Poor Angus

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘My God, you’re unbelievable,’ gasped Nell, collapsing on to the bed. ‘If it wasn’t that I know you’re right I’d knock your bloody head off. I used to speak as primly as you, God help me. Until I was sixteen I went to church regularly. I won a prize for Bible knowledge. So I know what’s right and what’s wrong. What I did last night was wrong and yet while I was doing it I had nothing but goodwill in my heart to everybody, including you. It’s more complicated than you think. You make no allowances. I’m sorry for your Douglas. Is that him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Handsome fellow. Knows it too. Well, why not? Reminds me a bit of Bruce when he was younger. When I sent that cable, I was in a way making a promise.’

  ‘That was how I saw it.’

  ‘So I’ve broken it. I’ll have to tell him.’

  ‘How can he blame you if he’s misbehaving himself?’

  ‘If it had been anyone but Angus. He doesn’t like him, you see; in fact he detests him. He once paid £200 for one of Angus’s paintings so that he could use it as a dartboard. It’s really Angus I’m sorry for. You saw how keen he was about this new painting. Now he seems to have lost interest. This Fidelia, she’s got a lot to answer for. Do you know what I think? I think she’s not as simple and easily pushed around as she lets on. She’s educated and she’s managed on her own for years, which isn’t easy for a woman in the East, especially if she’s separated from her husband and has a kid to bring up. I’ve met them before that were a mixture of Catholic beliefs and heathen superstitions: a dangerous combination. So I agree with Patel. Angus should have nothing to do with her.’

  ‘You forget that he loves her. Look at him now. Down on the beach yonder.’

  Nell got up and looked out of the window. ‘Poor bugger. That letter’s destroyed him.’

  ‘It needn’t, if he acts honourably.’

  ‘There you go again. Don’t you know, hasn’t your second sight told you, that a person can see what’s the right thing to do without being able to do it? We’re what we are. We might want to be different but we can’t bring it about just by wanting. I wish to Christ we could.’

  Angus did not object when Janet said that she would drive. He looked as if he would welcome a crash into a stone dyke or a somersault over a cliff, with an end to all self-questioning. Nell, however, who, in spite of everything, thought she had a lot to live for, expressed alarm as they shot round blind corners too fast or came off the road on to the grass verge.

  It was another splendid day. The island shone and the sea glittered. The furniture of heaven could not be more magnificent.

  In Kildonan they drove past the Free Kirk manse, a grim grey stone house with stunted trees in the garden. In the street people seeing the now-notorious blue Triumph 2000 stared censoriously, but one or two waved cheerfully. They might not approve of artists who painted bridges that did not look like bridges and they had been schooled since infancy to condemn sin, particularly if it took a sexual form, but they could not help feeling exhilarated by a way of life that escaped the trammels of their own. In a film or book they would enjoy the adventures of an artist who collected heathen idols and beautiful women. Well, here was one in reality, on their own native island. Therefore they waved.

  At the airport was the usual group of people waiting to greet friends or board the plane.

  There were some jocular remarks among them about the eccentric painter from Ardnave in his green suit and white hat, and his two girlfriends. Was he here to welcome another female to his harem? Did he have it in mind to set up a community like the Mormons, with himself the patriarch, tended hand and foot by handsome women? John Mcintosh, a farmer and the owner of two working bulls, doubted whether the skinny fellow had the balls to keep one woman happy much less a dozen or so, and he said so, though in a more roundabout way, for his wife beside him was one of Mr McPherson’s strictest adherents. All of the women were shocked by this suggestion of sinful polygamy but at least one of them was thinking that it might be fine having others to help with the housework and the weans, and the most tedious duties of all, those performed in bed.

  The plane arrived on time. Among the passengers was no dark-faced woman in a blue coat, accompanied by a dark-faced girl in a white one.

  ‘Well, you got it wrong,’ jeered Nell.

  ‘They’ll come tomorrow,’ said Janet.

  ‘Or the day after? Or the day after that? How long before you give up, Janet?’

  ‘They’ll come tomorrow.’

  Angus did not know whether he was feeling disappointment or relief, so he showed both on his face.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Nell, as they made their way to the car. ‘Now that we’ve got the rest of the day to ourselves, what are we going to do with it? I’d like to take a tour of the island. That’s to say, Angus, if you don’t want to get back to your painting.’

  ‘No, no. I told you I’ve given it up.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’ll be back at it tomorrow keener than ever. Aren’t there ruined castles and holy places that we can visit? Let’s pick up some food and a bottle or two of wine and Coke and have a picnic on a beach somewhere. Isn’t there one that’s said to be haunted?’

  ‘If we call in at the hotel, they would give us packed lunches,’ said Janet.

  ‘Good idea. You drive, Angus.’

  In the lounge bar David himself was in attendance. He was solemn when being introduced to Nell and turned more so when she asked genially if his jockstrap was tartan like his bowtie.

  To Janet he whispered, when the others were out of earshot: ‘Douglas phoned. He’s in Birmingham, but he’s still coming here on Saturday. You’ll have to leave Ardnave before then.’

  The drama might not be over by then. ‘Maybe,’ she said, and went to join the others.

  Angus had a half-pint of lager, and Nell a glass of Coca-Cola.

  ‘I’d like to show you my mother’s grave,’ he said, suddenly.

  Nell could not help laughing. ‘I’d love to see it, Angus. So would Janet, I’m sure.’

  Gloomily he wondered why she had laughed, indeed was still laughing. She liked him and she wished him well, which did not always follow. She was good-hearted and she knew that his mother had died when he was only ten. She had seen him weep as he remembered her. She had not laughed callously. It must have been because she was thinking of her husband and children, whom she loved and who were alive. Her laughter was not an insult to him but a salute to love and life. His mother had often laughed like that.

  Before they left she went to the ladies’ to take off her girdle.

  18

  As they set off, Angus driving, at Nell’s insistence, the sadness and despair that he had felt when making the same journey 33 years ago descended upon him again. It had been January then, with snow on the ground and the sky cloudy. Though it was warm and sunny now with blue skies, he kept shivering.

  Beside him Nell patted his thigh.

  The driver’s whiskers had had white in them. In his bewilderment Angus had wondered if it was frost. His name was Geordie McLachlan and he had kept taking fly swigs of whisky. Only Angus had noticed. Geordie had winked. Angus’s father’s eyes had been frozen with grief, so that they saw nothing and tears could not flow, not then or any time afterwards. The other person in the big black car, which had smelled of leather polish had been his mother’s sister, Aunt Isobel from Dumfries, herself long since dead. She had kept sniffing, so regularly that Angus, counting, had found that the sniffs were exactly five seconds apart, like the flashes of the Sanaig Light.

  The misery in the car had been like an enormous lump of ice.

  When someone you loved and on whom you had depended died, you never completely recovered. Angus had discovered that as a small boy and he still knew it as a grown man. Perhaps it had something to do with his unwillingness or inability to let any other person become as dear to him and as indispensable. Was he making this pilgrimage to his mother’s grave in an attempt to find out if Fidelia, for instanc
e, could take his mother’s place?

  They came to a steep brae. Geordie had had to be cautious here, for the surface had been slippery. Today it was dry and safe, with the hedgerows fragrant with meadowsweet, cow parsley, honeysuckle, and foxgloves. Then, they had been bare. Butterflies twinkled. Then, it had been flakes of snow.

  A sandy track led from the main road to the graveyard, which was close to the sea. Among the dunes on either side rabbits darted about. It was said that, after the myxomatosis, their fur was silkier but their flesh was still suspect. It was curious how seeing them healthy and lively today comforted not only him as he was now but also as he had been all those years ago. There had been no rabbits to be seen then.

  The track stopped at a wide flat green space among the dunes. Here the mourners had gathered, waiting to follow the coffin to the grave. Bottles of the island’s own malts had been passed round. When empty, they had been tossed into a deep hole like a golf-course bunker. Indeed, the golf course was not far distant. Its red flags could be seen. There had been a reverent wiping of mouths.

  In the graveyard, which had a wall round it protecting it from sheep, the gravelled paths were very narrow. Coffin-bearers often stumbled on to the edges of graves. None of the gravestones was grandiose. The oldest were slates, not unlike those used in the school 50 years ago. The rest were of ordinary stone, not marble or granite, and were badly worn by wind and rain. The few people on Flodday who could afford marble and fancy lettering had to do without them here where they would have been out of place.

  Nell thought it all too stark, and said so. She preferred a cemetery with trees and shrubs and flowers and tombstones with winged angels.

  Janet came behind them, in silence, as if, muttered Nell, she had just risen up out of a grave. A graveyard, she added, not altogether facetiously, must be a terrifying place for someone with second sight.

  Angus’s mother’s was in a corner near the sea-wall. There the graves were 30 to 40 years old, not ancient enough to be of historic interest but not recent enough to be visited frequently.

  Nell took off her shoes and walked barefoot over the grassy graves.

  Janet cried, like an offended ghost: ‘You are being disrespectful, Mrs Ballantyne.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ murmured Nell, and smiled, for, according to their own strict theology, a good many of the folk under her feet were already there. It was, however, too splendid a day for pessimistic eschatology, and she was feeling so hopeful about Bruce being glad to get her cable that, since she did not know any cheerful hymns, she hummed ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  The last time Angus had been there, about a month ago, he had used a sharp-edged stone to scrape the moss and lichen off the inscription on his mother’s headstone. They had already begun to grow again. His father had asked the stonemason to write simply: Margaret McAllister, aged 32, wife of Duncan and mother of Angus. For no extra charge he could have had a word or two of Christian consolation added but he had declined. His own name and age had been added ten years ago.

  ‘Is your father buried here too?’ said Nell. ‘You didn’t mention that.’

  ‘He died in Glasgow.’

  ‘But wanted to be buried beside your mother?’

  It had been his mother’s wish. Profoundly atheistic, his father had seen no virtue in the mingling of rotten bones.

  ‘Would you mind if we gathered flowers and put them on the grave?’ asked Nell. ‘There are lots on the shore.’

  ‘They don’t last when pulled,’ said Janet.

  ‘They’ll last long enough.’

  ‘You’ll ruin your dress.’

  That, thought Nell, was a very earthly remark for a ghost. And yet many of the women buried here would have been very careful with their best clothes.

  ‘Who cares?’ she cried, and kilting up her dress went to the wall and clambered laboriously over it.

  Leaving Angus to grieve by the grave, Janet followed Nell over the wall, but more nimbly.

  She announced the names of the flowers: gowans, flag, silverweed, loosestrife, vetch, and thrift.

  As she and Nell went about gathering them, with sea-birds screaming above their heads, they looked up now and then and saw Angus standing by the grave.

  His mother was giving him the good advice that he had known she would. The very larks in the sky, this green-backed beetle, every living creature bound by nature’s laws, were giving it too. Fidelia was not his own kind. Her background was so utterly dissimilar to his own. Her very colour was different. She was a Catholic too, with beliefs that he thought preposterous, and she had a child.

  Little Letty had not liked him three years ago and probably disliked him still more now that she was older. He had not blamed her. Her jealousy had been understandable, but it had caused distasteful scenes.

  Above all, Fidelia had been too ready to remind him, in that tragic voice, that Gomez was her husband in the eyes of God and would be till she or he died. She had even said it when she and Angus were making love. Too often when kissing her he had tasted tears. She had loved him, it would be caddish to deny that, but her love had had poison in it: that too had to be said. It had brought him more woe than joy. To be fair, it had inspired him to paint what up till yesterday he had regarded as his masterpiece, her portrait; but as against that it had made him lose heart and give up ‘Taurus’.

  Better, therefore, all things considered, to hope, here by his mother’s grave, where surely he must be truthful, that Fidelia did not come, and, if she did, that he would have the honesty and strength of mind to send her away again, for all their sakes.

  He had just reached this sad, bitter, but courageous decision when Nell arrived with a large bunch of wild flowers. Her face was flushed, her legs were scratched, in her hair were fragments of dry seaweed, her dress was crumpled, and her oxters were damp with sweat. There was no mystery about her. No demons threatened her. Angus was glad she had come, especially as her visit was not to be prolonged.

  If she did not have uncanny intuitions, she had eyes. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you been crying? Well, why shouldn’t you have been crying if you’ve been remembering your mother?’

  She had brought with her a swarm of flies. They pestered her as she strewed the flowers on the grave. She swore at them.

  Janet was standing in the sea, scattering flowers. Like Proserpina, he thought: except that Pluto’s chariot would come surging up out of the sea, drawn by sea-monsters.

  ‘I don’t think we should have our picnic here,’ said Nell. ‘Janet was saying there’s a famous bay not far away. Red sands. Fantastically shaped rocks. Masses of white flowers. Let’s go there.’

  ‘Did she say why it was famous?’

  ‘I thought because it was beautiful.’

  ‘So it is, but there’s another reason.’

  Nearly four centuries ago marauders from an island to the north had herded into Saligo Bay more than 100 men, women, and children, and slaughtered them. It was their blood, so legend said, that had given the sand its peculiar redness, and had caused such luxuriance of gowans. Last summer Mr McPherson had held a service there, well attended though the bay could only be reached on foot. His purpose had been to exorcise the evil and console the desolate ghosts, once and for all. Unfortunately heavy rain had come on and everyone had been soaked. The bay had not been purged of its sinister associations.

  19

  The path wound among sand dunes. Blue butterflies were everywhere, as they had been on the Sunday years ago when Angus and his parents had made their pilgrimage to the bay. He explained to Nell that everyone on Flodday felt obliged to visit it at least once. Some who delayed it too long hirpled there in old age or had to be carried. It was a sacred yet ominous place. Almost everyone born on the island had ancestors among those cruelly murdered.

  Though Nell sturdily did not believe in ghosts or evil spirits, she was immediately aware of them as she stood on the last dune and looked d
own on the little bay. Yet on that warm still afternoon it could not have looked more peaceful. The rocks, said to be like deformed animals, at that distance were simply rocks, with nothing fearsome about them. Where the sand ended, a sea of gowans began: there were many thousands of them. The immaculacy of the sand was as striking as its redness. In its shining midst was a single white object.

  A dead gannet, said Angus. Sometimes when diving for fish they misjudged and broke their necks.

  It wasn’t a place, thought Nell, glancing aside at Janet, for anyone who claimed to have second sight. If you didn’t actually see ghosts, you’d have to pretend that you did and the result would be the same.

  There were despairing cries, as of people being killed. They were made by sea-birds.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Nell, ‘but I wouldn’t like to come here alone. Why did they kill them?’

  ‘Revenge,’ said Angus. ‘About thirty years before that, Flodday men had made a similar bloody raid on their island.’

  ‘After thirty years?’

  ‘The desire for revenge is deep-rooted.’

  ‘Not with me it isn’t. I never bear grudges.’

  They found a comfortable hollow and spread out the rug and picnic things. Janet did not offer to help. She wandered off, as if in a trance, towards the rocks. One of them, Nell thought, was like a gigantic frog.

  ‘We’ll start without her,’ said Nell. ‘I’m famished.’

  They ate the dainty hotel sandwiches. Angus drank wine and Nell Coca-Cola. Bruce, she said, wouldn’t believe his eyes if he saw her. She used to be a terrible boozer. But it was having an effect, her abstinence. She might not look it but she had lost half a stone since leaving Sydney two months ago.

  ‘About last night, Angus,’ she said.

  ‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about last night.’

  ‘I didn’t use anything. Nor did you.’

  He didn’t feel worried, so he didn’t look it. He smiled.

  ‘I’m not past having a kid, you know. I still have my periods. I’m only forty-four. Lots of women have kids at that age.’