Concerns
1
People often said he was a good son, an only child whose mother passed away when he was eleven, and who probably should have left for university sooner than he did. He finished school at 17 with six Highers, four As and two Bs, but he didn’t apply for university until he was twenty-one, when some of his school friends were a year from graduating. He worked in a supermarket for a year and a bar for over two years. He wanted to remain close to his father, believing that to leave the island would have been tantamount to abandonment. His father was a poet and a crofter, and the son grew up believing that his father was often useless and obsolete; that the poetry he wrote in Gaelic relied on government grants, and the croft no less so. When his mother was still living, his father would often leave the island, travelling to Edinburgh and Glasgow, giving talks in English about the importance of keeping languages alive through poetry, even if the language had little value for communication and commerce. His father would read his poetry at these talks and translate it for an audience that was almost entirely made up of non-Gaelic speakers. He tried to explain why the poems needed to be written in Gaelic and why it was important that a language that was occasionally spoken on Skye, where he lived, and more so on the Island of Lewis, was worth preserving.
Yet after his wife died, Donald’s father no longer went to the bigger cities and only occasionally would get the ferry from the village in which they lived, Uig, over to Tarbert, where he would sometimes teach at the Gaelic college in Stornoway. In the pub where Donald worked, a few of the regulars spoke Gaelic, but most of the locals didn’t, and during the summer, most of the customers were from other parts of the world, passing through Uig and taking refreshments at the pub before the ferry would take them across to that most Gaelic-speaking of islands. Donald could see the ferry from the pub window, but hadn’t been back to the island since his mother’s funeral. She wanted to be buried on the island of her birth, and he supposed this was why his father continued going to the island, to visit the graveside. Donald would have gone with him were hhis father ever to have asked, but he supposed he wanted to be alone with his wife and Donald somehow saw his father’s grief as so much greater than his own, as though while he had lost a mother that would, in time be replaced by a wife, his father had lost a lifelong companion who couldn’t be replaced at all. Someone might have seen this as nonsense — that a 12-year-old boy would find it harder to replace his mother than a father who would potentially find another wife. That wasn’t how Donald perceived it, and may help explain how he reacted to a remark made by a friend of his dad's at his father’s funeral.
2
It was in the mid-afternoon at the wake, with Donald’s father buried in the local cemetery in Uig, after some talk over whether they should have the funeral and the burial on Lewis. His father had expressed no preference before he died, and Donald decided they would bury his father in the graveyard where his family were buried, just as his mother had been buried where her family were at rest. It made it easier for him to arrange everything, and it was at the house where he had organised the wake, with about sixty people from the village and elsewhere, who passed through the house's doors, offering Donald their condolences. But he was most moved by the woman, Ginnie, from the shop along the road and across the street, a small store that served the community now more as a convivial focal point catering for a few items, as many would use a supermarket in Portree. He knew she kept the store going less for financial gain than social necessity, needing the company and knowing others needed hers as well. She knew everyone in the village and, now that it wasn’t always so busy, she had more time than ever to hear about various people’s problems, their children’s successes and their cousin’s greed, their husband’s back problems, their wife’s arthritis.
That afternoon, she said to Donald that he had too much concern for others and that he should live his life. Donald was feeling guilty over believing he wasn’t there enough for his father in those last few months, and while the heart attack that killed him came as a shock, the complications that led to it needn’t have made it so. Yet her comment came as a surprise. He hadn’t been expressing these thoughts about his relative absence, and she came over and spoke to him as if she had been reading his mind. He supposed that it wasn’t so telepathic; that many feel responsible for the death of a loved one and believe they could have done more, even been more available.
He could see that he visited him less often in the last two years of his father’s life than in the previous five after he went to university. The reason was simple, even if the relationship that provided it was complicated. Before university and even during it, he felt no greater loyalty to anyone more than to his father but, after it, graduating in maths and physics, he got a job working in a lab where amongst other things he researched data based on faulty heartbeats. Emma worked alongside him, and when her boyfriend left her, she would sometimes ask Donald if he wanted to join her at the pub after work, then for a coffee at the weekend, and then for walks up and around its seven hills. She was a keen walker, he supposed, but others might have seen that she was keener still to forget a boyfriend she rarely talked to Donald about. But a more perceptive person — or at least a person more aware of the intricacies of feelings that take a long time to go away — could see this was preoccupying her. It wasn’t that Donald was oblivious to such things - but his two assignations at university were brief and any devastation he felt was more the awkwardness of making a mess of them than believing that the absence of the people after a few weeks was a loss. Even his mother’s death was, after all, his father’s bereavement more than his own, and so he never could quite understand Emma’s feelings at this time and, whoever she was choosing to express these with, it was not Donald.
What did they talk about, as they would spend so much time in each other’s company? They discussed work, and both liked graphic novels, read the same ones and could discuss them for many hours. They even considered writing one together: Donald was competent at drawing and Emma on their walks sometimes created scenarios for this unwritten graphic novel. It never did get written, but Donald and Emma did get together. Emma initiated it after much alcohol. However, an observer might have noticed that she wouldn’t have needed much booze to make the pass, but that Donald needed a few beers to know what to do about it. He may not have been without sexual experience, yet that had been aided and abetted by drink, and Emma became the first woman he knew where, after the initial few occasions, he could have sex without being inebriated. He accepted that Emma was clearly much more sexually experienced, and he may well have allowed this knowledge to impact on other areas of their relationship, even if observers may have believed that Donald was better at the job than Emma — or at least more conscientious —and this was partly what attracted her to him initially. But it was Emma who had the large social circle, knew the city well, and who helped him move towards a more rounded diet after years of him cooking dishes that seemed satisfactory to two men who liked meat or fish, and two or three types of vegetables. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say he was bemused by the variety she served up, and in time he learned to cook: rice dishes with vegetables absorbed into a sauce other than gravy; chickpeas fried and turned into dumplings, served on a bed of couscous or bulgur wheat, often with mint, peppers and sultanas running through the latter.
They also travelled to Paris, to the south of Spain and the south of Turkey, and Berlin. She knew people in the French and German capitals, and he found it odd that he could find himself so easily in another person’s spare room. For years, nobody entered his father’s house apart from him, and it was only at the wake that he opened it up to the community, as if in his father’s absence he could allow for the presence of numerous others. Emma no doubt brought a lot to Donald’s life, but a more perceptive person might have felt more anxious in her presence, noticed her occasionally glance at other men and, in that look, show a dissatisfaction with Donald. But it wasn’t as if Donald didn’t bring anything to her life. He may not have friends in other cities, other countries, he might not have had many friends at all, but this gave Emma a security that was new to her, and it was a for a while more than enough to see in Donald a partner she could admire, even if within that admiration others would have seen a capacity to take him for granted. What they both saw too was Emma’s reliance on Donald at certain moments in the working day, and that both accepted it as part of a healthy balance that was evened up by his reliance on Emma outside work, over what they ate and the social life they had. Others may have seen exploitation on Emma’s part — that she was increasingly expecting Donald to cover for her weaknesses at work. Yet such a perspective would have been offered by those who regard employment as more important than leisure, a Protestantism that Donald was happily escaping from. He found that Emma, who was from a Catholic background she had no interest in respecting, could help him generate that distance.
Yet this didn’t stop him from often feeling guilty, believing he needed to visit his father more frequently than he did. Yet Emma, after her first visit, admitted she didn’t much care for the place, saying that the sheep had more energy than the people, and that the pub was full of those too drunk to gossip and the shop full of gossips too puritanical to drink. She offered it with a laugh, and Donald received it as a liberation. It was good for him to reject the place that could have ensnared him in either the drinking culture or the religious one, and there may have been those who would agree that he needed to open up his mind, even if Emma was perhaps as close-minded as the locals; merely in a different way. It was as if Donald needed to exaggerate the oppression of the place because he felt guilt that if he attributed it to place, he could escape it by escaping from the milieu. This was probably unfair to the island, but it seemed plausible as Emma insisted it happened to be so. While it may have seemed that Donald was so taken by Emma that he didn’t know his own mind, it was more that Donald wanted to get out of his and reckoned that Emma was the person who could help him do it.
If this wasn’t quite true, it didn’t make it a lie either and, each time Donald visited the island while he was seeing Emma, he increasingly saw it through her eyes, even if she was absent. People did gossip in the shop, and in the pub every night several customers would end it slumped in their chair, lifted out of it after last orders, and all but carried to the door where they would then exit the building, relying on muscle memory to make their way home. He knew Emma would have found this amusing. Donald didn’t, but he had a perspective on it, one missing before he went off to university, and one augmented by Emma’s harsh perception of things.
Over those two years with Emma, he saw his father’s health deteriorate but credited it to an ageing process that nothing could change and that his presence couldn’t help. He still visited often, of course, despite the hundreds of miles between them, but not as regularly as he might have wished, even if it was more often than Emma would have liked. She occasionally said that his loyalty was more to his father thanto her, and said that he visited his father more often than she visited her parents, even if her family was only forty miles away in Glasgow and his father further away. He said that her family was made up of two parents, a sister, two brothers, aunts and uncles - all living near each other on the Southside of Glasgow. His father had no relative to rely on, and she said hadn’t Donald told her the community was tight-knit? Wasn’t that almost the same thing as a family? Donald didn’t argue, feeling that it was argument enough that they didn’t agree, aware that he would still visit his father more often than she visited her parents.
Some would see in Emma a monster, and by the end of this story a reader may well insist she is. But she gave to Donald’s life during those two years energy and confidence, and though the latter may have been battered for a while afterwards, he knew he would recover. And let us be clear: when Emma visited her family she was loving with her older brothers’ kids, as generous as she could afford to be with gift-giving, and would always say to her parents that though she didn’t visit as often as they would like, she was always only a phone call away and was free either to chat or, if need be, ready to visit. She might have been in a different city, but she was always nearby.
Yet just as Donald’s personality was being shaped by Emma’s, so, several years earlier, Emma’s had been formed partly by her ex-boyfriend. We needn’t say much about him, but he was five years older than she was, a skilled musician who played as a session guitarist for a few modestly well-known bands, which was how he earned his living, while also usually performing once a week in a small club playing solo and singing his own songs. The tunes balanced carefully the cynical and the nostalgic, the emotional and the funny, and had he been a little more original, or a lot more ambitious, he might have become famous. Instead, he settled for becoming a local celebrity, someone whom people admired and women wished to seduce. It was hard sometimes to know if his general faithfulness to Emma (with only a few lapses) rested on a respect for the relationship or an aloofness that felt resisting a fan’s advances was a type of disdain that augmented his sense of self, while succumbing would have been to undermine it. When he did cheat on Emma it was not with fans but other musicians, people he admired as much as they admired him.
We could say a few words about Emma’s personality before she met her ex, but that would risk infinite regress. All we need to offer is that he made her far more cynical than she may have become otherwise, and that all things considered her personality was probably closer to Donald’s than this aloof musician’s. Usually when Emma offered a cynical remark, a disdainful comment or a judgmental aside, she would laugh after it — aware she lacked the courage of the most abrasive of convictions, and would hug Donald and tell him he was making her a better person.
3
After eighteen months together, Emma was offered another job and took it. The job was in Glasgow and she said not only was it a little better paid, but a lot more interesting. She admitted she never quite felt comfortable in the job she was doing, and was the first to admit Donald helped her in it. It also meant she could be closer to her family. Donald didn’t say that she seemed to have little interest in being in closer proximity to them before, but as she moved out of the flat they were sharing with two others, and moved into one with people she still knew from university in Glasgow, he felt a sense of loss. One that, had he been more in touch with his feelings, a phrase Emma sometimes used, he would have known was bringing back the trauma of his mother’s death. The muscle memory that managed to lead the local drunks back to their homes, was perhaps not so very different from the memories Donald stored and that led him on occasion to drink when he started to miss Emma strongly enough. They hadn’t broken up and Emma reassured him that this was about the job and not about their relationship - there was no reason why they couldn’t continue; the cities were hardly that far apart.
This was true, but it also meant that during the last nine months of his father’s life, he went to visit him less often because he was visiting Glasgow frequently, even if one of these visits was in some ways a favour to his dad. Donald never really knew Colin; he was two years above him at school, but his father and Donald’s were close, and his father asked him if he could attend Colin’s wedding in his place. He was too tired to travel to Glasgow, he said, but he thought there should at least be a family presence. Donald, of course, agreed, asked Emma if she would like to come too, and she said if it was a chance to dress up, eat free food and drink copious amounts of various alcohol beverages, why would she say no? She laughed and said, of course she wanted to be of help.
At the wedding, there were about a hundred people, many from the island and a few Donald knew. Even those who weren’t appeared as if they could be, but this was probably more Emma’s perception than Donald’s, if for no other reason than that she was the figure who more than most looked like she wasn’t. She stood out in both what she wore and how she moved, with a confidence in her attire that was matched by the assertiveness of her presence. While Donald wore his one suit that would work for both joyous and sombre occasions (it was the suit he would wear to his father’s funeral), Emma wore a scarlet summer dress with a low cut front, narrow straps holding the dress up and with her back exposed, wore a strapless push-up bra. The other women were less bold in both colour and style, and Emma didn’t outshine the bride — it was more as if she had wandered in from a neighbouring event at the hotel. Indeed, one of the waitresses at the wedding whispered to another that Emma should probably have been attending the hen party next door.
Sometimes, when people are inappropriately attired at an event, they embarrass themselves or, realising how out of place they look, find some way to remedy the situation. They put on a cardigan, perhaps find a way to change their clothes, spend the day and evening apologising or making themselves less conspicuous. Emma didn’t do any of these things, and if she didn’t have the courage of her convictions when it came to cynicism, she did when it came to vivacity. Even if Donald had told her she wasn’t quite fitting in, she would have ignored him, seeing many of the guests as diffident islanders who could benefit from a city girl to give the place a little atmosphere. She wouldn’t have been wrong, even if a bit disrespectful and, as the day turned to evening, she would receive ever more glances of desire, scorn, admiration and irritation, though far from evenly divided between the sexes. Sure, more men were looking at her covetously, but perhaps a couple of the women were as well — and several of the latter showed admiration and even expressed it. One guest said to another they couldn’t keep their eyes off her; that even peripherally that dress kept finding its way into her line of vision. The guest was an art teacher who could admire bold art but could never quite put that courage into her dress sense or her own work — the latter she continued to do for the first ten years after she started teaching. Donald and the bride and bridegroom were all former students of hers. She wished Emma had been as well. She knew Donald’s father and asked Donald how he was, worried that the reason he wasn’t at the wedding was due to ill health. Donald said he was doing fine, but often felt too tired to travel very far afield, aware that even if he had the energy he wouldn’t have had the inclination.
Emma may have been conspicuously attractive whatever her chosen attire but when she wasn’t to be seen for twenty minutes, perhaps more people noticed than would have otherwise. Donald was aware of her absence but knew she would often spend many minutes in the bathroom, reapplying her make-up and sorting out her hair and, while she was away, he was in conversation with the very woman, the art teacher, who, after asking about his father, reminisced a little about their times years earlier being part of what constituted the art scene on the island. She said his father, his mother, herself, and about eight others all returned to the island after university, believing they could generate an art scene out of Portree. They didn’t entirely fail, she supposed, but it might have seemed a wilful ambition to some; showing a lack of ambition to others. They wanted an art of the periphery she said, and believed that by staying in Glasgow, or moving to Edinburgh or London, would have diluted their intentions. Perhaps instead it left them irrelevant and anonymous, but for several years they were an artistic community, and that meant something. He asked her a few questions about his mother, and she answered carefully, trying to be respectful to Donald’s feelings as she kept from him an affair his mother had when he was seven, and also said nothing about his father’s affair with her around the same time.
While this discussion was taking place, Emma wasn’t in the bathroom but in the foyer of the hotel, seated on a couch, speaking with her ex-boyfriend. He wanted her back, he insisted, and realised in her reply she was not countering him categorically but with the weakest of reasons: she was in a relationship and couldn’t simply walk out on her partner. She knew she should have been more adamant — she should have felt the phone call was an affront, as were the two texts over the previous few days. But instead she had replied to those texts, said it was ok to ring her if he felt the need, and didn’t leave the phone unanswered, even though she was at a wedding. Emma should probably have said promptly that she loved Donald and felt secure and safe as she never had with him, said that her ex was someone who helped her grow if not always in the most useful of ways, and that whatever use he had been to her had long since expended. But instead, she found herself speaking in a soft tone, softer than the one she usually used with Donald, and she didn’t want to go back to the wedding but stay in the foyer talking to him.
4
In the months after the wedding, Donald wished to see more of Emma, though he also knew his father wished to see more of him. When he and his dad spoke on the phone, his father said he would like him to come up, but knew he was busy at work and understood he was travelling now more often between Glasgow and Edinburgh. His father said this heavily, as if aware that he didn’t want to make demands but that he couldn’t quite eradicate the need from his voice. Donald knew he should visit and went up twice within those final four months, but was well aware he would have gone up more often were he not going through so often to Glasgow. After the wedding, Emma hadn’t come to Edinburgh at all, and when he did go to Glasgow, she proposed he should really be spending more time with his father, and that the flatshare meant it was awkward if he stayed for more than a night. That hadn’t been a problem before, and he liked her flatmates and he believed they liked him, and what was to stop her visiting? The one-bedroom flat he owned and he had no flatmates who need show signs of irritation. These were thoughts he would have, not arguments he pursued, and one might have thought he was so reticent in expressing what he might have seen as an injustice, because of the greater injustice he was feeling towards his father.
During those two visits to his dad, Donald noticed his increasing frailty and also that he was still smoking despite the doctor’s protestations. On the nights he was there, Donald watched as his father also drank two or three whiskies in the evening. They would sometimes go to the pub where he would have one or two, and then, when they returned home, he insisted on another to help him sleep. His father had never been a heavy smoker or drinker, but Donald did wonder whether his father’s heart was now strong enough to tolerate the regular consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. The doctor clearly thought not, yet what happens to be medical advice from a practitioner can seem like a sermon or lecture, and even more so from a son. After all, at least the practitioner can claim expertise; a son no more than concern, a deeper response to a person’s life, of course, but one that can contain within it the condescension that disinterested advice can escape. Donald said nothing, but anybody looking on would have seen on his face grave concern, as if his expression possessed the pun and that in his mien he wished to keep his father from any earlier a grave than was necessary.
Yet that expression of concern wasn’t only on Donald’s face because of his father; it was also evident while he fretted over what was happening between him and Emma. He began to believe that Emma had moved to Glasgow to allow for a slow break-up, and that was when he used his statistical skills towards the time they had spent together since her relocation. He noticed that the hours had moved from 48 hours out of 168, steadily decreasing to around 8 hours of the week. Sure, he needed to take into account trips to see his father, but he suspected that if he hadn’t gone to Skye, she might have been too busy to see him in Glasgow. She was working into the weekend, she said, and on a couple of occasions he took this to mean she didn’t wish him to visit, so he didn’t come, and partly why the weekly average was down to 8 hours. People understandably assumed the furrowed expression was due to his father’s health, and the only person who asked him about more than his father, when they saw him, was the woman in the shop. Ginnie’s questions seemed more pertinent than anybody else’s: everyone who asked would have known how his father was; they would have seen him in the pub, by the pier, buying fish as the boats came in, picking up items from the grocery store. Emma only visited twice, the first time enthusiastically and the second reluctantly, but enough times to visit a small place and be remembered, if chiefly by Ginnie. Donald said things were fine, though his countenance proposed otherwise and he saw on the woman’s face a concern that he couldn’t quite comprehend but took it to mean no more than that it might have been difficult to be there for a partner when he needed also to be there for his father, evident in her comment that she hoped all was well between him and Emma. He was surprised she remembered Emma’s name. It made him suppose his father occasionally mentioned her and, for a moment, he felt a tenderness towards his father, yet also towards this woman who showed interest. Yet he hardened just a little towards Emma. While it seemed the woman and his father had spoken nicely about Emma, Emma had said harsh things about the village and Ginnie. Emma may never have said anything cruel about his father. But she had shown no interest in visiting him again after those two occasions. It was Donald’s business she all but proposed, and that business was attending to his father’s ill health.
If Donald had looked statistically as closely at the time he spent with his father, as opposed to how much time he was with Emma, his guilt would have been potentially assuaged. In the months before his father passed away, he was in his company five times more than he was in Emma’s. Of course, this rested more on Emma’s resistance than on Donald’s insistence he see his father, but it was understandable when Ginnie, at the wake, said he needed to live his own life and not be so concerned with others that Donald would assume this was a reference to how much he had cared for him. It assuaged his guilt, but that wasn’t quite what Ginnie meant, and it wasn’t until three months later that he began to understand that she wasn’t speaking about his father at all.
5
He didn’t see Emma for several weeks after his father’s death. He stayed on the island, sorting things out legally and materially - deciding in the latter instance what he needed to keep and what to sell or give away. As for the legal issue, he was surprised to find that his father had left enough money in his will that Donald could pay off the mortgage on his Edinburgh flat, with no need to sell the cottage if he wished not to do so. Were he to sell it, he supposed he wouldn’t come back to Skye very often, if at all. He didn’t feel close to anyone there, and yet when he thought about it, didn’t feel very close to anybody in Edinburgh. In those moments, he yearned for Emma and would sometimes phone her. On occasion, she would answer; on others not, and when she did pick up she was always in a hurry as they rarely talked for more than fifteen minutes.
When he returned to Edinburgh, the flat had become much emptier, as though it didn’t just have the absence of Emma but the absence of his father too. An absurd thought perhaps since his father had never been in it, but as he looked at the red landline phone in the corner of the sitting room, next to the window and beside the chair on the smallest of the nest of tables in the room, he saw in the phone his father’s absence. It moved him far more than when he had lowered his father’s coffin. He thought of how often he had sat there, speaking for an hour to his father as they would discuss books, newspaper articles or whatever else either of them had been reading. His father was the only person he would speak to on this landline; everyone else (and there weren’t many), he would talk to on the mobile, though more often they would text. That phone became both a forlorn and obsolete object, and he remembered buying it in a retro store while at university.
That evening, he sat in the corner, picked up the handle and dialled, with a rotating finger, Emma’s number. She didn’t pick up. He phoned again. No answer. Of course, she would have viewed it as an unknown number and, for a while, he felt happy that she hadn’t ignored him, but had only ignored a number that was unfamiliar to her. Yet he was reluctant then to phone her mobile, and didn’t do so that evening, afraid that she wouldn’t pick up.
He spoke to her the next day and asked when would be the best time for him to come through. She said she was free all day Saturday but had something on in the evening, and he could have worked out statistically that their time together would shrink again — a few hours out of almost two months. She didn’t say she missed him, and he tried, but the words wouldn’t come out, perhaps because he knew she didn’t want to hear them.
He visited, nevertheless, and they met up for lunch in a cafe on the Southside and then went for a walk around Queen’s Park. The sky was overcast, but the weather wasn't cold, and for a while they sat on a bench at the top of the hill in the park, overlooking the city. She told him there was no point, really, that he kept coming through. It wasn’t that she didn’t wish to see him, it was that she didn’t think it was good for him to see her. They had been drifting apart, she insisted; this left her feelings weak, and she wasn’t so sure if that was the case for him. He said nothing. He held her hand and waited for her to speak about his father, how difficult it must have been and how he must feel very lonely now in the flat, living alone and with no brothers or sisters and his father gone. But no, she didn’t speak of these things, and while it would be tempting to say she didn’t because she didn’t care, some might have seen in her expression an ambivalence — as if she wanted to ask Donald but was aware too that this would be cruel, as she was saying she no longer wanted to be with him.
He left for a train back to Edinburgh late that afternoon, and the rest of the weekend was a blur of emptiness, gestures and habits that got the washing done, some groceries bought and food cooked. He was relieved to go to work on Monday morning, but the relief contained no enthusiasm for the job, nor for anybody at work. But it was somewhere to go, and he needed it, and knew he was good at the work he did.
He didn’t contact Emma again, and she made no effort to get in touch with him. A couple of weeks after the visit to Glasgow, he got a train up to Skye and, after meeting with the lawyer in Portree to finalise his father’s estate, he carried on to Uig. He was staying for a long weekend and was thinking about what to do with the house. Parts of his job could be done online, and he proposed to the boss that the following spring he would work three days in the office, two days from home. He wanted to renovate the house and also remove the shed at the back, replacing it with a garden cabin. There was plenty of space. He looked online and saw he could buy one with a bathroom, a kitchen and a toilet. He planned to build one with some of the cash his father left in his will, and wasn’t sure whether he would rent out the garden house or the house itself. It wasn’t for the money - it was a feeling that he wanted people around when he visited, and imagined either ongoing tourists staying for a few days in the home at the back, or a family living all year in the house, while he would sometimes visit and stay in the garden home.
He needed it as an idea to alleviate loneliness others might choose to remove through buying affection or paying for sex. He had thought about both, about going on sites and offering whatever date he could find the best of everything, a meal at a Michelin star restaurant, flowers sent to her home, a taxi to pick her up and a weekend away. He wondered whether regular encounters with a sex worker would alleviate his ongoing desire for Emma, even hiring someone who could dress up to look like her. But no, he would fix up the house and build a garden home.
He looked around the house to see what needed to be done, and went out into the garden to see how much land there was, and how far back from the house he could push the new build. The shed was only a few metres from the house and too close; you could see into kitchen without difficulty. He could easily put it back another fifteen metres, leaving it at the back of the garden and where it would face chiefly out on to the rest of the croft and towards the sea. When he imagined his plans, when he thought he might even move back to the island, he could not envisage Emma as part of them. He was pleased to realise he could think of a reality that didn’t at all include her, even if she was still, it seemed, almost constantly on his mind.
Donald looked in the cupboards and the fridge, looked at his watch, and saw that the shop was closing in a few minutes. He found his wallet, threw on his jacket, and rushed along the road, catching it just as Ginnie was about to turn the sign on the door. She ushered him in and asked him to feel in no hurry - it was good to see him. Ginnie asked him how he was coping, and when he said he wasn’t quite sure, she said he hoped he had people down south who were by his side. He said that he didn’t think he did, and it came out almost involuntarily. It was as though he had been speaking to himself, and she seemed to recognise that he spoke so openly less because he wanted to; he couldn’t help himself. Here was a woman who had run the shop for twenty-five years and had known Donald when he was a young boy, knew his mother and witnessed his father cope with her death, and Donald too, and now was watching this youngster as a grown man, coping with a death again, and with no one else left to bury. She might have lost her husband ten years earlier, but her daughter was alive.
She asked him if he wanted tea, and she came back a minute later with two cups, with the tea bags removed and milk splashed in both. She assumed he didn’t take sugar and was right, and they stood for ten minutes, on opposite sides of the counter, chatting. He asked her about a comment she made on the day of the funeral, about how he seemed to show too much concern for others, and he occasionally had wondered about that remark, saying he knew it wasn’t a callous comment but potentially might be viewed as such. After all, his father was only just in his grave; why wouldn’t he show concern? And nothing he added suggested that she was a person who didn’t show concern towards others, as he looked at the cup of tea she had made for him. He had never seen Ginnie look uncomfortable before, but in that moment, he witnessed a woman who appeared to have a thought on her mind that she was hiding from him, and she then asked him about Emma.
He told her they had parted more than a month ago and that it was a relationship he supposed she left long before he did. Ginnie took it to mean he already knew what she was about to say, and said it was good that he found out. Of course, when she said he showed too much concern, she wasn’t talking about how much he cared for his father. It was that he was perhaps showing too much concern towards a girlfriend who might not have been worth his attention. It happens, she added, saying that for five years her daughter was with a man who cheated on her every time he was on the mainland — he had all but another life in Inverness. Donald listened, anxious but curious, as he wondered what this woman knew about Emma and how she had come about this knowledge. It is one of the cruellest of paradoxes that every jealous person knows, everyone with a missing loved one, or someone awaiting an exam result, aware they have probably failed. The consequences can be enormous or relatively minor, but the need to know the worst releases a primal fear and a hunger for knowledge, and Donald was no different that day.
6
Ginnie said that when she offered her remark, she probably knew Donald would see it chiefly about his father, but hoped he would see it as a more general one — that he needed to look after himself now his father had passed away, but also wouldn’t allow others to take advantage of him. News travels slowly up here, she added, but it does travel, and whether this news is gossip or concern, sometimes it isn’t always easy to distinguish. Yet she thought that when someone was speaking to her about the wedding, and then specifically mentioned Donald, they were offering it with concern. He asked who it was, and Ginnie said that wouldn’t be fair to say, and it was enough that she was telling him what was said. He accepted her resistance and would for a long time muse over who the person might have been, but for the moment, all he wanted to know was the story itself and not especially who was behind it.
Ginnie said that while at the wedding, someone observed Donald and Emma together, they didn’t think much of it until one point in the evening when they saw her outside speaking to someone on the phone for quite some time. The person listening was sitting outside having a cigarette, and Emma was in the foyer, though near the entrance, and the entrance doors were open. At first, they assumed it was someone speaking to their boyfriend, but as they glanced around from where they were seated on the step, they could see it was the person quite a few people had noticed and was supposed to be Donald’s girlfriend. Who was this person she was speaking to in semi-whispered tones, in affectionate language, but someone who must also have been her boyfriend? Donald didn’t seem like the sort of person who was in a menage a trois or what people now call a polyamorous relationship — but perhaps they were.
As she spoke, Ginnie offered the information with more delicacy than we offer it here, and she also didn’t want to pry, but she said that of course if Donald and Emma’s relationship was open then that wasn’t anybody else’s business. The difficulty rests on wondering whether unavoidable eavesdropping becomes an ethical responsibility, and when this friend told Ginnie several months earlier, a few weeks before Donald’s father died, and a couple of months after the wedding, they decided to pass that responsibility on to her. Ginnie asked the person to say more about what they had heard. The person said that it was clear Emma was seeing this other man, and she supposed Donald was none the wiser. Was it somebody’s duty to make a him a little wiser, they wondered, and told Ginnie because she had known Donald since he was a boy. If anyone could speak to him, it would be her. But Ginnie said she hadn’t heard the conversation, didn’t know if Donald had any problem with his girlfriend seeing others, and even if the person who came to her, and Ginnie herself, were concerned for Donald, this wasn’t really their business.
Yet at his father’s funeral, she supposed she must have made it so, in that remark about concern that Donald then brought up now in the shop. Thinking about it, she said, she probably did want to warn him, if he needed warning, about Emma, but probably saw it as a question far beyond a present girlfriend: that Donald was a concerned person, and many people aren’t. Had his father not died, perhaps she would have said nothing, but there Donald was, with no brothers or no sisters, no mother and now no father, and she couldn’t get out of her mind the story from the wedding the person relayed, and realised she had to say something to Donald. But what to say - and so she said he should think more of himself and not only of others. Donald didn’t know whether to thank her or offer an angry remark, and didn’t know whether he wished to offer the latter because she hadn’t told him earlier, or had told him now too much. He didn’t know why he wasn’t more instantly angry with Emma, wondering whether he already more or less knew what Ginnie had told him or that it was easier to be furious with the person in from of him than someone hundreds of miles away, someone whom he no doubt still had feelings towards even if for a while he had adjusted to the idea that she had none for him. A person looking on might have felt he owed Ginnie some affection, that here was a woman who was concerned about him and who had worded carefully a warning after what she had heard, and worded it carefully all over again as she spoke to him in the shop.
Donald ended up thanking her, but curtly, as though aware he wanted to be rude but knew as well that this would have been unfair. In time he would apologise even for this curtness, and was relieved that he hadn’t had to apologise for so much worse.
Returning to the house, he sent Emma a message saying he wanted to meet up, that he was in Skye, and he could see her in Glasgow on his way back — he had taken the train up via Inverness, but he could go back down via Glasgow. She replied more promptly than he might have expected, but only to offer an excuse why they couldn’t meet. He said it wouldn’t take long; he needed perhaps an hour, and they could get a coffee next to the station. He offered a time and she agreed, perhaps relieved that he didn’t want to spend the day in her company. Were these his thoughts or hers? Maybe somewhere in between; she wanted to see Donald but was ambivalent; he very much wanted to see her but supposed she was reluctant. What matters is that they met.
What did they discuss? When he arrived and sat waiting for a couple of minutes, he knew that he didn’t have anything to say that wasn’t accusatory or intrusive. He wanted to yell at her for cheating and yell at her some more for doing it however indirectly at the wedding of people he knew, and that she didn’t. It seemed especially disrespectful. He also, of course, wanted to know who was the person on the other end of the line, though he supposed he knew the answer to that. When she came through the door, she was, as usual, glanced at by strangers, and was wearing a black skirt, boots of the same colour above the ankle, a red coat and red lipstick. Some might have thought she had made an effort, and this must be a date, but Donald knew that for Emma dressing conspicuously was effortless and, seeing how stylish and put together she was, saw in it a taunt. Donald may never have been much of a dresser, even with Emma’s best efforts. But his father’s death and Emma’s abandonment had done nothing to improve it, and there he was in gear better suited to climbing a mountain than charming a new lover. Neither asked the other how they were doing, as if what they were wearing explained enough. He asked her what she would like to drink and while getting the sort of coffees that usually holds up the queue, containing as it does so many intricate demands, he thought about what he would say, realising what he wanted to know most, and that would be least likely to start an argument, was who might have overheard her conversation on the phone.
As he handed her the coffee and then sipped his own, simpler beverage that was now half-cold, he said to her that he knew she had made an important or at least lengthy call at the wedding, and he wondered if she could remember anyone who was outside having a cigarette while she was speaking. He explained what the shopkeeper had said. He thought she might recall, since people doing something surreptitious are usually aware of others who might be observing them, and, sure enough, she could. The problem was t that Donald couldn’t then put a face to the description and could see that he asked only to avoid more resentful gambits. What mattered was that she had humiliated him, that the community he may have believed he had little interest in was present enough for him to feel the shame of their judgement.
Emma then said he probably wanted to know who she had been talking to, and he expected her to lie since she offered it without a prompt. Yet she admitted it was her ex-boyfriend, and that when she spoke to him, they had recently become reacquainted, but nothing was happening between them. Was it now, Donald asked. She nodded that it was. He wasn’t doing well for a while she said, and that was why he initially contacted her and, during the wedding, was about the fourth time they had talked. What she realised was that he wasn’t such a good person, but neither was she. They were selfish, and Donald wasn’t. At least if two selfish people get together, they are saving everyone else from their selfishness, she supposed. She offered it with a shrug, and Donald saw for the first time that she had seen in him an attempt to become a better person. While Donald may not usually have been flattered by such a notion, and probably wouldn’t have believed such a claim made by anyone else, he needed to believe it that afternoon in the cafe. Emma and the cynical ex deserved each other, he thought, but it came without all the usual assumptions and resentments that accompany the remark, and he was grateful that Emma had said what she said.
Yet she also added that people were looking out for him; that he might have supposed he had been judged by the community, that they would have seen a person oblivious to his girlfriend’s infidelity (though there wasn’t one), but that this probably wasn’t judgment. It was concern. If people were looking at her, and listening in to her conversation, they were also, it seemed, looking out for him. Emma said she might have mocked the shopkeeper, might have accused Ginnie of being a gossip, but that was probably unfair. It was more likely they were showing consideration. It was only in his fragility that he saw judgment over concern. She said it might seem like a defence on her part, and that it wouldn’t mean much to him, but what she was about to say did mean quite a lot to her.
She really hadn’t cheated on him. It wasn’t until after they had that conversation on the bench in Queen’s Park that she let her ex properly back into her life, and she didn’t know if she did so out of love for this man or out of self-hatred. She didn’t know if she couldn’t finally love Donald because she couldn’t love herself, which of course sounded trite, but she did know that it was easier to be with her ex if she didn’t. He wasn’t ethically demanding she supposed and, when Donald interjected saying that he didn’t judge her, she said that wasn’t what mattered. What counted was how she judged herself in her eyes through his. Her talk was a combination of the obvious and the obscure, but Donald saw in it sincerity, and let her speak. Emma talked and talked, told him things about her family he didn’t know, of school insecurities and a friend she had seen drown when Emma was ten. It was only when the cafe closed at eight (four hours after they’d met), she accepted she must go, and he sensed that she needed his company now more than he needed hers. He didn’t think this cynically but sorrowfully, as though aware that in time he would meet someone whom he could show concern and would show concern towards him, and Emma might take a lot longer to find such a person, and to offer the concern herself.
On the train back to Edinburgh he was looking forward to being alone in his flat for the first time in many months, and knew that rather than wondering constantly whether he would be getting a message or a call from Emma on his mobile, that he would look with sadness at the landline phone in the corner of the room that now, with his father’s passing, had become obsolete. Yet it also became the object that to him best represented his dad’s presence. He thought he might give the number to Ginnie as he wished, oddly, that she and his father had been secret lovers.
© Tony McKibbin