by Rebecca Wait
7
Davey McPhee rang Malcolm the next morning. Malcolm was in the kitchen, washing up the plates and pan from last night’s tea while Tommy ate cereal at the table.
Malcolm went into the hall to pick up the phone.
“Coming for a drink tonight, Malcolm?” Davey said without preamble.
The bar was attached to the tiny Litta Hotel, which closed during the winter months. The bar, however, was kept open for the locals, at least if you rang up Ross Johnston, who worked behind it, and told him you’d be coming (the disadvantage was you then had to drink with him). The others had long given up making fun of Malcolm for drinking his ale by the half not the pint. “Malcolm’s not a big drinker,” they’d acknowledge to one another, until it became a statement of fact rather than a criticism.
“I’m staying in tonight,” Malcolm told Davey.
“Been a while since we’ve seen you.”
“I . . .” He wasn’t sure why he was being hesitant; Davey would know already. “I’ve got Tommy here staying.”
“Bring him along,” Davey said. “You know he’s welcome.” After a pause, he added, “There are people here who’d be pleased to see him. See him grown.”
Malcolm took this in silence. He thought it was true that most of the others felt warmly towards Tommy, even felt a protective interest in his well-being. This unease, then, came from Malcolm himself. He said, “I’m a bit worn out, Davey. I’ll come along another night.”
“You sound like you’re in your eighties, not your sixties,” Davey said. “But fine, come along another night. With Tommy, O.K.?”
“O.K.,” Malcolm said.
“How is he, anyway?”
“He’s fine.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“I heard he lives in London now.”
“Aye,” Malcolm said.
“Travelled a long way, Tommy Baird.” There was a short, meditative silence, then Davey added, “He was a lovely boy.”
Malcolm wasn’t sure what to say to this. He presumed Davey meant before, given that most people would not have described Tommy as a lovely boy afterwards.
“Well,” Davey concluded, “tell him hello. From all of us.”
“I’ll do that, Davey. Thanks.”
When Malcolm put the phone down and went back in the kitchen, he knew Tommy wouldn’t ask who it had been. He had already learned that Tommy was scrupulous about observing privacy, both Malcolm’s and his own. But Malcolm found himself telling him, perhaps just for something to say, “That was Davey McPhee. Do you remember him?”
Tommy frowned. “Not really. Sorry.”
“He drove the school bus for years. Did it when you were small. Do you remember that?”
Tommy’s face cleared. “Yeah, I do. He was always nice to us.”
“He was asking if we wanted to go to the hotel bar. I said not tonight.” Malcolm remembered suddenly that Tommy didn’t drink, that he had given up, that he might even have a problem. “We don’t have to go any night,” he amended clumsily.
“You can go, Malcolm,” Tommy said. “Of course. Don’t change your routine for me. I don’t want to be in your way.”
“It’s not my routine,” Malcolm said, amused while slightly dispirited at how Tommy seemed to view his life. “It’s just a drink. I see them all the time, Davey and the rest. Feel I can’t escape them half the time.”
“I imagine not,” Tommy said dryly, “living on an island.” There was a pause, then he added, “You were speaking Gaelic.”
“Aye, we were,” Malcolm said, feeling oddly embarrassed all of a sudden. “It’s Davey, really. Feels we should keep it going. Not many of us left now.” Then, worried Tommy might assume they were saying things they didn’t want him to hear, he stumbled on, “He asked after you. Just briefly. I said you were well.”
Tommy nodded. “I haven’t heard Gaelic in a long time,” he said.
“Well. It’s still my first language, I suppose.”
Strange to think of that now. All through Malcolm’s childhood, he and John had spoken Gaelic at home, English only at school. Even by the time he met Heather, English had felt clumsy in his mouth. But now, in his old age, it was Gaelic that felt awkward to him; when they lapsed into the old language in the bar, there seemed to Malcolm something stilted and self-conscious about it, a foolish pathos in trying to grasp at what was lost. And at some stage—he didn’t know when—it had become Gaelic, not Gàidhlig; he always thought in English now. It was only in his dreams, and only rarely, that he was truly fluent again in the first language he had learned. The language of his forefathers, the language of his youth: to Malcolm it felt both ancient and young.
“You learned it at school, didn’t you?” he said to Tommy.
“A bit. I don’t remember much. We never spoke it at home.”
Malcolm had known this already. John had even banned Malcolm from speaking to his children in Gaelic. Malcolm had never been sure whether this was a reaction against their own father, who would hit them if he heard them speaking English, or if John had regarded Gaelic, as he did so much else about island life, as “backward”. Always in John there was that need to set himself apart.
“Tha i fliuch,” Tommy said unexpectedly. His accent was passable.
Malcom smiled. “Always is here.”
Nothing like having a stranger stay with you to highlight the immense tedium of your own life, Malcolm thought later that afternoon, after hearing himself offer Tommy a cup of tea for the third time in an hour. Christ, when had he started drinking so much tea? It was amazing he got anything else done.
“No thanks,” Tommy said, also for the third time.
“Just me then,” Malcolm said, and went into the kitchen.
They’d been sitting together in the living room since returning from their walk, which had taken them south towards Alban Bay and the lower reaches of the island. They hadn’t managed to spot any seals. Malcolm was reading a detective novel and Tommy was reading one of Heather’s old books, which he’d taken off the shelf with a polite, “May I?”
“Of course,” Malcolm had said. He hadn’t glimpsed the cover as Tommy took the book over to the sofa.
Now, returning with his mug, Malcolm glanced at his nephew. Tommy was sitting with his legs tucked under him, just as he had as a child, a frowning expression of concentration on his face. The book he’d selected, Malcolm saw, was The Portrait of a Lady, which seemed a strange choice. Malcolm could never get on with Heather’s old books. Tommy, though, seemed absorbed. He had always been a bright lad, Malcolm recalled. Did well at school. He’d been clever in the same way Heather was, always reading and asking questions (not that Heather would let anyone call her clever). They’d heard from Jill a couple of years before she died that Tommy had got a place at university, though he couldn’t remember where now. Somewhere in the north of England. Manchester, maybe, or Durham. Malcolm and Heather had sent him a card to say congratulations, though they hadn’t received a reply (hadn’t, by then, expected one). Malcolm didn’t know what subject Tommy had studied, didn’t know whether he’d even graduated.
He watched Tommy across the room for a few more moments, but wasn’t sure how to start the conversation.
“I don’t read much these days,” Tommy said, perhaps feeling Malcolm’s eyes on him.
“No?”
“Used to. Somehow got out of the habit.”
“I expect life moves fast, down in London,” Malcolm said, unable to imagine it.
“Depends,” Tommy said, and then didn’t expand on this.
Malcolm returned to his own book, but after a moment Tommy said, “Shall I cook tonight?”
He was looking up at Malcolm now, almost shyly. It was only cauliflower cheese, Malcolm thought. It can’t have been that bad. But then Tommy added, “To give you a break?”
>
“I don’t mind,” Malcolm said. “It’s no more trouble cooking for two than cooking for one.” Then he thought of Tommy’s agonized politeness and wondered if it would make his nephew feel less awkward if he was allowed to cook for them, so he said, “Sure, if you’d like. That would be nice.”
“Do you like omelettes?”
“Aye.”
“Great,” Tommy said, with a small nod to himself. “O.K. then.” He returned to his reading.
Tommy made a good cheese omelette. Malcolm tried to take his time eating it to show Tommy he was enjoying it, then noticed Tommy had inhaled his own in about half a minute. In some ways, he hadn’t changed. Malcolm had a sudden vivid memory of Katrina leaning over Tommy, ruffling his hair and saying, “No one’s going to take it off you, bairnie.”
Once they’d both finished, neither made a move to leave the table. Malcolm wasn’t sure if Tommy wanted to talk or if, like Malcolm, he simply didn’t know what to do next.
When Tommy did speak at last, what he said was unexpected. “I learned how to make an omelette from my father.”
Malcolm was careful not to show any reaction. “Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Tommy went on, in the same casual, distant voice. “It was the only thing he ever taught me to cook.”
Malcolm said, “He was never very interested in cooking, as I recall.” Thought it was a woman’s job. But so, Malcolm admitted, had he for many years. It was only more recently that he had come to realize how old fashioned he had been. Heather, too, in some ways.
“No,” Tommy said. “He never cooked. Wouldn’t. But he said my mother didn’t know how to make a decent omelette. He prided himself on his. Insisted on showing me and Nicky how. Somehow, through the years, I remembered.”
“Not a bad skill,” Malcolm said, choosing the most non-committal response he could come up with.
“But it occurred to me later on,” Tommy said, “how strange a thing it was, for a man to pride himself on his omelettes. I mean, was there really nothing else?”
“I think he prided himself on a lot of things,” Malcolm said.
Tommy nodded and didn’t reply. When he did open his mouth, it was only to yawn and say, “I think I’ll get to my bed soon. Maybe read for a bit. What time is it?”
Malcolm looked at his watch. “Just gone eight.”
“So early? Christ.”
“Evenings can be long here.”
Tommy seemed to take this the wrong way, growing immediately awkward. “You know, you could still go out to the bar. I don’t mind. Please don’t stay in just because of me.”
“No, I . . .” It was strange, Malcolm thought, how much time he spent trying to put Tommy at ease when he was so little at ease himself. “I’m quite happy staying in. I just meant that it can be boring if you’re not used to it. Not used to such a quiet life.”
“I think I’ve only ever wanted a quiet life.”
“Well then,” Malcolm said. “You’ve come to the right place.”
And even this comment, innocuous as it was, seemed to go too near something dangerous, to touch too closely on Tommy’s motives for being here, which were still a mystery to Malcolm. The simplest conversation with his nephew seemed to be riddled with traps.
“I suppose so,” Tommy said, getting up. “Well. Goodnight then.”
Perhaps Tommy really did just want a holiday, Malcolm thought after his nephew had left the room. Perhaps he had simply come here to get away for a few days, and it really was no more complicated than that.
In bed that night, he thought of his friends gathered together in the bar and wondered if they’d talked about him and Tommy. He assumed they had. Or maybe not about Malcolm himself—out of loyalty, they would avoid discussing him if they could—but he knew how likely it was they had returned to the old unresolved problem of John. Everyone had come up against it at the time and they continued to come up against it now. There was no getting around it.
Malcolm remembered how often Heather had said it, how she had repeated that old question: Why did he do it? She had blamed herself bitterly for not seeing any warning signs, as if John had somehow been her responsibility, though she wasn’t even related to him. She wasn’t the one who’d grown up with him.
Other people had asked Malcolm too—almost everyone on the island at one stage or another during the aftermath—as though he had some secret knowledge, as though he had somehow been party to it. Oh, nobody accused him, he knew that; nobody blamed him. But they watched him and he felt it. They trod quietly around him, waiting for the moment when he would choose to share his knowledge. Why did John do it? Everybody had liked John. Malcolm must tell them why he had done it. Had he lost his mind?
“He loved them,” Heather said. “We all saw it. He adored Katrina and those children.”
“The thing is,” Davey said to Malcolm at the funeral—John’s, which they held separately to the others (it was well attended, out of respect for Malcolm, though he’d have preferred it if nobody had come)—“it wasn’t just some stranger, was it? It was John. He was born here. He was one of us.”
Malcolm saw these words for what they were: a clumsy attempt at kindness. Davey was claiming John for all of them in order to ease the burden on Malcolm a little.
What could have been going through John’s head? people wanted to know. Many of them had seized on the fact of his money troubles, as though this could somehow explain it all. He’d maxed out his overdraft and run up £10,000 of credit-card debt buying nice suits, that fancy car, staying in expensive hotels for his nights on the mainland, and—worse—he had fallen into arrears with the mortgage payments. Then, of course, he’d lost his job; the firm had laid several people off, not just John. It had been a mess by the time it all came out, once John wasn’t around to hide it any longer.
Too much pressure, people said. Must have sent him over the edge. But even the debt John was in—it appalled Malcolm, but even he could just about see it wasn’t a catastrophe. John would have paid it off in a few years if he’d got another job, sold the car, lived within his means.
Still, Malcolm sensed in some people a kind of relief at the knowledge of John’s debt, as though that might explain everything. He must have panicked, they said. Probably thought he was protecting his family. Temporary madness. Later, in any case, they ceased to discuss it around Malcolm, and he was grateful. He did not think they had ceased to discuss it, though it was possible that, for a time at least, they had run out of things to say.
He never had any answers to give people, or not the kind that would make any sense. A monster had been among them, and nobody had seen it. Of course they were affronted. Malcolm tasted again the shock like metal in his mouth as he received the phone call that terrible afternoon, followed soon after by the bitterness of bile. “It can’t be true,” Heather kept saying in the car. “I don’t believe it.” She would continue to say this in the days afterwards, then over and over in the weeks and months that followed, long after she’d realized the words offered no protection. Malcolm would nod in agreement, seeming to share her disbelief. And yet beneath the surface, although his shock was real, the greatest shock of all had been finding he had no trouble believing it.
8
When Malcolm said, “Shall we head to Craigmore?” the next day, Tom thought of Nicky. His brother was very clear to him on some days, much vaguer on others. Tom wasn’t sure whether he missed Nicky more when he was present or when he was absent. Missing someone long dead was a strange thing. There was so much blankness caught up amidst the pain. All he recalled of Beth now was how warm her little body had felt when you lifted her and how she screwed up her face when she smiled, mouth open, in a way that Nicky said (kindly) made her look like a frog. Tom had no idea what sort of person she would have grown into.
“Yeah,” he said to Malcolm. “Craigmore.” He saw seals and black rocks.
They set off around lunchtime, walking side by side without saying much. Craigmore lay in the isolated northern reaches of the island, where there were no houses, only farmland and sheep and uneven, rocky hillside. It took them just over an hour to complete the journey along the road and then along the rough farm track before they were finally up on the cliffs. As they tramped across the grassland by the old abandoned chapel, Malcolm said, gesturing in its direction, “Fourteenth century, don’t they say? Built by the monks of Iona.”
The chapel was squat and roofless: just three ruined walls in ancient grey stone, half decayed and covered in moss and lichen. Tom saw himself crouching within these walls with Nicky, pausing on their journey to the coast to eat their sandwiches. They had loved this place; it felt like theirs.
“And the chief of Clan MacLeod is supposed to have hidden in it once, right?” he said to Malcolm, this information coming back to him unexpectedly. “Escaping capture by the MacDonalds. Afterwards he claimed he was protected by God.” Protected by his own cowardice, more like.
“I’ve heard that,” Malcolm said, “but who knows?”
“There are so many stories about this island,” Tom said. “The clans, the fighting, the ships lost. Do you still tell them to each other in the bar at night?” He could hear the hard edge that had come into his own voice and felt Malcolm’s eyes on him. Tom didn’t look round.
“Sometimes,” Malcolm said. “I suppose people like stories.”
“People like stories about themselves. Especially the people here.”
“Aye, maybe that’s true,” Malcolm said, his voice infuriatingly measured.
His uncle was a hard man to provoke, Tom remembered, not knowing why he himself was suddenly so angry.
Finally, they reached the coastline and descended from the cliffs, coming to empty stretches of beach. The sand was flat and wet, a faint sheen across it from the weak afternoon light. Dark rocks jutted out into the Atlantic, with the hunched outlines of other islands just visible through the mist: Mull to the north and Jura to the east. Way out west, across thousands of miles of empty sea, Canada. On a couple of rocks within sight of land were gannet colonies, and, on a good day, basking on the larger, flatter rocks near the shore, seals. As far as Tom could see, there were none today.