The Restless Sea. Vanessa de Haan
…’
‘Did Munro show you how to light the stove? Don’t you love it? It’s my favourite place in all the world. So special …’
Olivia swallows, aware that the men are watching her. ‘It’s just,’ she says. ‘It’s just … so … so lonely.’
‘Such bliss.’
‘But couldn’t I stay here? I’d so love to catch up with you …’
‘There’ll be plenty of time for catching up. I can’t wait to show you about the place …’
‘But I really don’t want to stay down there. Isn’t there a spare bed here?’
Aunt Nancy’s smile is beginning to look a little worn. ‘There just isn’t enough room at the moment, what with Commander Shaw and Brigadier Worthington here.’ The men nod apologetically. ‘And more arriving tomorrow.’
‘But I’m your niece!’
‘And these are my guests …’
‘But what will I do? There’s no one to help me …’
‘There’s Munro …’
‘I don’t think Munro wants anything to do with me …’
‘Hush, hush.’ Her aunt is holding up her hand. She ushers her out into the hall. ‘Now what exactly is the problem?’ she asks.
Olivia starts to list. ‘There’s no bath.’
‘There’s a tin bath in the shed.’
‘How am I meant to fill it?’
‘From the tap.’
‘You mean with a bucket?’
‘You’re jolly lucky there’s running water. I had it put in especially for you. We used to have to fetch it from the burn.’
‘There’s no electricity.’
‘Did Munro not show you where the oil lamps are kept?’
‘I don’t know how to light a fire.’
‘Munro will show you.’
‘I don’t know how to cook.’
‘Then it’s about time you learnt.’
‘I want to go home.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I’ll take myself.’
‘The station is at least a twenty-four-hour walk …’
‘Surely Munro can give me a lift?’
‘No one will give you a lift. There’ll be petrol rationing soon, and besides, your mother has asked me to keep you here. Now pull yourself together. You’re making a scene. I can’t think what my sister is doing bringing up a creature with no idea how to think or do anything for herself. Do you know what I was doing at your age?’
Olivia does not reply.
‘I was driving ambulances in France for injured and dying men. You think living in a warm cottage by the side of a loch, where your family have sent you to be safe, is a hardship? I could tell you things that would fill your childish slumbers with nightmares. I could tell you how I watched your uncle bleed to death before I could get him home. And now here you are, in his home, safely. I do not want to hear such nonsense again. Now stand up straight and behave as a woman of your standing should. With a bit of bloody backbone and some good grace.’
Olivia swallows, shamefaced. She has only met her aunt a couple of times. She had been fooled into thinking that she was like her sister, Olivia’s mother, a quiet and kind, gentle person. But this steely creature whose young life was forged in that Great War is nothing like her. In the dark of the great hall, poor, dead Uncle Howard stares down at them through the gloom, handsome in his olive-green army uniform and peaked cap, painted into a frame from which he will remain for ever twenty-five years old.
Aunt Nancy pats her shoulder. ‘Now,’ she says. ‘I’ve said my piece and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s done and dusted. Come and have some tea and meet the brigadier and commander properly.’
Olivia hopes her cheeks will stop burning before she re-enters the drawing room.
After that first afternoon, Olivia resigns herself to this temporary new life. There is no time to mope: Aunt Nancy is determined that her niece will be useful, helping in the garden and on the farm now that all the young men have rushed off to join up. She soon has Olivia digging for potatoes with Greer the gardener, hauling creels in and out of the water with Munro, wheeling manure, drying seeds, not to mention plucking pigeons with the maid and cook, who she now knows as Clarkson. Her time in the bothy is spent reading through the cobwebbed copies of books on the shelves, learning by trial and error how to cook, how to keep the greedy stove going, and how to light a fire in the sitting room, how to wash her own clothes, how to refill the oil lamps, to make her own bed.
Then the first letters arrive from Charlie, and Olivia is hugely grateful to him, for her aunt seems to warm to her a little. She really doesn’t need Aunt Nancy to encourage her to write back to the young officer; she enjoys it, writing letters as though Charlie is a diary, a confidant. For although she is busy, she is terribly lonely. Her aunt is always preoccupied with visitors and paperwork – something to do with joining the FANYs again, as far as she can glean from Munro – and the local schoolchildren – of which there are only a handful – are all half Olivia’s age. The other neighbours are kind, but they are not companions, and she still does not speak Gaelic.
The letters she receives back from Charlie are her only friends in those long hours of loneliness. And they make Olivia appreciate her own situation all the more when she reads about conditions on his ship, and how he keeps a sense of humour about the horrible cockroaches that invade, capturing and racing them against each other. Of course she has no idea where he is, but she shuffles closer to the fire when he writes of the snow and ice, and how he has to be winched out his pilot’s seat after a flight, his hands stuck like claws until someone brings him a steaming cup of cocoa.
As the days pass, Olivia’s truculence begins to ebb. The world slows to the lazy chewing of one of the cows that watch her with liquid eyes from beneath their thick, curly brown hair. Munro has indeed taught her to fish, and how to catch shiny green prawns in the rock pools. She is captivated by things she never knew about: baby starfish no bigger than a fingernail, seals lumbering across the rocks, the sudden flash of a pine marten’s creamy chest.
She speaks to her mother on the telephone once a week, but she does not miss home as much as she thought she would; somehow the pull of the breeze sweeping in off the loch and down from the hills is hard to resist. Take today, for example. It is one of those blustery autumn days, the weather as changeable as her moods can be. This morning she was eating corned beef from the tin while the rain lashed against the window as she tried to play patience in the yellow glow of an oil lamp. Now she is following the tumbling, churning burn that careers down the hill behind the farm between the thick, sodden bent heads of bracken. She sticks to the rocky bits, using the boulders as steps. When she looks up, she has to narrow her eyes as the rain drives into them. When she looks back to the loch, far below, only the pale foam of whipped-up water delineates dark grey water from dark grey sky. She is drenched to the bone.
She is looking for Mac, who farms behind Taigh Mor. One of his sheep has got stuck, and she has been sent to help. She finally spots him, a small green figure in a flat cap crouched on the rocks like moss. The sheep is still stuck. The farmer isn’t surprised to see her there. He doesn’t even glance up. But Olivia is growing used to the quiet, calm manner of the locals – and in a situation like this, there’s no time for pleasantries. The banks down to the burn are steep here, carved into the hillside over thousands of years. The sheep has slipped and got wedged between some rocks. It is in an awkward position, about level with Mac’s head. It bleats in their faces, a loud, raspy, aggressive mixture of fear and confusion. Its musky fleece is heavy with the rain.
Mac