The Sea House: A Novel (30 page)

‘Can I do something to help, Angus? Can we fetch some shopping for you?’

‘Mrs MacDonald has already filled up the cupboard. I’ll never eat all of what she has put in there. All Bran. What is that now? And Donny is fetching me back the cow, so I will be bringing you some milk down soon. And the sisters are saying they are going to be visiting more often.’ Another deep sigh. ‘But I’ve got a lady, here in Tarbert.’ He sounded brighter now. ‘Any time I need to, I can go and talk with her.’

I thought for a moment he might be telling me he had a girlfriend, but realised he was talking about a counsellor, someone probably recommend by the Inverness centre.

‘She’s called Dr Montgomery, come to live here for a couple of years on account of her husband’s job in the fisheries.’ He leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘And she’s half Red Indian. She and her husband are renting the old schoolhouse there down on Strond, not so far from Rodel. Oh yes, she’s just lovely. I only wish that I had met her thirty years ago, then, perhaps, my boy would have stayed.’

He fell silent; he looked suddenly drawn in on himself, as if he might fall asleep. I stood up to go.

‘You’ll tell us if we can do something?’

He didn’t reply. With the greasy tweed cap he always wore shading his eyes, it was hard to know if he was gazing out of the window or sleeping. I slipped out of the door, paused on the threshold.

For a moment, I had an impulse to go back in, wake him up urgently and ask him for the number of his American doctor. Then I felt a blur of shame: was I really in the same category as an old drunk? And anyway, what exactly was I going to say to her? It was never going to help.

Mrs MacDonald had evidently been watching from her place by the post office window. As I left the cottage, she came out and waved, hurried towards the path.

‘How is he?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘I’ll be there later to take his lunch over. But I was going to say, don’t forget now, you’re all to come over for Charlie’s birthday this afternoon. He’s going to be five. Doesn’t seem possible.’

We went over that afternoon and found her house given over to a small riot of jelly and crisps.

She said it was to be a double celebration, since Jamie had just been told that he’d got a job as a teacher at the school in Seilebost. He and Leaf were going to move out from the Sea House and they were looking for a cottage to rent down by the estuary.

The other seven children from Charlie’s nursery came along with their mums, women who were mostly about our age.

The mums were all slightly in awe of Jamie since he’d become something official, but when it came to those island women, it was me who was in awe of them. They were so at ease as they handled their kids: a word in a child’s ear while handing them juice, hoisting a toddler onto a hip while chatting and drinking cups of tea, everything so instinctive and natural.

Possibly a bit too relaxed, I thought, as I watched two little boys sword-fighting with the butter knives. I disarmed them and they ran off outside. They found some sticks and carried on with their war. Their mums watched serenely through the window.

One of the kids popped a balloon with a bang. I jumped a mile, let out a loud scream.

‘You’re silly,’ said Charlie.

Mrs MacKay called everyone in to light the candles. I took Michael’s hand as we crowded round the kitchen table and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ twice, once in English for our benefit, and then in Gaelic, the sheepdog outside barking hysterically.

Shona started handing round the cake. She completed every movement while balancing the sleeping baby in the crook of her arm like a gift on a platter.

‘This one’s a tinker,’ she admitted, catching me watching her. ‘The moment I put her down, she wakes up and cries.’

‘Do they all do that?’

‘New babies do, but this one’s the queen of “Don’t leave me now”. You wouldn’t hold her for me a moment, Ruth? Here’s me bursting to go to the loo.’

I found a small weight filling my arms, compact and soft as plums. A warmth radiated through the cotton blanket into my skin. The baby turned its cheek to rest against my arm.

I was mesmerised, the minute face drawing the eyes like a candle flame at Christmas. For a moment I thought I could scent pine and juniper and candle wax.

I knew I was having a baby. Of course I knew that. And yet it remained an idea, a problem, never a person. Now it struck me with breathtaking force that my child was real. I would hold it like this, its hot weight tiny and real, a being so, so vulnerable, so utterly dependent on me and Michael.

How did you do it? How did you care for a baby? How could you know what it needed, even when you loved your child as fiercely as I did mine? Because surely even love was no proof you would care for it properly in the end.

I felt Shona’s arms sliding under mine to take the baby back. I watched her lift the little girl and turn her body in the air to place the child against her shoulder, a hand cradling the back of the head; a fluid gesture, simple and caring and right.

But that was how you did it. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. You just did it. I was going to have a tiny baby, and I could do it – if I wanted to. I could learn all the little things a child like that needed.

Down to me now. Time to grow up.

I knew what I had to do.

*   *   *

Michael seemed glum as we left, as if the noise of the party had worn him out. He fetched my coat, held it out wordlessly for me to put my arms in the sleeves, looking away as if he had no expectation that we’d speak.

So much I had to tell him, soon.

*   *   *

I slept very little. I was awake and dressed at first light, sitting down in the kitchen with a mug of coffee, waiting for the light to gather itself, nervous about the day ahead.

By seven o’clock, I was parked a little way down from the old schoolhouse in Strond, watching the house for any signs of life. The early morning’s glassy blue light threw the sea and the flat shapes of the Uists into a blur of legends and glare that made my eyes sore.

A woman in red cargo trousers and a pink top came out. She held back a rope of long, straight hair with one hand and put something in a bin at the side of the house, shutting the lid with a scraping sound.

I slammed the car door and was by her side as she opened the back door to go in.

‘Dr Montgomery?’

She turned, looked puzzled.

‘Yes.’

‘Can you help me?’

CHAPTER 35

Alexander, 1862

It can sometimes happen that in the course of a day everything we believe is turned upside down, and we understand for the first time what it is that we have been looking at for so long. So it was for me, one dark autumnal day in Edinburgh.

I had taken rooms near to where Fanny and Matthew had once lived. For reasons I perfectly understood, they had quit Edinburgh some months earlier to return to Cambridgeshire. Without my old friends – and with most of my acquaintances embarrassed by my sudden demotion to an apprentice teacher – it was necessarily a lonely life, though my working days were full enough since I had started teaching in a school set up by Fanny’s circle to serve the poorer parts of Edinburgh.

I was, however, greatly troubled by fatigue, since nothing could prevent the night’s dreams from resurrecting the hours when I had last seen Katriona alive. My sleep shattered, I would then lie awake, and my mind would try to fathom the strange transmutation that had resulted in Katriona’s mermaid child. None of my enquiries to Edinburgh or Glasgow had yet returned any news of a similarly mutant specimen in their collections, and yet, in the answer to this conundrum, beyond a veil of darkness, I was sure that the seal man waited for me. When I slept, I saw him, a shadowy being on a glimmer of water.

I spent that Saturday marking exercise books, then remembered to run out to the market before the stalls closed to buy bread and apples and a cold pie. I could not afford a maid on my wages and had learnt to greatly appreciate the efforts involved in all the tasks that Moira had once undertaken on my behalf.

My errands finished, it was thus late afternoon before I lit a lamp and took up the morning’s paper, and found therein an article that captured my curiosity.

It was a notice for a lecture to be given that same day at the Edinburgh Historical Society. Dr Gordon MacIntyre was to speak on ‘A study of folk tales as oral history. A discussion of fairies, Finns and Selkies and their place in the history of the Gaelic peoples.’

I was not interested in Dr MacIntyre’s theories on fairies, but I was very keen to hear his ideas concerning the Selkies. That is not to say that I expected any enlightenment on possible transmutational links between man and seal, yet the topic was such that I was determined to attend the lecture.

Two papers were to be presented that evening and I arrived at the university buildings as the first talk was beginning. I made as discreet an entrance as I could, walking gingerly up the high wooden steps and sliding in along one of the banks of seats near the back.

The first lecture concerned the archaeological evidence for the supposed site of a battle in the Jacobite uprising. A purposeful young man had laid out his exhibits before him: a sword that was disintegrating away into rust, and a parcel of yellow bones with various cuts and chops. Rubbing his glasses and checking that his notes were in order, he proceeded to hold the audience with a winning exposition of his argument. At his conclusion, the room echoed with measured applause. The company looked satisfied, intellects and curiosity well exercised.

As Dr MacIntyre got up and went to the lectern, a noise of shuffling feet and coughing echoed around the panelled room, the audience become seemingly more aware of the cramped nature of the stalls rising in close tiers around the lecture pit. I could well appreciate, that to those of an academic mind, MacIntyre’s line of enquiry must have appeared somewhat fanciful.

He was a short, elderly man, ruddy-faced and with white hair. MacIntyre had no exhibits displayed before him, but giving a broad smile around the room, he launched into his discussion.

MacIntyre’s proposal was this: that certain folk tales of the Highlands preserve within them unique historic information predating any written accounts. He cited as evidence the tombs and dwellings recently uncovered at sites that had long been considered as enchanted by the local population. MacIntyre’s claim was that such stories of underground fairy houses were in fact the folk memories of ancient Neolithic peoples who had once lived in subterranean dwellings alongside the incoming farming communities.

A tall red-faced man rose to his feet and interrupted.

‘And where, sir, is the evidence that these unearthed dwellings have always been connected to local fairy tales?’

‘From the local crofters, naturally.’

‘Well, naturally, your average crofter is going to tell you anything you wish to hear. Especially if they can turn a penny for themselves by taking gullible visitors on tours of fairy mounds – no doubt making their stories up as they go. This supposition and make believe is surely entirely superfluous to modern history or archaeology.’

‘I beg to differ with the good gentleman,’ Dr MacIntyre replied evenly, but his face flushed a worryingly deep red for a man of his age. He cleared his throat, found his place and ploughed on.

‘I would like now to turn to the legend of the Selkie, the story of a seal man who is able to remove his seal skin on land and so transform into a human – a folk tale common along the entire western seaboard, from Ireland to Orkney.’

Again, more coughing and shuffling from the audience. Two men stood up and left the room. People were losing patience with MacIntyre’s whimsy.

MacIntyre paused and bent to reach into a box placed on the floor by the lectern. He took from it a small native artefact: a model of a boat or canoe, approximately ten inches long. He placed this upon the lectern and looked around the room, waiting for complete quiet.

There was a low buzz of voices and I sat forward in my seat to hear better. I for one found his theory of ancient dwellings remembered as fairy houses to be of great merit. I recalled the ancient hearth uncovered beneath the dunes that Maggie had always declared to be haunted by underground sprites.

But as to what MacIntyre could have to say about my seal people, there my imagination failed me.

CHAPTER 36

Ruth

With Susan Montgomery, I learned so much, so fast. That old lizard, for all that he was strong enough to make sure a body kept alive, he was actually quite stupid. With her charts and her tips and techniques, Susan showed me how to start to tame him. Just understanding how those survival reflexes worked helped me to see what was going on and showed me that I could choose how I reacted to a situation.

She helped me tell the story of how such close knowledge of death had carried out a subtle transmology on my body, and she helped me tell the story of the parts of my soul that I had tried to abandon.

And when I told Susan about the little refugee girl in the hallway, she helped me to tell that child’s story from the first night I spent in the first foster home; to let her become part of my own history once more.

All those strangers’ homes. I got so much wrong, so many misunderstandings. Meeting the woman in her hairnet in the middle of the night when I tried to creep downstairs and put my wet sheets in the washing machine. The bowl of Bird’s instant trifle, its hundreds and thousands melting into the fake cream, fairground lights drowned in rain. He said, ‘Eat it, we’re not made of money.’ He held the spoon to my chin. I bit his hand.

The social worker took me to the girls’ home, after that last foster home failed to work out. Terry, the house father, showed us round. The social worker kept saying, ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ We stood in a bedroom. It was crammed with old beds. Every piece of ramshackle furniture had been painted over with white gloss: the wooden headboards, the iron bedsteads like hospital beds; the rickety side cupboards. There were gritty bits in the paint. All the usual bedroom clutter was there – hairbrushes, blouses hanging over the backs of chairs, posters on the walls – but there were too many beds, too much of everything.