boat.
North Uist presented a dark, primal landscape. Soaring mountains shrouded in cloud that poured down their slopes to spread tendrils of mist across the moor. The skeletons of long-abandoned homes, gable ends standing stark and black against a brooding sky. Hostile and inhospitable bogland, shredded by scraps of loch and ragged inlets. The ruins of all the failed attempts by men and women to tame it were everywhere in evidence, and those who remained were huddled together in a handful of small, sheltered townships.
Further south, over yet more causeways, the island of Benbecula, flat and featureless, passed in a blur. Then somehow the sky seemed to open up, the oppression lifted, and South Uist spread itself out before him, mountains to the east, the fertile plains of the machair to the west, stretching all the way to the sea.
The cloud was higher now, broken by a rising wind, and sunlight broke through to spill itself in rivers and pools across the land. Yellow and purple flowers bent and bowed in the breeze, and Fin felt his spirits lifting. He drove past the turn-off to the east coast ferry port of Lochboisdale, and away off to the west he could see the abandoned sheds of the old seaweed factory at Orasaigh, beyond a walled Protestant cemetery. Even in death, it seemed, there was segregation between Catholics and Protestants.
Finally he turned east on the road to Ludagh, and across the shimmering Sound of Eriskay he caught his first glimpse of the island itself. It was smaller than he had imagined, dwarfed somehow by the island of Barra and its ring of islets lingering darkly beyond the watercolour wash of sea behind it.
A stone jetty extended out across the mouth of the bay at Ludagh, and a few isolated houses stood up on the hill facing south across the Sound. The tide was out, and a handful of boats at anchor in the bay lay tipped over on their keels in the sand. The concrete stanchions of a disused pier extended out beyond the slipway where once a ferry must have carried people and goods back and forth.
Fin parked his car on the jetty and stepped out into a stiffening breeze that blew warm into his face from the south. He breathed in the smell of the sea and raised his hand to shade his eyes from the glare of sunlight on water as he gazed across to Eriskay. He could not have said why, but he was almost overtaken by the strangest sense of destiny, something like deja vu, as he looked upon the island.
An elderly man in jeans and a knitted jumper was working on the hull of an upturned dinghy. He had a face like leather beneath a thatch of spun silver. He nodded, and Fin said, ‘I thought there was a causeway over to Eriskay now.’
The man stood up and pointed east. ‘Aye, there is. Just carry on round the road to the point there.’
And Fin strained against the glare to see the causeway spanning the Sound along the horizon. ‘Thanks.’ He got back into his car and followed the road to where it curved around to the point, and he found himself crossing a cattle grid on to the long, straight stretch of road built atop the thousands of tons of boulders that had been dumped to create the causeway between the islands.
As he approached it, Eriskay filled his field of vision, treeless and barren, a single mountain pushing up into the sky. The road turned up between the folds of rising hills to lift him on to the island proper. It reached a T- junction, and he turned left on a narrow ribbon of tarmac that took him down to the old harbour at Haunn, where Bill Lawson had told him the O’Henley family croft was to be found.
An old stone jetty in a state of considerable disrepair reached out into a narrow, sheltered bay. A couple of derelict houses stood up among the rocks on the far side where a concrete quay looked all but abandoned. A handful of other houses stood around the bay, some inhabited, others in ruins. He parked at the end of the old jetty and walked over the rise, past piles of creels and nets laid out to dry, and found himself looking down the length of a concrete ramp, and back across the Sound to South Uist.
‘That’s where the car ferry used to come in.’ An old man with a quilted jacket and cloth cap stopped at his side, his wire-haired fox terrier pulling and twisting at the end of a long lead. ‘The old passenger boat used to come in at the other quay.’ He chuckled. ‘There was no call for a car ferry till they built the roads. And they didn’t do that till the fifties. Even then, there wasn’t many folk had cars.’
‘I take it you’re a local, then,’ Fin said.
‘Born and bred. But I can tell from your Gaelic you’re not from around here yourself.’
‘I’m a Leodhasach,’ Fin said. ‘From Crobost in Ness.’
‘Never been that far north myself,’ the old man said. ‘What brings you all the way down here?’
‘I’m looking for the old O’Henley croft.’
‘Oh, well, you’re not far off the mark. Come with me.’
And he turned and headed back over the rise towards the old jetty, his dog running on ahead, leaping and barking at the wind. Fin followed him until he stopped by the quayside, the little bay stretched out ahead of them.
‘That yellow building over there on the left, the one without a roof — that used to be the village store and post office. Run by a chap called Nicholson, I think it was. The only Protestant on the island.’ He grinned. ‘Can you imagine?’
Fin couldn’t.
‘Just up beyond that, to the right, you’ll see the remains of an old stone cottage. Not much left of it now. That’s the O’Henley place. But she’s long dead. Widowed quite young, too. She had a wee lassie that stayed with her. Ceit, if my memory serves me well. But I’m not sure that she was her daughter.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Oh, heaven knows. Gone long before the old lady died. Like all the young ones. They just couldn’t wait to get off the island in those days.’ His smile was touched by sadness. ‘Then and now.’
Fin’s eyes strayed beyond the ruin towards a large white house built on the rocks above it. What looked like a brand-new driveway snaked up the hill to a levelled garden area at the front, and a wooden deck accessed by French windows from the house. Above it, a balcony was glassed in against the elements, and on the wall above that a neon star. ‘Who lives in the big white house?’ he said.
The old man grinned. ‘Oh, that’s Morag MacEwan’s house. Retired to the island of her birth nigh on sixty years after she left it. I don’t remember her at all, but she’s a character, that one. You’ll maybe know her yourself.’
‘Me?’ Fin was taken aback.
‘If you watched much telly, that is. She was a big star on one of those soap operas. Not short of a bob or two, I’ll tell you. Keeps her Christmas lights up all year round, and drives a pink, open-topped Mercedes.’ He laughed. ‘They say her house is like Aladdin’s cave inside, though I’ve never been in it myself.’
Fin said, ‘How many people are there still living on Eriskay these days?’
‘Och, not many. About a hundred and thirty now. Even when I was a lad there was only about five hundred or so. The island’s only two and a half miles long, you see. One and a half at its widest point. There’s not much of a living to be made here. Not from the land, and not from the sea now either.’
Fin let his gaze wander over the desolate, rocky hillsides and wondered how folk had ever managed to survive here. His eyes came to rest on a dark building sitting high up on the hill to his right, dominating the island. ‘What’s that place?’
The old man followed his gaze. ‘That’s the church,’ he said. ‘St Michael’s.’
Fin drove up the hill towards the little settlement of houses known as Rubha Ban which was built around the primary school and the health centre. A sign for
He parked his car and looked back down the hill towards the jetty at Haunn, and across the Sound to South Uist. The sea shimmered and sparkled and moved as if it were alive, and sunlight streamed across the hills beyond it, the shadows of clouds tracking across their contours at speed. The wind was powerful up here, filling Fin’s jacket, and blowing through the tight curls of his hair as if trying to straighten them.
A very elderly lady in a red cardigan and dark-grey skirt was washing the floor in the entrance hall. She wore elbowlength green rubber gloves and sloshed soapy water from a bright red bucket. She wore a silk headscarf around cottonwool hair, and nodded acknowledgement to him as she moved aside to let him past.
For just a moment time stopped for Fin. Light poured in through arched windows. Colourful statues of the
