The Islands Read online

  James Casey lay in a plain wooden box at the top of the room. I could see immediately that the brass handles were fake. Someone had examined a funeral menu and ticked cheap. I went to look down on him. I thought I had nothing to say but when I was standing there I had plenty.

  You stupid bastard, I said, you stupid murdering fucking bastard.

  There was more like that. I surprised myself with the flow of anger, the dam-burst of fury. After a time I stopped because I was afraid I was going to attack the corpse. And then I thought I might have been shouting. No one came; perhaps funeral directors and their secretaries are used to angry mourners. I stepped back and found my calf touching a bench. I sat down.

  They’ll all blame me, I told him. They already blame me.

  Then I cried.

  James Casey looked tranquil and unperturbed. In real life he was never like that. After a time I got up. I looked down at him. His eyes were stitched closed because when he was pulled from the sodden car of course they were open. They are not very expert in our part of the world; I could see the stitches here and there. The funeral director knows from experience that the eyes of dead people do not express emotion but he knows that his clients would see fear in them. Nobody wants to look a dead man in the eye. It’s bad for business.

  Fuck you, I said.

  I turned on my heel and walked out. A tiny sigh escaped when I closed the door, like the seal opening on an airtight jar. My bicycle lay on the ground in its chains. They knifed the tires while I was with James. I was not going to give them the satisfaction of watching me wheel it down the street. I was going to leave it where I found it. Do not slouch, my mother used to say, stand up straight, put your shoulders back. But I slouched just the same. How many years since I first loved James Casey? I pulled my shoulders back but I kept my eyes on the ground. The thought that I had done something unforgivable was always there in the dark. Things come back in the long run, the way lost things are revealed by the lowest tides: old shipwrecks, old pots, the ruined moorings that once held steadfastly to trawlers or pleasure boats. There are no secrets around here.

  THE LAST ISLAND

  1

  The little island ferry came through the entrance and immediately began to slow down. She made a slight turn about three hundred meters out and dropped anchor. Then she pulled against the anchor chain and that resistance turned her so that the stern was towards the land. It was a graceful and gallant maneuver, a curtsy. There are three islands, he told me on the phone, take care that you don’t fall asleep in the ferry or you’ll end up visiting all three in turn. It was late morning and the ferry was quiet. I could really have slept to the beat of the engine and the sea.

  He met me at the port captain’s office. I scarcely recognized him. He had a grey beard and his hair was white as Formica.

  He drove me up through the narrow lanes, crazy with Fiat Puntos and motor scooters and pedestrians who shrank away from the traffic, and we came to a place where he could park his car. We went in at a gate and there was the garden and the house. It was not what I expected.

  He brought me upstairs and showed me a room. Come down when you’re ready, he said, and we’ll have a drop of wine.

  There were two windows. In the distance was the sea, the haze of the mainland, the old broken back of Vesuvius. That old mountain had done enough damage in its time.

  The house was plainer, older than I thought it would be. It was emptier, too. Quieter. That would change when the others came. It was his seventieth birthday. The road below my window was narrow and across the way there was a lemon grove, a single old kitchen chair in the shade. An old woman walked through it carrying a watering can and a hoe. She wore a straw hat. Among the distant gardens, the cicadas were bitter about the heat. The geckos waited for evening. They looked on human existence as a temporary interruption in the hegemony of stone. They stopped for hours in one place and then on some geodetic sign shifted like a clockwork toy. There was no difference between the new station and the old, no difference in light or air, no obvious reason for change. At night they cavorted after insects and made weird upside-down leaps onto cornices or street lamps.

  The table stood under a square frame over which the vines crossed. In clusters the pale grapes caught shafts of sunlight. The shade was delicious. A wooden ladder stood against the frame at one side. The table was of some kind of wood too, rough-hewn enough, a country table, but the chairs were plastic. He brought a tray with two glasses of wine, some olives, some bread. I said that all gardens are magical.

  Yes. They all have one. The island of gardens.

  He made a gesture that was intended to encompass everything.

  There’s an old lady across the street from my bedroom watering her vegetables.

  They do that. There’s never enough rain.

  I was glad to have seen her. The earth is important still.

  He nodded. He agreed with that.

  So tell me about you, he said. How are you? How are you faring?

  Without ever having thought of the idea before I said, I’m shipwrecked.

  He laughed. Then he frowned. Bill?

  Bill, yes.

  So how are you managing it?

  I took a deep breath. I said I was coping but things were coming to a head.

  And if you don’t mind, I don’t like talking about it.

  As you wish.

  Something lapidary in the light, every shadow edged, exact, more itself than before. He put his hand on the nape of my neck. It fitted there. I had the feeling that he too was on the verge of revelation but that he turned away at the very last.

  Instead he said, Come and look at Salvatore’s rabbits.

  He was up again, leaving the wine and food. He looked unsettled. There was something nervous and disturbing about him. He led me out under the grapes. There were walls, shallow steps that led nowhere, wisteria, bougainvillea trailing everywhere, the thick tonguey leaves of the magnolia, the grapes, the lemon trees, the chipped statue of an armless Venus surrounded by cactus—an installation, he told me, one of Serena’s, the statue and the cactus had to be read together, the whole situation a totality. He didn’t sound convinced.

  Only the blue sky suggested that there was a world beyond. So this was his new island, his walled paradise. Once there was sea, now there was stone. He was always longing to be outside.

  We went down to where the vines spiraled onto old branches slung between posts and tied with rags. Salvatore—their neighbor who looked after the house when they traveled—kept them and had the grapes. He made wine with them. It had to be drunk young, a small wine like all the locals, but quite good. Then in a slatted shade there was a stone oven big enough almost to get my shoulders into. Again, Salvatore built it. The Centane stone was famously hard. Then an orchard of stunted lemon and orange trees. The fruits were last year’s crop and not good for eating; they had been on the tree over winter and the cold spring winds dried them out, and the new fruit was small and hard and green still.

  Through a gap in the wall he brought me to where his neighbor kept rabbits and hens in cages.

  He looked at me ruefully. They really are almost self-sufficient, the islanders. They have to be.

  Food that travels farther than the length of a parish isn’t worth eating?

  He started. I could see he was trying to remember. So many books, how could he remember one line.

  He said: It’s a funny thing, people quoting your own work back at you.

  I know.

  I don’t like it.

  There were pumpkins growing in the floor of a half-finished house and basil plants and rosemary, a fig tree with tiny hard fruits and a twisted olive tree whose trunk had split in two maybe a hundred years before; the ghost of the second half seemed necessary to sustain its precarious balance.

  It was the kind of garden that could be found in any house on the island that had the space, he said, as all the older ones did. Everybody grew their own food, if they could. But it was all chang
ing now. They have a saying, Stavamo meglio quando stavamo peggio. We were better when we were worse.

  He collected half a dozen eggs and I made a basin of my shirt and he put them into it. And standing there, with a shirtful of eggs, and looking at him, I said, Once upon a time I wanted to kill you.

  He stared at me. He didn’t say anything. He still held an egg in each hand. There were four in my shirt. If, for example, he had embraced me suddenly we would have broken everything.

  I never bother to remember dreams. Despite my training, or perhaps because of it, I don’t really believe in them. They have always seemed to me to be essentially trivial, housekeeping for the brain or at best an exercise in poetics. But that first night on the island I dreamed that I was looking in the windows of a car and it was like looking into a fish tank. My father was there, floating like an astronaut or a baby in a womb. The light was green and uncertain. His head was too big and his eyes were pearlescent and unresponsive. He might have been blind like a puppy. He was wearing the ochre-colored canvas trousers that he used to wear when we were children; it was wet and the thinness of his legs showed through. Why had his legs become so thin? His arms, too. I felt a surge of terrible pity. It came to me that the glass would not break because of the pressure—I had seen something to that effect in a film or television program, people trying to break out of a car underwater—so I simply looked on as he floated. He moved with wonderful grace, in slow motion, without any sign of pain or fear. I knew, as I watched, that I should be happy for him. If I broke the glass he would wash out into our world and things would begin again. But, in fact, when the first pity vanished it was replaced by revulsion and anger. I was the one who felt pain, who felt suffocated. I was drowning for him. I had to break the glass or die. I began to look for a weapon.

  I got up and stood at my window.

  2

  When I visited my sister, she lived with my father. She got him and I got my poor mad mother. The train from Waterloo to Portsmouth Harbour and the Red Funnel Ferry to the island. She too was at the pierhead. I slept in a small room at the top of the house. There too I was looking out on the garden. The air was sliced by swallows. The evenings were heavy with valerian and mock orange.

  The next room was my father’s office. I thought it would be his bedroom. There was a large locked filing cabinet. A clock that told the time in New York, London, and Tokyo. A mahogany bookcase that mostly contained his own books in different editions and languages. The center of the room was taken up by a partner’s desk with a chair at both sides. On its vast gleaming surface there was a Remington typewriter and a block of blank paper; opposite them, in front of the second chair, a typescript. I listened for any sounds in the house or garden but there were none.

  He was writing about my mother. I think my mother’s appearances in his books represented for her absolute truths about her life and personality. They came swift as judgment and struck her to the bone. This other self that we never express. They were, first of all, ideal forms of her life, potential existences that she always failed to realize. They were myths of happiness and self-sufficiency. Then there were tales of her madness fixed forever in words not of her choosing. They were his narrative of how she fell from grace: her lapses, her comical aporia, her diatonic weeping, her infidelity. She saw herself. She understood that she was an ex-angel, a pitiful fallen creature with a broken wing. She saw too that he was her imprisoned narrator. His readers would long for his release. Now he was beginning again. The starting point was different. This was memoir.

  One paragraph shocked me: “Nevertheless, and despite my advice, Jane persisted in her belief that the children should have tomatoes in summertime to eat with their salads. To achieve this impossible task she set about buying a glasshouse in bits and pieces, an old wooden glasshouse that was once attached to the southern wall of a Victorian cottage about twenty miles away on the mainland. She had it imported to our island, panel by panel, on the post boat which could spare the time in winter to call at our pier but which was too busy in the summer.”

  I didn’t remember any glasshouse.

  Chapter two was titled “The Mental: Cork.” Now I saw that what he had done was turn her madness into a story and the story had made everything that happened inevitable and that inevitability absolved us all, but most of all, him. I could see why he had taken so many years to write it. It would be a difficult book.

  I had seen her in that hospital. They called it The Red Brick and sometimes The Mental. There were old people everywhere. They were doing nothing. My mother was sitting in a glassed-in porch with a lot of others. Their chairs were against the wall. They were facing outwards to the winter sun. She did not look out of place. She said nothing for a long time. Then she cried. She called me Child of Grace. It was an old joke of hers. When I heard it I knew she was the same person now as before and I tried to think how I could get her out. I had dreams of organizing her escape. Child of Grace, she said, will I tell you a secret? But a nurse came and I never heard the secret. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. But at that moment, I think, there began in me the fascination with the hurt mind. I wanted to cure it. I was convinced it could be done.

  When I went to boarding school I was relieved. Because I could do nothing I felt the responsibility was no longer mine. Nothing could be as terrible as watching your mother being mad. But at night I thought about her. I could not stop wondering what it was like to be mad among madwomen, to be in a madhouse, to be hurt, to believe that you had caused the death of your own child, or neglected to save her, to have no way back, to always have that absence, that little nose between your shoulder blades, to be able to feel the steady breathing, or whatever recollection most troubled her, and to know that it was only madness, that the child was dead. The child is dead. There are few worse sentences in the English language.

  What I wanted most of all was to burn it. What I did was take the typescript and replace it with the same thickness of blank paper. I arranged the paper carefully so no one would know. I left the room and closed the door. I put it in my vanity bag and went back to London and my studies. Also in my baggage was a consciousness of all that my textbooks had to say about fathers and daughters, Carl Jung and his Electra complex and all the rest of it. We travel in two boats always, two cars, two trains; in one a person passes seas and roads and the back doors of other people’s houses. In the other we navigate inhospitable seas and struggle with impossible creatures of the mind. I had chosen to make the second voyage my profession, but professional or not, I traveled in that same boat. My journey home was an agony of hurt and shame and fear; I was a terrified passenger, an exile to myself, a lonely child inside a university student.

  I recalled everything. That corner of Ireland that faces the Atlantic. An island off the coast of an island on the edge of Europe. Those cold seas, green and grey and black and white, the wailing of seabirds, the barking of seals, the sudden sigh of a whale breaching, my father’s absence, my mother and her lover and all the jealousies and trivial rivalries that animate childhood. I remembered the time my sister Em died. I remembered every detail of that black day from breakfast to catastrophe and the night that followed.

  In that I was like my mother.

  My sister drove me to the boat. I remember when she was a little girl she had a book called Aurora the Sleeping Beauty; it was a coloring book based on the Walt Disney motion picture. And in it Princess Aurora became Briar Rose. I remember her sitting in the window coloring the outlines. There is always something extra in the light of an island. It is the presence of the sea, like living in a world where there is always a mirror just out of sight.

  As I left the island the bins at Portsmouth Pier were full to overflow and so I held on to the manuscript until Waterloo. People stared at me on the train. Since then, in a life of research and fitful practice as a psychologist, I have met many weeping girls. They weep for the imaginary as much as the real, or for the imagined real. Their sorrow is their own and cannot be taken fr
om them. And I husbanded mine against the sympathy of strangers. I nursed my grief.

  It was the commonplace book of Mother’s madness. My father only knew the beginning, but I saw it right through to the end. That obstinate hurt that diverted her life. It made a fanatic of her. It made her immovable. It made her irretrievably other. She was still my mother. It was impossible. Yeats wrote: Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter, seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream.

  That was her.

  3

  There were two coffee cups, a little jug of boiled milk and an espresso pot, a copy of yesterday’s Telegraph (it’s all they get here) folded to the crossword. The curdled skin on the milk like a drift of burnt plastic. There was a little bowl of white butter, already losing its shape in the heat, a plate of bread, two pieces of pastry. They were called lingua di bue, he said, which means ox tongue. They were a specialty of the place. They looked lascivious enough. We sat down to breakfast. I had seen photographs of him sitting here. I remember one page-length feature; the theme was, Radical critic finds peace at last.

  He looked deflated, like a balloon that had cooled, and I thought there was a pallor in his tan, something chemical almost, and a dry slack skin.

  Are you all right?

  Yes, I’m all right, I’m fine, I’m not sleeping well that’s all.

  Is there something wrong?

  Old age has laid her hand on me. Do you know the song? Frank Harte.

  Go on, Grace, ask him now, I thought. There’s no time like the present. I took a deep breath, but he spoke first.

  What you said yesterday, about wanting to kill me . . .

  Tell me about your life here, I said. He looked relieved.

  So he told me things about the island instead of himself. That it was formed in the eruptions of the Phlegrean Fields, twelve thousand years ago, and is really no more than the joined rims of three volcano craters. He said it was the most densely populated rural area in the world; that the walled village at the southern end used to contain a penitentiary, now a community center, and that consequently it was a closed island until 1967 and you needed a permesso just to land, and that it was one of the places that Mussolini exiled Communists to; that the architecture of the houses was remarkable and unique, more Africa than Europe; that the dialect was impenetrable.