The House Between Tides Read online

  “If the situation worsens, Asquith will have no choice.”

  “I’d far rather confront the Hun.”

  “The folly of it all is quite breathtaking, given the situation.” Theo cut vigorously at his meat, glancing briefly down the table at Cameron, and Beatrice sensed a deliberate intention to provoke. She saw Kit raise his eyebrows challengingly at Cameron, who ignored the invitation and continued chewing.

  “We can only hope that things settle.” Rupert reached for the water jug. “Theo, I’ve been meaning to ask, do you intend to exhibit next year, in Glasgow?” He leant over to replenish Beatrice’s glass before filling his own, and smiled across at her, and she knew then that Cameron’s indiscretions had not been discussed.

  “Exhibit what?” Theo scowled, studying his plate. “I’ve done nothing new. And from what I hear, Fry’s exhibition at the Grafton is setting London on its heels. It won’t be long before I’m a quaint footnote to posterity.” He took up his knife and fork again. “Not before time, I daresay.”

  “No!” said Emily. “Your paintings are as popular as ever, and I read that the prices are rising steadily.”

  Theo sat back, wiping his lips with his napkin, and gave her a sardonic look. “Financially sound, am I? Ever your father’s daughter, my dear.” He overrode Emily’s indignant protest. “If I’m becoming a good investment, you’d better have that one in the hall you go on about, call it part of your wedding present.” Torrann Bay, thought Beatrice, suppressing a pang, but she smiled at Emily’s obvious delight.

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, after Theo had held up his hand to stem her thanks. “And you should start painting landscapes again, Theo, now you’re back here. No one else comes close. When the bird book’s finished, you really should. Don’t you think so, Beatrice?”

  “Of course.” Beatrice looked across at Theo, who grunted dismissively.

  Kit speared another roast potato and rolled it in gravy. “But surely your days are numbered, Theo, like all your cronies. Isn’t that why painters have gone all strange and avant-garde? They just can’t compete. Who’ll buy landscape paintings if you can have photographs at a fraction of the cost?”

  Theo gave him a sour look. “And there speaks a mother’s son.”

  Kit and Emily exchanged amused glances, but Kit was not to be silenced. “No, quite seriously. Colour photography will soon do a better job at the close of a shutter. And anyone can do it.”

  “Dear God.” Theo rolled his eyes and proceeded to refute Kit’s challenge. Beatrice, anxious that their guests were being ignored, urged them to second helpings while Rupert, taking her cue, began discussing likely stock prices at the forthcoming cattle fair, consulting Donald’s views in a frank man-to-man tone. She herself chatted to Ephie Forbes, who had sat quietly in her own calm little world, unmoved by the shifting tensions around her. Seeing her sitting beside Cameron, Beatrice was aware of their physical similarities, both darker and more gracile than their brother and father, favouring their mother, Mrs. Henderson had told her.

  At the other end of the table, Emily was still defending Theo against her brother’s mischief. “But a photograph couldn’t capture Torrann Bay as Theo’s painting does—”

  “It’s only a matter of being lucky with timing and light. Catching a wave or two.”

  “Idiot. There’s no movement or depth or texture to a photograph. It could never catch the mood, the subtleties, the play of light on the water . . . There’d be nothing of the passion of Theo’s—”

  “So eloquent in my defence, Emily! I must make you gifts more often,” Theo remarked, signalling for another slice of roast duck. “But some painters do use photographs instead of a sketch-book these days, if only to help them with the tonal quality of—”

  “Worse and worse, brother!” Kit was enjoying himself. “Are you saying that painters now just copy photographs?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “And why would they bother? Photographs are so much more realistic.”

  “Perhaps that’s the reason.” Cameron suddenly joined the discussion, and his father looked up, breaking off from his description of swimming cattle across from off-shore summer pasture to listen.

  “Meaning what?” asked Theo in the ensuing silence.

  “In a painting, the artist can select from a scene to suit his ideas, choosing what mood to convey, while a photograph must show what’s really there. Unless the photographer has tidied it up first, of course.”

  “And that’s what you imagine painters do, is it? Tidy things up?” Theo asked, and Beatrice grew tense again.

  “No, but in a painting there’s scope to interpret. A photograph of the kelp harvest, for example, would show hard-pressed people wrestling with the filthy wet tangle, while an artist could romanticise the scene, depicting the nobility of labour, the honest peasantry, and so forth. Realism doesn’t mean reality.”

  Theo contemplated him dryly. “How slow of me, Cameron. For a moment I thought you were talking about art.”

  “I was.” John Forbes cleared his throat and Cameron frowned. “And I simply make the point that photography is perhaps more . . . more truthful.”

  Mrs. Henderson put her head around the door to ask if more potatoes would be required. “No, we do very well, thank you.” Theo waved a hand in dismissal, and Rupert stepped suavely into the brittle silence.

  “I suppose photographing birds must be difficult, though, getting the blighters to stay still.”

  “Quite. And photographs don’t always capture the texture and colour of plumage, which is why I still need the models in front of me, despite Cameron’s misgivings and the outright disapproval of my wife.” He raised his glass towards Beatrice, and she gave a slight smile.

  “But painting stuffed dummies hardly counts as painting from life, Theo.” Kit was unstoppable. “They’re corpses.”

  “Well, it’s the best I can manage.” The edge to Theo’s tone gave warning that his brother’s goading had gone too far, and Beatrice seized the moment to signal for the plates to be removed. When the dessert and fruit had been brought through, she released the serving girls from their duties and bid them close the door, glancing uneasily at the French ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, calculating when she might rise.

  Rupert came to her rescue again. “I was leafing through one of your journals, Theo. The Ibis?” Theo nodded briefly. “There was an article about new work on bird migrations and the distances some species travel. Fascinating stuff.” And he described what he had read about ringing migrating birds to learn about their routes.

  “They’re doing the same now on Fair Isle,” added Theo, “where they get a lot of migrants, as well as unusual wanderers blown off course.”

  “Trophy hunters flock there for the same reason to add to their private collections,” Cameron remarked, and Beatrice’s hope for peace evaporated as Theo turned his attention back to him, eyeing him sourly. They were like two terriers growling at each other, offering provocation but no direct attack, and she wondered again if they would make it through the meal without a row.

  “Private collections provide the backbone of current research.”

  “But deliberately going there to catch rare species is surely not acceptable, Theo,” Emily protested, and Beatrice signalled to Kit, hoping to occupy him filling empty glasses.

  “There’ll always be a place for scientific collecting, and besides, the word ‘rare’ can be misleading.” Theo gestured above the fireplace. “Take that diver, for example, ten a penny in Iceland or Canada, but unusual here, so it hardly threatens the species to take the odd wanderer for study. You saw a great many in Canada, I believe, Cameron.”

  “They’re common in the northern lakes but—”

  “Thank you. You make my point for me,” said Theo smoothly before turning back to Rupert. “It’s my great hope that one day they’ll stay here and breed.”

  “But there’s an irony there, don’t you think, sir?” Cameron remarked,
twisting the stem of his glass. “While Canadian birds are welcome to settle here and breed”—too late, Beatrice saw where he was heading—“you give the islanders and their families little option but to do the opposite.”

  The meal had finished abruptly. Beatrice learned later from Emily via Ephie that the factor had been furious, and that a tight-lipped apology had been offered and accepted—with ill grace on both sides—but she doubted that would be the end of it.

  Next day the same party assembled uneasily at the front door to set the visitors on their journey. Donald and Cameron loaded the cart with trunks while Theo took photographs, thrusting the camera at Cameron and instructing him to take one of the family group, and then it was time to go.

  “The place won’t seem the same without you, Cameron,” she heard Kit say. “We’ll hear of your doings, I expect, but I’ll always think of you here.”

  “Safe journey, Kit.” Cameron gripped his hand, and held on to it a moment.

  As Kit turned to say farewell to the factor, she saw Rupert hold out a hand to Cameron, first checking that Theo’s attention was elsewhere. “Good luck, Cameron. I detest your politics, but I daresay you’ll thrive in Canada where there’s more elbow space. But allow me to recommend that you learn restraint, my friend, or you’ll land yourself in trouble.” He raised a quizzical eyebrow and released his hand.

  Emily, meanwhile, was embracing everyone with equal gusto. “Goodbye, Donald. Ephie, darling. Goodbye, Cameron. I shall always remember this visit, especially the trip out to the selkies. The most perfect day of my life.”

  “I thought that had yet to come, my girl,” objected her fiancé, hoisting her onto the trap. “Up you get. We’ll be back next summer and all the summers to come, I promise.”

  Chapter 25

  2010, Hetty

  Hetty looked out over the ferry’s broken wake as the islands receded and melted away into the blue-grey seascape. She had left the observation lounge and come up on deck to escape the brittle politeness of a conversation that was going nowhere, and Giles had watched her go, his expression a mixture of exasperation and remorse.

  She was leaving the islands with her thoughts in disarray, plagued by conflicting emotions—a decaying house, a cracked skull, and broken lives. Images of gulls sweeping in on the tide, a flock of children running wild, and a man in worn jeans whose eyes had held hers.

  A pair of puffins flew low over the water, wing beats fast and furious. It still seemed incredible that the discovery of the bones had found no resonance amongst the people she had met. Could families simply bury secrets? And then forget them— Surely there would be something, some hint of wrongness, of something off-key. The Forbes family had always been on the island, absorbing the changes, adapting to the shifting sands of passing decades, carrying forward an understanding of the past. Surely they knew something!

  It was different for her own family, in which Theo Blake had been no more than a name. For them the connection with the island had long been broken, and continuity between generations fragmented, no stories had been passed down. But such a connection had once existed, and now some of the past figures had faces and substance. Emily, in particular, had become very real—a vitality had burned through the muted sepia in the old photograph, a bright captivating joy. Same smile . . . And there were those sketches on James’s cottage wall too, of an island girl with a provocative smile. A young Theo Blake’s soft pencil had caressed her form with a familiarity that was surely borne of knowledge—and desire. Was she an early love about whom history had recorded nothing? But had that love persisted, and had it intruded into the life of the pale woman who sat at the window and stared out over Muirlan Strand?

  She had stumbled into so many lives, past and present. Not least among them the descendant of a defiant-looking young man who covered his cottage walls with images of the island and its past. And now, because of her, feared for its future.

  This kaleidoscope of emotion spun around her brain all the way home, excluding Giles, who sat beside her, staring out of the train window, saying little. She had yet to find the words to explain. And always at the core was the youthful face of her great-grandmother. “Aonghas remembers his father standing with his arm around her as they watched the bonfire after the auction,” Ruairidh had told her, “and he said she looked like a young girl, though she must have been almost sixty by then.” And he had described how Emily had spent her last night in the old farmhouse “sitting with her elbows on the big old kitchen table, drinking tea and reminiscing with him about childhood days. A lovely woman, Granddad said.”

  It was Emily’s gift of land to the factor’s family, and other islanders, that was now under contention. And Emily was remembered kindly. “We’ll check again, of course, but I’m quite sure about estate boundaries,” Emma Dawson had said as they parted. And yet James had been equally certain it was otherwise, and so how could that be? And if Dalbeattie and Dawson were right and James wrong, that would have major implications for Ruairidh and his family. Unlike Emily’s, her own visit to the islands would be remembered with anything but fondness.

  And then there were the bones. That matter was now in police hands, although Ruairidh had been unable to say when they might hear back, beyond remarking that it was unlikely to be a priority. There was nothing she could do there, but the ownership of the land did need resolving, one way or another.

  When she got back home that first evening, having separated from Giles at the station, she went straightaway to find the box that had been sent back from the nursing home following her grandmother’s death. It was hardly more than a shoe box, the pitiful residue of a spent life, but she remembered seeing a notebook there, the first pages of a journal. She had flipped through it once before and found little of interest, but there had been something— It had begun in 1946, at the beginning of a sea voyage to South Africa and, in the way of most journals, that entry was followed by only skimpy notes, which had soon died away. After a description of the wartime devastation at Southampton docks, she found what she had been looking for. We sail tomorrow, weather permitting. Heading for what? And leaving so much. The only way to deal with loss, Mother always told me, is by accepting it, however painful, and looking to the future and taking only the best of the past with you. I never saw her cry, except that once, when she came back from the auction and told me about the stones. The reference to the auction she now understood. But what stones? Don’t ever let despair consume you, she said, that way lies the abyss. So I must be strong, but some days it’s so hard. Hetty sat back on her heels. Loss. That word again, but this too she shared with Emily. And was she right? Could you move through loss to a future and not lose the people held dear? It was a compelling thought, but it required strength to believe it. Had there been strength written on Emily’s bright young face on those fading photographs? Perhaps not. Perhaps strength in the face of adversity had to be learned.

  She had packed the mementos away again, remembering as she did that her grandmother had been born to Emily’s second husband, Edward Armstrong, and wondered again what had become of the tall, handsome man she had leant against in front of Muirlan House. But perhaps there was no mystery there, for a man who was young in 1910 had only uncertain chances of growing old.

  Over the next few days, with the help of the Internet and a few emails, she set herself the task of finding out, following every lead that might bring her to Emily, and from there, perhaps back to the island. Eventually her work began to pay off: she found a marriage entry for the 10th of October 1911 for Miss Emily Blake and Major Rupert Ballantyre, and a year later a birth certificate for a daughter, followed with painful swiftness by the registration of the baby’s death. Kit Blake had married in 1914, just weeks before war was declared, and although he had survived it, injured and gassed, Rupert Ballantyre had not. Twice decorated for outstanding bravery, he had been blown to pieces amidst the chaos of Passchendaele. Kit had died the year the second war was declared, the year that Theo Blake gave away half
the island as a bird sanctuary. And by dying then, he had been spared the knowledge that his own son, a spitfire pilot, was declared missing over the Channel in 1940.

  She sat back, almost wishing she had never started. It was ghastly! No less so as it must have been repeated in so many families during those years—the lost generations—and she saw again those images taken in front of Muirlan House in that summer of 1910. Carefree, youthful faces, looking to the future, captured in a moment in time before their world convulsed, exploded, and vanished, cheating men of life and women of their dreams.

  She got up and went to the window, looking out at the darkening street. And what of Theo Blake, learning of these tragedies alone on the island, deserted by his wife, bereft of family, growing old and senile? What must it have been like for him? And all the time buried under the floor-boards of his house there was a tragedy of another sort. He must have known about it; it seemed impossible that he did not.

  She had seen little of Giles since they had returned from Scotland, and preoccupied as she was, she had hardly noticed. Relations between them had been patched up, but not fully repaired, and by unspoken agreement they avoided the subject of the house. But he had phoned the previous evening to tell her that three of Blake’s works were coming up for auction that Saturday, and a friend of his from a local gallery was going along to bid for them. Did she want to come?

  She did, of course, and so Giles was now in the kitchen making coffee until it was time to go, while she was, once again, glued to her laptop.

  “Theo Blake reached his peak very early but did not sustain his initial excellence,” one source told her. “He embraced the aspirations of the Glasgow School, working ‘en plein air,’ exploring ways of combining realism with landscape painting, evoking emotion from everyday scenes while avoiding cloying sentimentality.” And there was an illustration of an unfinished sketch of a lithe young boy hauling himself out of a deep rock pool, the water trickling down his spine towards naked buttocks. She skipped over pages of comparison with contemporary painters, then paused and reread the next bit. “Like his contemporaries, Blake peopled his compositions with local characters. His technique, however, offered something more, an intimacy with his subject . . .” And she thought again of the sketches in James Cameron’s cottage, and to The Rock Pool painting. She was seeing the same girl in his other work too, sometimes close, often in the distance, but read no speculation about her identity.