The Penal Colony (20 page)

How curious that that new man, Routledge,
should have retrieved the crossbow. Martinson had killed a border
guard to get his hands on it.

Whenever Franks’s thoughts turned to
Martinson he felt a sense of transcendent mystery, of
inevitability. A Buddhist, someone who believed in rebirth, would
have said that the two of them had known each other in a previous
incarnation, that unfinished business had remained to be settled.
Their lives were linked: they had orbited one another, slowly
drawing closer. The first time he had met Martinson, Franks had
instantly recognized, not the outer man, but the personality
within. And he was sure it had been the same with Martinson, that
feeling of familiarity, of reacquaintance after an irrelevant gap
of space and time.

At Dartmoor Martinson and Franks had shared a
cell. A sort of friendship had developed, superficially initiated
and perpetuated by Martinson, who had seemed to fear and admire
Franks in equal parts. Ostensibly, for the sake of peace, Franks
had gone along with it; and yet he had also detected something
dangerous and fascinating in Martinson he had found irresistible:
independence, a tangential way of thinking. At its core lay
whatever it was that had to be resolved. Franks was in his debt.
Perhaps, a thousand years before – and Franks had an uncanny
feeling that they had lived by the rugged western sea then too, had
belonged to the same fierce tribe – Franks had let him down,
deserted or betrayed him, sold him to the enemy, taken his
woman.

They had been two months at Dartmoor. Towards
the end Franks, realizing too late that Martinson was insane, had
tried to shake himself free. Then had come the boat, and the first
appalling months on Sert. And then the wars, the division of the
island, the present precarious state.

The blow on the head and its consequences
marked, Franks hoped, the resolution of his debt. It was price
enough to pay. Apart from Sibley, only Appleton knew how much
effort it cost him to keep his suffering hidden.

The Village was his shelter from Martinson,
possibly for ever. That depended on Godwin and on Randal Thaine.
And on himself. He had wasted enough time here this morning. He
replaced his spectacles, stood up, and started back along the path
to the bungalow.

As he walked he thought again of Ireland, of
the wind and tides, and of the broad, peaceful estuary of
Courtmacsherry, lined on the south by pastel-painted cottages and
on the north by a quiet road and cornfields. He knew exactly where
the ketch could be hidden and later dismantled and burned; and at
Timoleague, at the head of the estuary, in a Georgian house, there
would be Siobhan and money and food and, eventually, safe conduct
to Pittsburgh. For the others, for Appleton and Godwin and Thaine
and eight more, there would be a forged passport and two thousand
pounds apiece.

The Village had been the only way for Franks
to surround himself with the people capable of bringing his scheme
to fruition and to enable them to work on it unimpeded. In Thaine,
Godwin, and most of all in Appleton, he had found intact the
English genius for improvisation and compromise; had found intact
the blend of arrogance and imagination that had once painted most
of the world’s map pink. His own imagination, of a different and
Celtic sort, more lateral and inspired than theirs, had provided
the motive power to make the whole thing work. He had long ago
forgiven them for being British: they could not very well help
that.

He had grown to love these men. But sometimes
they needed a spot of gentle manipulation. In the past few weeks he
had begun to feel that Godwin was being over-cautious about his
side of the work. This Franks could no longer afford. Sooner or
later the outsiders would bury their differences and launch a
concerted attack.

“That new man,” Franks had said to Godwin,
earlier this morning. “We have our doubts about him. But he’s good
with figures and has a bit of science in his background. I’d rather
you had your computer, but do you want to make use of him? He might
speed things up.”

Godwin had looked uneasy. “What sort of
doubts do you mean?”

“Thinks a lot of himself. Thinks he can go it
alone.”

“He’s trustworthy enough,” Appleton had said.
“I’ll vouch for that.”

“What was he before?”

“A quantity surveyor.”

Then Franks had said, “If you’re not happy
about it, Godwin, we’ll go on as we are.”

“It’s just that he’d have to do a hell of a
lot to produce anything useful.”

“Mr Routledge will work hard,” Franks had
said, winning the point, as he had known he would. “We’ll see to
that. You can meet him later today.”

At the bungalow Talbot stood up long before
Franks reached the veranda. They exchanged a few quiet words before
Franks, clapping him lightly on the shoulder, left the sunshine
behind and went inside to his desk.

In summer, routine work in the fields usually
stopped at about eleven, continuing again in the late afternoon,
leaving the middle part of the day for other work or simply for
leisure. King gave Routledge lunch sitting in the sunshine outside
his house, accompanied by Ojukwo, a large, phlegmatic and very
black man of Nigerian parentage, King’s next-door neighbour and one
of the Community’s carpenters. Like Daniels, King, and a number of
others he had encountered, Routledge found that Ojukwo appeared to
be impressed by his acquisition of the crossbow. As he ate,
Routledge tried to plan the best way to capitalize on his
reputation.

Lunch consisted of sandwiches of cold mutton
– or goat’s flesh: he did not ask which – between slices of brown
bread, coarse in texture but with a fresh, not unpleasant flavour.
The bread was made at the Village bakery, and the Village dairy
provided the butter. To drink there was water or goat’s milk.
Routledge opted for water.

When they had finished eating, his guided
tour began. Ojukwo decided to come along. They went first to the
nearby woodyard, where a prodigious quantity of driftwood had been
amassed. Most of it consisted of small oddments, variously warped,
cracked, splintered, bleached grey by sun and sea, or bearing faded
stencilling in Roman or Cyrillic characters. Few large or useful
pieces remained: and none of them bore any metal or plastic
fittings, which were always stripped, catalogued, and stored
elsewhere. This scrap wood, King explained, was used to supply
charcoal for the forge, and as a free source of any small pieces
that anyone might need.

Ojukwo said that driftwood was not suitable
for serious structural use. Under polythene shelters, arranged in
correctly sticked piles and left to season, the yard also held a
supply of planks derived from the island’s scanty stock of trees.
The yard was deserted for lunch, its workshop empty.

Opposite the workshop a sawbench stood
astride a heap of pale dust. Power was supplied by the horses
which, working a windlass, could raise a huge boulder four metres
into the air. As the boulder came down it turned an ingenious set
of gears and hence the viciously jagged blade, providing enough
force to cut a metre or more into a tree trunk.

The sawbench had been built by a man named
Randal Thaine, who had utilized cogs and sprockets from machinery
in the lighthouse. Thaine was also master of the metalwork shop,
where King sometimes worked. This was situated next to the
woodyard, looking out over the scrub to the western cliffs. The
forge was not in use today. Routledge noted with surprise the
professional-looking range of blacksmith’s tools, many made on the
island from recycled driftwood-fittings. There were two anvils, one
the engine block of a tractor abandoned in the evacuation, the
other a rounded boulder. Neither, according to King, was really
satisfactory, but so far the Prison Service had failed to respond
to the Father’s requests for a real one.

Once on Sert, King said, there was no getting
off. Nonetheless the Community had been interpreted on the mainland
as an attempt at rehabilitation, if not repentance, and the
unusually liberal governor of Dartmoor Prison, under whose
authority the penal colonies of Sert and Lundy lay, regarded the
project with a kindly and paternal eye. Had it been up to him,
Franks’s original petition and subsequent requests would have been
even more benevolently treated, but several tiers of regulations
intervened. One of these, the Home Office rules dealing with
Category Z, was anything but benevolent.

Supplies from the mainland were strictly
limited. There were allowances of such provisions as paraffin,
matches, and medicines, but these were by no means generous.
Special requests for seed, tools, and livestock were sometimes
granted, more often not. For nearly everything else the prisoners
had to depend on their own ingenuity, or on their personal
requisitions, and these took weeks, months, to come through and
even then were often lacking or inaccurately made up.

All this King explained as they visited the
recreation hut, a sort of common-room fitted with a bar, dartboard,
and a number of makeshift armchairs. Here Routledge was introduced
to several more men. One of them, Blackshaw, turned out to be the
self-appointed chaplain. Middle-aged, bald and bespectacled, with a
curiously braying voice, he wasted no time in inviting Routledge to
visit the chapel, which was located on its own some little way from
the Village.

“You’re welcome any time, Mr Routledge. Come
to evensong, why don’t you?”

“Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.”

Once they were outside, King said, “Are you a
religious man, Mr Routledge?”

“Not in Mr Blackshaw’s sense.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ojukwo said.

From the recreation hut they went in turn to
the dairy, the bakery, and the animal sheds. Leaving the Village by
the western track, they came to an exposed place on the cliffs
where a wooden tower, reinforced with steel guy wires, looked out
over the sea. At the top of the tower, about three metres up, set
one above the other, were two longitudinal scoops cut from a pair
of two-hundred-litre oildrums. Even in the light early-afternoon
breeze the drums were revolving quite quickly, turning a vertical
driveshaft connected to a generator. From this a cable led to a
large storage battery set on a cart. The windmill, like the
sawbench, had been made by Randal Thaine. Technically, King said,
it was called a Savonious Rotor. Another, smaller, rotor was
mounted on the roof of the metalwork shop back at the Village and
was used to drive directly a combination grinder, lathe, and
drill.

Routledge asked whether it was Thaine who had
made the crossbow.

“Yes. He’s done quite a few now. We use them
for border security.”

After showing Routledge the interior of the
hut where spares and batteries for the windmill were stored, King
and Ojukwo led him along the western cliffs and so back to the
fields.

The soil was extremely poor. In the early
days of the Village, large areas of scrub had been cleared by
machete and by concentrated grazing with goats and pigs. Once
cleared, the ground had been marked out with dry stone walling or
with willow hurdles, along which thousands of hawthorn and
blackthorn saplings had been planted to make hedges. The fields so
formed were mainly pastures consisting predominantly of the coarse
clifftop grasses, food for sheep and a few cows as well as the
goats. With each year, though, more of the pasture was being
improved and started on a cycle of rotation which would in time
provide the Community with all the cereals and root crops it would
ever need.

Oil-seed rape and kale were also being grown
as organic material to be ploughed back into the soil. The cleared
vegetation of the scrub, King explained, had not been burned, but
shredded and allowed to rot down. Quantities of guano were
collected in winter from the seabird cliffs and used as fertilizer;
every scrap of organic matter the Village produced, from potato
peelings to the sawdust in the woodyard, was kept and composted in
scientifically designed and tended heaps sited in the centre of the
cultivated area. Even the bags from the latrines were brought here
to be emptied.

“Speakin’ of shitbags,” Ojukwo said, “let’s
go wait for our good friends from the Service.”

King acceded: Routledge had seen enough to
get the general idea. The tour was over.

“Our good friends from the Service?”
Routledge said.

“The only ones we ever see,” Ojukwo said.
“The boys in helmets. The helicopter. It’s Tuesday today.”

* * *

The drop zone was marked out with a broad
circle of boulders on the turf at a place called the Warrens, on
the eastern side of the peninsula. This was the least cultivated
part of the headland, separated from the fields around the Village
by a waste of heather and bracken. The Warrens consisted of a
depression rather like the one above Old Town, but much larger and
shallower, shelving down to the cliffs and extending, to the
north-east, beyond the border.

A number of villagers had already gathered on
the landward slope. Some were shirtless; some wore shorts. All had
been working earlier in the fields or the workshops and would soon
be returning there.

This was the best vantage point, two hundred
metres from the edge of the zone. If anyone went closer than that,
Ojukwo said, the helicopter would not touch down.

They joined the waiting men. Routledge
acknowledged those he had already met and was introduced to a dozen
more. He was again congratulated on surviving his period outside,
and was again pressed for an account of Martinson and the crossbow.
It was just as King had said last night: he had become something of
a celebrity. But he was careful to play the matter down, and by his
reticence indicated that he did not wish to discuss it further.
This seemed to have its calculated effect, and he felt his standing
with them rise accordingly. During the ensuing conversation no one
ventured to address him directly. King did most of the talking.
Many of the matters discussed meant little or nothing to Routledge:
gossip about names he did not know, the weather and the crops, the
Village darts league. A championship was in progress, and King had
staked a bottle of whisky on the favourite, Gunter, whose abilities
were being hotly debated by several of those present.