by Peter May
‘Nothing that made much sense. At least, not then. He was talking to Ceit, not me. He said he would never forget their days at The Dean. Or the turrets at Danny’s. Something like that. Reminding them of their place in the world.’ She looked at him with pain etched in every line of her face. ‘And something else, that takes on a whole different meaning now.’ She closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly. Then opened them wide. ‘He said, we didn’t do too bad for a couple of orphan waifs.’
There must have been light in Fin’s eyes, because she frowned, canting her head, staring at him. ‘What is it?’
And if she had seen light, it was the light of revelation. He said, ‘Marsaili, I think maybe I know exactly what he meant when he talked about The Dean. And Danny’s turrets. And it must mean that Ceit, the girl who boarded with the widow O’Henley, came with them on the boat.’ And he thought, maybe there is someone after all who still knows the truth. He stood, then, and offered Marsaili his hand. She pulled herself up to stand beside him. He said, ‘If we can get seats, we should try to be on the first flight to Edinburgh tomorrow.’
The only light in the room came from the blue-tinged illumination of his laptop computer screen. He sat alone at the desk, in the dark, the stillness of the house pressing in all around him. The presence of others, in other rooms, seemed somehow only to increase his sense of isolation.
This was the room where he had spent so many hours tutored by Artair’s dad. Where he and Artair had sat, individually or together, listening to long lectures on Hebridean history, or puzzling over mathematical equations. Where the years of his boyhood had passed in suffocating incarceration, freedom glimpsed only occasionally in stolen glances from the window. Marsaili had said he could spend the night on the fold-down settee. But there were too many memories here. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain on the card table where they worked. The rows of books with their exotic titles, still there on the shelves. The smell of Artair’s dad’s pipe smoke, hanging in the still air in slow-moving blue strands. If he breathed deeply the scent of it remained, even if only in his memory.
Marsaili, fragile and fatigued, had gone to bed some time ago, telling him he could stay as long as he liked, to benefit from Fionnlagh’s wifi. The cursor on his screen winked over a webpage with the crest of the National Galleries of Scotland. Below it, a blue window with cottonwool clouds announced Another World. Dali, Magritte, Miro and the Surrealists. But he had long since stopped looking at it. It had taken him almost no time to confirm his suspicions, and immediately reserve their tickets on the morning flight. He had then spent much of the next hour in deep research.
He was tired. An ache behind his eyes. His body felt punched, bruised, his brain short-circuiting thoughts almost as soon as they appeared. He had no desire to go back to Edinburgh, a return to a painful past he had been unable to put behind him. The best he had been able to do was achieve a little distance. Now Fate was robbing him even of that. For Marsaili there would be no closure without it, while for him it would only serve to reopen old wounds.
He wondered, briefly, how she would receive him if he were to slip softly along the hall to her room and slide beneath the covers beside her. Not for sex, or even for love. But for comfort. The warmth of another human being.
But he knew he wouldn’t. He closed the lid of his laptop and moved silently through the house, shutting the kitchen door gently behind him. He walked up the road in the night to where his tent awaited him. Moonlight reflecting on the still of the ocean was almost painfully bright, stars overhead like the white-hot tips of a billion needles pricking the universe. All that awaited him within the soulless confines of his tent were a cold sleeping bag, a few sheets of paper in a buff folder describing the death of his son, and all the sleepless hours he knew he would have to endure before morning.
THIRTY
It was milder in Edinburgh, a light wind blowing in off the Pentland Hills, the sun dipping in and out from behind bubbles of cumulus, splashing light and colour across this grey city of granite and sandstone.
They had brought overnight bags in case of the need to stay, although Fin was not optimistic that they would find anything other than the places of which Marsaili’s father had spoken. A visit that would take them less than an hour. They took a taxi from the airport, and as it approached Haymarket the driver set his indicator going for a left turn into Magdala Crescent. Fin said to him, ‘Not this way.’
‘It’s a short-cut, mate.’
‘I don’t care. Go up to Palmerston Place.’
The driver shrugged. ‘You’re paying.’
Fin felt Marsaili’s eyes on him. Without meeting them he said, ‘When Padraig MacBean took me out to An Sgeir on his old trawler, he told me the story of how he’d lost his father’s brand-new boat in the Minch. Barely escaped with his life.’ He turned to see her eyes fixed upon him, wide with curiosity. ‘Even though there is nothing to mark the spot where she went down, Padraig said he feels it every time he sails over it.’
‘Your son was killed in Magdala Crescent?’
‘In a street off it.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?
He gazed past the driver, through the windscreen and the traffic stretching ahead of them along West Maitland Street. Finally he said, ‘No. I don’t think I do.’
The taxi turned into Palmerston Place, past smoke-blackened bay-windowed tenements, a park in early spring leaf, the Gothic grandeur of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, and down the hill to where the red-sandstone church on the corner had been converted to a youth hostel with pillar-box red doors.
It swung up the hill, then, on Belford Road, to drop them in the forecourt of a Travelodge hotel opposite a stone gateway beneath a blue-and-white banner fluttering in the breeze.
‘Dean Gallery,’ Marsaili read when they stepped out of the cab. Fin paid the driver and turned to face her confusion. ‘The Dean is an art gallery?’
Fin nodded. ‘It is now.’ He took her arm and they ran across the road between cars. Through a black, wrought-iron gate they followed a narrow cobbled path up the hill between a high privet hedge and a stone wall. The path opened up then, and curved its way through parkland shaded by tall chestnuts, where bronze statues stood on stone plinths planted on manicured lawns. ‘In the days before the welfare state,’ he said, ‘there was something in Scotland called the Poor Law. It was a kind of social security for the poorest in society, pretty much paid for by the Church. And where there were gaps, sometimes private charities stepped in. The Orphan Hospital of Edinburgh was set up in the early 1700s by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge to fill one of those gaps.’
‘This is what you were looking up on the internet last night?’
‘Yes.’ They passed a tarnished sculpture of the Madonna and Child called The Virgin of Alsace. ‘In 1833 the hospital moved into a new building, here on the Dean Estate, and it became known as the Dean Orphanage.’ An Edinburgh lady of indeterminate age with bob-cut silver hair and navy-blue skirts hurried by with a whiff of floral scent that reminded Fin briefly of Marsaili’s mother.
As they rounded the bend at the top of the hill, The Dean swung into view in all its towering sandstone grandeur: porticos, arched windows, four-cornered towers and stone balustrades. Fin and Marsaili stopped to take it in. There was an odd sense of destiny in finding it here at the top of the hill, hidden behind hedges and trees, revealing itself suddenly like a glimpse into history, national and personal. The circle of fate whose first curve had begun with the departure of Marsaili’s father was completed now by her arrival.
Her voice was hushed by awe. ‘This was an orphanage?’
‘Apparently.’
‘My God. It’s a wonderful building, Fin. But no place to bring up orphaned children.’
Fin thought that his aunt’s house had been no place to bring up an orphaned child either. He said, ‘I read last night that originally they were fed on porridge and kale, and that the orphan girls had to make clothes for all the c
hildren to wear. I guess things would have been very different in the fifties.’ He paused. ‘But it’s hard to picture your dad here.’
Marsaili turned to him. ‘Are you sure this is where he meant?’
He led her a little further up the hill, and pointed beyond The Dean, to the twin towers of another impressive building in the valley below. ‘Stewart’s Melville,’ he said. ‘A private school. In the days your dad would have been here it was called Daniel Stewart’s College.’
‘Danny’s place.’
Fin nodded. ‘A terrible irony in it, not missed by your dad. The poorest and most deprived children of his generation living cheek by jowl with the most privileged. What was it he said? The turrets at Danny’s had always been a reminder of their place in the world?’
‘Yes,’ Marsaili said. ‘At the bottom of the pile.’ She turned to Fin. ‘I want to go in.’
They followed the drive to the portico at the entrance, where steps led up between pillars to a rust-red door. A stone stairway to their left descended to an open green space that might once have been gardens. Fin watched Marsaili’s face as they crossed a tiled vestibule into the main hallway that ran the length of the building. Impressively grand rooms led off either side of it, galleries hung with paintings, or filled with sculptures, a shop, a cafeteria. Light cascaded down at either end of it from windows in the stairwells of each wing. You could very nearly hear the distant echo of lost children.
The emotion in Marsaili’s face was almost painful to watch as she reassessed everything about herself. Who she was, where she had come from, what dreadful kind of a life her father had endured as a boy. Something he had never shared with any of them. His lonely secret.
A uniformed security guard asked if he could help them.
Fin said, ‘This place used to be an orphanage.’
‘Yeah. Hard to believe.’ The guard tipped his head towards one end of the corridor. ‘The boys used to be in that wing, apparently. The girls in the other. The exhibition room along there on the left used to be the headmaster’s office. Or whatever he was called.’
‘I want to go,’ Marsaili said suddenly, and Fin saw that there were silent tears reflecting light on her cheeks. He slipped his arm through hers and led her back out through the entrance, watched by a bemused guard wondering what it was he had said. She stood breathing deeply at the top of the steps for almost a minute. ‘We can find out from the records, can’t we? Who he really was, I mean. Where his family came from.’
Fin shook his head. ‘I checked online last night. The records are kept locked up for a hundred years. Only the children themselves have a right of access to them.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it’s designed to protect them. Though I suppose the courts could grant the police a warrant to gain access. This is a murder investigation, after all.’
She turned teary eyes in his direction, wiping her cheeks dry with the backs of her hands. He saw in her face the same question he had been unable to answer on the beach the night before. Had her father killed his brother? Fin thought it unlikely they would ever know, unless by some miracle they were able to find the girl called Ceit, who had boarded at the O’Henley croft.
They walked in silence back down the cobbled path to Belford Road, the Dean Cemetery brooding in shaded tranquillity behind a high stone wall. As they arrived at the gate Fin’s mobile phone alerted him to an incoming email. He scrolled through its menu with his finger and tapped to open it. When he took some time to read it, frowning thoughtfully, Marsaili said, ‘Something important?’
He waited until he had tapped in a response before replying. ‘When I was looking for references to the Dean Orphanage on the internet last night I came across a forum of former Dean orphans exchanging photographs and reminiscences. I suppose there must be some kind of bond between them all that they still feel, even if they didn’t know one another at The Dean.’
‘Like family.’
He looked at her. ‘Yes. Like the family they never had. You still feel a greater affinity to a second cousin you’ve never met than to some complete stranger.’ He pushed his hands deep into his pockets. ‘A lot of them seem to have emigrated. Australia the most popular destination.’
‘As far away from The Dean as they could get.’
‘A fresh start, I suppose. Putting a whole world between you and your childhood. Erasing the past.’ Every word he uttered had such resonance for Fin that he found himself almost too choked to speak. It was, after all, only what he had done himself. He felt Marsaili’s hand on his arm. The merest touch that said more than anything she could have put into words. ‘Anyway, there was one of them still living here in Edinburgh. A man called Tommy Jack. He might well have been at The Dean around the same time as your dad. There was an email address. I wrote to him.’ He shrugged. ‘I very nearly didn’t. It was a real afterthought.’
‘That was him replying?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘He sent his address and said he would be happy to talk to us this evening at his home.’
THIRTY-ONE
Afternoon sunlight leaked in all around drawn curtains that breathed in and out in the breeze from the open window beyond them. The noise of passing traffic came with it, distant and unreal, along with the sound of falling water from the weir in the Water of Leith below.
Their room was up in the roof, with views across the river and the Dean Village. But Fin had drawn the curtain on it as soon as they entered the room. They needed the dark to find themselves.
There had been no discussion, no plan. The hotel was directly across the road from the gallery, and they required a place for the night. Fin was not quite sure why neither of them had corrected the receptionist’s mistaken notion that they were a couple looking for a double room. There had been ample opportunity.
They had ascended to the top floor in a tiny elevator without a word passing between them, Fin’s stomach alive with butterflies in collision. Neither had met the other’s eye.
It had been easier, somehow, to undress in the dark, although there was a time when they had known each other’s bodies intimately. Every curve, every surface, every softness.
And now, with the cool of the sheets on their skin, they rediscovered that intimacy. How bizarrely comfortable it was suddenly, and familiar, as if no time had passed at all since the last time. Fin found the same passion deep inside as she had aroused in him that very first time. Fierce, trembling, all-consuming desire. He found her face with his hands, all its well-known contours. Her neck, her shoulders, the gentle swell of her breasts, the curve of her buttocks.
Their lips were like old friends rediscovering each other after so many years, searching, exploring, as if not quite believing that nothing had really changed.
Their bodies rose and fell as one, breath coming in gasps, involuntary vocal punctuation. No words. No control. Lust, passion, hunger, greed. Generating heat, sweat, total immersion. Fin felt the blood of his island heritage pulsing in every stroke. The endless windswept moors, the fury of the ocean as it smashed itself upon the shore. The Gaelic voices of his ancestors raised in tribal chant.
And suddenly it was over. Like the first time. Sluice gates opened, water released, after years of constraint behind emotional dams built from anger and misunderstanding. All of it gone, in a moment, washing away every last wasted minute of their lives.
They lay afterwards, wrapped in each other, lost in their thoughts. And in a while Fin became aware that Marsaili’s breathing had slowed, grown shallow, her head heavier on his chest, and he wondered where in God’s name they went from here.
THIRTY-TWO
Tommy Jack lived in a two-bedroomed tenement flat above a wine shop and a newsagent’s in Broughton Street. The taxi dropped Fin and Marsaili in York Place and they walked slowly down the hill in the soft evening light, breathing in the strange smells of the city. Exhaust fumes, malt bins, curry. Nothing could have been further from the island experience. Fin had spent fifteen years of his life in
this town, but just a matter of days back among the islands and already it seemed alien, impossibly claustrophobic. And dirty. Discarded chewing gum blackening the pavements, litter blowing in the gutters.
The entrance to the close was in Albany Street Lane, and as they turned into it Fin saw a van driving past up the hill. It was a vehicle belonging to Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, and carried the logo, Giving children back their future. And he wondered how you could give back what had already been destroyed.
Tommy was a short man with a round, shining face beneath a smooth, shiny head. His shirt collar was frayed. He wore a grey pullover with egg stains down the front, tucked into trousers a size too big that were held up high around his stomach by a belt tightened one notch too many. There were holes worn in the toes of his carpet slippers.
He ushered them into a narrow hallway with dark wallpaper, and a front room which probably trapped the sun during the day, but which was dingy now in the dying evening light. A smell of stale cooking fat permeated the flat, along with the faintly unpleasant perfume of body odour.
But Tommy was a man of cheerful disposition, with sharp dark eyes that shone at them through frameless glasses. Fin figured that he was probably in his mid to late late sixties. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘That would be nice,’ Marsaili said, and he talked to them through the open door of the tiny kitchen scullery as he boiled a kettle and brought out cups and saucers and teabags.
‘I’m on my own these days, ever since my missus died about eight years ago. More than thirty years we were married. Still can’t get used to being without her.’
And Fin thought that there was a certain tragic irony in both starting and finishing life all alone.
Marsaili said, ‘No children?’
