Haunted (3 page)

Jamie’s father was 89, and fading. He had
known better than to order his only son to his side so that he
could see him once more before he died. Duncan had humbled himself,
and pleaded. And Jamie had ranted and raged, but he had come.
Marian thought she would be awkward with the old man whom she had
never met and to whose deathbed, in effect, she had come.

But by the time she had reached Duncan’s
house she had already been bitten by Skye. It was this that bridged
the gap between them, for this love was something thse two
strangers shared.

“Take her up tae Flodigarry,” Duncan had
said, sitting bravely up in his armchair, wrapped in a tartan rug.
He had been grey in the face when Marian and Jamie had arrived at
the house, but the love of Skye had put some of the colour back
into his cheeks and his eyes shone with the brightness of
excitement, not fever. Even to Marian’s professional eye he looked
almost recovered.

“We came to see you,” said Jamie.

“Dinna fash yersel w’ a’ auld man,” said
Duncan firmly. “I’ll be here when ye coom back.”

Jamie had acquiesced in the end, but with an
ill grace; it said much for Marian’s capability of enjoying
herself, and the power of the old man’s blessing on the trip, that
she got anything out of it at all. It had been a magical few days.
But now they were heading back to Portree, and Duncan. Returning to
give back his gift of freedom.

Mrs MacKinnon, who kept a neighbourly eye on
Duncan, was opening the door of his house almost before Jamie had
turned off the ignition of the Golf.

“I think he’s deid,” she greeted Jamie,
twisting her fingers. “I spiered him twae times if she was all
right, but he’s been gey quiet the last hour or so. He didnae even
want his dram when I coom tae gie it him. I cannee see him
breathin’.”

Marian always lost half of these exchanges,
because even the bits that were cohered English lost every ounce of
their Englishness in the mouths of the older islanders, who
appeared to be speaking what they called English only under duress.
Certainly these two, Mrs MacKinnon and Jamie’s father, had never
used the language amongst themselves; Gaelic was the order of the
day.

Whatever, the import of Mrs MacKinnon’s words
appeared to be painfully obvious this time. Marian slammed the
Golf’s door behind her and strode over the house, her trainers
softly slapping the pavement.

“Let me in,” she said quickly, “I’m a nurse.
Let me see.”

Mrs MacKinnon stepped back reluctantly, and
Marian ran up the stairs into Duncan’s bedroom. He wasn’t dead, but
only just not; his breathing was shallow and irregular, his eyes
closed, his eyelids flickering only slightly when Marian called his
name.

She took his frail old hand into hers, and it
was cold, the wrist blue with the tangled veins of old age.
Watching him drift slowly away, with his limp, winkled hand cradled
in her own, Marian’s eyes filled with tears. She had only known him
for a week, and that was the first time he had laid eyes on his son
for almost five years, and yet he had selflessly send them away
from a vigil for the dying to a vision of beauty when he saw how
much she loved his island.

He had seemed so much better when they had
first come, weak, but spunky, his cheeks flushed with what Marian
only now recognised as nothing more than happiness. “If I had
known…” Marian whispered guiltily, rubbing his hand with gentle
fingers. “I wouldn’t have gone, Duncan, I wouldn’t have taken him.
He came because you begged him, because you needed him. And I took
him away…”

“Marian?”

“He’s going, Jamie. Come here, hold his hand.
I’m sure he knows you’re here.”

Jamie’s eyes were wide and oddly defenceless.
He came in slowly; it was almost with reluctance that he took his
father’s hand. Marian relinquished it, wiping her eyes with the
back of her own, and turned away.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving you a bit of time, Jamie. It’s
you and him now. It isn’t me he begged to come to him.”

“But where are you going?” Jamie repeated,
almost straining to follow her, with something very like fear in
his eyes.

“I’ll be close,” she said. “Talk to him, for
God’s sake, Jamie. I don’t know if he can hear you, but it’s the
last chance you’ll get!”

She walked out, only half-closing the door
behind her. Mrs MacKinnon was clattering with something in the
kitchen. The parlour was empty and quiet; Marian entered it,
crossing creaking floorboards to the window where she stood looking
out. It was still light outside, although it was past eight
already. She wondered how it was possible for her to miss so much
an old man she had hardly known at all.

“Will ye have a coop o’tea, then?” said Mrs
MacKinnon at her elbow suddenly, startling her. The older woman’s
hair was coming out in straggles, and her hands were still uneasily
lacing her fingers in and out of one another.

She was unsettled, and far from a calming
presence. Besides, she spoke what was only nominally English and
really an acutely foreign language. Marian didn’t feel up to
deciphering Scotticisms at that moment.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’m going out for
a breath of air. Will you tell my… will you tell Jamie I’ll be
right back? I’ll just walk to the harbour and back.”

Not waiting for a reply, she turned and
almost ran out of the house and into the street. A young woman
passing by gave her a sort of half smile; Marian nodded back.
Everyone acted as though they had known you all their lives up
here. Perfect strangers greeted you heartily in the street; people
struck up conversations in pubs with wide and open-hearted
friendliness that was none the less pleasing because it was usually
more or less completely incomprehensible to Marian.

But there was nobody else around at this
time, the street echoingly empty of people, and Marian struck out
alone towards the little fishing harbour of Portree.

That’s when she saw him again, her little
boy. He ducked behind a corner, and then peered back at her
mischievously as though he wanted her to follow him. As he was
going in her direction, she did. He seemed to appreciate this. He
vanished, but reappeared again in a different shadow a moment
later, smiled, and was gone. Marian quickened her step, and swiftly
rounded the last corner.

The fishing boats bobbed quietly in the
mirror-still harbour, their reflections seemed to them so flawless
that they almost looked painted on the ocean. A few gulls hovered
in church-like silence in the pale amethyst sky of the long summer
twilight, and one paced the narrow beach, across which ropes
stretched taut from the motionless boats to the wall which rose at
the back of the water-lapped half-moon of pebbly shoreline, with
great deliberation, as though he were seeking buried treasure. A
pale cream cat startled at Marian’s approach and sloped off into
the purplish shadows of a narrow lane between houses.

On the prow of the closest boat her little
boy say, feet dangling over the side. As if aware of her stare, he
raised his eyes and laughed, stretching his arms out towards her,
almost begging to be picked up and hugged.

There was something achingly familiar about
him, something that constricted Marian’s heart with the nameless
pain of it; and then suddenly had it. The eyes. The eyes were old
Duncan’s eyes, grown young again. Jamie’s eyes.

The little boy was not reflected in the still
water – there was too much of shadow in him to cast one. That was
why she didn’t expect to see him mirrored in the ocean when he
suddenly leapt off the ship and skipped, across the top of the
water, towards her, his arms still outstretched.

Marian stood still, transfixed, her arms
going out to meet him even without her knowledge or her command. As
their hands touched he was gone, vanished into the evening, a
curious warmth spreading in her body from somewhere deep in her
belly.

In the same instant she left another hand,
heavy, very much of his world, descend on her shoulder. She whirled
with a little cry and stared up into Jamie’s face.

“He’s gone,” Jamie said quietly.

Marian hugged him wordlessly and they stood
there as the breeze picked at their clothes with impatient
fingers.

“He said…” Jamie’s words seemed to trail away
into the silence of the evening.

“He said?” she prompted after a moment.

“Yes. He blessed me. Us. And also his
grandson. And – this is the strangeness of it – he did not mean
Charlie. I know it.”

Marian suddenly smiled against Jamie’s blue
anorak, understanding all too well. That warmth in her belly,
waiting only for the seed to make it grow. The child had followed
her across Skye, old Duncan’s spirit, his true grandchild,
himself.

Marian turned herself in Jamie’s arms,
moulding her back into his body, taking his arms and curling them
around her, crossed at her belly. She looked up at the sky where
the stars were beginning to wink on, and smiled, entirely at
peace.

“We’ll call him Duncan,” she said softly, the
decision made, firm. “He’s going to have Duncan’s eyes.”

And now for another treat – an unpublished
one, never before seen by anyone’s eyes. Romantic ghosts haunted my
literary output for some time, it would seem – because as best I
recall this story was written some time after the previous two. But
by this stage I’d quit writing for the ladies’ magazine romance
market as such, and anyway this one was just a little darker, just
a little more ‘literary’, than anything before it had been. I love
it dearly, for the characters who crowd its pages, but it was a
difficult story to find a market for, especially for the young and
inexperienced writer that I was, and so after a while I left it to
haunt nothing more public than my own collection. I present, for
your reading pleasure, the debut of…

It was a quiet night. There had been too many
of those lately; they were beginning to add up not to weeks, not to
months, but to the first beginnings of years. Ever since Crawford
Cove had started its metamorphosis from the lowly grub of a working
fishing village into the small social butterfly of a town which it
had become, with its new suburbs of red-tiled white villas
stretching out along the emptiness of sand which used to be the
Long Beach. Ever since the summer people came, and started driving
away those who had been living there for countless calm years in
the comforting grip of their own tragedy and joy.

Terry's bar, once packed with jovial
fishermen in to celebrate a good catch or drown the sorrows of a
thin one, had been increasingly sparsely populated until it was
down to this, now - old Adam looking for tuna in the bottom of his
whisky glass at the darkest corner of the long counter, Will and
Georgy arguing pointless politics - for neither had voted in any
election, ever - perched on the edges of their tall stools, Sam
Sharkey telling a dozing Jake for the umpteenth time about his
encounter with the Great White (Terry knew the story almost as well
as Sam; without thinking, she'd catch a phrase and her mind would
run on mechanically, choosing words which would, as if by magic,
come falling out of Sam's mouth a moment later), and John and Tom
Grey playing their everlasting chess game which never seemed to
end, with Tom Wiggins offering the same hoary nuggets of wisdom to
one or the other from the sidelines without ever taking a hand
himself.

Terry's was the first bar people came to when
returning to the center of town from the piers, but not one of the
summer people had ever stepped inside - perhaps it was just too
uninviting, with its drab, peeling paint and the faint smell of
liquor hanging about outside, hinting at an establishment which
served "rough trade". Terry had to smile at the thought. Thinking
of any of the old faithful fishermen who still came to drink her
rye as rough trade was more than funny, it was ridiculous. They
were all, in a way, relics, left-overs from a past which, perhaps,
the summer people didn't care to contemplate. But Terry had long
since stopped expecting someone from the other side of the great
divide to deign to darken her door. That was why she was so
surprised when the door did darken - she wasn't expecting anyone
else, all her regulars were already ensconced - and the sight of
the young, tanned youth wearing a pair of denim shorts and a loud
Hawaiian print shirt (like Magnum, P.I., Terry thought; she watched
a lot of television) struck her with a ludicrous sense of surprise
which could hardly have been topped if it had been Tom Selleck
himself who had walked in.

The unexpected visitor looked a bit pale
beneath his tan, though, and Terry was, after all, a businesswoman.
She coaxed a smile onto her face.

"Can I offer you something, sir?"

"Brandy," he gasped. She had been right, he
needed that drink. "Make it a double."

Sam Sharkey had been interrupted in the
middle of his story and watched the new arrival with a jaundiced
eye; Jake had roused from his Great White induced stupour and
himself warily watched the young stranger stumbling towards the
bar. Terry put a glass in front of him, and he reached for it and
poured it down his throat as if it had been water.

"Hey, steady," said Terry, almost
involuntarily. She wasn't usually in the business of mothering her
customers, but this one seemed to cry out for it. "What seems to be
the trouble, youngling? You look like you've just seen a
ghost."

The face that he turned to her made her
literally step back. All at once, she knew; turning, she poured
another glass of liquor and plonked it down forcefully on the
counter before him.

"This one's on the house," she said firmly.
"Sit down. You've just met our Sally, haven't you?"