BY mid-afternoon the weather had changed and it had begun to rain, a soft, steady drizzle blown in from the western ocean. The clouds rolled low over the hills, making a cheerless murk, through which the painted sheep moved lost and plaintive while the gulls settled to roost along the furrows of the stripped peat beds. The smoke drifted heavily around the chimney stacks, and the only sounds were the slow wash of the sea, the drip of the rain from the eaves and an occasional bleating from the scattered flocks.
Morrison was anxious about Kathleen McNeil, who was living in the doctor’s house at the southern end of Harris. She would have to drive forty miles of mountain roads and then return late at night. So it was arranged that I would drive down to get her. She would sleep the night at the lodge and I would take her back in the morning. The exchange would pass all her calls to the district nurse, who would telephone the lodge in case of emergency. I must leave at four to be back by seven because the roads were crooked and full of surprises: humps and hollows and shaly verges and narrow causeways and ambling sheep and mist in the defiles of the mountainous country.
I recall the journey as vividly as if it were yesterday: the monotone of the fine rain, the dark hills and the darker water, the sweep of the wipers over the misted windscreen, the sluice of the wheels through puddles and potholes, the rags and tatters of cloud hanging from the hilltops, the rare, yellow lights in the cottages. I remember that I sang to drive away melancholy and tried to make rhymes from the place-names: Aglmachan, Ardhasig and Borvemore and Obbe. I remember the sense of relief and minor triumph when I saw the old Church of Saint Clement at Rodel and came, a few minutes later, to the dwelling of Kathleen McNeil.
I was early, she told me. She had been held late with a difficult case. She was still in her working clothes. Would I take a drink while she bathed and changed? It was not the warmest of welcomes and, foolishly, I was piqued by it. Then I saw that she had been weeping. When she poured the drinks her hand trembled, so that the decanter rattled against the glass and some of the liquor spilled on the silver tray. I asked her what was the matter.
She stiffened and tried to shut me out with a curt, professional summary. ‘I lost a child today. Breech birth, the cord tangled around the neck. I couldn’t revive it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It happens. But this was the first birth in the family and I’m the outsider.’
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘No. They will. And the blame will be hard to live down.’
‘They’ll make another child and forget this one.’
‘Perhaps. But there’s so much promise in a baby here. So much hope against the sea and the loneliness of the hills.’
I took the glass from her and set it on the table. I laid hands on her shoulders and held her while she steadied herself. ‘The hills will be here and children will be here when you’re long gone. If you want to cry, be done with it now. Then go upstairs and change and make yourself up like a girl going out to dinner.’
‘I don’t want sympathy.’
‘Then you won’t get it. But it’s a long drive to the lodge and I’d like some cheerful company. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
She gave me an uncertain smile, then left me. I sat by the peat fire and sipped my drink and thought about the sadness of life in the Happy Isles. Here everything was immediate, naked and potent. Here were no crowds to cushion the impact of events, no raree-show to distract the suffering or the fearful spirit. Birth, sickness and death came all in the same bed. Food was brought from garden plot to table. Man and beast were buffeted by the same storm, rejoined by the same thin sunshine. Mourner and merrymaker tramped the same rough road to the common meeting place between the mountains and the sea.
Withal there was a joy to be recognized. Here the primitive mystery of brotherhood and dependence was re-enacted every day. No one lay hungry without some hand to feed him. No one was too old to be remembered. No child lacked a family to cherish him. No man died without one tear shed for his passing. The winter peat was cut by common labour, stacked by friendly hands for the aged and the infirm. The lifeboat was at the call of every sailorman, and there was no cottage so poor that a stranger would not be offered a strupach: food and drink and a gentle word for the road.
In the world from which I had fled, violence was preached as a surgery for the sickness of society. Children killed themselves with heroin. Juvenile lovers infected each other with gonorrhoea. Diplomats peddled arms deals. Revolutionaries made hostages of the innocent. Citizens sent armed police against students. Students burned libraries like the tyrants of the Inquisition. Black man fought white man. Massacres were plotted on computers, and ant-heap cities devoured the sweet countryside. For all the loneliness of this place, for all the threat of the land and the elements, I was glad to be here. I felt then that I might be glad to stay. When Kathleen McNeil walked down the stairs I was certain of it.
Even now, a century older, with all my follies for remembrance, I have no shame in the confession. I was in love with her from that moment. I wanted her in every way that a man can want a woman, passionately, urgently, with body and spirit. Laugh at it if you want. It was so wild a thing I would not blame you. Call it whatever name you will – the coup de foudre, mid-summer madness – it happened. It was. I can no more reason it now than I could then. Unfashionable? Out of character? Juvenile? Clownish? All of that. But I see her now, dark hair upswept, cheeks glowing, lace at her throat and wrists. I see myself watching her, knowing with absolute conviction that this was my woman, this was the one for whom I would overturn mountains and hold for my own against all contenders.
Yet first I had to win her and I knew, even then, the game would not be easy. This was no foolish virgin, no light matron either. She knew the game, too, and she played it deftly and with charm. She would be outraged by a clumsy or incompetent suitor. Come the moment of avowal she would be ready – to accept or reject it out of hand. To time the moment, however, was my affair, and I, who had known more than one woman in a lifetime, was suddenly doubtful of my skill. I had a vision of myself, the comic fisherman, tangling his line in the rushes while all the trout in the loch thumbed their snouts at him.
‘Something funny?’ asked Kathleen McNeil.
‘Yes. I haul you out of a wreck in Glengarry. We’re as distant as moon from earth all through the Isle of Skye. And here we are going out to dinner together.’
‘You don’t like the idea?’
‘On the contrary. I’m trying to guess what you’ll say when I ask you to come out with me again.’
‘Why not ask and find out?’
‘Madam, would you one sunny, smiling day, when all your patients are recovering, please come driving with me through these Isles of the Blest?’
‘Thank you, sir. I would be delighted.’
‘You have made me a happy man. Now let’s get the hell out of here or we’ll be late for dinner.’
It was still raining and the twilight was mournful as we drove round the narrow track between the mountains and sea cliffs of the eastern coast. One skid, one incautious turn on an elbow would send us tumbling down two hundred feet into black water. It was a lonely road, haunted by the memories of clan feuds and old piracies and the bitter days of the Clearances. Both of us felt the haunting and the danger of the high crags, and Kathleen McNeil drew close to me so that I breathed her perfume and felt the warmth of her body thrown against me at every turn. There was one bad moment when a wandering ewe bounded across the track in front of us. I hit the brakes too hard so that we lurched dangerously towards the drop. For an instant I thought we were gone, but a jutting boulder bounced us back onto the track and we were safe again. My heart was pounding and my palms were wet.
Kathleen McNeil sat rigid, staring out through the streaming windscreen. When she spoke, it was if she were talking to herself. ‘It always looks like that.’
‘What?’
‘The moment of light when you’re a second away from blackness.’
‘For God’s sake! That’s a happy thought!’
‘In a strange way it is. There’s no fear, no regret. Just a kind of wonder.’
‘If it makes no difference to you, Kathleen McNeil, I was scared witless. And there’s ten more miles of this bloody goat track!’
She laughed then and laid a cool hand against my cheek. ‘So why don’t you pull into the next lay-by and wait till your pulse rate settles down?’
‘On the other hand, it might go a lot higher. And then we might never go driving again.’
‘Is that a warning?’
‘Call it a confession if you like.’
‘Please,’ said Kathleen McNeil softly, ‘please, not yet – not for a long time yet.’
‘Just so you know.’
‘I know, but I can’t play children’s games any more.’
‘Nor I. So let’s be friends, Kathleen oge, and see where that leads us, eh?’
When we came to the lodge, the other guests were already arrived. There were the Macphails, husband and wife, he a new minister of the Free Kirk, she a doe-eyed bride, eager to please and full of small embarrassments. There was Andrew Ferguson, from the coast-guard service, a sturdy barrel of a man with a grey spade beard and beetling eyebrows and Navy written all over him. With him had come Barbara Stewart, schoolmistress from Dumfries, a pert redhead, salty of tongue, with a slightly scandalous humour.
Alastair Morrison presented us with a flourish as ‘a bard and a bonesetter, unwed, unpromised, each a free spirit, the one a Scot, the other a Sassenach, but agreeable enough for a’ that’. Then he shoved whisky into our hands and stirred us about like a cook making a plum pudding. For the first few minutes I found myself anchored with Minister Macphail. He was tall, ruddy and confident, yet so young that I had to ask what had drawn him to the Wee Frees, that last offshoot of dissent in Scotland.
They were a tiny group in Christendom. Their theology was primitive, their ritual austere, their morals rigid. They had no hymns but the psalms. No organ music was allowed in their assemblies. No food might be cooked on Sundays, or alcohol consumed. Blinds were drawn against visitors, and there were those who frowned on copulation – of man or farmyard beast – as a breach of the Sabbath rest. Yet their hold in the Northern Isles was strong and unyielding. Macphail explained it to me with evangelical fervour:
‘…We’re believers, my friend, not doubters. We’re concerned to live the Gospel, not debate it. We stand, simple before God, free brothers in a free assembly. We keep the Sabbath holy because that’s the Scriptural command. Our lot is harsh, our lives plain. We need a plain faith to sustain us.’
‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ Barbara Stewart cut in with a mockery. ‘That’s only half the story, Jamie Macphail, and you know it. You’re a bunch of old-line fundamentalists. Tyrants, too, when you get a chance to be.’
‘That’s not fair, Barbara. Strict we may be, but not tyrants.’
‘No? If I want to drive my car on a Sunday, you scowl me off the road. If I want a drink – which I do – I’m the scarlet woman. Scriptural commands? You pick and choose the ones that suit you. Suppose I wanted to be like King David and dance naked before the Ark. Would you let me?’
‘If you’d lose some weight, they might.’ This with a laugh from Andrew Ferguson. ‘Even so, the climate’s hardly right for it.’
‘You’re a fine one to talk about weight, Andy! Look at you. You’re pickled in Navy rum and malt whisky and you sitting on your backside in a watchtower eight hours a day.’
‘I’m the guardian spirit of sailors, Babs! I brood night and day over the troubled seas, waiting to snatch men from disaster. I’ve got a newspaper cutting to prove it. Written by a woman too.’
‘And what did you pay her for that piece of prose?’
‘Attention. Which is more than I get from you, my girl.’
Minister Macphail turned to me with a grin. ‘You see why they need the kirk in these parts, tyranny and all. Without it they’d devour each other in a week. One of my professors used to say that Gaeldom was God’s private madhouse, so he had to give a special love to the inmates.’
‘Love among the Gael!’ The Stewart was not to be put down. ‘Now there’s a theme for our bard! Scene One. The boy’s drinking himself impotent in the pub on a Saturday night, while his girl stays home to finish the Sunday baking. Scene Two. At eleven he’s knocking on her door, drunk as Chloe, with a bottle of whisky in his pocket. They drive off into the night to dance in a barn. Scene Three. Six in the morning. They’re each in their own beds snoring off a hangover to be ready for church at eleven. Scene Four. The girl gets pregnant in the back of a car. They marry and live happily ever after in a little stone house in the middle of nowhere. Amen!’
She was a natural mime and she made such a comedy of it that even the doe-eyed bride dissolved into laughter. Alastair Morrison embraced her and swore he prized her above all other women in the world.
‘More than that, she’s the sweetest singer of Gaelic songs this side of Inverness. And that’s a precious kind of madness in itself. Be gentle with her if you want her to make music after dinner. Will you come along now all of you, else I’ll get a flea in my ear from Hannah!’
I have to tell you now that it was on this night I first learned the meaning of the word ceilidh. Look it up in a Gaelic dictionary – which is a hard book to come by in this complicated world – and you will find it means a visiting or a sojourning. It is the sojourning which carries the true colour. You come, a traveller out of a bleak land where there is no harbouring for man or beast. You are received with honour because in a place where men are few every human is precious. In the old days in the Isles, Bishop Knox had to promulgate a law against ‘sorners’: shiftless fellows who moved from house to house battening on the hospitality of the poor. You are settled immediately into a security of lamplight and fire warmth and cooking fragrances and respect for the person you are presumed to be. This is the gift of the house to you. But you are expected to offer your own gift as well, however small it be. If you have news, you must tell it. If you have music or story or a special knowledge, then you must dispense it. If you have nothing but opinions, then you must toss them into the argument because one who sojourns in silence is a blight upon the tree of mankind. If you are lovers and have need of privacy, a ceilidh is no place to find it because your wooing and your bedding will be subject to comment and advice and even the prescription of herbs and spells if you need them. If the sadness is on you, it must be left at the door. If you are drunk, you must be happy and not quarrelsome. If another is drunk, he must be walked to safety lest he freeze on a lonely road. Scandal may be talked, but it may catch you up in another house. If there is a piper or a fiddler, you may dance, indeed you should because dancing is another kind of gift that gladdens the eye and sweetens the blood.
The ceilidh of Alastair Morrison was exactly thus. His guests made at first sight an odd assembly; yet by the end of the soup we were wrangling happily over a hodgepodge of subjects: morals and medicine, the Russian presence in the Atlantic, the missile base on South Uist, Gaelic orthography, the follies of the Tourist Board, the troubles in Ulster and the latest tale of the island dispersion – a fellow from Harris who was trying to recruit mercenaries for the war in Cambodia.
Alastair Morrison stage-managed the affair with opulent good humour. He was the leading man and he played the role with elegance and relish. He was generous with the wine and with himself. He paid extravagant court to the women and to the men an ironic respect. Jack might be as good as his master in London or New York; but here in the Isles blood still counted, and Morrison the Brieve with power of life and death was only a page or two back in history. His performance brought out the best in the company. I had not heard in a long time so much vivid tale-telling, so much breezy, commonsensical debate. In Ireland they could be eloquent about nothing at all. In England they could be inarticulate about the end of the world. At the table of the Morrison each guest must say his mind to prove he had one.
For all the dazzle and the bravura, I could not keep my eyes off Kathleen McNeil. I was head over heels and gone for her, yet I realized, with a pang of jealousy, that I knew next to nothing about her. She was a Scot; she was a doctor; she was a madcap driver; she could weep for a dead child; she had fey moments when the fringe of life touched the hem of death. That was all. Had she been married? I guessed not, but only guessed. Had she a lover, now or then? She had not told me. To what did her heart respond, her body quicken? I did not know. So I watched her, hung on her every word and gesture, plied her with questions, displayed myself like a peacock to attract her interest. All her responses charmed me. She was an intelligent talker and a good listener. She laughed readily and her judgments were tolerant and compassionate. There were hints of a secret woman, too: a surprise politely veiled, a sadness quickly suppressed, an impatience covered with a laugh. I plotted, in fantasy, the private moment when she would drop all defence and say, ‘I am tired now. With you I won’t pretend any more. This is who and what I am. Understand me and be tender.’
We came near to the moment after dinner when Alastair Morrison unwrapped a beautiful violin, lustrous with age, and played accompaniment to the songs of Barbara Stewart. For all her sharp tongue she had a voice high and pure and effortless, like the flight of a bird. The songs she sang I had not heard since childhood: ‘Kishmul’s Gallery’, the ‘Love-lilt of Eriskay’ and that of Mingulay, which is sweeter still, the ‘Lament of Flora Macdonald’ and the chants of the milkmaids in the summer shielings. They lifted us out of ourselves into the dreamtime of yesterday, so that we were like children listening to the same fairy tale, touched by old griefs, glad with the small joys of a life long past. For this while we were not ashamed of our emotions, but acknowledged them to each other with nods and smiles and hands beating out a familiar rhythm. The music was a golden thread binding us all, a small tribe in a lonely place, with the rain outside and the sea cutting us off from the commerce of a rowdy world. Then we sang together, each one calling a tune until we were flushed and breathless and it was time for one glass against the homeward road.
When the last good-byes had been said, the three of us sat by the fire and relaxed in the afterglow of the ceilidh.
Kathleen McNeil put my own thought into words. ‘We’ve forgotten how to enjoy ourselves like that. It’s all so simple. But we’ve forgotten. I wonder why.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Alastair Morrison, ‘perhaps because there’s just so damned much to remember, like taxes and earnings and ownings and wars and revolutions and every salesman on the planet squawking at us every hour of the day. The world is shackled to us like a ball and chain. We never get rid of it long enough to lift up our heads or our hearts.’
‘But we can’t go on like that. Half the patients who come to my office are sick because they’re sick of the world and all its demands on their frailty.’
‘And what do you prescribe for them, Kathleen oge?’ I used the endearment unconsciously, and Morrison gave me a swift puzzled look.
Kathleen McNeil gave no sign that she had noticed it. She answered with a shrug and only the half of a smile. ‘Some loving, to take the weight off. Of course, you can’t buy that in a pharmacy, and there’s not enough to go round, anyway; so we use sedatives and tranquillizers instead.’
‘Yet there was loving here tonight. People gave something of themselves.’
‘There’s a difference,’ said Alastair Morrison. ‘In the Isles we are forced to depend on each other. In the cities we are forced to compete. The quality of life is changed. The quality of people too. But that’s all yesterday for me. I’m here and I’m happy and I’m ready for bed. So I’ll bid you both good night. Sleep well, both of you.’
We were not ready for sleep. So we sat, unwary, in the fading firelight and talked.
Kathleen McNeil seemed puzzled by our host. ‘Can he really retire like that? Can he close the door on yesterday and forget it?’
‘Forget it? No. I think he’s come to terms with it.’
‘But who laid down the terms for him?’
‘Quite a question, young Kathleen. Who mediates between the man I’d like to be and the man I know I am?’
‘Can you answer it?’
‘No. You’re the healer, young Kathleen. Can you?’
‘I wish I could, mo gradh…’ Her use of the Gaelic word was so unexpected and my ear so untuned that I almost missed it. Mo gradh …my dear, my darling – my lover, too, if the heart were so disposed. My own heart missed a beat, but I dared not risk too much on a transient endearment. So I let her talk on because every small knowing of her was precious to me. ‘…Time was when I despised all religion as a tyranny over the ignorant. A man like Minister Macphail with his serene certainties I would have rejected out of hand. People need certainties. Even the certainty of dying is a help to many. The sickness of the mind is a sickness of unknowing and uncertainty.’
‘And the cure?’
‘I think someone has to love you enough, to let you love yourself a little. I’m not saying it very well. But look…’ Suddenly she was eager as a schoolgirl. ‘Two patients with the same constitution, the same sickness. One lives, one dies. Why? In the one the urge to live, the love of living is strong; in the other it is weak. It’s as if – as if life were a gift to the loving. And if you laugh at that, I’ll spit in your eye.’
‘I’m not laughing. I’ve been down in the dark valley myself. I managed to climb out of it and get myself here – with a prod or two from Alastair Morrison.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘I fell in love and out of love – and lost my way in between.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Not tonight.’
‘There’ll be other times.’
‘I know. I’m glad there will be.’
We kissed then, new friends, still careful of the risks of friendship.
Good night, Kathleen McNeil. Golden dreams.
‘Good night, mo gradh. And a word for your own pillow.’
‘Tell me the word.’
She told me. It was an old proverb in the Gaelic and the words were a music to end a gentle day: ‘Is maith am buachaill an oidche …Night is a good shepherd. He brings home every man and beast.’
My night, however, proved restless. I slept fitfully, plagued by erotic nightmares, and woke a dozen times in the darkness itching with desire for the woman who slept only a few paces away and yet was as far away as the galaxies. For too long now I had slept alone. It was a symptom of my malaise that I had felt unready and unwilling to enter into any new commitment. I had nothing to spend but seed – no caring, no concern, no self that would stand a sharing, no curiosity even for a casual encounter. Then, in one day, everything was changed. I was a lover, balked of possession, impatient to be possessed. I was stiff with lust, burning up with the need of the small sweet dying. Had I not been in the house of Alastair Morrison, I might have thrown caution out the window and gone to Kathleen McNeil in her own bed. Would she have taken me? There was one wild moment when I believed she would have. Then sanity came back and I switched on the light and read until the sun came up. When I heard the servants moving about the house I crawled out of bed, shaved the stubble from my grey, pinched cheeks, bathed and went downstairs to cadge a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
Old Hannah made me the coffee, then stood, hands on hips, mocking me while I drank it. ‘So you’ve got thistles in your bed, have you, and a wee bittie birdie perched on your pillow, whistling love songs all night?’
‘Does it show?’
‘Does it show? God save us from the wild winds! Last night you were all sheep’s eyes and greensickness, and you ask does it show! It’s the dark one, isn’t it?’
‘Ach!’
‘What do you mean Ach?’
‘I mean that I’m paid to keep house for the Morrison. And what his guests do with their nights or their days is none of my business. Unless they do it in the house, that is, and scandalize my girls.’
‘Don’t you like Dr McNeil?’
‘More coffee?’
‘Yes, please. But you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I think she’s a good woman with the marks of the wrong man on her. I think you’ll get her if you try hard enough.’
‘Hannah. I love you!’
‘Aye, we all love the preacher with heaven in his hand and not a word about the other place.’
‘I’ll make you a promise, Hannah. You’ll dance at my wedding.’
‘And I’ll make you one. I’ll not buy the shoes till I read the banns! Get about your business now. Go take a walk and put some colour in your cheeks before breakfast. You look like a drowned man dragged up from the beach.’
I went out laughing at her and walked, whistling, into the bright morning. The rain was gone. The sun was on the water and the heather was gold and purple on the hills. All the omens were favourable. The scolding of an old, old woman was a kitchen comedy not to be taken to heart. Besides, there was strategy to be devised. The doctor must visit her patients at the hospital. I would offer to drive her to Stornoway and see a little of the country on the way. We would finish with lunch at the hotel in Tarbert. In the afternoon she would make her house calls, I would fish with Fergus. In the evening…Interesting point. If we were not lovers, or beginning to be, there was precious little to do in the evening but drink in a bar, or sit at home with a good book, or go quietly mad with Scottish television. As it turned out, I was a too-anxious general. The strategy was overweighted and there was no battle to fight anyway. The district nurse had reported a quiet night and no emergencies. The doctor was happy to have my company on her rounds. She was happy to lunch with me. After that I could only pray that she had no better plans for herself than I had.
By nine-fifteen we were on the road to Stornoway Hospital. By ten-thirty the ward visits were all done and we were heading over the moorland to the western shore, where the rollers fetch clear across the Atlantic and break on white sands, with the dunes behind, covered by the sweet green grass of the machair. On a clear day, when the sea is flat – and if you have the gift of faith, which is rare in our time – they say you can look towards the sunset and see the legendary Hy Brasil, the blessed stormless isle where all the men are good and all the women pure and God retreats for a recreation from the rest of us. I have to report, in all truth, that we did not see it because the sexual chemistry was beginning to work between us, slowly at first, but potently, through hands’ touch and the closeness of bodies and the sharing of small wonders: a sculptured rock thrusting out of a sea of glass, an oyster-catcher pecking for shellfish in the sand, the trill of a curlew questing through the kelp beds, a lapwing rising suddenly out of a meadow.
Of all the days of our loving, this I believe was the simplest, the most joyful. We were not children. Neither of us was innocent. Each of us had eaten the apples of knowledge and found them bitter. The moment would come – and we both knew it – when each must explore the other; the tastes of the body, the tangles of the secret spirit. The first declaration of need or love might open a Pandora’s box of fears and guilts and bitter antipathies. On the other hand, it might unlock the gate of a lost Eden, full of bright fruits and singing birds. So by unspoken consent we deferred the risk and surrendered ourselves to the placid pleasures of the morning.
We walked a deserted beach. We visited the black houses’, ancient dwellings of the islanders built of rough stone, raftered with driftwood and thatched with grass. We scrambled up a hillside to stand in a ruined watchtower built by the painted men against the seafaring raiders. We took tea in a weaver’s cottage and watched the making of the tweed. We leaned on a stone wall and watched a shepherd training a dog to the mustering of sheep. Then, as we drove out of Carloway on the road to Breasclete and Callanish, we came upon an activity rare in this isolated place.
There was a long peat slope, four, five acres of it, running down to a small brown lochan. A man on a bulldozer was stripping out the peat in wide, deep swathes and piling the spoil in mounds at each end of the slope. A tip truck was spilling beach sand into the excavations and three brawny fellows were spreading it with rakes and shovels. Two strips were already filled, and on these was spread a covering of dried sea wrack which smelled of salt and iodine. As the tractor came towards us, I saw that the driver was Red Ruarri the Mactire. He was stripped to the waist, his arm was still in plaster, and he drove the big machine one-handed. When he saw my wave, he accelerated and came lurching dangerously up the furrow, pushing a great load of matted rubbish in front of him. Then he cut the engine, leaped down and gave us a shout of welcome:
‘God’s good day! It’s the seannachie – and the doctor-girl come to collect her bill! Stay where you are, else you’ll be muck to the knees! I swore you’d come, seannachie. But the doctor’s a bonus I didn’t expect!’
He was bubbling with pleasure and with pride that we should see his work in the making. He pumped our hands and threw an arm about my shoulder and rattled away ninety to the dozen about what he was doing and how and why.
‘…This is where the money goes and the labour. The peat started to grow here about eight thousand years ago when the climate changed from warm and dry to cold and wet, and the moss ate up the forests of birch and hazel that once covered the land. It grows in a thick carpet, as you see, and the water lies underneath. There’s little oxygen, so the microbes that cause decomposition can’t work. The water washes out the lime, and the land becomes sour and useless. So we’re writing history backwards. We’re peeling off the moss and letting in the air. We’re putting in sea sand and shingle, which is full of lime. We’re laying in kelp for fertilizer, and in a couple of years we’ll have sweet, good grassland …and subsoil building up every year. You can see the challenge of it, can’t you? …But I’m talking your ears off. Drive me round the next bend and I’ll show you where I live…’
This was another surprise. He had taken one of the old black houses, long and low and ruinous, fit only for dwarfs to live in. He had rebuilt the walls, raising them another four feet. He had bought oak timber for the roof beams and ferried it from the mainland in his own trawler. He had laid withy hurdles over the beams and brought in thatchers from England to lay the roof and anchor it solid against the gale winds. He had built a stone enclosure and carted in loam and sand and made a vegetable garden to live from.
Inside, he had contrived, with more art than I had suspected in him, a modern adaptation of an ancient Viking house. At one end were his sleeping quarters, at the other a kitchen, large enough to feed a troop of cavalry and modern enough to delight any housewife. In between was a broad chamber, dining hall and meeting place together, with a stone hearth in the centre topped by a flue canopy of beaten copper. There were deerskin rugs on the floor; the chairs and the benches were upholstered in Island tweed. There were bookshelves and a gun rack and a well-stocked bar and a refectory table to seat a dozen or more. The walls were hung with the spoils of a travelling man: Benin heads and a juju mask, a brace of claymores and a buckler, the fragment of a Norse rune stone clouted to the wall with forged nails, a Spanish guitar, a set of rusted spearheads, a length of carved wood which had once been the tiller bar of a longship, a shelf of glassware fragments and turquoise beads and a golden locket with the skeleton of a tiny snake in it.
‘…It’s mine and it’s me.’ Ruarri preened himself like a schoolboy who had just won a prize. ‘It lives comfortable too. The plumbing works and, though you can’t see it, there’s a heating plant that warms the tiles of the floor the way the Romans used to do it. I’ve slept a dozen bodies here after a late night’s drinking, and no one complained of the cold.’
‘Where did you get this?’ Kathleen McNeil held up the golden snake locket.
‘I found it in an old chandler’s shop in the Orkneys. I think it’s a Viking piece. A fellow in Denmark told me the snake was a charm to protect the owner’s virility.’ He gave her that cocky rogue’s grin of his and added, ‘Since I’ve been home from the wars, I haven’t had the need to wear it.’
It was the old blade’s trick: test a woman with a touch of bawdry and see how she likes the taste of it. If she does, you’re up and away.
Kathleen McNeil did not smile; she looked at him with professional concern. ‘Does that worry you, Mr Matheson – losing your virility?’
Ruarri – give the devil his due! – was bright enough to side-step the snub. ‘Not now. But in Africa it was the thing that scared me most. The local boys were very nasty to their prisoners.’
‘You were fighting in Africa?’
‘I was a mercenary. In the Congo first, then for a while in Nigeria. We were a long way outside the Geneva Convention.’
‘I’ve never understood what makes a man a mercenary.’
‘Money, ma’am. There’s always a market for gun fodder. High risk. High profit. Ask the seannachie here. He’ll tell you. There’s a colony of Scots mercenaries been living in Italy for a couple of centuries, and there’s a branch of the Leslies in Russia since the time of the Empress Catherine. Can I offer you both a drink now to set you on the road?’
I was glad that Kathleen McNeil accepted for both of us. She had humour enough to make her point and grace enough not to insist on a total victory. She gave Ruarri time to recover too. While he made the drinks she moved about the house, admiring his pieces, looking through the books on his shelves.
Ruarri gave me a conspirator’s wink and whispered, ‘That’s a filly with spirit, seannachie. Think you can handle her?’
‘I think so.’
‘She’ll give you a run for your money. Come to that, I might too.’
‘You play in your own backyard, Brother Wolf.’
‘Just a joke. Forget it.’ Aloud he said, ‘So you liked the chessman?’
‘I did. I’d like to keep it.’
‘Good. And there’s things we ought to do together while you’re here. Some night fishing, maybe. And I’ve got my eye on a corrie where there’s red deer that no one can claim. We might go after a buck one day, you and me and a couple of my boys. In the next week or so I’m taking a run up to Norway for business and trawling on the way home. You’re welcome to come along if you like.’
‘Thanks. I’d like to try it all.’
‘I’ll call you at the lodge and we’ll fix it.’ Then, as Kathleen McNeil came back, he added, ‘And when we come back from Norway we’ll have a ceilidh here. There’ll be my boys and their girls and music to dance to. It’ll be a late night, but you’ll get the true taste of the Isles. You’re invited, too, Doctor.’
‘I’ll accept. If I can leave the doctor at home and be plain Kathleen McNeil.’
‘God love the woman! She’s human after all.’ He grinned at us over his glass. ‘Slainte – and good luck to you both!’
Damn his smiling eyes! He had all the dash and style of a circus performer. He could do it all: the high-wire walk, the dizzy swing on the flying trapeze, the death-defying human cannonball. But he was not satisfied with skill; he had to play the mountebank as well: deliver the spiel, have the yokels gaping at the white rabbits and the ribbons, and the port wine pouring out of his elbow joint. The hell of it was he would still have you cheering at the end, while he walked off with the money in his pocket. Kathleen McNeil was no country schoolgirl, but before her glass was empty he had her hypnotized. I knew who and what he was, which was more than he knew himself. I had a commission to keep him out of jail if I could. I resented his quackery; still I had to laugh with him and make a reluctant salute to his talent.
I see it now, plainly, as I saw it then, obscurely: that morning in his house was the beginning of the battle between us. Let me confess it – I was jealous of him. Twice now he had put himself on record as a possible rival for Kathleen McNeil, but my own male vanity would not let me accept him in the role. There were deeper reasons. He was born without an identity. He had built himself one. I had had mine handed to me on a plate, yet I was in imminent danger of losing it. I had worked as hard as he and travelled as widely and made more money and reputation; but the sheer impact of his physical presence, the magnitude and drive of his ambition made me feel inadequate, outclassed at every point, a painted clown beside the idol of the big ring.
‘…I like him,’ said Kathleen McNeil. ‘I’m not sure how far I’d trust him, but I like him. I think you’re probably good for each other. He respects you and what you’ve done. He’s anxious for you to respect him.’
‘I do very much. He’s a maker and a dreamer too. I admire that.’
We had said good-bye to Ruarri and were driving down the winding road to Callanish to visit the place of the Standing Stones. The drink and the talk had relaxed Kathleen McNeil. Ruarri’s enthusiasm had communicated itself to her and she was freer and more outgiving than at any time in our acquaintance. I was uplifted, too, because I had to match her mood and prove myself no less a gallant than our rumbustious host. If he had baubles to display, I had them too. If he had tales to tell, I could cap them – and I did, shamelessly. But Ruarri, the Red Wolf, was hard to evade; he was there loping alongside us as we drove, a presence in her thoughts and in her conversation.
‘…There’s a child in him as well as a man. A naughty child, but very engaging.’
‘Engaging, yes. But a child, never. He’s a mimic. He’ll make himself whatever it suits him to be at the moment.’
‘I thought you liked him.’
‘I do. There’s no one I’d rather drink with, play with, sail with. But if I had something he wanted, he’d take it and walk away smiling.’
‘That’s a hard judgment.’
‘I’ve proved it true, though I can’t tell you how.’
‘Did he really kill for money?’
‘He says he did. It’s probably true. He made big profits somewhere, and it fits the pattern of his thinking – himself the Viking adventurer in the twentieth century.’
‘I’d rather not believe it.’
‘Does it matter whether you do or you don’t?’
‘Of course not.’
She said it a shade too quickly and afterwards was silent a moment too long. It was then that I knew I could not do the simple thing and walk away with my woman on my arm and my pride intact. Muirgen the sea-goddess had woven the last strands in her net. I was snared now. I would not escape until I had done battle with the Red Wolf.
* * *
It was after noon when we came to the place of the Standing Stones, a high grassy hump that falls away southwards towards Loch Roag with its tatter of islets and the black cliffs of Bernera heaving out of it. Even now it is a haunted spot, remote and silent always save for the crying of the gulls and the whisper of the wind through the rank grasses. There are no trees. The hill lies naked to the sky and the great megaliths rise out of it, twice and three times the height of man. There are four avenues of them, north and south and east and west, and, at the convergence of the avenues, a circular burial place and a stone, larger than the others, which faces the sunrise. Of the men who raised the stones little is known except that they were here before the Celts – three thousand years ago – and that this hill and the surrounding countryside was a place of congress where they worshipped the sun as the source of being and plotted their ritual life by its movements. They left no language, no history. Even their burial place was despoiled before history began to be written. But they are still there, frail, tenuous ghosts. We felt them, Kathleen McNeil and I, as we stood hand in hand under the stone of sacrifice and watched a golden eagle fly up and up until we lost him in the glare.
She shivered as if a goose had walked over her own grave. I drew her close to me and kissed her dark hair. Then, because the need was on me and the haunting was on us both, I told her:
‘If it’s too early or too late, I don’t care. I’m not a boy any more and I’m too old to pretend. I love you, Kathleen McNeil. I’d like to marry you.’
Do you remember the happy silliness of your own loving? If you do not, then finish here. Toss the rest of it out the window. Go ask the boys or girls to spell the story for you – four letters to a word, all words in monochrome, nothing else to it but what you can see in any barnyard between first light and first darkness. Any fool can draw two lines on a wall and call it love. Any drunk can weep and every half-sober clod can laugh at his tears. Only a poet can show you – and he no more than half – the sweet agony of a man and a woman, hung between heaven and hell, with nothing but the passion of the moment to hold them there. I am no poet, but a seannachie: a teller of tales, shabby and out-of-date as Blind Raftery with his harp or the grey-beard chalking his dreams upon a pavement stone for the rain to wash away at midnight. So I can tell you just the afterwards, when the ghosts had left us and we sat on a stone wall watching the placid sheep, while Kathleen McNeil pieced out her answer:
‘Mo gradh…my dear, my dear, I’m glad you said it. I wanted you to say it. I know you, because what you say and what you do is what you are. But you don’t know me…No! Please listen to me! I like you, want you. Ask me to bed and I’ll go – no questions before, no blame afterwards. But love? I don’t know. I truly don’t.’
‘Love’s very simple, Kathleen oge.’
‘Is it? Was it for you? It wasn’t for me. I’m not sure I want to risk it again.’
‘What happened?’
‘What happened? God! It wasn’t so long ago that I thought every man in the street could read it on me and every woman was ready to laugh in my face. The day after I graduated – seven, no eight years ago – I married…You didn’t know that? You were out of touch. He was the catch of the season. A knight, no less! Films and stage and a bloodline nicely documented in Debrett. We were happy. Even now I can’t deny it. Happy as piglets in a clover patch. He needed a lot of mothering – what actor doesn’t? I liked mothering him. I suppose that’s why I became a doctor in the first place. I liked people depending on me. I didn’t know I was depending on them twice as much. Then, four years ago, I became pregnant. Suddenly life was complete. There was nothing more I could ask for. When I told my husband he was horrified. The child, not even quickening yet, was a rival in the house. He could not tolerate the thought. He worked on me day and night, with tears and sulks and tantrums, until I agreed to get rid of it. I’m a doctor. It was easily arranged. When it was all over I hated him. I hated him for two long years until he gave me grounds for divorce. Ever since I’ve been hating myself. And that, mo gradh, is the woman you’ve asked to marry you…What do you say now?’
‘What do you want me to say, Kathleen oge?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Suppose I tell you that I’m a jealous man, too, but not of a child – because a child is a love fruit for the cherishing of lovers.’
‘Then I’ll feel safer, but still not sure.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know who I am any more. I’m a lover and a hater. I’m a healer and a killer, both.’
‘And Red Ruarri’s a killer too?’
‘That’s brutal.’
‘But true?’
‘In one way, yes. In another, no, no, no!’
‘Then we have a chance.’
‘Only if you say we have.’
‘We both have to say it. We both have to believe it. Look, my dear, dark girl, we all have murders on our hands, little or big, dreamed or done. Before anyone else can forgive us, we have to ask pardon of ourselves.’
‘Have you been able to do that?’
‘Not quite. But you said it yourself. Someone has to love us enough, so we can love ourselves a little. Well, Kathleen?’
‘Will you give me time?’
‘Will you open your heart and let me in? It’s cold outside the door.’
‘Please come in, seannachie. Please come in and tell me fairy stories again.’
If this were a trite tale of faceless nobodies, I would tell you how we mated that night and what we did with these and those parts of each other, what wild pleasurings we had and what newness and what wonders. The truth is that we did none of it. We kissed and embraced like the lovers we nearly were; we parted at the milestone we had reached; she slept in her bed and I in mine and, wise or foolish, we waited for the day when the golden eagle would come plummeting down with the gift of the sun-god in his triumphant talons.