Eight

My see-sawing emotions were no steadier when Ray called for me as arranged the next morning, and perhaps gauging my turbulent mood he made no mention of the incident which must have been uppermost in his mind.

“I thought we’d go down through Kirk Michael and Glen Helen to St John’s,” he said as we turned in the direction of Ballaugh. “We can have a look at Tynwald Hill and then take the mountain road down to the south-west tip.” He slowed to negotiate a flock of sheep which, with an alert dog at their heels, were moving down the road ahead of us.

“I’d like to show you Cregneish. The Folk Museum will be closed now the season’s over but you can still see the typical Manx cottages, all thatched and whitewashed, and there’s a grand view from there over the Calf. There’s a bit of Norse for you, by the way: islets alongside a larger island are known in Scandinavian as calves.”

“Is there much Scandinavian influence left on the island?” Unwillingly I was remembering my dream of the tall fair men thronging the hillside. It hadn’t escaped me that they very closely resembled the sign outside the Viking Restaurant.

“A fair bit, especially in the north, though the culture is basically Celtic. Half the surnames on the island are Norse, my own included. Most of them begin with Q, K or a hard C. Incidentally, one of the most common is Christian. Fletcher Christian of the Bounty mutiny was a Manxman.” And llliam Dhone–

“This is Bishopscourt, on the right here. You can’t see much of it from the road. Part of it was built in the twelve hundreds and it’s been the official residence of the Bishop of Sodor and Man for centuries, though the present bishop lives elsewhere, which seems a shame.”

Kirk Michael awaited us, with its palm trees lining the road, its deep blue water and pretty houses. “There’s the Irish coastline across the water,” Ray pointed out. “You’ll be seeing England and Scotland too, if the weather stays clear. We’re right in the centre of the British Isles. They say from the top of Snaefell you can see six kingdoms: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Man, and the Kingdom of Heaven!”

The road was lined with hedges of prickly gorse and hips and haws glowed redly like a scattering of rubies. Above us fluffy white clouds raced across the blue sky. Ray’s naturalness was having its effect; for the first time I was actually enjoying his company and as I relaxed I felt the stirring of a long-dormant love for this sturdily independent little island.

The road started to climb and on either side the fields fell away criss-crossed by gorse hedges, with cattle and sheep grazing peacefully and plumes of smoke rising from the farmhouses, and as we drove, Ray recounted odd snatches of history and folklore as they came into his head, about Mannanan the Magician who had lived on South Barrule and used to throw a cloak of mist round the island whenever strangers approached.

“He couldn’t hide it from St Patrick, though, and when the people began to pay tribute to him and his monks instead of to Mannanan, the magician turned himself into three legs joined together and rolled like a wheel down the hill. We still talk of Mannanan drawing his cloak when the mist comes down.”

The road was now hemmed in by thickly wooded hillsides and a river cascaded on our left. In the autumn sunlight the trees were a riot of rich colour – spruce and fir, oak, sycamore and beech. “Glen Helen,” Ray told me as I exclaimed in delight. A few minutes later we had left the glen behind us and were approaching St John’s. “You know about Tynwald, of course?”

“Only that it’s a parliament independent of Westminster.”

“And the oldest continuous government in the world,” Ray said with quiet pride. “It’s been in existence over a thousand years.” We came up the road past the cattle market into St John’s and his voice blurred in my ears as I found myself gazing with a kind of numb resignation at the oddly shaped hillock of my dream. So today was not to be an escape after all.

“It was a site of Celtic sun-worship even before the Vikings,” Ray was explaining. “The four tiers of the hill are made up of soil from the seventeen parishes of Man, symbolizing the entire island. On Old Midsummer Day every year the laws are read out here in English and Manx Gaelic.” Was it Manx, then, the language in my dream that I had not been able to identify?

The echoes of that dream were all about me, the heat that suffused me no part of this cool October day but burning down from a sun which had set a thousand years ago. The murmur of voices and the clank of swords formed a continuous undercurrent to Ray’s voice as he parked the car and led me up the stone steps to the topmost tier.

“The sun-worship bit is still there if you look for it. The ceremony takes place at noon with the sun directly overhead and the dignitaries face to the east. It’s hard to know where one culture ends and another begins.” He went on talking about Keys and Deemsters and I wondered dizzily how many of the vibrations which were bombarding me came directly from the folk memory of Tom Kelly the hypnotist and how many were channelled through his nephew at my side. And as Ray’s actual presence came to the forefront of my mind, I became aware that he was standing watching me with a look of expectant excitement.

“You’re getting something, aren’t you?”

His face came back into focus and the past, throbbing with heat and pageantry, receded into its own wraiths.

“I knew Uncle’s influence was bound to come out here!” There was an exultant note in his voice and immediately all my fears came rushing back. His easy charm that morning had deceived me into relaxing my guard so that he could prove to his satisfaction the bonds that still held me. Martha had warned me not to trust Ray.

I pulled away and ran ahead of him down the steps but he caught up with me before I reached the foot of the hill. “Surely you can see what a breakthrough this is! Five years, for Pete’s sake, and from the way you were acting up there, you’re as much under his spell now as you were on that stage!”

I shuddered. “That’s not true! I shouldn’t think he knows anything about it.”

“For sure he doesn’t. He’s not done any mind-reading since and like any gift it fades if you don’t use it. But that’s the wonder of it, don’t you see, that just the residual influence is enough to produce the dreams and the premonition you had yesterday. God, the possibilities it opens up!”

I started to shiver violently as though I had in truth emerged from the heat of summer into this cool autumn morning. He caught hold of my arm, spinning me round to face him. “What was it that you saw up there? What era – Vikings, or the Horsemen of the Parishes riding in procession?” His eyes were burning into mine as though he could read my mind at will. “Chloe, for God’s sake! I’ve got to know!”

I pulled myself free and started back towards the car and, swearing under his breath, he came after me. ‘It’s stepping up,’ Martha had said, and Hugo: ‘Another legacy from the hypnotist?’ Now Ray assumed without question that the dreams, the premonition about John and the ghosts of Tynwald came to me directly from the mind of Tom Kelly. If they were all right and my mind was really so firmly welded to his, were any of its thoughts my own?

I knew, as he slammed the car door, that Ray was annoyed with me for remaining silent but I felt unable to justify myself to him. These last few minutes had been a new experience, a strange half and half world of the past impinging on the present without a total time slip. I went over them again and again, probing and analysing, and it was some minutes before I began to distinguish a new uneasiness, a deepening sense of despair which weighed increasingly down on me until it was almost unbearable.

Apprehensively I looked out of the window to find some reason for it, but we were driving along a pretty road halfway up a hill and the glorious foliage was with us still, lit to rust, bronze and gold in the thick sunshine. But whether there was any reason or none for my misery I found I couldn’t stand it. I put my hands suddenly over my ears. “I don’t like this place! Let’s go back!”

Ray didn’t answer and when I glanced at him I saw the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

“Please, Ray! I’m frightened!” If he wanted me to beg I was prepared to do so, anything to get away from the appalling sense of doom which was now overpowering me.

He smiled slightly and I realized with a shock that my distress was being inflicted deliberately, as a punishment for resisting him.

If he refused to help me I must somehow escape by myself. With a sob of terror I wrenched open the car door but he leaned across me and slammed it shut again. “All right, all right, I’ll take you down.”

“What’s that noise?” I demanded as he turned the car on the narrow road. “That distant rumbling? It sounds like thunder.”

He was still smiling and for the first time I saw cruelty openly on his face. Charming and attractive he could be, as long as he was getting his way, but below the surface lay a more unpleasant side of his nature – the one, no doubt, which Martha had admitted frightened her.

“I can’t hear anything,” he said.

So the noise too was for me alone, together with the terror and pain which were darkening my mind. I gripped the sides of the seat and shut my eyes tightly, willing myself to keep calm, and as we moved away down the hill the suffocating horror gradually ebbed until I was able to breathe more easily. Back on the main road Ray stopped the car and lit a cigarette.

“What was that place?” I asked in a whisper.

“Slieu Whallian, the witches’ hill.” For all his apparent detachment his voice shook slightly. “Women suspected of witchcraft were put in spiked barrels and rolled down it. If they were dead when they reached the bottom it was considered to be divine judgement, if they were alive, proof of their powers and they were burned at the stake. At least, that’s how the story goes. A medieval case of ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’.”

After a long moment I said, “If I’d been living in those days I’d probably have suffered the same fate.”

“Are you going to tell me this time what you felt?”

“Sheer terror,” I said flatly, “and difficulty in breathing.”

“The rumble you mentioned would have been the barrels rolling.”

I looked at his pitiless face with a kind of sick horror and the expression in his eyes changed as he reached for me. “I warned you not to fight me, my darling. I can punish you if I have to, but it shouldn’t be necessary.”

His mouth blocked off my protest and since he was stronger than I, I lay rigidly in his arms, emotionally uninvolved in his kisses. Only when I felt his hand fumbling at my breast did I put up my own to intercept it and turn my face away.

“Now what’s the matter?” he demanded unevenly.

“That’s enough, and it’s no use threatening me again.” I sat up and pushed back my hair. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll submit to anything for fear of being ‘punished’ as you call it. What’s the penalty for refusing to kiss you, anyway? A visit to Cronk-ny-arrey-lhaa?” I broke off, seeing his eyes widen. “There – isn’t such a place, is there?” The name had come into my mind without thought.

“Indeed there is, a Viking burial mound. What’s more, you pronounced it perfectly. Perhaps I need a yellow flower in my buttonhole after all.”

Protection against witchcraft – “It’s your own fault,” I said shakily, “you deliberately triggered it off.”

“But you brought it on yourself, didn’t you now? You were being rather stubborn, my love, and I felt it was time for a demonstration of how the land lay. I think you’ll agree it was effective.”

“So far,” I said slowly, “you’ve always had the advantage of surprise. Now that I know what you’re trying to do you’ll find it isn’t so easy.”

He gave a short laugh. “A challenge, is it? Right, my lovely, we’ll see who’s the stronger. Now, do we call a truce and go on with the tour?”

“Only if you promise to abide by it and not attempt any more take-overs.”

“Take-overs,” he repeated slowly. “A good description, that, though I’d prefer to think of it as a merger; a complete merger, body, mind and soul. How does that strike you, Chloe Winter?”

I shook my head. “Out of the question.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see. Now, after all this mind-bending I’m sure you’re in need of a bite of lunch. Don’t look so wary, my love! I won’t play any more games with you today.”

So we stopped for lunch at an isolated little inn and then drove on along Foxdale and down the Sloe road through bleak mountain stretches with South Barrule towering over us and thickly wooded plantations on every side. And Ray, his good humour restored, started again on snippets of folklore – about the Rider of Sloe, the Ben-varreys or mermaids round the coast, the fearful Tarroo-ushtay that lived up in the Curraghs and the Nightman who blew on his bugle before a storm.

But though I listened to his stories and made comments where expected, I couldn’t forget that a challenge had been offered and accepted, and while Ray regarded it simply as an exciting contest, for myself it was a question of survival.

On the hillside below Cregneish we stood looking across the sound at the low-lying Calf and the half-submerged rocks known as Kitterland and Ray told me the story of the drowned Norwegian baron they commemorated. “And we have our own Atlantis lying out there somewhere,” he added. “Fishermen say it rises up sometimes in the morning mist. It was once an island as big as Man, inhabited by a three-legged race who came across here on raids. Do you know the motto of the three legs, by the way?

‘Whichever way you throw me, I stand’. Very appropriate, wouldn’t you say, since the island’s been tossed about between the Scots, the Vikings and the English and still retains its independence.”

We turned back to the car and I knew there was a question I had to ask in spite of myself. “Isn’t there a legend about Lugh the Harpist?”

He glanced at me sharply. “Back to Uncle Tom?”

“When he put us into the trance he played something he called Lugh’s Sleeping Tune.”

“That’s right. Lugh of the Long Arm was the son of Kian, who ruled Erin, and was sent over here to be educated with Mannanan’s sons. He became a great harpist and played three wonderful tunes, the Laughing Tune, the Sleeping Tune and the Weeping Tune. I’d have to check the details with Granny Clegg, but I think his country was invaded and he went back to defend it, armed with Mannanan’s sword The Answerer.”

“It’s a pity he didn’t have a Waking Tune,” I said ruefully.

We were silent as we drove back past Port St Mary clustering round its little bay and on to the ancient capital of Castletown. Something about the brooding castle and dark, narrow streets depressed me and suddenly I was longing for the warmth of Hugo’s fire and curtains drawn against the approach of darkness.

“Hadn’t we better be making our way back?” I asked tentatively. “It’ll be getting dark soon and we shan’t be able to see much anyway.”

“I’d thought we could have dinner somewhere.”

“Martha’s expecting me for a meal and I am rather tired.”

“Just as you like. By the way, I meant what I said about painting you. Out on the hills somewhere. I have a place in mind, not far from Ballacarrick.”

“How long would it take?”

“Two or three sittings, perhaps, a couple of hours at a time. I’ve a feeling it could be the best thing I’ve done.”

“But I’ll only be here for another week.” As I spoke my mind went unbidden to Neil.

“Do you never listen to what I tell you? Didn’t I say the day we met you’d be here a long time? Don’t be thinking you’ll escape me that easily!”

An apprehensive shiver ran down my spine. “You can say what you like,” I declared roundly, “but one more week is my limit. After that I must go back and decide how I’m going to set about earning my living.”

“I’ll not argue with you. I’ve a free day every second Tuesday and it falls next week. Shall we make a start then, weather permitting?”

I hesitated. The thought of being alone with Ray on a deserted hilltop was not enticing but a numb kind of acceptance was closing over my mind and somehow I felt that this had to be and it was useless to try to avoid it.

“All right,” I said, “provided Annette St Cyr is well enough to do the lunch by then.”

We drove up the mountain road, dropped down into Ramsey and so through Sulby to Ballacarrick. The shadow of the hills crept closer as evening approached. Winter was coming too, I thought with a touch of sadness. There were drifts of leaves lying in the gutters like spendthrift gold and by the corner of the old school house two small boys were trundling a grotesque-looking guy in a wheelbarrow. Tonight the clocks would go back an hour. The long-drawn-out concession to summer was coming to an end.

“When will I see you?” Ray asked as we drew up outside the cottage.

“Tuesday will be quite soon enough.” I reached for the door handle but he gripped my arm.

“Come on, now. You’ll not be going without a goodnight kiss.”

I bent forward swiftly and kissed him on the mouth.

“Good-night, Ray. Thanks for showing me round.” And before he could stop me, I slid quickly out of the car.

He leaned across the passenger seat and looked up at me. “The truce is over Chloe. From now on it’s each of us for himself. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

He started the car and I stood looking after him until the red tail-light turned the corner and disappeared from sight.