Tim Binding - Island Madness

“Thank God for that, ma’am,” he said. “No disrespect regarding your niece intended.”

“And none taken, Albert. None taken.”

She climbs the steps now and unlocks the heavy front door. Closing it firmly behind her, she pauses in the hallway and feels the silence fall upon her, something which the island itself once possessed, but which now she finds only within these walls. It is a curious thing, this weight of absolute security. In the early days, when she had discovered her dreadful mistake, she would throw open the windows at the Villa, and lean out, cursing this peace, as if, willing it, she might hear the old noises of city she loved, the hum of the hub, as her father had called it, winging over the water. Now, standing in its last refuge, she wishes the island’s long quiet would return. It has become part of her, but though she misses it such a realization does not please her.

Though her first port of call is usually the study, from where she works her way down, today she makes straight for the Red Drawing Room, a dark, heavy room, weighted down with oak rurniture. The lock turns easily and skirting round the edge she moves quickly to the window to open the centre section of shutters. Light falls in, bisecting the room, illuminating beams of dust. Through the shadows the magnificence of the room takes form, a fire screen worked by Mme de Pompadour and four gilt figures taken from the Doge’s palace, the silk tapestries covering the wall and ceiling. In the centre stands the great table belonging to Charles II. In former times a pair of archbishop’s candlesticks stood at either end, but these have been set down on the floor, and in their place lies a humdrum collection of bags and containers: a pickling jar full of six-inch nails, a dried milk tin packed with bolts; a closed shoebox with a scattering of sugar rounds its base, a carrier bag buiging with the same substance with the name Underwood written on the side, another, altogether more elegant, which announces that Voisin & Co. of King St, Jersey is the Shopping Centre of the Channel Islands; a clock; a pair of pliers; batteries from a torch. Placing the basket on the table Mrs Hallivand sets aside the tins and other cleaning paraphernalia and lifting the embroidered cloth which is tucked in all the way round uncovers a pound bag of sugar and the last packet of weedkiller left in the Lodge’s outhouse. She picks up the tin and, holding it in front of her as if it were dynamite or something which might give her an electric shock, lifts the lid of the shoebox.

“I very much doubt,” she says to the self-portrait hanging above the fireplace as she pours it in, “whether you or I have ever seen so much sugar before, even in peace time. Three ounces a week is all we get now.” She pauses and then decides. “I don’t suppose it would do any harm. And I have such a sweet tooth.”

She moves quickly to the little kitchen at the back, where in earlier times the caretaker would brew up a cup during visiting hours. There is a kettle there and a small paraffin ring and beside them stands the tea caddy with the Swiss maid and Matterhorn motif and in which lies a dwindling amount of real leaf tea. On a shelf directly above the kettle stands a sizeable brown teapot, good for four thirsty people, with a cracked lid and a spout which pours in an indifferent are. Mrs Hallivand turns the tap and as the water is slightly discoloured Iets it run for a full minute before she fills the kettle through its forred-up spout.

While waiting for the kettle to boil she walks back into the room, to the window and the view of the besieged harbour and the glittering sea beyond. The room is beginning to smell of this strange assortment of packages, a damp sweetness clinging to the silk, an odd sourness too, like stale sweat. In previous times it would have smelt of cigar smoke and port. She talks, not to her husband, nor her dead niece, nor her dead sister (none of whom she misses), but to the man whose spirit had captured her heart all those years ago but who in the last eighteen months had been supplanted by another. If only she had been younger! If only the Major had been older! It was easy to see why he had found Isobel attractive, less easy to fathom his affection. Mrs Hallivand had flirted with a hundred different Lentsches in her time. If she’d been her niece’s age, Isobel wouldn’t have lasted more than a week. As it was, with barely any competition in sight, she’d had an uninter-rupted run, and where there might have been doubts, the language had saved her. Like any foreign man equipped with an English that was both precise and elegantly correct, when faced with a willing young woman with good looks and passable manners, the Major had taken any display of weakness in Isobel’s character as simply an example of his own inadequate hold on her native tongue. And there were so many reasons why she deserved him and her niece did not. Their love of literature, their understanding of art, the intelligent delight they both took in those flirtatious conversations that only lovers can sustain. She was still good-looking, she still had sparkle and, if she chose to wake it, there still lay within her that hard, unforgiving sexuality to which so many young men had once been drawn. But the Major had chosen Isobel, and Isobel was gone and now she has returned to the man who understood her best. The Major’s appeal was not only transitory, but misplaced. He meant nothing to her now.

The kettle starts to sing. Mrs Hallivand makes the tea, and using the milk from the stone bottle pours herself a cup. Bringing the cup back into the room she bends down and with her hand scoops up a palmful of crystals. It is an obscene amount to hold, to let run free. Raising her hand she Iets it flow through her fingers. She thinks of all the islanders queuing in the buffeting winds, waiting for their pitiful gram of this and their pitiful gram of that. The sugar sparkles fresh and light, a radiant white in this brown and solemn room, fairy dust from an angel’s wand caught in a beam from a distant star. She thinks of the long glittering evenings of her reckless youth; the murmur of voices in the ballroom below: the starched dress shirt and how it had glowed in the dark as she pressed her breasts, oh her lovely breasts, against it, reaching for one more illicit embrace. The white drifts down, to the floor and around her shoes. The light hurts her eyes. She could be skiing on the slopes above Wengen or walking barefoot on Deauville sand. She could be seventeen again, standing by the bay windows, watching the snow drift over the Parisian rooftops, waiting for her Peter Pan to lead her astray. She looks out, potion in hand, waiting for the sweet dreams of the liquid to cool.

A figure appears in the doorway. She turns.

“You’re early,” she says. “There’s some tea in the pot if you want.”

“Well?” he says. “How did it go?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

Albert grunts and walks to the table.

“Got you something.” He hands her a large tin.

“Custard! Where how on earth did you come by that?”

“Never you mind. Take it. Got something else too.” He digs into his pockets again. “Razor blades. Fifty of them.” He pulls out a little box and shakes the contents into the pickling jar. He holds it to the light. “This’ll take the wind out of his sails.”

Mrs Hallivand holds her cup tightly.

“I’m frightened, Albert,” she says. “Isobel has made it much more dangerous. I don’t know if I can go on.”

Albert steps up and shakes her hard.

“Do as you’re told, you silly woman. We’ve not long now.”

Five o’clock in the evening and Tommy Ie Coeur came back to the station in a bad mood. Van Dielen had still not returned and his feet were frozen. He showed Ned the holes in his boots.