“Some say the argument was about a girl. He’s not married, is he? Is his wife there?”
“I don’t know. I only saw him.”
“Hm. Anyway, as I was saying, he went off to America. Others said that the argument was about the croft. Jim’s the oldest, you see, and his father said that he wouldn’t leave him the croft because he didn’t show any interest in it. He was a shy boy or so I’ve heard. And so he’s come back again after all these years. That’s very funny. Did he look poor?”
“He was wearing a coat and he was sitting by the fire,” Iain volunteered, for he was glad to see his mother in such a good humour, and so interested.
“Is that right? Of course their climate is different from ours. He finds it colder here, I suppose. I can see that. Did he come on the bus?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course he might have a car. Coming from America he might have a car.”
“I didn’t see a car,” said Iain judiciously. “There might have been one but I didn’t see it.”
“Well, if you didn’t see one,” said his mother, laughing, “there can’t be one. He wouldn’t keep it in the bedroom, would he?” And she continued her ironing.
“I wonder if he’s come for good or if he’s just on holiday. Maybe he’s retired. A lot of them make enough money to retire on but many of them take to drink too when they’re out there. What did he say to you? Was he talking to you? He asked you if you were clever? What did you say? I hope you didn’t tell him that you were. That would be boasting. Anyway you’re only clever in certain things.” She put down the iron decisively. “I don’t think he’s married and I don’t think he’s done well for himself. That’s my opinion.” She resumed her ironing, pressing the iron against the white sheet, and added:
“There was a man from our village who came back from America and he spent his time walking about the moors with a stick. He never did a stroke of work but that was because he had retired and had plenty of money.”
She didn’t say any more and Iain forgot about Jim, Dollag’s son, till one day he was rather late in collecting the milk and found that Jim was the only person in the house apart from his brother who was quietly repairing his green net in the usual corner.
“Come in, lad,” said Jim. “Tell me, do you read books?”
“Yes,” Iain replied shyly.
“Well, then, I’m getting crates of books sent to me from the States and you can read some of them if you like. Would you like that?”
“Yes thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”
“Remember that then. Every day you come in here you ask if the crates have come and I’ll tell you. Is that OK, lad?”
So every day Iain would ask that question, till one beautiful morning, when the sun was shining and the dew was wet on the grass and the birds were singing, the books did finally come and Iain was allowed to search among them to his heart’s content. It was a day he would remember for ever, for among those books he found P. C. Wren stories of the Foreign Legion, a collection of detective stories edited by Dorothy L. Sayers, a massive book of ghost stories, another huge volume of stories about the sea and finally one of spy stories.
Every evening, that enchanted summer, he read those books, firing from forts in a desert glittering under the merciless glare of the sun, duelling with Germans in a dark Prussian forest, investigating cases with Sax Rohmer, sailing tropical seas and lying at anchor in blue lagoons.
And every morning before going to school he would go for the milk and Jim would be sitting by the fire in his coat and saying to him, “How are you getting on, lad? You keep reading.”
Was it his imagination or did Jim appear to be getting thinner every day, did his face appear more and more unshaven and shadowed, did he shiver more uncontrollably beside the large fire?
And his mother would say, “He’s home for good and everyone says he has no money. He’s like the rest of the family, a bit odd. Did you know that he’s drinking a lot and that the other night the bus driver had to help him into the house?”
“Shut up,” Iain shouted.
“What? What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said ‘Shut up.’ Who do you think you’re saying ‘shut up’ to? Don’t speak to me like that.”
And Iain muttered something under his breath while his mother glared at him, hands on hips.
Jim said very little to him. He never told him what had happened to him in America, what the cities were like, what criminals haunted the streets, what buildings towered into the sky.
And evening after evening Iain broke complicated codes, made dying confessions about stolen jewellery, hung from the yard arm, travelled through deserts and seas.
One morning Jim wasn’t sitting by the fire as he usually was and Dollag told Iain that her son was resting in bed.
“Would you like to go and see him?” she shouted though not with her usual cheerfulness.
“Yes, please,” said Iain and he was ushered into a small room with a bed, chair and curtains that had only been partially drawn.
“It’s you, boy,” said Jim. “Come in. I’ll be up soon. It’s just that I don’t feel so good. How are the books going? OK? When I was your age I read a lot too. Even in the States I read. When you get right down to it, boy, people fail you but books never fail you, and you can take that from me. You remember that.” He sat up in bed, wearing a blue cardigan, his face a bluish colour, and continued, “You know something, son. I left home because my father was always telling me ‘You give up those books now. You’re wasting your time. Why aren’t you learning to fish like your brothers? Why aren’t you learning to scythe?’ In the States though I had some peace.” And then he muttered as if to himself, “I should never have come home.”
“What did you do in America, sir?” Iain ventured timidly.
“What did I do, eh? Well, I’ll tell you. I worked on the elevators, lad, and every night after a hard day’s work I would go home to my books. Do you know what elevators are? Well, they’re not what you call lifts. They’re grain elevators. That’s where I worked till I got tired. My boy, America is a terrible place. Don’t ever go there. America is the most terrible place on earth.” His hollow eyes seemed to stare towards it, that desolate vast country almost too violent and brash for his imagination to encompass. Then he settled back on to his pillow again and said, “Books never fail you, lad, though people will.” He didn’t say another word, as if he had passed on to Iain the final epigram which contained his whole experience of life, and after a while Iain left the room, almost on tiptoe.
“How is he this morning?” Big Dollag shouted anxiously and Iain replied, “I don’t know.”
The jug of milk in his hand he left her house and went home through the singing birds of summer among the flowers which grew all around him.
Two weeks after that his mother told him, after he had come from school, that Jim had died and it seemed to him that there was a certain triumph in her voice.
“He was drinking too much. Everyone was saying that. He killed himself, going up town night after night, and never speaking to anybody. Big Dollag won’t like that, the scandal of it. He was just like her other sons, there was a weakness in that family. When I came here first Big Dollag wouldn’t speak to me because I was an incomer, and she would say things about your own father – that he drank too much – but now I’m getting my own back on her. There’s a want in her family and everybody knows it,” and, thin-lipped, she stared into the bleak world of her triumph.
Iain gazed at her horrified as if he knew that of all the people whom he had met in the village Jim had been the one who had been most like himself, quiet, withdrawn, imaginative. He ran out of the room and climbed into the attic where his books were. Weeping he took them out, thinking about Jim but not as if Jim were dead, for he was too young to imagine what death was.
Then he began to read “Beau Geste” by P. C. Wren and was soon lost in the desert again with th
e Foreign Legion, having forgotten his mother’s petty words; Big Dollag; the village, bare and unharmonious below him; and was himself, in spite of everything, true and upright and honourable in a fortress in the desert almost devoid of humanity and beaten upon by a torrid sun. And it seemed to him as if Jim was there also, standing beside him, his rifle at his shoulder, wearing a pill-box hat, while the tribes attacked, appearing over the horizon in undisciplined but venomous hordes.
13
“I WANT TO go for a walk to the sea,” said Pauline, tiring of sailing paper boats on the small pond.
“All right,” said Iain.
Pauline was the daughter of a lady who came from London to the village every year during the summer holidays and who in fact belonged to the village though she was now married in the metropolis. Most of the villagers were polite to her, but behind her back they said that she put on airs and adopted a condescending manner to them as if they were peasants who had seen nothing of the world. She dressed in a green costume, and always carried a handbag (“even to the byre,” some of them said, meaning of course the lavatory, since none of the houses had toilets or even water of their own), and spoke as if there were marbles in her mouth. One would have thought from her conversation, they said, that she knew the Queen well, that she regularly bought her jewellery in Bond Street, attended a doctor in Harley Street, and was regarded with reverence when she appeared at Horse Guards Parade. In actual fact, as far as could be ascertained, her husband worked as a clerk, was a small hunted-looking man with sleeked hair and shiny suits who never was heard to speak in his wife’s presence, and, when he did speak, conversed in an extraordinary form of English that no one in the village understood. Iain, however, was allowed to play with Pauline who was eleven years old like himself, wore ribbons in her blond pigtails and unlike many of the village children seemed preternaturally well dressed and clean: on this particular occasion she wore pink stockings and a pink dress.
As they walked down the path between the cornfields, Iain now and again kicking moodily at a stone, Pauline was thinking of the expedition as a great adventure. It was only after she had been chattering on for some time that Iain realised that she had never been at the sea before, though she mentioned that she had been on a boat on the river Thames. He found it quite extraordinary that anybody could have lived in a place which was not near the sea and desperately tried to visualise London.
“Is it bigger than Stornoway?” he asked.
“It’s so big that you can get lost in it,” Pauline replied, completely disdaining the reference to Stornoway. “I got lost in it,” she added proudly. “One day when Mummy was in a shop I got lost and a policeman had to take me home.”
“Was it Scotland Yard?” Iain asked.
“No, of course not. It was a policeman with a helmet.” She said this decisively as if it settled the truth of her story once and for all. “He was very tall and he had a helmet,” she repeated for good measure.
“What do you call this lovely lovely flower?” she asked, staring down at a yellow plant that grew in the field.
“I don’t know. Is there no water in London then?”
“I told you. There’s the river Thames. I told you that before.”
“Oh?” Iain gave up trying to visualise London and told her, “When we get to the bottom we go through a gate and then we walk to the sea.”
“Is it much bigger than the Thames then?”
“Rivers are fresh water, you know,” said Iain expansively. “The sea is salt. That’s the difference between the sea and a river.”
“Salt. How does it get salt?”
“I don’t know but it is. Maybe the salt was in from the beginning for thousands and thousands of years. The clouds drop their rain on it all the time.”
When they arrived at the gate Iain had to open it for her, because she didn’t understand how the bolt worked, and she wasn’t strong enough to pull the gate back. Her shoes had blades of wet grass on them, and even her socks were wet from walking through the high wet plants; she stopped to wipe her shoes clean and then followed Iain who had gone on ahead, proud of the fact that he was the leader, that he knew where he was going, and that under no circumstances would he get lost.
They walked along the road to the sea, passing cows on the way who stared loweringly at them, and then turned their heads away as if they were tired of the sight.
When they arrived at the beach, Pauline gazed at the vast glittering expanse of sea in astonishment:
“Is that all water?” she asked.
“Of course it is. You can get drowned there. Some boys were drowned in a boat there.”
“In a boat?”
“Not in the boat. When they were out in the boat. See. That’s what you call seaweed.”
“It’s like long ribbons. Long brown ribbons. Do you think I could take some back to show Mummy?”
“No, it’s too dirty. Come on. We might find a crab. Have you ever seen a crab?”
“Not alive. Where can we get a crab?”
“There may be one in the pool. Not all the time but sometimes. And you can get whelks on the rocks.”
Pauline daintily picked her way among the rocks, making sure that her shoes didn’t get wet and clutching her skirt as if she were a ballerina.
“There are the boats there,” said Iain. “See. There are the oars.”
“What are oars?”
“They’re for rowing the boat. Don’t you know anything?”
“I know lots of things. Do you know who Madame Curie was?”
“Of course I do. She invented radium.”
“All right, so you know. You don’t need to boast.”
“I wasn’t boasting. I was telling you.”
“I knew already anyway. It’s not my fault I don’t know about oars. I bet you don’t know about subways. I bet you’ve never been in a subway. I was in a subway lots of times. You go up and down an escalator.” She paused for a moment as if wondering whether she had said the word right but in any case Iain wasn’t listening to her for he had seen a crab.
“See,” he said, “you can touch it. It’s a big crab. Don’t let it nip you.”
“Nip you?” she said enquiringly.
“Bite you with its claws,” replied Iain despairingly. One would think someone who had come from London would at least know the English language.
Pauline touched the crab reverently and gently and it moved a little through the water under her hand.
“I wonder what it’s thinking about,” she said. “I wonder what crabs think about.”
“I don’t know,” said Iain impatiently. “You were lucky to see a crab. You don’t find them here all the time. Look, there’s a jelly fish.”
“Just like an umbrella,” said Pauline delightedly. “It’s like a tiny umbrella.” She touched it very lightly with her finger and then followed Iain who was standing among some rocks.
“Here are the whelks,” Iain instructed her as if he were a teacher. “They stick to the rocks but you can pull them away. See. Inside it, there’s the meat. We take it out with a pin and then we boil it in a pot.”
“Is the meat good? Is it not very salty?”
“It’s not salty. Out there, do you see, there’s a ship. It’s a liner. Do you see it sailing past? That island has got sheep on it.”
“How do they get out there? Do they swim?”
“Of course they don’t. People take them out and leave them there. Sheep don’t swim.” At least he thought they didn’t swim, though perhaps one or two might: dogs certainly could swim.
“Maybe,” said Pauline, “their wool would pull them down into the water. Maybe they would drown,” said Pauline seriously. “Maybe that’s what would happen.”
And then, “Can we not go over there,” pointing to the stone quay.
“If you like,” said Iain airily though he didn’t want to go.
“We were at the fish market,” said Pauline suddenly. “It’s called Billinsgate, I think, and we w
ere at Madame Tussauds. They’ve got statues of murderers and they’ve got axes and knives with blood on them and it’s very dark. And they’ve got chains and pots.”
They walked over to the stone quay, which was deserted, though sometimes there would be boys fishing with bait for cuddies, dangling their legs over the edge. Iain was glad that there was no one there, for he didn’t want to be seen with a girl, especially one from London who had never seen the sea before, and who wore pigtails as well. He would never live it down. He was angry with himself that he hadn’t thought of the boys before and had agreed so thoughtlessly to come down to the sea. It just showed one that one must remember things like that.
When they reached the quay, Pauline stood at the very edge to peer down into the water and Iain called her back.
“If you go too near the edge you’ll fall,” he said, and for a moment he had a vision of her small body with the pink frock and the blond pigtails floating eerily among the stones.
“Look,” said Pauline, “I can see more seaweed and stones. The water’s green here. It’s beautiful.”
“It’s blue further out,” Iain told her. “That’s because it’s deeper.”
Suddenly Pauline turned away from the edge and began to jump over the capstans which were sunk into the stone of the quay, three or four of them, made of iron.
“You do that, Iain,” she shouted; “you jump too.” At first he didn’t want to, because the capstans were so near the edge, but he knew that he must jump because she had and he jumped too, following her little figure over capstan after capstan.
After a while she grew tired of this and sat down on one of them. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” she asked Iain.
“I don’t know. I might be a writer.”
“I’m going to be a nurse and cure people. I’m going to work in a hospital. I saw little fish there just now.”
On the Island Page 7