I’VE BEEN READING—OR re-reading, I’m really not sure now—that stained copy that I inherited from John Arthur—from Francis—of William Morris’s News From Nowhere. The curled, brittle pages, smelling of damp, smelling of age, gritty with sand, dried mud and the dusty air of nearly half a century, as weary and old as the suitcase in which I kept them, speak of nothing that truly resembles the vision of Greater Britain that came to pass. Morris hated big industry, he hated all big things, he hated terror, he hated injustice. How, then, was he pulled so deeply into the currents of Modernism that Blackwells are even now trying to get rid of discounted piles of copies of The Well At The World’s End, The Sundering Flood, The Waters Of The Wondrous Isles? All that Morris and Modernism ever shared was a preparedness to dream, and a love of a bright, clean, glorious past that never was. But perhaps that was enough; perhaps the dream, any dream, is always the seed from which nightmares will follow.
John Arthur himself is fading in the new grey daylight of this different world. His memory seems to have no life, is twisted and pulled to suit whatever meaning people choose to give it as easily as were Morris’s unread pages. It’s almost as if I’m the only person left in this nation who grieves for him, or who still wishes to understand. That fatal night when we were together follows me even now, a dark figure filled with reproach and love and anger tugging at my shoulder, breathing chill upon my neck. All the questions I should have asked, the challenges I should have made. Either I loved, I suppose, the incarnation of something evil, or John Arthur was a puppet like me, jerked and changed through the years that separated us by the whims of some incomprehensible greater will. Between these two horrors, I keep trying to find some middle way, a decent path that anyone might wander along in their lives and find themselves unexpectedly and irrevocably lost. Francis was no monster, for all that I know that he used me much more than he loved me in the brief time that we were truly together. For all his faults, he railed against injustice, prejudice, stupidity, and would have been horrified to learn that people could be stripped of their lives for the sake of some accident of birth.
So I keep thinking instead of Mrs. Stevens, my acquaintance’s neighbour, who offered me tea and the unquestioning warmth of her kitchen, and of Cumbernald, and of the woman behind the counter in the Post Office, and that Bus Inspector on the road to Adderly, and the many nurses and policemen, and, yes, of Christlow, and even Reeve-Ellis, and the faces you see looking out from train windows, and the children you see playing in the street. And my own face in the mirror is there, too, although haggard as death now, the stranger-corpse that will soon be all that is left of me. Francis belongs there, with us all. He didn’t close the cell doors himself, he didn’t pull the ropes, touch the wires, kick shut the filing cabinet drawers, or even sign the forms that authorised the contracts that emptied so many lives from history. We did that for him.
We all are innocent.
We are all guilty.
During the few days before Francis and I headed south again at what turned out to be the end of our Scottish holiday, we lived together, totally alone, in a ramshackle stone cottage. The place had a rough slate floor like something carried in by the tide, thick walls with tiny windows that overlooked the beach and the impossibly smooth silver sand that faded without change into the flat glittering surface of the sea. The panes were clouded and cracked, holed and stuffed with old newspapers; curtained with cobwebs, too, when the old woman from the farmhouse up by the point came to let us in. In storms, in winter, the thin turf roof would have leaked the sea and the wind and the rain. But the weather was like honey when we were there. The sea was like wine. The rocks were marble. Alone, miles from the world once the old woman had gone, we swam naked and caught translucent shrimps from the pools beyond the dunes and lay on our backs on the sands and gazed into a sky that was as clear as gin, as deep as the sea. And we boiled the shrimps to pink in a witch’s iron pot on a driftwood fire each evening. We ate them with our fingers.
Time stopped. The Earth stood still on its axis. The whole universe turned around us. Francis’s skin was browned and bleached to lacy tidemarks by the sea and the sun, and he tasted like the shrimps; briny salt and sweet. The aurora borealis filled the sky at midnight, all the colours of light raining down from veils that moved with a soft hissing.
Lying one night tangled amid the blankets of our rough cot, my skin stiff from the sun and the soles of my feet gritty, some twist of emptiness made me reach out and open my eyes. Francis had gone from beside me, and was standing naked at the open cottage doorway, his hand on the frame, looking out at the pale sea, the white sand, the star-shot night.
“You see over there…?” he said, sensing from the change in my breathing that I was awake. “Right over there, Griff, towards the horizon…?”
I propped myself up, following his gaze out along the white shingle path, the low wall, the pale dunes that edged into the luminous ripple of the waves. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was something out there, the shining grey backs of a shoal of islands that daylight made the air too brilliant to see.
“I think we should go there, Griff,” he said, his shoulders and limbs rimmed with starlight. “Remember? That lovely name…?”
“There won’t be anything to see,” I said, lying back in the blankets, feeling the pull of sleep. “And there’ll be no way of getting across. No ferry…”
But I could see those islands more clearly now as I closed my eyes and the darkness began to take me. Heathered hills rolling down to dark green copses of pine. Sheep-dotted lowlands. The summer-sparkling rim of the sea. I could even smell a uniquely milky scent of summer grass and flowers carried to me on the soft breeze from off the Atlantic. Yes, I thought, we will go there.
But the weather had changed in the morning when we awoke. Low grey clouds lay across the dunes and met with the sea. Dampness beaded the cottage walls, silvering our bedding and filling the air like smoke as we shivered over breakfast and checked our map and decided to head south again, towards, perhaps, the Gulf of Corryvreckan—yet another of Francis’s magical names.
So we never did get to visit the Summer Isles. Francis pushed quickly down the track as we left our cottage beneath a sky that threatened nothing but rain, cycling as fast as he always cycled, forever heading on. I even feared that I, teetering with my older legs as I bumped along with my heavy suitcase strapped behind me, would never catch up with him. It was then, I think, as he crested the top of the first hill and vanished from sight, freewheeling eagerly down towards the farm on the headland where we would hand in the keys, that I finally lost my Francis. It was then that he was swallowed by history, and that everything else that was to happen began.