As it happened Mick had liked it, so he was quite content. Though his short fuse never really grew much longer, it became marginally less physical with the passing years. On the day of Rose and Sorley Og’s wedding, some three decades later and long after the archbishop had been consigned to pushing up the daisies, he looked even more disgruntled than usual, like an angry gargoyle.
‘I know, Father Mick, I know,’ Rose whispered. She tried to push him gently down the aisle in front of her as she took Dougie’s arm, but Father Mick, determined to have his say, stayed in step beside her so that they walked down the aisle as a threesome, two of whom were in deep conversation throughout. Standing at the side of the altar waiting to take her bouquet was her bridesmaid, Tess, the new schoolteacher and current lady in the life of the local doctor and best man, Gavin Johnstone, who stood across from her with the groom. Tess was a bright, bubbly blonde from Glasgow, ogled by all the attached men in Acarsaid and pursued by all the unattached. Rose didn’t know Tess all that well but, given their disapproval of her marrying Sorley Og, Rose had decided not to ask any of her sisters to do the honours. Tess was handy and willing to help out, and at least Rose could count on the best man and the bridesmaid getting on; that was one worry ticked off the list. She wished she could say the same about Father Mick, who was now listing every misdemeanour committed by the groom since the day he was born as they walked down the aisle in their unique arrangement.
‘Don’t say anything, please,’ she sighed. ‘Let’s just get it over with.’
Father Mick shook his head as he walked slowly on. ‘If ever a man needed a drop of the falling-down stuff to keep him going, it’s this man, here!’ he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘What else has he got planned, do you know? Am I likely to be faced with a troupe of acrobats doing somersaults off the altar as I start the service, or maybe a trapeze act? If I’m to be grabbed and forced to do a back flip through the air I’d rather be prepared for it, that’s all I’m asking.’
‘I wouldn’t rule it out,’ replied the blushing bride. ‘It would be safe not to rule anything out, Father Mick.’
‘Do you know he forced me to use an electric shaver this morning? Said he wasn’t having me standing there with a toilet roll arranged about my face.’
Rose laughed despite herself; Father Mick had more than one nickname, and he was often called Mick the Nick, because he couldn’t shave without cutting himself at least four or five times. ‘Dear God,’ she whispered. ‘He never did, Father.’
‘God?’ the small priest hissed back. ‘GOD, is it? Bugger God, a helluva lot of help he’s been in all this. It’s me you should be thinking about!’
‘Sshh, Father! Everyone’ll hear you.’
‘Well bugger me, why shouldn’t they? I christened that boy, patted his head every time I saw him, they all know that, and he stands there and watches me shaving to make sure I don’t use a real razor. I said I wouldn’t shave at all if that was his attitude, and he had the damned cheek to say I look like a tinker when I need a shave, and he wasn’t having his wedding pictures spoiled by a tinker!’
‘Aye, well, Father Mick, you can see his point. A tinker in the photos might be going a bit over the top.’ She smiled at him from under her veil. ‘After all, he wants this whole thing to be quiet and tasteful, doesn’t he?’
But Father Mick wasn’t prepared to have his mood lifted by kindly sarcasm. ‘He all but turned me upside down to get into the cleft in my chin, so he did! And anyway, who the hell said I wanted to be in his wedding pictures in the first place? I just do the necessary then go off for a snort of the falling-down stuff. I don’t appear in photographs.’
‘Calm down. You know what he’s like, Father Mick, he wants everyone in the photos, even my mother, for God’s sake,’ Rose whispered, laughing; Sorley Og was probably right, in certain lights Father Mick could look more like a tinker than an apache or a gargoyle, but then he’d always looked like that; he wouldn’t be Father Mick if he looked any other way.
‘And it’ll do no good, I’ll tell you that now, I’ll be black again in a couple of hours!’
‘He’ll have thought of that, Father,’ she whispered. ‘If I know Sorley Og he’s probably got the electric razor in his pocket now to give you another going over in the vestry afterwards.’
‘Oh, Holy Mother of God,’ Father Mick moaned. ‘I never thought of that, but I bet you’re right at that.’
At that moment the bridal threesome reached the groom standing before the altar with his best man. The little priest shook his head disapprovingly, gave Sorley Og a long, foul look, then, instead of the more traditional, ‘We are gathered here today,’ the first words the congregation heard, words recorded clearly forever on the video of the big day, were, ‘A tinker, is it? Well, if a tinker I am, boy, I’m content to stay a tinker!’
‘Ach, Father Mick,’ Sorley Og replied sadly in that slow, mocking tone Rose knew so well. ‘Didn’t you promise me you wouldn’t touch a drop till after the service?’
Throughout the service Father Mick added his own unique touches. ‘We are gathered here today to witness the joining-together in marriage of this … this … MacEwan,’ he said with feeling, then bestowing a sickly sweet smile on the bride, he said softly, ‘to this lovely Rose.’ When the time came for Rose to affirm that she did indeed take Sorley Roderick MacEwan as her lawfully wedded husband, Father Mick looked at Sorley Og with deep distaste, added a theatrical pause, and asked again, ‘You’re sure, now, Rose?’
The final touch of nonsense came when Sorley Og was told he could kiss his bride, which he did with some aplomb, then he hugged Father Mick and kissed him on the cheek too. The ensuing row continued all the way to the vestry and back, every word not only clearly audible to the congregation, but also recorded for posterity.
‘I suppose you think that was funny?’ demanded Father Mick.
‘Ach, away with you man,’ Sorley Og replied casually. ‘Have you no sense of occasion? Now pipe down.’
‘Pipe down, is it? Sure am I not even the boss in my own chapel? What right have you to be kissing me in front of everybody?’
‘You’re lucky anybody wants to kiss that ugly thing you call a face,’ Sorley Og replied. ‘Sure everybody knows your own mother couldn’t tell if you were upside down in your crib. You only became a priest because nothing of woman born could ever bring itself to have anything to do with you. That’s probably the first kiss you’ve ever had in your life, and I’m willing to bet anything it’ll be the last, too.’
‘I’ve a good mind to declare this marriage null and void,’ Father Mick announced, throwing his arms about, the wide sleeves of his white vestments flying up so that he looked like a particularly irritated seagull having trouble getting off the ground.
The noise of the argument receded as the bridal party disappeared to sign the marriage register, only to grow in intensity as they came once again into view, like a radio being turned up in order that something important should not be missed. The happy couple passed her family and Rose stopped and kissed Granny Ina, but her gaze didn’t linger too long on the rest of them. On the other side, in the sea of MacEwans, were the groom’s immediate family including his sisters on a rare visit from their homes in Australia, New Zealand and Canada specially to see him marry Rose. Chrissie wore a neat outfit in deep pink with a glorious confection of a hat perched on her head, shaped like a small, pink, ornate chocolate box, with a large ribbon bow on top and a veil that came down to her nose. Rose smiled; her new mother-in-law wasn’t one for high fashion: the hat, she knew, would soon be discarded.
There was Gannet, ever present beside Chrissie and Sorley Mor and their daughters, then the current crew of Ocean Wanderer interspersed with the villagers. There were the two engineers with their wives, Stevie and Jean, who had come all the way from Fife, and Eric and Marilyn from Glasgow. Eric towered above everybody else, his year-round tan freshly reapplied for the occasion, and his hair, dyed an improbable jet black, caught up in
a small ponytail. At his side stood his wife, Marilyn, who was just as well preserved, with her face beautifully painted; to them the wedding was a kind of performance, she supposed. Then small, motherly Molly Stewart stood alongside her husband, Stamp, the diminutive ship’s cook, his green and black checked bunnet, his flat cap, still glued to his head, nodding and smiling as she met his gaze. She noticed with surprise that his eyes were shining with tears, then remembered that he had been on board the day her father had been killed, and she knew what he was thinking. She fought an impulse to stop and hug him, then a few steps further on regretted that she hadn’t. The bunnet looked slightly odd with his best suit, Rose thought as they passed, but there again, he would have looked even odder without it, she imagined. Among the long-serving, core crew of the Wanderer were the men who made up the relief crew, those who stepped in when one of the permanent crew couldn’t make it for some reason, or were added during the busy herring and mackerel seasons. Everywhere she looked were MacEwans of one variety or another; all of them, like the rest of the congregation, familiar people among whom she and Sorley Og had grown up.
‘This church does not approve of divorce, Rose,’ Father Mick said emotionally as Rose smiled happily back at him, ‘but as far as I can see you have grounds the Pope himself could not refuse. You have made a terrible mistake here today and no one would blame you if you wanted out of it. I urge you to think seriously about annulment before it’s too late.’
‘Ach, be quiet,’ said Sorley Og dismissively, as they continued the long walk back down the aisle with Father Mick still in deep and agitated conversation with the bride.
Past old Alex and Davie Kerr, the brothers who had worked with Sorley Mor and with his father before him, and Alex’s son, gorgeous Pete, the nearest Acarsaid came to having a playboy – all golden hair, stunning smile and baby-blue eyes. Beside him sat the pretty but decidedly homely Alison Watt, who, rumour had it, would soon be coming down the aisle herself on Pete’s arm, though he probably didn’t know it yet. Rose smiled at them and then at her new husband and the belligerent figure of Father Mick on the other side. She had come up the aisle as a threesome, and here she was going back down again as one.
‘You give religion a bad name with your carrying-on,’ said Sorley Og said to the still-protesting priest. ‘Here.’ From his pocket he produced a half-bottle of the priest’s favourite tipple, Islay Mist Whisky, and handed it to him. ‘It’s the withdrawal symptoms you’re having, Father. Have a nip and you’ll be as right as rain again.’
Later, at the reception, there had been the usual speeches and, on the secure grounds that he and the groom’s father were inseparable, Gannet decided to deliver an unplanned word or two of his own. As Rose had suspected, Chrissie’s hat had been the first thing to go; it was now sitting slightly askew on top of Gannet’s pointed bald head. The only thing about Gannet that had changed over the years was that the tiny halo of dark hair around the expanse of pink, freckled scalp had become white. Chrissie said his eyebrows had become bushier as well as white, and his large ears ‘furrier. His father and grandfather were just the same as they got older,’ she’d say. ‘Like baboons that had been shaved in bits for a joke. Gormless baboons, they were too, just like this one.’
Gannet rose to his feet and spoke entirely without notes and from the heart, and as he’d had a dram or two his heart was full to brimming over, so his speech, both articulate and affectionate, was in danger of reducing a happy audience to tears. Hearing the odd sentimental sniffle from around the room, Rose stole a look at her mother, Margo, sitting nearby; there wasn’t the slightest hint of emotion, and not for the first time she wondered what made her tick. Gannet finished his oration by throwing his arms around the bride and telling her he had never seen one more beautiful. ‘I knew your father well,’ he said in his deep, attractive, inebriated voice, ‘and I look at you today, Rose, as I have almost every day of your life, and I see him. I would say that it is a tragedy he is not here to see you wed to Sorley Og, the son of our dearest friend, but I know that he is here. Quintin is with us today as he always is, and he’s smiling on the two of you.’
‘Ach, sit down, you great fool,’ whispered Chrissie MacEwan severely, ‘or I’ll come over there and kick you where it hurts.’
‘Chrissie!’ Sorley Mor said, his voice pained. ‘Do you have no soul, woman?’
‘I don’t have a good bottle of whisky softening my brain, if that’s what you mean!’ the mother of the groom muttered dismissively.
Gannet, who had heard similar putdowns from Chrissie for as long as he could remember, took no notice, but threw his lanky arms around Rose and Sorley Og and hugged them close. ‘Sorley Og,’ he said, ‘you have married the best of lassies, and you, Rose, have married the best of men.’
‘Quite right, Gannet,’ called Stamp from across the room. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, man. That’s it in a … in a … lump!’ He had ‘nutshell’ in mind, but it didn’t matter; everyone knew what he meant. Stamp had summed up the occasion in his own style, but also to perfection.
After the reception they were bound by air for a honeymoon in France. Sorley Og was none too sure about air travel, but he was considerably surer of flying in a metal box that he didn’t trust than of setting foot on a cross-Channel ferry: that way, he said, he would return in a wooden box. Before they left, though, the newly married couple had made their way to the cemetery, where Rose laid her bridal bouquet on her father’s grave. Instead of changing into her more manageable going-away outfit she had stayed in her white finery; Quintin wouldn’t see her, she knew that was just fanciful, but she still felt as though he could.
So their wedding had been just like their fine house: a bit off-beat, a touch overdone, reflecting Sorley Og’s need to win over the Nicolsons and his hurt at being slighted. The opulence of the structure on MacEwan’s Row provided the villagers with a great deal of gentle amusement, and they quickly dubbed it ‘MacEwan’s Castle’. Sorley Mor would describe the latest innovation to them in Hamish’s shop or the Inn, shaking his head slightly and smiling affectionately at his son’s folly. Early on, when he and Chrissie had come from their home next door to inspect the ever-changing plans and the start of the building work, Rose had asked Sorley Mor if he could have a word with his son, try to persuade him to scale things down perhaps. He put his arm around her and hugged her close.
‘You’ll not stop him lass,’ he’d said quietly. ‘Best let him go his way. You wait, though; he’ll grow up one day. The MacEwans always do.’ He winked at her as he used to down at the harbour when she was small, and she smiled.
‘Huh!’ Chrissie said beside him. ‘Would you listen to the man?’
Sorley Mor looked at his wife, an expression of genuine puzzlement on his face. ‘What do you mean by that, Chrissie MacEwan?’
‘I mean,’ she said slowly, ‘that you were no better when it came to building our house.’
‘Me?’ Sorley Mor replied. ‘Why, it’s a perfectly simple house, woman.’
‘And every room is the size of a barn,’ Chrissie said, stabbing a finger accusingly at his chest. ‘We could’ve fitted the whole family into one bedroom and still not been able to find each other!’
‘Ach, but that was just because boats are so cramped,’ Sorley Mor responded, sounding almost convincing. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be at sea for weeks on end, woman—’
‘Oh, God, here we go! Another lecture from the old man of the sea on the hard life he’s had. I’m not one of your tourists, Sorley Mor, and stop calling me “woman”! It was to do with you showing everybody what a big man you were—’
‘ “Were”?’ Sorley Mor interrupted, a hand clutching at his heart, his eyes wide with feigned hurt. ‘What a big man I were, Chrissie MacEwan?’
‘A big man,’ Chrissie continued, ‘who needed a big house, that’s what it was all about, but as I’ve said to you every day since, you should try keeping it clean!’ Chrissie stared at him, a tiny woman with ti
ghtly curled blond hair that no hairdresser could straighten out for more than half a day, sharp grey eyes and an air of bustle about her. If Sorley Mor was known to be relaxed, his wife had never been known to be still. Chrissie was always on her way to do something, or having completed that task, on her way to do something else, and usually clad in the kind of wraparound pinny that her own mother would have worn. She was the wife of Sorley Mor, a man of some standing, but she was just Chrissie when it came down to it; put her in fancy clothes and you would be looking at Chrissie MacEwan dressed up and looking uncomfortable. She’d still be who she was, and if she had ever had any worries about her lack of sophistication, she had left them behind her long ago. She stood in front of Sorley Mor, staring up in to his face, their noses only inches apart, her hands on her hips, and he suddenly put his arms around her, bent her backwards and kissed her full on the lips.
‘Will you stop it, you silly sod!’ Chrissie shouted, frantically slapping any part of her husband she could reach, but he was nuzzling her neck and hugging her closer the more she struggled, until her feet were completely off the ground. Eventually he let her go and she stood trying to smooth her unsmoothable hair, red-faced and breathless. ‘You have no shame,’ she said.
‘Can I help it if you’re irresistible, woman?’ Sorley Mor demanded pathetically. ‘There’s just something about that old pinny! Don’t think I don’t know you only wear it to drive me into a frenzy; I’m only a man, after all!’ With that he made to grab her again and she ran through the bare bones of what would be Rose’s house, chased by the skipper. Chrissie’s shrieks and laughter rang out as she and Sorley Mor, both in their fifties, behaved like teenagers, and Rose thought of the times her mother talked disparagingly of how the MacEwans always drew attention to themselves; this was undoubtedly an example of what she meant. But, she thought, her mother was wrong, there was real joy between them, and if she and Sorley Og were still like that after all those years – well, she’d be more than happy, that was all.
The Last Wanderer Page 15