Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  A door banged downstairs. Colombo unhurriedly put back Chemistry Notes exactly where he had found it, and went out to the landing. He leaned over the curved bannister rail of the great stairs, and called out, ‘Lucy?’

  She appeared immediately below him from the far door of the kitchen. ‘Who’s there?’

  `It’s me. Colombo. I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I came up to consult the Antiquities.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Lucy was mounting the stairs. ‘Are you finding what you wanted?’

  ‘I haven’t had time to look yet. Where’s Sidony?’

  ‘She went for her swim. She swims in Ogg’s Cove every day. I think she’s mad. I don’t go in until at least July, but apparently the sea in Britain is even colder than it is here.’ Lucy reached the landing and stopped. ‘Are you in love with her, Colombo?’

  ‘You know the answer to that. You know why, too.’

  ‘You promised never to mention that in this house. And I’ve kept my side of it: I’ve never not made you welcome.’

  ‘Do you think I’ve not kept mine?’

  Lucy regarded him warily, her hand still resting on the bannister. In concession to the first heat of summer she had shed her usual tight jeans and white shirt and was wearing a faded red cotton dress and dusty sandals. Her skin was as smooth as a new sweet chestnut, and as always, she seemed to exude a certainty about her self that would, Colombo thought resentfully, prevent any man thinking for one moment that she ought to be thinner than she was.

  ‘OK,’ said Lucy. ‘You have kept it. To the letter. I wish you wouldn’t even think about it.’

  ‘Sorry. My thoughts are my own.’

  ‘I was hoping when you asked me to have your English friend to stay they might have taken another direction.’

  ‘Do you want me to keep my promise or do you want me to answer you?’

  ‘OK, forget it.’ Lucy led the way back into the Great Hall. ‘I suppose I vaguely hoped she’d make you happy for a bit.’

  ‘That’s kind. Rather like offering a soothing jelly to an ailing tenant, I suppose. I’d be careful how you dispense your vague hopes, m’dear, if your heart’s too good for us.’

  ‘Stop being melodramatic,’ said Lucy crossly, going over to the bookcase. ‘Which volume did you want?’

  ‘Melodramatic! When I’ve been the last word in understatement for five years! If we lived in a fair world I’d get a gold star and a packet of Smarties for good conduct. I don’t know which volume I need to look through. Lucy, do you have any seventeenth-century glassware anywhere? I had a notion that I’d seen some once.’

  ‘Do you mean the Jacobite wineglasses? Or no, they’d be eighteenth century, I suppose. Or the Venetian cristallo bowls? Or the Flemish flagons? They’re all on the top shelf in the pantry.’

  ‘I had an idea I’d once seen your father drinking whisky out of a green goblet with a crest on it.’

  ‘A what?’ Lucy let go the glass door of the bookcase and it swung to sharply.

  ‘A green goblet. Do you remember it? Venetian, or possibly Dutch in the Venetian style, early seventeenth century. The point is— Lucy, why weren’t you at Kirwan’s exhibition last night?’

  ‘It was a lovely day. I decided to plant out the tomatoes instead. Also, peppers, melons, cucumbers and squash. By the time I’d finished it was getting dark and I needed a bath. Which reminds me, while you’re here you can help me lay out the hoses. It’s so much easier with two. I could ask Sidony, but she helped me spread compost most of yesterday. You’ll eat more of my food than she does in the long run. I’ll look in at Maldun’s Mill later this week. I don’t like openings. If I’m going to look at pictures I want to look at them, not talk about nothing to boring people.’

  ‘OK, I’ll move your hoses. But Lucy, about this goblet – you should have come to the exhibition. You know that photo in the Times – the one of Jed salvaging treasure off the Cortes?’

  ‘Yes? Oh yes, that was a goblet too, wasn’t it? What about it?’

  ‘Lucy, Kirwan arranged Jed’s goblet in a glass case in the exhibition, with photos all around it of the sea, and one or two of the thing itself. But the point is, when I saw it close to, I remembered I’d seen it before. Here. When your father was alive.’

  ‘You can’t have done. Or are you suggesting Pappa threw it back into the sea for Jared’s entertainment?’ Lucy went through to the further door that led down the back staircase into the kitchen. ‘Look for what you like, Colombo. I’ll be downstairs.’

  ‘Wait!’ She turned back impatiently. ‘Lucy, you do know. I can tell. What I’m saying is that there’s another one. That’s not so surprising. It could have come off the Cortes right after she went down. After all, there were survivors. You know how that American guy who did the blood-test survey reckoned that half of Lyonsness is descended from them. It’s not surprising if they came ashore with whatever capital they could lay their hands on. And I know I’ve seen another of those goblets. I’m almost certain that I saw your father drinking whisky out of a green glass goblet that’s the spit of the one in Maldun’s Mill.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Lucy. ‘Perhaps you did. So, I don’t remember. If it’s here it might well have ended up in the wine cellar. There’s a lot of old bottles and glasses down there. If you’re going to look you could choose a bottle of claret while you’re at it. I take it you’ll stay to supper, if you want a bit of time to look up goblets?’

  ‘Well, if it’s not a bother.’

  ‘It’ll only be pasta and salad,’ said Lucy, who was an excellent cook and knew it. ‘If you’re staying the night you’ll have to have the lower tower room. I’ve put Sidony at the top.’

  She was right: the stone shelves in the wine cellar were crammed. They were carved out of solid rock, and at their widest stretched back several feet. Colombo searched diligently through the detritus of five hundred years of habitation, covering himself in the process with ancient dust and cobwebs. Half of this stuff should be in the museum, he thought, and wished he could get Baskerville down here. But Lucy hated Baskerville, and had never given anything to the Hy Brasil Museum which was Baskerville’s life’s work, except once, in response to an impassioned appeal from the frustrated curator, when she had donated a silver thimble that had belonge to her great-great-grandmother Josephine de Rosas. Unfortunately Baskerville had retaliated by displaying the tiny exhibit on its own in a very large glass case in the middle of the central hall. He had added to the label, ‘owing to the unprecedented generosity of Lucy Morgan, mistress of Ravnscar’. Lucy couldn’t keep the Pirate Kings out of the lower levels of the Ravnscar caves; they had their own entrance guarded by binding oaths of secrecy. But when they were due to conduct their ceremonies Lucy always barred and bolted the oak door that separated the Ravnscar cellars from the lower passages. It was a shame. Francis Morgan used to invite the Kings in afterwards for sweet Canary wine and macaroons, and relations had always been cordial. But Lucy would have none of it.

  There was something about this goblet, too, that she was not saying. Colombo, who had made Lucy his especial study during the five years she’d been back from New York, knew quite well when she was lying. He was aware when he descended the cellar steps that she’d sent him on a wild goose chase. However, the search was not without interest, and Colombo had no scruples about making several notes and sketches to take back to Baskerville. He didn’t expect to find any goblet, but even so his irritation gradually mounted. He had not lost his temper with Lucy for four and a half years, but sometimes the restraint had been an effort. The desolation of Chemistry Notes made him even angrier with her. She was sabotaging herself even more effectively than she was hurting him. ‘Nick Hawkins. Nicholas. My love.’ Damn her. Damn her. Damn her. The fifteenth-century Dutch pottery punch bowl he was holding slipped out of his fingers and broke into three pieces on the flagged stone floor. Damn Nicholas. Damn Lucy. And be damned to himself, for being caught up in this web of her making, and not ha
ving the wit to extricate himself, not even after five futile years.

  FOURTEEN

  Sidony Redruth. The Red Herring, Dorrado. June 22nd.

  Notes for Undiscovered Islands (working title).

  I’D BEEN meaning to come to Dorrado anyway. I didn’t just leave Ravnscar because I felt de trop. Lucy had insisted that she wanted me there for as long as Colombo stayed, but her very vehemence made me feel uncomfortable. I came home from Ogg’s Cove, where I’d been for a swim, to discover Colombo and Lucy in the kitchen alcove playing chess. He seemed pleased to see me, but for some reason I felt left out, and found myself remembering, possibly not for the first time, how a week earlier Jared Honeyman had said to me, ‘I like you’ and shaken my hand. Neither Colombo nor Lucy seemed embarrassed, but then there’s nothing compromising about playing chess. It just seemed an odd thing for two attractive people who were obviously enamoured of one another to be doing together at five o’clock in the afternoon. But after all, why not?

  Supper, as usual, was delicious: tagliatelle with pesto, and one of Lucy’s homegrown salads. Colombo and Lucy were both unwontedly silent, a bit distrait, I thought, so I didn’t try to talk, but concentrated on my food. Afterwards I said I’d go for a walk, but when I stepped outside the fog had come down, and the twilit woods were dripping and mournful. The invisible precipice on my right seemed to glower at me from its misty depths, so that I started wondering if anyone had ever just walked straight over it. Since Ravnscar had been inhabited, according to the legends, for over a thousand years it seemed statistically likely that they had. I see no reason not to believe in ghosts.

  After a little while I went home. Lucy and Colombo had lit the fire upstairs, and were drinking Madeira in the light of it. Colombo poured me a glass, and I sat on the sofa enjoying the rich dark smell of it a good deal more than the taste. Firelight flickered softly over the painted ceiling, so that the god with the trident seemed to smile craftily down at me when I caught his eye. A log cracked violently and spat embers over the hearthrug. Lucy picked them up with the tongs and threw them back.

  ‘So you bought Kirwan’s photo of this goblet,’ said Lucy after a long silence.

  ‘Yes.’ Colombo was leaning back in his chair gazing into the firelight, and hardly seemed to be paying attention.

  ‘Things,’ said Lucy. ‘Treasures. Maybe it was better at the bottom of the sea.’

  ‘Why? It’s a beautiful thing.’

  ‘Sure. And now it’ll need dusting. I don’t understand why people always want to have more things. One more object in the museum, one more picture in your apartment. Haven’t you got enough stuff cluttering up your walls?’

  ‘Most of us aren’t drowned in treasures from birth. That’s your misfortune, not mine.’ He was turning his glass round like a kaleidoscope, not looking at her.

  ‘Don’t you be sorry for me!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  I looked from one to another, wondering what on earth was the matter, and whether they’d notice if I left. It occurred to me that on this foggy night my tower room would be cold. If I wanted to read in comfort I’d have to get into bed. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.

  ‘O que é que há?’ said Lucy, in a voice that was suddenly gentle.

  ‘Nothing,’ Colombo said, but he still wouldn’t look at her. He stared into the fire instead. He was wearing black jeans and a black polo-neck shirt, and against that sombre background his long hands, the right one adorned with its heavy opal ring, curled around the cut-glass tumbler like something out of a Medici portrait. The fact that he was unusually grubby, and had cobwebs in his hair, added to rather than detracted from the effect. ‘Nothing. I just bought a photo. Would you rather I hadn’t?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. Buy as many photos as you like. Spend your entire life hunting for duplicate glass goblets. Find the whole set and invite Mr Baskerville and his cronies to dinner. I won’t even comment if you’d rather I didn’t.’

  ‘Lucy,’ said Colombo quietly, ‘if it had anything to do with you, anything at all, it would be my pleasure to consult you about every investigation I undertake. As it is, I don’t see why my interest in the Cortes treasure should have any power at all to upset you.’

  I couldn’t work out if he were angry, unhappy, or just bored. I don’t suppose I’d ever be able to read Colombo’s feelings. I think Lucy can, but at that moment she didn’t want to try. Her own anger was palpable. ‘It upsets me because you come here to hunt about my house for any odd bric-a-brac that takes your fancy, even if it isn’t anything to do with you, and then you press me for explanations about things I know nothing about! Why hunt up the past and disturb everybody? OK, so you think my father had a goblet and now you can’t find it. It probably got broken in the washing up. Why should I be interested in that? You don’t care about what I’m trying to do here now. The truth is you’re as cold as a fish; you wouldn’t really share what you’re interested in with anyone, even if she wanted to. What you say to me about myself: that’s pure projection. It’s you you’re looking at. It’s you that freezes everyone off.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Colombo. ‘Oh no, m’dear. Quem υê caras não υê corações. You of all people know that.’

  They both know I don’t speak a word of Portuguese. I put my glass down, got up and went out. I don’t think either of them noticed. First thing this morning I packed my night-bag, walked down to the road, and started hitching to Dorrado. Neither of them was up when I left. Colombo was sleeping in the room below mine in the tower, and when I crept down the spiral staircase his door was uncompromisingly shut. I left a note for Lucy on the kitchen table. That day I walked at least ten miles between the four rides it took to get me to the steps of the Red Herring, and I had plenty of time to wonder if I’d left too precipitately. I felt guilty that I might have made them feel guilty. It was a damp, depressing day, and I felt chilled, excluded and foreign. For the first time since I came to Hy Brasil I thought about what it was going to be like when I went home. As my footsteps crunched along the gravel road that wound around the slopes of Mount Brasil they seemed to echo against the mountainside as if there were two of me. As there always used to be. Sometimes I forget for a moment that it’s changed. I forgot then, but as soon as I realised it, the moment passed. But it had happened, so I knew that in about a week’s time I’d probably get a postcard from Arthur.

  It was foggy dusk when I walked under the dripping sign into the bar of the Red Herring. Inside it was warm and filled with soft yellow light. A fire burned in the big medieval-looking hearth, and the light winked and blinked on polished wood, coloured bottles, faded prints, fishing floats and hundreds of mysterious objects that hung everywhere like in Aladdin’s cave. The genie behind the bar was Moses in a leather waistcoat. It wasn’t a lamp he was polishing, it was a pint mug. And Aladdin was there too, the only customer, in bleached jeans and a ragged blue shirt, standing with his back to me at the bar, a half pint in front of him. When he heard the door shut behind me he turned to look. It was Jared Honeyman.

  ‘Hi-aye, Sidony,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Dorrado.’

  I must have been tired after my long tramp, but for an absurd moment I felt tears against my eyelids, as if I’d just completed a long quest, and what he’d offered me was something more than words. It was wonderful to be there after a long day in the drizzle. The Red Herring is like an inn in a book. I’m writing this in a thin slip of a yellow room with chintz curtains that faces the harbour. I’m lying in my bed which is big and comfortable with a thick yellow duvet and stacks of pillows, and proper cotton sheets that smell of being dried outside. There is a flowered carpet, an old-fashioned chest of drawers and an austere wardrobe with a mirror, the door of which is wedged shut with a programme for the Dorrado Agricultural Show, Saturday August 23rd, 1995. It’s half past three in the morning and I am filled with wellbeing so that suddenly everything I see and touch pleases me. It has been a most unexpected evening.

  I had a bar suppe
r with Jared. We sat in the inglenook, one on each side of the fire, at the end of a long slate table that used to be a shove ha’penny board. Jared was interested that I recognised it, and I said I reckoned that the only reason there was shove ha’penny in Hy Brasil was because the West Country sailors must have brought it here. He told me the Honeymans came from Porlock in the eighteenth century, and now he was their last surviving male descendent in Hy Brasil. Jared had steak and kidney pie for supper and I had plaice and chips.

  By this time the bar was filling up, but no one disturbed us in the inglenook. We both had treacle pudding. The food here is all real, not bought in frozen from the Cash and Carry.

  Jared told me about Mrs Silva who does the cooking, and from that we got on to other families in Dorrado, and I found out a great deal. Colombo, for instance had occasionally spoken of ‘my sister’, but it was Jared who told me he had seven of them, all married but one, and more nephews and nieces than Jared had bothered to count, though he was able to tell me the names of nearly all of them. Colombo’s only brother is a Jesuit priest in Brazil, but all his relations on his father’s side are Scots Presbyterians, a dual heritage which accounts, Jared told me, for Colombo’s fatalistic streak, as well as his ability to see both sides of everything. But then, he said, everyone in Hy Brasil is a bit like that on account of living under a live volcano. I asked how he knew Colombo, but the question seemed to puzzle him: he had always known Colombo.

  When I said I wouldn’t have coffee in case it kept me awake, Jared mentioned that there was a gig at Da Shack as it was Saturday night, and if I liked a bit of dancing there was no reason why we shouldn’t wander down there later on. This sounded like excellent copy for the book, so I said yes at once. Jared said if he was going to dance he’d better not have a second helping of pudding, so I bought coffee for us both. He’s very easy to talk to. No one in Hy Brasil has shown more than a perfunctory interest in where I come from, and so far I’ve liked that. There’s a certain perverse freedom about feeling as anonymous as possible. But when Jared started asking me I found myself telling him a great deal. I told him about the travel writing competition, and how I really shouldn’t be here at all. He laughed, but said on the contrary, he saw it as precise proof that I should. When I asked why, he said, ‘Kismet’, and refused to explain. He told me about diving off Spitzbergen, and about marine salvage, and gannets. We seem to have read a lot of the same books when we were young. He doesn’t remind me in the least of Arthur, but in a way it was like having Arthur there.