Chapter 25 #3
She slipped on her coat and went to check on the men.
Catching John’s eye, she beckoned him on, and he followed her around the side of the house and down to the water’s edge.
He helped her over to the buried caravan, where she rested against the submerged roof.
He sat near her and they stared out at the sea for a while.
The land fell away before them, fifteen, twenty feet into the ocean. The sky was fleecy with clouds, but here and there were sunspots and the sun broke through on a slant, making shafts of sunlight that appeared like threads of golden warp.
“You wanted to talk?” he asked eventually.
“Look how beautiful it is.”
Ella didn’t seem to be in any hurry. She took a tub of cream from her pocket, which he imagined to be one of Grace’s recipes.
He watched as she rubbed it into her hands.
The air filled with the scent of lilacs.
“I used to love when you’d get a whiff of lilacs on the breeze,” she said.
“Used to wander about with my nose in the air, wondering who had planted them so I could go get a cuttin’.
I’ll never forgive ye for telling me that it wisnae flowers.
That it was some sheep that had died and was bloated, rotting in a ditch somewhere . . .”
She offered him some of the hand cream but he declined.
“You should come wi’ me when I go to Pàrras.
Don’t you think it’s time? It would mean a lot to Grace to see you.
” She stared at the side of his face, the heavy brow, the broken, noble nose.
“You won’t have long left. Every time I visit, your Uilleam seems that much farther away. ”
John had not spoken to his brother since he had taken up with Grace.
The only sightings of Uilleam had been a few glimpses in town, or the odd time their cars had passed on the spinal road and they had waved for civility’s sake before realising who the other driver was.
He had seen him a few years ago, at the fuel depot.
He had been sitting in the car while Grace filled the tanks.
Uilleam had looked older than his fifty-eight years, and the way his chin had begun to soften reminded John of their father napping in his armchair between the services.
He must have sensed his brother watching him because he looked directly at him, and then he looked right through him, and John felt Uilleam didn’t recognise him at all.
They had never been that close. The twelve years between them made Uilleam feel more like an uncle than a brother.
Uilleam and his father had been very close, but by the time John was born, his father was too old to care for a young child and Uilleam was resentful of John for demanding their father’s attention.
Even though it was especially subtle there was always a coldness, a remove in how they treated him.
It felt like a draught pushing into the room, a draught he could never quite find the source of, or prove the existence of, to others.
He felt his brother blamed him for his birth and for the death of their mother.
That he looked upon John like a bad trade made with God.
He was certain there had been nothing between Grace and -Uilleam – not until after Grace had left him for his affair with Innes.
But he had often wondered if Uilleam had taken up with Grace, if he had sought her out and settled around her, because he wanted to take something from John the way he felt John had taken something from him.
Ella reached into her pocket again and this time she produced a small plastic disc.
It was black and shiny and from where John sat it looked something like the cover for a camera lens.
She held it out to him and he frowned, so she took it back and popped the clasp.
It sprung open to reveal a selection of eyeshadows in moody, dramatic colours like petrol, storm cloud, bruise.
She rubbed a little of the eyeshadow on the back of her hand. She tilted it so he could see the colour. It had a purple cast to it, slightly fleshy, a little meaty, a little ashy. It was the liver colour he had seen on her feet on the day she told him her heart was failing.
“You lied to me.”
She made a long face. “Suppose you’d be the authority on lies. All these years you’ve lived in my house like some miserable cuckoo.” She licked her thumb and wiped the smudge from her hand. “When are you going to tell him about you and Innes?”
The conversation was moving too quickly for him.
“He deserves to know.”
John stared down at his own hands, he saw the veins and the mottled skin, the inflamed nail beds and the split knuckles. He stared at the hands and wondered who these strange tools belonged to. He had known who he was once.
He thought about himself as a young man, when he was fifteen and first falling in love.
It had seemed possible to love both God and Innes and to live a quiet, half-life.
He had no way of knowing how much lying it would take or how those lies would take root, how they needed constant tending, how they would grow thorny and wrap around all those who cared for him until they were all part of the tangle.
It seemed a cruel joke, that even as he salted the earth around him, his lies were the most abundant fruit these rocks could ever produce.
He closed his eyes, tried to find himself amidst all the noise.
He loved God. He loved Innes. He loved God and God hated how he loved Innes.
“If you were Cal, could you forgive me?”
Ella fished a packet of tobacco from her pocket and sprinkled some into a paper. “We never did it for you, John. We did it for him. We did it so he didn’t have to be the boy at boarding school with the homosexual for a father. But he’s a man now. He has a good head on his shoulders.”
“But her leaving made the lie into something worse. I couldn’t contain it, Ella.”
“She left so you could be with Innes. Did you expect her to hang around and watch?”
“And if Cal ever learnt that?”
“You insult my daughter. With every year that goes by, you piss all over her sacrifice when you don’t claim your own happiness.”
“You cannot show up for judgement and say: ‘Yes, I sinned, but oh Lord, I was happy.’”
She lit the cigarette and sucked on it until it caught. She had been rationing tobacco, setting aside money to give to Innes for diesel. The cigarette was mean and unsatisfying. It irritated her. “You should know that I came right out and asked Cal if he was a bender.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You have eyes. You know why.” She popped a smoke ring. “Turns out he’s a chip off the old block. He lied. He said he wisnae.”
“Then that’s your answer. Don’t ask again. Whatever he is, whatever he is not. Let him keep it to himself.”
“Islands within islands,” she muttered, “within islands, within islands.” Ella took up the disc of eyeshadow again.
She turned it in her hand. “Grace and me always had our suspicions. But he seemed so fond of Isla. And it seemed to be such an unfunny joke that you would be the way you are, and he would be yon way too. It was too weird to think of.” Her leg had fallen asleep.
She knuckled the muscle. “It was never a thing you and me could talk about. How can you tell a man that hates himself that his son is made in his image?” She put her hand on his knee.
“D’you know how hard it is for there to be somethin’ sittin’ in the middle of the room but for every scunner to go around pretendin’ they don’t see it? Pair of you had me wall-eyed to fuck.”
He didn’t want to know. He had decided years ago that he would never speak to his son about Cal’s sexuality.
To raise the subject would be to cast light onto it and it should be left in the murk where it belonged.
Cal had the myopia of youth, he was worried about things like honesty and happiness and now.
It was a father’s job to take the long view, to have lived through experience, and to keep sons from harm, even when the son wished so deeply for it.
He had no doubt that Cal could live a life of discretion, that he could one day become a good Christian husband and a loving father, while at times giving in to his needs, taking care of his urges in the way that allowed men like them to survive.
Ella went on, “Grace and me hoped that given a wee bit of distance, he’d decide who he was.
But for four year I sat in that living room every Wednesday and Sunday night and I’d listen to the two of you talk.
I could feel the distance gettin’ wider.
I could feel the boy pullin’ away.” She considered the eyeshadow.
“And it was all because of you, John. You have driven everybody I have ever loved away from me.”
“Is it always my fault?”
“I raised that boy. He’s as much mine as he is anybody’s.” Ella closed the case with a click. She put it back in her pocket. “I had an awful time trying to reach my feet. No half as limber as I used to be.”
“You’ve no idea the damage you’ve caused.”
“I only wanted to see him. Have him home for a few weeks. A few months, mibbe.”
They were silent for a time, watching the sunspots strike the sea. After a while, Ella drew an envelope from her pocket. She smoothed a crease and then she handed it to him.
Even before he opened it he knew what it was. It was stamped with the factor’s seal and it was a notice to say that there had been a change to the official Crofting Register. He didn’t have to read far before he saw what he feared.
She had transferred the croft into Grace’s name.