I was not at all the same person that I had been a decade before (is the oldster in his dotage the same that he was when he was an infant swaddled in his truckle bed?). A slow sea-change had taken place. I believe that over those ten years of incarceration — life, that is, minus time off for good, for exemplary, behaviour — I had evolved into an infinitely more complex organism. This is not to say that I felt myself to be better than I had been — the doctrine of penal rehabilitation broke against the rock of my inexpungible guilt — nor did it mean I was any worse, either: just different. Everything had become more intricate, more dense and pensive. My crime had ramified; it sat inside me now like a second, parasitic self, its tentacles coiled around my cells. I had grown fat on my sin; I seemed to myself to wallow along, bloated and empurpled, like a mutated species of jellyfish stuffed full with poison. Soft, that is, formless, malignant still, yet not so fierce as once I had been, not so careless, or so cold. Puzzled, too, of course, still unable to believe that I had done what I did do. I make no pleas; it is the only thing I can boast of, that I never sought to excuse myself for my enormities. And so I had come to this penitential isle (there are beehive huts in the hills), seeking not redemption, for that would have been too much to ask, but an accommodation with myself, maybe, and with my poor, swollen conscience.
They tell me I am too hard on myself; as if such a thing were possible.
I was brought, or perhaps transported is a better word: yes, I was transported here by boat. It was charming. I had expected to find myself standing outside the gates some desolate grey morning with a brown-paper parcel under my arm, whey-faced and baffled before a prospect of enormous streets, yet here I was, skimming gaily over the little waves with the breeze in my face and the tarry smell of the sea in my nostrils. The morning was sunny and bright, the light like glass. Shadows of clouds raced towards us across the water, darkened the air around us for a second, and swept on. When we got into the lee of the island the breeze dropped and the skipper cut the engine and we glided smoothly forward into a vast, flat silence. The water with the sun on it was wonderfully clear, I could see right down to the bottom, where there were green rocks and opulent, coffee-coloured weeds, and shoals of darting fish, mud-grey, with now and then a flash of platinum-white. The little jetty was deserted, the strand, too, and the green hill behind. On the quayside there was a jumble of tumbledown stone houses with holes in the roofs; at the sight of them, I do not know why, I experienced one of my moments of black fright. I have almost got used to these attacks, these little tremors. They last only an instant. There are times, especially at night, when I mistake them for stabs of physical pain, and wonder if something inside me is diseased, not a major organ, not heart or liver, but the spleen, perhaps, or the gall-bladder, something like that, some bruised little purple plum or orchidaceous fold of malignant tissue that might one day be the thing that would do me in to the accompaniment of exquisite torments.
I heard then for the first time that strange, soft, bellowing sound the island makes, it came to me clearly across the water, a siren voice.
‘Like music,’ I said. ‘Like … singing.’
When I asked the skipper what it was he shrugged.
‘Ah, don’t mind that,’ he said. ‘There must be an old blowhole somewhere that the tide pushes out the air through. Don’t mind that, at all.’
Then that teetering moment of slide and sway and the soft bump of the boat against the dock: landfall.
I liked the island straight away, finding its bleakness congenial. It suits me well. It is ten miles long and five miles wide (or is it five miles long and ten miles wide? — this matter of length and breadth has always puzzled me), with cliffs on one side and a rocky foreshore on the other. The seas round about are treacherous, running with hidden currents and rip-tides, so that yachts and pleasure boats for the most part steer clear of us, with the happy result that we are not troubled by day-trippers, or hearty people in caps and rugged jumpers tramping about the harbour demanding grog and talking incomprehensibly about jibs and mizzens and all the rest of it. The place overall is gratifyingly lacking in the picturesque. It is true, there are whitewashed cottages and dry-stone walls, and sheep, and even here and there a tweed-clad shepherd. We have the bigger stuff as well, the rolling hills and ocean views and shimmering, lavender distances, and at night there is the light-thronged firmament. What is missing is that look of stony fortitude — storms withstood, privations endured — which a real island turns upon the outside world and which fills the casual visitor with an equal mixture of awe and irritation. The fact is, the place is not like an island at all, more like a bit of the mainland that has recently come adrift. There are patches of waste ground, and mysterious, padlocked sheds smelling of diesel oil, and tarred roads that set off determinedly into the hills as if great highways awaited them out there like destiny. The village, though it lies no more than a mile inland from the harbour, hidden in the fold of a hill, has the forlorn look of a place lost in the midst of the plains. It seems to be inhabited entirely by idiots. (I should move there, I could be the village savant; imagine a mournful chuckle.) There is a shop, a post office, and a pub the door of which I do not darken. It is mostly the old who live here now, the young having fled to what I suppose they imagined would be the easier life of the mainland. I had thought, when I first arrived, of opening a little school, like poor Ludwig on the Snow Mountain, to teach the few children that remain, but nothing came of it, as was the case with so many of my projects. I, a schoolteacher! What an idea. Still, the thought was benevolent, I do not have many such. The island services in general are meagre. The nearest doctor is a slow and sometimes erratic boat-journey away on the mainland. So when I arrived I felt at once as if somehow I had come home. Will that seem strange, to say I felt at home in such seemingly uncongenial surroundings? But the poverty, you see, the dullness and lack of emphasis, these might have been a form of subtlety, after all. Drama was the last thing I wanted, unless it be seagulls wheeling above oaks, or a boat stuck on a sandbank, or a woebegone band of strangers struggling up the dunes one day and spying an old house standing on the side of a hill.