An Island Apart

by Lillian Beckwith

  evening I arrived I am wishing to tell you I am of a mind to take a wife and I’m after thinking you could suit me very well. If you have such a mind also that way you will maybe leave a message in my room where no one else will see it so we will maybe arrange a time to speak over the matter. Your friend, Ruari MacDonald.

  PS I must tell you I am to be away back to my home by Wednesday first so as to be there ready for the cattle sale.’

  Feeling completely winded by the shock of receiving such a letter, she read it six or seven times before she was able to allow herself to grasp that it contained a proposal of marriage. The first proposal she’d received in her thirty-eight years! As comprehension focused itself in her mind she had a desire to laugh wildly. ‘The Dear!’ she ejaculated under her breath. ‘The Dear, Dear!’ she repeated. She poured herself another cup of tea and her hand was so unsteady she slopped some into the saucer. Hastily she substituted a clean saucer before picking up the letter and reading it again, her head shaking with incredulity. What nonsense indeed! What sort of joke was this to play on her? But if it was nonsense her mind could not detach itself from musing, lightly, over his proposal. The revelation that she now knew the reason Ruari MacDonald had come alone to the city and why he had chosen to install himself at ISLAY rather than an establishment frequented by his kinsmen startled but did not wholly surprise her. He had come with the intention of seeking a wife and he’d wanted to lose no time about it! It was not unthinkable. She’d heard her Granny say there was occasionally a shortage of marriageable women on some of the more remote islands and that men would sometimes ‘suffer painfully from yearnings’. She’d thought then that ‘yearnings’ was a stomach ulcer or rheumatism, which seemed to be a prevalent illness in the Islands, but whatever had prompted Ruari McDonald’s desire to seek a wife, Kirsty realised it was a very daring thing for him to have done. And certainly it had been very wise of him to try to conceal his intention from kinsmen. Young as she’d been at the time she could even now recall the merciless teasing a bachelor neighbour had endured when there’d been a rumour that he was so anxious to seek a wife he had gone to the length of putting an advertisement in a newspaper. How would shy Ruari MacDonald have reacted to similar waggery? she wondered.

  But she was still of the opinion that to have chosen herself as a possible wife was nonsense. Whatever could have put it into the head of such a timid, gentle man that she would make a suitable wife for him? A woman he hadn’t set eyes on until a week previously. A woman he’d barely exchanged more than a few words with. It was almost improper to think of such a thing. Just nonsense her thoughts reiterated, and persisted in reiterating throughout that day and the whole of the following day and, careful as she was to avoid exchanging even surreptitious glances with him when she was in attendance in the dining room, the scornful phrase continued to assert itself.

  And yet, because of the changed circumstances at ISLAY she urged herself to consider his proposal, no matter how ludicrous it at first seemed and as she considered it she was conscious of a small tingle of excitement which she was reluctant to recognise. She remembered Mrs Ross asking her one day if she’d ever been tempted to get married or, more bluntly, if she’d ever had a fancy for being penetrated by a man?

  When Kirsty had indignantly denied any such temptations the old lady had complimented her. ‘You’re a wise lass, Kirsty. See and stay that way. The more a man has his way with a woman the sooner he’ll tire of her.’ She’d tried then to coax Mrs Ross into telling her of her own experience of marriage but the old lady had brushed off her curiosity with cynical abruptness. She wished now that it was possible to acquaint Mrs Ross with Ruari MacDonald’s proposal but, alas, the old lady was past clear-headed conversation. There was no one else she could or would have wanted to turn to.

  Mentally Kirsty allowed herself to list Ruari MacDonald’s virtues. He was an Isle man and for that reason alone she was prepared to trust him. Island men were shrewd. His decision to offer marriage would not have been made without keen observation and after deep reflection. He struck her as being quiet and clean. He gave every indication of being considerate, kind and intelligent. Even Meggy had spoken of his thoughtfulness. Would it be unwise of her to encourage him by agreeing to discuss the possibility of becoming his wife? There would be so much she would need to ask him and doubtless there was much he would want to know about her. She reviewed her own qualifications. She was a good cook and a competent housekeeper. She was strong; she was penny-wise yet not frugal. She reckoned she wouldn’t be the sort of wife an Island man would be ashamed of.

  After forty-eight hours wrestling with her misgiving she decided she would agree to his suggestion that they should meet and discuss the subject of marriage. She would slip into his bedroom the following evening while the guests were in the dining room and put a note on his dressing table telling him she could be certain of having the kitchen to herself the next evening once the meal was over. Isabel and Mac were invariably out until after midnight on Monday evenings and he would be welcome to come and take a ‘strupak’ with her. She thought her use of the word ‘strupak’ would serve to put him at ease although she herself hadn’t heard or used the word for ‘a cup of tea and a chat’ since she had left her Island home after her Granny had died, but she’d never forgotten the cosiness of the image it brought to mind.

  Chapter Four

  The following evening, a few cautious minutes after the front door had closed behind Isabel and Mac, Kirsty heard footsteps approaching the kitchen. To spare him, for she was certain it was him, the embarrassment of knocking and possibly risking being observed by another guest she rose from her chair and opened the door before he reached the threshold.

  ‘Ciamera a Tha!’ he greeted her. There was a bashful grin on his flushed face and a smell of whisky on his breath, not strong but evidently he’d felt the need to stiffen his courage before confronting her. Detecting it made her feel obscurely reassured.

  ‘Ciamera a Tha!’ she responded, smilingly indicating a chair she’d already placed between the stove and the table and opposite her own, but before he sat down he produced an unopened half bottle of whisky from his pocket and with eyebrows raised enquiringly held it for her approval.

  She nodded perfunctorily. As a child she’d once been coaxed into taking a ‘wee dram’ at New Year ‘to condition her’ as had been explained. She’d hated the smell, the taste and the effect it had had on her and even after she’d reached adulthood, save for a rare medicinal hot dram when she’d been suffering from a heavy cold, she’d taken whisky only on each New Year’s eve when Mrs Ross, whose regular Saturday night ‘tassie’ it had been, had prevailed upon her to share a celebratory drink. But she’d known instinctively that Ruari MacDonald would take it as a rebuff if she were to refuse the drink he offered.

  Compliantly she took two glasses from the cupboard above the sink and set them, along with a jug of water on the table and while he opened the bottle and poured the whisky she busied herself making a pot of tea and putting out a plate of scones she’d baked that afternoon.

  ‘Slainthe Mhath!’ he declared, raising his glass with a flourish and taking a mansize gulp.

  She, too, raised her glass. ‘Slainthe Mhath!’ she echoed, taking only a sip from her glass before nodding with the simulated approval she knew to be necessary.

  The toast lessened the initial constraint between them but even so they continued to talk banalities, each too imbued with the Island reticence to approach a subject until it had been prefaced by a suitable exchange of irrelevant conversation – and then only obliquely. Touching first on his impressions of the city they drifted effortlessly to speaking of the circumstances which had led to her being there. She was frank about her unidentifiable father; about her mother’s desertion; about being brought up by her Granny – the ‘Cailleach’ as she’d called her; about Uncle Donny who was Granny’s only son and who had always stayed at home because he’d been considered too ‘far back’ to go to school.
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br />   For some reason she herself could not be sure of, she had been guarded about speaking of Uncle Donny since she had come to the city. Even to old Mrs Ross. City folk didn’t understand such small strangeness in a person, she decided, aware that even at home in the village Uncle Donny had been mockingly known as ‘The Dummy’ because he could only produced a sort of ‘whoop’ at the back of his throat when he’d tried to communicate with anyone but, sensing her listener’s readiness to comprehend, she shed her restraint and chattered about him easily. Uncle Donny hadn’t been lacking in sense, she defended him to Ruari. And he’d been big and strong though he could be awkward and clumsy at times. But he could be tender and gentle, sometimes crying over a sick animal and never would he wring the neck of a wee hen even if such an important person as the missionary was likely to be in the village and expecting to be offered a meal. There was no doubt Granny could never have managed to work the croft without him doing the heavy work, she stressed, and his only misdoing so far as she could recollect was taking himself off to the hills without giving anyone a sign that he was going and then staying there for hours at a time, not even coming back to take his potatoes and herring though many were the scoldings he’d got from Granny about it. But more often than not when he did come back he’d bring some plant or flower that she and Granny had never seen but of course he hadn’t been able to tell them where he’d found it unless they’d been prepared to go with him and be shown the place.

  When Granny had died folks said poor Donny couldn’t be left to look after himself so he’d been sent to a Home, a fate which Kirsty obviously regarded as being far worse than being sent to an elderly relative as she herself had been. A minister had occasionally brought her scant news of him from which she’d deduced he had been very unhappy at the Home. It appeared that though he’d been kept clean and well-fed, the Home had been too grimly supervised. He’d fretted because there were no animals for him to look after and no hills or moors for him to wander. The grounds surrounding the Home had been enclosed by iron railings rather than the rough dykes he’d been accustomed to scrambling over and the only visible greenness had been well-disciplined hedges and lawns which had been mown so rigorously he’d been feared to tread on them.

  She’d managed to get messages to him via the minister telling him she hoped to visit him ‘soon enough’ but since Donny had never been able to write she’d had to glean from the minister small tit-bits of information about his well-being. She’d always nursed a hope, she confided to Ruari, that when she was older she’d maybe have a home of her own where she’d be able to have Donny and look after him but she’d been less than two years in the city when the minister had called to tell her that Donny was very poorly indeed. She’d not had a chance to see him before he’d died. She blinked away her tears.

  ‘My own mother had such a one in her own family,’ her companion commiserated. ‘It is true they need a lot of understanding.’ She glanced at him gratefully, realising that she felt suddenly uplifted as if speaking of Donny after so many years had erased a sense of guilt that had lain dormant since his death.

  For a few moments they stayed silent and then she again was burrowing deep among her earliest memories and tossing them to him for comparison. They soon became engrossed in sharing recollections of their childhood, each plucking at scenes that remained embalmed in their memories. They talked of the hard work of the croft, recalling with pride how young they were when they carried home their first creel of peats; their first pails of water from the well; of how secretly pleased they were to be trusted to help dig potatoes; to bind and stook the newly-cut corn; to rake and build prapachan of freshly scythed hay.

  They contrasted their memories of schooldays and the idiosyncrasies of their teachers; they chuckled over their recollections of Halloween mischief; gloated over the seasonal pleasures of collecting gulls’ eggs; of fishing with home-made rods and lines for the small brown trout that hid in the quiet pools by-passed by the rushing burns, or for sea fish from huge rocks that jutted out from the shore. She recalled the ecstasy of splashing about in the peaty brown water of the lochans after a hot, windless day’s work or play.

  ‘Hamish, the post, taught some of us to swim,’ she told him. ‘And I was well pleased about that when I came to the city because I could go to the swimming baths with the scholars. I soon learned to dive too,’ she added.

  He looked impressed. ‘I never did such a thing,’ he said regretfully. ‘There was no one to teach us at the school and the lochans on our island are so deep and thick with reeds, we were forbidden to try.’ He considered a moment. ‘Maybe we should have gone in the sea more but there were so many jobs to be done at week-ends and on holidays that when the weather was calm we didn’t get much time. I suppose that was the way of it.’

  ‘I daresay it would be so,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’m thinking maybe you liked the city when you first came to it?’ he asked.

  She thought she could detect a trace of wistfulness in his tone. ‘I liked my first taste of it well enough,’ she admitted. ‘It was exciting. The trams and the shops and the streets all lit up and full of people. The church bells ringing on Sundays and livening up people before they went to church. My! I was taken with it all. And I liked being able to switch on an electric light once I’d got used to it but I was terrified of the gas. It took me a while to pluck up even enough courage to strike a match and light a gas jet. Everything seemed to happen so fast it fair took my breath away. When I wanted water I had only to turn on a tap and better still when I wanted to get rid of the water I needed to do no more than let it swill down the sink or drain instead of having to carry the pail or basin outside and sluice the water over the ground. Folks had told me about such things but I’d not been expecting to see them for myself. It was all such luxury it didn’t seem natural. No carrying water from the well in all weathers. No peats to cut and stack and carry home but instead a coalman bringing bags of dusty coal with his horse and cart every week. Ach, I got used to it soon enough and tried hard not to let folks see how strange I found everything.’ Looking across at him she caught his perceptive nod.

  ‘No doubt I myself would have felt the same, just,’ he said.

  ‘There’s another thing that took me a while to get used to,’ she continued, ‘and that was their flush lavatories.’ She permitted herself a tiny embarrassed chuckle. ‘My but I’m saying they fairly made me flush scarlet and I mind I let myself get well and truly constipated before I could bring myself to use one. Being used to having the whole stretch of moors to choose my place I was shocked when I was shown the dark little cave of a wee hoosie in my aunt’s back yard. There was no way you could disguise where you were going because there was nowhere else to go just. I thought it was a terrible lack of privacy even though there was a door you could shut. But when you’d finished there was this chain you had to pull and it fairly scared me out of my mind the first time I tried it for it made such a dreadful noise. Even when I got used to it I still used to be in an agony of shame because I was certain all the neighbours would hear it and say to themselves, “There’s that strange girl from the Islands having to use the lavatory again”. I got to pulling the chain and rushing out as fast as I could in the hope they wouldn’t see it was me.’

  She shook her head. ‘And then there was only newspaper to clean yourself afterwards instead of a handful of good fresh moss. It didn’t strike me as being clean or healthy.’ She intercepted his nod of approbation.

  ‘That’s the city for you,’ he said. ‘Some folks think it cleaner but I doubt it myself.’

  ‘Mind you,’ she confided, ‘it was my job to cut the newspapers into neat squares every Saturday night and then thread them on a piece of string and hang them from a nail on the lavatory door. I didn’t dislike doing that because I got a good read of the papers while I was doing it and that was better than reading the Bible which was the only alternative.’ She shot a glance at him to see if her light dismissal of the Bible had aroused
a look of censure. His expression had not changed. She felt a sense of relief. The Islanders were not known for their devoutness and though she had not relinquished her own strict religious upbringing – she would never have dared to speak of the Bible disparagingly in her Granny’s time – the city had liberated her from much of its constraint. She had no wish to re-encounter it.

  ‘After I’d had to leave my aunt’s place I was taken on by the minister and his wife and I got another surprise. I found their lavatory was inside on the upstairs landing and the chain made such a noise you could hear it all over the house. Well, I thought, you’d expect ministers’ wives to be more particular about such things but no, they weren’t bothered about it at all. They had a roll of toilet paper instead of newspaper but ach, it was that thin you could have spat through it. I’m telling you, my Granny would have suspected they were debauched,’ she added with a giggle. She paused, shocked at her disclosures to a man she barely knew. ‘Ach but I shouldn’t be speaking to you of such things,’ she excused herself. ‘Likely it is that whisky has let loose my tongue.’

  He smiled appreciatively. ‘It was good to hear you talk,’ he said, helping himself to another scone. ‘These are good!’ he complimented her.

  A glance at the yellowed face of the kitchen clock told Kirsty that they had been talking for well over an hour and a half and yet were only a little nearer mentioning the subject they had met to discuss. She recognised a mounting tension within herself. There was so much more she must find out about him, her mind stressed but how was she to do it in the limited time before Isabel and Mac returned? She tried to devise some subtle comment that would serve to shape his mind in that direction but he forestalled her.

  ‘The master and mistress of the house are out for the evening, you said. Will they be late back?’

  ‘Shortly after midnight, I reckon,’ she told him. ‘I think they go to a cinema and afterwards they go for a drink with some of their friends.’