by Ann Swinfen
At around twelve o’clock, Tirza brought out their thick sandwiches and a piece of custard pie and an apple each. They sat on the lockers, facing each other across the fish kegs.
‘This last load will do us, I think,’ said Nathan. ‘Might even get back in time to haul the pots tonight.’ He bit into his apple, then paused, staring over his shoulder.
‘Hey, there, look at that! Seems like Walter’s caught more’n he bargained for!’
Tirza twisted round and looked where he pointed. The fishing had brought them quite close to the Reliant. Walter, Wayne and Eli, the other crewman, seemed to be struggling unusually hard to raise their net. Then Walter hung out over the stern while Eli held on to him by the legs. He seemed to be hitting something with the metal-tipped gaff.
‘What’s he doing?’ Tirza asked.
Nathan laughed. ‘He’s caught himself a dogfish. A good old Maine shark. Oh, Lordee! It’s torn some great hole in his net trying to get at the herring. Oh, by dear, I shouldn’t laugh. That net’s worth a load of money. Poor Walter, that’s his fishing done for today.’
They watched the torn net, spilling its fish, being hauled in. Walter looked across the waves at them and made a comic despairing gesture, shrugging his shoulders. Nathan got up, brushing crumbs from his mouth and went to start the engine again, but as he did so a great booming crash rolled through the air, like muffled thunder, and the whole ocean trembled. The Louisa Mary bucked like a frightened horse, and Tirza stumbled and fell against the stern, bruising her knees. She saw Walter and the others looking wildly around, and boats further away from them tossing unnaturally on the sea. Half a mile beyond them a grey naval vessel was slipping northwards, almost invisible against the sea. Behind it, a cauliflower mound of white water exploded upwards.
Tirza clutched at the gunwale to steady herself.
‘What was that?’
It was terrifying, this noise which seemed to be thrown up by the sea itself.
Nathan, after that first startled moment, collected himself. He left the engine and came back to her. Without a word he began to winch in the net, though it would be barely a quarter full.
‘What was it?’ Tirza could hear a note of panic in her voice.
‘Depth charges,’ said Nathan shortly. He released the pathetic catch on to the deck and began gutting.
‘Saw something in the newspaper. The navy is starting to drop depth charges as they patrol the coast. To hit the German submarines, if any try to sneak in to the shore. But of course it isn’t only submarines that get hit.’
He smiled grimly and wiped his knife on the seat of his pants.
‘I guess that’s the end of our prime herring run.’
9
Intermezzo
Scotland: Summer 1980
The exhibition of Tirza’s photographs at the gallery in Edinburgh proved such a success that it was extended by a fortnight. Then a gallery owner from Boston, visiting London and reading a review in the arts section of one of the Sunday newspapers, contacted Colin Tennant to arrange a loan of the entire exhibition to her own gallery for two months during the autumn. Max telephoned Tirza with the news.
‘And Colin has had to order a reprint of your Scottish book. I eat humble pie. Your stags and heathery crags have gone down a treat with the punters.’
Tirza snorted.
‘Jessica has forwarded another batch of fan mail to you today,’ he said. ‘And I’ve had some commission enquiries. I’ll ring you again when I have more details.’
‘OK.’
‘Oh, and this woman from Boston, Pam O’Rourke, she wants to know whether you would be willing to fly over and open the American exhibition? Same sort of thing as you did in Edinburgh, but I’ve warned her that you aren’t too keen on television interviews.’
‘Max, I’m not sure...’
‘No need to decide yet. Think about it. It’s a long time since you were in the States, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘A long time. I’ve no wish to go back.’
‘Think about it.’
Two days later the pile of letters forwarded by Max’s secretary was brought over from the mainland by Angus Maclean. He had shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves in the warm June sunlight and came cheerfully up from Tirza’s small pier talking as he came.
‘Well, it’s a braw morning, is it not? The weather forecast says we will be having this fine weather for a week or more. It is the high pressure – stationary, they said, over the west coast of Scotland.’
Tirza smiled up at him. She was seated on a large boulder beside her front door, drinking coffee and eating toast spread with the local honey which was liberally laced with whisky. The cat was spread out in a patch of sun on the thin turf at her feet. When she had first bought the island, Tirza had thought she would remove this boulder, which occupied a prominent position just to the side of her front door. She had discovered fresh marks of a crowbar around its base where someone else had tried before her, probably her German predecessor or his workmen. She soon discovered why they had abandoned the task. The boulder appeared to be welded to the bedrock of the island itself. Having decided she would have to live with it, she discovered that it made an excellent seat for viewing the bay and the ocean beyond. She wondered how many generations of owners, over how many centuries, had sat where she now sat, watching this view which had remained unchanged for millennia, yet which changed with every racing cloud and turn of the running tide.
‘Yes,’ she said to Angus, ‘I heard the forecast at six. But the sun is over-bright for the fishermen.’
Angus passed her the packet of letters and regarded her quizzically.
‘You are knowing about the fish, then.’
‘My father was a fisherman.’
When Angus was gone and she had finished her breakfast, she skimmed quickly through the letters, most of which she could answer with a standard reply she had evolved since the exhibition had prompted this flurry of correspondence. One letter, however, brought her up sharp.
Dear Miss Libby,
I am taking the liberty of writing to you after first seeing your interview with Mathilda Goldberg on television and subsequently visiting the amazing retrospective exhibition of your photographs in Edinburgh. For many years I have admired your work, without realising who the photographer was. To see so much, of such quality, gathered together in one place was truly rewarding.
It is, however, about a different matter that I am writing to you now. In your television interview you mentioned something from your past which caught my attention. Later, certain pictures in the exhibition confirmed my apparently wild conjecture.
It is, I know, a great deal to ask, but I wonder whether I might pay you a brief visit? I believe there may be a connection between our families, but I would prefer to speak to you about it face to face. It all happened a long time ago, and I may be mistaken, but if I am right I think you might wish to hear what I have to say.
Please forgive me if this sounds extremely lugubrious and mysterious. It isn’t meant to. If you are not willing for me to visit your home, perhaps you could suggest a place where we might meet?
Yours sincerely,
Alexander Wrycroft
Tirza read the letter three times. Alexander Wrycroft did not sound as though he was some crazy eccentric, but he was extraordinarily evasive. ‘A connection between our families.’ What could he possibly mean? ‘You might wish to hear what I have to say.’ It could be some kind of threat. She had never known anyone called Wrycroft, and her family certainly had no connection with...she peered at the address... something Gaelic and totally unpronounceable in the Highlands. Not very far away from Caillard, as the golden eagle might fly it, over the tops of the mountains. But a long way by car, detouring around the deep sea lochs which cut into this coast like the fingers of two hands plunged into a lump of dough.
That evening, Tirza sat down conscientiously to reply to the letters she had received in the morning’s post. All b
ut the one from Mr Wrycroft could be answered swiftly. She folded them, inserted them into envelopes, addressed and stamped them. They made a good, satisfying pile on the corner of the table. She read Wrycroft’s letter again, momentarily wondering whether there might be some link with her great-grandfather, Bruce Macpherson, who had emigrated from the Highlands a century and a half before. But she had made no reference in the television interview to this thread in her ancestry. Dismissing the idea, she pulled the pad toward her, picked up her pen, and wrote:
Dear Mr Wrycroft,
Thank you for your interesting letter. I am so glad you enjoyed the exhibition. I am afraid you must be mistaken about a connection between our families, recent or in the past. I have never known anyone of the name of Wrycroft. Regrettably, it will not be possible to arrange a meeting.
Yours truly,
T. Libby
In the morning, Tirza gave all the letters to Angus and forgot about them. She had embarked on a new project – photographing buildings of the west coast – and was away from home a good deal. The deserted cottages along the shore and tucked away into corners of the glens fascinated her. Most of their thick stone walls were still standing to their full height, though many had been abandoned long ago during the Highland Clearances. The roofs, which had been covered with turf or thatched with straw or reeds, had perished long since.
It was difficult to distinguish these long-deserted cottages from those which had been given up as recently as the thirties, although occasionally she was lucky enough to find something lying around which revealed the date of the last occupancy. Sometimes she discovered, amongst the nettles, a battered saucepan in the favourite cream enamel trimmed with green which every housewife had owned in the thirties and forties. Once she found a stained and faded calendar folded open at November 1923. But a well grown Scots pine standing in the front room – the ‘but’ – was evidence of a longer abandonment.
Hunting down these lost homes, which revealed a much richer, busier life in this now solitary land, reminded her again that some of her own ancestors had been driven from these very hills. Part of her fondness for her island was its isolation from any connection with her past, and the thought of her own deep blood binding her to this place was disturbing. She tried to push it from her mind.
She was not photographing just the empty cottages. There were several of the ancient Z-plan fortified tower houses nearby, and also a few of the grand mock-mediaeval castles in which the rich had played at baronial life during Victorian summers. Small towns and villages had their plain, rather dour buildings, occasionally breaking out into the absent-minded ornamentation of crow-stepped gables. The local villages lacked the charm of villages she had seen in England, which were coherent in shape, clustered round a central green and with big, spreading trees to set off the architecture and provide shelter from sun and rain. The Scottish villages seemed to have grown up heedlessly, their houses deliberately ignoring each other or any sense of cohesion. Sometimes they were simply strung along a road, with an ugly corrugated shed somewhere in the middle to serve as a petrol station. Sometimes the village stood at a cross-roads, but this provided no centre, no significance to the houses, which simply stood there, as if not sure why they had been built in the first place but anxious to be off as soon as possible. The small towns, however, were often arranged around a surprisingly wide main street, with a mercat cross and an ancient building which she discovered was called a tollbooth, where town affairs were decided. They hinted of a community life now lost.
Tirza found these places a little depressing – the villages ungainly and the towns declined – but in her growing collection of architectural studies they made an intriguing contrast to the clusters of empty cottages which were often located in places of great natural beauty. Her own small fishing village, Caillard – given structure and cohesion by the curve of the shore and the double arms of the harbour – was transformed into something almost pretty by comparison.
A couple of weeks later she returned from one of her trips spent photographing suitable subjects for her new collection. She had passed five busy days climbing through waist-high bracken and stumbling over the ridges of old plough-land hidden under the rough scrub and grass now cropped by sheep. She was covered with bites from midges, which had begun their annual plague of the west coast, and as she parked her car in the space she used in the car park behind the Prince Returning, she decided to treat herself to a drink and a bar supper before crossing to the island.
The usual crowd was occupying the bar when she pushed her way through the door. Fishermen, shopkeepers, one or two crofters – some with their wives or girlfriends, some without. Tirza hitched a stool up to the bar with her foot and sat down. Donnie McIver, landlord and barman, came over, polishing a glass.
‘And what can I get you, Tirza?’ The McIvers were the only village people who would address her by her first name. She had, after all, lived here a mere two years.
‘Half a pint of your best bitter, Donnie. No, make that a pint. I’ve a thirst like a navvy, and I need something to deaden the pain of the local insect life.’
Donnie drew her a pint and set it down on a mat proclaiming the virtues of some bottled beer no one ever bought.
‘That’ll set you up. Never mind the wee midges. You’ll no’ feel them at all when you’ve lived here ten years.’
‘Mingies, we used to call them, where I grew up. And, Lord, the horse-flies! They used to come in with a particular tide and stay for two weeks, then they disappeared again. The bites would come up in a red lump the width of your thumbnail and nearly as high too. Most painful bites I’ve ever had, even including the creepy-crawlies the Far East could throw at you.’
She took a deep swallow of her beer.
‘Ah, that would be what we call the clegs,’ said Donnie. ‘Vicious things.’
‘I’ve met the local breed. Ours were worse. What’s on the menu tonight?’
Donnie angled the slate towards her, reflecting that in all the time he had known Tirza Libby, she had never before made a reference to where she had grown up. Since the fuss of the Edinburgh exhibition the village had found out more about her by reading the newspapers than it had ever learned from her directly.
‘The scampi isn’t much good,’ he said. ‘It’s something Moira bought in from the sales rep and we won’t be getting it again.’
‘Honestly, Donnie, with all the shellfish out there in the bay, I don’t know why you don’t catch your own! Bought in from the rep! Well, what do you recommend, then?’
‘The chicken casserole is no’ bad. Local chickens from Munro’s flock, and Moira wasna mean with the wine and herbs. I had it for my own tea. It was just fine.’
‘OK, I’ll have the chicken casserole, then, with French fries. And some of Moira’s trifle afterwards. I deserve it, I’ve had a tiring few days.’
Donnie leaned through the hatch behind the bar and called, ‘One chicken and chips for Tirza, Moira. One trifle to follow.’
He was occupied for a time with his other customers, but returned to chat with Tirza as she ate her meal. The sink was at this end of the bar and he washed up as he talked.
‘There’s word going round that they are going to make up the road to the north of the village,’ he commented.
‘But it doesn’t lead anywhere.’
‘Some people are saying that the laird has sold land along there for holiday cottages.’
‘Oh, no!’ Tirza looked dismayed. ‘Sorry. I suppose it will help your custom, but I’d hate to see the village spoiled.’
Donnie dried the glasses slowly and hooked them into the rack above his head. ‘We canna fight progress, but I dinna want the place spoiled any more than you do. It’s likely just a rumour.’
Tirza glanced round the room. A man had come in while she was eating, a stranger. He was sitting in a low chair in a shadowed corner near the empty fireplace, apparently watching a darts match, but she was sure he had been looking at her before she turne
d round. She swung her stool back to the bar.
‘Who’s that man over by the fireplace?’ She did not have to explain who she meant. Visitors were rare here.
‘He’s come for the salmon fishing. Staying with us. A week’s fishing licence, he’s bought.’
‘Donnie, take a look. Is he watching me?’
Donnie let his eyes roam vaguely round the room, then looked at her.
‘Aye, he might be.’
‘Creepy.’
‘Not at all,’ he said gallantly, whipping away her plate and replacing it with a heaped bowl of trifle. ‘Why shouldna a man admire a fine-looking woman?’
‘Shut up, you daft bugger,’ said Tirza, unaccountably blushing as she dug her spoon into the trifle.
Tirza forgot the stranger when she took the boat over to the island and greeted Grace, who seemed particularly pleased to see her. The cat even followed her into the bedroom and curled up on the foot of the bed for the night.
‘I am honoured,’ said Tirza, rubbing behind Grace’s ears before switching out her bedside lamp. ‘Clearly I should go away more often.’
She recalled the stranger when she returned to the village to shop the next morning. There was an unfamiliar Range Rover parked behind the inn next to her own car when she went to collect a bag she had left there the night before. The Range Rover was fairly new and well cared for, except where heavy mud had encrusted the underside of the wheel-arches. A working vehicle, but one whose owner did not neglect it. The owner himself was nowhere to be seen while she walked about the village buying milk and groceries, and a sheet of stamps from the post office, but soon after she had perched on a bar stool he came in behind her and sat down in the same chair by the fireplace.