The Last Ferry to Mull

No sooner had Rosa reached the pier at Oban than the ferry's horn sounded across the bay, low and final, like a door closing in another room. She stood with her small suitcase at her feet and watched the lights of the boat slide away towards the Isle of Mull. Never had she missed a ferry in her life. In Vigo, where she had lived for all of her sixty-eight years, boats were things you could set your watch by.

The ticket office was shut. A sign in the window explained, with typical Scottish brevity, that the next sailing would leave at seven the following morning. Rain had begun to fall, fine and persistent, the kind her husband used to call Scottish weather even when it fell on Galicia. Rosa pulled her coat tighter and looked along the harbor front for somewhere, anywhere, that was still open.

The only lit window belonged to a small cafe with steamed-up glass and a hand-painted sign that read The Anchor. Inside, a young woman was wiping tables, and at the counter sat an old man in a heavy wool jumper, his hands wrapped around a mug of tea. He looked up as she came in, took in the suitcase and the wet coat, and nodded as if he had been expecting her. "Missed the last one, did you?" he said. "Happens to the best of us."

His name was Duncan, and he had fished these waters for nearly fifty years. When Rosa told him where she was from, his face changed. "Vigo," he repeated slowly. "I've been to Vigo. Spent a fortnight there when I was young, waiting for an engine part. Best octopus I've ever eaten." Rarely had Rosa heard her city's name spoken with such affection by a stranger, and she found herself smiling for the first time that day.

The young woman, whose name was Kirsty, said they could stay until midnight, and brought them soup without being asked. Outside, the wind was getting up. Duncan talked about the sea the way other men talk about a difficult brother: with exasperation, with respect, and with something close to love. Rosa listened. Her husband, Andres, had talked about it in exactly the same way. Only gradually did she begin to tell Duncan why she had come.

Andres had died in March. He had been a fisherman too, until his knees gave out, and for forty years he had told one story more often than any other. As a young man, he had been on a trawler that went down in a storm off the west coast of Scotland. Three of the crew had ended up in the water. A local boat had come out to them in the dark, and two of the three had been pulled aboard alive. "He wanted his ashes taken to Mull," Rosa said, touching the suitcase. "To Tobermory. That is where they brought him ashore."

Duncan had gone very still. For a long moment he said nothing at all, and the only sound was the rain against the window. "What was the name of the trawler?" he asked at last. "The Estrella del Norte," said Rosa. Not until she saw his hands begin to shake did she understand that she was not telling him a story. She was reminding him of one.

He had been on the boat that went out that night. He had been twenty-four. His younger brother, Callum, had been with him, and it was Callum who had tied a rope around his waist and gone over the side when the third man slipped beneath the waves. Neither of them came back. "Hardly a day goes by," Duncan said quietly, "when I don't think about that rope." At no point in forty years had Andres told her the name of the man who had died trying to reach his friend. Perhaps, Rosa thought, he had never known it.

They sat together until Kirsty began, very gently, to switch off the lights. Little did either of them know, when the evening began, that they had been carrying two halves of the same night for most of their lives. Duncan insisted that Rosa take the spare room above his sister's shop, and she was too tired to argue.

In the morning the sea was flat and silver, as though the storm had been nothing more than a rumor. Duncan was waiting at the pier with two tickets. "I'll show you where they came ashore," he said. "And where Callum is remembered. There's a stone." Rosa took his arm as they walked up the ramp. Only then, with the island growing slowly out of the mist ahead of them, did she allow herself to cry.