‘This is very bad,’ the Princess said. ‘I feared just such a response.’
‘Do not concern yourself,’ the servant said. ‘I have already organised an accident which will result in the painting’s total destruction. As for the artist, he will never be heard of again.’
‘Thank you, loyal friend,’ the Princess said. ‘I knew I could rely on your honesty.’
18 February
Shade
i.m. Vernon Robertson
We were undertaking a major study of the Upper Diyala that year. In Kurdish its name means ‘shouting river’, presumably because of the noise it makes going through the narrow gorges. The river valley is an ancient trade route between Iran and Iraq. Everything is ancient in those parts, or was back then. I’m talking about the late 1950s, a lifetime ago.
We were looking at irrigation, land use and conservation, and so Duncan was invaluable. He was an ecologist when most people had never heard of ecology. Even then, some of us could see what was coming, that the price of progress would be devastation of some of the most beautiful places on Earth. And we had no illusions, we were part of it. Our survey work would inform the decisions of governments, but at least we could warn them in advance of the possible effects of what they wanted to do.
Well, Duncan and I took a weekend off and drove up into Kurdistan, through the Rawandiz Pass to Haji Umran near the Iranian border. It was late spring and the flowers were magical. On the way we stopped at the little town of Shaqlawa, in the centre of which is a huge plane tree, said to be the one under which King Xerxes rested. An unlikely story – the tree would have to have been thousands of years old – but when we saw its great spreading branches we could almost believe it.
Duncan and I were opera buffs. We stood under that plane tree and sang the aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ from Handel’s opera Serse, in which the King praises its shade. All the local people stopped what they were doing and watched us, these two white Europeans in shorts. They must have thought we were insane, but we did not care.
The weather was perfect. We got to Haji Umran that evening, ready to spend the following morning searching for alpine flowers. However, it snowed heavily overnight, and it was pretty chilly, botanising in the snow in our shorts, and not very rewarding. But what I remember is not that, but the plane tree, the aria, and Duncan and I singing it.
19 February
The Gardener
He’d stayed out too long, walking on the shore in the gathering dusk. Now, as he came back through the rotten gate and under dripping trees, he could hardly see twenty yards ahead. The rain was ferocious. He kept thinking of the large whisky he’d have in the residents’ bar as soon as he’d changed his clothes.
The hotel grounds went on for ever. He was in a confusing network of paths with dark, looming hedges on either side. Occasionally there’d be a circle of lawn with a statue in the middle, then more paths and hedges. The place was completely overgrown. The hotel, which had been so prominent from the seashore, was not visible.
Somebody was up ahead, a woman. The moon breaking through the clouds cast a strange glow upon her. She wore a long white dress, and was dancing in a swaying motion back and forth beneath a tree.
He called out to her. ‘Hello!’ But there was something odd about her movement.
‘My God!’ He started towards her. She was hanging. She was in her nightdress and her feet were clear of the ground. ‘Help!’ he shouted as he ran.
Then he was cursing his own foolishness. His heart pounded even as he made himself laugh at the old plastic sack caught on a branch.
‘Did you call?’
An old man in overalls and a tweed cap was standing close by him. He had the weathered cheeks and big hands of a man who worked outdoors. He was carrying a spade.
‘Oh, hello, yes. I seem to be lost.’
‘Where are you trying to go?’
‘To the hotel, of course.’
The man pointed to another path to the left. ‘That way. You’ll see the lights as you go round the next corner.’
‘Thank you, thank you.’
‘You are welcome.’
A few minutes later, standing in the lobby, he wiped the water from his hair. He could almost taste the whisky on his lips. He’d have one now, before he went up.
‘Terrible weather,’ he said to the receptionist. ‘I got caught out. Luckily I bumped into the gardener and he gave me directions.’
‘What gardener?’ she said. ‘There is no gardener.’
20 February
A Hebridean Love Song
Where did he come from, that man with the shining smile? He came in a long dark coat, and dark was his face beneath the broad brim of his hat, but when he lifted that hat and gave his smile, if my heart had been of ice it would have melted in the warmth of it.
We had had the news of his coming from Oban, and we had had it from the fishing boats of Barra, and all up the long road from Lochboisdale to Gerenish the word of his approach came to us like the tap of his fine black boots.
Whiter than lambs in May were his teeth, and his hands like two brown trout from the loch. When he showed me his wares and I saw the length of his fingers I wished to bring them to my lips and make them wet with my kisses.
Then he sat down across from me and drank his fill of tea. And Peigi Mhor was at the drying green, but I did not invite her to join us. And though it was not proper, I fetched a little whisky from the press, and even if it was against his faith, did he and I not drink it?
And on the bed he laid the clothes he had brought all the way from Glasgow. Such beautiful things I hardly dared touch them, nor could I look at him when asking their price, knowing they were too dear and too delicate for such as I.
So he folded them all away save one, and that one he gave to me. Deep it is in the bedroom kist, still in its tissue paper, and never will I wear it. And he spoke of the land of his people, and how at nights he dreamed of returning there.
Where did he go, that man with his shining smile? He came in a long dark coat, and lovely was his face beneath his hat, and when he put his fingers to my lips it was to stifle my cries of joy. And Peigi Mhor was at the drying green, but I did not invite her to join us.
21 February
A Hebridean Incitement to Battle
That braggart has it coming to him. Take the cork out, Hamish, and throw it away. We will not be needing it again, unless perhaps to stop up his flatulence and send him tight-lipped and tight-arsed back to where he came from.
Who does he think he is, strutting about as if he owns the place? Repulsive is the way he twists his lip when he gives an order. Pour me three or four fingers, and a splash of water in it, and I’ll tell you what he can be doing with his orders.
No, no, we have had quite enough of his insolence. In my father’s day it would not have been tolerated. Then you would have seen the claymore fetched from the hayrick, and the targe, metaphorically speaking, from under the peat stack. Aye, go on, another will not go amiss.
Soon enough he will know the reward he will get for sticking his nose in where it is not wanted. A bloody nose it will be. We may be hard to rouse, but once we are up we do not readily sit down again. Is a dram not the very spark to set the heather blazing?
Have you seen the nose on him? Like a turnip, it is. I could lop it top and bottom and it would not be much diminished, but the sheep would still reject it as fodder beneath their dignity. He is an apology for a man. Ten of him would not make one of us. Tip it up, man, tip it up.
The arrogance in his voice is enough to stir me to violence. Last night I heard him braying through in the lounge bar. He thinks he is better than us, but we are better than him. If it had not been for the women present I would have told him to his face.
If he turns up tonight I will settle with him in the car park. The tyres of his Range Rover will be flat and if he wants to know who let the air out I will not be the first to deny it, no indeed. Yes, Hamish, I will, since you ask.
22 F
ebruary
A Hebridean Song of Exile
We did not think we would miss the unlocked doors, the neighbours who knew the details of your day before you did. Nor did we expect to lament the streaming kitchen, the wet clothes always hanging about our ears, the rank smell of boiled mutton.
When we boarded the ferry it was without regret for Sundays, for the endless sermons of hatred and the thunderous God of our forebears. Sweet was the music in our headphones, and glorious our schism from that dour old bastard in the dog collar.
Cutting the peats till your hands were raw with blisters, your back was broken in five places, the sweat ran off you like mud and the cleg bites were like a range of low hills on your arms – this was not labour we were sad to relinquish.
Winter days without light, horizontal rain, an absence of shopping malls, cinemas and phone signals, hardly a stretch of road straight, long and wide enough to get into fourth gear, the slowness and predictability of island life – gladly we exchanged these for adventure.
And I am not saying I would want to go back, but six years in this shitehole is enough to make the most cynical of men reach for the pen of sentimentality, the guitar of nostalgia and the bottle of fond memories.
What beauty is there in concrete? What peace sounds out in sirens? What sanity in the ubiquity of handguns and assault rifles? What humanity in unaffordable health insurance? We have arrived in the Promised Land, but a hundred years too late.
An eight-lane motorway is all very fine, nor can it be denied that skyscrapers have a certain grandeur, but I am three months without work and there is nothing left in the bank. And back there you never came home to find that the place had been turned over.
I am spared the constant tears of Morag but only because she has taken up with someone else and moved out. It is not for me to blame her. I leave the radio on all night now, to drown the neighbours’ shouts with country music. Those singers know me better than I know myself.
23 February
Strike
Everything was proceeding normally. The dentist probed and scraped, calling out numbers, and his assistant recorded the condition of each tooth as it was checked. Bob Cruikshank had his eyes closed, but he knew that this was what she was doing.
‘Very good,’ Bob heard the dentist say. Assuming that he was being addressed, Bob nodded slightly and made a reciprocal approving grunt.
‘Hang on,’ said the dentist. He seemed to be in the lower-left region. ‘That’s interesting.’ More probing and scraping. ‘Have a look at this.’
Bob felt Muriel leaning over him.
‘Wow,’ said Muriel.
‘Quite,’ said the dentist. ‘Relax, please, Mr Cruikshank. I want to go just a little deeper.’
There was a brief silence, then a kind of plughole gurgle. ‘Whoah, whoah, whoah!’ the dentist shouted, and in an instant he and Muriel were in amongst it like a SWAT team. A quick, professional-sounding exchange followed. Bob, unable to speak with his mouth full of equipment, was more than a little anxious.
‘Bring that over. Cap it. Right, clamp on. Secure? Good.’
‘This tank?’
‘Yeah, I think that’s wise. Where’s the uh … Oh, thanks.’
‘Pressure’s up to max now.’
‘Okay. Open that valve about a half-turn. Great. Now, Mr Cruikshank.’
Some, at least, of the equipment was removed from his mouth.
‘What’s up?’ Bob asked with some difficulty.
‘Nothing to worry about. On the contrary, it’s your lucky day. Our lucky day. Know what this is?’
Between his thumb and index finger was a plastic phial, in which a viscous-looking black globule was floating in some clear liquid.
‘I hope that didn’t come out of me,’ Bob said.
‘Oh, but it did,’ Muriel said. She clapped her hands. ‘It absolutely did.’
‘Oil,’ the dentist said. ‘That’s a big field down there. Nearly blew the tooth right out, but it’s safe now. Mr Cruikshank, I don’t think you’ll be paying any dental bills for a long time.’
‘Oil?’ Bob said. ‘Are you mad?’ He tried to sit up but the dentist held him down.
‘Mad? No,’ the dentist said. ‘Not mad, but rich – yes! You, me, Muriel – we’re going to be rich as Croesus. Muriel, off you go, girl. Fetch the big rig!’
24 February
Stone
This morning you take a stroll out to the Pictish stone, two miles from home. A good walk to a good place. Up onto the high road, which runs along and over the Sidlaws down to the Tay, and which gives commanding views of the Grampians to the north; past the castle and four neat cottages, and then to the stone. An old road, this: once a path, then a track, five hundred feet above sea level, avoiding the worst of the low-lying bogs. There would have been more trees on the hillside then, protection from the weather to which it is now exposed. A place from which to look north and not be easily seen. From here you’d see them coming, whoever they were.
A neighbour, who was out at the stone two days ago, remarked that the mountains, though still white, were looking contented, as opposed to saying Fuck off, their usual mood at this season. But perhaps this is a ploy, to lure you to them, and once you are lured they’ll say, Fuck off now, if you can. The King of the mountains is Death.
Who brought the stone, ice or man? Around here the ice moved from west to east. However it arrived, this six-foot slab didn’t originate in these parts. Different kind of rock. The carvings are only on the south side, and very faded. Two discs linked by a Z-rod: a frequently occurring symbol with a meaning lost to us. Below this, a mirror, and maybe a comb. At the top, an animal, camouflaged by the lichen, with a curved back and open mouth. Dog? Wolf ? Boar? Bear? At this distance, this close, it is impossible to be sure.
But you trace the lines with your finger and you know that men, if they did not transport it here, stood it upright. Why? To mark the land? To leave their mark? It is not hard to imagine them imagining you imagining them. The mirror of time. And they would have seen, as you do looking north, that this is what there is, earth and sky, and that the stone will outlast its carvings and all of us too.
25 February
Scottish Literary Connections
Some stories are so good that they deserve repeating in every generation. This one I have stolen, shamelessly, from the folklorist Robert Ford’s book Thistledown, published in 1891. It concerns Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling, a novel which Robert Burns said he prized ‘next to the Bible’. It was Mackenzie who used the misleading phrase ‘this Heaven-taught ploughman’ in a review of Burns’s first volume, the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, and thus helped to secure the poet’s reputation among the Edinburgh literati, who were stirred to their stockinged soles by the notion of rustic genius coming among them from the far reaches of Ayrshire.
Years later, in 1814, Walter Scott dedicated his first novel, Waverley, to Mackenzie, calling him ‘our Scottish Addison’. Mackenzie’s famously sentimental novel was published in 1771, the year of Scott’s birth, and though twenty-five years separated the two writers Mackenzie would predecease Scott by little more than eighteen months. In old age Mackenzie was described by Henry Cockburn as ‘thin, shrivelled and yellow, kiln-dried, with something, when seen in profile, of the clever, wicked look of Voltaire’. Now that’s a description worth reproducing, accurate or not. And so is this story, as related by Ford.
In houses of quality, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, it was the custom to keep a sort of household officer, whose duty it was to prevent drunk guests from choking. Mackenzie was once at a festival at Kilravock Castle (home of his cousin Mrs Elizabeth Rose) in Nairnshire, towards the close of which the exhausted topers sank gradually back and down on their chairs, till little of them was seen above the table but their noses; at last they disappeared altogether and fell on the floor. Those who were too far gone lay still there, from necessity; while those who, like the Man of Feeling, were glad of a pretence fo
r escaping, fell into a doze from policy. While Mackenzie was in this state he was alarmed to feel a hand working about his throat, and called out, when a voice whispered, ‘Dinna be feared, sir; it’s me.’ ‘And who are you?’ ‘I’m the lad that lowses the graavats.’*
26 February
Close
A boy went down to the shop but not the nearest one. He went well past that, until he reached an unfamiliar part of town where he was not known, where nobody would recognise him and stop to chat. ‘Aye, Kenny, how’s your mither? How’s your faither?’ All that Kenny shite. He needed to be away from that.
He hung about for a while, watching people entering and leaving the shop. Just a wee corner shop but it was doing a good trade in milk, bread, crisps, juice. Drink and fags. All ages, coming and going. He got his money into his fist and went in.
The man behind the counter had a sleepy, careless expression on his face. The boy reckoned it would be all right, he’d turn a blind eye, but when he asked for a packet of ten the man looked at him hard.
‘How old are you, son?’
‘I’m eighteen.’
‘Any ID?’
‘Eh, what?’
‘ID, son.’ The man shook his head. Hopeless. As the boy started his retreat he shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. No skin off my nose, was a phrase his dad used sometimes. It was no skin off his nose.
Outside he stopped two or three youngish people in whom he thought he might find sympathy. ‘Gonnae buy us some fags?’ he said, holding out his money. But they shook their heads, laughing at him. One stuck-up cow lectured him on the evils of smoking.
He hung about in a close entrance. He didn’t fancy walking all the way home without getting what he’d come for. It was dark now. The shop would close in half an hour.
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