The Island House (6 page)

The place was sparsely furnished, yet each item spoke of a clear aesthetic. The chair of stainless steel and leather, a small deep couch and matching armchair, a glass table loaded with books and magazines—even the old station clock over the fireplace had been chosen for its design and style, not just price.

So, he’d had taste, her father. Unaccountably that made Freya
angry—he’d not been around to show her how much he loved beauty.

She walked to the desk placed beneath one of the windows and ran her hand over the timber. Oak, planed and then meticulously sanded.

“Did you make this, Dad?”

From long ago, she remembered his hand holding a chisel as the other tapped on the end with a wooden mallet. He’d made her a bed once, and carved a bas-relief of her six-year-old profile on the headboard.

She banished that image.
Concentrate.

Her father’s desk was still covered with working papers, and there was a stack of books on the floor beside the chair just as if he had, at that moment, got up and gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. And there was a VHF radio. Small and bright yellow, it was the size of a TV remote. Freya thumbed the On button; the screen stayed blank. Her father had died six months ago. Of course the batteries were flat.

Ruby light displayed a bloom of dust on the sprawled possessions, the pot full of pens and pencils, the stapler. There was even dust on the paperweight—a snow dome of the Sydney Opera House, the sort of thing you’d give a child as a joke present.

Could she see him shaking it, or was that just imagination?
No snow in Sydney, Little Fee, except in here.
That was what he’d called her, Little Fee. Was that her laughter she heard, a happy kid? Freya stared at the paperweight, reached out, almost touched it . . .

No. She turned away from the black glass, away from the image of her face, one side in shadow, one side bright. Was it a trick of that strange mirror—to see her face so haunted and so strange? And younger, the face of the lonely child she’d once been.

“This is
rubbish.
” It was bracing to shout; the noise filled Freya with energy.

“What rubbish.” She said it softly the second time. Freya wandered
around the austere and beautiful room, trying to take it all in, trying to smell out the truth of Michael’s presence.

What remained here? What was really left? His books—he’d collected them and no doubt knew the contents of each one. Floor to ceiling, the width of the entire front wall of the house was lined with his library, and there were even shelves below, between, and above each of the windows. “Lotta trips up that path, Dad. That must have kept you fit.”

Freya slid a volume out from among its companions—there was almost no dust. These books had been frequently used.

Holding up the lamp, she saw a number handwritten on each spine in white correcting fluid; so, Michael still had his own system, and, if she looked, she knew she’d find his card file—there’d be no computer database for Michael Dane. “Writing time is thinking time, Little Fee.” He’d always been a Luddite.

Freya nodded.
I know, Dad. I agree.
She, too, liked to write things first in longhand—an anachronism, but his anachronism. Some things remained to her, of him. And as a child she’d loved his cards, each one an elegant statement of his love for what he did.

Archaeology, of course. That thing, worse than another woman, the obsession that had taken him away; it must have been that. Family and archaeology—why had they been so incompatible, and why had she followed Michael into that same realm of the dead past?

Freya snorted. She knew why; any bloody amateur psychologist could tell her why. She wanted to prove herself to him, wanted to be better than he was.

Too late.

Freya shook her head, angry, not sad.
Can’t please you now that you’re dead, can I?
She ran a finger across the book spines as she walked the length of the room. Gradually, as she knew she would, she was absorbed by the names, the bindings, the range of topics . . .

She stopped. Of course! This library would be the most tremendous resource for
her
work. Freya laughed at the irony.

No power = no laptop = no surfing the Net, but with all that was on these shelves, she’d not even miss the Web for research—her father’s books would get her to the end of her unloved doctorate. Michael’s deep knowledge of his chosen subject, the archaeology of the so-called Dark Ages, the early medieval to be exact, and the resources in this room would provide all she needed and more.

Perhaps she
was
meant to come to this place after all. Perhaps, in the end, there were no accidents.

Freya Dane sat down at her father’s kitchen table, the lamps placed on either side of the folder. She pulled it toward her. In that quiet room, the cardboard made a hushing sound as it slid across the plank top.

She opened the flap. It had an internal pocket, and in that was a solicitor’s card. She scanned the plain black type—it announced that Hindhawk, Piddington, and Associates, Solicitors and Advocates, could be found at Kings Quay Chambers, 18 Balloch Court, Ardleith, KA33, Scotland.
Scotland
was embossed—a definite statement. Freya’s lips quirked. Scots independence rose up from that small cardboard rectangle—no
United Kingdom
for these gentlemen at law, apparently.

She put the card aside. Inside the folder there was a mass of anonymous white pages, covered in her father’s writing. And then she took in the meaning and feeling behind the first words of his letter before they blurred.

December 31
Close to Midnight

My darling Freya,

Perhaps it is the last night of the old year that has made me write to you or perhaps because whisky, drunk alone, brings feeling close to the surface.

Truth is always complex, but tonight I have, it seems, the courage to say what must be said between us. And also to try to record what has happened on this island, to set down the facts as simply as I can, because it is your right to know.

For if you are reading what I’ve written here instead of talking to me over a companionable dram at last, that will be because I’ve left instructions with my solicitors in Ardleith.

By now you’ll know that Findnar belongs to you, with this house and all its contents. And this document will be placed where, hopefully, you will find it if and when you decide to come here. I hope you do. If I close my eyes, I can see you sitting here, at my kitchen table. That provides a little comfort.

Perhaps you do not believe that I am sad, desolate rather, that we have never met as adults? Believe me, I am. I have planned, so often, what we might say to each other, but each conversation in my head begins and ends with this. I want you to know that I have never, ever stopped loving you.

Freya blinked. There was a pain at the base of her throat, and it was hard to breathe. The words swam, and it was some minutes before she went on reading.

It’s such a very long time ago that your mother and I parted. I don’t know how much you actually understood, then, of the causes of the end of our marriage. I’ve often asked myself that question. Would it have been better if you hadn’t known the ins and outs, or worse?

No answer to that question. I shall not write of such sadness now because I want to tell you about the life I’ve lived here, and I want to explain an instinct I have long cherished: that you, and only you, are the right person to own Findnar after me. I’ll try to explain when I have told you a little more.

Of course, it will be your decision—and right—to keep this place or to sell it as you please. All I ask is that you read what I’ve set down here and suspend judgment, if you can. This is the most difficult letter I have ever written, but I am telling you the truth, so far as I understand it.

I also want to describe something very odd—a puzzle, if you like, or a mystery, the greatest of my working life. I’ve not been able to properly decode the evidence either, though I have found so many hints, gone down so many false trails trying to do just that. Perhaps you will succeed where I have failed. I hope that you do.

I know that you’re close to the end of your doctorate. By the way, I’m proud indeed that you have chosen to become an archaeologist. For this conundrum, however, you will need all the skills you have learned at university and something more, something I believe you have in your bones—instinct. I saw it in you as a child.

Do you remember that summer dig in Norway when you were seven? Freya, you were a real member of our team, not just a passenger, or the boss’s daughter.

Did she remember? Freya swallowed. Of course she remembered. Sleeping in a tent with just her dad, dirty and hot in the long, bright days, so happy grubbing in the dirt as they excavated the streets of the trading port from a thousand years ago. And the pride when, all by herself, she had found the enameled brooch and brought it out of the ground, intact.
He
had been proud of her, too, and there was a photograph of them both grinning—white teeth in dirty faces—as she held up the treasure she’d found.

Nineteen years ago. Time was supposed to heal, to seal over loss. Freya cleared her throat noisily.
Did you expect this to be easy for either of us, Dad?

Freya, this island gives up its secrets reluctantly. Some, from the recent past—the last six hundred years or so—I have uncovered, but some, one in particular, are much more ancient and intractable. And elusive; I did not know that, of course, when I came here. Perhaps you’ve wondered about Findnar—and why I bought the island.

Freya pushed back against his chair. “So, tell me, Dad.” When he left Elizabeth, Michael had done two decent things. He’d signed over the Sydney house to his wife, and he’d never shirked his obligation of maintenance payments for Freya as she grew up. Her mother had told her that—grudgingly—after the letter arrived from Scotland.

To say Freya had been angry she hadn’t been told didn’t touch the sides, and the flare-up between the pair went nuclear. It still hurt not to have known that he’d cared about her, even to that extent, for all those years. Searing questions had been asked and avoided.
Why did he leave you, why?

He was searching. We weren’t enough for him.

For what? Jesus Christ, what was he searching for? There has to be more. You’re lying to me; you have in the past, you’re doing it now.

Freya blinked. She was sorry for some of the things she’d said to Elizabeth, and they’d made up after a day or so because fights were rare between them, but her curiosity
had
kicked in—and Michael was right. She wanted to know how he’d been able to buy Findnar, since Elizabeth implied her ex-husband was, so far as she knew, broke after giving her the house.

I resigned from the university too—did you know that? That place was part of the problem between your mother and me. I was never ambitious and Elizabeth was—for me, that is. I’ve always liked to dig more than to teach, and they knew that. I was passed over for tenure too many times, and I was never going to be dean, of course. Politics. Not my strong suit. So I ran away from Sydney, worked in the gulf, on the rigs. Entry-level jobs at first, roughneck and roustabout. I was leading a drilling crew inside two years, and I rediscovered my physical self. How to just be and not overthink everything—that saved me.

“Overthink everything.” The pages trembled. “There’s a gene for that?” Freya shook her head.

It was hard work, twelve, fourteen hours a day and dangerous, but very well paid. And I saved my dollars because with free food and accommodation I had nothing to spend them on (we were paid in US currency, tax-free, when the dollar was worth something in the world). I heard about Findnar from a Scot—we shared accommodation on the platform—a forced sale, he said. And the gulf was starting to heat up politically at that time so . . . I decided it was time to go. I flew to Edinburgh and choppered into Aberdeen, hired a car and drove to Portsolly. End of story. There was something about this place, and I didn’t care about the remoteness, that suited me. Findnar was so cheap, though, of course, it’s a while ago now, and though Compline had been uninhabited for years—another winter and the roof would have gone—I knew I’d have the time (fourteen days on, twenty-one days off) to restore the house. It turned out that the bank was desperate to unload the place for almost any price to set against the debts of the owners on the mainland, and I had enough put by for a deposit. That got me a mortgage, and I decided to work out of Aberdeen on the North Sea rigs. Wilder, much, much colder, but it was closer to home. And that’s what Findnar has become. My home. And slowly, Compline came good—as you’ll see if you look around. A lot of work, a lot of trips up and down that path, but satisfying to see the house come back to life.