by Peter May
“No. But I did most of my growing up here.”
Fin turned to see her taking a stiff pull at her gin and tonic. The ice in her glass sounded like the windchimes outside. “And how does a girl from Eriskay come to be a famous actress?”
She laughed uproariously. “I don’t know about famous,” she said, “but the first step for an Eriskay girl to being almost anything other than an Eriskay girl, is to leave the damned place.”
“What age were you when you left?”
“Seventeen. I went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Always wanted to be an actress, you see. Ever since they showed a film of Eriskay in the church hall. Not that it was a drama. It was a documentary made by some German chap in the thirties. But there was something about seeing those folk up on the big screen. Something glamorous. And, I don’t know, it gave them a kind of immortality. I wanted that.” She chuckled and moved out from behind the bar to drape herself on the settee. Dino immediately jumped up on to her knee. “I got very excited once when a teacher on the island let the kids know that he would be showing films at his house. It was just after the electricity came, and everyone squeezed into his sitting room to see them. Charged us a penny each, he did, then projected slides of his holiday in Inverness. Imagine!” She roared with laughter, and Dino raised his head and barked twice.
Fin smiled. “Did you come back for visits?”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, never. Spent years working in theatre in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and pantos around Scotland. Then I got offered my first part in TV by Robert Love at Scottish Television and never looked back. Went down to London, then. Went to a lot of castings, got a few parts, worked as a waitress to fill the gaps in between. I did all right, I suppose. But never was a great success.” Another mouthful of gin induced a moment of reflection. “Until, that is, I got offered a part in The Street. It came kind of late in life, but I was an overnight success. I don’t know why. Folk just loved my character.” She cackled. “I became what you might call a household name. And the twenty years of fame that it brought, and the marvellous earnings that went with it, have paid for all this.” She waved an arm around her empire. “A very comfortable retirement.”
Fin gazed at her thoughtfully. “What made you come back?”
She looked at him. “You’re an islander, aren’t you?”
“I am. From Lewis.”
“Then you know why. There’s something about the islands, a ghràidh, that always brings you back in the end. I’ve already got my place booked in the cemetery over the hill.”
“Were you ever married?”
Her smile carried a sadness in it. “In love once, but never married.”
Fin turned to the side windows looking back out across the hill. “So you knew the people who lived on the croft below here?”
“Aye, I did that. Old widow O’Henley it was who stayed there when I was a kid. Her and a young lassie called Ceit who was in my class at school. A homer.”
Fin frowned. “A homer? What’s that?”
“A boy or a girl from a home, a ghràidh. There were hundreds of them taken out of orphanages and local authority homes by the councils and the Catholic Church, and shipped out here to the islands. Just handed over to complete strangers, they were. No vetting in those days. Kids were dumped off the ferry at Lochboisdale to stand on the pier with family names tied around their necks, waiting to be claimed. The primary school up on the hill there was full of them. Nearly a hundred at one time.”
Fin was shocked. “I had no idea.”
Morag lit a cigarette and puffed away on it as she spoke. “Aye, they were at it right into the sixties. I once heard the priest saying it was good to have fresh blood in the islands after generations of inbreeding. I think that was the idea. Though they weren’t all orphans, you know. Some came from broken homes. But there was no going back. Once you got sent out here all ties with the past were cut. You were forbidden contact with parents or family. Poor little bastards. Some of them got terribly abused. Beaten, or worse. Most were just treated like slave labour. A few were luckier, like me.”
Fin raised an eyebrow. “You were a homer?”
“I was, Mr. Macleod. Boarded with a family at Parks, over on the other side of the island. All gone now, of course. No children of their own, you see. But unlike many, I have happy memories of my time here. Which is why I had no problems about coming back.” She emptied her glass. “I need a wee top-up. How about you?”
“No thanks.” Fin had barely touched his.
Morag moved Dino off her knee and eased herself out of the settee to pour another drink. “Of course, it wasn’t just the locals who gave the kids a hard time. There were incomers, too. Mostly English. Like the headmaster at Daliburgh school.” She smiled. “Thought he was coming here to civilize us, a ghràidh, and banned the Gillean Cullaig.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the name they gave to the Hogmanay tradition when gangs of boys went around the houses on New Year’s Eve blessing each house with a poem, and being rewarded with bread and scones, and cake and fruit. All dropped into the white flour sacks they carried. They’d been doing it for centuries. But Mr. Bidgood thought it smacked of begging, and issued an edict forbidding any of his pupils to take part.”
“And everyone obeyed?”
“Well, most did. But there was one boy in my class. Donald John. A homer. He boarded with the Gillies family, a brother and sister, over there on the other side the hill. He defied the ban and went out with the older boys. When Bidgood found out he gave that lad such a leathering with the tawse.”
Fin shook his head. “He shouldn’t have had the right to do that.”
“Oh, they had the right to do what they pleased in those days. But Donald Seamus—that was the man that Donald John boarded with—he took exception. Went up to the school and beat the living shit out of that headmaster. Excuse my French. He took Donald John out of school that very day, too, and the boy never went back.” She smiled. “Bidgood returned to England with his tail between his legs within the month.” She smiled. “It was a colourful life we lived back then.”
Fin looked around and thought that it was a colourful life that she was living still. “So do you have any idea what happened to Ceit?”
Morag shrugged and sipped again at her gin. “None at all, I’m afraid, a ghràidh. She left the island not long before myself, and for all I know never came back.”
Another dead end.
By the time Fin came to leave, the cloud was gathering ominously all along the western bay, the wind had stiffened and carried the odd spot of rain. Somewhere much further to the west, beyond the cloud, the sun was drizzling liquid gold on the ocean as it dipped towards the horizon.
Morag said, “I’d better run you back over the hill, a ghràidh. It looks like you could get caught in a downpour. I’ll just open the garage doors now, so that I can drive straight in when I get back.”
She tapped a code into a controller at the side of the door, and it swung slowly upwards to fold flat into the roof. As they got into the car, Fin spotted an old spinning wheel at the back of the garage. “You don’t spin wool, do you?” he said.
She laughed. “Good God, no. Never have, never will.” Dino jumped up into her lap and she closed the door, but kept the roof down this time. He snuffled and yelped and rubbed his wet nose all over the window until she lowered it, and he draped himself in his habitual place over her arm to poke his face out into the wind. As she drove down the driveway she said, “It’s an old one I’m having restored. It’ll sit nicely in the dining room. A reminder of days gone by. All the women spun wool here when I was a girl. They would oil it and knit it into blankets and socks and jerseys for the menfolk. Most of the men were fishermen in those days, at sea five days a week, and the Eriskay jerseys knitted with that oiled wool were as good as waterproofs. They all wore them.”
She swerved at the foot of the drive as she took a draw on her cigarette, an
d missed the fencepost by inches.
“Each of the women had her own pattern, you know. Usually handed down from mother to daughter. So distinctive that when a man’s body was pulled from the sea, decayed beyond recognition, he could almost always be identified from the knitted pattern of his pullover. As good as a fingerprint, it was.”
She waved at the old man and his dog to whom Fin had spoken earlier, and the Mercedes nearly went into a ditch. But Morag seemed oblivious.
“There’s an old retired priest on the island who’s a bit of a historian.” She laughed. “Nothing much else for a celibate man to do on a long winter’s night.” She swung a mischievous smile Fin’s way. “Anyway, he’s a bit of an expert on the knitted patterns of old Eriskay. Has a collection of photographs and drawings, I’ve heard. Goes back a hundred years and more, they say.”
As they reached the top of the hill she glanced curiously across at her passenger. “You don’t say much, Mr. Macleod.”
And Fin thought it would have been difficult to get a word in edgeways. But all he said was, “I’ve enjoyed hearing your stories, Morag.”
After a moment she said, “What’s your interest in the folk who lived at the O’Henley croft?”
“It’s not really the O’Henley woman herself that I’m interested in, Morag. I’m trying to trace the roots of an old man now living on Lewis. I think he might have come from Eriskay.”
“Well, maybe I know him. What’s his name?”
“Oh, it’s not a name you would know. He calls himself Tormod Macdonald now. But that’s not his real name.”
“Then what is?”
“That’s what I don’t know.”
The rain started as Fin drove north from Ludagh, sweeping across the machair from the open sea to the west. Big fat drops that came first in ones and twos, before reinforcements arrived and compelled him to put his wipers on at double speed. He turned off at Daliburgh on to the Lochboisdale road, his mind filled still with the thought that Morag’s story of Eriskay knitting patterns was perhaps his last chance to track down the true identity of Marsaili’s father. A very, very long shot indeed.
The Lochboisdale Hotel sat on the hill above the harbour, in the lee of Ben Kenneth. It was an old, traditional, whitewashed building with modern extensions, and a dining lounge with a view out over the bay. At a dark reception desk in the lobby, a girl in a tartan skirt gave him keys to a single room, and confirmed that they did, indeed, have a fax machine. Fin noted the number and climbed the staircase to his room.
From his dormer window, he looked down on the pier in the fading light as the CalMac ferry from Oban, with its red twin funnels, emerged from the rain to manoeuvre itself up to the ramp and lower the door of its car deck. Tiny figures in yellow oilskins braved the weather to wave the cars off. Fin wondered how it must have been for those poor bewildered kids, plucked from everything they had known and dumped here on the pier to face their fate. And he felt anger at the men whose religion and politics had dictated it.
Who had known about it then, apart from those involved? Why had it never been reported in the press, as it certainly would be today? How would people have reacted had they known what was going on? His own parents, he was sure, would have been outraged. Anger welled within him as he thought about it. The anger of a parent. And the hurt of an orphan. His ability to empathize with those wretched children was almost painful. He wanted to lash out and hit something, or someone, on their behalf.
And the rain ran down his window like tears spilled for all those poor lost souls.
He crossed his room to sit on the edge of the bed in the evening gloom, and as he turned on his bedside lamp felt depression descend on him like a shroud. From the address book on his mobile phone he tracked down George Gunn’s home number and hit the dial key. Gunn’s wife answered, and Fin recalled the invitations George had extended on more than one occasion to come and eat wild salmon with him and his wife. He had still never met her.
“Hello, Mrs. Gunn, it’s Fin Macleod here. Is George there?”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Macleod,” she said, as if they were old friends. “One moment. I’ll go and get him.”
After a few moments he heard Gunn’s voice. “Where are you, Mr. Macleod?”
“Lochboisdale, George.”
He heard the surprise in his voice. “What on earth are you doing down there?”
“I’m pretty certain that Marsaili’s dad came from Eriskay. And I think there might be a way of identifying who he was. Or is. But I have to play a wild card, George, and I need your help.”
There was a long silence. “In what way?”
“Did you ever get those drawings done of the blanket pattern bleached into the lividity of the body?”
More surprise. “I did. The artist was in today, actually.” He paused. “Are you going to let me in on this?”
“I will, George, when I know for sure.”
There was a sigh at the other end of the line. “You’re stretching my patience, Mr. Macleod.” Fin waited. Then, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to fax the drawings to me here at the Lochboisdale Hotel.”
Twenty-seven
The damned dark again! It’s always dark. I was dreaming. Something very clear to me. Damned if I can remember what it was now. Woke me up, though, I’m certain of that.
What time is it? Oh. Mary must have taken the bedside clock. But it must be time for the milking. I hope the rain’s off by now. I pull back the curtain and see it running down the glass. Dammit!
It doesn’t take me long to get dressed. And there’s my good old cap sitting on the chair. Been with me for years that old hat. Kept me warm and dry in all weathers, and blown off a few times, too.
The light’s on in the hall, but there’s no sign of Mary. Maybe she’s in the kitchen preparing my breakfast. I’ll just sit at the table and wait. I can’t remember what we had for dinner last night, but I’m hungry now.
Oh God! Suddenly it comes back to me. That damn dream. I was on a beach somewhere, walking with a young man, and he gave me a little medallion, like a coin, on a chain. And I reached back with it clutched in my fist and threw it into the ocean. It was only as I saw it vanish that I realized what it was. The Saint Christopher. Ceit gave it to me. I remember that as clear as day. Only it was dark, and I was in a terrible state.
Peter was in the back of Donald Seamus’s van on the jetty at Ludagh, wrapped in an old knitted bedcover. Dead. A bloody mess. And I could barely control my emotions.
We had rowed him across the Sound from Haunn in the little rowing boat that Donald Seamus kept in the bay. It was a hellish night, too. I felt God’s anger in the wind, and my mother’s reproach in its voice. Thank heavens for the lights of the crofts on this side of the bay, or we’d never have made it. Pitch it was that night, and the boat got tossed about like a cork. There were times when I found it hard to dip the oars back in the water for the next pull.
The boat was tied up at the end of the jetty, rising and falling fiercely in the dark, and I knew that Ceit would have to take it back across on her own. I knew she didn’t want to, and I will never forget the look in her eyes. She reached up to grasp my collar in both her hands.
“Don’t go, Johnny.”
“I have to.”
“You don’t! We can tell what happened.”
But I shook my head. “No we can’t.” I took her by the shoulders, holding her too tightly. “You can’t tell anyone, Ceit. Ever. Promise me.” When she said nothing, I shook her. “Promise me!”
Her eyes dipped away, and she turned her head towards the ground. “I promise.” Her words were cast away in the wind almost before I heard them. And I wrapped my arms around her and held her so tight I was afraid I might break her.
“There’s no way to explain this to anyone,” I said. “And there’s things I have to do.” I had let my mother down, and I knew that I couldn’t live with myself until I had put things right. If they ever could be.
Sh
e looked up at me, and I saw the fear in her face. “Let it go, Johnny. Just let it go.”
But I couldn’t. And she knew it, too. She wriggled free of my arms and reached around behind her neck to unclasp the chain of her Saint Christopher medal. She held it out towards me, and it turned and twisted in the wind. “I want you to have this.”
I shook my head. “I can’t. You’ve had that ever since I’ve known you.”
“Take it!” It was a tone I knew there could be no arguing with. “It’ll keep you safe, Johnny. And every time you look at it I want you to think of me. To remember me.”
Reluctantly, I took it from her and clasped it tightly in my hand. The little bit of Ceit that I would have with me all of my life. She reached up then and touched my face, the way she had done that first time, and kissed me. Such a soft, sweet kiss, full of love and sorrow.
It was the last time I ever saw her. And though I married, and fathered two wonderful girls, I have never loved anyone else since.
Oh God! What possessed me to throw it in the sea? Did I dream that, or did I really do it? Why? Why would I do something like that? Poor Ceit. Lost for ever.
The light comes on, and I blink in the harshness of its glare. A lady is looking at me as if I had two heads. “What are you doing sitting here in the dark, Mr. Macdonald? Fully dressed, too.”
“It’s time for the milking,” I tell her. “I’m just waiting for Mary to bring me my breakfast.”
“It’s too early for breakfast, Mr. Macdonald. Come on, I’ll help you back to bed.”
Crazy! I’m up now. And the cows won’t wait.
She has her hand under my arm helping me to my feet, and she is staring into my face. I can see that she’s concerned about something.
“Oh, Mr. Macdonald . . . You’ve been crying.”