The Sea House: A Novel (3 page)

But then if I hadn’t hated the children’s home so completely, I would never have spent so much time hanging out in the local library.

You don’t want to live with twenty-nine teenage girls like me. It took a while to learn how to fit in. I got steel rings from Woolworths; I showed them I could give as good as I got when cornered in a fight. I cut my hair off, got workmen’s steel-capped boots and a black Crombie coat – skinhead gear.

Where do you go when you’ve no real home to go to? Hours and hours walking around the city, my hands bright red with cold. Where do you go when you’re the sort of person people can overlook, forget about – the sort of person anything can happen to, and no one cares?

One afternoon, in a freezing November fog, I’d walked off the streets into the marble halls of a London library, the quiet air spiced with the smell of old books, and everything else just fell away

I liked the reference section best. Running my hand along the smooth spines, I’d take a book out at random. A whole world of things I hadn’t known. That’s how I got the grades to read Biology at university.

Year Zero. University. You could be anyone. I lost the monkey boots and the steel rings; and it seemed like I finally lost the fug that they said we home kids always carried on our clothes in school. I turned up on freshers’ day in a crowd of endless new faces, wearing my brand-new jeans and a coat bought with my grant money.

The campus libraries were modern, made of white concrete and glass, and full of people who might be just like me, or perhaps I could be like them. It was all to invent, to create, and no one was more hard-working than me.

In my second term, I met Michael in a laundromat. He carried my washing and his washing back to the halls of residence. I thought he was mad, and I thought he was handsome – in a woolly jumper way, like one of the lecturers; and so clean and gentle. I watched him manhandling both bags. He had such a polite, soft voice – posh even.

He had the gift of caring; it radiated off him like a warmth. First bite at the apple of happiness when I kissed Michael.

The day we got married, there were no family guests on my side of the church. We filled it with friends from university. Professor Carter and his wife came.

*   *   *

My hands were beginning to lose their chill as I walked across the grass back to the caravan. The air actually felt warmer outside the house, and soft and damp now that the rain had passed over. In the distance, I noticed a tiny van approaching along the coast road. Squinting at it, I was relieved to make out a police van. The ferry must have managed to sail from Uig after all. They’d be coming to take away the remains.

*   *   *

‘One thing I know from rummaging around in boxes of bones in the zoology department, that child must have died at least a hundred years ago,’ I said to Michael as we sat in the Sea House kitchen once more.

‘Ruth, it’s gone. I think we should stop talking about it now,’ Michael said through a mouthful of toast.

‘I don’t know how you can say that. How can you stand it, not knowing exactly what happened here?’

He got up and started running water in the washing-up bowl. ‘I grew up in a house that was a priory in medieval times. An archaeologist friend told my dad once that there were probably dead monks buried in our garden. But if there were, they never bothered us. Ruth, it’s pointless thinking about something that’s over.’

I sat on at the table, dabbing my finger in a pool of honey till Michael took the plate away.

I went over to dry the dishes. I stacked them on the trestle table, looking out through the kitchen window towards the little white church. Dougal, the minister, had parked his car outside.

We bought the Sea House from the church board. It had been the church manse originally, until it became too expensive to heat and they built a nice pebbledash bungalow for the minister down in Tarbert. So its official address was the Manse, but the few people who lived in the sparse and scattered village of Scarista always called it the Sea House,
Tigh na Mara.
It stood away from the other houses, at the edge of the miles of empty, undulating grasslands that were surrounded by a half circle of hills. It was so close to the sea that sand from the dunes blew into the hallway.

Wherever you stood in the house, you heard the soft breaths of the waves. The view from the front of the house showed water so turquoise and sand so white that it looked like a holiday poster for the Bahamas – except with ragged sheep wandering the beach instead of people in swimsuits.

Ideal for a holiday business – until now.

‘I think I might walk over and ask Dougal some questions. There must be records of who lived here once.’

Michael sighed.

I walked up to the church past the walled-in graveyard. The fancier headstones, now toppling at crazy angles, had been placed importantly on the top of a rise in the grass. At the base lay the poorer stones, little more than dug-up rocks, and with no inscriptions. There were also newer, sharp-cut headstones, standing in municipal rows down near the road – and plenty of room to bury a baby properly under the turf of the churchyard.

The church was empty, silent. Michael liked to go along to the Gaelic services; he said he found them meditative, calming even, but sitting through the foreign sounds of their psalm singing created a mounting pressure in my chest that made me want to stand up and protest. Having lived on Harris now for a few months, I was starting to get a fair idea of why Mum might have hidden herself away in London, coming as she did from this strict religious community that locked up the children’s swings on Sundays and had no concept of an unmarried mother other than in biblical terms. It made me feel irritable and argumentative every time I met poor old Dougal the vicar.

I found Dougal in the vestry. He was standing on a chair, emptying out a large cupboard in the wall. As always, he wore a black suit, his white hair and pink face made even brighter above the white vicar’s collar. His elderly skin had a surprising smoothness to it, as if it was washed clean and back to innocence each morning by the island rain.

‘Ah, Ruth, there’s you,’ he said, getting down carefully from his chair. ‘What can I help you with? And I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for all your trouble with the manse. We had no idea.’

‘Thanks, Dougal, but actually that’s why I’ve come to see you. I was wondering if there might be some old records in the church, some information about the people who used to live in our house, say about a century ago?’

‘Sergeant MacAllister was asking me just the same thing and so I’m here to get the old ledgers out. This cupboard can’t have been emptied properly for years. You could give me a hand.’

He balanced his solid frame on the rickety chair again and began passing things down. I took a pile of floppy green hymn books, a stack of missionary society pamphlets in thick Victorian print, armfuls of parchment-coloured ledgers. ‘I think that’s everything,’ he said, leaning further into the cupboard. ‘Although…’ I heard something heavy falling onto wooden board. He pulled out a small bundle wrapped in a cloth and banged off the dust. He handed it down to me and stretched his arm to the back of the cupboard again.

He stepped down and placed a small metal lion on the table. It was a kind of paperweight, the dull greenish yellow of old brass. It needed a good shine with metal polish.

The bundle was wrapped in brown velvet. The cloth felt old and silky and gave off the smoky odour of mildew as I folded it back. Inside was a notebook marbled with blues and reds, and a square glass bottle with a line of dried ink. There was also an old-fashioned ink pen, nothing more than a wand of mother-of-pearl with a nib; faint layers of light glowed as I turned it.

‘This looks like a minister’s notebook for sermons,’ said Dougal as he flicked through the pages, ‘but there’s no name.’ He passed me the book. I scanned the insides of the covers.

‘There’s a date though, look,’ I said, pointing to the corner of a page, ‘1860.’

He pulled a ledger from the pile on the table. The faded black ink of the entries had sunk into the paper with a yellow bleed. He counted back until he came to 1860.

‘There you are: the Reverend Alexander Ferguson, minister in Scarista in 1860.’

‘So these must have belonged to him.’ The edges of the mother-of-pearl pen were fluted for decoration. It seemed rather pretty for a man.

Dougal was still frowning as he continued to scan the ledger. ‘According to this, he was in sole charge of the parish at just twenty-six. Not an easy task for a man so young. And I see Ferguson wasn’t a married minister, so the child couldn’t have been his.’

‘We can’t rule him out just because he wasn’t married,’ I said. Then, noticing how embarrassed Dougal looked, I quickly added, ‘Who else was living in the house at that time?’

He hunted through the pile of ledgers and found a slim accounts book for the manse farm. He spread it out to show a list of staff and their wages for September 1860: Margaret Kintail, Moira Gillies, Effie MacAllister, several male farmhands.

‘Maybe Ferguson never knew what was buried beneath his floor,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘Perhaps the baby was the child of one of these men and one of the maids. But why on earth would they choose to bury it under the floorboards of the manse study?’

I started making some notes from the ledger on the back of an old parish newsletter.

‘Dougal, would you mind if I took Alexander’s notebook with me to read? I’ll bring it back.’

‘I’m sure Sergeant MacAllister isn’t going to be interested in a book of sermons, and I can always look at it later. In fact, why don’t you take the writing set back to the house? After all, it must have belonged there once, and I know you young people like these old things.’

Part of me hesitated – a vague fear of making too many connections back to the past. Decided I was being silly.

‘That’s really kind,’ I told him. ‘We’ve nearly finished restoring the fireplace in the sea room, and these would look wonderful on the mantelpiece.’

Dougal came outside with me and we stood in the wind looking over the graveyard. He looked worried. It felt like there was something more he wanted to say.

‘I was sorry to hear about your mother, Ruth,’ said Dougal. ‘You were very young to lose her, and in such sad circumstances.’

Taken aback that he should suddenly refer to her like that, I realised there must have been some conversation between him and Michael.

‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘And it must have been so very hard for you, with your father never being around.’

I shrugged. ‘Actually, Dougal, I prefer not to talk about all that.’

‘I wanted to let you know, Ruth, that once the remains are returned to the island, we will be holding a proper burial for the baby.’

I nodded, and we stood in silence for a while, watching the frantic drama of the breakers. The sea was mountainous with navy blue waves, the spray blowing off like fine white hair streaming in the wind.

‘And I was thinking,’ he said, ‘I could be holding a house blessing for you if you would like me to. It might help you to feel more settled, after all that has happened.’

‘How do you mean, a house blessing?’

‘When people move in to a new house, I often come over and pray in each room to bless it. A fresh start.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude, Dougal, but that’s not really my sort of thing. But thank you anyway.’

He smiled and nodded, and we shook hands.

I walked away, half tempted to turn back and say, Yes, come over right away and do your house-blessing thing, but it smacked too much of superstition and magic and holy water, and I was still angry with myself for letting my stupid nervousness taint how I felt about the Sea House. No, if there was an unquiet spirit in our house, the only way to lay it to rest was to find out exactly what had happened to that child.

*   *   *

A few days later, I heard something land on the floor in the hallway and ran down to get the post. Professor Carter had sent a wad of photocopied pictures and articles. I took them back to bed, passing them over to Michael as I read through them.

‘There’s a condition called Mermaid Syndrome then?’

I nodded. ‘The correct name is Sirenomelia.’ I showed him a grainy photo of a large specimen jar containing a baby floating in preserving fluid, its round face placid, eyes closed in sleep. The torso was extended to a tapering sleeve of flesh twisted slightly to one side. At the end were two malformed tiny flipper feet. It wasn’t pretty. He pulled a face.

‘So this is how the mermaid baby would have looked?’

I nodded.

‘Grief! Poor thing.’

The article explained that the child had been born with a large vein missing from its lower body. The mother’s blood supply to the legs had probably been so poor
in utero
that the infant’s legs had simply failed to develop. The child had no kidneys and several other organs were underdeveloped. It would have been able to live for only a few hours before it passed away from its fatal mutations.

I read on and found that the condition was often linked to poor health in the mother: some illness, or exposure to a toxic chemical, perhaps poor nutrition. There was no incidence – and here I leaned forward and felt my heart beating too hard – no record of the condition being hereditary. No child had ever survived to pass on the gene. It was an extremely rare condition, each case a new mutation that died out almost as soon as it was born.

The relief I felt on reading that made me realise that I had actually been wondering if there was some kind of link between my mother’s wild sea people stories and the child under our house. I picked up the picture of the baby floating in the jar, and shivered.

*   *   *

We finally heard from the police about the post-mortem findings. The report showed that the baby had died of natural causes, just as Professor Carter had anticipated, and since it had happened such a long time ago, the coroner had recommended that the case be closed.

But I was more determined than ever to find out who’d been involved. Who had taken the decision to take up the floorboards, dig down into the compacted earth?