Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  Da Shack looked most unpromising from the outside on a foggy night. It’s a long frame-built shed down by the harbour, badly in need of a new coat of yellow paint. The place was already full of people, and Jared knew them all. They weren’t all the same age as us. There were people older than my parents, and people who looked barely old enough to drink (you have to be seventeen in Hy Brasil). You’d never have got such diversity together in a place like Da Shack at ten o’clock on a Saturday night in England. This is a foreign country. For a moment I felt so shy I just wanted to run, but to my relief Jared didn’t sit down with any of the groups who greeted us, but led me up half a dozen steps to a raised platform at the back. There was a small table looking over the floor below that still wasn’t taken, and we sat there. I looked around at the dark green walls covered with old advertisments: The Bisto Kids, Coleman’s Mustard, Horlicks For Night Starvation. An antique canoe hung above our heads, and between us and the band stood an old-fashioned scarlet petrol pump with a notice on it saying, ‘Motor Car Fuel Only: contains lead’.

  Jared pointed out various people to me: three of Colombo’s brown-eyed sisters were there with their husbands, there were various Gunns, Hawkins, Pereiras and Kidds, most of whom seemed, from Jared’s rather involved account, to be cousins of his by marriage. Then there was an alarmingly sexy-looking woman with long blonde hair whom I understood, from what he didn’t say, to be an ex-girlfriend. I began to feel extremely visible, though no one took much notice of us except to smile and wave at Jared. But my father is vicar of a small village, and I knew quite well that no detail about me would have been missed by anybody. I began to blush, until I reminded myself that I was a writer, an objective observer of life to whom this whole scene was merely excellent material. But I wished the band would come back and start playing again, so we could all get lost again in sound. To my surprise when the waitress came round to us Jared ordered water, and I did the same. The water in Hy Brasil is delicious. When I told Jared so he smiled and said,

  Srotha teithmilsi tar tir,

  rogu de mid ocus fin,

  doini delgnaidi cen on,

  combarty cen peccad, cen chol

  (I’m copying it out. It didn’t sound like that but I got him to write it down for me afterwards.)

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s the inscription on the drinking fountain in the market place in Dorrado. It comes from an old Irish poem about a voyage to Hy Brasil.’

  ‘And what does it mean?’

  ‘As well as I can tell you, it means, “The soil in that country is watered by sweet, gentle streams. The natives drink the best cider and wine. They are a fine people and full of integrity. Sex there is not a sin, and no one need feel any guilt about it.”’

  ‘Are you sure it means all that?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘I’m not an Irish scholar, but that’s what I’m told.’

  At last the band started playing again. They weren’t young. Jared said they’d been together since the sixties, and to look at them you’d think nothing had touched them since, but there was nothing fossilised about their music. They were pretty versatile. The saxophonist alternated between a tenor and a soprano sax, the guitarist between lead and rhythm, one of the singers also played the fiddle, and then there was a drummer and a wild-looking guy playing an electric piano and a synthesiser. It was mostly old-fashioned stuff, but funky rather than nostalgic. I liked it. I sipped ice-cold water and listened, and suddenly everything changed, like in a dream, into one of those moments of intense happiness which you recognise and know that this is it, this is what you’re alive for, and this makes it all worth it even if you die tomorrow. I didn’t care any more if we were watched by half the world. The band broke into ‘Love Shack’. I looked up and caught Jared looking at me with something that might have been surprise, but I didn’t have time to tell, because he jumped up and held out his hand to me, and we went on to the floor and danced. And that’s what we did until three o’clockin the morning. I love to dance. I get wild. It takes brilliant music for me to really know I’ve got a body, and those elderly-looking hippies had everything it takes after all. They played ‘Mustang Sally’, ‘Chain of Fools’, ‘Do you Love Me?’ and lots more. Sometimes if the music is great I dance with my eyes shut and get really into it. I did that last night at times, and other times I found myself looking at Jared. Jared dances the way I do, crazily. His tattered shirt came undone and flapped madly. When the band began to play I Only Haυe Eyes For You I hung back; in fact it wasn’t at all unpleasant to get close to him. He has a good sense of rhythm. But all through the evening every time I looked at him I’d find his blue eyes fixed on me, with that naked look one can’t help recognising, and can’t help remembering either that one has a certain power and occasionally men are vulnerable to it, and sometimes one ends up hurting them. But when it’s happening it all seems worth it, and in the end, too: however it ends I think, as far as I can tell so far, it still stays worth it.

  I got out my pen and paper just now so as to write this all up for the guidebook, but I can’t even remember the name of the band. I’m on to my second bound notebook, but I’m worried that what I’m writing is the wrong sort of book. Certainly I can’t put Jared Honeyman into a guidebook to Hy Brasil. Imagine how furious he would be.

  That was last night.

  When I came down at ten this morning Ernest said there was a message that I was to go to Maria’s house for breakfast. ‘I’ll run you down there,’ he said. I said that was hardly fair, as he was doing himself out of a customer, but he said he had a mind to go himself. It was only when we arrived that I realised that Maria was Colombo’s sister, the one who’s married to the harbour master. Maria was at the stove making an endless succession of pancakes. Her sister Maeve was dishing up Spanish omelettes and two more of the family were dispensing hot bread and coffee, while a mob of dark-eyed children milled about the table under their feet. About a dozen people from last night were sitting round the kitchen table, including the entire band. The babble of talk mingled in a friendly way with the smells of coffee and fresh bread. The table was covered with blue and white china and in the middle there was a big bowl of oranges looking almost luminescent in the sun from the open window. Jared was wedged in at the end of the table, rapidly demolishing a bacon sandwich. When Ernest and I appeared he said, ‘Good, you got her,’ with his mouth full, and moved up to make room for me.

  I wondered as I ate if Colombo were still at Ravnscar, and, if so, whether he and Lucy were having a cheerful breakfast in the alcove of the kitchen window, then remembered that would have been hours ago if it had happened at all. I looked at Colombo’s sister Natalia, leaning across her tattooed and silent husband, in order to tell the lead singer from the band how it was she knew that Father Browne’s housekeeper was feeding him entirely out of tins, so that the poor man never saw any fresh meat or vegetables from one month’s end to another, which would account for his terrible complexion, and in the middle of the summer too. I thought how if Colombo wasn’t at Ravnscar he might have been here. I remembered the day Colombo brought me to Dorrado, and how he’d never mentioned his family, but taken me to his godmother’s house on the hill to have tea. I looked at Maria who was breaking more eggs into a big blue-and-white bowl and arguing with a man I didn’t know about fish quotas, and it occurred to me that Colombo had shown me a very different country from all this. Then I thought about Lucy, living alone up at Ravnscar, and I wondered if she’d ever been to Da Shack, and if she had, why she’d never mentioned it to me.

  Next to me Jared was telling Ernest and two of the MacAdam sisters’ husbands about a document in the Spanish National Archive that told how the Cortes was commissioned to sail from Seville to Panama with a triple order to supply the existing colonists, to lay claim to new land and to seek for treasure. ‘The irony is,’ he was saying, ‘That the Cortes went looking for treasure and now she’s turned into treasure. What’s lying off Despair is nothing less than a microcos
m of Spain, 1611. We were down there a couple of days ago and we found the complete rim of an olive jar. And we’ve got other sherds that might be part of it too. God knows what’s lying under the sand, but we don’t even have a vacuum pump. And no one even wants to know.’ Jared had told me just the same thing, last night, and it occurred to me that if I spent more time with him I was going to hear him telling people about the Cortes fairly often. That was the first time I’d caught myself making any assumption at all about Jared. I looked down. He was spreading butter lavishly on hot rolls. His hands were very unlike Colombo’s, being square and brown, the fingers cracked and roughened by outdoor work and seawater. There’s nothing elegant about Jared, but he has a look of sturdy capability which makes an odd contrast to his unpredictable temper. I wondered which impression was the deceptive one: maybe he’s just paradoxical.

  I listened to the cadaverous-looking man who played the guitar telling me where the band had toured in England fifteen years ago, until Jared put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’d like to see the back of the mountain, wouldn’t you, Sidony?’

  ‘The back of which mountain?’

  ‘Brasil. Marco here says we can borrow his jeep. You ought to see the coast north of here. It’s something else.’

  ‘Jared borrows cars like other people borrow a pound of sugar,’ remarked the guitarist.

  Jared grinned at him. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Sidony? You’re not busy?’

  ‘No, I’m not busy.’

  Only, of course, I am busy, or ought to be. It’s time to turn over a new leaf, literally, and get back to where I’m supposed to be:

  The west coast between Dorrado and Ogg’s Cove can hardly have changed since the basalt skeleton of Hy Brasil first heaved itself out of the sea five million years ago. Certainly, once the old Dorrado whaling station is out of sight, history has made no impression on it. The only signs of habitation are the two parallel tyre tracks that mark where a vehicle has been this way before, and they stop abruptly where the angle of the hillside steepens to an alarming thirty degrees. The ride’s an uncomfortable one, heaving and bumping over rock and marshland, but the surroundings are spectacular. In June the grass slopes are pink with thrift, and the rounded outcrops of basalt gleam in the sun as if they hadn’t hardened yet into solid rock. The track stops where the grassy terrace peters out, and from then on one walks over bare rock. The basalt is rough and rounded like the barnacled back of a whale, as easy to walk on as paving stones. In the cracks between the rock swellings the grass is lush and studded with spring flowers: early purple orchids, lousewort, tormentil and milkwort. We passed a few of the feral goats which people keep telling me have become a pest on Hy Brasil. Their ancestors were left on the islands by passing sailors, so there would always be a supply of meat when their ships came back. The sea thumps lazily against the invisible rocks below, and white gulls swoop and glide, their cries echoing against hidden cliffs. One can see the islands that guard the entrance to the bay of Dorrado: Gwionsay, Bjornskerry, Tegid Voel. To one’s right the slopes rise upwards into the mist that hangs over the summit of Mount Brasil. It’s an active volcano; all this could be swept away tomorrow, or a hundred years from now.

  Jared said, when I asked how one lived with a thing like that, that it was more like living with a person than a thing, and when I asked how, he said all volcanoes had personalities, and the way people dealt with them in the past was to think about how they were feeling rather than what they might do. I said that wasn’t very scientific, and he said that living with anyone, which was what I’d asked him about, was an art not a science and Shakespeare knew what he was talking about when he said that, ‘Oft the teeming earth Is with a kind of colic pinched and vex’d By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb.’ The metaphor is particularly pungent, he said, insofar as the smell is in fact remarkably similar. Even after living with Arthur all my life it sometimes takes me a while to realise I’m being teased.

  I look at what I’ve just written and I think, who’ll read that, tomorrow or a hundred years from now? Will people come here because I wrote this, or will they sit at home, gentlemen in England now abed, and read what I’ve written rather than come here? Jared would rather they stayed away, but I’m trying to keep Jared out of this. In that last paragraph I failed completely. I realise for the first time that the reason guidebooks are so boring if you happen not to be in the relevant place, is because they don’t have any characters, and travel books, which do, are mostly lies anyway. Everyone I’ve met who knows the inside story of a travel book has told me it’s nearly all a lie. Is it a lie to say what flowers there were, and how old the rocks are, and leave out Jared? It’s certainly a distortion. At the moment my commissioning editor in Islington seems very far away, and Jared is very present, much more of a reality than she will ever be. I think I should get two different-coloured notebooks, one for what I’m supposed to be writing, and one for what I’m really thinking about.

  Jared and I sat on a rocky outcrop looking out to sea, due west in the direction of the northern peninsula of Newfoundland. I remembered the map that Peterkin had showed me in the Pele Centre, on which all the area around us was coloured in with grey spots. I mentioned this to Jared. He said Hy Brasil was very like Iceland, in that volcanic activity was usually chronic rather than fatal; it would leave nasty scars but it wouldn’t necessarily be what finished you off. I told him how my mother saw Surtsey rise out of the sea; she just happened to be flying to Reykjavik on the right day. ‘Lucky,’ said Jared.

  ‘Yes. She used to tell us the story; it made quite an impression. What happens when an island gets made: fire and steam and melted rock. Indescribable really.’

  ‘I’d say it had been described quite often.’

  ‘Where? In the National Geographic?’

  ‘Well, yes, that too. Or how about like this:

  “Below the thunders of the upper deep;

  Far far beneath in the abyssal sea

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth …”

  ‘I can’t remember the next bit. Hold on. Yes, I’ve got it …

  “There hath he lain for ages and will lie

  Battening on huge sea-worms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by men and angels to be seen

  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”’

  ‘Is that what they taught you on your oceanography course?’

  ‘No, I learned that in Ogg’s Cove Elementary School.’

  ‘You seem to have learned a lot of poetry at school. Much more than we do. You know, that in itself would be my mother’s notion of Utopia: a country where all the children learn loads of poems by heart at school. She’s an English teacher.’

  ‘We were doing a project on the volcano,’ said Jared. ‘I remember a lot of red paint.’

  We were silent for a bit, looking out to sea. I thought of something I’d meant to tell him. ‘Oh, by the way, Jared, you remember I said I’d seen that green goblet before?’

  He sat up at once. ‘Of course I do. What about it?’

  ‘It suddenly occurred to me when I was cleaning my teeth this morning where it was. There was a wineglass just the same – with the same crest and everything – with lots of other junk, on a shelf in the Pele Centre. It was when Olly West showed me round his office.’

  ‘What! You mean that man … Sidony, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. At least, I think I’m sure. It had a crack in it. I wasn’t noticing particularly at the time, but now I think about it, that’s why I recognised the one in Maldun’s Mill.’

  ‘Where did you say it was? In the main office?’

  ‘No, in his little office. The one on the right as you go in. There’s a whole lot of bits and pieces on the shelf above the seismology journals.’

  ‘You’re absolutely positive?’

  ‘Well, yes. At least, you’re making me think I’m
not. But it must have been like, because I’m sure that’s why your goblet seemed so familiar. Why? Has anyone taken treasure off the Cortes before now, do you know? I suppose they could have.’

  ‘There were survivors.’

  ‘Well then, I suppose it wouldn’t be so odd. I mean wineglasses … did they have sets of things in those days?’

  ‘The story goes that eleven people got off. It must have been a hell of a night.’

  He didn’t say anything else for a long time. I divided my attention between the sweeping gulls and his frowning profile. Eventually I said, ‘Jared?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘In return, will you tell me about Lucy?’

  ‘Lucy? What about Lucy?’

  ‘I think she’s lonely,’ I said. Though before I spoke I hadn’t formulated the idea, I knew as soon as I said it that it was true. ‘I’ve stayed with her nearly three weeks now and I like her a lot, and I can tell. I know Ravnscar is home for her, but most people couldn’t stand it. Sometimes she talks about New York and I wonder why the hell she came back here at all. She had a life. She talks to Colombo more than to anyone else, but usually on the phone. When he actually turns up they seem very tense together. She knows who everyone is, but she doesn’t seem to have any friends. And yet she’s kind and hospitable and friendly, and we talk a lot, but there’s this great big emptiness in the middle. I like Ravnscar. I love staying there and I’ll never forget it. But sometimes since I got to Dorrado yesterday – was it only yesterday? – sometimes I’ve just wanted to cry. I think I’ve been getting lonely myself. Missing something. Missing out on life, that’s what it feels like. That’s what it’s like with Lucy; it’s been rubbing off on me. I can’t explain.’