(1958) Robinson

by Muriel Spark

  That time in Rouen, when he had noticed that we had recognised him, it was too late for him to stop with any show of innocence. However, in about ten minutes he passed again, this time going through the motions of recognition.

  ‘I could hardly believe my eyes. What are you doing here?’ I should have replied, ‘What are you doing here?’ But I said, ‘Oh, just looking round’, while Brian said, ‘Taking the air.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, looking from one to the other of us. ‘Well, no wonder you’re always hard up.’

  ‘Will you have some coffee?’ said Brian.

  Robinson appeared on the patio carrying three packing cases bound together by string. I shut my notebook guiltily; he noticed this, and I thought, now he has guessed that I’ve been writing about him. I was coming to terms with this slightly disturbing thought, when he said,

  ‘I ought to have a mule. I’ve always resisted having a mule because the nuisance of keeping animals on the island sometimes exceeds their usefulness.’ I wondered if this was some obscure reference to me, then immediately decided it wasn’t. Sometimes I had to resist a tendency to read deep nasty meanings into Robinson’s words.

  ‘A mule would be useful for crossing the mountain,’ I observed.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Robinson. ‘I have to take all these packages over the mountain on foot.’

  Jimmie came round from the store-house with two bundles of cartons. They seemed to be heavy.

  Tom Wells emerged from the house in his braces, stretching his arms and yawning. ‘What’s afoot?’ he said.

  Jimmie pointed to the cartons. ‘Is commodities gone to rot.’

  ‘Which, what?’ said Wells. He had obviously been deeply sleeping.

  Robinson said, ‘A certain amount of my tinned food is inconsumable. It has to be disposed of quickly.’

  ‘We open these big tins,’ said Jimmie, ‘we look, we look away; we look again, and look away.’

  There were high stacks of tinned food in the storehouse, great six-pounders as well as the small grocer’s shop kind.

  ‘What about the rest of them?’ I said.

  ‘They are all right,’ said Robinson. ‘It is only part of the last consignment that is damaged.’

  Jimmie, anxious to console him, said, ‘We dump them in the ocean.’

  ‘We dump them in the Furnace,’ said Robinson wearily, ‘and I wish I had a mule.’

  ‘Look,’ said Wells, ‘you don’t want to cart that muck over the mountain.’

  I said, ‘Chuck them over the cliff, then follow them down to the sea.’

  ‘Chuck them over the cliff and keep following them down,’ said Jimmie.

  ‘They must go into the Furnace,’ said Robinson. ‘The food is bad. The tins are opened. The sea will throw them up again, and I can’t have my beach littered with rank meat. The Furnace is final.’

  ‘The sharks will demolish them,’ I said.

  ‘Not in tins,’ said Robinson. ‘They draw the line at tins.’

  It seemed to me that Robinson was particularly perverse. He heaved the first pack on to his shoulder by its rope and set off for the mountain. Jimmie wanted to accompany him. Robinson firmly refused his help. ‘Be a decent chap and stack up the stuff in the store. Put down plenty of disinfectant. The place stinks.’

  The smell of the two remaining packs of cartons was fairly fierce. I prepared to accompany Jimmie to the store-house with buckets of Jeyes’ Fluid, while Tom Wells clutched his ribs. ‘I hope all the rest of the food is in good condition. There’s five weeks to go. We could easily starve,’ he said.

  ‘Is in good condition,’ said Jimmie; ‘we have put to the test the samples of all commodities.’

  An hour later Robinson returned for the next package. He looked terribly exhausted. So were Jimmie and I after our exertions in the store-house. I had made tea, thinking meanwhile at least Tom Wells could have done as much. We sat floppily in the big stone kitchen.

  ‘You’ve put sugar in my tea,’ said Wells. ‘I don’t take sugar.’

  I had done it deliberately. I said, ‘Oh, I’ll pour another cup for you.’

  This I made very watery, but he did not complain about it. However, he said, ‘I’m sick and tired of drinking tea without milk.’ Our tinned milk was running low.

  I said, ‘We ought to have lemons. Lemon tea is nice. I am sure lemons could be cultivated here.’

  ‘They couldn’t,’ said Robinson..

  I thought, ‘Not if the job was left to you’, for the lack of cultivation on the island was a continual irritation to me. It was not simply that it offended some instinct for economy and reproduction. It was more; it offended my aesthetic sense. If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

  I said,’ I think lemons would grow at the foot of the slopes on the South Arm.’

  No-one paid attention to this remark.

  ‘What with the lack of make-up and the tinned food,’ I said, ‘my skin is getting very dry.’

  ‘Lemon wouldn’t help that condition,’ Robinson said. ‘Here we are,‘ said Wells, looking round with a flourish, ‘wrecked on a desert island, and January harps about her skin.’

  ‘Is my intention,’ said Jimmie to Wells, ‘to cast this beverage upon your face in the event that you do not keep your bloody hair on. Is monstrous to declare such offensive insults when a lady is in plight with regard to her complexion on an island.’

  Robinson got up. ‘Two more trips,’ he said.

  ‘Leave them till tomorrow,’ said Wells.

  ‘I can’t leave them stinking out there on the patio.’

  ‘Dump them on the mountainside for tonight,’ I said. ‘No need to trek all that way to the Furnace.’

  And Jimmie pointed out, in support, ‘The mist descends.’

  ‘All right,’ said Robinson surprisingly, for he hardly ever accepted any of our advice.

  This time he also accepted Jimmie’s help in carrying the heavy weights to the mountainside. As they set off I noticed again a look of exhaustion in Robinson, not only in his face but in the droop of his arms and the way he carried himself.

  Next day Robinson and Jimmie set off to pick up the packages they had left a short distance up the mountain and carry them to the crater. This was Jimmie’s first visit to the Furnace.

  ‘They scream,’ he said to me, on his return. ‘We have shoved these stinking bundles into the crater. First they roll, then they run, and lo! when they enter this cauldron, is a scream.’

  Mr. Wells, who had overheard him, said, ‘You know, old chap, being stuck on this island is bound to have a psychological effect on one. I feel it myself. It isn’t natural to live alone with Nature. I should guard against hallucinations, if I were you. A course of meditation—’

  ‘The Furnace does scream when you throw anything into it,’ I said.

  Jimmie said to him, ‘I like to see you descend into that mighty Furnace. Then is two screams — one is of the Furnace and one is of Mr. Wells.’

  In the evenings, however, we did not bicker quite so much. The evening after turning out the store-house, when we were settled in Robinson’s room, some drinking rum, some brandy, we were tired and relaxed with each other so far as to speculate how it would be when we were rescued, how surprised everyone would be.

  ‘I hope to God my wife’s gone over to her sister’s,’ said Wells. ‘There’s a brother of mine, he’s a bachelor, he fancies my wife. I shouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t got married, me presumed dead. If so, that’s just too bad, I’m still the husband — what d’you say, Robinson?’

  ‘You are still the husband,’ Robinson said, ‘and in any case I think you can’t be presumed dead till after seven years.’ He spoke very slowly, for he was worn out after his two mountain journeys.

  ‘Is definite that you remain the husband of the wife,’ said Jimmie amiably, ‘and in the event your brother is an honourable type of bastard, he will not marry your wife. In the cont
rary event, is manifest that you are bound to black that rotter his eye.

  ‘I reckon I might do him in,’ mused Wells.

  ‘Is to go too far,’ said Jimmie. ‘No, no. Is better to disfigure his countenance. Is only justice to your wife.’

  ‘I’d give her a piece of my mind,’ said Wells.

  ‘No, no, please,’ said Jimmie. ‘Is not nice to give a lady a piece of your mind.’

  ‘Ah well, we’re lucky to be alive.’

  ‘The goat must go,’ Robinson said.

  ‘Poor Bella, is she very sick?’

  ‘Yes, and suffering.’

  ‘You kill her?’ said Jimmie.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll have to shoot her.’

  ‘Is better to slay such a beast with a knife,’ said Jimmie.

  ‘Not better,‘ said Robinson, ‘only more traditional.

  ‘I miss the milk,’ said Wells. ‘I must say, just as I was getting used to it.’

  ‘Yes, we do miss the milk.’

  ‘Ah well, we’re lucky to be alive.’

  I recall that evening as the most pleasant few hours I spent on the island. A heavy rain-storm had left the atmosphere moist and cool. Robinson talked, as he sometimes did, of the history and legends of the island. It was a traditional hermits’ home. In the fourteenth century, five hermits living on different parts of the island had been attacked by a band of pirates, only one surviving to tell the tale. The island had always been privately owned. It had passed through the hands of a line of Portuguese. Vasco da Gama, on one of his voyages, put in at the island between the North Arm and the North Leg, at a point which was now called Vasco da Gama’s Bay. Pirates and smugglers used the island considerably, often without the knowledge of the inhabitants, for there was a cave in the sheer cliffs of the South Arm known as the Market, which was accessible only from the sea, and even then was dangerous to approach, owing to the numerous rocks and a particular whirlpool at its mouth. At the Market, however, the pirates would meet and barter their plunder, so it was said.

  From a long crack in the wall of Robinson’s room the flying ants were squirming out, spreading their wings and fluttering about. Tom Wells had fallen asleep. I, too, was giving but a drowsy ear to Robinson’s voice. I had taken a red cashmere tablecloth from a drawer in the dining-room to use as a shawl which I wore as an Indian sari pinned up over a shirt borrowed from Robinson. This enabled me to wash and repair my shabby green dress, and the change of dress in a way contributed to my peace of mind.

  Robinson and Jimmie were arranging to examine a disused ship’s boat which lay at the West Leg Bay, with a view to repairing it.

  I was so reluctant to disrupt our peace that I put off telling Robinson I had found one of my possessions which I thought had been lost at the time of the crash.

  This possession was my rosary. It had been in the pocket of my coat at the time of the crash, and later, when I had recovered, I was not really surprised to have lost it, for although the other contents of the pocket were intact — a handkerchief and a packet of matches — these were comparatively light, and less likely to fly out of my pocket when I was thrown clear of the plane than was my rosary.

  I found the rosary in a drawer in Robinson’s desk.

  I had once casually mentioned to Robinson that my rosary might be somewhere in the vicinity of the wreck, where the salvage had been picked up. ‘An antique one,’ I said, ‘made of rosewood and silver, quite valuable.’ Even then I must have sensed that he would be best induced to hand over the rosary if he thought I valued it mainly for its antiquity, rosewood and silver. And it was indeed a very attractive object.

  I found it quite unexpectedly in Robinson’s desk. It is true I had no business to open the drawers and examine his papers and read the letters. I suppose I desired to find out to what extent he resembled Ian Brodie, and I suppose I hoped to discover something bearing on his relationship with Jimmie and his family: so far I had only Jimmie’s version, which was most engaging, and invited further investigation. Anyway, I went to his desk in the first place to borrow the pencil-sharpener, and was waylaid by curiosity. And anyway, I found my rosary at the back of the second right-hand drawer. I took it away with me and lest I should judge Robinson too hard I also took a cigarette.

  Two days later I was busy in the kitchen preparing to cook some nettles I had got Jimmie to gather. I had remembered reading about the vitamin properties of nettles, and I felt our diet needed improvement.

  From the open lattice I saw Robinson leading the very sick goat from its pen. It occurred to me he might kill the goat there in front of the window.

  I called out, ‘Robinson! Don’t kill it here. I can’t bear the sight of blood.’

  ‘I’m going to take her up the mountain near the Furnace,’ he said.

  A picture of Bella’s corpse sliding into the Furnace and screaming came to my mind. I ran out and stroked the creature which stood in a weary stupor. Miguel ran up and hugged her, almost knocking her down, for she was thin and frail.

  Miguel was crying.

  I said, ‘Never mind, Miguel. I have something to show you.’

  Robinson said quickly, ‘If you mean the rosary, I do not want the boy to see it.’

  Miguel looked interested. ‘Show me Rosie.’

  This was the first sign that Robinson had discovered the absence of the rosary from his desk.

  ‘I intended to tell you that I had found it,’ I said.

  ‘What’s it like?’ said Miguel.

  ‘Rather nice. Silver and rosewood.’

  ‘Show me Rosewood,’ said Miguel.

  ‘I simply don’t want the child to see it,’ Robinson said. ‘He’s extremely susceptible to that sort of thing.’

  I stroked poor Bella, and tried to interest her in her bucket of water, but she would not touch it.

  ‘That sort of thing can easily corrupt the Faith,’ Robinson said.

  ‘What bloody rot,’ I said with a vehemence intended more for Ian Brodie than for Robinson. ‘What a fuss to make about a rosary.’

  ‘Let’s see the rosary,’ said Miguel.

  Robinson led the drooping goat away through the gate to the mountain path. Miguel followed him, but he was sent back within twenty minutes.

  ‘Robinson wouldn’t let me stop and watch Bella die.’

  ‘Robinson is quite right,’ I said snappily.

  ‘Show me—— ‘

  ‘Make yourself scarce for half an hour, because I’m busy,’ I said.

  The sound of a shot bounded down from the mountain.

  ‘Poor old Bella,’ said Miguel. ‘Will she be dead now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps she won’t die first shot.’

  ‘Robinson’s a careful shot,’ I said.

  ‘Will there be blood?’

  ‘Not much.’

  Ian Brodie used to return from the Continent having gone out of his way to feed his fury by witnessing all the religious processions and festivals.

  ‘Awful old crones hobbling along after the statues, clinking their rosaries, mumbling their Hail Marys, as if their lives depended on it. And the sickening thing, young people, people in their prime, caught up in the mob hysteria. That sort of thing corrupts the Faith.’ Ian Brodie would almost foam at the mouth in these denunciations. And sometimes, both repelled and attracted, I could not keep my eyes off him — Ian, mouthing his contempt, looked positively lustful.

  ‘Why do you go near the shrines? Why do you watch the festivals if they upset you?’ I said. ‘Surely you must be tired of being so upset.’

  ‘You can’t avoid them in Italy,’ he said.

  ‘Why not go to Iceland for your holidays?’ I said.

  ‘You would find them there,’ spluttered Ian. ‘You find these fanatics everywhere.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, looking hard at him.

  ‘You never seem to realise the materialistic implication of all these demonstrations,’ said Ian. ‘You don’t understand the gravity of what’s going on in th
ose orgies and processions you go in for.’

  ‘I don’t go in for them,’ I said.

  ‘All this Mariolatry is eating the Christian heart out of the Catholic faith,’ said Ian. ‘It is a materialistic heresy.’

  ‘What bloody rot,’ I said. And if there was one thing against which I did feel strongly at that moment, it was Ian Brodie, with his offensive way of looking at a woman. I thought: no wonder Agnes vows she will never become a Catholic.

  I held Ian in such contempt that from time to time I wished to do him a wrong, and so rid myself of the self-righteous feelings he provoked. My most effective method of hurting Ian was to tell him that I had won money on a horse, even if I hadn’t. This served to injure him in two ways: one, he was reminded that he had no influence over me — for he was morally against betting; and two, the mere suggestion that anyone but himself had received a sum of money, let alone money for nothing, really upset him, really gave him a pain.

  Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward. Ian Brodie had been loud against my leaving home for so long a period. Brian went away to school; he liked the idea. Therefore so did I. And I thought it would be good for him to have a change from Curly Lonsdale’s company. Ian Brodie’s suspicion was that I had a lover whom I proposed to meet abroad, in term-time, returning prim and replenished to my chaste widowhood for the summer holidays: I was indebted to Agnes for this information.

  Looking forward to my going home, my return from the dead, my intrusion into whatever new arrangements had been made, I had often in mind my past encounters with Ian. I liked to picture the effect if I arrived with Jimmie in my wake. For Jimmie was always saying, ‘If I give my candid opinion, is providential that you are not consumed in the aeroplane so as to marry me.