Letters from Skye

Chapter Twenty Margaret

3 September 1940

Dear Maisie,

I never would’ve guessed that the key to your mother lay in poetry. After meeting her that very first time in the neighbourhood allotment, I would’ve been tempted to call her one of the earthiest people I know. My gran is a tough old bird, but there was your mother, kicking her shovel and swearing up and down in Gaelic. But, to think, if I didn’t take pity on your mother and her poor shovel and help her cart those baskets of cabbage home, I might never have met you.

When she pushed open the door to the house and I saw you kicking a jig in the middle of the kitchen in that old sweater and plus fours, I knew that I wanted you for my girl. And, if you wouldn’t have me, I’d be your best mate forever and ever if it meant I could be close to you.

Your mam, though, she saw straight to my game. When she was escorting me down the stairs and thanking me, she leaned in and said, “She thinks with her heart. Don’t shatter it.” That’s why it took me two weeks to come calling again.

But to think she wrote love poetry! I suppose that’s why she saw right through me the moment I clapped eyes on you.

Really, you’ve never seen her write a word of poetry? After your letter, I looked into her, and she has seven books to her name. Seven! My gran has been around for twice as long, and she couldn’t put together a decent stanza if the fate of the world depended on it.

What have you discovered? I don’t suppose you’ve come across a poem with the name and address of “Davey”?

Beagan Mhìltean, Skye

6 September 1940 (What day is it, even?)

Dear Paul,

No, no addresses between the pages, but I did find flowers, blades of grass, curls of wool, sprinkles of sand. It looked as though she carried the books across the island, catching whatever she came across within the pages.

Out of Chaos, her last book, with the red cover barely creased, had pictures tucked throughout. A cheerful young man in a checked jacket grins from one. In another, a dark-haired woman in a pale flimsy dress sits in a garden of flowers, gazing wistfully at the camera. The same man, now in a robe and mortarboard, stands next to a tiny sapling in yet another, his chin jutting out proudly.

The last picture, hidden all the way in the back, shows a couple on a street, the pedestrians and vehicles a blur behind them. The man has both hands wrapped around the woman’s waist and leans in to whisper something in her ear. The woman holds one hand to the side of her face, as though trying to hide from the camera, but instead laughs with head thrown back. In pen, across the corner of the photograph, someone wrote “1915. Us.” Although the picture is grainy, the man is as in the other two photos. He’s the same as the ambulance driver painted across the back of Seo a-nis. The woman is my mother.

The photo is so nonchalant, so un-self-conscious. Just the two of them, caught in an unlikely photograph, a moment of transition in a secret affair. Cautiousness in the fingers curved against her cheek giving way to utter abandon in that laugh. In that instant, the blur of the city behind them doesn’t matter. This must be the London my mother is looking to find, the London she wishes she could capture again. An instant of aloneness while the war rushes on around them.

He’s her muse, I know it. Although the name “David” never appears in any of her books, I know the poems are for him. The person she writes to, she calls “my magnet,” “my warm summer night,” and the one “my heart flies towards.” Gran won’t say a word. She just nods and taps the stack of poetry books, as though they hold all the secrets of the universe.

And maybe they do. In school, I couldn’t find a theme in a poem if my soul depended on it. What makes me think I can find a life in a poem now?

There was one that Mother used to recite to me at bedtime, between the fairy stories and Gaelic lullabies, a poem about the wind coming off the sea, crisp and salt-tanged. Roaring across the water and straight up the crags, hurtling fingers of cold against anyone who stood in the way. I’m not sure if it was her own poetry, as I haven’t found it in any of her books, but it’s the only one she ever taught me.

Walking the island here, I remembered that poem. I stand up on the hills, looking out over the sea, and shout all of the lines into the wind. It whips my dress through my legs, sprays my bare arms, puts the taste of salt on my lips. And I know what that poem means.

Because, as much as the wind batters you up on the hills, as much as it demands to be noticed, the moment you climb back down, it begins to fade. And it’s no less intense down below, to be sure. The gulls fight it; the grasses blow flat. It’s there, but, after a while, it drifts from your mind. It’s a given, a constant, an expectation. You don’t think about it being there until one day, suddenly, it rushes right over you, fills your mouth and your ears and your soul and you remember what it’s like to breathe. You’ve been breathing every day but, in that instant, feel completely alive.

From the day you came into my kitchen with that basket of cabbages, you’ve been there. Always with me, like the wind. But that first time I found a letter from you in the post, my heart leapt as it never had before. You rushed right over me and I knew I was in love.

I wish you were here with me to feel the wind. It’s poetry in itself.

London, England

28 August 1940

Dear Sir or Madam,

Many years ago, a young man named David Graham was a student at the University of Illinois. He graduated in 1913, with a degree in natural sciences. I don’t know if he is active in the University of Illinois Alumni Association, but I understand that you often hear news from alumni and maintain a record of their whereabouts since leaving the university.

If you have any information on David Graham, can you please contact me? You can write to me at the Langham Hotel, London. I thank you in advance.