The Sea House: A Novel (10 page)

One thing I knew: I could never leave my child like Mum had left me. How could she?

All through my childhood, the answer to that had been because there was something wrong with me, something lacking and unlovable – until I felt myself starting to melt away. That flash of a white hand reaching up from the oily water, calling me to let myself slip away with her.

I put the story in the drawer, banged it shut. In the kitchen, poured lentils into a pan to soak them ready for supper. Later that day, Jamie and his girlfriend would be arriving on the evening ferry.

I made up the bed in the other finished bedroom, opening the window to let the wind blow in from the machair and get rid of the oily paint smell. I hung curtains and found a reasonable-looking sheepskin rug to put by the bed. Then I tidied round the half-finished sea room, adjusting the blanket that covered the battered sofa we’d acquired through the
Stornoway Gazette.

Walking over the new floorboards, I couldn’t stop my eyes flicking over to the spot where we’d stood and looked down at the rusting trunk and the mess inside.

I picked up some books and magazines from the floor and neatened them on the bookcase shelves and promised myself that as soon as things were less busy, I’d look into finding more records dating back to that time – perhaps from the library.

It had started to rain, not a polite shower like you get in town, but bucketfuls of water thrown against the window, as if the sea had changed its usual level and was beating on the house in waves. I stood watching the streaming windows, hoping the new struts and repaired panes would hold.

And I wondered how you went about looking up a mother who said she came from the sea, a mother who had left the barest amount of real information and no records of the family she once belonged to – a family who for all I knew comprised cousins or aunts walking around somewhere in the islands.

*   *   *

The storm had blown away as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving a calm and innocent sky. The first hints of the setting sun were deepening the colours of both land and sky as we went to meet Jamie and Leaf from the ferry late that afternoon.

They rumbled down the boat’s metal ramp in an old Bedford van. Jamie was driving. A blond girl was sitting next to him with her bare feet up on the dashboard.

Jamie leapt out of the van, pushing back his long fringe, and gave me a huge hug, enveloping me in his baggy checked shirt. Leaf was small and slender with pale blond hair. She was a couple of years older than Jamie, and the sun had begun carving fine lines along the delicate skin of her tanned forehead. She wore a large, striped jumper that fell away from one shoulder and pale jeans with artful rips across the thighs. Her earrings tinkled as she held me in a bony hug. Michael was already walking away, talking non-stop with Jamie.

‘Wow,’ I heard him say to Jamie, ‘Leaf’s a bit of a stunner.’

I’d made lentil lasagne as Leaf never ate meat. We lit candles and sat round the kitchen table, a jug of early machair flowers in the middle. I think that was the evening we talked about the child’s remains, but it felt like something finished and historic, nothing really to do with us.

‘So, how did your parents come to christen you Leaf?’ Michael said, filling everyone’s glass.

She laughed. ‘My parents call me Audrey. Audrey Marilynne Bloomfeld. Leaf’s my nickname. It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?’

Jamie told us a long story about how Leaf had appeared beside him with a pamphlet, the sun behind her as he lay on the beach in swimming trunks. She’d spent the next hour trying to convert him to the cause, saving a forest up along the California coast.

‘In the end, it was me who was converted to the way of Jamie,’ said Leaf, blowing him a kiss across the table, along with a waft of perfume that smelled of suntan oil, mixed in with a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. ‘And we’ve even been to see the lovely house where you grew up in Chichester, Michael. I love that old house. Where did you grow up, Ruth?’

I paused, too many snapshots crowding in. I put my palm round a glass of cool water. Took a sip. Placed it back in its own damp ring on the table.

‘In a children’s home.’

A great way to close down a conversation.

Leaf let out a tiny gasp. ‘But what happened? Your parents?’

‘Never met my dad. Mum drowned.’

‘I’m so sorry. That must be so hard for you.’

I shrugged. It was always tiring, explaining to people. Me ending up having to reassure them that I’m fine, really. Don’t worry about it.

‘Honestly. I don’t think about it now. Just one of those things.’

‘But don’t you have any family left now?’

‘I’ve got Michael.’

He reached over and took my hand, decisively changing the subject by telling a funny story about our neighbour Angus John. I felt my chest relax so that I could breathe again. Leaning against Michael, the fabric of his old denim shirt felt soft as peach skin against my arm. I was aware of the strength of his body when he stretched to refill our glasses.

We sat up late, drinking the wine that Jamie had brought, laying out our plans and hopes for the house and the holiday business; the little boat we were going to buy one day to do sailing trips, the walking tours up into the mountains, the wildlife-sketching holidays I’d put on. At the end of the evening, I gave out the schedules I’d drawn up for how we could share out the work and the expenses.

Eventually, we made our way up to bed, after Leaf had hugged everyone again and told us with tears in her eyes that she felt it here – banging her chest at this point – that she was really going to be happy in this place, and asked if we made our own bread.

‘Grief,’ I said as we got into bed. ‘If I am ever that obsessed with what I do or don’t eat, please shoot me.’

Michael laughed and it felt then like we were always going to agree, lying close together, his presence solid and reassuring, the house tamed, and the dark friendly with the sounds of other people.

Later, I heard someone wake up in the night and pad across the landing. I was already asleep before they must have padded back to their room again.

CHAPTER 10

Ruth

The days were getting noticeably longer, the air smelling wetly of rain, but at night it was still very cold. Finally, we got the central heating installed and the house relaxed in the warmth. New gloss paint baking on radiators became the aroma of well-being and comfort.

And with four sets of hands working on the house, we began to see real progress over the next few weeks. The house had taken on a different mood, the rooms full of voices, the transistor radio going all day, the air sweetened with turpentine and new wood. The sea room was painted white. Hard to think it was the same room where we had stood over the rusty little trunk a few weeks before – still that annoying little flicker of the eyes each time I walked across the newly varnished floorboards. When was that going to stop?

Two more bedrooms were now completed and we’d even made a start on the kitchen; having Jamie and Leaf helping out was making such a difference. True, it was Jamie who did most of the work. Leaf had a funny way of wandering off before something was finished. The paintbrush would be left to go waxy in the paint tray. You’d find her cross-legged somewhere, reading a book and twirling the end of the blond ponytail that she swept up to one side with a scrunchie. But when she was around, Leaf was a lot of fun. I’d never really had a girlfriend before who you could talk to about almost anything.

Of course, the home had been full of girls, but it was always tense in that place; we’d circled around each other, making brittle allegiances or breaking into fights – in the bathrooms, where the sound was dulled by the tiled walls. Getting close to one of the girls was tricky; you never knew when you’d press on something that could make someone explode into bitter words and punches.

Leaf and I talked as we slapped white paint onto walls. She was outrageously open: no topic was off limits. I knew so much about her that sometimes I felt I’d grown up in that wooden house by a river in California, the music of Dylan and Beethoven coming from her dad’s study, her mother furious when she found how Leaf had jumped out of the bedroom window to go to a forbidden beach party; the life of a doted-on daughter.

I told her funny stories about meeting Michael and then Jamie and their parents.

I didn’t feel keen to drag on about the tedium of my own childhood.

*   *   *

Michael and I were working outside one morning. He was painting the front window struts in the sun, humming the tune of ‘Aileen Duin’, while the wind trembled the yellow irises along the streams. Bright daisies had opened across the machair turf like stars. Drifts of sea pink shivered across the turf down by the sea.

I was sanding down a cot passed on to us by Mrs MacKay. Once it was re-varnished, it was going to look good as new.

‘Old Angus John says we’re to give him a lift tomorrow,’ said Michael. ‘According to some calendar, it’s time for the village to go and cut their peat bricks, and we’re counted in.’

‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ I said to Michael. ‘Being part of a place. I’ve never really had that before.’

‘Yes; but you know, home’s wherever you are now,’ he said.

‘That’s what I feel too.’

I carried on carefully sanding the cot bars, too happy to say anything, contentment settling over the morning.

*   *   *

The first time I met Angus John, I honestly thought he might be a bit simple. He lived alone in a ramshackle one-storey bothy at the end of the village. The roof was a hump of bleached thatch, criss-crossed with ropes that were weighted down against the Atlantic storms with a ring of dangling sea stones.

His nearest neighbours, the MacKays, were model crofters. Every day you’d see Mr MacKay sorting peats or digging seaweed into the rigs, or you’d see Mrs MacKay in her nylon overall, crossing the field in the early morning mist to milk the cow. Everything scrubbed and mended neatly. Nothing was ever wasted in that house.

Angus John had his thrifty ways too. His fences were made from rusty bedsteads and old doors, cobbled together with sections of blue fishing net. Behind the house was a whole graveyard of corroded tractor parts and an upended bath slowly sinking back into the turf.

The first day we moved into the caravan, the Sea House still not habitable, I was washing up at the sink when an arm suddenly reached up through the open window, holding a whisky bottle. ‘There’ll be one of those for you every day,’ a voice shouted in a thick Gaelic accent. I ducked down to see who it was and saw an old man with a creased face, an unravelling jumper, a shirt buttoned up to the neck. His trousers were belted with thick rope. He gave a grim nod and left.

The whisky bottle was a funny opaque colour. I opened it and sniffed. It was filled with milk.

‘Ah, that’s just Angus John,’ said Mrs MacDonald when I went to buy stamps and, more importantly, ask her if I should be worried about the old man who kept wandering into our caravan. ‘And to think he was the cleverest in his family as a boy,’ she said, looking out of the window towards his bothy. ‘All his brothers and sisters, they have left the croft now for high-flying careers on the mainland, teachers and bankers, but Angus John, he came back from the war and never wanted to leave. Ah well, he’s the nearest thing we have to a bard here.’ She sniffed. ‘He writes beautiful poems in the Gaelic, Ruth. And once, a man came from the BBC with a tape recorder so Angus John could tell his stories into it.’

Angus John’s habit of walking in without knocking was our introduction to how you socialised in the islands. It turned out that it was quite in order to wander into someone’s house and sit there in companionable silence while the host got on with whatever they were doing. We soon realised that what the host should be doing was preparing a snack, or
strupach,
a courtesy from the times when people would tramp miles across unmade tracks between villages – or in Angus’s case, from his croft to our kitchen.

I felt bad that Angus, who seemed to have nothing, should be bringing us so much milk and crowdie cheese which was soft and grainy and slightly sour and made by Angus on top of the stove in his kitchen. But he wouldn’t hear of being thanked. He had a cow, and we did not, so of course he’d bring round his extra milk. No need to make a song and dance about it.

And since we had a van and he did not, it was only natural that he should inform us when we’d be taking his calf down to Plocropol, or giving two of his sheep a lift up to the market in Stornoway. His English might sound abrupt, but the Gaelic he was translating from probably had more suggestion in the phrasing; braided into the old language were all the assumptions of a close-knit subsistence community, where sharing was a way of life.

Early the next morning, we picked up Angus John and drove across the island to where Scarista village had its peat beds. Right up to the start of summer, the east side of the island had been a place of industrial colours, of smoke-coloured mist and rusty heather, lochs black as oil, sheets of steel-grey rock slick with the wet. But now the heather was beginning to green over. We got out of the van to a wide view across the island, of silver rocks and the silver-blue of the Minch. In the distance, the blue smudges of Skye and the paler mountains of the mainland.

The peat was several feet deep, banks of it sliced down into the moor like seams of soft coal. Most of the villagers from Scarista were already cutting out the wet slabs, tossing them up the bank to where someone else caught them and stood them in small dolmens to dry out. To begin with, we were not much help, but gradually we got into the rhythm: the push of the blade into the wet soil, the catching of the slab of peat, the bending to stack it upright, the sun hot on our necks and a sea breeze coming off the sparkling Minch.

At around twelve we stopped. Mr MacDonald carried a mysterious, bundled-up sheet from his van and a huge pile of home baking made its magical appearance in the middle of the moor. Mrs MacKay got a kettle boiling and we sat down to eat, drinking mugs of peaty tea and sharing jokes in English.