How to Disappear

by Duncan Fallowell

  A rasping arpeggio of bird noise recalled me from the Indian Empire to the Lodge at Eigg where my two feet were firmly anchored to the earth. The bird spoke again – a magpie – that unpleasant rattling call. In front of the house a semi-circle of red fuchsia bushes enclosed the Laird’s lawn. Those fuchsias were great travellers too, since the plants are native to South America. I was surely in the most sheltered spot on the island, thickly wooded in every direction, enjoying the best of Eigg’s microclimate borne up by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The atmosphere around the house was charged with an improbable douceur. It was another world really, a surreal outpost of Thames Valley affluence transported across wild Celtic seas to arrive intact at this protected place.

  Personally I’ve never liked fuchsias and would rip them out if the property were mine. Coming closer, I peer in through the windows. Bare floorboards. A small drawing-room with art deco detail and some garden furniture stacked in it, otherwise no furnishing at all. The house was empty, with the magnetic pull of all empty houses. From its arcaded porch I heard the tinkle of a falling stream. The air was clammy and still. Yes, the Lodge too was waiting – but somehow not for Maruma.

  That evening a little enquiry back at Kildonan was productive. The villa had been put up in the nineteen-twenties by Sir Walter Runciman, later Baron Runciman, when he was the Laird of Eigg. Subsequently it was inherited, along with the rest of the island, by his two sons. One of them was the Byzantinist Steven Runciman and I thought I’d give him a ring at his house on the mainland at Lockerbie – I’d had some doings with him years before and retained the number. He was ninety-two years old when we spoke on this occasion but he recalled Eigg with instant affection. I wondered how long the island had been in his family and asked ‘Did your father inherit it too?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. But he’d fallen in love with it and it was for sale for practically nothing and he was tempted.’

  ‘And how often did you go there?’

  ‘I went for about three months a year – for forty years. In August my brother always had it. We went for New Year to celebrate with the tenants, and we gave a children’s party every year, so I knew all the islanders. There were no real difficulties. Now and again they tried to pull a fast one, but we made light of it and all got on rather well.’

  ‘The climate is so mild.’

  ‘Yes, it could be wet and windy but there was seldom any frost. I often went to write, taking a suitcase of books and groceries. A very good place for work and there were always mackerel and lobsters to eat. May, June was my favourite time. But there was often very good weather in December.’

  ‘Were you ever bored there?’

  ‘No. Why should I have been?’

  ‘I adore the Lodge.’

  ‘I’m glad you like that. Our idea was more a Mediterranean villa. We planted the palms. We didn’t want awful imitation Scots baronial. And it was a very easy house to run.’

  ‘When did you sell up?’

  ‘ 1966. The place is not very suitable as you get older,’ he explained, ‘because it’s not very easy to get to. Our excellent factor had to retire and the thought of finding a new one, with a wife who wouldn’t mind living there in isolation, was rather daunting. I have the happiest memories of the island and, I must say, it’s distressing what’s happened since. Very few of our tenants are left but I feel almost disloyal in allowing the place to get into disreputable hands. We sold to a Welsh farmer, Mr Evans, who thought it would be profitable as a farm. He sold it on at a great profit, but apologised to us for doing so. He said that the profit only realised what he had lost over the period. We ran the farm so that we didn’t lose much. But one always lost something. Eigg is an expensive pastime, you know. It was then taken over by a chancer who wanted to establish it as a school for deficient boys who would do all the work for nothing and he would be paid for taking them on, but I don’t think he could get a license from the county council.’

  ‘What about Keith Schellenberg?’

  ‘I rather like him but he’s a mixed-up kid.’

  ‘And now Maruma.’

  ‘Don’t know him but he’ll be good only if he’s prepared to spend money on it.’

  ‘And have you been back since you sold?’

  He made a short noise, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. ‘No…I don’t believe in going back to places you’ve loved, to places where you’ve been very happy. I think it’s always a mistake to do that.’

  Heavy clouds exploded across the blue sky bringing wind and rain. We watched television, read books and magazines, and one evening went for dinner at the house of Mrs Carr’s sister in Cleadale. When we arrived she was straining simmered blackberries through a cloth. A dark blood-coloured liquid spilled over the edge of the bowl to yelps of pleasure from her children. Though not well-off in money terms, people can live wonderful lives here if they don’t hanker for the amenities of a conurbation. Mrs Carr’s sister said ‘We heard that Maruma is sending £30,000 for urgent repairs.’

  One of the crofters, Micky, decided to throw a party in his kitchen. We all jammed in there on the cement floor under a bright light, hedged around by stacks of beer, whisky and cigarettes. Rock music, tinny and very loud, squirted from the radio/cassette player. I was reminded of Russia. Because of the squeeze, you couldn’t really see people’s bodies. The party was all heads and smoke and noise. Like most of the crofters, Micky was an incomer, not born on Eigg. In fact the crofters came more out of hippiedom than out of farming. An intense, Pre-Raphaelite girl asked ‘Is there any truth in the rumour that Maruma is penniless?’ Another rumour too was going round, that the successful businessman Richard Branson had tried to buy the island but Maruma got in first. An ample, kindly woman materialised out of the fug and introduced herself as Maggie. With the rock-music noise sizzling across her speech I was barely able to determine that she came from Bolton in Lancashire and was secretary of the Eigg Community Association. She said that Maruma’s master plan – his what? – master plan! for the island had just arrived in the post – had what? – just arrived in the post and I’ve pinned it up in my cottage. Would we like to go over and look at it?

  The following afternoon, rather thick in the head, we did. It was cosy by her fire with mugs of tea. A Pan-like boy from Huddersfield slouched and smiled in a chair. He didn’t say much. He ran a hand every so often through his tousled curls and years afterwards, to my surprise, I found myself using him in a novel. Craft objects were for sale. Maggie’s forte was knitted winter socks of an eskimo kind and I bought several pairs as presents. And there on a sheet pinned up and hanging the height of the room was Maruma’s Long Term Concept. It was very long indeed. We carried our mugs closer. He was hoping to change everything. Among the proposed developments were a fast ferry service, holiday cottages, the conversion of the Lodge to an holistic health centre, horse-breeding, fish-farming, removal of rubbish, renovation of buildings, a sports hall, indoor swimming-pool, shopping centre – it took one’s breath away and seemed over the top. Maggie pulled a funny face at it and handed me another mug of tea. Warming liquids are the blood of social life up here. The Huddersfield boy was about to say something but stretched his legs out instead and stared at his denim crotch.

  I asked Maggie if there were any crofters who weren’t hippies and she said ‘There’s Mr and Mrs McEwen. Theirs is one of only three or four households here who speak Gaelic.’

  The McEwens – who are nothing to do with the beer McEwens – lived in an old cottage facing west over the sea. Inside it looked like the nineteen-fifties. Or do I mean the eighteen-fifties? Lawrence McEwen remembered the time of the Runcimans as Eigg’s golden age but his account of it differed somewhat from Steven’s.

  ‘Lord Runciman got the island very cheaply. The previous owner had been borrowing from him, so Runciman virtually owned the island before he bought it. In those days there was a dairy which produced fresh milk and cheese and butter. Now all we have is this terrible long-life milk. Hate the st
uff. And there were jobs for everyone. Lord Runciman employed six rabbit catchers for example. And very good shooting there was. Do you know the Game Law here? You can shoot pheasant if they stray onto your property but you’re not allowed to lift them. They all belong to the Laird. To this German feller now.’

  ‘Have Germans ever come here before?’ I ask.

  ‘Only dead ones,’ says Mr McEwen. ‘Washed up on the beach during the war.’

  Without looking up from her knitting, Mrs McEwen, bespectacled, a woman dour in the extreme, nods agreement with her husband, as though the ironies of life could go no further. The light coming off the sea is metallic and the waves sound meaty and round, falling on the beaches below. ‘We don’t count him,’ she says after a while. For some reason I know she’s referring to the island’s ex, Keith Schellenberg.

  ‘And mines too,’ says Mr McEwen. ‘We used to get explosive mines washed up on the beach.’

  ‘Do you ever go to the city?’

  Lawrence McEwen glances at his wife as though I’ve said something dangerous.

  ‘Occasionally,’ she replies, ‘but I don’t like the sea-crossing.’

  ‘Does the city frighten you?’

  She pauses and looks up. ‘We take it in our stride,’ she says.

  Luca took some photographs. Unless it is absolutely unavoidable I never talk to people while they are being photographed because it makes them too self-conscious to give me their attention. But the McEwens took that in their stride too. Photographs, reporters, the press – Eigg doesn’t care much about that sort of thing. Water off a duck’s back. A sentimental view would be that places like Eigg bring out the genuine in people, for better or worse. I think it’s not that but, you know, living in such close proximity to the attentions of others, you’d be dour too. They drink to shake off, briefly, the chains of never rocking the boat.

  That night we discovered that an Italian couple were staying at the farmhouse, academics from Bologna, and Mrs Carr produced a surpassing dinner of smoked fish, roast lamb, and a hot fruit sponge with cream. Italians have a thing about Scotland, perhaps because it is the opposite end of Europe for them, and my first proper tour of Scotland was at the behest of my Sicilian friend Natale: and we discovered on our drive through the Highlands that there were more Italian visitors than any other kind.

  Luca was delighted to have the opportunity of speaking his native tongue but they didn’t overdo it and I learned that the female academic had been involved with the excavations at Pompeii. I said ‘As Venice gradually sinks into inundation, so Pompeii gradually rises from it.’ She said the former was happening too fast and the latter not fast enough. I questioned her on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, with its tantalising promise of lost masterpieces from Classical Literature coming to light, but that wasn’t her area and she was unable to tell me how affairs went on there. But she had done some work in connection with the digitalisation of the sites, the provisional results of which I’d already seen at an exhibition which came to London three years previously. Next day the weather was bad and the Italians lent me a book on Pompeii which they had with them. It was in Italian, which I can’t properly read, but it beguiled an hour or so on the bed as the rain smacked against the windows.

  Naturally the photographs occupied me more than the text and I experienced an intense recollection of my first visit to Pompeii which was one Italian springtime while staying in Ravello. I wrote of it in To Noto and shan’t repeat that here but I saw, as I flicked shiny pages, that this Italian book quoted several letters from English travellers to Pompeii. One was from Roger Fry to his mother. I’ve since tracked down the original English. He was visiting Pompeii in the spring of 1891, and wrote from the Hotel Victoria at Cava dei Tirreni:

  It is far more complete than I had expected, some of the buildings even having the roof left. The baths are especially delightful; the niches for putting one’s clothes in, the braziers for heating the rooms, everything quite complete. But the whole effect is quite wonderful of going from street to street and from one private house to another just as though one was in a modern town with free access to all the houses. They are very similar and one ground plan would serve for nearly all but of course there are slight modifications and the colouring is very varied. The decorations are extremely delicate and beautiful and in most of the rooms it is so perfect that one can get a good idea of what they looked like. Everything is absurdly small, the shops being often only about 8 feet square and the streets, even the broadest, only about as wide as Bank Place.. .I am writing this in a room with a large fire and listening to a young lady singing Schubert, so that one can hardly complain of being unhomely…

  Pompeii can be a very hot place to explore, even in spring. The dark volcanic rock holds the heat and the site is treeless and without other shade. Few of the buildings are roofed, although there have been discussions concerning the legitimacy of a roofing programme. I’m against it in theory, because it would turn the place into a mock-up, but for it in practice. In the event, sweating profusely, I was moved to tears by the experience because unlike most ruins, where the religious or warlike element is paramount, at Pompeii it is the human factor which is so strong. The Forum was smaller than the market square at Wantage! This humanity has always been the principal legacy to us from the classical world of Greece and Rome. How close to us it seems, in comparison with the primitive gibberish from elsewhere. And you enter Pompeii by the Nocera road which is lined with funerary monuments, now reborn to remind us once again of the oblivion which awaits us all.

  Herculaneum was rediscovered before Pompeii. The official date for the former is 1738. Horace Walpole, on the Grand Tour, was relatively quick off the mark and wrote to his friend Richard West from Naples on June 14th 1740:

  One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every book of travels; but we have seen something to-day that I am sure you never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of a subterranean town? a whole Roman town, with all its edifices, remaining under ground? Don’t fancy the inhabitants buried it there to save it from the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution we are not told they ever took. You remember in Titus’s time there were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and then called Hercula-neum. Above it has since been built Portici, about three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This under-ground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been discovered. It was found out by chance, about a year and a half ago. They began digging, they found statues; they dug further, they found more. Since that they have made a very considerable progress, and find continually. You may walk the compass of a mile; but by the misfortune of the modern town being overhead, they are obliged to proceed with great caution, lest they destroy both one and t’other. By this occasion the path is very narrow, just wide enough and high enough for one man to walk upright. They have hollowed, as they found it easiest to work, and have carried their streets not exactly where were the ancient ones, but sometimes before houses, sometimes through them. You would imagine that all the fabrics were crushed together; on the contrary, except some columns, they have found all the edifices standing upright in their proper situation. There is one inside of a temple quite perfect, with the middle arch, two columns, and two pilasters. It is built of brick plastered over, and painted with architecture: almost all the insides of the house are in the same manner; and, what is very particular, the general ground of all the painting is red. Besides this temple, they make out very plainly an amphitheatre: the stairs, of white marble, and the seats are very perfect; the inside was painted in the same colour with the private houses, and great part cased with white marble. They have found among other things some fine statues, some human bones, some rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine. These latter are preferred to all the ancient paintings that have ever been discovered. We have not seen them yet – as they are k
ept in the King’s apartment, whither all these curiosities are transplanted; and ‘tis difficult to see them – but we shall.

  There might certainly be collected great light from this reservoir of antiquities, if a man of learning had the inspection of it; if he directed the working, and would make a journal of the discoveries. But I believe there is no judicious choice made of directors. There is nothing of the kind in the known world; a Roman city entire of that age, and that has not been corrupted with modern repairs. Besides scrutinising this very carefully, I should be inclined to search for the remains of the other towns that were partners with this in the general ruin. ‘Tis certainly an advantage to the learned world, that this has been laid up so long. Most of the discoveries in Rome were made in a barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of treasure, and had no regard to the form and being of the building; or to any circumstances that might give light into its use and history.

  Walpole’s inclination was shared by others in the civilised world and Pompeii came to be discovered ten years after Herculaneum, though he never saw it. Venice is the victim of time, but Pompeii and Herculaneum escaped time for nearly two thousand years. History began again for them in the eighteenth century when these discoveries gave impetus to the Age of Enlightenment and to Neoclassicism in the arts. In the second half of the eighteenth-century Pompeiian decoration became all the rage, with its flat imagery and striking colours – black, green, purple, yellow, blue, vermilion – and numerous Pompeiian rooms appeared right across Europe from the Escorial to St Petersburg, more elegant but less mysterious than the originals. This decorative style, mixing architectural elements, grotesqueries and free-standing images set in large panels of coloured wash, injected a quasi-rococo gaiety into Neoclassicism and was fashionable for a long time (the Pompeiian Room at Ickworth was finished in 1879). These simulations have their own integrity; their function was aesthetic rather than antiquarian, and the gaucheness, for example, of Roman painting (so unlike the exquisite realism of Greek and Roman sculpture) was not reproduced.