5
IT IS FOR PLACES LIKE THIS THAT THE WORD “BLEAK” has been invented.
The island is a J-shaped lump of rock rising sullenly out of the North Sea. It lies on the map like the top half of a broken cane, parallel with the Equator but a long, long way north; its curved handle toward Aberdeen, its broken, jagged stump pointing threateningly at distant Denmark. It is ten miles long.
Around most of its coast the cliffs rise out of the cold sea without the courtesy of a beach. Angered by this rudeness the waves pound on the rock in impotent rage; a ten-thousand-year fit of bad temper that the island ignores with impunity.
In the cup of the J the sea is calmer; there it has provided itself with a more pleasant reception. Its tides have thrown into that cup so much sand and seaweed, driftwood and pebbles and seashells that there is now, between the foot of the cliff and the water’s edge, a crescent of something closely resembling dry land, a more-or-less beach.
Each summer the vegetation at the top of the cliff drops a handful of seeds on to the beach, the way a rich man throws loose change to beggars. If the winter is mild and the spring comes early, a few of the seeds take feeble root; but they are never healthy enough to flower themselves and spread their own seeds, so the beach exists from year to year on handouts.
On the land itself, the proper land, held out of the sea’s reach by the cliffs, green things do grow and multiply. The vegetation is mostly coarse grass, only just good enough to nourish the few bony sheep, but tough enough to bind the topsoil to the island’s bedrock. There are some bushes, all thorny, that provide homes for rabbits; and a brave stand of conifers on the leeward slope of the hill at the eastern end.
The higher land is ruled by heather. Every few years the man—yes, there is a man here—sets fire to the heather, and then the grass will grow and the sheep can graze here too; but after a couple of years the heather comes back, God knows from where, and drives the sheep away until the man burns it again.
The rabbits are here because they were born here; the sheep are here because they were brought here; and the man is here to look after the sheep; but the birds are here because they like it. There are hundreds of thousands of them: long-legged rock pipits whistling peep peep peep as they soar and pe-pe-pe-pe as they dive like a Spitfire coming at a Messerschmidt out of the sun; corncrakes, which the man rarely sees, but he knows they are there because their bark keeps him awake at night; ravens and carrion crows and kittiwakes and countless gulls; and a pair of golden eagles that the man shoots at when he sees them, for he knows—regardless of what naturalists and experts from Edinburgh may tell him—that they do prey on live lambs and not just the carcasses of those already dead.
The island’s most constant visitor is the wind. It comes mostly from the northeast, from really cold places where there are fjords and glaciers and icebergs; often bringing with it unwelcome gifts of snow and driving rain and cold, cold mist; sometimes arriving empty-handed, just to howl and whoop and raise hell, tearing up bushes and bending trees and whipping the intemperate ocean into fresh paroxysms of foam-flecked rage. It is tireless, this wind, and that is its mistake. If it came occasionally it could take the island by surprise and do some real damage; but because it is almost always here, the island has learned to live with it. The plants put down deep roots, and the rabbits hide far inside the thickets, and the trees grow up with their backs ready-bent for the flogging, and the birds nest on sheltered ledges, and the man’s house is sturdy and squat, built with a craftsmanship that knows this old wind.
This house is made of big grey stones and grey slates, the color of the sea. It has small windows and close-fitting doors and a chimney in its pipe end. It stands at the top of the hill at the eastern end of the island, close to the splintered stub of the broken walking-stick. It crowns the hill, defying the wind and the rain, not out of bravado but so that the man can see the sheep.
There is another house, very similar, ten miles away at the opposite end of the island near the more-or-less beach; but nobody lives there. There was once another man. He thought he knew better than the island; he thought he could grow oats and potatoes and keep a few cows. He battled for three years with the wind and the cold and the soil before he admitted he was wrong. When he had gone, nobody wanted his home.
This is a hard place. Only hard things survive here: hard rock, coarse grass, tough sheep, savage birds, sturdy houses and strong men.
It is for places like this that the word “bleak” has been invented.
“IT’S CALLED STORM ISLAND,” said Alfred Rose. “I think you’re going to like it.”
David and Lucy Rose sat in the prow of the fishing boat and looked across the choppy water. It was a fine November day, cold and breezy yet clear and dry. A weak sun sparkled off the wavelets.
“I bought it in 1926,” Papa Rose continued, “when we thought there was going to be a revolution and we’d need somewhere to hide from the working class. It’s just the place for a convalescence.”
Lucy thought he was being suspiciously hearty, but she had to admit it looked lovely: all windblown and natural and fresh. And it made sense, this move. They had to get away from their parents and make a new start at being married; and there was no point in moving to a city to be bombed, not when neither of them was really well enough to help; and then David’s father had revealed that he owned an island off the coast of Scotland, and it seemed too good to be true.
“I own the sheep, too,” Papa Rose said. “Shearers come over from the mainland each spring, and the wool brings in just about enough money to pay Tom McAvity’s wages. Old Tom’s the shepherd.”
“How old is he?” Lucy asked.
“Good Lord, he must be—oh, seventy?”
“I suppose he’s eccentric.” The boat turned into the bay, and Lucy could see two small figures on the jetty: a man and a dog.
“Eccentric? No more than you’d be if you’d lived alone for twenty years. He talks to his dog.”
Lucy turned to the skipper of the small boat. “How often do you call?”
“Once a fortnight, missus. I bring Tom’s shopping, which isna much, and his mail, which is even less. You just give me your list, every other Monday, and if it can be bought in Aberdeen I’ll bring it.”
He cut the motor and threw a rope to Tom. The dog barked and ran around in circles, beside himself with excitement. Lucy put one foot on the gunwale and sprang out on to the jetty.
Tom shook her hand. He had a face of leather and a huge pipe with a lid. He was shorter than she, but wide, and he looked ridiculously healthy. He wore the hairiest tweed jacket she had ever seen, with a knitted sweater that must have been made by an elderly sister somewhere, plus a checked cap and army boots. His nose was huge, red and veined. “Pleased to meet you,” he said politely, as if she was his ninth visitor today instead of the first human face he had seen in fourteen days.
“Here y’are, Tom,” said the skipper. He handed two cardboard boxes out of the boat. “No eggs this time, but there’s a letter from Devon.”
“It’ll be from ma niece.”
Lucy thought, That explains the sweater.
David was still in the boat. The skipper stood behind him and said, “Are you ready?”
Tom and Papa Rose leaned into the boat to assist, and the three of them lifted David in his wheelchair on to the jetty.
“If I don’t go now I’ll have to wait a fortnight for the next bus,” Papa Rose said with a smile. “The house has been done up quite nicely, you’ll see. All your stuff is in there. Tom will show you where everything is.” He kissed Lucy, squeezed David’s shoulder, and shook Tom’s hand. “Have a few months of rest and togetherness, get completely fit, then come back; there are important war jobs for both of you.”
They would not be going back, Lucy knew, not before the end of the war. But she had not told anyone about that yet.
Papa got back into the boat. It wheeled away in a tight circle. Lucy waved until it disappeared around the headland.
Tom pushed the wheelchair, so Lucy took his groceries. Between the landward end of the jetty and the cliff top was a long, steep, narrow ramp rising high above the beach like a bridge. Lucy would have had trouble getting the wheelchair to the top, but Tom managed without apparent exertion.
The cottage was perfect.
It was small and grey, and sheltered from the wind by a little rise in the ground. All the woodwork was freshly painted, and a wild rose bush grew beside the doorstep. Curls of smoke rose from the chimney to be whipped away by the breeze. The tiny windows looked over the bay.
Lucy said, “I love it!”
The interior had been cleaned and aired and painted, and there were thick rugs on the stone floors. It had four rooms: downstairs, a modernized kitchen and a living room with a stone fireplace; upstairs, two bedrooms. One end of the house had been carefully remodeled to take modern plumbing, with a bathroom above and a kitchen extension below.
Their clothes were in the wardrobes. There were towels in the bathroom and food in the kitchen.
Tom said, “There’s something in the barn I’ve to show you.”
It was a shed, not a barn. It lay hidden behind the cottage, and inside it was a gleaming new jeep.
“Mr. Rose says it’s been specially adapted for young Mr. Rose to drive,” Tom said. “It’s got automatic gears, and the throttle and brake are operated by hand. That’s what he said.” He seemed to be repeating the words parrotfashion, as if he had very little idea of what gears, brakes and throttles might be.
Lucy said, “Isn’t that super, David?”
“Top-hole. But where shall I go in it?”
Tom said: “You’re always welcome to visit me and share a pipe and a drop of whisky. I’ve been looking forward to having neighbors again.”
“Thank you,” said Lucy.
“This here’s the generator,” Tom said, turning around and pointing. “I’ve got one just the same. You put the fuel in here. It delivers alternating current.”
“That’s unusual—small generators are usually direct current,” David said.
“Aye. I don’t really know the difference, but they tell me this is safer.”
“True. A shock from this would throw you across the room, but direct current would kill you.”
They went back to the cottage. Tom said, “Well, you’ll want to settle in, and I’ve sheep to tend, so I’ll say good-day. Oh! I ought to tell you—in an emergency, I can contact the mainland by wireless radio.”
David was surprised. “You’ve got a radio transmitter?”
“Aye,” Tom said proudly. “I’m an enemy aircraft spotter in the Royal Observer Corps.”
“Ever spotted any?” David asked.
Lucy flashed her disapproval of the sarcasm in David’s voice, but Tom seemed not to notice. “Not yet,” he replied.
“Jolly good show.”
When Tom had gone Lucy said, “He only wants to do his bit.”
“There are lots of us who want to do our bit,” David said.
And that, Lucy reflected, was the trouble. She dropped the subject, and wheeled her crippled husband into their new home.
WHEN LUCY had been asked to visit the hospital psychologist, she had immediately assumed that David had brain damage. It was not so. “All that’s wrong with his head is a nasty bruise on the left temple,” the psychologist said. She went on: “However, the loss of both his legs is a trauma, and there’s no telling how it will affect his state of mind. Did he want very much to be a pilot?”
Lucy pondered. “He was afraid, but I think he wanted it very badly, all the same.”
“Well, he’ll need all the reassurance and support that you can give him. And patience, too. One thing we can predict is that he will be resentful and ill-tempered for a while. He needs love and rest.”
However, during their first few months on the island he seemed to want neither. He did not make love to her, perhaps because he was waiting until his injuries were fully healed. But he did not rest, either. He threw himself into the business of sheep farming, tearing about the island in his jeep with the wheelchair in the back. He built fences along the more treacherous cliffs, shot at the eagles, helped Tom train a new dog when Betsy began to go blind, and burned off the heather; and in the spring he was out every night delivering lambs. One day he felled a great old pine tree near Tom’s cottage, and spent a fortnight stripping it, hewing it into manageable logs and carting them back to the house for firewood. He relished really hard manual labor. He learned to strap himself tightly to the chair to keep his body anchored while he wielded an axe or a mallet. He carved a pair of Indian clubs and exercised with them for hours when Tom could find nothing more for him to do. The muscles of his arms and back became near-grotesque, like those of men who win body-building contests.
Lucy was not unhappy. She had been afraid he might sit by the fire all day and brood over his bad luck. The way he worked was faintly worrying because it was so obsessive, but at least he was not vegetating.
She told him about the baby at Christmas.
In the morning she gave him a gasoline-driven saw, and he gave her a bolt of silk. Tom came over for dinner, and they ate a wild goose he had shot. David drove the shepherd home after tea, and when he came back Lucy opened a bottle of brandy.
Then she said, “I have another present for you, but you can’t open it until May.”
He laughed. “What on earth are you talking about? How much of that brandy did you drink while I was out?”
“I’m having a baby.”
He stared at her, and all the laughter went out of his face. “Good God, that’s all we bloody well need.”
“David!”
“Well, for God’s sake…. When the hell did it happen?”
“That’s not too difficult to figure out, is it?” she said. “It must have been a week before the wedding. It’s a miracle it survived the crash.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Huh—when?”
“So how do you know for sure?”
“Oh, David, don’t be so boring. I know for sure because my periods have stopped and my nipples hurt and I throw up in the mornings and my waist is four inches bigger than it used to be. If you ever looked at me you would know for sure.”
“All right.”
“What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be thrilled!”
“Oh, sure. Perhaps we’ll have a son, and then I can take him for walks and play football with him, and he’ll grow up wanting to be like his father the war hero, a legless fucking joke!”
“Oh, David, David,” she whispered. She knelt in front of his wheelchair. “David, don’t think like that. He will respect you. He’ll look up to you because you put your life together again, and because you can do the work of two men from your wheelchair, and because you carried your disability with courage and cheerfulness and—”
“Don’t be so damned condescending,” he snapped. “You sound like a sanctimonious priest.”
She stood up. “Well, don’t act as if it’s my fault. Men can take precautions too, you know.”
“Not against invisible trucks in the blackout!”
It was a silly exchange and they both knew it, so Lucy said nothing. The whole idea of Christmas seemed utterly trite now: the bits of colored paper on the walls, and the tree in the corner, and the remains of a goose in the kitchen waiting to be thrown away—none of it had anything to do with her life. She began to wonder what she was doing on this bleak island with a man who seemed not to love her, having a baby he didn’t want. Why shouldn’t she—why not—well, she could…. Then she realized she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do with her life, nobody else to be other than Mrs. David Rose.
Eventually David said, “Well, I’m going to bed.” He wheeled himself to the hall and dragged himself out of the chair and up the stairs backwards. She heard him scrape across the floor, heard the bed creak as he hauled himself on to it, heard his clothes hit the corner of the room as he undressed, then heard the final groaning of the springs as he lay down and pulled the blankets up over him.
And still she would not cry.
She looked at the brandy bottle and thought, If I drink all of this now, and have a bath, perhaps I won’t be pregnant in the morning.
She thought about it for a long time, until she came to the conclusion that life without David and the island and the baby would be even worse because it would be empty.
So she did not cry, and she did not drink the brandy, and she did not leave the island; but instead she went upstairs and got into bed, and lay awake beside her sleeping husband, listening to the wind and trying not to think, until the gulls began to call, and a grey rainy dawn crept over the North Sea and filled the little bedroom with a cold pale light, and at last she went to sleep.
A kind of peace settled over her in the spring, as if all threats were postponed until after the baby was born. When the February snow had thawed she planted flowers and vegetables in the patch of ground between the kitchen door and the barn, not really believing they would grow. She cleaned the house thoroughly and told David that if he wanted it done again before August he would have to do it himself. She wrote to her mother and did a lot of knitting and ordered diapers by mail. They suggested she go home to have the baby, but she knew, was afraid, that if she went she would never come back. She went for long walks over the moors, with a bird book under her arm, until her weight became too much for her to carry very far. She kept the bottle of brandy in a cupboard David never used, and whenever she felt depressed she went to look at it and remind herself of what she had almost lost.
Three weeks before the baby was due, she got the boat into Aberdeen. David and Tom waved from the jetty. The sea was so rough that both she and the skipper were terrified she might give birth before they reached the mainland. She went into the hospital in Aberdeen, and four weeks later brought the baby home on the same boat.
David knew none of it. He probably thought that women gave birth as easily as ewes, she decided. He was oblivious to the pain of contractions, and that awful, impossible stretching, and the soreness afterward, and the bossy, know-it-all nurses who didn’t want you to touch your baby because you weren’t brisk and efficient and trained and sterile like they were; he just saw you go away pregnant and come back with a beautiful, white-wrapped, healthy baby boy and said, “We’ll call him Jonathan.”
They added Alfred for David’s father, and Malcolm for Lucy’s, and Thomas for old Tom, but they called the boy Jo, because he was too tiny for Jonathan, let alone Jonathan Alfred Malcolm Thomas Rose. David learned to give him his bottle and burp him and change his diaper, and he even dangled him in his lap occasionally, but his interest seemed distant, uninvolved; he had a problem-solving approach, like the nurses; it was not for him as it was for Lucy. Tom was closer to the baby than David. Lucy would not let him smoke in the room where the baby was, and the old boy would put his great briar pipe with the lid in his pocket for hours and gurgle at little Jo, or watch him kick his feet, or help Lucy bathe him. Lucy suggested mildly that he might be neglecting the sheep. Tom said they did not need him to watch them feed—he would rather watch Jo feed. He carved a rattle out of driftwood and filled it with small round pebbles, and was overjoyed when Jo grabbed it and shook it, first time, without having to be shown how.
David and Lucy still did not make love.
First there had been his injuries, and then she had been pregnant, and then she had been recovering from childbirth; but now the reasons had run out.
One night she said, “I’m back to normal now.”
“How do you mean?”
“After the baby. My body is normal. I’ve healed.”
“Oh, I see. That’s good.”
She made sure to go to bed with him so that he could watch her undress, but he always turned his back.
As they lay there, dozing off, she would move so that her hand, or her thigh, or her breast, brushed against him, a casual but unmistakable invitation. There was no response.
She believed firmly that there was nothing wrong with her. She wasn’t a nymphomaniac—she didn’t simply want sex, she wanted sex with David. She was sure that, even if there had been another man under seventy on the island, she would not have been tempted. She wasn’t a sex-starved tart, she was a love-starved wife.
The crunch came on one of those nights when they lay on their backs, side by side, both wide awake, listening to the wind outside and the small sounds of Jo from the next room. It seemed to Lucy that it was time he either did it or came right out and said why not; and that he was going to avoid the issue until she forced it; and that she might as well force it now.
So she brushed her arm across his thighs and opened her mouth to speak—and almost cried out with shock to discover that he had an erection. So he could do it! And he wanted to, or why else—and her hand closed triumphantly around the evidence of his desire, and she shifted closer to him, and sighed, “David—”
He said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” and gripped her wrist and pushed her hand away from him and turned onto his side.
But this time she was not going to accept his rebuff in modest silence. “David, why not?”
“Jesus Christ!” He threw the blankets off, swung himself to the floor, grabbed the eiderdown with one hand, and dragged himself to the door.
Lucy sat up in bed and screamed at him, “Why not?”
Jo began to cry.
David pulled up the empty legs of his cut-off pajama trousers, pointed to the pursed white skin of his stumps, and said, “That’s why not! That’s why not!”
He slithered downstairs to sleep on the sofa, and Lucy went into the next bedroom to comfort Jo.
It took a long time to lull him back to sleep, probably because she herself was so much in need of comfort. The baby tasted the tears on her cheeks, and she wondered if he had any inkling of their meaning—wouldn’t tears be one of the first things a baby came to understand? She could not bring herself to sing to him, or murmur that everything was all right; so she held him tight and rocked him, and when he had soothed her with his warmth and his clinging, he went to sleep in her arms.
She put him back in the cot and stood looking at him for a while. There was no point in going back to bed. She could hear David’s deep-sleep snoring from the living room—he had to take powerful pills, otherwise the old pain kept him awake. Lucy needed to get away from him, where she could neither see nor hear him, where he couldn’t find her for a few hours even if he wanted to. She put on trousers and a sweater, a heavy coat and boots, and crept downstairs and out.
There was a swirling mist, damp and bitterly cold, the kind the island specialized in. She put up the collar of her coat, thought about going back inside for a scarf, and decided not to. She squelched along the muddy path, welcoming the bite of the fog in her throat, the small discomfort of the weather taking her mind off the larger hurt inside her.
She reached the cliff top and walked gingerly down the steep, narrow ramp, placing her feet carefully on the slippery boards. At the bottom she jumped off on the sand and walked to the edge of the sea.
The wind and the water were carrying on their perpetual quarrel, the wind swooping down to tease the waves and the sea hissing and spitting as it crashed against the land, the two of them doomed to bicker forever.
Lucy walked along the hard sand, letting the noise and the weather fill her head, until the beach ended in a sharp point where the water met the cliff, when she turned and walked back. She paced the shore all night. Toward dawn a thought came to her, unbidden: It is his way of being strong.
As it was, the thought was not much help, holding its meaning in a tightly clenched fist. But she worked on it for a while, and the fist opened to reveal what looked like a small pearl of wisdom nestling in its palm—perhaps David’s coldness to her was of one piece with his chopping down trees, and undressing himself, and driving the jeep, and throwing the Indian clubs, and coming to live on a cold cruel island in the North Sea…
What was it he had said? “…his father the war hero, a legless joke…” He had something to prove, something that would sound trite if it were put into words; something he could have done as a fighter pilot, but now had to do with trees and fences and Indian clubs and a wheelchair. They wouldn’t let him take the test, and he wanted to be able to say: “I could have passed it anyway, just look how I can suffer.”
It was cruelly, screamingly unjust: he had had the courage, and he had suffered the wounds, but he could take no pride in it. If a Messerschmidt had taken his legs the wheelchair would have been like a medal, a badge of courage. But now, all his life, he would have to say: “It was during the war—but no, I never saw any action, this was a car crash. I did my training and I was going to fight, the very next day, I had seen my kite, she was a beauty, and…”
Yes, it was his way of being strong. And perhaps she could be strong, too. She might find ways of patching up the wreck of her life. David had once been good and kind and loving, and she might now learn to wait patiently while he battled to become the complete man he used to be. She could find new hopes, new things to live for. Other women had found the strength to cope with bereavement, and bombed-out houses, and husbands in prisoner-of-war camps.
She picked up a pebble, drew back her arm, and threw it out to sea with all her might. She did not see or hear it land; it might have gone on forever, circling the earth like a satellite in a space story.
She shouted, “I can be strong, too, damn it.” And then she turned around and started up the ramp to the cottage. It was almost time for Jo’s first feed.