JUNE 2017In the beginning, it was a heaven on earth.
The name of the island – Lark – had called out to them through the fog that embraced its shores, through the figurative fog that had descended on the mainland, shrouding Viola and her mother. The island was to be their salvation.
In the aftermath of the disaster back home, when fate had taken its violent strike, Viola’s mother left the radio playing in the kitchen lest a silence should settle, the kind that invited in thoughts. A short feature had come on air – an inconsequential piece, a slice-of-life peppered with unusual accents and the cries of gulls. Unspoilt, said the presenter, in a voice that was too worldly and wry. A place where children grow up at one with nature, in all ways safe.
Viola’s mother had looked up from her cold and forgotten tea and she had listened.
To journey to Lark, said the woman on the radio,is to take a step back in time.
At these words, Deborah Kendrick had risen, like a miracle, from the kitchen table, from the bleary depths of misery. She made immediate enquiries, ones that quickly transformed into plans and definite dates. She had told Viola in all certainty that their tragedy had been preordained, was unavoidable. That she was now willing to believe that fate could also be benevolent was a good thing. Wasn’t it?
Forms were filled out, promises were made. All newcomers were assessed, medically, ethically, and asked to pledge how fruitful they would be, both in the practical sense and the biblical. Lark was a religious community: participation was expected, baptism a stipulation. Then, there was a house to pack up, a past life to give away, workaday tasks in which Viola’s mother found a much-needed catharsis and impetus. Boat tickets were booked – the only way to reach this new existence, this forgotten British isle. They sold the car and boarded a train, out of the Home Counties to the coast.
That June they embarked on three sickly days at sea.
During the crossing, Viola found refuge in, if not a comfort from, her religious beliefs. She and her mother were the only passengers except for an anxious vet and a chain-smoking groom, who took it in turns to sit in a stall in the ship’s bowels, calming a sweating horse, bound too for the island. A day in, when there was nothing to see but the roiling grey of the North Atlantic and the breathless emptiness of the skyline, an eerie gloom beset everyone on board, the crew not exempt. The ugly vessel gave off its industrial chug, the moody wind whip-snapped across the waters and a desperate Viola Kendrick searched the never-ending horizon for dry land. Ireland had long ago vanished in their wake. To the north, there were no glimpses of Iceland or Greenland, something the maps that they had studied before leaving suggested would appear. How could the real world be this much vaster in scale? On the second day, Viola convinced herself she had spied the ragged coast of Canada up ahead but it was nothing but the reflection of a cloud – a hallucination. Please let there be something out here, she begged a God she was unsure existed. Please don’t let us die too.
And Viola’s absent god responded.
Lark appeared.
They clung to the rail of the deck to watch the island’s evolution from a distant smudge to jutting cliffs. Drunk on relief, Viola and her mother narrated each new detail as it revealed itself – the high green broom of woodland, the startling yellow tufts of wild grass on the rockface, the hawk riding a thermal as it scanned the ground below for mice. The ship rounded the northern headland and they could see then, in all its strange glory, the hollowed-out curl of the cape. In days of yore, when Lark lay much closer to the main British Isles, a giant took a bite of the rockface and didn’t like the taste, so he pushed the island far, far out to sea; that’s what they say. Deborah Kendrick recounted the fairy tale as the ship idled inelegantly into shore. Viola had heard this story before, but it had meant nothing on the mainland. Back there, it sounded slippery and fake – a tale told to charm tourists. Yet in context, with the sun glinting from the windows of the harbour cottages making a constellation of daylight stars, with fishermen on the decks of nearby tethered boats emptying buckets of fish in great silvery spills, seagulls turning hopeful circles above them, Viola heard it anew, and she was charmed. She was enchanted.
Calls heralding the ship’s arrival shrilled from the cobbled harbourside, voices travelling up and along the ginnels beyond. The sweating, uneasy horse was led off, legs quivering at the unfamiliar steadiness of terra firma, as Viola and her mother were ushered into the stripped-wood interior of a Customs House, where more forms were to be completed. Deborah Kendrick shook away her traveller’s daze to tick and sign under the officious gaze of a weaselly-looking man with epaulettes on his shoulders. The lengthier documents appertained to Dot, who was eyed cautiously, as if she were a dangerous breed, not a moustached Schnauzer of miniature size.
Viola sat on a wooden bench, Dot at her feet, their possessions spread about her in boxes and suitcases, sensing the effort of the journey alight suddenly, heavily, on her shoulders. She fought to keep her eyes open in the back seat of the battered Land Rover, no matter how bright the sun that day, how jerky the drive, so that she might take in the sight of a gathering of children standing on top of what looked like a set of wooden stocks, clambering over one another to get a better view of the newcomers as they drove past and away.
Steep fields opened out in an undiscovered shade of green, punctuated with cows and goats and sheep, a scene so idyllic it seemed set-dressed for their arrival. As they approached the farmstead, the unmade track gained in potholes and gradient. The weaselly man from the Customs House was their silent driver, playing brutally with the bite of the throttle, navigating the climb.
In the front passenger seat was their official welcomer, a Mr Jacob Crane, head of the Council, headmaster of the school, a large man with an imposing nose and a hard shell of a belly. He raised his voice above the crunching of gears to deliver his evangelism of the island, bellowing it over his shoulder to Viola and her mother, confirming all that they had been told before they came: Everything on Lark is good. Everything. You need only look around you and see. These affirmations somehow worked against the beauty playing out around them, not letting it speak for itself. Then came the old Reunyon Farmstead to disprove his theory after all.
Sitting on the blustery western elevation, it resembled a ranch house lifted from the Wild West proper and dropped on the island from a great height. It was in need of love and repair, something Deborah Kendrick said she understood very well when applying for tenancy of the vacant property. It wasn’t a lie. She reiterated her suitability for the task as they pulled up, explaining how she wasn’t afraid of hard work, that she had been a landscape gardener before having children. Viola watched her mother dip her chin after the casual usage of the plural – children. Mr Crane did not seem to notice.
They got out, Viola guiding Dot to a patch of rough grass to relieve herself. Her mother whisked a palm against the brittle paintwork of the veranda, bringing about a small storm of white flakes, already deciding what grade of sandpaper might do the job. Jacob Crane paced the dirt driveway as if it were a stage, regaling them with the origin of the farmstead’s name. It was a dialect word for a seal, an animal that returned to the island in the winter, sheltering in the western coves to feed, ahead of the breeding season. The man then turned to survey the neglected land beyond the house, the lumpy soil, hands resting on the belt of his brown slacks, and began a list of what needed to be done. Weeds must be cleared. Seeds must be planted. Every tree was capable of bearing fruit if it was treated the right way. Viola seemed to be included in this last statement. Mr Crane fixed her with a benevolent blue-eyed gaze.
Viola’s mother looked up from her assessment of the woodwork, alert, her pliant smile all of a sudden erased.
‘You’re the headmaster, you say?’ she asked.
The man peeled his gaze from Viola to give the woman a firm, proud nod.
Then Dot barked, directing their attention to an animal meandering light-footed across the abandoned land, its fur as red as the hair on Viola’s head – as the hair on her mother’s head too.
Mr Crane’s expression tightened.
‘We shoot them, I assure you,’ he said. ‘We snare them. We don’t let them get out of control.’
Viola crouched down low to loop a finger through Dot’s collar, a question finding its way to her tongue. How did the foxes get here? The first farm animals, like the horses, came in the belly of ships, she presumed, their arrival as deliberate as her own. Rats and mice might become trapped accidentally within cargo, slip on and off a vessel unnoticed. But a fox… ?
The animal paused to look back at them, reproachful, before disappearing into the tangle of a hedgerow, and in that moment it became clear to Viola that it was not her question to ask. The fox was demanding it of them. How did you get to the shores of my beautiful island? it wanted to know. Who said it was a good idea for you to come?