The old woman looked at me with her hooded, hawk’s eyes, unreadable. “I don’t want it. You keep it. It’s yours now.”
Clarissa was frowning. I thought she would ask what we were talking about – I was eager to explain, ready to get the painting out of its wrappings and show it to her – but she was following her own train of thought.
“Mum, we can’t go there. It’s an uninhabited island. There’s nowhere to land. You told me yourself how you had to swim ashore – I hope you don’t imagine we’re going swimming today!”
“You’ll get us ashore, won’t you?” Helen put her cold, claw-like hand on my arm and gave me an appealing, almost flirtatious look with tilted head.
I spoke over Helen’s head to her daughter. “There’s a dinghy on board, a little inflatable. We can go ashore in that.”
“There, you see?” Helen looked as triumphant as she had in that old photograph with Virginia Woolf. This was a woman who liked to have her way.
“I still think it sounds like too much trouble,” Clarissa said, offering me another chance to back out. “It’s up to you, of course.”
I was as curious – and almost as eager – as Helen to visit Achlan.
“It’s not far away, and it’s somewhere I’ve always meant to go. We – Allan and I – always meant to go ashore and explore, but we never did. I think it was because it was so close, too close – once we were out in the boat we wanted more of a sail.”
“Well, if you really don’t mind,” Clarissa sighed.
I looked at Helen. “I’d like to get a picture of you there, today. For my book.”
“You mean my book, don’t you?”
“That’s what I said.” I gave her a bland, mock-innocent smile, and she snorted delicately.
I could see she was happy. And why not? I felt happy, too. It was only Clarissa who looked a bit out of sorts.
“Do you sail?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. Is that a problem?”
“No, of course not. I can sail Daisy single-handed.”
Despite my long absence from her, she seemed to welcome me, and the old skills came rushing back. It was all very easy and smooth, pulling away from the dock and putting slowly out of the busy harbour until I was able to cut the noisy engine. I felt my own spirit crackle and lift like the crisp white sails as we went gliding through the Sound of Jura.
There are treacherous waters there, whirlpools and rocks of legendary fame, but I knew my way and was going nowhere near the local Scylla and Charybdis. I had only a short and easy sail ahead of me, never very far from shore. As I breathed in the fresh, salt air and eased Daisy along the familiar sea-lane, I imagined Allan close beside me, his hand resting lightly atop mine on the tiller. He had taught me to sail. I felt an unexpected ease in the thought. I still missed him badly, but the memory no longer crippled me with sorrow. I could take pleasure in the good memories, and there were many of them, so many aboard this little boat.
Helen murmured, “Allan would have loved this.”
It was as if she’d spoken my own thought aloud. I whipped around to stare at her, deeply shocked, but she didn’t even notice, staring out at the water.
I thought of the list in her journal, and I moistened dry lips to croak, “Who?”
She turned to give me one of her filmy, blue-eyed stares. “Your husband, dear.”
“How did you . . . I didn’t know you knew him.”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I met him in London. This was years ago – before you were married to him. He worked for Collins at that time, I think. My agent introduced us at a party, I do remember that. I was very struck by him. A lovely young man, so kind, yet so witty. That combination is rare, you know. And he reminded me more than a little bit of – but never mind that.”
This was plausible. Allan had worked for Collins in the 1970s, years before I had known him, and he’d been a stalwart of the publishing party scene. And it was not surprising that Helen Ralston should have been drawn to him, recalling the photograph of Clarissa’s father.
“But – how did you know—”
“That he was a sailor? We talked about it, of course! He told me about his holidays with his family, when he was a child, and how he learned to sail in the very same place where I came on holiday with Logan.”
What I’d meant was how had she known that the man she’d met once, thirty years ago, had been my husband, but I realized there was no point in asking her. She might have claimed that I’d told her, or maybe she’d read it on a book-jacket. Anyone might have told her; it wouldn’t have taken much effort to find out.
Plausible though her story of meeting Allan was, I didn’t believe it. Allan had a wonderful memory for the people he’d met over the years, and he knew how much I loved In Troy. If he had ever met its author, he would have told me.
I was sure that Helen was teasing, just as she had been with the story of “her” dream, and that I would find out why before too much longer.
Eilean nan Achlan came into view within a few minutes, but I waited until we were much closer before pointing it out. Clarissa shaded her eyes with a hand to look. Helen turned her head with no change of expression.
“Did you ever come back?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Never. I didn’t want to, until now.”
I steered Daisy into the little bay at the south-westerly end of the island and after some finicky manoeuvring, hove to. I had judged it very well, I thought: the view from here was just about exactly what Helen Ralston had been looking at when she’d painted “My Death” more than seventy years before.
When I got a chance to rest after hauling in the sails and making everything tight, I looked at Helen to see how she was responding.
She was sitting very still, staring up at the gorse and bracken-covered hills. Feeling my gaze upon her, she turned to meet my eyes. “Thank you,” she said quietly. Something about her look or her tone sent a shiver down my spine.
“You’re welcome. Shall we go ashore?”
“Yes. Let’s.”
Clarissa fought one last-ditch effort, casting an uneasy eye on the little rubber dinghy. “You know, I really don’t think that’s such a good idea, Mum . . .”
“Then you can stay here.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. You meant that I should sit down and shut up like a good little girl. I’m not your child, Clarissa.”
“No, but you do act like one sometimes!”
“It’s my right.”
“Why won’t you be sensible!”
The two women glared at each other, driven past endurance by the unfair role-reversal that aging forces upon parents and children. I felt sympathy for them both but gladly removed from it all. This was not a situation I would ever confront: I had two sisters, better qualified by geography and temperament to look after our parents (both still in good health) if the need arose, and I had no children. When I was as old and frail as Helen Ralston, assuming I made it that long, there would be no one left to care if I looked after myself properly or not. And unless I had the money to pay for it, there would certainly be no expedition like today’s for the elderly me.
Although I thought Helen had every right to do what she wanted with what remained of her life – even if it hastened her death – I felt a terrible sad empathy for Clarissa. I thought we both had guessed the real reason for Helen’s determination to visit the little death-island again, and I wondered how we would manage if the old woman simply refused to leave it.
Something like that must have been going through Clarissa’s mind when she broke the stalemate with her mother and asked me, “Will I be able to get a signal on my mobile phone out here?”
I shrugged. “You can try. I’ve got a short-wave radio on board for emergencies.”
The tension left her shoulders. “That’s good to know. Shall we go?”
There were a few minor hair-raising moments still ahead, helping Helen into th
e dinghy, but we finally managed to make landfall on Achlan, and I was the only one who got even slightly wet.
“Shall we have our picnic on that big flat rock over there?” asked Clarissa. “It looks like a nice spot.”
“We can rest and eat at the shrine,” said Helen. “I’m not stopping now.” She turned to me. “You can take my picture there, nowhere else.”
“Do you remember how to get there? Is it far?” I looked at the thin, blue-veined, old woman’s ankles above the sensible sturdy shoes, and recalled Willy Logan’s description of the long, slow, torturous descent over rough, rocky ground, leaning heavily on his lover and suffering many stumbles and painful encounters with brambles, nettles, and rabbit holes that he was unable to avoid in his blindness.
“How far can it be?” Helen replied unhelpfully. “Anyway, we’ll follow the water-course; that will take us to the source.”
I followed the direction of her gaze and realized when I glimpsed the fresh water tumbling over rocks to spill into the bay that I had been hearing its roar, subtly different from the rumble of the waves, ever since we’d landed.
Following the stream might have been sensible, but it wasn’t easy. Even so early in spring there was a riot of vegetation to slow our progress, wicked blackberry vines that snatched at our clothing and scored our flesh, roots and unseen rocks and hollows to trip us up. Clarissa and I led fairly sedentary lives and were not as fit as we might have been, but we were still relatively supple and capable of putting on the occasional burst of speed.
Helen, so much older, had fewer reserves. It must have been many years since she had walked for more than ten minutes at a stretch or over anything more taxing than a roughly pebbled drive. Within minutes, her breathing was sounding tortured, and I knew she must be in pain, pushing herself to her limit. Yet, no matter what we said, she would not consider giving up or turning back. A little rest was all she needed, she said, and then we could go on. And so, every three or four minutes, she would give a gasp and stop walking, her shoulders rising up and down as, for a full minute, she marshalled her resources to continue.
Of course we stayed with her, standing in harsh sunlight or in buzzing, leafy shade, during her frequent rest-stops, and then continuing to creep up the gentle slope of the island, plodding along like weary tortoises.
I recalled Helen Ralston’s comment as a young woman that in this island she had seen her death and Willy Logan’s conviction that “death” meant something else. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe death was just death, and Helen, now so near to the end of life, had finally come to meet it.
We crept along in silence except for the whine and tortured pant of Helen’s breathing and the laughing bubbling rush of the stream, and the background sough of wind and sea. I kept my eyes fixed on the ground, mostly, on the look-out for hazards. The sounds, our unnaturally slow pace, my worries about what was going to happen all combined to affect my brain, and after awhile it seemed to me that the earth beneath my feet had become flesh, that I was treading upon a gigantic female body. This was bad enough, but there was something stranger to come, as it seemed I felt the footsteps upon my own, naked, supine body: that I was the land, and it was me. My body began to ache, but it seemed there was nothing to be done. I lost track of time, and my sense of myself as an individual became tenuous.
“Is that it?”
Clarissa’s voice cut through the feverish dream or self-hypnosis or whatever it was that had possessed me, and I raised my head with a gasp, like someone who had been swimming for too long underwater, and looked around.
The stream had dwindled into a bubbling rill between two rocks. Nearby I saw a large tumble of stones, partly overgrown by brambles and weeds. Impossible to say now what it might once have been – a tomb, a sheep-fank, or a tumble-down cottage – but clearly they had been piled up deliberately by someone sometime in the past.
“Look at me. Now.”
It was Helen’s voice, but so different that I thought maybe I’d heard it only in my head. Yet at the same time I knew that she was speaking to me. I looked around and met her eyes. What happened then I can’t describe, can barely remember. I think I saw something that I shouldn’t have seen. But maybe it was nothing to do with sight, was purely a brain event. I flail around for an explanation, or at least a metaphor. It was like a lightning bolt, fairy-stroke, the touch of the goddess, death itself, birth.
The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, naked beneath the high, cloudy sky. I heard water sounds and the noise of someone weeping.
There was an awful, dull ache in my back. I opened my eyes and sat up slowly, painfully, wondering what had happened. I smelled sweat and blood and sex and crushed vegetation. I remembered looking at Helen, but if that had been seconds ago, or hours, or even longer, I had no idea. The other two women were gone. I was alone with a man – a naked man huddled a few feet away from me, beside the cairn he’d named a shrine, and weeping. I recognized him as Willy Logan.
Then I understood who I was.
I was Helen Ralston.
XI
Now, more than a year later, I am still Helen, as I will be, I suppose, until I die.
I avoid mirrors. It gives me a sickening, horrific jolt to see those alien, deep-set eyes glaring back at me out of another woman’s face, even if the terror I feel is reflected in hers.
Of course I keep what I know to myself – I certainly have no desire to be locked up in an early twentieth-century loony bin – and, as time goes by, it has become somewhat easier. Memories of my other life and of that other world that I suppose to be the future are growing dimmer, harder to recall and to believe. That’s why I decided to write this, before it is forever too late. The words in this book, which I intend to keep safe, will ensure that what happened once doesn’t have to go on happening into an infinity of futures – unless I want it to. I will show it to myself when the time is right, seventy-three years from now.
The feeling of dislocation, of alienation and fear, which I had at first, has eased with the passage of time. The strangeness has faded like my impossible, disturbing memories, and the sense of being embarked upon a great adventure – a new life! – has become more powerful. After all, this is not such a bad time or place to be young and alive.
– Helen Elizabeth Ralston
Paris
September 22 1930
XII
The interview – my one and only interview with Helen – had not gone exactly as she described. For one thing, she’d been more disabled by her stroke than the story indicated, and the conversation between us had been painfully repetitious, slow and circular. She did mention a few famous names, people she had known in Paris and London in the 1930s, but her anecdotes had a way of petering out rather than coming to a point, and one story would frequently blend into another, so that an incident that took place in pre-war Paris would segue abruptly into something that had happened to her in post-war London. I felt sorry for her and rather frustrated as I realized I was unlikely to get much first-hand information from her for my book.
After about an hour, Clarissa took her mother upstairs to bed. When she came back down, she gave me the notebook.
“Mum wants you to have this,” she said. “She wants you to read it.”
I took the old, hardbound notebook with a feeling of great privilege and excitement. “What is it? Did she say?”
“She said it has the deepest, most important truth about her life.”
“Wow.”
We smiled at each other – the charge of sympathetic, affectionate sympathy between us was very real – and she invited me to stay and have a bite to eat. We spent maybe an hour over coffee and cake, talking, getting to know each other. I left, then, and after a detour to do some shopping at Braehead, drove home.
I remember the details of my arrival home – putting away the groceries, looking through the mail, heating up a Marks and Spencer Indian meal and then eating it while listening to Front Row on Radio 4 – as if they were incide
nts from a lost Eden of innocence. Afterwards, I brewed a pot of herbal tea and took it upstairs to my office. There, at my desk, I pushed the keyboard aside, set Helen Ralston’s book where it had been and pulled the reading light forward and angled it down to cast a strong cone of light directly onto the page. I began to read and fell into the abyss.
It was after midnight when I finished reading, my neck and spine aching from the tense crouch I’d maintained for hours at my desk as I struggled to decipher her cramped, narrow writing. I was trembling with exhaustion, terror and bewilderment.
How was this possible? Could her story be true?
If it wasn’t, how did she know so much about me? How was she able to write in my voice, including so many accurate details about my life and everything that had happened starting with the chain of events that had caused me to decide to write a biography of Helen Ralston up to our first meeting?
I didn’t sleep that night.
At eight o’clock the next morning, so blank, cold, and numb that I could have said I was feeling nothing at all, I telephoned Clarissa Breen and asked to speak to Helen.
In a voice that wavered slightly, she told me her mother was dead.
“It happened not long after you left. Or maybe . . . maybe before.” She took a deep breath. “She was sleeping when I left her to come downstairs to you. Normally, she’ll sleep for about two hours. At lunchtime, I went upstairs to check on her. As soon as I went into her bedroom I knew. She was gone.”
All my questions seemed suddenly insignificant, and the terror that had gripped me loosed its hold. I rushed to sympathize, uttering all the usual, insufficient phrases of sorrow and respect.
“Thank you. I was going to call you, later today. I wanted to thank you – for coming when you did and making Mum’s last day so special. She was happy, you know, really thrilled to be meeting you. Not just because of the biography – of course it was great for her to know she hadn’t been forgotten – but because it was you. She loved your work, you know. She’d been reading your stories since you were first published – she always felt there was a special connection between you.”
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