Letters from Skye

Chapter Twenty-eight Margaret

Edinburgh

Tuesday, 1 October 1940

Dear Mr. Graham,

I hope you won’t think me forward, but I wanted to write to express my admiration for your book, Favorite Fairy Stories for Favorite Children. Although it has been many years since I’ve been young enough for fairy stories, something made me look beyond the words on the page. Each has a story beneath. Allegory, to be sure, but also magic and poetry. These are not tales just for children.

I especially was taken with the last in the book, “The Fisherman’s Wife.” That one felt so real, as though it was written from the heart. How like life, where we fumble our way through love only to find that it’s simpler than we think.

I find it interesting that you changed the ending of “The Fisherman’s Wife.” Originally, you had the story end with the water sprite sacrificing himself so that the fisherman could swim safely to shore. A very noble ending. But here, in the published version, you have the water sprite fight for Lucinda’s love. He gives her a chance to choose him of her own free will. Perhaps not as noble, but real, steeped in regret and hopefulness.

Of course, the tales in this book aren’t the only ones you’ve written. More than two decades ago, you wrote a love story in letters, a love story just as magical as the fairy stories—even more so because it was true. It’s a story without an ending, though. A story that breaks off in one noble moment, leaving questions for all the moments that came before. Questions that remain twenty-three years later.

I know you can finish it. You’re one of the two best writers I know.

London, England

October 5, 1940

Dear Miss Dunn,

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first wrote those same three words. That lifetime has taken me across an ocean, over the trenches, into hell and back. But writing that “noble ending” was by far the hardest thing. Little wonder that I changed my mind.

Only one copy of the original draft ever existed. Please, how is she?

Edinburgh

Tuesday, 8 October 1940

Dear Mr. Graham,

She’s wondering. She’s spent the past twenty-three years wondering why you stopped writing. Why you never replied to the letters she sent after Iain came home. Why you disappeared.

My mother never told me about you or about her life before I was born. But I could see the weight of regret on her shoulders, so many years of wondering and waiting. This war, it’s shaken her. It made her remember the other war, she said. Made her remember what she gained and what she lost. War is impulsive, she told me, and you are left with nothing but ghosts.

And maybe it’s not my place, to write so to a stranger, but I feel as if I know you—after reading all of her letters, kept walled up since the last war ended. Even though we’ve never met, I understand you. I’m just as restless, just as fearless, just as searching for my place in the world. I understand questioning but not leaving without a backwards glance. Why did you?

London, England

October 11, 1940

Dear Margaret,

I didn’t stop writing to her. I never could. I regretted that “noble ending” the moment I penned it. I wrote her letter after letter, but with no reply. Why would she want to write back to me when she had her husband back at home? When they had a second chance? Why would she want to write back to me when she had you?

She never wrote another letter, but he did: Iain, he asked me to stop. He asked me to never write again.

After he got back, he said, she was happy. They were starting over and trying to make things work. They’d started a family, something she dearly wanted to do. And it made sense. Why would she want a kid like me? A kid who couldn’t settle down? Who didn’t want to commit to a family the way she did? No wonder she was glad for Iain to come home.

I did try once to apologize, face-to-face. Even though Iain didn’t want me to talk to her again, even if I figured she didn’t want to talk to me either, Sue was worth it. When I got out of the camp after the Armistice, I begged, borrowed, and stole to get up to Skye. I had to hear it from her.

Someone directed me to her parents’ cottage. When I got there, I heard laughter, and I stopped in the road. I’d never forgotten the sound of Sue’s laughter. I looked to the back of the cottage, and I saw her. Sue was with Iain and a little girl. You. Iain had swung you out over a stream, and you were giggling uncontrollably. All three of you laughing. I hesitated. Sue looked up, just for a moment, and I thought she saw me, but then you started to giggle again and I couldn’t move a step. I couldn’t intrude on that happy family moment. I couldn’t intrude on her new life. I left and never tried to contact her again.

All of those letters while I was in the camp, unanswered. And, in all these years, she’s never tried to find me. Why stir things up now?

Edinburgh

Monday, 14 October 1940

Dear Mr. Graham,

I looked through every letter she saved, and they stopped the day Iain came home. You say you wrote to her. If they’d arrived, why wouldn’t she have saved them?

What if she never saw them? Iain might have tossed every one into the fire. You, who won her heart with nothing but your pen: Why would he let them get through?

She said you’ve always been the only one for her. Her love, her muse, her poetry. When Iain died, she took a risk the way you did. Sent a letter and crossed her fingers. She wrote that she was moving to Edinburgh and that she’d wait for you every day in St. Mary’s Cathedral—your old meeting spot—until you arrived. Because you would. You’d get her letter and you’d come for her. She was sure of it.

So sure that she’s waiting there now, the way she has every day since. She’s never given up on you. She couldn’t go for the noble ending.

London, England

October 17, 1940

Dear Margaret,

Waiting at St. Mary’s, all these years?

You know, I’m not surprised. She was always stubborn as a barnacle. Elspeth never gave up on anything—even when she should’ve given up on me.

I never did get that last letter of hers, the one where she talks of moving to Edinburgh. I’ve found it now. It was nothing but my own pigheadedness that kept me from reading it before. You see, she sent it tucked in the pages of Out of Chaos, her last book. Out of chaos. That seemed to describe Iain to a T. He’d escaped the trenches and a prison camp. He’d left his one rival behind bars. He came home to peace.

From the moment Iain and I met in that prison camp, we were at an impasse. He realized that all was not lost—not with me behind a fence—and I realized that things wouldn’t be so easy with Elspeth, not with her husband still alive. I once made her a promise that, if Iain came home, I’d back off.

I was in on an escape plan with a few other guys. We fabricated “Boche uniforms” out of jacket linings, parts of blankets, sheets. Our plan was to put them on and walk straight out of the gate. Audacious, but that was me back then. Iain got wind of the plan and he wanted in. The other guys saved me from having to say a word. They told Iain there wasn’t room for him. They said “no” so that I didn’t have to.

But it didn’t feel right. Here I was, writing to Sue, dreaming about the day I’d see her again, while her husband drew more and more inside himself, knowing he wouldn’t. Once again, he’d given up. To sit and watch that and know you are the cause… I couldn’t do it.

The night before the escape, I wrote “The Fisherman’s Wife,” with the ending that you read. I folded it in a letter, reminding her of the promise I’d made, to not get in the way if Iain ever returned. I tucked the letter and story in the fake uniform and left it under Iain’s pillow.

It wasn’t until he got up to Skye and Sue wrote, asking what right we had to make the decision for her, that I began to doubt what I did. I wrote her, oh, so many times. I kept writing until Iain asked me to stop. Until he told me that she didn’t care.

Why did I believe him? I don’t know. His story that she was happy with him home made sense. He’d come through so much just to be with her. He’d come out of chaos. Hence the title of her book. And I couldn’t read a book about Iain, for Iain. He’d taken from me the one thing I needed most of all in the world.

But I was wrong. She did write me again. And not only that letter, tucked in the pages next to “Repose.” She wrote me a whole book. Every poem in Out of Chaos—from the blushing to the yearning to the missing—was about us. If I’d opened that book all those decades ago, I would’ve seen that she hadn’t given up on me. Her last plea, her last prayer, bound in leather the color of red jasper. She never forgot.

All I had to do was open the book, read everything she wrote for me over the years. But I didn’t. Again, I let her down. Again, I showed myself a coward when it mattered most.

Edinburgh

Saturday, 19 October 1940

Dear David,

One letter I found in her copybooks, she never sent. She was writing it the day Iain walked back through her door. One letter that, more than all the rest, reveals. Read it, and then come up to Edinburgh. Read it and come home to us….

Isle of Skye

10 August 1917

Dear Davey,

I know I haven’t written in a long while, but, please believe me, I’ve had good reason. What I’m about to admit to you may make you cross, but please don’t be angry. I had my reasons. I told you I lost the baby. But, as my mother says, “The thing about lost items is that someday you may find them again.” I never had a miscarriage, Davey. I had the baby.

Oh, I tried to miscarry. After I got the letter from Harry saying you were dead, I didn’t want that reminder, that slap in the face, mocking me with the family I could have had. So I tried to miscarry. I did all of the things they say you’re not supposed to do during pregnancy—washing windows, walking over a suicide’s grave, eating green plums, standing outside beneath a new moon, drinking whisky while taking a hot bath. Nothing worked.

Then you were alive, and all was perfect. I had my baby, I had my Davey. But I remembered how you felt before, how scary you found the idea of impending fatherhood. I couldn’t admit that I found the idea of impending motherhood every bit as scary. And so I put off telling you. And then again. And then again. It got to the point where I couldn’t confess my lie without it sounding utterly fictitious. “I hope you enjoyed the parcel of food. Oh, by the way, I gave birth yesterday.”

I wish I had told you. I wanted you by my side during the birth. I wanted you to kiss my forehead and tell me that I was doing well, that I was your brave girl. I wanted you to hold your daughter and be the first person she saw when she opened her eyes.

I named her Margaret, which means “pearl.” She truly is a treasure.

But things have been hard. I can’t lie, Davey. All of the neighbours know. They watched my swelling belly beneath my widow’s weeds and they whispered behind their hands. They’d seen the years of letters from America and the three momentous days when Elspeth Dunn stepped on a ferry. They weren’t surprised when a bairn came a year after the letter saying Iain had died.

I’m thinking of leaving, tying Margaret to my back and stepping on that ferry one last time. Away from Skye, I can raise her without whispers. Away from Skye, maybe Finlay will return. Màthair misses him so.

You once said that apartment in Edinburgh felt like home. Could we make it so? Come home to Margaret; come home to me. Come home to your family, Davey.