The Last Wanderer

by Meg Henderson

  Ina had thought it over a lot, what caused what and why. As far as she could make out, it was as if two people with a dormant gene had married and in the resulting child the gene had become active, causing an illness, a condition. She and Aeneas had produced a child with a serious malfunction in her character, one that stopped her feeling for anyone – relative, friend or foe – in a normal way. She seemed devoid of the human sensibilities that enable people to get along together and make relationships. And poor Margo also had a strong personality like her grandmother’s, only it had been backed up by Aeneas’s money and position, so that her flaws were magnified, while those around her allowed her to get away with more. Aeneas hadn’t intended it that way any more than Ina had herself. They had wanted their daughter to have a better life than they had had, but they had not meant to indulge her flaws. Neither Ina nor Aeneas were emotional people. She supposed they could be judged anti-social in the way they shied away from close friendships; and maybe what they had each needed was a partner who was the opposite.

  Ina knew she had strands of her mother’s outlook; she had worked that out long ago. Her brothers and sisters also carried similar strands to a greater or lesser degree. All those years as a child growing up, trying to be good, trying to win her mother’s love away from the stillborn Angus, or at least get her share, and decades after Dolina’s death she had come to the conclusion that she had got it all wrong. The conversation she, Danny and Ella had shared before her brother had returned to Canada had probably come as near as anyone ever would to solving the enigma that was Dolina Polson. Dolina was a woman uncomfortable with closeness, and she had used Angus as a ploy to keep a distance between herself and everyone else, even her own bairns. It was easier to concentrate your feelings on one object, better still if that object had no capacity to form a real relationship, and Dolina had settled on someone who didn’t and had never really existed. There could be no interaction between her and her lost son, no real emotion between her and Angus, so he became a device for avoiding it with her real, living, breathing family. In a hadn’t failed her mother, neither had Danny, Ella nor any of the others. Dolina had failed them. But Ina had married a man like her mother, a man who had sunk whatever feelings he had into his daughter, just as Dolina had in Angus. Aeneas was equally safe, because Margo had no emotion to give back.

  And why had Ina married Aeneas? If there was any one reason it was that she had been angry with her father; that was why. There she was, in her thirties, and she had still worshipped Magnus like a wee bairn, but the discovery that her hero had turned a blind eye as Ella had been battered by her husband, had bruised Ina, too. Then Magnus had died, so that she had never had the opportunity to have it out with him, to demand an explanation, and no chance either to get to know him afterwards as an adult, to see him as the man he was instead of the fallen hero he had become in her estimation. If she had married at all, and she was far from sure she should have, Ina knew she should’ve picked a man like Magnus, who entertained her and made her laugh; she should have chosen a man like Gannet, she had often thought with a smile. Had he passed her a generation before, he would’ve been the man for Ina Polson. But how could Ina explain any of this to Rose, who looked so like Quintin and yet had inherited the tender, romantic heart of Ella?

  ‘Look, lass,’ she told her granddaughter kindly, ‘only you know what you feel for Sorley Og and if it’s enough. For me there were no bolts of lightning, and I would say the same for your mother, though I can’t be sure about that and neither can you. You know what she’s like and you know something of why, but you can’t judge her, you’ve never stood in her shoes. Just accept her as she is.’

  Margo’s simmering anger was, Ina told Rose – as she had many times over the years – caused partly by bitterness at being left a widow with six bairns under the age of six all those years ago. She suspected too that Margo knew she wouldn’t have been in that position if she hadn’t married Quintin, if she’d married Sorley Mor instead, though Ina had never been convinced that Sorley Mor had been seriously interested.

  ‘So why did she marry Daddy if she didn’t love him?’ Rose asked.

  Granny Ina shook her head. ‘How would I know? Because everybody else said she shouldn’t, maybe,’ the old woman smiled in response.

  Not that there was anything wrong with Quintin, of course, but he was so different from her, so quiet and reserved with women. He was a nice man but he had no money, and money was something Margo had always been used to having. Though Quintin and Sorley Mor had been friends, they weren’t in the least alike; the MacEwans had always been boat-owners, whereas Quintin had never aspired to do anything more than work for others. He was an unassuming, content man, happy to work here and there. He enjoyed having a few laughs with Sorley Mor and Gannet, but he was completely devoid of ambition, and why should he have it if it wasn’t in his nature? Everyone knew that Quintin would never have any interest in owning his own boat, for instance. As long as he had enough to live on and his beer money, he thought life was pretty much OK.

  ‘He was a nice man, your daddy,’ Granny Ina said kindly, ‘and my, but you’re his image, Rose. It’s a great sadness that he never lived to see you, but maybe he should never have married and had bairns at all.’

  Rose accepted this as code for ‘feckless’.

  ‘It was your mother pushed him into marriage, I’ve told you this before, Rose. He would’ve been quite content as a bachelor all his days, young Quintin. It was always my opinion that Gannet should have married and Quintin should have been the bachelor. He would’ve been quite happy like that, having a couple of drinks at the Inn with Sorley Mor and the lads, if only she’d left him alone.’

  ‘So she chose him over Sorley Mor to be perverse?’ Rose asked. ‘Just because she always did the opposite of what was expected of her? That’s a terrible reason to marry anyone!’

  Granny Ina laughed. ‘The truth is, Rose, that your mother and I were never close enough for me to ask her. She was always one for her own counsel, even as a child. I remember the last time I went to Lerwick, when she was young. I’d taken her to show off to my family, if the truth be told, and I always felt she was angry when we came back, though I couldn’t work out why. It’s hard to explain, but right from the start there was this bit of her that no one could reach. I used to think I should’ve tried harder with her, but I don’t think she would ever have let anyone in, not even me. Maybe that was my fault, I don’t know, but my mother was very like that too. I’ve often thought that was why her father gave her so much; he was trying to buy a way into her thoughts, into her affection.’

  ‘But people still talk about her,’ Rose said. ‘They say she was a real character when she was young.’

  Ina laughed quietly. ‘As I recall it she was a bit of a character,’ she said. ‘But the funny thing was that I was never sure she realised it. It was almost as though she behaved as she was and didn’t understand that other people didn’t do the things she did. For all we know she maybe thought they were the odd ones.’

  ‘And yet they say Sorley Mor was interested in her, and he’s such a lovely man,’ Rose smiled.

  ‘Well, you know what Sorley Mor is like now, and he was just the same then. He was the one who drew your eye; maybe it was just natural that other people might expect them to make a match of it. Certainly your grandfather wanted them to marry, but your grandfather thought in terms of money and position – love was never part of it for him. For all we know neither one of them thought they would make a match, though, and when she married your father I can’t remember Sorley Mor showing any great feeling either way. You know what small places are like for myths and stories: maybe there never was anything in it but gossip.’ She laughed. ‘Not that there was any shortage of other lassies ready to take Sorley Mor on, handsome devil that he was, but Chrissie was the only one I ever saw him with. She worked in your grandfather’s smokery, so I saw her every day, and Sorley Mor would be there looking for her every day that the Wandere
r was in harbour. Then they married.’ Ina looked at her granddaughter. ‘Now, Rose, if you want to know whether or not love exists, it strikes me that you could do worse than look at Sorley Mor and Chrissie. If that’s what you want, then I can’t see you doing any better than Sorley Og. All I’m saying is that you have to be clear about what you want, and, if you are – well, nothing anyone else thinks or says matters, not even me.’

  As she was growing up, Rose had often looked at them, trying to imagine her mother in Chrissie MacEwan’s place, but she couldn’t. Sorley and Chrissie were supremely happy together; as everyone knew, they were a perfect match, that was the general opinion, with Chrissie cutting Sorley Mor down to size whenever she could and Sorley Mor chasing her around as she shrieked and giggled, like two young lovers who just happened to be in their fifties. They embarrassed their bairns, or so their bairns often said – not that Chrissie and Sorley Mor bothered about that. When she was a child, Rose would get so caught up in their laughing and larking about that she laughed out loud herself, and she would wish it could be like that at her house. To her romantic young heart it was as though they were meant for each other, and maybe they were. It seemed that every boy in the village had had a crush on the outrageous Margo Hamilton in those days, hard as that was to believe looking at her now. Maybe Sorley had grown out of his crush, if he ever had one, and found the love of his life in Chrissie.

  Though Rose hadn’t known her father, she had grown up with him all around her; everyone, it seemed, remembered Quintin Nicolson as though they had spoken to him yesterday. Somehow she had always sensed that this wasn’t entirely because of his scintillating personality, but more to do with how he’d died, the awfulness of it, and the fact that those who died young never grew old. She wished she knew more about him, but he had been the only son of elderly parents who had originally come from from the Isle of Barra, and he had outlived both of them, though Granny Ina would sometimes tell her stories about him. Mostly, though, she concentrated on the old photos that she and her brothers and sisters looked at when Margo wasn’t around. Rose would spend hours gazing at his gently smiling face, trying to get to know him so that she could at least grieve for him. He was her father, he had died tragically young, but how could she really grieve if she hadn’t known him, hadn’t seen him, hadn’t even been alive when he had, despite the fact that he was her father? For some reason she had always wished she could hear his voice, because without being able to recreate the tone, the expression, the actual sound, it would always be as if he had been mute. It was the only thing no one could give her, the sound of his voice, and she would concentrate on his image as hard as she could, almost as though she was conjuring up a spell to enable the gentle, smiling man to talk to her from the grave: funny the things a child could dream up.

  Back then she used to think he was smiling out of those old photos at her alone, just as she did when Sorely Mor came into harbour, waving to his waiting bairns. She liked to think that she and her father were sharing a secret bond too, but looking back she knew better. She was the only one who couldn’t claim to remember him, though she sensed that the memories her brothers and sisters claimed to have were just that, claims, because they had been too young when he died to form strong memories of him, especially as he had spent so much time at sea. They had done what all bairns in those circumstances did, what she had done as she gazed at his photos: tried to establish some kind of relationship with the father they would never know. A fantasy father was better than none at all.

  Even when she was very young she had been aware of the strong resemblance between them. Looking at those photographs she knew that she was the female version of Quintin, no one had to tell her. She stared at them so long that she could’ve sworn the images had actually moved and, sometimes, guiltily, she would examine her father’s outline, scrutinising the head that the winch had ripped off. Yet there it was on his shoulders, exactly where a head should be, attached to him, part of him; it was hard to imagine the force needed to pull him apart like that. He had just slipped and fallen into the winch gear as the catch was being lifted; it had been as simple and quick as that.

  The whole village had felt the shock of Quintin’s death. Acarsaid was a small place where everyone knew each other and lives were inextricably linked by the fishing, so even one death at sea left a scar. You could tell by the way they never talked of it that the rest of the crew who had been on the boat with him that day, Sorley and Gannet among them, had never been able to forget it. Even when she was small Rose had been aware that those men looked at Quintin’s bairns in a certain way, and especially at her, because she looked so like him. Even if you hadn’t known them all your life and hadn’t known they had been on the boat and watched helplessly as he died that terrible death, she thought, you would guess by the way they looked at you. Sorley Mor, Gannet and Stamp as young men, and the others, the older men who had been on board, now retired from the fishing, they had never really recovered from it; you couldn’t help but pity them.

  She thought of the rest of the crew having to cope with the horror of her father’s accident out at sea, of their panic at being isolated on that huge expanse of water, unable to help him, then having to untangle him before making that long journey back to their home port. The rescue services had been too far away to be of any use, though Quintin had been beyond anyone’s help, and the crew had to bring him back to his family, shocked and distressed themselves and knowing there was nothing they could do to disguise the awful facts of his death. Quintin was well liked, he didn’t deserve to die like that, no one deserved to die in that brutal way. But accidents happened all the time on boats: men with fingers missing, with whole limbs gone, were a common sight in fishing villages. The kind of accident that had killed Quintin, horrifying though it was, was not too unusual.

  The newspaper and TV people took little notice of individual tragedies. They thought only in numbers; a boat being lost with its entire crew was news, but the mutilation or death of one man rarely merited a mention, regardless of the grief of his family and community. Maybe, Rose thought, gazing out of the window, that was no bad thing. At least her mother had been spared the waiting packs of jackals at the door, baying for pictures of her and her fatherless bairns, demanding nothing less than copious public tears to go with the transient lies that would appear on an inside page. For those left behind the lies weren’t transient, of course. If you weren’t part of a fishing community you might read what the jackals had printed and then forget it in a moment, but those left behind never did. It became part of their grief and intensified their pain forever. Those who had been scarred by the media’s attentions could quote the offending words decades later, by which time the writers would be elsewhere, door-stepping some other hapless, grief-stricken family. Another day, another tragedy. But as Quintin had been the only one to die on the boat that day, Margo had at least been spared their attentions.

  Rose remembered looking at her mother in those old photos, too, and feeling sad at the stark difference between that young woman and her mother. She had never known the pretty, dark-haired woman Margo had once been, any more than she had known her father, but she didn’t have to in order to feel pity for both of them. She knew her mother’s personality had changed when Quintin died, because Granny Ina had told her, and shortly afterwards Aeneas Hamilton had died too. After that, Rose decided, Margo must have decided to protect herself from further loss by disliking outsiders, by making them feel like intruders.

  Margo didn’t want anyone taking all she had left, her bairns; but her tight grip of them had persisted even when they were adults, with every boyfriend and girlfriend being given a hard time that didn’t get any easier when they officially joined the family. No one escaped her wrath. You could have known Margo Nicolson all your life, you might even have got on with her, but only at a distance, as long as you didn’t get close to her family and threaten to lure them away from her into marriage. The grandbairns these interlopers gave her were accepted, but
not the outsider parents who had helped produce them; they might have been found under a gooseberry bush, or cloned, for all the credit she gave their in-law parents. Give her her due, she tried to cover up her animosity, but it was always there, just beneath the surface, biding its time. The unwanted, unwelcome in-laws would repeat her remarks to each other, ‘Wait till you hear what Margo said to me the other day!’ they’d say with glee, setting up the latest acid drop, laughing like conspirators or, more likely, survivors of a shipwreck, huddled together on the same wave-tossed raft.

  Margo was so quick to jump on them that a barbed remark could suddenly burst from the undercurrent and ambush them, seemingly from nowhere. Wedding albums would be produced, each one showing Margo, her dark hair slightly greyer with each marriage, but still styled in a Connie Francis bouffant, as it had been in her own wedding pictures. She wore a different outfit for each occasion, her left arm through the handles of her handbag, her gloved hands clasped tightly in front of her, and in each posed photo she had that same agonized expression, silently appealing through the lens of the camera to the world beyond. ‘Please!’ her tortured blue eyes transmitted, as she stood slightly apart from the rest of the group. ‘I’m here because I have to be, but I’m not part of this, I don’t approve and I refuse to pretend otherwise. Feel my pain! See my suffering!’

  Comparing those photos with the ones before she was widowed you wouldn’t believe they were of the same woman. For Margo hadn’t always been like that. She had been quite a character in her day, so everyone told her youngest daughter. Margo had been the first woman in the village of Acarsaid to hold a driving licence and have a car, a black baby Austin that tore around the twisting, single track roads much faster than it should have, though no one would ever have dared tell her so. She had a quick mind and an even quicker tongue and she was game for anything; a lassie of some feistiness, that’s what the old people said, Margo would accept any challenge. Say she couldn’t and she’d drink the men under the table; bet her a pound that she couldn’t run in her bouffant skirts and peerie heels and she’d take off like the wind round the harbour and be back in no time. And she was good fun, too, even if some of her pranks were a bit much. She had a liking for practical jokes and was renowned for setting fire to people’s newspapers while they were reading them; then she would laugh so much at their reactions that she could barely stand. And there was the time she encountered some Danish fishermen in the Inn and insisted, through various bits of sign language, that they should yodel for the assembled company. The Danes had signed back that they couldn’t yodel, that she had the wrong nationality altogether for yodelling, but Margo proved them wrong. ‘I bet you’ll yodel if I grab you by the knackers!’ she’d said. Even without the use of her very graphic mime, the Danes had instantly understood, and Margo had been right, they could indeed yodel. And much as the villagers frowned on a woman saying those kinds of words, they couldn’t help laughing; somehow there were special rules for Margo Hamilton. She was quite a lassie, they’d say, giggling behind their hands as they passed the latest story from one to another; you couldn’t help liking her, even if they all agreed that they wouldn’t be too keen on her marrying their sons or brothers, because she would be handful for any man.