Alessandra raised her eyebrows. ‘Ah, senility. Is that what they say about me now?’
Saskia looked at her great-aunt. Her eyes showed no cloudiness, none of the vague abstraction with which some old people looked out at the world. Again she thought of Alessandra’s age. Her great-aunt had been a teenager when Saskia’s father was born – in fact, the age I am now, Saskia suddenly realized.
‘In my dream,’ said Saskia, ‘you led me away from the rocks . . .’
Alessandra eyes recoiled from Saskia’s look. ‘What rocks?’ She stirred her tea with unnecessary attention.
‘The rocks at the far end of the beach.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’ Saskia studied her great-aunt’s face. It showed no emotion, but the hand that held the teaspoon trembled.
‘That end of the beach is not a safe place,’ said Alessandra. ‘There are constant rock falls from the cliff, especially in bad weather.’
‘You said the sea was magical.’
‘That’s what you dreamed I said.’ Alessandra smiled, it seemed to Saskia, with difficulty. ‘It is much more likely that what I said was, “Those rocks are dangerous.” They were dangerous then. They are dangerous now.’
When, Saskia wondered, did magical become dangerous?
After breakfast Alessandra showed Saskia around the house.
On the first floor, across the landing from the bathroom and Saskia’s bedroom, were two more bedrooms looking out to the east with views over the little beach below the house.
‘My brother, who was your grandfather, had one of these rooms and I the other.’ Alessandra paused and smiled as if a small secret memory had passed through her mind. ‘Rob was the best brother I could wish for. He was a very loving and good person. And Esther, his wife, was as sweet and kind as he was. They were well matched.’ She sighed. ‘I loved them both dearly.’
‘You must have been sad when he moved away to get married.’
‘To begin with they lived here. Even after my brother was killed at sea, Esther stayed on. Your father was born in this house.’ Alessandra moved to the window and spoke with her back to Saskia. ‘It was later on . . . your father was still very young, not much more than a baby, when your grandmother Esther took him to Yarmouth to be with her own people.’
The rooms were sparsely furnished and bare of decoration, with no prints or photographs on display, and when Saskia asked about family photographs her great-aunt said, ‘My father did not like photographs being taken, but I have my own photograph albums that you can look through.’
Downstairs, on the ground floor, running along the back of the house was another bathroom and the kitchen. To the front were Alessandra’s bedroom and a long drawing/dining room with tall windows facing east. A pelmet of burgundy velour framed the windows but no curtains hung on either side. A pair of binoculars rested on the window ledge.
‘What a stunning view!’ said Saskia. ‘No wonder you don’t have curtains. I wouldn’t even close the window blinds if I lived in this house.’
‘I never do . . . now,’ said Alessandra.
The huge old dining table was covered with papers, books, magazines, journals and photographs. Beside an old typewriter stood a portable tape recorder.
‘It looks a bit of a muddle but when I’m working I do know where everything is.’
Saskia blushed, thinking her aunt was referring to her earlier remark about dementia. ‘Working?’ she asked quickly to cover her embarrassment.
‘I’m collating personal local histories. It’s mainly labelling photographs and doing one or two taped interviews for our new Heritage Centre. Sometimes, if the weather is kind and I’m feeling up to it, I cycle out and take photographs of the little towns and the bays. It’s all changing so rapidly. When Rob and I were growing up you could walk across the boats from one end of Fhindhaven harbour to the other. Now the harbour has more pleasure craft than working boats. With the oil boom going on and us merging with Europe everything is changing. A lot of our heritage will soon be gone for ever.’
Alessandra leaned over and pressed the PLAY button on the tape recorder. ‘My hearing is not what it was,’ she said and turned the sound up.
The voice of an old man filled the room.
‘Ye want me to tell ye whit it was tae be a fisherman?’ The man laughed. ‘The hale thing, like? Sixty-twa years in five meenits?’
‘Jist little things, Dodie. Wee bit memories . . . ken?’ Saskia barely recognized her great-aunt’s voice on the tape.
‘Dinna ken whaur tae begin, Alessandra.’
Alessandra’s voice spoke again: gentle, encouraging. ‘My brother Rob a’ways said the herring drifters were the real fishing boats.’
‘Aye, well, thon were the days afore the war when ye followed the herring through the seasons as they moved roon the mainland. The “magic circle” we ca’d it, but noo the scientists tell us different. From the Western Isles up bye Shetland and then aff Peterheid tae the far banks and doon the coast to the English gruns, then roon and up by Ireland they went.’
Saskia moved closer trying to tune her ear to pick up the unfamiliar accent.
‘An’ it was oor job tae find them. It was hard work and ye needed tae ken the ways o’ the fish. Ye never kent if it would be a big catch or nae, but that’s whit gave the herring fishing an edge ower line fishing and attracted a lot o’ the young ones tae it. There’s an excitement on the boat as ye leave and sail awa’ . . . sail awa’ to the high seas and deep watter.’
‘Tell us then aboot bein’ at sea,’ Alessandra urged him gently.
‘It was a hunt, ken? Ye’d tae set yer course and ken the signs that would tell ye whaur the fish micht be. Ye’d look oot for dolphins or birds diving. Noo they’ve got modern methods. But where’s the interest in watching for a bleep on a screen? A guid skipper could feel his way to the herring gruns blindfold, he’d smell the herring, see the plankton glistening upon the watter.’
‘Rob, my brother, said they’d sometimes use landmarks to guide them oot,’ said Alessandra.
‘Oh, aye,’ the old fisherman went on. ‘As ye left ye’d line the boat up wi’ the high steeple in the Broch or the lighthouse on Kinnaird Point, and ye’d guess how many miles oot the shoals were. And when ye got tae the fishing gruns, once ye’d found yer mark, the skipper would put the boat afore the wind, and then ye’d shoot the nets. Doon and doon they’d fall, like a great lang curtain in the sea. Then he’d bring the boat roon, head tae wind, and let her drift with the tide. And ye’re hopin’ yer skipper’s nose is keen an’ his een sharp an’ ye are on top o’ the shoals. The herring a’ move together and try tae swim through the nets and get caught by the gills. An ye bide that way for a few hours or more, an if the weather turns heavy ye let oot more rope if needed tae keep the boat right balanced. An’ after a bit we draw in oor harvest. We’d shout tae be heard above the wind and the noise, and the birds screaming and plunging intae the fish. We’d begin to drag the nets up and ower the side. The winch taks up the messenger rope but the men hauled the nets, an’ they were heavy, fu’ o’ fish.’
‘Did ye sing, at all?’
‘Sing? Nae. Not so often. But we’d call tae each other as we hauled the nets, an’ try to get a motion tae it. Haul and shake, haul and shake. Backbreaking, aye, backbreaking. With the force o’ the waves against ye, rain streamin’ doon yer oilskins and the boat battling the sea: tossing, riding high, an’ then troughing doon and doon until ye thocht it wasnae gan tae cam’ back up, and ye trying tae keep yer feet as ye pulled for dear life.
‘Aye . . . Mind, there was one song . . .’ Suddenly the old fisherman began to sing.
‘Haul away, boys!
Haul away, me lads.
Fill the boat, me boys!
Wi’ the bonnie siller herring . . .’
There was a silence. Then after a moment the fisherman began to speak again. ‘Ye see, when the nets are a’ adrift and ye can feel the drag, it tells ye the shoals are there, thoosans o
f fish sweemin’ awa’ under the boat, then ye ken fine the sicht yer gan tae see when ye begin the haul up. And the anticipation o’ it is in yer belly, an yer eyes are na’whaur else but on the watter. There’s naethin’ quite like it and Ah canna right describe it tae ye. There’s the surge in yer heart when ye ken the nets is fu’ and yer gaun home tae harbour wi’ a full catch. An’ the mate shouts an’ the winch creaks, an’ the first net breaks up through the waves, an’ there across the face o’ the deep are the fish, thrashing an’ twisting, an’ glittering silver – as if the lady moon hersel’ had tumbled fae the night sky and splintered intae a million siller pieces scattered ower the surface of the sea.
‘And we’d pull then, pull hard, for hours, hand over hand, bringin’ them in. And as they cam’ up we cried oot, “Swim up! Swim up! Ye siller darlin’s!”’
The tape whirred and ran on, clicking to a stop at the end.
Saskia broke the silence first. ‘That was beautiful,’ she said. ‘He has the sound of the sea in his voice.’
Two spots of pleasure glowed in Alessandra’s cheeks. ‘I thought so too,’ she said. ‘Although it loses a little when transcribed to the page. It is a language with its own music.’
‘I didn’t catch all of it,’ said Saskia, ‘but it doesn’t seem to matter somehow.’ She wandered over to the row of glass-fronted bookcases. ‘You called him “Dodie”. Is that a local name?’
‘It’s for George. But here in the Northeast we have lots of by-names.’
‘By-name?’ Saskia interrupted. ‘Do you mean like a nickname?’
‘Yes,’ said Alessandra. ‘They are used widely here because there are so many common surnames and first names. In small villages, if everyone was called a name like Smith, and children were always named for parents and grandparents, then a village could have a dozen or so people with exactly the same first and last names. So people are individualized by attaching a by-name like Pendy or Curly or Bullan, or some such thing. Sometimes they use the mother or father’s name first. Just as in the Western Isles MacDonald originally meant child of Donald, here in the Northeast we might say Annie’s Dodie. And a son of Dodie also called Dodie could be known as Dodie’s Dodie.’
‘Dodie’s Dodie?’ Saskia laughed.
Alessandra smiled. ‘Yes, even to the extent that we do have a man who is called Dodie’s Dodie’s Dodie.’
‘What would I be?’ asked Saskia.
‘You?’ said Alessandra. Her gaze shifted and she looked beyond Saskia’s head and out to sea. ‘You are Saskia.’
‘But,’ Saskia persisted, ‘if my grandfather’s name was Rob, and my father’s name is Alexander, then my father is not named for his father. Is my father named for his own grandfather?’
Alessandra blinked and refocused her eyes on Saskia. ‘Your father? Named for my father? No. Not for him.’
‘Who then?’
‘For me.’ Alessandra spoke quietly. ‘Your grandmother named her baby for me.’
Saskia turned to the glass-fronted bookcase to look at the photograph albums, and as she did so she saw the expression on her aunt’s face. Not pride, as one might expect at having a child named for her. Not pride, no. Alessandra’s face in the glass was crowded with grief. But when Saskia turned to look directly at her great-aunt the crumpled look of sorrow was gone.
‘You asked about photographs when we were upstairs.’ Alessandra reached past Saskia, opened one of the bookcase doors and took out some old-fashioned photograph albums. ‘Here are all the family albums: your Granton ancestors. Not so many from when Rob and I were young. My father would not agree to such things, so it was only on rare occasions that we had a photograph taken. But your grandparents’ wedding photograph is there, and . . . your own family holiday album.’ She held out a thick book to Saskia and stood back looking at her as she opened it up.
She must think that this will make me remember my previous visits here, thought Saskia. ‘Did I look through these when I was younger?’ she asked Alessandra. ‘You would think I would remember doing that.’
‘They didn’t interest you very much,’ said her great-aunt. ‘You were more inclined to be outside playing. We could hardly keep you indoors.’
The album was set out in years, the photographs attached to the dark-brown pages with old-fashioned corner mounts and labelled in careful small script: ‘Saskia holding a crab’, ‘Saskia at the harbour’, ‘Saskia with an ice-cream cone’, ‘Saskia with her mum and dad’. Saskia looked more closely at this photograph of a happy family. Had they been happy then? Both her parents were smiling into the camera, but then they were good at putting on a show for the sake of appearances. Saskia became aware that Alessandra was watching her face. She leafed through the last few pages and saw a photograph of a little girl squinting at the camera holding something in her hand.
‘It’s the shell!’ cried Saskia. ‘I dreamed about it last night. The special great whelk. I loved my shell collection, and that one in particular.’
Saskia’s mind jolted. A real memory slotted into place, not a recollection of her dream of last night.
She is sitting at the kitchen table, her legs swinging free, banging her sandals against the chair.
‘I want to go out. I want to go out. Out. Out. Out,’ she chants.
Her great-aunt Alessandra turns from the stove, smiling.
‘We will go out, my love,’ she sings back. ‘We will go out together. Out. Out. Out.’
Saskia looked at her great-aunt. ‘We did walk on the beach every day. I remember now, gulping down my food quickly so that we could go outside. The days seemed long and warm and . . . and . . . happy.’
Alessandra nodded. ‘The last year ye visited me was an especially grand summer, until the night of the storm.’ She took the book from Saskia’s hand, closed it softly and replaced it in the bookcase.
‘Why did we not come back?’ Saskia asked.
‘Maybe you just grew out of it.’ Alessandra’s voice was light but the line of her lip was pressed thin. ‘Your father said that you wanted to go to Disneyland, and at that time his business began to expand. As he was making so much money he could afford to take you there.’
Saskia knew that she had been much more interested in Sea World than Disneyland. The dolphins and whales had attracted her greatly, the great sea beasts that had known the ways of the planet long before man had evolved. Another thought came to Saskia. Was that when she had started trying to please her father? Becoming anxious to do what she thought would win his favour rather than doing what she herself wanted to do; feigning interest in exhibits and topics that interested him? But then, didn’t all little girls do the same thing at that age? Saskia had gone on to develop a close relationship with her father. She found that they shared the same sense of humour, enjoyed similar kinds of food, and relished outdoor activities, unlike her mother, whose preferred hobbies were reading or gardening or painting.
‘I wasn’t really surprised when your father said that you were so keen to visit here again now,’ Alessandra went on, ‘but I didn’t realize that you would have so few childhood memories of this place. Come, I’ll show you outside.’
Saskia was glad Alessandra was walking ahead of her so that she did not catch her reaction. Saskia knew that it was the other way about. Her father had told her that it was Alessandra who had written and invited Saskia to visit her. Perhaps her great-aunt was too proud to admit that.
The outside walls of the house which faced the sea had a thin gravel path running round them. Saskia walked all the way to the end of this path past the ground-floor windows at the front, to the side where her bedroom overlooked the sea. Here the path dribbled out to finish up against the cliff. On the outside edge of the path was a thick stone wall, and beyond that the cliff fell away sharply.
‘Wow!’ said Saskia. ‘It must have taken some amount of work to build a house in this place.’
‘It was my mother’s father who built it. I don’t remember him at all. He died before I was born. He c
ame from Buckie and the folk of Buckie have the reputation of being the hardiest in the Northeast. They say my grandfather loved the sea and this house made him feel as if he was part of it.’
‘When it’s very windy do you ever feel the house might blow away?’
Alessandra shook her head. ‘Never. It is solid within the rock. The back wall is buried into the overhang, secure, like an eagle’s nest.’
They returned to the little garden where, at the start of the front wall, the stairs led down to the beach. This gable end of the house, which faced inland, was where both entrances to the house were, the main door leading to the hall and to the left of that the kitchen door. Alessandra showed Saskia her vegetable and herb garden.
‘It doesn’t look much but it’s very sheltered and gives a good crop.’ She stopped by the stairs that led to the top floor of the house. ‘I put your bicycle with my own in this little cellar beside the kitchen door. Because it is under these outside stairs that go up to the attic it runs a little way back into the rock.’
The cellar door was unlocked and as Saskia followed Alessandra inside she saw that it was really a room cut out of the cliff. The sides and back wall were rock, part of the cliff itself.
‘Some houses along the coast had rooms like this or caves behind them. They say that they were used in the last century for smuggled goods. I keep only my bicycle in there now.’
Her aunt stood at the door as Saskia went in to explore. It was much darker at the far end where the sunlight did not reach.
‘There’s nothing much further back there. There were always rumours that a passageway led into the cliffs with a secret path to Fhindhaven or the top road. Locals made up stories of treasure and buried pirate’s gold. When we were small Neil Buchan and I searched for it but it doesn’t exist.’
Rumours of treasure. Saskia smiled to herself. Her father must have absorbed these stories and now he fancied that there was money hidden in the house. In reality everything about her great-aunt and the house gave the appearance of lack of wealth. The plainness of Alessandra’s clothes (she had on today the same clothes she had worn yesterday), the bareness of the rooms, the worn parts on the treads of the stair carpet. There was nothing of any great value in the cellar: an axe for chopping firewood, a small boat anchor, herring barrels of different sizes, and a whaling harpoon, its tip marked with rust.
Saskia's Journey Page 3