Peter May - The Lewis Man

From the kitchen window at the back of the modern bungalow that the Macdonalds had chosen as their retirement home, she could see quite plainly the collection of white and yellow buildings where she had once lived, and the red-brown brick of the tower that had weathered countless seasons of relentless assault to warn men at sea of hidden dangers.

Fin glanced from the window as Mrs Macdonald made them tea, and saw a rainbow forming, vivid against a bank of black cloud off the point, a dazzle of sunlight burnishing the troubled surface of the ocean, from here like dimpled copper. The peat stack in the small patch of garden at the back was severely diminished, and he wondered who cut their peat for them now.

He was barely aware of the old lady’s inconsequential babbling. She was excited to see him. So many years it had been since the last time, she said. He had been struck, the moment he entered the house, by the smell of roses that had always accompanied Marsaili’s mother. It brought back a flood of memories. Home-made lemonade in the dark farmhouse kitchen with its stone-flagged floor. The games that he and Marsaili had played amongst the hay bales in the barn. Her mother’s soft English cadences, alien to his ear then, and unchanged now, even after all these years.

‘We need some background information about Dad,’ he heard Marsaili saying. ‘For the records at the care home.’ They had agreed that it might be better if they kept the truth from her for the moment. ‘And I’d like to take some of the old family photo albums to talk through with him. They say photographs help to stimulate memory.’

Mrs Macdonald was only too happy to dig out the family snapshots, and wanted to sit and go through the albums with them. It was so rarely these days that they had company, she said, speaking in the plural, as if the banishing of Tormod from her life had never happened. A kind of denial. Or a coded message. Subject not up for discussion.

There were nearly a dozen albums. The most recent were bound in garish floral covers. The older ones were a more sombre chequered green. The oldest had been inherited from her parents, and contained a collection of faded black and white prints of people long dead, dressed in fashions from another age.

‘That’s your grandfather,’ she told Marsaili, pointing at a picture of a tall man with a mop of curly dark hair behind the cracked glaze of a faded and over-exposed print. ‘And your grandmother.’ A small woman with long, fair hair and a slightly ironic smile. ‘What do you think, Fin? Marsaili’s double, isn’t she?’ She was so like Marsaili it was uncanny.

She moved, then, on to her wedding photographs. Lurid Sixties colours, flared trousers, tank-tops and floral shirts with absurdly long collars. Long hair, fringes and sideburns. Fin felt almost embarrassed for them, and wondered how future generations might view photographs of him in his youth. Whatever is a la mode today somehow seems ridiculous in retrospect.

Tormod himself would have been around twenty-five then, with a fine head of thick hair curling around his face. Fin might have had difficulty recognising him as the same man whose glasses he had fished out of the urinal only yesterday, if it hadn’t been for the vivid memories he had from his childhood of a big, strong man in dark-blue overalls and a cloth cap permanently pushed back on his head.

‘Do you have any older pictures of Tormod?’ he said.

But Mrs Macdonald just shook her head. ‘Nothing from before the wedding. We didn’t have a camera when we were winching.’

‘What about photographs of his family, his childhood?’

She shrugged. ‘He didn’t have any. Or, at least, never brought any with him from Harris.’

‘What happened to his parents?’

She refilled her cup from a pot kept warm in a knitted cosy, and offered refills to Fin and Marsaili.

‘I’m fine, thanks, Mrs Macdonald,’ Fin said.

‘You were going to tell us about Dad’s parents, Mum,’ Marsaili prompted her.

She blew air through loosely pursed lips. ‘Nothing to tell, darling. They were dead before I ever knew him.’

‘Was there no one from his side of the family at the wedding?’ Fin asked.

Mrs Macdonald shook her head. ‘Not a one. He was an only child, you see. And I think most, if not all, of his family had emigrated to Canada some time in the fifties. He never talked much about them.’ She paused and seemed lost for a moment as if searching through distant thoughts. They waited to see if she would come back to them with one. Eventually she said, ‘It’s strange …’ But didn’t elucidate.

‘What’s strange, Mum?’

‘He was a very religious man, your father. As you know. Church every Sunday morning. Bible reading in the afternoon. Grace before meals.’

Marsaili glanced at Fin, offering him a rueful smile. ‘How could I forget?’

‘A very fair man. Honest, and without prejudice in almost everything except …’

‘I know.’ Marsaili grinned. ‘He hated Catholics. Papes and Fenians, he called them.’

Her mother shook her head. ‘I never approved. My father was Church of England, which is not that different from Catholicism. Without the Pope, of course. But, still, it was an unreasonable hatred he had of them.’

Marsaili shrugged. ‘I was never sure whether or not he was entirely serious.’

‘Oh, he was serious, all right.’

‘So what’s strange, Mrs Macdonald?’ Fin tried to steer her back to her original thought.

She looked at him blankly for a moment before the memory returned. ‘Oh. Yes. I was going through some of his things last night. He’s accumulated a lot of rubbish over the years. I don’t know why he keeps the half of it. In old shoeboxes and cupboards and drawers in the spare room. He used to spend hours in there going through stuff. I have no idea why.’ She sipped her tea. ‘Anyway, I found something at the bottom of one of those shoeboxes that seemed … well, out of character somehow.’

‘What, Mum?’ Marsaili was intrigued.

‘Wait, I’ll show you.’ She got up and left the room, returning less than half a minute later to sit down again between them on the settee. She opened her right hand over the coffee table in front of them, and a silver chain and small, round, tarnished medallion spilled on to the open pages of the wedding album.

Fin and Marsaili leaned closer to get a better look, and Marsaili picked it up, turning it over. ‘Saint Christopher,’ she said. ‘Patron saint of travellers.’

Fin craned and tilted his head to see the worn figure of Saint Christopher leaning on his staff, as he carried the Christ child through storms and troubled waters. Saint Christopher Protect Us was engraved around the edge of it.

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Macdonald, ‘as I understand it, the Catholic Church removed his status as a saint about forty years ago, but it still belongs to a very Catholic tradition. What your father was doing with it is beyond me.’

Fin reached out to take it from Marsaili. ‘Could we borrow this, Mrs Macdonald? It might be interesting to see if it stimulates any memories.’

Mrs Macdonald waved a dismissive hand. ‘Of course. Take it. Keep it. Throw it away if you like. It’s of no use to me.’

Fin dropped a reluctant Marsaili off at the bungalow. He had persuaded her it might be better if she let him talk to Tormod on his own first. The old man would have so many memories associated with Marsaili that it might cloud his recollection. He didn’t tell her that he had other business he wanted to attend to en route.

His car was barely out of sight of the cottage when he turned off the road, and up the narrow asphalt track and over the cattle grid to the sprawling car park in front of Crobost Church. It was a bleak, uncompromising building. No carved stonework or religious friezes, no stained-glass windows, no bell in the bell tower. This was God without distraction. A God who regarded entertainment as sin, art as religious effigy. There was no organ or piano inside. Only the plaintive chanting of the faithful rang around its rafters on the Sabbath.