I’ve only ever met one woman who took on the world, and that was Amelia Worthington.
I met her on my third night on the island, and was enthralled by her. We all were. By sheer luck I’d been given the seat next to her at dinner in the white house. She was elegant and loquacious, charming enough to accept my gushing speeches of adoration with good grace. At the end of the meal she offered to give me a personal tour of the house, and took me around the upper floor, where the artefacts were kept. It was an exhibition of pieces she had rescued from around the world: Egypt, Greece, Turkey. ‘Rescued’ was the term she chose to describe them. Others were not so keen on her euphemism. When I became her personal assistant, just two days later, the first task she allocated to me was the answering of letters from collectors and curators, often demanding that she release details of her hoard and return those that she had stolen. I responded politely. It was never going to happen, of course; she had so many powerful admirers, celebrities and politicians who kept her safe. It was a protected, cosseted life by then, but she had earned it. At least, that was what I thought back then. I saw her as a woman who stood alone, fighting the establishment, carving out a haven for all women. I didn’t find out the truth until six months later.
So I took the job under the illusion that I’d be doing some real good, I suppose. But it was more than that. A seduction took place. Amelia told me that she needed me, that nobody else could do the job, and I wanted so badly to believe her. Years later, towards the end, I asked her what she had seen in me that hadn’t been present in all the other women who stayed on Skein Island. She said, ‘Nothing, my dear. I picked you at random.’ That’s a difficult thing to accept. Like winning the lottery or surviving a concentration camp, it’s these things that happen out of the blue, without any logical explanation, that never make sense to us, that puzzle us to the end. The guilt of such luck is enormous. But Amelia always liked to tell stories, right until the very end, so I like to imagine that just wasn’t true. Maybe she said it just to shut me up, so she could get on with her nap. I wouldn’t put it past her. No, she must have seen something special in me. My tenacity, my ability to do the worst jobs, make the tough decisions. My gullibility.
That first time, when she took me down into the basement and introduced me to the statue, I didn’t dare to question her story. I never have. Of course, the business was up and running by then, and my role within it was laid out for me. I had to change the barrels once a day. That was my first duty. They had become too heavy for Amelia.
‘Her essence leeches into the water, dear,’ said Amelia, over consommé later that evening. At that point I had already moved into the white house and had become used to listening to her stories every day, so this seemed no different to me. She often talked of her travels, her lost loves, and her brushes with death in the same dreamy, half-remembered tone. ‘It makes the liquid from the spring potent with possibilities. We fill the barrels, then ship them out to a farm in Barnstaple. They prepare it for sale, with love and care…’ She made it sound like a rural smallholding, with rustic charm. Five years passed before she entrusted the accounts to me and I discovered the scale of the operation. Her personal fortune, inherited from her father, had dried up decades before, but the spring had made her a millionaire anew, keeping hundreds of people in jobs, allowing the island to run comfortably. Clubs, bars and pubs all over the country bought that liquid, paying a fortune for the smallest of bottles.
‘It brings happiness to all men,’ Amelia told me, in between mouthfuls of consommé. ‘They get a little taste of Moira, and she shows them what they could have been, in another era. Those dreams only last for a few minutes, but they will keep coming back for more.’
I asked her how much these drinking establishments charged for the pleasure, and she replied, ‘Oh, my, they don’t charge money for it,’ as if that would have cheapened the transaction. To this day, I still haven’t found out what happens. To be honest, I don’t think Amelia ever knew either. She wasn’t particularly interested in how the liquid was used. It was always the declarations that held her attention.
She kept reading them to the monster until her voice gave out and she could no longer make it down the basement steps. I think it had been the most pleasurable aspect of her old age, reading aloud the words of so many women, like eavesdropping on thousands of private conversations. I didn’t understand it. The monster had to be fed, but I always felt it was a betrayal of the visiting women. A necessary one, but still a betrayal.
‘I caught Moira with the stories of my life, and now I tell her the stories of other lives,’ Amelia would say to me. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’
I’ve never found the monster beautiful. She is a statue: cold, sharp, carved, no softness in her. Every time I look at her, her eyes seem different, but the expression remains serene. She wants to be free, I think. Maybe she’s had enough of the stories of women, and she wants to put them back in their place, as prizes or distractions in the kind of stories she used to create. But I get the feeling she’d like to do something personal to me, something awful.
I think she wants to kill me.
I think she had a better relationship with Amelia. Perhaps she admired her cunning, her skill in trapping. Amelia was an adventuress, with a thousand stories to share. I’m just an administrator with one sad tale to tell. More of a whine, really, about how I gave up everything for someone who doesn’t appreciate it.
In the minutes before she died, Amelia knew exactly what was happening to her. The pneumonia had grabbed her hard, squeezed her dry, punched her beyond breathless. It took her an age to wheeze out that she wanted to be taken downstairs one last time. I helped her. She was so small and frail by then that I thought it would be easy, but she leaned against me with all the weight of death in her. As we struggled down the stairs I remember thinking that I would never be able to get her back up again, not without help. I put her in the wicker chair next to the monster, and I left them alone. I left the door ajar, and didn’t go back up the stairs. I waited without much patience, even tried to listen in for a while, but I couldn’t hear a word.
When I came back in Amelia was dead, and Moira was motionless. Of course she was motionless. But if I had ever expected her to move, it was then. Just to look at me, to acknowledge the moment, the realisation that we were now stuck together for good.
Skein Island had become our mutual prison.
Of course, nothing melodramatic happened. An old lady had died of natural causes, that was all, and I dealt with the paperwork, because that was my role. I read one declaration to Moira every day, and changed the barrel, and dispatched it to the farm to be bottled. I kept everything going, just as it was.
Lately, I find myself accepting the fact that I won’t change anything now. It was never my job to be a bringer of change, I think. Maybe women are born into roles, too. But still, I did one revolutionary thing in my lifetime. I had a daughter of my own. I never realised it before, but it occurs to me now that she might reach a point in her own life when she begins to feel unappreciated, and to wonder why that is. I have her address. Such things are easy to find on the internet nowadays – electoral rolls and so on. I might write to her, give her a mystery to solve, a quest on which to embark. If her life is boring, she’ll grab that quest and let it bring her here.