by Sarah Maine
Was that disapproval in his tone?
“They’re options I’m considering,” she replied, maintaining eye contact as long as seemed civil, and then reached over to pick up the keys as an excuse to look away.
He was silent for a moment, frowning at the place where the keys had been, then looked up again, eyebrows raised. “And now you’ve seen the state of the place?” he asked, then added, “Forgive me, but have you any idea what you’re contemplating?” She sensed a genuine effort to strip the words of offence, but his question hit the mark too keenly for comfort. She had no reply. “I’ve known that house all my life and watched its decline. It’s past saving.” She turned aside and reached for her handbag. Perhaps Giles should have come.
“It’s very early days, Mr. Cameron,” she said, banishing the craven thought, and gave him a tight smile. “And I’m only just starting to gather the facts.”
Inside Ruairidh’s house, James introduced her to Agnes, Ruairidh’s wife, who came forward, wiping her hands on a striped apron before tucking wild red hair behind her ears, and shook Hetty’s hand. “Call me Ùna,” she said with a smile. “Everyone else does.” Beside her, the black-and-white collie thumped its tail in greeting. Pan lids rattled on top of a Rayburn, steam rising to lose itself amongst countless socks perched like starlings on a drying rail above. A table stood in the middle of the room, and a candle had been lit, intended perhaps to draw the eye away from piles of ironing and the evidence of hasty food preparation. A boy, introduced as their son, was laying four places, and he regarded Hetty for a polite moment before transferring his attention to James Cameron, swamping him with a torrent of Gaelic. The man listened gravely and nodded, and the boy then grabbed a torch, pulling him back out into the darkness, followed by the dog.
“Alasdair and his dad are repairing an old boat, and James has to admire progress,” his mother explained as she led Hetty through to the sitting room and offered her a drink. “Are you alright at Dùghall’s?” She moved a pile of papers and gestured to a chair beside the fire. “I don’t expect he spends much on comforts.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she replied, and after pouring two drinks, her hostess excused herself to check her pans.
Hetty sat and surveyed the chaotic room. The papers looked like pupils’ exercise books and a marking sheet. Primary school. An eclectic collection of paperbacks filled various bookshelves while paintings and photographs occupied the spaces in between. A bleached vertebra from a sea mammal leant against the mantelpiece with letters and bills stuffed behind it, while on a side table the reel from a fishing rod was under repair. Rectangles of peat stood drying in the hearth.
Islington belonged to another world.
Then she saw, hanging in an alcove, a very familiar painting, and rose to stand in front of it. The Rock Pool, 1889. It was Blake’s best-known work, his early romantic masterpiece, and even reproduced as this modest print before her, it was exceptional.
She had seen the original in London three years ago as part of a touring exhibition, and she had been standing in front of it, lost in admiration, when she had felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see Giles Holdsworth smiling down at her. They had met only a few times then and always in his firm’s offices, where the details of her parents’ estate were being unravelled.
“I was going to tell you about this exhibition, but you clearly knew,” he said. And later, over a cup of tea in the café, he’d explained that he was at the gallery on business. “But I skived off after the meeting to have a quick look once I heard The Rock Pool was here.”
Afterwards they had gone back to look at it again, and he had bent to read the label. “Painted in 1889, and it says he was barely twenty. How extraordinary.”
Extraordinary indeed, and yet so simple.
The painting depicted a young girl in simple clothing, standing beside a rock pool, bracing herself with one hand against the rock face and leaning over the water, lifting her foot from the ripples. A single drop of water had fallen from her toe and bounced off the pool’s surface. With her other hand she was clasping her clothes to her, raising her skirts away from the water, her dark hair falling forward across her face. Blake had caught her just at the moment she was turning towards him, and a tiny spot of brightness showed the gleam in her eye as she raised her face to him. It was a beautiful, sensitive piece invoking a stillness, a promise, a moment in time that would frame a lifetime.
The door opened and Ruairidh came across to clasp her hand with both of his, full of apologies. The fire-raiser had been despatched to the mainland, he reported, and the stunned family taken in by relatives. “You can’t blame the lass for leaving him,” he said, “but it’s a shame. He was a decent enough lad until his mother died.” Then the door opened again and James Cameron entered, poured himself a drink, and sat down beside the window, glancing briefly at a discarded newspaper.
The fourth place at the kitchen table, it transpired, was laid for him, not the boy, who had vanished with the dog, and she found herself sitting opposite him.
They were cousins, Ruairidh told her, as he ladled potatoes onto her plate. “But then everyone’s related on the island, one way or another, going back generations. And everyone knows everyone’s business.” He paused, the spoon half-raised, dripping butter. “Which is why these bones come as a shock, you see, because someone must have known.”
“And old gossip gets handed down,” his wife added.
Hetty looked around the table, observing the bonds of kinship but sensing something wider and deeper—an understanding of how their community functioned and had always functioned. It gave her a dart of pleasure, for this was what she sought—a community. And a community was not the same as a crowd, like Giles’s networking friends; it was a more complex fabric woven from mutual need and common interest, and a shared past. It was something more tribal—
Hetty had never had that sense of belonging. Her father’s job with the foreign office had meant that home was not a place but a transient thing, and her childhood had been spent flying backwards and forwards from boarding school. A new posting, a rapid withdrawal following a coup, or the need to replace an ailing colleague—it all boiled down to a different view from her bedroom window, a different language in the streets, and unfamiliar food. It was only later in life that she recognised how unsettling this had been.
“You’ve no idea who—?” she asked, coming back to the moment.
“None at all. There’s no one missing, if you see what I mean.”
“A visitor, perhaps? Though I read that Theo Blake was something of a recluse.” They ate in silence for a moment, and she wondered if perhaps the tribe was closing ranks.
“He was, towards the end,” said Ruairidh, lifting his glass to drink. “He spent his last twenty years alone in the house, letting it fall apart around him.” James Cameron glanced briefly at her. “But there used to be smart house parties, folk who came up to shoot and fish. Before his wife left him, that is.”
“If she did.” James Cameron had said little so far.
Ùna Forbes gave an exclamation. “You think it’s his wife, then, Jamie?” She reached for the bottle and smiled at Hetty as she filled her glass. “And that he stuffed her under the floor-boards! Very Gothic.”
James shrugged.
But Ruairidh was chewing thoughtfully. “No. It was always said that the Blakes left the island together, although she never returned.” He loaded another fork. “I’ve contacted Inverness, by the way, and they’ll send someone over.”
She thanked him but wanted to continue the earlier discussion. “If Theo Blake spent his last years alone, then surely someone could have disappeared, and no one knows?”
Ruairidh leant back in his chair, cradling his glass on his generous stomach. “True enough, but who? He shunned visitors towards the end.”
Since inheriting the house, Hetty had been trying to learn more about Theodore Blake, scouring libraries and the Internet for information, but had had mixed results. Wh
ile his artistic achievements were well-documented, there was frustratingly little written about his personal life, and his later reclusive years were unrecorded, except for the fact that he had drowned, as an old man, while crossing Muirlan Strand.
His father, she had read, had opposed his ambition to be a painter, but the young Theo had been determined to go to Glasgow, where he was attracted by the Glasgow School and their commitment to exploring realism. It was his early paintings, his Hebridean collection, which had made his name while he was still very young, but later, like so many of his contemporaries, he had gone abroad, where he had produced less innovative work, and his fame had dwindled. In his middle years he had limited himself to illustrations of native birdlife, completing a catalogue begun by his father, which had been well-received but was long since out of print.
“I’ve a copy here,” said Ruairidh, when she mentioned it, and he rose to fetch it. “He loved his birds, did Blake. Started one of the country’s first reserves.”
“And when did he paint those others?” asked Ùna. “You know, the weird ones.”
The weird ones—Hetty did know which she meant. There had been one such in the London exhibition, a chilling, wild scene of an anguished face looking from the shore to a goggle-eyed head rising from a cauldron of surf. The work of a deranged mind, some critics said. “I read they were done in his last years but that there aren’t many of them.”
“There were paintings burned when the house was closed up.” James spoke softly, tilting his glass as if to study the candle’s reflection on the wine. “Your great-grandmother didn’t like them, I’m told.” He glanced up briefly and then continued mopping up the last of the casserole with a chunk of bread, leaving Ruairidh to explain about the bonfires and what the old folks had said.
Ùna began clearing away the plates. “She was being protective, I expect, like a good sister. He was quite barmy at the end, you know.”
“Makes you wonder, though.” Ruairidh refilled their glasses.
“Barmy?” This was news. Or was this a judgement foisted unkindly on a reclusive man? “But he can’t have been entirely alone up there, surely?”
“Aye, that’s true,” said Ùna. “I don’t suppose he washed his own socks and peeled his own tatties.” She flashed an arch look at her husband as she cleared space for an apple pie. “And folk would have mentioned bodies being stuffed under floor-boards, you can be sure of that.”
“Donald Forbes was living at the farmhouse with his family then,” her husband said, “and they kept an eye on him, I understand.”
“So have a word with Aonghas, he loves a good old gossip,” said James.
“My granddad,” explained Ruairidh. “Turned ninety but sharp as a pin. Donald was his father, you see, and he remembers Blake’s sister coming up for the auction when the house was closed up.”
At the end of the evening, James took her home.
And as she stepped out of Ruairidh’s house, she felt the darkness engulf her—but it was a soft velvet darkness, not the flat dullness of a London night punctured by street lighting and the tracer light of car headlamps. It was still and quiet, and she breathed in the complex smell of the outdoors, looking up to see a million stars arching above them in the clear northern skies.
“Not a sight you’ll ever get in London.” He stood holding the Land Rover door open, watching her. “It was the thing I missed most working down there. The big skies.”
“Were you there long?” she asked, as he went to the other side and slid in beside her.
“Two years. It was enough.” The engine roared into life and they jolted off the verge and back onto the tarmac road.
Over dinner in Ruairidh’s cottage, she had felt a warmth stealing over her as they described what was known of the house in its heyday, of her family and theirs, realising with delight that she had a stake in this shared past. But James’s words reminded her that she was an incomer, recalling her to the sudden silence which fell when she referred to her plans for the house. Ruairidh had deftly moved the subject on, but not before she had seen the quick exchange of looks around the table.
“You didn’t see much of the house, I suppose, before I chucked you out.” James kept his face forward but she sensed the glimmer of a smile. “I’ll take you back over in the morning, if you like. Show you the problems.”
“Shouldn’t we keep away until after the police have been?”
“Can’t see it matters.” He slowed as a sheep stepped into the road and stopped, its eyes eerily lit by the headlamps. “If we asked Ruairidh, he’d have to say no”—he looked across at her and surprised her with a sudden grin—“so we won’t ask.”
Chapter 6
2010, Hetty
He was on her doorstep early.
“We’ve only got a couple of hours because of the tide,” he explained as the Land Rover rocked over the rough track and then sped across the pristine sand. He steered carelessly with one hand, glancing occasionally at her but saying nothing more, and she turned her head to look out of the window, matching his silence with her own.
White sand, shallow water, and clear blue skies created a spectrum of shades, dark turquoise and aqua blue blending with chalky pastels. To the west she could see open ocean, while to the east the curve of the shoreline masked the other entrance to the bay, set against a backdrop of misty hills rising from neighbouring islands, and she twisted in her seat to encompass the scale of her surroundings, awed by its beauty. “Have you been up here before?” he asked, breaking the silence, and she shook her head. “It’s got a special magic on days like this,” he said.
And he was right.
As they swept around the last rocky seaweed-clad mound, the house was directly in front of them. It was a tribute to unapologetic mid Victorian self-confidence, built to impress by its scale with a vigorous appreciation of the romantic, redolent of Abbotsford, or Waverley, with stepped gables and a little roof turret above the front porch. Built, she had read, to celebrate a very Victorian type of success in the textile mills of Paisley where Theodore Blake’s father had woven thread into cloth of gold. But the gaunt shell looked so bleak now, like an abandoned film set without purpose or meaning.
“Rather dominates the landscape, doesn’t it?” he said, and she felt his eyes on her again as the Land Rover left the sand and bumped up the sloping track to the house. “Closing up the place had a bigger impact around here than the end of the war.” He swung in between the entrance pillars, the wheels skidding on mud. “The bonfires burned into the night with stuff left after the auction. It was said they could be seen for miles. Armageddon, Hebridean style.” She nodded, then pushed the image aside and indulged in a moment’s fantasy, seeing the house restored, alive again, the windows free of boarding, open to the peerless view. “There’ve been rumours of all sorts of buyers over the years,” he continued, “rock stars, hippies, religious groups . . . But nothing ever happened, and then the November gales started to take the roof off.”
The fantasy vanished and she looked away. “And now you say it’s too late.”
He pulled on the hand brake, reaching back for hard hats and a large torch. “ ’Fraid so.”
When he had come to pick her up that morning, he had pocketed the keys which lay where she had left them the day before, and he used them now to unlock the padlock on the front door, slipping them automatically into his pocket as he cautioned her to tread warily. Would he remember to give them back? she wondered.
They crossed the hall in front of the main staircase once again, and he pointed out where part of the landing was collapsing, leaving the front bedrooms marooned and unreachable, their fireplaces hanging above vanished floors. Splintered wood panelling and a few shreds of wallpaper, leached of colour, still clung to upper walls. But at least today she was prepared, resolute against disappointment.
“This was the drawing room.” He stood in the doorway of a well-proportioned room at the front of the house and played the torch beam around the void. �
�There’re some old photographs at the museum which show what it was like. You should take a look.” The light rested on a gaping hole in one wall. “There was a splendid granite fireplace there once, a beauty, but it went with the others. And a grand piano stood over there in the corner, a chaise longue against that wall next to an old gramophone with a great morning-glory horn. And that’s all that’s left of a window seat.” The light lingered on a rusty rod of iron hanging loose beneath the window. “Not a bad sort of life, was it, curled up beside the window with a Scotch, the gramophone crackling away, and one of the best views in the country.” She glanced sideways at him. The enthusiasm seemed out of character, and his tone had lost its laconic edginess. He sounded almost proprietorial.
He guided her into the next room. “Dining room,” he said. “There’s a photo showing a great long table in here laid for some classy meal—white linen, some great silver exuberance in the middle, crystal, fine china, the whole bit.”
“Quite an achievement out here.”
“Which you intend to match,” he remarked. The edge was back, but she decided to let it pass. What exactly was his problem? When she made no reply, he shrugged and led her into the next room, the one she had broken into. “Blake’s study,” he said, stooping to pick up the splintered remains of the old window boarding. “Probably where he did his bird catalogue.” And she thought of the exquisite illustrations in Ruairidh’s book, imagining the painter bent to his task, lifting his head to watch the birds circling out over the strand. “I suppose it filled the man’s time. He’d nothing else to do, of course, not being troubled by making a living.”
He propped the broken boarding against the wall and tested the strength of his handiwork from the day before.
“I wonder why he didn’t go back to his landscape paintings,” Hetty said.
He shrugged. “Maybe he became as obsessed by birds as his father. That was why old man Blake bought the estate in the first place, you know. He’d made his fortune, so he built this pile to indulge his interests in comfort. First wife died, and he did a bit of social climbing and pulled number two wife from the impoverished gentry, then he built this place and indulged his fancies.” He turned back to the doorway, lighting her route with the torch beam. “A man of his time, was Duncan Blake, same as his son.”
