The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (24 page)

They were leaning against the back of the pickup, Cal and Violet side by side, watching out for the Ullapool bus. Hilary had phoned to say it was running ten minutes late. While they waited, Violet asked about Cal’s childhood, about his parents, whether they were alive, what relationship he had with them. It was on her mind.

‘You know families, parents and stuff . . . whether they always fuck you up.’

Because she was serious, his answer was serious too. He had been a single but not a lonely child, he said. His mother’s death, when he was seventeen, from cancer, had been the event that changed everything.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ She sounded awkward at having prised such a detail from him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but yes, it was the turning point, thinking about it now.’ His father’s breakdown, his new life in Africa then his new family, and ‘even,’ Cal smiled to lighten things, ‘why a five year old pickup with 102,000 miles on the clock seems to double up as my home.’

He had avoided making any comparison between himself and Violet, though one occurred to him. The death of a mother was formative for each of them, neither really belonging anywhere because of it, the ‘pin in the map’ thing he called it. He sensed Violet arriving at the same conclusion because she glanced at him, quickly, as if deciding to let him further into her confidence because of it but finding her habit of reticence hard to overcome.

‘Go on,’ he encouraged.

She looked again for the bus. ‘It’s funny,’ she said slowly, still deciding how much to reveal. ‘Sitting last night watching the diggers and the police. . . .’ She breathed out, a little rush of self-deprecation to pre-empt any reaction from Cal. ‘I can’t describe it because I’ve never experienced it before . . . not in my adult life . . . of being a daughter, I suppose.’

She glanced at him again, a silent apology for the right words being hard to find. ‘Of having a responsibility to a parent . . . do you know what I mean? That’s it . . . of feeling her pulling at me.’ She let out a laugh. ‘If the police hadn’t been there with their diggers and trucks I’d have used my bare hands to find her.’

He nodded. He understood, or
thought he did. If she had asked him two, maybe
three, years ago who he was or what he was
, he could have produced a short list of definitions. The
top three would have been ‘husband, son, oceanographer’ even if
he wasn’t sure about the order. Perhaps that was
why his marriage hadn’t exactly been successful. Now
husband
no longer applied and though still a son, he didn
’t feel like one anymore because his father had ‘shed
’ him, emotionally, had replaced him with another family. At least
that was how it seemed to Cal.

‘Until last night, I hadn’t considered myself a daughter,’ Violet said. ‘Because I always thought my mother abandoned me.’

Now she knew she hadn’t. That had made all the difference.

She picked at her nails. He said nothing.

‘Thank you,’ she said after a moment.

‘For what?’

‘For listening.’

He shrugged.
Who says he did?
She flicked the back of her hand against his thigh just as the bus appeared round the side of the hill. ‘Today,’ she said, setting off towards it, ‘is going to be a good day. Don’t you think?’

Cal stayed where he was, watching the reunion of mother and daughter. When Violet started back towards him, a child in each hand, she called out to him. ‘I should have warned you.’

‘What?’

‘How alike the girls are.’

‘Twins,’ he said. One was milky pale with straight white-blonde hair and the other brown-skinned with wide brown eyes and dark curls.

‘I’d be guessing now, but that one,’ he pointed at the darker girl, ‘is yours.’

‘How do you know?’

He looked from the blonde child holding Violet’s other hand to the blonde woman who followed behind, one a smaller version of the other. ‘Luck, I guess.’

‘You must be Hilary,’ he said, offering to take her rucksack and the extra tent. As he put them in the pickup he noticed Hilary giving Violet an inquiring look and Violet deliberately ignoring her. Something similar happened at the turn-off to South Bay. Cal caught it in his mirror: Hilary’s silent inquiry and Violet shaking her head and mouthing ‘stop it’. He wondered if that was why Violet had asked Anna and Izzy to tell her everything they’d seen on their journey. Was she trying to stall Hilary’s curiosity about Cal, about whether anything had happened between Violet and him? Approaching Boyd’s Farm, he realised Violet had another, more urgent concern. The girls had listed buzzard, seal, mountain, heather, river, sea, bus, rook, seagull and forests and Anna was looking out of the window for other ideas. ‘Now,’ Violet said, turning her back to the door and covering the window so that Anna couldn’t see past her, ‘why don’t you ask Cal what he found in the shop for you?’

‘What?’ Both girls glanced shyly at the back of Cal’s head.

‘Nets for fishing in rock pools and,’ Violet enthused, ‘buckets
and
spades.’ She mentioned the different creatures Anna and Izzy might catch, ‘starfish, crab, winkle, shrimp, prawn . . .’ The girls listened and stretched their arms wide to show how big their catch would be. Having worked out why Violet was behaving as she was, Cal joined in by announcing he’d caught a ‘whale’ in a rock pool when he’d been a boy, about the same age as Anna and Izzy.

‘Could we
really
catch a whale?’ Izzy asked Hilary.

‘Maybe a small one,’ Hilary suggested.

Anna adopted a know-it-all look. ‘There aren’t small whales.’

By then the pickup had passed the stone pillars to Boyd’s Farm and was approaching the road-end by the beach. ‘Here we are.’ Violet sounded relieved. As far as Cal could tell, Anna and Izzy hadn’t noticed a thing, not the police, the trucks or the diggers.

Anna was cleaning her beach apartment, patting the sand smooth with her hands, discarding seaweed and gathering up her collection of shells. ‘Really . . . honestly . . . how many times do I have to tell you?’ Anna greeted each new example of Violet’s untidiness with an exclamation. One by one she picked up the shells and placed them on a flat rock beside which was a puddle of seawater. She scolded each one in turn.

‘
You
need to be washed.’

‘You
need
to be washed.’

‘You need to be
washed
.’

With every change of emphasis she raised her voice. In between times she complained about the state of her new kitchen. ‘It’s a mess, worse than before. Really I don’t know what to do.’

Then she checked to see whether Violet was listening, whether she was sorry.

‘How often have I told you about tidying up after parties?’

Violet still wasn’t paying sufficient attention. So Anna pulled at her arm. ‘Mummy, I’m cross with you. I won’t let you stay here again if you don’t help.’ Violet glanced down at her daughter. Whenever Anna called her ‘Mummy’ she knew she was upset.

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’

Anna found a broken shell. ‘You’ll have to buy another one,’ she said, tugging at her, making her play beach apartments. They were among rocks by the bottom of the steep path which Megan Bates used to take to the beach. At Anna’s request, Violet had made a notice out of cardboard and put it at the entrance. ‘Anna’s Beach Apartment. Please remove your shoes,’ it said.

‘Please. . . . pleeeaaase. . . . Mummy, help me.’ Pulling on Violet’s arm wasn’t working anymore. So Anna slumped into a sulk. Her shoulders drooped. ‘There’s so much to do, pleeeaaase.’ She stood up, hands on hips, head at one side. ‘If you don’t help now (she stamped her foot) . . . this minute (again) . . . I’ll just have to ask you to leave.’

Violet pulled the little girl to her, hugged her and kissed her head as Anna gave up her struggles of protest. ‘Why won’t you help with the dishes?’ She twisted and turned until she was looking into Violet’s face which was puffy from crying. Anna was suddenly solicitous and attentive. She’d do the dishes. She liked doing dishes. Of course Violet mustn’t leave the apartment. Where else would she have to go, and anyway who else but Anna would put up with Violet’s partying and untidiness? ‘Please stay,’ she tugged at her mother, trying to persuade her. ‘If you don’t stay, I’ll be very lonely.’ Anna reached up to her mother’s face and wiped it, leaving grains of sand on her cheeks. ‘I wasn’t really cross.’

Violet said, ‘It’s not you silly.’

Anna was now pulling at her mother’s lips, making her kiss her finger tips one by one. ‘What is it then?’

‘Oh it’s nothing. It’s just being with you . . . here.’

Anna curled up between her mother’s legs. ‘How many floors will our proper beach house have?’ she asked.

‘Two,’ Violet replied.

‘Bigger than this beach apartment . . . ?’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’ll have a bedroom each, and one for Izzy to come and stay?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a separate kitchen?’ A separate kitchen was important to Anna. The flat in Glasgow had one room with a bathroom off.

‘Yes.’

‘And someone to do the dishes?’

‘Yes.’

Anna reviewed her mother’s answers, testing them for truthfulness, checking everything important had been covered. ‘All right,’ she said, adding, ‘I suppose’ as a warning against later revisions.

They lay together until Violet said, ‘Anna, if I help you with the dishes, will you come for a walk?’

‘I might,’ she replied. ‘Where to?’

‘Just along the beach, and then we’ll join the others. In fact,’ Violet suggested, ‘Why don’t you put your feet up and I’ll do the dishes.’ Violet reached for the shells and made splashing noises in the rock pool. ‘There,’ she said, ‘Finished.’

Anna sat and inspected the shells. She pointed at one, claiming it still to be dirty and set about washing it. ‘It’s always the same,’ she said, ‘if you want a job done properly you have to do it yourself.’ Violet smiled at Anna copying her nursery school teacher. It was one of Mrs Semple’s favourite complaints.

‘Do you know what?’ Violet asked, standing up and lifting Anna over the surrounding rocks and planting her on the sand.

‘What?’

‘Do you know what your grandmother did every day?’

‘No.’

Violet held out her hand for Anna. Their fingers interlocked and Violet walked her to the water’s edge. ‘She used to come here every morning.’

‘Did she paddle?’ Anna let the water approach the tips of her toes before jumping back.

‘She did. She used to do this, just like we’re doing.’

A black Audi with tinted windows was parked at the stone pillars to Boyd’s Farm. The car was clean, shiny and, in Cal’s opinion, out of place. It belonged to a swanky city street not this back of beyond. He walked towards it, his attention on the progress of the search. The scene was little changed. Teams of police sifted through the piles of flotsam and the numerous small mounds of earth the digger had scooped from the four shallow pits it had excavated so far. Even at a distance Cal could see how little topsoil there was, barely enough to cover a body. He would tell Violet that was why the police were concentrating their search on Duncan’s flotsam piles: a body in such a shallow grave would need to have another layer covering it for a guarantee of concealment. Something else was also obvious: by the numbers of police and the level of activity – there were half a dozen vans as well as two diggers and three trucks – the body had not been found.

By then Cal was almost at the parked car. As he drew alongside it, intending to carry on to the Poltown road before returning to the beach a different way, the driver’s window opened with an expensive swish. A man in dark glasses, Mediterranean blue shirt open at the neck and a supercilious smile, asked, ‘Don’t suppose they’ve found anything?’

‘Who wants to know?’ Cal said, bending down and looking in. There was another man in the passenger seat. Cal recognised Ross Turnbull. He nodded acknowledgement and Turnbull returned the gesture. Dark Glasses flashed another bright white smile and his card:
Don Saxby, Executive Director, Development, BRC
was written across the base of a drawing of a wind turbine. ‘Just wondering what delay to factor in.’

Cal snorted and shook his head. ‘Don’t you guys ever give up – a man’s dead for God’s sake.’ The window closed.

When Cal returned to South Bay Hilary and Izzy were splashing at the water’s edge, and Violet was sitting higher up the beach beside Anna. The girl was turning the pages of her painting book and telling Violet about each picture.

‘That’s Granny’s house. That’s her front door, and that’s,’ Anna pointed again, ‘her bedroom window.’

Violet glanced at Cal. He shook his head.
No, nothing, they’re still searching.

‘And here’s Granny paddling.’ Anna turned another page.

‘So it is, Anna. You are clever. Just as I asked you. Will you paint some more while you’re here?’

‘Hilary only let me bring crayons,’ Anna said crossly.

‘Well, draw something for me in crayons. I’d love that.’

Violet glanced again at Cal. ‘Alexandra Hamilton’s invitation?’ he reminded her. ‘What are you going to do?’

After a late picnic lunch
of tomato sandwiches, crisps and cans of Fanta, Violet warned
the girls they had work to do. It was a
rule of camping, she said; everyone pitching in together, children
and adults; each having a task. Izzy and Anna drowned
out Violet by shouting, and Violet told Cal he wouldn
’t have any young assistants after all. Anna and Izzy
would be accompanying their mothers on a long walk, and
he’d have to put up the tents and collect
driftwood for the fire by himself. She suggested the girls
put on their shoes because they’d be climbing uphill
and the path would be stony and rough. Izzy and
Anna looked at each other before Izzy announced she had
a sore foot and should probably remain behind to help
Cal. ‘So it’ll just be you walking, will it
Anna?’ Violet inquired while busying herself with her backpack. ‘Hilary
,’ Violet asked, ‘have you got any of those plasters for
blisters . . . oh, and an insect spray because we’ll be
eaten alive by midges once we’re away from the
beach and that nice breeze from the sea?’