Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
His car was barely out of sight of the cottage when he turned off the road, and up the narrow asphalt track and over the cattle grid to the sprawling car park in front of Crobost Church. It was a bleak, uncompromising building. No carved stonework or religious friezes, no stained-glass windows, no bell in the bell tower. This was God without distraction. A God who regarded entertainment as sin, art as religious effigy. There was no organ or piano inside. Only the plaintive chanting of the faithful rang around its rafters on the Sabbath.
He parked at the foot of the steps leading to the manse, and climbed to the front door. Sunlight was still washing across the patchwork green and brown of the machair, bog cotton ducking and diving among the scars left by the peat-cutters. It was exposed up here, closer to God, Fin supposed, a constant trial of faith against the elements.
It was almost a full minute after he had rung the bell that the door opened, and Donna’s pale, bloodless face peered out at him from the darkness. He was as shocked now as he had been the first time he set eyes on her. Then, she hadn’t looked old enough to be three months pregnant. She looked no older in motherhood. Her father’s thick sandy hair was drawn back from a narrow face devoid of make-up. She seemed frail and tiny, like a child. Painfully thin in skin-tight jeans and a white T-shirt. But she looked at him with old eyes. Knowing, somehow, beyond her years.
For a moment she said nothing. Then, “Hello, Mr. Macleod.”
“Hello Donna. Is your father in?”
A momentary disappointment flickered across her face. “Oh. I thought you might have come to see the baby.”
And immediately he felt guilty. Of course, it would have been expected of him. But he felt, in a strange way, disconnected. Unemotional. “Another time.”
Resignation settled like dust on her child’s features. “My dad’s in the church. Fixing a hole in the roof.”
Fin was several steps down when he stopped and looked back to find her still watching him. “Do they know?” he said.
She shook her head.