by Peter May
It took a moment for me to realize as she drew closer that she meant to kiss me. I jerked away, pulling my hands free. “Don’t!” I was seething with anger and confusion. And uncertainty. I know now that our sexuality is just an extension of ourselves. We don’t choose to be, we just are. Somewhere deep inside, a part of me wanted to take her in my arms and tell her everything was going to be okay. She was my best friend. We had shared the better part of our lives together. But it was never going to be okay the way she wanted.
I saw her tears through mine before I brushed past her, out into the hall, and ran all the way along to my room. I closed the door behind me and locked it, before throwing myself on the bed and crying into my pillow, stifling my sobs in case anyone would hear me. I felt . . . and I can’t think of any other way to describe it . . . bereaved. I had just lost the part of me that was Seonag. A part of me that, clearly, I had never really understood. But loved all the same. I couldn’t see, then, how I would ever get over it.
In the weeks that followed I felt trapped in a nightmare. My unhappiness in Gala compounded now by the fractious end of my relationship with Seonag. Who was still just across the hall, who still attended the same lectures, who was still Miss Personality superplus in a crowd at the union. But behind the face that she wore for the world I could see her pain. The tears of the clown behind the mask. We avoided each other like the plague.
Then, mid-December, entirely out of the blue, I received a letter from Ruairidh. He had put his name and a return address on the back of the envelope. Some student accommodation in Aberdeen. It was a Saturday morning, and I sat in my cell and tore it open with trembling fingers. Inside was a printed card. An invitation to the student Christmas dance at Aberdeen University. Clipped to it was a return air ticket from Edinburgh to Aberdeen in my name. Not a cheap purchase for someone on a student grant. I turned over the card, and saw that he had handwritten on the back of it, Saving the last dance for you. Beneath it a phone number.
It took me all of half a second to decide that I was going. I ran along the corridor to the pay phones and dialled the number on the back of the card. The phone rang several times at the other end before someone picked it up, and a woman’s voice said, “Yes?” It seemed very abrupt and I was momentarily taken aback.
“Can I speak to Ruairidh Macfarlane, please.” I heard the receiver being set down and then the same voice calling off into the distance.
“Ruairidh . . . Phone!”
“Coming,” even more distantly, then hurried feet on stairs. When he picked up the phone and said, “Hello?” I very nearly hung up. I’m not sure why. Except that I knew this was very possibly a watershed in my life. One of those crossroads you arrive at without any certainty of which road you are going to follow, always with the possibility in your mind that you could just turn around and walk back to the safety of everything you have known up until then.
I said, “It’s Niamh.” I could almost hear him hold his breath at the other end.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” I closed my eyes and took the plunge. “I got your letter.”
“Yes?”
“I’ll be on the flight.”
A long silence, then, “I’ll meet you at the airport.”
“Okay . . . See you then, then.”
“Yes.”
A hesitation. What else to say? Nothing. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
I hung up and stood breathing rapidly. The butterflies were back. And the palpitations. All the things I had felt during those weeks at Linshader when Ruairidh and I were together. I hurried back along the hall to my room and stood by the window, gazing out at the distant bus stop where I would board the bus to Edinburgh to catch my flight to Aberdeen in just ten days’ time. I would rearrange my transport home for Christmas from there. Bus from Aberdeen to Inverness. Then Inverness to Ullapool. And the Suilven back across the Minch. I had not felt this good in months. Which is when I realized that I had left the letter with the ticket and invitation on the table beside the phones. I turned to go back and get them but was stopped in my tracks by a knock at the door.
It swung open and Seonag stood there, with the letter and ticket and invitation in her hand. She held them out and said, “You left these by the phone.”
I stepped forward to take them. “Thanks.”
She shrugged, and the sadness in her face in that moment very nearly broke my heart. She said, with a tiny smile, “Guess I lose.”
As it happened, I never did go home for Christmas that year. Ruairidh met me off the plane at Aberdeen, and he saved not only the last dance for me, but every other dance that night. We went back to his digs and made love in his room, trying hard not to make a noise and disturb the other students, or his landlady. We spent half the night cooried up together beneath the duvet, stifling laughter and whispering conversations. I told him, as if he hadn’t heard it before, how unhappy I was at Galashiels. And he was shocked to hear about Seonag’s unexpected arrival, and how that had only compounded my misery. I didn’t tell him then, or ever, about what had actually transpired between us, only that the dissolution of our friendship seemed final, and that I didn’t see any way I could go back to Gala.
He said, “You know, I’ve heard that the RGU Dough School at Kepplestone runs a really good course in home economics.” He shrugged as if it were just a casual or throwaway thought when he added, “If you could get in there for the second term, then we could be in Aberdeen together.” He grinned. “And miles away from Seonag.”
I phoned and went to Kepplestone for an interview the next day. It was my good fortune that someone else was dropping out, and they were happy for me to step in and fill her place. And so Ruairidh and I stayed in Aberdeen all across the festive season. I remember it as probably the happiest Christmas of my life.
When term resumed I took up my new place at the Aberdeen Dough School and completed my degree over the next year and a half.
After graduating I surprised even myself by returning to Gala to do a Master’s in Clothing Management. Just six months at the college, and then six months on release at Mackays in Paisley, my first real job in a fashion buying office, while I researched and wrote my dissertation on the Harris Tweed industry and its marketing.
By the time I got back to Gala Seonag was long gone. She had abandoned her flirtation with the textile and clothing industry, and left to take a course in business and computer studies at Manchester, which I discovered later just happened to be Jane’s home town.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Braque sat at a table in the window, looking out over the inner harbour. Most of the fishing boats appeared to have gone, leaving only the pleasure boats and a few rusting hulks lined up along the quayside and the pontoons. The sky was broken, white clouds scudding across areas of blue, as if competing with each other to hide the sun, chasing their own shadows across the water.
She had not slept well, and was worried because she had still been unable to raise her ex on the phone. He had changed his mobile number after the split and all she had was his home number. Someone should have been there, even if it was only Lise. But, then, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to lift the phone when she saw who was calling. All the same, Gilles should have responded by now. She had left several messages. All she could think was that he had taken the girls somewhere for a treat. Maybe stayed overnight. But there was school this morning . . . She breathed in deeply and pressed her palms flat on the pristine white linen tablecloth. She did not want to let any other thoughts in. As Gilles had always been in the habit of telling her, she had a vivid imagination.
“Bonjour, Ma’am. Penny for them.”
She turned to find George Gunn standing by her table. “I’m sorry?”
“Penny for your thoughts. It’s an English idiom,” he said, before realizing she might not understand what an idiom was. “A saying. It just means I was wondering what you were thinking.”
She forced a smile. “Dark thoughts.” And waved to
the chair opposite. “Join me?”
Gunn grinned. “Don’t mind if I do, Ma’am.”
“Sylvie,” she corrected him again.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, and it was clear he had no intention of ever calling her by her name.
An elderly waitress in a black skirt and blouse and white apron asked if he would like toast.
“Yes, please.” He rubbed his hands together. “And a coffee.”
They indulged in polite conversation about how well each had slept. She lied, and wondered if he had, too. Then they talked about the weather, and he elevated what she had taken to be an unpromising start to the day, to being “grand.” His toast arrived and she watched as he spread it with slabs of quickly melting butter, before slathering it with thick-cut marmalade, and wolfing it down between large gulps of coffee sweetened with two spoons of sugar.
She smiled and said, “Does your wife not feed you?”
The toast paused halfway between his plate and his mouth and he glanced at her over it, suddenly self-conscious. “Actually,” he said, “she doesn’t.”
She cocked an eyebrow, surprised. “And why is that?”
He laid the toast down again, reluctantly. “The doctor gave her a strict diet for me. I’m not long returned to work after a heart attack a few months back. Damn near killed me, too. I’ve lost quite a bit of weight.”
Braque glanced at the white cotton of his shirt stretched taut across his belly. Not quite enough, she thought.
“And I’ve been working out at the gym.”
“You shouldn’t be eating that toast, and all that butter, then.”
He looked at it, shamefaced, on his plate. “No. I shouldn’t.” A pause. “Shouldn’t be drinking coffee either.” He looked at his watch and stood up suddenly. “We should go.”
Braque rose from the table and wiped a napkin across her lips. “Where are you taking me?”
“You said you wanted to talk to Niamh Macfarlane. So that’ll be our first port of call. I managed to secure a four-wheel-drive vehicle.”
For someone who had grown up in Paris, a city of stone and trees and traffic, the west coast of the Isle of Lewis was a shock to Braque’s system. Miles of barren peat bog as far as the eye could see. Occasional villages strung out along a ribbon of road laid precariously across the undulating contours of the land. Not a tree in sight. Flowers and bushes planted by optimistic Leòdhasachs in barren gardens, stunted by the wind and salt that arrived with the relentless onslaught of the Atlantic Ocean. A coastline at once beautiful and dangerous. Towering cliffs and rocky outcrops punctuated by unexpected scraps of beach with the purest gold or silver sand.
It was both breathtaking and bleak, and Braque wondered how people survived in this place without the shops and restaurants she took for granted, the sun-dappled apartments that looked out on leafy boulevards, the cinemas and theatres, the roar of traffic replaced here by the howling of the wind.
Gunn swerved to avoid a handful of sheep that had wandered on to the road. They seemed entirely unconcerned by the vehicle that had so nearly ploughed into them. “It’s worse when the wind drops and the midges come out,” he said.
“Midges?”
“Aye, wee flies. They breed in all that water out there on the moor, and emerge in bloody black clouds when it’s dull and windless. People think it’s just them the wee bastards go after. But it’s sheep, too. When the poor beasts start congregating on the road, you know the midges are out in force on the moor.”
Braque nodded. But in spite of Gunn’s colourful description had no clear idea of exactly what a midge was.
She sat in the passenger seat and watched the villages spool past, each one indistinguishable from the next. “There are a lot of churches,” she said. She had counted five so far, and not seen a single soul. She found herself speculating about where it was that all the people came from to fill so many churches.
“Aye,” Gunn said. “Folk here have divided God up into different pieces and shared Him around.”
Braque glanced at him across the car and wondered if he were making some kind of joke. If he was, she didn’t get it, and he wasn’t smiling.
Several times spits of rain had caused automatic wipers to smear them across the windscreen then stop. Gunn said, “It’s always trying to rain here. And usually succeeds.”
But today it didn’t, and by the time the silhouette of the Cross Free Church stood stark on the horizon, sunshine washed itself across the land in waves, like pure gold water. And everything caught, however fleetingly, in its light came suddenly to life.
Gunn turned on to the Skigersta road, and by the time they reached the east coast at Skigersta itself, the sky had cleared and the Minch sparkled all the way across to the mainland. The road came to an end, and Gunn slipped the vehicle into four-wheel drive as they began their potholed journey south across the moor to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. On either side of the track, peat banks curved away across the moor, scraps of water catching sunlight, the peat itself blacker, somehow, in comparison.
“They actually live out here?” Braque was incredulous.
“Oh, a good bit further on yet,” Gunn said. “They built their house at a place known as Taigh ’an Fiosaich. Nicholson’s house. Named after the man who built it. Iain Nicholson, from Ness. He went to New York sometime around the end of the nineteenth century and found himself a wealthy woman to marry. Brought her back here and built a house and church out on the cliffs. No doubt with her money. Apparently all the sand for the cement was taken there by boat and carried up the cliffs a pailful at a time. The cement itself was brought out on the backs of men from Ness.”
Braque had trouble imagining it. “Who else lives there?”
“No one, except for the Macfarlanes.” He corrected himself. “Or, rather, just her now.”
Braque fell silent then, until she saw the profiles of the ruined house and church standing out against the dazzle of sunlight on the water beyond. To the left of them, no more than two hundred metres away, stood the Macfarlane house, shining white and incongruous in the sunshine. The blades of two wind turbines turned at speed in the stiffening breeze. There was something inestimably sad about the young couple who had built their perfect home out here on the edge of the cliffs, on the very edge of Europe, meeting tragedy and death on the streets of Paris. A shattering of dreams in a far-off land. Even to Braque, or perhaps especially to the policewoman, her home city seemed very distant now.
As what passed for a road swept around the ruined settlement of Bilascleiter towards the house, they saw two vehicles parked outside it. A white Jeep Cherokee and a Red Mitsubishi SUV. “Looks like she has visitors,” Gunn said. He drew their 4×4 into one side as the door of the house opened, and a woman with the whitest skin Braque had ever seen stepped out on to the gravel. She carried a holdall in one hand, her flame-red hair whipped immediately back from her face by the wind, and Braque that saw in spite of her advancing years this was still a very beautiful woman.
She barely glanced in their direction before throwing her bag on to the passenger seat and slipping behind the wheel. She started the engine almost before her door was closed, then backed out at speed, sending chippings flying up behind her, before turning sharply and accelerating off into the distance.
Braque said, “I thought that islanders were renowned for their friendliness. Who was that?”
Gunn watched thoughtfully in the rearview mirror as the red Mitsubishi vanished over the near horizon. “That was Seonag Morrison,” he said. “I don’t know her personally, but I do know that she works for Ranish Tweed. I think she might be an office manager, something like that.”
“A good-looking woman.”
“Oh, aye, a real beauty.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was the sound of the house door slamming shut, more than the roar of Seonag’s engine as she turned the key in the ignition, that woke Niamh.
She felt terrible. Long after Seonag had fled her room the previous night,
Niamh had lain awake wrestling with past and present demons. To be confronted again by what she had taken for some distant and long-forgotten adolescent infatuation had further unbalanced her already fragile equilibrium. It seemed extraordinary to her that Seonag could have kept that torch burning all these years in some dark and hidden place, undiminished by time, or marriage, or children.
Sleep, too, had seemed a distant and evasive memory, until sometime after first light, when she had slipped away into the most shallow and dream-filled unconsciousness.
Now she sat up startled, the recollection of waking all those hours ago to find a naked Seonag in her bed flooding back with painful clarity. She slipped quickly from the bed and hurried to the window, parting the blinds with her fingers to see Seonag’s red SUV disappearing beyond the ruins of Bilascleiter. And be startled by the presence of another vehicle, two figures clearly visible beyond the reflections on the windscreen.
She let the blinds fall shut and grabbed her dressing gown to wrap and tie around her, pushing her feet into slippers and sweeping the hair from her face with both hands. She was in no way ready to receive visitors. But a firm knock on the door, and the knowledge that her Jeep parked outside betrayed her presence, meant that she had little choice.
In the hall she blinked away the sleep from her eyes and opened the door to let in a gust of cold, salty air. She was shocked to see Lieutenant Braque standing there, dark hair pulled back from a tired and lined face, ponytail flying out like a flag behind her. A portly middle-aged man with a widow’s peak stood beside her, and although Niamh didn’t know him, she recognized him as a police officer from Stornoway. Her first thought was that there had been some unexpected development.
“What’s happened?” she said.
“Nothing more than any of us knew when you left Paris, Madame Macfarlane,” Braque said.
