(1958) Robinson Read online

  ‘I’m stopping at the Azores.’

  ‘Myself likewise. And in the long run,’ he said, ‘I proceed southward by the sea to another island.’

  ‘Which island is that? I’m rather interested in islands.’

  ‘Is not on the map. Is too small.’

  The man with the lucky charms was asking his friends,

  ‘You know your future?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said the American lady.

  ‘The magazine Your Future?’

  ‘Well, now, I don’t.’

  ‘I own it and I run it,’ said the man.

  I noticed that the sun had set.

  When, at the end of my second week on Robinson, I began to recognise Jimmie, I was immensely cheered up by the memory of our conversation on the plane. The tall fair man with his head in bandages regained in my eyes the shape and status of my amusing travelling companion.

  When he squatted on the patio repeating, ‘Robinson is not man for the ladies. I know Robinson from the past’, I was not at all surprised. I had already noticed that he was familiar with Robinson, and had gathered that, in fact, Robinson had been that ultimate destination to which he had referred in the plane.

  ‘Robinson is not man for the ladies.’

  That, too, I knew already. There is easily discernible in some men a certain indifference, not to women precisely but to the feminine element in women, which might be interpreted in a number of ways. In Robinson I had detected something more than indifference: a kind of armed neutrality. So much for his attitude to me. And I thought it likely that he could be positively hostile to the idea of women in general.

  ‘Look here,’ I said to Jimmie, ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

  ‘Is so?’ said Jimmie gallantly.

  ‘And in any case,’ I said, ‘Robinson is not my style.’

  ‘Do not become rattled,’ said Jimmie, ‘in consequence of what I say.’

  ‘You can tell Robinson from me___‘

  ‘Ah me!’ said Jimmie, ‘I am not messenger from Robinson. I tell you this from my own heart.’

  That put a different complexion on things. I was quite charmed by Jimmie. He appealed to a quality in my mind which I considered the most advanced I possessed, and which was also slightly masculine.

  ‘You like this?’ said Jimmie.

  He held out to me a little shining lipstick case. I took it and opened it. The lipstick inside was almost unused, but not quite. There was a little blunt smear at the end. Suddenly I threw it with a clink into the dry fountain.

  ‘It is salvage,’ I said. I was not only repelled by the idea of using a dead woman’s lipstick, I was furious at Jimmie’s implication that I might entertain a romantic interest in Robinson.

  ‘Is true,’ he said.

  Having buried the dead, they had been gathering from the environs of the burnt-out plane everything that remained a recognisable object. It was surprising, the sort of things they had picked up several hundred yards from the wreckage. Among them were my reading glasses intact in their case, with my name and address in Chelsea on the inside. I had said, when Robinson handed them to me,

  ‘I’d rather have my make-up case. I can read without the glasses.’

  ‘Can’t you read without the make-up?’

  ‘I don’t feel quite myself without make-up.’ This was true. And I was not made any happier by the condition of my dress and coat, though I had patched them up since the accident.

  And so, when Jimmie offered me this gruesome lipstick, I felt sure that Robinson had repeated my complaint. I darkly discerned they had been discussing me considerably as a female problem. I left Jimmie sitting on the patio, and thinking how I must keep my end up, I helped myself to a couple of Robinson’s cigarettes above my allotted ration. I was the only other smoker besides Robinson on the island, and he had generously, though with an air of resignation, agreed to share with me, strictly fifty-fifty, his total supply for the duration of our stay. This gave us nine cigarettes a day each. As a result of his discussing me with Jimmie, and the incident of the lipstick, I had eleven cigarettes that day, while Robinson had only seven. I felt that this course was preferable to nurturing a grudge.

  Chapter IV

  AT the end of the third week Tom Wells was able to get up. He still wore the canvas contrivance in which Robinson had, with good success, encased his broken ribs which seemed to be knitting together nicely. This left me free from my nursing duties, and all the afternoons were my own. And now that the dead were buried I was free to wander about the island.

  ‘If you’re going for a walk,’ said Robinson, ‘take this raincoat. The weather is a woman on this island.’ It was my first excursion, a sunny day, the 6th of June, the Feast of Pentecost.

  I already had one arm in the garment when I peeled it off and threw it on the ground as if it were teeming with maggots. The violent action hurt my left arm which was just out of its sling.

  ‘It is salvage,’ I said.

  Robinson sighed and picked it up. ‘Borrow mine, ‘he said.

  Robinson’s waterproof was not much too big for me. For my first walk, he advised the path down the mountain to the south coast of the island, along the white beach, and returning by a second mountain path which was visible from the villa on clear days. Robinson pointed out the whole route from his gateway, for there was no mist.

  The descent did not start immediately from Robinson’s villa. The house was built on a flat shoulder wide enough to contain the blue and green lake and a patch of ground the size of a field which was visible from the patio. Robinson had planted this field with mustard which was now in bloom so that I was almost dazzled by its shimmering yellow. Placed so near the lake, the field was a startling sight. ‘I planted mustard for the effect,’ he said. Apart from the pomegranates, which he cultivated on an eastern part of the island as a business, he did not grow any of his own food. No runner beans, potatoes, onions, spinach, rhubarb, no tomato frames nor currant bushes, nor peaches and plums. A large storehouse behind the house held his quantities of tinned supplies and grain. I thought this odd, since the ground on the plateau surrounding the villa was fertile and the sun blazing hot, and the mists gentle and frequent.

  This was the first day since the accident that I had been alone with myself. I planned eventually to explore the whole island. Robinson had told us of a lava-landscape on the other side of the mountain which, he said, was like moon scenery. There was also an active crater. This excited me. But Robinson warned me against wandering further than the south beach on this my first excursion.

  The gradient was irregular, gentle and steep by turns. At one point I had to scramble down over old lava flows. Here I took my foothold on tough beds of thyme and ling about four inches high, and eventually came to a grassy woodland and a clump of blue gum trees which, from Robinson’s villa, had looked like dwarf vegetation.

  I must say that throughout my stay on the island I was more observant of my surroundings than I had ever been before, or have been since. I had often, previously, been accustomed to topographical observations, but that had been according to rule, deliberate. Now, without any effort of will, my eye recorded the territory, as if my eyes were an independent and aboriginal body, taking precautions against unknown eventualities. Instinctively I looked for routes of escape, positions of concealment, protective rocks; instinctively I looked for edible vegetation. In fact, I must have been afraid. And whereas, on my previous travels, I had been scenery and landscape-minded, had been botanically inclined, had been geologically enchanted, had known the luxury of anthropological speculations, I found myself now noting the practical shelter to be obtained from small craters and gulches and lava caverns. Fissures, cracks and holes attracted me for their contents of nettles and fungus, possibly edible. One could keep a fire alight more easily at a level above the mist-belt; one could, if necessary, survive, and bed down on bracken from these lower woodlands. Fresh water streams were frequent. One night spent on the sphagnum moors of the cloud-belt would
be fatal. On the other side of the mountain, where Robinson used to disappear for several hours on end, there was plenty of game, as I knew from his occasional reappearance with woodcock, partridge and sometimes snipe; or sometimes he brought back a rabbit. I now wished I had learned to use a gun. I had been told of a fresh-water stream from which Miguel was clever at getting trout. I wondered in what part of the island this stream could be. And then I wondered what all the panic was about. I had apparently nothing to fear.

  As I climbed down the pathway among the last of the lava rocks to the coast I saw Miguel approaching along the beach. I waved. He saw me, but did not respond. Miguel was not hostile exactly, but he was difficult to please. I think in those first four weeks he was jealous of our having appeared out of the skies and drawn off all Robinson’s attention.

  He had spent the greater part of his childhood with Robinson, with whom he spoke good English. His mother having died in his infancy, the father had attached himself to a trading boat and become one of Robinson’s pomegranate men. Miguel had always accompanied his father on his working periods on Robinson, and, when the father had died, Robinson adopted the child. Robinson spoke often of Miguel’s forthcoming departure for school in Lisbon, as if it were a great but inevitable misfortune. He had not yet fixed on any particular school, so strong was his disinclination to part with Miguel.

  Of course I had attempted to strike up a friendship with Miguel but so far there was nothing doing. Jimmie had also failed in this respect. A sort of competition had developed between us for the child’s attention, let alone affection. Tom Wells, who was only now risen from his sick-bed, had so far been too taken up with his own discomfort to notice him, but Jimmie and I had been disconcerted to find, on Tom Wells’ first afternoon out of bed, when he had been sat up with blankets on the patio, that Miguel had hung shyly round the man, who did not attempt to encourage the child, particularly. The next day, Robinson, with an air of omnipotent indulgence, brought to Tom Wells his own briefcase which had happened to be among the salvage —it having presumably been clutched in Wells’ hands at the time of his projection from the plane. As Tom Wells seized on this with delight and began to examine the contents, Miguel had approached without further hesitation, and thrust his brown hand into the interior.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, snuggling up to Wells, ‘what you’ve got there.’

  He was overjoyed when Tom Wells produced one of his sample Druid emblems.

  Jimmie and I were quite put out. My attempts to teach the cat Bluebell to play ping-pong were partly inspired by a desire to impress Miguel. He seemed to think it was an unworthy idea. Jimmie, who had been suffering from delayed shock, although his physical injuries had been slight, went so far as to attempt a cart-wheel on the patio, and suffered a nasty nose-bleed as a result. Miguel was indifferent. I fetched the great cold key from the kitchen and put it down Jimmie’s back. Miguel watched uppishly and without comment. ‘That youngster doesn’t even bloody laugh at my great sorrow,’ said Jimmie, dabbing his nose.

  And so I was not surprised when Miguel did not wave back to me from the beach, although I saw him look up. He had certainly seen me. I decided to amble along the beach towards him. The sand was extremely fine, and less white than it had looked from a distance against the black lava rocks. Up against the cliffs some pink star-shaped flowers were opening out of the very sand. A few yards away from where the cliff path joined the beach, the ribs of a small sailing vessel lay half-buried, and further along was the wreck of an old clipper, its leonine figurehead still intact and pointing skyward. I cleared a space among the weed on the mouldering forepart and sat there to rest, leaning on the bowsprit and rubbing my painful left arm.

  When he saw me sitting there, Miguel stopped self-consciously. He lifted a pebble and threw it into the curling sea. At this coast the sea was two miles deep and the currents were dangerous. Robinson had warned us not to bathe in the sea, for even where the currents were safe the sharks were not. The blue-green lake was the island bathing-pool.

  From the map of Robinson which he had shown me I knew that this stretch of beach lay in the small of the back. I could not help thinking of the island in this anatomical way, because of Robinson’s constant references to the Arms and Legs.

  Miguel continued to throw pebbles, and I watched the sea, in case he should be embarrassed by my watching him. There was a special fascination about the sea surrounding Robinson, stretching for a thousand miles to the nearest post-office. It was only a few seconds later that I realised Miguel had stopped chucking pebbles, and I fancied he must be approaching. I looked along the beach but could see no sign of him, although I had a view of the whole stretch. A small strip of vegetation grew against the black cliffs, but this was too low to hide Miguel unless he lay flat. I decided he must be lying flat, and set off along the beach, examining the base of the cliffs very closely. I reached the end of the beach, where the black rock rose sheer out of the sea, without having found any trace of Miguel. I was bewildered, then frightened. I could see no place where he could be concealed except the sea. I scanned the sea fearfully, hoping I should not see a head bobbing far out of my reach, but I saw nothing but the waves chopping with the undercurrents, which might have concealed anything. I did not really think he could have jumped into the sea in the few moments that my eyes had been turned from him. I did not really think he would be so foolish. I was sure Miguel was somewhere safe but I was disturbed by having no reason for this certainty. For a moment I thought perhaps my other companions, too, had disappeared. I thought perhaps they had never existed, that Robinson and his household were a dead woman’s dream, that I was indeed dead as my family believed and the newspapers had by now reported. In view of these ideas, I thought the most necessary course of action was to return to Robinson’s house by the shortest route and report the disappearance of Miguel.

  The quickest route led from the end of the beach where I now stood, although it was not exactly the shortest. It zig-zagged up the mountain, a gentler gradient than that of the path I had used on my downward journey. I had been tacking up this path for twenty minutes when I came upon a derelict crofthouse and watermill on a small plateau overhanging a stream which trickled down a small ravine. It now struck me that Robinson’s predecessors, hermits though they might be, had made efforts to cultivate every green spot on the island. Later, when I saw the rich pasture lands of the West Leg and South Arm, I felt a sort of outrage that their work was falling to waste. I saw by the croft-house a number of mango trees still bearing fruit, but they were bedraggled and untended. It was from here that Robinson must have gathered the poor specimens of mango which we ate for breakfast. I did not suppose the trees would bear much longer.

  Many times, during my climb, I had turned to scan the beach below and the surrounding mountain scrub for some sign of Miguel. I began to worry seriously, mainly because I had every obvious reason to worry. When I came up to the deserted croft I took a last look round, for above this plateau the cloud-belt was forming as it usually did in the late afternoon, and this made it impossible to see the coastline from where I stood.

  I decided to rest from my climb for ten minutes on this plateau, and I ambled about, walking round the cottage, looking through the gaping windows. I tried the door. It was open. I entered, and saw Miguel by the crumbling hearth laying twigs for a fire. He had a can of water and a tin of coffee.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘How did you get here?’

  He looked pleased with this question, and so, to please him more, I said,

  ‘I saw you on the beach. I looked away for a moment, and when I looked again you were gone.’

  He even laughed at this.

  ‘How did you do it?’ I said. If he had climbed the mountain I must have seen him. But he must have climbed the mountain and I did not see him.

  ‘There’s a secret cave,’ said Miguel, ‘with a tunnel.’

  ‘Where? I should like to see it.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Does Robinson know
the secret cave?’

  ‘Yes. But he won’t show it.’

  He handed me a tin mug of his hot black coffee brew. ‘Robinson won’t show you the caves. He only shows me.’

  ‘Oh, is there more than one?’

  He did not answer, having already let slip too much. ‘This is lovely stuff,’ I said, and lest I should seem patronising, I added, ‘but it needs some sugar.’

  He fished into the inside pocket of his lumber jacket and brought out a paper screw of sugar. This he opened and emptied into my mug, stirring it with a twig. We sat on the hearthstone and sipped. Meantime I was wishing I was at home.

  ‘I’m off now,’ said Miguel.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ I said.

  ‘No, you wait a short time.’

  I thought he wanted to go to some other secret caves and didn’t want me to discover the way, so I said,

  ‘All right. Let’s say about ten minutes. Will that do?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you wait till it stops raining.’

  I noticed that it was raining, not very heavily.

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t mind the rain.

  ‘Robinson’s raincoat will get wet,’ the boy pointed out.

  I could not deny it. I waited till the shower was over, then emerged to catch sight of Miguel making his nimble way home through the thicket above me.

  Chapter V

  ‘I WISH,’ said Jimmie, ‘I stay at home. I commence to think I want my head examined for making this dangerous journey.’

  ‘Same here,’ I said, without really meaning it.

  I did wish to go home, but not that I had never come away. If I had stayed at home, there might have been a fire in the house, or I might have been run over, or murdered, or have committed a mortal sin. There is no absolute method of judging whether one course of action is less dangerous than another.

  ‘Same here,’ I said, simply to convey agreement that our situation might be better than it was.