The Sea House: A Novel (6 page)

‘But I tell you this in confidence, dear Moira, knowing that I can entrust my reputation to you. It would not do one bit for the minister to be seen to believe in fairy stories, or to announce himself half fish, you do see, so it must be a secret between us, and indeed I can only conclude that my grandmother was mistaken, since if I am of the sea people, then at no point have they chosen to make themselves known to me, in spite of me living but moments from the shore. I can thus only conclude that I am not of their people, or such a distant and minor branch of the Harris Selkies that they do not deign to know me, any more than Lord Marstone at Avenbuidhe Castle has seen fit to come calling.’

Moira, who had been laughing at my silliness, now stopped and looked serious.

‘You do not want to let that man across your threshold, sir,’ she said. ‘No good will ever come of any word with the Marstone family.’ She cleared the porridge bowl onto her tray. Resting the tray on one hip, she pushed back her red hair. She is a pale girl at the best of times, and her freckles seem to float on milk, but now she was gone grey and ill looking.

‘It were best he never came here,’ she told me, and went off to her kitchen.

*   *   *

I had already said the devotional offices before breakfast in the quietness of the church where the high windows frame the blue-glass sea with colours as true as any stained glass window. I was somewhat distracted by the insistent rasp of a corncrake in the silverweed banks near the graveyard, but I returned from my prayers feeling in better communion with our Lord. I had learned that it was best to do one’s devotions before one of Moira’s breakfasts, since the burn of internal indigestion and the memory of fried eggs did little to aid divine contemplation.

I went in to my study to send off some letters; one to the library in Edinburgh, enquiring whether they might hold any similar letters or accounts from national or local newspapers, and to further request a possible reading list on the history of these islands and the legends of seal folk, or mermaids, as the phenomena seem to be variously known in the area. I also wrote to a bookshop that I use in Edinburgh, requesting that they send an early reader and alphabet primer, something that would not prove too offensive to the adult reader.

I then replied to Matthew, to thank him for his advice and his kindness in procuring
The Times
article, and to send hearty good wishes to his wife, whom I have met and found a solid and sensible girl although failing to see her through Matthew’s rosy-tinted spectacles. It was she who gave me the rather girlish pen on my desk, a white pearl, with a crystal bottle for the ink. ‘That you may remember to write to us,’ Fanny said.

Then I must attend to my parishioners, though they were but small in number.

It was a walk of an hour or so to Northton village. The island was almost treeless, except for the bushes and stunted pines existing in sheltered gullies and folds, and the entire stretch of land between Scarista and my destination lay spread out like a map. Across the fertile grasslands between the hill slopes and the sea dunes, only ruined walls remained of once numerous bothies, now looking like villages of thick-walled sheep fanks. One felt a lingering nostalgia in the midst of such beautiful emptiness, for the history of a people now gone from that place.

I had packed the small communion cup and plate, along with wafers and a phial of communion wine, to take down to a certain old lady in Northton village too feeble to come to the church. Fearing for her health, she was anxious to take of the Lord’s supper before she passed away – though I soon learned that she had been waiting for this event for a good many years.

While I was seated by her peat fire and forcing myself to take a cup of the smoky black brew so as not to offend – in spite of the horror of watching her lick her thumb and rub it round the cup to make sure of its cleanliness before filling and then offering it to me – she told me of a most interesting fact.

I had remarked that it being such a fine day, I might walk out further to the end of Toe Head.

‘Then you’ll see the ruins of Ruariah Mhor’s village,’ she told me. ‘A bad man if ever there was one.’

It would seem that Big Rory was, in truth, a small man, but large in evil deeds. Desiring to add the lower village to his sheep run, he was one of the first lairds to order the people off the land and fire the roofs of the houses. Forced to move out onto the poor soil of the headland where the constant Atlantic winds burned the crops and blew sheep clean off the hillsides in winter, the people had no choice but to leave for Canada.

‘Aye, but he got his comeuppance,’ she told me. ‘He was out on the headland one day, and he saw something in the sea that so frighted him that he then left the islands and never returned. And ’twas divine Providence that sent the monster to judge him of his sins, Reverend. If ye walk out that way awhile, beyond the ruins of the chapel, then you’ll see the walls of the poor houses those people built there still.’

I had wanted to examine the remains of the ancient church, built in the time of the first saints who sailed there from Ireland in their coracles, and so decided to walk on and also see the site of the old laird’s village.

My efforts were rewarded by a day without equal, a cloudless blue sky as vast as the sparkling sea, the bright green sward spread out above the white beaches, the wet sand streaked with the reflection of the heavens; though, by the time I reached the ruins, a veil of grey cloud had pulled itself across half the sky and was threatening to cover it entirely.

I was aware of being unable to resist constantly glancing out at the sea, ostensibly to spot a seal or something larger, but always with a shiver that something stranger might appear. Once or twice I was startled by a break in the sea surface, a disturbance and a glimpse of black, but surmised a rock covered in seaweed occasionally uncovered by the surface of the water.

On finding the ruined chapel, and the sad, abandoned walls of roofless huts – now no more than a series of tumbled stone walls – I sat down on the water’s rocky outcrops and gave myself over to gazing out to sea.

Across the great expanse of water were the dusky legends of hills, and the blue peaks of the Uist mountains. The stretches of Skye to my left showed a paler lilac, and further away still, the mountains of Argyll made a low ridge of cloud, the sky above them massed with huge, grey-blue formations. The whole view before my eyes seemed made entirely of air and water, the very land become without substance. Gradually, the sun became covered in clouds and the water turned as opaque as the land.

As I watched, I began to discern a tip of shiny black denseness making its way through the water, just level with the sea’s surface. Behind was a ridge of black and the tips of two more black triangular shapes in decreasing size. I understood with a quickening heart that I was witnessing my first sighting of a great basking shark. I stood up and hurriedly climbed down the rocks as close to the water as I could, soaking the leather of my boots, holding my breath.

The thrill of sighting so great a beast left me exalted throughout the returning walk. I made a further discovery on retracing the dune path, a species of tiny blue snails in flat whorls, striped faintly with white. It was a species particular to that headland, as small and delicate as a lady’s earrings.

Kneeling in the marram grass and engrossed in this discovery, I failed to hear the sound of a horse’s hooves until the animal was almost upon me. I managed to jump aside from the path in great haste, narrowly escaping injury. It was true that I had been concealed by my crouching down and by a dip in the dune land, but I wondered at who might be so inconsiderate as to ride recklessly along uneven ground. I saw a white pony, compact and stocky, of the type native to the islands, and upon its back a woman of small stature riding side-saddle. She did not seem to be dressed in riding clothes, but wore a thin blue dress that one might see in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh, and yet she rode well, as if experienced in the handling of horses.

She did not cast a glance backwards, and I doubt that she even saw me. She headed at great speed across the open land towards the long white beaches of Scarista and I watched her grow smaller and smaller beneath the hugeness of the sky as she attempted to come near the deep blue shadows of the North Harris mountains.

I had never seen the woman before, and was very surprised not to have heard of her, as on an island of so few people a lady of such consequence would surely have been the occasion of much talk. I was also greatly surprised that Moira, who seems to have an ear for all the local gossip, had never mentioned her arrival.

I walked back quite looking forward to sharing my news with Moira.

CHAPTER 6

Ruth

Passing the open door of the sea room early one morning, I caught a glint from the mantelpiece. A square of moonlight was framing the collection of little objects from Dougal, and throwing an almost perfect shadow of the crystal ink bottle on the wall.

It was seven in the morning and still dark.

As I stood there in the doorway, I felt an odd prickle of apprehension, as if the house were still held by the night’s shadows, a slippage in time where the darkness might hold a room strewn with Alexander Ferguson’s papers and books, or perhaps hide the house we first walked into, the rank debris and crumbling brown plaster of a building left empty and decaying for ten years.

My feet were frozen in the draught, so I hurried into the kitchen. Through the window, frost sparkled on the grass as if it was midnight. I switched on the light, made a coffee and got a biscuit.

The biscuit tasted odd: I wondered if the damp was making things stale. The coffee was too harsh and turned my stomach. I tipped it away and got some water.

I was sitting at the table, rewriting the To Do lists, rubbing my feet together inside woolly walking socks to generate some heat, and enjoying a certain neatness to my handwriting, when I realised that I’d stopped thinking about the papers in front of me. I sat with the pen poised, motionless. Some pretty impossible things were adding themselves up in my head.

Granted, I’d missed the last few months, but then I often did, if I wasn’t eating properly or I got really tired, and granted, I’d found my clothes tighter than I liked recently; but now I was feeling nauseous all the time, light-headed when I got up in the morning.

I sat with both hands on my belly for ages, shivering with excitement, horrified that this should be happening. We weren’t nearly ready for this. It was too soon.

*   *   *

Dr Lawson confirmed that I was about fifteen weeks pregnant. Michael was over the moon. A week or so later, we got a letter from the maternity clinic in Stornoway hospital to go up for a check-up and an ultrasound scan.

The letter said that we would be able to see our baby in considerable detail. I felt a weird tingle in my fingers, like something uncanny was happening. So far, the baby had been an idea, a thought growing out of some place in the heart, but still just an idea, like Christianity or world peace – beautiful but far off; but in the clinic in Stornoway, they had already worked out that we were talking flesh and blood and bones.

I lay on a trolley, holding onto Michael’s hand, as we stared at the monitor. The nurse squeezed some gel on my stomach. She began to push her strange phone with its long cord across my skin, moving this way and that to get a signal. On the screen there was nothing but whorls of static, a transmission of a storm happening far out to sea. Then something gave a pulse. We saw a curved backbone flicker, like a tail swimming in a blizzard of pixels. It vanished. The nurse went back, and began to hunt out the baby’s body parts, naming them for us.

‘Nice spine. That’s a healthy baby you have there.’ She beamed like we’d passed her exam. I realised with a pang that she didn’t always say that, and felt that little worry switch click on – the one you can’t ever switch off again.

Michael was looking stunned. The nurse gave him a print-out while I wiped off my stomach with some of the blue paper and pulled my dress down. We huddled together over the tiny photo. It felt like we were holding something secret, something forbidden – shadows of a future self, caught on film.

‘I think that’s the face,’ Michael said, tilting his head.

‘It could be a hip.’ I turned it round. ‘So that little white blur there could be an arm.’

‘It’s waving at us,’ said Michael.

*   *   *

It was an hour back to Harris, crossing the Barvas moors along an unlit single track. Michael drove slowly, perched forward over the wheel, concentrating on the stretch of tarmac that appeared in the headlights, disappeared behind us in the growing dark. He puffed out his cheeks and made a sound as if we’d just come through something.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’ I asked him.

‘Blown away. Can’t wait to get back and phone Mum and Dad, tell them we’ve got a photo of the baby.’

I thought of my six pictures of Mum in an envelope: no matter what I told them, her expression would never change. No photos at all of Dad – whoever he was. If the baby took after him, we’d never know; he’d never know.

The light was almost gone, the lochs on the black moor glimmering like pale glass. Michael suddenly swerved. The sheep loved to sit on the dry tarmac once the sunlight went; they never remembered about the cars.

‘Careful,’ I told him, louder than I meant to be.

Michael reached out his hand and squeezed mine. He had to let go to steer round another sheep. I saw two red eyes glinting in the headlights, the jaws chewing cud.

‘Sorry, Ruth. Didn’t think. Going on about ringing my folks.

‘Of course you must ring them. No need to be sorry. Just the way it is. I lose people. Probably leave this baby in a pushchair somewhere, go home and forget it. People do that, you know.’

‘Ruth, you’ll be a great mum.’

I shrugged and turned my head to look out of the dark window. The moor carried on slipping past, the light refusing to entirely leave the sky where the horizon held it. I got out the grainy photograph. Tried to make out the shape of a baby in the glow from the headlights.