by Peter May
I knew enough, even then, to know that a fever can make you delirious. That you can see things which aren’t there. It had been me holding his hand, and no doubt the nuns had been in and out. It had all merged together in his mind.
‘She had beautiful hands, Johnny. Such long white fingers. Married, too. So it couldn’t have been a nun.’
‘How do you know she was married?’
‘She was wearing a ring on her wedding finger. Not like any ring I’ve ever seen before. Sort of twisted silver, like snakes wrapped around each other.’
I think, then, every hair on my body stood on end. He had never known about our mother giving me her ring. Never knew how I hid it in a sock in the sack at the end of my bed. Never knew how it had gone into the furnace along with everything else that Mr Anderson had thrown into the flames that day.
I suppose it is always possible that some childhood memory of it had remained in his mind, of seeing it on my mother’s hand. But I believe that what he saw that night had nothing to do with lost memories or delirium. I believe that my mother sat with him through all the critical hours of his pneumonia, willing him to live from the other side of the grave. Stepping in to fill the vacuum left by my failed promise to always look out for him.
And I will carry the guilt of that with me to my grave.
It was some days before they let us go home, my arm still in plaster, of course. I was dreading it, afraid of the certain retribution that would be awaiting us at the hands of Donald Seamus. The look on his face when they pulled us out of the crevice was still vivid in my memory.
He turned up at the Sacred Heart in his old van and slid open the side door to let us climb in the back. We drove the twenty minutes down to Ludagh in silence. At the ferry, Neil Campbell asked after us both, and he and Donald Seamus passed a few words, but still he never spoke to us. When we climbed on to the jetty at Haunn, I could see Ceit watching from the door of the O’Henley croft, a tiny figure in blue on the hillside. She waved, but I didn’t dare wave back.
Donald Seamus marched us up the hill to the croft, where Mary-Anne was waiting for us inside, our dinner cooking on the stove, the room filled with the smell of good things to eat. She turned as we came in the door, and gave us a good looking over, but she too said nothing, turning instead back to the pots on her hotplate.
The first words spoken were the grace said in thanks to the Lord for the food on our plates, and then Mary-Anne served us up a meal fit for a king. I wasn’t big on the bible then, but I was minded of the story of the prodigal son, and how his father had welcomed him home as if nothing had happened. We gulped down thick, hot vegetable soup and cleaned our plates with hunks of soft bread torn from a fresh loaf. We had a meat stew and boiled tatties, and bread and butter pudding to finish. I am not sure if I have ever enjoyed a meal so much in my life.
Afterwards, I changed into my dungarees and my wellies and went out to feed the animals, the hens and the pony. Not so easy with your left forearm in plaster. But it felt good to be back. And maybe, for the first time in a year and a half of being there, it felt like home. I went down the croft then, looking for Morag. I was sure she must have missed me, though perhaps a part of me was half afraid that she had forgotten me in my absence. But I couldn’t find her anywhere, and after nearly half an hour of searching I went back up to the house.
Donald Seamus was in his chair by the stove, smoking his pipe. He turned around as the door opened.
‘Where’s Morag?’ I said.
There was an odd dull look in his eyes. ‘You just ate her, son.’
I never let him see how his cruelty affected me, or gave any hint of the tears I cried silently under the covers that night. But he wasn’t finished with me.
The next day he took me up to the shed where they kill the sheep. I’m not sure what it was about that old hut with its rusted tin roof, but you knew the minute you went into it that it was a place of death. I’d never seen a sheep slaughtered before, but Donald Seamus was determined that it was time that I did. ‘Animals are for eating,’ he said. ‘Not for affection.’
He pulled a young sheep into the shed and hauled it up on to its hind legs. He got me to hold it by the horns, struggling while he placed a bucket beneath it, and then he slid out a long, sharp knife that flashed as it caught the light from the tiny window. In one quick, short movement, he drew it across the major artery in the neck and blood spurted out of it into the bucket.
I thought the beast would struggle more, but it gave up on its life almost immediately, big hopeless eyes looking up at me till the blood had all been spilled and the light went out of them.
The same look I saw in Peter’s eyes that night on Charlie’s beach when his throat was cut, too.
The boy’s sitting staring at me now, as if he expects me to say something. In a strange way, I see me in his eyes, and I reach across to take his hand in mine. Damned tears! They blur everything. I feel him squeeze my hand and everything my life is, and has been, seems black with despair.
‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’
TWENTY-SIX
The old cemetery was full to overflowing behind its lichen-covered stone walls, spilling over now into a new one dug into the machair as it rose up the hillside towards the church.
Fin parked his car and walked among the headstones in this extended home for the dead. Death was a crowd, even on a tiny island like this. Crosses growing out of the ground, brutally stark in such a treeless place. So many souls passed from one life to another. All in the shadow of the church where once they had worshipped. A church paid for by fishermen. A church with the bow of a boat beneath its altar table.
On the far side of the fence stood a modern, single-storey bungalow with a conservatory at the back overlooking the Sound. But this was no private dwelling. A red board fixed to the gable end, and an oval sign on the wall of the ramp that led to its side door, revealed it to be a pub, Am Politician. A handy watering hole for the dead, Fin thought, en route from the church to the graveyard, or for their mourners at least. A place to drown their sorrows.
There was a pink, soft-top Mercedes in the car park. A yappy Yorkie dog barked at him from the other side of the glass as he passed it.
It was quiet in the pub, only a handful of customers nursing drinks on this late afternoon. Fin ordered a beer from a garrulous young woman behind the bar who was anxious to explain to him that the pub was named after the boat, The Politician, which had foundered in the Sound en route to the Caribbean during the war.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘anyone who has read Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore will know that its cargo included 28,000 cases of fine malt whisky. And that the islanders spent most of the next six months “rescuing” it and hiding it from the excise man.’
As she produced three bottles reputed to have come from the wreck, still with whisky in them, Fin wondered how many times she had told the story.
He sipped on his pint and changed the subject. ‘That beach on the west side of the island,’ he said. ‘Beyond the cemetery.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why would anyone call it Charlie’s beach?’
The girl shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard it called that.’ She turned and called over to an older woman who was sitting alone in the conservatory gazing out over the Sound while toying with her gin and tonic. ‘Morag, have you ever heard the beach down by called Charlie’s beach?’
Morag turned, and Fin saw that she must have been a striking woman in her day. She had strong features and smooth, tanned skin beneath a chaotic pile of thick, dyed blond hair, giving perhaps the impression of a woman in her fifties, although he could see that she was probably nearer seventy. Both wrists dangled with silver and gold, fingers crusted with rings, and she took a sip of her G amp; T, holding her glass in an elegant hand adorned with long, fuchsia-pink nails. She wore a patterned bolero jacket over a white blouse above diaphanous blue skirts. She was not at all someone you would expect to find in a place like this.
She directed a beatific smile towards them. ‘I have no idea, a ghraidh,’ she said speaking in English, but using the Gaelic term of endearment. ‘But if I were to take a guess, I’d say it would probably be because that’s where the French frigate, the Du Teillay, landed Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Seven Men of Moidart to raise an army for the ‘45 Jacobite rebellion against the English.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ the girl said.
Morag shook her head. ‘They teach you children nothing in school these days. Charlie reputedly sheltered in a cove down there called Coilleag a’ Phrionnsa. The Prince’s Dell.’ She turned rich, brown eyes on Fin. ‘Who wants to know?’
Fin lifted his pint and crossed into the conservatory to shake her hand. ‘Fin Macleod. I’m trying to trace the family who used to live on the croft just below your house.’
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh. You know who I am, then?’
He smiled. ‘Not before I got to the island, no. But it didn’t take long for someone to tell me. I’m making a wild guess here, and it’s nothing to do with the pink Merc in the car park. You’re the actress, Morag McEwan?’
She beamed. ‘A good guess, a ghraidh. You should have been a policeman.’
‘I was.’ He grinned. ‘Apparently I should know you from television.’
‘Not everyone’s a slave to the box.’ She sipped at her gin. ‘You were a policeman?’
‘Just plain old Fin Macleod now.’
‘Well, a ghraidh, I grew up here in the days when all the crofts were still occupied. So if anyone can tell you what you want to know, it’s me.’ She drained her glass and stood up stiffly, her hand shooting out suddenly to support herself on his arm. ‘Damned rheumatics! Come back to my place, Mr Fin Macleod, former policeman, and I’ll pour you a drink or three while I tell you.’ She leaned confidentially towards him, although her voice remained well above the level of a stage whisper. ‘The booze is cheaper there.’
Outside she said, ‘Leave your car here and come with me. You can always walk back for it.’ She slipped into her pink Mercedes to an ecstatic welcome from the Yorkie. And as Fin slid into the passenger seat she said, ‘This is Dino. Dino meet Fin.’ The dog looked at him then jumped into her lap as she started the car and lowered the roof. ‘He loves the wind in his face. And on those rare days when the sun shines, it seems a shame not to have the roof down, don’t you agree?’
‘Absolutely.’
She lit a cigarette. ‘Damned government laws. Can’t enjoy a good smoke over a drink any more, except in your own house.’ She sucked smoke deeply into her lungs and breathed out again with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’
She crunched the car into first gear and kangarooed towards the gate, narrowly missing the gatepost as she swung the wheel to turn them on to the road up the hill. Dino had draped himself over her right arm, face pushed out of the open window into the wind, and she juggled her cigarette and the gear lever to propel them at speed up towards the primary school and the road leading off to the church. Fin found his hands moving down to either side of his seat and gripping it with white knuckles at the end of arms stiff with tension. Morag was oblivious, veering left, and sometimes right, each time she changed gear. Her cigarette ash, and the smoke from her mouth, were whipped away in the rush of air.
‘The Mercedes dealer said they didn’t do pink, when I told them what colour I wanted,’ she said. ‘I told them, of course you do. I showed them my nails, and left them a bottle of the nail varnish so they could get the match just right. When they delivered the car I said, you see, anything’s possible.’ She laughed, and Fin wished she would keep her eye on the road rather than looking at him as she spoke.
They crested the hill, then accelerated down towards the harbour at Haunn, veering right at the last moment around the small bay, and turning up on the new driveway towards Morag’s big white house. They rattled over a cattle grid and crunched across granite chippings interspersed with coloured glass beads.
‘They glow at night when the lights are on,’ Morag said as she and Dino got out of the driver’s side. ‘It’s like walking on light.’
Plaster statues of naked ladies guarded the steps to the deck, while life-sized deer stood or lay in the garden, and a bronze mermaid draped herself over rocks around a small pool. Fin saw tubular neon lighting strung along the fencewire, and blocks of terracotta tiling among clumps of heather and a few hardy flowering shrubs that seemed somehow to have survived the wind. Windchimes sounded all around the house, a constant cacophony of bamboo and steel.
‘Come away in.’
Fin followed Morag and Dino into a hallway where thickpiled tartan carpet led up a broad staircase to the first floor. The walls were covered with prints of Mayflowers and Madonnas, sailboats and saints. Chintzy ornaments stood on Greek columns, and a sleek, full-sized silver cheetah stretched itself out just inside the doorway to the living room and bar, a room lined by picture windows on both sides, and French windows out to the patio. Every available laying space, shelves and tables and bar top, was covered in china statuettes and mirrored jewellery boxes, lamps and lions. The tiled floor was polished to an almost reflective gleam.
Morag tossed her jacket on to a leather recliner and slipped behind the bar to pour their drinks. ‘Beer, whisky? Something more exotic?’
‘A beer would be fine.’ Fin had drunk less than half of his pint at Am Politician. He took his foaming glass from her and wandered through the bric-a-brac to the French windows and their view north across the Sound towards South Uist. Immediately below was the little bay with its tiny stone harbour from which the boat had come and gone across the water to Ludagh in the days before the building of roads had required the car ferry. ‘You were born here?’
‘No. But I did most of my growing up here.’
Fin turned to see her taking a stiff pull at her gin and tonic. The ice in her glass sounded like the windchimes outside. ‘And how does a girl from Eriskay come to be a famous actress?’
She laughed uproariously. ‘I don’t know about famous,’ she said, ‘but the first step for an Eriskay girl to being almost anything other than an Eriskay girl, is to leave the damned place.’
‘What age were you when you left?’
‘Seventeen. I went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Always wanted to be an actress, you see. Ever since they showed a film of Eriskay in the church hall. Not that it was a drama. It was a documentary made by some German chap in the thirties. But there was something about seeing those folk up on the big screen. Something glamorous. And, I don’t know, it gave them a kind of immortality. I wanted that.’ She chuckled and moved out from behind the bar to drape herself on the settee. Dino immediately jumped up on to her knee. ‘I got very excited once when a teacher on the island let the kids know that he would be showing films at his house. It was just after the electricity came, and everyone squeezed into his sitting room to see them. Charged us a penny each, he did, then projected slides of his holiday in Inverness. Imagine!’ She roared with laughter, and Dino raised his head and barked twice.
Fin smiled. ‘Did you come back for visits?’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, never. Spent years working in theatre in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and pantos around Scotland. Then I got offered my first part in TV by Robert Love at Scottish Television and never looked back. Went down to London, then. Went to a lot of castings, got a few parts, worked as a waitress to fill the gaps in between. I did all right, I suppose. But never was a great success.’ Another mouthful of gin induced a moment of reflection. ‘Until, that is, I got offered a part in The Street. It came kind of late in life, but I was an overnight success. I don’t know why. Folk just loved my character.’ She cackled. ‘I became what you might call a household name. And the twenty years of fame that it brought, and the marvellous earnings that went with it, have paid for all this.’ She waved an arm around her empire. ‘A very comfortable retirement.’
Fin gazed
at her thoughtfully. ‘What made you come back?’
She looked at him. ‘You’re an islander, aren’t you?’
‘I am. From Lewis.’
‘Then you know why. There’s something about the islands, a ghraidh, that always brings you back in the end. I’ve already got my place booked in the cemetery over the hill.’
‘Were you ever married?’
Her smile carried a sadness in it. ‘In love once, but never married.’
Fin turned to the side windows looking back out across the hill. ‘So you knew the people who lived on the croft below here?’
‘Aye, I did that. Old widow O’Henley it was who stayed there when I was a kid. Her and a young lassie called Ceit who was in my class at school. A homer.’
Fin frowned. ‘A homer? What’s that?’
‘A boy or a girl from a home, a ghraidh. There were hundreds of them taken out of orphanages and local authority homes by the councils and the Catholic Church, and shipped out here to the islands. Just handed over to complete strangers, they were. No vetting in those days. Kids were dumped off the ferry at Lochboisdale to stand on the pier with family names tied around their necks, waiting to be claimed. The primary school up on the hill there was full of them. Nearly a hundred at one time.’
Fin was shocked. ‘I had no idea.’
Morag lit a cigarette and puffed away on it as she spoke. ‘Aye, they were at it right into the sixties. I once heard the priest saying it was good to have fresh blood in the islands after generations of inbreeding. I think that was the idea. Though they weren’t all orphans, you know. Some came from broken homes. But there was no going back. Once you got sent out here all ties with the past were cut. You were forbidden contact with parents or family. Poor little bastards. Some of them got terribly abused. Beaten, or worse. Most were just treated like slave labour. A few were luckier, like me.’
Fin raised an eyebrow. ‘You were a homer?’
‘I was, Mr Macleod. Boarded with a family at Parks, over on the other side of the island. All gone now, of course. No children of their own, you see. But unlike many, I have happy memories of my time here. Which is why I had no problems about coming back.’ She emptied her glass. ‘I need a wee top-up. How about you?’