How to Disappear (14 page)

A rasping arpeggio of bird noise recalled me from the Indian Empire to the Lodge at Eigg where my two feet were firmly anchored to the earth. The bird spoke again – a magpie – that unpleasant rattling call. In front of the house a semi-circle of red fuchsia bushes enclosed the Laird's lawn. Those fuchsias were great travellers too, since the plants are native to South America. I was surely in the most sheltered spot on the island, thickly wooded in every direction, enjoying the best of Eigg's microclimate borne up by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The atmosphere around the house was charged with an improbable
douceur.
It was another world really, a surreal outpost of Thames Valley affluence transported across wild Celtic seas to arrive intact at this protected place.

Personally I've never liked fuchsias and would rip them out if the property were mine. Coming closer, I peer in through the windows. Bare floorboards. A small drawing-room with art deco detail and some garden furniture stacked in it, otherwise no furnishing at all. The house was empty, with the magnetic pull of all empty houses. From its arcaded porch I heard the tinkle of a falling stream. The air was clammy and still. Yes, the Lodge too was waiting – but somehow not for Maruma.

That evening a little enquiry back at Kildonan was productive. The villa had been put up in the nineteen-twenties by Sir Walter Runciman, later Baron Runciman, when he was the Laird of Eigg. Subsequently it was inherited, along with the rest of the island, by his two sons. One of them was the Byzantinist Steven Runciman and I thought I'd give him a ring at his house on the mainland at Lockerbie – I'd had some doings with him years before and retained the number. He was ninety-two years old when we spoke on this occasion but he recalled Eigg with instant affection. I wondered how long the island had been in his family and asked ‘Did your father inherit it too?'

‘No, he didn't. But he'd fallen in love with it and it was for sale for practically nothing and he was tempted.'

‘And how often did you go there?'

‘I went for about three months a year – for forty years. In August my brother always had it. We went for New Year to celebrate with the tenants, and we gave a children's party every year, so I knew all the islanders. There were no real difficulties. Now and again they tried to pull a fast one, but we made light of it and all got on rather well.'

‘The climate is so mild.'

‘Yes, it could be wet and windy but there was seldom any frost. I often went to write, taking a suitcase of books and groceries. A very good place for work and there were always mackerel and lobsters to eat. May, June was my favourite time. But there was often very good weather in December.'

‘Were you ever bored there?'

‘No. Why should I have been?'

‘I adore the Lodge.'

‘I'm glad you like that. Our idea was more a Mediterranean villa. We planted the palms. We didn't want awful imitation Scots baronial. And it was a very easy house to run.'

‘When did you sell up?'

‘ 1966. The place is not very suitable as you get older,' he explained, ‘because it's not very easy to get to. Our excellent factor had to retire and the thought of finding a new one, with a wife who wouldn't mind living there in isolation, was rather daunting. I have the happiest memories of the island and, I must say, it's distressing what's happened since. Very few of our tenants are left but I feel almost disloyal in allowing the place to get into disreputable hands. We sold to a Welsh farmer, Mr Evans, who thought it would be profitable as a farm. He sold it on at a great profit, but apologised to us for doing so. He said that the profit only realised what he had lost over the period. We ran the farm so that we didn't lose much. But one always lost something. Eigg is an expensive pastime, you know. It was then taken over by a chancer who wanted to establish it as a school for deficient boys who would do all the work for nothing and he would be paid for taking them on, but I don't think he could get a license from the county council.'

‘What about Keith Schellenberg?'

‘I rather like him but he's a mixed-up kid.'

‘And now Maruma.'

‘Don't know him but he'll be good only if he's prepared to spend money on it.'

‘And have you been back since you sold?'

He made a short noise, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. ‘No…I don't believe in going back to places you've loved, to places where you've been very happy. I think it's always a mistake to do that.'

Heavy clouds exploded across the blue sky bringing wind and rain. We watched television, read books and magazines, and one evening went for dinner at the house of Mrs Carr's sister in Cleadale. When we arrived she was straining simmered blackberries through a cloth. A dark blood-coloured liquid spilled over the edge of the bowl to yelps of pleasure from her children. Though not well-off in money terms, people can live wonderful lives here if they don't hanker for the amenities of a conurbation. Mrs Carr's sister said ‘We heard that Maruma is sending £30,000 for urgent repairs.'

One of the crofters, Micky, decided to throw a party in his kitchen. We all jammed in there on the cement floor under a bright light, hedged around by stacks of beer, whisky and cigarettes. Rock music, tinny and very loud, squirted from the radio/cassette player. I was reminded of Russia. Because of the squeeze, you couldn't really see people's bodies. The party was all heads and smoke and noise. Like most of the crofters, Micky was an incomer, not born on Eigg. In fact the crofters came more out of hippiedom than out of farming. An intense, Pre-Raphaelite girl asked ‘Is there any truth in the rumour that Maruma is penniless?' Another rumour too was going round, that the successful businessman Richard Branson had tried to buy the island but Maruma got in first. An ample, kindly woman materialised out of the fug and introduced herself as Maggie. With the rock-music noise sizzling across her speech I was barely able to determine that she came from Bolton in Lancashire and was secretary of the Eigg Community Association. She said that Maruma's master plan – his what? –
master plan
! for the island had just arrived in the post – had what? –
just arrived in the post and I've pinned it up in my cottage.
Would we like to go over and look at it?

The following afternoon, rather thick in the head, we did. It was cosy by her fire with mugs of tea. A Pan-like boy from Huddersfield slouched and smiled in a chair. He didn't say much. He ran a hand every so often through his tousled curls and years afterwards, to my surprise, I found myself using him in a novel. Craft objects were for sale. Maggie's forte was knitted winter socks of an eskimo kind and I bought several pairs as presents. And there on a sheet pinned up and hanging the height of the room was Maruma's
Long Term Concept.
It was very long indeed. We carried our mugs closer. He was hoping to change everything. Among the proposed developments were a fast ferry service, holiday cottages, the conversion of the Lodge to an holistic health centre, horse-breeding, fish-farming, removal of rubbish, renovation of buildings, a sports hall, indoor swimming-pool, shopping centre – it took one's breath away and seemed over the top. Maggie pulled a funny face at it and handed me another mug of tea. Warming liquids are the blood of social life up here. The Huddersfield boy was about to say something but stretched his legs out instead and stared at his denim crotch.

I asked Maggie if there were any crofters who weren't hippies and she said ‘There's Mr and Mrs McEwen. Theirs is one of only three or four households here who speak Gaelic.'

The McEwens – who are nothing to do with the beer McEwens – lived in an old cottage facing west over the sea. Inside it looked like the nineteen-fifties. Or do I mean the eighteen-fifties? Lawrence McEwen remembered the time of the Runcimans as Eigg's golden age but his account of it differed somewhat from Steven's.

‘Lord Runciman got the island very cheaply. The previous owner had been borrowing from him, so Runciman virtually owned the island before he bought it. In those days there was a dairy which produced fresh milk and cheese and butter. Now all we have is this terrible long-life milk. Hate the stuff. And there were jobs for everyone. Lord Runciman employed six rabbit catchers for example. And very good shooting there was. Do you know the Game Law here? You can shoot pheasant if they stray onto your property but you're not allowed to lift them. They all belong to the Laird. To this German feller now.'

‘Have Germans ever come here before?' I ask.

‘Only dead ones,' says Mr McEwen. ‘Washed up on the beach during the war.'

Without looking up from her knitting, Mrs McEwen, bespectacled, a woman dour in the extreme, nods agreement with her husband, as though the ironies of life could go no further. The light coming off the sea is metallic and the waves sound meaty and round, falling on the beaches below. ‘We don't count him,' she says after a while. For some reason I know she's referring to the island's ex, Keith Schellenberg.

‘And mines too,' says Mr McEwen. ‘We used to get explosive mines washed up on the beach.'

‘Do you ever go to the city?'

Lawrence McEwen glances at his wife as though I've said something dangerous.

‘Occasionally,' she replies, ‘but I don't like the sea-crossing.'

‘Does the city frighten you?'

She pauses and looks up. ‘We take it in our stride,' she says.

Luca took some photographs. Unless it is absolutely unavoidable I never talk to people while they are being photographed because it makes them too self-conscious to give me their attention. But the McEwens took that in their stride too. Photographs, reporters, the press – Eigg doesn't care much about that sort of thing. Water off a duck's back. A sentimental view would be that places like Eigg bring out the genuine in people, for better or worse. I think it's not that but, you know, living in such close proximity to the attentions of others, you'd be dour too. They drink to shake off, briefly, the chains of never rocking the boat.

That night we discovered that an Italian couple were staying at the farmhouse, academics from Bologna, and Mrs Carr produced a surpassing dinner of smoked fish, roast lamb, and a hot fruit sponge with cream. Italians have a thing about Scotland, perhaps because it is the opposite end of Europe for them, and my first proper tour of Scotland was at the behest of my Sicilian friend Natale: and we discovered on our drive through the Highlands that there were more Italian visitors than any other kind.

Luca was delighted to have the opportunity of speaking his native tongue but they didn't overdo it and I learned that the female academic had been involved with the excavations at Pompeii. I said ‘As Venice gradually sinks into inundation, so Pompeii gradually rises from it.' She said the former was happening too fast and the latter not fast enough. I questioned her on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, with its tantalising promise of lost masterpieces from Classical Literature coming to light, but that wasn't her area and she was unable to tell me how affairs went on there. But she had done some work in connection with the digitalisation of the sites, the provisional results of which I'd already seen at an exhibition which came to London three years previously. Next day the weather was bad and the Italians lent me a book on Pompeii which they had with them. It was in Italian, which I can't properly read, but it beguiled an hour or so on the bed as the rain smacked against the windows.

Naturally the photographs occupied me more than the text and I experienced an intense recollection of my first visit to Pompeii which was one Italian springtime while staying in Ravello. I wrote of it in To
Noto
and shan't repeat that here but I saw, as I flicked shiny pages, that this Italian book quoted several letters from English travellers to Pompeii. One was from Roger Fry to his mother. I've since tracked down the original English. He was visiting Pompeii in the spring of 1891, and wrote from the Hotel Victoria at Cava dei Tirreni:

Pompeii can be a very hot place to explore, even in spring. The dark volcanic rock holds the heat and the site is treeless and without other shade. Few of the buildings are roofed, although there have been discussions concerning the legitimacy of a roofing programme. I'm against it in theory, because it would turn the place into a mock-up, but for it in practice. In the event, sweating profusely, I was moved to tears by the experience because unlike most ruins, where the religious or warlike element is paramount, at Pompeii it is the human factor which is so strong. The Forum was smaller than the market square at Wantage! This humanity has always been the principal legacy to us from the classical world of Greece and Rome. How close to us it seems, in comparison with the primitive gibberish from elsewhere. And you enter Pompeii by the Nocera road which is lined with funerary monuments, now reborn to remind us once again of the oblivion which awaits us all.