She parks the car outside the swing gate and holds it open to let Hector through. He disappears round the side of the house, delirious with delight at being home again. The world would be a nicer place if people could be as open to joy as most dogs. She hears a couple of barks of recognition and then silence, except for the usual chorus of birdsong and the sound of sea on shore. She ventures round the house more slowly. The back door is standing open, but there’s no sign of Cal. She becomes aware of a distant banging sound, like somebody hammering in nails. It stops and starts again. Perhaps he’s working on something. She pokes her head in at the cottage door and is alarmed to see pieces of smashed porcelain on the floor but it’s only a broken mug, a splatter of coffee beside it.
Hector rushes in, laps at the coffee, sneezes and rushes out again. She follows him as he trots into the lean-to at the side of the house. She hasn’t been in here before, but it’s more spacious than she realised: a room tagged onto the house, where Cal and his sister had once slept during their island visits. Now, there’s a long bench, tools, the usual clutter of a working craftsman. Cal is sitting on a high stool, leaning on the bench. There’s a heap of wooden drawers, large and small, in front of him. He’s been working on them, or trying to, but he’s not working now. He’s sitting there, staring into space. Hector jumps up and paws at him, but he pushes the dog away, not violently but more brusquely than usual. Hector decides he’s not wanted and disappears into the garden. To her considerable alarm, Daisy sees that Cal is holding a hammer. He seems to have been bouncing it, rhythmically and persistently, against the hard wooden bench, making little dents all along the edge of it. As she watches him, he starts up again.
‘Cal!’ she says, but he doesn’t seem to hear her. She’s unwilling to go any closer. It strikes her that she doesn’t know him well at all, and they are surrounded by potentially dangerous implements: knives, files, chisels, saws and hammers. ‘Cal,’ she says again, more loudly.
He stops hammering, gives himself a shake and looks at her. ‘Daisy!’ he says, dully. ‘What are you doing here?’
He looks absolutely furious. Not with her, but furious all the same. His dark brows are gathered together in a frown and his eyes are gleaming with suppressed rage.
‘Just visiting. I’ve been to Keill. To the charity shop and the cemetery.’ She finds herself trying to distract him. ‘I took some flowers to Viola’s grave. We passed your road end on the way back. I thought you might like to see Hector. Maybe not, though.’
He follows her gaze, looks at the hammer in his hand, says, ‘Oh, sorry. What am I thinking?’ and sets it down, carefully. His face clears.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks, although it’s clear that he’s far from OK.
He runs his hand through his hair, shakes himself again, like Hector. ‘Not really,’ he says, but he’s smiling at her and looking more like himself. ‘But all the better for seeing you.’
‘Come inside. I’ll make tea or something.’
‘Yeah. Or something.’ He gets off the stool and heads for the back door. She wonders how long he’s been sitting there, hammering viciously at his bench.
‘Be careful where you walk. I broke a mug.’
They pick up the pieces and put them in the bin. She mops up the spilled coffee with some kitchen towel.
‘My father was here.’
‘Cal, I was in the hotel. I saw him there. Elspeth Cameron was worried about you.’
‘Did she send you down to rescue me?’
‘I was going to come anyway. But did you not know he was coming?’
‘He never says. Just turns up and expects everyone to fit in with his plans. Which they usually do.’
He goes over to a cupboard and fetches out a bottle of Eilean Garbh malt and two glasses. He pours himself a large measure and holds up the bottle to her, raising his eyebrows.
She shakes her head. ‘I’m driving.’
‘You could stay again.’
‘OK. Just a small one.’ She could stay for a while, drive later.
The spirit is extraordinarily peaty with a definite tang of iodine. It catches in her throat but she can feel the wonderful warmth of it spreading through her. She could get used to it. He downs his own drink in one and pours himself another. ‘That’s better.’
‘What’s happened, Cal? Is there something wrong in Glasgow?’
‘The only thing that’s wrong in Glasgow is my fucking father.’
The raw viciousness of this alarms her all over again, but she waits quietly for him to calm down and explain. He’s practically trembling with rage. Vibrating with it.
He sighs, shakes his head. ‘He wants to put this place on the market.’ He drinks again, gazes at the floor. ‘A holiday cottage by the sea with potential for development. It’ll sell in no time at all.’
‘This place?’ She looks around. This is only her second visit but even she can see how much Cal treasures it. What a sanctuary it seems to be for him. ‘Why would he do that? Do they need the money?’
Cal bursts out laughing but it’s obviously not very funny. ‘No. Of course he doesn’t need the fucking money, hen. He’s rolling in it. You should see his personal VAT bill, the one for his art sales. And that’s nothing to do with the shop. A separate business altogether.’
‘Then I don’t understand. Doesn’t he know how you feel about it? How much you love it?’
‘Of course he knows. That’s one of his reasons for doing it. He likes to be in control and this is just another way of making sure everyone including me is under his thumb.’
She’s speechless for a moment or two. The thought of her dad, of Rob, doing something similar, is so far beyond her imagination that it’s hard to understand why any father would contemplate doing it to a child, unless in desperate circumstances.
‘Why?’ she says again. ‘I mean, what’s in it for him?’
‘What’s in it for him is that he thinks I’ll have to go back to Glasgow and take over running the shop. He sees this as my bolthole. My sanctuary. Which it is, of course. He thinks I make excuses to be here all the time, working on my fancy bits of furniture. Upcycling. You should have heard the way he spat that word out!’
Maybe he does make excuses to be here all the time. The thought had certainly crossed her mind, although she can’t say that to him now.
‘Can he do it?’ she asks instead.
‘Of course he can do it.’
‘But what about your mother?’
‘Well, yes. Her name is on the deeds right enough.’
‘I thought the house was in her family originally.’
‘It was. But she added his name when they got married. She once told me she wanted to share everything with him, and he was painting over here back then.’
‘So it’s in both their names?’
He looks exasperated, as though she’s being obtuse. ‘Yes, of course. She would have a say in it. As his wife. But you know, Mum tends to do as she’s told. And if he wants to sell, that’s what he’ll do.’
‘Does she? Do as she’s told, I mean?’ This is more or less what Mrs Cameron said too. But Fiona hadn’t struck her as being particularly meek.
‘Oh, Daisy, you don’t know the half of it. Years of living with my dad.’ He shakes his head. ‘What do they call it now? Coercive control? Gaslighting.’
‘Surely not!’
‘It’s hard to prove. Impossible really. It’s so well hidden and he’s so bloody charming in public. Or he can be, when it suits him.’
She remembers Mrs Cameron talking about a ‘vortex of negativity’. She had thought her overly dramatic, but perhaps not.
She hesitates, drinks some more of the whisky, almost whispers, ‘Is he violent?’
He shakes his head again but seems unperturbed by the question. ‘No. That’s not the way he operates. It’s all words, all to do with control. He’s a very strong character and a very attractive character, Daisy, and when you pair that with the kind of success he’s had, everyone thinking how wonderful he is, telling mum how lucky she is... God, he’s the most selfish individual I’ve ever known. It took us years and years to understand it. How afraid she’d become of crossing him. As though the sky might fall if she challenged him. I don’t know what she was like before she met him, but people have told me everything was different.’
It strikes her again that she has met people like that in the past, people who seem able to exert an unreasonable pressure. Often deeply attractive men. It’s how they do it. One or two of her friends have been involved with men like this and she has seen how they work, finding fault, quarrelling with friends and family, gradually detaching their partner from their circle of support, and all for their own good. Allegedly.
‘I think it was here that we first noticed it, though. Me and Catty, I mean. We used to get off the ferry and come here for the whole summer. The three of us. I always remember, the first thing we did, after we’d opened the door and put the bags inside, we’d go straight down to the beach. We’d be running about, making sure everything was as it should be: the rocks, the dunes. One year there’d been a terrible spring gale and a high tide and the sea had eaten into the sand hills. As though a giant had taken big bites out of it. And the salt had burned all the young leaves in the garden. We hated that. We liked everything to be the same.’
‘I used to feel like that whenever I went to stay with my gran in Ayr. I hated it if she’d redecorated, or moved furniture around.’
‘Anyway, Mum would be sitting on a rock and just breathing. We didn’t notice so much when we were little kids, but when we hit our teens we did. I remember Catty saying to me, “Isn’t she different? Isn’t Mum different on Garve?” And she was. All the tension just drained out of her. It was as though she could be herself here. Until there was the occasional short visit from Dad, and then she’d change again. He was forever telling her she was doing things wrong: her driving, the garden, the cooking, the way things were here in the house, the fact that we’d go down to the beach in our pyjamas if we wanted to. The only saving grace was that he never stayed. He’d go and we’d all breathe a sigh of relief and get back to the way we were.’
‘Is that why she doesn’t come here much now? He doesn’t want her to?’
‘That’s about it. When we were kids, he wanted the peace and quiet, so he was quite happy for her to bring us here. Now he needs her in the shop and for making sure the house runs the way he likes it. So she doesn’t come. She always says she can’t get away. But she could. Annabel could manage the shop perfectly well. Even Catty comes here sometimes, with the kids. They make do, bring camp beds.’
‘So he wants you to run the shop?’
‘He wants me there. I think even he realises it’s getting a bit too much for my mum. They’re not getting any younger, and he doesn’t want to do it full time, or even part time, but he doesn’t want to let it go either. He could, you know. He could sell up. Just paint.’
‘But wouldn’t you miss the income from it? I mean you, yourself.’
‘I’d manage. You trade online, don’t you? I have a big fat book of contacts now. I could do some buying and selling, but concentrate on the restoration side of it. It’s Dad who likes having a shop window for his pictures. But I think, most of all, he likes us to be there, under his thumb. He’s like Hector, only without the good nature. He gets uneasy when he doesn’t know where we all are and what we’re doing.’
Hector hears his name, pokes his head briefly round the door in case there’s any dinner in evidence and wanders off again.
‘But your sister must have got away.’
‘She did and he’s never quite forgiven her for it. Or Garve for that matter. She met Jake at a ceilidh in the Keill village hall. He was over here on farm business. At some level, I think Dad blames the whole island!’
‘It sounds almost pathological. I mean, it could have been worse. She could have run off, like my mum.’
He smiles, grimly. ‘It is pathological.’
‘Can’t you – I don’t know? Buy this place yourself?’
‘You mean sell my heavily mortgaged house in Glasgow?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Besides, I have to be there sometimes, and I can’t live under the same roof as him when I am. And even if I could sell, I’d never get a mortgage on this place – it needs too much modernisation – and it would be long gone. He’d never let me buy it. He’d take a cut in the price before he’d let me do that.’
‘Does your sister know about all this yet?’
‘No. She’ll be horrified. But there’s nothing she can do either. They don’t exactly make a fortune and what they do have goes back into the farm or they spend it on the kids.’
He looks around in desperation. ‘Christ, Daisy, I love this place. The best bits of my childhood were spent here. I can’t bear it. If I can’t come over to the island, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
She can’t help herself. She feels so much pity for him that she goes over to him and embraces him. Then he’s pulling her into his arms and kissing her fiercely, desperately. She can hardly remember how they find themselves in the bedroom, but she knows he closes the door and jams a chair against it. ‘Hector,’ he says, succinctly.
The bed is unmade but the bed linen is clean. It all smells of Fiona’s lavender, like everything in the house. They struggle to get their clothes off, reluctant to part even for a moment. His lips are warm and dry. They taste of whisky, but so do hers. He fumbles around in the bedside drawer and emerges with a condom.
‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think I had any. I don’t do this all the time. I really don’t do this all the time.’
She stops his words with another kiss, desperate for him, for his long, strong, whip-thin body. It’s ridiculously quick, this first time. They want each other too much and come quickly, together, laughing at themselves, at their sudden undeniable craving for each other, lying back on the pillows and on the crumpled sheet, the duvet a tangle at the foot of the bed.
‘God, that was good!’ he says. ‘Almost worth...’ He hesitates.
‘Worth what?’
‘I was going to say, almost worth having to suffer my pitiful father.’
‘I didn’t ... it wasn’t...’
‘Out of pity. I know that, sweetheart. You’re going to stay the night, right?’
She nods. ‘But have you...’
‘Any more of these things? I don’t know. I’ll have to have a hunt around. Let’s hope so, eh? Otherwise I’ll have to get myself to the hotel.’
‘The hotel?’
‘There’s a machine.’
‘Ah, of course!’
‘Can you imagine it?’ he says, and there’s genuine laughter in his voice this time, laughter that bubbles up and infects her. ‘Can you fucking well imagine it? I might meet my father in there. Just as I’m putting a coin in the slot.’
She spends the night in his bed. He finds another condom at the back of the drawer and they wake at first light to make love again, this time more slowly, just as enjoyably. He’s considerate, a kindly but passionate lover. Unselfish. She can see that she will have to be careful with this one. Never before has it occurred to her so soon and so swiftly in a relationship that here is a man she might love. He’s immensely loveable. And they fit well together. She feels comfortable with him, but given his troubles with his father, given his background, she can see that he might not be a straightforward man to love. The physical side is one thing, but he clearly has, to use the cod psychology term, baggage. And she’s mature enough to see that unpacking those bags might just be beyond her capabilities, no matter how much her overwhelming desire for him is currently clouding her judgement.
‘Is your dad coming back?’ she ventures to ask, as they are eating breakfast together, her bare feet resting on his, under the table.
‘Lord, no.’ He looks bleaker than he has since last night. ‘No. He gave me his ultimatum. He’ll be putting this place on the market at the end of June, so I’m to clear out my stuff before then. But it isn’t all my stuff. A lot of it belongs to my mum’s family. He’s going off on the first ferry. Doesn’t want to hang about. Tell you what, though. He took his two lousy pictures with him!’ He gestures at the wall, where she sees two blank spaces where the small rock pool studies were hung.
‘What a plonker!’
He starts to laugh, genuine laughter again. At least he’s seeing the funny side of it all. He can’t help himself. ‘Exactly. He is. He’s a plonker. But sadly, he’s a plonker with power. And an unimpeachable reputation.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to phone Catty later on, once she’s got the kids off to school. We’ll have a chat about it. You’re going to have to meet her, you know. Otherwise you’ll think my entire family is crazy, and she’s reasonably sane and sensible now. Well, compared to the rest of us she is.’
‘I’d love to meet her.’
‘I think you’ll get on.’
‘Am I sane and sensible too?’
‘You know what I mean. In one way she’s as mad as a box of frogs. I’m sure that’s what my father thinks.’
‘I do know what you mean. Listen, why don’t you come to the house later? To Auchenblae? You can let me know what she says. You’re going to have to think about all this, aren’t you?’
‘I am.’
‘Don’t make any hasty moves.’
‘You mean like last night.’
‘No. You can make those hasty moves as often as you like. I mean with this house. Don’t let yourself be bullied.’
‘It’s kind of hard not to when he has all the best cards in his hand.’
‘But he doesn’t. You only think that. He’s made you think that. You’re a grown man with all kinds of talents. When push comes to shove, he can’t dictate to you any more. He just thinks he can and he’s got you thinking he can as well.’
‘You’re right of course. It’s just...’ He looks around, sadly. ‘Here. Garve. I can’t bear to lose this.’
‘Where there’s a will there’s a way.’
‘Aye right,’ he says. ‘Talking of wills, I suppose I could just bump him off. That would be one way out of it.’ She thinks he might almost be serious. But then he grins at her again. ‘I don’t mean it. If he crashes his car on the way down the side of Loch Lomond, it wisnae me, hen. I didn’t tamper with his brakes.’
‘We’ll work something out between us. And until then, hell mend him.’
‘Hell mend him,’ he says, raising his coffee cup in a salute.