But hearing these stories repeated troubled Ina. She knew that Margo didn’t play practical jokes, she was cruel to people, she had no empathy, no fellow-feeling, and the only reason the villagers laughed instead of disapproved was because of her father’s standing in the area. And his money, too, was a big influence on how the villagers regarded Margo’s casual humiliations of other people.
For a lassie of Rose’s age it was hard to believe, but finding a man was still the main pre-occupation of young women in the 1950s and 1960s. It was an expectation thrust on them by their parents till it became a duty. Teenagers may well have been invented then and a sexual revolution taking place across the land, but not in Acarsaid. In Acarsaid the old values held true and lassies were expected to be safely married by the end of their teens or held to have been passed over, but there were damn few men would’ve wanted to cope with Margo, even though her father was rich, and fewer still who could. Say what you liked about her, she could sing and dance at ceilidhs with the best of them, and was often far more boisterous, but, they’d say with heavy emphasis, nodding approvingly, everyone knew she always went home alone. Aye, a real character, Margo, but no floozy, that’s what the old ones all said with approval. She kept herself to herself, if you knew what they meant, not like these days; yet more seeds, perhaps, of the fiercely insular figure tragedy would one day make her.
Listening to the old stories, Rose had felt it hard to reconcile the different character strands of the Margo Hamilton who would one day be her mother: game for anything, a feisty lassie, gregarious to the point of sometimes being outrageous; descriptions Rose would never have applied to her. She had always been ready for a laugh back then, and there seemed nothing she wouldn’t tackle for the hell of it. In those days, as the older villagers were forever saying, the Brae from the harbour rose steeply, causing problems for the fish lorries leaving for the city markets with the latest catch. The first lorry carrying the boxes of gutted fish would get up the Brae easily enough, but as it climbed the bree, the combined juices from the fish flesh, salt water and melting ice, would flood out of the back, making the road slippery for the next lorry. More bree would be added with each successive lorry, till it became like a skating rink. Hearing the drivers complaining one day Margo had said she didn’t know what they were moaning about, that any decent driver could get up the Brae. ‘So you try it, then. Bet you a pound you can’t do it!’ one of the men had challenged her, and Margo had climbed into the cab in her fancy dress, crammed the net underskirts under her as she sat in the driver’s seat, placed her stiletto-shod feet on the pedals and driven the lorry effortlessly to the top at the first go, then returned to demand her pound. After that any driver who couldn’t handle the Brae went to Margo to take his lorry up, and Margo Hamilton always charged a pound: not that she needed the money, but it was the principle of the thing. To the drivers’ minds it wasn’t like being beaten by a lassie, because Margo was no ordinary lassie.
Rose would look at the old Brae and doubt the stories. It was so steep that surely nothing could climb it, let alone a fleet of heavily laden lorries, but the old folk insisted that it was all true; they had seen it with their own eyes. Though it had long ago been by-passed, and the struggles to negotiate it were nothing more than distant memories, that era lived on in old village tales, and the bright, gutsy lassie Margo had once been was the same. In later years the older villagers would shake their heads as she passed and say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what she was like as a lassie.’
Rose was wrong about Sorley Og; he understood perfectly about the ice cream he bought in Hamish Dubh’s at the end of every trip. He had always understood. Each half lying in its saucer in the freezer was a hostage to fortune. It connected to a time when he’d come home safely, and so promised that he’d come home safely again, in a way that two smaller, individual ones somehow couldn’t. Even though he’d called to tell her he was on his way home, Rose would wait, scanning the horizon with binoculars, till she spotted his boat heading for harbour. Only then would she take the remaining ice cream from the freezer, scrape off the covering layer of new frost with a spoon, and eat it, balancing the saucer on a tea towel to stop her fingers from sticking to the frozen surface. Only when she could see Ocean Wanderer with her own eyes and knew that the promise had been kept, would the ice cream be consumed, then home he’d come with another hostage from Hamish Dubh’s store to replace it.
She’d never told him this part of this ritual because she knew she didn’t have to; she knew he already knew. It was really no different, she thought, from the model of the boat that Sorley Og never finished. The times he could’ve finished it, the times he should’ve finished it, then he would find something else to do that meant he couldn’t do any more work on it until the next time he came home. It still stood on a small table in the corner of the living room, surrounded by bits of wood, knives, brushes and various tins of paint, though painting would actually be the very last task after Sorley Og had finished the building. The real Wanderer had been a bright turquoise blue for years, but recently it had been repainted in green and white, so naturally Sorley Og had lined up tins of green and white, ready and waiting for the moment when the model was finished.
‘Look, why don’t you finish it first?’ Rose had teased him. ‘By the time you do the real boat will have changed colour another ten times, and you’ll be left with all these pots of paint that you’ll never use.’
‘A woman would never understand,’ Sorley Og replied. ‘Back to your kitchen, woman!’
‘So, explain it, man,’ she laughed. ‘Use very short words and I’ll try to concentrate really hard, I promise.’
Sorley Og’s face assumed an expression she knew so well from his father, the one Chrissie called ‘his old man of the sea face’. ‘The model would know,’ he said grandly. ‘Oh, you can laugh—’
‘Don’t worry, I will!’
‘But if I didn’t have the right colours ready for her, she would know, and she wouldn’t turn out right.’
Rose threw him an incredulous look and shook her head. ‘Just getting her to turn out at all would be something!’
‘You have no respect for the master of the house,’ Sorley Og said sternly. ‘Y’know, in some parts of the world I’d just have to say “I divorce thee” three times and you’d be returned from whence you came. You realise that, don’t you?’
‘Don’t think I’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming,’ Rose snorted, ‘and I wouldn’t want your rotten old never-to-be-finished wreck as part of the divorce settlement either! You’re not fooling me, Sorley Og. I know fine it will never be finished, don’t think for a minute that I don’t, and I know why.’
‘Away with you!’ he said, turning back to his work. ‘You’re married to a perfectionist, that’s the problem. I can only do perfect work and, if it’s slow, well, that’s the price you pay for perfection.’
Rose threw a cushion at him, knowing full well that, however long he was at sea. the model would be waiting for him, unfinished, when he came home. It was every bit as much a hostage to fortune as the half ice creams she kept in the freezer, and they both knew it. As was the cairn she had started at the front of MacEwan’s Castle. She wasn’t quite sure if Sorley Og had worked that out yet, but she thought he probably had. One stone for every week they’d been married, and one for every trip he had returned safely from. Now that was sheer superstition, there was no getting away from it. Rose MacEwan might have spent years away from Acarsaid, and have a university degree she had no use for, but underneath she was still a lassie from a fishing village after all.
16
When Sorley Og first mentioned selling Ocean Wanderer, Rose knew that it wasn’t a whim. He had had something on his mind for months, and she knew him well enough to know that he’d come out with it when he had thought it through and come to his decision. Normally the boat was away for anything up to four weeks at a time, back home for two days, then off again, but it was March and with the end of the ma
ckerel and herring seasons the crew would be at home for the next three months. In June they would be off again in search of sand eels for pet food, but the lull gave them time to attend to all those minor repairs that Sorley Mor insisted be logged, when the boat was repainted and checked for damage that could not be seen by the naked eye. She knew Sorley Og had been mulling something over, but when he voiced his thoughts it was still a momentous, if low-key announcement. Not only was the boat going, but it wouldn’t be replaced; the MacEwans were getting out of the fishing.
A decade before the very thought would have caused fatal seizures in and around Acarsaid. To those who had lived and worked beside them for generations the MacEwans were the fishing, but these days everyone knew there was no longer a living to be made. It had been bad enough in the mid-1960s, when herring fishing had been banned to allow stocks of ‘the silver darlings’ to recover from years of over-fishing, driving skippers out of business, crews – and curers, too – out of jobs. It had been the end of Aeneas Hamilton’s livelihood; with no herring being landed at the once thriving port, he was forced to buy what fish he could from other ports to keep the smokery in work. It wasn’t economical, but he hoped it would be a short-term measure – only it wasn’t, of course. When stocks had recovered and the ban had been lifted, years had passed and the public had lost the fish-eating habit; a whole generation of consumers had discovered the delights of beef-burgers, pizzas, chicken nuggets and other convenience foods. It had coincided, too, with a wider change in society, with more women going out to work and spending less time cooking, so convenience had become their priority, preferably anything that would heat up in the microwave in minutes without preparation.
Traditionally fish had always been cheap, but now it was regarded as too expensive, when the true cost, as with coal, was in the lives of the men who harvested it. Aeneas had stuck with his business to the very end, unable to comprehend that it was over, that now the fish had returned he no longer had a market to supply, or to face the fact that the situation was permanent, so that he was left with a smokery that no one wanted to buy because they had no use for it. He had gone from being a wealthy man with a thriving business to nothing, and all through no fault of his own. Ina watched him withering in front of her eyes and was unable to do anything to help him. He had worked hard all his life in an industry he knew well but, like countless others, he had been unable to conceive of a time when the fishing wouldn’t be there. If there was a downturn it would surely be followed by an upturn, that was what he thought, what they had all thought once. Finally Aeneas had to stop working because there was no work, and soon after he had just died.
Right until the end he had still got up every morning at the same time and put on his three-piece tweed suit and his brown shoes that he polished every night before going to bed, but then he found that there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Work had been his life: he had never taken a holiday, and he had no hobbies. He was the type of man, Ina knew, who would go on forever as long as he had his work to do. It gave him both status and purpose, and without it he became a shadow of himself. Over the years Ina had adjusted to his workaholic ways. She was too old now to sob that her husband didn’t love her. She had made her own life, quietly making up for the education she had missed out on, reading books and furthering her already wide knowledge of astronomy. Aeneas had nothing. They had never shared the same interests, and now she realised a huge gulf had opened up between them and it was too vast and too late for it to be bridged. At the same time, Margo, the daughter he adored, had been left a widow with five bairns and another on the way, and Aeneas could do nothing to help her. It was who he was and what he did: he provided, especially for his Margo. He felt a failure in every way, and there was no way of persuading him otherwise because only his own opinion mattered.
Ina watched him sink lower and lower. One morning he had sat in his favourite chair to read his newspaper and, when she came in minutes later, the paper was on the floor and Aeneas was unconscious. Old Dr Johnstone had shrugged his shoulders and asked Ina if she wanted Aeneas kept at home or taken to hospital. In those days there was no cottage hospital – that wouldn’t come till old Dr Johnstone’s son, Gavin, was the Acarsaid GP. Dr Johnstone meant Raigmore General in Inverness, many miles away from the village. She knew from his voice that it would make no difference to the outcome which bed Aeneas lay in, so he might as well lie in his own. ‘You can talk to him, Ina,’ Dr Johnstone suggested kindly. ‘Hearing’s the last thing to go. It’ll make him calmer if you talk to him.’
It took Aeneas three days and nights to die, and all the time she sat beside him, listening to his breathing. That last day, with the ticking of the clock sounding so ominously in the background, she talked to him about Yarmouth, wondering if he really could hear her, or if Dr Johnstone had just been giving her something to do to make her feel better, offering words of comfort for her, not for him; but still, she supposed, there might be a chance. She wondered if she should do something more for him – hold his hand, perhaps; but they had never been that kind of couple and it would have been false. In their everyday life such a show of affection would have embarrassed both of them, she decided, and all she could do for him was sit there talking about the old days and hope he could hear her voice. Then she noticed a new pattern to his breathing: one moment it would be loud and heavy, then the next so low and quiet that she thought each time he had gone. When the doctor looked in she asked about it, and he told her it was a sign that his brain was finally dying and meant the end wouldn’t be long, and in the early hours of the third night he stopped breathing completely.
It had been a neat and tidy death, Ina thought, with no fuss; a death that suited the man and the life he had led. ‘CVA’, it said on the death certificate. It stood for Cerebral Vascular Accident or, in layman’s terms, a stroke, but everyone in Acarsaid knew Aeneas had simply given up and died, and if he hadn’t had a stroke he would have died of something – anything – else. If ever there was a broken man, that man was Aeneas Hamilton. Not that he was the first or the last to be driven out of business by the dictat of the here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians. They were advised by career bureaucrats, who sat behind desks looking at figures on pieces of paper and, without the slightest understanding or knowledge of the fishing, made decisions for which they would never be held accountable. Meanwhile whole communities lay in ruins. That was the way of the fishing world.
It wasn’t just because it was becoming harder and harder to make a living out of the fishing that the MacEwans decided to get out of the industry, though; they had been successful for years and were hardly on their uppers. In fact, far more valuable than the boat was the licence allowing Ocean Wanderer to fish. A worthless piece of paper when it had first been granted years ago, it would now fetch millions of pounds. The real reason for giving up the sea was because Sorley Og wanted to be at home more. He wanted to be with his wife and, when they had bairns, he wanted to be there as they grew up.
Sorley Mor had rarely been at home when his son was small. He was more like a visitor, and Sorley Og had desperately wanted a father. It was the way of life in a community like Acarsaid; there was no cruelty intended, and it was no reflection on Chrissie’s care of all her bairns, but Sorley Og was the only boy in a family with three sisters, and it seemed to him that he had spent his life waiting for his father to come home, then trying to hide his grief at the inevitable next parting. They say like attracts like, and Sorley Og had often thought that maybe there was something of that in why he and Rose had ended up together: they both had missing fathers.
Rose had never known her father, but Sorley Og sometimes wondered if that might be preferable to having one you loved who was forever leaving you at home. Maybe, too, that was something that might not have affected another youngster so badly. He had never heard anyone else voice feelings like his, but it had affected Sorley Og, and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to his bairns. And that was another thing: he sometimes wondered
if he and Rose would ever have bairns, given that he was so rarely at home, as absences grew longer for less reward. These days he had his skipper’s ticket and had more or less taken over command of Ocean Wanderer, giving Sorley Mor the chance to stay at home more, though he and Gannet would still go to sea every second or third trip. So, how to tell Sorley Mor that the end of an era had come, that was the problem.
The Last Wanderer Page 22