The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “I see.”

  “Because we are starving to death.”

  She knew better now than to say anything.

  “The beggar’s lobster they’re called.” He snapped the knife shut and started down the shoreline and she came after him. When he heard her feet on the pebbles, he turned around to face her.

  “And that makes me a beggar.”

  He had to be faced up to now or it was over.

  “Hunger is a good master,” Maggie said. He looked at her in a different way and she was conscious of it. “Poortith is no crime. Poortith is no shame, just so a man tries.”

  He saw the dark brightness of her eyes. He liked the foreign darkness of her hair and skin.

  “And poortith is no excuse.”

  He picked up the creel and started down the shore, and when she followed he let her come this time. Ahead of them, sheltered at the base of a pine-studded headland, a stone house stood.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s where poortith puts you.”

  She was disappointed. She had thought of a little house somewhere but this was a cave, a cairn, a pile of stones craftily put together, but a pile of stones nevertheless. It looked like illustrations she had seen in the school books of Pictish houses from a thousand years before.

  “Did you do that yourself?”

  “With my father. We had to. They died here.”

  They both knew the next step, to go to the cairn or not. He didn’t move and Maggie wouldn’t move, and suddenly he put the tip of his thumb in his mouth and bit it, hard—a strange thing to do, she thought—and said, “All right, come, then.”

  The cairn was clean. The floor was earth but hard and smooth from a generation of bare feet and he had sprinkled fresh sand on it. There was a smell of fish to the place but also of pine and peat.

  “Knock the wet sand off,” he ordered. “Here, I’ll help you.”

  She lifted her boot, small and laced to the middle of her calf, and all at once the intimacy of what he was doing, holding a woman’s foot in his hand in the semi-dark privacy of his own house, overwhelmed him. He dropped her foot and looked away.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  “For what?”

  But he couldn’t look at her after that.

  His clothes were hung on pegs, and on a shelf fashioned from driftwood, indecently out of place, was a hat.

  “Ah, you wear a hat.”

  “Why not?”

  “Where I come from, only the earl and his sons wear hats. Miners don’t have hats.”

  “Well, I have a hat,” he said, his face turned away from her. It was a beautiful brown hat, soft and yet able to hold its shape, an arrogant slouch to it, with a band of grouse feathers around the crown and a silver medallion on one side with the tip of a red deer’s tail bristling from it.

  He could not get over the sensation of touching her leg, so small and compact and so strangely heavy.

  “One day I heard that a guest of Lord Monboddo fell from his boat shooting geese and the next day this came in with the tide.”

  “And did he drown? Would you wear a dead man’s hat?”

  “Poortith can’t be picky,” he said, and they looked at one another and laughed. It was easier after that.

  For a tall man he moved with a deceptive swiftness. He was not conscious of being watched doing the things he had done for years. He lit shark-oil lamps and with a blanched white branch he stirred the pot simmering over the fire. The pot smelled of the sea, of tidal flats at low tide, and of iodine.

  “Kelp soup.” He lifted several fronds of the seaweed out of the pot. They looked like strips of translucent boiled rubber. “Mixed with Irish moss, that’s the cunning trick.”

  There was no other word for it, Maggie thought; it stank.

  “I think you’ll like it,” he said.

  “I think I shall.”

  He went out and came back a few minutes later with a handful of greens and bay leaves, which he put in the pot.

  “Sea spinach and seaside salad,” he said. “You’ll like it.”

  “Aye.”

  He sprinkled the soup with dried sea lettuce that would serve as salt and herbs and then handed her a large whelk shell that would serve as a soup bowl the way the poor used gourds in Pitmungo.

  “No spoons,” he said. “You sip it from the buckie shell. Ah, you should have what comes in these,” he said, tapping the shell. “That’s a true treat.”

  The smell was very strong, totally of the sea, like being inside something from the sea. He watched her and she drank. She wanted to say something but she couldn’t manage her mouth. She was glad that it was dark enough so that he couldn’t see the tears come to her eyes.

  “Very tasty,” she managed to say.

  “An old recipe. Handed down, you know.”

  Hunger was, indeed, a good master, Maggie thought, and was surprised to find her brow wet with little beads of sweat.

  “Don’t let it cool,” he said. “It’s no good cool. All the oils come up. Lots of fish oil in there, you see.”

  She took another sip of the soup and another after that, and finally the shell was empty.

  “Och, good,” he said, and poured her shell full again. “Do you know there’s people along the coast won’t touch the stuff? Wait until you try the kelp.”

  The sweat on her brow was very serious now, running in rivulets down her face and wetting her linen collar. She wanted very much to go outside. She wanted to walk in the wind. She felt the sweat running down her arms and between her breasts. She hadn’t intended to get up but she did and went toward the door.

  “Don’t open that,” he said.

  “Why not?” She almost shouted it at him.

  “Can’t you hear it?”

  Rain was lashing against the walls of the cairn and the surf was pounding, and she had never noticed it. She came back and sat down again and took off her tweed jacket. The sweat outlined her breasts against the linen and she didn’t care. She tried to study her feet and concentrate on them, count the number of eyelets in her boots, and then he was holding a plate of something under her nose.

  “I’m sorry there are no eels,” he said. “A mess of eels in hot kelp soup is the thing for a day like this,” and then his eyes saw her breasts and rested on them for that one moment, and her eyes met his and he reddened and turned away again.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” he said.

  What a thing to say to a woman, she thought; he would really have to learn.

  “Of the storm?”

  “Aye, of the storm.”

  The rain had passed as suddenly as it had come, and the silence it brought with it made him uneasy. The responsibility of having her in his house, trying to keep his eyes and thoughts where they belonged, was too much for him.

  “You can go now,” he said. It was clumsy of him but he knew no other way. She put on her tweed jacket and saw that he was watching, although somehow managing to make it clear that he was not actually watching. He opened the door and the fresh wind was a blessing to her. At the door he didn’t know what to say or exactly what to do. What did one do when a lady left one’s house? He had no idea at all. He put out his hand and she took it, and she could see by his eyes that he was astonished by the hardness of it.

  “Thank you for my tea,” Maggie said.

  “Och, the tea.” He slapped his forehead. “I have the water on.”

  “Next time then.” That was it, the opening she had been looking for. “That’s a promise then.”

  He seemed bewildered.

  “Tea next time.”

  “Aye,” he said finally.

  “I’ll bring out a tea cake.”

  He nodded.

  “Good-bye then. Until next time.”

  “Next time,” he said.

  He watched her go down the path to the sea. “Wait,” he called, and ran back inside the house. He came back and handed her a sea thing.

  “A sweet for your walk back.”
>
  It was a frond of dried dulse, green and black as the bottom of a tide pool, and crusty with salt.

  “You have to keep chewing to bring out the full flavor,” he said, and she nodded and they smiled.

  “Do you know something? I don’t know your name. I’ve eaten in your house and don’t know my host’s name.”

  “Cameron.”

  She kept looking at him. “Is that all?” she finally said. “Just Cameron?”

  “Gillon Cameron. Gillon Forbes Cameron if you want it all.”

  She felt her heart leap pleasantly, just a tiny breaking of the beat and a dip back pleasantly into place. Yes, she thought, I want it all.

  “A very famous name, a very fine name.”

  “Aye, a very fine family so I’m told. Warriors and nobles and scholars and the like.”

  “A clan, I guess.”

  “Oh, yes, a clan, of course. The Camerons of Loch Something-or-Other.”

  “And Forbes?”

  “The same. My mother’s name. She’s a Rob Roy and a Sutherland, too. It’s the Sutherlands drove us off the land, I think. They’re very serious about that up there,” he said. He motioned toward the Highlands. “Names.”

  And why shouldn’t they be, she thought; names with a history and a meaning to them. Not like Pitmungo, where everyone was a Japp or a Cook or a Hogg. Hopp, Begg, Minto, Mengies, Pick. Pick was good for a coal miner. Pict was better. Ugly little clod-like names, as dull as coal, a race apart, the descendants of slaves. It didn’t matter where he stood now; what mattered is that they were great once and that somewhere in the bloodline greatness was lying in wait to climb out. She was smiling at him without knowing it, her eyes not even seeing him, and he was taken by her, by her small even white teeth, little keen teeth like the moor fox, and her eyes, little hard brown ovals that glittered like the fox.

  “Tell me something,” she said. He nodded. “Are you a Gael?”

  He thought about it. He looked to the mountains now lost from sight in the clouds.

  “Well, they all are, aren’t they? Then I am,” he said, and wondered why she smiled that way. It was such a brilliant smile, he thought, those foxy teeth in that alien brown face.

  He watched her go down the inlet and turn in the right direction for Strathnairn and then he slapped himself in the head for the second time in the day. He had never asked her name.

  He began to run. When he reached the mouth of the inlet he turned down the beach and then he saw her and stopped. Something told him not to go on. Her back was to him, away from the wind. She had pulled a blade of dune grass from the sand and with great care and neatness, her back to the wind at the right angle, was sticking the grass down her throat and vomiting up his hot kelp soup, his seaweed, and his dulse.

  4

  She gave him three days, making herself visible along the docks of the Toon where she knew he must come, walking the sidewalks of Lovatt Street until she felt her legs would collapse. The merchants thought she was a little asklent, just a wee bit off the line, standing outside staring at their boring little displays for hours and never coming in to buy.

  Her problems were the same, time and money, and every day they were more acute. The leather of her boots was growing dangerously thin, and then in May the resorts began to fill with fishermen from England hoping to kill a big salmon in the leased salmon rivers that run in from the sea through the forests to the south. Mr. Bel Geddes told Miss Drum that he soon would be forced to raise the price of her room now that the fish-killing season was upon them.

  “But I don’t see any fishermen staying here,” Maggie said. “You have no rights on any streams.”

  “They stay here just to say they’ve been in Strathnairn for the spring salmon run.”

  “You really expect me to believe that? You Italians are all alike, not to be trusted.”

  “Bel Geddes happens to be a noble Scottish name, Miss Droom. Standard bearers of the noble Gordon clan. And I expect you to believe that as much as I believe you came here to hunt.”

  “But I did, though. I have spotted my noble stag.”

  She infuriated him. He couldn’t stand the way she used her body when she was around him, as if he didn’t exist or couldn’t see her. He watched her once put her hands on her breasts and adjust herself beneath her sark—she really should know better—not ten feet from his desk. “Outrageous,” he said, loud enough so he hoped she could hear it. He let her stay on another week at half rates.

  On the morning of the fourth day she walked out through Poshtoon, over the wind-raddled links, and down to the sea and the dunes toward the stone house. The wind from the firth was cold, everything about Strathnairn was cold. The people on the glassed-in porches were breathing smoke as they talked. It was a high price to pay, she thought, to kill a salmon, and then she thought of the price she was paying to hook her own prize. All trophies worth winning come dear, her father had always said, not that he ever won one. She found herself yearning for the coal-filled fireplaces of Pitmungo.

  The stone house was empty. And cold, as cold as the tomb it was. Peat still smoldered in the fireplace; she must have missed him by less than an hour and she was angry with him. He should have come for her, he should have stumbled across her, he should be here waiting for her. She put straw on the peat and when it caught she burned what was left of his driftwood. When the fire went out she would have cried except that the tears wouldn’t come for her. Pitmungo people never had found it easy to cry.

  The shadows thrown by the dunes were long and deeply blue, and it was much later than Maggie thought it was when she saw him standing on the seaward side of a dune staring savagely at the sea. The anger in his face excited her, because the man she needed would have to be capable of anger. She went up the dune and stood beside him. She didn’t know if he was aware of her or not, his intensity was so great, but he finally looked down at her.

  “I came for my tea,” she said. He tried not to show his surprise, but that was beyond him. He went back to staring out at the sea.

  “What is it? What do you see there?”

  She knew she was interrupting some kind of ritual being carried on between Gillon and the sea.

  “The salmon,” he said. “I can see them out there.”

  He looked at her to see if she believed him.

  “I can smell them. You think that’s crazy, don’t you?” She shook her head that she didn’t and he believed her. “I can smell water that spawning salmon have been in. I know them, the way they are and the things they do. I know where they sleep at night.”

  They went down the dune and near the bottom Gillon gave her his hand to help her across a rough spot and when she didn’t withdraw it he held it, surprised at himself, looking down at her from the corner of his eye to see if she objected in any way.

  “Then you must catch a lot of them,” Maggie said.

  “I’ve never killed one. The lairds own the salmon streams, the lairds own the fish in the sea.”

  “No one owns the fish.”

  “The lairds own the salmon—I like ‘saumont’ better—and the Englishmen kill them. The rubber-gum waders with their twenty-foot rods and their gillies running up and down with hot meat pies and flasks of whisky, looking down their noses at you because they’re certain you’re out to try and steal one of their sacred fish.”

  “God put the fish in the sea. It isn’t fair.”

  “Aye, well. I suggest you go tell that to the water bailiffs.”

  He gave up too easily, too quickly for Maggie’s taste. There was not enough passion in his submission.

  “What would they do to you if you took one and they caught you?”

  He looked at her and smiled.

  “You’re not from here, are you? Three months in jail, a little thrashing sometimes when the bailiff closes the door on you, and worst of all a five-pound fine.”

  The wind was bad again. Scud from the waves blew across the inlet and the shoreline was lacquered with froth. It was becoming p
lain to Maggie that what was known as a storm in Pitmungo merely meant wind in Strathnairn. She hated it.

  “I would do it,” Maggie said. He didn’t hear her.

  “What?”

  “I would get me one. I don’t care what the risk,” she shouted. They didn’t talk the rest of the way but she knew where his mind was. At the house he walked out into the water to secure his little boat that was tied to a stone in the inlet and came back to the door.

  “What is your name?”

  “Meg Drum.”

  “MacDrum?”

  “Maggie Drum.”

  “That’s it? Maggie Drum?”

  “Aye. Meg Drum.”

  He thought about that.

  “A very fine name,” he said after a pause. “There used to be a man in my regiment named Drum, Willie Drum. He looked after the horses.”

  “Of course.”

  Gillon was embarrassed. He hadn’t meant it to sound that way.

  “He was hanged for something or other.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “What I meant by bringing that up was, what I meant by it, you see, was that he was very brave when he was dropped.”

  She said nothing to that.

  “Little short, dark man.”

  “Naturally.”

  He decided to close his mouth. They went into the cairn.

  “Someone’s been here,” he said. “I can smell pine and I used no pine.”

  She wondered if she should tell him and decided against it. Silence is sometimes better than honesty. She hoped she hadn’t left anything behind her. He had eyes like some of the fishing birds she had noticed on the shore. They missed nothing.

  “They used it all up,” he said. “Can you imagine the selfishness of it? Every stick of it.” He prowled around the edges of the cairn.

  “We descend from a long line of Pictish moudieworts,” Maggie said. He didn’t know the word but he would learn. He hadn’t really heard her.

  “They didn’t take my food.” He was lighting the shark-oil lamps. “Why are you smiling?”

  “You sound like the papa bear coming home.”

  “But they must have been here for hours.”

  “They was me, silly.”

  And there it was, exposed to him if he understood what she was saying, that she had sat there in darkness for hours waiting for him to come. All he noticed were those little teeth and knew that he had missed them. And her, in this house. She made him nervous but he was happy she was here. He had been dreaming about her in exactly the situation he was now in, alone with her again, and the dreams excited him and frightened him. In the morning when the sun was up, he managed to put them aside but they came again in the night. It was almost dark outside and time to go, but this time she knew she would be back.