Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

I was panting too much to hold my smile. ‘You didn’t have to come in after me.’

‘I bloody well slipped trying to reach you.’

‘I told you I was fine.’

‘How was I supposed to know that? I thought you were crying out for help.’ He lowered himself to the gravel next to me, shivering. The mangy roll of tape and plastic lay between us. He glanced down at it. ‘So that’s it, is it? Doesn’t seem like much from here.’

My hand was still gripping it. ‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts.’

‘Well, that’s not always true, believe me. That thing better be worth all the trouble. There aren’t many paintings I’d jump into a freezing lake for.’

‘I thought you slipped.’

He cornered his eyes at me.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Well, about bloody time.’ He patted his hands clean of stones, hooked on his glasses. ‘My kingdom for a towel.’

‘We can dry off by the fire,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘In Henry’s cottage. It’s five minutes that way.’

He looked north. ‘That might not be such a bad idea. My teeth are chattering.’

‘I can hear them.’

He gripped his jaw to quell it.

‘It’ll be worth it when you see it,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘I just want to get dry and get home.’

‘It’s yours — the painting. I’m giving it to you.’

He rubbed his knees. ‘That’s all very sweet. But I don’t want it. Even if it’s worth a fortune, I’m not taking your work.’

‘You kept that portrait I did of you.’

‘That had diagnostic value.’

‘So does this, probably. I wouldn’t have found it without you.’

‘Well, I’ve already diagnosed you once, and that didn’t turn out very well, did it? We’re not great adverts for the wonders of psychiatry.’ He stood up, extending his arm to me. ‘Come on. Let’s find somewhere to dry off and then we’ll hit the road.’

I let him haul me up.

We walked along the shore, the pair of us doused and shuddering. The canvas sagged and drooped in my clutches. ‘You’d better check that’s actually what you think it is,’ Victor said. ‘People dump all kinds of stuff in lakes, you know.’

But I could tell from the configurations of the tape around it, from the way that I had tucked and joined the pieces over its ends, that my mural was inside. The outer plastic was torn up; the inner layers still seemed to be intact. ‘I just hope it isn’t ruined,’ I said. ‘If the water’s really got to it, I might as well throw it back in.’

‘It’s probably more soaked than we are.’

‘I knew you’d find a way to cheer me up, Victor.’

‘You’re lucky I’m still talking to you. I’ve not been this drenched since I set the hotel sprinklers off on my honeymoon.’ He snorted a laugh from his nostrils. ‘One cigar. I’ve had one cigar in my life and I nearly set fire to the whole bloody building.’

And the thought of this did cheer me up somehow. We trudged along the beach, with the dregs of the daylight waning above us, and the silhouettes of dinghy-masts scratched darkly on the sky.

When we reached the nettled pathway to the cottage, Victor hung back. There were no lights on inside and the mossy roof was sagging ominously in the middle. The chimney had crumbled off. One of the windows had a brick-sized hole in it. The general impression of the place amidst the gloom was of a shipwreck. I pushed on, through the high weeds and grass. Part of me was still hoping to find Jim coming through the woods with a basket of fresh pickings. Part of me was thinking of Portmantle.

The front-door fixtures were corroded shut, so I led Victor round the side, into the thicket of the garden. There was a rusted oil drum lying in the nettles. The back door was unlocked and there must have been a shilling or two still left in the meter, because the bulb blinked yellow as I turned on the switch. The kitchen sink was stacked with unwashed crockery, and all across the table there were stale food scraps, tea left mouldering inside cups. It was colder in than out. The room had the upsetting reek of sour milk and Victor covered his mouth. ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘All the medication in the world couldn’t make me put up with this mess. You’d have to hold me here at knifepoint.’

But this was not where I had really been. This was just the place my body had been ghosting.

I laid the mural across two of the kitchen chairs and went to find the matches in the drawers — there were none. Victor had already parted the beads in the doorway and was looking through into the lounge. He turned the lights on and, going through, said, ‘Well, this is one way to live, I suppose.’

I followed after him.

A mattress was spread out by the fire, covered in dirty blankets that looked more like decorator’s dustsheets. The fireplace was crammed with singed paper and splinters of pine cones. The curtains were taped around the window frame. A fold-up table was loaded with rags and hardened tubes of paint, jars of briny water and murky bottles of linseed oil. There was a scattering of flora all across it and the floor, and a bucket of mulched pink petals, soaking. ‘That’s all Jim’s stuff,’ I said. ‘Or it was Henry’s. I can’t tell the difference any more.’

I found matches by the hearth and crouched to light some of the kindling scraps I found left in the scuttle. ‘Is there any paper over there that I can burn?’ I said.

But Victor’s mind was on something else. He was standing, cross-armed, by the wall at the far end of the room. ‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Come and see this.’

‘I thought you wanted to get dry,’ I said.

‘Just come and look.’

I left the kindling fizzling out and went to him. ‘Honestly, we’re going to catch pneumonia if I don’t get this lit.’ And, when I gazed towards the aspect of the wall that so fascinated him, I saw that it was pasted with images — they were glued right onto the plasterwork. Vivid colour photographs showing lush greenery, white houses glinting on a summer waterfront, men driving horses and carriages, two enormous buildings nestled in dense pines. I stepped closer, near enough to read their printed captions in the borders:

The only cars allowed on the islands are police and utility vehicles. Instead, there are horse-drawn carriages known as phaetons (‘faytons’ in Turkish). .

‘ National Geographic , if I’m not mistaken,’ Victor said. He walked towards the window, where there was another workbench of materials. I could not take my eyes from the wall. ‘You seem to have given my exercise some thought. Perhaps too much so.’

Heybeliada’s most visited attraction is the nineteenth-century Aya Triada Manastiri, a Greek Orthodox school of theology, which looks down over the island from its northernmost peak. .

‘At least now I understand what you were trying to tell me in that message. My secretary couldn’t figure out what you were saying. She thought she heard “Istanbul”, but it wasn’t the best of connections. You were rather garbled at the end.’ Victor was a blur now in the fringes of my vision. ‘I thought you said able something, table something, maple something. I should probably get my hearing tested.’

On the south side of the island is Heybeliada Sanatorium, a refuge for TB sufferers at the farthest point of Çam Limani Yolu.

I felt so numbed. There must have been ten or twenty of these images, cut from the magazine and glued down flat. And, surrounding them, I could see lines of my own handwriting in pencil. Ribbons and ribbons of scrawled text curving and bending all along the wall. I had copied it straight from the magazine, verbatim.

‘The Heart of the Princes’ Islands’ by scratched out of the wall with a blade. We know little about the island before we step off the ferry, but there are some things we have researched. This is as much a scouting mission as it is a relief exercise. Heybeliada lies twelve miles off the coast of Istanbul, the second largest of the islands that the locals know as Adalar. It is crowned by two steep forested hills to the north and south and its middle section bows into a plane of settlements where the natives live and ply their trades. Much of the work is seasonal. In the winter, the squat apartment blocks and rangy wooden houses stand vacant and unlit, but when the bright weather comes again they fill up with summering Istanbullus, who sit out on their fretwork balconies, sunbathe on the rocky beaches, flock upon the shining Marmara like gulls, and drink merrily on their roof-decks until dark. The Turkish meaning of its name — Saddlebag Island — evokes its shape at sea level. It is far up on the south-eastern peak, amidst the dense umbrella pines and pomegranate trees, that the Heybeliada Sanatorium is positioned. And we are—