by Rebecca Wait
“We will too.”
He felt tired simply from the phone call.
Malcolm worked with Robert as usual in the morning, and then after lunch he walked with Tommy halfway to Craigmore. Although November was creeping closer, the sky was blue and the sun shone on them with watery persistence. The hills looked brighter than usual, even the dark patches of bracken spotlit with gold.
“It’s beautiful here,” Tommy said, as they climbed up on to the cliffs and looked down at the beach. “Sometimes I forget.”
“It’s more hospitable in summer,” Malcolm said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“I never think of it in summer.” Tommy put his hands in the pockets of his coat and continued to stare ahead. “I always picture it in the rain or the mist. I always see it in greys and browns.”
“There are plenty of those.”
“But other colours, too.”
Back at the house, Tommy went upstairs and didn’t reappear for some time. When he finally came down, Malcolm saw that he’d changed into the shirt he’d first arrived in. He wondered if he himself should put on a smarter shirt, a less holey jersey, since Tommy seemed to have made an effort, but decided against it. It never would have occurred to him usually. He’d picked up a bottle of red wine in the shop on his way back from Robert’s farm that morning, and now he brandished it awkwardly at Tommy and said, “Well, I suppose we’d best be off.”
Tommy was silent in the car. It was dark outside, so the scenery provided little opportunity for conversation. Malcolm realized suddenly that they would have to pass Tommy’s old house to get to the McKenzies’, which lay further along the same track. He wondered why this fact hadn’t occurred to him sooner, and had no idea whether he should comment on it or keep quiet. It was the Dougdales’ house now, of course. Malcolm supposed that sitting down to eat with them would be strange for Tommy; he hoped no one would bring up the connection.
As they neared the eastern side of the island, he felt he had to say something. All he could manage was, “You all right with this, Tommy?”
“What?” his nephew said, turning towards him; he had been staring out of the window into the darkness. “Yeah, course.”
“We don’t have to stay long.”
“It’s fine.”
A few minutes later, they turned off the main road on to the lane where Tommy used to live.
“Almost there,” Malcolm said unnecessarily.
Neither of them commented as they drove past Tommy’s old house. No lights were on inside, and the porch light was off too, so it was difficult to make out the house beyond its dark outline, set a little way back from the road. The Dougdales must have left already.
Five minutes later, they reached the McKenzies’ house, right at the end of the track. Two cars were in the driveway, and Malcolm recognized the red Volvo as the Dougdales’ and the blue Toyota as the McKenzies’ own. The MacDonalds, it seemed, had not yet arrived.
Malcolm pulled up on the verge. The silence that followed felt unusually thick and still without the sound of the engine.
“I’m not very good at small talk,” Tommy said after a moment.
“Me neither.”
They didn’t have time to ring the doorbell before Fiona opened the door, presumably having heard the car.
“Malcolm,” she said. “Tommy. It’s so nice that you could come. Oh, a claret, how lovely.” She took the bottle from Malcolm and ushered them through to the small, bright living room where Chris and Mary Dougdale were on their feet, drinks in hand, talking to Gavin.
“Malcolm! Tommy!” Gavin said, with a cheeriness that seemed overdone to Malcolm. “Good to see you again.” He came over and shook Tommy’s hand vigorously, then clapped Malcolm on the shoulder. Malcolm had never seen this mild man act so heartily, and was slightly alarmed; Gavin had been normal with them the other day, but he wondered if he had been primed by Fiona this time. Make sure you’re jolly, Malcolm imagined her telling him. Be as jolly as possible, Gavin. He almost laughed out loud at the idea.
The Dougdales’ greeting was more muted. Although they had been on the island for almost twenty years by now, they were still regarded as incomers by most of the islanders, one or two of whom were given to wondering, with more curiosity than malice, when the Dougdales might pack up and go back to Stirling. Furthermore, Chris’s work as a graphic designer, running a small company from his study, continued to baffle the islanders, some of whom had not yet adjusted to the arrival of broadband on Litta. Mary was the island’s teacher, having taken over from the woman who replaced Aileen Brown, the one who’d only stayed a year, finding the island, she said, impossibly lonely, impossibly remote. (This was still joked about in the bar from time to time: the idea that someone could have gone so far as to get a job on Litta and move their whole family there without noticing beforehand how remote it was. They had all been kind, however, at the time, trying hard to ensure Hilda Grady felt welcome. None of them ever admitted how their feelings had been hurt by her departure, by her declaration of loneliness in the face of all their efforts.) Despite having been on the island so long, Mary still seemed to carry with her a faint air of city glamour; though when Malcolm said something along these lines to Heather once, Heather had snorted and said, “Mal, she’s from Stirling, not Paris. You just mean she looks a wee bit less windswept than the rest of us.”
Tonight, Mary was wearing make-up—not a common sight here—and Malcolm was momentarily taken aback by the insistent dark red of her lipstick. He thought it made her mouth look thin, but that might have been because he wasn’t used to it and, as Heather had often said, he didn’t like things he was not used to.
They were sensible people with no nonsense about them, but Malcolm thought that they must feel some discomfort all the same at finally meeting the boy whose family was killed in their house.
“It’s a pleasure,” Chris said, shaking Tommy’s hand and nodding at Malcolm.
“We’ve heard so much about you, Tommy,” Mary said, and then seemed to show, by a fractional change in her expression, that she regretted this banality, which carried so much more weight than she’d intended.
Fortunately the short silence that followed was broken by Gavin. “Can I get you both a drink?” he said. “Wine, beer, whisky?”
“Just water for me, please,” Tommy said, and Malcolm quickly added, “And I’ll have a whisky if it’s going, Gavin,” to ensure no one had time to query Tommy’s request.
Fiona had been hanging up their coats in the hall, and now she came back in. Of course she could never help but make a fuss. When Gavin returned with a glass of water and a whisky, she said, “Gavin, get Tommy some cordial to have in his drink. He can’t be drinking plain water like that.”
“It’s O.K.,” Tommy said. “I like it.”
“I suppose water can be very refreshing, can’t it?” Fiona said, back-pedalling rapidly. “Sometimes nothing else will do, will it?”
Tommy shook his head, smiling politely. Malcolm hoped the whole evening wouldn’t be like this.
The doorbell went and Fiona said, “That must be Ed and Kathy,” with a slight tone of surprise, as though she hadn’t been expecting them. She came back a moment later followed by the MacDonalds—Kathy, large and comfortable, her husband, slender and grey and perpetually frowning a little, even when he appeared otherwise to be in a good mood. The only time he cheered up a bit was when the drink was in him.
“Hi, Malcolm,” Kathy said. “Good to see you again, Tommy.”
Malcolm was immediately grateful for her easy manner, and wondered again at the mystery of her marriage to Ed, who seemed on edge even with friends as old as these. Malcolm tried to imagine what he was like with strangers, and then realized that seeing Ed meet Tommy again as an adult was probably one of the first times he’d witnessed Ed interacting with a stranger.
Ed overcame this social hurdle by
saying nothing, putting his hands in his pockets and looking at his feet.
Gavin bustled round again, taking drink orders and then returning with beers for Ed and Kathy. Malcolm sipped his whisky and wished he’d asked for a beer too. At some point he seemed to have gone off whisky. Heather had liked it; perhaps now she was gone he didn’t need to pretend anymore. He found himself standing with Fiona, who was saying, “How is it out on the farm, Malcolm? Tupping must be underway now.”
“Almost,” Malcolm said. “Robert pushed it back a week. Next week, I think we’ll make a start.”
“The work never stops, does it?”
“No. That’s a fact.”
Fiona turned to Tommy, standing silently beside them. “Did you never consider the farming life, Tommy?”
“No.”
“I suppose it isn’t for everyone.”
Malcolm watched Tommy, unsure whether his nephew would reply or if he himself would need to say something to cover the silence. But after a moment, Tommy came out with, “I do like the outdoors. But farming’s hard. It wouldn’t have suited me.”
“And remind me again, what is it you do in London?” Fiona said.
“Grant development manager,” Tommy said succinctly, a phrase that meant precisely nothing to Malcolm. “At a research centre.”
“Do you enjoy that?” Fiona asked, clearly as much at a loss as Malcolm.
“Not especially,” Tommy said.
“Well,” Fiona said. “We all have to do something, don’t we? To keep the wolf from the door.”
“Crofting’s never really done that,” Malcolm murmured.
“Ah, but that’s a way of life, not a job.”
“I suppose.” Malcolm wondered suddenly, and perhaps for the first time in his life, what else he might have done if there hadn’t been the croft. Become an accountant like John? No, he’d never been much good with figures. He’d have worked on the ferries, most probably. Croft or no croft, he’d never have left the island, even in his early twenties with his whole life ahead of him. Perhaps all this time what he’d thought of as love had really been fear.
Fiona excused herself to go and check on the lamb, and Malcolm found himself briefly alone with Tommy. “You O.K.?” he said, and Tommy nodded.
The next moment, Ed sidled up to them, emboldened by his beer. He’d refused the offer of a glass, and Malcolm could see from the way he lifted the can to his mouth that most of it was already gone.
“You on the water, lad?” Ed said to Tommy.
“Yes.”
“That’s not really the way we do things out here,” Ed said.
There was a short, awkward pause, and then Ed laughed. Malcolm wondered if he’d been drinking before he even arrived, perhaps wishing to prepare himself for the ordeal ahead. If so, Malcolm could hardly blame him.
“Water’s very refreshing,” Tommy said. He met Malcolm’s eye, his expression giving nothing away. “Sometimes nothing else will do.”
Kathy had been talking to Chris Dougdale and Gavin (Mary was nowhere to be seen, perhaps helping Fiona in the kitchen), but now she came up to join them.
“Ed, are you behaving yourself?” she said to her husband in her good-natured way, but Malcolm thought he detected a note of anxiety in her voice.
“Aye,” Ed said. “Just catching up with Malcolm and getting reacquainted with wee Tommy.”
“The man’s in his thirties, Ed,” Kathy said.
“Not in my head,” Ed said. “When you’ve known someone since they were a bairn, you always see them that way. They never grow up.”
Involuntarily, Malcolm thought of Nicky and Beth, and hoped Tommy wasn’t thinking of them too.
“What’s it like, being back here?” Kathy said to Tommy. “Does it look just how you remember?”
“Yes, I think so,” Tommy said. “The landscape doesn’t change much, does it?” He paused. “New generation of sheep, though.”
There was a moment’s hesitation before everyone realized he was making a joke, and Kathy and Ed laughed heartily. Malcolm smiled and Tommy looked ruefully down at the floor, as if embarrassed by his own weak attempt at humour.
Fiona and Mary reappeared at that point, coming to join the small circle. “What’s all this hilarity about?” Fiona said, and Malcolm winced for Tommy as his joke was repeated by Kathy, and then Fiona and Mary laughed too, in a slightly forced manner.
“What we need,” Mary said, “is a new generation of people to join the sheep.”
“Aye, Tommy,” Kathy said. “That must be one thing you’ve noticed. All of us are old now. You’ve come to an island full of the elderly and the decrepit.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ed said. More forced laughter.
“I don’t think that’s entirely fair,” Fiona began. “What about the Logans? Lovely young couple, Tommy, about your age, in their thirties—’
“Forties, hen,” Gavin put in from across the room, where he was standing with Chris by the fireplace.
“Well, young, anyway,” Fiona said, with a brief reproachful glance at her husband. “They came here two years back, with their two girls, who are filling places in the school, aren’t they, Mary?”
“That’s right,” Mary said. “Nice children, too. Mia and Suzie.”
“And they seem settled and here to stay,” Fiona concluded. “So there’s still a bit of young blood coming in.”
“They’re not here to stay,” Gavin said, coming over now, followed by Chris. “They’re taking a career break from their hectic life in Edinburgh, and as soon as Mia’s ready to start secondary school, they’ll up sticks and move back to the mainland. She’s ten now, isn’t she? We’ve got them for another year at the most.”
“Gavin, you’re being pessimistic,” Fiona told him.
“James Logan as good as told me that was their plan,” Gavin said. “We have to face facts. People don’t move here to stay. Not now.”
“Well, Chris and Mary did, didn’t they?” Fiona said triumphantly, taking in both Dougdales in her appeal. “They’re still here, nearly twenty years later, when nobody thought they’d stay. You don’t mind me saying that now, Chris and Mary? You’re proof that there’s hope yet.”
“It’s true,” Mary said. “We’re going nowhere.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Gavin said gallantly. “I can’t think of better neighbours.”
This comment seemed to hang in the air for a few moments as its unfortunate implications struck everyone at once, carrying as it did the glancing suggestion that it was nice to have some neighbours who weren’t going to self-destruct in a horrific murder-suicide.
Malcolm wracked his brains for something to say, something to change the subject, but while he was still thinking, Tommy broke the silence.
“But even if new people aren’t arriving,” he said, “it says something for the island that none of you have ever left. The people who are born here usually stay.”
Malcolm glanced at his nephew, thinking that this was generous of him.
Fiona smiled warmly at Tommy and said, “Maybe it’s not too late to win you back, Tommy.”
“Yes, maybe you’ll enjoy your visit so much,” Kathy added, “you’ll never want to leave again.”
Tommy gave that smile of his, the one that committed him to nothing. “Maybe.”
The meal was lamb shanks with mashed potato and cabbage. It was very good. Malcolm thought Fiona had probably agonized over this meal, a suspicion that was borne out by Gavin’s comment as the others praised the food: “I’m glad you like it. Fiona’s been in a state about it, haven’t you?”
He hadn’t meant to embarrass her, Malcolm was sure, but he could see that Fiona minded. “I haven’t,” she said, a red flush coming into her cheeks.
“Yes, I bet you’ve heard about nothing else all day but lamb shanks,” Ed said, takin
g it up. “Kathy’s the same when she’s having people over. Frets and frets about the cooking.”
Well, maybe you should help her, Malcolm thought, though he knew he’d never assisted Heather much while she was alive. He’d believed it wasn’t his place, but he saw all the ways now in which he could have done more. Not that Heather would have had it, probably. You stick to your sheep, he imagined, or perhaps even remembered, her telling him.
“Gavin, Kathy’s glass is empty, and so is Chris’s,” Fiona said, rather sharply, Malcolm thought. “Could you sort out more drinks, please?”
Gavin went out to get a fresh bottle of wine. Ed, seated to Malcolm’s right and across the table from Tommy, said, “Still on the water, Tommy? Can’t we tempt you to have a proper drink?”
“Ed, leave him alone,” Kathy said.
Ed was definitely drunk, Malcolm thought. He wished, once again, that he could think of something to say to turn the conversation, but he’d never been good at this; he’d always relied too much on Heather to keep the conversation going. He tried to imagine what she might say, and came up with, “Winter’s coming,” which sounded more ominous than he’d intended.
He saw Tommy choke slightly on his water and quickly hide his mouth. Well, it is, Malcolm wanted to tell him.
“Yes, the weather’s closing in,” Mary said, as Gavin returned with the wine and went round refilling everyone’s glasses (Tommy covered his empty wine glass with his hand and gave a polite shake of the head which fortunately didn’t set Ed off again). “It’s getting darker earlier and earlier. Bit depressing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Kathy said. “I always quite enjoy the winter, getting the fire going in the evenings and huddling up inside. And you have to have the winter, don’t you,” she added, “in order to appreciate the spring.”
The pause that followed lent this comment an unexpected profundity.
“That’s very deep,” Ed said after a moment. “Very deep, Kathy.”
“In the midst of life, we are in death,” Gavin said, rather surprisingly, as he resumed his seat. Malcolm wondered if he was drunk too.