The Ice Twins (12 page)

He nods, once more. Pensive behind his spectacles.

‘Please do stay in touch. Good afternoon, Mrs Moorcroft.’

And that is that. The door to his office shuts behind me, and I take the new steel-and-blond wood staircase to the main door, stepping out into the damp streets of Glasgow.

Streetlights make misty haloes in the freezing rain, the cold pavements are almost empty. There’s just one woman in black fighting an umbrella in the wind. And it’s me.

My Holiday Inn Express is just around the corner. I stay in the hotel all evening, get a takeaway curry delivered, eat it on my over-firm hotel bed with a plastic spoon, straight out of the plastic trays, gazing apathetically at the TV. Trying not to think about Kirstie. I watch nature programmes and cookery programmes until my mind is numb with the pointlessness. I feel nothing. No grief no angst, just quietness. Maybe the storm is past. Maybe this is it. Maybe life can go on.

My early breakfast is as plastic as dinner; I am glad to get in the car and head north for The Wilds. And as the grey council estates surrender to the greener fields, then wider forests, then proper mountains, graced with lean streaks of early snow, my mood elevates.

Surely Kellaway is right: he is a nationally renowned child psychiatrist. Who am I to argue? Kirstie Moorcroft is Kirstie Moorcroft, thinking otherwise is ridiculous. My poor child is confused, and guilt-ridden. I want to hug Kirstie for an hour when I get home. Then begin our lives again. In the sweet cold air of the Hebrides.

Loch Linnhe stretches blue and dark grey along my left, and beyond it I can see the thread of walls and hedgerows that is the Road to the Isles, which winds through woods and wilderness to the fishing port and ferry terminal of Mallaig.

I check the time on my dashboard as I drive. I’ve been told that if you get the right ferry, from Mallaig to Armadale, the Road to the Isles shaves two hours off the journey to Ornsay, as you don’t have to loop north to Kyle.

Pulling into a lay-by, I call the cheery lady at Calmac, the ferry company. The news is good. Next sailing one p.m. I can do it easily. So I phone the cottage on Torran to tell Angus and through the crackles I can hear him saying, ‘Good, good’ and ‘I’ll pick you up in the boat.’

‘The boat? We finally have a boat?’

Crackle. ‘Yes. Dinghy. I …’
Crackle
.

‘That’s great—’

Hiss. Crackle. KKkkkkrackle.

‘I’ll pick you up at Ornsay pier when …’ His voice fades out in a minor storm of static. This landline is going to collapse completely, soon.

‘Two thirty. Two thirty!! Angus. Meet me at Ornsay at two thirty.’

I can barely hear him reply. I think he said OK.

But we have a boat.

We have a boat!

When I reach the harbour at Mallaig, with its coastguard officers, and its chatting fishermen, and the cheery crabbers and prawn boats lined along the harbour, the air of busyness gives me a rush of extroversion. Briskly I drive my car on to the ferry and sit there, half smiling, half dreaming, handing my change through the window to a handsome Polish guy in a vast anorak, who is splurging tickets from a clever machine.

And then I offload, and excitedly skid the car along the main Sleat road to Ornsay – we’ve got a boat! A real boat of our own! Accelerating and animated I crest the last serious hill south of Ornsay.

It’s a bleak hump of moor, yet, often, strangely busy – because this is where the locals park their cars, at all hours, to catch a proper mobile signal: to access the Net on smartphones. It is also the last visual obstacle before Ornsay. And so, as I speed down the other side, I see it. My new home.

And my heart properly lifts.

Torran. Beautiful Eilean Torran.

For the first time since we moved here, I feel a serious attachment. Despite the rawness and the squalor, I am falling for the very real beauty of our new home: falling for the glory of the waters surging south past Salmadair; swooning over the lonely grandeur of Knoydart, between the sea lochs. The beauty is hurtful: like the pain of something beginning to heal.

I never want to go back to London. I want to stay here.

Eilean Torran. Our island.

Lost in my rhapsodies, I drive down through the village and park outside the Selkie, by the pier; and there indeed is Angus, with Kirstie in her pink coat protectively sheltered under his arm, and she is smiling shyly, and he isn’t smiling at all. He is looking at me, oddly, and I know something is wrong.

‘So,’ I say, disguising my fears, what can be wrong now? ‘How much did you pay?’

‘Five hundred quid from Gaelforce – chandlers in Inverness. Josh helped me bring her back. Two point five metres, inflatable. Bit of a bargain.’ He gives me a hard, handsome, unconvincing grin – and leads me to the pier, pointing down to a lurid, orange, inflatable dinghy, floating in the calm Ornsay waters. ‘Josh is worried that this won’t be man enough after a big night at the bar. But that’s bollocks.’

‘OK.’

Kirstie is clutching Leopardy with one hand, and her father’s large fist with the other. Waiting to get in the boat with Mummy and Daddy and go home. Her dad goes on: ‘Seen plenty of yachties get back to their vessels in this sort of thing. These are light enough to drag up the beach, solo. And as we’ve got no safe running mooring, seems crucial. Right?’

‘Erm.’ I’ve no idea what to say; I know nothing about boats. I’m still pleased about the boat; but there
is
some mood here. Something amiss.

‘Let me get in first,’ says Angus. ‘And I’ll help you guys aboard.’ He jumps down the stone steps, then climbs into the dinghy, which wobbles under his weight. He turns and opens his arms to our daughter, and says:

‘OK, Kirstie, do you want to come down first, before Mummy.’

I gaze at him. My eyes wide. Wondering. Thinking. Kirstie looks at me and says:

‘’Magine you had a dog and a cat and another cat called Hello Bye Bye and Come Here and you were in the park with them, shouting.’

‘Yes?’

She is softly giggling to herself, her white teeth shining, small teeth growing, one tooth wobbling. She is laughing properly now.

‘If you were shouting in the park with them, Mummy, with the cat and the dog and you were shouting Hello and Bye Bye and Come here, they’d be running around everywhere, they wouldn’t know what to do!’

I force a smile. This is the kind of joke – the kind of spontaneous nonsense concept – Kirstie would enjoy with Lydia; they would concoct these strange whimsical fantasies and they would get wilder and wilder and then they would both laugh, together, as one. But now there is no one here to play this game with her.

I try to laugh. It is blatantly phoney. Kirstie stares at me and now she looks sad, with the cold blue waves behind her.

‘Had a dream,’ she says. ‘Bad dream again. Granddad was there in the white room.’

‘What? Darling?’

‘Sarah!’

Angus’s voice is sharper than the cold Ornsay wind.

‘Sarah!’

‘What?’

‘Can’t you help her?’ His eyes are fixed on mine, and he goes on. ‘Help Kirstie into the boat.’

Taking her hand I lift her down into the boat, then follow. Kirstie is distracted, now, staring grief-struck at the waves. I lean close to my husband. And hiss at him:

‘What happened?’

He shrugs. And his voice drops to a whisper. ‘Another dream. Last night.’

‘The same nightmare?’

‘Yes. The faces. Nothing important. It will stop.’ He turns, forcibly brightening, and smiling. ‘OK, guys, welcome to HMS
Moorcroft
. Let’s go!’

I gaze from Angus’s measured and bogus smile to my daughter’s bonny blonde head, turned away from me, and I consider this recurring dream. She’s had it for months, on and off. And now her grandfather was there? Why is Angus dismissing this out of hand? It has to be symbolic. It has to mean something. Yet I can’t work it out.

Angus is starting the outboard motor. The wind is kicking and brisk. Kirstie is leaning over the side of the boat, looking down at the waves. I worry that her anorak hood is down, she must be getting cold. But the boat successfully guides us to Torran; Kirstie jumps out, and runs up the path to the house: apparently in a brighter mood, glad to be home. Beany waits for her at the kitchen door: where he often can be found.

As if he doesn’t want to go indoors.

We linger, as Angus tries to teach me how to tie the boat to the iron railings of the lighthouse.

‘No, like this,’ he says. ‘Do it like this.’

I try to master the knot; and I fail, again, in the dimming light. He smiles and chides me,

‘Milverton. You’re such a landlubber.’

‘And what are you, Gus, some old sea dog?’

He laughs. And the mood between us is better, again. Eventually I get the knot half-right – though I’m not sure I’ll remember it.

We go inside and the mood is definitely good. There is a purposeful sense of family. A big pot of tea sits on the dining table; mugs are poured and cake is eaten and decisions are made; we are a couple working on a home. The sweet smell of new paint fills the cottage, as Angus goes into the lumber-room and chops wood, to build a fire, while I cook supper.

I note, as I slice the eyes out of potatoes, and stare at the twinkled lights of Ornsay village, how the primitive conditions of our life are reverting us to traditional male and female roles. Angus would often cook in Camden, but he rarely does it here: this is because his strength and time is needed for arduous, masculine tasks. Chopping and lifting and bricklaying.

And yet, I don’t mind that. Indeed, I quite like that. We are a man and a woman on an island, self-reliant and surviving, working as a team: and doing male and female things. It is old-fashioned, but it is not unsexy.

Over dinner we sip cheap Co-op wine and I hold Angus’s hand and say, ‘Well done on the boat.’ He mumbles something about water hazards and basking sharks. I don’t particularly know what he is saying, but I embrace the sound of it. We live somewhere with basking sharks.

As the big fire consumes the logs, and we open a second bottle of red, Kirstie happily retreats to her room with a magazine. Angus gets out a book of knots and tries to teach me some special boating knots – the bowline, the cleat hitch, the stopper – with a length of thin rope.

We are snuggled under the rug, again. I gaze at the slender grey rope, and do my best. But the knot falls apart in my hand, for the seventh time.

Angus sighs, patiently.

‘Good job you’re not into bondage,’ he says. ‘You’d be useless.’

I look up at him. ‘But it wouldn’t be me tying the knots, would it?’

He pauses, and he laughs. That old, deep, very sexy laugh. Then he leans and kisses me gently on the lips, and it is a husband’s kiss, a lover’s kiss. And I know the sexual chemistry is still there. Somehow, it has survived. Through everything. And I am actually happy, or something close to it.

For the rest of the evening, Angus and I do more work on the house: he is grouting the bathroom, and installing new pipes. I am contentedly painting away some of the squatters’ murals: they are just too creepy.

Positioning a chair, I prepare to tackle the second mural. The harlequin. But then I stop, paint-roller in hand. And I look up. The harlequin looks down. With its white sad face.

From nowhere, the realization pierces me.

The white room, the sad faces, staring down. The constant repetitive nightmare. And now her grandfather?

I’ve worked it out. I’ve worked out Kirstie’s dream. And everything has changed again; and I am frightened.

8

He gazed at his wife. At least they weren’t drinking wine out of jam jars any more. At least they had gone beyond that, into a world of actual wine glasses.

This was something, but not enough. He was sweating around Skye, trying to find work, all kinds of work, any work, building pig sties and loft extensions, building garden sheds if he had to, all his wife had to do was unpack the rest of the crockery, which seemed to have taken her about a month. Or at least six days. Yes, they’d been working hard on the house. Together. And working quite well – getting along better, despite it all. And yes, she’d had her commission in Glasgow, but what was that all about, truly? He didn’t quite believe it. Imogen seemed vague and evasive when he’d rung her, yesterday, from the Selkie, and asked her: what was his wife doing in Glasgow?

Straining not to drink his wine in one gulp, he listened to her talk about telepathy.

Telepathy?

Sarah gazed his way. Then she went on.

‘Gus, think about it: I mean – the dream. Kirstie is dreaming about Lydia. And she is dreaming about Lydia in hospital. Must be, right? So maybe she is imagining herself
as
Lydia, at that horrible moment: when she woke up for a second and saw us all – her family, the nurses, the doctors. Her grandfather was there, he was in that room. The white room in hospital.’

‘But, Sarah, I—’

‘But Kirstie has no idea that her sister Lydia woke up, that she was conscious for one final moment. No one has ever told her. So—’ His wife’s expression was now quite panicked ‘Gus. How else would she have known about the hospital? How?’