Emotional Geology Read online

  EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY

  Linda Gillard

  A passionate, off-beat love story set on the bleak and beautiful island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

  Rose Leonard is on the run from her life.

  Haunted by her turbulent past, she takes refuge in a remote Hebridean island community where she cocoons herself in work, silence and solitude in a house by the sea. A new life and new love are offered by friends, her estranged daughter and most of all by Calum, a fragile younger man who has his own demons to exorcise.

  But does Rose, with her tenuous hold on sanity, have the courage to say "Yes" to life and put her past behind her?...

  EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY

  Linda Gillard

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2005 and 2014 Linda Gillard

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Originally published in paperback by Transita in 2005

  The e-book cover was designed by Nicola Coffield.

  www.lindagillard.co.uk

  Ebook Formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Also by Linda Gillard...

  Connect With Linda

  PROLOGUE

  I talk to the island. I don’t speak, but my thoughts are directed towards it. Sometimes it replies. Never in words of course.

  I miss trees. You don’t notice at first that there are hardly any trees here, just that the landscape is very flat, as if God had taken away all the hills and mountains and dumped them on neighbouring Skye. But eventually you realise it’s trees that you miss.

  Trees talk back.

  In the hospital grounds there was a special place where I used to stand, where I went to feel safe. It was my magic circle, my fairy ring. There were three slender pine trees in a triangular formation, only a few feet apart. I used to stand within that space, sheltered, flanked by my trees, like a small child peering out at the world from behind grown-up legs.

  Once, when the air was very still and a brilliant blue sky mocked my misery, I stood between my trees, head bowed, not even able to weep. I placed my palms round two of the tree trunks, grasping the rough bark. I begged for strength, support, a sign. Anything.

  My trees moved in answer. Quite distinctly, I felt them move. As my palms gripped them they shifted, as the muscles in a man’s thigh might shift before he actually moved. The movement was so slight it was almost imperceptible, as if their trunks were flexing from within.

  I knew then that the doctors were right, I was indeed mad. I threw up my head and cried out. Above me a light breeze played in the treetops, a breeze I’d been unaware of on the ground. It tugged at the branches with a sudden gust and I felt the trunks flex again, bending to the will of the wind.

  I wasn’t mad.

  At least, not then.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A woman alone in a light, white room. A glowing stove, a scrubbed pine table. No mirror, no clock, no photographs. A sewing-box lies open on the bare wooden floor. On a window-sill a still-life: driftwood, shells and a sheep’s skull. The woman - not old, not young - lays down her pen and shifts her weight in the chair. The screech of wood on wood shatters the silence. She folds sheets of paper with great care, pushing them into the envelope with hands that tremble slightly.

  .

  Grenitote, North Uist, Western Isles

  January 11th 2000

  My dear Megan,

  The days are very short, very dark and the wind is almost constant. My new home - my doll’s house! - is small, but I like it that way. (For a start there is very little to keep clean.) I have a sitting room and a workroom downstairs, a minute kitchen extension out the back and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs, all of a monastic simplicity. I can see the sea from the sitting room and from my bedroom. The holiday-home buyers didn’t want this one because it’s too close to the sea, or so my neighbour Shona McAskill says. (Dear Shona, fount of all wisdom and a great many outrageous Gaelic proverbs. There seems to be one for every occasion - all of them gloomy.) If there’s a freak high tide I shall have seawater round my ankles apparently, so I haven’t bothered with a carpet. The floorboards are bare and I have put my oldest, most faded quilts over the furniture to hide the suddenly-garish colours I’ve imported from my former life. (I like the idea of having a Former Life. It makes me sound intriguing and romantic, doesn’t it? Or does it make me sound reformed, like a criminal? Perhaps I shall tell the locals that I have moved here in an attempt to go straight. In a way, I have.)

  I try to go for a walk every day, whatever the weather - that is if the wind allows me to stay perpendicular. I see very few people on my walks. There are no tourists at this time of year and the locals are sensibly installed by their firesides, watching daytime TV. (Not an option for me as I don’t have one.) The radio has been my constant companion and the shipping forecast has taken on a new meaning. I don’t pretend to understand it but I’m beginning to get the gist. The prognostications for “Mallin, Hebrides, Minches” always sound vague but dire. (Rather like Shona’s proverbs.)

  Today I walked very fast to get warm, then I sat on some rocks to watch gannets dive, which made me cry. I can never watch gannets without thinking of how they go blind in old age and die of starvation. They hit the water at God knows what speed with their eyes open, looking for food. How can their eyeballs withstand the impact? And how do ornithologists know gannets don’t sneakily shut their eyes at the last minute? (Maybe gannets don’t have eyelids? I will ask Shona. I’m sure she will know.)

  The silence and the long expanses of uninterrupted time are Heaven. (“When God made time, He made plenty of it.” The Gospel According to Shona.) I think it’s affecting my work already. I seem to be using less colour and more texture and when I do use colour it tends to be colours from the natural world. I think this place will be good for my work, good for me. I hope so.

  Apart from the fact that they’ve made it clear they think I am a) mad and b) unlikely to last six months, the locals have been kindness itself. I’m sure they regard it as their Christian duty, although I doubt that duty prevents them from repeating (and probably embellishing) every snippet of personal information that I’m foolish enough to let fall. But I don’t mind - I didn’t come here expecting privacy. I realise I am an event. I am what passes for entertainment on an under-populated Hebridean island. I am an anomaly - a woman alone, too young to be widowed and too old to be looking for a mate. I occupy that no man’s land - no woman’s land - between youth and old age.

  Write soon, darling, or phone if you can. I’m not at
all lonely but would love to hear your news.

  With love,

  Mum

  P.S. I am keeping very well - no nightmares and I haven’t had to increase my dosage so far. You don’t need to worry about me at all!

  .

  She seals the envelope with a sigh and picks up her pen again. Gazing down at the blank white space, her memory shuffles, deals another blank white space. The pen hovers, dashes off a name, then skids across the envelope. She concedes defeat, replaces the cap on her pen and walks to the window where she rests her head against the cold glass.

  ~

  The comfort of glass. The attraction, the seduction of breaking glass and the quietus it will bring. No effort, just push, push until it cracks, breaks, then peels back your skin, letting the blood, letting the pulsing blood flow, cleansing your body, emptying your mind, letting life ebb away like the tide, leaving the beach clean, flat, blank.

  No one will ever know you were here.

  ~

  I lie in my bed, the bed I used to share with Gavin. Tiny pieces of fabric are flying round the room, a flurry of multi-coloured snowflakes, a rainbow blizzard. They cascade down until the floor is covered, inches deep in brilliant fragments, and still they fall. I watch the pieces flutter round the room, see them settle on the duvet, settle on me, piling up until I am buried like the Babes in the Wood by a mountain of multi-coloured leaves. And still they fall. My face is covered and I cannot breathe. I call out to Gavin but my mouth fills with pieces of cloth...

  ~

  I wake, sobbing, sweating, the duvet over my head, my mouth full of hair. In the dark I turn to Gavin's side of the bed and reach across, terrified.

  He isn’t there of course. He hasn’t been there for five years.

  But still I reach.

  ~

  When I wake I think at first that it is silent. I lie in bed quite motionless, thinking ‘Is this what it’s like to be dead?’ Gradually sounds impinge - the rumble and hiss of the waves on the shore, the whingeing of gulls, the tick of the clock.

  I wonder - do I really need a clock now? Here I have all the time I need. Once when I was researching a project, I saw a strange clock in a museum, a clock used by early American pioneers, a clock with only one hand. They only ever needed to know the hour. When they boiled an egg they used an egg timer.

  When God made time, He made plenty of it.

  ~

  Sometimes it requires a great act of will to get up, not because I am reluctant to resume my new routine, simply that I feel suspended, outside time, in a white space, here at the edge of the world. I do not move, I cannot move.

  Then I remember being in the hospital.

  It is in the end the memory of feeling drugged that induces me to move. I move to prove to myself that I am not drugged, that I have willpower and can use it. See me - I can move. I exist. I am me.

  The first battle of the day is fought and won.

  Brushing my teeth, I stare out the window, but a cobweb catches my eye, a cobweb slung across the corner of the rattling window frame. I raise my hand with a housewifely impulse to brush it away, then feel a sudden reluctance to destroy the web, so perfect, so mathematical in its construction. A small spider waits in the centre for its prey, looking not sinister, but pathetically vulnerable and exposed. The cobweb billows in the draught, like a sail.

  Who is there to pass judgement on my slovenly housekeeping? I am prepared to share my bathroom with this tiny spider. We shall endure the draughts together.

  So now I have company. A lodger. I shall call him Bruce. After Robert the Bruce, of course.

  We both dangle by a thread, Bruce.

  ~

  A spider splayed on a limestone rock face.

  Not a spider. A man. A vertical impossibility.

  He is still, spread-eagled, waiting to make his move. Then, sudden as an insect but with more grace, he moves diagonally upwards, jamming claw-like fingers into invisible cracks, folding grasshopper legs beneath him ready for the push, the swing, the gymnastic counterbalance as his body grazes the rock and takes up another perilous, temporary foothold on a crumbling ledge. He gathers himself, rests, an insect basking in the sun.

  Below at the foot of the cliff, a woman watches...

  ~

  When I think back to life with Gavin it was always as if he had just moved in. Or was about to move out. Boxes, cases, rucksacks, boots, jackets, sleeping bags, bivvy bags, crampons, ice-axes, harnesses, maps and hundreds of bars of chocolate. In my bitterest moments I used to ask myself if it was me Gavin needed or just my house as a place to store his gear.

  Was it love, Gavin? Or was it just need?

  ~

  The climber descends, sliding easily down a gaudy rope. He walks towards her, the glossy lycra shocking, revealing as nudity. He isn’t tall, but good-looking, with a dazzling thatch of white-blond hair and the old-young face climbers have: bright-eyed, tanned, prematurely wrinkled by the sun. He coils rope slowly, his large hands white with chalk.

  ‘Do you climb?’

  ‘No. But it fascinates me. It’s so beautiful to watch. Like dancing... Dancing on a rock-face, defying gravity.’ She gazes up at the amphitheatre of bleached limestone. ‘Death-defying. That’s what they say about circus acts, isn’t it? Is that what you’re doing? Defying death?’

  ~

  I never asked if you were faithful. I didn’t want to know. I had no illusions about your appetite for adventure, for risk, for novelty. With your charm and looks, your reputation in the climbing world, you must have had women throwing themselves in your path. Moral scruples - as I later discovered - were unknown to you, so I don’t doubt you availed yourself of whatever there was going.

  Ours was a very modern relationship, very grown-up, based on trust. Or so I thought. You had no idea what I was up to back in Fort William while you were freezing your balls off halfway up a Dolomite. For all you knew I was screwing your best mates. Except that you knew I wasn’t. I wouldn’t. Because I loved you. Because I loved you, Gavin. And attractive though Dave and Andy and Simon were - especially darling Simon who had a thing about older women and whose chat-up line (and I’ve heard worse) was that I reminded him of his mum who died when he was six - I would never have succumbed, in case you found out and were hurt and finished the relationship.

  And that is surely what you would have done, because you of all men wouldn’t be able to hack it if your girlfriend bedded any of your mates. Dear me, no. If a bloke has to climb a sodding Himalaya to prove he’s a man, he’s hardly likely to take a philosophical view of a mate shagging his woman. And the thing for you, Gavin, the thing that you would have killed to know, would have been whether Dave or Andy or even little Simon were any better at it than you. Had they scaled my North Face any quicker? With any more expertise, or with less gear? Or even without oxygen?

  So I didn’t screw around. And you knew I didn’t.

  But you screwed around. And - eventually - I knew that you did.

  Then I got angry.

  ~

  ‘Why do you climb?’

  He laughs, flings the coil of rope to the ground and takes a large bottle of water from his rucksack. He drinks deeply, ignoring her, then wipes his mouth with a chalky hand.

  ‘It’s like a drug. The adrenalin. The high. There’s nothing else like it. Booze, speed, sex... They’re all an impure form of the experience you get up there.’ He tips the bottle up over his head and lets the dregs trickle down through his hair and over his sunburned face and shoulders.

  ‘It sounds like a dangerous form of escapism. Do you escape up there?’

  ‘What makes you think I’m trying to escape from something?’

  ‘Isn’t everybody?’

  Looking away, disconcerted by her frank stare, he gestures upwards. ‘There’s no escape here... Too many fucking tourists. It’s different in the mountains.’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘Persistent, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’d like to k
now.’

  His broad shoulders sag and he exhales. ‘I need a piss.’

  ‘Tell me. Please...’

  He runs a hand through his damp hair, suddenly tired, exasperated. He shuts his eyes and turns his face up to the sun. ‘You stand on a ledge and you’re safe, you know you’re okay. Your foothold is secure, you’ve got a good grip, you can even rest for a while... You want to stay there forever. The last thing you want to do is move, lift that foot and place it down somewhere else, somewhere that might give under your weight. But you have to move because if you don’t you’ll die of exposure... So you move.’ He opens his eyes suddenly and fixes her with a stare, unsmiling. ‘That’s your ultimate reality, that moment when you decide to risk it. You lift one foot and put it in front of the other and you just don’t know... In that moment you are fully alive, because you know you might be about to die. But you just put one foot in front of the other.’ He shrugs, embarrassed by his avalanche of words. ‘That’s how it is. You can’t explain.’

  ‘I think you just did.’

  He pulls a bright fleece jacket from his rucksack and puts it on, tugging violently at the zip. ‘That’s our world and it’s more real than all this - the tourists, the picnickers, the weekend hikers. This isn’t real at all, it’s a fucking nightmare! The nine-to-five and the suit and tie, traffic jams and shopping in Tesco’s... You wheel your trolley but your mind is planning the next climb, your body is rehearsing the moves. You’re just killing time till the next climb.’