SEPTEMBER 2017Their new start was going so well.
Viola and her mother walked to chapel every Sunday, and sometimes on Saturday too for Evening Mass. The services seemed to gratify her mother, lift her up. They stood in line to receive the host, Deborah Kendrick meeting every wary glance from the congregation with her warmest smile, her intention behind this clear – she would settle for nothing less than complete acceptance, for herself and her daughter.
After service, Viola’s mother joined in with the preparation of teas and coffees in the nave, didn’t wait for an invitation. She fussed, she bustled, she made herself useful. Viola would sit in a pew, at a distance, cup, with a saucer and biscuit on her lap, banging her heels against the wood until it was time to go, an audience to her mother’s convincing performance of eagerness. It was hard to believe this was the same stricken woman whose head had rested in the cradle of her hands for days on end at the kitchen table back home.
Then one Sunday morning in July, there was a shift. Viola watched as a small, busy-looking woman pulled Deborah Kendrick aside for a quiet word. The woman started speaking and her mother’s enthusiastic smile twitched, then tilted, before righting itself into something not even passably genuine. Viola understood straight away that she was the subject of this exchange; her mother’s eyes skittered towards her in the pew, then back to the woman. It was a nervous action, one of someone who was all of a sudden on guard. It was a chink through which Viola glimpsed once again the broken, tormented woman her mother had been on the mainland.
Later that same week, the busy woman had landed on the doorstep of the farmstead. Out of the kitchen window, Viola saw the Customs Officer leaning against the bonnet of his Land Rover – acting as taxi driver again. His head was down, which she translated as embarrassment at being there.
The woman announced herself formally to Viola’s mother – ‘Miriam Calder, the school administrator’, her emphasis hitting the definite article – and Viola’s mother had responded with a sweet but terse reminder that they had met several times before and this introduction was unnecessary.
‘You need to enrol your daughter in school,’ Miriam said, in lieu of any pleasantries.
‘More forms!’ came Deborah Kendrick’s reply, the humour forced. ‘Goodness me! When does the paperwork stop?’
Viola had slid into the hallway then, had seen how Miriam took in the yellowing wallpaper and the trail of dry leaves blown in from outside. Her mother attempted to close the front door, keeping her voice bright as if this might soften the rudeness of her actions. ‘I’ll be sure to pop up to the school soon and get that done!’
‘I have the forms here,’ said Miriam, her hand meeting the wood of the door, its peeling paintwork. ‘We can fill them out now.’
Her mother had reluctantly let Miriam in, but not offered her tea. She filled out the lines and boxes of the forms briskly, belligerently, her pen piercing the paper every time it encountered a deep groove in the battered kitchen table. Miriam stood over her, casting an eye about the room, collecting its details – the bread left out on the board, the sleeping dog, the dripping tap.
Viola had wanted to stand over her mother too, find out which class she was being enrolled in. She had failed her GCSEs on the mainland, missed too much school in the wake of the incident and fallen behind. She had come to think of herself as a dunce, a div.
As it was, whatever Deborah Kendrick put on those forms was of no consequence at all.
On their trip to the Provisions Store that weekend, Viola’s mother had enquired of one of the aproned women behind the counter how she might go about ordering something to arrive on the last August ship. The aproned woman had pointed them towards the Counting House, where upstairs they had waited in line to use a computer. Deborah Kendrick had clicked, scrolled, bought.
A chill lifted the hairs on Viola’s skin, despite the clement weather that final summer month, when she watched her mother unpack the box that arrived. Teaching materials for Maths, English, Geography and French were arranged neatly in their corresponding piles on the kitchen table.
‘I’m really going to enjoy this,’ her mother had trilled, breaking the spine on a Tricolore textbook. ‘Et toi?’
There they were, on the remotest property on the remotest island, and now Viola was to be home-schooled. Yet, she said nothing – could find no way to protest. Just as she was careful not to wake Dot as she dozed in the radiating warmth of the kitchen Rayburn, Viola could not risk disturbing her mother from this lightness, this reverse of sleep. She had seen how delicate Deborah Kendrick’s mindset was in that brief moment with Miriam in chapel. She was under a precarious spell, one that could be easily broken.
So, the battered kitchen table became Viola’s school, her pencil now piercing the paper whenever a sentence crossed a groove in the wood.
‘Do you think they used to butcher animals on here?’ she asked her mother. ‘Slaughter them, even?’
‘It’s a timed test, you know,’ was Deborah Kendrick’s reply, ‘you shouldn’t be even thinking about chatting.’
Viola only spoke to break the silence, make the situation feel normal and not a step too far, an isolation within an isolation.
In the timed tests her mother set, Viola felt no urgency. The pink grains of the hourglass flowed slower on Lark. One – eeeeeeelllllleeeephant. Two – eeeeeeelllllleeeephant…. With no distractions – no texts from friends, no radio, music or television – the silence stretched. It made Viola restless.
In the afternoons, lessons done, she clipped on Dot’s red lead and headed out, south, down the main track from the farmstead. Her mother had been uneasy the first time she had pulled on her boots in the hallway.
‘But this is why we’re here, isn’t it?’ Viola had argued, as steadily as she could, not wanting to give away how desperate she was to escape the confines of the farmstead and her mother’s company. ‘It’s safe here, we know that. I can wander where I want.’
Deborah Kendrick had given a reluctant nod – heading out herself to turn the lumpy soil and mark out vegetable beds, cursing at the midges and the slugs as she went.
At the end of the farmstead’s dirt track, Viola turned right and headed towards the East Bay. She had entertained thoughts of paddling along the shore, combing the line of seaweed for interesting shells. That was before she’d discovered the true close-up violence of the waves; the bay could only be enjoyed as a view, from the raised lawn above.
Sometimes she trekked across the green estate land that spilled down from the Big House upon its rocky promontory, the acreage sectioned by woodland, given over in part to allotments. There she came upon a small cluster of stables and two enclosures for dogs, Dot greeting her fellow animals with sharp, delighted barks. There were half a dozen muscular beagles in one pen, and in the other, two grey-faced whippets with hostage eyes. Viola had reached over to caress the long, smooth nose of one of the whippets, while its companion leant against the fencing, trying to access the warmth of her thigh.
‘What are you doing?’ a man had bellowed at her, striding across the stable yard, making Viola’s hand fly guiltily away. He was a thin, stooped shape beneath his waxed jacket and khaki trousers. Old – though not quite granddad age, with a wiry beard, almost white.
‘I’m just stroking them,’ she’d said, and though he had made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t welcome, Viola tried to keep the conversation going, realising only then how hungry she was for talk. She asked if the dogs were working animals? (Yes, the beagles for the hunt, the whippets for catching rats) and if they had to stay in their pens at all other times (they did).
‘Isn’t that a bit cruel?’ she went on, gently, politely. ‘I mean, doesn’t it make them sad?’
The man snorted. ‘You talk like they have souls.’ He leant over the pen, as if checking what damage she might have caused.
‘Souls?’ Viola was taken aback at the swift philosophical turn of their conversation but pressed on. ‘And don’t they?’ she asked. ‘Have souls?’
He laughed at the question. He hadn’t been speaking philosophically at all, it seemed, only stating the facts as he saw them, but Viola’s sincere response had a sobering effect. He went from delivering a firm stare to looking anywhere but at her face.
‘I should get going, if I were you. You don’t want any trouble.’
‘Trouble from who?’ she wondered aloud.
‘The gamekeeper.’
‘Who’s that then?’
‘That then,’ he replied gruffly, ‘is me.’
Other days, she ventured as far as the cobbles of the harbourside, considering it a search for the island’s potential, the secret it had yet to offer up. She gripped tightly to the doomed hope of discovering a coffee shop, somewhere to sit and have a milkshake, but found only a smokehouse with herring and mackerel turning gold on their racks, a tiny, hardly ever open library in one of the lanes, and a pub that was more of a men’s social club, since it didn’t admit women until the weekends, and under-eighteens, never.
There was the Counting House, with its upstairs computers, the sort of building that would have been populated by lithe women with yoga mats on the mainland, but on Lark was the venue for (according to a poster in the marbled lobby) ‘fascinating and informative’ sessions with Dr Tobiah Bishy, MBBS, MRCGP, including ‘Correct Usage of the Island’s Defibrillator’, ‘Know Your Blood Pressure’ and ‘A Walk-in Skin Clinic (Lancing of Boils, etc.)’.
The island’s only shop, the Provisions Store, had been charming in its strangeness to begin with, but soon fulfilled its destiny to disappoint – nothing but a warehouse piled with stock, smelling of ripe cheese and even riper fish, lorded over by a brace of fierce, middle-aged women. Viola ached for the shiny persuasions of a Tesco Extra.
On one visit an argument broke out in the fresh produce section, providing a brief glimmer of interest. A pretty blonde girl around Viola’s age was standing with her mother behind a pyramid of plums. They were debating urgently in a language that sounded like Swedish, or Danish maybe. Viola feigned interest in a tray of walnuts, so she might edge closer, hear more.
The girl, at the height of her exasperation, switched the quarrel to English. ‘You’re not listening to me!’ she hissed. ‘That’s not what I’m saying, Mum, I’m not saying that at all.’
The woman, her hair cut into the same neat bobbed style as her daughter’s, snatched the girl’s wrist, looking worriedly about them for eavesdroppers. ‘Then why say it?’
The girl drew breath to speak again and the woman, frantic to make her quiet, drove her nails into her daughter’s skin.
‘Ow!’ She wrenched her wrist away, catching the corner of a crate of apples as she did, sending the fruit to the floor, bringing one of the fierce women running from her position behind the counter.
Viola craned to watch the girl flee the scene, her flat, buckled T-bars slip-slapping against the concrete.
‘And you can get rid of that filthy animal, ’n’ all,’ said the attending fierce woman, turning on Viola in the chaos. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing, bringing that thing in here?’
That Viola had a dog – as a companion, as a familiar – was very strange to the residents of Lark, she quickly realised. The cats were feral, not pets, kept fat on the island’s plentiful supply of mice – creatures Viola and her mother did daily battle with, forced to place a rock on top of the bread bin at night to stop them breaching the lid. The stares Viola endured on the cobbles were never greater than when she crouched to scoop up Dot’s poo. They were the same looks you received on the mainland when you did the opposite – walked away and left it, indifferent.
So, Viola took the left-hand path at the bottom of the farmstead track for a while, heading away from the harbour, to walk Dot in the anonymity of the woods.
As they progressed uphill, the scrubland was taken over by great swathes of ferns, the distance between the pines growing smaller. The world turned denser, browner, the trees enclosing them, making the clatter of a bird’s wing come blanketed and soft. Viola’s boots crunched against the needled path, a satisfying soundtrack, convincing her it wasn’t voices she craved so much, just a different kind of quiet.
The peace, though, was short-lived.
He came jogging up behind her one afternoon, arrived seemingly from nowhere, his breathing laboured when he reached her side. Viola recognised the St Rita’s uniform from her excursions to the harbour – knitted navy jumper, red-and-black striped tie – and the boy wore his with a grey wool duffel coat, toggles bobbing.
‘You’re the redhead!’ he gasped, matching her pace. ‘I’ve been dying to meet you!’
His hair was liquorice black above a high forehead, above a large jaw – a face best suited to gloom. When he smiled therefore – this being so unexpected – it was difficult to resist smiling back. But Viola did resist.
‘Is it like birdwatching?’ she enquired tartly. ‘Do you need to tick “redhead” off your list?’
He looked confused. ‘Birdwatching?’
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is not “the redhead”. It’s Viola.’
‘Oh!’ he said, catching on – perhaps – and they did not speak for a while. Viola waited for him to get bored, to trail away, but he stayed beside her, leather satchel banging against his hip. They paused in unison when a small herd of deer tripped anxiously across their path, and once they had resumed their walk, the boy said: ‘Do you know, I hate Violas!’
Now Viola was confused. She had never met anyone who shared her name. There had been a Violet in the year below at her mainland school, and a precocious Violetta at a drama club she tried once and immediately hated. How had this boy encountered enough Violas on an island of 253 souls to form such a strong opinion?
‘I mean the flowers,’ he said.
‘Oh!’
‘They look like they have faces.’
‘Yes.’
‘Weird eyes that creep you out.’
He was younger than her, Viola deduced, fourteen, fifteen maybe, though it was hard to say for sure. The kids at the harbour who looked to be her age physically, seemed young in their behaviour, childish – except perhaps for that blonde girl at the store. The island did it to them, Viola presumed, built them heartier, kept them innocent. You could only blame the lack of internet.
‘I’m named after a character in a play,’ she told him, trying to impress.
‘Oh, yeah. Which one?’
He was definitely younger. Either that, or more of a dunce than her.
‘The Shakespeare one,’ she enunciated.
‘Well, he wrote a ton of plays, didn’t he?’ the boy countered. ‘You’re going to have to narrow it down.’
‘The one with Viola in it,’ she said, toying with him.
She didn’t fancy him; she wasn’t flirting. There was just an easy familiarity between them – big sister, little brother – and she liked being teasingly superior, used as she was to being the younger one, if only by a few minutes.
‘Has it got sex in it?’ the boy asked. ‘The Viola play?’
She wondered if he had misunderstood their rapport, if he was flirting with her, but his enquiry seemed genuine.
‘Not really. Just a bit of cross-dressing.’
‘That’ll be why then,’ he said.
Why what? she would have asked if he hadn’t leapt in and flipped the subject.
‘So, are you heading for the Sisters’ Stones too?’ he asked. This was followed by a monologue about the perfect circle of nine Neolithic stones that lay beyond the wood, and a deconstruction of all the hypotheses for why it had been built in the first place – time-telling, worship, the strange proclivities of ancient druids. The tenth stone in the centre of the circle – a hollow stone – had healing properties, he said, if you crawled through its middle.
‘Have you tried it?’ Viola asked, triggering another lengthy speech from the boy, this one on local legends, including the giant’s bite story. He told a tale of how the sea surrounding Lark claims a child every seven years, then something about black-haired virgins – the word ‘virgin’ making him blush profusely – before he arrived at his point.
The Sisters’ Stones, as their name suggested, belonged to the women of the island. Everything else on Lark belonged to the men, which they could share with the women, if they chose to, but the stones … The boy couldn’t go near that hollow rock, even by invitation.
‘It’s bad luck for a man to enter the circle,’ he said gravely. ‘It invites a terrible fury.’
Dot strained impatiently at her lead. Viola hadn’t gained enough knowledge of the landscape yet to let her run free. Everywhere was the risk of an unexpected cliff edge, a drop into the sea.
‘Where does the fury come from?’ Viola asked. ‘From God?’
‘No!’ The boy looked shocked. ‘Oh, no!’ He crossed himself. ‘Not Him! Not Him!’
‘Then who?’
‘I don’t want to say it aloud,’ he replied. ‘I’m a good Christian and that’s pagan nonsense.’
‘But you said –’
He interjected, diverting her with another soliloquy. This time: about how he was going to be an archaeologist when he was older, discover more about Lark’s ancient cultures. He scooped up a fir cone and methodically stripped it of its scales. There was no precedent for this kind of career on the island, he told her, but that was no obstacle; the lack only indicated a demand. Once the island got a telephone mast and everyone had wi-fi (Did Viola know what wi-fi was? Had she heard of it?), he would be able to study an online course very easily.
Then he flipped the subject again, onto his older brother, Luke, who had just moved out of the family home and into the Billet House. He had begun an apprenticeship to the gamekeeper, which the boy explained was a ‘really very powerful role on the island’.
Viola thought of the stooped, white-bearded man who had yelled at her for bothering his dogs. He had been grumpy certainly, but powerful … ?
‘His daughter’s been given one of the cottages on the harbourside all to herself!’ the boy exclaimed. ‘And she doesn’t even have a husband!’
A rare pause opened up into which Viola thought she should offer some information of her own, a juicy detail of life on the mainland, quid pro quo, but he steamrollered her again with talk of fishermen and a tragedy at sea that had killed a load of them, way back when.
For someone ‘dying’ to catch a glimpse of the new redhead, he had no interest whatsoever in anything that redhead might have to say.
‘And you’ll have to take your dog back to your house, now,’ he said, as if this was a logical continuation of the story. ‘He’ll get in the way of the spying.’
‘She,’ corrected Viola. The woods were thinning now. There was the close-by sound of the sea. ‘And who are you to be telling me what to do?’
‘Oh, I’m Michael,’ he said, apparently immune to her resentment. He thrust forward his hand for her to shake, a gesture too late and too grown-up. It was oddly endearing. The boy meant well, Viola guessed. His rudeness, his social hopelessness, could only be born of interacting with the same handful of people every day. She shook that hand.
‘I’m named for Michael who leads the armies against Satan,’ he told her.
Viola grinned. ‘Oh, yeah, which play is that in?’
‘Oh, it’s not in a play,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Then why did you –’
‘Spying!’ she threw in, employing the boy’s own tactics on himself. ‘You said spying. Who are we spying on?’
‘The Eldest Girls, of course.’ He pointed to the needled ground beneath them. ‘Look, they’ve left a trail to lure us.’
There were rose petals there, red and bruised, a scattering leading away from the wood.
‘Well, me,’ Michael clarified. ‘It’s men those girls are after.’