Nina Todd Has Gone

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘OK.’ I got out and the wind almost knocked me off my feet.

  Charlie laughed. ‘You’re crazy walking in this! Look … if you need picking up just ring, someone’ll come and get you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. Through the window I squeezed his hand and he squeezed back. ‘Don’t get blown away.’ He drove off. We stood and watched him diminish until he was just a speck.

  And Rupert and I were left on the edge of the world. The wind rattled and whined in the signal tower; a scutter of rubbish danced a crazy circle in the lighthouse yard. I pulled up my hood to protect my ears.

  ‘Bracing,’ Rupert said. He jammed on a black fleece hat and smiled.

  ‘How dare you come here!’ burst out of me.

  But he just looked mildly down at me, and lifted his shoulders. ‘Didn’t you promise to get in touch?’

  ‘I was going to.’

  ‘You said a week.’

  ‘I was going to.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How’s your hand?’ He reached out but I shoved it in my pocket.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Here we are. Shall we walk?’ We leant into the wind and made towards the sea. The grass was shrunken to the salty ground, scattered with rocks, shells, bones, animal droppings. It was hard to walk against the gale on the littered ground in the wrong sort of shoes with legs still tired from earlier. Why had I come? This was stupid. Small rabbits, startled by our feet, flashed their scuts and flipped away.

  Some of the rocks had been built into circular walls, like roofless igloos. These were plantycrews that Charlie had told me about, meant to shelter plants from the wind but the only things growing inside were a spindly straggle of weeds. In one, a couple of the runty little sheep were sheltering, chewing, vacant-eyed, like teenagers with gum.

  We walked right to the edge where waves lashed up against the rocks. I stared out into the distance, the wind whisking tears from my eyes. The next place you’d get to would be Norway if you were mad enough to set out from here. The wind sucked its teeth between the leaky stone shelters and there was a wailing, maybe mammal, maybe bird or maybe it was just the wind.

  We clambered over some rocks and it was hard in my stupid shoes with their slippy soles. He stopped, hands shoved in his pockets, face lifted as he gazed out to sea. Lost for a moment. If there was a cliff I’d push him off it, I thought, and then everything would be all right. But there were no cliffs.

  We saw the afternoon plane bouncing in. Charlie would be at the airfield waiting, one foot on the bottom rung of the gate, delivering the board-game family, picking up the next lot.

  I was suddenly struck by how weird this was: me and Rupert together in this desolation. How had we got to here? I almost wanted to laugh: him so incongruously handsome and perfectly dressed, he could have been a catalogue model in his green waxed jacket, conker boots; even the hat, pulled low on his brow, suited him.

  ‘So …’ I began but it was too windy, my voice was torn away.

  ‘Let’s get out of the wind,’ he shouted and we set off walking, bent almost double. Despite the hood my ears ached and the toggle at the end of my hood string lashed about stinging my face. We stumbled over what seemed to be a golf course, littered with sheep and their droppings and pitted with rabbit holes. A forgotten flagpole rattled madly, a bandage of flag unravelling in the wind.

  We climbed back over the dyke and dropped, suddenly, miraculously, out of the wind and on to a flat and shining beach. The light was pearly grey now as if everything – the peaks of the buildings on the horizon, the curve of the stone dyke, the wheeling birds – were all etched on the sheeny innards of a shell.

  A smile unfurled on Rupert’s face. The wind had made his eyes water too, eyelashes spiky black. It came back to me then: him in the hotel lobby; his smile, his eyes, his velvety voice, the way he drew me in like some luscious bait. And I took the bait. I can’t blame anyone else for that.

  ‘I want you to come back with me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m rotaed in now. I’m staying. They need me.’

  ‘They don’t need you,’ he said, ‘but I do.’

  Need?

  ‘This is not you,’ he said, looking down at me, seeing through me, in a way that seemed almost tender.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This … setting.’

  ‘How do you know what’s me and what isn’t?’ I snapped. ‘You don’t know me at all. Can’t you see I’m trying to make it work with Charlie?’ My lips were numbed by the wind and it was hard to make the words.

  ‘You’d be better off in a city,’ he said. ‘Somewhere anonymous.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ I turned away and looked back the way we’d come. Two sets of footprints now and both filled with shining water. The wail again, like the call of a spook. I think it was a seal.

  He put a finger under my chin but I flinched my face away. ‘We both know how much you have to lose. Karen.’

  Something went loose in my legs then, knees buckling as if they wanted to bend backwards. He put his arm round me in a tight grip that held me upright. He held me against his chest as if I was his lover, the waxy smell of his coat in my nose. Anybody could have seen. I pulled away and started to run, but there was nowhere to run. I slipped and twisted my ankle on a rock. I was back in the wind again. I sat down with a bump and let out some tears, just a few, and they were whipped straight off my face.

  He came and hunkered down beside me.

  ‘How do you know?’ I said.

  ‘Come back with me.’

  ‘No one’s meant to know.’

  ‘No one else does. Yet.’

  ‘What do you want? Money?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Sex then?’

  ‘Did you think it was that good?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘What a reductive view of life you have,’ he said, straightening up. He looked down at me. ‘Money and sex, that’s sad.’

  I took a deep breath. I had to keep it all together, to concentrate. ‘That’s not true. It’s just … I can’t think what else you could want.’

  ‘It’s very simple,’ he said. ‘I want revenge.’

  I stood up and stared at him. ‘Who are you?’

  He smiled, the long dimple slanting in his cheek.

  I looked down at the water forcing itself up through the sand under the weight of my feet. I bit my lip and brushed the wetness from my face. My cheeks felt raw and chapped.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he said. He took off his hat and put it, warm from his head, over my aching ears. The warmth soaked painfully in.

  We began to walk; my ankle was only twisted, not too bad to walk on. The waves were growing and in the dark shine between them sometimes the head of a seal popped up, sometimes the white bob of a gull. The sky had gone to charcoal but pierced with shafts of yellow light like something from a bible story. Above the dyke a man on a tractor sat looking down and smoking. I wondered if he’d seen us. People run to islands in search of freedom but this felt anything but free, it was criss-crossed with lines of sight like trip-wires and you couldn’t not be known.

  ‘Let’s phone and get picked up,’ Rupert said. ‘It’ll take hours at this rate.’

  ‘No.’

  We walked without talking, until at last we rounded a headland on to the beach where I’d been in the morning. The storm had landed great stalks and ribbons of mustard-coloured weed, almost as big as trees, and pocked the sand with the glassy cushions of jellyfish. As we climbed up off the beach and on to the track that led to the observatory, I saw that the Land Rover was coming towards us. I looked at my watch. I was late.

  Toni stopped and leant out of the window. ‘They sent me out to find you,’ she said. ‘You OK? Want a lift?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I climbed in beside her. Rupert got in the back and slammed the door.

  ‘There’s a heap of tatties back there with your name on them,’ Toni said, jerking the Land Rover into
gear.

  Her thighs were long and slim in the blue jeans, her hands rough on the wheel, a silver puzzle ring on her thumb.

  ‘Good walk then?’

  ‘Interesting,’ Rupert said, leaning forward between us. ‘Wasn’t it, Nina? Or Karen?’ he whispered in my ear.

  ‘Cold,’ I said, ‘for June.’

  * * *

  I was late but no one noticed, or mentioned it, at least. I went straight into peeling the spuds, stepping over Ben doing his floor puzzle right in the middle of the kitchen while Daisy wobbled about on a pair of roller-skates, grabbing at people’s legs. The radio was blaring out the news; Ruth stirring a vast casserole; Bruno sipping wine and bellowing good-naturedly into the phone. Toni came in to collect the cutlery.

  ‘Pretty breezy out there, eh?’ she said.

  ‘You should wear a rubber glove over that.’ Ruth nodded at my hand.

  I couldn’t look at her. I peeled and peeled, muddy spud skins in the cold, muddy water, scraping my own skin with the peeler.

  ‘Hey …’ Ruth came and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Calm down, Nina. You’re peeling them to nothing. Let’s put a glove on that. Come on.’

  She took my hand. ‘Silly thing,’ she said and I could almost have cried at the soft scrape of kindliness in her voice. ‘Let’s have a look.’ She pulled the old plaster off. The scar was withered from the water, one end weeping.

  ‘Glass of wine?’ Toni breezed past with a bottle. I nodded and she sloshed some in a tumbler.

  Ruth was gentle, bending her snarly head close to mine, holding my cold hand in her warm dry one. She tugged the backing from a new pink Band-Aid and smoothed it down.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Good as new.’ Daisy came crashing past on her skates. ‘Mind how you go, honey.’

  ‘How did you do that?’ Daisy said, bright eyes zeroing in. She picked the corner off a slice of bread and chewed it, waiting.

  ‘Fell over.’

  ‘Can I have a plaster, Mum?’ she said. ‘Right here.’ She pointed to her knee. Ruth raised her eyebrows at me and found her a little round one to stick on.

  I put a rubber glove over my bad hand and went back to the potatoes; little ones so there were hundreds, crusted with scabs of mud. Orkney tatties, Ruth said. She had to help me in the end, there was a muddy mountain of them, shrinking too slowly, and dinner was already going to be late.

  The guests gathered at the table with their wine or their beer, swapping bird and life stories, and I must have seemed like part of it to them, distributing bread baskets and water jugs, giving them their plates of lamb, spinach and mashed potato. It was only Rupert sending me his sleek-eyed look that made me clumsy and self-conscious.

  When I sat down it was at the only place available: across the table from Rupert, beside Charlie. Toni was opposite Charlie as if we were a foursome. Rupert almost ignored me, chatting easily with Toni, and though I studied Charlie from the corner of my eye he didn’t look at her particularly. I didn’t see anything to mind. He asked about our walk.

  ‘I had to lend her my hat,’ Rupert said.

  ‘Didn’t expect to need a hat in June,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got a spare,’ Toni offered, ‘I’ll dig it out for you. But there’s always lost hats and stuff lying about, a whole boxful in the office.’

  ‘Ta.’ I took a mouthful of the chewy iodine-flavoured meat but it had gone cold. I put down my fork. I went out into the kitchen and watched Rupert lean across to Charlie. He could wreck everything with a sentence. He saw me seeing that and gleamed. I stared back, searching my mind for who he might be. Whoever it was he knew me. He was the only person here who knew the truth, who knew that old name. Karen. Just the sound of it changed the shape of me, the way I stood, the way I breathed.

  I realised something else as well as fear was stirring up in me. Curiosity. I needed to know who he was. I needed to know how he knew. I needed to know what he wanted. I couldn’t go on any more with him in the background. I would go back to Sheffield; not with him, I knew he wasn’t on tomorrow’s plane and that it was fully booked. I would try somehow to get away first and I would wait for him. And he would come to me. And we would somehow finish this.

  Ruth had come into the kitchen to dole out plates of chocolate cake and ice-cream. She waved a hand in front of my face. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ she said, ‘give us a hand with this.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I reached for the ice-cream scoop.

  ‘Could you be up for breakfasts tomorrow?’ she said. ‘About seven?’

  ‘Aye. Thanks to you, I get a lie-in.’ Toni grinned as she went past, carrying a stack of dirty plates. There was a bit of spinach caught in her snaggly teeth but when she smiled the corners of her eyes tilted upwards, like blue-green boats sailing across her face.

  ‘He fancies you,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rupert. He’s watching you like a hawk.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘He’s fit,’ she said, ‘despite the poncy name. I wouldn’t chuck him out of bed.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  I stayed in the kitchen, making a start at loading the dishwasher and peering through at the dining table from time to time. Toni was telling a story, waving her hands about and laughing, stopping to swig her bottle of beer, and both Charlie and Rupert listened, their bodies inclined towards her as if she was the sun. Rupert looked up suddenly to catch me watching. I turned back to the dishwasher.

  After dinner most of the guests went out for a walk. Clouds raced across the sky, lemony hints of sunset shivering on the waves. Ruth and Bruno took the children off to bed and to go off-duty in their private part of the observatory.

  Toni fetched a bottle of Famous Grouse and four glasses. Charlie came in with a plate of shortbread. I got the feeling that this was their after-dinner ritual.

  ‘What do you do then?’ she queried Rupert, sloshing out drink for everyone.

  ‘Ah ha.’ He touched the side of his nose with his finger.

  ‘Something secret?’

  Rupert poured a drop of water into his glass and swilled it round. ‘You could say that.’ He brushed me with his gaze. I looked down into the amber drink and took a tiny sip, just enough to heat a sliver of my tongue.

  ‘Well, well! Slàinte!’ Toni knocked hers back.

  ‘It means cheers,’ Charlie explained, as if that wasn’t obvious. ‘Slàinte!’ He knocked his back too. He never downed Scotch at home like that.

  ‘Give us a clue,’ Toni said to Rupert.

  ‘Hush-hush.’ He brought his finger to his lips. I saw a flare go off in her eyes. No one could look at his lips and not think they were beautiful.

  ‘Fair dos. What brought you up here then?’ she asked.

  ‘Call it curiosity,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘Came here on holiday with my folks when I was wee,’ she said, ‘always fancied coming back. If there was a vacancy at the school here … but there’s only seven kids! Bliss. I finish here in August – looking for teaching jobs now. Guess it’s time to settle down. I’m nearly thirty. Tick-tock.’

  ‘Plan to have kids then?’ Rupert said and I saw the way his eyes penetrated hers, the same golden gleam in the brown that had got to me, and she blushed.

  ‘Oh hundreds,’ she said. ‘But there’s the wee detail of a man, first.’

  I watched very carefully and she didn’t look at Charlie when she said that.

  ‘What about you, Nina?’ Rupert turned the gleam on to me, but I was immune.

  ‘No.’ I took a bite of shortbread.

  ‘No?’ Rupert looked at Charlie.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a kid,’ Charlie said and the shortbread dried in my mouth. I swigged my whisky and the heat of it brought tears to my eyes. Charlie banged me on the back.

  ‘I’ll finish clearing up,’ I said when I’d stopped choking. ‘Charlie?’

  We went into the kitchen and left them with the whisky bottle. Charlie suggested a walk but my ankle was throbbing.


  ‘Get Bruno to look at it,’ he suggested but I didn’t want to make a fuss. We went across to the byre. The wind was dropping though it still whooshed through me, swayed me on my feet.

  ‘You told me you weren’t bothered about having kids,’ I said.

  ‘Well you never know, do you?’ He turned away and pulled his sweater over his head. We showered together but it was too cold to be sexy. Afterwards we cuddled damply together in the lower bunk. I thought of him lying here at night, chatting to Toni. Both in bed. Intimate murmurings and whisperings about shrikes, godwits, Siberian robins. In the time I’d been with Charlie I could have got interested. I could be an expert on kingfishers or herons by now. Of course they would get on well with their shared interest in ornithology. You could almost call it a passion. But I could still learn. It was not too late, stonechat, whimbrel, arctic tern, but why did it have to be birds with their cold feathers and scratchy little feet?

  I kissed him, enjoying the unfamiliar whisky taste in his mouth, another bird, a famous grouse. At first he didn’t respond but I kept on kissing and tasting, ran my hands down his damp back, stroked them over the rough texture of his buttocks, pushed my lovely breasts against him, he always said they were lovely, I squashed them against him, kissed his neck, moved down to suck him, difficult to manoeuvre in the narrow bunk, and eventually he started to respond. And when he pushed inside me it all made sense again, it all fell into place like a key in the lock, locking us tight together, his heart thumping against mine, the shower’s moisture turning to sweat on our skins. It was hard and passionate, this was passion not some shared interest in birds, this was us, Charlie and Nina together making love, and I didn’t care if Toni came in, I wished she would. I wanted her to see us together like this, to see this demonstration of our love. Even though he clamped his hand over my mouth and tried to hush me, my voice came out loud enough for anyone who might have been near to hear and no one could mistake that sound, the passion in it, the utter love.

  Afterwards we lay still, close, stuck together, our hearts slowing in unison.

  ‘Are we all right?’ I whispered.

  ‘Okey-dokey,’ he replied right away, no hesitation. ‘Only I must pee. You stay put.’