The Fish Ladder (16 page)

In less than half an hour I had found it.

I walked along the track, which separated fields full of bullocks. I passed beneath the sheltering trees, which had now grown vast. The track had been grass in my memory, but had now been tarmacked over. A stream chirruped along one wall, a wood closed off the back. I hadn’t remembered the cemetery being so close to the road.

Iain MacMartin was killed, very early one morning, in a motorcycle accident, while returning to the university after the Easter holiday. He was working towards the completion of his doctoral thesis. Although it was over thirty years ago his sister, Miss MacMartin, still wrote to Mum each Christmas. I knew I was in the right place. I remembered Miss MacMartin telling us that the coffin had been carried on a grocer’s cart. This detail had seemed important at the time, as though the young man had been transported on a gun carriage. There had been a piper. It was only a small place, and I began systematically to search the headstones. But, try as I might, I could not find his name.

A fine rain began to fall, and I was aware of the lightness of its touch. I recalled having my face washed as a child, the softness of the cloth, the gentleness of the hands, yet here was no kindness, no unkindness; the caress without feeling or intention. A brown buzzard eyed me from the adjacent field. It shifted from a gatepost to the grass, before lifting away, peevish.

Iain MacMartin. I looked everywhere, searched every headstone, searched again. There were Robertses, Robertsons, McFarlanes, Macfarlanes, Shantos. I observed how connected many of the names were. I thought of Robert Macfarlane, and his book,
The Wild Places
. It was Robert who first told me of
The Well at the World’s End
and introduced me to the writing of Neil Gunn. I thought about Richard McFarlan of New Brunswick, who had patented a fish ladder in 1837. I became intrigued by the idea that one might come from somewhere. Or perhaps, rather, that one might know where that somewhere is.
All around me, lying side by side, were kinsmen. A field of them.

Rupert and I had been together for twelve years before Evie was born. A surgical investigation revealed the architecture of my Fallopian tubes to be imperfect. I might fall pregnant naturally, but it was really very unlikely. If I were to have
in vitro
fertilisation, then the obstacle presented by the damaged tubes would be bypassed. We met with a fertility specialist. The benefits of IVF were obvious: we might have a child. But the disadvantages, too, were concrete: it was expensive both financially and emotionally. It would take up a lot of our time, possibly over several years. There was a significantly increased risk of cancer in women who received the treatment relative to those who did not. Whether this increased risk was connected to the reasons for referral in the first place, or whether it increased as a result of the treatment itself, was not clear. After a while the doctor asked us if we would consider adoption. Well, yes, I said, adoption was a possibility. But I was an adopted child myself. Whenever a baby was born, or a family idiosyncrasy discussed, or if an old photograph came to light, then I had always stepped back – by which I meant that I would get up and move – deliberately maintaining a respectful distance from what I perceived to be the genetic hum in the room. I had done it since my earliest childhood. If I didn’t move fast enough then there would always be someone who could, and generally did, point out the impossibility of the baby, or great-aunt, or whoever it was, ever looking like me, or me like them. What for others might be a moment of shared history was, for me, an ongoing reminder of my charity status.

My grandmother used to fascinate me with the stories of Dad’s ancestors. Of Faithful Norbury, the sixteenth-century groom, who was ‘elevated beyond his station to his mistress’s bed’, which gave a whole new slant to the family motto:
Regi Et Patriae Fidelis
. Of
William Norbury, converted from the liquor to Methodism by John Wesley himself, who then paced the county for the next forty years with a suitcase of sermons written in minute cursive script and carried by a ‘half-wit lad’, who had never been known to leave his side. Or of Roger de Bulkeley who had changed his name to that of his Shropshire land:
Norbury
, meaning a northern town or fortification. Genealogy allows us to construct our identities from our own myths and legends, to know who we are, and where we have come from. Or we can use the stories as a starting point for where we might like to go, a legacy to be built on or rebelled against. Sara Maitland describes the tradition of storytelling as ‘a very fundamental human attri­bute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats “narrative loss” – the inability to construct a story of one’s own life – as a loss of identity or personhood.’ The stories I had inherited were fascinating, but they weren’t mine. I had never met anyone who shared my blood, or who looked like me. There was no genetic starting point from which I could begin my narrative. I didn’t even know my nationality.

In answer to the doctor’s question, then: I didn’t, in the first instance, want to adopt a child, because I was lonely. Not superficially so, not lacking in friends or loved ones. Cosmically. I felt, I had always felt, dizzyingly adrift. I realised that this might be regarded as a poetic conceit, or even a form of vanity, but it also happened to be true.

The doctor then told us that when he was a little boy his own father – a GP – had abandoned his mother, abandoned both of them. The word
divorce
was never mentioned, at any rate he had no recollection of hearing it, and his mother did not remarry. Each birthday and Christmas a present arrived, purporting to be from his father, but the doctor recognised the writing on the package to be that of his mother. Even as an adult he could not bring himself to discuss the subject with her. Shortly after his mother died an aunt had contacted him. She told him that his father was buried in the graveyard of St Mary’s Priory in Abergavenny. The doctor was unable to describe his feelings in that place. He realised that he had followed in his father’s footsteps, and had clung to what little he knew of him – his profession. Our doctor had facilitated the conception of hundreds of children – their photographs covered the wall behind him. He had four daughters of his own, and several grandchildren. He said: ‘I am personally acquainted with the loneliness of which you speak. In my own way, I have sought to fill the void.’ He had noticed that a disproportionately large number of people who were adopted, relative to the normal population, presented themselves for fertility treatment. In other words, either adoptees with impaired fertility had a greater desire to create a child of their own than non-adopted people in the same circumstance, or adopted people were proportionally more likely to encounter difficulties conceiving than the non-adopted population. He had even written a paper on the relationship between unexplained infertility and shame, in which shame might be defined as the sense that one is different from other people and therefore, at some level,
not right
, and not worthy to continue one’s line, in a very literal, physical, way. This perception, of being different, was sufficient, he believed, to explain infertility. The American psychologist Nancy Verrier has written about the way in which the brains of children who have suffered separation trauma might differ from those of children who have not. Others refer to ‘attachment disorders’ and these are both, perhaps, ways of describing what the fertility doctor had observed. Adoptees inherit a complex legacy.

Returning to this graveyard, to this wet afternoon, it seemed fitting, or at least ironic, that I who came from nowhere that I knew of – before the Convent – was unable to find the one person I was looking for, and even that was someone – no longer living – who I’d never known in life. I wondered if I had misremembered his name, Iain MacMartin, and if it was an Anglicisation from the Gaelic. Or if it perhaps referred to the little blue bird, the martin, the one with such a long migratory path.

Where trouble melts like lemon drops

High above the chimney tops

That’s where you’ll find me . . .

The words of ‘Over The Rainbow’ began to revolve, in unexpected spirals, inside my head. They were accompanied, like the hiss of an old 45, by the drip and crackle of the rain.

And the dreams that you dare to . . .

Why, oh why, can’t I?

One of the graves was marked by a wedge of granite. There was no name. It was flanked by two jam-jars of freshly pulled heather, tight clusters of magenta bells. It was a wild place, made tame. I stopped and crouched down next to it and for those few moments drew my dead about me, my own lovely darlings, those whose arms had enfolded me, those small enough to hold in the palm of my hand – Dad, Pamela, my lost baby. Neither Dad nor my miscarried child had a grave that I might visit. Pamela had been buried, but I arrived too late to visit the churchyard. The following morning I had left, in a rainstorm, and though I had driven past the cemetery where Pamela was lying, I had been too afraid to stop. I didn’t want to look at the flowers, and the mud, and know that she was under them.

The rain in this Highland cemetery was becoming heavier. It found a way inside my collar, down my sleeves, it flattened my hair against my skull and in wet curls against my neck. I carried my dead in a net, a clattering catch of bones, of promise, of might-have-been. I knew that I had to leave them, free them, free myself. Yet something was interfering with the resolution of my grief, complicating it. Dad had been dead for almost eight years. I felt as I had the day I accidentally found the Convent where I had been born, as though there was a truth, close by, if I could but see it. But the beginner’s luck that graced me then had gone. I could perceive this truth in the flickering landscape, like watching television without an aerial, an incandescent image beneath the cloak of rain; but I was either looking too hard, or not hard enough. In part I had not been honest. I did not begin this journey on behalf of Sofia, the girlfriend to whom I gave my copy of
The Well at the World’s End
. I came here because I wanted to. There was no other reason. But I couldn’t understand what motivated me on my not quite random, yet only loosely guided, path. I turned away from the unmarked granite and as I did so four words, cut into a nearby stone, caught my eye:
Glad did I live
. I was puzzled by the brevity, the baldness of the statement. The inscription felt like a gauntlet, a challenge, requiring something from me.

Early on the last day of Dad’s life, I had gone into the room where he was lying. Outside, a Japanese maple tree flapped, ragged, in the wind. I had looked at the scarlet, tenacious leaves, wanting to point them out to Dad. Then realised it was too late. There would be no more trees. I rested my head on his chest. He appeared to be unconscious, and yet I could sense his anxiety, a steady fizzing below his skin, beneath his ribs, at his core.

‘Dad?’ I ran my fingers over his, put my mouth close to his ear. ‘Remember . . . The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be destroyed. Or created. It can only change its form.’ I watched his face: it was opaque as alabaster in an unlit room, the deep cold already separating us, drawing us further apart. For all intents and purposes, Dad was in a coma. And yet, in spite of this, he smiled.

Glad did I live
.

Newton’s first law, of which Dad was also fond, states that an object will remain in a state either of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change by the action of an external force. For me to be able to look back on my life, and to know those four words to have been true, I had to alter my course.

Notes on
Tummel

Garry

For the rest of the afternoon I travelled ahead of the weather, the A9 before me, companioned by the River Garry. The dark sleepers of a railway line were laid out as neat as pickets. All three paths – road, rail and river – ran in parallel across the plain that divided the Am Monadh Liath, the grey hills, from the Am Monadh Ruadh, the red hills – the Cairngorms.

The previous night, at Liz’s house, I had toyed with the idea of abandoning the journey to Dunbeath. It was still a day’s drive away. I had lingered over a map of this plain, looking for a river that might replace the Dunbeath Water. The River Garry was a tributary of the Tummel, which was itself a tributary of the Tay. It had its source in Loch Garry, which in turn was fed by three other rivers. Strictly speaking the Garry didn’t run from the sea to a source, but rather it formed a part of such a journey. The River Spey did travel from the sea to its source, Loch Spey in the Corrieyairack Forest, and it also ran across this plain. This new idea was tempting. I had a connection with the River Spey, because we used to holiday next to it when I was a child. I had even caught my first fish in it. However, I was already many miles inland, the Spey ran alongside a road for much of its length, and I wanted to walk from a river mouth. Also, the idea of actually reaching Dunbeath was becoming concrete. I found I couldn’t even look at the surrounding hills because I did not wish, as the result of an accidental glance, to develop an idea that might divert me from my intention. I was well aware that I could spend happy hours, if not days, in the Cairngorms. So I kept my eyes at the level of the road, and glanced only occasionally at the river. But at the turn-off to the village of Dalwhinnie, I noticed some buildings, small as matchboxes. Beyond them the mountains rose in lilac slopes.