Mum hadn’t been a great one for exercise, and was scornful of ‘sporty’ people, but she liked going for walks and riding. She also liked to swim. Some of my earliest memories are of her swimming in the public pool in Holyhead. I can still feel the surges of her strong breaststroke, how dizzily dangerous it had felt clinging on to her shoulders. Dad has a cine film of us in Ghana. Mum, young and slim, flared trousers, midriff showing and her hair swinging impossibly thick and red. A barrage of hair, surely too much for one person. And that colour, bright bay if she’d been a horse. The film, silent and speeded up, of her under a tree smoking a cigarette, walking and joking with the Ghanaian grooms at a polo yard, us being given pony rides. The African bush and the old Cortina on red dirt roads. Dad, young and handsome, his beard dark, eyes smiling. Will’s face already full of mischief, Tom and I white-blonde from the sun. The three of us splashing in an outdoor swimming pool, playing and performing for the camera. Mum at the side of the pool, laughing, diving in. I touched the pottery fish bead one last time. If I had another, I would have left it here, nose to tail with this one, like her star sign, Pisces.
Mum’s favourite bird, the Raven, croaked as we approached Vallay House which sat eerily in the muted morning light. I couldn’t see the bird, but the ponies were on the skyline by the house, heads up, looking straight at us. Ross’s mane was lifting out in all directions. He was getting saltier and wilder-looking by the day. They were standing against the disarray of an old iron fence, each upright post leaning waywardly, each cross-piece unsprung, a far cry from the neat line it must once have been. The rufous red of its rust stood out against the wet pigeon colour of the house walls. Gold Lichen swept the house’s graceful lines and curves. Large square windows, and small porthole-shaped ones, looked out at us, lacklustre without glass. The crow-stepped gable ends bit into a dull sky.
Parked outside the house was a tractor, rusted away to finger-touch crumble. The sea air had been hard on it. We looked through windows and saw tiled fireplaces, moulded ceilings fallen to the floor, a fire grate in mid-air where the first floor had collapsed. A sister Starling to the one we’d seen yesterday landed on the grate, hissing, her mouth full of Grubs, before hopping up into the chimney cavity.
‘Do you know anything about this place?’ I asked Shuna. ‘Did someone say it belonged to a photographer?’
‘Yes, a historian and photographer, his name was Erskine Beveridge.’
‘What a great name.’
‘It’s a sad story. His son inherited the house and lived here alone. He was forbidden from marrying the love of his life, became an alcoholic and died crossing the sands to Vallay, caught by the tide.’
The Raven croaked again. So close now it must have been somewhere in the building. Maybe it had a nest here, or was just on the prowl. We looked in on a circular room as a Pigeon flew low over the fallen debris following the curve of the wall, soft feather-flap of air as it passed before disappearing through an archway. The place was derelict but pulsing with life.
Ross and Chief followed us back down to the steading. ‘We’ll be back for you soon,’ I said to them, climbing over a wall. We wanted to explore the east end of the island and Angus had asked us not to go with the ponies as there were cows calving. As Shuna climbed over the wall beside me a buff bird whirred by before disappearing into the long grass.
‘A Corncrake!’
‘That’s the first one I’ve ever seen,’ said Shuna. ‘Oh, this place…’ I couldn’t agree more.
The tide was going out and we followed a trail of neat cattle hoof-prints and tiny pink cockle shells across the bay towards the promontory of Àird Mhic Caoilt. Past a gate with a hand-painted sign warning Cows Calving, Please Keep Out were the dun and the standing stones that Anne had told us about. The dun was easy to spot, a circular stone-built wall straddling the pre-existing bedrock. The sea was encroaching now, and I wondered how it had looked when it was first built 3,000 years or so ago. Had there been trees, and where had the high tide mark been way back then? Now the tides were breathing on the dun and sometime in the not-too-distant future the sea would take it. We sat on the grassy top of the wall but weren’t the only ones to ever rest there. Little tubes of goose shit were dotted all about. There was a fence running through the middle of the dun with seaweed hanging from each square of rylock. I loved that this fence was there, that there were no paths to this ancient site, no signage, and wham-bam, a stock fence put up right through its centre. It was a living, breathing monument with tides and Cattle and Geese smoothing its edges.
There was an entrance way to the right, a beautifully crafted stonework channel that I imagined had originally been a doorway but was now a conduit for the sea. A tiny bird watched us from a grass tump beyond the dun. Bright glare from the sun came through the cloud and the air was warm. To my left a thick hessian rope dropped from beneath the turf, hanging over the inner wall of the dun and disappearing into a tangle of seaweed and silverweed below. I found my bead, a gemstone I didn’t know the name of. Roughly shaped, its purple hues picked up the blush of an empty crab’s shell and the pink in the quartz running through the gneiss. I threaded the bead and tied it onto the thick rope, drawing the knot extra tightly.
‘Shall we leave the standing stones for another day?’ Shuna said. ‘It’s so nice just sitting here, listening to the Oystercatchers.’ I nodded, feeling a jolt of pleasure at the thought of coming back here sometime.
A quiet while later we left the dun and headed back towards the waiting ponies. The Highland stirks from yesterday were this side of the island now, it must have been their prints we’d seen earlier. They followed us, halting when we stopped to look back at them, their coats rippling like reeds in the breeze, eyes hidden by forelocks. Between us and them horn-tipped shadows glistening on the sand.
We left Vallay the way we’d come, past the turreted gate post. Beyond it was its missing partner, recumbent in the rocks but visible from this angle. I got off Ross to take a closer look. Bricks radiated out from the centre of its upturned base like petals of a flower. P & M HURLL GLASGOW said each rosy rectangle.
We dropped off our gear at the pickup outside Kathryn and Angus’s house, and leaving the ponies to stand in the newly built loose boxes, went inside for a cup of tea.
‘Can’t believe you went to bed last night.’ Kathryn laughed. ‘Angus and I sat upstairs for hours watching the sky. It was a blaze of pinks and oranges, well after midnight. We thought you two must have been flipping out. It must be the best sunset we’ve ever seen here!’
Later, after an exhilarating gallop across the strand to Solas and Angus’s parents’ croft, Kathryn picked us up and we drove down to the shore.
‘We need to hurry,’ she said, ‘cockling on the rising tide is not the easiest. Hopefully we’re not too late.’ We took off our boots and socks and Kathryn showed us how to look for the little tufts of Algae which were the telltale signs of Cockles. Her technique was to dig in with a fork and pop them out. It was a blissfully meditative task. Our feet got cold as Kathryn’s Labrador Darrach guddled happily nearby. Soon the green plastic basket was heavy with shellfish.
That night we feasted on cockles and spaghetti, the Prosecco was flowing as we looked across the treetops to Vallay through an entire wall of glass. Kathryn showed us architect drawings of the beautiful cabins they were planning to build in their forest retreat. We talked Owls and Eagles, Horses and previous lives. It turned out Kathryn had done her Assistant Riding Instructor training at Gleneagles at around the same time as Shuna. Although they’d never met, they’d heard of each other, knew the same people and the same horses. I went to bed tipsy, revelling in the sense of what a small world it was, and that there were surely Short Eared Owls roosting close by in the Sedges.
DAY THIRTEEN
Solas to Berneray
‘Look at the swans,’ I said.
Shuna slowed the pickup to a standstill and we watched, through a rainy windscreen, a family of Mute Swans, two parents and
six cygnets, cross the road in front of us. They were walking from Loch Aonghais on the right down to the shore on our left. From the nursery to the sea. Wind ruffled the cygnets’ baby down and their heads, the size of cockle shells, had halos of silver. Six little scrappy angels, focusing intently on their feet, on following.
We carried on, soon catching up with Kathryn. We were following her to the island of Berneray where we’d leave the pickup and horsebox at the ferry terminal, and get a lift with her to Lochmaddy, the main town in the Uists. We were keen to visit the arts centre there, Taigh Chearsabhagh.
The exhibition was called ‘THE LOBSTER AND THE LACUNA/An Giomach agus an Fhaochag’. Its blurb said: A new exhibition takes us on a descent through the logbooks of Roberta Sinclair, naturalist and submariner. Her entries offer a glimpse into the 1950s heyday of the Hebridean Cable Transit company, and its underwater exploration of the Sound of Harris.’ It gave a definition of ‘Lacuna’ – a genus of small inter-tidal mollusc; A gap or vacancy; A prolonged silence; A missing piece of text or information.
I was captivated by the exhibition: the life-size model of Roberta’s submersible ‘Effie’ where you could feel the vibrations and hear the sounds she would have experienced under the sea. Roberta’s logbook entries had been reproduced on the walls:
1st July 1957. I am standing on the shore at Bays Loch, looking down the Grey Horse Channel towards Hermetray. My conveyance, car No 72 of the Hebridean Cable Company, hangs next to me in her newly modified form. The air smells of seaweed, pitch and diesel smoke.
5th May 1957. I have renamed Effie ‘The Lacuna’ after Lacuna Vincta, the banded Chink Snail, for she will be my hard shell as long as I live in the sub tidal region, and because she is to me a gap in knowledge, an extended silence. I will step into her.
My mouth was watering with the language and the underwater otherworld. Kathryn called us over to introduce us to the manager of Taigh Chearsabhagh.
‘Andy, this is Beady and this is Shuna.’ We shook hands.
‘So, are you Donald Shaw’s sister then?’ Shuna nodded in surprise. ‘Anna-Wendy was in a couple of nights ago at the opening and told me that you were staying at hers. She told me about your trip.’
‘Donald’s sister?’ asked Kathryn. ‘I know him from my Glasgow days. I’ve got a very embarrassing story, will tell you later.’ She was laughing.
‘See, it really is a small world,’ I said.
‘The exhibition, it’s beautiful, what a remarkable woman,’ I said to Andy.
‘You do realise it’s all made up?’ he said.
‘What?’ I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I went and sat in the submersible, thinking about it. Well, why did it need to change anything, whether she was real or not? She is here, this is her story, over there is her swimming costume and on the wall are her words. What difference does it make whether she was real or not? But I was shaken. I listened to the underwater sounds, gullibility sticking in my gullet.
‘So, it’s a big fat lie,’ Shuna said, joining me. ‘It’s so well done.’
I wanted to enjoy the artistry of it, but I’ve never been one for practical jokes. Those few seconds of another’s discomfort have always been excruciating to me, when a laugh is had at someone else’s expense. I was taking this personally, I realised.
We bought Kathryn a present in the shop, a jug glazed in all the blues of this island. On the way back to her house she told us the story of Donald and his harmonium.
‘When I was a producer, one of the things I produced was a Gaelic Country Music series called ‘Ceol Country’ with Donald organising all the arrangements. He’s great, it was so much fun working with him. We were filming every night for, I dunno, seven nights or whatever it was, down in Glasgow. One night we finished really late and I offered him a lift home in my car, which at that time was a banger of an old Golf. He had his harmonium with him and when we got to his house he couldn’t open the boot. I got out and pressed the button and the whole thing fell onto the road. Oh my God, it was awful! He might have had insurance to get it reconditioned, but I just felt awful. I thought I am never ever giving anyone a lift with a really precious instrument again.’
‘But it could have happened to anybody,’ said Shuna.
‘Do you know, he couldn’t have been nicer about it, but I can still see all the gear falling out and it was too heavy to catch. I could also see he was upset, and quite rightly so.’
‘Do you know what happened to him?’ said Shuna. ‘He had someone else’s harmonium in his car, quite recently, I think, and his car was stolen. I think that’s worse, he just felt so bad that he hadn’t taken it out of the car, it was stolen overnight. It was an old old old old one, irreplaceable.’
‘Harmoniums are iffy things to travel about with, it seems,’ I said.
It had turned into a dry sunny afternoon but the wind was fierce. The flagpole outside Donnie and Peigi’s house snapped in the north easterly. The ponies were grazing, bums to the wind, apparently oblivious to the sound. Donnie and Peigi had us in for a cup of tea and we gave them wine and chocolate, a token for their kindness in having the ponies for the night. They asked about the ponies, and our trip. Donnie told us about the tracks on the hill that he remembered from when he was a boy. ‘They had three ruts’, he said, ‘two for the cart’s wheels, one in the middle for the pony. You can still see those three tracks out on the hill today, the old peat tracks, they don’t go anywhere though, just stop out on the hill. No use for getting through to someplace else. You’re better sticking to the coast for that.’
We followed Kathryn and Akiko across the machair towards the Udal peninsula. The wind savaged the strips of plastic silage bale caught in the fences. It spooked the horses and snatched our words away. We rode across cultivated fields, past a wide shiny tractor and its trailing cloud of wind-spattered gulls. We topped the dunes and Tràigh Iar (meaning west beach) spanned out in front of us. It was one of those moments when your senses take off. I shouted something unintelligible at the top of my voice. The cold wind intensified the colours: Vallay was an emerald green banner unfurling on our left; straight ahead, way out across the citrine sand the sea was a strip of dark aquamarine. Our world was a bright whip of mane and tail and marram grasses, and our smiles spun off into the sand. Kathryn and Akiko led the way down the dunes towards where the line of white-finned waves met the shore.
‘How about a gallop then?’ shouted Kathryn when we caught up, and off we went. There was no way we could keep up with Akiko who raced ahead through the waves. The three-beat of the canter turned into the smooth four-beat of the gallop. Ross and Chief took it in turns to overtake each other and everything was wide open: no walls, gates, fences, bogs, people, just smooth wide beach. Exhilarated and laughing we left the beach at the far end. The ponies felt ten feet high, how rarely they get the chance to really move like that. And for them to let us taste the expansion and speed and freedom their DNA is built on. What a privilege.
Kathryn was taking us to a wheelhouse. Finally we’d actually see one, it seemed. We rode past a coil of rope up in the dunes, a black zigzag of pitch decorated its coils. It was like a giant adder, as big as a sleeping pony, asleep in the sun, tucked in out of the wind, basking.
Snakes. Mum had been obsessed with them. Snakes and Spiders and all ‘creepy crawlies’, as she called them. When Brèagha, her first grandchild, was born she’d refused to be known as Granny or Grandma. Instead she chose to be known as ‘Lolo’, from ‘chongololo’, a Giant African Millipede. So Lolo she was. That day after her death when my brothers and I were emptying the Luton van there had been a whole box of insect and reptile books. On the top was a hardback with REPTILES written simply on its cover in block capitals. Below was a high resolution photo of a Chameleon. Mum had loved her reptiles. She’d a touch of the Chameleon herself, could change in a flash, her mood, her allegiances, even her make-up. Stripes of Clinique and Dior in all the colours of Peacocks and Humming Birds, strokes of iridescence that brou
ght out the green in her eyes. Green like cats and witches.
Mum always said that witches were in the family. That her mother was a witch, that she’d killed her own father, Mum’s grandfather, with a curse. That’s what she told us. I thought about the exhibition that morning. The Lacuna, ‘a genus of small inter-tidal mollusc: a gap or vacancy, a prolonged silence, a missing piece of text or information’. Now I wanted to ask her more about my grandmother being a witch. I wanted to ask her more about so many things. I’d had that small opening, when she was dying and I was in softest love with her, when I could have talked to her. But I didn’t step into it. None of us did. We’d followed her lead and not talked about her death. Not even mentioned it. She’d known when Will and Tom and I were called in to see the consultant, the one in Oban with a bedside manner like a blunt shovel, but Mum hadn’t asked what she’d said. She didn’t mention her own death, not once. Not like all those years before, when she’d gone in for her first brain surgery when I was fifteen. She’d come upstairs to talk to Tom and me. ‘If I die, children, I want you to know that I’ve had a good life. A full life. I’ve got you three. I have loved deeply. I have adventured.’ This time, twenty-three years later, she was saying nothing. The tumour had done what tumours do, grown or moved or devoured something vital, and she could no longer talk. We’re left with a whole host of lacunae that will never be filled. I can guess and imagine, but I will never truly know. My memories of her are a palimpsest like the sea-licked Lichens on the rocks at our feet, merely a thin breathing skin over the unfathomable story of the rock.
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