Peter May - The Lewis Man

He turned up at the Sacred Heart in his old van and slid open the side door to let us climb in the back. We drove the twenty minutes down to Ludagh in silence. At the ferry, Neil Campbell asked after us both, and he and Donald Seamus passed a few words, but still he never spoke to us. When we climbed on to the jetty at Haunn, I could see Ceit watching from the door of the O’Henley croft, a tiny figure in blue on the hillside. She waved, but I didn’t dare wave back.

Donald Seamus marched us up the hill to the croft, where Mary-Anne was waiting for us inside, our dinner cooking on the stove, the room filled with the smell of good things to eat. She turned as we came in the door, and gave us a good looking over, but she too said nothing, turning instead back to the pots on her hotplate.

The first words spoken were the grace said in thanks to the Lord for the food on our plates, and then Mary-Anne served us up a meal fit for a king. I wasn’t big on the bible then, but I was minded of the story of the prodigal son, and how his father had welcomed him home as if nothing had happened. We gulped down thick, hot vegetable soup and cleaned our plates with hunks of soft bread torn from a fresh loaf. We had a meat stew and boiled tatties, and bread and butter pudding to finish. I am not sure if I have ever enjoyed a meal so much in my life.

Afterwards, I changed into my dungarees and my wellies and went out to feed the animals, the hens and the pony. Not so easy with your left forearm in plaster. But it felt good to be back. And maybe, for the first time in a year and a half of being there, it felt like home. I went down the croft then, looking for Morag. I was sure she must have missed me, though perhaps a part of me was half afraid that she had forgotten me in my absence. But I couldn’t find her anywhere, and after nearly half an hour of searching I went back up to the house.

Donald Seamus was in his chair by the stove, smoking his pipe. He turned around as the door opened.

‘Where’s Morag?’ I said.

There was an odd dull look in his eyes. ‘You just ate her, son.’

I never let him see how his cruelty affected me, or gave any hint of the tears I cried silently under the covers that night. But he wasn’t finished with me.

The next day he took me up to the shed where they kill the sheep. I’m not sure what it was about that old hut with its rusted tin roof, but you knew the minute you went into it that it was a place of death. I’d never seen a sheep slaughtered before, but Donald Seamus was determined that it was time that I did. ‘Animals are for eating,’ he said. ‘Not for affection.’

He pulled a young sheep into the shed and hauled it up on to its hind legs. He got me to hold it by the horns, struggling while he placed a bucket beneath it, and then he slid out a long, sharp knife that flashed as it caught the light from the tiny window. In one quick, short movement, he drew it across the major artery in the neck and blood spurted out of it into the bucket.

I thought the beast would struggle more, but it gave up on its life almost immediately, big hopeless eyes looking up at me till the blood had all been spilled and the light went out of them.

The same look I saw in Peter’s eyes that night on Charlie’s beach when his throat was cut, too.

The boy’s sitting staring at me now, as if he expects me to say something. In a strange way, I see me in his eyes, and I reach across to take his hand in mine. Damned tears! They blur everything. I feel him squeeze my hand and everything my life is, and has been, seems black with despair.

‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’

The old cemetery was full to overflowing behind its lichen-covered stone walls, spilling over now into a new one dug into the machair as it rose up the hillside towards the church.

Fin parked his car and walked among the headstones in this extended home for the dead. Death was a crowd, even on a tiny island like this. Crosses growing out of the ground, brutally stark in such a treeless place. So many souls passed from one life to another. All in the shadow of the church where once they had worshipped. A church paid for by fishermen. A church with the bow of a boat beneath its altar table.

On the far side of the fence stood a modern, single-storey bungalow with a conservatory at the back overlooking the Sound. But this was no private dwelling. A red board fixed to the gable end, and an oval sign on the wall of the ramp that led to its side door, revealed it to be a pub, Am Politician . A handy watering hole for the dead, Fin thought, en route from the church to the graveyard, or for their mourners at least. A place to drown their sorrows.

There was a pink, soft-top Mercedes in the car park. A yappy Yorkie dog barked at him from the other side of the glass as he passed it.

It was quiet in the pub, only a handful of customers nursing drinks on this late afternoon. Fin ordered a beer from a garrulous young woman behind the bar who was anxious to explain to him that the pub was named after the boat, The Politician , which had foundered in the Sound en route to the Caribbean during the war.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘anyone who has read Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore will know that its cargo included 28,000 cases of fine malt whisky. And that the islanders spent most of the next six months “rescuing” it and hiding it from the excise man.’

As she produced three bottles reputed to have come from the wreck, still with whisky in them, Fin wondered how many times she had told the story.

He sipped on his pint and changed the subject. ‘That beach on the west side of the island,’ he said. ‘Beyond the cemetery.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why would anyone call it Charlie’s beach?’

The girl shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard it called that.’ She turned and called over to an older woman who was sitting alone in the conservatory gazing out over the Sound while toying with her gin and tonic. ‘Morag, have you ever heard the beach down by called Charlie’s beach?’

Morag turned, and Fin saw that she must have been a striking woman in her day. She had strong features and smooth, tanned skin beneath a chaotic pile of thick, dyed blond hair, giving perhaps the impression of a woman in her fifties, although he could see that she was probably nearer seventy. Both wrists dangled with silver and gold, fingers crusted with rings, and she took a sip of her G amp; T, holding her glass in an elegant hand adorned with long, fuchsia-pink nails. She wore a patterned bolero jacket over a white blouse above diaphanous blue skirts. She was not at all someone you would expect to find in a place like this.

She directed a beatific smile towards them. ‘I have no idea, a ghraidh ,’ she said speaking in English, but using the Gaelic term of endearment. ‘But if I were to take a guess, I’d say it would probably be because that’s where the French frigate, the Du Teillay , landed Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Seven Men of Moidart to raise an army for the ‘45 Jacobite rebellion against the English.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ the girl said.

Morag shook her head. ‘They teach you children nothing in school these days. Charlie reputedly sheltered in a cove down there called Coilleag a’ Phrionnsa . The Prince’s Dell.’ She turned rich, brown eyes on Fin. ‘Who wants to know?’

Fin lifted his pint and crossed into the conservatory to shake her hand. ‘Fin Macleod. I’m trying to trace the family who used to live on the croft just below your house.’

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh. You know who I am, then?’

He smiled. ‘Not before I got to the island, no. But it didn’t take long for someone to tell me. I’m making a wild guess here, and it’s nothing to do with the pink Merc in the car park. You’re the actress, Morag McEwan?’