The Chessmen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It never failed to affect him, seeing his aunt’s house lying derelict and forgotten. Peeling whitewash, broken slates, windows smashed or boarded up, like missing teeth in a neglected mouth.

Oddly, he never thought of it as anything other than his aunt’s house. Never his home. And yet he had spent the greater part of his childhood here, in a cold, damp bedroom with its rusty-framed dormer window looking out over the rocky bay below. He remembered the first time she had brought him here to live. Just days after the death of his parents. A handful of possessions in a small brown case that she had placed on the bed, telling him to pack them away while she went and made something for their tea. And he had sat on his own, feeling the cold damp of the mattress beneath him seeping into his very soul, and wept.

He stood now on the pitted tarmac in front of the house, looking up at the window of that room, a window that gave on to a past he had no wish to revisit. And yet somehow it was always there. In good memories and bad. Of a life long gone, populated by people long dead. And there was no escaping it.

As he frequently did, he wondered what point there was in it all. Were we really just here to procreate and pass on, leaving our seed upon the earth to do as we had done, as our fathers had done before us, and theirs before them? A meaningless cycle of birth, life, death?

He walked to the edge of the path that led down to the shore, a shingle beach in a boulder-strewn cove where he had often played among the ruins of the old salting house. He almost expected to see himself down there: a lonely boy seeking solace in the world of his imagination.

It was a long, sleepless night which had sparked his mood. Images of Roddy’s broken, decayed body in the plane. The look on Whistler’s face. The big man walking away, climbing back up to the ridge only to disappear. And Fin had woken from shallow dreams in a sweat, with the certainty in his heart that Whistler knew something he wasn’t telling. And yet his shock at the discovery of the body had been as great, if not greater, than Fin’s.

He had risen early, leaving Marsaili sleeping, and set off along the cliffs above Crobost, until he reached the sheltered inlet where generations earlier his ancestors had built the small harbour. A steep ramp down to a short jetty and a deep pool among the rocks where they kept live crabs in cages until they could be shipped out to foreign markets. It seemed that everything good about this island left it. Its resources. Its people. And all their ambitions.

The wind blew strong in the sunshine, cumulus bubbling up and tracking across a vast, ever-changing sky. And still it was not cold, even though October was just an exhalation away. Fin sat himself down among the dry grasses, pulling his knees up to his chest to hug them, gazing out over choppy green water that rose and fell in gently coruscating swells across the bay.

And he remembered the day that Whistler had first come to spend the night here with him and his aunt.