Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘And other things,’ interrupted Baskerville.

  ‘Yes, and now I have a new assistant. Allardyce had to go, I’m afraid. He had terrible problems working with other people, that was the trouble. I advised counselling therapy, but he wouldn’t take any interest. It was a pity, as he had an official training in volcanology, but one must take other matters into consideration when appointing personnel. Now I’m training up young Peterkin. He has no background, of course, but …’

  ‘West! I’m telling you that you’ve been robbed. Are you saying you haven’t even noticed?’

  Olly West stopped talking for a moment, but he still didn’t meet Baskerville’s eyes. ‘Of what have I been robbed?’

  ‘A green glass goblet. And other things. Perhaps I should tell you that I’ve spoken to the thief. The thief’ – the emphasis Baskerville placed on the word made Colombo look at him sharply – ‘the thief informs me that he also found other information – “something he has to sort out about the past” – do I make myself clear to you, Mr West? I was told that a glass goblet “wasn’t the only thing he found”. Are you sure you aren’t missing anything important, Mr West?’

  Olly glanced at Colombo, but his gaze slid away at once when he saw that Colombo was looking at him. ‘This is ridiculous, quite ridiculous, my dear Fernando. A green glass goblet? I don’t even have such a thing, to my knowledge.’

  ‘No, you don’t, not any more. But until two days ago it was on the shelf in your private office.’

  Olly West shrugged. ‘Well, there are various things up there I haven’t gone through lately. I wouldn’t know. Who says it was there?’

  ‘An independent witness.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ The man’s mood changed so fast that Colombo jumped up, clenching his fists, as if to protect the old man who sat perched imperturbably on his stool. Olly West bent over Baskerville and hissed at him, ‘If you’ve broken into my property, or if you’ve instigated any kind of robbery, I’ll have the law on you! You’ll be hearing from my solicitor, Mr Baskerville. This is an outrage!’

  Baskerville wiped a drop of Olly’s spittle from his forehead, and said, ‘No, Mr West, I have not broken into your office. And if I had, what kind of law could you invoke against me?’

  There was a short silence. Colombo looked from one to the other, his eyes bright and alert.

  ‘I suggest you go home and check your inventory,’ said Baskerville. ‘Let me know what you find.’ He stood up stiffly. ‘And if I hear instead from your solicitors … Well, perhaps the time has come. But if I fall, West, know this: I do not fall alone:’

  ‘In my opinion,’ said Colombo, striding up and down, ‘the old man’s going senile. I would to God that’s all there was to it. He’s been very good to me; I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for him. And after all these years I still can’t decide if West is God’s fool or Machiavelli’s prize pupil. What a pair! After half an hour of witnessing a duel between those two I can’t even imagine what’s real any more.’

  ‘M’dear, sit down, and stop pacing up and down like a tiger, or I’ll start thinkingwe’re in a cage. I’m about to dish up. You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten. You can pour the wine now if you like.’

  Colombo fetched the open bottle from the hearth, and came over to the table. It was laid for two, and four green candles burned in the centre of it. The table was polished wood, the china dark green, the napkins maroon. Silver winked in the candlelight. Nesta brought a steaming dish from the oven and placed it on the mat between them, between the bread and the salad. ‘Thank God for civilisation,’ said Colombo, by way of grace, and sombrely helped himself.

  ‘Listen, m’dear,’ said Nesta presently, laying down her fork. ‘About Jared…’

  ‘Baskerville didn’t tell Olly who it was. He only told me when that serpent in sheep’s clothing had taken himself off. He didn’t say a word about following you to Maldun’s Mill either. He’s being pretty cagey. But the thing was … Nesta, he’s putting it all on to me. He said if Tidesman presses the government too hard – he’s talking about my articles on the economy – he said, if I go too far, a scapegoat will be found. He was talking about Jed. He said to me, “Do you want his blood on your hands?” My hands, Nesta! Can you credit it? Basically he’s telling me to stop being controversial or someone’s going to do for Jed. Does that make any sense to you? Does any of it make any sense at all?’

  ‘M’dear, I’d better tell you. There’s something else.’ Nesta picked an olive out of her salad and ate it. When she’d delicately spat out the stone, she went on, ‘Jim called me from Dorrado an hour before you got here. He’d just had Baskerville on the phone to him. Baskerville told him everything he knew, I think, even that I’d taken poor Jared out to Atlantis and given him dinner. Jim wanted to find out what Jed had told me.’

  ‘And what had he told you?’

  ‘I didn’t think it mattered. Jim asked if Jared had mentioned anything else. If he’d found anything else at all – those were his words – at the Pele Centre.’

  ‘And had he?’

  ‘Yes, Colombo, he had. Jed told me he’d found letters that had once been Nicky’s. He took those as well. He didn’t tell me what they were, but he said, “I have to sort all this out, you see. There’s someone I need to talk to.”’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘You know who!’

  ‘I can guess. Lucy phoned me at the office today. She asked if I had any idea why Jared was leaving urgent messages all over the place for her to contact him. She thought I might have been in touch with him. I said no, as far as I knew he was incommunicado on Despair.’

  ‘I did think it might be Lucy, when Jed said he had to talk to someone. Because he did say, “it’s all stuff to do with the past, but Olly isn’t going to get away with this”. And with the letters being Nicky’s, I guessed that Lucy might be involved. But where Olly comes into it I just don’t know.’

  ‘You told Jim all that?’

  ‘Yes, m’dear, I did. I don’t think Jim was particularly interested in the letters. You know I won’t let Jim hurt Jared if I can possibly stop him. But even less will I let Jared hurt Jim.’

  ‘I see,’ said Colombo drily. ‘Conflicting loyalties.’

  ‘Yes, my love. Just like you.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Colombo, and reached for the cheese.

  He was silent for a long time after that, brooding over his coffee, and staring out of the window at the slowly darkening evening.

  ‘You’re exhausted, Colombo. Come to bed.’

  ‘I need to have a shower.’

  ‘Have one then, and come to bed.’

  When he came through into the white bedroom she’d turned out the light and drawn back the curtains, so that they could look out on to the pale night sky and the lights of St Brandons glowing like a starlit pool surrounded by the outer dark which was the sea. Colombo went over to the window and stood there naked, breathing in the cool salt breeze that the night brought with it. When he turned back to the room, darkness had crept in so that all he could see was the faint outline of the white bed. He felt his way back and got in beside her. The sheets were cool and clean against his skin. She always had them clean; he’d asked her about it once and she’d told him yes, naturally she had clean sheets on Saturday, for him, and then again on Sunday, before Hook came back from Dorrado. It was no trouble, she said, and it would hardly be civilised to do anything else.

  Nesta’s cool common sense was balm to his soul after the tortuous agonies of love. On the other hand, sex with Nesta was anything but cool; after the frozen wastes where he and Lucy together seemed to dwell, it was like coming in from a winter day to a blazing fireside. He put his hands out to her and met her hands. She was laughing, he knew. She always laughed at sex, and in the faint light from the window he thought he could see her smile. He rolled over on to her and kissed her. Her hands moved down his back and he shut his eyes. For a moment he thought of the yellow file labelled Chemistry Notes and
the vision of loneliness that had haunted him ever since he read it. He shoved the thought away, and obliterated Lucy from his mind the way he had to do every Saturday night. It seemed as wrong to him to think of one woman while making love to another, as to go straight to Mass after a night of fornication. It actually disrupted his life a good deal more to go to church on Wednesdays than to forget about Lucy for one day out of seven. But then it was only fair that illicit pleasures should be paid for, even if his method of accounting was unorthodox.

  Before he finally fell asleep he heard the clock from St Brendan’s Cathedral striking three. After that he was dreaming, and somehow Jared was in the dream. They were in a small boat sailing through the turbulent darkness on the far side of Despair, and Jared was telling him to bale, to bale, to keep on baling. But the boat filled slowly as the melting rock poured in and burst the seams, and he knew he could only save his own life if he woke himself up, and left the other there. Then he was looking down on Hy Brasil from far above, and all the islands were drowning in red lava, everyone except for him, and he knew that he should go down with them, because if he did not the end of his beloved country would be entirely his own fault, and then he would have nowhere to go, but would wander the empty seas forever, outcast until the end of time. He woke up, hot and shuddering, and remembered where he was. He reached out for Nesta. She was cool and soft-skinned in his arms, still half asleep, but she responded to him as he could always trust her to do. He was wide awake then, making love to her all over again, so that just for a little while he was not alone any more.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sidony Redruth. Ile de l’Espoir. July 20th.

  Notes for Undiscovered Islands (working title).

  STANDING ON THE jetty at Lyonsness, I thought about the way that islands get moved. Look at Juan Fernandez, for example, which is in the Pacific, at 79˚ west, 33.4˚ south, at least three hundred miles west of the coast of Chile. Defoe shifted it without compunction to the mouth of the Orinoco in the Caribbean, to 60.4˚ west, 9˚ north. He did this in order to provide a suitable mainland only thirty miles off, and consequently a supply of savages, which he needed for the plot. I call that fairly cavalier behaviour. Swift, on the other hand, is disingenuously vague about bearings, when Gulliver discusses what might have happened ‘if I had not made bold to strike out innumerable passages relating to the winds and tides, as well as to the variations and bearings in the several voyages’. Well, indeed, supposing he hadn’t, what then? Then if you go back to the old maps, right up to the nineteenth century, real islands keep vanishing because there was no accurate way of determining longitude, and for the same reason unreal ones keep appearing. Also, on old maps, islands are proportionately huge, not the tiny dots they are in a modern atlas. That’s not wrong. The maps are meant to be a picture of the islands as they are inside one’s head. They’re drawn to the scale of their significance.

  I thought about all this while I looked across at the mists that wreathed around Despair. If I didn’t know it was there I wouldn’t have been able to see it at all. I don’t think I’d ever fully grasped before how the existence of Hy Brasil could have remained the subject of serious debate for so long: it was 1865 when its place on the Purdy chart was last disputed. I considered the world in 1865, and it seemed incredible that such an incontrovertible fact as an archipelago could still have remained unproven. There was a white boat moored just below where I stood. Its name was painted on the side: Cerberus. Inside it were two cardboard boxes and a thing that looked a bit like a gas cylinder. I stared down at it, and remembered how when Marco Polo came back after all those years and described his travels, they didn’t believe him. I think that must be one of the worst things in the world: to tell the truth and not to be believed.

  ‘Sidony?’

  I looked up, and there was Jared. He put a bulging carrier bag down on the quay. ‘Were you waiting for me?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘I was just looking round.’

  ‘You said you wanted to come over.’ I must have looked blank, because he pointed at the boat moored at my feet. ‘That’s my boat. You said you wanted to go to Despair. I’ve been expecting you to get in touch.’

  ‘I do. But I wasn’t … I didn’t know you were over today.’

  ‘I’m not done yet,’ he said. ‘I’ve still to fetch my washing. It’s in Per’s washing machine.’ He waved towards a new bungalow built on a mound at the end of the town. ‘It would be a good day to come,’ he added. ‘A friend of mine killed a sheep. This is all mutton.’ He indicated the carrier bag. ‘So I could feed you pretty well.’

  ‘Well …’ A great many thoughts were going through my mind. The first was that I hadn’t heard from him at all for a month. After the night at Da Shack, and our walk, and the earthquake, I’d expected him to get in touch. He hadn’t. My second thought was that no way was I going to show any enthusiasm for his company if he didn’t make it very clear indeed that he wanted me around. Another thought was that I genuinely did want to get to Despair, and the best chance of doing that was with Jared. Finally, I remembered that I was, first and foremost, the writer of a book, and that meant seizing every opportunity, whatever my personal inclinations. ‘I suppose I could come today,’ I said at last. ‘You’d have to bring me back again, though. Wouldn’t that be a bother?’

  ‘There’s no point coming back today. The mist’s down. Come for a day or two at least. As long as you like. It’ll probably be clear again tomorrow.’

  ‘I suppose I could,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I’d need to get my stuff.’

  ‘You’ve got the Land Rover?’ I nodded. ‘You can do it to Ravnscar and back in an hour and ten minutes. Half an hour to get yourself sorted, say? I’ll be here again at …’ He looked at his watch. ‘Three. Can you do it by three?’

  He gave me a note to give to Lucy, but of course I’d forgotten that Lucy would have to come back to Lyonsness with me to retrieve her Land Rover. On the way she took it upon herself to warn me that I was more attractive than I realised, and that Jared had been living on his own for over a year. I said I didn’t foresee any problems. She exclaimed that she never meant for one moment that I wouldn’t be safe with him, more the other way about if anything. I was indignant, and she gave me a tangled explanation from which it emerged that she was fond of Jared, she’d known him since he was a baby, and although she’d seen him get into a lot of trouble, she’d also seen him be very good to his mother. ‘Mind you,’ added Lucy, ‘his mother had been more than good to him. But most boys of eighteen don’t think of that.’

  ‘What happened to his mother?’

  ‘She got iller and iller all that winter and then she died. Jed went back to college after Easter, then the first weekend he was back in St Brandons he ended up assaulting a policeman. They sent him to jail for six weeks. He took the boat to Southampton the same day he got out. He didn’t come back for almost eight years.’ Lucy slowed down as we came into Lyonsness. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ she added, ‘but I’d rather you didn’t hurt him.’

  ‘I don’t intend to.’

  ‘Intend!’ repeated Lucy derisively. She pulled up on the quay with a jerk.

  After all that, the sight of Jared sitting patiently reading the cricket section of the Times in his boat, which was now level with the jetty, disconcerted me: he looked self-contained and very far from vulnerable. As soon as he saw us he folded up the paper and leapt ashore.

  ‘Lucy! I didn’t think you’d be there! Did you get my message?’

  ‘Hundreds of messages,’ said Lucy acidly. ‘Everything short of SOS. But I wasn’t in. So what’s up?’

  ‘I can’t tell you here.’ He looked from me to her, and back again, like Paris trying to reach a tactful compromise. ‘I need to talk to you. Come over to Despair. I can bring you back in an hour or two.’

  Lucy looked at her watch. ‘Can’t. I have to be in Ogg’s Cove by seven. I’m going to hear Song of the Sea play at the Crossed Bones.’

&nb
sp; I was momentarily disappointed. I’d forgotten about the gig, and I’d really wanted to go. The tapes Lucy had played me were brilliant. But maybe there’d be another chance.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ asked Jared.

  ‘Tomorrow I’m opening the Scouts’ Bring and Buy sale in Dorrado, and having lunch with Penny. And in the afternoon we’re watching Lyonsness play Dorrado.’

  ‘Day after tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, Jed! All right. Suppose I’m here at eleven the day after tomorrow, and you can take me over for lunch? Then Sidony can come back with me if she’s had enough of you. Will that do? OK, see you in a couple of days. But if the weather’s horrible I’m not crossing the sound. Be nice to her. She likes tea at four in the afternoon. I hope you’re up to it. Be firm with him, Sidony. See you.’

  The crossing excited me. As soon as we were a couple of hundred yards out we couldn’t see land at all. It was just ourselves in a small hollow of visibility surrounded by cloud and sea. The mist in my face was like damp fingers, and I could see little drops of water congealing on my jacket. I’d looked down on the tide race through the sound very often from Ravnscar. Now, with the tide just turning, the water close to me was still and green, but I could see little upwellings where the current was just beginning to set the other way. Jared said another quarter of an hour and we’d have really begun to feel it, but at this time of year it’s possible to get across most days. He has a mooring in a little bay at the end of the white strand. He dropped me off at the lighthouse jetty, and we unloaded my bag and his shopping. Then he took the boat round to the mooring. I walked along the top of the beach through wet marram grass, and watched him row ashore in a little pram dinghy.