Bird of Passage

by Catherine Czerkawska

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The funeral service was held in the kirk with its stained glass window of St Columba, standing up precariously in a brown cockleshell boat. The minister said nice things about Isabel and seemed genuinely sad. Kirsty sat in the front row with her grandfather and her Aunty Beatie. The rest of the relatives were in a huddle behind them and then came Finn, wearing an ill-fitting suit that he had borrowed for the occasion, poised in a sort of no-man’s-land, in the middle, with the other islanders crowded at the back.

  Malcolm, seated in his own family’s pew, was openly moved and blew his nose into a large white handkerchief from time to time. Kirsty looked neither right not left, staring at the minister with her head held high and her face stony. She had wanted her grandfather on one side and Finn on the other, but Beatie had bustled in and the rest of the relatives had filed into the pews behind. Finn had waited until they were settled before taking his place.

  Contrary to the Scottish custom at that time, the younger women went to the cemetery, where Isabel was laid to rest beside Kirsty’s father, though the older ones stayed at the hotel, drinking sweet sherry and discussing the shortcomings of the service. This was a typical Scottish burial with eight cords which were allotted to friends and relatives who lowered the coffin into the grave. It was normally seen as man’s work but Kirsty had insisted that she would take the cord at the foot while her grandfather took the one at the head of the coffin, and nobody dared to disagree. Neither did they argue with her when she called over Finn on her left, and then Nicolas on her right. There were some dark looks and murmurs of complaint among the assembled friends and relatives. Kirsty ignored them all. The weather was fine and mild and there were late roses blooming on the adjacent graves.

  Afterwards there were sandwiches, sausage rolls and shortbread in the hotel function room with tea and coffee and a generous measure of whisky for everyone, courtesy of Malcolm. Beatie and her carload would be going back to Glasgow in the morning with the Canadian cousins who had already exchanged their funeral suits for brightly coloured golfing sweaters and grey slacks. The friends and relatives all went back to Dunshee to drink tea and whisky and nibble at the remains of the funeral buffet. Kirsty saw that they were well provided and then slipped on a jacket and a scarf that had the scent of her mother on it and walked up to Hill Top Town. Finn was waiting for her. She sat down beside him on the damp ground. He slipped his arm around her and she leaned in to him. They sat in silence for a while but it was Kirsty who spoke first.

  ‘I was talking to Malcolm today. About the estate and their plans for the future. It kind of worried me.’

  ‘What plans?’

  ‘He didn’t say it in so many words – well he wouldn’t at the funeral, would he? He was genuinely fond of my mum, you know. But I think the family would like my grandad to retire. Then they could take over Dunshee, do it up and market it as – oh I don’t know. A self catering holiday development. Something commercial anyway.’

  ‘But what about the farm?’

  ‘None of the farms are very profitable for them. Holiday lets would be better. And I’ve heard him say it before. This isn’t a social project. It’s a business. When push comes to shove, they don’t care.’

  ‘Can they do that?’ Finn looked shocked, as well he might. He had never anticipated this kind of change.

  ‘They can do what they like. We’re very reliant on their goodwill. We have no security. You know fine that we’re all on short tenancies here.’

  ‘What about your grandad? They couldn’t just turn him out, could they?’

  ‘Oh they would certainly have to give him somewhere else to live. But he would have to take what he was given, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘He isn’t that old. I didn’t think this would be an issue. Or at least not till later.’

  ‘He’s sixty eight. He doesn’t have the strength or stamina he once had.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘I know you do. And I think it would kill him to move away. He belongs at Dunshee. He’s built in with the stones. Him and his father before him. He should be able to live here until the day he dies. If my dad was still around, things would be different. Grandad could retire. The Laurences wouldn’t find it so easy to take over.’

  ‘And what about me?’ asked Fin, quietly. ‘Do I not count?’

  ‘You count with me and my grandad. But not with the Laurences.’

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  She sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned this. Not tonight. There’s no immediate problem. But it worried me a bit. We’ll have to find some kind of solution. You and me and grandad. We’ll have to find some way round this.’

  ‘Your mother wanted you to marry Nicolas, didn’t she?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘She told me.’

  ‘Well, I wish she hadn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know if she even knew who she was talking to by that time, Kirsty. The morphine was making her very vague by then. But she was desperate for you to marry him. She thought he would take care of you!’

  ‘I don’t need anyone to take care of me!’

  Kirsty had been thinking about Finn all day, aware of him in the church, stuck in the middle, with no friends to speak of except herself and her grandfather. But then Finn was his own worst enemy. He didn’t mix with the other young men of the island, or only on the most superficial level. His social skills were practically non-existent and always had been. There was something about him that made people uncomfortable.

  ‘The best thing for you, you know, would be to leave the island and get an education for yourself. You just sort of fell into farming, didn’t you? It was a way out for you.’

  Her knowledge of his life was a sketchy patchwork of painful fragments which he had let slip over the years. From these, she had constructed some of his story. He had never yet assembled the whole picture for her, She thought it was because he couldn’t bear to do it. Not for her. Not for himself, either.

  ‘Maybe you could do something else. You’re brilliant with boats. And you can fix anything.

  He grinned. ‘Of necessity.’

  ‘My point is, even you don’t know what you’re capable of. You’re stranded here. Washed up. And I’m beginning to wonder if you should be staying here at all.’

  ‘It’s not such a bad place.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful place!’ she said. ‘We belong here. I think we both feel exactly the same about it. And that would be just fine, if you could take over the farm after my grandad’s dead and gone. But you have no rights, no family except us. So you’re stuck and I can’t bear the thought of it.’

  ‘So what am I to do, Kirsty? You tell me that!’

  ‘I don’t know. I just think that maybe you could find yourself a better job, if you were prepared to leave me behind.’

  ‘Is that what you want me to do? Leave you behind?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not saying that. It’s just that our friendship, our love, what we have together…’ Kirsty was floundering now, hunting for the right words, wishing she had never started this. ‘What we’ve always had, it’s above and beyond everything else. More important than anything. But we have to face the fact that Malcolm will hand over the running of the whole estate to Nick. He already has done, more or less. And Nick will never give the tenancy to you, so we’ll have to do something else, won’t we? We’ll have to think of something else!’

  ‘We could go to the mainland together. I suppose we could do that.’

  ‘It’s a possibility. We could even go to Edinburgh. I could finish my degree. But I’ll be leaving my grandad and I know what will happen then. Nick will give him notice and move him into one of those nasty little prefabs down in the village, and he’ll be so miserable he’ll probably drink himself to death within the year. I’ve seen it happen to other people. The estate owns our lives here, and we do as we’re told.’

  Finn was silent for so long that she thought he had fallen asleep. She nudged hi
m and he got to his feet, pulling her with him. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said ‘Let’s go home. We can talk about all this later.’

  She followed him meekly down the hill. It was a dark and moonless night and the grass was damp around their ankles. Practical as ever, Finn had brought a flashlight. He took her hand, and concentrated on shining the torch ahead of them, illuminating the ridges and tussocks of grass. He was still very quiet.

  ‘Are you alright, Finn ?’

  ‘Just tired. And you?’

  ‘I’m tired too. In fact I’m beyond tired.’

  Back at Dunshee, he told her that he had one or two things to do about the farm. He had forgotten to shut up the hens for the night. The fox might be on the prowl. She offered to help but he shook his head.

  ‘No, Kirsty. You get off to your bed.’

  ‘Alright. I’m dead on my feet anyway. Will you come up later?’

  ‘If I can. But you need your sleep. Don’t try to stay awake. You just go to sleep now, Kirsty.’

  She reached up and kissed him. ‘Goodnight, Finn. ’

  He put his arms around her and pulled her close, so close that she could hardly breathe, a brief, intense embrace. ‘Goodnight my Cairistiona, my darling,’ he said, and went off into the darkness. She watched the thin beam of the torch, wavering in front of him for a moment or two, and then went inside to bed.

  One job lead to another and it was very late when Finn came in. Everyone seemed to be asleep. He saw that even Kirsty’s room was in darkness now, so he went up to his loft and lay on the bed for a while. He didn’t fall asleep immediately but drifted on a sea of memories, his head full of thoughts of Dublin, and his mother.

  They were walking down Grafton Street, past Bewleys. He could smell the powerful scents of coffee and baking. They passed Bewleys often and whenever they did, his mother said ‘When our ship comes in, we’ll go in there, and have a feast. Would you like that, Finn ?’

  Then, one day, they did go in. They had their own table and there were ladies at the other tables, many of them in fancy hats. There was coloured glass in the windows. Finn liked that very much, the pictures in the glass and the way the sunshine filtered through them and cast red, green and blue shadows on tables and faces. He gazed at them in wonder. They sat down at a table, he and his mother, and no sooner had they settled themselves into their seats than a strange man came by and raised his hat to Finn’s mother. She seemed to know him. She told Finn that he was a friend and his name was Johnny. The man shook him by the hand and sat down at their table.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ he said, and winked at Finn’s mother and then at Finn as well, for good measure.

  The man was nice. Finn remembered how kind he was. The waitress came over and he ordered a pot of tea for Finn and his mother and a cup of coffee for himself, and a plateful of buns for all of them. There were serviettes on the table and Johnny folded one up into a paper boat for Finn. ‘Is this our ship, coming in?’ Finn asked, and Johnny and his mother laughed. Then, Johnny showed Finn how to do it and when the boat was made, he perched it on Finn’s head and said it would make a fine hat too.

  Finn could still make paper boats out of bits of paper. He had made them for Kirsty when she was a little girl, and they had sailed a whole fleet of them down the burn, where once she had thrown her swimming dolls. Finn remembered his mother shaking her head at Johnny and saying ‘what are you like?’ and the curls bouncing around her face. The buns had cherries in them and sugar crystals on top and they were shiny and sticky, the nicest thing he had ever tasted in his life. It amazed Finn that there was as much butter as they could eat. The best butter. His mother ate even more than he did. Johnny too. They cleared the whole plate between the three of them, and he and his mother had two pots of tea.

  Johnny drank another cup of strong coffee with plenty of sugar. Then he paid the bill and held up Mary’s coat for her to slide her arms into.

  ‘Thank-you, kind sir,’ she said. But Johnny left before them, which seemed strange to Finn. His mother didn’t mind. She swung Finn’s arm as they walked, laughing and talking all the way down Grafton Street.

  He couldn’t remember when he had first begun to make sense of that meeting. It had been so gradual that there was no definite moment of realisation, just a slowly dawning awareness that Johnny must have been a special friend to his mother. It had only happened once, the visit to Bewleys. He had seen Johnny again, a few times. The man would come to the house and bring sweets with him, bars of chocolate, Fry’s Chocolate Cream for his mother, and Five Boys chocolate for Finn, thin and warm from the heat of his pocket.

  ‘Better eat it up quickly, Finn!’ he said. ‘There’s more where that came from!’

  And for a while there had been more, chocolate and sweets and a red clockwork engine made of tin, with sharp edges. ‘Mind your fingers, Finn,’ his mother said. Finn had called it ‘the train that goes itself’ because you wound it up with a little key, But it had stopped, all of it, and not just the engine. As far as he could remember, it had stopped before that day when Mrs Maguire from the Legion of Mary came calling, in her blue petal hat, but how long before, he didn’t know. Was it before or after he had started at his first school? Time was a jigsaw puzzle but nobody had done the edges.

  Finn thought about that school. It had been a small school, run by the nuns. His teacher was called Sister Rosalie, and it was clear that she liked all the children, but if she had any favourites, Finn was one of them. She would say ‘come along now my little hero!’

  The children were supposed to bring in dinner money and a few pennies for the black babies as well. You got a stamp to stick on a card. A girl called Assumpta burst out crying because she thought she would get a black baby all to herself when her card was full. She was distraught when she found out that she couldn’t have one and Sister Rosalie tried to distract her with coloured crayons, but she wouldn’t be consoled for a long time, and heaved with sobs for an hour after. Finn never had any money for the black babies, and sometimes his mother forgot to give him his dinner money as well. Now, he could see that the reason why she ‘forgot’ so often was that she didn’t have it to give, but Sister Rosalie would come to the dinner hall with them and she would always make sure Finn had something to eat, a bit of meat pie and lots of potatoes, with a big bowl of jam sponge and custard to follow.

  ‘Can’t let a growing boy starve, can we?’ she said, smiling at the dinner lady. ‘Fill his plate, so! There’s always plenty of pudding.’

  It had been a very nice school. He had been very happy there, until the day when he stayed at home, the day when Mrs Maguire came to call. He should never have answered the door, never have let her in. But he thought they knew Mrs Maguire. He had seen her in church, and thought that she was one of the people he was allowed to let in. She had asked him lots of questions, fierce questions, too hard for a little lad to answer, most of them. He had started to cry with the fierceness of them all. What was he doing here? And how could a child be left here because it was a scandal? He shouldn’t, he couldn’t, he mustn’t. What was it that he mustn’t do? She seemed enraged about something, her anger filling the room. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong but just thinking about it made him feel guilty. He tried to clear his mind. But the harder he tried to remember, the more blurred and confused the memories became, the pieces a jumble of colours and shapes. All he knew was that he should never have let her in. He had made a mistake. It was all his fault.

  It was after that that they took him away from the nice school, and away from his mother. Mrs Maguire had given him a sour sweet and taken him away in a car. He had never seen his mother again. Somebody at the new school, one of the big, frightening boys, had told him that his mother would have been sent to a place where the nuns were in charge. For a while, when he was still young, he imagined that the nuns must have been like Sister Rosalie and he envied her. But later, he realised that not all nuns were like Sister Rosalie. Later still, he heard about the Magdalen
e Laundries, from other pupils whose mothers and sisters had been taken to such places, and wondered if that was where his mother might be, but nobody would tell him for sure. Nobody would give him any information. If you asked questions, you were beaten for it. He had soon learned to keep his head down.

  A letter had come for him. Only one letter, in all the time he had been at the new school. One of the Brothers had to read it out to him because he couldn’t read very well. The letter was neat and short, on flimsy blue paper. It said that his mother was in a fine place now, working hard and saying her prayers. She was very happy and he was to be a good boy and make himself useful. They took the letter away from him afterwards and said they would put it in a safe place so that he could have it later, but he had never seen it again. He didn’t think that his mother could have been in a fine place at all. He wanted to go and see her, but whenever he asked about visiting her, the responses had ranged from shocked surprise to a cuff round the ear.

  He made a plan. He was going to earn a lot of money and save it all up, and then he was going to take his mother out of that place and bring her home. Even the nuns wouldn’t be able to say no to him when he turned up in his flash car. In some versions of the plan, he roared up on a big motorbike, and his mother clambered onto the back of it, and they drove away together. But how could he ever do that, when he had no idea where she was?

  He must have fallen into a doze, lying fully clothed on his bed at Dunshee, overwhelmed by memories, but somewhere between sleeping and waking, between dream and reality, panic seized him. They were coming in the night. They were coming for him. Still half asleep, he sat up on the bed, his mouth dry, his heart hammering in his chest. Listening. Listening.

  The silence was absolute. But he felt as though he might be going to die. There was something he had done wrong. He had made a mistake. Something his mother had warned him about and he had got things wrong and that was why Mrs Maguire had come. It was all his fault. But he couldn’t remember what it was, only that it was important. A matter of life and death. He woke properly and took deep breaths, trying to calm himself. For weeks now, everything had seemed strange and unreal, even his own face in the mirror. It was all too much. Everything was too much for him. He couldn’t cope with any of it. He drank a mouthful of water from the glass beside his bed and then he stood up. He knew what he had to do. He was certain of it. Other feelings tried to struggle to the surface, nipping at him, reminding him of other allegiances, other powerful emotions, but he suppressed them all. It was what he had learned to do, ruthlessly. It was a matter of priorities. Of survival. He knew what he had to do.