by Alison James
‘Let’s listen to some music then,’ I suggest, pulling up a list of digital channels. ‘What would you like?’
My own preference would be for 80s and 90s hits, but to my surprise Jim chooses Jazz FM. Despite the irregular beat and unpredictable scatting, I fall into a doze. When I wake up, with my head at an awkward angle and drool on my chin, we’re somewhere near Sheffield. Jim looks at me with a faint smile, and raises one eyebrow.
‘What?’ I demand. ‘Was I snoring?’
‘A bit, yeah.’
I look away, feeling suddenly vulnerable.
‘Let me take over for a while,’ I say. ‘And let’s see if you snore.’
We stop at a service station for a comfort break and to buy sandwiches and a drink.
‘No rubbish in my car though,’ I say primly. ‘Bag it up and we’ll dispose of it later.’
Jim salutes. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
He doesn’t snore. He doesn’t even sleep. He sits with his eyes fixed on his phone, answering texts and emails until we are over the border into Scotland and he takes over the driving again.
‘Have you ever been to Scotland?’ We’ve been in the car for more than six hours, and I’m keen to fill the silence.
He nods. ‘I’ve been to the Edinburgh Jazz Festival a few times.’
Ah yes. The jazz obsession.
‘How old are you?’ I ask.
He slides his gaze left, while still keeping an eye on the road ahead. ‘Why? Are you saying I’m an old fart because I like jazz?’
‘No. Well, kind of.’
‘I’m forty-seven.’
I look at him more closely. At this proximity, I can see the deep laughter lines etched into the corners of his eyes. His craggy and weather-beaten face might make you think he was older, but he has a youthful energy. He’s definitely no middle-aged fuddy-duddy.
‘How about you?’ he asks. ‘You been over the border before?’
‘We used to come on family holidays when I was young. When my dad was still alive.’
Jim simply nods.
The light is starting to fade, and as we head into the Trossachs National Park and down the Kintyre peninsula, a steady film of drizzle clouds the windscreen. We hardly see another car, but a deer steps onto the road in front of us, its eyes reflecting the headlamp beam, vapour coming from its nostrils.
‘Bloody hell!’ Jim stamps on the brakes just in time. ‘We almost had venison for dinner.’
The road twists and turns, giving us glimpses of a black sea. By the time we reach Campbeltown, we’re both stiff and sore and a little tired of one another’s company. We check into our hotel and mutually agree that we’ll eat in our own rooms. I fling myself onto the bed and pull my boots off my swollen feet, but before I can even pick up the phone to order food, I fall into an exhausted sleep.
* * *
The hotel promised ‘harbour views’, but when I look out of the window the next morning, there’s nothing to see, except rain and angry pewter sky. But having eaten nothing but a sandwich in the past twenty-four hours, I’m too hungry to dwell on the disappointing weather.
Jim is already in the dining room, newspaper propped against the teapot, working his way through a huge plate of sausage, eggs, mushrooms and haggis.
‘It’s the full Scottish.’ He washes down his mouthful with tea. ‘I can highly recommend it.’
I order the same, and we discuss our first port of call. I suggest we go straight to Glenbarr, but Jim thinks we should wait until the weather clears. ‘It’s too small a place to have any shops anyway,’ he says, ‘and I think we need to start by finding who supplied the kilt in the photograph.’
We set off down the high street, awkwardly keeping enough physical distance to signify to the world at large that, no, we’re not a couple. Our options are rapidly narrowed down. Campbeltown – grey and stern in the rain – has one hardware store, one tea shop, one optician, one ladies’ boutique and one gentlemen’s outfitters memorably named, ‘Wee Toon’. Together, we survey the window; dated mannequins dressed in dusty wigs and wearing the sort of clothes my male teachers wore when I was at school: tweed jackets, Viyella shirts and cavalry twills.
‘Wee Toon is where it’s at,’ Jim observes drily.
Inside, there’s an old-fashioned glass-fronted counter with displays of pocket handkerchiefs and thermal long johns. A mannequin in kilt, sporran and evening jacket is propped in a corner. Behind it is a poster entitled ‘Tartans of Argyll’. Jim shoots me a hopeful look.
The woman behind the counter is plump, fortyish, with her hair in a bun and wearing a coral knitted suit.
‘I wonder if you could help us.’ Jim shows her the photograph of the Scots bride. ‘We’re trying to identify the people in this photo.’
She squints at the kilt, then holds it up against the poster. ‘That’s MacAlister of Glenbarr,’ she says triumphantly. I nod politely, acknowledging what we already know. ‘It’ll be before my time, but if you like, I’ll ask the owner, Mr Hamish.’
She heads into the back office and a few minutes later a stooped figure shuffles out. Mr Hamish is at least eighty and dressed like the dummies in the shop window, with the addition of a yellow bow tie and a tape measure looped around his neck.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘That’ll be the MacAlister lass. Old Dougie MacAlister’s girl. Dougie was a distant cousin of the laird, and he ran one of the farms on the estate.’
Jim and I exchange a hopeful look. ‘Do you know her name?’ Jim asks.
Mr Hamish purses his lips and rubs his whiskered chin. ‘Let’s see now… no, I cannae remember. It’d be more than forty years ago now… my wife Maura would know.’
‘Do you think we can speak to her?’
The old man gives a rueful smile. ‘Aye well, that would be difficult. She’s been gone fourteen years.’ He sucks his teeth. ‘I’d say your best bet would be to speak to Tavish, up at the Sheep’s Head.’
‘Is that local?’ I ask.
‘It’s out along the Glenbarr road; you won’t miss it. I recall Tavish’s father knew the family. But then, when you run the only pub in the whole area, you’ll get tae know everyone.’
The Sheep’s Head is closed when we get there at eleven thirty. It’s a low, whitewashed stone building with grimy windowpanes and no other human habitation visible for miles. We sit in the car for a while, watching the steely clouds grow pale and break to reveal patches of bright blue sky. At midday, the pub is still closed.
‘I don’t suppose they get much passing trade,’ Jim says with a sigh.
‘What do we do now?’ I ask.
He gives me a slight smile. ‘We’re going on a picnic.’
Thirty-Seven
Alice
Now
A basic grocery store on the outskirts of Campbeltown provides a loaf of bread, cheese, apples, cans of lager for Jim and ginger beer for me. Once we’ve bought provisions, we turn the car round and drive due east to Loch Lussa.
Armed with our rather pedestrian picnic, we walk to the shallow beach at the loch’s edge. The sand is too wet to sit on, but we find a log big enough for the two of us, which Jim drapes with his coat. The air is freshly washed and clear as crystal, and there’s no sound at all, apart from the dripping of rainwater from the fir trees behind us.
‘Beautiful isn’t it,’ I sigh with pleasure, looking across at the heather-clad hills on the far side of the loch. ‘It reminds me of the holidays we used to have, camping near Pitlochry. We used to fly-fish and kayak on the loch.’ I hold up the bottle of Old Jamaica ginger beer. ‘We even used to drink this on our picnics.’
‘Very Enid Blyton.’ Jim looks at me thoughtfully over the rim of his lager can. ‘Was it a happy childhood?’
‘Yes, it was.’ I smile at the memory. ‘We were the perfect nuclear family: mother, father, son and daughter. Of course, we bickered occasionally, as all families do, but most of the time we got on well.’
‘The Famous Four.’
‘Yes. Ex
actly. Until my dad died suddenly when I was seventeen.’ We hadn’t thought to acquire a knife, so I tear off a chunk of the bread. ‘How about you – were you happy as a child?’ Even as I ask the question, I still can’t imagine the self-contained, impassive Jim Cardle being a child.
He shrugs and pulls out a cigarette packet and lighter from his jeans pocket. I frown at him as he goes to light it, and he sighs and slides the cigarette back into the carton.
‘My dad buggered off when I was six. Left my mum and my brother and me and had another family. I only saw him once after that, just before he died, and we had fuck all to say to one another.’
‘How about your mum?’
‘She’s still alive. She worked as a legal secretary and studied at night school for her solicitor’s exams; ended up becoming a lawyer. Although we were almost finished at school by the time she qualified. But still, we were all right financially. We didn’t go hungry.’
I bite into an apple so hard that it hurts my gums. ‘But it must have affected you in some way. Your dad walking out.’
Jim stands up, picks up a pebble and sends it looping across the water. ‘I expect it did. According to my ex-wife, it gave me trust issues. Always living with the assumption that anyone you’re close to will bugger off too. So you don’t let your guard down.’
I think about this for a while. ‘I think I had the opposite problem.’
He skims another pebble and turns back to look at me. ‘How so?’
‘I’m too trusting.’ I sigh and busy myself searching for a pebble of the right size and shape. ‘My dad was incredibly protective of me, and after he died, my brother took on that role. So I suppose my assumption was that that’s what men always did. I blindly trusted Alex, my first fiancé, and he dumped me out of the blue. I trusted him – Dominic, or Ben – and chose to believe him. I accepted his behaviour even when…’
Jim sits down on the log again. ‘When what?’ he asks sharply.
Slowly, and haltingly, I tell him about the night in the summer of 2017 when he raped me. ‘It still feels wrong calling it rape, because… you know… we were married. I convinced myself it was just a failure of communication and that he just didn’t realise I didn’t want sex.’
‘Ever since 1991, it’s still classed as rape,’ Jim says quietly. ‘It doesn’t even need to involve violence. Just lack of consent. Did you tell the police about this?’
I shake my head.
‘You should do. You should tell Alan Sutherland or one of his colleagues.’
‘There’s no point now. As they’ve already told me: you can’t prosecute a dead person.’
I hesitate for a few seconds, and then I tell him the rest. About Dom being the man in the red-soled trainers who was following me on my way back from work. And my suspicion that the atropine the police found in his car was in some way meant for me, because of my heart condition.
Jim stares at me, appalled. I stand up and start thrusting the remains of the food into the carrier bag so that I don’t have to make eye contact with him.
‘Alice. Stop, stop…’ He blocks me with his large body, placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’
‘Why do think?’ I say angrily, snatching up his empty lager can. ‘Because I felt ashamed. And because I didn’t want to believe it. Your mind can’t really accept that it’s rape, even though you know it really is. If he wants it and you don’t.’
He takes the bag of picnic detritus from me and puts it to one side, enveloping me in a hug. He smells of hops and old-fashioned shaving soap, with a faint whiff of nicotine. I twist my head to avoid getting snot on the shoulder of his jacket.
‘The thing is, though,’ Jim’s Yorkshire accent makes him sound matter-of-fact, though I know he means to be reassuring, ‘ultimately he couldn’t go through with doing you serious harm. He ran off that night in the street, and the night he died he’d made the decision to leave the country rather than do anything to hurt you and the baby. You’ve got to try and focus on that.’ He releases me and pats my shoulder again, awkwardly. ‘Come on, let’s get back to the fleshpots of Campbeltown.’
* * *
The Sheep’s Head is open when we return, but not exactly a hive of activity.
A couple of old boys sit near the fire sipping drams of malt and playing dominoes, and a disconsolate couple still wearing their coats hunch over their drinks, not speaking to one another. We approach the bar and Jim orders half a pint of draft ale for himself and a tonic water for me. The man who serves us is stout, with thinning white hair and a face as smooth and pink as cut ham.
‘Are you Tavish?’ Jim asks, although there are no other candidates.
‘Aye, that’s me.’
We go through the photograph routine again.
‘That’s Dougie MacAlister.’ Tavish stabs a plump finger at the man in the photo. ‘And that’s his daughter Ellen. I was at school with her.’
‘D’you mind us asking how old you are, Tavish?’ Jim asks.
‘I was born in 1945. Ellen was a little bit older than me; she’d have been born during the war. She married up at St John’s Kirk, the other side of Glenbarr.’ Tavish looks at the photo again. ‘This must have been taken, ooh 1966, 1967?’
Ellen MacAlister. I take the photo back and examine her image: the full-skirted gown with three-quarter length sleeves, the dark blonde hair teased into a beehive, with a short veil pinned at the back. Was this my real mother-in-law?
‘Do you remember the name of the man she married?’
‘Aye, of course. She married someone called Malcolm Henderson. His family came from up in Tarbert.’ He speaks as though it was Mars, rather than a mere twenty-five miles away at the top of the peninsula.
‘Did they have children?’ I ask, forcing myself to sound casual even though my heart is pounding.
‘Now that I can’t tell you.’ Tavish pulls a cloth from the straining waistband of his trousers and starts polishing glasses. ‘They moved away from the area soon after they married. Dougie MacAlister was widowed about a year later and he moved too, to be near his daughter and son-in-law. People round here lost touch with them after that.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Down south, as I recall.’
‘You mean London?’ Jim asks.
He receives a withering look from Tavish. ‘Dumfries.’
* * *
We make a detour to Edinburgh on our way back to London, to visit the National Records of Scotland on Princes Street.
‘We’ll find what we need here,’ Jim tells me confidently. ‘They’ve got all Scottish births, deaths and marriages, as well as other kinds of data.’
A couple of hours’ work turns up Ellen and Malcolm Henderson’s wedding certificate, for the 23 July 1966.
‘We already knew that, more or less,’ I point out to Jim.
‘Yes, but now we also know for sure that Ellen was born in 1941, and Malcolm was born in 1939. That will help us locate their offspring.’
We run several searches of birth records, but there are no matches. Ellen and Malcolm do not have children.
‘We must be doing this wrong,’ Jim tells me, getting visibly frustrated.
I queue at the Enquiries desk and eventually enlist the help of a Records Office staff member, but she also draws a blank. She can’t find any corresponding adoption records either. ‘Although back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, private adoption was more commonplace, so that could be the explanation. Why don’t you look at the census record? That will tell you exactly who’s living in the household.’
We pull up the 1971 census and, sure enough, Ellen and Malcolm are living in Craigs Road, Dumfries. Malcolm is listed as a farm labourer and Ellen as a clerical worker, but there are no other members of their household. No children.
‘Let’s keep on trying,’ I suggest desperately, but when we search the national census records for 1981, 1991 and 2001 not only are Ellen and Malcolm no longer in Dumfries, they’re not t
o be found anywhere. The trail has gone cold.
Thirty-Eight
Alice
Now
‘You’re starting to bloom.’
I’m sitting outside Bean & Beaker with JoJo, for the first time in what feels like years. It’s one of those unseasonably warm early May days that feels more like June, and I’m wearing a lightweight linen shift dress that drapes my growing stomach.
‘Nearly halfway,’ I say with a smile. ‘I’ll be having my twenty-week scan soon.’
‘Well, it’s great to see you out and about and looking so much better.’ JoJo sips her iced latte through a straw. ‘And you’ve coloured your hair again: looks better.’ She indicates my newly tinted chestnut locks. ‘Tell me all about your trip.’
She texted me a few times while I was in Scotland. At the time, I told her I was away visiting old friends. I’m not entirely sure why I lied, but it probably has something to do with JoJo thinking I should move on from Dom and put the whole sorry episode behind me. Also, perhaps, because I don’t want her to read anything into Jim and I going away together. I’ve grown to quite like him, but that’s it. That’s definitely all it is.
As if I’ve summoned him, my phone buzzes with a call and ‘Jim Cardle’ appears on my screen. I jab my finger and cut the call as though I’ve been scalded, but not without JoJo’s eyes widening.
‘Oooh… is that a new love interest by any chance?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say, pointing at my pregnant belly. ‘That’s the last thing on my mind.’
As I’m speaking, a text arrives from Jim.
Call me as soon as you can, please.
‘Well, whoever it is, they’re pretty keen to speak to you.’
