A Handful of Ash

by Marsali Taylor

  I regularly dodged the answer to that one. ‘I put on make-up last night,’ I told her now, ‘at a party, with Gavin.’

  She nodded approvingly. ‘A very eligible parti who does not need a conventional wife. And a dress?’

  ‘Your pretty one. It was the children’s Hallowe’en party,’ I added.

  Her pink lips curved. ‘So, you build me up, then deflate. Wicked Cassandre.’

  I grinned.

  ‘All the same, he is serious, that one.’ Her dark eyes flicked a sideways look at me. ‘You do not think so?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but I’m not sure I am, yet.’

  ‘Oh, you were serious even as a little girl. You thought about something, then decided, and after that you would not be diverted.’

  We’d reached the houses now, and I remembered Shaela’s talk of eggs. The teenagers had gone to town. There was yellow and white egg smeared everywhere, and the gutters crunched with broken shells. Outside one pair of houses, three men were gathered around their cars. The morning’s sun had baked the egg onto the car bonnets, and you could see by the way they looked at it that retribution was being planned.

  Past the Meat Co., there was no sign of this morning’s find. There were no rubberneckers or police cars at the car park above Burn Beach, and Blackness pier was quiet, with only the occasional person working on a boat propped up with pallets. The tide was still retreating, the brown-pebbled shore giving way to layers of glistening kelp floating at the water’s edge. Then I noticed that the boat workers lifted their heads from time to time to look at something to their right, and as we came up the road past Fraser Park I looked back. There were dark figures moving along Burn Beach, heads down, searching what had been the sea bottom.

  Maman came round the curved road in a smooth swoop, and began climbing the hill to the quarry. ‘But how can you fit him into your career?’

  The heather hills here were rust brown. We passed the clay pigeon shooting range that had been made for the Inter-Island Games, littered with orange targets. On our right, the hills opened up to the south. A herd of ponies, red and white, came galloping alonside the fence, manes and tails flying. On our left, the hill with the post was Hollanders’ Knowe, where the medieval Scalloway folk had traded eggs and meat for gin with the men of the Dutch herring fleet.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said at last. ‘I thought I’d worry about it if he asked me.’

  ‘He will ask,’ Maman said. She shot a sideways glance at me. ‘I thought, with your father, that love would make it possible to be in two places at once. You know how wrong I was.’ We passed the Sandy Loch and the mustard-coloured houses that had once been Shetland’s weather station, drove alongside the magnificence of Sound’s ‘Nob Hill’ houses, Lerwick’s most expensive real estate, then negotiated two of Shetland’s four roundabouts, Maman’s face set with concentration to cope with cars coming from her wrong side.

  ‘But then,’ she said, cheerfully, now that hazard was past, ‘you are not me, and your M. Macrae is most assuredly not Dermot.’

  She turned up King Harald Street to our church and parked behind the scarlet Range Rover with the gold dragons on the side. I poured Cat some water, set down a dish of catfood, and opened his lid, then we slipped into the church. As I’d suspected, the service hadn’t yet begun. Father Mikhail was dressed in his robes, but still greeting the last straggle of Mass-goers. He shook my hand. ‘Hello, Cass. What news do you have from the young man who was injured?’

  He’d been with us at Voe Show in that awful moment when the bull had charged. ‘Back to work,’ I said, ‘and getting bored. He’s threatening to come back to Shetland.’

  Maman’s dark eyes flicked across at me. I was in for a lecture about making up my mind. She held her hand out to Father Mikhail and he bowed over it. ‘Welcome back, madame.’

  I usually lurked at the back of the church, but Maman swept me past the cluster of white-surpliced altar-children to the second-front pew, where we’d always gone as a family. We knelt together, her shoulder six inches taller than mine, white coat by navy jacket, dark chignon and dark plait. The marks on the hymnal shelf at my eyes were as they had been when I was a child: a spiral scrawl, a run of varnish in the shape of a feather, eleven jabs of a pen making a rough J. I’d always wondered who that J was. Beside me, Maman’s dark lashes swept down over her eyes. I could not tell what her prayers might be now: for her and Dad, for me and Gavin, for that lost baby brother Dad had told me of, little Patrick who had never drawn breath. Or perhaps for her new production, for the homeless, the starving, for prisoners, for world peace. She was a book I was only learning to read.

  My prayers were for Nate, and Annette, their parents and Rachel, and then for Gavin, that he would catch the murderer before more damage was done. I was just starting to assemble my wayward thoughts when the bell rang, the keyboard wheezed into life, the guitars strummed, and Mass began. I scrambled to my feet, and Maman rose gracefully beside me, as if she’d calculated to end her prayer at just that moment. A moment more, and her voice floated out in the hymn. When I was little, I’d imagined the angels sang like Maman, that clear soprano that even at its softest could ring across to the carved altar like the note of the ship’s bell on a still day, its sweet tone enriched by the softness. When she gave it full volume, in tunes like ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’ it would ring round the whole church, and I’d fancy the birds in the trees outside stopping their cheeping in astonishment, listening for a moment to this human eagle, then joining her with renewed vigour.

  St John was the church’s eagle, who soared even to the throne of God in his visions. I wondered about the eagle we’d seen, floating on its great wings over the cliffs. Was it a solitary wanderer, or the harbinger of its species’ return to Shetland, coming to spy out the land as the Vikings had come, thirteen hundred years ago? I’d visited the Lerwick school for some assembly once, and all I remembered of it was a wardrobe-sized case of stuffed birds, with the great erne in the middle of them, chestnut feathers and charcoal beak faded by the long incarceration in that glass coffin. It would be wonderful if the clock could be turned back, the sea eagles restored to their nests on the high eyries of Watsness cliffs, Maman and Dad celebrating Christmas together in our house on Muckle Roe –

  In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit … I finished the prayer I hadn’t realised I was making, and focused my mind on the Mass.

  We came out in a blaze of stained-glass light, the glorious triptych at the end of the church. I’d called it the oily window when I was little, for its centre was an oilman in his orange overalls receiving communion, and the upper half of the windows showed a rig in a stormy sea and men straining at a pipe. The lower half showed scenes from my childhood: Lerwick, with the old Saint Clair ferry at the pier, a woman with a kishie, a man casting peats. Around were the creatures Maman used to encourage me to look for when I got bored, the peewit with its crest, the dinner-suited shalder, the seal on its rock, the Arctic tern.

  We came through the knots of English and Polish conversations and back to the car. Cat uncurled his plumed tail and sat up with a welcoming yawn. I tipped his water out into the gutter, and we headed back up the twenty miles to Brae.

  It was breath-still. The water of Laxfirth was so smooth that the salmon cages floated on replica black hoops, and each green hill that sloped down to the water sloped back again beneath the pebbled shoreline. Girlsta Loch was filled with grey clouds. Past it, the sheen of water stood on the hill, and a grey ribbon twisted in front of each dark peat bank. A diver sculled on Sand Water, slender beak tilted. Then we drew away from the sea, driving along between two of the three long hills where Dad planned to put his wind turbines. The Kames, they were called, the long spine of Shetland that had once been a part of the Caledonian mountain range around Loch Ness. Draw a line from the Kames and you’d join up with the Great Glen.

  ‘How’s Dad doing?’ I asked.

  Maman made a blowing-out sound. �
�He is not. After everything having gone so smoothly, now it is all problems. There is the court case, and the delay on the interconnector, you have heard this?’

  ‘Another five years,’ I said.

  Maman nodded. ‘Five years, and Scotland will be filled with turbines who can produce their electricity much more cheaply than Shetland, with no long cables to pay for. And then – but do not mention this again, it is not public yet – the electricity company who was to be their partner in the business, well, they have just sold off their shares in another windfarm. The Shetland people would not like that, Dermot says. To have a company that is a Shetland one joined with another that is large and well known here, they can live with that. To risk an unknown business suddenly taking almost half of the shares, no.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. I could just hear Magnie: ‘What, hae folk fae south able to decide for more turbines or roads and us no be able to stop them? Na, na, bairns. We’re no haeing yon.’

  ‘So there would need to be an agreement that the firm would not do this, and Dermot is not sure they will accept such a limitation.’

  ‘But is it possible for it all to be stopped now?’ I asked. ‘The impression I’ve got is that the Shetland Islands Council has got the wind behind them. They smell money and jobs.’

  ‘It is not so many jobs,’ Maman said. The village of Voe slipped past, its pier curving out into the mirror water, each yacht floating above a double with a mast twice as tall, each hill as green below the tide line as it was above. The freshness of the colours suggested rain to come, and the grey cumulonimbus curled like fleece across the sky. She swept one hand out, palm up. ‘I do not know. Tourism, it is becoming important here, and if the windfarm makes the tourists stay away, then there will be jobs lost. Nobody has studied that.’ Her mouth twitched downwards. ‘I find it hard to agree with Dermot, but I am like you, I am the bird of passage. It is for the people who live here to decide.’

  Now we were entering the world of my childhood again, but from land. The chocolate-dark island to my left was Linga, the heather island, and behind it were the hills of Muckle Roe, the big red island where our house was, and the passage from Papa Stour we’d sailed yesterday. Aith was down to our left. The water spread in front of me had been my back garden. I’d tacked my beloved Osprey from the pier up to the opening of adventure, the Atlantic rollers, beaching her on the pebble curve below the house. Suddenly, sitting here with Maman, I felt that world surge up again, the constant battle between Maman’s wish for me to be a pretty girl and mine to be an adventurer. I asked now, ‘Why did you always want me to be a girl? To be pretty, and read books, and play with dolls?’

  She shook her head. ‘It didn’t make any difference what I wanted, you went your own way.’

  ‘But why?’ I insisted. ‘Why did you think it was better?’

  ‘It is always easier to be conventional.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I was not conventional either. I wanted to sing. Well, you can imagine – a farm girl, in a small village – who did she think she was, they asked. But my mother said that I should have my chance, and she persuaded your Papy to let her save the money from the eggs and the goats’ cheese so that I could have lessons with the music teacher in the village. He thought I had talent, and so I went further. Oh, it was hard work, and sometimes I regretted being separated from the other children. A child who has a talent has to sacrifice childhood. I wanted you to belong.’

  ‘What you wanted me to belong to wasn’t interesting,’ I said. ‘The idea of what girls ought to be, with a pretty dress, and playing with dolls. I could see that, even when I was only six. The older girls at the Brownies did craft and fashion shows, while the Boys’ Brigade got to go camping.’

  ‘You’re a rebel.’ She jerked her chin back at Cat and echoed Nate: ‘In the olden days, with your independence, and your little cat following you, you would have been burned as a witch.’

  ‘I don’t get it, though. Are men so convinced this show is theirs that they can’t let us have even a little piece of independence?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maman said. ‘I think they are all convinced, deep down, and even in spite of their better nature, that they know best, and that a woman’s true happiness lies in finding the right one of them to look up to.’

  ‘In spite of nearly a hundred years of voting? In spite of women doing every sort of work?’

  ‘Only seventy years of voting in France,’ Maman reminded me. ‘That is only yesterday. Every woman over eighty can remember her mother not being allowed to vote.’

  They had taken the masts down in the Brae marina. Winter was on its way. We came past Busta House, where we’d staged a ghost to catch a murderer.

  ‘Maman,’ I said tentatively. It was easier to talk like this, side by side, with her expressive dark eyes on the road. ‘Dad told me you’d lost a baby, my little brother.’

  Her head turned quickly towards me. Her face was filled with wary hope. ‘Did he indeed say that, that I had lost a baby?’

  I shook my head. Her mouth drooped. ‘No, I thought he did not. He will not believe – but I will tell you what happened, when we reach the house, and you will know the truth.’

  We drove the last mile in silence, along the single track road with the verges overhung with rose-rust heather, and the sea burnished grey below us. Dad had built our house square, grey-harled, with a porch at the back, and great picture windows looking out over the sea. Cat leapt out and went off to investigate what other cats had been in the garden since his last visit, while Maman and I went into the kitchen. She poured us each a glass of L égende d’automne and we took it through to the sitting room. The sky was clouding over: rain before nightfall.

  ‘It was my fault,’ Maman said. ‘It was my first big chance, you know, after I had married your father and come here, I had tried to keep in touch, and I had had little roles here and there, but this was a friend directing, from my days in Lille, and he offered me the role of La Folie in Platée. She has this aria – like the Queen of the Night in the Magic Flute, a real show-stopper. I could not bear to refuse it.’ Her dark eyes held mine. ‘You understand that, Cassandre. For you it would be the offer of captaining a four-master.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Dermot was against it, because of the baby. We argued. We both became more and more stubborn – you have inherited that from both sides.’ Her face stilled; the dark lashes veiled her eyes. ‘But he was right. It was too much, and I lost the baby.’ Her long hands curved around her belly. ‘It was my fault. It was not as your father believed, that I had had him –’ the fingers clutched one another ‘– removed. I would never have done that, and your father should have known, but he was so angry, and grieving, his boy, and I was grieving too, but instead of clinging together, we took out our grief on each other, and found consolation apart. Oh, not that sort of consolation! He worked, and I sang. Platée was a mad success, and then there were other offers, larger roles, and suddenly every château on the Loire was doing its own son-et-lumière.’ Her eyes returned to mine. ‘Never do that, Cassandre. If a grief should come, however hard it is, share it.’ Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. ‘They let me see him, in the hospital. He was so little.’

  ‘Have you tried to explain to Dad?’ I asked. ‘He might listen now.’

  She shook her head. ‘We are together again, and he has forgiven. That is enough. It was my fault, as much as he believes, only in a different way. I killed him with my ambition. Even now, when the audience are applauding to raise the roof, I remember what it cost.’ Her eyes started straight ahead. ‘I would never have thought that I defined myself by my ability to bear a child, but after I lost the baby I felt that I had failed as a woman. I should have nurtured him, mothered him, above all else. It took a long time to get over that. Even now, sometimes, I feel this – ’ Her slim hand indicated the dark eyeliner, the smooth cheek. ‘All this, is just a mask to make me look like the woman I do not feel I am any more.’

  My son, my only son …

  Sh
e drained her glass, and rose. ‘I have made a chicken. I put some aside, and poached it just a little. Your cat will eat that?’

  He ate it with enthusiasm, and sat in the exact centre of the dark green Chinese carpet to wash his whiskers, purring like a jet-ski engine, while we ate at the oval table: chicken in a pot, with leeks and a wine sauce, followed by a Normandy apple tart. I told Maman about the mad people at my college course, and she countered with characters she had met in the world of Sun King music, and we both laughed a lot. As she cleared the plates away, she smiled at me. ‘I am very glad to have a daughter.’

  ‘It’s good having a mother,’ I agreed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maman drove us back to Scalloway just after two. Now the sky had clouded over completely, and the first drops splashed the windscreen as we came through the Kames, singly at first, gathering until the glass was flecked with them, and Maman had to clear them with a single wipe, then, by Tingwall loch, she needed the full sweep, sweep, sweep. The water ran at the roadside, and hissed under the car wheels. We came past the little grass isthmus where law-seekers had walked, in the days of the Norse foudes, to ask for justice. Shetland’s oldest document showed a woman taking a high official to court because he was embezzling the rents due to the overlord. Like the witches three centuries later, she lost her case.