One Night on the Island(17)

I’ve followed the trail that leads to Salvation’s northernmost point. My first glimpse of the island’s simple stone church and the graveyard beyond it – a collection of white granite crosses scattered across the clifftop, strikingly simple, their words turned out to face the sea. I walk amongst them, hands shoved in my pockets, my shoulders bunched against the harsh wind. Jeez, the weather here is a daily struggle. The last names carved into the granite are unknown to me yet familiar – Macfarlane, Campbell, Sweeney, Macdonald. They echo my grandmother’s stories, faces on faded black-and-white photographs stored in an old cookie tin in the back of her kitchen cabinet. I wish I’d found the time in years gone by to ask more about them, to make notes on the back before the early stages of dementia started to throw dust covers over her memories. And then I find a cross inscribed with ‘Elizabeth Doyle, December 1907’, beside her husband, ‘Henry Doyle, March 1909’. I study the scant information, hungry to know more about these long-passed relatives of Barney. Of mine. Elizabeth died when she was seventy-nine, Henry just fifteen months later, aged eighty-four. They clocked up fifty-six years together. I stand behind their graves and look out to sea, a hand braced on either stone. ‘Fifty-six years, folks,’ I say. ‘That’s a damn fine number.’ Life couldn’t have been easy for them out here on the island, especially back then without modern comforts. Or maybe I’m wrong and it was bucolic and romantic, far from the madding crowds and all the better for it. ‘Less complicated, anyway,’ I say, thinking of my own tangled marriage, faltering when we’re barely into double figures. Day by day, week by week and month by month, Susie has systematically untied every knot that bound us together, and with every loosened thread she drifts further from me. She said there wasn’t anyone else, just that she needed something different. She said it hurts like hell that she isn’t sure if we’d make better friends than lovers. It doesn’t seem like we’re either at the moment. And that, Elizabeth, Henry, is why I’m here, three thousand miles from the people I love most in the world. I hear a creak – wind in the trees, or perhaps it’s Henry turning in his grave at the thought of a Doyle man being so remiss as to let his family slip through his fingers.

‘Morning.’

I turn at the sound of a voice and find a woman behind me, early sixties at a guess, though that’s a game I never play because it only ever ends one way. She’s a cool kind of sixty-something, in any case. Blue hair pokes from beneath a wool hat with huge flowers stitched to the side of it, her coat made up of bold slices of colour and textures. My fingers ache for my camera.

‘You must be our honeymooner,’ she says, but the glint in her brown eyes confirms that news of the mix-up has reached her ears, and probably every other ear on the island.

‘It came as news to me too,’ I say, and she laughs, pleased.

She glances at the cross in front of me. ‘It’s been a while since we’ve had any Doyles on the island.’

I make a mental note not to tell Brianne any secrets. ‘I’m a Sullivan by name, but yeah, my mother has a cousin named Lauren Doyle.’

‘I remember Lauren leaving with the little ones,’ she says, sticking her gloved hand out. ‘Ailsa Campbell.’

I pull my hand from my pocket and hold it out. ‘Good to meet you.’

‘You too,’ she says. ‘So what brings you to Slánú?’

I savour her use of the old name; it reminds me of my grandmother’s stories.

‘Oh, it’s okay if you’d prefer not to say,’ she says when I don’t reply straight away. ‘It’s just that few folk choose to come to a place like this without a story. We’ve had flashy, exhausted city types, the occasional novelist trying to blow writer’s block away. Sarah, the doctor’s receptionist up in the village, came to get away from her revolting husband about twenty years ago and never bothered going home. Staying long?’

There isn’t a particularly straightforward answer to her question.

‘That’s up in the air,’ I say. ‘Planning to. A couple of months or so, maybe even until the holidays.’

She stands back and crosses her arms over her chest, assessing me. ‘Intrepid reporter hoping to land the scoop of your life?’

I think she’s having a little fun at my expense. I shake my head, even though there will hopefully be an element of interviewing and documenting to go along with the photography project, as long as I can get the islanders to trust me enough to talk to me, that is.

‘You’re not one of those explorer types, are you, set on walking all of the isles? We’ve had a few of those over the years.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘This is the only island I’m interested in.’

Ailsa narrows her eyes for a few seconds, then shrugs. ‘Okay, Doyle, you win. What brings you out here?’

I offer a few details, aware that by telling one of the islanders, I’m telling all of them. ‘He’s a photographer,’ she’ll say, next time she’s in the store. ‘Here to capture the home of his ancestors, the people and the flora and fauna, he said,’ raising her eyebrows as she nurses a dram in the tiny island pub. ‘A slice of history, his and ours, for an exhibition in Boston next summer,’ she’ll tell a neighbour while walking her dog on the beach.