As for heritage foodstuffs, sod that. The laird’s well-hung haggis with venison and blaeberry on the side, and ‘partan bree’ and ‘crowdie’ to you, missus, three bags full, would madam care to pay in guineas?
But health food down here in the south, now that was big big money. Janet laughed most at the ones who came in the shop in fur coats to get their meat-free roasts. But she was fairminded, mind. She sniggered right enough at the ones who wore raffia shoes in case of cruelty to leather. The guys of those couples always seemed to be pregnant and did they belong to a secret society that telt you not to clean out your ears? Janet was careful about her appearance, she liked stilettos in white patent and Sandy liked her curvy. No one down here did their hair like Janet. She’d the top bit puffed up and longer bits all down her neck, the Slade look it was known as in the clubs back in Campbeltown. Slade was a great group, a bit old but great for dancing, dead rhythmic. She’d not found someone to colour it the very way she liked it; Shena’d done it for nothing in the house twice a month. But there were advantages to not living with the family as well. It didn’t matter that much for example that she and Sandy were not married, though maw’s letters made such a hefty deal of not mentioning the situation it was amazing the envelopes didn’t bust with the effort.
Not homesick, or not very, Janet would say to the people who picked up on her accent, saying it was that attractive and how it reminded them of some holiday they’d been on, never in winter and never with a holiday job packing kippers for dirty Donal Forteith.
‘Never mind four teeth, he’s four hands’, the kipper girls would say. In the lounge bar of the Argyll Arms hotel, dirty Donal had said something about the smell of kippers to Janet’s father who had stopped the holiday job, ‘Forthwith, Janet, forthwith, and that means now even if I’ve to employ you myself.’ So it must have been bad, because there was nothing at all to do in Janet’s father’s shop in the winter unless you counted the odd poke of rock to some daft tourist the bus had left behind in a portaloo in the summer months.
Health food, now, that was not seasonal. People seemed to fancy trying to feel well all the time. Sandy said that they felt better because they lost weight the instant itself they left the shop. It was a weak joke. The goods were dear, it was a good living. Sandy and Janet even ate some of the foods, the ones you could ginger up till they tasted normal. Still, neither of them felt quite a hundred per cent.
Maybe this was just how people felt down south? Was it how people felt anywhere at all now the water wasn’t recommended for drinking (even watered down) nor the air for breathing? Did Janet imagine it? Had she once felt better than this?
‘I don’t feel too good,’ Janet said to Sandy.
‘Nor me,’ said Sandy. It was not a proper feeling of illness, just not feeling perfect. Not as bad as sickness, more a kind of ache.
‘Everything’s touched with poison, you can’t be too careful,’ Sophy was saying to Gert. The little wooden birds in her ears had been made by children in Chile. Sophy had bought them from the Quakers at their meeting house fair against war. Two bright little wooden birds against war.
‘It’s everywhere the sickness, in our bodies, our homes . . .’ said Sophy.
Gert had heard it all before. She was glad she had had that solid bit of death inside her instead of just the vague sense of pervasive mortality these young ones had.
‘Do you think it might be homesickness?’ asked Gert.
The Buttercoat
This story is for Peter and Kathryn Kuhfeld
‘It’s perfectible so long as you keep it wet and moving,’ said Lorne, and he made a beautiful subduing swoop over the wall to flatten the blushing plaster whose chalky convalescent smell filled the half-tamed room.
Intrigued by the idea that her lover, her betrothed now, or she herself might say the wrong thing in response to Lorne’s words, and hoping that neither of them would at quite this moment, but might use the very words later, Nora idly offered herself the idea of being about to live with the gentleman-plasterer rather than his employer, whom she would wed and who had done so well hereabouts in animal feeds.
Gavin had done well. Here was the pink-faced house, two hundred years old, at the head of the sealoch to show for it, and frail tough little Nora to put in the house.
Thornshields looked out down a low belt of islets that seemed at dawn and twilight to be attached to one another. The sea between them at other times was defined in colour in apposition to the mood of the little drops of land themselves, that often was itself at odds with the temper of the mainland. You could stand in front of the house and collect eight ways of seeing blue before your eye had met the furthest island, to which Lorne had moved with his dog, his dinghy and his son long before Gavin Whelan bought Thornshields from old Lorne.
Lorne’s parents were relieved but shy about the transaction. Since the sale, having driven into Campbeltown on a weekday morning to see the world, Grizel would hide from those she had most hoped to see, from the butcher where she had for forty-three years bought old Lorne’s favoured cuts of meat, from the tweed ladies over whose counter she had never bought anything but thread, from the postcard-lady who had a past and smoked behind the counter of her shop, where there was a sign: ‘Patrons will understand it is discourteous to Smoke inside this shop.’
Having lived at Thornshields for her entire married life, having been raised only a nibble of shoreline along, but three and three-quarter hours away by the road, Grizel could not bear to explain what might seem a sudden defection, her husband’s and her own subsidence in the face of their son’s apparent exhilarated uninterest in the house since his widowerhood – and Gavin Whelan’s friendly, cleansing, money.
What Grizel made of Nora Cronin was not clear, and she would not have uttered it even to her confidantes, those people with whom she enjoyed the conversational luxury of uninvolvement, to whom she was not related by blood or obligation. She lived, as do many women of her class, under the sense that she was closer to those who were innocent of her life’s actual drudgery, thinking it easeful and slow as pears in a bowl, than to those who knew how she swabbed and stitched and sat silent over papers that would not agree with each other as the place swelled in demand about her.
Indeed, she had unhooked most of these last people from her own and her husband’s life. It was somehow draughty to be seen and erroneously pitied by their old friends.
‘Like it?’ asked Gavin, not asking, but instructing, his handsome face resting quite comfortably on his chin as he moved around.
Nora couldn’t speak, so she enlarged her pupils. She assumed his question related to the moment.
‘It is a nice house, isn’t it?’ said Gavin. His hair was just turning from gold to silver, thick, bimetallic, glistening. Many things about him were moving from their natural state into silver or gold. He had never felt stronger, more defined.
They were not yet living at Thornshields, but had flown back to the city, which was airless but exciting, like almost being wherever you want to be, off. Tomorrow was to be the day.
Gavin redisposed all the limbs within his reach or power. Now she might speak.
‘Who are you thinking of?’ asked Gavin, which was the question he was wont to ask at such times.
As Nora did, she told not the truth but gave the answer required, demanded by the sort of good manners that make a hedgehog feel good by addressing it as a porcupine.
She was thinking of many things at one time, barely of a person, but she knew whom he admired and modelled himself upon and gave the name, and later, when he was sleeping, she looked at him and felt that routine would bring her to love. In the night he cried and never woke up and she lay awake with worry for him till he cracked open the new Glasgow day with, ‘What’ll we get the day?’
It was an idea, she thought, to purchase a present for the day.
Actually, had she had anyone in mind, it was him alone. But that might have bored him. He wished more for magnification than reflection.<
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Gavin grew up strong and miserable, tied to ways had helped his father stay upright. He saw the life he wanted and he went to get it, with his hands at first, and then stopping as soon as he could, turning to a more inflated currency than labour, the capacity to sell.
When he saw young Lorne using his own hands to get away from that same life Gavin burned for, his centre buckled. It was pathetic. It was lucky Gavin had a feel for personality that is like a feel for ripeness or putrescence. He and Lorne were going to pass one another, slowly, maybe painfully, in their divergent ascendancies, he knew that.
On his borrowed but chosen slot of land in the narrow loch, Lorne looked over the small isles to Thornshields, up at the crook of the sealoch. It was a house he knew too well to give a different skin, even of so friable a substance as plaster.
His past life there would, he now saw, spin out into the rest of his days. He would never, though, not be imagining what went on in the house, its cellars and yard, and the cold merry corridors where light gave way to shadow and comforting nightmares and ennobling dreams lay, and offchance kisses.
He wanted not to own the house, but to know it, touch it all over. Plastering its walls was like watching a beloved skin grow old, and filling that skin once again with youth. He did not need to live at Thornshields to save its skin.
When he turned to his father, Lorne’s small son looked up with bored adoring trust.
‘Can you let me make a mess tonight?’ asked Lorne the youngest.
They went out to the wall where the wind over the garden-sized island was least chill, where there was even a last flag of sunshine on the salt grass.
Lorne equipped his son with a fist of rosy plaster, a flat square to hold it upon and a jittery diamond-shaped knife. Together they set about the soothing of an area of dark drystone wall.
‘No use,’ declared the youngest Lorne.
‘It’s harder with a smoother wall,’ said his father. ‘You can see the problems here. They’re plain to see.’
His son, at seven often seized up by ambiguities, did not reply, but stuffed the juicy barely gritty stuff into deep but tidy crevices, and from time to time made fanning effortful gestures, getting the plaster to lie like icing over baking that has not yet achieved its full distension. Plaster looked as though it would taste good stuffed in to your mouth, but it did not. It sucked up your spit.
The work of the youngest Lorne had a happy temporary look, as though a group of small children was waving through his plastering from within the wall, about to break out with whoops and powder and clatter of burst stones.
Once his son was in bed and asleep, Lorne blew out the last candle in the steading on the small island and got into his dinghy.
He rowed, without his dog, who would have alerted the child, over to the unlocked house, sixteen square stacked rooms looking empty through their pink shell on to samples of land and reaches of sea.
He made fast the dinghy at the jetty under the shadestruck tangled garden. Within the walls of the vegetable patch acanthus rattled. The only birds he could hear were misled by the uncommitted Highland summer darkness, that would settle for barely three hours in the night.
Lorne began to work, Thornshields having electric light, in the room where he had explained that morning to the new purchaser of his mother and father’s house that in order for mobility there must be wetness, until he had made one wall as flat, as poreless, as butter. Before he did so he wrote on the wall in carpenter’s pencil his letter to Nora Cronin, a letter born perhaps of loneliness and too much proximity to one child alone and the similarly incessant demands of the sea, but also of the moment when he had seen her think, after he spoke, that she could move in either direction, that she was as yet fluid enough to do so.
So he claimed his house and made clear what he might husband as his love, a secret warm for himself and helpful too against the tiring, loving interest of his parents.
Seven miles inland but forty-nine miles by road away from Thornshields, Grizel and old Lorne sat down to dine.
‘The rest of the world may now eat,’ said old Lorne. She had never said it for him, in all the three hundred and sixty-five multiplied by forty-three evenings, with the leaping lunar extra days, just as he had never corrected her pronunciation of the word ‘orchestra’, that she spoke with a hard G at heart. By such sharps and flats they made their way. When she looked at him over the table she already missed him. It had been so too when they began.
‘You’ll be reasonably pleased about the news,’ she said, leaving it loose so’s he could respond.
‘Television news?’ he asked, ‘or real?’
‘Lorne’s news.’
‘He rents a bit of land in unpredictable water not his own, how is it we can be sure he has not found a woman just the same type as the house he makes the boy inhabit?’ he asked, pleased with the conceit, not applying the analogy. ‘And I mean inhabit, not live in.’
‘He said he was in love, Lorne,’ said Grizel, ‘And he never tells us anything.’
‘It’s not natural,’ said her husband.
Grizel, who had watched her husband grow layer by layer, who feared for him in case of some ugly demolition or careless exposure of his careful self-restoration, thought of their son’s calling.
He made walls smooth with his plaster, made them themselves again. He sharpened and restored detail unnoticed unless absent. Briefly jealous of the person, whoever she was, in whom her son had settled his affection, she speculated with interest and with a horror of knowledge, and came up with possibilities so conventional that she realised she was herself, in her own eyes as free as a cat, not merely conventional but of historic curiosity.
As an intimate formality, she offered her husband a second water biscuit. In the glass she watched his face, willing him to repeat himself.
‘Do you know, I think I won’t,’ he said, making her happy. So they sightread through their time, virtuosos by now in their marriage.
Gavin Whelan chose his own breakfast and that of his wife to be, who was upstairs in the hotel putting together her day’s appearance.
One of the things suited him about Nora was her unchanging mutability. She looked a new woman every day. It was hard to think of being stuck with a woman who just looked the one way and let time eat her up.
He dealt with the foundations by ensuring that her first meal of the day would set her up without spreading her out.
He gave himself the pleasure, extra heady in a hotel, of referring to Nora as his wife when he gave the order to the waitress: ‘Full house for me with double Lorne sausage and burned tomatoes, skin off the black pudding if you would.’
Senga the waitress saw his handsome head and fine tall body and acknowledged to herself that this was the ideal. A man ate like a man but looked like he did not. She supposed some people were just lucky and burned it off. He gave her the set of his face that had made him an excellent salesman when he’d commenced in animal feeds, a smile just restrained behind the lips and eyes, a smile it was impossible not to feel dawning in answer behind her own skin.
‘My wife’ll take a selection of fresh fruit, a yoghourt shake and six prunes in a glass bowl. Prettier.’
His smile came through on the last word and gave the waitress the feeling here was a man loved women. She left the table writing on her wee pad and feeling she’d received a compliment.
In the kitchen, she gave the order to Callum the griddle chef and watched him cut the slices off the Lorne sausage that was of special catering size, as long and thick as a stocking stuffed with remnants.
‘What meat is the Lorne, mainly?’ Senga asked Callum, pretending to be retying her frilled pinafore while he took a nip out the vodka bottle he kept in the muesli drum that was the size of a cement mixer.
‘Basically, it’s the bloody zoo,’ he said. ‘That’s rare. The bloody zoo.’ He was already on the second stage of his morning’s drinking, the confidence. He’d be tearful by the time the last reek of kippers had
been and gone and they were back to salad and Parozone.
Now she looked at the brick of plopped meats, she could make herself see the bits in it, bits of tiger, parrot, cow, pieces from the cage floor, the bits from between the teeth of grinders, old used-up animals and vigorous ones that had succumbed to stress in the modern world.
‘It’s like felt,’ said Callum. ‘Ken, felt, it’s formed out of all the cloth never made it into clothes, ground up and plastered together and rolled out smooth. It’s meat felt, Lorne sausage. Right enough. Felt meat.’
The Smirnoff had made him hungry. He caught a sizzling slice of Lorne sausage up on his spatula and ate it off the smoking metal keeping his lips away from his teeth.
Something made Senga think of horses.
‘You look gorgeous,’ said Gavin, finishing his breakfast with the rich sweet knob of eggy black pud he’d saved. He changed it to a word she preferred. ‘Delicious.’
She looked up at him through her fringe. Today she took her colour from the buttery caramel suit she wore, and the contrast with her rural fresh self of yesterday was like a gift of time to him from her. Today she was a woman poised to spend. He repeated his exciting if idiomatic question of the day’s beginning.
‘What’ll we buy the day?’
‘Poor man,’ she said, finishing her last prune, and raising to him the look she saved up for such moments, when she knew what she wanted so much that she dared not say. He interpreted this look in a way that satisfied them both.
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