Sacrament

CHAPTER I

Will emerged from the Donnelly house in a daze and remained that way for the next hour or so. He was aware of getting into Frannie's car, Rosa half-lying across the seat behind him, and their taking off out of the village as though they had a horde of fallen angels on their heels; but he was monosyllabic in his responses to Frannie's enquiries, resenting her attempts to snap him out of his fugue. Was he hurt? she wanted to know. He told her no. And Steep; what about Steep? Alive, he told her. Hurt? she asked. Yes, he told her. Badly enough to kill him? she asked. He told her no. Pity, she said.

A little while later, they stopped at a garage and Frannie got out to use the phone. He didn't care why. But she told him anyway when she got back into the driver's seat. She'd called the police, to tell them where to find Sherwood's body. She was stupid not to have done it earlier, she said. Maybe they would have caught Steep. 'Never,' he said.

They drove on again in silence. Rain began to spatter the windscreen; fat drops slapping hard against the glass. He wound the window halfway down, and the rain came in against his face, and the smell of the rain too: tangy, metallic. Slowly, the chill began to rouse him from his trance. The numbness in his knife-hand started to recede, and his fingers and palm began instead to ache. As the minutes passed he began to pay some attention to the journey he was on, though there was nothing of any great significance to be noted. The roads they were travelling were neither jammed nor deserted, the weather neither foul nor fine; sometimes the clouds would unleash a little rain, sometimes they would show a sliver of blue. It was all reassuringly mundane, and he took refuge from his memories of Steep's vision by making himself its witness. There to his left was a car carrying two nuns and a child; there was a woman putting on lipstick as she drove; there was a bridge being demolished, and a train running parallel to the motorway for a little distance, with men and women rocking in its windows, staring out, glassy-eyed. There was a sign, pointing north to Glasgow: one hundred and eighty miles. And then without warning, Frannie said, 'I'm sorry. We have to stop,' and bringing the vehicle over to the side of the motorway, got out. It was all Will could do to stir himself from his seat, but at length he did so. The rain was coming on again; his scalp ached where the drops struck. 'Are ... you ... sick?' he asked her. It was the first time he'd put a sentence together since they'd left the village, and it took effort.

'No,' Frannie said, wiping rain from her eyes.

'Then what's wrong?'

'I have to go back,' she said. 'I can't...' she shook her head, plainly enraged at herself. 'I shouldn't have left him. What was I thinking? He's my own brother.'

'He's dead,' Will said. 'You can't help him.'

She covered her mouth with her hand, still shaking her head. There were tears mingling with the rain, running down her face.

'If you want to go back,' Will said, 'we'll go back.'

Frannie's hand slid from her face. 'I don't know what I want,' she said. 'Then what would Sherwood have wanted?'

Frannie gazed forlornly at the bundled figure in the back of the car. 'He would have done his damnedest to make Rosa happy. Lord knows why, but that's what he would have done.' She looked at Will now, her expression close to utter despair, 'You know, I've spent most of my adult life doing things to accommodate him?' she said. 'I suppose I may as well do this one last thing.' She sighed. 'But this is the last, damn it.'

Will took over the wheel for the next stage of the journey.

'Where are we headed?' he wanted to know.

'To Oban,' Frannie told him.

'What's in Oban?'

'It's where you catch the ferries for the islands.'

'How do you know?'

'Because I almost went, five or six years ago, with a group from the church. To see Iona. But I cancelled at the last minute.'

'Sherwood?'

'Of course. He didn't want to be left alone. So I didn't go,'

'We still don't know which island we're heading for,' Will said. 'I got an old atlas from the house. Do you want to run through the names with Rosa, to see if any of them ring a bell?' He glanced over his shoulder. 'Are you awake?'

'Always,' Rosa said. Her voice was weak.

'How are you feeling?'

'Tired,' she said.

'How's the bandage holding up?' Frannie asked her.

'It's intact,' Rosa said. 'I'm not going to die on you, don't worry. I'll hold on till I see Rukenau.'

'Where's the atlas?' Frannie wanted to know.

'On the floor behind you,' Will told her. She reached round and picked

it up. 'Have you considered that Rukenau may be dead?' Will said to Rosa.

'He had no plans to die,' Rosa replied.

'He might have done it anyway.'

'Then I'll find his grave and lie down with him,' she said. 'And maybe his dust will forgive mine.'

Frannie had found the Western Isles in the atlas, and now began to recite their names, starting with the Outer Hebrides. 'Lewis, Harris, North Uist, South Uist, Barra, Benbecula...' Then on to the Inner, 'Mull, Coll, Tiree, Islay, Skye...' Rosa knew none of them. There were some, Frannie pointed out, that were too small to be named in the atlas; maybe it was one of them. When they reached Oban they'd get a more detailed map, and try again. Rosa wasn't very optimistic. She'd never been very good remembering names, she said. That had always been Steep's forte. She'd been good with faces, however, whereas he

'Let's not talk about him,' Frannie said, and Rosa fell silent.

So on they went. Through the Lake District to the Scottish border, and, on, as the afternoon dwindled, past the shipyards of Clydebank, alongside Loch Lomond and on through Luss and Crianlarich up to Tyndrum. There was for Will an almost sublime moment a few miles short of Oban when the wind brought the smell of the sea his way. Some forty years on the planet, and the chill scent of sharp salt still moved him, bringing back childhood dreams of the faraway. He had long ago made these dreams a reality, of course; seen more of the world than most. But the promise of sea and horizon still caught at his heart, and tonight, with the last of the light sinking west, he knew why. They were the masks of something far more profound, those dreams of perfect islands where perfect love might be found. Was it any wonder his spirits rose as the road brought them down through the steep town to the harbour? Here, for the first time, he felt as if the physical world was in step with its deeper significance, the forms of his yearning made concrete. Here was the busy quayside from which they would depart, here was the Sound of Mull, its unwelcoming waters leading the eye out towards the sea. What lay across those waters, far from the comfort of this little harbour, was not just an island; it was the possibility that his spirit's voyage would find completion; where he would know, perhaps, why God had seeded him with yearning.