Bird of Passage

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked. The answer was not very well, which was hardly surprising, thought Kirsty. She might appreciate his work, but she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to live with it.

  He rocked back on his heels, hands in pockets. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  ‘I’m one of Peter Sharansky’s students.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember, You were at one of those gatherings of his.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘He’s a bit of an idiot, isn’t he?’

  She was taken aback. ‘I like him.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ He strode off into the other room.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ she asked. They kept a filter machine on the go for favoured customers.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no.’

  After that, Kirsty found herself hoping that Ash would come into the gallery while she was there and he did seem to visit more often than was strictly necessary. Whenever he arrived, she would offer him coffee, with her tongue tying itself in knots. Everything she said to him seemed foolishly naïve. She would ask him questions about his work and let him talk about himself and his ambitions, which he seemed more than happy to do.

  One afternoon, he came in just before closing time, when the Rose Street shops were putting up their shutters. She switched off the lights and locked the door, and they went out into the hot August evening together. Their footsteps echoed off the old stones as he tucked her arm through his. She could feel the warmth of him, his firm, wiry body, striding along beside her.

  ‘Do you fancy a drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not?’

  They went to the Abbotsford, its ornate interior full of BBC producers and tourists, and Ash had to shout to make himself heard. He drank beer and she drank cider and after two half pints, she felt lightheaded, because she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast time.

  They talked and talked. She told him about her own painting, and he said, ‘Why didn’t you go to Art School?’ and she explained how difficult it had been to get away from the island at all.

  ‘But Fine Art!’ he said. ‘That’s not what you want, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know what I want yet. And it’s certainly giving me all kinds of ideas about what I might want to paint.’

  ‘Well, good for you. I’m hungry, aren’t you?’

  They went to an Italian restaurant and ate spicy pasta, and laughed over the gigantic pepper mill, and the way the waiter brandished it over their plates. On the street outside, her hand found his little finger and as if it were something quite new in the world, they were holding hands. He walked her home to the New Town flat and when they got to the door, she wanted him to come in, but he said ‘Better not. Maybe next time.’

  At the last possible moment, he kissed her, his tongue dipping into her mouth, a sudden and shocking intrusion, leaving her full of the sweet taste of him and she floated up the stairs with a foolish grin on her face.

  Even after his exhibition had finished, Ash and Kirsty saw each other often. Sometimes she would go out for drinks or meals with him, late lunches or early dinners, and she would come in a bit tipsy and very happy, but he still seemed reluctant to begin a proper affair. For a while, he asked for nothing but her company. Once he bought her a big bunch of roses and she walked home through the Edinburgh streets carrying an armful of blooms, aware of how striking she looked, with her long red hair, and the pink roses. ‘Girl with a Bouquet,’ she thought, happily self -conscious.

  The problem was that he was married. His wife was living in London and he said that they were estranged, that he didn’t see much of her, but they had a daughter, a little girl called Hannah. He made no secret of the fact and was adamant that he loved his daughter, but not his wife. Kirsty knew that she couldn’t compete with a child, nor was she willing to try.

  Soon after the start of the autumn term, Nicolas Laurence got in touch with her again. He was in his final year, and working hard, but sometimes he would invite her out to the theatre or the cinema. Once he brought a picnic in a willow basket and took her for lunch in the Meadows behind George Square. They drank champagne and ate late strawberries and her friends and flatmates couldn’t understand why she wasn’t madly in love with him. Nicolas saw her with Ash on a couple of occasions and tried to question her about him, but Kirsty was deft at keeping the different compartments of her life separate and would only say that Ash was a friend and that he was helping her with her art. This was true. Ash was giving her lessons although her friends were sceptical about his motives. But Kirsty could have told them that the caution was all on his side.

  Just before Christmas, the girls decided to throw a party. They pooled their finances and bought wine and cider from the off licence round the corner, cold meats and chocolate covered plums from the Polish deli on Broughton Street, bread and cheese from Hendersons. Kirsty found herself wondering which of the men in her life to invite, but Nicolas settled the matter by going off to London for the weekend, which probably meant that Annabel had got herself embroiled in some kind of misery again. She was always having what Nicolas called ‘man trouble’ and demanding that her brother come and sort it out for her.

  Kirsty went to Marks and Spencer’s and found an empire-line nightie with a low neck and little sleeves that emphasised her breasts. It was in some pale, diaphanous fabric and she intended to wear it for the party, even though the flat was too cold for comfort. Anne had managed to bring a record player on the bus, all the way from Devon, and they were playing Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen at full volume. In later years, Kirsty could never hear Cactus Tree or Suzanne, without remembering that magical time in the New Town flat.

  Most of the guests left in the early hours of the morning. The other girls went to bed, but Ash lingered, helped with the washing up, made a pot of tea. He was unexpectedly fond of tea. He brought the mugs into the bedroom; she sat on the floor at his feet, loosened her hair, and began to brush it out.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Don’t do that, Kirsty!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I won’t be responsible for my actions, if you do!’

  She blushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘God’s sake, woman, don’t apologise! I suppose I’d better go as soon as I’ve finished this.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘Do you really want me to stay?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Then, come to bed, Kirsty.’

  After that, even when he was away, he would stay in touch, writing her ten page letters, ornamenting them with tiny pen-and-ink sketches, making them for her on trains, in offices, at his hotel table, late into the night.

  ‘I feel like a character in a Victorian novel. I’m distracted by love for you!’ He wrote as he spoke, with great emphasis.

  When she thought about him, afterwards, she would remember chiefly that fine tapestry of words and images, woven just for her. He seemed profligate with his affection at that time, and she loved him for his generosity. His letters were full of boyish intensity. ‘What do I have to offer you?’ he would say, and she would rush to reassure him, not realising that this was the literal truth. He had very little to offer her.

  In his Edinburgh flat he would insist that she work, insist that he teach her whatever he could and she was, and would remain, eternally grateful to him for that. The flat was at the top of a big house, on the Newington Road. He had his studio there, high up in the building. It was full of his painting things: canvases propped against walls, jars spiky with brushes, the smell of paint and thinner. It was what she aspired to and she adored it and him in about equal measure. Patiently, he showed her what he knew of drawing and painting, and she would work assiduously, until she was almost faint with desire for him. He would send her to bed to wait for him, and then get lost in some piece of work of his own. She would lie awake, desperate with longing, and when he came through, at last, would make love to her with a
passion that seemed all the more intense for his ability to defer the pleasure. They talked and touched and their words flew from one to the other, a tangle of words and fierce images that caught and held them together. ‘My red headed, shiny girl, whose face collapses with love when she looks at me,’ he called her.

  Afterwards though, it struck her that there had been a kind of cruelty about all this. They were never an equal partnership. She had always been early for their meetings however hard she tried not to be; he had always been late. The fact remained that, whatever he said, whatever stories he concocted to explain everything, his wife was still a significant presence in his life.

  Her things were everywhere in the flat. Kirsty couldn’t ignore them. Joanna. That was her name. Ash called her Jo. Jo was everywhere. Everywhere and nowhere. And she was not the villain he had painted her. Ash had been lying. Ash lied as the skylark sings and believed implicitly in his own fantasies. There was little evidence of the child, beyond a couple of teddies perched on a window seat and a yellow baby cup in the kitchen cupboard, but there was a pink toothbrush and a woman’s dressing gown in the bathroom, tubes of make-up and a bottle of Rive Gauche in the bedroom, even – on one occasion - a carefully arranged platter of fruits and vegetables on the kitchen table that may well have been placed there by Ash himself. But for some reason, Kirsty associated it with Joanna. And she began to wonder just how real their separation was. She and Ash bickered about it. She tried to force some kind of declaration out of him but he clammed up. Maybe Joanna was his safety net, his insurance against making a commitment to anyone else.

  One day, when Kirsty had been in the flat painting for an hour or so, Ash took a phonecall and came rushing into the studio in a panic, taking the brush out of her hand, hustling her out of the room and out of the flat, gabbling about ‘a sudden emergency’ and how he had to go away, now, immediately. It was like a scene from a farce. At the time, she left meekly enough, but in retrospect, she thought that Joanna had probably been on her way from the station.

  When she tried to discuss these things with him, tried to have some kind of debate, his voice took on the whining, haranguing tone of somebody who has been storing up points in his head and is now intent on making them.

  ‘You’re so bloody needy,’ he said.

  She saw that this was how it always would be. She shed a great many tears and her university work suffered, but self preservation finally took over, and she ended the affair, there and then, refusing to have any more to do with him.

  She had come to the realisation that – while she had been wounded by his lies - she only really cared about her work. If she truly loved anything, apart from her family, it was that. But her work itself was all tied up with the island: the plants, the stones, the sea and sky, or even the small things, the way a leaf lay over another leaf, the way the light sat on the water. If she could put it into words, then she probably wouldn’t have to paint it. The transitory nature of everything fascinated and saddened her. It had something to do with Ash, with her attraction to him and with all he had taught her, but it had more to do with her childhood and her friendship with Finn, the way he had come and gone from her life, come and gone from the island. Nothing held. Not for a minute. You might grasp something and it was gone. You might try to transfix something and it would die, like a butterfly on a pin. You might capture something on canvas, but you were only capturing change itself.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In the summer of her second year, Kirsty took a break from the gallery and went home to the island, intending to stay for a couple of weeks before returning to Edinburgh. But almost as soon as she got back, she realised that her mother was ill, seriously ill in a way that made Kirsty breathless with panic. Over the past year, Isabel had found it increasingly hard to swallow anything but the softest food. Now, she seemed to be living on soup and porridge and she had lost a tremendous amount of weight. In the warm summer weather, Kirsty was alarmed to see how thin her mother’s arms and legs had grown, although she seemed to be trying to disguise it, wearing loose clothes and cardigans. She looked like a skeleton in a dress.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you say what was going on?’

  ‘You seemed to be having such a good time in Edinburgh – we didn’t want to worry you. It’ll be alright. Once they find out what’s causing it, they’ll sort it out, never fear.’

  But they didn’t seem able to sort it out and her mother’s illness tinged the remains of the summer with its own peculiar misery. Meals became an agony of suspense, while Isabel tried to swallow. Soon, food, other than the most bland puree, made her cough, then choke. Kirsty came to dread the hunted look that accompanied every mouthful. Alasdair seemed to think that it was all in her mind. He kept telling Isabel to ‘keep going, lass’ as though sheer perseverance could make her well again. There were trips to a mainland hospital for tests, procedures, treatments that seemed to work, but only for a little while.

  ‘I feel much better,’ said Isabel after each change of medication.

  And for a time, this cheered Alasdair up. ‘Aye lass, I reckon that’ll do the trick,’ he said.

  She was always hopeful, always positive, but Kirsty didn’t think she was getting any better. Soon, there were spells of devastating fatigue, when all she could do was lie on the couch, listening to the radio or reading while Kirsty kept her company. Then one of her doctors told her that she ought to get more exercise, so Kirsty persuaded her to walk down to the village. But only a few hundred yards down the track, she stopped.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kirsty’ she said. ‘I just don’t know if I can. I feel so weak.’

  ‘Come on, mum!’ Kirsty chivvied her along. ‘You have to build up your strength, you know.’

  ‘I’m trying. I’m really trying.’

  Isabel struggled on for a few hundred yards, but before they reached the main road, she collapsed onto the muddy bank. Eventually, Finn came by in the jeep, and he and Kirsty helped Isabel inside. For once in her life, Isabel seemed glad that she had Finn to lean on.

  ‘Thank-you,’ she said, and smiled at him, although in her exhausted state it seemed more like a grimace.

  ‘I’ll be better soon,’ she kept saying.

  It made Kirsty’s heart ache to hear her, but she conspired in the fiction. She so much wanted it to be true that she clutched at any sign of hope, however faint. Afterwards it seemed to her as though her mother’s doctors had entered into this conspiracy as well, endlessly prevaricating.

  ‘Oh we’ll get to the bottom of it sooner or later, Mrs Galbreath,’ they kept telling her.

  Kirsty wondered if it was because doctors were as fearful of death as their patients. Incurable illness was such a defeat for them that they couldn’t bear to contemplate it either.

  She kept having to ask her grandfather for money. Though he gave it, gladly, she was always aware that he had no cash to spare either. The farm was barely profitable, and rent must be paid to the estate. She racked her brains for ways to earn some money for herself, but there was little work to be had on the island. Besides, most of her time was taken up with helping her mother to and from hospital, doing the housework, cooking meals which Isabel couldn’t eat, (though Finn and her grandfather made short work of them) or catching up on the farm paperwork, the letters and accounts that Alasdair had long neglected.

  ‘What did we do without Kirsty?’ he said, over another plentiful breakfast.

  Finn glanced across at her but his sympathy was more than she could bear and she got up to clear the plates. When he came over to help her, he touched her hand in a gesture of solidarity. She squeezed his fingers in return and then busied herself at the sink. Later, when Alasdair and her mother were in bed, he came into the kitchen again and threw himself into a chair, tugging off his boots.

  ‘It’s a bugger,’ he said, and she knew he wasn’t only talking about the mud clinging to the soles.

  ‘What am I to do, Finn? I can’t go back, can I? I ca
n’t leave you and my grandad to cope with this.’

  You can’t give up half way through your course.’

  She came and sat beside him, and leaned on his shoulder. She felt profoundly weary, too tired even to think. ‘I can’t go back right now, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Can’t you – I don’t know – take a year off? Isn’t that allowed?’

  ‘I could always ask. Explain the situation.’

  ‘Once they get to the bottom of it, once they find out what’s happening, and she’s better, you could go back. Even if you’ve missed a year, you could just pick up where you left off, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I could try.’

  She requested and was given a deferral of her course for a year. Dr Sharansky was very understanding.

  ‘These things happen,’ he wrote. ‘Take whatever time you need, keep reading, keep painting, and come back when you’re ready.’

  Nevertheless, Kirsty felt as though her ambition and her creativity had been put on hold, although she still painted in the quiet of her own room or outside, with a folding easel. Finn framed up the landscapes, and the village shop and the hotel displayed them. The more conventional views sold quickly, although the ones she liked best, those which were more experimental and abstract, weren’t so popular. She wondered if she could apply to the Arts Council in Edinburgh for a bursary. It might buy her some time. But would the time be available when so much of it had to be devoted to Isabel?

  During one of those autumnal warm spells that often come like a late blessing to the West of Scotland, Kirsty was lying in the stuffy box bed with the weight of the cat on her legs. He divided his favours about equally between Kirsty and her mother. She had been asleep for an hour or so, but something had wakened her from a peculiarly unpleasant dream, the details of which slid away from her almost immediately, leaving only a sensation of misery. She lay there, straining to hear, but the house was quiet. Fish Face stretched and burrowed into the coverlet, flexing his claws. She closed her eyes and had a sudden sense of things spiralling out of control. The walls of the bed were closing in on her. Panic seized her. There was a ringing in her ears and a tingling sensation in her fingers. She felt unreal. If she were to look at herself in a mirror, she wouldn’t recognise what she saw there. She opened her eyes, got up on wobbly legs and went to the window. On the bed, the cat shifted, yawned widely, and settled down again in the warm space which she had vacated.