47

Vigils

Bruce had awoken shortly after four, when the first rays of the sun had penetrated the shutter-boards of his window. In those latitudes there is little darkness in the small hours of the morning, and claims that one might read the Inverness Courier outside at two in the morning are by no means apocryphal. The question of whether one might wish to read a newspaper at that time and in those conditions is another matter, but it is certainly possible. For Bruce, though, any thought of reading a newspaper, even in the cold light of day, seemed unattractive – even pointless. He had come to Pluscarden not to immerse himself in the world and its problems, but to abstract himself from them in order to find something that, until that point – or, to be precise, until the point that he was struck by lightning on Dundas Street – was lacking. His life, he realised, had been empty. He had tried to fill it with a social whirl – one in which young women vied with one another to be with him at the parties at Prestonfield House, in the fashionable bars of the Edinburgh New Town, on the three-day breaks to Reykjavik or Berlin – and he had succeeded in that project, in so far as what was really a complete failure can be regarded as a success. And it was all failure, he now felt – every moment of it was dust in his mouth, because it meant nothing. He had been diverted by it – yes, that was so – but he now knew that he had been chasing after an ignis fatuus – no more than that.

As a guest in the abbey, he was under no obligation to attend the services that punctuated the monastic day – guests could, if they wished, sleep in while the monks began their devotions – but Bruce was there in the chapel for Vigils, technically a Night Office notwithstanding the first appearance of the sun. There was one other guest, another early riser, a young man from Aberdeen, a fisherman, whom Bruce had met the day before and with whom he had had a brief conversation. This young man was wearing a grey garment, a hoodie, that he had pulled up over his head, a street garment that here, in this particular setting, seemed like a monastic cowl. He had greeted Bruce with a nod of the head, but neither had spoken, as it had been impressed on them that silence was expected in most of the monastic areas of the abbey.

The monks entered the chapel, white-clad figures taking their seats in the rows of stalls set aside for them. There was a calm timelessness about their movement: this was something that happened at the same fixed points of every day, no matter the season; something that required no practice, no choreography. It was like a tide that one might see on the shore: eternal, fixed.

And then they began to chant, guided by a chord played on the organ. The psalmody followed its appointed musical intervals, rising and falling within a narrow compass, the sound of something that had been performed in such settings for centuries, unaltered by fashion, surviving all the uncertainties of human life: wars, oppression, and times when love and kindness had been threatened by the busy doings of Hate.

Nobody who sat in that place could be unmoved, and Bruce now closed his eyes and let the Gregorian chant embrace him. He thought: how can I have been so wrong about everything? How can I have been so selfish, so absorbed in myself, so vain? How can I have believed that material things would make me, or anybody else for that matter, any happier?

It was a moment of conversion, as radical and as complete as when an item of clothing is dipped into a vat of dye and comes out a completely different colour. He did not believe in anything that he had not believed in half an hour before this moment: Bruce wanted to be seized by faith, even if he was still unconvinced of the literal truth of what was on offer in this place – that story still seemed inherently unlikely to him – but he felt entirely different.

He sat quite still throughout the saying of the Office. When the last notes of the chanting had died away and the monks had retreated from the chapel, he rose from his seat, nodded in the direction of the young fisherman, and made his way out into the field on the other side of the abbey. This was a paddock in which sheep were grazing – ewes with their growing lambs – and they now looked at him with the balefulness of animals disturbed at forage, before returning to their grazing. One or two bleated to reassure their offspring. “Don’t worry,” said Bruce. “I’m not going to harm you.”

He walked across the grass, heading for the far side of the field, and then turned round to make his way back to the abbey. Just outside the purlieu of the main building, separated from the abbey by a line of trees, was a vegetable garden, at the end of which several lengthy growing tunnels marked the edge of the cultivated land.

Bruce decided to explore the garden. Brother Gregory had spoken to him about the possibility of his working on the land, and Bruce had quickly accepted. He liked digging, and he thought that here, at last, he could put to use all those hours he had spent in the gym in Edinburgh. It had been vanity that had driven him to those long sessions with the weights and on the running machine, but now he would use the muscle built up to do something useful.

He walked past neatly ordered beds of salad vegetables. Lettuces of various shapes and sizes stretched out in long lines, the soil around them weeded and finely raked. Then there were rows of peas and beans, supported by a scaffolding of canes; and cabbages, nibbled at by caterpillars but still generous in their profusion; and bed upon bed of herbs: rosemary, thyme, parsley, sage, chives in purple flower; and there were Jerusalem artichokes, too, proliferating like weeds.

And then a long bed of what he thought were onions. He bent down to examine the legend on the stake that had been driven into the ground at the edge of the first bed of this crop. Garlic.