One day, sitting gazing out of the window, while Kirsty sliced vegetables for the evening meal, she said, ‘Nicolas looks like a man in love to me.’
‘Who with?’
‘You. Has been for years hasn’t he?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You could do worse, you know!’
‘I still kind of want to go back to Edinburgh.’
‘Well, there’s that too. But what about Ealachan? Who wouldn’t want to say yes to a place like that? I’d have given anything for...’ she trailed off.
‘I don’t want to play at houses. I want to paint.’ Kirsty spoke more sharply than she had intended. ‘That’s all I really want to do.’
‘You could always do both. Has he asked you to marry him?’
‘No! Of course not.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he does, Kirsty. What would you say?’
‘I can’t think about anything until you’re sorted, mum.’
‘You’d be mad to turn him down.’ It would have been her dream, thought Isabel, imagining a proposal from Malcolm.
‘I’d be mad to say yes if I didn’t love him.’
‘You just look right together. You’re good friends and that’s what matters in the long run. Besides, who else are you going to find in this place?’
‘I don’t intend to stay in this place.’ Kirsty faltered. ‘Mum, I want to paint. I want to do more than get married and have babies. But I can’t think about anything except you, right now, and then there’s grandad. He isn’t getting any younger either.’
‘Finn. There’s always Finn. He’ll help with the farm.’
‘That’s not fair. It isn’t his responsibility.’
‘But he wouldn’t walk out on your grandad, would he? Listen Kirsty, if I’d had someone as rich and lovely as Nicolas Laurence who wanted to marry me, and I liked him the way you so obviously like him, I’d have bitten his hand off!’
‘I wonder what Finn would say?’
‘This has nothing to do with Finn. It’s none of his business. He’s had a good home here all these years. Better than he deserved, I’m sure. But you’ve outgrown him.’
‘You don’t outgrow your real friends, mum.’
‘However close you think you are, he’s still the hired hand. Not a bean to his name. And no prospects either. I know it shouldn’t matter, but there’s a world of difference between the two of you now.’
‘I don’t want to talk about this any more.’
‘And it isn’t as if your grandad could leave him the farm. That belongs to Nicolas.’
‘You sound as if I’ve thought about marrying Finn. I never have. Why would I?’
‘I’m relieved to hear it.’
Sometimes, Kirsty felt as if she wanted to pack a bag, get on the first ferry of the day and never look back. She would go to Italy or France, and paint, make a new life for herself, forget about all of them. She couldn’t do it, of course. But the prospect of leaning on Nicolas instead seemed very attractive. He was making himself indispensable, and she loved him for his kindness, his gentleness, his concern for her. It seemed churlish not to return such affection.
Isabel had been right. When Nicolas asked Kirsty to marry him, he didn’t exactly get down on one knee but they were in the conservatory at Ealachan, sitting in green Lloyd Loom chairs, and he leant over, took her hand and said, ‘Christine, my darling, you will marry me, won’t you? ‘
She looked at him in dismay. ‘Nicolas, I can’t possibly make up my mind while my mother is so ill.’
He was crestfallen. ‘I do realise that, and maybe I shouldn’t have asked you just yet. But I want you to know my feelings.’
‘I do know your feelings. You’ve made them quite clear.’
‘Have I?’
‘Of course you have.’
He looked so uncertain that she leant over and kissed him. She suddenly felt very fond of him and very sorry for him.
‘Well, just so long as you know. And please – take all the time you want. But I think we could be very happy. I adore you, Christine, always have done.’
‘As soon as I can think about something other than my mum, we’ll talk about it.’
He seemed satisfied with that. Perhaps he thought that it was a foregone conclusion. Of course she would marry him. She would be crazy to turn him down, wouldn’t she?
To all intents and purposes, the operation had been a success. Isabel could eat again with some semblance of normality, but the doctor had told Kirsty and her grandfather that the tumour itself was inoperable. Isabel knew the truth about her illness, but never acknowledged it. She sat outside in the garden, watching things grow and blossom. She kept talking about what she was going to do in the future, ‘when I’m better’ but they could see that she was getting weaker by the day. She complained of aches and pains in her legs and in her shoulders. The district nurse came along and said it could be rheumatism, but Kirsty and her grandfather knew it wasn’t rheumatism. Kirsty was very frightened. She had to be brave for all of them: herself, her mother, her grandfather who seemed bewildered by imminent tragedy.
Which was why Ealachan House was such a refuge. And Nicolas was so kind to her when she was there. Nothing was too good for her. He gave her flowers from the gardens and he sent baskets of fruit to tempt her mother’s appetite: apricots from the greenhouse; strawberries and raspberries from the fruit cages. When he went to the mainland, he always fetched a gift of some sort: scent, jewellery but also good drawing paper and canvases, expensive brushes, packs of charcoal.
Finn carried Isabel about like a child, wherever she wanted to go, and sometimes she said, ‘Thank-you Finn. You’re a good lad you know.’
The first time this happened, he looked so surprised that Kirsty almost burst out laughing, but Isabel’s change of heart was disturbing. He had always been a cuckoo in her nest. Kirsty would have been happier with the old abrasive Isabel.
One evening, Finn came into the kitchen and put a glass lemonade bottle down on the table.
‘What’s that?’
‘Spring water. From the Well of the Winds. I managed to find the place again. I nearly got lost, and it was getting dark, but I found it.’ He had been racking his brains for anything that might lessen the burden on Kirsty.
‘Oh Finn…’
‘Well, it’s worth a try, isn’t it? Anything’s worth a try.’
‘How do you think I should give it to her? Do you think I should boil it up and make tea with it?’
Finn shrugged. ‘Mightn’t that…’
‘Spoil it? Maybe I’ll just make it up into orange squash for her. She’ll never know.’
Isabel never knew. But the water didn’t help. Afterwards, Kirsty and Finn wondered if they should have told Isabel what they were giving her. Perhaps that would have made all the difference. Perhaps knowing that she was drinking the water of the Well of the Winds would have helped. Or perhaps not.
Nicolas’s sister, Annabel, and a couple of his old school friends came visiting. Annabel was tall, slender and elegant as her mother, with sleek blonde hair. She wore sunglasses perched on top of her head, even on the island, and chiffon scarves that blew out in the wind. Nicolas took the visitors down to the hotel for a meal. He had invited Kirsty too, but she cancelled at the last minute because her mother was having a bad day. The newcomers were in the bar afterwards, and Finn was there as well, just sitting by himself, having a quiet beer.
‘Take a break!’ Kirsty had said to him, forgetting that Nicolas and Annabel would be in the hotel. ‘Go for a walk. Have a drink. No point in all of us taking the strain at once.’
Finn could only muster a little compassion for Isabel. She had never been kind to him but he found the change in her disturbing. He knew how he ought to feel, saw the people around him feeling love and sympathy, but he couldn’t identify those feelings in himself, and that alarmed him. He was truly sorry for Kirsty. If he could have taken her pain upon himself, he would have done it without a moment’s thoug
ht. But he found himself struggling to give her words of comfort. Instead he would work quietly and diligently, as he always had, hoping that his actions would speak louder than Nicolas’s words. He was jealous of Nicolas, jealous of his easy manner, his money, his influence, jealous of all the ways in which he could be of help to Kirsty.
His mood wasn’t improved when Nicola, Annabel and the London visitors started whispering and glancing over at him.
He heard one of them say, ‘The natives certainly are revolting tonight!’
Even when they were trying to be quiet, they had voices that would cut through glass. And tact was never their strong suit. It didn’t seem to cross their minds that Finn might be hurt by their comments. Or perhaps they didn’t care.
He tried to ignore them, but then he heard Annabel say, ‘What in God’s name does your lovely Christine see in that moron, Nicolas?’ Finn was more upset by the way she said ‘your Christine’ than by the word moron. He had been called worse. Much worse.
‘Oh well, I don’t suppose she sees anything in him at all,’ Nicolas replied. ‘But my Christine isn’t one to ignore her old obligations when she’s going up in the world.’
Afterwards, Finn didn’t remember how he got there, but he suddenly found himself squaring up to Nicolas. He’d have knocked him down if he’d had the chance. Nicolas was fit, but Finn was bigger and stronger and full of rage. He could feel it vibrating through every molecule of his body. The barman was quick off the mark though. Helped by a couple of trawlermen who were drinking at the bar, he grabbed hold of Finn and held him back. Nicolas and his friends left, but not before one of them had called him an illiterate Paddy bastard.
Back at Dunshee, he told Kirsty all about it, but he didn’t get the sympathy he expected. In the old days, she would always have taken his side in any dispute, especially with the Laurence family. But there had been some subtle change in her allegiance.
‘You shouldn’t get involved,’ she said, furiously. ‘I hate it when they have a go at you like that. But you shouldn’t have given them the opportunity. You should just have left.’
‘Oh aye,’ said Finn. ‘That’s right. Take his side!’
‘I’m not taking anybody’s side. I just can’t be doing with this kind of hassle. Not right now anyway!’
A few days later, when the visitors had left, Nicolas came up to the farm. ‘You really ought to have a word with that tinker who works for you, Christine,’ he said, casually. ‘Otherwise I might be obliged to give him a good kicking one of these days.’
All the tensions of the past few months boiled up inside her.
‘You and whose army?’ she asked him. ‘You and whose army Nicolas? What did you expect him to do when you were so horrible to him? He’s my good friend, but you treat him like some kind of pariah. And I wouldn’t go bragging about giving anybody a good kicking if I were you! He could knock you flat with one punch.’
Nicolas was dismayed. She looked as though she wanted to punch him herself. There was something about her rage that reminded him of Finn.
‘I hate you!’ she told him, furiously. ‘I hate you, Nicolas Laurence!’
He backed down and tried to dismiss it as a joke. He could see that she was really upset, so he had the good grace to apologise to her if not to Finn. But he still put it all down to her fragile state of mind. He kept saying ‘Sorry, sorry, Christine, I’m so sorry.’ And he seemed to mean it.
Finn was sulking. If Kirsty went near him, he just shrugged her off. He wouldn’t even let her sit near him. He sprawled on the lumpy kitchen sofa next to the range, reading the newspaper, slumped there with his long legs stretched out, so that she had to step over them every time she walked past. Isabel and Alasdair had gone to bed and they were alone in the kitchen together. She finished the washing up and tried to sit down next to him but he was having none of it. He stood up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve got stuff to do outside.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
He shrugged. ‘Do you know, I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, Kirsty.’
She was very shocked. He never swore, or not when she was around, anyway.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I’m fucking sick of it, if you must know. Sick of the way you treat me!’
‘How do I treat you?’ she asked. ‘And you don’t have to swear at me.’
‘There you go again. Ordering me about.’
‘When did I ever order you about?’
The frustration and rage boiled up inside him all over again.
‘I think you treat me like shite!’ he said, viciously. ‘You use me. When you want a bit of comfort or a bit of company, you think I’ll always be waiting for you with open arms. And you seem to think I’ll be grateful for any crumb of affection you throw my way. Well not any more – Christine!’ He said it just the way Nicolas said it, except with a sneer in his voice.
He tried to go out of the kitchen but she barred his way.
‘Will you move?’ he said.
‘Or you’ll what?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Or you’ll what? Oh don’t be so bloody stupid, Finn !’
‘That’s right. I’m a thick Irish bastard. A moron. That’s what they used to tell us we were. Thickos. Charity cases. And it seems to me that I still am. I’ve just exchanged one form of slavery for another.’
He took her by the shoulders and put her out of his way so hard that he bruised her arms. She could feel the marks of his fingers. She went up to bed, and wept into her pillow. She thought he might come up and apologise but he didn’t. She cried herself to sleep, but very quietly, so that neither her mother nor her grandfather would be able to hear her.
The next morning, however, he intercepted her in the yard. He could hardly look at her.
‘I’m sorry.’ He stretched out his hand and she saw that he was holding something out to her. It was a tiny piece of flint, beautifully shaped.
‘An arrow head!’
He had found it up at Hill Top Town, one of his few treasured possessions. People on the island used to call these things Elf Shot, believing that they were made by the fairy folk, the daoine sidhe. Finn had spent half the night making a little hole in one end, so that he could put it on a fine leather thong and made it into a pendant for her. He took it from her and put it carefully over her head, his long fingers brushing her hair. She felt the static raising the strands of hair, a small tremor against her scalp.
The last week of her mother’s life was surprisingly quiet. The inevitability of the ending calmed them all. The very last thing Isabel said was, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Kirsty?’ She slipped into a coma after that, and only stirred when the pain broke through the morphine. The nurses kept her pretty much drugged so she didn’t suffer acutely. She just lingered on. Kirsty could hear her breathing, rasping. That sound would stay with Kirsty for ever. She kept waiting for it to stop or change in some way.
Kirsty stayed beside her mother’s bed. After a while, she found herself whispering into the pale pink shell of her mother’s ear, ‘You can go now mum. You can go, if you want to. I’m ready for you to go.’ But still Isabel lingered. Kirsty wondered if it was she herself who was keeping her mother there. Maybe Isabel knew that Kirsty couldn’t bear to lose her. Maybe that was why she was reluctant to go, even though her body was worn out. Alasdair came in and out of the room, but kept starting to cry, saying it’s unnatural, saying it should be him, laid there, dying.
She wouldn’t let Nicolas or Malcolm into her mother’s bedroom, although Malcolm came up to the house with his son, his face grave and strained. Not at the end. She didn’t want either of them to see her like that, but especially not Malcolm. It seemed like an insult to her dignity. Isabel looked so sad. Not awful, just sad. Kirsty kept remembering Shakespeare’s line about the dying Falstaff: ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and he babbled of green fields.’ Her mother’s nose had gone strange and sharp and
fine, exactly like an old fashioned pen nib. It was very odd to be sitting there and thinking of Shakespeare getting his images right, while her mother lay dying.
Finn sat with her whenever he could, and the fact that he was there was enough. Sometimes an image came to her of Finn, holding her in his strong hands, holding her steady. Sometimes she imagined what it might be like if he were to let go of her altogether, let her fall. She knew that she might go tumbling down forever. She wanted to say to him, ‘Don’t ever let me fall, Finn. Don’t leave me. Don’t ever let me go.’ But it seemed daft, so she never did.
He wasn’t very sad about Isabel, and he didn’t pretend to be. Kirsty admired him for that. She had never been a mother to him. He had lost his mother and no replacement would do. He sat at the opposite side of the bed, and when Isabel died, he held Kirsty’s hand, and Kirsty held Isabel’s hand, and it was alright. It was like pushing somebody onwards and outwards.
The difference between life and death was amazing. Somebody could be literally ‘at death’s door’ but when they had gone, it really was as though they had stepped through a door. Her mother was simply not there. Kirsty felt surprised as well as sad. It was surprising.
They had to delay the service for a week, since there were so many people who wanted to come from the mainland: all the Glasgow relatives, and one or two cousins from Canada as well. Kirsty wished that a few more of them had come to see Isabel while she was alive, and not now, to watch a box being put into the ground.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was the empty time between the death and the funeral. No man’s land. A grey space of a week, a blank page in a diary. The closed coffin, with her mother’s body in it, sat in the room where she had died, surrounded by flowers. The scent of lilies was overpowering. Nicolas had sent them up from the Ealachan gardens. Isabel had loved lilies, but Kirsty disliked them. She would have preferred her mother to be surrounded by the wild flowers of the island, but only Finn understood and she knew that other people would find it strange. He had brought her a posy for herself: late honeysuckle and heather, a bizarre combination which smelled very sweet. She had had a terrible, terrifying impulse to sketch her mother in those last few weeks, the way emotions seemed to flit across her thin face, distantly, weather seen from space, and then the ultimate tranquillity of death, the complete absence of expression, of the person she had once been, utterly and irretrievably gone. But her courage had deserted her, and instead she had found herself sketching the honeysuckle and the heather, over and over again.
Bird of Passage Page 17
