face looked luminous as harsh rain drummed on the roof of their little red English Ford, where everything was reversed. Her country, his patriotism. Her birthday, his treat. How strange, Bech bothered to notice, that his happiness in Scotland should take the form of being mean to her.
The Sinclairs had farmed, and perhaps a few did still farm, these great treeless fields of Caithness whose emerald sweep came right to the edge of the perilous cliffs. The cliffs, and the freestanding towers the sea had created from a millennial merging of those eroded ravines called gills, were composed of striations of gray sandstones as regular as the pages of a book. Down on the shore, vast, slightly tilted flagstones seemed to commemorate a giant’s footsteps into the sea, or to attest to the ruin of a prodigious library. No fence prevented a tourist or a cow from toppling off and hurtling down the sheer height composed of so many accreted, eroding layers;paths had been beaten raggedly parallel to the cliff edge, leading to cairns whose explanatory legend was obscured by lichen and to, in one spot, an unofficial dump, where newspapers and condensed-milk cans had been deposited upon the edge of the precipice but had not all fallen in. Gulls nested just underneath the lip of the turf and in crannies straight down the cliff face; their white bodies, wings extended in flight, speckled the windy steep spaces between the surface of the twinkling sea and the edge where Bech and Bea stood. The plunging perspectives made her giddy, and she shrieked when, teasing, he took a few steps forward and reached down as if to steal a gull egg. The mother gull tipped her head and peered up at him with an unimpressed pink eye. Bech backed away, breathless. For all his boyish bravado, his knees were trembling. Heights called to him.
Fall. Fly
.
The wind so fierce no trees spontaneously grew in this northernmost county of Britain was a bright May breeze today, setting a blush on Bea’s cheeks and flaring Bech’s nostrils with the scent of salt spray. The Vikings had come to this coast, leaving ruin behind, and flaxen-haired infants. The houses of the region were low, with roofs of thatch or slate, and squared slabs of its ubiquitous flagstone had been set upright and aligned into fences along field boundaries. But the primary feel of this land was of unbounded emptiness, half-tamed and sweet, with scarce a car moving along the A9 and not another walking man or woman to be seen this side of the green horizon, beyond which meadows gave way to brown moors where peat was dug in big black bricks out of long straight trenches, and the emptiness began in earnest. Every cemetery they stopped at had its Sinclairs. Bea was excited to be on ancestral territory, though less ecstatic than she had been in Israel. Bech had felt crowded there, and here, in themany-pocketed tweed jacket he had bought along Princes Street and the droop-brimmed plaid bog hat purchased just yesterday in Wick, he felt at home. “This is my kind of place,” he told Bea from the cliff edge, his breath regained and his knees again steady.
“You’re just paying me back,” she said, “for liking the Holy Land so much.”
“That was overdeveloped. This is just right. Thousand-acre zoning.”
“You look ridiculous in that hat,” she told him unkindly, uncharacteristically. The wind, perhaps, had whipped a shine into her eyes. “I’m not sure the jacket suits you, either.”
“They feel great. ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’ ”
“They give you that troll look.”
“What troll look?”
“That troll look that—”
He finished for her. “That Jews get in tweeds. Shit. I’ve really done it. I’ve married an anti-Semite.”
“I wasn’t going to say that at all.” But she never did supply what she had been going to say, and it was not until they were snuggled in their bed on the musty third floor of the Thurso Arms that the monsters in the deep space between them
The Sinclairs had farmed, and perhaps a few did still farm, these great treeless fields of Caithness whose emerald sweep came right to the edge of the perilous cliffs. The cliffs, and the freestanding towers the sea had created from a millennial merging of those eroded ravines called gills, were composed of striations of gray sandstones as regular as the pages of a book. Down on the shore, vast, slightly tilted flagstones seemed to commemorate a giant’s footsteps into the sea, or to attest to the ruin of a prodigious library. No fence prevented a tourist or a cow from toppling off and hurtling down the sheer height composed of so many accreted, eroding layers;paths had been beaten raggedly parallel to the cliff edge, leading to cairns whose explanatory legend was obscured by lichen and to, in one spot, an unofficial dump, where newspapers and condensed-milk cans had been deposited upon the edge of the precipice but had not all fallen in. Gulls nested just underneath the lip of the turf and in crannies straight down the cliff face; their white bodies, wings extended in flight, speckled the windy steep spaces between the surface of the twinkling sea and the edge where Bech and Bea stood. The plunging perspectives made her giddy, and she shrieked when, teasing, he took a few steps forward and reached down as if to steal a gull egg. The mother gull tipped her head and peered up at him with an unimpressed pink eye. Bech backed away, breathless. For all his boyish bravado, his knees were trembling. Heights called to him.
Fall. Fly
.
The wind so fierce no trees spontaneously grew in this northernmost county of Britain was a bright May breeze today, setting a blush on Bea’s cheeks and flaring Bech’s nostrils with the scent of salt spray. The Vikings had come to this coast, leaving ruin behind, and flaxen-haired infants. The houses of the region were low, with roofs of thatch or slate, and squared slabs of its ubiquitous flagstone had been set upright and aligned into fences along field boundaries. But the primary feel of this land was of unbounded emptiness, half-tamed and sweet, with scarce a car moving along the A9 and not another walking man or woman to be seen this side of the green horizon, beyond which meadows gave way to brown moors where peat was dug in big black bricks out of long straight trenches, and the emptiness began in earnest. Every cemetery they stopped at had its Sinclairs. Bea was excited to be on ancestral territory, though less ecstatic than she had been in Israel. Bech had felt crowded there, and here, in themany-pocketed tweed jacket he had bought along Princes Street and the droop-brimmed plaid bog hat purchased just yesterday in Wick, he felt at home. “This is my kind of place,” he told Bea from the cliff edge, his breath regained and his knees again steady.
“You’re just paying me back,” she said, “for liking the Holy Land so much.”
“That was overdeveloped. This is just right. Thousand-acre zoning.”
“You look ridiculous in that hat,” she told him unkindly, uncharacteristically. The wind, perhaps, had whipped a shine into her eyes. “I’m not sure the jacket suits you, either.”
“They feel great. ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’ ”
“They give you that troll look.”
“What troll look?”
“That troll look that—”
He finished for her. “That Jews get in tweeds. Shit. I’ve really done it. I’ve married an anti-Semite.”
“I wasn’t going to say that at all.” But she never did supply what she had been going to say, and it was not until they were snuggled in their bed on the musty third floor of the Thurso Arms that the monsters in the deep space between them
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