Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘He’s done it! He’s done it!’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Lucy. ‘St Brandons is more than half the country. Twenty-three thousand. And the President has to have a majority vote from the country as a whole. That’s what it says in the paper.’

  An hour went by. We ate cheese and apples. The clock struck midnight. It was echoed, a millisecond later, by the peal of St Brendan’s Cathedral. And there on the screen was the familiar skyline. Lucy and I leaned forward. I could feel Jared’s back tense against my knees.

  Government House. There was Ishmael again. The Grand Cherokee must have been driven at some speed. Lucy squealed beside me, ‘There’s Colombo.’ And then she blushed. It was the first time I ever saw her do it, and maybe it’ll be the last. The other two didn’t even look round.

  First candidate: four-thousand-seven-hundred-and-nine votes. Second candidate: five-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fourteen votes. Third candidate: twelve-thousand-seven-hundred-and-sixty-eight votes.

  There was Ishmael, on the screen. There was the crowd, yelling in the dark, with the Trojan Horse floodlit behind. Jared and Per and Lucy were on their feet. I hung back. I’m still a little overwhelmed by the way these people fall into each other’s arms when the spirit moves them. At home we don’t. But Jared dragged me to my feet. At least I’m used to his embraces, and the other two were also friends.

  Presently we sat down again, and listened to Ishmael. I found it most peculiar. I kept saying to myself, ‘but I know this guy’. That was foolish, because what I realised now was that I didn’t. It occurred to me that Ishmael was not in fact secretive. He’d probably talked to a great many people. But some of us – Jared, Lucy, me – had had our minds on other things. I thought, as I listened, that Colombo was probably the least surprised of any of my friends.

  Ishmael made a very good speech. Everyone says so. I’d put it down here, only unfortunately I don’t remember a single word of it. Jared says it will all be in the Times next Saturday, so I can copy bits from there.

  Before Ishmael was done we started to hear the fireworks. Then he finished, and they were exploding right across the screen in front of us. And not just there. Jared drew back the curtains, and the fireworks had leapt from the screen to the sky. They blazed like comets over Lyonsness, illuminating the whole town in rainbow colours, then falling and fading, vanishing into the darkness of the sea.

  ‘Let’s go down!’

  We walked four-abreast along the harbour road. The sea sighed on our left, and as our eyes got used to the darkness we could make out the faint far-off outline of Despair. Then more fireworks shot into the sky ahead, and everything dissolved into a Babel of colour. Jared began to run.

  We caught up with him in Market Street just outside The Admiral Inn. Then we were swept on, and in, into the crowd and the shouting and the fireworks, into the wild and sleepless night. I forgot I didn’t have a vote. I forgot I was a stranger. I forgot it wasn’t anything to do with me. I’d find it easier to write history if I wasn’t expected to live it at the same time. I said that to Jared when finally we were cruising cautiously across the sound, our boat feeling its way through the dark to its home mooring. He laughed at me, and said I should worry about writing tomorrow.

  As we climbed up the hill to the lighthouse I could see the first pale streaks of light away to the east. Jared switched off the torch, and we could see the island dimly taking shape around us. I looked at it, and I thought, yes, I will, I’ll write it all, tomorrow or some day. That’s one part I can play, even if I haven’t any other. But then Jared said, as if he’d heard me, ‘To hell with history. At least we can leave it over the water.’ He took my hand and pulled me up the steep bit. He was laughing. ‘I’ll share my island with you, Sidony,’ he said. ‘If you want it I’ll share the whole damn lot. But from here on in it’s private. You can write down all the history you like. Only not here. Not now. This bit is for living, just for its own sake, and you don’t get to write it down.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, laughing back at him. ‘I’ll do my book. Lots and lots of books, maybe. But I don’t mind drawing the line somewhere.’ I drew an imaginary line across the turf with my foot. ‘Maybe here,’ I said, and stepped over it.

  TWENTY-NINE

  COLOMBO DROVE OUT of Dorrado, and took the winding uphill road in second, much too fast. The engine snarled and groaned, and on each hairpin the back tyres sent up a shower of gravel from the outside curve. Colombo kept one hand on the wheel, and the other on the horn, which he sounded hard and long on each blind corner. His mouth was set in a hard line, and his brown eyes looked black and thunderous. He knew he was driving recklessly. He didn’t care. He was suddenly, gloriously, angry. They’d all used him: fate had used him; women had used him; Ishmael had used him; the government had used him. He had thought he could use Tidesman; Tidesman too had used him. He had given all he had to this wretched country that might vanish into the sea at any moment, and what had it ever given him? He was the only man on Hy Brasil who hadn’t got a life. Tidesman was famous, Tidesman was an institution, and Tidesman had swallowed up Colombo MacAdam and now Tidesman was spitting out the pips.

  The road levelled out, and forked. The left hand road wound around the foothills of Mount Brasil to Lyonsness and Ravnscar. It had been recently tarred, and a battered notice saying:

  ROAD CLOSED: DIVERSION

  ESTRADA IMPEDIDA: DESVIO

  lay in the ditch with a couple of sandbags chucked on top of it. The right-hand road dipped down into a lush valley full of freshly harvested apple orchards, heading back to St Brandons. Colombo shot off the road just before the junction, and jerked to a stop in the parking place just below the wayside shrine, amid a cloud of dustand a smell of hot rubber. From the shelter of her shrine the Madonnain her blue robe gazed impassively downon him, nursing her fat white cuckoo of a child. Someone had laid fresh roses at her feet.

  Colombo had helped to make a revolution. Fifteen miles away Mount Brasil simmered ominously, turning the very idea of history into a cruel conceit. The lingering smell of sulphur seemed far too apposite. All Colombo had succeeded in doing, he thought savagely, was to be nice to everybody. That made him angry, but a small part of him still believed passionately that this had been the only thing worth doing.

  Was there anything left? Pereira had established a proper democracy. Following further elections the second Parliament of Hy Brasil was already six weeks into its first session. The legend was over, and justice was about to begin. Two people had died, and a few others thought they were happier than they’d been before. Colombo MacAdam could write articles about it if he liked. Colombo MacAdam could go to hell.

  Colombo MacAdam loved two women, or thought he did. Each was in love with a dead man. If he lay with either of them, he’d be aware of the shadow of the dead hovering there with him, and know that she was embracing a dream, a ghost, closing her eyes so that she would not see that really it was him, Colombo. Possibly in the future he might be useful to either, temporarily salving the pain by holding her in his living arms, and telling her what just for the moment she might want to hear. But she wouldn’t be listening for him.

  He thought of Nesta alone in her apartment which Hook had given her, looking out over St Brandons and the harbour while the sun moved away from her window, and the afternoon shadows crept in. If he went to Nesta she’d make love to him savagely, perhaps, the way she sometimes did, as if that would wipe out the past and Jim, her own Jim, would walk back in tomorrow. That was the only reason she’d ever wanted Colombo, he realised now. It was the piquancy of him not being Jim, because Jim would always be back next day. But at least Nesta would touch him, at least they’d make love, as often as he could want, because that’s what she wanted too.

  Or at least they could do that until she grew old. She was old. She was thirteen years older than he was. She’d never had a child. She used to say she’d never wanted one. That seemed unnatural in a beautiful woman. If she’d been ugly it would have been ea
sier to accept. Even if she wasn’t too old – or was she?

  He’d never heard of a woman of forty-nine having a child, but for all he knew it could happen – even if she wasn’t too old, she’d refuse. The thought surprised him, as until that moment it had never crossed his mind that anyone would dream of asking her.

  He had adored Lucy for far too long. Sometimes she’d phone and want to see him urgently; sometimes she wouldn’t let him come anywhere near her at all. She’d use him when she was desperate to stave off the nightmares that she insisted on retaining, but she’d give him nothing, and she’d leave him frustrated as hell.

  In mid-April there would be an heir to Ravnscar. Its mother was already totally, passionately committed to its future wellbeing, which was, Colombo reckoned, worth a good deal more than its other inheritance: a castle filled with treasures beyond price. Apparently the one gift that would be denied it, the curse at its christening, you could say, was the possession of a father. Lucy wouldn’t even confirm that she was going to put his name on its birth certificate. She said she’d think about it.

  Whether it was a girl or a boy – he hoped it might be a girl, for some reason – he guessed it would be beautiful. It would be – must already be, come to think of it – dark-haired, oliveskinned, brown-eyed. Both he and Lucy had Portuguese mothers. Her mother had been a De Rosas, the oldest family in Hy Brasil. His mother had first come here as an immigrant from Madeira, who got a job as chambermaid at the Red Herring, back in the days when Ewan MacAdam first had the ferryboat that ran from Dorrado to Mayda and Tuly.

  Colombo glared at the fork in the road. One fork led to Nesta, who might grieve for ever but who would be only momentarily cast down. Perhaps she was already thinking about her work again. Perhaps right now she was developing the photos she’d taken in Dorrado on August 3rd, 1997. She would face that film some time, he knew, because that was her way. She would face it and then grow old, because she was older than he was, and of all the men she’d known so very well, the only one that had really mattered was Jim.

  The other road led to Lucy, immured at Ravnscar. It was a perfect October day; she was probably in the garden, harvesting vegetables, or maybe she’d be sitting on the courtyard parapet writing her endless journal in the yellow folder entitled Chemistry Notes. Or maybe she was hunting through old chests and closets, looking out the last hundred years’ worth of infant clothing and children’s toys. Toys that belonged in the nursery at Ravnscar, where Lucy, an only daughter, had once played almost daily with a neighbour’s child, Nicky Hawkins.

  It was a golden afternoon. The autumn trees blazed in the sunshine, brown and gold. The sky was a hard crystalline blue. There were sea eagles circling over Ailbe. He realised for the first time that the colours were free of smoke. The summit of Brasil was out of sight. Today, one could believe it was an ordinary autumn day. One could almost believe that nothing irrevocable had happened.

  Colombo put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed once. But weeping was too difficult. He shoved the car into first, and shot into the road. The decision was made before he knew it. The tyres ground against the verge as he swept into the turn, and in a sputter of gravel and flying grass he was gone. The ancient engine roared and faded, gradually dying away into the distance. Then the silent afternoon settled down in the place where the three roads met, as if no one had ever passed that way at all.

  About the Author

  MARGARET ELPHINSTONE is the author of four previous novels: The Incomer (1987), A Sparrow’s Flight (1989), Islanders (1994) and The Sea Road (2000). Her short stories have been collected in An Apple from a Tree (1990) and her poetry in Outside Eden (1991). She lives in Glasgow and teaches in the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University. Her sixth novel, Voyageurs, will also be published by Canongate.

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2010

  by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Margaret Elphinstone, 2002

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 059 0

  Map on p. vii by Jennifer Outhwaite

  Typeset by Hewer Text, Edinburgh

  canongate.co.uk