Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘I’d better go.’ Fin moved past her to the door.

‘What about your tea?’

He stopped and turned, and their eyes met again, and he wanted to run the back of his hand gently across the softness of her cheek. ‘Some other time.’ And he went down the steps to the path and hurried up it to where he had left Gunn’s car at the side of the road.

A sense that they had all wasted their lives, that they had somehow missed their chances through stupidity or neglect, lay heavy on his shoulders, pulling him down into deep dejection. His mood was not helped by the bruising clouds gathering themselves on the Minch, nor by the Arctic breath carried on a stiffening breeze. He turned the car and drove up the hill and out of Crobost to the turnoff that led down to the harbour, drawing in beside the old whitehouse where he had lived with his aunt for nearly ten years. He got out of the car and stood breathing deeply, facing into the wind, the sound of the sea breaking on the pebble beach below.

His aunt’s house was all closed up, neglected, willed to a charity for cats which had been unable to sell it, and then ignored it. He felt as if he ought to have some emotional response to the place, considering how long he had lived there. But it left him cold. His aunt had never treated him badly, and yet still he could only associate it with unhappiness. No single memory. Just a dark, amorphous cloud of despondency that he found hard to explain, even to himself. It stood looking out across the bay, where fishing boats had once brought their catch for processing in the salt houses built into the hill above the shore. Only the stony remains of their foundations provided testimony now to the fact that they had ever existed. Out on the headland stood three tall cairns. They had fascinated Fin as a boy, and he had visited them often, replacing stones occasionally displaced by unusually ferocious storms. Three men returning from the Second World War had built them there, his aunt had told him. No one knew why, and the men were long dead. Fin wondered if anybody bothered to repair them now.

He walked down the hill to the tiny Crobost harbour, where he and Artair had sat so often throwing stones into deep, still water. A stout steel cable snaked down the slipway from the winchhouse above the harbour, a large hook on the end of it. The winchhouse was a square, harled box of a building with two openings at the front and a door in the side. Fin pushed the door open, and the big, green-painted diesel motor sat in silent witness to the thousands of boats it had lowered into the water, or pulled from it. The key was in the ignition, and from impulse he turned it and the motor coughed but wouldn’t start. He adjusted the choke and tried again, and it spat and spluttered and caught this time, thundering away in the dark enclosed space. Someone was still maintaining it in good order. He switched it off, and the silence seemed deafening in the aftermath of its roar.

Outside, half a dozen small boats were pulled up along the edge of the slipway, angled against the foot of the cliff, one behind the other. Fin recognized the faded sky blue of the Mayflower . Hard to believe it was still in use after all these years. Above the winchhouse, the skeleton of a boat long since fallen into desuetude lay tipped over, keelside up. The last flakes of purple paint lay curling along her spine. Fin stooped down to wipe away the green slime covering the remaining planks on her bow and saw there, in faded white letters, his mother’s name, Eilidh , where his father had carefully painted it the day before he launched her. And all the regrets of his life rose up inside him like water in a spring, and he knelt beside the boat and wept.

Crobost cemetery was out on the machair above the west shore beyond the school, where the village had buried its dead in the sandy soil for hundreds of years. Gravestones rose up like prickly spines over the brow of the hill. Thousands of them. Generations of Niseachs with a last and eternal view of the sea which had both given them life and taken it away. Rings of white foam broke upon the shore below as Fin picked his way through all the names of those who had gone before. All the Macleods and Mackenzies, Macdonalds and Murrays. The Donalds and Morags, Kenneths and Margarets. It was exposed here to the full fury of the Atlantic gales, and little by little the sea had eaten away at the machair until it had been necessary for the villagers to build defences against it to stop the bones of their ancestors being washed away with the soil.

Fin finally found the graves of his parents. John Angus Macleod, thirty-eight years old, loving husband of Eilidh, thirty-five. Two flat stones laid in the grass side by side. He had never been back since the day they were put in the ground and he had stood and watched the first spades of earth rattling across the coffin lids. He stood now with the wind blowing full in his face and thought what a waste it had been. So many lives had been touched by their deaths. Changed by them. How very different everything might have been.

FIFTEEN

Usually I slept the sleep of the dead. But that night I was restless. Not that I could claim in any way to have had a premonition of what was to come. It was more likely to have been the bed. It was my old bed, where I had slept the first three years of my life, before my father made the attic rooms. It was built into a recess of the wall in the kitchen where we spent most of our lives. It was a kind of wooden stall with cupboard space below it to store linens, and a curtain that pulled over to screen it off from the rest of the room.

I had always felt warm and secure there, hearing the murmur of my parents’ voices in the room beyond the curtains before I went to sleep, and waking to the smell of the peats, and toast, and the sound of porridge bubbling on the stove. It had taken me a long time to get used to the cold isolation of my new room in the roof of the house, but now that I had, I found it hard to sleep again in my old bed. But that is where I was that night, because my aunt was babysitting, and she did not want to have to run up and down stairs all evening.

I must have been drifting in and out of sleep, because the first thing I remember was the sound of voices out in the hall, and a cold draught that found its way through the house and into my stall from an open door somewhere. I slipped barefoot out of bed, wearing only my pyjamas. The room was lit by the glowing embers in the hearth, and by a strange blue light that flashed around the walls. It took me a moment to realize it was coming from outside. The curtains weren’t drawn, so I padded to the window to peer out, and saw a police car sitting on the road, blurred by rain running down the glass. The blue flashing light on its roof was almost mesmeric. I saw figures in the path, then heard the sound of a woman’s voice, wailing as if in pain.

I had no idea what was happening, still half asleep and disorientated when the door opened. Lights came on in the room, nearly blinding me. My aunt was there, pale as a ghost, and chill air rushed in behind her to wrap itself around me like a big cold blanket. I saw a police officer, and a woman in uniform behind her. But these are just fragments of recollection. I can give you no really clear account of what happened. I remember only the sudden soft warmth of my aunt’s breasts as she knelt in front of me and clutched me to her, and the sobbing that punctuated her breathing as she said, over and over, ‘The poor laddie. The poor wee laddie.’

It was really the next day before I understood that my parents were dead. If an eight-year-old can ever understand what death is. I knew that they had been to a dance in Stornoway the night before, and I knew now that they weren’t ever coming back. It is a difficult concept to handle at that age. I recall being angry with them. Why weren’t they coming back? Didn’t they know I would miss them? Didn’t they care? But I had spent more than enough time in church to have a decent grasp of the notion of Heaven and Hell. They were places you went when you died. Either to one or the other. And so when my aunt told me my parents had gone to Heaven, I had a sort of rough idea where that was, somewhere beyond the sky, and that once you went there it was for ever. The only thing I couldn’t grasp was why.