The Blackhouse (35 page)

‘No, you shouldn’t.’ Fin got to his feet. ‘You need the proper equipment and help for that kind of thing.’

‘Guess I know that now.’ Fionnlagh jumped lightly over the rocks and started up the gully. Fin followed him, feeling that somehow he had managed to sour things between them. But when they got to the top of the cliffs it was as if nothing had happened. Fionnlagh pointed towards the road. A silver Renault was making its way up the hill. ‘That’s Mrs Mackelvie. She gave mum a lift down to the store. Looks like that’s them back. Race you.’

Fin laughed. ‘What? I must be twice your age.’

‘I’ll give you a sixty-second start, then.’

Fin looked at him for a moment, and then grinned. ‘Okay.’ And he took off, sprinting along the edge of the cliff before turning up the hill towards the bungalow. That’s when it got hard, his legs becoming quickly leaden, lungs rasping in their attempt to drag in more oxygen. He could see the peat stack, and hear the engine of the Renault idling at the top of the path. He was nearly there. As he got to the peatstack, he saw Marsaili coming down the drive, bags of shopping in each arm, and the Renault pulling away up the hill. She saw him at almost the same moment, and stopped, staring in astonishment. He grinned. He was going to beat the boy. He was going to get to the house first. But at the last moment, Fionnlagh cantered past him, laughing, hardly out of breath, and turned on the path, as Fin had to stop and bend over to support himself on his thighs, gasping for breath.

‘Come on, old man. What kept you?’

Fin glared up at him, and saw Marsaili smiling. ‘Yes, old man. What kept you?’

‘About eighteen years,’ Fin said, panting.

The phone started ringing in the house. Marsaili glanced towards the kitchen door, and Fin saw concern in her eyes.

‘I’ll get it,’ Fionnlagh said. He ran to the kitchen door, mounting the steps in two leaps, and disappeared inside. After a moment the ringing stopped.

Fin found Marsaili looking at him. ‘What are you doing here?’

Fin shrugged, still trying to recover his breath. ‘Just passing. I was up seeing Calum.’

She nodded, as if that explained everything. ‘You’d better come in.’ He followed her down the path and up the steps to the kitchen. She put her bags on the kitchen table, and they could hear Fionnlagh’s voice from the sitting room, still talking on the phone. Marsaili filled the kettle. ‘Cup of tea?’

‘That would be nice.’ He stood awkwardly, watching her plug in the kettle and take two mugs down from a wall cabinet. His breathing was returning to something like normal.

‘Just teabags, if that’s okay.’

‘Fine.’

She dropped a bag in each cup and turned to look at him, leaning back against the worktop. They heard Fionnlagh hanging up the phone, and then his footsteps on the stairs up to his room. And still she kept looking at him, blue eyes searching, probing, violating. The kettle growled and hissed as its element began heating the water. The kitchen door was not properly closed, and Fin could hear the wind whistling around its edges.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?’ he said.

She closed her eyes, and for a moment he felt released from their hold. ‘Artair said he’d told you. He had no right.’

‘I had a right to know.’

‘You had no right to anything. Not after …’ She broke off, gathering her calm, drawing it in around her. ‘You weren’t here. Artair was.’ She fixed him with her eyes again, and he felt trapped by them, naked in their gaze. ‘I loved you, Fin Macleod. I loved you from that first day you sat next to me in school. I even loved you when you were being a bastard. I’ve loved you all the years you weren’t here. And I’ll still love you when you’re gone again.’

He shook his head, at a loss for what to say, until at length he asked lamely, ‘So what went wrong?’

‘You didn’t love me back enough. I’m not sure you ever loved me.’

‘And Artair did?’

Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Don’t, Fin. Don’t even set foot on that road.’

He crossed the kitchen in three steps and put his hands on her shoulders. She turned her face away from him. ‘Marsaili …’

‘Please,’ she said, almost as if she knew that he was going to tell her he had always loved her, too. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Not now, Fin, not after all these wasted years.’ And she turned to meet his eye. Their faces were inches apart. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

They had kissed before either of them realized it. There was no conscious decision behind it, just a reflex action. A small meeting of their lips before breaking apart again. A breath, and then something much more intense. The kettle was shaking and rattling in its holder as it brought the water to a boil.

The sound of Fionnlagh on the stairs forced them apart, recoiling as if from an electric shock. Marsaili turned quickly to the kettle, flushed and flustered, to pour boiling water into their mugs. Fin thrust his hands in his pockets and turned to stare, unseeing, from the window. Fionnlagh came through from the living room carrying a large holdall. He had changed out of his sweatshirt into a heavy woollen jumper and wore a thick, waterproof jacket. If their guilt made them self-conscious, Fin and Marsaili need not have feared that Fionnlagh would notice. He was in a black mood, preoccupied and agitated.

‘We’re going tonight.’

‘To the rock?’ Fin asked. Fionnlagh nodded.

‘Why so soon?’ All Marsaili’s embarrassment had been stripped away in a moment by a mother’s concern.

‘Gigs says there’s bad weather on the way. If we don’t go tonight it could be another week. Asterix is picking me up at the road end. We’re going in to Stornoway to load up the boat and leave from there.’ He opened the door, and Marsaili crossed the kitchen quickly to catch his arm.

‘Fionnlagh, you don’t have to go. You know that.’

He gave her a look layered with meaning which only his mother could interpret. ‘Yes, I do.’ And he pulled his arm away and slipped out the door without so much as a goodbye. Fin watched from the window as he hurried up the path, slinging his holdall over one shoulder. He turned to look at Marsaili. She stood, frozen, by the door, staring down at the floor, looking up only as she became aware of Fin’s eyes on her.

‘What happened on the rock the year you and Artair went?’

Fin frowned. It was the second time he had been asked that today. ‘You know what happened, Marsaili.’

She shook her head almost imperceptibly. ‘I know what you all said happened. But there had to be more to it than that. It changed you. Both of you. You and Artair. Things were never ever the same after that.’

Fin gasped his frustration. ‘Marsaili, there
was
no more to it. God, wasn’t it bad enough? Artair’s dad died. And I nearly died, too.’

She inclined her head to look at him. There was something like accusation in her eyes. As if she believed he was not telling her the whole truth. ‘There was more than Artair’s dad died. You and I died. And you and Artair died. It was like everything we’d all been before, died that summer.’

‘You think I’m lying to you?’

She closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

‘Well, what does Artair say?’

She opened her eyes and her voice dropped in pitch. ‘Artair doesn’t say anything. Artair hasn’t said anything in years.’

A voice called from somewhere in the depths of the house. Feeble, yet still imperative. ‘Marsaili! Marsaili!’ It was Artair’s mother.

Marsaili raised her eyes to the ceiling and let go of a deep, quivering sigh. ‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she called.

‘I’d better go.’ Fin moved past her to the door.

‘What about your tea?’

He stopped and turned, and their eyes met again, and he wanted to run the back of his hand gently across the softness of her cheek. ‘Some other time.’ And he went down the steps to the path and hurried up it to where he had left Gunn’s car at the side of the road.

III

A sense that they had all wasted their lives, that they had somehow missed their chances through stupidity or neglect, lay heavy on his shoulders, pulling him down into deep dejection. His mood was not helped by the bruising clouds gathering themselves on the Minch, nor by the Arctic breath carried on a stiffening breeze. He turned the car and drove up the hill and out of Crobost to the turnoff that led down to the harbour, drawing in beside the old whitehouse where he had lived with his aunt for nearly ten years. He got out of the car and stood breathing deeply, facing into the wind, the sound of the sea breaking on the pebble beach below.

His aunt’s house was all closed up, neglected, willed to a charity for cats which had been unable to sell it, and then ignored it. He felt as if he ought to have some emotional response to the place, considering how long he had lived there. But it left him cold. His aunt had never treated him badly, and yet still he could only associate it with unhappiness. No single memory. Just a dark, amorphous cloud of despondency that he found hard to explain, even to himself. It stood looking out across the bay, where fishing boats had once brought their catch for processing in the salt houses built into the hill above the shore. Only the stony remains of their foundations provided testimony now to the fact that they had ever existed. Out on the headland stood three tall cairns. They had fascinated Fin as a boy, and he had visited them often, replacing stones occasionally displaced by unusually ferocious storms. Three men returning from the Second World War had built them there, his aunt had told him. No one knew why, and the men were long dead. Fin wondered if anybody bothered to repair them now.

He walked down the hill to the tiny Crobost harbour, where he and Artair had sat so often throwing stones into deep, still water. A stout steel cable snaked down the slipway from the winchhouse above the harbour, a large hook on the end of it. The winchhouse was a square, harled box of a building with two openings at the front and a door in the side. Fin pushed the door open, and the big, green-painted diesel motor sat in silent witness to the thousands of boats it had lowered into the water, or pulled from it. The key was in the ignition, and from impulse he turned it and the motor coughed but wouldn’t start. He adjusted the choke and tried again, and it spat and spluttered and caught this time, thundering away in the dark enclosed space. Someone was still maintaining it in good order. He switched it off, and the silence seemed deafening in the aftermath of its roar.

Outside, half a dozen small boats were pulled up along the edge of the slipway, angled against the foot of the cliff, one behind the other. Fin recognized the faded sky blue of the
Mayflower
. Hard to believe it was still in use after all these years. Above the winchhouse, the skeleton of a boat long since fallen into desuetude lay tipped over, keelside up. The last flakes of purple paint lay curling along her spine. Fin stooped down to wipe away the green slime covering the remaining planks on her bow and saw there, in faded white letters, his mother’s name,
Eilidh
, where his father had carefully painted it the day before he launched her. And all the regrets of his life rose up inside him like water in a spring, and he knelt beside the boat and wept.

Crobost cemetery was out on the machair above the west shore beyond the school, where the village had buried its dead in the sandy soil for hundreds of years. Gravestones rose up like prickly spines over the brow of the hill. Thousands of them. Generations of Niseachs with a last and eternal view of the sea which had both given them life and taken it away. Rings of white foam broke upon the shore below as Fin picked his way through all the names of those who had gone before. All the Macleods and Mackenzies, Macdonalds and Murrays. The Donalds and Morags, Kenneths and Margarets. It was exposed here to the full fury of the Atlantic gales, and little by little the sea had eaten away at the machair until it had been necessary for the villagers to build defences against it to stop the bones of their ancestors being washed away with the soil.

Fin finally found the graves of his parents. John Angus Macleod, thirty-eight years old, loving husband of Eilidh, thirty-five. Two flat stones laid in the grass side by side. He had never been back since the day they were put in the ground and he had stood and watched the first spades of earth rattling across the coffin lids. He stood now with the wind blowing full in his face and thought what a waste it had been. So many lives had been touched by their deaths. Changed by them. How very different everything might have been.

FIFTEEN

Usually I slept the sleep of the dead. But that night I was restless. Not that I could claim in any way to have had a premonition of what was to come. It was more likely to have been the bed. It was my old bed, where I had slept the first three years of my life, before my father made the attic rooms. It was built into a recess of the wall in the kitchen where we spent most of our lives. It was a kind of wooden stall with cupboard space below it to store linens, and a curtain that pulled over to screen it off from the rest of the room.

I had always felt warm and secure there, hearing the murmur of my parents’ voices in the room beyond the curtains before I went to sleep, and waking to the smell of the peats, and toast, and the sound of porridge bubbling on the stove. It had taken me a long time to get used to the cold isolation of my new room in the roof of the house, but now that I had, I found it hard to sleep again in my old bed. But that is where I was that night, because my aunt was babysitting, and she did not want to have to run up and down stairs all evening.

I must have been drifting in and out of sleep, because the first thing I remember was the sound of voices out in the hall, and a cold draught that found its way through the house and into my stall from an open door somewhere. I slipped barefoot out of bed, wearing only my pyjamas. The room was lit by the glowing embers in the hearth, and by a strange blue light that flashed around the walls. It took me a moment to realize it was coming from outside. The curtains weren’t drawn, so I padded to the window to peer out, and saw a police car sitting on the road, blurred by rain running down the glass. The blue flashing light on its roof was almost mesmeric. I saw figures in the path, then heard the sound of a woman’s voice, wailing as if in pain.