Peter May - The Blackhouse

I had no idea what to do with my aunt’s things. I went into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Her clothes hung in silent rows, colours obscured by the shadow of her death. She had kept trousers and skirts and blouses years beyond her ability to wear them. It was as if she had harboured somewhere the hope that one day she might find again the person she had been in the sixties. Young, slim, attractive, her whole life ahead of her.

I did not want to spend a single night in this house. But I had nowhere else to stay, and so as night fell I lit a fire, wrapped myself in a blanket and slept on the settee in front of it, flitting in and out of strange dreams in which my aunt and Mr Macinnes were dancing together across an empty dancefloor.

I wakened to the sound of banging. It was broad daylight. I looked at my watch and saw that I had slept for nearly ten hours. There was someone knocking at the door. I answered it, still wrapped in my blanket, screwing my eyes up against the glare of sunshine to find myself squinting at a woman called Morag. She was a second cousin, I think, but much older than me. I’m not sure that I had seen her since my parents’ funeral.

‘Fin. I thought it must be you. I could smell the peat smoke, so I knew there was someone at home. I’ve got a key, but I didn’t like to use it if there was somebody in. You know the funeral’s today?’

I nodded blearily, and remembered that my aunt had never had a good word to say for Morag. But as it turned out it was Morag, in the absence of anyone else, who had organized everything to do with the funeral. ‘You’d better come in.’

And it was Morag who solved the problem of my aunt’s things. There was stuff, she said, that her family could use, and what they couldn’t, she would take to the charity shop in Stornoway. ‘You know, someone’s thrown out all your old toys.’ She was indignant. ‘I found them at the bin. I’ve put them in the boot so they don’t go to waste.’ And some other kid, I thought, would build a new set of memories around them. I just hoped they would be happier ones than mine.

There weren’t many people at the church. A few distant relatives, a few diehard villagers who went to every funeral, a handful of nosy neighbours, curious perhaps to learn a little more about the weird old woman who had lived in splendid isolation in the whitehouse by the harbour. It wasn’t until the end of the service when I rose and turned towards the door, the Gaelic psalms still ringing in my ears, that I saw Artair and Marsaili slipping out together from a pew at the back. They must have known I was up there at the front, and yet they turned away quickly through the door, almost as if they were trying to avoid me.

But then they were there among the group of mourners outside the house fifteen minutes later when a dozen of us gathered on the cliff to take the frail remains of my aunt on her final journey. Artair acknowledged me with a nod and a shake of the hand, and we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder when we lifted the coffin off the backs of the chairs placed out on the tarmac. I’m sure the coffin was heavier than my aunt was. I saw Marsaili standing in black among the group of women who watched as the men began the long walk to the cemetery. This time I caught her eye, but only for a moment. She glanced quickly down towards the ground, as if overcome by grief. She had known my aunt only a little, and liked her even less. So it couldn’t have been my aunt she mourned.

It wasn’t until we had put my aunt in the ground, and left the gravediggers to cover her over, that Artair spoke to me for the first time. A small group of us straggled back through the headstones towards the gate of the cemetery, battered by the wind shearing in off the Atlantic. He said, ‘How’s university?’

‘Not what it’s cracked up to be, Artair.’

He nodded as if he understood. ‘You like it down there, in Glasgow?’

‘It’s alright. Better than here.’

We were at the gate before anything more was said. We let the others through, and I hung back with him as he closed it. He turned to look at me, and it felt like a very long time before he spoke. ‘Something you should know, Fin.’ He took a deep breath and I heard the rattle of phlegm in his tubes. ‘Marsaili and I got married.’

I don’t know why — I mean, I had no right — but I felt a hot flush of anger and jealousy. ‘Oh? Congratulations.’

Of course, he knew I didn’t mean it. But what else could I have said? He nodded acknowledgement. ‘Thanks.’ And we set off across the machair to catch up with the others.

Marsaili was out at the peat stack filling a bucket. She wore jeans, and wellingtons and a thick woollen jumper. For once her hair was unclasped and was blowing all around her face. With the wind driving down from the north she did not hear Fin’s car pulling in at the top of the drive. A tiny Daewoo, the colour of vomit, which he had rented in town on a cheap oneday hire. All along the line of the coast below her, the sea broke in angry white wreaths, winding itself up for the storm gathering in the north-west like an invading army.

‘Marsaili.’

She stood up, startled by his voice at her shoulder, and she wheeled around, surprised to see him, and then alarmed by what she saw in his face. ‘Fin, what is it?’

‘You must have known that he was beating the boy.’ And she closed her eyes and let the bucket drop to the ground, spilling its peats all over the turf.

‘I tried to stop it, Fin. I did.’

‘Not hard enough.’ His tone was harsh, accusing.

She opened her eyes and he saw the tears collecting there, preparing themselves to spill. ‘You can’t imagine what he’s like. At first, when Fionnlagh was wee, and I saw the bruising, I couldn’t believe it. I thought it must have been an accident. But there’s a limit to the number of accidents you can have.’

‘Why didn’t you take him and leave?’

‘I tried, believe me, I did. I wanted to. But he told me if I ever left, he would come after us. Wherever we went he would find us, he said. And he would kill Fionnlagh.’ Her eyes desperately sought Fin’s understanding. But he was like stone.

‘You could have done something !’

‘I did. I stayed. And I did everything I could to stop the beatings. He would never do it if I was around. So I tried always to be there. To protect him, to keep him safe. But it wasn’t always possible. Poor Fionnlagh. He was wonderful.’ The tears ran freely down her face now. ‘He took it all like it was something to be expected. He never cried. He never complained. He just took it.’

Fin found himself shaking. With rage and pain. ‘Jesus, Marsaili, why?’

‘I don’t know!’ She almost shouted it at him. ‘It’s like he was doing it to get at me for some reason. Whatever it is that happened out on that bloody rock, whatever it is you’re not telling me, either of you, it changed him beyond recognition.’

‘You know what happened, Marsaili!’ Fin lifted his arms in a hopeless gesture, and then let them fall again in frustration.

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’ And she looked at him long and hard, baffled by his obduracy. ‘It changed all of us, you know that, Fin. But Artair was the worst. I wasn’t aware of it at first. I think he was hiding it from me. But then, after Fionnlagh was born, it just started coming out of him, like poison.’

Fin’s mobile started ringing in his pocket. Scotland the Brave . Cheerful and jaunty. Ludicrously inappropriate in the circumstance. They stood staring at each other, the ridiculous ringtone fibrillating in the wind. ‘Well, aren’t you going to answer the stupid thing?’

No one on the island knew his number. So it had to be someone from the mainland. ‘No.’ He waited for the answering service to pick it up, and was relieved when the ringing stopped.