Containment

By Fiona Cameron

The loneliest thing in the world is to be with someone who's not talking to you.......
Although Ella Collingwood knows this well, she’s hoping her new life in Balvaig, a tranquil village on the Hebridean Isle of Soma, will be a fresh start. But within weeks her husband, Rolf, is disillusioned with his new job, and it’s clear he means to distract himself in the way that’s almost caused their relationship to break down already; he still has a roving eye.
A new relationship seems to offer Ella a way out – is it a haven or a trap?
Recently-widowed artist Lenka Majewska, another recent arrival in Balvaig, is also feeling trapped; she’s being pressured into making a commitment she's not yet ready to make.
The two women soon become friends. Both have found to their cost that love is a risky business. Can they help each other weather the storm?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiona Cameron
• Release date: Mar 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780993124051

Fiona Cameron

Fiona Cameron was born in Glasgow, and has worked as a lecturer, journalist and PR consultant. She now lives in SW Scotland, and tries hard to fit her writing day around tending cats, dogs and a garden. Her short stories have previously been published in New Fiction collections. The books forming the Balvaig Trilogy are her first full-length novels. Her pet hates: cruelty to animals, and snobbery.

Book preview

PART ONE: ARRIVAL

ELLA

On the road to Balvaig, Isle of Soma, 4th October 2011

I have planned my escape route thoroughly (I have the entire Calmac ferry timetable stored safely in my memory). So I know that even if I ask them to stop the van right now, and hitch a lift back the way we’ve come, I’ll only end up sitting in the shelter at the pier waiting for tomorrow’s sailing. In any case, Lottie isn’t with me, and there’s no chance I could ever abandon Lottie, or tear her away from her father. She loves Rolf. She doesn’t see the side of him I sometimes see.

I’ve spent more than ten hours wedged uncomfortably between two men I met yesterday, and they’re not in the best of moods either. We’ve already had to pull off the road for two vans with ‘SeaSilver Quality Scottish Salmon’ emblazoned on the side, and one truck from Sterling Fish Feed.

‘I didn’t think there were any salmon left to catch,’ the driver says. ‘I heard a report about it on the radio last week.’

‘They farm salmon up here, these days,’ I say.

‘That stuff’s bad for you, isn’t it? Gives you cancer. I read about it in the paper. Some guy saying he wouldn’t feed it to his cat.’

This is the point where I’m supposed to trot out a spiel in defence of salmon farming. To hell with it. I shouldn’t have had to make this journey with the removal men in the first place. I should never have let Rolf sell my car before the move. It was on its last gasp, but it’d have made it this far. Rolf: waiting for me at journey’s end, and a hundred to one, he’ll be in a foul temper.

I shut my eyes and picture him. Dr. Rolf Collingwood, fish biologist extraordinaire. Tall, bearded, a smidgen heavier than when we met six years ago. A difficult man. Dazzling mind, passionate. Too passionate. A chip on his shoulder the size of Brazil. Lottie’s father. Three hundred and sixty three days younger than me. Twelve months to go before he contemplates the big four-oh. In the early years, we used to hold carnival for the two days we were the same age.

This is supposedly our fresh start. Rolf has his marvellous new job as Environmental Manager with SeaSilver Scottish Salmon; he’s more optimistic and energised than he’s been in years. Maybe enough to satisfy him in more than one dimension. This is the Hebrides after all: median age for women – forty-seven (hey, I’m young here). And he promised.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here. I want it all. I want to be my own person, and I want to save my marriage, but the way life is nowadays, loving Rolf is jumping off a cliff without a hang-glider.

Yesterday, we had the ghastly scene when he realised I’d forgotten to tell the removal guys about his fishing gear in the rafters of the garage. It was too late to stow it all in the safest positions, by then occupied by his Fender Telecaster, the bouzouki, the guitarra, and the Gibson Hummingbird – all of which have perfectly adequate flight cases. The way he went on you’d have thought they were Qianlong vases.

In the end, the baskets, the net, the rods, the hideous carved rod rack that had been his grandfather’s, all had to go in the car, along with Lottie. There wasn’t any more room. At that stage, all I felt was relief. I wasn’t madly keen to spend nearly twelve hours in a car with him in one of his moods.

I meant to stay overnight with my friend Maddie, then travel up by public transport. Newcastle to the Hebrides should take around three days, with any luck. It would be like a holiday. Poor Lottie had really drawn the short straw. But Rolf turned on the charm, the way he can, and the removal men (who’d sworn blind they weren’t allowed to carry any living item) said they’d take me. I ran to the van to say I’d meet them at their depot in the morning. When I turned back, Rolf had already driven off.

I allow myself half a minute of wallowing in the annual pangs of regret, of jealousy, of suadade. The weather in Portugal will still be warm, even up in the Douro valley where my mother’s people come from. A tolerable warmth, not the forty degrees plus of high summer. The vindima will be almost complete by now. The tourists who pay a couple of hundred euros each to wear straw hats, tread the Touriga Nacional grapes and pretend to go native, will be packing up to go home. I should be there, to paddle my fingers in the dark purple grunge, instead of travelling on this God-forsaken island road.

Maybe I’m cracking up. Martin, my first husband, had a nervous breakdown before he killed himself, and it begs the question, whose fault was that? Did I tip him over the edge?

Never mind. At least I have a friend here. Getting to know Kate Gordon again may be the most positive outcome of coming to live in Balvaig; we’ve known each other since I was ten, and she’s been here long enough to almost be a local.

‘Jesus H Christ – pardon my French pet – but why the hell do you want to come and live here?’ says the driver. ‘The roads aren’t even roads.’

I can see why he’s losing it. The ferry journey was bad enough; he was seasick before the Lord of the Isles left Oban.

‘I visited the island a lot when I was young.’

‘You’ve family here?’

Yes, all the family I have this side of the Bay of Biscay, and they’ll be full of the joys after a long drive and a night in a cold house sleeping on camping mats. Rolf has it in his head that I spent half my childhood in Balvaig. The truth is, a few weeks during school holidays with a distant cousin of my father’s, who had the dubious distinction of being the last practising Catholic to live on the island. The last time I visited, I was sixteen.

‘My husband will be working in this area now.’

‘Doctor isn’t he? I suppose they need GPs here. Lot of old folk.’

‘Not a medical doctor. He’s a fish biologist.’

He doesn’t pursue it, and I don’t volunteer any further information.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I say, to take his mind off fish. ‘I like this side of the island best. When you get to the top of the hill, you get a stupendous view over to Barra. At least, you would if it was a clear day.’

The sea is grubby mother of pearl rather than turquoise. Driving rain; torrents of water running down every available angle of the hillside. Yet, even at this season, the sky can change in a blink from leaden grey to the washed-out blue they paint their shutters in the Languedoc. We successfully negotiate the bend where I once saw two passing lorries stuck fast, their spring-loaded wing mirrors locked around each other like fighting stag beetles.

‘You’re lucky it’s not the tour bus season,’ I say. ‘They come from all over. Holland. Germany, the Czech republic.’ And East Kilbride.

‘Imagine coming from Prague to holiday here. Wonder what they think of it?’ says the driver’s mate. It’s the first time he’s spoken since we set out. I’d decided he was either not the full shilling or mute.

There’s no answer to his question anyway. It was bad enough in the ‘80s. One of my mother, Leonor’s, main grouses was being stuck on Scotland’s cold, sodden western seaboard for three summers, when she should have been relaxing in the sun on a restaurant terrace beside the river in Peso de Régua, watching me play with my cousins; riding on Nicolas’s back. What she feared most of all was letting her siblings realise how badly she’d fouled up, breaking ranks by marrying (unlike her sisters), and choosing a humourless and obscure Scottish lawyer, without her mother’s permission.

Our little removal party sits in silence for a mile or two. It feels like an eternity.

‘I thought it was bad for midges here?’ the driver asks. ‘I saw a TV programme where the gardeners were wearing gear like bee-keepers’ hats.’

‘The rain keeps them away,’ I say. ‘There’s skin cream made by Avon that’s supposed to be the best for repelling them. I’ve heard the Royal Marines use it. Imagine. Ding-dong, Avon calling at the barracks.’

I want to say it puts a new slant on going Commando, but think better of it, and close my eyes until the van sways onto an even narrower road, then pulls up. My new home. Much smaller than Rolf described it; dismal.

‘Afternoon, sir,’ the driver salutes Rolf.

Typical. He’s ‘sir’, I’m ‘pet’.

Rolf is feeling sorry for himself. The day he saw this dump and took photos to bring home must have been the one sunny day of late summer. Or else he was cute enough to photograph a postcard. Cobalt sky, plum-coloured mountains, aquamarine-and-lapis-lazuli sea, palm trees in the garden wafting in the breeze, not bent double in a hurricane.

It takes much less time to get the van unloaded than it did cramming all our gear into it. Just as the last of the furniture’s carried over the threshold, the rain stops, and the sun comes out. A spectacular site, high up above the village street and the harbour, with stunning views over Balvaig Bay and Loch Olla to the low silhouette of Barra. In contrast, the house is an ugly 1970s concrete block and pebbledash box, in a row of similar ones, though at least they’re all separated by generous stretches of garden. Indoors, it’s clear that nothing has been done to the kitchen or the bathroom since it was built.

Rolf lifts a cardboard box without supporting the bottom. There’s a loud crash as the contents shatter. St Anthony lies in a dozen mismatched pieces. It’s an ornament Leonor treasured. I let out a shriek, and Rolf starts whistling "The Sash". Bugger him. I haven’t been inside a Catholic church since I was a child, except for her funeral. Rolf doesn’t hold with any church, least of all anything redolent of smells and bells.

‘Well, here we are in the motherland,’ he says cheerfully, giving me a hug. ‘So why are you walking around with a face like a slapped arse?’

Why indeed. Pull yourself together, Ella. We wanted a fresh start where nobody knew us. We’ve got it. Almost. Although I was at school with Kate, and she lives here now in her grandparents’ old house, we were never particularly close. In fact, the last time I actually saw her would have been when I married Martin. She runs the Balvaig Pottery, and shares her home beside the harbour with a Polish artist of unpronounceable name. I’m tempted to nip down and see them, but it’s my duty to start sorting through the chaos that’s all our worldly goods.

LENKA

The Old Salmon House, Balvaig, 4th October

I’m having a late breakfast, spoiling myself, because the bereaved deserve to be coddled for as long as it takes.

I know my name figures prominently on my mother-in-law’s list of people who have to suffer – along with the Russians, the Americans, Polish Communists, Protestants, homosexuals, and Neville Chamberlain. But for more than forty years I was as good a wife as I could be to Roman Majewski, and although there are secrets a mother may not know about her son, there are things she must suspect. I have no reason to reproach myself; I do not deserve to be punished.

Relict of Roman Majewski: it’s what they put on gravestones, isn’t it? ‘Relict of’. Left behind, like some decrepit ruin Time Team has three days to dig up. More than four decades in my husband’s shadow; I should have plenty of years to stand in full sunlight. But God’s always one to have his little joke, so I take nothing for granted.

Everyone has my number as ultra-pragmatic, a risk-taker. There are risks and risks. A few moments ago I heard the mailbox clatter. Cold sweat prickles the back of my neck. Suppose it’s a letter from Sven-Eirik? I haven’t answered his last one; his ultimatum. Why are men either totally opposed to commitment, or over-eager? Every month since the beginning of this year, the same question. Then suddenly, the bolt from the blue: If you can’t make up your mind, Lenka, then perhaps we’d best end it.

Why does he need an answer now, when he’s been patient for so long? I know better than most: marriage is a trap, not a refuge. What we have is security enough. Wanting certainty doesn’t sit well with his credo of non-attachment. He’s told me often enough that in architecture the beauty is in the spaces. Perhaps it’s what makes a relationship beautiful too? He said to me, ‘Lenka, we’ve slept apart more than together for nearly half a century, and I’ve used not a few of those nights to figure it out. For me, apart is the problem. I thought you’d reach the same conclusion.’

He’s correct, of course. Apart has been the problem since 1970. He knows there’s been a practical reason too: unfinished paperwork. He kept telling me to just do it. He can’t understand why I didn’t crack on as soon as I was widowed. I don’t know why either. It’s not as if I’ve ever wasted a nano-second hoping my life might go back to where it was when I was eighteen.

I’ve lost a deal of sleep wondering if there’s a real risk of losing Sven, because it’s more than I could bear. The problem is, while Roman was alive, I didn’t have to make a decision about one single detail. It’s a skill like any other: use it or lose it.

Soma’s so remote. I could have stayed in Edinburgh, in my rented flat in Chessel’s Court, with its rooms tall and white and fancy as a wedding-cake, and the airport and direct flights to Brussels half an hour away. Edinburgh has a lovely face, but its dark under-belly unnerves me. It’s like living in Yellowstone; I could feel the magma building under my feet. I need space to grieve quietly for a while, over so many wasted lives. I need to close the circle.

So I came to Balvaig, where the machair explodes into a sea of blue and magenta and gold and white every summer. A place of healing, of fresh starts. Jan Wisely worked here for several years, and I know her canvases as if they were my own. I have a print of Half moon: Balvaig in my studio – the only other painter I’ll allow to share my space, apart from Walter Sickert, and I can’t afford an original by him, or find a print I like.

The house where Wisely lived with her friend Annemarie towards the end of her life is still here, and the studio she used (it’s a storage shed now, full of rusting bicycles). Arriving felt like coming home. It’s a typical island community; the ones who were old forty years ago are all dead, and most of the ones who were young then have left. Maybe I had some notion I could retrace my steps to the crossroads where I lost my way. But without that false step, I’d have missed the path leading me to Sven. You can’t change or regret parts of your life.

On my first day in Balvaig, I swallowed my pride and went to see Rose Archany, the so-called watercolour artist, to ask for the rental of Kingdom, the traditional croft house she won as an optional extra when she built her Scandinavian monstrosity. It took courage to make the request.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, with the look she puts on as if she can smell rotten fish underneath her elegant nose. ‘I don’t plan to let it out. I bought it because I value my privacy.’

Subject closed. When you have never had to sell even one of your paintings to buy your bread, you can afford to act as if no one else matters, and build yourself a fancy wood and glass palace.

‘You and your bloody caste system for artists,’ I said. I had the door slammed in my face; not for the first time.

Her paintings are meaningless landscapes with limpid blue skies. Look at her: over eighty and her hand is rock-steady, steadier than mine. Because Rose knows people, she gets work as a critic. Traitor. No true artist would do it. She’s written some vicious reviews of my work.

Poor Walter Sickert, who did no worse than paint reality as he found it, look what the public did to him. He was accused of being Jack the Ripper. And the other Jack; Jack Vettriano – still only one of his canvases in his country’s national collection. Such snobbery in the art world, entirely down to the critics: talentless drones who earn a living from the work of others, and think their fame should be in direct proportion to the vitriol they spout.

On the very day Rose’s door was slammed on me, who should I meet but Kate Gordon the potter, looking for someone to share her house at the head of the harbour where she lives with her spider plants and her sensible clothes and her legacy from daddy which allowed her to buy the old rope-works in the main street and convert it to a gallery. Two artists. It’s been a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I know what they say about us in the village. They call me the Mad Jew, because they don’t know how to pronounce my name, ‘My-yef-ska’. They’ve dubbed Kate and me the dykes at the docks. Let them think what they want. It means we have no trouble from the older men, the ones who should have given up hope by now, or the yobs from the council houses.

Kate says my paintings are morbid, but where’s the sense in painting what isn’t true? She also says the canvases are too big to hang properly in the gallery. The last two I sold were bought straight from the floor of the studio, propped against the wall. The collectors snapped them up, even before they were in frames.

‘Gallery, indeed,’ I tell the bluebottle zinging against the window. ‘A converted shed in the arsehole of Scotland.’

I fold the Herald and kill the fly with one wallop, before recollecting that although I detest flies, it is not acceptable to kill any sentient creature. I take a moment to apologise to its small ghost. This sort of behaviour goes to prove I’m not fit to be Sven’s wife.

Then I remember the number of times he’s said to me (when I’ve voiced a view along these lines), ‘Who’s judging you?’ Sometimes, he’ll make a pantomime of looking under chairs and behind the curtains, and tell me no, he can’t find this other person who is judging me.

Not a bad aim without my lenses in, all the same. I don’t always wear my contacts when I’m painting. I prefer to see the unmediated massing of colour, like Gertrude Jekyll (what a waste of talent, making gardens for the rich). Sometimes I work until dusk; I won’t use artificial light. When it gets too dark to see, I visit the canvases that have dried, draw my fingers over lightly, to feel the texture of the paint; the texture of the island landscape, and its skies. I never tire of trying to paint the sky, catching the shifting colours. It seldom turns out the way I see it. It changes so fast; if you start to paint at dawn the pink colours vanish before the cap’s off the tube. The same with the lemon and the cadmium yellow and the cerulean blue, and the luminous shade with no name and no hex code, somewhere between green and blue and lime, shifting, shifting every moment. I refuse to paint from photographs. In any case, the camera able to capture these shimmering colours hasn’t been invented yet.

I need to be outside, in the rain. I need to feel the cold Atlantic needles pricking my face and my eyes. I need to see how the colours brighten when the deluge stops, and the air’s fresh-washed, and every surface glistens. I need to renew it in my mind, the way the mist creeping up the mountains mutates from palest blue to lilac, then a hint of Sennelier Caput mortum. Ordinary observers see it as grey. When I see it that way too, I know it’s time to send for another pack of extra-strength St John’s Wort; nothing stronger, ever. There are worse outcomes than depression.

As I climb the harbour brae, the rain slackens and the sun blinks through. It’s afternoon, and the light is ebbing fast. Balvaig’s a hard-edged, leaden place. Nothing to add warmth, like the pantiled roofs you find in Fife’s coastal villages. I have brought my easel and sandbags to weigh it down, but this is hopeless. I pretend to sketch while I watch the pantomime being staged at the absentee professor’s house. People moving in, at last. A dark-haired woman is trotting out and in, getting in the workmen’s way, trying to keep her child from being trampled underfoot. Her man is tall, bearded, red-haired, the same opulent colour as my own. Sven also has a beard, but it’s silver these days, and close-trimmed, neat.

This man could be Scandinavian, or Dutch. Looks like the Victory under full, scarlet sail. A man who wears his emotions too close to the skin, I think. Even from my perch up on the rocks beside their garden I can hear him clearly. Colourful language!

The removal men leave. Within minutes, the dark one runs out of the house crying. Red-beard appears at the door, drying his hands on a tea towel (Yuck! Such a filthy habit.)

‘For fuck’s sake, Ella. Pull yourself together. What’s the point of making such a song and dance because a piece of Papist tat got broken?’

‘It was my mother’s. I haven’t got much left to remember her by.’

Red-beard guffaws. The wailing stops. I hold my breath. I’d never let a man speak to me in such a tone. The child, a very comely little girl with her mother’s black hair, arrives and proffers a garish plastic toy.

‘I’m sorry your St Anthony got broken, Mummy. You can have this instead.’

The mother stoops and runs her fingers through the child’s hair. They stand there for a few moments, the girl with her arms round her mother’s waist. I remember clearly how it feels, to be the coloured ribbon at the centre of the tug-o’war rope, bearing the brunt of the strain. Poor child. Poor mother.

God almighty, here’s Willow ffawcett, leaning up the brae, a glittery paper bag in her hand. Surely she isn’t …? Yes, up the path she goes, knocking on the open door, introducing herself, proffering the bottle of supermarket wine (I know it’ll have a screw-top).

Willow the writer – published writer, as she always announces – self-appointed local historian and guardian of tradition. Moved up from Stoke on Trent, though she’s always quick to reassure her public that she actually comes from Lichfield, within sight of the cathedral. She’s working on a collection of local superstitions and folk tales.

‘I want to return their culture to the island’s people,’ she’ll say. ‘They don’t seem to value it as I do.’ She’s wise enough not to be indiscriminate in mentioning her mission to the locals.

Her appearance, as usual, is American hippie circa 1969: longish print skirt – homemade – scrubbed-clean face, long greying hair. Her braying is clearly audible above the wind. ‘Welcome! Willow ffawcett. I wanted to say we’re awfully glad you’ve come. Always good to get new faces in, raise the tone of the place a little.’

The dark one stands tongue-tied in the doorway, clutching the bottle in its ridiculous bag, recycled from last Christmas no doubt. Willow falters. She has caught sight of Red-beard, and hasn’t found his appearance congenial. She’s already into the doorway, but it isn’t a long visit. Within ten minutes, she leaves. There is no sign of the dark one.

The afternoon’s entertainment is over. I pack up my gear.

Kate comes in, pink-cheeked, still wearing her duffle coat and warm woollen hat. She’s holding today’s mail, including the cream-coloured envelope I ignored, ripped open. The letter is longhand, and I know it’s from a woman, for when did Kate ever get a letter from a man? The only man who ever contacts her is her brother, and it’ll be a text or an email.

‘Someone I once knew is coming to live here. She must be arriving tomorrow. What date is this? It’s today!’

‘How do you know her?’

Kate is pensive. ‘I was at school with her. You’ll like her. She’s a nice old-fashioned, sensible girl. Woman.’

‘Like you.’

‘Like me. We’re the best kind, because we don’t go out of date. She’s very, very clever. Dr Collingwood. She and her husband are both Dr Collingwood, in fact.’

She is treading on eggshells; she believes I have a complex because I never graduated from anywhere. I only have to look at my bank balance to know it’s the last matter I need to worry about.

‘Her mother was Portuguese,’ says Kate. ‘Ella’s obviously inherited her looks from there. Rolf, the husband, has got a management job here, with the fish farmers. He’s a scientist. Wow! She says they’ve got the rental of that crummy bungalow up on the Brae. Wait till she sees the state of it.’

‘I haven’t heard you mention her?’

‘I’ve not seen her for years and years. You know how it is once you’re living on an island.’

‘What nationality is he, this husband of your friend?’

‘Rolf? English as far as I know. She moved to England after she graduated. I was at her first wedding,’ says Kate.

‘First? How many has she had?’

‘Two.’

‘She’s a bigamist?’

‘Her first husband died. By his own hand, as they say. She had a daughter who died too. Debbie. You never saw such a perfect baby, like an expensive porcelain doll. I have a photo somewhere. Very white waxy skin, hair like flax, and huge blue eyes. You’d