The Lewis Man by Peter May

lost in the wind. ‘Gimme a fucking break!’ He slammed the door shut behind him.
    Marsaili flushed with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘Don’t be. He’s just a boy facing up too early to a responsibility he shouldn’t have had. He needs to finish school and go to university. Then maybe he really could offer them a future.’
    Marsaili shook her head. ‘He won’t do that. He’s frightened he’ll lose them. He wants to quit school at the end of term and get a job. Show Donald Murray that he takes his responsibilities seriously.’
    ‘By throwing away his only chance in life? Surely to God he doesn’t want to end up like Artair.’
    The fire of resentment burned briefly in Marsaili’s eyes, but she said nothing.
    Fin said quickly, ‘And one thing’s for sure. Donald Murray would never respect him if he did.’
    Marsaili lifted their plates away from the table. ‘Nice of you to come back after all this time and tell us how we should be running our lives.’ The plates clattered on to the counter top, and she laid her hands flat upon it, leaning forward to take her weight on them and letting her head fall. ‘I’m sick of it, Fin. Sick of everything. Sick of Donald Murray and his sanctimonious bullying. Sick of Fionnlagh’s lack of backbone. I’m sick of fooling myself into studying for a future I’ll probably never have.’ She drew a deep tremulous breath and forced herself to stand upright again. ‘And now this.’ She turned back to face Fin, and he saw that she was hanging on to control by a gossamer thread. ‘What am I going to do about my dad?’
    It would have been easy for him to stand up and take her in his arms, and tell her everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. And there was no point in pretending it was. He said, ‘Come and sit down and tell me what you know about him.’
    She pushed herself, laden with weariness, away from the counter and sat heavily in her chair. Her face was strained by tension and fatigue, pale and pinched in the harsh electric light. But he saw in it still the little girl who had first drawn him to her all those years before. The little girl with the blond pigtails who had sat next to him that first day at school and offered to translate for him, because for some reason inexplicable to the young Fin his parents had sent him to school speaking only Gaelic. He reached across the table and brushed the hair from her blue eyes, and for a moment she lifted a hand to touch his, a fleeting moment of recollection, of how it had once been long ago. She dropped her hand to the table again.
    ‘Dad came up from Harris when he was still in his teens. About eighteen or nineteen, I think. He got a job as a labourer at Mealanais farm.’ She got up to take a half-empty bottle of red wine from the worktop and pour herself a glass. She held the bottle out towards Fin, but he shook his head. ‘It was sometime after that he met my mum. Her father was still the lighthouse keeper then, at the Butt, and that’s where they lived. Apparently Dad used to walk to the lighthouse every night after work to see her, even just for a few minutes, and then back again. In all weathers. Four and a half miles each way.’ She took a large sip of her wine. ‘It must have been love.’
    Fin smiled. ‘It must have been.’
    ‘They went to all the dances at the social. And all the crofters’ do’s. They must have been going out steady for about four years when the farmer at Mealanais died, and the place came up for lease. Dad applied for it, and they said yes. On condition that he got himself married.’
    ‘That must have made for a romantic proposal.’
    Marsaili smiled in spite of herself. ‘I think my mum was just pleased that something had finally prompted him to ask. They were married in Crobost Church by Donald Murray’s father, and spent the next God knows how many years eking a living off the land and raising me and my sister. In all my conscious life I can’t remember my