My heart is a dark passage, lined with ranks of gleaming jars. In each one something floats. The past, preserved as if in spirit. Here is the scent of grass and the sea, here the creak of wheels on a rough path, here a bright yellow gull's beak. The sensation of blood drying on my cheek in the wind. Abel crying for his mother, Uncle's hand on me. Silver on a white collarbone. The knowledge of loss, which comes like a blow to the heart or the stomach. It does not reach your mind until later.
She is there, too, of course. Evelyn. Somewhere along the rows, behind glass, she floats in the dim air. I do not seek her out. My survival depends on that.
After everything, and against all odds, I have been given a chance. A life. Never mind what kind. I have people who depend on me and I on them. Never mind who they are.
I am filled with memory. I must make room in the dark passage. So I cast it forth, this day. I give it to you. This is the day I became what I am.
* * *
On the morning of 2 January 1921, James MacRaith was roused by silence. The storm that had raged across the coast for three days had passed. Thrushes and waxwings sang in the silver birch trees that lined Loyal’s narrow cobbled street. It was half past six, and there would be no dawn in these northern reaches for some hours.
Jamie was twenty-eight years of age, in good health, and had never married. He dressed by the light of a candle in front of the small square of glass that hung on the wall above the chest of drawers. A vest, thick woollen socks with gaiters, the collar of his cotton shirt tied together with a bright red kerchief, a sheepskin waistcoat smelling strongly of lanolin. He painstakingly worked up lather from a sliver of shaving soap and stropped his razor. He put in his dental plate, filling the dark gap on the left side of his upper jaw with a white incisor and canine. The teeth had been lost in a blast in France. Last of all he put on with care the cufflinks his father had left to him. These were battered silver, inlaid with yellowing ivory, and Jamie MacRaith had always loved them. When he held them in his hand he felt the sway of a long trunk, the gentle tread of a great foot on dusty earth; he caught the scent of flowering hibiscus. The cufflinks also made him recall his father’s death.
The upstairs of the cottage comprised two bedrooms, one occupied by Jamie. The other had been his father’s and now lay empty. Sometimes he still heard his father moving about in there.
Jamie ate some preserved apricots from a jar. He smoked Woodbine cigarettes while drinking strong tea. He buttered two slabs of white bread and sprinkled them with sugar before wrapping them carefully in wax paper and slipping them into his jacket pocket for later. He read a few pages of Tarzan and the Ant-Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In this story, Tarzan was taken prisoner and enslaved by a race of tiny people who put him to work in the mines. Jamie MacRaith was fond of reading, particularly stories of adventure and murder. The other books he had out on loan from the travelling library on that January day were The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and an instruction manual for building a carburettor engine.
Jamie locked the cottage and stowed the keys in a pile of slates by the back door.