The island, rich in plant and bird life, was a paradise for a young boy, but for Siona, fresh from the camaraderie of blitz-torn Glasgow, it may have seemed like a prison. Who can blame her for returning to the city when her father died ten years later?
Siona’s mind may always have been unsettled, or it might have been the years of drudgery on her father’s croft that disturbed it. Maybe it was even her move back to the city and the loneliness that she encountered there that were the catalysts. Whatever the origins of her deteriorating mental health, there’s no record of it until after she and her son returned to Glasgow.
Murray looked up from the single page. Christie smiled at him. ‘Interesting?’
‘Yes.’ He wondered if his face looked wolfish. ‘How much more is there?’
‘A lot.’
‘And this is as much as you’re prepared to show me?’
‘Of his childhood, for the moment.’ Christie slid her hand into the folder, pulled forth a second page and held it out. ‘Here.’
He took it from her and read on.
Edinburgh was still a small city in 1969, but Archie and I could have passed each other daily without knowing. I used to look for him on the street; desperate to meet this ‘son of an abomination’ my mother had warned me about so many times. Eventually I asked around, discovered his local and persuaded a girlfriend to go there with me. Later I got used to places like that, but this was the first time I’d ever been in a working men’s pub.
The barroom was lit by a naked one hundred-watt bulb, the floor strewn with sawdust. Even though we’d never met, I knew Archie straight away. He was slouched at the bar, so drunk he seemed to sweat alcohol. Archie was a good-looking young man, but when he drank his features grew slack and lost their air of intelligence. He behaved stupidly too. I watched Archie embrace a man, and then insult him with his arm still clasped around his shoulders. I heard him flirt like a fool with the barmaid and saw him lavish drinks on strangers who laughed in his face. I told my friend I’d made a mistake and left without speaking to him.
A week later he took the seat opposite mine in the university library and started to read Baudelaire’s ‘Fleurs du Mal’. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Eventually I plucked up the courage to introduce myself. Later I’d discover Archie was always shy when he was sober. He offered to take me for a drink, but I persuaded him back to my digs instead. We talked all through the night and when the sun came up we went to bed together.
Murray looked up from the page and saw Christie’s small mouth widened in a smile.
‘You look shocked. We were cousins, not brother and sister.’
‘I’m not shocked. But I’d like to know what happened next.’
‘After we went to bed?’
‘No.’ He forced a smile. ‘After that.’
‘After that, we spent most of our free time together. I soon realised there was no way I was going to be able to keep him sober, so I learned how to drink.’
‘If you can’t beat them, join them?’
‘Drink was his wife, I was just his girlfriend.’
‘Was Archie writing a lot when you knew him?’
Christie took on a look he had seen in other interviewees, a far-away stare as if gazing back into the past.
‘Apart from drinking, it was all he seemed to do. When we first met, Archie was matriculated at the university, but the only classes I ever knew him attend were poetry lectures. He used the library, of course, but that was for his own reading. He would lie around in the morning in his dressing gown, sipping beer and reading detective fiction or sci-fi. At midday he’d go down to the pub for a pint and a bite to eat. Then he’d either browse the local second-hand bookshops or go back to his room and write. He’d step out again at about nine in the evening.’
‘How could he afford it?’
‘Archie had been lucky. His mother had died and left him some money.’
‘An odd definition of luck.’
‘Do you think so? I used to envy him terribly.’
He ignored the playful note of provocation in her voice and asked, ‘Were you writing too?’
‘I didn’t pick up my pen until after Archie’s death. Then it was as if a new well had been sunk in me, it all came bubbling out.’ She reached into the folder again. ‘The final extract.’
He took it from her, noting the page number, 349. Earlier in his quest the completeness of Christie’s memoir might have frustrated Murray, but it no longer mattered if his own book was rendered redundant. There were new poems. The thought thrilled him.
Archie might never have returned to the island if I hadn’t suggested it, but when I did he leapt at the plan. By that time we were a trio plus one. That extra man was vital to our group; Bobby was Renfield to our Dracula. We thought he was harmless.
Ours was an era of new societies, ideal communities and communes. Property was theft, jealousy bourgeois, and anyone over thirty, suspect. We set out with bags full of acid and hearts full of idealism. But it was soon clear the cottage was too small to house four adults and the sickness which had eventually left me in Glasgow returned with a vengeance.
Archie’s sickness followed him too. There was no pub on the island, but he found a ceilidh house where he was very quickly unwelcome. That didn’t bother Archie. He’d already made enough contacts to be able to draw on a seemingly endless source of homebrewed spirits. Some mornings he was as sick as I was and the two of us lay groaning together in the bed recess we’d requisitioned as our own.
As if overcrowding, bad trips, drunkenness and sickness weren’t enough, the weather descended into a long period of dark skies and relentless rain. Bobby would probably have stayed with us for ever, lost in his muddled world of drugs and spells, but very quickly I realised that Fergus was planning to leave. I couldn’t blame him. I had sold the island as an adventure, an opportunity to create, but there was no privacy to be had in the damp cottage, and my hopes of keeping the three of us together until what had to pass had passed were beginning to fade.
Murray read the page twice, and then he set it aside on the table and looked at Christie.
‘You were pregnant when Mrs Dunn visited the cottage, weren’t you? That’s how you knew she was too.’
Christie rolled her eyes. Her voice was impatient.
‘She was the kind of woman Fergus always seems to attract — buttoned-up, but desperate for some kind of adventure, some kind of debauch. The trouble is they never realise how far Fergus is willing to go.’ Was there a gleam of pride in her eyes? ‘He always pushes them beyond their limits.’
Murray thought of Rachel. He asked, ‘Like he did with Helen James?’
Christie snorted in amusement.
‘I very much doubt little Nelly was raped, but what could she say when her mummy and daddy found out she was unmarried and with child? It was the wrong time of year for an immaculate conception.’
‘She had an abortion.’
‘You didn’t strike me as a man who would be against a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.’
‘I’m not. In fact, I’d go further and say everyone has a right to know what they take into their body. Mrs Dunn lost her baby.’
‘That was nothing to do with me.’
‘Was the baby Archie’s?’
‘I think it was Mr Dunn’s.’
It took all his effort to keep his voice low and his words polite.
‘Was your baby Archie’s child?’
‘I like to think so.’
‘What happened?’
‘I delivered her here, in the bed recess.’ She nodded towards the far corner. ‘Where my desk is now. The first major piece of work I produced there. A perfect little girl.’