The Sea House: A Novel (7 page)

I thought then of the child that had been tucked away to sleep under our house, the inadequate blood supply starving its bones of nutrition, the half-formed legs. How did you know? How did you know what a child needed?

‘I don’t know if I can do this.’

‘Hey, you’re not doing this alone, you know. I’m going to be there.’

‘You’d better be.’ And that was enough, as if my foot had touched bottom, and I felt that fierce determination to swim up, reach the air. This child forming under my skin was going to thrive, and it would never doubt, even for a moment, how much it was loved.

It made me wonder, but hadn’t she felt that about me?

How could she do it, let herself slip away into the dark water? Couldn’t she understand that when a mother takes her own life, she reaches out a hand to take her child with her? That cold, white hand reaching up from the water, willing me to slip away with her.

I shut my eyes, blinked those years away. Whatever it took, I was going to be there for this child.

*   *   *

It was dark when we let ourselves into the house. And, oh my, how sorry the kitchen looked in the bald light of one bulb dangling from the ceiling. The black glass of the windows still had no curtains to pull over them. The sink was still hanging away from the wall, propped up by bits of wood torn off a builder’s pallet. I let my eyes travel around the unplastered walls that sifted brick dust down onto the food. I thought around the rest of the house; every room a list of jobs; several rooms habitable only in theory.

I slumped at the table, too tired and too cold to take my coat off.

‘This house is like living in a documentary about slum conditions.’

Michael looked hunted. He started making cocoa on the Belling, mixing the powder into a pan of milk.

‘We were going to have everything so organised, do it all properly, and now … Michael, I don’t think this house wants us here.’

‘Oh come on, Ruth.’

I watched some splashes landing on the table as Michael plonked the mugs down. He sat down heavily. He held out some kitchen roll. I blew my nose.

‘We’re never going to be open in time for the holiday season are we?’ I said through sniffs.

‘Doesn’t look that way. But we’ll have to start making the repayments on the loan in September, whatever happens.’

We stared at the table, trying to make the impossible add up.

‘Perhaps we should give up. Michael, perhaps we should just go back to London.’

He shook his head. He looked white and defiant.

‘Listen, Ruth, I got a letter from Jamie this morning.’

I wondered why he’d changed the subject. ‘And?’

‘You know how he’s been working his way round the world, looking for the most beautiful place on the planet. I told him, it’s right here. Well, he’s back in Edinburgh now, and he wants to come and stay.’

Michael and his brother were close, only two years apart, Jamie a darker, slightly shorter version of Michael.

‘Of course. How long for?’

‘Here’s the thing. Why don’t we ask him to stay a while, help us work on the house? We could get this place fixed in half the time. What d’you think?’ He reached across the table and held my hand.

‘Jamie’s great. It’ll be fun with him around,’ I said. Michael squeezed my fingers, looked relieved.

‘And he wants to bring his girlfriend.’

‘His girlfriend?’

‘Yes. He met her on a beach, in California. She was living in a sort of tent commune. Protesting about something. And she’s, er, called Leaf.’

*   *   *

Two new lists: things we needed for our guests’ room; things we’d need for the baby. It was all happening so fast.

I don’t think I’d ever wanted something so much as that baby, or felt so ill prepared; a vague anxiety, like an emptiness or vertigo. I wondered if there were some books I could get, books that told you what you were supposed to actually do with a baby once it arrived. I decided to try the little shop by the harbour.

If there was something vital that had been damaged in the years after I’d lost Mum, then I was determined to make up for it, fill in the gaps. Whatever it took.

*   *   *

I found myself standing by the shelves of groceries in the store in Tarbert. I looked at the wire basket in my hands, looked at the magazines on the rack. I couldn’t remember coming into the shop. No idea what I was buying.

I pretended to read the captions on
Woman’s Weekly,
clutching the wire handle, trying to work out what I needed to put in the basket, breathing in the smell of damp cardboard, the smell of branny earth in a sack of potatoes. I dug the wire handle into my hand. Everyone needed bread didn’t they? I picked up a loaf of bread, soft inside the plastic bag, the slices of bread giving way and parting under my fingers.

I came out of the shop feeling uneasy. It had been a long while since something like that had happened. In the first year at uni, it used to happen quite a lot. In those months when I started deciding who I was going to be, sometimes the world would stop; I’d be halfway down a street and suddenly sort of wake up, unable to remember why I was there or what I was doing – odd little moments, when who I was completely faded away.

In the haberdasher’s I managed to find a box of knitting patterns for impossibly tiny jackets and cardigans. Pages of instructions and numbers, a dense code that bore no relation to my clumsy knit-one-pearl-one.

The clouds were curdling to lilac as I got off the bus and walked up to the Sea House. The low light raised shadows across the hillsides, revealing the corrugations of old potato beds, vast expanses of swirling rigs and ditches that must have taken hundreds of hands to dig out. Now, there were only a handful of crofters and their houses left across the empty machair grassland. I wondered just what had occurred to make the people leave such a beautiful place.

Up in the field near the road I saw Mrs MacKay walking back towards her house carrying a bucket. She had a woollen scarf tying down her white perm, a face that was as unlined as new soap. She waved me over.

‘Come away in now, Ruth, why don’t you and we’ll make ourselves a cup of tea?’

Mrs MacKay’s kitchen smelled damply of baking and washing drying over the Rayburn. There was a lamb in a wire pen next to the stove. Neat and white as a shorn poodle, it bleated indignantly, showing a trembling pink tongue.

‘What happened to this one?’ I said, putting my hand on its woolly head. The lamb butted it off and moved away to the back of the pen.

‘He arrived very early in the season, and his mother must have been a gimmer, a first-time mum. The new mums can forget they have a baby and wander off.’ She shook her head. ‘Jonny’ll go up on the hill later and see if he can find her. She might recognise the lamb and take it back.’

Mr MacKay appeared at the back door. Whether sorting the peat bricks or digging black tangles of seaweed into the potato beds, he always wore an immaculate blue boiler suit.

Mrs MacKay took a plate of her baking through to their deeply quiet and rather bleak sitting room. We sat drinking our tea in silence under the framed Bible verse, ‘Thou God seest me’. I decided this was a good chance to ask Mrs MacKay if she had any old family memories of the Sea House from Ferguson’s time, perhaps some gossip or memory passed down from her grandmother.

‘Oh yes, well, after your troubles, I expect you will want to know.’ She shook her head, very apologetic. ‘I can tell you about this minister and the minister before him, but we don’t know anything about your Reverend Ferguson. Our parents were from Lewis, you see. They only moved down here after the Great War.’

‘Aye, and that was only because the landlord up at the castle was forced to let crofters back on his land by a government commission. When the government realised they couldn’t send the sheep to fight in their wars,’ said Mr MacKay.

On the way back home, I passed Mrs MacDonald’s croft house. Next to it was a blue corrugated iron shed with a large hand-painted sign over the door: ‘
Oifis a’ Phuist
’ – Post Office. I called in on the pretext of buying one of the tins of soup or beans spaced out at lonely intervals along the shelves.

Mrs MacDonald spent a lot of time looking out through the window for customers and the minute she saw one approaching she’d come bustling into the shed wearing a coat and the dignified expression of the village post mistress. She knew everything there was to know about the comings and goings in Scarista, but when it came to the manse a century back, even she drew a complete blank.

I walked back to the house puzzling how everyone in the sparse village seemed to be a relatively recent incomer, their croft tenancy going back fifty years at the most. There’d been a complete break in the village’s timeline.

It was proving difficult to find out any more information – and part of me was almost glad. I was nervous about what I might turn up, but the remains of that woollen blanket round the child had left me feeling that someone must have tried to care for her.

Michael came out to meet me, hands in his back pockets, the old jaunty lollop to his stride as he came down the path to take the shopping.

‘Dougal came by. He dropped something off for you.’

On the kitchen trestle table were some thick sheets of paper covered with a familiar cursive in even, flowing lines. The black ink was rusted by time and a dusty, grey border ran along the top sheet, as if the papers had been left sticking out from a book or folder. There was a title: ‘The Story of Ishbel and the Seal Man’.

‘Dougal was looking through some other papers in the vestry and came across these, something else written by Ferguson, and – you’ll like this – he said it isn’t a sermon this time; it’s a story about a Selkie. Looks like our Reverend Ferguson had seal people in his family – just like you.’

‘Really? You’re joking.’

‘And he says there’s a dedication, there at the top of it, to a Miss Marstone.’

‘That name sounds familiar. Wasn’t it the Marstones who owned the castle back then, over at Avenbuidhe? I wonder if there are any photos of her in the library? And I’m guessing that our Miss Marstone was rather pretty.’

CHAPTER 7

Moira

Every third Sunday, the offices at church are said in English and that is the day when those who consider themselves as good as the gentry bestir themselves to come and worship. So every Sunday the farm workers from the manse’s glebe are all there, seated in the back row in what passes as their Sunday best, caps on their knees and the women in their bonnets. I sit alongside Maggie Kintail, and if ever there was a lady of quality that came to our church out here on the machair, then I do believe she would be far outshone by the glory of Maggie Kintail.

Maggie Kintail is seventy-nine and as thin and sprightly as an old chicken. She has worked for the tacksmen’s wives for near seventy years and over that time has received many presents of gaudy, cheap trinkets and jewellery from those women, since this is what pleases Maggie most. The gaudier the piece the better in Maggie’s eyes, even if it cost but two pence, and Maggie Kintail does wear all of them, all of the time, be she milking the cow or manuring the rigs with rotten seaweed. No circumstance can dim the glory of Maggie, and no one has a more cheerful disposition, since you can hear Maggie singing away, the old songs and the
puirt a beul
mouth tunes, long before you catch sight of her bent low over her work.

Time was when this big church was full of the many families roundabouts, but since they have all been cleared away, the church has an empty feel, even when every last soul is out of bed and here at Sunday matins.

So even though the church is all but empty, we of the manse farm do sit politely towards the back of the church. Those poor cottars left as squatters on the land, hoping for daily work and even daily pay as the tacksmen see fit, sometimes creep in and sit behind us. Mr Stewart, His Lordship’s bailiff and tacksman, and his wife and bairns in their Glasgow hats and suits and boots, they process down almost to the front and arrange themselves along the pew – though never directly at the front, beneath where the very word of God is spoken from the pulpit, since even they would not presume.

No, that row is reserved for the Marstone family. And we will have to wait a long time, most likely until the Second Coming till we see him in the Lord’s house. His wife and his daughter do not live here in the islands. They prefer to stay in London. The story is that Lady Marstone took one look at the grandest castle in these parts and declared it smaller than her father’s stables. She stayed a few years, then took herself away home and was never seen here again. I cannot say that I blame her for her desertion.

So, here we all are in our places, waiting for the Reverend to come in his white robe and satin stole, and the door creaks open and a woman I have never seen before walks in – a woman in a fancy gown – and she walks down to the front of the church and sits herself in the Marstones’ pew.

Everyone is trying not to move their heads and show how they are staring, but every eye is on that woman. Maggie Kintail is standing up, gawking, hopping from foot to foot to get a better look, most likely for the fashions she can copy. I pull her hard back down on the seat.

Maggie’s behind makes a thump on the wooden pew and the woman turns her head. I see a face before me that would fair make you gasp. She has the full cheeks of an apple and a smooth forehead with yellow hair all piled up under a small blue hat. And she has the large eyes and the smiling lips that make you unsure if you might be jealous or in love. I could not tell her age but she was very young, perhaps still a girl.

Then the door creaked open again and I heard the rustle of the Reverend’s robes as he walked down to the front and we all stood up in respect. I saw her dark blue dress, so smoothed and fitted round her form that I was puzzling how exactly you cut up the pieces of cloth to make them sit so close to a person.

If the Reverend felt curious about this stranger then he did not show it, other than a flicker of his eyes to where the besom sat proud as you like in her little hat. He gave a sermon of great fire and conviction, which did concern striving and casting off of sins to better run the race – though I did find it hard to follow since my own mind was running all over the place as to who she was. I found myself hoping that she was not staying in these parts for very long, since I reckoned that she could only be a guest of Lord Marstone. And yes, I thought, it is surely she who is the stranger lady on the horse, and she who near killed the Reverend.