Page 36

WISE FOOL

M idge is a mess. I help get her back inside and then stand there like a spare part while my wife rushes around knowing exactly what to do. Just like old times. Abby is clearly very at home in Sandy and Midge’s house. She puts the kettle on, doesn’t need to ask where the mugs are kept—mugs she made from the look of it—and doesn’t need to ask how Midge likes her tea. She listens patiently to the older woman about how long Sandy has been gone and how worried she is.

I do my best not to get in the way, and pretend to be distracted by looking at some framed photographs on the wall. I don’t remember them being here when I was invited to dinner a few weeks ago, but maybe I just didn’t notice them. I see them now, and can’t stop staring. Some are very old—black-and-white images of relatives I presume, and a faded picture of Sandy and Midge holding a baby outside Saint Lucy’s Church. A christening perhaps. But my attention is focused on a photo of Abby as a child. I’m almost certain that is what I am looking at. The picture shows a birthday cake with the number ten written on it in icing. Abby is sitting next to a blond little girl who looks the same age, and their cheeks are filled with air, preparing to blow out the candles. A younger Sandy and Midge are standing behind them with big smiles on their faces. I wonder if the blond girl is the daughter Sandy lost, which would make her Midge’s niece. I’m sure the dark-haired child is Abby. I gawp at the photo, trying to put together pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know I had to solve, my brain working overtime.

I never met Abby’s parents—they were both dead when we got together. I only met Kitty, her godmother. Abby lived in London with Kitty since she was... ten or eleven, I think? She never mentioned the Isle of Amberly, not once, I would have remembered. I didn’t know she’d even been to Scotland, let alone lived here. I’d suggested us visiting the Highlands so many times, but she always said it was somewhere she had never been and never wanted to go. So why is there a picture of her here as a child with Sandy and Midge?

There is another picture of Abby on the wall, a more recent one.

It’s of my wife on her wedding day.

Not ours.

She is standing with a group of women I recognize from the island: Sandy, Midge, Cora Christie from the corner shop, Mary and Alex the butchers, Arabella from The Stumble Inn, and the Reverend Melody Bates. There are a few faces I don’t recognize, but it looks as though they were all there when Abby married someone else last year. The whole community . She’s still married to me; how can she have married someone else? Confusion and anger pollute every thought inside my head. I could wait, or I could confront them both now. Ask the questions that I want to ask and demand the answers I need. But then Midge starts to cry again and I decide this isn’t the time or place. I feel like an outsider intruding on their grief.

“Sandy is a wise fool. I suspect she knew better than to drive back from the cave when she’d had too much to drink and is walking home. She’ll probably come through the front door any minute. Try not to worry,” Abby says to Midge.

“Would you mind if I used the bathroom?” I ask.

Both women stare at me as though they had forgotten I was here, but it’s Midge who answers. “Of course, you know where it is.”

I leave the kitchen, pass the downstairs bathroom, and creep up the staircase to the first floor instead. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I hurry down the corridor anyway, quietly opening doors and seeing what is behind them. Bedrooms mostly, until I reach what looks like an office. The thing that makes me stop and stare is that one of the walls is covered in newspaper clippings. There are hundreds of them.

I don’t understand what this means.

Before I get a chance to see if the articles were written by Abby, I hear a quiet but unfamiliar sound on the other side of the wall.

Bang, rattle, whoosh. Bang, rattle, whoosh. Bang, rattle, whoosh.

I creep back out onto the landing and follow the sound to a closed door. I slowly lean down until I can peer through the keyhole, and then I see her. The woman I met in the cemetery dressed head to toe in tweed. The one who said I should leave before it was too late. She must be Morag, Sandy’s mother, the woman who kept banging her walking stick on the ceiling when I was here for dinner. She is sitting behind some kind of enormous loom; I think she’s weaving. I stand and try the door handle but it’s locked. Morag knows something, I’m sure she does. If only I could speak to her I might be able to find out what. I lean down again, and this time when I peer through the keyhole there is an eye staring right at me. I leap back.

“You shouldn’t be here. You must leave ,” she hisses. Then she starts banging her walking stick against the back of the door.

I quietly hurry down the stairs and to the kitchen.

“I think your mother might need something—”

“When doesn’t she?” Midge interrupts.

“I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying—”

“My mother wasn’t saying anything. She hasn’t spoken a word or left the house since my father died.”

I heard her speaking. Twice. And I saw her in the graveyard.

“These days she just bangs her stick when she wants something. Sorry, Grady. I didn’t mean to snap at you, but today has been a lot. I’ll go and see to her.”

“Don’t feel as though you need to stay, I’ve got this,” Abby says when Midge has gone.

It’s a relief to get out of the house for all of the reasons, but it feels strange to leave Abby behind when I’ve only just found her. I can’t think of an excuse to stay any longer, and I don’t know whether telling her the truth would be the right thing to do right now. She seems to have a whole new life here. As I walk across the driveway, I glance at the upstairs window and see Morag. She’s frantically waving, almost as though she wants to warn me about something, but maybe she’s just confused. She stands so close to the glass that it starts to mist, then she holds up a crooked finger and writes backward in the condensation. Even from here I can read the letters: leave . She shakes her head sadly then backs away until I can no longer see her. As if she was never there.

I can still smell Abby’s perfume in the car as I drive back toward the cabin. It makes it hard to think about anything else. My mind is blown by the afternoon’s events, and the Land Rover almost swerves off the road twice because I’m too tired to see straight. Too tired to properly process anything that has happened. What I need is sleep, but what I want is whiskey. My wife is alive but she doesn’t remember me, and now she’s married to someone else. If that doesn’t justify a drink in the afternoon I don’t know what does.

As soon as I get inside the cabin I pour myself a glass of scotch—just a small one, since I need to focus or at least try to—then I sit and stare at the ocean while trying to come up with a new plan. The old plan was to get off the island as soon as possible, find out what Kitty meant in her letter, and hope that she liked the new book well enough to sell it and help get my life back on track. There was nothing left to stay here for until I ran into Abby.

Now I don’t know what to do.

So I do what I always do when I don’t know what to do and pour another drink.

One minute I want to know everything about the man she has married, then I want to know nothing. Nothing at all. “The tree doctor,” she called him, as though that was supposed to mean something. As if that might make all of this okay. None of this makes sense. How does someone disappear from the south of England and end up on a remote Scottish island? How can she have no memory of us? Of me? Should I tell her? Once again I find myself facing a moral dilemma with no right answer.

Now that I know she is here I can’t just walk away.

Abby is the only person I have ever truly loved. What if she does remember us one day?

I keep thinking I can hear someone creeping around outside the cabin, so I check that all of the doors and windows are locked. I think about what my doctor said the last time I bothered to go see him, about long-term lack of sleep leading to paranoia, confusion, hallucinations, and all the other great stuff he predicted if I didn’t find a way to switch off, learn to make my mind rest. I take a couple of sleeping pills he prescribed and wash them down with more whiskey.

I start to wonder if I imagined everything that happened today, if it was all just a dream, but then I take the Beautiful Ugly pamphlet from the pottery out of my pocket and there she is, my wife’s familiar face staring right back at me. I pour myself another drink. Then I leave the pamphlet on the desk and take out the walkie-talkie instead.

It isn’t mine, obviously.

I’m just “borrowing” it.

I’m hoping it might help me figure out what is really going on.