Bird of Passage (39 page)

She didn’t know how to respond to the compliment. Her self possession deserted her.

‘You’re a very clever little girl, India,’ he said.

She coloured up and hung over the back of her grandad’s chair, scowling at Finn as though daring him to say anything else.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Kirsty and Nicolas were planning to spend Christmas in London that year. Malcolm and Viola lived in a tall house in Maida Vale, its stonework crumbling, its paint flaking away from the walls. Kirsty was never comfortable there, although her daughters liked it very much. There was an old nursery at the top of the house which was a treasury of vintage toys: a Noah’s ark full of battered animals, a long legged horse on green rockers and a collection of Edwardian pond yachts. India and Flora were in their element.

Kirsty didn’t want to go away for Christmas but Nicolas argued that her grandfather would have Finn to keep him company.

‘So you can go south without worrying about him,’ he said and she was forced to agree. 

Before they left, Kirsty drove up to Dunshee, through sleety rain. She took a heap of parcels for her grandfather: pipe tobacco, a packet of strong tea, (Alasdair hated teabags), chunky milk chocolate, a new walking stick with a curly horn handle, some fishing tackle. Among the parcels she had included a couple of gifts for Finn.  One was a lavishly illustrated book of Celtic myths and legends including the story of Dermot and Grania. The other was a small photo frame in pewter. In it was a snapshot, taken years before, of Kirsty and Finn together, sitting in the old wooden boat, in shallow water. Finn’s hands were on the oars while Kirsty was smiling at the photographer. Her grandfather had taken the picture. She must have been about nine,  just a bit younger than India was now, and Finn thirteen, so it was before he had moved to Dunshee permanently. Kirsty was wearing shorts and a navy blue Aran sweater. Her hair was in plaits. Finn was thin and long legged and his hair was a shaggy nimbus. He arrived each year as a shorn sheep and then it would grow as the summer progressed. Sometimes her mother had taken the shears to it, hacking off enough of it to make him decent again.

She had found the photo when she was helping her grandfather to clear out his papers. It was the only picture she had ever found of the two of them together. She’d had it copied on the mainland, wanting to keep the original for herself. She had enjoyed choosing these things for him. But now, when she was handing them over, they seemed too intimate, too personal, the kind of clandestine gifts a woman might buy for her lover.

Just before she left, he slipped his own little parcel into her coat pocket.

It was heavy for its size and solid. Not having any proper wrapping paper, he had done it up in white writing paper. He leant in at the car window.

‘Enjoy your Christmas.’ The wind was whipping his hair around his face. His hands, gripping the edge of the window, looked red and raw with the cold. 

‘I’ll try!’ 

She turned up her face to him, tilting her cheek slightly, but he leant in, cradled the back of her head with one hand and kissed her hard on the mouth. His lips were cool and dry. The sudden stab of desire in the pit of her stomach took her by surprise. Her response to him was so immediate that it was as much as she could do to prevent herself from leaping out of the car and embracing him. With an effort of will, she stayed where she was.

This is impossible, she thought. Nothing’s the same and you can’t do it.

He released her, but she grasped at his fingers, anxious to maintain the contact between them as long as possible. She looked up at him and saw the darkness behind his eyes.

I know him so well, she thought. But perhaps she hardly knew him at all. Her stomach churned in apprehension.

A squall was passing over and a sudden flurry of rain on the windscreen blinded her and drenched him. There were droplets on his eyelashes. He turned away and stumbled back inside the house. She sat there for a moment or two before she could bring herself to start the engine and drive back down to Ealachan.

It was Christmas night before she could find the time to open his gift. She had left it nestling at the bottom of her handbag. Now, when everyone else was in bed, exhausted by massive intakes of food and drink, she seized a few moments for herself. She wondered what Finn could have given her. Nowadays, if she wanted to wear the arrowhead pendant, she kept it tucked inside a sweater but sometimes she wondered if Nicolas ever really looked at her closely enough to notice it. How had that happened? When had love become familiarity? When had he stopped gazing at her as though unable to believe his good fortune in marrying her and begun, instead, to jolly her along as though humouring a difficult child? What fault line between them had opened so gradually that she had barely noticed it?

She unwrapped the white paper, and a stone tumbled into her lap. She recognised it at once; not this particular stone, but where it came from. It was an agate from the beach below Dunshee, or rather a half agate with the flat, oval face polished. It didn’t have the gloss of a machine polished stone, but the matt shimmer of something which the sea itself had smoothed. One summer, she and Finn had become obsessed with stones and had spent many hours looking for agates, and identifying them with the help of a book from her grandfather’s shelf. Finn had been reluctant at first but gradually, he too had been drawn in. They had been as enchanted by the names of the different stones as they were by the agates themselves: white chalcedony, blue chalcedony, celadonite, jasper, carnelian, moss agate, onyx agate,  thunder egg.

This was a blue-grey quartz with streaks of green celadonite in it. It was a scenic agate with a landscape frozen into the quartz, a world within a world. A mass of mossy clumps at the base were seaweed clad rocks, or maybe twisted roots. Further off was a milky blue sea with white-topped waves. Some variation in the quartz gave the impression of a broad path which lead to the horizon, like the reflection the moon made when it was full. There were mountains in the distance and turbulent light in the sky, like the moon riding high above clouds. Mysteriously, some brownish fault in the quartz was a small boat with figures in it, just heading out to sea. There was a scrap of paper with it.

‘This is a talisman,’ he had written. ‘I found it the first time I went back down to the beach. I think it was waiting for me. That’s the two of us. In your grandad’s boat. Setting out together. All my love  Finn x.’

She stared into it for a long time before she could bring herself to put it back in her bag and get into bed. She had the fleeting thought that maybe if she could find the right words, she and Finn could disappear into that enchanted landscape and stay there together, forever.

Early in the New Year, Flora was ill with influenza for several weeks. Nicolas came and went between the island and the mainland, with frequent trips further afield, fuming about some new setback to the family finances. Annabel had taken over an office beside Kirsty’s gallery at Ealachan House and was spending more time on the island, although she still made frequent trips to the family home in London. At Ealachan, she devoted a great deal of her time to Flora, who had become a favourite with her.

‘She’s such a sweetie,’ she told Kirsty. ‘I love India very much but she’s so …’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Kirsty. India had many wonderful qualities, and Kirsty loved her dearly, but you would never call her a sweetie. Flora was softer and less sure of herself, loving everyone indiscriminately and therefore – thought Kirsty, with a pang of apprehension for her daughter – vulnerable to the occasional disappointment. 

When Annabel was not reading to Flora or playing games of Happy Families, she was trying to work on designs for a new jewellery collection. She had also taken to walking down to the beach at Dunshee, looking for driftwood and semi-precious stones, ‘hunting for inspirational objects’ she called it. Flora was too wobbly on her feet to walk far yet.

‘I saw your friend Finn, this morning.’

 Annabel and Kirsty were sitting together in the gallery. Kirsty was trying to work, but she was listless and looking for any distraction. Annabel had made coffee.

‘I asked him if he wanted to come for a walk with me but he wouldn’t.  Actually, I was angling for a ride on that fabulous bike. But I suppose that’s out of the question. What a bird of ill omen he is, Christine!’

‘No, he isn’t!’

‘You know what I mean. He’d be quite good looking if only he would smile a bit more. What does he have to be so dismal about?’

‘Oh that’s just Finn!’ It was the way she always fended off enquiries about him.

‘Maybe you see a different side to him.’

‘Maybe I do.’

‘I’d like to get to know him better.’

‘You didn’t think much of him when we were kids.’

‘That was different. Kids are little savages anyway.’

Kirsty found that the thought of Annabel getting to know Finn better was faintly upsetting. ‘You probably wouldn’t like him very much if you did get to know him,’ she ventured.

‘Surely there must be a nice, normal chap, buried somewhere beneath that grim exterior.’

‘Must there?’

‘So tell me more about him. I’m interested.’

 Kirsty wished she had never started this conversation but felt forced to continue. ‘I think maybe there’s something lacking in him. Sympathy. Or do I mean empathy?’

‘God, Christine!’ said Annabel in astonishment. ‘This is your
friend
you’re talking about.’

 ‘I don’t mean he’s dangerous or anything like that. And I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, you and me,  but I wouldn’t like you to get hurt.’

 Without ever growing particularly close or even understanding each other very well, they had become friends over the years. She had seen a vulnerable side to Annabel. None of her countless relationships had ever come to anything. Perhaps the men in her life were scared of her or perhaps she had just made wrong choices all the time and yet she was an attractive woman, always travelling hopefully, never quite arriving.  Even her design business seemed faintly amateurish and was only moderately successful in spite of the Laurence family connections.

‘He’s my good friend,’ Kirsty conceded.  ‘He was like a brother to me when we were younger. Still is, in some ways. But he’s not a very easy man to know.’

‘He’s been amazingly kind to Alasdair. Even Nicolas is forced to admit that. Grudgingly.’

‘But then my grandfather was always very kind to him. When it really mattered. With Finn you get what you give. No more, no less.’

 ‘You mean I couldn’t handle him?’ Annabel asked, only half in jest.

 ‘I think I’m trying to say that he’s not like other people. He isn’t just different. I think in many ways he’s
indifferent.
He ... he had some terrible experiences as a child.’

‘What experiences?’

‘Even I don’t know all the details. He was put in a boarding school back in Ireland. An industrial school.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I think they used to be a bit like workhouses. All I know is, Finn was sent to an industrial school and it was a terrible place. He was very badly treated. Don’t ever tell him we discussed this. But it’s as if it made him switch something off. Some capacity to love and be loved. I think it’s buried so deep inside him that he’ll maybe never find it again. He isn’t like the rest of us.’

‘So what
is
he like?’

‘What you see is exactly what you get. It isn’t a pose. He won’t mellow over time. Won’t grow to like you when he knows you better. I think he really is indifferent to most people.’

‘But he isn’t like that with you, surely.’

‘We go back a long way. And sometimes... I don’t think…’

‘What? Don’t stop now.’

‘I don’t think I count as somebody else. Not for Finn, anyway.’

‘What a very strange thing to say!’

‘Well, maybe I’m just havering.’

Kirsty had a pad on her knee. As she spoke, she had been sketching little images of shells and flowers and seaweed.  Annabel looked at them.

‘Lovely’

‘Do you think so? They’re just doodles.’

‘Even your doodles are more interesting than mine.’

‘Your jewellery? I’ll do a bit of work on the designs if you like. I didn’t know whether you wanted help or not.’

‘I need all the help I can get. And I suppose I’ll just have to take your word for it about Finn. You think he wouldn’t let me get close.’

‘Feel free to try, but he lets almost nobody get close to him. Hardly even me. He left here without a second glance, you know. Not a letter, not a phonecall. But I know a little bit about what he is and why. I know that whatever happened to him was the kind of cruelty that makes you retreat deep inside yourself. I think Finn finds it very hard to escape.’

 Annabel smiled, ruefully. ‘I doubt if he even notices me, and maybe that upsets my vanity a bit.’