The Lewis Man

SEVENTEEN

Fin watched the old man carefully. Sunlight caught the silver bristles on his face and on the loose flesh of his neck, and they stood out sharp against his pale, leathery skin. His eyes, by contrast, were almost opaque, obscured by memories he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, share. He had been quiet for a long time, and the tears had dried in salty tracks on his cheeks. His knees were pulled up to his chest, and he sat hugging them, staring out to sea with eyes that saw things Fin could not.

Fin lifted the photograph from the travelling rug, where Tormod had let it fall, and slipped it back into his bag. He took Tormod by the elbow to try to encourage him gently to his feet.

‘Come on, Mr Macdonald, let’s take a walk along the water’s edge.’

His voice seemed to wake the old man from his reverie, and Tormod turned a look of surprise towards Fin, as if noticing him for the first time. ‘He didn’t do it,’ he said, resisting Fin’s attempt to get him to stand.

‘Who didn’t do what, Mr Macdonald?’

But Tormod just shook his head. ‘Maybe he wasn’t the full shilling, but he learned the Gaelic a lot faster than I did.’

Fin frowned, his thoughts tossed around in a sea of confusion. On the islands, you grew up speaking Gaelic. In Tormod’s day, you wouldn’t have spoken English until you went to school. ‘You mean, he learned the English faster?’ He had no idea who he was.

Tormod shook his head vigorously. ‘No, the Gaelic. Took to it like a native.’

‘Charlie?’

Tormod grinned, shaking his head at Fin’s stupidity. ‘No, no, no. It would be the Italian he spoke.’ He put out a hand for Fin to help him to his feet now and stood up into the wind. ‘Let’s get our feet wet, just like we always used to at Charlie’s beach.’ He looked at Fin’s boots. ‘Come on, lad, get those off you.’ He bent forward and began rolling up his trouser legs.

Fin kicked off his boots and pulled his socks from his feet, hoisting his trouser legs to his knees as he stood up, and the two men walked arm in arm across soft, deep sand, to where the outgoing tide had left it compacted and wet. The wind blew Tormod’s coat around his legs and filled Fin’s jacket. It was strong in their faces, and soft, laced with spray, blown uninterrupted across three thousand miles of Atlantic ocean.

The first foaming water broke over their feet, racing up across the slope of the sand, shockingly cold, and old Tormod laughed, exhilarated, lifting his feet quickly to step away as it receded. His cap blew off, and by some miracle Fin caught it, seeing it lift from his forehead in the moment before the wind whipped it away. Tormod laughed again, like a child, as if it were a game. He wanted to put it back on his head, but Fin folded it into his coat pocket so that they wouldn’t lose it.

Fin, too, enjoyed the feel of the icy water washing over his feet, and he led them back into the last tame surge of a once towering ocean as it splashed around their ankles and calves. Both of them laughed and cried out at the shock of it.

Tormod seemed invigorated, free, at least for these few moments, of the chains of dementia that shackled his mind, and diminished his life. Happy, as in childhood, to delight in the simplest of pleasures.

They walked in and out of the brine for four or five hundred yards, towards the cluster of shining black rocks at the far end of the beach where the water broke in frothing white fury. The sound of the wind and the sea filled their ears, drowning out everything else. Pain, memory, sadness. Until finally Fin stopped and turned them around for the walk back.

They had only gone a few feet when he slipped his hand in his pocket to bring out the Saint Christopher medal on its silver chain that Marsaili’s mother had given him a few hours earlier. He passed it to Tormod. ‘Do you remember this, Mr Macdonald?’ He had to shout above the elemental roar.

Tormod seemed surprised to see it. He stopped and took it from Fin, gazing at it lying in the palm of his hand before making a fist to close around it. Fin was shocked to see sudden tears following the tracks of their predecessors. ‘She gave it to me,’ he said, his voice almost inaudible above the din that crashed around them.

‘Who?’

‘Ceit.’

Fin thought for a moment. Was Ceit the cause of his unreasonable hatred of Catholics. ‘And she was a Catholic?’

Tormod looked at him as if he were insane. ‘Of course. We all were.’ He started walking briskly along the line of the outgoing tide, wading through the water as it rushed up the sand, oblivious to it splashing around his legs and soaking his rolled-up trousers. Fin was taken by surprise and it took him several moments to catch him up. This made no sense.

‘You were a Catholic?’

Tormod flicked him a dismissive look. ‘Mass every Sunday in the big church on the hill.’

‘At Seilebost?’

‘The church the fishermen built. The one with the boat inside it.’

‘There was a boat in the church?’

‘Beneath the altar.’ Tormod stopped as suddenly as he had started, standing ankle-deep in the water that broke against them, and gazed out at the horizon where the dark smudge of a distant tanker broke the line between sea and sky. ‘You could see Charlie’s beach from up there. Beyond the cemetery. Like a line of silver painted along the shore between the purple of the machair and the turquoise of the sea.’ He turned and looked at Fin. ‘And all the dead in between wanting you to stop on the way. Some human company in the world beyond the grave.’

He turned away again, and before Fin could stop him he had hurled the Saint Christopher medal into the rush of incoming water. It vanished into the swirl of sand and foam, to be sucked out by the undertow and laid to rest somewhere in the deep. Lost for ever.

‘No need for papish things now,’ he said. ‘The journey’s nearly over.’

EIGHTEEN

Fin took the call from Gunn on his mobile as he left the Dun Eisdean care home. Tormod had been strangely subdued on the drive back from Dalmore and went meekly to his room, where he allowed staff to take off his coat without a word of protest, and lead him to the dining room. Having eaten almost nothing the previous day he had now, it seemed, rediscovered his appetite. And as he wolfed into a plate of spring lamb and boiled potatoes, Fin slipped quietly out into the midday sunshine.

He parked his car now at the top of Church Street and walked down to where Gunn was waiting for him on the steps of the police station. The wind was blustery and cooler here on the east coast, rippling the water in the bay, rustling the first leaves in the trees on the far side of it below the dark decay of Lews Castle. The two men fell in step on the walk down to Bayhead, and saw the fishing boats at high tide towering above the quays. Nets and creels and empty fish boxes lay strewn across the cobbles, and the good people of Stornoway leaned into the wind as they made their way towards the centre of town.

As they passed a cafe with picture windows looking out on to the boats at dock, Gunn said, ‘Isn’t that young Fionnlagh?’

Fin turned, and through the shadow of his own reflection he saw Fionnlagh and Donna together at a table on the other side of the glass. A carrycot sat on the floor between them, and Fionnlagh held his baby daughter in his arms, gazing with unglazed love into her tiny, round blue eyes. She gazed back adoringly at her father, impossibly small fingers grasping his thumb. Just as Robbie had once held Fin’s.

Fin had only a moment to feel the regrets of a lifetime press down on him before Donna turned and saw him. Her face flushed with the first colour he had ever seen in it, and she turned away, speaking quickly to Fionnlagh. The boy looked up, startled. And Fin saw something strange in his eyes. Guilt? Fear? It was impossible to tell, evaporating in a moment to be replaced by a bashful smile. He nodded at Fin, who nodded back. An awkward moment, a silent exchange, the glass of the window a much easier barrier to breach than all the things left unsaid between them.

‘You want to go in?’ Gunn said.