I’d begged Mum to explain exactly what it was that they hated so much about Moth, but it was like trying to catch a frog in a bucketful of tadpoles. Each answer almost formed the real reason, but none did so fully: ‘His hair’s too long’, ‘His jeans are ripped’, ‘He’s going to turn into a dirty smelly old man’, ‘He’s lazy’, ‘He doesn’t drive’ – ridiculous answers. But eventually something came close: ‘He’s not like us, he’s a townie.’ There it was, but not quite, a tadpole with legs but still hanging on to its tail.
I was angry, I felt betrayed, but however valid their argument seemed to them I stayed with him anyway. The moment he’d entered my life he’d filled it to the brim; there couldn’t be anyone else. It finally came to a head when we bought a cottage on the outskirts of the village, a tiny house with a long garden: my happiness was uncontainable.
‘Moving in without getting married, that’s disgusting; you’re an embarrassment.’
We worked on the house, drying out the damp, repairing the broken windows and putting in running water and a bathroom, but we didn’t move in. I couldn’t take the final step of defiance. I needed them to love what I loved; I needed them to understand. But there was no stopping it now: the volcano was always going to erupt. It came on a polite Sunday afternoon over a plate of salmon sandwiches and Victoria sponge cake.
‘I’m ashamed of you. You had so many opportunities to marry a farmer. What use is he to you anyway? He has no land. You’ll never be happy without land.’
There it was, croaking, wet, slimy, blinking into the light. A fully formed frog that could never hop back into the bucket of vague suggestion. I was too bound up in the moment to hear what they were really saying, and they didn’t have the words to express themselves. All I heard was, he wasn’t a farmer, so he wasn’t good enough.
We didn’t move into the cottage; instead we got on a train to the Isle of Skye. The registry office on the island was closed for renovations, but had temporarily set up in a spare room at the back of the builders’ merchant in Portree, the capital of the island. For some oddly superstitious reason we spent the night before our wedding in separate bed and breakfasts, meeting in the morning in the car park among the builders’ vans. We were a spectacle, an unexpected source of amusement for the people hanging out of the builders’ merchant’s window, laughing and clapping on a Monday morning. We shone out against the grey tarmac, Moth glowing in a bright cream suit he’d had made by a local tailor, and me in a white dress I’d bought in a Laura Ashley sale. Clothes smuggled north in our rucksacks, hidden from each other on the train. In the dark dusty room we held hands and said yes, absolutely we do, without fear, or doubt, or hesitation, behind a curtain made from hessian sacking that separated us from the shop, while a builder was buying ‘half a pound of lost-head nails’.
The next day we stood on the summit ridge of Bruach na Frìthe in the Black Cuillin. The first day of thousands of days. Clouds rose from the valley behind. Appearing from nowhere to pour over the ridge top in a river of running moisture, clinging to the rocky precipitous side of the hill and sweeping away to dissipate in the warmth below. Our lives stretched ahead, a running river of days as the sun shone overhead in a clear blue sky.
Then we returned to our tiny house, with no plaster on the walls or bed to sleep on, but overflowing with hope and enthusiasm.
We still had to tell my parents what we’d done. We’d sat on the mounded oak roots in the Park as my stomach churned and I tried to breathe, in the moments before we walked down to the house and unfolded the marriage certificate on the kitchen table. I’d lain on the grass there as a child during the lambing season. I’d been sent to bring a ewe and her lamb back to the farmyard. As I lifted the just-born lamb, making little lamb bleating noises to encourage the new mum to follow, I realized she was about to give birth to another, so put the lamb down and stopped to wait. Lying on the grass, the cool earth damp beneath me and white clouds drifting overhead, the ewe lying next to me as the second lamb slipped into life, I knew something stronger, more powerful than anything I’d known in my short life. It was all one: the earth, the grass, the ewe, me, the clouds. Just one huge whole, one cycle of completeness. I wasn’t on the earth but of the earth. It was a profound, deep molecular understanding that shaped the rest of my childhood and kept me separate from other children, and attracted me to Moth; it would allow me to survive homeless on a cliff top with awe and inspiration; and on that day it saw me walking to my family home, about to cut the cord between myself and my parents so savagely that it could never really mend. But their words still rang in my ears: You’ll never be happy without the land.
I’d moved into the dying room with Mum, sleeping on the upright chair by her bed. Nurses came and went, tending to her needs; doctors came, looked at her and then left, saying, ‘Not long now’; the air in the room shut down in still, suffocating finality. In the dimly lit corridors of the hospital, each night a man came shuffling from the men’s ward in his striped pyjamas, entered the women’s stroke ward and went to the bedside of the same frail old lady. Each night he held her hand and talked to her: ‘Mum, wake up. Mum, take me home. I need to go home.’ Each night as he shook her awake and she shouted that she was being attacked, the nurses would come and quietly escort him away. She wasn’t his mum, but somewhere in the darkness at the end of his life he was looking for the way back to the beginning.
Four days passed, then ten, and still the doctors came, ticked their boxes and said, ‘Not long now.’ Mum’s eyes opened occasionally, looking at me for long moments, then at the bright light of the window, but mainly they stayed focused at the end of the bed, before closing again. Her breathing became heavier and the pneumonia crept back, drying her mouth and blocking her throat. Days became a series of long-drawn-out seconds, crawling into minutes. I listened constantly for a variation in breathing, any sign that the agony of watching her go would end soon, but nothing changed and the days dragged on.
I began to understand that nurses aren’t allowed to tell you about anything except practicalities and mid-level doctors are programmed to pass you on to the consultants, so to catch one of those as he flew past was the only way to get an answer. Waiting for an unending time in the corridor, afraid that if I looked away he would pass like a wisp of smoke, I watched as desperately ill people were wheeled into the ward and then as one was transferred to an identical room opposite Mum’s, the family following, heads bowed and weeping. I was back in the corridor two days later when they shut the door on a quiet, still body, shaking hands with the nurses and leaving for the last time. The faces on the ward changed, people went home, their lives shaken and altered by strokes, but went home all the same, and finally on the third day I caught one. He looked briefly at Mum, ticked a box and was about to vanish when I stopped him.
‘You said three to four days, so why is she still here? If I’d known, if you’d explained …’
‘Most old ladies on this ward are frail, but your mum, she’s strong, she has a willpower to keep going. But soon, now the pneumonia’s here.’
The walls of a dark pit of self-recrimination began to rise around me. If she had the will to keep going now, against all the odds, maybe, just maybe, if I’d allowed them to insert the feeding tube it might have bought her time to recover. Had I chosen to allow her to die when she could have recovered? I went back to her room, pulled a blanket of horror over myself and listened to her harsh breaths.
‘You’re doing yourself no favours here, duck. She’s going nowhere today. Get out of this place for a bit – you’ll feel better.’
That word ‘duck’, that colloquial word, it bore the sound of childhood and home and belonging. I looked at the nurse as she held my arm and guided me to the door. I hadn’t met her before, but something in that one simple word made me trust her enough to put my coat on and leave.
With no thought or sense of reason, I returned to the woods. It seemed so obvious; it was the only place to be. I had to be there, safe, held. Exhausted but alert with a numb, hollow fear, I lay on the dry bed of pine needles and watched the sun move across the sky between the dark branches.
I left the wood, past the black stump of the old elm tree. It had been a tall, mature tree, growing alone on the hillside, burrowed under by rabbits and giving shelter to cattle as they stood beneath its branches, swishing away flies with their tails on hot summer days. It seemed to have the strength to live forever, and yet one night at the end of summer, when I was only seven, just before the start of school, Dad had woken me to get dressed and go outside.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Still in bed.’
This felt momentous. It had never happened before: he’d woken me to take me out into the adult world of night.
‘You have to see this. I’ve never seen it before; you’ll never see it again.’
I held Dad’s weather-cracked hand and followed him into the field behind the house.
‘Dad, why? Why have you set the tree on fire?’
‘I haven’t.’
The elm that had stood alone in the field for possibly two hundred years was alight. Vast, leaping flames engulfing the branches, bursting into the black sky with bright orange heat. So much power released from one tranquil, green, shady habitat.
‘But why is it burning?’
‘I don’t know. It’s as if it lit itself, as if it chose to burn.’
During all the years I shared with that practical man, who prided himself on ‘calling a spade a spade’, this was the closest that he ever came to wonder. As the bright light lit his face, that’s what I saw: awe and wonder at the spectacle, a reaction so profound that I was witnessing it being burnt into his psyche. As the tree crashed to the ground and we cowered from the ferocity of flying sparks and burning branches, I could feel something in his hard-worked hands soften. The tree continued to blaze on the ground, but nothing else around it caught fire; it burnt alone. The tree released its own intense life heat, and all around it the night stayed still and calm; the cows grazed and the stars didn’t go out. As the flames subsided we walked back to the house; he was silent, but I could still see his face lit by a natural magic.
I walked away from the stump, a mass of intense emotions that I could barely name. My past, my present, my family and in there, amongst it all, Moth, casting a shadow across every day with the knowledge that this wasn’t the only choice I would have to make. That the choice I’d made for my mum I would have to face for him too. Or would he choose his own time? Choose his own moment to let go of his bright green light and say, This is the most perfect day I’ll ever see, and for that to be enough. I pushed the thought back into the shadows. Not now, not now.
In the churchyard the truth of life was laid out in neat rows. The farmers from the village, my grandad, the people from the cottages, the old estate owner and his family, my aunt and uncle. Everyone who had peopled the village of my childhood were there, collected together with my dad. I knelt by his grave, ripping the long grass from around the headstone with my hands and putting fresh flowers in the holder. I couldn’t feel peace there, just a sense of them all gone, sucked into the vortex of life that drew them all into the cold ground of a windy hillside. The weight of death was crushing me in visions of Moth standing at the church gate, waiting his turn.
‘Dad, please. I can’t take this, she can’t go on like this, please come and get her, please.’
Feeling the pull of the hospital, I called back at the cottage and had my first shower for days, did some washing and looked for a book to read through the long hospital nights. She still had a box of books taken from the shelves in my old bedroom. I’d taken a few over the years, but somehow that box hadn’t been collected. Fingering the yellowed pages and folded corners of books I’d loved in my childhood and teenage years, I spotted one I didn’t know so well. The ruined house on the cover was familiar but the contents were elusive, blurred by time. I put Mum’s clean things in a bag and the battered old copy of Copsford by Walter J. C. Murray on top.