Tim Binding - Island Madness

Albert shakes his head, bewildered at the improbability of it all. “If you were alive,” he tells her, “if you were alive…” But he can go no further. Instead he starts again with his other tale, the one he has held as tightly to himself these two miles as the bunch of primroses now standing in the cloudy vase, smoothing the gravel with his hand, forming shapes and patterns as he works. He has big hands, red and ruthless, hands used to the shotgun and the snare, hands used to the fork and the spade, hardened by frost and stone and the snag of summer thorn, tough hands, always purposeful but as delicate with the rabbit’s neck as they are with the greenhouse seedling. There are no weeds today, no stray leaves for him to clear, nothing to interrupt his foss, but in his agitation it is he who is disrurbing the symmetry of the ground, making little heaps of stones with his hands, fashioning the square and diagonals of the English flag, marking out the single word LIDICHY before obliterating it with his hand. He has not read of this foreign place in the newspaper (which is why he spells it incorrectly) nor has he heard of it from the lips of Lord Haw-Haw or the outlawed Alva Lidell, but in recent months it has reverberated round the walls of Mrs Hallivand’s drawing room, first in hushed whispers, and lately in more acerbic tones. Usually it is the Major who introduces the word, waving a requisitioned fork in the air, or filling his balloon with another swirl of Mr Hallivand’s brandy, only for it to be shrugged offby a show of indifference by the Captain or dismissed as malicieus tittle-tattle by the loganberry thief. LIDICHY. He writes it again and underneath adds the phrase CERTAIN DEATH. Almost immediately he smoothes the gravel free once more, fearrul lest someone might be watching him, or that he might leave without remembering to erase the confession, but it is too cold, too windy and too late in the afternoon for inquisitive meddlers to be around, and besides, who would intrude on an old man visiting his wife’s recent grave? He fashions the words again, speaking them to his Rose lying so close, tracing the letters he has formed as if by writing them she will absorb what he has to tell her. LIDICHY he writes, CERTAIN DEATH and then, underneath, the word DUTY. He stares at this bleak litany for a moment, silent and then rubs out LIDICHY and replaces it with GUERNSEY. GUERNSEY, CERTAIN DEATH and DUTY. He looks at his list and, conscious of the flawed logic he has imposed, shuffles his hand across the pebbles for the third time in order to place the words in their correct order. Now it appears for the last time. GUERNSEY, it reads. GUERNSEY, DUTY and CERTAIN DEATH. “Duty and Certain Death,” he says calmly. He turns and speaks it into the wind. “Duty and Certain Death.” He shouts it loudly so that his words are lifted into the wind and carried out over the water to where his daughter could be standing, in Weymouth or Southampton, planting those tulip bulbs perhaps, thinking of her old dad and the soil she has left behind. She cannot hear him, he knows, and he can never tell her what he has never told her, but perhaps, God willing, in years to come, his spirit will find her and whisper that he did love her and that he missed her and he died with the thought of her in his eyes and in his arms.

In the late morning Mrs Hallivand walks up the hill. It is for the most part a humble street, and with her frame bent by both the steep incline and the weakness of her undernourished frame she is struck, as always, by how the route to Guernsey’s most famous house takes her past some of the island’s most unprepossessing quarters, battered damp dwellings, built haphazardly, huddled and crumbling, punctuated by dank alleyways and dim cobbled court-yards, the smell of rot and drains and last night’s urine drifting through a hum of upstairs cries. It was somewhere here, despite his initial denials, that her husband Maurice had leaned their ledger girl up against the wall, too busy inhaling the scent of his own desires to notice the stench rising from round their ankles. Was that what all her good works had been for, so that she could book Elspeth Poidevin into the Weymouth Hostel for Wayward Girls without too many questions being asked and have the baby whisked away (to a good home, she promised blithely) as soon as it dropped out of the little trollop and into the midwife’s arms? Whenever she went into the bank and had the misfortune to see her grinning insolently from behind the counter an uneasy wave of guilt swept over her, for the child she had foisted on some unsuspecting couple and the mother she had denied. Not that Elspeth showed any signs of the loss, cocking her head at any man who came through the door. No one could describe Elspeth as pretty, a dumpy thing, stupid and cruel like her parents, but there was no denying that there was something overwhelmingly tempting about her, perched up on her stool, licking her fingers as she counted out the banknotes, on show and out of reach, like a flaky pastry fat with cream set out in a baker’s window. At least she had kept her mouth shut. For that reason alone the fifty pounds had been money well spent. Twenty-five pounds and a job in the office for life, that’s what she asked for in the drawing room that afternoon, lowering her eyes, her hands clasped over the all too apparent bulge. Fifty pounds, two months in the hostel and a job anywhere but with us, that’s how she countered and Elspeth took it on the spot, knowing the strings the Hallivands could pull, the embarrassed standard-bearer of the family name pushing his hair back in the library, grooming himself for the onslaught to come.

Mrs Hallivand carries with her a large oval basket in which lies a stone bottle, a square of squashed carrot cake, a duster, a chamois leather, a tin of floor polish, a packet of fly-papers, a mousetrap and a hefty clutch of keys: a rusting iron one, heavy like the front door for which it is fashioned, and a host of smaller ones, each tied with a small white handwritten label bearing the name of its locked location: the Billiard Room, the Tapestry Room, the Smoking Room, the Library, the Blue Drawing Room, the Red Drawing Room, and so on, up to the Eyrie. She has carried this basket for twelve years, ever since her late father proposed to the Parisian authorities who own the property that she become their designated trustee. The States were willing to appoint a housekeeper for the weekly chores, but Mrs Hallivand offered to perform these functions herself, not because she liked cleaning (she had rarely lifted a duster or squeezed a mop in her life) but because she realized that such an unchaperoned opportunity would afford her an intimacy with the house’s former occupier denied to anybody else. Maurice might spend business afternoons on the mainland enjoying one of his golf club wives on the second floor of the Norfolk Hotel, Bournemouth (boasting a Cocktail Bar, the Richmonde Lounge and the Norfolk Hotel Broadcasting Orchestra); she on the other hand took her pleasure alone, high in Victor’s eagle nest, surrounded by mementoes of his life and work. And what a life! It thrilled her to think of that great bearded giant looking down on the town where she now stood, washing his naked torso for all to see, the apparatus of his prodigious sexual appetite on display; servant girls, married women from the town, visiting aristocratie amours, not to mention the mistress up the road, he served them all. He did not try and hide it. He recommended sexual intercourse to his friends as a cure for headaches, depression, even constipation, urging them to act without delay, with whomsoever was available. Regular intercourse was a physical necessity; the smooth running of the body demanded it.

From where came the means was not the point. Sex on such a grand, lordly scale had nothing to do with infidelity or betrayal, far removed from Maurice’s clumsy affairs with their candlelit dinners and false promises of love. Victor’s needs were simple; an uncomplicated coupling taken when the need came upon him, like a cup of strong coffee or a brisk walk, enjoyable, invigorating, and paradoxically, however exotic the company, a profoundly solitary exercise: a prelude to the real business of the day—work. And what work! Here amongst these rooms she could finger his lines of thought, delve into the mystery of the man. Over the years, suspended in rêverie in that floating room of light, she had come to believe that only she had the capacity to embrace and receive his monumental fertility. Every week she would take one of his notebooks home and place it on her bedside table. Let Maurice return from his expeditions to fall asleep in his adjoining bed, she would sit in hers and become, if not satiated, then hungrily content. She did not reproach her husband for his excesses, but not because she excused them, for she did not, but because she wanted as little to do with him as he did with her. What she had not told anyone since her arrival seventeen years ago was that once the flurry of moving to Guernsey had died down, once she had settled into the island’s ways, she had opened her eyes one morning and came to the conclusion that she had made a terrible and irreversible mistake. All her life she had fought to be allied to a certain kind of uncharted freedom, a man of spirit, and now, looking up from the comfort of their then double bed, watching Maurice mouth the minutes of the golf club’s last meeting, it was plain to see she had handcuffed herself to a dullard and sentenced her own free will to a life of imprisonment. Maurice was small-minded. Guernsey was small-minded. The forty thousand souls living alongside them had similar visions. Their horizons stretched no further than the rock on which they stood, a self-satisfied triangle, six by seven by nine, an immovable wedge of granite, stuck fast and impervious to change. Where was the glitter, the intrigue, where were the stakes to be played, the bolts from the blue? It was all so dull! The clubs with their empty protocol and pointless committees, the endless cocktail circuit, the spring and winter balls, all, in their proud pomposity, heartbreaking reminders of the glittering society she had left behind. When her sister had turned up she had hoped that she might be able to take Isobel under her wing, so that she could live once again a life of wit and nerve, but Isobel, wilfully indifferent to her schemes and confident in her own inherent abilities, had paid her little attention. Then there’d been that trouble over Ned Luscombe. Albert had come running to her about that the moment he found out. How could it be, he said, waving a pair of hedge-clippers in his hands, that his nephew would dare walk out with Mrs Hallivand’s niece? What if it went further, what if the worst thing in the world happened and they had to get married? They were headstrong those two, from stubborn stock, Albert had pronounced, ever the gardener, adding, “I could never be related to you, Mrs H., not even if the King himself commanded it.” She had laughed, the spell of her own horror at the story broken, for she saw at once that Isobel would never contemplate such an unlikely and unflattering alliance either. She had seen the look of incredulous pity pass over her niece’s face when Isobel had first been introduced to Maurice, the celebrated stories she had been told of her aunt’s glittering past transformed into insolent mockery. Ned hadn’t seduced her. Isobel had seduced him, and Mrs Hallivand knew why. To get back at her. To tell her to mind her own business, that she needed no lessons from such an abject failure as her. So she told Albert not to worry, that by next spring he would be able to tip his beret and wish her good morning with an easy heart.