Free In Another Country by David Constantine Page A

people trying to settle and failing. There are the few families who rule the graveyard, that stock won’t leave and it will be many years before they die out or get diluted and lose their identity among the incomers who take root. A family from Wolverhampton, another from Bristol, another from Halifax are powerful and one of them may dominate in the end. But if they want to be buried they’ll have to go elsewhere, here they’ll have to make do with a tablet on the wall by the way in. So some do settle, they blow in and root tenaciously. But the chief impression you get is of instability. Whether it’s sex or panic, I can’t tell, but every year there’s some breakup, ­re­­arrangement and departure.
    I think they quite like the people who are passing through. The island economy, such as it is, depends on them. Of course, they’re a risk as well, any one of them might become the solvent of a marriage and perhaps of a small business too. There was a baker here till a few years ago, then a girl came to help in the café and he left with her for London when the season ended. I guess some wives and husbands watch very anxiously who will land when the season starts again; others will watch hopefully. And it is certain that several in houses on their own have watched year after year, have gone down to the quay when the launch came in and have idled there and were never looked at by a stranger who might have stayed. They watch long after the likely time has passed. One such, a very lonely man, against all the odds and beyond all rational hope was chosen, as you might say, by a visitor not half his age. She stayed three years, then left him and the islands without warning.
    I’ve got more than enough work now. In fact the manager offered me a room in the hotel but I like my shed too much. I’d pay Mary some rent but she won’t have it, so I’ve begun tidying her workshop. Well, more than tidying it. I’ll clear all the junk out, repair outside and in, see to the tools. She says that’s a job long wanted doing and who would do it but somebody blown in? She’s a Jackson, one of the old families, widowed, her two sons fish for crabs and lobsters, she has a couple of holiday-lets. The workshop was her father’s, that’s his boat there in the nettles. He was in his workshop or out in his boat most of the time. There was something wrong when he came back from the war. He more or less gave up talking, she said.
    The hotel manager, Brian, is on his own. His wife left him at the start of the summer holidays, went to the mainland. It’s not even that she fell in love. Suddenly she’d just had enough and she left him, taking the children. He dresses well and is altogether particular about his appearance and his environment. He’s a rather fussy employer, which I don’t mind. I see through his eyes, at heart he is terrified. He talks a lot to me and I don’t mind that either. I guess he’s ten years my junior. This is the first year he’s had to close and it worries him. Not that he owns the place. A very rich man does. You don’t have to stay here, I tell him. If it fails. No, of course not, he says. With my qualifications I can go where I like.
    He’s taken three other people on, all young. A boy from Melbourne on his way round the world, called Chris. A girl from Manchester, Elaine, who used to come here as a child and should be at university but couldn’t face it and is having another year off. And Sarah, from Nottingham, who has finished university and is wondering what to do. I could have had a warm room on a back corridor with this attractive trio. I don’t think they would have objected to me.
    The hotel is shut till the end of March but Brian opens the bar a couple of nights a week and the regulars arrive. I make an appearance when I feel up to it. If asked, I tell the makings of a tale about myself. Nobody probes. Either