The Last Wanderer

by Meg Henderson

  ‘If you’re thinking of doing anything,’ she said, ‘I’d think again. Anything daft, I mean, like her brothers going down to Yarmouth or getting some of the local fishermen to see to Eddie. I wouldn’t bother. There’s not a man in Shetland able for him, and there are a lot of men down there who’d stand by his side. Besides,’ she said, dragging her kist to the door, ‘you don’t want to leave Ella’s bairn without a father, do you?’

  A babble of shocked words rippled round the room.

  ‘It’ll be your kin, too,’ she smiled.

  ‘It’ll be no kin to anyone here,’ Dolina shouted, rising from her chair. ‘And neither will she. First your brother shaming us with his carrying-on with that lassie, and now your sister!’

  ‘Danny’s your son and Ella’s your daughter,’ Ina said firmly.

  ‘They’re nothing to me,’ Dolina replied. ‘I wish they’d never been born, the pair of them!’ She looked heavenwards, shaking her hands imploringly. ‘What did I do to have to suffer this?’ she wailed. ‘And to think I lost a decent one, too!’

  ‘I don’t know how you can be sure about that,’ Ina smiled, though her insides were turning. ‘If the saintly Angus had lived, he might’ve been worse than the rest of us put together, Mother.’

  ‘Don’t you badmouth your poor dead brother!’ Dolina rounded on her.

  ‘Maybe if you’d given the rest of us as much thought as you gave Angus, you’d have had the time to do something to help Ella!’ Ina shouted back at her.

  ‘Don’t mention her name in this house,’ Dolina replied angrily. ‘She will never be welcome in this family again!’

  ‘Well in that case,’ Ina said contentedly, ‘neither will I.’ She went to her kist again and took out the jars of sweets she and Ella had bought. ‘Here,’ she said to Sandy, ‘you may as well take these, give them to your bairns.’

  ‘Don’t touch them!’ Dolina hissed. ‘Whatever comes from that direction is tainted.’

  Sandy withdrew his hands and Ina put the presents on the table and turned to go. As she did so she put her hand in her pocket and drew out the envelope of barrel money. ‘Here, old woman,’ she said, throwing it to Dolina, ‘I’ll bet anything you won’t refuse that. But you’d better make the most of it; there won’t be another penny from me as long as I live.’

  As she pulled her kist out the door, Sandy moved as if to take it from her. She fixed him with a stare. ‘Don’t,’ she said to him menacingly. ‘Just don’t.’

  Down at the harbour the boat was preparing to leave again for Aberdeen. As Ina got on, she was aware of the stares of the locals. They were used to the herring lassies coming home, and knew that with the war most would be home for good this time, yet Ina Polson had just arrived after her father’s death and here she was leaving again almost within the hour. Ina held her head high and smiled serenely. She had intended visiting her father’s grave, but she hadn’t; events had overtaken her. Never mind, he wouldn’t know the difference and, as Dolina had said, he was with Angus now, the perfect and beloved Angus. Who could want for more, even in the grave? She would never come back to Shetland, she decided, never. But she was wrong; there would be one more time.

  5

  Ina had a boring war, that was the truth. The hospital at Newmachar in Aberdeenshire had been an asylum, but it had been converted into a naval hospital and Ina was sent to work in the laundry. She had no contact with the sailor patients – the WREN nurses jealously guarded their professional positions from the untrained – and for five years she washed, dried, starched, ironed and folded sheets, pillowcases and the rest of the paraphernalia needed in a hospital. Granted it was cleaner work than she was used to, and the conditions were as hot as gutting herring had been cold, but even so, her one thought was to get back among the herring lassies. And she knitted: that was her main contribution to the war effort, she was convinced. The Navy delivered large amounts of thick, heavy wool to the WRENS and asked them to knit seaboot socks, but Ina was the only one who could work at speed and knew how to turn a heel, so she was given the job almost exclusively. At least she was warm as she did it. To this day she would watch TV coverage of sea battles during the war and wonder how many of the sailors were wearing Ina Polson socks.

  There was no contact with or from Lerwick, but there were letters from Danny and Isobel in Canada as often as the wartime postal service allowed, though Danny was far from his new home, spending the war years protecting naval convoys making their way across the Atlantic. She had a picture of them in her room taken after they arrived in Canada, two beautiful young people, excited and happy, Isobel still with her hair in the long, golden ringlets Ina had so admired when she was a child. Ella kept in touch too; three years on she was the mother of not just one boy, but three. Making up for lost time, Ina thought. Ella had married Eddie shortly after the birth of the second boy while he was on leave, having been conscripted into the Royal Navy for the duration. Not that Ronnie had divorced her: there was no such thing as divorce for people like them in those days. Ella had written in great distress to tell her that Ronnie had hanged himself in the byre where Ina had last seen him. As his legal next-of-kin she had to be informed, and she had the right to whatever he had left behind, but she had wanted nothing. Ella was in a no-win situation, of course: she was no longer welcome in Shetland because of what she had ‘done to Ronnie’, and if she had claimed her legal share of the croft she would have been further vilified; but, even so, there would be an element in Lerwick that would exchange righteous nods of the head and say that her refusal to do so amounted to a confession of guilt.

  There was a tiny piece in one of the Aberdeen papers about Ronnie’s suicide. He had been depressed, so it said, after his wife had left him. ‘Depressed because people knew,’ Ina supplied, ‘depressed because he missed her money.’ She had no sympathy for him; maybe that was hard, but it was the truth, and there was no use pretending otherwise. She told her sister not to hold herself responsible either, not to blame herself as she had when Ina had been exiled from the family for taking her part. ‘I did that, not you,’ Ina told her. ‘All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I’d still be the dutiful daughter. I knew what I was doing.’ The truth was that she was grateful to have broken away, and if the life she was leading in Aberdeen wasn’t the one she wanted, well, there were millions of people across the globe who could say the same.

  At the end of the war Ina decided she would make her way back to Yarmouth. There was no point in talking about ‘going home’ – she had no home – and at least she had Ella in Yarmouth where she had waited till Eddie came home after the war. And someone else, too. Danny had survived the war, and before going back to Canada he had made arrangements to see his sisters. He was waiting for her at the station. It had been more than fifteen years since Ina had last seen him, but she would have known him anywhere because he had turned into a younger version of Magnus. He was older, broader and more assured, if a little weary, but it was still Danny. The last time she had seen him was the year before he and Isobel had made their great escape, and here he was, just turned forty and the father of two sons.

  Ella was now a middle-aged mother, far more relaxed than she had been the last time Ina had seen her nearly six years before. She was distracted by her boys but happy, and Eddie, the gorgeous ladies’ man, had very quickly grown into his role as husband and father. He even had the beginnings of a paunch, and his hair was thinning, Ina noticed, smiling to herself. Looking at him now it was hard to find the handsome devil who had introduced her to drink all those years ago. Now he sat quietly in the corner, smoking his pipe, while the three Polsons caught up with each other and discussed their individual, self-imposed exiles from Lerwick. The two sisters listened enthralled as Danny described how he had eloped with Isobel.

  ‘When she came off the boat at Aberdeen we caught the next train to London,’ he smiled. ‘For some reason nobody had thought of us going all the way down there, and by the time her family caught up with us we’d got mar
ried by a registrar. You were allowed to get married without going to a kirk in England, you see. I don’t think they knew that; I think they expected us to be hiding out in Scotland somewhere for three weeks for the banns to be read and all that. Not that they could do anything about it, we were both over the age of consent, but they would’ve tried anyway. Old Carnegie had that look on his face when he found us, the one when he was winding up to use the tawse on you, remember?’

  ‘I never knew you had such sneakiness in you, Danny!’ Ella laughed. ‘And not getting married in the kirk, I’ll bet that didn’t go down too well.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s what did for my mother,’ he winced, ‘but I was prepared for that. Then we went to Canada. I kept telling Isobel that we could just turn up in Nova Scotia and knock on a Polson door and we’d be welcome, but, to tell the truth, I was scared witless!’

  ‘And you found them all right?’ Ina asked.

  ‘The place is full of them,’ Danny smiled. ‘I called the first Andro Polson in the phone book. God knows how many generations he was removed from the first one, but he was so excited to see us. He’d been brought up on the same stories as us, and I suppose he’d always wondered how much truth there was in any of them. He’s a nice guy; once we’d calmed him down he took me to see his grandfather – Magnus, would you believe? – and once the family tree had been sorted out it was as if we had known each other all our lives. It was the strangest feeling.’ He looked at Ina. ‘Remember all those stories Da used to tell us when we were bairns?’

  Ina nodded.

  ‘I thought they must be myths. Still, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, but to go there and find out for myself. They were all I had to rely on, but they were true. I never got to tell Da that. I wrote, of course, but he never replied, I don’t even know if he was allowed to get the letter. I never heard his voice again, either: that still hurts. I used to think of ways I could contact him. I was near at hand sometimes on different boats, and I would’ve liked to have met up with him somewhere, made my peace with him, but he would never have done it. Mother would’ve stopped him. I only heard he was dead from Davie. You remember Davie, Ina?’

  Again Ina nodded. ‘The boy in the boat,’ she smiled.

  ‘That was him. He’s been a good friend to us. Isobel and I would never have managed to get away if it hadn’t been for him, and he keeps me up to date with what’s happening in Lerwick. We called our first boy after him and we called the second Magnus.’

  ‘You didn’t think of calling one Angus, then?’ Ina teased.

  ‘Dear God, no,’ Danny said with feeling. ‘I’ve heard enough of that name to do me for two lifetimes!’

  ‘And you think it was my mother more than Da?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Of course it was, Ella! Old Dolina always called the shots. She had complete control of him; you must know that.’

  The two sisters exchanged bemused glances.

  ‘You mean you didn’t?’ Danny laughed. ‘I’m not saying she didn’t need to, mind. He had his head full of other things: stars, galaxies, planets, fairy stories.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Ina laughed. ‘I never heard him talk about anything else.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been easy to be married to a man like Da,’ Danny said fondly. ‘There she was having a bairn nearly every year, and there he was, lying in the grass getting us to recite the order of the planets from the Sun, and we always did it better than the ten-times table!’

  The three of them laughed.

  ‘Do you remember, Ina, when we were going to collect the peat? He was never quiet, he told stories the whole time. And do you remember him telling us off even one time? Well I can tell you, he didn’t. He couldn’t. Mother always had to do that, she was the one who made the practical decisions. It wasn’t her fault either, but it made her, I don’t know, harder somehow.’

  ‘Did you feel that, too?’ Ella asked, surprised.

  ‘You mean you did?’ Ina asked, even more surprised. ‘I thought it was just me and Danny she was coldest to, because we were nearest to Angus. He was the one before, I was the one after.’

  ‘I think she was like that with all of us, Ina,’ Ella said. ‘She got harder after she lost Angus. He was the only one she ever talked about and he never actually lived. Maybe she could only love the dead properly, you know, at a distance.’

  They all nodded.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Eddie said quietly in the background.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Ella demanded.

  ‘Well, if she could only love the dead, how could she be loved by the living?’ Eddie said.

  ‘I never thought of that, Eddie,’ Danny laughed. ‘You know, I think this one’s all right, Ella. You didn’t do so badly after all … It couldn’t have been easy for Da either, though,’ he mused. ‘A man like that, with such a lively mind, that imagination, and he was stuck in a rut all of his life. All he ever did was work hard. Think what he could’ve achieved if he’d been educated.’

  ‘You’re the image of him, Danny,’ Ina said softly.

  ‘I know!’ Danny laughed. ‘Sometimes I catch sight of this face in the mirror when I’m shaving and I see him. It’s quite eerie, I can tell you.’

  ‘But I can’t get over him not doing something about how Ella here was being treated. If he hadn’t gone so quickly he’d have been seeing stars close up, I’d have made sure of that,’ Ina said ruefully.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ her brother said gently. ‘He was a man of his time, Ina, a man of his background. I can see Da making sure he didn’t know, if you see what I mean. He was a gentle soul. He couldn’t have faced up to anything so harsh.’

  ‘That just means he was weak. It’s no defence,’ Ina protested.

  ‘No,’ Danny replied, ‘you’re right, it’s no defence, but it is a reason. We had a Da who couldn’t handle the hard side of life, he had to rely on his wife to do that for him, but we were also blessed with a Da who taught us to think for ourselves and to see outside that life, weren’t we?’

  Ina and Ella looked at each other and smiled. ‘You were always good at pouring oil on troubled water, Danny,’ Ella smiled. ‘Da would’ve been proud of the way you’ve turned out, son.’

  ‘You mean if I wasn’t an outcast?’ Danny chuckled.

  ‘We’re all outcasts,’ Ina laughed. ‘We’re the three Polson reprobates!’

  ‘Only three out of eight,’ Danny mused. ‘The old man didn’t do too badly out of his brood, did he?’ Going over Danny’s thoughts on their father later, Ina could see that he was right about the relationship between their parents, but she still couldn’t quite shake off a feeling of angry disappointment over what she saw as his neglect of Ella. A man of his time and of his background; a man of his personality. Her head accepted it, but her heart didn’t – or maybe it was the other way round.

  Just before the meeting of Polsons broke up, Ella said excitedly, ‘I knew there was something I had to tell you, Ina, you’ll never guess who I bumped into the other day?’

  Ina shrugged; if she would ‘never guess’ there was no point in trying.

  ‘Mrs Brown!’ Ella said, slapping the table in front of her.

  ‘She’s still alive then?’ Ina asked.

  ‘Of course she’s still alive! I met her at the butcher’s, trying to get an extra sausage off her ration book, just like the rest of us,’ Ella smiled wryly. ‘You’d think we’d earned the odd sausage after all these years, wouldn’t you?’

  Ina and Danny looked at Eddie sitting by the fireside in his slippers and exchanged amused glances. ‘Some might say you’ve already got the oddest sausage of the lot,’ Ina muttered, and Danny laughed.

  ‘Don’t you go running my Eddie down,’ Ella scolded, smiling despite herself. ‘He’s a gorgeous big man, is Eddie, a handsome brute.’

  Ina and Danny looked again at Eddie then both of them laughed out loud.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ella continued, glancing archly at them, ‘I told her we’d pay her a visit w
hen you came down, so you can judge for yourself if she’s still alive.’

  ‘Och, Ella, why did you do that? She won’t even remember who I am, she probably didn’t remember who you were, come to that.’

  ‘She asked for you by name,’ Ella stated smugly.

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ Ina replied.

  ‘She did,’ Ella insisted indignantly. ‘Sure as I’m sitting here.’

  So the next afternoon the two sisters set off for King Street.

  ‘Isn’t it funny?’ Ina mused. ‘I feel as if my feet have a life of their own, they just turned down the street of their own accord.’

  When they knocked on the door they heard the familiar pattern of Mrs Brown bustling through the hallway and the little noises she made turning the lock, Ina even recognised the creaking of the door as it opened. And there she was, tinier than Ina remembered, but wearing exactly the same outfit as every other time she had seen her all those years ago. The wrinkled little face almost imploded when she saw her visitors and tears sprang to her bright blue eyes as she rushed to embrace them both at once.

  ‘My girls, my girls!’ she cried, ushering them inside, and it was in the midst of that triple hug that Ina thought she saw the perfectly coiffed hairstyle, well, move, slightly.

  Once through the parlour door, a place they had never been inside in their days of fish scales and guts, though sometimes a head would be permitted inside if they were looking for their landlady, they were bade sit down and plied with tea and scones. Ina was touched by the little woman’s generosity, wartime rationing would be in force for years yet, so the feast she was providing them with must have taken up a lot of her allowance of things like butter and sugar. As she listened to their news her mouth still worked furiously, as though she were trying out words before she said them, but she made the appropriate sounds of surprise over Ella’s growing family, with a delighted ‘My, you never wasted much time, did you?’

  Then, looking at Ina she made the usual inquiry. ‘And what about you, Ina? No young man in your life yet?’