Suddenly he stopped, almost tugged her over.
‘What’s wrong?’ she panted. ‘Got a stitch?’
‘N … No.’
She followed his gaze, saw a dumpy woman dressed in layers of woollies over a long and bulky skirt, watching them from further up the cliff path. They were too far away to make out her expression, but could feel her disapproval hanging heavy in the air like the threat of rain.
‘Old Nan,’ said David softly.
‘Wh … Who’s she?’
‘Cormack’s second cousin’s aunt. They’re all more or less related on this island. I met her once at Cormack’s.’
‘Want to go and say hallo, then?’ Morna had never approached the islanders herself, had glimpsed a shuffling figure once or twice, nodded at a watching head. Even Cormack was little more than a name to her, a small blurred cutout manoeuvring his boat. ‘I’ll come with you, shall I?’
‘No, no.’ David sounded shocked, stayed stock-still where he was. ‘They … er … don’t approve of you—us—I mean …’ He flushed, broke off.
‘Us?’
‘You know, sharing the same cottage. They’re … er … very puritanical.’
Morna said nothing. Was that why David kept his distance, feared gossip, bitchy tongues? They must have been wagging anyway, since the day she had arrived. She had compromised him, without even realising, and whilst living like a nun. She watched the woman stomp away, disappear from sight. David was striding towards the cliff edge.
‘See that rock,’ he said, pointing out to sea. ‘The very narrow craggy one?’
She nodded. He was trying to act the teacher, distract attention from his own embarrassment.
‘That’s where Abban spent the last months of his life.’
Morna stared at the chimney stack of rock, lashed by waves, guarded by one raucous gull which seemed to be screeching out a warning. She had read about Abban’s last retreat, even translated the passage from the French, but the sheer brute fact of it was far more frighteningly extreme than her namby words, or the biographer’s euphemisms. Dubhgall had called it a stepping-stone to heaven. It looked more like a fortress or a penitentiary, a one-man prison ship with cascades of water thwacking at its hull, breaking over the deck. How had Abban ever got there in the first place, braved that vicious sea?
She turned away, trudged on, sobered by Abban’s courage, or perhaps foolhardiness. Had he deliberately courted death, in a longing to join his God?
David tramped beside her, both of them silent now, needing all their strength to battle against the wind. They were walking north along the west and most exposed side of the island where the sky was often stormy, angry violent colours daubed across the clouds. Today they were white and fluffy, innocently pale, the sea beneath them glinting in the shifting morning light. David paused a moment, drew out a soggy package from his pocket.
‘I forgot the salt-meal cake. We ought to be strewing it on the ground as an offering to the soil.’ He unwrapped the paper, broke the cake into chunks. ‘Want a piece to eat?’
‘I thought we were meant to be fasting.’
‘This doesn’t count. It’s a symbolic offering like the host at Mass.’
Morna was already squatting on her heels, fastening a loose shoelace. Almost without thinking, she shut her eyes, put out her tongue, felt a damp and salty morsel placed upon it, gulped it down. When she opened her eyes again, David was standing over her, the vast sky behind dwarfing his tall figure. He struck her very lightly on the shoulder with his stick. Neither spoke. They could hear the fretting of the sea below them, the squall of gulls above. This blow was a cure for her sterility, not literal barrenness—Chris had taken care of that—but the years of stagnation when she had fumbled around in torpor and fatigue, achieving little, fearing everything. She would blossom now, grow towards the light instead of cowering in the darkness. She sprang to her feet, seized the cake from him, crumbling it along the path, tossing a chunk towards the sea. She wanted blessing for this place, blessing for Abban and their work on him. David followed, striking the ground with his stick, scattering more crumbs. They were walking faster now, despite the wind, the steep and rugged ground.
‘This wind is nothing, really,’ David said, as they stopped to rest a moment, sheltering in a dip. ‘We’re lucky. This time last year, they had non-stop blizzards. Cormack’s wife was telling me about it. Apparently, a lot of birds had just arrived to breed and a good half of them collapsed with sheer exhaustion. They were pretty deadbeat anyway, flying all that way, and a buffeting by ninety-mile-an-hour storms was just too much for them.’
‘Ninety miles an hour? Surely not.’
David shrugged. ‘Easily. On St Kilda they’ve recorded winds of one hundred and thirty miles an hour. And at Barra Head a hurricane dislodged a solid block of gneiss weighing more than forty tons. The cliff’s a good six hundred feet there, yet I’ve seen surf and small fish flung right up out of the sea on top of it. Hey, look!’ He pointed down to a cluster of rocks. A seal was surfacing between them, swirling with the waves, its whiskers dripping foam as it paused to peer at them.
Morna sprang up. ‘Isn’t it seals you’re meant to sing to? Let’s climb down and serenade it.’
‘It looks frightfully solemn. We might offend it.’
‘How about a hymn, then—the sort we sang at school?’ Morna was already scrambling down, her feet sliding on the slippery rock.
‘Careful!’ David warned, abandoning his stick so that he had both his hands free. ‘Plainsong would be even better—in good old-fashioned Latin. He looks a bit like Gregory the Great to me, with that mournful face.’
Morna laughed, clutched at a ledge of rock to stop herself from falling. ‘Oh, David, he’s gone.’
‘No, he hasn’t.’ David pointed to a flurry of water between two rocks. The wave somersaulted, turned into a smooth grey snout. ‘He’s waiting for the concert. What shall it be?’
‘How about the ‘‘Te Deum’’, since it’s a holiday and sunny and your birthday and …?’
‘Perfect.’ David hummed a few bars, broke off. ‘Okay?’
Morna nodded. ‘Yes, you start. I can see you’re more musical than me. I’m a sort of female baritone.’
David cleared his throat, stood up as straight as he could on the jutting spur of rock, took a deep breath in. The first phrase of the ‘Te Deum’ soared powerful and majestic, his voice so compelling Morna was humbled into silence. She had never heard him sing before.
After the ‘Te Dominum’, he broke off. ‘It’s not meant to be a solo.’
‘I’m sorry. You sing so well, I’ll only spoil it. Even the seal’s impressed. Look, he’s brought his mate.’
Two grey heads were now poking above the waves, two streamlined bodies bobbing up and down, keeping their balance in the tumultuous sea around them.
‘Well, you join in this time. We’ll start at the ‘‘Te aeternum’’. Okay?’
Morna nodded, let her voice waver after his, less certain until they reached the ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus’, and the words were more familiar, almost identical to the ‘Sanctus’ in the Mass. Strange to hear a man’s voice shape those words, after all the years at school when there had been only nuns’ sopranos and contraltos, backing the shrill piping voices of the girls. She remembered the little golden bell ringing on the altar, declaring the moment sacred. It was sacred now, their own religious rite, with two seals as congregation and the whole vast sea and sky as altar.
‘Pleni sunt caeli,’ David was intoning, conducting with her wooden wardrobe rail. She joined in, her voice growing stronger as they reached the end of the phrase, ‘majestatis gloriae tuae’. Glory and majesty were all around them, spilling over in cloud and ocean, grey and gold, in the ancient words themselves. ‘Paraclitum Spiritum’, they sang, as a huge grey-winged gull wheeled low across the cliff. She wanted to bow down and worship it, worship something, everything, give thanks for this day, for David.
‘Tu devicto mortis a
culeo’. David made the phrase a clarion call. Their voices were circling round each other, converging, seeming to embrace; his tenor and her contralto so perfectly attuned it seemed impossible that they should still be standing separate. She took a step towards him, the power of the music throbbing through her body.
He broke off suddenly in the middle of a bar. ‘Sorry, Morna, I’m out of breath—haven’t sung for ages.’
He seemed in no way out of breath. ‘I thought we were doing pretty well,’ she said, trying to hide her disappointment. ‘And the seals are loving it. They look quite rapt. They must be Lefebvrians, hungry for their Latin. Is the larger one the male?’
David nodded.
‘Let’s christen him Gregory, then, after the plainsong.’
‘I’m not sure it’s right. Seals can be quite vicious, you know—even bite your foot off. Freud would say it’s maternal deprivation. The mothers leave their pups when they’re only three weeks old. They have to fend for themselves then, make their own way to the sea and eat whatever they can find.’
Morna thought of Chris at three weeks old, white and fluffy, too, in Bea’s hand-knitted poodle pramsuit, totally dependent on her. Still needing her now, to some extent. Supposing she had quarrelled with her father, or had got in with some wild crowd in LA, or was moping back in England. Dreadful not to know if one’s only daughter were even home or not. She tried to force the worries down. Chris had said she was all right, told her not to fuss. And surely even human mothers could take a break after seventeen odd years?
Both seals were romping through the waves, seemingly careless of the jagged crags of rock, their blotched and mottled coats looking like clumps of seaweed rippling underwater. The smaller one surfaced again, stared in their direction as if begging for more music.
David shaded his eyes to watch it. ‘The local legends say that seals were once human, but were put under a spell and forced to live in the sea. They’re never really content in either element. How did Cormack put it? ‘‘Their sea-longings shall be land-longings and their land-longings shall be sea-longings.’’ Well, that’s a rough translation from the Gaelic.’
‘It’s … beautiful.’
‘Yes. Cormack can surprise you sometimes. He obviously believes all that stuff about the seals. He said they can still change back into human shape. In fact, there are several stories about islanders marrying seal-wives, hiding their skins to make them stay on land. They always seem to escape, though, in the end, find their skins and creep back to the sea.’
‘How about an encore, then, to lure that female back? She might be Cormack’s wife from long ago, before he married his all too human one.’
‘No, better not. We’ll never get round the island if we stop so long.’ David was already clambering back towards the path. Morna followed, silent, increasing her pace as he broke into a jog-trot.
He slowed, turned back for her. ‘We’re almost at Cormack’s now. I think we ought to turn inland, cut across the island to the east side. If Cormack sees me, he’ll only think I’ve come to pester him for something—and he’s had enough of that the last few days. He’s wheezing rather badly as it is.’
Morna said nothing, just followed David across the scrubby grass. He didn’t want to be spotted with a woman—that was obvious and really rather ludicrous. They knew she was here, wouldn’t stop their tittle-tattle just because she hid. She realised now he had been hiding her, keeping her indoors whenever he could. Easy to blame the weather or pressure of work or her lack of proper walking shoes. Those were all factors, yes, but so also was his resolve to screen her from prying eyes. She had sensed it somehow, unconsciously, even gone along with it, kept her own walks short, deliberately avoided the north end as if she were infectious. Now she was curious.
‘Where is the farm?’ she asked.
‘Down there.’ David clambered on to a boulder, pointed back to a dip in the hill where a squat grey cottage collapsed into the arms of a few crumbling outbuildings.
Morna hauled herself up beside him. ‘But it’s a tiny house. I thought they had seven children.’
‘They did. Three or four to a bed, I suppose.’
Morna could almost see the seven, crammed into that hovel, buffeted by gales, never having glimpsed a single tree or flowerbed in their lives, let alone a shop or cinema, until they were sent away to school where the comforts of the mainland finally seduced them, so that they stayed away, leaving their parents and the island with no new growth, no promise of a future. She gazed around Cormack’s boggy empire, could see no spread of crops, no new-dug soil, only a rusty plough, a pile of rotting posts, a straggling potato patch whose rickety fence had been broken down by sheep.
‘This place needs blessing, David, more than anywhere. Any salt-meal cake left?’
‘No.’ He jumped down from the rock, struck the ground with his stick, muttered something in a foreign tongue.
‘‘‘Dhe fadaidh thusa am chridhe steach
Aiteal graidh do m’ choimhearsnach …’’’
‘What you saying?’
‘It’s an ancient prayer in Gaelic—a blessing on the hearth.
‘‘Bho’n ni is isle crannachaire
Gu ruig an tAinm is Àirde.’’
It’s nice, that last bit—‘‘from the lowest created thing to the Name Most High’’. We’ve lost that view of the world—the sort of … divine unity of everything. Right, we really must push on. We’ve got the whole east side to walk yet.’
They continued across the island to the other coast, the path less overgrown there, since it was the main track to the quay, although that was still some distance further south. David was looking up, shading his eyes against the glare, following the flight of two black and white birds swooping in from the sea.
‘Razorbills?’ she asked.
‘No, oystercatchers. They’re very different. See their orange beaks and that sort of cross on their breasts? Well, it’s more a white band really, but the islanders says it’s the sign of the cross. The birds are meant to have received it as a reward for hiding Christ from His enemies beside the Sea of Galilee. They covered Him with seaweed.’
‘We can’t get away from seaweed. Do they eat it, too, or only oysters?’
‘They don’t eat oysters, actually. Your crazy mixed-up Yanks gave them the wrong name. They saw them—in Maryland, I think it was—feeding on crustaceans in the oyster beds and assumed they were eating the oysters themselves. It’s a nice example of a mistake locked in the language, even passing on to other countries.’
‘America’s good at those.’ Morna stopped to take a stone out of her shoe. The wellingtons were difficult for walking, so she had set out in Bunny’s sneakers, now stained and waterlogged. ‘David …?’
‘Mm.’
‘Did you think of me in America?’
‘Course.’
‘It seems so far away now. Not just another time scale, but another world completely.’
‘Yet Los Angeles is almost like an island.’
‘An island? Surely not.’
‘An island on land. Someone called it that and I can see what they meant. It’s cut off by the desert and mountains on three sides and the Pacific on the fourth. And then it’s very much a separate culture with its own traditions and …’
Morna was silent. LA seemed like a prison, one she had escaped from, all seventy square miles of it confining her, while this two-mile stretch of rock promised endless space and freedom—or would do, if only David … She glanced up at his profile, the beard still fascinating, taunting her to touch it. Was this how Neil had felt when she herself had been undemonstrative? Was coolness a sort of attraction in itself, challenging you to change it, break it down?
David refused to meet her eye, was still gazing out to sea, watching for new and rarer birds amongst the squabbling flocks of herring gulls. ‘The fishermen round here say gulls are the spirits of dead seamen still following the boats.’
She mumbled some reply. He was too concerned wit
h spirits to bother much with bodies. Couldn’t she just accept that, as she’d resolved a dozen times, stop being so perverse? When men did pester her, she didn’t like that either.
‘We mustn’t forget our firewood,’ he was saying. ‘There are some steps cut in the rock just here. We can climb down to that scrap of beach I was telling you about—the one where I found the crate.’
Morna’s feet were squelching now and aching, her stomach rumbling from the fast. Yet David and St Abban had taught her greater tolerance, simply to endure fatigue or cold or hunger, to find joy in pain and hardship, if for no other reason than the sweet relief of food and warmth when finally they came. She followed David down the rough-hewn steps of rock, not daring to look down and see the dizzying drop, but concentrating on each steep step, each handhold. The sea bellowed like a wild and hungry animal, making pounces at them, licking at their feet as they jumped the last yard or two which had crumbled into scree.
David picked his way from rock to rock across the tiny sandy beach, turned back to shout to Morna. ‘We’re in luck! See that box?. Well, half a box. That’ll make marvellous fuel.’ He stopped before he reached it, squatted down to peer at something else. ‘Good God!’
‘What?’ Morna caught up with him.
He didn’t answer, just stood staring at what appeared to be a boulder, half-submerged in sand. He leaned forward, touched it gingerly, grimaced. ‘Feel that.’
She reached out her hand, withdrew it in shock. The rock wasn’t hard, but flabby, rubbery. Its surface was mainly blackish, but marbled with different colours—purple, pink, ghoulish-green.
‘It’s a seal,’ David muttered.
‘It … It can’t be.’ Morna recalled the two lithe acrobats on the other side of the island, somersaulting, diving, vigorously alive. This was something inanimate or defunct.
‘It’s been skinned,’ he explained. ‘And washed up here by the tide. Look, you can still see a few tufts of hair, and a gash or two where the knife slipped.’
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