The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Margaret Drum, will you do these things for me?”

  She stared at the floor, in which Mr. Bothwell read humility. The floor was so rich in fish oil that bubbles came out of the boards.

  “She will, she will,” Mrs. Bothwell cried, and she embraced Maggie and stained the bride’s bottle-green velveteen dress that Maggie had bought in a second-hand shop on Lovatt Street.

  “In that event, I now utilize my authority as your agent of God here on earth to pronounce you man and wife. The ring.”

  Gillon was stunned. “You didn’t tell me to get a ring,” he said to Maggie.

  “You’re the master, you should have known.”

  Mr. Bothwell produced a tinny kind of ring that could not have cost a ha’penny to make. With the aid of a dab of fish oil, it was slid onto her finger.

  “Mr. Cameron, you may now kiss Mrs. Cameron.”

  It was then that it reached him, the whole of the experience. How had it happened, how had it come this far and this fast? And why was he standing next to this little dark girl who he was supposed to kiss in public and live with for the rest of his natural life? He found he was trembling.

  “In a kirk?” Gillon finally said.

  “Oh, go on, give her a smooch,” Mrs. Bothwell said, and she turned Maggie’s little brown face toward him, and he kissed her on her cheek.

  The cost of the service was ten shillings. It was more than Gillon had intended to pay, but when one considered the sermon and the songs, the dance and the poems and the ring, it was not that far out of line. Men of God must eat like everyone else, Gillon thought, and felt better about the ten shillings. When they went down the stairs of the fish house, Mr. Bothwell played them out onto Lovatt Street on his pipes with “The Liltin’,” a very moving lament that Gillon only long afterward discovered was written for the dead at Flodden.

  It was strange being out on the street in the morning, the fog cleared away and the sun shining, daundering along with no work to do. They walked along the harbor’s edge, Gillon closely studying the boats in harbor, wondering if he should take her hand and deciding that it wouldn’t look right at that hour of the morning, even if they were just married. In the week before the wedding, he had not had any trouble in talking to her, but now he had nothing at all to say.

  “Well, how does it feel to be Mrs. Gillon Cameron?” he said. He knew it was lame.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it yet.”

  Gillon turned brick red.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I did,” Meg said.

  “Ah, come look,” he called.

  It was his old boat, which he had sold the week before. The new owner had beached it and was at work caulking the bottom. They watched him work and Maggie took Gillon’s hand.

  “Our boat,” Meg said.

  The “our” was another shock to him, the way “Mrs. Cameron” had been. What was his was hers for the rest of his life.

  “I’ll miss her,” Gillon said, and took his hand away. It was too much for a Strathnairn morning. The wind from the firth caused the brim of his hat to flare up on one side and it gave him a jaunty, even arrogant look.

  “You look like them, Gillon.”

  “Och.”

  “It’s why I married you.”

  “If you married a kiltie lad to get one of them, then you made a bad bargain.” Maggie merely smiled.

  With the salmon money Maggie had bought him a Shetland-tweed suit the color of peat-bog water, like the ones the painters who came to Strathnairn wore, all russets and rusts and reds, and a white linen shirt with a long soft collar and a wide tie, the color of heather, loomed from coarse soft wool.

  “How does she seem?” Gillon asked. The man looked up from his caulking pot and stared at them. He didn’t recognize Gillon in his hat and new suit.

  “For a man who’s starving, good enough.”

  They went on.

  Over the tops of the gray-stone houses lined along Lovatt he could see the upper floors of the Bel Geddes house and her window, her room, and the intimacy of it alarmed him. He wasn’t prepared to go there.

  “I’ll tell you what. Since I’m one of them, let’s walk out to Fiddich House and have ourselves a proper toff’s lunch.”

  He was surprised when she agreed. He thought she would object to the money.

  “We’ll have champagne,” he said, and she nodded. “I’ll snap my fingers and shout ‘Champagne.’” Maggie nodded.

  He was excited by the idea. A person should do that once in his life. Ever since the days when his family had been driven from their croft in Cromarty, he had wanted for one day to sit on a glassed-in terrace and have some bobbing Scottish girl, especially one he knew, serve him his tea.

  “You know how to order it, of course?” She said it very quietly.

  “You shout, I’ve heard them.”

  “What about fish? Do you just shout ‘Fish,’ and let it go at that?”

  “I guess not.”

  “They ask you what kind of fish and how you want it done.”

  He was beginning to feel a little flattened.

  “And they order champagne by the size. And by something called the vintage. And the color.”

  “I see.”

  He was flat. It was such a childish dream. He was ashamed of himself for even thinking of subjecting her to it.

  “And do you know how to read a menu in French?”

  “No, God, no, this is Scotland.”

  “The menus are all in French.”

  The worst of it, he understood then, just as he had been understanding things all that morning, was that he was never going to sit in one of those glassed-in terraces and have someone bring him his tea, not in all his life ahead. That was always going to be for someone else.

  “Let’s go back,” Gillon said, and she agreed in the same voice she had used when she agreed to go out to Poshtoon. They cut across a lot where a great house had stood and into the area of old decaying houses where the lawns needed cutting and the hedges were overgrown. It was a sad place and felt chilly in the shadows. They walked along the backside of Lovatt Street until they came to the gate outside of the Bel Geddes house.

  “Why are you turning in?” he asked her.

  “We belong here.”

  “I don’t.”

  “If I do, you do.”

  “And what will we do?”

  “What people who are just married do.”

  He hesitated at the gate.

  “With him in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  She started down the path to the side door of the house but he wouldn’t follow her.

  “I won’t do it,” Gillon said. “I order you not to go.”

  Maggie looked at Gillon so hard that he was forced eventually to look down at the graveled path.

  “Now you listen to me. I am Mrs. Gillon Cameron and you are Mr. Gillon Cameron and we are husband and wife under the laws of Scotland and the eyes of God, and we are entitled to share the same room and the same bed and I intend to do both.” She took his hand. “Now come on with me, we belong here.” He took his hand away but he followed her up the path. Before going up the steps he heard a tinkle on the white pebbles and looked down to see the tin ring bounce on the pebbles and roll into the weeds that edged the path. The ring will be there until I die, Gillon thought, and realized what a peculiar thing it was to think. Rodney Bel Geddes was at the desk, doing his ledgers.

  “Congratulations,” he said. He stood up, which he had never bothered to do before. “And, Cameron, congratulations.” Gillon didn’t even know he knew his name. He took Gillon’s hand in that special way men have when something extraordinary has happened to one of their own kind.

  “How did you know?” Maggie said.

  “How did I know? This is Strathnairn, Miss Drum. Mrs. Cameron. One street, Mrs. Cameron, perhaps you noticed. What happens at one end gets down to the other end and what happens at the other end gets down to this end and
nothing goes unnoticed. ‘Did you hear about your little Miss Drum?’ they said to me. ‘Married a kiltie lad named Cameron.’”

  “The key, Mr. Bel Geddes,” Maggie said.

  “Ah, yes, the key.”

  He put it in her hand, large, glinting dully of brass, and for the final time that morning, Gillon was faced with the truth that whatever paths life had intended for him, this was the most important one he would ever take. He thought of the sea just then, the openness of the water and his life in the boat with the winds and waves, the sun and the rain; and there was the key and up ahead were the stairs, dimly to be seen, and there was Maggie next to him, the key in her hand, and he knew there were no longer any choices left to him at all.

  8

  He wished he couldn’t see the sea from the window of the room but the glass was filled with the blueness of it and the sky, a sun-burning blueness so rare for Strathnairn, and when he turned away from all the brightness he could almost not make her out, sitting on the foot of the bed.

  “I don’t think we should stay here,” Gillon said. “Everyone must know. Everyone in the dining room must know.”

  “And I should be left alone on my wedding day, is that what you think is proper?”

  He sat down on the one chair in the room as far from the bed as it was possible to get and twirled his hat in his hand as if it were an important occupation. He knew he looked foolish doing it. When he looked up at her, she was slipping out of her green dress and he quickly turned back to the window and the blueness out there. He wished it were darker outside; it would seem more natural that way. There was so much light in the room.

  “All right,” Maggie said, “you can look if you want. You might as well see what you have bargained for.”

  “Och, Maggie.”

  He wouldn’t look. The word “bargained” bothered him. It was strange: she was there, something very solid and calm poised on the edge of a bed, but he didn’t seem to be in the same room with her. He was standing and yet he could see himself sitting in the chair looking away. He wanted to leave and he wanted to stay, to become a part of the room the way she seemed to be, and all the while he had a dangerous sense of doing something wild and unpredictable.

  “All right,” he said, “what exactly am I supposed to do?” It had taken all his courage to say it, but as soon as he said it, he was glad.

  “Make love to me.”

  He felt a numbness possess his limbs. He had once come out of the water that way, close to drowning, all numbness and a dying heavy slowness to his limbs.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “I can’t describe it, Gillon,” Maggie told him. “It’s the natural thing to do.”

  He could not bring himself to look up from his hat.

  “If it’s so natural, why don’t I know it?”

  “You do know it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I don’t believe you, Gillon. Come over here to me.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “You were in the army.”

  “But I never listened. I turned away when they talked. I didn’t like it, they made it seem so—I don’t know—clarty. Saint Gillon they called me.”

  That had taken as much courage as all the rest. He felt that if he could keep track of the several boats clearing Herringtoon harbor, follow the raising of their sails and the lowering of their nets, then he could eventually place himself in life properly and get things in the room in order. And all at once she was beside him. She was in her robe but without moving his head he could see part of her brown leg and her thigh. He had been alone with her in the cairn but not this way: in a civilized room, in the real world, with a real bed and her, a real woman in a robe.

  “Gillon.” It was a kind of order. “Put down your hat.” He dropped it on the floor.

  “Do you know the word ‘houghmagandie’?”

  “Yes, they all said it.”

  “Well, say it.”

  He said it, his lips almost touching the window glass.

  “There, is there anything so terrible about that? I said it and I’m still here and you said it and you’re still here. Do you feel so terrible, so clarty?”

  He felt a little better.

  “And daffin, do you know it?” He didn’t. “Daffin is different, daffin is like us, daffin is when a husband and wife make love. Luve, we call it in Pitmungo; it sounds more like what it is that way.”

  “Yes.” He liked that, luve.

  “In daffin there is fun and nice and that is all there is to it.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Girls in coal towns know everything sooner or later.”

  He could see her toes, little lean brown toes keeking out from under her robe, playing with the floor and the soft clothing, and without his knowing why, perhaps because it was so personal and so inoffensive at the same time, they excited him.

  “I know the words,” he admitted, “but I don’t know how to go about it.”

  She said nothing.

  “And, besides, the bed will creak.” And she began to laugh, not at him, he knew that, not very loud, but at the situation he was in and they were in and what he had revealed.

  “So, Gillon, you know all about it.”

  “I do not.”

  “Sit on the bed with me.” It was an order and she led him across the room to the bed before he could find a way to resist. When they sat on the bed, holding hands, his hand very cold and wet in her hard little dry warm hand, he was suddenly enormously conscious of how loosely tied the robe was, how open to him, and that underneath it were only her few underclothes and that although this was his wife it was also fairly outrageous. She found his eyes looking at her and he reddened.

  “Do you know why you turn red all the time?”

  He pulled away from her. He didn’t like to talk about himself and he told her that; it made him restless and uneasy.

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Because your mind is so filled with everything about it, you think the whole world can read it.”

  “Och.”

  “It’s true, though. You’re worse than Rodney downstairs and worse than Mr. Drysdale.”

  “Och.” It was absurd. “He goes after all the girls.”

  “And so would you.”

  “Och.”

  She took his hand again and he allowed it.

  “You are a romantic, you see, Gillon. Do you understand the word?”

  “Aye, I know the word.”

  “You’ve thought about the day and dreamed about the day so much you almost can’t do anything about it now it’s here.”

  “Och, that is your absolute pile of … well, nonsense,” but he knew the moment she said it that it was true, and once it was there it wasn’t so painful.

  “But you’ll get over it, Gillon, I will guarantee you that. I’ve seen them before, shy little boots in kirk, little angels in their pews, and then they go into pit and get their lass and the little boots are prancing goats. Doup skelpers.”

  “Doup skelpers?”

  “Bottom pinchers, bottom smackers.”

  “Och.”

  “You will.”

  Absurd, he thought, a man who had never dared run his hand down the arm of a woman and he should be a carouser, one of the world’s lovers, absurd, and yet it made him smile a little bit.

  “Because you have luve-glint in your eyes, Gillon, and nothing you can do will put it out. Anyone can see that. Now, this is what we are going to do. I am going to get undressed and get into our bed.”

  His pulse began to pound as if he were rowing into a headwind.

  “And when I am there you will get undressed and come to bed.” Orders again, it was better that way.

  “And after that nature will tell us what to do.”

  “I see.”

  “God will reveal it to us.”

  “I see.”

  “Because that is the way that must be natural. The original o
nes, they didn’t have anyone to tell them, they didn’t have guidebooks about it.”

  “No, I see that.”

  “They just … knew.”

  * * *

  He lay there looking at the ceiling, conscious of the heat coming from her body, trembling a little bit but not as much as he had feared he would. It is enough, he thought, for a start, just to lie there and watch the sun shots from the water far out glister in patterns across the ceiling. Nothing is being revealed so far, he thought. It was just as well, the slow way. When he finally dared to turn and glance at her he was surprised to find she had fallen asleep. He had a mind to get out of bed. It was certainly insulting to him, as a man, as a doup skelper of the world—but then he lay still and watched her the way he had the night of the salmon, smelling the essence of her the way he did with the salmon, breathing her, knowing all of her presence, knowing everything about her.

  It became clear, each minute a little clearer, what was demanded of him, some force in him now running stronger than his own nature. He was the salmon and she was his goal. All his life he had spent getting here and now, he knew, he must have her, because it was right and nature’s way. So he struck.

  She never said a word but once.

  “I told you,” she said, right into his ear; “didn’t I tell you?”

  He knew everything that had to be done and was aware that he always had. He was only surprised by the force of the climax and at the fact that such a little person could accept it so totally without being damaged. He didn’t know if she experienced the same thing he did and he was never able to bring himself to ask her. He hoped she did.

  They moved apart from each other and lay in bed, looking upward, trying to understand the meaning of what they had just experienced.

  “I don’t believe other people have ever done it just this way or else we would have heard a lot more about it,” Gillon finally said.

  She had liked it, which had not surprised her. All the pithead girls liked it, and she could see no reason why she wouldn’t like it when her time came. It didn’t really matter whether she liked it or not; it was the way it was and the main business was to begin getting her family as soon as possible. The fact that there was some strange kind of animal fun in it besides was just so much added butter to the oatcakes.