The Sea House: A Novel (33 page)

‘I am sorry to have caused you some discomfort.’

‘No, you have given me what I sought: you have given me the truth about who I am, and an entire family of ancestors. I am truly happy to have met you.’

‘You have done a great deal of research into sightings of the sea people and the folk myths around them. I have come to it from the other direction, from my theories of kayaks and Arctic customs. Why don’t we put it all together into one paper, or even a book perhaps? It seems to me that you know the right people, Alexander, when it comes to getting the university to publish.’

‘If I have a few friends in the university, then I am happy to put them at your service. Let us see what we may achieve together in this matter.’

CHAPTER 38

Ruth

Three weeks till the baby was due. I was filled with a surge of energy and a mania for cleaning – a nesting instinct, Shona called it when she came by to drop off some good-as-new baby clothes.

I took the tiny nighties and knitted jackets up to the bedroom chest. Next to it, a Moses basket was set up on a table near the bed. I’d cleaned the room from top to bottom, but the scrap of paper was somehow still there, weighted down on the windowsill by a collection of shells: a white limpet scoured down to bone, a worn mussel shell with wintery lines of blue like a pale sky.

‘But I thought you would have contacted her weeks ago,’ Christine had said when I bumped into her in the Co-op in Tarbert earlier in the week. ‘You remember her, the lady who’s been trying to trace a cousin that moved to London and suddenly stopped writing – a lady who had a little girl who’d be about your age now. She so wants to meet you, Ruth. Call her, why don’t you?’

I was taking a pile of washing downstairs anyway, so I picked up the paper and took it with me, down to the phone in the hallway. I dialled the number more in a spirit of tidiness than any hope that I was going to trace some relatives. I listened to the phone ringing somewhere across the water in Uist. It rang for a long time. I was on the point of replacing the receiver when a soft and tentative voice answered.

She was called Sally, Sally Nicolson. For some reason – to put an end to any false hopes she might have – I agreed to meet her at the Harris Hotel in Tarbert.

*   *   *

It was past five o’clock, the agreed time, but she hadn’t arrived. The shadows were getting long in the garden outside, a low dazzle from the sun beginning its descent towards Loch Tarbert. I ordered a tray of tea and a plate of rock-hard scones and sat waiting in the chilly conservatory of the Harris Hotel – not the most appealing place, but at least it was quiet. Through the window, a view of overgrown flowerbeds, the valiant fuchsia bushes making mounds of red flowers, everything else killed off by the wind, as is often the case so far north.

A short, heavy-set woman came into the conservatory. I saw a cheerful face, a perm tousled by the wind as if she might well have come up on the ferry from Lochboisdale. I noted the island way of plain dressing: tan stockings and a wool skirt with a forgettable cardy.

She came straight over and asked if I was Ruth, took my hand in both of hers.

She pressed my hands so intently that I realised that she’d already decided she recognised something in my face. I was worried how I was going to put her off if she was wrong, or, worse, if she was a bit of a crackpot. She organised the tea things in a way that made me feel uncomfortable – motherly, intrusive.

After some stilted conversation, rather guarded on my part, she opened the clasp of her large handbag and pulled out a frayed envelope. She produced a jumbled handful of black and white snaps.

The first one showed two young women in front of a low, whitewashed cottage: one plump with curly hair tipped up by the wind, the other a little taller. That girl was my height, slim, her long black hair held back by a scarf. I felt tears sliding down my face. I brushed them flat. I’d never seen a picture of Mum looking so young.

‘Where was the picture taken?’ I asked. Sally produced an ironed handkerchief and I dried my cheeks. The fabric had the faded smell of clothes in a drawer.

‘In front of Gran’s cottage. Your mum told you that she was brought up by Gran?’

I don’t remember.

‘Oh. Well, her dad passed away when she was twelve, and her mum passed soon after, so that’s where your mum lived. It was a lovely old place, quite dark inside, but cosy with a big fire. Your mum had her own little wooden room built in one end, with one of those old-fashioned box beds with curtains you could pull at night. She loved that house.’

‘Where was it?’

‘Up at Point of Ness, in Lewis. And here, see, this one is your mum with Gran.’ Mum looked about eighteen in that one. She was standing outside the door of a cottage, next to an elderly lady seated at a spinning wheel.

‘She liked to sit out in summer, Gran. The light was better. She was a weaver. You could hear the loom clacking away as you went up the path. You know she taught your mum?’

I shook my head again.

She sighed. ‘That face, Ruth. You look so like your mother.’

I swallowed, determined not to cry again, keep a clear head.

‘This is me and your mum, the first day we started work in Stornoway at the department store. Oh, it was a big deal, moving to the town like that. We had lodgings in the main street, and we had money to spend. We were the bees knees, went to all the dances in the church hall, and that’s where she met your father.’

‘You knew my father, Sally?’

‘Oh yes, of course. He was one of the Stornoway fishermen, very handsome, and charming with it. More than he’d any business to be. And she fell so in love, you see.’

‘So why did they split up?’

‘He was married. They always knew there could be no future in it; there was no such thing as divorce on the islands then. When she realised you were on the way, she knew she was on her own.’

‘He wouldn’t help her?’

‘She didn’t tell him. If she’d told him, he’d have left his wife, and then he’d have had to leave the island. And he was an island man to his bones, worked on the trawlers going out from Stornoway. She knew he’d never be happy anywhere else. But she was desperate to keep you, Ruth, not to go to the girls’ home in Inverness and have to give you away. So that’s why she took herself off to Oban and worked as a maid in one of the big hotels, for as long as she could, and that’s where you were born, in Oban.’

‘You were still in touch with her then?’

‘Oh yes. I went down to help her when you arrived. I worked in the same hotel as your mother, taking it in turns to look after you. When she got a job in London, in an office, to make a life for you, I came to the station and got you both on the milk train down to Euston at two in the morning – the cheapest ticket, you see.’

Sally stopped and took a moment, swallowing, her eyes swimming and watery.

‘I remember seeing you sleeping, seeing you through the window in the dark. Never thought that I wouldn’t see you again – till now.’

She reached over and crushed my hand in hers.

‘Ruth, if I’d known … if I had known you were on your own, you know I would have come to get you.’

A whole other life flashed by, growing up in the islands, living with Sally.

‘I appreciate that. It means a lot. But Sally, there’s something about Mum you ought to know. Has Christine told you? The police said that Mum took her own life. I mean, after what she went through, you can understand.’

Sally squeezed my hand tighter in her own large grip.

‘Ruth, she loved you. She would never, never have willingly left you.’

‘Maybe. But you see, she was on anti-depressants. That’s how they came to the suicide verdict.’

‘There’s no possible way that the woman I knew would take her own life. She must have had some kind of accident, taking a short cut in the dark. Your mother turned her whole life upside down to keep you with her: she would never, never have left you while there was breath in her body.’

‘I want to believe you, I do, but…’ Something cracked inside my chest then. Sally’s handkerchief became a cold and crumpled ball of wetness before I finally stopped blubbing.

‘Sally, I haven’t asked you this, but do you think my father might still be alive?’

‘I’m so sorry, my dear; he passed away. He drowned in a winter storm out in the Atlantic. You would have been only two or three at the time.’

I couldn’t speak, trying to unknot the ball of disappointment in my throat.

‘But he has a brother, your uncle. He lives in Finsbay still. Alone now since his wife passed on, years back. He builds boats. His name’s Lachlan Macleod.’

‘Lachlan! Lachlan Macleod? Are you sure, Sally?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But we’re buying a boat from him. I know him really well.’

‘Would you like me to ring him? I’d like to tell him if that would help.’

‘No. I think I’d like to tell him, Sally. Though I’m not sure where to start.’

‘Ruth, just tell him you’re Ellie’s daughter. Tell him you’ve come home. But look, here’s me needing to get on the ferry back to Uist. I wish I could stay, but I’ve got work tomorrow. Will you call me once you’ve spoken to Lachlan, yes?’

We hugged, a bit clumsily, because she was still a stranger really, and, well, she was a sizeable woman. Not a tall person but plump, a soft face. Insisting again that I keep the pictures of Mum, she gathered up her bags and left for the ferry.

I went to the ladies’ and splashed my face with cold water. In the mirror, roadkill, a face red and shiny from crying. I couldn’t stop shaking.

I couldn’t get it together to drive home. I called Michael. Felt so grateful when he said he’d be there really soon.

I sat down, trying to take it all in. I knew who my father was. I had a sort of cousin, and an uncle – an uncle who was a really nice man.

What would he say when I told him?

I stared out of the window, over towards the shine of the sea loch. I thought of Mum trying to work out what to do, younger than me, expecting a baby and no one but Sally to help her. She must have been so strong to decide to not tell my father; she must have loved him to try and protect him like that. And she must have been so determined to keep me, working so hard to make a life for us together.

I though of Sally’s indignant conviction that Mum would never have chosen to take her own life. A stirring of hope: Mum had been on her way home to me, hurrying; that unerring impulse that drove her, to protect the child she loved.

As I looked out at the bay, it came back to me how I used to stare through the window of our flat in London, watching the smoke and the sun rising over the cityscape as Mum brushed my hair in the morning. She used a soft hairbrush and she was very gentle. I shut my eyes. I could almost feel her cool hand, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. She would sing in time to the brushstrokes while my head rocked back a little with each stroke. I didn’t know what the words meant exactly, but she sang the same song to me so often, I could reproduce the sounds. I hummed the first notes, tried out that old tune again. And then an odd thing happened in that cold and empty hotel conservatory; I started quietly singing, under my breath, the words coming from some deep place.

I let the coolness of her hand sooth my forehead. I felt the song travel through my lungs and diaphragm, felt it travel down into a tight little world of amniotic fluid and mingled heartbeats, and I placed my hand on the brow of the little hill where my baby was sleeping.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 39

Alexander, 1879

As inspector for Board schools I was allotted a low, whitewashed building at Kilmaluag on the Trotternish peninsula of Skye. One end of the building served as the parish schoolroom, the smaller portion containing my simple accommodation. An elderly lady came early each morning to cook and clean, but so shy was old Jesse that she would slip out and go to her cottage as soon as I came down to eat my breakfast, only returning to finish the housework and set a meal on the stove while I was away teaching the afternoon lessons.

So it was that my meals were necessarily silent and solitary affairs, interrupted only by the rustle of book pages turning, or the crack and spit of an ancient root embedded in a peat brick on the fire. Such was the sparsely provisioned but calm life that I had established. And though remembrance of the hopes and the failures of my earlier days sometimes pierced my heart, I counted myself fortunate to have found an occupation that would meet my daily needs and also allow me to be useful to others.

There were moments however, many moments, when the solitude of that place weighed heavily upon me. Isolated as I was, between the Quiraing mountains that loomed up behind the house, and the grey ocean before, I often felt entirely cut off from mankind. For once the children and the assistants left for their homes on Friday, then scarcely a soul passed on the track before the schoolhouse. I saw company only when I walked down to the morning service at the chapel in Trotternish.

I had lost none of my love for the divine, though I now attended the services more in the spirit of a novice or a supplicant – in spite of my advancing years. For it seemed to me that I now gazed as through a dim glass at my past self, that man so sure and so precise, so confident of the eternal prize, sitting secure in the study that looked out over the machair with its carpets of flowers and the bright sea continuously renewing the white sands.

I saw often, in dreams, that dear place, and dear little Moira; how she would bring in tea, her cap askew, chattering away on every subject as she read her way through the books on my shelves. And it was clear to me, on reflection, that given a different start in life, Moira could have been the equal and more of any of the fine ladies that Fanny once paraded in Edinburgh as a good catch.

Standing in front of the glass propped up on the washstand, it seemed to me that, now, I would be considered a great catch by no one. I saw before me as I fastened my collar, a man approaching the middle of his fifth decade, hair turned to a steely grey, a tightness, perhaps even a bitter twist, to the lips, a weary narrowing of the eyes, the face of a man set in its disappointments. A face, it was true, that did not encourage the children to misbehave, and of this I was glad, since I had lately removed the leather tawse so beloved of small-minded disciplinarians – entirely unneeded among the docile boys and girls who often walked the long miles to school across moor and heathland in bare feet.