Bird of Passage (41 page)

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘But Nick came to your rescue as usual, and you took the easy way out. Poor bastard. I don’t suppose he knew what he was letting himself in for. I suppose he still doesn’t. I suppose you’re deceiving him, too.’

She gazed at him, shaking her head.

‘Still lying?’ he said. ‘To me and to yourself!  Jesus. If I’d known...’

‘Would that have made you stay? Would it have solved anything?’

‘It might!’

‘I don’t think so. Not if you were so set on going.’

‘Ah but I’m sick of it all, sick of the deceit and the misery. You’ve brought this on yourself, Kirsty.

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ she repeated stubbornly. She couldn’t let this happen. And to her relief, he seemed to capitulate.

 ‘Have it your own way. Keep pretending. Even though she’s the image of me. India. A wee cuckoo in his nest!’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘I’m surprised
he
doesn’t see it. Your Nicolas. But I suppose we only see what we want to see. So what now, Kirsty? What now?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s not too late.’

‘I still want you for my friend.’

‘Fuck that!’ he said, furiously. ‘Friendship? What good is your friendship to me?’

 ‘But nothing’s the same any more. And there are the girls to consider. I’m a wife and mother now.’

‘Indeed you are.’

‘It’s too late. You have to see that it’s too late for us to be anything but friends, Finn. ’

‘You mean you don’t care to be around me any more.’

‘I want to be with you all the time.’

‘Then do something about it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Because you love Nicolas? Say it! Say you love Nicolas and you don’t want to leave him.’

‘I love my husband very much and I can’t possibly leave him. It would break his heart. Like you broke mine.’

‘Come home with me. Now. Come back to Dunshee.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because too many other people would get hurt. And besides…’

‘Besides what?’

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘I’m afraid of the way you love me. Afraid of what it might do to both of us.’

He switched on the engine.

 ‘I’ll take you back to your car.’

‘What are we going to do, Finn ?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’ he said angrily, and then didn’t speak again until they reached her car, parked in a muddy lay-by at the side of the main road. He stopped, leaned over and opened the passenger door.

‘Get out.’

‘Finn!’

‘For fuck’s sake Kirsty, will you just get out and leave me alone.’

 She got out and he drove away immediately, leaving her in the road. She got into her own car, turned on the engine and ran the heater to clear the misted windscreen before she could drive safely back to Ealachan. 

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

A day or two later, when the winds had abated and Nicolas had managed to get home to the island, he sat her down and said, ‘Darling, we have to have a serious talk.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because things can’t go on like this. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. Not good at all. I think we’re going to have to offload the whole bloody island. Certainly this place.’

‘This place?’

‘Well. Ealachan. We really need the money.’

She was confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Sell the place,’ he said. ‘Realise some capital. You know? Selling off the farm and the other places wasn’t nearly enough.’

‘But where will  we live?’

‘There’s always Maida Vale. There’s plenty of room. Mum and dad are rattling around that big house anyway.’

‘Then why don’t you sell that?’ She thought about the tall house with its rooms stuffed with brown furniture and brown paintings.

‘Couldn’t do that. Need some sort of a base in London. We all do, Annabel included.’

‘Couldn’t it be a smaller base?’

‘I can’t throw my poor old father out of his home can I?’

No, but you could do it to my grandad, she thought.

‘Your father always liked this place much better than London.’

‘Maybe so but he’s not fit to travel nowadays, is he? And in any case, he doesn’t remember where he is from one day to the next.’

Malcolm had become vague and forgetful. He spent all his time up in the nursery at Maida Vale, playing with his collection of pond yachts, rigging and rerigging them, arranging them in little flotillas. He had even been known to fill up one of the cast iron baths and sail them up and down. ‘Lee-oh!’ he said. ‘Going about!’ He seemed profoundly happy. There were times when Kirsty envied him.

 ‘We need to do something fairly drastic, and offloading this place is the most realistic option. It was always a luxury. Now it’s become one we can’t afford.’

‘What about me?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. It’ll do you good, being in London. We could get you into more of the galleries down there. Annabel would help.’

‘What will I paint?’

‘Well, whatever you like, darling.’

‘
This
is what I paint. This place.’

‘But you could always paint something else, couldn’t you?’

‘No. I don’t want to paint something else. This place is my inspiration. I can never have enough of it. Never come to the end of it. Never!’

She saw that he was looking at her with profound scepticism and knew that he didn’t understand, would never understand what drove her.

‘Nicolas?’

‘Yes?’

‘This is about more than selling Ealachan, isn’t it? It’s about your parents, too.’

‘To some extent. My mother could do with a bit of help with dad. Annabel can’t always be there. She has her own business to see to.’

‘And what about my grandad?’

‘He has Finn now, doesn’t he? Worked out rather well that.’

‘Will you be staying at home to help with your father? Or will you be taking off to the States at every available opportunity?’

Sometimes she suspected that it wasn’t only business interests that took Nicolas over to the States so often. But how could  she complain? ‘Pots and kettles, Kirsty’ that’s what her mother would have said. ‘Pots and kettles.’ And yet she had done nothing wrong, nothing except renew an old friendship.

 She saw him colour up. ‘We do have business interests over there. In fact it’s our best bet for solvency. But if you don’t want to help with dad, we can always get a nurse in.’

‘Christ, Nicolas, I wouldn’t mind sailing his pond yachts with him, or whatever else he wants to do. It isn’t that at all.’

‘Well then’

She said nothing. She was trapped. One way or another, he would remove her from Finn’s influence. Panic was succeeded by anger. If once she opened her mouth, the words would  spill out and she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.  But what could she say that wouldn’t sound unreasonable.

India was due home for the Easter holidays in less than a week. Nicolas had been in Edinburgh on business and was planning to make a detour to St Andrews,  pick her up from school  and bring her to the island with him. Flora had been back at the village school for the past month, but was still looking peaky. Annabel had begged to be allowed to take her out of school a few days before the official start of the holidays, and fly her off somewhere warm.

‘Why not?’ said Kirsty, conscious that her husband would not approve. School attendance was a point of principle with him, though Kirsty and Annabel had no such scruples. Besides, this would leave Kirsty alone at Ealachan for a blissful few days. She felt guilty at how much of a relief it was to be spared the demands of her immediate family.

Her grandfather was confined to the house with a heavy cold and consequent flare-up of his arthritis – not so bad that he needed constant attention, but too uncomfortable for him to do more than sit in front of the television with a blanket over his knees. Sensing that he wanted a little loving care, she loaded a few treats into the car and drove up to Dunshee. Finn was out and about on the farm, although a young man called Dave, much more efficient than Billy, came up from the village to help nowadays. Finn had no intention of taking on the full burden of the work again but realised that most of it was well beyond Alasdair’s strength.

Kirsty went into the kitchen and found her grandfather where Finn had left him that morning, huddled in a chair beside the range, with the radio and yesterday’s newspaper beside him, a half drunk mug of tea and a plate of chocolate digestives on the table.  A fat tabby cat, Fish Face’s real successor, was asleep on a cushion on the opposite chair, its body making a perfect circle. It opened one eye but didn’t raise its head as she came in. She went over and kissed the top of her grandad’s head where the white hair was thinning. The shiny pink scalp beneath seemed very vulnerable. He had been such a big strong man; now he had shrunk, his limbs folding in on themselves. He had been a part of her life for so long. What would  she do without him?

‘How are you?’ she asked him.

‘Och, not so bad, lass. Not so bad.’

‘I’ve brought you some fruit cake. It isn’t like mum’s but it’s pretty good all the same. And whisky and honey. I know how much you like a hot toddy.’

‘It’s you yourself that will cheer me up. So sit down and tell me all the news.’

She shooed the cat off the cushion. It went and sat in the hearth, with its back to her, hunching its shoulders and twitching its tail indignantly. She talked to him about India and Flora, which was chiefly what he meant by ‘the news.’ Then she pottered about the room, singing to herself, making ham sandwiches with mustard for their lunch. It was soothing to be here again, working quietly in what she still thought of as her kitchen. She had always disliked the kitchen at Ealachan with its stone floor and banks of gloomy wooden cupboards, but Nicolas had  been disinclined to change it.  Besides, there had always been somebody else to do the cooking. Now, as she sliced down through the layers of brown and pink and yellow, she had a moment of pure happiness.

‘Oh it’s so nice to be back!’  

‘It’s good to have you here.’ She turned round to see Finn, standing in the kitchen doorway, taking off his wellington boots, sliding out of a scuffed  jacket. He was wearing a baggy sweater that seemed to be unravelling at neck and cuffs, and a pair of faded jeans, not fashionably faded, just old. However else he may have changed, he still didn’t care about his clothes. He kept them clean, but that was it.

‘Are those for me as well?’ he asked, looking at the sandwiches.

‘Of course they are,’ said Alasdair. ‘She’s made a great pile of them. You sit yourself down and get stuck in!’

They sat cater-corner at the kitchen table. Alasdair stayed where he was, with a tray on his lap.

‘He’s always trying to feed me up,’ said Finn.  ‘He keeps telling me there isn’t enough meat on my bones.’

‘You seem fine to me.’ But it was true that he had lost a bit of weight. She suspected that sometimes he just forgot to eat. She reached out and touched his arm, above the elbow, and was shocked by the dangerous flicker of sensation that passed between them. She wondered if he felt it too.

Their eyes met and again she felt a frisson of anxiety. When they were young, she had always been confident that she could banish his dark moods. Feisty Kirsty, walking in where even angels might fear to tread. Now, she was not so sure. He had left her once before. What if he left again? And then she thought that if Nicolas had his way, it was she herself who would be leaving.

‘This is just like old times,’ she said.

‘Where are they?’ he asked her abruptly. ‘Your lot, down there?’

‘They’re all away. Nicolas and India will be back later in the week. Annabel’s taken Flora off for a break.’

‘How do you bear it, Kirsty? Living in the same house as that family?’

‘Don’t be silly. They’re
my
family. I love them. And they’re all very nice to me so I expect they love me too.’ But she knew that he meant Nicolas. How could she bear living with Nicolas?

He finished his sandwiches and drank his tea in near silence. It wasn’t a sullen silence. He just seemed disinclined to argue with her. Afterwards, she cleared away the dishes into the sink.

‘Leave those,’ he told her. ‘I’ll do them later.’

Alasdair was sneezing so badly by this time that when she suggested an afternoon nap, he agreed. She took him upstairs and straightened the bed for him while he got into his striped pyjamas. He was shivering and she laid a hand on his forehead.

 ‘You’re running a bit of a temperature. No point in you getting dressed again. You stay here and I’ll bring you up some supper later on.’