The Summer of the Bear Read online

  ‘Aye, they’ve been dislodged a wee bit.’ He tapped the speakers with his screwdriver. ‘See?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘I see.’ Two of the four screws attaching the cones to the wooden plinth had been loosened and the speakers had been manually swung around and away from the perforated circles. No wonder the quality of sound had been poor. No wonder Alba had complained the whole journey up north. After all, Letty thought bitterly, a man had to breathe.

  It was the single worst week of her life. She spent most of it in bed, away from the children, staring at the passport photo, passing her thumb over the stranger’s face with increasing pressure as though some hidden clue to his identity might reveal itself like one of those novelty scratch cards Nicky had brought back from America. She couldn’t bring herself to question Georgie; she dared not call Tom.

  He was never the man you thought he was. The accusation came back to her again and again, but if Nicky wasn’t who he said he was, then who on earth was she? Her whole life, everything she stood for, every memory she had held sacred unravelled until all she was left with were two hard knots of fury and grief.

  One night, it was as if her brain could no longer purge the poison from her thoughts. Suddenly it was Tom’s vicelike grip on her wrist that came to her. Hold on to what you believe, Letty, he’d said.

  She switched on the light, reached for her cigarettes and smoked three in a row, hunched up in bed and trying to imagine a Nicky committed to treason, involved in subterfuge, a secretive, bitter man exacting revenge on his government, but she knew then with absolute certainty that she could never square this picture with the man she loved. She thought instead of Nicky standing beneath her bedroom window. Alick had brought the Flora Macdonald story back to life with his talk of ghosts, but Nicky had made it their story too, and now this memory on top of so many others had come back to haunt her.

  ‘I’ll make you a bet,’ Nicky had said that day after lunch with her father. ‘I bet you anything I can get you out of that window and down that tree without your father catching us.’

  ‘This is assuming you’ll be asked up to the island,’ she teased.

  ‘Whether I’m asked or not is irrelevant,’ he said. ‘The question is, will you take the bet?’

  ‘What are the stakes?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll think of something,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you worry’

  He’d been due to leave for Washington the following week and she was sure he meant to propose before he left, but he hadn’t. And when the projected month in the US doubled and his letters continued to arrive less and less regularly, it had been to the island she’d fled to nurse her breaking heart. She’d not seen him for three months, she had almost forgotten the bet they’d made in the back of the cab, when she was woken by the noise of stones hitting glass. She’d looked out the window to find him grinning sheepishly up at her, his arms wrapped about his chest.

  ‘Nicky,’ she’d said faintly. ‘Dear God, how did you . . . ? Nicky, whatever are you doing?’

  ‘I’m here to rescue you!’ he’d cried in a not entirely successful attempt at a Hebridean accent. ‘Come along now, Flora lass,’ he added when she seemed too shocked to move. ‘Down you pop. It’s bloody freezing out here.’

  When it came to it, though, Letty had been right. The old tree, more bowed than ever from the unrelenting wind, seemed just that much out of reach.

  ‘Jump,’ Nicky said recklessly, ‘and I’ll catch you.’

  Nicky, no!’

  ‘Climb over the ledge and then let go. I’ll catch you, I promise.’

  ‘It’s too far.’

  ‘Jump and we can elope.’

  ‘Are you proposing to me from down there?’

  ‘What does it look like, goddamnit?’

  ‘Oh, Nicky.’ She was half laughing, half crying. ‘What if I say yes to the elopement thing, but come down the stairs?’

  ‘No,’ he said stubbornly. ‘There are certain things that have to be done for love.’ He stretched out his arms. ‘Jump and I’ll catch you. I promise.’

  She’d looked down. The ground wasn’t that far away, but it was the sort of uneven landing you could easily break a leg on.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘No need to be scared, my love, trust me.’

  ‘Nicky . . .’ She faltered. She did trust him. God knows the thought of him made her bones feel stronger and her blood thicker. Nicky Fleming knew who he was and what he believed in. It was the quality she most loved about him.

  ‘Letty, trust me,’ he ordered, ‘and let go.’

  56

  The problem was Jamie never put anything out of his head. All information received went straight to his ‘brainbox’ and from there was processed in a manner that made sense to him before any decision was taken on how to use it or where to store it.

  Nominally earmarked for the file of his father, ghosts were new information, important information, if only he could work out why.

  His father had had an accident. His father had gone away for a long time. His father was lost. Over the past months Jamie had tried to fit the clues together, but like a cheap cardboard puzzle whose pieces had been pressed in, the picture that had finally emerged made no sense to him. And all Jamie had ever wanted was a picture that made sense. Not good sense, not real sense or even common sense, but Jamie sense. For days after the Alick incident the connections between his father and ghosts perplexed him.

  Ghosts were lost souls, and hadn’t he heard his father described in the same way? Ghosts had not yet made it to heaven. Neither had Dada. Ghosts could not get to heaven if they had unfinished business down below.

  Jamie thought back to the papers scattered across his father’s desk in Bonn. He remembered the telegrams that arrived twice a day, the contents of the mysterious ‘diplomatic bag’, not to mention the help he, Jamie, had needed with his own homework. How could his father not have had unfinished business? And once again he found himself back on his unrelenting treadmill. His elliptical loop of sleuthing.

  And then, the night of Georgie’s birthday, the thing with the lobsters happened.

  A long-standing tradition of the Fleming family called for the method of cooking lobsters to be decided by the winner of a race held before supper. First, each family member would choose a lobster and assign it an inappropriate name. Next, the rubber bands were snipped off their claws and the lobsters released onto the floor to begin their tentative scrabble across the cork tiling. The question of how most ethically to kill lobsters was argued passionately by both sides. Was the agonizing but virtually instant death of a dunking straight into scalding water more or less cruel than the prolonged torture of being placed in cold water and lulled into a coma over a low flame?

  This year, however, there had been no race and no debate about comparative forms of death. Alisdair the fisherman delivered five lobsters in a sack and Alba dropped them without ceremony into the boiling water, cramming the lid on top of them with shouts of ‘Die, you buggers, die!’

  When the lobsters began to squeak, Jamie stuck his fingers in his ears.

  ‘It’s only air,’ Georgie soothed, ‘it’s air escaping out of their shells.’ But Jamie wasn’t so sure. He stared at the giant saucepan. The lid was rolling and dipping on the bubbling water like a ship on stormy seas. To his horror, a single tentacle poked its way out. Oh dear Lord, one of them was trying to escape. He covered his eyes with his hands and watched between spread fingers. More and more tentacles crept over the edge of the saucepan like aliens emerging from a spacecraft. One appeared to be appealing directly to him for help while another was quite clearly attempting to locate the handle of the lid.

  After it was all over, Jamie had gazed wonderingly at the steaming crustacean on his plate. Had it been scared? Had it watched Alba filling the huge saucepan and felt the dread of impending death? Did lobsters on the ocean floor threaten their children with tales of the giant saucepan to ensure good behaviour? Surely not, he reasoned, for no lobst
er lived to tell the tale. But then there was the ghost of poor murdered Flora Macdonald to consider. Where there was sudden death, violent death, Alick had claimed, there was unfinished business. Could lobsters become ghosts? If so, would the unfinished business of these lobster ghosts be to return to the deep in order to warn friends and family never to climb into lobster pots, no matter how deliciously putrefied the bait inside them? He touched the creature with his finger. Poor lobby. He wished it luck wherever it was going, it really hadn’t had a nice time at all. Its shell was scalded a painful red and one of its tiny black eyes had fallen out and all of a sudden Jamie realized that there was one thing he knew for certain about ghosts. You had to die to become one.

  So slowly, tentatively, he turned his attention to the question he least wanted answered.

  What if his father was dead?

  People died. It didn’t matter how clever or strong you were. Death still happened. His grandfather had died. Even the bear, with all his strength, could have drowned. Jamie had put everything he had into believing in his father’s return. He had believed in it with the sort of blind conviction people reserved for True Love or the existence of angels with proper wings. His father was a clever man, a brave man, but wherever it was that he had gone might have been a place too far. He might have been too weak from the accident. The mission could have been too dangerous. He knew his father would have tried his best to get back, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t failed. To Jamie’s intense surprise, the idea that his father was dead did not much increase the unhappiness he already felt. The emptiness he carried around inside him remained the same. Over the past months the memory of his father had continued to fade even as his belief grew stronger that his father would return home, but until this moment his father’s return could not be squared with the finality of death.

  He had felt that there was something uniquely important about the Flora Macdonald story. The idea that she’d returned to deal with her unfinished business came to rest on the divide between his logic and imagination. And when Jamie couldn’t find an answer to the preoccupations of one side of his brain, he always provided explanations from the other.

  As he pushed away his plate, it dawned on him why ghosts were so important. This concept that you could die and return as something else.

  Ghosts were a get-out clause in the contract with death.

  57

  Every day the air in the greenhouse bus felt steamier and more humid. Georgie liked the way her body melted in the heat. At home she sometimes felt so brittle she feared her bones might snap, but here with Aliz, surrounded by plants and earth and the smell of fermenting fruit, her arms and legs felt supple and her heart simmered and burned. He was reading to her from his book but the words swam past her like a shoal of the world’s tiniest, most interesting fish. Her eyes were closed and she was dreaming of the sandstone facade of her future Syrian home, of the turquoises, reds and yellows of its courtyard mosaics and the explosion of colour from the garden. That’s where they would sit all day, she and Aliz, under a jungle canopy of hibiscus listening to the clicking of the crickets, the shrill whistles of birds, the baby geckos scurrying across the floor. Just before she left Bonn, two of her friends had lost their virginity. A third had been put on the pill by her mother before she had ever been kissed. Georgie had been in awe of all three. They had passed to the other side, leap-frogged the continental divide between childhood and adult life.

  Aliz stopped reading and leant his head against the wall. She looked at his chipped front tooth, at the sharp cheekbones and the wild springs of his hair, but she tried not to look at his mouth because whenever Aliz opened his mouth, Georgie thought about kissing and when she thought about kissing, her thoughts generally turned to sex. She found it safer to concentrate her mind on the upper half of the body. Anything south of the stomach made her nervous. At fifteen she had passed through a stage of obsessing about what grown-ups, more specifically grown-up men, looked like naked. The minute Georgie found herself in close proximity to any male, she began staring through the outer layers of his clothing with X-ray eyes. The more formal the diplomats, the more pompous their voices, the faster her eyes would drop from their faces and begin to burn through the cottons and wools of their trousers until the geography of their naked bodies was revealed. At night she tossed with feverish dreams in which she was running through a Maurice Sendak forest being pursued by grotesque monster-ministers. Hot on her heels was Fielding, from the Home Office, his chest pale and hairless as he coursed through the moonlight. Hiding behind a laurel tree was the Chargé d’affaires, scratching his crotch companionably . . .

  It had been a miserable year on so many levels.

  Assuming she was suffering from a teenage bout of extreme shyness, her father gave her several well-meaning lectures about looking people in the eye and being charming. ‘You can do this,’ he whispered, as he introduced her to the Spanish Ambassador. ‘Find something of interest and ask them about that.’ If only he knew! Georgie thought as she received the Spaniard’s small damp hand obediently in her own. She tried to dredge up something pertinent to say about the Prado but, to her utter shame, found herself imagining him naked, running across the plains of the Sierra Nevada, the tips of his fingers trailing through the leaves of the olive trees while his pendulous balls swung between his legs like castanets. What an abysmal catch-22 she was caught in. The more she blushed, the more hands her father insisted she shake and the more her head was filled with the images of exposed diplomats, until England’s entire foreign service had become a nudist camp to her.

  Until one day, magically, it stopped. If this was what growing up meant, she thought, relieved, she wanted no part of it.

  But now here was Aliz, with his dry skin and the musty smell it gave off and almost every physical part of him was fascinating to her. More than anything she wanted to touch the pads of her fingers to his, she wanted to put her ear to his heart and hear the rhythm of its beat. She couldn’t decide whether his lips were blue or purple or the inside of his mouth hot or cold. All she knew was that she had a strong desire to put her tongue inside it and find out. It seemed quite unimportant that she barely knew him.

  58

  Letty disliked cleaning mussels. Tugging at their beards and scraping off the barnacles made her feel like a nurse cleaning up grizzled old men on a geriatric ward and she had always preferred to leave the chore to Nicky and the children. Now, as she dropped a gleaming shell into the saucepan of water, it struck her as a pleasantly mindless pastime. Outside the back door, protected from the wind, she could watch the sky change colour and keep an eye out for the black wing-tips of the male hen harrier that had already flown by twice that morning, probably on the lookout for a mouse or some other rodenty titbit for its lunch. The sun was warm on her face. Bluebottles were fretting around the moss in the render. The children had disappeared for the day with an assortment of picnic food stowed in their pockets. She had given up asking what they were doing. What did it matter, as long as it got them out of the house, as long as they weren’t lolling around on the sofa, tearing her heart in two with their listlessness. She was aware of barely coping; she no longer knew how to.

  She stole another look at Donald John, perched awk- wardly on the far end of the bench. It was unusual for him to pay her a visit, and after a lengthy preamble about the weather, he’d slipped into an even more uncharacteristic silence.

  ‘So, you’re keeping well, Donald John?’ she ventured.

  ‘Aye, well enough.’ He slurped at his coffee then stretched his neck towards the sky like a stork conducting a survey of possible routes south. Letty could dimly make out the sound of a plane. Donald John stared at the twin streaks of white cutting through the blue. ‘These air-o-planes, where are they going? Forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards. Up in the sky . . . so high, so lonely’

  ‘They’re transatlantic planes, Donald John. I expect they’re on their way to America.’

  ‘Aye.’ He shook hi
s oblong head in sympathy. ‘Poor souls.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. She too had no desire to be anywhere except on the beach, or trailing across the machair, blown by wind and rain. She understood why it was so hard for Donald John to leave. The island exerted a mesmeric pull. She had felt the magic of it all her life, but it was a magic that stayed on the island. You couldn’t take it with you.

  ‘Letitia,’ Donald John began heavily, then broke off to gaze seemingly with great interest at an odd assortment of treasures stacked against the wall – glass lobster floats, whale vertebrae and sheep skulls, all bleached white by salt and sun. There was no particular reason why they’d been left there for so many years, but by the same token, there had never been occasion to move them.

  ‘What is it, Donald John?’ Letty pressed gently. ‘What’s bothering you?’

  Donald John floated his big hands off his knees, then dropped them down again. ‘It’s about Alick.’

  Letty laid down her knife. ‘He’s on the drink, isn’t he?’ she said quietly.

  An islander’s right to drink was inviolable, she accepted that. Within the community drinking was neither frowned upon nor encouraged. It was accepted as an everyday happening like breathing or the baking of scones. But since the ghost incident, Alick’s behaviour had become increasingly erratic. He had taken to pitching up at ungodly hours, sometimes painfully early or just as Letty was deciding to go to bed. There was always a purpose for his visit. To show her a letter he’d received years earlier from a girl he’d admired, or to produce an obscure part he’d ordered for the Raeburn. Each time he’d take up position at the kitchen table, his sharp, inquisitive eyes flitting between each child in turn.