I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Nineteen

Balanish sat at the mouth of the river, overlooking the sea loch, and with easy passage from the harbour out to the ocean. Hills rose on three sides and it nestled in the valley where it was protected from the worst of the weather that the Atlantic could muster.

The Macfarlane croft was accessed from the turn-off just before the bridge, and sat halfway up the hill. It fell away on a long, gentle slope to the shore. Ruairidh’s father still kept a handful of sheep, but they had long ago stopped growing anything other than a few potatoes on a patch they cultivated at the side of the house.

The old croft house, now providing offices for Ranish Tweed, had been built next to the ruins of the original blackhouse halfway down the hill at the end of a steep pitted track. The new house sat just below the road at the top of the hill, commanding spectacular views over the loch, as well as the village below.

Niamh pulled her Jeep in alongside the Macfarlanes’ Audi A3. It was not a vehicle that could ever have negotiated the track across the moor to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. But beyond the initial tour of the house that Ruairidh had given them when he drove them out himself in the Jeep, the Macfarlanes had never been to visit.

As she walked around the granite-chipped walls of the house, Niamh felt the full fresh blast of a stiffening wind and noticed that Seonag’s red SUV was not outside the office further down the hill. She knocked on the back door and opened it into the kitchen.

Donald was sitting at the kitchen table eating toast and watching the news on a small TV set placed on top of the fridge. He seemed startled by her arrival, and then embarrassed.

‘Hi,’ he said, turning off the television and getting hurriedly to his feet. ‘Mum, Dad,’ he called through the open door into the hall, ‘that’s Niamh.’ Then he shuffled awkwardly. ‘Everything okay?’

Niamh shrugged. ‘As okay as anything can be in the circumstances.’

Mr Macfarlane came in first, wiping shaving foam from his neck with a towel that he then hung over the back of a chair. He looked gaunt, dark semicircles below his eyes. ‘Aw, Niamh,’ he said, and gave her the warmest of hugs. ‘I’m so sorry, my love. It’s the most awful thing to have happened. Donna’s been inconsolable.’

Donna appeared at the door. Niamh had never been able to bring herself to call her mother-in-law anything other than Mrs Macfarlane. She might have been inconsolable, but she stood now with a face like gneiss. Whatever grieving was going on inside was not visible on the exterior. She said, ‘Seonag told us you were coming.’ A pause. ‘It might have been nice if you had told us yourself.’

Niamh stiffened. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you on the sabbath. But I did tell Donald that I would be here today.’ She glanced at Donald and he blushed to the roots of his ginger hair. Niamh had little doubt that he had told them just that. But Mrs Macfarlane revelled in being contrary. Niamh said, ‘I didn’t see Seonag’s car down by the office.’

‘She’s been and gone,’ Mr Macfarlane said. ‘Off to collect some finished cloth from the mill at Shawbost.’

Niamh nodded. ‘We need to talk about funeral arrangements.’ It sounded so blunt and businesslike, but she had no idea how else to say it.

‘You can leave that to us,’ Mrs Macfarlane said. ‘I think it’s down to the family to organize the funeral.’

Niamh felt anger colour her grief. But she retained control. ‘As his wife, and next of kin, I am his family.’ She saw Mrs Macfarlane bristle. ‘But I do think we ought to agree on the details together.’ The last thing she wanted was to fall out with Ruairidh’s parents.

‘Aye.’ Mr Macfarlane nodded his approval, but his wife was not to be so easily mollified.

‘Was he really having an affair with some Russian fashion designer?’ she demanded, as if it might all somehow be Niamh’s fault.

‘I have no idea. It’s what they’re saying.’

A puff of contempt blew from between puckered lips. ‘I think if my husband was having an affair with a Russian fashion designer I would have known about it.’

Niamh glanced at an awkward Mr Macfarlane, who didn’t know where to look. Niamh wanted to say, If your husband was having an affair with anyone, Mrs Macfarlane, who could blame him? But she bit back the retort. Instead she said, ‘Whether or not Ruairidh was having an affair is not something I’m going to discuss with you, or anyone else.’

‘What about Ranish, then?’ she said coldly.

‘What about it?’

‘We need to discuss the future of the company.’

And finally Niamh lost patience. ‘For God’s sake! I’m here to talk about burying your son. Not some business venture. Frankly, right now I don’t give a damn about the future of Ranish. I don’t know how it even finds a place in your thoughts.’

For the first time, Mrs Macfarlane appeared chastened and at a loss for words.

Mr Macfarlane said, ‘Donald tells us you’ve brought the body back with you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s it being kept?’

‘It’s in the boot of the car, Mr Macfarlane.’ And she saw the shock on both their faces, glancing then at Donald, who blushed again. She realized there were things he had clearly felt unable to tell them. She said quickly, ‘I phoned the funeral director in Stornoway first thing this morning to make an appointment. We should probably all go together.’

The cardboard box with its plastic shipping straps sat on the table in front of them. No one knew quite what to say. The awful realization that this was all that was left of her son had reduced Donna Macfarlane to tearful silence.

The funeral director, Alasdair Macrae, stood with his back to the window, looking at it thoughtfully. Here was a man who had seen and dealt with all manner of death, all degrees of grief. A dapper, soft-spoken man with sympathetic blue eyes and the smudge of a sandy moustache on his upper lip. Coffins in racks rose from floor to ceiling against one wall. And through the window behind him Niamh saw a line of refuse bins pushed against the wall. One blue, two black with coloured lids. For recycling the refuse. Just as here, on the inside, they recycled death.

Mr Macrae had already removed and examined the shipping papers, and now he took a knife to cut the strapping and lift the coffin for stillborns from inside its box. He picked it up, almost as if weighing it, and said, ‘Come through to the back.’

Niamh and Donald and his parents trooped along a corridor with a shiny linoleum floor into a workshop at the rear of the building. A large clear plastic fanlight let daylight through into the workshop where they had once made the coffins on site. Old workbenches were pushed against painted breeze-block walls, and two coffins stood, lengthwise, on trestles in the middle of the floor. The funeral director removed the lid from one to reveal that beneath its veneer the coffin was constructed of biodegradable MDF.

‘I’ll line the interior as I normally would,’ he said, ‘and place pillows at the head of it. We have to do things properly.’ He laid the box of Ruairidh’s remains in the middle of the coffin and looked around for a couple of cardboard boxes to brace it at either end. ‘I’ll construct something like this to hold it in place, so it doesn’t slide about when it’s being carried by the bearers. I’ll make it look nice, of course. Even if nobody sees it.’

Niamh put her hand to her mouth and bit down hard along the length of her forefinger. This was almost too much to bear. The dreadful banality that came in the aftermath of death. Everything practical for the dispatch of the body following the departure of life. And yet it all had to be gone through, step by painful step. The road to closure. The consignment of a lover to eternity.

Outside the rain had begun to fall, swept in across the Barvas Moor from the west coast. Stornoway was a dull town in the rain. Figures huddled in coats and hats, bent over against the wind. Umbrellas were rare, and never lasted more than a few minutes. They could hear the plaintive cries of seagulls circling the inner harbour below.

It was possible to pass the funeral parlour in this residential back street without noticing. The only indication being discreet gold lettering painted on a small square of window. A*MACRAE FUNERAL DIRECTORS. Barely two doors along stood the Body & Sole beauty parlour. Opposite, the Associated Presbyterian Church. This was a street, it seemed, that catered for all aspects of life and death.

The funeral was set for Wednesday at the cemetery at Dalmore Beach, the irony of which was not lost on any of them. Two more days, and all that was left of Ruairidh would be dispatched to the earth for good.

Inside, Mrs Macfarlane had said, ‘The coffin should be available at the house for mourners to pay their last respects.’ And Mr Macrae had promised to deliver it to the croft at Balanish by that evening.

Now, as they stood outside in the rain, she said, ‘I’ll arrange things with the minister.’ And although Niamh had wanted to keep control of the process, she was almost relieved to pass on the baton. It had been a long and painful journey, and she was not at all sure she had the strength to see it through to the end.

By late afternoon the wind had blown the rain away, and gathered in strength. From the clifftops at Cellar Head, Niamh felt buffeted by it. Far out across the Minch she saw the rain still falling, like a mist obliterating the swell of the sea and the mainland beyond. The ocean thrashed white against black rocks two hundred feet below, and she wondered how it might feel simply to step off into the void, spreading her arms like a bird and falling to oblivion. No more pain, no more grief, no more missing Ruairidh, or contemplating the life that lay ahead without him. But she did not have the courage for that.

Half a mile further along the coast, she could see the house they had made together standing proud and defiant on the promontory, and beyond it the ruined house and church built by Iain Fiosaich. A hundred years from now, she wondered, what would remain of their home? Would it vanish without trace like Ruairidh and Niamh themselves? Would anyone remember them, as folk today still remembered Iain Fiosaich and his wealthy wife from New York?

In the gully below, on a rocky shelf cut by nature into the face of the cliff, Fiosaich had built his first home, balanced somewhere between life and death, a precarious if spectacular place to live. But he had abandoned it soon enough, and when Ruairidh and Niamh arrived to build their own home, all that remained of it were the scattered stones of the walls and foundations. Over time, and on countless sabbaths beyond the disapproving glare of the Church, they had built a tiny stone bothy in its place, a refuge for the walkers and hikers who made the pilgrimage out to see the house that Fiosaich had built.

From where she stood Niamh could just see it, with its roof of stone slabs in overlapping layers set upon the wooden structure below, walls of stone hewn from the cliffs, like camouflage, making it difficult to spot if you didn’t know it was there.

It was here that she and Ruairidh had opened the urn containing Róisín’s ashes, to let the wind take them where it would. Nearly eight years ago now.

When she had fallen pregnant, Ranish was in its first flush of success, and her initial thoughts had turned to abortion. How, she had wondered, could a baby possibly fit into the lives they were making for themselves? Working ten or twelve hours a day. Frequent trips abroad or to the mainland. Ruairidh would have carried on as before. Seonag, and no doubt Ruairidh’s mother, would have taken greater control of the company. Leaving Niamh with a primary role as mother and babysitter, and a back seat in the forward progress of Ranish Tweed.

Ruairidh had been opposed to the very idea of termination. Not for any religious or philosophical reasons, but because he wanted a child. And when his mother got wind of Niamh’s thinking she had accused her of trying to murder her grandchild.

It had been a fraught time, filled with argument and aggravation. Ironically it was Seonag who had finally settled Niamh’s mind on the matter. A throwaway conversation, even before she knew that Niamh was pregnant. Already with two children of her own, Seonag had said simply that they were the greatest gift that God had given her. It had crossed her mind, she said, when first pregnant, that she was too young for children and that abortion would have allowed for future planning. Niamh remembered how her childhood friend had gazed off into the middle distance, and with a slight shake of her head said, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t do that. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I could ever have forgiven myself.’

Niamh knew she could never have lived with that kind of regret, and so she took the bold decision to let her pregnancy run its course, determined that their baby would have to fit in with their lives, rather than the other way around.

She had relaxed into her decision, then, and begun to relish the prospect of becoming a mother. A scan had revealed that their child was a girl, and she and Ruairidh had chosen the Irish Gaelic name of Róisín for their daughter.

But then two months before the baby was due, Niamh had begun to bleed. Unaccountably. She’d been rushed to hospital in Stornoway, then airlifted to Inverness, where the baby was stillborn. As if it had not been devastating enough to lose their child, the doctors told Niamh that due to internal damage she was unlikely to have more children.

Ruairidh had been stoic and supportive, despite his disappointment. But his mother, though never saying it in so many words, had implied that somehow it was Niamh herself who had contrived the miscarriage. That dark cloud of suspicion and mistrust had cast a shadow on their relationship ever since.

Róisín had been cremated in Inverness. A ceremony attended by just Niamh and Ruairidh. They had returned to release her ashes here on the cliffs, as if releasing her spirit to rest with her parents in this place for eternity.

Niamh had regretted it immediately. With Róisín’s ashes dispersed instantly by the wind, it was as if she had lost her all over again. Vanished without trace. And in all the years since, she had lamented not burying her child. A grave to visit, a place for flowers. A piece of this earth forever Róisín’s.

Niamh sat on a cluster of stones and gazed at the rock face below. A complex pattern of molten rock which had cooled in layers to form these cliffs untold millions of years before. If only she could be absorbed by them, subsumed to become a part of the whole. Instead of remaining this wretched speck in the universe, this tiny repository of grief and sorrow, so filled with regret at the loss of her man, and her child.

Never in her life had she felt so small and alone.