by Noel Scanlon
I began to feel better and calmer as the material world slid away into its true insignificance.
Sometime later when I left the guru, I was surprised to find Ursula in the church apparently waiting for me. She didn’t speak but stood there staring at me. She was not allowed to speak in the church. The guru’s teaching in fact discourages all unnecessary speech. He often says that to talk too much is to become a mere talking machine. Spiritual giants are produced by intense concentration and not by ill-considered speech.
I indicated to Ursula that she should prostrate herself on the church floor. After a momentary hesitation, she obeyed. I looked down on her slim sensuous figure, clad in a light sari that clung to her. She was the least compliant of the community and I wondered sometimes if she had really made the transition from her previous life-style at all.
Something about Ursula’s prostrate body held me. Perhaps it was the combination of rebellion and submissiveness. Perhaps it was because of the outrageous way she had spoken to me at the funeral pyre. In any event, I saw her prostrate figure as intensely erotic. And when she looked up at me out of wet rather swollen eyes she signalled a clear message, made a quick naked contact.
I struggled against my lust. I had long ago given up sex as egotistical. During my years in India I had forgone all sexual intercourse as all yogis recommend and as is indeed more or less obligatory for the attainment of real spiritual advancement. My resistance was therefore real but it was short-lived. I can see now that I had been weakened by my constant involvement with material things. So even as I struggled against my desires, I was on my hands and knees on the church floor and in the few seconds during which we were kneeling opposite one another before we were conjoined in the dim candlelight before the statue, she did everything possible to facilitate me. I was surprised by the look of satisfaction, if not of triumph, on her face.
I had up to this point practised total sexual abstinence on the island. The guru expects it. He does not condemn sex — it is just another obstacle to spiritual progress.
Because of this, intercourse with Ursula was, to me, a defeat. It was perhaps for this reason I had first slapped her hard across the face and during intercourse subjected her to a more or less severe beating though the latter seemed to make her cling closer.
I have powerful, and none the less powerful because repressed, sexual desires and as soon as my initial resistance was overcome I was only aware of Ursula’s energetically sensual writhing on the church floor.
She grew and grew and then became suddenly smaller and less significant until I was barely aware of her being there at all. Indeed by the time I had left her and gone outside without glancing back, I had forgotten both her and the two young Indian boys who had been spectators. Not, I am sure, that Hari or Arjun attached any undue significance to our casual coupling.
CHAPTER 3
Outside, I took a deep breath of the Atlantic air. The white scut of a rabbit flashed momentarily then disappeared into the security of one of the burrows that riddled the hill. The burrows indicated that there had once been a huge rabbit population but it was very rarely that we saw one. A sheep dog, giving chase to the rabbit, glided over a low stone wall, light-hearted with the excitement of the chase. It was Dominic’s dog which I had told Dominic was not to be let loose on the island.
I walked towards my cottage through what had once been the main street of the Deserted Village and was now an overgrown track. Spirals of turf smoke rising from the cottages which, with Augustus John and Dominic’s help, we had made habitable, gave the place a pleasant, settled air.
The name Deserted Village had intrigued me from the beginning and I tried to find out from the local people why it was deserted. But my enquiries got me nowhere. They always answered by silence, evasiveness or a change of subject. It was quite obviously something they didn’t want to talk about and, if l persisted, they looked at me oddly as if l had said something that shouldn’t have been said, uttered some unforgivable obscenity. Most of my information came therefore from Augustus John.
The Deserted Village was abandoned during the second half of the last century. This didn’t happen as a result of normal emigration nor was it a result of the Great Famine. The islanders survived the famine probably by eating seafood. But within ten years of the end of the famine the village was deserted. The people didn’t leave gradually. They all left hurriedly and together. They left everything behind them - land, houses and furniture. Why exactly they left I had not yet established beyond the fact that it was the result of some ugly and terrifying event. Everybody in Blackshell apparently knew about it but they would never discuss it with a stranger.
After that sudden exodus from the only village on the island the population was permanently depleted.
The small number who returned earlier this century built cottages to the north of the island. I could not understand why they had done this. It would have been far easier to re-roof the better of the standing houses as we had done. But this didn’t happen. Not only was the Deserted Village left deserted, but even various artefacts that would have been useful were left to rot. Nothing was removed from those houses. Even where a table had been laid all those decades ago it was left that way. The village was shunned. Since the houses had been built of huge pieces of solid stone with walls several feet thick brought there with enormous labour, I could only conclude that they were shunned for reasons of peasant superstition.
The second exodus from the island had taken place in the recent past, that is only about twenty years ago. Being so recent, many people in Blackshell must have known about it. But they were even less willing to talk about this recent exodus than the previous one. I was inclined to agree with the solicitor that they were indeed an odd and superstitious lot.
From the time the last man had left some twenty years ago until our arrival, the island had remained uninhabited, swept by the Atlantic gales that so frequently hit it.
My cottage, which I shared with the two Indian girls, stood a little farther inland than the others. But it was exactly similar in construction: that is fine solid stone walls but a rather improvised roof. Against one gable end was a clamp of turf, our sole supply of fuel for heating and cooking. There were, I estimated, many thousands of tons of turf on the island and certainly enough to last us, at our present rate of usage, indefinitely. The problem was not that of availability but of cutting and saving. Augustus John and Dominic had helped us putting down our present supply but, nonetheless, it had been a major preoccupation.
In the stony fields beside my cottage I noticed Enika, the Dutch girl, gathering some wild herb or other. Enika had recently become oddly silent and uncommunicative.
As I opened the door, a light gust of wind blew down the chimney and into the long room which was the living-room. The furniture, as in all the cottages, was very basic being made from what driftwood happened to be thrown up on the beach with some supplementing from the mainland store. On one side of the fireplace was a home-made four-poster bed where the two Indian girls slept. My room was at one end opening off and the store-room at the other. The living-room was as untidy as it was possible to imagine, with everything strewn here and there. In the water bucket, the water was a light brown and floating in it were pieces of leaves and moss. An Indian vina hung from a nail in the wall.
In contrast to the general chaos, Manju and Maya sat on small stools on either side of the hearth, neat, tidy and controlled. Their black plaits were oiled until they glistened, their red tilak marks recently applied, their saris freshly washed; their ankle bracelets, their gold arm bangles and neck ornaments shone. They both wore extremely abbreviated cholies that left exposed the rounded sides of their breasts. They looked at me out of their large brown Indian eyes, passively and incuriously, with that special oriental quality never to be found among European females.
hen they returned to gaze at the black kettle which was suspended from a hook over the blazing sods of peat.
I took off my cloak and,
reaching under the bed, pulled out the heavy woollen pullover I always put on for going to the mainland. In changing my clothes, I also hoped to change my appearance to one acceptable to the local people.
A knock at the door made me start nervously. Chris came in. She was frowning. “I’ve written out the list,” she said, handing me an old notebook in which were pages written and overwritten in pencil.
Chris, like all the girls, was wearing a sari. Though, to be frank, she looked rather ridiculous in it when compared with the statuesque Manju and Maya. There is no question but that there is something intrinsically different about the oriental and occidental female body. If you have watched Indian girls carrying their brass pots to the well almost anywhere in India you will know what I mean. Chris was a tall American, with long fuzzy hair, and wore spectacles.
“I can’t read the half of this,” I said irritably. I was always at my worst when going to the mainland.
With that coolness of manner which was one of her hallmarks Chris said, “Show me what you can’t read.”
“No, no,” I said. “There isn’t time.”
Time was a concept which on the island we had largely done away with but which came back with a rush in dealings with the outside world.
“You forgot a whole lot of things last time, so this time I’ve underlined the items we have to have.”
Chris was intensely practical and had she been allowed to go to the mainland would, needless to say, never have forgotten anything. “I’m concerned about our diet,” she went on. She was always concerned about our diet. “We must have as many of the items listed as possible.”
I didn’t disagree. The trouble was that the stock in the general store was severely limited — at least for non-meat- eaters. And we were all, of course, non-meat-eaters. I had for so long regarded meat-eating as only a milder form of cannibalism involving the slaughter of animals and the consumption of their flesh that the mere thought of a meat meal made me physically ill.
“I’ve underlined grain twice,” Chris said. “So you can’t forget it.”
“No, no, of course I won’t.”
Manju and Maya took no notice. They didn’t even look in our direction but continued to gaze into the fire.
“The mice are becoming a problem again,” Chris went on. This latter was a tricky matter since the guru’s teachings forbade our killing any creature — which ruled out poison or traps.
“I saw one of them yesterday. It looked really big — bigger than I’ve ever seen a mouse.”
I didn’t respond. I was thinking about something else.
“I’d like you to bring back a cat. We have to protect our food somehow.”
“I’ll make enquiries,” I said vaguely.
“Don’t forget,” Chris said. “And don’t forget anything on the list.” She went on about the supplies we had to have. She was frowning and it was obvious that something was worrying her. But I had no time to speculate as to what it might be. My own mind was already obsessed by an ill-defined but gnawing fear of going to the mainland, a fear which increased with each trip I made.
CHAPTER 4
Augustus John and his brother Dominic were sitting on the little pier waiting for me and immediately they saw me launched the currach.
I must say from the beginning that, though they were helpful, I always mistrusted the brothers and especially Augustus John. I have said that the island when we bought it was uninhabited but I learned later that the brothers occasionally spent nights in a boley house on the north side of the hill. When we took possession I immediately forbade them ever to spend a night on the island.
I would, of course, have got rid of them but unfortunately I was unable to do so. There are, as you can imagine, distinct practical disadvantages to living on an island five miles from the mainland, not the least of which is that you have to cross the intervening sea in order to get supplies.
At that time, I hated and feared the sea, as indeed I still do, and crossing that distance alone just was not a possibility. So, in a sense, I was tied to the brothers in an unwelcome but very necessary alliance.
This alliance was further cemented by the indisputable fact that no one else in the area (and I had tried) would even begin to consider acting as a boatman for our community. It was for this reason that Augustus John was able frequently to take advantage of our isolated situation. Besides, he was a naturally dominant character. I resented him in many ways but I had at all times to camouflage my feelings.
“Good-morning, sur,” Augustus John said with false jocularity looking at me appraisingly with those hard black eyes of his.
He was a stocky red-faced figure wearing turned-down rubber boots, old dirty trousers and an Aran pullover with the elbows out. Dominic was similarly clad except that the elbows of his pullover had been darned. “Are you ready for the crossing then?” Augustus John asked teasingly, the seaman addressing the landlubber.
Dominic didn’t say anything. Dominic never spoke. As Augustus John had once told me, touching his finger to his forehead, Dominic was not quite all there. There was a want in him. Yet despite this “want”, despite his short stature and the disfigurement of his hunched back, Dominic’s movements were extraordinarily lithe. His limbs were even more powerful than Augustus John’s, the muscles of his arms being especially developed from constant rowing of a currach. He handled the boat with expertise and an odd kind of grace. The black and white sheepdog that was his shadow and which I had just seen on the hill, crouched now in the stern, alert and panting, but cowed.
I threw my bag into the currach and stepped in after it.
The brothers took an oar each and pushed off.
As always, the sudden heaving movement occasioned by being in a boat made my stomach lurch. The sea was rough or at least seemed to me to be rough. It only ever differed in the degree of roughness. Although Augustus John referred to it as calm weather, the swells were in fact huge. And no wonder, considering that for three days previously the winds had swept in from the Atlantic tearing at the island, leaping on our cottages with a ferociousness and viciousness that seemed to me to be personal and vindictive.
The brothers, of course, treated the swells with a nonchalance that must, I think, have been exaggerated. After all neither of them could swim.
“That was a nice little bonfire you were having on the beach,” Augustus John said, looking somewhere to the right of me in the sly way that was his custom. “What were you burning?”
I felt as if a bolt had hit me out of the blue. I had thought that that incident was over. I had never thought to be questioned on it.
With a grimacing grin I said, “We were burning some furze bushes.” My explanation of the funeral pyre didn’t sound, even to me, very convincing.
Augustus John, himself a dissembler of some skill, did not, of course, believe me. “Burning whins were you,” he said, weighing the explanation and clearly discarding it just as clearly this piece of information added to the dominance over me which he always sought.
“Burning whins were you,” he repeated and there was mockery in his tone. Not, of course, that he would say anything explicit. That was not his way. He was a master of the allusive, the sly probing suggestion.
“I didn’t think you liked doing that class of thing, reverend.”
Augustus John knew that I loathed the word reverend and consequently used it as occasion arose. It was one of his ways of baiting me. God knows how he had found out that I had once been a priest.
Just then, I put my hand to my forehead and realized that in my haste I had forgotten to remove the painted insignia which I normally wear. Since we had no mirrors on the island there was no way I could have seen it. I trailed my hand overboard and, averting my head as if to study the island, wiped it off surreptitiously.
The island, viewed like this from the sea, could be seen as it really was; a small insignificant piece of land with the Deserted Village crouched at the bottom of the hill. And yet it didn’t really look insigni
ficant. It had a definite personality. There was something about it, an aura that was slightly awesome. It seemed to radiate something, some energy perhaps.
Every now and then the brothers, I am convinced purposely, allowed the boat to go broadside on to a wave so that my stomach turned over and I was drenched with spray. The brothers were drenched with spray too, but that was a small price for them to pay for my discomfort. Having lived in rain and mist and sea spray all their lives, I don’t think they even noticed being wet and indeed neither of them ever wore oil skins or, for that matter, a coat of any sort. On each occasion that this sort of thing happened and after I was badly drenched, Augustus John would say, “Sorry, sur. She seemed to slip a bit sideways there.”
In between incidents of this nature, he recounted local gossip, wakes and the like, in which he knew I had not the slightest interest. Scandal mongering, vilification of neighbours in whose misfortunes Augustus John took a deep delight, was clearly one of his main preoccupations. In addition, he told a large number of tasteless and quite humourless stories which he apparently considered to be funny as both he and Dominic laughed uproariously at all of them.
We were regularly drenched with spray. Light drizzle seemed now to have joined the sea to the rain clouds in one solid element of water, so that there was no perceptible dividing line between land and sea as if the elements had somehow combined.
But Augustus John had more on his mind than his tasteless stories. His mind had not in fact been diverted from the matter of the funeral pyre or the way in which he could best turn it to his advantage. With his natural cunning, he was merely biding his time.