‘Yeuch.’
‘It’s a bit spooky. He’s down the shore. Sitting on a rock. I think it must be the shore at Dunshee, though it’s hard to tell. You think the eyes are following you. But they’re not really watching you at all. They’re watching the artist. And the expression on the face. I can’t describe it. You’d have to see it. There’s a heron in the picture. And just the suggestion of Hill Top Town in the background, but you wouldn’t know that, if you didn’t know the place. It’s the most wonderful piece of work. It’s Finn, looking absolutely gorgeous and he’s gazing straight out of the canvas at my mum. A real woman’s perspective on her lover. You don’t often get that. They’re so ...complicit. That’s the word. As though they share some amazing secret. And yet – here’s the really spooky thing – there’s something wrong. You don’t see it at first. I didn’t. But he has his hand, down by his side – and there’s a knife, a dagger of some sort, in his thigh. Somebody has stabbed him. And he’s holding it, and looking at her. With love.’
‘God’s sake, India, it sounds dead creepy. Just like him. You’re welcome to it. I certainly don’t want it.’
‘I love it. It’s so sensuous and so beautiful. I put it in a cupboard whenever dad comes to visit.’
‘Just as well. So what were the drawings he gave you?’
‘They were mostly of Finn as well. Charcoal sketches. Very strange and disturbing. Hard to describe. I can show you some of them, if you like.’
‘No thanks, Indie.
‘I keep feeling I should show them somewhere though. Arrange an exhibition. They’re so good. But I can’t do it. They seem so very personal, somehow.’
‘Keep them. Do what you like with them.’ Flora hesitated. ‘I hope to God I never fall in love like that.’
‘Most people go through life looking for that kind of passion. Reading about it. Hankering after it.’
‘Then they’re crazy. And isn’t it lucky that most of us never find it? It destroys you.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘You wouldn’t want anything like that, would you, India?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes, when I look at those pictures, I envy them.’
‘But look at what it did to them. And to other people.’
‘Mum was her own worst enemy. She didn’t ever want anybody to get hurt.’
‘Besides. You’ve found that kind of passion already.’
‘You mean my music?’
‘Yes. Your music.’
‘It’s true. When I’m playing there’s nothing else in the whole world that’s more important. Our mum was like that with her art. I understand her very well. But it was all tied up with Finn, somehow. For mum I mean. There was something uncanny about it. He was such a part of it for her, even when he wasn’t there. Like a muse. I know all these dead male artists used to go on about their muses, but I think in some strange way, Finn was essential for mum. She couldn’t do without him. She was essential for him too. But he was part of the island, part of her inspiration. In a way, he was in everything she did. And she was... well, I’m not quite sure what she was for him, but she was certainly essential.’
‘ I can’t see me ever feeling like that about any man. Although it might be good to find some nice guy, make a couple of babies, and then carry on working, of course.’
India hugged her. ‘Which is exactly what I hope you do!’
In May of that year, not long after India’s visit to Flora, Charlie McNeill phoned her with the news that Finn O’Malley was dead. He had wandered up to Hill Top Town and passed out up there, probably from too much drink, or not enough food, or a combination of both. It wasn’t a particularly cold night, but all the same he had died of exposure.
‘That does happen from time to time, seemingly,’ Charlie added. ‘People dying of exposure, on nights when they should be fine. They become disorientated and confused and then just lie down and fall asleep.’
Finn hadn’t been in the habit of visiting the village much, and even the postman seldom came to Dunshee, but eventually he had driven up with a council tax demand, and found the house deserted, the doors wide open, the hungry cats roaming around. Search parties had been sent out and when they found Finn, he had been dead for some time. Charlie told her that he had been clutching a piece of agate in his hand and it was buried with him. If India had been of a more sentimental turn of mind, she would have imagined that he had died of a broken heart.
India cancelled a recording session, went over to the island and paid for the funeral herself. She had Finn buried with her mother, in what she had called that ‘nice part of the cemetery’ though she couldn’t imagine Finn wanting to have much posthumous conversation with Isabel.
No other members of the family attended the funeral, but however reclusive he had become, the islanders still counted Finn as one of their own and turned out in force to bury him. Kevin Gleason came over from the mainland and assisted the minister with the service. He was older, more portly, a little more cynical about almost everything but still a kindly man, in his own remote and rather bookish way. He told India that he had brought the news to Finn’s mother himself, but Sister Dominica was vague these days. The nuns explained that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s and her short term memory was all but gone.
‘My son?’ she said. ‘My Finny, dead? Ah, God rest his soul!’ She dabbed at her eyes, but only a few minutes later, she smiled brightly at Kevin, and asked ‘Are you conducting a retreat here, Father?’
After the funeral, it was discovered that Finn had lodged a will with his Glasgow solicitors, leaving everything, Dunshee included, to India. This caused a minor sensation on the island, but the rumour and speculation soon died down. Finn had always been strange in the head, and this was just one more piece of odd behaviour.
India, however, was profoundly disturbed by her inheritance, because it served to confirm a suspicion which, only a few months earlier, had become a certainty for her. She could date it with some precision. It was the day her mother’s huge portrait of Finn had arrived. Charlie had sent it by carrier, and she had been alone in the Edinburgh flat when the delivery men carried it upstairs. It had been securely wrapped in many metres of bubble wrap, inside rigid cardboard and a layer of brown paper, and the men staggered beneath the weight of it. She had signed for the parcel, and then sat, gazing at it for a while, reluctant to open it, remembering the folio of drawings. At last, she went and fetched scissors and wrestled with wrapping and cardboard.
When, finally, the portrait emerged safely from a sea of paper and plastic, she breathed a sigh of relief and propped it against one of her plain white walls. It was beautiful. He was beautiful. There was still, within the picture, something of the boy within the man, uncertain, long-legged, arresting, with dark, troubled eyes fixed on the artist. Who could not love him? But there was something else about the picture and just at first, she couldn’t identify it. It seemed disturbingly familiar and yet she knew that she had never seen this picture before. So it must be something about the man, the depiction of the man himself.
Her eyes strayed to the small bookshelf where she kept her favourite novels. On the top shelf sat one of her mother’s many sketches of India herself, as a young girl. It was a lovely, swift, charcoal drawing. Kirsty had caught her daughter as she perched on a rock, down on the beach at Dunshee, long legs apart, hands on knees, feet firmly planted on the sand, as though she were about to spring into action and run away. India found herself looking from the sketch to the portrait and back again. The resemblance between the two was uncanny. But then, why wouldn’t it be? She gazed at Finn, tears running down her cheeks. She tried to dash them away, but still they came, blurring her eyes as she stared and stared into the face of her dead father.
India made many attempts to find Grania. Her sole confidant about her own parentage was Kevin Gleason and she trusted him to keep the revelation secret. With his help, she managed to identify the Dublin convent where the baby might have been taken. He offer
ed to intercede on her behalf. She made a special trip to the convent, met with the Mother Superior, begged, pleaded, cajoled. When none of this had any effect, she tried a solicitor’s letter. But she met with absolute silence. The information was a secret and must remain so. Finn’s mother had been persuaded to sign his sister, Grania, away for adoption, and there was not a thing anyone could do about it now. All other details were confidential.
She had another meeting with Kevin in Glasgow. He pointed out that the child could have been sent anywhere: America, Australia, Canada. Nobody would divulge these secrets, not the Irish State, and certainly not the Church. But he thought that if somebody would go to the trouble of adopting a wee baby, then they wouldn’t be looking for unpaid labour. They would be looking for a child to love.
‘Some of the nuns had a good thing going with wealthy families, overseas. Good Catholic families, with a bit of cash,’ he said. ‘Grania was probably much more fortunate than Finn.’
India was surprised by his openness, but he had been very fond of Finn and very sorry for him. All the same, whenever she visited the States – and her work took her there quite often now - she would find herself gazing at the faces of middle aged women and wondering, is that my Aunt Grania? Or that? Or that?
Afterwards, when she began to stitch the revelations of the past couple of years into the fabric of her life, India thought long and hard about Finn and her mother. But no matter how often she rehearsed what she knew about the relationship, there was always something that eluded her. It was like a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye, a footstep of somebody who had just left the room, a distant, magical air that she couldn’t quite catch. The more she tried to pin the melody down, the more it slid away from her.
Love? Could it be love? And if so, just what kind of love? That was what she asked herself, constantly interrogating what she knew about her mother and Finn, not obsessively, but with a kind of insatiable curiosity about them. She thought that Flora was right. People might fantasise about the kind of passion that lay between Kirsty and Finn but it burned into you, that kind of love. It consumed the lovers. Nothing was ever enough. It sprang from some terrible need, some wound that could never be healed. Finn had been so grievously damaged that nothing could really heal him, not fully. She thought uneasily about her mother’s illness, about her last sight of Finn, literally dying of grief.
Sometimes she would lie awake, thinking about her mother. If Kirsty had really loved Finn, how could she have thought of marrying Nicolas? If he had loved her, how could he ever have left her? She always came to the same conclusion. Of course she had loved him. That was her tragedy. And Finn had certainly loved Kirsty. That was his.
And yet, there was something primitive, something deep inside her, that was forced to acknowledge its attraction, the romance of it, the way in which so many people could be so enthralled, so spellbound by the prospect of such a passionate obsession. Everyday life could be so prosaic that even the most practical and pragmatic of us might dream about selling our very souls for love. A world well lost indeed. But then, she thought uneasily, was that only because she truly was her father’s daughter?
She had Finn’s name added to Kirsty’s on her mother’s headstone, a smooth slab of black granite with a simple engraving, like a child’s picture of a hill, just like the land behind Dunshee. Somebody – India had no idea who –carried on leaving posies of wild flowers at the foot of the headstone, even after Finn ’s death. In summer it was wild roses and honeysuckle, in autumn it was late harebells and heather.
During the following wet and windy summer, India spent some money on Dunshee, tidying it up, making it windproof and watertight again. She got Cat’s Protection to come over and move most of the cats, though two of them escaped, only to come back and lurk about the barns, a moth eaten black tomcat and his companion, a ragged marmalade female, but they seemed to be beyond breeding, and eventually she left them in peace.
‘If they don’t bother me, I won’t bother them,’ she said to her sister.
She had decided almost immediately that she would keep Dunshee. One of these days, she thought, she would want to settle down and when she did, Dunshee would be waiting. Until that day she went there only occasionally. But then, she would light a fire in the range, sit in the old rocking chair and each night, she would sleep in her mother’s bed, in the wall, where it was warm.
Flora would sometimes come for a day or two, but she always said it was too spooky. Too sad. Too nostalgic.
‘I don’t know how on earth you can bear to be up here all alone. I couldn’t do it.
‘I don’t mind. There’s nothing to be afraid of here, Flora.’
‘Well I wouldn’t like it. It’s a noisy old house. Too many creaks and bumps for my liking.’
‘There are mice in the attic.’
‘They must be wearing hobnail boots then.’
‘I play the fiddle for them and I’m sure they listen.’
‘Who listens, India? What are you talking about?’
‘Oh…’ She stretched out her long legs and smiled enigmatically. ‘You know? Such ghosts as choose to inhabit this place. Our great grandad for one. Don’t you sometimes imagine that all the layers of times past are still here, with people just carrying on, living here, all of us at once?’
‘No I don’t,’ said Flora with a shudder.
‘Well I do. Sometimes I could swear that I can smell great grandad’s tobacco. You know that lovely vanilla stuff he used to smoke?’
‘You’re kidding me!’
‘I’m not.’
‘And our mum?’
India didn’t answer immediately, but at last she said ‘The old loft above the kitchen.’
‘What about it?’
‘It makes me a bit uneasy. I wouldn’t like to sleep up there, that’s for sure.’
‘You’re scaring me, India.’
‘I don’t mean to. And it isn’t exactly scary. Not really. Not in any sinister sense. This is our mum I’m talking about, after all! Just strange. A strange feeling. As though the whole room has the weight of the past in it. It’s a sad room. Self contained. Private. Keep out. That’s what it says.’
‘I don’t think I want to know any more.’
India regarded her sister thoughtfully for a moment.
‘And you know the old hill fort?’
‘Of course. Hill Top Town. I haven’t been up there for ages though. And if you’re going to tell me something horrible about that as well, don’t bother.’
‘No, it isn’t horrible at all. It’s rather nice. It was a special place for her. For her and Finn both. I think they were happy there. Really happy and whole.’
Flora shrugged. ‘So?’
‘Well, I went up there, the last time I was here. It was such a beautiful day. I was tired and needed to recharge my batteries, so I came here. I woke up in the morning and the sun was streaming in the window, so I took a picnic, just like we used to do when mum brought us up to see great grandad. I packed a few sandwiches and some fruit juice. Then I climbed the rocks behind the house and went up towards Hill Top Town.’
‘And?’ Flora was interested in spite of herself. It was a calm night and the windows were open. She could hear the faint rasping of the corncrake in the meadow by the shore. India paused to listen for a moment.
‘Summer visitor,’ she said. ‘He’s in lots of mum’s pictures. Have you noticed? Even if he’s only lurking in a corner.’
‘I never saw that.’
‘I did. It’s like a game. Hunt the corncrake.’
‘Typical mum.’
‘Anyway, I remembered Hill Top Town so clearly from when I was a wee girl. Before they sent me away to school. I loved it up there. I know it was never your favourite place, Flora.’
‘No. It was always Ealachan I loved. The gardens. The trees. The avenue of camellias.’
‘Anyway, there’s a sort of saucer of land at the very top of the hill. You think it’s flat topped whe
n you look at it from below, but actually it’s not. There’s a kind of depression, with a jumble of rocks at the bottom of it. There are blueberry plants and myrtle and a few harebells. The heather was just coming into bloom. I hauled myself over the lip of land at the top and I could have sworn I heard voices.’
‘It would have been visitors, hill walkers.’
‘No. Listen. There were two people talking nearby. Quite close to me. That’s what it sounded like. A man and a woman. You know that kind of low murmuring you sometimes hear when two people are very intimate and are chatting to each other, with comfortable pauses? You can’t quite make out what they are saying, but it doesn’t matter, because it isn’t for your ears anyway. Two people, their words only for each other. I looked around, expecting to see … oh I don’t know… somebody. Anybody. Tourists who had walked up from the hotel maybe. But there was nobody to be seen. Nobody at all.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘No. It was good to hear. It made a kind of music. I sat there for a while in the sunshine, listening to them. Soothed by them. I think I fell asleep for a moment and when I woke up, all I could hear was the wind rustling across the heather.’
Flora cast about for an explanation. ‘Maybe sound travels. And maybe Hill Top Town holds it, traps it there.’
‘Maybe it does,’ said India. ‘That’s exactly my point. Maybe it does.’
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Alan, my husband, and Charles, my son, for their unfailing encouragement and support, as ever.
Thanks also to all my wonderful Facebook and Twitter friends, but especially my many writer and indie-publisher friends for their helpful advice, for keeping up my spirits, and for sometimes making me laugh out loud at the general silliness of things. Writing can be a lonely business and I value my online friendships very much.
Similarly, thanks to the ‘electric’ authors: http://authorselectric.blogspot.com/ for sharing the vision and helping to make it come true.
Bird of Passage Page 36
