When the World Was Steady (26 page)

‘Please explain,’ said Angelica. She had been shredding a tissue during this conversation that went nowhere.

‘Are you deaf, damn it? They’ve gone for the birds—out to Kilda for the birds. They’ll be there till September at least, that’s when their permission lasts until. Or his, rather. But he wants to stay the winter and prove that they can do it. They’ve got their own boat, after all, and there won’t be anybody going to check.’

‘What’s Kilda? I don’t understand. Can we hire a boat and go? Will you take us?’

St Kilda, Kenneth Campbell explained, pointing a fisherman’s finger at the grey horizon, was as far out as the Outer Hebrides went. ‘Last stop before Newfoundland,’ he said, and winked at Angelica. ‘
You’re
British, at the least.
You
know about St Kilda?’

It was a nature reserve, full of birds, said Campbell. Hence the voyage: puffins, fulmars, egrets, migrating, nesting, milling about in their thousands. It had been, until 1930, inhabited by an extraordinary, backward people who had never seen a tree, who had hardly invented the wheel, a tiny group of people inbred for generations; but now, there was only a small army base there. Nothing else. In the winter, no boats could land, not for months. Back in the twenties, all but starving in the winter, the people had begged to join the mainland. No protection, no security: this was why there was no permission for the winter even now, or possibly now more than ever. It simply wasn’t safe.

‘But why—what about Rupica? Why would they want to stay the winter? It’s the decision of a madman!’

‘To you or me, aye, that’s the only word for it. But he’s got
the fire of faith, doesn’t he? He’s a bloody Christian, isn’t he?’

Angelica made a little coughing sound. ‘I am a Christian,’ she said. Kenneth Campbell ignored her.

‘And I’ll tell you something, man, there’s something of arrogance there, for all the humility he pretends. Sometimes I think he thinks he
is
God, you know. It’s the
certainty
I can’t abide.’

‘What about my sister? Is she a Christian?’

‘Damned if I know. Above all, the lass is in love with the fella. That was plain a mile off. So you could say she has faith of a kind.’

Angelica and Nikhil didn’t stay long after that: there didn’t seem much point. And besides, Campbell, drunk as he was getting, wanted to drive into Portree (in the lorry, a gift from the departed pair: ‘Would they have given it to me for good if they were planning to come back? No they would not.’). But no, he could not take them to St Kilda, it was far—hours and hours, day and night—and would be dangerous. And even then there was no guarantee of landing. Besides which there was no
permission
for landing. Permission came from London, from some ministry in Whitehall, and didn’t it take months—he’d heard all about it, from start to finish. To try to get there, even to try, he said, they would need to bribe a crooked fisherman with a big boat, with a great deal of money. And they would need time. And still, no guarantees. ‘So you see,’ he finished with a smile, ‘so you see, it
is
more or less as if they’d sailed off the edge of this flat earth. Or as if they’d died and gone to heaven. There isn’t any way to get to them. None at all.’

There was a weight like death in the car when they returned to it: the weight of their triumphant kiss, jubilantly weightless only an hour earlier. They sat there, staring out at the gloom, while Kenneth Campbell passed in front of them like an actor in a film, shrugging into his coat. He climbed into the lorry and tussled briefly with its engine before pulling away, amid a clatter
unseemly in the mournful seaside silence.

Angelica looked at Nikhil, at his pinched mouth and fine profile. She was trying to pray for some understanding, but she found that her mind could not utter the simplest formulations of prayer.

‘It is late. We should get back,’ said Nikhil.

Angelica couldn’t tell what he was thinking and didn’t know him well enough to ask. In any event, he would probably have lied. She wanted, then, to say something about the kiss. But what was there to say?

‘If you like,’ she said instead, ‘we could ask Virginia and her mother to join us for supper. It might, you know, take our minds off things?’

Nikhil raised his shoulders almost imperceptibly to signal his indifference, and bit at his lower lip in an endeavour to communicate something Angelica didn’t understand; or perhaps in an effort not to communicate at all.

When Melody Simpson woke up and saw the white-white of the hospital room around her, she did not think for one second that she had died and gone to heaven. She knew full well where she was and what she was doing there and she felt like a damn fool.

After Virginia had left her bunched up against the cold paving of the house, Melody Simpson had done her best to wait with fortitude. But she had known absolutely that she was dying: even in the lee of the house the winds were bitter, and seemed to strip away not only her clothes but the layers of her flesh as well. Not that she had felt anything about it, other than faintly annoyed that death should take so long and be so uncomfortable. But obviously she had dwelt a great deal on the subject, because the next thing she knew she
was
dead, or believed herself to be, and although still chilled she was warmer, and she had climbed
through the window and was in the house.

It wasn’t at all neglected. In fact, it was brightly lit and furnished with familiar objects, and its only drawback was that it seemed to be recently abandoned—not unlike the Tarbish Hotel, only the day before, Melody had thought to herself. There was music wafting in from somewhere (‘Roll, those, roll those pretty eyes …’), and Melody (remarkably spry and able, and, she noticed, in full possession of her own, original bosom) wandered through the house to find its source, calling out every so often, although nobody answered her. She was just coming to the realization that the origin of the music was God, and was feeling sheepish about not having believed in Heaven when here it was, and lovely too (if a bit empty), and was just thinking what a pleasure and a relief it was to be at last finished with the trials of life, when it started to rain, and she awoke to find herself still on the steps of the house, alone and cold and now wet into the bargain, and suffering the agonies of the damned in her horrible twisted foot. But it did make her think, and she did wonder, for the first time ever, whether on some level of her encrusted, atheistic old self, she didn’t
want
to believe. It must, she thought, make the most final things so cheerfully furnished and comfortable.

Virginia had returned, in time, with two thick, surly men from the village down the way. Neither seemed versed in the medical—even in her disoriented state Melody Simpson had called them brutish to their faces, an insult which they seemed not to register. They had hoisted her between them and lugged her up to the Ford Fiesta, where she had remembered at least that the passenger seat would be wet and had laid claim to the back, although she had a suspicion that she had actually just moaned. And then one of them, a burly, bearded fellow, had driven at breakneck speed to the hospital in Portree, an interminable time during which Mrs Simpson had given in to the pain and had dozed and awoken several times, generally to find Virginia clutching at her, teary-eyed, her face wobbly
and too close to focus upon.

In that odd, fluid, woozy period, Mrs Simpson did realize, solidly, that she would never be able to explain any of this, the before or the during, to anyone. She felt hollowed by the tiresome old thought of how lonely life was. And death too—if her dream was any indication.

In the hospital room it didn’t all seem so bad. Melody Simpson felt a damn fool, but she didn’t think she was going to die any more, and with the help of the painkillers she’d been given, she almost believed she might never die at all. Only two thoughts irritated her: one was that her letter to Emmy remained in her handbag, unsent, and now, she knew, she would never send it; and the other was that, given that she had unexpectedly survived her trip to Alt-na-Ross, she was sorry to have spent twenty-one pounds on her lunch the day before. The food had not been that memorable, after all. But these were small, feathery things.

Everyone around her—Virginia, the fluttering nurses, the doctor—appeared quite concerned, but she wasn’t worried. Not hungry, not tired, not in pain, not worried: she turned her head to look at her daughter, to try to convey this.

‘I feel very … not,’ she said. She could tell that this communication only caused Virginia’s brow to furrow further, but Mrs Simpson could not get upset about it. Virginia looked pale to her, a ragged sack of wrinkles and bones, and Mrs Simpson felt a great, vague tenderness. She tried to speak again.

‘Pale … bones,’ was what she said. To her fuzzy and faint irritation, Virginia put her head in her hands and burst into tears.

Virginia was unutterably tired. It was still light, but late, and the nurses, deeming visiting hours to be over, had cast her out on to the street. Not knowing what to do, she made her way the short distance down to the harbour. Before going, she turned to see if
she could pick out her mother’s room, but no lights shone from the upper windows.

The day played back in her head in disordered snippets and flashes: the castle, their breakfast, the soreness of the cold air in her lungs as she ran—it must have been miles—for help. Her mother’s tortured, bloated ankle. The doctor seemed confident of Mrs Simpson’s recovery (‘It could’ve been her hip, now, couldn’t it? And when the hip goes, they’re as good as gone, aren’t they?’), but uncertain of how long she might have to stay in the hospital. Unlike London hospitals, it did not seem to be busy: Virginia could almost imagine that they would welcome her mother as a diversion, and might even keep her on for that purpose.

Amidst her anxiety and fatigue, Virginia, as she stood outside the bed and breakfast, was also furious. She felt she had been conned. It was as if her mother had known it all—the tongues, the hand in the vestry—since before it even happened; just as she had clearly known about what would happen at work.

As for God—where was He? Virginia could not, no matter how much she wanted to, ally her mother and the divine. Mrs Melody Simpson would have no truck with God’s plan, not knowingly or inadvertently, just simply not at all. If Virginia were to forge such a link, even only in her mind and only for a minute, she had no doubt that her mother would rise from her hospital bed and descend upon her daughter in a fury. Which meant that maybe for once—just once, she promised the seagull that landed nearby and pecked at the garbage—God had no place here. Just possibly, on this one, long day, while she, Virginia Simpson, had been traversing this nasty, wet island, He had been elsewhere.

God’s absence was also the only way to explain the reappearance of Kenneth Campbell. Although he put it otherwise: ‘Waiting for me outside my office?’ he bellowed from the threshold of the pub. ‘No need for an appointment. You’re expected.’

Virginia did not want to enter the pub, or she did not
necessarily
want to. But she went in. And found it empty as an office but for Campbell and MacAllister, the publican.

‘Whatever you want, on me,’ offered Kenneth Campbell, with a slurring such that he elided over the comma. ‘You’re grey as the day and you look like you could use a drink.’ Then he made a great, theatrical show of looking around the pub, his hand above his brow like a sailor scanning the horizon. ‘And mum?’ he cried. ‘Where’s our dear mum? Have you got rid of mum, then?’

‘My mother,’ said Virginia, ‘has had a serious fall. She has broken her ankle and possibly worse and is in hospital. I would be grateful if you could show some respect.’

‘That’s a terrible thing. You’ll be needing a drink then. I
am
sorry. Do you take water with your whisky?’

Because she didn’t answer, Virginia was given a glass of the stuff neat. She did not protest, because it seemed a fitting tribute to her mother: ‘Mother would love to be doing this just now,’ is what she said to herself, not only upon accepting the first drink, but the second and the third.

She and Kenneth Campbell sat and talked—like friends—at the table by the window, as a few other customers came and went and doubtless thought them intimates of long standing. Every so often, Virginia felt the familiar prickle of fear on her neck—who was this man and what did he want of her, after all?—but it would fade as quickly as it had come. She was in no state to sustain terror, or even surprise: she was as empty and light as the husk she had been, lying out on Primrose Hill into the small hours. Only she was being weighed down and filled with words as warm as whisky.

They did not go until MacAllister asked them to leave, and by then it was truly night, or as close as it would get. Virginia Simpson had been drunk before, but not for a long time. Not since she had become the person she now considered herself to be. She was not wild with it—blunted was closer to the truth—but a burden was
lifted, and when Kenneth Campbell stumbled towards his lorry and waved her with him, she said, ‘No.’

‘I may be drunk, Mr Campbell, and I may not know how to drive, but I do know that drinking and driving are not compatible. I think you shouldn’t drive. I certainly wouldn’t go with you in such a state. Which is not to say that I would go with you at all, but there we are.’

‘So what do you propose I do, sweet Virginia?’

Virginia stood for a moment and thought, although nothing was very clear, in part because it was night, at last, in part because of the whisky, and in part because she felt either like a young girl or an old woman, but certainly not like the self that she thought herself to be. Then she told Kenneth Campbell he could stay in the little blue room overlooking the harbour with her.

‘Mother’s in hospital, but we are paying for two just the same. So you might as well. You can sleep in her bed. Or on it, at least.’

He seemed to think this a fine idea. Somewhat to Virginia’s annoyance, he appeared neither surprised nor excited: he clearly had no grasp of the enormity of her concession. But she did not feel it was an offer she could retract.