And the weather was no help. For days the wind came smacking off the firth, coating the stones with salt. When the wind wasn’t blowing, the fog clubbed in, filling the long crescent harbor with damp. The cleaning men came around then to scrape the mildew off the walls, and the bonging of the buoys out beyond the harbor became more real to Maggie than the beating of her heart.
* * *
It was boring then, those days, lying in her room, waiting for the fogs to lift and the skies to clear. But any mine-town girl soon learned the art of making time pass in a place where time seemed to stand still and nothing ever seemed to happen beyond work.
When the winds were right she walked through Lovatt Street and then out through Poshtoon and beyond. The winds and occasional sun had given her skin a glow she had never known in Pitmungo and her close diet had given her a lean delicacy that soon, unless she could do something about it, would send her over the line into looking wasted. There was nothing like a good work stoppage to get the pithead girls in Pitmungo looking lithe again, but if it went on too long the newly fine faces began to look like death’s-heads.
And then the winds would shift, the fogs return, the rains come down, and she would be alone in her room again. Time became a problem then, not because of boredom but because it came to represent something else. Time became money in the most immediate way. Her money was running out.
Every day she felt the siller slipping away, a shilling or two at a time, draining from her purse with the regularity of the tides in Herringtoon harbor.
She loved that word “siller.” That was the Scotch word it was going to be hardest to part with, because siller was siller and nothing could ever truly take its place for her. Some afternoons, when the rains and the winds and fogs locked her away in her room, she would lie on her bed after counting her coins, and then she could hear it, half awake and half asleep, the clinking of the coins into her metal box at home, each week a little more siller, the chink, chink, chink of the coins slipping down to the bottom of the box, hard and soft at the same time, something silken, something soothing: her marrying money. She always thought of silver as being warm.
What sustained her was that every day she saw the kind of man she wanted, tall and always leaner than the men in Pitmungo, blond with long white faces or sometimes with hair as dark as crows’ wings, a kind of angular and easy bearing about them, a grace to their movements that was unknown to the pitmen, a style about them that told the world they were something other than objects to be hired out for work. When they talked she liked the quiet way they spoke, spare and lean, the accent clean and as tidy as their words, with only a trace of a lilt that she supposed was their Celtic or Gaelic—she wasn’t sure of the distinction—Highland heritage. She wanted one of them.
When the weather was right, she went out every afternoon through Poshtoon, trying to appear at home there as if she had a reason to be on the grounds of the resorts. Those were the saddest times. No one noticed her but the caddies on the links, and she had made up her mind that she was never going to have anything to do with a man who would carry another man’s bag of clubs while he went after a little white ball.
There were nights after days like that when she lay on her bed and watched the reflections of the lanterns from the herring boats bob their wild patterns over her black ceiling and wondered why she didn’t go down to Herringtoon and do whatever it was that a young woman was expected to do with a man and for doing it get paid a little pile of siller.
Who was it said that it could be a sin on Thursday and the same act be God’s blessed will on Friday, with the same two people in the same rumpled bed doing it?
“Houghmagandie!”
She said it aloud in the darkness of her lonely room.
“Sculduddery.”
“Fewkin.” What was so terrible about that?
It was Mr. MacCurry, deacon of the Free Kirk in Pitmungo, who said that marriage was an institution designed to keep young men from sin. Thereby admitting, Maggie thought, that the institution was sinful or the act wasn’t, because you couldn’t have it both ways; that’s one thing her father had taught her.
Sin was sin or it was nothing.
So she lay there and her mind drifted downstairs to Mr. Pomeroy, the elegant Mr. Pomeroy, traveling man for Plymouth Cordage, dealers in naval rope and twine, who could not, could not keep his hands to himself in hallways and away from her knees at dinner. Mr. Pomeroy, in and out of Strathnairn all the time, who more than once—at least eight or nine times to be more precise—let it be known, when Mr. Bel Geddes was entertaining his guests with piano playing after dinner, that if there was ever any difficulty in her keeping her room in the Bel Geddes house, that he was available—more than available, eager—to help her find some amenable way to meet the cost of her rent.
There was more than one sound to the clink of siller, Maggie thought, when one was driven to listen for it.
3
By being canny with her money, ca’ canny to the brink of eccentricity, by nursing the last of her pennies with the care of a mother for her firstborn, she judged, when it was all over, that she had two weeks left to her when she found him.
It had been a dismal day for her. She had walked out to Fiddich House, the farthest out of all the resorts, and when no one was to be seen there she had crossed the croquet grounds, holding her hat against the wind, and gone on, since she had never tried it, to the edge of Rothesay golf course and down to the sands along the firth. The beach, as she feared it would be, was deserted.
It wasn’t working, it wasn’t working at all. Each day a little earlier in the day she was forced to admit that to herself. She was tired, which she recognized as a consequence of hunger, and her tiredness made her despondent. She was—she was very conscious of it—becoming demoralized. The thought of walking all the way back to the Bel Geddes house filled her with despair. Nothing was working.
And then there was the Strathnairn wind, endlessly blowing in from the sea, blowing against her, blowing at her, chilling her bones and her hopes and her heart. She found a high dune in the links, the flank of which mercifully curved away from the wind, a pocket of sand shielded from the wind and yet in view of the sea where some young yachtsmen were tacking about in the run of wind in the inlet, shouting to each other in those high English voices. They always sounded to Maggie as if they were meeting each other for the first time in their lives although she had often seen them together before.
“Hallooo!”
“Oh, hallooo.”
Great surprise and animation in the voices. Silly nonsense, she thought, wasting their lives in those little boats like that when they had the money to do things. It never ceased to astonish her that people like them, the halloos, had managed to overcome the Scots.
When the wind slackened, she had—for the first time since she had been in Strathnairn and not in her bed—the sensation of being warm. She opened her tweed coat and let the sun play on her and then closed her eyes and listened to the water hissing up the shore, a rushing of water and grinding of pebbles as it washed its way back to the sea. When she woke he was there, down at the edge of the water, doing something curious to the sides of a large rock standing several yards out in the sea. She watched him without moving at first, wondering what he was doing. One decisive movement, as if he were turning a large screw and then putting something into a creel, an odd movement, and she knew without any doubt, while watching him, that this was the man she had come for.
He was wearing a kilt, and it made her smile because she had never seen a man in a kilt before, not a man doing natural things. Several soldiers once, lost on their way somewhere, drinking in the Coaledge Tavern, but those were costumes. And Lord Fyffe from time to time, trotting up Colliers Walk to the High Moor to pot a few moorcocks and grouse, looking self-conscious and as though someone were going to take a shot at his kilt or, worse, snicker at it. But this man was wearing a kilt.
She sat up, very slowly so as not to alarm him, the way a
good bird dog moves in the field, and when she had arranged herself and felt ready, she started across the sand to the stone. He never noticed her. He was tall, by Pitmungo standards very tall, an inch or two over six feet, she thought, although it was hard for a person her size to tell, and lean. Even by Highland standards lean, but there was a heavy-boned quality to the leanness, a wind-burnished hardness to it, that made it different from being thin. He was down to sinew. The man could work, she could see that much.
He was fair in what she felt was the classic Highland way, his hair reddish gold and at times, in the sun, almost pure gold, and long, in the Highland fashion, to save on the need for haircuts, she thought. His skin was white, although around the cheeks he was red, as if he had been slapped, the kind of fair skin that didn’t burn from the sun or mottle after drinking. Clear fair skin, she had felt since she was little, was the feature of the natural aristocrat. Everyone in Pitmungo had skins like weathered brick or as gray as badly done wash, or faces like fat plums, over-blooded and ripe for early death.
When he finally looked up he was startled by her, head flying up, eyes wide, like a deer caught in a clearing, and then very quickly, without seeming to move at all, he slipped around to the far side of the rock. In his haste he was forced to leave his creel behind and that, Maggie understood at once, would be the tool she would have to work with.
She waited for him to come around the rock again. She was not a patient person, but she felt now a kind of endless patience, as if she had a lifetime to wait and was prepared to wait it. The water where he was standing was deep, up to the hem of his kilt, and the wind was up again, waves slapping hard against the rock, and he was getting wet. It was a question of time and tide. Time was passing and the tide was flooding in.
“What are these horrible-looking things?” she called to him, but he didn’t answer.
“I say, what are these beasts in your basket?”
No answer. It wasn’t a matter of pride; there was no room for that now. She had to pretend he hadn’t heard her and try again.
“I said, you behind the rock, what are these sea things you’re collecting here?”
She was surprised to feel her heart beating quite rapidly in her throat.
“You know what they are,” he called to her. He sounded angry and she was surprised by that, too, because she thought it would be softly shy.
“I don’t. I’ve never seen such things before.”
He came a little of the way around the rock for a fleeting glimpse of her.
“Barnacles,” he said. “Now you know.”
“They’re unco ugly. What do you do with them?”
“What do I do with them?” His voice was sarcastic. He came fully around the rock and was studying her. He was angry with her, she could see that, and she didn’t understand why.
“I eat them. Now do you understand?”
He went behind the rock again and she waited. He had no choice in the matter unless he chose to drown, and she didn’t think shyness could carry that far. When the wind slacked off, she told him that she didn’t come from near the sea. She spoke in a very unconcerned voice, as if she hadn’t known or sensed his anger.
“Where are you from, then?” he finally said.
“South of here.”
“A Sassenach, then? English?”
She pretended to be insulted.
“I’m a good Scottish girl, I am.” She gave it a little burr, the faintest touch of the soul. “From near Edinburgh.”
He was at once suspicious of her again.
“That’s near the sea.”
“West Fife, then. I’ve never been to the sea before.”
He came fully around the stone but stayed in the water. He seemed embarrassed by his bare legs but she knew he would come out. The water was freezing cold.
“And how do you like it?”
“Very much, but I’ve never been in it.”
“I love the sea,” he said, and she noticed his face color at his outburst of emotion. She had never heard a man say “love” that way before.
And then there was nothing to say. He stood in the water, having revealed himself to a stranger, and she had nothing to say that sounded genuine. The water washed in and washed back around his knees, occasionally wetting the kilt. She could appreciate the fine lean features of his face, the hawkness of it, with a large sharp nose the way a lord’s nose should look.
“Why don’t you come out of there?” she said suddenly. “You must be freezing to death.”
It was good. It broke the silence in a genuine way. The simple fact was that he was freezing.
“Aye, I’ll come out. There’s no more barnacles anyway.”
She was surprised at how much taller he seemed when standing near her. Once again, the silence fell between them. He wanted to put on his socks but he was shy about doing it in front of her, and they stood by the basket of barnacles. He nudged the creel with his foot.
“Goose barnacles, to be exact.”
“Ah.”
“In olden times, they used to believe that geese came from these.”
“It’s strange to think what people used to believe.”
Then there was nothing more to look at in the basket and Maggie could think of nothing genuine to ask about barnacles. She pointed across the Moray Firth.
“And what are those?”
He looked at her again, to see if she was serious.
“Why, the Highlands.”
The hills were beautiful then. Great flubbs of clouds were floating down over them, turning the tweed and heather colors of the lower slopes to a soft dark velvet.
“The Cromarty Hills, to be exact,” he said, with a great deal of heat. He caught her look. “My family were driven from there like cattle out of a field. The Highland Clearances.”
An occasional splash of bright spring green leaped from one of the hillsides where some surviving crofter had kept his farm and put in a crop.
“And came here and died. Froze to death.” His face reddened again from revealing so much of himself to a stranger. “I suppose a man can get himself dressed?”
“Oh, excuse me.”
She went around behind the dune and waited. In Pitmungo, the men took their tubs in the living room in front of the fire and here was a man who needed privacy to put on his knee socks. She waited and waited and when she came back around the dune she saw he had started down the shore away from Strathnairn. She had been dismissed.
The dunes ran parallel to the sea for at least a quarter of a mile. He was on the sea side of the dunes. If she ran on the landward side it would be possible to be waiting for him where the shoreline curved and the dunes ended. She ran. She stumbled in the sand and over the stones, but she ran, trying not to gasp so that he wouldn’t hear her on the other side of the dunes, knowing that she’d have to arrive well enough ahead of him so that she wasn’t gasping for air when he came around the last of the dunes.
He was far more startled to see her the second time than he had been the first. He looked at her and could not account for it. Several times he opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it again. Surely, Maggie thought, he has got to be able to hear the pounding of her heart in her chest.
“You want the other way,” he said, at last.
“Other way?”
“Strathnairn is the other way, Miss.”
“But I could have sworn…”
“No.”
He balanced the creel on one shoulder and then the other, on his head and then on one knee and the other knee, conscious of appearing ridiculous, and it angered him.
“I’ve never seen a man wear a kilt before.”
That angered him too.
“All sorts of men wear them,” he said, as if she were arguing with him. “Up there.” He nodded toward Cromarty and beyond. “Army,” he said. She didn’t understand.
She began walking along the shore, away from Strathnairn as naturally as walking home along Lovatt Street, and he came al
ong.
“Army?”
“I was in the army, the Cameron Highlanders”—he seemed bitter about that—“and they let me out and sent me home in this.”
“At least it didn’t cost.”
“It’s all I have, do you understand?” He reddened from embarrassment but he was angry, also. He made it very plain then. “I have never been able to earn enough to buy anything else; now do you understand?”
“Where I come from the men have one suit and it’s meant to last them for their life. They’re put in the dead box in it.”
He looked at her with disbelief. An old stone wall blocked the passage down the shore. He stepped over it and when he was on the other side and about to say good-bye, she held out her hand to him and he looked at it and at her and took it and helped her up over the stones. As he did, some of the barnacles spilled from the creel onto the sand. She knelt at once to help pick them up.
“Stop it,” he said. “Ladies don’t do that.”
They were on their knees, their faces almost touching. She noticed his hands in the sand, long and white, slender but strong, not like the chunky brown stubs of Pitmungo. Her own, she knew, were harder. It was her turn then, and she made it as plain as she knew how.
“I am not a lady.”
He looked up at her suddenly, in that open, suspicious way, doubtful and yet believing at the same moment. He didn’t know how to hide things, she realized, he never was taught. In the mine towns you learned very soon in life.
“I earn my way. I’m a working woman.”
He looked at her clothes, the fine tweed suit and Highland tam, her tiny leather boots and the ruffles of her linen shirt, and bit his lip. She got up then.
“How do you prepare these?”
“You don’t want to know, it’s disgusting.”
“I’m not easy to disgust.”
“All right.” He decided to shock her. He took out a knife from the top of his kilt and slashed through the stalk of a barnacle and peeled away the tough rind-like skin until the meat in the fleshy stalk was revealed.
“We boil them in sea water and eat them because we are hungry.”
The Camerons Page 3