The Last Wanderer Read online

  Meg Henderson

  was born in Glasgow. She is a journalist and the author of the bestselling memoir, Finding Peggy, and several bestselling novels.

  Praise for Meg Henderson’s novels:

  THE HOLY CITY

  ‘A hugely absorbing story. Henderson brings the horror and pain of wartime experiences vividly to life with vigorous humour, commonsense wisdom and vitality.’

  Observer

  BLOODY MARY

  ‘A novel full of the rich detail of domestic lives, told with humour and sharpness.’

  Scotland on Sunday

  CHASING ANGELS

  ‘Henderson writes from a position of uncompromising humanity. A strong, atmospheric writer with gifts of insight, she has a sharp and tarry black humour, so while she attacks the objects of her wrath, she leavens the battle with a running current of dark and infectious wit.’

  Glasgow Sunday Herald

  Also by Meg Henderson

  FINDING PEGGY: A GLASGOW CHILDHOOD

  THE HOLY CITY

  BLOODY MARY

  CHASING ANGELS

  THE LAST WANDERER

  SECOND SIGHT

  DAISY’S WARS

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2003 by Flamingo,

  an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Copyright © Meg Henderson 2003 and 2012

  The moral right of Meg Henderson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-193-4

  Version 1.0

  MEG HENDERSON

  The Last Wanderer

  For Michael Currie, Coxswain of the Mallaig Lifeboat, native of Barra, gentleman, philosopher and former fisherman

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  1

  It seemed to Angusina Polson that her memories of ninety years ago were nearer and more vivid than her recollection of what had happened in the last ninety seconds. And she wasn’t Angusina Polson from the Shetland Isles; she knew that. She might be a daft old woman losing whatever mind she ever had, but she knew she was Angusina Hamilton and she lived in Acarsaid, had lived there for many a year, though she couldn’t rightly recall how many. She had carried Aeneas’s name far longer than she had her father’s, but she still thought of herself as Angusina, or Ina Polson, daughter of Magnus and Dolina from Lerwick in the Shetland Isles. Why was that, she wondered? If it was a judgement on her years with her husband then it was an unfair one, because Aeneas had been a good, steady man.

  Once, in Yarmouth, when she was worlds younger, Ina and the other herring lassies had gone to see a fortune-teller in a fairground booth. They were a bunch of giggling, shoving lassies out for a laugh, not really believing a word of what they were told about meeting tall, dark, handsome strangers, but wanting to, as long as the others didn’t know that they did. The gypsy woman was as dark and wrinkled as a fortune-teller should be, the lines on her face intensifying every time she put her left hand to her mouth and inhaled deeply from the stub end of her cigarette. She clasped Ina’s right hand in her own, stared at it intently for a few seconds, then looked at her solemn-eyed before saying, ‘You’ll marry someone you already know and you’ll live across the sea from your home. You’ll be content, but you could’ve done better, and you won’t have many bairns.’

  Coming from a time and a background where big families were the norm, with women having a bairn a year – or every two years if they were lucky – Ina would have no trouble with the notion of not ‘having many’. Not that she had been fooled by any of it, but looking back it was true that she had lived across the sea from her home and she had been content, too, mostly, with Aeneas, even if she did still feel more like the lassie she had been born than the wife she became. Feeling guilty, she would go over it in her mind many times, each time defending Aeneas against a charge that hadn’t been made, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. Constantly thinking about it didn’t change the truth, though; Hamilton she was, but Polson she had been born and, deep down, like a brand burned into her soul, Polson she would always be.

  The memories came in no particular order, all jumbled up and out of sequence and more like visions, or waking dreams, than memories. Sometimes she spoke with people she had grown up with in Shetland. Then her daughter Margo would appear, and sometimes Rose, her youngest granddaughter; all of them together as though they had known each other all of their lives. They hadn’t, of course, being separated not just by distance, but by many decades. None of it made any sense, except to Ina, because they were her memories. There was something she should remember about Rose but she couldn’t quite recall what it was; no matter, it would keep for another time. Most of the memories came from a time when she felt she belonged in the world – unlike now, when it plainly belonged to someone else and made so little sense to her that she sometimes wondered not only whether it belonged to others, but whether it was a different world entirely; maybe she had fallen asleep in the Milky Way and wakened up in another galaxy. Maybe that’s what it was. When she tried to retrieve those very early memories they came in snatches. She had a few snapshots in her mind of her much older brother, Sandy, and more of her sister Ella, though she couldn’t remember her sister clearly in her younger days; Ella was younger than Sandy, but she had still been seven years older than Ina.

  Now that Ella was in her mind she knew there was another connection with Rose, but whatever it was would have to keep for another time, too, because it had slipped from her memory as quickly and easily as it had come into it. She hadn’t got to know her sister till they were herring lassies together; maybe after that, really, to be truthful. Ina’s own fault, not Ella’s, she thought sadly. Ella, poor Ella, she would think, then she would think again and ask, ‘But was she really? Hadn’t she got what she wanted, what she truly deserved eventually?’ Even if it had come at a price, it was one Ella was prepared to pay – and she had never regretted it. So Ella was in her memories, at a distance sometimes as she had been when Ina was a bairn, and closer at other times, as she became later; though she was long gone now. So, for that matter, was the main companion of Ina’s early years: Danny, her elder brother by two years. Danny, caught with her in the painful debris of their mother’s grief. She recalled her mother’s eyes: beautiful blue eyes, Dolina had; deep pools of sadness and, at times, of resentment, too, she sometimes felt. It was when she thought of her mother that Rose would be called to mind. She thought there was a connection, something about the eyes, though Rose’s were brown and not blue. What was it? No, it had gone again.

  Ina’s mind would drift happily to the stars above her native Shetland Isles, a hundred bits of rock suspended far out in the North Sea between Iceland, Norway and Scotland. Only fifteen of the isles were inhabited, and Ina’s home had been in Lerwick, on the biggest
one, in the east of the part that was called the South Mainland. She had no idea why, but from her earliest days she had taken note of the skies overhead and the familiar but brilliant show that appeared every night. She had been in other places in her life where it was easy to identify the sparkling, faraway planets in their distinctive patterns as they shone brightly against a blue or black backdrop, but it was different in Shetland. There the sky never quite darkened, no matter what the season, but there were no street lights either, nothing to distract from the show up above. The air was clearer, cleaner, too, and you could see more than the major constellations that everyone knew about. Between them were millions of other diamond glints invisible to the eyes of those trapped in other places, as though some great hand had created Orion, the Great Bear, Gemini and the others and, having some stardust left over, as a parting gesture had thrown it into the air over Shetland to fall where it would, so the constellations rested not on the background of blue velvet that people talked about, but on one twinkling with billions of smaller stars, like dew caught in a spider’s web.

  When she was a bairn she would sometimes wake in the night, open the window and just gaze at it spellbound, lost in the silent glory of it, amazed that others could sleep while the stars travelled across the sky till they melted in the dawn sun. She didn’t think there was anything odd about her fascination because her father, Magnus, shared it, so at first she assumed everyone else did too; and by the time she was old enough to realise that they didn’t, she was also wise enough not to mention it.

  Not that she had much to fear from the teasing of other bairns; she had spent most of her time with Danny. The two younger Polson bairns were bound together by Dolina’s loss. So Ina Polson was known all over Lerwick as a boy’s girl rather than a girl’s girl. Ina Polson could hold her own in any skirmish; but still, the less ammunition you gave the little minds the better, that was how she saw it. She had always been like that, she was never one for close friendships; with them, but from a distance. There was a saying that it was possible to be lonely in a crowd. Well, for Ina it was possible, preferable even, to be alone in a crowd; she got on with the others well enough, but she had always liked her own company, too. She would watch the brains at school, see how wrapped up in each other they were – in tight twos, mainly – and she knew that she would never have any need of that closeness. Then would come bitter hurt when a third inevitably came between once best friends, as they moved on and formed other best friendships, then others, gradually outgrowing each other. It was the normal way of things, though not being aware of this they always behaved as though they had been betrayed. But Ina had never been like that. Ina had Danny and she had her father and she hadn’t needed anyone else. Except her mother, of course, and she knew that was a lost cause, even if she always did secretly hope.

  Even when she went with a group of bairns – who lived, like the Polsons, ‘out by the Burgh’, fishermen’s bairns – to Clickimin Loch, where the earth was damp and the wild flowers flourished, the others would run around and play while Ina collected the flowers and grasses to take home and press in a book, carefully recording the names underneath: forget-me-nots, marsh marigolds, raggy willies, curly dodies, white and red clover. Nature was her main interest. She wasn’t clever at school, Mr Carnegie had told her mother; there was no chance of her ever going to the institute for more learning once she reached fourteen. She remembered Dolina looking at her and there he was again. Angus. Angus would’ve been clever, that’s what Dolina’s eyes said when they looked at her; Angus would’ve gone to the institute, then on to university in Aberdeen or Glasgow. But Ina wasn’t Angus; Ina wasn’t clever.

  Not that it mattered: soon after that Dolina had fallen and broken her leg and, as there was no money for medical attention, the leg hadn’t set properly. The others were all married or working and the family couldn’t afford to lose a wage, so Ina stopped what schooling she had been getting at the age of thirteen to help her mother keep house. Education for lassies mainly consisted of ‘housewifery’ anyway, the inference being that, unless they were clever, they weren’t fit for anything more than marrying, having a family and being tied to the kitchen for the rest of their lives. Not being clever, Ina was no exception. Housewifery wasn’t what she wanted to do, but on the other hand school just wasn’t her thing either, as they said nowadays, so better to be at home where she was needed than at school.

  In the summer school started at 9 a.m. and finished at 4 p.m., but in winter the bairns were let out at 2 p.m., because it was growing dark in Shetland by then. She hated the regimentation of it; the bairns were made to march about like soldiers in two lines, marched out across a field and made to do exercises, touching their toes, stretching. Anyone who ran was severely belted by the headmaster, ever skulking in the wings for the opportunity. Mr Carnegie was a mean little man who seemed to wait with bated breath for the chance to use the four-pronged leather tawse, a man who looked down on the Shetland people and their bairns. They weren’t allowed to speak their own dialect, there was the tawse for that too. ‘Normal people don’t say “tattie”,’ he would intone. ‘We say “potato”,’ leaving the bairns in no doubt that Mr Carnegie regarded himself as one of the normal people.

  He lived in the schoolhouse, separated from the school itself by a high wall, with his wife, son and daughter. The girl, Isobel, was the same age as Ina, but wasn’t allowed to play with the local bairns, though sometimes she would sneak out if they peered over the wall, encouraging her with hooked fingers. Isobel would look around with furtive glances for the first sight of her father, knowing that she too would get the tawse if he found out, which he sometimes did. Ina could see her now, all these years later, a pretty girl with a pink face, brown eyes and the most beautiful golden ringlets, staring out from behind the window, wondering if she dared take the risk and escape her prison. She did eventually, and in circumstances that would appal her father so much that he would leave Shetland and never come back. Now what was the boy, her brother’s name? No, it had gone. No matter. And though it was true that Ina had never been clever at school, she could name every flower that grew on the land and draw detailed pictures of them in bloom, and she could sketch every star and their positions in the sky. But that didn’t count as clever.

  Ina was the youngest of eight bairns, four girls and four boys, counting Angus, the one between her and Danny; he had been stillborn a year to the day before she had drawn her first breath in the first decade of the twentieth century. Later in life she would wonder if the loss of the brother she had never known was the reason, or part of the reason, why she had been such a tomboy. Maybe it had been down to more than just spending her time with Danny; perhaps she had in some way been trying to make up to her parents for their dead son. They had called her Angusina in his honour, but it had always made Ina feel second-hand, as though the birth of a fifth son would have been infinitely more welcome than a fourth daughter; but they had had to make the best of what they got, and that had been Ina. Certainly those who had known her mother before the loss of the boy said that Dolina Polson had never been the same afterwards. Not even the birth of the small but healthy Angusina had made up for that, and neither could Danny, the healthy son born the year before Angus.

  Losing a bairn did that to some women, of course, and even with seven healthy bairns, Dolina never truly got over the loss of her fourth son. She would visit the bairn’s grave in the small local cemetery at least weekly, carrying a bunch of wild flowers and returning tearful, and all through her childhood Ina remembered her mother looking at bairns who had been born at the same time as her dead son and saying wistfully, ‘Our Angus would be that age now,’ or, ‘Angus would be doing this or that now.’ This led to the stillborn boy still existing in some parallel universe inside Ina’s head as well as her mother’s, so that Ina had a clear image of him through ages he did not inhabit, an image based on what her other brothers looked like and her belief that he would have resembled their mother.

  In
her imagination he would smile silently and with a slight self-consciousness at her from a distance, this growing, dead boy, as though he agreed with Ina that the situation was unfair. He too knew he could never fall from his mother’s grace, because he hadn’t lived and so would never commit the normal transgressions of childhood that would have annoyed his mother or made her angry, and so he would remain forever perfect. Likewise Angus would never visit upon Ina the usual brotherly mischiefs and casual unkindnesses, so in her imagination he was a nice boy who felt sorry for her and wished he could help. This made her grow up resenting not being as good as him in any way, but without resenting Angus, and feeling slightly guilty that she had lived and he had not, as though she were somehow not just inhabiting his name, but also his life.

  It was a cruel twist of fate that Ina had been born on what would have been Angus’s first birthday, and every birthday for as long as she could remember had been a sad day, marked by her mother’s tears, a day when she felt her guilt at usurping her brother even more keenly. No one celebrated birthdays in those days, there wasn’t even as much as a card, but Ina’s was marked in the Polson household as the day Dolina’s son had died. Even when she started school she didn’t get this huge step all to herself, with Dolina remarking wistfully that Angus would have been at school for a year by now and would probably be reading by himself. Each time her mother said something like this Ina would feel bad, as though nothing and no one, especially not her, could ever make up for living instead of him, and in her head Angus would look at her, smile shyly and shrug his shoulders, as if telling her that he knew how she felt, but there was nothing he could do. Perhaps, too, that feeling of being second best was why Ina was always on the defensive, always ready to take on all comers, to stand up for herself – to stand alone if need be. Danny suffered, too, for not being Angus. Though they never discussed it, Ina knew that was what had forged the strong bond between them, the one born the year before and the other born the year after Angus, the ones who missed out on Dolina’s love because they were there and he wasn’t.