The Sea House: A Novel (14 page)

She’d never, never been this late before.

I played with my Sindy dolls, and later in the day watched telly. I made myself tomato sauce sandwiches in the kitchen. Then I spent a long time kneeling up on the sofa watching from the window to see her coming back across the scuffed grass spaces between the flats. When it started to get dark again, I went out onto the long brick balcony and knocked on Doris’s door.

Doris was very old and always wore a hairnet and the same apron dress with washed-out flowers. She looked at me with a startled, pouchy face while I told her about Mum. She said I could come in. Her house always smelled of soapsuds. I sat on the edge of a chair by a china dog that stared at me without blinking and I waited for Mum to come and get me.

Two ladies in coats came and asked me a lot of questions, wrote things down. They said I could stay with Doris, till Mum came back.

I stayed with Doris for a week. I went back to school each day, and even though Doris gave me some pennies to get fruit salad chews from Molly’s sweetshop on the way home, I didn’t go past the sweetshop. I took the long way round, past the road that goes down to the canals, walking slowly by the bus stop where Mum would have waited.

After a couple of days I couldn’t resist going down the road to the canal, and I started walking along the canal bank, staring at the grey, opaque surface and the bits of plank or old bike coming up out of the water, like they were going to help me understand something. The weeds scratched at my knees over the tops of my socks.

On the last day I went to the canals, I had a bag of sweets with me. As I walked down between the blank wall of Sankey’s factory and the wooden paling of a coal yard, eating penny chews, I saw two vans parked down by the canal at an angle, their backs to the water. There were lots of people down there, policemen – one with an Alsatian on a lead that kept barking – people in blue suits and a man who looked like those plastic divers you could put in the bath and blow down a tube to make them float. He was sitting on the edge of the bank. He pushed off and sank under the water.

No one noticed me. I expected someone to shout at me to go away, but I was able to walk right round the back of the van and watch what was happening. Someone yelled at the man with the dog, and he put the dog in the front of the van. The dog was in the seat right above where I was standing. He turned his head and pawed at the window and whined.

There were other divers. You could only see them when they came up like the bobbing heads of seals, the water was so murky – a thick grey-green with a rainbow skim of petrol at the edges of everything. They were bringing something up from the water, quite big, because it took all three of them. Someone on the bank had a sort of pulley. In the end the thing came out of the water quickly, and for a moment it hung in the air. It had a head and arms, and the water was pouring off the arms in the sunlight, a white shape dripping with wings of watery light, like an angel. And then I saw the white mac, the long white legs, the black hair tangled with weeds and a muddy blue scarf.

I think I screamed for a long time. I remember them running round the van to see what was going on, and I remember them talking to me in a shouty voice. They kept asking my name, and I told them. They kept shouting it at me, like I was deaf, ‘Ruth, Ruth, listen to us. Ruth, Ruth. Tell us where you live. Can we ring your mother? Ruth, it’s all right.’

They took me in the back of the van. I caught a glimpse of them carrying a black shape into the other van. The lady policeman pulled my head against her side so I couldn’t see any more. They sat with me in the back, and a policeman gave me his jacket because I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering. They gave me tea from a flask, spooned in three little wings of sugar from a bag. When I was drinking it, the woman said, ‘There, that’s better now, isn’t it? You’ve had a nasty shock seeing something nasty like that. Where do you live? Can we phone your mum to come and get you? Where’s your mum?’

I couldn’t say anything. My throat wouldn’t work.

The policeman gave me a little shake on one shoulder.

‘Come on, love,’ he said.

‘She’s in the van,’ I told them.

I told them, because I wanted them to explain it. I wanted them to make it all right, because they were policemen.

‘What do you mean? That van out there?’ said the policeman who gave me the jacket.

I nodded.

I saw them look at each other. They were pulling faces, like they’d just seen something really bad, mouthing words. Then the lady with her arm round my shoulders said, ‘You’ve had a fright, love. It’s made you think bad things. That’s not your mum. That’s just some poor woman. Let’s take you home.’

CHAPTER 14

Moira

Miss Katriona Marstone came for her lesson each week in the parlour, and every Sunday she turned out eagerly for the services and listened with showy interest to my Alexander’s sermons (for this is how I think of him now, my Alexander) but she did not see what I had already seen, I who had loved Alexander from the day he took me in from the moors and saved my life – though no one else in the world cared about that. For I had seen through his smooth and boyish face, and though it made my heart grow small with fear, I had seen the narrow old man waiting under his smooth skin.

Well might a girl stand next to Alexander and long to press the fine firmness of that forearm, and well might she long to stroke the shiny smoothness of his black hair, or even note how his eyes did follow the movement of a body and for a moment feel some encouragement. In the end it would do a body no good. For the Reverend, so scrubbed clean and unsullied, his love was only for his Saviour. And though as a result he did love the whole of mankind, he would never allow himself to love just one soft sweetheart – not while that old and watchful Alexander was in charge of all his doings.

After the Sunday service, most of the congregation had melted away but the Reverend was still in church, packing away the green linen hymn books. I saw with dismay how Miss Katriona was still there too, pretending to help, but moving about to very little effect, lifting the odd hymn book into a small stack. So I did also stay and take the books from her and stack them properly along the shelf.

And still the besom wasn’t leaving, but trying to get him to get into her pony and trap, saying he must come back to the castle across the bay for a small lunch and then stay for dinner. I smiled when I heard her plans, because I knew Alexander would not go. Charming as that Miss was, Alex was not easy pickings.

So when my Alexander got into her little trap with his hat on his knees and rode away with his back showing – and only the briefest word of how I could let the dinner I was roasting for him get cold and he would eat it another time – I stood with my mouth open, watching them disappear along the track, unable to understand how she had wove her spell round him so quick and got him to do her bidding with a mere smile and a small hand on his forearm. Truly that besom has her powers.

I was a long way beyond feeling any rage. I was as cold as if I were miles out in the sea, and drowning from a loss of hope. I did not know if I could carry on with the dreariness of living.

I had never for a moment thought that the Reverend would return my love. I am not without understanding of how the world is, and how I stand in his eyes, but yet I never thought I would lose him.

Now I saw that I was mistook in that. And to lose him to a Marstone, to the ones who have already stripped me of every soul I ever loved.

*   *   *

Only a couple of days later, I was out in the manse garden hanging the sheets to dry when I was disappointed to see Miss Marstone’s pony and trap once more driving along the road between the machair and the slopes of the bens that rise up behind the manse. She looked very small, making her little way towards us along the wide grass sweeps of Scarista, and I thought, she is but a girl, even younger than me, and yet how she does plague me.

I had already been up to the burn and set the tub to boil on a fire next to it so that I could wash the blankets while the weather was fair, and I was sticky with the toil, but I left that and hurried back to the house to be ready to open the door to her – and keep an eye on what mischief she was thinking to make. I pulled my hair straight as it would go with the comb that I keeps in the kitchen, for now I pass the hall mirror often during the day and this makes me want not to go around with my hair looking like a tinker’s. Then I straightened my skirt, which will always twist round to the left as I work, folded up my apron, dirty as it was from carrying in the peats, and stood behind the front door of the manse ready to open it to her and be there to serve the tea.

It wasn’t her usual day for her lesson, which as everyone for twenty miles knows is of a Thursday, just as everybody knows that I do sit and sew as they do the said lesson, since otherwise they would be the scandal of the island – and it is me that has told them this must be done. I listen in to all they say, and see how she is clever in some of her ways, and yet the Reverend cannot see it. I watch them and see how, though His Reverence is the oldest and the wisest in the room, in some matters he is remarkable for how foolish he do think.

And great progress the Miss is making too with her lessons, since I opens the door to her that morning and she is greeting me in Gaelic with, ‘Good morning, my dear Moira and how are your fleas?’

I do not respond in kind, though I am sore tempted, but reply my health is very good, thank you. But she is not listening of course, she is looking in the mirror to see if she is still beautiful, and my eyes, yes she still is. I am about to bundle her hat and her fancy cloak into the cupboard and I see, for just a moment, she is not smiling at that pretty face in the glass. She is looking in the mirror as if she has seen something very bad inside it and she stares for a while then turns away quickly. She puts on the little smile again, and she puts away the face I just glimpsed.

And before I can get her things hung up, she gives a quick knock and goes straight in to the Reverend and I can just see through the half-open door how she does kiss him on top of the head and laugh, and he puts down his pen from the sermon he was writing, and well might he do so since I am seeing how every holy thought he was just writing on his paper has clean dropped out of his head. He looks up at the Miss and blinks at her in a daze, and I want to run in there and say…

Well, I don’t know what I should say, but instead I get together the things for her tea fast as can be done, willing the water for the tea to boil quicker, and carry it through with the cups all rattling. Then when they are served, I sit down in the corner with my sewing like I am a shadowy thing.

But she turns then, and smiles right at me, says to the Reverend, ‘Now you mustn’t be cross with me, because I know it is not my lesson, and I am disturbing your work, but I had a wonderful idea and I wanted to come and tell you straight away. And you must not look worried, Alexander, because I have not come to see you. I have come to see Moira, to ask her a very special favour.’

This made me look up because I was not expecting her to say any such thing, any more than I was expecting the concern for my fleas, but I was listening.

‘You see, I know you are teaching me Gaelic with great pains, Alexander, and you are a very good teacher for such a dim-headed little pupil, but like me you are firstly an English speaker, and it is Moira here who has the greatest facility with the language. And since I am in a hurry to understand this place, and to speak the language like a native, I have come to ask if Moira will let me come and visit her to chat with just her. I can visit her little cottage, and we can have tea by the fire, and she can tell me all her wonderful stories about fairies and she can teach me some songs.’

Well ‘she’, whoever she might be, was thinking of a lot of problems with this arrangement, not least Maggie Kintail’s chickens, which like to live under the bench near the fire and roam around the house laying their eggs where it pleases them; not to mention the ram that was a pet of Maggie’s when it was a lamb and still tries to get back in through the door when you are not looking. I have been putting the milk in the bowl to settle to cream and found the ram in the kitchen, ready to butt me from behind. It were only that Maggie came back to catch him that he did not butt me and spill the milk all over the floor.

I could feel my cheeks hot and red at the thought of Her Ladyship coming in to see our poor ways and she turning her nose up, no doubt, and I felt shamed already, but I had to look pleased because it is her father who holds the Reverend in his gift, just as his factor do tell the cottars to move as he pleases, even to clearing them off to Cape Breton and Manitoba. So I smiled and said it would be an honour and a privilege.

But she was prattling on, hardly waiting for my permission, all stirred up and feverish. She did seem to be very strange, I thought. It seemed her gestures were mannered as if she was acting on a stage. Then she was getting up to go, and kissing me and telling me how I was her true friend. I must wait and watch while she flirts her goodbyes to the Reverend and see how he is left with his hair ruffled and on end, looking at her sideways as she lingers her fingers along his hand and flaps her eyelids at him.

It was a relief to finally shut the door on her, and have the house go quiet and calm. The Reverend was left even more pink than usual after a visit from that little witch. I heard him shuffling his papers and fussing about like he must put more order into his affairs of a sudden. Leaning on the old door I had shut on her, I saw her through the watery glass, just a little puppet thing again, riding away in her little trap since she has been forbidden of late by His Lordship to go about the county in all weathers, sitting on the horse itself. She looked small and stiff and jolted about, rattling across the track back up to the mountains and their castle at Avenbuidhe.

I stood at the window with its wavy glass and pondered as she travelled along the machair road, the wide sea bluer than the blue sky, and thought about her very strange way of behaving; how capricious the gentry are and how we must agree to whatever they please to do, whether it be to shoot their guns across the shielings where the girls are milking the cows, or turn us from our homes for their big English sheep, or come in their tweed suits and write down our stories and songs so that they may go off to London and amaze their friends with their booming voices.