Bird of Passage (21 page)

 ‘I feel like a character in a Victorian novel. I’m
distracted
by love for you!’  He wrote as he spoke, with great emphasis.

When she thought about him, afterwards, she would remember chiefly that fine tapestry of words and images, woven just for her. He seemed profligate with his affection at that time, and she loved him for his generosity. His letters were full of boyish intensity. ‘What do I have to offer you?’ he would say, and she would rush to reassure him, not realising that this was the literal truth. He had very little to offer her.

In his Edinburgh flat he would  insist that she work, insist that he teach her whatever he could and she was, and would remain, eternally grateful to him for that. The flat was at the top of a big house, on the Newington Road. He had his studio there, high up in the building. It was full of his painting things: canvases propped against walls,  jars spiky with brushes, the smell of paint and thinner. It was what she aspired to and she adored it and him in about equal measure. Patiently, he showed her what he knew of drawing and painting, and she would work assiduously, until she was almost faint with desire for him. He would send her to bed to wait for him, and then get lost in some piece of work of his own. She would lie awake, desperate with longing, and when he came through, at last, would make love to her with a passion that seemed all the more intense for his ability to defer the pleasure. They talked and touched and their words flew from one to the other, a tangle of words and fierce images that caught and held them together. ‘My red headed, shiny girl, whose face collapses with love when she looks at me,’ he called her.

Afterwards though, it struck her that there had been a kind of cruelty about all this. They were never an equal partnership. She had always been early for their meetings however hard she tried not to be; he had always been late. The fact remained that, whatever he said, whatever stories he concocted to explain everything, his wife was still a significant presence in his life.

Her things were everywhere in the flat. Kirsty couldn’t ignore them. Joanna. That was her name. Ash called her Jo. Jo was everywhere. Everywhere and nowhere. And she was not the villain he had painted her. Ash had been lying. Ash lied as the skylark sings and believed implicitly in his own fantasies. There was little evidence of the child, beyond a couple of teddies perched on a window seat and a yellow baby cup in the kitchen cupboard, but there was a pink toothbrush and a woman’s dressing gown in the bathroom, tubes of make-up and a bottle of Rive Gauche in the bedroom,  even – on one occasion - a carefully arranged platter of fruits and vegetables on the kitchen table that may well have been placed there by Ash himself. But for some reason, Kirsty associated it with Joanna. And she began  to wonder just how real their separation was. She and Ash bickered about it. She tried to force some kind of declaration out of him but he clammed up. Maybe Joanna was his safety net, his insurance against making a commitment to anyone else.

One day, when Kirsty had been in the flat painting for an hour or so, Ash took a phonecall and came rushing into the studio in a panic, taking the brush out of her hand, hustling her out of the room and out of the flat, gabbling about ‘a sudden emergency’ and how he had to go away, now, immediately. It was like a scene from a farce. At the time, she left meekly enough, but in retrospect, she thought that Joanna had probably been on her way from the station. 

When she tried to discuss these things with him, tried to have some kind of debate, his voice took on the whining, haranguing tone of somebody who has been storing up points in his head and is now intent on making them.

‘You’re so bloody needy,’ he said.

She saw that this was how it always would be. She shed a great many tears and her university work suffered, but self preservation finally took over, and she ended the affair, there and then, refusing to have any more to do with him. 

She had come to the realisation that – while she had been wounded by his lies - she only really cared about her work. If she truly loved anything, apart from her family, it was that. But her work itself was all tied up with the island: the plants, the stones, the sea and sky, or even the small things, the way a leaf lay over another leaf, the way the light sat on the water. If she could put it into words, then she probably wouldn’t have to paint it. The transitory nature of everything fascinated and saddened her. It had something to do with Ash, with her attraction to him and with all he had taught her, but it had more to do with her childhood and her friendship with Finn, the way he had come and gone from her life, come and gone from the island. Nothing held. Not for a minute. You might grasp something and it was gone. You might try to transfix something and it would die, like a butterfly on a pin. You might capture something on canvas, but you were only capturing change itself.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In the summer of her second year, Kirsty took a break from the gallery and went home to the island, intending to stay for a couple of weeks before returning to Edinburgh. But almost as soon as she got back, she realised that her mother was ill, seriously ill in a way that made Kirsty breathless with panic. Over the past year, Isabel had found it increasingly hard to swallow anything but the softest food. Now, she seemed to be living on soup and porridge and she had lost a tremendous amount of weight. In the warm summer weather, Kirsty was alarmed to see how thin her mother’s arms and legs had grown, although she seemed to be trying to disguise it, wearing loose clothes and cardigans. She looked like a skeleton in a dress.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you say what was going on?’

‘You seemed to be having such a good time in Edinburgh – we didn’t want to worry you. It’ll be alright. Once they find out what’s causing it, they’ll sort it out, never fear.’

But they didn’t seem able to sort it out and her mother’s illness tinged the remains of the summer with its own peculiar misery.  Meals became an agony of suspense, while Isabel tried to swallow. Soon, food, other than the most bland puree, made her cough, then choke. Kirsty came to dread the hunted look that accompanied every mouthful. Alasdair seemed to think that it was all in her mind. He kept telling Isabel to ‘keep going, lass’ as though sheer perseverance could make her well again. There were trips to a mainland hospital for tests, procedures, treatments that seemed to work, but only for a little while.

‘I feel much better,’ said Isabel after each change of medication.

And for a time, this cheered Alasdair up. ‘Aye lass, I reckon that’ll do the trick,’ he said.

She was always hopeful, always positive, but Kirsty didn’t think she was getting any better. Soon, there were spells of devastating fatigue, when all she could do was lie on the couch, listening to the radio or reading while Kirsty kept her company. Then one of her doctors told her that she ought to get more exercise, so Kirsty persuaded her to walk down to the village. But only a few hundred yards down the track, she stopped.

‘I’m sorry, Kirsty’ she said. ‘I just don’t know if I can. I feel so weak.’

‘Come on, mum!’ Kirsty chivvied her along. ‘You have to build up your strength, you know.’

‘I’m trying. I’m really trying.’

Isabel struggled on for a few hundred yards, but before they reached the main road, she collapsed onto the muddy bank. Eventually, Finn came by in the jeep, and he and Kirsty helped Isabel inside. For once in her life, Isabel seemed glad that she had Finn to lean on.

‘Thank-you,’ she said, and smiled at him, although in her exhausted state it seemed more like a grimace. 

‘I’ll be better soon,’ she kept saying.

It made Kirsty’s heart ache to hear her, but she conspired in the fiction. She so much wanted it to be true that she clutched at any sign of hope, however faint. Afterwards it seemed to her as though her mother’s doctors had entered into this conspiracy as well, endlessly prevaricating. 

‘Oh we’ll get to the bottom of it sooner or later, Mrs Galbreath,’ they kept telling her. 

Kirsty wondered if it was because doctors were as fearful of death as their patients. Incurable illness was such a defeat for them that they couldn’t bear to contemplate it either.

She kept having to ask her grandfather for money. Though he gave it, gladly, she was always aware that he had no cash to spare either. The farm was barely profitable, and rent must be paid to the estate. She racked her brains for ways to earn some money for herself, but there was little work to be had on the island. Besides, most of her time was taken up with helping her mother to and from hospital, doing the housework, cooking meals which Isabel couldn’t eat, (though Finn and her grandfather made short work of them) or catching up on the farm paperwork, the letters and accounts that Alasdair had long neglected.

‘What did we do without Kirsty?’ he said, over another plentiful breakfast.

Finn glanced across at her but his sympathy was more than she could bear and she got up to clear the plates. When he came over to help her, he touched her hand in a gesture of solidarity. She squeezed his fingers in return and then busied herself at the sink. Later, when Alasdair and her mother were in bed, he came into the kitchen again and threw himself into a chair, tugging off his boots.

‘It’s a bugger,’ he said, and she knew he wasn’t only talking about the mud clinging to the soles.

‘What am I to do, Finn? I can’t go back, can I? I can’t leave you and my grandad to cope with this.’

You can’t give up half way through your course.’

She came and sat beside him, and leaned on his shoulder. She felt profoundly weary, too tired even to think. ‘I can’t go back right now, that’s for sure.’

‘Can’t you – I don’t know – take a year off? Isn’t that allowed?’

‘I could always ask. Explain the situation.’

‘Once they get to the bottom of it, once they find out what’s happening, and she’s better, you could go back. Even if you’ve missed a year, you could just pick up where you left off, couldn’t you?’

‘I could try.’

She requested and was given a deferral of her course for a year. Dr Sharansky was very understanding.

‘These things happen,’ he wrote. ‘Take whatever time you need, keep reading, keep painting, and come back when you’re ready.’

Nevertheless, Kirsty felt as though her ambition and her creativity had been put on hold, although she still painted in the quiet of her own room or outside, with a folding easel. Finn framed up the landscapes, and the village shop and the hotel displayed them. The more conventional views sold quickly, although the ones she liked best, those which were more experimental and abstract, weren’t so popular.  She wondered if she could apply to the Arts Council in Edinburgh for a bursary. It might buy her some time. But would the time be available when so much of it had to be devoted to Isabel?

During one of those autumnal warm spells that often come like a late blessing to the West of Scotland, Kirsty was lying in the stuffy box bed with the weight of the cat on her legs. He divided his favours about equally between Kirsty and her mother. She had been asleep for an hour or so, but something had wakened her from a peculiarly unpleasant dream, the details of which slid away from her almost immediately, leaving only a sensation of misery. She lay there, straining to hear, but the house was quiet. Fish Face stretched and burrowed into the coverlet, flexing his claws. She closed her eyes and had a sudden sense of things spiralling out of control. The walls of the bed were closing in on her. Panic seized her. There was a ringing in her ears and a tingling sensation in her fingers. She felt unreal. If she were to look at herself in a mirror, she wouldn’t recognise what she saw there. She opened her eyes, got up on wobbly legs and went to the window. On the bed, the cat shifted, yawned widely, and settled down again in the warm space which she had vacated.

Outside, the moon was suspended massively over the island. A giant orange, she thought, gazing at it, distracted by its strangeness for a moment. Her bed looked rumpled and uninviting. She went quietly out of the room, past her grandfather’s bedroom door (he was snoring) and past her mother’s room, where she paused for a moment, listening. There was no light showing round the door, and she could hear Isabel’s even breathing. She pictured her for a moment, with the heavy curtains pulled against the alien moonlight, propped up on three or four pillows, because this was the only way she could sleep without being overcome by the coughing that choked her.

Kirsty moved through the upper landing. The old lino was cold and gritty on the soles of her feet and she wished that she had put her slippers on. She went downstairs  quietly, walking to the wall side of the creaking fifth stair, and then paused for a moment in the hallway, wondering if she should go outside and sit in the garden for a while, with the moon for company. But this big orange stranger was too bizarre and she was afraid. Without putting on the light, she stole though the kitchen, comforted by the hum and whirr of the fridge and the settling of ashes in the range. She went through the oak door at the other side of the kitchen and stood in the lobby, at the foot of the ladder, staring upwards. There was a faint light burning in the room above.

‘Finn?’ she said. It was the merest whisper, but she heard the creak of floorboards as he came towards the open trapdoor. She saw his dark head silhouetted against the lamplight.