Chapter 4: Thicker Than Water

“Daddy, can I go with the twin’s mum to get morning rolls.”

I struggled to wake up but managed to stick my head out of the door of the tent. Aine was standing grinning at me, fully dressed and with her wet hair pulled back in a ponytail. I don’t know whether it was the way the light shone on her or the fact that I was looking up at her with my head almost on the ground, but for the first time I saw a resemblance to her mother.

“Did you go back to your own tent?” I can be pretty stupid until I wake properly.

“You snore, Dad!”

I reached behind me and groped a note out of my wallet. I had intended to let her have a fiver, but I shrugged when I saw the brown colour of a tenner. The exchange took less than a minute, but the twins were already yelling at her to hurry up. When they were gone, laughing and chattering as they danced up the road to the shops, I took fresh clothes and enjoyed a warm shower in the Youth Hostel.

Aine was a little subdued when they returned and she took me aside to show me a message on her phone: ‘Leave Wales immediately, Mum.’ It was from an unknown number so Emer must have borrowed a phone to send the message. I jumped to the conclusion that grandfather had taken possession of her phone after Aine’s call from the train the previous morning. At the very least the message showed that our location was unsuspected.

We had no chance to talk until the twins had been bundled into the family car for a trip to Elgol. They wanted Aine to go with them, but their mother clearly sensed that something was wrong; she quietened her kids and squeezed my arm saying that she would be praying for us. We must look like a couple of basket cases, I thought as we waved them on their way.

“What do we do now, Daddy?”

I’m ‘Dad’ when she’s feeling grown up and sure of herself.

“We need to get your Mum off that island. Once our family is reunited, we can think what to do next.”

Aine thought about that for a few moments but when she opened her mouth to reply I got my word in first.

“We must find someone to hire us a boat or take us out to Pabay. That way there will be someone who knows where we’ve gone and will ask questions if we don’t come back.”

“Do you think they would try to keep us locked up on the island?”

We were crossing the main car park when I spotted an old man sitting on a fish box repairing a net strung between two poles. I chose to ignore Aine’s question because I was convincing myself that Emer’s father might just be desperate enough to try kidnapping. I considered going to the police station to tell them where we planned to go but I finally decided against doing so.

I had no evidence that Emer was being held against her will and the police might stop me making a scene by demanding her release from her father, a law-abiding resident of their community. He’s plausible and he has lived here for many years so I guess he will be respected. The thing that swayed me most, however, was the conviction that I had to stop the monster to keep my wife and daughter safe; until I won, it was better for the three of us to be together, even if we were trapped on the island. I had no plan – not even a vague idea that might grow into a plan – but I was certain that I would prevail.

The old man stopped tying string from the shuttle he was holding and gave us a friendly greeting when we halted in front of him. I asked him if he knew someone who would take us to Pabay or hire us a boat to go ourselves.

“There’s nothing much to see there and the owner isn’t very welcoming to strangers.”

“It’s not a social call, there’s someone on the island that we want to talk to.”

“Why not just give them a call on one of these mobility phones?”

“We really want to see her face to face. I’m sorry if the people on the island are friends of yours...”

“No friends of mine,” he interrupted, scowling.

I was heartened by the antipathy in his voice – clearly not everyone has been taken in by grandfather’s charm. There was a long pause while he got out an old pipe and filled it with tobacco.

“It’s the Sabbath and most of the lads will not put to sea,” he began, cupping the bowl of the pipe while he applied a match. “Seamus might do it – he’s a Sassenach although he goes to church more than I do, but I’m an old heathen.”

It needed a second match to get the pipe smoking to his satisfaction. He gave us directions for Seamus’ house, and we had taken a step away when he added: “He’s always ready to do Cu Chulainn a bad turn, is Seamus.”

Broadford is called a township, but it is really just a large village sprawled along the shores of the bay. The main pier is to the north of the town but there are numerous jetties and slipways between the houses on the seaward side of the main road. Seamus’ house was at the top of a little creek and there was a jetty at the end of the garden at the side of the house. There were several little launches or fishing boats on moorings about thirty metres from the shore.

We approached from the front where a low dry-stone dyke was pierced by a wrought iron gate swinging open. Inside on a scrap of lawn a man was standing looking out to sea while two children played around his feet; they were all dressed in their best, so it was easy to guess that they were ready for church. Aine clutched the sleeve of my shirt and tugged it frantically as we approached but I had my hand out and a smile of greeting in place, so I ignored her.

We were almost at the gate when a woman came out dressed in a print summer frock. She pulled the house door shut behind her and noticed us as she turned towards her family. She stopped and put her hands up to her face as she looked first at me then at Aine and then back to me. Her scrutiny became a stare, and I was becoming uncomfortable under her gaze. Seamus was still looking out to sea, but the children had spotted Aine and were coming forward to meet her.

She was now clutching my left hand in both of hers; I looked down at her staring at the man, her eyes huge and her mouth forming an almost perfect ‘O’. We held our positions for what seemed like minutes before the woman moved beside her husband, clasped his arm and hugged it to her with both hands.

“It’s uncanny,” she said in a whisper.

He looked at me and we exchanged puzzled glances. Now the tableau had dissolved, I began looking around noticing for the first time a van parked in the shade. On the side it carried the slogan: ‘James Cuthbert, Shellfish.”

“This is a strange coincidence,” I laughed. “Five hundred miles from home and I find my own name on the side of a van.”

“Oh my God,” the woman blurted out, tugging on her husband’s arm. “Are you Jack?”

“Daddy,” Aine whispered her eyes still wide in disbelief, “You look so alike you could be brothers.”

The woman stepped forward and knelt in front of my daughter: “And you must be Aine.”

The next thing I was aware of was sitting on the grassy bank outside the gate with the woman kneeling beside me and the three kids standing looking at me with huge, bewildered eyes. The man hadn’t moved but his eyes were boring into me in no very friendly fashion. I was struggling to suppress a most unsettling thought. It was a blow to find that my father and mother divorced when I was young; he wasn’t a superhero or super villain as I imagined but a run-of-the-mill failed husband.

The documentary evidence was there for the divorce, probably due to the strain on a flawed relationship imposed by my birth. A cliché – and what was more likely than that it should play to a finish with remarriage and a second family. The only remaining mystery is why my mother was so secretive. I think the thing that made me sit down with a bump was the realisation that Uncle Jim must have known all along; why on earth would he and Aunt Jenny conspire with my mother to keep me in ignorance?

“We didn’t think you knew about us,” the woman was saying.

She was on her knees with her two children standing just behind her staring at me with their chins on her shoulders. Aine was standing with a worried look on her face, uncertain what to do about a parent sitting dazed on a grassy bank. I was having difficulty finding words and it was my daughter who replied.

“We didn’t know anything. We met an old man with a stinky pipe, and he told us Seamus might help. I still don’t understand what’s happening.”

The woman reached forward and pulled Aine into a hug which she returned with a sob.

“We need someone to take us to the island to rescue my wife.”

The man had moved nothing but his eyes since we arrived but now, he stepped towards me, his face flaming with anger.

“Rescue that bitch! Let her and her evil father rot there!”

Aine pulled herself free from the woman and stood to confront him.

“That’s my Mummy and she’s not evil or any other bad thing.”

His face changed at once to a look of remorse.

“I’m sorry lass. I shouldn’t have said that, but she and her father have caused a great deal of pain to me and my family.”

Aine sat down on my lap and put her arms round me, but she didn’t break eye contact with the man standing beside her.

“Emer has hurt us but she needs saving from her father. I’ve let her down over the years and it’s time for me to stand by her.”

It was his remorse at upsetting my daughter that induced me to explain my position. His outcry had come from the heart, and it takes a good man to respond to the anguish of a child as he had done.

Seamus was still struggling with his anger, but he said nothing. I was confused; I was reluctantly accepting that he might be my brother, and I had no idea why he was so bitter about my wife. There was a rational part of me that recognised that he was not normally a man of extreme views, and I acknowledged that some of Emer’s actions were pretty unpleasant. She had been poisoning our daughter which should have been unforgiveable except that Aine forgave her mother.

“I’ve let my wife down. She’s struggled against the malign influence of her own father all her life and I’ve not been there to help her.”

I spoke loud enough for everyone to hear but I was really thinking out loud – talking to myself more than to my audience. Then I looked at my half-brother and spoke directly to him.

“I want to get her away from him for her sake, because Aine and I can help her, but you should help us even if you hate her since it will divide her from her father. It’ll be easier to defeat them one at a time than both together.”

He listened and I could see that he was considering what I had said but it was his wife, now back on her feet, who spoke.

“If we use the van we can still be in time for church. Will you and Aine join us, Jack?”

The boy was sent to fetch a blanket that was thrown into the back of the van. Seamus and I got in with his kids while Aine sat in the front beside his wife who drove us. As we drove, she introduced Ruaridh, almost ten, Morag, seven and herself, Shona. Seamus is the Gaelic form of James, which is what the family call my brother. I have another niece, Pat, the daughter of my sister Becky who is expecting her second at the end of October.

Aine asked questions about her cousins and then we were parking and lining up to be ushered into the church by Shona. Mother and I visited a great many churches to see the stained glass or carvings, but this was the first time I’d attended a service since I left primary school. The interior of the little church in Broadford was austere compared to Anglican churches I’d visited but the order of service was much as I remembered.

I rose at the right times and sat again with the rest of the congregation but only a tiny part of my consciousness was on my surroundings. When the minister announced the first hymn, I was wondering if it was a good or bad thing to have a sister and brother but by the time he stood to give us the benediction I had accepted that the question was irrelevant; they are a fact, and their existence fundamentally changes my life. The minister wore a black gown relieved only by the gleamingly white Geneva bands at his throat. I apologised for being dressed in hiking clothes when he shook my hand at the door on our way out.

“God can see your heart, even if some of my parishioners can’t see past the fact that you’re not wearing a tie.”

On the way home, Shona was pondering on who to tell first about the coming of the prodigal. Becky and her husband run a B. and B. in the town and are booked solidly through the half-term holiday. She’ll have to be told before some of the churchgoers get to her. Timing is the problem because she has a rest from twelve until two when she gets up to prepare dinner for the guests. There was something immensely soothing in this torrent of domestic trivia.

She got out at the house, handed the keys to James and sent us to the Youth Hostel to collect our tents and rucksacks. ‘Of course you’ll stay with us. There’s a pull-out bed in the living room and the other bunk now Ruaridh has a single in his own room.’ The kids talked about their schools and James explained the differences between Scottish and English education systems as we packed the gear into the van.

Shona had changed out of her good frock and was immersed in the production of Sunday dinner, so we were sent off to explore. We walked along the beach, together at first but the kids soon became fascinated by the inhabitants of rock pools and with searching under rocks. James, still in his good suit, and I strolled on in easy silence.