The guard at the front door ran round to the terrace to tell his colleague—a silly move of which I took instant advantage, slipping out of the door and shutting it behind me. Then I crawled round the north side of the house, reckoning that if they ran back to the door that way they would pass me in the pitch darkness without spotting me. But in fact they went straight inside through the window, politics or not, to catch the unknown who had switched the light off. As soon as I saw those great beacon beams of theirs searching the rooms I went over the wall of the terrace and down into the estuary.
I had intended to swim upstream and go ashore on one of our hidden beaches. It could not be done. The tide was racing out too strongly. To swim across to the open sands seemed to me to be asking for trouble. Even at night they showed as a paler expanse against which my figure might be black. If the mounted man or men had good night sight, I could be chased and captured before reaching the distant cover of the sandhills.
So there was little else for it but to go down on the tide. I didn’t like that either. Flares, as I expected, were on the beach. A head floating down past the boats, the village and the inn would probably be spotted—and, even if I got past the lot, there was no future but the open Atlantic. An exaggeration, this. I could have worked myself ashore on the right bank well below the village, and perhaps got away by following the beach towards the Hostal de las Olas. But one is not at one’s best when hanging on to a piece of seaweed, with the current, let alone the Pair, demanding instant decision.
Downstream I could just make out the bows of the Allarte’s launch. It was anchored only a few yards from Maya beach, but the far side of it must be in darkness. That was what I chose. I allowed the current to sweep me down on the María de Urquijo, and climbed aboard just opposite the engine housing where my silhouette would not stand out against sky or white sand.
I remember thinking that I could be seen from the bedroom windows of the inn, but no lights were on and it was unlikely that anyone had yet torn himself away from pleasant digestion of the Sunday night supper and gone up to bed.
The glory hole in the forecastle, packed with bits of net, lobster pots and miscellaneous gear, offered a refuge. It was heated, I should guess, by the decay of small pieces of fish. The smell was unspeakable, and I was very glad when Allarte and his crew of three came aboard. As soon as the forecastle began to thud into the sea, I knew we were clear of the estuary and came out.
Allarte was far from welcoming. He swore copiously and told me that I had no right, friend though I was, to hide on the María de Urquijo.
I apologised for the necessity and asked him why he was fussing, since he knew very well that nobody was looking for me.
‘What I know is that you are wanted for murder,’ he said bluntly, ‘and the whole place is crawling with police. For God’s sake, Ardower! It’s likely the boat will be searched wherever we put in!’
I asked incredulously if all the excitement which I had noticed around Maya was just for my benefit.
‘Of course! What did you think? They knew you would come.’
It is humiliating to find one’s behaviour predictable. The criminal will visit his girl. Normal police procedure. Picket the house and you have him. It drives home the truth of Olura’s insistence on the unity of mankind. Dons or juvenile delinquents, the first thing we do after committing murder is to call on our young women.
I could not make out how my return from France was known. Even if Sauche and Vigny had managed to give a hint without compromising themselves, why should police be so sure I was in Spain?
‘What murder?’ I asked Allarte.
‘How do I know? A foreigner, they say. And they have no doubt that it was you. Look, man! We have families! This is a risk we cannot take.’
Allarte throttled down the diesel. He and his crew left me sitting on the break of the forecastle, while they went into a huddle like mutineers deciding what to do with an awkward officer.
At last he called me over.
‘None of us want to take you back to Maya,’ he said. ‘It would be uncivilised behaviour to a friend. But we cannot afford to have trouble with the police. What we will do is to land you on the Ermita. After all, you could have swum there, though God knows how you would have got ashore.’
‘And you won’t talk?’
‘Not us, by God I Not drunk or sober! I tell you, we have families.’
The Ermita is not quite such a fearsome island as it appears from your terrace. The top, if one could roll it out flat, would cover some four acres. There are patches of turf and heather wherever there is shelter from the salt spray. On the far side, which only the fishermen ever see, the slope facing the open Atlantic is more gentle and the cliffs much lower. There is a just possible, indetectable landing-place which can be used on the rare occasions when there is no swell booming in from the Bay of Biscay.
We came up alongside this low rock, with all fenders out, and Allarte told me to jump. He threw after me a loaf of bread and said that he would be back, weather permitting, the following night with more provisions. He warned me on no account to light a fire or to let myself be seen from boats or on the skyline, and told me that I should find water behind the hermitage which gave the crag its name.
I climbed up to the hermitage very carefully, for it was no place to be helpless with a broken ankle. I found four thick, loose-stone walls enclosing a small room, and a bit of roof left. It was horribly cold, and I did not attempt to sleep or to occupy the hut. Too many odd vegetable growths—odd at least in darknesss—poked out from the walls and encumbered the floor. The enclosure seemed inhabited by a sad spirit of loneliness, which I felt might become visible and unpleasantly conversational at any time. So I sat down on a patch of turf with my hands round my knees and my dripping clothes spread out alongside me. Nakedness is a glory of love and the sun, even an emblem of virtue in a nudist camp; but civilised man, pitched into night and nature with no clothes on, feels singularly defenceless.
My spirits rose a small point with the dawn, both taking the devil of a time to develop into any sort of warm lucidity. Then I slept a little, and woke up convinced that gaol had been more friendly than this freedom. The only comfort was that I felt pretty well. Ever since the police magistrate had turned me loose on the public I had become remarkably tough, even for a much-travelled and impecunious don.
There was, as Allarte had told me, a rock pool of rain water at the foot of the bare slope behind the ruined hermitage. Whoever the hermit was—I know nothing of him except that he is supposed to have been a soldier in the Thirty Years War—he had smoothed a primitive catchment area to feed the pool.
After a breakfast of bread and water I explored my refuge. On one side was nothing but the sparkling semi-circle of the Atlantic; on the other, my love and very dubious future. The whole scene of my happiness was spread out for me as I crouched among the eroded rocks at the top of the island; the Hostal de las Olas, Maya, its inn and its beloved estuary, and your villa where it pleased me to think that I could see Olura in the red cloak. But the distance was more than two miles, and I insisted that it was probably the massed geraniums in the tubs of the terrace. When I and my clothes were warm and dry I spent the long hours lying in the sun and reviewing the feverish days since first I met Olura. I marshalled all the facts as if for a thesis. It was then that this narrative was prepared rather than in the actual writing.
In the evening I saw Allarte’s launch coming round from Lequeitio. He and his crew had certainly dumped me on a spot where they themselves ran no risk of ever being accused of complicity. As soon as the María de Urquijo passed behind the Ermita it was out of sight of Maya and the mainland; a watcher on shore would only see it disappear and reappear two or three minutes later. Allarte did not even stop. He brought the launch up alongside the land rock and flung ashore a bundle of old ragged net containing more bread, a kilo of cold, grilled sardines and a leather skin of Rioja.
I ate ravenously and made myself a bed of heath
er on a patch of sheltered grass. It was one of those soft, clear nights when a man in the open wakes often to full consciousness and then falls asleep again without intervals of drowsiness. There was no sound but the splash and suck of the sea, no light but the brilliance of stars and the phosphorescence of ripples and bubbles beyond the streaks of foam. In one long, peaceful interlude of wakefulness I thought I heard Olura call my name. That was not surprising. My thoughts were obsessed by her. During the afternoon I had childishly lined up two sticks so that in the early darkness I should know which were the lights of the villa.
The beating of the sea itself was high-pitched and feminine, agitated rather than militant. That I should hear a falsetto Phi-i-ilip from the sucked pebbles of some deep cleft was not beyond imagination. I got up and started to prowl restlessly above the water. There could be no doubt that the cry was reality, or at least that I was really hearing it. I make the distinction because hair was prickling at the back of my neck. In such an emptiness the siren or the wandering spirit do not appear so impossible as when listening to the positive biochemists of my College.
I threw off my few clothes and dived in. The freshness of the sea dispelled the fear of it. Whatever it was that I had heard and was still hearing, I settled down to swim indefinitely towards the thin sound. But it was much nearer than I thought, seeming to come from a whale-backed rock, soft with long weed, away to the west of the landing point. The rock was just clear of the falling tide and I came ashore as gently as on a beach. My mermaid was there, stretching out her arms and calling into the limitless night.
Beyond uttering each other’s names I doubt if we ever spoke. We clung together like the two last seals on earth, herded up by nature to reproduce from desolation a happiness of the sea. How did you get here? How did you know?—I believe that some time I must have asked those questions and received some incoherent reply of Elena and the stars. But speech has so little to do with ecstasy.
‘Take me to the Ermita, Philip,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t find a place to land.’
It was only then that I realised there might not be one. Something of the sort had passed through my head before I dived in, but that had been no moment for caution. Together we swam to the landing rock, keeping such close contact that often we went under and rose laughing. A sensuous journey, easier for furry flanks and pulsing tails. But perhaps seals cannot laugh.
No lonely swimmer could ever get ashore unhurt on the Ermita except in dead calm and at the top of a spring tide. The landing rock, falling sheer to deep water and the restless Atlantic, was out of reach. But we felt absurdly sure that two could do what one could not, and we were right. Round to the south we explored a dark fissure, sheltered from the direct battering of the waves, where a patch of foam-flecked water heaved sullenly up and down. I hung on to the weed while Olura stood on my shoulders and pulled herself up to a wide ledge. From there two long legs with frog flippers on the end of them—which I had not even noticed before—came down to me, and we were on the Ermita.
I led her to such hospitality as I could offer—a dry and filthy coat, the heather and Allarte’s gift of wine. We kept each other warm as she told her story.
She said that on the night I was in the house she herself had been at the inn, taking a late supper after driving her godfather as far as the frontier. She was not allowed to cross it, but otherwise was free to do what she pleased. In the middle of her lonely meal she felt a sudden compulsion to run back to the villa and turn off the light over the front door. She reminded herself firmly that she couldn’t turn it off. It had been burning day and night since Friday.
Feeling more desolate than usual, she had sought out Elena for the inarticulate warmth of her comfort and together they had gone up to her former room. While looking out into the night they had seen, as they thought, one of Allarte’s crew go aboard by swimming. At the sight of such masculine folly they stopped crying and cheered up. There was nothing out of character in a Basque fisherman, after a heavy evening’s drinking, impulsively taking a swim with all his clothes on to clear his head. Elena accepted it quite naturally, described by vivid gestures the quirks of the indomitable drunks of her country and merely remarked that she hoped he had a warm sweater on board.
When Olura returned to the villa, the Pair were in possession and insisting that somebody had been in the house. She replied that the fellow who claimed to have seen her in the garden must have seen her ghost, for she was always in two places at once. She giggled happily in my arms remembering her effort to express this obscure thought first in pidgin Spanish, then in French which one of the Pair vaguely understood.
After searching the house and apologising profusely, they tried to mend for her the wayward bulb over the front door, blew the fuse twice and left, promising to order an electrician in the name of the law to pay Olura a visit. It was clear that they had been enchanted by the English Terrorist.
When they had gone, she found the cloak and put two and two together. Next morning she harried Elena to get hold of Allarte as soon as he returned on the evening tide. The two cornered him in a private room and wore down his denials by threats and supplications. The threats at any rate worked. He could not stand up to Olura’s bluff when she swore she would tell the police immediately if he didn’t confess what he had done with me. She must have reduced him to pulp with an obstinate determination to be understood.
Allarte, however, had refused to take her out to the Ermita. Everybody would notice it, he said. Everybody would want to know what he was doing. And the tide was anyway too low to put her ashore.
That much Elena confirmed, and Olura had to accept it. But she managed to persuade herself that a swimmer could go where a boat could not. Except for a low cave or a very narrow entrance I cannot imagine such a place, for timber is less breakable than bone. The night was comparatively calm, and a couple of miles in her frog feet were well within her powers.
Horrified by her recklessness, I exclaimed that she could have missed the island altogether in the dark.
‘No, I couldn’t,’ she replied casually. ‘Through all those long nights wondering where you were I had time to notice so much. There was a great star low down on the horizon which I called yours. And it used to disappear behind the top of the Ermita. So I knew that if I kept the lights of Maya behind me and couldn’t see the star I must reach the island.’
‘Jupiter,’ I remarked pedantically.
The planet blazing in the north-east sky had been my companion for many lonely hours, but I had not paid much attention to it. My rainbow’s end was the tail of the Milky Way hanging over Maya in the west.
‘Is it?’ she answered with feminine indifference towards giving a name to something which was too important to need one. ‘Well, I think my navigation was pretty scientific.’
It was. She had hit the target bang in the centre, below the savage crag on the southern side. Then she had swum round, looking for any place where Allarte could possibly have landed me and calling out. But since she was so close under the cliffs and out of breath I never heard her until she stubbed her toe on the reef of the whale-back and came out to rest.
‘Does anyone know where you are?’ I asked.
‘Nobody. My godfather went to Paris this morning.’
‘And the police?’
She chuckled happily as if they had suddenly become a mere casual annoyance.
‘I was very careful. If they miss me tomorrow, they’ll think I made another bolt for the frontier.’
I left the details of my own story for next day, for I did not know whether she had heard that I was wanted for murder. I refused to spoil the hours of unity by a description of violence which I believed was bound to shock and repel her.
The sun was clear of the ocean clouds before we awoke. She sat up and yawned like a newly created Eve, exploring with little-girl eyes her immediate surroundings.
‘What a lovely place!’ she exclaimed.
That certainly was not how I myself would hav
e described the Ermita. After the black water and waving weed of the night, our patch of green probably looked to her eyes more like a sunken alpine garden than a rock cap pickled in salt and the wind. I said that I might appreciate it more if we had a full picnic basket.
‘It will do you good,’ she retorted. ‘You’ll have time to pay some attention to me.’
That gay, ironical jealousy of a mere thought! I thanked God in all humility that it was I who had worked the change in her—not that I was in any way responsible for her content of joyous femininity, but at least I had unwrapped the parcel right side up.
However, I was not to see her for the first time in that maternal mood which everyone else—her touchy young Africans, her Group and even Leopold Mgwana—considered the natural expression of her character. While we lay in the sun and ate the last of Allarte’s sardines, I perceived that she knew far more than I ever suspected and that I had not been as clever as I thought in avoiding all detail. It was she who had refused to encourage me.
I gave her the whole story of my rash visit to Zarauz and the attempt to remove me. Livetti and his death had to come in. She told me rather distantly and formally how and when she had met him. I got the impression that after so much cross-examination by an incredulous Gonzalez—and perhaps an incredulous guardian?—the whole episode had become unreal to her.
It was not her fault that she had inspired a muddle-headed decency in the man which had cost him his life, but I feared that, with her readiness to accept guilt, she might think it was. Not a bit of it! Livetti was a thing in a wheelbarrow, a thing which threatened her lover who could do no wrong, a thing which had led to the humiliating exposure of an intimate and difficult folly. It was by exaggerating all this resentment, I suspect, that she protected herself from any feeling of responsibility.
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