Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  I’d heard all this from Colombo over a cup of coffee at Caliban’s, and I was thinking about it now as I drove cautiously out of St Brandons on the left hand side of the road. I was glad to be behind a wheel again. I felt free and powerful, in charge of my own destiny, and I realised I’d been missing this. I wasn’t used to driving an ancient Land Rover, however, and getting from first to second, which one has to do all the time on these hills, was still a minor nightmare. So it was freedom and power with reservations. Lucy had offered to lend me the Land Rover for the day, which is something I would never have asked for. She was planting out young brassicas, so couldn’t get away. She said to tell Colombo she’d see him at Kirwan’s Opening at Maldun’s Mill on Friday.

  I felt I was getting somewhere: meeting people, building up a network of my own. Colombo had been the first break. I still wasn’t sure why he’d been so helpful, in spite of what he’d said, but I was beginning to suspect it might really be disinterested goodwill. If it was, I felt a little overwhelmed. Possibly also a little disappointed. I wished, only for a moment but not for the first time, that I’d married Lance after all, and settled down to a respectable life in Winchester. If I’d done that I’d now be free, at twenty-five, of this everlasting speculation. I didn’t like eyeingup men, however secretly. As I successfully double de-clutched on the one-in-four hill at the top of Fraternity Street I remembered Aristophanes’ bit in Plato’s Symposium where he tells the story about all the four-legged creatures being chopped in two and rushing about forever looking for their lost half. Why (here I saw myself asking my father, who believes in these things) did God make us dissatisfied with just being one? I didn’t need a partner to interrupt my life; why then did every social occasion present itself to me as a possibility of finding one?

  If they had changed to driving on the right, the turn from Fraternity Street north on to the Lyonsness Road would be a hell of a lot easier than it is now. I was thinking about that, and about how I’d ditched poor Lance back in England, when I saw the hitchhiker. He hadn’t stopped; he was walking up the road with his back to me and his thumb out. He had heavy boots and a shapeless green rucksack that looked as if it had been through the Second World War and back. I just had time to remember that this was Hy Brasil, where violent crime is unknown, and transport in rural areas tacitly consists of people giving each other lifts. I pulled up with a jerk, and skidded on to the verge.

  He opened the door at once. ‘Thanks.’ I grabbed the rucksack as he heaved it in and pulled it over into the middle. It was heavy. At least it would make a barrier between us. He didn’t look dangerous, only sweaty and dusty. He was fair and sunburned, with a lot of freckles. Although he was my age at the very least, I could see just what he must have looked like as a small boy. I wondered if he was old enough not to mind giving that impression; Arthur used to go to great trouble to cultivate a streetwise look.

  He got in and slammed the door. ‘Where’s Lucy?’

  I’d noticed already that hitchhikers in Hy Brasil take their rides for granted, and don’t bother with an excess of gratitude. ‘Oh, you know Lucy?’

  ‘Of course. You’re English?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘As soon as you opened your mouth. Yeah, I’ve got it. You’re the one writing a book about us.’

  ‘A guidebook to Hy Brasil. Yes.’

  ‘Have you ever been here before?’

  Definitely hostile. Once again I cursed Colombo, or whoever it was, for destroying my anonymity so completely. ‘No. My name’s Sidony. I’m staying at Lucy’s. You’re a friend of hers?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Maybe he realised how surly he sounded, because he added, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve had an unpleasant day. My name is Jared, and I really don’t mind if you write a book or not.’

  Already I counted that as remarkably civil, coming from him.‘Thank you, that’s very kind. I’m not trying to be an expert, you know. It’s just one of those guidebook series, saying things like where the Youth Hostels are, and what time the buses run.’

  ‘At that rate it’ll be about three lines long.’

  ‘And other things. Potted histories and descriptions of places, stuff like that. Fairly standard.’

  ‘Sounds pretty boring to me.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to read it.’

  There was a short silence. I took the next bend at thirty-five, then realised how sharp it was. Gravel crunched under the front tyres, and I dragged the wheel over. I saw my passenger – I’d forgotten his name already – clutch at the strap hanging by his ear. There were no seatbelts.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have annoyed me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ He sounded it too, to my surprise. ‘Truly, I am. I’ve had a horrible day. I don’t lead a very sociable life anyway. And you’re a guest. This is Hy Brasil. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press. You write what the hell you like. Bring the tourists in. You’ll be doing us a favour. Personally I might feel like shooting them, but we need the money. You write away. Don’t mind me.’

  ‘I can’t write and drive at the same time.’

  ‘Not on our roads, anyway. Do you like it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Being here. I’m making conversation now, you see. Being polite.’

  ‘Yes, then, I do like it. Do you live at Lyonsness?’

  ‘No. Despair.’

  The car shot up a straight stretch. ‘Despair! Then you must be Robinson Crusoe! Peterkin told me about you. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Alexander Selkirk.’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  ‘Seriously, Jared Honeyman. And you seriously said you were called Sidney?’

  ‘Sidony. It’s a feast day; it comes just after Easter.’

  ‘I like that. Are you called anything for short? Or does everyone call you Sidony?’

  ‘Everyone except my brother. I wouldn’t let anyone else shorten my name without my permission.’ I glanced sideways at him. ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll remember, if I ever want to shorten your name, to ask your permission first.’

  I ignored that, but anyway I was trying to recollect something else. ‘I’ve got it,’ I said suddenly. ‘You were in the paper the other day. You got caught in the tidal wave, and you said it was “interesting, but you wouldn’t specially want to do it again”. That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That was me.’

  He was quite willing to talk about it, but you’d think he’d been in a completely different boat from Colombo. Colombo’s boat had, according to the article, escaped by the skin of its teeth from a seismological cataclysm; Jared’s boat had evidently found itself in a sea that was just a bit damper and bumpier than usual. I found that interesting, and tried to get Jared to tell me more.

  We were driving past terraces of apple trees. The blossom had all gone now and the trees were green, but there were petals scattered on the ground like melting snow. Although I had my eyes on the road I was aware of him watching me. ‘I do know,’ I told him all at once, ‘that I can’t possibly know enough about the country to write the sort of book you’d want. But the offer was too good to miss. Sometimes you have to take risks, and say yes, even if you don’t know how you’ll do it. That must have happened to you sometimes?’

  ‘Yes, that’s happened to me.’ He didn’t take his eyes off me; I glanced at him sideways and encountered a steady blue-eyed gaze. I could feel myself beginning to blush, and changed gear hurriedly. ‘So how would you describe it so far?’ he asked.

  ‘Hy Brasil?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not in any way you’d like, probably. Sometimes I seem to recognise things, as if I’d dreamed it all already. Like this bit.’

  ‘This bit?’

  ‘This road through the orchards. The apple trees. Meeting you like I just did. The way the sun makes patterns on the gravel.I keep having the feeling that it isn’t new. People say autumn is melancholy, but I find it’s the spring that feels so o
ld. You think how many times it’s happened, from the beginning of the world.That’s how it feels at home, anyway.’ I stopped. The uncanny impression of déjà υu went a little further than that, but I wasn’t going to say so.

  ‘Hy Brasil isn’t very old.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Not geologically or historically. Before Brendan came there was never anybody here at all. Right up until the nineteenth century there were arguments about whether the place even existed. Until there was a way of measuring longitude no one could say for certain whether it was here or not. A lot of people thought it wasn’t.’

  ‘And yet it’s been written about for two and a half thousand years.’

  ‘So? What does that prove? I should think more’s been written about things that don’t exist than things that do.’ When I didn’t answer, he added, ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it. I suppose it depends on whether you believe in those sorts of things. Stories, I mean, and dreams, and stuff like that. I was looking at the Ortelius map. It’s on the cover of a new book I saw in Finnegan’s.’

  ‘That’s Brendan Hook’s book. I never had dreams about this place until I went away to England. Then I did: homesick, I suppose. I guess it sounds daft to you, but the rest of the world seemed so unreal; I felt a long way away. I used to dream about Hy Brasil and then I’d wake up and wish I was still sleeping. Only at first, of course. How does it feel being a foreigner here? Do you mind it?’

  I had to think about that one too. ‘Yes and no,’ I said eventually. ‘I like feeling I can be whoever I want. I mean, no one here knows who I am or what I was like before.’

  ‘But you know.’

  ‘I can forget if I like. On the other hand, I don’t like being lonely.’

  ‘Are you lonely?’

  ‘No. I mean, not superficially. People are very friendly. But sometimes I realise that no one else is seeing just what I’m seeing; then I look at myself in the mirror and I have this strange feeling I’m the only one like me in the whole world. I can’t explain it really. Have you ever felt like that?’

  ‘I never thought to put it like that. I felt very alone when I first went abroad, which I wasn’t expecting because of the language being the same. But you can use the same words and have different thoughts.’

  ‘Well, that has to be true of every single person,’ I said practically. ‘I suppose it helps that we both speak English anyway.’

  ‘Of course it does. You can tell me what you dream about, which you couldn’t otherwise.’

  ‘Yes, maybe, but I don’t think I will.’

  ‘That’s not fair. I told you.’

  ‘You told me one thing. OK then, if you really want to know. Last night I dreamed I was about to have this lovely dinner: grilled trout and new potatoes and fresh peas, and a nice white wine, quite dry. I was just sitting down to it when I woke up. It was terribly disappointing. I’d only had cornflakes for supper because Lucy went to see The English Patient with Colombo. I expect that was why.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s both sad and significant. Someone should take you to Atlantis.’

  ‘Oh? What’s Atlantis?’

  ‘It’s the best fish restaurant in Hy Brasil. Which is to say, quite definitely the best restaurant of any kind in Hy Brasil, and probably the best fish restaurant in the whole Atlantic. It belongs to Penelope Hook, and it’s in Lyonsness. It deserves at least two pages. I’m surprised no one’s mentioned it to you already.’

  ‘I’d like that. I can take myself, anyway, if I want to.’

  ‘No doubt, but it wouldn’t be the same, would it?’

  ‘The difference isn’t worth thinking about.’

  ‘Yes it is. But in Hy Brasil we’re more straightforward about being romantic. I noticed this a lot when I was in England. You come from the West Country, don’t you?’

  ‘Cornwall.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him smiling. “Where the westering waters roll From drown’d Lyonesse to the outer deep.” Isn’t that right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is that a poem?’

  ‘If you don’t know you should. We learned it at school. Tristan and Iseult. You believe in a lot of unreal things, don’t you? Do you include love potions?’

  I didn’t answer him because I wasn’t attending. We had come over the pass, and down below the sea sparkled in the sound between Lyonsness and Despair. I pulled up, forgetting him. ‘Oh, wow! Look at that. Just look at that!’ I opened the door and slid out into the bright air. I just stood gazing at the island and breathing in the smell of the sea.

  ‘I live in the lighthouse,’ said Jared.

  ‘Do you? I sent a postcard of it to Arthur – my brother. We used to play lighthouses when we were little. We used to go to the Scillies for our holidays; I suppose that gave us the idea. We used to pretend the sycamore tree in the garden was our lighthouse. We used to make up shipwrecks and tempests. How does one get to Despair?’

  ‘By boat.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. I mean, is there a ferry?’

  ‘No. You have to get someone to take you.’

  ‘I see.’ I waited a moment longer, then turned back to the car. ‘Well, we’d better get on.’

  ‘You can drop me at the Lyonsness turning, if you’re going on to Ravnscar.’

  As we lurched over the potholes he was busy writing something on the back of an envelope. I pulled up where he said, and opened my mouth to say goodbye. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘When you want to come to Despair, phone that number and ask for Per. He’ll tell you when I’m over. I’ve got a boat. All you have to do is ask.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, staring down at the wobbly number he’d given me. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘My pleasure. I like you. I’d like to show you my island.’ He was holding out his hand, and I shook it hesitantly. ‘It is my island, you know. There isn’t anyone else there so it must be. I’m sorry I was rude. I’ll see you again, Sidony. Goodbye.’

  He opened the door and jumped out before I could think what to say to that. I watched him running down the steep hill, his rucksack bouncing on his back. When he got to the corner he turned and waved, and then he leaped down off the road and was lost to sight among the trees. I stared stupidly at the empty road, and the white village with the sea behind it. Beyond it, the two peaks of Despair lay open to the sun, and the lighthouse at the top winked at me as if it were lit, though I knew it was only the sun catching the glass dome. I blinked, and shoved the recalcitrant gear lever into first again. As I ground slowly uphill again I switched on the radio. The Hy Brasil classical station was playing Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’. Déjà υu. I swore, and double de-clutched savagely. The Land Rover lurched across the muddy potholes on the road up to Ravnscar, while the sea glinted below.

  TWELVE

  ON THE GROUND floor of Maldun’s Mill the outside walls had been laid bare to the stone. The inner walls and partitions were white, the carpet a tweedy grey. It made a good exhibition space, being pleasing in its proportions and unobtrusive in its colours. One space led through enticingly into the next, the whole arrangement of open rooms circling around the central shaft of the mill. The long windows on the north side looked on to the mill race, and when the place was empty the sound of rushing water percolated through into all its corners, just as it had done during the centuries when the ground floor of the mill had been used for very different purposes.

  It was a pleasure to superimpose those images over the reality of the present. If you half-shut your eyes and concentrated on the shapes of the boulders in the stone wall, on the way they had been fitted together as if they had been deliberately formed for the space they now occupied; if you listened to the falling water that never stopped or faltered whether anyone remembered it or not, then the other images would come too, almost as strongly as if you could by a glance, a mere flick of the eye from the wall into the room itself, see the sacks of grain piled up in the corner, the wi
nch and tackle, the trapdoor from the floor above. Over the sound of water you could nearly make yourself hear the grinding of stone on stone, the crank of the turning wheel outside, the water splashing from one paddle to the next.

  But not quite. The past can’t be present, except in the mind’s eye, and that’s only a delusion. Even if the past is caught, developed, printed, framed and hung on the wall it’s still gone. The images don’t take you back there; they only help you to remember. And what’s the point of that, thought Nesta bitterly. She turned her face away from the wall, and faced the room. All those rectangular images, like tombstones in a cemetery, hanging there flat against the white walls. Why bother? There was a moment attached to every one, something which had once happened, but it was gone, and it couldn’t be brought back.

  She took a glass of red wine and trailed away up the stairs, leaving the President to stare intently at his reflection in the watery world beyond the window and carefully adjust his tie. Before Nesta reappeared the first guests had arrived, and Hook had chatted benignly to the Town Clerk of St Brandons and his wife, and then to the junior art master from the Academy, and to Ishmael Pereira’s wife, to whom he endeared himself by remembering that she was one of the doctors at the new clinic in Lyonsness, and, even more impressively, being able to demonstrate that he’d thoroughly read the clinic’s annual report.

  Ishmael, meanwhile, ignored the company completely, and slowly toured the exhibition, examining each photograph with concentrated attention. Out of the corner of his eye Hook watched him disappear into the next room, and interrupted himself to say to Anna, ‘Can we join your husband for a minute? There’s something in there I’d like to watch him seeing.’