Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  Sunlight glances across the polished table. I look up, startled. The air is bright with old dust. The stained glass panels at the top of the neo-Gothic windows are throwing a rainbow of sudden colours across the faded spines of the Proceedings of the Hesperides Literary and Scientific Society Volumes I–LXVIII: a blue-and-green spectrum from the sea and mountain, and a patch of red cast by the Saint’s cloak. I look up at the original, and it sparkles now so that I can hardly see it. I’m not sure if it is his cloak after all; it might be the sail. In the glass panel he is standing right by the mast, and the artist has made him taller than the ship. Through the plain glass below I see the sky for the first time since I landed. It is the same blue as the cobalt that you get in medieval paintings, which they had to use sparingly because it was so rare and expensive. I thrust my pile of books together, grab my jacket, and make for the door. It clicks into place behind me and the sign that says, ‘Hesperides Room. Key available from librarian only. By order. F. Baskerville’, sways a little as I pass.

  The street is transformed. Puddles gleam among the uneven stone flags, and now all at once there are people, wearing not raincoats but colours; red and green and blue. I can see their faces for the first time. My first thought is that this is a port, in fact it has never been anything but a port; that is all there is. Everyone has landed here: Irish, Moroccan, Scandinavian, Portuguese, Italian, English, Spanish, Scottish, African, French, American, Filipino, Vietnamese; so many people have landed and just a few stayed. Dorrado and St Brandons were famous for their brothels for four hundred years, and as I look at the passing people, representatives of a population of under forty thousand, I see the varying colours of their skin and hair and eyes, and I feel just for a moment that this sea-ridden outpost must be the centre of the world.

  Suddenly everyone is walking in the High Street. I am reminded of Venice, because what I hear is the sound of footsteps, and the murmur of voices. The faint roar behind me might be traffic, but I choose just now to think that it’s the sea. I stop outside the Frisland Bank to study the exchange rate; I’m going to have to cash another cheque before long. The sign reads:

  To Buy 1 Hy Brasil pound

  US 2.0000

  GBR 1.2000

  CAN 2.8356 POR 360.1200

  DEN 13.4634

  FR 11.8836

  DET 3.5360

  ICE 142.9138

  SPN 297.7380

  IRE 1.3569

  JPN 257.3120

  Damn. I thought this place was supposed to be going to the dogs, but its currency gets stronger every time I look at it, which isn’t what I need at all. Just then someone speaks in my ear.

  ‘They have excellent doughnuts at Finnegan’s.’

  It’s the man in the raincoat, who was writing down all those mysterious numbers. He is now wearing a homburg hat like Humphrey Bogart’s in Casablanca, which he lifts as I turn round. No one has ever raised their hat to me before. ‘Finnegan’s?’ I say, for want of a better response.

  ‘There’s a coffee shop on the top floor. Better than Caliban’s. Besides, you tried that yesterday.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s my business to know.’ He’s much taller than I am and also good-looking in an austere, Spanish kind of way, like a Goya portrait. But his brown eyes look friendly. He holds out his hand. ‘Colombo MacAdam,’ he says. ‘I work for The Hesperides Times. So you’re writing a book about us?’

  ‘I haven’t told anybody that yet.’

  ‘These things get around.’ I see now that the mackintosh is not shabby after all, but on the contrary, very much part of the thirties effect. His hands are large and beautiful, and he wears an ornate signet ring on his little finger. ‘May I take you for a coffee? And I seriously recommend Finnegan’s doughnuts. They make their own blueberry jam. I might be able to assist you a little. One never knows.’

  He takes care to walk on the side nearest the traffic. My grandmother told me how men used to do that. I glance sideways at him as he strides along. I like his hat. I want him to go on talking so I can savour his lilting accent, and the old fashioned phrases he uses.

  Finnegan’s is halfway up the High Street, just by the cherry tree. Now the sun’s out the tree seems to glow from inside its pink cover like a candle in a paper lantern. That’s why I hadn’t seen Finnegan’s: the shop sign is dark green and right behind the cherry blossom. When Colombo leads me inside I realise he’s showing me a treasure.

  The inside is much bigger than the outside. Colombo says this was once a chandler’s warehouse stretching all the way from High Street to Water Street. Now it’s a big open space with wooden staircases and half landings and odd corners stacked with books. The main part of the ground floor is all bookshop, with great sweeps of shelving stretched from white brick wall to white brick wall. It’s hushed and warm the way that bookish places ought to be, and behind the dry book smell there’s a whiff of tar, as if the ghosts of ropes and barrels and sailcloth have reached across time and settled like cats in the sunny window-shaped rectangles that cover the floor. Coffee smells waft down from somewhere under the rafters, but it’s hard just to walk past all those books.

  ‘Colombo! Hey, Colombo!’

  I look round and there’s a black man standing in the doorway, as tall as Colombo and twice as substantial, waving a newspaper at us. ‘So what’s this?’ he’s calling out. ‘What does Tidesman know of Spanish gold?’

  ‘Excuse me a minute,’ mutters Colombo, and hurries over to him. They stand half-turned away, heads close together, talking in low voices.

  I wander among the books, resisting an impulse to pinch myself, because if it’s a dream I don’t want to wake up just yet. I get to Languages, and walk among books in English, Portuguese, Gaelic, Catalan, Icelandic and French. I drift on between maps and bird books and Earth Sciences and Music and Cookery and Scuba Diving. I pass two World Wars and an alcove of Biography. I glance at Humour, ignore Sport, and meander towards Theology. My attention is arrested by a special display. A dozen copies of a fat, expensive-looking hardback are arranged tastefully on black drapery. There is a map, gorgeously printed in full colour, on the front cover. I know that map. I go closer. Yes, it’s Ortelius, 1570.

  ‘Ubi insula est?’

  That’s an odd title for a book, especially one that’s clearly brand new. There’s a lectern with a copy you can open and leaf through. I turn to page one, and I’m hooked.

  It’s a story. There was a man who wanted to know about early navigation. He went to the South Pacific, and travelled with islanders in a canoe, with no instruments of any kind, not even a watch or a pocket compass. They crossed the ocean for hundreds of miles. The sky was cloudy and they couldn’t see the sun, and at night the moon was dark and the stars were obscured. They travelled for many days and then they made a perfect landfall on the little island they’d been heading for. The man couldn’t understand this at all. ‘How did you know the island was there?’ he asked. The steersman seemed puzzled by the question. He replied, ‘The island has always been there.’

  Enraptured, I turn the page. But it’s all a trick. The book isn’t about navigation or islands at all. It’s just a great turgid academic tome. As far as I can make out from the cover blurb it’s an extended essay on the relative status of imagined and empirical realities. I open it in the middle and read a bit at random:

  It might be thought that fiction, unlike reality, is inextricably connected to an author, and that this partly explains its impoverished ontological status. This line of reasoning, however, is at the very least misleading. Fiction often does not involve its author, and when it does it is questionable whether this involvement demotes it to an inferior ontological status.

  The author of a work of fiction need not, and usually does not, exist in the fictional world of the work. Shakespeare is obviously not an inhabitant of Prospero’s island, but neither need he exist at any time or place within the wider world of The Tempest. England may well be a place in the fictional wo
rld of The Tempest – the Mediterranean and the city of Milan certainly are – but The Tempest’s England may be one in which Shakespeare had never been born.

  Even if we allow that there is a sense in which the author creates much of the fictional world and many of its inhabitants, this does not mean that such creations are imaginary or ghost-like. Hamlet may be a creation of Shakespeare’s, but, unlike the Ghost, he is very much alive: he plots, loves, and finally fights.

  Authors certainly do not know everything about their fictional worlds. Shakespeare did not know the gale force necessary to cause the shipwreck in The Tempest and could not have known that Hamlet had an Oedipus complex.

  It’s all getting horribly close to being back at university. Disappointed, I turn to the back flap. Academic works tend to be reticent about their authors, as if they’re trying to pretend they don’t really have any, but this one does have a discreet little note in white letters on the midnight-blue laminated cover.

  Brendan Hook was born in 1946 and educated at The University of the Hesperides, Hy Brasil, and Cambridge, England. He is now a professor in philosophy at Harvard University. He is married and has two sons and two daughters. His first book, Images of Formlessness, was published in 1989.

  I turn back to Ortelius. Why do they give the most unreadable books the most beautiful covers? I’ll never get a cover like that for my book. I’ll be lucky if I get something like ‘Fishing boats in the harbour at St Brandons’ or ‘Sunset at Dorrado’. I’ll be lucky if I get anything.

  ‘Doughnut?’ says Colombo, and makes me jump.

  He waits politely for me to precede him up the stairs.

  He’s right about the doughnuts, and full of information on other matters. I ply him with questions, trying not to do so with my mouth full. I can see he’s impressed when I mention the exchange rate.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know you were making a study of our economy.’

  ‘I’m hardly doing that. But when a loaf of bread costs me twice as much as it does at home I can’t help noticing. I thought with no fish left in the sea the country would be more or less bankrupt, especially as there hasn’t really been much of a tourist industry.’

  ‘Ah well, that’s changing. But you’re right, it does raise a question. In fact there was an article in the Times this week.’ He delves into the pocket of his mackintosh, where it hangs over the back of his chair, and takes out a newspaper. ‘Here, read this.’ While he leafs through I read the back page which is facing me. It says:

  Ogg’s Cove have just beaten Lyonsness by three wickets. In this one-day game Lyonsness, batting first, were dismissed for a fighting 93. In reply, Ogg’s Cove also struggled with Alton remaining not out and steering them home to a victory.

  Colombo hands me the paper, folded back at page six. It seems to be a sort of editorial, with a rather fetching woodcut of a man in a cap with a pipe in his mouth by way of graphics. Tidesman, it says at the top. I swallow my last mouthful of doughnut and concentrate.

  TIDESMAN ON OUR ECONOMIC FUTURE – WHAT PRICE NOW?

  It’s interesting that the schools’ history curriculum in Hy Brasil stops sometime in the late 1960s. The last chapter in The Jewel of the Atlantic, published in 1976 and still used in primary schools throughout the country, is reprinted annually with little change bar the President’s introductory remarks. It’s entitled ‘A Land of Promise’, and it eulogises our freedom, our prosperity and our potential, and bases our good fortune on fertile soil, teeming seas and an indomitable will to succeed. Wishful thinking? Or wilful thinking?

  In 1997, no citizen with open eyes can fail to recognise that the fertile soil provides a living only to the few who own it. A small, locally consumed cider industry, and a few cheeses for sale in St Brandons’ delicatessens can hardly provide income for a nation. More and more of our food arrives pre-packaged from Spain and South Africa, Costa Rica and the USA. The sea is all but fished out by Portuguese trawlers and Icelandic long-liners. There are at least twenty local whitefish boats mothballed in St Brandons’ harbour as I write. Tourism? The latest (third or fourth?) attempt to float plans for a new airport hotel has just fallen through.

  Which leaves us with the will to succeed, the one assertion that does seem to hold water. Hy Brasil, despite its apparent deficit, is clearly doing very nicely. A new project has been announced in these pages almost every week this year: a branch library in Ogg’s Cove, a swimming pool in Lyonsness, four new academic posts at the University …

  Shrewd post-independence investment – to the tune of nearly twenty million last year – we’re told, has proved to be Hy Brasil’s bastion against a world in recession. The seven fat years were put to good use, and evidently all we have to do now is to thank a benign Providence for our President’s timely prophetic dreams. And while the state provides for an ever-growing population of out-of-work fishermen and farmworkers, who’s complaining? Big numbers go over most people’s heads; who cares whether there are six or seven noughts on Hy Brasil’s GDP?

  But think about it: even at a 5% return, our country would have to have nearly half a billion pounds stashed away somewhere. That’s nearly £15,000 for every Hy Brasil man, woman and child. It’s about three times what all the real estate in the islands is worth at a liberal estimate. We can only hope the government knows what it’s doing. Large sums need wise heads and steady hands. We don’t want to hear in twelve months’time that First National or Citicorp has withdrawn credit facilities to a tiny mortgaged island state, or that they’ve suddenly decided to halve their rates to investors or – God forbid – that the President and his cronies have decamped to a Caribbean hideout – worth real money – which they but not we have known about all along.

  ‘Who’s Tidesman?’ I ask.

  Colombo shrugs. ‘A journalist. Commentator. He’s been on the books a long time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘He got his own column in 1876. Hasn’t missed a week since.’

  I glance at him suspiciously, then understand. ‘Oh, you mean he’s generic?’

  ‘That’s it. You’ll find he’s more or less proverbial here. He had a bit of a thin time after ’58, but our President has a sense of proportion. Humour too, if you catch him at the right moment. And Baskerville was his man anyway, so it did no harm to have an obvious safety valve.’

  ‘Baskerville?’

  ‘Used to be Tidesman from – what would it be – ’54, ’55? for – oh, twenty years or more. It’s OK to tell you that; it’s an open secret now. But the current Tidesman is always anonymous.’

  ‘So who is it now?’

  ‘I said he – or she – is always anonymous. Anonymous, iconoclastic and informed. You could say it’s the nearest to an opposition we’ve got.’

  ‘It seems quite an outspoken article.’

  ‘Ah well, we are living in a democracy. Would you like a refill?’

  When he comes back with the brimming cups he seems to have reached some sort of conclusion. ‘Speaking of which,’ he goes on, so that I have to try to think what we have been speaking of, ‘I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. You said you were thinking of staying up north next?’

  ‘Yes. I have the number of Peterkin’s aunt in Lyonsness.’

  ‘Are you teetotal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you read your Bible?’

  ‘I know it pretty well, but I can’t say I read it much now.’

  ‘Do you ever swear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t want to stay with Peterkin’s aunt. I have a better idea. Listen to me.’

  FOUR

  THE COURTYARD FACED west, and in the late afternoon the sunshine poured into it like honey. Even the grim walls of the keep looked benign under the softening golden light. The white doves circling over the battlements shone bright as pearls against the sky. The castle enclosed the courtyard on three sides. The fourth wall of the courtyard was two feet high, a low parapet above a precipice. The courty
ard was paved round the edges, like the floor of a cloister. In the middle of the grass quadrangle a gnarled thorn tree grew over a circular stone well, its twisted branches almost hiding the ancient stonework. A thin film of green had begun to creep over it. On the other side of the parapet the valley below was already hidden under a green mist of slowly budding trees. Beyond it the sea lay in shadow, a sombre hazy blue, like looking into a cave.

  In the valley only two creatures were visible. One was a kestrel that hovered high over the trees, just level with the courtyard wall. The other was Lucy, who sat on the parapet writing in a yellow loose-leaf folder. The wings of the kestrel moved so fast it seemed to be motionless, and Lucy’s hand travelled rapidly across the page, as if she never had to wait for a thought to come. She wrote in a spiky italic script, with purple ink, and even when she turned a page she never paused long enough for her ink to dry.

  The kestrel plunged, and the trees closed over it. Lucy looked up, and pushed her short hair back, as if it were still long enough to have fallen over her eyes. She stared out to sea, blinking. There was another sound besides the waves beating on the lava shores of Brentness, which Lucy never heard anyway because they were simply part of life. A car was coming up the road behind the castle, its gears grinding on the steep corner below the old ice house. Whoever it was would reach the door in four and a half minutes. Lucy squinted up at the Spanish clock that one of her ancestors had intercepted on its way to Haiti in 1643 and had fixed to the tower just below the belfry, where three bells from a foundry in the ancient kingdom of Leinster hung in readiness to warn the island against eruption or invasion. Four thirty-two. Lucy frowned. She wasn’t expecting anyone to tea, and all the ginger biscuits had been finished yesterday. She screwed the top back on her fountain pen, shut her folder, and went in to put the kettle on.