by Jessica Mann
“I meant The Visit. And U.D.I. And all that.”
“I don’t see why it should affect me.”
“You didn’t know about it before you left London?” he asked, peering too closely into her face.
“No.”
“I thought, seeing as you are a civil servant …”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Tamara said stiffly. “I’m on the staff of the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments.”
“So I heard,” he said meaningfully. “We’ve all heard about you.” His dirty hand moved towards Tamara’s. She began to put her binoculars into their case.
She said, “And do you support the independence for Forway?”
“Yeah—why not? If it makes them happy.”
“You don’t feel that it’s dangerous?”
“In what way?”
“Giving a stepping-stone to some foreign power?”
“Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care about things like nationalities. They are all the same. Like the Forway men—what has the U.K. ever done for me, that’s what I’d like to know.”
“You don’t feel patriotic?”
“Why should I? All that stuff about loyalty, all the flag-waving … they used to talk about it in my work. Public employees, they called us, as though it made a difference to the job. I did it okay, because they paid me, as simple as that. The ideology is just eyewash.”
Tamara stood up.
“I must get on. There probably won’t be many days when the weather is clear.” Even now, heavy clouds were scudding across from the west, and in the distance a broad grey strip dropping to the sea showed where the rain was already falling.
“Can I help?” he said. “I know about digs. I’ve had friends who went digging.” The tone of his voice implied a double meaning.
Tamara replied blandly, “At the university, do you mean?”
“When I was in the Civil Service—just like you. Until I was disabled. Luckily there was an insurance scheme on special Civil Service terms. That’s how we could afford to come here.” He picked up the end of the measuring tape, but Tamara took it from him.
“It’s a one-woman job,” she said. She carried on measuring and drawing while he marched down the hill and across the causeway. Once he was out of sight, she went on scanning Trinder’s Castle. Nothing could be seen to move there but the dogs, and she had got down to the eastern beach below the less grandiose side wall and was eating her sandwiches when she first heard human sounds from inside.
The voice was just like that of the late Mike or the late Rory. The hairs on her head prickled. For the first time since that decisively murderous evening, Tamara felt, not so much guilty, as fully aware of what she had done.
“Don’t you be forgetting now,” the voice said. “You’re to be there to meet her. Nine o’clock and don’t fail.”
“I won’t, Frank, you know I won’t.”
“And that’s just to remind you.” The sound of a slap. The man came round onto the beach, an ordinary-looking man with dark hair and palish skin. He began to pull a dinghy down the beach towards the water. He did not notice Tamara, who was lying concealed by a shingle bank. She watched as he launched the boat and climbed into it. He began to row straight out to sea, and Tamara realized that he was making for a large fishing boat, one of the kind that is festooned with the radio equipment that makes a mockery of the word wireless. She did not wait until he had climbed aboard but made her way around The Castle walls to the yard. The dogs were still barking madly, but when Tamara appeared they increased their noise to a crazy ululation, and Nonie Anholt came out of the back door. She shouted, though her voice was inaudible over the din, and soon went inside again to fetch something that she threw to the animals from a safe distance. They began to gulp the food, and Mrs. Anholt came over to Tamara.
“Who are you?”
Tamara introduced herself. “Marvellous, do come in.” Mrs. Anholt’s voice was that of a much younger woman. “Come and see The Castle properly. You’ll appreciate it.” Tamara followed her through the back door into a smelly lobby. She glanced automatically at her reflection in a fly-spotted glass that hung crooked on the wall, and straightened her hair. “Ah, you’re still at that stage,” Mrs. Anholt remarked. “I have become perfectly indifferent to my appearance. It’s like being reborn. Such freedom. I don’t give a damn any more.”
“Really?” Tamara murmured.
“Once I devoted my whole life to it. Brushing and curling and dyeing and plucking. I spent hours putting on paint and taking it off and being massaged or pommelled or combed. I thought I owed it to myself. My baby had hardly been born when I asked the nurse for my compact. And then suddenly one day I stopped. Just like that. I became a different person. And now I simply couldn’t care less. It’s so convenient that old women don’t sweat. But I suppose you are still at the stage of caring.”
“I don’t wear much make-up.”
“Natural or paint, the effect is the same if you’re good at it. I should know. But nowadays I see the wrinkles and all the horrors, and they don’t affect me at all. I just don’t react.”
Tamara understood about not reacting; she felt no reaction, emotionally, to her memory of Mike and Rory alive or how they died, though the sound of Frank’s voice had reminded her of them. “Non-judgemental,” she murmured.
“That’s the word. That’s how I feel about everything that once seemed to matter so much. You should have seen my little house in London. Convenient for Harrods and always full of flowers and magazines and pretty little touches. Hours of my life, years, I spent on that. All over.”
That no time was spent on this house was self-evident. Great festoons of cobwebs hung down from every corner, and every flat surface was covered with greasy dust. There were graveyards of flies on the window sills. Tamara followed into what might once have been a library. There were still a few mildewed books on the shelves, but most were bare or had on them such things as empty bottles, dirty plates, and cigarette stubs.
“Have you lived here for a long time, Mrs. Anholt?”
Nonie Anholt sat down on a sagging-springed sofa, releasing a cloud of dust, and drew her feet up under her skirt. “I’ll tell you all about it,” she promised. “Come and sit down. Frank’s away for the night, there’s no worry.”
“Frank?”
“Don’t be silly, you have heard all about him. I saw you with Freya Barnes and those chatterboxes in The Town. She’s going senile since Pedro went. Helped on his way, Frank says, don’t know who by though. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about the violent Irishman who lives up here? They wrote to my son, Peter, about it in Surrey. Luckily he is too busy to come and interfere. He finds me very embarrassing. In his world people live as though they were about to be photographed for Ideal Home Magazine. Peter wrote that I should consider how my life-style would shame them if their friends knew about me. No doubt they’d stick social workers onto me, if there were any here. What nobody seems to understand is that I like living like this. I won’t say that I actually relish being knocked about, no doubt you have noticed the bruises, but I like having a young man to keep me company and I like living as I choose.”
“Frank’s your lodger, is he?”
“You could call him that.” The expression of a much younger, sexually successful woman surfaced and sank among the wrinkles, and Tamara understood what made Nonie Anholt accept the battering. Perhaps it even turned her on; Rory had got his kicks from administering blows, and on the only occasion he tried it on Tamara, she had realized that there were women who would have revelled in it. “Anyway,” Mrs. Anholt added, “I like to hear the brogue around this house again.”
“Again?”
“My first fiancé was an Irishman. Look.” She blew the dust off a framed photograph. It showed a blank-faced young man in striped tie and a boating jacket, with a straw hat on the back of his head.
“Was he killed in the war?”
“You could call it that.
Killed is just what he was. But I’ll pay them out …”
“Did he live here too then?”
“He was my cousin. When he left it was like a light being turned out. I left too, of course. I joined up, and then I wasn’t back here for years, I didn’t come until my grandfather’s funeral, and by then my mother and father and brother were all dead too, and I’d been engaged more times than I can remember, and married twice. But it stays with you, you’ll find that out. Nothing is ever so real again as your first love affair.”
Tamara made a grim, silent promise to Ian’s ghost: I shan’t end like this. Aloud she said, “What happened on Forway during the war? Did the Germans attack it?”
“No. I don’t think anyone took much notice here. After all, they were neutral in the Republic, weren’t they?”
“You don’t think there’s too much patriotism in Forway then?”
“Patriotism? For which country? We’re no more British than we’re Irish. All my mother’s family came from Donegal, anyway. Do you want to look around this pile? My grandfather was one of the few Forway men who left to make a fortune and came back to spend it here. This is his visible expression of success.”
And so it might have been, once; everything was too derelict now to seem like anything except failure. Collapse and squalor lay all around, but Nonie Anholt glanced about her complacently and said, “Isn’t everything messy? My mamma would have had a fit. I dare say I would have once upon a time. I tell you what I’ve done, Tamara Hoyland. I’ve come out of my cupboard, isn’t that the fashionable phrase? I live how I choose, and nobody can stop me, and I don’t care what anyone thinks any more. If that isn’t independence, tell me what is.”
Chapter 7
On the day Tamara went to Forway, I too was on my way there. I was on a boat called the Eurydice, circumnavigating the British Isles. My role was to lecture to the paying passengers about the literary associations of our various landfalls. I had used the preparing of my three lectures as an excuse for not writing the book I was under contract to produce; I had spent far too long doing research, like an undergraduate with an overdue essay, so that a pile of neat notes would make me think the day well spent. But all the time I knew that I should be doing other work. I left my desk ready for a new start, a fresh ream of paper, a new ribbon in the typewriter, and a new file waiting for the completed pages, and as I shut my front door I told myself that I would return invigorated after two weeks at sea and a week on Forway.
I felt the relief of a released prisoner when I left the flat in which my previous months had been so unproductive. Guilt is the natural condition of the free-lance writer, as the headmaster warned me when I left a secure teaching post to become one, but it was not always as justified as mine that day. Guilt and dread; for the prospect of two weeks enclosed in a ship with two hundred strangers was daunting too.
The other passengers looked unpromising at first sight, nearly all elderly and mostly American. The other lecturers were a landscape gardener, a clergyman, and the archaeologist Thea Crawford. On embarkation at Southampton we eyed each other with the hostility of the British forced to be matey with strangers, and the mateyness of strangers forced into intimacy by their work. By York we were on first-name terms; by Edinburgh we had become well enough acquainted to go off together for the day while everyone else went to buy their quota of tartan.
I wanted to see Orkney and Shetland, though; I had originally accepted the invitation because ordinary life would not take me there. Thea Crawford and I were in the front of the queue for the launches that were to ferry us across to Dingwall. We had reached the stage of giggling together—lecturers allied against the rest—and Thea whispered scurrilous suggestions about the private lives of inoffensive lawyers from America’s eastern seaboard.
“And there’s one I swear I have never seen before,” she said.
“You’ll still be saying that when we disembark at Southampton,” one of the cruise organizers told her.
“Do you mean one never learns to tell the difference between them?” I asked, running my eye over the rows of identical burberries. I had already noticed that there were several apparently indistinguishable pairs of men and women on board, for I had sat next to two of them on successive evenings, and the second conversation, not surprisingly, had led to some embarrassment. But that was not what the girl meant.
“There are always pairs like twins, every trip. But you do get to recognize people you have had a bit of a chat with. But there are some people who don’t turn up for the bus tours or meals or the lectures—”
“And half those who do sleep through them,” I said.
“If they don’t come and change their currency, or ask for the doctor, or anything like that—well, there are some we just never see.”
There were not many faces in the crowd that I could recognize, but I had been lying a little low myself, not feeling exactly sick but rather as though I were about to feel sick any minute. The collected passengers gave a disconcertingly homogeneous impression. I reminded myself severely that each was an individual with a unique life history and personality. The cruise organizers referred to passengers in bulk as “pax.” I warned myself against herding them into a collective noun in my own mind.
That one, for instance: an elderly woman with a younger companion. Perhaps the girl would be good value, if one had a chance to talk to her; short nails, neatly kept—a musician, perhaps, or a surgeon? But I knew that she was more likely a typist or computer operator. She wore a bulky sweater anorak, dark glasses, woolly hat, effectively hiding her figure and face. There was more personality apparent in the older woman, who was not dressed in the uniform of the matrons on board, who queued to have their hair set every day by a sad-looking hairdresser, and who wore toning tweeds and knits, bangles, and tactfully knotted scarves. This woman wore a long woven skirt, tennis shoes, and a fisherman’s jersey and looked sensible but eccentric. I decided to aim for this pair’s table at lunch or dinner; but the cruise organizer was right, for I did not see them again that day, or the next, on Shetland, or the one after that, in the outer Hebrides.
By then one was resigned to life on board, to the international food, the sultry, sweaty heat of the airless cabins, the gloom of the Greek crew as their ship sailed farther on into inhospitable northern waters. The lump of passengers began to break down into individuals; I met a retired explorer from Nova Scotia, a retired nurse from the Australian outback, and a shy pseudonymous writer of considerably more fame than myself. I was polite about where I got my ideas from at the lunch table and about whether I type or handwrite at dinner. I spoke to somnolent audiences about Boswell and Johnson, and Somerville and Ross. I listened to Professor Thea Crawford lecturing about Scottish prehistory, to the young woman from Kew Gardens about the gardens at Inverewe and Garnish, to the chaplain about the gathering of the clans and Irish nationalism. By the time we docked at Galway I watched the passengers stream down the gangplank to the waiting coaches with some relief that I was to have a day in my own company. Being whizzed round Connemara by a driver who would be unlikely to glance at the road more than once a minute was not my idea of fun. I planned to spend a happy day in the rabbit warren of Kenny’s antiquarian bookshop.
The intellectual-looking old woman, on whom I had not set eyes since the Orkneys, had evidently also decided to skip the scenic tour. Clutching the arm of her companion she edged down the gangway to the quay. The younger woman was swaddled like an Eskimo again. I noticed her glance at the granite wall of the warehouse nearby, which had an enormous message sprayed onto it in red paint: “Brits out.” But a poster nearby read, “Ireland of the Welcomes.” Beside that was a row of identical small posters, showing one of those unrecognizable police photographs of wanted criminals: a female escaped prisoner, on the “most wanted” list.
The wind had been strong all down the west of Ireland—a good many of the tourists were greenly wan that morning at breakfast—and a sudden gust blew off the younger woman’s hat. Sh
e jumped for it, her black hair blowing out behind her, and for a moment her prominent black eyes met mine. I watched the two women walk off into the town.
I was back on the deck by the end of the day to watch all the passengers return. Thea Crawford had brought a friend and his family on board for a drink, an archaeologist from Galway, whose children rampaged happily about the usually sedate decks. Thea told him about her family: a son, with the appalling name of Clovis, who was on an expedition studying endemic diseases in South America, and her husband, the journalist Sylvester Crawford, who was writing a book about prison conditions in the Third World. Not long before, he had been in a Turkish gaol, wrongly suspected of drug smuggling, and naturally had chosen that subject for his next crusade. I had known that this elegant academic woman was married to a famous reforming journalist, but she was deeply ignorant of current affairs herself, and it did seem a strange match.
After the busses had unloaded their weary passengers, a few stragglers returned to the ship late. We watched the keen photographer from Utah, who had spent the day adding to her collection of twelve thousand slides; my fellow writer, whom I had seen earlier in the day in Kenny’s, almost delirious, and who now returned to the ship in a taxi and needed help to carry the three cratesful of books he had bought; the two women I had seen that morning. They came in a battered car and scuttled up the gangway just in time, for the customs officer and the archaeologist had left, and we sailed immediately.
I delivered my own final lecture that evening and then stayed on in the lounge to listen to the chaplain talking about Forway. Of course I already knew most of what he said, but I had to admire the way he made dry detail interesting to uninformed holiday-makers.
Forway, he explained, was neither autonomous as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands were, with independent legislature and governor, nor was it properly a part of the United Kingdom like the Isles of Scilly and the Hebrides.