An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  “Where have you been?” He was angry. “I’ve been worried sick waiting for you and was about to call the police.”

  “I went to Dumfries.”

  “Why didn’t you leave a note saying where you were going and when you’d be back?”

  “I forgot.” She had also forgotten when Duncan had said he would be returning from Germany and had the vague notion it was tomorrow.

  “How could you forget?”

  “I got caught up in what I was doing,” she said, her voice distant and wayward.

  Duncan didn’t know what to make of his wife’s behaviour. He didn’t understand how she could go off without letting him know where she was going. It was totally irresponsible. There were times, like the expedition to Dumfries, when Moranna went off on a tangent and became so wrapped up in herself that no one else existed. She was single-minded that way and, he reminded himself, easily distracted.

  Early next evening, after he had calmed down and they were strolling around the castle ramparts, Duncan suggested Moranna try her hand at writing a book.

  “What kind of book?”

  “Why not a travellers’s guide to Auld Reekie? There’s always a market for that kind of thing.”

  “There are dozens of those in bookshops.”

  Duncan laughed indulgently. “But not one written by you.”

  Writing a travel guide was too mundane for Moranna. “I’ll write a novel,” she said, “a novel about Burns and the women he knew in Edinburgh. I’ve read about his various liaisons so I know quite a bit. What I don’t know, I’ll invent.” She went on, making up a story, speaking with such authority that Duncan thought she must have already given some thought to the novel though in fact she had only now considered writing it. She had no idea how to write a novel, but she saw no reason why she couldn’t act her way through the writing by pretending to be Agnes, May, Jenny, etc.

  Moranna now got out of bed in the mornings the same time as Duncan and after breakfast settled down at the writing table to work on the novel. In the afternoons she visited places where Burns’s women had been. Sometimes she left the flat wearing the pink satin dress beneath her shawl and went to St. Giles’ Cathedral, where she pretended to be Agnes, hysterical with religion, meeting Reverend Kemp to confess her guilty love for Burns. Or she pretended she was blowsy May working as a barmaid in Johnnie Dowie’s Tavern at the moment Burns picked her up. Or she was Agnes’s shy serving maid, Jenny, whom Burns impregnated on his twenty-ninth birthday when she delivered a message from Agnes while he was confined to bed with an injured knee. (Moranna would have written the Poet a letter chastising him about taking unfair advantage of poor Jenny but he had already been thoroughly scolded by Agnes.) Although Burns’s wife, Jean Armour, had never been in Edinburgh, Moranna imagined her visiting the tiny room behind the bakery where poor Jenny lay on a cot, dying of consumption, having given birth to a son Jean was willing to raise. Because Moranna lived these scenes, the writing came easily at first, convincing her that she was composing a masterpiece. Already she saw long lines of well-wishers and fans outside James Thin Bookstore, clamouring for her autograph.

  Duncan was pleased that his wife had found something to challenge her intelligence and talent while keeping her occupied. The months she spent working on the novel were a peaceful interlude that included a Christmas week spent at Scoggie House, a Victorian inn near St. Andrews operated by Shonagh Morrison. The inn was closed to the public for the season, but the Morrisons had a custom of inviting family and friends to join them for the holiday.

  In March, Jim Fraser telephoned his son at the newspaper to tell him that he and Lorene would be spending Easter in Edinburgh and had secured reservations at the Waverley Hotel. After Easter they were going on to London to take in the theatre and wanted their son and daughter-in-law to join them, all expenses paid.

  Although Lorene thought Moranna an unsuitable choice for her son—anyone could see she was scatterbrained—she had decided to make the best of the situation for now. In this she was following Jim’s advice that she should make every effort to be pleasant to their daughter-in-law because being hostile would only drive a wedge between Duncan and themselves. Jim had no difficulty warming to Moranna. A flighty young woman, he thought, but he liked her nonetheless.

  Duncan took Moranna shopping for clothes. It was high time, he said, that she had some stylish streetwear and he wanted to help her pick it out. She was pleased that although he disliked shopping and spending money, he wanted to help her buy clothing to wear in London. Together, they chose two lightweight tailored suits in cream and black, Duncan waiting outside the dressing room while she tried them on. The skirts were cut above the knee, which, as Duncan pointed out, gave her the chance to show off her legs. They also bought a pale blue sleeveless shantung dress and matching jacket, a pair of strapless shoes and a hat. His mother, he said, would be wearing a hat in London and Moranna should probably wear one too. Until now, she hadn’t thought Duncan was much influenced by his mother, after all he had denied her a wedding, but during the shopping spree it occurred to Moranna that the clothes they were buying were meant to please Lorene as much as they were her.

  Lorene aside, Moranna enjoyed wearing those clothes. She knew she looked good in them and, having been offered a modelling opportunity before, was unsurprised when she and her mother-in-law were shopping in London and the manager of a Knightsbridge store asked if Moranna would be interested in modelling a new line of sweaters—he said the sweaters would be enhanced by her unspoilt good looks. Lorene was not amused by her daughter-in-law’s response. Moranna told the manager she was writing a novel and didn’t have time for modelling. It didn’t occur to the foolish girl that if she accepted the manager’s offer, she would be able to provide Duncan with much needed financial help.

  Their last night in London, after the Frasers had seen a performance of Hamlet, Lorene forgot Jim’s advice and, looking across the pub table, asked Moranna if when she finished her novel, she’d be taking on the role of Ophelia—who the actress had played as a mindless waif. “You’d be a natural for the part,” Lorene said. Engrossed in reading the theatre programs laminated on the tabletop, Moranna didn’t pick up the malice. “I could play Ophelia,” she said, “but it’s not a major role and I prefer playing major roles.”

  Jim looked at his wife. “Gertrude is the role for you, Lorene,” he said.

  She grinned, pleased to have been caught. “But I’m not an actress, darling.”

  “So you say.”

  Duncan squirmed. He hated it when his parents baited one another.

  The morning of their return to Edinburgh, Duncan and his father left the dining room early, leaving Moranna alone with her breakfast of bangers and eggs. While she was eating, her mother-in-law appeared and seated herself opposite. Moranna watched her shake out the linen napkin and order grapefruit and coffee—Lorene seldom ate much, which was why she was whippet thin. Noticing the scrapbook of press clippings Duncan had brought downstairs to show his father and had left on the table, Lorene began leafing through it while she sipped her coffee. Soon she put it aside with the comment that the journalism of the future wasn’t print, it was television. “When this stint in Scotland is over, Jim thinks Duncan should move on to something else.”

  Moranna said that she and Duncan enjoyed living in Edinburgh and that Duncan was doing well at The Scotsman.

  “That may be,” Lorene waved a ring-laden hand. “But Duncan has to think of the future. Jim is a forward-looking man, and he’s already told Duncan that it would be good experience for him to work in Ottawa for a while. Now that Lester Pearson is in power, Jim is in a position to get Duncan a job. Mike owes him a few favours.”

  Moranna left the dining room without finishing her breakfast and went upstairs to speak to Duncan, but he wasn’t in their room and the subject of leaving Scotland didn’t come up again until they had said goodbye to the Frasers and boarded the train, on the way back to Edinburgh. Duncan asked how Moranna l
iked the idea of living in Ottawa. “Dad said the prime minister will be looking for speech writers and that if I was interested he would put in a word for me. If I got the job, we might be leaving Edinburgh as early as June.”

  Moranna wanted to stay in Scotland. “What about your job at the newspaper?”

  “Ken won’t stand in my way. As a newspaperman, he knows how important it is for me to learn the workings of government inside out.”

  “All the same, I don’t think it’s fair to Ken.” In spite of what Duncan had said about her making a fool of herself at the dinner, she knew Ken liked her and she imagined she was sticking up for him. Also, the fact that Duncan had decided to move without talking to her first was making her balky. “It’s not fair that you’ve made so important a decision without discussing it first with me.”

  “What do you know about being fair?” Duncan said. “You do lots of things without discussing them with me first.” He was thinking of the money intended as a wedding gift being spent on a trip to Dumfries, and using their landlord’s bedspread to make a dress. Disappointed that his wife wasn’t enthusiastic about the Ottawa job, he lapsed into silence, worrying his lower lip between his teeth, which he did when he was upset. Just once he wanted to hear Moranna say she was proud of him; just once he wanted her to acknowledge he was supporting them both. It didn’t seem to occur to her that she could take a paying job. For instance, the modelling opportunity his mother had told him about, why hadn’t Moranna followed it up? If he was the one bringing in all the money, then he would be the one making the decisions about where they would live.

  By early May, Duncan’s plans were finalized: he would work at the newspaper until the end of the month, after which he and Moranna would take a two-week holiday. Except for the purchase of clothes, they had been living frugally, which left them with enough money to rent a car and travel to the Highlands. Duncan charged Moranna with the responsibility of planning the trip, a challenge she took up wholeheartedly, setting the novel aside. So far she had written a dozen scenes involving Burns and his women, but having no idea how to stitch them together, was relieved to quit the novel and begin planning the trip—with Moranna the best part of any undertaking was the beginning. She wrote her father straight away, outlining the route she and Duncan would take through the Highlands to the Outer Hebrides.

  Her father had been writing to her every week, filling his letters with fond descriptions of his granddaughter, Ginger, a large red-haired baby born in October. Apart from the baby, Ian didn’t have much news, but he knew how to embellish small incidents, which made his letters appear more interesting than his life.

  To avoid the Glasgow traffic, Duncan and Moranna left Edinburgh before dawn, driving north past Loch Lomond and from there through the steeply winding mountains to Glencoe, where clouds hung over the valley in melancholy sheets of rain. They didn’t linger but continued on past inscrutable lochs, rust-coloured hills coursed with swift-moving streams and everywhere, grazing sheep. They drove to Culloden and walked the scruffy, unkempt moor, stopping to read the stone cairn honouring the valiant clansmen who died. According to Great-Aunt Hettie, Big Ian’s father, Murdoch MacKenzie, had fought at Culloden. Her great-aunt claimed that before going into battle, Murdoch had worked for a tenant farmer on the Hill of the Hoody Crow on Cromarty Firth and that his only son, Big Ian, was born in a manger.

  Moranna remembered asking, “Like Jesus Christ?”

  “Like him. When Ian was a lad, his father heeded the call and, dropping his mattock, went off to Culloden where, brave man that he was, he led the charge against the British, who were trying to break the back of the clans.”

  “Was his father killed?”

  “No, but he was badly wounded in the legs and never worked again. Big Ian supported both of them and when the clearances were underway, moved west, carrying his father on his back all the way to Loch Broom.”

  Moranna had booked accommodation on a sheep farm overlooking Loch Broom. She had chosen this particular bed and breakfast because it was close to the church where, Hettie said, Moranna’s great-great-grandparents had married. According to Hettie, before he could marry his fourteen-year-old cousin, Big Ian had waited five years at a place called Letters, which was nothing more than a slope so steep and overgrown with gorse and brambles that not even sheep could graze. At the end of the loch was Inverbroom, a sprawling country lodge that had once belonged to Henrietta’s parents and was now owned by an absentee London doctor. At the time of the marriage that branch of the MacKenzies had money, not much, but more than Big Ian. Behind the lodge was the crumbling stone foundation of a barn where Big Ian danced at the ceilidh with his nineteen-year-old bride on his shoulders. “His step so light,” Hettie said, “he could snuff out a candle with his feet.”

  “Big Ian moved his bride to Polbain, a hillside of stone crofts overlooking the Summer Isles where wind whipped the sea into peaks of gold and shaggy-maned horses stood on the edge of the mahair until the tide came in.”

  Moranna wanted to know if Hettie had seen this for herself.

  “No, but my great-grandmother described what it was like. She said it was so beautiful she didn’t want to leave. But they had to emigrate, there being no more roadwork and the fishing being poor. They owned nothing but the clothes they wore, their tools and their croft.”

  “What was their croft like?”

  “It was a stone house Big Ian rebuilt from a ruin on the hillside. It had belonged to Catherine MacKenzie, who was forced out during the clearances. She was a paraplegic and her chair had to be wheeled out to a knoll, where she watched her croft burn. They had set the roof on fire to get her out.”

  “But my great-great-grandparents weren’t burned out.”

  “No. They decided to come to Cape Breton, thinking they could make a better life here for their children.”

  From Polbain, Moranna and Duncan crossed the Minch by ferry, on their way to Lewis to see the Stones of Callanish. In spite of the rough water and steady rain, Moranna walked the deck, dressed in her slicker, wondering where her mother had been on the ferry when she fell overboard. The ferry was high-sided and Moranna thought the waves must have been mountainous that day for her mother to have been swept into the sea. Aware of a growing queasiness in her stomach, Moranna thought her mother might have felt nauseous during the crossing and climbed onto a girder to relieve her seasickness and fallen from there.

  On Lewis, the Frasers stayed in a whitewashed croft owned by a weaver, Ina MacDonald. A stoop-shouldered, wide-hipped Free Presbyterian who sang Gaelic hymns as she worked, Ina took them under her wing and, after serving oat cakes and tea, advised them not to go to Callanish until morning. “The standing stones are from Odin’s time and it isn’t wise to visit pagan idols at dusk.” It was Duncan’s idea that they visit the stones. When he was a teenager, his parents had taken him to see Stonehenge and the Ring of Brodgar and he wanted to compare them with the Callanish stones.

  The Stones of Callanish were on a hilltop where the view in every direction was unobstructed and more standing stones could be seen in the distance. Taking in the vastness of the view, Moranna imagined a time when prehistoric stones covered the countryside, uniting people for some obscure and mysterious purpose. While she wandered among the stones, Duncan studied their configuration, puzzling over what might have been an avenue with a circle in the middle. At a loss to explain the arrangement, he walked back to the tea house to ask for information, leaving Moranna alone, so she thought, among the stones.

  She was beside the large spoon-shaped stone at the centre of the circle when the woman appeared. She must have been there all along, concealed by the stone. “Don’t be afraid, dearie,” she said. “I’ll do you no harm.” She was a tall woman in an oversized sweater and a long skirt. Her hair was a thick frizzy grey, but her eyebrows were black. “I live over there,” she said, nodding toward one of the cottages scattered on the hills. “But I came over here to tell you about the stones. I could see you were r
ipe for the telling.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Moranna said. “My husband has gone to get a book that will help explain what the stones mean. He’s visited other stone circles, and although the configuration is different, he thinks they all mean more or less the same thing.”

  “You won’t find the meaning of the stones in a book,” the woman said. “You need me to tell you.” She reached out and stroked the stone, her bony fingers rubbing the scabby surface.

  “What does this stone remind you of?”

  Moranna said she didn’t know. Something about the woman frightened her. Yet she didn’t back up or move away.

  “A man’s pintle,” the woman said. “Look around you, dearie. Each of these stones is his horn of plenty.” She smirked. “As you can see, they come in all sizes.” She walked around the circle. “And this, dearie, is the mating wheel where a man and a woman came to fuck. In prehistoric times all over Britain, the men and women lived apart. The men hunted.” She waved an arm and the sweater sleeve fell away, showing a pouch of larded skin hanging from bone. “There used to be forests and wild animals all through here. Now it’s only peat. The women raised crops and children. They didn’t want to live with the men. It was better that way, better than now.”

  Moranna looked around for Duncan, but he was nowhere in sight. “Come, I’ll show you the Weeping Hill where women sacrificed their first-borns.” The woman walked ahead, stopping twice to see if Moranna was following, which she was, reluctant yet spellbound, because the woman had stirred something prurient inside her that was frighteningly, thrillingly deep. They trudged over the rumpled moor to an earth wall and on to the Weeping Hill, an overgrown tussock with a rock slab in the middle. Moranna asked why the women sacrificed their first-born children.

  “The men of Dalriada demanded it, dearie, so the women would come into heat sooner.” The woman bared her teeth in what could have been either a grin or a grimace. “You see the men wanted to grow their Seed inside the women but some men had more chances than others and planted their Seeds time and time again.”