The Dangerous Islands

by Ann Bridge

  ‘How long will you want here?’ he asked.

  ‘Two and a half to three hours,’ Jamieson replied.

  ‘Good so—I’ll be back for you at half-past four.’

  Samson is a long narrow island with two humps, one at each end, joined in the centre by a low sandy neck of land; Julia and Jamieson, standing on the North Hill, could see most of it, except the portion hidden by the bulk of the South Hill—on the nearer slope of this stood several roofless stone buildings. Philip adjusted his field-glasses and scanned all the slopes and the low shores; there was not a soul in sight, the whole island seemed utterly deserted.

  ‘We’d better go to the other end,’ he said, and set off along the summit ridge. ‘Oh, hullo, here are the tumuli’—he stopped to glance at four rather good specimens. ‘No sign that the old boy has been at work here, though. Come on.’

  Down on the sandy neck joining the two hills they first saw the black rabbits. Julia was rather disappointed—‘They aren’t really black, they’re more gun-metal-coloured,’ she said. But she was delighted by the deserted village. The abandoned houses stand in an enclosure surrounded by a dry-stone wall five feet or more high, beautifully built; along its top small flat slabs are laid on low vertical ones, forming little windows, like a sort of lace trimming—the whole was covered with a fuzz of silvery-grey lichen, an inch or more long, giving the impression of the richest sort of velvet. Inside the entrance they came on two springs, each some three feet across, which had been carefully built up with stones to hold the water; they were rather green-mossed and weedy, but the water was beautifully sweet—Julia cupped her hands and sampled both.

  ‘Come on,’ Philip said again, rather impatiently, and they climbed up to the South Hill. This is very stony; the minute path winds round and between great bulwarks of living rock. The wind had begun to blow freshly from the west—‘Let’s get into the shelter and have lunch,’ Julia said. ‘I’m hungry.’

  They sat on sun-warmed slabs under a high wall of rock to eat their sandwiches. Below them the hill fell away steeply to the sea and a stretch of marshy land along the shore, with a curious pool running into it.

  ‘Now you could plant something there,’ Julia said. ‘For once there seems to be some soil without daffodils in it. But do let’s eat in peace first,’ she exclaimed, as Philip began to get out his binoculars.

  After lunch Philip insisted on using his field-glasse. ‘I must see what those birds are, sitting about in pairs down o the rocks in the marshland.’

  ‘Greater Blackbacked Gulls—even I can tell you that. Don’t you hear them yowking overhead?’ Indeed the sky above them was suddenly full of the huge wheeling creatures. ‘Hateful brutes!’ she said vengefully.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, they’re the cruellest predators in Britain. If a ewe gets cast in a gully they peck out her eyes; and they tear new-born lambs to pieces, as well as devouring young grouse.’

  ‘How horrible.’ But he was now looking through his binoculars. He gave a sudden exclamation.

  ‘Hullo! Someone has been digging down there—near that pool. We must go and see.’

  Julia begged for coffee first, but in vain; she bundled the Thermos, the cups, and the remains of their lunch into the carry-bag, and followed Jamieson down through the rocks onto the marshy flat land beside the sea. When she came up with him he was standing beside three holes in the boggy soil—one rather more than four feet square, one about fifteen inches, and the last a square of barely eight inches; they were a few feet apart from one another, and all half-full of water.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘The tracker, the batteries, and the hole for the aerial—they tried it out here, and gave it up.’

  ‘Because of the water?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Almost certainly. Obviously a try, and a failure.’

  ‘Why didn’t they fill the holes in again?’ Julia asked. ‘That seems silly.’

  ‘I suppose they thought the tourists wouldn’t come down here. Anyhow you said yourself that the old Prof, is silly.’

  ‘But I thought you said he was cleared, or practically,’ Julia protested.

  ‘I did. But I don’t like this at all.’ He frowned. ‘It looks as if they were still forcing him to act as cover for their goings-on; we heard only this morning that he’d got a permit to dig on Samson.’ He paused. ‘We simply must find him quickly,’ he said urgently. ‘Absurd of the Duchy Office not to have got his address.’

  Julia was troubled by Philip’s evident unease.

  ‘Might he be camping in one of those ruined cottages?’ she suggested. ‘He’s a great camper-out.’

  ‘We’ll look.’ But first Jamieson insisted on taking a cast round the lower, western side of the island, below the South Hill; they found nothing and no one, and struck up to the deserted village. To reach the cottages involved scrambling through brambles and bracken; but their search proved fruitless. There were no signs of camping in any of the ruins.

  ‘Well that’s no go—he’s not here,’ Jamieson said. He looked at his watch. ‘Do we have to climb up that other hill again?’

  As it proved they did not have to. From the far side of the sandy neck a small path led along the eastern shore only a few feet above the sea; they followed it. Julia was excited by the sight, first, of a pair of mergansers, swimming just off-shore, and then by that of a pair of Great Grey Seals. ‘Philip, look! There they are.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said briefly. ‘If possible I’d like to catch that Office again before it shuts.’ He hurried Julia along, past the famous rabbits—which here swarmed, and looked much blacker as they scurried over the white sand on the shore. The launch was waiting at anchor when they reached the little bay, and they were rowed aboard. Without difficulty Jamieson persuaded Mr. Hicks to take them back direct to St. Mary’s; when they landed, and he had paid the very modest charge, they hurried uphill to the Duchy Office. It was shut.

  Chapter 13

  The moment after breakfast next morning Jamieson went off to the Duchy Office to see if he could get more information as to the Professor’s whereabouts. Julia stayed in the hotel, and occupied herself in washing her underclothes and Philip’s socks and handkerchiefs. It gave her a quite new and peculiar pleasure to perform this wifely task for him; she had a better right now, she thought, than on the yacht. Practical women, staying in hotels, use the neat trick of smoothing wet handkerchiefs onto mirrors or windowpanes; this produces a very fair imitation of ironing after the articles have dried. Julia’s room was at the front of the Zennor Hotel; as she stood at her window, pressing her own and Philip’s handkerchiefs onto the glass, she noticed a group of people passing through the stone arch at the end of the quay—a boat must have come in from one of the islands. She glanced at them idly—and then gave a start. There was the Professor! Short-sighted as she was, Julia could not fail to recognise that tall, rather stooping figure, in the familiar stained burberry, with the old-fashioned fore-and-after stitched cloth hat. She threw up the window with a wild impulse to shout to him; but he turned sharp left along the street in front of the Mermaid, and was lost to sight.

  The girl flung the rest of her wash into the bedroom basin, and raced downstairs, down the garden steps, round the corner and along the street. But of course she was too late—he was nowhere to be seen. She went into one or two shops—the tobacconist’s, the chemist’s—the Prof. was a great one for taking pills; but everywhere she drew a blank. She debated whether she should go on to the Duchy Office, but decided against that; Philip knew him by sight, and would see him if he should go there. She went back to the quay, and asked some of the usual loungers there where the boat came from that had landed about ten minutes ago? Two had come in then, she was told; one from Bryher, and the Black Swan from Tresco—but their crews had gone up into the town. Discouraged, Julia returned to the hotel, and finished dealing with her washing.

  Philip walked in a few minutes later. No, the Duchy Office had no idea where the Professor was staying. Al
l they could suggest was that they should enquire at the hotel on Tresco, quite close to Samson—‘which we know for ourselves,’ Philip said acidly. Julia told him what she had seen—‘He’s in this town, now. What ought we to do?’

  They deliberated.

  ‘He may be anywhere, doing anything,’ Philip said at length. ‘I don’t think we shall do much good posting ourselves as a watch on the quay—so frightfully public, for one thing. I suggest we follow up the Office’s tip and try the hotel on Tresco. He may even be on the launch.’

  ‘Take lunch?’ Julia asked.

  ‘No, we can eat at the hotel. Save time.’

  They just caught the Tresco launch on her return trip, and went straight to the hotel, where Philip booked a table for lunch. Then he asked if a Professor Burbage was staying there? No, nor had the receptionist heard anything of him.

  ‘So much for that,’ Jamieson said, as they walked out into the garden, where exotics like the great Echium, ‘Pride of Madeira’, stood about in the beds among more ordinary plants.

  ‘Well what shall we do? We’ve got more than two hours. Go and see the gardens at the Abbey?’

  ‘I don’t think so—I’d rather have a scout round. Let’s look at the map.’ They found a seat, and Philip spread out his map across their knees.

  ‘Yes, we’ll walk north towards this Piper’s Hole, and King Charles’s Castle,’ he said. ‘I always like to have an idea of the lay-out.’

  They took a small path up through the hotel gardens, scrambled over a stile in a stone wall, and found themselves suddenly in quite a different world. Here were no houses or daffodil-fields, only the open hillside; cows grazed in a pasture close to the wall, everywhere else the bracken lay thick and golden, like skeins of orange silk. The path led across the pasture, through another wall, and skirted a ploughed field; then it rose steeply to the spine of the island. This was open country indeed: ling grew sparsely between the endless rocks and stones, but what struck them both was that the whole hill was full of water—tiny streamlets ran everywhere, even down their little path, such as it was.

  ‘Well, I suppose you could plant something here,’ Julia said. ‘It seems lonely enough.’

  ‘Oh no you couldn’t—in summer endless stout-hearted tourists come to look at The Piper’s Hole. We won’t bother with that— I’d rather look at the castles. They call one Cromwell’s Castle and the other King Charles’s Castle; of course these Islands were one of the last strongholds of the Royalists, till Admiral Blake knocked them for six.’

  As they breasted the ridge the wind struck them like a blow— a gale was springing up from the west. They hurried across to shelter under the ruined walls of King Charles’s Castle, the higher of the two; from here they could see the stout round tower and square block of Cromwell’s Castle, projecting into the sea below them—beyond, part of another island, barren, rocky, and humped and necked like a sea-serpent, half-closed the channel between it and Tresco.

  ‘What’s that?’ Julia asked.

  ‘The north end of Bryher, and Shipman Head.’

  ‘Goodness, there must be a sea on outside,’ Julia said, as clouds of white spray rose high into the air above the two low necks on the opposite island. ‘Oh, I should like to get onto Bryher, and see all that from close to.’

  ‘We might do that tomorrow—we’ve got to try everywhere. We simply must find your foolish old friend.’

  ‘Oh look,’ the girl exclaimed suddenly—‘there’s a boat coming in.’

  Indeed round the eastward-pointing tip of Shipman Head a trawler appeared; it crept into the comforting shelter of the channel between Tresco and Bryher, and cast anchor only a few hundred yards from where they sat—the strong wind brought the loud metallic rattle of the anchor-chain clearly to their ears as it ran out. Philip got out his field-glasses.

  ‘French,’ he said. ‘Good luck to them. They’ll be all right in here, poor devils. God, what a frightful place this is for sailors!’

  ‘Hullo, here comes another!’ Julia said—a second boat was hurrying round Shipman Head to seek shelter. She was a trawler too, but chose a different anchorage; she tucked in on the opposite side of the channel, close under the nearer of the two sea-serpent humps on Bryher. Jamieson focussed his binoculars on her.

  ‘God-damn-it, she’s a Russian!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Well I don’t suppose Russians want to be wrecked, any more than any other one,’ Julia said, using the idiom of Mayo.

  ‘I don’t like it. We must find your wretched old Professor. Let’s go and have some food, and get back to St. Mary’s. The police, or someone must be able to find out where he is.’ He was returning his binoculars to their case when Julia stayed his hand.

  ‘Just a mo. Look down towards that round tower. Do you see what I think I see? I’m so blind.’

  Philip, reluctantly, turned his field-glasses towards Cromwell’s Castle. Just beside the round tower stood a small figure in green trousers and a white wind-cheater; he held a small flag in each hand, and was moving them systematically.

  ‘Signalling, by God!’ He watched. ‘No, I can’t make a thing of it. It must be in Russian—someone is signalling back from that trawler over on the other side.’ He watched a moment or two longer, and then rose to his feet.

  ‘Come on. This gets nastier and nastier—we haven’t a moment to lose. You’d better ring Mrs. Hathaway from the hotel and see if she’s got his address by now.’

  ‘She hadn’t when she wrote the day before yesterday,’ Julia replied, as he pulled her to her feet.

  ‘Had she asked him? You did tell her to, didn’t you?’

  ‘More or less—but Mrs. H. does what she thinks,’ Julia said, hurrying after him over the rough path up to the ridge. They returned to the hotel by the way they had come, walking very fast; when they got in Jamieson ordered drinks in the pleasant little bar, and then asked Julia for Mrs. Hathaway’s telephone number.

  ‘Are you going to do this?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Yes. She might take me more seriously; and this is serious.’

  ‘Well don’t frighten her,’ Julia said.

  There was a telephone-box in the lobby by the reception-desk, and surprisingly quickly the girl at it sent Philip in to take his call to London—Julia, sipping her gin, waited on a chair outside. She was still rather out of breath after their race back from King Charles’s Castle, and was longing to go and powder her face, and generally tidy up; but she waited to know what went on. The telephone-box was sound-proof; she could only hear the diffused noise of Philip’s voice speaking. Presently he came out, slamming the door after him.

  ‘Well?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He went across to the desk and asked the girl to have his call put on his luncheon bill, and to arrange to have their meal ready in five minutes; then he picked up his glass and ushered Julia out into the long glass-sided passage, cloaked with delicate exotic creepers, which gives access to the hotel.

  ‘She had a picture-postcard from him this morning, with the postmark “Bryher”, so that’s where he probably is,’ he said. ‘We must get back and find out exactly where.’

  ‘Bryher’s not very big—that shouldn’t be impossible.’

  ‘No. But we may be able to get more details at St. Mary’s— we’ll try that first, anyhow. I’m getting sick of all this working blindfold!’

  This was in fact a mistaken decision, though neither of them could know it at the time. If they had telephoned for Hicks’s boat and gone straight across to Bryher that afternoon—only a matter of half an hour all told—everything might have turned out very differently. As it was, they went and ate a very good lunch in the dining-room, its huge windows giving onto the sea and some of those yellowish islets.

  ‘Goodness, it’s hot in here,’ Julia said. Presently another idea occurred to her. ‘Did you ask about the little man in the odd clothes, and whether he really works here?’

  ‘No I didn’t. What difference does it make where he works? We k
now what he’s up to; we saw him at it. Hurry with that ice if you want coffee,’ he said impatiently. ‘The launch goes in half an hour.’

  They gulped their coffee in the L-shaped lounge, whose huge windows also overlooked the sea. They just caught the Black Swan, and had a very rough trip back to St. Mary’s; Julia, observing that she particularly disliked getting wet through on a full stomach, took shelter in a little cabin under the fore-structure.

  ‘Are you feeling seasick?’ Philip asked her.

  ‘No—never seasick! But I’m always chilly after a meal.’

  ‘“Eat till you’re cold, live to grow old,’” he quoted, grinning at her. ‘I bet you’ll outlive me.’

  ‘Oh, I hope so. I want to cherish you in your old age, when you’re half-gaga, and fretful about your food, and can’t remember people’s names.’

  ‘Is that your idea of marriage?’ he asked, sitting down on the narrow seat beside her—her smile, when she uttered this dreary prophecy, seemed to him one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

  ‘Well it’s bound to be the latter end of most marriages, isn’t it? One’s seen it so often—and I’m a good bit younger than you.’ Again she gave that seraph’s smile. ‘But lots of fun before we get that length,’ she added.

  Cabin or no—the gale, which the man in the knitted cap told Philip was of Force 8, whistled into and out of it—Julia did feel chilly when they got in, and went to have a hot bath, leaving Philip to conduct his enquiries by himself. She had already decided that in future the more she left him to do his work alone the better he would like it, and hence the better they would get on; which had now, for her, become the really important thing. He had drinks brought up to her room before dinner, and reported a nil result. The police didn’t know where Professor Burbage was staying on Bryher, and nor did the Post Office—he had given a Poste Restante address there, and collected his mail himself; it would be entirely against the regulations to give anyone’s actual address away, the Bryher post mistress had said, when Philip rang her up.