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seemed only five or seven years her older. Already Elaidh felt the
coolness of the lake, the freedom of a fish, she smelled the ocean and the
opening of infinity.
    But then, she glanced back.
    There he stood, her father,
straight and scaled and calm, no longer young. And he raised his hand in
farewell. “Elaidh, my love, I wish you well and happy.”
    But she saw his eyes, they were full of
salty water, full of tears.
    Elaidh took her foot out of the lake’s
edge, and put down her hands. She stood on the lakeshore and looked at her
wonderful mother, the mermaid.
    “Mother,” said Elaidh, “thank you so
kindly for your queenly offer. But I will stay here with mankind. I’ll stay
with my da.”
    And Trisaphee made a sound, that might
have been the human word Why ?
    “Oh,” said Elaidh, “because they kept me
when you let me go, and he lets me go when I would go and you would take
me. Because they can cry salt water. Tears—that is ocean enough for me. I will
stay with my da.”
    And turning, Elaidh walked back along
the shore, into the land.
    Behind her came a splash they say, as if
every mirror in the world had been smashed in fragments. No more but that, and
the reeds again were empty, green, and silent as the moon.
     

Magritte’s Secret Agent
     
     
    You
asked me about it before, didn’t you, the picture? And I never told you. But
tonight, tonight I think I will. Why not? The wine was very nice, and there’s
still the other bottle. The autumn dusk is warm, clear and beautiful, and the
stars are blazing over the bay. It’s so quiet; when the tide starts to come
back, we’ll hear it. You’re absolutely right. I’m obsessive about the sea. And
that picture, the Magritte.
    Of course, it’s a print, nothing more,
though that was quite difficult to obtain. I saw it first in a book, when I was
eighteen or so. I felt a strangeness about it even then. Naturally, most of
Magritte is bizarre. If you respond to him, you get special sensations, special
inner stirrings over any or all of what he did, regardless even of whether you care
for it or not. But this one – this one.... He had a sort of game whereby he’d
often call a picture by a name that had no connection—or no apparent connection—with
its subject matter. The idea, I believe, was to throw out prior conception. I
mean, generally you’re told you’re looking at a picture called ‘Basket of
Apples’, and it’s apples in a basket. But Magritte calls a painting ‘The
Pleasure Principle’, and it’s a man with a kind of white nova taking place
where his head should be. Except that makes a sort of sense, doesn’t it? Think
of orgasm, for example, or someone who’s crazy over Prokofiev, listening to the
third piano concerto. This picture, though. It’s called ‘The Secret Agent’.
    It’s one of the strangest pictures in
the world to me, partly because it’s beautiful and it shocks, but the shock
doesn’t depend on revulsion or fear. There’s another one, a real stinger—a fish
lying on a beach, but it has the loins and legs of a girl: a mermaid, but
inverted. That has shock value all right, but it’s different. This one.... The head,
neck, breast of a white horse, which is also a chess piece, which is also a
girl. A girl’s eye, and hair that’s a mane, and yet still hair. And she—it—is lovely.
She’s in a room, by a window that faces out over heathland under a crescent
moon, but she doesn’t look at it. There are a few of the inevitable Magritte
tricks—for example, the curtain hanging outside the window-frame,
instead of in, that type of thing. But there’s also this other thing. I don’t
know how I can quite explain it. I think I sensed it from the first, or maybe I
only read it into the picture afterwards. Or it’s just the idea of white horses
and the foam that comes in on a breaker: white horses, or mythological kelpies
that can take the shape of a horse. Somehow, the window ought to show the sea
and it doesn’t. It shows