The woman in the stores had told me there was nobody of the name of Randall in Hamnavoe now. She had said something about a plaque in the church, but when I went there after my lunch, it was locked. There was no pub and the few people I met had never heard of him. It was the teacher up at the school who suggested I talk to Miss Manson, an elderly spinster living at Brough, about a mile down the road towards Grund Sound. But the wind had backed westerly and it was raining then. I found lodgings in a little house on the hill that had a Bed and Breakfast sign in the window and was full of children. It was a bleak place looking north to a scattering of islands half hidden in the rain. The man was away at sea, the woman uncommunicative, and the radio blared incessantly.
As darkness fell I walked down to the pier. But there was nobody there, the two fishing vessels silent and deserted, and Hamnavoe itself a dead place wrapped in a wet blanket of low cloud. I was walking slowly back, my head tucked into the collar of my anorak, when a shaft of light shone out from a cottage doorway and a voice said, 'You the stranger been asking about Alistair Randall?'
'Yes,' I said, and he invited me in. He was a beaky, tired-looking man with thin white hair and a nervous blink to his eyes. The door closed behind me and I was in a cosy little room with a peat fire. A little old woman, very plump, sat in her knitting chair, the needles clicking, bright eyes watching me out of a round face that showed scarcely a wrinkle.
'My wife,' he said and I was conscious of an atmosphere in the room, an undercurrent of strain. 'Mrs Sandford knew the Randalls.'
She nodded, an almost imperceptible movement of the head, the knitting needles clicking away and her eyes fixed on me with a strange eagerness.
'Can you tell me about Alistair Randall?' I asked.
Her eyes dropped to her knitting and there was an uncomfortable silence. Her husband smiled at me blinking his eyes. 'He was here all one summer.'
It was very warm in the room and I unzipped my anorak. 'You did know him then?'
The knitting needles stopped, the room very still, and she was staring at me again. 'Who are you?' she asked.
I hesitated before replying. Since leaving the Fisher Maid I had been using my mother's maiden name of Fraser — just in case they tried to follow me. But now… 'My name is Mike Randall,' I said. 'Alistair Randall was my father.'
The sound of her breath was like a sigh and she nodded slowly. 'Yes, I see now — the eyes, of course. We did wonder, Albert and me — when we heard you had been making enquiries…' That strange eagerness was back in her eyes as she gazed up at me. 'From America, aren't you?'
'I was brought up there. I left when I was twenty.'
She seemed disappointed. 'But your mother.. She went out as governess to a rich businessman and then married him. During the war I think.'
'Yes, during the war.'
'Muriel.' She nodded. 'Her name was Muriel. Is she still alive?' I didn't say anything and she turned to her husband. 'Give Mr Randall a chair, Albert. And a glass of whisky to keep out the damp.'
She asked me a lot more questions then, about myself and what I had done with my life. 'So you didn't come to see me?'
'I came to find out about my father.'
'Did you know I wrote to your mother?'
'No.'
'It must be three or four years ago now.'
'She shouldn't have written like that,' her husband said, his voice gentle, almost apologetic. 'I told her not to.'
'Life hasn't been easy for us,' she muttered angrily. 'Both of us getting old now, and Albert hasn't worked in twenty years. It was my son insisted I write. Did your mother never mention I had written to her? Mrs Graber, Bay View, Narragansett, Rhode Island, USA. That's right, isn't it?'
I think she must have written to her for money, and because she was disappointed that I hadn't come to Hamnavoe in answer to that letter, it took time and patience to get her to talk about my father. Her husband hardly said a word. He was from Scalloway and I don't think he had ever met Alistair Randall. But she had virtually grown up with him, for the Randalls had had a small farm at Houss on East Burra and her eldest brother had kept a lobster boat down in the Voe of North Houss. 'Alistair often came out in the boat with us.' The softness of her voice, the faraway look in her eyes… I sensed there was something more, but all she said was, 'He was a very wild boy.'
He had gone to sea at the age of fifteen, on an inshore boat fishing out from Hamnavoe. Then his father had died, the farm was sold and his mother had gone to live at Easter Quarff, which was where she had come from. 'I didn't see him for a long time after that. He got a job on a Lerwick drifter. And when the Shetland Times printed his views on the working conditions of the island drifters he started writing for the papers regularly, you see.'
She produced some faded cuttings from her work bag, and while I was glancing through them, she told me how he had shipped in a Danish cargo boat bound for Svendborg and hadn't come back for a long time.
'Did he go on to Russia?' I asked, for the last of the cuttings was about whaling in the Barents Sea.
But she didn't know. 'He only spoke of Denmark and Norway. Oh, and Finland — he had been to Finland.'
'How long was he away?'
'Almost three years.'
'And then he came back to Lerwick?'
'No, to Hamnavoe. Of course I was married by then…'
'But you saw him again?'
She glanced across at her husband, a smile that had a quality of sadness. 'Yes, I saw him again.'
'Did he talk about Russia at all? He was a Communist, you know.'
She shook her head. 'No, he never talked to me about Russia.'
'How old was he then?'
She paused while she worked it out. 'He was a year younger than me, so he would have been twenty-three.'
That made it 1930, for he had been born in 1907. I asked her how long he had stayed in Hamnavoe. 'Just the summer, that was all. He was writing most of the time — a book, I think. But I never heard it was published. And he was gone before winter. He was a very restless man.'
'Was that when he went to America?'
But she wasn't sure. 'I never heard from him again — only at the end.' She delved into her work bag again, an envelope this time. She held it out to me, her small hand trembling slightly. 'It was because of this I asked Albert to bring you in. I thought you must be a relative, you making enquiries of him here. He will have written it just before he was killed. You can read it if you like. I don't mind.'
The envelope was dirty and torn and it had no stamp on it. The address was in pencil, barely readable. Mrs Anna Sandford, Hamnavoe, Shetland. The letter inside consisted of two sheets of ruled paper taken from some sort of notebook, a thin pencilled scrawl that had obviously been written under great tension.
It was was headed 'Somewhere outside Madrid' and dated February 25, 1939.
Darling Anna -
We are cut off and being shelled to hell. We have held on now for twenty-eight weary months. Not much food and bitterly cold. The Communists have pulled back, our flank exposed. Tomorrow or the next day I shall probably be dead. In these last hours I think of Shetland, and of you. There's not been much of happiness in my life, and what little there has been I had with you. A pity I ever left the islands, but a man's destiny lies in himself and is unavoidable. It has led me inevitably to Spain where we have played out the overture for a new world war, the bright hopes of youth lost in this mess of blood and cordite.
You may think it strange that my thoughts are with you now and not with my wife. But Muriel is a realist, whereas you are the essential woman, the Mother Earth of my native islands. God keep you, and Shetland, in peace during the holocaust to come. I pray for you as I hope you will sometimes pray for me.