Aftershocks E-Book

A.N. Wilson

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

"It's unlikely that a more intelligent, amusing and yet disturbing novel will appear this autumn."Scotsman On The Island, just as on many other islands, marriages are unhappy, people fall in love and the seasons pass. The town of Aberdeen is no different, until the earthquakes. These seismic ripples tear down houses, forge bonds, and shake the foundations of humanity and religion. And in the midst of it all, Nellie and Ingrid fall in love. In Aftershocks A. N. Wilson offers a portrait of nature, death and morality. Moved by the real losses of the Christchurch earthquake, this is an extraordinary novel about a community profoundly linked to the land it lives on. "Witty, erudite and artful." Spectator Country & Townhouse's the best books for Christmas, 2018

Leseprobe

Aftershocks

A. N. WILSON grew up in Staffordshire and was educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is a prolific and award-winning biographer and celebrated novelist. He lives in North London.

ALSO BY A. N. WILSON

Fiction

The Sweets of Pimlico

Unguarded Hours

Kindly Light

The Healing Art

Who Was Oswald Fish?

Wise Virgin

Scandal: Or, Priscilla’s Kindness

Gentlemen in England

Love Unknown

Stray

Incline Our Hearts

A Bottle in the Smoke

Daughters of Albion

Hearing Voices

A Watch in the Night

The Vicar of Sorrows

Dream Children

My Name Is Legion

A Jealous Ghost

Winnie and Wolf

The Potter’s Hand

Resolution

Non-Fiction

The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of

Sir Walter Scott

A Life of John Milton

Hilaire Belloc: A Biography

How Can We Know?

Tolstoy

Penfriends from Porlock: Essays And

Reviews, 1977–1986

C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

God’s Funeral

The Victorians

Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her

London: A Short History

After the Victorians

Betjeman: A Life

Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II

Dante in Love

The Elizabethans

Hitler: A Short Biography

Victoria: A Life

The Book of the People: How to

Read the Bible

The Queen

Charles Darwin: Victorian

Mythmaker

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2018

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Please see p.277 for permissions details.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 603 4

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 604 1

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 606 5

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

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Homage to E.R.M.

A NOTE

A NEW ZEALAND FRIEND READ THIS NOVEL AND ASKED – WHY ‘not set it in New Zealand? Why call your imaginary country “The Island”?’

The answer is that this is not a novel about New Zealand. It is about a group of people caught up in an earthquake, two of whom fall in love. It is set in an imaginary place, and it is not intended to be a roman à clef about Christchurch, which suffered a devastating earthquake in 2011.

I visited Christchurch in May 2017 for three days, and nothing had prepared me for the experience of seeing a city which had been completely laid waste by a quake. It was during my short time there that the seed of this novel was planted in my mind. My imagined city, Aberdeen, is, like Christchurch, a Victorian colonial city which is, likewise, all but wrecked. But I do not know Christchurch, and I did not want to write a novel about its real inhabitants. The mayor, the Bishop and the property developers in my story are, fairly obviously, all invented. So is the Green MP. So are all the characters in the story, except for the blind busker, whom I have named Penny Whistle, and who, throughout my three days in Christchurch, could be heard singing eighteenth-century English songs in a robust baritone, never repeating himself, among the ruins. I hope he will forgive me for putting him in a story. Although the English characters inhabit actual named places (Winchester, and some named Midland towns), these too are fictitious. There is a funeral in Winchester Cathedral. That was because I wanted my heroine Nellie to pause beside the grave of Jane Austen, not because I wanted to depict the actual clergy of Winchester Cathedral.

The invented Island in this book finds itself in the position of several real postcolonial, mixed-race, modern countries. In this respect, it has characteristics in common with New Zealand, with Fiji, with Australia, and with some African countries. To compare great things with small, it bears such a relation to former dominions and colonies as Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo bears to several countries in South America. I have spent less than three weeks in New Zealand and could not possibly hope to write a book about it, even if that had been my intention.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS ALWAYS THE TWO OF THEM, DIGBY AND ELEANOR. THE inseparables. Then came the Earthquake, and everything changed.

I don’t want to swank, but I was the only one in Aberdeen who saw this. An early sign of love, I suppose. True love, the full works, orchestra playing Puccini, blood coursing through your temples, inner certainty that this wasn’t some fly-by-night thing, but Destiny in the Person of the Beloved calling us to Newness of Life . . . But this is jumping ahead a bit, people! Sorry about that. Let’s go back to the Dyce, where I was wandering around in a bit of a daze that lunchtime, having just broken up with my tutor, Barnaby Farrell.

An art gallery’s a good place to go and think, specially if, like the dear old Dyce, it doesn’t really have any good pictures. Course, now the paintings in the Dyce have all been destroyed, I miss them, the Alma-Tadema of Aeneas at the court of Queen Dido; the Holman Hunt of ‘Caedmon tells St Hilda how he received the gift of song’ – in which the cowherd bard had those strange flesh tones which Hunt’s figures always have, as if they had been made up for American TV with loads of orange slap. No one would ever have sat in front of that picture and been lost in rapture, as you would if you saw a Vermeer for the first time. They are the picture-equivalents of background music, those middle-rank Victorian efforts, and so you can just wander round, have a look at them, smile a bit; or have your own thoughts; or spy on the other gallery-goers, who, during lunch hour on a weekday in our city, Aberdeen, tended to be a mixed bunch – some of them like the sad people wandering round parks in Larkin’s ‘Toads’ poem, and some of them there for reasons which a gossipy person, like me, would like to winkle out.

But I’d primarily gone there to think. To ask myself – what did you imagine you were DOING, sleeping with the man who is meant to be teaching you about tragedy? I mean, if I’d been nineteen, you’d have understood it, but I was twenty-seven. I’d been round the park, had a number of not especially satisfying relationships in the recent past, and I did not need to prove anything, to myself, or to him, by sleeping with Barnaby Farrell. Nothing against Barnaby. He’s very good-looking, in a classic hunk sort of way – thick curly dark hair, quite muscular, fine-boned face – and a lot of the women in the class fancied him. Well, I did – obviously, but why not just leave it at that? Now it was all going to be just a bit embarrassing, attending the class he ran with Digby. (She did the Greek tragedy stuff, he did Shakespeare and Hardy, it was a fantastic class – I’ll tell you more about it in a later chapter.)

He’d been really nice, said he wanted us to continue, said he wanted to see how it would go, but I could see how it would go a mile off – we’d sleep together about twenty more times; then one of us would start thinking they were in love, and the other would be going off the boil; then he’d say he wanted me to move in with him and look after his kid, and, thanks, Barnaby, that wasn’t my idea of a life. I’d taken a year off from an acting career which was going really well. But I was finding that when I was faced with a real challenge – like when I was Hedda Gabler at the Redgrave in Carmichael, which has been the high point of my career to date – I just did not know enough. Mum said, actors don’t need to know, they need to feel. I don’t agree. I know what she means, but – well, let’s pitch it really high, why be modest – Mrs Siddons or Sarah Bernhardt or Ellen Terry or Sybil Thorndike really knew Shakespeare and the Canon in and out. True, an actor’s perspective is different from an academic’s, but it is a form of intelligence. I’d rather hear Gielgud or Branagh talking about Shakespeare than read some middle-grade university lecturer on the subject. Barnaby and Digby, though, who gave our seminar jointly, were well above the middle-grade. Their seminar really fizzed. And I’d reached a stage of my career where I needed to think more – about the drama, about what I wanted to do in my theatre life – and I was in the fortunate position of being able to come back to Aberdeen, live at home with my mum, and go out to Banks University a few times a week for seminars and lectures.

I’d said quite firmly, when Barnaby asked why not just let’s see how it goes – no, we should stop NOW. Of course, I’d said, ‘before we get too fond of one another’. And at least he had not embarrassed me by making any declarations of love or anything like that. But I felt rather foolish all the same and, like I say, I was wondering what on earth a grown woman like me thought she was DOING behaving like that.

I think the answer was that, before I found True Love, I wouldn’t ask myself – when the question arose of going to bed with someone – why I should. Instead, I asked why I shouldn’t, and quite often I did not see the reason even if it was staring me in the face.

Anyhow, the Barnaby thing was over now, and there I was in the Dyce. I’d had the embarrassing conversation with Barnaby the previous day, and we’d been all very ‘civilized’ about it, and kissed one another on the cheek and given a little hug after breakfast (I’d been staying over at his place) and then I’d slipped out of the flat before Stig, his kid, woke up.

It was nice, always, that day or two after you’d broken up with a lover. Even if you’d been in love (which Barnaby and I certainly weren’t) there was always also this feeling of being free, and wondering what you’d seen in him. (Very unlike NOW, when the thought of splitting up with the one I love would be totally unthinkable, and I’d quite honestly rather die than suffer such a thing. Luckily we both feel the same, and I am sure I have found True Love Forever and Ever Amen.) But this is to leap ahead. That’s what this story is about. How an earthquake helped me find True Love. My lover, my East and West, said I should call this book The Earth Moved for Me – How About You? But I’m settling for Aftershocks.

Anyhow. There’s me in the Dyce. And another good thing about wandering around an indoor public place like that is noticing all the other people and speculating on what they are up to. Of course, you get the odd pest, wondering if you are on for it, but as I have told you, I was twenty-seven, a big girl, capable of looking after herself. By big, I do not mean heavy (in spite of someone later in this narrative describing my face as ‘fleshy’!), but I mean grown-up. And quite tall. I don’t know if that is a disadvantage in my profession. Most theatrical people are smaller than average – Judi Dench, Laurence Olivier, Garrick . . .

It was while I was ambling about idly that I heard her voice.

Maybe before we hear her together, I should explain that when I heard that voice, I never knew if it was Digby’s or the Dean’s. Different as they were, they both sounded exactly the same.

I saw more of Digby, ’cause of my course. Already, by this stage, she was coming to fascinate me. I loved her mind. Her grasp. Her sure-footedness. The way she really loved that Greek stuff, knew it backwards, and had not merely mastered it in an academic way, but lived with it. The Dean was a frostier, much less passionate person, or so it seemed to me when I sometimes accompanied Mum to the Cathedral. As I stood there in the Dyce, though, a second or two of listening assured me that it was the Dean’s voice I could hear. The Dean’s name was Bartlett, Eleanor Bartlett.

—I know we’re not supposed to like this sort of thing, but gosh, I DO. Always HAVE ever since I was nine.

—How did you see this picture when you were nine? You were in England, surely.

—I grew up in England, but Mum was a Huia. She taught at St Hilda’s here. Science. Came to England one summer to stay with relations. Met Dad.

It would be hard to find a voice which was less ‘Huia’ than this. It was real old-fashioned English. It put me in mind of the old St Trinian’s films. Joyce Grenfell. ‘Gossage, Call me sausage.’ You hardly ever hear a voice like this on the Island, and I’d guess it is dying out in England. Yet she was only forty. Course, when I heard her dad’s voice, all was explained.

The pair were certainly closely absorbed in one another. They did not see me. I wasn’t hiding, and I wasn’t in disguise, but I was wearing shades. OK, I may as well admit this, as well as being a relief, breaking up always made me a bit red-eyed. I wasn’t in love, course I wasn’t, but I felt I’d made a fool of myself. Again. I was wondering why I’d got to twenty-seven without getting this love business straight, perhaps no one can get it straight, and . . . well, anyhow, that made me just a little weepy. I was wearing a white tee-shirt, jeans and white Converse with red piping.

Why would pairs be wandering round an art gallery at lunchtime on a weekday? Think about it, and there can only be a few answers. The lonely singletons have a whole variety of reasons, no doubt. Some were like me, still a bit stunned from breaking up. Some might have been bereaved, fearful of going into a café or a pub in case they suddenly found themselves crying. Some were just depressed, drifting about in a daze. Some of them were genuine enthusiasts for second- – no, let’s be honest – third-rate painters such as Gilbert Rhys, or for the poorish pictures by good painters like G.F. Watts, which was all the Dyce could muster. If you’re European, reading this, you probably are used to going to galleries which have Titians and Rembrandts and Picassos by the score, but don’t mock Aberdeen. We did our best, and the Dyce was all we had.

But back to the pairs who went there at lunchtimes . . . I don’t mean the pairs of seniors, ’cause they have usually become ‘Friends’ of the Gallery, partly because they no longer have many real friends of their own, and partly in the hope that they can get free coffee in the Friends’ Room, or find reliably clean toilets.

Pairs which are real pairs, though, they wouldn’t come to a place like this at 1.40 p.m. on a weekday. They’d wait till they had finished work and meet up for drinks in some bar – there were plenty of good bars in central Aberdeen before the Quake – or go home together. And those who were in the middle of some irresistible adulterous passion – they wouldn’t be ambling about the Dyce, they’d be in a hotel or some flat somewhere. The point is, think about it. Only those whose relationship had not started, or was in a state of crisis, would have chosen to come here at this point of the week. So if you sit still and wait, in a place like the Dyce, you’ll see a lot of drama.

The two likeliest dramas are: ‘Are we falling in love?’ or ‘Shall we break up?’ And I did not think this pair were about to break up.

It was clear that he was nuts about her. I’ll describe her first, though my ways of describing her will change as this book goes on. I’m trying now to recollect exactly what I saw, WHO I saw, that day in the gallery. Tall, like me, taller than me, nearly six foot. Thick dark hair, cut quite short, so you could see the nape of her neck. The swan-like, truly beautiful neck. It was so beautiful that it took my breath away. Deep blue eyes which had not yet seen me. Eyes only for him, seemingly. A short nose. Creamy complexion. Apparently no make-up. That toothy smile, instantaneously beguiling.

He was a bit older. Or maybe being so worried, and so in love, made him look older. Long face with black hair which flopped over his forehead, cut short at back and sides. Raven black eyes. Hollow cheeks and the sort of blueish chin which he’d have had to shave at least twice a day if he wanted to keep it smooth.

By the way, in case you’re thinking all the people in this book are going to have dark hair – and there would be no reason why they shouldn’t – I have mousey-blondish, very thick hair, quite long, cut with a fringe over my brow; brown eyes, freckles. But back to Charlie.

His voice was Huia, but of the old world – a bit like Mum’s. We – my generation – speak with much stronger ‘accents’ – whereas they sound more English. He was wearing a smart suit and highly polished shoes, but you wouldn’t have been surprised to see his lean face sticking out of Victorian costume – an earnest Mr Rochester or Mr Dombey.

The woman was telling him more about the year her mum, a young teacher from Aberdeen, had been to England, stayed with some cousins near Birmingham, and been introduced to her dad who was a young clergyman in a place called Dudley. Mr Dombey’s facial expression suggested that this conjunction, of the woman’s parents, was the happiest thing which had occurred in the history of the world. I was asking myself how much he’d paid for his shoes. Hundreds of dollars.

—Mum had intended to stay in England for the summer, but she stayed for good! And about a year later I arrived on the scene!

—She bucked the trend. Normally, it is the Huia men who go abroad. Meet an American or an English woman, and stay; whereas Huia women have a homing instinct. So it has now been shown. Hence the Man Drought.

—The Man Drought?

Her question came out as a schoolgirl hoot.

—What on EARTH?

—Surely you knew? The proportion of women to men on the Island is something like sixty to forty. And the gap is widening, among the graduate classes, aged between twenty and fifty.

—What accounts for that, I wonder?

—Some people think it explains our having so many lesbians.

—I hadn’t noticed.

I liked that reply. I even more liked the suddenly peremptory tone in which she said it. It’s not a word you’ll be reading much in this book. I don’t know about you, I’m against labels, and find it really bizarre that people want to be categorized as black, white, LGBTQI, etc., rather than being individuals. She did not let him expand on his generalization, but plunged on with the autobiography.

—Anyhow, Mum brought me back three times when I was a child, and we always used to come to the Gallery. I know we aren’t supposed to believe in colonies any more – well, of course we don’t believe in them – but it does not stop me having a soft spot for this sort of thing. And it is such a lovely pair of pictures. Dear old Gilbert Rhys!

A whoop of schoolgirlish mirth. The Madcap of the Remove.

They were standing in front of Gilbert Rhys’s The Death of George Pattison.

Since it no longer exists – it was pulverized by the Quake, and was in any case lucky to still be hanging on the walls of a public gallery, given its content – I’ll describe it for you, in case you never saw it.

It was one of his most famous landscapes – famous on the Island, that is. It evokes with great love the wooded hillsides which still rise majestically above the western suburban shores of our city. Perhaps it was the sheer topographic accuracy of it which allowed its survival, in spite of the fact that no historians believe in the scene depicted. It was said that Obadiah Fairbrother – the lawyer whose family had grown so rich through wool – attended the death-bed of the greatest Tangata chieftain, Tamihana Huli, from whom he had leased vast tracts of fertile land. ‘George Pattison’ was the name adopted by this proud tribal chief after he had not merely formed land agreements with the Europeans, but had also been baptized as a member of the Church of England.

Fairbrother allowed it to be known that ‘George Pattison’, in his dying breath, had not simply given his land to the Europeans, but that he had done so in perpetuity. He is supposed to have gasped out, ‘Remain here after I am gone – ake, ake, ake – forever’. Even the most fervent admirers of the Victorians take this story with a pinch of salt.

After the signing of the Treaty in the 1840s, the growth of population following the gold rush, the development of Waikuku Harbour into an industrial port, it was almost inevitable that our colonial forebears should wish to build a city. They climbed over the ridge beyond the site of present-day Pakenham Street to the vast plain which sits behind the harbour. Here, for five hundred years and more, the Tangata had pursued their watery lives, paddling in the wetlands, fishing, and gathering reeds which they used for clothing and artefacts.

When they became aware that the Malahi intended to build their city on the wetlands, the local Tangata chieftain and his advisers had requested a meeting with Fairbrother and the other European worthies who were drawing up plans, arranging loans from European banks, and commissioning English architects to build streets, squares, warehouses, the Guildhall, the Garrick Theatre, the Liddell Library and the churches.

The wetlands, which had been part of the domains of the great ‘George Pattison’, were an entirely unsuitable place on which to build a pastiche European city. The chieftain’s sons told Fairbrother and his companions that it was crazy even to contemplate such a building-scheme. Fairbrother took this as an attempt by the younger Malahi to subvert the Treaty of HuruHuru. Historians now tend to the belief that, though there was an element of resentment in the Tangata, they were, for the most part, trying to give the newcomers some very necessary warnings. These had been wetlands time out of mind. They were not suitable for building edifices of brick and stone. It would not be possible to lay deep foundations in such a terrain. And besides, there was the possibility of earthquake.

When Fairbrother dismissed the younger Tangata’s attempts to warn him, they asked for another meeting, bringing with them one of their elder statesmen, the formidable Gee-wara-go. The old chieftain, a Merlin-like figure with an abundant white beard falling from his cheeks, had tried to warn the Europeans by reference to an old folktale which the Tangata people told themselves. The Earth Mother Siyuta was pregnant with her difficult son Mudu. He was still in her womb, but he was kicking and raging to be let out. Every now and again, when this obstreperous foetus kicked the sides of his mother’s womb, there was a tremor in the earth. There had been tremors in the wetlands. Many Tangata carried the memories of these moments, when their little skiffs suddenly found themselves overturned by disturbances beneath the waters, or when apparently dry meadowlands suddenly swelled with mud which came from beneath the surface of the earth.

Obadiah Fairbrother, emerging from a conversation with the chieftain on this subject, wrote home that it

almost beggared belief that the savages, in their avaricious desire to hold on to this land – rightfully ours since the Treaty – should attempt to invoke the authority of their heathen gods to dissuade us from bringing civilization to this territory. I thank the one true God that we shall be able, in spite of their superstitious attempts to frustrate our endeavour, to build a British city in which every mountain shall be laid low, and every valley shall indeed be exalted.

They had moved on to the painting beside it.

—I like this even more, she said. The arrival of the First Tangata Settlers.

—It reminds me of the watercolour illustrations to my Bible when I was a kid, said Mr Dombey.

—Harold Copping, was her reply.

—That’s right!

How weird is the madness of love! Her casual naming of a watercolourist was greeted with an enthusiasm which could not have been more excited if she had just offered something improper.

—One would once have called it exotic, she said, but probably even the word exotic is pejorative now.

—I’m not sure. I’m one eighth Tangata. I’ll allow you to call us exotic.

—You’re right, the men on the canoes are comparable to the figures of Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage as she found the infant Moses among the bullrushes.

—Painted about the time Lord Cromer was lording it over the real Egyptians.

In both cases, the ‘exotic’ ‘natives’ could have been ‘extras’ in a contemporary production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, perhaps directed by Harley Granville-Barker. Over their heads, skimpily clad handmaids waved ostrich feathers, and their male companions wore greaves, cuirasses, golden buckles, and kilts which resembled stage costumes. As the pair spoke, so eagerly, I sensed she did not really fancy him as much as he fancied her. On the other hand, she would not have agreed to come for this little tryst if she had not fancied him a bit or at the very least felt flattered by his worship. She was teasing him, perhaps teasing herself? I sensed her holding back, while he was evidently ready to gallop forward into whatever madness his passions led him.

—Eleanor, he said, I’ve SO enjoyed this!

—Well, it was fun . . .

—Can we . . . can we make it a regular . . . thing?

No, evidently, she did not want a ‘thing’, or not what he called a ‘thing’, for she looked away and smiled, flattered but troubled.

—I think we’ve both got jobs to go to, she said.

As they turned, they both saw me. Her creamy pale cheeks flushed scarlet, and then, with her perfect garden-party manners, she said, ‘Hel-LO!’ as though I was the person she had most wanted to see in the world. He merely nodded at me, as they walked out of the room together. They were not hand in hand, but I did wonder, had I not been there, whether they might have been. Well, well. The Dean of our Cathedral, Eleanor Bartlett, and Charlie Nicolson, one of the highest-powered lawyers in Aberdeen, both seemingly on the verge of a bit of midsummer madness. But presumably, even the clergy, and even senior lawyers, can fall in love.

Like I say, those two period piece paintings by Gilbert Rhys, and, indeed, the whole of the dear old Dyce, with its big stone staircase and its portraits of King George V and Queen Mary on the landing, and its air of not having changed all that much since that pair had stirred the loyal feelings of many a Huia sheep-farmer to send out their sons (at their own expense) to be slaughtered in France and Flanders; the Dyce with its Gibson statue of Venus in the cafeteria, where old ladies drank coffee next to giant rampaging cheese-plants, has all been blown off the face of the earth. And here we are in the ruins of Aberdeen. And, yes, ‘We’ve got to live,’ as the Lady said, ‘no matter how many skies have fallen.’ (Or rather, as the man said, before he told us that racy story about the Lady.) With us, it’s not just the skies that fall, it’s the land that rocks. Who knows what lies ahead?

We’re, like, post, here on the Island; very post, us; post just about everything, except post-truth. That’s not the Huia way, and it’s certainly not mine. This book is my journey into Truth – because it is a Journey into Love, which we – my Love and I – believe to be the same thing. But we are very definitely post-much else: post-Earthquake, that is. Postcolonial. Certainly. In many ways, until the Quake, we were carrying on like the post-war generations. But now all that’s behind us, and some of us, well, we’re posthumous some of us. Postcards, pretty tourist postcards sent from addresses that have been blown sky high, views of beauty spots that will never be spotted again, that are post-spots. Postal votes in an election for a local Parliament which is just a heap of bricks and concrete. Post-it notes stuck to dead computer screens in roofless office blocks. Posts in the shifting sands, post-hoc; postscripts in history; post-traumatic stressed. Postmen and postwomen with no mail to deliver, no doors to put it through if we had it in our postsack. Post men, too. Is that what we are, my Love, you and I? Not so much that annoying L word, which, like I say, I’m not planning on using in this book . . . but – well, Post Men?

We can’t climb out of our post-seismic, post-structuralist language games. Metaphor is our only home now our material homes have all been demolished by God. (Is He or She a metaphor, by the way?) We only speak scornfully of metaphors as ‘obvious’ because they are true. (My beloved’s dad apparently liked to say, ‘Only second rate minds despise the obvious.’)

Now – it really is true, we can’t trust the ground we tread on.

The tectonic plates which, in their violent convulsions, created our mountain ranges and our green tufty hills are on the move again. They really are on the move, shaking up our idyllic sheep farms; our quaintly retro, smugly happy, Victorian parks really moved. They changed us forever. No wonder we clunk from one metaphor to the next, post-structuralists all. The Kantian hope of being able to describe a thing-in-itself is put on hold. Religion itself can never be quite the same . . . Can it, Nellie? Are we all post-Christians now?

Digby would maybe once have snorted at such language, Digby the single-minded atheist. She preferred to think of herself as pre-Christian, a Euripidean sceptic, or a Stoic of the Senecan breed. But witness the journey of our Dean, Eleanor Bartlett.

It needed no earthquake, of course, to draw forth a stream of clichés from Rex Tone, our go-ahead mayor; their unstoppable lava-flow spouted when he first stood for membership of the Council – no, probably much earlier when he was a student politician at Carmichael University, reading Business Studies.

Rex’s emptier sayings got picked up and mocked by Cavan Cliffe, legendary radio voice and host of Island Breakfast for quarter of a century, but even she could not escape the metaphor-trap.

Skilled oarswoman she may be, but she found her little skiff adrift in the shallows, her oars clogged with reeds, as she tried to describe the Quake to her listeners, or as she interviewed so many of them afterwards, shellshocked, walking wounded, somnambulists, air-raid victims looking for their old lives in the rubble, mix and match your metaphors, they were the only instruments she had, to build pictures for us as we rummaged in the debris for fragments of our old certainties.

Even Cavan, who had built her career on cynicism about the half-truths and false hopes peddled by salespeople, politicians (same thing), charlatans, saw us all needing to find something we’d lost in the ruins. We needed to rebuild our Convention Centre, Rex Tone’s pride and joy, our sports stadium, our concert hall, our schools. We needed to find among the wrecked concrete slabs, the spaghetti of twisted cables, the gaping holes in the highways, the buckled tramlines that stood upright like inebriated lamp-posts in the poststreets, that old something which had led our ancestors to settle here in the first place. We needed their optimism, their sense of a future. You’d expect an earthquake to obliterate evidences of the past. What none of us predicted was the way it obliterated our capacity to imagine a future.

The Dean, Eleanor Bartlett, said that here we have no abiding city, and maybe that’s about all we can say. Our Island had once been home, and it no longer is. None of us feels at home here, not even the Tangata. Maybe none of us is MEANT to be here. Meant by Nature or the gods. Historically, the Island did not even have mammals on it, never mind human beings, until the thirteenth century. So of course we quite literally aren’t at home here.

After all, although they called it – seemingly from their first arrival, depicted by Gilbert Rhys – the Homeland, or Whenua, they are immigrants, just as we are, those Indonesian tribespeople who sailed here in cane, masted rafts or paddled in their gigantic canoes to these shores, at about the time, from another region of the planet, that Dante Alighieri was journeying through the infernal, purgatorial and paradisal realms. The early settlers – known now collectively as the Tangata, though they actually came from a variety of Indonesian tribes and families – were, as far as archaeology is able to shed light upon the matter, the first human beings to set foot upon our Island. The Tangata fought many tribal wars with one another before we – the Malahi – arrived. Dutchmen in the seventeenth century were the first Malahi to come, discovering our shores almost by chance, as they made their way to the Indies in pursuit of trade. A century later came the famous English sea captain and his naturalist companion. Later, of course, the waves of Scottish and English soon came to outnumber the Tangata – hugely. By the time they erected the bronze statue of the Imperial Mother in Argyle Square, at whose plinth Penny Whistle busks daily, there were ten Malahi to every one Tangata. There was much interbreeding, of course, so that today the proportions are blurred. The seven per cent Tangata realize that, of the ninety-three per cent Malahi, very many have Tangata great-grandparents. Over the years, there have been many disputes between us, the Malahi and the Tangata, about the rights and wrongs of land-ownership, and about the evils of colonialization. But all of us carry a guilty sense that the arrival of any human beings at all, in such a paradise as ours, was a kind of intrusion, a pollution.

No hominid feet, no primitive ancestor of the human form, ever trod our thickly wooded hillsides. No hairy, hunched figure, on its way to becoming a human being, ever tried to spear or cudgel the multifarious fish in our wetlands. There were no troglodytes in the caves at the foot of our great Southern Alps, whose snow-capped beauty came into being when, millions of years ago, tectonic shifts took place, equal in majesty to those which tower over Switzerland and Italy. Indeed, there were not even any mammals, until the Tangata brought them on their rafts. There were only fish, and birds and insects and reptiles. They buzzed and twittered and trilled about in the pure air of the forests with no marmoset or koala or dog or human eyes to appreciate or to threaten them.

It was the early Tangata who brought dogs to help them hunt. Intentionally or not, they also appear to have brought rats. The Royal Naval vessels of the eighteenth century certainly disgorged ships’ rats. Innocent of any of the modern sense of ecology, these bluff folk also gave to the Tangata pigs and sheep. By the close of the nineteenth century, our Island was famous for its sheep-farmers. Little by little the birdlife diminished. Within a few centuries of the human arrivals, there were about half the number of birds. The songs from the brake which had so delighted the visitors of the eighteenth century were stilled.

All of us, then, Tangata and Malahi, bear within us, like some felt folk memory of pollution, a sense that to arrive here was to spoil it. Science in our own day, with its keen sense of ecological balance, told us a Fall Myth which we already carried within our imaginations. The very emblem of our Island, the Huia – our nickname for one another – is an extinct bird, though it wasn’t extinct when it was chosen as a national emblem on the first Victorian coins minted in Carmichael. Visitors to our National Museum there will see fine examples of Huia feathers in the cloaks of the Tangata tribesmen. There were also similar examples in the museum here in Aberdeen, though they, among so much else, were destroyed in the Earthquake. When the Dean of our Cathedral was first brought to Aberdeen as a child by her parents, she remembered being shown the feather cloaks by her father, the canon. He pointed out to her that there were two fine specimens of just such Huia cloaks in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.