The House Between Tides (6 page)

Inside Ruairidh's house, James introduced her to Agnes, Ruairidh's wife, who came forward, wiping her hands on a striped apron before tucking wild red hair behind her ears, and shook Hetty's hand. “Call me Ùna,” she said with a smile. “Everyone else does.” Beside her, the black-and-white collie thumped its tail in greeting. Pan lids rattled on top of a Rayburn, steam rising to lose itself amongst countless socks perched like starlings on a drying rail above. A table stood in the middle of the room, and a candle had been lit, intended perhaps to draw the eye away from piles of ironing and the evidence of hasty food preparation. A boy, introduced as their son, was laying four places, and he regarded Hetty for a polite moment before transferring his attention to James Cameron, swamping him with a torrent of Gaelic. The man listened gravely and nodded, and the boy then grabbed a torch, pulling him back out into the darkness, followed by the dog.

“Alasdair and his dad are repairing an old boat, and James has to admire progress,” his mother explained as she led Hetty through to the sitting room and offered her a drink. “Are you alright at Dùghall's?” She moved a pile of papers and gestured to a chair beside the fire. “I don't expect he spends much on comforts.”

“Oh, I'm fine,” she replied, and after pouring two drinks, her hostess excused herself to check her pans.

Hetty sat and surveyed the chaotic room. The papers looked like pupils' exercise books and a marking sheet. Primary school. An eclectic collection of paperbacks filled various bookshelves
while paintings and photographs occupied the spaces in between. A bleached vertebra from a sea mammal leant against the mantelpiece with letters and bills stuffed behind it, while on a side table the reel from a fishing rod was under repair. Rectangles of peat stood drying in the hearth.

Islington belonged to another world.

Then she saw, hanging in an alcove, a very familiar painting, and rose to stand in front of it.
The Rock Pool, 1889.
It was Blake's best-known work, his early romantic masterpiece, and even reproduced as this modest print before her, it was exceptional.

She had seen the original in London three years ago as part of a touring exhibition, and she had been standing in front of it, lost in admiration, when she had felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see Giles Holdsworth smiling down at her. They had met only a few times then and always in his firm's offices, where the details of her parents' estate were being unravelled.

“I was going to tell you about this exhibition, but you clearly knew,” he said. And later, over a cup of tea in the café, he'd explained that he was at the gallery on business. “But I skived off after the meeting to have a quick look once I heard
The Rock Pool
was here.”

Afterwards they had gone back to look at it again, and he had bent to read the label. “Painted in 1889, and it says he was barely twenty. How extraordinary.”

Extraordinary indeed, and yet so simple.

The painting depicted a young girl in simple clothing, standing beside a rock pool, bracing herself with one hand against the rock face and leaning over the water, lifting her foot from the ripples. A single drop of water had fallen from her toe and bounced off the pool's surface. With her other hand she was clasping her clothes to her, raising her skirts away from the water, her dark hair falling forward across her face. Blake had caught her just at the moment she was turning towards him, and a tiny spot of brightness showed
the gleam in her eye as she raised her face to him. It was a beautiful, sensitive piece invoking a stillness, a promise, a moment in time that would frame a lifetime.

The door opened and Ruairidh came across to clasp her hand with both of his, full of apologies. The fire-raiser had been despatched to the mainland, he reported, and the stunned family taken in by relatives. “You can't blame the lass for leaving him,” he said, “but it's a shame. He was a decent enough lad until his mother died.” Then the door opened again and James Cameron entered, poured himself a drink, and sat down beside the window, glancing briefly at a discarded newspaper.

The fourth place at the kitchen table, it transpired, was laid for him, not the boy, who had vanished with the dog, and she found herself sitting opposite him.

They were cousins, Ruairidh told her, as he ladled potatoes onto her plate. “But then everyone's related on the island, one way or another, going back generations. And everyone knows everyone's business.” He paused, the spoon half-raised, dripping butter. “Which is why these bones come as a shock, you see, because
someone
must have known.”

“And old gossip gets handed down,” his wife added.

Hetty looked around the table, observing the bonds of kinship but sensing something wider and deeper—an understanding of how their community functioned and had always functioned. It gave her a dart of pleasure, for this was what she sought—a community. And a community was not the same as a
crowd
, like Giles's networking friends; it was a more complex fabric woven from mutual need and common interest, and a shared past. It was something more tribal—

Hetty had never had that sense of belonging. Her father's job
with the foreign office had meant that home was not a
place
but a transient thing, and her childhood had been spent flying backwards and forwards from boarding school. A new posting, a rapid withdrawal following a coup, or the need to replace an ailing colleague—it all boiled down to a different view from her bedroom window, a different language in the streets, and unfamiliar food. It was only later in life that she recognised how unsettling this had been.

“You've no idea who—?” she asked, coming back to the moment.

“None at all. There's no one
missing
, if you see what I mean.”

“A visitor, perhaps? Though I read that Theo Blake was something of a recluse.” They ate in silence for a moment, and she wondered if perhaps the tribe was closing ranks.

“He was, towards the end,” said Ruairidh, lifting his glass to drink. “He spent his last twenty years alone in the house, letting it fall apart around him.” James Cameron glanced briefly at her. “But there used to be smart house parties, folk who came up to shoot and fish. Before his wife left him, that is.”

“If she did.” James Cameron had said little so far.

Ùna Forbes gave an exclamation. “You think it's his
wife
, then, Jamie?” She reached for the bottle and smiled at Hetty as she filled her glass. “And that he stuffed her under the floor-boards!
Very
Gothic.”

James shrugged.

But Ruairidh was chewing thoughtfully. “No. It was always said that the Blakes left the island together, although
she
never returned.” He loaded another fork. “I've contacted Inverness, by the way, and they'll send someone over.”

She thanked him but wanted to continue the earlier discussion. “If Theo Blake spent his last years alone, then surely someone
could
have disappeared, and no one knows?”

Ruairidh leant back in his chair, cradling his glass on his generous stomach. “True enough, but who? He shunned visitors towards the end.”

Since inheriting the house, Hetty had been trying to learn more about Theodore Blake, scouring libraries and the Internet for information, but had had mixed results. While his artistic achievements were well-documented, there was frustratingly little written about his personal life, and his later reclusive years were unrecorded, except for the fact that he had drowned, as an old man, while crossing Muirlan Strand.

His father, she had read, had opposed his ambition to be a painter, but the young Theo had been determined to go to Glasgow, where he was attracted by the Glasgow School and their commitment to exploring realism. It was his early paintings, his Hebridean collection, which had made his name while he was still very young, but later, like so many of his contemporaries, he had gone abroad, where he had produced less innovative work, and his fame had dwindled. In his middle years he had limited himself to illustrations of native birdlife, completing a catalogue begun by his father, which had been well-received but was long since out of print.

“I've a copy here,” said Ruairidh, when she mentioned it, and he rose to fetch it. “He loved his birds, did Blake. Started one of the country's first reserves.”

“And when did he paint those others?” asked Ùna. “You know, the weird ones.”

The weird ones—Hetty did know which she meant. There had been one such in the London exhibition, a chilling, wild scene of an anguished face looking from the shore to a goggle-eyed head rising from a cauldron of surf. The work of a deranged mind, some critics said. “I read they were done in his last years but that there aren't many of them.”

“There were paintings burned when the house was closed up.”
James spoke softly, tilting his glass as if to study the candle's reflection on the wine. “Your great-grandmother didn't like them, I'm told.” He glanced up briefly and then continued mopping up the last of the casserole with a chunk of bread, leaving Ruairidh to explain about the bonfires and what the old folks had said.

Ùna began clearing away the plates. “She was being protective, I expect, like a good sister. He was quite barmy at the end, you know.”

“Makes you wonder, though.” Ruairidh refilled their glasses.

“Barmy?” This was news. Or was this a judgement foisted unkindly on a reclusive man? “But he can't have been entirely alone up there, surely?”

“Aye, that's true,” said Ùna. “I don't suppose he washed his own socks and peeled his own tatties.” She flashed an arch look at her husband as she cleared space for an apple pie. “And folk would have mentioned bodies being stuffed under floor-boards, you can be sure of that.”

“Donald Forbes was living at the farmhouse with his family then,” her husband said, “and they kept an eye on him, I understand.”

“So have a word with Aonghas, he loves a good old gossip,” said James.

“My granddad,” explained Ruairidh. “Turned ninety but sharp as a pin. Donald was his father, you see, and he remembers Blake's sister coming up for the auction when the house was closed up.”

At the end of the evening, James took her home.

And as she stepped out of Ruairidh's house, she felt the darkness engulf her—but it was a soft velvet darkness, not the flat dullness of a London night punctured by street lighting and the tracer light of car headlamps. It was still and quiet, and she breathed in the complex smell of the outdoors, looking up to see a million stars arching above them in the clear northern skies.

“Not a sight you'll ever get in London.” He stood holding the Land Rover door open, watching her. “It was the thing I missed most working down there. The big skies.”

“Were you there long?” she asked, as he went to the other side and slid in beside her.

“Two years. It was enough.” The engine roared into life and they jolted off the verge and back onto the tarmac road.

Over dinner in Ruairidh's cottage, she had felt a warmth stealing over her as they described what was known of the house in its heyday, of her family and theirs, realising with delight that she had a stake in this shared past. But James's words reminded her that she was an incomer, recalling her to the sudden silence which fell when she referred to her plans for the house. Ruairidh had deftly moved the subject on, but not before she had seen the quick exchange of looks around the table.

“You didn't see much of the house, I suppose, before I chucked you out.” James kept his face forward but she sensed the glimmer of a smile. “I'll take you back over in the morning, if you like. Show you the problems.”

“Shouldn't we keep away until after the police have been?”

“Can't see it matters.” He slowed as a sheep stepped into the road and stopped, its eyes eerily lit by the headlamps. “If we asked Ruairidh, he'd have to say no”—he looked across at her and surprised her with a sudden grin—“so we won't ask.”

2010, Hetty