Bird of Passage (24 page)

All the tensions of the past few months boiled up inside her.

‘You and whose army?’ she asked him. ‘You and whose army Nicolas? What did you expect him to do when you were so horrible to him? He’s my good friend, but you treat him like some kind of pariah. And I wouldn’t go bragging about giving anybody a good kicking if I were you! He could knock you flat with one punch.’

Nicolas was dismayed. She looked as though she wanted to punch him herself. There was something about her rage that reminded him of Finn.

‘I hate you!’ she told him, furiously. ‘I hate you, Nicolas Laurence!’ 

He backed down and tried to dismiss it as a joke. He could see that she was really upset, so he had the good grace to apologise to her if not to Finn. But he still  put it all down to her fragile state of mind. He kept saying ‘Sorry, sorry, Christine, I’m so sorry.’ And he seemed to mean it.

Finn was sulking. If Kirsty went near him, he just shrugged her off. He wouldn’t even let her sit near him. He sprawled on the lumpy kitchen sofa next to the range, reading the newspaper, slumped there with his long legs stretched out, so that she had to step over them every time she walked past. Isabel and Alasdair had gone to bed and they were alone in the kitchen together. She finished the washing up and tried to sit down next to him but he was having none of it. He stood up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve got stuff to do outside.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

He shrugged. ‘Do you know, I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, Kirsty.’

She was very shocked. He never swore, or not when she was around, anyway.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’m fucking sick of it, if you must know. Sick of the way you treat me!’

‘How do I treat you?’ she asked. ‘And you don’t have to swear at me.’

 ‘There you go again. Ordering me about.’

‘When did I ever order you about?’

The frustration and rage boiled up inside him all over again.

‘I think you treat me like shite!’ he said, viciously. ‘You use me. When you want a bit of comfort or a bit of company, you think I’ll always be waiting for you with open arms. And you seem to think I’ll be grateful for any crumb of affection you throw my way. Well not any more – Christine!’  He said it just the way Nicolas said it, except with a sneer in his voice.

He tried to go out of the kitchen but she barred his way.

‘Will you move?’ he said.

‘Or you’ll what?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Or you’ll what? Oh don’t be so bloody stupid, Finn !’

‘That’s right.  I’m a thick Irish bastard. A moron. That’s what they used to tell us we were. Thickos. Charity cases. And it seems to me that I still am. I’ve just exchanged one form of slavery for another.’

He took her by the shoulders and put her out of his way so hard that he bruised her arms. She could feel the marks of his fingers. She went  up to bed, and wept into her pillow. She thought he might come up and apologise but he didn’t. She cried herself to sleep, but very quietly, so that neither her mother nor her grandfather would be able to hear her.

The next morning, however, he intercepted her in the yard. He could hardly look at her.

‘I’m sorry.’ He stretched out his hand  and she saw that he was holding something out to her. It was a tiny piece of flint, beautifully shaped.

‘An arrow head!’ 

He had found it up at Hill Top Town, one of his few treasured possessions. People on the island used to call these things Elf Shot, believing that they were made by the fairy folk, the
daoine sidhe.
 Finn had spent half the night making a little hole in one end, so that he could put it on a fine leather thong and made it into a pendant for her. He took it from her and put it carefully over her head, his long fingers brushing her hair. She felt the static raising the strands of hair, a small tremor against her scalp.

The last week of her mother’s life was surprisingly quiet. The inevitability of the ending calmed them all. The very last thing Isabel said was, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Kirsty?’ She slipped into a coma after that, and only stirred when the pain broke through the morphine. The nurses kept her pretty much drugged so she didn’t suffer acutely. She just lingered on. Kirsty could hear her breathing, rasping. That sound would stay with Kirsty for ever. She kept waiting for it to stop or change in some way. 

Kirsty stayed beside her mother’s bed. After a while, she found herself whispering into the pale pink shell of her mother’s ear, ‘You can go now mum. You can go, if you want to. I’m ready for you to go.’ But still Isabel lingered. Kirsty wondered if it was she herself who was keeping her mother there. Maybe Isabel knew that Kirsty couldn’t bear to lose her. Maybe that was why she was reluctant to go, even though her body was worn out. Alasdair came in and out of the room, but kept starting to cry, saying it’s unnatural, saying it should be him, laid there, dying.

She wouldn’t let Nicolas or Malcolm into her mother’s bedroom, although Malcolm came up to the house with his son, his face grave and strained. Not at the end. She didn’t want  either of them to see her like that, but especially not Malcolm. It seemed like an insult to her dignity. Isabel looked so sad. Not awful, just sad. Kirsty kept remembering Shakespeare’s line about the dying Falstaff: ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and he babbled of green fields.’ Her mother’s nose had gone strange and sharp and fine, exactly like an old fashioned pen nib. It was very odd to be sitting there and thinking of Shakespeare getting his images right, while her mother lay dying.

Finn sat with her whenever he could, and the fact that he was there was enough. Sometimes an image came to her of Finn, holding her in his strong hands, holding her steady. Sometimes she imagined what it might be like if he were to let go of her altogether, let her fall. She knew that she might go tumbling down forever. She wanted to say to him, ‘Don’t ever let me fall, Finn. Don’t leave me. Don’t ever let me go.’ But it seemed daft, so she never did.

He wasn’t very sad about Isabel, and he didn’t pretend to be. Kirsty admired him for that. She had never been a mother to him. He had lost his mother and no replacement would do. He sat at the opposite side of the bed, and when Isabel died, he held Kirsty’s hand, and Kirsty held Isabel’s hand, and it was alright. It was like pushing somebody onwards and outwards.

The difference between life and death was amazing. Somebody could be literally ‘at death’s door’ but when they had gone, it really was as though they had stepped through a door. Her mother was simply not there. Kirsty felt surprised as well as sad. It was surprising.

 They had to delay the service for a week, since there were so many people who wanted to come from the mainland: all the Glasgow relatives, and one or two cousins from Canada as well. Kirsty wished that a few more of them had come to see Isabel while she was alive, and not now, to watch a box being put into the ground.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was the empty time between the death and the funeral. No man’s land. A grey space of a week, a blank page in a diary. The closed coffin, with her mother’s body in it, sat in the room where she had died, surrounded by flowers. The scent of lilies was overpowering. Nicolas had sent them up from the Ealachan gardens. Isabel had loved lilies, but Kirsty disliked them. She would have preferred her mother to be surrounded by the wild flowers of the island, but only Finn understood and she knew that other people would find it strange. He had brought her a posy for herself: late honeysuckle and heather, a bizarre combination which smelled very sweet. She had had a terrible, terrifying impulse to sketch her mother in those last few weeks, the way emotions seemed to flit across her thin face, distantly, weather seen from space, and then the ultimate tranquillity of death, the complete absence of expression, of the person she had once been, utterly and irretrievably gone. But her courage had deserted her, and instead she had found herself sketching the honeysuckle and the heather, over and over again.

The room had stopped being a sickroom and was now a chapel of rest. The coffin had been placed on a wheeled metal stand with the easy chairs and polished furniture and her mother’s favourite ornaments, the Doulton ladies, arranged around it. Kirsty had already cleared out most of the medicine. There was so much morphine. She reckoned she could have taken it to Edinburgh and made a fortune selling it on the streets of the capital. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, but the district nurse had reluctantly taken it away for safe disposal when Kirsty, all out of patience, had threatened to throw it on the midden at the back of the farm. 

Kirsty seldom went into the room where the coffin rested, although she showed a succession of relatives, friends and neighbours in there, to ‘pay their respects’ - whatever that meant. She handed in trays of tea, bottles of whisky and plates of shortbread biscuits, while they sat around, talking quietly about the past, with the occasional outburst of nervous hilarity, quickly silenced. She wished they would just carry on laughing. Her mother wouldn’t have minded.

Aunty Beatie, on the other hand, couldn’t stop weeping. She had worked her way through several boxes of tissues and industrial quantities of tea, presumably to replace lost fluids. Kirsty used the floral wedding china which Isabel had inherited from her own mother and kept for special occasions. She supposed this must be special enough.  One of  the Canadian cousins, a smart and courteous elderly man,  broke a cup. He put it down on the floor beside him and then – to his own mortification - trod on it, but Kirsty reassured him.

‘There are another thirty five pieces,’ she said. ‘Not counting the milk and sugar, the teapot
and
the two cake plates.’

He looked at her as though she had gone mad, and indeed she did feel slightly hysterical. She had to suppress a dreadful desire to giggle at inappropriate moments.

The visitors watched the coffin. Her grandfather got down his fiddle and played a lament. He  played at all the island occasions: ceilidhs and weddings and christenings, but it was a sad thing to be playing for his own daughter-in-law’s wake. They wanted Kirsty to sing but she refused. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said.  Instead, somebody else sang a sad song, a lament, in Gaelic. Kirsty heard them and thought about Francis singing The Curragh of Kildare, all those years ago.

‘And straight I will repair to the Curragh of Kildare and it’s there I’ll find tidings of my love.’

There were always people in the room, day and night, keeping the coffin company. She wondered what they were waiting for. The room was so empty that she wanted to tell them to stop keeping vigil over a wooden box. Wherever her mother was, she wasn’t here. She wanted them all to go away and leave her in peace but it would be churlish to tell them so. She clattered the wedding china in the sink, hoping to break more of it, but it was robust and didn’t even chip.

About the middle of the week, Nicolas took her to the mainland to buy some new clothes for the funeral. She got a black wool suit and some smart black shoes and a hat. The only hats she had ever worn had been bright woolly hats in Edinburgh winters, with her hair streaming out from under them. Nicolas insisted on paying.

‘I know you’re a bit strapped for cash’ he remarked, diffidently.

She was embarrassed by his generosity, but he brushed her objections aside. ‘I’d do the same for any friend. This doesn’t place any obligations on you. You know that, don’t you?’ And because he was such a gentleman, she believed him.

He took her for lunch in a hotel with tartan carpets and heavy brown furniture, and insisted that she drink a double Lagavulin. The pungent, peaty spirit brought tears to her eyes, but it also spread warmth through her cold bones and she was glad of it. It softened the edges of the hard knot of pain that she felt in her heart and in her head.

‘A suit might come in handy, anyway,’ said Nicolas. He probably had  visions of her welcoming his business guests to Ealachan, wearing her funeral suit, but she knew that she would  never wear it again. It would  sit in the back of her wardrobe until the moths reduced it to irregular black lace.  If it were left to her, she would have worn something bright.  But the other mourners would have been shocked and even Kirsty didn’t have the nerve to go against tradition in this way.

 ‘Oh Kirsty, you do look like a hippy, but such a pretty one!’ her mother had said, seeing her wearing her long Indian cottons on the island, amazed and charmed by this strange, eccentric daughter. It suddenly occurred to Kirsty that her mother might have been a little envious. She had been such a pretty woman herself but ever since her husband’s death, there had been a touch of austerity about her. There were old black and white photographs of Isabel, when she and James were courting. Isabel had worn floral print dresses and high heeled shoes, her hair falling in soft waves.  Again, Kirsty found herself wondering why. Why had her mother found no other lover? A week ago she might have asked,  but now it was too late. 

The week dragged on. The weather was warm and golden with that immanent stillness peculiar to September. The apples and plums and pears were ripening in the Ealachan orchards. The hedges were all jewelled with blackberries and festooned with dewy spider’s webs every morning. Up at Dunshee, the old grey horse, the last of the real working horses that would  ever be housed there, cropped his field and stood looking out to sea, dreaming in the sunshine. The potato harvest was done. The day before the funeral, Finn burned the last of the leaves in heaps along the margins of the sandy fields where they grew. The acrid scent of the bonfires drifted in at her bedroom window. Only Kirsty was cold. Her hands were icy. She shivered as though it were the middle of winter, and her mouth was dry. Later on, when Finn came in for his supper, the smell of smoke was still clinging to his clothes. For Kirsty, time was standing still. There was no past, no future. There was only the now of this polished September day where time hung as heavy on her cold hands as the biggest, shiniest apple, on the oldest tree.