WE sat, as we had sat so many times before, together at the bar, with the shambles of the ceilidh spread around us. We had drinks between us, but they remained untasted in the glasses because the time for drinking and the time for playing was over, and now, or nearly, it was time to walk away. Ruarri was calm and direct. The only time he smiled was at the beginning.
‘So you finally called me, seannachie.’
‘You asked for it.’
‘So I did. I’ve been asking for it ever since we met. Tonight I want to tell you why.’
‘Look, it’s late and —’
‘Seannachie. Please do me this favour. It’s the last, because you’re going away and so am I. Don’t say a word. Just hear me out, right to the end. Will you?’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘Thanks.’
Then he began to talk, haltingly at first, then in a steady flow of simple words.
‘... We met on a strange day, seannachie. You were running away from whatever was in your past. I was cruising the Minch, single-handed, trying to make some sense out of what I was doing with my life. Oh, I know! I was always very sure with you. I could see all the rewards hung like baubles on a Christmas tree. All I had to do was reach up and snatch them off. But underneath, and for a long time and about a lot of things, I wasn’t sure at all.
‘Now, if you’re living a life like mine, and all the other lives I’d lived before, you have to be sure. If you’re not sure, you’re dead or rotting in some lousy jail in a flea-bitten country where they don’t have habeas corpus and the British Consul has a short memory and no funds to spend on roving rascals. You have to be sure because you’ve only half a second to pull a trigger or duck from a judo chop, or decide whether to tell a lie or risk the truth with a son of a bitch who won’t believe it anyway.
‘On that day, seannachie, I wasn’t sure any more. I had money enough – and even in a legal way, I’d have more. I had comfort enough and friends enough – and though they’re simple fellows, they are good friends, as you saw tonight. I had women enough, too, though from the day Maeve threw me over, there was always the doubt whether I had the brains or breeding to hold the kind of woman I liked. I had some things going, on the edge of the law, like the guns, and wholesale pharmaceuticals that you can buy cheap and sell in bulk for a good profit if you know the market. That didn’t worry me too much. I liked the thrill and I liked the profit even better. But I was beginning to wonder how long I wanted to play games with the law – not for the morals of it, but the comfort really, and being able to sleep at night and walk into a bar without the Duggie Donalds of the world tapping me on the shoulder for a little chat.
‘Then you came along…Now I don’t want you to take it amiss, seannachie, but I want to talk about you for a little while. You don’t talk much about yourself, except in your books, and I’ve read a couple now, though I’ve never told you. But you’ve got some dangerous talents. For instance, you’re always curious and questioning, so that people are flattered to talk to you. They think – and don’t we all like to think it? – that you’re interested in them. You are some of the time. But for the rest you’re interested in what they have to tell you, because it’s grist to the writing mill and sometimes it’s a clinical thing, like a chemist looking into a test tube. I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying what I’ve seen and felt. You’ve got good manners, seannachie, which are part gift and part practice. But when you’re using the practice and not the heart, it shows and it hurts.
‘Also, seannachie, you’re well-read and you have a logical mind, chop-chop-chop like a lawyer’s, but that’s hard to take for ordinary folk who live half by their wits and half by what they feel with the tips of their fingers. You want to reason with everybody, and the only exception you’ll make is with people you’re very close to, and them you’ll love and protect even if they’re the biggest bastards in the world. So you’re a hard man to live with, laddie, easy to be jealous of, and a bloody obstruction on the horizon of someone like me because you stand in your own light and won’t let us get at ours. Another thing, you’re alive and twitching all the time, so whatever you feel communicates itself: fears, doubts, angers, loves and hates too. You won’t – or you can’t – let anyone ignore you. No one can float on the surface with you because you’re not content there either….
‘So there’s you and me on that morning in Uig, each with our separate histories catching up with us, very alike and yet very unlike, and we sail back together into Stornoway. I wonder if you’ve ever understood the real meaning of that day – my meaning? You were trespassing. No man should have all that you have and be able to sail a boat like that. No man should have a nice clear mind, and cheat the law like you were prepared to do for me.
‘Then, when you came to the croft, I saw that in your own way you were jealous of me. You saw me riding the tractor and you were ashamed of your soft hands and the fact that you were a wanderer with no land under his own feet. I saw you when you looked at my house, how you felt the beams and knew how the stones were laid and the joinery done, though you’d never done any of it yourself – or maybe you had, but you’d stopped doing it a long time ago. You’d been a fighter, too – I’ve never forgotten that night when you were all set to take me with a broken bottle. But somewhere along the line you’d given that up. And I wondered why. I wondered about you and Kathleen, too, because when you brought her to my house, I didn’t know what you wanted from her – although I knew you had balls, seannachie, and I thought you knew what they were for….
‘So I started to play a game with you. At least I told myself it was a game, but it wasn’t. I was looking for myself and I thought I might find me through you. You spoiled the game, seannachie, when you brought me Morrison’s news. I had to take you seriously then. You weren’t outside my life any more. You were like a cow tick under my skin. I couldn’t scratch you out or laugh you out. You were there, drinking my blood and itching me day and night.
‘But I had to play out the game. I was the rogue, you were the nice, scholarly gentleman with a well-known name and good table manners and a lawyer’s mind. You couldn’t be as good as you looked just as I couldn’t be as bad as I was painted. I took you poaching. You proved a cleverer rascal than I. We went after the deer, and you made a kill clean as the next man.
‘I made a play for Kathleen and you were in bed with her already. On board the Helen, you told me about Lachie, which meant you could think as well outside the law as inside it. The closer I looked, the more you seemed like me.
‘That’s why I called the play tonight. You couldn’t see yourself, seannachie. You thought I was playing rough – but it was you who drew blood and you who had death in his eyes. I know we’re the same, and I think you do too.
‘And yet there’s such a difference. In a funny way, I think I’ve cured you of what was ailing you. But you haven’t cured me, seannachie. You’ve left me weaker and more puzzled than before. I’m not blaming you. Don’t think that. I’m just stating a fact. The ceilidh was my public statement. This is my private one to you.
‘You made me question everything I did, said, or believed. That’s not a bad thing, except you have to prepare the subject for the experience – and you didn’t do that. It’s just as hard to see yourself plain as it must be to see God for the first time when you didn’t believe He was there at all. You never understood that. You wouldn’t let me have any secrets from myself; but you have to have them sometimes, otherwise you can’t bear to live with yourself. I thought I was doing a good thing when I went to see Morrison. You saw it, and said it, as a total selfishness. Well, part of it was, but not the best part.
‘You thought I was a shit because I told you a lie about my dinner with Kathleen. The lie was to protect her, because I could have taken her, seannachie, and I didn’t. And the insult I laid on her was the only way I could send her home with her pride unbroken.
‘When you told me about Lachie on board the Helen, I was blazing mad. I said wild things – but it was you who read murder into them, seannachie. I know that murder was in the back of my mind. But you pulled it out and showed it to me …made me look at it, made me weigh chances and consequences I’d never thought of, might not have thought of if you’d let me cool down.
‘As it turned out, I did kill him…I chopped him while he stood at the wheel just after he came on watch. I carried him out of the wheelhouse in the fog and tossed him overboard….
‘Don’t look shocked, seannachie. You’ve had the knowledge buried in your own mind ever since it happened. And there’s nothing you have to do about it because all the arrangements are made…No, I’m not going to give myself up, because they’d have me mad and raving after a week in prison. I’m going away, as I told you. How, I’ll tell you in a minute. I’d like you to understand the why, first of all…Lachie’s death was because of the guns. Now my boys were in that and Maeve O’Donnell too. The boys followed me. I have to protect them. And my deal with Maeve was that I would hold her and her organization safe. I want to honour both friendships.
Then there’s Morrison. He’s my father – and you may think it strange, but I’ve started to think of him like that. He’s old and ailing, and I know he’s told a lot of people about me and I won’t have him shamed now. When I’m gone, you’ll have to tell him, and I know you’ll tell him the best, and only so much of the worst as he would guess anyway.
‘I know what you’re thinking, seannachie. You can’t figure out why, if I’m the bastard you know, I don’t stay and bluff it out, because I can. Even what I’m telling you now I can deny in the next breath.
‘It gets back to you and me and the difference between us. I know what the difference is now. You’re a reversible man. I’m not. You’re open to change. You’re open to believing, to disbelieving, to forgiving, to starting again. You’re one of those who can be – what do they call it? – converted. You can believe in a better tomorrow, a better you even. I don’t. I can’t. And I’ll tell you, seannachie, you and those like you had better beware, because there’s a whole dark world full of people like me, and you haven’t seen the half of it yet.
‘I’m programmed, seannachie, like one of those great whirring machines that will soon be used to run the world when men give up trying. My little memory bank, seannachie, is loaded with everything I’ve ever done in my life. And I can’t live with myself any more because I know one day someone else like you is going to come along all naive and respectable and press the starter button and have me spew out another and bloodier answer on the tape.
‘You remember I told you at dinner that I’d wished once I could join the Romans or the Greeks or some old and tolerant religion. You never heard why. It’s because they still raise a hand over you and bless you clean in the name of God and let you crawl away into a desert or a monastery until you grow new and fit for human commerce again. Of course I missed the bus, because I was too proud and stupid to lift my hand and yell for it to stop. That’s where you and I failed together too. We couldn’t forgive each other’s being what we are. It’s a great shame, but there it is.
‘Now let’s talk about my exit, seannachie. It’ll be clean. All the paperwork’s done. The will’s made. The legacies are as just as I can make them. There’s no confession because that would have to implicate my friends. The law will have to be content with what it gets – a closed case and no more. When you leave here I’m going to fire this place. And then I’m going to take the capsule I’ve carried round with me all these years – which will have me cleanly dead in four seconds maximum.
‘Don’t look shocked, seannachie. You’ve heard it, maybe written it, all before. This is how it looks when it happens. I’m exercising the last liberty of a man, seannachie, to pull out his own plug before the computer takes him over. The fire? That’s always been in my mind, seannachie. It was the way the old Vikings did it, and it’s clean and final. And no police surgeon will be poking round inside my guts to find what I died of – which is an obscenity I’ve always shrunk from. When you’re on your way home, turn back, just once, and you’ll see a light in the sky. That’ll be me... on the way to Valhalla, whereever that is!
‘Funny; I’ve never been much worried about the afterwards. I’ve seen so much torment and terror on this side of time that I never saw the need of hell on the other. Just being alive is punishment enough for whatever you do. I know the kind of heaven I’d like, though. Just to see it all plain, just once and calmly and wholly, and be able to say it was good. Because there is good in it, seannachie – except you need some kind of a gift to enjoy it. Maeve’s got the gift, seannachie – for all she’s a crazy loon dedicated to putting the clock back. Your Kathleen’s getting it – which is maybe what loving does for people. I think you’re getting it, too – or maybe you just lost it and are picking it up again.
‘Me? …I missed the gift. Or maybe I threw it away in the days when I was young and bitter. There were moments with you when I thought I had it back, but that was just fairy gold, which goes away when you close your fist on it…Your sextant was real, though. There was a care and a gentleness in that. And you’re the last here, to say good night to me. You’re not arguing with me either. Not that it would do any good, but it shows you understand.
‘You should go now. I’ve things to do, and I have to be alone for the last of it. No tears, seannachie. That wouldn’t be fair. I haven’t any left to share with you. Just one favour – when you go, don’t shake my hand. Don’t say anything. Just do what I’ve seen in the sunny places and laughed at first and then envied. Put your arms round me. Hold me a moment and lay your face against mine. Then get the hell out of here! It’s a silly thing to ask, but I never had a father to kiss me good night.’
When I left him he closed the door on me and turned the key. The sky was blown clean and the moon was riding high and cold among the faint and distant stars. The roadway was deserted. The hills were black, and Rawlings was dozing in the front seat of my car. He gave me that blank little smile of his and said:
‘Thought you might like some company, on the way home. You’ve had a rough night.’
‘I’m not going home yet.’
‘Waiting for something?’
‘No. There’s a visit I want to make. You’re welcome to come.’
‘I think you mean that.’
‘I do.’
‘Are you friends again?’
‘As near as we’ll ever be.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘A little way and a long way, Inspector…Trust me now.’
I drove him up to the place of the Standing Stones and walked him over the damp turf and down the great colonnade to the burial place. I told him the history of it, and the legends of the Shining One with wrens flying round his head and the cuckoo that heralded his coming. I told him how good it was to make love and plight troth in this place, and how there were still families on the island who belonged to the Stones in a way that they would not explain. He was very patient with me and very polite, which is no small compliment to pay because I was very voluble and, I think, inclined to ramble. He let me talk myself to a standstill before he asked me:
‘Why do you tell me this? And why here?’
‘Because this is one place where we don’t belong. It’s a great monument on a tiny island. All its history begins around here, and all the people, whether they know it or not, are touched by the history. They can’t escape it. They’re still living the consequences of the Ice Age, when the peatbogs were made…There are so few of them now, everything that happens to them is large and talked of and full of consequences. Every death is a diminishment greater than you or I can understand. Every despoilment is a tragedy, and every going away is one pair of hands lost and one heart less for the loving of the harsh place…So you want to ask me a lot of questions because that’s your job. Here in this place I’ve got all the answers. Tomorrow, because of the magic and the night air, I may have forgotten them all. I want to make a bargain with you, Inspector… I want to make it not for myself, but to save more grief for those who have enough already and will have more tomorrow.’
‘I never make bargains, my dear chap. I’m not free to do that. Sometimes, though, I make decisions on my own responsibility, which is what I’m paid for. Also, I have a conscience, and you would pay me a compliment if you believed that.’
So, because there comes a time when you have to believe or else go mad in unbelievable horrors, I turned him round, not to the east, from whence the Shining One would come, if he ever did, but to the west, where he could see over the rise of the hill the leaping flames of Ruarri’s funeral pyre.
He stood there watching, a long time, in silence. Then he said, ‘Of course he was alive when you left?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was well and in good spirits?’
‘Yes. He was tired, though. He said he was ready for a long rest.’
‘I suppose the place was still in a mess, glasses, cigarette butts, all that sort of stuff?’
‘It was a shambles. That was quite a wild party, one way and another.’
‘A generous gesture, though. And it did make quite a bit of money for a good cause… He didn’t give you any letters, depositions, anything like that?’
‘No.’
‘Any messages to deliver?’
‘None. Of course I’ll have to break the news to his father …and I should talk to Maeve O’Donnell. She was very fond of him.’
‘She’s at the lodge now with your Dr McNeil. You might give her a message from me.’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell her I’ll be busy tomorrow and I’d be happier if she took the first plane out – and left the United Kingdom the same day.’
‘You’re a gentleman, Inspector.’
‘I’m a policeman. I have a closed case… And as you say, there’ll be enough grief tomorrow. Can you stay on this road for Stornoway?’
‘We can. It’s a long way round, that’s all.’
‘I don’t like fires. They scare me. There’s a big one building up. I pray God I won’t be round to see it.’
I had never heard a policeman pray before. Which shows you how ignorant a man of letters can be and how little you can trust him in his ignorance.
It was four in the morning when I got back to the lodge and found Maeve and Kathleen still awake by the fire. They had to hear the story and I had to tell it all – because the weight of it and of the guilts which Ruarri had laid on me was suddenly beyond bearing. There was a crushing horror in the vision of myself triggering a programmed man to acts of murder and self-destruction. And yet I could not gainsay the truth of what Ruarri had told me. Maeve could, would and did.
‘…To hell with de mortuis and all that crap! He was a man with a flaw in him. He knew it, hated it, but wouldn’t do anything about it. He loved it. He had a ready-made excuse for everything he chose to do. I’m sorry, seannachie, you’re tired and you’ve had a rugged night of it, but you’ve got to think straight. Ruarri’s exit wasn’t clean. The flaw was there still. You beat him at all his games. He had to trick you into believing he’d won the last one of all. He’d have the glory and you’d have the guilt, and you’d remember him always because of it – which isn’t the kind of immortality any half-sized hero would be wanting. He’s done something good, though. He’s cured me… I wish him luck wherever he’s gone – and, by Christ, he’ll need it! But he’s out of my life at last. Thanks for the rest of it, seannachie. I’ll be off in the morning. Good night, children. Be kind to each other.’
It was a gallant effort and she had my salute for it; but it still wasn’t the whole truth, and I knew it and so did Kathleen. For what was left of the night – and there wasn’t much of it, because I had to face Morrison soon after daybreak – Kathleen was firm and tender and would have no argument at all.
‘…Ruarri loved you, like a brother. You loved him too. And the proof is what you’re doing now, cleaning up the mess he’s left. That’s the good thing you’ll remember in the end. The rest of it? You have to forgive yourself as you taught me to do, for something much worse….’
‘What do I do about Morrison?’
‘Tell him the truth.’
‘Can he take it?’
‘There’s something I’ve learnt from you, mo gradh, and now I’m teaching it back to you. It’s only the lies that kill us and only the truth that keeps us alive. Come on now, sweetheart, close your eyes and lie on my breast, and I’ll wake you when it’s time…’
There was a time, and I have told you of it, when I condemned Morrison for weakness and was angry at the burden he had laid upon me. It is for this reason that now, before this chronicle is ended, I must show him to you in respect. He was still in bed when I went to him, and he did not need to be clairvoyant to read bad news on my face. He asked me to hand him his Bible, and while I talked he lay back, eyes closed, holding it in his hands. What strength he drew from it I do not know. All I know is that he did not weep and exclaim, but listened silently, until the long, sorry tale was done. So, I imagined, some noble patriot or martyr might have listened to his death warrant from a hireling messenger. When finally he spoke his first words were for me:
‘I blame you for nothing, laddie. I thank you for the best of it. I’m alive and Ruarri’s dead, and that’s the irony of God we talked about, the kind of harsh dispensation you have to accept or lapse into despair. Perhaps it’s the way I’m asked to pay for a kind judgment on Ruarri. I’ll be out of here tomorrow, and there’ll be a service for him in the kirk. But he should have a prayer now. I’d be pleased if you’d read it for me.’
His hand was steady as he opened the book and his voice firm as he recited the psalm with me.
‘Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy.
And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my iniquity.
Wash me yet more from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin….
Cast me not away from thy face: and take not the holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation: and strengthen me with a perfect spirit….’
When I had finished he laid a hand on my head and said gently, ‘Go home to your woman now. You’ve earned some loving for yourself.’
But she wasn’t there; she was out ministering to the sick. So I drove as far as I could, to the loneliest beach in the west, and swam until I was exhausted. The water was very cold, but it was clean; and the sands, when I came back, were as empty as I was.