Chapter 10
a deich / ten
They needed eggs, they needed milk. Innes had mentioned that fuel prices were decent, so John thought he might take a run to town and fill the tanks with diesel for the Landy, and a little petrol for the Sunbeam.
As he pulled on his coat, he thought he should ask Ella what else she needed from the big shop.
He decided he would ask Cal if he wanted to come along.
They could take the long road and skirt round the west coast, maybe stop and walk along one of the white sand beaches, let the harsh Atlantic wind cool their feelings. Maybe they could talk.
It had been a couple of weeks since their fight – and John thought of it as a fight even though Cal had never raised his fists in response.
But now the silence had gone on too long and there was an imbalance in the house, a faint but certain feeling of two against one, the sound of laughter in other rooms.
When he went in search of them, he found them at the kitchen sink, peeling a heap of potatoes. The radio was playing and Ella was whispering, telling Cal some gossipy thing that John couldn’t quite hear. He jangled his keys to announce his presence and they stiffened slightly. They pulled apart.
He had always been aware of how he could alter his son’s mood whenever he entered a room.
Whether Cal was with Grace or Ella, he saw how their laughter ebbed when he came near.
He became resentful of their love and powerless to the anger that stemmed from the heartache he felt at always being on the outside.
Then Cal went away to the mainland, and anytime he would phone home, he would talk to his father for five minutes before he asked for her, his beloved seanmhair.
Then afterwards, Ella would explain his own son to him: all the awards he was winning, the tests he was anxious about, the new friendships he’d found and then lost.
There were days he wished Grace had taken the boy from him.
There were days he wished he’d been brave enough to be the one to leave.
He jangled his keys again.
“You gave me a fright!” said Ella, taking several shuffling steps in order to turn her bulk to face him. She saw how he was hovering as if waiting for something. “You wanting the sink?”
“No.” He hoped for Cal to glance his way, but Cal kept his back to him as he dug the peeler into the potatoes. “I just came to tell you I’m heading out. You can leave my lunch on the side.”
The town was quiet. It was too early for the afternoon ferry and the few tourists that were there killed time by wandering along the row of terraced houses, peering into the front rooms.
He went to the depot and refilled the Landy and a can for the Sunbeam.
By the time he had finished there was a cluck of old crofters loitering outside the big shop.
They were hunched men, standing in a puddle of weak sunlight while they debated Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom.
They had seen the world go through considerable change, and they had seen more of the world than John could ever imagine.
He was not yet ready to go home and because he had nowhere else to be, he tapped his brim and stopped and said hello.
“This feels like something a mere mortal shouldn’t see,” he said.
“Like the point where two rainbows meet.”
“First Tuesday of every month we gather and fix the world a little,” said Cam Carey, struggling to straighten up. “We fix it just enough that it can spin on and nobody is any the wiser.”
They had heard his boy was home and they asked him how the congregation fared.
He asked after their children and grandchildren and was sad to hear that this one or that one was in ill health.
He promised to carry the news home to Falabay so they could pray for the suffering.
Then he stood on the outside as the talk meandered around politics, wind farms, and the internet cafe that was rumoured to open in the big town.
Cam Carey puffed his pipe thoughtfully, his good eye sparkling with mischief. “So now, Johnnie, and more importantly . . . if you were a Spice Girl yourself, which one would you be?” The old men chuckled. They trembled in their serge suits.
John said he would have no idea and so they told him he would be Baby Spice.
“You’re nothing but a bairn,” said Paul Murray. “You’re nothing but a wee boy.”
Feeling cheered by the conversation and thinking how he might use it as an opener with Cal later, he said goodbye to the bodachs and left them standing in their pool of sunlight.
He took his time and filled his basket with all the needed things.
His hand hovered over the chewy sweeties that Cal liked, but he remembered Ella’s laughter from earlier, and he put them back.
As he was queuing to pay and worrying about the small talk he would make with Margaret on the tills, he saw her out the corner of his eye.
He had to stare just to be certain.
She had changed. There was something of the mainland about her.
She wore a mock neck tucked into a short, A-line skirt that had rows of gold sailor buttons up the front.
Her messy hair was cradled in the collar of an unbelted trench coat and as she bent over the freezer it fell across her face and prevented her from noticing him.
He hadn’t been this close to Grace in years.
And now here she was, his own wife, searching the wheezing freezer for chips.
He turned away just as she was straightening up. He dropped the basket on the counter and hurried out of the shop, ignoring the shopkeeper as she called after him.
In the raw months after she’d left, he would hear reports of his wife as though she were some rare bird, spotted near a beach or roaming the moors.
He heard that Grace was staying with some school friends, or some awful woman he had never liked, someone who had also fallen out with the church and been pushed to the social hinterlands of her own little settlement.
When he heard note of a credible sighting, he would wait until Cal was in school and then he would drive to the settlement.
He would park at some distance and wait for hours just for a glimpse of her.
When he was sure it was her, he would fill an envelope with whatever money he had and push it through the door.
He went in search of Innes and found him near the raised beds.
Whenever Innes had a spare moment he liked to work on his plot rebuilding a section of retaining wall that had collapsed in the rains.
He was kicking an old bladder along the road and, to John’s surprise, Cal was kicking it back to him.
John had never known Cal to enjoy football.
He watched as Cal kicked the ball too hard.
Innes caught it with his chest and brought it back under control.
Cal raised his eyes and saw his father standing on the low hill. The ball rolled past him.
There, in the clear daylight, John could see the mess he had made of his son’s face.
He had been unable to look directly at him, so to see it now was different from all the little glimpses he had stolen in the house.
With his hair tied back, here it was for all to see, laid bare under God’s eye.
“Forgive me,” he murmured. “Good Lord, forgive me.”
Innes turned and smiled up at him. “Ah, Johnnie! Fancy a kickabout?”
John jerked his thumb indicating that Innes should come away for a moment.
He walked away from the men, giving Innes no option but to put the ball down and follow.
Innes muttered something to Cal that John could not hear, but he wiped his hands on his trousers and followed John up the road all the same.
When he reached John’s heels, he said, “Your Cal’s been a great help with the wall.”
“We have fences of our own.”
Innes put his hand on John’s arm. “What happened to his face?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He was born clumsy.” John kept walking, careful not to look at Innes and face the flicker of accusation. When they descended the far side of the hill, he stopped and Innes came to his side. “I saw Grace this morning. At the big shop.”
“Ah, so that is what this is about,” Innes sighed in relief. “I see her all the time.”
“You never said.”
“It would only upset you.”
The men turned to face the sea. They stood a distance apart. John would have liked Innes to step closer and to feel the back of his hand brush against his own, but he feared stepping closer in case Innes, even unthinkingly, stepped away.
“You have to stop going to her house.”
John flinched.
Innes chewed his lip, weighing if he should say anything more. “You’ve been seen. Alan the butcher tells me he sees you parked up on the Pàrras road every now and then. It’s not healthy, John. You’re driving yourself to madness.”
Innes had compared the island to a fishbowl once.
He said you had to learn to live with your disappointments and your shames because if you thought you had left them behind, you would only swim back around and be hurt all over again.
John had argued this wasn’t accurate, because he could never put his failures out of mind and at least in a fishbowl you could look outwards. This, he said, was rats in a bucket.
Innes wiped the side of his boot on the grass. Then he said, in his usual, intuitive way, “Maybe now you’ve seen her, you can get out and about more. It’ll do you the world of good.”
John had often wondered if Grace was the real reason he had become so attached to the church, because no matter where he travelled or what community hosted a Communion, he was always safe in the knowledge he would never see his wife inside a house of worship again.
Innes rocked on his heels. “OK, then. So tell me, how was she?”
Innes had hurt his feelings by seeing him so clearly, so John tossed the words onto the ground at his feet. “I don’t know. We didn’t talk.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. Any time I’ve spoken to her she’s been very nice.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“Aidh—never for any great length, but if I see her, we exchange a few words. We can always laugh about Ella. Grace has always been civil.”
“And I suppose you think civility is better than I deserve?”
“I was thinking, better than what we deserved. But . . . yes.”
He had noticed that Grace no longer wore her wedding ring and as he watched her, he had hidden his hand behind his back and attempted to loosen his own band with his thumb. “How can she go about her business smiling like that?”
Innes studied John’s profile a moment. “Say what you really mean.”
John darted his eyes to the side. “And what do I mean?”
“You mean she embarrassed you and you’re angry with her. You mean you worry that all these other men look at you now like a man who can’t keep a wife.” Innes turned back to the sea. “I, for one, am grateful to her for leaving. She could have made life difficult for us.”
“Has it not been hard enough?”
“You never wanted her, John. And you don’t want anybody else to want her. You have to master your possessiveness. It will ruin you.” He corrected himself. “It has ruined you.”
“She started a family with my brother. My only brother! She’s living in sin, in a house that they built on the good land my father left him.
And everyone – everyone I ever knew, and every cunt I ever meet, knows it before they know me.
” He thought about the bodachs waiting in the sunshine.
He realised that they must have seen Grace enter the shop just before he burst out the doors and hurried away.
“So tell me, how exactly should I behave?”
Innes pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.
He took his time and dug at his nose and used the moment to let John calm himself before he said: “I’m not going to watch you torture yourself and then come round here expecting sympathy for it.
” He folded the hanky carefully, edge to edge, over and over again.
He did it with a deliberate slowness because he understood that John’s first reaction when confronted with the truth was always anger, and that when he was angry, he stopped listening.
Innes tucked the handkerchief into his breast pocket.
“Sometimes I think you wish it was me who had gone away.”
“Sometimes.” John said it quickly and in English. But as soon as he said it, Innes flinched, and he heard how cruel it was and how deeply untrue. “I didn’t mean that.”
Innes walked away. “Remember that she didn’t marry you. Not the real you, anyway.”
John trailed behind him. “Wait!” he commanded. “I’m not done talking to you.”
“Och, let me finish this wall before the rain starts.” Innes had a long, determined stride and John was forced to jog in a way he felt was beneath him just to keep up.
Innes pulled his work gloves from his back pocket and tugged them on.
“Aidh—I think she has been very decent, all things considered. I have a lot of respect for Grace Morrison.”
“Macleod! In the eyes of our Lord she’s still my wife. Her name is Grace Macleod.”
“Which is tidy,” said Innes, turning, walking backwards. “Seeing she belongs to your brother.”