She had to follow form, go down to the harbour as the boat came in, the eyes of the place on her, all of them tear-filled except her own – shock again, they’d said, sympathetically. Then she’d gone home to explain to the bairns, though none of them were old enough to understand and, as their father wasn’t home very often, it would make little impact on them anyway. It was the villagers who imposed Quintin’s death on them, treating them as tragic orphans, or half orphans.
In the years ahead Margo had set about organising the practicalities of their lives, making sure they would have jobs outside the fishing. Everyone understood, or thought they did, that she didn’t want any of her bairns to go into an industry that had claimed their father; the thought of losing another loved one was too much for her. Nonsense, of course. She didn’t think any of them had the slightest spark of ambition or imagination in them, but if they had she wanted them to be able to aim for more than the fishing, to be able to escape one day. They heard no tales of Quintin from her as they grew up; for one thing she didn’t know him well enough to tell any, but she knew the mythologists of the village would more than make up for that. There was nothing she could do to stop their father becoming a hero to them, even if in reality he had been a boring wee man. And she wouldn’t marry again, she knew that without a doubt. She had made her one huge mistake and wouldn’t be repeating it; she was free of wifedom forever. No doubt that would be interpreted in Acarsaid as devotion to Quintin, but that was a product of their small minds and it didn’t bother her what they thought: it never had. And who knew? One day, with the bairns taken care of, maybe there would still be time to escape.
And so the two widows settled into their life together, with Margo taking the practical role while Ina supplied the affection and the dreams. She told them stories of her child-hood and older tales her father had told her, of Uncle Andro, who generations ago had fled to Canada after escaping a pressgang and had gone from Shetland, a windswept land with no trees, to Nova Scotia, where they blotted out the sky; of her brother Danny, who had run away to Canada with Isobel, her father in hot pursuit, and of his stories of his new life there. Uncle Andro’s descendants in Nova Scotia had welcomed the young couple, as they would – Ina told them – any of the young Nicolsons, and helped Danny find work in the fishing.
Later, after the war, Danny and Isobel had settled in Toronto. and Danny had worked at the harbour where great big ships docked, bigger even than Ocean Wanderer. There was a road there called Yonge Street and it was forty miles long, the longest street in the world, he said, though Ina had no way of knowing if he was maybe exaggerating, and you could travel through Toronto and pass through different parts – the Chinese part, the Greek, the Turkish – all of them looking like real countries in miniature, all within one city. He sent pictures of himself and Isobel, each one showing that in some indefinable way he was becoming more and more North American – and you should never call a Canadian an American, he said, it was like calling a Shetlander ‘Scotch’. Isobel, on the other hand, and much to Ina’s amusement, had kept the same hairstyle she had had all her life, so that over the years her face became more and more aged, disintegrating and collapsing under a sea of girlish golden ringlets. And it was a shame, because Isobel had such a lovely old face and the ringlets made her look foolish. Ina would look at each picture and wonder what Danny saw when he looked at his wife – what Isobel saw when she looked in the mirror, for that matter.
In time Danny had sent tapes that the Nicolson bairns could listen to with their grandmother, and they could hear him talking in his Canadian accent for themselves, confirming that Danny was real and not just a story, like the snow in Lerwick. She taught them all to knit, even the boys, and how to identify the constellations, and about her own father who had passed his passion for the stars to her, but she couldn’t tell them very much about their own father. Quintin was the one person they wanted to know more about; they hungered for morsels of information that would bring him closer to them and bring him to life in their minds. Feeling for them, she mentioned it tactfully to her daughter, but Margo had shrugged and asked, ‘What is there to tell? He was a fisherman; he died at sea. It happens. That’s all there is. If they want fairy stories about him, I’m sure the whole of Acarsaid will oblige.’
So over the years Ina watched the absent Quintin take on the heroic status in the eyes of her grandbairns that Angus had in her mother’s – and for the same reasons. From the villagers it was inevitable that they heard only good things about the father they never knew, who, just like Angus, hadn’t lived in their lives and so would never do anything to make them think less of him, as Ina had come to think less of Magnus. Only now she missed him and would have given anything for five minutes of his company. Swings and round-abouts, she thought: the world just goes round and round.
Despite all the years Ina had lived in Scotland, she still looked differently at anyone whose name began with ‘Mac’. Not that she looked down on them – that would be silly but, how could she put it?, she noticed them, that was it: there was still a division in her mind between people and Mac people. She had absorbed the prejudice with her mother’s milk, she supposed; funny how the things learned in childhood stayed with you, even when you knew better and no longer had any need of them. There were times, as she sat by the fire, when she could hear the voices of her family in Lerwick so clearly that they could have been in the room with her. She would turn to answer them and find there was no one there, yet she had heard them so clearly, even long after they were all dead. Maybe that’s what ghosts were, the backward dreams of old folk.
People came to see her and she was glad of the company, but the older she got the more she retreated back into an age none of them could remember. Back and forth she went over events she thought she might have changed had she behaved differently, done something other than she had, sitting by the fire in her own world. Margo was her main concern, and her fear that her daughter’s unhappiness was her fault, but deep down she knew she was wrong: Margo would’ve been Margo no matter what Ina had done. Or was she using that as an excuse? Maybe what you made of circumstances depended on what kind of personality you had; she was sure she had read that in one of her books, or heard it from someone. Gannet, that’s who it was. It was New Year and he’d had a few, so he was telling people things he had found out when he was sober. They had all told him to go away, if not quite in those words. Ina would always listen to Gannet, but being more or less confined to her fireside armchair by old age and legs that refused to work as she wanted, she had been a captive audience, anyway. And Sorley Mor was laughing in that way of his where he collapsed in the middle and his legs refused to work too. ‘We could make a pair!’ she’d shouted to him, and laughed with him; she had never known a man to be so disabled by laughter and, even if you didn’t understand what he was laughing at, you couldn’t help joining in with him. Not that she’d minded, whatever it was: he was a good man, Sorley Mor, and she’d got almost as much of a soft spot for him as she had for Gannet.
He’d read it in one of his books, Gannet had told her that New Year, and wondered if she agreed that the human mind was a wondrous thing. Not that he was at all sure that personality came from the mind, of course. No, now that he came to think about it, he’d better find another book to explain it, but so far he had learned that personality couldn’t be changed and that was a solid fact. You were stuck, Gannet said, with the one you had, so maybe it wasn’t the skipper’s fault that he laughed so much, or his own that he didn’t talk when he was sober: did Granny Ina think that was possible?
Ina had thought of Margo when she heard that; trust Gannet to bring her something to think about. She always smiled when she thought of Gannet. Rose had asked her if she had loved Aeneas, and she had done her best to answer her truthfully. Aeneas had been a good, solid, responsible man, a man Ina admired and appreciated; but that Gannet, he was something else: a good man gone to waste was what he was. Had she known what she was doing all those years ago
, understood that she was spiting her father by marrying Aeneas, taking someone who was the opposite to Magnus to snub a dead man, she would’ve thought some more and waited for a man who amused her and made her laugh, a man like Magnus himself, a man like Gannet.
Life was like that, she had decided ages ago: it didn’t let you see things clearly until you were too old for it to make any difference; you only ever saw your mistakes in retrospect. And it must be the same for her daughter, she thought. Aeneas had given Margo everything. He adored her so much that he bound her to him so that she never learned how to make her own decisions, thereby setting her up for the disastrous route her life would take. Margo had done her best by her bairns during the bad times. She had cared for them in her distant way as though her family was a project. She had pushed them into better lives and objected in her bad-natured way when they ‘betrayed’ her by leaving her to marry and set up families of their own. But the only reason they were able to do that, Ina knew, was because she herself had done her best to give them the love their mother either didn’t feel or couldn’t show. It was at Ina’s knee that they had heard stories, learned to look outwards to different horizons, and so it was to her they brought the hopes and fears that they knew their mother wouldn’t want to hear and wouldn’t understand anyway. Ina knew that they often wondered why their mother was the way she was, and she wished she had all the answers, but she didn’t, that was the truth, and she wondered if Margo did or ever would.
18
Margo Nicolson hadn’t been alone in her disapproval of her daughter marrying Sorley Og. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she had been; after all, she had disapproved of all her bairns’ partners: everyone knew that. It seemed, though, that the entire family disapproved, and their opposition caught Rose unawares, despite being the smart, educated one. And that was at the heart of the objections, apparently – her education. Margo hadn’t wanted any of her sons to become fishermen, so she had used her influence and strong personality to steer them into other occupations. Andy worked in the bank, Martin was a plumber with his own business, and Dougie was now the local manager of Crawford’s, the fishing agent. On behalf of Crawford’s Dougie bought the entire catches of the Acarsaid boats when they were landed, paying the skippers immediately so that they in turn could pay their crews’ wages and for the upkeep of their boats, without waiting for the buyers to pay up. For this Crawford’s took ten per cent of the price negotiated, an arrangement that seemed fair to all, given that it could sometimes take three weeks for the money to come in. As each boat was a family business, Dougie was in effect in charge of running the businesses of men he’d known all his life, without ever having gone to sea himself. The job suited him, though; Dougie was intensely logical and methodical, and also thought highly of all of the fishermen in Acarsaid, would defend them against anyone, was as close as a brother to most of them. So it shocked Rose when he of all people reacted angrily to the news that his youngest sister was about to marry one. He stood there, a mild man normally, angrier than she had ever seen him.
‘You’re ruining your life,’ he’d said, white-faced with anger. ‘You can’t marry Sorley Og!’
‘You’ve always liked him,’ Rose had replied, stung and confused. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Sorley Og,’ he’d replied angrily, as though she was the one objecting to him. ‘He’s just not for you.’
‘Why? I don’t understand, Dougie.’
‘Sorley Og is one of the finest men I know, but you weren’t meant to marry him – to marry any fisherman, come to that.’
‘Alan’s a fisherman, I don’t recall this reaction when Sally married him.’ She shrugged, staring at her brother helplessly, as though he were speaking a foreign language.
‘Sally’s different, Sally’s not bright,’ he said, pacing up and down, hardly able to contain his rage. ‘Being married to Alan suits her, but you were meant for better things.’
‘Better things? You’ve just said Sorley Og’s one of the finest men you know!’
‘Listen to me, Rose. We all worked bloody hard in this family to make sure you got to university. You wanted to see foreign lands, have adventures, you were going to have a life away from Acarsaid, and you are clever enough to do it. For as long as I can remember every spare penny has gone to giving you that chance. We all gave up any dreams we had ourselves to make sure you got out of here because you were the brightest. Sally is fine married to Alan, Sheena’s fine married to her schoolteacher, they’ll both spend their lives here, but maybe if they’d got the chances we gave you – ach, I don’t know why I’m bothering! Just don’t expect me to be happy that you’re throwing it back in our faces, that’s all, and that’s what you’re doing by marrying a fisherman.’
‘I didn’t ask you to do that,’ Rose replied, close to tears. ‘I just want to live my life, Dougie, my own life!’
Rose had then turned to Sally for support, and was even more hurt to find that her sister wasn’t on her side either.
‘What have you got in common with Sorley Og?’ Sally asked when she heard the news.
‘What do you mean by that?’ Rose asked, genuinely taken aback. ‘Are you listening to yourself? What have we got in common? We were born and brought up in the same village, went to school together, our families have known each other for generations, for God’s sake! Whereas your Alan comes from Glasgow, you didn’t even meet him till just before you got married, he doesn’t come from a fishing community – do you want me to go on?’
‘Leave me and Alan out of it,’ Sally said. ‘This isn’t about us.’
‘Oh, I see, you can point out what you think is wrong about me and Sorley Og, but you and Alan are some sort of special case?’ Rose demanded.
‘We’re different. We’d have got on regardless of where we grew up. We think the same way,’ Sally retorted.
‘And you’re saying Sorley Og and I don’t?’ Rose demanded. ‘What do you know about us? When did you become the great authority on other people’s relationships?’
‘I’m only saying I don’t think you’re suited and that you’re making a mistake,’ her sister insisted.
‘Then mind your own bloody business, Sally, you know nothing worth knowing!’
The row wasn’t over when it was over either, it stayed between them from that moment on. In times to come when they watched from their windows for the men’s boats steaming towards harbour at the end of trips, and though their homes were within walking distance on MacEwan’s Row, they never knocked on each other’s door; it was never the same any more. Rose knew Alan felt bad about it, Rose and Sally had always been the closest to each other. He liked Sorley Og, too, everybody did, and he thought the Nicolsons were wrong in trying to force their expectations on Rose. But Alan wasn’t a Nicolson, and this was a Nicolson feud, and he had known the family long enough to understand that his opinion didn’t count and expressing it would only cause trouble between him and Sally. They were a strange bunch, he had often thought. They made fun of their mother for regarding in-laws as outsiders, but they all did it to some extent – except Rose, funnily enough: probably because she was the only one who had lived away from Acarsaid and had had some experience of the outside world. She wasn’t their wee Rose any longer. That was what none of them seemed able to grasp: she had grown up and was her own woman.
And by contrast the MacEwans had reacted with such joy when they heard the news that Rose was ashamed of her own family. Everyone said it was the nearest to tears anyone had seen Sorley Mor in the whole of his life. Before they went to tell his parents, Sorley Og had one instruction for Rose.
‘Now that you’re to become one of the family,’ he said, ‘the old man will probably tell you about Eric.’
‘What about Eric?’ she asked.
‘About the dancing.’
‘Everybody knows about the dancing!’ Rose laughed.
‘Aye, but Sorley Mor has persuaded himself all these years that he’s managed to keep
it a secret.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘I’m not. He had to tell my mother eventually, spent weeks trying to pluck up his courage, and she had to almost faint with shock, though she knew about it ages ago. So just act as surprised as she did, that’s all.’
‘So I have to faint, do I?’
‘He’d appreciate that,’ Sorley Og smiled. ‘But a sharp intake of breath would probably do.’
When Sorley Mor heard that Rose was marrying his son he hugged her as tightly as he dared, the muscles of his arms trembling as he tried not to squeeze the life out of her. His hands, coarse and rough from a lifetime at sea, repeatedly stroked her hair, snagging a strand here or there, but Rose didn’t care. To be held in Sorley Mor’s arms was something she had wanted for as long as she could remember; once she had been Quintin’s child, and now she was at last Sorley Mor’s.
Standing at the big window in the dark these years later she sighed. Was that what it had all been about after all?
She pretended that she hadn’t understood her family’s feelings, but she had, that was the problem, and once she had been told, and told so brutally by Dougie, the big brother she had admired and relied on all her life, she felt ashamed. No one had ever sat her down and explained that, because she was clever, the rest of the family would be sacrificing their lives and dreams to make sure she got a university education. They hadn’t said to her that she would carry all their ambitions, that they had invested in her future and that she had to repay them by living the life they wanted her to live. The thing was unfair, obscene! Sally and Alan were happy, and the family had been happy, too, when they had married, she remembered that clearly – apart from Margo, of course, who was never happy when an interloper took one of her own. Rose hadn’t realised then that the family regarded marriage to a fisherman to be all Sally was good for, the best she could hope for, given that she wasn’t as clever as Rose. How could anyone defend that position?
The Last Wanderer Page 26