href="#ulink_f72569cb-8885-5c1e-945e-f3d7e9767e11">CHAPTER 1
When Jack Sweeney arrived in Polmayne in May 1934, he brought with him several bundles of letters, his mother’s diamond ring and a small, oak-framed painting of a bird of paradise. He was twenty-eight.
Behind him was a farm in Dorset which had been owned by Sweeneys for three hundred years and probably a lot more. He himself would never have needed to farm if his elder brother had survived the shrapnel shard which sent him face-first into the Flanders mud. Nor would he have been left in charge so young if his father had not succumbed to pleurisy in the winter of 1925. And he may have come to keep the farm, to make it prosper, even perhaps to love it, had he made some provision for the upheavals that took place in the early 1930s.
But in truth farming had never appealed to him. As a child he resisted a practice which made narrow enclosures from the land and planted each one with a single species of plant. Nor could he feel a part of anything that made such a mockery of the beasts – the lumbering cattle, the confused sheep, the swollen pigs. He had already built his own pantheon from the world and its virtues were diversity, rarity, independence; the farm seemed opposed to all three. He bred rare hawk-moths, collected birds’ eggs. He had a habit of making remarkable finds. He was a dreamy child, they said, a natural.
He had been to Polmayne once before, in May 1913. The winter before had been a fug of bronchitis and come spring his mother took him to the Antalya Hotel. He loved the town. He loved its hugger-mugger houses, the strange sea creatures that came up in baskets from the boats, the constant harbourside shouting. Within two days he had seen a peregrine falcon, a pair of seals and a group of basking sharks. On Pendhu Point, a smudge of orange wings sped past him and he cried: ‘Mother, look! A milkweed!’
That autumn his mother became ill. By Christmas she was dead. Jack could not understand what it was that changed her so quickly, that sucked away all the flesh and reduced her voice to a whisper. But when the farm collapsed, twenty-one years later, and his father’s cousin offered him a job in a forestry project, and everyone else was surrounding him with their platitudes and promises, all he could think about was how to get away. He remembered Polmayne. He put the sale of the farm in the hands of solicitors, bundled up a few possessions and took the train to Cornwall.
In Polmayne he rented a room from a Mrs Cuffe. It was a loft room. It had its own staircase, its own entrance and two dormer windows which looked down over the sea wall, over the bay and out to Pendhu Point. At one end was a slate mantelpiece and there he propped his bird of paradise.
He never intended to stay. Polmayne was a stopgap, a stepping stone, a place in which to sit back and look around before starting afresh. But the weeks passed and the mantelpiece filled with assorted top-shells and pebbles, with rounded shards of pottery and ceramics and a piece of surf-polished driftwood that resembled the torso of an erotic dancer. Soon the bird of paradise was hidden by a foot-long blade of a ship’s propeller prised from the mud of Pritchard’s Beach.
That summer the threads that bound him to the earth thinned and frayed. He took his meals alone in Mrs Cuffe’s dining room. He listened to the alien murmur of the other guests. The only person he spoke to was Whaler, the almost blind husband of Mrs Cuffe.
Whaler Cuffe had spent his working life as bosun and mate on a succession of ships. He had never served on whalers but had once told a story about a whale and after that everyone called him Whaler. In the summer months he lived across the yard in a lean-to shed while Mrs Cuffe rented out their bedroom to visitors. Most of the day he sat outside the shed with his hands propped on his cane while the sun glowed against his sightless eyes. He told stories to anyone who listened and mainly it was strangers as no one in Polmayne believed him. On Parliament Bench, his stories were a byword for fantasy: ‘Tall’n a bloody tree, Whaler’s yarns.’
It was from Whaler that Jack first heard about the Main Cages. He reeled off the names of the ships that had been lost there as if they were the dead from some age-old campaign – the Carlisle, the Athens, the Prince Henry, the Adelaide. He told Jack about the Phoenix whose cargo of sugar turned to syrup as she sank, drowning the crew; and the Constance, loaded with rice which swelled as she filled and burst the hull open like a pea-pod. On the seabed below the rocks, he explained, there are thousands and thousands of barrels, locked there by the cement that spilled from them and hardened; the cement was on its way to San Francisco to assist in rebuilding the city after the 1906 earthquake. In gales, Whaler continued, you can hear in the pine trees the moans of ‘all the poor beggars who perished on the Cages’. He told Jack that they used to leave pirates on the rocks sealed inside an iron cage.
‘And that’s why,’ said Whaler with a vague waving of his cane in the direction of the sea, ‘we call the rocks as we do.’
Jack found a copy of Tom Bowling’s Book of Knots and spent the mornings working his way through it, sitting on his steps with a ball of whipping line and various lengths of lanyard. Beside him was a pump with a cow’s-tail handle and it was this pump that gave the cobbled yard the name of Bethesda. Each morning Mrs Cuffe come into the yard to draw water.
‘Still tying they knots, Mr Swee?’
‘Still tying, Mrs Cuffe.’
‘Well, one day you’ll knot your own fingers together and starve yourself to death …’
In early July, he woke on a cloudless morning and found he could not move his head. He lay staring at the ceiling. Veins of sunlight reflected off the sea and flickered on the rafters. An hour later he had managed to reach his stool in the yard. When Mrs Cuffe came to the pump she told him he looked ‘stiff as a scarecrow’.
Bending to pick up her pails, she told him: ‘I seen others like you, Mr Swee. You get out on the water, have a bit of a row-round.’
He did just that. He went down to the harbour and hired a boat, twelve feet of clinker-built dinghy with long, heavy paddles. On that first day he could barely move them. The following day he managed to push out through the Gaps and across the bay. The next morning he reached the entrance to the Glaze River and by the fourth, when he hauled the boat over the sand and into the water the last of the stiffness had gone.
It was a day of no wind. The sea stretched flat and featureless into a pale haze. The dinghy surged forward with each stroke, splitting the water. The only sound was the rowlocks working back and forth in their sockets: cler-clunk … cler-clunk …
He pointed the bows of the boat out of the bay. Pendhu Point slipped astern. A slight swell rose from the east. In the bright midday, the heat fell on his back and bounced off the sea and he shipped the paddles and uncorked his water bottle.
He looked back towards Polmayne. In the haze was the white blot of buildings around the quays. He raised the bottle to his lips and drank deeply, then he pressed in the cork and rowed on. He rowed south-east. Some time later he stopped again and pulled in the paddles and drank some more, and as he drank and wiped the last trickle of it from his chin, he heard from the direction of the open sea the very faint sound of a bell.
There was nothing at all for several seconds but then it came again. Three loud clangs and a softer one – then a silence and two soft clangs and some louder ones, and he realised that it was not a mechanical bell but one rung by the irregular motion of the sea.
Jack raised one hand to his brow, shielding the sun. He squinted towards the sound. In the flood of light he made out three or four shapes of rocks. He took up the paddles and headed out towards them. As he rowed closer so
