The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Indeed, we ate quite well before the shop came along,’ Donald John confirmed when she quizzed him on the subject.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, this and that I suppose.’

  ‘What specifically?’

  ‘I was very keen on the salted herring,’ he offered. ‘They sold it on the mainland in barrels and it came over on the boat.’

  ‘Did you fry it?’

  ‘No, no, we boiled it.’

  ‘How revolting!’

  ‘No indeed, it was very good, Alba,’ he said, faintly insulted.

  ‘What about vegetables?’

  ‘Ach, I’ve no use for vegetables.’

  ‘Crab? Lobster?’

  ‘I ate a crab once but I didn’t think much of him.’

  ‘Mackerel?’

  ‘Mackerel are villains! Oh, boo boo, I’d rather eat my sheepdog than a mackerel.’

  ‘Rabbits, then. Surely you eat rabbits?’

  ‘Aye, you can snare a rabbit in no time. Ask Roddy. He’ll teach you.’

  ‘Is it worth shooting cormorants?’

  ‘Well, they’re very oily.’ Donald John ironed his knees with his big flat hands. ‘You have to take the skin off them because they’re difficult to pluck. After that you can boil them in a pan with an onion. When I was a boy we used to poach plenty of duck and many’s the goose your father brought for us too. He was a fine shot, your father, a fine shot indeed.’

  It was true, Alba thought wistfully. For as long as she could remember her father had been engaged in a highly personal war of wits with the island geese. ‘They’re far more intelligent than people, of course,’ he told her. ‘See that formation of dots in the distance? Greylags. They’re a cunning bunch and they probably suspect I’m waiting for them. However, the wind is coming off the loch today, so you and I have decided to face north.’ He winked at her. ‘That’ll fool them, you’ll see.’

  He’d conscripted all three children into his plucking squadron. She could remember standing at the big table in the outside room pulling at the dead birds with brisk tugs while the radio crackled in the background and down floated through the air like dandelion spore. How fragile bird skin had been beneath its armour of feathers. You could rub skin off a snipe with the tip of one finger. Nicky used to keep the prettiest feathers in a cigar box under his bed. When he saw that Alba had developed an interest, he began taking her along on the morning flight and she would stumble behind him through the bogs while he tested the wind and planned the best place to hide to intercept the geese on their way to their feeding grounds.

  She checked the mussels again. She’d picked them that morning, hitching a lift to the causeway only to find a big yellow digger idling on the bank and a man perched on the driving seat, alternately gnawing at a boiled egg and pulling on his cigarette.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Alba stared at the vast crater already gouged from the hill.

  ‘Well now,’ he said lightly, ‘we’re building a hotel, right enough.’

  ‘You are not!’

  ‘Aye, a casino in fact, and we’re looking for nice young women like yourself to work in it.’

  Alba giggled. ‘No, come on, what are you doing really?’

  ‘It’s a quarry, lass. We’re digging up the whole of this bank.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. But the government is paying so we’re doing it.’

  ‘What are the government going to do with all this rubbish stone?’ She kicked at the pile of rock.

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll do a thing with it, it’s just that the money’s there so they might as well spend it.’ He winked. ‘EEC grants and the like. There’s nothing we won’t dig up if we’re paid to so you’ll soon be seeing a fine lot of progress on the island.’

  ‘But what about my mussels?’ she asked suspiciously. On either side of the causeway where the tide was seeping back into the channels, the water appeared to be tinted with rainbow colours. ‘Can we still eat them?’

  ‘To be sure,’ he’d replied cheerfully. ‘A little oil in the water never hurt anyone.’

  Alba lifted the saucepan lid and stared down at the clunky gumbo of black shells. The moules were more ‘Liquide de Fairy’ than marinières and when she drained them water frothed in the sink like the dregs of bubble bath. It was probably prudent to give them an extra rinse under the tap, but really, who could be bothered?

  ‘Supper,’ she yelled.

  51

  When Alick met them at Ballanish with the news that there was a ghost in Letty’s bedroom, Jamie did not immediately appreciate the significance. The only ghost he could ever remember seeing was Casper the Friendly Ghost from the pages of his Harvey comic, a subscription for which Tom Gordunson had sent him as a Christmas present. Every Saturday in Bonn, it would appear on his pillow in a thin brown paper bag and although the words meant nothing to him, he could easily follow the pictures with his finger. In fact, he’d been so taken by cheery little Casper and his foxy friend playing happily by their graveyard home that one day after school, he’d been inspired to make a ghost outfit for himself. He pulled the sheet off his bed, found some scissors and snipped out holes for eyes. The result couldn’t have looked more like a child’s idea of a phantom, nevertheless Jamie was thrilled when both his sisters jumped after he burst into their room and he was even more chuffed when Alba suggested smuggling it that afternoon into the embassy where they were due to meet their father. Later, in Nicky’s office, after the three of them had stuffed the sheet with newspaper, tied a string around its neck and then crept undetected to the flat roof, Alba clambered out and lowered the ghost down until it hung in front of their father’s window.

  Unfortunately for the children’s comic timing, the mid-seventies was the high-water mark of the political activities of both the Baader-Meinhof and Black September groups. According to Nicky’s somewhat stern lecture later that evening, Ulrike Meinhof, following her trial earlier in the year, had been found dead in her cell in Stammheim Prison. The Red Army Faction claimed she was killed by the German authorities and German embassies in most major cities, along with every international embassy in Bonn, were in the throes of dealing with threats against their staff.

  The very minute Nicky drove through the security barrier of the embassy, he was met with news that an effigy had been delivered to his office by an unknown terrorist group and was swiftly led by a jittery attaché to see it. He’d taken one look at the stuffed sheet with its smiley face and inked-in nose and his shoulders began heaving.

  ‘This is the work of my children,’ he’d said, laughing, but no one else had found the incident funny. The children were promptly banned from the embassy and Jamie had not thought about ghosts again until he trailed into the kitchen behind his mother to find Alick pacing the floor and sucking at his roll-up in short impatient bursts like an expectant father in a hospital corridor.

  ‘Ach, something terrible!’ Alick exclaimed.

  ‘What is it, Alick?’ Letty said, not even mildly alarmed. Terrible was one of Alick’s favourite words and was applied with equal lack of discrimination to neighbours, slights, storms and joint pains.

  ‘Upstairs!’ Alick glanced up at the ceiling with apparent dread.

  Letty saw at once that he was tipsy. His eyes were roving round the kitchen as if on the lookout for some mischief to cause and her heart sank. Under the influence of almost any quantity of alcohol, Alick quickly transformed from his gentle, sober Jekyll into the more impish Hyde and this persona in turn cast Letty into the unwelcome role of disapproving Victorian matron. Alick’s four days’ absence suggested a prolonged bender and his disappearing acts, whilst she understood that they meant nothing, still left her feeling oddly depressed, as though it was he who did the drinking while she was left to suffer the hangover.

  ‘What’s happening upstairs?’ she asked calmly.

  ‘There’s a ghost up there.’ Alick relit his cigarette end with trembling fingers.

&nb
sp; ‘A ghost?’ Jamie pictured Casper whizzing around his mother’s bedroom like a balloon with its air abruptly released.

  ‘Whatever do you mean, a ghost?’ Letty took the lid off the stock pan and sniffed the steam.

  ‘Come with me, Let-ic-ia.’ Alick grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the kitchen. At the top of the stairs he paused, then, with the exaggerated gait of a vaudevillian clown, crept along the corridor until he reached her bedroom door. ‘Ready, now?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, yes, we’re ready’ Alick looked almost spectral himself, Letty thought. The lower rims of his eyelids shone red against the pallor of his skin.

  ‘Are you sure now?’ His eyes darted over her shoulder to include Jamie.

  ‘Quite sure,’ she said firmly

  ‘Right you are.’ He threw open the door as though surprise was the only way to catch whatever menace was lurking within.

  Letty stepped briskly around him then stopped. ‘Alick, what on earth . . . ?’ Horrified, she surveyed the wreck of her bedroom.

  The bed had been moved away from the wall and positioned in the centre of the room. Balanced on top of it, in one vast teetering pile, was every other piece of furniture along with whatever contents it had held: the small wicker chair and cushion, her bedside tables, books and alarm clock; the chest of drawers, with all the clothes spilling out. There were the medicines from the cupboard, including a sticky pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and poking out from under her pillows she could see the pair of wooden elephants that Nicky had bought for her from a roadside stand in Liberia.

  ‘Alick, what happened?’

  Running a shaky hand through his hair, Alick explained that he’d been fixing the hinge of the door when he’d heard a moaning noise coming from the walls – and it had been a noise so dreadful, so chilling, so unlike anything he’d ever heard in all his years, he had realized at once that it could not come from any mortal soul. Terrified, he’d run out of the house, across the garden and jumped over the yellow gate before even daring to look behind him, but when he had, he had spotted something he’d never noticed before.

  ‘There was a window there, Let-ic-ia,’ he said awfully. ‘A secret window on the outside that canna’ be seen on the inside.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a blind window, Alick,’ Letty said with a trace of impatience, ‘it’s always been there.’

  ‘Still and all, that’s where the noise was coming from,’ Alick said stoutly.

  ‘Alick, it’s just the wind. When it blows hard from the north-east, it sometimes makes a moaning noise.’

  ‘It’s no’ the wind.’ Alick knuckled the side of his head feverishly. ‘I’ve been living with the wind since the day I was born. I’m telling you, Let-ic-ia, there’s something very queer in this room, and I don’t trust it at all. Not at all.’

  ‘All right,’ Letty asked reasonably. ‘What do you think it is, then?’

  ‘There’s a secret place there.’ Alick swayed backwards and forwards on his feet. ‘Just like the one in that car.’

  ‘What car? Alick, you’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘It’s not nonsense, it’s proof!’

  ‘Proof of what?’ Jamie said.

  ‘A mer-derr.’ Alick rolled the word off his tongue. ‘It’s the ghost of poor Flora Macdonald, strangled by the Captain and holed up behind that window.’

  ‘Come on now, Alick,’ Letty said. ‘Everyone knows that Flora Macdonald ran away to Australia.’

  ‘That’s what they say.’ Alick’s eyes flashed. ‘But who’s to know what really happened? Why, I never believed that story anyways. Neilly McLellan was a rogue and a rascal, and he’d have had a job taking her all the way to Australia. In any case, ghosts canna’ just appear and start their moaning for no reason. I’m telling you, she was mer-derred by the Captain and now she’s trapped behind that window.’

  ‘But why does she have to live behind a window?’ Jamie asked. ‘Why can’t she go to heaven?’

  ‘Because where there’s sudden death . . . a vi-olent death – ’ he leant his hand on Jamie’s shoulder for support – ‘there’s unfinished business.’

  ‘Alick,’ Letty said uneasily, ‘that’s enough.’

  Flora Macdonald’s elopement with Neilly McLellan. She hadn’t thought about the story for so long. It was an island myth, a love story, but it had become her love story too, and before she could stop herself she’d gone back to that evening again, the night she’d met Nicky. Tom had taken her to a dance in London. She could remember his arm about her waist, the smile in his eyes, then suddenly he was looking over her shoulder, his face briefly contorted by some emotion – what had it been? Resignation? Defeat? But she had no chance to process it before Nicky had cut in and waltzed her away. Letty had been startled at how strongly she’d reacted to the smell of his neck and the way his hair sat cleanly just above his collar. He was Tom’s closest friend, she’d heard so much about him, but she had pictured another thoughtful, dishevelled wolf, a logical extension of Tom, not the slim, elegant man in whose arms she now found herself. She and Nicky were natural opposites. He loved Hoagy Carmichael and Thelonious Monk – or Melodious Thunk, as he liked to call him – while she had a passion for opera. He was funny and gregarious; Letty was quiet, a little reticent. Nicky was being wooed by the Foreign Office, which was funding his studies in Russian while she, politically naive as a bar of soap, was working as a secretary for a legal firm in Piccadilly. For six weeks, they saw each other nearly every day. Then suddenly, Nicky was sent to Washington as a temporary replacement for a junior diplomat who had jaywalked a traffic light and suffered the consequences.

  The week before he flew, Letty had introduced him to her father. They’d lunched at Scott’s in Mayfair and she couldn’t remember quite how it had cropped up, but her father had told him all about the story of Flora Mac-donald and her midnight flight from the isle.

  ‘It’s a very good story,’ Nicky had said later in the taxi.

  ‘Who knows how much of it is true though . . .’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I’ve heard it a thousand times and my father is constantly rewriting the facts.’

  ‘Oh, do tell.’

  ‘Well, sometimes it takes place in the nineteenth century, sometimes he bumps it up a generation or two, sometimes he has Roddy, the hunchback, building the walled garden, other times it’s Roddy’s grandfather. Occasionally it’s a cautionary tale for overbearing parents, but usually it’s just your everyday farce with drunken, lovesick sailors in completely unseaworthy boats endlessly criss-crossing the Minch. Once, I swear he even managed to bring Bonnie Prince Charlie into it, but he dropped that version pretty quickly.’

  ‘So which one did I get?’

  ‘You got the Shakespearean tragedy. Instead of living happily ever after, the illicit lovers are torn to shreds in the shark-infested seas of the Pacific’

  ‘A warning to his daughter’s unscrupulous beau, perhaps?’

  ‘No doubt, except you’re about the least unscrupulous person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘How dull. I must cultivate some hidden depths.’

  ‘Well, in the meantime you can console yourself with the fact that the window in Flora’s room, my room as a child, that is, and the one she is supposed to have jumped out of, makes the most hideous noise when you pull it up. Captain Macdonald would have had to be as deaf as a loaf of bread not to hear it, moreover the tree – the only tree on the island – is at most a gnarled stump of a thing and viciously thorny to boot. I wouldn’t have climbed down it.’

  ‘Not even for the man you loved?’

  She’d smiled.

  ‘You sound as if you don’t want the story to be true.’

  ‘Of course I do. I’m hopelessly sentimental, but we’ll never know for sure.’

  ‘I could find out,’ he said eagerly. ‘I could write to the Australian embassy, get the land registry checked. There would be records.’

  ‘No, please don’t.’ She’d kissed him. ‘I’d hat
e for my father to lose one of his favourite stories.’

  But, now, as Alick continued to embroider his theory, she thought wistfully how much she would have liked to have known for sure . . .

  ‘Don’t you think you’re being a bit melodramatic, Alick?’ she said. There had never been so much as a handbag snatch on the island, let alone a cold-blooded act of filicide. In fact the most heinous crime in recent years – discounting the illegal transfer of ten lobsters from Alisdair Mackinnon’s pot to rival fisherman Callum’s, an act that had been punished by Callum’s ostracism from the community – had been her own daughter’s extensive shoplifting spree.

  But no amount of reasoning could deter Alick from his theory. ‘Ach, poor Flora, poor soul,’ he lamented, ‘lost for all this time, not allowed to rest peacefully in heaven.’

  It was this last statement that started Jamie’s brain whirring. Lost for all this time. Disappeared, heaven, resting – here were the very same words struggling for order in his own confused lexicon. Wide-eyed, he turned to his mother, his mouth forming a question.

  ‘Alick,’ Letty said sharply, ‘you’re scaring Jamie with all this talk of ghosts.’

  ‘No, no,’ Jamie protested. ‘It’s just that... I want to ...’

  Alick grinned wickedly then lurched sideways. Letty put out her hand to steady him. ‘All right, that’s quite enough now.’ She took stock of the precarious arrangement of furniture on the bed, of the mothballs rolling around on the floor like reproachful eyeballs, and resolved to sleep on the sofa downstairs. She could smell the sourness of whisky on Alick’s breath and she suspected that to indulge him any further would inevitably lead to a second dram, which in turn would encourage a third. Jamie, however, had several searching questions for Alick on the nature and purpose of spirits but Alick seemed suddenly too dizzy to answer. Neither did he appear well enough to explain why he had thought that exorcism of Flora Macdonald’s ghost might be achieved by pushing all the furniture away from the walls and, after a while, Letty quietly but firmly suggested that Jamie put it all out of his head.