The House Between Tides

by Sarah Maine

  She heard the back door bang behind him, and a moment later the sound of the Land Rover starting up and driving off, and then fading as it headed along the road skirting the wide bay.

  Chapter 22

  1910, Beatrice

  Beatrice leant against the folded shutters at the drawing room window, watching the shadows racing across the strand towards her. Fair-weather clouds. Then shapes on the far side began to resolve themselves into a pony and trap, followed by a cart, and she sat forward. “I think they’re here!”

  Theo came and stood beside her. “Looks like them,” he agreed, and then returned to his book. She flung him an exasperated look as she went to the door. “They’ll require entertainment,” he had complained when they had received Emily’s last correspondence detailing their plans. “Especially if Emily’s bringing the major with her.” He had glanced balefully at his sister’s letter. “And Kit’s coming along as chaperone. Ha! But I suppose it spares us their mother’s company.”

  She went out onto the terrace alone and stood waiting, the wind snatching at her hair. The trap rocked over the stony foreshore towards her, a cartload of luggage behind it, but as she started down the drive, the front door opened behind her and Theo caught her up, taking her arm. Emily Blake half rose in the trap, waving vigorously, only to be pulled down smartly by the tall figure beside her. The pony had hardly halted before she pulled her elegant skirt aside and stepped down, embracing Beatrice eagerly. “Bea, darling! We’ve made it!” She spoke in the breathless, gasping way Beatrice remembered as she hugged her. “What a journey. Such hideous roads, Rupert was in agonies over his precious automobile. We left it on the mainland, of course.” She offered a cheek to her older brother. “How are you, Theo? You look well. And oh! The house—” She clasped her gloved hands together, and sunlight reflected back a welcome from the high walls.

  Her brother strolled over to give Beatrice a casual peck on each cheek and shook hands with Theo. “Good to see you both. Married life suits you, Theo. I—”

  “And here’s Rupert,” Emily interrupted, pulling forward the tall man who had stepped down to join them. He clasped Theo’s hand and bent to kiss Beatrice, his eyes twinkling a greeting as Emily continued to chatter. Beatrice had approved of Major Ballantyre when they had met in Edinburgh, seeing that beneath the military bearing there was a shrewd eye and a sense of humour. Then Emily squeaked again. “Look, Kit. It’s Donald!” And she rushed forward, elegance forgotten, to greet Donald and the factor, who were approaching from the stables.

  “But where’s Cameron?” Kit demanded, clasping Donald’s hand and turning to Rupert. “I told you about Cameron, didn’t I? Boon companion. I’d have followed him into the jaws of hell, if he’d let me. You said he’d come back?” And even as he spoke, Cameron appeared on the crest of the rise beside the house, shouldering a gun, Bess running at his heels. He raised a hand in greeting and came down swiftly to join them. Kit sprang forward. “Cameron! Are you well?” Urban nonchalance fell away as he pumped Cameron’s hand.

  “Very well, Mr. Kit.” Cameron gave a slight bow by way of greeting to the other arrivals, before propping his gun against the wall, laying two rabbits beside it, and went to unbuckle the leather straps which held the luggage in place.

  “Mr. Kit?” Kit’s astonished words were lost as John Forbes took charge of the unloading. Emily tucked her hand into Beatrice’s arm and Theo led the family towards the house. Kit paused a moment, distracted, looking back to see Cameron jump up on the cart, voicing his scorn at the number of boxes. Donald’s laugh was swiftly silenced by a word from John Forbes, and Cameron looked up to give Kit an ironic salute.

  Beatrice took Emily upstairs, where she tossed aside her hat and travelling coat, throwing open her bedroom window and leaning out. “Oh, Beatrice. I had forgotten—” She took great gulping breaths of air. “How could I have done so?” And she stood a moment watching the seabirds swoop and dip over the empty sands. “I’m so glad we came,” she said, then turned back to Beatrice, her eyes sparkling. “Even I was getting tired of wedding plans.” She dropped onto the bed and began peeling off her gloves. “So I’ve left it all to Mama to fuss over and now I have Rupert to myself. Kit doesn’t count. Oh, Bea! I am so happy. I can’t begin to tell you.” Her eyes rested a moment on a bowl of primroses that Beatrice had picked that morning. “How lovely! Did Theo tell you this was my old room?” And Beatrice smiled, letting her believe it to be so. “Where will Rupert sleep?”

  The house seemed to rouse from its lethargy to greet the return of the two younger Blakes, and Beatrice felt her own spirits reviving. Voices and laughter lit the rooms like shafts of sunlight, breakfasts were no longer solitary affairs, nor were dinners oppressed by long silences. They had even brought gramophone records, and Kit wound up the Monarch every day until Theo protested. But he too became more sociable, taking Kit and Rupert on fishing or shooting excursions by day, and joining conversations or card games in the evenings. And it seemed to Beatrice that he smiled at her more.

  On fine days, bereft of their men, she and Emily would stroll along the foreshore or tramp across the machair to the western shore, and Beatrice found that she was hungry for this easy companionship. In Edinburgh, after Theo and Beatrice’s wedding, Emily had declared, with uncomplicated enthusiasm, that she had always longed for a sister and had proceeded to regale her with confidences, never tiring of extolling Rupert’s manifold virtues. She did the same now, but Beatrice felt unable to reciprocate. “Should I worry about you, Bea? Do you get lonely up here with no other company?” Emily’s puckish face showed kindly concern as she guilelessly hit the mark. “I suppose you’ve had visitors, which helped. But do you manage alright?”

  Beatrice hesitated, then answered obliquely. “I quite like the quiet. Theo’s visitors tend to be local landowners, apart from the group from Edinburgh whose wives found it all rather primitive. I actually prefer it when we haven’t visitors, apart from you, of course.” Emily flashed a smile and squeezed her arm. “I’m glad you came.”

  “And Theo looks so well. You must be good for him.” Beatrice smiled slightly. “Though, in fact, I don’t really know what pleases Theo—” and the words found an echo in Beatrice’s confusion as Emily stopped to empty sand from her shoe. “We’ve spent so little time together. Mama is quite terrified of him, you know, for all that she boasts about him to her cronies. He was grown and gone when we were little, and the Forbes boys were more like brothers, especially for Kit. He was quite devastated when Mama dragged him away, you know, though he’d have had to leave for boarding school anyway. Theo did invite him back here in the holidays, but somehow Kit was never able to come. Mama’s doing, I expect.” She paused again, looking back into the past, and then tucked her arm in Beatrice’s and they walked on, stopping occasionally to admire the shells which lay tumbled in the seaweed. “Cameron and Donald have both grown into such handsome men, and little Ephie is quite the young woman,” she continued after a moment. “They used to be the centre of our lives, you know, we spent all our time together, running wild.” Beatrice smiled, imagining a childhood very different from her own, constrained as it had been by finance and etiquette. “Yet I hear that Cameron is planning to leave again?”

  “Yes,” replied Beatrice, “in the spring, I think.” Or at least he had been— A gull gave a harsh cry above them, and she paused, looking up at it.

  “Theo wanted him to stay on at one time, I remember, as some sort of secretary.” Emily’s words seemed devoid of deeper significance, and she turned, waiting for Beatrice to catch up.

  “He’d still like him to,” she said, and screwed up her face to follow the bird’s flight across the bay.

  Since the day the wild flowers had appeared in the morning room, Beatrice had felt both befriended and further confused, drawn to Cameron by curiosity as well as suspicion, lingering if she came across him alone in the study. He would break off and rise, but sit when she did and lean back in his chair, and they would talk quit
e easily about all manner of things, and now if they met out-of-doors, he would stop and converse, or walk with her awhile. And her response to his presence only confused her more—for whatever Theo might feel towards Cameron, the irony was that it was now she who sought the company of the factor’s son.

  “I gather he’s proved something of a disappointment to Theo.” Emily interrupted her thoughts. A disappointment? Perhaps so. There had been another argument in the study a day or so before Emily’s arrival, and she had overheard the name MacPhail again. Cameron had not appeared since, but she had watched him come and go from the window. “It’s a wasted opportunity for him, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe Cameron wants to make his own way in the world,” she replied, falling into step again. “And he and Theo don’t always see eye to eye.”

  “I can imagine!” Emily laughed. “Theo can be a dreadful autocrat, and I don’t suppose Cameron likes to knuckle under.” She gestured to the grassy bank at the top of the beach where a patch of bog cotton shook in the breeze, and they sat on the edge, dangling their feet above the overhang of turf. “He was always rebellious, even as a boy.” She leant back, plucking at the cotton tufts and teasing the fibres apart. “Rupert says he has reckless eyes . . . But Theo has always been very good to him.”

  On fine afternoons they would have basket chairs set out in front of the house, where they would chat or read their books and have tea brought out to them. “How is your garden coming along?” Emily asked one day. “Mama tried to grow things year after year. I remember her wailing that the storms would tear the house from the land, which used to terrify me, but it was always the garden which got the worst of it.” She sat back, surveying Beatrice’s efforts, sipping her tea. “Try the things that grow here anyway, the wild iris, or the primroses, or even gorse and broom. Native things do so much better.”

  Cameron had said the same to her when he had come across her planting a climbing rose designed to spread across the trelliswork of the bower. He had taken the spade from her and dug a deep hole, and then returned with horse manure to bed it in, but he had leant on the spade and shaken his head when the job was done. “It’ll be a hardy rose that survives up here, Mrs. Blake.”

  “The catalogue said it was particularly strong and resilient—”

  “It’ll need to be.”

  “—with creamy yellow flowers,” she finished, lifting her chin.

  “Yellow, eh?” He had smiled back at her.

  But perhaps he had been right, she thought, looking at tight buds already blighted and brown. “No doubt I’ll learn the hard way.”

  Emily, it seemed, was determined to extract every ounce of pleasure from their visit. No one was to rest while the weather held, and one evening when Beatrice mentioned her thwarted trip to see the seal pups, Emily had sat forward with sudden enthusiasm. “Then we must all go and see them. Why not tomorrow, Theo?”

  “It’s a very long walk,” he replied, “and the tides are all wrong.” But Emily was not to be put off, ambushing John Forbes outside the stables for his opinion, delighted when he suggested that if Cameron and Donald took them in the boats, there were some good mackerel spots on the way. Emily had clasped her hands together. “Fishing! That’s it—I haven’t been fishing since I was fourteen. It will be splendid.”

  Theo

  Theo strolled down to the foreshore to see the party off, half regretting his decision not to join them. But it would have been too much: Emily’s incessant chatter and Beatrice’s reproachful looks. And Cameron— He watched him now as he helped Beatrice into the larger boat, laughing as he pushed it off the shingle and leapt aboard, a single movement executed with his customary skill and grace. Oblivious, it would seem, to Theo’s growing exasperation. Or indifferent, more like.

  And this land crusade of his was becoming tiresome. He simply refused to leave the matter alone! Like last week: “There’s enough for three or four workable crofts beyond the lochan, sir. And you don’t use that land for anything.”

  They had been working together in the study, companionably, until that point. “Snipe and curlew nest over that way, as well as other species,” Theo said, and continued to paint in the detail of a shelduck’s plumage. “Farming would reduce numbers.”

  “Shooting reduces numbers.”

  He had returned Cameron a dry look, and they had worked on in silence. Then Cameron had tried a different tack. “You could make it part of the tenancy agreement that crofters must protect the nests and nestlings,” he began. “You’d still get the rents, they’d get a livelihood, and the birds would thrive. It would be ideal.”

  He turned to clean his brush. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “How can I? These people are desperate.”

  Theo had sat back and considered him, tapping the end of the paintbrush against his teeth, thinking what a fine-looking young man he was, his mother’s grace transformed into a lithe strength, her dark colouring defining regular features. And Màili’s eyes . . . He had bent again to his painting.

  “Sir?” Cameron’s voice had recalled him to the present. “All they want is a patch of land to plant—”

  “Potatoes?” He had raised his eyebrows in mock interest. “Or turnips? Keep a cow, perhaps?” Couldn’t he even try to understand?

  “It’s not too much to ask.”

  “It’s too little, Cameron. Far too little.” Cameron had continued to scowl at him. “Stop for a moment and look beyond your own indignation, and you might understand a little better.” He dipped his brush in the rinsing water. “There’s not enough here now to sustain people. I’d be condemning them to poverty.”

  “Their families were living well enough until your father cleared them off.”

  “Were they?” He had kept a grip on his temper. “And what about the decades before then, after the kelp price collapsed? You don’t think maybe myth has clouded the truth over the years?” Cameron had said nothing, containing a tight-lipped anger. “Besides, I refuse to live in perpetual guilt for what my father did. It made sense, Cameron, even if there were individual cases of hardship.”

  “Hardship! If having your roof burned from over—”

  “Face facts, man.” His patience had snapped, and he had taken up the brush again, adding dark umber tones to the colour of the sea. “By the time this house was built, a generation had already lived in poverty. Reducing numbers made sense. My father did them a favour.” Cameron began another angry retort, but Theo stuck the brush back in the jar and raised a hand. “Enough. You do no good with your persistence.” They had faced each other across the desk. “Vilify me by all means, Cameron, but the tenants on this estate are treated well. Your father sees to that.” The words had choked him, and since that day they had hardly spoken.

  He turned back to the group at the water’s edge, where the boats had been made ready and Cameron had assumed command. A natural leader, with no outlet for his talents, thwarted by his circumstances. Theo wondered how much Kit’s presence must irk him, reminding him of the very different courses their lives had taken since boyhood. And yet Cameron still rejected his offers of advancement! Frustration boiled in him again, and he shut his eyes, powerless to resolve the matter, defeated.

  And when he opened them, the boats were pulling away. Perhaps he should have gone with them after all—Beatrice had tried to persuade him, but was that out of courtesy, or pity? Had she really wanted him? The sight of her, happy now, brought a guilty pain.

  She looked so lovely! Windswept and carefree as she turned to laugh at Kit’s antics, and yet he sensed a change in her. In Edinburgh she had had a serenity, a poise; her cool eyes had offered calm, a balm to his spirits, but those same eyes were restless now, evincing thoughts he could only imagine. Her hair, no longer swept back and elegant, had become bleached by the sun, and twisted tendrils escaped from under a carelessly tied hat. Her skin had a new glow, a luminance that would once have had him reaching for his palette but now, too late, caused only anxiety and regret. />
  He shifted his attention to the others, remembering their idyllic childhood world which he had glimpsed through his own obsession. They had been inseparable companions then, indifferent to him, a grown man, grim-faced, no doubt, as he wrestled with his demons. He remembered coming back, several years after leaving the island, summoned home by his father’s sudden illness. Riding across the strand, he had seen figures down by the foreshore. John Forbes, a young man then, was repairing one of the boats, assisted by two small boys who stopped their play to watch as Theo approached. He’d ridden on, steeling himself for the encounter he’d been dreading.

  And the young factor had been faultlessly respectful as Theo dismounted and held out his hand, forcing a tight smile. “John. Are you well?”

  “Very well, sir.” He had gripped Theo’s hand briefly. “Mrs. Blake will be glad you’re come.” Then they had stood awkwardly, Màili an invisible presence between them, and Theo had looked at the two small boys. She had borne John two sons and a daughter since he left, and the knowledge twisted his guts.

  “Fine boys, John.”

  “Aye, they are, sir. Though I can’t lay claim to both.” He held out his other hand to the smaller of the two boys. “Greet your brother, Kit, he’s come all the way from Glasgow to see your father,” he said, and the child had looked at Theo with a puzzled expression. He had been a baby when Theo had left.