Skinner's mission

26

It was another fine evening. The lights of Edinburgh shone brightly across the dark waters of the Forth Estuary as Bob gazed out of the dining-room window of the Green Craigs Hotel. Across the table, his daughter sat quietly, her coffee cooling in its cup.

‘So that’s the story, Alexis.

‘That’s why I’m out here, and that’s why Sarah and your wee brother are in Edinburgh. Irreconcilable differences, you lawyers call it.’

Alex looked at him anxiously. ‘Come on, Pops. Not irreconcilable, surely? You can work things out between you. Look, I know you think that what Sarah did was wrong, and if you force me to it, I agree with you.

‘But you have to ask yourself why she did it. Surely it was for you, because she was worried about you and because she loves you.’

He looked back from the window. ‘I wish it was as easy as that, sweetheart, I really do. You think I didn’t ask myself why she did it? I did, and I asked her, and I saw the same answer both times.

‘Sarah didn’t manipulate your Uncle Jimmy for me, she did it for her, to stop me from doing something she didn’t want me to do. Because that something involves your mother.

‘I can’t reconcile that with the Sarah I fell in love with and married. It’s a part of her I didn’t know was there. She looks at me now and she sees a different man, and that’s true too. But. .’

He paused and looked across at her and she could see the depth of his hurt. ‘Alex, am I a selfish man?’ he asked, quietly.

She looked at him and shook her flowing, wavy locks. ‘Pops, you. . and my fiancé. . are the two least selfish men I know.’

‘Well that’s not how Sarah sees it. By her way of it I am selfish in my determination to investigate your mother’s death. Yet when I try to explain to her that this is something that I have to do, she won’t see it that way. She sees it as my own selfish mission.

‘“Myra is dead. Let her stay dead.” That’s what she demands. As if I could bring her back to life!’ He said it suddenly and bitterly.

He reached across the table and squeezed his daughter’s hand. ‘Come on. Let’s go back to Gullane. There’s something I want to show you.’

He paid the bill and they drove home, up the mile-long straight and through Aberlady. They sat in gathering silence. As Bob steered smoothly round the curve where Myra had died, it became unbearable.

‘I miss her too, Pops,’ said Alex at last, her faced framed in the amber glow of the dashboard. ‘Every day of my life I think of her. All those years, when you were being father and mother rolled into one I still couldn’t help missing Mum.’ Her voice faltered.

‘I never expected you to stop missing her, my darling,’ Bob whispered. ‘It’s just that I did my best not to, myself. But now the dam has burst.’

The Goose Green was quiet as usual, as he parked in front of the cottage, beside Alex’s Metro, and led her indoors.

The projector was set up on the dining-room table, a reel of film loaded and ready to run. He sat Alex down on a straight-backed dining chair and turned off the lights. ‘I want you to see this,’ he said.

The film flickered white at first then into life. Alex stared at the beautiful young woman in her strikingly effective bikini. As the camera shot widened and panned out she recognised Gullane beach, thronged with day trippers on a bright summer’s day. The tide was almost full.

Her hand went to her mouth as she saw the toddler. The little girl, wearing nothing but a sun-hat and a smile, as she lurched and staggered in the sand, falling backwards, laughing, at her mother’s feet.

The film rolled on. When it finished and Bob switched on the light, she was in tears. ‘Oh Pops,’ she said, quietly as he stilled the spinning reel. ‘How beautiful she was. The photos don’t do her any sort of justice.’

‘No,’ said Bob, quietly. ‘They don’t, do they. She was alive, your mother, in a way that very few people are. She was bright, funny, wanton and loving. She lit the place up. We had only lived here for a few years, but the whole village turned out for her funeral. Everybody.’ He smiled. ‘Even a certain wee man that your fiancé is currently trying very hard to lock up. I remember how touched I was by the turnout, and I remember noticing how shocked everyone was.’

He began to rewind the film. ‘There are more movies of the two of you together,’ he said, ‘and others as well. I’ll have them all transferred to video, save one. That’ll come to you after I’m dead.

‘Meantime — and it’ll be a long meantime, mind — there’s something else I want you to have. It’s under the table, out of the way.’

Alex looked down, and saw the trunk. ‘That? It’s the old box from the attic. The one you told me not to touch. You were so serious about it that I never dared.

‘What’s in it?’

Her father reached across the table and squeezed her hand once again. ‘Your mother’s life is in it. Everything about her. Her Highers certificate, her College diploma, her photographs, records of her teaching career, some of her favourite books, some of her clothes: I put them all in there after she died, in a sort of time capsule. With them, you’ll find the diaries that she kept so faithfully all her years. Everything of her is in there.

‘I could never bring myself to reopen it, save once. I should have given it to you a long time ago. I want you to take it now, away from here; through to Glasgow, not to Andy’s.

‘When you’re alone, and only then, open it, and go through everything. Learn about your mother. Read the diaries. I suppose she was writing them for you, in a way, writing down all the things she did, that we did, that we talked about.

‘When you’ve finished, you should decide what’s to be done with everything that’s in there. Whether you should keep it, to show your daughter eventually; whether some things should come back to me. Each of those decisions will be yours.’

He pulled the trunk from under the table and stood it on end. Alex heard its contents shift inside. ‘Open the door,’ he said, ‘and I’ll carry it out to your car. It’s been gathering dust for far too long.’

‘Okay,’ said his daughter. ‘I was going to stay tonight, if you wanted, but if you don’t mind I’ll go back through to Glasgow now. Andy isn’t expecting me or anything.’

She hugged him as he stood there. ‘Pops, I don’t know what to say. But somehow, I think it was right of you to keep the box upstairs till now. I don’t know if I’d have been able to handle it before. Even now, I’m not sure how I’ll feel. I only know that this will be the most private thing I’ve ever done.

‘You sure you don’t mind if I go?’

‘Not a bit, love. You do what you have to do.’ He nodded towards a big brown envelope which lay on the table. ‘Anyway, I’ve got some reading of my own to do.

‘But not tonight, I think. That I have to keep for the morning light.’