News of Torm’s death had taken more than a month to reach me. Arriving with it was a request from the Father Confessor’s office at the seminary that I should visit my uncle’s house as soon as possible to sort out his effects. Both of these messages had reached me through the medium of the Seigniorial Visa Department in Jethra. If it had come direct to me and not through official channels, if the priests at the seminary had had my address, I could have slipped across unofficially. But that was not to be. Government officials knew of my visit in advance and therefore I was to be escorted.
I was telling Serjeant Reeth about the reasons for my trip – the need to sign documents, to permit furniture to be given away or destroyed, to decide which of his papers should be kept – when the waiter returned to the lounge. He was carrying two menus, discreetly implying that the dining-room staff were ready for us. While we perused the menu he drew the curtains across the tall windows, then led us down the corridor to the dining room.
My last visit to Seevl. I was fourteen.
There were examinations coming up at school and I was trying to concentrate on them, but I knew that at the end of the week we were going to visit my aunt and uncle and cousin. It was summer and Jethra was dusty and windless, with a great blank heat pressing down on the city. Sitting by my bedroom window, unable to concentrate on my revision, I looked frequently out across the roofs towards the sea. Seevl was green then, a dark, tough green. It was a coloured lie, a deceit about lushness.
The days crept by and I thought about evasion tactics I had tried in the past: a migraine attack, a sudden bout of gastroenteritis, an obscure ailment allegedly picked up from a passing stranger … anything that I thought might delay the next visit. At last the day arrived, though, and there was no more avoiding it. We were out of bed and away from the house before dawn, hurrying down in the breaking light, cool and lovely at that time of year, to catch the first tram of the day.
What were these visits for? Unless my parents spoke in some adult code I have never been able to decipher, they went out of a combination of habit, guilt about Alvie’s illness and broader family obligations. Torm and my father seemed to have nothing in common any longer. I never heard them discussing anything of interest, in the way I now know educated adults can discuss matters (both my parents were educated and so was my uncle, although I cannot be sure about Aunt Alvie). There was news to impart but it was always stale news, trivial family events and remarks and experiences, not even interesting when fresh. Everything that passed between the four adults was familial or familiar: an aunt or cousin who had moved house or changed jobs, a nephew who had married, a great-uncle who had died. Sometimes, photographs were passed around Alvie’s sickbed: Cousin Jayn’s new house, or this is us when went to the mountains, or did you know Kissi, your sister-in-law’s daughter, had given birth to another baby? It was as if they had no ideas they could externalize, no sense of the abstract, no conception that there might be a larger world of events outside the narrow one they presently inhabited. I was serious about such matters at that age. I was trying to learn to think for myself. I came to the mature conclusion, at the age I was, that they used these banal exchanges as a levelling device. It was almost as if they were instilling a sense of mediocrity into themselves, to bring themselves to Alvie’s level, to make her seem, that is, no longer ill.
It made sense to me then.
And where were their recollections of each other? Did they have no past together they could reminisce about? The only hint of their forgotten past was the photograph taken before I was born, the one in our living room at home. I was genuinely fascinated by it. When had it been taken and where? What were they doing that day? Who took the photograph? Was it a happy day, as it seemed from the picture, or did something occur later to mar it? Why did none of them ever mention those times?
What occurred in the years after that photograph was almost certainly the swamping effect of Alvie’s illness. It spread over everything in past and present. She knew only her pain, her discomfort, the treatments she endured, the doctor who understood nothing, the lack of a proper hospital, the absence of regular nursing, the medication with its innumerable side-effects.
The disease was creeping through her. Every time we visited she was a little worse. First her legs lost all sensation. She became incontinent. She could not take solid food. But if her decline was steady it was also slow. News of further deterioration usually came by letter between visits, so that whenever I saw her I did so with the prospect of seeing her arms withering or her teeth falling out or her face decaying away. The ghoulish imaginings of childhood were never satisfied, disappointed even, once I had resigned myself to having to visit her again. There was always an inverse surprise, based on morbid fears: how well she looked by comparison with what I expected! Only later, as the depressing news was handed out to us, would we hear of new horrors, new agonies.
Yet the years dragged by and Alvie was still there in her bed, propped up by eight or nine pillows, her hair in a lank skein over one shoulder. She grew fatter and paler, more grotesque, but these changes would show in anyone who never took exercise, who never went outside. Her spirit was unfailing: her voice was pitched on one note, sounding sad and dull and dreary, but the things she said were self-consciously everyday. She reported her pain and setbacks factually, she did not complain about them. She knew the disease was progressively killing her, but she spoke of the future, even if it was a future of the narrowest vision (what would I like for my next birthday? what was I going to do when I left school?). She was a stalwart example to us all, a model of stoicism in distress.
Whenever we made our visits one of the priests would come in to see Alvie. I cynically believed that no one ever called round from the seminary unless there was someone there from the outside world to take note of it. Alvie had ‘courage’, they told us, she had ‘fortitude’, she ‘bore her cross’. I loathed the priests in their black soutanes, waving their white hands sanctimoniously over the bed, blessing not only Alvie but me and my parents too. I sometimes thought it was the priests who were killing her. They were praying not for a cure, I decided, but for a lingering death and they were doing it to make a point with theological content to their students. My uncle was godless, his job was to him just a job. There was hope in religion, and to prove it to him the priests were going to kill Alvie slowly.
I remember too many of the wrong things. Feelings not facts, impressions not information. How little I knew and how little I still know.
The last visit. Yes.
The boat was late docking in Jethra. The man in the harbour office told us the ship’s engine was undergoing emergency repairs. For a joyful moment I thought the trip would have to be cancelled, but then at last the ferry appeared at the harbour mouth and moved slowly to the quay to collect us. There was a handful of other passengers waiting too. I’ve no idea who they were or why they were making the crossing.
It seemed to me that we were almost upon Seevl as soon as the boat left Jethra harbour. The grey limestone cliffs were dead ahead, and the clear marine air had an illusory foreshortening effect. It was a whole hour’s voyage to Seevl Town, though, because the boat had to swing far out to sea to avoid the shoals beneath Stromb Head, before turning in again to take the sheltered deep-water passage beneath the Seevl cliffs. I stood apart from my parents, staring up at the cliffs, watching for occasional glimpses of the high moors beyond, feeling the onset of the real, stomach-turning dread I invariably suffered as we arrived. It was cool out at sea and although the sun was rising quickly the wind came curling down from the cliffs above. My parents went into the bar to escape the chill wind, and I stood alone on the deck with packing cases, trucks loaded with livestock, bundles of newspapers, crates of drink, two tractors.
The houses of Seevl Town, built up in terraces on the hills around the harbour, were constructed from the grey rock of the island, their roofs whitened around the chimney stacks by bird droppings. An orange lichen clung to the walls and roofs, s
ouring the houses, making them seem more decrepit. On the highest hill, dominating the town, stood the derelict remains of a rock-built tower. I never looked directly at the tower, fearing it.
As the boat glided in on the still and sheltered water of the harbour my parents came out of the saloon and stood beside me, one on each side, like a military escort, preventing flight.
There was a hired car to be collected in Seevl Town. Such a thing was an expensive luxury in Jethra but it was a necessity for the wild interior of the island. My father had booked it the week before but it was not ready and we had to wait an hour or more in a cold office overlooking the dismal harbour. The ferry departed on its return trip to Jethra. My parents were silent, trying to ignore me as I fidgeted and made fitful attempts to read the book I had brought.
Around Seevl Town were some of the few farms on the island, rearing their scrawny animals and growing their hybrid cereals on the barren soil of the eastern side. The road climbed up through these smallholdings, following the perimeters of the fields and turning through sharp angles and steep climbing corners. The surface of the road had been metalled once but now it was breaking up, presumably under the effect of the harsh winters and the general economic malaise. The car lurched uncomfortably in the potholes and the wheels frequently spun on the gravelly sides. My father, driving, stayed tight-lipped, trying to master not only the dangerous road but also the controls of the unfamiliar vehicle. He went too fast on the level stretches, braked too late for corners. He was constantly having to correct his mistakes. My mother sat beside him with the map, ready to direct him, but we were forever lost on Seevl, we never seemed able to find the same way twice. I sat in the back of the car, cold and uncomfortable, thinking of home, ignored by them both except when my mother would turn to see what I was doing. I was always doing nothing, staring out of the window in mute suspension of visible reaction, wishing I could dream.
It took nearly half an hour of such driving to reach the first summit of the fell road, by which time the last farm, the last hedge, the last tree, were miles behind us. There was a far-distant glimpse of Seevl Town as the road went over the crest, and a wide, unwelcome view of the gun-metal inner sea, flecked with islets and rocks. Across the strait the unfamiliar aspect of the mainland coast, bathed in sunlight.
On the moors the road rose and fell at the whim of the country, winding through the scrub-covered land. Sometimes the car would emerge from a high pass, where on each side great crags of limestone loomed over the scree slopes and the blast of wind from the north would kick the car to the side.
My father drove jerkily, trying to avoid the loose rocks on the road and the unpredictably positioned potholes. The map lay unconsulted on my mother’s knee because Father claimed he knew the way from memory, pointing out supposedly familiar landmarks as we passed them. Yet he frequently made mistakes, took wrong turnings or drove up a side road that led nowhere. Mother would sit quietly at his side until he realized. Then the map would be snatched from her lap, the car would be reversed or turned and we would go back the way we had come to the place where he had made the error. Sometimes he drove past without realizing it, doubling the problem.
I left it all to them, although, like my mother, I usually knew when we took a wrong turning. My own interest was not with the road but the landscape through which it passed.
I never failed to be appalled and impressed by the gigantic emptiness of the Seevl moors. Father’s wrong turnings had the double advantage of not only putting back the time of our eventual arrival at the seminary, but also of opening up more island vistas to my eyes.
The road passed several of the dead towers of Seevl, frightening me every time. I knew the islanders would never go near the towers, but I did not know why. Whenever the car passed one I could scarcely look towards it for the fear it aroused in me, but my parents never even noticed. If we passed slowly I would cower in my seat, tensed up, trying not to move, anticipating some ghoul of legend making a rush for the car. I never really worked out why these old buildings should scare me so much. I knew only what I saw: they were abandoned, they were unexplained, they were like nothing I had ever seen at home.
Later in the journey the surface of the road deteriorated still further, becoming a rough track consisting of two gravel paths divided by a strip of long, coarse grass that scraped against the underside of the car.
Another hour or two passed on the moors before the track led down briefly into a shallow valley, one I always recognized. Four of the dead towers stood like sentinels along the ridge. The valley was almost treeless but there were many sprawling thorn bushes and in the lowest part of the valley, beside a wide stream, was a tiny hamlet with a view of the sea and the mainland. A part of Jethra could be seen from here. It spread blackly against the side of the Murinan Hills and it seemed simultaneously close and foreign. Already by this time you had started looking and seeing like an islander might.
Outside the village we climbed up to the high fells again and I looked forward to passing one of the scenic surprises of the journey. The island was narrow for a distance and after crossing the moors the road briefly ran along the southern side. For a few minutes we had a view of the Midway Sea to the south of Seevl, a sight never possible from Jethra, nor indeed from most parts of the coast near to where we lived. Island after island cluttered the sea, spreading southwards towards the horizon. Because of its closeness and cold climate I had never really considered Seevl to be a part of the Dream Archipelago. That was a different kind of place, as I imagined it: a lush, tropical maze of islands, hot and tranquil, forested or barren, but always dozing under the equatorial sun and peopled by strange races with customs and languages as bizarre as their food, clothes and homes. Seevl was a cold offshore island, geologically if not politically part of our country. This elevated view across part of the girdling sea, with its temptations of the tropics, was an almost cruel glimpse of a world I could never enter, away from the north, under a marine sun. The rest was dream.
I saw airplane condensation trails high in the sky, spiralling away towards the south.
Another valley, another hamlet. The road led the car back inland once more.
I knew we were approaching the seminary at last and in spite of myself I was staring ahead, looking for the first sight of it.
After dinner Serjeant Reeth and I returned to our separate rooms, she because she said she wanted to take a bath and wash her hair and I because I could think of nowhere else to go and had nothing else to do. I tried to telephone one of the friends I had been intending to look up, but the outside line for guests would not connect. I sat for a while on the edge of my bed, resting my feet on my suitcase and staring at the carpet, then found the letter I had received from the Father Confessor at the seminary.
It was strange to read his ponderous, circumlocutory sentences, full of a stiff intent – meant not only to engage my sympathies but also, it seemed, to intimidate me – and to try to reconcile it with my adolescent bitterness about him and his priests.
I remembered one occasion of many. I had been walking on a lawn at the seminary, innocently close to one of the flowerbeds, and a priest had appeared and reprimanded me severely for endangering the garden. I didn’t deserve it but I took it meekly. None of them could leave a reprimand to stand alone: they had insights into the universe and I did not, and so I was warned of hell and my imminent and irreversible destiny. In the intervening years that priest had quite possibly become this reverend father, and the same implied threat was there in his letter: you must attend to your uncle’s affairs or we will fix the fates for you and God will get you.
I lay back on my bed, thinking about Seevl and wondering what it would be like to be there again.
Would it depress me as Jethra had ever since I arrived? Or would it scare me all over again? The priests and their heavenly machinations no longer held any terror for me. Alvie was long dead and now so too was Torm, both joining my parents, and a generation was gone. The island itself intere
sted me – as scenery, as a place – because I had only ever seen it through a child’s eyes, but I wasn’t looking forward to crossing its empty moors again, seeing the bare views of rock and marsh. Then there were the dead towers: they were another matter, one I did not know how to think about. Do childish superstitions survive into adulthood?
I knew, though, that this trip was not going to be the same as before. Perhaps earlier that morning, when I had set out from home, I might have thought it would be the same without actually articulating the words. But everything had changed when Serjeant Reeth appeared.
She told me at dinner that her name was Ennabella but that I should call her Bella. She had instructed me in this when we ordered our second bottle of wine. I, with much of the wine inside me, had been unable to stop myself smiling. I had not known that policewomen had names like Bella, but there it was. She drank quickly and the wine was unstiffening her too: she forbade me from calling her by her rank again, yet even as she sat across from me, in the starched khaki shirt of her rank, I found it difficult to believe that she meant it. But thinking of her as Bella did help. The mask she hid behind began to slip. She told me the Seigniory training had been a hard, testing experience but she had done well, made friends, gained achievement points. She had not been a serjeant long because she had been promoted quickly, while still young. She didn’t say as much but I assumed it meant that she was an achiever, earning the respect of her superiors. She had a quality of innocence, a wide-eyed ingenuousness which showed many times. I couldn’t decide if it was a natural mannerism, or something she was using to try to influence me in some way. I spent most of that meal trying to work her out. It was the uniform that confused me, those drab-looking clothes which came attendant with so many associations of Seigniory repression of nonconformist ideas and official interference with civil liberties.
Bella. She wanted me to call her Bella. It took some doing. She didn’t laugh often, but when she did she was uninhibited, throwing back her head, wrinkling her eyes, smiling across the table at me afterwards. I liked it, and I liked the feelings about her that rose within me, but she made me feel my age. I could not shake off the idea that our roles were reversing – that I, being older, more experienced, was becoming her guardian, an escort for the journey. In spite of the severe uniform, the austere hairstyle, it became easy to forget that she was a member of Seigniory, with immense powers of authority residing behind those dancing eyes and girlish smiles.