‘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
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
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.
