The Lewis Man

drenched in sunlight across the water.

It was a light wind that ruffled the clear blue surface of the Sound as they drove across the straight stretch of causeway to where it curved around and climbed gently between rising slopes. At the road end, Fin turned down towards the tiny bay and harbour at Haunn.

He watched Tormod in the rearview mirror as the old man gazed from the window, no sign of recognition in dull eyes. It had been a tiring drive down the spine of the long island. With the ferry crossing and stops for lunch and coffee, it had taken nearly five hours. The old man was weary and drowsy- eyed.

Where the single-track road curled around the head of the bay, Fin turned off on the gravelled drive that led up to the big white house on the hill. His car rattled over the cattle grid, and he drew it in beside the pink Mercedes. He and Marsaili helped Tormod out of the back seat. He had stiffened up during the long journey, and found it hard to move until he was out on the path and had straightened up to look around, feeling the cool breeze in his face, and breathing in the salt air. He seemed brighter now. His eyes clearer, but still without recognition as he gazed around the hillside and down towards the harbour.

‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘Back where it all began, Mr Macdonald.’ Fin glanced at Marsaili. But her eyes were fixed anxiously on her father. ‘Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

They climbed the steps to the deck and the front door, and as Fin pressed the bell they heard the chimes of ‘Scotland the Brave’ sound somewhere deep inside the house. After a short wait, the door opened wide, and Morag stood there, a gin and a cigarette in one hand, Dino barking around her ankles. She took in the three visitors standing on her doorstep, before a look of resignation crossed her face like a shadow. She said to Fin, ‘I had a funny feeling you’d be back.’

‘Hello, Ceit,’ he said.

A strange intensity burned for a moment in her dark eyes. ‘Long time since anyone’s called me that, a ghraidh.’

‘John McBride might have been one of the last.’ Fin turned his head towards Tormod, and Ceit’s mouth fell open as she looked at him.

‘Oh, my God.’ She caught her breath. ‘Johnny?’

He looked at her blankly.

Fin said, ‘He has dementia, Ceit. And very little awareness of anything around him.’

Ceit reached across more than half a century to touch a love lost irrevocably on a stormy spring night in another life, and her fingers lightly brushed his cheek. He looked at her curiously, as if to ask, Why are you touching me? But there was no recognition. She withdrew her hand and looked at Marsaili.

‘I’m his daughter,’ Marsaili said.

Ceit laid her drink and her cigarette on the hall table and took Marsaili’s hand in both of hers. ‘Oh, a ghraidh, you might have been mine, too, if things had turned out just a little different.’ She looked back towards Tormod. ‘I’ve spent a lifetime wondering what happened to poor Johnny.’

Fin said, ‘Or Tormod Macdonald, as you would have known him last.’ He paused. ‘Did you steal the birth certificate?’

She flashed him a look. ‘You’d better come in.’ She let go of Marsaili’s hand and lifted her gin and her cigarette, and they followed her and Dino through to the sitting room with its panoramic views across the hillside and the bay. ‘How did you know I was Ceit?’

Fin reached into his bag and drew out Tormod’s book of cuttings. He opened it up on the table for her to take a look. He heard her sharp intake of breath as she realized that they were all media stories about her. Torn or cut from newspapers or magazines over more than twenty years, ever since she had achieved celebrity status through her part in The Street. Dozens of photographs, thousands of words. ‘You might not have known what became of Tormod, Ceit. But he certainly knew what had become of you.’

Tormod took a step towards the table and looked down at them.

Fin said, ‘Do you remember these, Mr Macdonald? Do you remember cutting them out and sticking them into this book? Cuttings about the actress Morag McEwan.’

The old man stared at them for a long time. A word seemed to form several times on his lips before finally he spoke. ‘Ceit,’ he said. And he looked up at Morag. ‘Are you Ceit?’

It was clear that she couldn’t find her voice, and simply nodded.

Tormod smiled. ‘Hello, Ceit. I haven’t seen you for a long time.’

Silent tears ran down her face. ‘No, Johnny, you haven’t.’ She seemed on the verge of losing control and took a quick gulp of gin before moving quickly behind the bar. ‘Can I get anyone something to drink?’

‘No thanks,’ Marsaili said.

Fin said, ‘You haven’t told us about the birth certificate yet.’

She refilled her own glass with a trembling hand and lit another cigarette. She took a stiff drink and a long pull on her cigarette before finding her words. ‘Johnny and I were in love,’ she said, and she looked at the old man standing now in her living room. ‘We used to meet at night down by the old jetty, then go over the hill to Charlie’s beach. There was an old ruin there, with a view over the sea. It’s where we used to make love.’ She glanced self- consciously at Marsaili. ‘Anyway, we talked often about running off together. Of course, he would never have gone without Peter. He would never go anywhere without Peter. He’d promised their mother, you see, on her deathbed, that he would look after his little brother. He’d had some kind of accident. A head injury. Wasn’t all there.’

She put her glass down on the bar and held on to it, as if she thought she might fall over if she let go. Then she looked again at Tormod.

‘I’d have gone to the ends of the earth with you, Johnny,’ she said. When Tormod returned a blank stare she looked back to Fin. ‘The widow O’Henley used to take me with her when she went up to stay with her cousin Peggy on Harris during the holidays. Easter, summer, Christmas. And she took me to the funeral there when Peggy’s boy was drowned in the bay. I’d met him a few times. He was a nice lad. Anyway, the house was full of relatives, and I slept on the floor of his room. Couldn’t sleep at all that night. And someone, maybe his parents, had laid out his birth certificate on the dresser. I decided that with all the business of the funeral no one would miss it immediately. And when they did, they would never connect it with me.’

‘But why did you take it?’ Marsaili asked.

‘If we were going to run away together, me and Johnny, I thought maybe he would need a new identity. There’s not much you can do without a birth certificate.’ She took a long reflective draw on her cigarette. ‘I never knew, when I took it, the circumstances in which it would be needed. Certainly not in the way I’d intended.’ She smiled then. A tiny smile tinged with bitterness and irony. ‘As it turned out, it was far easier for me to change my own name. Just register a new one with Equity and I was no longer Ceit anything. I was Morag McEwan, actress. And I could play any part I wanted, on or off the stage. No one would ever know I was just some poor abandoned orphan girl, shipped out to the islands to be a widow’s slave.’

A silence laden with unasked questions and unspoken answers settled on the room. It was Tormod who broke it. ‘Can we go home now?’ he said.

‘In a while, Dad.’

Fin looked at Ceit. ‘Peter was murdered on Charlie’s beach, wasn’t he?’

Ceit pulled in her lower lip and bit on it as she nodded.

‘Then I think it’s time we all knew the truth about what happened.’

‘He made me promise never to tell a soul. And I never have.’

‘It was a long time ago now, Ceit. If he could tell us himself, I’m sure he would. But Peter’s been found. Dug out of a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis. There’s going to be a murder investigation. So it’s important we know.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t Johnny was it?’

‘Oh God, no!’ Ceit seemed startled by the idea. ‘He would have died himself before touching a hair on that boy’s head.’

‘Then who did?’

Ceit took several long moments to think about it, then stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Better if I take you over to Charlie’s beach and tell you there. Easier for you to picture it.’

Marsaili pulled her father’s cap back on his head, and they followed Morag out into the hall, where she lifted a jacket from the coat stand. She stooped to scoop Dino up into her arms. ‘We can all go in the Merc.’