The breeze was freshening a little, but it was still warm. He headed south past Josey’s restaurant. On his left, a chain was strung across the track that climbed to the little airstrip which had once played host to a winter passenger schedule between Entry Island and Havre aux Maisons. The short stretch of runway where Cowell had habitually landed his single-engined aircraft and picked up his Range Rover. The plane was still there, sitting on the tarmac.
At the top of the slope the road cut inland and he followed it up to the Anglican church. A plain white building of clapboard siding with green trim around small arched windows. It stood on the hill with a panoramic view extending west. A huge white cross, held in place against powerful winds by steel cables, cast its shadow across the graveyard.
Sime opened the gate and walked past a ship’s bell on a rusted metal mounting to wander among the headstones in the late-afternoon sunshine. Rifleman Arthur E. McLean; Curtis Quinn; Dickson, infant son of Leonard and Joyce. Some of them dated back decades. Others were more recent. But those who had staked their claim to a place here on the slopes of Entry Island were unlikely to be joined by too many more of their fellow islanders as the population dwindled towards extinction.
Sime’s shadow fell across an old, weather-worn headstone that stood no more than eighteen inches high and leaned at a slight angle in the grass. He was barely able to make out the name McKay, and he crouched down to brush away more than a century’s accumulation of algae and lichen. Kirsty McKay, he read. Daughter of Alasdair and Margaret. Died August 5th, 1912, aged 82. Kirsty’s great-great-great-grandmother. It had to be. The old lady whose photograph he had seen in the album started by Kirsty’s mother. He tried to recall her face, but the detail was gone. There was just an impression left in his mind of a time when people of a certain generation all seemed to look the same. Perhaps the homogenising effect of a popular hairstyle, or a fashion in clothes and hats. Or the limitations of those early cameras. The black, white and sepia prints, the poor lighting. Too dark or too light, too much contrast or too little.
Whatever it was, Sime found something sad in stumbling across the old lady’s grave like this. An image in a photo album perpetuates the illusion of life. Long after death, a smile or a frown lingers on. But a hole in the ground, with a stone marking the place where your head has been laid, is for eternity. He placed his hand on the stone. It was cool against his skin, and he felt the strangest sense of affinity with the old woman whose bones lay beneath him. As if somehow she made a bridge between his past and his present. Between him and her great-great-great-granddaughter.
As he stood up he shivered, although it was still warm. And goosebumps prickled all over his arms and shoulders as if someone had just stepped on his grave.
Clothes hanging out to dry in the late September sunshine flapped in the wind on a line strung from a characterless modern house next to the Epicerie. Two men in scuffed blue boiler suits and wellington boots interrupted their conversation to stand and watch as Sime walked past the junction. The road surface was broken and stony here. An old golden Labrador, with stiff, arthritic back legs, fell in step beside him.
‘Duke!’ one of the men called. ‘Duke! Here boy.’ But the dog ignored him and kept pace with Sime.
Where the path turned right towards the lighthouse, the road swung left, leading towards the Cowell House. Duke took the turn ahead of him and hobbled up the hill, almost as if he knew where it was that Sime was going. Sime hesitated for only a moment. He had no reason or authority to go back to the house. His interviews with Kirsty were over. And in any case, she would no longer speak without a lawyer present. Still, he followed Duke’s lead.
The house built by Cowell seemed like a sad extravagance now. It sat up here in cold testimonial to a failed marriage, empty and loveless. He stepped into the conservatory. ‘Hello?’ His voice reverberated around all the empty spaces within, but brought no response. He crossed the grass to the summer-house, and found the patrolman from Cap aux Meules making himself a sandwich in the kitchen. The young man looked up, a little surprised.
‘I thought you guys had gone back to Cap aux Meules,’ he said.
Sime just shrugged. ‘Where’s Mrs Cowell?’
‘You going to question her again?’
‘No.’
The patrolman bit into his sandwich and washed it over with a mouthful of coffee. He threw Sime a curious look. ‘Last time I saw her she was on the road heading off up the hill there.’
‘Where does that go?’
‘Nowhere in particular. It peters out after a while.’
Duke was waiting for him as he stepped back out of the house. The Labrador seemed to grin, then turned and started off up the road as if showing him the way. Sime stood and watched as the old dog ambled with his awkward arthritic gait up to the brow of the hill. There he stopped and looked back. Sime could almost feel his impatience.
But Sime turned away and followed the path that led to the cliffs and the narrow steps down to the jetty. The Cowells’ motor launch bobbed gently in the afternoon swell.
He imagined Kirsty, half drunk, fired by jealous humiliation, running down these steps in the dark and setting off across the bay in that small boat to Cap aux Meules. What kind of desperation must have driven her?
He turned and walked back towards the house and saw that Duke was still waiting for him on the hill.
Sime had no reason to talk to Kirsty again. And yet he wanted to see her. He wanted to tell her how much he hated this, even although he knew he wouldn’t. He started off up the hill after Duke. The dog waited until he was within a few metres, then turned and hobbled on.
The road was rutted and uneven, loose stones skidding away underfoot. When he reached the top of the rise Sime turned and looked back. The house seemed a long way below him already. In the distance, at the southernmost point of the island, the lighthouse looked tiny. And across the water, Havre Aubert seemed almost close enough to touch. The wind was stronger up here, whipping through his hair, filling his hoodie and blowing it out behind him. He turned to find Duke waiting for him again, and he walked on to a point where the road became little more than a path worn through the grass. It divided in a hollow, one branch snaking up towards the summit of Big Hill, the other descending again to the cliffs and the red rock stacks that rose up out of the ocean.
And there he saw her. Standing very close to the cliff’s edge, silhouetted against the blaze of reflected sunlight on the ocean beyond. They were facing east here, out across the Gulf of St Lawrence and the North Atlantic towards a far distant land from which their ancestors had once come.
Duke reached her before he did. She stooped to ruffle his neck then crouched beside him. Sime saw her smiling, animated in a way he had not seen her before. Until he entered her peripheral vision and she turned her head to see him approaching. The smile vanished and she stood up immediately. Her whole demeanour became hostile and defensive. ‘What do you want?’ she said coldly when he reached her.
Sime pushed his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I was just taking a walk. Killing time till the ferry comes.’ He flicked his head beyond where she stood. ‘You’re a bit close to the edge here.’
She laughed, and it seemed to Sime that it was the first time he had seen her genuinely amused. ‘I’m not going to throw myself off, if that’s what you think.’