The Sea Detective (12 page)

He shrugged too. He didn’t know.

‘What went wrong, Cal?’

He shook his head. He couldn’t tell her, not there, not then. ‘I can’t do this Rachel.’

‘Why did we let our marriage go?’

Cal didn’t reply.

Rachel stirred her cappuccino before saying, ‘Did you ever love me? I mean really love me.’

Her eyes studied his, alert for evasion.

Cal felt his arms folding. ‘You were never here, Rachel.’ It was how he’d justified his behaviour to himself at the time. Now, at this distance, out loud, it sounded weak, self-serving; hollow.

Rachel raised a hand to her cheek as if he’d struck her.

‘I was trying to earn money so we could buy our own flat, a house … a home, so we could have children, be a family. And you …’ She stopped herself throwing accusations back at him. ‘Cal, one of us had to have a half decent salary and there wasn’t any work for me in Edinburgh.’

The twin smile lines under her eyes now seemed to represent disappointment and the first sign of ageing. ‘My God, I’m so fucking stupid.’

She twisted her mouth, picked her bag off the table, found her sunglasses, and slid them on. ‘I’ve got to go, there’s a reception.’

She pushed back her chair and left without saying goodbye. Cal was ordering a double espresso when she sent him a text. ‘Bad day at the office … Suddenly it mattered someone had loved me. Wrong to burden you. It won’t happen again.’

He didn’t answer. What was there to say?

The affair, with a botanist he’d met on Knoydart, lasted a few months. It ended soon after Rachel moved south for good. There’d been two other women since, short relationships. They’d all disintegrated the same way, with Cal going off on his own, escaping, finding space which wasn’t shared.

Should he also tell Rachel that he was a loner who should never have got married in the first place? He hadn’t known that then.

Had he loved her? Did it matter anymore?

The phone call had brought all this back. Cal kicked off the duvet and went to make coffee.

He wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway.

After dark, Basanti crept from her shelter and waited by the wall, listening. On the other side was an expanse of tarmac. This was where she scavenged for food: in the bins of a supermarket service area, where the delivery vehicles came by day and the hungry by night. Usually, she was the last to forage through the boxes and ruptured bags of discarded food past its sell-by date. The others arrived soon after closing. Sometimes she heard them arguing and fighting. Other people frightened her; men who had been drinking scared her most of all. She ventured out only when everyone else had gone, to pick over what they’d fingered and left behind.

She climbed the wall, still watchful. The bins were across the tarmac under an awning. She ran across to them, a lithe figure with cropped hair, and started at the bin closest to her. The smell of rotting meat from it made her retch. She pulled out an empty cardboard box to use as bedding and moved on to the next bin. There were black bags of assorted food in it: over-ripe fruit, bread and fish which stank of the van which had brought her to Glasgow all that time ago. There was a pile of newspapers by the bin. She took one from the middle and laid it open on the tarmac to place the best of the fruit on it.

Then she saw the picture: a close up of a man standing against a map. Behind him, in the left-hand corner, beside the map on the wall, was a blurred small face she recognised.

She let out a wail of surprise and anxiety and held the newspaper up to the night-light above the bins, angling it one way then another, trying vainly to decipher the blurred text around the photograph of her friend.

‘Oh Preeti, what has happened to you?’

The bus from Edinburgh arrived at Galashiels in the Scottish Borders seven minutes late. Agnes, Miss MacKay’s carer, was waiting for Cal as arranged by the baker’s shop at the bus stop. She was 50-ish, small and overweight, with curly salt and pepper hair. Cal apologised for keeping her waiting.

‘No bother at all,’ she replied, cheerily, picking up the half-full carrier bag at her feet. ‘I was doing Grace Ann’s bit of shopping anyway.’

Agnes led Cal into a nearby street of two storey terraced houses at the far end of which was a group of four bungalows clad in cream coloured harling. She pointed to the right hand one. ‘Grace Ann’s lived here for a year or two now. She used to have a place on the Melrose road.’

Agnes made it sound as though that was
the
place to live in Galashiels.

Cal didn’t pick up on it, instead inquiring after Miss MacKay’s health.

‘She can’t really do for herself, not after the last stroke. The doctor says it won’t take much to carry her away.’

Soon they were at the flagstone pathway to Miss MacKay’s bungalow. Cal followed Agnes along it and into a small glazed porch with a wicker chair. The inside door was open, held by a rubber wedge. Agnes shouted ahead, ‘Hello Grace Ann. I’ve a special visitor for you.’ Then she turned back to Cal, lowering her voice. ‘She’s been agitated all day, don’t know what’s wrong. Something from the past – she spends a lot of her time there now. It happens when they’re getting close …’ Cal nodded, letting her know he understood what she meant.

The first opening off the hallway led into a bright rectangular room with white walls and blue curtains. It contained a sofa, two arm chairs, a pine mantelpiece with a little gold clock and Grace Ann MacKay sitting in an adjustable chair covered in a brown leaf-pattern fabric which didn’t match the rest of the room. Her face was small and sharp featured, her grey skin stretched tight to the bone, her hair silvery-white and caught in a tidy bun.

She looked at Cal over glasses which seemed too big for her. She appeared confused, as if she had just woken up.

‘So you’re Uilleam’s and Ishbel’s grandson?’ she said eventually.

Her speech had an unexpected and old fashioned rhythm.

‘I am.’

She smiled quickly at him before examining his face for long forgotten memories.

‘They call you Cal?’

‘My proper name is Caladh. I believe it means harbour in Gaelic.’

Encouraged by Agnes, who whispered ‘she’ll settle in a minute or two’, Cal went to the arm chair closest to Grace Ann. When he had sat down, the old woman said, ‘I’ve been trying to remember. What was your mother’s name? My feeling is I didn’t meet her …’

‘It was Eilidh.’ Cal reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a brown envelope. He opened the flap, removed a faded photograph and handed it to Grace Ann who took it from him, her hand shaking. The photograph was of a young woman wearing a black hat with a black ribbon around it, and black clothes. A baby wrapped in an off-white shawl lay along her legs.

‘It was taken after my mother’s baptism,’ Cal said. ‘The woman is my grandmother, Ishbel.’

‘Funny thing to wear black at a baptism,’ Agnes said.

‘She was in mourning for my grandfather Uilleam; he died before my mother was born.’

‘The wee soul.’ Agnes’s sympathy was for the baby born without a father. She left the room, taking the shopping with her, and Grace Ann stayed quiet in contemplation of the photograph. The fingers of her free hand stroked the satin border of a blanket lying across her knees.

Cal asked, ‘You knew my grandmother?’

‘Yes. I knew both Ishbel and Uilleam though I knew Uilleam the better of the two.’ Grace Ann paused. ‘What did your mother tell you of them?’

‘Very little.’

She nodded as though it didn’t surprise her. ‘I was sorry to hear of your mother’s death. Rachel told me. … I forget her full name.’

‘Rachel Newby.’ Cal helped.

‘Yes. You know her?’

Cal had wondered if Rachel had mentioned their marriage. It appeared she hadn’t. ‘Yes I do,’ he said before changing the subject. ‘My mother’s death seems a long time ago. I was 17.’

Agnes returned with an enamelled tray on which were two matching mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. She laid it on the table beside Cal’s chair and put one mug on Grace Ann’s trolley. ‘That’s me away now,’ she said, touching the back of the old woman’s hand. ‘Mind, those wee boxes from your bedroom, they’re on the stool beside you here.’ Then she said to Cal, ‘Pleasure to meet you.’

Grace Ann waited for Agnes to close the front door before speaking again. ‘There are things I should have told your mother …’ Her eyes flicked towards him and away, as if apprehensive about his reaction. Cal thought she seemed frightened. Perhaps she wasn’t used to strangers. ‘Things that I regret.’

He tried to reassure her. ‘I can’t believe that.’

Grace Ann picked up a small black Bible which was lying near her on the trolley. She put it on her lap, plucking at a corner of it with her thumb, before saying, ‘What do you know of the island?’

‘I know its name, Eilean Iasgaich Mor; that it means Great Fishing Island; and that it’s on the north coast of Sutherland, near a settlement called Eastern Township.’

‘Have you been there?’ Grace Ann was watching him again.

‘No.’

‘You haven’t seen the memorial to the men who were killed?’

‘No.’

‘So you don’t know then?’ It was as much an exclamation as a question.

‘Know what?’

Cal glanced at her and noticed her eyes were closed and her head was shaking as if she was upset. Had talk of the memorial brought it on, all those dead men? Rather than remain quiet and draw attention to her distress, he ventured, ‘When did you leave?’

She looked towards the window. ‘In October 1943.’ Then back at him as though the event was still alive to her. ‘There was such a storm blowing the island was hidden in spray when I reached the mainland. I looked back and it was gone.’

‘Did you ever return?’

‘So many times in my sleep.’ She paused. ‘If I could have gone back and put things right I would have.’

Once more she closed her eyes tight. ‘God forgive me.’

‘It’s all right,’ Cal reassured her.

‘No, no it’s not,’ she snapped back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, surprised by the reprimand.

She picked at the satin trim of the blanket on her legs. A sigh came from her, then a thin, weak smile. She looked at him. ‘You remind me so much of Uilleam, it brings it all back.’ Her eyes were wet with tears.

She sipped at her tea and Cal let her settle again. Then she said, as if he had asked the question and she was answering it, ‘There were eight families on the island – MacKay, Rae, Gunn, MacLeod, Murray, Sutherland, McIntosh. And of course Sinclair which was your mother’s family.’

Grace Ann repeated the names counting them off on her fingers

‘But if you ask me which families ran the island, it was the MacKays and the Raes. There were three brothers in each family. They ruled the roost.’

‘They were your relations?’

‘They were cousins. We were poor relations. Our circumstances were closer to your mother’s family, the Sinclairs, who were our neighbours. There wasn’t an able bodied man in our house; nor for many years had there been one in the Sinclair house.’ She sipped at her tea. Cal did too, relieved she had regained some composure. Putting down her mug, she said, ‘You see if you had a man on the boat you were all right. If you didn’t, well …’

She reached down for a bleached cardboard box on the stool by her chair. She lifted the lid and offered it to Cal. He found himself looking at a wooden model of a fishing boat lying on a bed of cotton wool. ‘Eilean Iasgaich’ was painted in black on its side.

‘My father carved it from an old deck timber,’ Grace Ann said.

‘Was it a big boat?’

‘A proper trawler, 300 tonnes, it was. Other islands had boats but nothing as big as ours.’

The pride came through in her voice. ‘It must have been something,’ he said.

‘It had a crew of 16 and every man of them came from the island. They wouldn’t have it any other way even if they were short-handed. They thought a stranger off the mainland would bring them bad luck.’ Grace Ann shook her head at the stupidity of it. ‘A boat never had such misfortune.’ After Cal handed the model back to her, she stared at it, momentarily forgetting herself. ‘Did I tell you every crew member had an equal share of the boat’s profits?’

’No.’

‘Well, they did. So the MacKays and the Raes, with three crew members for each family, had six shares of the profits. But without a man on the boat, money was hard to come by. My family and yours, the Sinclairs, had to survive on whatever the land or nature provided: oats, fish, potatoes, eggs and as many seabirds as we could store.’

‘Was there land to grow crops?’

‘There was the green pasture between the island’s two hills, Cnoc a’ Mhonaidh and Cnoc na Faire, the peat hill and the watch hill. Much of it was boggy but other parts were dry enough and fertile. My family and your family had the two best strips.’ She stared out of the window before adding, ‘God knows it was the only blessing the island bestowed on us.’

Grace Ann’s face had flushed purple. The colour looked livid against the silvery-white of her hair.

‘Are you sure this isn’t too much for you?’ he asked, wary of provoking another reprimand.

She didn’t answer, instead taking another sip of tea. After dabbing at her upper lip with a handkerchief, she said, ‘My father was a MacKay, so the other MacKays looked after us now and again, but they wanted your mother’s family off the island so their cousins the Raes could take over the Sinclair croft.’

She let out a snort. ‘They hadn’t reckoned on your great-grandmother who was determined to hold on until Uilleam, your grandfather, was old enough to inherit and to take his place among the boat’s crew.’

Cal removed a photograph of his grandfather Uilleam from the envelope and gave it to Grace Ann. She examined it, becoming wistful. ‘His mother used to say,’ she shook her head, ‘his smile could light up a room and his laughter could warm it; and so they could too.’

She seemed to become quite lost in her memories until Cal asked, ‘Were you the same age?’

‘He was older by three years,’ Grace Ann replied. Then she hesitated. ‘I believed I would marry him, but his eyes and his heart were set at another and that was that. What could I do?’