Peter May - The Lewis Man

Finally Marsaili said, ‘How can you afford it?’

Fin shrugged. ‘I have a bit put by. And it’s not my intention to remain unemployed for ever.’

More silence hung heavy between them. A silence born of regret. Of all their failures, individually and together.

Fin said, ‘How did your exams go?’

‘Don’t ask.’

He nodded. ‘I guess you weren’t exactly best prepared.’

‘No.’

He drew a deep breath. ‘Marsaili, I have some news for you. About your dad.’ Blue eyes fixed him in their gaze, filled with naked curiosity. ‘Why don’t we get out of here, get some fresh air. It’s a beautiful night out there, and there won’t be a soul on the beach.’

The night was filled with the whispering sound of the sea. It sighed, as if relieved by the removal of its obligation to maintain an angry demeanour. A three-quarters moon rose into the blackness above it and cast its light upon the water and the sand, a light that threw shadows and obscured truths in half-lit faces. The air was soft, and pregnant with the prospect of coming summer, a poetry in the night, carried in the shallow waves that burst like bubbling Hippocrene all along the beach.

Fin and Marsaili walked close enough to feel each other’s warmth, leaving tracks in virgin sand.

‘There was a time,’ Fin said, ‘when I would have held your hand when we walked along a beach like this.’

Marsaili turned a look of surprise towards him. ‘Can you read minds now?’

And Fin thought how completely natural it would have been, and how immediately embarrassing. He laughed. ‘Remember how I dropped that sack of crabs off the cliff on top of you girls sunbathing down here?’

‘I remember slapping you so hard I hurt my hand.’

Fin grinned ruefully. ‘I remember that, too. I also remember you were topless at the time.’

‘Damned peeping Tom!’

He smiled. ‘And I recall making love to you among the rocks back there, and skinny-dipping in the ocean afterwards to cool down.’ When she didn’t react he turned to look at her and saw a distant look in her eyes, thoughts transporting her to some far-off place and time.

They were almost at the boat shed now. It loomed out of the darkness like a portent of past and future pain, and he put his hand lightly on her shoulder to turn her back the way they had come. Already the sea was washing up over their footprints, erasing any history of their ever having passed this way. He left his arm around her shoulder and felt her lean in to him as he steered her a little further up the beach, away from the water.

They walked in silence for almost half its length until they stopped, by some mutual unspoken consent, and he turned her towards him. Her face was in shadow, and he put a finger under her chin to turn it up to the light. At first she wouldn’t meet his eye.

‘I remember the little girl who took me in hand that first day at school,’ he said. ‘And walked me up the road to the Crobost stores and told me that her name was Marjorie, but that she preferred her Gaelic name of Marsaili. That same little girl who decided that my English name was ugly, and shortened it to Fin. Which is what everyone has called me for the rest of my life.’

She smiled now, a smile touched by sadness, and finally met his eye. ‘And I remember how I used to love you, Fin Macleod.’ Moonlight shimmered in the tears that brimmed in her eyes. ‘Not sure I ever stopped.’

He leaned in, then, until their lips touched. Warm, tentative, uncertain. And finally they kissed. A soft, sweet kiss full of everything they had once been, and everything they had since lost. His eyes closed, and the regrets and passions of a lifetime washed over him.

And then it was over. She stepped back, breaking free of his arms, and looked at him in the dark. Searching eyes full of fear and doubt. Then she turned and walked away towards the rocks. He stood for a moment watching her go, then had to run to catch her up. When he did she said, without breaking stride, ‘What did you find out about my dad?’

‘I found out that he’s not Tormod Macdonald.’

She stopped dead and turned her frown towards him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he borrowed, or stole, that identity off a dead boy from Harris. His name was actually Donald John Gillies, and he came from the Isle of Eriskay. The young man they took out of the bog was his brother, Donald Peter.’

Marsaili gaped at him in disbelief.

‘Only Donald John isn’t his real name either.’ He saw her whole world falling apart in the look of pain that creased her eyes. All the certainties of her life shifting beneath her feet like the sand she stood on.

‘I don’t understand …’

And he told her everything that he had learned, and how he had learned it. She listened in silence, her face paler than the moon, and in the end put a hand on his arm to steady herself.

‘My dad was a homer?’

Fin nodded. ‘An orphan in all probability. Or a child in care, shipped out to the islands with his brother by the Catholic Church.’

She slumped down into the sand, sitting cross-legged, her face falling forward into open hands. At first he thought she was crying, but when she took her face out of her hands it was dry. Shock had blunted all other emotions. Fin sat down beside her. She gazed out over the transient benevolence of the sea and said, ‘It’s strange. You think you know who you are, because you think you know who your parents are. Some things are just …’ she searched for the word ‘…unquestioned, unquestionable.’ She shook her head. ‘And then suddenly you learn that your whole life has been based on a lie, and you’ve no idea who you are any more.’ She turned to look at him, eyes wide with disillusion. ‘Did my dad kill his brother?’

And Fin realized then that while for him it might be possible to accept the idea that her father’s true origins and who murdered his brother might never be discovered, Marsaili could not rest until she knew the truth. ‘I don’t know.’ He put an arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

They sat like that for a long time, listening to the slow, steady pulse of the ocean, drenched in moonlight, until he felt her trembling with the cold. But she made no attempt to move. ‘I went to see him, just before I left for Glasgow, and found him sitting in the rain. He thought he was on a boat. The Claymore , he said it was, sailing from the mainland.’ She turned to look at Fin, her eyes clouded and sad. ‘I thought he was just rambling. Something he’d seen on television or read in a book. At first he called me Catherine, and then Ceit, like I was someone he knew. Not his daughter. And he talked about someone else called Big Kenneth.’

‘Beinn Ruigh Choinnich. It’s the mountain that shelters the harbour at Lochboisdale. They would have seen it from the ferry, from a long way off.’ He reached out a hand to brush stray hairs from her eyes. ‘What else did he say, Marsaili?’

‘Nothing that made much sense. At least, not then. He was talking to Ceit, not me. He said he would never forget their days at The Dean. Or the turrets at Danny’s. Something like that. Reminding them of their place in the world.’ She looked at him with pain etched in every line of her face. ‘And something else, that takes on a whole different meaning now.’ She closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly. Then opened them wide. ‘He said, we didn’t do too bad for a couple of orphan waifs.’

There must have been light in Fin’s eyes, because she frowned, canting her head, staring at him. ‘What is it?’

And if she had seen light, it was the light of revelation. He said, ‘Marsaili, I think maybe I know exactly what he meant when he talked about The Dean. And Danny’s turrets. And it must mean that Ceit, the girl who boarded with the widow O’Henley, came with them on the boat.’ And he thought, maybe there is someone after all who still knows the truth . He stood, then, and offered Marsaili his hand. She pulled herself up to stand beside him. He said, ‘If we can get seats, we should try to be on the first flight to Edinburgh tomorrow.’