by Leah Fleming
‘We flew in from Glasgow,’ she offered, knowing it was best to give a little true information. ‘This is Hew Charles, Mistress Sinclair, and Mor-Anna has gone off to find her bearings. Thank you for your kind offer. A cup of tea would be a Christian act on this cold afternoon.’
‘And Mr Lennox, he’ll be coming at the weekend?’ asked Peggy.
‘No, he’s far too busy,’ she replied a bit too quickly.
‘And you’ll be going back after the mid-term?’ Peggy sipped, her ears flapping.
‘There’s no rush. Anna’s not in school full time yet,’ Minn said feeling the heat of the peat fire on her cheeks. How cosy and warm these houses could be when the thick walls were heated through.
‘She’s a big girl for her age. She’ll be your first husband’s girl?’ Peggy asked.
This inquisition had gone on long enough. ‘Thank you for the tea but I must get on and open up the house. There’s plenty of dry peat in the byre I notice. I’ll take the children beachcombing in the morning,’ she said, standing up to check Hew, who was just about to pull the tablecloth on to the floor. I’d better find Anna before she gets into mischief.’
‘She’s away playing with Jessie Munn, see. Does she have the Gaelic?’ Minn shook her head, ashamed that she had not passed on her mother tongue.
‘Children learn quickly when left to themselves. They teach it in the school now. In my day we were only allowed the English in class, but you’ll not be stopping that long will you?’ said Peggy.
You nosy wee cailleach, she thought as she whisked Hew out of the door. It had brightened up and so had her spirits. With Peggy’s help they could make the cottage clean, dry and lighter.
‘It must be our season for visitors this autumn,’ smiled Peggy Sinclair. ‘There’s been a big gathering at the Crannog all summer, a bunch of artists from Glasgow taken over the big house as some school, comings and goings. The Macallum girl has been rushed off her feet cooking for the lot of them, and now back in the village school teaching…’
‘Jo Macallum, Johanna. I thought they were abroad now,’ said Minn, stopped in her tracks by that name.
‘Aye, Mrs Mackinnon now, of course. Ewan dubh’s the assistant warden at the Crannog. Made a name for himself in Edinburgh by all accounts, and here with a bunch of students.
Most of them are on their way back now for the course is over. It’s nice to see the old place being used like the old days. You’ll have to pay them a visit while you’re here. You were all pals as I recall.’ Peggy smiled, knowing full well that the whole island knew about Ewan and Minn before the war.
She stepped back blindly from the path, waving and calling Anna back from her playing. He is here on the island, her heart cried, shocked by Peggy’s news. She leant on the gate to recover herself.
He is here. Why are you so helpless when you hear his name on the wind? she cried. Was there no escaping the torment of greeting a face that haunted her dreams?
She had come here for peace of mind, for time to rethink the future. The letter left for Harry was terse and to the point, giving him no chance to persuade her to stay.
DEAR HARRY,
Tell Edie and Gil I’ve gone to Phetray for mid-term with the children. I can’t stand the atmosphere. Need some time to clear my head. Don’t come rushing after us. We’ll be fine in the cottage. I’m trusting you’ll take the time to sort out the Prentiss affair while we’re out of the way. Can’t go on like this.
BRODIE
How could she find peace of mind now, trapped by the storms, by all the broken promises the two of them had made on this cursed island? There was so much still to say and yet nothing to say. It was six years since they had last met face to face.
Why was she feeling as if this impulsive flight with her children, this voyage of her heart was ending here on this shore with the tide out and the ferry boat cancelled for a hundred years, with no means of escape? How could she face him again?
Two
The Crannog
‘They’ve all gone at last,’ sighed Ewan Mackinnon, assistant warden of the Crannog summer school for artists, as he made his way down to the old boat house on the beach that served as his temporary studio.
The experiment was over; the students returning back to their colleges seemed satisfied by three months retreat. His head was spinning with all he had learnt from Sandy Thompson, a brilliant maestro who’d torn his work apart, made him reassess his ideas and left him raring to start on some fresh abstracts.
Phetray was free of its annual visitors, the Tulloch bar emptied of the English crews, and the peace of his beach walks with Cullein, the terrier, was uninterrupted by strangers.
He needed time to process all that Sandy had suggested about his work: how to capture the tones and textures of harbour scenes, how the houses here grew out of the landscape. He wanted to capture the isolation of his community, the vibrant colour of it all so that he could go back to the mainland and continue his studies with all these visions still in his mind’s eye.
His head was spinning with ideas. What was needed now was peace and solitude.
Not that Ewan had any quarrel with the sons and daughters of Phetray for returning each season when the schools were closed. The annual invasion of swallows flocking back to their breeding grounds with new bairns and aged parents, cramming on to the decks of the Pride of Argyll ferry for a first glimpse of Kilphetrish harbour and Sandy ‘the polis’ waving them ashore was only to be welcomed. They were family, in-born bairns, but they were all but gone now before the gales stopped the ferries.
His head was spinning with ideas and he wanted no disruption to his quiet routine, for there was real work to be done. Jo had taken up a temporary post helping out with the infant school. She was a great help to the cook at the Crannog but needed to fill her time in her own way until he was ready to return south.
It had not been easy for her this last year. They had been travelling to Italy when she’d lost the baby suddenly without any warning; the wee boy was born too soon to live. She named him Andrew John after their fathers and they buried him in a little hospital close to Milan. She took great comfort from the busy cemetery with waxed flowers and pictures.
‘He’ll not be lonely there,’ she wept, and Ewan felt it was all his own selfish fault for dragging her off on one of his restless sprees. She was a saint to put up with his singleminded determination to cram years of neglected education into a few months living out of a suitcase.
Taking the post on Phetray seemed only fair so Jo could be close to her family and recuperate. They were told there was no reason for them not to conceive again, but nothing was happening. This time they would stay until she was ready to leave. He owed her that but he felt uneasy staying on.
The past cast its long shadow. Women and islands could drive a Highland man mad, was the old saying. Jo seemed to enjoy living in such grand houses and meeting all the artists. She acted as temporary housekeeper to a bunch of absent-minded scruffy students of all ages, shopping, giving orders to the cook, but she was happiest around children.
Ewan parked his battered old bike on the gravel, making his way down to the boathouse set neatly on one side of the cove. Here he could work free from interruption,
Jo would call down after school to bring tea in a flask, he smiled to himself, unlocking the boathouse and setting up his work for the day. He lit up his pipe and looked out over the beach, to an expanse of colour as far as the eye could see: a delft-blue sky touching an opalescent sea, silver sands and pea-green machair dotted with chestnut cattle.
Some would call it predictable, a chocolate box landscape, but he was not going to paint like a photograph. He wanted to capture the scene through sunlight, capture the essence of light on the sea. His quirky seascapes were beginning to fetch a decent enough price to keep his shelves lined with books and a bottle of best Islay malt whisky.
Phetray was more of a connoisseur’s taste: an island flat, delicate, full of light. In June it shimmered wi
th sunshine, in winter it was wild and windswept. There was not the hilly grandeur of a Skye or the ruggedness of some of the inner isles. Far out on the distant horizon those landscapes shimmered as its backdrop. It lay like an emerald in the ocean, brilliant, frilled with white spume, home to myriad flowers and rare birds, oceanic shells, all the colours of the rainbow.
It was criss-crossed by just a few roads strung with old black houses and crofts, always a breeding ground for artists and craftsmen, naturalists and seafarers. Traders across the centuries had left their mark on Phetray culture, its language and its poetry, and he was proud to be an adopted son.
After all the wanderings of the past year he was strangely content to return, if only the memories of his last visit would die down. How could he forget what he had said to Minn Macfee.
A shadow crossed his canvas, disturbing concentration for a second, and Ewan swung round in frustration only to see Jo in her thick coat and headscarf waving a flask, standing in his light with her arms folded.
‘Oh, it’s you, Jo!’ he snapped. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’
‘Have you forgotten it’s mid-term. School’s out and I’ve been down to the post office.’ She smiled, waving some mail in front of him.
‘Huh! Is that all you’ve come for… It could wait… I want to get this finished.’ Ewan was putting the final touches to a seascape of sand, rock and waves. After Sandy’s eye had roved over it he was no longer satisfied with the finished effect.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve heard some interesting news. I just thought you’d want to know,’ she said.
‘What do I want with gossip?’ he sneered, continuing with his brushwork, standing on the planks under the upside-down boat with a glass hole in the upturned hull to capture the northern light.
‘There’s smoke coming out of the Macfee croft,’ she teased.
‘You came all the way down here to tell me Niall Macfee is in residence?’ He laughed.
‘That’s where you’re wrong. Peggy the postie had it on good authority from Sandy the polis who heard from Effie in the Co-op store who saw Alice Munn, who’s Peggy Sinclair’s neighbour, that Minn Macfee is cooried up in the cottage with her kiddies for mid-term.’
‘So?’ Ewan paused, unimpressed.
‘Apparently she flew in without any warning and they had to air the house in a hurry while they were staying at the hotel,’ she added.
‘Is the Lennox chap with them?’ Ewan carried on fiddling about.
‘Apparently not, he’s away on business, abroad or in America. You can take your pick. Anyway we must ask them up for tea,’ Jo replied.
‘What ever for?’ snapped Ewan wishing she would leave him to his work.
‘Ewan, you were engaged to the girl, we were all at school together and the whole island knows about it, so don’t be mean.’ She smiled, her grey eyes flashing with a twinkle of mischief. ‘It’ll set the cat among the pigeons if we do. Everyone wants to know why she’s back and living in a wee house.’
‘Johanna Mackinnon, you’re getting as bad as the old cailleachs, and here was me thinking what did I do to deserve such a paragon of virtue? Now leave me to my work and find some dusting,’ he said as she picked up an oily rag and threw it at him.
‘Oh don’t take it all so seriously. I’m only trying to be polite.’ Jo smiled. ‘I’d like to see her children and catch up. I feel bad we never saw her when her mother died. It’ll be very strange for her after a big house. She might like to see the Crannog again before it’s closed up for the winter.’
‘Please yourself,’ Ewan muttered, feeling a wave of anger surging through him, tightening his chest.
Jo stood inspecting the state of the boathouse. It smelt of oils and dried spirits, with crumpled rags curled to a crisp. Through the sunlight of the open door she could see a stack of canvases, shelves of tools, frames lining the walls, an easel, and Cullein, his biscuit-coloured Cairn terrier, snoozing in the corner.
This was the working, living, messy studio of an artist. A shaft of sunlight glistened on the whisky bottle and she picked it up in disgust, shoving it in his face.
‘I’m going to pour that stuff in the sea. If your teetotal father could see the state of you…’ Jo pointed to his baggy checked shirt. ‘It’s about time you changed that rag.’
‘Don’t you dare touch that bottle. It’s a fine peaty malt from Islay. What pleasure is left if an artist can’t have his dram after a hard day’s work? Don’t you be such a fishwife, nag, nag nag.’
‘And just what’s this officer’s camp bed doing back in here? Have you been sleeping rough at night? People’ll think I’ve chucked you out of my bed.’ She winked.
Trust his proud eagle-eyed wife to miss nothing. He knew her chunnering was meant well, but he did his best work in a cramped guddle. It suited him sometimes to carry on painting into the night, to sit by the shore with his pipe and watch stars across the stretch of sky he knew so well. Sometimes he was just too bushed to walk back over the rocks and machair to the big house. Sometimes he was too unsteady on his feet to attempt the journey. Sleeping rough alongside a bottle of ‘Ardbeg’ had always soothed his spirits. He liked to be close to the sea.
‘You shouldn’t doss down in this hut like some tramp. I’m told you get too drunk to make it back some nights. How are we ever to make a child?’ Jo argued.
‘Have the old cailleachs of Kilphetrish nothing to do but clack their false teeth so you come running with their cracking?’ he winked.
‘The sea’s rough now and it’s too cold for nights under the stars. What if you had an accident?’ she snapped.
‘Then it’s no far for you all to be dumping me back into the sea.’ He laughed away her worried look.
‘Enough of this morbid talk… Why did I have to marry such an irascible man? Irascible, reclusive, stubborny bodach; that’s you!’ She laughed. ‘You shame me dressed like a tramp, your hair down to your shoulders and a beard like Moses. Minnie will think you’re some dosser when she sees you! Honestly, have you seen yourself in the mirror lately? How long since those bespattered cords saw a scrubbing board and washing line? I want them off you and in the tub.’ Jo tugged at his britches.
‘Hush, woman, and let me get on!’ he said, knowing there were still so many ideas in his head, so many moments he wanted to imprint in his memory before they left the island and the weather closed in on him.
Jo still did not understand how fiercely he was driven. How could she understand how he had been given life when so many good men had perished in the war? The past was never far from his thoughts, invading his dreams with bitter memories.
The sea was a cruel but stalwart companion and he wanted to record its moods and secrets, capture the elusive power of its hold over him. Here on Phetray he felt closer to its essence. It was here that his passionate affair had begun.
Jo was sensing defeat and sighed. ‘I don’t know why I’m bothering. You never take a blind bit of notice of what I say. I might as well be invisible; perhaps Minn Macfee will put a clean shirt on your back and a decent shave on your face.’
Ewan put down his brush carefully, looking up with his leathery face creased into a v-shaped frown, his eyes spearing her with anger. ‘And why on God’s earth should she be doing that then?’
‘Haven’t you been listening to a word? I’m going to ask her round for tea. Don’t make me ashamed of you. You couldn’t get enough of her once upon a time,’ she added.
‘That was a long time ago. We were still bairns. I don’t care what I’m wearing. I never have. Life’s too short to be a fashion plate,’ he snapped back.
‘Well there’s no fear of that then. I’ll leave you to it.’ Jo was making tracks across the powdery sand back to the path.
‘Aye, I’ve heard you… Don’t go making any show for that jumped-up madam,’ he shouted, throwing his brush across the boathouse. His face was drained, his weather-beaten features cragged, hewn and gnarled. ‘I’ll be making myself scarce. I’ll not be wan
ting to make a spectacle for her amusement,’ he muttered spitting his pipe out wearily.
Suddenly the sky above darkened as black clouds banked up over the sea. Ewan shivered with the chill on the breeze, uneasy at the news. Surely not… in the name of God! After all these years, the wanderer was returning to haunt him once more.
He was in no hurry to go back to the house. Cullein wanted a run along the beach. In the grey light the machair was dotted with a thousand stars, the last of the summer flowers still blooming: clover, vetchlings, harebells and wild thyme, shimmering with raindrops. He swigged the last of the malt in his flask in a gulp of frustration.
Who was it said that whisky took the fire out of fever and the ache out of loving? The wind was beating his cheeks like whipcords. Her presence on the island was making him edgy.
He could sense her on the wind, Minn… his signpost and his muse, hewn like him from these hard rocks.
She was the one love that had almost broken his heart. He ached to see her but hurt pride would cage up this longing. He would never go to her again, to that sea cailleach who cast a spell over him. He must steer clear of her wily magic.
The thought of her would distract him, for with her name came back so many memories. Thinking about her was an indulgence he could ill afford when there were so many other visions in his head.
‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t bother me!’ he yelled, and Cullein stopped in his tracks and sank on the sand dejected.
‘Not you, old bodach… Not you.’ He picked up a stick and threw it.
One man, his wife and their dog was the best life for him. As he stood watching the dog tearing across the beach in pursuit of his master’s command he heard the siren voice calling to the seals and saw again the girl in the faded frock, barefoot on the shore. Their lives had been so inextricably bound together by the sea and the tide. How could what was begun with such innocence cause so much heartache unless there was some curse in the wind?
