She stared at him for a long moment and he saw her eyes cloud over, then she immediately brightened up. ‘It could be wrong, though, couldn’t it?’
‘Well, a false negative is more likely than a false positive, that’s true, but—’
‘Well, that’s what it is, then!’
‘No, Rose, I honestly don’t think so,’ he said slowly. ‘If you’ve missed three or four periods as you say, then I don’t really think we’d be getting a false negative this far along.’
She sat silently for a long time, the muscles in her face working furiously. ‘You don’t want me to have this baby, do you?’ she said at last in a low voice.
‘Rose, it’s nothing like that!’
‘You don’t want me to be happy, do you? You have to take this away from me.’
As Gavin was moving towards her, she was moving away.
‘Just because Tess preferred Sandy Bay to you, you don’t want anyone else to be happy!’ Before he could stop her she ran out of the surgery, slamming the door behind her.
Gavin sat at his desk and ran his fingers through his hair. The whole thing was grotesque. He was dealing with his own grief as best he could – losing Sorley Og had been as hard on him as losing Sorley Mor had been on Gannet – but he had no real support mechanisms: no Chrissie shouting at him, no Father Mick carousing with him in the Inn. He was the local doctor, and there had to be some distance between him and his patients, however familiar they were. On top of his own feelings he was trying to cope with the increase in patients coming through his door with minor and fictional ailments. It seemed he had discovered a new illness, ‘Wanderer-itis’. If there was a way of dealing with this massive blow that had hit everyone in the village, he had yet to find it. All he could do was to take one step forward, and two back, if he was lucky. No matter how well he thought he was doing, just around the next corner some other difficulty triggered by the loss of the boat and her crew waited, coiled and ready to spring out and attack him.
That evening he drove up to MacEwan’s Row and knocked on Rose’s door. When there was no reply, he turned the handle and let himself in. She was standing by the big window, the lights off, looking out over the sea. She turned and looked at him, then turned away again, embarrassed, as he walked over the long lounge floor towards her, glad of the lack of illumination.
‘About this morning, Rose,’ he started.
‘No, don’t, Gavin,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve been feeling so ashamed of myself ever since. I’m sorry I said the things I said.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You were upset,’ he replied.
‘What if everybody in the village was upset, would that give them the right to go about offending each other? Think of the trouble that would cause.’
Gavin smiled wryly. ‘Funnily enough, that’s exactly what they are all doing,’ he told her.
‘Really?’ she asked, looking at him. ‘Why?’
‘Because they’re upset.’
‘Over the lads?’ She sounded surprised.
‘Of course over the lads,’ he smiled. ‘There’s hardly anyone in this village talking to anyone else. It’s just a phase, it’ll pass, but it’s hard on everyone.’
Rose nodded slowly. ‘I didn’t realise they were all feeling so bad,’ she murmured.
‘Well, your own feelings have been pretty major,’ Gavin said. ‘It’s hardly surprising that you haven’t had time to look around and see how they’ve all been affected.’
She nodded again. ‘Listen, what I said about Tess and Sandy Bay, I really am sorry, Gavin.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not a problem, honestly. Everybody wanted us to make a match of it; they want to marry me off so badly they’d have been happy if I’d married Sandy Bay! But there wasn’t much in it with me and Tess. A couple of dates and we knew we were just pals.’ He shrugged again. ‘I feel sorry for Sandy Bay, though. Father Mick’s giving him a helluva time for going to Glasgow and snubbing him, as he sees it. Keeps making the age difference bigger all the time to prove Sandy Bay’s nothing but a dirty old man.’
‘What is the age difference?’
‘Well, she’s about thirty and he’s late forties, I think, but you’ll never get Father Mick to accept that! Thirteen and seventy was the last estimate I heard!’
For a while they talked quietly in the dusk, going over old times and new, and Gavin had the feeling an important crisis point had been passed. As he turned to leave he had one more thought.
‘What we were talking about before, Rose,’ he said. ‘If you want to make absolutely sure I could arrange an ultrasound appointment at one of the city hospitals if you like?’
Rose shook her head and smiled. ‘No, that’s OK, Gavin. I was clutching at straws; I think I knew that all along. There’s no baby, I only wish there was.’
By the time he left, the dusk had grown into darkness, but Chrissie was waiting on her doorstep, arms crossed against the chill of an autumn evening, concerned by the sight of the doctor’s car.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked, glancing across at Rose’s house.
‘Fine,’ Gavin replied, opening the door of the Range Rover. ‘It wasn’t professional, just a personal call. She seemed a bit upset earlier today. I was just checking, but she’s OK.’
‘Aye, that was my fault,’ Chrissie admitted quietly. ‘I went too far, as usual.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Chrissie. Everyone’s a bit near the edge, it’s part of the process. I was just explaining that to Rose.’
‘Aye, Mastermind in there explained it to me before he conked out.’ Chrissie motioned with her head to her own house. ‘I suppose there’s some sense to it, though I’d never admit it to him.’
‘Gannet?’ Gavin asked. ‘Where is he?’
‘Asleep on the table in the porch.’ She threw her head back and laughed.
‘What is it?’
‘I just heard a voice from the past, that’s all,’ Chrissie grinned, her eyes shining even in the darkness.
‘What did it say?’ Gavin asked.
‘It said “Conservatory, woman!” Silly sod! Goodnight, Gavin.’
27
As the months passed in Acarsaid, one phase of grief gave way to another, and a new village life began to establish itself. What emerged in the wake of their loss was different from the days when Sorley Mor was at the centre of the village. For one thing, it was quieter, but time, if it doesn’t heal, at least forces the most reluctant to move on. Chrissie was forgiven for her remarks to Rose, Gannet took to reading his books again and, gradually, Rose came out of her bitter mourning and was seen about the place. That more than anything helped to restore the village: the sight of Rose – whose suffering they all felt – picking up the pieces seemed to give them permission to go on.
Rose borrowed the Land Rover to visit Granny Ina, spending quiet hours with the old woman, who was asleep more often than she was awake. It suited Rose just to be in the comforting presence she remembered from her childhood. Though her mother was there in the background, there was still little connection between mother and daughter. It was the same with the rest of her family, the gentle, biddable Rose had gone for good; the gulf that had started with their opposition to her marriage to Sorley Og had continued in the months after his death, and apart from Dougie the paths of the Nicolsons rarely crossed. It was the way they were. They weren’t like other families, she realised that; probably thanks to Margo and despite Granny Ina’s efforts, they understood family to mean ownership. One relationship had flourished, though, that of Dougie and Father Mick. With Sorley Og the little priest had become as near to being a real father as lifelong celibacy would allow, but the meetings and discussions in the wake of the tragedy had brought him and Dougie into closer contact, and they were often to be seen, cheerfully arguing and insulting each other. Gannet would watch them, matching the relationships of surrogate son and surrogate father up to his latest reading matter, and smile, wondering if either understood this new friendship and determined to explain i
t to them once he had tracked it down. For Father Mick’s part he wondered how he could have known Dougie nearly all his life and seen him almost every day without realising what a splendid chap he was. To cap it all, the boy took his dram like a man: what higher praise could there be?
In Sorley’s Mor’s corner of the Inn, overlooking the dominoes table, a photo of the Wanderer was placed on the wall, with another of her crew taken at Sorley Og’s wedding, and beside them a copy of ‘The Sea’, the tract the skipper had liked so much. That made three, counting the one on the wall of his house on MacEwan’s Row, and the original where he had put it, in the wheelhouse of the Wanderer at the bottom of the sea off Denmark. At first the locals didn’t look at the little memorial on the Inn wall, though they were acutely aware that it was there, but slowly they were able to. Then they would smile when they saw it, and in time the stories it provoked came more easily. They laughed when they talked of what Sorley Mor’s reaction would have been to Tess and Sandy Bay’s marriage, knowing from Father Mick that he hadn’t had time to believe it and suspected it was just one of Chrissie’s wind-ups.
‘I tell you this, Sandy Bay,’ they would tell him over and over again, ‘but you got off lightly there. Sorley Mor would’ve put you through hell every time he saw you!’
Sandy Bay would smile sadly. ‘I wish he was here to do it,’ he’d say. ‘Nothing would make me happier than to walk in some day and find the skipper sitting there, ready to make a fool of me. Especially now, with Tess expecting the twins. Think what he’d have made of that! And it breaks my heart that he’ll never know them and they’ll never know the fine man that he was.’ Then Sandy Bay would look away, as once again a moment of jest proved capable of catching them out by turning so quickly to grief.
So there was still the occasional fast blink of an eye at such times, or when a painful lull in the telling of an old story reminded them of their loss, but they were reclaiming their lives and their futures post-Sorley Mor. Boats went to sea and the crews didn’t expect to see the Wanderer when they returned, and they no longer waited in the Inn to shout ‘The Wanderer has returned!’ as the skipper entered, even if they remembered vividly the times when they had. In the loft area of the Inn lay a big, yellow plastic banner prepared for the boat’s return from her final trip proclaiming that ‘The Wanderer has returned – for GOOD!’ It lay folded into a large square shape taking up a great deal of room and gathering dust. Annie Stewart, Dan’s wife, kept tripping over it; knowing what it was, she hadn’t said anything about it. As time went on and the pain receded, though, she would complain to Dan, suggesting that he destroy it or put it somewhere else, but somehow Dan could never bring himself to do anything with it, so there it stayed.
Six months after the sinking there were definite signs of recovery, and one day Rose announced that she was fed up with the bone-shaking old Land Rover, and bought a car. She had never needed one before – the uncomfortable Land Rover had always been there for whatever journeys were necessary – but the car was perhaps as much to do with her growing sense of independence as comfort. She bought a new Beetle that Gannet sniffed at, saying it was ‘a lassie’s car’.
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Chrissie remarked. ‘I don’t suppose the lassie will let you near it, so what’s it to you?’
Chrissie liked the odd little car so much, and spent so much time in it with Rose, that she wondered aloud about learning to drive, a thought that sent Gannet into paroxsyms of laughter. ‘What will you drive?’ he demanded, ‘a bulldozer?’ and she was forced to stand on a chair and soundly box his furry ears. But though new paths were being forged, their eyes were still focused on the results of the probe into the sinking of Ocean Wanderer, and the campaign to make sure Sorley Mor wasn’t blamed for the sinking. Rose’s attitude worried Dougie, though. Her sights were firmly set on having the freighter skipper found guilty of a major crime, and he knew that wasn’t going to happen – it shouldn’t happen.
‘What I don’t want,’ he told Father Mick and Gannet, ‘is for Rose to go back to the state she was in because she doesn’t get what she wants out of this – and I can tell you she won’t get what she wants.’
‘She’s pretty angry, right enough,’ Gannet said quietly.
‘A natural reaction in the circumstances,’ Father Mick mused. ‘There’s been a bit of me baying for blood, too, I have to admit that, and you can see her reasoning. Her world has been destroyed in such a terrible manner: surely someone must be held to account?’
‘It’s not going to happen, Father,’ Dougie repeated. ‘I’ve tried to tell her that, but she won’t listen. She’s convinced things like right and wrong and justice actually exist.’
‘Well, don’t blame her for that,’ Father Mick smiled. ‘It’s the sign of a good heart, just like my own!’
As the time drew near for the publication of the Preliminary Inquiry report, there was a heightened tension in Acarsaid. On the day it was to be released, the village widows gathered in Chrissie’s house, waiting for Dougie to arrive. Gannet had taken himself off to his official residence in Keppaig for the afternoon. Dougie looked around the expectant faces of the women as he entered and his heart fell. He had warned them all, not just his sister, what to expect, but obviously not one of them had taken it in.
‘It’s as I told you it would be,’ he said, sitting down, ‘the accident happened because the Wanderer did not alter course as she should have, and the freighter didn’t take avoiding action in time to prevent the collision.’
There was a long silence.
‘That’s it?’ Rose eventually asked, incredulously.
‘Rose, it’s just the Preliminary Inquiry report,’ Dougie said.
‘It makes it sound as if our men were at fault,’ Chrissie said. ‘We know there was a lookout on the Wanderer. Is there no mention of the lookout maybe being taken ill before the collision and not being able to alter course?’
‘Chrissie, you’re looking for too much,’ Dougie said gently. ‘This is the initial reaction, the one taken after a first look at the available evidence.’
‘They’ve taken nearly a year to come up with that?’ Rose demanded. ‘We knew that from the minute the boat went down!’
Dougie squirmed. ‘I tried to make you understand,’ he said.
‘So now it’s our fault, is it?’ she demanded.
Chrissie put a hand on her arm and patted it. ‘No, Rose, it’s not our fault, but it’s not Dougie’s either, is it?’ she asked kindly.
‘There will be a fuller inquiry,’ Dougie told them, ‘one that looks at all the circumstances, and we’ll be putting detailed questions into that one.’
‘Will it make any difference?’ Rose demanded angrily.
‘Rose, I don’t know,’ Dougie replied. ‘You have to appreciate that we’re dealing with three countries here, which makes everything more difficult and time-consuming. But we won’t be giving up. Sorley Mor was on lookout, we know that; he was fully clothed and found at the bottom of the wheelhouse stairs, so we also know something happened to him. Sorley Og was fully clothed too; he was clearly about to take over as lookout. We won’t be letting them or any of the crew be blamed, but this report just states—’
‘The bloody obvious?’ Chrissie butted in.
‘As you say,’ Dougie smiled sadly. ‘I’m sorry if you were all expecting anything else. I tried to warn you, but I obviously didn’t try hard enough.’
‘It’s not your fault, Dougie,’ Chrissie repeated firmly. She shook Rose’s arm gently. ‘Is it now, Rose?’
‘No,’ Rose said quietly, her face flushed and holding back tears. ‘It’s not his fault.’
And so the inquiry into the accident continued for another year, with Rose taking the lead in pushing to make sure nothing was missed.
‘She’s making it her life’s work,’ Dougie told Gannet. ‘I can’t get her to accept that, whatever comes out of this, it won’t be exactly what she wants.’
‘Leave her alone,’ Ganne
t advised. ‘If it gives her a reason to go on, then it makes her stronger. Even if it doesn’t work out exactly as she wants, that strength will help her to get through it.’
That winter there was heavy snow in Acarsaid for the first time that Rose’s generation could remember, and she stayed in her house and cried; Sorley Og had never seen snow and had desperately wanted to. The others all faced identical low points. As with all bereavements the ‘firsts’ were always difficult: the first birthday, the first anniversary, the first snowfall. Peter Sorley Kerr grew more like his father every day. He learned to walk, unaware that he was a special child to everyone; unaware, too, that he had provided the reason for his grandparents and his young widowed mother to go on with life. Rose, though, still seemed to be stuck in the pattern of waiting that had begun when she and Sorley Og first started going out together: waiting for him to phone while he was away, to start the journey home at the end of each trip, for first sight of the boat as she headed for harbour, for his body to be found and brought home, for his funeral and, now, for the final inquiry report to come out. In the back of her mind she sometimes wondered what would happen when there was no more waiting to be done, but mostly she just waited, feeling much older than her years.
Then the day arrived, two years after the Wanderer had been lost, when the official last word on what had befallen her was released by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch. Dougie had warned everyone that it would be couched in bureaucratic language, but he was surprised to find that it read as though it had been written by human beings.
Sorley Mor was, without question or argument, it said, a particularly safety conscious skipper, who ran one of the best regarded boats in the Scottish fleet with strict discipline. The boat was well maintained, every safety device had been regularly serviced, and there were no mechanical or structural defects on her. Likewise her crew had the qualifications they required; as well as the experience and attitude to their work that Sorley Mor demanded. They had all the safety and survival certificates modern fishing asked of them, even the older fishermen and the skipper himself, and they had all been with him a great many years. Why this boat, of all boats, should have sunk with all hands was not only a tragedy, but a mystery, and though the initial report’s findings were upheld, the investigators had indeed looked more closely into the accident.
The Last Wanderer Page 40