Red Bones

They didn’t talk about Mima again until they started the pudding, and then it was Jackie who raised the subject. Anna had found herself enjoying the meal. The wine had relaxed her. She must even have become a little drunk, because she realized she was laughing too loudly at a joke Jackie had made. That would never do. She put her hand over her glass when Ronald next offered the bottle to her. Perhaps everything will work out, she thought. Perhaps I can make it work. Jackie too had been drinking heavily throughout. Her face was flushed with the cooking and the responsibility of encouraging them to enjoy themselves.

‘She won’t be missed, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ronald was poised with a spoon in one hand.

Jackie looked up at him. ‘Mima Wilson. She could be a dreadful old gossip. And it was an accident. You mustn’t blame yourself.’

‘Don’t say that.’ Ronald’s voice was steady.

There was a pause while Jackie composed herself. ‘No, you’re right. We mustn’t speak ill of the dead.’ She flashed a look across the table to Anna. We’ll humour the boy. He’s upset.

Since the stroke Andrew had spoken with difficulty. Sometimes it took him a long time to work out the words in his head and then to get his tongue round them. Occasionally a whole sentence came out at once, surprising his audience and himself. That happened now.

‘She was a good-looking woman,’ he said. ‘When she was younger.’ Then seeing them all staring at him, he added: ‘Jemima Wilson. I’m talking about Jemima Wilson.’ He retreated into a shocked silence.

‘Oh aye, she was bonny,’ Jackie said bitterly. ‘And didn’t she know it. When she was middle-aged she was flirting with men half her age.’

Anna wondered if Andrew had been one of Mima’s younger men. There was an awkward silence.

‘I always liked her,’ Ronald said quietly. ‘When we were bairns she told great stories.’

‘Oh, the bairns liked her right enough. They were round her place like bees at a honeypot.’ Jackie seemed about to continue but stopped short.

There was a moment of silence. Perhaps they were all replaying their memories of Mima.

Andrew coughed, then came out with another of his surprise sentences. ‘A man died because of Jemima Wilson.’ He looked around the table to make sure they were listening. It seemed to Anna that he was desperate they should believe him. ‘A man died because of her.’

Satisfied that he had their attention, he added; ‘Well, now she’s gone to join that husband of hers. They were two of a kind. A match made in heaven.’ A pause and a strange choking laugh. ‘Or in hell.’

Chapter Thirteen

As he drove carefully off the ferry at Laxo, Perez had a momentary stab of shame. He shouldn’t be so delighted to have escaped Whalsay and Sandy’s family and the upset that always follows unexpected death. Grief he could deal with. What he found more difficult to handle were the selfish reactions, inevitable but distasteful, that came in its aftermath. The first was greed, because even if the deceased person weren’t wealthy there would usually be something to squabble over. Then came guilt, because greed seems inappropriate after the death of a loved one and because relationships, especially between family members, aren’t perfect. At least one of Mima’s survivors would have thought at some time, I wish you were dead. Not really meaning it perhaps, but thinking it all the same. Now the thought would have come back to haunt them.

He drove south down Shetland mainland towards Lerwick with the radio on. Fran said his concern for the people he met through work was a sort of arrogance. ‘I love the fact you care about them, but you’re not a priest after all. Let people take responsibility for their own pain. Why do you think you can help them when their own friends can’t?’ Now he tried to take her advice, to forget Sandy’s grey, exhausted face and the tension in Evelyn’s back as she bent over the stove. Instead he sang along, very loudly, to the Proclaimers. The mist lifted a little as he approached the town and there were streaks of pale sunlight reflected from the dock as he drove past the ferry terminal.

He decided he would go home for lunch. He felt a need to talk to Fran and Cassie and he couldn’t do that from the office with its noise and interruptions. He lived in a narrow, old house built right on the waterfront, so you could see the high-water mark on its outside wall. By now the mist had cleared sufficiently for the island of Bressay to be visible. It was the warmest day of the spring so far and he opened the living-room window to let in the sound of the gulls and the tide, the salt-laden air.

He was missing Fran more than he thought he would. He hadn’t told her, of course. She would despise it and think it was a sign of his easy emotion. Whenever he phoned she was full of the people she’d met, the shows she’d seen, the galleries she’d visited. Sometimes he worried that she wouldn’t want to come back. It occurred to him now that the Whalsay women he’d met had that in common with Fran. Sandy’s cousin and father were content with life on the islands, but Evelyn and Anna looked at the world outside and wanted more. It seemed to him that in their demands for change they might spoil the place they claimed to love.

He’d bought a second-hand filter-coffee machine at one of last summer’s Sunday teas. He folded the filter paper and spooned in the coffee, waited for the delicious smell as the coffee dripped through. Fran envied his ability to drink strong black coffee all day and still sleep at night. He realized she was in his head whatever else he was doing, a backdrop to all his other thoughts.

He dialled the number of her parents’ house, but there was no answer and he replaced the receiver when the answering service clicked in. He didn’t like the idea of them picking up his message and listening to his stumbled words in an accent that must be all but unintelligible to them.

It had become an obsession that he should ask Fran to marry him. The idea had come to him as a fleeting whimsy the summer before, but now it had returned and wouldn’t let him go. If he suggested that they live together he knew she would agree at once. They’d known each other for more than a year and he spent as much time in her house at Ravenswick as he did in his own place. She’d said recently, making a joke of it but obviously wanting to test his reaction, ‘If we sold both homes we’d be able to buy somewhere with a bit more space.’ He’d been non-committal and he knew she’d been disappointed but too proud to let on.

He had no moral objection to their living together and he couldn’t care less what people – even his parents – thought, but still he was haunted by the idea of marriage. It was to do with permanence and stability; he knew that Fran wanted another child and he was terrified of being the cause of a fragmented family. There was a less noble motivation too. Fran had married Duncan, hadn’t she? If she refused Perez, wouldn’t that mean she loved him less than Hunter, with his affairs and his wild parties? Perez was tortured by the possibility of rejection, but couldn’t let the idea go.

He poured another mug of coffee then called Fran’s mobile. He wanted to talk to her and was willing to put up with a background noise of laughter and traffic. She answered almost immediately.

‘Jimmy? How lovely to hear you.’

‘Is it convenient?’ Why did he always sound so formal when he spoke to her on the phone? He might have been talking to one of his colleagues.

‘Brilliant timing. We’ve come to an exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Mum and Dad have taken Cassie off to look at dinosaurs and I’ve sneaked off to grab a decent cup of coffee.’ He could imagine her face lit up with enthusiasm, wondered what she was wearing. He’d like to picture that too. Would she think it weird if he asked her?

‘I’m at home,’ he said. ‘I’ve sneaked off for a quick coffee too. And I wanted to talk to you in peace.’

‘I wish I was there.’

Come home then. Get on the first flight from Heathrow to Aberdeen and I’ll book you on to the last Loganair. You could be back this evening.

Because that was racing through his mind and he was thinking about the practicalities of the plan – he supposed she would need to pack her bags, so after all there wouldn’t be time – he realized suddenly that there was a silence between them. She was waiting for a reply. ‘You don’t know,’ he said, ‘how much I miss you.’

In his head the haunting, ludicrous chant. Marry me. Marry me. Marry me. She would despise him and think him sentimental all over again.