Calum was waiting for him, looking past his shoulder, scanning the other passengers. The same slight, grey-haired figure in a green windcheater who met them every year. Being Calum, he didn’t ask; he waited. They had known one another, with a kind of intimate formality, for twenty years or so. Now that regularity, that repetition, and all it contained, was broken.
As the van dawdled along the single-track road, and waited politely in the passing bays, he told Calum the story he was already weary with repeating. The sudden tiredness, the dizzy spells, the blood tests, the scans, hospital, more hospital, the hospice. The speed of it all, the process, the merciless tramp of events. He told it without tears, in a neutral voice, as if it might have happened to someone else. It was the only way, so far, that he knew how.
Outside the dark stone cottage, Calum yanked on the handbrake. ‘Rest her soul,’ he said quietly, and took charge of the holdall.
The first time they had come to the island, they weren’t yet married. She had worn a wedding ring as a concession to … what? – their imagined version of island morality? It made them feel both superior and hypocritical at the same time. Their room at Calum and Flora’s B & B had whitewashed walls, rain drying on the window, and a view across the machair to the sharp rise of Beinn Mhartainn. On their first night, they had discovered a bed whose joints wailed against any activity grosser than the minimum required for the sober conception of children. They found themselves comically restricted. Island sex, they had called it, giggling quietly into each other’s bodies.
He had bought new binoculars especially for that trip. Inland, there were larks and twites, wheatears and wagtails. On the shoreline, ringed plovers and pipits. But it was the seabirds he loved best, the cormorants and gannets, the shags and fulmars. He spent many a docile, wet-bottomed hour on the clifftops, thumb and middle finger bringing into focus their whirling dives, and their soaring independence. The fulmars were his favourites. Birds which spent their whole lives at sea, coming to land only to nest. Then they laid a single egg, raised the chick, and took to the sea again, skimming the waves, rising on the air currents, being themselves.
She had preferred flowers to birds. Sea pinks, yellow rattle, purple vetch, flag iris. There was something, he remembered, called self-heal. That was as far as his knowledge, and memory, went. She had never picked a single flower here, or anywhere else. To cut a flower was to speed its death, she used to say. She hated the sight of a vase. In the hospital, other patients, seeing the empty metal trolley at the foot of her bed, had thought her friends neglectful, and tried to pass on their excess bouquets. This went on until she was moved to her own room, and then the problem ceased.
That first year, Calum had shown them the island. One afternoon, on a beach where he liked to dig for razor clams, he had looked away from them and said, almost as if he was addressing the sea, ‘My grandparents were married by declaration, you know. That was all you needed in the old days. Approval and declaration. You were married when the moon was waxing and the tide running – to bring you luck. And after the wedding there’d be a rough mattress on the floor of an outbuilding. For the first night. The idea was that you begin marriage in a state of humility.’
‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Calum,’ she had said. But he felt it was a rebuke – to their English manners, their presumption, their silent lie.
The second year, they had returned a few weeks after getting married. They wanted to tell everyone they met; but here was one place they couldn’t. Perhaps this had been good for them – to be silly with happiness and obliged into silence. Perhaps it had been their own way of beginning marriage in a state of humility.
He sensed, nevertheless, that Calum and Flora had guessed. No doubt it wasn’t difficult, given their new clothes and their daft smiles. On the first night Calum gave them whisky from a bottle without a label. He had many such bottles. There was a lot more whisky drunk than sold on this island, that was for sure.
Flora had taken out of a drawer an old sweater which had belonged to her grandfather. She laid it on the kitchen table, ironing it with her palms. In the old days, she explained, the women of these islands used to tell stories with their knitting. The pattern of this jersey showed that her grandfather had come from Eriskay, while its details, its decorations, told of fishing and faith, of the sea and the sand. And this series of zigzags across the shoulder – these here, look – represented the ups and downs of marriage. They were, quite literally, marriage lines.
Zigzags. Like any newly married couple, they had exchanged a glance of sly confidence, sure that for them there would be no downs – or at least, not like those of their parents, or of friends already making the usual stupid, predictable mistakes. They would be different; they would be different from anyone who had ever got married before.
‘Tell them about the buttons, Flora,’ said Calum.
The pattern of the jersey told you which island its owner came from; the buttons at the neck told you precisely which family they belonged to. It must have been like walking around dressed in your own postcode, he thought.
A day or two later, he had said to Calum, ‘I wish everyone was still wearing those sweaters.’ Having no sense of tradition himself, he liked other people to display one.
‘They had great use,’ replied Calum. ‘There was many a drowning you could only recognise by the jersey. And then by the buttons. Who the man was.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Well, no reason for it. For you to know. For you to think.’
There were moments when he felt this was the most distant place he had ever come to. The islanders happened to speak the same language as him, but that was just some strange, geographical coincidence.
This time, Calum and Flora treated him as he knew they would: with a tact and modesty he had once, stupidly, Englishly, mistaken for deference. They didn’t press themselves upon him, or make a show of their sympathy. There was a touch on the shoulder, a plate laid before him, a remark about the weather.
Each morning, Flora would give him a sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper, a piece of cheese and an apple. He would set off across the machair and up Beinn Mhartainn. He made himself climb to the top, from where he could see the island and its jigsaw edges, where he could feel himself alone. Then, binoculars in hand, he would head for the cliffs and the seabirds. Calum had once told him that on some of the islands, generations back, they used to make oil for their lamps from the fulmars. Odd how he had always kept this detail from her, for twenty years and more. The rest of the year round, he never thought of it. Then they would come to the island, and he would say to himself, I mustn’t tell her what they did with the fulmars.
That summer she had nearly left him (or had he nearly left her? – at this distance, it was hard to tell) he had gone clam-digging with Calum. She had left them to pursue their sport, preferring to walk the damp, wavy line of the beach from which the sea had just retreated. Here, where the pebbles were barely bigger than sand grains, she liked to search for pieces of coloured glass – tiny shards of broken bottle, worn soft and smooth by water and time. For years he had watched the stooped walk, the inquisitive crouch, the picking, the discarding, the hoarding in the cupped left palm.
Calum explained how you looked for a small declivity in the sand, poured a little salt into it, then waited for the razor clam to shoot up a few inches from its lair. He wore an oven glove on his left hand, against the sharpness of the rising shell. You had to pull quickly, he said, seizing the clam before it disappeared again.
Mostly, despite Calum’s expertise, nothing stirred, and they moved on to the next hollow in the sand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her wandering further along the beach, her back turned to him, self-sufficient, content with what she was doing, not giving him a thought.
As he handed Calum more salt, and saw the oven glove poised in anticipation, he found himself saying, man to man, ‘Bit like marriage, isn’t it?’
Calum frowned slightly. ‘What’
s your meaning?’
‘Oh, waiting for something to pop out of the sand. Then it turns out either there’s nothing there, or something that cuts your hand open if you aren’t bloody careful.’
It had been a stupid thing to say. Stupid because he hadn’t really meant it, more stupid because it was presumptuous. Silence told him that Calum found such talk offensive, to himself, to Flora, to the islanders generally.
Each day he walked, and each day soft rain soaked into him. He ate a sodden sandwich, and watched the fulmars skimming the sea. He walked to Greian Head and looked down over the flat rocks where the seals liked to congregate. One year, they had watched a dog swim all the way out from the beach, chase the seals off, and then parade up and down its rock like a new landowner. This year there was no dog.
On the vertiginous flank of Greian was part of an unlikely golf course where, year after year, they had never seen a single golfer. There was a small circular green surrounded by a picket fence to keep the cows off. Once, nearby, a sudden herd of bullocks had rushed at them, frightening her silly. He had stood his ground, waved his arms wildly, instinctively shouted the names of the political leaders he most despised, and somehow not been surprised that it had calmed them down. This year, there were no bullocks to be seen, and he missed them. He supposed they must have long gone to slaughter.
He remembered a crofter on Vatersay telling them about lazy beds. You cut a slice of turf, placed your potatoes on the open soil, relaid the turf upside down on top of them – and that was it. Time and rain and the warmth of the sun did the rest. Lazy beds – he saw her laughing at him, reading his mind, saying afterwards that this would be his idea of gardening, wouldn’t it? He remembered her eyes shining like the damp glass jewellery she used to fill her palm with.
On the last morning, Calum drove him back to Traigh Mhòr in the van. Politicians had been promising a new airstrip so that modern planes could land. There was talk of tourist development and island regeneration, mixed with warnings about the current cost of subsidy. Calum wanted none of it, and nor did he. He knew that he would need the island to stay as still and unchanging as possible. He wouldn’t come back if jets started landing on tarmac.
He checked in his holdall at the counter, and they went outside. Hanging over a low wall, Calum lit a cigarette. They looked out across the damp and bumpy sand of the cockle beach. The cloud was low, the windsock inert.
‘These are for you,’ said Calum, handing him half a dozen postcards. He must have bought them at the café just now. Views of the island, the beach, the machair; one of the very plane waiting to take him away.
‘But …’
‘You will be needing the memory.’
A few minutes later, the Twin Otter took off straight out across Orosay and the open sea. There was no farewell view of the island before that world below was shut out. In the enveloping cloud, he thought about marriage lines and buttons; about razor clams and island sex; about missing bullocks and fulmars being turned into oil; and then, finally, the tears came. Calum had known he would not be coming back. But the tears were not for that, or for himself, or even for her, for their memories. They were tears for his own stupidity. His presumption too.
He had thought he could recapture, and begin to say farewell. He had thought that grief might be assuaged, or if not assuaged, at least speeded up, hurried on its way a little, by going back to a place where they had been happy. But he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him. And in the months and years ahead, he expected grief to teach him many other things as well. This was just the first of them.
TWO
The Limner
MR TUTTLE HAD been argumentative from the beginning: about the fee – twelve dollars – the size of the canvas, and the prospect to be shown through the window. Fortunately, there had been swift accord about the pose and the costume. Over these, Wadsworth was happy to oblige the collector of customs; happy also to give him the appearance, as far as it was within his skill, of a gentleman. That was, after all, his business. He was a limner, but also an artisan, and paid at an artisan’s rate to produce what suited the client. In thirty years, few would remember what the collector of customs had looked like; the only relic of his physical presence after he had met his Maker would be this portrait. And in Wadsworth’s experience, clients held it more important to be pictured as sober, God-fearing men and women than they did to be offered a true likeness. This was not a matter that perturbed him.
From the edge of his eye, Wadsworth became aware that his client had spoken, but did not divert his gaze from the tip of his brush. Instead he pointed to the bound notebook in which so many sitters had written comments, expressed their praise and blame, wisdom and fatuity. He might as well open the book at any page and ask his client to identify a remark left by a predecessor ten or twenty years before. The opinions of this collector of customs so far had been as predictable as his waistcoat buttons, if less interesting. Fortunately, Wadsworth was paid to represent waistcoats rather than opinions. Of course, it was more complicated than this: to represent the waistcoat, and the wig, and the breeches, was to represent an opinion, indeed a whole corpus of them. The waistcoat and breeches showed the body beneath, as the wig and hat showed the brain beneath; though in some cases it was a pictorial exaggeration to suggest that any brains lay beneath.
He would be happy to leave this town, to pack his brushes and canvases, his pigments and palette, into the small cart, to saddle his mare and then take the forest trails which in three days would lead him home. There he would rest, and reflect, and perhaps decide to live differently, without this constant travail of the itinerant. A pedlar’s life; also a supplicant’s. As always, he had come to this town, taken lodgings by the night, and placed an advertisement in the newspaper, indicating his competence, his prices and his availability. ‘If no application is made within six days,’ the advertisement ended, ‘Mr Wadsworth will quit the town.’ He had painted the small daughter of a dry-goods salesman, and then Deacon Zebediah Harries, who had given him Christian hospitality in his house, and recommended him to the collector of customs.
Mr Tuttle had not offered lodging; but the limner willingly slept in the stable with his mare for company, and ate in the kitchen. And then there had been that incident on the third evening, against which he had failed – or felt unable – to protest. It had made him sleep uneasily. It had wounded him too, if the truth were known. He ought to have written the collector down for an oaf and a bully – he had painted enough in his years – and forgotten the matter. Perhaps he should indeed consider his retirement, let his mare grow fat, and live from what crops he could grow and what farmstock he could raise. He could always paint windows and doors for a trade instead of people; he would not judge this an indignity.
Late on the first morning, Wadsworth had been obliged to introduce the collector of customs to the notebook. The fellow, like many another, had imagined that merely opening his mouth wider might be enough to effect communication. Wadsworth had watched the pen travel across the page, and then the forefinger tap impatiently. ‘If God is merciful,’ the man wrote, ‘perhaps in Heaven you will hear.’ In reply, he had half-smiled, and given a brief nod, from which surprise and gratitude might be inferred. He had read the thought many times before. Often it was a true expression of Christian feeling and sympathetic hope; occasionally, as now, it represented scarce-concealed dismay that the world contained those with such frustrating deformities. Mr Tuttle was among those masters who preferred their servants to be mute, deaf and blind – except when his convenience suited the matter otherwise. Of course, masters and servants had become citizens and hired help once the juster republic had declared itself. But masters and servants did not thereby die out; nor did the essential inclinations of man.
Wadsworth did not think he was judging the collector in an un-Christian manner. His opinion had been forged on first contact, and confirmed on that third evening. The incident had been the crueller in that it involved a child, a
garden boy who had scarcely entered the years of understanding. The limner always felt tenderly towards children: for themselves, for the grateful fact that they overlooked his deformity, and also because he had no issue himself. He had never known the company of a wife. Perhaps he might yet do so, though he would have to ensure that she was beyond childbearing years. He could not inflict his deformity on others. Some had tried explaining that his fears were unnecessary, since the affliction had arrived not at birth, but after an attack of the spotted fever when he was a boy of five. Further, they pressed, had he not made his way in the world, and might not a son of his, howsoever constructed, do likewise? Perhaps that would be the case, but what of a daughter? The notion of a girl living as an outcast was too much for him. True, she might stay at home, and there would be a shared sympathy between them. But what would happen to such a child after his death?
No, he would go home and paint his mare. This had always been his intention, and perhaps now he would execute it. She had been his companion for twelve years, understood him easily, and took no heed of the noises that issued from his mouth when they were alone in the forest. His plan had been this: to paint her, on the same size of canvas used for Mr Tuttle, though turned to make an oblong; and afterwards, to cast a blanket over the picture and uncover it only on the mare’s death. It was presumptuous to compare the daily reality of God’s living creation with a human simulacrum by an inadequate hand – even if this was the very purpose for which his clients employed him.
He did not expect it would be easy to paint the mare. She would lack the patience, and the vanity, to pose for him, with one hoof proudly advanced. But then, neither would his mare have the vanity to come round and examine the canvas even as he worked on it. The collector of customs was now doing so, leaning over his shoulder, peering and pointing. There was something he did not approve. Wadsworth glanced upwards, from the immobile face to the mobile one. Even though he had a distant memory of speaking and hearing, and had been taught his letters, he had never learnt the facility of reading words upon the tongue. Wadsworth raised the narrowest of his brushes from the waistcoat button’s boss, and transferred his eye to the notebook as the collector dipped his pen. ‘More dignity,’ the man wrote, and then underlined the words.