I, however, was not thinking of the psalm that morning, but of a pair of pale blue eyes and a long rosy face with fair hair brushed to one side that was still a little tangled from the pillow at the back. For the first time, I had no condemnation for Lot’s wife, turned as she was to a pillar of salt for not being able to refrain from casting her eyes back to the city of sins. I tried. I stared hard at the minister as he preached, almost mouthing the words along with him, but all I could think is – he is near.
But then, I thought, only old widow MacDonald who cannot walk is missing from our congregation, and of course that boy who thinks so highly of himself that he can ignore the call of the Lord on the Lord’s own day. And it was this anger for Mr Fred Lawson that saved me from my thoughts about Archie, for I found myself paying close attention to the service, imagining what Fred would think if he were here, which bits he would find ridiculous, which parts might stir his soul, and I almost forgot that Archie was so close as I listened to the singing and sermon as if through the ears of that most annoying boy.
Stepping out of the church with the women, I waited for Father. But there was Archie with him in his plus fours and toffee-gold corduroy jacket. He was shaking the men’s hands as they went by as if they would wish to thank him for the sermon. I bowed my head as we came near to, resigned to the fact that Archie thought only of his English girls now, but he dipped his head to catch my eye. ‘Chrissie, good morning. I hardly recognized you, you look so splendid with your new hairstyle. And such singing. I could pick your voice out anywhere, you know, lovely as ever. We really should kidnap you and take you back to Dunvegan to sing for us.’
I nodded and hurried away. Scolding myself for having nothing to reply – perhaps the only time in my life this had happened. But my heart was full and rising like a lark. He said he would like to take me away with him. Foolish that I am, I wondered then, does he remember the promise he once made – nothing but a child’s promise – and everything to me?
CHAPTER 16
Fred
ST KILDA, 1927
From under my burrow of blankets I heard someone moving about on the other side of the partition, pleasant smells of porridge, eggs and tea floating through. By the time I was up and out of the wooden box that made up my sleeping quarters in the middle of the bothy, she was gone, leaving behind an unusually tidy table and dresser, the peat fire burning bright in the hearth. It was Chrissie’s first morning helping with the cooking, her mother being too busy. I could see that I was going to have to set my alarm forward if I was going to find Chrissie at her morning work.
I called Archie through. He had the pitiful, greenish look of a man who’d stayed too many hours late into the night, sharing one of the bottles from his rapidly diminishing supply over at Lachie’s house.
‘It’s great they are giving you such a hand with the digging but you know the boys here like Callum and Lachie they’re not used to strong drink. Do you think it’s a good idea to be so free with it?’ I said, attempting some casual lightness in my voice.
‘My God, does anyone get used to strong drink?’ said Archie, hands on his head. ‘Do see if there’s an aspirin on the dresser somewhere, would you. And yes, point taken, I shall never drink again. Not a drop. My liver, it would seem, forbids it.’
He stirred his porridge rather than ate it. Drank two cups of coffee and smoked a cigarette while I finished up his share of the eggs. Before setting off with my canvas bag weighed down with tools and notebooks, I made sure Archie was out of the door and on his way to complete his work on the souterrain.
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘I’ll have this done and dusted and then I’ll be over in the glen working on my next project, the warrior queen’s house. I’m sure it’s another Neolithic site. After all, if the island belongs to someone else this time next year, I might not even get permission to come back and work on it, so it’s now or never.’
Archie’s news that his father might have to sell the island disturbed me as I walked along the bothies towards the schoolroom. The men had gone up into the hills with most of the dogs to collect some of the sheep, ruaging they called it, for most of the week, and the village felt quiet and bereft, one old lady outside number eleven sat at her spinning wheel. I’d followed the debate in the newspapers over the past couple of years on whether it was time to evacuate the island. You had to wonder how much longer they could manage with so few able-bodied men to do the hard and often dangerous work needed to keep themselves fed. I stood and looked around the village bothies, so much a part of the hills, homes of a generous-hearted people unspoiled by the grasping city, and my heart felt a contraction of pain to think that this unique little settlement might one day be relegated to a footnote in history.
The minister had not been any more reassuring when I’d spoken with him over the past few days. He’d shown me a pile of letters that he’d received from various government ministries in reply to his requests for a regular mail boat. ‘A regular boat isn’t worth it, they say, for the few people here. In the government’s opinion, the costs of supplying a school and a nurse for a mere forty people are already too high. I’m afraid I don’t see how the village can hold on through another bad winter unless something substantial changes in the mainland government’s attitude towards the mail boats.’
‘But if the seas are impossible in winter, what can they do?’
‘They could get the lighthouse ship to call in on her way to the Flannan Isles. Nothing impossible about it.’
The school was tucked alongside the flank of the church. I found myself in a room directly from the Victorian age, high wooden desks in a row, cast-iron inkwells and a ledger high desk for the teacher. Mrs Munro was marking names in a register, its pages wavy with sea damp. In the corner hearth a peat fire cast its unique scent of ancient oils from bogwood and long preserved roots – necessary even in summer in an attempt to keep the damp at bay. A wistful feeling lingered in the room that it had once been far more crowded. I’d seen a photograph of the crowded rows of Victorian children. Now just eight children sat at their desks, hair neatly combed, clean pinafores, faces expectant.
I was heartened to see Chrissie there, evidently one of her days when she came in to help the minister’s wife, but she gave me the briefest nod in greeting, no smile.
Still cross with me for being such an atheist, then.
Mrs Munro closed her register. ‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Lawson. The children are very fortunate to have you here this morning and we are so interested to hear what you might have to tell us.’
The slanted desks were no good for laying out the rocks, so we agreed to hold the class out on the grass, the minister’s son running to fetch a blanket on which to display the specimens.
‘I’m more than glad we are out here,’ I told the children sitting along the edges of the blanket, ‘because the lesson is all around us. Does anyone here know what a volcano is?’
Mrs Munro was pleased to see that the children could explain a volcano.
‘Excellent. And did you know that you are sitting inside the crater of a volcano right now?’
Children always love a safely scary story.
‘The bay where the boats are calmly sitting on the water, the beach, this grass where you are sitting, were all once a deep hole, with red-hot molten lava shooting up from deep inside the earth, and huge billowing clouds of dusty gas above us.’
‘Will it go off again, Mr Lawson?’ asked Mary MacDonald, looking at the water doubtfully.
‘No, don’t worry, Mary. That was six million years ago, and the land is cold and completely sealed off now. The molten lava is all safely hidden away deep, deep inside the earth’s crust. But it was a very good thing that the volcano went off all that time ago, because those great fountains of molten rock piled up as they cooled, and eventually they made the hills we see now. The islands are the result of a series of volcanoes in fact.’
I let the children look around at the ring of hills and take in what the
y had just heard. The adults seemed no less impressed. I had a feeling they did not have many encounters with pure science in their lives.
Tormod raised his hand. ‘So that’s how God did it. First the earth was covered in water and then he made dry land, and it was with the volcanoes he did it. Just like in Genesis. I always did wonder how he did it so fast.’
‘Well done, Tormod,’ said Mrs Munro.
‘Well, actually. . .’ I began.
I glanced over at Chrissie who was staring down hard as if she knew what I would say next. I decided to avoid the more philosophical side of geology for the morning.
‘The thing that has me very interested about the island, and may interest all of you, is that the volcano, or volcanoes perhaps, must have gone off several times because I am finding quite different areas of cooled magma across Hirta and her islets.’
I stood and pointed to the shale slipping from the side of Conachair. ‘You see, over there to the right, the rocks are cream-coloured granite, the hard stones we use to make the bothies and the storage cleits. But if you look on the left side of the village, the patch of shale coming down the side of Mullach Mòr has a bluish tinge, especially in the rain. That’s dolerite. Then, over towards the Cambir and the isle of Soay the rock is a dense and greenish olivine-gabbro. It’s a sort of rock that’s so hard people used to make hand axes from it. In fact, Mr Archie Macleod found just such an ancient axe inside what you call the fairies’ house, made by the people who lived there over a thousand years ago. But what I want you to do now is to look at these rocks on the blanket. Pick them up and feel how heavy they are.’
The children handled the specimens, discussing their various colours and textures. ‘They are different, you see, because each of the eruptions produced a different mix of chemicals. Some have just salt and calcium, others, these yellower ones, have more potassium in them. And can you feel that some rocks are smoother than others? That’s because the faster they cooled, the smoother the rock. These very grainy ones now, they would have cooled down slowly, do you see? And the result is the different kinds of rock that make the island archipelago we sit on.’
‘For great are the works of the Lord,’ said the minister’s wife
‘Or a question of chemistry and physics,’ I said, a mite apologetically.
Mrs Munro gave me a hard look, dolerite at least, and I did not pursue my corrections. I glanced over to where Chrissie sat on the edge of the blanket in her blue dress, her tanned feet and ankles bare. She still hadn’t spoken. I could tell from the heightened colour in her cheeks that she was still angry with me.
‘And you are very sure the volcano will not be exploding again?’ asked Mary, pressing on the grass as if to test its reliability.
‘Absolutely. I promise. You are safe as houses here on this island.’
I spent some time letting the children examine the rock collection and answering their very intelligent questions. They agreed to help me by bringing back any interesting specimens they found on the island, being careful to note where they had found them.
I soon realized how thorough children are.
‘More gifts from your little ants,’ Archie would say as another child appeared at our bothy door holding an offering. Some of the specimens they came with were quite beautiful, polished smooth by the sea to show the quality of the rock, green olivine-gabbro veined with cream, pink granite flecked with quartz, sparks of blue feldspar layered inside rough gabbro, even a rare lump of black volcanic glass. We filled the surfaces in the bothy and then began to place a line of them along the low wall in front of the door.
I wonder, if I were to go back there now, would those stones still be there along the sea wall, keeping vigil in front of the empty cottages?
CHAPTER 17
Chrissie
ST KILDA, 1927
It was my own curiosity that ruined my peace of mind. It was wrong of me to steal a look that first morning I went to help at Archie’s cottage, and there was no undoing what I saw.
Archie slept in the larger room at the far end of the cottage with a desk under the window and a hearth on the far wall to keep the room warm. His finds from the fairies’ house, however, were laid along the kitchen windowsill. A piece of brown pottery with patterns pressed into it as if with a stick. Animal and bird bones, chalk-white shells of limpets, which we call famine food, for we eat limpets here only if we must. A smooth round stone that was once an axe, hard and greenish, used perhaps for smashing shells held fast to the rocks. All things the fairies had put there, or rather, the ancient men and women who once lived beneath the turf, safe from the gales and spray of the winter storms. I ran my hands over the objects and wondered if those people had looked like we St Kildans do now, what they thought about and prayed for.
The porridge was ready, the table set, a pan of mutton and potatoes ready for the boys to put over the fire for their supper later. What else to do? Fred had the smaller bedroom in the middle of the bothy, so his desk was in the kitchen, his stones ranged along the back like the pieces of a game whose rules I did not know. I picked up a rock filled with glassy black layers shimmering like a dark sea, weighed another in my hand, green as moss but hard as iron.
Then my eyes went to the notebook lying open. No harm in looking, just dull notes about rocks. Some notes on the ceilidh at Allie’s house. I smiled, for hadn’t he written down the song of the fairy lovers from what he recalled of my English telling, though he hadn’t it all correctly – I could see that much. Curious, I glanced through more, turning the pages back, notes on rocks interspersed with passages about the island and our village ways. Pleased to see that he thought well of our old traditions and our kind community, I read on. Surely I had the right since it was us he was describing, and then I stopped, my cheeks on fire. For I was reading about me, words on how I was lovely to look at, on my dark hair. How he thought of me often. How much I loved my own opinions. I stepped back like I’d been burned.
I was so embarrassed I could have melted on the spot. I touched the back of my hand to my hot cheeks. Why ever was he going on so much about me? And then I saw in a moment what I had never imagined or suspected: Mr Lawson thought he loved me.
But what a nonsense. And how sorry I was for him, for how could he be so mistook as to think like that of me – who cared for him not at all?
I turned the pages back, smoothed them down. I hurried to give the porridge a last stir, making sure the fire was hot enough to keep it warm but not burn it, checked the room was tidy, and then took myself away as quietly as I could.
Much good it was going to do me, since in a village like ours there was no hiding. I’d be back there the next day and the next to set their breakfast. And wasn’t he coming down to the school today to talk to the children? Oh, but I could never let him know I had read his secret pages – I would die with the shame of it. Poor man. To imagine himself in love so. How could he be so mistook? And he was very mistaken – for wouldn’t I love him back if his love were a true thing?
So many other thoughts crept in, as if I had never before noticed this Mr Fred Lawson on our island. Such as his eyes were merry with a quiet mischief beneath a thick brown fringe that had grown too long. How he could be as bashful as a boy at times. How he was a good friend to Archie. Though he was ever galling with his superior thoughts, I reminded myself.
When he came down to the schoolroom that day, I was cool but kindly distant. Never so glad for the breeze on my face outside, and never so glad when it was over and he went away with his satchel of rocks.
‘He has a thoughtful way with children,’ Mrs Munro said after school was dismissed. ‘I do think that Mr Lawson would make a very good teacher if that were the path he wished to take, don’t you agree? As would you, Chrissie. Remember, if you ever wanted to come away with us to finish your studies when we go, I could make sure you had employment after in a good school.’
I thanked her but both she and I knew that would never happen, for all my future was here on t
he island. The very thought of ever leaving the island was like the news of a death to me, a blow of loss in my heart.
I decided that I should show myself in my worst light when I was with Mr Lawson, so that he might be quicker rid of his illusions. But I did not get much opportunity, for the next day the tourist boat came. My great-uncle, old Finlay MacQueen, might have been more than eighty, but he was still the tallest man on the island, and the proudest, with his white beard spread over his chest in the way that all our grandfathers wore theirs. But since Finlay and his generation never had the English lessons that we were all made to have as children, it was difficult for him to talk with the tourists and so he often got overlooked and failed to sell his tweed.
I found myself sitting by Fred on the wall, watching as the tourists gaped and twittered around Mrs MacKinnon’s front door as she demonstrated her skill with her spinning wheel. I was making sure to make a display of scratching my side, slumping in an ungainly way. But Fred was looking over at old Finlay who had spent all day carrying his roll of grey tweed to and fro among the tourists.
‘Don’t you think it sad,’ said Fred, ‘that Finlay was the pride of the island in his youth, famous as the greatest of the cragsmen, and look at him, so rudely overlooked by these silly tourists?’
‘I see you have been listening to Finlay. But, aye, it is true. Finlay, even now, is never afeared on the cliffs, never dizzy. They say he was the last man to balance by his toes on the edge of the lover’s stone that juts out above Soay, heels in the air with nothing but a thousand feet of wind beneath. But these fools see nothing of all that. He will be sore disappointed to have no pennies to buy his tobacco. Though Finlay always finds someone who will give him a little as a present of it, that’s how canny he is.’
The Lost Lights of st Kilda Page 11