Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘It’s hardly your fault,’ said Jared. He was looking back up the mountain. ‘I think maybe we’d better go back.’ He touched my cheek with his finger. ‘Do you have a hanky?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor do I. Well, it’s not bleeding much. You must have fallen against the rock.’

  ‘Jared, the rock moved.’

  ‘Yes, it was quite a tremor.’

  ‘I suppose you’re used to it?’

  ‘No,’ said Jared. ‘I’m not. If you’re ready, I think perhaps we should go back.’

  ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I think you must be the least hysterical person I’ve ever met in my life.’

  He smiled at that. ‘Well, I’m glad I can make an impression some way. But even so I think we’d better go.’

  I stood up shakily, but I wouldn’t accept the hand he held out to me. All the way home I distrusted the ground under my feet, and that made everything in the world suddenly frightening in a way it had never been before. But Jared didn’t say anything and neither did I. When Arthur and I used to tough it out like this it was always Arthur that gave in first. I knew it wouldn’t be like that with Jared. Not only would I never be able to beat him, but I had a humiliating suspicion that he wasn’t even playing. For some reason I was thinking of a picture in a book I’d had when I was little, of a dark neverland appearing down below in the middle of a crinkly sea, under twinkling stars. It was the beginning of a new chapter, and the caption, in curly writing, read ‘THE ISLAND COMES TRUE’. I swallowed, and planted my feet firmly in Jared’s footsteps as if that would keep the earth tame and quiet under me until I got back home.

  FIFTEEN

  PETERKIN SAT WITH his back to the window, reading the most recent catalogue of earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone. It made the Mid-Atlantic Ridge seem comparatively torpid. Hy Brasil had been geologically quiet for nearly a fortnight. Peterkin yawned and put down the printout. Globally it was a quiet day. It was a quiet day in the office too: the monitorson Mount Brasil had nothing to report, and Olly West had left the moment Peterkin arrived, at nine o’clock in the morning. The thermometer was already over 80°F, and Olly had been anxious to get down to Ogg’s Cove and his breakwaters. Peterkin had his employer’smeasure by now: if nothing of interest was occurring underground he’d sunbathe for the rest of the day. It was nearly noon, and a regular scorcher. Peterkin had opened all the windows and the door, but still the office was as close as an oven. The fan in the ceiling turned desultorily, barely disturbing the knot of flies that buzzed against the ceiling. Outside the sky was metallic blue, and the land quivered in the haze. Wearily Peterkin clicked on PRINT, and the printer disgorged the latest reading from Mount Brasil. Peterkin picked up the paper, glanced at it, and threw it on the table. No earthquakes. Nothing. He yawned.

  ‘Peterkin!’

  He stopped mid-yawn, and swung his chair round. ‘Jed? Hi- aye. I wasn’t expecting …’ The words trailed away.

  Jared had a shotgun. Aimed at him, Peterkin. Peterkin’s jaw dropped. ‘Jed?’

  ‘Sorry, old chap. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ Jared crossed the threshold and came right in. He lowered the gun. ‘Listen, Pete.’

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Is that thing loaded?’ Peterkin could hear the squeak in his own voice, and tried to make it firm and deep. ‘Jared! Put that down!’

  ‘No,’ said Jared. ‘Now look, Pete, it’s like this. Olly’s got something here that doesn’t belong to him. I need to find it. It’s nothing to do with you. I didn’t want to bring you in, only at night there’d be the burglar alarm, and I don’t know how to fix those things. So I had to come now. I have to force you to let me.’

  ‘But Jed …’ Pete looked hurt. ‘You don’t have to point that thing at me. God, don’t you remember … You don’t think you can’t trust me?’

  Jared held the gun so it was pointing at the floor just in front of Peterkin’s bare feet. ‘Think, man. This is your job. I’m not about to lose it for you. Olly’s your employer. If you help me, and it gets out, you’re done. Think of that!’

  ‘You always used to leave me out when things got real,’ said Peterkin sulkily. ‘Seems like it’s not changed much.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Peterkin, what do you think this is? Cowboys and Indians? Stop wasting time. When’s Olly due back?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Peterkin, reminded of his other grievances. ‘He’s on the beach. And if you’d come at night you’d probably have got him not the alarm anyway. After that second earthquake he was trying to do a round-the-clock watch single-handed. He was wanting me to start at two in the morning as well, but Pappa said I should say no if he wasn’t giving me time and a half. Which of course he wouldn’t. The crazy thing is there’re all these professors and experts and what-have-you from all over the world phoning up more or less begging to come in and do shifts for nothing. But he won’t let them.’

  ‘Typical. Anyway, I know where he is. I saw him. That’s why I’m here. Now stop changing the subject and listen. Either I hold you at gunpoint while I search, which won’t be comfortable for either of us, besides taking twice as long, or we can take that bit as read. That means you quit moaning and co-operate. Suppose you stand there at the window, keep your back to the room. That’s right. Now you won’t see a thing, which means you can quite truthfully say you didn’t. If I find what I want and get clear away you never laid eyes on me at all. Got that? And if anyone comes up you’ll see them at the bend in the road, and there’s nothing to stop you having a fit of coughing, say, which I can’t help overhearing, but you won’t know about that because you were at the computer and you never saw me slip by. But if there’s trouble and I’m caught, and it’s obvious you couldn’t possibly have missed me, you’re not involved because I forced you at gunpoint. No one could lose you your job for that. More likely give you a medal. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Shut up, Pete. You’re wasting time. No, don’t look round.’

  ‘I could help you, if you told me what …’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Peterkin subsided, and looked stonily out of the window. Heat shimmered over the curve of the road fifty feet below. He could feel the sweat running down his back inside his shirt. There were small movements behind him, the familiar click from the latch on the door of Olly’s inner office. Then silence. Five minutes, ten minutes. The door clicked again, and Peterkin took a deep breath. Jared’s voice came from just behind him.

  ‘There we are. That didn’t hurt, did it?’

  ‘You could have trusted me!’

  ‘I did. There’s a phone six inches from your right hand. I’m off, Pete. You never saw a thing, remember that. And if anyone says anything’s missing, you don’t know a thing either.’

  ‘Well, I don’t, do I?’

  ‘Don’t take a huff, old chap. That’s the whole … what’s that?’

  ‘Fuck!’ Peterkin’s eyes were riveted on the bend in the road. ‘He’s coming up! I’d know that gear change anywhere! That’s Olly.’ Even as he spoke an ancient blue Ford came out of the trees and reached the hairpin bend. ‘He’s coming!’

  ‘So long, Pete. Mind, you never saw a thing!’

  Out of the corner of his eye Peterkin saw a figure flit past him into the sun, like the shadow of a passing bird. He turned back to the empty office. Automatically he picked up the chart from Memphis, Tennessee and sat down in front of his computer, his eyes glued to the paper as if every fault line on the planet had exploded into action on the very stroke of noon.

  Jared crawled into a shady cleft three hundred feet above Hogg’s Beach, where a shrunken waterfall trickled over slabs of bare lava. He unslung his gun, which had not been loaded, and his knapsack, stuck his head under the thin stream of water and drank thirstily. Then he sat down, took off his hot trainers, and dabbled his feet in a fern-lined pool that lay six inches below its usual watermark. Below him the beach glinted in the full blaze of the sun. He could see
no one on it, but a solitary swimmer was slowly crossing the bay, parallel to the grassy shore just below where he sat. It didn’t matter; he could get back to his boat – which was hidden, as it could only be during a flat calm, in one of the inlets off Brentness – through the lava channels without anyone seeing him.

  Nothing moved, not so much as a bird. The land seemed stunned by heat. He pulled off his damp shirt, and used it to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Even in the shade, dressed only in cut-off jeans and a green sunhat, it was far too hot. He began to undo the straps of the knapsack.

  It was far too hot. At three o’clock in the afternoon the sun showed no sign of relenting. After the blinding heat outside, the apartment was as cool as a cave, and Nesta entered it gratefully, threw her bag down on the sofa and kicked off her sandals. She needed a drink. There were two messages on the machine. She pressed the button and listened while she poured herself a glass of juice.

  ‘Sweetheart. I’m letting Pereira take me up to Ferdy’s Landing this afternoon. He insists I take notice of his communications project which will apparently employ upstanding citizens in their thousands and tens of thousands. It sounds ghastly to me, but then I’m not looking for a job. I think really he wants to show me his computers. Pearls before swine, but I daresay they’ll give me tea. I adore you, but don’t wait dinner.’

  ‘Nesta, this is Jared Honeyman. Listen, there’s something I need to talk to you about. It’s urgent. Very urgent. I’m at Lyonsness 263, Per Pedersen’s. I’ll stay here till you call back. If you do. I hope you do. If you’re not back tonight I’ll go home, because of the gannets, but in that case, can you leave a message here? I do need to talk to you urgently. That is, if you don’t mind. It really is quite urgent.’

  Nesta refilled her glass, and wandered over to the window while she replayed the messages. The city shimmered in the heat. Beyond it the sea shone like polished oilcloth. She smiled as she listened. Then she curled up on the sofa, picked up the phone, and began to dial a number.

  Baskerville sat on a high stool at his workbench in the museum, examining a barnacle-encrusted lump of rust through a powerful magnifying glass. There were no windows in here, but the heat had infiltrated from the exhibition rooms in the front of the building. Baskerville had removed his black jacket, which hung over the back of his chair looking like an undertaker’s mute, and had rolled up his grey shirtsleeves to expose two skeletal forearms overgrown with thick white hairs. His braces, startlingly, were scarlet. He was frowning so intently over his work that his eyebrows met in one straight line like an untrimmed hedge. The phone rang several times before he moved to answer it.

  ‘Baskerville here … Yes? … Oh yes, Ms Kirwan. What can I do for you? … Keys? … What keys? … I don’t have the keys to Maldun’s Mill … Oh, those keys … I don’t know about that … It shouldn’t be removed from its case … There’s the insurance … The insurance was a nightmare … You want to photograph it again? … Now? … I suppose it couldn’t wait? … No … No … Technically that’s true … Yes, technically, I suppose it does belong to young Honeyman … He seemed willing for it to come to the museum … I had assumed … Yes, technically, I suppose he can … Only a photograph? … Who wants this photograph? … I see. An artistic inspiration. Well, I suppose these things do happen … So Honeyman isn’t there? He doesn’t want to take the thing back? … No … No … So you’re going down there now? … Alone? I’m not sure that’s wise, Ms Kirwan … Very well, very well … Yes, I have them here … I suppose technically … naturally I’m anxious … Oh, very well …’

  Two green glass goblets side by side. Not quite identical, but certainly twins: they belonged in a time when no two things were ever quite the same, though the differences were hardly measurable. Of course the first one to come ashore was marred by the long crack in its bowl. God knew when that had happened: on the night of the shipwreck, perhaps, or at any time in the intervening three hundred and eighty-six years. The second goblet was unflawed as the day it left the hands of its maker. But apart from that one obvious difference, the likeness rose, clear, striking and unassailable, so that from a few feet away the two goblets were precise mirror images of one another. It was when you came closer, to within inches, that you began to see that each one had its own characteristics. The ring at the base of the sea goblet was not exactly parallel to the foot; the glass bowl of the land goblet was marginally grainier; the impression of the galleon on the sea goblet was about a millimetre off centre, compared with the land goblet.

  The shutter clicked with a flash. ‘OK. I’m coming in a bit nearer.’ Nesta, with her eye to the camera, brought the lens a mere foot away from the goblets. ‘Bring the light down a bit. A couple of inches. Not as far as that. Back a bit. Down. Yes.’

  She took two more shots, and lowered the camera. ‘OK. You can put that light away now.’

  ‘Before my arm drops off,’ agreed Jared, putting the hot spotlight down cautiously on the floor, and unplugging the flex.

  Nesta screwed the lens cap back on. ‘Well, we should get some half-decent pictures out of that.’ She put down the camera, and surveyed the two glasses once again. ‘And now, my lad, I think you’d better tell me all about it.’

  ‘I just did tell you!’

  ‘You’ve told me nothing I can’t see with my own eyes, except what you told us all that day on the boat. All right, so the other goblet belonged to Nicky Hawkins, and he kept his matches in it on the mantelpiece at Ferdy’s Landing. Nothing wrong with that, assuming he wasn’t the vandal who put that crack in it. But when Ishmael got to the Landing the glass wasn’t there. And quite clearly when you fished it up he’d never seen anything like it before in his life. So where’s it been all these years? And how did you find it, when up until now you obviously hadn’t a clue where it was? And whose is it now?’

  ‘It’s Nicky’s.’

  ‘No, Jared. We bring nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. Nicky’s dead.’

  He looked away from her, and stared at the two goblets. Now the bright light was gone, they looked ordinary again. Two wineglasses on a stand draped with a white linen cloth. It was hard to see what all the fuss was about. Jared bit his lip. Two wineglasses. A memory surfaced: Nicky’s brown hands cupping the green glass, Nicky’s face illuminated by the candlelight from the table, Nicky swilling a pale liquid around the bowl, watching something dissolve that wasn’t sugar, Nicky holding the glass to his lips so that he could taste. ‘A sip, Friday, only a sip. It’s spiked. None of that sniffing that you don’t like. This is easier stuff for a little chap.’ A mouthful of bitter apples. That was all.

  A warm hand touched his bare arm. The slightly musky scent that was part of Nesta Kirwan came suddenly very close to him. ‘Poor Nick,’ she said. ‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’

  Under the sign proclaiming MALDUN’S MILL: ART GALLERY. CRAFTS. GIFTS. CAFÉ, a white board said CLOSED in uncompromising black letters. Twenty to eight. Two vehicles remained in the car park: a 1958 black Citroen DS and a BMW motorbike. Baskerville’s ancient Jeep pulled up beside them. Baskerville climbed out stiffly, like an ungainly spider, and strode over to the entrance. The door was unlocked. He slipped inside. The main hall was deserted, the entrance desk closed up for the night, the archway to the shop barred by a steel sliding door. One light was on, shining through the alcove at the far end from the room where the goblet was. There was no sound at all.

  Baskerville moved silently across the hall, and peered in.

  He saw two impossible things at once. The goblet had duplicated itself, and both of it stood on a white linen cloth on the stand in the centre of the room. And Nesta Kirwan and Jared Honeyman were locked in one another’s arms a foot away from it.

  Baskerville contemplated both phenomena without drawing attention to himself. During that time he was able to establish, according to the clear evidence of his senses, that the goblets were separate realities. In fact they were indubitably two. Moreover, the em
brace, though incontrovertibly intimate, was not precisely amorous. There was no kissing. When it ended, and young Honeyman wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, swallowed, and said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make a fool of myself’, it only confirmed Baskerville’s revised impression.

  ‘You haven’t,’ said Nesta. ‘On the contrary. I’d say you were a charming and admirable young man. If we’ve finished here, I think we should put all this back where it belongs. I’m hungry. Have you any plans for dinner?’

  ‘Dinner? No. I mean, all I have to do now is pick up some stuff I left at Per’s and return his bike. Then go home.’

  ‘We could go to Atlantis. You’ve eaten there before?’

  ‘Atlantis?’ said Jared. ‘Yes, Lucy took me there on her birthday. But I don’t think … I didn’t bring any other clothes over, it was so hot.’ He glanced down at himself. ‘Would they let me in? And even if they did … To be honest with you, I haven’t got enough money for Atlantis.’

  ‘This is on me. I’m sure you need something to eat, and you look very fetching. I’m still waiting to hear all about your day, remember. No, you don’t have to start thanking me, I’ll enjoy it.’ Nesta turned round to pick up her camera case. ‘Christ! Who’s that?’

  ‘Only me,’ said Baskerville, strolling forward. ‘I knocked at the door but apparently you didn’t hear me.’