Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Do you ken where you’re going?’ MacPhail had said to her, when finally he had spoken that first day. She’d nodded. Of course she did. She had come here as a child, with her family, she knew both croft and island very well. But she no longer knew the people. Most of the islanders she had got to know, in holiday times, forty years ago, had died or left for the mainland. Once, there had been more than a hundred people living here, but now there were only a dozen. MacPhail was the son of a fisherman who used to take her father out with him, she knew that, but he did not recognise her or her name, though she used her maiden name and had expected him to know it. But it suited her to be thought a stranger and so, when asked, she said only that she knew what the croft was going to be like. MacPhail seemed to doubt this. She saw him watching her closely when they reached it, looking, she was sure, for signs of dismay. She betrayed none. He unloaded her stuff and was gone, to spread the news, she imagined, of the madwoman taking up residence.

  Nobody bothered her. Nobody called to see if she needed anything or to invite her to their house. The few people on the island kept themselves to themselves and expected others to do the same. There was no longer a shop or a school, and the tiny chapel had long been abandoned – no service had been held there for a decade. There had never been a hospital, and now there was no doctor either. Anyone who was ill had to take the ferry to the mainland. There was one farm, on the other side of the island from the croft, but she remembered that even years ago it was hardly worthy of the name. The farmer was old and could hardly look after his hens and goats and the plot where he grew vegetables. His wife was dead, his children long since left, and he was stubbornly resisting all attempts to make him join them. No tourists came, there was nothing to see, no historic connections. If any did venture here, they left quickly. Even on a sunny day, it was not a picturesque island, but a barren, windswept outpost with a range of hills as its backbone and no buildings of architectural interest. Indeed, everything man-made was ugly.

  She had a routine worked out from the beginning and stuck to it in spite of the atrocious weather. Her mood was not one of melancholy but of hope, though hope of what she couldn’t have said. She had energy, and needed to use it, so her walks were long and made at a great pace in spite of the weight of her heavy wellingtons. She went out straight after her breakfast of porridge and long-life milk, and when she returned applied herself to learning not just Gaelic but Italian. She’d brought tapes with her, and books. She was especially determined to master Gaelic, the language of her forefathers, even if hardly anyone spoke it now and she would never be able to practise. Speaking phrases aloud in the croft, she liked the sound; and out on her walks, when she practised talking aloud to herself, the words felt part of the wind. She baked late morning, bread, made with dried yeast, and sometimes cakes like those her mother made, though these used up ingredients too quickly and she did not want to go to the mainland yet to renew her supplies. She made soup, broth, for the evening, enjoying all the chopping and cutting of onions and potatoes and carrots. Only after her second walk did she feel there was a hiatus in her day – she did not quite, at half past four, want to come inside and stay there, but there was no alternative, so she listened to the radio, though the reception was poor, and made the best of those hours. If the rain would only stop, things would be different, but she was not entirely dismayed by its continuation. She felt she was preparing for something and that the weather was forcing her to do so. She couldn’t pretend in these circumstances. She had to face things.

  Every day, going in and out of the croft, she looked at the little painting she’d brought with her, and wondered if she was getting any nearer to understanding it. It looked incongruous, stuck there on the stone wall, hanging perilously from a nail she’d driven into a crack. Some days, she could hardly see it at all.

  *

  On 2 July, the rain stopped. Waking early, Ailsa could not at first account for the light – the room was full of it, every dark corner illuminated. Sitting up, she looked towards the small window, where she had left the shutters open, and saw that it was now a square of gold. Getting up, crossing the room and leaning on the deep sill, she peered out, and there was the sun, already risen from behind the hills, the sky all around it a cloudless blue. Colours she had never known existed emerged on the hillsides, slashes of bright green, streaks of white, great expanses of rich brown. It was as if she had been transported to another country. On her walk, she found tiny white flowers in the sodden grass, and when she reached an inland loch, small and dark like a tarn, there were arctic terns on the water and ravens flying above it. The wood surrounding it was full of trees she recognised and which she hadn’t thought would grow there, birch and willow, aspen and oak. She sat there for a while, looking towards the mainland and making out what she thought might be Ben Nevis.

  All that day she spent outside, glorying in the warmth and brightness. She saw something jump, fifty yards or so from the shore, and knew it was not a fish. It jumped again, further out, and she wondered if it could be a seal. There was no one to tell her. The sea was calm, only the merest ripple disturbing its surface. She lay on the shingle and ran the tiny stones through her fingers, and found herself smiling. Was this happiness? Would it last? Could it last? The trick was to live in the present, hold off memories, refuse to face any future. She wanted to be suspended in time, she wanted her mind to be emptied, and then she would be ready to restock it: it would be under her control.

  This was the beginning.

  *

  It took a while to become accustomed to the change in the weather. She had expected it to be a fluke, and that clouds would soon drift in and the rain start again. But the heatwave went on. She swam in the sea, bitterly cold though it remained, and grew tanned and healthy-looking. One or two people appeared on the beach she went to but did not stay long. She knew she was watched, and wondered about, but beyond the barest of greetings no one troubled her. Inevitably, when her supplies ran out, she had to take the ferry to the mainland and on the boat she saw MacPhail again. He nodded but said nothing, turning away from her for the rest of the trip. But when she had finished shopping, and staggered down to the ferry again with her rucksack full and a large, heavy bag in each hand, he helped her on to the boat. ‘You’ll want a lift home, with a’ that,’ he said, matter-of-fact. ‘I can walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll take my time, leave a bag on the jetty.’ He didn’t reply, but after they’d docked he seized the bags and swung them onto his truck. They drove to the croft in silence, he didn’t bother her with questions, and she was grateful. ‘Thank you,’ she said, gathering her bags together. ‘Any time,’ he said. ‘I’m just up the road.’ She knew that ‘up the road’ was at least two miles and round the end of the hills. She’d seen his house, stone-built like the croft, but with a corrugated iron roof, surrounded by an untidy garden full of old cars and bits of cars. She’d seen his wife, too, a wiry little woman who wore a headscarf and a man’s jacket much too big for her. They had a dog, some sort of mongrel, who barked ferociously if anyone came anywhere near the fence, as Ailsa had done on her walks. The woman had come out, when she heard the barking, but at the sight of Ailsa – who waved – she turned and went back in without responding.

  The only person who did speak to her was the postmistress. The island no longer had a post office but there was a postbox on the jetty which was emptied twice-weekly and the woman who did this also delivered the mail that came over. She had a moped and chugged round the island in a self-important way, sounding her hooter unnecessarily at every bend. She wouldn’t simply leave letters on the doorstep – there was no letter-box in the croft’s door – but insisted on knocking and handing them over one by one, commenting on the postmarks. ‘Two from London,’ she would say. ‘One from South Africa, my that’s done well, getting to here.’ All the time she would stare at Ailsa, quite open about scrutinising her. She was the one who asked, ‘Here for long? Or just the summer, maybe?’ Ailsa smiled, said she didn’t know. ‘Yo
u wouldn’t fancy a winter here,’ the postmistress said. ‘I don’t fancy it myself, and I’ve had plenty of them.’ She, too, said she was ‘just up the road’ if needed. Her house, Ailsa knew, was a bungalow on the far shore, resplendent with a crazy-paving path and two urns, one either side of the bright red door, her front garden full of some hardy shrub which flowered yellow. Her name was Jeannie, Jeannie McKay. It was the only name Ailsa had been offered, apart from MacPhail’s.

  The letters Jeannie brought felt like an interruption: calls to duty that troubled her. Both her sons wrote regularly, or rather Cameron wrote and James’s wife wrote for him since James was too lazy actually to do so himself. His concern was real, though, or so Melissa said. ‘James has sleepless nights worrying about you,’ Melissa wrote. Cameron didn’t mention sleepless nights but sounded irritated, asking why she had to be so ‘awkward’, spiriting herself away like that to some godforsaken remote Scottish island. It was, he wrote, ‘unnecessary’, and Dad would not have wanted her to go there. Well, he was right. ‘Dad’, Paul, would certainly have poured scorn on this retreat of hers. He wouldn’t even have begun to understand what she hoped to gain by coming to the island.

  But then Paul’s understanding of her had been limited, and it was her own fault. She had allowed him to cast her in a certain mould and never once had she tried to break out of it. She was meant to be content with motherhood and domesticity and to feel no need for any other fulfilment – a common enough expectation, back in 1957, when they had married. In any case, what could she have done? She had no training for anything, marrying Paul as she did when she was eighteen. She’d been meant to go to Edinburgh University, to read Modern Languages, but then she met Paul, and any thoughts of further education vanished. She knew, given her time over again, she would do exactly the same. She became an army wife, without realising it, which meant constant moving from one base to another, and then came the birth of the boys and the frightening realisation that she felt trapped and inadequate. And what had been Paul’s response? ‘Nonsense, you’re just tired, having two babies so close together.’

  He was always ambitious and determined, never content to stay still – she couldn’t keep up with him. His leaving the army and going into business did not help her feelings of inadequacy, though she benefited from the stability it gave her. Paul was hardly at home, working all hours, leaving her to bring up the boys. When he was there, he was something of a tyrant and she used all her own feeble energies to protect her sons. That, she supposed, is when it began, the dreadful awareness of not being entirely happy. She tried to hide it, and had maybe been too convincing. She never complained to Paul, but instead took pride in playing the part he wanted her to play, because she couldn’t see what else she could do. Never once did it enter her head that she could find another life – she was much too afraid of being alone and much too loyal to find anyone else.

  From the island, she wrote back to Cameron, and to James and Melissa, feeling bound to. Her letters, she made sure, were cheerful though there was not much content. She told them about how beautiful the barren island had become in the sun, and how well she felt, leading such an outdoor life. But she didn’t invite them to visit her, nor did she mention returning to London. They had to be content with that. She didn’t, in any case, believe that her sons, or her daughter-in-law, were truly worried about her – they were just going through the motions of concern, and were perhaps also a little embarrassed at her withdrawal. ‘You’ll be turning to religion next,’ Cameron had said, when she’d told him where she was going. But no, she wouldn’t. Paul had been the Catholic. She had never had any faith.

  Other letters delivered by Jeannie over the weeks were more problematic, and disrupted her days more seriously. There was one, forwarded from London by Cameron (she had made no formal forwarding arrangements), from Lucasta Jenkinson. In a way, Ailsa had been expecting it. The woman had left the church swiftly on the day of the funeral but Ailsa had felt somehow that this would not be the last she would know of her. Her appearance at the funeral had made her angry. This letter made her angrier still. Before reading it, but having opened it and looked at the signature, Ailsa speculated as to its purpose. An apology? She didn’t think so. It would not, she thought, be in the character of what she knew about Lucasta Jenkinson to apologise years later for having an affair with someone’s husband. What, then, would her letter be about? Something about Paul? Some tribute? Some regrets? When finally she read it, Ailsa was surprised. She ought to have known that this letter had been written because the writer wanted something.

  *

  Three glorious weeks, and then the clouds came again, but they did not bring rain. There were once more great banks of clouds, every day, filling the sky, greying it over, and then, towards dusk, they raced away and for an hour the sky would clear and the sun set splendidly, a magnificent red. There was a wind most days, coming in from the Atlantic, but it never built up into a storm. Ailsa changed her routine, adapting to the weather. She still went out every morning, to walk, but in the afternoons she turned to studying, Italian now more than Gaelic, and began trying to make something of what passed for a garden. She doubted if anything would grow, but she enjoyed preparing a small patch of ground: the digging and turning of the soil helped her to think better than walking round the island did.

  What she was still thinking about was how to reply to Lucasta Jenkinson’s letter. For a while, she thought she would not reply to it at all – why should she? The woman had a cheek; she did not deserve a response. Then she veered towards thinking that it would be more satisfying to send an extremely curt reply: what you have asked is out of the question, please do not bother me again. But that did not seem appropriate either, and the longer Ailsa left it, the harder any letter seemed. She began to become obsessed, dangerously so, by the whole problem – her mind raced with alternative letters and she was near to making herself ill with repressed fury. Again and again, she looked at the little painting Lucasta Jenkinson had had the temerity to ask to be returned to her, and began to hate it. She should destroy it, then write saying she had done so. That would settle the matter. It would be spiteful, mean, the act of a philistine, of a vandal, but why should she care? Yet Paul had spoken of it when he was dying and to destroy something which had had some strange power over him, and that she herself had grown to love, too, would be akin to sacrilegious. She would have to reply.

  *

  Once she’d posted the letter in the box on the jetty, she realised how unsatisfactory it had been. It had come out more passionate than she had intended, and was far from being the polite, cold little note she had aimed for. Again and again, planning what she would say, she had schooled herself to hold back on emotion, and above all not to reveal how Paul had mentioned the painting as he was dying – that was an entirely personal and precious memory which belonged only to her. She wished, also, that she had not let Lucasta Jenkinson know that she did indeed have the painting. It would have been perfectly easy to say she had no knowledge of it and that all Paul’s effects had now been dispersed. But she had admitted to having the painting, and said that she could not possibly part with it. That would have been sufficient, but she had spoiled the dignified effect by adding that she bitterly resented Lucasta Jenkinson’s request and thought it cruel of her to make it. ‘You spoiled our marriage,’ she wrote, ‘which is something I cannot, even now, forgive you for.’

  This was the sentence that kept coming back to torture her – it was foolish, unfair, childish. Paul had done the ‘spoiling’ and what had been spoiled had already been far from perfect. It was her pride that was hurt, and, most of all, she had resented the fact that he had told her about his affair – it could have been conducted discreetly as she came to suspect previous liaisons had been. But he had had to confess and by doing so humiliate her, and then on top of that to suggest ‘terms’, all to do with maintaining appearances. She should have refused his terms, thrown them in his face and told him she wanted a divorce or at le
ast a formal separation. But she was not a woman who could survive alone, or so she believed.

  So they had carried on afterwards, for all those years, the marriage never recovering, just the husk of it remaining, solid though it might appear. And she had realised only during Paul’s illness that she was stronger than she had ever believed and was more than ready, far too late, to be on her own. She dared to start thinking that she could have a life that had nothing to do with him. She did not want him back from the dead. In her letter to Lucasta Jenkinson she made no mention of this unpalatable truth though she had longed to, and by saying her marriage had been ‘spoiled’ she knew she had created the opposite impression. The woman would think she had always loved Paul and that her rage was due to the jealousy and resentment she still felt. But it was not – the anger was because she could have stood on her own, left Paul, or made him choose, and she never had done. But there was another source of fury which she had not let creep into her letter, about the painting itself. Lucasta Jenkinson had written that she had given it to Paul to help him understand why she had to be on her own again, but that she had regretted parting with it ever since. The memory of it had haunted her for years now, and she realised she had been wrong to part with it. It had been a present from her father to her mother, and she should never have let it go. Paul, she thought, had probably never understood its significance and she doubted if he had treasured it. If Ailsa could return the painting, hers would be a magnanimous gesture she would greatly appreciate.

  But I am not inclined to be magnanimous, Ailsa had decided. She’d grown fond, truly fond, of the painting, and had got into the habit of looking at it each time she left and re-entered the room, as though checking that nothing had changed. The chair was still empty, the posy of flowers still bright, the window still closed and curtained. She’d noticed tiny details never evident to her before – the texture of the floor, the exact pattern of the wickerwork in the chair – but still she felt the atmosphere evaded her. Had Paul really understood anything about his mistress from it? Or was she right, and he had not seen what she had seen? Sometimes, especially during the weeks of rain when she came in soaked, there had been a warmth there, a welcoming glow of serenity from the picture, but other days the sense of some significant absence was overpowering. She wished the canvas were bigger, that she could see more of what was going on in order to make up her mind about whether this was a happy or a sad picture. It was impossible to decide.