The Summer of the Bear Read online

  Letty made some general noise of sympathy and plunged the switch on the kettle. ‘So you’re here visiting, I take it,’ she fished. ‘Holiday?’

  The woman let out a mirthless tinkle. ‘As if this would be anybody’s choice for a holiday! Why, it’s only when I visit that I remember the island is half a century behind civilization.’ She sighed. ‘It’s queer to think that when my husband went to school there were precious few who even wore shoes!’ She accepted the cup of tea with thanks. ‘Though naturally it’s hard for you or me to comprehend.’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Letty murmured. ‘So, where are you staying?’ She slid a plate of chocolate digestives onto the table.

  ‘With the Macdonalds, of course.’ The stranger looked surprised. ‘It would never do to offend them, though if ever a place was crying out for a good motel it would be this island.’

  Letty gave up. What had she expected? Eighty per cent of the island sheltered under the umbrella of the Macdon-ald clan. Besides, whoever she was, she seemed determined to honour Letty with an extended visit. Outside the window, a sparrow was huddling anxiously on the sill. Patches of ochre-coloured lichen were mushrooming in the cracks of the render. It had stopped raining and a needle of light hung over the south island. She had always loved days like this, every colour soft and muted. In the far distance, Beinn Mhor rose out of the mist like a humpbacked whale. She risked a look at the clock. Two thirty. Her mind went to the beach and the virgin expanse of sand waiting for her. The tide would be on its way out – and still the woman was prattling on. ‘All those heavy scones and sandwiches. It seems downright penny-pinching to be still using margarine when I’ve seen with my own two eyes that butter can be bought in the shop. Aye, Spam too! Why, none of the wives I know would touch the stuff! I don’t know about you, Letitia, but I can barely keep it down.’

  Letty began to shift irritably in her chair. She was no fan of the islands’ Spam cult, but to say so outside the family was disloyal in the extreme. ‘So you live down south, I take it?’ The woman’s polyglot accent was hard to place.

  ‘In the Midlands. We moved there from Glasgow, why, let me see – a good year ago now.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ As the woman embarked on a lengthy boast about the superiority of the south, its inhabitants, weather and bingo clubs, Letty drifted away again. She needed her time on the beach. It was where she went to think. Every day she looked at the small photograph and the painting. CO-60, NI-60, MG-137. Sometimes she drew the colour codes in the sand with a piece of seaweed and stared at them, waiting for meaning of some kind to come to her, but nothing ever did. Cobalt, nickel, magenta. Blues, silvers, purples. Sky, sea, heather. They were the colours of the island, that’s all.

  ‘Oh, it’s hard to find an excuse to leave the croft, but with Murdo away to Eileandorcha today I said to myself: May, this is a good moment to pay your respects to Letitia.’

  ‘Murdo?’ Letty choked on her biscuit. ‘Murdo Macdon-ald?’ She stared at the woman with dawning recognition. Only a few days ago, she’d been sitting in the kitchen when she’d heard the noise of gunshots and instinctively she’d looked for Nicky. She saw him so often in her dreams that had he appeared at the gate, duck in hand, she would not have been remotely surprised, but all she could see was the blue square of Alick’s tractor parked on the machair. The children were lifting potatoes, Nicky was dead and the shots were being fired by a flesh-and-blood poacher with a pocketful of cartridges, so she’d pulled herself together, thrown on a coat and hurried down the sandy path until she’d spotted him. A stocky man, crouched on a tiny islet in the middle of Aivegarry, waving his gun about his head, letting off shots at every bird in the sky. Letty shouted. She was answered by another shot, this time aimed low across the ground. An oystercatcher swerved and dipped in shock. Incensed, she splashed over the wet sand until she reached him.

  He acknowledged her presence with a jerk of his chin, then lifted his gun again.

  ‘Oi!’ She positioned herself in front of it. ‘What are you shooting at?’

  ‘Anything that moves.’ He was a bullish-looking individual, with wide nostrils that flared aggressively when he spoke. Generally Nicky turned a blind eye to poaching, reasoning that it was the islanders’ right to shoot for the pot, but she was stung by the man’s rudeness. ‘Well, I move, my children move, so what on earth do you think you’re doing shooting so close to them?’

  ‘It’s my God-given right to shoot anywhere I wish.’

  ‘It’s not your right. You don’t have the shooting here. Who are you?’ Then, adding as imperiously as she dared, ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘My name?’ He laughed and she smelt the beer on his breath. ‘Well, you might ask. Certainly not a Sassenach who owns the half-acre of land her house sits on and not a square inch more. Don’t you be telling me where I can and can’t shoot, Letitia Fleming. My family has lived on this island for hundreds of years.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Warily, she stepped back.

  ‘Ach, you’re all I hear about night and day. Letitia this, Letitia that.’

  ‘Well.’ Letty was completely wrong-footed ‘. . . You still can’t shoot on this land, so please go.’ To her relief she saw Alick hurrying towards her – there was nothing Alick liked better than a good fight – but instead of throwing himself into the fray, he’d pulled on her arm, agitated. ‘Let’s away home, Let-ic-ia.’

  ‘Alick?’

  ‘Aye, leave him to it.’

  ‘Alick, what is it?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Why are you so fussed?’

  ‘Don’t you bother, Alick.’ The poacher snapped the cartridges from the barrels of his gun. ‘I’m away myself. Although you should be happy for a man about the place, Letitia Fleming, especially with that bear prowling around. Why, by now it must be hungry enough to take a cow, let alone a child.’ He strutted off without another word.

  ‘Alick, my Lord – who was that man?’ Letty watched him go. ‘Was he drunk?’

  Alick shoved his hands deep into his pockets. ‘Murdo.’

  ‘Murdo who? Is he an islander?’

  ‘Aye, he’s an islander, all right.’ Alick gazed miserably at the ground. ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘Indeed, Murdo Macdonald,’ May confirmed with some surprise. ‘Goodness, you’ll not have been thinking I was married to one of the other brothers all this time. First come, first served, and I always say I got the best apple in that barrel.’ Her eyes flickered. ‘Aye, I know you give Alick a little work here and there. I can’t imagine what the poor thing would do without you.’

  ‘I imagine he would do very well,’ Letty said pointedly. ‘He’s an exceptionally capable man.’

  ‘The drink makes him unpredictable,’ May countered, ‘but I suppose it must be hard being the only son who’s not found himself a wife or even a steady job. Alick should have had the sense to leave the island and better himself in some way’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Letty said coldly. She could dimly remember meeting Euan and Mrs Macdonald’s eldest son. Almost twenty years older than Alick, he’d left the island as a young man and barely returned since. Perhaps it was what Alick should have done but she resented the implication of superiority.

  ‘Of course, he’s left it too late now,’ May continued blithely. ‘Though I must say, Murdo has been a very good brother to Alick, allowing him to live in the croft all these years.’

  ‘Alick doesn’t live in the croft, he lives in his caravan, which he bought with his own earnings. He looks after everything for Euan, the croft, the cattle, all the farming. Your husband is extremely lucky to have him there.’

  ‘Well, who can say if it will be for much longer?’ May pursed her lips.

  ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh, I mean nothing by it,’ May said airily, ‘other than that Euan is hardly a young man.’

  Letty stood up abruptly. She was no longer a diplomatic wife whose every utterance had to be checked, cross-referenced and milked of any
nuance that might conceivably cause offence. If she didn’t want this woman in her house, then she would throw her out or throttle her, whichever proved the most enjoyable – but May Mac-donald was already knotting her scarf under her chin. ‘Alick certainly has a good friend in you, Letitia,’ she said, a hard edge to her voice, ‘a good friend indeed.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ Donald John consoled her later. ‘As soon as Murdo married her and took her to England she got terrible grand, Letitia.’

  ‘She’s completely lost her accent,’ Letty said indignantly.

  ‘Oh, boo boo,’ he agreed delightedly. ‘She talks just like someone on the wireless right enough. The simple life is no’ for her.’

  ‘Oh, poor Alick. He must hate having them here.’

  ‘Oh, tse tse, yes indeed. He’s no’ been down for a visit since the day they arrived.’

  ‘Is he on a bender?’ Alick’s drinking sprees were intense, short-lived episodes, invariably followed by bouts of remorse.

  ‘Aye, I’m afraid that’s it, Letitia.’

  ‘I don’t blame him. Do you know what business Murdo has up here?’

  ‘Something to do with the army; building contracts, I think,’ Donald John said vaguely. ‘Still and all, he’ll be away to the mainland soon and Alick will be rid of them.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Letty tried to shake off a lingering feeling of concern. Even if he was on a bender, Alick was rarely absent this long. But then once, when he’d disappeared for a few days and she’d suspected drink, it turned out that he was secretly holed up in her own garage repairing the Peugeot after Georgie had smashed into a telegraph pole. Another time, she remembered him ploughing the machair with Donald John following behind, throwing rye and barley seed for the cattle out of a sack slung over his shoulders, and they’d both been alarmed to see the tractor lurching erratically from right to left.

  ‘Why, the bugger’s drunk!’ Donald John had exclaimed. But in fact, the lapwings were nesting on the machair that year and Alick had been deliberately weaving in between the nests in order not to disturb their young.

  43

  Jamie stared at the knife in Roddy’s hand. He watched as the old man, with calm precision, inserted the tip of the blade into the lower belly of the rabbit then forced it swiftly upwards. Seconds later, the long ribbons of gut had been yanked out and were sitting, leaking blood in a bucket while Roddy, holding fast to the rabbit’s hind legs, relieved the animal of its fur with one powerful rip.

  ‘Skin-a-bunny,’ Jamie whispered as the origin of his mother’s jolly bathtime mantra sank in. Roddy laid the rabbit on the table and reached for the next. Roddy’s income from wall building and antique dealing was supplemented by snaring rabbits. After they’d been cleaned and skinned, he would pack them up, five or six at a time in brown paper, and post them off to the mainland. ‘D’ye want to take a turn, Jamie?’ Roddy held out the knife towards him.

  ‘Oh! Actually, no, thank you very much,’ Jamie said. His relationship with rabbits was complicated enough without having to butcher them. He was not averse to them stewed in a casserole dish with carrots and onions but he preferred them alive and hopping about the sand dunes, unless of course they had the mixy, in which case their bulbous eyes and drunken staggerings came back to haunt him at night. He tried not to look too closely at the pile of corpses on the table. Stripped of their fur, they were unrecognizable, their bodies thin and extruded, their flesh strawberry-rippled with capillaries. Jamie shuddered. Sometimes it seemed that death was everywhere he looked – it was in the whale on the beach, in the matted carcass of the sheep at the bottom of the cliff, even in the bones that were occasionally spat out of the bog.

  ‘Roddy!’ Suddenly he had an idea. ‘You can see the future, can’t you?’

  ‘Aye, when the second sight grants it me.’

  ‘If the bear was still alive, could you see where it might be tomorrow, or the next day?’

  ‘I might. Who’s to say?’

  ‘What about my father, Roddy? Could you try to see my father in the future?’

  ‘The day will come soon enough.’ Roddy glanced dramatically towards the heavens. ‘And when it does, I’ll be sure to shake him by the hand and tell him you’re doing all right, lad.’

  ‘But if you don’t mind, could you do it now, please? I mean, you saw my grandpa in the future and then he came back, didn’t he?’

  ‘Aye, that’s right, Jamie.’ Roddy wiped the knife on his trousers and laid it carefully on the counter. ‘But that was a premonition, something else entirely – you know that story well as any’

  Jamie did indeed. It had happened many years after Flora Macdonald had set sail for Australia with Neilly, her fisherman, and a much younger Roddy had been building the walled garden at Ballanish. Roddy disliked Captain Macdonald as much as the next islander, but he pitied him. Left with no possibility of seeing his beloved daughter again, the Captain regretted his cruelty and decided to plant a garden in her remembrance. Every flower he could lay his hands on – wild orchids, irises, daffodils – went into that sandy, barren ground. He sent away for exotic bulbs and seeds from the mainland and purchased a load of rich Irish soil that had been used as ballast on a ship, but nothing took. Storms uprooted every hopeful shoot until finally the Captain’s sense of loss overcame his inherent meanness and he decided to build a high stone wall around the entire garden to afford it some protection. Roddy was the only wall builder on the island, but he was a master of his craft. His walls were sculptures, constructed from thousands of haphazardly shaped stones, each one meticulously graded and sized before being intricately slotted together. Wall building was a painfully laborious process, particularly for a hunchback, and Roddy had barely completed the east side of the garden when he spotted a lone figure walking towards him. The way Roddy told the story had him recognizing Jamie’s grandfather as a distinguished sort of a gentleman merely from the manner of his gait. The man had sauntered down that road as though he hadn’t a care in the world and Roddy had been intrigued. There wasn’t a soul on the island he didn’t know. A stranger was news and news was currency and currency paid for whisky. ‘So your grandfather walks right up to me,’ Roddy said. ‘He makes a remark about the fineness of the day and then, polite as can be, tells me to stop work.’

  ‘And you asked him why, didn’t you?’ Jamie prompted.

  ‘Well, of course I asked him, and that’s when he tells me he has bought the house off Captain Macdonald and he wants the wall built in a different place.’

  Young Roddy needed no further encouragement to down tools and while away the remainder of the afternoon rolling cigarettes and ruminating on the house’s new owner until he was discovered by the Captain himself.

  ‘Why, you lazy bugger!’ the Captain bellowed. ‘What the bloody hell are ye doin’?’

  Roddy related his story, duly receiving a cuff round the head for being a liar and idle bastard. The years passed, the grieving Captain grew old and infirm and was eventually transferred to a home on the mainland. Thistles and weeds destroyed Flora’s garden, the wall was invaded by moss and lichen and a section of its southern corner was destroyed in the great storm of 1949, but Roddy remained the island’s only wall builder and finally he was brought in by the estate to make repairs. He’d barely had time to edge his trowel between two stones before he chanced to glance up and, sure enough, there was a gentleman walking towards him down the hill.

  Roddy recognized him at once – the man’s gait, the fine clothes. There wasn’t a single detail of that original meeting he’d forgotten. ‘Aye, it was your grandfather, Jamie, twenty years on to the very day, and insisting on buying the house that very minute.’ Roddy shook his head. ‘Now that was a grand premonition, indeed it was.’

  A grand premonition and a top-class opportunity. Roddy, shrewdly assuming the role of land agent, instantly upped the price of the house from the few hundred pounds it was worth to the two thousand pounds for which Jamie’s grandfather eventually acquired it.

 
‘Aye, your grandpa was well liked on the island. Your daddy too, and more’s the pity your father’s no’ resting here as there’s many a soul who’d like to pay their respects to him.’

  ‘I don’t think my father is resting anywhere, Roddy,’ Jamie said reprovingly. ‘He’s lost.’

  ‘Oh?’ Roddy’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘Jamie, your father’s not lost. Why, he’ll be up in heaven, keeping an eye on you.’

  ‘Oh no, Roddy, he’s not in heaven.’

  ‘And what makes you so sure?’

  ‘I went to look for him there.’

  ‘Did’ye now?’ The old islander tilted his cap and fixed his eyes on Jamie’s peaked face. ‘And how did’ye get there if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘I took a taxi,’ Jamie said.

  44

  London

  Heaven.

  The first time it had cropped up had been a few weeks after the family arrived in London from Bonn. One of the boys in Jamie’s class asked him about his father’s job and Jamie – yet to make a single friend at the school – had been sorely tempted to confide in him. A long minute passed while he considered the multiple-choice answers to this question.

  My father works for the government.

  Sometimes my father gets to be a spy.

  My father is currently a prisoner of the Cold War.

  This last one had set him thinking. Lately he had taken to wondering what exactly the Cold War was. That it was so dubbed because it took place in snowy countries like Germany, Siberia and Russia was obvious. But so far as he could glean, it was not a war that involved trench foot or parachutes or Lancaster bombers. He had yet to wrap his brain around the concept of an amorphous conflict of counter-ideology and misinformation and so he had no pictorial backdrop against which to imagine his father. Jamie was not the kind of child to complain but it hurt him physically whenever he thought about his father. Sometimes it felt as though the bones in his legs were being ground to dust, sometimes he complained about his chest. Occasionally, the pain was so intense it erupted out of his body via the colony of gumboils that lined the inside of his cheeks. Still, none of this was the point – the point was Jamie would have endured any degree of suffering in exchange for news of his father but he decided that giving information to Felix Thompson for no reason was without real benefit.