Yarns Without Threads 

You always were fair-skinned, Olive, and giving yourself to the sun wasn't something you set about lightly. We went well-prepared on our trip to Aberlady Bay. You had your plastic bottle of tanning milk, with a high factor of sunscreen, and your sunhat; I carried the big new Thermos of blue-and-white plastic, whose workings we didn't altogether understand. Each of us, of course, brought a P. G. Wodehouse paperback along. Yours was 'Summer Lightning'.

...

We parked the car by a golf course, at the point that looked on the map to be nearest to the beach we wanted. The beaches we want are far from the roads, pretty much by definition, but even by our standards this was a bit of a trek.

You promised me that in Scotland there's no such thing as a law of trespass, and I decided to take your word for it. I don't know whether the golf course was technically part of the nature reserve, but certainly there were birds about, singing away when not actually visible, as well as the usual dogged golfers. We passed by them in silence, awed by the equipment and the dedication, above all by the tremendous space that golf opens up, which just hangs there waiting to be filled by something sensible.

... We stopped at a convenient bench, by a water-fountain put up in memory of a local resident. I was all for us staying there until you were fully recovered, but you were back on your feet after only a couple of minutes, and we pressed on past the golf course. The nature reserve contained some sort of sewage plant, but once we were beyond that we could smell the sea. As we climbed the dunes we could catch glimpses of a fine sandy beach, and of tightly curling, self-amused waves. We could also see people standing on top of choice dunes, shading their eves and peering around, as if they were on top of crow's-nests and not overgrown sandhills. They stepped back from the dunes, formed little groups, and then went back on lookout. They seemed to have borrowed from the nature reserve the watchfulness proper to endangered species.

It didn't take us long to find a dune of our own, one with a dip near its summit which gave us a minimum of privacy without shutting us off from a view of the water. You gave me one of your crinkliest smiles, and you spoke the formula that I've grown so used to: 'Well now, shall we turn this into a naturist event?' And of course I said yes.

We weren't like that on our side of the family, were we, Olive? Though if there was 'our side' - me and you - there must have been 'their side' too, and our opponents (I don't say our enemies) never managed to act in concert. My mother and your Joan had the same ideas about what was important, but they could never abide each other. ...

In the long run, your Joan was far more trouble than my mother. At first she bided her time, being too young to translate into action the adult-sized will that had been evident since her cradle days. But she must also have been laying her plans, for what turned out to be a long campaign.

There's a word that naturists use, a term of abuse for everything they despise in the clothed world. You disliked that word, and would never use it of anyone, let alone of your Joan; I'm afraid that doesn't stop it from applying. But then you were a tender naturist, Olive, a naturist without rancour. I salute you. You built up no new defences to make up for the ones you had cast off. Sunhat and sunscreen; that was all. You asked for little, and you managed on a lot less. In my innocence, I thought that all naturists had the same goodness of heart you had, the same robust freshness. I had to learn for myself that there are meannesses of mind and spirit not lodged in folds of clothing or stowed away in pockets. I had to learn that a person can be naked and still be wrapped in bitterness.

The word is 'textile'. The word of abuse. A textile is someone who doesn't exist except as a succession of costumes, and I'm afraid your Joan was a textile through and through. She could certainly wear clothes. She could groom like nobody's business, but that was all she could do, and she couldn't groom the whole world to her liking.

Your husband left you, and you never willingly mentioned his name again. You became a naturist, which was something you said you'd always wanted to do. I'm sure it was. But there was a special symbolism involved. When your husband left you, you didn't retreat from the sexual world; you advanced away from it. You entered a nunnery of flesh, a nunnery without habits. And it was as if by the simplification you achieved in your life, you were trying to send the message that getting rid of your husband had been the first part of the same process. You claimed control retrospectively, as if you had shed that man as you now shed your clothes, and the history that clung to them like cigarette smoke at a party.