‘Here, you go in the front,’ I say, opening the door to her. But she’s already climbing in the back after Molly and Ella.
‘That’s OK, I’ll go in the back with the girls.’
As Jack starts the car the girls thankfully fill the air with their excited chatter.
‘And the cabins were so small but so cute,’ Ella tells Molly.
Lorna and Jack are both quiet as we drive. I glance in the rear-view mirror, listening to my niece and daughter talking and watching Lorna as she stares out the window.
There’s a crowd gathered outside The Lookout and they turn in our direction as we drive by. I know that everyone who once knew Lorna is keen to see her again and that my friends are eager to meet Ella and my husband’s sister. But I see the flicker in Lorna’s eye as she sees the islanders looking this way. It must be nerve-racking to feel so watched, even if I know that everyone (or at least most people anyway) mean nothing by it. I can certainly relate to feeling incredibly visible here on the island. All newcomers are and it was no different for me when I arrived as a volunteer. When Jack and I started getting closer, the interest became more intense. People questioned me about what I planned to do after my gap year, whether I planned on coming back, or staying even. Looking back, I think they just felt protective of Jack as one of their own. I remember Pat Campbell singling me out in the village shop one day not long before I was due to return to the mainland and telling me she didn’t think she’d ever seen Jack Irvine looking so happy. It totally threw me. I still hadn’t decided what to do. I had a place at university waiting for me. And even though I didn’t particularly care about the course I’d chosen, studying was the path both my sisters had taken before me and I thought it would be mine as well. When I finally left and headed home to the mainland I felt the strength of the islanders’ disappointment, their disapproval even. But when I realised the mistake I’d made and eventually returned, I experienced the full warmth of their welcome too.
The car winds its way along the road that cuts through the island. I try to see my home through Lorna’s eyes, taking it all in for the first time since she was a girl. The wind turbines in the field behind the village are new but otherwise not much about the landscape must have changed since she was here. A few new houses, but the hills and the mountain are the same. The mist has fully cleared now and the sky is blue patched with clouds. The grassy moorland is blanketed here and there in heather, rippling from lilac to mauve to deep pink. Sheep graze among the grass and the heather. Every now and then the road rises in a hump and the sea becomes suddenly visible, flashing brightly beneath the sun. The ferry pulls away from the harbour now and heads out into open water. Does Lorna wish she was on that boat?
We pass by the church, a small white building topped with a cross. In a few days we will all return there for the funeral. As we head alongside the edge of the forest a track veers off the main road and I watch Lorna’s eyes following that route towards the house where she grew up. She blinks quickly and our eyes meet in the mirror. I want to say something but Jack is still staring ahead in stony silence so instead I attempt a reassuring smile. We share a look for a moment and then she turns away again.
‘Oh, that must be Brenda’s house!’ Ella says suddenly, pointing towards the blue house on the hill, the walls pale duck egg and the doors and wooden shutters bright cobalt.
‘You know Brenda?’ I ask my niece, turning around in my seat so I’m facing her.
She nods enthusiastically.
‘We met on the ferry. She showed me her new puppy Puff.’
‘Oh!’ chips in Molly, ‘I’m so jealous! Mum said we had to wait to see him because we were picking you up, but that we could maybe go and visit later. Can we, Mum? I’ll see if Olive wants to come with us.’
At the mention of Olive I remember suddenly that my friend Sarah and Lorna used to be best friends when they were children. Sarah has told me that much, but otherwise never speaks about Lorna, and however much I’ve wanted to ask her questions about my sister-in-law I’ve held back. Now, their daughters will be meeting and perhaps will become friends themselves. I think back to the yoga class a week ago when I told the group that Lorna and Ella would be visiting for the funeral. Sarah stiffened at the news, her expression troubled. After the other women left she lingered behind and sensing that she wanted to talk I walked down to the beach with her, silent until we reached the sand and sat down beside one another. Facing out to sea seemed to make it easier to talk and everything came spilling out in a tumble of words and tears. She told me about the day Lorna left and how she waited every day after that for word of where she had gone or how she was doing but heard nothing.
‘I waited for years,’ she confessed as I shuffled closer and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. ‘Sometimes I thought something terrible might have happened to her. But then other times I thought that maybe she’d found such wonderful new friends wherever she’d gone that she’d just forgotten about me.’
Remembering Sarah’s tears, I glance again at my sister-in-law, feeling torn between a sense of loyalty to my friend who spent so long feeling abandoned and has been such a great support to me over the years, and a yearning to establish a connection with this woman who is Jack’s last living relative. I picture again the large, bustling family of my imagination, our farmhouse full of voices and footsteps.
‘If Ella wants to,’ I reply after a moment’s pause. ‘And if Lorna is OK with it too, of course.’
‘I do, I do!’ says Ella. ‘Can I, Mum?’
She turns to her mother who nods, sending Ella and Molly into another burst of conversation, this time about the new puppy.
‘Brenda is a friend of mine,’ I explain to Lorna. ‘She moved to the island just before I did. We’ve been friends ever since I arrived. She’s Molly’s godmother.’
‘She’smyfriend too,’ Molly adds pointedly. That’s one of the things I love about this place. There are only so many children of a similar age so my daughter has grown up counting younger children, older children and adults as her friends. It’s given her a confidence that I hope will stand her in good stead when she eventually leaves the island, which I know in my heart she must surely do but which I try my best not to think about.
‘How many of the islanders would you say are newcomers these days?’ Lorna asks.
So she’s talking at last, thank goodness. I launch enthusiastically into my answer.
‘Hmm … I guess I’d say about twenty or thirty per cent are indigenous like Jack, folks who grew up here and perhaps have families going back quite a way who did too. Then the rest are newcomers like me. And a good thing too really. We need the young families moving to the island, otherwise the community would struggle to survive. That’s what happened on Caora Island, wasn’t it, Jack?’
He says nothing in reply. My enthusiasm dips as I think of Caora and what happened there.
‘I’m sure you know the story,’ I add to Lorna.
‘I do, it was something of legend when we were growing up.’
I remember Jack telling me for the first time about the island off the northern coast that was inhabited until a few decades ago. His parents had relatives who used to live there and his mother showed Molly photos once. Over time though, the tiny community declined. Families left for a new life on the mainland or nearby larger islands, growing tired of the relentless wind and rain and the hardships of crofting life on such a small island. When the school closed, all the remaining families were forced to leave. For a while there were just a few of the oldest islanders left, desperately trying to cling on to their homes and survive on the near-empty island. But it became too difficult. The last few residents were evacuated by boat to the mainland in the 1930s.
Over time, the abandoned crofts on Caora fell to ruins and the wildlife took over. Now it’s only visited every now and then by a shepherd who travels by boat to manage the sheep, or by visiting ornithologists or wildlife researchers. The island rising out of the sea is a constant reminder to everyone on Kip of the precarious nature of our own life here. A sign of what could happen if the community fell apart. The thought sends a chill through me. It could so easily happen again. And not as some distant concept in the future, but soon. I try my best to shake off the thought but it’s still there in the back of my mind, a fear I can’t quite bring myself to voice out loud.
The car slows and we turn off the road onto our track, the red and white sign that I painted years ago hanging from the gate and reading ‘Hilly Farm’ in tall letters.
