Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘And then I got the chance to be on Despair. I could live right above my wreck, so I could keep an eye on her. And also I wanted to see what it was like. I’ve been in lonely places but not on my own. I wanted to find out about that. I wanted to know what I was like when I was just myself, no one about and no one asking for anything.’

  ‘And what is it like?’

  Jared shrugged. ‘It varies. Boring, sometimes. Melancholy. Exciting. I guess the place is beautiful. When you’re alone you don’t stop seeing that. Sometimes I talk out loud so as to hear a voice. I read a lot. I have a routine. Sometimes I think if I didn’t find things to do I’d be afraid of myself. Other times there’s nothing to do, and I’m totally at peace and afraid of nothing at all. Like I say, it varies.’

  ‘But you can’t stay there for ever, Jed.’

  ‘Of course I can’t stay there for ever! You’re the fifth person who’s told me that, and I can’t think why anyone would need to point out anything so obvious. Are you going to live all alone in Ravnscar for ever? Does it make it wrong to be here if you’re not?’

  Lucy followed his gaze across the sea to Despair. ‘The answer to the first is, I don’t know, and to the second, I don’t know. I’m not afraid of being on my own either, though my way is different.’

  Jared looked at her. ‘But you’re afraid of the alternative.’

  ‘If that’s a question I’m not going to answer it.’

  ‘It wasn’t a question.’

  Lucy said nothing, and presently he reached across and tentatively touched her hand. ‘Sorry. I’ve been a rotten guest. Maybe I should go now.’

  Lucy gave a little shudder, as if she were shaking something away. ‘Are you going home tonight?’

  ‘It’s getting dark. I’ll sleep at Ishmael’s and cross first thing in the morning. Oh, before I go: could I borrow Monson’s Naval Tracts again?’

  ‘Help yourself. It’s in the Great Hall – but you know where to find it. Make sure it doesn’t get wet. But you could stay here if you like.’

  ‘No, I can’t. I’ve got to get Ishmael’s car back to him. I’ll come over next week as usual. I never did get my groceries today. The whole trip’s been a bloody waste of time.’

  ‘Oh Jed, do cheer up. Come over and meet the Brit when she’s staying here. She might be the luscious blonde you’re craving for, you never know. But Brits are supposed to be awful in bed; I can tell you a joke about that.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear your racist jokes. I’ve had three English girlfriends – at least, one was Welsh and one was Chinese – and I can tell you it’s not even particularly true.’

  ‘I knew your time abroad was educational and productive in every possible way. Goodnight Jared. I like seeing you even when you’re horrible. Take care.’ Lucy hesitated for a moment, and then reached up and lightly kissed his cheek. ‘This place has to be home. We can’t help that. I guess it’ll turn out all right.’

  FIVE

  Sidony Redruth. YWCA Hostel, Water St, St Brandons. May 20th.

  Notes for Undiscovered Islands (working title).

  ‘THEY PUT THE NATO base on Mount Ailbe,’ said Colombo, ‘because seismically it’s supposed to be the most stable.’

  ‘You mean anywhere else in Hy Brasil there might be an earthquake any minute?’

  ‘Anywhere in the world there might be an earthquake any minute. Anywhere on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge you could call it a strong possibility every minute. Mount Ailbe has been stable for several thousand years. Mount Brasil and Mount Prosper, not.’

  ‘I’ve read about the Mount Prosper eruption in 1783.’

  ‘In Faraday? He’s a good authority. You should look at his Survey of the Ocean Floor. Did you find that?’

  ‘No. That’ll come under Oceanography. I’m still on History.’

  Colombo swerved to avoid an exceptionally large pothole. He was driving with one hand on the wheel, at six-o’clock, and the other resting on the bottom of the open window. His right forearm was much browner than his left, so obviously he made a habit of it. This was the first time I’d seen him in jeans and a t-shirt. He had a lean, rangy body: nice. I thought we were driving a bit too fast.

  ‘This isn’t a very good road,’ I remarked.

  ‘It’s good enough. The Brits have a mania for road-building: I noticed that when I was there. The object being to make everywhere look like Surbiton. At least that’s what a Brit told me. I don’t know what Surbiton’s like, but it has a certain ring to it. I have an image of it inside my head.’

  I stopped myself trying to justify Surbiton, where incidentally I’ve never been either, because this was not what I wanted to talk about. ‘Before we go any further,’ I said instead, ‘please will you tell me about the Revolution?’

  We’d reached the watershed. Suddenly the sea was directly south of us, a twinkling May-time blue dotted with islands. Foothills fell away to a rocky shore. Colombo pulled into the side with a crunch of gravel. ‘It’ll take a little while. Let’s stop.’

  I got out and gazed south. I knew the islands from the map, and pointed to a jagged crescent in the middle. ‘Is that Mayda?’

  ‘It is. That’s Mayda, and that’s Tuly. You can’t see Elphin-holm. Wherever you get to, it almost always turns out to be hidden behind something else.’

  ‘A shy island?’ I stretched out my bare arms. ‘It’s hot up here. It’s actually hot.’

  ‘Shall I tell you the story then?’

  It was a good place for listening. Colombo sat on one rock, and I lay in eyebright-studded grass with my back against another, and gazed out over the Atlantic while he talked. The sea sparkled back at me, and when I half closed my eyes I kept seeing the shapes of islands that weren’t really there.

  ‘It begins during the War,’ said Colombo, and paused for a long time. ‘Let me think. I’ve heard so many stories all my life; let me think how to put them in order. I’ve never been asked to before, not by a foreigner. Certainly not by a Brit. It makes a difference.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let it do that.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I mean, I talk about the past – oh, a lot, we do it all the time – to other Brasils, and it’s just history. Telling you, it feels a bit personal. Only it isn’t really. I wasn’t born till three years after ’58 was over. You’re even younger. It’s just history.’

  ‘Only it’s your history and not mine, you mean?’ I tried to sound disinterested, but I felt, quite irrationally, excluded. It occurred to me that if recounting a chapter of his country’s history was for Colombo a personal act, his private life must just about count as classified information. It made me realise that, although this was our second fairly intense conversation, I knew absolutely nothing about him.

  There was another pause before he answered me. ‘Not exactly. No. I guess anybody’s history is for anyone who wants it. That’s OK. I respect your asking for it.’

  I can’t think why that made me blush, but it did.

  ‘So,’ said Colombo. ‘In the Second World War, Hy Brasil, or rather, the British colony of Frisland, was in a critical strategic position. The garrisons moved straight in in ’39: Brits, Canadians, Anzacs. This place was a supply base and static aircraft carrier for six years. You can hardly walk half a mile along our coasts without tripping over old gun emplacements.’

  ‘I’ve looked at the ones round the harbour in St Brandons.’

  ‘Yes. Baskerville wants those done up as a museum piece. I think we’d do better to clear away the lot and dump all that concrete in the sea. Anyway, no one’s ever found the money to do either, so there’s no point arguing. So. It’s the end of the war, and things are changing fast in the North Atlantic. Independent Iceland:1944. Faroe, semi-independence from Denmark: 1948. Newfoundland becomes a province of Canada:1949. Hy Brasil has been a British colony since the Brits captured it in 1812. The Brits held on to it like grim death against France first and then the United States, and in 1816 the Treaty of Vienna gave it to them on a bit of paper. So now
it’s 1946, and Hy Brasil’s been British for a hundred and forty years. A few folk have objected now and then: the revolution didn’t quite happen in 1831, it was easily quashed in 1848, and two executions did the trick in 1871. But in 1946 things look serious. The Independence Party has a majority in the Assembly. Two shots are fired at Sandy Arbuthnot, the High Commissioner, as he leaves his Residence in an open Rolls, and for once the little colony of Frisland hits the headlines in London. Change begins to seem almost possible.

  ‘Negotiations are under way. Students from the University of the Hesperides start a riot. A British soldier is wounded. The student ringleader, a Classics graduate born in Dorrado who is writing a thesis on the Persian Wars, is arrested. His name: James Hook. He’s expelled from the university and remanded in custody. More riots. Hook is tried and released for lack of evidence.

  ‘1947. Hook stands as candidate for the Independence Party in Dorrado, and is elected with an overwhelming majority. Things are moving fast. We set up an Iceland Commission, who come back from their research trip with a glowing report on the success of a new nation that has plenty of fish and less than a quarter of a million citizens. The issue is debated hotly in the Assembly. And we’re winning, we’re almost winning. There’s a competition to produce a logo for a flag for a new country, the smallest nation in the world. It’s won by a high school student called Penelope Hawkins. It’s a motif taken from the rod and crescent, the only Pictish carved rock in Hy Brasil, the single proof we have that the Irish ever really came. But she’s made it so it could be a diagram of a man standing on an island that turns out to be a whale. It’s our history and our saint and our emblem of a possible future all in one. We resurrect an old name too, the one that Brendan gave us, so they say. Hy Brasil.

  ‘And then comes the backlash. A dossier is published on Hook, the twenty-four-year-old white-headed boy of the Independence Party. So he’s a member of the CP? So he’s in secret communication with the Kremlin? Or is he? Who put this together? Suddenly there’re reds everywhere. Lift the covers off the Independence Party and underneath it’s crawling with them. It’s a Communist plot. Or is it? Who said? Where did all this evidence come from?

  ‘But it’s in all the London papers, so it must be true. The story’s out, and Hook’s back in the town jail. But this time he doesn’t hang about. One morning there he isn’t. Where did he go? We know where he went first, because nine months later Penelope Hawkins turns up at St Bride’s Maternity Hospital in St Brandons, a week after she wins the Fine Arts Scholarship endowed by the Pelea Fund, and what does she do? She gives birth to a nine-pound boy and registers him the next day as Brendan Hook. What’s this got to do with national politics, you ask? I can only say, we’re a small country, and small things matter here.

  ‘So do large ones. This is 1948 and there’s a very large matter looming, which is about to alter everything. It’s NATO. Incidentally, there’s a minor eruption of Mount Brasil the same year. That’s by the by. Yes, NATO. Hook’s out of the picture, tucked away in some Central American rainforest, and the Independents are riven with accusations and denials. Is this a plot? If so, whose? Consider this: November 1947:preliminary formation of the Atlantic command. There’s a cold war settling over our sea. Only is it ours, or is it just someone else’s battleground? If you get your pawns in the right position they can win the game for you. You don’t hang around asking their permission. Pawn to king four. That’s about the sum of it.’

  ‘Pawn what? You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Sorry. Put it this way.’ Colombo was striding up and down in front of me, so his shadow kept falling across my face – light, dark, light, dark – flicking across my half-closed eyelids. ‘The West must be defended. The maximum bombing range of the new nuclear B29 is one thousand seven hundred and seventeen miles. The Brits happen to own a few insignificant little islands, halfway between Europe and Fort Norfolk, Virginia. Very handy. Especially as Britain and the USA are secretly fighting it out as to who’s going to get the lion’s command of the North Atlantic. The Americans reckon they should run the whole show, and the Brits say – wait while I remember – that letting the Yanks just take over would be ‘unacceptable to the United Kingdom’.

  ‘So. During the war the Brits controlled the seas round us down to 42°, and south from there it was over to the Yanks. And of course in 1948 we have the Canadians wanting a say too. So the latest idea is to divide the ocean into three parts, like Gaul.

  ‘The Brits don’t have much going for them. They won the war, didn’t they? So they’re broke. It’s Marshall versus Bevan and he who pays the piper calls the tune. Only the Brits have this one little pawn. A little pawn in the middle of the board, sitting right on the boundary of the proposed new carve up. Independence? You must be bloody joking. Communist infiltration? No chance! April 1949. The Treaty’s signed. And the Independence Party of Hy Brasil collapses into ruin and oblivion. You can’t blame anybody, of course. I mean, the world must be saved, even if it’s sometimes tough on the little chaps.’

  ‘Did everyone in Hy Brasil think like you do?’

  ‘No one in Hy Brasil agrees about anything. We’re an independent nation, every one of us. Have you had enough? Shall I go on?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ll skip nine years. Nine years during which the Brits and the Yanks argued endlessly about boundaries. Always trying to carve up the sea. Canute versus Moses. Which would you put your money on? They kept drawing new straight lines, and every time there were these little islands in the middle, always getting in the way. We were an occupied country, you know. A third of the population was NATO personnel. The airport you came into, that used to be NATO. It’s the only place flat enough for a landing strip apart from the cricket pitches, which are sacrosanct, so we couldn’t even have a civil air service. All flights courtesy of NATO. Same with St Brandons harbour. Somehow the fishing fleet managed to squeeze itself in around the edges. The only thing they didn’t do was nuclear testing, because it might have been dangerous for the NATO guys. So there’s something for the natives to be grateful for. Of course we were a prime Soviet target. Another plus. The bunker on Mount Ailbe was only for military personnel, so at least we could look forward to a quick ending. Better than a nuclear winter, I reckon.’

  ‘But Colombo,’ I couldn’t help saying, ‘it’s too simple just to say it’s the Brits. We’d have been blown to bits even before you were. You know where my parents met?’

  He looked round at me as if he had forgotten who I was. ‘Your parents? What about them?’

  ‘They met on a CND march in Aldermaston in 1969.’

  ‘Good,’ said Colombo. ‘I’m glad they met, or you wouldn’t be here now.’

  ‘Thank you. But what I’m trying to say to you is you can’t just blame a whole nation. It’s too simple.’

  ‘History is always too simple. What do you expect?’

  ‘That sounds like a very abridged edition of War and Peace.’

  ‘Thank you. I have a great admiration for Tolstoy. Shall I go on?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No,’ said Colombo, stopping suddenly and stretching himself, so that his t-shirt came away from his jeans and I could see the dark hairs on his stomach. ‘I’ve got a better idea. I want you to meet my godmother. She can tell you more than I can. She lives in the hills just south of Dorrado. We can go there now.’

  ‘OK.’ I got up slowly and followed him back to the car.

  We lurched through the potholes back to the paved road, where we took a hairpin bend at a 20° angle, and turned left. As we curved inland and began to rise, I recognised the place. Maybe I once dreamt it, maybe it was a touch of my own west country in this alien island, maybe I was infected for a moment by another consciousness, who knows what? But the curve of the road was familiar to me as the lines on the palm of my own hand. A potholed gravel road rising among birches and aspen trees. I hadn’t expected so many trees would grow in Hy Brasil, but we were a couple of miles inland now. The
valley was sheltered on three sides, narrowing as it rose. We took the next corner in second, and the wheels on my side ground on loose gravel. Now I could see right over the valley. Slopes curtained with trees fell and vanished into rolling cloud. St Brandons was lost in the mist to the east of us, and there was nothing left of the sea but the faint tang of salt blowing in the open window. The road curved again, with that same tantalising familiarity. I knew the fork in it; I even knew what the red-and-white sign would say before I could read it:

  ROAD CLOSED: DIVERSION

  ESTRADA IMPEDIDA: DESVIO

  ‘Hell and damnation,’ said Colombo. He braked abruptly and the car skidded to a halt, its nose almost touching the sign. One of the many wayside shrines in Hy Brasil stood just above the turning. Under the wooden eaves a blue-robed virgin clasped a fat Caucasian baby. There were fresh hyacinths at her feet. I read the notice again. ROAD CLOSED. DIVERSION. White letters on a red background. The metal was slightly rusted, the frame held down by a couple of soggy sandbags. As I watched, the letters pulsated gently but insistently. There was a hollow feeling behind my eyes, and suddenly I was too tired to think. I was here. I had my first scoop: a real native with a godmother, who also happened to be a journalist himself. But the sun had gone in suddenly, and we were inland, hemmed in by precipices. There were swarms of flies buzzing over puddles at the roadside, and scraps of cloud clinging to the treetops.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Colombo, and jerked his poor old car into first again. `Red tape and foolishness. Hold tight!’

  We shot between the sign and the roadside. I looked from the passenger window on to the tree canopy forty feet below. When I opened my eyes again the trees were gone. The mist lay like a bleached eiderdown below us. The road ended in a pile of boulders, but no, we’d swung a hundred and sixty degrees and against my window I saw a basalt cliff. I’d just got used to that when we swung again, and there was the eiderdown much lower now. In between was the jaggedy road and steep green slopes strewn with boulders. When next I opened my eyes we were high on a ridge where silver pools gleamed under a pale coin of a sun. The weather had changed so fast I felt disorientated. I turned away, and looked north. Delicately outlined through the cloud I saw a mountain, symmetrical and steep, with a cone at the top of it as cool and harmonious as a Japanese brush painting.