Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  The first entries gestured towards the rhythm of life on the island:

  December 1903: Great storms have wrought such damage to the church roof that it was necessary to conduct services at Colsay House, Lady Cassingham having kindly sent permission … March 1904: There is grave anxiety for the crew of the Lady Jane, last seen in difficulties in the Sound last Tuesday before the fog came down … April 1904: Lady Cassingham sent books, ten slates and maps for the school. Baptism of Alison Petrie, b. 26 Mar, on Easter Day …

  Two of the crew of the Lady Jane had swum ashore near Inversaigh, the boat having been smashed on the rocks in the fog, and the bodies of two of the remaining four washed ashore near Rothkinnick a few days later. Occasional acts of charity by Lady Cassingham, who must have been Giles’s great-grandmother. Her finely judged contributions suggested a careful use of resources which in no way reflected my understanding of life at Bringham Hall in the closing days of Edwardian splendour. In Julia’s attic there are hats almost airborne on the feathers of birds now poised on the edge of extinction, and a handwritten book of family recipes which typically begin ‘Take 5 pints of best cream’ and progress to sponge cakes, best sherry and candied rose petals. Early photographs show family groups so large that the women must have fallen on the first publications of Marie Stopes a few years later with cries of inarticulate gratitude – mothers, nannies, governesses and children of both sexes decked with lace and parasols and intricate tucks and piping. It was not a household that concerned itself with the price of school slates.

  I glanced at my watch and flicked through World War I. The Rector had noted when each family received the news they were dreading, six young men ‘killed in action’ and four ‘missing believed dead’. Colsay must have lost more than half its young men. One more wrecked fishing boat and the next generation would have disappeared. One wedding, in that war, and the groom killed six months later, two births, and four people between the ages of fifty-nine and eight-two died on the island. After 1918, in the new book, the notes contracted to brief aides-mémoire about births (four between 1918 and 1940), deaths (eleven) and marriages (two). I read more carefully. During the second war, there were three deaths recorded: George Petrie, aged seventy-nine, Margaret Maclean, aged seventy-six, Hannah Grice, aged sixty-two, and one birth, Alexander Buchan, November 1942. So he was seven months old. Probably sitting, certainly smiling and babbling and pointing, probably not crawling. Not, these days, old enough for egg custard (risk of salmonella, since if you boil what Giles calls ‘real custard’, as if Birds’ lovely stripy tins were imaginary, it curdles), but old enough to play with a little girl. Able to point and clap and show a range of feeling far richer than the newborn’s distraught/not distraught. One of the things I liked least about small babies was the impossibility that one’s most Herculean labours would result in any greater reward than the baby not being furious for a few minutes, but by seven months they are well on the way to humanity. And young enough to crawl over the glass cliff without the slightest intimation of mortality. There was no mention of Alexander’s death, and no reference at all to Mary Homerton. I looked up. The rain melted the hillside and sky in the window and the wind pushed at the walls. I remembered the boat, the passage back across the Sound whose sandy floor is littered with the bones of people who knew the wind was rising but wanted to get home for supper and reckoned their luck would hold. Time to go.

  ‘So,’ said Fiona. ‘You found what you wanted?’

  I was kneeling on the floor, trying to persuade Moth to let me put his coat back on. ‘No, Moth, arm through. No. Or at least, I found that it wasn’t there. Moth, put your arm through, please.’

  Moth shook his coat off the arm I’d just threaded through. ‘No coat. Hot sunny day.’

  ‘Moth, it’s not. It’s cold.’

  ‘No coat.’

  ‘You have to wear a coat, it’s raining.’

  He wriggled away and turned to face me. ‘Mummy stop it raining.’

  ‘I can’t stop it raining. Believe me, if I had supernatural powers the world would be a very different place. Moth, please put your coat on.’

  ‘No coat.’

  We eyed each other. The theory that I am in charge is undermined by his readiness to lie screaming on the floor in a public place in a town where I am believed to make Medea look like the most diligent follower of Penelope Leach.

  ‘Oh, all right then. Suit yourself.’

  ‘So you found an answer, anyway?’

  ‘No.’ I stood up and held out my hand to Moth. ‘I think I’m going to have to rephrase the question. But it was useful. Come on, love. Let’s see what those waves are doing.’

  Raph came back from the door, where he’d been waiting. ‘Waving, I expect. Come on, Mummy. Or I might as well go back on the computer.’

  Fiona held out a book. ‘Will you take this, then? Help you in your enquiries?’

  I lifted Moth on to my hip. ‘I haven’t got a library card.’

  ‘It’s my copy,’ she said. Colla, Inversaigh and Colsay from Settlement to the Present Day. ‘Bring it back when you’re ready. And you know if it’s births and deaths you’re after you should try the Scotland’s People website.’

  ‘Mummy, come on.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Scotland’s People. Thanks. And Fiona, thanks for the book. I’ll bring it back soon.’

  The boat was bobbing against the landing stage, the fenders rolling like eggs along the sides. I felt queasy.

  Raph watched a fishing boat lurching at its mooring. ‘It’s going to be very bouncy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Moth go swimming?’

  I picked him up as he made for the edge. ‘Not today. Too cold. Yes, the wind’s rising. If Judith doesn’t come soon I think we shouldn’t risk it.’

  ‘What, stay here?’ asked Raphael.

  This conversation is how people’s bodies get washed up in the cove at Rothkinnick.

  Zoe frowned at the horizon. ‘I’m not sharing a hotel room with my mother.’

  ‘There isn’t a hotel,’ I pointed out. ‘Anyway, isn’t that your car?’

  A red Volvo was snaking along the shore road like a tank approaching an undefended village.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zoe. ‘I’m just going to buy something. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘But, Zoe!’

  The waves inside the headland were beginning to break. Judith’s whisky might have to wait in her car. Maybe Judith, who must have weighed as much as Zoe and the children put together, ought to wait in her car.

  ‘Moth tired.’ He rested his head on my shoulder.

  ‘I know, love. Soon home.’

  ‘Biscuit?’

  I had a cottage cheese pot in one pocket and a proper Tupperware one (Julia’s) in the other. The cottage cheese pot turned out to contain an unidentifiable biological hazard.

  ‘Can I have that?’ asked Raph.

  ‘No.’ I dropped it in a bin. KEEP SCOTLAND SMILING. ‘This one’s got biscuits, Moth.’

  ‘Mummy, now that pot’s going to go to landfill and take thousands of years to decompose and release PCBs into the soil.’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘Never mind. Look, here’s Judith. And Zoe’s coming.’

  I felt like a small state caught between two superpowers. Zoe had a large plastic bag from Spar.

  ‘What have you been buying?’ asked Judith.

  ‘Mind your own business.’ Zoe’s hair blew across her face as the wind came over the water.

  ‘Judith,’ I said. ‘I’m concerned about the weather. The wind’s coming up. I think we need to go immediately and be ready to turn back if it’s too rough out in the Sound. And I’m sorry, but if those boxes are whisky I think we should leave them for next time. I don’t want any extra weight in the boat.’

  She held a box with a plastic carrying handle in each hand. No one needs eight bottles of whisky, not even to guarantee the effectiveness of an overdose. If Zoe were mine I don’t think I’d want eight bottles of whisky in the house
.

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Only with no shop on the island, you know, people will want to be able to take their groceries over.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But we have to put safety first. And you can manage, can’t you, for a day or two, if we just take one or two bottles?’

  Zoe sniggered.

  ‘Of course I can. But it’s hardly putting safety first to leave bottles of whisky in full view in the car, is it?’

  This woman’s presence was making Giles believe his project was viable. It was feeding his vision of the role of hereditary landownership in the twenty-first century. I took a deep breath, which was wetter than I would have liked.

  ‘Put them in the boot if you’re worried,’ I said. ‘We don’t even lock our car here. Come on. Raph, Moth, let’s get your lifejackets on. Zoe, do you mind holding Moth again?’

  I made Raph as well as Moth wear a safety harness and clipped them to the boat. If it sinks, they sink, but boats sink more slowly than prams and if it doesn’t sink they will be easier to find. Judith was climbing down the ladder when the librarian came hurrying along the harbour. I held the boat against the wall.

  ‘Did I forget something?’ I called. ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry.’

  She was breathless. ‘I’ve been watching. It’s too rough out there. With the little lads. I’ve phoned to Alec. My cousin. He’ll take you out in his boat. We’ll get yours aboard. We’ll not watch you sink.’

  Judith stopped with a foot on the boat. ‘I don’t think we’ve met?’

  The librarian smiled under her hood, her skirt and hair whipping in the wind. ‘Fiona Firth.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I called. I began to secure the ropes again. ‘No, sit down, Raph. I was worried. I’d be very grateful to buy a safer passage.’

  ‘You’ll need to talk about that with Alec,’ she said. ‘Here, I’ll help with the children. And then I must get back. There’s Alec now.’

  A white-haired man in yellow salopettes came along the wall. I remembered reading somewhere that fishermen still don’t like having women on their boats, although I think that was in the Greek islands or maybe Brittany.

  ‘You’ll be Anna? Right, let’s get her tied down then.’

  I passed Moth back to Zoe and climbed down into the boat to secure the oars and fenders.

  ‘Who tied down?’ asked Raph, looking at Judith.

  I held on to him as he stepped on to the ladder.

  ‘Your boat,’ said Zoe. ‘Boats are always called she.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Tradition.’ I said. ‘It’s ready.’

  ‘There you go,’ said Alec. His body swayed with the boat as if he were gimballed like the compass and the stove in the cabin. ‘We didn’t want to watch you floundering out here. The cliffs are no good in an east wind.’

  I looked at him. ‘You’re very kind, Mr …?’

  ‘Buchan. Alec Buchan. You call me Alec, Anna, we don’t use titles round here.’

  Ian MacDonald does. A handful of spray blew into my face. ‘Alexander Buchan?’ My stomach swooped as if we were driving too fast over a hilly road.

  ‘Alec. I told you, Alec.’

  A white bird flew between waves. I tightened my grasp on Moth.

  ‘And you were born in 1942?’

  His gaze flickered away from the boat’s prow, ploughing into the sea, and met mine. ‘As a matter of fact. Why?’

  I swallowed. ‘I’ve been doing some research. Colsay in wartime. Fiona’ll tell you, I thought I might write a little booklet for the visitors.’

  ‘And you found poor little Mary Homerton.’

  The boat lurched more as we came round the headland. He moved his feet and began to sway again, as if to slow music.

  ‘Yes. And it sounded as if – as if— Well, I didn’t expect to meet you.’

  ‘They found me asleep in a field. Well back from the cliff. Not until they’d found Mary’s body, mind, and you can just imagine the state of my mother.’

  I worked my hand through one of the straps on Moth’s lifejacket.

  ‘Were you crawling?’

  ‘What? Crawling? Shuffling, my mother said. That’s what they do, isn’t it?’

  Raph did, a seal-like gait with one foot trailing which didn’t work at all on carpet. Moth crawled like a bear, a fast bear who could get down the hall and halfway up the stairs in the time it took me to answer the phone.

  Alec Buchan slowed the engine as we came into the bay. ‘My mother thought it was the shuffling that saved me. I couldn’t get over the rough grass. Gave up and went to sleep in the end.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Judith. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Ancient history,’ he said. ‘Nothing but ancient history.’

  His gaze rested on the horizon as the boat rose and fell.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But do you mind – is your mother …’

  ‘Died ten years back. Cancer. And here we are now.’

  Did your father come back, I wanted to ask. Do you have siblings? Did she tell your story often or did you have to force her to return to those hours when she had lost her baby? Could she read about the ones who stayed lost, or worse? How many months did it take her to let you out of her arms, to stop smelling your hair and touching your apple cheeks for long enough to go to the loo or hang up the laundry? Did she ever take another nap? I rummaged in my bag. ‘You’re very kind. Please tell me what I owe you.’

  ‘Ah.’ He turned in towards the landing stage. ‘You send me a copy of that book when it’s done.’

  ‘What, my book? On eighteenth-century childhood? Or the pamphlet?’

  ‘I’d like to see your book. I reckon I know about Colsay.’

  ‘I’d be delighted. Are you interested in eighteenth-century cultural history?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I am.’

  He probably had a coffee grinder too, down in the cabin with the minutes of the Colla and Inversaigh Post-Colonial Theory Research Group. I kissed Moth’s cheek, which was cold as stone, and stroked his red fingers. In two hours the children might be in bed and Judith and Zoe would have gone away and I could lie in a hot bath and close my eyes.

  ‘Anna?’ Zoe had her arm round Raph, who was kneeling on the seat watching the waves run past. ‘I’ll come back with you and mind the children while you make the tea if you like. I bought some ice cream for them.’

  With her hair blown off her face I could see the bones working at her temples.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s a very sweet thought, but you must be tired. I think Giles is back anyway – look, there’s a light on. We’ll just need to feed them and get them to bed.’

  Moth looked up. ‘And supper.’

  ‘And supper.’

  ‘You’re coming back to the house with me,’ said Judith. ‘I’m sure Anna could do with a break.’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Mum. You concentrate on your whisky.’

  Raph looked from one to the other as if he were watching tennis.

  ‘Zoe’s been very helpful,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do my work without her.’

  Judith looked at her daughter. If Zoe had closed her eyes, and loosed her hold on my son, she would have looked dead. ‘I’m glad she’s helping someone.’

  Alexander Buchan glanced at the shore where the waves scribbled white on the rocks.

  ‘Still getting up. This’ll be worse before it’s better.’

  *

  I took a packet of Maltesers into the bath with me, and though the water was hot enough to redden my skin the air stayed cold enough for them not to melt. I lay back with my ears underwater, listening to the amplified sounds of sugar bubbles crushed against my palate. When I’d finished I sat up, arranged my towel over the packet in case Giles came in and rinsed my hands. I, who once rode pillion on a motorbike from Cambridge to wildest West Wales for a party, who at Zoe’s age used to cycle home in the early hours from nightclubs through parts of town where there were boards instead o
f net curtains in the windows and burnt-out cars on the streets, now regard eating chocolate while reading borrowed books in the bath as foolhardy.

  I skimmed through the early chapters of Colla, Inversaigh and Colsay from Settlement to the Present Day. Geology is a noble science; Wordsworth and Darwin and many other great minds of the nineteenth and for all I know the twentieth century were fascinated by prehistory written in stone, but for me it is like going on holiday in countries where the currency has been inflated until six figures barely covers an ice cream; I cannot think in numbers larger than the historical record. The Norman Conquest and the birth of Christ are my decimals, even though I regard the latter as fictional. The Fall of Troy is a waymark seen through shifting fog, from which I am sometimes able to discern the Bronze Age, and earlier (alleged) events are beyond my horizon. You need a different language, I think, for worlds known only by their physical remains. The first person to leave a written account of Colsay was William Tabb, who spent three weeks here in 1637 as part of a journey up the West Coast, taken for no apparent reason other than to write A Narrative of a Journey up the West Coast of Scotland. He reached the island on the third attempt, after the skipper of his hired boat twice turned back ‘on Account of the Highnesse and Whitenesse of the Waves which is they say in those Parts an infalliable Prognostication of Storm’. At last the wind fell and ‘such Tribes of Fowles were seen in Flight as Promise Calmnesse from the West’.

  William Tabb, the Rev. MacFarland recounts, was greeted with ‘what I took for a Kind of Quiet Pleasure’ and shown to ‘a Bed of Straw’ where he was offered ‘Eggs and Fowles, both longer cooked and more advanced in Yeares than they are eaten elsewhere’. He reported that the people were living in ‘most extreame Poverty, having barely Roofs to their Heads in these most inclement Conditions, their Nourishment obtained at the Mercy of a raging Sea’. The men of the island ‘perforce pass their Days upon these fearsome Cliffes, where with the utmost Diligence and Skill they doe worke at gathering Eggs and Fowles, all the while Hanging above that raging Sea by a mere Thread of Rope, which often breaks and sendes hime to a tumbling Deathe’. Even drinking water came from ‘a Springe to which no Stranger would venture to ascend, forbye the Boys judged too younge for the cliffes must risk themselves in that Place’.