‘What are we looking for?’ says Inger.
‘Not sure. Invoices. Receipts. Letters. Personal documents. Anything.’
I wish I was better at coming up with ideas. It was Inger who pointed out that maybe all the paperwork hadn’t been kept at the white house, and maybe we should look at our immediate surroundings. To do something manual, to throw around paper rather than merely ideas, is a relief, even if we’re only finding thank you notes from past visitors, and ferry timetables stretching back to 1978.
‘What’s in that one?’ I ask Inger. We are sitting cross-legged, facing each other, on the floor of the back office. A stack of documents from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet sits between us. She’s holding a vinyl ring folder that looks a lot more exciting than the weather print-outs from the Meteorological Office that I’m examining.
‘Receipts from the mainland for fresh fruit,’ she says. ‘I have a new understanding of how many pears we all ate last year.’ She puts down the folder and stretches, raising her arms above her head as she yawns. I catch her yawn, and return it. I’m tired too, even though it’s still early in the afternoon. But I’m not despondent. Even if we don’t find something here, a clue to help me understand this place better, we’ll find it in the remains of the white house, I’m sure. The excavation has been completed; nothing was found, apart from a few intact barrels of water and some lucky declarations that escaped destruction. The white house is now being rebuilt. The basement has been filled in with concrete.
‘Look,’ says Inger. She holds up a few sheets of yellow paper, stapled in the top left corner. ‘It was underneath the receipts. It doesn’t have a red file, but it looks complete.’
It’s a declaration. I recognise that type of paper, and the letterhead. It should have been lost with the other hundreds, thousands, of declarations that Vanessa kept in the library. I can see the loops and lines of a neat, sure hand, setting out a life story in black.
‘What does it say?’
Inger purses her lips, then reads aloud, ‘“I’m not going to give her a second helping. She takes all of my time and energy as it is. Instead I’m going to keep this all to myself. It’s the story of how I came here, and why I stayed. My very own—”’ She stops reading. ‘It’s a proper declaration. It’s private.’
‘It’s Vanessa’s declaration.’
‘Yes, I think so. The handwriting…’ Inger looks up at me with her steady eyes. ‘Do you think we should destroy it?’
‘Destroy it?’
‘Declarations weren’t written to be read.’
That’s true. The authors never dreamed that their words would be read aloud in order to feed a monster, but that is what happened. And I know that, no matter what the reason behind my mother’s decision to record her past, she wouldn’t want me to read it. But I don’t really care whether she’d hate it or not.
‘Inger, would it bother you if I asked to keep that?’
‘Are you going to read it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? What do you think you’ll learn?’
‘I don’t know.’ I feel tempted to lie, to say I’m hoping to gain some sort of empathetic and wonderful insight into my mother’s choices, but I suspect Inger will see through such bullshit. So instead I tell her, ‘I already know why she abandoned me, and that she thought it was the right choice. I suppose I just want to own something that was personal to her. To feel I have a right to it. I already have her money and the island. Now I want a little bit of her voice.’
Inger considers this, and nods. ‘That makes sense,’ she says. She folds the paper once and gives it to me. ‘Do you want to read it now? Shall I give you some time?’
‘No, thanks. I’ll do it tonight.’
‘All right. Tonight.’
So we spend the rest of the day sorting through a history of bungalow allocations and staff holiday requests and coastguard reports, and I feel like I’m on the edge of a precipice, teetering, toeing the chalky, ragged drop into a cold, blue sea below.
The day is done; the night is here. How strange time has become to me. It is disjointed, unconnected to the slow sweeps of the hands of the clock. I could almost believe that I am not aging at all.
The dim light of Inger’s anglepoise is casting a circle over the sofa, where I lie in my sleeping bag, with my mother’s declaration in my hands.
Outside, all is calm, still and cloudless, the iciest of nights. In the morning all will be frozen, but in here the stove gives out glad heat and the spicy, warming smell of burning wood. Inger has gone to bed, and the moment has come.
I lift the declaration and read:
I’m not going to give her a second helping. She takes all of my time and energy as it is. Instead I’m going to keep this all to myself. It’s the story of how I came here, and why I stayed. My very own declaration. Not like the first one, when I came to the island for my week away from the world, and wrote about how my husband and my daughter failed to appreciate me. That was how I felt back then, no matter whether it was true or not. Doesn’t everyone fail to appreciate everyone, after all? But I had my predictable moans to get off my chest, and that’s what I did.
Predictability – that’s a terrible way to live. In all the years that have passed since my arrival, I never woke up knowing exactly what was going to happen.
Perhaps I always craved an element of danger, but I don’t remember being an adventurous child. I liked dolls and cuddly bears, and I kept all my toys throughout my teenage years, right into marriage. I only got rid of them once Marianne came along. I wanted everything that belonged to her to be brand new.
When I applied for Skein Island I never thought I’d get a place, so when the acceptance came through, I decided to go immediately, before my nerve deserted me. It was going to be my personal adventure, probably the only one I ever experienced. I was ready to have my week of self-discovery, and then return home forever more. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for something more than that. In retrospect, what was I expecting to happen? On an island in the Bristol Channel with no men, I harboured some overblown romantic fantasies. I think one involved a dashing pirate kidnapping me on the beach. Too much Daphne du Maurier is to blame for that. Of course, as soon as I saw the beach I realised how ridiculous that idea had been. Not only were there no pirates off the coast of North Devon, but the beach was a small patch of grey shingle strewn with smelly seaweed – hardly the golden stretch I had envisaged.
I remember checking into my bungalow. The décor was utilitarian, the other women uninteresting. The first two days of my holiday were spent taking part in macramé and yoga workshops. It didn’t occur to me to not attend the meditation sessions or the knitting circles, even though I hated them and still do now. I didn’t want to draw attention to my differences by refusing. The truth is, I’ve always imagined myself to be less of a woman for not liking such things, and I’ve never wanted anyone else to find out.
This is a strange thing to admit. I’ve been denying it to myself for years, but I’m just not fond of the company of women. Ironic, I know. When I was younger I thought maybe I hadn’t met any of the right sort of women yet, and that one day I would find a whole pack of them, just like me. I hoped they would turn up on Skein Island. But now, after years of waiting, I’ve begun to accept that all women are the same. I include myself. Didn’t I simply go along with the herd? Didn’t I make the choices that were easiest for me? When did I ever stand up and say, actually I don’t give a flying fuck about yoga or manicures? I only ever thought it. There must be millions of us thinking it. But we never act on it, do we? We never take over the magazines or shoot the fashion designers. We’re all too goddamn good for an actual war.