I OPENED THE SLOE GIN AND CANCELLED MY TICKET home. You can’t leave a house with a goose in it. You certainly can’t sell it. I told Mateo I wasn’t finished and then procrastinated on signing the condo paperwork. The gin was delicious.
As the days grew warmer and longer, I found I could read in the orchard late into the evening, if I had a sweater around my shoulders. I worked through all Felicity’s letters but felt no further ahead. The goose built a second nest under the apple trees and kept the grass trimmed.
In Gran’s living room, I looked at maps, tracing the coastline with my finger – Gullane, Dirleton, then inland to Drem, East Fortune and Athelstaneford. In her letter, Gran had suggested that I explore. North Berwick along the coast, the islands and Tantallon. It would be a long day for the goose alone at the bungalow, and I didn’t fancy the greeting I’d get when I returned. So I’d need to take her in the car and just how was I going to make that work? I covered the backseat with towels and layered them with large handfuls of grass so that she’d have something to graze on. Then I opened all the doors wide, stepped back and hoped. And in she hopped, surprise surprise, and she settled right down in the backseat.
The drive was worrying, but she kept quiet with her wings folded. I was lucky. Well, some people drive with dogs, don’t they? I was just pulling into the car park at Tantallon Castle, out past North Berwick, when I realized the goose had fallen asleep. When I turned the engine off, I could hear her gentle snores.
I opened the windows wide and shut the door as softly as I could. The car park was almost empty. Luckily. She wouldn’t be disturbed.
I bought a ticket in the small visitors’ centre and crossed a wooden footbridge towards a ruined gatehouse. The grass was closely trimmed and neat, carefully kept, and there was Izaak, standing with an easel and facing the sea. The gravel on the path crunched under my feet and he turned, then smiled.
‘You again, I see. And on your own this time? That goose has flown?’
‘No … she’s …’
‘Ah, then. Still under siege. And so, you have come looking for doo’cots. Me too. Come and see.’ He fluttered his hands, beckoning, and I stepped close. In the background of his sketch, the Bass Rock sat like an iceberg in the water of the Forth. In the morning light, it looked stark and stately, and the doo’cot stood on the grass like a landlocked reflection. Its roof was stepped and, in the sky above, a faint moon was clear and almost full, a thumbprint on the blue.
Izaak held a charcoal pencil elegantly in his fingers. ‘How is it?’
‘Perfect. The balance is just right.’
‘Yes, I thought it was. I hoped so. Thank you.’ He pulled another pencil from his pocket and added a few smudging lines to the surface of the moon. ‘It is difficult to show just what the eye sees, I find. Especially when the face is so familiar. We should all be able to draw her in our sleep for all that we see her, but we can’t. She can be difficult.’
A couple walked past us, their dog on a lead, pulling them across the grass towards the doo’cot. It was greyer than the ruddiness of the castle, and blind with no windows.
‘Perhaps you look for ideas of a goose house?’ he asks, grinning. The wind unsettled the pages on his sketchbook and his eyes looked bright and wet.
‘No, she’s fine on the chair in the living room. Well, almost fine. She’s laying eggs all over the place. And I’m not sure what she’s going to do when I leave.’
‘Tricky. You cannot leave her inside the house and you cannot take her with you. You have a wild-goose problem.’
‘I just need to find a bird rescue centre or something.’
‘When do you go?’
‘I don’t know. I need to sort that out, too. And decide about the house. And …’
Izaak put away his charcoal pencil in his pocket and pulled out a large white handkerchief. ‘I ask too many questions – I apologize,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘You were right to worry about me – an old man who cannot mind his own business. I do not have your grandmother’s grace, I’m afraid. But I’ve remembered her story about godly geese. I found an old notebook of mine from the war and I’d jotted her story there, next to a sketch of a skein of geese out over your bay. She said the Celts saw geese as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Fitting, I thought, because what is God if not free and maybe unpredictable, too? Wild and calling somewhere high above our heads, making us look up.’
‘That is a good image,’ I said.
‘Yes, I thought so too. Compelling.’ He fussed with his jacket buttons. ‘I wonder if it’s true. Hard to know what anyone really thought when you stretch back so far, isn’t it?’
Yes, I thought. In many ways, but he was following his own train of thought and didn’t wait for an answer.
‘But they might have needed it – whoever came up with the story. A necessary fiction. Things were difficult during the war. They might have needed that kind of divine wildness.’ He shook out his handkerchief, then folded it carefully and inserted it back in his pocket. ‘You know, I think your grandmother would like that idea. And she would like your goose, too, I imagine.’
‘But what do you think she would do about it?’ I asked, seeing the eggs on the kitchen floor. The nest in the armchair. The mess of gooseness all over the carpets. Izaak shrugged, smiling.
‘Likely make omelettes. Pragmatic, don’t you think?’
I left Izaak on the lawn with his sketching and headed towards the castle ruins, the clouds shifting overhead. As the sun hit my face, I turned towards it and I noticed the doo’cot’s roof also faced south, angled to catch the sunshine and shelter from the northern winds. Clever, that. A well-thought-through design. Stepping inside, I found the space above me higher than I expected. And still. So quiet the blood thrummed in my ears, and the space, too, was divided rhythmically. I could see why Izaak liked these places. There was space here for a thousand roosting birds, and for each one, a perch, a nest, a space to be inside this honeycombed bell, this house full of letterboxes.
Of course, letters are written to be delivered. Delivered and read. Like all the letters in Gran’s boxes. Read and saved to be read again. There may have been others; there probably were. Misplaced, discarded. Slipped into books or piles of newspapers and forgotten. Burnt even. But the letters in Gran’s house were the letters she’d saved and left for me. Maybe she even thought they were necessary. Hard to tell without asking. A box of letters can hold such a lot. Or such a little.
The letters I left at Birthwood were still unread. I’d chosen that. Felicity had said that I didn’t need to open them until I wanted to. That when I did, I could read about my father’s family history. She’d never made me feel anxious about what I might find. It was just a box of additional information, should I want it at some stage. But I’ve always thought I knew enough. Enough came through. Not the details like dates, place names and the names of wild flowers, but stories enough. Pulse through an eggshell. Wind in a sail. The love that sustains.
* * *
Back at the car, the goose was awake and preening her feathers. I unlocked the door and she looked at me, blinking.
‘Hey, you. Snooze well?’
A quiet, rusty squonk.
‘You want out? A bit of fresh air? The grass here looks nice for grazing.’ I opened the door wide, but she stayed put, so I reached in and ruffled her feathers. That’s what she liked – not a stroke like a cat, but a bit of a muss, my fingers digging into the warmth between her feathers. She stretched up towards me, leaning in, then when I stopped, she shook out her head, amicably, and honked. ‘Well then, goose, time to be heading off, I guess. Home? Yeah, home.’
Driving back towards Aberlady, I noticed all the old stone walls. Must have been thoughts of castle ruins in my mind or the way the stones fitted together. Or maybe just the beauty of the overhanging chestnut trees with their broad-fingered leaves and the last of their candles fading as summer crept in. In places, the wall was difficult to see at all amidst all the green, and I wondered how long it would stand. I thought of the useless fences in the woods at home, the way the forest claimed the land. How long before this coastline would grow wild again, if given the chance? Before the stone walls disappeared into the trees, the trimmed castle grounds grew tangled with dune grass and the concrete blocks by the coast started to crumble? Or for the road itself to crack and grow green with long grasses, the creek to flood and the sea shift inland, drowning the fields and the walls, changing everything.
A strange thought. Or maybe a lonely, or just a tired one. I parked the car and when I opened the door, the goose pushed past me, rushing to get out.
‘Hey, easy there. Lots of space out here.’
She flapped her wings and, in a slim moment, was up on her stump again, standing sentinel and looking out over the bay.
‘See? You’re back, aren’t you, goose?’ She’d need a name, I thought. I couldn’t just keep calling her ‘goose’. It didn’t seem friendly. I’d think of something.
She turned towards me and stretched her wings. The wind ruffled her feathers and I felt it catch my own hair, too. Then she called – a long sustained cry, tossing her head back and calling again and again in broken song. A flutter in my heart at the sound. She shook out her wings, caught the air and took flight. With slow, easy wing beats, she flew over the water, over the bridge towards the dunes and then back to the shore, turning, circling, still calling. I watched her, a sketch on the sky, her wings wonderful. Then, she headed out towards the mouth of the bay. Out past the sand spit, out to open water where the surface caught the light. I didn’t need to wonder then. I knew she was flying away.
Inside, the house felt empty. Fragile and porous.
The kitchen clock ticked. A seashell rested on the mantelpiece among the photographs. A feather lay fallen on the floor. Then the wind blew in through the open window as it did every evening. It blew right through me, unsettled the petals in the garden, every leaf trembling, and knocked the apples from the tree, the eggs from every basket, and unfettered my heart like a field gone wild. All things become themselves in time. Every necessary thing.
When I came down to earth, I stood by the mirror and watched the reflections and the changing light. Then I sat at the desk, picked up Gran’s pen and started to write a letter home.