by Jessica Mann
“Some of my regulars were ever so disappointed,” Annie Foggo said.
“We were glad of the excuse to put people off,” said Lena Gerson. “Holiday accommodation is far more trouble than I expected.”
“There have been outsiders here, though. What about those two journalists who took my place on the Eurydice?”
“And the party from the Eurydice itself,” Tamara murmured.
“They heard nothing. All that lot was interested in was spending their money. They wanted local crafts.”
“I sold three knitted berets,” Lena Gerson said. My father called everyone’s attention. “That really is not the point,” he said. “What we are assembled to discuss is last night’s outrage. Now, I think I can safely promise that there will be no retribution or recriminations. What’s done is done. But no doubt the perpetrator of the outrage will now realize how wrong he was.”
“Who’s to say he’s here?” called one of the Foggo boys.
“We’re all here.”
“What about that Irishman up at The Castle then? And Mrs. Anholt isn’t here either. She never comes to our meetings.”
A mutter rose in the room. “That’s right. The Irishman. Bombs, explosions. Terrorists.”
“We don’t know anything about him,” Godfrey Lisle shouted above the growing noise. “Just because he’s from Ireland—”
“We don’t deserve independence if we start judging people by their accents,” Thetis Lisle said in her ripe Forway voice. According to dialect specialists, the Forway accent was that of North-West England, fossilized for a century, but nobody knew why.
“Anyway, what possible motive could he have?” Godfrey shouted.
Such meetings always end inconclusively, and I did not think that the experience had been cathartic either. We left dissatisfied, eyeing each other suspiciously.
“And we were so united,” Freya said sadly as she came out leaning on my father’s arm.
“I suppose you expected Utopia,” I said sourly.
“Why not?” she snapped back.
“Utopia has a better climate, for one thing.”
“Other places have climates. We have weather,” my father quoted.
How right he was. On Forway the hourly changes from rain to shine, from calm to gale, from warm to icy, were so much part of life as hardly to attract attention, and the fact that when we gathered in The Church an almost horizontal fine rain had been enshrouding the island, and that now it was brilliantly clear, with not a cloud to be seen, hardly deserved comment.
A helicopter was landing. “That will be the security men,” my father said, and he and Godfrey went off to meet them. I almost stopped him. But then I thought that if the helicopter had brought an advance guard of press bloodhounds, Godfrey, with his massive and manifest simplicity, would be a better protector than myself.
Freya said that she was going to eat something with Annie Foggo at The Hotel and then go out in her boat. I asked Tamara to walk up The Hill with me and was surprised when she agreed. I did not know then that she wanted to pump me for information.
The Cork ferry had called at dawn, so we collected some newspapers and food and walked off together. I could feel indulgent glances following. We were made for each other, I thought they would be saying, a handsome couple, well matched.
Tamara had the knack of making people talk—or, perhaps, of making those who loved her talk. Ian had been massively indiscreet about his work, as I was later to hear. By the time she and I had reached the remains of the lighthouse, Tamara had extracted from me an account of everything I had done, seen, and heard since arriving on Forway. I was putting out my wares to attract her during those days, all those practised tricks that experience had taught me were attractive to attractive girls. I was despicable. I was like a dog rolling submissively onto its back, I was like a peacock spreading its tail. Tamara was putting out her wares too. Her alert and apparently sympathetic interest encouraged me to tell her everything—and not only me. A good many people on Forway told her more than they realized. Like me, they probably did not recognize that she was interested in their information more than their personalities; nor had I recognized, as she did, that we were seeing the start of a classic destabilization exercise. If distrust and unease were created among those close-knit islanders, perhaps by the sabotage of main services, such as they were, the island would ripen for authority’s, or an enemy’s, plucking. I merely thought that the islanders were edgy, and if I considered the idea of a Forway Liberation Front at all, it was only to dismiss it as a juvenile extravagance.
Chapter 19
More often than not, the top of The Hill was sheeted in cloud, but today Tamara Hoyland and I could see the whole of Forway and the unusually numerous ships in the sea around it. My bruised ribs were aching but I tried to suppress the thought, for Tamara looked so new-minted and glossy. On other women that brilliant sun would have revealed flaws. It highlighted her perfection.
She told me about her archaeological survey and the evidence of the past about us. “So much of the work has been done for me,” she said sadly. “Ian saw pretty well everything when he was a schoolboy.” She had his notebook in which he had written notes and drawn maps and accurate, if inartistic, sketches.
“I wonder why he never became an archaeologist himself,” I said. As far as I knew then, Ian’s chosen career had been that of an administrative civil servant.
“He wanted to influence the present, not just record the past,” Tamara said. I did not then recognize the self-justification in her voice. Nor did I know that she was working even at that moment, while we sat on the damp turf and while I relished the sun on my face and the prospect of pleasure with my companion. I was an arrogant man, at least about women. I was not much afraid that Tamara Hoyland would reject me. So far in my life, I had been more pursued than pursuing.
You cannot see land from Forway, nor is it visible from other lands. What a horrible shock it must have been to a sailor who unexpectedly saw that gaunt threat looming out of an empty sea and felt the waves and the tide drawing his ship ever closer to its hidden teeth. The lighthouse beside whose stump Tamara and I now lounged had been built by a public subscription in England and Ireland in the last decade of the nineteenth century. An American steamship had been wrecked on Forway in 1888, and a small plaque fixed to the lighthouse wall recorded both its name and the generous donations made by Americans to the cost of the lighthouse.
“I hate the sea,” I said.
“After living here? I do too, but to Ian it was a native element. I don’t mean he loved it, just that it was like the earth or the air, an inevitable part of life.”
“He could cope with it. I get seasick. And I have never got over being afraid, which seems silly when I did spend my holidays fishing and sailing here.”
“I’d have thought you would be too used to it.”
“It’s all right in a big boat like the Eurydice. But my mother was drowned in a small boat, and I’ve never trusted them since.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Even people who have lived here all their lives get taken by surprise by the weather. That’s what happened to her.”
“Was she alone?”
“Thetis Foggo—Thetis Lisle—and I were with her. Her head was hit when we capsized. We were picked up quite quickly, but she was dead.”
“I am sorry,” Tamara said.
“At least half the tombstones here are for people who were drowned. The ones on the north side of The Church are those without names. ‘Known unto God,’ they put, if they buried them at all. Until Godfrey’s old grandfather took charge, I doubt if they bothered with such niceties.”
“Well, I can see why you are not fond of small boats.”
“It would not count as much excuse here, actually. There is not much life for you on Forway if you can’t rise above that kind of thing. I think a lot of people feel the only place they can get away from each other is at sea. And of course, one needs the fish. Even old
Freya still goes out spinning for mackerel.”
“I know. She’s going today, I’m afraid.”
Several small boats had put out after the meeting. One had to take advantage of the weather. This was not a place where there was any point in making plans before waking up to see if the elements would cooperate. Now I could see one of the Windows brothers hoeing his vegetables and the two Yetts pacing their ground together, coats, caps, and strides matching. Lena Gerson was tugging a thin cow towards her shed; every line of her body indicated curses. There was no movement to be seen at Trinder’s Castle, though I could see the oldest Aragon man picking shellfish near the causeway ahead of the rising tide.
“It’s all really very small,” Tamara said.
“Five point nine six square miles. About four thousand acres or sixteen hundred hectares. Population two hundred and seventy-three.”
“Didn’t the Duke of Wellington say that a regiment should be no more than five hundred men because that was the largest number one commanding officer could know by name?”
“I imagine the figures for a self-governing nation are somewhat greater,” I said acidly.
As though absent-mindedly, I put my arm around her shoulder. She fitted neatly into the curve. I hoped that in her, as in me, instinct would take over from thought. But she soon moved away from me and got up to start prodding at the ground and picking up small objects from it. I turned my attention to the papers I had brought up from The Town.
On Thursdays the papers came via Cork, so Forway men saw the Irish Times and the Cork Examiner as often as the Times and the Guardian, but the London papers that had reached southern Ireland by Wednesday afternoon usually came on the ferry too.
Carl Hawker’s companion, Maggie, whose surname, apparently, was Macaulay, had got her pen to paper as quickly as he. One of the London papers carried an article by her about the Eurydice’s cruise round the British Isles, and since it was written as though its author had been present throughout, I knew that much of the copy was derived from the brochure; indeed, I recognized some of the hyperbole. The illustration was a photograph of the passengers disembarking at Holyhead for a visit to Anglesey and the famous garden at Bodnant; Maggie Macaulay and Carl Hawker, presumably, had caught the train to London instead. Holyhead was the next port on the planned itinerary after Forway. The faces in the photograph were familiar to me: the lawyer from Boston, the famous writer, and the old woman in her fisherman’s sweater, at last defeated by the exertions of the trip and being wheeled off the gangway. I knew that girl, at one side of the wheeled chair, while a sailor helped her on the other side. It was the girl I had seen in the Hebrides, dark-haired, dark eyes. It was not the young woman I had watched disembarking at Forway.
Were there two women companions? Two women who wore enveloping clothes and shared the tiny cabin?
I shrugged the minor perplexity away. I did not intend to write about the cruise of the Eurydice myself, so it was of no importance. I turned pages, marvelling as always that the hot news in England should be so different from that in Ireland. The Irish Times devoted its front page to the troubles in Northern Ireland which were not mentioned in the London Times that day at all. Another cardinal had been making appeals. Another American senator had arrived on a fact-finding mission. A terrorist had been recaptured after his escape from a Dublin gaol. His girl-friend was still on the run: Emma Hurst, otherwise known as Dierdre Tyrone. Two mug-shots were shown, full face and profile; and the girl was the one who had left the Eurydice at Forway with the game old woman.
In other circumstances I should certainly have doubted my memory. But the atmosphere of Forway just then was one of melodrama, and it seemed perfectly likely that a murderous terrorist should be on the island.
I lay back on the grass to think about it, some of my mind wandering to the closeness of Tamara Hoyland and to the skin-stinging brightness of the sun on my face.
Dierdre Tyrone: another English public-school girl bewitched into criminality by the legend of Holy Ireland. It was easy to see what she had done. Several of the Eurydice’s passengers had remarked on the perfunctory nature of the passport and customs formalities between British and Irish ports, for this shipful of passengers of all nationalities. A carefully synchronized operation would have been almost fool-proof.
The old lady would have come on board at Southampton with her innocent companion, who was seldom seen, and then only when well muffled up. Disembarking at Galway, they would have met Dierdre Tyrone, who escaped from prison and was anxious to enter the U.K. She would have returned to the ship in the guise of the companion who had been on board for days before the notorious terrorist was known to have got free. No doubt there would be some check on passengers at Southampton, especially as the Eurydice was calling in the Channel Islands on the way there. I had heard the women, foiled by a Saint’s Day from buying Waterford glass in Waterford, promising loudly to “hit the stores” in Jersey, so presumably customs officers would be waiting to pounce. But Dierdre Tyrone could safely leave the ship at one of the British ports of call before that: Holyhead, or Scilly, or Falmouth, or Forway, and the original girl, who would have made her way there by other means, could replace her again.
But unless Dierdre Tyrone had returned to Ireland on the Cork ferry this very morning, and she would hardly wish to do that, she must still be on the island; it was not hard to guess where she would be.
Chapter 20
Tamara had heard of Dierdre Tyrone earlier in the day, over breakfast with Freya Barnes. Unfortunately, but naturally, she did not take Freya very seriously. Tamara had seen the girl herself, a gentle creature with a degree in archaeology, and liked her. Freya was seventy-five and for most of her life had seemed much younger than her years, so it was not surprising that bereavement should have aged her, especially since she carried around so much surplus weight and chain-smoked. Her physical health seemed good, and her face was still beautiful. But her behaviour worried Tamara, though she did not know how much she should worry. She had not known Freya well after her only previous visit to Forway, and for all she could tell, Freya had been wandering in her thought and speech processes for years. Perhaps it was her native characteristic to lose track of her anecdotes, forget proper names, and change the subject of conversations. Perhaps a gentle inconsequentiality had been part of her famous charm.
Nor did Tamara know what her responsibility was as nothing more than the girl-friend of Freya’s dead son. She knew that there were no other relations, except for the unattractive Gersons, with whom she would be reluctant to discuss Freya. Tamara decided to have a word with Thetis Lisle and meanwhile stayed on in the cottage with Freya, chatting, picking up what she dropped, turning off the gas when she left it on, stubbing out the cigarettes she abandoned, and worrying gently about the old woman’s future. Uncomfortable words tittuped in and out of her mind, like “senile dementia” and “irreversible deterioration” and “confused geriatrics,” all the ghastly jargon of a society in which the natural incidents of life and death are regarded as pathological. For all that was wrong with Freya was old age—life itself, in fact, a condition for which there can be only one cure.
Luckily the episodes of “wandering” were not so frequent as to make life with Freya uncomfortable, and at breakfast that morning Freya had entertained her guest with all the sparkling concentration that had subjugated generations of her husband’s students.
Time diminishes age difference. Freya was describing a conversation in which Tamara visualized two very old women talking about the distant past. Yet Nonie Anholt was not much more than sixty; and when she and Freya recalled meetings in Oxford, it was an Oxford in which Nonie was a young and frivolous visitor to a house where Freya presided as a matron. “I forget who brought her to the house first,” Freya mused. “There were so many boys, each so self-centred, and all so hard to tell apart. So many young men who thought that they were the first people in the world to understand anything, so arrogant. I used to make them dried egg and
carrot cakes. Some of them were sent parcels from the family estates and then they brought me cream and butter; against the law, of course. Nonie married one of them, one of the rich ones. I must admit he did look very dashing in his uniform. The Greenjackets. But I could see what he’d become, a real blimp. You can always tell.”
“And did he?” Tamara had asked.
“He was killed in North Africa. But Nonie’s boy is exactly what his father would have been. A stockbroker, I believe. He came here to see her and was pathetically embarrassed. He worried what his neighbours would have said.”
“I thought it was pretty ghastly at Trinder’s Castle.”
“Oh well, poor old thing, she can’t cope.” There was a note of complacency in Freya’s voice. “I go and see her from time to time. Actually she was very pleased to see me yesterday.”
“Was anyone else there?”
“The Irishman, you mean? I didn’t see him, though Nonie had a new bruise on her cheek. It might have been dirt though. Dirt … dirt …” Tamara had noticed several times that Freya’s mind seemed to get stuck; she would repeat the same word or phrase like a scratched gramophone record. Freya sat murmuring that monosyllable and rubbing at her own cheek. There was ash on her hand, and she left a smudge where she had seen one on Nonie Anholt.
Tamara took Freya’s hand in her own reassuring grasp. Tamara’s hands were always warm. Freya stopped speaking but puffed at her cigarette and drank more tea. She went on in a stronger voice, “There was someone there, though.”
“Who was that, Freya?”
“A girl. I’ve seen her somewhere. Seen her picture.”
“A pale girl with light blue eyes and mousy hair?”
“That’s the one.”
The two old women had been sitting in that dusty ruin of a library. “Not much like the rooms we used to meet in,” Freya said. “I couldn’t help remembering Pedro’s workroom in Boars Hill. Not that I believe in living in the past. But the contrast … Anyway, she didn’t see me. This girl, I mean. I was sitting on that old Koole settee with my back to the door, and of course it is higher than my head. Very uncomfortable when you are my size, I must say. The girl was terribly cross when she saw me. Thought she’d been indiscreet.”