The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (6 page)

‘Do you live here?’ she asked before he’d lowered his window, repeating the question as it was sliding down. He shook his head and she seemed disappointed, pulling her mouth to one side and looking around as if hoping to see someone else. ‘Try me,’ he said.

‘The island in the sea loch . . . I’m trying to find out who owns it.’

‘Orasaigh?’

‘You know it?’ Her voice lifted.

‘No not really.’ He’d walked there earlier in the day.

She sighed and apologised for bothering him. She made to leave but changed her mind. ‘You don’t know when low tide is, do you?’ He took his mobile phone off the pickup’s dashboard. ‘In exactly one hour and 42 minutes, at 17.54, and the next one is at 06.36 tomorrow morning.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Just do.’

She raised a hand in thanks and went along the beach road. ‘Hi, my name is Cal McGill,’ he said quietly to her retreating back.

A knee deep stream of retreating water covered the causeway. After removing her trainers, socks and jeans and clutching them to her, Violet waded across the 80 metres to Orasaigh Island. She went ashore at a gravel ramp at the side of which was a wooden notice board nailed to a post. ‘Beware of the changing tides,’ it warned. ‘This causeway is impassable either side of high water. If you find yourself trapped, please have consideration for the inconvenience of others before attempting to summon help. An hour or two passes surprisingly quickly and enjoyably on Orasaigh.’

After brushing sand and grit from her feet, Violet dressed. She left the ramp and climbed uphill on a grassy track which wound through a plantation of spindly alder, ash and birch. Wherever she looked she asked herself the same question: had it changed since her mother lived there?

Where the trees gave way to bracken and grass, a pitched roof appeared above the sky-line. In her impatience to see where her mother had lived, Violet broke into a run. Soon she found herself standing before a two up, two down 19th century cottage. It was surrounded by a mossy wall which enclosed twin patches of lawn and between them a path edged with narrow borders of lavender. Violet lifted the latch of the gate and went uncertainly down the path. Knocking at the outer door of the porch, she noticed a card in one of the side windows. She read it while she knocked again. ‘For letting inquiries, ring Brae Estate Office.’ The phone number was printed in fading letters. She shouted out ‘Hi, hello.’ After waiting for a response, she crossed one of the patches of lawn to what turned out to be the sitting room window. She peered through the glass onto another life. Her mother’s, she wondered?

The room was dark but neat with two arm chairs either side of an open fire framed by matching bookshelves. Violet took it all in, noticing there was none of the clutter that went with occupation. It seemed no-one was in residence. She made her way back to the letting notice and tapped the number into her mobile. It went straight to message. Violet left her name and number and a request for her call to be returned. Then she looked in the window on the other side of the porch, at a small dining room with a circular table and four chairs. It, too, was neat and gloomy. Going back to the porch, she rattled at the locked door in frustration. Having waited so long to discover her birth-place, she found her patience gone. With a regretful backward glance, she left the garden and carried along the track towards the middle of the island until she found a sheltered area of grass beside some rowan trees. She took off her backpack and unfolded a small tent.

After putting it up, she rang Hilary, who regaled her with the exploits of the two girls. Typically, she ended one story with a burst of laughter before launching into another, until Violet’s silence prompted her to ask, ‘Are you all right?’

‘I think I’ve found my mother’s house.’

Hilary relayed the message to Anna. Violet heard the child cry out with excitement. ‘Would you like to speak to her?’ Hilary asked.

‘I can’t,’ Violet replied.

‘Why what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. I’ll cry and I don’t want Anna to think I’m upset.’

Hilary sounded put out. ‘Well, ok, if that’s what you want.’

Violet could still hear Anna’s excited squeaks. ‘Ask her if she will paint me a cottage with two windows upstairs and two downstairs with a door in the middle? Ask her,’ she added, ‘to paint her granny’s house.’

* * *

Cal had seen something similar on Texel, the largest of the Dutch Frisian Islands. Strategically positioned between the North and Wadden seas, Texel had a long history of being journey’s end for cargoes lost overboard in collisions or storms and an equally long tradition of beach-combing. Cal had visited it because he’d heard of beach-combers there who kept dated records of their finds. He’d matched their logs of high value flotsam – Burberry bags from Britain, the wooden components of kit houses from Germany, cases of wine from Italy – with the ship-owners’ reports of losses. Comparing where they’d gone overboard with where they’d beached, he was able to calculate actual speeds of travel for different weights, shapes and sizes of flotsam against his computer program predictions and to make adjustments. The beachcomber who provided the most useful data went by the name of Olaf, a merchant seaman from Norway who had also washed up on Texel after a shipwreck. His bungalow had been constructed from the spoils of beach-combing – when Cal paid him a visit he found it hard to be certain what was dwelling and what his collection of flotsam.

Duncan Boyd’s farm had the same feel about it, Cal thought, as he bumped along the rough track to the house and steading, past the old tractor with ‘This Farm and Land is NOT for sale’, through a field littered with other derelict farm machinery and piles of flotsam. Despite the appearance of chaos, on his previous visit Cal had detected a semblance of order, as there had been at the Texel farmstead. In Olaf’s case, flotsam was stacked by date, a new pile for a new year. In Duncan Boyd’s, the piles were colour coordinated as well as sorted by type. Blue buoys were gathered together in one pile; orange in another nearby. Ditto ropes of different colours. Cal detected method where others might have seen mess, a judgement which was reinforced by the sight of footwear of all shapes and sizes nailed to a barn wall. There were fishermen’s boots, brogues, sandals as well as trainers. Scrawled at the top of the barn in white paint was ‘The Wall of Lost Soles’. Cal found it funny even on second viewing: wit as well as method.

He parked outside the steading entrance. The dilapidation of the buildings struck him for the first time – roofs sagging and bowing as if close to collapse; intermittent and forlorn heaps of broken slates and fallen masonry at the bottoms of the walls. Entering the courtyard, he came upon three men with ill-fitting suits and office pallors. Two leaned against a car, their arms folded; the other, a big, balding man, stood separately smoking a cigarette. ‘You don’t know where he is by any chance?’ He sounded weary with waiting.

Cal shook his head.

‘Mr Boyd isn’t expecting you?’

‘Not really. This evening or tomorrow morning, one or the other. Nothing firm.’

The smoker’s brow creased in mild irritation. ‘Well?’ He directed the question at his two colleagues. ‘What’ll we do?’

‘It’s up to you,’ one with a sharp face said. The other, a younger man, shrugged in bored agreement.

‘Another five, then,’ the smoker said before introducing himself to Cal. ‘Alastair Henderson. I’m the councillor for this area.’

Cal nodded. ‘Hi.’

‘We were hoping to speak to Mr Boyd about the windfarm.’ He studied Cal on the off chance he could be of assistance. ‘See if he’s open to persuasion at all.’

Cal wished he could help but he didn’t know anything about it. Since there was a queue for Duncan, he’d try again in the morning.

Driving away, Cal looked back and noticed a movement at a skylight in one of the barns. He had the impression of a disembodied head, grey hair and a goofy broken-toothed grin.

Mary Anderson’s hands were clasped around a mug of tea which had become lukewarm since her last sip. Her eyes were staring vacantly at the wall opposite, at the space between the cooker and the kitchen clock. On the table beside her was a collection of seven letters, which she had been re-reading for the first time since she found them in Mr William’s dressing room at Brae House after his death six years ago. They had been in his chest of drawers, concealed under his jerseys and wrapped around with two rubber bands. At Diana’s request, Mrs Anderson had been sorting through his clothes, separating what could be given to charity and what should be burnt. Diana had said she would find the task too distressing but it had to be done, or else the room would become ‘William’s mausoleum’. Would Mrs Anderson be ‘an absolute dear’, while Diana removed herself to Edinburgh?

Mrs Anderson hadn’t told Diana about her discovery, a correspondence from Mr William to Megan Bates, nor had she burnt any of the letters. After reading them she had locked them away in her bureau, considering them to be a form of insurance, evidence should she ever require it of Diana’s motive in wanting rid of the child, of Diana being the instigator.

It was 2.23 in the morning. The kitchen was in shadows. The only light was from a lamp on the table, which cast a pale glow on Mrs Anderson’s face, as if she had seen a ghost. And, in a manner of speaking, she had. On re-reading the letters, she had not only disinterred the remains of Mr William’s affair with Megan Bates, but also those of Mrs Anderson’s own marriage which ended when Robert, her husband of eight years and an instructor at the Poltown base, abandoned her for another woman. What made the memory bitter, and the letters poignant, was that Mrs Anderson was pregnant when Robert abandoned her, as was Megan Bates by the end of the correspondence. Mr William’s transformation from surprised lover to terse negotiator when the affair cooled still had the capacity to create a whirlwind of emotions in Mrs Anderson. Like her husband, Mr William appeared to consider a promise of continuing financial support sufficient to resolve ‘an impossible conflict’ in his responsibilities to two women. The significant difference in the behaviour of the two men was which woman they attempted to placate with money. In Mr William’s case, it was his mistress Megan Bates – in his letters he promised the child would be his heir; the mother would be given a house and an allowance. In Robert’s, it was Mrs Anderson, the soon-to-be-abandoned wife. As was usually the case with Robert, it was an offer made in drink, late at night, circumscribed and grudging. It was limited to maintenance for the child and to ‘keeping a roof over
its
head’. A final similarity: in neither case did the man honour his commitment.

As the storm of emotion subsided, it left Mrs Anderson with a legacy of anger: at the casual and capricious trail of destruction left by men in pursuit of their desires and at women who conspire with them, women like Megan Bates and Alice Forsyth, her husband’s lover who became his wife and the mother of his three children. Most of all Mrs Anderson reserved her bitterness for the loss of her baby daughter, still-born at eight months, her death the consequence she would always believe of the stress she suffered when Robert finally deserted her.

Hadn’t that been the story of her adult life: her loyalty always rewarded by betrayal of one kind or another?

As usual, the thought was quickly followed by a spasm of self-pity and by tears which welled at the corners of her eyes. Her hands began to shake and she placed the tea cup back in its saucer. She continued to hold it, and every time her hands trembled the cup rattled against china, a noise like a distant chiming clock marking the passage of time. She appeared deaf to it: at any rate she didn’t change or release her grip. And so the distant chiming continued as she rehearsed for the umpteenth time since Diana’s memorial service the injustices she had suffered. Having run through those, she fretted about the precariousness of her position, at the household bills which would eat into her savings and pension, at the first rental demand for £575 which was due in a few days, at the lawyer’s reprimanding tone in response to her written protests. Finally, there was the nagging worry that her anonymous letter concerning Megan Bates’s daughter was lying crumpled and discarded in some official’s waste bin.

In one combination or another, these ghosts and fears assailed her throughout the night, until at 4.20am, exhausted, she went to bed, having set her alarm for nine to have sufficient time to be dressed and ready for Jim Carmichael who would deliver her order from the shop in Poltown around eleven. She would encourage him to divulge all the local news, the comings and goings, in the hope he would tell her whether any young woman had been in the shop asking questions about Poltown. A slice of Mrs Anderson’s chocolate cake and a cup of tea were usually enough encouragement to get Jim talking. Sometimes he became so carried away she had to remind him that others were still waiting for his deliveries and to chivvy him, either in mid mouthful or mid-story, often both. That was something she wouldn’t be doing later that morning. She’d let him talk for as long as he wanted and she’d listen to his ramblings for any mention of a last minute B&B booking, for a stranger walking the beaches, a young woman in her mid-20s. If Mrs Anderson had been the daughter of Megan Bates, she would start the search in the shop, either there or at Boyd’s Farm though she’d get no sense at all out of poor Duncan Boyd. Just before she fell asleep, Mrs Anderson wondered how Duncan would react to hearing the name of Megan Bates again.

* * *

Cal woke before seven, his shoulders and neck stiff after sleeping uncomfortably in the pickup’s cab. He’d dozed off six hours earlier to a radio discussion about the banking crisis and had come round to another memory altogether. During the night when he’d barely been conscious he’d heard a short news item about the search being abandoned for a five year old boy who had been swept off a pier in the south of England by a freak wave. The pained dignity of the parents as they thanked the emergency services for trying to find their child’s body had stuck in his mind. He could picture their faces – the sucked-in cheeks, dulled eyes and grey skin, the sudden and silent tumble of tears, the gnawing of despair. Hearing their agony as well as their tenacity – they would keep looking for their boy’s remains for as long as it took – had forced Cal to think about an issue which had nagged at him uncomfortably for a few months now. Avoiding it had been one of the reasons he’d taken off to the coast; that, and a dislocated feeling of not quite belonging anywhere else.

Did his success at tracking and finding bodies lost at sea offer people at their wits’ end, like the mother and father of that dead boy, false hope?

Recalling his cases he couldn’t think of any where he hadn’t. It wasn’t intentional. It was just the nature of the work. Either he’d draw a blank – a matter of regret even though Cal warned in advance about his area of expertise being an ‘imprecise science’ and the sea having its own unwritten rules – or the body he led them to would be bloated, disfigured or half-devoured by scavengers of one sort or another. The media usually described these as ‘astonishing discoveries’ which provided ‘closure for the parents’. It was a phrase and a concept Cal had come to loathe. It was why he’d started to fob off those who emailed him with emotional pleas for him to take on their cases too, to help them find their relative’s body. If all that Cal could do was lead them to putrefying flesh had he helped them at all? Better, he thought now, that their memories survived intact – their dead child or spouse smiling, happy and living – than having them replaced by the stuff of continuing nightmares.

Would the mother and father of that missing five year old boy contact him too?

He rubbed his face, his stubble rasping under his fingers. He swore, pushed open the driver’s door, and ran across the beach, escaping his demons. At the high tide mark, he stripped off his shirt and jeans. He walked the remainder of the way to the sea and waded out until the water was up to his armpits. He let the waves wash past him before ducking his head. Splashing back through the shallows, he remembered Rachel, his ex-wife, complaining about his habit of removing himself to a distant coast instead of discussing what was wrong with their marriage. She had accused him of using his work as an avoidance technique. He couldn’t keep on running away, she’d said. In that, as well as other things, she had been wrong.

Back at the pickup, he put on a blue shirt, cotton trousers, thick socks and walking boots. After eating breakfast – a cheese sandwich left over from the day before and a swig from a carton of milk – he drove to Boyd’s Farm. As on the previous evening, he parked at the entrance to the steading. Unlike it, there was no-one to be seen when he entered the courtyard. His progress past the Wall of Lost Soles was witnessed by two stray cats from the slate roof of the back porch and, as it turned out, by Duncan Boyd who spied on him from an upstairs window in the farmhouse, a habit it seemed. Only when Cal shouted out who he was and why he was there did Duncan emerge into the sunlight, grinning shyly, wearing baggy black trousers and a creased off-white shirt with frayed collar and cuffs which was tucked into his waistband at the front but not at the back.

‘Good morning, lovely day,’ Cal said.

His greeting caused Duncan to indulge in a succession of facial expressions, from amusement to panic to vulnerability, as if he was trying out each one in an attempt to discover which felt appropriate to the day. He settled on amusement.

‘Wall of Lost Soles . . .’ He nodded towards the rows of shoes nailed to the barn.

‘Yes, I saw it.’ Cal said. ‘It’s funny.’

Duncan grinned at Cal’s reaction. ‘I stole it,’ he said, ‘from a woman who lives on the Pacific coast of America. She has a Wall of Lost Soles too.’

‘I wouldn’t call that stealing,’ Cal shrugged, ‘and anyway the world’s big enough for two.’

Cal’s answer again seemed to please Duncan who began to hum, turning this way and that before beckoning to his visitor and leading him from one barn to the next. Duncan kept up a continuous commentary about his beach-combing finds, selecting examples for inspection, until Cal was taken to see the Neptune Scroll. Though it was squint and in a damaged frame, Duncan ushered Cal into its presence with all the comic formality of a fawning courtier. Making admiring comments, Cal cast his eye over Duncan’s table of special discoveries. He wondered aloud whether he could spend some time picking through the barns. He was sure they would reveal all kinds of interesting information. In case he hadn’t explained properly, he said he researched ‘anything that floats really’. His particular area of interest was the North Atlantic, discovering all the quirks of the wind and currents, discovering where things washed up, tracking back to find out where they’d originated.

Duncan shot Cal the same half-mad grin he’d seen at the skylight the previous evening. Without thinking, Cal said, ‘By the way who were those men?’

The grin faded. Duncan picked at the sleeve of his shirt and muttered about his land not being for sale, about the public meeting, about people taking sides against him. He wouldn’t look Cal in the eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ Cal said, seeing his distress. ‘It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

The tide was out, Duncan said, changing the subject. It was time he went to South Bay.

‘You’re ok if I have a look around?’ Cal said as Duncan turned and walked away.

Duncan stooped but not low enough – at fifty-seven, he wasn’t as supple as he imagined. The effect was the exact opposite of the one he intended. Instead of keeping himself hidden by the dune until he had checked the identity of the woman on the beach, he broke the sky-line. She saw him and changed direction.

He cursed his bad luck and lit a cigarette. The thought of another angry confrontation made him jumpy. He talked to himself, a nervous undertone, like someone psyching himself for a challenge: reminding himself how it was
Boyd’s
Farm, how he was a Boyd, how he could do what he wanted. It seemed to help because he added ‘I, Neptune, Monarch of the Sea’ grinning and peering through the tall grass. The figure was still too distant to tell whether she was friend or foe. Duncan hoped it was Dr Bell, who walked her terrier, Pepe, at South Bay. But Duncan couldn’t see any sign of the little dog. He prepared for a stranger, turning his back, raking his fingers through his unruly and brittle hair and brushing down his clothes. When, eventually, she was close enough to try ‘hello’ he pretended not to hear her.

‘Hello,’ she tried again, louder, and walked round him until she was beside him, looking up into his face. ‘Hi.’

He indicated with a nod of his head the pile of flotsam he had collected. He picked up a lobster pot, followed by a buoy, which he turned around so that she could see all sides of it. ‘I’ll be busy sorting out this lot for a while I imagine.’ The remark was boastful in a juvenile way and his demeanour also that of a self-satisfied child expecting a compliment for his hard work.

‘I’m sure you will,’ Violet said. She tried to summon up sufficient enthusiasm. ‘It must have taken you ages. Haven’t you done well?’

Duncan pulled a piece of torn netting from the pile and then a plastic pipe.

‘Wow, so many different items,’ she said, getting the hang of things.

After Duncan had shown her a length of blue rope, Violet asked, ‘I was wondering whether you might know who lives at the farm house?’

‘Depends,’ he replied, squinting at her to see her reaction.

‘On what?’

‘Why you might want him?’

‘Just to ask him about someone who used to live near here.’

‘Not about the windfarm?’

‘
Definitely
not about the windfarm . . .’

‘Good.’

‘You don’t like the windfarm?’

He shook his head. ‘I won’t sell, you know.’

‘So you own the farmhouse,’ she said. ‘I saw the notice.’ She referred to the old Ferguson tractor parked at the farm gate. ‘Land NOT for sale,’ she repeated. ‘Good for you,’ She laughed a little at another strange turn in the conversation.