The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

  My brother owned a yacht and two beautiful small villas, adjoining each other, on the island of Euboea, their brilliantly creepered and vine-trellised terraces a hundred feet or so above the sea. Throughout the whole of the summer he was in the habit of chartering the yacht with the larger of the two villas; only very occasionally, when, as now, there was a last-minute cancellation of a charter, did he have the use of the yacht for himself and his friends.

  In a sense of format, set in a different climate, and a different, harder beauty, my brother’s home at Katounia was curiously like my own at Camusfeàrna; the little seaside village five miles to the north; the port, the nearest shopping centre, seventeen miles to the south.

  We drove from Athens to the port, Chalkis, where a bridge spans the narrow fast-flowing channel between the mainland and Euboea, and where the yacht was berthed to meet us. It was dark when we reached Chalkis, and my brother decided to spend the night there and sail in the morning. Again I had had no walking to do, and I had not given another thought to the curious behaviour of my foot at Athens airport.

  We ate at a restaurant table on the waterfront, the narrow strip of water between us and the mainland bright with multicoloured slivers of reflected light that wriggled like eels on the running tide. We drank retsina and ate hot roasted crabs. Fortunately I had finished eating before I saw just how they were cooked; even then I was forced to move my chair so that I did not have to watch it any longer. A few yards from our table a girl, a gentle-faced little creature of ten or eleven years old, stood before a charcoal grill, and beside her was a big tray full of octopus arms and crabs. From time to time she would take a pair of tongs and place something new upon the grill in front of her. The grid on which she put them was surrounded on three sides by upright sheets of glass like a vivarium; I wondered idly why this should be so, and then I suddenly saw that the legs of the crab nearest to me on the grid were waving slowly, that the only completely motionless things on its whole surface were the octopus arms. After some minutes I realized that the crabs were being roasted alive, very, very slowly, but those that I was watching were in the later stages of cooking; lying there on their backs with the glowing coals below them, this protest of lingering life was all that was left to them. After a very long time all movement stopped, the girl inspected them and signalled to a waiter. He brought a tray, and to it with her tongs she transferred the hot crabs and octopus arms until the grid was bare of bodies. It was only then that I understood the significance of the glass sides. With her tongs she selected a fresh crab and placed it carefully, back downwards, upon the grid. For a few seconds it remained without movement; then, as the heat from the glowing coals penetrated through the carapace the crab suddenly twisted right side up and literally shot into the air. It struck the glass side, fell back on to the grid and began to scuttle around it at fantastic speed. One of its legs went through the grid, touched the embers and was burnt off. The girl caught the crab again with her tongs, and patiently replaced it on its back. She had to repeat this three times before only the legs waved helplessly and she could turn her attention to the next victim. This one actually scaled the glass with the force of its first leap and fell to the pavement where it scuttled about on scorched legs. Someone at the next table noticed it and laughed. Then I moved my chair so that I couldn’t see the little girl any more, and there was only the delicious smell of hot crab coming from behind me.

  When we sailed north in the morning the cares, the worries, the pressures and emotional strains of my life at home seemed to slip from me like a sloughed snakeskin. Here in the fresh breeze streaming south, ruffling the sea to the hue of dark lapis lazuli and striking miniature rainbows from the white upthrust of our bow wave, with the sun not yet too hot for a bare skin nor the deck planks too scorching for bare feet, I felt free and exhilarated as I had used to feel always at Camusfeàrna. Perhaps, I thought, the secret of keeping one’s vision was always to be a nomad, never to remain long enough in one place to allow time for the deadly clouding of sight, the creeping cataract, that is composed of preoccupation with past mistakes and their present results. I felt the salt spray on my face and I was happy.

  On our starboard bow the great pale mountain cliff of Candeli towered three thousand feet out of the sea, a pair of eagles wheeling in steep arcs on the hard blue sky above. Just beyond its foot was a little flat calm bay where the water was emerald green backed by wild flowering pink oleanders.

  In the afternoon we took the small inflatable rubber speedboat called Grishkin and roared down the coast to the little calm bay I’d seen at the foot of Mount Candeli. We beached her there on the roasting hot pebble beach below the giant cliff, and I set off to cruise with a snorkel. I cannot swim without it, so that this is not only my favourite water sport but my only one; rarely indulged, because to me it is essentially a leisurely pastime, and the sea at Camusfeàrna never becomes warm enough for a swimmer to be leisurely.

  I swam slowly, entranced as always by the shoals of bright, multicoloured fish, the waving weeds, the host of marine life that passed unobscured below the clear glass of the mask. I swam out to the edge of the shelf, the sea’s floor so far no more than ten feet below my face, and looked down into the great dim murk where the shelf ended and the depth plunged down an unguessable distance. There were huge shadows moving down there, too indistinct for identification, but I thought they were tunny. I turned for the shore; there is no more reason for a snorkel to jam in a hundred fathoms than in one, but even strong swimmers tell me that they experience the same illogical fear when looking down suddenly into the shadowed mysteries of the sea’s abyss.

  When I came back into shallower water I saw the brilliant mother-of-pearl gleam of an angel shell lying open and empty between the black spines of two sea urchins on a rock. I was trying to dive for it when the same thing happened to my left foot as had happened at the airport, but this time it took place much more quickly. I was in real pain in less than a minute. I remained long enough to get the angel shell, then I headed for the shore as quickly as I could. I landed on a smooth rock and took off the snorkel. I sat down and examined the foot carefully; I looked at it and prodded it, but at first I was none the wiser. It looked the same as its fellow but for the scab of a long graze across the arch of the instep. There had been enough dried blood, I remembered, to make it necessary to soak the sock from the foot when I had got back to Camusfeàrna that day after the Land Rover accident. There had been a bluish bruise, too, but it had soon disappeared. This was the first time that I connected what was happening with the recollection of my foot jammed between the pedals of the car; something sinister and unseen must be taking place below the marks of that graze. The rock was so hot that I had to move my foot; and simultaneously I realized that the pain had stopped.

  I had enough medical knowledge to grasp the implications. I had not emerged from that ridiculous accident unscathed; the blood supply to the foot was impaired. Heat caused a temporary alleviation, but the foot itself was in the very first stages of dying. Without supply of blood it could not live.

  Even if I had acted then and there the situation was already beyond my control; I was probably right in wanting, for the duration of my brief holiday, to forget that something terrible and far-reaching had happened to me. I walked back to the speedboat, carrying my angel shell, and telling myself that this was a temporary obstruction that would clear itself. I could not bring myself to believe in any real sense that I might become a partial cripple; I had been too long used to strenuous physical exertion and the full use of my muscles and limbs, as a necessary part of my existence, to accept the idea of any change other than as a purely intellectual concept.

  The next day we began a cruise of the Aegean islands, Skiaros, Skiathos, and Skopelos with its steep, chalk-white town and echoing marble sea-caves where the mud nests of a thousand swifts clung to the remote vaulted ceilings. By now the limitations of my physical activity had become exact and predictable – a hundred yards’ slow walking bef
ore I had to rest and allow the pain to wear off, five minutes in the sea before I had to land and warm the foot on a hot stone until the cramp slackened.

  When I got back from Greece to England I went at once to see a doctor about my foot. His opinion was somewhat vague, but generally encouraging. The temperature of the foot was considerably lower than that of the other, indicating a reduced circulation, but he did not think a natural cure impossible. He gave me pills to take, which were arterial dilators, and asked me to watch progress carefully. In the case of deterioration he advised me to see a specialist, and not to be content with only one opinion.

  I returned to Camusfeàrna. Once there it was obvious that without the heat of a Greek summer sun upon a bare instep to aid circulation I was now virtually crippled, whether or not the crushed vessels might eventually re-channelize themselves naturally. I was scarcely able to walk at all, and when I sat writing at my desk I had to keep my left foot upon a hot water bottle to avoid the cramp setting in even without use of the muscles. All feeling of freedom had gone from Camusfeàrna now, and it was a wildly unsuitable place for someone in my condition to live, more than a mile from the road. I felt as much of a prisoner as the otters that were now confined to zoo conditions. I had always worked hard there, writing for long hours every day; now there was nothing for me to do when I had finished work, nothing to do but go on sitting at that desk and worry about the infinite problems that seemed to form the future of Camusfeàrna. The staff problem was acute. Jimmy Watt, who had then been with me for five years, had originally looked after one otter and a very small uncomplicated household; now he had under his charge the running and maintenance of two jeeps; a Land Rover; the forty-foot speedboat Polar Star; half a dozen dinghies and outboard engines; and our recent purchases, the two lighthouse cottages of Isle Ornsay and Kyleakin, besides two cottages I had bought near to the village. In varying degrees all four of these houses were in need of more or less extensive renovation or alteration, and if I was to go on writing the responsibility for every detail had to remain with him. A gale would blow up, and someone would have to go out to Polar Star at her ill-sheltered moorings north of the islands, nearly a mile away, to pump her bilges and secure her tarpaulins. Every so often someone had to take her seventeen miles south for refuelling. Someone had to order household stores and collect them and the mail from the road at the top of the hill. Assistants came and went, leaving behind them diverse trails of disaster, but it was plainly impossible to run this microscopic but infinitely complex empire without Jimmy and two assistants. An accountant’s analysis had shown that, excluding wages – but taking into consideration all other expenses, such as light, heat, transport fuel, vehicle repairs, human and animal food, laundry, insurances and telephone –each human being at Camusfeàrna was costing nearly twenty pounds a week. Wages included, the total sum was well above a hundred pounds a week. Even at that comparatively early date the cottage of Camusfeàrna itself was costing five thousand pounds a year, and the only way in which to meet this charge was for me to forget all the joy that I had once found in its beauty and its freedom and to remain immured between the walls of my little bedroom-study and write day long. Casual visitors, often strangers who wanted to see the otters, could not be expected to understand this situation, and my work was constantly behind schedule.

  The only freedom now lay in Polar Star, and on the days of holiday when all conditions were right and we would take her to visit the lighthouses or just cruise the long winding sea lochs that, like Norwegian fjords, fray the mainland coast between high hills, I experienced a feeling of liberation and exhilaration as complete as I had on my brother’s boat in Greece. The glory of summer days on Polar Star is with me still; days when the sea was so utterly smooth that the groups of guillemots and razorbills would leave spreading circular ripples as they dived before our bows, and our foaming white wake lay like a furrow far astern of us; the deep, pulsing throb of engines almost inaudible in the forward wheelhouse; the pull and suck of the whirlpools in the tide race of the narrows at Kylerhea tugging at the rudders; the screaming, hovering, plunging hordes of gulls feeding upon fry forced up to the surface by great shoals of mackerel beneath them, and the fluttering pull of a darrow line on which danced a dozen or more fish as bright as fine blue and green enamel; storms when the ship would buck and slew in the waves like a bronco, and a terrifying white wall of water would pile up under her leeward bows so that she lay over to sixty degrees or so and I would be fighting not only with the wheel but with cold fear; all these, but perhaps most of all the quiet evenings when we returned her to her moorings at sunset and we would sit for long in the open after-cockpit. The sun going down behind the Cuillin of Skye, scarlet streamers of cloud reflected as a great path of blood across the Sound and staining the small wavelets that slapped lightly at the boat’s side with a fluid changing mosaic of pale fire and jade. We would sit there until the hills had become black silhouettes against an apple-green afterglow, the only sounds the water lapping against the hull and crying of the seabirds, the colonies of gulls and of Arctic terns on the islands beside us. Those moments of peace and stillness at Polar Star’s moorings had come to represent to me what the waterfall once had, the waterfall now disfigured by pendant lines of black alkathene piping that carried the water supply to the house and to the otters’ enclosures. Enclosures; the whole of Camusfeàrna by now seemed to me an enclosure, the sea the only freedom.

  The house and its surroundings were as much a prison to me as to the otters confined behind fences.

  As the weeks went by it was impossible to disguise from myself that the condition of my foot was deteriorating rapidly. But a sort of inertia, born perhaps of a subconscious fear of the future, blocked me from taking any positive action. By October, when the deep sunburn of Greece had worn away and the true colour of the foot was revealed, it was a cold bluish white, and a cratered ulcer had begun to form near the base of the big toe. One day the doctor called to visit another member of the household, and inspected my foot. She said, ‘Now you’ve got to do something; you can’t postpone it any longer, unless you’re prepared to lose the foot. When I say that I mean that there is now a possibility of future gangrene and total amputation at the ankle. This is no place for you now.’ It was indeed no place for me, physically or mentally; it seemed a dead-end, without even the peace and quiet associated with a cul-de-sac.

  So in late November I went back to London and saw specialists. The first said that it might be possible to replace the crushed vessels with artificial ones; the second said that the vessels were too small to replace satisfactorily, and in all likelihood would anyway be cast off by the system in the course of a year or two. There was no alternative, he said, to lumbar sympathectomy (the removal of a nerve through an incision in the abdomen in order to permit a full flow of the blood supply to the lower limbs).

  I said, ‘How long have I got before this operation becomes urgent?’

  ‘That is a very difficult question to answer. Prognosis is not always clairvoyant, you know. In my opinion not very long – two, three months, possibly four if you were lucky, judging by the present rate of deterioration. Have you ever seen gangrene?’

  ‘Yes.’ I had indeed; I remembered with sick horror Terry’s fingers after they had been chewed off by Edal; the stench, the amputation, the realization that parts of a young human body had gone for ever, lying there blackened in an enamel basin, and that nothing in the world could ever restore them. In some way they had been to me more terrible to look at than a corpse.

  ‘Then you realize that, after the initial onset, the progress of the condition may be very rapid. An emergency operation is always undesirable. I take it that you are now reconciled to the necessity of surgical interference?’

  ‘Yes.’ Reconciled was not quite the appropriate word, but this was no time to discuss finer shades of meaning. I did not feel then that I could ever be reconciled to any of these things that had so changed my life, even though I might recognize thei
r menacing aura.

  ‘I understand that you live in Scotland. Would you prefer to have the operation there or in London?’

  The problems of Camusfeàrna babbled at me as I sat there in the calm, clinical atmosphere of the Harley Street consulting room with the muted rumble of traffic outside; I couldn’t separate myself from them by five hundred miles. I said, ‘Scotland.’

  3

  The Third Fall

  I was admitted to hospital on Boxing Day 1963.1 was afraid, but I suppose I had by then come near to the consultant’s adjective ‘reconciled’. In fact the institution did not call itself a hospital; it was a vast nursing home, built, it seemed, with utter disregard for cost. I was slightly disconcerted to find a nun behind the reception desk, in a spacious hall where a notice requested visitors not to wear stiletto heels. I wondered just what a visitor so shod was expected to do after reading this. The pallid, wax-work nun took down the usual particulars with a chilling impersonality, and without once raising her eyes from the form that she was filling in. ‘Next of kin? Religion?’ Because my own beliefs are eclectic and personal, I suddenly found that I could not answer this question. I hesitated for so long that at last she did look up, and her expression was icy, her thin lips pressed together. ‘Religion?’ she repeated in her small expressionless voice. I knew there was a word for what I wanted to say, but I just could not find it. She laid down her pen and waited, while I felt like a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition. I said, rather desperately, ‘I’m afraid I don’t subscribe to any orthodox religion.’ ‘Non-denominational,’ she murmured, managing to convey an infinity of distaste in the words, and I watched her inscribe them in a handwriting as anonymous as her face and voice. Then she rang a push-button bell, and passed me on to another nun who was as human and welcoming as a well-greased cog wheel.