The Sea for Breakfast

by Lillian Beckwith

  I took a deep breath and the key of the shed from the drawer and accompanied Hector to ferret out his ‘tsing’.

  Within a few months of having bought the cottage from Galium I was getting thoroughly tired of having his name quoted in exoneration of their actions by those who descended upon me with predatory intent. Callum, it transpired, had hurriedly disposed of everything movable in and around the cottage as soon as I had popped up as a prospective buyer. There had been a useful store of peat in one of the sheds which I had thought would help me through the winter but a week or so after I had settled in when, I suppose, the unmistakable blue of peat smoke had been seen eddying from my chimney, visitors had come in the night with sacks and appropriated the lot. Had I been a Gael I should either have nursed my grievance until there was a chance to retaliate or I should have referred to it obliquely, perhaps blaming the fairies. I did neither.

  ‘Why did you come in the night and take peats from my shed?’ I taxed the offenders.

  ‘Indeed they were no your peats at all,’ they retorted loftily. ‘Callum said we could have them a while ago, but we left them till we would get a chance to move them.’

  ‘Then why couldn’t you have told me and taken them in the daylight instead of coming at night?’

  ‘Why? Did we frighten you? Ach, we’re awful sorry. If we’d known you were going to be frightened we would have come some other time right enough. We just thought we wouldn’t disturb you.’

  Similar appropriations happened every other month or so to begin with. A pair of wheels and an axle which I had annexed for making into some sort of a box cart were claimed immediately I made known my intention and I had to endure being thanked effusively for having looked after them so long. A boat-hook and a pair of oars were spirited away when it was discovered I was looking around for a dinghy; a sack of fleece which I had envisaged having spun into knitting wool likewise vanished. Always the excuse was ‘Callum said …’. I padlocked the shed eventually and though admittedly the claims decreased they have not ceased altogether during the years, and I am still apprehensive that the massive lump of oak which was once an engine bearer in a boat and is now my mantelpiece will some day be recognized and desired by someone with an irrefutable claim to it, or that I shall wake up one morning to find the cattle breakfasting in my garden because the shafts of a cart which make the gate to keep them out have been requisitioned for their original purpose.

  By far the most persistent claimant was Morag’s nephew, Hector, who had now returned to Bruach with his wife and child to settle on his aunt’s croft. Before his return Hector had been rather a shadowy character, rarely alluded to by Morag or anyone else until he had met with the accident, the alleged effects of which were bringing him back to Bruach. Once it was known he was coming his name was soon on everyone’s lips. His transgressions were remembered and related with glee. Hector was the son of Morag’s sister who, according to Morag, had married a real bad man, English of course, who had soon left her to bring up their son as best she could. She had brought the boy to the home of her parents and there let him run wild. Morag strongly disapproved of Hector’s upbringing.

  ‘My sister didn’t believe in skelpin’,’ she lamented to me. ‘She used to say you can’t knock sense into a lad’s head by thrashin’ his backside, but I was always after tellin’ her that sense can work its way up from the bottom to the top same as everythin’ else in this world.’

  It seemed however that Hector had not entirely escaped thrashing.

  ‘Always takin’ the day off from school to go fishin’ he was,’ Erchy told me. ‘One mornin’ he went fishin’ off the Black rock and he fell into the sea. He was near drowned but for Big Willie bein’ out in his boat and pickin’ him up in time. He was brought into school. Ach, we thought he was dead right enough, but the teacher turned him over and squeezed a lot of water out of him. By God! The teacher was that mad with him as soon as he came to he lay him across the desk and thrashed him till his pants steamed. That cured Hector of drownin’ and of playin’ truant from school, I can tell you.’

  Hector’s main claim to notoriety though, as everyone admitted, was his success with women.

  ‘Hell, what a man he was,’ Erchy told me reverently. ‘Used to carve his initials on every rock he’d taken a women behind, and when we go after the deer in the hills we keep comin’ across these “H. M.Ss” chipped all over the place. Makes you feel hot to see them there’s that many. Honest, he’s as bad as the stags themselves, that man.’

  ‘Perhaps marriage has changed him,’ ventured someone, but from the way the suggestion was received it was obvious that no one really believed Hector could change appreciably.

  I naturally expected to meet an Adonis, but when Morag brought him to my cottage I was confronted by a middle-aged man, with thinning black hair and with a pale, marrow-shaped face, carelessly shaven and deeply lined between nose and mouth. He was tall and well made but he drooped despondently over his stomach and jumbled his arms and legs about when he walked. He had, however, a pair of very beguiling blue eyes, a charmingly shy smile and a unique gift for making every woman he paid even the scantest attention to feel that she was someone very, very special. He exerted a little of his charm on me that day and I succumbed immediately, despite all the warnings I had been given. I was soon deluding myself that never again should I have to wait for someone to do for me the little jobs that were beyond my capabilities; that Hector’s strong arm would always be ready with help whenever I needed it; that I should always be a welcome guest aboard his boat; that a fish would be procured for me, one way or another, whenever I might express a fancy for one. For hours after he had gone I glowed with satisfaction.

  The very next day Hector came and enlisted my help to haul up his boat for repairs. Wayfarer was a thirty-two foot motor-boat, heavily built and deeply keeled, and I felt rather as though I were taking part in an ill-matched tug-o’-war when I was harnessed, along with most of the able-bodies in the village, male and female, to a thick rope and exhorted repeatedly to heave. We strained and sweated, our feet shifting and skidding on the shingle, while all the time Hector, who had to keep an eye on a ‘tsing’, appeared to do nothing more strenuous than caress the boat’s stern.

  A few days after the boat hauling I started clearing out my sheds and Hector, who had proffered help, stepped in only to assert his claim whenever I discovered anything useful and to magnanimously bestow on me anything that was not. I soon found that most of what I thought I had paid for had been previously disposed of to him by Callum – even an old log basket which had been woven for me by a friend, but which he confidently asserted was one of his grandfather’s unorthodox creels. I found too that while he was not averse to sitting in the kitchen drinking innumerable cups of tea, his capacity for which was even more impressive than his Aunt’s, he melted away like the mist when I gave the slightest hint that I should like some help. He would sometimes go fishing if I agreed to row him about while he dangled a line, but it was in Hector’s company that I was able to prove that the old fisherman’s belief: ‘If a red-haired woman crosses your path when you are going out fishing you may as well go home because you will not catch a fish’, is no idle superstition. A red-haired woman once crossed our path and Hector promptly abandoned me and any ideas of fishing and took off in pursuit.

  There were undoubtedly times when Hector’s behaviour was infuriating, yet I could no more have vented my spleen on him than I could have thrown a stone at a blackbird stealing the strawberries in my garden. He was weak, but he was lovable, gentle, philosophical, and so kind-hearted that the word ‘no’ simply did not come into his vocabulary. Sooner than make someone momentarily unhappy by a refusal he would promise faithfully anything at all, without having the slightest intention of keeping his promise. If anyone reproached him he assumed an utterly dejected air, his blue-eyes would open wide and he would start to explain haltingly how some ‘tsing’ had prevented him from keeping his word.

  Hector could
be in turn gallantly attentive, shy and gangling and guilelessly candid. In a moment of confidence one day he whipped up his shirt and showed me the operation scar on his stomach and seemed disappointed when I did not whip up my skirts and show him mine. Though he came to regard my cottage much as a second home and to feel that he knew me too well to address me as ‘Miss Peckwitt’, he could never permit himself the familiarity of using my name (Gaelicized as ‘Lilac’) or the diminutive ‘Becky’ by which I am known to my friends. In conversation he referred to me as ‘she’ with a nod in the direction of my cottage or my presence. If he wished to attract my attention for any reason, he would sidle up to me and give me a companionable slap on the behind. This aversion to using my Christian name persisted even when he adopted the disturbing habit of kissing me goodbye. He would lumber across the kitchen towards me, fling his arms around me and, because I dodged expertly, land a kiss somewhere on the back of my neck. It was the utterly simple, warm-hearted kiss of a child, or of a brother or sister, grateful for understanding. At first I had wondered if I should permit it but it was gradually borne in upon me that every time he kissed me good-bye some tool or other useful article disappeared from the cottage on loan. Once it was my nail brush and when it was surreptitiously returned I realized from the smell in the bathroom that it had been used for scrubbing the ‘berries’ off ‘berried’ lobsters which are not allowed by law to be marketed. Once it was my toothbrush which came back reeking of oil and petrol, no doubt after having been used to clean a ‘tsing’ in his engine. Another time it was my paraffin drum because his own had developed a leak. Dusters he collected and stowed away in his boat much as a park attendant collects waste paper and I grew accustomed to seeing my cast-off under and outer clothing wrapping greasy tools or used for swabbing down decks. Though eventually I came to accept this good-bye kiss as pure camouflage, at first there were times when I rebelled at his perfidy and avoided his embrace. Then he would slouch away and not return for several days or even weeks. The last time I had practised such an evasion Behag, Hector’s wife, had come to see me the next day. Behag was a fat, pallid voiced, sagging little woman whose only interests in life seemed to be her child, her retinue of cats and the knitting of colourful pullovers for her husband. She was curiously placid and remained completely indifferent to her husband’s affairs unless they were right under her nose and even then she evinced only tolerant amusement. I liked her tremendously and thought she deserved so much better than she had got but she was content with the way things were. As she got up to go, which is the time all Gaels reserve for the offhand disclosure of the real reason for their visit, she had asked anxiously: ‘Were you cross with Hector last night, Miss Peckwitt?’

  ‘Yes, a little,’ I had admitted briefly.

  ‘And last Thursday week, no it wasn’t Thursday but Friday. You were cross with him then too, were you not?’

  ‘Perhaps. I can’t remember.’

  ‘I can,’ she had said sorrowfully. ‘I can always tell.’

  ‘Can you? But how?’ I had asked.

  ‘Because if you won’t let him kiss you good-bye, he comes home and he kicks the cats,’ she had told me with infinite pathos.

  Today, Hector wanted a ‘tsing’ for his engine. It was time his boat was launched for the summer tourist trade, he said, and though he had scraped and ‘bottomed’ her and patched any leaks with tingles he was now having trouble with the engine. My shed was by now reasonably tidy. If only Hector had shifted the boxes of ancient engine parts he so much cherished I might have been able to whitewash it and fit it out for its eventual use as a dairy. He tipped up one of the boxes, cascaded wheels, nuts, washers and unidentifiable lumps of rust on to the floor and scrabbled through them. I watched him unhelpfully.

  ‘I wonder at you, Hector,’ I said. ‘You’ve had such a lot of work to do on this boat and yet you told me you spent quite a long time looking for a good one when you were in Glasgow.’

  Hector sat back on his heels and clasped his chin with rusty fingers. ‘Well, you know how it is,’ he explained slowly. ‘You go lookin’ for a boat like you go lookin’ for a wife. You wander from place to place having a good look first at one and tsen at another. If you find exactly what you want and tse price is right, tsen you say, “Ach, she’s too cheap, tsere must be somsing wrong with her,” and like as not you end up with gettin’ the worst.’ He bent again over the scatter of things on the floor and extracted an object which seemed to give him some satisfaction.

  ‘I’ll just try will tsis do,’ he said. ‘I’ll need to come back and clear up tsese tsings for you.’

  That was the last I saw of him for about a week.

  When he came again I was at the far end of the croft from the house, trying my skill at building up a collapsed drystone wall. Hector must have seen me but he sprackled across the croft with the deceptive aimlessness of a hen on her way to a secret nest.

  ‘You’re busy,’ he greeted me.

  ‘Yes. Are you any good at building up walls, Hector?’

  ‘No indeed, I was never any good at it, tsough I remember my grandfather always used to say to keep my middle well filled.’ He teetered one or two of the stones I thought I had wedged in position but he was too polite to comment.

  ‘She looks as tsough she’ll make a nice day yet,’ he murmured.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Aye. Too nice for a funeral, anyway.’

  ‘Whose funeral?’

  ‘Well, you see, an uncle of Behag’s has died and he’s bein’ buried today and Behag tsinks I should go. What do you tsink yourself?’

  ‘If Behag thinks you should go she’s probably right,’ I replied. ‘But how will you get there if the funeral’s today. The bus has gone long ago.’

  ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘tsat’s tse way of it.’

  I realized that I was going to have to insist on taking him in ‘Joanna’.

  ‘Ach, it’s no right. I’m givin’ you too much trouble,’ he said as I expected him to.

  ‘Not at all,’ I replied, as he expected me to. ‘How soon do you want to go?’

  ‘I was wonderin’. You see I have a box of mackerel I got tsis mornin’ just and I tsought maybe if we could put it in tse back I could sell it to one or two of tse hotels on tse way. If we could start out early enough, say in about an hour’s time.’

  I left my stone-building and went to get myself and ‘Joanna’ ready, not really sorry to be taken away from my work for a day out even if it were for a funeral. The service was to take place at the hospital where the old man had died and I should not be expected to attend it. It was just a matter of taking Hector up, collecting him after an hour or so and then bringing him back. At least, that is what I thought in my innocence.

  All dressed up in his best blue suit and cap, Hector was waiting by the gate of Morag’s cottage when I stopped ‘Joanna’. He lifted the box of fish into the boot and came and got in beside me. Morag and Behag, colourful figures in the silvery morning sunshine, waved to us from their work on the croft.

  ‘Tse cailleach tsinks it’s goin’ to rain,’ said Hector as he settled himself. ‘She’s wantin’ to get all the tatties cleaned before she comes.’ I wondered fleetingly if it really was at Behag’s insistence that Hector was dashing away to her uncle’s funeral.

  Our run was extremely pleasant. The sun spent long periods in moody retirement but the rain disported itself only across the outlying islands, and left us alone. Hector pointed out a hotel and asked me to drive round to the back door. He disappeared inside and ten minutes later came out again followed by two very capable-looking ladies, one carrying a white pail and a cloth. They went round to the boot, some discussion went on and they all three went back into the hotel. I stayed in ‘Joanna’, Hector soon came out, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and rejoined me and we drove on to another hotel where much the same thing happened. Hector finally emerged, once more wiping his mouth and growing noticeably more benign. At the third hotel, once the tra
nsaction was over, I was invited by the housekeeper into the kitchen for a cup of tea, an invitation which by this time I was very glad to accept. The kitchen of the hotel was large and cool and refreshingly clean. A long white wood table, scoured to perfection, ran down the centre; at one end was a tempting-looking tea-tray laid for two and at the opposite end there was a scale and a large dish of silvery trout. The grateful smile and the words of thanks I was uttering died away as I stared first at the trout and then at Hector.

  ‘Hector!’ I ejaculated hoarsely. But Hector sat with his knees locked girlishly together, rubbing the palms of his hands slowly up and down his thighs, and except for a couple of furtive glances in my direction, concentrated his attention on the decorative fly-catcher which hung from the ceiling. I was appalled. Here I had been driving round with a box of illicit fish in the boot of my car and everyone who had seen me and the friends and relations of everyone who had seen me would be quite certain that I was in this poaching business up to my neck. I was so shocked at his treachery that I drank little and ate less of the ‘strupak’ that was offered me and even that gave me indigestion.

  ‘Hector,’ I upbraided when we were outside again, ‘I can’t forgive you for this. You’ve really gone too far.’

  ‘Ach, but nobody worries about a bit of poachin’ nowadays,’ he soothed. ‘So long as it’s not too much. And someone else would have tsem if I didn’t take tsem myself.’

  ‘You could have been honest with me,’ I said. ‘You could have told me they were trout, not mackerel.’

  ‘Ach, well now, surely you’d know tse hotels wouldn’t want to be buyin’ mackerel from me?’

  ‘Are there any more left?’ I demanded, abashed at my own stupidity.

  ‘Just about four, maybe the half dozen. Ach, we’ll not worry about tsem. You can take tsem for your dinner.’

  ‘You know perfectly well I wouldn’t dream of taking them, but I do want them out of my car,’ I told him.

  ‘Aye, tsem, I’ll take tsem in a wee minute, but see and just come with me to the shop now before tsey close. I’d like you to help me choose a tsing for Behag,’ he wheedled.