by Bella Pollen
‘Sleep all right, darling?’ Letty asked vaguely.
‘Fine,’ Georgie lied. ‘You?’
‘Fine,’ Letty lied back, then smiled brightly to prove it.
20
He tended towards anxiety in new situations so for the first few days he stayed put. Time would come when he’d have to search out food and water but in the meanwhile there was plenty to keep him occupied, listening to the wind and watching the birds freewheeling in the sky. Fulmars were Olympian gliders, they were trapeze artists, acrobats of the air, swooping through the narrowest of cliff openings at impossible angles. On the ground, they led more prosaic lives, passing their time in domestic disputes, bickering and cawing and knocking their beaks together in irritation. They were a thuggish, foul-mouthed crew, yet he continued to watch them, mesmerized. These birds enjoyed the kind of freedom that he, trapped in his cumbersome body, could only dream of. From time to time his thoughts strayed back to that small boat chugging by and he couldn’t help but wonder – what had led to that heartbeat of an impulse, to hide?
Meanwhile he arranged and rearranged his new quarters to his liking. The cave was a repository of sea booty, a lost and found of global treasure. From various corners he piled up a wooden box from the Ukraine; remnants of Irish naval uniforms, bleached almost white by sun; a shoe made in Russia and a shampoo bottle from Denmark. There were also a variety of colourful plastic containers, three frayed lengths of rope and a terminally rusted mine to which he intuitively gave a wide berth. Every tide promised some new object, a maritime refugee that had been bobbing, corroding and disintegrating for years until suddenly it was brought to the end of its journey. One day, as he was sitting there, waiting for the tide to recede, there was a popping noise and a glass bottle bounced over the lip of the entrance. He examined it curiously. If the Atlantic rollers had the power to grind shells to the silky consistency of sand, it seemed impossible that such a delicate object could be granted safe passage. He rolled the bottle around and sniffed it, and in doing so, noticed a piece of paper origamied inside. It was, of course, that most romantic of things – a message in a bottle. An ocean-gram delivered by the great sea god himself. He smashed the bottle and played clumsily with the piece of paper. It was a map of Europe, drawn in black crayon. A single dot marked the north-west of Germany and from there, tiny red arrows marched across France, forded the channel and made their way to London, where they turned sharply right to Scotland. On and on they advanced, up the west coast, across the Minch – and had he been adept at the art of map-reading it might have occurred to him that the line of red arrows led almost directly to his cave. Except the map didn’t depict a cave. X marked the spot over a house, its name childishly written and hopelessly misspelt. BALERNICSH
July 1979, the map was dated. And underneath the date, a message.
To Dada, was written in a barely legible scrawl.
To my Dada. If yu ar lukin for uss . . . we ar beer . . .
21
It was quite an ordeal kissing Alick’s mother. Firstly, it went on for an astonishing amount of time; then there was the odd bristle to contend with; thirdly, the kiss itself was of the wet, full-lipped variety and accompanied by some exploratory and often painful rubbing of the chin. Nevertheless, it was an unspoken requirement of the Ballanish township that visits to Alick’s parents be made on the first day of the holiday and so the children held their breath and duly surrendered to Mrs Macdonald’s embraces. She met them at the door of her croft, a warm-hearted woman with ample bosom, wearing sheepskin slippers and a pinafore tied over a tweed skirt. ‘And how is the mammy today?’ she cried, hugging Letitia and ushering them all into the croft to shake hands with Alick’s father. Euan was a neat, self-contained man with ear muffs of white hair and long elegant fingers, which from time to time stole into the pocket of his serge jacket for a Jew’s harp, a strange contraption, more resembling a dental brace than a musical instrument.
Once inside, the children were positioned on the wooden bench for the ritual of present-receiving. Mrs Macdonald had worked for many years at the knitwear factory and every summer produced a triptych of unusual-coloured jumpers from the seconds pile, all of them boasting a surprise deformity that only revealed itself as the children, encouraged by their parents, attempted to try them on. This year it was a polo neck in egg yolk for Alba, a slime-green tank top for Jamie, and a dung-coloured V-neck for Georgie. Mrs Macdonald’s own dimensions blunted her ability to judge the size of others. If she was large, all other adults were small and children were smaller still. Thus, as Alba’s shoulders became dangerously embedded in her sleeve and Jamie attempted to push his head through an opening more suitable for an elf, while Georgie found an asymmetric flare under her armpit, they were compelled to endure the enthusiastic endorsements of their mother. ‘Why, they’re lovely, Mrs Macdonald, how very generous of you.’ And there was nothing else to be said, because it was astonishingly generous of her, but what little money she had the children fervently wished she would not spend on them, as it only made her poorer still and them increasingly guilt-ridden. Afterwards, weak from the exertion, they sat roasting gently in front of the fire while Mrs Macdonald set about making the tea. ‘I’m surprised the ferry came in at all,’ she said. ‘Quite a storm it was, Letitia, and it’s been that way all winter, right enough. Many’s the croft that lost a roof, and a fishing boat struck the rocks near St Kilda, why, no’ more than a for’night ago.’
‘Did it sink?’ Jamie asked.
‘Aye, three men gone and with their bodies not yet recovered.’ She transferred the kettle to the hotter of her two griddles.
‘Will they wash up on the beach?’ Jamie asked.
‘You’ll no’ be wanting to find them if they do, young Jamie, they’ll have been tossed around plenty so there’s no telling what they’ll look like.’ She turned to encounter Letty’s strained face and remembered herself. ‘Though it’s more likely God will have taken them before that.’
‘Taken them where?’ Jamie asked eagerly.
Mrs Macdonald collapsed onto a stool and squeezed her hands together in an effort to milk inspiration out of them. ‘They say that sailors and fishermen who drown at sea come back as seagulls and the sky and the ocean become their kingdom. Ach, you can imagine them swooping down, with the sky always blue and the fish plentiful for the rest of time. There now.’ She snatched a scone from the trolley and pressed it into Jamie’s hand. Letty smiled gratefully, but she didn’t know, how could she possibly know, what a child like Jamie could do with imagery like this?
The Macdonalds’ tea trolley was a three-tiered affair that would not have looked out of place in the finest hotel in Edinburgh. The teapot and crockery were kept on the top, a bowl of carrageen and a plate of sandwiches below and on the very bottom a basket of warm scones. Mrs Macdonald’s scones were famous on an island already famous for scones, but her tea trolley was approached in strict hierarchical order from above. Tier one presented no problem as the children were not deemed old enough to drink tea; however, the question of how to endure their itchy knitwear receded in the face of carrageen, a quivering blancmange of a dish made by boiling milk and seaweed together for days. Even should this feat be accomplished, there were other foodie dragons to slay. Mrs Macdonald’s sandwiches were grouted with a thick layer of margarine and an even thicker layer of tinned luncheon meat. How to avoid them was a subject often discussed in the Fleming household and inevitably Letty now found herself working her way solo through the white triangles, feeling the benevolent eyes of Mrs Macdonald and Euan upon her.
Alick’s parents might have five sons, but Letty was their spiritual daughter and they treated her accordingly. In turn she loved Euan for his gentle manner and thoughtful mind. No matter how many times she heard his stories, she was always eager to hear them once more. How his eight siblings had all died of smallpox. How the London and Port Stanley Railway had conned him along with many of the islanders into emigrating to America to make his fortune. How
he’d arrived instead in Canada in the bitter depths of winter to find he was not to be given papers to cross into the USA. How snow was as easy to drown in as a bog . . .
Euan held himself straight and spoke slowly and quietly, for which Mrs Macdonald more than compensated by delivering a ceaseless stream of news, and the news that she was currently preoccupied with was the closure of the seaweed factory.
‘Plenty of people lost their jobs in that factory, Letitia,’ she said. ‘It’s created a terrible unemployment on the island. There’s only the lobster and the knitwear now.’
‘And the knitwear is no job for a man,’ Euan said darkly.
‘But can’t they do something about it?’
‘The councillors called a meeting in the school and the whole township came. Back in May it was, Letitia, but it didn’t make a bit of difference.’ Euan sucked his teeth. ‘No, indeed it didn’t.’
‘It’s a terrible shame,’ Mrs Macdonald said indignantly. ‘And with all the products it went into.’
‘A seaweed shortage,’ Alba smirked. ‘How tragic’
‘It’ll no’ affect the carrageen, don’t you worry.’ Mrs Macdonald emptied a shimmering second helping into Alba’s bowl. ‘I can fetch seaweed from the water myself, but that factory stuff went into all sorts. Soap, postage stamps, even the froth on the top of beer. Why, it was a very useful thing, that seaweed.’
‘They started importing it from Tasmania. They said it was cheaper.’ Euan shook his head sorrowfully. ‘But how can it be cheaper? Bringing it in from such a far-off place, why, Letitia, it makes no sense.’
‘No sense at all,’ Mrs Macdonald echoed.
The first week on the island, Jamie found it hard to decipher what anybody was saying. A mainland Scots accent sounded sharp and clear, as though each word had been carved from a man’s vocal cords with a knife, but the Hebridean accent was muffled and heavy enough to tip a word to the left or push it far to the right. Although Nicky claimed that the islanders’ use of English was so spare and precise they might have been 1920s Cambridge undergraduates, when they actually spoke, it was as though a wind was blowing through their mouths. Even for the Flemings, whose ears were attuned to it, Euan could make English sound as foreign as any language spoken in the corridors of the Bonn embassy and mistakes in translation were just as easily made. When Letty remarked that the ferry appeared to be new and asked Euan what had happened to the old one, he replied, ‘Whell whell, Le-ti-see-ya, they say it’s been sent off to Tourrkey, rroight enuff.’
‘Turkey? Has it really?’ Letty said, enjoying a wonderful vision of the shabby little ferry berthed in the glinting heat of the Sea of Marmara with the skyline of Istanbul behind it. Still, much as the image appealed, she couldn’t quite reconcile it with the logic. Why on earth would a Scottish ferry be sent to Turkey – and indeed, on closer investigation, it turned out that the ferry was not in Turkey at all, but enjoying semi-retirement in the less salubrious port of Torquay.
Jamie sat quietly on the bench feeling his scalp prickle from the heat. The image of the fishermen turning into seagulls preoccupied him. It seemed so odd. Why couldn’t they remain as fishermen in their heaven and still be rewarded with plentiful fish from the ocean? And what of the fish? Were they real fish or heaven fish? And if they were heaven fish, then how would it be fair for them to get eaten all the time? And what if a particular fisherman in real life had hated being a fisherman? What if the swell of the ocean had made him seasick and the sight of those bloody entrails on the deck iller still? What if you were a fisherman who had more ambitious dreams? Were heaven’s rewards always career-appropriate? Would a fireman’s heaven be smoke-free and flame retardant? But how would that work for a fireman who had loved his job? Wouldn’t it be better for him to go to hell, where his expertise would really come in handy? But before Jamie could push these thoughts through to any conclusion he found his face being marinated in another of Mrs Macdonald’s kisses and then suddenly the door to the croft was miraculously opened and Alba was shoving him towards the light and the blessed coolness of mist against his skin.
22
Bonn
It was thought better that Jamie did not attend the funeral.
‘He’s been through so much already,’ the Ambassadress said. ‘What purpose will it serve to upset him further?’ And Letty, quietly sinking into darkness, was fast losing the ability to make judgements for herself. Despite the prickle of warning in some closed-down part of her brain, she had to concede that the Ambassadress was probably right. Jamie had come to the funeral of his maternal grandfather and suffered nightmares for weeks afterwards.
‘Doesn’t it hurt to be burned?’ He had clutched her hand in the crematorium.
‘Oh, my darling, of course not.’ Letty had been stricken with remorse. Nicky bent down to his son. ‘Nothing hurts after you’re dead, fish-face.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because when you die your body and mind switch off completely, and you don’t feel pain.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do, and you have to believe me.’ He put his arm round Jamie’s shoulder. ‘So don’t you worry.’
Jamie remained unconvinced. How could anybody know? What if the idea that a dead person felt no pain was simply wishful thinking on the part of the living? Hadn’t Alba once told him that a severed head knew it was a severed head for at least a minute after it got chopped off?
Every night he dreamed of those purple curtains. Of his grandfather waking to find himself locked in his wooden box. Of sparks catching in his thick white hair. Jamie watched, trapped in sleep’s helplessness, as his grandfather tried to beat out the flames on the sleeves of his favourite red checked jacket, and Jamie had wept for him.
So Letty spared him the funeral – if that’s what the small, awkward, under-attended service in Bonn could be called – and she spared him her tears. She tried to spare all three children the talk. Heaven knows there had been plenty of that.
Appropriately, it had been the press attaché who found the letter. It was the morning after the accident and a methodical search of the embassy had yielded a piece of paper in Nicky Fleming’s office and the smoked end of a cigarette on the embassy’s roof. The letter was a draft, clearly an unsatisfactory one, crumpled into a ball and left on the desk. It had been addressed to Letty, but neither its existence nor its contents were disclosed to her for a further six days, by which time it had been examined and re-examined, its implications discussed and every word analysed for nuance and meaning.
My darling love, it began.
How wrong it feels to be writing this, when all I want to do is take you in my arms and tell you everything. It’s ironic, really, given how much of my job is spent talking to strangers, that I have not found a way to reach the one person I love above all others . . .
And there the letter ended. Below this single paragraph, however, were a number of disjointed phrases, some crossed through, others underlined or scrawled at odd angles – and it was these that Letty read over and over again, until they were running through her head on perpetual loop.
Something I’ve been keeping from you, something that’s been preying terribly on my mind
protect you and the children . . . in doing so I fear
a moment of madness
taken the only way out I thought possible
for which I am finding it hard to forgive myself
Forgive me, my love
An internal investigation was immediately launched into ‘the matter of Fleming’.
Letty could not understand why the questions that consumed her were not pertinent to anyone else. Situated on an industrial allotment between Bonn and Bad Godesberg, the British embassy was a low, rectangular building with a flat roof. Certainly if you fell unhappily you would be killed, but a person intent on killing themselves? Moreover, how could anybody be so impatient for death that they fail to finish a suicide note? Nicky was a methodical man. He could not tolerate unfinish
ed business. He was a neat man who might have crumpled a letter merely because he hadn’t liked the slant of his handwriting. The letter was a private matter, she argued. It proved nothing. But according to Nicky’s colleagues, it said everything.
Over the previous few years, indeed for much of the time that the Flemings had been stationed there, Bonn had suffered a number of ‘irregularities’, which, once discovered, had become increasingly hard to ignore. The leaks were small, often unconfirmed – yet suspicion persisted. Was a file missing or misplaced? Had an apparently chance meeting really been contrived? Distrust settled over Bonn like a thin layer of dirt. The Ambassador and those directly under him were emissaries between the British and the local governments and as such were privy to enormous amounts of intelligence. Enough alarm had been generated to warrant surveillance on one or two individuals but nothing concrete had been turned up. Still, diplomats, particularly high-ranking ones, did not often jump from the roofs of their own embassies. Now, fingers were quick to point. Nicky’s polymath abilities, that unusual, God-given skill for absorbing information, had been one of the reasons he’d risen so fast in his job. Oh yes, everyone agreed, Fleming had been extravagantly well informed. So what secrets had he access to? And why had no one picked up that he might be ‘unsafe’? Suspicion lit its own fire and it was only a matter of time before it burned a trail towards the greatest sin of all. Betrayal of Queen and Country.
To Letty, a woman for whom trust and loyalty were as much part of her everyday life as bread and butter, it came as a shock – the speed with which Nicky’s colleagues lined up to condemn him. Who knew, they argued, what clever, considered Nicky Fleming had really been up to? Who knew what cards he’d been holding or even what game he’d been playing? People were regularly expelled from the service – for spying, for being unsuitable, for being unsafe. To his colleagues, he was just another fallen angel of Britannia. In a world where deceit was the norm, the fact that Nicky Fleming was popular, respected and trusted only made his betrayal worse.