A Handful of Ash

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘Active gardening, right opposite where Khalida’s moored, and at times I can fit in around the college,’ I said, and dialled their number.

  ‘What gardening have you done?’ was Kate’s first question, once I’d introduced myself.

  I’d thought out my answer. ‘None,’ I replied promptly, ‘but spending my life at sea means I’m quick to learn and very good at following orders. I’ll do far less damage than someone who only thinks she knows about gardening.’

  She laughed out at that, and we agreed on me doing as much of the heavy clearing as I could before Bonfire Night, the first Saturday in November.

  Inga had found it very funny, ‘Given that you’ve done your best to stay away from the land since you got your first boat.’ In spite of that, I was enjoying myself. I was used to fresh air, and the occasional shower of rain didn’t bother me. Working for Kate got me outside, away from the strip-lighting and recycled air of the college, away from the constant admonitions-for-two-year-olds: Have you washed your hands? Don’t use two when one will do! The only notices aboard ship were serious ones, so the constant visual drivel was getting on my nerves.

  Kate was standing in the doorway, a dog at each side. Everything about her said ‘county’ – the dark brown cords, the green bodywarmer over a jumper and polo shirt, the scarf held round her neck with a cameo clip, the green rubber boots. They didn’t keep horses here, but you could bet she’d grown up with them, and could back a horsebox into a tight space as easily as I’d back a dinghy trailer. Her shoulder-length hair was bright and glossy as a newly fallen conker, and held back with an Alice band, sixties style. She had an outdoor complexion, with faint red veins running under the skin, and hazel eyes. One look told you that anything she organised would run like clockwork.

  Her eyes were on the gate, but looking beyond it, to where Annette had gone. The dogs saw us first; Candy, the black and white one, bounded forward from a standing start, leapt over Cat, turned in a circle, and began sniffing at his back. The male, Dan, rose more slowly, shook, and strolled forward to greet us. Then Kate turned and focused on us.

  ‘He’s not quite right yet,’ she said, watching Dan. ‘We still think it was food poisoning. Maybe we’re about to find a half-eaten dead sheep in the wilderness. He even refused his walk last night. Peter was talking of calling the vet out, but we decided to see how he was in the morning.’ She straightened her shoulders and came down the steps. ‘All set for another hard session of undergrowth clearing?’

  ‘All set,’ I agreed.

  We were clearing a patch of ground where the Japanese roses, tough as herring-gulls and spined like sea-urchins, had flung their suckers up through the grass for two yards around the parent plant. I’d come to enjoy these land colours: the primrose leaves held out from the rain-black stems, the shiny damson-red hips like miniature pomegranates. Here and there a bird had torn one open to show the yellow flesh and seeds within. There was a clump of autumn crocus among the central stems, veined violet globes on transparent stems, the petals shut against the cold.

  It was satisfying work: the feel of the root giving, the speed you could clear a group of suckers when first one, then another, and another came free, and you had a whole bush in your gloved hand. Cat scampered about with Candy, leaping over him, pouncing on leaves, chasing trails of grass as they pulled through with the roots, and retrieving the jingly ball that Kate had bought him. It was covered with tinsel, and flat enough for him to carry in his mouth, so when you flung it, he’d play with it where it landed for a bit, then bring it back to be thrown again, just like a dog. Candy would join in that too, and where it was a good throw she usually got it first, but Cat would be on it before her if it went only ten yards, and bringing it back while she circled round him. She’d tried, just once, to pick him up like a puppy, but he wasn’t having that one.

  When we’d cleared back to the centre bush, Kate headed off with the barrowful of suckers, while I raked the brittle bluebell stems and gave the grass a last stamp, for luck. The bonfire was at East Voe, on the other side of the harbour, so she had to pile the suckers into a salmon feed bag in the back of her estate car and drive them over. The burning space was already piled high with old chairs and pallets and what looked like a shed roof. It would be a good blaze, come a week on Saturday.

  ‘Coffee and tabnabs,’ Kate said at last, leaning the emptied barrow back against the wall. It was part of our routine, a ten-minute tea-break and a biscuit to give us energy for the next onslaught. Cat, Candy, and I followed her into the kitchen, where the oil-fuelled Rayburn glowed gently, with the kettle tickling on the back burner, and Dan’s brown and white length sprawled out in front of it. The room smelt of warmth, coffee, and dog. Kate moved the kettle to the hotplate and fetched the biscuit tin while I got out the mugs and dished coffee into each, and Cat curled up in his bubblewrap box by the Rayburn. Then we sat down one each side of the wooden kitchen table and relaxed.

  I’d taken to Kate straight away. We’d not become mates during our tea-breaks, the age difference was too wide, but I’d learned a lot about her. She’d grown up in the Cotswolds, and her mother had been very proud of her garden: ‘She had real green fingers, you just gave her a root and it’d grow.’ She’d met Peter at a function in the children’s home she’d volunteered at; he’d been one of the trustees, and they’d caught each other’s eyes while one of the other trustees was making a particularly pompous speech, and somehow that had been that – ‘Although it took him nearly a year to get over me being almost twice his age – he was just twenty-three, and I was in my late thirties.’ She’d learned to entertain businessmen, instead of the hunt set – ‘Slightly less interested in the quality of the wine, and thought a pretty presentation was more important than a quantity of good, filling, warming food.’ Her face had softened. ‘And then Annette came along. She was the most beautiful baby, with a head of golden curls –’ Nothing had been too good for their child: a black Shetland pony called Ricky, dancing lessons, the baton-twirling club, private tutoring for the subjects she found hard in school. She’d got reasonable Highers, and was waiting for her university place. ‘So we can get back to our bachelor days!’ They still seemed a pretty stable couple (in so far as you dare say that of any couple, these days), in spite of the age difference. He was out all day, of course, but made the six-mile drive from Lerwick for lunch, and rarely stayed late in the office. His evenings were devoted to the museum, or socialising at the Rotary and the Legion, while she painted in her wooden studio hut by the house. She was a regular exhibitor in Bonhoga gallery out at Weisdale, and I’d managed to hitch my way over to see her recent show. That had been flowers, as Magnie had said, and most of them had a red dot on the label.

  Equally, she’d learned about me: brought up in Shetland, the only daughter of an Irish oil worker and a French opera singer. When I was a teenager, Dad was asked to oversee a new construction in the Gulf, and I’d been sent to Maman’s elegant town flat in Poitiers. I’d hated it; I was homesick for the sea, for my fellow sailors, and I’d emptied my bank account and run back to Scotland, via a berth on a Russian ship, Mir, in the Cutty Sark Tall Ships’ Race. After that, I’d wandered the high seas on tall ships, and taught dinghy sailing in Med resorts. I’d crossed the Atlantic with my lover, Alain – but I didn’t talk about that, nor about his death on the way home. My weight of guilt was lifting, slowly, but it hadn’t gone yet. Then I’d found my Khalida, lying neglected in a Greek marina, sailed her to Norway, and come home at last to Shetland, and reconciliation with Dad, with Maman, who were now themselves mending their sixteen-year separation, while I took the qualifications I’d missed as a teenager, so that I could be an officer on a tall ship.

  Kate stirred her coffee and took a second Kit Kat. ‘Did you meet Annette on your way in?’

  I nodded.

  Kate sighed. ‘I just don’t understand it. We used to get on so well – she was such a sweet little girl, and of course being the only one she got buckets of attent
ion. We used to do everything together. I thought she’d always listen to me, at least …’ She got up and went to the sink, face turned away from me. ‘I think it’s a boyfriend, and one we wouldn’t approve of. What really worries me, Cass, is these uneven moods, flaring out at the least thing. I’m afraid she’s taking drugs. You can see she’s not happy, guilty-looking … do you think it could be that?’

  ‘I don’t know much about the drugs scene,’ I said. ‘It’s not something you see much in the sailing world. Well, for a start you can’t afford them, because any spare money goes on the boat.’ I’d got £4,000 from the job as skipper of a replica longship for a film. If I could live on £3,000 for this college year, the last thousand would go on a new suit of sails for Khalida. ‘And then you have to be alert at sea, you need all the senses you’ve got, and none making you see things that aren’t there.’ On a moonlit night, alone on deck, with the sea in a great saucer all around you, it was easy to see things. Once I could have sworn I saw the ghost of a long-gone square-rigger, with tattered sails and dead men pulling on the ropes. Then the moon went behind a cloud, and I was left alone on the sea that glinted like coal, wondering what was out there, until the moon returned to show empty water.

  ‘There’s a big drugs scene in Shetland, among the young ones,’ Kate said. She began twiddling her Kit Kat paper into a silver cup. ‘I’d hoped Annette was too old and too sensible to be drawn into it, but you never can tell. Parents always say that: “We thought our child was too sensible.” It just takes the wrong company.’

  ‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, diffidently, for after all it was none of my business, ‘who the wrong company is?’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s a boy from the college who seems rather keen on her, fair-haired, rather protuberent eyes, quiet. James something. He’s phoned a couple of times.’

  ‘James Leask,’ I said. That explained how Annette knew I’d run away to sea. He was on the engineering component of the rather mixed course I was doing. ‘He wouldn’t lead anyone astray, nor be led himself. He’s one of the quiet, stubborn ones.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s the impression I got too. She met up with him a couple of times this week – let me see, on Saturday, and then they went out for a meal at the Scalloway Hotel on Monday. So I was hoping …’

  I thought, but didn’t say, that maybe Annette had a reason for feeling suffocated, if she was watched as closely as this. When I’d been Annette’s age, Dad had been busy with his new oil installation, and Maman had been in Poitiers. I’d been on board Sorlandet all summer, then on a Caribbean beach teaching dinghy sailing all winter, and neither of them who knew who I met, or how often, or where. They still didn’t, but at least bridges were being built. ‘James wouldn’t do drugs, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Kate said, ‘she’s off to some party at Hallowe’en, and that’s what this latest row was about.’ She gave me a sideways look, as if she was trying to assess whether I was a rabid anti-Hallowe’en fundamentalist. ‘Peter thinks it’s all going too far, dressing up as devils and witches, and skulls everywhere, all that. He was disgusted with that silly Hallowe’en play – did you see it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It was just a bit of fun,’ Kate said. ‘It was about this village where the dead came alive every 31st October. It was the minister’s son, Nate, that got it together for the Drama Festival, last March. He played one of the dead, a zombie, and she played one half of a honeymooning couple, and he carried her off. It was very silly, and they played it for laughs, and got a trophy for being the “most entertaining”. I thought it was harmless, but Peter was angry about it, said she should have shown us the play first.’

  ‘I know Nate,’ I said. ‘He works at the café in the college, and looks after Cat on days I’m at sea.’

  ‘Peter doesn’t like him.’ Kate sighed. ‘He’s turning into a Daily Mail reader. He says the boy has a brain that he’s wasting, and no good ever came of someone taking a job that was beneath their intelligence. Then he starting going on about Branwell Brontë, when I could have sworn he wouldn’t even have known who Charlotte was.’

  ‘What had Branwell to do with it?’ I asked, amused.

  ‘Search me. Wasn’t he supposed to be the really clever one who was going to make the world sit up, then he died a drunkard, and the unimportant girls became famous?’

  ‘I’ll take a good look at Nate this afternoon,’ I promised, ‘and tell you if there are signs of a neglected genius.’

  ‘You do that.’ She tilted her wrist to check her watch, and stood up. ‘Back to those suckers. I’m getting so excited about this garden, Cass. You know how there’s the remains of terracing? Well, I was standing at the door, yesterday evening, just looking, and the sun caught something red among the roses – a withered paeony leaf. It’s like digging on a treasure island.’

  I wouldn’t have gone that far, but I did wonder how the bulbs that the suckers brought up with them would look in spring, a drift of snowdrops under the roses, a yellow ribbon of daffodils down each side of the flagged path, and bluebells making a sky haze under the sycamores.

  We worked away until the click of the wooden door told us it was lunchtime. The dogs went barking forward. Peter came striding up the path towards us, a black plastic bin bag in each hand. ‘Hello, girls,’ he called. ‘You’re making good progress.’

  He said that every day.

  ‘Peter!’ Kate said, as if she was surprised to see him. ‘Is that really the time?’ She said that every day too.

  Peter didn’t look like a banker, which I supposed was just as well in the present climate, with ‘banker’ being synonymous for ‘scum’. Even with the dark grey suit and old school tie, you’d have said a naval man, or an explorer, or an entrepreneur. He was just into his forties now, with thick fair hair combed back from a broad forehead. He had level, sandy brows, blue eyes, and a rather beaky nose over a firm chin. Like Kate, he had a ruddy, outdoor complexion. He gave the impression of someone who’d make a good naval officer: efficient, decisive, ready to act quickly in an emergency. I’d have put him as watch leader without hesitating.

  Kate uncramped herself from under a lichened flowering currant, and went over to kiss his cheek. He flourished the black bags at her. ‘A present from an admirer.’

  ‘Mine, or yours?’ Kate unknotted the top of one bag. ‘Oh, the lamb! Fantastic. I’ll get it in the freezer straight away. How about you, Cass, could you use some lamb?’

  I would have loved some. ‘I don’t have an oven on Khalida.’

  ‘You have a grill, though. Come into the kitchen, and I’ll sort some chops out while you wash your hands.’

  By the time I’d stowed the barrow, cleaned the tools, and got the last of the grime out from under my nails, she’d spread the meat out over the table. The room was rich with the pink smell. Cat was stretching up a table leg, whiskers forward and grey nose twitching.

  ‘Do you eat kidneys?’ Kate asked. Her hands were already cleaning them, creamy-white fat peeling away to show the dark red oval beneath. ‘Peter and I don’t touch them.’

  ‘Fried kidneys would be a treat,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Here, then.’ She put them into a freezer bag, then into a Co-op carrier. ‘And some soup bits –’ she added a neck and several legs ‘– and a few chops. And your pay.’ She held out an envelope.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat well for a week on this.’

  I passed Peter on the way out. He was frowning, his mouth twisted downwards, but when he saw me, his face re-arranged itself into his usual cheery good humour. ‘Thanks for the work, Cass. See you next time.’

  But his voice echoed from the dining room as I let myself out. ‘Kate, I’ve found out who it is that Annette’s got herself entangled with –’

  It was none of my business. I closed the door on the name.

  Chapter Two

  Cat and I headed home for lunch. I was moored up at the westshore marina, right next
door to the college. There were fifteen berths on each side of a long pontoon, protected from the long Atlantic rollers that washed straight into Scalloway harbour by a solid breakwater. Good luck had me up tucked on the inside, behind a wooden-masted Colin Archer ocean-crosser which protected me from the worst of the winds.

  The scenery was good. My stern was thirty metres from the shore that formed Scalloway’s curved seafront. Looking out of the cockpit, there was a vertical bank of rough grass, with chocolate brown heather on the left, and a tangle of rose bushes and yellow-leaved montbretia on the right. There were three or four houses at the top of the bank, backed by dark green pine trees, then the hill, chocolate dark with heather, and topped by a radio mast. The shore ran along the jumble of sheds and slips used by the Shetland Bus men and past the youth centre and shop, buildings that had once been herring curing stations. It ended at Burn Beach, with the square eighteenth-century front of the pink Haa above it. A street of coloured houses led along to the castle: a cream former inn where Sir Walter Scott once stayed, then grey stone, powder-blue, Minoan-red, creamy yellow, pale green.

  In front of the coloured street were three stone houses, each built above a buttress jutting into the water, one square buttress, two curved. The last of them had been a smithy, and it was said to be haunted. The water below it was where they had put witches to the test: bind your arms and throw you into the water. If you sank, you were innocent, though unfortunately dead; if you floated, the Devil was holding you up, and they took you up the Gallow Hill that I could see from Khalida’s cockpit, garotted you, and burned your body to ashes. Scalloway was the last place in Scotland to burn witches.