The Sea House: A Novel (29 page)

Maggie made the sign of the cross, and then so did I.

‘Praise be,’ said Maggie. ‘So shall we get her away from here before they come, sir?’

He looked around again, as if all his thoughts were exhausted. Then his face cleared. He began to stride around the room as if leaving already. ‘But of course, I have the note that her aunt gave me. Wait.’

He went then, and fetched a letter from his study. He said there was a name in it, of a family on the island whom he could ask for help. And then the Reverend rode away to try to make some arrangements to get Katriona away by boat to the mainland.

I took up the letter to read it, telling Maggie what was said: how Lady Erquart had feared for the Miss, and she had wrote down the name of a good family on the island who could be depended upon for help.

And Maggie said she thought that the Miss’s real father must have been some soft sweetheart of the Lady Marstone, somebody she fell for in London after she had fled away from His Lordship, back to her sister. But after Lady Marstone died, then Marstone had been able to use the law to call the child back to him as his own.

*   *   *

The following night, under dark, we lay the Miss and the baby in a bed of blankets in the back of a cart, covered them over with more blankets and a tarpaulin. Then I watched the Reverend lead the horse off towards a village by Rodel, where it was arranged that the people named would meet them with a boat. I stood and watched the cart until the dark had taken them completely, waited until I could hear no more the sound of them going.

I knew that I might never see the Miss no more, so sick was she, but I never thought, as the white face of the Reverend faded into the dark, that it would also be the last sight of my Alexander on the island.

Maggie and I turned back to the manse.

The Miss had refused to go unless she could take her mermaid baby along with her also. Alexander had had to be very firm with her, that she must loose hold of the poor bundle of blankets now, for the child was with God and must stay here to be lain in peace.

‘But I know how it will be,’ said the Miss. ‘She did not get baptised. She will have to lie all on her own, away from the good people. Will you promise me, if you take her, that my Clare will lie with all the other good people, in holy ground?’

Maggie stepped forward and she promised that she would bury the baby in holy ground, in a place that was blessed by holy prayers.

And so the Miss let her take the mermaid baby.

‘But Maggie,’ I said as we took the little body back into the house, ‘we cannot bury the child in the churchyard. The turf is so smooth; they will all see at once, even a tiny new grave.’

‘We shall bury her in another holy place, where the Reverend says his prayers each day,’ she said.

‘In the church?’

‘Not in the church,’ she said.

She took the babe into the Reverend’s study, and I had to help her take up the nails and pull up the boards under the Turkey rug, and dig down in the soft sandy soil under the house. Then I found a small red trunk that was used to send over books, and we made the little mite a bed. We wrapped her well in my best shawl, and laid her to rest, covering the box over with the soil, patting it down like a blanket.

Maggie and I found the Reverend’s prayer book and I read out some prayers for those that have passed away. Maggie sang a psalm, and we must hammer the nails back down, and then we must close up the house and go.

CHAPTER 33

Ruth

I’d thought that finding out about the child buried under our house would solve things, but all I’d discovered was the precise amount of cruelty that one person can inflict on another.

Katriona and her poor, stunted mermaid baby, what chance had they ever had? And as for the sister who’d survived, what had happened to her?

Nobody seemed to know or care.

‘But how could that other little girl simply vanish off the face of the earth?’ I said, pushing away a half-eaten plate of bean casserole. It tasted bitter and burnt, though no one else thought so. ‘It’s as if no one cared one bit about her, as if she didn’t matter.’

‘Most probably she passed away with Katriona,’ Michael suggested. ‘In those days, an illegitimate child could have been buried with the mother and left unrecorded.’

He helped Jamie and Leaf wash up the dishes. I sat on at the table, the same thoughts going round and round in my head; getting nothing done. After a while I realised they had finished and had gone through to catch the evening news, leaving the kitchen silent and empty. A few weeks till the baby arrived, and here I was, part ghost girl, part lizard, trying to make it add up to a grown-up capable of raising a tiny child; and too tired, too tired to keep on holding it all together.

When you left me so alone, did you have any idea what it would be like, the miles of rubble you left me to walk through?

*   *   *

The next morning, I woke up too early, the dawn white and blank. I knew straight away it had come in again, like rain, that same old blank depression. A white-out. No energy to rise and invent someone.

After Michael had got up, it was a long time before I made myself sit up. Pulled yesterday’s jeans and shirt from the back of the chair. They felt heavy and cold, as if they had taken in moisture during the night.

I heard Michael downstairs, whistling. He was very upbeat about how much progress we were making on the house. But by the end of the morning my coldness had begun to seep into him.

‘Not feeling so good again?’ he said.

I shrugged.

I couldn’t think of anything to say for the rest of the day. Nor for the following few days, and then the days seemed to merge together. A heavy feeling of moving through water, slowly travelling to some inevitable conclusion.

Finally, I realised I was sleepwalking to a place I didn’t want to think about. I went up to bed early, and woke in the dark some time later to find Michael’s side of the bed still flat and cold. It was two in the morning.

I could hear muffled voices. They seemed to be coming up through the dormer window from the garden.

Downstairs, I went out into the garden, the dark warm and soft. I found Michael and Leaf sitting together on the bench at the side of the house. A huge canopy of stars in a vast sky hung above them.

Leaf uncurled her legs, and stretched. ‘Night then. And Ruth, sweetie, it’s going to get better. This depression, it will pass. I promise.’

She hugged me. Held me for a beat or two. Then she blew a kiss to Michael. We listened to the soft pad, pad of her feet round the side of the house, her patchouli scent sweetening the night air.

‘What were you doing?’

‘Nothing. Talking. We should get you back into bed. You need your sleep.’

*   *   *

The summer was suddenly brilliant over the island. I’d hardly noticed it arrive. I needed to wake up.

I said to Michael, why don’t we go down to Losgaintir, take a picnic to the dunes – a kind of last-chance date before the baby appeared.

I packed a basket with a bottle of our home-made beer, a slab of cheese and some oatcakes, and we took some old beach towels and books.

By the time we set out, it was late afternoon: the warmth was starting to go out of the air. At seven months, the bump made me heavy and slow as we walked in silence through the dunes. Down on the beach, we found an amphitheatre of dunes as shelter from the wind. In front of us, the mountains hunkered together over the glassy water; amethyst reflections streaked across the white sands where the waves left a sheen of water. Michael stripped off to his bathing trunks, ran down to the icy breakers in a moment of madness and plunged in.

He came running back minutes later, shivering in the bright sun. ‘Grief,’ he said. ‘That water never warms up, does it?’ I rubbed him down with a towel. He swayed as I rubbed him hard, but he didn’t seem to notice, looking out at the water in a dreamy and distant way as if the cold had made him sleepy. The sand caught in the blond hairs on his arms, like minute lights. Cold drops of seawater fell from his hair onto my skin. I licked one from my forearm, kissed his lips with a salty kiss. I sat alongside him, trying to warm him up, looking out at the sea, but my eyes soon got dazzled and felt weary from the brightness and the wind.

As the sun got lower, it started to draw out long shadows across the slopes of the dunes; the sand there felt chilly when you stepped into it. No one else was on the beach, nothing but miles of flat sand and the sea glare.

‘What were you talking to Leaf about, the other night?’

Michael stared at the sand as if it had the answer written on it. He took his time in answering. I folded the towel, fiddled with the material so that it was exactly even over my lap.

‘We were talking about you.’

‘Oh?’

‘She was saying how it can really help, to talk to someone. Leaf’s aunt’s a psychologist and she says—’

‘Wait. So you’ve been discussing me with Leaf? You and Leaf have been talking about me? That’s so disloyal, Michael. Thanks.’

‘But listen. If we asked the doctor, like Leaf said; got some counselling.’

‘Like Angus John in his loony bin.’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Isn’t it? Thanks for the vote of confidence. Why can’t you just talk to me, Michael?’

‘Because everything I say is wrong these days. Because you get so angry.’

‘Well of course I’m angry now.’

‘Ruth, you’re always angry, and I get so tired of being your punch bag.’

‘It’s not like that.’

He got up and shook the sand from the towel, and started packing everything away.

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I followed after him. He looked so slender and lopsided, weighted down on one side with the blanket and the basket. Then I stopped walking, stood and watched him growing smaller against the miles of empty beach.

After our child was born, wouldn’t it be better for them, better for us all, if I got up one morning and slipped away?

How do you know when something is ending? I started after him heavily. Slowly walking towards something inevitable.

*   *   *

Once we were back in the house, Michael disappeared. I went through and sat in the sea room, and stared out at the blue of the thickening twilight.

I could see the sense in what Michael wanted me to do, but I simply couldn’t afford to do it. There’s a reason for forgetting some things – all the things I’d never told even Michael about those lost years.

I felt so tired, so weary. I looked out at the vast plains of sea, the water opaque under the horizontal light, a dazzle of clouds and shards of setting sun. How peaceful it must be to walk there, gradually let yourself sink down; the burn and cold of rolling in oblivious waters. I think for the first time I understood how Mum felt, before she stepped off the edge, let herself slip away into the dark canal water.

I carried on sitting in the half dark for a long time. No sound but the breaths of the waves coming in, the beat of them falling onto the beach.

I saw the brown bottle of pills on Mum’s dressing table with its typed label. Pills for clinical depression; the evidence that swung the coroner in favour of a suicide verdict.

A Selkie goes back to the sea.

And it was a comfort to me, knowing that Michael would be a good father; that he would take good care of our child.

A Selkie always goes back to the sea.

CHAPTER 34

Ruth

‘There’s a light in Angus John’s house,’ Jamie said when he came back in after filling up the basket of peats late one evening. ‘He must be back from the loony bin.’

First thing next morning, I went up to see how Angus John was, in case he needed something.

The sun was already long up, everything quiet, the grasslands sharp in the early light. A sheep was lying at the side of the road on a cushion of grass. With its black forefoot extended like an evening glove and its yellow eyes rimmed in black, it looked like an old debutante collapsed after a heavy night out.

I found Angus John sitting at the kitchen table, the teapot on the stove nearby. Someone had washed the tea cosy – turned out it was blue. In fact the whole kitchen looked as if it had been combed down and tidied up, all the surfaces bare. Mrs MacKay had evidently made the most of her opportunity to get the place in order. Angus John seemed diminished by such tidiness, his face gaunt, his nose with a bloom of red veins beneath the thick glasses propped there to read a letter.

‘It’s you,’ he said, going back to his letter. ‘How are things in the commune?’

‘Fine. And how are you, Angus John?’

‘I get by,’ he said. ‘Aye, I’m taking it one day at a time, as they say. Being away doesn’t stop the gas and the electric sending bills.’

He shook his head and then reached for a mug. Pushed it in my direction and pointed at the teapot. I noticed his hand had developed a slight tremor. There were patches of grey stubble in the empty folds of skin under his chin, silver when he turned his head to the light.

‘A day at a time,’ he repeated, watching the stream of tea thoughtfully as I poured it. ‘You see, I’m not drinking any more now, Ruth. Not again.’

‘That’s really good.’

‘And it’s not that I like a drink, to tell the truth. It doesn’t suit me, in fact.’

I nodded.

‘Good tea,’ I said. ‘You seem so much better.’

He gave a shuddering sigh. The effort involved made me feel quite worried for him.

‘I walked away from that war, you see, and came home, and all the time, I didn’t know I had come home with my pockets all full of it, like so many grenades ready to go off.’

‘You mean you had shellshock?’

‘Oh yes. Except, they don’t call it by that now.’ He lifted up his tea and took a loud sip, stared towards the window. We sat and watched his shirt on the washing line, flapping and punching madly in the wind. I felt so sorry for him, as he sat in his battered chair, so decrepit and broken down. Something boyish lingered on in Angus John’s face, but it was worked over by folds of creased skin, altered by the slippage of the years. I tried to see him as the young man in the photo before the war, a smooth face that someone had loved once, a woman and a child at his table, but all I could see was the worn jacket, the long, knobbly wrists, the bony hands with swollen knuckles.