Free Beyond the Sea by Melissa Bailey Page B

made by herself to see her grandmother. She had heard all manner of stories about him. But she knew the truth of only one – that he could see things that other people could not. Over time she had learned to trust in him and his vision and she had grown to love him. Besides, he had another gift, one that she had adored from being a child. He was a great storyteller. Spinning the yarn, as he called it.
    He was talking now, reminiscing, about when Sam was a baby. She and Jack had brought him to see Maggie. Torin had been keen to hold him. The little wriggler, he’d called him, as Sam squirmed right out of his arms and fell, head first, onto the tiled kitchen floor. Freya had turned cold, Maggie had gone crazy and Torin had been exiled from the house. He chuckled now in the remembrance of it – Jack, the calm one, bundling the whole family off to hospital, Maggie yelling from the departing car, why hadn’t he seen it coming?
    Freya smiled but she wasn’t really listening. She heard the dulcet tone of his voice, the lilt of his words, but she couldn’t focus on what he was saying. She found it painful. So instead she concentrated on the view from the window in front of her, taking in the lush expanse of Torin’s garden and its subtle incline down to the water’s edge. Loch Scridain glinted blue in the afternoon sunlight and the grey-green hills beyond it seemed to sprout right out of the water. An eagle, or a kestrel, she couldn’t tell which from this distance, was circling high over the loch, and the sky was spattered with small white clouds. It was a beautiful place, but an isolated one for a blind man living alone. Freya’s gaze shifted momentarily to her old friend and realised he had fallen silent.
    She picked up the teapot from the table between them and poured them both another cup. Then she placed a second piece of cake on Torin’s plate. ‘It’s funny,’ she said at last, taking up the delicate thread of the conversation. ‘But sometimes it doesn’t feel as if they’re gone at all. I keep expecting them to walk through the door, from work or school, from football practice or whatever. And then, eventually, there’s a slow realisation, or a sudden recollection, I’m not sure which one is worse, that it isn’t going to happen. They’re gone. And I’m alone.’ Freya stopped, took a breath and licked her lips. Should she tell Torin that sometimes the sense of loneliness was so acute that she could taste its bitterness in her throat, feel its touch and weight upon her? As if, heavy and oppressive, it was invading her body. And that, in her darkest moments, she imagined she could vanish beneath it. She took another breath. Perhaps, sometime, she would tell him all these things. But for now she said nothing.
    Torin was nodding silently, his cloudy eyes staring ahead. Freya followed his gaze out over the water and wondered, not for the first time, if he could tell that there was sunlight and a dappled sky, or whether there was nothing there for him but darkness. She had asked him about it long ago and his answer had been vague. So she wasn’t sure. One thing she was sure of, however, was that Torin knew a thing or two about being alone.
    â€˜Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it?’ he mused, and Freya wondered if he was talking about his blindness or solitariness, both or neither. Torin nodded again and his hand reached for the cake beside him. He broke off a corner and brought it slowly to his mouth. But he held it there, uneaten, for a moment, perhaps indulging a thought that had just come to mind. Freya both loved and hated this about him. He always took his time, in what he said and what he did.
    â€˜What you were saying reminds me of something, although the situations are different. Some said that was the work of loneliness. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. It may simply have been the result of being alone. People