No Man's Island (Tamara Hoyland Book 2) Read online

  Behind a wind-break of woven fencing and Californian pines, a garden thrived in the temperate climate. Ian used to say that he was colder in a London spring than ever in a Forway winter. But the wind was incessant. Freya’s plants, and indeed all growth on the island, were sculpted by it. Wind speeds faster than a hundred miles an hour had several times broken instruments set to measure them, and sometimes solid clouds of spray would blow from one side of the island to the other.

  On the bench outside the cottage a black cat was asleep. One side of the double door—designed to push open whatever the wind direction—was propped wide. The laboratory, across the yard, already looked abandoned, a depressing reminder, but Freya did not glance at it.

  In Pedro Barnes’s lifetime the house was scattered with the belongings he left in his wake: pipes, matches, books, papers, tools, specimens, coffee cups, irresistible driftwood, and the materials for half-completed experiments. These days the kitchen was tidy and smelt of lavender instead of cooking.

  “Lovely smell,” Tamara said.

  “I can’t smell anything these days. Old age.”

  “Chain-smoking more likely.”

  “Too late to stop now,” Freya said.

  The low-ceilinged living-room would have been a good setting for a more fey, more folk-tale-type figure than Freya. Ian’s mother had become so fat as to seem dropsical. Her ankles swelled out above her shoes, her tiny hands dangled from trunklike arms. A famous portrait of her as the young wife of a famous professor, by Kokoschka, hung in the Courtauld Gallery, but she looked like a distortion of it now. Generations of Pedro Barnes’s students had written verses to the beautiful woman whose shadow lurked in the grotesque flesh. Many of them were at retiring age themselves by now, and she was beginning to feature in memoirs, a popular and influential hostess at university festivities.

  Pedro Barnes was within seven years of retirement when Freya found that she was expecting a child. Their giggling friends had suppressed their mirth for long enough to say that it was no joke at her age. Her contemporaries, now grandparents, were sympathetic at the prospect of being landed with a baby that could not be handed back to its young parents when it became tiresome.

  But Pedro and Freya welcomed Ian as the old woman welcomed Tom Thumb. Pedro retired early, they enlarged their holiday home on Forway, and brought their son up on the island. And now Freya was the only one left.

  “I should have come to see you even if they hadn’t sent me to do a field survey,” Tamara said guiltily. She had not considered Freya’s loneliness before.

  Freya always knew what to say. Just now—nothing. She sat in the cane chair with its coracle back, which Pedro had ordered for her from the Hebrides. She rested her bulbous ankles on a faded tapestry stool and showered cigarette ash about her. As always she wore a vast canvas smock that covered layers of clothes and rolls of fat. She had whitened tennis shoes on her oddly small feet, and pressing into the skin of her fourth finger was Pedro’s gold and onyx signet ring.

  Tamara thought with determination about her work; she would keep her mind upon impersonal subjects. The field survey: that would be a pleasure—after all, she was really an archaeologist. And the job for which the field survey was a cover? That seemed even more ridiculous now that she was here on Forway. There were no signs of unrest or agitation that she could see. No posters, no huddled groups of conspiratorial whisperers, no sidelong glances, no conversations abruptly broken off—none of the evidence of conspiracy that had been described to her. Perhaps Mr. Black thought that she needed a holiday.

  Lena Gerson came into the cottage without knocking and assumed a welcoming air towards Tamara, as though she were the hostess both on Forway and in this house. She did not look like the conventional escaper from urban corruption. Tamara had expected her to be in the uniform of those who reject the works of civilization, clothes partly homespun and partly made on rather expensive machines but all decorated with patterns derived from either nature or the Third World. Lena Gerson looked like a highly competent secretary—and turned out to have been one. She spoke of her job in London with enough traces of wistfulness in her voice for Tamara to ask, “Do you miss it?”

  Lena smiled at Freya and said quickly, “No, no, not a bit. We’re terrifically happy here. We were both longing to get away.”

  Lena went through to the kitchen, and Tamara watched through the open door as she bent to take a nylon overall out of her bag and put it and some rubber gloves on before beginning to clean the sink and wipe over the cooker.

  “How nice for you that Lena has come to live here,” Tamara said.

  “Yes, she is very kind to me,” Freya agreed.

  “I have brought you a turnip pie, Freya,” Lena called. “There’s plenty for two of you.”

  “You make too much for me, dear. I shared the last one with Sergeant Hicks.” Freya lowered her voice and whispered to Tamara, “I can’t eat that vegetarian food. It gives me indigestion. But it’s kindly meant.”

  “And shall I throw away this bit of cheese? It looks a bit past it to me?” Lena Gerson’s voice was high, with slightly flattened vowels. It was the voice of a suburban housewife on a phone-in programme asking the experts how to remove stains from her table-cloths. It sounded strangely foreign here.

  Tamara felt restless; had James Bond been inhibited by social embarrassment from doing what he wanted? Would he have sat politely giving a hostess the requisite amount of attention before going off to his own work? I should have brought some knitting, she thought. What have Ian’s mother and I in common to converse about now?

  “You have come here at an exciting time, Tamara,” Freya Barnes said after a while. Tamara opened her eyes wide, in assumed incomprehension. Lena Gerson came in, smoothing cream into her hands.

  “Do tell her about it, Freya,” she urged. “She’s sure to be safe.”

  “Oh, Tamara is one of the family,” Freya said.

  “But what is this?” Tamara said. “What’s the great secret?”

  “You know that they have found oil deposits in this part of the western approaches.”

  “But that has been announced, surely, it’s no secret.”

  “What has been kept secret is the plans for extracting it. It’s only because Selwyn Paull still has his contacts in Whitehall that we know.”

  “Isn’t it done with oil rigs? I’ve seen pictures—”

  “Their plan for this area is rather different.”

  “You won’t believe it, Tamara,” Lena Gerson said eagerly.

  “They want to evacuate all the islanders,” Freya went on, “all the natives forced off the island, and the whole of Forway used as a rock-based oil rig. Have all their camps and everything here, devote the whole place to it.”

  “Isn’t it incredible?” Lena said. “Can you imagine it? Just think—at Sullem Vog, on Shetland, their pay-roll is five thousand people! They’ve built two whole villages for them, quite apart from housing some in a converted car ferry. That’s what an oil terminal takes. And that’s what they want to do here.”

  “Are you sure?” Tamara asked.

  “They have just a few more days to change their plans. Until Friday,” Freya said sternly.

  “What happens then?”

  “The Visit. The first Royal Visit to Forway ever.”

  “I still think it’s a shame we can’t have one of the important ones. The queen, say, or …” Lena grumbled.

  “It will be the last Royal Visit too,” Freya went on firmly. “Unless the Visitor brings a message that the oil plan has been dropped.”

  “What then—if there’s no such message?”

  “We make our Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Our independence from all three of the governments that have staked a claim to Forway. France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.”

  Lena Gerson’s hands were clasped under her chin. She said, “It is all so exciting.”

  “I shall invest Pedro’s money in a Trust for Forway.”

  In the
days when she and Ian Barnes had talked about marriage, the Barnes wealth had been one of Tamara’s causes for hesitation. Pedro Barnes had become staggeringly rich during his retirement. He had patented several inventions of practical application in industry. The most lucrative, ironically, was indispensable for the extraction of oil. Pedro and Freya Barnes, and now Freya on her own, could have gone to live anywhere in the world; yet they chose this chunk of weather-battered rock. Tamara had no moral scruples about wealth, but she wanted to live a life that was normal by the standards of her class. “I am a product of the puritan ethic,” she used to say ruefully to Ian. He had been similarly conditioned. They wanted to live in a house of no more than comfortable size, they wanted only occasional domestic help, they wanted to send their children to local schools, without the constant fear of burglars or kidnappers. They both wanted to need their jobs. “I wasn’t cut out to be rich,” Tamara had said. Ian used to reply, “We can always give it away,” but they had both known it would be hard. “I wish I had your problems,” Tamara’s sister, Alexandra, who was married to a teacher and had three small children, had commented. “You can always give it to me.”

  Now it seemed that Freya was indeed about to give the wealth away.

  “It sounds a bit drastic,” Tamara said mildly.

  “We can see no alternative.”

  “But won’t anyone else—”

  “We have had them all. The conservationists, archaeologists, ornithologists, biologists, botanists—Forway has been a living laboratory for years. But only money gives power.”

  “You have to live here,” Lena Gerson said, “to understand how wonderful it is. There is something about the way of life …” She took a compact from her bag and examined her face carefully before painting on a renewal of lipstick. “I must go back. Rik’s waiting.” She gathered herself together in a feminine flurry and left, waving as she walked past the window.

  “Your cousin doesn’t look quite naturalized yet,” Tamara remarked.

  “I doubt whether she likes Forway as much as her husband does,” Freya agreed. “I didn’t myself when Pedro decided to come here permanently. Holidays were one thing, all the year round quite another. Still, look at me now.”

  “Rik Gerson is the away-from-it-all type, is he?”

  “Seems to be. And I must say that Lena is taking a lot of trouble over me—not all in the hope of a little legacy, I’m sure. In any case, she and Rik quite agree with our independence plans. They are as involved as anyone.”

  “I can see you are all quite committed.”

  “After all, darling,” Freya said, “what would I do as a lonely multimillionairess all alone away from Forway? This is what Pedro would have wanted me to do. Ian, too. Ian. I used to warn him to drive carefully. Killed outright, they said. Ian …” Her plump face loosened, its lines slackening as though an internal strength had been relaxed. She mumbled indistinguishable words and twisted her hands together. In a few moments she said, her voice weaker, “I get confused sometimes.” She lit another cigarette, not commenting on the almost unsmoked one that Tamara had stubbed out, when it fell from her fingers.

  Tamara said gently, “What will the islanders do with the money?”

  “We are making elaborate arrangements. You’d be surprised. Boarding schools in Switzerland, a helicopter of our own, a proper cottage hospital. In future we shall ask nothing from the big powers. It’s little enough they gave when we needed it, withdrawing our ferry from England, refusing us a scheduled flight. We shall leave them to fight over territorial waters without us. It will be a new world.”

  “I’m afraid you will find snags,” Tamara said soberly.

  “I dare say. One always does. But world opinion will be on our side. We have arranged press coverage too. It will make a good story—David and Goliath. Come along, darling, I’ll show you your room.” Freya took the weight on her wrists, heaving herself up, and led Tamara to what had been Ian’s bedroom. Tamara remembered it well. Could they have gone on being happy here? She was uneasy at the strangeness of the island. This could never have been my home, she thought, but knew that Ian would have wished to live in it.

  Tamara put her clothes into the drawers now emptied of Ian’s property. She disposed her gadgets. The miniature camera in a box of tampons, the various eavesdropping kits rolled into her underwear. The lipstick and the deodorant spray had false bottoms and dangerous contents. She could not imagine needing any of them here. The simplest weapon was sold in stationers’ shops, a razor-blade set into a plastic handle. That went into a canvas satchel along with the spring measure, the clinometer, and the thirty-metre tape. The ring on the end of that could be unscrewed to fit on her finger, with a lethally sharp point jutting upwards.

  She hesitated with her hand on a tin of powder but decided to go the whole hog while she was about it. She spilt some talc in strategic places and used spit to stick a couple of hairs across the drawers. She felt uneasily that all she could be was conscientious, like a student whose work was bad but gained points for effort.

  Chapter 5

  I am Magnus Paull, the son of Sir Selwyn Paull. I was born on Forway and spent periods of my childhood there. My most recent trip to Forway had been about a year before Tamara was sent there. I was about due to pay a filial visit in any case and it was convenient to be out of London just then since the girl who had been living with me for the last few months was beginning to nag about marriage and mortgages, and we had consequently agreed to part. I reminded her of our initial agreement that there would be no ill feeling if things didn’t work out. She thought things were working out. However, I could not at that time imagine the woman with whom I would be prepared to stay for ever. There never seemed to be a shortage of candidates for the left-hand side of my large bed and the row of fitted cupboards in my entrance hall. It seemed wise to leave the girl a few days to move herself and her belongings out. “You may be the bee’s knees in bed, Magnus,” she shouted after me, “but one of these days you’ll find a girl who wants more than just your pretty face.”

  I flew as far as Cork from London Heathrow. The wait in Cork was supposed to be two hours and turned out to be much longer, which should not have surprised me; I had heard the weather forecast before leaving London. “And now here is a gale warning. Southerly gale eight, strengthening severe gale force nine, sea areas Rockall, Bailey … sea areas Shannon, Forway, Irish Sea, severe gale force nine strengthening storm force ten, veering easterly later.”

  I sat morosely in the bar, jostled by passengers waiting for an overdue flight to Aberdeen. Airports are the century’s purgatory: misery on the way to better or worse. A girl with rainbow-coloured hair tried chatting me up, but she had bad teeth and legs. These mass-produced people were unspeakably depressing. As often, I reminded myself that if one did not live in the century of the common man, one would not live in the century of aspirin and piped water either. How I hate the human race, how I hate its silly face … especially when it chatters about the trivia a quick survey revealed: golf handicaps, had one remembered to turn the gas off, could one buy Marlboros in Scotland, what would whisky cost there, the likelihood of rain, the certainty of delay. On my left a fat man and a sequinned woman were carrying on the Great Bores of Today double-glazing conversation. On my right a local man with a taxi driver’s badge in his lapel was talking to a small Englishman in dirty jeans.

  The Irish voice said, “So you’re none the worse? No more than a dunt on the head …”

  “We haven’t regretted it for a moment. Of course it costs a fortune …”

  “There were after-effects. They say I have memory loss.”

  “The saving on your fuel bills, what with the price of oil these days …”

  “How can they tell about your memory? What do you forget?”

  “When you come to sell, it raises the value …”

  “When I say that I’ve forgotten.”

  The Irishman whistled. “That’s neat. A blighty one.”

 
“The other real plus, it keeps the noise out …”

  “What’s a blighty one?”

  “Course you have to be careful not to get taken for a ride. Plenty of cowboys …”

  “In the First World War. A wound that got you sent home for the duration. They used to shoot their own feet off.”

  “Too many rip-off merchants around these days, conning the householder …”

  “I didn’t hit myself on the head.”

  “And of course it’s a real deterrent in case of burglars.”

  “A really scientific job,” the Irishman said, clapping the other man on the back.

  The tannoy announced the departure of the helicopter for Forway. The fat householder went on indefatigably, “It needn’t spoil the look of the place. After a day or so you hardly notice it.”

  I stood up and so did the small man in jeans. He went over to help a depressed-looking girl with expensive luggage and London clothes. The three of us were the only passengers, but it was too noisy to talk even if we had wanted to. The machine sprang up and down as though the sky was a trampoline. Later in the day my travelling companions were identified to me: Rik and Lena Gerson, coming househunting to Forway.

  There is no such thing as a terminal or heliport on the island. The machine simply comes down on a flattish piece of ground—one of the few there are—marked out with a concrete H, and the passengers scurry to or from it, ducking under the whirlwind of the rotors; the helicopter makes a quick turn-around.

  Freya and Pedro Barnes had been waiting in their old van, and I passed them as they went to the helicopter. Pedro carried Freya’s luggage, and she limped badly, leaning on two sticks. Since I had last seen her, Ian Barnes had been killed in a car crash, so it was not surprising that she had aged.

  Only Freya climbed in. By the time the helicopter was heading north again and one could hear oneself speak, Pedro was by my side, offering to drop me at my father’s place. Petrol and diesel are in short supply on the island, and people seldom drive anywhere, but Freya had been very crippled. “They are giving her a tin hip,” Pedro told me. “She’s got so bad, she can hardly move.”