Collector of Lost Things (42 page)

He informed me that Clara had stepped off the ship’s rail within sight of the English coast. Several of the men had seen her fall, and she had done so without a cry. The boats had been lowered but her body had not been retrieved. Captain Sykes had performed a full ceremony on board, which all the crew had attended.

I
T IS FIVE YEARS
since I received that news. I did not believe it at first. How could I? How could it possibly be true?

As soon as I had read his words, I thought of the impenetrable wood in Norfolk, where I had fought my way through the rhododendrons, trying to find the girl I had let escape. I had remembered the way my feet sank in the mud, the way the branches and foliage seemed complicit in preventing me from reaching her. Then the startling sight of the almost perfectly round lake, fringed with dark trees and, in its centre, that solitary coot, turning quietly towards the ripples that had just reached it. I had remembered the feel of Celeste’s body as I pulled her from the water, and the sight of her, at peace, as she was carried from the lake. How could it be possible, after I had saved her, that she would return to the water once more, this time for good?

I didn’t accept the news of her death until an event that occurred several weeks later. I had been travelling to South Uist on a small sailing ferry, in search of boating supplies for the skiff I was restoring. It had been a blustery day, and I had seated myself in the lee of the wheelhouse, where I could read one of my books in peace from the wind. Occasionally I would look to the craggy inlets and promontories that passed by, always keen to spot otters playing on the shore. It was a joyful sight.

Out of habit, I had absorbed myself in my book, not wanting to draw attention to myself. But when the boat tacked into the sea loch, approaching South Uist, the water had become sheltered and I had put my book down.

At the stern rail, a woman turned to face me. It was Celeste. Taller than I remembered, dressed in the rough woven shawl that is common in this area, but with the same appeal in her eyes that has filled my dreams for so many years. She smiled at me, wishing me a good morning, and I must have stared back, in my confusion, my inability to comprehend what I was seeing. Perhaps I had paled, as if about to faint, because she quickly came to me and asked if I was feeling well.

‘Celeste?’ I managed. She looked back at me, wondering what I had said. When she spoke, it had been with the strong island accent of this part of Scotland.

‘Why do you not … don’t you recognise me?’ I asked, in a mixture of sadness and fear. She seemed undecided, puzzled and unsure whether I needed assistance. I noticed her hair was shorter than I remembered, and darker.

‘Shall I fetch help for you?’ she asked, quietly.

‘Please, tell me you know me,’ I replied forcefully and she took a step back. I saw that a couple of men had come to stand near by. One of them—looking quite fiercely down at me—put an arm around her to guide her away. I saw her speaking to him and, after some minutes, he returned to confront me.

‘I don’t know who ye are, man, but you scared me wife. I’ll not have it,’ he said.

I put my hands up, fearing he might strike me, but it appeared he was not interested in making any further scene.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Very deeply sorry.’

He gave me a single nod and returned to his wife. We had nearly reached the harbour. She glanced at me just once more, when no one was looking, and alongside my recognition that she must be Celeste, I knew at that moment that I would see Celeste, that I would keep seeing Celeste, when I was least expecting it—in the fragment of a face in a passing carriage, in the back of a room sitting by the fire, on the shore just after sunset—for the rest of my life.

Since then, I have largely avoided being in the proximity of people. I cannot trust myself, I cannot trust my perceptions, and I cannot trust where those perceptions might lead me. No. I have chosen to devote my life not to the things I have lost, but to the one true thing that I have ever saved.

I have been living this way for five years. No one knows the true nature of my business or, if they do, or at least suspect, then none of them realises what I have done. It is my secret, alone. I am meticulous in my arrangements, for I live in a community which is small and therefore naturally suspicious. In these five years I have become a good boatman, I sail my skiff with a keen eye, noticing the cat’s paw of the wind upon the water, or the curl of the tide as it pulls to ebb. I have learnt about nature, most profoundly learnt about nature. I have charted the migrations of birds and the arrivals of fish, and the cycles of breeding they announce. I watch the hares as they fight and pant. The swallows in their scattered flight, flying in ribbons beneath the boathouse doors, their wingtips an inch above the water, where they swoop up to their fragile mud nests under the joists. I have counted the shearwaters as they fly in at night, hundreds of silhouettes against the moon, before they drop screaming to the ground to search for their burrows. I have studied the weather, am able to interpret the sky and the clouds, and the colourings of the sea. The black shine of cold water, or the blooms of plankton that drift in mossy clouds each June, heralding the arrival of the basking sharks. I am able to mark the changes of the seasons by the transformations of the insects and by the simple budding of a flower. I have made a good and comfortable shelter where I can sometimes stay overnight. But what I do, year after year, is also dangerous. I could drown a thousand ways, each day, alone. Or fall from the cliffs, where the rocks are almost permanently wet from the sea mist. I might be a victim of a sudden squall or a gust of wind, and my vanishing would hardly be noticed. A cry and a splash in the water, and I would be gone. It is for this reason that I decided to write down the story. You see, I have had plenty of time to think, out here. And my hope is that in writing this I might spot the details I missed at the time, on that voyage, and recover what was lost. I might see where it all began to go wrong. Yes. Plenty of time to think.

Edward Bletchley pays for my lodging and the maintenance of the boat. He has written to me many times. Often he tells me not to be so frugal, insists that I must be incurring additional expenditures, but he is wrong. My life is Arcadian. I have all that I need. He is the only contact I have with the world beyond this island and, as such, I believe he is probably to be counted as my only friend. It is remarkable the companions we end up with, some of whom we never chose. From each letter I have learnt more about him. He has decided to live in Norfolk after all, and has let a portion of the estate he inherited go wild, encouraging waterfowl and migratory birds, well away from the blasts of hunting rifles. He describes it as the only safe landing spot in all of East Anglia. He tells me that his soul is clear and that he is to be considered a free spirit and an integrated part of the nature of all things. I truly believe he is an extraordinary man, compassionate and interested in his role in life, and that it was the Arctic that first opened his eyes. I recognise now that the voyage on the
Amethyst
changed my life, also, as voyages are meant to. It taught me that there are some things that can be saved, truly saved, in a life where I once thought it was not possible.

Celeste drowned, that day in my early twenties, when I recklessly stole the key and unlocked her bedroom door. I let her out. She escaped. She died. I know now that I had been obsessed with her, that I might have been too blinded by this obsession to realise the consequences of my actions. It was I who let her escape, and I who should take the blame.

Perhaps her life was always going to end that way. Given the severity of her father this really may have been so. But I was instrumental that day, and for that I am truly regretful.

It has been harder for me to accept that the sightings of Celeste—over the years—have been chimeras of my own mind, delusions arisen from my own feelings of guilt and longing. Only now do I understand that I have also seen her in the country lanes of Suffolk, standing on staithes and quaysides in Norfolk, in the windows of passing carriages in London, even on the ferryboat to South Uist, and I saw her on the deck of the
Amethyst
, in the eyes of a woman who was vulnerable and in need of solace. I have seen Celeste in all these women, and each time I have sought her out I have been absent from myself. Clara, I was mistaken to think you were her, but I wasn’t wrong to love you, too.

I think of Quinlan French when I see a candle flame near to me. On several occasions I have tried to find what he saw, by staring at a lit candle until my eyes hurt with the intensity of light. But when I experimented in this way, it wasn’t the dance of the flame that disturbed me—it was the ring of darkness that surrounded me at the edge of my vision, like an impenetrable wall of shadows as I stared at the light—a darkness that felt thicker and more oppressive than I thought could be. Perhaps this is what he saw, and wished to observe. I shall never know, because I never wish to meet that man again.

If Sykes lived beyond the onset of his illness, then he must be retired by now, and I think of him sometimes, stitching his elaborate embroidery in the cottage home he was so dismissive of. In my vision, I like to think of him as an embroidered character in one of his own creations: a small, portly man by a suffocating fire next to a wife he is trying to ignore. I imagine him sitting in a church pew on a Sunday morning, or pruning the roses around his front porch, and occasionally smiling privately at the anchor-shaped knocker on his front door. No one has ever known that this little and fairly old man once had the chance to save a portion of the world’s animal kingdom, and that he failed to take it.

I am still haunted by what he did. One by one they had been taken to the inlet. And I must state a truth here: a drowning is never peaceful. But there on the rocks, faced with the aftertaste of an extinction, something transcendent had been illuminated: this scene, of man’s destruction, of his heartlessness, would inevitably be repeated time and time again, across the decades and centuries with all the world’s creatures. Man will murder whales and seals in their thousands, he will pluck the birds from their rocks and shoot them from the sky.

It is 1850, we are halfway through this century, and I have little notion as to whether my efforts have all been in vain. It is said the whales are becoming scarcer in the Greenland Sea. The seals are more infrequent among the ice floes. The walrus colonies are dwindling, their tusks and bristles raised impotently against gaff hooks and grappling irons. Even that most invisible of the polar beasts, the white bear, may one day entirely vanish.

Clara once told me to believe, and I try to stay true to this each hour and each day, even when I lose hope. I have chosen a solitary life in order to complete all I promised to her, but there is still a kernel of anger in me that wishes to tell the world what I have tried to save. I have been greatly affected by the death and slaughter I saw in the Arctic. It has stayed with me. I think of it constantly. I want to confront the men who have ruined our world. I want to go to the cities—where the Arctic’s great animals have been reduced to collar stiffeners and parasol ribs, corset stays and combs, where their oil lights the lamps and greases the axles and gears and chains of a relentless industry—and list the crimes that have been committed in the Arctic in the name of profit. How a man like Captain Sykes, who I truly believe was not an evil-hearted individual, can nonetheless be warped by greed until he can make no moral judgement. Perhaps one day, man will save the Arctic in all its multitude of extraordinary life, but perhaps by then man will be too late, as he always seems to be. It is a fight that will need to be fought, and it is for this reason that I have written this account.

I often sit on Mingulay’s headland, on granite that is warmed by the sun, surrounded by the blowing scents of the grasses and heather. Crickets chirp around me, bees, moths and butterflies fly delicately in the air. Flowers grow in even the smallest cracks and lichen clings to the bare rock in a coat of brilliant colour. Below me, a thousand acres of sea roll quietly towards me from the west. It is such a vast sight, such emptiness, that it fills me, overwhelms me, every time I sit here. There is nothing to interrupt the eye, apart from the gannets as they spear the water beneath the cliffs, or occasionally the tip of a basking shark’s fin—a lonely, roaming point of life in all this view. Sometimes I feel as though I am floating, yet surrounded and connected to all that I adore. Everywhere is the reminder that nature is tenacious, it clings to the bare, it abhors a vacuum, and will fill a void. Nature replaces, continually.

It is strange to think that when it came down to it, the great auk’s future was a simple throw of the dice. The odds were even, but nature won: the auk chick was a male offspring. Within two years another egg was laid. With plentiful feeding, a second batch succeeded that same year. I think of it being the largest of journeys that began with a single step.

On fine days I launch the skiff from the white sand of the coral bay and row around the brittle limbs of the promontories that reach out to sea. I scull towards the west of the island where the cliffs rise, ever steeper and more sheer, until they tower above me by several hundred feet. They are a formidable sight to pass beneath, black and stained and as ancient as any rock I have ever seen, splitting into stacks and coves and sea caves along their foundations. As I move alongside them, their brooding presence begins to affect the motion of the sea, as if they have their own gravity, lifting and pulling at the skiff even on the calmest of days, sucking the tiny boat into their shadow where the water swells up and surges. It is a humbling experience to pass below these wonderful cliffs, hearing the echoing shrieks of the nesting birds high on the ledges, feeling an intruder beneath a primeval landscape. After the third stack, which rises as sheer as a cathedral’s spire, I turn the boat into the shadow of the cliff and let the current guide me in. I pass a narrow entrance, a collapsed cave, not much wider than the span of my oars, and bring the boat into a cleft in the rock, where I can tie the painter around a boulder. It is a damp, slippery hollow in almost total shadow, with drips and streams falling from the cliffs, and black rock overhung with vivid green ferns and trailing vines. But beyond this natural barrier, there is a small protected cove which opens onto the sea, and this is where I sit, among the group of great auks that have made this place their home.