by Peter May
It had taken until the early hours for the two men to work themselves halfway down the second bottle. Fin had woken up on the settee some time after seven with the smell of bacon wafting through from the kitchen.
There had been no sign of Donald as Catriona served him a plate of bacon, egg, sausage and fried bread at the kitchen table. She had gone to bed long before they had finished with the whisky, and made no comment about the amount consumed. Neither Fin nor she had felt much like engaging in conversation. That she disapproved of him, and whatever had happened the night before, was evidenced by her silence.
The rain had stopped some time during the night, and already soft southern winds had dried the grasses, another change in the weather. The sun had rediscovered its warmth, and fought to take the edge off the wind.
Fin needed the air to clear a head still fuzzy and delicate from the words and whisky that he and Donald had spilled and consumed between them. He had not been back to his tent yet, dreading to think what state it might now be in, having left it open to the elements all night. There was a chance it might be gone altogether, and he wasn’t sure that he was ready yet to face that possibility.
Whether drawn by his subconscious, or by pure chance, he found himself on the track leading to Crobost Cemetery, where headstones stood out on the rise of the hill like the spines of a porcupine. All the Macleods and Macdonalds and Macritchies, the Morrisons and Macraes, who had lived and died in this narrow neck of the world were buried here. Hard like rock, and carved out from the mass of humanity by the wind and the sea and the rain. Among them his own parents. He wished, now, he had brought Robbie back to put him in the ground here with his ancestors. But Mona would never have allowed it.
He stopped at the gate. It was here that Artair had told him all those years before that he and Marsaili were married. A part of him had died that day with the loss, finally, of the only woman he had ever loved. The woman he had driven from his life, by thoughtlessness and cruelty. A self-inflicted loss.
He thought about her now. Saw her in his mind’s eye. Skin flushed by the wind, hair unravelling behind her. Pictured those cornflower-blue eyes piercing through all his protective armour, disarming him with her wit, breaking his heart with her smile. And he wondered if there was any way back. Or was it true what he had told Fionnlagh? That they hadn’t been able to make it work all those years before, why would it be any different now? The pessimist in him knew that it probably was. And being consumed by pessimism, it was only the tiniest part of him that thought they had any chance at all. Was that why he had come back? In pursuit of that smallest of chances?
He didn’t open the gate. He had revisited the past too often, and found only pain.
With alcohol still fogging his brain, he turned weary feet in the direction of the road home, past the school where he had so often walked with Artair and Marsaili. It hadn’t changed much. Nor had the long straight road that led up to the Crobost stores, the silhouette of the church on the hill, and all the houses standing four-square to the wind along the ridge. Nothing grew here but the hardiest shrubs. Only man, and the homes he built, could stand up to the fury of the weather that swept in across the Atlantic. But only for so long. As the cemetery on the cliffs and the ruins of so many blackhouses could testify.
Fionnlagh’s car still sat on the apron in front of the store, where it had been abandoned the night before, its ignition key lost somewhere in the bog. No doubt Fionnlagh would return some time later in the day to hotwire it and take it home. Fin’s car stood proud near the summit of the hill, buffeted by the breeze at the top of the path leading down to Marsaili’s bungalow. He had handed his keys to the boy and told him to take Donna and the child home with him, then driven back in Donald’s car to the manse.
He knocked at the kitchen door before going in. Donna turned from the table where she had poured herself a bowl of cereal, her face a mask of apprehension. She relaxed only a little when she saw that it was Fin. Her features were devoid of all colour. Painfully pale. Shadows beneath frightened eyes. Her eyes flickered past him, as if she suspected he might not be alone.
‘Where’s my dad?’
‘Sleeping off a hangover.’
Her face creased in disbelief. ‘You’re kidding.’
And Fin realized that Donna knew only the biblethumping, God-fearing, self-righteous bully that Donald had become. She had no idea of the real man who hid behind the religious shell he had grown to conceal his vulnerability. The Donald Murray that Fin had known as a boy. The man he had glimpsed briefly once again in the small hours of this morning, when whisky had lowered his defences.
‘Where’s Fionnlagh?’
She nodded towards the living room. ‘He’s feeding Eilidh.’
Fin frowned. ‘Eilidh?’
‘The baby.’
And he realized it was the first time he had heard her name. She had only ever been referred to as ‘the baby’ or ‘the child’. And he had never thought to ask. He caught Donna looking at him with eyes that seemed to read him so easily, and he felt himself blushing. He nodded and went through to find Fionnlagh sitting in an armchair, cradling the baby in his left arm, holding a feeding bottle to her lips in his right hand. Wide eyes in a tiny face stared up at her father with absolute trust.
Fionnlagh seemed almost uncomfortable at his father finding him like this, but he was in no position to move. Fin sat down in the armchair opposite, and an uneasy silence settled on them. Finally Fin said, ‘Eilidh was my mother’s name.’
Fionnlagh nodded. ‘I know. That’s who she’s named after.’
Fin had to blink hard to disperse the moisture that gathered suddenly in his eyes. ‘She’d have loved that.’
A pale smile drifted across the boy’s face. ‘Thanks, by the way.’
‘What for?’
‘Stepping in last night. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t showed up.’
‘Running away’s not the answer, Fionnlagh.’
The sudden fire of indignation flared in the young man. ‘Then what is? We can’t go on like this.’
‘No, you can’t. But you can’t throw your lives away either. You can only do the best for your child by making the best of yourselves.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘For a start you need to make your peace with Donald.’
Fionnlagh gasped and turned his head away.
‘He’s not the monster you think he is, Fionnlagh. Just a misguided man who thinks he’s doing the best for his daughter and his granddaughter.’
Fionnlagh started to protest, but Fin raised a hand to stop him.
‘Talk to him, Fionnlagh. Tell him what it is you want to do with your life, and how you intend to do it. Show him that you mean to support Donna and Eilidh when you can, and marry his daughter when you’re able to offer her a future.’
‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life!’ Fionnlagh’s frustration caused his voice to crack.
‘Hardly anyone does at your age. But you’re bright, Fionnlagh. You need to finish school, go to university. Donna, too, if that’s what she wants to do.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘Stay here. The three of you.’
‘The Reverend Murray’ll never accept that!’
‘You don’t know what he’ll accept until you talk to him. I mean, think about it. You’ve got much more in common than you know. He only wants the best for Donna and Eilidh. And so do you. All you have to do is convince him of that.’
Fionnlagh closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Easier said than done.’
The rubber teat slipped from Eilidh’s mouth, and she burbled her protest. Fionnlagh refocused his attention on her and slipped it back between tiny milky lips.
Fin recognized Donald’s car parked where his own should have been, on the curve of the road above the derelict croft and his wind-battered tent. Heavy low cloud scraped and grazed itself against the rise and fall of the land, pregnant with rain, but holding
it still as if in realisation that the ground below was already beyond saturation.
Fin reached the car and looked around. But there was no sign of Donald. At least his tent was still there, beat up and bedraggled, guys slack and vibrating crazily in the wind, but still clinging to their pegs. He slithered down the slope towards it, and through the open flap saw that there was someone inside. He knelt down and crawled in to find a tousled-looking Donald Murray sitting crosslegged on the sleeping bag, the hit-and-run folder open on his knees.
Anger spiked through Fin and he grabbed the folder away. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
Donald was startled. And seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, Fin. I didn’t mean to pry, honestly. I came down looking for you and found the tent open, and the contents of your folder blowing all over the place. I just gathered up the sheets, and …’ He paused. ‘I couldn’t help seeing what it was.’
Fin couldn’t meet his eye.
‘I had no idea.’
Fin tossed the folder towards the back of the tent. ‘It’s old news.’ He backed out of the tent and stood up into the wind. The great rolling banks of cloud seemed to be just above his head, pressing down on him, and he felt the odd spit in his face. Donald clambered out after him, and the two men stood side by side, looking down the slope of the croft towards the cliffs and the beach below. It was some minutes before they spoke.
‘You ever lost a child, Donald?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘It’s gut-wrenching. As if your life no longer has any meaning. You just want to curl up and die.’ He turned quickly towards the minister. ‘And don’t give me any shit about God, and some higher purpose. That would only make me more mad at Him than I already am.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
Fin shrugged and pushed his hands into the pockets of his oilskins and started off down the slope towards the cliffs. Donald hurried to catch him up. Fin said, ‘He was just eight years old, Donald. We didn’t have a great marriage, Mona and me, but we’d made Robbie, and in a way that made some kind of sense of us.’
They could see now, below them, the sea rolling in off the Minch in great slow-motion waves that smashed in white, frothing fury on the rocks all along the coast, sending spray thirty feet in the air.
‘She was out with him one day. They’d been shopping. She had bags in one hand, Robbie’s hand in the other. It was a pelican crossing. Go for pedestrians. And this car just came straight through the lights. Bang. She went up in the air, he went under the wheels. She survived, he died.’ He briefly closed his eyes. ‘And we died, too. Our marriage, I mean. Robbie had been the only reason for staying together. Without him we simply fell apart.’
They had almost reached the edge of the cliffs now, where weather erosion had made the soil unstable and it was unsafe to get any closer. Fin squatted down suddenly, and plucked the soft wet bloom from a single head of white bog cotton, rolling it gently between thumb and forefinger. Donald squatted down beside him, the ocean growling and snarling beneath them, as if hoping to pluck them from the cliff’s edge and suck them down into the deep. It spat its spray in their faces.
‘What happened to the driver?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t stop. They never got him.’
‘Do you think they ever will?’
Fin turned his head to look at him. ‘I don’t know that there’s any way I can move forward with my life until they do.’
‘And if they found him?’
‘I’d kill him.’ Fin twisted the bog cotton between his fingers and threw it into the wind.
‘No you wouldn’t.’
‘Trust me, Donald. Given the chance, that’s just what I’d do.’
But Donald shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t, Fin. You don’t know anything about him. Who he is, why he didn’t stop that day, what kind of hell he’s been through since.’
‘Tell it to someone who gives a damn.’ Fin stood up. ‘I saw you last night, Donald. The look in your eyes, when you thought you were losing your baby girl. And all she was doing was catching a ferry. Think how you’d feel if someone laid hands on her, hurt her, killed her. You wouldn’t be turning the other cheek. It would be an eye for an eye, and fuck what Gandhi said.’
‘No, Fin.’ Donald stood up too. ‘I can imagine I would feel many things. Rage, pain, a desire for revenge. But it wouldn’t be my place. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. I would have to believe that somehow, somewhere, justice would be done. Even if it was in the next life.’
Fin looked at him for a long time, lost somewhere in myriad thoughts. At length he said, ‘There are times, Donald, I wish I had your faith.’
Donald smiled. ‘Then maybe there’s hope for you yet.’
And Fin laughed. ‘Not a chance. Souls don’t come any more lost than this one.’ He turned quickly away. ‘Come on. I know a path down to the rocks.’ And he headed off along the cliffs, too perilously close to the edge for Donald’s comfort as he chased after him.
After about fifty yards, the land dipped down, cliff giving way to crumbling peat and shale, sheltered from the sea’s assault by a towering cluster of rocks that stacked up from the shore. A ragged path led down at an angle to a protected shingle beach, almost hidden from the sea itself and nearly impossible to reach from either side. Only a matter of feet away, the ocean vented its anger all along the rocky shallows, the roar of it muffled by the stacks that kept it at bay. The clearest of water gathered in pools among the rocks below them, and the spray blew high over their heads.
‘This was my secret place when I was a kid,’ Fin said. ‘I used to come down here when I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I never came back after my parents were killed and I went to live with my aunt.’
Donald looked around this tiny oasis of calm, the sound of the sea echoing around it, so close and yet so far away. Even the wind barely made it down here.
‘I’ve been a couple of times since I got back.’ Fin smiled sadly. ‘Maybe I thought I’d find the old me still here. A ghost from an age of innocence. Nothing but pebbles and crabs, though, and a very distant echo of the past. But I think that’s probably only in my head.’ He grinned and planted one foot on a ledge of rock. ‘What did you come to see me about?’
‘I woke up thinking about Tormod, and his stolen identity.’ Donald laughed. ‘Well, after I’d drunk about a pint of water and swallowed two paracetamol, that is. I haven’t had that much whisky in a long time.’
‘Catriona will be banning me from the manse.’
Donald grinned. ‘She already has.’
Fin laughed, and it felt good to laugh with Donald again after all these years. ‘So what was it you thought about Tormod?’
‘There was an article in the Gazette a couple of months ago, Fin. About a genealogy centre down at the south end of Harris. Seallam, it’s called. One man’s hobby that became an obsession. And now it’s just about the most comprehensive record of family relationships in the Outer Hebrides. Better than any church or government records. This guy’s traced tens of thousands of family connections from the islands as far as North America and Australia. If anyone has a record of the Macdonald family and all its branches, it would be him.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you think?’
Fin nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think it would be worth a look.’
TWENTY-FOUR
The drive south took Fin past Luskentyre and Scarista where he had gone the day before with George Gunn. He had been on the road nearly two hours when the bare green hills of South Harris rose up from the valley to dwarf the tiny settlements that clung tenaciously to the banks of the small lochs that flooded the gorges.
Beyond the single-storey white building with its pitched roofs that housed the Seallam visitor centre, cream-coloured cloud flowed down the sides of a conical hill like an erupting volcano. Unusually, the wind had dropped, and an unnatural still hung in the valley with the mist.
Dwarf pines crowded around the few houses that made up the vil
lage of Northton – An Taobh Tuath in the Gaelic. Yellow irises and the pink bloom of flowering azaleas lined the road, rare colour in a monotone landscape. A sign read: SEALLAM! Exhibitions, Genealogy, Teas/Coffees.
Fin parked in a gravel area on the far side of a stream that wound its way down between the hills, and he followed a rough path to the small wooden bridge that took him over it and across to the centre. A big man with a fuzz of white hair fringing an otherwise bald head introduced himself as Seallam’s consultant genealogist, Bill Lawson. He pushed enormous seventies teardrop glasses back up on to the bridge of a long nose and confessed to being the man whose hobby had become the obsession described by the Stornoway Gazette.
He was only too happy to show Fin the huge wall maps of North America and Australia that comprised a part of the centre’s public exhibition. Clusters of black-headed pins identified settlements of Hebridean families who had gone in search of new lives in California, the eastern seaboard of the United States, Nova Scotia, south-eastern Australia.
‘What exactly is it you’re looking for?’ he asked Fin.
‘It’s one particular family. The Macdonalds of Seilebost. Murdo and Peggy. They had a son called Tormod who drowned in a boating accident in 1958. They left their croft some time in the early sixties, and may have gone abroad. It’s now lying derelict.’
‘That should be simple enough,’ the genealogist said, and Fin followed him through to a small sales and reception area where shelves groaned with coffee-table tomes, and hard-cover tourist guides to the islands. Bill Lawson stooped to recover a volume from a pile of buff-coloured publications on the bottom shelf. ‘These are our croft histories of Harris,’ he said. ‘We do it by village and croft. Who lived there, when and where they went. Everything else changes, but the land itself stays in the same place.’ He flipped through the pages of the spiral-bound book. ‘Prior to civil registration in 1855 information was thin on the ground. What information was kept was all in a foreign language. English.’ He smiled. ‘So you got what the registrar thought the name should be. Wrong in many cases. And often they just weren’t interested. Same as the church records. Some ministers kept a faithful register. Others couldn’t be bothered. We’ve combined word-of-mouth with the official records kept since 1855, and when the two match up you can be pretty sure it’s accurate.’