Before the Past Vanishes

Sour alienation and a scramble for identity have been abiding themes for Mackay, always happy to be an outsider, too observant for her own good. The central character Rowena is a masterpiece of damaged goods — paranoid chips on the shoulder, jealously guarded turf battles and misread signals. We all have a Heligoland haven we dream of. But for Rowena Snow, it is the one thing from her barely remembered childhood that ever held out any possibility of happiness and in moments of embarrassment and despair, she returns to that interrupted idyll. Life has been most unfair. Sudden orphanhood, rude uprooting, unwilling years at Chestnuts boarding school, her more recent disgrace as wrongly accused caregiver jangle her middle age. The fact that she is Scottish-Asian seems to deepen her lack of community. Gus Crabb, stealer of bric-a-brac but nonetheless a good egg, brings this sacked nurse in as a new housekeeper at the Nautilus. Rowena scrubs, scrounges, frets at not being considered good enough.

The quaintly fashioned Nautilus — once a haven for intellectuals, artists and activists — is now a shell of its former self. There is nothing as absurd as bohemians past their prime. Jewish Celeste Zylberstein and grouchy poet Francis Campion resent their passage from fame to anonymity. Rowena enters this cerebral charmed circle, but her shabby-genteel world is quite removed from theirs. Where Campion writes memoirs and owns Louis McNiece’s hat, Rowena is merely required to dust both memoir and hat. Rowena has intellectual pretensions and zero opportunity. She marvels at being “elected by people who not only knew how to pronounce names like Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe, but had probably met their owners. Long ago, she had memorised the names of Les Six, perhaps in anticipation of some future test, and she saw that her study might pay off soon.” There is something seriocomic about self-improvement in circumstances so markedly unpromising. Yet everybody shares equally the bemusement at the present being so very different from the vanished past. In the surprise party for the ever-suspicious Rowena and the promise of a journey to India at the end, there is tremulous hope for all Nautilus inmates and well-wishers. Even delinquent teenagers redeem themselves.

Heligoland is a homage to elderly eccentrics and their desperate need to belong.