In one of my favourite books when I was small, the characters step into a picture, and into another world. Landing on Despair was like that. It slopes towards the south-west, so on a clear day you can see the whole of it laid out from Ravnscar. Some days it’s flat like a backcloth, other days it comes much closer and is three-dimensional. As we walked up the hill, loaded with bags and boxes, I had this strange idea that I was seeing myself as a little figure inside the picture, but part of me was still outside. As we went up the fog grew thicker, as if we were vanishing ever further out of sight of the world I’d come from. It took me a while to take in, maybe I still haven’t quite, that I really am here, not there. I’m sitting here on solid ground, on the island of Despair.
The lightkeepers’ houses are built in a row with their backs to the northeast and the cliff, and their faces on to a walled yard. Jared lives in the house next to the tower, which is the smallest. The family houses are boarded up. He has a big kitchen living-room downstairs, and two bedrooms upstairs. One bedroom is full of diving equipment, and various bits of an engine laid out on newspaper. The other room is for sleeping in, presumably; the door was shut so I didn’t look. I wasn’t sure whether there’d be a bathroom or not, but there is a very cold one in an extension at the back.
The kitchen is cosy. It has a cast-iron wood stove which is lit most of the time because he uses it for cooking, and a table by the window with a red oilcloth over it. I’m sitting at the table now, writing. Behind me there are shelves full of books, mostly on marine archeology, navigation, seabirds, and cetaceans, in that order, but also some volumes of selected poems, ranging from John Donne to Medbh McGuckian. On the other side of the room, underneath a big army blanket, there’s a huge sofa with no springs. At one end of it there’s a pile of cushions built into a kind of nest with books and scraps of paper all around it. There isn’t any other furniture at all. The whole room is warm and bare and clean. I like it.
I’m amused by the girlie calendar from Trink’s garage that’s hanging above the table. He has marked the days off with green crosses. SUNDAY JULY 20th. I suppose it could be quite easy to lose count all by one’s self on an island. The only other picture is a print of Millais’ Boyhood of Raleigh on the wall above the sofa. I didn’t mention the calendar but I asked him about the picture.
‘We had it at home,’ he said. ‘I let nearly all the things go because I’d nowhere to put them, but I did take that. I wish I’d kept more now. Someone would have lent me a space to store stuff for a few years. But I didn’t. Didn’t think of it, I suppose.’
He put a hunk of mutton in a big pot to boil, and then we went up to look at the gannet colony. It’s strange being at the top of the cliff when you can’t see down. You just hear the echoes going very deep below you. A gannet close to is a large yellow and white bird, very like the never-never bird that rescues Peter Pan when he’s marooned on the rock in the mermaids’ lagoon. I told Jared this, and he told me about the blood samples that he and Per had taken in the spring. This hasn’t been done before with gannets, but it was very successful, and proved that these birds originated from colonies in the Scottish islands. Apparently when you take a blood sample from a gannet you have to insert the needle into the capillary tubes in its armpit. One of you has to hold the bird, and stretch out the wing, and the other sticks in the needle and gets the blood. You put the blood into sealed vacuum flasks, until you’ve got all your samples, – they did twenty birds this year – then you take the blood home to the centrifuge machine, which Jared says looks a bit like a coffee grinder, and you separate the plasma, and you put it in the freezer compartment at the top of the fridge, and as soon as you can you get it across to Lyonsness and put it in Per’s deep freeze. Then you call the university from there, and it’s picked up and taken back to the biology department where they do the DNA work.
I want to see the view from the summit of Despair. Jared says he thinks the mist will clear by morning. He’s cooking supper now. I’m hungry, and the mutton smells good. It’s getting very warm in here. The window is all steamed up with cooking, and I can’t tell any more which are the drops running down the inside of the glass and which is the fog on the outside. I watch Jared wash half a dozen newly dug potatoes under the tap, and add them to the pot. I’m a bit sleepy. He’s whistling as he peels a couple of onions. I watch him drop them into the pot whole. I recognise the tune as a song my mother used to sing: ‘Let him go, Let him tarry, Let him sink or let him swim, He does not care for me And I don’t care for him …’ Presently he opens a tin of baked beans and tips that in too, and stirs everything round with a large wooden spoon. I watch him take a spoonful of mutton stock and taste it. ‘Do you like salt?’
‘A bit,’ I say cautiously. After a moment’s hesitation I add, ‘You know there’s a rosemary bush in the corner of your yard?’
‘Yes, what about it?’
‘You could put in some of that.’
‘Oh.’ He looks at his stew as if it might answer him, like at the Red Queen’s dinner party. ‘OK.’ He puts the spoon down. ‘How much, do you reckon?’
‘I’ll get it if you like.’
Ferdy’s Landing. July 23rd
That was barely thirty-six hours ago. I need to describe what happened after that – I think I must, for my own peace of mind – but I just don’t know how to begin. At the beginning, my mother would say, and go straight on through until you get to the end. I shall try; it would help a lot to sort my thoughts out. It would make more sense than crying anyway.
We had a stupid argument after supper. It began because we were talking about library books, of all things. He said it was far more important to return books to a library than not to steal money, because everyone has a right to access to books, and it’s a serious crime to take away knowledge that should be held in common. I said that you couldn’t possibly judge what other people needed their money for, and it was wrong to take what didn’t belong to you, never mind what it was. He argued that it would be right to take works of art from a secret collection that was stored away in a vault after being bought on the black market. I said abuses should be stopped by constitutional methods, and it was arrogant to take the law into one’s own hands. He replied that it was irresponsible not to act in the face of injustice. He said supposing I were being assaulted in front of my brother, what would I want Arthur to do, start phoning my solicitor? I said that was a sexist example. He said women always said that when they couldn’t defend themselves against logic. I lost my temper. I didn’t think his arguments made sense anyway; he seemed to be coming from some illogical position between Marxism and piracy. He said I’d been brainwashed by a Protestant-capitalist-imperialist value system. I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but it seemed to me he was being rude about my father, and as I say, I lost my temper.
In the end I said I wanted to go to bed. He produced a roll of bedding, and asked if I wanted the sofa or an inflatable mattress on the floor. ‘The sheets are almost clean,’ he said. ‘No one’s used them except Colombo.’ The mattress was an old-fashioned one without a foot pump; I was surprised he had the breath to blow it up, he looked so angry, but I suppose a diver has to go on breathing deeply whatever his emotions. As soon as we’d made up the bed he went away.
The mattress was cold, and wobbled uncomfortably whenever I moved. I seldom quarrel with anybody, except Arthur of course, and I couldn’t understand why the end of such a good day had gone so wrong. Being alone, I began to cry.
The next thing I knew he was there beside me, with his arm around me over the heap of blankets. ‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying into my hair. ‘Sidony, m’dear, I’m sorry. Truly, I am. I didn’t mean to be horrible to you. Honestly, I didn’t.’
I hardly ever cry, but when I do start I find it difficult to stop. I should have stopped then, because if the cause was that he wasn’t being nice to me, then I should have been instantly better now that he’d changed his tune. I don’t know how it was: I think perhaps I’d been
feeling lonely for a long time. When you’re by yourself in a foreign country it’s very rare that anyone comes near enough to touch you. If I’d looked him in the eyes I’d probably have ended up howling, so I turned my face into his chest instead. He was wearing a red flannel nightshirt that smelt as if it had been stored in a musty cupboard; presumably he didn’t usually wear anything in bed on a summer night. I tried to pull myself together, but he said I didn’t have to, and then I did let him cuddle me, and went on weeping, rather like Violet Elizabeth Bott in Just William.
Presently Jared said, ‘M’dear, I’m getting cold. Could we go upstairs? It’s a lot more comfortable.’
That brought me round at once. ‘No! If you think it’s OK to upset me so I cry, and then use that as an excuse to get me into your bed, then you’ve got another think coming, because I won’t!’
‘I don’t! Of course I never meant to make you cry! I’m sorry. I said I was sorry. Look, come upstairs and I promise I’ll make no attempt whatever to seduce you tonight. It’s nice up there. I’d like to show you. Please.’
It was much warmer in his bed, under a thick duvet that smelt faintly of Jared. ‘Look,’ he ordered me. ‘I wanted you to see out.’ There was a small square window in the north wall, right behind the bed and on a level with it. I lay on my front, and leaned my elbows on the sill, with the bedcover tucked around me, and my shoulder touching his. ‘Look,’ he repeated. ‘The mist’s away.’
Below us the ground sloped away to the cliff top twenty feet away. We could see right over it into a moon-washed sea that licked the lava skerries with long white tongues. The skerries were fantastically high, jagged at the edges and sharp as monsters’ teeth. The ocean was grey and silver where the moonlight caught it, black under the shadow of the cliff. The brightness of the moonlight varied like breathing going in and out, but then I realised it wasn’t the moon that was changing; it was the lighthouse: two long flashes and two short, fading into nothing and then coming round again. We seemed to be suspended offshore like an eagle hovering over a world composed of contrasts and sharp edges, inked-in shapes in an ice-clear spectrum of black to white. It was a pitiless, cold-blooded world, composed as a Dürer etching. I wriggled closer under the duvet, and he put his arm around me and held me tight. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’
It wasn’t the word I’d have chosen, but, framed as it was by the square window, it felt magical to be so very nearly inside a world so alien. Without the window frame, if the magic were suddenly to become real, it would be terrifying. ‘Is it like that under the sea?’ I asked him.
‘Yes and no. Under the sea there’re colours. But the dimensions are like, I mean: not feeling earthbound. That part’s the same, only with the sea it’s real, not just looking out, but being able to move around in it and touch things. It’s nice. I’d like to show you one day.’
I gazed and gazed, while little draughts crept in between the window and the frame, and ran lightly over my face and arms. The rest of me was very comfortable. It was getting harder to keep my eyes open. When I couldn’t keep awake any more, I squirmed back under the covers and closed my eyes. I was just aware of his warm body curling itself around my back, but right after that I fell asleep.
In the night I must have rolled over because when I woke I was looking straight into his eyes. He was leaning on his elbow looking down at me; he must have been watching me while I was asleep. ‘Morning m’dear,’ he said, and kissed me. I wasn’t properly awake; I responded with a fervour that I’d almost forgotten I could feel. I’ve been so busy with that damn book I haven’t had time to think about loving anybody. I expect I surprised him, but he liked it, because the next moment he was holding me very tight and stroking me and kissing me passionately. I touched him back, and I could feel his erection hard against me. But after a while he drew away, and buttoned up his nightshirt again. ‘I keep my promises,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’d better get up.’
Hoist with my own petard, I reckoned. If you promise not to seduce a person you can’t very well, according to the strict letter of your bond, behave in a provocative manner and then ask her if she’s changed her mind, because that’s precisely what seduction is when you think about it. It briefly crossed my mind that I hadn’t promised not to do anything to him, but then I decided I’d be tempting him to break his word, which wasn’t fair.
‘Would you like some tea?’ asked Jared. ‘There’s something in the other room I want to show you.’
I let him go. There wasn’t much else I could do with any dignity. After he’d gone I rolled over on my front and looked out of the window at the pale morning. The skerries in their beds of foam looked like the teeth of a drowning dragon. On the floor next to me there was an upturned fishbox, which served as a bedside table. I leafed through the books: The Mariner’s Handbook, Surveying in Archeology Underwater, a book of poems called Fishermen with Ploughs, Maritime Archeology, Pottery from Spanish Shipwrecks 1500–1800, The Gannet, Spanish Armada Tonnages, a recent volume of the International Journal of Nautical Archeology and Underwater Exploration, The Selected Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 and a photocopy of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, a dozen pages stapled together. I flipped through and read:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
That was all the books. No fiction. Underneath Monson there was a looseleaf notebook with pencil diagrams on the first page that looked like geometry. I turned the page. There was writing in neat italic script, unusual for a man, but I was beginning to recognise the distinctive calligraphy of Ogg’s Cove Elementary. It said:
A candle burning underwater
Sea-green light incarnadine
pearl incandescent
mica incorruptible
abyss (St Elmo’s fire)
he is flame/sulphur
sea deep (pearls from sand)
eyes
Sea-green light// The Serpent
His eyes//incandescent Leviathan
Dull eyes/ Kraken/squid
Sea green//unseen//deep
whale/blood/incorruptible/he is/he sees/scars
Dull eyes seeing unseen from the abyss
The sea flames green
Sand in a dying shell is incandescent pearl
A candle burning underwater
The rest of the notebook was blank. Lying next to it was a small brown paper bag. Idly I glanced inside. It contained two unopened packets of condoms, and a receipt. I hesitated for a moment, and then I took out the receipt and read it. It said:
20/7/97 TRINK’S GARAGE
FISH ST, LYONSNESS
PHONE LYONSNESS 632
petrol 2 galls £4.03.09d
AAA batteries 4 £1.13.04d
frsh frt 1 .07d
cdby dry mk .03.06d
frlite cdms £1.02.04d
Total £7.01.06d
CASH £7.01.06d
THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT TRINK’S
I knew for a fact he’d bought petrol after he’d said he’d meet me at three, because he told me so. Well.
I picked up A Voyage to Virginia in 1609, and opened it where the place was marked with a torn-off corner of the notebook. It said:
During all this time the heavens looked so black upon us that it was not possible the elevation of the Pole might be observed; nor a star by night nor sunbeam by day was to be seen. Only upon the Thursday night Sir George Somers, being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little, round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the mainmast and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, ‘tempting to settle, as it were, upon any of the four shrouds …’
I could hear Jared coming up the stairs, and I was glad I was reading something I didn’t have to put quickly away. He brought me a mug of tea, put his own down on the front page of The Ancient Mariner, and w
ent into the other bedroom and came back with a small cardboard box. He placed it in the middle of the bed, and got back in under the duvet at the foot of the bed, where he sat crosslegged facing me.
He took out something wrapped in bubblewrap, and gently unrolled it, and held it up. It was the glass goblet I’d seen at Maldun’s Mill. No, it wasn’t. It had a crack in it, right down one side of the bowl, the same as the other goblet, the one on the shelf at the Pele Centre, only this one wasn’t greasy and dusty. It shone like new, like the one from the bottom of the sea. ‘Jared! Can I look? Which is it? Where did you get it from?’
It was heavier than I expected. I turned it round, and there was the crest with the galleon. It was like the halfpennies they have in Hy Brasil which have Drake’s Golden Hind imprinted on one side, only it wasn’t as neatly etched as those. It was more the impression of a ship in motion: lines and sea-colours rather than nautical detail. I touched it, and felt the curves of the sails under my finger. ‘Better than in a glass case,’ I said. ‘More real. But which one is it, Jared? How did it get here?’
‘It belonged to my friend Nicky.’
‘Nicky Hawkins? You didn’t tell me that before.’
‘No. But this one was his. It was cracked then. He had it on the mantelpiece in Ferdy’s Landing.’
‘But did Ishmael …? What about …? This is the one I saw in the Pele Centre, isn’t it? That one had a crack in it too.’
‘I’ll tell you. But I want to show you more first. Put that down a minute.’ He delved into the box, and handed me something else. It was a brass polished cone the shape of the volcano, about two inches long, with rings etched around it and some measurements along the side. The base had threads so it could be screwed on to something. Considering it was so small it was quite a weight. ‘You know what that is? No? It’s the top of a shell, the kind they used in the First World War. Nicky’s great-grandfather picked it up at Gallipoli. It was one of Nicky’s treasures.’ I started asking another question, but he ignored me. ‘Now this.’
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