‘Saskia, I don’t even recall saying that to you. If I did then it would have been meant as a joke. Honestly, I wouldn’t have tried to scare you as much as that, but I do remember I was very annoyed with her.’
‘Why?’ Saskia asked her father more calmly now. ‘Why would you even want to think of doing that?’
There was a silence.
‘Was it the roof? You had hurt your hand.’
‘Yes, yes. I had hurt my hand.’
‘Something more?’
Saskia waited. She knew the reason. Alessandra had told her. But she wanted to hear her father say it himself.
‘It was to do with a loan. I wanted to expand the business and she wouldn’t lend me the money.’
‘She doesn’t have any money,’ said Saskia. ‘She lives very frugally.’
‘All misers do,’ said her father bitterly. ‘I needed the money at that time and she knew it.’
‘But she can’t give you what she doesn’t have.’
‘She does. I know she does.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
There was a pause. ‘Because she lent me money before. In fact she gave me the money to start the business . . . and,’ he added casually, ‘a few other bits and pieces, off and on. But it was you,’ he went on with a rush, ‘it was you that decided it for us. After you took ill you were so upset. That was when we decided not to go back.’
‘I’d like to speak to Mum.’
‘Darling’ – her mother, usually so detached, distant, had words falling out of her mouth so fast Saskia could scarcely keep up with her – ‘you screamed and screamed. You had horrible waking nightmares. We could not get you to talk sensibly. You kept saying that you did not want to go back to Cliff House, and finally I agreed that you would never go back, not ever. And you made me promise never to speak of the house or Alessandra again, and not to talk about this to your father. Darling, I would have promised you anything, anything. We thought you were going to die. Then we thought you were losing your mind. After I agreed never to mention it again you got better quite quickly, and I kept my promise, so each year we made up reasons not to go there.’
‘My father told me a truly frightening lie about Aunt Alessandra.’
‘But he wouldn’t have done anything so deliberately cruel as to keep you apart. Yes, he was deeply hurt as a child, and still gets upset about it. And you know how he is, about’ – Saskia’s mother hesitated – ‘about blaming people for things. But he appreciates that Alessandra was sick in her mind for a while and should be excused her strange behaviour, and his mother, who was a kind woman, told me this too. She forgave Alessandra. In fact it was your grandmother Esther who asked us to visit Cliff House again. Before she died, she made us promise to take you to see Alessandra. We waited a bit, until you were nearly two years old, and then we went up there for a few days. You adored it, and Alessandra was besotted with you, so we kept going back. It was good for your father – the business stresses him and it made him take a break. And Alessandra and I got on well. I mean, she does have a certain obstinate way with her, but she has a fine mind, has read a lot, very knowledgeable—’
‘And you painted.’
‘Why yes, I did. I’d forgotten. In fact, some of my best stuff was from that time.’
‘Why did I never see any of it around our house?’
‘There’s no mystery to that. Because it sold, darling. It was good art and people bought it. I might come up and join you for a week or so, give you a hand with Alessandra when she comes out of hospital. I could paint a bit more. Your father and I could do with some time off from each other. It might help . . . things.’
Saskia said nothing. Her mother had never before acknowledged that there might be a problem with her marriage.
Saskia knew what her parents had told her was the truth, or as much as she would ever hear. They had probably wanted to go abroad anyway rather than spend time in the same place year after year. But it had been her, not them, who had not wanted to go back, all because of a stupid remark that her father had made on the train. Now he said he couldn’t remember saying it. Maybe he couldn’t. She would never know. At the time he was probably glad that it had happened, because he hadn’t wanted her becoming too attached to the sea. He said he hadn’t been seeking revenge, wasn’t using it as a way to pay Alessandra back for not giving him more money. Saskia would never know if that was the complete truth either. Her father probably didn’t know himself. He was so accustomed to bending the truth, adjusting things to suit himself, that even he wouldn’t know.
‘Hang on a minute.’ Her mother had slowed down. ‘Your father wants another word with you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Saskia’s father. ‘I’m really sorry if I upset you.’
A few minutes later Saskia hung up the phone. Her father had apologized. He had said ‘sorry’. Properly and contritely, not a form of words or an ‘excuse me’ type of sorry, but a genuine apology, seeking forgiveness. ‘I’m really sorry if I upset you.’ Saskia could not recall a single previous occasion where he had done that – taken responsibility for a mistake.
Saskia sat on the floor of the hall in the old house. The outline of the places where the furniture had once stood were clearly visible on the carpet: a chest of drawers on the stair landing, a table by the front door which might have held a bowl of fresh flowers.
Saskia got up and lit the storm lantern Alessandra kept in the kitchen. She went outside to the cellar under the stairs. The door creaked as she pushed it open and her shadow jumped before her. Saskia felt her heart-pace quicken but she was not afraid of the dark, she told herself, and she wanted to see what lay in the furthest reaches of this room.
She walked past the two bicycles, glancing at Alessandra’s with its grotesquely shaped wheel. Her fingers lightly touched the harpoon propped against the wall. It must have belonged to Darach. What fears her great-aunt must have had when she knew Darach had gone whaling. Many boats did not return. Ships were trapped and crushed by the relentless arctic ice. The iceberg that sank the Titanic had come from south Greenland.
Against the wall stood the group of old herring barrels. Saskia spread her hand upon the cliff wall. The face of the rock was solid, but stuffed in behind the barrels was a pile of broken wood. Saskia set the lamp down on one of the barrels and bent to examine the pieces. They had been chopped into bits with an axe. She lifted what looked like spars from an old chair, and then saw that they were part of a child’s cot. The wood was burnished mahogany and the light shone in its depths. Saskia knew that what she held in her hands was part of the cradle her father had slept in as a baby.
There were tears in her eyes as she came out of the cellar and closed the door behind her. She looked up at the great bulk of the house in front of her and then leaned her head right back and gazed at the night sky. Was that the Plough? The one the Americans called the Big Dipper? Big Dipper was a more obvious name – easy to see the outline of the ladle rather than the shape of an old-fashioned plough. One of the stars of that constellation pointed to the Pole Star.
Saskia raised the storm lantern high and turned to walk up the outside stairs. Twenty steps. How often had she done this as a child? She had expected all memories of her time here to come flooding back when the block of her childhood trauma had been removed, but they hadn’t. She would have to wait. It would happen when it would happen.
She turned the handle of the attic door and stepped inside. Across the floor a scuttering sound. Mice? She held the lantern low. Eyes gleamed quickly among the herring nets and were gone. Rats? Saskia shivered. She hoped not. It could be one or more of any type of similar creature. She had told Ben about hearing sounds in the room above her head at night, and how, not knowing what it was, it made her slightly uneasy. He had suggested that it could be rabbits. He said they might have burrowed along the cliff or found another way in. They wouldn’t stay in the attic but they might run about from time to time. Living mainly on the ground floor Aless
andra wouldn’t have heard these noises in the night.
The lantern cast shadows at odd angles throughout the attic. Saskia saw what she had previously thought was a bundle of blankets. In the light from the lantern the colour showed faded burgundy. She took an end of one with her hand and unfolded it. It was the curtains from the big front room of the house. Not torn down as her mother had said, but intact, and carefully folded in neat piles. Saskia picked up the shoe boxes containing the seashells and returned to the house.
First she went to her great-aunt’s bureau. She did not feel that she was prying. She had to know. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for, Alessandra did so little banking business. Saskia checked the dates of the dealers’ receipts for the sale of house furniture against the cheque stubs in Alessandra’s cheque book: the cheques made out to Saskia’s father. They matched. Alessandra had sold the household goods to support Saskia’s father’s business.
As she ate dinner Saskia laid out her shell collection on the kitchen table. In the third box she found the one she was looking for. She walked through to the bookcase in the big room and searched for a book about shells. Saskia began to study the pages and pages of coloured plates. When she was collecting shells at six years old she had been too young to seek out information like this. Now she saw the entry she was looking for and another secret of Cliff House was revealed to her.
Saskia put off starting her summer job and waited until her great-aunt had been home from hospital almost a week before she showed her the shell.
Alessandra picked it up and turned it over in her hand. She placed her thumb along the long curling lip. ‘How beautiful are the creatures of the sea,’ she murmured.
‘The day that I found this shell beside the rock . . .’ Saskia hesitated.
Alessandra met Saskia’s eyes with a steady gaze, and Saskia saw how much improved her great-aunt was from her time in hospital. The strength had returned to her voice and she was eating most of the food Saskia prepared for her each day.
‘I dreamed that I was crying that day,’ said Saskia, ‘but it wasn’t me. It was you. When you saw the shell, I remember now, you picked me up. The taste of salt on my face was tears. But they were not mine, they were yours. You told me it was a British great whelk. I was only six years old so I believed you, and my parents did not even look at it properly. But no British shell is that colour or size. It is a Great Stair Shell from the seas of the Southern Ocean where Darach went whaling.’
Alessandra placed the shell on the table beside her bed. ‘Darach found it on the shores of one of the islands of Japan and sent it to me. I used to carry it with me and it must have dropped from the pocket of my apron years ago. It upset me that day when I saw it. I recalled Darach, and how much I had lost. I think I lifted you up and hugged you so that you would not see me cry.’
‘He sent you many gifts.’ Saskia glanced at the double doors of the large wardrobe in Alessandra’s bedroom. ‘I’m sorry that I went into your private things. I was looking for clothes to bring to you in hospital and I unlocked your wardrobe.’ She paused and, as Alessandra said nothing, went on, ‘Why do you never wear any of those clothes? They are so beautiful.’
Alessandra clasped her hands together. Her fingers intertwined more loosely, Saskia noticed, rather than the stretched-tight clutching of the past.
‘It was too painful and I had to be careful.’
‘Careful of what?’ asked Saskia. She looked at her great-aunt seriously. ‘Alessandra, it would be better to talk about whatever it is that is worrying you.’
‘You say this with such conviction that I am beginning to believe you.’ Alessandra smiled and reached a hand out to stroke Saskia’s cheek. ‘We will talk, and I will tell you what happened to me when I was about your age.’
Saskia sat down by the side of the bed.
‘It wasn’t only my brother Rob who found love in Yarmouth town,’ Alessandra began. ‘One morning as I was at my work, topping the barrels with brine, I saw a young man looking at me. His name was Darach Keal. He was from the Western Isles and his boat had docked into Yarmouth. Darach means an oak tree in Gaelic, and he was broad and strong like an oak, with eyes that had the colour of the ocean in them. There was a fair setting up on the town brae and he asked me if I would be there on Sunday, and I’ – Alessandra gave a little laugh – ‘I said, “I might be.”
‘That night I took my best dress from my kist and ironed it. Chris and May brushed out my hair and on Sunday we all went to the fair. He was waiting for me. I found out later that he’d been standing since dawn on the road to the fair. He asked me to walk with him, and we walked and talked, and we found that we liked the same things. Darach had the Gaelic. It was his first language. He had poetry in his head and the stories of the Gaels on his tongue, tales of the faery folk and water sprites, of kelpies and silkies. We walked all day, and then, in the evening, on the beach under the stars, he said he would come for me to my father’s house.
‘At the close of the season I went home. One winter’s day his boat came into the harbour at Fhindhaven and he knocked on the door of Cliff House. My father was furious. He was not prepared to lose his housekeeper. But then he saw that I might leave with or without his permission, and he arranged with Darach that I could marry when he came back with enough money for us to set up house.
‘So Darach agreed to go away and come back again when he had the money. He knew that he would not make such a sum in herring fishing so he went to the whaling. He tried Arctic whaling to begin with, and then went to North America.
‘It was a weary winter for me. I began to knit him his own gansey to wear. I designed the pattern, chose the wools. It would be special for us. The moods of the sea and the brightness of the stars were in it. Moss stitch for the machair of the Western Isles and blackberry knots for the islands of his home. The colours were blue and brown, with yellow and grey.
‘The next year Darach came back for me. My father said he had not made sufficient money to keep his daughter and would not let me speak to him alone. By that time Esther was with us, expecting Rob’s child, and Rob was away to the herring fishing. She helped me slip away from the house one afternoon and I met Darach and we walked far from the town. He asked me to come away with him—’
Alessandra stopped in mid-sentence. Saskia, who had kept very quiet until now, said softly, ‘Oh Alessandra. Now you wish you had gone with him.’
‘But I couldn’t,’ Alessandra said with resignation. ‘I did not tell you all of the conversation my brother Rob and I had the morning he left, and I walked with him part of the way to Fhindhaven.
‘We stopped to say goodbye . . .
‘“Alessandra,” he said. “I worry about Esther and my unborn baby. If anything happens to me—”
‘“Dinna say that!” I cried.
‘“But if it did.”
‘“I’d take care of them,” I said.
‘“Our father frightens me at times.”
‘“No harm will come to them. I promise you.”
‘I told Darach about my promise to Rob, and Darach, being the man he was, agreed that I should stay in the house with Esther until Rob returned. As he left he said that when he next came back we would be married. This time, he said, he would go whaling to the South Seas. There was more money to be had there.’
‘So you didn’t break off your engagement to Darach?’ said Saskia.
Alessandra shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘though I know that some people in the village thought I did. Darach sailed from Aberdeen and was months away by the time we knew that Rob had been killed. It was a difficult time for all of us. Darach wrote to me and said that he would go on to Japan and make enough money so that we could take Esther to live with us when he and I were married. Not long after that, I had to send Esther and her child away, so that she and your father would be safe. I could not bear to tell her of my suspicions about my own father.’
Alessandra looked at Saskia. ‘It was a subject n
ot spoken of then.’
‘Even now,’ said Saskia, ‘victims of abuse say that they are too ashamed to speak out.’
‘Although I was ashamed of my thoughts I knew I was not wrong,’ said Alessandra. ‘My father became incensed with rage when he found out that Esther was not returning. He took the baby crib and smashed it. I think that was to punish me. Eventually I put the remaining pieces at the back of the cellar. Even now I cannot bear to go inside and see the broken bits lying there.
‘Then my father turned his gaze on me. I became more and more disturbed by his way of following me around the house, always there, watching, waiting . . . I became very frightened. I wrote to Darach. I did not tell him everything, only that I wanted to leave my father’s house at once. In the next parcel that Neil Buchan smuggled to me, Darach sent money. I prepared myself to leave.
‘But my father knew I was being secretive, and searched through my things. He found the money. He took it. He shut me in my room and said he would deal with me later, that there would be no escape for me. But early that night I climbed down from the window, left the house and began to walk south, away from Fhindhaven. I had only gone a few hundred yards when I heard steps on the road behind me.
‘He was pursuing me.
‘I left the road and ran onto the cliff path. He caught up with me above the rocks at the headland. He ordered me to come home. I refused. He tried to pull me back. He was tearing at my clothes. We struggled. With great force I pushed him away.’
Alessandra stopped speaking, her eyes huge and dark in her face.
‘Before my eyes he disappeared.’
‘He fell from the cliff?’ Saskia whispered.
Alessandra put her hands over her face.
Saskia’s heart trembled within her. ‘He fell from the cliff,’ she repeated.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ said Alessandra. ‘The water was high. I hoped he’d missed the rocks. I ran back to the house and tried to take our lobster boat out. The tide was running. The boat spun away from me. I ran to the Buchans’ house. Only Neil was at home. He cycled to the village and they launched the lifeboat. They found the boat run aground under the headland. Everyone thought my father had been in the boat when it was driven onto the rocks. It was many weeks later that his body was washed up further down the coast. No one thought it was anything other than a fishing accident. I decided to let them think that. I began to think if I told the truth I would be charged with murder.’ Alessandra paused. ‘Sometimes I still believe that that could happen.’
Saskia's Journey Page 16
