The Strong Man Read online

  ‘Yes,’ John said, suddenly sharply severe, ‘and I dare say the fellow wasn’t Particularly complimentary either. We’ve had a lot of trouble from the steamer crew recently. We had to gaol one of them, and Mr Mylchraine’s forbidden them to come ashore.’

  However I was not going to be sidetracked.

  ‘But those guard fellows? Who are they? Is this some new uniform for the Watch?’

  They’re Keepers.’

  ‘Keepers? What do they keep? A private collection of convicts?’

  John sighed. Heavily.

  ‘They’re Mr Mylchraine’s gamekeepers,’ he said. ‘From his place out at Gilvinneck. Originally.’

  Gilvinneck was one of the largest of the big estates which shared between them almost all the country. It lay about twenty miles south of Lesneven, almost at the dead centre of the ninety-mile long island.

  ‘And now these chaps form a sort of private police force?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. The Watch was getting totally unable to carry out its duties. Violence was on the increase, and someone had to step in.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied gravely.

  If John was so much in cahoots with Mr Mylchraine, it would hardly be sensible to point out that since the island’s purse-strings were firmly in one man’s hands if the Watch needed improving the remedy was simple. But I could see the advantages of substituting your own servants for the nation’s customary law-enforcers. So no comment.

  ‘Yes,’ John said comfortably now. ‘I’m sorry to say it’s much the same here as elsewhere. There’s a spirit of violence abroad. The fruit of modern times.’

  I was unable to restrain a sort of laugh.

  ‘John,’ I said, ‘are gold coins still in use here as they used to be?’

  ‘Well, yes. To some extent.’

  ‘All right. You live in the gold coinage times, then. You’re not pre-1939: you’re pre-1914. Oceana’s got nothing to do with modern times.’

  ‘And you think we’re pathetic because of that, don’t you?’ John snapped. ‘Well, let me tell you there are things happening in this little island no more than half the size of Cyprus which could teach a lesson to the whole of the rest of the world.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to make a joke about Mr Mylchraine as an advanced political thinker. But I checked myself. Something in the note of assertive uneasiness in John’s manner alerted me.

  ‘Things in which Oceana has the edge on the world?’ I said. ‘I’d be interested to hear. Really.’

  For a little John did not answer, as if he regretted having said what he had. Then he heaved his shoulders off the edge of the mantelpiece, dropped down into my father’s old chair and regarded me assessingly.

  ‘There are matters like religion, for example,’ he said.

  That shook me.

  ‘Religion? I never thought of Oceanans as doing more than a bit of gentle church-going at Christmas and harvest-time.’

  ‘I don’t mean the religion of the churches,’ John replied. ‘What’s taught there doesn’t bear much relation to the realities ever.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to defend our Particular branch of the Protestant Church of Ireland,’ I said. ‘But what is being taught here that does bear relation to the realities?’

  ‘What’s always been taught here,’ John answered. ‘Or handed down from person to person, perhaps one should say.’

  Then I was on to it.

  ‘You don’t mean witchcraft’s flourishing again?’

  ‘Witchcraft isn’t the right word.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ I said with a laugh. ‘What do you call it then?’

  ‘Worship,’ John said. ‘Worship of the powers that are within us.’

  A thought occurred to me.

  ‘And your Mr Mylchraine encourages it all?’

  ‘It was Mr Mylchraine who saw how important it was in the first place,’ John said.

  From here on I began to smell out the pattern. A people does not surrender power to a dictator, however strong, just because he asks. To some extent they may let him dominate them out of mere apathy, but he will always have to buy them as well. And what he buys them with is what in the end sells them to him.

  With Mr Mylchraine it looked as if it was witchcraft that was doing the buying. He was offering its adolescent glamour and its easy appeal to the grosser instincts, and, happy with that, the islanders were allowing him total control and were simultaneously succumbing to a weakness which would one day prevent them taking back any power, however much they might want to.

  Well, witchcraft would be something to write about in the paper. Liberal readers are as ready as anyone for a little titillation at second hand.

  ‘You may be right,’ I said with an air of judiciousness. There is something to be said for going back to the more primitive side.’

  John looked at me carefully.

  ‘If you haven’t any plans for this evening,’ he said, ‘there’s something I’d like to show you.’

  ‘I’m at your disposal.’

  A momentary doubt flicked across his features. But it cleared.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a ceremony takes place this evening. Quite an important one in the calendar of our worship. Mr Mylchraine will attend. I could introduce you.’

  ‘Could you?’ I said. ‘I’d certainly like it. I’ve got a feeling there may be more to him than people seem to think.’

  ‘Yes,’ said John decisively. ‘At about eight then.’

  He regarded me with unwavering solemnity.

  ‘The St John’s Eve Esbat,’ he said.

  I went on my own for a stroll after we had lunched.

  The day was still sunny, confounding my memories of an almost perpetual shroud of the soft rain that is called in the island ‘cloaky’ weather. The word has always been the subject of one of those endless, rather acrimonious debates that enliven provincial isolation: did it mean weather that called for a cloak, or did it mean that fine grey rain was cloaking everything? No doubt the debate still raged.

  However now the weather was far from cloaky and soon I was stopping every five minutes to lean over a wall or sit on one of the numerous granite mounting-posts still scattered all over the sleepy old town, though I did not see anyone actually on horseback as one had ten years earlier.

  Well, I reflected at one of my stopping-points, perhaps Lesneven’s a pretty ordinary place after all, in spite of chained convicts, intercepted letters and—what was it?—St John’s Eve esbats.

  Ordinary it certainly seemed. People were staidly going about, almost never hurrying, frequently stopping to gossip. Housewives with big round wicker baskets poked their way from shop to shop. Tenant farmers from the surrounding wolds plodded stolidly through the crowd. Here and there a strong splodge of vibrant colour was made by the deep orange shawl of a countrywoman well wrapped round sturdy shoulders. No truck here with the holidaymaker’s obsession with the sun.

  I met one or two people who remembered me but, though I did my best to steer the talk round to Mr Mylchraine and what life was like under his heel, somehow within moments we were always back to the girls I might have known as children who Were now married and with children of their own, or the old people who had ‘passed on’.

  I even bought a copy of the island paper, the Oceana Messenger, repeating to myself the old sourish joke of my young days ‘Messenger, yes. But where’s it taking the message to?’ I was a little disappointed when I deliberately proffered an Irish five-pound note for this small purchase not to get any gold in my change, but I gathered from the shopman that there were fewer of the old coins to be seen now. Was this a sign that Oceana was getting modern after all?

  I certainly changed my mind when I read the leading article in the Messenger. It was written in a thoroughly turgid nineteenth-century style, though it made its point well enough. Beyond the shores of Oceana, it told its readers, the world was in a mess.

  Well, I thought, folding the crammed black sheets, what if the islanders
are being told they have brought themselves tranquility as well as a little legitimatized sexual excess as the price of giving their powers of decision to Mr Mylchraine? A safe life was a good deal to be thankful for.

  And then, round the next corner, I came upon prompt evidence that, right or wrong, the writer of that thumping prose had at least been guilty of some tactful suppression. Because there on a sun-bright white plaster wall was an array of posters—the Band of the Lesneven Watch (Bandmaster Mr J. Orry) to play in Brignogan Park on Saturday afternoons, point-to-point races that had been held at Kermaddack two months earlier—with prominent among them a stark black-and-white bill offering a substantial award for ‘information leading to the apprehension of Dirk Gilhast, guilty of armed robbery, now believed to be in region of the Trigastell Hills’.

  Guilty, I noted, without trial. I walked on, my mind switching from one view of affairs to the other with every ten paces.

  In some ways, I saw, the place looked clearly more prosperous. Surely in the old days, the drink-shops had by no means outnumbered the lobster-pie bars, those unique Lesneven institutions. And the whiskey advertisements seemed to be infinitely more numerous too. No, Mr Mylchraine’s Oceana could not be all bad.

  I got back home to find John had worked himself into a decidedly excited state. Striding up and down the drawing-room, he twitched the ornaments into new positions and poured out a stream of words—about the state of the world, items in the news, anything he could lay hands on of a safely general nature. And on he went as we ate our early and hasty dinner which ended, I remember, with the island’s one contribution to the cuisine of the world, a ‘blayberry breaddie’, a curious cold affair made from bread and blayberries, a plant unique I think to Oceana. The dish is served with thick cream and is pleasant enough to a hearty eater.

  And then we set off. Although it turned out we did not have far to go, John elected to make the journey by car and when we stopped I was not quite sure where we were. I peered out into the gathering dusk. Clouds had come up while I had been indoors and it was darker than it might have been.

  ‘Where’s this?’ I said. ‘Aren’t we somewhere at the back of the Rota building?’

  John did not answer. Instead he set off at a rapid pace and plunged into a narrow doorway at the back of the Rota itself.

  I have never been one for extolling parliamentary democracy, and in all my years in London I had never set foot in the Mother of Parliaments, though as a schoolboy I had watched the proceedings of the Oceanan Rota. But all the same I experienced now a feeling of shock.

  Mr Mylchraine was holding his esbats in the Rota, was he? There was no doubt about it: I felt a sense of outrage.

  Following John along a tall, dank, stone-walled corridor I remembered that I had in fact been vaguely aware that the Rota had ceased to meet some six or seven years ago. There had not been any great to-do about it: the situation had just arrived at the point where there was nothing left for the worthy Delegates to decide.

  John turned at last and gave me a word of explanation.

  This leads to what used to be the robing room. It makes a convenient way in. People are apt to gather outside the front.’

  ‘Nothing like dodging a crowd,’ I agreed.

  John’s attitude amused me. The great upholder of folk wisdom seemed awfully anxious not to be seen by the people absorbing his share of their rich instinctive knowledge.

  But I got no more time for amused speculation. At that moment John opened the tall mahogany door at the far end of the dank corridor and came to a sudden halt like a toy train toppling off its rails.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  I tried to peer over his shoulder to see what it was in the room ahead that had had this effect on him. Then I understood.

  ‘I’m most awfully sorry, sir,’ John said, suddenly back in the days when we had been at school together and the Headmaster had spoken a word of reproof. ‘I’m most awfully sorry. I had no idea you were already here.’

  ‘But come in, come in, my dear fellow,’ said a rich voice from inside the room. ‘Have you brought that brother of yours?’

  John sprang into the room, as if staying outside had been a positive crime. And I had no need of introductions to know that the big man in evening dress I could now see sitting in a small brown, cane-backed armchair was Mr Mylchraine, ruler of Oceana.

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes. This is my brother,’ John stammered out. ‘It was very good of you not to make any objection.’

  Mr Mylchraine pushed himself up out of the little armchair and came towards me.

  ‘Your brother thought it necessary to telephone to me to say he was bringing you, Mr Quine,’ he said. ‘He thought I might have forgotten you were a journalist. Good evening.’

  He was smiling cheerfully. I could even see that his teeth were Particularly stubby. The skin of his big oval-shaped head with its short fuzz of greyish hair round an almost bald skull was of a curious waxen white so that his features were deprived of much animation. This, I imagine, was the effect of the skin trouble my brother was treating. But in spite of the dead pallor of his face there was in the deep brown eyes something that looked very much like a twinkle.

  He thrust out a very white hand, small for a man of his size. I took it. It felt a little cold to the touch but the pressure of his handshake was warm.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘I’m really extremely interested to meet you, even though I’m here off-duty.’

  Again the deep brown eyes twinkled.

  ‘Write about me if you want to, my dear chap. Though I’m afraid I shan’t see it. That paper of yours is something I feel I don’t have to read.’

  He swung round to John.

  ‘You didn’t know I knew which paper your brother worked for, did you, Doctor?’ he said. ‘A little evasive on the telephone, I thought.’

  John flushed a thunderous red to the very tips of his ears.

  Mr Mylchraine turned to me again.

  ‘Naughty of me, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘But I did happen to remember where you went from something your father said to me once years and years ago, and I couldn’t resist showing off a little.’

  I smiled.

  ‘But what if I’d changed papers since?’ I asked.

  Mr Mylchraine plumped down in the brown-cushioned cane armchair again. He gave me a quick little grin.

  ‘Yes, it wouldn’t have sounded quite so clever then, would it?’ he said.

  He glanced round at John.

  ‘But I don’t expect you’d have let on I’d got it wrong, would you, Doctor?’

  ‘No. Yes. No, I mean.’

  Mr Mylchraine left him at it.

  ‘Well now, Mr Quine, how do you find our little island after all these years?’ he asked me.

  ‘I was saying to my brother: it’s changed remarkably little.’

  ‘Except, of course, for the political structure.’

  ‘I’ve hardly had time to go into that.’

  Mr Mylchraine grinned at me.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t need much time,’ he said. ‘It’s simplicity itself. There’s me, and that’s that.’

  Poor John felt he had to do something to smooth over the rough edges of this.

  ‘But I was telling my brother, sir,’ he broke in, ‘there’s much more to our present state of affairs than might appear on the surface.’

  Mr Mylchraine heaved round in his little chair. I noticed now that it seemed an incongruous piece of furniture for the room, a dignified, if bare, chamber containing only a long elegant table and on its attractive sage-green plaster walls rows of curly iron coathooks. I saw the armchair as having been hurriedly brought in especially for its present occupant this evening.

  ‘Well, Dr Quine,’ he said to John now, ‘I think I’ll leave you to explain just how different we are from what we seem. It will be the—er—religious angle, won’t it?’

  And before John had had time to reply Mr Mylchraine turned to me again.

  ‘A great glosser-over,
your brother,’ he said. ‘But I admire him for it, of course. It’s a useful gift. Was he always so good at it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps he had less to gloss over when we were boys.’

  Mr Mylchraine laughed.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t think there’s really all that much to hide. I hope you’re not expecting a great deal from this evening, for example. I’m afraid nothing much will happen, you know.’

  He darted me a sudden shrewd glance from his rich brown eyes.

  ‘Or nothing at least that doesn’t happen often enough behind closed doors elsewhere,’ he added.

  ‘But this will be in public,’ I said. ‘Or to some extent in public, I gather. And that does interest me.’

  ‘Well, you must go round the island asking your questions then, Mr Quine. And write up all our excesses in that terrible righteous paper of yours afterwards.’

  ‘I understood you didn’t much like the island being written about.’

  ‘Understood? Is this something more your romantic brother has been telling you?’

  But I thought I had caught him out now.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not my brother. The paper applies for visas for a reporter to come here every twelve months or so. And invariably they get turned down.’

  ‘Yes, yes, they do,’ Mr Mylchraine replied equably. ‘I gave instructions long ago not to admit anybody of that sort. It’s not so much what they would say, but who might read it over here. People would feel a fuss was expected of them. And they’re really very happy as they are. But if you want to write something, my dear fellow, please feel you can.’

  That’s very kind—’

  ‘I shall have to see it doesn’t get to the island of course. But that isn’t difficult.’

  He pushed himself to his feet once more.

  ‘And now, Dr Quine,’ he said to John, ‘have you forgotten that I like to have a little while to myself before my own part is reached in this life-renewing ceremony?’

  John blushed again.