‘Oh, there’s one of those all right. He’s called Bernard.’ I hung up before she could reply.
Rose had been feeding slabs of peat into the stove, a once-cream Rayburn, smoked to the colour of a kipper by half a century of use. The furniture and the floral-patterned wallpaper had a similar patina of age, and the only modern items in the room were the telephone and the television set, perched on a corner of the dresser. Like the table and chairs, the dresser was solid but rough-hewn, and I could imagine Rose’s father or grandfather making them from timber salvaged from shipwrecks, even saving and straightening the bent nails to be used again.
Rose turned up the draught on the stove, then began wiping down the kitchen surfaces.
‘Dusty stuff, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I grew up in Kerry, in the west of Ireland. We used to burn it there.’
‘Tell me about it. What’s it like?’
‘A bit like here, cold and windy. I used to think it was pretty remote as well, but I’ve changed my mind since I’ve seen the Falklands.’
Rose smiled. ‘Wait till you’ve seen some of the settlements on West Falkland before you call us remote. They found a body on Mount D’Arcy a few years ago. It was a shepherd who’d gone missing in the 1930s. The body was lying in the open, but no one had ever passed that way in sixty years.’
She opened the back door. There was a meat safe the size of a coal shed just outside. She emerged from it carrying the hindquarter of a sheep. ‘I hope you like mutton. It’s known as 365 in the Falklands. We seem to eat it every day of the year.’
She made some tea and we sat facing each other across the table as the light faded outside. Rose talked eagerly, her eyes sparkling as she questioned me about life in the UK, the Air Force and in the different countries I had seen. ‘Your parents must be very proud of you.’
I laughed. ‘I’m not sure they’d agree. I’m a bit of a black sheep. I’m a constant let-down to them, especially compared to my brother. To be honest, I’m not even a very good pilot.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘It’s true. I could be a better one, that’s for sure, but as my father would tell you, I never see anything through. That’s what I always got on my school reports: “Could do better.” The only other things they used to write were comments like, “Sean has a vivid imagination.” What they meant was that I spent all my time staring out of the window and daydreaming.’
I glanced out of the window for a moment, my eye caught by the wind whipping the spume from the white-capped waves rolling in to the bay beyond the fields.
She laughed. ‘I believe you.’
I gave a sheepish grin. ‘It’s beautiful here, but I don’t think I could handle the isolation.’
She gave a wan smile. ‘You get used to it, but I miss.’ She paused. ‘How can you miss what you’ve never had? But I do miss the idea of towns and cities, of woods and forests and deserts, and anything that isn’t peat, tussac grass and rock. I miss cinemas and theatres, and restaurants and dancing, and bright-coloured clothes and high heels.’ She broke off, embarrassed by her own enthusiasm, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining. ‘Don’t get me wrong, since the war, life’s become a lot easier for all of us here, in some ways at least. We all have telephones and satellite TV.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘It reminds me of a story I once read – I read a lot, my sister sends me a box of new books from England every month. It was about the arrival of the first ever tractor in a remote farming village in the Alps. From that moment on, just knowing that there was an easier way, the work that the farmers had been doing every day of their lives without ever questioning it, suddenly became a little bit harder and the weight that they were carrying felt that bit heavier.’
She had been staring down at her fingers resting on the table. They were long and delicate, but roughened by hard work. She glanced up at me. ‘Television’s like that. So are the cruise liners docking at Port Stanley, the flights coming in to Mount Pleasant twice a week – even you servicemen. They all remind us that there is somewhere else and another way to live. Children go away to school and college and, like my sister, they don’t come back.’
‘You could have gone to college too.’
‘I know. There are times now when I wish I had, but I was young and impatient to get my nose out of books and see more of life.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? Instead of that, I came home and got married to the first and only man I’d ever dated.’
‘Bernard’s very lucky. If I’d…’
Our eyes met and my words trailed away. Her lips were slightly parted and her look was a mixture of surprise and excitement. The tick of the clock seemed very loud in the stillness of the room.
She looked away. ‘When I was young, I used to dress up in some of my mother’s clothes and pretend I was a model; I suppose all girls do. And I used to dream about England, imagining what it was like. Before satellite television, all we had were books and glossy magazines. I built a picture of England from them.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘It wasn’t a very accurate one – all thatched cottages and stately homes, royalty, handsome men, sophisticated and glamorous women – and the Beatles, of course. I used to dream.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s silly, I know, but I used to dream that your brother was still alive and that I was married to him. We had a house in London, a thatched cottage in the country with roses round the door and two perfect children.’ She looked away in embarrassment.
‘Do you have children?’
She blushed. ‘No, we don’t have any, we—’
I heard the stamp of boots across the yard and the door banged open. Bernard came into the kitchen and we both fell silent as if interrupted in a moment of intimacy.
Rose flushed deeper under his stare. I felt the silence growing, but could think of no way to break it.
‘The cow’s still to milk,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, I’d forgotten the time. I was talking…’ She gave me an apologetic smile. ‘I’ll only be twenty minutes or so, help yourself to some more tea.’ She pulled a coat around her and hurried out into the yard behind Bernard.
I wandered around the room for a couple of minutes, then began leafing through the local newspaper I found on the dresser. It was published weekly and boldly headed, ‘The Kelper – the independent voice of the Falklands’, but it had more the flavour of a parish magazine. There were only two items of international news, a brief paragraph on the disturbances in Argentina and a table of wool prices on world markets. The list of ships due to dock at Stanley – Japanese, Korean, American, Russian, Canadian, Spanish and Norwegian – read like a roll call of the world’s fishing fleets. The only non-fishing vessels I could see were an exploration ship and a cruise liner.
The front page story, alongside a picture of an elderly woman holding an envelope, was headlined, ‘MISSING LETTER TURNS UP!’ The copy was equally riveting. ‘A letter Mrs Joyce Hunt had given up for lost arrived this week, over three weeks late. Post Office spokesman Neville Rowley explained: “Joyce’s letter had been added to the mail for Dunnose Head settlement by mistake. We had to wait for the next supply run before it could be collected and delivered to the right address. We’ve apologised to Joyce for the delay.” “Accidents do happen,” quipped Joyce. ‘I’m just glad to have got the letter in the end. It had a picture of my granddaughter in it.”’
Further down the page, another brief item caught my eye. ‘Leonora Patten lost a £10 note in Ross Road after last Wednesday’s Council meeting. If anyone has found it, please leave it at the Upland Goose.’
I shook my head, half-amused and half-envious of a place where, instead of a daily diet of rapes and murders, a misdirected letter or a lost £10 note qualified as front-page news.
I heard the engine of a tractor and looked out of the window. Bernard was backing it across the yard to hook it up with a trailer. He stopped and jumped down from the seat, leaving the engine rumbling. He had stopped a couple of feet short of the trailer and I watched him for a m
oment as he struggled to connect the coupling, trying to drag the loaded trailer over the rutted yard. I went outside. The sheepdog, now chained to its kennel, started to bark.
Bernard glanced round and shot me a suspicious look.
‘I’ll guide you back, if you like.’
‘Thanks, but I can manage.’
‘I know you can, but as I’m sitting around doing nothing, I might as well give you a hand.’
He hauled at the trailer once more, then gave an abrupt nod and climbed back on to the tractor. I waved him slowly back, eased the steel bar into the slot and dropped the locking pin through the hole.
He cut the engine and the wind whipped away the stink of diesel smoke. In the silence I heard the clank of a pail from the cowshed on the far side of the yard.
Bernard walked round to the back of the tractor, checked the coupling and muttered something that might have been thanks. He glanced up at the darkening sky, then turned his head as if he was scenting the wind. ‘Snow’s coming.’
The cold steel had chilled my fingers to the bone and I blew on my hands to warm them. ‘Do you never wear gloves?’ I asked.
He looked down at his red, swollen fingers. ‘No. You can’t work in them.’
‘Even when it’s this cold?’
‘You don’t feel it when you’re used to it.’ There was a touch of pride in his voice.
There was a flurry of snow, and he nodded to himself as he led the way towards the house. The back of his coat was split down the seams and belted with a piece of baler twine. He held the gate open for me and I saw that the hinges were the soles of an old pair of Wellington boots, nailed to the wood.
He followed my gaze. ‘Nothing’s wasted here.’ As he spoke, he had the same look, part-proud, part-defensive.
He put the kettle on to boil, then sat down facing me across the table. ‘So what brought you to the Falklands? Your brother’s grave?’ He spoke without looking at me, his hands cupped on the table in front of him.
‘I was posted here for the usual four-month tour.’
‘One of our blue-eyed protectors from the Argies, eh?’
I took my time about replying, still trying to weigh him up. ‘It’s just another job, really.’
‘Nice work, though. I bet the women are impressed with your uniforms and your tales.’
‘Only the shallow ones.’ Again I studied him. ‘I’m not going to start apologising for what I do. I love flying, but like any other job, there’s plenty of bullshit and boredom as well, and a fair bit of danger too. I’ve lost more friends than I care to think about in training accidents, never mind war.’
‘You wouldn’t swap your life for mine, though.’
‘I wouldn’t swap my life for anything, but I wouldn’t know how to begin to do what you do.’
He looked up sharply, scanning my face as carefully as he’d examined the tractor coupling, then relapsed into silence. After a minute, I tried again. ‘Do you own the farm?’
‘We rent it, but at least we rent it from a Falklander these days. Ninety per cent of the farms used to be absentee-owned; at least that’s changed since the war.’
‘There’ve been a few other changes too, haven’t there?’
He gave a grudging nod. ‘There’s been a few, not all of them for the best.’
‘But life’s better now than it was, surely? And certainly better than being an Argentine colony?’
‘Maybe we’d be better off without either of you.’
I was trying to keep the conversation light, but his truculence niggled me. ‘You’d soon want us back, though, if Argentina tried to invade again.’
‘Maybe. There wouldn’t have been a war last time if you hadn’t tried to sell us down the river.’ He spoke as if it were my personal responsibility.
‘Perhaps so, but in the end we saved your necks.’
‘You fought to save your Prime Minister’s neck, not ours.’
I took a deep breath and made another effort to find some common ground. ‘Well, whatever our past differences, at least we’re all working together now.’
‘Working together? We can’t even sell you the milk from our cows. The EC won’t allow it. Our milk’s good enough for us but not for you apparently. Every pint you drink on the Falklands has been imported.’
I smiled. ‘You won’t get an argument from me about the lunacy of the EC, but even if we don’t buy your milk, Britain’s put some very serious money into the islands in the last fifteen years. £80 million a year is an awful lot for just over 2,000 people. That’s about £40,000 per head.’
He waved his hand across the table top as if brushing the argument aside. ‘Falklanders raised enough money to pay for ten Spitfires to defend the UK in the Battle of Britain. Didn’t know that, did you? And it wasn’t just money we sent. We lost over forty of our menfolk fighting in Britain’s wars, one in fifty of the population of these islands. My grandfather was one of them. We’ve put plenty – in every way – into the UK. And now we’re not the poor relations any more. We pleaded for years for the introduction of a 150-mile limit to protect our fishing grounds, but Britain ignored us. It took the Argentine invasion before an exclusion zone was declared.’ He paused. ‘Know how much we get from the sale of fishing rights now?’
‘£20 million.’
‘And do you know how much we got before the war?’
I could have hazarded a pretty accurate guess, but I didn’t want to steal too much of Bernard’s thunder. I shook my head.
He gave a small smile of triumph. ‘Nothing. Now we don’t rely on British help any more. We do things for ourselves. We grow fresh fruit and vegetables the year round now, using hydroponics; it’s the first regular, guaranteed supply we’ve ever had.’
‘But ninety per cent of your food still comes from Chile.’
‘Maybe, but we pay for it with our own money, not British government handouts. In fact, we’re self-sufficient in everything, apart from defence, and when the oil starts flowing, maybe that will change too. We won’t just be talking about tens of millions then, but hundreds of millions a year. Long after your North Sea oil has run out, they’ll be pumping oil from off these shores.’
‘Then you’ll all be rich, but the Falklands will be changed forever. It’ll be one of the most important pieces of real estate in the southern hemisphere… and you’ll definitely need us then, to stop the Argentinians marching in and taking it from you.’
He shrugged. ‘We’ve offered to pay our defence costs retrospectively, once the oil revenues build up, but there’s talk that we might recruit our own Defence Force, maybe from the Gurkhas. They’re another lot that the British used when it suited them and then tried to dump when they’d outlived their usefulness.’
I wasn’t too sure I could argue against that. I remained silent for a moment, then noticed that Bernard’s expression had softened. For the first time he gave me a smile of genuine warmth. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to talk to you about debt. Your brother saved Rose’s life and that’s not a debt that’s lightly discharged. You’re welcome here as long as you want to stay.’
It was now so dark that we could barely see each other across the table. Bernard stepped outside for a moment and I heard the sound of a diesel engine starting up. It settled into a regular thudding beat and a moment later the bare bulb hanging over the kitchen table flared into light.
He came back inside kicking sleet from the end of his boots. ‘You’ll need to take a candle when you go to bed. We turn the generator off at ten. You’ll be sleeping in the Portakabin. It’s warmer than the house.’
Rose came back in shortly afterwards, pausing in the doorway as if to test the atmosphere. As she began to prepare the meal Bernard turned on the television. The tail end of the news bulletin included a brief item on the continuing street demonstrations in Buenos Aires. Again I saw banners carrying slogans about the Malvinas.
‘They can march as much as they bloody want,’ Bernard said. ‘They won’t get the
se islands, not now, not ever.’
Rose and I did most of the talking over dinner as she pressed me for every detail of my home and family, and every memory I had of Mike. Every time I looked up, her eyes were on me. Each time she would meet my gaze for a fraction of a second and then look away, towards Bernard.
When she spoke, she was animated and excited, words pouring out of her. At times I watched her, almost mesmerised. She was as well read as anyone I’d ever met, informed and witty. She seemed wasted in this setting, though that was not a sentiment I was ever likely to voice around Bernard.
He did his best to look interested, but said little. When she mentioned books she had read, or talked about places she wanted to see, he seemed to stiffen and a frown creased his brow.
I tried to steer the conversation round to him, but he paused after each question, as if examining it for booby traps, and when they came, his replies were often hesitant.
‘So what do you think of the Falklands?’ he said at last.
‘I haven’t really been here long enough to form an opinion. It does feel a long way from home, but the landscape’s beautiful and—’
‘The people are friendly?’ He smiled. ‘We know what most of you think about us. We can see it in your eyes.’ He held up a hand as I began to protest. ‘I’ve overheard soldiers talking in pubs in Stanley. You think we’re a hundred years behind the times. Most of you are polite to our faces, but behind our backs, you’re laughing at us. And you’d rather be anywhere else than here.’ He paused. ‘It’s understandable. But one thing above all you should understand. We’re not like you; we’re not here because we have to be. We’re here because we choose to be.’
All the time I’d been talking to him, I’d been aware of Rose’s gaze on me. I looked up suddenly. She flushed and looked away.
‘What about your own life, Sean?’ she said. ‘Are you married?’
Bernard laughed as I shook my head. ‘Even if he was, I’ve never met a soldier yet who was married after six at night.’
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