A Drop in the Ocean

by Jenni Ogden

  “What do you mean? What other firsts have there been?”

  “Do you really want a list? In front of Pat?”

  Pat was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Stop it, the pair of you. Get yourself in the shower, Anna, and I’ll make you something light to settle your stomach.” I caught her winking at Tom. “And after you’ve filled the shower bucket, Tom Scarlett, you can scarper and let us get on with it.”

  I had to face up to what was really bugging me, sooner or later, and Pat made sure it was sooner. Poached eggs, two cups of tea, and a four-word lecture.

  “Your mum needs you,” she said.

  TWENTY - TWO

  Brisbane, Sydney, Singapore, London, Edinburgh—and finally I stepped out of the plane onto the land my mother had fallen in love with even before she fell in love with Magnus Hill. As I drove my rental car along the skinny southernmost finger of Mainland, the creatively named southern island of Shetland, my travel fatigue lifted a little. Perhaps my new love of islands had expanded my capacity to appreciate the almost treeless expanses of green and gray that stepped down to the wide blue sea. It was a lyrical day, pale blue skies and a warm sun. Not at all as I had imagined it. I was lucky, I supposed, to arrive at the beginning of August, Shetland’s warmest month, although even on this day the air was many degrees cooler than Turtle Island’s winter temperature when I left.

  I tried not to dwell too much on Mum and her illness as I drove from Sumberg airport to the attractive fishing village of Lerwick—Shetland’s capital, and the only town of any size. Now that I was there I was glad I had come. I harbored enough guilt over never having visited Mum before, and never having met her husband, without adding to my sins my reluctance to leave my own island prematurely.

  Lerwick was a prosperous, well-maintained-looking town, courtesy of the lucrative oil fields off Shetland’s shores. I stopped only for a sandwich and a surprisingly good cup of coffee, knowing I had two ferries to catch before I reached Unst, the farthermost island where Magnus had his croft and kept his fishing boat. Mum had been discharged from the Lerwick hospital two days ago, stents holding open two of her arteries. The doctors had decided that a bypass operation might not be necessary, and had elected to wait and see.

  It wasn’t too difficult to ignore my apprehension as I watched the ancient landscape meander past. Even in August, the road was quiet, and I stopped occasionally to take photos of pretty crofts nestled into the stark landscape, almost as if they had been there as long as human history. Of course they hadn’t; I did at least know—from my reading of Lonely Planet’s guide to Shetland on the endless plane journey from Australia to London—that people had lived there since 3,400 BC. Then before the 9th Century AD, there were the Pictish people, whose name made them sound like something out of a fairy tale. Later came the Vikings. Apparently Unst was their stronghold.

  I loved all these facts. According to Lonely Planet, Shetland was closer to Bergen in Norway than to Edinburgh, and lots of Shetlanders considered themselves more Scandinavian than Scots. From the few photos I’d seen of Magnus Hill, he wouldn’t be an exception.

  I swallowed my frustration as I glimpsed signs pointing to ancient settlements, field systems, carved stones, and Pictish towers. Brochs, they were called. Even the words sounded mystical. I’d had quite a thing about archaeology for a while when I was a teenager, but apart from a visit to Stonehenge with Dad when I was a kid, we’d never gone anywhere where I could see it for real. When I was quite young Dad and I would spend whole days at the British Museum, and he managed to pass on to me something of his fascination with collections of tools and bits of pottery, and the people who made them. No one else in my class at primary school was in the least interested in things like that. All it did for me later, when I was at grammar school, was brand me even more firmly as a freak. And Mum wasn’t the sort to want to drive for miles to see a few standing stones in the middle of a muddy paddock. I remember being angry with her about that too, and screaming at her that Dad would have taken me to see interesting stuff but he was DEAD. I think I managed to curb my tongue before I went as far as blaming her for his death. One of the counselors I was forced to see had even had the gall to imply that deep down I wished it had been Mum who had died, not Dad. Psychobabble. I had hated it. Still did.

  And now here she was, my so very English-rose mother, making this her home. I wondered if it had changed her? The grumbling apprehension deep in my gut was back, so I breathed in, a lung-filling gulp of salty air, and breathed it out again, but my guilty thoughts weren’t that easy to expunge.

  I should at least have come to their wedding. It didn’t look too good to make my first visit to see them contingent on Mum having a heart attack. Magnus was going to have a lovely, warm feeling about me. I shook my head and turned the car radio on, twiddling the knob until some jolly Scottish music blasted out.

  I could see the car ferry—much larger and more modern than I expected—coming towards me when I putted into Toft. Opening up its giant jaws, it swallowed my little car and me, and regurgitated us twenty minutes later onto the next island, Yell. To get to the northern end of this took no more than half an hour, and after another, shorter ride on a smaller car ferry, I was at last on Unst, the northernmost inhabited island in the British Isles. By now it was early evening, although the sun was still bright. Checking the directions I’d written down, I drove north for about ten kilometers, along a carless road bordered by peat bogs and green meadows scattered with pink, yellow, and white flowers. Behind were the smooth ripples of gentle hills covered in browned heather, with spare white and gray and pale apricot houses, sometimes in clusters of two or three, and sometimes alone, looking out across their own private expanses of sea and sky. Everywhere there was water—ponds, freshwater lochs, sea inlets, and always the vast Atlantic stretching to infinity. But even that was dwarfed by the sky, still pale blue but now drawn with wispy, pinkish clouds.

  Turning left at a sign to “The Westing,” I bumped along a narrow road until I came to a gate with another sign, “Hill’s Houl.” I was there. A rough farm track led to a croft that began at one end with an oblong stone house of normal height, chimneys at each end, and attached to that three more buildings, each lower and smaller than the previous one. Low stone walls enclosed an area of grass behind the house, presumably to keep out the sheep dotting the rougher grazing outside. Two brown-and-white Shetland ponies gazed curiously at me from inside the wall before dropping their shaggy heads and resuming their grazing. Beyond the house the ground sloped down to the sea.

  I parked my small car behind an old truck, and, breathing in the sea-washed breeze, picked my way through a mosaic of sheep pellets and walked around the smallest end building, which was so low that my head was level with the slate roof. Along the front of the house was a paved area surrounded by a low railing fence. I stepped over the small gate as the door in the main building swung open and my mother stepped out. The shock of her pure white hair almost halted me, but I collected myself and stooped to hug her small body. Surely she had shrunk? She had never been a tall woman—I got that from my father—but now she seemed to reach no farther than my chest. The doorway darkened as Magnus squeezed out, and I looked over Mum’s head at him, feeling scarily as if Mum were our child. I had seen photos of him, but none in recent years. I knew he was only ten years my senior, but seeing him in the flesh brought that vividly home. I suppose Mum’s new frailty made their age difference starker, and I shivered in the cooling air.

  Magnus reached his hand out and I shook it, surprised that he stood no taller than me. It was the door that was small, requiring him to bend his head to get through. He had a nice face and a shy smile, and my stomach settled.

  “Du is welcome, lass. Dine mither widna rest wi’ou du.”

  His voice was low-pitched, his words slow and less lilting than the Scots I was more familiar with. He was not like my image, garnered from vague memories of those few photos I had left back in Boston. My mother either, although
I had seen her a few times in the ten years since their marriage. Probably from his wedding photo, when he seemed to tower over Mum, I had visualized Magnus Hill as a Viking in modern garb, but he was of medium build, although tough-skinned and brown, with sandy, graying hair—plenty of it—and clean-shaven.

  “Come inside, Anna, and Magnus will fetch your bags from the car.” Mum took my hand and I stooped down and followed her into a smallish kitchen, thankfully high enough to stand up in. A delectable smell of roasting lamb made my stomach gurgle and my mouth water. The room was dim, with light streaming in two narrow beams from the small, deeply mullioned windows set into the three-foot stone walls. Magnus maneuvered my case and backpack through another door that involved bending double, and we crawled into a tiny bedroom with a beamed ceiling that soared about a foot above my head. Then after a tour of the main house—the other buildings contained the laundry, a milk and cheese outhouse, and the smallest a stall for their two Shetland ponies—we sat outside on the stone patio and watched the luminous light on the sweeping half-moon bay below, the vivid green of the low hills all around almost too bright. It was, quite simply, magical.

  “We mightn’t get another evening as perfect, so I wanted you to see it like this,” Mum said. I could now see the mother I remembered, the artist’s light making her soft peaches and cream complexion glow, and turning her white hair, still in the same chin-length bob, to the gold it used to be.

  “It’s wonderful. I can see why you love it,” I said, following her gaze and drinking it in.

  “Winter is not quite so easy, but I often spend a few weeks in late January and February in London with Jane.” Jane was her older sister, an aunt who had never married, and had always seemed too sophisticated to be bothered with me.

  Mum insisted her heart would stand a small glass of the wine I had brought all the way from the Australian duty-free shop, and we drank to my arrival and Mum’s good health before squeezing into the kitchen where Magnus served the best plate of melt-in-the-mouth, home-grown-and-hung Shetland lamb and home-grown-and-dug tatties I had ever tasted. I noticed Mum ate almost nothing of her small helping, and after we had finished with bread still warm from the oven and Magnus’s own sheep-milk cheese, she went willingly to bed.

  As Magnus and I washed up, the light still glowing through the small windows although it was close to ten o’clock, Magnus told me about the croft. The main house was the new part, built around 1840, and the smaller buildings were considerably older, and were once where his ancestors lived, often in the same room as their animals. I asked him about Mum’s heart attack, and he told me that, in retrospect, she had been getting breathless quite easily, when once she could walk for hours without a problem. Apparently she had been having a lot of indigestion as well, which was almost certainly angina. Her doctors wanted her to see how things went with the stents and her medications before discussing any further the possibility of a bypass. So far they were happy with her progress.

  “It’s guid du came,” he said. “She wadna hae asked.”

  Next day Mum was, as she said, bone-weary with all yesterday’s excitement, and spent most of the day in bed, or lying on the couch in the small sitting room. The golden weather, as she had predicted, had not held, and a chilly wind swept around the stone croft. The sea was dark gray under an eerie yellow sky, lowered by black clouds. After breakfast, Magnus left her in my care and drove off in his truck. His fishing boat was moored in Belmont, where the Unst ferry docked, and he said he had a few maintenance jobs to do on his fishing nets. While Mum slept, I explored the fields around the croft, and walked for a short distance along the bank that dropped a couple of meters to a stony beach directly in front of the croft. Farther round, a pale sandy beach followed the curves of a bay. The wind was bracing, and I huddled into the fleece I had borrowed from Magnus. Every so often a black head would pop up in the gray sea, one of the many seals that lived there. Otters were apparently resident as well, although not so easy to spot. It was a haunting sort of landscape, with its low, smooth shapes repeating again and again, and everywhere the dominating sky, today barely distinguishable from the sea.

  So it wasn’t until Saturday—another bonus warmish day —that Mum and I really talked. Magnus had left at dawn on his first fishing trip since Mum’s heart attack, and she suggested we drive to a cafe at Baltasound for lunch, telling me in advance that the name of the cafe was not intended for her. She was laughing as we sat down below the sign, “Final Checkout.” It was a general supplies store as well, and while we waited for our soup and scones I wandered around the aisles, filling a trolley with groceries. Over cups of tea Mum asked me about Pat; in my rare correspondence I had told her about the breast cancer. I waited for the inevitable question about Tom and me, but it didn’t come, and I wondered if I’d avoided any mention of him in my letters. I knew I hadn’t told her that we had a relationship, if that was the polite word, but surely I had mentioned his name in passing?

  She was asking me about my visit to Dry Acres Artists’ Community, and, because I liked seeing her laugh, I hammed up the tale of my first meeting with George. “When he appeared at the door I thought I was seeing Dad’s ghost. I practically fainted in a heap at his feet, poor fellow.” I pretended to swoon but stopped when I saw Mum’s worried frown. “Come on Mum, that was meant to be funny. I didn’t really think Dad had come back to haunt me.”

  Mum smiled, but her eyes were sad. “You were so unhappy when he died, and I didn’t know how to make things better for you. I’m sorry, Anna.”

  “Heavens, it wasn’t your fault. I don’t know how you put up with my moods. I know you did your best, but no one could have helped me.”

  “Harry was a good father, and you two had a very special bond. I’m afraid I was a very poor substitute.”

  The anger welled up inside me as I looked at her, so little and fragile. “He didn’t deserve you—or me, for that matter. Mary put me right on the sort of person he was.” I gulped down some tea, trying to dilute the acrid reflux that burnt my throat. “Why would he lie about his parents—all that cock ’n bull about his father being a violent drunk?”

  “Yes, you told me that in your letter. Harry’s lying was a revelation to me too. I had always imagined his father as a monster. I suppose he thought it was easier than telling me about the girl’s abortion and his mother’s suicide. Then when I found I was pregnant and he had to marry me, he was stuck with his lie. Perhaps that’s why he cut all his ties with his sister, so I could never find out the truth.”

  “He was guilt-ridden about his mother’s suicide, and had to make up that story to put the blame on his father. That’s what I think.”

  “You’re probably right. He was only a boy when all that happened. It must have been terrible for him.”

  “You always forgave him.” I looked at her, the mother I had ignored for most of my life. I was as bad as Dad. “Why did he leave you, Mum? Did he have affairs?”

  “Perhaps. I didn’t let myself think about that. He was away so much, and working in trouble spots with exciting young women journalists. In the end I got tired of waiting for him to come home, never sure if he would. It was me who broke it off.”

  “Good for you. How did he take it?”

  “Like a lamb, of course.” She laughed. “He couldn’t hide his relief.”

  “I knew you were pregnant when you got married, but I never worried too much about it. It never occurred to me that you mightn’t have got married otherwise. Did he love you at first, do you think?”

  “He said he did, and I believed him. In fact, I’m sure he did. We had a lot of fun for a few years. So don’t go blaming yourself for being born,” Mum said, looking at me sternly.

  “I won’t. I’m so sorry for the way I treated you; the way I’ve always treated you, as if Dad were so much more important. It was always you who looked after me, even before he left us.”

  “That’s the lot of mothers, I fear. Anna, it’s all water under the bridge, and you’
re here now.”

  MAGNUS BROUGHT HOME SOME OF HIS DAY’S CATCH, and herrings fresh from the Atlantic sea were in no way related to the ones I had reluctantly eaten, on rare occasions, from tins. We ate outside, and I shared a beer with Magnus and listened to his now-familiar accent as he related what I suspected was a much-embellished tale of the muddle he and his fishing partners had got themselves into when hauling in their catch. Mum was giggling, and I felt the past shimmer. How young I must have been when I heard her giggling like that with Dad.

  Magnus’s tale became taller, and I was soon chuckling as well, more at Mum than at Magnus.

  “Enough,” Mum cried, “enough,” and Magus bowed low. Mum wiped her eyes and became serene again. She smiled at me. “I like your hair like that. It shows off your fine bone structure.”

  I caught Magnus’s eye across the table.

  “Aye, it’s bonnie,” he said, smiling his sweet smile.

  Later, with Mum tucked up on the couch, and the toasty smell of a peat fire smoldering in the hearth, Magnus took up a fiddle. From my cushioned seat on the floor beside the couch, I was transported. He was no amateur, and stranger though I was to Shetland, the mournful, haunting sounds closed my eyes and filled my mind with timeless fields of heather, peat bogs, stone crofts, and the cold gray lochs. I felt a touch on my head and reached back and clasped Mum’s hand as she stroked my newly short hair.

  TWENTY - THREE

  We settled into a kind of routine—Magnus was away by seven o’clock or sometimes even earlier, and I took Mum breakfast in bed, leaving her to read her book for an hour or two while I did whatever housework I could find, and often took a stroll along the beach, looking, invariably without success, for otters. After lunch we went somewhere in the car—to visit one of Mum’s many friends, to a remote, stony beach where colorful dinghies waited patiently for the weekend, to small museums where I read more about Unst history while Mum chatted to the staff, or for leisurely explorations of one of the numerous archaeological sites scattered around the island, Viking longhouses a specialty. When we returned, I usually prepared dinner while Mum had a rest. By seven Magnus was home and, weather permitting, we often sat outside for a quiet drink—non-alcoholic for Mum—before eating. After the dinner things were cleared away, unless it was very wet, I usually went for a long walk, sometimes taking the car to the start of a walking track farther afield. Often Mum and Magnus were in bed when I returned.