Entry Island

‘I think it’s time you held a wee exhibition of your work. You’ve got enough now to make a sizeable presentation. The church hall would be a good venue for it, and if we advertise it properly, it should draw a sizeable crowd. Most folk around here still remember the islands. And you capture the very essence of them in your paintings. You could sell a fair few.’

Saturday, 22nd July 1854

I am so excited that I know there is no point in even trying to sleep. I have no idea what time it is, nor do I care. I have been sitting out here on the porch ever since I got back from town, and I watched the sun go down over the trees a long time ago now.

We held the exhibition of my work in the church hall today, and there must have been two hundred folk or more went round looking at my pictures during the course of the afternoon. And not just from Lingwick. From all over. From as far away as Tolsta in the east and Bury in the west. I had thirty paintings and drawings on display. And we sold every single one of them. Everyone from the old country, it seems, wants a piece of home hanging in their house.

I am sitting here now with nearly forty dollars in my pocket and a list of folk who have commissioned me to do paintings specially for them. It’s a small bloody fortune, and more than I could ever have expected to make doing almost anything else. And there is nothing else that I love doing quite as much as this.

For the first time in my whole life I know what it is that I want to do with it.

Chapter thirty-eight

Sime’s immersion in the diary was suddenly broken by a security lamp coming on below his window and he resurfaced to the reality of the attic room in his sister’s house in Bury. He felt disorientated, and a little disappointed. He had no idea where events in the diary were leading, nor could he see what possible relevance they might have.

He stood up and leaned over the desk towards the window to peer down into the garden. In the light that flooded the side porch and the grass beyond it, he saw his sister wrapped in a coat and carrying a flashlight. She crossed the lawn towards the trees at the far side.

As the security light behind her went out, only the beam of her flashlight cut through the dark of the garden until another security lamp above the doors of the double garage beyond the trees poured light down on to the path and the turning area in front of it. She opened a door and disappeared from view. A few moments later a yellow light appeared in the attic window above the garage doors, and the security lamp extinguished itself to plunge the garden back into darkness.

Sime sat down again and returned his focus to the diary.

He scanned quickly through its pages, trying to get a sense of the story they told without becoming bogged down by their detail. His ancestor, it seemed, had gone on to great success, exhibiting his work in Quebec City and Montreal. His paintings, in the end, had commanded substantial sums of money. Enough for him to make his living by his art, which must have been rare in those days. But his art was popular. Immigrant Scots appeared to have had an unquenchable appetite for a piece of their homeland, and his ancestor had barely been able to keep up with demand.

It wasn’t until an entry made nearly fifteen years later, when his great-great-great-grandfather must have been about forty years old, that Sime found himself halted in his tracks by the opening line.

Chapter thirty-nine

Saturday, 26th June 1869

I sit writing this tonight with a real sense that there is some force that guides our lives in ways that we will never understand. I could, I suppose, attribute it to God. But then I would have to credit Him with the bad as well as the good, and to be truthful I am no longer sure what I believe. Life has treated me well and badly in almost equal measure, but it is the bad that always tests our faith. In a strange way we tend to take the good for granted. But I shall never do that again. Not after today.

I have been in Quebec City all this week at an exhibition of my work in the old walled town, almost in the shadow of the Château Haldimand. There are sixty works in the exhibition, and today was the final day, with only two paintings remaining to be sold. It was late afternoon and I was preparing to leave shortly when a young lady entered the gallery.