by Ronald Smith
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mairi was less than welcoming to me when I returned.
"So you've decided to come back," she said, dryly. No embrace, no kiss; she was apathetic as I tried to express my delight in seeing her again, pushing me away to return to the bread she was making when I grinned and hugged her, as if to say, 'Come on, it's me, I'm back.'
I sat down at the long kitchen table to drink tea from a chipped mug. It was one of my favourite mugs, with Persian designs on it, and I recalled with irritation that it hadn't been chipped before.
The table was the usual jumble of jam jars, ash trays, breadcrumbs and small plastic animals which little Sheena was lining up on her plate of half-eaten vegetable moussaka. Everything was as it had been, I noted, apart from the chip; yet something was different.
Jamie sat there opposite me, listening to my stories of Egypt solicitously, his eager eyes seeming as always to beg forgiveness for some unspoken sensual excess. But Mairi only gave me half of her attention, as if I were an awkward visitor come at the wrong moment.
The little girl's bedtime came; she was yawning, but struggled wilfully with Mairi as she attempted to separate the plastic horses from the sticky fingers which paraded them along the plate.
"Come to bed with Uncle Jamie," he said to her, sliding up beside Sheena and leaning his head down on the table, to look imploringly up at her. She raised her hand and flapped it crossly on his nose, and he rolled away in mock agony, crying out, "Ohh, ma nose, you've busted ma nose'." She laughed and slid down off the bench to slap him again while he rolled about like a playful dog.
"Ha! Now I gotcha," he exclaimed with a triumphant laugh, bearing her aloft and out of the room before she realised what was happening.
Bob and I sat up until late, talking about my adventures and his plans. He had decided it was time he moved on, he told me, and he had fixed on South America as his next destination, somewhere in the Andes.
Sadly, I felt how his absence would diminish me, how he had dispelled chaos from my life and gently insinuated his methodical sense of purpose into my undisciplined strivings. He had become my ally whose integrity was a powerful counterpoise to the madmen and thieves that came to the Mill, drawn by an unspoken myth. I remembered for a moment the eighty-eight year old Alchemist who wanted to teach me the Freemason's craft because he said I instinctively thought as they do; he had set me to thinking about the mystical meaning of leylines in spite of my skepticism. The fort on the hill which the quarry had demolished was an ancient Celtic site. Monuments to the Celts were all around me - Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, where the electrical storm had imprinted as yet undeciphered visions in my mind, Ben Arthur to the west of Loch Lomond, Arthur's tomb was perhaps in Angus, I had heard, and Guinivere’s castle, and the leylines connecting these old focal points of Scottish culture converged at the Mill. It was like Camelot, my castle, and I was Arthur, Mairi was my Guinevere, Jamie was Lancelot, and Bob was Bedivere, the trusted knight who remained faithful to the end.
"After you go, Bob, you'll still be here," I said to him quietly, "You'll leave me more than I was before you came."
I walked with Bob over to his cottage and said goodnight. When I returned to the kitchen, Mairi was still there, alone. She seemed uneasy, then she came out with what was burdening her.
"Will, I've fixed up the flat next door so you can sleep there. I don't want you sleeping with me, it's just impossible; I can't go on pretending to be your wife. My heart's just not in this any more, my life has been taken over and I need to be on my own to think about what I want to do,"
It was like a door slamming shut in my face,
"Look, I know I've been neglecting you because of the Mill, but we'll work it out, everything will be OK once we finish," I pleaded.
"It's no use, Will, my mind is made up. I don't even want to try. I just feel cold towards you." There was an iron tone in her voice which chilled me. "You're just impossible to live with, and you've run through all my money and we're still nowhere near getting this place together. I've got to start thinking about myself."
It was pointless to argue with her; her mind seemed locked in a spasm of rejection. Disconsolately, I walked along the stone paving and opened the door to the self-contained flat at the south end of the farmhouse. All my clothes had been heaped in the bedroom, and there were sheets and blankets on the bed.
My mind was in a turmoil. This was a totally unexpected blow, yet when I reflected on the last couple of years, I could see that she had been becoming more and more alienated from me and what we were doing together. Still, there was hope, I thought, 'She doesn't really know what she wants, she'll get over it, I'll bring her round.'
I remembered when we had first met, one April day in Edinburgh, on St. Steven's Street, I had been carrying one of Jake's children piggyback, and Jake had stopped to talk to her. She was a final year art student, and he introduced us. She had thought the child was mine, I recalled.
A few days later a friend of mine who was a cobbler came to stay in my flat. He had just split up with his wife, and I told him he could use the empty room to set up his shoe factory. He had only been there a few hours when he started to feel ill; he quickly became so unwell, that he asked me to take him home, back to his wife. The next evening, I paid him a visit, and who was there but Mairi. We smoked some dope together and became friendly.
"Let's go to the University dance," she had suggested, and we drove off together in her natty little yellow Triumph sports car with its ski rack on the back.
Afterwards, we had gone back to her flat in Glen Street. At that time, I had decided to remain celibate, I had even entertained the notion of becoming a monk, so our relationship developed on a platonic level. And now here I was, celibate again, deserted by matrimony.
The winter came while we were putting a new floor in the hall. I worked doggedly, throwing myself into the work to keep my mind off what was going on between Mairi and Jamie, They were as thick as thieves; it was as if he had taken my place. At first, I was numb with disbelief that she could have turned so against me; then I understood that this was her way of getting even with me, that she had taken up with my erstwhile right hand man out of resentment and despair. But it was more than just a flirtation to make me jealous, since he was always in the farmhouse with her. They must be sleeping together, I realised. He had played on her feelings of neglect, fanned the flames of her frustrated ambitions and now was warming himself at the fire, at my fire.
There was little 1 could do. The house, everything in fact, was in Mairi's name, since she had put down most of the money. And my respect for her prevented me from stepping in and throwing him out. In any case, violence was a recourse I had always hated. But my ideal, that a person should be allowed to do whatever he or she wants, was taking a battering; it is all very well to believe this, but when someone you love does the one thing that hurts most deeply, then the real test comes.
I decided the best thing to do was ignore it, play my role, and pretend nothing was happening. I would rise above petty emotions, keep on with the work, and hope for the best. Suffering is strength; the Christianity of my ancestors lingered on, all those ministers and clerics whose heritage I had raged against were still a part of me.
Mairi was revealing an aspect of her personality I hadn't seen before, a hard, callous side, utterly selfish and grasping, so it seemed to me, I squirmed and wriggled like a hooked fish but she bore down ruthlessly whenever I appeared.
"I want to get out of this. Sell the place and give me back my money," she nagged over breakfast.
"Don't be ridiculous, Mairi, you know I can't sell until it's finished. And anyway, it would be better to hire it out and make money. I don't want to part with the Mill, it's my creation, I've put years of my life into getting it together."
"You can do what you like with it," she retorted impatiently, "just give me seventy thousand pounds and I'll leave."
"You know 1 haven't got that kind of money," I raged, "just be reasonable, will
you? I can hire the studio to film people, maybe run it as a health farm or a rehabilitation centre. It's got a lot of possibilities."
I racked my brain looking for ways to raise money so I could buy off Mairi, but nothing came of my search. 1 began to feel like a berserk mechanism with spools of tape unreeling out of my head as I hammered and sawed, or drove at eighty miles an hour around Perthshire and Fife, looking for contacts, friends, anybody to distract me from the despair I felt about Jamie and Mairi.
Then a dreadful blow fell: a heavy frost descended on the country like an ice age and everything everywhere came to a standstill. 1 couldn't work out how to turn off the water, and all the pipes froze solid.
I could do nothing except wait for the thaw. To pass the time, I began to think about the leylines the old Alchemist had told me about. I didn't believe or disbelieve his theories, but I was interested to see if there was something to learn, so I pinned up an Ordnance Survey map of the area and marked the points where there were cairns,
forts, tumuli and very old churches. Visitors would look at the map and say, "Oh, I know a place." and I would go out to look at it, and mark it on the map if 1 thought it was significant.
An example of this was the wood on a hill opposite the Mill, where someone told me I could find two lumps shaped like tits, that weren't on the map. They seemed to be some kind of earthwork, so I marked them in. Then I put pins in all the points marked and stretched string between them. There were dozens of lines criss-crossing all over the map . I had no idea what they meant. But one thing was very obvious:the Mill was right in the middle of the lines, many of them passed through it. I noticed one line which connected the Mill, an old church, and the battlefield of Bannockburn.
The main axis of lines went straight through the quarry, which, I remembered, was the site of an ancient fort. Some very rare Egyptian pottery had been found there in an old excavation, I recalled reading in an archeological survey.
Jane became very interested in the map. She saw herself as an earth goddess and was particularly knowledgeable about Tarot cards and divining, and the occult aspects of the leylines excited her. She raved on about astral planes and other mystical jargon, and 1 began to get annoyed at the pseudo-scientific house of cards she used to explain herself.
As she talked, 1 realised I was struggling to move away from the irrationality that she and many others wrapped themselves in, fighting to get some rationality into my life - which the straight leylines seemed to symbolise - and thus escape from my troubles which were largely brought on by my illogical behaviour in the past.
"Your dream about the standing stones," she was saying, "is an ancient belief-structure which comes to you telepathically from the old, prehistoric inhabitants who are trying to reach through time and guide you to repair what has been altered."
"Well, I think that's a lot of bullshit," I answered her quietly,
Jane was shocked; I had uttered heresy. "Well, if that's the way you feel, I'm going back to my cave ," she declared defensively.
A mental flash like the air burst of a miniature atomic bomb illuminated me. I saw Plato's cave, in which he described people who were chained with their backs to the entrance, unable to see the real world outside, except as passing shadows on the wall before them.
"That's IT, Jane, that's just what I mean: your cave ! That's the whole trouble," I laughed, jumping up from my chair like an old tutor whose most hopeless pupil had just expressed an unexpectedly intelligent idea.
Jane retreated from the kitchen, puzzled, and still in a huff. I couldn't believe in what she had just said, but neither could I deny that the biggest thing on the map which had been changed was the fort where the quarry now was, like a cancer eating away at a vital organ.
The black stone upstairs in the studio suddenly appeared to me as the key to all my troubles. It had been given to me for some purpose, I felt, and this was it. The heavy, misshapen lump of magnetite was the missing standing stone from my dream in Crete, or at least, it was the equivalent of something that had been taken away by the quarry:
I must replace it.
I ran out to get Jane, who immediately understood what I meant. We collected the heavy stone with its devilish portrait and dog-like aspect on the other side, and set off up the frost-covered hill towards the quarry, Jane carrying her Tarot deck with her.
Thick white crystals of hoar-frost crunched beneath our feet on the rock hard ground. We passed through a dark railway tunnel which was festooned with huge hanging stalactites of ice, any one of which was big enough to kill us if it fell. Some had detached themselves and lay on the tracks like shattered logs of ice. Twenty degrees of frost had frozen everything to the solidity of iron.
We clambered into the deserted quarry, and Jane began fumbling with her cards."
What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm trying to find the best place to put the stone."
"No, I'm going to find the spot with the pendulum," I replied, thinking at the same time, 'I don't believe any of this but I'll go along with what happens.'
With the pendulum, I found two points which I used to pace out a line in the frost; then I found two more places where it twirled about, and to my surprise the second line intersected the first.
"Here, we'll put the stone in here."
There was a crack in the bed-rock, and I shoved the devil's stone deep into it.
"This is a place where the quarrymen will probably blast," I told Jane, "and if they destroy the stone, it will be on their heads. There is a tribe in the Sudan which doesn't like to kill snakes or scorpions, yet they are sometimes bitten or stung. So if they come across a snake, they catch it and put it in a bag and wait until a scorpion turns up, which they also put in the bag, and the two kill one another,"
She looked doubtfully down at the crack.
At that moment, an appallingly harsh hooting noise tore through the icy air and assaulted our ears, like some demon crying out in rage. It was an unholy moment and in spite of myself I felt an uncontrollable rush of cold fear surge through me.
Then I recognised it: the hooter at the quarry works.
On the same day, the frost lifted and the thaw began.
In all the buildings, the cottages, the farmhouse, burst pipes began to spray water, flooding rooms and soaking carpets, damaging plaster, dripping through ceilings, devastating years of work.
I could not remember a time when I had felt so utterly desolate; this on top of Mairi and Jamie's betrayal was more than 1 could bear, and in a whirlpool of self-pity, I began thinking seriously of suicide.
The best course of action at such times is to get another perspective, a second opinion, preferably from an old friend. Andrew, who had sent us the original newspaper clipping of the Mill from the Isle of Jura, was now living in the Sidlaw Hills behind Dundee; I drove over to see him.
He offered to do a Tarot reading, to see if the cards would give us any insights. There was no pretence of occult wisdom with Andrew; it was a genuine gesture of concern, so 1 accepted.
What came up was all the swords of the pack, and right in the middle was a guy huddled up on a bed with his head in his hands. It was me, a perfect representation of how I felt.
I decided a walk in the hills would make me feel better, so I set out, following a narrow sheep track through the short heather and grass. The tops of the Sidlaws, although not very high, were sufficiently wild to dispel the crowding tensions in my head. Before long, as I strode along the grassy ridge and looked across the rounded tops which resembled giant frozen waves on a petrified ocean, a song began to go through my head, in that repetitive, nagging fashion which refuses to go away. It was 'Climb every Mountain'. There seemed an endless succession of hill-tops around me.
"Hell," I objected out loud, "I'm bloody well not going to climb every mountain. If I do, I'll go mad."
Just over the next hill, although it was still daylight, a single bright star shone absurdly and poignantly. It reminded me of a drawing I had d
one called 'Evolution', in which I had tried to represent the unfolding and developing of my spirit.
"No,' I thought, 'I won't go down, I'll go on from here, move on to new things. Everybody and everything is at my throat. Screw the bastards, I've got to give the place one more chance, I've got to do it’.
I couldn't face the depressing chaos back at the Mill, so I drove instead over to the east coast of Fife to visit George, a musical friend who played guitar with his own band. I found him staying in a cottage between St. Andrews and Anstruther.
George had a very sympathetic way of looking at me with eyes full of concern, and I told him of my woes as we smoked several joints, distancing myself from the unhappiness by transforming it into narrative.
Soon we became ravenously hungry, but there was no food in George's cottage, so we decided to drive to a village in search of chips. As we drove along the coast road, 1 noticed a sign which read,
ST. FINIAN'S CAVE
Open 9 to 4
Keys at Number 9
"Hey, look," I exclaimed to George, "let's go see that."
"It's after four. Will, it'll be closed."
But I stopped the car and went up to the cottage anyway, and knocked on the door. A little old lady opened it, and I asked, "Have you got the keys for the cave?"
"Ehh, ye're no really supposed tae go in after four," she replied querulously.
"Ah, come on," I beamed at her, "I've never been in a cave before."
"Ach well, I suppose it's all right. That'll be ten pence."
We walked across the field towards the sea cliffs, and down the slope to the cave. There was a wooden door across its entrance which I unlocked. The cave had once been used as a dump by a nearby farmer, but now the rubbish had been all cleared away to reveal a beautiful cavern with enchanted sparkling walls caused by flecks of mica in the rock, A clear spring bubbled up in the floor, and I gazed admiringly around, entranced by the aura of the cavern.
Outside, clouds which had scattered rain were blowing eastwards across the grey North sea, and slanting sunlight from the west lit up their blue-grey retreating ramparts, and the straggling curtains of misting rain beneath them. The prism-like blue, yellow and red hues of a rainbow began to appear, then something1 had only read about happened.
The rainbow formed a complete circle in the sky.
We stood and watched it grow, then fade, feeling awed and privileged. "That's a Coolie, George; you're very lucky if you get to see even one of them in your lifetime."
As we went back towards the cottage, George seemed lost in thought, his head bent over his chest. He looked up and said, "Will, you know my last name, Maclennan, do you know what Maclennan means?"
"No," I replied.
"It means 'Son of Finian.'"
That night back at the Mill, I had an unusually vivid dream: I was fighting my way out of a cave. Its floor was covered with pools of blood, and littered with severed heads, over which I continually stumbled, as if trying to walk on footballs, I was dragging behind me a professor of archaeology whom I had rescued.
In the morning there was a phone call from Barrie, now an organizer of pop concerts. "We're doing UB2 in Dundee tonight; come on over and I'll give you some tickets," he invited.
I took Jane along. She decided to wear an outlandish Hell's Angels' jacket with a grinning skull on the back. By contrast, I looked quite smart in my blue blazer, but I brought along a wide-brimmed straw hat with a red bandana around the crown, just in case I felt like wearing it.
We met Barrie outside the Caird Hall, and he took us to excellent seats right in the middle of the auditorium. As the lights dropped and the band appeared, I was flooded by a feeling of awe such as I had never felt before: the flood-lit stage seemed exactly like St. Finian's Cave,and the cave in last night's dream.
The band began with the song 'You can only put me down so far', which seemed incredibly apt; it summed up my feelings exactly, I sat there exultant, bathed in pure, shining truth. An uplifting sense of renewed purpose filled me: I’m not going to give in and leave the Mill. To hell with having no money. I'll get rock and roll musicians and turn it into a music studio.'
At the interval I found Barrie, who didn't seem to be enjoying the concert; I knew it was because he was so preoccupied with organizing hundreds of events and putting up with criticism and opposition that he hardly ever has time to enjoy what he provides for the pleasure of others, so I threw my arms around him and tried to put all the good feelings I had picked up from the band into the hug I gave him.
After the concert, he caught my arm as we were leaving and said,"There's a party for the band at the Angus Hotel in the West end. Come
along and I'll see you there,"
"Right, Barrie, I'll be there," I assured him.
But I had arranged to meet some other people and give them a lift back to Fife, and I felt too euphoric to bother with a party. Nothing could top, or even equal, what I had felt at the concert. However, at midnight I found myself outside the Angus Hotel and decided I might as well go in.
The Angus is a dismal glass-sided modern building, and there were a lot of policemen milling around the entrance. Something had obviously happened, perhaps a fight, and they were agitated.
I looked askance at Jane with her cropped hair and ragged denims emblazoned with outlaw biker insignia, "You wait in the car. I'll go in, and I'll come back and get you, OK?"
I tried to enter, but one of the policemen stood in my way and
said "No."
"I've come to the party."
"What party?"
"The band's party."
"What band?" It was an immediate brick wall. There's no arguing with a dumb cop; I wasn't in the mood to try, anyway.
I went back to the car and removed my jumper, revealing a striped t-shirt, put on the blazer and pulled the straw hat low over my brow to make a quick disguise.
"Come on," I said to Jane, and we went back to the hotel entrance.
I had about half an ounce of hashish in my pocket.
By this time the police had gone into the foyer and the glass door was shut. As we went up to it, a couple from inside tried to get out, but couldn't. The door was jammed. They pulled at it, then a policeman came up behind them, but found that he couldn't open it either. After a
long struggle he succeeded, and let them out.
I was standing there, arms crossed, tapping my foot impatiently; I glared hard at him,
"What about the fire regulations, then, eh?"
He looked dumbfounded.
"What happens if there's a fire in this hotel, eh?"
Confusion worked in his face, "Err…"
"GET SOMETHING DONE ABOUT IT. NOW. And I don't mean put it off till later'."
"Eh, are you…?"
"OFFICIAL? That's RIGHT'."
"Are you …?"
"Coming in? That's right." And in we both walked, past the same man who had just barred me, Jane like a Hell's Angel and me in a loud hat.
They were trying to impose their idea of order on the scene, and here was Mr. Anarchy walking through them. We went upstairs and found the band slumped in a horrible hotel suite, looking thoroughly miserable, I gave them all my dope, which cheered them up tremendously, and they started rolling joints, Garry came over, delighted to see me. "How's about coming over to my room for a couple of lines of coke?" he invited.
"No, coke makes me really logical, and I'm into the illogical tonight."
"Ahh," he exclaimed with mock seriousness, "chained by reason."
The phrase reverberated in my head. I thought it was a reference to Plato's 'Republic' (a misquote, as I later discovered), to his image of humanity chained in a cave, unable to see the world outside, which a comment of Jane's had brought to my mind before the thaw.
Whole areas of meaning began to stir and shift as I connected Jane's cave of the occult, the cave of my grandfather's Greek scholarship, my father's cave of logical obsession, the cave dream I had just had…
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br /> This reverie was interrupted when one of the band members came up to me and said, "I think there's something really important about your coming here tonight. I've got this strong feeling that I should give you my pass card so you can get into any place where we're playing."
I was touched by his gesture, which confirmed my ideas that rock music was the way to raise money to pay off the huge debts hanging over the Mill.
In the band there were two brothers named Campbell. "I'm a bit of Campbell, too, through my father," I told them. Then it hit me: 'I'm married to a MACDONALD! Oh my God, it all fits in; everything that's been happening to me is the revenge of the Macdonalds, This is terrible.