She did, however, see Saif.
Saif spotted her at the same time from the other end of the beach. He lived in the old manse – the smaller, crumbling one, not the one Colton had lavishly updated – up on the hillside, empty since their vicar had moved to the mainland, the ageing population here no longer large enough to justify a full-time padre, on an island which, even though it had strong overtones of religious severity and Knoxism, had never torn itself away entirely from its earlier roots: the many, fierce gods of the Viking invaders; the green earth gods of its primary inhabitants. There was something on the island that was deeply, utterly spiritual, whatever your beliefs. There were standing stones on the headlands – the remains of a community that had worshipped heaven knows what – as well as an ancient, beautiful ruined abbey, and scattered stern plain churches with stubby steeples standing stiff against the northerly winds.
The house was rented to Saif as he did his two years’ service to the community in return for which, it was promised, he would receive his permanent right to stay. He was a refugee, and a doctor, and the remote islands desperately needed GPs, although his promised right to stay of course was not guaranteed. Saif had given up reading about British politics. It was a total mystery to him. He was unaware that it was an equal mystery to everyone else around him; he just assumed this was how things had always been.
He had been having the dreams again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be free of them. Always the clamour, the noise. Being in the boat again. Clutching on to his leather bag as though his life depended on it. The look on the face of the little boy he’d had to stitch up without anaesthetic after a fight had broken out. The stoicism. The desperation. The boat.
And every morning, regardless of the weather, he woke up determined not to sink beneath his own waves – his own waves of waiting: waiting to hear about his wife and his two sons, left behind when he went to see if he could forge a passage to a better life for them all in a world that had got suddenly, harshly worse.
He had heard nothing, although he called the Home Office once a week. He was unsure if the distant neighbourhood he had left behind – once friendly, chatty, relaxed – even existed any more. His entire life was gone.
And people kept telling him he was one of the lucky ones.
Every morning, to shake the night horrors from his head, he would go for a long walk down the Endless to try to get himself into an appropriate state of mind to deal with the minor complaints of the local population: their sore hips, and coughing babies, and mild anxiety, and menopauses, and everything that he must not dismiss as absolutely nothing compared with the searing, apocalyptic misery of his homeland. A couple of miles normally did it. Through the winter, he had walked as the sun barely rose, half by instinct, welcoming the handfuls of hail that felt like rocks being thrown into his face, a phenomenon he had never experienced until he had come to Europe and which he had found almost comically inconvenient.
But at least the weather allowed him to feel something other than dread, and he let it scour out his head. When he was chilled to the bone – and exhausted – then, he felt clean. And empty. And ready for another day in this half-life – an eternal waiting room.
And he was thinking this when he saw it, and he threw up his arms in surprise.
Lorna saw this happen from the other end of the beach, and her brow furrowed. It was not like Saif to be enthusiastic. If anything, you had to work pretty hard to draw him out. Life on Mure was chatty – there was no way around it. Everyone knew each other and everyone used gossip as the lifeblood of their community. It wasn’t unusual to know the goings-on and whereabouts of three generations of Murians at any one time. Of course, everyone was a millionaire in America or doing fabulously well in London or had the most brilliant and amazing children. You just accepted that as a given. Still, it was nice to hear, regardless.
But Saif never, ever spoke about his family. It was all Lorna knew that he had – or had had – a wife and two sons. She couldn’t bear to ask anything more. Saif had landed on Mure stripped of everything – of possessions, of his status. He was a refugee before he was a doctor: he was something pitied – even, in some quarters (until he stitched up their injuries and tended to their parents), despised for no reason. She couldn’t bear the risk of upsetting him, of taking away the last bit of dignity he had left, by prying.
So when she saw him waving, the bright empty Mure morning full of whipping clouds and promise, her heart started to beat faster immediately. Milou caught on to her excitement and bounded cheerily up the beach. She ran to keep up with him, arriving panting – the Endless was always much longer than you thought it was; the water played tricks on your concept of distance – and trepidatious.
‘Look!’ Saif was shouting. ‘Look!’
She followed his pointing finger. Was it a boat? What was it? She screwed her eyes up.
‘Oh. It’s gone,’ said Saif, and she looked at him, puzzled, but his gaze was still fixed out on the water. She stared too, trying to get her heart to calm down. Just as she was about to ask him what the hell he’d been going on about, she saw it: a ripple at first, not something you could be sure of, then, straight out of the blue, a huge body – vast, vaster than it had any right to be, so big you couldn’t believe that it could possibly propel itself. It was like watching a 747 take off – a huge, shining black body leaped straight out over the waves and, with a vibrant twist of its tail, shaking off the droplets of water, plunged back underneath.
Saif turned to her, eyes shining. He said something that sounded like ‘hut’.
Lorna squinted. ‘What?’
‘I don’t know the word in English,’ he said.
‘Oh!’ said Lorna. ‘Whale! It’s a whale. A weird … I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
‘There are many of them here?’
‘Some,’ said Lorna. She frowned. ‘Some normal whales. That one looks weird. And it’s not good for them to be so close to shore. One got washed up last year and it was a heck of a palaver, remember?’
Saif didn’t understand whether a ‘heck of a palaver’ was a good thing or a bad thing, and did not remember, so he just kept looking. Sure enough, after a few moments the whale leaped again, and this time the sun caught the droplets dropping from its tail like diamonds, and what looked bizarrely like a horn. They both leaned forward to see it.
‘It’s beautiful.’
Lorna looked at it. ‘It is,’ she said.
‘You do not sound so happy, Lorenah.’
He had never been very good at pronouncing her name.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘For starters, I’m worried about it. Whales beaching is a terrible thing. Even if you can save them once, sometimes they just do it again. And the other thing …’
Saif looked at her quizzically.
‘Oh well, you’ll think this is stupid.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘For Murians … on the island, I mean. They’re seen as unlucky.’
Saif frowned. ‘But they’re so beautiful.’
‘Lots of beautiful things bring bad luck. So we’ll welcome them in,’ said Lorna, her eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘We need Flora. She can handle these things.’
Saif looked doubtful, and Lorna laughed. ‘Oh, it’s just silly superstition though.’
And the whale leaped again through the breaking waves, so strong and free, and Lorna wondered a little why she didn’t feel joyous; why she had, unexpectedly, an ominous feeling in the pit of her stomach, quite at odds with the blowy day.
Chapter Three