Page 92 of Little Wing
Dougie raised his eyebrows.
‘It’s a compliment,’ she mumbled. ‘I’d take it, if I were you.’
And Dougie looked at where he was. Luskentyre. On primeval land that had more grace and solidity and substance and longevity and meaning than the shiniest modern metropolis. And he knew he had a choice. He could take Nell’s compliment and pop it in a box and keep it in his cupboard in his childhood home to revisit when he was next here, whenever that might be. Or, he could take it with him when he flew away from the island in a few hours’ time. He could take it with him back to Camden, to his day-to-day, and allow it to change the way he saw himself and the way he’d chosen to live his life. Much as Nell was taking home with her a cushion cover in Harris Tweed because she’d grown away from the bare neutrality she’d thought was so necessary.
‘And the island,’ Dougie said quietly. ‘I turned away from it and I don’t even know why. I’ve resisted coming back. I’ve stopped calling it home. And yet it’s the place where I’m mostme. But listen to me blethering on – I have a plane to catch.’ And he changed direction and walked back along the beach, Nell having to jog a little to catch up to him.
An hour after she’d dropped Dougie at his home, with a fond smile and a shy kiss on the cheek and a reminder that he was to call her with any new memories, Nell was still sitting in her car outside Flora’s old cottage. What had she looked like, Flora? Nell attempted to clothe her imagined mother in mini-dresses and Mary Quant, and then Woodstock and flowing hair and robes. She tried to picture herself with butter-gold curls and dimpled elbows and knees, a sagging nappy and a grubby face. Maybe her mother had painted on the walls of her bedroom – perhaps doe-eyed animals and flowers with smiling faces and a rainbow that stretched from one side of the wall to the other. Maybe her mother had sung daft, made-up tunes to entice baby Nell to eat. But how could she know? She couldn’t. The only thing she could do was feel. And her overriding feeling was that she had been loved.
She left the car and walked through to the back of the house and looked up at the bedroom window. Yesterday she and Dougie had looked down from there onto the garden.That’s the garden, she’d said.You don’t say, he’d said. She laughed today as she had yesterday. She peered in through the kitchen window, from where she’d first caught sight of the stone building at the back of the garden. Yesterday. Only yesterday. Now, a day later, she had enough facts to fill in the blanks and pack the pages of a virtual photograph album that she hadn’t known existed. What a charmed and happy life she’d had for 21 months.
Nell walked across the garden and opened the glazed doors to the studio. There was no mural but there had been once. Right there, all over the back wall. And there was meant to be one up there, on the ceiling, but that wasn’t to be. And here on the floor, this was where she’d kicked her chunky baby legs on a sheepskin rug while three-year-old Dougie bashed his heels against a steel bucket. And here in this studio she’d toddled around. This is where she’d had her first birthday party in a dress with great big red flowers. And here, on this floor, she’d made cup after cup of tea while her mother lay there still as still can be. Nell knelt down and ran her hands over the floor, and felt warmth not cold from the old, old stones.
* * *
Al was at reception when Nell returned later to the hotel.
‘You eating with us tonight? Fish and chips?’
‘I may surprise you and choose the daily special.’
‘Which today is – scallops. But you could have that as a starter and the haddock for your main.’
‘Thank you, Alasdair.’
‘Och, it’s only fish and chips.’
‘I mean, thank you – for everything. But I’m going to check out tomorrow morning.’
‘You are? You’ve found all the missing pieces to your puzzle?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well, I hope we’ll see you again. You’ll always be welcome.’
‘I hope so too. But I need to go home,’ said Nell. ‘I want to see my mum.’
It’s May 1971.
Jessie is coming home for the summer soon. The machair is exceptional this year, as if to welcome her back. And I want the painting to be well under way by then.
The Munros will be back by then too – Màiri has taken wee Douglas up to Stornoway to stay with her mother for a while as she had a fall. Jessie left not soon after Nell’s first birthday party last September. Oh, I loved that day – and Nell looked like a little dolly all dressed up in the frock and hat with the bright red flowers that the Munros gave her. She was like royalty that day, visitor after visitor. If I’m that proud of her turning one, whatever will I be like when she turns six, or double figures, or becomes a teenager, or passes a zillion O levels or graduates from Oxbridge University or on her wedding day or when she has her first child! One day I’ll be a granny – imagine that! If this wretched bloody cold-flu thing doesn’t kill me first.
So Jessie left for university last September, to study Politics and Something Else at Edinburgh. Joan was busy training to be a teacher, but her father was offered a job in New York and the whole family moved there just before Christmas. We don’t know when we’ll see each other again and our letters take ages to arrive. She cannot believe she hasn’t met Nell. And neither can I. Joan says that the Outer Hebrides still feels further away than New York.
Joan and Jessie – I love them I hate them I’m proud of them I envy them I miss them I want to hear about everything and I don’t want them to forget me. Jessie is a far better pen pal than Joan but that’s alright – whenever I receive their letters it’s a treat. I read them out loud to Nell – but I’ve taken to whispering the racy bits to myself because even though she’s a baby, it doesn’t seem right. She can’t exactly talk yet but she can say words. ‘Garden’ was her first word. Anyway, I don’t tell her all about Jessie and Joan and the boys they’re in love with. I don’t tell her that sometimes I have a little envious wonder about what their lives must be like. I haven’t seen Jessie since she was last home at Christmas, almost five months ago. I haven’t seen Joan in over two years but I love her just the same – even if she is the worst correspondent in the world. Well, she’s slightly better than Wendy who sends me huge ramblings every once in a blue moon. But that’s just my sister. When her letters arrive the envelopes are practically bursting because she folds the various sheets of paper over and again. She says Jimmy is ‘a one’. I don’t know what that means. ‘Oh, Jimmy is a one.’ I can’t hear her tone of voice. I’m not sure if she’s saying this is a good thing or a bad thing.
I haven’t been well. Stupid flu thing. Every time I cough it feels like a plank of jagged splintered wood is trying to break through the back of my ribs, it feels like my lungs are being crushed between rocks. I’m easily out of breath too – but maybe that’s because Nell is now a wee chunky lump of loveliness. She can walk – but obviously not too far and the little dips and tussocks of the land are like mountaineering to her. How can I resist her when she puts her arms up for a carry? I can’t, that’s the answer! But at the moment, with this rotten cold, even climbing the stairs is hard work. If I don’t feel any better soon, I’ll call for Nurse Keaton – I’ll walk to the Munros and ask if I might use their telephone. It’s frustrating feeling so poorly. It’s exhausting.
My new mural peps me up, though. It is for the studio ceiling – hardly the Sistine Chapel but I thought that, as the back wall is a night scene inspired by ‘Little Wing’, I’d paint a daytime scene on the ceiling. I borrowed a book about Van Gogh from the mobile library which comes by every fortnight. I’m inspired! However, instead of his great big sticky blowsy sunflowers, I’m going to paint all the machair flowers – but ten times the size – against a background of swirls and swooshes to signify both the hurling wind and the whispering breeze, to describe the swell of the sea and the waves of the storm, the slick of dolphins, the swoop and rise of eagles.
Iain once told me that in a square yard of machair you can find forty-five different species of wild grasses and flowers and that some of the rarest birds and bees make it their home for a few months each summer. I want the mural to look so vibrant, so pretty that people will imagine they can actually smell that lovely honey fragrance, that they can hear the skylark and the corncrake though they can see neither. Jessie and I plan to picnic with Nell and spend day after day in the sea meadows, in the machair, and I will sketch all that I find. Harebell and eyebright, red clover and white, tufted vetch and gentian and primrose, bird’s-foot trefoil, the buttercups and the daisies and the orchids. I will paint the bees too – the moss carder and the great yellow bumble bee that’s extinct in mainland Britain. I know my meadow will be upside down on the ceiling but I don’t mind. My whole world is a topsy-turvy world. And I love it.
Who knew!
Who knew that this would be me at my happiest?
I am living a good life now on my island of hills and heather, of sand and flowers, of sheep and eagles, of bleak bare rock, of horizontal rain and sawing wind and dazzling sun and cerulean water. Here, I’ve been taken into the embrace of the kindest, gentlest and wisest of folk. I’m living on an island that is as refreshingly mundane as it is inspiringly mystical, where the sea is black and angry, where the sea is turquoise and benevolent. I’m living on this island on the edge – right on the very edge. Me and my beautiful baby girl.
