The Posy Ring Episode 43

Cal continues: “We set off down the shore every morning and explored. Walked into Keill to play with some of the kids there or cycled north and climbed Meall Each.” “Is that the big hill you can see from just about everywhere?”

“That’s the one. If you set off from your house and head inland, there’s a track to the top. Fantastic views. Catty was fearless. We could have had a hard time as incomers, but mum belonged to the island and the other kids admired Catty.”

“She’s younger than you?”

“A couple of years, yes. But it didn’t matter. They’d tell me she was mad, and so she was, in a good way. There was nothing she wouldn’t dare do. In fact, she was often the leader of the pack. Good with her fists and they couldn’t hit back because she was a girl!”

His hazel eyes are shining. He’s back in some treasured past time. He gestures to a couch with threadbare cushions and she sits down. He sits opposite in a battered old armchair. The scent and sound of the sea filters through the doorway but there can hardly be a house on Garve into which the powerful sense of the sea does not intrude.

It shifts your perspective on everything, thinks Daisy. The island seems like a world within a world. Hector’s bed is beside Cal’s chair. He climbs into it, turns around three times, heaves a big sigh and settles down.

She looks around the room. There are pictures on the walls, many of them island scenes. “Which are your dad’s?” she asks.

He points them out: two small but detailed studies of rock pools. She wouldn’t have guessed that they were by the same artist whose bleak cityscapes she had seen in Island Antiques.

“Like I said, this is early stuff. He doesn’t rate them any more. That’s why they’re still here. Most of the others are pictures my mum acquired over the years. A friend of hers did that one.”

He points to a framed watercolour sketch over the mantelpiece. Two children are playing on a beach, a boy and a girl, the boy tall, slender, intent on digging with a long spade, with his brown hair flopping forward; the little girl turning a cartwheel, her polka-dot skirt hanging down, navy knickers showing, and a pair of skinny brown legs and bare feet waving in the air. There’s a glass jar on the sand beside the boy. He’s concentrating fiercely on the job in hand, but behind him, the younger child is all movement and carelessness.

“Is that you and your sister?”

“Aye it is. Digging for bait. Except that Catty was always distracted. And she never liked the worms. She was always letting them go, setting them free, she called it. That’s Mum’s favourite picture.”

“Did your dad never paint you and your sister?” Cal seems to find her question quite funny. “No way. You must be joking. Dad doesn’t do people at all!”

She thinks about what little she knows of William Galbraith. There have been exhibitions in some of the Glasgow galleries and elsewhere. He has slowly built up a fine reputation in Scotland and beyond. One or two US stars have acquired his work and that has helped things along. He only seems to paint cheerless images. They have always looked to her like the aftermath of some terrible holocaust, although she doesn’t want to say as much to Cal.

The room is warm and bright and too full. Not like a man’s room, but she senses the presence of his mother everywhere. There’s a table with a red and white gingham cloth and a shallow slipware fruit bowl in the middle. There’s a dark wood spinning wheel, a well-stocked bookshelf, faded embroidered cushions, a threadbare rug covering most of the floor area, an ancient fiddle hanging on the wall.

She can understand why he comes back again and again. She finds herself wishing that she had inherited a cottage like this. It wouldn’t present as many problems as Auchenblae. She could keep it.

“My dad would love the fiddle,” she says. “Of course. I’d forgotten your dad’s a musician. It was made on the island. I can’t play. Catty can, though. Not well, but she can coax a tune out of it.”

“Maybe when my dad comes he can give it a go.”

“I’d be honoured.”

After a while, he goes into the kitchen and investigates the fridge. “I’ve got eggs and cheese,” he says. “I can make us an omelette. Or scrambled eggs. Actually, with me, it amounts to the same thing.”

He beats the eggs and she grates the cheese, a big block of cheddar. They just about fit in there, but keep bumping into one another, saying “sorry”. Hector is very interested in the cheese.

“His favourite thing. But then everything’s his favourite thing. Except the vet’s. He doesn’t like the vet much. Which is a shame, because the vet likes him.”

Cal makes a big omelette on top of the stove, sprinkles the cheese on top and then finishes it under the grill. While Hector wolfs down a bowl of dog food, they eat fluffy omelette with crusty bread from the village shop, and a salad consisting mostly of tomatoes with some chopped basil from a plant on the windowsill, olive oil and lemon juice. He opens a bottle of Pinot Grigio. She thinks about the drive back to Auchenblae, but doesn’t say anything.

After supper, they go through the gate in the back garden and head down towards the sea, accompanied by a happy Hector. Looking back the way they have come, she can see that the house does indeed seem to be sitting on a stony mound, with the path they have walked down a deliberate causeway leading to the sea.

There is a small horseshoe of a bay and a low drystone jetty stretching out a few metres across the mouth. The tide is out and a blue painted boat with an outboard propped up on the stern is sitting picturesquely on the white sand, tied up to a rock just above the shoreline.

“I’ll take you out in it some time,” he says.

“That would be good.”

“You see all sorts out there. Seals. Dolphins and porpoises if you’re lucky. There are lots of rocks and islets. It can be a bit dodgy, but I know it like the back of my hand.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I put out a line for mackerel sometimes. Donal McNeill puts out creels for crabs and lobsters. From Ardachy, back along there. You can’t make much of a living out of it, but he says he does OK alongside all his other work.”

More tomorrow.

The room is warm and bright and too full. Not like a man’s room, but she senses the presence of his mother everywhere

The Posy Ring, first in the series The Annals of Flowerfield, is written by Catherine Czerkawska and published by Saraband. It is priced at £8.99.