Debatable Land (33 page)

Logan slammed down the companionway hatch and yelled, ‘Is anyone interested? By my reckoning, it’s thirty miles till we hit land.’ He stood with the albatrosses behind him at the wheel of his boat, disappointed once again in having found what he was aiming for.

Like a head of seeds, blown, the tight-packed boat would scatter the six back out over the world.

Alec looked at Sandro, a combination of two Souths, Italy and New Zealand. He held his arms out to Elspeth, ‘I’m to the North,’ he said.

She came into his arms and there felt to him already like the past.

She returned to Logan, up among the hard weather, at the wheel of his boat.

‘Stay with me for a time,’ he said, ‘if you would like to.’

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to William Kirk for permission to reproduce his lettering for the memorial tablet to Colin McWilliam in the Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, and to the Trustees of Hawthornden Castle, where parts of the book were written.

Candia McWilliam
was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of
A Case of Knives
(1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize,
A Little Stranger
(1989),
Debatable Land
(1994), which was awarded the
Guardian
Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories
Wait Till I Tell You
(1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir,
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
.

By the Same Author

A Case of Knives

A Little Stranger

Wait Till I Tell You

What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness

First published in Great Britain 1994

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Candia McWilliam 1994

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material

reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked

the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

50 Bedford Square, London
W1CB 3DP

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408826973

www.bloomsbury.com/candiamcwilliam

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