Islands of Mercy Read online

  Rose Tremain

  * * *

  Islands of Mercy

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE THE RUBY NECKLACE

  ONE AFTERNOON AT MRS MORRISSEY’S

  THE ANGEL OF THE BATHS

  GOLEM

  CAPERCAILLIE

  RAJAH

  A PORTRAIT

  ‘THE DESTINY OF THE STOMACH’

  ACROBAT

  ‘… AND OF HIS KINGDOM THERE SHALL BE NO END.’

  ‘EYES WITH WHICH TO SEE’

  MICROSCOPE

  TUMOUR

  VANISHING ANGEL

  LEON’S NEW IDEA

  WHERE THE RED ANTS LED

  VALENTINE REVISITED

  BELLE ÉPOQUE

  MORGUE

  THE RIVER TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN

  PART TWO ‘SOMEWHERE QUIET AND SOLITARY’

  EBB TIDE

  SUDDEN MERRIMENT

  AFTER THE RAINS

  THE GREAT MISTAKE

  HEIRLOOM

  MAGIC FROM UNDERGROUND

  THE RAINSFORD

  MIDNIGHT

  COMPLICITY

  STRANGER

  FORGOTTEN STREETS

  DARK AND SHINING COLOURS

  PART THREE WOMAN IN WHITE

  ‘ONLY SUBMIT’

  THE HAND OF THE ENGINEER

  CAT’S CRADLE

  NO NEARER TO CERTAINTY

  ANTE-ROOM

  THE TREASURE HOUSE

  WHAT TAMINAH KNEW

  OUT OF REACH

  UNCTION UPON WATER

  TABLEAU

  ‘BRITISH EMPIRE DOCTORS’

  A BOUT OF SINGING

  DUTTON & CALDECOTT

  ‘SHE WAS COMPLETE’

  CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

  LEON’S PLAN

  LILIES AND BRIARS

  ‘SOMETHING OF GREAT WEIGHT’

  THE WOODEN HOOP

  PART FOUR A BARGAIN

  QUEEN OF THE ISLANDS

  VIGIL

  A STATE OF MARVELLOUS DREAMING

  A MAN WHO DISLIKED RIDDLES

  THE WHITE CLOUD

  THE GOOD SHEPHERD

  THE MIDDLE CHILD

  NEVER BEFORE SEEN IN BATH

  A STORY OF GOOD AND EVIL

  ‘ONE AND THE SAME’

  THE WHITE ROAD

  SNOWBERRIES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel’s Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger (Sacred Country) and the South Bank Sky Arts Award (The Gustav Sonata). Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.

  Of Islands of Mercy, Rose Tremain writes: ‘This novel explores the primal and timeless human quest to find meaning in a life, an aspiration which engages people in wildly different ways across the globe. I chose two contrasting locations: the genteel city of Bath and the harsh island of Borneo and unfolded in them both stories of sexual entrapment, material striving, loss of love, untimely death and – through them all – the desperate and unending search for places of consolation and solace.’

  www.rosetremain.co.uk

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Novels

  Sadler’s Birthday

  Letter to Sister Benedicta

  The Cupboard

  The Swimming Pool Season

  Restoration

  Sacred Country

  The Way I Found Her

  Music and Silence

  The Colour

  The Road Home

  Trespass

  Merivel

  The Gustav Sonata

  Short Story Collections

  The Colonel’s Daughter

  The Garden of the Villa Mollini

  Evangelista’s Fan

  The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

  The American Lover

  Non-Fiction

  Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life

  For Children

  Journey to the Volcano

  To Richard, with love

  ‘Many a green isle needs must be

  In the deep wide sea of Misery,

  Or the mariner, worn and wan,

  Never thus could voyage on.’

  ~ Lines written among the Euganean Hills, 1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Part One

  * * *

  THE RUBY NECKLACE

  She came from Dublin.

  In that crowded city, she had worked for a haberdasher and presided over the slow death of her mother, after which she’d discovered in herself an unexpected yearning to leave Ireland and see the world. Her name was Clorinda Morrissey and she was thirty-eight years old when she arrived in the English city of Bath. The year was 1865. She was not beautiful, but she had a smile of great sweetness and a soft voice that could soothe and calm the soul.

  Clorinda knew that Bath was not exactly ‘the world’. But she had been told that it was built on seven hills, like Rome, and that it hosted ‘galas and illuminations’ in the spring and autumn seasons, and these things took on some splendour in her mind. It was also, she heard, a place where very many rich people assembled, to take the waters, or simply to take their leisure, and where the rich congregated, there was always money to be made.

  Poorly lodged at first on Avon Street, at the lower end of the town, where the gutters were choked with refuse, among which dozens of pigs wandered in the daytime and at night lay down to sleep in their own comfortable filth, Clorinda Morrissey began her sojourn in Bath by working as a milliner’s assistant in the cold basement of a shop on Milsom Street. This work was punishing to the hands. Though she kept reminding herself that it afforded her a ‘living’, she soon came to feel that this living resembled nothing so much as a kind of ‘dying’ and it made her furious to think that she’d left Dublin only to find herself suffering from feelings of collapse and decline. She vowed to alter her lot as quickly as possible, before her spirit failed her.

  The only article of value she possessed was a ruby necklace. It was an object of some beauty: twenty blood-red stones strung upon a delicate gold thread, with a golden clasp. It had come to Clorinda recently from her dead mother, who, in turn, had had it from her dead mother, and she, in monotonous rotation, from hers. For long and featureless years, this necklace had been passed from one place of safekeeping to another. It had hardly been worn by any of its owners, but rather had taken on the petrified status of an heirloom, kept in a satin-lined box, dipped in methylated spirits once in a while, to clean it and show its brilliance to the air. For long periods of time, it was forgotten completely, as though it didn’t exist at all.

  Rumours that the great-grandmother had got it ‘by dishonourable means’ seeped down the generations, but these, if anything, only made each successive inheritor more keen to hang onto it. All of them believed that the ruby necklace would one day ‘find its true purpose’. But what that purpose might be, even if it was speculated upon, was never decided. The necklace remained hidden away in peculiar places: under floorboards, inside a broken long-case clock, in the secret compartment of an empty wall cupboard where bowls of hyacinth bulbs were nurtured through the winter darkness.

  Now, however, Clorinda Morrissey, toiling over stiff bonnets and the fabrication of cloth flowers to attach to them, in her cold basement, made a vertiginous decision regarding the ruby necklace. She was going to sell it.

  To the voice inside her which protested that she was betraying the status of the necklace as an heirloom, to be passed on to future generations, sh
e replied that she had no children, so there was no ‘future generation’ to pass it on to. To the idea that, by moral right, she should leave it to one of her brother’s girls back in Dublin, she gave scarcely any consideration. These two nieces, Maire and Aisling, meant nothing at all to her. They struck her as dim, morose children, who probably did not even know of the existence of the necklace. And the rubies, she now saw uncommonly clearly, had no value whatsoever to anyone, until or unless that value could be realised. Surely, after all these silent generations had lived and died, it was time for someone to put them to use?

  She took the necklace first to a pawnbroker. This elderly person applied a cup-shaped object to his eye and gazed at the rubies through it. Clorinda Morrissey, watching him with her sharp gaze, saw a tiny froth of saliva escape from his mouth and dribble down his chin. She deduced correctly from this that the man had at once understood that, among the dross of gilt, brass, glass, ivory and pewter habitually offered to him, here at last was a thing of uncommon beauty and value. He laid the cup aside, wiped his lips with a limp handkerchief, cleared his throat and made Clorinda an offer.

  But it would not do. Mrs Morrissey was intent on changing her life. She knew that what was being proposed, although more than she could earn in six months at the milliner’s, was miserly. A violent hatred towards the cynical pawnbroker surged up in her breast, a loathing as red and heartless as the jewels themselves. She didn’t argue with the despicable man. She snatched up the necklace, replaced it in its box and prepared to walk out of the shop without another word. As she got to the door, she heard the pawnbroker call her back, raising his offer by a fraction, but she kept going.

  The following day, she paid sixpence to borrow a fancy bonnet from the milliner, arranged her hair carefully beneath it, put on her best coat and clean shoes and marched into a high society jeweller’s on Camden Street. Her entrance into this shop set ringing a little melodic bell above the door, and she took this for a sign of welcome.

  The money Clorinda Morrissey obtained for the rubies, paid in gold sovereigns, signed for on an embossed Bill of Sale with as much flourish as she was able to muster, put her into a trance of what she called ‘pure purpose’. She did not sleep. She sewed the sovereigns into the hem of a cambric petticoat. She chose to believe that her thirty-eight years of life had been lived in a kind of semi-darkness, but that now she would journey towards the light. And she knew exactly where she wanted that light to fall.

  Further down Camden Street there was an empty shop premises. It had formerly been a funeral parlour which, Clorinda was told, had gone out of business ‘due to insufficient deaths in the city’. It was explained to her that although Bath had a very high population of sick and suffering people, these were mainly ‘imports to the town’ who came hoping to be cured by the healing waters and who were indeed cured – or else went back to their homes to die. Bath’s indigenous population was extremely long-lived. The steep hills around the city kept the people’s hearts beating strongly. The air they breathed – at least in the upper part of the city – was very pure, compared to London and many other cities. Entertainments of all kinds kept them from despair. Reasons for dying were comparatively few.

  The funeral parlour, however, was large: a handsome office at the front, where examples of coffin design were still on display, bolted to the wall. At the back, two rooms, kept as cool as possible by an arrangement of iron pipes ventilating into a sunless back alley and once furnished with expensive fresh-cut flowers, had served as ‘viewing parlours’ for those bereaved relatives who could stomach the sight and stench of an embalmed corpse.

  Mrs Morrissey walked back and forth between these two areas, arranged to accommodate the conventions of English burial. And she saw immediately how her Irish spirit could adapt them very satisfactorily to her need for what she liked to think of as her resurrection. She stood at the window facing Camden Street and watched the scores of beautifully attired people strolling past. Her mind returned to the ruby necklace. She half expected to see it, adorning the crumpled neck of some wealthy dowager, but then she reasoned that it wasn’t necessarily the kind of jewel to be worn in the daytime, but rather saved for one of these ‘gala evenings’ that had been allowed to acquire such splendour in her mind, but of which she had heard little since arriving in Bath. And anyway, the necklace was no longer itself. It was on the very precipice of becoming something else.

  Once she’d signed her lease and engaged workmen to refit the premises, she wrote out a notice and attached it to the front door of the shop with milliner’s glue. It read: Opening soon in this place. Mrs Morrissey’s high class Tea Rooms.

  What Clorinda Morrissey wanted from her enterprise was not only to make the kind of living that had nothing of the ‘dying’ about it, but also for herself to become known – a landmark, a magnet, a destination in her own right. Though she had had many friends in Dublin, it had always seemed to her that in the great life of the city she had had no importance whatsoever. She was invisible in her haberdasher’s shop.

  In the taverns, where she could match the men, mug for mug of ale, nobody paid her any special attention. She’d had a suitor once, a carrot-headed boy who had walked with his head in the clouds and been run over by the night mail coach. Later, she had had a proposal from a Norwegian sailor and wondered for a while whether she might enjoy lying in arms so strong and foreign, so inured against the cold. But in the end, she’d decided against him. The carrot-headed boy had died with his face turned to the sky; the Norwegian would probably fall into the sea and drown. And it came to her then that she didn’t really want to live with a man – or at least not yet, not until she found someone whose gaze was steady and whose feet were planted firmly on the earth. She wanted to live for herself, to travel her own road. By the time she set sail for England, she’d reinvented herself as a widow, because widows survived far more cleverly in English society than spinsters – or so she’d been told.

  And now she was going to have her name in gold script above the shop: Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. The future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake. With a dairyman on Carter Street, she placed a substantial twice-weekly order of Devon clotted cream.

  ONE AFTERNOON AT MRS MORRISSEY’S

  Perhaps because of its excellent location on Camden Street and because Mrs Morrissey’s builders had unearthed a pretty fireplace, with a serviceable chimney, from behind the coffin samples, where she was able to install a coal fire to warm her clientele on cold autumn afternoons, the Tea Rooms soon enough drew people to them in highly satisfactory numbers.

  Word also went around Bath that Clorinda Morrissey could make a Victoria Sponge as light as a goosedown pillow, that the tea was always Best Assam, with no added dross, and that the atmosphere of the place was such as to make people feel that this particular teashop was a place outside time, an oasis or a fragrant island, a place where nothing bad could ever come upon them while they were there.

  This was due not only to the brightly burning coals and to the excellent cakes, but to the personality of Clorinda Morrissey herself – to her quiet movement among her guests and to her sweet Irish voice, which was like a kind of soothing music permeating the air. She greeted all her clientele – whether duchess or daughter-of-trade, whether baronet or baritone in the local choral society – with a smile of exquisite courtesy and compassion, as though she had known these strangers through all the vicissitudes of their lives.

  More than this, she was pleased, as time went by, to stumble upon the realisation that some people soon began to choose Mrs Morrissey’s Tea Rooms as a favoured location for conversations of great intensity or confessions of the utmost importance. Watching from her service counter, from behind the bewitching array of jam tarts, crumpets, iced buns and fruit muffins, she could see them displace to one side the cake stand which she always set down in the middle of the table, in order to lean towards each other, so that their heads were almost touch
ing. She saw gloves removed and hands grasped. She heard sighs and laughter and sometimes glimpsed tears sliding down an alabaster cheek and falling into the Assam. These things gave her great gladness of heart. She was someone at last. She was Mrs Morrissey of Camden Street and humanity came gathering to her sheltering bosom.

  On this particular afternoon, the man arrived first.

  Mrs Morrissey knew him as Dr Valentine Ross, one of the scores of medical men who made a good living from the cavalcade of invalids who came to Bath to take the waters and who liked to be encouraged in this and other cures for their ailments by reassuringly expensive doctors.

  He was a strong-looking man in his thirties, of mid-height, with dark hair beginning to recede a little. Perhaps there was a suggestion of cruelty in his narrow blue eyes, but his manners towards Mrs Morrissey had always been impeccable. Often he’d come alone to the Tea Rooms, not to eat anything, but to sip tea and smoke a cheroot and seem to ponder some tangled or wayward question lurking beneath his conventional outward appearance. Sometimes, he’d engage Clorinda Morrissey in courteous conversation, asking her about the city of Dublin, its joys and woes, its prosperity and its poverty. He always listened carefully and once said to her that he was ‘ashamed’ to know so little of the world outside Bath.

  His younger brother, he told her, was an explorer in the field of Natural Science, currently working on the island of Borneo in the Malay Archipelago. This extraordinary adventurousness of his made Valentine Ross feel ‘parochial’, or so he admitted, but he added that there was nothing to be done about it. He was not the kind of man who yearned to see raging cataracts and rainforests where no light fell. He couldn’t completely understand, either – so he told Clorinda Morrissey – the white man’s desire to discover ‘lost tribes’ in parts of the world nobody had yet mapped, being inclined to think that these people might be happy in their ‘lostness’ and living lives of quiet content.