The Dangerous Islands

by Ann Bridge

  ‘Pity you couldn’t wait for my boat to take you over,’ the General said.

  ‘Oh, we’ll go from Roonagh—though thanking you all the same, Michael.’

  ‘They can’t miss this chance, darling,’ Lady Helen said to her husband. ‘It’s extraordinary to get rooms at this time of year, with no notice at all.’ The General grunted.

  Julia went out with Jamieson to the car. The rooks were wheeling and cawing above the sycamores where they had nested; from the open kitchen windows came the drone of voices in prayer—the maids were saying the Rosary.

  ‘Can you come out and pick me up here tomorrow at a quarter to ten?’ Julia asked. ‘The boat goes at eleven, or thereabouts.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Jamieson said. He gave a glance at his companion, who had turned to gaze up at the wheeling rooks with an expression of calm pleasure; a late ray from the westering sun lit up her lion-gold hair, as it was gilding the heavy leaves of the sycamores. He caught hold of her hand.

  ‘Bless you for making all this so easy,’ he said.

  ‘I thought that was the object of the exercise,’ said Julia.

  Chapter 9

  Julia back into the house in a very happy frame of mind. Helen had obviously done whatever was necessary with Michael to smooth their path to Clare Island. She crossed the hall, conscious, as she always was, of the graceful line of the curving staircase, the beauty of the oval walls and dome. Lovely house! In the library she found her hostess, rearranging the flowers on a table in the corner.

  ‘Michael’s gone to get his bath—he loves to wallow,’ Lady Helen said. ‘Have another drink, Julia.’

  ‘I don’t think I need it. We had to drink for ages with Josie to get the low-down on Tony MacMahon’s background.’

  ‘Oh, that’s why you were so late. Of course, Josie knows everything; though how, I can’t think.’

  ‘Contacts in Dublin,’ Julia said.

  ‘Ah. Well anyhow, have another little drinkie, darling, I want to talk about backgrounds. We’ve plenty of time.’

  ‘Tony’s?’ Julia asked, pouring herself a small gin.

  ‘No, your very delightful friend’s. Tony seems to know rather a lot, too.’

  ‘Oh? What did he say?’ Julia was only thinking in terms of M.I.5, and was quite unprepared for what followed.

  ‘He said “It’s so sad about poor Susan”. And when I asked who in the world poor Susan might be he said—“Oh, didn’t you know? That man Jamieson’s wife. She’s a dipsomaniac, and has to be shut up in a home.” Did you know, Julia?’

  ‘No,’ Julia said—the one syllable was strangely prolonged. After it she remained silent, wondering if this appalling news could be true?—and if it was, why he had at least not behaved as though he were free, and beginning to love her. Her mind ran over their recent conversations. He hadn’t said anything very definite, except his irritation that very afternoon about poor Professor Burbage’s ‘silliness’ coming between them, and putting her in a cleft stick. But his whole manner had been that of a lover free to love—and in this bitter moment she knew, quite certainly, that she loved him completely.

  But she had to say something to Helen, who also remained silent, her dark eyes fixed on a portrait above the fireplace.

  ‘I’m not sure that I put much reliance in anything Tony MacMahon says,’ the girl remarked, still speaking rather slowly.

  ‘He was right about M.I.5, wasn’t he?’ Lady Helen remarked, reaching out to a silver box and lighting another cigarette. ‘You never told us that, darling.’

  ‘No—why should I? Nearly all my boy-friends seem to be in M.I.5,’ Julia said—she was beginning to recover herself. ‘That’s thanks to Colin—the Secret Service is really my first cousin once removed! But one doesn’t advertise the fact—they don’t like it.’

  Lady Helen gave her low laugh.

  ‘I see that. Have you any special reason for mistrusting Tony?

  ‘Only his being a Commie, and his general irresponsibility. Imagine his putting you and Michael, in a book, when you’d been so good to him. But thank you for telling me.’

  ‘Dearest, I hope he really is only on appro, as you said,’ Lady Helen observed.

  ‘Yes, that’s all,’ Julia lied blandly. ‘But I can easily find out if Master Tony is telling the truth or not.’

  ‘How? Oh, your Mrs. Hathaway, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes.’ Julia realised how little she relished the idea of writing to her dear Mrs. H. to put this particular enquiry; all the same she must do it—and did that very night, before she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  The horrid thought of ‘poor Susan’ gnawed at her the following day, when she and Jamieson drove through Martinstown and down the southern shore of Clew Bay. She had decided, in the helpful daylight of a summer morning, to hold her hand where Philip Jamieson was concerned till she got the answer to her letter; but she was disturbed and unhappy, and to dispel her unhappiness she spoke about local matters. As they passed the foot of Croagh Patrick she told Jamieson of the great annual pilgrimage, when tens of thousands of people from all over the world stumble more than two thousand feet up the stony track to the summit, and receive Communion, kneeling on the rough ground, from midnight till noon.

  ‘Of course the local Prots take a dim view of it,’ she said. ‘There was a sweet old man who used to live just down there’— she pointed towards the sea, on her right. ‘Helen suggested to him once that she and Michael might go over for drinks before lunch the next Sunday. The old boy, who used that wonderful eighteenth-century form of speech—it’s dying out now—said No. “On Saturday there commences a species of Saturnalia, which continues until Sunday afternoon.” Helen guessed what he meant and said—“Oh, the Croagh Patrick Pilgrimage! It begins at the Abbey, doesn’t it?” There’s an old ruined Abbey down by the sea. But the old fellow said—“Lady Helen, the pilgrimage begins at the public-house—and ends there!”’

  ‘Are they really as bitter as that?’ Jamieson asked, though he could not help laughing.

  ‘Oh yes—religion in Ireland is all politics. Two opposed races, two opposed religions. Christian charity gets pretty well squeezed out, on both sides.’

  They drove on down to Roonagh Point. A narrow road led through a stretch of coastal country, remarkable for its solitude, and for the exquisite limpidity of the light that lay on sea and land, under the pale Atlantic sky. At Roonagh, on a small stone-built quay in a sheltered cove, several curraghs, the long canvas-built boats of Ireland’s western sea-board, were drawn up, looking, with their black tarred bottoms, like enormous sleeping serpents. But there was no sign of the mail-boat, not even on the three-mile stretch of blue water between them and the harbour on Clare Island, now plainly visible—a long sea-wall, a grey castle, and some houses grouped round a small bay.

  ‘She’s late,’ Julia said.

  Jamieson wanted to know where to put the car.

  ‘Oh, get the luggage out here, and leave her up in one of the old kelp-sheds.’ Jamieson did as he was told, and parked in one of several open-fronted stone buildings. Julia looked out towards the Island again.

  ‘What can be going on? Give me your glasses.’ She lay down on the short turf, thickly studded with daisies—the air was full of their faint scent—adjusted the field-glasses to her short-sighted eyes, and propped on her elbows, examined the harbour.

  ‘There isn’t a soul about,’ she pronounced. ‘What day is it? Can they all be at Mass? I’ll try the Abbey.’ She shifted the field-glasses slightly to the left, where about a mile beyond the harbour a large modern Church stood close to the ruins of a mediaeval Abbey.

  ‘There’s a terrier—yes, and a spaniel—on the Church steps,’ she said then. ‘I bet you it is some Saint’s Day, and everyone’s at Mass. The mail-van isn’t here either. We must just wait.’ She lit a cigarette, but at intervals continued to study the Island through Jamieson’s binoculars.

  ‘The dogs are getting up,’ she announced presently. ‘Ah, here they come!’
The Zeiss glasses showed a dark crowd of people emerging from the Church and streaming along the white road towards the harbour. ‘Not so long now.’

  And in half an hour they saw a dinghy pull out from the harbour towards a stout chunky motor-boat, which chugged across towards them, and tied up at the quay.

  ‘How are you, Mr. O’Malley?’ Julia asked of one of the men who stepped ashore.

  ‘Great, Miss Probyn—how’s yourself? So you’re coming back to see us on the Island again—that’s good.’

  ‘This is Colonel Jamieson,’ Julia said—both the men from the boat shook hands with the stranger.

  ‘Jimmy, see if the mailbag is up in the shed,’ Mr. O’Malley said. While Jimmy went up and returned with a rather small mailbag—Clare Island has only about a hundred and thirty houses—Mr. O’Malley apologised for the delay. ‘Were ye waiting long, Miss Probyn? Today is a Holy Day.’

  ‘Never mind, Martin.’

  ‘There’s four cases for the hotel up in it,’ the man called Jimmy now observed. ‘Give me a hand down with them, Mairtin— they’re heavy.’

  ‘That will be the booze, and our tinned soup and tinned fruit,’ Julia said to Jamieson. When all the cargo for the Island was stowed, the boat shot away.

  As so often in the last forty-eight hours, Jamieson was surprised —now by the O’Malley Hotel. Though very small indeed it was extremely neat, clean, and decently furnished, even the two minute bedrooms in which their luggage was bestowed. Julia, after being greeted with warmth by Mrs. O’Malley, asked ‘How are you off for water?’

  “Oh, fine. We had great rains this season.”

  In the little dining-room a very young girl served them with lamb chops and kidneys on mashed potato, plus grilled tomatoes; followed, naturally, by Californian tinned peaches, but also by a quite excellent baked custard.

  ‘Eat away now—you’ll only get high tea this evening,’ Julia adjured her companion. The very young girl sidled up to her and asked shyly, in a voice hardly above a whisper—‘Mrs. O’Malley wants to know, would ye care for crayfish to your tea?’

  ‘Oh yes, please— and a lettuce. I see she has some in the garden. Thank you, Bernadette.’

  ‘And will ye be taking coffee?’

  ‘Tell Mrs. O’Malley, yes if it’s Nes; if not, tea.’ The girl called Bernadette went away, giggling softly. She had the dark hair, creamy-white complexion, and grey eyes set in a smudge of dark eyelashes supposed to be typical of Irish girls, but in fact rather rare; in the West red or mouse-brown hair are more usual.

  ‘What a lovely creature,’ Jamieson said.

  ‘Yes, isn’t she?’ But Miss Probyn had other matters on her mind—principally the course their enquiries were to take. Julia had a rather remarkable capacity for detaching her mind from her own concerns, and switching it onto the job in hand; she did so now. She was sufficiently familiar with the Island to realise that two people might easily spend three weeks covering the ground carefully enough to find what they were looking for, unless they had some indications to help them. When Bernadette brought the Nescafe she asked—

  ‘Is Mr. O’Malley still in the bar, or could I have a word with him? If he’s busy, maybe I could see the Mistress?’

  ‘What are you after now?’ Jamieson asked.

  ‘To find out if old Charlie Ruddy is still alive—I forgot to ask Helen. He’s practically the oldest inhabitant, and knows everything that goes on; he’s frightfully good value, if he hasn’t gone gaga meantime.’

  ‘Do you mean you propose to ask him about this?’ Jamieson looked rather horrified.

  ‘Oh well, throw a line over him, and see if he rises. We must get any help we can.’

  The landlord presently appeared; a regular O’Malley, with curly black hair, a red beard, and a big beak of a nose. After the usual introduction and greetings—‘Mr. O’Malley, is old Charlie Ruddy still going strong?’ Julia asked.

  ‘He is that, Miss Probyn—and as cute as ever!’

  ‘Oh, I am glad. I thought we might look in on him this afternoon on our way to that Stack beyond the Tower—that’s full of birds.’

  ‘Miss Probyn, I was thinking—will you and the gentleman want to walk all that length in this heat? Wouldn’t you be the better of Pat O’Malley’s side-car?’

  ‘Yes, we would,’ Julia replied promptly. ‘How soon can he have it ready?’

  ‘He has it before the house now, Miss Probyn.’

  ‘Fine.’ She laughed as she ran up the steep narrow stairs; the landlord had fixed all this in advance, of course. On the little landing Jamieson accosted her. ‘Is everyone on this island called O’Malley?’

  ‘A lot of them. It was one of Old Grace’s great strongholds— you must see her castle tomorrow or sometime. She’s supposed to be buried in the Abbey—you must see that too.’

  ‘Who was Old Grace?’ the man asked, following her down the stairs.

  ‘Granuaile—Grania-ni-Mhaille, Grace O’Malley, the legendary heroine of Irish freedom. I’ll tell you about her sometime. Come on now.’

  The Irish side-car, now almost extinct, is one of the least comfortable vehicles imaginable. The driver sits easily foursquare behind the horse, but the passengers perch on two long seats with a high back between them, parallel with the direction of the vehicle—and since side-cars are now never used except on very rough roads, they are jerked about, clinging to the back between the seats. Julia was accustomed to this, and placed herself diagonally, with one elbow over the high back; she urged her companion to do the same, bracing his feet against the floorboard. After that she enjoyed the drive. The hot sunshine lay hazy over the high hill in front of them, the sky was full of lark-song; the small fields on either side of the white road smelt sweet, and were amazingly clean and free from weeds—‘Look, there’s hardly a dock or a buchelaun in them, and no foxgloves on the banks.’

  ‘What on earth is a buchelaun?’

  ‘Ragwort.’

  Pat proudly pointed out the Abbey—would they look at it?

  ‘Not today, Pat—we want to get on to the Stack and see the birds, and have a talk to old Charlie, if he’s about.’

  Jamieson had been using his eyes on his surroundings. After climbing a slope up from the harbour on the sheltered eastern side, their road was now skirting the western shore, open to the Atlantic; here was where he would expect to find what he was looking for. The coastline was deeply indented by cliffy inlets, with projecting headlands between them—he realised that it would take hours and days to cover them all. Julia was right; they would need any help they could get.

  About a mile and a half beyond the Abbey a tall stone tower rose into view ahead of them—but before he could ask what it was Julia pointed down to the left.

  ‘There’s the Doon—the best of all the headland forts.’

  A spectacular tongue of land, surrounded by perpendicular cliffs, here projected into the ocean, with a deep chasm on one side; Jamieson thought he could just detect the outline of the fort itself, and three defence walls on the landward side, all grassed over.

  ‘And there’s old Charlie, by gum!’ said Pat. ‘Will ye go on to the Tower, or will ye stop and speak with him?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll stop. You go on to the farm.’

  Pat got down and held the horse’s head while Julia and Jamieson clambered off the side-car. They walked across some close-grazed pastures to a turf bank on which sat a most magnificent old man. He was dressed all in black—for Mass, of course— and had an immense white beard; a sheepdog sat at his feet, a long staff rested against the bank at his side, a flock of sheep grazed near him. The perfect example of the pastoral patriarch, Jamieson thought as they approached and Ruddy used his staff to hoist himself to his feet—he was very tall, and his big-featured face was noble and intelligent.

  ‘Mr. Ruddy, how are you?’ Julia said. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘It’s good that you’ve come back to visit us, Miss Probyn,’ the old man replied, wringing her hand. ‘Or did
you get married?’ he asked, with a glance at Jamieson.

  ‘No, no—still Miss Probyn!’ Julia said gaily, though with a knock at her heart. ‘This is my friend Colonel Jamieson,’ she went on. ‘I’ve brought him over to see the Island and the birds.’

  ‘Is it in Rostrunk you are? How is the General?—and Lady?’

  Jamieson was struck during the conversation which followed by the beautiful quality of the Island speech—there was no trace here of the rough burr and slurred vowels of the mainland. Julia enquired about Mr. Ruddy’s daughter, who kept house for him, then after the well-being of his sheep; she learned that the wire fence along the top of the cliffs at the northern end of the island was ‘rotted away altogether’, so that the sheep went down the cliffs and sometimes fell—Charlie had lost four quite recently. ‘Every day I do be through the cliffs myself, clapping and whistling them out of it. I brought them down here today, to have some peace while I was at Mass.’

  Jamieson had not yet seen ‘the cliffs’, an almost vertical drop of eleven hundred feet; when he did, he was as aghast as Julia now was at the idea of this old man of over eighty going ‘through them’—i.e. along the narrow ledges—to ‘whistle and clap’ his greedy animals back to safety. But he listened carefully to Julia’s talk with Mr. Ruddy; clearly they were on the best of terms, and if enquiries must be made, she could not have chosen a better person.

  At last the girl came to it—as cautiously, as casually, as she could.

  ‘Mr. Ruddy, has there been anything odd seen on the Island lately? Some sort of wireless apparatus? I don’t mean Mrs. O’Malley’s machine in the Post Office, of course. Someone mentioned it, and I wondered if it was true.’

  ‘Now it’s funny you should have heard of that already. You’ll be meaning these little blue-and-white wireless masts, that pop up and then go down again?’ Julia nodded, delighted, though she preserved her usual calm expression. ‘Yes, there’s two of them in it,’ Mr. Ruddy pursued—‘One on the Doon, and one up on the top. But ’tis only four or five weeks since they started up.’