Sorley Mor gulped and closed his eyes. The thought of a teetotal, dancing engineer was bad enough, but one who also cried! Eric caught his expression and misunderstood. ‘Ah know, Skipper,’ he said wearily. ‘Terrible, intit? That wan human bein’ could dae that tae another.’ He sighed heavily. ‘The cruel things that huv been said tae me, ye widnae believe it!’
‘Well that’s our concern exactly,’ Stamp said. ‘We know you must’ve suffered for your art, Eric. Geniuses like yourself often do; it’s the way of the world.’
Sorley Mor had a feeling that he had woken up in a parallel universe. That the poor Ocean Wanderer should live to hear such language!
‘And we have to admit that fishermen are, on the whole, much rougher sorts than Merchant Seamen. Is that not right?’ He looked at Sorley Mor and Gannet, who both nodded their heads in agreement.
‘The worst of the lot!’ said Sorley Mor with feeling. ‘Demons and devils they are!’
‘So to save you from all that,’ Stamp continued, ‘seeing as you have a fresh start with us, we think we should keep the whole thing between ourselves. We don’t mention the dancing to anyone, we don’t give the ignoramuses the chance to mock.’
Eric looked down at the table in silence.
‘Not that you have anything to be ashamed of, Eric, or we of you, don’t think that,’ Stamp told him. ‘There’s no one prouder than us to have a man of such artistry as part of our crew. Is that not right, Skipper?’
Beside him Sorley Mor nodded glumly; a dumb lie. It crossed his mind that he would henceforth have to join those who went to confession in other ports, there was no way he could tell Father Mick any of this either. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound, he supposed.
‘We just won’t have your life made a misery, Eric,’ Sorley Mor said seriously, ‘and if some of these uncouth fellows find out they’ll never leave it alone. We’d defend you; you know that. On this boat it’s one for all and all for one. Is that not right, Gannet?’
Gannet nodded wordlessly, and once again the skipper wished he had relaxed his ban on alcohol aboard the Wanderer. He could have done with a touch of Gannet’s eloquence at this juncture. Sorley Mor searched his mind for something else to reinforce his heartfelt empathy with his engineer. ‘After all,’ he said, wondering what in hell he was talking about, ‘aboard the Wanderer it’s always been a case of birds of a feather sticking together!’
Beside him he sensed Gannet laughing inwardly and had an urge to lift the tomato sauce bottle off the table and slap it across his sober pink head.
‘Ah understand,’ Eric sighed. He suddenly put his huge hands across the table and grasped his skipper’s. ‘Ah jist waant ye tae know,’ he said, his voice breaking and tears filling his eyes, ‘that Ah love youse guys!’
Sorley Mor stared at him, transfixed with horror and shock, his mind racing with unspeakable thoughts of what could happen next. Then Eric got up from the table with his bag, wiped his nose on his sleeve and sniffed loudly.
‘Stamp, son,’ he said, trying to regain his composure. ‘Ye wur right about the Two-Step, by the way. Ah jist stoapped thinkin’ aboot it an’ it a’ fell intae place, jist like ye said.’ He sighed heavily and blinked. ‘Ah’ll never leave this boat,’ he said emotionally. ‘This is where Ah was meant tae be! Who’d huv thoaght Ah’d find ma soulmates wi’ a buncha teuchters?’
‘Aye, that’s right, Eric,’ said Stamp kindly. ‘As the Skipper here said, on the Wanderer we’re just like a … a … a bunch of feathers tied together!’
Eric sniffed even more loudly and, unable to control his emotions, almost ran out of the mess.
‘Well, Skipper,’ Stamp said smugly, ‘I think that went well, don’t you?’
And so Eric’s dancing had been kept under wraps, as far as Sorley Mor had been concerned at any rate. Then one day the big engineer made an announcement. ‘Ahm gie’n up the Auld Time,’ he said over a meal in the mess one night, and Sorley Mor’s heart leapt with happiness.
‘You are, are you, Eric?’ Stamp asked in his quiet, gentle way. ‘My, but that’s a big step, is it not?’
‘Aye,’ Eric sighed, then he reached for a large brown paper package at his feet and put it on the table. ‘Ah’ve aye hid a fancy fur Latin American!’ he said, eyes ablaze. From the packet he drew out a long, scarlet, shiny garment and spread it out. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is ma catsuit.’
Sorley Mor stared in horror as the said catsuit was opened up to reveal a pattern of sequins spread about its surface.
‘Only thing is,’ said Eric, ‘it needs mair sequins, it’s too dull like this.’ He then picked up a plastic bag and spilled on to the table a myriad of sparkling discs of every colour. ‘It’s helluva time-consumin’,’ he said to Stamp. ‘Mibbe ye could help me, Stamp, son?’
‘But of course, Eric,’ the little man said kindly, ‘but you’ll have to tell me more about the Latin American.’
‘Oh, it’s dead fast,’ said Eric excitedly. ‘The wey tae look at it is that the man’s a bullfighter an’ the wumman’s his cape.’ He leapt to his feet, grabbed a tea towel and did a few graceful passes at an imaginery bull on the high seas. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Ye treat the wumman like that, so ye dae!’
‘Interesting,’ said Stamp, ‘and you’d need pretty fancy footwork I’d imagine?’
‘Oh aye, ye need to be quick oan yer feet a’right.’
‘As well as light,’ moaned Sorley Mor to Gannet. ‘Eh, Eric, I hope you don’t mind me asking what is a personal question?’
‘Fire away, Skipper.’
‘Well,’ said the Skipper, ‘that suit thing looks pretty close-fitting.’
‘It is,’ said Eric. ‘It’s supposed tae be tight.’
‘Aye, well, what I was wondering was how it contains all your bits?’
Eric threw his head back and roared with laughter. ‘Ye get special drawers!’ he laughed. ‘Look.’ From the paper package he brought out a pair of elasticated pants.
‘They look like corsets,’ Sorley Mor whispered in horror.
‘Aye, Ah suppose they dae.’ Eric laughed again.
‘Do they not, em, cut off the blood supply to important regions?’
Eric’s huge head went back once again and he howled with laughter. ‘Ye’re an awfy man, Skipper!’ he roared. ‘Naw, they jist haud ye in, like, gie ye a flatter outline, merr streamlined, like, nae bulges sticking oot. D’ye waant me tae show ye?’ The big man stood up and moved to unfasten his overalls, and Sorley Mor realised that he was about to treat the crew to a practical comparison between the bulging Eric and the streamlined Eric. It was more than the skipper could bear.
‘No, no, it’s all right Eric,’ he smiled weakly, ‘I was only wondering, that was all. I’ll take your word for it that it will do you no damage,’ and with that he headed for the wheelhouse to ruminate on the ways of the world. Now his non-drinking engineer would no longer be doing silly dances and funny salutes wearing a tailed coat, white dicky and shiny shoes, he’d be wearing a corset and a shiny catsuit covered in sequins instead – sequins, moreover, that the ship’s cook, Stamp, would help him to sew on while they were at sea. What could be more normal? How could any other fisherman find that even faintly amusing compared with the silly dances with the salutes? He just had to keep telling himself that this was progress, this was better all round, and one day he might begin to believe it.
14
As Rose and Sally waited and watched for their men coming home, they were no different from past generations of fishermen’s wives, except that from their vantage points high on MacEwan’s Row they could at least see them. These days there were radios and mobile phones, but when the sisters were bairns there had been few means of keeping in touch, and in the low-lying village the boats often weren’t visible till they came round the point. Everyone had a vague notion of when a boat should return, though, and the bairns used to sit by the harbour, waiting for a glimpse of a father, brother or uncle, sometimes all three on the same boat, while t
he women stayed at home and got on with their work, afraid of tempting fate. Only when a boat was actually overdue and there had been no sightings by other crews, when fate had already struck, would women wait by the harbour in those days, just as their mother, Margo, must’ve waited all those years ago, though she never talked about it. The latest technology had transformed much of the fishing industry and made vast changes to the working lives of the men, but it did nothing to allay the deepest fears of their wives. It was something that would never change, that waiting spell, and the relief when he opened the door remained undiminished, no matter how many years your man had been going to sea and coming home safely again.
Fishermen tended to marry within their own communities, or took wives from other fishing communities. Either way, they convinced themselves that the women didn’t dwell on what could be happening out at sea, didn’t think of the danger. They were brought up in the industry; they coped with it: so the men reasoned. The notion that they spent their time in fear and worry while their men were away was one that outsiders invented; fishermen’s wives were cut from harder-wearing cloth. That was the way the fishermen coped, by believing that their wives didn’t worry while they were at sea. Rose knew this wasn’t true, though. Of course they worried. Oh, you didn’t walk about the house all night crying, ‘Ochone! Ochone!’, you got on with things, but it was there in the back of your mind all the time. Sometimes you dreamed about it; it was often the first thing you thought of when you woke in the morning. And what was that rush of happiness when you set eyes on him again but proof of your worry, even if you only said quietly, ‘So, you’re back, then?’
Coming from a fishing community did help, though not in the way the men rationalized it. These days she understood the silent contract between fishermen and their wives not to acknowledge the dangers, least of all between themselves. The men had to go to sea without the worry of an anxious, fearful wife at home, so being a fisherman’s wife meant learning not to let that fear show, not to let it rule your life. From the point of view of the men it therefore made sense to choose a wife from a family who had lived within that silent pact for generations, one who understood it almost instinctively and would get on with raising your family without you, even if that meant permanently. Some wives listened avidly to every weather forecast; others made a point of not listening to any: both were signs of their fears. There was a tacit agreement that you never let your man go to sea without any arguments you might have had being settled, and if there was bad news at home while he was away, a child ill or a relative dead, you didn’t say a word till he was home again; what could he do from hundred of miles away except worry? In those circumstances a trouble shared was a trouble doubled. Not that you seriously thought something would happen to any of the men in your family, of course. If you thought that, you’d never let them go out of the door.
Rose often wondered what thoughts her mother must have had, though she knew better than to ask, which was just as well, because she would’ve been shocked at the answer. Every time he went to sea, Margo had hoped Quintin wouldn’t come back. He had been the biggest mistake of her life; he had ruined her life, in fact. She had spent her all her years waiting for something, convinced that she would only be in this place until whatever she was waiting for arrived, but it never did. There was that one time when she was seven years old, when old Ina had taken her to her grandmother’s funeral in Lerwick – though she didn’t know where she was or why at the time. They were going somewhere: that was all she knew. Even at that young age, when they arrived in Aberdeen it seemed to Margo that this was the end of waiting and the start of what she had been waiting for. It was a huge place, with cars and buses and people and streets everywhere; it was the kind of place where she felt she belonged. Then they had got on a boat then off again, at a place that was as small as Acarsaid. There they stayed at a place that looked like a castle. Rose remembered feeling horrified and confused, and people looking at her. Her mother had spoken briefly and stiffly to a man, then they had got on the boat again.
Margo had been anxious about this, but when they arrived back in Aberdeen she had relaxed; she was where she wanted to be. But Ina had taken her straight home to Acarsaid. Her father had been waiting for them and threw his arms around her, squeezing her till she could hardly breathe. She hated people touching her, hated anything holding her tightly – a neckline or a necklace touching her throat, even her dark pigtails too tightly bound caused her to panic – and she had tried to push Aeneas away, gasping as she did so. He hadn’t noticed, or if he did he thought she was just excited to be back, he was too involved in the reunion and the presents he had bought to welcome her home after two days, and when she noticed how moist his eyes were she almost felt sick.
It was how Margo had always felt about emotion; even though over the years she had come to understand that other people didn’t feel the same way, it hadn’t made her feel any less uncomfortable. Emotion crushed you, it held you tight, it squeezed the breath out of you – at least it did her. She had never felt any emotion for Quintin; she had just thought how smart she was for picking on him. In the 1950s and in that community the man ruled the family – though to be truthful not much had changed as one century had given way to another. Didn’t matter how stupid he might be or how smart the woman, the man was boss, and her father was more boss than anyone. Aeneas Hamilton controlled her with his money. He had snared her early, giving her a life of luxury that she thought was the norm. He had even refused to let her go to university, which to her was no more than a means of escape from Acarsaid and from him, because he knew, quite rightly, that if she succeeded in getting away she would never come back. Every time she built herself up to go, he stopped her. He had bought her the first car in the village, gave her a job with just enough money to stop her saving up enough to leave with; he had brought her up with an appetite for the best of everything so that she didn’t know anything else existed.
Aeneas had had it in mind that she would eventually marry the then Sorley Og MacEwan, the son of the richest family in Acarsaid, because as there was no way he would ever leave his home, that would mean neither would she. Margo had been determined to look around for an alternative. Sorley Og was too strong a character. She knew he was wedded to this place and nothing but death would end that union. But there was Quintin Nicolson: shy, easy-going Quintin Nicolson, who blushed every time she even glanced in his direction. There was no way to pass from the ownership of her father except to the ownership of some other man and, she decided, it would suit her purposes if he should be a man she could control. So she had picked Quintin, picked on Quintin. If she became his property she could get him to leave Acarsaid, to take her in to the world outside, and once away she would be free to move on without him. It was a master plan and she had believed it would happen just because she had always had everything her own way all through her life.
What a shambles she had made of that! And all because her father had brought her up to believe that she could have whatever she wanted, that everything would work out as she decided. Maybe if she had had more to do with men she wouldn’t have made such a silly mistake, but Margo had always kept her distance from them. Quintin, she discovered, might have been quiet and shy, but he turned out to be solid as a rock; he knew his own mind and he was stubborn. It had taken her a while to understand that she couldn’t move him. At first she had just thought, give it time; Margo Hamilton always got her own way. She would have to put up with him in bed a bit longer, the worst, most constricting feeling she could ever imagine, lying there with him on top of her, squeezing the breath out of her, suffocating and invading her; after the first time she had rushed to the bathroom and vomited, and every time after that she had gritted her teeth and concentrated on keeping breathing, surviving, until he was finished.
It would soon be over, this time and for good, Margo told herself, and it would all be worth it, because once she got him to take her away from here she wouldn’t have to see him, or the village e
ver again; wouldn’t have to put up with this violation ever again. Then, two months after they had married, she discovered that she was pregnant. She felt like killing herself. Trapped. That’s how she felt then, trapped. Six years later, when he died in an accident at sea, the only emotion she had been consumed by was rage. Why hadn’t he died sooner? There she was, pregnant with number six; why hadn’t he died before number one was conceived? And she knew there was no one she could tell. Everyone loved Quintin, and she was expected to play the tragic widow, but she cursed him, and them, every day of her life. One thing was for sure, though: never again would she lie under any man. Her body, like her life, was now her own – or would be when the bairns had grown. Maybe she could leave them with her mother and father when this last one was born. The old woman had more time for them than she did, anyway.
Margo and Quintin’s daughter, Rose, had never thought about the village or her life there until she had left Acarsaid; like all bairns she had just absorbed whatever underpinnings supported adult life without really thinking about them: that would come later. She had left Acarsaid at the age of eighteen and had been surprised at how much she’d missed the place while she was away, and at how clearly the distance brought it into focus. Till then she hadn’t been aware of the various currents bubbling away underneath village life, so it had been like standing back from a painting and suddenly seeing colours and depths that hadn’t been visible close up. Like all the other youngsters she had been anxious to leave the familiar boredom of home, to become part of the bright, exciting world beyond, to walk down a street where no one knew her name, where there were pavements on both sides of the street, even! Yet her university years, much to her embarrassment, had been marred by homesickness.
When it was really bad, Rose would lie in bed and conjure up every detail of life in Acarsaid. In her head she would watch the fishing boats unloading at the harbour and hear the banter of returning fishermen above the clamour, as they teased each other about over-fishing their quotas and exchanged insults with Sorley Mor. She would follow people she had known all her life going about their business, stopping in at Hamish Dubh’s store at the bottom of the Brae to complain about his prices, a ritual everyone observed; and she would listen to the conversations of the women as they put out washing or issued threats to errant bairns about what would happen to them when their fathers got home. It was like having her own private film show in her mind, that she could rewind, pause and fast-forward in time as well as place, to whatever incident, whichever character she decided to see again.
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