by A. D. Scott
Rob was distracted by the extra work, plus rehearsals for his band’s upcoming first night in front of an audience of more than fifty-five, but he enjoyed being around Neil, saw him as a man of the big wide world, a man who had crossed the Atlantic on an aeroplane.
Hector had spent the past weeks scuttling around like a demented guinea pig. Now responsible for all the content of the sports pages, plus his usual work covering school events, town and county council gatherings, and the occasional accident and emergency, he still had time to notice Neil. And have reservations.
Neil paid him no heed and, although used to being ignored, Hector was used to being ignored in an inclusive way, as though he was the Gazette’s mascot, or resident genius, as he thought of himself. No, Neil’s charm did not work on Hec, because Hec had never been caught in Neil’s searchlight.
“Have you time for a coffee this afternoon?” Joanne phoned Chiara, catching her as she was about to leave for the café.
“For you—always.” They laughed. “But no coffee, my wee one kicks enough as it is.” Despite her pregnancy, “slow down” was not in Chiara’s vocabulary, so work continued, a glass of red wine with dinner stayed; only her five cups of coffee a day changed.
Later, sitting in their favorite window table, Joanne told Chiara about the plan for the trip to the west coast.
“Of course the girls can stay with us. Why don’t you leave them on Friday evening, that way you can set off without rushing.”
“That would be great. They hate getting up in the dark, Jean especially—she is still scared of the dark and Neil says we should be on the road by seven.”
“Oh well, if Neil says seven then it’s seven.”
Joanne did not catch the sarcasm; she was too busy thinking about Neil.
“He’s looking at the more recent migration to Canada—turn of the century,” Joanne was telling Chiara. “He laughs about a people who leave one stretch of barren rock for another, in places like Newfoundland and the southern tip of New Zealand.”
“Very attached to barren rocks, you Scots,” Chiara teased.
“And Neil says . . . ” Joanne saw Chiara rolling her eyes. “What?”
“Have you any other topic of conversation? Like . . . ” Chiara saw what she had done to Joanne; like a bright wee sailing boat hurtling along and suddenly the wind drops, her smile, her happiness, came to a standstill. “Oh, Jo, I’m sorry. I was teasing. It’s only that . . . I don’t want to see you . . . ” Make another mistake was what she was going to say. “Me and my big mouth.” Chiara mock-slapped herself. “You know you’re the sister I never had, you’re family. And I’m wrong. You’re right. Life is short. Go off with your gorgeous Canadian and enjoy yourself.”
Joanne was blushing. “I’m still in shock over what happened to Mrs. Smart . . . but it also makes me want to live my life.”
“And life is precious.” Chiara took her hand. “I mean what I said. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it.” She stopped herself from saying, “Be careful,” but only just.
Chiara had reservations. Not about Neil but for her dearest friend. She watched Joanne falling. She knew Neil was passing through. She saw Joanne dreaming. She could see Neil’s charm. She also saw he was ambitious. She did not know but she suspected her friend’s fantasy; the one where Neil proposed and they all went to Canada and lived happily ever after.
Chiara knew a divorce was almost impossible for a woman; a man was more easily forgiven. She knew that for a woman, the financial consequences were often dire. She knew how the town would label Joanne—and her children. She was completely certain that Neil Stewart cared for Joanne, but for him this was the working equivalent of a holiday romance. And she was scared for her friend.
Neil had been telling Joanne of the trip for a week or so.
“I’m off to the west coast via Strath Oykel,” he had said. “I want to look up the parish register in a tiny church near Lochinver.”
“A wee kirk”—she laughed—“‘tiny church’ makes you sound English.”
“Heaven forbid!” He held up his hands in mock horror. “Why don’t you come? You can be my interpreter.”
“I’d love to.” She meant it; the rain and the cold and the dark of the Northwest in late autumn did not matter; being with Neil was all that mattered.
The trip arranged, the girls taken care of, Joanne was watching Neil sorting papers on the table. It was clear he knew what he was looking for and where to look. He had names of arrivals to Canada and relevant dates, lists of families and familial relationships and the parishes they came from, names of ships, ships’ manifestos, all neatly typed in columns, with space between questions allowing for the answers. What he needed was to confirm his research in the Scottish parish records.
To one side was a photograph.
“That’s your mother.” Joanne recognized the photograph Neil had shown Jenny McPhee.
Neil pushed it towards her. “It was taken a week before she left the glens for the last time.”
The photograph in the cardboard folding frame was protected by tissue paper but had yellowed. The lucky white heather his mother had brought with her to Canada had long since disintegrated. He had promised himself to pick more, but it was too late in the season for heather, and very few knew where white heather grew—only the tinkers know, his mother had told him.
Joanne examined the picture, but the woman’s face was hard to read, her eyes squinting as she looked into the sun. Her clothes looked as though she were about to go to church, her hat her Sunday best, was pulled down—to hold it tight against a ferocious wind, most likely, Joanne thought. In the background, the twin peaks of the distant mountain were distinctive and strange. On the far edge of the picture, although faint and faded, was the unmistakable shape of Travelers’ caravans and two horses. She didn’t like to mention them, although she didn’t know why.
“Where was this taken?” Joanne asked.
“At the far end of Strath Oykel, so my mother said. This was before she was married; ‘just a lass’ was how she put it. And that mountain is called Suilven.”
“It’s certainly striking.”
“It is. And we will see it on Saturday.” He looked at her, and she looked back but could not hold his gaze for more than a fraction of a second before turning away, knowing that her face was growing pink.
“Looking forward to it?” he asked.
“Of course. But I wouldn’t count on seeing the mountain. There’s so much mist and rain in those parts you sometimes can’t see more than a few yards.”
“Maybe. But we’ll have fun anyway.”
She looked away. The significance of her decision was completely lost on him. But she was going on this trip, no matter the consequences. A cocktail of guilt, pleasure, excitement, and dread made the skin on her arms tingle, and she crossed them, hugging herself, telling herself over and over, it’s just a harmless day out to the west coast. That’s all.
* * *
Joanne had asked Neil to pick her up on the riverbank near the Islands. It was not that she was ashamed, just that she did not want to be seen getting into his car this early on a Saturday morning.
When he drew up in the borrowed car, Joanne felt a flash of doubt. Too late for cold feet, she told herself.
“Right on time.” She smiled as she got into the car. “I thought you hated early mornings.”
“Not hate, more not used to them.” He smiled back. “After years on a daily newspaper where I was lucky to finish by midnight, my body is not used to early.”
They followed the river back to the main road north, crossed the canal, passed through the fishing village strung out between the road, the railway line, and the firth. The sight of a famous battle, Neil told Joanne.
She laughed, saying, “You know more about my town than I do.”
Saturday mornings, the roads were busy in the opposite direction; people coming into town from the glens and the coastal villages to shop. Many came into town from Beauly and Strathcon
on and Strathglass, from Kiltarlity and Conon for a big shop or for clothes and shoes, new washing machines and televisions. The border of Ross & Cromarty was a mere fifteen miles away, and the people from there went to their own county town, not only to shop but to catch up on the gossip. And Dingwall was fine for Wellington boots and farmwear but not for fashion and teashops and staring at electrical appliances you couldn’t afford.
Neil laughed when he saw the first major road sign. “‘North,’” he read. “Well, that’s simple. I suppose we’ll meet another sign and it will say ‘West.’”
“Or ‘North-west.’”
“Or ‘North-north-west.’”
The banter lightened the trepidation she was feeling at being on such a momentous adventure. All her senses acute, the air in the car seemed charged with lust—although that was not a word she would acknowledge, as ladies did not feel lust, and besides, lust was a sin.
“The turn-off should be marked Bonar Bridge or maybe Ardgay, or hopefully both.” Joanne had the map and as navigator she was happy to have something to concentrate on.
“Ardgay.” He sounded the name as though it were a spell. “My mother talked of visiting relatives around there.”
“Just past Evanton on the main road, there’s a shortcut to Ardgay, but it looks pretty winding and steep—over the hills not around them.”
“Over the hills and far away . . . ” Neil chanted. “The road will be no problem in Countess Sokolov’s car.”
“Countess . . . ”
“Mr. Beauchamp Carlyle’s sister, Rosemary, married a Russian count in Shanghai in the nineteen thirties, I believe. Although she prefers plain Mrs., I love knowing that I know a countess.”
“How do you know them?”
“I had a letter of introduction from a solicitor. She and her brother have given me access to their family archives. There is such interesting material in it from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . . . ”
Joanne half listened as Neil rattled on recounting births and deaths and marriages along the Fraser matriarchal line of the Beauchamp Carlyle family, feeling altogether inadequate. Much too elevated company for me, she was thinking when the sign for the turn-off appeared and they almost missed it.
“Left,” she called out, “left here.”
With a squeal of tires and the engine moaning, he changed down gears, propelling the car into a much narrower road. Fortunately nothing was coming the other way.
“I’m sorry.” Joanne was shaken.
“I enjoyed it—gave me a chance to show off my driving skills.” Neil was laughing. He reached over and patted her on the thigh. “Not too much of a shock for you?”
Not the driving, she thought. But the hand on her knee burned her skin, or so she fancied. And once again, she was scared by the momentousness of the journey.
“I’m fine,” she replied, “and the road is really bonnie.”
The minor road wound up over hills, down into glens, crossed stone bridges, climbing higher and higher until they reached an open stretch of moor and forest. The sky was vast and grey. The firth spreading below was a lighter shade of grey, the hills a green-grey and the outlines of mountains on the horizon to the north a deep dark foreboding grey. Only a splash of yellow on a gorse bush next to the roadside, and the sulfur-yellow patches of lichen on the drystone dyke that measured the hillside into quadrants, broke the monochrome of the vista.
They clambered out of the car, pulling on raincoats.
“Well, I see what you meant about the visibility,” Neil said.
“This is nothing,” Joanne told him, “at least we can see. And at least it’s not real rain, only a light mist of a rain.”
He laughed. “Only a light mist of a rain . . . I’ll remember that when I’m soaked through.”
The journey down to Ardgay and Bonar Bridge was short, so they decided not to stop but to push on up Strath Oykel hoping the weather would clear the farther west they drove.
Crossing the bridge over the narrow end of Dornoch Firth, they crossed into Sutherland. For the length of the glen—a fault line stretching from east coast to west coast—the road was mostly in Sutherland, but sometimes in Ross & Cromarty; the contours of the rivers and history had made manifest the ancient boundaries.
At first the glen was indeed bonnie. Drystone dykes were everywhere. Joanne was counting the miles of them—Are these Scotland’s version of the Great Wall of China? she was thinking—counting the hours, the days, the years of backbreaking labor they must have taken to build.
They reached the Oykel bridge and the end of the walls, the end of “bonnie.” Now it was a landscape that could well be described as a terrestrial version of the moon, and the higher and bleaker the landscape became, the quieter Neil was.
Joanne did not notice; she was half dozing in the warmth and the leather seats and the comfort of his company, dreaming half-dreams, unable to fall completely asleep—being this close to him, shut in against the weather, the past, the future, being here with him alone on this dreich Saturday in the wilds of Sutherland, made every part of her, skin, hair, heart, and knees, feel she was as enchanted as a faerie princess briefly in this realm to capture a lover.
Neil, feeling as desolate as the land they were driving through, did not take in the dancing white heads of the bog-cotton. He did not see the pattern and color and texture of the lichens. He did not notice the beauty of the tiny plants and minuscule flowers and shrubs on the verge of the road, in the bog, growing in cracks in the rocks, clinging to life as surely as the people had and did. And in the emptiness, in the vast openness not broken by tree or by man, he did not feel the joy of the proximity to heaven, or the heavens.
He felt cheated.
This is what those displaced Scots were longing for; this is what they were devastated to leave behind. Moors are so barren they’re pitiable. The leaving of this wilderness broke the hearts of those clansmen and women. It made them, their songs, their stories, their music, this landscape that continues to haunt every generation of the scattered diaspora, the progeny of the Highland Clearances.
Were all my mother’s memories exaggerations, falsehoods?
At first he thought it a mirage. Then the shroud lifted and he saw it again, this time for more than a minute. He kept driving. There it was again, no mistaking it. Suilven.
He pulled over. Switched off the engine. Joanne sat up. The mist parted. She saw the mountain, and said nothing. This was his moment.
He stared at his touchstone, his nemesis, his mountain. He got out. Joanne watched him standing, staring, as still as the silence and the air around them. For once the landscape did not echo to the sound of running falling water, nor the frequent croak of carrion crows or the cough of sheep or the rustle of wind—there being nothing to rustle. Leaving space for him to absorb the encounter, she stared at the twin peaks and her heart was glad. Glad for him, but also inspired by the sight.
There is something about that mountain, she thought, and like his mother’s photograph, it will be forever imprinted on my memory.
But, as he contemplated the sight of his pilgrimage, he found it wanting; too round, too bleak, no color. His sacred mountain was not high enough, not sharp enough.
“It’s just as it is in your mother’s picture,” she said as she walked over to join him. “Really bonnie.”
“Joanne, this could never be called bonnie. Stark, threatening, menacing, ominous, never bonnie.”
“Aye, you’re right, not bonnie, but beautiful and . . . primordial.” Joanne was staring into the distance, her back to him. She felt he had been reprimanding her for a lack of vocabulary, but no matter what he said, she saw the mountain as spectacular and yes, beyond bonnie. It was beautiful.
The clouds were not lifting, but the light started to brighten, blue shafts waving through the slipstream like carnival streamers, widening, until there was more sky than cloud.
Suilven, with rounded mountains framing it and thin silver slivers of loch, the
ir beginnings and endings unclear, lay on the horizon shining clear.
Suilven all sparkling; caught in a shaft of light of biblical dimensions, the mountain seemingly growing taller, sharper, the twin peaks revealing themselves as one fractured ridge with deep dark rivulets running like guy ropes to anchor it to the land.
Yet still it did not satisfy him.
Neil shook himself, shivering like a dog shaking off water.
“Let’s drive on a little further. See if we can find the exact spot where the picture was taken.”
Over the next few miles, Joanne, sensing his detachment from the surroundings, assumed it was her. She was desperate to please him, searching out the window for some rock some lochan some cleft in the landscape that might please him. Suddenly she saw it. “Neil, is this where the picture was taken?”
“Maybe.”
He got out. He walked towards the shore of the lochan. He lifted his head to stare at the mountaintops, sniffing the wind like a wolf investigating new territory. Now, not only could he see it, he began to feel it, feel the day, the sunlit day. More likely the sunny quarter of an hour, he thought, and equally cold.
He could not dismiss the sensation. He could feel it. And he could feel her, the woman he had known as mother, see her raise her hand to her brow to squint into the camera, laughing, probably saying, Hurry up, it’s freezing in this wind, to the photographer, a person whose name she said she couldn’t remember.
A small cluster of trees bent at the waist by the winds, huddled at the far end of the lochan. Joanne thought she recognized the spot from the photograph—yes, she was sure, this was where the tinker’s horse-drawn caravans had stood. The only place of shelter for many a mile, it was a good place to set up camp, make a fire, fetch water, rest the horses, catch brown trout. And the view of Suilven, sitting plumb in the middle, was a marker, a pyramid, a giant standing stone, as spiritual as any in civilization.