The room had stopped being a sickroom and was now a chapel of rest. The coffin had been placed on a wheeled metal stand with the easy chairs and polished furniture and her mother’s favourite ornaments, the Doulton ladies, arranged around it. Kirsty had already cleared out most of the medicine. There was so much morphine. She reckoned she could have taken it to Edinburgh and made a fortune selling it on the streets of the capital. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, but the district nurse had reluctantly taken it away for safe disposal when Kirsty, all out of patience, had threatened to throw it on the midden at the back of the farm.
Kirsty seldom went into the room where the coffin rested, although she showed a succession of relatives, friends and neighbours in there, to ‘pay their respects’ - whatever that meant. She handed in trays of tea, bottles of whisky and plates of shortbread biscuits, while they sat around, talking quietly about the past, with the occasional outburst of nervous hilarity, quickly silenced. She wished they would just carry on laughing. Her mother wouldn’t have minded.
Aunty Beatie, on the other hand, couldn’t stop weeping. She had worked her way through several boxes of tissues and industrial quantities of tea, presumably to replace lost fluids. Kirsty used the floral wedding china which Isabel had inherited from her own mother and kept for special occasions. She supposed this must be special enough. One of the Canadian cousins, a smart and courteous elderly man, broke a cup. He put it down on the floor beside him and then – to his own mortification - trod on it, but Kirsty reassured him.
‘There are another thirty five pieces,’ she said. ‘Not counting the milk and sugar, the teapot and the two cake plates.’
He looked at her as though she had gone mad, and indeed she did feel slightly hysterical. She had to suppress a dreadful desire to giggle at inappropriate moments.
The visitors watched the coffin. Her grandfather got down his fiddle and played a lament. He played at all the island occasions: ceilidhs and weddings and christenings, but it was a sad thing to be playing for his own daughter-in-law’s wake. They wanted Kirsty to sing but she refused. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said. Instead, somebody else sang a sad song, a lament, in Gaelic. Kirsty heard them and thought about Francis singing The Curragh of Kildare, all those years ago.
‘And straight I will repair to the Curragh of Kildare and it’s there I’ll find tidings of my love.’
There were always people in the room, day and night, keeping the coffin company. She wondered what they were waiting for. The room was so empty that she wanted to tell them to stop keeping vigil over a wooden box. Wherever her mother was, she wasn’t here. She wanted them all to go away and leave her in peace but it would be churlish to tell them so. She clattered the wedding china in the sink, hoping to break more of it, but it was robust and didn’t even chip.
About the middle of the week, Nicolas took her to the mainland to buy some new clothes for the funeral. She got a black wool suit and some smart black shoes and a hat. The only hats she had ever worn had been bright woolly hats in Edinburgh winters, with her hair streaming out from under them. Nicolas insisted on paying.
‘I know you’re a bit strapped for cash’ he remarked, diffidently.
She was embarrassed by his generosity, but he brushed her objections aside. ‘I’d do the same for any friend. This doesn’t place any obligations on you. You know that, don’t you?’ And because he was such a gentleman, she believed him.
He took her for lunch in a hotel with tartan carpets and heavy brown furniture, and insisted that she drink a double Lagavulin. The pungent, peaty spirit brought tears to her eyes, but it also spread warmth through her cold bones and she was glad of it. It softened the edges of the hard knot of pain that she felt in her heart and in her head.
‘A suit might come in handy, anyway,’ said Nicolas. He probably had visions of her welcoming his business guests to Ealachan, wearing her funeral suit, but she knew that she would never wear it again. It would sit in the back of her wardrobe until the moths reduced it to irregular black lace. If it were left to her, she would have worn something bright. But the other mourners would have been shocked and even Kirsty didn’t have the nerve to go against tradition in this way.
‘Oh Kirsty, you do look like a hippy, but such a pretty one!’ her mother had said, seeing her wearing her long Indian cottons on the island, amazed and charmed by this strange, eccentric daughter. It suddenly occurred to Kirsty that her mother might have been a little envious. She had been such a pretty woman herself but ever since her husband’s death, there had been a touch of austerity about her. There were old black and white photographs of Isabel, when she and James were courting. Isabel had worn floral print dresses and high heeled shoes, her hair falling in soft waves. Again, Kirsty found herself wondering why. Why had her mother found no other lover? A week ago she might have asked, but now it was too late.
The week dragged on. The weather was warm and golden with that immanent stillness peculiar to September. The apples and plums and pears were ripening in the Ealachan orchards. The hedges were all jewelled with blackberries and festooned with dewy spider’s webs every morning. Up at Dunshee, the old grey horse, the last of the real working horses that would ever be housed there, cropped his field and stood looking out to sea, dreaming in the sunshine. The potato harvest was done. The day before the funeral, Finn burned the last of the leaves in heaps along the margins of the sandy fields where they grew. The acrid scent of the bonfires drifted in at her bedroom window. Only Kirsty was cold. Her hands were icy. She shivered as though it were the middle of winter, and her mouth was dry. Later on, when Finn came in for his supper, the smell of smoke was still clinging to his clothes. For Kirsty, time was standing still. There was no past, no future. There was only the now of this polished September day where time hung as heavy on her cold hands as the biggest, shiniest apple, on the oldest tree.
Finn had cut his hand on barbed wire, and went to rinse his fingers under the kitchen tap.
Kirsty had been making a blackberry and apple pie for the visitors. The table was white with flour, littered with apple peel and cores. There was a big bowl of glossy berries waiting to join the sliced apples in the pastry case.
‘How did you do that?’ she asked him. Her tongue felt thick and numb in her mouth. ‘You’ll get blood poisoning!’
‘It’s nothing much. I stumbled and reached out to the fence.’
‘You should be wearing gloves if you’re working with wire.’
‘I wasn’t working with wire. Just beside it. I didn’t mean to touch it. ‘
‘I’ll get you a plaster.’
‘It’s alright. I’m fine.’
Nevertheless, she made him stand still while she disinfected the ragged cut and stemmed the bleeding with gauze and elastoplast. She bent over his hand to finish the dressing but then found that she couldn’t let go of his fingers. She raised her eyes to meet his. The kitchen was empty for once and the house was quiet , the only sounds the whisper of voices from the other room and the simmering of a pan of soup on the hob. The build-up of steam kept pushing the lid off the pan with a knocking sound.
The feeling was so sudden and intense that it took her breath away, leaving her gasping for air. He held her gaze, then pulled her towards him and kissed her on the lips. Or she kissed him. Afterwards she couldn’t say who made the first move. They kissed long and hard, their bodies pressed close. Everything about him, the clumsiness, the smoky scent of him, the taste of him, was at once familiar and yet absolutely strange. The kitchen tilted around her. Her whole world had moved on its axis and then righted itself. But everything was different. Nothing would ever be the same. Before they could kiss again, they heard the rattle of the back door opening, and they sprang apart. She gave a cry of regret and rage at the space between them.
‘Shsh.’ Finn frowned at her. ‘Later?’ he asked, tentatively.
‘Where, when?’ She was desperate. She would die for lack of him. She would die of the ice inside her.
&
nbsp; ‘Wherever you like,’ he whispered.
‘My room. Tonight.’
‘Are you sure?’
The kitchen door opened and Kirsty’s grandfather came in. He had been down to the kirk, making arrangements for the funeral service.
She turned away, busying herself with setting the table for supper.
‘Yes,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘I’m sure.’ She turned and smiled at her grandfather. ‘How did that go? Everything sorted?’
‘Aye’ said the old man. He sighed and threw himself into a chair. He looked grey and exhausted. ‘Aye, lass. That’s everything sorted.’
She thought that they would never go away or go to bed. It was the night before the funeral and they seemed determined to extend the wake as long as possible, these relatives and friends who had seldom visited Isabel during her last illness.
‘Where were you all,’ she thought, ‘when I was struggling to get her moved to the right hospital? Where were you in her last week, when I was sitting beside her bed, watching her fade away?’
Nicolas had phoned her earlier that day. ‘Just try to get a good night’s sleep.’
‘I’ll do my best. But we’ve got a lot of guests.’
‘You’ll have to be firm with them. Can’t you get Finn to throw them out? Send them packing to their digs and tell the ones that are staying with you to get off to bed. Tomorrow will be a long, hard day.’
‘I’ll be alright.’
‘Well just you look after yourself.’
She wished all of them would go away, but she smiled at them until her face ached and refilled their glasses, hoping to tire them out. At last her grandfather staggered up to bed, and that was her cue to stand up and yawn and shoo them all away. Beatie and her daughters were sleeping in Isabel’s old bedroom, two in the bed and one on cushions on the floor. Fish Face was already ensconced on the bed, waiting resentfully for Isabel to come back. He was missing her and would miss her even more when Beatie pushed him off the bed, and one of her daughters put him outside the room closing the door on him.
A couple of the younger cousins had brought sleeping bags and were planning to bed down in the kitchen. The two Canadians took a flashlight and headed off down the track – they were staying in one of the estate cottages. Kirsty went upstairs, washed, and got ready for bed. Her head was just starting to ache. She crept out into the hallway and stood there, listening. The house had fallen very quiet. There was no movement from below. Maybe he had changed his mind. Then it struck her that Finn, coming down from his room, wouldn’t be able to go through the kitchen without disturbing the sleeping relatives.
He was equal to the challenge. A little while later, leaning out of her window, she heard the lonely, sawing call of the corncrake down by the shore, and then the eerie, high pitched whoop of owls, calling to each other. She heard the gentle lifting of a latch. He had come out of the back door and in at the front. Now he was quietly climbing the stairs. She felt her heart thudding beneath her nightdress.
Before he could even tap on the door, she had opened it for him, and he was inside. He was wearing shabby jeans and a faded tee-shirt and he was barefoot. He stooped to brush the dirt from the soles of his feet and she stood there in the lamplight, watching him, watching the light glisten on his hair, like the thick pelt of some animal.
‘I almost forgot about that pair sleeping in the kitchen!’ he said.
‘I wondered what you would do.’
‘Thank God nobody put the bolt on the front door. I thought I might not be able to get in.’
She was trembling with a mixture of fear and excitement.
‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’ve been cold all week.’
She had brushed her hair and it was streaming down around her shoulders in thick, bright red ripples He reached out and touched the soft mass of it.
‘The house is so full of people,’ she whispered, despairingly. ‘We mustn’t make any noise.’
‘I know.’
She could hear a sound from outside her room. It was Aunty Beatie, going to the bathroom, padding along the hallway in her plastic rollers, her quilted nylon housecoat and furry slippers.
‘She won’t come in here?’ he said.
‘No. I don’t think so. ‘
They stood, frozen, listening, trying not to laugh, while Beatie flushed the lavatory twice and then went back to bed. The house fell quiet again.
The interruption had broken the mood, made them both nervous, shy of each other.
‘Are we crazy?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How’s your hand?’
‘OK. Bit sore.’ The plaster was already grubby. Everything Finn did covered him in mud or dust or worse. No matter how much he scrubbed his hands, the ingrained grime never quite went away. He seemed to have had dirty hands for as long as she could remember, to have grown up with them. She thought about Nicolas’s slender hands, soft, white, well manicured. Finn sat down on the bed and looked up at her. He was so tall that he made the bed look small. He folded his long arms around himself, not knowing what to do with them, shutting her out, keeping her away.
He said ‘I don’t know,’ and she said ‘I’m not sure,’ simultaneously. ‘You first,’ he said.
‘I’m not sure if we should be doing this.’
‘No. Maybe not.’
He was not going to help her. He couldn’t. He was so afraid of rejection. She turned to the window, crossing her own arms in unconscious imitation of his, but there was nothing to be seen outside. Her body seemed strange and unwieldy to her. Ever since her mother had become ill, it had been as though she were living only in her head. She had forgotten about her body and its demands. Now, she came into herself with a flicker of sensation.
‘Oh Finn, help me!’ she said. ‘I’m so cold.’
He stood up and opened his arms to her, and she rushed at him, almost butting her head against him in her eagerness to be close to him. He caught her and they were falling onto the bed, into the shelter of her bed, into the cocoon that the box bed had become, and he was kissing her clumsily, but as though he would never be able to stop, kissing her cheeks, her eyes, her throat, biting fiercely at her lips, and he was saying ‘Kirsty, oh Kirsty!’ At last, he braced himself above her, looking down at her, trying to breathe. He saw that she was wearing the pendant. The elf shot. The arrow head as old as Dun Sidhe itself.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute.’
She reached down and slid the nightdress up, crossing her arms to tug it over her head, and he helped her, and the air struck cool on her skin. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled his tee-shirt off, tugging at his jeans in a frenzy, hurting his poor hand all over again and swearing under his breath, and it seemed comical to her. She almost found herself laughing, until at last he turned towards her and covered her sad, cold flesh with his lovely, long, warm body, and slid inside her. She gave a little cry at the acute sensation, but she was warm and wet and there was no space, no space between them at all.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘How strange!’
He paused for a moment, looking down at her. ‘It feels…’
‘Right’ she said. ‘It feels so …oh Finn … it feels so right…’
He moved inside her, never quite leaving her, and she pushed herself towards him. She forgot all about the last terrible year. Love was stronger than death she thought. And life was stronger than death. Life would always have its way.
And then they ceased to think in words at all because they were moving together, moving like the incessant wind at Hill Top Town, and there was nothing but their awareness of each other. Their mouths were fused, their bodies were fused, and they thought they would die with the pleasure of it, they couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. And for the first time in a long time they were warm and whole and wholly alive.
Did they cry out together? The house gathered its silence round them, and they found themselves wondering who heard? Did anybody hear t
hem? Perhaps not. Finn lay his finger lightly on her lips. Shook his head. Let out his breath in a long, quivering sigh. ‘Oof,’ he said.
‘I know.’
He moved away from her, and she hated the space between them. He pulled the coverlet over them, then turned and slid his arm under her so that he could hold her close, resting his lips on her forehead. She had taken the ice out of his heart. All the images of all the stories that they had ever told each other were winding in procession through his head. It seemed as though all the words of all their tales had been aimed at this one end. Even if some of them had been sad.
Early in the morning, they slid out of bed, dressed, crept quietly down the stairs so as not to wake the others, and went into the garden, which was drenched with autumn dew, the chilly precursor of frost. The fields below the farm were bathed in mist. They could hear the short, sharp calls of oystercatchers down on the shore. Together they climbed the rocks behind Dunshee, and sat among the clefts and crags of Hill Top Town. West, the sea and sky were one grey meld. To the east, the sun was rising over the mainland. They sat side by side, hand in hand, their bodies touching, but they didn’t talk. Their lips were swollen with kissing but they were quiet and contented in each other’s company. Time passed and they knew that they must go back and face the day of the funeral. They embraced, and it crossed Kirsty’s mind, in those last few moments, that nothing could part them.
‘Who could possibly separate us?’ she thought. ‘Who in the whole wide world could ever tear us apart now?’
Bird of Passage Page 18