No Man's Island (Tamara Hoyland Book 2)

by Jessica Mann

  “The trouble is, it has been convenient for governments to forget it,” he said. “A few more niggles from lawyers in the past would have—for once—been no bad thing. Now, take the Scillies: their name is always included in any statute. Not Forway’s though; but it is never formally excluded either. Or what about tax? Well, the Scillonians started to pay income tax in 1953 and road fund licences even later. On Forway, nobody has ever earned enough to pay income tax and there aren’t any roads. The Health Service doesn’t run a hospital there. The ferry to Cork is quicker than the ferry to Penzance, so islanders tend to go to the Republic for treatment. There’s a primary school, and some of the children have gone as boarders for secondary education in Cornwall; but quite a few just didn’t get any other schooling. There’s no public library: they don’t pay rates, just a small sum they call tithes, which supports such services as they do have. Nobody has ever formally said which diocese of the Church it’s in. Sometimes they have a priest from Ireland, sometimes they are sent a curate from Cornwall, sometimes the chaplain of the Isles of Scilly pays a visit. But their marriages are celebrated as though they were on a ship at sea—their boss, their mayor—actually they call him the captain—performs the marriages, and nobody has ever got round to testing their legality. Probably the whole population is illegitimate.

  “As you’ll see when we land there tomorrow, it’s a fearfully desolate spot. Before helicopters were invented, people could be waiting for weeks for the sea to calm enough to land or embark at Forway. Even on what seemed to be a calm day, a sudden storm might push the sea into waves forty feet high, and until a rudimentary jetty was built by the navvies in the first war, landings from the boats had to be made onto slippery rock. It’s a miracle it’s survived as an inhabited island. You’d have thought it would be evacuated, as St. Kilda was in the thirties. But of course, one of St. Kilda’s problems was the decline in population. The poor brutes had been killing their own babies by smearing gunk tainted with tetanus on the cord at birth. Forway was saved from that kind of tragedy by a Scotswoman who moved there in the eighteen eighties. She and her husband reorganized them and ever since then they have managed somehow. It’s a remarkable story, what the Lisles did for Forway.

  “But nobody even knows who the place belongs to. There doesn’t seem to be a landowner, and nobody who owes allegiance to the Crown. The Scillies belong to the Duke of Cornwall, that is, to the Crown. The Hebrides all belong to Scottish landowners, or they did, until bits were sold off to rich Dutchmen and Arabs. But Forway—nobody is sure. Nobody seems to be responsible, and until recently nobody had worried. The idea seems to be that they once belonged to the Dukes of Brittany, then they belonged to an Irish grandee … but after about a.d. 1500, unspecified. Three sovereign states have claimed it, and there’s to be a case heard at the International Court at The Hague, between France, the United Kingdom, and Eire. Perhaps they’ll ask us for our passports tomorrow.”

  I talked to the chaplain afterwards and said, “But of course it is part of the United Kingdom—must be. After all, I was born there and I’ve got a British passport. There’s a police sergeant, and he certainly has a uniform, even if he doesn’t wear it.

  “That’s evidence of custom and practice, of course. But you never know with these supra-national courts—The Hague, Strasbourg, Luxembourg. They sometimes make the most bizarre judgements. You may yet turn out to be an Irishman or a Breton, my dear chap.”

  I got landed with the ship’s bore at dinner and felt very sour afterwards as I watched the Greek chanteuse, who spent her days in some nameless bowels of the ship, singing repetitive songs. I watched dapper old gentlemen steering well-upholstered ladies around the tiny circular floor, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to the sound of bazouki music. I was glad that this was my last evening.

  The sea had calmed a little by daybreak, which was just as well. Like the captain, I knew well the warning to mariners in The British Islands Pilot:

  Before approaching Forway, all vessels should be prepared to batten down, and the hatches of small vessels ought to be secured even in the finest weather, as it is difficult to see what may be going on at a distance, and the transition from smooth water to a broken sea is so sudden that no time is given for making arrangements.

  Then the warning continues:

  Sometimes a sea is raised which cannot be imagined by those who have never experienced it.

  As Charles Darwin had written of Tierra del Fuego, and as I could write of Forway, “The sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.”

  The Eurydice was narrow enough to go through the Corinth Canal, and its draught was shallow enough to approach most of the Aegean Islands, but the approach to Forway, as I have shown, is notorious, and while I stood on the bridge directing the passengers’ attention to details of the view through the loudspeaker, I watched the monoglot captain gesturing his refusal to the pilot’s injunctions to approach the shore more closely. I read aloud to my phlegmatic audience the words of an eighteenth-century seafarer about the stupendous cliff face on the other side of the island. “We should not have been more dismayed by an island of demons, and should have said that naught else could inhabit it but that its reputation had been made known to us before.” When the ship did scrape, hardly perceptibly, against the bottom, the captain’s shriek drowned both my monologue and the pilot’s assurances about the making tide. The pilot was John Windows, and when he moved away to his boat he saw me.

  “They all have to float off here, Magnus, you know that. There’s no other way to reach Forway.”

  As I had been telling my audience, the island was barricaded by sharp submerged rocks. Only one narrow channel allowed ships to approach Harbour Bay, and there the water was dangerously shallow.

  Too few tourists visit Forway for there to be a fleet of launches ready to ferry them off, as there is in Orkney, or Scilly. The Eurydice’s lifeboats were swung down to take everybody on shore. One had to admire the courage of the passengers, old, lame, and faltering but undaunted by ladders and swinging gangplanks. The old woman with her swaddled companion was handed down by some sailors with some difficulty into one of the small orange boats. I thanked whatever providence watched me that there had been no taking to the boats at midnight on this cruise.

  Of course there are not tourist coaches on Forway; the day’s programme was for “free exploration.” I had offered to show Thea Crawford the island. We jumped into the lifeboat, with my luggage, and I caught a glance from the old woman’s companion that disconcerted me mightily, but it was not until I had landed, and given my bags to one of the Yetts boys to trundle up to my father’s house, that I realized why. I had thought that the younger of these two women had dark hair and eyes, but this woman had pale northern eyes with undarkened lashes. I shrugged it off: a different-coloured contact lens, a different woman, it made no difference to me, for I was shot of the Eurydice now and had to get into the right mood for Forway instead.

  Chapter 8

  Professor Crawford said that she had grown out of enjoying cold walks across desolate landscapes looking at evidence of the past. Seeing her narrow shoes and spotless trouser suit, I could believe it. I asked her what she would like to see instead.

  “I don’t know, Magnus. The essence of the place. What picture comes to your mind if you think of Forway?”

  “A smell, more than a picture.”

  She sniffed experimentally. “No good. I’ve got a cold.” We all had colds. I believed that the germs were distributed by the Eurydice’s air-conditioners. So Thea and I went into The Hotel instead. It was a small building made mostly of painted corrugated iron, yellow, with blue window frames and door. The bar was furnished with the type of metal-and-plastic furniture advertised in mail-order catalogues. Few tourists ever stayed on Forway, so that there was no need for folksiness, and though the island had once been “dry,” alcohol was a major import now. Annie Foggo poured us brandy and ginger ale,
although it was only ten o’clock. She said that Sergeant Hicks—not that he ever enforced the licencing laws—was away in England. “In England?” Thea asked.

  “A foreign country,” I said, and Annie Foggo nodded. Then two of Thea’s compatriots came in begging for gin, and it turned out that Thea knew them through her husband, so there was a lot of chatter about the Eurydice, and where Sylvester was now, lucky sod. I had heard of Carl Hawker, naturally, but I did not admire him or his writing, though my judgement was perhaps affected by jealousy of his fame, since he was a year younger than myself. He had ridden to fame by exposing traitors in the Secret Services but somehow managed always to write about world politics and spying as though they were pornographic. I wondered what he was doing on Forway.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” Thea said. “Holiday?”

  “Hardly. No, there was supposed to be a story, but I haven’t found it.”

  “What was it?” I asked, astonished. The last place on earth, I’d have thought, for a story to interest Carl Hawker.

  “Nothing. There’s some royal visit due, but that’s not my bag at all. Met your father, though. Couldn’t make out what a bloke like him does all day here.”

  Carl Hawker seemed interested in my father’s life-style, and we chatted about that for a while. Then Maggie, the photographer, began to grumble about being marooned on Forway for another three days, and I told her to go and talk nicely to the management of the Eurydice, since my cabin would now be vacant. They left, promising favours to compensate me.

  Thea said, “Sylvester says there is more to Carl Hawker than you think.”

  “More spy rings still unrevealed, you mean?”

  “No, it was something about being given scoops in exchange for services rendered. I can’t remember the details. I can’t say I like him much, but I do quite wonder what he was doing here.”

  We drank some more brandy. At last I felt obliged to say, “Well, Thea, what can I show you on Forway?”

  We looked at one another silently. I did not feel enthusiastic about pottering around the island in the rain. She was equally unenticed. We each knew that the other felt so, and neither of us felt able to say it. She said, “Not archaeology, anyway.”

  “That’s just as well. I know damn all about it, I had a friend here who was keen, but he was killed in a car crash last year and I never listened to him much.”

  “I would quite like to see how people actually live here,” Thea suggested with the air of one dredging up the only bearable possibility from a well of nastiness. “I haven’t ever been anywhere quite so remote. Or should we avoid treating it like a human zoo?”

  “People here used to grow rich on that.” In the earlier part of the century rich yachtsmen used to come ashore at Forway to be photographed beside the huddled bothies; they paid intentionally in money, and unintentionally in infectious germs, for the privilege. Before that, benevolent societies used to be inspired by articles in such journals as the Illustrated London News to send comforts to these Northern Hemisphere savages. “It is less interesting now,” I told Thea. “Forway men live in houses and eat convenience foods. Just like civilized Londoners.”

  But that, in fact, was to deny the truth that life on Forway was different from that elsewhere. The isolation itself was a differentiating factor, and the exposure to elements from which twentieth-century Europeans were protected elsewhere.

  “It isn’t very like the Scillies,” Thea said. “I had expected …”

  “That’s partly for physical reasons. Geological differences, you know. And of course modern sensibilities regard the Scillies as beautiful. They were thought of as savage too, until people began to admire beaches and seascapes. The only holiday attraction of Forway is the ‘getting away from it all’ feeling. And the natives feel the opposite. If you live here you feel you can’t get away, it’s a very small, enclosed, inward-looking community. We all know each other’s business.”

  “And you all know each other.” All the islanders we had seen had greeted me by name and looked inquisitively at Thea. The Eurydice’s passengers were wandering disconsolately around the damp Town. Their scope was limited. Forway has one cluster of houses, called The Town, one road, called The Road, and one hotel, called The Hotel. The Town consists of an irregular open space, called The Square, around which stand the doctor’s house, The Church, the three shops, and a scatter of cottages. Other houses are reached by footpaths that trail out into fields and hillside.

  “And the Scillies are very spick and span,” Thea said, kicking some litter to one side with her fastidious foot.

  “The Hebrides would be a better comparison. Nobody is tidy there.” Perhaps because there have been so few prosperous settlers on Forway, it has never displayed any of England’s puritan cleanliness; and of course the circumstances are not favourable to gardening, so the gaunt landscape has not been disguised by burgeoning subtropical plants. The main reason, though, as in the outer Hebrides, is that Forway men are just not interested; they are deaf to the scandalized comments about mess that outsiders tend to make. The native eye is quite indifferent to the sight of empty detergent bottles, or rusty heaps of metal, or any junk abandoned where it fell.

  “I usually prefer a landscape that shows the hand of man,” Thea said thoughtfully. “But man’s hand has hardly embellished Forway.”

  “It’s all in the eye of the beholder,” The sour, peaty landscapes of Forway were not my idea of beauty either.

  How can it be that the barren hillside was not transformed when I saw Tamara Hoyland on it? She came towards us along the track where Thea and I had paused. She was slung about with canvas bags and cameras. She recognized Thea and waved to her, and they met with loud expressions of surprise and pleasure. Thea said, “Magnus, this is Tamara Hoyland. She’s an archaeologist too.”

  “I was one of Thea’s pupils; I’m doing a field survey on Forway.”

  I looked at her. She looked at me. And for a little while she was no more than a pretty girl, not less interesting than pretty girls always are, but not more. Was I interesting to her? I think not—not, at least, in the sense I should have liked. Her thoughts were masked by her seemingly lucid face.

  “I have heard of you,” I said crassly. “From Ian Barnes.”

  She was not offended. “I have heard of you from Ian too.”

  We shook hands. What did she see? A shaggy man with spirals of hair jutting from a narrow head, with a face neither bearded nor clean-shaven, with dirty finger-nails.

  My own vision was blinkered. How was it possible for me to set eyes on Tamara Hoyland without realizing that my world was changed? I even felt, God help me, irritable, almost aggressive. The ground still seemed to sway under my feet, as it did on the Eurydice.

  “Of course, I’d forgotten,” Thea Crawford said. “Your boy-friend comes from Forway, doesn’t he?” I tried to nudge her, or tread on her toes, but I saw Tamara Hoyland’s eye on my clumsy movements, and she said quite calmly, “He did, Thea, but he’s dead. Nearly a year ago now.”

  “My dear—I had no idea—what happened?”

  “It was a motor accident. Not his fault. He was killed at once, they say.”

  We walked on in silence for a while, but I knew Thea Crawford well enough by now to realize that naked emotion would embarrass her, and soon she said, “Look, the boats are taking people back to the Eurydice. I shall leave you two to your island life.” Tamara and I waited on the quay with Thea until there was room for her in a boat. We spoke of the cruise and the lectures we had given. Thea said she was glad to have circumnavigated the British Isles, once. We spoke of meeting again later in the summer, in civilization. Thea Crawford kissed Tamara goodbye and then brushed her cheek politely against my stubble. “Have fun, children,” she said. We watched the boat buck across the sea to the Eurydice. I momentarily wished myself back in its imprisoning comfort.

  “Are you going to your father’s place?” Tamara said. “I’ll walk with you. I am staying with Ian�
�s mother.”

  I took some of her equipment from her. She walked lightly, springily, her legs moving from her hips without her bottom wiggling. She was half a head shorter than myself, and when she looked at me, her eyes met mine without messages.

  I naturally invited her in for a drink when we reached my father’s place. I did not like what he had done to the bothy. When he bought it from the Aragons, it had been little more than a heap of stones and mud. He had imported plasterers and paper-hangers and crates of elegant furniture. With the curtains drawn you would have thought you were in a suburb of London, except for the ineradicable smell of Forway, presumably compounded of salt and seaweed, guano, and burning, oil-spoilt driftwood.

  “I’ll fetch some ice,” I said. Tamara followed me into the kitchen, which was equally magnificently equipped, with American equipment humming around the walls (except when it was silenced by a generator failure) and with cantilevered glass-doored cupboards full of gleaming crocks.

  “Golly,” Tamara said.

  “Do you like it?” I said, probably scornfully. She stood close to me, and I touched her cheek and hair with my finger. I would have done the same with any passable girl. She did not flinch and one day I would learn that she was ready to use her body as a part of her armoury. She was determined that she would kiss and I would tell, yet I felt within myself, not in her, an unusual reserve, a shyness I had not known for ten years. We were still standing there when I heard my father come into the living-room next door, and before I could go and greet him the telephone bell rang and he had lifted the receiver.

  “Selwyn Paull,” he barked. “Oh it’s you. Yes. All according to plan. No … yes … it will obviously take a while to get under way. One of the stumbling-blocks—excuse me, I think there is someone in the house. I’ll call you later. Magnus, is that you?”

  “Me and Tamara Hoyland, Father.”

  My father came through to the kitchen. He glanced swiftly up and down Tamara’s clothes, and mine, and must, I think, have assumed that we had come in from the bedrooms on the other side of the kitchen. He greeted Tamara warmly.