Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘But this is the thing that concerns me,’ said Jared. ‘I see no signs of recession. There’s more money in Hy Brasil now than I’ve ever known. If you travel around and see what’s happening, you’d begin to assume that this is one of the richest countries in the world.’

  ‘And so we were, Mr Honeyman, as you well know. We retain an infrastructure which has been very carefully built up through better days, and we draw upon investments that were made to insure our nation against such a reversal of fortune as has indeed occurred, and thank God, I say, that we have done so. Our wealth was built on the fishing industry, and as a maritime expert you should understand better than anybody why we’re in serious trouble now. You can’t blame the government for that.’

  ‘I don’t blame the government for that. But I’m not a fool, Mr Hook, and I can see with my own eyes that this government is not poor.’ Under those imperturbable hazel eyes Jared was beginning to lose his temper. Careful, he thought, I have to be careful.

  ‘So what are you trying to suggest?’ The question flashed out at him so suddenly it took him by surprise.

  ‘I’m suggesting to you,’ said Jared, ‘that you could very easily find the money for me to salvage the Cortes. I’m suggesting that the reason that I didn’t get it has nothing to do with lack of funds. I’m suggesting that maybe this government would prefer to have no inhabitants on the island of Despair.’

  ‘Young man,’ said Hook. ‘Either you’re dangerously arrogant or a complete fool. Do you think it wise to try to blackmail a President in his own office?’

  ‘It would be unwise anywhere, if that’s what I was trying to do. Only I’m not.’

  ‘So what did you come here for?’

  It was the way the President leaned back so comfortably in his chair, accusing him of blackmail, for God’s sake, and looked down on him through half shut eyes, that did the trick. Jared forgot everything he’d learned to be; he was just a boy from Ogg’s Cove who wore old hand-me-downs and who hadn’t got a father, alive or dead, and since that was all he was, Jared knew he could be no match for this. It had taken him years to learn to keep his temper, and with a look Hook stripped all that time away from him, and Jared flared up in a blaze of useless anger. All he’d gained abroad now was the ability to speak his mind; it might have been much better if he had not.

  ‘I came to say,’ said Jared, red and furious, ‘that if I were to find myself a citizen of a country that made its money out of destroying other people’s lives, that was secretly engaged in a trade that made fortunes by working towards the ruin of other nations, that lied about its contacts and its revenue, that evaded any kind of enquiry and thought itself beyond accountability to anybody – if I ever found myself a citizen of a nation that behaved like that, I’d fight to expose it with everything I’d got! I wouldn’t rest until I’d found out what was going on and made it public. I’d fight for the freedom to vote against it and bring it down. I couldn’t live with myself if I did anything else! That isn’t what I came to say, but it’s what I think. And if you can’t deny what’s happening in Hy Brasil, if you can’t give me proof that all our money is coming to us the way it should, all above-board and accountable to any citizen who wants to see the books, then I’ll fight back until you admit what’s going on and move heaven and earth to change it!’

  There was a silence. The President didn’t move, and gradually Jared realised with horror exactly what he’d just said and done.

  ‘Mr Honeyman.’ It was the coldest voice he’d ever heard. ‘In my time, you may recall, I organised a revolution. Before you were born we created a free country and called it Hy Brasil. If I had been inclined to give way to the kind of display you have just exhibited to me, I think we would be a British colony today.’ He looked Jared in the eyes. `But you would rejoice at that, no doubt. As your father’s son, you would presumably rejoice if that were so.’

  Jared was up on his feet. ‘My father was not a traitor!’

  ‘Your father was a British agent. Your father was trusted by this government, and he sold the information he received to the British Secret Service.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ But the trouble was, perhaps he did. Jack Honeyman had never taken his eight-year-old son into his confidence. No one who knew the truth had ever told Jared anything about it. And his father was a traitor; Jared knew that all too well. He was a traitor because he’d left his family and never sent a message, never so much as a postcard. He’d gone out into the wide world beyond Hy Brasil and he’d never come back. So this time Jared didn’t even have his own conviction to support him. ‘He was not a traitor,’ repeated Jared. ‘It was only your word against his.’

  ‘The Government’s word. I’m sorry, Mr Honeyman. I can understand the episode is a distressing memory for you. You would do better to forget it. Forget you ever had a father, and this government will have the courtesy to do the same.’

  ‘I bet it would! It was you that exiled him! He never had the chance to speak!’

  ‘Mr Honeyman, I think you’d better go.’ As the President spoke, the door magically opened, and a uniformed bodyguard appeared. ‘Mr Hands, you may show this gentleman out.’

  Bewildered and appalled at what he’d done, Jared turned to follow. At the door Hook softly called him back. ‘Mr Honeyman!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You accuse me of having Jack Honeyman exiled. I don’t think you quite grasp the position.’ Jared waited, mute. When Hook spoke again his voice was so quiet it was almost gentle. ‘I could so much more easily have had him shot.’

  ‘Open the Madeira, Jim. It’s been that sort of day.’

  ‘But you’re all set for Friday?’

  ‘It all came together just at the last minute. I shifted the lighthouses. They were a section, but now I’ve made them more of a theme. Interspersed. It’s better. Like scraps of reason in the void.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Drops of light, I mean, where there wasn’t anything before. A metaphor, maybe, for the beginnings of history and habitation. God, I’m tired. Am I talking nonsense?’

  ‘Nesta Kirwan, you are as beautiful as the sun on Prosper at the dawn of a clear June day. You are the light of my life, a beacon in the terrible void of endless weekdays, and I adore you.’

  ‘Even when I’m preparing an exhibition?’

  ‘More than ever.’

  ‘You know, it’s not till I see them all there, on the wall, that I begin to understand what it is I’ve done. It’s all fragments up until then. Bits of the elephant. But I’ve got it, Jim, it works. One sees the place. I didn’t even know myself, that I could make it be like that. I’m sick to death of it. I shall put a padlock on the darkroom door and sit in the sun for the next month. I shall be a lizard on a rock.’

  Nesta put down her glass with a thump, leaned back on the sofa and shut her eyes. Jim sat down cautiously at her feet, twirling his glass so that the Madeira caught bits of lamplight like silver fishes in a brown net. She poked at him with her foot, and he looked round at her.

  The way she was lying was perfect, just as all her movements, all her poses, were perfect. It had always fascinated him, this extraordinary way in which she inhabited her body, as if she were more present than other people. Not more substantial; she was still as slight as she’d been at twenty; it was more the way she was as suggestively animal yet deceptively refined as a well-bred cat. He’d been watching her for thirty years, off and on, and still he was acutely aware of the actress in her, even though she’d never stood on a stage since the day she left drama school. She never seemed to age either; perhaps that was all part of it. Her brown hair was cropped short in a way that few other women in their forties could have got away with. No one could have looked less masculine. Her hands, folded on her chest, were brown and slender like a peasant Madonna’s, and her lashes curled on her cheeks as innocently as a Murillo bambino. He wasn’t sure, though he knew her better than anyone else in the world, if the effect she was having on him now was calculat
ed to the last detail, or if the only images in her mind were the remembered imprints of her own photographs. Perhaps it made very little difference. He knew her work, perhaps better than he knew her, and was quite aware of the technique that lay behind the blazing simplicity of her compositions.

  She was wearing the scarlet tracksuit she did her yoga in, and bare feet. That was Nesta. On Friday, at the opening, she would be the most elegant woman in Hy Brasil, in her own offbeat idiom. On Friday, he guessed, she would wear black, with amber and old silver, and some sort of floating scarf that always draped itself the right way, however she stood or sat or gesticulated, as she always did when the conversation began to excite her. On Friday it would excite her, because everyone would be talking about her work. He could never describe the details of what she wore, or the content of what she had said, but the way she looked, the way she spoke: he could have gone on forever about that, if he had been enough of a poet to find the words.

  He was not a possessive man. When he gave her this apartment he gave himself no corresponding entitlement to ownership. He had only thought that the view was what she needed. On those mornings when he woke up in her bed and looked out over St Brandons and straight into the sunrise, and watched the light shine back into her austere white room and tinge everything with a flush of pink, he never reflected on his own generosity in bringing this about. He simply thought that this place was right for her. If it was mostly his money that had paid for the pale carpets, the three well-chosen items of Regency inlaid furniture, the white sofas with their dark green and maroon cushions, and the pre-Raphaelite painting of Hercules plucking the golden apples, it never occurred to him to count the cost. Nor did he worry about whether any other man might lie in the white bed with linen sheets when he was elsewhere. No one else would know quite what he knew. His most possessive thought was that Queen Anne Terrace was very handy for Government House, less than five minutes’ walk, and that was very convenient for him when he’d been working late.

  ‘Jim?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Do you think my work is important? I mean, really important?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? To you? To me? To Art with a capital A?

  ‘It isn’t political.’

  ‘What does that mean? Of course I think it’s important.’

  ‘Why? What you think is important is freedom and power and all that stuff.’

  ‘You’re always telling me what I think. Freedom and power? These days it’s more a case of All That Stuff. The other was a long time ago. Nesta, am I getting old?’

  ‘‘‘And deeper than did ever plummet sound, I’ll drown my book.” Did you have a tiring day as well?’

  ‘Not too bad. I had to deal with an enraged young man after lunch, and in the morning I had an interesting encounter with a crocodile.’

  ‘Oh, of course, you said. You had to open the new reptile house at the zoo. Is it nice?’

  ‘Charming. Though it crossed my mind halfway through that possibly it’s unwise to encourage a collection of poisonous snakes in a seismically sensitive zone.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They have a black mamba and two cobras who will no doubt reproduce, since male and female created he them. Certainly they seemed to be passionately intertwined. Are cobras passionate? Do they lay eggs? Natural history isn’t my strong point, but in my opinion Brendan did this country a favour when he banished the serpent. I’ve never been partial to anything that crawls on its belly. Obviously I shouldn’t have gone into politics.’

  ‘I don’t quite see where the earthquakes come in.’

  ‘Just a thin pane of glass between us and them. If the earth moved, what then? I’d have been caught between a grinning crocodile and a posse of poisonous snakes. Given our seismic record, I’m not sure it’s a wise project. Ishmael Pereira began it when he donated that damn stingray. I don’t like zoos anyway.’

  ‘But you smiled and smiled and cut the tape?’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘I like Ishmael.’

  ‘Oddly enough, he had an interview with me today as well. Now there’s a man after my own heart. He actually seems to understand that the country needs to generate an income before it spends it.’

  ‘You were cross with him last week because he wanted you to put more money into seismic monitoring after that tidal wave on the west coast.’

  ‘That was no tidal wave. That was an excitable young reporter trying to get himself on to the front page.’

  ‘Tidesman is thirty-six, m’dear, and past worrying about being on the front page. Nor is Ishmael an excitable young reporter. Nor are the Ogg’s Cove coastguards, so far as I know.’

  ‘Neither Ishmael nor the coastguards produced this week’s piece of sensationalism. However, it won’t happen again. I spoke to the senior editor this morning. Ishmael had to admit that this remarkable cosmological event passed quite unnoticed by him, and he was at Ferdy’s Landing all the time. Now he does know something about the sea; I would accept him as a reliable witness.’

  ‘Jed Honeyman was quoted as saying it must have been ‘‘quite a quake”, and I should have thought he’d know if anyone does. I enjoyed that day I did the diving photographs with them. But they told me the Cortes project didn’t get its funding after all?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me. This is a democracy, remember. We have committees for all that sort of thing. All projects must be (1) banal, and (2) anodyne. If Ishmael wants to go diving he can afford to pay for it himself, and young Honeyman, who came in and ranted at me earlier today, can’t expect a government subsidy in order to play Robinson Crusoe on Despair.’

  ‘Jared came and ranted at you? I thought he was a delightful young man. I got a brilliant photograph of him. You’ll see it in the exhibition.’

  ‘Delightful? That freckled whelp? I’ve seen enough of young Honeyman this afternoon not to wish instantly to repeat the experience.’

  ‘Well, he was charming to me. Are you sure you weren’t horrible to him, Jim? Why did he come?’

  ‘Angst, m’dear. Avoid young men; either they’re exhausting or they’re disappointing. Honeyman has ideals and is therefore exhausting. Look him up when he’s forty. I’ll be dead and he’ll be just what you need by then I expect.’

  Nesta screwed up her eyes and studied the lamp. Then she said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t live to be eighty-eight. Jared’s older than you probably think. He was off the island quite a while, remember.’

  ‘Christ, Nesta, do I want to be eighty-eight?’

  In one graceful movement she was kneeling beside him on the sofa, his head cradled in her arms. ‘Oh Jim, my love. You’re not old. You won’t ever be old. Not to me, whatever changes.’

  ‘Liar.’ He leaned his head against her breasts. ‘Don’t lie to me, my sweet. Just forget. Come here, come here. Yes, like that. I want to forget. Just for a little while, I want us to forget.’

  ELEVEN

  Sidony Redruth. Ravnscar Castle. June 12th.

  Notes for Undiscovered Islands (working title).

  THE PARLIAMENT OF the new independent state of Hy Brasil only met once, in October 1958. It held one major debate: whether the rule of the road should be altered from the British Left to the European Right. The argument was passionate, and lasted until three o’clock in the morning. One can see why. The symbolic significance of Left, so pertinent to the recent Revolution, warred in delegates’ minds with the association of Left with an aggressive British insularity, seen now as a bloody-minded insistence on being different for its own sake. Driving on the Right, seen in that light, was concomitant with removing the statue of Nelson from the harbour entrance to the drying green behind Back Lane elementary school, or changing the names of Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli Streets – which formed a grid at right angles to Water Street and High Street – to Liberty, Egality and Fraternity Streets. (You can still see the old names etched into the stone buildings on street corners, just above the modern black-and-yellow road sign
s.) Driving on the Right was an assertion of a new and independent foreign policy, in which Hy Brasil would take its place among the relatively normal nations of the world.

  But, the Left drivers argued, this reasoning was entirely spurious. The facts were these. (1) Hy Brasil is fifteen hundred sea miles from the nearest road outside its own boundaries, which, as it happens, is in County Kerry, in the Irish Republic, where they drive on the left, a small point which actually invalidated the whole Right argument. (2) Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the rest of the world (as opposed to the UK) which drives on the Right. In China, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand and Africa, and in numerous islands scattered across the five oceans, they drive on the Left. Right, in fact, is not a symbol of global solidarity, but of Western dominance, and as such, argued the Leftists, it could hardly be read as a radical step into a post-colonial world. (3) The new State of Hy Brasil was born into debt, and faced a future dominated by interest rates. No one was about to buy a new, left-hand drive car. Even to dream of doing so was seen as a capitalist, and therefore an unpatriotic, fantasy. With every driver in the country on the wrong side of the vehicle, possibly for years to come, the accident rate would soar. Mass emigration already being a problem, the wilful subtraction of accident victims from the total population could only be regarded as a shockingly irresponsible waste of human resources. (4) Even if the government encouraged the purchase of new vehicles, this would tie up the slender freight resources of the country to an alarming degree. The cost of imported goods, and the difficulty of attracting freight shipping to such a small market, was already one of the new government’s major problems, now that the UK subsidy was withdrawn. It would be more logical to forbid the import of vehicles than to encourage it by creating a false demand. (5) The entire public transport system of the nation, viz. the 227 bus, possessed right-hand drive. (6) Since all the roads in the country, with the exception of Water Street, were single track, the effect of the change would be negligible anyway, except when two vehicles met, at which point both drivers had to remember, preferably at the same time, on which side they were supposed to be. What would that be like on a Saturday night in Dorrado?