We walk back in silence from the headland where Mum parked the ambulance that night, along the rough track to where I’ve left the car at the end of the road. Mairi gazes out one last time towards the rocks of Furadh Mor and then opens the car door.
‘Right,’ she says with a little more of her usual brightness and briskness, ‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a cup of tea and a cuddle with wee Daisy.’
‘Thank you for showing me that,’ I say. ‘It really helps, you know, you and Bridie telling me more about Mum’s life before I was born.’
She nods. ‘I know. Even though it’s so painful, grief is something we have to go through sooner or later. There’s no way round it, no way to avoid it. That’s something we all learned in the war. You go through it. But if you have a friend or two to walk along that path beside you, it helps you to bear it.’
I absorb her words as I drive back along the shore of the loch. She’s right, I realise. In their different ways, the friends I’ve found here are helping me shoulder the burden of my grief as we walk the path together. It helps to know they’re by my side.
As we push open the door of Bridie’s cottage, the sound of singing greets us.
‘Step we gladly, on we go,
Heel for heel and toe for toe,
Arm in arm and row on row,
All for Mairi’s wedding.’
Bridie’s teaching Daisy the ‘Lewis Bridal Song’， clapping along to keep the time.
‘Oh an oh,’ sings Daisy, laughing as Bridie bounces her on her knee.
‘Here they are, look, your mammy and your Auntie Mairi.’
‘Mam a Ma,’ agrees Daisy, reaching her hands towards me. I scoop her into my arms and give her a cuddle, but then she wriggles to be let down and toddles over to the coffee table where a large photo album lies open. I settle myself on the sofa and pick it up. There’s a black and white picture of Mairi and Roy on their wedding day as they come out of the kirk. Lined up on either side of the path is a guard of honour of Wrens, standing to attention in their neat uniforms. Mairi’s veil blows in the breeze and she is laughing up at Roy, whose white-blond hair gleams in the sunshine as he smiles back at his pretty bride.
Mairi comes to sit beside me and Daisy clambers on to her lap, where she’s as much at home as she’d be on mine. ‘Look.’ Mairi points to another photo on the next page. ‘That’s your granny.’
Daisy contemplates the picture seriously and then points a stubby finger of her own. ‘Gan,’ she says.
‘And Bridie, too – they were your bridesmaids,’ I exclaim.
I’ve never seen these photos before. Mum and Bridie stand on either side of Mairi and each of the three holds a posy of flowers. I swallow hard as I realise they are forget-me-nots, tied with lengths of pale ribbon, just like the bouquet Bridie handed Mairi to leave on the beach at Black Bay. She should have been marrying Hal in this photo. She should have embarked on the biggest adventure of her life alongside her friend, heading off to make a new life on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, the life that she should have had died on a storm-blackened beach on a February night in 1944. My heart aches for her and I think of what Mairi said in the car about grief.
I’m glad Bridie and Mum had each other as they walked along that hard and stony path together, side by side.
Flora, 1944
With the arrival of spring, Alec was reassigned to the patrols on the Western Approaches and, with a promotion to commander, he joined a new crew aboard the Kite. While it was hard being parted again, ever since she’d witnessed the shipwreck and the oil-blackened bodies washed up on the beach, an image of his bloodied hands on the axe had begun to haunt Flora’s dreams and she couldn’t help but feel a guilty sense of relief.
Mairi, who knew her so well, was astute enough to notice the change in Flora’s mood and commented on it one day when they were waiting outside the hospital in the ambulance. ‘How are things between you and Alec?’
‘Fine,’ replied Flora, but she could hear the defensive lift in her own voice. She tried for a little more nonchalance. ‘Why do you ask?’ She was loath to confide her doubts to her friend. After all, Bridie had lost Hal and Mairi had almost lost Roy. She ought to have felt she was the lucky one.
‘Because it’s strange. You almost seem happier these days with him off at sea. It never used to be that way. Are things tough with his parents again?’
Flora nodded miserably, then turned to face Mairi. ‘It’s that, yes. But there’s more,’ she admitted. ‘I feel I’m losing him. It’s as if everything is stacked against us, not just his father and his position in life, but the war, this latest promotion . . . Sometimes it feels as though everything is conspiring to push us apart. I don’t know if I can keep fighting against it all for much longer. More to the point, I don’t know that he can, either.’