A door opened and Ellie said, ‘I’m ashamed that happened, Cal.’
He looked at her and then out across the bay, at the island. ‘What are they frightened of?’
‘Oh, they don’t want you coming here, spoiling their myth.’
She let out a brittle laugh. ‘The heroes of Eilean Iasgaich.’ The same laugh. ‘It makes me sick.’
She sighed twice, the second more despairing than the first.
‘Don’t you see? It’s money to them: it’s what brings guests to the hotel, day trippers to the island … It gets grants for building the cafe and restoring Hector MacKay’s house … even a television company making a programme. Everyone’s buying it. They’re not going to let someone like you try to rewrite history and take it away from them.’
For a while each of them watched the sea.
‘At least let me give you a lift to civilisation,’ she said.
Cal thanked her and asked if he could be dropped at the hotel.
‘That wasn’t exactly what I meant.’ The hotel belonged to the Raes. Of course.
On his way round the car to the passenger seat he noticed his rucksack in the back seat. ‘I thought you might need it,’ Ellie said after he closed the door.
Cal asked, ‘You know about my grandfather?’
‘Oh, I’ve heard the story all right.’
‘You don’t believe it?’
She shook her head. ‘No, not the one they’ve told me.’
A young woman with a ‘can’t you bother someone else’ expression was at reception when Cal entered the hotel’s small lobby. ‘I’m looking for Rachel Newby,’ Cal said. She didn’t speak but pointed to a corridor beside the stairwell behind her desk. Cal followed the passage to a lean-to sun-room in which there were a dozen tables. Four were occupied; three by couples and the last by Rachel, on her own, her back to him, beside an overgrown jasmine. She was in jeans, walking boots and a fitted cream jersey.
‘Nice shower?’ he said, pulling out the seat opposite her.
‘Actually,’ she replied, smiling up at him, her left hand touching her wet hair, ‘I’ve been swimming in the sea.’
He picked up a cup. ‘Do you mind?’
She shook her head. ‘Help yourself. I’ve had all I want.’
He reached for the coffee, poured half a cup and gulped it to stiffen his resolve while Rachel watched him.
‘Well, go on, tell me, how was your night?’
‘Two of Douglas Rae’s men dismantled the cairn.’
‘God, when?’
‘Early this morning.’
‘But you only built it last night.’
Cal poured more coffee.
‘Rae saw me. He watches the island from his house. He’s got a telescope trained on it.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
She sensed his evasion. ‘I’m not pumping you, Cal.’
‘It’s not that, it’s this situation. Well you know what I think about it.’ Then, as if conceding something to her, he told her about Sandy MacKay’s body beaching on the Lofoten Islands and the unexplained mystery of how he got there.
‘What do you think happened?’ Rachel asked.
‘I don’t know, but not what the records say. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to see the logbook for myself.’
Cal rubbed his hands across his face. He was tired and his eyes were prickling and sore.
He wanted to get it over with. ‘Listen Rachel – ’
But she interrupted him. ‘Please, Cal, there’s something I’d like to say.’
‘Ok.’
She looked out of the side window.
‘I was wondering …’ Her voice caught and she coughed to clear it. ‘Will you think about something?’ Cal made to reply but nodded instead.
‘It was good yesterday wasn’t it?’
Cal nodded again. ‘Yeah,’ he said guardedly.
‘We don’t fight when we’re together, do we?’ She looked up at him, hoping to find confirmation. ‘We only ever argue when we’re apart.’ He noticed her use of the present tense when he would have used the past.
She dropped her eyes. ‘Can’t we be together again, at least give it a try?’
He could have asked for time to consider it, to let her down gently. He could have said he didn’t think it would work. He could have talked about their differences: how he was happiest when he was alone, walking the tide line; how she was happiest when she was busy, with people around her. Instead he told her what he should have told her when they split. ‘I had an affair, Rachel, when we were together. I should have told you. I’m sorry.’
Now she was staring at him, angry. ‘Who, Cal? Who was it?’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter who Rachel.’
She jerked her head stiffly away. She didn’t speak for a while, but Cal knew she was crying. Her shoulders were shaking gently.
‘Nobody you know. …’ he tried.
‘You let me think it was my fault,’ she said eventually. ‘When? When did it happen?’
‘There’s no point Rachel …’
He could have repeated what he had told her when she read his note asking her to leave. She had rung him demanding an explanation and he had accused her of abandoning him, of putting her ‘precious career’ before him. He believed it then because it suited him. It gave him a justification for his behaviour. Now he said, ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t anything you did.’
He could have said something else in mitigation, about him being the wrong type for marriage, for putting down roots with another person. Instead, he stood up to leave. ‘I’m sorry.’
As he went back along the corridor to the reception desk he wondered why he’d thrown her away a second time.
The woman at reception said, ‘Did you find her?’
He didn’t answer. When the front door swung shut behind him, she said, ‘Suit yourself, why don’t you?’
Chapter 18
There was another passenger on the Postbus back to Lairg, and another driver. Cal didn’t catch either of their names but they seemed to know each other well enough to chatter about their respective families for the entire journey. Cal leaned against his door, watched the scenery go by and thought of Rachel, wondering if he’d ever see her again, surprised that he minded. The train from Lairg left on time, with a party of noisy schoolchildren in his carriage. He changed at Inverness and slept most of the way to Edinburgh. When he awoke, he was crossing the Forth Bridge. He opened his phone and scanned his emails. There was a message from DLG. ‘Hey, switch on the news NOW.’
‘I’m on the train. Why?’
The response came immediately. ‘Cal, get this. Remember the two matching feet, the one from Shetland and the other from East Lothian. Well, there’s this cop on the news saying they were wearing odd shoes. How weird is that?’
‘What type of shoes?’
‘I’ve got it: the left foot from East Lothian was wearing a Nike Air Max 360, the Right foot from Shetland a Nike Air Max 95. Both were American size 8.5, the same as British size 8s, men’s.’
‘Thanks.’
Before the train pulled in to Waverley Station, Cal rang his parents’ home. The tenants were called Jim and Annabel Richards. He hoped the husband would answer. Jim was an easy going man, less likely than his wife to mind Cal rummaging around in the back room for an hour or two. After four rings the phone switched to answer. Cal left a message. ‘Hi, it’s Cal, Cal McGill Can you return my call?’ He left his mobile number.
He rang again from the taxi rank and again on the cab ride south to Newington. He got no answer. He left another message just in case. It was early evening. Perhaps they were out. Perhaps they were away. The taxi pulled up outside the house, a Victorian semi-detached villa with a rectangle of lawn in the front garden and a laburnum tree. The knot of rope from his swing was still there. It had cut into the bark and become enveloped by it.
‘Are we just going to sit here?’ The tax
i driver sounded weary.
‘I’m waiting for someone.’ Cal replied. ‘If that’s all right …’
‘Fine by me, you’re paying.’
Cal had keys, but he didn’t like to use them without Jim or Annabel being there. He rang again and it went to answer. He’d give them another ten minutes before letting himself in. Then he saw he had voicemail. Maybe they’d rung when he was calling them.
‘Mr McGill. This is Helen Jamieson. I’ve emailed too. Can we meet?’
He switched to email. Hers was the only one unread in his inbox. It was the same brief message. ‘Can we meet?’
He replied. ‘Ok. Where? When?’
Her response arrived as he watched. ‘Tomorrow? 2pm? Your flat?’
Maybe she’d return his computers.
The smell was different, and the atmosphere. This part of the house used to be dank and musty, chill like an abandoned basement. At night it became a threatening underworld, a stairway of acid lagoons descending into the sulphurous centre of the earth where a monstrous creature lived, a thrilling place for an only child with too much imagination.
This was where he came on winter evenings after his tea when it was black dark. He would run up the front stairs, across the landing to the swing door which opened on to the back room and the old bathroom. The passageway at the top of the back stairs was his fortress. From here, he repelled the creature on its raids up the stairs and from here he launched his own raids down them.
Now the back porch smelled of fresh paint.
Cal let his hand run against the wall as he climbed the back stairs. The surface felt dry and papery, not the damp he remembered. Stepping on to the landing he expected the hardness of old linoleum but it was deep soft carpet. He misjudged the height of it and stumbled, steadying himself on the banister. At least it was still there.
His father had asked the letting agent to organise decorators between tenants. He was abroad and busy he’d said though the truth was he didn’t want the house to change and couldn’t bring himself to make the arrangements or to witness the make-over. A ‘magnolia paint and beige carpet job’ he said apologetically to Cal knowing his son felt the same way. Their memories of his mother were bound up in the house. She was in the haphazard detail of every room, the way the books were stacked in the sitting room; the claret paint in the hallway; the pulley she loved over the old Aga in the kitchen (‘Tenants don’t want cooking smells on their clothes, or knickers drying above the soup. Sorry,’ the agent told Cal firmly when he’d protested at a ‘site meeting’ to discuss the plans. Cal had never been back.)
Now, everything was bland, without memories, for strangers who paid to inhabit a living space, to use his parents’ furniture and to move it around to places and rooms it didn’t belong.
Cal resented creeping round the house like a thief. This was home even if it didn’t smell like it anymore, where his mother lived and died, the first of these in happiness, the second in pain, though she never cried, at least not in their presence. Cal had heard her one night when she thought the two of them were out; his father at a dinner; him at a student party. He had come back early because of her and opened the door to her wailing, not crying exactly but a keening which rose and fell with her breathing and which came from the downstairs bedroom they’d made for her in his father’s study. He listened to it until he’d felt furtive, then he shut the front door, purposely loud, to give her time to compose herself. The keening stopped immediately. She died a week later. He was seventeen, which hadn’t felt young before her death. It did afterwards.
His father’s disintegration followed. He took compassionate leave from teaching, then sick leave. He slept during the day, in his clothes, and paced his study at night, talking to her, Cal assumed, though he never went near enough to the closed door to hear properly. The change in his father surprised him more than the death of his mother. He was uncommunicative and padded about the house unkempt and unshaven. After months of it, Cal came downstairs one morning to find him washed and dressed with breakfast on the table. He announced he was enrolling with VSO to teach in Papua New Guinea for two years.
‘It’ll mean the house being rented while I’m away.’ Embarrassed, he added, ‘You wouldn’t want the responsibility of a big house like this. I thought we’d split the rent money and you’ll be able to lease a small place of your own.’
Cal moved into student lodgings during the term. In the short vacations he went on research trips to the west coast and the islands, or stayed with friends. In the summers he went to his father, paying for his trip with the rent money.
On one of these visits, a beach holiday in New Zealand, his father had said he didn’t think he could go back to the house in Edinburgh.
‘Why not?’
‘Oh it’s too full of memories.’
‘Why don’t you sell it?’ Cal had said.
‘No I couldn’t. I’d be betraying her. She loved that house.’
His father looked at him, his mouth flinching, with an expression of desolation. ‘Anyway it’s all that’s left of her.’
It was then Cal understood his father couldn’t go home. He’d become displaced, as Cal’s mother had been in childhood, as her mother Ishbel had been in pregnancy, and as Cal now was, standing on the gloomy back landing of his family home like an intruder. If displacement was his family’s inheritance it was a legacy which originated on Eilean Iasgaich with Uilleam Sinclair’s death.
In the gloom at the top of the back stairs, Cal fumbled for the padlock which he’d fitted to the store room door after helping his father carry boxes of his and his mother’s possessions to it. The lock was stiff: Cal had to twist the key four times back and forwards to open it. When he opened the door, the room was dark and smelt dusty; the closed shutters prevented the city outside from penetrating. Cal flicked on the light, a bare cobwebbed bulb dangling from the ceiling above the corner fireplace. Along the wall to the right were two rails of bagged clothes, his mother’s. In front of them were her personal things, packed away in large cardboard boxes.
In one of these boxes were three old photograph albums, square and squat with thick card pages and filled with sepia prints of family groups: the men with serious faces in tweed suits, watch chains and pigeon chests; the women, modest in hats, jackets and long skirts, with thin smiles, their lips pursed together; the children miniature versions of their parents, except for the mischief in their eyes. These were the Stewart forebears, his grandmother Ishbel’s family, merchants and shopkeepers from Aberdeen.
In the same box, he remembered, had been two ledgers with lined pages bordered with vertical columns in black, blue and red inks for entries of pounds, shillings and pence. These were Ishbel’s journals. He hadn’t known of their existence until his father found them in his mother’s chest when they were packing up the house. Cal flicked through a few pages before wrapping them in newspaper and storing them away – there had been too much else to do that day. All he could recall was his grandmother’s hand-writing which was neat and plain apart from her capitals which she drew with flamboyance. T appeared to be a favourite. When it was the first letter of a diary entry she gave the cross stroke a looping flourish which became a cloud with the rays of the sun shining through it, or spots of rain falling from it. Cal had wondered whether it illustrated her mood that day, or the weather. But he hadn’t been curious enough to go to the bother of unpacking her journals again, especially when tenants moved in.
Now he wanted to find them for the light they would shed on Eilean Iasgaich and the injustice done to his grandfather, his grandmother and the two generations which came after them. It was time for the truth to be told.
The first box he tried contained some of his mother’s books. The next had the contents of her roll top desk, legal papers mostly. Cal’s fingers fumbled clumsily at the tape of the next box. He opened the lid and inside was her wool, layered in colours, red on top, blue underneath, white, green and brown below; skeins as well as balls. He had packed it
that way to protect the photograph albums and the two ledgers at the bottom. Cal emptied out the wool and removed the books one at a time, taking off their newspaper wrapping. The journals were identical in size and appearance with black covers and triangular red flashes at the top and bottom corners. The spines were matching red. Inside the front covers, on the facing pages, in printed handwriting and blue-black ink, his grandmother had written her name and the dates each of her journals spanned. In the first ledger, she’d written ‘Ishbel Stewart 1939–1941’, and in the second ‘Ishbel Sinclair 1941–1943’. 1941 was the year she married Uilleam Sinclair.
Cal turned to the next page of the second ledger. The writing there was neat and economical, as he’d remembered it. Each day began with the date and a colon, followed immediately by his grandmother’s trademark flourish on the first capital letter. Cal read the first entry. It was October 22, 1941.
‘This is my first day on the island. My Uilleam carried me from the boat and Mrs Sinclair (I daren’t call her Margaret though she urges me to do so) was there to welcome me. The others were fishing or working the land and too occupied to greet me, according to Uilleam, though I know when he is trying to protect my feelings. I will work hard, be a dutiful wife and with God’s assistance I shall be accepted here.’
The next entry was October 24. ‘I must be patient. I must persevere. All will be well, I am certain of it. Uilleam is by my side and I pray to God.’
There were five entries on the first page. The last was dated October 28. ‘I have lived in dread of this day. Uilleam has gone to sea. He assured me he will be back soon. He did not say so but I overheard the other women talk of 10 days perhaps more. Our neighbours are the MacKays: the mother is called Ina, her daughter is Grace Ann and the boy is called Sandy. The boy is a delight and visits Uilleam often but neither Mrs MacKay nor Grace Ann will address me. Indeed Mrs MacKay shouts names at me. Mrs Sinclair told me it was on account of my marriage to Uilleam. Mrs MacKay had expected Uilleam and Grace Ann to marry, as had Mrs Sinclair ‘though it is of no importance to me if you do your duty and provide Uilleam with a son and me with a grandson’. Mrs Sinclair had provided a male heir for the Sinclair croft and a share-holder for the boat, now the duty was mine.’
The Sea Detective Page 18
