The Sea House: A Novel (26 page)

‘So, what do you think of that?’ he asks me. ‘The seal becomes a Finnman.’

‘That’s what they say up in the Orkney Isles, sir. We only have seals and mermaids down here and are not so mixed up in our stories.’

‘I agree that it is all very confusing. I am at a loss myself to understand why we have these three variations on a similar story of a seaman: the mermaid, the Selkie and the Finnman.’

‘But where do the Finnmen come from, sir? Do they come from Finland?’

‘Well, yes and no. The Finnmen are nomads who inhabit the polar regions of Europe – a tribe who wrap themselves in animal skins like Eskimos or Red Indians, but who, to my knowledge, have no attributes of fish or seal. So I cannot, at the moment, understand why these Orkney tales include Finnmen. But it is very interesting, because it seems to me, Moira, that what is called a mermaid in Benbecula, and a Selkie or seal man in Lewis, and a Finnman in Orkney could all be ways to attempt to describe the same thing: a creature, with human attributes, yes, but also with the bodily adaptations of a seal or fish. You see, I’m sure that the Finnman reported in the stories cannot be a mere man, since he is able to dive below the sea for some time and exist in intolerable marine conditions. So don’t you see, Moira, if I can find what these old stories mean by terming the creature a Finnman, then I might finally have my link in the transmutation of species; perhaps a man with gills, or perhaps where others have legs, a man with some fin-like adaptation?’

‘He sounds like something you would dream up in a night of bad sleep.’

His face fell. ‘Ah, bad sleep is all I have now.’

Then I say my piece. ‘Sir, what if the seal stories are truly just stories? Would it not be for the best to give your brain some rest from all its striving?’

He sighed and sat quiet; seemingly trying out how it might feel to sit in peaceful slumber in his silk armchair by the fire, untroubled by the seal man calling out to him day and night.

‘Moira, I know you are concerned for me, having as you do such a good heart, and I see the good sense in what you are saying, but have you considered this? If my seal man is real, if he is here, living and breathing and walking on the earth, then how foolish to fail to do everything in one’s power to understand and perhaps even see such a marvellous being.’

*   *   *

I decided that I should make up my old sleeping place on the settle in the kitchen, since the doctor had told me Alexander’s head was so weak in its bones and I should not be surprised were he to fall down in a fit of a sudden. I was worried this might happen as he paced around at night.

I found that though I slept passably well on the bench near the smoored fire, I never did sleep entirely fast, but kept an ear tuned to the sounds of the house. So I knew when he was turning over and over in his sheets, and I knew when he was padding around the house in bare feet, letting the cold flagstones draw all the heat from his body till his feet were numb and icy. I knew when he was in his study in the small hours, searching his bookshelves by the candlelight that guttered around the walls. I could tell when he was seated quiet in his armchair, the blanket wrapped round his legs, reading again about the sea people.

It must have been that I did sleep deeply one night, for just as the light began to spread across the window, I was startled awake by his voice close to me in the kitchen.

‘Moira! What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been here each night since you got back, Reverend. The doctor said it was for the best that I listen out.’

‘Really, there is no need. You must regain your own bed.’

‘You are up mighty early, sir. What time is it?’

‘I am not sure. Oh, yes, it is just after four o’clock.’

‘Are you going for a walk, sir?’

‘I am going to call on old Mr MacAllister, since I need to urgently question him about the boats of the Finnmen.’

I screwed up my eyes against the bright light, sharp and clear in the window, and saw how he had a blanket wrapped round his nightshirt, a pair of breeches pulled up with the nightshirt tucked in.

‘I don’t think he will thank you, sir, for such an early visit. Why don’t you rest a while till they may be up and dressed? I will heat you up some milk while you wait for a more Christian hour for calling on folk.’

He was forced to agree to the sense in this, and I busied myself warming a cup of milk. While he waited on the settle, he outlined his newest discoveries as to the indisputable similarities between the legends of his mermaid and the Selkie and the Finnmen.

So listen I must, but I was heartily sick of the sea lady and the Finnman and wished them both away at the bottom of the sea so that they might leave my Alexander alone; leave his poor head with a moment’s peace to get better.

At least, I said to myself, they have driven all thoughts of her away. At least she has become too grand to bother us any more, and is keeping herself away in her castle where she may no more harm us.

The milk all drunk, I think he was overcome then with tiredness, his stomach recalling what it was to be warm and full. He did not get up off the bench to go, but he leaned back and pulled the blanket round his shoulders.

‘Did you hear from your cousin, Moira?’

‘No, sir, and I don’t expect to until she gets there.’

‘If I could have done anything … If I had the power…’

I did not know how to rightly reply, not without the bitterness showing in my speaking.

‘I dream of Finsbay. I keep hearing that old woman’s voice. Her words go through my head again and again. In my dreams, I see that headstone in the graveyard with my name on it, and I see how it will never stand upright now.’

‘I’ll thank you, sir, to talk no such nonsense. She’s a simple-minded and spiteful old woman, Norma Macleod.’

‘Even when I’m awake, Moira, I hear that dreadful keening of the people, in the wind, in the silence.’

He leaned his head against the wall and I saw a tear come out from under his closed eyelids and go down his cheek. A small thing, but to me it felt like I was watching the ground in front of the house start to move about.

‘I did try,’ he said. ‘I did try, Moira, to be a good man. To be the man I meant to be. If I could have stopped them from throwing the people into the boats, sending them off to God knows where.’

I knew not what to say. I had only ever seen a man cry one time before, my father as we must leave our island, and it was something to tear a heart, to see the Reverend so broken up like that of all his hopes, so I pretended not to have noticed his tears and got all bright and busy at the sink.

‘Is that rain coming in?’ I said. ‘Might be as well to go see old MacAllister later, after you have done your devotions.’

‘Ah yes, MacAllister,’ he said. ‘Was I going there? Perhaps I will go to my study first, do you think?’

‘Or catch a nap upstairs? The doctor would be pleased by that.’

‘D’you think so? Perhaps I will.’

Off he wandered in his blanket, and I listened out for his steps going up the stairs slowly. I heard the creak of the bedsprings as he lay down, and at last the house went quiet again.

*   *   *

Six weeks more, and the Reverend decides he must begin to give sermons again. So I ironed his surplus and he fretted away with prayers and concordances, scratching out words, starting over again, crumpling up pages that would not do. I had never before seen him so nervous; it was as if those weeks had driven from his head how it was he used to go about doing those things. And he was back to his old tricks with the fasting and night prayers and the early devotions, chasing after holiness like a tired fisherman who must rise early while it is dark, stay on the sea till evening and yet still come home exhausted and with the nets empty.

His nerves must have been catching, because as I sat on the wooden pew next to Maggie that Sunday, I was wringing my hands like it was me who was about to get up and address the people – which I felt all but ready to do, since for the past two weeks I had listened to him over and over, rehearsing his good advice concerning the hope of grace in us who are but sinners.

I felt my heart jump like a cart going over a bump in the path as I saw the Reverend rise up and climb to his pulpit. But then the precentor got up at the same time, and he also went down to the front to open the psalm singing. I saw then with dismay that the Reverend had misremembered the office, got up too soon; he must stand in the pulpit, holding onto the sides like it was a boat tossing at sea, and with us all examining him while we sang through the whole of Psalm 84.

In churches hereabouts, we do not sing hymns that are fancy and rhyming like the popish do down in Uist, but we sing only psalms, straight from the Bible. So the precentor stood himself at the front, looking humbly like someone standing in for a better man. He wailed out the first line of Psalm 84, telling us the true confession of pain in his heart – though we did see him all week tending his sheep or working his croft, a quiet and plain man. Then the whole congregation decided that they too must truly sing their woes to God, and there was a wailing sound of all our voices replying with the same line of scripture, each man making up the tune as he remembered, or inventing how he felt it should be sung so that it was not so much a song as a roomful of laments. On it went, line by line throughout the entire scripture, till we all sat down spent and wrung of our sorrows. And all this time, the Reverend must hang onto the rail of his pulpit above and join in the lament, and must compose his mind ready for his sermon.

The church went quiet. All eyes turned up to the Reverend, all ears ready for his words. With a white face and a sticky shine of sweat across his brow, he read out his text.

‘Jeremiah, Chapter Eight: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!”’

A long pause; eyes closed, he seemed to be meditating in his heart. Then he continued.

‘“Is there no balm in Gilead, no physician there? Why then is there no recovery? Oh, that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep—”’

There was a sliding noise of papers. A book fell from the lectern shelf and thudded onto the wooden floor. We watched the Reverend sink down behind the front of the pulpit. Then there was no more of him to be seen. We waited for him to gather his papers together and continue, but we must sit a long time in silence and must listen to the crack from time to time of Maggie Kintail’s peppermint which she always sucks through a sermon to guard against the tedium of so much good teaching.

Then there was another noise, the sound of someone gulping air, a shuddering of the wood of the pulpit. Clear across the church, as the sun shone down through the windows, we heard the sound of a grown man sobbing. The steward and his wife turned their heads and looked at each other above their daughters’ bonnets. Then they quickly stood and did hurry from the church, walking in a line.

As if a sign had been given, each man and woman did stand up and walk away, as if hurriedly called to be elsewhere, until only Maggie and I were sitting there in that empty place, with the sound of crying. Then I too stood up. I walked down to the front of the church and up the steps of the pulpit.

There was the Reverend in his white surplus, like a gannet crashed on the ground with its wings broken. He looked up at me, his face a mess of crying. He looked ashamed and lost and horrified.

‘Shall we go back to the manse now, sir?’

He looked about him and got himself up slowly. Maggie was waiting at the foot of the pulpit and we took his arm each side and walked him back home.

Halfway there he stopped. ‘I’ve lost the words, Moira. My gravestone will never stand upright now.’

‘Oh hush now, sir. You’re talking old foolishness.’

While Maggie got him settled in a chair in his study, I went for one of the farm boys to tell them to ride up and ask for the doctor to come. Although in my heart I knew that the sickness the Reverend had was nothing that could be cured by some bottle from the doctor’s bag.

CHAPTER 29

Ruth

I didn’t sleep much that night, disorientated by meeting that lost child from another time. Getting the shopping in Tarbert the next morning, I opened the van door ready to drive back home. I glanced over at Dr Lawson’s surgery, a white house half hidden under dripping trees. I hesitated, gripping the van door, then dumped the carrier bags on the front seat, slammed the door and walked across the car park.

The receptionist looked through her appointment book.

‘I could squeeze you in at two thirty, if you’d like to wait. It’ll only be half an hour, unless Dr Lawson gets held up with a patient.’

I sat down and picked up a magazine. The pages felt soft and crazed from being turned so many times. A drooping spider plant sat in the window beneath a venetian blind that was caught on one side and sloped down at an angle. A little boy with bright red cheeks was pulling toys from a box while his mother shut her eyes and tipped her head back against the wall, coughing every so often.

It was hot in there. The chair was hard. The backs of my legs were sticking to the plastic through my thin skirt.

How many times had I sat on a chair exactly like this one? Waiting in a corridor, the edge of the plastic cutting into the backs of my legs, waiting to see the social worker with that falling feeling in my stomach?

I made a complaint once, about a foster father and his wandering hands. It went with the territory: kids like me were easy game. And he was mean to the other kids.

I was so angry, I decided to tell them; already knew it was going to end badly.

When the social worker was out of the room, I got up and looked at my files to find out what she’d written.

She fabricates incidents for attention and seems to have difficulty telling fact from fiction. We do not recommend a further placement in a family home until this is resolved. Under the circumstances, placing Ruth in the girls’ home would be advisable.

The little boy with a cough threw a metal car at his mum’s leg. She woke and spoke to him in Gaelic, pulled him up onto her lap. A buzzer sounded and the receptionist called out her name. The woman gathered up her things, took the child’s hand, and went through to the doctor’s room.