The Wind Off the Small Isles Read online

  It was on our second day in Lanzarote that Mrs Gresham decided that she would buy a house there.

  ‘It really is the perfect retreat,’ she told me. ‘“Paradise” was true enough, if by that you mean something out of this world. Just think of the peace and quiet, think of the sunshine, think of being able to get all the help in the house you want without having to worry about it.’

  ‘Think of being nearly two thousand miles away from home. Think of the Canary telephone system. Think of having your mail all opened and read. Think of not knowing a single word of Spanish except mañana and hasta la vista,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’d leave you. You know perfectly well you couldn’t do a thing without me. I practically write your books as it is.’

  ‘Dear child, I know. But you’d love it, you really would. It isn’t as if it would be for ever, just a year or two—’

  ‘A year or two? Now, look—’

  ‘What’s a year to you? You can spare it better than I can, after all. No, I’m serious. This might be the place really to pause and take stock of oneself, and maybe write something worth while.’

  ‘Everything you write is worth while,’ I said, promptly and firmly. I knew this mood. Mrs Gresham, who is nothing if not clear-sighted, once called herself ‘the clown with the normal clown’s urge to play Hamlet’, but this didn’t seem to me to fill the bill. I called it her ‘Sullivan act’ – a finished master of light music breaking his heart to be Verdi. I said: ‘I wish you’d stop tormenting yourself because you’re not Graham Greene or James Blair or Robert Bolt or someone. The number of people who’d miss “Coralie Gray” if you stopped writing could be laid end to end—’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s all right, you don’t need to hold my hand today. That’s one reason why I think I would like to stay in this place, even if it’s only for a few months – there really is peace here, and yet not a relaxing peace. Tranquillity’s the word. One would be hedged in by quietness, and I think one could write. Look over there, nothing but sea and sky and wind and the small islands …’

  We were sitting – we had been picnicking – on the northernmost point of the island, the Bateria del Rio, where a high cape rears a windy head of red cliff some fifteen hundred feet above the blue slash which is the strait between Lanzarote and the white island of Graciosa. Graciosa is white because it consists entirely of sand, save for the grey cones of its three dead volcanoes. Beyond these ghostly pyramids, more dimly, floated the shapes of the other islands.

  ‘Even their names,’ said Mrs Gresham. ‘The Pleasing Isle, the Isle of Rejoicing, the Clear Mountain, the Eagle’s Rock—’

  ‘You’re surely not thinking of living there!’

  ‘No, that’s a little bit too peaceful, even for me. I’d go round the bend in a week, and what you’d do I hate to think.’ She shivered suddenly and pulled her coat round her. ‘And the wind. I don’t like the wind.’

  ‘Don’t you? I love it.’

  ‘You’re young. When you’re my age you’ll find that “the wind on the heath, brother,” is only good for rheumatism and damaging the garden. Come back to the car. We’ll go home the other way, and see if we can find somewhere sheltered.’

  I picked up the picnic things. ‘There’s always the Cueva De Los Verdes, where your Countess hid out during the raid. Do you want to visit that this afternoon? I think we go right by it.’

  We found the signpost – a rather chichi affair of polished rustic work and antique lettering – which pointed the way off into a plain of tumbled black lava, but when we had bumped our way hopefully along the appalling track, the only ‘cave’ we could find was a large gaping depression in the lava, more like a quarry than a cave. It looked as if the top crust of solidified lava had collapsed, exposing a section of an underground tunnel which ran into darkness under the sharp and overhanging edges of the hole. We looked at it without enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘Even if you could get in; it simply wouldn’t be safe without a guide. What do you say I fix it up and bring you back another day?’

  ‘And that would let you out?’ She laughed. ‘All right. Go and turn the car while I take a look round the top.’

  It was quite a relief to be back on what the maps were pleased to call the main road. Some way further on, right in the middle of the lava plain which stretches along the north-east coast, we saw the notice sticking up: ‘Plots for Sale.’

  It was about as reasonable as seeing ‘Good Building Land’ advertised in the middle of the Solway mudflats. This was old lava, from long-ago eruptions, nothing more nor less than a plain of dusty, broken black rock with cutting edges, lightened here and there by the brilliant yellow-green sponges of some succulent, and the phalli of the candelabra cactus, like clustered stands of organ-pipes acid with verdigris. Nothing else grew. As building land it was ludicrous. The only way one could live there was to buy one of the caves that gaped here and there in the lava – monstrous holes disappearing into blackness – and set up house in that.

  ‘Cheaper, too,’ I said. ‘Look, if you want to use a cave for your story, why don’t we just go to the Jameos del Agua? It’s another cave near here, and they’ve turned it into a restaurant, so at least it should be easy to get into. It shouldn’t be far away – in fact, isn’t that a signpost a bit further along the road, to the left?’

  ‘It looks like it. Well, if you like. Do you suppose they’d run to a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’m sure they would.’

  ‘Then vamos,’ said my employer.

  But the signpost did not mention the Jameos del Agua. It was merely a board, weathered white by sun and the salt wind, on which had been roughly painted the words Playa Blanca.

  ‘Doesn’t that mean white beach?’ asked Mrs Gresham. ‘If it’s like those lovely beaches in the south there might be a café—’

  ‘I’m sure there won’t be. This isn’t the tourist end of the island – I mean, you can see why, can’t you? And that’s not a touristy kind of notice, it’s too shabby and genuine. If it leads anywhere at all apart from the beach, it’ll just be to a farm or something.’

  ‘Go down, anyway, and let’s have a look.’

  ‘I thought you were dying for some tea?’

  ‘There might be something there. In any case, we’ve still got some wine left over from lunch, haven’t we? And if it is a white beach you can have a swim.’

  ‘This being the one day I haven’t brought my swimming things.’

  ‘It mightn’t matter, at that. Go on, it would be lovely to find a quiet place right out of the wind, and the shore down there’s bound to be sheltered. We’ll probably find we’ve got it all to ourselves.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ I said grimly, as I put the car in gear and turned it off the road into a horrible track that plunged down at right-angles through the lava bed. It was like driving through a coal tip. The black dust was at least six inches deep, and the wheels churned and skidded through it, every now and again jerking across hunks and ruts of broken lava, so sharp that I was in constant terror for my tyres. The track became a lane, deep between lava walls crowned with the candelabra cactus, which after a while gave way to a sort of jungle of prickly pear, so thickly grown that not even a goat could have pushed its way through. We ploughed steeply downwards, trailing our wake of black dust.

  ‘I only hope if we do get down that there’s a place to turn,’ I said.

  ‘It must go somewhere. After all, there was a signpost.’

  ‘It might only be to a beach. If I’ve got to turn on sand—’

  ‘You could reverse up.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ We bucketed round a bend between the monstrous cactus hedges. ‘Thank heaven for that! There’s a farm or something, there’s bound to be a gate where I can turn. Look, we really will have to stop here, I’m afraid. I daren’t go further. Any minute now one of these tyres will go phut, and then we really will have to spend the night in a cave. It isn’t far to the sea from here, we can walk
down. I’ll manage the picnic things.’

  In fact the farm gate, set back to our right, marked the end of the track. Beyond the gate this dwindled merely to a path for goats, which wound its way even more steeply downwards for twenty yards or so, then branched off to zigzag down the shallow cliff towards the glimpse of white sand and sea.

  I stopped the car between the stone gateposts. ‘I’ll have to drive right in to turn. We’d better ask them.’

  ‘Drive in first,’ said Mrs Gresham reasonably, ‘then they can’t stop you, can they? Besides, you’ve got to leave the car somewhere, and they might let you leave it in the yard.’

  ‘You’ve got a point there.’

  Inside the yard was the usual clutter one associates with a peasant’s smallholding – a wood-stack, buckets, what looked like a galvanised-iron trough. I only vaguely saw them as I turned the car carefully in between the gateposts and manœuvred to turn. But beside me I heard Mrs Gresham make some sort of subdued exclamation, then she said, sharply for her: ‘Look. Just look at that.’

  It was certainly very picturesque. The house was single-storeyed, low and flat-roofed, with a ‘picture’ window facing the sea, and a garnet-red bougainvillaea tumbling over a whitewashed wall. Behind the house was the big beehive shape of a primitive oven, with the wood stacked beside it. Between the long front of the house and the edge of the low cliff there had obviously been at one time a sprawl of buildings; sheds and sties roughly built of mudbrick and undressed stone. These now lay tumbled into piles of rubble. Masonry and wood lay everywhere, and I realised that the trough and the buckets I had noticed were not farm implements at all, but builders’ tools, and that there were no animals about, nor any signs of them. Now that I came to look at it, the house itself, with its new whitewash and the modern window, looked too sophisticated to be one of the primitive farmsteads we had seen elsewhere.

  I knew what Mrs Gresham was going to say, and she said it. ‘My house. This is it. No wonder my Daemon gave me a nudge and told me to come down here. This is my house, Perdita. Look at it. All we’d have to do is knock down the rest of these old sheds in front and floor the yard to make a terrace, and look at the view we’d have. Straight out of that window – the sea, and that flash of white sand at the bottom, and those black cliffs reaching up with their arms holding the bay. And not a living soul.’

  ‘Well, somebody owns it,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Indeed yes, and now’s as good a time as any to look for them and ask about it. You can do it. No, don’t gape at me like that, my child. Switch the engine off and go and knock on the door.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘Because I’m fat and fifty, and you’re twenty-three and a dish,’ said my employer frankly. ‘You’ll at least get a hearing, where I might not.’

  ‘A hearing? And what do I use for Spanish?’

  ‘Anything you like. If they’re Spanish all you have to do is smile at them and they’d listen even if you talked Gobbledegook.’

  ‘Well, thanks, but—’

  ‘Now stop arguing, and go and see who lives there. They might speak a bit of English anyway, and at the very least you can probably find the name of the owners. Then when we get back to Arrecife we can make enquiries, and get a lawyer to take over from there. Go on, I’ll wait in the car.’

  I got out resignedly, and picked my way across the yard to the door, which was set deep in an archway in the end wall of the house. It was a thick, studded affair of heavy planking, which had recently been given a lick of blue paint. If it had been any use arguing with my employer, I would have pointed out that the new paint, and the evidence of building operations, suggested that someone had recently moved in and was doing on his own account just the improvements she had suggested, but I knew from experience that Mrs Gresham’s impulses had to be allowed to wear themselves out in their own time, so I merely lifted a hand and knocked at the door.

  The wood must have been very thick. The sound seemed to drown, almost, in the door itself. No echo. It was like knocking on a solid wall instead of a hollow door.

  I waited for a bit, then tried again. Still no answer. But when I turned away, half in relief, Mrs Gresham called from the car:

  ‘I can hear something round the other side. Someone talking, I think. Go round the front, I think they’re at the far end.’ And she waved towards a grove of palm trees and some softer green which showed beyond the house.

  I went. At least it would be shady, and it was pleasant to be out of the car. It was mid-afternoon now, and the sun was hot, but a small breeze wandered even here, clicking the leaves of the palm trees. These made a grove of shade where a small patio had been newly laid out at the far end of the house and out of sight of the entrance yard. The patio, facing the sea, was enclosed on its three landward sides by the wall of the house, by the slope of black lava which rose steeply behind the house and was formidably overgrown with prickly pear, and by a black wall – now grey with builders’ dust – where a gap made a gateway to the cliff top. In the shade of the palms stood a white painted metal table with a chair drawn up to it, and two or three brightly coloured beach chairs.

  There was no one there. But a portable typewriter stood on the table with a pile of paper beside it weighted down by a rose-coloured shell. On the top page I could see a line of typing which looked like a title: The Wind Off The Small Isles.

  ‘Señorita?’

  A man’s voice, sharp. I jumped and turned.

  He was standing in the gap which opened on the cliff top. I hadn’t heard or seen him coming, and now I saw why. Beyond the wall a small clump of tamarisk trees waved their frothy green at the cliff’s edge, and in their light shade two men lay dozing, hats tipped over their eyes. Beside them was the remains of their meal, and a little further off some shovels, buckets and piles of what looked like sand and lime. They seemed to have been building a kind of low retaining wall along the edge of the cliff. It was their voices which Mrs Gresham must have heard, and now I had interrupted their siesta.

  The man who had spoken was evidently some kind of foreman, for where the other two wore patched and dirty khaki trousers and the floppy straw island hats, and apparently worked stripped to the waist, this man had on a pair of reasonably decent blue denims and a short-sleeved shirt open at the neck. He was bareheaded.

  ‘Perdóneme,’ I said. ‘Buenas tardes, Señor.’

  ‘“Tardes.’ He was unsmiling, but this didn’t mean anything. Spain is not, like Italy, a land of flashing teeth and ready hands. He waited for me to explain myself.

  ‘Por favor, Señor—’ But here my Spanish ran out. At the sound of my voice the other two had roused themselves, and were sitting up, staring. I tried the smile that Mrs Gresham had recommended. ‘Excuse me, but do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’ I thought there was something wary about the admission, as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was going to let him in for. He was much younger than the other two. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘It’s only – my friend and I were driving down from El Rio and we saw the signpost and came down this little road to see what there was, and she … well, we couldn’t turn the car, so we drove into the yard. I hope you don’t mind?’

  ‘Not at all. You wish me to turn it for you?’

  ‘Oh, I can manage, thanks. It isn’t that. My friend … as a matter of fact she’s my employer … she sent me to ask what this house was and who owned it. I did knock at the door, but no one answered. I suppose it’s a bad time to choose, siesta time? I’m sorry if I’m intruding.’

  ‘There is no one at home.’ He said no more, just waited there in the gap of the wall. If I was to find out anything at all I was going to have to persist. Perhaps he hadn’t understood my rapid English. I spoke more slowly:

  ‘Then perhaps you would just tell me – is the house itself called Playa Blanca, or is that the name of the beach?’

  ‘It’s the name of the beach, but the house goes by that name too. It’s the only one here.’

>   The sun was making me blink. I moved a pace into shadow, narrowing my eyes at him. ‘Surely you’re English?’ His eyes were hazel, not dark as I had thought. ‘Is it your house, then?’

  ‘No.’

  I am not by nature aggressive and persistent, but since these are qualities which Cora Gresham values in her secretary, I persisted. ‘But you speak it so well, Señor … Now I won’t interrupt you any more, but I wonder if you’d just give me the name of the owner, please? That’s really what my employer sent me to ask.’

  I thought he hesitated. The other two men were on their feet now, staring at us, and he gestured irritably to them with some phrase in Spanish and a glance at his watch. As they trudged off to their buckets and cement, he turned back to me. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I only work here.’ There was in fact, I noticed now, a faintly discernible Spanish accent. ‘We are employed by an agent in Arrecife. Now we turn your car, eh?’

  He crossed the patio, and with a gesture invited me to precede him back to the car. We walked together along the house-front.

  ‘An agent in Arrecife?’ I said. ‘Then if you would be kind enough to give me his name? Just for the record, you know.’

  ‘Qué?’

  I stopped dead and turned. A hoopoe, startled, shot off a ruinous pigsty with a flare of camellia-rose and brilliant barred wings. Beyond it the sea flashed and glittered. The silence was profound.

  I faced him squarely. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but it’s as much as my job’s worth to let you push me right out without getting some kind of answer. And don’t pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying, because your Spanish accent’s only just descended on you like Elijah’s mantle. You are English, aren’t you? And you’ve probably only just moved in, which is what it looks like, and you don’t want to be bothered answering a lot of questions from someone who’s obviously interested in the property? Fair enough, you wouldn’t dream of selling – then all you have to do is say so. But wouldn’t it be just as easy to tell me the name of your lawyer in Arrecife and let him do it for you? Straight up, it’s as much as my job’s worth to go back to the car now and tell my employer I haven’t found out a thing about it. What’s more, it’s the quickest way of bringing her down on your neck that I’ve ever known. Just give me chapter and verse, and I’ll clear us both straight out of your life and never come back.’