The Islands

by William Wall

  His stories seemed just like stories to us, like fairy tales. The reality was a few lines of salt-blanched kale. The reality was trying to rot seaweed for fertilizer and having to live with the sour fish smell. Agriculture practiced at the most desultory level. We had no animals except the cat. The reality was being mostly cold at night and then being too hot. And being alone and not knowing how to behave when we were not alone. Of feeling safe with the world’s ocean as our moat, a place where no one watched us with envy. A place that was precarious and fatal and temporary. The reality was a kind of foolishness that was like a dream, an existence that had no outside, no edge, that we could never transgress. A dream is a language; it has its own alphabet. But the dream knows that someone somewhere will understand and all communication is founded on that premise. But we grew up without that faith. We never knew that we could be understood. These are the consequences of living on an island.

  That last summer I think we sailed almost every day. It must have been an exceptional year. At any rate that’s how I remember it. The cockpit of Richard’s boat was too small for five of us—Richard Wood, Mother, my sisters, and me. It was narrow and our feet crossed in the center and the huge iron tiller extended two feet, so that whoever sat opposite the helmsman might as well have been steering too.

  There was one day that I always think of as the beginning of the end. It was time winding up. Of course I believe that the past is not a narrative, it has no beginning and end, even though we survive, we hold ourselves together by telling stories about ourselves. For a practicing psychologist I have a weak faith in consequence.

  We beat out against a southerly wind and we fished for mackerel all day. We caught only three. The shoals were not in so it must have been June or early July. We hove to about ten miles out and we three children lined the rails and dropped our lines and Mother and Richard Wood held their faces to the sun and chatted. When they had had enough, he backed the staysail and brought her round and we sailed back, surfing thunderously on the ingoing swells. The boat rushed forward, caught in the belly of one, and then, unable to keep pace, slowed and fell back into the next following trough. In the valleys the sails flogged and clapped, and on the crest they were full-breasted matrons shooing us home. Mother and Richard Wood took turns at the tiller. They sat very close. I saw that he held her right thigh tightly between his knees. His body was moving with the movement of the boat. Her knee was in his groin.

  Her knee in his groin and the motion of the boat and the scissors of his thighs around hers. It was a slow warm day and I was thirteen and at that point it was an easy thing to fall. In those days I swam so much my skin ached. I tasted salt. I was holding the mizzen shroud in one hand and my mackerel feathers in the other. It was simply a matter of transferring my trust from the boat to the line. I fell over the stern. I surfaced quickly. I could feel the tug of the lead. Had a mackerel caught the feather he could have towed me away and I would not have cared. I saw the boat disappear in a trough and when it rose again they were looking for me.

  Swimming in the deep sea is a kind of letting go. I could do it because I was never afraid of anything. The darkness was between my legs. I lost a sandal. The boat came back. It was an elegant piece of seamanship. I know he never for a moment believed I had fallen. But I had.

  They made me take my clothes off and sit on the bunk in a towel. My mother put the kettle on. Tea would warm me, she said, as she always did. I had given her a fright, but I was a brave girl. She was an innocent, in so many ways; she trusted things to be themselves. My sister Jeannie came down to look at me. She said nothing. My sister Em looked in and asked if I was all right. She too had been worried. Richard watched me from the tiller. I saw that I had moved the stone of his attention. Sunlight slanted in from the porthole. After a time the primus needed to be pumped again. I did it. When the kettle boiled my mother made tea. There was barely enough room in the tiny cabin for the three of us. She was stooped because the headroom was bad.

  They hung my clothes on the guardwire and as we approached the anchorage they gave them back. They were damp and sticky.

  Richard said I would need to learn that there was always one hand for the boat and one for myself. He said I was such an otter that I needed to learn how to stay out of the water. I needed to become truly amphibian. I suspected he was preparing a poem in his head and these random metaphors were some kind of a beginning.

  Em let the anchor go. She liked lifting the pawl and releasing the clutch with the iron bar. It was something a child could do and love. Lift the pawl and release the clutch and the chain runs out with a satisfying clatter that becomes a growl. Tighten the clutch again. She loved it. The wind was almost gone. We came to a slow stop, winding the jib on the Wykeham-Martin gear. The mizzen was always first to go up, last to come down. It kept her nose to the wind, he said. The bay was ablaze in the evening sun. There was a seal watching us. He put me and Jeannie ashore first and then went back for the others. We walked up to the house.

  Jeannie said, I saw you, you jumped.

  I did not.

  I saw you letting go.

  I changed in our room up under the slates and when I came down they were all there in the kitchen. Richard had the mackerel. He ran his knife along the membrane of the belly and the guts spilled out red and black. He nipped the stomach where it penetrated the gut and scraped it into a bucket and started again. My mother had her hands in the basin. She brushed soil from the potatoes with her thumbs. They were laughing. They were talking in low voices but still I heard what they were saying. They were talking about running away. Outside it was already dark. Jeannie was at the window looking out at the reflection of the inside, as though she could see through it. Em was looking into a picture book. Nobody looked at me.

  I see now that I was already watching my mother for the secrets she knew, even though in the end it would be Jeannie who mastered them; they were wasted on me. I knew it was her body. I remember her beautiful breasts with their sand-pale aureoles, the wrinkle under them, her full straight thighs and the place between them. Though I didn’t know it then, I wanted my body to know such things.

  The longer my father stayed away the more open she became with Richard. She kissed him holding her palm flat against his heart. What did her hand hear? I watched them lying in a fold of heather near the beacon facing the sun. She was listening. What was he saying? I would never know. Her summer frock was turned back to her hip. She liked the heat but she never tanned. Her face was freckled but pale. The beacon threw a long shadow. When it reached them they got up.

  I listened for their lovemaking all that summer long. But what can be learned from listening tells us nothing about gesture or act. Although what happens is natural enough, no one could invent it, exactly. I knew all about whispering and sighing and hushing and the other sounds. Their bed creaked like a boat.

  On my birthday, he gave me a poem. Jeannie gave me a stone shaped like a seal with one eye. Em gave me a card with our names in a heart.

  We were sitting at the table. I looked at the poem as if I were reading but in reality I was watching my chance. When Mother turned to the kitchen I kissed him on the mouth. It tasted of fat. Mother never saw but Jeannie did. Her jet-black eyes. What was the poem about? I tore it up that night. I never read a word. That night I hated him for sitting there and accepting my kiss and saying nothing to break her spell. When she turned around she was holding my birthday cake on a plate. There were only two candles—I don’t think we ever had any more—and he began that idiotic fellow song and they all joined in the chorus. I should have known that he was a failure but children only feel the horror. They have no idea why.

  When we had eaten the cake we all went out to see the evening. I remember that the sun was a blood orange and there were thin lines of horizontal cloud. I remember it more intensely because of my state of mind. If it had been raining I would remember it as clearly because everything I saw and felt that evening had the intensity of sex. We walked to the wes
tern end of the island and my mother, with Richard’s help, climbed onto the beacon. She was triumphant and a little crazed. Up there, she said, she would have sunshine long after we were in darkness. Em cried because she was jealous. Em was the climber in the family. I walked down to the pebble beach with Richard. He said, You must take care of your mother, Grace. He was thoughtful, and I think, a little frightened. I knew what he meant. He turned to look back when he said it, and I looked too. She looked like some kind of stone against the darkening sky, a graven image as unsafe and uncertain as any false god.

  And then there was a scene in our kitchen some days or weeks later. My mother stood with her back to the sink and her arms folded. She wore, I remember, a long patterned caftan. The pattern was a kind of red paisley like an amoeba on a pale cream. She wore slacks and sandals. Her face was freckled. Her hair was held back by a band of tortoiseshell. She was never more beautiful than when she was angry. Em was somewhere else. She may have been upstairs. Jeannie was sitting by the window. She had been to the well, I remember, and the bucket of water she had brought was standing on the kitchen floor. I could see a fine membrane of dust and pollen and salt gathering on it in the sunlight. Richard Wood stood in the center of the room talking about me. I needed some discipline in my life, he said. I was growing up. Sooner or later I would leave the island and I would have to make my way in the world. I remember he said it exactly like that, in those old-fashioned terms: I would have to make my own way in the world.

  It was as though I weren’t there, but I was. Or at least I think I was. It’s true that Jeannie remembered it for me. She told me everything in careful detail many years later, including things I didn’t know about. She was able to tell me that Richard talked about their plan. He was to take me out sailing and explain everything. He was to do it gently, in a fatherly way, there being no father to speak of at that moment. Out there, alone with me, on the waste of the sea.

  Jeannie remembered that he had blue jeans with a slight flare and that he had a faded blue fisherman’s smock. He could wear those things authentically. It was as though his class had appropriated the entire history of the country and could be what they liked, whatever character from fiction or history: the poor beggar, the journeyman tailor, the wandering seaman, the sailor. We saw them wherever we went, in London, in the houses we visited, these members of the former ruling class who had adopted victimhood as though it belonged to them.

  In the end my mother agreed. She agreed, I think, because she could not do without him. If my father had been there it would never have happened. But there were long weeks when we were alone. When we saw Richard’s sails—and they were unmistakable: two headsails, one set on a bowsprit with the ancient Wykeham-Martin winding gear, the tall main, the little stunted mizzen, the classic yawl-rig; there was no other boat like it on the coast at that time—our hearts lifted. Here was news of the main. Here was someone with stories to tell, with fruit or meat or newspapers or Kiley’s lemonade.

  All right, she said. I give in. But you must be back by teatime. No wandering.

  She meant he could not keep me away after dark. She knew he sometimes drifted up the coast and stayed offshore during the night. That he fished and drank black coffee. That he sometimes found himself among the night trawler fleets, or out where the big companies were prospecting for oil. Or anchored in some cove out of the seaway. She would not stand for that. Not the two of us alone in the boat overnight, the sea and the stars and the two of us in the little cabin in the afterheat of the primus stove.

  I don’t think she believed in any plan. Childhood was nothing to her. It was just another time.

  So I picked up my anorak, my boots, my jumper and went down with him to the boat.

  We would sail south for half the day. At midday we would turn and beat back up. At that point we would be twenty-five or thirty miles offshore. It would be him and me and the deep sea. A sailboat is all protocol and procedure, he said. And the names of things. He named each rope, each stay and shroud, each of the corners of the sails, each edge, each block and its tackle and parts, the sheave, the cheek, the choke, the cleat. He named the processes of taking in and letting go. In the brutal simplicity of that day he named things I have never forgotten. I remember that unless the mizzen was trimmed properly she sailed like a bitch. I remember that he had stitched a leather cutaway into the clew of the inner staysail and the threads had worked loose. I remember that in light airs it was necessary to back the jib to make her tack and that unless it was done smartly the boat simply stopped in irons. All this I learned, and so much more.

  The leaving and the return are the boat’s best time. She feels the anchor coming home and she becomes impatient for the sea. She is at her slowest and most sensitive. She turns her head. The wind against her body.

  First the mizzen. He showed me how to sweat it up. Even for someone with my light frame it was easy work. We unwound the jib and when the anchor was home and dry he allowed her to fall away to one side and used the backed headsail to turn her to the open sea. Once outside the arms of the anchorage he brought her to wind and I sweated the main and the staysail and we bore away. He told me what to do and I must do it at once. There was never to be time to think. I must carry out each order quickly, precisely, calmly. Mistakes would be punished by the boat.

  This is what we did.

  It was a brilliant day of northerly winds. The sea in the lee of the land was flat. The sails filled and the boat ran out, and all that long day he drove me to distraction.

  Far out beyond the horizon there were only two of us. The wood giving to the wind and sea. Wooden boats move in every way.

  He told me my mother was worried about me.

  His arms around the iron tiller. There was a knuckle of iron at the end. One hand enclosed it.

  Did I know that they had talked about sending me to board at his old school? It was co-ed now. My father had been written to. I was a wild child. My mother had asked him to take my reading in hand and so I might be seeing more of him. He said that my father’s theories about homeschooling were fine when I was younger, but now I would need to sit exams. I would need to think about the future. It was a cruel world, he said, and wildness was punished without mercy. He had been thinking a lot about me, he said, and so had my mother. Worrying, in fact. They had both been worrying about me.

  I had not known I was in danger. I sat straight as a larch, staring at the future that seemed to me no more than several wave crests distant. I would leave the island. She wanted to part us. I hated her for it. She was plotting to put me aside. When children think of punishing their parents they understand what it is to be powerless. They think about dying. When I’m dead you’ll be sorry. I tried to imagine such a complete punishment. But I also knew I would not be there to know. Then later there was fear. What would school be? What were other people of my age like?

  All this as we ran down our southing with nothing but the heaving sea before and the land falling away behind. He watched me. In the dreamy running down when the boat ran almost as fast as the wind and it seemed as if we were carrying our own air, the sails full of it, wing on wing.

  I was long and straight from shoulder to hips. My shorts hung low. At some point in my anger and fear I became conscious of the dimpled hollows of his back and waist.

  His arms wrapped around the iron tiller, his cheek on his shoulder. He had long lashes like a girl’s. The sinews of his arms. His hair fell continually into his eyes and he brushed it away with a gesture that took five hundred years to perfect.

  And coming back he shouted and hectored me. Each tack was a welter of rope and clattering sail and groaning blocks. We beat up hard by and water flew in our faces. He worked me brutally, coldly. My muscles hurt. My skin burned from the sheets. Now I know what he was doing. He was loosening my grip on myself.

  By evening we were anchored in the Carthys, two broken reefs with a patch of drowned sand between. We were stopping there to eat, he said. In an hour or so the wind woul
d shift and set fair for home. We would coast back on the evening breeze. My mouth was dry. My nails were broken. I was mortally tired. I said I would bathe before eating. I began to change into my swimsuit. I moved swiftly, peeling things away, dropping them. My shirt, my shorts, my pants.

  Use a towel, he said. But it was too late.

  Look at you, he said, you’re brazen.

  He smelled of sweat and iron. I was pulling on my bathing suit, I think. I stopped and looked him straight in the eye. What if he kissed me? My head to his? I kept my mouth closed. He would put his hand on me. Now something in my belly leaped like a fish. My heart raced. He looked at my face. I stared brazenly at him, covered barely to the waist, the straps of my bathing suit trapped between finger and thumb of each hand. I saw him look down. I knew what he was looking for. I remembered my mother’s muffled cry in the night, the sound of animals struggling. There was an instant that hung at the cusp, when anything might have happened, I believe that still.

  Then he slapped me.

  I was taut and supple as a whiplash. I went straight out onto the little afterdeck. I thought for an instant of jumping. I believed in swimming away, in striking out for home, five or six miles of open sea. I could trust myself to the ocean. I stretched my arms towards it, arched my back, my toes wrapped on the coaming. Already I was exulting in falling. It would have fixed the moment forever. But he called out.

  Don’t, he said. Stop as you are.

  I turned to defy him. For the first time ever I was conscious of my breasts. They were small—they still are—but the nipples were pale, something like the color of sunlit sand. It occurred to me that there was power in staying as well as running away.

  I’m going to jump, I said.

  You’ll only have to come back. There’s nothing on these rocks.

  Someone would come. Mum would come.

  Who would tell her?

  I could swim.