The Loud Halo

by Lillian Beckwith

  ‘Well, I never!’ I said, lapping it all up without a qualm of conscience. ‘Is Barabal married?’

  ‘Not at all.’ The nurse’s tone implied that no man would have been fool enough to marry Barabal.

  ‘Who’s the father supposed to be, then?’ I asked, overcome with curiosity.

  ‘Nobody here anyway. They say she went to Glasgow for it.’ The nurse was still contemptuous. ‘She was there for a couple of months in the summer, anyway.’ She opened the door and stepped out into a drizzle of dusky rain. ‘I wish I’d remembered about Barabal being Alistair Beag’s sister when he was shouting insults at me the other day,’ she said. ‘I could have told him if anyone had been anywhere too long it was his sister in Glasgow.’ She got halfway down the path and I stood in the doorway watching her. ‘Change the nurse like they change the bull, indeed.’ she was muttering as she went out through the gate. ‘I wish I’d remembered it.’

  Kirsty

  ‘Ach, that woman!’ commented Morag.

  I had just told her that I was on my way to visit Kirsty, Johnny Comic’s sister, to see if she would sell me a bag of potatoes.

  ‘Aye,’ went on Morag, ‘I doubt she’ll sell you a bag, though she’d have but one left to do herself. Let her see your money an’ she’ll not be able to say no to you.’

  Morag was standing in the doorway of her cottage, bending over a rubbing-board which stood in a zinc bath of soapy water. The washed clothes she had flung aside into another tin bath which stood outside catching the wind-harried douche of water from a piece of leaky guttering, for it was still raining torrentially. (In Bruach where there was no piped water we washed on wet days and, if it was calm enough, optimistically hung out the washing on the line to wait for the dry day that would come. With this treatment—sometimes hours, sometimes days, of crystal clear rain coursing through them—our clothes needed no artificial bleaches to get that ‘extra whiteness’.)

  ‘You do dislike Kirsty, don’t you?’ I said. Morag looked shocked.

  ‘Ach, it’s no’ that I mislike her at all. It’s just the way of her.’

  ‘What way?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, mo ghaoil, I’m tellin’ you, she’s that grand seemin’ an’ whenever any of us women hereabouts that’s been in service go to speak to her we always get the feelin’ that the first thing she’s goin’ to say to us is, “And can you do a little flannel washing, my dear?” ’ She stretched her neck and screwed up her lips to convey the condescension of a duchess and looked at me to see if I understood.

  ‘It’s what the mistresses always used to ask when I was girl in service,’ she supplied by way of explanation.

  ‘Was Kirsty never in service herself?’ I asked.

  ‘No, indeed, she was not. Not service as we knew it, anyway. All my fine Kirsty did was to push one of them rich invalid ladies around in a wheelbarrow.’ She tossed her head haughtily. Drawing aside the bath so that I could step round it, she resumed, ‘I saw you comin’ so I called Erchy to pour out a cup of tea for you.’ Erchy was sitting on the bench under the window with his elbows resting on the back of it. He had taken off his oilskins but his cap was still on his head, pushed well back so that it would not drip over his face. With a limp gesture, of acknowledgement he indicated that the cup of tea beside him on the bench was for me.

  Opposite Erchy and within convenient spitting distance of the fire sat Neilly Ally, an old uncle of Morag’s, who had arrived unheralded on the bus one evening, as crofters’ relatives appeared to have a habit of doing, and who had been in semi-residence with her ever since. He took his pipe out of his mouth briefly to say ‘Aye’ by way of greeting. Although Neilly had lived in Glasgow for over fifty years he had not shed the aura of the croft and, sitting there with his disordered white hair, his blue seaman’s jersey and his dark crumpled trousers he looked as though he might just have come in from the shore after hauling his boat. There was a bowl of soapy water on the floor beside him—another acknowledgement of bounteous rain—and his newly washed feet resting on the of slab driftwood that did duty as a kerb looked as though they had been more accustomed to paddling in peaty burns than treading Glasgow’s pavements. In the intervals of puffing his pipe and spitting uninhibitedly he was engaged in scraping the tar off a netting needle, a task which appeared to require a disproportionate amount of concentration.

  ‘Well,’ said Erchy, rousing himself, ‘are you pleased with the weather?’

  ‘I am not,’ I replied. ‘I’m tired of this rain, rain, rain, day after day. I can’t get anything done.’

  Neilly Ally ceased his scraping momentarily. ‘’Tis no’ as bad as in the Bible when it rained forty days and forty nights,’ he soothed.

  ‘How do you know? You weren’t there,’ said Erchy pertly.

  The old man stared aloofly through the window above Erchy’s head. ‘Was I no’, then?’ he enquired in a tone that implied there could be some doubt about it, and glancing again at his white spongy-looking feet I almost believed there might be.

  Morag came in, wiping her hands on the edges of her coat. “You’re not sittin’ down, Miss Peckwitt,’ she chided me.

  ‘Not as wet as I am,’ I told her. ‘I’m more comfortable standing.’

  She picked up the teapot and tilting it drained the remains of the tea into her own cup.

  ‘This weather,’ she grumbled. ‘You’d think the sky would have got tired of flingin’ the rain at us the way it’s been doin’. I don’t remember weather like this when I was a girl. Wind we had, but not all this rain.’

  ‘They say the bombs has changed it all,’ put in Erchy, ‘but ach, I don’t believe it’s that at all.’

  Neilly, who had been sitting in an offended silence since Erchy’s previous remark, now sat up. With great deliberation he put the netting needle on the table and placed his pipe beside it.

  ‘’Tis no’ the bombs,’ he pronounced, fixing us with an impressive blue gaze. ‘It started before the bombs, I can tell you.’

  ‘Aye?’ encouraged Erchy.

  ‘I’m tellin’ you, what spoiled the weather altogether was when that ship the Titanic hit that iceberg. The weather’s never been the same since that day.’ He fitted his pipe back between his lips and took up his netting needle again, indifferent to our varied expressions.

  ‘Aye?’ murmured Erchy politely.

  ‘Aye?’ repeated Morag curiously.

  ‘Aye?’ I echoed faintly.

  Erchy changed the subject. ‘Did I hear you sayin’ you was goin’ to Tornish?’ His voice was only faintly interrogative.

  ‘Yes, I’m going to call on Kirsty.’

  ‘Ach, that woman!’ spluttered Erchy through a mouthful of tea.

  It was always the same whenever anyone mentioned the name of Kirsty. ‘Ach, that woman!’ would be the rejoinder. The tone might be disparaging, combative, outraged or contemptuous but the phrase prefaced any further comment no matter how her name cropped up in the conversation, and it amused me that the woman should appear to go out of her way to get herself so much disliked.

  Sooner or later Kirsty mortally offended everyone with whom she came into contact and yet the strange thing was that she was never ostracised. It would be safe to say, I think, that she was completely unloved but never hated. The women disliked her intensely during the few minutes’ altercation she permitted herself to have with them from time to time and from which she always emerged victorious. The men detested her temporarily and mumbled epithets for a few days after she had humiliated them, which she did with great deliberation but without apparent malice. But her acid comments on neighbours were too much relished for enlivening the ceilidhs for there to be any risk of her being ignored for long and her reputation for always providing a ‘good dram’ for any man who did an odd job for her ensured that she was well looked after.

  A rigid Presbyterian, she had been known to refuse point blank a lift from church in a visitor’s car one stormy Sabbath with the words: ‘Some may not care what becomes of their s
ouls but others know what is right from what is wrong.’ And when the much discomfited minister had put his head out of the window of the car and assured Kirsty that it was no sin —‘Wasn’t he himseif taking the chance of it?’—she had shrivelled him back into his seat with the retort, ‘Maybe it is no sin for you, but I’m takin’ no risks with my soul.’ The rest of the congregation still within earshot had been quietly outraged. As they said afterwards, ‘Wasn’t it a wild wet night anyway for such a walk an’ after all wasn’t the minister himself only gettin’ a lift to Kirsty’s own house where he always lodged on a Sunday night because there was no bus back to his village until the Monday morning, poor man.’ I have often wondered which of them asked the blessing on the cold supper they would have shared that night.

  Erchy stood up. ‘Ach, if you’re goin’ that way I suppose I might just as well come with you,’ he volunteered, setting his cap with the peak at the back in deference to the wild weather. ‘I was thinkin’ it was time I went to see Dugan about some rams an’ it’s on my way.’

  ‘See and take care Kirsty doesn’t get a hold of you,’ Morag called out to him insinuatingly as we started off.

  ‘Hell, no!’ returned Erchy. He bestowed upon me what from someone less unsophisticated might have been a leer but from him was only a crumpled smile.

  ‘You heard about that?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘tell me.’

  ‘Well, I’d just done a bit of cementin’ for her. That bit of path you mind, down by her shed. When I’d finished she had my strupak ready an’ we had a wee ceilidh an’ then she poured me out a good dram. She didn’t take one herself an’ I was sittin’ by the fire drinkin’ mine down an’ feelin’ good inside when she said all of a sudden, “Erchie, did I ever tell you about the time I saw a naked man?” God! I near dropped the glass out of my hand I was that scared, an’ I was sweatin’ that much I thought the drops would run down an’ spoil my whisky.’ (I should perhaps mention that in Gaeldom there is no age at which a woman ceases to be regarded as a seductress.) ‘Then she went on tellin’ me that when she was a girl she was standin’ on the shore an’ she saw a man come out of the water an’ walk up the beach an’ he had nothin’ on at all! She ran all the way home an’ told her mother an’ all her mother did was to give her a good thrashin’ for not shuttin’ her eyes I can tell you,’ said Erchy with a grunt, ‘I finished my whisky an’ grabbed my coat an’ was off out of the house as fast as I could go, an’ that old cailleach just stood in the door an’ watched me an’ she was laughin’ that funny way she has, you know? Indeed, I believe she did it on purpose, just to see me sweat.’

  We picked our way through the rivulet that was normally a dry sheep-track to the open moor where the wind, still full of the smell of tangle, doubled its strength, threatening to tear the buttons off our oilskins, whipping our clothes against our legs and rattling the rain against our sou’westers, so that all other sound than the plodding of our boots was shut out. With chins tucked resolutely down into our coat collars and gloved hands hooked into pockets (the latter filled with rain too easily to plunge our hands deep into them) we battled to the comparative shelter of the glen where the track was less exacting and I was able to forge ahead of Erchy. Although I never found the prospect of walking the moors in a storm remotely inviting there was at times, I confess, something almost pleasantly hypnotic about it once I had accepted the necessity for my journey and was well and truly embarked upon it. Shut inside oilskins and sou’wester and hearing nothing but the rain, one has the feeling of being insulated not only from the weather but from the world in general. Because superfluous movement would expose chinks in the carefully disposed insulation one limits one’s gaze to the path immediately in front of one’s feet. In any case there is no perceptible movement to distract one’s eye. The ubiquitous rabbits, the busy shrews, the sinuous stoats, are all snug in their secret places. The cattle and sheep, having found a sheltered corrie, lie there, patiently cudding. There are no trees on the moors to be lashed into dervish dances; no tatters of bracken whirling on the wind. Everything that is not securely anchored has been wrested away in the first few hours of the storm. So, one plods on tranquilly, building and rebuilding a lifetime of dreams while one’s feet seem to stride without conscious effort over the stiff black heather roots and the flayed grass, so abject in its surrender.

  ‘Hi!’

  I halted guiltily as I heard Erchy’s shout, for I had forgotten all about him.

  ‘My,’ he grumbled as he panted up to me. ‘You’re a fast woman.’

  I smiled at him.

  ‘Aye, yon can laugh, but folks shouldn’t rush like that over these moors. You’ll get heart trouble or somethin’. That’s why people here live so long, you know. It’s because they never hurry.’ His face was peony red with exertion and polished by the rain.

  Realising that I too was breathless, I slowed my pace and so it was nearly half an hour later than I had reckoned before we started to come down the hill and could see the stone dykes and croft houses of the village.

  ‘Kirsty’s croft isn’t a very big one, is it?’ I asked Erchy, for now we were in the shelter of the hill and could converse without too much effort.

  ‘Ach, she’s no’ needin’ a very big one. She only keeps the one cow anyway an’ if she thinks her hay’s a wee bit short she just helps herself to what’s on other people’s crofts.’

  ‘No!’ I protested.

  ‘Aye, she does indeed. My uncle used to have the croft next to her but he gave it up because of her. When he’d go to cut his hay he’d find Kirsty had cut that much of it over his boundary—an’ the best of it, too.’

  ‘But he could have stopped her, surely?’

  ‘You cannot stop that woman doin’ anythin’ she’s set her mind to,’ said Erchy. ‘When he spoke to her about it she just reared herself up the way she does an’ told him she’d cut hay wherever she wanted. “But that’s my own croft I pay rent for,” my uncle told her, “an’ that grass you’ve cut was growin’ on my land.” “Indeed,” Kirsty says to him, “supposin’ it was growin’ on your own chin, I’d still cut it.” My uncle was that mad about it but there was nothin’ he could do except complain to the Land Court an’ they wouldn’t have been able to stop her from doin’ it. They would only have told her not to.’

  We came in sight of Kirsty’s cottage, easily identifiable by its piebald appearance. Johnny had been directed to cement-wash it during the summer and had almost completed the task when he had discovered a large and beautiful spider’s web suspended from the guttering. Unable to bring himself to destroy it he had left that part of the wall uncemented and by the time Kirsty had returned to coerce him the rain had started and it had been raining off and on ever since.

  ‘Poor Johnny Comic,’ I said, for in contrast to the excessive gentleness of Johnny’s nature Kirsty was rock hard. She had been twelve years old when her brother was born and perhaps because her mother had never fully recovered after the event and had died less than a year later, it seemed as if she had never forgiven him for the presumptuousness of being born at all. Six years later their father had died and Kirsty at eighteen had been left to cope alone with the infant Johnny. People said that from that time she seemed to have become obsessed with the idea of thwarting his every wish, and though she had fed him adequately, clothed him and kept him clean, his presence in the house had irritated her and thus Johnny’s wanderings had begun at an early age. When he returned home he was given his porridge and boiled egg meal and unrelentingly sent to bed, no matter if it was only six o’clock in the evening. He had been so repressed that even when he was a grown man he was too docile to protest at the arrangement and so it had continued for nearly sixty years. He was allowed no money of his own although Kirsty’s income, thanks to a small annuity left to her by the ‘lady in the wheelbarrow’, was more than adequate for their standard of living. The only indulgence she permitted her brother was a grudging access to the tin of baking-soda in her cupboa
rd, and even this small comfort was hidden away if she considered his consumption excessive.

  ‘You’d think she’d let Johnny keep a pet of some sort,’ Erchy said. ‘It wouldn’t do her any harm an’ it would be good for Johnny.’

  ‘Someone did give him a baby rabbit a little while ago,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t he allowed to keep that?’

  ‘No, indeed. Kirsty killed it as soon as she could get a hold of it.’

  ‘She’s a real bitch!’ I said feelingly, recalling the rapt expression on Johnny’s face when be was fondling a cat or a dog and his anguish when he found an injured bird.

  ‘Look at the way she was last year with that bird’s nest,’ continued Erchy. ‘While she was away seein’ her cousin last spring the birds built a nest in the chimney of “the room”. Johnny was up to it every day on a ladder watchin’ it. When the birds was just about ready to fly Kirsty came home an’ sees it’ an’ though I believe Johnny went down on his knees pleadin’ with her to wait only a couple of days for them to leave the nest Kirsty just took paper an’ paraffin an’ lit a roarin’ fire in the grate an’ roasted the poor wee things to death.’

  We opened the gate to the grassy plot that Kirsty kept trimmed so expertly by means of a hay scythe and she herself appeared on the doorstep. Her face expressed surprise but I suspected she had seen us coming. She had in her hand a barometer which she held up in the rain.

  ‘Look at that!’ she addressed it crossly as we came within earshot. ‘Take a good look at it, will you, an’ then dare to tell me it’s fair weather!’ Giving it an admonitory shake before hooking it savagely back on the wall in the porch she turned to us. ‘That thing has a face full of lies,’ she said.

  Erchy turned and winked at me, while Kirsty, satisfied she had given him a good story for the next ceilidh, bade us take off our dripping oilskins and ‘come away inside’.

  The kitchen into which she led us was blatant in its discomfort. The wooden walls were painted a shiny gasometer green and were completely unrelieved by pictures or hangings of any sort except for an embroidered cloth bag which bulged with mail-order catalogues. These, with the Bible and hymn-book prominent on the window-sill, were the only literature Kirsty permitted herself. The linoleum too was shiny and green and sketchily patterned with small dark circles that reminded me of the eyes of a moribund sheep. The table was covered with American cloth, white and new-looking; the big black range gleamed with polish; the cushionless wooden chairs and the bench shone with many coats of varnish. The whole place looked almost sterile in its cleanliness and about as comfortless and uninviting as a fishmonger’s empty slab.