The Last Wanderer

by Meg Henderson

  Ina shook her head.

  ‘Well, he’ll come along,’ Mrs Brown said firmly. ‘You’re quite right to take your time.’

  Ina and Ella glanced at each other. Taking her time might be something of an understatement given the fact that she was pushing forty years of age.

  ‘I never married, you know,’ Mrs Brown whispered over her teacup and saucer. ‘I just put on my mother’s ring when she died and called myself “Mrs.” Isn’t that terrible?’ she giggled, shaking her head at her own naughtiness. ‘Not that I didn’t want to, of course, I always planned to have a big, big family, took it for granted, maybe that’s why it never happened.’

  She sighed.

  ‘I’m sure you had your chances,’ Ella said kindly.

  Mrs Brown looked up. ‘Do you know, Ella,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I never did.’ She chortled to herself. ‘Not one, never even been kissed, shows you what a let off some man had!’

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ Ella insisted. ‘Surely the men around here must’ve been really stupid if that was the case, they couldn’t have known what they were missing.’

  ‘Maybe they did,’ Mrs Brown said, still chortling. ‘Maybe they did!’

  Ina said nothing.

  ‘My mother always took in boarders,’ she explained, ‘and when she died I just kept it going. I’d been helping her all the years I could remember, so it was the natural thing to do. I never had children of my own, that’s why I was so fond of all my girls, you were like my own. When you all went your separate ways during the War I didn’t know what to do with myself, I’d spent my life looking after people and then they were all gone,’ she said sadly.

  Then she looked up and flashed them a cheerful smile, ‘Still, now that it’s over we’ll soon be back to normal, won’t we?’

  As they were shown out, Mrs Brown gliding them to the front door, she hugged them again and wiped her eyes.

  ‘Now I want you both back here as soon as the herring picks up,’ she said, ‘and all the others, you mind and tell them I’ll be waiting for them.’

  Ella and Ina waved to the tiny figure till they rounded the corner, then walked on in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘You know,’ Ina said quietly, ‘I may be wrong, but I think Mrs Brown does wear a wig after all.’

  ‘Do you?’ Ella smiled, slipping her arm through Ina’s as they walked along. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well I’m almost sure I saw it move back there.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ella, looking at the ground.

  ‘And when you think about it, did you ever see as much as a single hair out of place, ever?’

  Ella laughed out load. ‘You may be right, Ina,’ she said.

  Neither said a word for a few paces, then Ina turned to her sister. ‘You knew!’ she accused her.

  Ella nodded, still laughing. ‘Everybody knew!’ she giggled. ‘Everybody except you, of course!’

  ‘Everybody?’

  Ella nodded.

  ‘Why did no one ever tell me?’ Ina asked incredulously.

  ‘Because we had so much fun with you going on about it.’

  ‘You were all laughing at me?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘My own sister!’ Ina said, shaking her head and smiling wryly. ‘And Edie and all those lassies I worked with every day! All laughing at me!’

  ‘It was just like you, Ina,’ Ella said, wiping her eyes. ‘You never noticed anything unless somebody sent you a telegram with instructions!’

  Ina thought for a moment then nodded her head. ‘You’re right,’ she smiled. ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’

  ‘Of course there’s not!’ Ella retorted.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder, though,’ Ina smiled, then they walked on in silence once again.

  ‘It’s not going to happen, you know,’ Ella said quietly.

  ‘What isn’t?’ Ina asked.

  ‘The herring fishing,’ Ella replied sadly. ‘It won’t pick up again, so they say, or at least not the way it was. Hard to believe, but they say the good old days have gone for ever and soon there won’t be an industry left.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ Ina demanded.

  ‘Well Eddie says everybody’s saying so. He was looking for a job now that the war’s over and the other fishermen were saying the herring fishing will just keep fading, they say it’ll soon be a thing of the past.’

  ‘Och, who wants to believe your Eddie?’ Ina said, nudging her sister with her elbow. ‘And the rest of them gossip like old women as well, worse than old women, you know what fishermen are like, always looking on the gloomy side. Did you ever know one that was cheerful?’

  ‘Well Eddie always was,’ Ella replied defensively.

  Ina threw her head back and laughed. ‘He was never cheerful, Ella,’ she giggled, ‘he was just daft, that’s all!’

  ‘You cheeky—’ Ella replied, trying to look affronted.

  Not too many years later Ina would remember that conversation and how she had dismissed the thought of there being no more boats delivering their catches at Bloomfields or any other curers and how she had dismissed the notion out of hand. It had always been, she had thought, therefore, it always would be, because she wanted life to take up again where it had left off. Like a be-wigged Mrs Brown and a great many people who wanted the same thing after surviving those six years, she had been wrong and Eddie, daft as he was, and all those gloomy fishermen had been right.

  There was no large-scale resumption of the herring trade, so in 1946 Ina got a job with Erie Resistors, an electronic components factory in Yarmouth. She couldn’t believe how much money she was being paid. The herring lassies had staged frequent strategic strikes for more wages before the war, and by always taking action when there was a lot of fish to be gutted, they had succeeded in getting what they wanted, more or less. Now she was working considerably fewer hours doing a great deal less work, and she was coming out with four times the money. She even asked the foreman if he’d made a mistake. But it wasn’t enough to keep her there; like many people she wanted to recapture the life she had before the war, even if there was a sneaking suspicion in the back of her mind that it had gone for good, that the world had moved on and there could be no going back.

  On a whim one day she went to Sutton’s, the kippering firm that had kept her and Ella from going home at the end of so many seasons, just to see if there was anyone there she knew from years past, and the first person she saw was Aeneas Hamilton. She watched him bustling about for a few moments before he saw her. He was still the same; he still wore a tan checked three-piece suit, collar and tie, cap and highly polished brown shoes. The entire world had changed and somehow Aeneas Hamilton, like Mrs Brown, had managed to stay exactly as he was when she had last seen him six years ago. She was still smiling when he looked up and saw her, returning her smile. There were times in her life that she now knew held defining moments, though there had been nothing to highlight them at the time. No drums had beat, no cymbals clashed; yet when you cast your mind back you couldn’t believe that they hadn’t. Was that it, she wondered? Had the path her life would take really rested on finding a particle of that warmer world she had known before the war? Had her future rested on Aeneas Hamilton remembering to polish his brown shoes that morning?

  Aeneas had been pleased to see her and they had gone for a drink; two lemonades: he was no more a drinker than she was. He talked of his plans, of how he had been saving for years for the chance to buy his own smokery. It struck her that his world wasn’t wide, he was content with the small corner he had, and though her own horizons were broader, after the turmoil of the last years there was something comforting about being with someone who knew who he was, where he was and where he was going. He also offered her a job back at Sutton’s, which she gratefully accepted, even though it meant canning herring and putting up with the smell of the sauces that had made her feel sick, and the wages were lower than she was now used to. Money no longer mattered
. She had no responsibilities apart from herself. She had taken her barrel money home to her mother until she was a grown woman in her early thirties, but those days, along with so much, were now gone. The only settled thing in her mind was to save her money to visit Danny and Isobel in Canada, and she could still do that with what she made at Sutton’s.

  Ina continued to see Aeneas outside work, but there was no great romance. He was simply someone she had known in a previous, happier existence. When Ella laughed at the thought of the two of them together, though, she felt annoyed in a way she couldn’t understand, so she joined in rather than give her sister any reason to seriously wonder. Then one morning he had asked her if she’d like to come to the pub at lunchtime as he had some news. He had put in an offer for a smokery in the fishing village of Acarsaid, the home of Ocean Wanderer, the boat Eddie had left to be with Ella. It had been accepted, he told her calmly, and asked if she’d like to come with him. Ina saw no reason why not: the prospect of going somewhere, anywhere, appealed to her, and he was obviously offering her a better job, maybe even asking her to be his manager. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll get married before we go up there.’

  There had been no nervous speech, no declaration of undying love, and certainly no proposal on bended knee. It was more a statement of practicalities, and she had no idea till later why she had simply agreed, except that, equally, she had no strong reason – no reason at all – to refuse. This was another pivotal moment to be analysed at a later date. Why had she married him? There were so many reasons, some she wouldn’t understand till she was an old woman, an old widow. There were the obvious ones: they had a meeting of minds rather than any romantic notions; they worked well together and they got on. Neither of them was given to emotional outbursts, to emotional anything, come to that; in general they were both calm people, though Ina was occasionally prone to trying things to see what happened – the impromptu visit to the White Lion all those years ago was one, her last trip home was another. And so, arguably, was her marriage to Aeneas – in part, at any rate.

  Ina didn’t have high expectations of marriage. She was forty years old, for one thing, far too old to be kidding herself; and for another, over the years she had seen what became of those who had. She thought back on the married herring lassies who went away year after year for months at a time from their husbands without their hearts breaking. Given their longings, she had often wondered why they never seemed to miss their men. Even Ella, who had been banished from home and family because of the shameful circumstances of her love for Eddie, had settled now for a very ordinary, unexciting life. He had been a dashing figure, so Ina was always told, and even if she could never quite see him like that, she knew he had been a handsome man who played the field and liked his freedom. But it hadn’t taken him long to settle down to a domestic life where he was looked after by his wife. Whatever sparkle there had ever been about Eddie had dimmed long ago. Not that Ella complained. She would look at him asleep by the fire sometimes and say affectionately, ‘Look at him, it’s like having another bairn,’ as she continued to find romance in her penny novelettes.

  Marriage, it seemed to Ina, had less to do with passion and romance than it had to do with a whole set of circumstances that came together at a crucial time in folks’ lives. People simply paired off when it suited them, when they had reached a phase in their lives when they needed to settle down and when the timing was mutual. Marriage was nothing more than a set of compromises that enabled them to live together in some degree of harmony. Nothing wrong with that, she reasoned, except that most people didn’t seem to understand it, though she suspected that men understood it sooner and better than women, who seemed determined to and were encouraged all their lives to regard the whole thing as magical. Even men who ran after every female who crossed their paths eventually stopped running, not because they had met the one true love of their lives, but because it was time, it suited them to stop. If it all depended on passionate love, then why did so many people meet what they insisted was their only possible partner in life near at hand? Wouldn’t anything so life-shattering and affirming be just as likely to be found at the other end of the world, rather than at the bottom of the road or in the same workplace, or did she just think that because she had never experienced the heady love other women professed? It seemed to her that her chances of contentment with Aeneas Hamilton were as good or as bad as with anyone else. It was all a lottery when you looked at it calmly, but he was a man who wanted to better himself, who had ambitions. Even if his dreams were more pedestrian than travelling the Milky Way, or the world for that matter, he was a reliable, commonsense hard worker who would provide, and she could think of nothing to say against him. And the look of shock on Ella’s face when she told her she was marrying Aeneas Hamilton did nothing to dissuade her and a lot to amuse her. She didn’t know where this liking for upsetting the odd applecart came from, but there was no denying it was part of her personality.

  6

  When the Hamiltons arrived in Arcarsaid it was a working fishing village. Its reincarnation as a tourist spot lay in wait some years up ahead, a welcome safety net happily in place for the days when the fishing was in decline. Ina was pregnant, and it was difficult to tell which of them was more surprised by that. It certainly hadn’t been in the plans, and took some getting used to, but at least Ella got her own back by laughing till she cried.

  ‘You’ll have three by the hand the next time I see you!’ she shouted, as the train pulled out from Yarmouth; but that wasn’t in the plans either, and Ina was determined the plans would not be deviated from again. She’d make sure all the gypsy’s predictions came true if it was the last thing she did.

  The Acarsaid smokery had been owned by an old man who had faced upgrading or replacing the existing wooden buildings. As he had no one to take the business over from him, he had decided to sell instead. Aeneas had already paid a visit to the village long before he had mentioned it to Ida, which was no more than she would have expected from him. Aeneas was a tidy man – he liked everything shipshape, as they said, and made sure there were no loose ends in his life – so the imminent arrival of his bairn threw him. He didn’t want bairns, he hadn’t thought for a minute that Ina could have them, but there it was and he’d have to make the best of it. That was like him, too; if he met an obstacle he had the ability to know whether it was one he could do something about, and if he couldn’t, he coped with it. It would be a boy, that’s what he had decided, Ina knew that without asking him, a son to take over the business one day. The plan had been altered but not abandoned, and Aeneas moved on inside the newly drawn boundaries.

  He had ambitions for the business, but not huge ones; that wasn’t his way. The Acarsaid fishing fleet consisted of mainly smaller boats that went after white fish and the herring that could be caught nearby. The boats didn’t follow the herring all the way down the coast for months; they stayed out for a few days, landed their catches in their own harbour, and sold them to agents who sent the fish on the way to the cities by lorry immediately. There was enough there to keep the smokery busy: herring for kippers and other fish for smoking, too, with locally caught salmon and trout gradually being added to the menu. It was a thriving business, but one compact enough to remain within Aeneas’s control; he wanted success, but he didn’t want an international conglomerate to rise from his efforts. He wasn’t a man who gambled in any shape or form: he had his rules and he stuck to them.

  Aeneas and Ina bought a house up the Brae, as they called the hill going through the town, and that’s where Margo was born. Ina was a late prima gravida – a late first-time mother – but large families were the norm, and women in those days had bairns in their forties, so Ina’s pregnancy was routine up to a point. It was harder – she knew to expect that, she was older and tired more quickly – but the midwife came armed with her forceps and Margo was born after two days of labour; for the rest of her life Margo carried a series of scars under her hairline where the instrument that ha
d dragged her out of the womb had dug into her flesh. So Aeneas didn’t get the son he had decided upon when he knew he was to be a father, but a daughter who was the image of Dolina Polson: dark-haired with deep blue eyes. Not that Aeneas knew this, of course. He had never seen Dolina, and that suited him and his wife; neatness above all else, he wanted no outside influences.

  From the first time he set eyes on his daughter, Aeneas adored her. Ina remembered the moment for the rest of her life, the look of utter adoration in his eyes and the stab of fear she felt when she saw it. The child looked like Dolina, but that look, that immediate and, she knew instinctively, exclusive attachment between father and daughter – well, that was Dolina, and Margo became the love of his life. If there had been any chance of Ina and Aeneas being a true partnership it was lost at that moment. He had enough room and love in his life for just one person: his Margo. Ina would smile wryly; second best again. Then she thought of the gypsy’s promise that she wouldn’t have many bairns and smiled even more wryly; there had been no chance of it after Margo appeared. Any passion Aeneas had, which admittedly hadn’t been a great deal, had thereafter been transformed and diverted towards his strikingly beautiful daughter.

  Not that Ina minded greatly: she had lived without sex for most of her life, and couldn’t see what the fuss was about once she had discovered it. If Aeneas didn’t intend to make demands, she wouldn’t be complaining. It was the first time she truly understood the other herring lassies and their longing for romance, especially the married ones. Once she had wondered how they could spend those months away from the objects of their desires, seemingly content with their substitute love stories, but now she saw it. It was romantic love they craved, a romantic love they didn’t get from their men, anyway. In all probability they read their penny novelettes when they were at home, too, because the same gap existed in their lives when they were with their men – perhaps especially then. The sex, she realised, they could do without far more easily than they could live without romance, even if it was fictional.