Coda

HUGH TOWN, ST. MARY’S, SCILLY ISLES
1950

“Handsomely there, Boy.”

His head pops up under a quiver of short brown curls on top, shaved almost to stubble on the sides, blue-gray eyes squinting in the befuddlement my words so often seem to prompt. “Eh?”

“Not so hard, and pay more attention,” I explain, nodding to the sanding block clutched in both his little hands. “You’re not grinding walnuts.”

Alfie’s fair, ruddy-cheeked face relaxes. “Oh. Sorry, guv.” And he presses the sander more gingerly to the upturned hull of the little rowboat raised up on sawhorses between us.

I watch him covertly for another moment before I go back to scraping a patina of barnacles and old paint off the port bows, steadying the hull with the curve of my hook. I must stoop like Father Time over much of the work, while Alfie, who is small for his age—not above nine or ten, if I am any judge of boys—cannot quite reach the keel, even stretched to the fullest extent of his limbs. But he’ll not be put off sweeping up sawdust and shavings forever. And as he comes round every day after school, I reckon there’s a deal less mischief he can get up to with a block of sandpaper than some of the more formidable tools in this shop.

Mad for boats, his mum says. I was like that once. I think.

I went back to Bristol for a few days, but nothing looked the same as I thought I remembered it. No one knew me there. The name Hookbridge is unknown in the Hall of Records. My dubious memories of the place seem antiquated and unreal, as all my memories seem fantastical to me now, no more substantial than a play I might have seen once, or a film at the cinema. Amnesia, the doctors call it; not uncommon in men who’ve been through war.

So I came back to the Isles, here to Hugh Town on St. Mary’s, where I first appeared. Back to my sloop, Le Reve, as is painted on her stern, all that I know in the world that is mine. The authorities held her for over a month, impounded, as they put it, during which time she was the subject of a great deal of postal correspondence, telephone calls, and, I believe, police investigation into her origin and provenance. But as no such vessel has been reported lost, stolen, or missing, they have recently returned her to me. There is some trade to be had, I’m told, in sailing a boat between these islands, especially as an alternative to the bowel-rattling steamer that provides that service now. Perhaps I’ll look into it.

In the meantime, to pay for her berth, I work here in the woodshop for old Mr. Barnes. He also lets me a little gabled room upstairs in this solid stone building with its prospect of the broad beach and the bay of St. Mary’s Pool. It’s not fine woodworking; we most often repair small fishing craft. But hammering, sawing, sanding and shaping are skills at which I appear to have some facility, although I can’t recall where I learned them.

The calendar in this shop says 1950. I can find no record at all of where I might have spent the intervening years. It’s as if I am reborn.

A shadow appears in the open double doorway, a slender silhouette against the afternoon light glinting off the water. Alfie’s mother, Mrs. Harris, breezes in, on her way home from work, her hair still pinned up under a kerchief, a battered canvas sack of groceries in her arms.

“Thanks for minding him, Mr. Benjamin,” she says to me. I’ve dropped the surname Hookbridge; it sounds like a joke, considering. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.”

“Aw, Mum;” the lad rolls his eyes.

“Behave yourself, you, or I’ll tell her the truth,” I warn him, sotto voce. His mother looks stricken for an instant, until Alfie erupts in giggles, delighted to be branded some sort of desperado, if only in jest.

“Really, you should let me pay you something,” she tells me.

“No, no, no,” I wave her off. “An extra pair of hands is always useful around here.” This I say without irony or self-consciousness. The depredations of the war are well known here. Ludlow, the house painter, came back with a wooden leg; the publican’s son lost an arm. But the Scillonians are a hardy lot, as rugged as their landscape, and do not squander time and energy on anything so useless as pity. They simply get on with things. It’s what I most enjoy about this place, the hardworking folk and the nearness of the sea.

“Well, come on, then,” Mrs. Harris urges her son. “Your dad’s coming home tonight and I’ve got a chop for supper.”

Alfie all but hurls the sander back onto the workbench in his eagerness. Like so many in these Isles, his father must go often to the mainland to find work. The separations must be hard, so soon after the war, but I imagine the homecomings are twice as sweet.

They both wave goodbye as Mrs. Harris herds the lad out again. I watch for another moment as they hurry down the road, her fingertips on his shoulder, the boy’s animated hands describing the day’s adventures. It makes me wistful to see it, as it often does.

Perhaps I was married once. I know I have been loved; I feel it in my heart the way my hand knew the touch of my sloop. Whoever she was, wherever she is, I pray she does not grieve for me.

Le Reve rides the tidewater at the end of her slip off the quay. Things are calm enough now, in May, heading on toward summer, but I must see about housing her more securely for the winter months, I think, as I hop down to her deck. It’s always a joyful moment to board my little ship, odd as she is, an old-fashioned wooden sailing vessel. I suppose I looked quite the buccaneer myself, when I first arrived, with my long hair and battered old coat. I am barbered now, and dress more sensibly, although it’s funny to think how flummoxed I was at first by common things like zippers and snaps.

I’ve not had much time to myself on board since I got her back, but Barnes is closing up shop tonight, so I’ve scarpered off. Perhaps the thought of a wife has made me melancholy for all I might have left behind, but I pay closer attention than ever as I rove across the deck, down the hatch, prowl through the salon, for any forgotten receipt or bill of lading or harbor pass that might tell where we’ve been. I suppose the police have been through here at least once, but finding no corpses nor runaway Nazi spies secreted below decks have left things not much disturbed.

In the cabin, most of the space is occupied by a rectangle of bed, a mattress set into a built-in wooden frame that juts out from the stern wall. Two mattresses, by the depth of the frame, and as I reach out to press down one corner beneath a pretty silken coverlet, I realize it’s stuffed with wool, possibly even feathers, and without springs. An old-fashioned lantern with a tallow candle sits on the shelf above the bedstead. Is she a replica built for some historical exhibition? I wish I knew. It’s a lonely feeling to be so completely unknown in the world, even to myself.

Perhaps there is some purveyor’s mark somewhere on the bed linens, someone who might recall the circumstances of this order. And twitching up the corner of the coverlet to peer down into the bedstead, I spy something odd, some pinkish, fluffy thing peeking out from between the two mattresses. I pry up the corner of the top mattress with my hand and gingerly hook aside the trailing bedcover. It’s a feather, yes, but far too grand to ever stuff inside a mattress, a single, long feather from some tropical bird, a flamingo such as I have never seen outside of the Indies, in the most provocative hue of sunset pink. What’s it doing here? And what is that object it’s protruding out of?

Shifting the corner of the mattress to my hook, I reach in and withdraw a small leather-bound book with the uproarious feather stuck between its pages. Dropping the mattress, I turn to perch on the bed, securing the antique book on my lap with the curve of my hook, sliding my fingers over the embossed gilt lettering of its title: Paradise Lost. Why is poor, respectable Milton hidden between the bedclothes, like some lewd pornographic verse? Does opium, stolen jewels, the whereabouts of some lost treasure, lie concealed within its pages? Who has thrust it here so furtively?

Was it me?

My fingers stray to the billowy, cloud-soft upper fronds of the pink feather sticking out of the book. In a strange way it soothes me to touch it, yet it also fills me with a yearning I cannot name. What can it mean? Why is it here? Gingerly, I open the book on my lap to the marked place; as I set the feather aside, I notice the nether tip of the shaft has been savaged to a crude point. There is nothing exceptional in the text of the passage it marks, Satan maundering on about some injustice or other. But the margins round the text of each page are wide, and in the far margin of the left-hand page, something is scrawled at right angles to the text. I tilt the book sideways, muster my spectacles out of my shirt pocket and squint at it, a few words scribbled in a thin, rusty-looking ink. One is a name. The others are so poorly limned, I must sound them out aloud like a schoolboy to divine their meaning.

No sooner have I spoken them than something stirs within me, incipient life shaking off primordial ooze, a longing beyond words, an urgency that will not be denied. I am a madman to follow it. I will perish, somehow, if I do not.

I’ve climbed to the quay again, heading back toward town, as jittery as a lad, with no clear idea where I intend to go. The parish church, perhaps? The Hall of Records? Surely, if anyone in Hugh Town knew me before, they’d have come forth by now.

The usual afternoon activity teems along the quay; fishermen, dockworkers, a few early passengers for the steamer. Mr. Guy from the bakeshop going home to his dinner. Mrs. Islington from Trescoe, who comes to the school now and then to read the children stories. I nod to Miss Patchett, on her way to work at the public house. I’m passing them all by when I remember something Alfie said to me not long ago, about Mrs. Islington. She told his class she’d been coming to Scilly since she was their age.

Perhaps I needn’t go as far as the parish church, at least not yet.

She stands near the railing, gazing out at the boats in St. Mary’s Pool. Close by is a bench for those awaiting the steamer, but she does not use it, cradling an armload of storybooks on her hip. I come up to the railing alongside her, and she turns her head, nods. We have passed each other before along this quay.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Islington, but I’m told you have a long history in Scilly,” I venture. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

Her mouth tilts up briefly, a prelude to a smile not yet ready to appear. “Fire away.”

“Do you know of anyone round here named Stella?”

She makes a mischievous mouth. “Only me.”

My heart quickens, and I turn away in some confusion, gaze off down the quay, out past the masts of fishing boats in the harbor, toward the dark speck that is the distant steamship chugging toward St. Mary’s. Yet the words I spoke moments ago, in the cabin of my sloop, bubble out of me before my brain can intercede.

“I believe we’re on this journey together.”

She studies me, face carefully polite, as if my remark were not utter nonsense; I’m not even going anywhere. “Well,” she begins, “assuming the steamer ever…” But the rest of her words trail away as something shifts in her expression; her eyes become tender, wistful. Sad, perhaps. I don’t mean to sadden her.

“Sorry, I don’t know where that came from,” I apologize quickly. “You must think me a raving Bedlamite. I promise you, it’s not my usual habit to accost strangers in the street.” Embarrassed, I start to turn away.

“No! No, wait!” she laughs. “On the contrary, I’m delighted to make the acquaintance of anyone who knows what a ‘Bedlamite’ is!” She shifts her books into the crook of her left arm, thrusts out her right hand. “Stella Islington,” she says formally.

I smile back cautiously. “James Benjamin.” I put out my left hand; undaunted, she slides her fingers under mine, briefly grips my hand. Something vast, terrible, wonderful yawns open inside me for a heartbeat, then subsides.

“See? We are strangers no more.” There is her smile, as ripe as the promise of its prelude.

The far-off steamer blows its whistle, and a few more people wander down the quay in response. Thieving gulls scree in expectation over a fishing smack heading for the beach. Clerks and shopgirls and customers are bustling in and out of quayside storefronts. The air smells of salt and fish, the pervasive honey of the narcissus that grows in such profusion here, the metallic scent of incipient spring rain. And we stand transfixed, myself and this woman I scarcely know, with her impudent smile and sea green in her eyes.

“Do you believe in folie à deux, Mrs. Islington?” I hazard.

Her smile broadens. “Absobloodylutely!”

It makes me exceedingly merry. I can’t think why.