31 October
The last boat of the season arrives and leaves today. That’s not as final as it sounds, there’s a helicopter from Halangy once a week and I daresay I could scrape together enough for the fare if I panicked and had to get out. But the way things are now I don’t think I shall panic. I’m as well off here as anywhere. Wherever I was, there’d still be the want of you.
Yesterday, if you’d been watching, I think you would have laughed out loud. (Your laughter is like nobody else’s, it always made me feel there were deeper, freer, more abundant sources of mirth than I would ever have access to.) The birders arrived. I looked up from writing and there they were, about thirty of them, all men, in army camouflage, with their heavy tripods, cameras and telescopes, they must have come over the hill to this west side and they lined up barely twenty yards away, with their backs to me, in silence, in the mild early-morning light. After a while I went out and stood behind them. None paid me any attention. And when I asked I got two words in reply: rosy starling. I could see where they were looking—through the opening of the hedges, slantwise about three hundred yards down the length of the dune—but I couldn’t see any bird. Then they all gasped and made the sounds of communal glee I had heard on the boat, then a great shout and they gathered up their equipment and began to run heavily away. The one I was standing next to, a fat man even more laden than his comrades, set off last. The others were almost out of sight and hadn’t waited for him and nobody turned round to see was he following or not. His cumbersomeness troubled me for the rest of the day.
Sunday 1 November
I couldn’t sleep for some hours last night. I thought very brokenly of you. Or, to be more exact, very breakingly—you were breaking, or my power to remember or imagine you was impaired, like sight or hearing, and back came the worry that everything I ever held true will crumble, perish and turn to dust from within, from within me, the power to uphold any faith and hope and love will erode, perhaps very quickly the way a cliff might collapse that was riddled through and through and nobody had known. I got up, to be less at the mercy of all this, and went out to the dune, the tide was high, close, but the washing, sliding, unfurling and withdrawal of it was very muted under cloud and in a light fog. That bay is a horseshoe, its headlands and an island behind and some reefs in part barricade it, so that in a storm the ocean breaks through very violently, being fretted, slewed and rifled by these hindrances, but last night it made a lingering and gentle entrance, at leisure, dispensing itself, its immensity, easefully and as though mercifully. Having seen this and after my fashion understood it in a light without moon or stars, a light embodied in drifts of vapour, silvery, I went back into my shed in the embrace of the tamarisks and behind closed eyes I insisted on that gentle incoming and could still hear the sounds of it, the breathing of water over shingle, and this morning I felt something had been added to my stock of resources against disintegration: an ocean entering quietly and giving bearably.
Sunday 8 November
There was a bonfire last night, on the beach that twins with mine, over the hill. They built it well below high water on the fine shingle and the weed. I haven’t stared into the heart of such a fire for years. It was mostly old pallets and wood-wormed timbers, but loppings from the pittosporum hedges too and their leaves flared and vanished with an almost liquid sizzle. I noticed that flames can live for a second or two quite detached from the substance they were burning—in the air, just above, they dance and vanish. There was hardly any wind so that the fire extending in sparks reached very high.
I met a few people. Several came up and said hello and I got a couple of offers of labour, cash-in-hand, which I need since what I do on the campsite I’m paid for with my shed. The hotel manager offered me some painting and decorating. He has closed for the winter. He kept open last year but this year trade is worse. Amiable chap, a bit nervous. Then a young man who farms at the south end asked had I ever cut hedges and I said yes, I had, years ago. He said there’d be plenty to do for him, if I liked. When I was with the monks I simplified the whole business into the two words: work and pray. The work was all with my hands, and by prayer I meant concentrating on whatever good I could imagine or remember, so as not to go to bits.
The women had made soup and hot dogs and there was a trestle table with beer and wine on and things for the kids. You helped yourself. I put my last ten-pound note in the kitty. I felt very blithe. And when after that I got my offers of work I wondered at my ever losing faith.
Much later, I came back. I wanted to watch the sea overwhelm the fire, and I did so, very closely. The hissing and the conversion of flame to steam were remarkable but best I liked the ability of fire to survive quite a while on blackened beams that floated. The sea swamped the ground of the fire but strewed its upper elements for a briefly continuing life on the surface left and right. True, the waves were soft. Breakers would finish it quickly.
20 November
The island is used to people passing through—or people trying to settle and failing. There are the few families who rule the graveyard, that stock won’t leave and it will be many years before they die out or get diluted and lose their identity among the incomers who take root. A family from Wolverhampton, another from Bristol, another from Halifax are powerful and one of them may dominate in the end. But if they want to be buried they’ll have to go elsewhere, here they’ll have to make do with a tablet on the wall by the way in. So some do settle, they blow in and root tenaciously. But the chief impression you get is of instability. Whether it’s sex or panic, I can’t tell, but every year there’s some breakup, rearrangement and departure.
I think they quite like the people who are passing through. The island economy, such as it is, depends on them. Of course, they’re a risk as well, any one of them might become the solvent of a marriage and perhaps of a small business too. There was a baker here till a few years ago, then a girl came to help in the café and he left with her for London when the season ended. I guess some wives and husbands watch very anxiously who will land when the season starts again; others will watch hopefully. And it is certain that several in houses on their own have watched year after year, have gone down to the quay when the launch came in and have idled there and were never looked at by a stranger who might have stayed. They watch long after the likely time has passed. One such, a very lonely man, against all the odds and beyond all rational hope was chosen, as you might say, by a visitor not half his age. She stayed three years, then left him and the islands without warning.
I’ve got more than enough work now. In fact the manager offered me a room in the hotel but I like my shed too much. I’d pay Mary some rent but she won’t have it, so I’ve begun tidying her workshop. Well, more than tidying it. I’ll clear all the junk out, repair outside and in, see to the tools. She says that’s a job long wanted doing and who would do it but somebody blown in? She’s a Jackson, one of the old families, widowed, her two sons fish for crabs and lobsters, she has a couple of holiday-lets. The workshop was her father’s, that’s his boat there in the nettles. He was in his workshop or out in his boat most of the time. There was something wrong when he came back from the war. He more or less gave up talking, she said.
The hotel manager, Brian, is on his own. His wife left him at the start of the summer holidays, went to the mainland. It’s not even that she fell in love. Suddenly she’d just had enough and she left him, taking the children. He dresses well and is altogether particular about his appearance and his environment. He’s a rather fussy employer, which I don’t mind. I see through his eyes, at heart he is terrified. He talks a lot to me and I don’t mind that either. I guess he’s ten years my junior. This is the first year he’s had to close and it worries him. Not that he owns the place. A very rich man does. You don’t have to stay here, I tell him. If it fails. No, of course not, he says. With my qualifications I can go where I like.
He’s taken three other people on, al
l young. A boy from Melbourne on his way round the world, called Chris. A girl from Manchester, Elaine, who used to come here as a child and should be at university but couldn’t face it and is having another year off. And Sarah, from Nottingham, who has finished university and is wondering what to do. I could have had a warm room on a back corridor with this attractive trio. I don’t think they would have objected to me.
The hotel is shut till the end of March but Brian opens the bar a couple of nights a week and the regulars arrive. I make an appearance when I feel up to it. If asked, I tell the makings of a tale about myself. Nobody probes. Either it’s tact or they’re not very curious. My kind come and go, every year there’s at least one of us. Mostly they talk and I listen. I’m a good listener. From the hotel back to my shed is no great distance. I go past the Pool, quite an extent of water with only a bar of sand between it and the sea. The Pool is very softly spoken, even when there’s a wind, at most you hear a steady lapping. The sea on my left, unless it’s very low tide, makes an insistent noise. At high tide walking between the two waters it feels peculiar being a drylander who needs air to breathe. Some nights the dark is intense, the pale sand, the pale dead grass and rushes either side, are all the light there is. There’s a lighthouse far out to the southwest, the wink of its beam comes round, and another, closer, to the north, but all you’ll see of that one is the ghost of the passage of light on the underside of the cloud. I use my torch as little as possible. I like to feel my way, in at the opening of the tamarisks to my wooden home.
27 November
The work in the hotel is easy enough. We paint and decorate and we clear things out. Some days I drive the quad and trailer and take old fridges and televisions to the tip. Yesterday I fed fifteen hundred of last year’s brochures into the incinerator, a rusty iron contraption with a tall chimney, we call it Puffing Billy. Children are mesmerized by it, Brian says.
Brian misses his family. They are living in the house they kept in Guildford just in case the venture here failed, which it has. He is not from Guildford nor is his wife. They moved there from the north, following the opportunities of his work. Brian detests Guildford and so does his wife. It distresses him that she would rather be there than here. And that she has nobody else, that she didn’t fall in love and move to a new place with a new man so as to start again, that also distresses him. He has not even lost out to somebody more desirable. It is simply that she doesn’t want to be with him. So she leaves, and takes her children with her, as of right. He hasn’t the heart to contest it. Really, he agrees with her. In this beautiful place, a paradise some would say, she can’t be happy with him, she can’t even make do with him. Instead she takes herself and the children off to a place she detests, just so as not to be with him, and in his heart of hearts he can’t blame her. It is not even passionate, she does not passionately hate him, wish to kill him, avenge herself on him for her wasted years. She just wants to be away from him. He tells me this in the bar when everyone else has gone. But he is quite sober, he is not a drunkard, nor is he a gambler, nor in a million years would he raise his hand against her, he scarcely ever raises his voice, he has never hit the children nor even frightened them by throwing things and swearing. It is not rational that she should leave him. It is not in her material interest. Still, she has. He hopes at least the children will come and visit him next Easter when the season has begun again and there are boat trips to the other islands. He will take a day off and perhaps they would like to go fishing. He tells me all this in the empty bar, quite late, still cleanly dressed in his suit and tie, and his watery eyes over his trim moustache appeal to me not for pity but for an explanation. And yet he knows it needs no explanation. I am in my work clothes, which are not much different from any other clothes I’ve got, my nails are broken and there’s paint on my fingers. I know that he confides in me because he assumes I am passing through. Also that I leave his warm hotel and go back in the dark to a place of my own barely half a mile away but out on the rim, as far as he is concerned, eccentric, and when he looks me in the eyes and shakes me by the hand next morning, altogether affable, he knows or thinks he knows that he has nothing to fear from me. I think he assumes I am at least as unhappy as he is. And he is certain that before very long I will go away and he will never see me again.
Does Brian interest you? I am trying to interest you in him.
30 November
I learned this from a lone birder, itself a rare creature, who wandered, fully accoutred, into my precinct early yesterday: that in the winter, and especially about now, first thing they do on their computers every morning is check out the weather over the western Atlantic. They pray for winds, colossal storm winds, blowing our way, because on winds like that the nearctic vagrants get blown in. The worse the storms, the longer-lasting, the better for us, he said. Birds making laborious headway from, it might be, Alaska to, say, Nicaragua, for all their struggling get blown off course—three thousand miles off course—and land up here. Mostly singletons, my birder said, rare things, first-time sightings, and mostly, so far as anyone can tell, they don’t, except in a thousand photographs, survive. The star last year was a great blue heron, a juvenile. The winds blew steadily for a week or more and the birders waited—not for a great blue heron in particular: a varied thrush or a laughing gull or a Wilson’s snipe would have made them happy enough. The GBH, as he kept calling it, was beyond their wildest dreams. The creature landed exhausted on Halangy, in the reeds of Lower Moors, around midday on 7 December and was observed and photographed by scores of enthusiasts, summoned from here, there and everywhere, all afternoon, feeding, until the weather worsened, torrential rain came horizontally in, the light declined and the juvenile vanished, ‘never to be seen again.’ My birder liked that phrase and repeated it, in tones of wonderment: ‘never to be seen again.’
6 December
You mustn’t think I live too monkishly. I’m never very cold and I eat pretty well. I found an old army greatcoat in the workshop and I put that round my shoulders when I sit and read or write. I can get most things it occurs to me to want at the post office near the quay and, besides, there’s a shopping boat to Halangy once a week, though if the weather’s very rough the supply ship from the mainland can’t sail. I went to Halangy last week and spent a good bit on books. The one bookseller is giving up and he wanted rid of his stock. I bought a couple of things I know you’d like and now they and the rest sit on a shelf I made of a plank of driftwood.
Altogether my shed is quite well appointed. When I take junk from the hotel or from Mary’s workshop to the tip I always look through what other people have thrown out. I got the brackets for my shelf from there, and an Italian coffee maker, a Bialetti, one like yours, that works okay, and two nice cups. Two wine glasses and a beer mug also. There was a mirror I might have had but I didn’t want it in the shed. I’ve the wash house to myself just up the hill. Mary gave me a dinner plate. I’m okay. I don’t think you would like the long hours of darkness but I don’t mind so much. There’s work in the evenings at the hotel if I want, and there’s the bar some nights. But often I prefer it here. I do a bit more at the workshop. It’s coming on nicely. And Mary gave me a little radio so I lie on my truckle bed and listen to that sometimes. You might think the news would be easier to bear being so remote but in fact it’s worse. I suppose I’m not distracted. The little box in the dark is very close, the voices say the bad things direct into your ear. When I’ve had enough or if I don’t feel up to listening to the radio I lie there and listen to the sea instead. And I think—though it’s not exactly thinking, more like being a shade already in the underworld among the whispering of other shades in chance encounters out of time. You are among them some nights, though always as a visitor, you always make it clear you don’t belong there. I’ve wondered lately when it was I stopped expecting or even hoping to be happy. I push the date back further and further, into my youth, into my childhood, vengefully, as though to wipe out my
life, I cast my shadow back, longer and longer, to chill all the life I ever had in darkness though I know it is a terrible untruth I am perpetrating.
Here’s okay. I do like the people and they interest me. And I like the work, especially in the fields southward. I cut the hedges. Nathan has given me a field to start with that hasn’t been cut since he took over, the tops have shot up six or eight feet higher than they should be. He said the trimmer, fixed on the tractor, would hardly work and could I manage with loppers, a bowsaw and the ladder? It would be slow work, he knew. I answered that suited me perfectly. I’ll tash it with the pitchfork and come round after with a buckrake on the tractor. Fine, he said. So when the weather’s kind I skip the painting and decorating and cut fence all day, on my own, content. I find the old slant cuts from years ago, where the height should be, and work along level with them. It’s mostly pittosporum, a silver grey, they remind me of the olive branches, perhaps it was on Ithaca. They make a whoosh when they fall over my shoulder through the air. You cut an opening in no time and there’s the sea, running some mornings a hard blue, then suddenly black, jade green, turquoise and you see stilts of sun far out probing over pools of light, and shafts of rainbow almost perpendicular, just beginning their curve, then they break off. If I stay I’ll have cut the hedges of all of Nathan’s fields. That will be something done. And why shouldn’t I stay?
In Another Country Page 6