The Interpretations

  The cover, across which he now drew slowly his right forefinger, was still glossy although a little scuffed along the edges from being pushed between other books with perhaps more robust bindings. It was a black cover with white lettering which read:

  The Sheeppark Clearances

  by J P McFarren

  There was a little cross in the corner, bottom right, which he had fought hard to retain. The printers had been against it.

  He opened the book and read, on the inside cover:

  Sheeppark Publications No. 1, 1957.

  Was it four hundred or five hundred copies he’d paid for? He couldn’t remember exactly. He’d charged 2/6d per copy but kept none of it. Straight to church funds, or was it missionary work? Yes, missionary work, that was it. Africa. The United Africa Mission. And there were to be more books, on different subjects, more books to instruct, to enlighten, to shake people from their lethargy, to point them to the Lord, to make them alive to danger. For there was danger everywhere. Change, for example. Not change itself perhaps but the dangers that attended it, the difficulties created by those who not only wanted change but insisted upon it, pushed for it, forced it on others.

  But there were to be no more books for some time. He had begun one, a few years ago, on the decline of farming, but his wife had died about that time and the writing stopped abruptly. And then, some months or perhaps a year later, when he had sat down at his desk to begin again, he felt that it really wasn’t very important any more. He put his notes in a folder and filed them away. He knew what he was doing; he knew that what he felt was normal, justifiable and even necessary. There would be a period of mourning and then things would return to some sort of order again. It would be a different kind of order but it would be a method of living and certain things, abandoned, would be taken up again. So, even as he put aside his notes for the second pamphlet he was able to tell himself that it was just a further delay, that the need to complete this work would return. It was a flaming sword and he would reach out again and take hold of it. But he never did. A few years passed and he never did.

  But he wrote letters. One of these, clipped out of the Dalmore Herald and folded in two, was employed as a bookmark in The Sheeppark Clearances. He had forgotten about it and glanced at it now. ‘My Dear Sir . . . take the opportunity offered by your pages . . . refer to your recently announced anti-litter campaign under the title “Highland Clearance” . . . certainly applaud this initiative . . . the town can always benefit . . . litter an indictment of a care-less society . . . must remonstrate however . . . choice of title for this campaign . . . trivialization of a subject of great historical significance . . . a slight upon the memory of those who suffered . . . intolerable privation . . . death of Elsie McKillop . . . remembrance to be associated with something of greater dignity . . . at best an unfortunate choice of name . . . not a subject for levity . . .’

  He smiled. It had seemed so important at the time. It was important. But then along came the bridge.

  When the idea was first put forward he could see immediately the immense upheaval that the construction of the bridge would cause. He even decided that at some point he would write another pamphlet: The Duie Bridge: The Story of a Disaster (Sheeppark Publications No. 2). But at the beginning he had been too busy writing letters to the press. And they had published them – The Dalmore Herald, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, The North Star – the first few letters, anyway, until they grew tired, it seemed. But he didn’t tire, or at least not till much later. On the contrary, he gained strength from every rebuff, from every rejection of his views. He worked harder and harder in his opposition and there was certainly no time then to think of writing a pamphlet. He wrote more letters, he set up a committee, he spoke on the radio and once he even appeared, although briefly, on television.

  Every day, from the arrival of the first surveyor, he would walk down from the manse to Chalmers’ field to see what was happening, to see if there were any delays in the programme of construction. He saw the lorries arrive, and the cranes, and the barges that were moored in the middle of the firth. He saw the arrival of more and more machinery and with it he witnessed the gradual disappearance of Chalmers’ field, turned into mud in winter and dust in summer and then tarmacked over.

  Then one day when he went out to look at the bridge he saw that it was different. It wasn’t a couple of stranded towers any more, attended by cranes and lorries, it wasn’t a building site; it was a bridge. The minute amendments to the structure of the previous day had somehow transformed it overnight from being a jumble, an apparently random array of objects, into something that was recognizably a bridge. It might have been the addition of a cable, a few feet of carriageway or merely the removal of a crane or two but this thing, this monstrous construction, was no longer going to be a bridge, it was a bridge. It was unfinished but it was a bridge nevertheless. It was then that he realized he had lost this battle, that it was too late now. It was then that he began to feel tired.

  Much later, when the bridge was complete, after the protests had finished, months after his arrest during his final protest, he woke up very early one morning. It was a cloudless day in early June and even at six o’clock the sun was high and strong. The thin fabric of the curtains on his bedroom window could not deny its power and the room was filled with light which explored with apparent eagerness the corners and surfaces that had been in shadow for months. The light reached his pillow and then fell on his face and woke him.

  He got up and drew the curtains back, admitting even more light, though this seemed hardly possible. When he looked out he saw that it was one of those days when everything was as near to perfection as things might be in this temporal world. His first reaction was to kneel down and say a prayer of thanks. This prayer was delivered with sincerity and humility. Then he stood up again, placed his hands on the window ledge and looked out.

  There was the bridge, in full view as always. He saw the towers, the tall steel columns which looked like silver in the sunlight. The cables that depended from the first platform and from the very top of each tower, out towards the middle of the bridge and back towards the land, looked like drawn out threads of glass. Even the steel fence that edged the carriageway was bright and polished. And nothing was flat or straight; everything seemed to be curved. The bridge was constructed of shallow curves which meant that the sun, as it rose higher, moved along shaped surfaces and made them shine.

  This sudden revelation that he could view the bridge as a thing of beauty both surprised and appalled him.

  He decided to go out straight away. He put on yesterday’s clothes – he even left the church key behind – and went out by the back door. There was a narrow path that led down to the Crask burn and then up to the Top Road, the old road to Dalmore which now joined the southern approach to the Duie Bridge.

  Within fifteen minutes he was standing on the edge of the grass embankment only a couple of hundred yards short of the bridge itself. He reached the couplings, like giant knuckles, which anchored the longest of the suspension cables to the carriageway. Farther on – a few hundred feet, a few hundred yards? – was the south tower. Today it wasn’t grey but silver. From where he stood he could look along the curve of the nearest cable and up to the very top of the tower.

  At one time he had learned the dimensions of the bridge, its length, its height, its weight, the time it took to build, the number of men involved in its construction and so on, but he couldn’t remember any more. The figures were large and that was all that mattered. But no, there was one statistic he could remember – the number of men who had died during the building of the bridge. Four. One man had fallen from a crane and three had been swept off a barge in the Duie Firth during a storm and had drowned. Was this loss of life worth it?

  There was hardly any traffic. He stood on the grass verge and allowed the sunlight to warm his face. He became aware, for the first time, not so much of the size of the bridge but of the immense amount of effort that must
have gone into designing, planning and constructing it.

  And someone had told him that the view offered of the firth from the centre of the bridge was outstanding. You could see the coast north of Dalmore and you could see all the way up the Skiach to Sheeppark and beyond. Yes, it had been Skinner, the builder, who had told him with laughter that it was like a map, only full size with hills and glens and sea spread out before you so you could touch them.

  For a moment he thought how nice it would be to walk out onto the bridge, all the way to the middle, to see the view for himself. But of course he could not do this because he had made a promise never to set foot on the bridge. Perhaps he could justify walking to the first tower which was only a little way away, not really onto the bridge at all. According to one quite reasonable definition, this structure only really became a bridge between the two towers. If he were to walk to the first tower but no farther, perhaps this would be permissible.

  He took a step forward and then stopped. At that moment an articulated lorry rushed by him, heading north to Dalmore and the noise of its passing drowned out what he shouted at the bridge, three words, rising in force and volume: ‘No! No! No!’

  He turned his back on the bridge and knelt done on the grass to pray for forgiveness. Then he got to his feet slowly, with difficulty, and stood for a few moments looking at the land, the hills, in front of him. He walked back to the manse as quickly as he could.

  He took a sip of tea and found that it was now quite cold. He realised he had been reading for over half an hour. It was time now for prayer and then bed. But he skipped forward to the last page of his pamphlet and read the final paragraph:

  It is indeed a cruel irony that the site of this infamous deed should be called Sheeppark. For those who were evicted, those poor people thrust into even greater poverty, some even sent to their deaths on the ships that were supposed to transport them to a new life abroad, all these unfortunate souls were replaced on the hills and glens of their birth by other colonizers: sheep. Sheep in their tens of thousands were brought into the Highlands for one very simple reason: money. Sheep were cheaper to look after and the income they generated was higher. Consequently they were held in greater esteem than the people who had lived on this land for centuries.

  He closed the pamphlet. Forty-eight pages. Of course the story was more complicated than the one he had told and he knew this. He could have written a book ten times as long and still not done justice to the subject. But what he had attempted was a distillation, a search for essence, and such an approach required brevity. He had wanted to write more about the invasion of the sheep, the . . . the . . . He tried to remember the name of the breed but he couldn’t. It was one of those words that irritated him because no matter how hard he tried to remember it he could not. He took his mug, half-full of cold tea, to the kitchen. He began to make his way through the alphabet. Angus – no, cattle . . . black-face – sheep but not the breed he was trying to recall . . . Border Leicester, no . . . C, D, E, F . . . Friesian – no, cattle again. He placed the washed mug on the draining board. No, it was gone. Who could he ask . . . ? No. F, G, H . . . H, something about H. Hill sheep, hill land. Hills, yes, yes, a range of . . .

  Cheviot.

  He felt a measure of relief that was far greater than this tiny achievement warranted. Cheviot. It was important for him to remember the name because names were essential. You had to know names. You had to learn them, memorise them because if you knew a name you were close to essence, you were approaching control. Nobody could deny that.

  9

  Mike Delvan saw the small black figure in the distance and knew it was McCall, the police inspector, pacing his way along the damp walkway towards him. No one else would be out in such weather.

  Mike was standing in the centre of the bridge, right in the middle of the span, exactly beneath the lowest point of the curving cable whose arc was more than half a mile long from saddle to saddle. Below him the firth was empty of water, the sea sucked away by the low spring tide and the river channel reduced to a trickle by the recent dry weather now so spectacularly ended. There was more water in the air above and below and around him, huge spaces filled by the heavy persistent rain that had started three hours before. It had come over the hills from the west and, looking west now, Mike could see no break in the stubborn grey sky.

  He was wearing an oilskin jacket and jeans. No hat. His head and legs were wet, his hair dripping, blue denim soaked through. But his feet were dry in their dubbined army boots.

  The walkway was separated from the road by the cable suspenders and an interlock net fence ten feet high. McCall had driven past a few minutes before, tooting his horn. He must have parked at the north end of the bridge and was walking back.

  He was nearer now and Mike could hear his approach, his police issue shoes, steel heel-tipped, striking the tarmac of the walkway, the occasional beat missing as a puddle cushioned the shoe’s landing.

  ‘Did it have to be here?’ he asked as he arrived. Rain dripped from his hat and from the hem of his black coat. He was wearing black leather gloves but only the fingers of these could be seen as he had withdrawn his hands as far as possible inside his sleeves.

  ‘I wanted to show you something,’ Mike said.

  ‘Hope it’s something I can see. Doesn’t dissolve in water, does it?’

  ‘It is water,’ Mike said. ‘Or lack of it.’

  ‘Lack? Lack?’ McCall came up and stood beside Mike at the rail. He wiped water from the curved surface with a gloved hand and then gripped the rail with both hands. They looked out towards the west and the origin of the rain. ‘What’s this about lack of water?’

  ‘Down there.’ Mike pointed to the firth below, to the bed of the firth.

  ‘Spring tide,’ McCall said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Don’t often get it as low as this.’

  ‘No water in the river,’ Mike said, ‘and offshore breezes. Otherwise it’s like this twice a month.’

  ‘You’ve been doing some research then?’

  ‘A little. For example, what was the state of the tide on the night of the race when Tom disappeared?’

  McCall turned to look at him. There was water dripping from the rim of his hat’s peak. There was water dripping from the end of his nose. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Almost exactly. Maybe even a bit lower. There was a spring tide and it was close to the equinox. Very low water.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes. Low tide was about a quarter of an hour after the race started.’

  ‘Let’s walk back,’ McCall said.

  They walked north, slowly. They walked towards the north tower but before they reached it, they stopped and looked over the side again. Directly below them, through a hundred and fifty feet of rain, they could see the channel of the River Skiach, reduced to a thin dull grey wire lying crooked upon the wet banks of shingle.

  ‘Do you think you could jump from here,’ Mike said, ‘and land in the river?’

  ‘Not much chance of that, is there?’

  ‘No. Almost none.’

  ‘So that’s blown your theory then,’ McCall said.

  ‘My theory?’

  ‘The escape theory. Jump into the water, swim to the shore. Disappear.’

  Mike was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘At one time I thought it was maybe something like that, yes. But remember, your theory’s blown out as well.’

  ‘Oh? How’s that then?’

  ‘Because if he did jump, he’d certainly be dead. And if he’s dead, where’s the body?’

  ‘Washed out to sea.’

  ‘No, no. No, that doesn’t work. And you should know this. Maybe you do but you’re just not admitting it.’

  ‘Not admitting what?’

  ‘Well, we’ve had five people who’ve committed suicide by jumping off this bridge. Five. And all five bodies were found within a week. Four were washed up on the coast north of Dalmore and one up there . . .’ He poin
ted inland. ‘Eileen Tulloch, the only one to jump when the tide was coming in. Anyway, five. All found. So where’s Tom’s body?’

  McCall said, ‘Well, I am a bit surprised it hasn’t turned up yet. But it will. I’m sure it will.’

  ‘No, it won’t. Anyway, I have another theory.’

  ‘Oh yes? Does it involve a helicopter?’

  Mike ignored this. ‘Let’s walk a bit further,’ he said.

  They approached the north tower.

  ‘OK,’ Mike said. ‘You just wait here and close your eyes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just close your eyes and count to twenty.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be taking the mickey by any chance, would you?’

  ‘Look. Nobody’s watching. Close your eyes or just turn round and admire the view. Count to twenty and come and get me. It’ll only take half a minute. Go on.’

  ‘OK, OK . . .’ He turned to the rail and looked at the weather rushing in from the west. ‘I’ll admire the rain.’

  Mike set off at a run towards the north end of the bridge while McCall counted. McCall heard him go, the first few paces anyway, before a lorry travelling north to Dalmore passed by only a few feet away and the noise of the engine and of the tyres on the wet road drowned out the sound. When the lorry had passed he couldn’t hear Mike any more and when he opened his eyes at fifteen instead of twenty, he couldn’t see him any more either.

  The only thing between McCall and the north end of the bridge was the north tower, its upstream leg, rising slim and silver between the carriageway and the walkway, its curved section pushing out onto the walkway itself. McCall walked slowly past the tower leg. No sign of Mike anywhere. The walkway was empty. He went to the rail and looked out, up the Skiach Glen, mostly obscured by rain. Then he glanced back towards the tower leg. Mike was standing at the railing, leaning against it, only a few feet away.

  McCall seemed more amused than surprised. ‘C’mon, then,’ he said, ‘how did you do that?’