Island of Dreams Read online

  ‘No,’ Pete said as he started the engine and revved like mad. ‘You’ll find the island grabs you,’ he said, raising his voice as he revved. ‘I used to work clearing the paths; then I started doing the tours. You end up becoming fixated on the place. I want to step back from it. See you tomorrow, if there’s a tour.’

  He roared off, black smoke billowing out behind his jalopy as it farted up over the bridge and down into Kyleakin.

  I sat at a desk in the bothy with the door open. A sparrow-sized bird – a whitethroat – was hopping about, perking in the brambles outside. It sang. The pamphlet Pete had given me was short, twelve pages, published by a local printing press in 1982. There were photographs of the lighthouse, of small boats moored in the bay at the front of the house, a photograph of Maxwell sitting on a bench in front of the cottage looking shifty in the dark glasses he habitually wore towards the end of his life.

  I had trouble concentrating on the text. I leafed through Gregory’s script and then looked at Susan Browning’s to-do list and couldn’t decide which of the jobs to tackle first. I wondered if instead I should start working my way through the filing cabinet, or tidy the bothy as Pete had suggested, or go for a walk around the island, or drive over to Skye, or go down the pub. I stared out of the window at the two villages, the surrounding islands and the mountains and sea. A strange feeling was coming over me, and it took me a moment or two to recognize it for what it was. I’d only experienced it once before, in Damascus. A new lover had gone away for the day and left me alone in her apartment. I hadn’t known what the feeling was back then and had got frightened, had wondered if I wasn’t going a little insane. For it is a kind of insanity, falling in love.

  That evening, before bed, feeling calmer, I took a stroll around the island, looking for signs of otter. In the last of the twilight I stood stock-still by the wall of the cobbled path and waited, watching the water in the bay by the lighthouse. The traffic overhead had quietened for the night. The navigation lights on the bridge winked high above me. I waited and watched, but nothing stirred in the darkening sea before me.

  The following day, kitted out with gardening gloves and a trowel, I made a start on the to-do list. All morning I was bent down on one knee or the other, loosening and pulling out great hanks of grass and assorted weeds along the edges of the paths that criss-crossed the island. Devil’s coach horses raised their abdomens and snapped their pincers at me as I shuffled along, prodding and pulling, turfing out beetles and ants and leatherjackets from their homes. Kneeling there, my eyes lowered to the level of a small boy’s, the ground and all its minuscule life forms so much closer, I felt for the first time in years a sense of purpose. I was needed and had a role, something to take me away from myself. I was ‘the Warden’ and I would care for the island after its long neglect and I would love it and repair it and bring it to life again.

  ‘I’m glad you’re getting on with it.’ Susan Browning’s unsmiling sunglasses-covered face looked down at me. Her shoulders were up, her arms filled with clean, ironed linen.

  ‘There’s a car parked in the lay-by. They shouldn’t park there. It’s only meant for people staying on the island.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ I said. ‘The blue estate.’

  ‘No, no. There’s another one. These people park there so they can walk onto the bridge to look at the view and take photos but they shouldn’t. I’ve phoned the Highland Council so many times to put up a No Parking sign but they never do anything.’

  I stood up and mopped my brow. ‘I’m sure they’ll be gone soon,’ I said. ‘They’re not doing any harm. It is a lay-by.’

  Susan Browning tutted. ‘Anyway, I suppose I better get on with the cleaning. I’ve arranged cover at the visitors’ centre for a few hours but I must get back. There’s so much needs doing all the time.’

  ‘Can I help?’ I said.

  ‘It’s better if I get on alone. It would only slow me down having help.’ She trotted down the path to the cottage.

  A little later I went to my room for a glass of water. Susan Browning was banging and crashing about in the cottage kitchen. I stepped through to the lobby, peered around the kitchen door.

  ‘I wonder if I might see the rest of the house?’

  ‘Go right ahead. Don’t—! Oh good, you’ve taken those boots off.’ She grabbed a vacuum cleaner and hauled it through a door into the house.

  From the exterior, the lighthouse keepers’ cottage looked like two long, back-to-back single-storey houses, and originally the cottage had been two dwellings – one for the Principal lighthouse keeper and his family, another for the Assistant keeper. Gavin Maxwell had had the dividing wall knocked down in order to create a single three-bedroomed house. Today, the bathroom, bedrooms and a small sitting room are situated off a dark corridor at the back of the house, their windows looking out to an alleyway and a patch of scrub beneath a high, curved wall of rock. Both Maxwell and his friend Richard Frere wrote about this alleyway. Ghosts are said to parade and chatter there. Frere heard them, visitors to the island have seen them. The Long Room had been the sitting room in Maxwell’s day. My room – the former coal shed and workshop – stretched across the north-west gable end of the cottage. Apart from my room and the Long Room, the rest of the house smelt of furniture polish and stately homes.

  I found Susan Browning busily vacuuming the small sitting room at the back of the house. When I stuck my head around the door she switched off the machine.

  ‘The Raffertys will be here sometime on Saturday. We tell people to arrive after 2 p.m. so we can get the cottage cleaned if there’s been someone in the week before, but you never know with people when they’re going to turn up. If I give you a set of keys could you meet the Raffertys when they arrive and give it to them? It’s just that it’s a fifty-mile round trip for me otherwise.’

  I told her it wouldn’t be a problem.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ she said and went back to her hoovering.

  Later I found her sitting on the bench at the front of the house, a packed lunch spread out neatly beside her, a pair of binoculars in her lap.

  ‘I’ve just got to eat something,’ she said.

  I stepped over the gravel in my socks and perched on the bench beside her. A bird feeder hung from a length of dowelling stuck in the slope of the lawn in front of us. A flock of greenfinches flitted between the feeder and the silver skeleton of a very dead tree.

  ‘You’ve met Pete,’ she said when she’d stopped chewing. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to help with the tours? There’s a script somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ I said.

  ‘Pete always begins his tours in the Long Room but I like to leave that as the finale when I have to do the tours. It’s better that way, I think, especially when Maxwell fans are on the tour.’

  She started, raised the binoculars to her eyes.

  ‘Is that an otter? Out in the bay there?’ She waggled a finger in front of her.

  The tide was ebbing, exposing sandbars and seaweed. Tangles of bladderwrack and kelp fronds floated lazily in the sun. We sat watching where she’d pointed. A herring gull flew down and settled on a sandbank.

  ‘No. Just seaweed.’ She sighed, and took another bite of her sandwich.

  ‘I’m hoping to get Jimmy Watt over here in the next few weeks so we can go through the inventory of the artefacts in the Long Room together. We need to know what belongs to him and what belongs to the Trust. I know he donated some things at the beginning.’

  ‘Have you met him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, several times. I get him to do my paintings. He’s a picture-framer, you know. Lovely house, he has. A lovely man.’ She sighed again.

  ‘What do you paint?’ I asked.

  ‘Animals and birds. And I also paint rocks I find on the beach where we live. I enjoy it. I’m trying to sell some at the moment but nobody’s buying.’ She sighed again. ‘There’s a craft exhibition in Portree in a few weeks and I’m desperately trying to
get a collection ready for that.’ She twisted the cap off a bottle of water and drank.

  A loud grunting came from the bay in front of the house. We looked at each other.

  ‘Quietly,’ Susan Browning shushed. We waded through bracken and heather to the edge of the lawn.

  A seal the size of a cow was basking on one of the flatter rocks at the sea’s edge. Another, smaller, seal was attempting to haul itself out next to it. The larger seal was grouching at the smaller seal, galumphing and flipper-waving and groaning. Susan Browning and I peered over the rocks.

  ‘Such a wonderful thing to witness,’ she whispered. ‘We’re so lucky living up here.’

  ‘Like kids squabbling over toys,’ I said. ‘“It’s mine! No, mine! I found it first!”’

  The smaller seal, out-manoeuvred by the sheer mass of the other, gave up and swam off. The heffalump, its point having been made, flopped into the sea and followed it.

  We walked back to the bench.

  ‘By the way, you should go and see Johnny Ach,’ she said. ‘He’s been involved with the Trust from the beginning and was chairman until recently. He’s the harbourmaster in Kyle and knows everything. After Gregory and the other wardens left he used to take the tours during his lunch break. Now we’ve got Pete, of course, and you.’

  She placed the remains of her picnic into a Tupperware box and shut the lid with a snap.

  I asked Pete if he would accompany me on my first tour.

  ‘You’ll be fine. I imagine you know more about Maxwell and his crew than I do. Seen any otters yet?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They’re around. But I rarely see them on a tour. I often see them in the evenings down by the river when I’m out walking the dogs. Everybody thinks they’re rare but they’re everywhere up here.’

  The Raffertys – an emphysemic couple from Glasgow – waddled and wheezed onto the island early on Saturday to stay the week. I welcomed them, handed them their keys and escaped to the bothy to read. Having strangers staying in the cottage, hearing their voices in the kitchen and coming across them on my wanderings around the island felt, back then, like an invasion. I wanted time alone with the island and its memories.

  That afternoon I drove over the bridge to Skye and nursed my car the short distance up and down the hills to the Otter Haven at Kylerhea. I sat out of the rain in a hide overlooking the narrow stretch of sea between Skye and the mainland and scanned the shorelines and rocks and water for a small black head, a loping gait or a long flat tail. I saw plenty of seals and herons and gulls. I watched a fishing boat make slow progress against the tidal race, punching its way south into the Sound of Sleat. The Glenachulish turntable ferry plied back and forth across the Narrows. A Lilliputian lighthouse, which looked familiar but had not been there on my 2001 trip north, had been erected above the slipway on the Glenelg side. But I saw no otters. Nearby was the large white house, recently painted, the grounds neat and orderly, where Jimmy Watt lived. An estate car and a Land Rover were parked in the driveway. A small motor boat tied to a mooring buoy was bobbing in a nearby bay.

  The wipers slashed across the windscreen as I drove back home. The road in front of me and the hills and sea blurred then cleared, blurred then cleared. Rain fell into the night and continued to fall for most of the following week.

  ‘You learn to work around the rain,’ Pete said one day before a tour. ‘When it’s raining you do indoor things and when it stops you go outside again.’

  I took tours. It was like taking the stage – daunting before you step out, invigorating once you’re on and exhilarating or exhausting depending on the audience. I tidied up the Long Room, polished and dusted, and murdered moths daily.

  I walked into Kyle to see Johnny Ach. Pete had told me that Johnny ‘Ach’ Macrae, of the Clan Macrae – whose traditional clan-lands we lived on – was considered by many to be the King of Kyle. He had been born down the road at Achmore (thus ‘Ach’ – to distinguish him from other local Johnnys) and had lived all his life in Kyle. And as far as the Kyleakin Island Trust went, Johnny Ach was the monarch, the rest mere parliamentarians – transient and ever-changing do-gooders.

  I found the harbourmaster’s office and tripped in. A number of burly men togged out in sea boots and wet-weather gear stood bantering in a large, carpeted office. A picture window gave a panoramic view over Kyle Harbour to the Black Islands, Kyleakin and Skye. None of the men looked at me when I entered.

  ‘I’m looking for Johnny Ach,’ I said finally.

  ‘Aye, that’ll be me.’ A large man leaning against a desk, dressed in jeans and a light blue shirt, the only man there not wearing sea boots, glanced over at me.

  I told him who I was. ‘I’m looking for a boat,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place,’ said Johnny Ach brightly.

  The loiterers wandered away.

  ‘And a set of tide tables for the year.’

  ‘Ah, well. We may be out of those. We’re after getting some more run off on the photocopier. What will you be wanting a boat for?’

  ‘For the island,’ I said. ‘For clearing rubbish off the shoreline. And because an island needs a boat.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Right then,’ I said and turned to go.

  ‘Hang on,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ve been meaning to come over to see you.’

  He had a confidence about him that any man might wish for, and intelligent, sparky blue eyes. I imagined his flushed, florid face to be a badge of honour, a reminder of all the whisky sessions in all the captain’s cabins of all the ships that had ever sailed into Kyle.

  ‘How are things on the island?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m clearing the paths and I want to paint the house and the bothy and lighthouse shed, and sort out the damp and the moth infestation in the Long Room. They’ve got into the carpets. And I’d like to open up the fireplace in there and get some warmth into the walls.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Johnny. ‘Anything you need?’

  ‘A boat,’ I said, ‘and a set of tide tables.’

  ‘Ha.’ Johnny looked out the window for a moment. ‘Have you a minute?’

  I followed him into a meeting room and sat at a table. He got me a cup of coffee, sat across from me and swung his boatshoe-shod feet onto the tabletop. He leaned back in his chair. We looked at each other.

  ‘The Trust is in a bad way, I think,’ I said.

  ‘People left,’ Johnny said, as if he’d been betrayed.

  ‘And now there’s no money. No income.’

  ‘No,’ he said, then took his feet off the table and sat up, ‘I mean, aye . . . there will be. Match-funding!’

  ‘?’

  ‘You raise a little money from one source and then you go and talk to other sources and say, ‘Look, we’ve already raised this amount from A because he knows our cause is worthwhile, can you match it?’ Then once you have B onboard you set up a meeting with C, and on it goes. That’s how it works.’

  ‘But will it cover the Trust’s debts?’

  ‘Everybody has debts,’ Johnny said and shrugged. ‘Once we get funding in place again we’ll get rid of the debts right enough.’

  He knew people, influential people. Johnny Ach knew everybody. He sat on committees and councils and was fluent in form-filling officialese. He was one of them, but his first loyalty was to his community.

  ‘Up here we do things the West Highland way. Always have, always will. It just takes time, that’s all,’ he said.

  Unlike the parliamentarian trustees, Johnny Ach was in for the long haul. He saw a bigger picture and took the long view. Most people’s plans so often sound like what they are: pipe dreams and gaseous pub talk. Johnny Ach spoke with such energy and force and intelligence that the realization of his plans sounded not only possible, but easily achievable. Money would come, there’d be salaries again, the boat trips across to the island from Kyleakin would resume, there’d be open-access days when the island would be
open for everyone to visit for free; and what about turning the bothy into a cafe? It’s a great location for one.

  I could have sat for a long time listening to Johnny throwing ideas around. I’m sure many have.

  At eleven o’clock that night it was still light, not quite light enough to read by, but almost. Up above the island, in a patch of muted blue between white-grey rags of cloud, I could see only one star, bright and twinkling.

  The Gaelic name for the Isle of Skye is Eilean à Cheo, which translates into English as ‘the Misty Isle’. My dictionary defines an isle or an island as ‘a mass of land that is surrounded by water and is smaller than a continent’. The Isle of Skye and Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, then, remain islands, though with the coming of the Skye Bridge that status has been diminished, connected to the mainland as they are by concrete and steel. But before the opening of the bridge they were proper islands and to visit meant taking a boat. It was an event.

  Ferries had plied the Kyle–Kyleakin route since the 1600s, but by the end of the twentieth century the popularity of the route had led to mile-long queues through the villages. Coachloads of tourists, and lorries and traffic of all kinds, slowed the turnaround rate. Nurses and postmen and tradespeople had trouble getting to work. Locals and tourists alike were left waiting, sometimes for hours. The ferries simply couldn’t cope. Something had to change.

  A consortium of investors put up £25 million. (The final cost would approach £39 million.) Land in Kyleakin and Kyle, and the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, was bought by compulsory purchase order. Construction of the Skye Bridge began in 1992. Three years of rock-blasting, bulldozing and splashing about of concrete followed. Navigation lights were placed on the bridge and the lighthouse was decommissioned. The ferries continued to run until the tollbooths opened at the end of 1995. Traffic could now speed between the mainland and Skye, but at a price. The tolls were set at the same rate as had been charged on the ferries, which had never been cheap. In the first year of operation more than 612,000 vehicles used the bridge. Protesters claimed the bridge was an extension of the national road network, a public road, and passage along it should be free. The investors wanted to recoup their costs and turn a profit. There was a campaign of non-payment. Over a hundred people were convicted for refusal to pay the tolls. Tempers flared.