Stranger on Rhanna

by Christine Marion Fraser

  ‘Indeed it will, Isaac,’ she had intoned primly, ‘and there is no need for you to emphasize the fact that you will only be biding wi’ me as a lodger. No one could ever take Hector’s place in my house, dead or alive, he will aye be my man, you know that as well as I do myself.’

  It had taken Captain Mac all his time not to laugh outright at this. In his lifetime, drink-sodden Hector had never known a minute’s peace from Elspeth’s nagging tongue. Their vigorous arguments had never been anything else but public knowledge, for Elspeth had never made any secret of her matrimonial disputes nor had Hector ever tried to hide the fact that ‘the cold sea was a far better place to be than a frozen marriage bed wi’ naught but the blankets to keep him warm.’

  Perhaps time had softened Elspeth’s memories of her empty, childless years as Hector’s wife, though it was far more likely that she was doing everything in her power to ease Mac’s mind about coming to live with her.

  In order to hide his incredulous face Mac had pummelled his nose with alarming energy. ‘Indeed, I know fine that you will aye be a one-man woman,’ he assured hastily, ‘otherwise I would never have suggested moving in with you. But it is an arrangement that will suit us both, you need a man to see to the heavy jobs around the house and I need a woman to darn my socks and cook my meals. You understand, of course, that I was never the sort o’ man to bide in one place for any length o’ time? The sea will aye be in my blood and I couldny live without my wee trips wi’ the fisherlads, also, from time to time. I’ll be staying wi’ my sister Nellie at her croft on Hanaay.’

  ‘Of course, I understand your life is your own to do as you like with,’ Elspeth acquiesced readily. ‘We will both be leading our own lives, for I have still my duties to see to at Slochmhor. Och, I know fine that Phebie imagines she can do it all herself but Lachlan needs a body like me about the place. I have had a lifetime o’ seeing that he has all his wee comforts to hand and I intend to go on doing that till I drop. Besides, Phebie was never much o’ a cook, she aye puts too much baking powder in the scones and too much salt in the soup, and too much salt at Lachlan’s age isny a good thing. Oh, ay, you and me will lead our separate lives, Isaac, though you can be assured you will aye have a full belly and a good, dry pair o’ socks on your feets. Hector had all o’ these things and a bittie more forbye, but he was never the sort o’ man to appreciate the kind o’ comforts a good wife provided.’

  ‘Ay, ay, good friends sometimes make better companions to one another than a wedded pair,’ Mac had stated hastily, growing a bit hot under the collar at the enormity of the step he was taking. When his cronies got wind of it they would think he had taken leave of his senses altogether but he had thought the whole matter out very carefully. After a few days living at Nellie’s croft she began to nag him worse than any wife and he was glad to make good his escape back to his relatives on Rhanna. But he was growing tired of all the hopping around and had decided that Elspeth was the better of two evils. She was an excellent cook, she kept a tight ship and he knew she was fond of him in her own queer way. If she too started nagging him he could always escape back to Hanaay for a few days and there was always the fishing trips with the lads to fall back on, nevertheless he was aware of a gnawing sensation of unease deep in his belly which moved him to say rather anxiously, ‘You are sure you’ll no’ regret it, Elspeth, and maybe start being annoyed at me for getting under your feets?’

  ‘Ach, of course not, Isaac,’ she had returned coyly. ‘You should know better than that.’

  ‘And you’ll no be worrying as to what folks might be saying about us? I wouldny like to be doing anything that would tarnish your reputation as the good, upright woman that you are.’

  Elspeth had snorted. If only he knew! She was longing to have her reputation tarnished! For too many years she had endured the snide remarks of people like Kate McKinnon regarding her ‘dried-up opinions about life’. She had been referred to as ‘a spinster woman wearing the mantle of widowhood’ and ‘an old maid who had tripped over the marriage bed and had completely lost her way in the dark’.

  She was fed up to the back teeth with Behag’s continual prying and poking into her affairs and it would give her the greatest satisfaction to see the look on the old bitch’s face when it became apparent that Captain Mac had moved in with her. It was therefore with the greatest conviction that she told Mac he had no need to worry on that score since ‘in the eyes o’ the Lord she was doing nothing wrong and to hell with gossips and scandalmongers’.

  Elspeth sat back and thought of all this while she sipped her tea. For once she had no idea of any of the latest happenings in the village, so taken up was she with her own thoughts and affairs. For a long time she sat in her chair thinking about her meeting with Captain Mac at the war memorial, then, with an oddly furtive expression on her face, she made her way upstairs to her sparsely furnished bedroom. Almost on tiptoe, as if afraid that something or someone might leap out on her at any moment, she went to her dresser and from a bottom drawer she extracted an untidily wrapped brown paper parcel.

  ‘Will you look after this for me?’ Mac had asked her a few days ago on returning from a trip to Oban. ‘You mind I told you that my brother’s widow lives on Uist. There is a daughter, my niece, a right bonny lass who will be twenty-one in November. Joan, that’s my sister-in-law, fair dotes on the girl and is planning a big party for her birthday when it comes. She is already gathering things together and bought this parcel o’ stuff when I was wi’ her in Oban. She doesny want Katie finding them, for she has a wee habit o’ snooping into cupboards if she thinks her mother has been hiding things. They’ll be safe wi’ you till the time comes.’

  Elspeth had agreed to keep the parcel but the moment Mac’s back was turned she had decided it would do no harm to ‘have a wee keek’.

  The contents of the innocuous brown wrappings had taken her breath away. Out had tumbled several luxuriant garments, including two nightdresses, one a peach satin with furls of snowy white lace trimming the low-cut neck, the other a black silk with red ribbon slotted through the black lace at the neck and tiny red bows decorating the hem.

  Elspeth had never seen the likes in all her born days and she had spent some time running her hands over the wondrous material. After that she hadn’t been able to stay away from her bedroom and at every opportunity she was up there, sitting on her bed, surrounded by black silk and peach satin, enchanted and mesmerized by such beauty.

  It was sinful, of course, what mother in her right mind would buy such things for a young girl? It was just tempting providence, any man would go daft with lust and passion if he got just one keek of them covering a young girl’s body. It wasn’t decent, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t proper.

  Even so, Elspeth’s own eyes gleamed at the very thought of that lovely material touching human flesh and very daringly she had crept guiltily to her room one night, undressed and slipped the peach satin over her head. The touch of it on her body was like slipping into the cool, silken waves of the sea. Not that Elspeth had ever dipped herself in any sea, silken or otherwise, but in her heightened state of awareness she imagined that this was what it must be like. She felt pampered, delicious, almost like a girl again, and when she dared to view herself in the full-length wardrobe mirror she imagined she looked like a young girl again, virginal and untouched. Of course, the candlelight was kind, she wasn’t foolish enough not to recognize that and never, never, would she dare to garb herself in such a manner in the unkindly light of day. But for just a few, short, ecstatic moments she was the young Elspeth again, before time and care had withered the flesh on her bones and robbed her face of its youthfulness . . .

  A shout from outside had nearly caused her to have a heart attack, and rushing to cover the peach silk with her aged brown cardigan she had peered from her window to see Kirsteen McKenzie standing below with a message from Phebie requesting Elspeth be at Slochmhor early next day as visitors were expected for dinner.

  ‘As if she couldny
see to it herself,’ Elspeth had muttered, contrarily ignoring the fact that she had, for years, tried to brainwash the McLachlans into believing that she was indispensable.

  Now here she was again, surrounded by folds of exquisite nightwear that spilled over the patchwork quilt on her bed, like gleaming jewels that taunted and tormented her. It was while she was standing there that an astounding idea came into her head, one so daring that she pushed it aside with an impatient snort. But it wouldn’t go away that easily, drumming at her so insistently she felt weak with the power of it, her shaking legs forcing her to sink down on the edge of the bed where she sat, staring into space, allowing the idea to gel and take shape.

  Clasping her hands to her mouth, she began to laugh, a small, breathless laugh born of her own audacity. ‘I’ll show them,’ she whispered. ‘That bitch, Behag, I’ll give her something to talk about, I’ll give them all something to talk about . . .’

  A voice from the kitchen brought her back to earth with a start. Was there never any peace on this island? At all hours of the day and night there was always someone interfering with her life. Unwillingly and reverently she put the glamorous garments back into her bottom drawer and went downstairs to find Mollie McDonald in her kitchen.

  ‘There you are,’ Mollie said with a frown. ‘I was beginning to think that the fairies had spirited you away.’ She omitted to add that, in her view and in that of quite a few others, Elspeth had been behaving so strangely of late she might indeed be ‘away wi’ the fairies’, but Mollie was too respectful of the other woman’s sharp tongue to risk suggesting anything of that nature.

  Instead she plunged into the gossip of the moment, knowing that an interest in other folk’s business was Elspeth’s main pastime. But when she mentioned the ‘foreign stranger’ and his supposed link-up with Rachel Jodl of An Cala, she met with only luke-warm enthusiasm.

  Somewhat unwillingly, Elspeth went to put the kettle on, not in the least bit concerned about a man who was just another visitor to Rhanna – even if he was a foreigner. As Mollie prattled on, Elspeth listened with only half an ear, her mind too busy with her own affairs to be bothered with those of anyone else.

  Chapter Five

  Tina turned a hot face from the stove as Otto appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Och, tis yourself, Mr Klebb,’ she beamed, tucking away a wilful strand of flyaway hair, ‘frozen and done in by the look o’ you. It is far too cold a day to go wandering down by the shore. Away you go ben the room to the fire and I’ll bring your dinner through on a tray. It won’t be long, I’m just waiting for the bone to go out o’ the tatties.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Bones in the – er – tatties?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Ach, it’s just our way o’ saying the potatoes are still hard in the middle. Now, if you’ll excuse me for speaking my mind but I don’t like anybody under my feets when I’m in the kitchen, so go you through and have a nice warm to yourself by the fire.’

  He seemed glad to do as he was bid and when she eventually appeared with a laden tray it was to find him sprawled in a chair with his eyes shut, a look of exhaustion on his face.

  ‘Ach, there now, you’ve been taking too much out o’ yourself,’ Tina told him kindly. ‘The island air is something you have to get used to bit by bit, the sea has a rough breath to it and tis no wonder your hands are blue wi’ cold, you went out without gloves and no’ even as much as a stitch to cover your head.’

  As she spoke she was setting his meal down on his lap, her actions languid and unhurried, her voice lilting and calm in his ears. When she uncovered the plate a steamily delicious aroma of steak and kidney pudding assailed his nostrils and suddenly and unexpectedly he felt ravenously hungry.

  ‘There you are now, Mr Klebb,’ Tina stood back with a beaming smile and folded her hands across her ample stomach, ‘just you enjoy that and I want to see every scrap eaten. Neither me nor my Matthew could ever abide waste o’ any sort and don’t be giving any to that cat, she has her own food in the kitchen but will try to pretend to you she’s wasting away wi’ hunger.’

  Otto looked at the little grey tabby sitting very erect on the hearthrug staring into the fire with huge green orbs.

  She had ‘come wi’ the house’ – at least that was what Eve had told him. On his first morning on Rhanna he had gone to the door and there was the cat waiting to get in. She had stalked past his legs, straight in to the house to sit herself by the fire and look at him as if to say, ‘Well, I’m home, how about some breakfast.’ He had named her Vienna and in the three days he had been at Tigh na Cladach she had only budged from the house when it was strictly necessary. Now he couldn’t imagine his hearth without Vienna sitting on the rug or waiting at the door to meet him when he returned from his lonely walks on the beach.

  ‘She thinks she owns me,’ he had told Tina, who had informed him, ‘She will certainly never disown you as long as you pamper and fuss over her the way you do. Cats are fly craturs, they know where the monkey sleeps and this one is no exception.’

  Otto was quite sure that Vienna had no earthly idea where monkeys slept but suspected that it was just another one of Tina’s quaint expressions. He only knew that Vienna had found him and was here at Tigh na Cladach to stay, and the minute Tina’s back was turned he slipped the little cat a piece of juicy steak which she carried off to a corner like a prized trophy.

  He could hear Tina in the hall, singing in a sweet if slightly tuneless voice as she went about dusting, and he smiled to himself because he had witnessed her methods with a feather duster, flicking it about half-heartedly while she studied things that were of far more interest to her.

  She had shown a great deal of enthusiasm for the books that he had brought with him and was particularly taken with a volume of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Seeing the look on Otto’s face, she had smiled indulgently. ‘Ach, I know fine what you’re thinking, you are wondering what can an island woman like me know about books like these. But the Scottish people have aye wanted to educate themselves, Mr Klebb. You can go into any Highland home and find similar books on the shelves, and old Magnus of Croy who lives in a thatched cottage has a bookcase filled wi’ Shakespeare and Shelley, Burns and Sir Walter Scott, wi’ a few volumes o’ Chekhov thrown in for good measure.

  ‘He also loves good music and on his old gramophone he plays records o’ Beethoven and Schumann and that Austrian chiel, Schubert, I think he said. Magnus himself plays the fiddle and makes up wee songs and in his younger days he also played the accordion, the kettle drums, and the bagpipes.’

  ‘Frau Tina,’ Otto had said rather severely, ‘you don’t have to convince me, I know that the Scots have always educated themselves, they are also explorers and have travelled the world in search of fame and fortune and have sought the knowledge of other cultures, though never do they lose their pride in their Scottish roots – that I know for a fact,’ he ended on a somewhat mysterious note.

  ‘You can take War and Peace home with you and read it at your leisure,’ he had added, and an appeased Tina had gone away clutching the book, thinking to herself that he was a generous man under that stand-offish exterior and that there was also something very odd in the way he spoke about the Scots, almost as if knew them very well or had made it a point to find out as much as he could about them.

  Having finished the dusting, Tina returned to the living room to pile more peats on the fire and take Otto’s tray from him. ‘There now, you enjoyed that,’ she said, gratified when she saw the empty plate. ‘Visitors always get a good appetite when they come to Rhanna, the fresh air is just the thing many o’ them need to get them back on their feets again, but you mustny think you have to go off on your own all the time. It will be nice for you to meet other lads who come from the same country as yourself. Two nice young Germans crash-landed their airyplane on Rhanna during the war and later, one o’ them, Anton Büttger, who has a farm above Mara Òran Bay, came to settle here, the other, Jon Jodl, has a house near Anton’s and comes to it with
his wife whenever they can get away.’

  Otto looked at her in some annoyance and said harshly, ‘Frau Tina, because you speak English does it follow that you are from England? No, of course it doesn’t and the same applies to me, I speak German but I am an Austrian and proud of it.’

  Tina had coloured but she was not to be browbeaten. ‘And I am a Gael, Herr Klebb, and proud to be such, the Gaelic is my native language but if I had never learned the foreign tongue I would not have been counted. German, Austrian, English, Scottish, we are all alike in the eyes o’ God . . .’ her dimples showed, ‘just as long as we all learn English in order to understand one another!’

  He looked at her, she had a nice face, open, honest and kind. Megan had told him all about Tina, how she had lost her husband when he had gone out with the lifeboat during a terrible storm only last spring. The same sea that had taken her husband had also brought with it two young men who had been the cause of a different kind of havoc on the island.

  Otto didn’t know all the details but he had gathered that Mark James, Megan’s husband, had suffered some sort of breakdown as a result of the storm and that Tina’s daughter, Eve, had been seduced by one of the young men, resulting in her becoming pregnant, and the baby was due some time this month.

  Tina had had more than her share of suffering, yet a smile was never far from her face, a song always ready at her lips, and he felt ashamed for his outburst.

  ‘We understand one another, Frau Tina,’ he said gently. ‘We are of the same soil, the surge of the western ocean beats as strongly in my heart as it does in yours, the voice of lonely places speaks in my soul as it has done for as long as I can remember.’

  The mystery was deepening. Tina opened her mouth to speak but he put a finger to his. ‘Hush, mein Frau, the time will come but for now I am not yet ready for it. It is enough that I am here, warming myself with spicy-smelling peat fires and finding out for myself the meaning of good, wholesome Scottish cooking, the steak pie was köstlich and I am feeling fit to burst. Now, if you will excuse me, I have many things to do and I am sure that you too have much bustle in your life.’