I went back and stayed working at my table by the window, the light so gloomy that I had to light the lamp by early afternoon. Still no sign of Archie. And I’d still not seen Chrissie go past or heard her voice along the path. For no good reason, I felt uneasy. Surely she’d be back by now?
I went out to find her.
No one answered when I knocked on the door of her bothy, the windows dark. No sign of her down in the schoolroom where she liked to play her tunes on the piano when it was quiet there. She wasn’t working with the animals in the byre. Back down on the jetty to ask Tormod and the other small boys who roam the island. They’d not seen her, all busy doing their best to get in the way of the men who were readying the final loads to row out to the boat.
The captain came over, not looking happy. ‘Tell Mr Macleod that we’ll be wanting to go soon. There’s a wind getting up. If he’s coming with us, then he’ll need to get a move on.’ He checked his pocket watch. ‘We’ll leave tonight, by ten at the latest.’
‘So Archie’s definitely going back with you?’ I was relieved to hear it.
‘Aye. He came running down in a hurry a short while back and that’s what he said. He’s up in the village getting his things but needs to look sharp.’
I ran back to the bothy. Sure enough, Archie was there, his trunk open, books and clothes being tumbled into it.
‘So you’re going?’
‘The captain says he’s quite sure this might be the last boat for a while with the weather turning bad. Look, Fred, you ought to get away now too. Grab your notes and we can have the rest of your things sent on as soon as possible. Come on, man, think. Do you really want to be stuck here till next spring, eating nothing but sea birds and sending little rafts with a message home? Risk flunking out of a whole term – your entire degree, perhaps?’
I knew Archie was trying to stampede me into going. I didn’t mind. He was doing what he thought best for me.
‘You won’t change my mind, Archie,’ I told him cheerfully. ‘Now, the least I can do is give you a hand getting on that boat. It leaves at ten.’
His affairs finally packed, I strung one of his bags over my shoulder. He looked around the room as if searching for a new line of persuasion, picked up a case and his jacket and stormed out.
Down at the jetty, I put his bag down and embraced him, thumped his back. He shrugged me off. Eyed me in a strange way. I sighed. I knew he was going to have one more try.
‘Chrissie’s not the girl you think she is,’ his voice hard and bitter. He came closer, eyes two blue shards of glass. ‘She’s a very willing sort of girl, isn’t she, your little Chrissie?’
I stepped back. ‘I’d rather you didn’t talk about Chrissie like that. If you think that, just because I confided in you—’
‘Oh, Fred. If that was all. If you only knew. I didn’t want to have to tell you this, but you should know you’re not the only one your little Chrissie’s been so generous with. She came over to me in the glen today. I suppose she’s always carried a candle for me. You know how wild she can be. I shouldn’t have let her, I suppose, but how’s a boy not to get swept away?’
‘Nonsense. It’s not true.’ I felt sick to my stomach at Archie’s lie that he’d lain with Chrissie. And as if it were a comparable thing. What Chrissie and I had shared had been precious, for life.
‘No? Ask her then. See if she can deny it. I’m telling you, Fred, get out of here while you can. There will be a boat waiting by the pier for a while. Change your mind and come.’
‘I shall go straight to Chrissie. If she ever heard what you said. . .’
He shrugged, picked up his bag and climbed down into the dinghy. Left me on the jetty, the land buckling beneath my feet.
‘Remember, the boat will be here a while longer,’ he called out. I watched as his dinghy gradually faded in the mist until there was only the sound of the dipping oars across the water.
I could never tell Chrissie the lies he had told about her. And yet, it was there. He’d sown a doubt. And only Chrissie could answer it.
I ran back up to the village. Still no sign of her. I knocked on her door again but there was no reply, the cottage remained in darkness. At last I saw her mother returning along the path.
‘Mrs Gillies, have you seen Chrissie?’
‘She is here inside.’
‘Could she come out and speak with me a moment?’
‘I’ll ask her but she came back from milking all dirtied and in such a strange mood. I left her to sleep.’
‘But what’s wrong?’
‘I can’t say. But she’s not herself.’
‘Please. I must speak to her. They are saying I should leave on this boat if I’m to get back to Cambridge in time. But I wanted to speak to Chrissie first. Please. Tell her. I need to speak to her.’
I waited on the path, much longer than I liked. Why wasn’t she coming?
Finally, her mother came back, her kind face worried. ‘She says she won’t come.’
‘But you told her that I might leave on the boat.’
‘I did, Mr Lawson. But she still says she won’t come.’
I went back to my bothy and sat down on the chair in a stupor. Why wouldn’t she speak to me? One word from her was all I needed. I waited for her to run in at the door, out of breath. But the minutes went by, each seared with pain. She’d never been so cold and careless before. Could it really be that something had happened between her and Archie?
Her silence was all the proof I needed.
That Chrissie should give herself to Archie, as if the love and the words she and I exchanged had meant nothing.
The door stood open and I could hear the faint sound of evening prayers across the glen from the village bothies, the wailing of their psalms in that wild, unknowable language. Oh, what a fool I’d been to be taken in by all that. As if the world could be a good place, as if it were in the heart of man to follow ideals and faithfulness. I thought of my two uncles and all the broken men sent back from the trenches, the moments of despair that made them and so many others choose to end it rather than endure the pain of living.
My love for Chrissie broken in two, for the first time, I could see the logic in their self-destruction.
I began hurriedly packing up my things. Cambridge would be empty with everyone down for summer, but I couldn’t stay on the island any more. I’d keep out of Archie’s way.
And already I felt the pain leaving this place.
I was just in time to find the boatmen down at the jetty. They rowed out in a hurry, although once I was on board the ship, the weather kept us in the bay all night.
A long, blank night without sleep. I lay, hoping that a boat might still come from the village. A message from Chrissie. At dawn, the swell eased enough for us to get away. Sunday again, the devout men in the crew assembling on deck for the morning service, sober and humble, and all of them deluded in their superstition, deluded in themselves.
CHAPTER 31
Fred
MARSEILLE, 1941
The Seaman’s Mission in Marseille was a run-down two-storey building near the docks, badly in need of a coat of paint. The Reverend Donald Caskie had resurrected the derelict place with the express purpose of smuggling soldiers and airmen out of France, supplying all they needed to pose as merchant seamen while he made plans to get them over the border into neutral Spain. His code name, the Tartan Pimpernel, was even passed around among prisoners of war interned in France and Germany. His Seaman’s Mission was the place to try and reach if you wanted to get across the Pyrenees.
At all costs we needed to avoid ending up in the internment prison at Saint-Hippolyte where all active servicemen picked up in the town by the police were banged up in dire conditions.
Inside the mission, a converted set of garages from the look of it, we found a boy wiping down tables. He called us over, asked our business then sent us hastily up a flight of stairs to knock on the door at the top.
Caskie greeted us, a short
Scotsman of a certain age, alert and convivial and sharp as a tack, reserving his opinions while he quizzed us on our story. The Vichy police had not been able to pin anything on Caskie so far, but that, we soon came to realize, was only down to the meticulous operation he ran. Every time the police raided the mission searching for illegal servicemen, they found nothing out of order.
Once Caskie had satisfied himself that we were who we claimed to be, men from the 51st escaped from German captivity and trying to get home, he became warmer towards us and put us in his own room at the top of the house along with another man from the 51st, Alan Bowrie, a bank clerk from Tarbert in Harris. He’d walked down from St Valery, eating raw vegetables from the fields and sleeping rough. When Caskie brought up bowls of soup he wolfed his portion down like the starving man he was. Caskie took his tattered uniform to dispose of it and found him clean clothes.
Caskie laid out mattresses on the floor and showed us a secret panel with a crawl space if there was a raid. I slept fitfully, listening for steps on the staircase. Outside, the noises of a busy port city.
The bliss of hot coffee and fresh bread in the morning when it’s laced with the hope that we might make it home one day soon.
But Caskie had sobering news.
‘I have to tell you that over the past couple of days there have been arrests in the safe-house line in the north, including the Abbé in Lille who fixed your passes. Looks like we might have someone on the inside passing information to the Gestapo.’
I shook my head sadly. We both knew that the Abbé would be tortured and shot, but he would never betray his fellow countrymen.
‘And you’ve no idea who it could be?’
‘Everyone’s under a cloud until this gets sorted out. In the meantime, I’m sorry to say we’ll need to change our route across the Pyrenees, check the passeurs and that, as you may well imagine, will take a while. The men on the last trip were stopped and arrested. On their way to the rendezvous with the guide, a boy came up with a letter purportedly from me. It told them to go to a different meeting point, but sent them straight into the arms of the police. I suspect it’s the same source passing on information, and it must be someone well trusted.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll need to be extra vigilant, and when you combine that with how the German police have been tightening up lately, very anxious to stop downed airmen getting back home, then I’m afraid you will have to endure waiting a while longer before we can move you on.’
The following days were long. Caskie came up and sat with us with a bottle of whisky in the evening after curfew. Alan got out his harmonica and played a few tunes, old Scots melodies.
I turned to Caskie. ‘While you were in Glasgow, you didn’t come across any of the folk from St Kilda after they were evacuated, Reverend?’
‘We’ve always had one or two passing through Glasgow, at the Gaelic church, St Columba’s. Was there someone in particular you were thinking of?’
‘Chrissie. Chrissie Gillies. Her mother was Mary Gillies.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know that family. But the St Kilda folk were very spread about after they left the island, and sadly too many of them were taken by the tuberculosis. The pastor there in Morvern was a friend of mine. I don’t know if the ones who went there were given bad cottages or they were particularly vulnerable to the mainland viruses, but he said it took almost all of the MacKinnon family, several children.’
‘The MacKinnons? But I knew them. That is a blow. But you’ve heard nothing about a Christina Gillies?’
He gave me a wry look. ‘Am I right in thinking we are talking about a past sweetheart of yours?’
‘A long time ago. I can’t tell you how much I regret that I never went back to see her.’
Caskie sighed and looked into his glass, swirling the whisky around. ‘The war does that, shows you what really matters.’
It was getting late. I had a feeling that Caskie had his own memories but he wasn’t forthcoming.
Perhaps it was talking about the island but I dreamed of you again that night. You were singing the song that I’d held in my head for months, ever since I heard it again in the prison barracks. You were sitting by the fire in the bothy, drying your hair after the rain had caught you on the hill.
When I woke on the thin mattress on the floor of the Seaman’s Mission, I was bereft. And yet there was a comfort there too, a feeling, a message almost, that you were waiting for me somewhere. But there was bitterness too, for Archie and what he did. That day had changed the course of our future. And now, were you married, perhaps, our love forgotten? If I could only stand near you again, drink in the Chrissie you have become. Just to know that you are well, a smile. It would be enough.
CHAPTER 32
Chrissie
ST KILDA, 1927
It had taken every fibre of my body to stop me running out to call Fred back, but I knew I must let him go. And when he had finished all that he must do at his university, then his love would bring him back to me. I did not doubt it, though the pain of him going would be great.
As to Archie, I cast him from my mind, only glad that Fred had known nothing of his friend’s readiness to betray him.
It was hard seeing the bothy at the end of the village abandoned again, the windows dark each night. I went and sat inside there sometimes, picking up the things that Fred had left behind, holding them. A jumper that needed mending, a chipped cup he used to drink from. He would be back soon, I felt it, for our love was a living thing still, growing and breathing as surely as all the birds in the air. I saw him stepping from a rowing boat and running up to the village where we would meet each other again.
‘She’s met a fairy on the hill,’ was what Allie said when mother remarked on how I always had my thoughts far away of late.
We could feel the chill in the air each evening as the days shortened and autumn approached. A huge and bitter storm swept across the island and tore away the green tops of the potato crop, poisoned what lay in the ground with salt. At least the grass still had time enough for one last growth so we might cut it for winter hay for the beasts. The village was out as one, working to scythe and twist stooks, or storing the hay in the cleits, slotting handfuls between the gaps in the stones to let the wind do its drying work faster.
I was up on the slopes of the glen, working with the scythe, when I first felt a strange weariness that I had never known before, a weakness that carried on day after day. I began to wonder if I was ill or simply heartbroken. The fog came back, cold and wet, and left us in a small space where you could see no further than the next bothy, the tops of the hills now only a memory. How I longed to be away from our island then, standing wherever Fred might be. When I helped Mrs Munro in the schoolroom, I looked at pictures of forests or fields, of city streets, and wondered, is this what it is like where Fred is?
By the time October ended, I knew the problem. Come May, there would be a child. Perhaps I should leave the island well before that date to spare the shame on my family? And yet, even as I sat in the chapel and listened to the minister’s sermon on sin, I could not feel sad on behalf of the child growing in me, for this child had done nothing wrong any more than the lambs or the flowers or the winds that are God’s creation. The text for the day was, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Angus MacDonald expounded on the text for a long time, but all I heard was this assurance, a message for me: the child would not have the sins of the past but only its future in the Lord’s creation.
The men were out on the hills now to catch the sheep. Sometimes they rowed across to Soay where the little brown sheep were as wild as goats and needed all the dogs and men to get them dipped. As I helped my father at the fank with the dipping of the black-faced sheep up at the gap, I realized that my time of weakness had passed. The child pressed inside me, making me more solid in my stomach, so I was gaining in strength and energy. At night I pondered on the child, the sky perfect in its own darkness, stars sharp as glass, a moon like a polished lamp watching over us.
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The winter season was ever a time of much work for us. Supper done, we went along to each other’s bothies turn by turn to ceilidh and card the rough wool into tufts like smooth waves ready for spinning long into each night. In the day there were other tasks: my father and the men slaughtered sheep and I helped my mother make tripe and puddings. There was cheese-making, the cow’s milk still rich from the summer grass. We mixed it together with the sheep’s milk to give our cheese the sweetness it was famous for, though we did not let the tourists ever watch us milk the sheep lest they laugh at us. I helped lift what remained of the potatoes on the day when the village went out to bring them in. We had precious little growing in the soil after the storm. As I worked, even though I was hot, I never once took off the shawl wrapped across my front for I feared that my secret was beginning to show.
And all the while, my thoughts were on Fred. I felt it in my bones, strong as any belief in God, that he would come back for me one day. I could have put my hand out in the dark and found the solidness of him, I believed so strong. For how could he not feel the same and so come back to me?
The hurricanes came in with no relent, the village boat put up for winter under a layer of turf and boulders. So he could not have come back to me even if he wanted to, with the waves marching on us in droves and making the cliffs shudder beneath their fists. In the day, the little children were not allowed to go to school alone, their fathers and older brothers holding tight to them with one hand and to the walls of the bothies with the other, trusting to God in the gaps between. No, there would be no boats coming near in such weather, and so how could I be disappointed?
One morning, almost four months after Fred left, I made my way with difficulty and care through the gale to aid Mrs Munro as usual in the schoolroom, grateful for the lessening of the wind’s din inside the school’s thick walls. The window on the seaward side had been boarded up with a plank where the wind had smashed a pane. It was gloomier than usual in the room and Mrs Munro had lit a lamp as well as banking up the fire. I sat and heard the small children read and then I helped them with their sums, all the while the heat from the fire making me wish I might remove my shawl.
The Lost Lights of st Kilda Page 18
