She was waiting for me down at the jetty, nervous I thought, and a bit impatient. ‘What took you so long?’ Her whisper seemed excessively loud, and I realized that there was no wind, just the slow, steady breathing of the sea.
‘It must be all of five past,’ I said. But she just tutted and took my arm and led me up the track towards Rubha Ban. There wasn’t a single light burning in any of the crofts across the hillside, an entire island asleep, or so it appeared.
Visibility was no problem in the wash of moonlight, but it made us feel vulnerable, too. If anyone should venture out we would be clearly visible.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.
‘Charlie’s beach.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
There was only one moment when it might all have gone wrong. Ceit yanked suddenly on my sleeve, and we flattened ourselves into the long grass at the side of the track as a light flared in an open doorway, and we saw an old man stepping out into the moonlight with a shovel and a newspaper in his hand. Most folk used a chanty during the night, which got emptied in the morning. But old Mr MacGinty must have thought it was a fine night to relieve himself out on the moor. And so we had to lie there, giggling in the grass, while he dug himself a shallow hole and crouched over it, with his nightgown up around his neck, grunting and groaning.
Ceit put a hand over my mouth to shut me up, but she could barely contain her own mirth, air escaping through tightly pressed lips in tiny explosions. So I put my hand over hers, and we lay like that, pressed together, for nearly ten minutes while Mr MacGinty did his business.
I suppose that must have been the first time I became aware of her body in a sexual way. Her warmth, the softness of her breasts pressed against my chest, one leg crooked over mine. And I felt the first stirrings of arousal, both surprising and scary. She was wearing a sort of pale print dress with a V-neck that showed her cleavage. And I remember she was barefoot that night. There was something sensuous and tempting in those bare legs exposed in the moonlight.
She wore her hair a lot longer now than she had at The Dean, and it fell in soft, chestnut curls over her shoulders, a too-long fringe constantly in her eyes.
I noticed, too, as we lay in the grass a faint smell of flowers about her, aromatic, with a low, musky note, different from the smell she’d had at The Dean. When Mr MacGinty had finally gone back to his bed and we took our hands from each other’s mouths, I sniffed and asked her what the scent was.
She giggled. ‘It’s Mrs O’Henley’s eau de cologne,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Perfume, silly. I sprayed a couple of puffs of it on my neck. Do you like it?’
I did. I don’t know what it was about it, but it set butterflies free in my stomach. Her eyes seemed very dark as we lay there in the moonlight. Her lips full, with an almost irresistible allure. I found myself so much wanting to kiss them. But before I could succumb to the temptation, she was on her feet, holding out her hand and urging me to get up quick.
I scrambled to my feet and she took my hand, and we ran then up over the hill, past the primary school and along the road above the beach. We stopped, breathless, to take in the view. The sea simmered in a shimmering silence around the curve of the bay below us, rolling gently in to break in soft silver foam along the sand. The reflection of moon on water stretched away into a never-ending distance, the horizon broken only by a handful of dark islets and the brooding shadow of Barra.
I had never seen the island like this. Benign, seductive, almost as if it were colluding in Ceit’s grand plan.
‘Come on,’ she said, and led me down a narrow path through the heather to where the remains of an old ruined cottage looked out across the sands, and we picked our way through the stones to its grassy interior. She promptly sat herself down in the grass and patted a place beside her. I sat down, immediately aware of the warmth of her body, the soft sighing of the sea, the vast firmament overhead, the sky black now and crusted with stars. I was full of breathless anticipation as she turned those dark eyes on me, and I felt her fingertips on my face like tiny electric shocks.
I have no idea where we learn how to do these things, but before I knew it I had my arms around her and we were kissing. Lips soft and warm, parting to let our tongues meet. Shocking, thrilling. I felt her hand between my legs, where I was already straining at my trousers, and mine slid beneath the cotton of her dress to find it filled by a soft, pendulous breast, a nipple as hard as a nut grazing my palm.
I felt intoxicated. Drunk. Swept away on a sea of hormones. Completely out of control. We undressed in a kind of frenzy, clothes discarded in haste, and then we were skin to skin. Soft, warm, hot, wet. I had no idea what I was doing. Boys never do. They just follow some crude instinct. Ceit was much more controlled. Taking me in her hand, guiding me gently inside her. Gasping, almost crying out. I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or pleasure. Then all my primal instincts took over, and I performed as I suppose I was programmed to do. Her cries only aroused me more, driving me on towards the inevitable, which of course came far too soon.
But Ceit was ready for it, forcing me away so that my seed spilled itself silver in the moonlight across the soft curve of her belly. ‘Don’t want me getting pregnant now, do we,’ she said, and she put my hand down between her legs. ‘Finish me off.’
I had no idea what she meant, but with her guidance my clumsy fingers quickly learned how to elicit a response from between the wet softness of her lips, and I was filled with such a desire to please as her body arched and arched beneath me before she cried out to the night and lay panting in the grass, her face flushed and smiling.
She reached up, taking my head between her hands, and pulled me down to kiss me. A long, lingering kiss, her tongue turning slowly around mine, again and again. And then she was on her feet, grabbing my hand. ‘Come on, Johnny.’ And we ran naked among the stones and down on to the beach, helter-skelter across the sand and into the sea.
The shock of it very nearly took my breath away completely. Freezing cold water on hot skin. Both of us called out involuntarily, and it was a good thing that there were no inhabited crofts close to the beach or we would certainly have been heard. As it is, I am amazed we weren’t. Our cries must have carried right across the island.
‘Fuck me!’ Ceit shouted out in the dark
And I grinned and said, ‘I think I just did.’
We ran, splashing, back on to the beach, and up the sand to the old cottage where we rolled in the grass to dry ourselves off and slip quickly back into our clothes. Now the cold gave way to burning skin as we lay wrapped up in each other’s arms, lying there and looking up at the stars, breathless, enthralled, as if we had somehow discovered sex for the first time in human history.
Neither of us spoke for a long time, till I said, finally, ‘What was it you wanted to give me?’
And she laughed so long and hard.
I lifted myself up on my elbow and looked at her, perplexed. ‘What’s so funny?’
Still laughing, she said, ‘One day you’ll work it out, big boy.’
I lay back down beside her, and the sense of being on the wrong side of a joke quickly passed, overcome, nearly overwhelmed, by feelings of love, and the desire to hold and protect her, to keep her safe and secure. She wrapped herself around me, her face nuzzled into my neck, an arm across my chest, a leg thrown over mine, and I just gazed at the stars, filled with a new sense of joy in being alive. I kissed the top of her head. ‘Why do you call this Charlie’s beach?’ I asked.
‘Cos this is where Bonnie Prince Charlie first landed when he came to raise an army to march against the English in the Jacobite uprising of 1745,’ she said. ‘They taught us that at school.’
We met several times in the weeks that followed, to find our way to that old ruined cottage and make love. The fine spring weather continued, and you could feel how the ocean was warming, the conveyor belt of the Gulf Stream invading the cold winter waters of the North Atlantic. Until the night of the storm, when it all went wrong.
I had arranged to meet Ceit as usual that night. But some time during the late afternoon the wind changed, and great dark clouds bubbled up on the horizon, sweeping in as darkness fell. The wind rose, and must have been
