Christopher Priest - The Islanders

Meanwhile, it means that Smuj offers the sympathetic visitor an unusual social experience.

The patois divide also means that the name Smuj has three patois interpretations: ‘old ruin’, ‘stick for stirring’ and ‘cave with echo’. These are by consent more or less interchangeable.

I was due to stay on Smuj for a whole week, but by the third day time was hanging heavy on me. There is little culture on the island. In Smuj Town there is a small lending library, containing popular novels and copies of recent newspapers. There is a theatre, but locals told me it had been closed for several years. Touring companies rarely visited Smuj, they said, and in any event the theatre building needed to be renovated. I went to the museum, but had exhausted my interest in its few exhibits in under half an hour. I found a cinema, but it was closed. The only art gallery was exhibiting colourful paintings of the town. Swimming beaches and coves speak for themselves, and photographs are enough.

Then, one day at noon, while I was in a bar cooling off from the blistering sunlight, someone asked me if I had yet visited the ruined city in the hills. I had not. That evening I found out what I could — it was thought to be more than a thousand years old, destroyed in an ancient war, abandoned by what inhabitants had survived, and thereafter the little that remained had been sacked and looted.

The next morning I set off on a rented moped and headed for the range of inland hills. There were no indicating signs, but the man at the rental office told me that once I was through the pass I would see a large wooded basin surrounded by the hills, and the ruins were probably somewhere there. No one apart from me seemed at all interested.

I was soon to discover why. There had certainly once been some kind of settlement in the valley, but the traces that remained, all wildly overgrown with creeper, moss, intrusive shrubbery, were not much more than patches of broken rubble. I walked around for more than an hour, hoping to find something that might once have been a recognizable building or open space, but the clustering broadleaf trees had taken over. It was clearly a site that would reward scientific exploration, but I am not an archaeologist so would not know where to begin. I still do not know for sure which era it represents, who built it, who lived there.

I retraced my steps to where I had left my moped, wondering what else there could possibly be about Smuj that would be worth writing about. And at the exact instant, I found it.

When I dismounted I had hardly noticed the building next to where I had parked the moped. Now, walking back to it, I looked at the house for the first time. It was more than just a dwelling: a mansion of some extent, surrounded by mature trees, almost shielded from the road by the thicket. Beyond the widened patch of the road where I had left the two-stroke was a tall, metal gate, clearly locked and intended to be secure: it was not instantly obvious from the road because it was set in the drive itself, which curved away. I walked over and read the sign with great interest:

SCHOOL OF CAURER INSTRUCTION

AGES 6 — 18

UNDER PERSONAL SUPERVISION

AND PARTICIPATION OF E. W. C.

It took a few moments for the meaning of this to sink in.

Of anything that I had expected to find on Smuj, a Caurer Special School was not it. My state when I arrived to confront that gate was that I was hot, thirsty, sweaty, bitten by numerous insects and in general frustrated by my visit to this small and obscure island. All these were uppermost in my mind as I stared in surprise at the sign on the gate. It was not an old sign — it looked recently made.

Did the phrase under personal supervision . . . of E . W . C . mean what I had assumed in the first instant? That Caurer herself was here, working in the school, on Smuj? Supervising and participating in person?

It seemed unlikely. Caurer had died several years before, which would seem to eliminate her from everything. But the circumstances of her death were attended by a certain mystery that I well remembered. The death certificate revealed that she had died of ‘infection / infestation’. In the shorthand understood throughout the Archipelago, this strongly suggested she had suffered a fatal insect bite, probably that of a thryme. The consequences of such an attack were so appalling that even though several hundred people a year were killed by the insects, there was still a stigma attached. Death after a thryme bite usually led to a hastily arranged cremation, often within twenty-four hours, and was always the target of speculation and comment.

These were the circumstances of Caurer’s death, but because of her public renown, and the love and respect in which she was widely held, she could not pass quietly from view. Her life was praised, celebrated and memorialized throughout the Archipelago in every form of the media.

I too was involved as a reporter in the search for information after her death. I was sent to Rawthersay to speak to people who had known or worked with her, and my impression of the great woman was deepened by what I saw and heard.

But there were difficult questions unanswered. The principal one concerned the cause of her death. No thryme colonies had ever been discovered in the temperate zone of Quietude Bay, let alone on Rawthersay itself, so the revelation that she had suffered a fatal bite caused great alarm throughout the islands. However, the usual searches and precautions confirmed that no colonies appeared to have been settled. The death certificate was in its way unambiguous, and the professionalism of the doctor who had signed it was never in doubt, but even so there remained a feeling that we were not being told everything.

Throughout her life Caurer had enjoyed robust good health, which naturally would not protect her from a stroke or a heart attack, or one of many other underlying causes of unexpected death. Any of those remained a possibility, a genuine death behind the one that felt a little unlikely. It was tragic and heartfelt, she was widely and sincerely mourned, but I at least, and many other journalists, continued to feel a nagging sense of mystery.

My own researches turned up the surprising information that shortly before her death Caurer had travelled unaccompanied to Piqay to be present at the funeral of the author Chaster Kammeston. This in itself was unusual: Caurer travelling alone was almost unheard of. Although she had been subjected to intrusive media coverage while using the ferries to reach Piqay, it turned out that in practice most of the media outlets who had cottoned on to her journey were all from the islands along the fairly narrow zone of the Archipelago through which she had travelled. For some reason it had spread no wider, certainly not to me or to the offices of the IDT . At the time, it was the fact of Kammeston’s death that had been the major news and Caurer was by no means the only famous or celebrated mourner at the funeral. When I looked through all the reports from the time, the identities of individual mourners were usually not specified: ‘the great and the good’ was the journalism shorthand employed by reporters who had not been allowed into the ceremonies.

I could not help wondering if the death of Kammeston might not have had something to do with what followed almost immediately after.

I was probably not by then the only one asking that question. After much travelling around, however, and after many further interviews, I came to the conclusion that although we had certainly not been told the whole story, there was nothing in the public interest about it, and that Madame Caurer was entitled to privacy, in death as in life.

Such thoughts rushed through my mind while I stood there by the sign that announced Caurer’s presence. Then I stepped forward and pressed the intercom bell. I heard nothing.