No Man's Island (Tamara Hoyland Book 2) Page 2

  Two free-lance journalists were sharing Tamara’s table. They were on their way to Forway too, though nothing that they said implied that they had heard whispers of political upheavals there. Mr. Black had not told Tamara how he came by the copy of the notice he had shown her, but he had said that nobody outside the island knew of it, and that she was not to let on that she knew of it inside the island. These journalists were very grumpy about the miseries of second-class travel and the tribulations of the free-lance. They tittered desperately about the coming ferry crossing, gesturing out of the window where even the dead elm trees tossed in a strengthening wind.

  “God knows where we’ll stay when we get to the bloody place,” the young man said.

  “You don’t suppose they demand proof of a bed before they let you land?” exclaimed his companion. “That happened to me on a Greek island once.”

  “Sleeping under a hedge, oh God.”

  “There will be by-laws.” The woman was clanking with necklaces and loaded down by cameras. Her pointed nails were scarlet. Would she look smart or silly on Forway, Tamara wondered, twitching at her own jeans.

  She recognized the man suddenly. Carl Hawker: the man who had come to fame by revealing the identities of Communist spies, past and present, and hinting at those of the future. How cross he would have been to hear that it had taken her from London to Exeter to attach a name to those features.

  “Mary and I had a holiday there two years ago,” he said despondently. “That’s why they thought I should cover it now. It rains for one thousand four hundred and forty minutes every day.”

  “Jolly for campers.”

  “The campers who are fools enough to go there deserve what they get, which is a pitch on a soaking sponge. We put up with a peasant woman in a shack. The guide-book said it was a voyage out of the twentieth century.”

  The train’s terminus was at Penzance, where the passengers for Forway were decanted onto a platform near the pier. The ferry boat looked a frail cockle-shell for the eight-hour crossing, and it was already bouncing up and down in a minatory fashion. The two journalists evidently relied on alcohol, and Carl Hawker was heard loudly recommending a mixture of port and brandy. Tamara swallowed a double dose of Stugeron. Her distaste for and distrust of the sea had been one of the major points of difference between her and Ian. And this boat was peculiarly unattractive. It sailed once a week, a shallow-bottomed tub—there was no deep-water anchorage at Forway—rusty and paint-chipped, reeking of diesel and vomit. At one time the British government had subsidized the ferry service. When the subsidy dwindled, the cost of goods sent to and from Forway became not simply ridiculous but impossible. A year ago the subsidy had been withdrawn, and the ferry company said that its loss-making service would soon cease as a consequence. No alternative suggestions about supplying the island had been made, although it was dependent upon its imports of such staples as paraffin and diesel fuel, sugar, salt, tea, coffee, alcoholic drinks, and everything made of metal, quite apart from the fruit and vegetables that could not grow in its peaty wastes. To be completely reliant on home-produced goods, few as they were, such as salted fish, feathers, and fulmar oil, knitwear and harsh cloth, tough meat and sour cheese, as the islanders had briefly been during the two world wars, would have been intolerable to a generation educated to the expectation of comforts by television. A leader in the Times had used the dread words “Evacuation of the island’s population.” Shortly after that announcement, Ian had taken Tamara to Forway. Moored within the small harbour was a craft belonging to an international mineral-exploration company. Its elegant paintwork and gleaming brass showed up the squalor of the ferry. It looked as though there might be resources on Forway after all—for some.

  No sleeping berths were available on the ferry. Tamara found herself a corner on a torn leatherette bench and wrapped herself in her duffle coat. The lounge, as it was grandly called, was decorated with posters inviting visitors to sample the simple pleasures of Forway: rock climbing, walking, nature study. A picture, surely in breach of the Trades Descriptions Act, showed bikini-clad girls running across a golden beach. In fact, unlike the Isles of Scilly, Forway was not edged with flour-soft sand. It had two stony coves, delightful for geologists but neither safe for bathers nor comfortable for baskers, and one small shell beach on which for all but about seven days of the year the wind rasped abrasives against any uncovered skin.

  It was too noisy and dim to read. Tamara sunk her chin down into the rough warmth of her coat. Last time she made this crossing, she had pillowed her face on Ian’s shoulder. He had been too excited about going home to sleep.

  What was it about that bleak rock that enchanted its natives? Tamara had tried to understand—indeed, had tried to love it too; for in a lifetime with Ian she could expect to spend months if not years on Forway. She had gone there expecting it to be like the Scillies, which she knew well from childhood holidays and which were obviously lovable. In Scilly, jewel-coloured islands surround a limpid lagoon; subtropical plants flower in scented gardens. But not even a myth maker could ever have thought that Forway was a promised land, Ultima Thule though it might be. The climate was hostile, the soil sour, and the island had never been a welcome landfall. It is an isolated rock with a cluster of smaller, barren rocks around it. Their base slopes into the depths. Like St. Paul’s Rocks in the South Atlantic Ocean, it is one of the few exceptions to an almost universal rule, that oceanic islands have a volcanic origin. In the remote past, unimaginable stresses in the midst of the earth must have pushed this rocky mass upwards until the island protruded from the deep sea. It has been described, in terms ranging from the cool to the appalled, by numerous travellers. Any ship forced into its minimal shelter would leave as soon as possible. Any mariner who survived shipwreck on this inhospitable shore—and the shores were exceeded in danger only by the savage inhabitants for most of recorded history—stayed until they were rescued by chance transport. Forway might have been a desert island for all the means of escape it offered.

  Forway’s history was vague, but for the certainty that it was brutish and nasty. When the British navy smoked out the nest of pirates there in the eighteenth century, the wretched peasants who had been those pirates’ slaves found their shacks destroyed also. For a while it was used as a prison, the Northern Hemisphere’s answer to St. Helena, but no competent governor would stay there, and without proper control the prisoners themselves became wreckers and pirates. A garrison was stationed there during the Napoleonic wars but was soon withdrawn when its men mutinied and escaped; they said that it would even be better to be pressed into the navy. During the world wars of the present century, garrisons were maintained. Small detachments of soldiers grumbled their way through four boring years. They were given the rations of men on overseas service.

  The suppression of piracy by the British navy had managed to reduce the inhabitants of Forway to wretched poverty although wrecks continued to bring some harvest to the island. But, for food, the population became dependent on the potato crop. When that failed in Ireland, it failed in Forway too. But somehow the islanders survived, self-sufficient and self-supporting—just—and self-limiting. The small nucleus of population was reinvigorated by a man with a mission from Glasgow. Septimus Lisle arrived in 1887 with his prayer-book, Bible, and a tramp steamer full of equipment. Ten years later his burgeoning civilization was augmented by some shipwrecked mariners who chose to stay where they had been succoured. A few years previously they would have been more likely to meet death than rescue on those shores. By the turn of the century the huddle of shacks had turned into a miniscule town, with one or two slate roofs showing among those that were turfed and with a chapel that was well attended on Sundays and used as a schoolroom on weekdays. One of the Lisle sons had brought back a brass plate from London where he had gone to train as a lawyer. A doctor had left the Cunard line and settled on Forway. A nurse was sent by a Bible missionary society.

  To a British government of the late twentieth
century, Forway was merely one of the many inhabited islands off the coast of the United Kingdom, its legal position anomalous but—until recently—unchallenged, its desirability, with no natural resources, without enough flat land for a runway or enough deep water for a harbour, dubious. If it had been uninhabited it could have been used, no doubt, for strategic purposes; or to experiment with germ warfare.

  Gaunt, bleak, inhospitable, and lonely. It was easy to understand, Tamara thought, how that judgement, quoted in Parliament and in the national press, could be made of Forway. She had made it herself. No wonder it was regarded as a punishment station by the customs officer doing a three-year stretch or by the policeman on his two-year tour of duty. Even the surveyor, camping on The Hill last year, with his taciturn team, for undisclosed purposes, had loosened up enough one night in The Hotel to admit that the best thing that could happen to the dump would be—but at that point he came to himself and would not say which disagreeable fate he would recommend for Forway.

  But to the island nurse, Jeannie Foggo, who had so badly missed the island every day of her training; to Dr. Thetis Lisle, who had not quite realized how much she longed for it until she got back from her seven-year stint in London; to the Yetts men, farming the tiny steep fields first taken in by their grandfather; to the Aragons, that extended clan descending from an ancestor who had survived the shipwreck of his galleon in Armada year and stayed where the sea had washed him; to Kirstie Windows, now asleep on the floor of the lounge of the SS Islander by Tamara Hoyland’s feet: to them all, Forway was warm in welcome, and homely. But in the dawn, when Tamara saw through the damp mist the first glimpse of those striated, dun-coloured rocks rising like a wall of death from the Atlantic, she felt a chill that was not entirely caused by remembering what Mr. Black expected of her.

  Chapter 4

  Freya Barnes was waiting, delighted, to meet Tamara. Larger, more expansive than ever, as though a final bereavement had released her to be herself untrammelled, she embraced Tamara, like an eiderdown, and exclaimed, “You needn’t have brought all that stuff.” She waved her plump hands helpfully while Tamara assembled her equipment. “All Ian’s tools are still here. Have you come to dig?”

  “Just a field survey for the time being.”

  “If you find a treasure, we won’t let you take it away to London this time.”

  Five years before, a remote government that never guessed the worm might turn had refused to let the Forway men retain a silver hoard from the early Christian period which had turned up under a plough. Its removal and display by the British Museum was regarded as an unforgiven robbery.

  Freya linked her cushiony arm in Tamara’s. “My frog is having its oil changed. We’ll collect some food.” Freya’s old Bedford van, her “Frog,” more like a motorized wheelbarrow than a car, was in the open-sided shed that served as the Forway garage, and beside it one of the Yetts men nodded to Tamara as she deposited her baggage. He was talking to a man with a beard who was pointing out faults in a battered ex-post-office van. Freya waved but walked on. She said to Tamara, “You’ll meet him soon enough. Rik Gerson. They weren’t here last time you came. Lena Gerson is a sort of cousin of mine, and they have bought the Peter Aragons’ place. The Peter Aragons have gone to live in Majorca.”

  “Are the Gersons farming?”

  “They try to be self-sufficient, but one does meet them buying tinned spaghetti. The fox takes the chickens, the cow is dry. Lena tries very hard to be part of Forway. But as an outsider …”

  “But if she’s a relation of yours?”

  “Pedro and I were not natives, as you know. We were not accepted overnight. But Pedro was so lovable. Of course everyone here loved him. Lena Gerson … I haven’t any other relatives left. So perhaps …” The old woman broke off and stared at the sea, refusing to squeeze any tears from her eyes. They were the same brilliant turquoise as Ian’s.

  “How do the Gersons manage to live here?” Tamara enquired.

  “Oh, they have a little of their own.”

  It was easy to imagine how hard the Forway men would have tried to discover that little’s source, the postmistress holding letters up to the light to try reading the signature on cheques, the neighbours dropping hints and asking questions, those scrapes at each individual’s reticence that make up life in enclosed communities.

  “Lena spins and knits wool, too,” Freya added.

  “While he knits their spinach, I suppose?”

  “That kind of thing. And they have fixed up some of the outbuildings as holiday lets, but I don’t think that is giving much satisfaction. And then they have a little printing-press.”

  “They can’t make that farm worse than it was,” Tamara said. She had heard on her first visit about that branch of the Aragon family, feckless and uncooperative, with a high proportion of defective children. There had been some tale of a son tethered to a kennel and fed on scraps. Though that was half a century ago, memories were long on Forway.

  Tamara carried Freya’s purchases on a slow progress between the three shops. Everybody had apparently been reminded of Tamara in advance, for she was greeted by name and welcomed with the implication that she belonged here, because Ian Barnes had belonged. She smiled back at faces to which she could only put surnames, and only that because there were few to choose from. Families on Forway were called Yetts, Aragon, Lisle, Windows, and Foggo. The Barnes family was a late addition, and nobody else would bear that name now. And there was the settler Selwyn Paull, who had a son in London. But there had been so much intermarriage between the clans that they were little differentiated in social life. Still, Ian had told her, there was a tall dark strain of Yetts men, a red-faced, blond, stocky Windows type; Tamara doubted now, as she had the previous year, whether she would ever be able to think of most of these islanders as individuals. Forway had stamped them all. They used the same Christian names as each other too. Fred, John, Humphrey, Godfrey, and Magnus, for boys; Thetis (after the first girl whose parents liked the name of a shipwrecked steamer), Jean, Kirstie, and Anona.

  A woman Tamara was sure she had not seen before was buying meat in front of Freya. Her appearance could only be the result of long avoidance of mirrors. Her cheekbone was badly bruised, and when her sleeve fell back her arm showed black and blue. She smelt acrid, as though her clothes were impregnated with old food, and though her macintosh and skirt had evidently once been expensive there were great rips in them now.

  One of Europe’s last witch-hunts had taken place on Forway. This woman looked like the reincarnation of the wretched creature, who had died at last when she fled into the sea and was prevented by thrown stones from struggling back to land. But now the voice was purest Knightsbridge.

  “Four pounds of the sirloin, Mrs. Windows, please,” she ordered. “Well hung if you please. The last joint was not quite to my liking.”

  “Very good, Mrs. Anholt.”

  “And please be so good as to send up some marrow bones for the dogs too.” They watched her as she went serenely across to the shop where Fred Yetts was selling newspapers, paraffin, wellington boots, and all the stock of an old-fashioned general store.

  “Real lady-of-the-manor stuff,” Mrs. Windows said thoughtfully. “Godfrey Lisle always pays her accounts, you know, Mrs. Barnes. He’s her lawyer, of course. I can just remember her old grandfather—and her, too, in the old days. But it shouldn’t be allowed, all the same.”

  “Nonie Anholt grew up on Forway, in The Castle,” Freya told Tamara. “She came back here to live a little while ago.”

  “It isn’t right, that’s what I say,” Mrs. Windows said. “Did you see the bruises today, Mrs. Barnes? The man she has up at The Castle does that. Beats her up. I’ve spoken to Mr. Lisle about it. And I’ve done more too. I’ve written to her son. In Camberley. I got the address from a postcard she sent. I told him to come and take care of his poor old mother. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like up at The Castle, Mrs. Barnes, you wouldn’t really. I had to deliver myself las
t week, John was away in Cork having his teeth seen to, and the mess up there! Ridden with vermin. It shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “Who is to stop her?” Freya Barnes asked. “She prefers it to somewhere sanitized on the mainland.”

  “Have you seen her cousin? That man staying at The Castle? Irish—I heard his voice. You can see he doesn’t treat her right, can’t you? How she looks …!”

  “I remember Nonie Anholt years ago,” Freya said. “Before the war, even. You’ve never seen such a pretty, polished creature. So frivolous and superficial. Never thought about anything but men and clothes. Once at a party in Oxford, she had a hat with a feather curling all down the side of her face. I can see her now, blowing it out of her mouth … even Pedro thought she was charming, and he didn’t often like stupid women. I’d forgotten she had a son. Did you say you’d written to him?”

  “I did that,” Mrs. Windows replied virtuously. “I told him straight. It’s your duty, I said, your duty to come and see after your old mother. That Irishman …”

  Outside the shop, pursued by self-righteous chatter, Freya and Tamara watched Nonie Anholt staggering ahead of them.

  “Tamara, promise you won’t ever do anything for my good,” Freya said suddenly. “If I become like poor Nonie there, for instance—you must always remember it’s my own life.”

  “People like that Mrs. Windows are very powerful, aren’t they?” Tamara said. “Buoyed up by the certainty of their own rectitude.”

  “That’s always been the trouble with Forway, or so people say. The women govern. Their much-discussed opinions are voiced by their men as new-minted decisions.”

  “A gynocracy.”

  “Which is becoming a gerontocracy. We are all too old. Isola Geriatrica …”

  The van was ready, and Freya drove with fine insouciance along the track and hillside to her home. She left the van apparently at random out on the hill.