The Sea House: A Novel (11 page)

Mr MacKay passed round the smallest glass in the world and we each took a nip. Leaf offered the whisky to Angus John but he waved the glass away, staring out to sea and holding on to his skinny knees like a man avoiding evil and depressed about it.

‘Oh no, don’t be giving the bottle to him,’ Mrs MacDonald told her, leaning over to take it away. ‘Angus John has taken the
curam.
’

‘The
curam
?’

‘It’s when a man sees his ways of drink and sin are going nowhere, and gets religion,’ said Donald Allan, a nephew of Mrs MacDonald’s. ‘It’s one or the other here on the island, and I dare say when I get old and have done with my drinking, I might go that way.’

I thought of the bottles that came filled with milk each day. A lot of whisky bottles for someone that didn’t drink.

‘And how long is it till the baby is born now, Ruth?’ said Mrs MacKay.

‘Just under five months.’

‘That will come round soon. You’ll be wanting a name. Of course, the young people now they want modern names like Tracey and Craig. But in my day, the boys were all given their father’s name, the girls too sometimes. Not always a good thing. My aunt was a Murdina, after her father Murdo. Ah, but you’ve never been able to find any of your relatives here on the island?’

‘Nothing. Mum was a Macleod, but then so are half the people on the island.’

‘It’s not right,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Everyone should know who their people are.’ Then her face cleared. ‘What you should do, Ruth, is go and see Christine MacAulay down at Northton. She traces the family trees for Americans and Canadians. Now she’d be just the one to help.’

‘I’d probably be wasting her time. There’s not much to go on really.’

I helped Mrs MacKay wash the plates in the stream, and then everybody got back to work.

Leaf walked a little way off and climbed up onto some rocks. For some reason, she’d decided to wear a long flowery tea dress to cut peats, and a droopy jumper rolled up to the elbows that fell off her shoulder if she tried to dig. She sat cross-legged, facing out towards the sea, and held up her face to the sun. She laid her hands palms up, one on each knee. Leaf believed in meditating every day.

As she sat in the sun, her white-blond hair lifted with the breeze, twirling and then falling. I saw the wives looking sideways at her, bemused, as they worked on. Mrs MacDonald was in front of me, her woollen skirt taking the strain over her behind as she dug the peats.

Her hair was secured under a nylon scarf, firmly tied under her chin so that the wind had no chance to mess about with the perm she had every Tuesday in Tarbert.

Only Leaf, I thought, could be entirely oblivious to the fact that everyone else was shifting and breaking into a sweat, as the sun got further round the island.

I watched as the breeze played with Leaf’s hair. For some reason, I saw a picture of myself at thirteen, in a barber’s shop. I’d gone in and asked him to shave it all off. The hair fell like feathers from my scalp and when I saw myself in the mirror, it looked brutal, but I was glad.

‘You can have this spade now, Leaf,’ I yelled.

Leaf slowly lay back onto the turf, and put her elbow across her eyes. ‘Um hum, just a minute,’ she said sleepily and didn’t move.

Something snapped in the back of my head. I felt, at that moment, as though Leaf had stolen the life I should have had. I had the sensation of flying over the turf. I was aware that I was down low, right in her face, and her pale green eyes were wide open with surprise.

‘I don’t know why you think you can keep living in our house when you hardly lift a bloody finger!’ I was shouting. ‘How come you get to do all the fucking meditating, and we get to do all the fucking washing-up?’

She was frowning up at me in confusion, like some little kid who’s been told off. I saw Jamie running up the slope towards us.

‘Everything okay there?’

There was the sound of a spade slapping into the turf. A bird rose up into the sky, a lark, singing madly.

‘She freeloads off you, Jamie,’ I said, walking away.

‘But I don’t mind,’ he said with a half laugh. ‘If Leaf has stuff she needs to do.’ He started helping her up. The bird kept on winding its song higher and I walked back to the group standing around the peats, and politely not looking.

I could feel my cheeks roasting in the sun, my head bursting. Michael shot me a baleful look, a God-not-again look, but I blanked him.

The sea breeze was starting to cool the air, and the anger was going out like the tide now, as distant and ridiculous as tiny figures gesticulating on a shoreline.

*   *   *

By the end of the day, Michael was beaming: we were going to be able to take our share of the peat bricks home when they were dry. Months later, when winter came round and we started to burn the peat, it would have an unexpected smell, blue and woody, tinged with something like paraffin; and I would recognise it then as the smell of the islands, the particular odour that had been there all along.

As we drove home, exhausted and grubby, I watched Leaf staring out of her window; a pang of regret for how the afternoon had gone.

Sometimes I saw her, that girl that I might have been, if things had been different. She would have been nice, good with kids, sweet even; the image of her flickered before me like a TV screen where ghostly signals waver and compete. Hard to know what was real. Surely, all I had to do was focus on her to make her clearer.

I leaned over and put my hand on Leaf’s wrist.

‘I’m sorry about … you know.’

‘Hey, don’t worry,’ she said. But there was something behind her eyes. A shutter had come down.

I got out of the van that day, slamming the door hard, determined to change, to do better. In just a few months’ time I’d be holding a small child.

The thing was, I had a bit of a history of losing it – each time I was sure it was the last time. Things really were going to be different now, I told myself.

They had to be.

I still hadn’t understood; how there’s a certain smell to a dispossessed soul, acrid, bitter as smoke, the irrefutable odour of an angry refugee, banging on the doors of strangers, asking for money, for water, for food for the children, for recompense.

And I was so, so tired. I would have given anything to lie down and sleep for a few years, but as we went inside, I realised there was no relaxing in our home, not while the image of that infant’s remains lay at the edge of every thought like an unanswered question.

CHAPTER 11

Ruth

In spite of my determination to get hold of something like facts about what had happened in our house, I got no further. I was beginning to think that too much time had gone by; we’d simply never know who that child was, why she’d been hidden away.

A fine rain set in, making everything feel cold and shut in. Morning after morning, we woke to find the house stranded in a white mist that only cleared by noon.

‘I’m driving into Tarbert,’ Michael yelled up the stairs one morning. ‘Anyone else want to come?’ We’d been cooped up inside for days. Everyone was in the van and ready to go within minutes.

We drove out along the coast road. The grey cloud let through an obscured light, sad and thin, yet the sodden ground was bright with colours; cuts of liquorice peat; purple and orange heather stems; electric-green moss. The lochs were black and brimming, stippled with reed tips like the stubble on an old man’s chin.

We turned into Tarbert High Street, which is little more than a row of cottages looking out over the harbour. A group of bandit sheep shambled along in front of the van, taking their time and apparently heading for the post office. We parked in front of Parek’s haberdashery store, where gruesome truncated bodies modelled blouses and corsets in the window. A yellow acetate blind was pulled down against the unlikely event that strong sunlight might damage the goods.

Leaf and I headed for the MacDonalds’ grocery store. She hummed as we walked up the hill. We hadn’t really spoken much in the days since the peat cutting. She was pleasant enough, but it felt a bit rusty trying to open up a conversation.

‘Did you get a letter from your parents this morning?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled.

‘How are they?’

‘Just fine.’

I nodded and we turned into the grocer’s shop.

Norman and Kenneth MacDonald might have looked like civil servants with their neat jumpers and ties and their blameless and studious faces, but they had their own slaughter shed out back and were the stopping post between the sheep on the hills and the chops and joints spread out on the display counter. At the back of the shop stood a large aluminium contraption. I watched it feeding the pinkish beef mash into sausage casings. The fruit and veg were expensive. I bought apples and carrots – but not the bright yellow cabbages wilting on the bottom shelf, mutated into toxic balls of sulphur.

Standing in the queue to pay, I listened to the knots of Gaelic conversation between the crofters and their wives. When we first came to the island, it had been a shock to hear everyone speaking with the breathy twang that I had always thought of as peculiar to my mum. It made her feel so near. It gave me a constant feeling that she’d left the place I’d just arrived at, only moments before. I decided to learn Gaelic and bought a Gaelic grammar from the bookshop. It turned out learning Chinese would have been easier. ‘Oh, they all mean to learn Gaelic when they move here,’ the lady in the bookshop said, ‘but you need to grow up in a Gaelic house to speak it properly.’ I had four words of Gaelic from my childhood – two of them quite unrepeatable, according to Mrs MacKay.

In that first week, I’d been sure I was going to discover more about Mum now that we were living in the islands. Walking across the moors in blinding rain with Michael, we’d sheltered in an unlikely red telephone box stranded at a junction of small tracks. I’d looked up my surname in the phone book, excited to think it could be that easy to contact a distant relative. There were pages and pages of Macleods. It was evidently the Hebridean equivalent of Smith. Impossible to phone every number and quiz them.

Now, as I waited in the grocery store queue, I felt frustrated and disappointed again, to think how impossible it had proved to find any hint of Mum’s family.

And yet, somewhere in the islands there had to be people that I was related to – and no way now to find out anything about them. Mum had made sure of that when she slipped away into the silent water. There was the woman Mrs MacKay had mentioned, Christine, but I was pretty sure that would only be another dead end, another rebuttal: trying to find lost bits of your past does nothing but make old sores weep and sting.

I stopped at the haberdasher’s to pick out some knitting wool for the baby-jacket pattern I’d bought last time. As I went to pay, I saw a loose skein of soft green wool that was almost the colour of Leaf’s green-and-yellow-flecked eyes. In a moment of inspiration, I decided I’d knit her a gift – a scarf. I could do a scarf.

I paid for the wool then headed down to the hardware shop where Michael and Jamie had gone to buy bags of cement.

Macleod’s hardware store was a wonderful barn-like shed, open to the sea air in all weathers, the pine panelling painted in odds and ends of beige and blue. There was a huge handwritten board over the door listing ‘Wellies, Fish Hooks, Chicken Feed, Tweed Caps, Worm Bait, Outboard Motors, Nylon Rope, Tick Tweezers, Light Bulbs, Overalls’, and everything was stacked up on roof-high metal shelving, accessed by enormous wooden stepladders.

I found Michael and Jamie in a gully of boat equipment, discussing the merits of separation pumps as if we actually had a boat that might need one. I wandered off to the middle of the shed where there was a great Edwardian dresser piled with woollen socks, hot water bottles, parish newsletters and WD40 cans. I glanced at the notices taped to its mirrored back; there was one for a ceilidh at An t’Obbe in a few weeks’ time; another with the hours of the Tarbert museum.

‘I didn’t know there was a museum here,’ I said to Johnny, the shop owner.

‘It’s new. Up next to the fish and chip shop. I think it’s open if you want to go up and see awhile. Just knock on the door.’

I headed back up, keen to find out if there might be something about the Sea House.

Next to the smallest fish and chip shop in the world – the front room of a tiny terraced cottage where a fat fryer took up nearly all the space – was an equally small cottage. A notice covered in a plastic bag was pinned to the front door: ‘Tarbert Museum, all donations to be approved by Morag MacIver.’

I pushed the door and stepped down into a whitewashed room with a stone floor. There was a motley collection of articles along one wall and a trestle table on the other side, piled up with elderly photograph albums. It felt colder inside the room than out in the misty air. I recognised a few of the old farm implements: hoes and
cas-chrom
spades, a group of rough and ready butter churns and a large stone with a hollowed-out centre – an old hand quern for grinding corn. There was also a Tilley lamp, some Victorian crockery, and several black bibles in Gaelic.

On the wall was a photograph of Avenbuidhe Castle, a small turreted and castellated building tucked into a bay below the mountains. I wondered if there were any photos of the Marstones.

The jumble of photo albums didn’t look promising. I turned the pages. There were black and white photos of cottages in full sun with people milking or spinning wool outside the bothy door, and endless formal line-ups of people looking serious and stiffly wearing their plain, best clothes for communions or weddings. There were also some wonderful Victorian photos in a box, of fishermen with huge moustaches, and women in bonnets and black skirts cutting hay with scythes, but nothing that would help me.

Then, in the next picture, I saw our house. It was a very old photograph, printed on thick card and faded to a yellowed sepia, the faces and clothes of the people shining pale and silvery as moths. It showed a minister in a clerical collar, his staff assembled each side of him outside the front gate. I turned the picture over. Some indecipherable words were written on the back with the date: 1860. My heart skipped. I flipped it back over.