In Another Country (7 page)

I've got more than enough work now. In fact the manager offered me a room in the hotel but I like my shed too much. I'd pay Mary some rent but she won't have it, so I've begun tidying her workshop. Well, more than tidying it. I'll clear all the junk out, repair outside and in, see to the tools. She says that's a job long wanted doing and who would do it but somebody blown in? She's a Jackson, one of the old families, widowed, her two sons fish for crabs and lobsters, she has a couple of holiday-lets. The workshop was her father's, that's his boat there in the nettles. He was in his workshop or out in his boat most of the time. There was something wrong when he came back from the war. He more or less gave up talking, she said.

The hotel manager, Brian, is on his own. His wife left him at the start of the summer holidays, went to the mainland. It's not even that she fell in love. Suddenly she'd just had enough and she left him, taking the children. He dresses well and is altogether particular about his appearance and his environment. He's a rather fussy employer, which I don't mind. I see through his eyes, at heart he is terrified. He talks a lot to me and I don't mind that either. I guess he's ten years my junior. This is the first year he's had to close and it worries him. Not that he owns the place. A very rich man does. You don't have to stay here, I tell him. If it fails. No, of course not, he says. With my qualifications I can go where I like.

He's taken three other people on, all young. A boy from Melbourne on his way round the world, called Chris. A girl from Manchester, Elaine, who used to come here as a child and should be at university but couldn't face it and is having another year off. And Sarah, from Nottingham, who has finished university and is wondering what to do. I could have had a warm room on a back corridor with this attractive trio. I don't think they would have objected to me.

The hotel is shut till the end of March but Brian opens the bar a couple of nights a week and the regulars arrive. I make an appearance when I feel up to it. If asked, I tell the makings of a tale about myself. Nobody probes. Either it's tact or they're not very curious. My kind come and go, every year there's at least one of us. Mostly they talk and I listen. I'm a good listener. From the hotel back to my shed is no great distance. I go past the Pool, quite an extent of water with only a bar of sand between it and the sea. The Pool is very softly spoken, even when there's a wind, at most you hear a steady lapping. The sea on my left, unless it's very low tide, makes an insistent noise. At high tide walking between the two waters it feels peculiar being a drylander who needs air to breathe. Some nights the dark is intense, the pale sand, the pale dead grass and rushes either side, are all the light there is. There's a lighthouse far out to the southwest, the wink of its beam comes round, and another, closer, to the north, but all you'll see of that one is the ghost of the passage of light on the underside of the cloud. I use my torch as little as possible. I like to feel my way, in at the opening of the tamarisks to my wooden home.

 

27 November

 

The work in the hotel is easy enough. We paint and decorate and we clear things out. Some days I drive the quad and trailer and take old fridges and televisions to the tip. Yesterday I fed fifteen hundred of last year's brochures into the incinerator, a rusty iron contraption with a tall chimney, we call it Puffing Billy. Children are mesmerized by it, Brian says.

Brian misses his family. They are living in the house they kept in Guildford just in case the venture here failed, which it has. He is not from Guildford nor is his wife. They moved there from the north, following the opportunities of his work. Brian detests Guildford and so does his wife. It distresses him that she would rather be there than here. And that she has nobody else, that she didn't fall in love and move to a new place with a new man so as to start again, that also distresses him. He has not even lost out to somebody more desirable. It is simply that she doesn't want to be with him. So she leaves, and takes her children with her, as of right. He hasn't the heart to contest it. Really, he agrees with her. In this beautiful place, a paradise some would say, she can't be happy with him, she can't even make do with him. Instead she takes herself and the children off to a place she detests, just so as not to be with him, and in his heart of hearts he can't blame her. It is not even passionate, she does not passionately hate him, wish to kill him, avenge herself on him for her wasted years. She just wants to be away from him. He tells me this in the bar when everyone else has gone. But he is quite sober, he is not a drunkard, nor is he a gambler, nor in a million years would he raise his hand against her, he scarcely ever raises his voice, he has never hit the children nor even frightened them by throwing things and swearing. It is not rational that she should leave him. It is not in her material interest. Still, she has. He hopes at least the children will come and visit him next Easter when the season has begun again and there are boat trips to the other islands. He will take a day off and perhaps they would like to go fishing. He tells me all this in the empty bar, quite late, still cleanly dressed in his suit and tie, and his watery eyes over his trim moustache appeal to me not for pity but for an explanation. And yet he knows it needs no explanation. I am in my work clothes, which are not much different from any other clothes I've got, my nails are broken and there's paint on my fingers. I know that he confides in me because he assumes I am passing through. Also that I leave his warm hotel and go back in the dark to a place of my own barely half a mile away but out on the rim, as far as he is concerned, eccentric, and when he looks me in the eyes and shakes me by the hand next morning, altogether affable, he knows or thinks he knows that he has nothing to fear from me. I think he assumes I am at least as unhappy as he is. And he is certain that before very long I will go away and he will never see me again.

 

Does Brian interest you? I am trying to interest you in him.

 

30 November

 

I learned this from a lone birder, itself a rare creature, who wandered, fully accoutred, into my precinct early yesterday: that in the winter, and especially about now, first thing they do on their computers every morning is check out the weather over the western Atlantic. They pray for winds, colossal storm winds, blowing our way, because on winds like that the nearctic vagrants get blown in. The worse the storms, the longer-lasting, the better for us, he said. Birds making laborious headway from, it might be, Alaska to, say, Nicaragua, for all their struggling get blown off course—three thousand miles off course—and land up here. Mostly singletons, my birder said, rare things, first-time sightings, and mostly, so far as anyone can tell, they don't, except in a thousand photographs, survive. The star last year was a great blue heron, a juvenile. The winds blew steadily for a week or more and the birders waited—not for a great blue heron in particular: a varied thrush or a laughing gull or a Wilson's snipe would have made them happy enough. The GBH, as he kept calling it, was beyond their wildest dreams. The creature landed exhausted on Halangy, in the reeds of Lower Moors, around midday on 7 December and was observed and photographed by scores of enthusiasts, summoned from here, there and everywhere, all afternoon, feeding, until the weather worsened, torrential rain came horizontally in, the light declined and the juvenile vanished, ‘never to be seen again.' My birder liked that phrase and repeated it, in tones of wonderment: ‘never to be seen again.'

 

6 December

 

You mustn't think I live too monkishly. I'm never very cold and I eat pretty well. I found an old army greatcoat in the workshop and I put that round my shoulders when I sit and read or write. I can get most things it occurs to me to want at the post office near the quay and, besides, there's a shopping boat to Halangy once a week, though if the weather's very rough the supply ship from the mainland can't sail. I went to Halangy last week and spent a good bit on books. The one bookseller is giving up and he wanted rid of his stock. I bought a couple of things I know you'd like and now they and the rest sit on a shelf I made of a plank of driftwood.

Altogether my shed is quite well appointed. When I take junk from the hotel or from Mary's workshop to the tip I always look through what other people have thrown out. I got the brackets for my shelf from there, and an Italian coffee maker, a Bialetti, one like yours, that works okay, and two nice cups. Two wine glasses and a beer mug also. There was a mirror I might have had but I didn't want it in the shed. I've the wash house to myself just up the hill. Mary gave me a dinner plate. I'm okay. I don't think you would like the long hours of darkness but I don't mind so much. There's work in the evenings at the hotel if I want, and there's the bar some nights. But often I prefer it here. I do a bit more at the workshop. It's coming on nicely. And Mary gave me a little radio so I lie on my truckle bed and listen to that sometimes. You might think the news would be easier to bear being so remote but in fact it's worse. I suppose I'm not distracted. The little box in the dark is very close, the voices say the bad things direct into your ear. When I've had enough or if I don't feel up to listening to the radio I lie there and listen to the sea instead. And I think—though it's not exactly thinking, more like being a shade already in the underworld among the whispering of other shades in chance encounters out of time. You are among them some nights, though always as a visitor, you always make it clear you don't belong there. I've wondered lately when it was I stopped expecting or even hoping to be happy. I push the date back further and further, into my youth, into my childhood, vengefully, as though to wipe out my life, I cast my shadow back, longer and longer, to chill all the life I ever had in darkness though I know it is a terrible untruth I am perpetrating.

Here's okay. I do like the people and they interest me. And I like the work, especially in the fields southward. I cut the hedges. Nathan has given me a field to start with that hasn't been cut since he took over, the tops have shot up six or eight feet higher than they should be. He said the trimmer, fixed on the tractor, would hardly work and could I manage with loppers, a bowsaw and the ladder? It would be slow work, he knew. I answered that suited me perfectly. I'll tash it with the pitchfork and come round after with a buckrake on the tractor. Fine, he said. So when the weather's kind I skip the painting and decorating and cut fence all day, on my own, content. I find the old slant cuts from years ago, where the height should be, and work along level with them. It's mostly pittosporum, a silver grey, they remind me of the olive branches, perhaps it was on Ithaca. They make a whoosh when they fall over my shoulder through the air. You cut an opening in no time and there's the sea, running some mornings a hard blue, then suddenly black, jade green, turquoise and you see stilts of sun far out probing over pools of light, and shafts of rainbow almost perpendicular, just beginning their curve, then they break off. If I stay I'll have cut the hedges of all of Nathan's fields. That will be something done. And why shouldn't I stay?

Nathan and his wife are making a go of it. She's local, he arrived. There's no future in bulbs and flowers any more so they're growing potatoes, broccoli, carrots, spinach, stawberries, all manner of things in abundance. The hotel buys from them and so do the self-catering visitors. His wife works as hard as he does. They'll make out all right, you can see it in their faces, the way they look at you, candid and appraising. They're settled, they'll make their way, their children will grow up here and have a good inheritance.

 

9 December

 

I had a shock this morning. I was at my table writing, concentrating hard, trying to be exact, vaguely conscious of the daylight strengthening, the sparrows and starlings in the hedges, the sea risen up under the dune, and I raised my eyes, for the right word, to get nearer the truth, and saw through the glass a face so close I had for an instant, long enough for a lifetime, the conviction that I looked into a mirror and the face I saw was mine: a big lopsided grinning face, baldheaded but for some white remnants, the eyebrows albino-pale, the teeth all angles, the blurting tongue very red, the eyes of a blue so weak it looked dissolved almost to nothing in an overwhelming blankness… Twelve hours later, writing this letter—I call it a letter—to you, I don't conjure up the face by force of memory to let you see it too, I can see it on the window pane, this side not outside, on the black glass which when there is no light in the tamarisk grove does indeed more or less distinctly reflect my own. The worst is its mix of senility and childishness—that raised the hairs on my neck, not for nearly a year have I felt such convincing proof that the heart of life is horror. He raised a hand and tapped on the window, his big head wobbled and wagged from side to side, then his hand went to his mouth, to cover his chortling, as though he remembered it is rude to laugh however ridiculous the stranger you are looking at may be. When he did that—made the gesture of consideration for my feelings—I knew there was no harm in him and tears came to my eyes, my face was wet with tears, I wiped them away, I smeared the salt of them across my lips, and seeing this he uncovered his mouth, showed me the palms of both his empty hands, made little grunts and mutters of pity for me, his features worked, sorrow possessed them, and I stood up, opened the door, to welcome him in. That was too much, too suddenly, he backed away, but as though he didn't wish to, as though he'd stay if he could be sure there was no harm in me. I put out my hand, as you might to a bird or an animal that—you supposed—had come to your door because it needed food or care, and he paused at that, near the useless boat, about fifteen yards between us. Then he shook his head, as though tired of it, as though dispirited, as though not wanting my company after all, and slouched away, out at the horseshoe opening towards the dune and the sea.