by Jessica Mann
“Sight for sore eyes, eh Magnus? Hope I didn’t disturb you.”
I never knew how to answer him. All my life I had been guilty of not living up to his expectations and angry that his expectations were so different from mine. His apparent assumption that I had been making love to Tamara was the more annoying because it was so nearly true.
Chapter 9
Field-working; field-walking: the laborious inspection by all means, in all ways, of an area of ground. The landscape is a palimpsest on which all man’s activities have left some trace. Here a sheep-pen, there the stub of the lighthouse, erected but not maintained, replaced later on by an unmanned lightship outside Forway’s rocky teeth. The materials that had built the lighthouse, like those that had formed a fish-packing station in the days when commercial success for Forway seemed possible, could now be traced to their present positions in the walls of other structures. It was a prudent recycling of materials.
Forway, Tamara thought, would amply repay an elaborate programme of field-work. Meaningful sequences of activity could be recognized among the patterns on the ground. She wished she could concentrate on archaeology now, ignoring the perverse machinations of contemporary man.
Tamara was pacing the slight undulations of a barely perceptible earthwork on Trinder’s Island and hoped that another day, in evening sunlight, it might be possible to plan the oblong shadow of some now-vanished structure. Her concentration was interrupted by the pinging sounds of an electronic instrument, and she looked up to see a girl with a metal detector in her hands. Before Tamara could launch into the professional archaeologist’s denunciation of that hated object, the girl flicked the switch off and called out, “Don’t worry. This is just for fun, just to see whether it responds. I wouldn’t dream of fossicking.” A southern English voice, pleasantly cadenced. She came and squatted beside Tamara. “Some rectangular building, do you think?”
“Are you an archaeologist? Not many people would see that.”
“Alas, I’m not. But I studied it once. Archaeology with history, combined honours. Our prof was very hot on field-work.”
The girl’s natural colouring was pale, and her skin looked dingy, as though it were a long time since she had been out of doors. Perhaps she had been ill.
“Do you live here?” Tamara asked.
“I’m just passing through. Isn’t it heaven?” She lay down on the squidgy ground on her stomach and stared out towards the hazy sea. The wind ruffled her hair and clothes and she drew in deep breaths. “It’s my idea of paradise.”
“Not mine,” Tamara said. “I like to see the sun.”
“I don’t care about that. It’s the freedom, the loneliness … it’s a precious place.”
She could not be as young as she had seemed at first sight. There were faint lines on her forehead, and deeper grooves running downward from her nostrils showed traces of strain. “I should like to preserve it for ever.” She put her face down on her folded arms and spoke with her voice muffled. “Put a glass dome over the top so that nothing ever changed. Not a blade of grass.”
“So what do you think about the idea of independence?” Tamara asked, wondering whether the girl had heard of it here.
She replied, “Ach, haven’t we had enough of that sort of talk in other places? I’m tired to death of it.” Her face did look as though she were tired to death, though not perhaps by that. “Let there be just one place on the globe that we keep our murderous hands off.”
Tamara went on with her work, pacing, measuring, looking, touching. It would be worthwhile to cut a trench across a section here. She had not had time before leaving London to examine the aerial photographs but was sure that they would reveal something interesting here.
The girl woke up when the rain had penetrated through her cream-coloured Arran sweater. Tamara said, “I’m going back.” The tone of her voice implied an invitation to keep her company, but the girl said, “I think I’ll stay here a bit longer. I like to feel the rain.”
“The tide’s coming in. Don’t forget the causeway.”
“I won’t.” She had a sweet smile. Tamara suddenly felt desperately lonely, remembering how she had come here before with Ian Barnes and how they had run across the causeway, chased by the tide, and how they had lain together on the other side, panting and embracing.
It was a relief to be distracted from these memories by Lena Gerson’s voice. She saw Tamara walking past from her doorway and invited, almost begged, her to come in for a cup of tea.
The Peter Aragons’ farmhouse had originally been not much more than a one-roomed shelter made of stone and turf, with a lean-to shed for cattle at one end. The lean-to had been converted into a kitchen and bathroom of a kind, and the other room was both bedroom and living-room. Like Lena Gerson’s own appearance, the interior decoration was surprising. There were few signs of self-sufficiency, no patchwork or crochet, but furniture suitable for a young executive in the suburbs. Forway’s damp air had not treated those brave banners of egalitarianism kindly. Veneers were peeling off the furniture, and the shine had left the enamelled “cookware.” An Indian dhurra was on the hearth, where someone had pleated white paper into a fan to hide the ashes.
Lena Gerson made tea on her bottled-gas double burner and arranged cups and saucers on a glass-and-metal trolley, which she had to lift instead of wheeling across the uneven flagged floor.
“Milk and sugar? I’m afraid we can’t get lemons very often here. Tell me, whereabouts in London do you work?”
“Near Piccadilly.”
“Oh, do you? That’s where I was. Isn’t it lovely? You are lucky. I worked in a travel agency. I did so love secretarial work.”
“I wonder why I never met you with Ian.”
“We hardly ever saw each other, I’m afraid. I am only a second cousin once removed. Freya’s great-aunt was my great-grandmother. I just saw Ian once or twice when I first came to London, that was all.”
“Where is your own home?”
“I still think of London as home, but I grew up in Sheffield.”
“It must seem strange living here, after those big cities.”
“Yes, it does—well, what I mean is, it’s lovely, so peaceful and away from it all. A real change from the hustle and bustle. No pollution. Clean air. Food we have grown ourselves. No clock watching.”
Tamara had often heard the litany of arguments against evil town life, and she noticed that Lena trotted out every one as though she had once learned them off by heart.
Lena brushed some dirt off her dark blue skirt. When she moved her leg, a small hole in her nylon tights ran into a ladder. “I am always snagging my tights on things,” she complained. “It is so difficult to keep your things nice here.”
“Yes, it must be,” Tamara said. She had not brought a skirt or tights with her to Forway.
“I got this skirt at Fortnum and Mason, in a sale,” Lena said. “Christmas before last. I bet there’s lovely things in there now. I used to go and look in my lunch-hour.”
“Freya told me you make things from your own spinning and so on,” Tamara said. “I should love to see.”
“Come and look. I’ll show you.” Lena opened the door and jumped back with a gasp. A dead shrew had been deposited on the step. “That cat! Rik’s not here. He’s gone to collect driftwood for the fire.” She looked about her helplessly.
“Shall I deal with it?”
“Oh, I couldn’t expect you … somehow I can’t bring myself to touch them. It’s always happening. If Rik’s here—”
Tamara picked up the shrew and threw it into a mess of brambles at the edge of the yard.
“I know it’s ever so silly of me. You are brave. I can’t seem to get over feeling …” Lena’s voice trailed away.
“It must be rather inconvenient living here, if you feel like that.”
“Oh, yes, it is. I’m always nervous when I open doors, what I’ll find on the other side. It’s so stupid. Rik says that any spot of turbulence he can alway
s deal with. Still, if you are here …” She pulled open a battered door into a collapsing shed. Making and mending their property was evidently not one of Rik’s priorities. “There’s the wool for spinning.” A shapeless heap of unspun wool was heaped into a cardboard box, exuding its powerful smell. Some cans of paint stood beside it, with a messy heap of driftwood piled against the wall, and a small hand-operated printing-press on the table. “You don’t get much heat from a fire made with peat, we find,” Lena explained. A confused cackling noise could be heard through the back wall of the shed, mingled with excited barking. “Oh goodness, that’s the geese. Oh dear. I suppose Rik isn’t back yet. I’d better just see …”
Left alone, Tamara had a speedy look in and under things. A brown parcel beside the printing-press contained copies of the notice about Forway’s Declaration of Independence, of which Mr. Black had shown her a copy. Some rolls of plastic insulating foam lay against the wall, and one escaped to lie beside the heap of wool. A variety of carpentry tools, some of them very rusty, were heaped on the table. Under a tattered and grimy manual called How to Succeed at Cultivating Mushrooms was a gold propelling pencil, engraved with the initial B. Ian had possessed a pencil just like that, and Tamara remembered that Lena had been his cousin. It was a desirable little object, with elaborate flowers chased down its shaft, and Tamara weighed its heaviness longingly in her hand. How many times had its twin lain on the dressing-table beside Ian’s wallet, heap of small change, and bunch of keys. If it had not been worth quite a lot of money, she would have put it in her pocket for remembrance. Nothing on or of Ian’s person had survived the explosion in which he died. When Lena came back, Tamara was holding some of the wool, gently tugging and twisting.
“I can’t think how you turn this into knitting wool.”
“It’s a knack.” Lena bent to pick up the roll of foam. “This is for insulation.”
“You have to be careful if you cook on gas, don’t you?”
“Our problem is too much ventilation here, not too little.” Out in the yard, Tamara asked whether the geese were all right. “Yes, thank goodness. I’m terrified of having to deal with them. It was one of the boys from The Town, with his dog, but luckily he called it off.”
“I must go back. Freya will be expecting me. How do you think she is coping?”
“I do what I can,” Lena said.
“It is very good of you.”
“She is a bit vague, though. She loses her way and forgets what she is talking about. Rik says she isn’t all there. He doubts whether she is of sound mind, but I think that’s going a bit far. It can’t help being lonely for the poor old thing. And Ian dying like that must have aged her. It must give her a queer turn every time she sees that man Mrs. Anholt’s got at The Castle.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know. Thinking about those IRA bombers and that.”
“Did Freya tell you about how Ian died?” Tamara asked. Lena looked startled.
She said, “Yes. Yes, of course she did. When we came to live here, Rik and I.”
“I can’t help feeling that it was your husband who chose to move to the country. Was he brought up in a place like this?”
“Not to say quite like this, no. He comes from Lincolnshire.”
“Perhaps his family were self-sufficient, though,” Tamara suggested.
“Oh, no. Rik’s father worked for the post office.”
“So public service ran in the family, then. Wasn’t Rik in the Civil Service?”
“Oh yes, but that was quite different,” Lena said, conscious of her husband’s exalted status. “Rik went to grammar school and university. He was at Leicester, he studied Law. Rik’s very clever, you know.”
“I wonder why he chose to go into the Civil Service.”
“He had thought of being a barrister, actually. But it was ever so difficult to get into chambers. And then some man came to Leicester recruiting for the Civil Service. So he did that instead.”
“Which department was he in?” Tamara asked.
“He moved around a bit. When I met him it was the Department of Health and Social Security. The pay was good, but it meant being away from home every so often. He had to go round looking at hospitals and things.”
“That doesn’t sound a very dangerous trade,” Tamara said. “How did he get injured?”
“It was an accident on a building site. Something fell on his head and he was concussed. There’s nothing to show now, of course, but he couldn’t remember things. You know what I mean, he kept forgetting things, which wasn’t much good in that job. So they invalided him out.”
“But what made you choose to live on Forway? Was it just because of your cousin Freya?”
“Oh no. Nothing like that. That wasn’t anything to do with it. We just wanted to get away from it all. Leave all our cares as far behind us as we could.” Lena’s laugh was silvery and sounded slightly inane. She stood where there should be, and might once have been, a gate, as Tamara went along the path from the Aragons’ old place. When Tamara looked back, Lena was still standing there, but it was only as Tamara turned that the expression on her face changed from anxiety to a brilliant smile, so that the departing guest should retain the image of a woman happy in her work and play, happy, happy, every day.
Chapter 10
“There will be a leader, a visionary and a front man,” Mr. Black had said. “One to think it up, one to work out how to swing it, and a third to take the blame.”
When I turned up on Forway, Tamara Hoyland wondered whether, or where, I fitted into that pattern; she was already sure that my father, Selwyn Paull, was deeply involved, both publicly and in secret.
Tamara was there, in Freya’s house, while old conspirators revealed their deep-laid plans to me, and showed me all their files full of details, and prepared statements, arranged in a walnut bureau—Queen Anne, full of little drawers and cupboards, and badly warped by Forway’s climate. I said, “You are in your dotage, the pair of you. You and my father, Freya. Even if you are an innocent at large, he isn’t. He’s just trying to see if the old hand has lost its cunning. He ought to be certified.”
Freya’s hands did not even pause in their knitting. “Why is that, dear?”
“For God’s sake. We can’t let Forway go. In the world of real politics and real money—”
“We?”
“Britain. The United Kingdom. Damn it, Father—”
“Don’t you feel like a Forway man then?” Freya asked.
“Certainly I do. A Briton from Forway.”
“You would have been a Frenchman from Forway, if a mediaeval Duke of Brittany had not betted too much on a falcon.”
“Or an Irishman from Forway, if old Devalera had read the small print.”
“History, twistery,” I snapped.
“Not a bit of it. You know quite well that both France and Ireland dispute Britain’s title to Forway,” my father said.
“That’s one of the reasons H.M. Government have given for refusing to invest capital here,” Freya said.
“Nobody cares about all that now,” I told them. “Gamble with Forway in the nineteen eighties, and it will be scooped straight into Russia’s lap. You wouldn’t like that.”
“I doubt if that would be allowed,” Freya said, still with that idiotic serenity.
“You mean,” I said through gritted teeth, “that you want to be protected by the Western Alliance without owing it any loyalty.”
“No, we don’t want to be protected or attacked. We just want to be left alone.”
I said, “How can you imagine that a place is not British when there is an English policeman stationed here?”
“Oh dear. Sergeant Hicks,” Freya said. “I feel quite guilty about him. You know he was ill after having a meal with me. Such a nice man too, I really don’t know what I can have done to the food. I know I’m growing very absent-minded.”
“Weren’t you ill too?” I asked.
“Not at all.”<
br />
My father interrupted, still on the former track. “After all, if they send the whole British navy to the South Atlantic to protect the right of a few Falkland Islanders to self-determination, they can hardly send even one ship here to deprive us of ours.”
I watched Freya’s old hands twinkling as she knitted. Forway women had learned to knit from a Shetlander brought there for a winter by Godfrey Lisle’s redoubtable grandmother, and now, like Shetlanders, Forway women knitted almost faster than the eye could follow. Once a film of Shetlanders’ knitting had been laughed off a cinema screen in London because the audience wrongly supposed that it had been speeded up. I groaned and got up to take some whisky. I needed it.
“You are an innocent, Freya. And Father is a fool.”
“Why don’t you leave us to our foolishness, dear boy,” Freya said indulgently. “Take Tamara for a drive in the Frog.”
“I checked the fan belt for you, Freya,” my father told her.
“Oh good. Actually, I had it in at Yetts’s this morning. But that means it’s fine for you to take, children. Off you go.” They were in their dotage, as I had told them. I just hoped they would not be able to make any real mischief, those two old things plotting their schemes together.
“Where shall we go?” I asked Tamara.
“Don’t mind. Wherever you like.”
I sat with my hands on the wheel, thinking about the two people inside the house. “It’s easy enough to see what my father is up to. He’s a retired administrator leaping at the chance to do some admin. again. Everything tidy and neat about him, that’s what he likes. The organization man. I shouldn’t think he gives a damn for their airy fairy aspirations. He just enjoys making sure they do everything properly.”
“You know best,” Tamara said. “But there is quite a lot of scope for making trouble here, I’d have thought. It would be very much in the interest of some foreign powers to get their clutches on Forway, what with the oil and the territorial waters and the shipping lanes.”