The Sea House: A Novel (35 page)

Jesse was persistent in making me her good broth, and my body decided to proceed with its business of healing itself; in time, therefore, I was once more walking along the beach under an expansive blue sky. At the line of surf I espied a glistening black head rise up out of the water and then disappear. It was a small seal. It was hard to keep in sight, as the creature slipped behind a roll of white wave, then reappeared yards away. I wondered that the seal stayed so close to the shore and did not flee. It was the size of a small child, its head sideways, one black flipper cutting the rolling waves, enjoying the play of the surf. I followed the pup for half a mile as it swam along the shoreline, and when I could follow it no more, I stood exhilarated by this encounter.

I turned back up the long and empty beach, the sky stretching out to the horizon, and breathed deeply and easily in the healing air. Then I saw that the landscape was not empty. Someone was walking up by the machair above the dunes in the distance, a shawl billowing up round her shoulders. For a moment, I was annoyed that the purity of the land should have to be shared with another person, and then I stood very still. There was something familiar about the gait of that figure, a sense of purpose about her walk as she moved towards me. I laughed at myself, alone and so prone to no end of fanciful imaginings, my head still weak from the fevers.

The figure continued to walk towards me and then raised an arm and waved. I strained my eyes to see if it were perhaps old Jesse, come to get me out of the breeze. But this was a slight and nimble figure, and no one I recognised from the island. The sun caught the woman’s shawl, a rich amber colour. Her hair, the same hue, was gathered up on top of her head but beginning to stream out in the wind. My heart started to race; I walked slowly forward and saw Moira walking towards me.

I surely could not have been more surprised if I had seen the Lord Jesus Christ walk across the beach and take my hands, nor more overjoyed. Her own small hands were cold but alive and her thumbs worked against the skin of my hands as if chaffing them back into life. Tendrils of hair were streaming across her eyes that she must brush away with her fine-boned hand. I saw her freckled cheeks, the kind concern in her eyes.

I found myself smiling at her in great joy, she smiling back with those grey eyes and their lights of amber. I took the shawl that was wrapped round her and pulled her close against my coat and held her. She put her head against my chest and sighed, stayed there, quietly. The wind sang across my ears as I looked down at that dear head.

‘Dear Moira,’ I said. The wisps of her hair tickled around my face. She looked up directly into my eyes.

‘I have come to answer your letter. I wanted to be here with you when I told you that when I say I will be your wife, then I mean it. You have written such sad and despairing letters.’

‘You would marry me?’

I looked at her steady eyes, the fine lines at their corners as she smiled at me.

‘Yes. Of course.’ She took my hand, put it against her cheek. ‘But you must come into the warm. You’re quite frozen. Let’s walk back to the house.’

We walked up the beach. She put her arm through mine, leaning in against the wind. But I stopped, moved to stand in front of her, still holding her hand.

‘Are you sure, Moira? So much has happened. I am no longer the man you remember, the boy you remember.’

‘You are the man I love,’ she said. ‘That is how it is.’

We walked on in silence and great happiness. How strange it was to unfasten the front door and have Moira enter there, watch her walk round the table and the chairs by the fire, pick up my shells from the shore along the mantelpiece, and smile at everything and examine it as if she were reading the story of my life in the intervening years. She ran her hand along the book spines on the shelves, stopping to greet an old friend as she took it down to read a little.

I watched her and shook my head, for it seemed to me so very right and comfortable to have Moira there in the room.

‘I cannot think how it is that I should be so blessed, that you should decide you could love me.’

She shut the book. ‘Alexander, I have loved you from the moment I saw you.’ She walked over to me and put her slim hands each side of my face, stood on tiptoe, and that was the first time that Moira kissed me.

CHAPTER 41

Ruth, 1996

I am standing in the shower, still half asleep, letting the water run over my body. The morning light is white and peaceful through the silvery drops on the shower screen, and the faint outlines of older drops visible beneath them. I am standing and letting the last of the soap run off, relaxed with that feeling of well-being that you get from water, from swimming or from standing in a long, hot shower.

I watch my hands turning off the taps. They are pale and new-looking hands, solid and capable. I watch them carry on getting the towel almost as if they have their own agenda, their own good sense.

And it strikes me, but of course, they always did have their own agenda. My hands and my body always remembered. They were living my real life, getting on with what was really happening, while I was trying to live the life I thought I had. They remembered all the days I forgot, when I couldn’t see how I had died and come back again, a body and a soul for ever changed by fear.

I look at those poor white dumb things and I think, It’s okay now. I know you. I know our story. I wrap the towel round my shoulders, open the shower door and emerge into the chilly room. I balance on one leg, then the other, getting dry, rubbing down my skin.

I am thirty-three years old and I am slightly overweight for a smallish person. I have long black hair, a few grey hairs on one side at the front. I love chocolate almonds and I hate the taste of nougat. I have post-traumatic stress disorder and my body can go from nought to sixty in panic for no good reason; when my palms sweat and my heart begins to gallop, when I feel like I have to run or fight, then I know I must stand and slowly let it all stop. I wait for the fear to finish drowning me, and then I start to breathe, start to think again.

And I say, Poor old hands and brain, it’s okay now. We are safe. Then we remember our story, how we came to be here, and we are tired, but we are okay. I can choose how my days will turn out now – and my days are good.

I pull on my clothes, twist my hair into a pleat, pin it up still damp.

In the kitchen Michael is in his shorts and T-shirt, not showered yet, his fair hair tousled by sleep. Euan at four has that same mop of curls, only much fairer after a summer spent outdoors in the sun.

Euan has three tractors lined up in front of his porridge, multitasking, eating while making tractor noises and re-parking them round the bowl.

Emily – our little surprise arrival sixth months ago – is in her highchair. She is sitting with her tiny hands one each side of a bowl of baby porridge, clenching and unclenching her fists. Michael is spooning it slowly into her mouth, shaving it off as they go.

I take over from Michael. He puts a mug of coffee beside me as he goes to shower. Emily keeps her mouth open while we change shifts and gives a shudder of happiness when she sees me carry on with the gloop. As the spoon travels towards her, she fastens on it and her eyes turn up and look at me, centre on my face.

The porridge finally all gone, I clean her cheeks and chin and undo the highchair strap, lift her small, heavy weight and balance her against my shoulder. She smells of damp skin and oatmeal and gently bangs her cheek against my chin as she wobbles.

She sees a bird go past the window and lifts her arm. I carry her over and we stand at the back door, looking at the sparrows fussing and hopping in the fuchsia bushes outside. I balance and rock her as we watch them, and think, I can do this. I can do this because I changed.

My body grew and swelled and tore and I became a new creature, a mother. And I saw that all my old life stopped then. It was up to me, to choose to let go, because me and my hands, we had to stop asking and we had to start giving; we had to stop fighting and start holding instead.

I am thirty-three years old. I have black hair. I am slightly overweight and I had a grotty childhood. I like chocolate and I know no one is coming back from those days to say sorry for what happened. But I believe there’s a sweetness and a kindness in this world that infuses the morning with yellow sunlight, and I am married to a man who is kind and loving. And I don’t know how I got so lucky. I am thirty-three years old and I am the mother of Emily and Euan and I am so, so lucky.

The door goes. Leaf arrives, comes into the kitchen and grabs an apron from the back of the door. ‘Hi, sweetie,’ she says, blowing a kiss at Emily. She grabs a hug from Euan and goes through to the main kitchen to begin cooking the breakfasts. Leaf has become the chef for the guesthouse and the evening restaurant we now run together, her lentil soups and home-made bread and cheese soufflés always bringing the Sea House guests back for more. I hear her moving quickly around the kitchen, sliding a CD into the player, cracking eggs, swooshing them into the pan of hot oil in time to a fiddle and a bodhran beat. She sings along in a phonetic approximation of Gaelic that Angus John tells me is actually rather good.

I hear guests moving around upstairs, water running in the showers. At the moment, we’ve got a group of sixteen teenagers from Lanarkshire.

A toot from a car outside and Euan jumps off his chair. Maire, Donald Allan’s wife, drops by every other morning to take Euan to the little school, a two-room building on a spit of blond dunes and sandy machair that stretches halfway out into the Seilebost estuary – land that looks far too fragile to withstand the winter storms, but it does, year after year. I put his snack in his backpack. Euan adds a tractor. We go out to the car and he climbs in the back, chatting away in Gaelic to his best friend, Kirsty. I kiss him, fasten his seatbelt and wave to him until they are out of sight.

The thing that has taken longest for me to cope with has been letting the kids take those small daily risks, letting them out of my sight. But I am working on it, working out the difference between a real risk and a feeling of panic. The car is gone and I turn and go into the house.

Michael has the back carrier ready for Emily. She’s going with him and eight of the kids for a hike to Hushinish. She loves sailing along on Daddy’s back with the tassel on her hat swinging from her little head.

I hurriedly finish my coffee, kiss Emily and Michael, and head out to get ready for the morning.

Down at the new shed that we built at the bottom of Angus John’s croft, on a piece of land he sold to us, I unbolt the doors and open them up onto the sand. Ten kayaks in blues and reds sit on a rack under the roof, paddles fixed up against the wall, and beneath them, the larger dinghy. Donald Allan arrives and we start to pull the dinghy out. Once the kids are down, I get them to help me unload the kayaks, check they all know what to do, a little talk on safety, and then we go down to the water. They’ve had a good two weeks to get used to the kayaks, so today we are going to do a slightly longer trip.

I lead on the way out, as we start to glide round the peninsula between the shore and the island of Taransay across the sound. Nothing but the slap of the paddles dipping, the rocking waves like a dance partner as we measure the pull and swing of the water. Beneath us, the intense glassy turquoise and purples of the sea as we cross over white sand and dark rocks, heading out to deeper water. Donald Allan cuts the motor on the dinghy, lets it track in the currents, and we travel along in silence, the kids awed to be afloat on the sea, the surface of light melting into a view of deep water and caves of shadow.

I think of Michael. He’ll be walking out towards Hushinish Point in the distance in front of us, above the beaches where Ishbel first saw her man gliding along the surface of the sea.

And I think of my mother’s Selkie ancestor now as I paddle, pulling her skin boat up the sands, pulling off her seal skin jacket, and shaking out her long black hair. The Selkie woman walks up the beach, and as she does, a woman in a yellow dress with long sleeves and a floaty skirt waits for her, wind fanning out the long black hair that is tied off her face with a chiffon band. I see how they talk together as they go. Sometimes they stop, shade their eyes and wave at me, just to check I’m all right.

Before we turn round to go back, Donald Allan cuts the motor again while the kayaks make a detour into a cave beneath the cliffs, a silent space that belongs only to the clip-clopping of the sea. A mineral light, blue and vivid green, shines up from the water, throwing bright nets over the roof. Blooms of red seaweed and bunches of purple mussel beds, hushed by the quiet echo.

‘It’s beautiful,’ they say.

A tall boy with a stud through his lip, shaved eyebrows and scars on his wrists, his face thin and hungry, hangs there on the water, rocking. ‘Wow,’ he says, ‘you’d never believe it, would you?’

*   *   *

At seven we are due in Stornoway at the An Lanntair Arts Centre. The Hebridean summer festival is quite a big thing now, and this year the centre is holding a multi-media presentation: ‘The Selkie, based on a book by Rev. Alexander Ferguson and Dr Gordon MacIntyre’.

When my uncle, Lachlan Macleod, tracked down Alexander Ferguson’s manuscript, it seemed incredible that the book had never been published so I approached Edinburgh University to see if they could suggest what we might do with it. They seized on the pages immediately and were very keen to publish it under the university’s name.

A few months after that, the director of the summer festival approached us. He’d seen the manuscript and wanted to present the story of the Selkie and the mermaid. The Glasgow schools of music and art were going to take part, and there would be dancers and an audio-visual presentation with a huge screen at the back of the stage.

The An Lanntair Arts Centre is a lovely modern building with a large glass atrium. Sally and Lachlan are already there, Lachlan dapper in a tweed overcoat as he looks at one of the photos in the exhibition. Euan runs up to him and grabs his knees and Lachlan swings him up in the air. Lachlan kisses my cheek, shakes Michael’s hand and then gives us a tour of the exhibition as if he personally organised it, Sally following behind and unwrapping a toffee for Euan.