White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  And so, one day, there they were, sitting in a large Manila envelope on my doormat: the deeds to Granny’s house. I opened the envelope, and nearly dropped the accompanying solicitor’s letter in shock as I read through the details. It was all mine. The stone walls, ancient wiring, wilting wallpaper, cobwebs everywhere and gutters full of moss and sprouting weeds. A house, on a cliff, in a remote part of Scotland where I had once belonged, and now did not. Granny was gifting my heritage back to me from beyond the grave, heaven knows why. Maybe there was no-one else to leave the house to, now that my parents were gone. Maybe there was another, more secret agenda.

  Either way, I was at a loss as to what to do with it.

  Taigh-Faire was pronounced a bit like ‘tie fareh’, although not exactly like that, because Highlands Gaelic is a special, ancient language with a very particular form of pronunciation. Although I was from the Highlands, I lost the tongue very early on in my life, and fumbled my way around the native words like a tourist when I first read the deeds anew.

  But I liked the name: ‘watch house’. It felt apt, considering its location on a cliff overlooking the sea, facing the ocean like a small, squat lighthouse, windowed eyes scanning the waves and all that lay beyond. There was a definite sense, from the photo stapled to the paperwork, of the house waiting for something. Watching.

  Watching what, I didn’t know, or much care about back then.

  Not until later.

  Ironically, I had been leafing through the papers and deeds associated with Taigh-Faire, and toying with the idea of selling Granny’s house, when my husband Tim decided he no longer loved me and ended our marriage.

  Just like that, after nine years.

  I had just set the papers to one side, and was standing in the hallway, cradling a half-drunk coffee in my cold hands when he came home from work. I heard his key slide into the latch, and wondered, as I always did, where the time had gone. So many hours, all of them creeping slyly past without comment, and I had achieved nothing of note with any of the time I’d been given that day. I waited for my husband, thinking that maybe he had made better progress against the inertia that hits when you reach a certain age, a certain phase of your life. Maybe he was winning, finding a clearer path through the dreary fog of mid-life, because I sure wasn’t.

  Be careful what you wish for, I thought, later. Because it turned out Tim was winning, and had found a path. It was just a different path to the one I was on.

  He walked in, saw me, and sighed. I could tell something was wrong immediately. My heart sank. I watched as he dropped his key wearily into the porcelain bowl on the hall stand, looked me up and down, and told me, without preamble, that it was over.

  And my first fleeting, split-second reaction, one that was quickly squashed down by a subsequent tidal wave of conflicting feelings, was a profound sense of relief.

  Thank god, I thought. Finally. Finally!

  But then the words sank in, really sank in.

  ‘I don’t love you anymore, Megan,’ he said.

  Just like that.

  The bottom fell out of my world. I slid down abruptly to the floor, as if gravity had suddenly intensified around me, and I sat there, feeling cold, and numb, and I wondered at the audacity of it, walking in through the front door as if it were any other day of the week instead of the first day of the end of my marriage, handing me the news that he didn’t love me as perfunctorily as if he were telling me the weather forecast. I suppose Tim thought he was doing the right thing by being quite so brutally honest with me, but was he doing the right thing for me, or for himself? I suspected the latter. Tim was a canny, business-like sort of person. The idea of a ‘clean break’ suited his personality better than it did mine.

  My second reaction, after gravity had normalised, was to throw my coffee mug at him from my awkward position on the floor. I have a finger missing on my right hand, my little finger, taken by a childhood accident, but I’m still a crack shot. The mug hit the wall immediately behind him and smashed, splattering liquid and pottery shards all over the tiled floor. Timothy just stood there, watching the coffee coalesce into little brown puddles all around him. I searched his face desperately for any traces of the man who had once loved me, and saw nothing there but weariness and unfamiliarity. As if we were total strangers, which I suppose, looking back, we were.

  And then, horribly, with an indecent disregard for everything that was happening, my brain threw a curveball into the situation, and Tim’s face blurred, and became the face of another man, for only a split second, but long enough to feel as if I had been punched in the stomach.

  Matthew.

  He smiled, and then became my husband once again.

  Did Tim find out? I thought, desperately hoping he hadn’t, because I was not sure I could bear the shame of it. It had been a slip, a pleasurable and wonderful slip, but a slip nonetheless.

  No, wait.

  That wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t a ‘slip.’ I didn’t know what it was, exactly. I certainly didn’t want to use the word ‘mistake’, because it had never felt like a mistake. It defied an easy description. Too brief a thing for it to be deemed an ‘affair’, it hadn’t even felt like cheating, although it most certainly was. Matthew was special to me. I trusted him. I loved him, dearly. I wouldn’t have slept with him, otherwise.

  Whatever it was, it had only been once, and I had been in knots about it ever since. I had never intended to hurt anyone. I had certainly never meant for it to end our marriage.

  But I knew somehow, with a flash of instinct, that this wasn’t it. I lacked the courage to ask Tim outright why he was doing what he was doing, but I knew it wasn’t my ‘slip’.

  It was something else. Some other reason why he didn’t love me anymore.

  My ego cried out, and I realised I was angry. I lashed out, and raged at him. He bore it. Then, I wept. He looked on with pity, but didn’t console me. I shifted tack, tried to get a hold of myself, act reasonably, maybe even coax a change of heart out of him. I wheedled and cajoled, hating myself for it, but he remained indifferent. He had locked himself down, tuned himself to a different frequency. I may as well have been trying to appeal to the emotional sanctity of a robot.

  Upon realising this, I erupted into one final, frantic tantrum as he looked on, blank-eyed. I threw things out of kitchen cupboards, tore up photographs of us, smashed a fruit bowl onto the floor, watching with wild disbelief as it shattered into a million pieces.

  None of it made a difference. It was wasted energy.

  Tim stood strong and silent in the face of the storm.

  Exhausted, defeated, I stilled as I thought about what to do next. If he wanted to end things, I couldn’t stay here. I wasn’t wired that way: I was not magnanimous in defeat. I needed to leave, but to go where? I could go to a hotel, I supposed. Or a friend’s house. Trouble was, I didn’t have too many friends. Well, I had one, but he was half the reason I was in this mess. My eyes roamed our house, the house Tim and I had bought together, furnished together, renovated together, grown apart in together, and eventually, an answer presented itself to me.

  The deeds to Taigh-Faire, sitting on the kitchen counter.

  Almost as if Granny had known.

  Looking at the paperwork, I felt as if something had dropped, somewhere, something heavy and definitive. As if a die had been cast, or a bell struck.

  So be it, I thought. Careful what you wish for.

  I gathered up the deeds, and the keys that came with it, and went upstairs to pack. Tim watched me as I did so, still wordless, still resolute. I found I no longer cared to know what he was thinking.

  I loaded up our van with the few personal possessions I could be bothered to pack, and left my husband behind in our house, closing the door behind me without saying another word, not even a goodbye. Nine years of marriage, dissolved in a single evening.

  Was I sad?

  I hardly knew.

  I drove for thirteen hours solid, through the night, t
hrough the dawn, through traffic jams and roadworks, through every type of temperamental spring weather England could throw at me. The drive up-country to Scotland, past Inverness and through the Highlands, was surreal. Cities and concrete gave way to jewel-green valleys, long misty lochs, and winding single-lane roads that were heavily potholed. I slammed the van into deep, watery craters in the tarmac more times than I could count, tiredness catching up with me the further I drove, but the van’s tyres remained sturdy. They held. Meanwhile, the views became more distracting, more poetic. The sky seemed higher, brighter, cleaner. The land rolled and bucked and dived about me, valleys and hills cradling the roads that grew bendier and narrower the further north I went.

  I stopped frequently, getting out of the van to stretch my back and my legs and squat furtively next to the vehicle if no toilet was to hand. I made my last pit-stop just after dawn. I was about twenty miles from my destination, and I pulled into a viewpoint that overlooked a small loch. Behind the loch, a mist-capped hillside rose, green and grey and purple with heather. Marked onto the hillside in a series of striking white lines, was the enormous, crudely rendered image of a man. It had long thin legs, and a strange, rude face. It carried something in its hand, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I had seen hill figures like this before, in the South. Usually, the figures were white horses, picked out in chalk, but there was a particularly fine giant on a hill in Cerne Abbas too. I remembered it had a large knobbled club raised high above its head, and proud genitalia pointing skyward.

  I looked at the giant above the loch for a while, enjoying the play of light on the hills as the sun rose from behind them and burned away the early morning fog.

  Then I got back in the van.

  I arrived, eventually, early on the morning of the first day of May. The van pulled into the driveway of the house my Granny had gifted me in her will, crunching over old gravel, the vehicle’s belly scraping over tall weeds that sprouted up between the stones. I stopped a few feet from the front door, killed the engine and yanked hard on the hand-brake, deciding to leave the van in gear because of the slope of the drive.

  And then, all was quiet.

  And I was suddenly home.

  At Taigh-Faire, the little squat barnacle house above a sandy bay that only a few hours before, I’d contemplated selling.

  Drastic, wasn’t it? Running off to Scotland. I could have taken myself to a hotel. In hindsight, I could have insisted Tim be the one to leave- we both paid the mortgage on that house, after all. I had just as much right to be there as he did. I could have dug my heels in, demanded that we work through whatever his issues were. I could have worn him down, fought for my marriage. Maybe. Tim was stubborn but logical, a reasonable sort of person, mostly, and I had the perseverance of a terrier shaking a rat by the neck if the occasion called for it. I could have appealed to his logic, given time.

  Maybe.

  But I hadn’t. Instead, I’d run. Perhaps a part of me knew, deep down, there wasn’t much point in trying to fix things. Perhaps a part of me knew, deep down, that you can’t fix something if the other person doesn’t want it to be fixed, not really. You can paper over the cracks on the ceiling, but sooner or later, the foundations will shift, and the cracks will reappear, because they never really went away in the first place.

  Admitting defeat was not in my nature. I have too much pride for that. But in this instance, I found I didn’t have a choice. Something told me that I had lost, that there was no going back now. My home was not my home anymore, and it nearly killed me to admit it, but that was the truth.

  So, out of spite, or desperation, or resignation, or all three, I had relocated myself to the wilds of Scotland, where I knew approximately nobody and nothing apart from the looming new reality of my own loneliness.

  And, as I sat there in the van, listening to the engine cool down after the long journey, it dawned on me just what I’d done, then, and how far I’d driven.

  And a strange, huge feeling came over me.

  A feeling of…

  What was that? I frowned, and tried to place it.

  Was it…?

  Yes, that was it.

  It was a feeling of return.

  2. Nothing by halves

  Of course, I reasoned with myself as I unbuckled my seatbelt. I must have been here before, as a child. Maybe more than once, before my parents left Scotland and headed for the south, chasing their dreams of higher wages and better job prospects. We had lived not too far from here, just along the coast in a small place called Poolewe. I had patchy half-memories of early morning fog and heavy dew, of dark slate and granite, of a fast-flowing river rushing and rumbling beneath a stone bridge, grey skies, purple and green and grey hills. Little sensory scraps of information that never added up to a whole memory. It was the same with Granny. I had vague, shadowy recollections of her, a thin, odd woman who always tried to get me to eat boiled sweets, for some reason. I’d never liked boiled sweets, never liked the way they stuck like glue to the crevices of your teeth for hours after you’d crunched down on them. That never stopped Granny trying to push them down my neck. Persistence, it seemed, was a family trait.

  Funny that I should remember that, and not the house, I mused, as I climbed wearily out of the van. Because really, Taigh-Faire was located in an incredible spot. The photographs I’d seen did not do it justice, not by a long shot. I did a three-sixty to take it all in, and felt my spirits stirring as I did so.

  The house sat on its rock shelf contentedly overlooking an endlessly distracting vista, which lay before me as if someone had painted it upon a giant canvas and hung it out to dry: Gruinard Bay. A wide expanse of deep blue water that spread lazily within rolling, lumpy arms of sandstone and gneiss. Torridon rocks, Mother had told me, after we’d left. Some of the oldest rocks in the world. I’d heard my Mother talk about the Highlands, about their beauty and how much she missed them, but nothing had prepared me for this. Everything was colour: the rich blue of the sea and the sky above, the pink-yellow sand, the deep grey shingle peppering the beach further along the coast, the green and silver hills, the browns and ochres and reds and purples and yellows of plants and wildflowers. It was almost too much. It hurt the eyes, this unanticipated paradise.

  I breathed in the fresh air, tasted salt on my lips. I squinted at the horizon, shading my eyes from the gathering strength of the sun. From here, I could see a low, long Island in the distance, just beyond the mouth of the bay, not far from the mainland. It held my attention, although I couldn’t say why, exactly. My head ached as I looked at it. Just a twinge, but distinct. I blinked. It looked too small to be livable, and I could make out only one detail, from here: that it was covered in tall, slender trees, pine trees. The sort that only sprouted needles from the very tops, while the trunks stretched out long, and thin, beneath them.

  How could I have forgotten this view? I thought, heart beating faster than it should, and I took a moment to watch the sun climb higher in the sky over my new territory.

  And then suddenly, without warning, I crashed. I realised where I was.

  Alone, in the middle of nowhere.

  To be precise: five hundred and ninety-eight miles away from the person I had been yesterday.

  Five hundred and ninety-eight miles away from the person I had once, in naivety, called my soulmate.

  What was I doing here? Really? What did I hope to accomplish by driving to the other end of the country? Tim and I would need to talk. There would be things to sort out, papers to sign. Assets to divide. Practicalities. So why was I here, outside the house that time forgot? Was there even a phone in this house? Electricity? I could see cables running along the outside walls, but had no idea if they were connected to anything.

  Mother always said I never did anything by halves, I thought, as I tried to find my footing. I stood in the drive of my new house, fiddling with the heavy door key that sat in my pocket. I thought of my life, then, as a series of chapters in a book. I had finished the previous ch
apter, and it seemed to me, on reflection, as I stood here with the rest of my life in my hands, as if not much of any note had really happened in that chapter at all, despite the length of it. A marriage, a job, a house, sure. But no children. No travel. A few friends, but an awful lot of time spent grinding through a routine that now felt like something we had done for the sake of it- because that’s what people do. Get up, go to work, come home, sleep, repeat. There had been love, at first, I could not deny that. But how long had it been since that love had faded, bleached like the pattern on fabric left too long in the sun? I didn’t like to think about it. It was scary, the notion that I had lived so long in the shadow of comfort and routine that I had forgotten how to…

  Never mind.

  Not now.

  I was too tired and fragile to start any in-depth analysis of the whys, and wherefores.

  Now was for moving forward, despite my fatigue and shock and bitterness. It was time to turn the next page, sink into a new chapter, and who knew? Maybe, just maybe, this one would be more remarkable.

  Ready or not, I thought, fingering the key again, but the thought rang a little hollow in the tired spaces of my mind. I gave the Island one last look, not knowing why I did so. My head twinged again, and I frowned. I needed rest. At the very least, a cup of tea.

  The house said nothing.

  It just watched, and waited for me.

  ​I unloaded the smallest box from the van, the one that contained my carefully packed word processor, and went to unlock my new front door.