The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (5 page)

On the bus from Ullapool Violet studied an Ordnance Survey map of Poltown and the surrounding district. She read again the newspaper cuttings Mr Anwar had given her, though she knew them so well she could recite paragraphs from memory. How Megan Bates had left her cottage on the tidal island of Orasaigh. How she walked the coastal path to the headland by South Bay where she descended to the beach. How it had been a still, sunny day – one newspaper made reference to an ‘Indian summer’ that year. How ‘Miss Bates’ had been wearing a loose white dress and a raffia sun hat decorated with broad red ribbon. How she also had a leather bag on a shoulder strap. An unnamed witness, a woman exercising her dog on the beach road 300 metres away, had told the police it was ‘unmistakeably Miss Bates because no-one else wears summer dresses in Poltown’. How the witness hadn’t thought anything was untoward because the two women often saw each other at a distance on their morning walks. How Miss Bates had stood at the water’s edge before wading into the sea. The witness had been elderly and hadn’t paid much attention because it was only ‘Miss Bates paddling’. How the hat and bag had been recovered later from North Bay, less than a kilometre up the coast, where they’d drifted ashore. A local farmer by the name of Duncan Boyd had found them. How the witness had come forward the next day. How the police had searched the coast for seven more days waiting for the sea to give up her body. But it never did. How that was unusual in waters like those, with a prevailing south-westerly which brought all kinds of flotsam ashore, including occasionally the bodies of whales and fishermen drowned in The Minch. How the unseasonal and light southerly wind that September might have influenced the natural order of things. How, according to Inspector Robert Yellowlees of Highland Constabulary, the officer in charge of the investigation, there had been ‘no suspicious circumstances’. All the evidence pointed to an unhappy young woman killing herself by drowning.

On a ridge three kilometres from Poltown, the bus driver, an obliging middle-aged man called Stuart, pulled into a passing place. He was five minutes ahead of schedule and ‘might as well have a ciggie break here’ to let Violet ‘enjoy the view’ considering she was his only passenger and she’d been asking so many questions about the area. As soon as Violet stepped from the bus she realised why he had chosen to stop there. The passing place had a 180 degree view of the coast line, ‘a veritable panorama,’ Stuart said mockingly, taking on the role of personal tour guide. He lit a cigarette and clamped it in the right hand corner of his mouth. ‘Didn’t I tell you it’d be worth it?’ he said out of the left. Despite his sardonic manner, there was satisfaction that someone ordinary like him could live among magnificence like that.

Violet managed to nod in reply, but her mind was on the map and the cuttings and translating them to this incredible vista of land and sea across which her mother had made her final journey. She identified the features whose names had become familiar in the days since Mr Anwar’s visit. There was Orasaigh, the tidal island, at the inner mouth of the sea loch. A band of blue sparkled between it and the mainland: the tide was in. From there Violet’s eye was drawn to the north by a scored line a little inland from the coast. This was the trace of the path which Megan Bates had taken that day. At the headland, a distance of half a kilometre, maybe more, she descended to South Bay, a long inviting curve of grassland dunes, sand and sea. Somewhere along its lazy sweep of beach Megan Bates had walked into the water and disappeared. Violet lingered on the view, the scene of her mother’s death, before seeking out the final landmark, North Bay, where the hat and bag came ashore. Violet recognised it from its outline on the map, like a mouth that was half-open.

‘In case you’re interested . . .’ Stuart said, his tone suggesting she shouldn’t be, ‘Poltown is over to the left. It’s hidden by the hill. See that grand house?’ Violet looked to where he was pointing. ‘That’s Brae House. And see the church?’

Violet could: a building of grey stone squatting on a hummock of bright green encircled by a boulder wall.

‘Well, Poltown’s the other side of it, round the shoulder of the hill, out of sight and out of mind . . . best way with Poltown. Bit of a dump to be honest.’ He dropped his smouldering cigarette into the swept-up gravel at the side of the lay-by while Violet’s attention was drawn back to South Bay.

‘Enjoy the view while you can,’ Stuart said.

‘Yes, it is the perfect day, isn’t it?’ Violet replied, thinking it might have been similar weather twenty-six years before.

‘I wasn’t meaning that.’ Stuart nodded towards the horizon. ‘There’s going to be a forest of windmills out there, hundreds of them, a monster of a windfarm or whatever it’s called when it’s at sea . . . and down there. See that little turn-off to the beach?’

Violet looked at where Stuart was pointing. She guessed it must be the road from which the witness saw Megan Bates. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, see the field the other side of it?

Violet nodded.

‘And the farmhouse and steading . . . across the field, do you see? This side of the headland. They’re planning to put up a building the size of a football pitch . . . for converting the electricity for the grid, or something like that. I don’t know what. It’s all progress, I suppose.’ Stuart sounded unsure and kicked at the gravel to emphasise the point. ‘But it’s causing a rare old stushie between the people who rent out their cottages and make money from the tourist industry and the rest who don’t give a tinker’s fart about tourism or the environment and just want a house and a job.’

Violet turned quickly away in case Stuart noticed her distress. For the first time in her life she had an address for her mother, geography, a context. She was able to see what
she
had seen; in fact, the last thing she had seen before she died. Now, it was to be spoiled by a ‘forest of windmills’.

‘Well that’s us,’ Stuart said, unaware of Violet’s mood swing. ‘Last stop before sunny Poltown,’ he snorted. ‘Bet there’ll be a cloud hanging over it by the time we get there.’

Violet said, ‘I think I’ll walk.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Stuart sounded disappointed. ‘Maybe pick you up again some other time.’

‘Yes, maybe . . .’ she replied.

He loitered, as if hoping she would change her mind. Then he said, ‘I’ll be off then.’

She nodded without turning, saying ‘thanks’ after he had shut his door.

Once the bus had gone, Violet remained where she was, the prisoner of conflicting emotions. She yearned to walk in her mother’s footsteps but she also had a gnawing fear at the consequences of doing so, at the turmoil it threatened to unleash. She found her mobile phone in the pocket of her backpack and took the opportunity to text Hilary in case there was no signal later at the coast.

‘Arrived safely. Love to Anna. Hugs for you and Izzy.’

Hilary lived downstairs from Violet’s bedsit in Glasgow. Anna and Izzy were best friends; so were Violet and Hilary who had met as students at the city’s School of Art. After graduating they shared the same bed to save money on rent. Hilary worked days as a part-time clerical assistant in an insurance office, Violet nights waitressing in a pizza restaurant. After their daughters were born four months apart, they moved into their own rooms, sharing child care instead of a bed.

‘Leave Anna with me,’ Hilary had said when Violet told her about Mr Anwar’s visit and her decision to go to Poltown. She had ‘due days’ to take and Izzy always loved it when Anna stayed. Last night, when Violet returned from work, Hilary had hugged her unexpectedly. ‘What’s that for?’ Violet had asked.

‘You’ll be careful won’t you?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Violet had said. Now she wasn’t so sure.

On the road down to the coast, Violet came upon a poster tied to a telegraph pole. It was publicising a public meeting about the wind farm at Poltown community hall in two days. ‘Fuck the environment, give us jobs’ had been daubed across it in red paint. Despite the bus driver’s forewarning, Violet was surprised and unsettled by the angry note it struck in an otherwise harmonious landscape.

Then she had another shock.

She was following the path her mother had taken to the beach. At the headland, it tipped into a gorge between sheer plates of rock. At first the going was firm – compacted peat – but as the path became steeper it became a flight of stone steps. Some were crumbling under the persistent drips of water trickling from an overhang. Others were scattered with loose stones, making it difficult to find a secure footing. Violet leaned forward to pick out the safest descent and her backpack and tent pressed against her shoulders. She feared she was about to topple and let out a cry of surprise. Her voice reverberated in the confines of the gorge, changing into a sound she was sure she had heard before, an age ago. It was the strangest experience, not the sort of fey imagining to which Violet was usually inclined. Yet it had the force of absolute conviction: she
had
been here before. Hadn’t she felt that same claustrophobia, heard that same echo?

Now she also knew when. She had been in her mother’s womb, not on her last journey, but at some earlier time in the pregnancy. Had her mother also felt enclosed by these rocks? Had she also feared losing her balance, in her case the bulge of pregnancy making negotiation of the stone steps precarious? Had she cried out in frustration? For a moment, Violet believed the echo
was
her mother’s voice, travelling back to her through time. Then it was gone. All that remained was the drip-drip of the water and the dankness. Violet was left with a lurching sensation in her stomach, the feeling a child has as soon as it realises it is lost and in peril, its mother nowhere to be seen. She carried on down the remaining steps to the beach, irritated that she’d allowed such a flight of fancy to take hold of her.

As she walked across the sand she reflected on the childhood she had had, instead of the one which should have been hers. Her adoptive parents, Tom and Bridget Wells, were kindly and generous though each had an enthusiasm which (in Violet’s slowly developing consciousness) provided adult satisfactions against which a child could not compete. Away from work (as a manager in the council’s property maintenance department) Tom’s hobby was reassembling old car engines, whereas Bridget’s interest was domestic – keeping their 1980s bungalow spotless. Tom’s domain was the integral garage; Bridget’s the house. Violet went between the two, never feeling she belonged in either or with either. It was a knowledge she kept to herself, aware of its potential for hurt. Perhaps her reticence also owed something to her dim understanding that the differences between her and her parents were parts of a bigger mystery which one day would be revealed. Bridget’s disclosure of her adoption provided the single most important piece to the puzzle. Afterwards she remembered over-hearing Bridget worrying to Tom about Violet’s non-plussed reaction. Bridget was sure it had been caused by shock which would lead to a delayed and disturbed emotional response; that each should be vigilant for it. Bridget needn’t have worried. Violet had never felt more reconciled or more curious about the mysteries still to be revealed.

Violet dropped her backpack on the wet sand, slipped off her trainers and padded towards the retreating water. Despite confiding in her lost mother throughout her teenage years, proximity to her place of death left her without words. She surveyed the sea in accusing silence for being so calm when she was anything but. When she did speak, all she could say was, ‘How could you leave me?’

Cal McGill watched her through his dirty windscreen. There was something compelling about her stillness, about the length of time she had been standing there, square-shouldered, erect, staring out to sea, like an Antony Gormley figure waiting for another of its cast-iron tribe to emerge from the waves. By his calculation, she hadn’t moved for ten minutes, not a stretch of an arm, a twist of the shoulders, a turn of the head – nothing. What brought her here, he wondered? Just as he began to guess at some of the possibilities she turned around, collected her backpack and continued further along the beach, towards North Bay.

Her imminent departure caused him an unexpected pang of regret
followed by the whimsical notion that this young woman, whom
he had never met, whose face he had never seen,
of whom he had been aware for no more than
a dozen minutes, might be a companion spirit, someone who
found refuge by the sea, as he did. For as
long as she remained in view, he let himself be
distracted by the possibility of an unexplored affinity between them.
The thought was accompanied by a wistful smile. A beach
was where he met his wife, Rachel. The divorce wasn’
t quite six months old. If he had learned anything
by the experience surely it was to be wary of
a combination of wide skies, an empty beach and the
chance appearance of an unaccompanied young woman? Still, it was
a bitter-sweet sensation as this newest encounter climbed the
headland and began to descend towards the next bay. He
followed her progress until all that was visible of her
above the horizon was her bobbing head, and then he
closed his eyes. The cab of the pickup was warm,
the afternoon sun making it soporific. He dozed for ten,
perhaps fifteen minutes. When he woke the statue from the
beach was coming towards him through the dunes, and the
path she was following led her to the turning circle
on the beach road where Cal had parked. He reached
for a file, opened it and pretended to read, while
tracking her approach out of the corner of his eye.
She was taller than he’d imagined: 5’8” or so,
almost his height, and slender too. He feigned surprise when
she tapped on his door, taking in her boy’s-
cut short brown hair, the two silver rings in her
left ear, and an impression of pale skin on a
small face.