The Islanders

Rawthersay (2) SPOOR THE TRACE

The study was lodged high beneath the eaves of the house and it was imbued with traces of him. It had not changed much in the twenty years since I was last there — it was more untidy, a mess of papers and books, standing on, lying beside, heaped below the two tables and a desk. I found it almost impossible to walk across the floor without stepping on his work. Otherwise, the room was much as I remembered it. The window was still uncurtained, the walls unseeable behind the crowded bookcases. His narrow divan bed stood in one corner, now bare of everything except the mattress. I will never forget the tangle of blankets we had left behind when I was here before.

Being there again was a shock. For so long his study, this exact room, had been a memory, a hidden joyful secret, but now it was bereft of him. I could detect the scent of his clothes, his books, his leather document case, the old frayed carpet. His presence was in every darkened corner, in the two squares of bright sunlight on the floor, in the dust on the bookshelves and on the volumes that stood there in untidy leaning lines, in the sticky ochre grime on the window panes, the yellowed papers, the dried careless spills of ink.

I gulped in the air he had breathed, choked by sudden grief. It was incomprehensibly more intense than the shock I felt on receiving the news of his illness, his imminent death. I knew I was rocking to and fro, my back muscles rigid beneath the stiff fabric of my black mourning dress. I was dazed by the loss of him.

Trying to break out of the grief I went to his oaken lectern, where he had always stood to write, his tall shape leaning in an idiosyncratic way as his right hand scraped the pen across the sheets of his writing pad. There was a famous portrait of him in that stance — it was painted before I met him, but it captured the essence of him so well that I later bought a small reproduction of it.

Where his left hand habitually rested on the side, the invariable black-papered cheroot smouldering between his curled knuckles, was a darker patch, a stain of old perspiration on the polish. I ran my fingertips across the wooden surface, recalling a particular half-hour of that precious day, when he had turned his back on me while he stood at this lectern, absorbed by a sudden thought.

That memory of him haunted me as I set out on this desperate quest to reach him before he died. The family had delayed too long in telling me of his illness, perhaps deliberately — a second message I received en route, while waiting in an island transit lounge, broke the news I dreaded, that I was too late to see him. I had travelled across a huge segment of the Dream Archipelago with the unchanging mental image of his long back, his inclined head, his intent eyes, the quiet sound of his pen and the tobacco smoke curling around his hair.

Downstairs the mourners were gathering, awaiting the summons to the church.

I had arrived after most of the other mourners. It had taken me four anxious days to reach Piqay. It was so long since I had made the journey across this part of the Archipelago, I had forgotten how many ports of call there were on the way, how many lengthy delays could be caused by other passengers, by the loading and unloading of cargo. At first the islands charmed me, as always, with their variety of colours, terrains and moods. Their names had memories for me from last journey to Piqay, all those years ago: Lillen-Cay, Ia, Junno, Olldus Precipitus, but they were reminders of that sense of breathless anticipation on the voyage to meet him, or of the quiet, contented thoughts on the journey home. My recollection of the journey home, or experiences ashore, telescoped into one brief episode.

This time the charm soon faded. After the first day on the ship the islands simply seemed to be in my way. The boat sailed slowly across the calm straits between islands. Sometimes I stood for hours at the rail, watching the arrowing wake spreading out from the sides of the vessel, but it soon came to be an illusion of movement. Whenever I looked up from the white churning wake, whichever island we happened to be passing still seemed to be in the same relative position as before, across the narrows. Only the seabirds moved, soaring and diving around the superstructure, and at the stern, but even they went nowhere that the ship did not, and no faster. I wished I had wings.

At the port on Junno I left the ship because I wanted to find out if there was a quicker passage available. After an hour of frustrated enquiries in the harbour offices I returned to the ship on which I had arrived, where they were still unloading timber. The next day, on Muriseay, I managed to find a flight with a private aero club: it was only a short hop by air but it saved visits to the ports of three intervening islands. Afterwards, most of the time I saved slipped away, while I was forced to wait for the next ferry.

At last I arrived on Piqay, but according to the schedule of funeral arrangements that arrived with the news of his death, there was only an hour to spare. To my surprise, the family had arranged for a car to meet me at the quay. A man in a dark suit stood by the harbour entrance, swinging the passenger door open as soon as I appeared. As the driver steered the car swiftly away from Piqay Port and headed into the low hills surrounding the town and its estuary, I felt the commonplace anxieties of travel slipping away. It was even relaxation of a sort. I felt able at last to surrender to the complex of emotions that I had managed to keep at a distance while I fretted about ships and arrival times.

Now they returned in force. Fear of the family I had never met. Apprehension about what they might know about me, or what they might not. Worse, what they intended for me now, the lover whose existence might undermine his reputation, were our affair to become publicly known. The bottomless grief still sucking me down as it had done from the moment I heard the news about his illness, then later his death. My defiant pride in the past. The untouchable sense of loneliness, of being left only with memories of him. The hope, the endless irrational hope that something of him might yet live for me.

And I was still confused about why the family had sent the messages. Were they motivated by concern, by spite, or by just the dutiful acts of a bereaved family? Or perhaps, and this was one of the hopes I clung to tightly, he had remembered me and made the request himself?

But above all these, that endless grief, the loss, the feeling of final abandonment. I had suffered twenty years without him, holding on to an inexpressible hope of seeing him again one day. Now he was gone and I was forced to face the prospect of a life finally, absolutely without him.

The driver said nothing. He drove efficiently. After my four days aboard ships, with engines and generators constantly running, the bulkheads vibrating, the car’s engine felt smooth and almost silent. I looked out of the dark-tinted window at my side, staring at the vineyards as the car speeded along the lanes, glancing at the pastures, at the rocky defiles in the distance, at the patches of bare sandy soil by the roadside. I must have seen these the last time, but I had no memory of them. That visit was a blur of impressions, but at the centre were the few hours I had spent alone with him, brilliant and clear, defined for ever.

I thought only of him, that time. That one time.

Then, the house. People crowded around the gates, pushing each other aside to make a way for my car. They stared at me curiously. Some women waved as the car slowed, leaning forward to try to see me, spot who I was or who they thought I might be. The gates opened to an electronic signal from the dashboard of the car. They closed behind, as the car moved at a more stately pace up the drive. Mature trees in the park, mountains behind, glimpses of the cerulean sea and dark islands, far away. It was painful to look around at a view I had once thought I would never forget.

On arrival I stood silently in a reception room with other mourners, knowing no one, feeling what I sensed was their silent disdain. My suitcase stood on the floor outside the room. I moved away from the cluster of people and went to an inner door, from which I could see across the main hall towards the wide staircase.

An elderly man detached himself from the group and followed me. He glanced up the stairs.

‘We know who you are, of course,’ he said, his voice unsteady.

His eyelids fluttered with apparent distaste and he never looked directly at me. What struck me most was the facial similarity. But this man was old! In my sudden confusion I felt embarrassed, unable to make a polite guess as to who he was. My first thought was he might be the father, but no, that was wrong. I knew his parents had died many decades ago, long before we met. There was an identical twin brother he had told me about, but he said they were alienated. Could this now be that twin, a living likeness? Twenty years had passed and you never imagine what changes there might be in someone you have not seen. Was this how he had looked before he died?

‘My brother left clear instructions for us to pass on to you,’ the man said, solving the mystery, but too late for me to respond courteously. ‘You are free to go up to his room if you wish, but you must not remove anything.’

So I made my escape and went quietly and alone up the staircase to this room beneath the eaves. But now I was trembling.

A faint blue haze remained drifting in the room, a vestige of his life. The room must have been empty for several days, yet the light mist of the air he had breathed remained.

With a sudden flowing of renewed unhappiness, I remembered the only time I had lain with him, curled up naked on the bed beside him, glowing with excitement and contentment, while he sucked in the acrid smoke of the cheroots and exhaled it in a thin swirling cone of blueness. That was the same bed, the one in the corner, the narrow cot with the bare mattress. I dared not go near it now, could barely glance at it without the pain of loss.

Five of the cheroots, probably the last he ever bought, lay in an untidy scrambled pile on a corner of one of the tables. There was no sign of a packet. I picked one up, slid it beneath my nostrils, sensing the fragrance of the tobacco and thinking about the one I had shared with him, relishing the dampness of his saliva on my lips. A delirious exhilaration moved through me and for a moment my eyes lost focus on the details of the room.

He had never left the island during his lifetime, even after the prizes and honours began to be bestowed. While I lay naked in his arms, exulting inwardly over the touch of his fingers as they rested on my breast, he tried to explain his attachment to Piqay, why he could never leave to be with me. It was an island of traces, he said, shadows that followed you, a psychic spoor that you left behind if you departed the island. If you did you would become diffuse in some way that he could not explain. He said if he followed me when I left he would never be able to return to Piqay. He dared not try, because to do so would mean he would lose the trace that defined him to the island. For him, the compulsion to leave was less powerful than the urgency of staying. I, feeling a different and less mystical urge rising in me again, quietened him by caressing him, and soon we were making love again.

I would never forget the time we had spent alone together, but afterwards, in the many years of silence that followed, I had never been sure if he even remembered me.

Too late I had the answer, when the first message arrived. Twenty years, six weeks and four days. I had always kept count.

I heard large cars moving slowly on the gravel drive outside the house, and one by one their engines cut out.

The blue haze was thicker now. I turned away from the lectern, aroused by memories, but despairing because memories were all they could ever be. As I looked away from the dazzle of the window it seemed to me that the blue air was denser in the centre of the room. It had substance, texture.

The haze swirled around me. I moved my face towards it, puckering my lips. I darted my face to and fro, trying to detect some response from it. Streaks in the old residue of smoke, denser patches, coalesced before my eyes. I stepped back to see them better, then forward again to press my face against them. Smoke stung against my eyes and tears welled up.

The swirls took shape before me, creating a ghostly impression of his head and face. It was the face as I remembered it from two decades before, not the one the public knew or the grizzled countenance of the old man glimpsed on his identical brother. No time had passed for me, nor for the trace he left. The features were like a mask, but intimately detailed. Lips, hair, eyes, all had their shapes, contoured by the shifting wafts of smoke.

My breath stuttered, halted momentarily. Panic and adoration seized me.

His head was tilted slightly to one side, his eyes were half closed, his lips were apart. I leaned forward to take my kiss, felt the light pressure of the smoky lips, the brush of ghostly eyelashes. It lasted only an instant.

His face, his mask, contorted in the air, jolting back and away from me. The eye shapes clenched tightly. The mouth opened. The lines of smoke that formed his forehead became furrowed. He jerked his head back again, then lunged in a spasm of deep coughing, rocking backwards and forwards in agony, hacking for breath, painfully trying to clear whatever obstructed him below.

A spray of bright redness burst out from the shape that was his open mouth, droplets of scarlet smoke, a fine aerosol. I stepped back in horror, trying to avoid it, and the kiss was lost for ever.

The apparition was wheezing, making dry hacking coughs, small ones now, weak and unhoping, the end of the attack. He was staring straight at me, terrified, full of pain and unspeakable loss, but already the smoke was untangling, dispersing.

The red droplets had fallen to the floor and formed a pool on one of his discarded sheets of paper. I knelt down to look more closely and trailed my fingertips through the sticky mess. When I stood again, my fingers carried a smear of the blood, but the air in the study had cleared. The blue haze had gone at last. The final traces of him had vanished. The dust, the sunlight, the books, the dark corners remained.

I fled.

Downstairs I stood once again with the others, waiting in the great hall to be allocated to one of the cars. Until my name was spoken by one of the undertaker’s staff, no one acted as if they knew who I was or acknowledged my presence in any way. Even the man who had spoken to me, the brother, stood with his back against me. His hand was linked affectionately around the upper arm of a short, grey-haired woman, speaking quietly to people as they stepped outside to join the cortège. Everyone seemed daunted by the seriousness of the occasion, by the thought of the crowds waiting in the road at the end of the long drive, by the passing of this great man.

I was given a seat in the last of the cars, bringing up the rear of the cortège. I was pressed against the window by the large bodies of two serious and unspeaking adolescents.

In the crowded church I sat by myself to one side, forcing calmness by staring at the flagstone floor, the ancient wooden pews. I stood for the hymns and prayers but only mouthed the words silently, remembering what he had said were his feelings about church services. The tributes to him were formal, grand, spoken sincerely by illustrious men and women. I knew some of the speakers already, but not one of them acknowledged me. I listened closely, recognizing nothing of him in their words. He had not sought this renown, this greatness.

In the churchyard on a hill overlooking the sea, standing near the grave, back from the main group of mourners, hearing the words of committal distorted by the breeze, I was again alone. I remembered the first book of his I had ever read, while I was still at college. An inspiration for me, a constant guide through life. Everyone knew his work now, but at that time he was unknown and it had been my own deeply personal discovery.

The persistent wind from the islands buffeted against me, pressing my clothes against my body on one side, sending strands of hair across my eyes. I smelt the salt from the sea, and the fragrance of flowers, the promise of distance, departure, escape from this place.

Members of the public and the cameras of the media were only just visible, kept in the distance beyond a cordon of flowers and a patrol of policier officers. In a lull of the wind I heard the familiar words of the committal being uttered by the priest, and watched the coffin lowered into the ground. The sun continued to shine but I could not stop shivering. I could think only of him, the caress of his fingertips, the light pressure of his lips, his gentle words, his tears when I had had to leave him at the end. The long years without him, holding on to everything I knew of him. I barely dared to breathe for fear of expelling him from my thoughts.

I held my hand out of sight beneath the small bag I was carrying. The blood had congealed on my fingers, cold, an encrustation, eternal, the final trace of him.