Bird of Passage (2 page)

‘She didn’t want to.’

‘What difference does that make? She left me all the same.’

‘None of us wanted her to leave,’ she said, gently. ‘I miss her all the time.’

‘Do you?’ For the first time he looked directly at her.

‘Oh Finn …’

He shook his head, looking away again.

‘Don’t pity me. I don’t want pity. Least of all yours. She was my salvation. Now, I have to try not to think about her. I have to make a space in my day when I don’t think about her.  I’m not very good at it. The whisky helps.’

‘Come downstairs, now. She isn’t here.’

‘How could she leave me, India? Me of all people?’

 ‘I don’t know.’

‘And if they were right, all those years ago. If there is something afterwards, some place they go to, some kind of heaven, why won’t she come back for me?’

 ‘The dead don’t obey our rules, do they? I sometimes think that maybe they
are
here, all the time. Only we’re so sad that we’re blind and dumb to them. Our own need obscures everything.’

‘Do you think that could be true?’

‘Maybe.’

She went to the door of the room, and saw to her relief that he was following her. ‘I have to go soon, Finn. There’s a gig tonight. I’m playing. And you can see what the weather’s doing. I have to get off the island.’

‘You’ll be playing Alasdair’s fiddle.’

‘That’s right.’

‘He would have liked that.’

‘He would.’

 Compassion for him brought tears to her eyes, but she knew that there was nothing she could do about it.  He didn’t care whether she stayed or not. He wouldn’t care if he never saw her again.

As she gathered herself together to leave, tucking the folio inside her jacket to protect it from the rain, fumbling in pockets for her car keys, he said, ‘I saw a funeral procession, you know.’

‘What?’

‘It was down there, on the shore.’

‘A
funeral
procession?’  She felt the ground shift beneath her feet. Even for Finn, this was bizarre. She moved towards the door.

He grinned at her, but, if anything, she found this more alarming than his despondency. ‘I’m not going mad, India. Or no more mad than usual. I’m telling you the simple truth. I saw a funeral procession. Men in black overcoats, carrying a wooden coffin, and they were down on the seashore there. It was twilight. A few days ago. I’d gone down to check on the boat. They crossed my path, and one of them looked back at me. I don’t think it can have been real, though? Do you?’

‘No, Finn. I don’t think it can have been real.’

At the door, she reached out her hand to shake his, but at the last minute she changed her mind, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. Then she headed back to her car. Her last image of him, as she turned around to wave, was of him raising his fingers to his cheek, and touching the place where her lips had just brushed the sallow skin. Without looking back again, she got into her car and drove away.

Safe in her mainland hotel, with the smell of cats and whisky lingering in her nostrils, she ordered a pot of tea and some sandwiches and tugged at the knots on the folio. The tapes had been pulled tight, and she had to tease them apart with a pin. Inside was a sheaf of sketches, mostly in charcoal, although a few were in pen and ink.  India drew them out, one at a time, and laid them on the bed. She thought she had seen most of Kirsty’s work: all those  landscapes, all those studies of the island flora and fauna that seemed to capture the very essence of the plant, the bird, the animal. When Kirsty had painted the island in spring, when primrose, violet and bluebell vied for space, or when the lanes were dazzling corridors of golden gorse – whins, they were called on the island -  there was something savage about the resulting pictures, nothing like the genteel watercolours on display in most Highland galleries.

Most of Kirsty’s paintings were full of light, as vibrant as she had once been herself.  But these were stark studies in black and white, light and shade, Gothic in their intensity. They were more like illustrations for a book, but what book could that possibly be? Staring at them, one after another, India had to suppress a shudder.

There was a knock on the door and Max came in. He had showered and his hair was a damp blonde cascade. He looked relieved to see her.

‘Thank God you’re back!’

‘I told you I wouldn’t be long.’

‘I thought you might get stranded. How was your island?’

‘Cold and wet and windy.’

‘And…?’

‘Finn?’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘You should have let me come with you.’ His gaze alighted suddenly on the pictures. ‘Wow!’

‘I know.’

‘Whose are they?’

‘My mum did them.’

‘Christ!’ He came over and slipped his arm around her shoulders, and they stared at the pictures together.

They couldn’t be called portraits, because they were largely unrecognisable, although there was one very bold sketch of a man, head and shoulders, with a background of dark cross- hatching, and the face just angles and planes of light. India thought she recognised Finn. It was a much younger Finn, to be sure, but there was a haunted, haunting quality about the face, as though the artist had foreseen his solitary future with horrible clarity. Or perhaps known something of his past.

One of the sheets showed two figures, so closely intertwined that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and another began, or to say which limb belonged to which person, and it was so full of a dark, heavy sensuality that India found herself blushing. In one sketch, a woman seemed to be stabbing her partner in the thigh with a dagger, or was she pulling the knife from the wound? Another had the suggestion of a great mass of roots and rocks in the foreground, with – when you looked more closely – human bodies somehow emerging from the landscape or perhaps becoming a part of it: hands, torsos, legs, all with a sense of movement, struggle, striving to escape. Or was it a striving to be absorbed?

There were also simpler studies of two children, swiftly drawn lines,  just an impression of hair and arms and long legs.

‘That one looks a bit like you!’ said Max. ‘You must have been on her mind, Indie.’

She had thought the same thing. Only when you looked more closely, you began to wonder if these were not children after all, but birds, long legged herons perhaps. In another, the same two figures seemed to have impossibly long arms which were forming an arch across something that was surely …

‘Christ, that’s a gravestone,’ said Max. ‘These are very strange drawings, India.’

‘You’re not kidding.’

‘When did your mother do them, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe in those last years. I’ve certainly never seen them before…’

‘And look at this one.’

It was a kiss, but there was something savage about it, the lips and indeed the two heads so fused that, once again, it was difficult to say where one ended and the other began. A thought entered her head, but it seemed so crazy that she couldn’t voice it. Were they kissing or feasting off each other?

‘Did you know about these?’

‘Not a thing. Finn gave them to me. Now I’m beginning to wish he hadn’t. But look, there’s a bird down in the grasses. Here. And here, on this one as well.’ She sifted through the pictures. ‘And here too.’

‘Are they signed?’

‘Some of them. Just a letter C. That was all she ever did. Her initial.’

‘I thought your mum’s name was Kirsty.’

‘Her proper name was Cairistiona. It’s the Gaelic form of Christine. Most people called her Kirsty.’

Max smiled. ‘I can see why.’

‘But these don’t look anything like her usual stuff.’

‘They’re very disturbing, aren’t they?’

India began to gather them together. ‘They are.’

‘What will you do with them?’

‘Right now, I’m going to put them away and try to forget about them.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘I know. But I’ve got more important things to worry about.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going to have a shower, get changed.’

‘Will you show them to your dad?’

India shook her head, decisively. ‘No way. These are mine. Finn gave them to me. Dad’s fine. He’s happy now. I don’t want to go dragging up all that stuff again. It’s history. Over and done with. Well, it is as far as he’s concerned.’

‘Yeah,’ said Max and bent to kiss her on the forehead. ‘Yes, Indie, I do know. I’ll keep my mouth shut. But …’

‘But what?’

‘That.’ He nodded at the folio. ‘Bit like carrying Pandora’s box around with you, isn’t it?’

‘Not if nobody else knows I’ve opened it.’

He left her to get ready for the show. Even then, India found herself staring at the green card cover of the folio, its contents indelibly imprinted on her mind’s eye.  Later, when she was playing, she was still seeing them, and the sensuousness of those dark embraces somehow translated itself into her music. Never had she played so magically. Never had she played with such passion.

CHAPTER ONE

There was too much space and too much light. It dazzled Finn’s eyes and made them water. He couldn’t stop blinking, and he dashed the tears away with the back of his hand, afraid that the men might think he was weeping. Out on deck, breathing in the salty air, he felt disorientated, and had a sudden sensation of queasiness. The spit came up into his mouth, and he had to swallow hard. He wanted to yawn all the time. His clothing was too thin for the day, and he found himself shivering.

The gaffer, Micky Terrans, told him to fix his eyes on the horizon.

‘Whatever you do, don’t look down at the sea!’ Micky was lean and balding with a tonsure of wispy, fair hair, and he always wore a shabby tweed cap to keep his scalp warm. Rumour had it he even wore it in bed. ‘If you look down at the sea, you’ll lose your breakfast for sure.’   

Not that there had been much breakfast: just the heel of a loaf and a scraping of red jam with a mouthful of cold tea, strong and bitter, and that hadn’t helped the sickness at all.

He gazed towards the horizon, but everything was in motion. Even the big white birds were never still. Gannets, Micky had called them, although Finn didn’t remember that he had ever seen such creatures before or, if he had seen them, nobody had given him their name. If you had no name for a thing or even a person, you could not hold  that thing in your mind. You could never really know it properly. Who had told him that? It must have been his mother. He watched the birds riding the wind and then plummeting into the water, disappearing for what seemed like minutes, and bobbing to the surface again in a flurry of droplets and thrashing fish that caught the light. Watching them made him uneasy, worried that they might not reappear. But the sight of them took his mind away from his sickness.

Finn could not swim, and he was afraid of the water. He had never so much as set a toe in the sea. Even when he had been living in Dublin, he had never spent any time at the shore. And afterwards, he had been far inland. He gazed at the gannets and wondered what it must be like to dive in like that, to plunge down below the waves in search of your dinner. He wondered what strange creatures swam down there. But that too made him feel queasy and he clutched at the railing, feeling the rust flake off under his fingers. They were between two countries, between Ireland and Scotland, and neither was visible. On a clear day, so his companions had told him, it would be different, and you could see the slices of land, one behind the other, with the cake-shaped Craig, its cliffs, its shining white lighthouse, in between.  And then they would be steaming north, passing the Cloch lighthouse and the Tail of the Bank.