by Jessica Mann
“How right you are. That’s what I was trying to get Freya and my father to understand. Old, deluded, arteriosclerotic …”
“Is your father a native of Forway?”
I started the engine, and we bumped off over the hillside. “No, it was my mother who came from here. They met during the war when he was stationed in the garrison, and afterwards he took her away to govern the empire.”
“So you must be related to all those Aragons and Yetts and Windows—”
“And Foggos and Lisles,” I finished the litany for her. “Actually, no. My grandfather was a Dutchman who settled here hoping to make a fortune out of herrings. He didn’t, of course. I really don’t know why my father came back here when he retired. My mother died when I was small. Not that he has roots anywhere else; his own people were Indian Civil Service.”
“Do you not think of Forway as home, then?”
I did not. To me, I said, Forway was no more than a pleasant place to come for the holidays. That was not entirely true, but I did not yet know that Tamara was a person with whom I should be truthful. I knew that she must have preconceptions about me. I had known Ian Barnes intimately, though for most of our lives more as a close enemy than a close friend. We were thrown together in the summers, in this small place. I despised Ian for not being at Eton, and he despised me for being there. But we played competitively together, and later we exchanged lies about our sexual experiences. He was always better than me at everything that needs skills and energy, but I’ve never needed to feel inferior about my love life.
My father always managed to take his leave in August. We would meet at Paddington and dine together at Simpsons’, the constraints of a year apart thawing over the roast beef. Such as our intimacy ever was, we recovered it in the sleeping compartment, packing away our suits and ties and emerging onto the morning platform in clothes still stained with the previous year’s sea. We always stayed in the Peter Aragons’ farm, where the Gersons live now, and when my father came to the island for good, he bought the Aragons’ own cottage, which was a two-roomed bothy then, built out of massive boulders, with stone weights holding down the turf roof. John Wesley slept in it on his only visit to Forway, when he found the natives unredeemed and unseemly. But by the time my father had begun on that conversion, I was seldom there. I sought quite different pleasures once I was an undergraduate, and even now, at the age when some men return to the pleasures of nature and silence, I felt more resigned to the island than devoted to it. I doubted whether I would return when my father was not there.
Parts of The Road on Forway are tarmacadamed, but it consists mostly of stone and shale. It winds along a little above the level of the cliff top, separated from a fearsome drop by an edging of rough ground. Occasionally it bends behind a small hill, but for most of its four miles there is a view of the endless sea, until it drops precipitously down into The Town. I drove cautiously. There are very few motor vehicles on Forway, but each is driven as though there were no others.
“So you don’t think that U.D.I. will work,” Tamara said.
“Of course it won’t work. The whole idea is daft.”
She seemed almost disappointed, and I went on, “How could it be on? I mean, even if the government left them to stew in their own juice, it’s just impossible.”
“Of course, nobody outside Forway knows about this yet,” Tamara said.
“If they do, they will take it no more seriously than movements for Welsh or Cornish independence. Jokes one and all. But even if it came off, human nature would prevent it lasting.” I felt, then, worldly, world-weary, infinitely more sophisticated than my elders.
“How do you see the scenario?” Tamara asked, as though she valued my opinion.
I took my fingers from the wheel to enumerate possibilities. “Most likely the government sends the troops in. That’s what they would do in Shetland, say, or the Isle of Wight.”
“They are more valuable than Forway.”
“I know. This is a useless lump of rock without a deep-water harbour. All the same, they won’t allow rebellion. Or another Power might decide not to wait for the judgement at The Hague and grab.”
“And if they all wait and see?”
“I can tell you one thing that won’t happen,” I said with certainty. “This won’t be an innocent island paradise uncorrupted by the twentieth century. That’s pie in the sky. The first time there’s trouble, an oil-slick, say, or a hurricane, or an epidemic, they will all run back to the nannystate so fast, you won’t see them move. That’s the older generation. And the kids won’t stand it for long. Not with all the airwaves bleeping out consumerism on every channel. You don’t think the next generation will choose the simple life, do you? Not with all Pedro Barnes’s money waiting to be spent out there in the big wide world.”
“Will they get the money?” Tamara said.
“You heard Freya. She’s handing the lot over to the islanders. Otherwise I suppose it would go to her own family. Pedro made a massive fortune, you know that, Tamara. There are plenty of people on this island who have had a lifetime of simplicity and would choose Marbella or San Francisco any day. They know what they have been missing. I hear that Peter Aragon and his family are living in bliss near Torremolinos. And compared with the way they used to live, the Gersons’ simple-lifery is just a sham. The people like Thetis Lisle or my father are a minority, doing their stints in the outside world and then coming here as fast as the ferry will bring them.”
On The Road on Forway you can sometimes see no farther than the sea at your side and the bend a few feet ahead; and then, at other moments you can see its other end, three miles away across the hill. So I knew that some way ahead was Rik Gerson’s old post-office van. It is the sort of road you have to attend to, but while we chatted I had registered that Tamara was something really special. Three hours since I first saw her, it had taken me to recognize the obvious. I admired her small, haughty nose. Her skin was in clear, almost primary colours, dead-white on her forehead and at the side where hair had kept the sun from tanning it, and strawberry-red on her cheeks. If she was wearing lipstick, it was skilfully disguised. The translucence of her mouth looked natural. And her eyes: poets have stolen all the analogies. I toyed with words, as I absent-mindedly turned the steering-wheel and changed the gears up and down. Sapphires? Aquamarines. Lapis lazuli? Hyacinths? No, they were a sharper, brighter colour than any of those. More like delphiniums at midsummer, or laundry-blue, a clear colour with no mauve in it, and, on the left iris, a fleck of yellow close to the pupil. She noticed me looking at her and said sharply, “Look out!”
I had not been concentrating on driving. I admit that. But I could have wrenched the wheel round, I could have braked to avoid the on-coming yellow van, if there had not been a sudden snap of something under the bonnet of Freya’s van, and though my foot was off the accelerator pedal, the accelerator remained engaged. The throttle spring had broken. The brake did not seem to be working. It is strange how quickly the human mind works. In what felt like a split second I diagnosed the failure, I moved the gear lever to neutral, I pumped my left foot up and down on the unresponsive brake, I tried to hook my shoe under the accelerator to force it up—and the car skidded off The Road and down across the humpy, bumpy terrain towards the two-hundred-foot drop.
You will have read numerous descriptions, usually by definition invented, of cars and their passengers falling to their ends over a cliff. You will have seen even more mock-ups of the same event on the screen, stunt men leaping, dinky cars rolling, explosions of flame, gusts of black smoke. To a television generation it is almost boringly familiar. I prefer to leave the dramatic adjectives to your imagination.
I have to admit that I was not cool in the face of danger. I was in a useless panic and aware of impending death. Tamara Hoyland is made of better stuff. She dragged the sliding door on her side of the car back, looked out, quite cool, to see the ground outside. She said to me in a clear, commanding voice, “Magnus: open your
door and jump.”
I did. She did. I did not see her land, though it was later clear from her lack of injuries that she had done so like a gymnast. I fell awkwardly onto my shoulder. I heard the car scrape, fall, and splash into the sea. But the next thing I was conscious of was being in a strange bed.
Chapter 11
Undamaged and undeterred, the redoubtable Tamara clambered down the cliffs with John Yetts and two boys who were camping out on The Hill in order to gain points for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Freya’s van was beyond redemption and must be left to pollute the sea. Even if there were lifting gear on the island, it could never be driven again. But John Yetts felt personally responsible, he said, since if Freya had been driving, she would not have been agile enough to jump out. From the cliff top they could see the wreck, still recognizably a Bedford van, lying on its side like a discarded toy. The deep water of high tide had softened its fall, and it had neither burst into flames nor fragments.
“Only in my place yesterday,” John Yetts said more than once. “And there was me showing it to Rik Gerson and telling him it would be better than his banger.”
The climb down had to be made at low tide, several hundred yards along the cliff from the actual place where the van had fallen. Not even gulls-nesters or samphire-gatherers, legendary practitioners of now-obsolete trades, had ever managed to descend there. John Yetts watched approvingly as Tamara climbed down like a professional, leaving the boys gawping. Then they all made their way along the slippery shingle to the wreck.
It was the throttle spring that had broken.
“There you are,” John Yetts said. “Snapped right off. Could happen anywhere.” He unscrewed wheel nuts busily, determined to salvage at least the tyres before the tide turned. “Course, if there were a policeman on the island we’d have to get him to it,” he told one of the soldiers and handed him a wheel to carry.
“Isn’t there usually a policeman?” Tamara asked.
“Sergeant Hicks. He went sick, ten days back. Some sort of stomach trouble. Don’t know when they’ll get round to replacing him. Not much crime here after all.”
Tamara put the coiled metal in her pocket and bent to give a hand with the dismantling. “Does anyone else ever drive this van? Except Mrs. Barnes, I mean?”
“Not that I know of. I know Sir Selwyn doesn’t. He says there’s no need to, place this size. But I’ve heard it’s because his sight’s bad.” Tamara nosed inquisitively about the machine; her secret education had included some motor engineering. The brake pipes to two wheels were pinched together like hairpins. If they had been like that before the van fell, no fluid could have flowed through. “Better hurry, hadn’t we?” one of the boys said nervously. The water was almost lapping round the van, and they would have to wade back to the cliff path. John Yetts filled his knapsack with anything he could salvage. “Worries you, does it, lad?” he said. “Don’t suppose you’re used to sea and cliffs where you come from.”
“I come from Reading. And I don’t care how soon I get back there. I feel like a prisoner here.” Half-way up the cliff he dropped the wheel he was carrying, but John Yetts did not complain.
Chapter 12
I was the one who complained, having been healthy all my life and consequently never before understood how unpleasant illness is. I only had a couple of bruised ribs and a minor concussion and was revoltingly sorry for myself. Dr. Thetis Lisle said I should stay on her ward overnight—no more than two rooms attached to the Lisles’ house. At the time I was muddle-headed enough not to compare my own weakness with Tamara Hoyland’s strength. In fact the contrast did not occur to me until the next morning when my father appeared and bawled me out in his best “accustomed to command” manner for showing myself up as a weak and feeble man, while Tamara had the heart and stomach of a king. He, like Godfrey Lisle, as I soon found, had been thumbing through the quotation dictionary for stirring words. Those were from Elizabeth I. When he turned up I was reading through the island Log; Godfrey Lisle had rushed in to press it upon me—he was always about twenty minutes late for everything—and rushed out again, telling me that he had always meant somebody to write a book about the island, and it was more my line than his.
My speciality, in fact, was writing racy but scholarly accounts of the adventures of famous explorers, the kind of book they might have written themselves if they were not too modest or too busy and could view their exploits with posterity’s eye. My greatest success had been with Frobisher; at present I was overdue with Younghusband in Tibet. I would not presume to say I had a writer’s block, but was beginning to believe that I just wasn’t up to Younghusband, not clever enough, not sufficiently imaginative. I knew there was no future in self-castigation; the only way to get a book written is to apply arse to chair and write. But Godfrey Lisle’s document was a welcome distraction from that thought.
It was a massive leather volume, bound with tarnished brass, began by Godfrey Lisle’s grandfather, that Glaswegian with a mission who had settled in Forway. He wrote the regular, copperplate script of the conforming Victorian and interspersed his words with prayers to and explanations of the Almighty. He clearly thought of Forway as his sacred charge, an attitude still apparent in his grandson, but his original motives in settling in Forway in 1887 were perfectly worldly; he liked to be monarch of all he surveyed. He was not welcomed then by the islanders, who at first thought him an interfering busybody. The habit of taking his advice and his gifts grew, however, and within not many years had become the habit of jumping when he said jump. By the time he was old he was round the bend, as far as I could tell from his journal entries. He would have had to be, to have perpetrated Trinder’s Castle. I could well understand why Godfrey’s father had been glad to hand the place over to his cousin by marriage, Nonie Anholt’s father.
Godfrey’s own father was much more down to earth. He evidently accepted his duty to Forway, partly, it seemed, in pious memory of his mother, whose motives for leading the uncomfortable life of a reformer were much more altruistic than the old man’s had been. But this second Lisle regarded the place more as a job than a vocation. He only wrote in the journal when something memorable happened, and he left out the prayers. There were not very many entries. Once starvation was banished, the population had risen dramatically, but its rise levelled out and then lessened; Godfrey’s own entry for the current year showed that there were only twenty-nine children on the school roll.
Deaths, births, drought, and drowning; that was what the record consisted of, and only a sociologist would have wanted to make a book about it. Nothing in those pages explained to an outsider why those who passed their uneventful years on Forway should feel so passionately about preserving its life-style. Their only argument was that they were an endangered species. But I doubted whether conservationists would be able to drum up sympathy for such species as the natterjack toad if they had voices to speak for themselves.
In purely legal, unemotional terms, there were several items interleaved in the journal that might make useful evidence: rejections by Whitehall of appeals for money or practical help; refusals to maintain the ferry service; denials of any obligation to ensure means of communication; a letter of the most perfunctory regret when the helicopter service, being proved uneconomic, was withdrawn. Another sheet of paper showed that the government in Dublin had subsidized the ferry from Cork for years, and though that was probably through absent-mindedness, it still existed. Here were some expressions of fraternal interest from town mayors in Brittany, and here one from the Falkland Islands. In an envelope I found the case papers of a treason trial part-heard in camera in 1944. It referred to a man who seemed to have been an obscure version of Lord Haw Haw, employed by the Germans to preach surrender throughout camps in Italy to their prisoners of war. This man had been born on Forway, educated in Ireland, and had lived with his relations at Trinder’s Castle from the age of eighteen until war broke out when he was twenty. He left for Cork, his ship was torpedoed, and he was rescued a
nd captured by the Germans, for whom, after a while, he worked. His defence was to be that he was not a British subject, but the case never reached the stage of judgement, for while the trial was going on he was shot dead, while allegedly trying to escape. The man must have been a cousin of Nonie Anholt. I had never heard of him before, but the story left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Godfrey Lisle had taken over as captain of Forway on his father’s death in 1950. He gave himself away in every word of his terse entries—a well-meaning, hard-working, slightly ineffectual man who did his best with responsibilities he did not question. I had just reached the great gale of 1975 when I heard my father’s voice trumpeting along the passage and into the room.
“There’s that girl, bright as a button, not a scratch on her, and here you are lying around like a wet rag … I don’t know why you …”
My father had been disgusted with me for much of my life, as I went through a school career of muffing catches, missing kicks, and even fainting on parade at a corps display. He thought it was the last straw when I became a schoolmaster—until I turned into something even more reprehensible, a writer.
Luckily for me, Thetis Lisle came in before he could get very far with the catalogue of my inadequacies. I heard her outside the room, telling him about clinical shock; and I heard him grumping about weakness. Eventually Thetis sent him off and came back into the room. She was still wearing the apron in which she must have cooked her family’s dinner and had pastry under her finger-nails. She sat down on the bed, reflectively picking it out.
I liked Thetis. I remembered her as Thetis Foggo, the daughter of The Hotel. She had known her life plan from the cradle: off to London to get qualified as both dentist and doctor, then back to take charge of the island’s health until her own gave out. So far she was thriving on delivering babies and laying out corpses, and there wasn’t an operation in the book that she would not tackle if the weather kept the rescue helicopter at bay.