“Would he like a cup of tea,” said his aunt to his mother.
“No, no, no,” Iain screamed. “I want to go home.”
His mother looked from Iain to her brother and she knew that at that moment she would have to make a choice which would be hard for her, the potatoes that she needed or her son. Her brother was looking at her with clear lazy eyes as if he recognised this, and also as if he knew in which direction she would jump, which road she would take: and as if he also knew that whatever direction she took he would be able to drag her back again into his richer circle. She looked around her at the house which was so much better than her own, at the easy chairs, the carpets, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the cream-coloured clock, the house of a childless couple who had put all their earnings into the furniture.
Her sister-in-law hung limply between the two of them and her whiteness seemed to have turned to a diminished grey, as if she had suddenly become tiny and hump-backed, and a glaze had come over her eyes.
“I never liked you,” said Agnes to her brother. “I never liked you. Ever. Even when we were young I never liked you. Our father never liked you either. I remember the time you broke my doll. No,” she said to her sister-in-law, “I never wanted to say it, not about my own brother, but it’s true. You think I want your potatoes. Well, I need them but I can do without them. You’re always holding that over me, aren’t you? When my husband died what did you do for me? Nothing. You never even came to visit me. And yet he was a better man than you. He was a sailor and he had seen the world. You haven’t seen anything. Nothing but this croft and this house. For years I’ve been over in that village and you never came to visit me, and you’re on at Iain because he’s clever, because you’re not clever yourself. I know you went to Australia and you threw in your job there because you couldn’t do it and you came home here, and you took over the croft. I never liked you and I don’t like you now.”
“He’s just a crybaby,” said her brother, “that’s all he is. You can’t bring him up, that’s what’s wrong with you. You let him do what he wants. Women can’t bring up boys. Everyone knows that. It’s books with him all the time. What use are books to him? Eh? Tell me that. If I had him I’d …”
“You keep your mouth shut, Angus,” said his wife suddenly. “You just keep your mouth shut.” And though she spoke strongly she was trembling. “You keep your mouth shut. You don’t have an ounce of pity on your bones. She’s right in what she’s saying. You never had any children of your own and that’s why you are what you are.” She subsided into silence again and there they stood, the four of them, Iain and his uncle and his mother and his aunt, in the living room of that house which was much better than that of Iain’s mother, and they were frozen momently in time as if the clock had stopped, and poison was running like rivulets from their mouths, while outside the window Iain could see the black bull raising its head, with spittle at its mouth and nostrils, solid in the day.
His mother got to her feet. “Come on, Iain,” she said.
“Are you going then?” said her brother, as if he were surprised that she was escaping.
“I’m going and I’m not coming back,” said Iain’s mother. And she took Iain by the hand and led him past her brother who was standing in the doorway.
“All right then,” he shouted, the veins standing out on his forehead. “But I’m telling you he’s a crybaby. And it’s high time you made a man of him.”
“A man like you?” she said, raising her head scornfully.
“Yes,” he shouted, “a man like me. I’ve got my own croft. I’m not a beggar.”
As she was going out the door she raised her hand as if to slap him but then thought better of it and dropped it. Without a word she walked down the path to the gate, somehow succeeding in looking larger than her brother in her draggled clothes.
“Well, now we know where we are,” she said to Iain. As she reached the gate she turned and shouted, “And you can keep your potatoes.” Then the two of them walked away together, her hand still clutching Iain’s hand. When Iain looked at her he saw her proud white face staring straight ahead of her, her back straight as a ruler, her lips clamped tightly together, and her boots, slightly cracked and clayey from the potato field, heavy on the road.
11
“WHAT WAS MY father like?” said Iain one day to his mother as she sat in her chair knitting while Iain sat on the floor with a picture book open in front of him.
“Your father? He was just like anyone else. He was a sailor.”
“Where did he sail to?”
“He sailed all over the world.”
“I know, but what places?”
“I can’t remember all the places. I think he was in Australia and New Zealand. But I don’t remember all the places.”
“Was he always a sailor?”
“No, he wasn’t always a sailor. We lived in Glasgow for a while. He used to be in the gasworks.”
“The gasworks? What’s that?”
“Just gasworks. Why do you want to know anyway?”
“Nothing. It just came into my head. Everyone else talks about their fathers. Petey’s father was in the Navy.”
Her fingers stopped their knitting and she said, “It’s a long time since your father died. We were living in Glasgow at the time. He caught pneumonia and then he got TB and when they tried to keep the windows open he was always getting up and shutting them. I used to go and visit him. I would get the bus from Sauchiehall Street and I would take it to the hospital. He would sit up in bed and say to me, ‘Another week or two, eh, and I’ll be as good as new. I’ll be out of here. I think I’ll leave the gasworks and go back to the boats. The fresh air will do me good but I’m not having them keep the windows open all the time. All you get is a draught. You don’t get the proper benefit of the air.’ That’s what he used to say, your father.”
“Was he an officer?”
“He was a bosun and that’s almost as good as an officer. He would bring things home, little presents, and I knew that …” She clamped her lips together as if she had decided not to say whatever she had been going to. “Anyway that was how he died.”
After a while she said, “He was a good dancer. That was how we met, at a dance. He came up to me and he said, ‘Would you care for this one?’ And I danced with him. He was very light on his feet. When we lived in Glasgow we were in a tenement and we had good neighbours.” She stared dully out at the day which was turning cloudy and said, “I liked Glasgow. A lot of people don’t like Glasgow, they say it’s too big and dirty, but I liked it. We had very good neighbours. The people there are very warm-hearted. If anything happened to you the others helped you. I used to go to the shops on Sauchiehall Street. We didn’t have much money but I used to go and admire the shops. When your father had any money he would spend it right away. I used to tell him, ‘Keep some of your money for your old age,’ but he didn’t keep any of it.”
“Did he have a lot of money then?”
“No, he didn’t. But what he had he spent. That was the way he was. I hope you’re not going to be like that. When you grow up and earn money you should put it in a bank, and that way you’ll never want.”
“I want to be a sailor too,” said Iain who was looking at his picture book in which he could see a big schooner becalmed on a blue sea. “I want to go away and see the world.”
His mother looked at him for a moment in silence and then said, “Is that what you want to do?”
“But I would take you with me,” said Iain earnestly.
“What good would I be on a ship?” said his mother, laughing so that her face was transformed as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud. “What would I do on a ship?”
“I would take you on a tour,” said Iain. “I would take you on a tour round the world.”
“One day he went out,” she said, “and he didn’t come back till night, and he’d brought some of his friends with him. He had met them in a pub, they were sailors, and they came from
the island. He was very thoughtless that way because of his kind nature. And we didn’t have any food in the house. They stayed all night and one of them had to sleep on the floor in the same room as your father, because we didn’t have another room. I had no food at all and I was ashamed. But they didn’t need any food, all they did was drink and sing. They went away in the morning, the first time anyone left a house of mine without eating. You see, in my father’s time, when people came to the communions there was plenty of food. But we didn’t have any food that night. I remember it well because I was so ashamed and your father said to me, ‘Why didn’t you give them something to eat?’ He didn’t know that there wasn’t any food in the house. He never thought about things like that. That was why he was so popular. Come day, go day.”
She had forgotten about Iain while she was talking and sat staring into the past as if she were gazing at a series of pictures in a book or on a moving screen and the pictures were so vivid that her eyes followed them intently as they passed in front of her eyes.
“I wonder if he was in Hong Kong,” said Iain suddenly.
“Hong Kong?”
“Yes, it’s in China and there’s a picture of it here. It’s got a lot of shops and there are Chinamen there.”
“I don’t know about that,” said his mother. “I don’t know about Hong Kong. Maybe he was. He was in a lot of places. He told me about a place where they left food for their dead people. That might have been Hong Kong. He was very alive, you see, your father. I wondered …”
And again she clamped her lips together as if she had decided against saying something that she had intended to say. “It’s not a good thing when a man is away so long. But he said that that was where the money was. He didn’t like the gasworks. Sometimes on Saturdays we would go out into the country and we would visit Loch Lomond. He was quite happy there watching the boats sail up and down the loch. When he would come home at night he would start singing Loch Lomond, you know, the song.” And her lips suddenly softened as if she were hearing her husband’s voice as he stood in the kitchen in their tenement singing,
“Where me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”
But of course she would never sing herself, she had never sung a song in her life and she wasn’t going to start now, at her age.
Iain turned another page of his picture book and said, “Maybe he was in New York too.”
“He might have been,” said his mother, who after her moment of becalmment had gone back to her knitting. “Everyone liked your father. Only … But it doesn’t matter. And you tell your friends that he was a bosun. He was always a good seaman.”
Iain sat happily on the floor thinking about his father. His image of him was that of a sailor shouting orders to his men while they rushed about all over the decks or hauled at sails as the breeze propelled the ship through the hissing water on its way to the East. “Come on then, lads,” his father would shout to them, “get a move on there.” Kindly but firm, but able to deal with any of them if they became cheeky. “You know, my lad, that you have to take your orders like anyone else. Five lashes for him. We must have discipline on board this ship.” Sometimes in a strange way his father’s face faded into that of his mother and then became itself again.
“He loved children,” said his mother. “He would tell them stories and when you were a baby he would take you on his shoulders and show you off to people. He would say, ‘This boy is going to be far better than me. He won’t waste his life as I did.’ And then he would laugh and …” She fell silent again and then began to speak in quite a different voice. “But it’s true just the same. He didn’t think about anything really, not about food or rent or furniture or anything like that. He left all that to me. He left you to me as well. What he said about you was true in a way.”
“What did he say, Mother?”
“Oh, nothing. He didn’t say anything. He liked children, that was what I was saying.”
I am Jim Hawkins and my father is captain of the good ship, the Hispaniola, and we are in search of treasure. My father can handle Long John Silver all right. To the hold with him and keep him there till he learns some sense. He’s got to be disciplined. Don’t give him food or water for three days. And then his father would shout, “Keep her going boys. Keep her on course. Steady as you go, you lubbers.”
“He died a brave death, they said,” his mother remarked, broodingly bent over her knitting. “The nurses told me that. His last words were, ‘Shut that window, will you?’ So they said. And the people in the tenement took a collection and gave me the money. That was a long time ago. They came into the house, six of them, and they pressed the money into my hand. They didn’t wait for tea or anything. That must be, oh nine years ago. You were two at the time and Kenneth was one. Oh well, this won’t do.”
And she put the knitting away, got to her feet, and put the kettle on. “You’d better run to the shop and get some sugar.” She counted out the pennies to him, and he ran down to the plank and then at full speed along the road towards the shop. She stood at the window watching him and thinking, I hope he won’t turn out like his father. But while she was thinking that she was also thinking, I loved him and I miss him. She stared at Iain’s diminishing figure till eventually like a small boat he disappeared over the horizon of the brae.
12
EVERY MORNING IAIN used to go to buy the milk from a woman called Big Dollag who lived with her two sons in a house which stood slightly back from the road at the bottom of the brae. Big Dollag was large and extremely deaf, and for this reason she shouted when she was talking to someone as if she was speaking through a high gale, her hand held to her right ear.
She would say to Iain, “Have you heard anything new, eh?” and he would shout back that he hadn’t, and she would look at him in a disappointed manner, encased in her prison of almost total deafness.
One of her sons always sat in a corner of the kitchen, never speaking but smiling benevolently and hidden behind a green net which he seemed to be endlessly repairing, so that Iain thought of him as a pleasant spider who was weaving the net out of himself in some strange way.
Iain would stand in the scullery while Big Dollag poured the milk into his jug from a big red ewer and all the time she would be saying things like: “Who was that man who passed along the road yesterday? He was wearing a hat and he had an umbrella. Do you know who it was? I nearly went to speak to him but he went by too quickly.”
And Iain would stand on the stone floor impatient to be gone, for he found it very exhausting and hard on his voice to converse with Big Dollag. She got the milk from a brown cow which she allowed to wander among the houses, sometimes chewing the washing that had been hung on ropes to dry. Once she had almost eaten Iain’s own green jersey but his mother had said nothing to Big Dollag in case she stopped selling them the milk, for no one else would do so.
Iain found the house very strange because apart from the son who was always repairing the green net, another son would sometimes emerge from his room and then go back to it like a shy deer when he saw Iain. It seemed odd that the two sons should be so silent when Big Dollag herself was so noisy, her deep voice echoing through the house, and almost reverberating from the cold stone.
One morning when he had arrived for the milk as usual he found a stranger sitting in the kitchen by the fire which was, unusually, glowing brightly; and this stranger was wearing a coat, which Iain thought odd as he had never in his life seen someone doing so in a house before.
“That man you are seeing there,” Big Dollag shouted, “is my son Jim. He is home from America. He came yesterday and he is not going back again.”
Iain looked at the man shyly and the man in turn looked at him, and Iain saw that he had soft haunted eyes as if he had suffered a great deal.
“How are you, lad,” said the man to him. “Who is he, Mother?” At first Dollag couldn’t hear what he was saying, for his voice was even softer than Iain’
s, and it was only after some protracted verbal confusion that she eventually replied:
“He is Agnes’s son. Do you remember Agnes? She had just come to the village when you left.”
The stranger shook his head and Big Dollag continued: “Agnes is not from our village at all. She came from another village. She’s an incomer. Don’t you remember her?”
The man shook his head again, and ignoring his mother said to Iain: “Come in here, lad, so that I can talk to you. What’s your name?”
“Iain, sir.”
“A very polite boy.” The stranger spoke in a peculiar accent that Iain had never heard before and now and again he would swivel his neck nervously as if he were searching for some object that he couldn’t see.
“Are you a clever boy? Are you smart? Do you go to school?”
“I go to school, sir,” said Iain who felt too embarrassed to admit to being clever. However Dollag, who would at times, surprisingly, hear certain statements as if they were struck like bells through a deep silence, suddenly remarked:
“They say he’s clever. They say he’s good at his books.”
“Good boy, you keep that up. You keep that up, boy.”
“Jim’s been away in America for twenty years,” Dollag shouted joyously. “We never heard from him and then yesterday he knocked on the door. I didn’t know him at first. I thought it was a man selling carpets,” and she laughed loudly, her belly shaking like a vast jelly, “but it was my own son Jim. You tell your mother that, that Dollag’s son is home. You tell her that.”
When Iain went home he did tell his mother, as he had been instructed to do, and she said: “Jim’s home, is he? Would you credit that now? He’s been in America for twenty years or so. They say he was very clever but he had an argument with his father and his father told him to clear off and he did too. He ended up in America. No one knew what the argument was about. It was when I came to this village with your father more than twenty years ago. I was just a bride.” And she looked out of the window at the bare landscape as if she expected to see herself by miracle rise from it, in her white bridal gown with a bouquet of flowers in her hand, her husband holding her by the arm.
On the Island Page 6