Maja

All the stories about Conach were Geordie Kemp’s. He had a wife, Betty, but she died years ago, long before he did. She and Geordie shared the Conach stories between them, and after Betty went Geordie had to keep them all in his head, because he was the only one left that had them. It was Geordie that those earlier folklorists − Dr Tybault’s predecessors − had come to see. They were mostly young men with beards and dark-framed glasses and they came with heavy reel-to-reel tape recorders, and later with smaller cassette machines, and they recorded him telling stories until he ran out, and then they would ask for more. He didn’t like to disappoint them, so he would say he was tired and would have to have a think and they were to come back in a month and be sure to bring another bottle of that fine whisky when they did. And by the time they returned he would have another batch of stories for them. He was a rogue, Geordie. He would order books of folktales from the library van and read up on the kind of things the students liked, and change the names or add a new twist to a story that came from somewhere else, and they loved it. I remember he told me once, ‘That’s them awa wi a Norwegian tale and a Russian ane, and they’ll never ken the difference.’ They couldn’t get enough of him but he was canny, he knew what would make a good story and what would make a bad one. A good story, he said, had to have some element of truth in it, even if he had made it up or stolen it. If it did not have that truth, even if it was the best tale of them all, it would fail. But, anyway, some of his stories were very old and as good as anything else the academics had in their collections, and Geordie swore he’d had these ones, from folk who were now dead, long before anybody from the universities was interested.

Another thing about Geordie was that he was of the glen and it was deep in him. If you wanted to know some fact about the glen and its history you went to Geordie Kemp and you might get what you asked for but you would get a few stories too, and you could check the fact later but not the stories. You just had to take them as they were, for what they were. I don’t think he would ever have told you something that showed the glen in a bad light. That would have been insulting to himself.

Geordie was a labourer all his days, an outdoors man, he worked with sheep and cattle but, as I told Lachie, at many other jobs too. He was just the kind of person the Darrochs could do with now. The thing he did best was building walls. He was a drystane dyker and he was famous for it. His hands were like big claws and he could use them like the bucket on a digger to move stones but he could use them like a musician or a potter too, you could see his mind shaping the dyke as he worked, the thoughts went down his arms and into his fingers and he shifted and shoved and slotted stones into place like a conjurer. ‘It’s jist fillin in spaces,’ he said, but it was much more than that. It was Geordie who repaired all the dykes around the estate. The last job he did was the big dyke in the high park. He was eighty-five when he started that, it took him two summers, a day here and a day there, but one day he finished it. That afternoon he went home with a sore back and looking forward to a dram. ‘That’s the last bloody stane I’m pittin on tap o’ anither stane,’ he said to Peter Darroch, who met him on his way home. Peter went on up to see the finished dyke. ‘I’ll come in later and settle up with you,’ Peter said, but death got there first.

That was five years ago. Apart from when he was away in the army at the end of the war, Geordie was in the glen all his life, and nobody could remember it without him. It was as if he had been here for ever, like the birds and the other creatures. And that’s something else about him − he was as close to being an animal as any human could be. There was a roughness and a heat about him, sometimes his eyes flashed at you and you thought there was a dog or a fox or even some beast long gone from the glen hidden away in the depths of him, a wolf or a bear.

But none of that made any difference at the end. One day he was building a dyke and the next he was gone. Death came for him and I think he knew it was coming. He felt a change, maybe the way I’m feeling it now. I think when he said that about the last stone he wasn’t just complaining about his back, he was saying that that was him, done. Peter went in to pay him what he was still owed and found him in his armchair with his boots off and his slippers on, and his bunnet still on his head, and an empty glass on the table beside him. And that was Geordie Kemp’s place, he was in it when death came calling, and he didn’t even have to get up to open the door.

Geordie’s cottage − I still think of it as his, even though my neighbours Kristina and Sean have been there for the last three years − is not that far from mine, at the other end of the clachan. I often went to see him in the evenings and we always had plenty to laugh and talk about, but I hadn’t been for a week or so because he was feeling tired after those days working on the dyke; he said he wouldn’t be good company. So I left him alone. It was a great shock when Peter came to my door to tell me what had happened. We went back together, and then Peter went home to tell Shirley and phone for the doctor while I waited with Geordie. He seemed quite at peace. I tried to be cheery even while I was wiping my eyes. ‘Och, Geordie, Geordie, could you not have poured a dram for me too?’ I poured myself one anyway, and raised it to him. He could have been sleeping. I checked a couple of times to make sure that he wasn’t, but the coldness of his cheek told me he was away. I felt the world settling around me: I was sad, but it began to be all right that he had gone. We are all going, we just don’t know when it will be our turn.

I am getting distracted again – by my own meanderings, I suppose. If it was stones you wanted to know about, or if it was local history, or if you were after a Conach story or any other kind of story, Geordie was your man. If he’d still been alive when Dr Tybault came, Shirley would have sent him to Geordie. ‘You have to speak to Geordie Kemp about this,’ she’d have said. But it was too late, so she gave me the typescript of Charles Gibb’s journal to read and sent Dr Tybault to me instead. I couldn’t help him much. What was in that journal was all new to me. It would probably have been mostly new to Geordie too but, then again, you could never tell what he had stored away under that bunnet of his; he might have been able to fill in a few spaces to help Dr Tybault out.

The one story you wouldn’t get from Geordie was the one about the dumb lass. You would not get it from him because he didn’t know it.

That’s not quite right. He did know it, or some of it. He was in it, near the end. He never told it, though, because it wasn’t his to tell. Och, that’s not right either. We would talk about it, but that was just between him and me. But it didn’t belong to him. The Conach stories were his and Betty’s, but the dumb lass’s story wasn’t, and he knew that and he respected it. Betty too, she understood. There were certain things, certain ways of behaving. That’s the kind of people they were.