At the Scoull Hotel, Daisy sits outside at one of the picnic tables with Hector’s lead tied to the wrought-iron table leg so that he won’t bother the other customers. Mrs Cameron is behind the bar, chatting to her daughter-in-law, who is serving a bevy of visiting yachtsmen and visitors to the campsite in the field behind the hotel.
‘Go back and sit down. I’ll bring a tray out to you,’ Elspeth Cameron says. She’s looking slightly flushed with excitement and she clearly has news of some kind.
When she brings out Daisy’s late lunch, Hector greets her like a long-lost relative.
‘I see you’ve borrowed Cal’s dog!’
‘I had no choice. He was foisted on me. But to be honest, I’m very glad of the company.’
‘You can bring him into the bar, you know. We’re dog-friendly here. Just not into the restaurant.’
‘It’s nice to sit out while the weather’s good.’
Daisy realises that she’s ravenous and falls on the prawn salad sandwich and coffee with enthusiasm. Elspeth Cameron has brought out her own drink as well, a tall spritzer. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’
‘Please do. I’ve only had the dog for company since yesterday. He’s lovely but it’s nice to talk to a human being. I’ve started sorting things out.’
‘Well, if you need help, just say.’
‘Don’t you have enough to do?’
‘Yes, but your place is more interesting. You could have a garage sale.’
‘I could have several and I probably will when I get things organised. I could do it in the old sheds at the front of the house.’
‘So where’s Cal? Has he gone back to Glasgow?’
‘No, I don’t think so. He said he had a restoration job to do down at Carraig. He’s working on a piece of furniture. An old Scots dresser.’
‘He’s a talented lad, that one.’
‘Is he? I wouldn’t know.’
‘He did a couple of pieces of nice old furniture for us. Made a good job of them and didn’t overcharge. Not like some.’ She glances around and lowers her voice. ‘Did he say anything about his father coming over?’
‘His father? No. Not at all.’
‘Have you ever met him, William Galbraith?’
‘Not to my knowledge. I’ve seen pictures of him online and occasionally in the press. Why?’
‘It’s just – he’s here. Arrived on the first ferry of the afternoon. He’s upstairs.’ Her voice sinks almost to a whisper.
‘In the hotel? Why is he staying in the hotel and not down at the cottage?’
‘He always does. Well, he never comes here at all now. Or almost never. But on the few occasions when he does, he books a room here.’
‘Maybe he thinks the cottage is too small.’
‘He used to come over when Cal and Catty were young. But even then not very much. It was Fiona who brought the kids to Garve for the summer. I’m told he came when they were courting, though. That was before we had the hotel. He did quite a bit of painting here back then.’
‘Cal doesn’t seem to rate his new work.’
‘Cal doesn’t rate his father at all. Or his work. But I liked those early pictures. Now he’s changed his style completely. Forgive me, my dear, I know very little about art, but they seem very bleak. Very heavy and grim.’
‘I’d agree with you. But Cal never said his dad was coming. I mean, he was out at Auchenblae yesterday. That was when he brought the dog. To keep me company.’
She thinks about the posy ring, but decides to keep quiet about it for the time being. The fewer people who know about it and the portrait of Lilias the better.
‘He didn’t mention William then?’
‘He never said anything about his father at all.’
‘I don’t think he knows he’s over here then. Oh dear.’
‘I don’t understand. Do they really not get on?’
She can’t imagine Rob arriving anywhere and not wanting to see her. Nothing would be more important. From time to time it occurs to her how lucky she has been to take for granted something that so many other people don’t have. Such unconditional love.
Elspeth leans closer. The windows in the upstairs bedrooms are propped open. Daisy wonders which one Cal’s father has checked into. But surely he can’t possibly hear from up there.
‘They don’t. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but they don’t get on at all. That’s one of the reasons why Cal spends so much time away from Glasgow. Fiona more or less runs the shop, or at least she does all the dogsbody stuff. She does as she’s told. I’ve occasionally seen them together, and my dear husband always remarks that if he ever spoke to me like William speaks to Fiona, he would find a saucepan fitted over his head, and it would probably be made of cast iron. And he’s right.’ Little Elspeth Cameron looks very fierce all of a sudden, her cheeks very pink.
‘I had no idea. He never said anything about it.’
‘He never does. Too concerned for his mum.’
‘He did say something about the restoration work. How he preferred doing that, but his dad said it was just craftwork and not worth bothering with.’
‘That’s the long and the short of it. But I wondered if he knew that William was coming over and now you tell me he doesn’t.’
‘He may know. He doesn’t tell me everything. In fact, I hardly know him.’ Why does she feel the need to stress this? Is she protesting too much?
‘He doesn’t lend Hector to just anyone.’
‘Doesn’t he?’
‘No. But I’m in a quandary. I don’t know whether to phone Carraig and tell him that his dad’s here, or whether I shouldn’t be sticking my nose into things that don’t concern me. That’s what my husband says anyway. That’s his advice. Leave well alone, Elspeth.’
‘Maybe he’s right.’
‘He’s not such a big fan of Cal, that’s the trouble. William’s booked in for an evening meal. I keep wondering what he’s going to do in between times. And why he’s here.’ She gestures towards the car park. ‘That’s his car. You’re parked alongside it.’
‘The big white Jag?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Good grief. I was wondering who owned that. I don’t know whether you should tell Cal or not. I mean, he’ll know soon enough, if his dad turns up on his doorstep, won’t he?’
‘That’s what my husband says as well. Messengers have a habit of getting shot, though.’
‘They do.’
‘You wouldn’t like to tell him? Text him or something?’
‘No!’ She’s appalled at the very idea. Hector gets up, startled by her tone. She scratches him behind the ear and he sits down again. ‘No, I can’t. Mrs Cameron, Elspeth, I don’t know his dad from Adam, do I? If I text him, he’ll know we’ve been talking about him. And that’s awful.’
Elspeth Cameron finishes her spritzer with a sigh. ‘You’re right, of course. But I can’t help thinking it’s not going to be good news. He’s a...’ She hesitates, searching for the right description and finding something unexpectedly poetic. ‘He’s a vortex of negativity that man.’ Then she splutters with laugher. ‘God, will you listen to me?’
‘William?’
‘Yes, of course. Not Cal. Cal’s an angel by comparison. Well, perhaps not an angel, but he wouldn’t do you a bad turn. William could start a fight at a meeting of Quakers. And it’s worse than that. He can be incredibly charming when it suits him. But he also rubs people up the wrong way. He has this unerring instinct for their weak spots. He makes it seem all harmless and coincidental, but afterwards you realise he meant it, meant to be rude. Unless he thinks he can get something out of you. It’s calculated to make you feel small and insignificant. And he does that to Fiona all the time.’
‘I went out with somebody like that once. Just for a couple of months. Found myself thinking I was in the wrong all the time but I couldn’t figure out what I’d done. I kept finding myself apologising to him and then for him as well. He was rude to all my friends.’
‘Exactly.’
‘My dad told me to kick him into touch and after I stopped being angry I could see that he was right.’
‘Even when he stays here, there’ll be complaints. He’ll say nice things and then there’ll be a sting in the tail. The only person I’ve ever known get the better of him was Donal, one time anyway. Donal from Ardachy. William said something quite unpleasant about his wife’s jewellery, damning it with faint praise, you know, and Donal spoke to him in Gaelic. He has some of the language. From his father, Iain. It was Iain’s mother tongue, of course. I think William didn’t know whether it was an insult or a curse but suspected it was a curse, and it unsettled him. He always likes to be in control, that one.’
Now she’s intrigued. ‘I was going to go down and see Cal later on. Take Hector down to say hello. Do you think that would be a good idea? I don’t want to walk in on a row of any kind.’
‘Yes. Maybe you could do that. Galbraith is booked in for an early dinner at six o’clock. He said he didn’t want any lunch so he’d eat dinner early. You could go down then. That way you’d be sure of missing him.’
‘I was going to take some stuff to the charity shop at Keill anyway. So it would be fine. I’ll have a cup of tea if there’s a café or a pub there and wait till almost six.’
‘There’s a pub. The Ferryman’s. They’ll do you some tea.’
‘But I still don’t quite understand the problem.’
‘I can’t explain. I’ve just got a bad feeling about all this and I don’t know why. But I’ll feel a whole lot better if somebody goes down to make sure that everything’s OK. Cal loves the bones of that dog. You and Hector ought to go down and make sure he’s all right.’
*
Mrs Cameron leaves Daisy alone to finish her sandwich in peace. Before she sets off to drive to Keill with the charity shop donations, she puts Hector in the car and heads indoors to the lavatory.
She’s passing through reception when she almost bumps into a tall man who looks vaguely familiar. She realises it’s only because there’s the faintest resemblance to Cal. He’s in his sixties, tall, very slender, with floppy grey hair receding at the temples. Unlike Cal, though, he has pale grey eyes. He has a handsome, hawkish face: lined, distinguished, full of a certain confidence, the kind of man who always walks with his head held high, ignoring anyone he deems to be unworthy of his attention. But perhaps she’s been too easily swayed by Elspeth’s prejudices. Maybe she should give him the benefit of the doubt.
‘Sorry,’ she says, smiling at him. Why do women apologise all the time when there’s nothing to be sorry for? Should she introduce herself?
He doesn’t give her the chance.
‘Oh, excuse me!’ he says, with a brief, chilly glance at her. She’s nobody of note. Keys in hand, he’s heading for his beautiful car, the most expensive in the car park. Her muddy Polo seems remarkably shoddy by comparison. He seems intent on something and very much in a hurry, in his smart leather jacket, a man bag over his shoulder, shiny brown brogues on his feet. There’s an atmosphere of money and sophistication about him that she suspects his son will never quite possess, or even want to possess, no matter how apparently successful he becomes. Cal is good-looking and charming, but charmingly ordinary. This man, striding along with his head in the air, has an elegance about him that seems the epitome of success. Doors will slide open for him. Life will be easy on him. And even if it isn’t easy, he won’t care. He won’t even notice the hurdles, because he’ll walk straight over them, mowing them down in the process, as well as anyone who has the misfortune to get in his way. The door to the car park is open, and she sees and hears Hector making a racket as William passes her car. He is up at the window of the car, barking but wagging his tail at the same time. William casts a look of immense irritation and perhaps puzzled recognition in the dog’s direction. It’s only when he’s gone, folding his long limbs gracefully into the sleek car, that she realises something else about him. Where Cal is all warmth and energy, with a certain vulnerability, there is nothing remotely warm about his father at all.
As soon as he has gone, Elspeth Cameron emerges from the office at the back of the desk like a rotund cuckoo from a clock, to hiss, ‘See what I mean?’
‘He’s a bit...’
‘He’s absolutely full of himself. You go and see Cal. Find out what’s going on. Lend him some moral support. Because nobody else will. Or nobody who can make a difference, anyway.’
All the way along the meandering coast road to Keill, she thinks about this and wonders what kind of difference she can possibly make, what is it that is worrying Mrs Cameron so much? After all, Cal’s a grown man, a significant part of his parents’ antique and fine art business, with talents of his own. William Galbraith is ridiculously successful as an artist, but surely that means that he can do without his son. And surely that would suit Cal himself. He seems to be a gifted dealer with the knack of finding a bargain, but he’s also a clever restorer. If the worst-case scenario involves closing the Glasgow shop – and she can see that Fiona might be finding it a bit of a trial, having to work with the appalling Annabel, day in and day out – then surely she could retire from the shop and do her own thing: research or teaching. Cal could set up his own business, buy and sell online, do restoration and upcycling in Argyll, sell in Glasgow and Edinburgh and further afield. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it’s really none of her business, is it?
‘What am I like?’ she asks Hector, who is on the floor beside her.
Everything is easier when there’s a lot of cash floating about, she thinks, and has to remind herself that if she sells Auchenblae there will be quite a lot of cash floating about in her life as well.
In Keill, she leaves the dog in the car with the window open and drops off several bin bags full of clothes and bric a brac to a pair of delighted charity shop volunteers, retired ladies, and asks the way to the church of St Columba and the adjacent cemetery. When she tells them whose grave she’s looking for, she can see that they’re curious, but politeness prevents them from enquiring too closely.
‘It’s my grandmother,’ she says, taking pity on them.
Now they will be able to place her. They obviously know all about Auchenblae and Viola and everything that has gone before. They direct her to a narrow road at the back of the village. ‘Follow the signs to the distillery,’ they say, which amuses her, but the distillery is apparently a couple of miles beyond the church. She has picked a bunch of wild flowers from the garden and she takes them out of the back of the car.
The headstone is easy to find, because the charity shop ladies have described it to her, one of those ostentatious Victorian affairs, with Viola’s name the last one on it: Viola Neilson, born in 1920 to Hugh Neilson and Lily Galbraith. Lily’s surname startles her for a moment. Could her great-grandmother have been related to Cal’s family in some way? But Galbraith is a common enough island name and like the McNeills there would have been plenty of them. There are other names on the stone: Hugh’s parents, Alexander and Mary Neilson, who both seem to have lived well into old age in the 1950s, with Mary outliving Alexander. Hugh Neilson ‘fought for his country’ but the year of his death is 1921 at the age of thirty, not long after his daughter, Viola, was born. There is no date of death given for Lily on this big, ornate stone, but glancing to one side, she sees a plain granite headstone, very much smaller than the Neilson edifice: ‘Sacred to the memory of Lily Galbraith, beloved daughter of Islay and Iain, who passed away on the 24th December 1930. Sweet flower transplanted to a clime where never comes the blight of time.’
How odd, she thinks. This separation. She senses a story here. Were Lily and Hugh engaged to be married? Had the war intervened? Had Hugh been injured, but not too badly to father a child? Presumably, after his early death, Viola had been brought up by her mother and her Neilson grandparents, who had assumed guardianship after Lily herself died. She notes that after Lily’s death, Viola had clearly remained at Auchenblae, rather than being brought up by her other grandparents, Islay and Iain Galbraith. She thinks, with a little frisson, of her father saying, ‘Viola would have wanted you, and back then she might have got you.’ The Neilson family had clearly been wealthy and powerful. The Galbraiths, possibly tenants, would have fallen in with their wishes. That was the world into which Viola would have been born, even though things were already changing.
Then she notices that, already almost obliterated by yellow crotal, the name Jessica May Neilson has been carved into the big stone between Mary and Viola Neilson. Jessica May, ‘Sadly missed, never forgotten’ without any date at all.
How could she?
How could Viola ignore Jessica’s marriage?
It occurs to her that for a long time, Viola couldn’t have known where her daughter had gone, and had probably found out about her early death only long after the event. Her father had been so worried about Viola claiming custody that he had kept everything as quiet as possible. There had been no newspaper intimations, only a small, sad mention in one or two of the folk magazines; but Viola wouldn’t even have been aware of those. And back then, social media hadn’t got going. It would have been good to have got to know her grandmother. Good to have found out more about her mother and her Neilson forebears, about Hugh and Lily. And why Lily Galbraith, who outlived her husband by only ten years, was buried in a separate grave. It occurs to her that perhaps the answers to some of these questions might lie in Auchenblae. There must be papers somewhere: letters, birth and death certificates perhaps. She’ll have to hunt for them.
There’s an empty stone vase with a metal flower holder, misshapen with age, fitted into it, at the foot of the larger grave. Nothing for Lily. She has brought a plastic bottle from the car. She finds a tap, fills the vase with water and arranges the flowers, but she makes up a separate posy and puts it on Lily’s grave, drenching it with water to keep it fresh.
There’s a church, lower down the hill, dedicated to St Columba, with a stained-glass window of the saint, standing up precariously in a small boat with an island behind him. It makes her think of the islet, Eilean a Cleirich, she can just see from the upstairs windows at Auchenblae. Cal told her that one of Columba’s monks built a cell there and spent his time praying for the souls of the islanders who converted to Christianity. There’s an ancient graveyard there too, where the old lairds and their ladies were traditionally buried. Here, at Keill, she sees the ruins of an older church, a shell only, with more tombstones round about: a mouthful of grey teeth, yellow with crotal. It’s a peaceful place, but sad too.
She’ll come back here again. Where is Lilias buried, she wonders? On the islet maybe? But there are other ancient graveyards on Garve. She has left Hector tied up to the gate and he is delighted to see her all over again. For now, it’s time to find somewhere to get a cup of tea and then she’d better drive down to Carraig and see what has been happening to Cal.