He had developed an affinity with this desolate place. The coarse, tightly knit, maras grass that bound and protected the thin layer of soil from the unforgiving Atlantic assaults of wind and spray served also as a quite acceptable cushion for his slight frame. As he well knew, comfort, as with all things, is a relative concept.
It had become a morning ritual to walk to this steep perch, the rolling hill behind isolating him from the building he could never think of as other than the end of his dreams. A building he could never think of as home.
Here he could think. He had much to think on, but these days his thoughts obsessively focussed on the colour red and his grandmother's too easily dismissed injunction.
At the time it had seemed to him almost frivolous, almost farcical given the circumstances. After all the "advice" given to him by his mother, father and the parents of the other party was far more immediate and dramatic.
At the time she had been his first love. He fifteen, she, one year older. This one year being, he admitted to himself, a major factor in his infatuation. The other being her startling red hair. Even if she had been otherwise unprepossessing, this single and singular feature would have driven him to know her, for no other female in the town was similarly endowed. And for as long as he could remember, it was the pursuit of the unique, the exotic and the unobtainable that had driven his childhood fantasies.
But of course this fair maiden had other endowments that drove the urge to conquest to even greater heights.
For a moment memories of that lissom figure leaping and dancing before him, her coquettish voice challenging his senses segued time and place. The erratic violence of the turbulent depths below him dimmed and his memory and despair transported him back to a different Isle set in a far more benign body of water. The ripples creeping up the shallow pebbled beach, almost apologetically caressing her bare ankles. The surface of the water reflecting a million shards of sunlight…
His thoughts were interrupted as a freak breaker violently exploded on the rocks below. The steel blue seas disintegrating into a white sheet that in turn spumed into an almost colourless icy spray. The thin, biting drizzle turned his grey topcoat into a shade matching the turbulent ocean beyond the breakers and spread a fine mist across his gunmetal framed glasses. The shock of this icy spray on his face ejected him from his childhood reveries into the present and he drew a silk kerchief from his waistcoat pocket to wipe dry the lenses of his spectacles.
Red. The colour that dominated his waking and sleeping thoughts and nightmares. Even on this desolate outpost of nature he could not escape it. It was a colour that paraded mechanically, mockingly. Duos of blood-wreathed cranes across all avenues of egress.
Red, the colour of blood.
God! So much of that that been shed.
Red. The colour of danger. Danger! How he had thrived in the face of adversity and catastrophe!
Red. The colour of impetuosity. Ahh, there's the rub.
Finally, red, the colour of defeat.
He subsided once again into his reverie.
'Forget her family. I don't care about that! Let your pig-headed father sort that out.' She had exclaimed with quiet intensity.' Then stooping her time-worn face close to his, she had, almost pleadingly explained. "You have a gift my child. A gift that will take you far. But you also have a flaw. And that flaw is that you believe you are God blessed."
He remembered the shake of her head. The dry cough.
'Those that the God's will destroy, they first make mad.' She whispered. "I fear for you my child, for your feelings for this trollop is madness".
'Your love for her is because you believe she shares your own ambition. You see her flaunting and rejection of all we hold dear; By Christ, by Honour and by Tradition as somehow worthy of you. As even giving substance to your dreams.'
Her hand reached out and grasped his wrist.
'My hope, my grandson, my dear beloved, do you not see that that she is driven to these things! She has no understanding of why she acts as she does!'
He felt her hands grip him with a strength that belied her age - her fingernails biting into his flesh.
'Her acts are not those of nobility or even direction. She is guided only by passion and fire. Fire as hot and uncontrollable as the colour of her hair'. Her voice now was low and sibilant.
'I implore you. Cease this descent into madness my child'. She paused in her speech as a paroxysm of seeming grief engulfed her. A racking cough shook her fail frame and she drew her shawl across her chest as though to prevent her life force escaping.
