The Lewis Man

TWENTY-NINE

A strange calm had settled across the northern half of the Isle of Lewis. In contrast to the confusion of chaotic thoughts which had filled Fin’s mind on the long drive north.

He had not stopped once, except for the half-hour spent in Stornoway briefing George Gunn on what he had discovered. Gunn had listened in silence in the incident room. He had stood staring out over the roofs of the houses opposite, towards Lews Castle and the trees on the hill, the final sunshine of the day slanting down among the branches and lying in long pink strips across the slope. And he had said, ‘So the dead boy is Marsaili’s father’s brother.’

‘Donald Peter Gillies.’

‘Except that neither of them is really called Gillies. That’s just their homer names.’

Fin nodded acknowledgement.

‘And we have no idea where they came from, or what their real names might be.’

After leaving Stornoway, Fin had thought about that on the drive across the Barvas moor, and through all the villages of the west coast. Siader, Galson, Dell, Cross. A blur of churches, each one a different denomination. Of DAF 2s and 3s, whitehouses, blackhouses, modern harled bungalows, braced all along the coast for the next assault.

He had no idea what kind of record, if any, the Church might have kept of those poor children it had torn from homes on the mainland to transport to the islands. There was no guarantee that the local authorities would be any more forthcoming. It was all so long ago. And who had cared back then about the human detritus of failed families, or orphaned children without relatives to champion their rights? Fin’s overwhelming emotion was one of shame that such things should have been so recently perpetrated by his fellow countrymen.

The biggest problem in trying to identify who Donald John and Donald Peter Gilles actually were, was that no one had any idea where they came from. They would have arrived, anonymous passengers off the ferry at Lochboisdale, with cards around their necks and their past erased. And now, with Peter dead and his brother John lost in a fog of dementia, who was there to remember? Who was there to testify as to who they had really been? Those boys were lost for ever, and the likelihood was that neither he, nor the police, would ever know who had killed Peter, or why.

The lights of Ness sparkled all across the headland in the gloom, like a reflection of the stars emerging in the clear, settled sky above. The wind that had buffeted his car on the unprotected drive up through the Uists had died to an unnatural stillness. In his rearview mirror he could still see the clouds brooding in their habitual gathering place around the peaks of Harris, and away to the west on an ocean like glass, the reflected last light of the day was fading into night.

There were three cars parked on the gravel above Marsaili’s bungalow. Fionnlagh’s Mini, Marsaili’s old Astra and Donald Murray’s SUV.

Donald and Marsaili were sitting together at the kitchen table when Fin knocked and walked in. For a moment he felt a strangely unpleasant pang of jealousy. After all, it had been Donald Murray who had taken Marsaili’s virginity all those years before. But that had been in another life, when they had all been very different people.

Donald nodded. ‘Fin.’

Marsaili said quickly, almost as if she wanted Fin to know straight away that there was no cause for jealousy, ‘Donald came with a proposition about Fionnlagh and Donna.’

Fin turned to Donald. ‘Has Fionnlagh been to see you?’

‘He came this morning.’

‘And?’

Donald’s smile was wry, and laden with history. ‘He’s his father’s son.’ Fin couldn’t resist a smile.

Marsaili said, ‘They’ve moved in here permanently, the two of them. And the baby. They’re upstairs.’ She flicked an uncertain glance Donald’s way. ‘Donald has suggested that he and I share the cost and responsibility of the baby to let Fionnlagh and Donna finish their studies. Even if it means one, or both of them, leaving the island to go to university. I mean, we all know how important it is not to throw away the opportunities life offers when you are young. You spend the rest of your life regretting it.’

There was more than just a hint of bitterness in her voice. And Fin wondered if there was recrimination in it, too.

‘Sounds like a plan.’

Marsaili lowered her eyes to the table. ‘I’m just not sure I can afford it. Fionnlagh going to university, I mean. And the cost of the baby. I’ve been surviving on Artair’s life policy, and was hoping it would see me through university, if I get in. I guess I’ll have to postpone my degree and get a job in the meantime.’

‘That would be a shame,’ Fin said.

She shrugged. ‘Not much alternative.’

‘There could be.’

She turned inquisitive eyes on him. ‘Like what?’

‘Like you and I share the burden of your half.’ He smiled. ‘I am Eilidh’s grandfather, after all. Maybe we can’t stop our children making the same mistakes we did, but at least we can be around to pick up the pieces.’

Donald’s gaze alternated between them, discerning and interpreting everything that remained unspoken. He stood up then. ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to talk about it.’ He hesitated before offering Fin his hand. Then, at length, held it out and they shook. He left without another word.

The kitchen was oddly silent in the wake of his departure, burned out, almost unreal in the flickering glare of the overhead fluorescent. Somewhere deep in the house they could hear the thump, thump of Fionnlagh’s music.

Finally Marsaili said, ‘How can you afford it?’

Fin shrugged. ‘I have a bit put by. And it’s not my intention to remain unemployed for ever.’

More silence hung heavy between them. A silence born of regret. Of all their failures, individually and together.

Fin said, ‘How did your exams go?’

‘Don’t ask.’

He nodded. ‘I guess you weren’t exactly best prepared.’

‘No.’

He drew a deep breath. ‘Marsaili, I have some news for you. About your dad.’ Blue eyes fixed him in their gaze, filled with naked curiosity. ‘Why don’t we get out of here, get some fresh air. It’s a beautiful night out there, and there won’t be a soul on the beach.’

The night was filled with the whispering sound of the sea. It sighed, as if relieved by the removal of its obligation to maintain an angry demeanour. A three-quarters moon rose into the blackness above it and cast its light upon the water and the sand, a light that threw shadows and obscured truths in half-lit faces. The air was soft, and pregnant with the prospect of coming summer, a poetry in the night, carried in the shallow waves that burst like bubbling Hippocrene all along the beach.

Fin and Marsaili walked close enough to feel each other’s warmth, leaving tracks in virgin sand.

‘There was a time,’ Fin said, ‘when I would have held your hand when we walked along a beach like this.’

Marsaili turned a look of surprise towards him. ‘Can you read minds now?’

And Fin thought how completely natural it would have been, and how immediately embarrassing. He laughed. ‘Remember how I dropped that sack of crabs off the cliff on top of you girls sunbathing down here?’

‘I remember slapping you so hard I hurt my hand.’

Fin grinned ruefully. ‘I remember that, too. I also remember you were topless at the time.’

‘Damned peeping Tom!’

He smiled. ‘And I recall making love to you among the rocks back there, and skinny-dipping in the ocean afterwards to cool down.’ When she didn’t react he turned to look at her and saw a distant look in her eyes, thoughts transporting her to some far-off place and time.

They were almost at the boat shed now. It loomed out of the darkness like a portent of past and future pain, and he put his hand lightly on her shoulder to turn her back the way they had come. Already the sea was washing up over their footprints, erasing any history of their ever having passed this way. He left his arm around her shoulder and felt her lean in to him as he steered her a little further up the beach, away from the water.

They walked in silence for almost half its length until they stopped, by some mutual unspoken consent, and he turned her towards him. Her face was in shadow, and he put a finger under her chin to turn it up to the light. At first she wouldn’t meet his eye.

‘I remember the little girl who took me in hand that first day at school,’ he said. ‘And walked me up the road to the Crobost stores and told me that her name was Marjorie, but that she preferred her Gaelic name of Marsaili. That same little girl who decided that my English name was ugly, and shortened it to Fin. Which is what everyone has called me for the rest of my life.’

She smiled now, a smile touched by sadness, and finally met his eye. ‘And I remember how I used to love you, Fin Macleod.’ Moonlight shimmered in the tears that brimmed in her eyes. ‘Not sure I ever stopped.’

He leaned in, then, until their lips touched. Warm, tentative, uncertain. And finally they kissed. A soft, sweet kiss full of everything they had once been, and everything they had since lost. His eyes closed, and the regrets and passions of a lifetime washed over him.

And then it was over. She stepped back, breaking free of his arms, and looked at him in the dark. Searching eyes full of fear and doubt. Then she turned and walked away towards the rocks. He stood for a moment watching her go, then had to run to catch her up. When he did she said, without breaking stride, ‘What did you find out about my dad?’

‘I found out that he’s not Tormod Macdonald.’

She stopped dead and turned her frown towards him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he borrowed, or stole, that identity off a dead boy from Harris. His name was actually Donald John Gillies, and he came from the Isle of Eriskay. The young man they took out of the bog was his brother, Donald Peter.’

Marsaili gaped at him in disbelief.

‘Only Donald John isn’t his real name either.’ He saw her whole world falling apart in the look of pain that creased her eyes. All the certainties of her life shifting beneath her feet like the sand she stood on.

‘I don’t understand …’

And he told her everything that he had learned, and how he had learned it. She listened in silence, her face paler than the moon, and in the end put a hand on his arm to steady herself.

‘My dad was a homer?’

Fin nodded. ‘An orphan in all probability. Or a child in care, shipped out to the islands with his brother by the Catholic Church.’

She slumped down into the sand, sitting cross-legged, her face falling forward into open hands. At first he thought she was crying, but when she took her face out of her hands it was dry. Shock had blunted all other emotions. Fin sat down beside her. She gazed out over the transient benevolence of the sea and said, ‘It’s strange. You think you know who you are, because you think you know who your parents are. Some things are just …’ she searched for the word ‘…unquestioned, unquestionable.’ She shook her head. ‘And then suddenly you learn that your whole life has been based on a lie, and you’ve no idea who you are any more.’ She turned to look at him, eyes wide with disillusion. ‘Did my dad kill his brother?’

And Fin realized then that while for him it might be possible to accept the idea that her father’s true origins and who murdered his brother might never be discovered, Marsaili could not rest until she knew the truth. ‘I don’t know.’ He put an arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

They sat like that for a long time, listening to the slow, steady pulse of the ocean, drenched in moonlight, until he felt her trembling with the cold. But she made no attempt to move. ‘I went to see him, just before I left for Glasgow, and found him sitting in the rain. He thought he was on a boat. The Claymore, he said it was, sailing from the mainland.’ She turned to look at Fin, her eyes clouded and sad. ‘I thought he was just rambling. Something he’d seen on television or read in a book. At first he called me Catherine, and then Ceit, like I was someone he knew. Not his daughter. And he talked about someone else called Big Kenneth.’

‘Beinn Ruigh Choinnich. It’s the mountain that shelters the harbour at Lochboisdale. They would have seen it from the ferry, from a long way off.’ He reached out a hand to brush stray hairs from her eyes. ‘What else did he say, Marsaili?’

‘Nothing that made much sense. At least, not then. He was talking to Ceit, not me. He said he would never forget their days at The Dean. Or the turrets at Danny’s. Something like that. Reminding them of their place in the world.’ She looked at him with pain etched in every line of her face. ‘And something else, that takes on a whole different meaning now.’ She closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly. Then opened them wide. ‘He said, we didn’t do too bad for a couple of orphan waifs.’

There must have been light in Fin’s eyes, because she frowned, canting her head, staring at him. ‘What is it?’

And if she had seen light, it was the light of revelation. He said, ‘Marsaili, I think maybe I know exactly what he meant when he talked about The Dean. And Danny’s turrets. And it must mean that Ceit, the girl who boarded with the widow O’Henley, came with them on the boat.’ And he thought, maybe there is someone after all who still knows the truth. He stood, then, and offered Marsaili his hand. She pulled herself up to stand beside him. He said, ‘If we can get seats, we should try to be on the first flight to Edinburgh tomorrow.’

The only light in the room came from the blue-tinged illumination of his laptop computer screen. He sat alone at the desk, in the dark, the stillness of the house pressing in all around him. The presence of others, in other rooms, seemed somehow only to increase his sense of isolation.

This was the room where he had spent so many hours tutored by Artair’s dad. Where he and Artair had sat, individually or together, listening to long lectures on Hebridean history, or puzzling over mathematical equations. Where the years of his boyhood had passed in suffocating incarceration, freedom glimpsed only occasionally in stolen glances from the window. Marsaili had said he could spend the night on the fold-down settee. But there were too many memories here. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain on the card table where they worked. The rows of books with their exotic titles, still there on the shelves. The smell of Artair’s dad’s pipe smoke, hanging in the still air in slow-moving blue strands. If he breathed deeply the scent of it remained, even if only in his memory.

Marsaili, fragile and fatigued, had gone to bed some time ago, telling him he could stay as long as he liked, to benefit from Fionnlagh’s wifi. The cursor on his screen winked over a webpage with the crest of the National Galleries of Scotland. Below it, a blue window with cottonwool clouds announced Another World. Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists. But he had long since stopped looking at it. It had taken him almost no time to confirm his suspicions, and immediately reserve their tickets on the morning flight. He had then spent much of the next hour in deep research.

He was tired. An ache behind his eyes. His body felt punched, bruised, his brain short-circuiting thoughts almost as soon as they appeared. He had no desire to go back to Edinburgh, a return to a painful past he had been unable to put behind him. The best he had been able to do was achieve a little distance. Now Fate was robbing him even of that. For Marsaili there would be no closure without it, while for him it would only serve to reopen old wounds.

He wondered, briefly, how she would receive him if he were to slip softly along the hall to her room and slide beneath the covers beside her. Not for sex, or even for love. But for comfort. The warmth of another human being.

But he knew he wouldn’t. He closed the lid of his laptop and moved silently through the house, shutting the kitchen door gently behind him. He walked up the road in the night to where his tent awaited him. Moonlight reflecting on the still of the ocean was almost painfully bright, stars overhead like the white-hot tips of a billion needles pricking the universe. All that awaited him within the soulless confines of his tent were a cold sleeping bag, a few sheets of paper in a buff folder describing the death of his son, and all the sleepless hours he knew he would have to endure before morning.