Death on a Longship

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘Is the oil going to run out?’

  ‘Production’s down to a third of what it was,’ Dad said. ‘Ten years, and it’ll be almost gone. Fossil fuels are history. The world needs new sources of energy. Tide’s good, but it’s not as developed as wind, and wind’s what we’ve got here. If we want to keep this prosperity, we’ve got to do this. I know it’ll make a mess of the countryside, although we’re working with local people to try and minimise the effect. We’ll site the turbines as sensitively as we can, but it’s money for Shetland, girl, enough money to keep the way of life we’ve got.’

  ‘And we need to save the planet,’ I said. I thought of the little flocks of guillemots and puffins that used to watch my boat as I approached them, and of the two solitary puffins I’d seen this year. I imagined chicks choking on pipe fish because that was all their parents could find them, and bare ledges where the kittiwakes used to nest, and beaches emptied of swooping terns.

  Dad nodded. ‘We need to stop filling the atmosphere with poisonous gases, and use clean energy. It may be too late, but we’ve got to do something. If that means sacrificing some of our bonny views, well, that’s the way it’s got to be.’

  We drove on in silence through green farmland now, with brown and white cattle grazing, and long rigs of Ness tatties. We glimpsed the new Dunrossness primary school, the neat rows of new boats in the equally new Grutness marina, came across the airport runway and around to park in the big new car park at the terminal. New, new, new. The oil wealth.

  Maman must have insisted on a rear seat, for she was almost last off, unmistakeable and elegant in her black-and-white chic. She paused for a moment at the top of the steps, as though waiting for her photographer, then descended steadily and began crossing the tarmac. She had at least five of those plastic suit-bags on hangers over one arm.

  I waved through the glass and moved to the doorway. Maman came in on a wave of Je reviens and stood on tiptoe to greet Dad briskly, two kisses on each cheek. ‘Dermot, you are looking very well. Cassandre.’ She kissed me in the same way. ‘I have clothes for you. You can change here, and then we will be ready for the press. My agent has contacted them. We will give an interview when I arrive in Brae.’

  Behind us, the carousel began to wheel its caterpillar sections. I grabbed Maman’s luggage for her.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Maman said. ‘Dermot, if you wish to go for a cup of your dreadful English coffee, we will be back before you have to drink it.’

  She whisked me into the ladies’ toilet and began laying the bags out. I tried to think how long it was since I’d seen her. Six years. The ship I was on was stopping at La Rochelle, and I’d phoned her to say I’d be there. I’d wanted family. Not that she’d known about Alain, particularly; I hadn’t told her or Dad, and if they’d seen the fuss in the newspapers, they’d had the tact not to mention it. I’d just wanted to say hello, that was all. We’d gone out to dinner, and I’d told her about the ship I was on, and my plans for the coming season, and she’d told me about her latest production. It had been civilised and cordial, and after that I’d phoned occasionally.

  She hadn’t changed. Her swept-back hair was black as ever, elegantly coiled into a Callas chignon, her pointed eyebrows perfectly plucked, and there were no wrinkles on her powder-smooth cheeks,, no dark circles under the hazel-green eyes that reviewers called ‘expressive’ and ‘commanding’. They were bright and alert as ever, and her long mouth was smoothly outlined in burnt scarlet. Only the sweeping, studied grace of her every move made her fifty, not thirty.

  I’d never been able to read what she was thinking, and I couldn’t now. She was too busy, too driven, her total attention on unpacking the things she’d brought for me, each parcel precisely positioned, as if she was decorating an altarpiece for the gods. Then she looked up at me and I realised she was nervous, eyes searching my face as if she wasn’t sure how I might react. For the first time I wondered if she felt the same about me as I felt about her, that I was elusive, practical, too busy doing my own things to have time for her; if this was her chance to be a mother for me. In the same instant, I realised I’d never asked her for anything before. She’d given, I’d refused. I hadn’t wanted pretty dresses, a girl’s bedroom, an expensive private school, I’d wanted freedom, and torn myself out of her grasp. It would have served me right if she’d stayed in her acoustically perfect salon and left me to claw my own way off this lee shore. It couldn’t have been easy to drop everything, pull strings, do all this shopping and get on a flight so soon. I resolved to be convincingly grateful for the pretty dresses, to be a girl for once if it would please her. I leaned forward and gave her another kiss on the scented cheek.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Maman.’ I made a joke of it. ‘You’re our goddess from the machine to sort everything out, and organise the happy ending.’

  She gave a French shrug at that, but smiled too. ‘In opera it is easier. Here in Shetland you are not so well organised. The papers are whirling, whirling. My agent shrugged at first, and said ‘Keep out of it’ and then when I insisted she said it would be good publicity in the end, the mother to the rescue. She has done a press release, but it is the interview that counts. They have seen you as the captain of the ship, and the one who found the body, and perhaps a love interest for this Ted Tarrant.’ She said the name French-style, with a disapproving intonation. ‘Now we will do the young girl with her family around her.’

  She’d laid a litter of parcels out on the space around the three washbasins. ‘I have brought everything. I had to guess, but you are far too active to put on weight, so I hoped. Let me see.’ She fished out a swathing of pink patterned tissue paper. Resolution, Cass. I began taking my comfortable jeans off. ‘Underwear.’ I hauled off my T-shirt as well and undid my bra strap. I’d forgotten this French passion for getting clothes right from the skin outwards. The bra was not only underwired but padded upwards too, and it gave me the sort of cleavage I normally only saw on garage calendars. The knickers were like little shorts, silk, and not very comfortable. ‘And do not pull at them,’ Maman said severely, forgetting the new entente cordiale. After that, a slip, silk too, mid-thigh length. It had probably cost as much as new jib sheets. ‘Stockings. Do you never go out without your legs covered?’

  ‘Too cold,’ I said. ‘This is Shetland, remember.’

  ‘You would need to wax,’ she said. ‘How can you attract a man if you do not take care of yourself?’

  ‘I don’t need to attract a man,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you do not need to,’ Maman said. ‘That is like saying you do not need to listen to music. You will not die without it, but you may want to listen. Life is much more full with it. With a man, too. Stockings.’

  I was horrified to find she actually meant stockings. ‘Not even tights?’

  ‘They are not elegant.’

  This was taking ages; I could see poor Dad having to drink nasty English coffee after all.

  ‘Nearly done,’ Maman said. ‘Sandals.’ I buckled them on and was instantly two inches taller and standing model-straight. She cleared the last of the paper into one of the carrier bags and brought out her make-up case. ‘Can you do this yourself?’

  I looked at her immaculate skin and the smooth swathe of dark eyeliner above the long lashes. ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘Sit down on the washbasin. I hope I have matched your colouring. I took it that you would be more tanned than I.’

  I looked myself in the eyes. Smooth, brown skin, the freckles across the bridge of my nose. Cutting my face in two was the long scar on my cheek, slanting from just below the cheek-bone to just above my upper lip, the width of a snail’s trail and ruler-straight, with rumpled edges creeping onto the line of thin, shiny skin. The strip-lighting made it more prominent.

  Maman unscrewed the lid of the tube. ‘A little, only.’

  Now my face was flattened, smoothed out, except for the indented line. Blusher next, and eyeshadow, to put the contours back. It took an effort not
to shy away as Maman steadied my face with one hand on my cheek, the hazel-green eyes close to mine. ‘Look up.’ A little brush scrubbed at my lashes. ‘Look down.’ The eyeliner stick, stroking along my eyelid. The other eye. ‘Good. Finished – no, do not look yet.’

  She unzipped the suit cover and brought out an armful of black material with a swirling tracery of grey-green foliage over it. It was a sleeveless dress, fitted to the waist, with a scooped neck, and a flaring skirt of a floating material that hung in demure folds.

  ‘Georgette,’ Maman said.

  ‘Your own dressmaker?’ I guessed.

  ‘The material. Good. No, do not look yet. Your hair. Did you bring your hairbrush?’

  Of course not. ‘I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘No matter.’ She rinsed her own comb out at the sink and handed it to me. ‘I am glad you have kept your hair long. I was fearing a bad cut in a boyish style.’

  ‘Long hair’s easier to keep out of your eyes,’ I said.

  Maman smiled at that. ‘A touch of the feminine at last. Your hair is very beautiful.’

  She tied a strip of the dress material around it, like an Alice band, and tucked the ends in. ‘There now.’ She turned me back to the mirror. ‘Look.’

  A stranger looked back at me. Taller than I was used to, and slimmer in the elegant dress that swirled around her ankles, she wasn’t pretty in the English style, but chic, very French, with her eyeliner, and her smooth, creamy skin, unscarred now, and her dark hair tumbling down over her shoulders. I couldn’t have guessed her age; fifteen dressed up as forty, or forty dressed down to twenty. I wondered what Ted Tarrant would think if he saw me like this.

  ‘It is still Cassandre, you know,’ Maman said. ‘Cassandre en fille. You are old enough to understand that now. Look at her eyes, and the stubborn chin. Definitely my Cassandre.’

  We smiled at each other in the mirror. ‘Thank you, Maman.’

  She insisted that I go out first, so that I could have the fun of seeing Dad’s jaw drop. It did, too; he didn’t recognise me at first, then his eyes widened, and he stood up. ‘Well, Cassie, look at you. You’re as beautiful as your mother. Eugénie, my dear, congratulations.’

  He offered us an arm each to escort us to the car. We drove past the sand dunes, where cobalt and saffron flowers clustered side by side, and out by the wide sweep of sea where the waves tumbled white against Horse Island. Maman drew a deep breath.

  ‘I had forgotten how it was beautiful. How I loved it in summer, when the wild flowers fill the roadsides, and the sea is the colour of aquamarine. Dermot, chérie, we should have had a migratory life, Poitiers in the winter and Shetland in the summer. This barbarian child would have had her sailing and culture as well.’

  ‘Never too late to change,’ Dad said cheerfully.

  In the back seat, I was having difficulty believing it. Not even a goddess could just sweep back in like that …

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’d dreaded another press rush, but there was only a photographer and two interviewers, for The Times and The Guardian. Maman, Dad and I sat in a row on the couch, and were photographed as a happy family, then Dad and I listened while Maman rippled off a short aria. Dad leaned his head against the couch, eyes almost closed, smiling, contented. Had he really believed, all this time, that she’d come back some day? Never too late to change …

  More photos, of me this time, posing against the window, chin up, head tilted away. I hoped that they’d use one that wasn’t too revealing.

  Then they began the questions. Maman was serene and confident. ‘Of course I have had to live a lot in France, but Cassandre and Dermot and I have managed to meet up in spite of that. Cassandre, as a ship’s captain, travels all over the world, and Dermot for his firm. However, with this distress, my place is here.’

  Her calmness was infectious, and when the Guardian woman leaned forward to me and asked, with a meaning look, ‘How did you get on with Ted Tarrant?’ I managed a touch of girlish enthusiasm, ‘It was amazing working with someone who was my childhood heart-throb.’ I even smiled. ‘He and Favelle were a very devoted couple. You saw for yourselves how devastated he was by his loss.’

  ‘What do you plan to do now, Cassandre?’ the Times man asked.

  ‘It depends on Berg Productions Ltd. They own the ship,’ I said. ‘As Ted said, the filming was almost finished aboard. I don’t know about the Shetland Eco-Energy publicity.’ An over-to-you gesture to Dad.

  ‘Favelle was going to do publicity shots for our projected wind farm here in Shetland,’ he explained. ‘The directors of the company are discussing whether we’ll still use the ship – it’s a question of sensitivity.’

  Back to me. ‘How would you feel about modelling for your dad’s publicity shots, Cassandre? Launch a new career?’

  I shook my head. ‘Favelle’s record in eco-activism was what was important. Her support would have meant a good deal worldwide.’

  They went back to Dad. ‘Is it true there’s a growing local resistance to your plans?’

  ‘We’re in discussion with the local community,’ Dad said. ‘We’re listening to the people who live here, the people who’ll have a stake in the wind farm, if it goes ahead.’

  It seemed to go on for ages. We kept smiling until we’d waved them out, then sank back on the sofa.

  ‘Well done, both of you,’ Maman said. ‘That went very well. Very positive.’

  Dad was opening the wine. ‘Your good health. Santé, Eugénie. Welcome home.’

  I didn’t believe it.

  After we’d eaten I drove back to Khalida. I parked the car above the boating club, and considered going in for a nightcap, but it was too bonny a night to be indoors, clear and very still, with the light thickening around me, the streetlights flickering on, red in their first moments, then dimming to ugly sulphur orange. The air smelt of mown grass and salt. On the moor, a snipe flapped its wings with an eerie drumming sound, houb-boub-boub, and below me on the shore the water shushed on the pebbles.

  Besides, I wasn’t dressed for the boating club. The people in there were folk I had come to know, who’d accepted me in my old jeans and jumper with the casual camaraderie of one sailor to another. I was just about to slip quietly along to Khalida to get changed when I heard a whistle from beside Stormfugl. Anders was sitting on the jetty, a pint glass in one hand and Rat on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, contemplating the darkening sky over the western hill. His fair hair was slightly tousled, his cheeks flushed. Behind him, Stormfugl was criss-crossed with police tape which shone in the last glimmer of light. No entry: crime scene. At least the spacemen had gone for the night, although there was no sign of Sergeant Peterson’s promised officers-on-patrol keeping an eye on her. Maybe they were going to wait until the pier-head skippers of the boating club had gone home.

  ‘Ssssh!’ I cast a quick look up at the boating club windows. It wasn’t too dark for anyone to look out and recognise me.

  He didn’t whistle again, but I could feel his eyes on me.

  ‘Maman,’ I explained, wobbling my way down the jetty. One heel caught between the planks. If I took the sandals off I’d ruin the stockings. ‘I must go and change.’

  He stretched one arm out for me to sit beside him. ‘Now you are head-turning, belle Cassandre. These film stars will need to look to their laurels.’

  ‘I’m your relief watch,’ I said crossly. These wretched clothes.

  ‘I thought you might be staying at home, since your mother has arrived.’

  ‘This is home,’ I said, too vehemently.

  A pause. Anders fished behind him and produced a half-pint glass. ‘Have some of this beer, and tell me what is wrong, if you like.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said. He tipped half of what was left of his pint into the spare glass and handed it to me. ‘Skol.’ I sat uncomfortably against the angled wood, not wanting to lean back. The water trickled soothingly along the clinker hull. ‘No, I mean that, there really is nothing wro
ng. In fact everything is working out nicely. Maman is home and she and Dad are being all matey as if she’d just gone off for a fortnight’s holiday instead of being away over sixteen years, and I just don’t understand people.’ It came out as a wail. I took a deep breath, and steadied my voice. ‘Here’s Favelle dead and Maree missing, and Dad ought to be sick with worry about her, and instead he’s just welcoming Maman home as if – as if –’ I spread my hands, almost slopping some of the beer over Anders’ foot. ‘I don’t get it. I don’t.’

  Anders put up a hand for Rat to run down. ‘I have been thinking about you, Cass. You’re a very good sailor. You know what’s to be done, and you choose the best people to do it: the one to put on the helm, the one to send up the rigging. People’s sea abilities, you assess those very accurately.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I can do that. I’d put Dad as the owner, the businessman planning the voyages, and Maman on plotting our course. She’d get us in spot-on, too.’

  ‘Think about them like that, then,’ Anders said. ‘That is the way you think. What course is your mother plotting? Where does she want to end up, where are the rocks?’

  I answered immediately, ‘She doesn’t want us to get arrested.’

  ‘That is a negative. What does she want?’

  ‘Us to be safe. Both of us.’

  ‘Well, then. No, Rat, be still.’ He put him on Stormfugl’s gunwale. ‘What are the hazards she must steer around?’

  ‘Bad publicity. DI Macrae arresting us.’

  ‘Your father’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Her too.’ Maman was the goddess from the machine, looking down at the crosses on the chart, spreading her respectability over us. I wondered what she planned to do about Maree.

  ‘So. She is protecting you and your father. Now, here is the question you do not wish to ask. Why?’

  I shrugged. ‘She cares about us.’

  ‘She loves you, Cass. What is so wrong with admitting to being loved?’