What We Can Know - 21

I t was dusk when we anchored off the island. We were out in the channel, a quarter of a mile offshore, in the hope of catching a breeze to turn the wind turbine and charge the batteries. In the gloaming, we heard the sad ululating cry of a loon calling across the glassy water to its mate, who called back. According to Jo, these ducks moved in ten years ago. There was not much to see of our island beyond the outline of a black mass of trees rising then dipping in two long curves. Away to our left, vivid against the remains of the sunset, was the unsubmerged portion of a church spire. We had seen many along our journey, marking the sites of lost villages. They had outlasted the office and apartment towers of Francis Blundy’s time. The islands we had passed on the way seemed to pretend that they knew nothing of what was once here, and I was almost persuaded. Hard to admit, but it was still beautiful.

Jo and Rose went below and I remained on deck for a while, wondering at the dread I felt. The dark shape of the island seemed to carry across the still water an accusation of trespass. It was reckless to invade this dream buried in a century-long sleep. I was here to disturb phantoms. The land belonged to Francis, to Vivien and all who once visited them. The island was a tomb and I would be breaking in to steal its treasure. That these literary ghosts were my own creations, conjured from library archives, made them more forbidding. So familiar, and absent. It was my own madness we were about to break open.

I considered all the gear we would have to drag through the trees tomorrow, the tent and sleeping bags and bottled tap water and a cooking stove that might not work – and I hated all of it. Like Francis Blundy, I was a creature of indoor spaces. It was the business of other people, of our frail civilisation, to keep me sheltered and warm, hydrated and fed. We all had our specialisations, our own particular talents. The others could rely on me for mine – for what? Retrieving a lost poem and unhinging myself in the process.

The next morning, under a watery sun, the island looked more approachable. After acorn coffee, bread and jam in the wheelhouse, Rose and I packed. With much discussion about what to leave behind, it took two hours. Jo laughed when she lifted my pack. She fetched some ancient scales. Thirty-nine pounds. The fork and spade we would use like walking sticks. We pulled up the anchor, and since there was no wind, Jo used the motor to steer us towards a spit of bare limestone rock where we were to scramble ashore. At less than a slow walking pace we slid silently across clear water barely two metres deep. We saw shoals of small grey and orange fish, freshwater turtles and water snakes among fronds of pale green seagrass growing from what looked like limestone brash. We passed over a straight line of dressed stone, probably the remains of a drystone wall. The island, like most of the others, was a dense mess of competing oaks and birches and leaning dead trunks, right to the water’s edge. The undergrowth was mostly nettles and brambles, collapsed and soon to regenerate. Jo had been right, getting through in summer would have been tough. She put the motor in reverse, cut it and let us drift alongside the rock. Rose climbed ashore with a mooring rope, and I passed the packs across. It was well after midday as Jo backed the boat away and called out her good-luck wishes. She would anchor at the same spot in the channel and wait.

Pack on my shoulders, spade in hand, I followed Rose along the spit. Ahead was a steep bank that stretched away to left and right, as far as we could see. No going round it. Until we got to its base it looked vertical. I took our coiled rope, paying it out behind me as I climbed up, using the base of trees as footholds. Rose attached a pack and once I was at the top I hauled it up. Twice she had to climb up and free it where it wedged between trees. An hour passed before we were both at the top with all our gear, catching our breath. From here we saw Jo’s boat already at anchor. We figured we had advanced thirty metres along our line towards what we were calling Dolly’s spot. Before we set off, we built a waymark of dead branches.

We checked the compass constantly for our 352 degrees bearing. Our method for keeping on course was simple. Rose walked ahead as far as she could while remaining visible. I kept the compass open on our course, and when she turned to look back at me, I waved her into a position which she would keep while I caught up with her, pacing out what I guessed to be metres. I kept a tally in a notebook. This was slow progress. The loads we carried were set to break our backs. The spindly trees grew close together, in places as dense as a bamboo thicket. Within ten metres, Rose would disappear as if behind a screen. After 291 metres by my reckoning, we were on a steep descent at the bottom of which was a grassy bog. It was not possible to cross it in one-metre paces and we had to guess its width. Our feet were sodden. Later, an immense patch of high bramble blocked our route. We walked 210 metres to the east to get round it. We thought we could walk the same distance west, but the brambles were not formed in a convenient rectangle. I drew a map of our corrected course. Rose was certain it was wrong. Discussing that and making a compromise, which put us both in error, took up half an hour.

We had gone 600 metres when I saw that she was limping badly. Or, as she put it, well. Our backs, deskbound academics’ backs, ached from our loads, so we stopped for a late lunch. Bread, protein cake, water. As I was helping Rose with a plaster for her heel, something went into my eye – an insect, or a fragment of a leaf. Her careful intervention to extract the speck took up more time. Still, it was a tender moment. The light was beginning to dim as we passed the 1,000-metre mark, and we should have set up camp. But we continued and to our relief the final stretch, along the top of a hill, was easier and we reached what we decided was near the Barn as darkness fell. We were not quite in a clearing, but the trees were sparser and for a few minutes we were cheerful. Neither of us had ever erected a tent before our rehearsal on the grass outside the apartment building in the week before we left. But that was in daylight. By the narrow beams of our headlamps, it took us an hour and a half. The process and its petty reversals made us irritable with each other. That souring of mood had not faded by the time we struggled, fully clothed and with cold wet feet, into our sleeping bags, too tired and disheartened to bother with the stove and supper.

After I had dozed uncomfortably for a while, Rose woke me to complain that I was snoring. She went back to sleep immediately. I lay on my back, watching swirls and shifting swags of purples, greys and black on my retina, and listening to the rustle of animals close to the tent. I thought of the biologist who had tried to introduce wolves onto the island. He may have been successful after all. I opened my eyes. Perhaps his mistake was to have left too soon. Ours was to have brought our food into the tent. Its fabric was against my arm in the narrow space. Easily bitten off. I moved towards the centre and now I felt Rose’s familiar warmth and her breath on my other arm. In the dark, my desire was sharp, like a needling pain. It was more than three months since we had made love. I recalled the vague disappointment, which we could not discuss. Hard now to bring back how it once had been, how it felt from the inside, sensually, emotionally, the wildness, that spontaneous intimacy we had conjured between us. I longed for its return. Without it I’d be condemned to go on pursuing it for the rest of my life. On the fading of that self-pitying thought, I fell asleep.

When I emerged from the tent at seven, Rose was crouched over the camping stove making chicory coffee, a rare treat. We were pleasant with each other as we ate bread and protein cake again, and last summer’s mushy apples. They had a bad effect on Rose because later, when we were dressed and ready, she went off into the bushes to be sick. After I had fetched water for her and was waiting for her to recover, I became alive to the extraordinary fact: I was perched on a damp log in the Blundys’ garden. The gentle slope of the ground told me that the house would have been off to my left. The gate on to the footpath that led down to the stream would be more than a hundred metres to my right. I imagined an indignant Vivien, fresh from her breakfast, striding out from the Barn to shoo the bedraggled travellers off her lawn. I bestowed on her, from old films, the level well-enunciated tones of the twentieth-century English elite. As I stand, I explain that we have come from the future, academics with a special interest in the poetry of your husband. That does not go down well and she does not let me finish. We must leave immediately, she tells us. It would not help to confide what I feel about her, or that I have read her journals and know the dates and circumstances of her and her husband’s deaths. The grubby intruders must go and take their mess with them, including the fork and spade.

Rose had been resting in the tent and was now ready. We discussed our ailments. My back hurt, my eye was fine, her heel was bearable but her wrist was sore from carrying the fork. I was starting to suggest she wore my gloves for the journey back when I broke off. My view was through the slender white trunks of birch trees towards what I thought was a portion of a steep green hill in the distance. Then I leaned to one side and as my perspective shifted, I understood what I was seeing. It was a portion of a wall covered with moss. Rose saw it too and stood. We walked towards it slowly, as if to delay disappointment. We used sticks to beat aside last summer’s tangle of collapsed fern, bramble and nettles. The wall of Cotswold stone stood about a metre and a half high and formed a large rectangle with one wide gap where the double entrance had been. Beneath the foliage were the rotting remains of roof beams. There were no roof tiles. They could have been taken long ago for other buildings. Birch and smaller plants had colonised the building’s interior. It was a big space. Underfoot were broken bricks that must have formed the interior walls. Somewhere within it, Vivien had sat at the desk and dreamed of the book she would never write. Now, outside her study, dense moss was converting the remaining limestone wall to a more complex vegetable existence.

‘I’m sure it’s the dairy,’ Rose said. ‘And over there is the right corner.’

We went round the outside of the building to look. I thought Rose was right – we were standing by the remains of the south-east corner. Rose used the compass for confirmation. We knew the dairy from photographs and phone-videos. A fine building of trimmed stone, stone-tile roof, cream window frames and pale blue doors. There was a weathervane on top with a playful cut-out of coach and horses and a highwayman. Harry Kitchener thought it was a more interesting building than the Barn itself.

I held one end of the tape against the corner while Rose measured out four metres. Our intended spot was two metres into a bramble patch. We had nothing so useful as the secateurs Vivien used to snip her roses for table decoration, but we had bought in Port Marlborough a rusty machete and a pair of leather gloves. I went back to the tent to fetch them. On the way I took time to look for the Barn and found only broken bricks and overgrown cement traces of the foundations. The building had been demolished or scavenged. Perhaps the military had used it for target practice. Back at the site we took turns at slashing away at the bramble patch. We wanted a cleared circle three metres across. The growth was tough and prickly stems flew up in our faces. The machete was blunt. I tried sharpening it on a rock. We needed granite, but here there was only soft limestone. We kept working as it started to rain. It took us until lunchtime, four hours, to clear the digging circle. We sat shivering in the tent, barely speaking as we ate another round of bread and protein cake. There was nothing hot to drink. We had left the stove out in the rain and it would not start.

The downpour ceased and we started work by marking out east–west and north–south lines across our cleared patch. At my first thrust dead centre where the lines crossed, the spade barely penetrated the ground. There were more roots than soil forming a lattice of bramble, tree roots and the wiry suckers of nettles. The machete was useless. The saw was unwieldy, but it was all we had. We were on all fours in the mud, working at awkward angles. Further down were thicker tree roots. We loosened the earth beneath them with the fork, then scooped out handfuls to make space for the saw. It was sometimes possible to use the spade to lever a root up so that the other could saw it. After two hours our hole was only thirty centimetres deep. Rose suggested driving down a stick as a probe. If it met resistance, it might give us hope. But nothing was easy. The wood lying around us was rotten. It began to rain again. We sawed off a branch of scrub oak, hacked it clear of twigs, made a pointed end and hammered it into the ground with the flat of the spade. We hit something solid. Another two hours of digging, scooping and sawing uncovered a bed of limestone. It was impossible to dislodge, and it was slow work breaking it up. We were not thinking straight. It did not occur to us that nothing could have been hidden underneath.

It was late afternoon and we were cold, dirty, tired and disheartened by our incompetence. We left our tools on the ground and went to the tent. As I was untying the flap with mud-caked hands, I had a sudden thought, an impulse of curiosity, despite my exhaustion. I told Rose I was going to explore further down the slope. She was already halfway in the tent.

‘Fine. But I need to lie down.’

I went through the woods, down along the line of its descent. I looked out for remnants of the Barn’s boundary, once a hawthorn hedge. Nothing now of course, no wooden gate onto a footpath through open pasture. I kept on down the slope. Now there were more oaks than birches. Where the ground began to level, I heard it before I saw it between the trees. I went closer and stood amazed. It was wider than I remembered from photographs. But the same stream, holding a tenuous line between present and past. I forced a way through the undergrowth and crouched down on the bank to wash my hands and face.

To understand my joy at the discovery, a stranger would have needed to share my obsession. My surprise and delight were misplaced. A hundred years was nothing in the life of a river. They might shift their course, but they lasted a very long time. The original drainage line of the River Thames was almost sixty million years old. A mere 20,000 years ago, it was a tributary of the Rhône. It could have lasted another ten million years if it had not disappeared under the sea. As I sat by the stream, those facts meant nothing. From a vanished wooden footbridge near here, Vivien started out on her walks. When I was a child, I used to imagine that the past existed somewhere other than in people’s heads. All that happiness and sorrow, those jokes, battles, holidays and people could not simply disappear. Surely, the past lingered in a hidden dimension by its place of origin. The walls of a room were altered, I suspected, by everything that had happened between them. I knew the sensible grown-up response – the present vanished forever into the gaping mouth of the greedy past. Vivien existed only in the minds of those who thought about her. But my research had revived childish dreams. Different water flowed here, past different bank vegetation, with different creatures living in the stream and different air flowing above it. But it was the same stream, and she was here once, looking at it, just as I was looking at it now. That our presence here, screened from each other by time, constituted a separate reality, was at the core of my obsession, and perhaps the obsession of all dedicated historians, biographers and archaeologists. Vivien’s contemporary, the young Richard Holmes, tramped across the Cévennes in Stevenson’s footsteps. For Holmes, the writer he admired and pursued was a colleague and a friend, a living presence worth waiting for on a bridge, the wrong bridge, as dusk fell. For my neighbour, Cyril Baker, with whom I shared a bathroom, the court of Innocent III was a teeming reality. A million historical movies, novels and serious histories expressed our yearning to keep the past with us. Kind or cruel, it haunted us, and its ghosts, unlike most, were real.

I went back to the tent to tell Rose about my find. She was lying on her sleeping bag. She was excited by the news and wanted to see the stream for herself. As she pulled on her boots, she told me about a passage in Vivien’s journal describing how the stream had flooded the surrounding meadow, and in a later entry, how the water turned a polluted milky green. As we walked down through the woods, I reminded Rose that Vivien accused Francis of being indifferent to the sighting of a kingfisher flying upstream.

Rose said, ‘When you get your hands on the poem, you’ll forgive Blundy everything.’

She too washed her hands and face in the stream. She also drank from it. I would never do that. A rotting animal could be lying half-submerged upstream. Radioactivity was another consideration. We went back to the tent. We were happier. Only now did we realise that if Vivien wanted the Corona to be found, she would not have heaved a slab of limestone over it. Tomorrow we would keep to the plan and dig the next hole further along the east–west line. We agreed on everything, our moods matched and we were walking hand in hand.

After a bad half-hour, I had the stove working again. We warmed up a can of vegetable soup and ate it with slices of protein cake sliding about on its surface. Later, we lay in our sleeping bags, in absolute darkness, exhausted, though it was barely eight thirty. We gossiped about department colleagues for a while, then were silent. I reached for her hand. She took mine, gave a squeeze, a stroke with her thumb, then withdrew. I understood a ‘no’ or ‘not yet’. The expedition had given us good cover for not confronting our situation. My thoughts were now clear. I wanted us to continue. Rose’s brief scene with Kevin Howard still lay between us, quietly suppurating. I was baffled as well as angry. To probe would be heard as accusation and bring on another row when we were already on a cliff edge. But I had my theories. A taste of youth, a jolt to recall me from my obsessions, the thrill of the illicit – consensual sex with graduate students was no longer a sackable offence, but it was still frowned on by the older professors who might cook up some other charge and throw her out. I knew the kind of fight Rose and I would have – my emotional illiteracy against her flagrant betrayal. Each believing an apology was owed. Usual stuff. Could we engage with such banality? I had rehearsed a muscular notion: only by being together, sharing difficulties as we had yesterday and today and solving them, could we act out, rather than analyse, our best path into the future. A typical evasion, I could hear her say, but her silence was evasion too. A hand squeeze and a thumb’s brief caress in the dark kept my hopes alive while seeming to forbid discussion. There was our route, eight degrees east of south, a non-talking cure or the slow poison of silence. Nothing induces sleep so handily as a looped thought. I was soon oblivious.

A metre or a metre-fifty along our east–west line? Back at the site in the bright early morning, we tossed a coin. The head of our republic’s president, Mary Tyndall, gleamed in the wet grass: one metre fifty. We soon hit the same network of roots. This time, we accepted the work would be slow and we knew what to do. We were forty centimetres deep when we drove down our probe. It sank unobstructed sixty-five centimetres before hitting an obstruction. We stopped for lunch – bread and the last of the protein cake – and then kept on with sawing and digging. We had lost the sun to a bank of dark cloud. That, and the brevity of the late-winter twilight depressed us. We should have been out of our sleeping bags in the morning while it was still dark.

Around half-past four, the edge of the spade caught something so hard that it sent an electric pain through my elbow. Another rock. I dug clear limestone brash and clay. What we saw rarely, if ever, occurs in nature. We were looking at the outlines of a right angle. When we leaned in to look closer, our heads blocked our light. We had forgotten to bring the headlamps from the tent. As we cleared the soil away, we could make out the corner of some kind of container, and a hint between the dirt of dulled metal. We froze. We looked at each other but said nothing. It was not a moment of exultation. It was awe. One thing to have a hypothesis about some numbers in a notebook, another to dig down on that lead and find a steel box, put there by someone we felt we knew. Vivien had wanted us, strangers from an unknowable future, to find what she had buried. We took turns to touch the cold metal of that grubby corner embedded at a tilt in the floor of our excavation.

The president’s head had served us well. The container extended under the earth, away from the dairy. If the tossed coin had shown tails, we would have missed it. Digging it clear would take time and the rational option was to start in the morning. But we were not feeling rational. I fetched the lamps, more water and our last chunk of bread from the tent. On the way back, I could not help myself, I broke into a run, like a child on its way to a spectacular treat. It took us an hour and a half to get our treasure clear. We burrowed into the side of our pit, above our find, and then dug round it with care. At seven thirty, as it started to rain hard, we lifted the steel container onto the grass. We used our bare hands to clear away most of the remaining sticky mess of clay, earth and limestone crumbs. It was a smooth case, like a piece of luggage without a handle. It was secured by two clasps which were encrusted with a white foamy substance which felt as hard as coral. Like the professionals we were not, we recorded dimensions in a notebook. Sixty-five by forty, and twenty centimetres deep. We guessed its weight. I thought two kilos, Rose four. She took off her coat and wrapped it round the case, I carried the lamps and water bottles, and we retreated through the downpour to our camp.

Our dirt-smeared steel treasure lay between the sleeping bags in the squalid disorder of the tent. It had a sinister appearance, like a piece of advanced technology of unknown purpose, dispatched across light years by another civilisation. As we shivered in our bags, hoping to dry out before we slept, there was nothing to do but stare at our prize by the light of one lamp and try to forget how hungry we were. But sleep was not possible alongside a sealed box whose radioactive contents were stimulating every nerve end in my body. Nine hours until sunrise. We should have brought a bottle of local poitín in anticipation of success. For a while we talked through the expedition and our initial doubts, of our growing feeling of triumph, and of various mishaps that we now recast as comedy. We celebrated ‘Vivien’s stream’, how finding it and washing in it had boosted us. We would open the case in the documents room of the university library with the help of a technician. Vivien must have called on expert help, for the container was unlike anything we had ever seen. Then, mid-sentence, Rose trailed off significantly. I thought she was about to change the subject and say something hopeful about our future. But her breathing settled into its familiar steady tread. I turned off the lamp.

For the third successive night, I was alone in the dark. How was I to sleep when the Corona, most precious document in the world, lay between my wife and me like a small child come in the night to share our bed? Like many people, when I lay sleepless in the dark, my thoughts sometimes drifted towards death. A history of the years that lay between us and the Blundys could easily confine itself to the stories of those who died before their time. So numerous they formed mountains behind us, the accumulated victims of global heating, nuclear battles, drowned cities, ruined economies, shattered ecologies, untamed viruses. The kids I taught thought no more of those victims than Vivien’s students troubled themselves too much with the dead of medieval famines and plagues or the slaughtered of the Napoleonic Wars or the victims of the twentieth-century Holocaust. Vivien and Francis had the massed dead right at their backs. They grew up in the aftermath of civilised Europe’s long civil war, 1914 to 1945, when scores of millions died. During the Blundys’ lifetime, there were enforced famines, invasions, genocide, drought and savage local wars. They could see what was coming next. When 2.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels was recorded, early in the twenty-second century, no one was surprised. And this despite the cooling effect of previous nuclear exchanges. Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this was what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending or, Vivien, Rose and I, teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk and the rest. Francis liked to quote T. S. Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’. Sonorous lines, but empty, for no one ever needed that lesson. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less. Whether Jack and Jill can pull their marriage together trumps what happened at Thermopylae. There would always be the eccentrics who cannot get their heads out of the past. I included myself and my colleagues along the department corridor who knew all that could ever be known about their sixteenth-century subjects. But we had no choice. Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.

I was aware of my heartbeat growing heavier as if someone or something outside the tent was walking towards me. Foolish fears. I thought again of Adam Smith’s ‘there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’. A nation is so large and full of things and ideas that it takes a lot of determined folly to ruin it all. So with the planet. We wrecked much of it, but not everything. Here was the other story, not of the dead but of the descendants of the survivors, whose three-word history was bleakly simple: we scraped through . Devastated cities came back to life or were established elsewhere, just as they always had been. Significant parts of the knowledge base were preserved. Many institutions crawled through the gaps between catastrophes. People lived at poverty level, but they lived. When the rising curve of global temperatures met the descending curve of population numbers and industrial activity, nature seized the moment and pushed up through the ruins. Constant destruction, constant reinvention. Sail through the clear waters of the Cotswold Islands and be delighted by what’s starting to come back.

We might one day lose our internet, or be reduced much further to become subsistence peasants, or dissolve into widely separated bands of hunter-gatherers eking a hard life from a degraded biosphere. But I doubted it. There were knowledge centres across the habitable world. Ours was in the Pennines. It contained indestructible illustrated handbooks of simple step-by-step instructions. How to make high-temperature fire; how to melt sand with lime and soda to make glass; how to grind and polish a lens; how to build a simple microscope and look through it to develop a germ theory of disease. Literacy will have to survive, at least for some. There were other handbooks on crop rotation, childcare, pulleys, printing, soap, human rights, electricity, how to make painkiller out of willow bark, how to combine copper with tin to make bronze, and hundreds of other basics that took thousands of years to develop. Then, so informed, we will start cutting down the trees again, digging for iron ore and eating the mammals and fish that flourished in our absence. Round we go. Each time we fail, or calamities overwhelm us, we will come back from a slightly higher place. Rising and falling, we would continue to scrape through. Like one of nature’s rhythms, spring and autumn, when the earth breathes in then exhales carbon dioxide. With civilisation barely 10,000 years old, an eyeblink of time, we hardly know our cycles yet. My optimism says that with each one, we will adapt and improve. Slow progress, and how soothing and deceptive, to avert the gaze from individual suffering and think in the inhuman long term. In 500 years there might still be a Literature Department somewhere on the planet. In 5,000? Five million?

We were up at sunrise and packed with surprising efficiency. The case fitted into a backpack as we had hoped. Like siblings competing over a new toy, we both wanted to carry it, but I could not deny Rose. We packed the tent away and left it with the stove in the undergrowth. It was comforting to pretend to each other that we might come back. We brought the sleeping bags in case we could not find our boat. I went to the site and filled in our two pits. I drove the fork into the softened ground as a marker for whoever might want to come after us. I left the spade leaning against a tree. Back at the camp, I paused to make a mental farewell to the Blundys’ garden, to the imagined smooth lawns and richly tangled flower beds by the barn where the poet worked, the gate to the path meandering down the valley to the footbridge. It no longer had such power over me.

With the compass showing us our route, 172 degrees, we set off and covered the ground easily with lighter packs and our hands free. But we did not see our waymarks, nor did we remember passing a large tree blackened by a lightning strike. The boggy stretch did not appear. We made another detour around brambles, but this patch was far bigger. It was hard holding a course through overgrown forest. When Rose was walking in front of me, I could not take my eyes off her bulging backpack. Tiredness exaggerated my exhilaration. I was walking on air, not watching where I was putting my feet as we came down a slope. I tripped on a root, fell hard and gashed my knee. Cleaning up the wound with dirty hands took a long time. Now I was walking with a limp and every step hurt. Though our progress was slower, we still made it to the cliff above the shore by early afternoon. The return was two hours quicker than the outward journey.

But no sign of Jo’s boat, for we were facing across a different bay, narrower, with longer headlands reaching into the channel, blocking our view along the coast. So, east or west, left or right? We turned east because the way looked easier, but there was a gully to descend and climb, then another, but even when we made it onto the neck of the headland, we could not see the water below. We descended to get a better look and soon we had gone too far down to think of climbing back up. It was a long scramble to the shore. On some sections we slid on our backsides, clinging to trees to break our speed.

East was the lucky choice. Still twenty metres above the shore, we parted some branches and saw Salty a mile away, anchored off the next headland. An hour later we were climbing onto the rocky outcrop where Jo had set us down. Three blasts of the whistle brought her on deck. Within twenty minutes we were on deck too, embracing like old friends. We took out our find to show her. It touched us, the way she punched the air and hooted. There were two bottles of a local apple brandy waiting and a vegetable stew. The bunk room through the galley appeared palatial. Its stowaway table of polished wood spoke of a rich civilisation. There was a narrow shower-stall that gave a thin trickle of lukewarm water. We had left on board a set of clean clothes. While Rose took the first shower, I cleaned the steel container. Then it was my turn, and though by then the water was running cold, it was a fine thing to step out, shivering but free of dirt and encrusted blood, and into the towel that Rose held open for me.

From outside in the dusk we heard again the echoing sound of a loon and its mate’s reply from far away. The stew – turnips, carrots, potatoes – and our success brought Rose and me to a state of bliss. We raised our cups in a toast, brandy for the captain and me, herb tea for Rose. I lifted the case onto the table.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Forget professional procedures. We should open it now. There’ll never be a better moment.’

Rose agreed. Jo fetched a screwdriver and hammer. The white substance around the clasps was lime deposit. A few gentle taps and it fell away. In a mock ceremony, Rose and I stood side by side holding the clasps.

‘Ready?’ Jo said. ‘Then … open!’

Nothing happened. The lid needed to be prised open with the screwdriver. It came up with a squeak and a musty smell filled the cabin. What we saw was a disappointment. Another case fitted snugly inside the first. It was made of tough continuously welded plastic. No going back now. We had to cut it open. Jo brought out every cutting tool she had on board. Again, another discussion. The idea was to make an incision with a sharpened chisel, then use a bolt-cutter to slice open the sides. But chisel and hammer made no impression. We used a hand-drill to make a line of holes, which we joined up and enlarged with a keyhole saw. The blades of the bolt-cutter were too big, and we took turns with the saw again. That done, the cutter could gain purchase. But this plastic was tough. Each cut needed two of us on the bolt-cutter’s long handles. Getting round four sides took an hour.

We sat back and Jo poured herself and me another drink and topped up Rose’s tea. We were too tired this time for ceremonies. As we lifted the top half of the case clear, a shower of crystals poured across the table. No one spoke. We were looking at two packages embedded in moulded foam. One was tapered and almost as long as the container and perhaps thirty or forty centimetres across at the wider end. The other was rectangular, about twenty by thirty. Both were thickly wrapped in a semi-transparent material. The larger object was surprisingly light. Through the wrapping I made out something dark in the centre, like a chrysalis, a creature waiting to be born. As I turned the object in my hands, light was refracted through the plastic and caused the thing inside to appear to move, to writhe. I had watched too many horror films in my early teens. I discerned a curving line of a deep brown colour and, at the narrow end, something black with short protruding arms. Of course.

I said in a whisper, ‘A violin. Percy’s violin.’

His copy of a Vieuxtemps Guarneri. Only Rose could know the meaning and weight of this. Her eyes shone with unspilled tears. I placed the package back within the moulded foam. The other piece was rectangular, and I guessed it held a document in a standard format. It felt comfortable and familiar in my hands. I cut the protective layers away. There were more crystals within each fold, and I let them cascade to the floor. I had been standing a long time and my injured leg was throbbing. I sat down. I felt the heat of Rose’s scrutiny. I had in my hands a heavy folder. Trembling, I opened it out and felt the paper’s unusual thickness, saw the first page and gasped, turned to the middle, then to the last page. I could not bear to read it.

I looked up and into Rose’s eyes. I too was emotional. I tried to keep my voice steady, and I failed. ‘It’s not … It isn’t poetry. It’s prose.’

I passed the folder to her and she began to read from the beginning. Then she too turned to the middle and read.

There was silence, broken by the rustle of a page turn and the faintest creak of the boat’s timbers. From much further away this time, we heard the falling cry of the loon, a melancholy farewell sound but no answering call. A couple of minutes passed before Rose reached across the table and put her hand on my arm and said quietly, ‘It’s going to be all right.’ Then she took my hand and guided it onto her belly, onto a faint swell I had not noticed before, and while our captain looked on, smiling, Rose added, ‘And we are too.’