Page 57 of Little Wing
She walked, scrambled, tentatively for a couple of miles but the weather was glowering and so she returned to the car and sat there while fat drops of rain soon obscured the view from the windscreen. She had planned to go on to Leverburgh but, just then, she saw little point. Instead, she listened to the radio as if it was the most normal thing to do: to sit in a stationary car in the middle of nowhere looking for someone who appeared not to want to be found.
Back in Tarbert, the rain had stopped and a ferry had come in and the small town bustled. Boat fumes and clangs and chatter and traffic, visitors arriving and locals returning; hire cars, a coach and a few vans laden with the prosaic requirements of the islanders. It was a tonic to be amongst mundane human activity after the drama and isolation of the landscape she’d just left.
‘Miss?’
If the tweed shop was open, maybe she would buy the cushion cover.
‘Hey!’
And perhaps she’d have something other than fish and chips tonight.
A hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Miss?’
It was the shop assistant from the morning, next to her, an older woman with rock-dark eyes and wire-grey hair twisted into a modest bun.
‘I said it was you,’ she said. ‘I said it was you! Even under all that!’ She gestured at Nell’s anorak. ‘This is the Mrs MacDonald who works part-time. She was in to town, to the shops, and I saw her. And then I spied you.’
Mrs MacDonald regarded Nell quizzically, her mouth giving a little twitch every now and then. She was not the type to covet attention and she appeared uneasy as to why she was wanted. The ferry honked and a car horn sounded and a group of lads laughed raucously as they passed. Measuredly, Nell gave out her hand and spoke.
‘I’m Nell Hartley,’ she said and she took a beat. ‘My mother came here when she was sixteen.’ Mrs MacDonald’s eyes startled. ‘She was unmarried. Her name was Florence Lawson. She was pregnant with me. 1969.’
The woman regarded Nell for some time, tipped her head and looked at her unblinkingly whilst leafing back through over thirty years of memories. In 1969 she was sixteen too, at school up in Stornoway.
‘Lawson, you say?’
‘Yes. Florence Lawson?’
She shook her head and shrugged. She vaguely remembered a Buchanan, but not a Lawson. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t remember anyone of that name.’
Mrs MacDonald and the shop assistant watched the anorak deflate as the shoulders holding it up gave way a little.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Mrs MacDonald said again. ‘I can ask around for you?’
‘Please do,’ said Nell. ‘I’m staying up at the hotel. Until Tuesday.’
‘Have you asked at the medical centre – it’s back up there? They’ll have records. They’re sure to know.’
The surgery was closing but Nell knocked and pressed her hands in prayer at the window. The receptionist let her in and listened intently. She was a similar age to Nell and apologized profusely for the fact that she wasn’t going to be much use to her at all because the surgery was bound by Hippocratic oaths and patient confidentiality. But she put her finger to her lips and left Nell watching her as she nimbly flicked through files in a steel cabinet, then tripped her fingers over old brown folders in a long dark-wood box. She came back to the desk and whispered to Nell.
‘No Lawson. No Florence.’
‘Will you ask around, please? I’d be so grateful.’
‘Oh aye, of course I will! I hope you find her before you go. Try Leverburgh too.’
Al, again, only had a smile for her the next morning.
‘I asked five people yesterday,’ she told him, ‘between here and Rodel. I asked in shops and cafés and at the medical centre. But no one could shed any light.’
‘Ah – but they’ll each ask around.’
‘I hope so,’ said Nell. She faffed around in her knapsack for her map, which she then crinkled out in front of her.
‘And where are you off to today?’
The anorak was tied by the arms around her waist and she’d tucked her jeans into her walking socks which frilled over the tops of her boots.
‘Today I’m going to go west – to Hushinish.’
