THIRTEEN
LIKE ALL THE doors on the island, the door at Ravnscar was never locked. Colombo wandered into the kitchen and called out ‘Lucy! Lucy?’
No answer. The papers on the long table had been tidied into piles at precise right angles at one end. The other end was bare, waiting for the next meal. There were new red candles in the pewter candlesticks, and fresh oranges in the fruit bowl. The round table in the window had been swept clean of crumbs. Simpkin the cat lay curled in a neat ball on the windowseat. Beside him was yesterday’s copy of The Hesperides Times carefully refolded.
Colombo flung his jacket over a Jacobean carved chair, and went over to the stove. It was warm, and the coals glowed gently behind the glass door. There were brushmarks across the clean hearth, and the coal scuttle had been freshly filled. Colombo wondered vaguely what Lucy and Sidony were like when they were alone together: whether they went in for mutual housekeeping as a matter of course, or just sat over their wine discussing the vagaries of men. If that were the case, he would like very much to know what they said to each other, and how much either of them knew about how he felt.
However, that was not what he had come for. Yesterday he had bought a photograph, and ever since an impression had been tugging at his mind, and the maddening thing was that he couldn’t place it. He hadn’t gone to Kirwan’s exhibition with the idea of buying anything. He only had three rooms in his apartment, and all twelve walls of them were full. He had been seduced, however, by a composition of blue and green, and a cleanness of line that seemed only possible in those cold colours. The subject was precise and yet surreal. It had the quality of dream that he associated with painting rather than photography. The two artists who sprang to his mind could hardly be more diverse: Dali and Hockney. Dali because of the precision of the dream, and Hockney for the intense clarity of tone and colour.
Colombo stood with his back to the stove while the warmth of it crept gently up his spine. He couldn’t pick up his purchase until the exhibition was over at the end of the month, but he could recreate it in his mind’s eye. Subject: a seventeenth-century glass goblet permeated by a background sea. Glass and sea together had come out the colour of the iris of the eye in a peacock’s tail. The glass was translucent; the sea behind it was calm and opaque, an unreflecting milky blue. The goblet floated free, having dispensed with gravity, perspective and possibility in the simple erasure of whatever, in reality, must have been used to support it. But the trick was – he tried to think how she could have done it – the trick was, it hadn’t been superimposed. The colour of the goblet was made out of the symbiosis of glass and sea. It had been all one photograph from the beginning, only somehow she’d taken the structural apparatus out of it. An angel in the image of a man, thought Colombo irrelevantly, could not really fly. He’d read somewhere, a long time ago, that a man would need to have a breastbone sticking out four feet in front of him if he were to begin to be a candidate for aerodynamics. And the wings could not, in nature, be additional to the arms. If a glass goblet could suspend itself against an ocean and fill up two-thirds of its area, then a man could surely become an angel without any physical inconvenience.
Kirwan had told Colombo all about the diving trip, and he’d seen the photo in The Hesperides Times six weeks before the original appeared in the exhibition. The goblet in the photograph was the one Jared had salvaged, no doubt about it, and yet Colombo knew, was positively certain, that he had seen it before. The time and place hovered tantalisingly just across the borders of his memory. It was a long time ago. He must have been young. His father was in it somewhere. In Dorrado? Colombo mentally reviewed the crowded shelves of the Red Herring. There might well be goblets. Where there were nets, harpoons and glass fishing floats, and an outsize stuffed halibut in a glass case, why should there not be goblets? But no, it was not the Red Herring that he remembered.
Francis Morgan, Lucy’s father, had a handwritten manuscript compiled by his grandfather, Antiquities of Frisland: Being a Compilation of Legends and Artefacts of the Islands of Hy Brasil, 1855–1882. Baskerville would literally have given his eye teeth to secure the four calf-bound volumes for the library archives, but Francis Morgan was not the man to part with his treasures, and his daughter, when approached persistently by an increasingly frustrated Baskerville, proved similarly recalcitrant. An unpleasant correspondence in The Hesperides Times, following a barbed article by Baskerville on the negative values of a ci-devant aristocracy in an age of revolution, had failed to move her. The Antiquities remained at Ravnscar.
Colombo looked at his watch. Twenty to five. He knew where the volumes were, on the bottom shelf between the desk and the window in the Great Hall, hidden behind the armchair whose faded leather still showed the worn patch where Francis Morgan used to lean his head, while he smoked his briar pipe and stared out of the window at the ever-changing sea. The bookcase was hardly a safe repository. If Baskerville only knew, he could have come and helped himself to the Antiquities any time this past forty years. But Baskerville did not know, and Colombo did. Lucy wouldn’t mind. She might be hours, and he knew she’d say go ahead. She trusted him completely. Too completely, thought Colombo bitterly. He pulled back a dark-red curtain in a corner of the kitchen, opened a little door with a Romanesque arch, and took the private staircase up to the Great Hall two steps at a time.
The Great Hall smelt of woodsmoke and old ashes. Its main claim to fame was its sixteenth-century painted ceiling. The central panel depicted Poseidon mounted on a chariot driving six winged horses, with a ring of Nereids round him riding on dolphins, and the wine-dark ocean at his back. The god held the reins in one hand, and with the other he laid claim with a sweep of his trident to the empty archipelago of Hy Brasil. Six lesser panels bordered the main picture. The first was of a lush and fertile country, with valleys filled with apple orchards, and high pastures with cattle and goats. The second showed a busy harbour, with galleons three deep against the crowded wharfs. The third was of a snow-capped mountain with a plume of smoke at its summit, and a bright palace built among the many terraces of its southern slopes. The fourth depicted vast quarries dug into the mountainside, where men toiled with rollers and pulleys, and the rock was tricoloured; black, white and red. The fifth was a view of Poseidon’s temple with its golden roof and classic portico, surrounded by a hedge of gold. The last panel was a picture of a meeting in a colonnaded market place, where men waited in decorous silence to cast their potsherds into one of the two amphorae in the centre of the frame.
Colombo had occasionally lain on his back on the threadbare Persian carpet and studied the ceiling at leisure. Even now he wasn’t in too much of a hurry to omit glancing up at it. He winked at Poseidon, and it pleased his fancy, as it always did, to imagine that the god winked back. He skirted the grand piano; the lid was open, and the score of a Chopin Polonaise left out on the rack. The huge leather armchairs and the horsehair sofa were untidily draped with rugs and cushions as they always were. The hearth was filled with cold ashes, and there were ring marks of red wine on the stone flags. Lucy’s housekeeping was always pragmatic: in the daytime the Great Hall had nothing to do but retain the ghosts of past evenings, and hold out the promise of evenings yet to come.
Colombo stood over Francis Morgan’s empty chair and looked out on the view over the wooded mountain slopes to the sea. He was struck by a flash of memory: old Morgan in his chair, and Colombo’s own father, Ewan MacAdam the Mayda ferryman, sitting across from him with his cap on his knee, imperturbably sipping contraband Scotch whisky as if he sat beneath Poseidon in a grand house like this every evening of his life. And he, Colombo, he’d been sitting too, on a pouffe with a woven pattern on it, all reds and blues and browns, soft and leathery against his bare legs. He’d had a treasure in his hand. He could remember the touch of it very vividly, the feathery strands between his fingers, and a long spine that felt like fingernails. And the colour, the vibrant blue-green eye at the tail of the peacock’s feather. He’d forgot
ten until now that there’d been peacocks at Ravnscar, but it was coming back to him, two birds almost as tall as he was parading the courtyard, and himself waiting by the thorn tree, holding the housekeeper’s hand, until the male displayed his gorgeous tail, and the housekeeper said, ‘There you are, m’dear. Will you look at that now?’ Then later the harsh peacock screams rose out of the summer dusk and in through the open window. The sound of his father’s soft voice came back to him too, saying to Francis Morgan that there’d been talk, and he should perhaps beware, for what with this revolution people took strange notions, and the Pirate Kings, so they were saying, were speaking of coming up to Ravnscar to claim their own. And the old man gripping the arms of his chair, so that his pale skin stretched over his knuckles like bleached bone, and him saying … saying … saying what? Colombo couldn’t remember, but even as a little boy absorbed with his peacock’s feather, he knew what everyone knew, that the treasure was at Ravnscar, and Francis Morgan kept it, as all his ancestors had done before him for ever and ever. Whatever the treasure was: the four-year-old Colombo had had no notion about that.
Now he took his eyes away from the window with an effort, and looked round the faded room. The very same pouffe was still there, on the hearthrug. He remembered sitting in the middle of it as if it were his own particular island, but it had got much smaller in the last thirty-two years. There was a yellow ring-binder on it, labelled – Colombo went a little nearer to read the familiar spiky writing – Chemistry Notes.
Colombo was nearly three years older than Lucy, and had been in sixth year when she arrived at St Brandons Academy from Lyonsness Junior High, but he remembered quite well that she had been thrown out of the science department in her first term for attempting to burn the school library copy of The Origin of Species over a bunsen burner. She’d explained to everyone who would listen that it was a genuine experiment. Having read that copies of the first edition had been burned by Christian fundamentalists, she just wanted to find out how difficult it was to do such a thing. No, this did not reflect her opinion of the subject matter, because she didn’t have one. She only read fiction. Colombo remembered quite well how she had held forth at length to an admiring audience during the lunch hour, when the less insipid sixth-formers, and the most adventurous juniors, used to skip school dinners, and go down to Caliban’s for chips and black coffee. He also seemed to recollect that Lucy had sworn never to go to any kind of science class again. But it was definitely her writing. Intrigued, he picked up Chemistry Notes and opened it. He realised then what it was. Colombo had scruples, but only some. He stood listening for a moment. Not a sound. The house was empty. He read on:
Lucy Morgan: Chemistry Notes
So what did happen? How did I reach this impregnable state, immured in my castle as surely as Elaine was spellbound to her boiling bath? I’ve only told my story once. Io, Io, where are you now? A fortnight away, by mail, and that’s two weeks too far. My dear and only friend, I miss you.
It took me four years to tell you, in snippets and rag-ends, and in the end you had the whole patched-up pattern from me. It’s the place where I told you that I see most clearly now. I can’t recall your face. The spider plant. Remember the spider plant, Io, the way it hung over our kitchen table in the apartment? I’m re-creating the whole room in my head just now. I’m sitting there again, inside my mind, at right angles to the rickety sash-window that reaches almost to the floor. I can see the cuttings in yoghurt pots you’ve set out in a row along the top of the bottom window, all leaning out as far as they can towards the sun. The window is wedged open three inches from the top. You complain about draughts, but I come from Hy Brasil where we’re not so used to central heating. What do I see out of the window? A brownstone terrace, cars lining the road on both sides, the damp sidewalks embroidered with Fall leaves that kids have scuffled through and left grey lines among the gold. Why do I remember the Fall best, Io? Why not the piled-up snow, or the smell of spring and the young unfurling leaves on the peeling plane trees? I’m seeing the yard at the end of the terrace with the high black fence around it, where the preschoolers come running out in their recess. I remember those kids as a kaleidoscope of colours, the brightness of their sweaters as they run to and fro across the grey asphalt, squealing like gulls.
Indoors, I see our cramped kitchen with its sloping ceiling, its wooden shelves where the jars gleam. All those healthy foods we’d cook together, such lovely colours: orange lentils, yellow split peas, white basmati rice, soft brown flour, green mung beans, rich red kidney beans, pale butter beans, black-eye beans, brown rice, oatmeal, couscous, berrymeal … I can even remember the order they came in, ranked around the stove. You taught me to cook that way, Io. You taught me to do a lot of things your way.
And I remember how we talked. We sat one on each side of the yellow pine table, a bowl of fruit between us and coffee cups, wine glasses and crumbs, me nearest the window, and you on your own rush-bottomed chair behind the door. You could reach behind you and get another bottle of wine out of the rack without getting up, it was so squashed in our kitchen. We had a big sitting room next door, with sofas and Persian rugs and a sanded golden floor, but I remember us best sitting in the kitchen, the spider plant with its baby spiders hanging down from straw-coloured stalks just above our heads. I see myself turning my wine glass in my hands, and the sunlight catching the wine so it was like a liquid ruby inside the glass, between my warm hands.
What a weird story it must have seemed to be to you, Io, like a dream. But New York before I got there was like a dream to me, and my life there with you has become a dream again now. Is the past always a dream? It goes to the same place as dreams, I know that. My past now is just an unconquerable image inside my head. Maybe it’s immaterial whether it real y happened or not. But it’s when I think about New York in Hy Brasil that I realise that Hy Brasil has not, could never be, a real place to you. Is that why you’ve never come? Is that why the two weeks between us can’t be crossed, why we never reach one another now? What you are to me now, Io, is letters. When I come home and find an airletter in the box, and my address written in your familiar curly script, the kind they teach you in first grade in New York State, my heart glows. Once every couple of months or so, when a letter from you happens, my heart glows. Not at any other time, not now.
I have a woman living in my house. She comes from Cornwall, England. She is twenty-five years old, and she has an incredible accent, the sort they speak in a BBC costume drama, which is the kind of television we mostly import in Hy Brasil. She’s very pretty in an English kind of way too: light brown hair that’s not quite straight and not quite curly, blue eyes, and the kind of complexion that really does fit the cliché about English roses: I’d never believed in that before. But if she’s a rose at all it’s one of those wild, scratchy dog roses with the windblown flowers that you can’t pick. She blushes very easily, and I can tel how much that annoys her. It’s easy to imagine her in a Regency pastel frock; she has – or could have – that look of appealing frailty that would win an audition for a Gothic heroine. I’d never dare say so. The fact is she dresses every day as if she were on an expedition into the outback. Maybe she thinks Hy Brasil is the outback. She has thin delicate hands, with which she does anything practical with great capability. I asked her if she played the piano, and she reacted as if I were psychic. We went up to the grand piano in the Great Hal, which luckily I’d had tuned last winter, and she played me Chopin, which one would think was unlikely to bring tears to one’s eyes, but that was the effect her playing very nearly had on me.
I like her. We talk, and there are moments when it’s almost like having you there. There are moments when I find myself on the brink of telling her things about the past. I’ve only told my story once, and that was to you, Io. I was watching her while she played to me, and I saw her as both tough and vulnerable. She likes being outdoors mostly, and if she’s indoors, she’s usually reading. That means she misses much of what goes on inside. There
are a lot of things she doesn’t see. She’s very efficiently collecting material about Hy Brasil, but there are too many things she’l miss out, because she doesn’t understand the possibilities of her own role. Colombo would fall in love with her, I think, if she could ever dream of playing Elizabeth Bennett instead of Huckleberry Finn. I see it like this because when we were talking yesterday she told me Elizabeth Bennett was her favourite heroine in fiction, and that when she was little she used to go about pretending she was Huck Finn. ‘Did you ever pretend to be Elizabeth?’ I asked her. She looked stunned. ‘Me?’ she said. ‘Elizabeth? No, not me.’ I poured her another glass of wine so she couldn’t see me laughing. I couldn’t look at her, it was too poignant: Elizabeth Bennett in denim dungarees and a khaki t-shirt.
But I find myself giving little things away. For example, she’d been telling me about her brother (whom incidentally I blame for inadvertently teaching her that really she’s a boy) and I told her how I’d always been alone, only I’d had a friend all my life, and that he was dead. I even mentioned that he’d died at Ravnscar. I wanted to say his name to her, but it wouldn’t come. That’s private still, but I can write it now: Nick Hawkins. Nicholas. My love. Io, Io where are you now? Where is Nick now that Nicholas is dead? Io, I remember how when I told you it was afternoon when I began, and as I talked the shadows of the trees grew long outside, and the sun dropped behind the brownstone houses and twilight crept along our street like a curtain slowly drawn, and when I had finished it was dark.
What if I told her now? When I think of doing so I find myself thinking that she’s English, a foreigner, she wouldn’t understand. I never thought that about you, Io, and yet in some ways your world was far more foreign to me than hers. It’s only the sea, really, that separates Sidony’s home from mine, and in its own way that unites us, because the sea is the thing that we both know, from the beginning of our separate lives. But the sea also separates our worlds, there is no getting away from that. Shall I tel her why it was that Nicky died?
Hy Brasil Page 18
