Beyond the Sea (6 page)

SITTING OPPOSITE ONE
another at the kitchen table, a pot of tea between them, Freya wondered what her sister was thinking. No doubt she had spotted the unwashed pots in the sink, among them several wineglasses, empty but for an incriminating film of red at their base. Perhaps they had gone unnoticed. But it was unlikely. Still, if Marta had seen them, she said nothing, and Freya loved her for it. She looked her sister over. She was as beautiful as ever – long brown hair, dark eyes, full, irreverent red lips. They had been chatting, catching up, nothing deep or contentious. Yet Freya was sure there was something, unspoken, lurking beneath her usual bravado.

‘So how long are you thinking of staying?' She tried to make the question sound nonchalant.

‘Trying to get rid of me already?' Marta answered, quick smart.

‘No, no, not at all,' Freya rushed in. Then she saw Marta smile. ‘I was just wondering.'

‘I don't know. But I'm flexible. Could be open ended.'

‘Open ended?' Freya repeated. ‘How does that work with a full-on job as a lawyer in London?'

‘Ah, that.' Marta paused. ‘It really wasn't working out with the cock, and that meant that it really wasn't working out at work. I decided to quit.'

So that was it. ‘Isn't that a little hasty?'

Marta shook her head. ‘No. I've been thinking about it for a while.' She took a breath. ‘He was never going to leave his wife and that made the whole thing pretty untenable. Besides, I can get a job like that anywhere else.'

Freya nodded. ‘I see,' was all she said.

‘So, as I'm owed holiday, it seemed sensible to take some time off during my notice period and come and see you. Two birds, one stone.' Marta's tone was light, but beneath it Freya suspected that she was hurting.

‘I see,' she said again. She was longing to ask if Marta was okay, but she knew that if her sister didn't bring something up directly she didn't want to talk about it. ‘And the cock agreed that this was a sensible approach?'

‘I made it clear that, if he knew what was good for him, he really wouldn't mind how much time I spent up here with you. Personal time, on so many levels.'

Freya snorted and Marta smiled.

‘But don't panic. I won't cramp your reclusive style. I thought just for a few weeks perhaps. And then I'll be off.' She winked at Freya, but there was something beneath the look.

Freya reached over the table and took Marta's hand. ‘Darling sis, I'm very glad to see you. Thank you for coming. And you are welcome to stay as long as you like. Are you okay?'

Marta nodded briskly and kissed her sister's hand. Then she sat back in her chair, looked around and, as Freya had anticipated, changed the subject. ‘It brings back a whole load of memories for me being here, you know. It's been a while since I've been to Ailsa Cleit. That's right, isn't it?'

Freya nodded. That was what Jack's father, Alister, had called it when he bought the island for his wife. And it had stuck. Everyone for miles around knew it as that. The Rock of Ailsa.

‘You know what?' said Freya. ‘I can still see Jack's mother, as clearly as if it were yesterday, standing by the shoreline, gazing out to sea, her blonde hair whipped by the wind.' Freya smiled. Ailsa had the wildness of the Orkneys within her bones and a greater affinity with the water than the land. She had eyes like shimmering rock pools and her skin was so pale it was almost translucent.

‘She was a strange woman, wasn't she?' Marta said. ‘I don't think she said more than ten words to me in total, in all the times I met her.'

‘Me neither. And I saw her a lot more than you.'

Ailsa had been taciturn, unfathomable, and Freya sometimes thought that she had the cold saltwater of the Atlantic, rather than blood, coursing through her veins. But once, perhaps only once, there had been a moment of connection between them. As Freya was leaving, after her very first trip to the island, Ailsa had taken her hand and looked into her eyes. Something had passed between them, but quite what it was, Freya wasn't sure. Then Ailsa had smiled, let go of her and the moment was gone for ever. When Ailsa died, she left the island to Jack. But Freya always felt that, secretly, it had been a gift to her. A gift given with a smile and a look as deep as the ocean.

‘Do you remember when you finally got round to renovating this cottage? You were pregnant with Sam. It was chaos.'

Freya nodded. She also remembered that she had never been happier.

‘And I seem to recall you standing on the beach and yelling at the ocean?'

Freya smiled. ‘I did.'

‘What was it you kept shouting?'

‘I feel like the Stevensons,' she replied, laughing.

‘That's right. And every time you did it, the builders practically shat themselves. They were petrified you were going to go into labour on their watch.'

‘It was a brilliant way of keeping them on schedule.'

Both women laughed. ‘And then you basically lived here, didn't you, after Sam was born?'

Freya nodded. They'd spent a lot of time on the island then; less with the advent of school and careers that led to greater ties to London. But they always came back, washed in by the tide. And it had been a dream of Freya's, barely acknowledged, unrealistic after all, that eventually they would settle here and leave London behind. It had been a vain, unlikely hope. Impossible, ironically, until now.

‘When I put my stuff in the spare bedroom I passed Sam's room.' Marta's voice was soft, tentative. ‘Have you been in yet?'

Freya shook her head. She had hovered at the threshold several times, but still hadn't been quite able to take the plunge.

‘I really think it will help.'

The sisters looked at one another and Freya nodded her head.

‘Yes. Perhaps it's time,' she said.

FREYA FLICKED THROUGH
the worn copy of
Treasure Island
, its pages close to her face. The smell of the old paper, its notes of grass and vanilla, rose towards her reassuringly, pulling at her memory. She heard Sam's voice, talking of pirates, maps and the search for gold, of murder and intrigue, friendship and loyalty. It had been his favourite book and he had read it over ten times. In fact, he knew it almost by heart. She flicked through the pages once more, inhaling deeply. Most of all, she remembered, he was fascinated by the black spot. How a dirty stain on a piece of paper had had the power to kill Billy Bones. Maybe he'd died of a heart attack, she'd suggested, or a stroke brought on from all the rum. Perhaps he'd simply died of fright. But Sam had shaken his head defiantly. No, he had said sadly, it was not something that could be explained like that. It was unexplainable. And perhaps that was why it bothered him. She smiled, ran her fingers over the tattered cover and then replaced the book on the shelf.

Marta had gone for a walk around the island. She said it was to get her bearings once more, but Freya knew that it was to give her some space. And, in that space, she had taken Marta's advice and ventured into Sam's room for the first time. The curtains had been pulled to, and its smell was different to how she remembered it. Faded, withered, almost like a tomb. She had immediately lain down on the bed and sought out the smell of Sam's small body on the still-unwashed sheets. Only when she was satisfied that she could detect it did the furious racing of her heart subside. For a long time, she had remained there, prone, her eyes closed, breathing deeply, feeling connected to something that she knew was gone. Eventually she had turned over and opened her eyes.

In the darkness of the room, the ceiling had glittered, tiny dots of silver spattered across its surface. For a moment Freya simply gazed at them. And then she remembered. They were stars that she and her son had painstakingly arranged into constellations. She could make out the Plough and Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major. Yes, they had spent the best part of a week creating this universe in his room. She smiled as tears slid down onto the pillow. The universe wasn't quite the same any more.

For a long time Freya lay on the bed, surveying the room. She looked at the elaborate map of Treasure Island that Jack had created on Sam's wall, the train set in the corner that he had constructed with his son. She looked at the ship in a bottle that Sam's grandfather had made for him and that had always sat in pride of place on his chest of drawers. Alongside it lay an old wooden pipe that Sam had found beachcombing. It had once belonged to a pirate, of this he was convinced.

Finally, she rose and looked under the bed for the boxes she knew Sam kept there. His most treasured possessions. She pulled one out, sat down on the floor beside it and removed the lid. Almost instantly she came across the fossilised remains of some sea creatures that resembled highly elaborate necklaces. Freya loved these, and something about their ornate beauty, so delicately preserved, had always made her want to cry. But today when she looked over them her eyes remained dry.

She placed the fossils back into the box and rummaged through the books and drawings it also contained. Robert Louis Stevenson,
Kidnapped
,
Prince Otto
,
The Master of Ballantrae
and
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
– a book that, after much discussion, it had been decided Sam wasn't quite old enough to read just yet. The fact that it was nonetheless here was, for once, not down to her. It must have come from Jack's father. Freya frowned and continued. She found a tattered picture of the Pharos lighthouse – an old favourite of Sam's – marking the entrance to the shallow harbour of Alexandria. There were other pictures of lighthouses, Eddystone Rock, Bell Rock, Skerryvore and the Isle of May, and a well-thumbed picture of Lucy Anderson. Freya stopped when she came to this last item. It was a story that had fascinated Sam and one that he could recite by heart.

‘It happened in 1791.'

Freya could hear his small voice, still incredulous despite the number of retellings.

‘The keeper was George Anderson, who, with his wife and five of his children, was suffocated by fumes from the lighthouse beacon. Only the youngest child at the lighthouse, Lucy, survived. She married the man who rescued her and moved with him to America.'

Freya had always thought Lucy's story strange and miraculous, but never before had she felt so acutely its arbitrariness; the thin pale line that separated those who lived from those who died. She placed the picture back in the box and began shuffling its contents around once more. As she did so, her eye caught upon something metallic in a bottom corner. She reached forwards, grasped it and pulled it out. It was an old copper key, long and slightly greening with age, with three teeth, two thick and one thin, and intertwining loops of metal at its end. Freya ran her fingers slowly over its length and wondered whether this was also an object discovered beachcombing. She doubted it, as Sam didn't hide things from her and she had never seen it before. She would have remembered. Then she caught a glimpse of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and frowned again. Perhaps it was another secret gift that someone had given to Sam. She weighed the key in her hands and tried to imagine what it might open. A trunk or a case, perhaps. But the key seemed too large for that. She looked it over one last time and then threw it into the box which she slid back under the bed. That was enough for today.

THAT EVENING, MARTA
was standing at the hob cooking risotto while Freya chopped salad sitting at the kitchen table. Rain lashed the windows and a hard wind juddered the panes. But inside the wood burner crackled, spilling out heat, and the lamps filled the kitchen with a homely glow. Freya had to admit that it was nice to have the company. Especially now. Eating alone made her feel a peculiar form of sadness. She took a mouthful of red wine – which Marta had poured for her, unquestioningly and without remark – and continued to slice cucumber.

The ring of the telephone shattered the companionable silence.

Freya put down the knife, wiped her hands and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello, darling.'

Freya looked at Marta and rolled her eyes. It was Joan. ‘Hi, Mum. How's things?'

‘Better for getting hold of you again. It seems you're elusive even on a tiny island.' Her mother let the rebuke hang on the air for a second before stampeding through her news and settling close to where she really wanted the conversation to be. ‘And, darling, how are
you
?'

‘I'm okay. It's nice to have Marta here.'

‘Well, of course. It's important to have company.' Freya smiled. Slowly they were inching towards it. ‘Which reminds me. I've been meaning to ask you for ages. Have you been in touch with Alister?'

Freya hadn't seen or spoken to Jack's father since the funeral. She found him a difficult, stern Scotsman, all facts and rigidity. In his life, everything could be explained, nothing was uncertain. And, after the accident, Freya felt that there was nothing but uncertainty in hers.

‘Really, Freya, you should get in touch. He's all alone now, you know.'

Freya nodded. This was her mother's way of saying that Alister had lost his son and his grandson; that this was a family tragedy and not just Freya's personal loss. ‘I know,' she said. ‘I promise I'll call him.'

‘Well, you should. Especially as he sent that jar on to the museum. That was so nice of him.' Her mother paused and Freya waited for the next assault. ‘And what of Torin? You must have been to see him by now?'

‘Not yet. I haven't been here very long, remember?' Freya blushed nonetheless. Even the lightest of her mother's touches had always been able to make her feel guilty. ‘But I'm planning a visit soon.'

‘Well, I'm glad to hear it. Really, Freya, you can't closet yourself away up there.'

Now they were getting closer to it, to what she really wanted to say.

‘So, darling, have you had any thoughts about when you are coming home?'

There it was. Clearly her parents had been hoping, ever since she arrived at Ailsa Cleit, that being there would prove too much and she would come straight back to London. But now she had been at the lighthouse nearly a week, they realised that this wasn't going to happen. ‘I don't know, Mum.'

‘What do you mean, you don't know?' Joan's incredul-ity was palpable – that there was no plan, no schedule.

‘It means that I don't know,' Freya shot out. ‘That I'll come back when I'm ready.' Then, regretting her snappiness, she added, ‘Besides, Marta's here.'

‘But your sister can't stay for ever.' Her mother's tone was forlorn.

‘I know, Mum. But I just need to be here at the moment. I think it'll help me to come to terms with things.'

‘But, darling,' her mother persisted, ‘I don't see why you can't come to terms with things closer to home. Closer to us.'

Freya raised her eyes heavenwards and tried not to audibly tut. But she knew her mother only did it because she cared. ‘I think a change of scene will be helpful to me.'

‘But not one this radical. The doctor didn't think it would be, did he?'

Freya smiled. Round one to Joan. She knew there wasn't much she could counter with when her own doctor had doubted that isolation would be beneficial. ‘Even so, for now, especially with Marta here …'

Joan was silent on the other end and Freya could picture the pursed lips she always had when her daughter disagreed with her. It was usually around this time in their conversations that her mother admonished her for having inherited the stubbornness of her grandmother, Maggie. Yet it appeared to Freya that Joan had also inherited a healthy dose of stubbornness herself.

‘Okay, Freya,' she said tartly, ‘I'm going to put your father on. See if he can talk some sense into you.'

And before Freya could say anything else, the baton of the conversation was passed over. Her father chatted amiably enough and only once ventured into the territory his wife liked to plunder. ‘Won't you come home, darling?'

She could hear the pleading in his tone. But the truth was that she was already home.

Freya handed the phone to Marta and moved into the sitting room, towards the bookshelves opposite the sofa, which were clustered, not just with books, but with photographs of her family. There were lots of her, Jack and Sam, as a family and individually. But these were not what she was looking for. Her mother had reminded her of something. Eventually she caught sight of it on the top shelf.

The photograph had been taken in autumn, a few weeks after Sam's birth, and in it Joan's mother, Maggie, was smiling broadly, clutching the bundle that was her grandson tightly to her. Maggie's once-auburn hair glowed white in the fading daylight and the scene seemed so close, so fresh, that Freya could almost hear her grandmother's laughter as it floated on the wind that day, as strong but as light as kittiwake wings.

As Freya looked at the image, the contours of the island visible in the background, the sea in the distance, she remembered her grandmother's stories of St Kilda, the tiny island on the very fringes of the Outer Hebrides, where Maggie had been born and that she had left in her youth. She never talked about why that was, but Freya thought she knew the reason. For a long time the newborns of St Kilda had been plagued with a mysterious sickness, killing many within days of their birth. Some said it was the islanders' dirty habits, their unventilated homes; others that it was the pink-tinged oil of the fulmar that they burned or the rich, bitter effect of the bird's fatty meat on the mothers' milk. Some said that it was all of these things; others that it was none and that the sole cause was that the midwife was a filthy wench. Her grandmother had never admitted that the sickness was the reason she had left her home, but Freya had always suspected that it was the case. She had seen a future for her children written in the graveyard and decided in that moment upon a different future for herself.

Freya looked at the photograph of Maggie holding Sam so closely to her, and her eyes filled with tears. If only she had followed in her grandmother's footsteps, had left behind the danger of this island, however difficult that was for her – perhaps she too would have had a different history to tell.

‘Whatever she said, don't let it upset you.' Marta had come up quietly behind Freya, her conversation with their parents over.

‘She didn't say anything.' Freya managed a smile.

‘Yeah, but sometimes she has a way of saying something without actually saying it.'

Freya nodded. She showed the picture to Marta.

‘Ah, our beautiful Scottish grandmammy,' said Marta.

‘Mum thinks I'm as stubborn as her. Perhaps I am.' Maybe more so, she thought, as she imagined Maggie, suitcase in hand, sailing away from dimly lit, smoky houses on an island far away.

‘So what if you are?' Marta paused. ‘It's not your fault, Freya. You have to accept that sometime.'

Freya nodded, blinking away tears.

‘Now come and eat. And then you need to go to bed. You look exhausted.'

They sat down at the kitchen table and Marta dished out risotto and salad. For a while they ate in silence.

‘Mum told me about the soldier's letters.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘I'd like to see them if that's okay?'

‘Sure.' Freya nodded. She was overcome with tiredness. Conversations with her mother always made her feel that way. ‘We can read them together. But, for now, do you mind if I go to bed? I'm shattered.'

‘Of course not. I'll see you in the morning.'

Freya woke suddenly out of sleep. The room was cold and dark and, even though she couldn't see, she knew that the sheets were soaking. She could feel them beneath her body. Her sleep had been filled with the sound of her grandmother's laughter, punctuated with the crying of babies, unable to feed, lingering painfully on the brink. Then there had been letters stained with salt, whether from tears or the sea she didn't know, ships and shipwrecks. She sat upright and waited for the images from the dream to subside, then she threw off the duvet, lay back down and tried to think of something, anything else.

For a moment she concentrated on the sound of the sea. The rise and fall, the ebb and flow. The wind was up tonight. She could tell from the surf crashing against the beach. The waves out on the ocean would be high and rolling. As her mind strove to focus on this, driving away bleaker, blacker thoughts, she heard a plaintive, melancholy noise. After a moment it was gone, dissolved by the sea. But the next instant it came again. A haunting, almost human cry. What was it? Freya sat upright again and listened intently. Perhaps it was migrating whales? But surely it was a little early in the year for them. Besides, she had heard their noise before and she was sure it was different to this. She waited for the sound to return, half wanting it not to. It was eerie, hard on the heels of her dreams. But nothing more rose out of the blackness. Eventually, she got out of bed and made her way up the hallway to the guest bedroom. The door was ajar so she pushed it open. The room was dark and still.

‘Marta?' she whispered.

Nothing came back to her but silence. Her sister was asleep, oblivious to what she had heard.

She closed the door and headed back down the hallway to the kitchen. At the threshold she paused again and listened. But she couldn't hear anything beyond the usual sounds of the night. She gazed into the dimness of the kitchen's interior, but it all looked the same as usual. As she turned around to go to bed, her hand glanced against the wooden doorway that none of them were allowed through. She ran her fingers slowly over the cool metal guarding the entrance to the lighthouse tower. Then her hand fell away and she walked on.