Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  * * *

  He was the oddest person to entertain to tea. About halfway through I decided I quite liked him. The smell was really nothing worse than badly-aired clothes. He had a grey look about him, but he was not unclean. He ought to wear a bit of colour, but presumably there was no one in his life who would suggest it to him. He said he preferred Lapsang Souchong, and I made it in the Hester Bateman teapot. He continued to apologise with rusty old-fashioned courtesy for having startled me, until I told him there was no need to say any more about it. He ate two ginger biscuits. I would have been less nervous if I hadn’t expected Lucy to walk in any minute. I had a feeling she wouldn’t approve, but what could I have done? One thing that a West Country vicarage has in common with the castle of Ravnscar is that hospitality is compulsory, and as far as that goes I’m my mother’s daughter. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him to go away. He was working on an archeological report on the lower caverns of Mount Prosper, apparently, and the path at the bottom of the cellar steps was a useful short cut. He wouldn’t let me fetch Lucy, which I very much wanted to do. He said there was no need to disturb her. I thought there was; never before have I found afternoon tea so nefarious.

  Even so, I began to enjoy our conversation. He said he’d visited Cornwall as a young man, but when I asked when that was he said, ‘Long before you were born. In the Dark Ages, m’dear,’ and his lips stretched out in a thin white line which I realised was a smile. He seemed to remember Cornwall well, however. We had an interesting discussion about chambered cairns, of which of course there are none in Hy Brasil. That led us on to the Phoenicians and the tin trade, and we somehow got from there to the Renaissance explorers. He mentioned the goblet we’d looked at together at Maldun’s Mill. ‘The interesting thing about that particular goblet,’ he said, `is that it has a duplicate. Long before Mr Honeyman salvaged the one you saw, its fellow was brought ashore, probably by one of the survivors from the wreck. But then, no doubt you’ve seen it. I expect Miss Morgan showed it to you?’

  ‘Lucy? Oh, no, she hasn’t got it. It’s not here.’

  ‘I think if you ask her you may find that it is. So she didn’t tell you about it? It’s an interesting story.’

  ‘I’m sure Lucy doesn’t even know about it.’

  ‘But you do, I gather?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Forgive me, m’dear. I thought when you said “not here”, you meant you’d come across the story, or even the goblet itself, somewhere else. These things get about. It would be an interesting legend to write up in your book, would it not? You must come and visit the museum sometime. I have some intriguing notes on possible artefacts from the Cortes. You know the story goes that the screen in St Bride’s church at Ogg’s Cove is made from timbers from the wreck? Possibly the goblet is in Ogg’s Cove too. I must speak to Father Segato about it sometime. Perhaps you’ve met him? He may be able to tell you where it is now, if you’re sure it isn’t at Ravnscar. I’m sure he’d be delighted to help you in any way he could.’

  Staying silent, after what he’d just said, was tantamount to lying, or, if not that, a very uncivil way to treat a guest. The second goblet had nothing at all to do with Lucy, I was certain about that. I couldn’t be incriminating anyone except possibly Olly West, which I didn’t care too much about, especially after Jared had been so indignant, and to what more reliable authority could I mention my find than the curator of the National Museum of Hy Brasil? All this flashed through my mind during the time it took to swallow half a ginger biscuit. I said, ‘I have seen it, in fact. It isn’t here. It’s in the Pele Centre. I saw it on the shelf in the little office when Olly West showed me round. I don’t think he realises what it is. He didn’t mention it.’

  Baskerville’s expression didn’t change. He sipped his tea, and stared out of the window into the blazing heat outside. I didn’t like to interrupt his thoughts. I don’t think either of us moved for nearly five minutes. ‘Well, that’s very curious,’ he said at last. ‘And what do you think of our earthquakes? It isn’t what you’re used to, I’m sure. Nor are we, as a matter of fact. This has been the most unstable year since 1958, I believe.’

  Not long after that he said he must be getting back. He told me to give his regards to Miss Morgan. I suppose I should have escorted him as far as the wine cellar door, but I just didn’t feel like another descent into the nether regions. I shook his chilly hand at the top of the stairs, and listened to his footsteps gradually echoing away, down into the dark.

  I didn’t think any more about Baskerville until the following evening, which was the Saturday night that Penelope had invited me to dinner. It was almost two months since she and Colombo had promised I should meet the President, and by the time the invitation did come I’d more or less forgotten about it. I’d never completely believed I’d get to dine with James Hook on one of his quiet weekends in his own house, and I had been amazed when Penelope finally phoned. Lucy seemed to think it was quite normal, but when I was about to set off, she did seem a little more agitated than usual.

  ‘Sidony!’ she said, when I came downstairs. ‘Turn around. Let me look at you. Oh m’dear, you see you can look pretty if you try. It’s a pity Henry Tilney isn’t going to be there. But where has that dress been?’

  ‘Nowhere. Not since I came.’

  ‘I can see that. Rolled in a ball in the bottom of your rucksack I suppose.’ She was dragging an ironing board out of the cupboard. ‘Is your mother like you, or are you the despair of her, or both?’

  These things never seem to me to be worth arguing about, so I allowed her to have her way with me, and even let her lend me a gold chain with a star on it to hang around my neck. When she was satisfied she tossed me the Land Rover keys, and off I went.

  When the door opened I did a double take. It was Maeve standing there: Colombo’s sister Maeve whom I’d met at breakfast with Jared the day after the dance. I felt so relieved to see her: in the two hours it had taken to drive from Ravnscar to Dorrado I’d worked myself into quite a state of shyness. I think it was Lucy and the ironing that set me off. Maeve said nothing at all about my unusual appearance – not knowing me she probably didn’t realise how unusual it was – but greeted me as if I were an old friend. I felt bereft when I realised she was leaving me at the drawing-room door, having announced me by both my names to whoever was in there. I must have looked as panicked as I felt, because she gave me a little push from behind, and whispered, ‘It’s OK m’dear, he won’t eat you. He won’t have to; there’s a smashing dinner coming up. I should know. I’m the cook.’

  The President didn’t eat me. On the contrary, he was extremely affable. I sat on the edge of my chair sipping dry sherry, and remembered I needed to stay sober enough to drive home over those mountain roads in the dark. I wished Colombo were there, or Lucy, or Jared. I doubted if Jared ever ironed anything; he wouldn’t see the point. I wondered if he ever felt shy, and discovered that I had no idea. On the other hand, I was fairly sure that Colombo would not feel shy under any circumstances, and one only had to look at him to know he would never dine with his President in an unironed shirt. I tried to imagine Colombo shirtless, ironing, but I couldn’t conjure up a domestic setting for him at all. Meanwhile the President was talking about a new programme of Study Abroad scholarships, and student exchanges at the University of the Hesperides. I did my best to look intelligent. ‘Travel for the young,’ he was saying. ‘I’m all for it. Personally, I never want to stay in a foreign hotel again as long as I live, or shake hands with another royal personage, or be photographed again with balding men even older and uglier than I am in ill-fitting suits. But to the young all things are no doubt new.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I don’t think they send the young to diplomatic functions.’

  ‘No, such tortures are reserved for desiccated cynics like myself. The young are merely offered the means to do what they will, and in another country. But youth should have its opportunity, youth should rule. Old age should merely mete and
dole unequal laws unto a savage race, but at least the current arrangements allow us the occasional transient opportunity to feast our eyes upon a pretty face. I never thought that young women should be immured at home. We have a pro-active equal opportunities policy in Hy Brasil, Miss Redruth. In fact there are more women employed in this country than there are men. You will no doubt have observed the preponderance of women in the public sphere.’

  ‘I thought the reason so many men didn’t have jobs was because there’s no more fishing. And the women don’t usually get the highest-up jobs, do they?’ As soon as I’d spoken I felt I’d said the wrong thing, but he seemed delighted with me.

  ‘There you are, my love,’ he said to Penelope. ‘I detect an articulate member of the opposing party.’ He turned to me. ‘Never let it be said, m’dear, that we lack an opposition. The young naturally assume that role without any prompting from above. My grandchildren displayed a flourishing instinct for contradiction from the age of eighteen months. My son and his wife tell me that this is normal and healthy, from which one deduces that there is no need whatsoever to foster any artificial systems of controversy. The young will automatically oppose the old, and in the end the young, God help them, will overthrow us all. And when they do so they will know that they are old. Don’t look so dismayed, m’dear. Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled. Have you noticed much dissidence among our young?’

  ‘No,’ I stammered. ‘No one seems to talk about politics much at all.’

  ‘No, the burden of government is of little weight to those who never felt it. Never mind. Which of us was born to be appreciated, after all? Hy Brasil won’t always have me, the young it will always have with it, unless of course we all encounter our apocalypse simultaneously in the immediate future. Our volcanological problems must be an added source of interest to your researches? I hope I don’t express myself too blasphemously, m’dear? I understand you come from a godly household.’

  ‘Well, Jim dear,’ interposed Penelope, ‘I think perhaps you do.’

  At that moment the double doors at the far end of the room swung open, and Maeve, in a white apron, announced, ‘Dinner is served.’

  Maeve was right: the food was good. The three of us sat at a long table with a silver epergne in the middle of it, lit by six white candles. The President sat at one end, under a portrait of himself as a young man, and Penelope at the other, under a painting of a white horse with a docked tail. `Is that a Stubbs?’ I asked her.

  It was, and for about twenty minutes she and I talked about horses. I felt grateful for the three years of horse mania I’d put in between the ages of nine and twelve, undeterred by Arthur’s teasing. Penelope said I should come in daylight sometime and have a tour of the stables. But when we had all finished our soup and had started on the boeuf en daube, she interrupted herself. ‘But I mustn’t go on. You wanted Jim to tell you how they took the NATO base on Mount Ailbe, didn’t you?’

  I looked nervously at him. ‘Well, it would be really interesting. If you’re sure you don’t mind.’

  ‘M’dear, Jim always loves to talk about himself. Don’t you, sweetheart?’

  ‘It’s my pleasure, m’dear. So what would you, Miss Redruth? The story of my life, and the particular accidents gone by since I came to this isle? Or no, that would be too much. You’d like to know about the Trojan Horse?’

  ‘If you don’t mind telling me.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all.’ He wiped his mouth on his napkin, and took a sip of wine. ‘The Trojan Horse. Yes, indeed, that was the crux of the matter. I came back from the Americas in ’58 with just twelve men, and we were landed secretly at Hogg’s Beach one freezing February dawn. We hid first in the lava field at Brentness, and then we moved up into the caverns under Mount Prosper. Under the house where you’re staying now, in fact, m’dear. The caverns of Ravnscar remained our headquarters for the next two months, while we recruited local support. Lemuel Hawkins was our agent to the outside world. He lived at Ferdy’s Landing, and through him we kept our communications open, mainly by sea. It was Lem who first drew my attention to Jack Honeyman.

  ‘Yes, Honeyman was the key to it all. He had no record of political activity, though he was known to be a staunch Union man, a creature almost unheard of in Hy Brasil. It was a Union of one, in fact, and totally irrelevant to the man’s own life. He’d had his own business from the day he finished his apprenticeship. I knew nothing of that, of course; he was only a lad of sixteen when I had to flee the country. But Honeyman was known as an eccentric. He had the only subscription in Hy Brasil to the Socialist Worker. Always more than a week late, of course, because it came from Southampton on the ferry. But the Honeymans always took strange notions into their heads, and Jack’s politics were a standing joke in Ogg’s Cove, nothing more. Obviously NATO didn’t take him seriously, because he must have been vetted pretty thoroughly, or they’d never have let him in. But let him in they did. Of course they were desperate men. Desperate men, Miss Redruth. You know why?’

  ‘Because of the drains, you mean?’

  ‘That’s it in a nutshell. Drains were their downfall. Hell hath no fury like a backed-up drain, and the mountain would keep moving. NATO had their own personnel for everything, or should I say everything but a shifting sewage system. Even men who control the fate of a planet must shit.’

  ‘Sweetheart, we’re at the dinner table.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I know. But still the young lady hangs upon my tale. Within yards of the control room, as I say, there have to be the usual offices. Now, the sewage system had been put in at the beginning of the war by the British, when Mount Ailbe was an Allied base. They had problems with it even then. It was a single system, you understand, so that all the drains fed into one main sewer, which led to the treatment system, which was then outside the base. The original pipes were fireclay; when NATO expanded the base after the war they used concrete pipes. So you see all the pipes were rigid, and liable to crack even in small earth movements. Also, the main drainage system wasn’t designed for two hundred personnel. Trouble!

  ‘The other problem was the gradient. The Brits designed it to be around one in forty, but there was a problem with subsidence under the treatment plant. What with one thing and another, the drains kept getting blocked. And so we come to Jack Honeyman, Plumbing and Drainage Expert. He was only twenty-six, but his business was flourishing and his reputation went before him. No other man understood so much about the uncertain ground on which we stand. No other man in the country could or would guarantee a reliable septic tank. In desperation, NATO called him in. Scorning and fearing any local interference, they had previously gone ahead in their own fashion, and made what Honeyman described as a right pig’s ear of the whole thing. He did his best, but every time he did a repair the drains would promptly collapse again somewhere else. In the end he told them that the only possible solution was an entirely new system.

  ‘Six months of red tape and backed up drains ensued. At last the go-ahead came from High Command. The job proved to be a large one. Jack had to start again at the very beginning. He couldn’t use local labour. NATO provided the brawn, but Jack’s was the brain, and Jack’s also was the white van that went through the perimeter fence every day, past the guard posts, and right up to the main building complex. They got so used to his passing that after a while they failed to see him any more. Everyone knew that Jack Honeyman was all right.

  ‘Jack was thorough. Jack, in all innocence, demanded to see the plans. He had to know where the existing pipes were, you understand. His plan was to replace the single system with a series of individual septic tanks, each serving a section of the base. Each mini-system was to have some flexible pipes built into it. The beauty of the arrangement was that one blockage wouldn’t disrupt the drainage system of the whole base any more. It was a typical Honeyman solution. Jack was one of these small-is-beautiful chaps, ahead of his time you might say.

  ‘He had to look around the place. Escorted, of course, always e
scorted. And never within too close range of the control room. Of course he knew perfectly well where it was that he wasn’t being taken. But he would never have done anything about it, if it hadn’t been for Lemuel.

  ‘I used to slip into Dorrado occasionally. I had a wife and child, neither of whom I’d seen for ten years, and that was quite an incentive. It was Lemuel who pointed out Jack’s white van to me one night in the streets of Dorrado. We made our plans, and he began talking to Jack. Jack listened. Remember he’d been reading the Socialist Worker in solitude ever since he was old enough to write a cheque for the subscription. Lem encouraged our Jack to come over to Ferdy’s Landing of an evening and talk politics. A month of this, and the time seemed right to let him know that the caverns of Ravnscar were no longer uninhabited. Lem swore him to secrecy, and brought him up to meet us. Jack was a Romantic. In five minutes I knew that we were sure of him. It took Jack a week longer to realise the same thing, and then the planning began.

  ‘April 9th, 1958. Jack drove his white van in as usual, carefully packed with a load of pitch-fibre piping. Heavy stuff, I can tell you, if you happen to be underneath it. Which we were, three of us: myself, Lemuel Hawkins and a gentleman from Hy Brasil who had been decorated several times over for his distinguished career as a sapper in the Second World War. You know Fernando Baskerville. In fact he was just telling me you’d had a pleasant cup of tea together yesterday.’ The President offered me another glass of wine, and I shook my head. While he poured one for himself, he remarked in an offhand manner quite unlike his usual style. ‘The bravest man I ever want to know.’

  ‘Fernando was the deputy librarian in St Brandons library. He kept a low profile after the war, but he was then and always has been totally committed to the cause of independence. I think there is almost nothing he would not have done to achieve it. I’m an egotist, m’dear; I daresay you’ve noticed that. But Fernando was something else: a patriot. Every revolution must have one, and he was ours.