Chapter Nine
What It’s Worth — Mara
We walked home from the cliff, and neither of us said much, and I spent the rest of that day deciding, and by dark I’d finished.
Isla went up at nine. I built the fire high, which she’d have told me was a waste of good peat, and then I went up the stairs and got the bundle.
The drawer. The dress. The oilcloth on top of it, stiff with salt and older than me.
That cloth had been folded. Corners in, top over, and over again, creased flat each time—the way you’d put away a good shirt.
I carried it down, and I put it on the table between us. My coat was on the hook by the door next to his, which was the first time in eleven days I’d been in a room without wearing it.
Firelight is not kind to most things, and it was kind to this. Dark, close, dense, so black it took the light and gave nothing up. Warm through my hands the way a loaf is warm. And under the surface that slow knock, on and on.
“This is yours. I’m not keeping it.”
He sat forward and put his eyes on it.
He didn’t reach for it.
I waited. The fire cracked and settled, and I waited some more, and he sat three feet from the thing he’d told me he’d die without, and he did not put his hand out.
Then he sat back and looked across the room, and left it lying in the middle of the table.
He wasn’t going to make me do it.
I’d come down that staircase at half nine at night after the strangest day of my life, and I’d put the whole of a man’s future on a table, and he’d worked out—inside about two seconds—that a person who decides a thing like that at a fire might feel differently at breakfast. So he left it there.
He wasn’t going to close a hand round it while I could still change my mind.
Six years I spent with a man who booked the flowers.
I loved him a little for that.
“What will you do?” I got the bottle of wine and poured for both of us. “After?”
He started to say something and stopped before the first word was out.
“I’d like to go and see if there’s anybody left.”
“Left?”
“Nineteen years is a long while in the water. There were four of us the same year.” He turned the glass. “There’ll be nobody who remembers what I sound like.”
“They’ll remember you.”
“Aye, well.” The nearest thing to a smile he does. “I’d settle for the water. I’ve stood beside it that long I’ve forgotten what it does when you’re in it.”
“What’ll you miss?”
He took that seriously, which nobody ever does.
“Bread.”
“Bread.”
“You’ve nothing like it down there. And the wireless. And a dog I knew in 1971.”
“You had a dog?”
“He wasn’t mine. He belonged to a man at Rosehearty who didn’t want him, and he sat outside a boathouse with me for two winters.” He drank. “Black thing, one ear up. He’d not come near me for a month, and then he’d not leave off me.”
“What was his name?”
“The man called him Dog.”
“That’s the worst name I’ve ever heard.”
“He answered to it. I’d have thought less of him if he hadn’t.”
I was laughing into my glass with my elbows on the table by then. That was the best hour I’d had in six years. Six years, and it was a peat fire and a bottle of wine and a man telling me about a dog called Dog.
The door opened.
“It’s only me.”
Callum came in dripping, boots off at the mat, holding a bundle of newspaper out in front of him.
“Two mackerel. My brother-in-law’s got more luck than sense.” He put them on the counter. “Tell Isla they’ll not keep past Thursday.”
I had the cloth over the table before he was through the door. It was the only quick thing I did all night.
“Sit down. You’re soaked.”
“Two minutes.” He sat anyway. His hands went round the glass I gave him, and the iron ring on his right hand knocked the side of it.
Callum’s eyes, sharp as a herring gull’s, swept the room before landing on Tavish. “You’re upright, then.”
“I am.”
“Good man.” He drank. “Isla’s hip any better for the weather?”
“She says a hip’s a hip.”
“That’s her.” He laughed, and it filled the room, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Eleven days without a blow. I’ve the tides written down since 1993, and I’ve nothing like it in the book.”
We talked about the mackerel and about a boat that came in wrong at Fraserburgh, and about Isla’s roof, and Callum cuts his own hair, and you can tell from the back of it.
Tavish had gone quiet in the window chair. His hand was in his pocket, and I could see him working something around in his fingers.
“You’ll not have been down the far end again.” He put it to the fire rather than to me. “Since that night.”
“No. I’ve been up on the headland mostly.”
“Aye. Better light up there.”
“That’s what I told him.” I forced my shoulders to relax.
“You’d want to keep off it altogether.” He set the glass down and turned it a quarter, the way he’d turn a bolt.
“There’s a lad in Peterhead had two thousand pound of gear off a boathouse in September.
Folk go through them. You get all sorts in an empty building, and half of it’s nothing, and then you get a thing wrapped up in oilcloth folded over three times, and you’d wonder who’d bother.
” He stood and reached for his jacket. “Right. Isla’ll have my head about the fish. ”
He got his boots on at the mat.
“Mind that step. It’s greasy. Night, both.”
The door shut, and the cold came in behind him, and the fire leaned sideways and came up again.
I sat there with my glass in my hand.
Nobody had seen that cloth. It went from a box behind a wall into my coat, and from my coat into a drawer, and out of the drawer onto this table twenty minutes ago, under a cover.
Corners in. Top over. Over again.
Only the man who wrapped it could know that.
My eyes met Tavish’s across the table.
He knew. He’d known all along.
And he still hadn’t taken it.