The House Between Tides (31 page)

“I thought that had yet to come, my girl,” objected her fiancé, hoisting her onto the trap. “Up you get. We'll be back next summer and all the summers to come, I promise.”

2010, Hetty

Hetty looked out over the ferry's broken wake as the islands receded and melted away into the blue-grey seascape. She had left the observation lounge and come up on deck to escape the brittle politeness of a conversation that was going nowhere, and Giles had watched her go, his expression a mixture of exasperation and remorse.

She was leaving the islands with her thoughts in disarray, plagued by conflicting emotions—a decaying house, a cracked skull, and broken lives. Images of gulls sweeping in on the tide, a flock of children running wild, and a man in worn jeans whose eyes had held hers.

A pair of puffins flew low over the water, wing beats fast and furious. It still seemed incredible that the discovery of the bones had found no resonance amongst the people she had met. Could families simply bury secrets? And then forget them— Surely there would be something, some hint of wrongness, of something off-key. The Forbes family had always been on the island, absorbing the changes, adapting to the shifting sands of passing decades, carrying forward an understanding of the past. Surely they knew
something
!

It was different for her own family, in which Theo Blake had been no more than a name. For them the connection with the island had long been broken, and continuity between generations fragmented, no stories had been passed down. But such a connection
had once existed, and now some of the past figures had faces and substance. Emily, in particular, had become very real—a vitality had burned through the muted sepia in the old photograph, a bright captivating joy.
Same smile . . .
And there were those sketches on James's cottage wall too, of an island girl with a provocative smile. A young Theo Blake's soft pencil had caressed her form with a familiarity that was surely borne of knowledge—and desire. Was she an early love about whom history had recorded nothing? But had that love persisted, and had it intruded into the life of the pale woman who sat at the window and stared out over Muirlan Strand?

She had stumbled into so many lives, past and present. Not least among them the descendant of a defiant-looking young man who covered his cottage walls with images of the island and its past. And now, because of her, feared for its future.

This kaleidoscope of emotion spun around her brain all the way home, excluding Giles, who sat beside her, staring out of the train window, saying little. She had yet to find the words to explain. And always at the core was the youthful face of her great-grandmother. “Aonghas remembers his father standing with his arm around her as they watched the bonfire after the auction,” Ruairidh had told her, “and he said she looked like a young girl, though she must have been almost sixty by then.” And he had described how Emily had spent her last night in the old farmhouse “sitting with her elbows on the big old kitchen table, drinking tea and reminiscing with him about childhood days. A lovely woman, Granddad said.”

It was Emily's gift of land to the factor's family, and other islanders, that was now under contention. And Emily was remembered kindly. “We'll check again, of course, but I'm quite
sure
about estate boundaries,” Emma Dawson had said as they parted. And yet James had been equally certain it was otherwise, and so how
could that be? And if Dalbeattie and Dawson
were
right and James wrong, that would have major implications for Ruairidh and his family. Unlike Emily's, her own visit to the islands would be remembered with anything but fondness.

And then there were the bones. That matter was now in police hands, although Ruairidh had been unable to say when they might hear back, beyond remarking that it was unlikely to be a priority. There was nothing she could do there, but the ownership of the land did need resolving, one way or another.

When she got back home that first evening, having separated from Giles at the station, she went straightaway to find the box that had been sent back from the nursing home following her grandmother's death. It was hardly more than a shoe box, the pitiful residue of a spent life, but she remembered seeing a notebook there, the first pages of a journal. She had flipped through it once before and found little of interest, but there had been something— It had begun in 1946, at the beginning of a sea voyage to South Africa and, in the way of most journals, that entry was followed by only skimpy notes, which had soon died away. After a description of the wartime devastation at Southampton docks, she found what she had been looking for.
We sail tomorrow, weather permitting. Heading for what? And leaving so much. The only way to deal with loss, Mother always told me, is by accepting it, however painful, and looking to the future and taking only the best of the past with you. I never saw her cry, except that once, when she came back from the auction and told me about the stones.
The reference to the auction she now understood. But what stones?
Don't ever let despair consume you, she said, that way lies the abyss. So I must be strong, but some days it's so hard.
Hetty sat back on her heels.
Loss.
That word again, but this too she shared with Emily. And was she right? Could you move through loss to a future and not lose the people held dear? It was a compelling thought, but it required strength to believe it.
Had there been strength written on Emily's bright young face on those fading photographs? Perhaps not. Perhaps strength in the face of adversity had to be learned.

She had packed the mementos away again, remembering as she did that her grandmother had been born to Emily's second husband, Edward Armstrong, and wondered again what had become of the tall, handsome man she had leant against in front of Muirlan House. But perhaps there was no mystery there, for a man who was young in 1910 had only uncertain chances of growing old.

Over the next few days, with the help of the Internet and a few emails, she set herself the task of finding out, following every lead that might bring her to Emily, and from there, perhaps back to the island. Eventually her work began to pay off: she found a marriage entry for the 10th of October 1911 for Miss Emily Blake and Major Rupert Ballantyre, and a year later a birth certificate for a daughter, followed with painful swiftness by the registration of the baby's death. Kit Blake had married in 1914, just weeks before war was declared, and although he had survived it, injured and gassed, Rupert Ballantyre had not. Twice decorated for outstanding bravery, he had been blown to pieces amidst the chaos of Passchendaele. Kit had died the year the second war was declared, the year that Theo Blake gave away half the island as a bird sanctuary. And by dying then, he had been spared the knowledge that his own son, a spitfire pilot, was declared missing over the Channel in 1940.

She sat back, almost wishing she had never started. It was ghastly! No less so as it must have been repeated in so many families during those years—the lost generations—and she saw again those images taken in front of Muirlan House in that summer of 1910. Carefree, youthful faces, looking to the future, captured in a moment in time before their world convulsed, exploded, and vanished, cheating men of life and women of their dreams.

She got up and went to the window, looking out at the darkening
street. And what of Theo Blake, learning of these tragedies alone on the island, deserted by his wife, bereft of family, growing old and senile? What must it have been like for him? And all the time buried under the floor-boards of his house there was a tragedy of another sort. He
must
have known about it; it seemed impossible that he did not.

She had seen little of Giles since they had returned from Scotland, and preoccupied as she was, she had hardly noticed. Relations between them had been patched up, but not fully repaired, and by unspoken agreement they avoided the subject of the house. But he had phoned the previous evening to tell her that three of Blake's works were coming up for auction that Saturday, and a friend of his from a local gallery was going along to bid for them. Did she want to come?

She did, of course, and so Giles was now in the kitchen making coffee until it was time to go, while she was, once again, glued to her laptop.

“
Theo Blake reached his peak very early but did not sustain his initial excellence,
” one source told her. “
He embraced the aspirations of the Glasgow School, working ‘en plein air,' exploring ways of combining realism with landscape painting, evoking emotion from everyday scenes while avoiding cloying sentimentality.
” And there was an illustration of an unfinished sketch of a lithe young boy hauling himself out of a deep rock pool, the water trickling down his spine towards naked buttocks. She skipped over pages of comparison with contemporary painters, then paused and reread the next bit. “
Like his contemporaries, Blake peopled his compositions with local characters. His technique, however, offered something more, an intimacy with his subject . . .
” And she thought again of the sketches in James Cameron's cottage, and to
The Rock Pool
painting. She was seeing the same girl in his other work too, sometimes close, often in the distance, but read no speculation about her identity.

And then she came across a link to Blake's role in bird conservation in Scotland, and switched to that. If she was going to find herself in dispute with the reserve, the more she knew, the better. “
Established in 1939 with a generous land grant from the landowner, the painter Theodore Blake, it was one of the earliest of its kind. Using his collection of Hebridean birds begun by his father, Blake published an early catalogue, together with his own exquisite illustrations. Some of these specimen, including what must be one of the last native sea eagles, still survive . . .
” And there was a photograph of the faded sea eagle that James Cameron had pointed out to her in the museum, with a caption:
Sea eagle shot in August 1910, by Theodore Blake.
And there was that date again—1910. The date of the photograph of the family in front of the house, the date after which the conservatory was built, the date after which a body had been hastily buried.

She read on. “
Other surviving specimen include a red-necked phalarope and what has recently been identified as an isabelline shrike, but tragically much of the collection was put on a bonfire and destroyed after Blake's death in 1944.
” And then the next lines had her sitting bolt upright. “
The establishment of the reserve coincided with other land claim settlements, leading some writers to speculate that Blake, who was by then a recluse, was troubled by a guilty conscience and that these gifts were in atonement for the damage his Edwardian shooting parties had done to the local wildlife, as well as resolving other long-running disputes over land . . .
”

“Giles! Come and look at this.” He came through carrying two cups of coffee.