The Sea House: A Novel Read Free Page B

me. It took a while to learn how to fit in. I got steel rings from Woolworths; I showed them I could give as good as I got when cornered in a fight. I cut my hair off, got workmen’s steel-capped boots and a black Crombie coat – skinhead gear.
    Where do you go when you’ve no real home to go to? Hours and hours walking around the city, my hands bright red with cold. Where do you go when you’re the sort of person people can overlook, forget about – the sort of person anything can happen to, and no one cares?
    One afternoon, in a freezing November fog, I’d walked off the streets into the marble halls of a London library, the quiet air spiced with the smell of old books, and everything else just fell away
    I liked the reference section best. Running my hand along the smooth spines, I’d take a book out at random. A whole world of things I hadn’t known. That’s how I got the grades to read Biology at university.
    Year Zero. University. You could be anyone. I lost the monkey boots and the steel rings; and it seemed like I finally lost the fug that they said we home kids always carried on our clothes in school. I turned up on freshers’ day in a crowd of endless new faces, wearing my brand-new jeans and a coat bought with my grant money.
    The campus libraries were modern, made of white concrete and glass, and full of people who might be just like me, or perhaps I could be like them. It was all to invent, to create, and no one was more hard-working than me.
    In my second term, I met Michael in a laundromat. He carried my washing and his washing back to the halls of residence. I thought he was mad, and I thought he was handsome – in a woolly jumper way, like one of the lecturers; and so clean and gentle. I watched him manhandling both bags. He had such a polite, soft voice – posh even.
    He had the gift of caring; it radiated off him like a warmth. First bite at the apple of happiness when I kissed Michael.
    The day we got married, there were no family guests on my side of the church. We filled it with friends from university. Professor Carter and his wife came.
    *   *   *
    My hands were beginning to lose their chill as I walked across the grass back to the caravan. The air actually felt warmer outside the house, and soft and damp now that the rain had passed over. In the distance, I noticed a tiny van approaching along the coast road. Squinting at it, I was relieved to make out a police van. The ferry must have managed to sail from Uig after all. They’d be coming to take away the remains.
    *   *   *
    ‘One thing I know from rummaging around in boxes of bones in the zoology department, that child must have died at least a hundred years ago,’ I said to Michael as we sat in the Sea House kitchen once more.
    ‘Ruth, it’s gone. I think we should stop talking about it now,’ Michael said through a mouthful of toast.
    ‘I don’t know how you can say that. How can you stand it, not knowing exactly what happened here?’
    He got up and started running water in the washing-up bowl. ‘I grew up in a house that was a priory in medieval times. An archaeologist friend told my dad once that there were probably dead monks buried in our garden. But if there were, they never bothered us. Ruth, it’s pointless thinking about something that’s over.’
    I sat on at the table, dabbing my finger in a pool of honey till Michael took the plate away.
    I went over to dry the dishes. I stacked them on the trestle table, looking out through the kitchen window towards the little white church. Dougal, the minister, had parked his car outside.
    We bought the Sea House from the church board. It had been the church manse originally, until it became too expensive to heat and they built a nice pebbledash bungalow for the minister down in Tarbert. So its official address was the Manse, but the few people who lived in the sparse and scattered village of Scarista always called it the Sea House, Tigh na Mara. It stood away from