Corncrake - The First Four Chapters - A Scottish Island Novel

The story with this novel is that I wrote it some time ago as a book called Darragh Martin, and my agent sent it out. It came back with the observation (fully justified, as I later realised) that there was a gap at the heart of it, principally in relation to Ceit, who really was the central character - not, as I had first intended, Darragh himself. I shelved it for a while, and started work on something else. But then, while I was working on God's Islanders, my non fiction book with a similar setting to this novel, the solution to the problems suddenly occurred to me.
Like most writers, faced with a similar situation, I found that I couldn't leave it alone, and - over the following year, and while I was working diligently on other things - I rewrote it completely and extensively. I now think that the gap at the heart of it has been filled and that it is an infinitely better (and quite different) book as a result. One enthusiastic reader told me that it was 'Bridges of Madison County meets Wuthering Heights, with a touch of Du Maurier.' I can't think of a better pitch than that.
But the sad and frustrating fact is that my agent can't now send it out again. Once it has been turned down, nobody is going to want to look at it a second time. The response here on Blogger to the first couple of chapters has been very positive. So I'm posting a bit more - the first four chapters this time, which have been revised, even since I last posted two of them on Blogger. I won't be posting any more of it, but the whole novel is now finished and ready to go. And I do have hopes that this extract may arouse some curiosity.


CORNCRAKE

CHAPTER ONE
The last time India saw Darragh Martin, he frightened her so much that she knew there was nothing to be done except let him be. She had a gig in Oban, a festival of Celtic music, and on impulse she had made the long trip to the island. It was February and very cold and the Sound was rough. She felt sick on the ferry, so her first port of call was the village shop where she bought some biscuits and a bottle of dry ginger (her mother’s cure) to settle her stomach, and the elderly woman who worked there recognised her. She had known India’s mother when she was a little girl, and Darragh for as long as he had been coming to the island. She had sold five and ten penny ‘mixtures’ – little pokes of sweets – to India and her sister Flora, when they too were children, and now she seemed delighted to see India, if slightly overwhelmed by her growing celebrity.
‘I miss your mother,’ she confided. ‘I miss seeing her cheerful face around the village.’
‘I miss her too. We all do.’
‘It was good to see her so happy. Her and…’ the woman hesitated, uncomfortably aware that what she was about to say might sound tactless.
‘Her and Darragh.’ India finished the sentence for her. She was long past pussyfooting around the idea of her mother and Darragh.
‘But it was disturbing as well, you know,’ the woman continued, encouraged. ‘It was so….’ she paused, searching for the right word. ‘So exclusive. As if they had no time, no mind for anyone else in the whole world. Only each other. You would see them walking down the road to the village together. She would always be turning to look up into his face, looking at him as though she could never have enough of the sight of him.’
She halted, embarrassed by her own eloquence. ‘It must have been hard on you lassies. I always thought it must have been hard on you.’
India wanted her to go on talking, needing to know. What had once been a source of resentment had, as she had grown older, become intensely interesting. But if she was honest with herself, she already did know. There was nothing this woman with her pink cheeks and salt and pepper hair, could tell her that she had not already imagined for herself.
‘And what brings you back to the island my dear?’
‘I was in Oban. I thought I might go up to Dunshee.'
The woman frowned at the thought. ‘But surely … he’s still up there. Not that we see much of him in the village. God knows what he eats. He drinks plenty though.’
‘I know. But I thought I should go and see him.'
‘Oh my dear. I don’t think he will welcome you.’
‘All the same, I have to go.’


India got back into her car and ploughed on. Max, from the band, big, cheerful Max who was half in love with her, had offered to accompany her. She had turned him down, wanting to make the journey alone, but now she began to wish that he had come.
On the way to Dunshee, she made a small detour to the cemetery. The place was tidy as usual, and somebody had left a posy of evergreens beneath the headstone – holly, ivy and a few larch cones twined together. She had bought a bunch of flowers on the way through Oban that morning, and she arranged them in the little vase, her fingers stiff and clumsy with the cold, wondering how long the pink carnations would last in the wind that blasted around the granite headstones, and threatened to carry the old stones of the kirk with it. The evergreens were a better choice.
She didn’t linger long here. It was a gesture only. If Ceit was anywhere, she thought, it wasn’t in this sad place, although she could imagine other windy hillsides that might draw her. She clambered gratefully back into the warmth of the car and set the heater as high as it would go. Then she drove on towards Dunshee.
The lower parts of the familiar track were a sea of chocolate brown mud. Higher up, long neglected ruts played havoc with her tyres. Freezing rain was blowing in from the west, horizontal rain that blinded her and she almost drove into a ditch. ‘Why am I doing this?’ she thought. ‘Why?’
He didn’t answer at first. She had to hammer on the door with her fists. And then he was standing in the doorway, staring down at her through half shut eyes. He had never run to fat but she always remembered him as being very fit and muscular, what with the physical work he did. Now his clothes hung off him and his thinness made him seem even taller. His hair had gone grey, and his face was stony. She had a nightmare about him afterwards. It was as though he was slowly turning into one of the ancient monoliths that walked the fields below the farm. It struck her that if she had met him down in the village, she wouldn’t have known who he was.
He seemed disinclined to move from the threshhold, but eventually motioned her in, grudgingly.
‘How are you?’ he asked, and his tongue seemed thick in his mouth, though she couldn’t tell whether it was because of the drink, or simply because he so seldom spoke to anyone these days. He had always been taciturn, but now the power of speech seemed to be deserting him altogether.
She chatted away, trying to fill the silence, telling him about her recent tour, and the CD and the television appearance and Oban.
‘The fiddle,’ she said. ‘I still play my grandad’s old fiddle, you know. The one he taught you to play.’
He stirred a little at that, remembering. ‘It had a good sound. But I was never… I could never…' His voice trailed off into silence.
He made her some tea, and the mug was chipped and dirty but she drank it anyway, because she was afraid of upsetting him. He looked very ill and he stank of stale whisky. There was such misery about him. He couldn’t contain it within himself. It spilled out and filled the whole house like water finding its own level. The house was stifling with it. India found that she could hardly breathe in there. Besides, the whole place stank of cats.
Her mother had loved cats – India did herself – but she realised that he had just started to let them come and go as they pleased, and of course they had bred, unchecked, tabby with ginger, feral with domestic. When she looked around the room she saw hostile yellow eyes in all the dark corners. That frightened her as well. The fire in the kitchen range was burning, but it was choked, so there seemed to be no heat in it. It gave her a sudden pang of despair. The fire at Dunshee had always blazed bright and warm, no matter what else might be going wrong with their lives. Now the house was smothered in dust and the fire was a weary smoulder of smoke and ash.
‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘Something that you ought to have.’
He got to his feet and shambled up the stairs. She could hear them creaking successively beneath his feet. Left alone, she poured the tea down the sink, and rinsed away the evidence, though it was so grimy, so clogged with dust and tea leaves, that nobody would have noticed, least of all Darragh.
She sat down again, and stared out of the window, listening to the whine of the wind in the chimney. She ought to be going. The next ferry might be the last of the day, if the weather deteriorated any further. She heard faint footsteps, moving over the floor above. Then nothing. Where was he? One of the cats, a thin ginger, more daring than the rest, emerged from its hiding place, and batted at her foot with a tentative paw.
‘Where is he then?’ she asked but it only gazed back at her with large golden eyes.
Eventually, she got up and climbed the stairs in search of him. She knew where he would be, and went straight into her mother’s bedroom. He was there, crouching in the shelter of the box bed. Her entrance startled him, disproportionately. She saw a tremor run through his whole body. ‘I was worried about you’ she offered, by way of explanation.
‘I thought you should have these.’
She saw that he was holding a faded green cardboard folio, tied up with black tape. He said again, ‘You should have these.’
‘What are they?’
He thrust them at her. ‘Your mother’s. Some of the last things she did.'
‘Paintings?’
‘Drawings. Take them.’
She made as if to open the folio but he shook his head. ‘No. Take them away. Don’t open them here. Not here. I don’t want to look at them.’
‘Alright.’
‘ I never thought she would leave me.’ The words erupted from him. He shook his head and clamped his mouth firmly shut again. His fists were clenched on his knees. His face had an awful blankness. It was as though the struggle not to give in to despair had left him unable to manage any other expression but this dreadful mask.
‘No. None of us wanted her to leave,’ she said gently. ‘I miss her all the time.’
‘Do you?’ For the first time he looked directly at her.
‘Oh Darragh…’
He shook his head, looking away.
‘I have to try not to think about her. I have to make a little space in my day when I don’t think about her. I’m not very good at it. The whisky helps. There’s nothing else.’
‘Come downstairs now. She isn’t here.’
‘Don’t you think I don’t know that? Why does she never come to me India? Me of all people? Why does she never come?’
India felt the lump in her throat. It was a question she had asked herself more than once. ‘I don’t know Darragh. The dead don’t obey our rules, do they? I just sometimes think….’
‘What?’ he asked and she could see that he was clutching at anything that might help.
‘Oh I don’t know. Just that maybe they are here, all the time. Only we are so sad and sorry that we are blind and dumb to them. Our own sorrow, our own need, obscures everything.’
‘Do you think that could be true?’
‘Maybe.’
She went to the door of the room, and saw to her relief that he was following her. ‘I have to go, Darragh. There’s a gig tonight. I’m playing.’
‘Your grandad’s fiddle?’
‘That’s right. ‘
‘He would have liked that.’
‘He would.’
Pity for him brought tears to her eyes, but she knew that there was nothing whatsoever she could do about it. He didn’t want her. He didn’t care whether she stayed or not. He wouldn’t care if he never saw her again. At the door she reached out her hand to shake his own, but at the last minute she changed her mind, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. Then she headed back to her car. Her last image of him, as she turned around to wave, was of him raising his fingers to his cheek, and touching the place where her lips had just brushed the prickly, sallow skin. Without looking back again, she got into her car and drove away.


Back at her hotel, with the smell of cats and whisky lingering in her nostrils, she ordered a pot of tea and some sandwiches and tugged at the knots on the folio. The tapes had been pulled tight, and she had to tease them apart with a pin. Inside was a sheaf of sketches, mostly in charcoal, although a few were in pen and ink. India drew them out, one at a time, and laid them on the bed. She thought she had seen most of Ceit’s work: all those landscapes, all those studies of the island flora and fauna that seemed to capture the very essence of the plant, the bird, the animal. When Ceit had painted the island in spring, when primrose and violet vied for space, or when all the lanes were dazzling corridors of whin, there was something savage about the resulting pictures, nothing like the genteel watercolours to be found in most Highland galleries.
But these were different again, thought India, frowning at them. Most of Ceit’s paintings were full of light, as vibrant as she had once been herself. These were stark studies in black and white, light and shade, Gothic in their intensity They were more like illustrations for a book, but what book could that possibly be? Staring at them, one after another, she had to surpress a little shudder.
There was a knock on the door, and Max came in. He had showered and his hair was a damp blonde cascade. He looked relieved to see her.
‘Thank God you’re back’
‘I told you I wouldn’t be long.’
‘I thought you might get stranded. How was your island?’
‘Cold and wet and windy.’
‘And….?’
‘Darragh?’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘You should have let me come with you.’ His gaze alighted suddenly on the pictures. ‘Wow!’
‘I know.’
‘Whose are they?’
‘My mum did them.’
‘Christ!’ He came over and slipped his arm around her shoulders, and they stared at the pictures together.
They were a series of studies of human beings. They couldn’t be called portraits, because they were largely unrecognisable, although there was one very bold sketch of a man, just head and shoulders, with a background of dark cross hatching, that India thought she recognised as Darragh – a much younger Darragh for sure, but with a haunted, haunting quality about the face, as though the artist had foreseen his solitary future with horrible clarity. One of the sheets showed two figures so closely entwined that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and another began or to say which limb belonged to which person, and it was so full of a dark, heavy sensuality that India found herself blushing. In another sketch, the girl seemed to be stabbing her partner in the thigh, with a dagger. Or was she pulling the knife from the wound? A third had the suggestion of a great mass of roots and rocks in the foreground, with – when you looked more closely – human bodies somehow emerging from the landscape or perhaps becoming a part of it, hands, torsoes, legs, all with a sense of movement, struggle, striving to escape. Or was it a striving to be absorbed? There were simpler studies of two children, a boy and a girl maybe, swiftly drawn lines, just an impression of hair and arms and long legs. One of them gave India a start, in that it looked very like herself. She had just such a photograph of herself, when she was a little girl, on the island. Only, thought India, when you looked long enough, you began to wonder if these were not children, but birds of some sort, long legged herons, perhaps. In another, two children seemed to have impossibly long arms which were forming an arch across something that was surely …
‘Christ, that’s a gravestone’ said Max. ‘These are very strange drawings India.’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘When did she do them?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe in those last years. I’ve certainly never seen them before….’
‘And look at this one.’
It was a kiss but there was something savage about it, the lips, and indeed the two heads so fused together, that once again, it was difficult to say where one ended and the other began. Were they kissing or feasting off each other? The thought entered her head, but seemed so crazy that she couldn’t voice it.
‘Did you know about these?’
‘Not a thing. Darragh gave them to me. He said I should have them. Now I’m beginning to wish he hadn’t. Look, there’s a little bird down in the grasses. Here. And here, on this one as well.’ She sifted through the pictures. ‘And here too.’
‘Are they signed?’
‘Some of them. Just a letter C. That was all she ever did. Her initial. They don’t look anything like her usual stuff.
‘They’re very disturbing, aren’t they?’
India began to gather them together. ‘They are.’
‘What will you do with them?’
‘Right now, I’m going to put them away and try to forget about them. ‘
‘Easier said than done.’
‘I know. But I’ve got more important things to worry about. ‘ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going to have a shower, get changed.'
‘Will you show them to your dad?’
India shook her head, decisively. ‘No way. And don’t you go telling him either. I know what you’re like after you’ve had a few drinks. These are mine. Darragh gave them to me. Dad’s fine. He’s happy now. I don’t want to go dragging up all that… well, you know.
‘Yeah’ said Max, and bent to kiss her on the forehead. ‘Yes Indie, I do know. I’ll keep my mouth shut. But …’
‘But what?’
‘That.’ He nodded at the folio. ‘Bit like carrying pandora’s box around with you, isn’t it?’
‘Not if nobody else knows I’ve opened it.’
‘For sure.’


He left her to get ready for the show. But even then she found herself staring at the green card cover of the folio, its contents indelibly imprinted on her mind’s eye. Later, when she was playing, she was still seeing them, and the sensuousness of those dark embraces somehow translated itself into her music. Never had she played so magically. Never had she played with such passion.


CHAPTER TWO

All day long, the boy had been labouring in the sandy fields. Only the day before, Ceit had overheard her grandfather saying ‘he works like a grown man, that one.’ The year was 1963. She was eight years old and he was twelve; a big, strong boy for his age, one of the Irish tattie howkers, who came every summer to help with the potato harvest. She was an only child, living with her widowed mother and her grandfather at a farm called Dunshee, perched high up on the windy spine of the island, with its fields sweeping down to the sea.
Dunshee was an ancient, slate roofed building with dormer windows on the upper floors. It was set on a plateau of high land, slightly at angles to the sea, to take advantage of the shelter afforded by an uneven ridge behind it. It had weathered grey stones, and peeling green paint. Outside was a flower garden crammed with sea-friendly hebes, hydrangeas and fuchsias. There was a clean courtyard, with byres and barns, a dairy and what had once been stables because it wasn’t that long since the islanders had used horses on the land.



It frustrated her that there were no other children on the farm and only a handful in the village. There was so much to tell, and so few people to listen.
She came running up the hill from school, in her red summer sandals, with her leather satchel on her back, and saw her grandfather, leaning on the field gate, staring down at the workers, with a frown on his face. She distracted him by running to him, and he swung her up in the air, her pigtails flying. She loved to feel his big hands birling her round and round. Fields and sky blurred around her and then she was on her feet, holding onto his legs to steady herself.
‘Ceit, my little Ceit!’ he said. ‘Did you have a good day?’ He lifted his cap and replaced it on his head, a habitual gesture.
It was almost holiday time, but they never went away. There was too much to do about the farm at this time of year and her grandfather seldom left the island except to go to the cattle market on the mainland. Once or twice, her mother had taken her to stay with relatives in Glasgow, in October, but summer holidays were invariably spent at home.
Her grandfather singled the boy out from the others, and called him over.
‘You there! Come here to me!’ he shouted.
The boy shambled up to the gate, wiping the sweat from his face with a grimy hand.
‘Yes mister?’ he said. He looked ready to shy away, as though expecting a blow, but instead her grandfather told him to knock off early, have something to eat, take a rest.
‘For God’s sake’ he said abruptly, almost angrily. ‘Take a rest for God’s sake!’
The boy looked puzzled but obediently followed them in the direction of the farm, veering towards the barn where the tattie howkers always slept.


In the summer, when the nights were light, Ceit was allowed to stay up late and wander where she pleased, so long as she stayed away from dangerous machinery, (they had drummed the danger of tractors into her so thoroughly that she couldn’t see the old red Ferguson without a little thrill of horror) or the precipitous cliffs on the far western side of the island. But there was no-one to play with. There were only half a dozen children at the island primary school, and most were much older or younger. Miranda from the big house, was just a little older than Ceit, a year maybe, but she already went to boarding school on the mainland. She spent most of her holidays in London, and only visited the island occasionally. Even then, she hardly acknowledged Ceit’s existence, but once she had sat in church and pulled faces at Ceit during the whole long sermon. Ceit had responded in kind, indignant but enthralled, until her mother noticed, and shook her by the shoulder, hissing ‘Will you stop that nonsense!’ It might have been the start of a friendship, but afterwards Miranda had swept past with her parents and her brother, Oliver, and didn’t so much as glance in Ceit’s direction.



Ceit climbed up the rocky slopes behind the farmhouse, scrambling through heather and bracken that was almost as high as she was, scratching her bare knees, rousing unpleasant clouds of crane flies that blundered about her head, till she reached the summit, a wide saucer of land, which sloped gently to a tumble of rocks in the middle. From the furthest lip of this saucer, she could see the great blue-grey expanse of the western sea, pied here and there with patches of wind. Her grandfather called this place Hill Top Town. That’s what she called it herself, though sometimes she wondered why there was no town here at all; only this shallow bowl of land with jagged rocks, a thin covering of lumpy turf, and drifts of purple thyme papering the crevices. It was her favourite place. Her secret place. Her palace, her fortress, her sanctuary.
Except that, tonight, there was an intruder. The Irish boy was sitting on the western lip of this hill top depression, looking out at the sea, shading his eyes against the setting sun. She was not dismayed by his presence, only curious. His shoulders were hunched and, even from behind, he looked dejected, so because she was only eight and not yet shy of boys, she went and plumped herself down beside him.
‘Hello!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
He turned to look at her. ‘Just sitting’ he said. ‘Why? Am I not allowed?’
‘Why should you not be allowed?’
He didn’t reply. There were so many things the visiting Irish were not allowed to do. They were allowed in the public bar of the hotel, but not in the lounge. They were not made welcome in the shop. They were not supposed to light bonfires, or stray too far from the farms where they were working. If anything went missing, however small, they were blamed. The most that had ever gone missing on the island was a clutch of eggs or the odd turnip out of the fields, but they were blamed anyway. They must always be watching their step for fear of putting a foot wrong. That’s what her grandfather said about it, and as far as Ceit was concerned, her grandad’s word was law.
‘And why not?’ said her mother. ‘You know as well as I do what they are like!’ But her grandfather would never agree.
‘We are the same blood’ he said, strangely, and Ceit had no idea what he meant.
She looked sideways at the boy. It didn’t seem to her as though they could possibly have the same blood. He was very dark, with sooty hair like her favourite cat and a face burnt by exposure to sun and wind. But he had beautiful blue eyes like little fishes. He seemed too old and grown-up to be a playmate. He looked very sad, and she saw that there were tears on his eyelashes, and her own eyes filled up with sympathetic moisture.
‘Ooh don’t cry’ she said, and watched as he rubbed his eyes fiercely with a grubby hand leaving dark smudges around them.
‘I’m not cryin’’ he said, angrily. ‘The wind’s in me eyes. That’s all.’
She didn’t know how to reply to this. Surreptitiously she lifted the hem of her skirt and pulled a faded blue handkerchief out of her navy knickers. ‘Here’ she said. ‘You can have my hankie anyway.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘But look at you, you’re all muddy.’ She licked her hankie, and wiped briskly at his cheeks, the way her mother sometimes cleaned her own face and hands when there was no soap and water near.
He started to laugh. ‘I’m alright’ he said pushing her away. And his accent was funny. He took the hankie from her however, and rubbed his eyes. When he handed it back to her, it was streaked with sandy marks of soil from his face and fingers.
‘What do you do with your handkerchiefs?’ said her mother. But she wouldn’t tell.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.
She was a great one for names.
‘You have to know the names of things, Ceit - trees, plants, birds, flowers.’ That’s what her grandfather always told her. ‘They all have their own names, and you should know what they are. It’s no good being careless about such things.’
Her grandad knew the names of all the wildflowers which grew on the island and she liked to file the words away in her mind. Bogbean and ladies tresses. Speedwell and celandine. She liked to say the words aloud. She liked the sounds that they made on her tongue. It was almost as though she could taste the words themselves like the luscious bramble and the glossy but bland crowberry. And the words themselves had colours. Even more than saying them, she liked to draw and paint them.
Ever since she could hold a pencil in her fat little fingers, Ceit had liked to draw. When she ran out of drawing paper, she had drawn on the endpapers of books, or in the farm account books, or sometimes on the wallpaper in her bedroom. Eventually, her grandfather had persuaded Mrs McGregor in the village shop to stock large pads of coarse cartridge paper, paints, paint brushes and soft pencils, and kept Ceit well supplied with them. She liked to make pictures of flowers and birds and animals, and the kitchen wall was full of them, all sellotaped together, because her mother could never bear to throw any of them away.


‘Darragh’ said the boy. ‘My name’s Darragh Martin.’
‘Darragh’ she repeated, the way he said it. ‘Da-ra.’ Liking the sound of that as well. ‘Are you from Ireland like the rest of them?’
He pointed to the south west where the sea glittered in the sunlight. ‘Somewhere over there.’
‘Are you homesick?’
He considered this for a moment. ‘Maybe I am. But I don’t know why.’
‘Why don’t you know why?’ She was a persistent child. She would follow a question to the bitter end and beyond.
‘Because I don’t like it at home.’
‘Oh.’ She nodded sagely. He must know what he was talking about. But she didn’t really know what he meant.
‘Is your mammy not here with you?’ she asked. The women and men who came over from Ireland for the potato harvest worked together but they always slept in separate barns for decency’s sake.
‘No. She’s not with me.’
‘You must miss your mammy though’ she said after a little pause.
‘Yes, I miss her. But I don’t live with her.’
‘Do you not? ‘
‘No. They won’t let me. I live on a farm in Donegal.’
‘Is it nice?’ she asked.
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Is it anything like this one?’
‘It’s smaller than this one. But the people are….’ He hesitated. ‘They won’t let me go to see my mammy.’
She wondered who ‘they’ were and how they could be so cruel. But although she wanted to pursue this she realised that it might not be polite so she sat still for a moment and thought of something else to say. He had not asked her name. She was surprised by his lack of curiosity, but she ventured the information anyway. ‘I’m Ceit. You say Kate but you spell it c-e-i-t.’
She spelled out the letters the way they said them at school. ‘Ceit Galbreath.’
He nodded but said nothing, just sat there staring out to sea and picking at the purple thyme flowers and the small grasses.
‘It’s nice up here, isn’t it?’ she offered, after a bit.
‘It’s alright.’ He looked around as though seeing it properly for the first time.
‘This is the best place on the whole island. This is Hill Top Town.’
‘I thought it was Dunshee.’
‘No’ she said, ‘Not the farm. That is Dunshee. I mean this bit. Up here. Hill Top Town. That’s what my grandad calls it. That’s what everyone calls it, though there’s no town here that I can see.’
‘There is no town. You’re right.’
‘I asked my grandad and he said there might once have been one, a long time ago.’
‘Maybe so. You mean down there?’ He turned to look into the shallow bowl of land with its scattering of grey rocks, which formed the summit of the hill.
‘That’s right. And do you see the part where the flags grow, the yellow irises there? That usually means water. A spring maybe.’
‘Is that so?’
‘My grandad said so.’
‘And he’s always right, your grandad?’
‘Of course’ she said, and he didn’t have the heart to laugh at her.
‘Is this your first time here?’ she asked him.
‘It is.’
‘And how long will you be staying?’
He shrugged. ‘A few weeks. We’ll be working on the other farms and maybe going to some of the other islands, but we’re to live here at Dunshee mostly.’
‘That’s good’ she told him. She stood up, levering herself off the ground with her hand on his shoulder.
‘Why is it good?’
‘Because I don’t have many people to play with and you can come out with me so long as you’re here.’
‘They won’t let me do that.’
‘They will so. My grandad will. He’ll let you if I ask him You don’t work on Sundays, do you?’
She could twist her grandad around the smallest of her small fingers. ‘Leave the child be,’ he often said to her mother. ‘She’s alright. Let the child do what she wants. She’s doing no harm.’
‘You spoil her’ said her mother.
‘And why not? What else would I be doing with my one and only grandchild? Besides. How can you spoil someone by loving them?’
Do you like fishing?’ she asked him, on a sudden inspiration.
‘Maybe.’
‘I’ve got a rod. We can go fishing. There’s a loch with trout. It belongs to the estate but my grandad’s allowed to fish there. It’s not far.'
‘I don’t know …’ he hesitated. ‘I’m here to work.’
‘You’ll get a bit of time off to go fishing though’ she told him. ‘I’ll ask my grandad if you can come with us.’ He would say yes. She was the apple of his eye. ‘Listen, we’ll take you fishing. Me and my grandad. And there’s the beach down there. We can go to the beach some days. Make sandcastles. Swim. It’ll be good. You’ll see.’


As an adult, Ceit often found herself rehearsing this first conversation in her mind, polishing the story like a beach pebble, making it perfect in her memory. What was it about him that so drew her to him? Was it pity for his loneliness? Curiosity about the stranger – for there were few visitors to the island? Or just a childish perception of his need; the same instinct that made her so anxious to bottle feed the orphan lambs for her grandad? And she was good at it as well. ‘Nobody can bring them through like my Ceit,’ he told everyone proudly.
Darragh Martin looked up at her as she stood over him, small and ingenuous, her red hair in two fat crinkly plaits hanging on either side of her freckled face, and he grinned at her. ‘Alright’ he said. ‘If you like. I don’t mind if I do.'



A day or two later she asked her grandfather about the fishing.
‘Is this wise?’ asked her mother, but Alasdair just shrugged.
‘Why not? He’s only a young lad. He needs a wee holiday now and then. The work’s back breaking. Even our own lads have a spell once in a while. He’s young to be over here – God knows why he was even sent here with nobody to keep an eye on him. The money I suppose. It could only be the money.’
‘Heavens above! Why would anybody need to keep an eye on him?’
‘You wouldn’t like to see our Ceit in the same situation.’
‘That’s a different matter altogether and well you know it. But taking him fishing now… making a favourite of him…. I just think…’
‘What?’
‘Is it quite suitable?’
‘Don’t be so po-faced woman.’ It was the mildest of rebukes but her mother knew when she was beaten. Alasdair only ever bothered to argue with his daughter-in-law about points of principle but then he was unmoveable.


Alasdair often took Ceit fishing to the loch, at the back of Ealachan House, the ‘big house’. Alasdair Galbreath was on friendly terms with Malcolm Laurence, who practically owned the whole island, and had stocked the loch with trout. Alasdair was casually deferential. He would have preferred it if he were not a tenant farmer, if the farm was his own. But what couldn’t be cured must be endured and permission to fish was one of the perks of the tenancy. He was teaching Ceit to cast. The rod was long and too heavy for her, but she managed, and was proud of herself.
Sometimes they met Malcolm’s son, Miranda’s elder brother, Oliver. He was also away at school during term time but he spent at least part of his summer holidays on the island. The family had a house in London, but twelve year old Oliver was said to be ‘chesty’ and they sent him north for his health. Ceit and her grandad often saw him, walking the island paths with his black labrador at his heels, looking like a youthful version of his father. He wore the same tweedy clothes, the same polished brogues. His appearance always exasperated Alasdair.
Tonight, they met Oliver on their way to the loch. He whistled his over- exuberant dog to heel and wished them a polite good evening.
‘Spot of fishing eh?’ he said, like a little old man.
‘Just a spot’ said Alasdair and walked on.
‘Nice evening for it.’
‘It is indeed.’
‘Would you look at that?’ said Alasdair to Darragh, when he had gone past. ‘He’ll be my landlord one day! May the good lord keep Malcolm Laurence safe and sound.’
Darragh said nothing, just grinned and whistled through his teeth.
‘Don’t you like Oliver?’ asked Ceit. ‘I think he’s a nice boy. Much nicer than his horrible sister.’ She screwed up her nose at the thought of Miranda.
‘Oh he’s fine’ said Alasdair, patting her on the head. ‘Don’t you waste your time worrying about Oliver Laurence, my wee lamb. He doesn’t need your sympathy.’



At the loch, Ceit practised her casting for a while, and then lent Darragh her rod very willingly. It was her great-grandfather’s old rod, in smooth greenheart , with brass fittings. It was too heavy for her to handle, but fine for Darragh who – so her grandad said – was very big for his age. She sat in the shade among the creamy meadowsweet and watched him fish. She noticed that he was left-handed, like her grandfather.
Alasdair was being quietly kind to Darragh.
‘Come on lad’ he says. ‘Let’s see what you can do.’
It was very warm beside the loch. When you beathed in, you could feel the heat in your mouth and lungs, a slight sense of suffocation. Ceit judged – with some satisfaction - that Darragh wasn’t quite as competent as she. There were tiny green spiders among the meadowsweet and they scuttled over her hands and legs and tickled her as they went. She lifted her hand and watched as one of them dived into space, swinging from its own silk, trapezing from her finger. Carefully she lowered it to the ground, making sure that it landed in a hollow below a stone, not wanting to squash it when she got to her feet. The smell of cut grass drifted across from the gardens at Ealachan and mingled with the musky scent of meadowsweet and the cool scent of water.
She raised her eyes and saw Darragh, a dark silhouette, obliterating the sun. Her grandad had been showing him how to cast properly. ‘Tick Tock’ he said, to time the cast. She was already proud of having a big boy for a friend. She heard the plop as the float hit the surface and saw the widening rings out on the water as fish rose to flies but not to her grandad’s bait. Or Darragh’s either, for that matter. She felt the nip of the midges on her arms and legs and slapped at them but they were persistent. She was afraid that they would have to go home before they had caught anything. Over in the woods beside Ealachan house she could hear the din of rooks beginning to circle, thinking about roosting, jostling for position.
Seeing that they hadn’t caught anything, Alasdair used ground bait, which was something that he wasn’t supposed to do, and they caught two fat trout in a matter of minutes, which was the maximum he was allowed by the keeper. He despatched each fish with a single blow from his wooden ‘priest’, the small but heavy cosh which he kept in his fishing bag . Then they took them home to Dunshee where her mother gutted them and cooked them in a frying pan on the top of the stove. The house was warm and cluttered. The kitchen was home to an old Scots dresser, a chunky piece of furniture, much lower than its Welsh equivalent, with a row of small spice drawers along the top and a row of deeper drawers set over the base. There was an ancient spinning wheel in one corner. Every room in the farmhouse had its share of ornaments: Doulton ladies in the best sitting room, pottery cows and horses, and a collection of lustre jugs in the kitchen. Each room had its own fireplace too, and even now, in the middle of summer, the fire in the kitchen range was blazing warmly.
The wireless was playing Scottish dance music. It was a big, boxy affair with exotic names like Hilversum and Luxemburg on the dial. In use, it grew very warm, and the cat liked to sit on top of it with the music spilling out of his soft body. Darragh gazed at the wireless as though he had never seen anything like it before.
‘I should be getting back to the barn now’ he said, uncertainly.
‘Not at all!’ her grandfather told him, pulling out a chair for him. ‘What’s the point of catching the fish if you don’t get to eat them afterwards?’
Ceit saw that her mother would prefer it if Darragh went back to the barn but she said nothing. He stayed to eat with them: fried trout and boiled potatoes and scones made with buttermilk and baked in the oven at one side of the kitchen fire. All the bread and cakes were baked in this oven. Ceit liked to help, liked to watch her mother throwing flour into the bottom of the oven. If it burned, the oven was too hot. If it stayed white, the oven was too cool. If it went pale golden brown, the oven was just right. There was something infinitely satisfying to Ceit about this simple formula although she couldn’t explain why. Sometimes she lay in bed at night, imagining herself as a grown-up woman, in charge of the house, tossing flour into the oven. Trying to get the temperature exactly right.
Darragh sat at their table and ate ravenously, glancing over his shoulder from time to time. As though anticipating some attack from behind, he held his arms protectively around his plate and forked the fish and potatoes into his mouth, hardly pausing to chew between mouthfuls, burning his tongue on the delicious flesh.
‘Steady lad’ said Alasdair, watching him, his brow furrowed into a frown. ‘Steady on. You’ll need a wee pause between mouthfuls. You’ll not be wanting to choke yourself.’
Darragh looked up and Ceit thought that he reminded her of the farm dogs when they hunched protectively over a bone, casting dangerous, white eyed glances in all directions. Or perhaps he was more like the lonely crows that lurked about the farm, waiting to scavenge dead meat. But she said nothing. She found herself blushing for him.
Darragh saw them watching him. He coloured up as well, his cheeks scarlet beneath the brown of exposure to sun and wind. He moved his arms away from his plate and slowed down.
Isabel spooned out more potatoes for him but she snatched the spoon away quickly, Ceit noticed, as though she was feeding a wild animal.
‘Thanks’ he said. ‘Thanks very much missus.’ He looked up and flashed his sudden disconcerting smile at her, but she turned away, without acknowledgement.
‘Alright?’ asked Alasdair.
‘Yes thanks.’
‘Good.’
Alasdair reached out and patted him on the shoulders.
‘Good lad’ he said. ‘Good lad.’
For the first time, Ceit felt something that she would always feel in Darragh’s company. She felt a sudden sense of proprietary pride in him, as though praise of Darragh was praise of herself, but it was compounded – as it always would be - by a sharp pang of jealousy. She wanted him all to herself. But she wanted her grandad all to herself as well.
‘Am I not good?’ she asked her grandfather, plaintively, to distract him.
‘Of course you are. You’re my little Ceitag. My little lass!’ he said, turning from his plate to tug at her pigtails, tying them into a loose knot at the back of her neck. Ceit was ticklish. She hunched her shoulders and shivered but still she liked it when he teased her in this way. She glanced up and caught Darragh watching her, watching her grandfather. He looked hungry. That’s what she thought.. But how could he be hungry when he was in the middle of eating? When he had eaten so much already?
‘Just eat your tea and stop your nonsense Ceit’ said her mother. As always. ‘Just finish your tea and be quiet now. And then Darragh had better get back to his friends in the barn.’


CHAPTER THREE

Each year, the house martins returned to Dunshee from wherever they chose to spend their winter months. Ceit always looked out for the first pair of them in late April or early May. One evening, they would come swooping over the house in long curves, inspecting the rows of old nests under the eaves. Ceit liked to imagine these early visitors deciding which one would be the most suitable for their needs. She pictured the nests comfortably lined with strands of her own hair because whenever her mother trimmed the ends she always deposited the hairs on the windowsill for the birds. One winter’s day, when she was only five years old, her grandad had come home carrying a robin’s nest which he had found tucked into one of the field hedges. It was lined with a fabric of closely interwoven red hairs. She had taken it down to the school, where it sat on the nature table for years. New infants would look at it and say ‘That’s Ceit Galbreath’s hair!’
‘You couldn’t make one of those however hard you tried!’ said the teacher. Ceit knew that she was right, because she had tried and it was impossible. She had assembled the materials, sure that she could do it, but everything just fell to pieces beneath her fingers. At that time of year, Ceit heard the sad song of the curlew over the farm by night as well as by day. Her grandad told her that these birds were not summer visitors, like the martins and swallows and the mysterious corncrake with his strange, sawing cry that Ceit often heard when she was in bed, on summer nights, but residents.
‘Where do they go in the winter then?’ she asked him, and he said ‘ Oh they lie low Ceit. They just lie low.’
In summer, she waited anxiously for Darragh to return, wondering if he had been lying low as well. The climate of the island was very mild, and the potato harvest started early. But she worried. Perhaps he would not come back. Perhaps ‘ they’ – whoever they were - wouldn't let him. She didn’t speak to her mother about this, although she talked to Isabel about almost everything else. Ceit loved her mother. She loved to come in from school and find her busy about the house or garden – for Isabel adored her garden and seemed to forget about the time when she was working in it, so that dishes remained unwashed, and hateful ironing undone. In the evening, Ceit lay in bed with the door open and heard her mother downstairs washing the dishes, or listening to the radio, or talking quietly with her grandfather and was soothed by the sound. Isabel baked lemon curd tarts for her to take down to the school as her playpiece. She brushed her daughter’s long hair every night and every morning, and was very gentle, holding it twisted in her left hand and combing it carefully with her right to get the tangles out first, so that it didn’t tug too much.
‘You have lovely hair, God bless it’ she said.
Sometimes, if Ceit was ill or unhappy, her mother would sit beside her bed, rocking like an old granny on the rush seated chair, and singing her to sleep. Although Isabel did not really speak the Gaelic language, she could sing a little in that tongue, and Ceit loved the sound of the foreign words, and the strange melodies that seemed to veer so unexpectedly between joy and misery.
‘Yes but what does it mean?’ she asked.
‘Dance to your shadow,’ sang her mother. ‘ Dance to your shadow when it’s hard to be living. Dance to your shadow and let Fate to her fiddle. Dance to your shadow when there’s nothing better near you.’
Ceit didn’t know anything about Fate, but her grandad played the fiddle. It hung on a nail on the kitchen wall, and he played it at weddings and wakes, at ceilidhs and christenings. It was very old and precious. Her grandfather’s great grandfather, which made him her great great great grandfather, had made it. It belonged on the island. It belonged at Dunshee. And sometimes Alasdair played it just for Ceit and her mother, sad tunes and happy. But usually happy.




One morning, when she was sitting in the small schoolroom that looked down towards the ferry, and struggling with mental arithmetic, (her least favourite subject) she saw the truck come lumbering up the road and knew that the tattie howkers had arrived. It was raining, and the windows were misted with droplets. She couldn’t see whether Darragh was among them or not. She could hardly contain her excitement and fidgeted for the rest of the day.
‘What’s wrong with you, Ceit Galbreath?’ her teacher asked.
But she just shook her head and sat on her hands and said ‘ Nothing Miss.’
When she came home from school, the weather had improved, as it so often did here after a morning of rain. Dog roses were unfurling in all the hedgerows, the sky was blue, and a late, hot sun was making steam rise over the fields. Ceit came running up the hill and paused on the brink of one of the tattie fields, shading her eyes, scanning the bent figures. The earliest potatoes were howked out with big forks called graips, and gathered up by hand. The visiting Irish were often joined by young women from the islands whose job it was to gather the tatties into their sacking aprons and carry them back to the waiting carts. But the Irish were better at howking the small potatoes without damaging them. There he was, wielding a long fork with a will, though the sandy soil was damp and heavy. She felt another churning of excitement in her stomach. She stood up on the lower bar of the gate and shouted his name.
‘Darragh! Hey! Darragh Martin!’
He looked over at her but didn’t move, so she waved frantically, balancing on the gate. There would be a line of rust along the front of her powder blue school dress.
‘Darragh! Come here!’
He rested his fork on one of the carts and came over, clumsily negotiating the edge of the field and then standing still, a few paces away from her. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he thrust them into his pockets.
‘You came back!’ she said.
‘I did.’
He had grown taller. And he had grown shy again in the intervening months. But she was so obviously pleased to see him that he found himself smiling at her. ‘ It’s nice to be back’ he said.
To his surprise, she clambered over the gate, her sandals scrabbling on the rusted metal, rushed over to him, reached up and hugged him. He hardly knew where to put himself. And yet he liked it. She had been eating sweets and her mouth was red. She smelled of raspberry jam.
‘I have to get back to work,’ he said.
‘I’ll see you later then. After tea.’ It was a command rather than a request and he wasn’t inclined to argue with her.
‘Where?’
‘Hill Top Town’ she said, and flew back to the gate, up and over, skipping up the track towards the house. ‘ He’s back, he’s back, he’s back!’ she was chanting to herself as she went. But not aloud. Her mother might hear.



Later on that evening, she told her mother and her grandad that she was going out to play for a bit.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Isabel. ‘ It’ll be time for bed soon.’
‘There’s a skylark’s nest up at Hill Top Town that I want a sight of.’
‘Well don’t be disturbing the bird on her eggs!’ said her grandfather.
‘I won’t.’



They sat together, watching the misty sun sink towards the furthermost islands. Far, far away they could see a couple of ring netters, like toy boats, red and green, working together on the flat waters.
‘I’ve missed this place’ said Darragh. ‘It’s been a long winter. I kept wishing I was here.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know why,’ said Ceit, ‘For they work you so hard.’
‘They work me hard back there, as well.’
‘What have you been doing?’ Ceit asked him. ‘ Have they let you see your mammy yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘Does she not write to you?’
‘No. She’s not allowed.’
Ceit wanted to ask why, but bit her tongue, suddenly shy of pressing the point. If he wanted her to know, he would tell her.
‘I’ve been going to school,’ he added. ‘And working. They keep me off school to work, and then the priest comes to the house, and so they send me again, but I can’t get the hang of anything so they beat me.'
‘That’s not fair.’
‘I know, but what can I do? Will you come and fight them for me Ceit?’ He started to laugh, imagining her confronting the baldy headed schoolmaster, arms akimbo or flying at him in a rage, her red hair streaming out behind her.
‘I would too,’ she told him. She looked at him and gave a sigh of pure pleasure. In her eyes at least, he was a hero; even now, when it suddenly seemed to her that his laughter was very close to tears. But big boys weren’t supposed to cry, were they?



When school was over for the summer, Ceit was free to roam the hills and shores of the island on pursuits of her own. This year, however, she was never very far from the tattie fields. She swung on the gate, watching the work. Often, when the weather was fine, she went into the fields and helped out, gathering up the little potatoes that were left behind, the ‘ pig potatoes’ which she and her mother and grandad liked to eat, fried up in butter in a cast iron pan, until they were crispy. When the rain came driving in from the west, her grandfather sent her home, although if it was up to her, she would have soldiered on through the mud. Darragh couldn’t help but admire the bossiness of her, the way she laid down the law to everyone, even her grandad.
She was not a steady worker however. She was too easily distracted, by the heron’s long legs trailing behind him as he flapped overhead or the sight of a boat in the bay. She sang all the time.
‘Do you know this one?’ she asked Darragh and sang, ‘If I were a blackbird I’d whistle and sing, and follow the ship that my true love sails in, and on its top rigging I’d there build my nest and pillow my head on his snowy white breast’
Ceit had a high, clear voice, like a choirboy and the song made him shiver. ‘ Go on’ he said in a whisper, so that nobody else would hear. ‘Sing it again. Sing it for me again. My mammy sang that one,’ he told her. ‘ But she smoked too much. You could hear it in her voice.’
‘What are you like?’ said her grandad indulgently, ‘You’re a distraction to honest working folk, that’s what you are Ceit Galbreath! You’re worse than the midges, always nipping at people’s ears!’
The older Irish indulged her too. ‘Come here to me’ they said, when she sat among them as they took their mid-day meal. They gave her bits of bread and cheese or Victory V lozenges, which she tried to eat, wishing she could like them, but they made her want to retch and she spat them out secretly, into the long grass, so as not to seem impolite. One man plaited a whip out of reeds for her . Another taught her how to make a whistle out of a piece of green hazel. Darragh wished he had thought to do that, for he could make a whistle as well as the next man.
‘I could do that’ he said later on. ‘I could make you one of those.’
‘Why didn’t you then?’
She queened it over them, took their affection as though it was her due and gave plenty in return. These were summers of unadulterated happiness for Ceit. But it was Darragh’s presence that somehow underpinned all her delight. His unspoken appreciation of what she was and what she did was a sweet accompaniment to all her days.


In late July, the weather turned very warm and Darragh, who was working elsewhere on the island, came back to Dunshee at nights, and took her out in her grandad’s wooden boat. They took mackerel flies, and sometimes they caught a box full of striped fish and sometimes they caught nothing at all. It depended. That was always the way of it with mackerel: none or a dozen. Alasdair had rigged up a miniature smokehouse where he could smoke mackerel and trout and the occasional salmon. He didn’t call them salmon though. He called them ‘ queer fellows’ which was what the local fishermen called them as well, salmon being an unlucky word. Salmon, pigs and red headed women were all unlucky at sea.
When Ceit had first started at the school, she used to meet an old fisherman going down to his boat, every morning. She had been walking that road since she could toddle, and she knew everyone along the way, so her mother just took her down to the Dunshee road end and sent her off by herself each morning. She would pass the man and say ‘Good morning’ politely as her grandad had told her. She was surprised to see that he just grunted at her in return, crossed himself, turned right round and went back the way he had come. Then, a few days later, a letter came popping through the door. And it was from this same old man, except that his sister had written it for him, and it asked if wee Ceit Galbreath could please leave for school fifteen minutes earlier or perhaps fifteen minutes later, so as not to be passing him by on the road to his boat, because not a day’s luck had he had with his fishing – when he could get to his boat - since the start of term. Her grandad had read the letter and laughed out loud. Isabel had been very indignant, but Alasdair had just started laughing.
‘Silly old bugger!’ he said. ‘You leave it to me.’
‘What will you do?’ asked her mother.
‘I’ll write back to him.’
‘And what will you say?’
‘I will just tell him that he can leave earlier or later himself if he wants, so that he can avoid the terror of seeing our wee red headed monster on the road!’



Darragh didn’t seem to mind taking a redhead out on the water.
Isabel was anxious all the time they were gone, but Alasdair was reassuring. ‘The lad knows fine how to handle a boat’ he told her. ‘I’ve watched him. You don’t think I would have let them go otherwise, do you?’
The farmer in Donegal had a boat and Darragh was often sent out fishing alone for a contribution to the table. Still, Isabel was surprised that Alasdair trusted the Irish boy with his precious grandaughter. But Alasdair knew instinctively that Ceit would be safer with Darragh than with anyone else.
Darragh rowed strongly and smoothly and, following Alasdair’s instructions to the letter, did not take Ceit too far out, though if it was up to her they would have been off visiting the neighbouring island where there was nothing but a saint’s chapel and an old ruined chieftain’s house, but where a brownie was said to live, a magical creature who would do all your housework for you so long as you didn’t attempt to pay him. Once you offered him money, he would leave and never come back.
‘I could do with one of those’ said Isabel. ‘Away over there and fetch him back for me.’
‘Darragh won’t take me so far in case the weather changes.’
‘Well I’m pleased to hear it!’
Ceit loved the grey seals that popped their heads up to look at them, and the shearwater skimming low with straight wings, and the way the scent of the land lay like a spell on the water. She loved to watch Darragh bending over the oars, his hair a glossy tangle, his bare brown feet planted firmly on either side of her own grubby sandshoes, and the way he looked from light eyes under dark brows and grinned at her, or better still winked at her because he couldn’t think of anything much to say. She didn’t need him to say anything. His companionable presence was enough
Afterwards she helped him to haul the boat high up onto the beach below Dunshee and tie it to an iron stanchion let into a rock. Then they sat together on a boulder, watching the light draining gently out of the sky. She picked up a swatch of dry bladderwrack from the sand and started cracking the little capsules, each one making a satisfying ‘pop’.
‘I wish you were here all year round’ she said.
‘You’d soon get tired of me.’
‘No I wouldn’t. I always wanted a big brother.’
‘If I were your brother I would be teasing the life out of you.’
‘That’s true.’
She threw away her seaweed. ‘Do you know any stories?’ she asked.
‘What kind of stories?’
‘Oh any kind. All kinds. What do you read? What’s your best book?’
Ceit loved stories, especially stories with pictures. She had a bookcase in her room with a whole shelf of Enid Blyton, and a heap of old ‘Wonder Books’ which someone had given to her grandmother when she was a little girl. Ceit pored over the words and pictures: the Wild Swans, the Tinder Box, the King of the Golden River, she knew and loved them all. When she was younger, her mother or her grandad would read to her, but now she read the stories for herself, every night before she went to sleep, every morning when she woke up. She liked to read her favourites again and again but more than that, she liked to draw her own pictures.
‘I can’t keep up to you in paper!’ said her mother in exasperation, whenever Ceit demanded more drawing books from the village shop, but in this too her grandfather was indulgent, and would bring large blocks of cartridge paper back from the mainland, whenever he went to the market.
Darragh was looking down at the sand and she saw that his cheeks were scarlet beneath the brown. ‘I don’t read much’ he said.
‘Can you not do it?’ she asked him candidly.
‘Oh I can read alright. Well, I’m not the best scholar in the world but I can get by’ he admitted. ‘ But we don’t have any books in the house except maybe the odd newspaper. I read stuff at school sometimes. Once we had a teacher who read to us. He wasn’t our usual teacher. He was just filling in because the master was off sick. He read something called The Wind in the Willows and it was such a gas.’
‘That’s one of my best books as well.’
‘Was it? We were all doubled up laughing. He put on all the different voices.’
‘Which bit did he read?’
‘He got through most of it before our ordinary teacher came back and started beating the hell out of us all again.’
‘Do they really beat you?’ she asked, distracted by the repetition of something he had told her earlier. ‘I mean really?’
‘Sure they do. With a cane. Don’t they beat the children here?’
‘Well. The boys sometimes’ she admitted. ‘She keeps a strap in her desk, the teacher. She calls it her Lochgelly. That’s the name of the place where they make them. I hate it. It’s this brown belt with a split at the end so that it hurts more.’
‘And haven’t you ever caught it?’
‘Not me. My grandad said if she ever belted me he would go straight down there and give her a good smack with her own Lochgelly. See how she liked it!’
‘Would he do that?’ asked Darragh, in wonder.
‘I think he might. But I behave myself anyway so it doesn’t matter. What did you like best about the Wind in the Willows?’
Darragh hesitated. ‘ I liked that whole…. That whole thing. The picnics and stuff. I always wanted to be rowing home in the sunshine like that.’
‘Well now you can be.’
‘What?’
‘Rowing home in the sunshine like that’ she told him, triumphantly. 'With me.'
Ceit always liked to live her literature.




That second summer they divided their time mostly between Hill Top Town and the beach below the farm. Sometimes they went out in the boat, and sometimes they just wandered among the rocks and pools or rather Ceit wandered about and Darragh, glad to be resting, sat there watching her as she went searching for treasures, things that she would take home and draw later: a banded agate, a chunk of rose quartz, a curly shell.
‘Listen to the sea’ she said, holding it to his ear.
‘I can hear the sea just fine without the bloody shell!’ he told her, laughing at her, so she ran off and threw it at him instead.
When the weather was very fine, there were parts of the beach that became infested with a kind of pink algae that stank in the sun and then you couldn’t sit there. It only improved when the rain came down and washed it away. But the rain made the tattie howking a misery, so nobody welcomed it.



Once they found an old green bottle with a piece of paper inside, but the water had got in and the message, whatever it might have been, disintegrated in their fingers.
‘It could have been a treasure map’ she said, disappointed.
‘It could have been a message from somebody stranded on a desert island.’
‘So it could. He threw it into the sea years ago. And now it’s washed up here, but we can’t read the message.’
‘So he’ll just have to stay put’ said Darragh.
‘Like Robinson Crusoe.’
‘Who’s Robinson Crusoe?’
‘Just a man who got cast away on a desert island.’
‘When?’
‘How should I know? He’s in a book.’
‘Have you read that as well?’
‘No. But my grandad told me about him. And he said that there really was a man like that.’
‘So maybe this was his last message.’
‘Maybe it was. His last will and testament. And now his forgotten bones are whitening on the sand!
Darragh shook his head. ‘ You’re a very strange little girl.’
‘Am I?’ she said, lacing her arm through his as they headed back up to the farm.



The next wet Sunday, she got out her copy of The Wind in the Willows, and took it into one of the barns. She and Darragh made themselves snug on a bale of hay, with the wind making music in the rafters and beams, and she read aloud to him.
‘He’s always going on about comfort and contentment’ said Darragh.
‘So he is . That’s why I like it.’
‘You said you liked disasters.’
‘Well I do. But I like people being happy as well.’ She struggled to explain. ‘ When Moley’s in the wild wood it’s terrible, but then they find Badger’s house and everything’s alright, only it’s even more alright because he’s had such a bad time.’
He made no comment, just looked at her with a frown.
‘Which one would you be Darragh?’ she asked him after a moment or two.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If you were somebody in the book. Who would you be?’
‘I don’t know. Who would you be?’
‘Maybe Ratty because he can do things. I want to be able to do things. You know? Or Otter. I might be Otter. Because he’s not afraid of anything.’
‘I’m not afraid of anything. Not really.’
‘Are you not? Why not?’
‘Because there’s nothing else for me to be afraid of, is there?’
She related this conversation to her grandfather later on that evening, when she was sitting cross legged on the rug, drawing pictures: Ratty and Mole in their boat, rowing along the river.
‘Why wouldn’t Darragh be afraid of anything?’ she asked.
Her grandfather shook his head. ‘I don’t know, my lamb. Maybe so many bad things have happened to him that he knows he can put up with whatever else they throw at him.’
Afterwards she pondered this suggestion. She was afraid of a great many things including hell and – to a lesser extent – heaven, which she did not think would suit her at all. She was not remotely interested in sitting at the right hand of God, singing his praises. ‘But I can’t play the harp’ she had said, anxiously, when she first attended the Sunday school. She hoped that some corner of heaven would be a little like Dunshee. Last year one of the girls at school had lost her grandfather. He had died quite suddenly and ever since then Ceit had been afraid of losing Alasdair too. Sometimes she lay awake and prayed. ‘ Don’t let my grandad die for a hundred million years!’



That wet Sunday marked the start of a long spell of rain and the tattie fields were awash with mud. Darragh’s boots were caked with it. Worse, his hands and face and all his clothes were permanently dirty. The sandy earth was so engrained in his fingers that when he washed them in cold water they bled profusely. Ceit wanted to invite him in to use their bathroom, but Isabel wouldn’t hear of it.
‘It’s bad enough trying to clean it up after you’ve been in there without inviting all and sundry in to use it’ she said.
‘It isn’t all and sundry’ said Ceit wondering, just in passing, what sundry meant. ‘ It’s only Darragh.’
But her mother was adamant so Darragh had to make do with the tap in the yard.



Just before he was due to leave, Ceit wrapped up her copy of The Wind in the Willows in a sheet of fancy paper from the Post Office, and gave it to him.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, surprised.
‘It’s a present for you. Don’t open it till you get back.’
‘I’ll keep it for my birthday.’
‘When’s that?’
‘October. I’ll have to find a hiding place though or they’ll have it off me!’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘The other kids would want it. The farmer’s kids. They don’t get many presents either.’
‘But what about your own things? What do you do with them?’
‘What things?’
‘Don’t you have stuff of your own?’
He shook his head. ‘ Not really. Well. I used to have this teddy bear. My mother gave it to me. But she took it off me.’
‘Who did?’
‘The woman of the house. She said ‘A great boy like you has no need of a teddy bear.’ I suppose she was right.’
‘Oh Darragh!’ She was still not sure who these people were and why Darragh lived with them and not with his mother. She was still shy of asking. It seemed too personal somehow. She was simply waiting for him to tell her.
‘I found it on the muck heap, a few weeks later, but it was all torn apart and the mice had got to the stuffing.’
‘Couldn’t someone have stitched it for you?’
‘No. There was no way of saving it. It was just a daft old bear anyway.’
‘ Will you be able to find a safe place for the book?’ she asked anxiously, not wanting to see the gift wasted. There was a strong streak of prudence in Ceit. She took good care of all her possessions and hated to see anything broken or ill used.
‘Oh yes. I’ll look after it alright. There’s an old dresser in one of the sheds. I keep a few things at the back of one of the drawers there now. Nobody looks.’
He brought the book to the island with him the following year, but then took it back to Donegal again when the tattie harvest was over. And after that, other stories and other characters began to take the place of Mole and Ratty, Toad and Otter. Years later, she remembered her gift, and wondered if the book was still there, with ‘ to Darragh with love from Ceit xxx’ on the flyleaf, mouldering at the back of a drawer in an old worm-eaten dresser, somewhere in a barn in Donegal.


CHAPTER FOUR

Ceit’s body was growing and changing, filling out, embarrassing her when she had to change for games with the younger children at school.
‘Time you had a bra, young lady’ said Isabel, and took her on a trip to Glasgow where they stayed with Aunty Beatie and the Glasgow cousins in their bungalow in Newton Mearns.
They went to Marks and Spencer’s (Marks and Sparks, the Glasgow cousins called it) and bought two white nylon bras which Ceit found desperately uncomfortable. She got a suspender belt and some American Tan stockings as well, but although she was excited by these grown up things, in reality they were fiddly and awkward. The plastic buttons dug into her legs, and sometimes they popped out at embarrassing moments, and the nylons wrinkled around her ankles. It was a miserable business and she refused to wear them anywhere except for going to the kirk on Sundays. Instead she wore long socks in winter, and went bare legged in summer. All this, however, paled into insignificance beside the onset of her first period and the terrible contraption of belt, hooks and sanitary towels which Isabel handed over in the privacy of her bedroom. Ceit had seen advertisements for tampons in her mother’s magazines, but Isabel did not approve, couldn’t even bring herself to talk about them.
‘Oh no. You only use those when you’re married’ she told her daughter, mysteriously.
As soon as Ceit left home to go to secondary school on the mainland, she bought herself a packet of tampons and – experimenting with them in the hostel lavatory - threw the despised belt in the dustbin. But for now, she had to put up with whatever she was given. Her periods were very painful. She was doubled over with cramps and lay in her little box bed, clutching a hot water bottle against her stomach.
She did not sleep well at any time now. She found herself waking up in the early hours of the morning, and staring out of her window, watching the moon making a silver pathway over the sea. She kept a notebook beside her bed and had taken to writing wildly lyrical poems, or melodramatic stories, all of them illustrated, in which she was the heroine, rescued from some fate worse than death (though what that might be, she couldn’t imagine) by a tall, dark, handsome hero. The school had a small library and Ceit, as her mother was fond of saying, ‘never had her nose out of a book.’
Darragh came back to the tatties each year, taller and more unkempt than ever. One summer, she ran down to the field to welcome him, but he wouldn’t stop for her.
‘I have work to do,’ he told her.
‘Can’t you at least say hello to me?’
‘Hello Ceit.’
She stood back and surveyed him, biting her lip. He looked thin and gaunt and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She started to cry.
‘Ah now, don’t do that for God’s sake!’
‘I’ve been waiting for you all winter,’ she said, choking on her sobs. Then she saw that he was holding out his hands to her after all. He clutched at her fingers so hard that she gasped with pain, but didn’t pull away. ‘You’re home now’ she told him. ‘It’s alright. You’re home now.’
She always brought him round, eventually. Sometimes she just ignored his silence and chattered on. Sometimes she resorted to more violent measures, nudging him hard in the ribs until he was forced to speak, if only to say ‘stop it!’ If all else failed she would hug him or thrust her arm through his and give him a peck on the cheek . Sooner or later she would see his eyes light up with pleasure or amusement, and knew that she had won again.
But as close as they were, there was something unsettling about him, some quality which had intensified as the years had gone by. His shyness seemed to have grown into a kind of chilly indifference towards everyone except herself and her grandfather. Darragh did more than dig the tatties now. He helped Alasdair about the farm but there was something awkward and inept about all his interactions with other people. He had no social skills at all. He was a hard-working boy, but deeply self contained and unemotional. Even if he was injured or exhausted, he would never complain. One summer he put a fork right through his boot and made a large gash in his foot. They had to get the island nurse to come up and stitch the wound and give him a tetanus injection, but he hardly even cried out.
‘You’d have been bawling the house down, wouldn’t you, Ceit?’ said her grandfather.
‘Of course she would’ said her mother, accusingly. ‘There’s something inhuman about that boy.’ But her grandfather just shrugged. Like the grey mullet that swam about the harbour, he would never rise to the bait.



When Darragh and Ceit were not out on the boat or down on the beach, skimming stones across the water, they were climbing up to the rocks and turf of Hill Top Town. This place, which had once been Ceit’s private kingdom was now a shared refuge. Darragh had little time to spare but such as he had, he spent with Ceit. The name of the farm, Dunshee, meant ‘Hill of the Fairies’ but for Ceit and Darragh, Hill Top Town was the heart of the place. They went up there together as often as they could.
He still came for her when he had finished work for the day. He wouldn’t knock on the kitchen door, for fear of Isabel’s disapproving frown as she opened it to him. Instead, he lurked among the outbuildings until Ceit came out but he had become too silent to make pleasant company and if – as sometimes happened now – she had friends visiting from the mainland, he would simply make himself scarce, slouching off with his hands in his pockets, making no attempt to be sociable.
In spite of all these difficulties, Ceit still anticipated his arrival with excitement and then later in the summer, bade him goodbye with a heavy heart. She always felt that if he could stay, if he didn’t have to go back to Ireland, things would be alright. She won him over each year, only to lose him again. If he was here all the time, she believed that she and her grandfather could make him happy. His company was not always the supreme pleasure that it had once been, but his absence left a gap in her world that nothing else could fill.
‘I can’t think why you like him so much’ said Isabel. ‘It’s always Darragh this and Darragh that with you!’ She had never taken to the Irish boy. She always hoped that Ceit would grow out of the friendship, but she never did.



They were sitting down on the seashore one day when Alasdair, who had been checking his creels, came to join them. Darragh had made himself comfortable on a flat rock while Ceit was sitting at his feet, resting her elbow on his knee. It was the summer before she went away to school on the mainland. She was eleven and Darragh was fifteen, almost sixteen. Having made sure that his boat was safely tied up, Alasdair came over, sat beside them, and took his pipe out of his pocket. He mostly smoked matches, but liked the feel of the old briar in his mouth. He too had noticed the gradual change in Darragh and although he had said nothing to Ceit, it worried him.
The tide was out, leaving a flat canvas of sand. Ceit took up a stick and drew a face.
‘Tell us a story’ she said. ‘I want a story.’
It was what she had always said to her grandad when she was a little girl, cuddling up on his knee, or sitting on the rag rug at his feet.
‘What story do you want ?’ asked Alasdair.
Ceit looked beyond him, towards the hill which rose above Dunshee. From this angle you could see from its slightly strange shape, with a vague but regular suggestion of ramparts and earthworks, that it must once have been a fort.
‘Tell us about Dermot and Grania. ‘
Darragh stirred. ‘That’s an Irish story’ he said.
‘No it’s not.’
‘’Tis.’
‘How do you know?’ she asked him.
‘I heard it told once when I was at the tatties. One of the older men, he told about this man called Dermot, and this woman called Grania, and she was engaged to this older man, but she fell for Dermot instead and she ran away with him on her wedding night. He had this little mark on his face, a love spot the old man called it, but I thought that was just mad. Anyway, she got a sight of it, and she was mad for him, right there and then and they ran off together. But she was the one who persuaded him to do it.’
Ceit looked over at her grandfather, who was smiling quietly to himself.
‘Is he right, grandad? Is it an Irish tale?’
‘That’s about the long and short of it son,’ he said, to Darragh.
‘But what about Hill Top Town? Didn’t they live up at the old fort up there?’ asked Ceit.
‘Not in the story I heard’ said Darragh.
‘Who asked you?’ said Ceit, turning on him, irritably.
‘Shush’ said her grandad. ‘Leave the lad alone.’
‘Well…’ She frowned at the sand. ‘Anyone would think…’
‘What?’
‘That he knew more about storytelling than you do.’
‘But he’s allowed to tell his own story, Ceit.’
‘Can I not answer for myself?’ asked Darragh.
‘Apparently not’ said Alasdair, with a chuckle. ‘You should know by now. You have to get in quick or Ceit will always answer for you.’
Ceit started to giggle, stole another sidelong look at Darragh and saw that his lips were twitching.
‘Go on then’ he said. ‘Tell me about Dermot and Grania.’
Alasdair made himself comfortable, puffed briefly at his pipe, and began his tale.
‘Well, you had it right. Grania was in love with Dermot, so she was, madly in love with him, because it was an enchanted love, and there was nothing to be done about it. There was nothing that could break the spell, no matter what. Now Dermot was a great hero. It was said that he was never weary, that his step was as light at the end of the longest battle as it was at the beginning of the day. But he had this wee spot on his face, it’s true, and once any woman saw it, she was enchanted with him. So Grania caught a sight of his beauty spot and there was nothing for her but that he must take her away, they must run away together.
Now he was an honourable man, and besides, he had been a good friend to Finn, the man that Grania was supposed to marry, and although he went away with her right enough and travelled with her, they lived apart and not as man and wife, which was what she would have liked, with the enchantment full on her. But they travelled all over the place, sleeping here and there, at hill forts, or in the wilderness, on beds made of heather, just as the fancy took them, and her man Finn McCool was after them both by this time, and threatening that if he found them he would kill Dermot , and punish Grania.
Alasdair pulled on his pipe, discovered that it had gone out, lit it again, and blew out a stream of blue, vanilla- scented smoke. ‘So at last they came to the island, and up to the old fortress at Hill Top Town there which was called Dun Sithe, or the Hill of the Fairies, at that time.
‘Why the hill of the fairies?’ asked Darragh.
Ceit nudged his knee. ‘Just listen will you?’
Alasdair winked at Darragh. He resumed his story.
‘Now there was a lord who lived up there, an earl of fairyland, I hear tell. And that was why the place was called the hill of the fairies, and that is what our own house, down below, is called to this very day.'
‘See’ said Ceit, nudging Darragh. ‘Now go on with the story grandad, for those that want to hear it.’
‘The earl was a wealthy man for those times, and he set out to charm Grania, because he played the fiddle, like many of the fairy folk, and he played it well, a fairy tune that filled her head with dreams. And because poor Dermot was paying her scant attention, she took a liking to this other man, this earl of fairyland, partly to make Dermot jealous, and partly because he was kind to her. He would bring her eggs to eat, and fish from the sea, and blaeberries from the moors. And he would make her a bed of feathers to lie on, the feathers of the curlew and the corncrake, soft feathers and much more comfortable than any heather bed And he would play to her, so that she slept deeply and well, and her dreams were sweet because of the feathers, and the music. But soon, this man, the earl of fairyland, came to Grania with a plot that they might kill Dermot, and then she would marry the earl and live with him up at Dun Sithe where old Finn would never find them, because the earl would weave a web of music around them.
So they made a plan that Dermot and the earl would play at a game of dice together, and whenever the earl saw his chance, he would kill Dermot, and Grania vowed to help him.’
Darragh moved restlessly. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong now?’ asked Ceit, impatient with the interruption.
‘Why would she kill Dermot, when she was in love with him? You said she was mad in love with him!’
‘You have to listen properly. The other man was good to her. He fed her and made her a feather bed, and he played music for her,’ she said, crossly.
Alasdair surveyed them for a moment or two and then continued. ‘Well, they were playing at the dice, all fine and nice, and the earl saw his chance and laid his hands upon poor Dermot. But Dermot was younger and stronger and he turned himself around and they began wrestling together. Dermot got him down on the ground, and at that the earl called out to Grania to save him, and she took up Dermot’s own knife and stabbed her lover in the thigh with it.’
‘I still don’t see why she would do that’ said Darragh, mutinously.
‘Because she loved him more than he loved her. Isn’t that clear to you?’ said Ceit.
‘But….’ He saw her face and stopped. ‘Alright.’ He shrugged. ‘Go on then. ‘
‘Thank-you’ said Alasdair. ‘So when Dermot saw what she had done, and he saw the blood coming down, he took himself off, more dead than alive, and went away from them, and disguised himself, and if they thought anything about him at all, they thought that he was dead.
But at last, a long time later, he came back to the Dun, and he brought a fine fat fish, a salmon it was, with him, and neither of them recognised him, he was so changed. He asked them if he could have leave to roast the fish on their fire, and Grania brought him a wee bowl of water so that he could wash his fingers. Now there was another magic thing about Dermot that anything which he might touch would have the scent of honey upon it. He cooked the fish until it was just done, and then he said to Grania would she like a morsel, and it smelled so good that she took up a piece of it, and put it in her mouth. And she thought it had a strange taste for a fish. And then she took up the bowl of water where he had dipped his fingers, and put it up to her nose and of course, as soon as she did that, she could smell the powerful honey in it, and she knew that the stranger was Dermot. By then, she was tired of the earl, who had not been by any means what she had thought he might be, so she went close to Dermot and threw her two arms around him.
At that, the earl of fairyland leapt up with a roar and attacked Dermot but at last Dermot killed the earl and he went away from the Dun. Grania followed him, all the way down to the seashore, and she called to him and called to him, but he would not turn round. The corncrake was calling in the reeds, crek crek he was calling. And the heron was screaming on the water. And there was Dermot, sitting on a big rock. And Grania said “Are you hungry Dermot? If you are hungry I will feed you. I have food and drink enough for both of us.”
Dermot said “Give me a piece of your bread, Grania.”
She said “But where is a knife, that will cut it?”
Then he said to her “Why will you not search for it in the place where you sheathed it last?” meaning the wound that she had given him in the leg, and at that she was overcome with shame. She went to him, and she drew the knife out, and gave it back to him, and that was the greatest shame that any woman ever had, when she realised how she had betrayed this man and wounded him, and now wanted him back again.’
Alasdair leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction.
There was a moment’s silence. It was always like this, thought Ceit. It was as though her grandfather had conjured up images from the sea and the land around them, from the salty air itself. It too was a kind of magic; he took the memories of the island, the sticks and stones, the shells and feathers and water and transformed them into words. Nobody could tell a story the way he did. It was an old skill and few could manage it like Alasdair.
After a while Darragh said ‘That tune…’
‘What tune?’asked Ceit.
‘The tune that the earl played… are there any tunes like that.’
‘A melody to enchant a woman? Of course’ said Alasdair. ‘There are all kinds of fiddle tunes that are said to be as old as the hills, and some of them are said to have been passed down by the fairies themselves.’



Later on, Alastair invited Darragh into the kitchen. Isabel was away on a shopping trip to the mainland with the minister’s wife and the ladies of the Guild, so there was nobody to object. Alasdair made a pot of strong tea, and Ceit put out cakes and biscuits and then he got the old fiddle down from its nail, tuned it up, and played a strange sad melody which he said was reputed to be a fairy song .
‘I would like…’ Darragh began, and then hesitated.
‘What would you like?’ asked Alasdair.
‘Nothing. No.’ He turned to Ceit. ‘Can you play that?’
‘The fiddle?’ She shook her head.
Alasdair was laughing ruefully. ‘Not for lack of encouragement. I always hoped she would try, but she has no patience with it. None at all. She sings sweetly enough but she is no musician. Why? Would you like to learn Darragh? My wee Ceit will do nothing but make pictures.’
Darragh coloured and looked down at the floor. ‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘Why couldn’t you do it?’
‘I’ve no brains mister.’
‘Who told you you’d no brains?’
He shrugged. ‘They tell me at school. Thick as two short planks. That’s me.’
‘Nonsense. You’ve brains enough for two in that head of yours. Look – do you want to learn?’
‘Am I not too old.’
‘Aye, you are a wee bit. But I can teach you to busk a tune as well as the next man.’
Which was why Alasdair began to teach Darragh the rudiments of playing the fiddle. He would never be particularly good at it, but Alasdair was right. He enjoyed the process of learning. He never played for anyone except Ceit and her grandfather. And of course Isabel, who was forced to listen whether she liked it or not. After a while he found that he could coax a simple melody out of the instrument, and when, some years later, he mastered the fairy melody, nobody was more delighted with his pupil’s success than Alasdair, except perhaps for Ceit herself.