In Another Country (9 page)

 

I feel on edge, the least thing would do it. But also I feel something you'd hardly credit in me, an insouciance. Really I don't much care what happens next.

 

31 December

 

Quite a few came to Brian's Christmas party, thirty I should say. The men put on suits and ties and since I'd only ever seen them in work clothes before, they were very strange to me. I don't mean they looked in the least ridiculous or uncomfortable. On the contrary, it felt like manners: this is an occasion, this is how you look. But their hands and faces, especially the boatmen's, bare in their Sunday best, it brought the outdoors, the weather, the sea into the room, which Brian had gone to the trouble of decorating. The women had dressed up even more. They wore a good deal of makeup and jewellery. And the children, especially the girls, more children than I knew existed, they were also dressed for the occasion. I had no decent clothes to change into.

The first glass and the mince pies were on the house. Then Brian went behind the bar and Chris joined him.

I had a conversation with one of the boatmen—Matthew, I think his name was, he has a ginger beard—about the way things drift. I told him I'd found bits of charred wood here on the west side, bits of blue pallet, that I was pretty sure had come from the bonfire on the east side. He shrugged and said quite likely but I shouldn't make a rule of it, you never could tell. Tide, current, wind, you never know. People go in the water here and are never seen again. Perhaps they land up somewhere, perhaps they don't. Take Alf Lewis last summer, he went in the channel, drunk, so you can understand him drowning, but he's never come up again so far as anyone knows. I don't know about Alf Lewis, I said. Matthew shrugged. He blew in. Now he's gone. Good riddance, some say. I waited but he wouldn't say more. So instead I nodded towards the bar and said it was nice of Brian to give everyone a drink and a mince pie. Matthew nodded, but as though he'd have disagreed if I'd been somebody worth disagreeing with. Then I made a mistake. I asked did Lucy ever come to things like this. Matthew looked me in the eyes and slowly shook his head, which I took to mean, It's none of your business, and not, No, Lucy never comes to things like this. He's a big man, a big beard, with very small eyes. I asked would he like another drink. He said, No thanks, so I left him and went to the bar myself.

Later—I was already thinking of making my surreptitious exit—Sarah and Elaine came over to me in the window. I had noticed their transformation, among the other women, but close up it shocked me, they seemed sent in their beauty and gaiety to remind me of what I had never striven hard enough to possess and now never would and did not deserve. Their arms were bare, Elaine wore a necklace of pale jade, Sarah a bracelet of lapis lazuli, her dress was a dark blue and that colour and the colour of Elaine's dress, a blue-green, I had often watched travelling over the sea from the top of my ladder in Nathan's fields in the wind and the swishing to earth of the olive-grey loppings of pittosporum. They were tipsy and full of mirth, knowing their own attractiveness, knowing how their dresses and the occasion, the decorations, the light of the sky and the sea through the window, the wine, how it all worked to increase their youthfulness and beauty, the life in them, beyond what I could bear to contemplate. They were close together, I think of them now as having each an arm around the other's waist, and a glass in the outer hand, and like that they came up close and kissed me, one on each cheek, so that I was for a moment fully in their aura, the scent in their hair, the wine on their breath, all the gaiety. Then they stood back, close together, childish. Elaine said, We came to say Happy Christmas, and nudged Sarah with her shoulder. Sarah said, We don't know anything about you. You're our workmate and we don't know anything about you. We know everything about Chris and quite a bit about Brian, and Elaine and I are best mates but we don't know a thing about you. Is it true you were a monk? Chris says he's sure you were a monk. He says he can always tell a monk, because of his early life.

Eyes and smiles, dresses and stones of the sea, they were cajoling me and I felt what it would be like (would have been like) to be a person with companions, alive in an easy exchange with a dear friend or two, and if I'd been able to speak I should have tried to say so, perhaps as a preamble, on the threshold of candour: that their youth and gaiety and delight in themselves had opened me, a little at least, so that for a moment, for the duration of their waiting to hear what I might answer, I saw into a world so spacious and cheerful my own felt like the cramped cast-off shell some naked crab had squatted in and years later still peered out of and dared not leave. I was, I said. Chris is right. But it was years ago, I was his age—younger even—I was about your age. They didn't want to be serious. Had there been the least music they would have danced. They didn't want to be polite, considerate, sympathetic. They wanted everything to be funny for an hour or so. And in their careless good nature they wanted me to be like that too. I should have taken each by the hand, there and then, and summoned up a syrtaki from Ithaca or Samothrace and danced the lumbering graceless dance of my leaden soul, right there among the dressed-up islanders, between two girls, danced, and they would have hearkened either side of me and heard the tune in my head and taken it up, lifted and lightened it, and led me and I'd have followed, dancing, dancing, ugly bear of a soul, dancing, until I was changed. Were you chaste? Sarah asked. Was it hard, our age, being chaste? Were you obedient? Did you do as you were told? Will you obey Elaine and me if we ask you to do a thing? I can see you wouldn't mind being poor, I agree it is disgusting to be rich. But was it not hard, our age, being chaste? They wanted me to increase the laughter in them, they gave me the chance, but I could feel the shadow of me, of my seriousness, the stain, the leaden atmosphere of me, beginning to creep over them, like bad afterthoughts, like regret, like the sad obligation to apologize, and I knew I would defeat them and the whole occasion, the light dancing at the window, the sparkle and the fumes of wine, the will to gaiety, I would defeat it in them, so I said what I always say, Forgive me, and left.

 

I tell you this so that you will know, again, that you were right.

 

Leaving the hotel, I went to the church. There was a service Christmas Eve and another Christmas Morning. I didn't attend either. The first was the children's nativity play which they'd been rehearsing for weeks. The props—a crib in a stable made of blue pallets, the doll, the toy animals—were still there and the costumes (those of the Kings so scarlet, black, silver, gold and sparkling) were folded and laid to one side. All the church was decorated with greenery and the earliest narcissi and butcher's broom for holly. Six oil lamps hang from the ceiling on long chains, six beautiful brass bowls and the glass funnels of flame. Six windows: the two north illustrate the verses concerning the lily of the fields; the two east are without script or image, only light; the two south read, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life. And they show that life. The lights and colours of all six windows put me in mind of the dresses, the necklace and the bracelet of Sarah and Elaine.

Being with the monks soon killed even my desire to believe in God. But I love such houses as this one on Enys, so well built, so close to the quay where every day there is a busyness of boats and goods and people and the sea embraces equally the living worshippers and the dead. And the beautiful work in the house, the fitness of it, and the flowers and greenery of the island for decoration, the singing, the children's yearly acting out the old story, the light and the silence when everyone has left, how I love all that.

It was too early to go back to my shed. My nervousness and sadness were acute and I didn't think I'd be able to combat them well enough by any reading or by cleaning and sharpening the tools in Mary's workshop. Most days towards dusk it is like that. How will I secure the oblivion of sleep? I've often thought no sane and happy person could bear my life for even an hour if suddenly translated into it. Only because my life has
grown
to be like this, because it has habituated me to it, is it bearable. If it is bearable.

I climbed the hill that forms the southern headland of my little bay. All the six hills have their tumuli but here, nearest my shed, the remains are especially apparent. Many events of late have assumed a peculiar definiteness, like finality. They present themselves to me as though prepared—as though they are ready and they lie in wait. So on this hill I found that the best preserved of the tombs, which I last visited a couple of weeks ago, has been, so to speak, further clarified, made more compelling, by somebody outlining the shape of it with large clean ovoid pebbles through the gorse and heather. I supposed at once that the builder of the arch had returned and done this too. First because it was a labour. I counted two hundred and seven pebbles and they must have been carried, and surely not more than three or four at a time, up from the one beach under the headland where in all sizes the pebbles are smooth and egg-shaped. At his way into the zone of the tumulus he had placed two larger stones, each as much as you could carry from sea level. And the kist, where the corpse had huddled up small and which I had always seen empty, he had floored quite deeply with clean limpet shells. The pebbles lay around the sinuous circumference the way you might lay out a necklace on a surface, to see what shapes it was capable of when not determined by a woman's neck and throat. The pebbles are smoothed more or less finely according to the coarseness of the granite's crystals—which decide the colours also, the shades of grey, white, pink, almost black, to which, as he strung his chosen stones to enclose the grave, he had paid close attention. The kist at the heart, floored with limpet cones, was bone-white and bone-yellow.

I stood there until the sky became as bleached as bone and the light far out as sheer and pitiless and uninhabitable as a work of gold, silver and steel. I let myself get cold. I was thinking of the builder's exertions, how he must have sweated, the faster beating of his heart as he climbed with the weight of stones, how warm his hands were, handling them, the brief lingering of his warmth on their egg-shaped surfaces, their resumption of their natural cold. And remembering how he had appraised his arch that he intended to go underwater, how he had nodded in approval and farewell, I felt sure he had done the same when he had made apparent the skeletal shape of the tomb on the windy hill and tipped a dry libation of limpet shells into the small space where the human had gone into the earth.

 

I think these letters may still be a sort of courtship. Not pleading that you will love me, only hoping you will remember me. And then I think even that is asking too much.

 

Sunday 3 January

 

I was on Flagstaff Hill when the year turned. Halangy had fireworks. From my distance the rockets did not seem to reach very high. Orion, on the other hand, seemed to walk quite low. The moon was lessening. Mostly what you are aware of is the water, the large lagoon of it, the ocean all around, in varying degrees of restlessness but always everywhere restless. Lights on the water, the four or five boats, the beacons winking where there are rocks and shallows. Odd lights of a habitation, near and far. Very faint haze of the mainland. The red lights of the wireless mast on Halangy, so many conversations pass through there. The blue-green watery earth spinning and circling till it stops. Lights, the man-made, amount to nothing, the constellations are shapes only to us and not one moon or star or sun or planet acknowledges the beginning we celebrate with fireworks, song and drink.

 

This morning I had a visit from Mary. I was in the workshop, the light pouring through, the sea behind the dune sounding very near. I was cleaning and sharpening her father's chisels. Steel has a smell when you get the rust off it and shape the blade razor-sharp on an oiled whetstone. I touch the edge and sniff it. I've made a rack above the workbench and as each chisel is done I slot it where it belongs in the order of diminishing width of blade. I've oiled the wooden handles, they have a dull glow now and a good smell. The saws, all of them, all shapes and sizes for various kinds of wood, for logs, planks, plywood, dowling, balsa, also for metal, are restored and they hang in place. Likewise his hammers, planes, pliers, screwdrivers, bradawls… The wood he never used is stacked or laid down so you could easily distinguish the piece you want. In a dozen or more very beautiful old pale green jam jars I've sorted nails and screws into various sizes. I've rigged up better lighting, planed and proofed the two windows and the door. With the heater from my shed you could work all night in any weather if you wished. Yesterday, still clearing a far corner, I opened a sack and found the mallets, chisels, gouges, knives you need for woodcarving and a thick log of apple wood that he had begun to shape into a woman's head and shoulders, the rough tress of her hair coming over on the left side. Mary was surprised by that and surveying the whole place and how far I'd got with it, she said, in a tone I felt to be benevolent, You look set to carry on where he left off. I shrugged and asked her about Alf Lewis.

He came from the mainland, as they mostly do, and beached his leaky boat in Merrick Bay. It was late October. People said he was lucky he hadn't sunk. At the post office he bought a bottle of brandy and a frozen chicken. He asked might there be any work over the winter but nobody much liked the look of him and they were noncommittal. For a week he lived on his boat and waded ashore at low water for provisions and to ask again was there any work. Then came a gale and a high tide, he smashed up under the tamarisks, on the rocks, and that was the end of his boat. But a woman looking after her grandchildren, Betty Daniel, who lived down there took pity on him and said he could live in her boathouse and do odd jobs for rent. And that was more or less the way of it, for fifteen years. He never did many jobs but Mrs. Daniel never seemed to mind. The grandchildren loved him. He got down on his hands and knees and one rode on his back while the other led him by a rope around his neck. They called him Horsey, never anything else, even when they were too big to ride on him. He lived off social security and Mrs. Daniel's charity. She lent him an old punt and he rowed across the channel, bought a
Racing Post
, sat in the Dorrien Arms and bet more than he could afford on the horses. When the tides were big he liked to walk across at low water. He'd time it so he'd get there only paddling and after a few pints he'd wade back, holding his paper and any other bits of shopping above his head. He did that, summer and winter, for fifteen years. Then last August when he stood up to leave the pub a fog had come in, thick as a bag, everybody said, and they said he should wait a couple of hours, there was a boat going back, he could take the boat for once. But he wouldn't be told, he left the pub and vanished. Nobody missed him for a day or two, then the bookmaker phoned Mrs. Daniel and said to tell Alf his horse had won at 10 to 1 and was he coming over to collect his winnings. Afterwards that made people laugh, since he was never lucky with his bets. Mrs. Daniel and the grown-up grandchildren were very upset but nobody else was. Still, said Mary, it gave her a chill around the heart to think of anyone vanishing in the sea like that, in a fog.