Beyond the Sea

by Melissa Bailey

  The ring of the telephone shattered the companionable silence.

  Freya put down the knife, wiped her hands and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  Freya looked at Marta and rolled her eyes. It was Joan. ‘Hi, Mum. How’s things?’

  ‘Better for getting hold of you again. It seems you’re elusive even on a tiny island.’ Her mother let the rebuke hang on the air for a second before stampeding through her news and settling close to where she really wanted the conversation to be. ‘And, darling, how are you?’

  ‘I’m okay. It’s nice to have Marta here.’

  ‘Well, of course. It’s important to have company.’ Freya smiled. Slowly they were inching towards it. ‘Which reminds me. I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages. Have you been in touch with Alister?’

  Freya hadn’t seen or spoken to Jack’s father since the funeral. She found him a difficult, stern Scotsman, all facts and rigidity. In his life, everything could be explained, nothing was uncertain. And, after the accident, Freya felt that there was nothing but uncertainty in hers.

  ‘Really, Freya, you should get in touch. He’s all alone now, you know.’

  Freya nodded. This was her mother’s way of saying that Alister had lost his son and his grandson; that this was a family tragedy and not just Freya’s personal loss. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I promise I’ll call him.’

  ‘Well, you should. Especially as he sent that jar on to the museum. That was so nice of him.’ Her mother paused and Freya waited for the next assault. ‘And what of Torin? You must have been to see him by now?’

  ‘Not yet. I haven’t been here very long, remember?’ Freya blushed nonetheless. Even the lightest of her mother’s touches had always been able to make her feel guilty. ‘But I’m planning a visit soon.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it. Really, Freya, you can’t closet yourself away up there.’

  Now they were getting closer to it, to what she really wanted to say.

  ‘So, darling, have you had any thoughts about when you are coming home?’

  There it was. Clearly her parents had been hoping, ever since she arrived at Ailsa Cleit, that being there would prove too much and she would come straight back to London. But now she had been at the lighthouse nearly a week, they realised that this wasn’t going to happen. ‘I don’t know, Mum.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ Joan’s incredul-ity was palpable – that there was no plan, no schedule.

  ‘It means that I don’t know,’ Freya shot out. ‘That I’ll come back when I’m ready.’ Then, regretting her snappiness, she added, ‘Besides, Marta’s here.’

  ‘But your sister can’t stay for ever.’ Her mother’s tone was forlorn.

  ‘I know, Mum. But I just need to be here at the moment. I think it’ll help me to come to terms with things.’

  ‘But, darling,’ her mother persisted, ‘I don’t see why you can’t come to terms with things closer to home. Closer to us.’

  Freya raised her eyes heavenwards and tried not to audibly tut. But she knew her mother only did it because she cared. ‘I think a change of scene will be helpful to me.’

  ‘But not one this radical. The doctor didn’t think it would be, did he?’

  Freya smiled. Round one to Joan. She knew there wasn’t much she could counter with when her own doctor had doubted that isolation would be beneficial. ‘Even so, for now, especially with Marta here …’

  Joan was silent on the other end and Freya could picture the pursed lips she always had when her daughter disagreed with her. It was usually around this time in their conversations that her mother admonished her for having inherited the stubbornness of her grandmother, Maggie. Yet it appeared to Freya that Joan had also inherited a healthy dose of stubbornness herself.

  ‘Okay, Freya,’ she said tartly, ‘I’m going to put your father on. See if he can talk some sense into you.’

  And before Freya could say anything else, the baton of the conversation was passed over. Her father chatted amiably enough and only once ventured into the territory his wife liked to plunder. ‘Won’t you come home, darling?’

  She could hear the pleading in his tone. But the truth was that she was already home.

  Freya handed the phone to Marta and moved into the sitting room, towards the bookshelves opposite the sofa, which were clustered, not just with books, but with photographs of her family. There were lots of her, Jack and Sam, as a family and individually. But these were not what she was looking for. Her mother had reminded her of something. Eventually she caught sight of it on the top shelf.

  The photograph had been taken in autumn, a few weeks after Sam’s birth, and in it Joan’s mother, Maggie, was smiling broadly, clutching the bundle that was her grandson tightly to her. Maggie’s once-auburn hair glowed white in the fading daylight and the scene seemed so close, so fresh, that Freya could almost hear her grandmother’s laughter as it floated on the wind that day, as strong but as light as kittiwake wings.

  As Freya looked at the image, the contours of the island visible in the background, the sea in the distance, she remembered her grandmother’s stories of St Kilda, the tiny island on the very fringes of the Outer Hebrides, where Maggie had been born and that she had left in her youth. She never talked about why that was, but Freya thought she knew the reason. For a long time the newborns of St Kilda had been plagued with a mysterious sickness, killing many within days of their birth. Some said it was the islanders’ dirty habits, their unventilated homes; others that it was the pink-tinged oil of the fulmar that they burned or the rich, bitter effect of the bird’s fatty meat on the mothers’ milk. Some said that it was all of these things; others that it was none and that the sole cause was that the midwife was a filthy wench. Her grandmother had never admitted that the sickness was the reason she had left her home, but Freya had always suspected that it was the case. She had seen a future for her children written in the graveyard and decided in that moment upon a different future for herself.

  Freya looked at the photograph of Maggie holding Sam so closely to her, and her eyes filled with tears. If only she had followed in her grandmother’s footsteps, had left behind the danger of this island, however difficult that was for her – perhaps she too would have had a different history to tell.

  ‘Whatever she said, don’t let it upset you.’ Marta had come up quietly behind Freya, her conversation with their parents over.

  ‘She didn’t say anything.’ Freya managed a smile.

  ‘Yeah, but sometimes she has a way of saying something without actually saying it.’

  Freya nodded. She showed the picture to Marta.

  ‘Ah, our beautiful Scottish grandmammy,’ said Marta.

  ‘Mum thinks I’m as stubborn as her. Perhaps I am.’ Maybe more so, she thought, as she imagined Maggie, suitcase in hand, sailing away from dimly lit, smoky houses on an island far away.

  ‘So what if you are?’ Marta paused. ‘It’s not your fault, Freya. You have to accept that sometime.’

  Freya nodded, blinking away tears.

  ‘Now come and eat. And then you need to go to bed. You look exhausted.’

  They sat down at the kitchen table and Marta dished out risotto and salad. For a while they ate in silence.

  ‘Mum told me about the soldier’s letters.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I’d like to see them if that’s okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ Freya nodded. She was overcome with tiredness. Conversations with her mother always made her feel that way. ‘We can read them together. But, for now, do you mind if I go to bed? I’m shattered.’

  ‘Of course not. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Freya woke suddenly out of sleep. The room was cold and dark and, even though she couldn’t see, she knew that the sheets were soaking. She could feel them beneath her body. Her sleep had been filled with the sound of her grandmother’s laughter, punctuated with the crying of babies, unable to feed, lingering painfully on t
he brink. Then there had been letters stained with salt, whether from tears or the sea she didn’t know, ships and shipwrecks. She sat upright and waited for the images from the dream to subside, then she threw off the duvet, lay back down and tried to think of something, anything else.

  For a moment she concentrated on the sound of the sea. The rise and fall, the ebb and flow. The wind was up tonight. She could tell from the surf crashing against the beach. The waves out on the ocean would be high and rolling. As her mind strove to focus on this, driving away bleaker, blacker thoughts, she heard a plaintive, melancholy noise. After a moment it was gone, dissolved by the sea. But the next instant it came again. A haunting, almost human cry. What was it? Freya sat upright again and listened intently. Perhaps it was migrating whales? But surely it was a little early in the year for them. Besides, she had heard their noise before and she was sure it was different to this. She waited for the sound to return, half wanting it not to. It was eerie, hard on the heels of her dreams. But nothing more rose out of the blackness. Eventually, she got out of bed and made her way up the hallway to the guest bedroom. The door was ajar so she pushed it open. The room was dark and still.

  ‘Marta?’ she whispered.

  Nothing came back to her but silence. Her sister was asleep, oblivious to what she had heard.

  She closed the door and headed back down the hallway to the kitchen. At the threshold she paused again and listened. But she couldn’t hear anything beyond the usual sounds of the night. She gazed into the dimness of the kitchen’s interior, but it all looked the same as usual. As she turned around to go to bed, her hand glanced against the wooden doorway that none of them were allowed through. She ran her fingers slowly over the cool metal guarding the entrance to the lighthouse tower. Then her hand fell away and she walked on.

  13

  THE DAY AFTER the phone call with her parents, Freya made the journey to the tiny village in the south of Mull.

  She knocked on the door and waited. Meanwhile, butterflies gathered in her stomach. It always took a while for him to answer, she knew. But she was surprised, after all this time, that she still felt the same way. Excitement mingled with a touch of anxiety at what exactly he might say. He had always provoked this response in her since she was a small child.

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and looked at her watch. A minute passed and Freya began to think that she should have called ahead. But he had always seemed to know when she was coming. She was just raising her hand to knock again when the door opened silently and without warning. Instinctively she smiled. An old man stood in front of her, in a pair of faded beige cords and a shirt, of similar insipid colour, with flecks of red and green running through it. His face was brown and wrinkled, like a walnut, while his hair, in distinction, was a wiry eruption of white. For as long as she could remember, he had always looked like this; outside of time, he never seemed older or younger.

  For a few moments neither of them said anything. Freya held her breath while the man stared out into the day with milky, unseeing eyes. Then, suddenly, he smiled. ‘Freya. I was wondering when you would come. I’ve been expecting you.’

  ‘Hello, Torin,’ she said, and felt tears suddenly close. She hadn’t appreciated until now just how much she had missed him.

  ‘And Marta is staying with you, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. For the moment.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘She sends you her love and told me to tell you she’ll come next time.’

  Torin nodded. ‘Of course. Come nearer,’ he said softly.

  She stepped forwards and his wizened hands reached for her face. He ran his fingers gently over her skin, tracing the indents of her eyes and the lines around them and on her forehead. So many more now than there had been when they last met over a year ago. His hands moved across her head, in the same light way as a priest during a blessing, and he murmured something to himself. Freya watched the movement of his thin, pale lips. It was as if he was incanting.

  After a moment he spoke out loud again. ‘You and I could almost be twins now.’ He gave a lock of her hair a playful tug.

  She nodded and her cheeks flushed. ‘It’s one of the many things I’m still not used to. I keep forgetting …’ and her voice petered out.

  Torin stared at her for a moment and Freya felt herself becoming as transparent as a pane of glass. Then the old man’s gaze dropped and he gestured to the house. ‘Come in, my dear. So much to talk about. Did you make the frushie yourself?’

  Freya paused. ‘Yes,’ she said, after a moment, looking down at the box of apple cake dangling from her fingers. ‘Just how did you know about that?’ she continued, shaking her head.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ said the old man, and smiled again.

  Torin had second sight. Or, at least, that’s what half of the locals said about him. The others claimed it was nothing more than a fiction. There was nothing otherworldly about his blindness. They said he had lived peaceably with his wife on a livestock farm in Ireland until she had discovered his affair with her sister (or brother, depending on the source). The betrayal broke her heart and claimed her sanity, and just before she killed herself, she poisoned Torin with a concentrated dose of formic acid, a preservative she had used in the animal feed. The result was that he lost his sight and, along with it, his capacity to love again. Other stories were less ornate. Some claimed he was the son of a witch, others the offspring of a madman. But no one knew his true heritage. He never spoke of his family or where he originally came from. And he had lived on Mull for such a long time now that people almost treated him as one of their own. Those who did not simply ignored him.

  Freya’s Scottish grandmother, Maggie, had been Torin’s neighbour for most of her life. So Freya had seen him regularly over the years – on family trips to Scotland during the school holidays; on journeys she later made by herself to see her grandmother. She had heard all manner of stories about him. But she knew the truth of only one – that he could see things that other people could not. Over time she had learned to trust in him and his vision and she had grown to love him. Besides, he had another gift, one that she had adored from being a child. He was a great storyteller. Spinning the yarn, as he called it.

  He was talking now, reminiscing, about when Sam was a baby. She and Jack had brought him to see Maggie. Torin had been keen to hold him. The little wriggler, he’d called him, as Sam squirmed right out of his arms and fell, head first, onto the tiled kitchen floor. Freya had turned cold, Maggie had gone crazy and Torin had been exiled from the house. He chuckled now in the remembrance of it – Jack, the calm one, bundling the whole family off to hospital, Maggie yelling from the departing car, why hadn’t he seen it coming?

  Freya smiled but she wasn’t really listening. She heard the dulcet tone of his voice, the lilt of his words, but she couldn’t focus on what he was saying. She found it painful. So instead she concentrated on the view from the window in front of her, taking in the lush expanse of Torin’s garden and its subtle incline down to the water’s edge. Loch Scridain glinted blue in the afternoon sunlight and the grey-green hills beyond it seemed to sprout right out of the water. An eagle, or a kestrel, she couldn’t tell which from this distance, was circling high over the loch, and the sky was spattered with small white clouds. It was a beautiful place, but an isolated one for a blind man living alone. Freya’s gaze shifted momentarily to her old friend and realised he had fallen silent.

  She picked up the teapot from the table between them and poured them both another cup. Then she placed a second piece of cake on Torin’s plate. ‘It’s funny,’ she said at last, taking up the delicate thread of the conversation. ‘But sometimes it doesn’t feel as if they’re gone at all. I keep expecting them to walk through the door, from work or school, from football practice or whatever. And then, eventually, there’s a slow realisation, or a sudden recollection, I’m not sure which one is worse, that it isn’t going to happen. They’re gone. And I’m alone.’ Freya s
topped, took a breath and licked her lips. Should she tell Torin that sometimes the sense of loneliness was so acute that she could taste its bitterness in her throat, feel its touch and weight upon her? As if, heavy and oppressive, it was invading her body. And that, in her darkest moments, she imagined she could vanish beneath it. She took another breath. Perhaps, sometime, she would tell him all these things. But for now she said nothing.

  Torin was nodding silently, his cloudy eyes staring ahead. Freya followed his gaze out over the water and wondered, not for the first time, if he could tell that there was sunlight and a dappled sky, or whether there was nothing there for him but darkness. She had asked him about it long ago and his answer had been vague. So she wasn’t sure. One thing she was sure of, however, was that Torin knew a thing or two about being alone.

  ‘Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it?’ he mused, and Freya wondered if he was talking about his blindness or solitariness, both or neither. Torin nodded again and his hand reached for the cake beside him. He broke off a corner and brought it slowly to his mouth. But he held it there, uneaten, for a moment, perhaps indulging a thought that had just come to mind. Freya both loved and hated this about him. He always took his time, in what he said and what he did.

  ‘What you were saying reminds me of something, although the situations are different. Some said that was the work of loneliness. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. It may simply have been the result of being alone. People said a lot of things at the time. And later …’ Torin finally placed the cake in his mouth and began to chew, an inscrutable look on his face.

  Freya waited patiently, imagining the narrative gathering pace within him.

  ‘Have you heard of the old lighthouse keepers of the Flannan Islands?’ he said at last.

  ‘I remember something,’ she said. ‘But nothing clearly.’

  ‘There are seven Flannan Islands, as you know. They lie just shy of twenty miles west of the isle of Lewis, at the very fringes of the Hebrides. They’re also called the Seven Hunters, although I don’t know why they are called that.’ Torin paused for a moment, as if trying to remember if he had ever known. ‘They have largely been uninhabited. Hebrideans, superstitious bunch that they are, were always fearful of the islands. Indeed, whenever they set foot upon their shores, they made a turn sunwise and removed their hat and other items of clothing. Such was their way.’