The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (20 page)

Each time it had happened it was as if she was turning the page of a photograph album. Yesterday, for example, the image which filled her head was of Diana: blood on her hands, face and blouse, her eyes flashing with hatred. Today, it was of the baby, lying naked on the kitchen table, the stump of the umbilical cord milky-grey against the pale white of the child’s washed skin, the cardigan in which she had been wrapped beside her, where Mrs Anderson had let it drop.

As Mrs Anderson struggled for breath, the image disappeared and she unfolded her hands and rested her knuckles against the table to steady her. Even now, so long after, it had the power to stun her. She remained standing, the scene rolling forward, that stark image providing a prompt for the next: Mrs Anderson dripping glucose and water into the child’s mouth; dribbles of it forming into a sticky pool on the table; Diana ranting on about Megan Bates; her face contorted by loathing; how detestable the child was; how she wished it had died like its mother.

Mrs Anderson had removed the cardigan in
which the baby was wrapped and swaddled her in a
white towel. After placing her in a cardboard box, she
stroked her cheek with the back of her fingers and
said, ‘There you are. You’re safe now.’ Then she
took Diana to the bathroom and removed her blood-stained
clothes and shoes. While Diana washed, Mrs Anderson went to look for the hand-me-downs she’d had from Brae House over the years
. When she returned to the
bathroom Diana was standing naked in front of the mirror
. She dressed her in black trousers and a pale yellow
shirt and Diana protested about yellow not suiting her. Mrs
Anderson put Diana’s jersey and skirt into a plastic
bag, intending to put Megan’s bloodied cardigan into it
too.

After going downstairs she peered in the baby’s box and the child was fast asleep. She was so small, so defenceless. It was already a miracle she had survived. How many more hardships were to come? She remembered her own childhood, how much comfort her little blue blanket had given her. In moments of worry or trouble how she had always sought it out. She spread out the cardigan and used the kitchen scissors to cut a rectangle from its back, where it wasn’t blood-stained. That was when she found the brooch. She unfastened it, took it to the sink and washed a smear of blood from it. Thinking it pretty, she pinned it to the piece of cardigan and put it into an envelope which she taped to the side of the box. She couldn’t send the child out into the world with nothing. Mrs Anderson said a prayer then went upstairs to tell Diana she was taking the baby away. She stroked Diana’s forehead, reassuring her. She was safe now, she said, leading her to the spare bedroom. She told Diana to sleep if she could, to rest if she couldn’t, to relax now because her torment was over.

Mrs Anderson took the baby to her car and drove to Inverness. When she returned, she found Diana gone. A note was on her bed:
I won’t ever forget. D.
Mrs Anderson cleaned the floor, and wiped the table. She put the mop, the cleaning cloths and the bag with the bloodied clothes on her garden fire. The note she kept in case she ever had need of it. Later, she and Diana had spoken again, Mrs Anderson, as usual, doing what had to be done. Once the fuss had died down, she sought Diana’s ‘absolute assurance’ of secrecy. Giving it, Diana asked Mrs Anderson never to raise the subject again or to inquire how Megan Bates died or where her body was. They never broached it thereafter, except with their eyes, one providing the other with reassurance or understanding. It was a silent bond between them, one which acted as a spur to greater intimacy in other matters, Diana relying on Mrs Anderson, or so she said, more and more.

Cal sat against a slab of rock, Violet nearby on a shingle bank, the closing-in of night making an exchange of intimacies possible. Violet was explaining why she hadn’t been in a relationship since Anna’s birth, how she’d been formed by ‘the hours, days, months, years’ she’d spent yearning for her mother, then by the desertion of Anna’s father.

‘I don’t want any of that: being in a relationship, breaking up, starting again, Anna wondering who’ll be next, whether I’ll still love her as much when Mr Right comes along;
if
Mr Right comes along.’ She screwed up her face, finding even the notion objectionable. ‘I don’t want her to grow up with that insecurity, with that influence. I don’t want her to see me . . .’ She glanced at Cal. His face was in shadows. She stared into the gloom, trying to make out his expression. ‘I don’t want her to see me searching for something she can’t give me. That’s it, I guess.’ She picked at the stones around her, feeling their shapes, selecting one, letting it drop, choosing another until she found one small and round enough to fit her hand. She threw it, the movement making the shingle under her shift and rattle, like a drum roll heralding the splash of the stone in the sea.

Violet glanced again at Cal. ‘Having Anna has changed everything.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.’ He spoke quickly and quietly. ‘It’s not my business.’

‘It’s fine, really it is. I’m glad you did.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it was me. I started it.’

They were waiting for dark, watching its shadows creep across the bay, keeping out of the way of Tam and Co. As the colours of the day drained away, she asked him about his childhood fascination for the sea. What had inspired it?

‘I suppose you could blame my grandfather,’ he replied. ‘He died in World War Two, lost overboard, his body never recovered, or so I’d thought. I spent hours, days, trying to work out where he’d gone.’

At one point he had become convinced his grandfather had been preserved in Arctic sea ice. Aged nine, he wrote to Norway’s government providing some possible coordinates and requesting an immediate search. ‘And all the time he’d been buried on a Norwegian island called Moskenesoy and had been since his death. There’d been a mix-up over identities – it’s a long story. Nobody had known it was him until I found the grave a year or two ago.’

She made a sound which let him know she was impressed.

‘So you see my grandfather’s to blame for everything, for me becoming an oceanographer, for me doing what I do.’ He’d never even considered another field.

Recently he had been questioning the direction of his work – he’d said as much to her on the island. He’d always had an academic interest in where and how bodies floated, but dealing face to face with the relatives had become draining. He didn’t think he could do it anymore. The last few days had given him time and space to make a decision. He’d reply to ‘those poor, distressed parents’ who wanted him to track down their missing children. It would be hard to say no to them.

He apologised for being so serious. Then, his voice lifting with enthusiasm, he said, ‘The rest of it . . . all the other stuff . . . yeah, I still get a kick from knowing that in three days there’ll be a new moon, that the sun, the moon and the earth will be aligned, that it’s called syzygy. That the combined gravitational pull of the sun and the moon will make the high tide higher than normal and the low tide lower.’

He laughed. ‘Rachel . . . she was my wife . . . used to say I was just another train-spotter, stamp-collector, or the guy who played computer games at 3am because he was a loner, because it was his escape. With me it was the sea.’ He stopped to consider the accusation. ‘Yeah, she might be right.’

‘You were married?’

‘I was, yes.’

‘Children?’

‘No.’

She hadn’t meant to pry, she said.

‘It doesn’t matter, he answered. ‘And you? Were you married to Anna’s father?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ she said.

Usually she’d have left it at that but in the circumstances she thought it an opportunity to say more. She’d seen the way he looked at her. She didn’t want him to have a false impression. ‘I wouldn’t marry now. There’s no chance of that. I don’t even do relationships.’

‘Why not?’

She attempted an explanation, awkwardly. Being a good mother was the only thing that mattered to her. That meant ‘never letting Anna think she isn’t sufficient for me, never letting her think I might love someone else more than her, never loving anyone else, never taking that risk.’

After a while and with night settling in, he said, ‘Shall we go now?’ She heard a difference in his voice, or thought she did, and she wondered if he was bruised by what she had said, if the difference was disappointment.

They walked back among the dunes, Cal in front, Violet following; going from dip to gully. The sand of South Bay lay to their right. ‘Did you see the buoys and the driftwood?’ Cal said when they reached the scrub of bushes where the pickup was parked for concealment.

‘No,’ she said.

He pointed across the sand. ‘See?’

She screwed up her eyes. ‘I think so.’

‘It’s an oil drum. Duncan hasn’t been out today. He hasn’t been collecting. That’s not like him.’

* * *

A beech tree reared up from the slope by the back door to Brae. Its lower limbs drooped and hung so that anyone standing close to its trunk was rendered invisible by the murk of evening. Yet, inside the tree’s shroud of branches, it was possible to see out and in particular to observe Brae’s large kitchen, as Mrs Anderson had been doing for more than twenty minutes.

She was watching Alexandra Hamilton moving between the Aga and the table with occasional forays to the pantry – so far she’d brought back a bowl of cooking apples, flour and a joint of meat, venison or leg of lamb. Mrs Anderson observed Alexandra’s comings and goings with something approaching glee. To think she had produced the ingredient which could wreck this scene of rural domesticity. As tantalising to Mrs Anderson was the increasing frequency with which Alexandra scowled at the windows from which pools of yellow light spilled across the back courtyard. It was as if she knew she was being watched, as if she had a sixth sense for impending disaster. Alexandra had been peeling an apple at the table when suddenly her head jerked up. She searched the three windows in turn before Matt came into the kitchen disturbing her. He took a tray of glasses from the sideboard – for the drinks cupboard in the sitting room, Mrs Anderson guessed – and departed by the swing door. As soon as Alexandra was alone again, her eyes flashed back to the windows. It brought a smirk to Mrs Anderson’s face.

‘All in good time,
Miss
Alexandra,’ she said. ‘All in good time . . .’

Mrs Anderson wondered what would happen next. Would Alexandra go to one of the windows to stare out into the darkness? Would she go to the back door, open it and stand in the yard? Mrs Anderson decided to wait and see. After all, she was in no hurry to move things on. She was warm in the tree’s shelter. It was dry underfoot and quite apart from considerations of comfort, she was enjoying the capriciousness of power, her ability to decide when to exercise it. In fact she expected this part of the evening to be just as enjoyable as the next.

There. It happened again. Alexandra interrupted rolling pastry to stare at the middle window. Her face was flushed and fuller than it used to be, Mrs Anderson decided. On its own this was a source of some satisfaction, the thought that Alexandra’s looks were going. As Mrs Anderson watched, Alexandra’s expression changed from watchfulness to worry. She walked hurriedly to the back door. Mrs Anderson heard the old lock turn, a noise which brought back her days as housekeeper, when she had been custodian of the same key. The outside light came on and Alexandra appeared beneath it. She glowered in the direction of Mrs Anderson without seeing her before going back indoors. At the kitchen table again, she draped the pastry over a pie dish and trimmed the edges with a knife. When she had finished, she glanced at the window again. A smile fluttered across Mrs Anderson’s thin lips. ‘It’s time,’ she said.

She moved away from the shelter of the tree and crossed the grass to where steps led to the drive. She proceeded with care, feeling for each mossy tread with one foot before taking her weight off the other. When she reached the bottom she looked up. Her face shone in the beam of the backdoor light and the movement caught Alexandra’s eye. By her expression – turning from shock to anger when Alexandra saw who was there – Mrs Anderson realised she was unlikely to be asked inside, even into the kitchen. She had imagined Alexandra sitting her down in the hall or the drawing room and Mrs Anderson having the pleasure of telling her about Violet Wells surrounded by the most precious artefacts of her inheritance from Mr William. But it was clear from Alexandra’s opening salvo that would not happen.

‘What are you doing creeping about out here?’ she demanded imperiously pulling the back door open to intercept Mrs Anderson. ‘What do you want?’ Alexandra stood with hands on hips. ‘Well?

Mrs Anderson did her best to look as though some terrible and unjustified wrong was being done to her by such an ungracious welcome. ‘If I’d known this was how I was going to be treated I would have had second thoughts about coming out at night.’

Alexandra laughed; short and bitter. ‘Oh please, Mrs Anderson, do me a favour.’

Mrs Anderson thrust out her chin in turn and addressed the black sky above Alexandra’s head. ‘I refuse to repay your ingratitude with disloyalty. It is not my way.’ Her head gave a little tremble of repressed pride, as well as excitement.

Alexandra snorted again. ‘I’m bored by this, by you, always trying to interfere. If you don’t say what you want I’m going back inside.’

Mrs Anderson glowered. How she wished Alexandra was still small enough to be put across her knee and smacked.

‘Jim told me this evening that the young woman who is renting Orasaigh Cottage . . .’

‘You mean Violet Wells?’

‘I am only telling you what Jim said because of the implications . . . for you, the family, for Brae. I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Oh, ever the loyal and faithful servant,’ Alexandra sneered. ‘What implications?’

‘Violet Wells’s mother was Megan Bates. She’s Mr William’s daughter . . . his flesh and blood.’ For dramatic effect, Mrs Anderson waited before carrying on. ‘His only child . . . his heir.’

Anyone else wouldn’t have noticed the flicker in Alexandra’s eyes, a slight widening. But Mrs Anderson was watching for it and knew what it meant. ‘Oh go away, Mrs Anderson. Go away.’ Alexandra collected herself and strode back across the courtyard. ‘Go away. Go away. Go away.’

The door slammed shut. The outside light snapped off, leaving the yard lit only by the light from the kitchen windows. Alexandra extinguished that too by closing the kitchen shutters, leaving Mrs Anderson in the dark.

* * *

One noise after another entered the darkness of her bedroom. If it wasn’t the wind pushing breathily at the window or mortar chips tumbling down the chimney, it was the hollow tick of her alarm clock. With each interruption Mrs Anderson shifted in her bed. To prevent the wind disturbing her, she turned her back to the window. To block out the intermittent skittering from the chimney, she rolled on to her right side, her left ear being the duller of the two. To muffle the tick of the clock, she pushed it to the furthest edge of her bedside table. Every competing sound banished, she lay in the dark, her eyes closed, revelling in the memory of Alexandra’s discomfort, in the wound she had inflicted, and listening as the fluttering in her breast grew ever louder. For Mrs Anderson, vengeance was an overdue visitor and it did not come as a horned, horrible creature but as a glorious butterfly.

Jim Carmichael’s hands shook. A mug of tea was in his left and a bottle of 12-year old Macallan, a Christmas present, in his right. He was attempting to top up his brew with whisky but neither the mug nor the bottle remained steady enough for any kind of accuracy. The result was a splatter on the kitchen floor followed by a lucky splash of whisky into his tea. He brought the mug to his mouth and gulped at it before taking a swig from the bottle. He washed the alcohol down with more tea and banged the mug on the table. He was as careless letting go of the whisky bottle. It toppled and spewed the rest of its contents across his paperwork – over his calculations of the previous night, over his ruined plans – before tumbling on to the flag floor with a crash. Jim leaned back in his chair and listened to Tommy, his collie, howling. The sound expressed a little of what Jim was feeling too: fear and a sense that something irrevocable had happened even though it was only 7.30 in the morning. Tommy, who was shut up in the tractor cab, only knew about the missing blackies. He didn’t know the half of it; he didn’t know the worst of it.

Jim put his head in his hands and rubbed his unshaven face, groaning and cursing. He berated himself either for his stupidity or for his naivety and followed it up with: ‘What did you think would happen, Jim? Well?’ The question went unanswered because Jim’s elbow knocked against his mug of tea, tipping it over. The remaining liquid spilled across the table and Jim stared at the mingling pools of whisky and tea and then at the damp papers on which he had been estimating the costs of acquiring a polytunnel to supply the new village store as well as his projections of cash flow. Splashes of tea or whisky or both stained the page on which he had made a clean copy of his calculations the night before.

He had retired to bed with an intoxicating sense of optimism, of opportunity finally seeking out his remote corner of the world and rewarding his years of uncomplaining hard work. Unusually for him, he’d even thanked God before going to sleep. Now the sodden page seemed to mock him and he tore it up, scattering the pieces on to the floor. His mug went flying too, as did a pottery vase of dried flowers, a bottle of ketchup and another of mustard. After a cacophony of discordant crashes and bangs the kitchen fell quiet, apart from Tommy’s intermittent howling and the clock above the stove. Tick. Tick. Tick. So often it had been Jim’s reassuring companion. Now it was a sound filled with menace. In an hour and a half, Davie would be returning. Then Jim would be told what job he had in mind for him.