In Another Country (6 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Island

 

 

20 October

 

T
here weren't many on the boat—mostly birders coming over to observe the departures and for sightings of any rare vagrants. I eavesdropped a bit, on deck and in the bar they talked about nothing else. Before we left, one of them got texted that a red-eyed vireo had just been seen on Halangy dump and when he told the others they were taken up in a sort of rapture, big grown men with their beards, bad-weather wear and all the equipment. They made sounds that were scarcely words any more, little shouts and squeals, a hilarity, in the enchantment of their passion. I loitered on the fringes.

After a while, when we were clear of the harbour and coasting quietly along and had passed the first lighthouse, I went downstairs, right down to the lower saloon, below the waterline, and lay on a bunk under a blanket. There was nobody else down there. I felt okay on my own in the big throbbing of the engines, I felt them to be in my chest, like a heart, but I was okay, I kept seeing the faces of the birders when they received the news about the red-eyed vireo, I heard their voices, the transformation wrought in them by their enthusiasm, and it seemed to me that I knew what it was like to be in a company of friends in a common passion that would do no harm. Then I must have slept, but not deeply, near the surface, in the rapids of sleep, not restful, and in the whitewater hurry of the images the clearest, flitting not abiding but as clear as the blade of the moon when it cuts through the clouds, was you. And I believed you wouldn't mind if I wrote to you now and then. Everyone needs a fellow-mortal to address. You won't mind?

When I went up on deck the islands were coming into view. I watched them materialize in their own domain of light. It seemed to me a quite peculiar blessing that a place so manifestly different, far away, out on the borders, could be approached by me.

At Halangy I went down the gangway among the birders in single file and soon found the boat to Enys.

So here I am, camped snugly in the angle of two walls for shelter against the expected weather, the site to myself, the season ending and the small birds resting up here in the tamarisk hedges before they launch themselves across the ocean.

 

Sunday 25 October

 

The island is barely half a mile wide at its widest. There's a channel of the sea on the east and open sea on the west and my home (for now) is midway between, just under the winds that mostly come from the west. My first evening there was a pause, a complete silence. My second, and all through the night, the weather came over me like nothing I have ever been out in or lain under before, so thorough in its strength, loud in its howling, the wind, the rain, the waves after hundreds of leagues without impediment making their landfall here. Weather knows itself at last when it finds some terra firma to hit against, and best, most thoroughly, knows itself when there are some habitations too and creatures in them who can feel what it is like. Soon after daybreak the rain ceased and I went out in the wind, crouching and gasping for my own small breath in it. The scraps of abandoned fields were strewn with stones, wreck, seaweed, dead things that had lived in salt water. The waves slid up the sheer face of the northern headland and spilled back milk-white off the crown. Nowhere are we higher than a hundred feet above the sea. I crawled along the chine in a blizzard of spindrift through the tumuli home to this tiny lair with every stitch of dress and pore of exposed flesh sticky and proofed with salt. My little stove was a wonder to me, its hoarse flame, the can of drinkable water, the inhalation of the steam of coffee.

Since then, though the wind has dropped, I can always hear the sea, like a vast engine working just over the hill. It's as though I've been taught something, had my ears and my heart opened to a fact of sound I was ignorant of and now I shall always be able to hear it, even in the city where you live, there on the pavement in the din of traffic if I paused and bowed my head I would hear this sea.

Tomorrow night I'll be closer still, but more secure. The woman who runs the campsite has offered me accommodation in a shed. I can fit it out as I like, she says, there's a table and chair and a camp bed in it already and she'll lend me a bigger stove. In return, I'll paint the wash house here, do a few repairs, clear up, make myself useful. If she thinks me odd, she didn't say so. Generally someone blows in, she said, about this time and quite often over the years they've been about your age. You'll pick up more work if you want it, she said. If you're handy, if you want to stay. And it suddenly seemed to me that I
am
quite handy, that I do want to stay, that I'll be glad to be an odd-job man for a while and possess my own soul in patience in a shed within a stone's throw of the sea.

 

It's dark an hour earlier from today. I know you don't like that day of the year.

 

If you did want to write, c/o the campsite would find me. In fact, c/o Enys would, enough people have seen me by now on my walks or at the post office.

 

26 October

 

I went in the church today. It's down by the quay. Every now and then I remember—I mean, feel again—why I was ever with the monks. Four solid walls containing stillness, the light through the windows. Really it's only that, the possibility of being quiet and of receiving some illumination. I don't think that's too much to ask once in a while. Afterwards I mooched among the graves. There aren't many different names, half a dozen families seem to own the place. Newcomers get cremated and are remembered on tablets by the gate. The sea is so close, who wouldn't want to be buried or at least remembered here?

I like my shed. It smells of the sea. It's roomier than I expected and with electricity too because there's a workshop on the same plot, not used now but still connected. Mary lent me a heater as well as a stove, I trundled them down in a wheelbarrow with the rest of my gear and now I'm nicely at home. I cleaned the place out, mended the roof where the felt had blown off, shaved the window so it closes tight … Things like that. A few other jobs want doing and there are all manner of tools lying idle in the workshop. Help yourself, Mary said. Tomorrow I'll start on the wash house. That's the deal.

I've put my notebook, my writing paper and my couple of books on planks from the sea laid over two packing cases. That's what Mary meant by a table. It's to write on, read at, eat off—under the window that faces out towards the sea. The chair's a real one, decently made. It came in off a wreck many years ago. The bed I shall call a truckle bed because I like that word. I took your photo out and did think of standing it on the planks to glance at while I write to you—but I shan't. I keep my eyes on the page, the nib, the black ink, the making of the letters and the words. If I stare out of the window towards the dune that hides the sea, if I let the vagueness come over, if I don't keep my eyes by force on the here and now, I see you at once, it's my gift and my affliction.

 

31 October

 

The last boat of the season arrives and leaves today. That's not as final as it sounds, there's a helicopter from Halangy once a week and I daresay I could scrape together enough for the fare if I panicked and had to get out. But the way things are now I don't think I shall panic. I'm as well off here as anywhere. Wherever I was, there'd still be the want of you.

Yesterday, if you'd been watching, I think you would have laughed out loud. (Your laughter is like nobody else's, it always made me feel there were deeper, freer, more abundant sources of mirth than I would ever have access to.) The birders arrived. I looked up from writing and there they were, about thirty of them, all men, in army camouflage, with their heavy tripods, cameras and telescopes, they must have come over the hill to this west side and they lined up barely twenty yards away, with their backs to me, in silence, in the mild early-morning light. After a while I went out and stood behind them. None paid me any attention. And when I asked I got two words in reply: rosy starling. I could see where they were looking—through the opening of the hedges, slantwise about three hundred yards down the length of the dune—but I couldn't see any bird. Then they all gasped and made the sounds of communal glee I had heard on the boat, then a great shout and they gathered up their equipment and began to run heavily away. The one I was standing next to, a fat man even more laden than his comrades, set off last. The others were almost out of sight and hadn't waited for him and nobody turned round to see was he following or not. His cumbersomeness troubled me for the rest of the day.

 

Sunday 1 November

 

I couldn't sleep for some hours last night. I thought very
brokenly
of you. Or, to be more exact, very
breakingly
—you were breaking, or my power to remember or imagine you was impaired, like sight or hearing, and back came the worry that everything I ever held true will crumble, perish and turn to dust from within, from within me, the power to uphold any faith and hope and love will erode, perhaps very quickly the way a cliff might collapse that was riddled through and through and nobody had known. I got up, to be less at the mercy of all this, and went out to the dune, the tide was high, close, but the washing, sliding, unfurling and withdrawal of it was very muted under cloud and in a light fog. That bay is a horseshoe, its headlands and an island behind and some reefs in part barricade it, so that in a storm the ocean breaks through very violently, being fretted, slewed and rifled by these hindrances, but last night it made a lingering and gentle entrance, at leisure, dispensing itself, its immensity, easefully and as though mercifully. Having seen this and after my fashion understood it in a light without moon or stars, a light embodied in drifts of vapour, silvery, I went back into my shed in the embrace of the tamarisks and behind closed eyes I insisted on that gentle incoming and could still hear the sounds of it, the breathing of water over shingle, and this morning I felt something had been added to my stock of resources against disintegration: an ocean entering quietly and giving bearably.

 

Sunday 8 November

 

There was a bonfire last night, on the beach that twins with mine, over the hill. They built it well below high water on the fine shingle and the weed. I haven't stared into the heart of such a fire for years. It was mostly old pallets and wood-wormed timbers, but loppings from the pittosporum hedges too and their leaves flared and vanished with an almost liquid sizzle. I noticed that flames can live for a second or two quite detached from the substance they were burning—in the air, just above, they dance and vanish. There was hardly any wind so that the fire extending in sparks reached very high.

I met a few people. Several came up and said hello and I got a couple of offers of labour, cash-in-hand, which I need since what I do on the campsite I'm paid for with my shed. The hotel manager offered me some painting and decorating. He has closed for the winter. He kept open last year but this year trade is worse. Amiable chap, a bit nervous. Then a young man who farms at the south end asked had I ever cut hedges and I said yes, I had, years ago. He said there'd be plenty to do for him, if I liked. When I was with the monks I simplified the whole business into the two words: work and pray. The work was all with my hands, and by prayer I meant concentrating on whatever good I could imagine or remember, so as not to go to bits.

The women had made soup and hot dogs and there was a trestle table with beer and wine on and things for the kids. You helped yourself. I put my last ten-pound note in the kitty. I felt very blithe. And when after that I got my offers of work I wondered at my ever losing faith.

Much later, I came back. I wanted to watch the sea overwhelm the fire, and I did so, very closely. The hissing and the conversion of flame to steam were remarkable but best I liked the ability of fire to survive quite a while on blackened beams that floated. The sea swamped the
ground
of the fire but strewed its upper elements for a briefly continuing life on the surface left and right. True, the waves were soft. Breakers would finish it quickly.

 

20 November

 

The island is used to people passing through—or people trying to settle and failing. There are the few families who rule the graveyard, that stock won't leave and it will be many years before they die out or get diluted and lose their identity among the incomers who take root. A family from Wolverhampton, another from Bristol, another from Halifax are powerful and one of them may dominate in the end. But if they want to be buried they'll have to go elsewhere, here they'll have to make do with a tablet on the wall by the way in. So some do settle, they blow in and root tenaciously. But the chief impression you get is of instability. Whether it's sex or panic, I can't tell, but every year there's some breakup, ­re­­arrangement and departure.

I think they quite like the people who are passing through. The island economy, such as it is, depends on them. Of course, they're a risk as well, any one of them might become the solvent of a marriage and perhaps of a small business too. There was a baker here till a few years ago, then a girl came to help in the café and he left with her for London when the season ended. I guess some wives and husbands watch very anxiously who will land when the season starts again; others will watch hopefully. And it is certain that several in houses on their own have watched year after year, have gone down to the quay when the launch came in and have idled there and were never looked at by a stranger who might have stayed. They watch long after the likely time has passed. One such, a very lonely man, against all the odds and beyond all rational hope was chosen, as you might say, by a visitor not half his age. She stayed three years, then left him and the islands without warning.