Entry Island Page 33

  Luc was around fifteen, with a shock of blonde hair gelled back from his forehead. He crossed the room obediently and gave Sime a solemn handshake. There was just the faintest curiosity in eyes that were reluctant to meet his. ‘You were just about so high last time I saw you,’ Sime said, without any real idea of what else to say.

  His sister had trotted along behind him. A gawky girl with braces who gazed at him with unglazed interest.

  Annie said, ‘Magali couldn’t have been much more than a baby.’

  Magali presented each cheek and Sime stooped to kiss her awkwardly. Then both teenagers headed back to their game while their father put his paper aside and stood up. He approached Sime with his hand outstretched, but his smile was cold.

  ‘Gilles.’ Sime nodded and shook his hand.

  Gilles said, ‘Nice to see you after all this time. Not sure I’d have recognised you if I passed you in the street.’

  Sime felt the sting of the rebuke, and Annie said quickly, ‘He’s not been well, Gilles.’ And the warning in her tone was clear.

  *

  It was dark by the time they all sat around the table for their evening meal. The first time Sime had sat down for a family dinner since the death of his parents.

  Annie prattled on to fill the awkward silences, bringing Sime up to date on everyone and everything. Luc excelled at sports and was a budding star of the school basketball team. The boy blushed. While Magali, on the other hand, was top of her class at school and wanted to be a doctor. Magali continued to gaze at him with her unselfconscious curiosity. Gilles was now principal of the Bury secondary school, and was even flirting with the idea of standing for political office.

  Sime was surprised. ‘What party?’ he asked.

  ‘Parti Québécois,’ Gilles said. Which was the Quebec nationalist party. Sime nodded. He had never been convinced by the idea of an independent state outwith the Canadian federation. But he didn’t say so.

  Suddenly Magali said, ‘How come you never visit?’

  An uncomfortable silence fell around the table. It had clearly been a topic of conversation among the family before his arrival, and he felt eyes turning towards him.

  He laid down his knife and fork and wanted to be honest. ‘Because I’ve been pretty selfish and self-obsessed, Magali. And I’d forgotten what a wonderful person your mother really is.’ He couldn’t bring himself to look at his sister. ‘But I hope to be a regular visitor from now on, and maybe we can all get to know one another a bit better.’ He caught Magali’s eye. ‘And if you’re really interested in medicine, I can take you on a tour of the pathology labs at the Sûreté in Montreal sometime.’

  Her eyes opened wide. ‘Really?’

  He smiled. ‘No problem.’

  Her mouth fell open now. ‘I’d love that.’

  ‘Do you carry a gun?’ It was the first time that Luc had spoken since his arrival.

  ‘Usually, yes,’ Sime said. ‘Not right now, though. ’Cos I’m sort of on sick leave.’

  ‘What kind of gun?’

  ‘Well a patrolman would carry a Glock 17. But detectives like me carry the Glock 26.’

  ‘How many rounds?’

  ‘Thirteen. You interested in guns, Luc?’

  ‘You bet.’

  He shrugged. ‘Then maybe I can take you to the police shooting range one day and you can have a shot at firing one yourself.’

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘Luc!’ his father reprimanded him.

  ‘Sorry,’ the boy said. But he wasn’t. ‘That would be brilliant.’

  Sime glanced at Annie and saw the pleasure in her smile. He knew she didn’t approve of guns, but anything that made connections and brought the family together had to be good.

  He spent the rest of the meal fielding questions about cases he had worked on, murders that they had read about in the papers or seen on TV. From the family pariah he had suddenly become exotic and interesting, at least as far as the kids were concerned. Gilles was more reserved. But just before Annie took him upstairs to show him his room, Gilles solemnly shook his hand and said, ‘It’s good to have you here, Sime.’

  IV

  Sime’s room was up in the roof, with a dormer window looking out over the garden below. Annie switched on a bedside light and laid out the diaries on the bed in chronological order. He watched her with both apprehension and anticipation. He couldn’t wait to read them, but at the same time feared that perhaps they would not provide the illumination he sought. About the ring that had first sparked his dreams, and its possible connections to a woman charged with murder on Entry Island.

  Annie lifted the final diary and turned towards him. ‘After you phoned,’ she said, ‘I dug these out and spent most of the next two days reading them. I can’t tell you what memories they brought back. I could almost smell Granny’s house as I read. And I could hear that distinctive little creak she used to have in her voice when she was reading.’ She paused. ‘You know she didn’t read us everything?’

  He nodded. ‘I knew there was stuff our folks didn’t want us to hear. I can’t imagine what, though.’

  ‘You’ll figure it out when you read for yourself,’ Annie said. ‘But you mentioned the ring when you phoned, and that’s what I focused on.’ She searched his face with dark green, puzzled eyes, then opened up the diary that she held in her hands and searched through it for a page she had marked with a Post-it. ‘His entries became more and more infrequent before he stopped altogether. But you should read first from here, Sime. Granny never read us any of this. If she had I’m sure you’d have remembered the significance of the ring.’ She handed him the diary. ‘When you’ve read to the end, you can go back and follow the trail from the beginning. I think you’ll know where to look.’

  She reached up and kissed him softly on the cheek.

  ‘I hope you’ll find resolution here.’

  When she had gone, Sime stood for a while listening to the silence of the room around him. Somewhere outside he heard the hoot of a distant owl. The diary seemed to grow heavier as he stood there with it in his hands, before eventually he pulled up the chair at a small writing desk below the dormer.

  He sat down and turned on the reading light. Then carefully opened the diary at the page she had marked and began to read.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Thursday, 19th May 1853

  I have floored the beams now in the pitch of my cabin roof to make an attic. I have built a spare room and indoor toilet at the back, and a covered porch with fly screens at the front. I often sit on the porch at the end of the day and watch the sun set over the trees, and I dream about how things might have been had I not been separated from Ciorstaidh on the quay at Glasgow that fateful day.

  I have cleared and ploughed most of my land, and grow enough to feed myself with some left over to sell. At certain times of the year, myself and a few of the other men from Gould walk across the border to earn a bit of cash on the bigger farms at Vermont in the United States. At others I am busy enough on my own land. Especially at harvest time when I have to rush to bring in the crops before the first frosts, which can come as early as September.

  Recently I have obtained part-time work teaching English to the Gaelic-speaking children at Gould school. Most of them arrive having spoken only Gaelic in the home, but when it comes to learning to read and write, it’s in English that they must do it.

  The reason I write about this today is that a remarkable thing happened at the school just yesterday morning.

  There is a new teacher this year, Jean Macritchie. She’s married to Angus Macritchie, the mayor of the Lingwick municipality. She’s a very genteel sort of lady. In her mid-forties, I would say. No airs and graces about her, but polite and softly spoken. She wears print cotton dresses and silk shawls and has a sort of artistic air about her. In fact, art is her great passion, and she has instituted a new art class for the children.

  It was lunchtime yesterday when I finally finished marking some papers and I wander
ed into her classroom. Everyone had gone to eat, but the still-life that Mrs Macritchie had set up for the children to draw was still there. Just a jug and a glass of water and some fruit. And the efforts of the children themselves were still lying on their desks.

  I wandered around looking at them. Most were pretty awful. Some of them even made me laugh. And one or two were quite good. I have no idea what impelled me to do it, for I have never drawn anything in my life, but I had a sudden fancy to see what kind of a fist I could make of it myself. So I got a fresh sheet of paper and some charcoal from Mrs Macritchie’s desk, and sat down to draw.

  It’s amazing how I got sucked into it. I don’t know how long I sat there following the lines that my eye guided me to draw, using the flat of the charcoal to create the light and the shade, but I didn’t hear Mrs Macritchie coming in until she spoke. I just about jumped out of my skin. I looked up and there she was peering down at my sketch. ‘How long have you been drawing, Sime?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘About half an hour, maybe.’

  She laughed then. ‘No, I mean, is drawing something you’ve been doing for a long time?’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘No, not at all. This is the first I’ve ever done.’

  Her smile faded. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well … no,’ I said, and glanced at my drawing. ‘Is it that bad?’ I was hoping to make her laugh again, but she remained quite serious.

  ‘I don’t know if you realise it, Sime, but you have a very real talent.’ It was news to me. She clasped her hands thoughtfully in front of her face, resting her fingertips on her lips. ‘What would you say if I offered to give you lessons?’

  I looked at her in astonishment. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  I thought about it for all of two seconds then nodded my head vigorously. ‘I’d like that.’

  Friday, 7th July 1854

  Today was the last day of the school term, and the start of the holidays for the children. Of course, it means that my teaching income will dry up till September, and I’ll have to put in a hard summer shift on the land.

  It also means putting aside my painting until the start of the new term when I will have time once again. I have taken so much pleasure in the discovery of this unexpected talent. Mrs Macritchie has been very patient this last year, painstaking in teaching me good technique. First in drawing, and then in painting. But it is in the painting that I have found my greatest pleasure. At first I painted the things I saw around me. People and places. And then at some point, I’m not sure exactly when, I began to paint the landscapes that I remembered from home. Baile Mhanais, the castle at Ard Mor. Seascapes, mountains, the bare windswept peat bogs of the Hebrides. These past months I have spent most of my money on materials. Canvas and paints and brushes. I fear it is becoming something of an addiction.

  At any rate, I was just packing up my things when Mrs Macritchie came into my classroom. Her behaviour seemed oddly casual, a little unnatural.

  ‘Sime,’ she said, ‘you remember that painting you gave me? The landscape with the stag, and the hunters shooting at it from behind the rocks.’

  ‘Yes.’ I remembered it only too well. The painting of it had taken me right back to the day of my father’s funeral when I had hunted down the wounded stag to put it out of its misery. I had taken pleasure in giving it to her as a gift, a small return for all the time she’d invested in me.

  ‘Mr Morrison and his wife from Red Mountain were at our house for dinner last night. He’s established a sawmill over there.’

  I nodded, a little puzzled. I couldn’t imagine where this was leading.

  ‘Mr Morrison is from the Isle of Lewis himself. He saw your painting before dinner, when we were in the drawing room. It hangs above the fireplace there. He was so taken by it that after dinner he went back through to stand and look at it for a very long time. When I asked him what it was that drew him to it, he said simply that it took him home. He said he could almost touch the heather, and smell the peat smoke blowing in the wind.’ She hesitated. ‘He asked me if he could buy it.’

  ‘Well, he can’t,’ I said indignantly. ‘It was a present to you.’

  She smiled. ‘Sime, I’d be very happy to hang any one of your paintings on my wall in its place. Besides which, Mr Morrison said he would happily pay five dollars for it.’

  I felt my jaw slacken and my mouth fell open in surprise. Five dollars was a small fortune. ‘Really?’

  ‘He wants that painting, Sime.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I suggest, if you agree, that I sell it to him for the amount mentioned and hand the money straight over to you.’

  ‘Less a percentage for yourself,’ I said quickly. ‘Since I would never be doing this at all if it wasn’t for you.’

  But she just laughed. ‘Sime, Sime … I didn’t give you your talent. God did that. I just helped you harness it. The money is yours. You’ve earned it. But I have a further suggestion.’

  I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what that might be.

  ‘I think it’s time you held a wee exhibition of your work. You’ve got enough now to make a sizeable presentation. The church hall would be a good venue for it, and if we advertise it properly, it should draw a sizeable crowd. Most folk around here still remember the islands. And you capture the very essence of them in your paintings. You could sell a fair few.’

  Saturday, 22nd July 1854

  I am so excited that I know there is no point in even trying to sleep. I have no idea what time it is, nor do I care. I have been sitting out here on the porch ever since I got back from town, and I watched the sun go down over the trees a long time ago now.

  We held the exhibition of my work in the church hall today, and there must have been two hundred folk or more went round looking at my pictures during the course of the afternoon. And not just from Lingwick. From all over. From as far away as Tolsta in the east and Bury in the west. I had thirty paintings and drawings on display. And we sold every single one of them. Everyone from the old country, it seems, wants a piece of home hanging in their house.

  I am sitting here now with nearly forty dollars in my pocket and a list of folk who have commissioned me to do paintings specially for them. It’s a small bloody fortune, and more than I could ever have expected to make doing almost anything else. And there is nothing else that I love doing quite as much as this.

  For the first time in my whole life I know what it is that I want to do with it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sime’s immersion in the diary was suddenly broken by a security lamp coming on below his window and he resurfaced to the reality of the attic room in his sister’s house in Bury. He felt disorientated, and a little disappointed. He had no idea where events in the diary were leading, nor could he see what possible relevance they might have.

  He stood up and leaned over the desk towards the window to peer down into the garden. In the light that flooded the side porch and the grass beyond it, he saw his sister wrapped in a coat and carrying a flashlight. She crossed the lawn towards the trees at the far side.

  As the security light behind her went out, only the beam of her flashlight cut through the dark of the garden until another security lamp above the doors of the double garage beyond the trees poured light down on to the path and the turning area in front of it. She opened a door and disappeared from view. A few moments later a yellow light appeared in the attic window above the garage doors, and the security lamp extinguished itself to plunge the garden back into darkness.

  Sime sat down again and returned his focus to the diary.

  He scanned quickly through its pages, trying to get a sense of the story they told without becoming bogged down by their detail. His ancestor, it seemed, had gone on to great success, exhibiting his work in Quebec City and Montreal. His paintings, in the end, had commanded substantial sums of money. Enough for him to make his living by his art, which must have been r
are in those days. But his art was popular. Immigrant Scots appeared to have had an unquenchable appetite for a piece of their homeland, and his ancestor had barely been able to keep up with demand.

  It wasn’t until an entry made nearly fifteen years later, when his great-great-great-grandfather must have been about forty years old, that Sime found himself halted in his tracks by the opening line.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Saturday, 26th June 1869

  I sit writing this tonight with a real sense that there is some force that guides our lives in ways that we will never understand. I could, I suppose, attribute it to God. But then I would have to credit Him with the bad as well as the good, and to be truthful I am no longer sure what I believe. Life has treated me well and badly in almost equal measure, but it is the bad that always tests our faith. In a strange way we tend to take the good for granted. But I shall never do that again. Not after today.

  I have been in Quebec City all this week at an exhibition of my work in the old walled town, almost in the shadow of the Château Haldimand. There are sixty works in the exhibition, and today was the final day, with only two paintings remaining to be sold. It was late afternoon and I was preparing to leave shortly when a young lady entered the gallery.

  She was an extraordinarily pretty young woman, which is what immediately drew my eye, although to be honest she was not of the class that one would expect to be visiting an art gallery. I calculated that she was probably in her late teens or early twenties, and while very presentable she was plainly dressed, as you might expect of a maid or a serving girl. But there was something about her that fascinated me, and I could hardly stop myself from watching her as she wandered casually around the gallery moving from one painting to the next. She took some time over each picture, and seemed quite engrossed.

  There were others in the gallery at the time, and I became distracted by a potential buyer asking me questions about one of my unsold works.