Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  Back in the kitchen she made me more coffee, which I accepted although I felt quite jittery enough already, and as we talked I began to feel calmer, as if I were back in the real familiar world again. We didn’t discuss the papers; Anna made it obvious that she wasn’t going to do that. She talked about her girls, and how fond they were of Jared, and how now that Ishmael was so often busy, it was nice of Jared to take them out in his boat sometimes, fishing with handlines.

  ‘Jared used to crew for Ishmael, didn’t he?’ I asked her.

  ‘That’s how we got to know him. It began the night Jed pinched our boat. Ishmi guessed who it was, when about midnight he found the boat gone. Olly West had warned him about Jed. So he sat up and waited. Jed was only fourteen. Sure enough, just after dawn, Ishmi saw the boat coming back. He watched Jed cut out the engine, to be quiet you see, and bring her in alongside and moor her. He was just creeping away up the jetty when Ishmi jumped him. He fought like a cat, Ishmi said, hardly Queensberry Rules, and he wouldn’t seem to understand when he was beaten. In fact he bit; Ishmi still has the scar on his left hand, if you look closely. I was shocked by that, though Ishmi wasn’t, but then nothing shocks him really. So Ishmi, with his hand all bleeding, dragged Jed into the caravan, and woke me up. We managed between us to calm him down a bit, and in the end we got him to talk to us. When Ishmi said maybe the best solution was to try him out as crew, I was doubtful. Rachel was still a baby; we were broke because all our money had gone into Ferdy’s Landing; Ishmi was working part-time at the coastguards; and we were trying to build a house at the same time. I didn’t think we needed a delinquent boy on our hands as well.

  ‘But it worked fine. Ishmael was impressed by his seamanship, and at sea, he said, Jed would do as he was told, though on land it was a different matter. And Ishmi liked him. You don’t notice the difference in their ages so much now, of course, but even before Jed went away he seemed to grow up pretty fast. With his mother being ill he had to. But Ishmi always liked his company. Jed could – still can – make him laugh. That isn’t always easy to do, but Jed seems to know how. Ishmi liked Jed’s poems; he was amused by all that. Apparently when there wasn’t much doing out there, he’d say to Jed, “Let’s have a poem, then,” and Jed would always produce one. Even Ishmi learned a few lines by heart, the bits he liked best. He’d repeat them to me later, and then he’d laugh. What was that one he liked again? I know:

  Then out spake brave Horatius,

  The Captain of the Gate:

  “To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  And the temples of his Gods …”

  I’m sure Jed could tell you the rest of it. Ishmi used to say it sounded pretty good against a bit of weather. The two of them always got on. They’ve a fair bit in common. Ishmael had a rough time growing up himself.’

  ‘Where did he grow up?’

  ‘Tuly. You’ve not been to the south islands?’ I shook my head. ‘Well, Tuly’s mostly rock, as you’ll see if you go there. They live by fishing, but the fifties and sixties were hard times, with the depression. The story is that Tuly was uninhabited until the 1780s, when a Bristol slaver out of the Gold Coast was wrecked on the west side of the island. They say that the prisoners had escaped from the hold and overwhelmed and killed the whole crew, before they reached the Caribbean, and they were trying to sail the ship home to Africa, but of course they didn’t know how to handle a three-masted brigantine, or navigate in deep waters. So they fetched up on the Tuly rocks, in daylight and fair weather. They say not a life was lost that day.

  ‘Anyway, that’s Tuly, and the folk there have kept pretty much to themselves ever since. A few comings and goings, but not much. Too much inbreeding. They’re nearly all Pereiras, after the old landowners – absentee, of course – who laid claim to the island, and took rents from them. And then in the sixties the fishing suddenly boomed, and from being the poorest community in Hy Brasil suddenly they were one of the richest. That’s all gone now. The population’s lower than it’s ever been, down to forty-seven since last month, my sister-in-law was telling me on the phone. They had another family move away three weeks ago.

  ‘There’s always been trouble about sending their kids to school on the mainland. Just after the Revolution it was finally agreed that Tuly Elementary would teach up to Junior High. Occasionally a girl would come over after that to do two years at St Brandons Academy, but never a boy. The boys all went straight into the fishing. Ishmi was the first boy ever to leave the island to go to school. That was in ’72. You’ve seen the hostels for the island children up by the school in St Brandons? Like two fortresses, boys on one side, girls on the other. The first week Ishmi was there they held him out of a third storey window, hanging by his ankles, and they wouldn’t haul him back in until they’d made him call himself all the names they knew that are used to describe the folk from Tuly.

  ‘That was only the beginning. The kids didn’t like him because he was clever, and that didn’t fit the image they had of Tuly. But after a bit he got better at fighting back. Then there were the chess championships. He was international class, you know, on the television and everything. And he could play cricket. The first year we all just thought he was too damn good. But when he came back after the summer he’d grown his hair thick and matted like a Rastafarian, and he started wearing jeans with holes slashed in them, and no shoes, because one of the less libellous things they taunted him with – which isn’t true – is that the Tuly folk go barefoot. That was a typical way for Ishmael to deal with it – I know that now – and it worked. It’s against school rules not to wear shoes, but Ishmi gets away with breaking rules, maybe because he only does so when it’s important. He was still getting straight As for everything, but you’d never have guessed it to look at him. And if the boys still had it in for him, it soon became fairly obvious that the girls didn’t, not that he took any notice of them. By that time he was going out with a singer from one of the clubs on Water Street. After the first year the other lads learned to leave him alone.’

  ‘So you were at the Academy then too?’

  ‘I was two years below him. I knew who he was. He says now he knew who I was too, but I have my doubts.’

  ‘So how did you get to know him?’

  ‘I didn’t, until I came back to St Brandons in ’83. I qualified in London, after I did my first degree in medicine at the university here. By that time Ishmi was working in the government Finance Department. He was a real whizz-kid, working with the President and everything. It was just when the fishing was starting to go down. Ishmi had lots of ideas, but it was the red tape and graft that finished him. In the end he just couldn’t stand it any more. But back in ’83 we were both in St Brandons. I met him again at the consultant surgeon’s Christmas party, and he recognised me from school. Naturally I remembered him, though he’d changed his image somewhat since I’d last seen him. We went out a few times, and I discovered he hadn’t got so respectable after all. They have good clubs – great music – downtown in St Brandons. We were both into that. And then I happened to mention I’d always wanted to see whales close to. I never had, even though I grew up in Dorrado. My family were farmers, and we didn’t have a boat. So Ishmael asked a friend of his, Per Pedersen, if he could borrow his Shetland model – that’s the same boat Per sold later to Toby Ready at Ogg’s Cove – and he took me out from Lyonsness to the far side of Despair. That’s when he first told me he was thinking of moving out of town and setting up on his own. “A computer and a boat,” he said, “If I had both of those I reckon I could make a living.” I said it sounded pretty good.’

  ‘Did you see whales?’

  ‘Indeed we did. We saw humpbacks, which is what we’d hoped for. And not just that. M’dear, we saw a sperm whale. Truly. Now that’s rare, once in a blue moon if you’re lucky. And it sounded right close t
o us, fifty yards from the boat maybe. We were rocking in the wake of it. I shall never forget that moment, not in all my life. They come up to look, you see. Curious about us, like us about them. We saw it so close you could see the scars on its skin. They say the sperm whales dive deep, right down into the abyss, where they feed on the giant squid. They say the scars you see are from those battles. Picture that: those two huge creatures fighting a mortal duel, locked together down there in the dark. The sperm whale surfaced again; we saw it blow. They rest a while on the surface after diving down so deep. It blew, and then it floated there, for all the world like a lump of shining land. And then it dived, a slow roll over and out of sight, down into the deep.’

  ‘Oh! It must have been magic!’

  ‘I guess it was. I think I was fairly out of myself just seeing it. I know Ishmi was. He’s not one to act by what he feels, not usually. He tends to have it all worked out first. But on that occasion, not. So that was our beginning, in the bottom of an old wooden Shetland model, with a couple of lifejackets underneath us to make it slightly less uncomfortable. It was a very fair day, and we were far enough out to drift, but he had to keep reaching up to shift the tiller so as to keep her head into what swell there was. Not very romantic, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I think that’s extremely romantic,’ I said truthfully.

  ‘Well, we did get married three months later. It usually happens that way in this country.’

  I wondered briefly how on earth Anna thinks we organise things at home. She’s worked at a big teaching hospital in London, and yet she seems to have this notion that contemporary rural life in England is accurately depicted in Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. I looked at her across the table, and tried to imagine what she’d been like fourteen years ago. When I first met her I’d had an impression of a fairly formidable woman, definitely somebody’s mother, with angular features and an overly authoritative manner. I could imagine her telling her patients exactly what they ought to do. Now I noticed for the first time that she has beautiful brown eyes with long lashes, and a slightly downy skin that looks as if it would feel soft like apricots. I like the way she treats her children. She talks to them as if they were reasonable beings, but supplies them at the same time with a demonstrative affection that too many people reserve only for cats.

  Suddenly I answered the question she’d asked me nearly two hours ago. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am serious about Jed. I don’t know what that means exactly. I don’t know what will happen.’

  ‘No one ever knows what will happen,’ said Anna. ‘That’s the deal. But I reckon it only means one thing, the same thing it always means. It seems odd to me that you seem to find it so surprising.’

  There was a sudden sound of wailing from the tree outside, and a moment later a grubby weeping child appeared at the door. ‘She pushed me down the ladder! She won’t let me in!’

  Anna swept her youngest-born on to her knee, and rocked her in her arms. ‘Sounds like you’d better leave her alone until she changes her mind,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s not fair!’

  ‘Nor is life,’ said Anna, cuddling Susanna in one arm, and reaching for her coffee with the other. ‘I wouldn’t let it worry you.’ She looked over her daughter’s curly head and continued, as if we hadn’t been interrupted, ‘You seem to have a curious idea that it can’t possibly come to this, or that for some reason it shouldn’t. But with Jed it will. He’ll want this sort of set-up, and he’ll have fewer mixed feelings about it than most men do. He hasn’t got a family to run away from. You must see that by now.’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe it’s myself who’s a bit harder to understand.’

  ‘Is that all?’ said Anna. ‘Well, I wouldn’t let that worry you. The whole thing seems fairly obvious to me.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  A THIN DRIZZLE hung in the air outside the President’s plate-glass window. St Brandons was awash with cloud, which had sunk down on the east coast of Hy Brasil and now lay sluggishly, apparently too exhausted to drift any further. In front of it the President lolled in his chair, absentmindedly doodling a black-and-white maze on the notepad under his right hand. Opposite him, Ishmael had drawn up one of the upright chairs to the other side of the desk. He sat with his feet firmly planted on the floor, holding a leather file open on his lap. He had taken various papers and photographs out of it, and laid them on the desk in front of Hook. The President didn’t seem to be paying much attention. He was gradually filling in the walls of his rectangular maze with thick black ink.

  ‘So,’ said Hook at last, and laid down his pen. He picked up one of the photographs by one corner and held it to the light. It was a black and white image of the main office in the Pele Centre, with the desk pulled out, and an area shaped like an open grave where the floorboards had been pulled up. It was possible to make out the plastic packages stacked within. One corner of the picture was badly over-exposed. ‘I’ve seen better photographs,’ remarked Hook.

  ‘I think its interest lies in its subject matter.’

  ‘Oh, come,’ said Hook. ‘You can’t separate subject from technique in photography, surely you know that? There’s no connection between image and fact except what a consummate artistry can convey. In this case the perspective is distorted, I would say, by excessive nervous tension on the part of the photographer. In other words you didn’t take it. I think I know who did, but perhaps it would be more tactful of me not to ask. Your methods of acquiring information seem to have been unorthodox, Pereira.’

  ‘But effective,’ said Ishmael. ‘As you see, I have conclusive proof that the Pele Centre is the centre for the drug trade which we knew existed somewhere on the north-west coast. The astonishing fact about it is that an intensive campaign by government coastguards over the past two years failed to uncover a shred of evidence pointing to the Pele Centre. I’ve been aware for years that West was an obvious suspect.’

  ‘I seem to recall you had doubts about him.’

  ‘Remember I was the financial advisor on the Planning Committee when West’s proposal was first mooted? I asked then why he’d picked the old quarry on the west side of Mount Prosper. Why not the Ogg’s Cove side of the watershed, where the unit would literally look out over Mount Brasil? Half a mile over the ridge, and they’d have their main object of study right there outside the window. But no. He wanted that quarry. Why? You can’t see Mount Brasil from there, but you do get the best possible view of the north coast, from Brentness to Despair. Why did he want that? The Committee dismissed my objections. I was the financial expert, not a planner.

  ‘But I kept my eye on the Pele Centre from the time I moved to the Landing. Mine is the only house from which you can see it. When West worked late shifts we’d see the lights up there. The other thing we see from Ferdy’s Landing is the coastguards patrolling between Brentness and Despair. I suspected West, but there was an obvious problem. West has no boat. If, as I guessed, the stuff was coming ashore somewhere between Ogg’s Cove and Lyonsness, who was bringing it? What kind of boat could cross the Atlantic, land on our shores away from any harbour, leaving no trace at all, and then vanish?

  ‘There had to be a shore contact with a boat. I made discreet enquiries about all the boats that work regularly out of Ogg’s Cove and Lyonsness. I was quite aware that the most likely suspects were individuals who owned their own boats, who operated them from secluded harbours, and who fell into no clear category of work. That put myself and Honeyman at the top of the list. Honeyman was obviously out. He’s only been back in the country a year, and I’ve been aware of an active smuggling trade for much longer than that. Also, you don’t find a successful drug smuggler selling a first edition of Raleigh’s History of the World at auction because he can’t afford to buy underwater surveying equipment. You certainly don’t have to fetch him afterwards from the Crossed Bones at Ogg’s Cove because he’s drunk himself into a state of maudlin and voluble regret on seven pints of draught cider. You can’t tell me the government do
esn’t have a dossier on Honeyman. You can’t tell me either that it fits in any respect the profile of a large-scale drug dealer.’

  ‘Circumstantial evidence, Pereira. I’m not sure you’d convince a jury.’

  ‘I know what would. Of course I should have been treated with far more suspicion than Honeyman, because a very few enquiries would have told the government that I had the income to match the supposition. You could tell your jury, too, if you didn’t know me very well, that I also have the personality: cold, competitive, devious, tough. And I live at Ferdy’s Landing, a far more logical landing place than Despair, since it’s not only on the mainland but also at the end of a serviceable road. Everything, in fact, pointed to me, but of course I had the best of reasons for knowing that it wasn’t me. You can also see, if you have any idea what paranoia is, and I think perhaps you have, why I had a strong incentive to discover the real operator.’

  ‘I remember now: trust was never your strong point, Pereira.’

  ‘If Hogg’s Beach or Ferdy’s Landing were being used on a regular basis I’d have known about it. I could also rule out Brentness. On a calm day you could land a cargo with difficulty. How many calm days do we get in a year? And when it was landed, what then? You couldn’t get a vehicle anywhere near the place. That left Lyonsness and Ogg’s Cove.

  ‘Everyone knows about Olly West: naturism and breakwaters. He’s down on Ogg’s Cove beach every day of the year, often at the most peculiar times. Sometimes on his bike, sometimes in that blue Ford, which he parks at the end of the jetty by the coastguard station. Everyone knows he loads fertiliser bags full of rocks into that van and dumps them on his breakwaters. And who takes any notice? The only record of his activities in the police station in Ogg’s Cove is a petition from the townsfolk requesting that he be compelled to refrain from cycling down the main street on market day with nothing on.’