How to Disappear

by Duncan Fallowell

  Keith Schellenberg was an ageing playboy, a vegetarian and a wildlife enthusiast who declared in a benevolent and defiant proclamation that the whole island would from now on be a nature reserve. Benevolent to the wildlife, defiant of local tradition. He forbad shooting and permitted only limited fishing. At the same time he drove a titanic Rolls Royce backwards and forwards along the island’s only road and played ‘war games’ across the moors and woods, crags and beaches, with other ageing playboys. During one of them the Nazi flag was seen to fly from the Lodge flagpole. Schellenberg behaved coarsely with the tenants and it all came to a head when he attempted to prise the Carr family out of Kildonan. During the subsequent protests his beloved Rolls Royce was captured and set on fire. Schellenberg abandoned Eigg in a fluster, referring to the islanders as ‘rotten, dangerous, and totally barmy revolutionaries.’

  Maruma resembles Schellenberg to the extent that his association with Eigg is his chief, perhaps his only distinction. Otherwise Maruma is very different. Schellenberg was unavoidable whereas Maruma is undiscoverable. Maruma is a wraith and, judging from the intermittent vibrations he sends out, he is a New Age wraith. He is also very indecisive. He seems to hang around waiting for the energy to be right – which is a mug’s game; to sit in a chair waiting for ‘energy’ sounds like stalling or depression or inner conflict. Therefore he generates waves of doubt in others. Where are his paintings, said to have sold for enormous sums? They have been searched for but not located. What is this art of fire energy he goes on about? One doesn’t expect it to compete with Vesuvius but surely it has heat of some kind? I’m told he’s a chain-smoker – would that be it? And is there any money? His ex-wife, a woman called Renate, told a reporter that Maruma is not rich in his own right and does not come from a rich family. The Eigg purchase appears to have been funded by a loan of £1.6 million from what one British newspaper has identified as the Volksbank Workers Banking Co-op. Now, they say, problems have arisen over this loan. Where will the additional millions required for investment be coming from? The locals are gasping for cash like landed haddock.

  Suddenly the mid-day ferry is glimpsed as a dot on the horizon. Everyone stirs and stands to attention in an orderly row and all eyes strain, even the sozzled ones. The ferry swells into view but halts and anchors offshore, riding on the waves while passengers transfer to the little red boat which will bring them to land at the jetty steps. We are scrutinising the commotion of bags, suitcases and bums for some outline of a plump man in his forties, with long dark hair and a pale face, wearing a beret. Could that be he? Or that one? No likely candidate presents himself. The red transit boat arrives at the jetty and ties up. As its passengers disembark – two priests and a telephone repairman – the remainder are sailors – Luca says ‘Fuck…’ and the camera, ready to immortalise Maruma’s apprehensive face and transmit it to the world, slumps unused to his side on its straps. The islanders look at each other, shrug, and sit down more or less where they are and open more beer. Colin Carr gives a strangled asymmetrical laugh. Maruma has stood them up again. Yet again. No message of apology or explanation. Nothing. He simply didn’t come, and if they still hope to see him the only thing they can do is – carry on waiting.

  This resurgence of inertia is intolerable. Do we sit down and drink beer and utter vapidities until it’s time to eat and get fatter? Not me. I escape up the hill to have a look inside the Protestant church. A shower breaks as I enter the neat Arts and Crafts building and when I come out again a perfect rainbow has arched from a field on the left into the sea on the right. The sun is warm on my head. Further up the lane the Huddersfield boy comes by on his motor scooter – he hadn’t been waiting at the jetty, he had more sense. He points to the rainbow and looks at me and smiles. He knows the island well and tells me about an isolated tarn he likes to fish in. I ask him if we can go there and he says ‘Sure’. We head for the centre of the island, leave the bike beside a stile, he unstraps his fishing rod, and we trek through heather, with the great tower of rock hanging over us like the sword of Damocles. It’s too strenuous for conversation but at last we arrive at the dark pool of water, his special pond. The views are always immense on Eigg. But up here they are empyrean. As he joints together his rod, I try to take it in, the wheeling vistas, his expression concentrated on his fishing rod, the air passing clean through one’s nostrils and lungs and blood, and instead of letting it go, letting it fly, letting it all disappear, I decide to ground it with an ordinary question. If I don’t I might be blown away, never to return.

  ‘Do you work on the island?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  I never, on principle, ask people what they do for a living, but I’m longing to know in his case, longing to decode his elfin grace, to find out exactly who he is. But I don’t know what to say. He helps me by adding, with one eye screwed up, ‘Don’t work at anything much. Bit of this, bit of that.’

  ‘Nothing you’d call a career.’

  He smiles again. ‘I’m too relaxed for a career.’

  We sit quietly, making occasional small talk. Birds shriek high above us, gliding about the shaft of rock which is thick and black against the sky but cuts sharply into it because the sky, by contrast, is pure blue. He stands up, moves off a little into the heather for a pee and returns, buttoning the fascinating thing away. He’s gifted with effortless, animal charm, but it doesn’t work on the fish -nothing bites.

  ‘Did you ever meet this German artist?’ I ask.

  ‘No. I heard about him. Don’t you think he sounds like an idiot?’

  Not an idiot, no. Maruma is a nightmare. People like Maruma, you have to avoid them. People who don’t know whether they’re coming or going. People who stand you up or cut you dead, and then express surprise if you’re put out or hurt. Usually they’re men unable to face it. Men more than women are guilty of offensive cowardice. Men are more easily discouraged than women. Maruma is frightened to come. If he’s into fire energy it’s probably because he has none himself. I’m willing to bet he’s a water person who found himself the owner of Eigg not because of the volcanic plug driven through its heart but because it is an island, because it is surrounded and contained by water. If I were into astrology I’d wager he is a water sign – Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces – but I was never into astrology, not even when I was taking LSD, though that drug did give rise to an interest in numerology which is, I think, more credible since ‘number’ is what lies behind music and science. The only time I find my eyes wandering over the horoscopes in women’s magazines is when I fall in love frustratedly, because then one is scanning the mythic realm for any signs, any clues, any way across the divide, any way out of the self and into the other, and so the irrational character of astrology becomes its recommendation, the loved one viewed with abstract objectivity from elsewhere.

  Maruma is beginning to discover that a man who buys an island buys a kingdom, and that kingship is a trap. A king is not a free man, as Eigg’s previous owner discovered. A trap but not a mistake. We may choose inconveniently or unwisely – for ourselves or for others – but we never choose incorrectly. We always gravitate to what we need to realise our particular natures. I think I’ll phone Maruma again. But not from here, not from Eigg. I don’t mind waiting for a while, for quite a long while very often. So much of my life has been spent waiting, because I don’t see that there’s any alternative if you are trying to achieve something. You get on with other things of course, but in your heart you are still waiting. For love, for success, for a cheque, for an answer, an acceptance, a telephone call, an email, a response, yes, a response, often that’s all one is waiting for, a human response…But there comes a point when if you hang around any longer you’re a berk.

  So Luca and I packed our bags, said our good-byes, and caught the train from Mallaig to Glasgow. It was now, on the 16.10 train, that I had that freakish surprise. I found myself reading the actual obituary of Bapsy Pavry.

  ‘Are you all right?’ enquired Luca.

  ‘I th
ink so.’

  ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

  No – the ghost was the obituary I’d read before. The precognition one. This was the real one – even more startling. It really was shocking to find that obituary exactly as I’d envisaged it, staring at me on the return train to Glasgow. Bapsy showing up again without warning. Maybe Maruma will unexpectedly enter my life in the future, from an oblique angle, when it might take me a little time to register who the hell he is. I hope so.

  In Glasgow we booked a suite for the night at the Central Hotel, a Victorian behemoth put up over the Central Railway Station and refitted in the 1930 s with giant sofas and beds. Several huge rooms opened into each other before opening into a bathroom whose high Cunard curves disappeared in a blaze of white. Our sitting-room windows looked down on to the bustle of the station concourse which the double glazing transformed into a lively silent film. Viewed from the cushions of our gallery sofa, trains came and went in a bizarre silence. Luca wanted to snooze, so I took myself off to the health club in the basement and slotted myself into the sauna with one of the hotel waiters. He told me that the hotel had seen better days and that Laurel and Hardy, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Churchill, the Kennedys and the Beach Boys had all stayed there. ‘What about Cernuda?’ I asked.

  The heat hissed around his perplexity. He’d never heard of Cernuda. Few people have. I’ve never ‘done’ Glasgow. I’d like to one day. On this occasion it struck me as far more exciting than Edinburgh and soon after the Eigg jaunt I tried to arrange a visit to Glasgow in pursuit of Cernuda. He was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville in 1902. The first volume of his to make a mark was Forbidden Pleasures in 1931. Thereafter surrealism and classicism found a fruitful rapprochement in the work of a man who believed that ‘he who knows love wants nothing else’. At the beginning of 1938 Cernuda left Spain to go on a lecture tour of England – and he never returned to his homeland. The triumph of Franco and the outbreak of the Second World War persuaded him to stay on as lecturer in Spanish studies at Glasgow University where he had gone in January 1939. He remained there until his move to Cambridge in 1944, London in 1945, the USA in 1947, and Mexico in 1952. Controversy surrounds his death in Mexico City in 1963 – some say it was a heart attack, others suicide after a rewarding love affair turned sour. The corollary of love eliminating all other needs is that when love goes you are left with nothing.

  I rang the head of Hispanic Studies in the University of Glasgow, Professor Gareth Walters, to enquire whether any of Cernuda’s colleagues might still be alive and he suggested I write to Neil McKinlay who was working on a study of Cernuda. Mr McKinlay said that Cernuda ‘was very reclusive and loathed Glasgow intensely’ but one of the Spaniard’s colleagues, Ivy McClelland, was still alive. So I wrote to her. A letter came back – but from Professor Walters. ‘Ivy does not feel she would have much to tell you about Cernuda as he was a very reserved person. She doubts it would be worthwhile for you to make a special visit to Glasgow to speak to her about him, but she will be willing to speak to you on the phone if you wish.’ When I did ring her the phrases ‘nothing to say’, ‘he was very reserved’ went round and round, not a single personal observation of the man, let alone an anecdote. The page on which I was going to record my conversation with Ivy McClelland has one word on it: ‘Nothing’.

  A man by the name of Ian Gibson, writing to me on another matter in 1997, suggested I contact Rafael Martinez Nadal, a friend both of Lorca and Cernuda. Rafael lived in Hampstead, Mr Gibson said, and was very knowledgeable and approachable and in the telephone book. When I rang I learned that Mr Martinez Nadal was at his house in Madrid but would be back soon and I should write to him. I wrote a letter to the Hampstead address and was afterwards myself in Herefordshire – the South of France – St Petersburg – my father died – and there was no reply to my letter. Rafael Martinez Nadal died in 2001, aged 97.

  Luca said ‘I’m not going to Venice.’

  ‘Copycat.’

  ‘That’s right. You convinced me. Next time I do a story I want to go somewhere hot. With brothels.’

  ‘Try Mexico.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  In the end I think it was Nicaragua he went to – and never returned.

  At least things were moving again. And we hadn’t given up on Maruma altogether. Back in London, I tried the Maruma Centre repeatedly, with much the same result as before. He’s running away while pretending not to run away; that’s what this sort of person does unfortunately. Like old Monty did with Bapsy. Maruma’s receptionist was always patient and good-natured. Occasionally she laughed and he was always unavailable: in a meeting, arriving later, anything to avoid confrontation. Until one day, right in the middle of her spiel, Maruma interrupted her and came on the line.

  ‘Oh – you’ll speak to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About Eigg?’

  ‘There are so many things going on at the moment, Duncan.’

  You see, he’s so damn nice. That’s the other big problem with his kind – they’re so damn nice. One is stymied by their niceness.

  ‘What happens next, Maruma?’

  ‘Long story.’ I hear him inhale deeply on a fag.

  ‘Well, what about the Lodge being turned into a health clinic?’

  ‘There is shit energy there.’

  ‘In the Lodge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’m surprised. I thought there was lovely energy there.

  ‘Perhaps we will do hotel.’

  Another go at the fag.

  ‘And the proposed distillery? That would be popular.

  Fire-water.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The red indians called alcohol fire-water.’

  ‘…You see, I have to clean up so many misunderstandings caused by the press and I must especially clean them up with the people of Eigg.’

  ‘Coz you’re never there.’

  ‘Yes, they cannot find out what person I am.’

  This is the nub of it, isn’t it. Why is communication such an act of bravery? Why do we hide the truth that is in our hearts? Oh, the truth! No arrangement ever came about by telling the truth. People often prefer to die than to tell the truth, hoping that a more acceptable truth will arrive in the future, one that they can admit to. But truth is really all that matters because the great thing is to be able to look someone in the eye. The truth is nakedness now. The truth is active. And not telling the truth is what paralyses everything.

  ‘So why don’t you go there and reveal yourself?’ I ask.

  Sigh.

  ‘Do you have money problems?’

  ‘I have no money problems.’

  ‘Do you love the island?’

  ‘Yes, I fell in love with it when I saw it from above.’

  ‘And from below?’

  ‘Below?’

  ‘Is it too much for you on the ground?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

  He’s choking. I feel awful really, goading him on.

  ‘Are you afraid of Eigg now?’

  ‘No, not afraid. But I don’t want to play the landlord.’

  ‘Unless you play the landlord, nothing will happen.’

  ‘What would you like to do with Eigg?’

  ‘Me?’

  He’s asking me. There is something enchanting about him.

  ‘Yes, Duncan, you. You seem very interested. So have you got any ideas what to do with it?’ I hear him light another cigarette – in Stuttgart.

  ‘Well, yes, actually. I do have some ideas.’

  ‘Which you believe in?’

  ‘I said ideas. Not beliefs.’

  I don’t have beliefs. Beliefs are dead things. I want to know things, not believe things. I have some ideas I could propose, that’s all.

  ‘We must talk more about this, face to face, on Eigg.’

  Oh dear, we’ve been here before.

  ‘Definitely. Yes. When will you visit it next?’ I enquire flatly.
/>   ‘Soon I hope. Maybe at the end of the month.’

  ‘Or at the beginning of next?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So the islanders waited and waited. I didn’t wait, no siree, not any more. But they had no choice. They waited. Ends of months and beginnings of months came and went. And they waited for their lover to answer their appeals, to call, to speak, to visit. And still they waited, unable to move forwards or to have closure or to grasp what on earth was going on, fettered by his remoteness and his refusal and his silence. They never saw any more of Maruma. He never returned. Then one day the island was put up for sale. And the islanders raised the money to buy it for themselves. They need never wait for a lover again.

  CHAPTER FOUR Who was Alastair Graham?

  At the end of the nineteen-seventies I was living in the small town of Hay-on-Wye writing a book. Several times a week it was necessary to escape Hay’s delightful, gossipy confines, and one of my jaunts took me to New Quay. This is not to be confused with Newquay in Cornwall, surf capital of Britain; and it not often is because New Quay is an obscure fishing village on the west coast of Wales. Its brightly painted cottages have storm porches of coloured glass and are built in terraces on cliffs of black rock. Beneath them, coves of pebbles alternate with loops of dull sand. In the season, not very well-off holidaymakers occupy its few modest hotels and boarding houses.

  It was not the season. It was chilly and damp and the sky was a monotonous grey. At lunchtime, after meandering New Quay’s little streets, I entered a pub called the Dolau Inn not far from the sulky, flapping water. There was a mere handful of customers inside and, having ordered a pint, I nodded at a character sitting on a high stool at the end of the bar and eventually exchanged a few words with him. He was getting on in years and bald, with a trim grey beard, and dressed spotlessly in yachting clothes: sailcloth trousers with knife-edge creases, a navy-blue jersey, slip-on deck shoes. One thing struck me in particular: his nails, perfectly manicured, were white from base to tip. His hands looked as though they’d never touched even so much as a tiller (an erroneous impression, it turned out). In these simple surroundings his curiosity lay chiefly in the air he had of an extreme refinement tinged with exoticism.