‘Do you remember that storm we had about six months after we moved in?’ Pat said to Frank. ‘It rattled the tiles so fiercely we were sure it was going to take our roof right off, and we thought how much worse it must be for Bren?’
‘Oh, aye,’ Frank said, nodding. ‘The waves were so big I was sure we’d look out in the morning and find the whole place had been swept straight out to sea. After about the third time a wave had washed up past our front door – about 1 a.m., that was – I decided to go and get her and bring her over to the Weaver’s Nook. Better safe than sorry, I thought, and we had plenty of room. Anyway, I wrapped myself up and battled my way over there to bang on the door. It felt as if I’d been knocking for half an hour before she finally opened up, all snug and cosy in her dressing gown, declaring that I’d woken her!’
Pat laughed. ‘We didn’t bother after that. I’ve never known a soul as hardy as that one. Bless Bren, we still miss her.’
‘I forgot to say,’ Anna said, indicating the half-empty plate of shortbread, ‘I found an old recipe book of Bren’s yesterday and made the raspberry and almond shortbread out of it.’
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Susan exclaimed, reaching for one of the biscuits. ‘Dear Bren and her baking. She was a whizz with a cake.’
‘I meant to bring the book with me, actually,’ Anna said, turning to Robert MacKenzie. ‘Your family should have it back. I can go and get it now, if you like.’
Robert smiled. ‘You know what? I think you should keep it. You’re more likely to use it than we are, and I like the idea of it staying in the place where all those recipes were first baked.’
‘Are you sure?’ Anna said, touched. ‘That’s really kind of you.’
‘She left us plenty to remember her by. I took Young Robbie out in her dinghy the other day,’ he added, addressing the whole gathering. ‘It’s taken a while to get it up to scratch, but it’s there now. I think the boy’s going to be a fine seaman. Bren couldn’t have given him a better present.’
‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ said Marie. ‘Mind you, not surprising he’d take to the sea, given his blood, eh? Both his grandfathers, you on the lifeboat, his grandma, his mum, his aunt…’
Old Robbie dragged a hand through his hair, and Anna saw the glint of gold on his ring finger. ‘Well, he’ll do anything to follow his beloved dolphins, this is the thing. He’s got it in his head that he can use the dinghy as a rescue boat for any that run into trouble with nets and so forth. I’ve made him swear a solemn oath that he’ll never take it out without either me or Barbara with him. He’s a good boy, but he gets so carried away.’
‘Is your wife a sailor too?’ Anna asked. ‘That must make for some great family days out.’
He glanced at her, a sharp look that was almost a wince, and Anna felt her stomach plummet with the absolute certainty that she had said something terrible. A sudden, brief silence suffocated the buoyant atmosphere in the room.
‘Actually, Robbie’s mum died a few years ago,’ he said, his voice even but quiet. ‘Barbara is his grandma. She helps out a lot. She’s an exceptional sea-woman herself. She was with us on the lifeboat until a few years ago.’
‘I – I’m sorry,’ Anna stammered. ‘I didn’t—’
Old Robbie smiled and shook his head slightly. ‘There’s no need to apologize. Anyway, you’re right – Cassie was a sailor – she was so much a part of the sea that I used to joke she must really be a selkie.’
Eight
The next day, Sunday, Anna joined David and Glynn as they walked their Irish setter, a great soppy beast with shaggy red fur. The windswept trio had knocked on her door as they passed and asked her to join them. Anna had accepted, touched by the ready offer of friendship and remembering her vow: Say yes to as many things as you can while you’re here.
‘Don’t ask,’ David said, as Anna was officially introduced to their hound, which claimed the incongruous name of Bill. ‘It’s all Glynn’s fault. The agreement was that I got to choose the breed and he got to choose the name and I should have known that if a deal sounds too sweet, it probably is.’
‘I think it’s a fine name,’ Anna said, as she and the effervescent Bill got to know each other, and then laughed as Glynn beamed at David in triumph.
They set off up the main – the only – track out of the village and then turned off at the car park, striking out over a stile into the fields that topped the cliff above Crovie to the east. The path wound steadily higher and steeper as the cliffs rose towards the sky. At times it came perilously close to the edge – so close, in fact, that below she could see not just the Fishergirl’s Luck, but also the roofs of the houses.
Anna watched Bill charge ahead of them, his great paws galumphing along the track before he doubled back to check they were still following his lead. The wind was up this morning, tearing at hair and breath. In rain or in winter walking up here would be an even more difficult proposition. In the more precipitous parts of the track there was evidence of slippage, too – scrapes in the slopes where the grass had separated from the earth to reveal the reddish soil beneath. It reminded her of the damaged houses she’d spotted on her first perambulation of the village.
‘I meant to ask last night,’ Anna said. ‘Has there been a landslide in the village? There are houses in Crovie that look as if they might have been hit by one.’
‘Yes,’ said David, ‘that was terrible. It was a couple of years ago now. There was a huge storm off the coast. We got off lightly, considering – it could have been a lot worse. The council keep talking about earthworks to shore up the rest of the cliff, but no one in the village can really see how that would be possible.’
‘Neither can they, evidently,’ Glynn added, ‘as they’ve gone very quiet about it for the past year.’
Anna frowned. ‘That’s a bit of a worry, isn’t it?’
‘Well, it is,’ David agreed, ‘and there have been other, minor landslips since. But Crovie has been here for centuries and has survived a lot worse. The great storm of 1953 washed away whole houses all along this coast and Crovie was no exception. You’ve probably noticed where one of them was – there’s a gap next to one of the larger cottages? There used to be another house there, but it was so damaged it had to be taken down. The storm was pretty much what killed the last of the fishing in the village. They lost so many boats and it was too small a community to get back on its feet. Tragic, really.’
‘The Fishergirl’s Luck must have been there in 1953,’ Anna said.
‘Oh yes, it would have been,’ Glynn nodded. ‘And Bren would have been in it, too, I bet. I doubt she even noticed it knocking at her window.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘David more than me,’ said Glynn. ‘I met her a few times – enough to know she was a force to be reckoned with, though to be honest one meeting was probably enough to see that. She was already a wee old lady with silver hair by the time I knew her, but still formidable. One of those stalwart grannies you think is going to soldier on forever. I wish she had. She was one of the last links to Crovie’s past, really.’
‘I remember her as I was growing up,’ said David. ‘She never seemed to look any different. She was always smiling, always had a piece of tablet in her pockets for us children. Right up until the last few months she used to walk to the harbour to meet Old Robbie as he brought in her shopping from Gamrie. May we all be as spry as Bren MacKenzie when we’re in our ninety-fifth year.’
‘I’d love to know more about her.’
‘Talk to Old Robbie,’ Glynn suggested. ‘He’d be happy to tell you stories about her.’
Anna sucked in a cold breath. ‘Oh, I think I’ll be avoiding Robert MacKenzie until I move on,’ she said.
‘What? Why? Because you mentioned a dead wife none of us had thought to tell you about?’ David asked. ‘Honestly, he’d never hold that against you. Why would he? Cassie’s been gone for five years and I can’t believe he and Young Robbie don’t talk about her all the time. I don’t think s
he’s a taboo subject. I hope she isn’t, anyway – that would be sad, for all of them.’
But Anna remembered the expression that had flashed through Old Robbie’s eyes as she’d asked the question. It had been gone in less than a second, but still. She wondered whether there was anything more tragic than seeing a man still so clearly in love with a dead wife. Anna’s father had never really got over her mother’s death and although the two of them had talked about her frequently and had filled the house with as many photographs of her as they could, Helen Campbell’s departure had cleaved a void in her husband’s heart too deep to be filled. The look that had been in Robert MacKenzie’s eyes at that second had shaken Anna because it was so familiar. She had seen it on her father’s face as he’d contemplated a photograph of her mother on their wedding day. That was only a week before his own passing, and her mother had been dead for almost thirty years. Some loves last no more than a season, and others reach beyond a lifetime. Each could be as powerful, Anna knew, which was one of the many inexplicable geographies of the human heart. Perhaps it was because she was still feeling her father’s death so keenly herself that she felt so awful about probing that hurt in someone else. Whatever the reason, it weighed on her, and she could not seem to forget that swift flash of pain that had crossed Robert MacKenzie’s face.
‘How did she die?’ Anna asked, looking out towards the turbulent, wind-churned waves far below them. They had left the village behind now, and all Anna could see was wild, rocky coastline. ‘She didn’t drown, did she?’
‘Cassie? Oh no, it was breast cancer. Her funeral was a sight to see. She was a primary school teacher over in Macduff and the whole school turned out, as well as plenty of former pupils and just about every resident from here to Fochabers. Cassie MacKenzie was very much loved.’
Anna thought again about the look she’d seen in her widower’s eye, and didn’t doubt it for a moment.
* * *
Anna spent the next week painting. She started with the downstairs living space, borrowing dustsheets from Frank and carefully rolling up her new rug. It was amazing what a difference the clean walls made. Anna had chosen a bright white paint that made the most of the light that filtered in through the bothy’s few windows and helped the interior of the Fishergirl’s Luck to feel bigger. It was a tiring job, though, and when the sun began to shine just as she was almost finished with the final coat, Anna took it as a sign that she should listen to Cathy and have an actual holiday, one where she wasn’t constantly looking for something to do.
By the Thursday of her week-long ‘holiday’, however, Anna was restless. She had thought, after years of long hours and few holidays, her body would thank her for a prolonged period of complete relaxation. Once she’d decided that her sojourn in Crovie was a vacation, Anna had imagined she could catch up on all the books she’d always planned to read and had never had the time to pick up, seek out the best places on the coastline around her to swim, go for day-long sun-drenched hikes where the only time she had to worry about was when it would be too dark to find her way home. She had expected long lie-ins and lazy afternoons spent in cafés. Instead, she woke as early as ever, and without anything else to occupy her, she kept thinking about things best left behind – about her father and how she hadn’t seen him nearly enough in his last years, about how much she missed him. She also kept thinking about Geoff, to whom her dad had never warmed. Why had she put up with Geoff for so long? How had he managed to convince her that a half-life with him was as good as she could ever hope to get? She found she was becoming angry with herself at the time she had wasted, the years that could have been so much better spent.
Anna’s need for distraction and the enjoyment she had felt as she prepared for Pat and Frank’s gathering gave her a renewed desire to cook. She supposed she should be pleased that the passion for the skill she had thought jaded beyond recovery had in fact only been on hiatus, and that her new circumstances had allowed it to flourish again. The problem was, of course, that now she had only herself to cook for.
‘I’ve been thinking about the cookbook I used to talk about writing,’ Anna told Cathy, during one of their chats via the new wi-fi that she’d had installed in the Fishergirl’s Luck, on the basis that any holiday let would need one. ‘Maybe I should work on that. The problem is that all the recipes I have at the moment would be ones I’ve cooked at the Four Seasons.’
‘Then start cooking new stuff,’ Cathy advised her. ‘You’ve got a kitchen there, right? What about all these new neighbour friends you’ve made? I bet they’d all jump at the chance to have you make them a meal.’
Anna looked around the Fishergirl’s Luck. ‘The place is so small, though. There’s not much room for entertaining.’
‘I’m sure they’ll understand if you have them over two at a time. They know how big the place is, after all. I think the cookbook is a great idea – it’ll give you a chance to work out exactly what sort of food you want to cook, for one thing, won’t it? That’d help when you do start looking for another job.’
‘You’re right, it would.’
‘Of course I’m right. I’m always right. Don’t you know that by now?’
Anna smiled. ‘Sorry, I’d forgotten.’
‘Pfft,’ was Cathy’s parting shot. ‘Don’t let it happen again. Oh, and please, please, please email me the recipe for the chocolate and pistachio roulade thing you make. I’m going insane without it.’
Anna asked Pat and Frank to be her first guests, both because they were the closest and because she still felt indebted to them after all their hospitality, not that they would see it as something that would need repaying. The more Anna saw of them, the more she loved them.
‘Are you free tomorrow?’ she asked Pat, as they sat having another of their now customary cups of afternoon tea.
‘We’ve actually got guests arriving in the evening, would you believe it,’ said Pat. ‘They want a bite to eat when they get here. Sorry.’
‘How about lunch instead?’ Anna asked.
‘Lunch would be lovely, if you’re sure it’s not going to put you out too much.’
‘Of course not,’ Anna said. ‘It’s not as if I’ve got any pressing engagements, is it? Is there anything either of you don’t eat?’
‘No, we’re both pretty easy to please.’
‘I’d like to cook fish, if that’s okay with both of you,’ Anna added. ‘I’d rather get it from a local supplier than off a shelf at Tesco, though. Do you have any suggestions?’
Pat considered. ‘Well, there’s no local fishmonger anymore,’ she said. ‘But the Gamrie boys still ice their catches at Gardenstown before it gets taken for processing at Fraserburgh.’
Anna chewed her bottom lip. ‘I think I’ll take a drive over and see what I can see.’
‘You could walk it,’ Pat suggested. ‘It’s a nice day and the sea’s fair. It’ll be beautiful out there at the moment.’
‘There’s not a path between Crovie and Gardenstown, is there?’ Anna asked, surprised.
‘There is,’ Pat told her. ‘Come out and I’ll point you to it. The snook, we call it. I’d come with you but I’ve got to get the sea-view room sorted for these visitors. Not that I’m complaining. Roll on the summer season, that’s what I say.’
Nine
The path from Crovie to Gardenstown – known locally by its old name, Gamrie – had been built along the cliff that jutted out into the bay between the two settlements, forming a narrow passage above the tideline. To get to it, Pat said, Anna needed to walk down through the car park. There she would find a narrow path, which was just visible from the front door of the Fishergirl’s Luck. Further on, as it rounded the cliff, this became a more formal concrete walkway.
‘It’s about a mile or so, straight into Gamrie,’ Pat said. ‘Wear good walking boots – at high tide the waves will splash across the path, and at the other end the beach is rocky. But it’s a lovely stroll.’
The day was blustery but warm as Anna set
out, the early April weather showing promise. On one side the path was edged by the sheer weight of the cliff and on the other by thin chains strung between slim metal fenceposts, rusted red by the salt wind. Below, uneven rocks jagged the shoreline, slick with moss and seaweed, scenting the air as it decayed. Sea birds screamed on the wind above her head, a sound to which Anna was surprised to find herself becoming accustomed, despite the harsh and plaintive pitch of the gull’s piercing calls.
As the path rounded the promontory, Gardenstown opened up ahead of her. The oldest part of the town was closest to the water, built as Crovie had been by farmers cleared from other, richer lands further from the coast. As soon as she was on the other side of the cliff, the wind dropped to no more than a fresh whisper, and Anna realized how much more protected the larger village was compared to the exposed lip on which Crovie perched. Still, Gardenstown’s harbour was enclosed by sea walls built to give more protection than even the natural shelter of the bay provided, which probably explained why there were more boats moored within its confines. Most of them were pleasure boats, but two or three looked to her untrained eye as if they could be small fishing trawlers.
Anna checked her watch – it was coming up to three in the afternoon. She had a chef’s knowledge of how the British fishing fleet worked, having been on shopping runs to Billingsgate fish market on numerous occasions. Working with the tides, out at night, back in the ultra-early morning, the fish for purchase there came from all over the UK, but not, she suspected, from tiny Gardenstown on the Moray Firth. Still, their fishing hours were likely to be similar. With any luck, Anna would arrive in time to find one of the crew to talk to before they set out for the night’s catch.
The House Beneath the Cliffs Page 6