Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘Mount Brasil.’

  It looked like a picture postcard of itself. I hadn’t bought any because I don’t like sending people images of what I haven’t seen yet. It was white from the waist up, and like Ariel it rode on the curl’d clouds, but not in flame or lightning, just cool and watercoloured, as if it weren’t made of earth at all and didn’t know what weather was. That was a deception too, I knew. ‘It doesn’t look active,’ I remarked.

  ‘Try walking on it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You feel the heat through your boots. Barefoot you’d burn. The springs are boiling. You can see the steam rising twenty miles away sometimes. If the wind were southerly you’d get the whiff of sulphur now. The last significant eruption was 1958.’

  ‘The same year as the Revolution?’

  ‘That’s right. The bass note for our coup d’état was a subterranean harmonic tremor. Quite piquant, when you think about it. In fact ’57 to ’58 was an unstable year along the whole Atlantic Ridge. Same in the Azores. In September ’57 there was such a big eruption they actually evacuated Dorrado, but it turned out OK. After three weeks the lava just stopped and everyone went home. Nothing was damaged, but the hot spring that fed the fountain in the market square had vanished, and they had to make a culvert from the Dorrado river. So it’s cold water in the fountain now, which is a pity. I’m told on winter mornings it was quite a sight, steaming away in the middle of the village like a domesticated dragon. My sister says it’s one of her earliest memories. In the Azores they weren’t so lucky.’

  ‘And Mount Brasil could still go up any time?’

  Colombo shrugged. ‘Or you could get run over by the 227 bus in St Brandons Square. The chances are about equal, within the year, say. We could bet if you like.’

  ‘So when did it last erupt?’ I couldn’t take my eyes from that perfect cone. It looked like something out of Euclid.

  ‘1981, ’83, ’87, ’92, ’96.’

  ‘How come there’s anything left then?’

  ‘Oh, those were only little eruptions. Just big enough to get recorded. You’ll have to go to the Pele Centre – the volcanic observatory down at Mount Prosper. The process is continuous really. Until we get to the big one.’

  ‘And when’s that?’

  ‘That’s serious gambling. Which is illegal here, didn’t you know?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Quite seriously. So are prostitution, spirits and hard drugs. You can grow and use your own cannabis but it’s illegal to buy or sell any, including the seeds. We have vineyards, of course, and our apple orchards produce the best cider in the world. But in 1982 two men were deported for operating a still. The tax on tobacco is two hundred per cent.’

  I was still staring at the volcano. ‘How far away can you see it from?’

  ‘Two hundred miles in totally clear weather, that is to say, not usually. From the sea it sometimes floats on the clouds, the way it is now. Before it was charted, the early sailors thought it was a vision of heaven, the promised land of Ailbe. At least, they did when it looked like it does now. But when it was smoke and flame and ashes they said this place was the gateway to hell.’

  ‘A bit of a paradox.’

  ‘Not at all. The gate of hell lies at the foot of the throne of God; that’s how Lucifer fell. You see, I know your English poets better than you do.’

  ‘But one can climb it?’

  ‘Don’t go by yourself. It’s tough. My friend Ishmael used to do tours occasionally. He might take you up sometime.’

  The road dipped down from the pass as abruptly as it had gained it. The ridge coiled in a semicircle between us and Mount Brasil, green peaks rising out of the mist like fangs. There was something reptilian about it. I thought of the dinosaur’s footprints they found on the coast of Dorset, which you can see in a glass case in the museum at Lyme. It occurred to me that no smoke rose out of the volcano, and that in my previous imaginings I had always seen it spurting out fumes like an autumn bonfire. The island was turning out different from the way I’d pictured it, and I had a disconcerting feeling that my project was not quite under my control.

  ‘Penny for them?’

  ‘Not worth a penny,’ I said. ‘They’re all questions.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘All right. How come there are two hundred and twenty-seven buses on an island roughly eighty miles by twenty?’

  ‘Eh?’ It took him a moment, then he laughed. ‘Oh, that. We have one regular bus route, which circumnavigates St Brandons, goes ten miles down the coast one way, and three miles up the other until the road stops. It started running in 1935, and the first bus was shipped over from London, ex-LCC standard single-decker red bus stock. On the front it had written: Crystal Palace Penge Beckenham Shortlands Bromley Market Bickley Chislehurst Stn Chislehurst War Memorial. That particular bus came off the road in the sixties. Tommy Zakis lives in it now, just behind the old herring station at Port o’ Frisland. But the number stuck. On this island 227 is the word for bus. Are you ready to go on?’

  The road dog-legged over the edge of the ridge, and just before it plunged down there was another view that took my breath away, over the bite-shaped bay of Dorrado and the shining islands that lay to the west of Hy Brasil. I clung to the seatbelt to hold myself steady while I gazed and gazed. We were out of the mist and into spring sunshine again. I felt a prickling at my eyelids and my throat felt tight. I hadn’t thought Hy Brasil would do this to me. I told myself it was just a place, and swallowed.

  ‘Tell me about your godmother.’

  ‘Penelope? She was my mother’s best friend and a remarkable woman. She’s the President’s wife, officially, but she never does anything official. He visits her at weekends.’

  ‘You mean that Penelope? She’s your godmother?’

  ‘And a very good one too. She and my parents were neighbours in Dorrado before I was born. My Papa was the Mayda ferryman. Things were a lot different then. Not much money about. After the Revolution she and Hook moved into the house we’re going to now.’

  ‘So you must know her son? Hasn’t he just written a book?’

  ‘Brendan? Of course I know him. When I was little he was my hero. He’s a yachtsman, you know that? He used to take me sailing.’

  ‘I thought he was a philosopher.’

  ‘Nothing like sailing alone for philosophy. Think of Slocum. But Brendan’s in America now.’

  ‘So what happened after Hook left in ’48?’

  ‘To Penelope? Nothing. She brought up Brendan in Dorrado by herself for ten years. Everyone said Hook was gone for good, but she refused to believe it. My Mamma says she could have had any man she wanted, but she refused them all, and brought her boy up for ten years in the faith that his father would come home.’ Colombo negotiated a hairpin bend with a casual twist of the wheel. ‘She specialises in textiles,’ he added, ‘She used to do a lot of weaving.’

  * * *

  (I’m tired, it’s very late, I’ve only two pages left in this notebook, and I’m not halfway through the day yet. It’s no use doing sums like that or I’ll start feeling like Tristram Shandy. Instead I’m going to skip on to part of the conversation we had at tea.)

  Penelope said the best thing about the revolution is that no one had died for it. She said it was a hideous and misguided thing to die for one’s native land. We talked about wars, and how Hy Brasil had always been a strategic outpost in someone else’s war, but no battle had actually been fought on it.

  ‘I suppose it’s the same where I come from,’ I said. ‘We haven’t had a war since 1685. The battle of Sedgemoor was the last pitched battle to be fought on English soil.’

  They both looked at me. ‘But you’ve had a civil war going on for the past thirty years!’ burst out Colombo.

  I felt so embarrassed, I almost said, ‘I forgot’, but decided that would sound too crass. I began, ‘But that’s on another …’ then realised this sounded even worse, so I shut up.

  No one else s
aid anything either. I found Penelope oddly intimidating, in spite of her quiet brown eyes and soft voice. The other silly thing was that I’d forgotten she would be old. Colombo’s story had been about a young woman, and now this elderly person with short white hair and skin like a winter apple disconcerted me. I began to blush, and the more I tried not to, the redder I got.

  ‘My grandmother was from England,’ said Penelope gently, as if that’s what we’d been talking about. ‘Have some more fruit cake. The thing I enjoyed most when I visited was the gardens. Hidcote, Blenheim, Sissinghurst. So lovely. I try to emulate Gertrude Jekyll, not that it’s practical nowadays. I would like to show you my herbaceous border. You must come again in June or July. But I hope I’ll see you before that.’

  ‘Penny, I want you to tell her about ’58.’

  ‘Oh my dear, I’m not the one to ask. It’s all so long ago.’

  ‘But you’ve got the scrapbooks.’

  ‘I only show photos of my grandchildren. Sidony’s too young to be interested in those. You can show her anything in the library yourself if you want to.’

  ‘She pretends to be octogenarian,’ Colombo said, addressing me. ‘It’s all a front. Ignore it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Penny. ‘Very well, Sidony. I’m to tell you what happened here in 1958. It’s quite simple. My husband, whom I’d not seen for ten years, although I’d received six unsigned postcards during his absence, knocked on my door in Dorrado one February night and asked me to supply food to an expeditionary force which he had just landed on Brentness. Have you seen Brentness?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a lava field. What the Icelanders call “hraun”. I was surprised to see Jim. The rumour was that he was dead, which I didn’t believe, because I’d asked him to make sure I knew, if he died before we met again. Since I’d heard nothing, I was still expecting him, but not in the middle of a snowstorm. The fifties were austere times, and there wasn’t a lot of food in Dorrado but we managed to scrounge what we needed. Jim had twelve men with him when he landed. We soon found more men. We’d been a NATO base for quite long enough.

  ‘You can’t beat NATO with their own weapons. It wasn’t an army we needed, it was a plan. Jim was in his element. Just four men took the base on April 10th, and held it. Jack Honeyman was a plumber, you see, that was the key to the whole thing. I remember that white van of his, and the name on the side, John Honeyman: Plumbing and Drainage Expert. Partly luck, of course, but such a clever idea when you think about it. The others were there to back them up from outside, but their real weapon was the one NATO had forged itself. With his finger hovering over the button, so to speak, Jim had the White House, Westminster, and Geneva literally on a line. They talked. They didn’t have much choice.’

  ‘Tell her how they took the base, Penny.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I wasn’t there. There’re two men left who could tell Sidony the whole story first-hand. They’d both be only too happy to do so. Why don’t you bring her over one Saturday evening when Jim is here?’

  ‘Could she do that? You’re sure Jim wouldn’t mind? I know he avoids foreign writers if he possibly can.’

  ‘Sweetheart, let’s be frank. Most foreign writers who come to Hy Brasil are not young, beautiful and female. I think he’d enjoy meeting her very much.’

  It dawned on me they were talking about the President, and I felt overwhelmed. I knew this was a small and aggressively democratic country, but this was quite beyond my expectations. But Colombo was saying to me, ‘That would be just what you want, wouldn’t it, Sidony? Meet the man himself.’ I managed to say thank you to Penelope as if hobnobbing with the head of a nation who was also a legendary hero of the left was quite a commonplace way for me to spend a Saturday night.

  ‘I doubt if I’d be able to bring you,’ Colombo was saying. ‘I’m usually tied up on Saturdays. But that doesn’t matter. Penny, won’t you tell her your version now anyway?’

  ‘My dear boy, what am I supposed to do? Burst into an aria? Sidony, m’dear,’ she said, turning to me. ‘It was a sensible revolution. Tactics, not reprisals. Four men took the base by surprise – Jim will tell you how they worked it. It was the mountain that gave them their chance. They say Ailbe is stable, but there’s always movement under the surface. They had terrible trouble with the drains in there. The pipes kept breaking and then the lavatories would back up, too awful to contemplate. I’m so glad it’s never happened to me. NATO were supposed to use their own personnel for everything, but no one in Hy Brasil knew more about dealing with sewage in a seismically sensitive area than Jack did, and I think those poor chaps in there must have been getting pretty desperate. Anyway, the upshot was that the four got in – Jim will so enjoy telling you how – and seized control of weapons that could have blown the whole world to atoms. They announced to the world, on radio and television – of course, that was quite a new factor in a revolution then – that all they wanted was to be an independent nation again. After the first shock the whole thing was done with great decorum. They appealed to the United Nations, and everything was arranged through a Treaty. They even agreed to keep a token NATO presence here, rent-free.

  ‘Hy Brasil has no army and no defence policy. We remain a base for maritime patrol aircraft from the USA, and there’re about two hundred NATO personnel, including families, still on the island. There’s a USA admiral in charge. The base employs about fifty islanders, and that’s better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, these days. We read all this propaganda about Hy Brasil being a nuclear-free country. It’s extraordinary what people believe when they wish to. It’s Jim’s official line, of course. That, and up until ’89, no truck with Moscow. Jim was always a realist. I was glad to have him back, of course, but one changes. One doesn’t always realise until too late how much one has changed.’

  Later, in the pub, Colombo explained to me that marital fidelity was not the President’s strong point. I felt sorry for Penelope, but the place we were in cheered me up. The bar at the Red Herring is of polished oak, salvaged from His Majesty’s ship of the line The Irrepressible which foundered on Tegid Voel at the mouth of Dorrado Bay in 1779. If the ship had got as far as the rebellious colonies which were its destination, it would probably not have changed anything in the long run. There were five survivors, including the Bo’sun, Hosea Honeyman. He never returned to his native Porlock; churchyards of all denominations in Dorrado, Lyonsness and Ogg’s Cove contain his descendents, and his name still lives in the Electoral Roll, the Internal Revenue files, and the records of the Frisland Bank.

  The present landlord, Ernest, inherited the Red Herring from his mother, and he likes talking about its history. He looks just the way a landlord ought to do. He wears a leather waistcoat, over which his beard flows down to the second tortoiseshell button. His white hair reaches to his massive shoulders. His shirtsleeves are rolled to the elbow, displaying muscular forearms tastefully tattooed with an anchor to port and a red rose to starboard. He was in the middle of explaining to me how he comes of a long line of Swiss pastors, and how his grandfather Ernest had been shipwrecked as a boy and grown up on a tropical island, when the door opened and a draught of cold air hit my back. The door shut with a bang.

  ‘Oh God,’ Colombo muttered, so only Ernest and I could hear him. ‘It’s Olly West.’

  A tall man strode up to the bar. He wore wellingtons, a dirty waxed jacket and a hat with ear flaps. ‘Evening Ernest, evening Colombo.’ His voice was unexpectedly high. ‘One Mars Bar please.’ He laid half a crown on the counter.

  ‘Two and sevenpence ha’penny,’ said Ernest.

  ‘No! And they seem to get smaller all the time.’ Olly fished in his pocket and counted out three more coins. ‘Quiet tonight?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’ll rain by seven. There’s a depression moving up from the Azores. How nice to see you, Colombo. I know your mother misses you when you don’t visit Dorrado for weeks at a time. I can only give you five minutes though. There’s a m
eeting of the Mayda Trust tonight.’

  ‘You’re not on the Mayda Trust, are you?’ asked Colombo, frowning. ‘I thought you were one of its chief beneficiaries?’

  ‘No, no. You’re referring to the Pele Centre having received a grant. I’m not the Pele Centre. As a private individual I’m quite eligible to serve on the Committee. I was co-opted last month. They’re using my expertise in fundraising; I can give them a great deal of advice from my experience setting up the Pele Centre. I’m working closely with Baskerville, of course. This year is the crucial period, with the forty-year celebrations coming up in 1998. We have to make some very important decisions. Tonight we’re discussing grants for Arts projects. We need to have as many venues as possible next year. We expect up to twenty thousand visitors.’

  ‘Please,’ I interrupted, ‘what’s the Pele Centre? Is it an Arts project?’

  I don’t think Olly saw me; I don’t suppose he’s deliberately rude. ‘I can help them on the administrative side,’ he went on telling Colombo. ‘It’s a case of judging the projects on their merits. We have to think about achieving the correct balance. Anyway, I’m sorry to have to tear myself away. It would have been delightful to spend the evening with you. I must apologise.’

  As soon as he’d shut the door behind him, Colombo burst out, ‘What the hell’s he doing on the Mayda Trust? It was supposed to be Ishmael. Ernest, you thought they’d appoint Ishmael, didn’t you? That man wouldn’t know a viable Arts project if it fell on his head. He got himself co-opted on to the Committee when we did the In the Wake of Pytheas exhibition. I don’t know what he thought he was doing there; it turned out he hadn’t even heard of Brendan’s Navigatio. That man’s never read a book in his life. And what’s the betting his wretched volcano centre gets another whacking grant from the Mayda Trust next year?’