The Summer Isles (38 page)

“I’m far too old,” I mutter, still gazing at the screen as Christine and Barbara run up to me, their tongues stuck out like gorgeous gargoyles, their whole futures ahead of them. “Far too ill…”

“Such a pity,” Cumberland says, re-folding his arms, adding just the right note of regret, “even if it were true…” But he doesn’t push it. In fact, he sounds relieved.

“Anyway,” he stoops down, preparing to lift the needle from the record as the matchstick figures dance and shift, grey on white. I can’t remember whether he brought his cine camera with him when we went into the Sun Area, but it’s impossible to tell now whether the figures on the screen are clothed or naked, young or old, starving or affluent. “Time we got back into the throng, old man,” he says as they dissolve into a flash of light, then shrink down through a pin dot into the blackness. At the end of the day, we’re all the same. “It’s nearly midnight.”

The lights are off now in the reception room, and the Christmas tree sparkles and flashes. People’s hands brush and linger as they part to let me through to another big television screen, still trying to absorb what little remains of my talismanic sparkle. What a year, after all, it has been.

The television shows the face of Big Ben as its minute hand climbs through the last moments of 1940. With what seems like a final reluctant shudder, it shakes the year off and the bells begin their famous chime.
Bong
—and there it is.
Bong
—a New Year is beginning. Lips and hands press damp against my own with the rustle of tweed and rayon, the dig of jewellery, wafts of perfume and sweat. The maids are already waiting with fluted glasses of sparkling Sussex wine, but first we must join hands and sing that song by Burns, a ritual from which even my fame and obvious frailty does not excuse me.

Afterwards, I sip the sweet fizzy alcohol and think of escape—of getting back to my tablets, my rooms—when the doorbell sounds along the hallway. I’m already on my way towards it in the hope that it’s my driver when I realise that eager hands are assisting me, eager voices are urging me on. The doorbell sounds again. It’s clearly some neighbour out first-footing with a piece of shortbread, a lump of coal to lay upon the fire. And who better than I, Geoffrey Brook, to greet them? This, after all, is 1941. Winter will soon be ending, and spring and summer beckon. The days will be sweet and long again as the sun blazes down; dark, bright and joyous even as memory swarms over them like the rush of the tide.

The Cumbernalds’ large front door swings inwards. I’m expecting a figure, some shape or form, perhaps even the dark handsome stranger of tradition, to be standing on the doorstep. But the doorway remains empty, and I, pushed on, seem to travel out and through; on into the blackness and the terrible, empty, cold.

I
’VE BEEN READING—OR
re-reading, I’m really not sure now—that stained copy that I inherited from John Arthur—from Francis—of William Morris’s News From Nowhere. The curled, brittle pages, smelling of damp, smelling of age, gritty with sand, dried mud and the dusty air of nearly half a century, as weary and old as the suitcase in which I kept them, speak of nothing that truly resembles the vision of Greater Britain that came to pass. Morris hated big industry, he hated all big things, he hated terror, he hated injustice. How, then, was he pulled so deeply into the currents of Modernism that Blackwells are even now trying to get rid of discounted piles of copies of The Well At The World’s End, The Sundering Flood, The Waters Of The Wondrous Isles? All that Morris and Modernism ever shared was a preparedness to dream, and a love of a bright, clean, glorious past that never was. But perhaps that was enough; perhaps the dream, any dream, is always the seed from which nightmares will follow.

John Arthur himself is fading in the new grey daylight of this different world. His memory seems to have no life, is twisted and pulled to suit whatever meaning people choose to give it as easily as were Morris’s unread pages. It’s almost as if I’m the only person left in this nation who grieves for him, or who still wishes to understand. That fatal night when we were together follows me even now, a dark figure filled with reproach and love and anger tugging at my shoulder, breathing chill upon my neck. All the questions I should have asked, the challenges I should have made. Either I loved, I suppose, the incarnation of something evil, or John Arthur was a puppet like me, jerked and changed through the years that separated us by the whims of some incomprehensible greater will. Between these two horrors, I keep trying to find some middle way, a decent path that anyone might wander along in their lives and find themselves unexpectedly and irrevocably lost. Francis was no monster, for all that I know that he used me much more than he loved me in the brief time that we were truly together. For all his faults, he railed against injustice, prejudice, stupidity, and would have been horrified to learn that people could be stripped of their lives for the sake of some accident of birth.

So I keep thinking instead of Mrs. Stevens, my acquaintance’s neighbour, who offered me tea and the unquestioning warmth of her kitchen, and of Cumbernald, and of the woman behind the counter in the Post Office, and that Bus Inspector on the road to Adderly, and the many nurses and policemen, and, yes, of Christlow, and even Reeve-Ellis, and the faces you see looking out from train windows, and the children you see playing in the street. And my own face in the mirror is there, too, although haggard as death now, the stranger-corpse that will soon be all that is left of me. Francis belongs there, with us all. He didn’t close the cell doors himself, he didn’t pull the ropes, touch the wires, kick shut the filing cabinet drawers, or even sign the forms that authorised the contracts that emptied so many lives from history. We did that for him.

We all are innocent.

We are all guilty.

During the few days before Francis and I headed south again at what turned out to be the end of our Scottish holiday, we lived together, totally alone, in a ramshackle stone cottage. The place had a rough slate floor like something carried in by the tide, thick walls with tiny windows that overlooked the beach and the impossibly smooth silver sand that faded without change into the flat glittering surface of the sea. The panes were clouded and cracked, holed and stuffed with old newspapers; curtained with cobwebs, too, when the old woman from the farmhouse up by the point came to let us in. In storms, in winter, the thin turf roof would have leaked the sea and the wind and the rain. But the weather was like honey when we were there. The sea was like wine. The rocks were marble. Alone, miles from the world once the old woman had gone, we swam naked and caught translucent shrimps from the pools beyond the dunes and lay on our backs on the sands and gazed into a sky that was as clear as gin, as deep as the sea. And we boiled the shrimps to pink in a witch’s iron pot on a driftwood fire each evening. We ate them with our fingers.

Time stopped. The Earth stood still on its axis. The whole universe turned around us. Francis’s skin was browned and bleached to lacy tidemarks by the sea and the sun, and he tasted like the shrimps; briny salt and sweet. The aurora borealis filled the sky at midnight, all the colours of light raining down from veils that moved with a soft hissing.

Lying one night tangled amid the blankets of our rough cot, my skin stiff from the sun and the soles of my feet gritty, some twist of emptiness made me reach out and open my eyes. Francis had gone from beside me, and was standing naked at the open cottage doorway, his hand on the frame, looking out at the pale sea, the white sand, the star-shot night.

“You see over there…?” he said, sensing from the change in my breathing that I was awake. “Right over there, Griff, towards the horizon…?”

I propped myself up, following his gaze out along the white shingle path, the low wall, the pale dunes that edged into the luminous ripple of the waves. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was something out there, the shining grey backs of a shoal of islands that daylight made the air too brilliant to see.

“I think we should go there, Griff,” he said, his shoulders and limbs rimmed with starlight. “Remember? That lovely name…?”

“There won’t be anything to see,” I said, lying back in the blankets, feeling the pull of sleep. “And there’ll be no way of getting across. No ferry…”

But I could see those islands more clearly now as I closed my eyes and the darkness began to take me. Heathered hills rolling down to dark green copses of pine. Sheep-dotted lowlands. The summer-sparkling rim of the sea. I could even smell a uniquely milky scent of summer grass and flowers carried to me on the soft breeze from off the Atlantic. Yes, I thought, we will go there.

But the weather had changed in the morning when we awoke. Low grey clouds lay across the dunes and met with the sea. Dampness beaded the cottage walls, silvering our bedding and filling the air like smoke as we shivered over breakfast and checked our map and decided to head south again, towards, perhaps, the Gulf of Corryvreckan—yet another of Francis’s magical names.

So we never did get to visit the Summer Isles. Francis pushed quickly down the track as we left our cottage beneath a sky that threatened nothing but rain, cycling as fast as he always cycled, forever heading on. I even feared that I, teetering with my older legs as I bumped along with my heavy suitcase strapped behind me, would never catch up with him. It was then, I think, as he crested the top of the first hill and vanished from sight, freewheeling eagerly down towards the farm on the headland where we would hand in the keys, that I finally lost my Francis. It was then that he was swallowed by history, and that everything else that was to happen began.

W
ELL-ANCHORED IN MY
wheelchair on this steamship’s juddering deck, scarfed and gloved and wrapped and alone, I gaze at those famous white cliffs, as grey on this late January morning as is the sea, the sky, these circling gulls. The air is bitter and cold, filled with the groan of engines and the smoke and salt they churn in their wake. There will be no last glimpse of England—I realise that now—just this gradual fading.

Like so many other things I have done in my life, my departure has proven surprisingly easy. I could detect no resistance as my driver ferried me about Oxford and I withdrew my funds and made my travel arrangements. In any event, the number of stamps and passes required to leave this country are greatly reduced. There have been no footsteps behind me, and the glances at my tickets and papers as I took the train for the last time down to London, changed at Kings Cross, then travelled on to the docks at Dover, have all been perfunctory. I do not think I have seen a single member of the diminished KSG, or even of the local Constabulary. No voices called me back as I was carried up the gangplank to this ship, the
SS Tynwald
, bound for Calais.

The voices that I have heard from the crew, the stewards, the other passengers, are French, Spanish, Dutch, German, American. Here, as we plough across the narrow stretch of water that separates the rest of the world from England, we are all foreigners. Back in Oxford, I suppose, Allenby will have found my note by now, and passed it on to Cumbernald as he tidies his desk and prepares to leave the college. My letter, posted to London the day before, will probably also be waiting in a pigeonhole for Miss Flood. Of course, there will be concern about my semi-mysterious disappearance, but that will soon be followed by weary, head-shaking amusement at the thought that I still had this one last act in me.

Thus I travel, ill, wealthy and alone. My precise plans, as the maps and the possibilities widen in my mind, remain vague. Long journeys hold no fears for me now: if you are rich enough, there are always people who will give you what you require. All I know is that I want to end my days somewhere far from England, where the climate is dry and warm, where there are lizards on the walls and the stars are different. From Calais, I shall continue east and south for as far as this body will take me. First Class, and by train. Preferably by sleeper.

Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel,
Wake Up and Dream
, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series
Playhouse Presents
. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.

Gillian Bowskill

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