be felt like that was to feel like that myself — too much. I broke off, told her the colour of the food looked wrong, I didn’t want to eat it, and went up to bed, and locked my door.
23 June
The salt-air and too much fucking.
What day is this anyway?
24 June
Our last night. Too full up on each other to touch. We fall on talk as something new. We talk about the island. I said how this would be a bleak place in winter. Exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. The wind would be wild, wouldn’t it? She sounded almost envious. You would like that? When we walk inland, in the quieter places, I feel anxious, she said. About seeing people? (We had seen that same guy with his dog that afternoon.) No, she said. The quiet. I thought you worshipped quiet. In others, I envy it. But quiet for me is torture. Why? I can hear myself. Your thoughts, you mean? The sound of me. I like it best by the sea or in the wind, where I can’t hear myself. Most people feel anxious when they can’t hear themselves. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’ Then I told her about D’s brother. He heard voices. It was bad in the wind or by the sea. Noises outside turned to voices inside. He goes mad with the sound of other people in his head. And you go mad with the sound of yourself!
Evie told me about the castrati then. Those boys who had their balls cut off to keep their voices sweet and high. When they sang they did not sound like boys, and they did not sound like women. It was an eerie sound, Evie said. The practice had been banned by the Vatican in the nineteenth century, but she had heard a recording, made during the earliest days of recording technology, when the last castrato was still alive and singing in the Sistine Chapel. A moment in time, she said, when the sound could be captured for ever. What were her words? Beautiful synchronicity. But think! (she clapped a hand over her mouth). Think of all the sounds we will never hear! And what about the sounds that are facing extinction, she said. Sounds that future generations will never hear!
Like certain rare songbirds, I said. Or the din of yourself.
The castrati! I have not thought of the castrati in decades. There was a period in my teenage years, before I met Damaris, when I thought about almost nothing else. One day in Edinburgh, in a charity shop, I came across a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, who died in … I forget the year, I will have to consult the Encyclopaedia. What do I recall of Alessandro’s entry, read all those years ago, after I returned from the charity shop? That as a child he had a beautiful singing voice (needless to say). That at the age of nine he was placed in a warm bath, drugged with opium and castrated. That he sang in the Sistine Chapel choir. That he was the only castrati to have made a recording. As soon as I returned from the charity shop — this, shortly after I left boarding school — I went to my room and listened to the recording of his voice. I became obsessed by Alessandro Moreschi, as well as by the strange race of which he was a last member: emasculated giants whose voices did not change with puberty, but whose limbs and ribcages, lacking testosterone, developed abnormally: long and heavy for the limbs; thick-boned and swollen for the ribcages. By the time Alessandro reached maturity, I read, his chest was cavernous, his lungs enormously powerful, and he could sustain a high c, no, d for over a minute. More than this I cannot recall. Once again I am forced to consult my Encyclopaedia. That is something I have often found myself doing, while writing this history. It has never been easy. The set is in constant use, although not the use for which it is intended. The volumes of my Encyclopaedia are not so much repositories of information as elements of furniture, since they comprise the legs of my desk, four pillars supporting the wardrobe door. Let me (briefly) describe the Encyclopaedia. Bound in blue leather, each volume measures approximately ten by seven inches. The pages are yellowed and in places eaten away by the moths and damp. Pasted on the inside front cover of Volume 1 is an advert cut from a magazine.