Collector of Lost Things

by Jeremy Page

  In several excursions into Castlebay harbour, I learnt the rudiments of handling the boat. In the flat water of July and August I explored the complicated chain of islands that extended, in a series of reefs, grazing islands, cliffs and barren shores, to the south and west of Barra, each day pushing my knowledge of this region further.

  On fine breezy days I would leave early, hanging a dog-vane of auk feathers and cork from my hand to feel the direction of the wind. I would raise my simple lugsail and beat to windward into a sea that was as iron blue as the ocean fjords of Greenland. With the sun on my face and my back to the wind, I chopped at the waves, enjoying the spray that splashed me from the bow and the smell of the new canvas of the sail. My lungs felt full of this vital air and sense of achievement. Close to shore I raised the keel board to drift through kelp forests, their wide bronzed arms stroking underneath the boat like horses’ tails, and I would pass mirror-calm bays, fringed with coral-white sand, where the wake of a sea otter would create a single, precise scar.

  I learnt the names then explored the islands—Vatersay, Muldoanich and Sandray, Pabbay and Mingulay—noting the coves where I might be able to make a safe landing, and the stacks and bays and cliffs where one day the auks might be placed, safe from predation by land or by sea.

  As my journeying increased, I began to overnight on some of these islands, hauling my beloved skiff onto the sand and sleeping next to it by the side of a fire fringed with rocks. I would lie on my back, staring up at the deep azure heavens of the summer night sky, finding there the stiff cruciform silhouettes of shearwaters flying in from the sea in mysterious flocks, making the stars blink as they passed beneath. The eerie callings of the birds, the spitting of my fire and the sighing of the shoreline, the pops of bladderwrack and the settling of the boat next to me were the most peaceful sounds I have ever heard.

  Some of the islands were inhabited, and here I would eat with the crofters, sitting in their kitchens while a stew of mutton was prepared, or bread baked in the stove, while through an open doorway I would gaze at the sparkling light of the sun on a lonely shoreline. The crofters told me much about the nature of these islands. How the months could be read with the flowering of the plants, how each wind brought new elements of optimism or strife, how the currents encircled the rocks and bay and promontories like the runes of an ancient language that, given time, could be read like any other.

  I performed all these tasks and excursions with diligence and enthusiasm, believing fully that one day I might be joined by Clara. She had hinted as much during the last few days of the voyage. Believe, Eliot, she had told me, remember to believe. It is what you are good at. I would work hard, I promised her, to build a home for myself and find a haven for the birds, so that all we had strived for would not be in vain. There will be a day when we will be together once more, I had said, and we will know that we have made a difference in the progress of the world. That we might live a simple life next to the birds we had saved spurred me on in those first few weeks. This belief kept me alive in spirit and endeavour, right to the moment when, three months after my arrival, I received a letter from Edward Bletchley.

  He had a curious and unkempt writing style, as if his hand was trying to catch up with the race of his thoughts, but I could tell, even within the first few words, that this letter had been written in difficult circumstances and brought news that would be hard to bear. I sat, on the edge of my bunk, as sailing had taught me, in preparation for the unexpected.

  I reacted to the news of Clara’s death as if I had been struck. I stared at the words, disbelieving their shapes and message, wishing I could rapidly undo the news they formed.

  Bletchley wrote with great consideration for my feelings. He acknowledged that Clara and I had shared a special bond that had developed during the voyage, and it was this which had without doubt restored her health, albeit briefly. He made reference to the fact that he had found the voyage—and hunting in particular—a very difficult experience to bear, and admitted that he had become disengaged from the day-to-day nature of social interaction. ‘I had been withdrawn, for the entire second half of the trip, and I thank you for being able to be Clara’s strength in this period. She benefited greatly from having you to rely upon.’ He had written generously, anticipating my sadness and shock and apologising for all he might have done to exacerbate the situation on board. ‘My soul was dark,’ he wrote. ‘I was hardly the pilot of its woeful direction.’ His sentences were muddled at times, as if the entire experience of the ship and its journey existed as one present and immediate sensation for him. ‘She was ill at the start, from a mental exhaustion which I believed was a result of the escape from her wretched father—and the impending day when she would have to face him again, but I have since concluded that my own presence may also have contributed to her oppression. I am truly sorry for it.’ He wrote of his reliance upon her, and said that it must have taken a toll. And there followed a lengthy passage where he explained the sins we had all committed against the balance of the world, suggesting his recovery was far from complete.

  Becoming more lucid, he wrote of the situation on board following the day I had been left on Barra. He described an uneasy truce, with the captain having retired to his cabin for much of the day, and Clara and Mr French in lengthy conversations long into the night. He described French as a leech, sucking the blood of life from whomever he latched onto, and wished that he had thrown him over the side, rather than the pelts of the great auks. My mistake! he had written, as an afterthought, in the margin. ‘It seems that Mr French had developed an unhealthy obsession with my cousin,’ he wrote, ‘which could not be easily satisfied.’ In an oddly formal comment he added: ‘Rest assured, Clara did not once lose her natural and splendid dignity.’ But it had been clear, he continued, to all on board, that French was exerting a most uncomfortable pressure upon her, a pressure of expectation, and a tragic air had descended upon the decks of the ship. Near the end of the voyage she had, in his words, ‘been virtually unreachable’.

  He informed me that Clara had stepped off the ship’s rail within sight of the English coast. Several of the men had seen her fall, and she had done so without a cry. The boats had been lowered but her body had not been retrieved. Captain Sykes had performed a full ceremony on board, which all the crew had attended.

  28

  IT IS FIVE YEARS since I received that news. I did not believe it at first. How could I? How could it possibly be true?

  As soon as I had read his words, I thought of the impenetrable wood in Norfolk, where I had fought my way through the rhododendrons, trying to find the girl I had let escape. I had remembered the way my feet sank in the mud, the way the branches and foliage seemed complicit in preventing me from reaching her. Then the startling sight of the almost perfectly round lake, fringed with dark trees and, in its centre, that solitary coot, turning quietly towards the ripples that had just reached it. I had remembered the feel of Celeste’s body as I pulled her from the water, and the sight of her, at peace, as she was carried from the lake. How could it be possible, after I had saved her, that she would return to the water once more, this time for good?

  I didn’t accept the news of her death until an event that occurred several weeks later. I had been travelling to South Uist on a small sailing ferry, in search of boating supplies for the skiff I was restoring. It had been a blustery day, and I had seated myself in the lee of the wheelhouse, where I could read one of my books in peace from the wind. Occasionally I would look to the craggy inlets and promontories that passed by, always keen to spot otters playing on the shore. It was a joyful sight.

  Out of habit, I had absorbed myself in my book, not wanting to draw attention to myself. But when the boat tacked into the sea loch, approaching South Uist, the water had become sheltered and I had put my book down.

  At the stern rail, a woman turned to face me. It was Celeste. Taller than I remembered, dressed in the rough woven shawl that is common in this area, but with the same a
ppeal in her eyes that has filled my dreams for so many years. She smiled at me, wishing me a good morning, and I must have stared back, in my confusion, my inability to comprehend what I was seeing. Perhaps I had paled, as if about to faint, because she quickly came to me and asked if I was feeling well.

  ‘Celeste?’ I managed. She looked back at me, wondering what I had said. When she spoke, it had been with the strong island accent of this part of Scotland.

  ‘Why do you not … don’t you recognise me?’ I asked, in a mixture of sadness and fear. She seemed undecided, puzzled and unsure whether I needed assistance. I noticed her hair was shorter than I remembered, and darker.

  ‘Shall I fetch help for you?’ she asked, quietly.

  ‘Please, tell me you know me,’ I replied forcefully and she took a step back. I saw that a couple of men had come to stand near by. One of them—looking quite fiercely down at me—put an arm around her to guide her away. I saw her speaking to him and, after some minutes, he returned to confront me.

  ‘I don’t know who ye are, man, but you scared me wife. I’ll not have it,’ he said.

  I put my hands up, fearing he might strike me, but it appeared he was not interested in making any further scene.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Very deeply sorry.’

  He gave me a single nod and returned to his wife. We had nearly reached the harbour. She glanced at me just once more, when no one was looking, and alongside my recognition that she must be Celeste, I knew at that moment that I would see Celeste, that I would keep seeing Celeste, when I was least expecting it—in the fragment of a face in a passing carriage, in the back of a room sitting by the fire, on the shore just after sunset—for the rest of my life.

  Since then, I have largely avoided being in the proximity of people. I cannot trust myself, I cannot trust my perceptions, and I cannot trust where those perceptions might lead me. No. I have chosen to devote my life not to the things I have lost, but to the one true thing that I have ever saved.

  I have been living this way for five years. No one knows the true nature of my business or, if they do, or at least suspect, then none of them realises what I have done. It is my secret, alone. I am meticulous in my arrangements, for I live in a community which is small and therefore naturally suspicious. In these five years I have become a good boatman, I sail my skiff with a keen eye, noticing the cat’s paw of the wind upon the water, or the curl of the tide as it pulls to ebb. I have learnt about nature, most profoundly learnt about nature. I have charted the migrations of birds and the arrivals of fish, and the cycles of breeding they announce. I watch the hares as they fight and pant. The swallows in their scattered flight, flying in ribbons beneath the boathouse doors, their wingtips an inch above the water, where they swoop up to their fragile mud nests under the joists. I have counted the shearwaters as they fly in at night, hundreds of silhouettes against the moon, before they drop screaming to the ground to search for their burrows. I have studied the weather, am able to interpret the sky and the clouds, and the colourings of the sea. The black shine of cold water, or the blooms of plankton that drift in mossy clouds each June, heralding the arrival of the basking sharks. I am able to mark the changes of the seasons by the transformations of the insects and by the simple budding of a flower. I have made a good and comfortable shelter where I can sometimes stay overnight. But what I do, year after year, is also dangerous. I could drown a thousand ways, each day, alone. Or fall from the cliffs, where the rocks are almost permanently wet from the sea mist. I might be a victim of a sudden squall or a gust of wind, and my vanishing would hardly be noticed. A cry and a splash in the water, and I would be gone. It is for this reason that I decided to write down the story. You see, I have had plenty of time to think, out here. And my hope is that in writing this I might spot the details I missed at the time, on that voyage, and recover what was lost. I might see where it all began to go wrong. Yes. Plenty of time to think.

  Edward Bletchley pays for my lodging and the maintenance of the boat. He has written to me many times. Often he tells me not to be so frugal, insists that I must be incurring additional expenditures, but he is wrong. My life is Arcadian. I have all that I need. He is the only contact I have with the world beyond this island and, as such, I believe he is probably to be counted as my only friend. It is remarkable the companions we end up with, some of whom we never chose. From each letter I have learnt more about him. He has decided to live in Norfolk after all, and has let a portion of the estate he inherited go wild, encouraging waterfowl and migratory birds, well away from the blasts of hunting rifles. He describes it as the only safe landing spot in all of East Anglia. He tells me that his soul is clear and that he is to be considered a free spirit and an integrated part of the nature of all things. I truly believe he is an extraordinary man, compassionate and interested in his role in life, and that it was the Arctic that first opened his eyes. I recognise now that the voyage on the Amethyst changed my life, also, as voyages are meant to. It taught me that there are some things that can be saved, truly saved, in a life where I once thought it was not possible.

  Celeste drowned, that day in my early twenties, when I recklessly stole the key and unlocked her bedroom door. I let her out. She escaped. She died. I know now that I had been obsessed with her, that I might have been too blinded by this obsession to realise the consequences of my actions. It was I who let her escape, and I who should take the blame.

  Perhaps her life was always going to end that way. Given the severity of her father this really may have been so. But I was instrumental that day, and for that I am truly regretful.

  It has been harder for me to accept that the sightings of Celeste—over the years—have been chimeras of my own mind, delusions arisen from my own feelings of guilt and longing. Only now do I understand that I have also seen her in the country lanes of Suffolk, standing on staithes and quaysides in Norfolk, in the windows of passing carriages in London, even on the ferryboat to South Uist, and I saw her on the deck of the Amethyst, in the eyes of a woman who was vulnerable and in need of solace. I have seen Celeste in all these women, and each time I have sought her out I have been absent from myself. Clara, I was mistaken to think you were her, but I wasn’t wrong to love you, too.

  I think of Quinlan French when I see a candle flame near to me. On several occasions I have tried to find what he saw, by staring at a lit candle until my eyes hurt with the intensity of light. But when I experimented in this way, it wasn’t the dance of the flame that disturbed me—it was the ring of darkness that surrounded me at the edge of my vision, like an impenetrable wall of shadows as I stared at the light—a darkness that felt thicker and more oppressive than I thought could be. Perhaps this is what he saw, and wished to observe. I shall never know, because I never wish to meet that man again.

  If Sykes lived beyond the onset of his illness, then he must be retired by now, and I think of him sometimes, stitching his elaborate embroidery in the cottage home he was so dismissive of. In my vision, I like to think of him as an embroidered character in one of his own creations: a small, portly man by a suffocating fire next to a wife he is trying to ignore. I imagine him sitting in a church pew on a Sunday morning, or pruning the roses around his front porch, and occasionally smiling privately at the anchor-shaped knocker on his front door. No one has ever known that this little and fairly old man once had the chance to save a portion of the world’s animal kingdom, and that he failed to take it.

  I am still haunted by what he did. One by one they had been taken to the inlet. And I must state a truth here: a drowning is never peaceful. But there on the rocks, faced with the aftertaste of an extinction, something transcendent had been illuminated: this scene, of man’s destruction, of his heartlessness, would inevitably be repeated time and time again, across the decades and centuries with all the world’s creatures. Man will murder whales and seals in their thousands, he will pluck the birds from their rocks and shoot them from the sky.

  It is 1850, we are halfway thro
ugh this century, and I have little notion as to whether my efforts have all been in vain. It is said the whales are becoming scarcer in the Greenland Sea. The seals are more infrequent among the ice floes. The walrus colonies are dwindling, their tusks and bristles raised impotently against gaff hooks and grappling irons. Even that most invisible of the polar beasts, the white bear, may one day entirely vanish.

  Clara once told me to believe, and I try to stay true to this each hour and each day, even when I lose hope. I have chosen a solitary life in order to complete all I promised to her, but there is still a kernel of anger in me that wishes to tell the world what I have tried to save. I have been greatly affected by the death and slaughter I saw in the Arctic. It has stayed with me. I think of it constantly. I want to confront the men who have ruined our world. I want to go to the cities—where the Arctic’s great animals have been reduced to collar stiffeners and parasol ribs, corset stays and combs, where their oil lights the lamps and greases the axles and gears and chains of a relentless industry—and list the crimes that have been committed in the Arctic in the name of profit. How a man like Captain Sykes, who I truly believe was not an evil-hearted individual, can nonetheless be warped by greed until he can make no moral judgement. Perhaps one day, man will save the Arctic in all its multitude of extraordinary life, but perhaps by then man will be too late, as he always seems to be. It is a fight that will need to be fought, and it is for this reason that I have written this account.