He considered how he would describe all this to one who had not seen it—that one being all the world but himself. Start with the flowers? With the sea? With the sun whose warmth he could feel now against his right cheek? He had the desire to pray but let his prayer take the form of a slow walking over flowers. Someone, he thought, someone should have taught me how to meet joy better. He raised his arms and tried moving in a dance, had it for a moment, a slow, courtly turning, his feet brushing the grasses, the stems, the petals. Then he dropped his arms in a fit of laughter, took off his coat, his jacket (how ragged he’d become!) and lay down, heavy with gratitude, heavy too with a month of nights broken by foxes and owls, and by other creatures—men perhaps—less easily known.
Like this he slept off the first portion of the morning, a shape in the grass, perfectly at home, perfectly ignored. Birds in low flight flicked their shadows across his shirt. A small topaz beetle climbed the slope of his wrist. When he woke, and before he opened his eyes, he wondered if it would be the same, if the intoxication of the dawn had been no more than that, a passing excitement, but when he sat up and looked around he found that though the light was different (the sun pouring from a sky almost cloudless, so that the meadow had exchanged a quality of water for a quality of glass) the morning was intact, had lost none of its enchantment, and he climbed to his feet ready for anything, any extravagance—a whale the size of Gibraltar, a parliament of drowned men, some green-eyed Christ patiently stripping religion from the land . . . Instead, he caught sight of Corporal Calley climbing up from the beach to the plateau. He was wearing his coat still, while he, Medina, stood perfectly warm in breeches and shirt. As he watched him come there was a moment of misgiving, a second, the fragment of a second, like a stumble of the heart, but it changed nothing. In truth, it felt that nothing could be changed.
“I’ve been looking for you,” said Calley.
“And I have been here,” said Medina, spreading his hands as though to welcome Calley to what he had found, his half-acre of the beautiful.
“Doing what?”
“Sleeping.”
“Well, that’s fucking useful. Have you found a boat?”
“I have not. Have you?”
“This is the wrong side of the island,” said Calley. “This is south.”
“And you wish to go north.”
Calley looked at him. He came closer. Six, eight steps between them now. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked.
“Nothing is wrong with me.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then why are you acting like a cunt?”
“To you,” said Medina, “most people are acting the cunt.”
“Put your boots on.”
Medina did not move.
“I said put your boots on.”
“I will put my boots on,” said Medina. “But first I will tell you what I have decided. What I decided this very morning. I will take no more orders from you. I will have no more insults. The story between us is over. I am going home. Or I am going . . . somewhere. I have not yet chosen the place or the route but I am going where you will not be going. That I do know.” He paused, trying to judge the effect his words were having. That Calley was listening to him and listening closely, he had no doubt. Beyond that . . .
“This man you are hunting,” he continued, “does he even exist? Why have we not found him? And if he does, let us suppose that he does, can you believe, in truth, they intend to let him be killed? One of their own? By you? Their mistake was to send a man who does not know when to stop, who continues to act even when the theatre is dark. If you kill this man and go back to Lisbon, you think they will say thank you? You think they will give you a medal? I will tell you what will happen. You will be found in the Tagus with your throat cut. And let me assure you there will be no inquiry to discover the fate of Corporal Calley. A man without family, without friends. So this is my advice to you. Disappear. Forget the army. Forget the war. Disappear. Become someone else.”
Calley unbuttoned his coat. “You finished?” he said.
“Oh yes,” said Medina. “I have finished.”
“That’s good,” said Calley, “because I’m going to tell you now what I know. What I know. First off, this man we are hunting. I have seen him. Remember? We have been to his house. We have been to his sister’s house. He exists. Of course he fucking exists. Second, you and me are soldiers in the field and we will do what we have been ordered to do. And I’m not talking about that streak of shit Don Ignacio. I piss on him. No one cares about him. I’m talking about someone you can’t even fucking imagine. A man who cannot show himself because his face would blaze like the sun. A man whose word cannot be gainsaid. And though I will not hear his voice again, and I am sorry for that, very sorry, he has placed his trust in me and I will not fail him. So we will do the job, you and me, and we will go to Lisbon and you will tell them what you saw. That is what you are going to do.”
“No,” said Medina, “No es asi. I will find a boat with you but nothing more. The rest is for you, Señor Andrews. Alone.”
Calley reached inside his coat, unslung the carbine, cocked it. All smoothly done. “It’s like I said, I know what you are going to do. Now put on your boots and pick up your coat.”
Medina nodded. He glanced over to his boots then back at Calley. “My friend,” he said, “you say you know things but the truth is you know very little. You are, I believe, the most ignorant man I ever met.” He bent down to pick a flower by his bare feet, a yellow flower the length of his little finger. “Do you know this? Do you know what this is called? No?” He bent down again and picked another, a purple flower or, arguably, a blue one. “Or this?” he said. “You know what this is?”
As he stood with a third flower—it is difficult to stop these things once you start—he felt himself lifted and saw the flower, or something he took for the flower, flash past his face. Then he was gazing up at the birds. There were thousands of them, their dark forms in frantic movement so that it seemed incredible they did not collide with each other. Calley came into view and looked down at him. The birds circled his head like a crown. His mouth was moving but whatever he was saying Medina couldn’t hear him. More surprisingly, he could not hear the birds either. He wondered if he had become deaf. But then he heard the slow rush and roar of the sea, and he knew that all was well.
19
The Oban coach should have left at two o’clock but some trouble with an axle delayed it. For this reason, Emily and Lacroix, reaching the coaching office at a quarter past, were able to buy tickets, though there was only one place left inside. The other passengers looked out with deep interest at the sight of a woman with her head bound in a grey silk scarf. Room was made for her next to the window on the side facing the horses. A man—fatherly, red-faced, slightly drunk—spread a page of the Dundee Courier across the seat, explaining that the windows of coaches could never be made to shut securely and he feared the leather was somewhat damp. Lacroix thanked him, nodded to the woman who was to be Emily’s neighbour, then climbed up the back of the coach to his own place on the roof. There were two others up there. One man was tying on his hat with a ribbon; the other had the look of a poor poet, a man uselessly exulted and who would perhaps, at some point, begin to babble about the moon.
Ten minutes later, the axle declared safe, a horn was blown, and a minute after that they were rattling through the streets of Glasgow, the outside passengers returning the waves of small boys, old men and the city’s population of inebriates and gentle idiots for whom a common coach was a masterpiece of human excitement.
Two hours out of the city they stopped to stretch legs and empty bladders. Lacroix stood with Emily beside one of the coach’s yellow wheels. Was she comfortable? Did she need anything? Had she been able to sleep a little? They had not, since their encounter that morning with the master, had any opportunity for
a conversation of the sort both knew must come, and soon. This left them strangely free, all large questions, the answers to those questions (if such existed) postponed until the conclusion of the journey. In the meantime they could simply loiter in the moment. He described a cloud to her. She told him she could hear a blackbird singing.
The coachman rounded them up. They resumed their places. On the roof the poet addressed Lacroix in schoolboy Latin; Lacroix responded (he had schoolboy Latin of his own). The man with the ribbon under his chin talked about the weather. He could, he claimed, smell a change on the way, and though to Lacroix the weather seemed exactly what it had been for hours it turned out the man knew what he was speaking about. The western air began to have a hazy appearance. They passed by coils of smoke, sea-flavoured, that spread and grew denser until the scenery on either side, the grand vistas, was entirely lost in it. In the high places they were above it and looked down at a white sea they would, shortly, plunge into again. Lacroix, gripping his strap, sought to ignore it, the odd spectral loveliness of it. He was concentrating. He was trying to think. And he made good beginnings, recalled in detail the whole of the master’s narrative, examined it with a thoroughness quite impossible when he first heard it, the master staring at him like a one-eyed Torquemada.
But after each good start he came up against what he could not make sense of and he faltered and fell into fancies, and into one in particular in which he advertised his whereabouts in a newspaper—the Dundee Courier?—then went alone, north after north, to Iceland, to Greenland, all the while drawing the master’s assailant after him and away from Emily, from everyone. And then he would wait, sitting in some ice cave, ice crystals in his beard, until he saw, in all that whiteness, the tiny black upright of the monster’s approach . . .
This daydream, ever more detailed, engrossed him for miles and might have done for miles more had the poet not let go of his strap to point at a pink moon rising above the mist’s horizon. His cry of joy turned to a yelp of terror as he tumbled backwards into the luggage basket. He was in the midst of a somersault that would have ended in the road when the man with the ribbon caught the hem of his coat and clung to it until Lacroix found the poet’s hand and together they dragged him back to his place.
I will have to be quicker than that, thought Lacroix. I will need to be more awake. Enough of this dreaming. Live in the world, man!
At half past eleven they were above Oban, though only the church spire showed clearly—an old black piling in a moonlit sea of milk and purple. They descended, were swallowed up, and came to a final halt in the deadened air between rows of ghostly houses and the yardarms of ghostly ships. The coachman held up his lamp, a thumbprint of yellow light. Lacroix and the others on the roof helped hand down the luggage. It was, generally, how outside passengers regained the use of their limbs.
Emily waited with the woman who had sat beside her on the journey. Lacroix, still unsure where in the town they had stopped, asked the way to the Russian Hotel. The Russian Hotel was not its name but everyone, even the poet, knew what he meant, and three or four of them, more familiar with the town or less easily disorientated, pointed the way.
“But you’ll be lucky to find a room,” said the man with the ribbon.
“Why?” asked Emily.
“The ship,” said the man, “the Chiron. Due in three days. The town will be filling up with passengers. Poor devils.”
Lacroix caught only “ship” and “poor devils” but it was enough. He understood. “We shall have to take our chances,” he said. He collected their bags, and with Emily’s hand on his shoulder, started out, aware their backs were being watched, that the moment they were deemed to be out of earshot there must be some discussion of them.
It was not far to the hotel, a ten-minute walk, but they passed on their way a number of small camps, families bivouacking under shelters of canvas or cloth or nothing at all. The more fortunate had small fires in makeshift braziers and by the light of these could be seen men and women and children. The displaced, the chased-off, or those with an uncle or brother in the New World, someone who sent letters about a land that had no end to it and where you would not be robbed by laird or tacksman.
In the hotel parlour the air was a fug of tobacco fumes, and under that the slightly sweet, slightly pissy scent of island tweed. The company was mostly men. One of them was singing and Lacroix thought it was a song he had first heard the night he wandered into the house at the bottom of the hill, the night Ranald sat beside him in his red coat asking if he had come far.
When it was finished, people began to notice the newcomers. They glanced at Lacroix but at Emily they stared. It was as if, in their heightened mood of parting they felt themselves visited by a figure from one of their tales of misfortune, one of their endless tales of misfortune. Lacroix thought he might need to say something—an introduction, an explanation—though feared he would sound like the manager of a fairground sensation, that they would expect him to promise she would tell their fortunes or stand unflinching against a door while he threw knives around her head. Then he saw Spinkey crossing the room in his gear of 1780, and it was clear from the way the Russian held out his arms that he was equal to the moment, that a show of largesse was in the offing, that it would be quietly approved of by the company, and that they would not need to spend the night camping beside the water. He greeted Emily like a fellow exile. He looked at her, held her sightless gaze without a trace of awkwardness, as though his work had somehow habituated him to the appearance of blindfolded women. There was a room. The very last he had. It was on the top floor of the hotel. It was simple, bare. He was ashamed of it. It was where the cats slept. But if they thought such a room would not insult them he could make up a fire, bring up hot water . . .
A girl was summoned, the same one who had shown them to their rooms the last time they stayed, the putative daughter. They went up the stairs with her—the girl first with the candle, then Lacroix with the bags, then Emily holding on to a fold of his coat. Over four flights of stairs she stumbled only twice. The room was, as they had been told, a dormitory for cats. It smelled of cats and of what they had brought up there but it was, otherwise, a perfectly good room with a window that looked out over the harbour. Lacroix, after a certain amount of struggle, got the window to open. They were, on this floor, just above the fog. The moon was directly ahead of him. A fist’s width to the left of it was a star or planet, blue and trembling.
When he looked round into the room an old man was tipping live coals into the fireplace and the girl was flapping her apron at the cats who departed, rubbing the edge of the door with high backs. The fact that there was only one room rather than two, well, it was a fact and they would deal with it later. There was a chair, vaguely French, where a last cat was still asleep. Lacroix thought he could manage on it quite well. The cat could share the bed with Emily.
A candle, a fire, a room. And later, Spinkey himself brought up a tray with two bowls of hot negus, two hard-boiled eggs in their shells, some bread. He apologised again for the room. Lacroix said they were deeply grateful. They had forgotten about the emigration ship. Were all those in the parlour passengers?
“Some are to voyage,” said the Russian, “some to say adieu.”
“Mr. Spinkey,” said Emily, who was sitting on the bed, who looked exhausted, “we need a boat tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.” She told him where they were headed. That the matter was urgent.
“Madam,” said Spinkey, the fixer of all things, the soother, “the people have all been delivered by boats from the islands and the boats must return. There will be no difficulty finding what you need. In the morning I will send out Sasha to ask among the captains.”
He put one of the bowls of negus into her hands. He wanted her to blow on it a little. She did, and sipped from it and swallowed and was very still.
“Vous l’aimez?”
“It is perfect.”
Spinkey smiled, bowed to them both, and left them. They emptied their bowls. Spice, wine, heat. Lacroix peeled an egg by rolling it between his palms. He gave it to Emily and she ate it as though asking questions of it, as though devouring it with curiosity. Because the bed-frame was high, appeared to stand on its tiptoes, her boots did not quite touch the floorboards.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Late,” he said. “Midnight at least.” He squeezed a scrap of bread, made a pellet of it. “Emily,” he said.
She nodded. “You have things you wish to tell me.”
“Things I must tell you. Though now I suppose is the wrong time. You are tired. You should sleep.”
“And delay some more? I am tired, John. But I do not want to wake in the morning without there being some truth between us.”
He was surprised how much the remark distressed him. What of their travelling together? Their wait in the cathedral, the vigils at the hospital? Had there been no “truth” in any of that? For two, three seconds he stared at her, then crossed again to the window. He knew he would not be able to talk while looking at her. The nature of what he had to say, of course. But also the blindfold, that half-yard of grey silk Rizzo had given as a parting gift. Even more than the dressings it had replaced it made her . . . what? Allegorical. A figure from a masque, a pantomime. Like sharing a room with the Oracle of Delphi.
Through the window, through the thinning fog, he could see the flickering of the emigrants’ fires and imagined for a moment the state of their hearts. Then he began to speak.
“Did you follow the war, Emily?”
“You mean did I read about it in the papers? Did people talk to me about it?”
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