The Dangerous Islands

by Ann Bridge

  Philip Jamieson was surprised by her words, and by the energy with which she uttered him them.

  ‘You seem to care about the place,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, Helen O’Hara is a remotish cousin, and I’ve been dodging over there for years. It’s not at all the same thing as Glentoran, which is really home to me; but I do enjoy Mayo madly—everything is such fun.’

  ‘And will “the locals” take anything from your cousin?’

  ‘Oh yes, everything! You see the O’Haras aren’t Ascendancy at all; they’re “the old lot”, the indigenous aristocracy, so their position is still recognised by everyone. Elizabethan creations like Lord Oldport are regarded even today, after more than three centuries, as “in-comers”.’

  ‘How enchanting! I do look forward to seeing this set-up under your auspices.’

  ‘Good. But now let me write,’ Julia said, turning back to her desk.

  ‘May I use your telephone?’

  ‘Of course.’ She wrote away, concentrated on what she was saying to Lady Helen, while the Colonel telephoned. When she had closed and stamped her letter she held it out to him. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ But he made no move to leave. ‘A messenger will be here to collect this at any moment,’ he said. ‘I wondered if you would dine with me?’

  It was Julia’s factotum’s evening off, and rather than poach herself a couple of eggs, she accepted this invitation. ‘So long as it’s not one of those smart crowded places. I can’t bear having my hat knocked into my soup by a waiter behind me.’ Jamieson laughed.

  ‘I know the place you mean. No, not there. Have you a preference?’

  ‘There’s lots of room in the Ritz Grill, and the food is good.’ She was also thinking that one almost never met anyone one knew in that spacious place; the horrible people who wanted to be seen dined upstairs.

  ‘Excellent! May I telephone again and book a table?’

  While he was doing this the front-door bell rang—Julia went to it.

  ‘For the Colonel’s letter,’ said a small man in a brown trilby hat.

  ‘Oh yes—just a moment.’ She went back into the drawing-room, where her letter to Lady Helen still lay on the arm of Jamieson’s chair—she took it out.

  ‘I ought to see the Colonel,’ the man in the trilby hat said.

  ‘The Colonel’s on the telephone.’

  ‘I’d better see him,’ the little man persisted. She went back into the drawing-room; Jamieson had now finished his call.

  ‘Your little type won’t take the letter without seeing you.’

  ‘All right’—he went to the door.

  ‘I must change,’ Julia said as he returned to the drawing-room.

  ‘You look perfect.’

  ‘Nonsense! Eight minutes—give yourself a drink.’

  In exactly seven minutes the girl reappeared.

  ‘Do you mind if we go by taxi? It’s impossible to park anywhere near the Ritz,’ Jamieson asked.

  ‘Not a bit. I’ll ring for one.’

  ‘I have—in fact he’s there,’ the Colonel said, looking out of the window.

  Over dinner in the spacious calm of the Ritz Grill—‘How have you explained me to the O’Haras?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘Oh, the same old boy-friend-on-appro act,’ the girl said, a faint hint of one of her becoming apricot blushes appearing on her cheeks. ‘Plus a terrific interest in Fulmars—hence Clare Island.’

  The Colonel smiled rather wryly at this assessment of his position. Few men who are falling in love really care to be described as a ‘boy-friend-on-appro’.

  ‘I told her to book you in at the Oldport Hotel for next Thursday, and to tell Shamus to lay on a hire-car for you for as long as you wanted it,’ Julia added. ‘She’s to telegraph me if everything is all right. Of course it’s the height of the fishing season, but Dickie Bowden-Brown will do anything for Helen. I said Shamus was to meet us with your car at Martinstown.’

  ‘What and where is Martinstown?’

  ‘Oh, the railhead from Dublin—fifteen miles away. Shamus can take me on, and then drop the car back at the hotel for you.’

  ‘That sounds all excellent,’ Jamieson said.

  ‘I’ll ring you when I get her wire,’ Julia added.

  ‘Why doesn’t she use the telephone?’

  ‘Six-and-eightpence for three minutes, and four hours delay? Not on your life,’ Julia responded briskly. ‘I must warn you that Oldport isn’t “on the air” after 10 p.m., or before 8 a.m. Mayo is in the wilds still—the O’Haras had to lay on two miles of line to be on the telephone at all—it cost them twelve hundred pounds.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ the Colonel exclaimed.

  ‘Oh yes—the Outer Islands are positively metropolitan compared to the west of Ireland,’ the girl said cheerfully. ‘You go back fifty or sixty years when you set foot in the County Mayo. “Mayo, God help us!” the people call it themselves.’

  A fresh dish appeared; they discussed it. ‘I’m glad you care about food,’ Jamieson said, after some rather discriminating comments from Julia.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I care about it too.’ He left it at that, and rather hastily put the question that Julia had been dreading all the evening. ‘Have you seen Mrs. Hathaway?’

  ‘Yes, I saw her last night, and had some of your brandy—it was very good indeed. She said she thought it must be a bribe,’ the girl said, with the deliberate intention of putting him off his stroke.

  Colonel Jamieson was not easily put off his stroke, but he did look slightly disconcerted.

  ‘Mrs. Hathaway really said that?’

  ‘Of course—and I told her she was lucky to get such an excellent bribe,’ Julia added.

  All this free talk of bribery could hardly be pleasing to some one in the Colonel’s position. He looked hard at the girl’s beautiful impassive face, which wore its dumbest expression, trying to imagine this outrageous conversation.

  ‘Well, I must leave you to your wicked and quite unfounded suspicions,’ he said lightly. ‘Did you talk about the Professor?’

  ‘Oh yes—she had had a long letter from him. There was a doubled-up skeleton in that cist, and two beakers and a lot of beads. I wish we could have seen all that,’ the girl said, her face now quite animated.

  ‘Oh, you irresponsible creature! Nothing else?’ At another time Philip Jamieson would have been genuinely interested in the discovery of a typical ‘beaker’ burial, with the appropriate pottery and beads; but he felt now—quite rightly—that Julia was making fun of him, and standing him off at the same time.

  ‘Yes, there was some more.’ She paused, thinking what to say first—in the end she employed the bouncing tactics which had served her with Mrs. Hathaway, and so often before. ‘How much does your Office know about his excavations twenty-five years ago in Central Asia?’ she asked. ‘I should like to know that before I say much.’

  He stared at her, astonished.

  ‘Did she—Mrs. Hathaway—tell you about that?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’d found it out before, quite by accident.’

  ‘Before we met him?’ Jamieson’s voice was suddenly very cold.

  ‘Oh don’t be so silly! Of course not—after you’d gone South,’ Julia said. ‘But I’m not talking till you’ve talked! If you let me know what you know, I’ll add anything I can. But I’m not making you any presents—or bribes,’ she added, with a slightly malicious grin.

  ‘You really are quite monstrous,’ Jamieson said, half-laughing; he couldn’t help himself. He too thought for a moment before he spoke.

  ‘Yes, Burbage did do some excavations in Central Asia in 1936,’ he went on, ‘and allegedly got himself involved with the wife of a rather high-powered Soviet executive.’

  ‘The Prof. involved with a woman? I can’t believe it!’

  ‘Well my dear he was, or so the Russians say—even a little pledge to prove it.’

  ‘Unless I saw the pledge—who
must be a strapping young Komsomol of over twenty by now—and noticed a marked resemblance to the Prof., I should find that hard to credit, ’Julia said. ‘Oh, the poor old boy! And I suppose they’ve been turning the heat on him about this alleged bastard ever since?’

  ‘About that, and other things. They said he hadn’t handed over all the objects he found to the authorities, but smuggled some of them out through China.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘We don’t know. He went out through China, certainly. But no one has ever seen these finds, and if they’re still in China I don’t suppose anyone ever will.’ He paused. ‘If Mrs. Hathaway didn’t tell you about the Russian episode, who did?’

  ‘Lady MacIan. Oh what an old idiot he is!’ the girl exclaimed impatiently. ‘He seems to have poured it all out to her—imagining, I suppose, that nothing said on Inch-Ian would ever get to London! Learned men really are the biggest fools of all.’

  The Colonel pounced on the mention of Inch-Ian.

  ‘What was he doing there? That’s quite close to the Erinishes, isn’t it? Had he been to them, do you know?’

  ‘Yes—he told Lady MacIan that too,’ Julia said miserably. ‘What a clot!’

  ‘Did he tell Lady MacIan what he was doing on the Erinishes?’

  ‘Oh, examining those silly forts! Anyhow, by his own quite dotty admission, there he was.’

  ‘Hm. That’s more tiresome still.’ He waited for a moment or two, in silence. Then—‘You said that after I had talked, you would talk. Well, I have. Had Mrs. Hathaway any light to throw on the Russian thing?’

  ‘Nothing like as luminous as your account. She just said that one should never trust the Russians, and that he was too innocent to live, more or less—which we know,’ Julia said drily. She hesitated, and then added—‘And that he had been in torment for twenty-five years.’

  ‘Thank you. Poor soul!’ said Philip Jamieson.

  Chapter 7

  On the following Friday morning Colonel Jamieson, in Shamus Moran’s hire-car, drove Julia Probyn out to the O’Haras for lunch. All Lady Helen’s arrangements had worked out exactly as Julia had foretold. Mr. Moran had met them on Thursday afternoon at Martinstown with a small Volkswagen, in which, after dropping Jamieson at the Oldport Hotel, he had driven the girl on to Rostrunk, later returning the car to the hotel. Here Jamieson, who had heard much of the horrors of Irish hotels, had spent the night in a degree of comfort which astonished him, in a beautiful Georgian house, sold by its former owners, and—most surprising of all—with wonderful food. He had complimented Mr. Bowden-Brown, the landlord, on this after dinner, and learned to his amusement that it was produced by ‘a girl out of the bog’. ‘These Irish girls have a genius for cooking, if anyone takes the trouble to teach them; my wife taught her,’ the landlord said. But Jamieson had also learned something else, which disconcerted him a good deal; namely that there was something seriously wrong with General O’Hara’s motor-boat—‘He’ll not have it right till he gets a proper engineer from Galway or Dublin,’ Mr. Bowden-Brown stated roundly. The Colonel expressed concern—he had been counting on that boat to get him to Clare Island to see the fulmars. The landlord told him not to worry—‘You can drive down to Roonagh and cross in the mail boat, and stay at the inn; it only has the four bedrooms, but it’s a decent little place enough.’ But these tidings sent Jamieson to bed in a gloomy frame of mind. Would Julia be willing to stay with him in a tiny hotel, however ‘decent’?

  Next morning Julia had come in to Oldport on the bus to do Lady Helen’s ‘messages’, i.e. her shopping errands; these they collected in the car, in every case with introductions of the Colonel, and warm hand-shakings—‘You’re heartily welcome,’ was the invariable phrase. After picking up the messages Julia had taken him in for ‘a quick one’ at Josie Walsh’s, a local publican who was a great source of gossip; there the Colonel had listened to the latest story of salmon-poachers being caught, and the negative attitude of the country priests towards poaching. Mr. Walsh took advantage of Jamieson’s car to send out a dozen bottles of stout to ‘The General’—Julia refused to take more. ‘Ah, Miss Probyn knows her own mind—but she’s pleasant with it always,’ Mr. Walsh said. Jamieson was struck, then and throughout the morning, by the evident affection for Julia which obtained in Oldport, and on the drive out he saw one reason for it. They overtook an old woman weighed down with bundles, and his companion made him pull up and bestowed the old party, whom she addressed as Katie, on the back seat. ‘Did ye get married, Miss Probyn?’ the old woman asked with deep interest. ‘No, nothing of that sort, Katie,’ Julia replied laughing. A couple of miles further on the old woman startled Jamieson by tapping him on the shoulder and saying ‘Would you stand at the cross, sir?’ Julia interpreted—‘Pull up at this next turn on the right.’ When Katie and her parcels had been extracted from the car she thanked them in the local fasion—‘May the Holy Mother of God look after you every time you go out on the road. Ah, Sir,’ she added to Jamieson, ‘Miss Probyn will never leave anyone after her—and nor will Lady.’

  ‘Why the “Stabat Mater” idea?’ Jamieson asked, as they drove on.

  ‘Any turn is a “cross”, and “stand” just means to pull up,’ Julia said. ‘Now at the next cross you don’t stand, you turn down to the left.’

  Past more of the thatched one-storey whitewashed cottages, which stood at intervals all along the road, they came at last to the turning down to Rostrunk, a narrow lane enclosed on either side by high hedges. At the far end the hedges ceased suddenly, and the lane emerged into open stone-walled pastures, with the sea just beyond; to the right a small mediaeval tower rose at the water’s very edge; directly in front a grey house loomed up among wind-slanted sycamores in which rooks were clamouring. It was a breath-taking sight—Jamieson slowed down to stare at it.

  ‘What a magical place,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? Straight on, over the cattle-stop,’ she directed him; the car clanked over iron bars between stone gateposts, past meadows where cows were grazing, over a second cattle-stop, and followed a drive round an oval lawn up to the house.

  The door was opened to them by an excessively pretty maid in a pink uniform and a pink muslin cap.

  ‘Oh Attracta, there are parcels in the boot,’ Julia said. ‘Get Tom or Mick to help you in with the Guinness—it’s heavy. Where is her ladyship?’

  ‘Lady’s in the garden yet, Miss Probyn—but the drinks are in the library.’

  ‘Thank you, Attracta. Let’s go and find Helen,’ Julia said; she led him to a door in a high stone wall—as they passed through Jamieson paused in astonished delight. A paved path stretched away in front of them to a further wall, hung with ivy; broad borders flanked the path on either side, brilliant with phlox, pentstemons, big white daisies and red-hot-pokers—hedges of small-leaved escallonia backed them. Away to the left were plots of vegetables, bordered by gooseberries and currants laden with fruit; a neat orchard of young apple-trees, beautifully pruned, rose above the hedge on their right.

  ‘Why do you call the maid a tractor?’ the Colonel said. Julia laughed.

  ‘Attracta was an Irish saint—I don’t know anything about her. Everyone’s children here are named for saints.’ She raised her voice. ‘Helen!’ she called.

  A tall figure rose from behind the farthest gooseberry-bushes, wiping the earth from her hands—Lady Helen was planting out lettuces.

  ‘Is it lunch time?’ she asked. ‘Oh dear—I suppose I’m late, as usual. Is this Colonel Jamieson? How do you do—I’m too dirty to shake hands! Julia, just give a spot of water to these last ones, while I gather up my things.’

  ‘Can’s empty,’ Julia said—‘I’ll get some more.’ She walked over to a stand-pipe at an intersection of two grass paths and refilled the watering-can; the Colonel had already noticed several of these objects, studded about the garden, with approval —obviously a practical intelligence had been at work here. While Lady Helen wiped her trowel clean with the palm of her ha
nd, and piled it and her other effects into a basket he said—‘You have made a lovely garden here.’

  ‘Well, one has to. What you don’t grow youself in Mayo, you don’t eat—our nearest good greengrocer is in Dublin, a hundred and seventy-five miles away.’

  ‘You seem to have everything here,’ the Colonel said; his glance, straying over the garden, had noticed rows of raspberries under a north-facing wall, and a huge strawberry-bed—but instead of straw the ground round the strawberry-plants was covered with some dark substance. ‘What is that you put round your strawberries?’ he asked.

  ‘Turf-dust. Mould and slugs are our great enemies here; straw encourages both, and turf-dust defeats both. It sticks to the slugs, so they avoid it; and it’s completely anti-mould. These strawberries are rather interesting,’ Lady Helen pursued. ‘When I came here first I got plants from a neighbour, who said they were “Royal Sovereign”. Then I read in the R.H.S. Journal that Royal Sovereign was subject to some ghastly disease, and that the thing to have was something called M.40, which was disease-resistant, and kept the old wonderful flavour. So I wrote to enquire, and was told that M.40 was the old County Mayo strain!—M. standing for Mayo.’

  ‘How quite delightful,’ Jamieson said, picking up the basket. He studied his hostess with interest. Lady Helen was tall, rather beautiful, still dark and still slender, though he put her age at about fifty; in spite of her interest in gardening she gave a curious impression of detachment, almost of remoteness, as if her interior life was somewhere else. They went back up the paved path between the glowing borders, Julia following, but instead of going through the door onto the drive, Lady Helen led them through a long workshop, its bench under the windows set with vices, a lathe, and even a drill; the rafters were festooned with rolls of galvanised wire of varying weights. The Colonel was impressed.

  ‘What a splendid place.’

  ‘Oh, it’s my husband’s Paradise. Very useful, too—one has to be rather self-dependent, here.’ She passed through a door-way at the farther end, where a small room with an array of garden-tools opened on the left. ‘The basket stays here—thank you so much’ Lady Helen said. ‘Just one second, while I wash my boots.’ She was wearing rubber Wellingtons, and as she spoke opened another door which gave onto a lawn and the sea; just outside it was a grating set over a sump, and above this a tap to which a piece of rubber hose was attached—Lady Helen stood on the grating, turned on the tap, and sloshed her rubber boots with water; then she came in, pulled off her boots, and stuffed her narrow feet into a pair of slippers. She did this in a very small room with a basin—in the passage beyond it coats, oilskins, and Burberrys hung from hooks on the wall.