The Lewis Man

TWENTY-SIX

The old cemetery was full to overflowing behind its lichen-covered stone walls, spilling over now into a new one dug into the machair as it rose up the hillside towards the church.

Fin parked his car and walked among the headstones in this extended home for the dead. Death was a crowd, even on a tiny island like this. Crosses growing out of the ground, brutally stark in such a treeless place. So many souls passed from one life to another. All in the shadow of the church where once they had worshipped. A church paid for by fishermen. A church with the bow of a boat beneath its altar table.

On the far side of the fence stood a modern, single-storey bungalow with a conservatory at the back overlooking the Sound. But this was no private dwelling. A red board fixed to the gable end, and an oval sign on the wall of the ramp that led to its side door, revealed it to be a pub, Am Politician. A handy watering hole for the dead, Fin thought, en route from the church to the graveyard, or for their mourners at least. A place to drown their sorrows.

There was a pink, soft-top Mercedes in the car park. A yappy Yorkie dog barked at him from the other side of the glass as he passed it.

It was quiet in the pub, only a handful of customers nursing drinks on this late afternoon. Fin ordered a beer from a garrulous young woman behind the bar who was anxious to explain to him that the pub was named after the boat, The Politician, which had foundered in the Sound en route to the Caribbean during the war.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘anyone who has read Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore will know that its cargo included 28,000 cases of fine malt whisky. And that the islanders spent most of the next six months “rescuing” it and hiding it from the excise man.’

As she produced three bottles reputed to have come from the wreck, still with whisky in them, Fin wondered how many times she had told the story.

He sipped on his pint and changed the subject. ‘That beach on the west side of the island,’ he said. ‘Beyond the cemetery.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why would anyone call it Charlie’s beach?’

The girl shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard it called that.’ She turned and called over to an older woman who was sitting alone in the conservatory gazing out over the Sound while toying with her gin and tonic. ‘Morag, have you ever heard the beach down by called Charlie’s beach?’

Morag turned, and Fin saw that she must have been a striking woman in her day. She had strong features and smooth, tanned skin beneath a chaotic pile of thick, dyed blond hair, giving perhaps the impression of a woman in her fifties, although he could see that she was probably nearer seventy. Both wrists dangled with silver and gold, fingers crusted with rings, and she took a sip of her G & T, holding her glass in an elegant hand adorned with long, fuchsia-pink nails. She wore a patterned bolero jacket over a white blouse above diaphanous blue skirts. She was not at all someone you would expect to find in a place like this.

She directed a beatific smile towards them. ‘I have no idea, a ghràidh,’ she said speaking in English, but using the Gaelic term of endearment. ‘But if I were to take a guess, I’d say it would probably be because that’s where the French frigate, the Du Teillay, landed Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Seven Men of Moidart to raise an army for the ‘45 Jacobite rebellion against the English.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ the girl said.

Morag shook her head. ‘They teach you children nothing in school these days. Charlie reputedly sheltered in a cove down there called Coilleag a’ Phrionnsa. The Prince’s Dell.’ She turned rich, brown eyes on Fin. ‘Who wants to know?’

Fin lifted his pint and crossed into the conservatory to shake her hand. ‘Fin Macleod. I’m trying to trace the family who used to live on the croft just below your house.’

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh. You know who I am, then?’

He smiled. ‘Not before I got to the island, no. But it didn’t take long for someone to tell me. I’m making a wild guess here, and it’s nothing to do with the pink Merc in the car park. You’re the actress, Morag McEwan?’

She beamed. ‘A good guess, a ghràidh. You should have been a policeman.’

‘I was.’ He grinned. ‘Apparently I should know you from television.’

‘Not everyone’s a slave to the box.’ She sipped at her gin. ‘You were a policeman?’

‘Just plain old Fin Macleod now.’

‘Well, a ghràidh, I grew up here in the days when all the crofts were still occupied. So if anyone can tell you what you want to know, it’s me.’ She drained her glass and stood up stiffly, her hand shooting out suddenly to support herself on his arm. ‘Damned rheumatics! Come back to my place, Mr Fin Macleod, former policeman, and I’ll pour you a drink or three while I tell you.’ She leaned confidentially towards him, although her voice remained well above the level of a stage whisper. ‘The booze is cheaper there.’

Outside she said, ‘Leave your car here and come with me. You can always walk back for it.’ She slipped into her pink Mercedes to an ecstatic welcome from the Yorkie. And as Fin slid into the passenger seat she said, ‘This is Dino. Dino meet Fin.’ The dog looked at him then jumped into her lap as she started the car and lowered the roof. ‘He loves the wind in his face. And on those rare days when the sun shines, it seems a shame not to have the roof down, don’t you agree?’

‘Absolutely.’

She lit a cigarette. ‘Damned government laws. Can’t enjoy a good smoke over a drink any more, except in your own house.’ She sucked smoke deeply into her lungs and breathed out again with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’

She crunched the car into first gear and kangarooed towards the gate, narrowly missing the gatepost as she swung the wheel to turn them on to the road up the hill. Dino had draped himself over her right arm, face pushed out of the open window into the wind, and she juggled her cigarette and the gear lever to propel them at speed up towards the primary school and the road leading off to the church. Fin found his hands moving down to either side of his seat and gripping it with white knuckles at the end of arms stiff with tension. Morag was oblivious, veering left, and sometimes right, each time she changed gear. Her cigarette ash, and the smoke from her mouth, were whipped away in the rush of air.

‘The Mercedes dealer said they didn’t do pink, when I told them what colour I wanted,’ she said. ‘I told them, of course you do. I showed them my nails, and left them a bottle of the nail varnish so they could get the match just right. When they delivered the car I said, you see, anything’s possible.’ She laughed, and Fin wished she would keep her eye on the road rather than looking at him as she spoke.

They crested the hill, then accelerated down towards the harbour at Haunn, veering right at the last moment around the small bay, and turning up on the new driveway towards Morag’s big white house. They rattled over a cattle grid and crunched across granite chippings interspersed with coloured glass beads.

‘They glow at night when the lights are on,’ Morag said as she and Dino got out of the driver’s side. ‘It’s like walking on light.’

Plaster statues of naked ladies guarded the steps to the deck, while life-sized deer stood or lay in the garden, and a bronze mermaid draped herself over rocks around a small pool. Fin saw tubular neon lighting strung along the fencewire, and blocks of terracotta tiling among clumps of heather and a few hardy flowering shrubs that seemed somehow to have survived the wind. Windchimes sounded all around the house, a constant cacophony of bamboo and steel.

‘Come away in.’

Fin followed Morag and Dino into a hallway where thickpiled tartan carpet led up a broad staircase to the first floor. The walls were covered with prints of Mayflowers and Madonnas, sailboats and saints. Chintzy ornaments stood on Greek columns, and a sleek, full-sized silver cheetah stretched itself out just inside the doorway to the living room and bar, a room lined by picture windows on both sides, and French windows out to the patio. Every available laying space, shelves and tables and bar top, was covered in china statuettes and mirrored jewellery boxes, lamps and lions. The tiled floor was polished to an almost reflective gleam.

Morag tossed her jacket on to a leather recliner and slipped behind the bar to pour their drinks. ‘Beer, whisky? Something more exotic?’

‘A beer would be fine.’ Fin had drunk less than half of his pint at Am Politician. He took his foaming glass from her and wandered through the bric-a-brac to the French windows and their view north across the Sound towards South Uist. Immediately below was the little bay with its tiny stone harbour from which the boat had come and gone across the water to Ludagh in the days before the building of roads had required the car ferry. ‘You were born here?’

‘No. But I did most of my growing up here.’

Fin turned to see her taking a stiff pull at her gin and tonic. The ice in her glass sounded like the windchimes outside. ‘And how does a girl from Eriskay come to be a famous actress?’

She laughed uproariously. ‘I don’t know about famous,’ she said, ‘but the first step for an Eriskay girl to being almost anything other than an Eriskay girl, is to leave the damned place.’

‘What age were you when you left?’

‘Seventeen. I went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Always wanted to be an actress, you see. Ever since they showed a film of Eriskay in the church hall. Not that it was a drama. It was a documentary made by some German chap in the thirties. But there was something about seeing those folk up on the big screen. Something glamorous. And, I don’t know, it gave them a kind of immortality. I wanted that.’ She chuckled and moved out from behind the bar to drape herself on the settee. Dino immediately jumped up on to her knee. ‘I got very excited once when a teacher on the island let the kids know that he would be showing films at his house. It was just after the electricity came, and everyone squeezed into his sitting room to see them. Charged us a penny each, he did, then projected slides of his holiday in Inverness. Imagine!’ She roared with laughter, and Dino raised his head and barked twice.

Fin smiled. ‘Did you come back for visits?’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, never. Spent years working in theatre in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and pantos around Scotland. Then I got offered my first part in TV by Robert Love at Scottish Television and never looked back. Went down to London, then. Went to a lot of castings, got a few parts, worked as a waitress to fill the gaps in between. I did all right, I suppose. But never was a great success.’ Another mouthful of gin induced a moment of reflection. ‘Until, that is, I got offered a part in The Street. It came kind of late in life, but I was an overnight success. I don’t know why. Folk just loved my character.’ She cackled. ‘I became what you might call a household name. And the twenty years of fame that it brought, and the marvellous earnings that went with it, have paid for all this.’ She waved an arm around her empire. ‘A very comfortable retirement.’

Fin gazed at her thoughtfully. ‘What made you come back?’

She looked at him. ‘You’re an islander, aren’t you?’

‘I am. From Lewis.’

‘Then you know why. There’s something about the islands, a ghràidh, that always brings you back in the end. I’ve already got my place booked in the cemetery over the hill.’

‘Were you ever married?’

Her smile carried a sadness in it. ‘In love once, but never married.’

Fin turned to the side windows looking back out across the hill. ‘So you knew the people who lived on the croft below here?’

‘Aye, I did that. Old widow O’Henley it was who stayed there when I was a kid. Her and a young lassie called Ceit who was in my class at school. A homer.’

Fin frowned. ‘A homer? What’s that?’

‘A boy or a girl from a home, a ghràidh. There were hundreds of them taken out of orphanages and local authority homes by the councils and the Catholic Church, and shipped out here to the islands. Just handed over to complete strangers, they were. No vetting in those days. Kids were dumped off the ferry at Lochboisdale to stand on the pier with family names tied around their necks, waiting to be claimed. The primary school up on the hill there was full of them. Nearly a hundred at one time.’

Fin was shocked. ‘I had no idea.’

Morag lit a cigarette and puffed away on it as she spoke. ‘Aye, they were at it right into the sixties. I once heard the priest saying it was good to have fresh blood in the islands after generations of inbreeding. I think that was the idea. Though they weren’t all orphans, you know. Some came from broken homes. But there was no going back. Once you got sent out here all ties with the past were cut. You were forbidden contact with parents or family. Poor little bastards. Some of them got terribly abused. Beaten, or worse. Most were just treated like slave labour. A few were luckier, like me.’

Fin raised an eyebrow. ‘You were a homer?’

‘I was, Mr Macleod. Boarded with a family at Parks, over on the other side of the island. All gone now, of course. No children of their own, you see. But unlike many, I have happy memories of my time here. Which is why I had no problems about coming back.’ She emptied her glass. ‘I need a wee top-up. How about you?’

‘No thanks.’ Fin had barely touched his.

Morag moved Dino off her knee and eased herself out of the settee to pour another drink. ‘Of course, it wasn’t just the locals who gave the kids a hard time. There were incomers, too. Mostly English. Like the headmaster at Daliburgh school.’ She smiled. ‘Thought he was coming here to civilize us, àghràidh, and banned the Gillean Cullaig.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s the name they gave to the Hogmanay tradition when gangs of boys went around the houses on New Year’s Eve blessing each house with a poem, and being rewarded with bread and scones, and cake and fruit. All dropped into the white flour sacks they carried. They’d been doing it for centuries. But Mr Bidgood thought it smacked of begging, and issued an edict forbidding any of his pupils to take part.’

‘And everyone obeyed?’

‘Well, most did. But there was one boy in my class. Donald John. A homer. He boarded with the Gillies family, a brother and sister, over there on the other side the hill. He defied the ban and went out with the older boys. When Bidgood found out he gave that lad such a leathering with the tawse.’

Fin shook his head. ‘He shouldn’t have had the right to do that.’

‘Oh, they had the right to do what they pleased in those days. But Donald Seamus — that was the man that Donald John boarded with — he took exception. Went up to the school and beat the living shit out of that headmaster. Excuse my French. He took Donald John out of school that very day, too, and the boy never went back.’ She smiled. ‘Bidgood returned to England with his tail between his legs within the month.’ She smiled. ‘It was a colourful life we lived back then.’

Fin looked around and thought that it was a colourful life that she was living still. ‘So do you have any idea what happened to Ceit?’

Morag shrugged and sipped again at her gin. ‘None at all, I’m afraid, a ghràidh. She left the island not long before myself, and for all I know never came back.’

Another dead end.

By the time Fin came to leave, the cloud was gathering ominously all along the western bay, the wind had stiffened and carried the odd spot of rain. Somewhere much further to the west, beyond the cloud, the sun was drizzling liquid gold on the ocean as it dipped towards the horizon.

Morag said, ‘I’d better run you back over the hill, a ghràidh. It looks like you could get caught in a downpour. I’ll just open the garage doors now, so that I can drive straight in when I get back.’

She tapped a code into a controller at the side of the door, and it swung slowly upwards to fold flat into the roof. As they got into the car, Fin spotted an old spinning wheel at the back of the garage. ‘You don’t spin wool, do you?’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Good God, no. Never have, never will.’ Dino jumped up into her lap and she closed the door, but kept the roof down this time. He snuffled and yelped and rubbed his wet nose all over the window until she lowered it, and he draped himself in his habitual place over her arm to poke his face out into the wind. As she drove down the driveway she said, ‘It’s an old one I’m having restored. It’ll sit nicely in the dining room. A reminder of days gone by. All the women spun wool here when I was a girl. They would oil it and knit it into blankets and socks and jerseys for the menfolk. Most of the men were fishermen in those days, at sea five days a week, and the Eriskay jerseys knitted with that oiled wool were as good as waterproofs. They all wore them.’

She swerved at the foot of the drive as she took a draw on her cigarette, and missed the fencepost by inches.

‘Each of the women had her own pattern, you know. Usually handed down from mother to daughter. So distinctive that when a man’s body was pulled from the sea, decayed beyond recognition, he could almost always be identified from the knitted pattern of his pullover. As good as a fingerprint, it was.’

She waved at the old man and his dog to whom Fin had spoken earlier, and the Mercedes nearly went into a ditch. But Morag seemed oblivious.

‘There’s an old retired priest on the island who’s a bit of a historian.’ She laughed. ‘Nothing much else for a celibate man to do on a long winter’s night.’ She swung a mischievous smile Fin’s way. ‘Anyway, he’s a bit of an expert on the knitted patterns of old Eriskay. Has a collection of photographs and drawings, I’ve heard. Goes back a hundred years and more, they say.’

As they reached the top of the hill she glanced curiously across at her passenger. ‘You don’t say much, Mr Macleod.’

And Fin thought it would have been difficult to get a word in edgeways. But all he said was, ‘I’ve enjoyed hearing your stories, Morag.’

After a moment she said, ‘What’s your interest in the folk who lived at the O’Henley croft?’

‘It’s not really the O’Henley woman herself that I’m interested in, Morag. I’m trying to trace the roots of an old man now living on Lewis. I think he might have come from Eriskay.’

‘Well, maybe I know him. What’s his name?’

‘Oh, it’s not a name you would know. He calls himself Tormod Macdonald now. But that’s not his real name.’

‘Then what is?’

‘That’s what I don’t know.’

The rain started as Fin drove north from Ludagh, sweeping across the machair from the open sea to the west. Big fat drops that came first in ones and twos, before reinforcements arrived and compelled him to put his wipers on at double speed. He turned off at Daliburgh on to the Lochboisdale road, his mind filled still with the thought that Morag’s story of Eriskay knitting patterns was perhaps his last chance to track down the true identity of Marsaili’s father. A very, very long shot indeed.

The Lochboisdale Hotel sat on the hill above the harbour, in the lee of Ben Kenneth. It was an old, traditional, whitewashed building with modern extensions, and a dining lounge with a view out over the bay. At a dark reception desk in the lobby, a girl in a tartan skirt gave him keys to a single room, and confirmed that they did, indeed, have a fax machine. Fin noted the number and climbed the staircase to his room.

From his dormer window, he looked down on the pier in the fading light as the CalMac ferry from Oban, with its red twin funnels, emerged from the rain to manoeuvre itself up to the ramp and lower the door of its car deck. Tiny figures in yellow oilskins braved the weather to wave the cars off. Fin wondered how it must have been for those poor bewildered kids, plucked from everything they had known and dumped here on the pier to face their fate. And he felt anger at the men whose religion and politics had dictated it.

Who had known about it then, apart from those involved? Why had it never been reported in the press, as it certainly would be today? How would people have reacted had they known what was going on? His own parents, he was sure, would have been outraged. Anger welled within him as he thought about it. The anger of a parent. And the hurt of an orphan. His ability to empathize with those wretched children was almost painful. He wanted to lash out and hit something, or someone, on their behalf.

And the rain ran down his window like tears spilled for all those poor lost souls.

He crossed his room to sit on the edge of the bed in the evening gloom, and as he turned on his bedside lamp felt depression descend on him like a shroud. From the address book on his mobile phone he tracked down George Gunn’s home number and hit the dial key. Gunn’s wife answered, and Fin recalled the invitations George had extended on more than one occasion to come and eat wild salmon with him and his wife. He had still never met her.

‘Hello, Mrs Gunn, it’s Fin Macleod here. Is George there?’

‘Oh, hello, Mr Macleod,’ she said, as if they were old friends. ‘One moment. I’ll go and get him.’

After a few moments he heard Gunn’s voice. ‘Where are you, Mr Macleod?’

‘Lochboisdale, George.’

He heard the surprise in his voice. ‘What on earth are you doing down there?’

‘I’m pretty certain that Marsaili’s dad came from Eriskay. And I think there might be a way of identifying who he was. Or is. But I have to play a wild card, George, and I need your help.’

There was a long silence. ‘In what way?’

‘Did you ever get those drawings done of the blanket pattern bleached into the lividity of the body?’

More surprise. ‘I did. The artist was in today, actually.’ He paused. ‘Are you going to let me in on this?’

‘I will, George, when I know for sure.’

There was a sigh at the other end of the line. ‘You’re stretching my patience, Mr Macleod.’ Fin waited. Then, ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to fax the drawings to me here at the Lochboisdale Hotel.’