The Summer Isles

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “There you are, Brook!” Cumbernald looms out from the lights in the hallway and lays his hand on my shoulder. Everything else subsides. “Can’t just drift off like this, you know. There’s a phone call for you. A Miss Flood. She sounds pretty excited.”

  “She’s my editor.”

  “Ah!” He nods as if that explains it all. My knees pop and crack like tiny fireworks as he helps me up. His right arm supports me as he leads me down the corridor. “You can take it in here in my study,” he says, pushing open the door. He hands me the receiver from the top of his desk, then steps back, watching me for a few moments as I settle down on a chair that smells of new leather and swivels alarmingly.

  I lift the telephone to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Geoffrey, there you are!” Miss Flood sounds excited, and I can hear merry voices behind her, the pop of a bottle. “I got your number here from that creepy chap who works for you at the college.”

  “Christlow?”

  “Whatever. I’ve marvellous news, Geoffrey. I really couldn’t wait to share it. The most amazing thing is that it’s come quite unsolicited. I mean, I really wouldn’t have the nerve to ask…”

  I wait as Miss Flood burbles on, studying the ample bookshelves that cover these study walls (mostly do-it-yourselves and who-dunnits, a few biographies and thin histories; a small space where my own work will fit in easily), doing my best to banish the sense of gloomy premonition that still comes over me when people announce they have news. I have, of course, no recent sexual misdemeanours to worry about, but a sense of them is still with me; those ghostly hands and arms and mouths, the sigh and the glisten of flesh in those few moments when hot reality soars; and then afterwards when everything seems far off, encased in glassy guilt, passionless ice…

  “…so Arkwright’s own Private Secretary asked if it wasn’t too much of a presumption to ask. I mean, as if we’d really mind. It’s perfect, isn’t it, Geoffrey? You’ve met—he knows you—he’s a link with the future, yet also with John Arthur and the past. It’s everything, Geoffrey, that we were talking about this lunchtime. Of course, we’ll have to re-do the dustjacket to give his name due prominence, but it really does cover just about every imaginable angle…”

  “You mean Arkwright is—”

  “—Yes, going to write a Foreword to your book! I know, I know. I still haven’t got over it either.”

  “Can’t we just say…”

  “Say what?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “I haven’t even started to think what this’ll do to the print runs! Of course, it means that you, Geoffrey, can relax. You won’t have to write a thing more…”

  Part of me drops away as I gaze down at the receiver. There are two ways, I decide, to gain a person’s silence and compliance. You either take away their lives and scrub out their identity. Or you give them everything.

  “So that’s it, then?”

  “That’s right, Geoffrey. I hope you’re not too upset about losing that new article. But we couldn’t possibly squeeze it in now if we’re to keep to the same pagination…”

  “Right.”

  “Marvellous! And Happy New Year.”

  “You, too, Miss Flood.” I begin to put down the phone.

  “Oh, Geoffrey…” Her voice is a buzzing lisp. “…not that it matters now as far as the book’s concerned, but I do have a number, a contact for that research you were talking about. Someone in the Government who’s co-ordinating the Jewish relief effort.”

  “Yes?” I cradle the phone between my shoulder and chin, searching the leather and ash expanse of Eric Cumbernald’s desktop for something resembling a pen or a pencil, a scrap of paper. There are brass-framed family photographs. A gold-plated Modernist circle and cross paperweight. A few seashell boxes. Some kind of golfing trophy. I slide open the drawers until I find a note pad and begin to scrawl out the number and the name that Miss Flood dictates to me, left handed.

  Then I put down the phone without wishing her goodbye.

  “Everything okay in there?” Cumbernald asks. His eyes travel down to my bit of paper. “If you want to make another call, no matter where, you—”

  “—It’s alright. I don’t think I’ll bother.”

  “In that case,” Cumbernald says, sliding back a cabinet front to reveal a television screen surrounded by a complicated nest of equipment, “there’s something I’d very much like to show you. I think we’ve just time before midnight…”

  Cumbernald twists dials and turns switches. As the comforting smell of warming valves slowly fills the room, I tear the top sheet of the note pad into tiny bits. The name Miss Flood’s given me of the Home Office official who’s overseeing of the operation to give food, medical treatment and shelter to the Jews is Hugh Reeve-Ellis.

  The television screen snows. Then there are ghostly figures that make me think of my acquaintance and his family, huddled in their crude huts or blanketed in the hurricane wilderness on this and other wintry nights. Of course, the Government has come to their rescue now. The terrible situation has been proclaimed by Ministry of Information Press Release, and the newspapers have lapped it up unquestioningly. Soon, it will be dealt with, and—a little sadder, a little wiser, a little less trustful—we Britons will watch the results on the Nine O-Clock News and in the cinemas on Pathé, knowing that the camera cannot lie. This Jewish Scandal has come at just the right time. It shows Arkwright as a man of honesty who is prepared to deal with the aberrations that so blackened Modernism’s reputation in the rest of the world. It may even get us back into the League of Nations. In a few months—or years, perhaps—a similarly narrow spotlight will fall upon the treatment camps in the Isle of Man. But, even if my acquaintance and his family have survived, angel of death that I am, I realise I will never try to contact them.

  Cumbernald produces a large black disk and places it on the spinning turntable of what appears to be a giant record player. “I had the cine-recording transcribed onto vinyl,” he explains as the television screen sparks and crackles and the needle wobbles up and down. “Of course, it’s not cheap at the moment, but, take my word for it, it’s the future of home entertainment…”

  I watch the jumpy white outlines of Eileen, Christine, Barbara and myself as we sit outside the summer lodge in Penrhos Park. Eileen and I raise a glass and smile for the camera whilst the children bound and leap, then becoming swirling blurs, as if their life and energy is too much for any kind of technology to contain. Behind it all is a crackle and a rumble. Eggs and bacon, Eggs and bacon. Apple and custard…

  “Been thinking, by the way,” Cumberland says, leaning against a bookshelf as he admires his handiwork. “About who should replace me as principal at college. We need someone with reputation, don’t you think? Someone with a sound background. All the right connections. Weight. An agile mind… The post is, in honesty, a tough but rewarding one. And I don’t really think you’ll be surprised, Brook, when I tell you that your name was the first that came to mind.”

  “I’m far too old,” I mutter, still gazing at the screen as Christine and Barbara run up to me, their tongues stuck out like gorgeous gargoyles, their whole futures ahead of them. “Far too ill…”

  “Such a pity,” Cumberland says, re-folding his arms, adding just the right note of regret, “even if it were true…” But he doesn’t push it. In fact, he sounds relieved.

  “Anyway,” he stoops down, preparing to lift the needle from the record as the matchstick figures dance and shift, grey on white. I can’t remember whether he brought his cine camera with him when we went into the Sun Area, but it’s impossible to tell now whether the figures on the screen are clothed or naked, young or old, starving or affluent. “Time we got back into the throng, old man,” he says as they dissolve into a flash of light, then shrink down through a pin dot into the blackness. At the end of the day, we’re all the same. “It’s nearly midnight.”

  The lights are off now in the reception room, and the Christmas
tree sparkles and flashes. People’s hands brush and linger as they part to let me through to another big television screen, still trying to absorb what little remains of my talismanic sparkle. What a year, after all, it has been.

  The television shows the face of Big Ben as its minute hand climbs through the last moments of 1940. With what seems like a final reluctant shudder, it shakes the year off and the bells begin their famous chime. Bong—and there it is. Bong—a New Year is beginning. Lips and hands press damp against my own with the rustle of tweed and rayon, the dig of jewellery, wafts of perfume and sweat. The maids are already waiting with fluted glasses of sparkling Sussex wine, but first we must join hands and sing that song by Burns, a ritual from which even my fame and obvious frailty does not excuse me.

  Afterwards, I sip the sweet fizzy alcohol and think of escape—of getting back to my tablets, my rooms—when the doorbell sounds along the hallway. I’m already on my way towards it in the hope that it’s my driver when I realise that eager hands are assisting me, eager voices are urging me on. The doorbell sounds again. It’s clearly some neighbour out first-footing with a piece of shortbread, a lump of coal to lay upon the fire. And who better than I, Geoffrey Brook, to greet them? This, after all, is 1941. Winter will soon be ending, and spring and summer beckon. The days will be sweet and long again as the sun blazes down; dark, bright and joyous even as memory swarms over them like the rush of the tide.

  The Cumbernalds’ large front door swings inwards. I’m expecting a figure, some shape or form, perhaps even the dark handsome stranger of tradition, to be standing on the doorstep. But the doorway remains empty, and I, pushed on, seem to travel out and through; on into the blackness and the terrible, empty, cold.

  20

  I’VE BEEN READING—OR re-reading, I’m really not sure now—that stained copy that I inherited from John Arthur—from Francis—of William Morris’s News From Nowhere. The curled, brittle pages, smelling of damp, smelling of age, gritty with sand, dried mud and the dusty air of nearly half a century, as weary and old as the suitcase in which I kept them, speak of nothing that truly resembles the vision of Greater Britain that came to pass. Morris hated big industry, he hated all big things, he hated terror, he hated injustice. How, then, was he pulled so deeply into the currents of Modernism that Blackwells are even now trying to get rid of discounted piles of copies of The Well At The World’s End, The Sundering Flood, The Waters Of The Wondrous Isles? All that Morris and Modernism ever shared was a preparedness to dream, and a love of a bright, clean, glorious past that never was. But perhaps that was enough; perhaps the dream, any dream, is always the seed from which nightmares will follow.

  John Arthur himself is fading in the new grey daylight of this different world. His memory seems to have no life, is twisted and pulled to suit whatever meaning people choose to give it as easily as were Morris’s unread pages. It’s almost as if I’m the only person left in this nation who grieves for him, or who still wishes to understand. That fatal night when we were together follows me even now, a dark figure filled with reproach and love and anger tugging at my shoulder, breathing chill upon my neck. All the questions I should have asked, the challenges I should have made. Either I loved, I suppose, the incarnation of something evil, or John Arthur was a puppet like me, jerked and changed through the years that separated us by the whims of some incomprehensible greater will. Between these two horrors, I keep trying to find some middle way, a decent path that anyone might wander along in their lives and find themselves unexpectedly and irrevocably lost. Francis was no monster, for all that I know that he used me much more than he loved me in the brief time that we were truly together. For all his faults, he railed against injustice, prejudice, stupidity, and would have been horrified to learn that people could be stripped of their lives for the sake of some accident of birth.

  So I keep thinking instead of Mrs. Stevens, my acquaintance’s neighbour, who offered me tea and the unquestioning warmth of her kitchen, and of Cumbernald, and of the woman behind the counter in the Post Office, and that Bus Inspector on the road to Adderly, and the many nurses and policemen, and, yes, of Christlow, and even Reeve-Ellis, and the faces you see looking out from train windows, and the children you see playing in the street. And my own face in the mirror is there, too, although haggard as death now, the stranger-corpse that will soon be all that is left of me. Francis belongs there, with us all. He didn’t close the cell doors himself, he didn’t pull the ropes, touch the wires, kick shut the filing cabinet drawers, or even sign the forms that authorised the contracts that emptied so many lives from history. We did that for him.

  We all are innocent.

  We are all guilty.

  During the few days before Francis and I headed south again at what turned out to be the end of our Scottish holiday, we lived together, totally alone, in a ramshackle stone cottage. The place had a rough slate floor like something carried in by the tide, thick walls with tiny windows that overlooked the beach and the impossibly smooth silver sand that faded without change into the flat glittering surface of the sea. The panes were clouded and cracked, holed and stuffed with old newspapers; curtained with cobwebs, too, when the old woman from the farmhouse up by the point came to let us in. In storms, in winter, the thin turf roof would have leaked the sea and the wind and the rain. But the weather was like honey when we were there. The sea was like wine. The rocks were marble. Alone, miles from the world once the old woman had gone, we swam naked and caught translucent shrimps from the pools beyond the dunes and lay on our backs on the sands and gazed into a sky that was as clear as gin, as deep as the sea. And we boiled the shrimps to pink in a witch’s iron pot on a driftwood fire each evening. We ate them with our fingers.

  Time stopped. The Earth stood still on its axis. The whole universe turned around us. Francis’s skin was browned and bleached to lacy tidemarks by the sea and the sun, and he tasted like the shrimps; briny salt and sweet. The aurora borealis filled the sky at midnight, all the colours of light raining down from veils that moved with a soft hissing.

  Lying one night tangled amid the blankets of our rough cot, my skin stiff from the sun and the soles of my feet gritty, some twist of emptiness made me reach out and open my eyes. Francis had gone from beside me, and was standing naked at the open cottage doorway, his hand on the frame, looking out at the pale sea, the white sand, the star-shot night.

  “You see over there…?” he said, sensing from the change in my breathing that I was awake. “Right over there, Griff, towards the horizon…?”

  I propped myself up, following his gaze out along the white shingle path, the low wall, the pale dunes that edged into the luminous ripple of the waves. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was something out there, the shining grey backs of a shoal of islands that daylight made the air too brilliant to see.

  “I think we should go there, Griff,” he said, his shoulders and limbs rimmed with starlight. “Remember? That lovely name…?”

  “There won’t be anything to see,” I said, lying back in the blankets, feeling the pull of sleep. “And there’ll be no way of getting across. No ferry…”

  But I could see those islands more clearly now as I closed my eyes and the darkness began to take me. Heathered hills rolling down to dark green copses of pine. Sheep-dotted lowlands. The summer-sparkling rim of the sea. I could even smell a uniquely milky scent of summer grass and flowers carried to me on the soft breeze from off the Atlantic. Yes, I thought, we will go there.

  But the weather had changed in the morning when we awoke. Low grey clouds lay across the dunes and met with the sea. Dampness beaded the cottage walls, silvering our bedding and filling the air like smoke as we shivered over breakfast and checked our map and decided to head south again, towards, perhaps, the Gulf of Corryvreckan—yet another of Francis’s magical names.

  So we never did get to visit the Summer Isles. Francis pushed quickly down the track as we left our cottage beneath a sky that threatened nothing but rain, cycling as fast as
he always cycled, forever heading on. I even feared that I, teetering with my older legs as I bumped along with my heavy suitcase strapped behind me, would never catch up with him. It was then, I think, as he crested the top of the first hill and vanished from sight, freewheeling eagerly down towards the farm on the headland where we would hand in the keys, that I finally lost my Francis. It was then that he was swallowed by history, and that everything else that was to happen began.

  21

  WELL-ANCHORED IN MY wheelchair on this steamship’s juddering deck, scarfed and gloved and wrapped and alone, I gaze at those famous white cliffs, as grey on this late January morning as is the sea, the sky, these circling gulls. The air is bitter and cold, filled with the groan of engines and the smoke and salt they churn in their wake. There will be no last glimpse of England—I realise that now—just this gradual fading.

  Like so many other things I have done in my life, my departure has proven surprisingly easy. I could detect no resistance as my driver ferried me about Oxford and I withdrew my funds and made my travel arrangements. In any event, the number of stamps and passes required to leave this country are greatly reduced. There have been no footsteps behind me, and the glances at my tickets and papers as I took the train for the last time down to London, changed at Kings Cross, then travelled on to the docks at Dover, have all been perfunctory. I do not think I have seen a single member of the diminished KSG, or even of the local Constabulary. No voices called me back as I was carried up the gangplank to this ship, the SS Tynwald, bound for Calais.