The Islands

by William Wall

  There’s no time like the present.

  I swam back.

  Out of my world.

  I wore my bikini and a fine muslin shirt. I was long and straight and fit still.

  I sent Bill a text. It was the least I could do. Fair warning. I met him in the garden of the Hotel Riviera. There was bougainvillea and a few waxy petals of gardenia. That dense, almost unbreathable air they make. You could drown in the scent of gardenia. Somewhere above us in a hot little room the researcher was rearranging her face. Putting her makeup on. A little bitch. They were all little.

  I told him there in the garden. It was over.

  He put his back to the balustrade and folded his arms. I knew Bill. I had studied his moods for years. I sensed a crisis. Something had unblocked in him. I prepared myself.

  He said nothing for a time. Then very calmly he said: You knew I’d be like him.

  He took me by surprise. First I wondered who he meant. Then I wondered if he was right.

  He said: I knew that was why you married me. From the beginning. What does your lot call it? The Oedipus complex? Isn’t there a cure for that yet? In fact, can you cure anything at all?

  He laughed loudly. It was an unsettling, artificial sound.

  But I’m the soul of discretion, he said. Don’t think I’ll mention it. To your fucked-up family. Mum’s the word.

  I tried to match his calm.

  I want a divorce.

  And you’re welcome to it.

  That’s it, then.

  What’s all the fuss about? You could have said it anywhere. You could have sent me a fucking solicitor’s letter.

  There’s no time like the present.

  He pointed at me. Now I saw that his hand was shaking. Anger. Careful, Bill, anger will kill you. His father died of a stroke at fifty-seven. And now that I looked more closely at him I saw that he was sweating. His breathing was shallow. Bill was afraid of me. I knew what would come next.

  Look at you, he said, you’re like a stick insect. You’re sick. If you’d seen a doctor years ago we wouldn’t be like this now. You’re completely fucking mad. You probably thought, I’ll bring him out to this fucking shit-heap island complete with BBC fucking film crew and then I’ll ruin his fucking film. Do you know how much setting this up cost? Do you have any idea what will happen to me if I don’t pull it off? On second thought, of course you do. It was all part of your calculations, wasn’t it? This is your revenge.

  You should see yourself, Bill. You’re shaking like a leaf. I thought you’d take this like a man.

  Fuck you. Your whole family is screwed up. You picked the right profession. You’re the worst of them all. All these years I’ve put up with your nerves and your fucking obsessions and your moods.

  And so on. It was a brutal affair but I knew what I was doing. We were wrestlers but I was the only one with my feet on the ground. I had the strength of endings, of finality, of decision.

  That’s it, Bill, it’s all over and done.

  Then I said, Be on your best behavior at the birthday party tomorrow night, Bill. I promise you a treat.

  He stared at me.

  What are you up to now?

  All the next day I stayed away. I wandered the island roads as far as they would take me. Bill hadn’t come back.

  The late afternoon bus was the pleasure of bodies, of crowding into an already crowded space, of hanging from a strap and feeling myself pushed this way and that by the contrapuntal sway, the press of people; the pleasure of smiling, the chatter, the music of happening. There was a space beneath my skin that wanted compression, that felt the absence of another body. Ghostly figures of lovers and children, half memory, half possibility; there was, at times, a fluttering that terrified me. I was thinking of severance and rupture and letting go. I was thinking of falling and jumping. I was thinking that this was the last time.

  I felt emptied and filled by this crazy music, this cantata of community, of being together.

  I felt I could face anything.

  When I got home I found that Bill’s clothes and laptop were gone. Where to? Wherever the little researcher was.

  5

  At my father’s birthday dinner I sat with her. She had the body of a child and the eyes of a hungry dog. My father sat at the head of the table with Serena at his right hand and my sister at his left.

  Bill was getting his film after all. Or calling my bluff.

  He and the crew moved around the table, surveying us through the one good eye of the camera. When they came to me I waved. Hello, Bill, lovely to see you. Mosquitoes swarmed in the glare of the lighting—Bill had been experimenting with his Caravaggio effect. Before we sat down to eat we had all been given our instructions and now our skin glistened with DEET. It’s a hundred percent effective, Bill said. He did not want the scene interrupted by people slapping insects or scratching. What he was hoping for, he said, was a biblical solemnity and a twenty-first-century joie de vivre. Even my father thought this was crap. Oh, Bill, he said, you do talk the talk, don’t you? He seemed relaxed. The paterfamilias, the successful man among his adoring family.

  The dinner was catered by Hotel Riviera, my father told us. Everything we would eat was local. He made a little speech, standing at the head of the table, Serena gazing up at him. Even the wine was from the next island where the biancolella vines grew, an ancient local stock, a wine that had to be enjoyed while young. I tipped my glass to Bill—Touché, I said, we had it for our honeymoon. People around me smiled.

  The people who did the cooking, my father said, were neighbors, islanders all.

  We were to feel virtuous because of all this. Never mind that his royalties alone would have bought half the island. We were to feel we were making a contribution. That this humble repast would make a difference to the world we had abused. In his heyday he was good at this. You were excoriated and affirmed at the same time.

  We had fried flowers and little fish and mussels marinated in lemon and little parcels of cheese. Then we had a risotto bianco. Then we had chicken. The food was superb. No one can do a banquet like the Italians.

  Anyone who had walked down through the grapes and the lemon trees might have met these fellows, he said, indicating the chicken and olive secondi. They lived in this very garden until their death and a very good time they had of it too.

  He took pleasure in the reactions of the camera crew, their protests. We can’t eat them now! But they did.

  Bottles of young wine went round and round and afterwards there was grappa and Amaro Averna and Fernet-Branca. People took photographs. It was one of those perfect evenings. Father talked in a contrived way about the intensity of small, how the world needed it, how thinking big meant thinking energy, how rapacious capitalism had done for the world. He talked about Marx and Adam Smith and about low-energy, high-intensity production. About the greed of the corporation making water, earth, and air into commodities to be exploited. About power and discourse and multitude. I recognized the language and ideas from writers I was reading myself. I was surprised that in all this time he had been thinking and reading, but there was also regret—that it was all too late, that he thought he had made his mark and it was the wrong mark. Or that time had erased it.

  Once, he said, we thought we could invent a new politics, but of course the old problems were still there and they had their politics too.

  It was the lesson or the gospel or whatever it is they read. The dead air of a church service had settled on us. If there had been incense I would not have been surprised. All this solemnity. I wanted to say that feminism had done more to change the world than anything they could imagine. But there were other things I had to say.

  His next lesson was, We missed our revolution.

  First I almost laughed aloud, then I coughed loudly, the sound ending in a splutter. It may have been a bit theatrical, but I was conscious of the cameras. I heard Bill swearing somewhere outside the rim of light. I stood up.

  I said I would like to ta
ke the opportunity to tell them that Bill and I were to be divorced. It might seem strange to say it here, I said, but since we were all gathered here together, breaking bread, as it were, all the people concerned—I raised my wineglass first to the shadows where Bill was recording the moment, then to the researcher, then to my father—I was happy to be able to tell everyone at the same time. And to have it recorded for posterity.

  My father said congratulations with as much irony as he could muster considering I had shattered the air of solemnity with this trivial revelation. But I saw him glance at the little researcher.

  Serena had to have the divorce business translated before she would believe I could say it here in public. I waited. It sounded sweeter and truer in Italian. It sounded like poetry. Then she cried. She may have been one of those people who believed in marriage despite the evidence, despite being an installation artist from the left-wing city of Genoa, where, possibly, installation artists are regarded as real artists and not funny architects. Then I proposed a toast for my father’s birthday. I wished him long life and happiness in his island paradise. The glass I raised was half full of the blackness of Fernet. Everyone blithely echoed my words. Irony glistening like broken crystal in the soft night. Then I recited a poem for him, or at least a stanza and a line. It was Sylvia Plath:

  So I never could tell where you

  Put your foot, your root,

  I never could talk to you.

  The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  It stuck in a barb wire snare.

  They didn’t do toasts like that in the BBC.

  My father stared at me. Serena wanted a translation. He put out his hand to her, but it was a gesture of control. She stopped.

  I held my glass towards him again. I was conscious of the film moving frame by frame past the lens. I guessed that Bill would want this piece of drama preserved, whatever about the divorce announcement. It would make riveting television, a reality show that was real. We’re using film stock, he said, for that special atmosphere. You can’t catch it any other way. Bill’s old-fashioned virtues. I’ll say this, he made some pretty documentaries.

  You are a guest at my table, my father said.

  He pointed at me. He tried to say something else, the words stuttering like a clockwork gone wrong. I never heard what they were. Serena had her hand on his arm. A comfort or a restraint? What do you say now, Daddy? What do you say now? He shook her hand off. Serena looked up at him. She was frightened. Some of us held glass, some did not, according to our place in the ancient pledge.

  I may have been a little drunk. In my small frame even a little alcohol is enough.

  Stop it, my sister shouted. She plucked at my clothes.

  Lights, camera, action, I said. I may have waved my glass. Something gleamed in the light that might have been glass or liquid. This is better than Caravaggio, Bill, I said, The Death of the Family Newman, bestseller’s daughter fucks up the party.

  Christ, my father said, the film, for Christ’s sake, Bill, stop it.

  I had his attention now. For the first time in my life.

  But Bill said nothing. Good old Bill. The consummate professional. This is my parting gift to you, Bill.

  You kept it all under wraps, I said to my father, you buttoned us down, you were the master of ceremonies. You used us, you stole our island. You used our lives to make money. You’re a charlatan. Here’s to you, the great liar, the denier, the hider, here’s to the redistribution of guilt to each according to his need. You made me lie to the coroner when my sister Em died. And you made me swear to it. You wrecked my mother’s mind. All these years I blamed myself. Years and years of guilt. You ruined our lives. You could have saved her, but you didn’t. If you loved her she would never have died. And Em would never have died. She’d be here at this table now, drinking to your health, Emily my sister.

  Some obstacle in my throat rising and falling like a cork on a wave. I was crying. I needed to master it. I took a deep breath.

  Here’s what I want to tell you, Tom, on your seventieth birthday: I blame you. We all do.

  I knew I was crying. I felt as if my brain were breaking down. Those words stuttered out of me. I was disintegrating. I was shaking myself apart.

  There was no glasshouse, I said.

  I think I shouted it. The silence was instant. Only two of us knew what it meant. Everyone else held their breath.

  He looked at me for what seemed like a long time. I could see he was trying to remember. Then he looked away and looked back again. There was something blind in the second look.

  It was you, he said. You stole the book.

  Yes.

  Now he was looking down at his lap. His head was trembling, an infinitely small but definite vibration. Old age has laid her hand upon me. Bill and his camera moved a little closer.

  It would have been my best book, he said. A certain bestseller.

  It was a book of lies.

  He looked at me again and this time there was an appeal in it. I could do it now, at his weakest moment, destroy him as simply as breaking a bird’s neck. I said nothing.

  What did you do with it?

  I put it in a bin at Waterloo.

  Did you read it?

  No. A few pages, no more.

  God.

  I knew what it was about, I said. I knew the ending.

  His lips and the tip of his nose were white. His breathing was fast. He was sitting very straight.

  You’re a vicious little bitch, he said. A sinister little bitch. Jesus Christ.

  He stood up awkwardly and stumbled and sat down again.

  No more, Serena said, please, basta!

  She put her arms around him but she was looking at me.

  She was a delicate woman. Those ideal forms that Italy makes. Her dark eyebrows were charcoal lines on a face that was shaped for pity. Her lips full as cherries. Her perfect breasts. Her boy’s hips. Everyone at the table was in love with her. When she admonished me I sat down.

  My sister comforted her. She held her hand. No one held mine. No one looked at me. I let the evening go. Darkness got past the lights. It flooded the lemon trees and fireflies appeared.

  6

  Bill didn’t come home. I wasn’t surprised. I heard he was living with someone in Putney. I heard she worked for a fashion magazine. His next real manifestation was a Form D10: the petitioner therefore prays that the said marriage may be dissolved, etc., etc. He cited unreasonable behavior as the grounds for divorce. It seemed a bizarre choice to me, but my solicitor assured me it would make no difference. I went out to dinner to celebrate, but afterwards, coming home on the busy bus, I felt my life had somehow darkened, that a shade had fallen—or perhaps a filter that eliminated certain characteristics of the light. For a long time there was something tenebrous even about morning, and nights were bleak. We are to think that the departure of someone who has been part of our psyche, no matter what role they played, must inevitably be felt as loss, and I suppose I was bereft in some way, even if at the conscious level I was happy to be rid of him. Anyway, I survived.

  My sister had elected herself as my support. I found it strange that divorce had precipitated me into the role of patient or victim. Until now I had imagined myself as the strong one, my sister the waif, the underdog.

  She told me that my father forgave me. It made me angry and at the same time ashamed. What did he mean by forgiveness? And for what? Did he understand anything?

  He says he’s going to write to you, she said.

  Tell him I won’t read it.

  I won’t do your dirty work, Grace.

  I shrugged. It’s not his place to forgive anyone.

  She looked at me. You know, for a clinical psychologist you really haven’t a clue.

  I grinned at her.

  I’m on edge a bit, I said. I keep seeing Bill in crowds. It’s ridiculous. It’s like a girl in love. I see him from the bus. I see him ahead of me on escalators, getting off the tube. I’m seeing more of the bastard th
an I did when we were married. Is there an epidemic of obesity in London?

  She reached across and held my hand. Just read the letter, she said. Promise.

  Touch undoes us always. I was screwed tight and now I was spiraling into tears. I looked away. She squeezed my hand again. My sister comforting me. It felt so strange.

  It’s all right, Grace, she said.

  In time I turned back.

  I saw a shipwreck once. In Cornwall or Devon, or at least I saw the wrecked ship. A small coaster had mistaken its place at the entrance to a harbor. Finding the error, it had attempted to turn, and in the process, while the engines were being put into reverse but the ship was still carrying its way, it ran onto a sandstone outcrop. That was a night of fog. Then came a series of southwesterly gales that lasted almost three weeks. I watched from a distance as the ship was first broken in two, the head tipped forward into deeper water, and finally battered with astonishing force until the original structure had all but disappeared. At the end of it, the stern section resembled nothing but a stamped-on drink can.

  I thought often about the mistakes the captain had made: how in the fog he had missed the lighthouse, how too late he had seen it and begun the fatal turn. From the technical point of view, had the maneuver, ill-chosen or not, been executed correctly? The sequence only seems inexorable in retrospect. In reality every moment is infinite and capable of infinite possibility. How many of the possibilities would have resulted in the same outcome? I thought of my mother, the way she held Em between her legs when she was sitting, one arm wrapped around her chest, or caressing her hair.

  The first letter arrived on a Monday morning. The letters came every two or three days. Some were long like the first, some short. They were mostly reminiscences, and more than once I wondered if they were excerpts from some new memoir he was writing, or rough drafts. At first I did not reply. Five letters came before I wrote a word. I responded because he asked me if I wanted him to continue. I have always been capable of great coldness. It’s what makes me a good psychologist. And a bad lover. I said that the letters were clearly fulfilling some need in him. He should continue until that need had been satisfied. None came that week, nor the next. I regretted my reply almost as soon as I put the letter in the post. As the days dragged on I began to think about asking my sister. In the end I phoned her up. She didn’t know I had been getting letters. She may have been jealous. Twice I picked up the phone to call him. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to say I regretted everything. But then a new letter came. It was a day of stupefying downpours. The streets clattered with rain. The noise of cars, their wheels spewing water like broken pipes. People rushing past under umbrellas, wearing those transparent plastic coats and ponchos. Tourists, swamped by London. He was telling me that he was dying. Or just that he was getting old. I was disturbed, as much by my own sudden apprehension as by the possibility of losing him. A door opened onto my own mortality. While our parents live we imagine lights between ourselves and the great gloaming. And I was suddenly conscious of the waste—all those years that I hated him. I called my sister and arranged to meet her in Kettner’s. It was her choice. It was founded by a chef of Napoleon’s. It was a place that was conscious of some faded belle epoque that never quite happened.