by Morris West
Fergus William McCue was a member of this sect and an initiate of its highest degree. He was a genius with the rod and a tyrant with his novices, of whom I was, as he told me many times, the most doltish and the least deserving. If I took one wee bitty brownie in a season, it would be a miracle for which I should fall on my knees and thank the good God.
He made me drive him five miles into the country, then tramped me another mile over the peat land to a private lochan where there would be no one to witness the follies I was about to commit. He took a long guzzle of whisky to wet his pipes against the ordeal and then read me a half-hour lecture on the rod and the reel and their respective parts. He talked of lines, dressed and undressed, level and forward-tapered and double-tapered. He orated on wet flies and dry flies, on casting and shooting, and ‘fishing to the rise’ and ‘searching the water’. Then, when he judged me sufficiently confused, he put a rod into my hands and ordered me to make my first cast.
Immediate disaster! The line floated free as gossamer and tangled itself in the sedge. Fergus William McCue shook his head mournfully, took another dose of whisky to steady himself and then abused me mightily. I had a wrist, hadn’t I? I wasna one of them damty robots, all jerk and jiggle with the clockwork inside? Would I try again now and try to have a little respect for the fish, which was an intelligent creature and respected an intelligent angler? I tried again and again and again, with Fergus groaning and keening at my back, until I could manage a halfway respectable cast; but never a fish rose and the level of the whisky went down and down. Finally the master took the rod and within fifteen minutes had grassed a pair of brown beauties, neither far short of a pound. Thus humbled, I was ready for another lecture.
‘It’s a patient art, laddie, as you’ve now seen. It’s like the painting of a picture or the carving of an angel out of a chunk of marble. It’s the art of the hands, but it’s also of the mind because you must know what a fish will be doing with himself while you’re bending your wits to catch him. And even when you’ve hooked him, you have to know how far he’ll run and when you can begin reeling him in. Four pounds’ breaking strain is all you have in the line, and that’s not much against a big fellow with a hook in his mouth and him racing away down the loch. No time then for philosophizing or writing poems in your head, or daydreaming about the girls you’ve never kissed. Would you like to try again now, before the sun is all over the water?’
I would and I did, and the first small miracle happened. I made a strike and I was so excited I forgot to throw the clutch on the reel, so that the line snapped on his first run and I lost fish, fly and leader all at once. Fergus William McCue abandoned himself to a biblical despair. If Island tweed could be torn, he would have rent his garments. Had we had a fire, he would have poured ashes on his head and on mine. Nothing would calm him but a large tot of liquor and a grudging dram for me, to steady the hand and clear the mists from an addled Sassenach brain. Whether it was the whisky or a recklessness born of despair I cannot say, but the next time I was lucky. I hooked and played and finally landed a modest half-pounder. He looked small and insignificant beside Fergus’ catch, but I was as proud of him as if he were the original white whale. Even Fergus’ grudging compliment was a music in my ears:
‘Nae so bad – for a beginner, that is. Had he been bigger, though, you’d never have held him. You have a hand like a ploughman. No delicacy in it at all. But, given time from you and patience from me, there’s a wee small hope.’
‘You’re a hard man, Fergus.’
‘Aye. Indeed I am. How else would I put up with all the idiots that come to me in a season? You’re bad enough, but God save me from the worst of them. Last year – would you believe it? – I had a woman handed to me by Morrison himself. She was a great horsy creature with cruppers on her like a Clydesdale and a laugh to frighten even the hoody crows. She yearned to catch a salmon, she said; but it was a man she was after, and Alastair Morrison if she could have him. After a week I handed her back to Morrison and told him he could marry or murder her, but she’d never in her life make an angler. He, poor fellow, lost a guest, but he’d have lost a gillie if she’d stayed. So you’ll understand the trials I have.’
He was becoming garrulous with the whisky, but I was happy to let him run on. I was so stuffed with argument, so sick of controversy and clattering opinion, that his simplicity and his innocent malice were a refreshment. I was relearning, too, one of the primal arts of survival and I felt dignified by the experience. It was good to be a pupil again, good to be ignorant, good to be eager for the smallest accomplishment. It was like drinking spring water after a surfeit of wine, like tasting an apple fresh from the tree. I felt a sudden poignant regret for all the innocence I had lost in a lifetime. Yet I had not lost the itch of curiosity or the habit of devious inquiry; so, as I searched the water for another fish, I searched old Fergus, too, for hints and keys to the secret life of the island.
‘The Morrisons now, Fergus. They’re an old name in these parts?’
‘Aye, laddie. Old and respected – though not always respectable as they are now. For a long time the Morrisons were brieves of Lewis. And if you don’t know what a brieve is, then I’ll tell you. He was a judge of life and death in his own territory. Son succeeded to father and each one swore that his justice would be as even as the bones of the herring on either side of the spine. Not that they always kept the oath. For there was Hucheon Morrison, who sired a child on the wife of the MacLeod of Lewis, and the brothers Allan and Neil, whose heads were taken in a sack to Edinburgh. There was John the Tacksman, who was a bard, and Roderick, who was a harper, and one bastard son who was called the fire-raiser because of his habit of burning other folk’s hayricks. There was a whole line of ministers in the clan, and some very good doctors, too, like Hugh, who was the father of this one. But the way it looks now, the doctoring’s going to die out – unless Alastair makes a very late start, which I doubt he will.’
‘I’d have thought he’d have lots of women running after him.’
‘Aye. He’s had ’em. And he’s got a good eye for a filly himself. At least he used to have before he got religion and went away to serve the heathen. But he hasna been caught yet. And the way you’re holding that rod, you’re not about to catch anything either! Try another cast, right on the edge of the shadow… Yourself, now, are you married?’
‘Not now. I used to be.’
‘Are you looking again?’
‘Not this trip, Fergus.’
‘But you wouldn’t be averse if a good-looking lass happened along?’
‘Do you have anyone in mind?’
‘Not for you, laddie. I’ve got two sons of my own to settle and they’re frisking a mite too freely around the local pastures. But old Hannah’s the one if you want a list of the possibles. She knows ’em all, whether they’re good breeders, how they can cook and keep house, and how much money’s likely to be settled on ’em. Have a wee chat with her before you start walking out.’
‘They tell me she has the second sight. Does she use that for matchmaking as well?’
‘She has. Indeed she has. She knew my own wife’s death a year before it happened. She told the homecoming of Alastair Morrison before he knew it himself. As for the matchmaking, she’d read you a warning if she liked you, and if she didn’t, she’d….’
I did not hear the rest of it because at that moment I got a strike and I hooked him. Fergus was on his feet immediately, dancing about me, yelling directions in Scots and Gaelic. If I missed this one, he would never forgive me. I would never forgive myself. To hell with second sight and all the Celtic humbug. I had a fish and I could feel the fight in him and damn me if I was going to lose him. Twice I nearly did because I reeled in too eagerly and misjudged his run, but both times the tackle held, and at last I had him netted and grassed, a pound and a half of saving grace that any man might be proud of. I shouted and laughed and did a crazy jig on the verge of the lochan. Fergus, wise teacher, decided we had earned a drink
. We had one and then another. We drank a toast to our noble catch. We had one more for the road, and then we set off across the peat land, singing in discordant duet ‘Thoir a’ Nall am Botul’.
When I got back to the lodge I was as elated as a schoolboy. Alastair Morrison was locked in his study, so I went straight to the kitchen to display my catch to Hannah, who, floured to the elbows, was rolling a vast pastry for the evening meal. She enthused over it as though I had taken the King of the Fishes himself. Then she admonished me with that winter smile of hers:
‘If it’s half a bottle every time you go out with that rascal McCue, you’ll be in a sorry state when you come to leave. You need a dash of cold water now and a walk in the garden, else you’ll be falling asleep over lunch.’
‘Hannah, you mustn’t scold me. I’m a happy man today. I’m a fisherman, which I didn’t know I was.’
‘You’re two steps short of sober and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
‘Look into my eyes, Hannah, and tell me if you don’t see a happy man.’
‘I’ve looked already. Get along with you.’
‘But you haven’t told me what you’ve seen.’
It was idle banter, and I was just silly enough to persist with it. Suddenly she was no longer smiling. Her dark eyes clouded as if a membrane had been drawn over the iris. Her body stiffened and she stretched out a hand to touch the breast of my jacket. When she spoke her voice had a dull, monotone quality, as if she were reciting a rhyme learned painfully by rote.
‘There is light at the coming and darkness for the going. There is life wanted and life refused. There is sleeping and dying and a waking afterwards.’
Then, abruptly as it had begun, the catalepsy was ended. Her hand dropped to her side, she shook her head like a sleeper waking suddenly to full consciousness. She gave me a puzzled look and then a curt dismissal:
‘Out of my kitchen now. It’s half an hour to lunch, and I’ve no time to gossip.’
The strange thing was that I was not perturbed. I accepted the brief phenomenon as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Why? I truly do not know. I had drink taken, as the Celts say, but I was by no means drunk. I knew about the second sight from my own forebears. I knew the old counsel that those who had it should never marry, lest they pass on the gift and the sadness of it too. But to witness the telling and to be unmoved, to be neither believer nor unbeliever, or even curious – that I cannot understand even now.
Only one thing I can say with certainty: from that precise moment, reality slid out of focus for me, and I began to live precariously but passionately in a dimension of dreaming. I might have done so anyway, but the moment was critical, catalytic. I was a man in flight: from the past, from a threatening future, from a self which I had found, suddenly and disastrously, incomplete and out of balance. I was seeking an impossible newness. If I could not find it, I would turn mythmaker and create it for myself. I would open myself to every impression, every experience. I would borrow every symbol that came my way and fit it into a cosmogony of private illusions. I did not understand how sick I was, how vulnerable in my imagined convalescence, how dangerous still to all those who had contact with me. I feel a guilt for this now, the greater because, at my coming to this small, strange place, I surrendered myself immediately to the delusion of innocence. I had changed my skies; I believed I had changed myself. At the end of Alastair Morrison’s dinner party, the delusion was complete.
Chapter 3
BY mid-afternoon the weather had changed and it had begun to rain, a soft, steady drizzle blown in from the western ocean. The clouds rolled low over the hills, making a cheerless murk, through which the painted sheep moved lost and plaintive while the gulls settled to roost along the furrows of the stripped peat beds. The smoke drifted heavily around the chimney stacks, and the only sounds were the slow wash of the sea, the drip of the rain from the eaves and an occasional bleating from the scattered flocks.
Morrison was anxious about Kathleen McNeil, who was living in the doctor’s house at the southern end of Harris. She would have to drive forty miles of mountain roads and then return late at night. So it was arranged that I would drive down to get her. She would sleep the night at the lodge and I would take her back in the morning. The exchange would pass all her calls to the district nurse, who would telephone the lodge in case of emergency. I must leave at four to be back by seven because the roads were crooked and full of surprises: humps and hollows and shaly verges and narrow causeways and ambling sheep and mist in the defiles of the mountainous country.
I recall the journey as vividly as if it were yesterday: the monotone of the fine rain, the dark hills and the darker water, the sweep of the wipers over the misted windscreen, the sluice of the wheels through puddles and potholes, the rags and tatters of cloud hanging from the hilltops, the rare, yellow lights in the cottages. I remember that I sang to drive away melancholy and tried to make rhymes from the place-names: Aglmachan, Ardhasig and Borvemore and Obbe. I remember the sense of relief and minor triumph when I saw the old Church of Saint Clement at Rodel and came, a few minutes later, to the dwelling of Kathleen McNeil.
I was early, she told me. She had been held late with a difficult case. She was still in her working clothes. Would I take a drink while she bathed and changed? It was not the warmest of welcomes and, foolishly, I was piqued by it. Then I saw that she had been weeping. When she poured the drinks her hand trembled, so that the decanter rattled against the glass and some of the liquor spilled on the silver tray. I asked her what was the matter.
She stiffened and tried to shut me out with a curt, professional summary. ‘I lost a child today. Breech birth, the cord tangled around the neck. I couldn’t revive it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It happens. But this was the first birth in the family and I’m the outsider.’
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘No. They will. And the blame will be hard to live down.’
‘They’ll make another child and forget this one.’
‘Perhaps. But there’s so much promise in a baby here. So much hope against the sea and the loneliness of the hills.’
I took the glass from her and set it on the table. I laid hands on her shoulders and held her while she steadied herself. ‘The hills will be here and children will be here when you’re long gone. If you want to cry, be done with it now. Then go upstairs and change and make yourself up like a girl going out to dinner.’
‘I don’t want sympathy.’
‘Then you won’t get it. But it’s a long drive to the lodge and I’d like some cheerful company. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
She gave me an uncertain smile, then left me. I sat by the peat fire and sipped my drink and thought about the sadness of life in the Happy Isles. Here everything was immediate, naked and potent. Here were no crowds to cushion the impact of events, no raree-show to distract the suffering or the fearful spirit. Birth, sickness and death came all in the same bed. Food was brought from garden plot to table. Man and beast were buffeted by the same storm, rejoined by the same thin sunshine. Mourner and merrymaker tramped the same rough road to the common meeting place between the mountains and the sea.
Withal there was a joy to be recognized. Here the primitive mystery of brotherhood and dependence was re-enacted every day. No one lay hungry without some hand to feed him. No one was too old to be remembered. No child lacked a family to cherish him. No man died without one tear shed for his passing. The winter peat was cut by common labour, stacked by friendly hands for the aged and the infirm. The lifeboat was at the call of every sailorman, and there was no cottage so poor that a stranger would not be offered a strupach: food and drink and a gentle word for the road.
In the world from which I had fled, violence was preached as a surgery for the sickness of society. Children killed themselves with heroin. Juvenile lovers infected each other with gonorrhoea. Diplomats peddled arms deals. Revolutionaries made hostages of t
he innocent. Citizens sent armed police against students. Students burned libraries like the tyrants of the Inquisition. Black man fought white man. Massacres were plotted on computers, and ant-heap cities devoured the sweet countryside. For all the loneliness of this place, for all the threat of the land and the elements, I was glad to be here. I felt then that I might be glad to stay. When Kathleen McNeil walked down the stairs I was certain of it.
Even now, a century older, with all my follies for remembrance, I have no shame in the confession. I was in love with her from that moment. I wanted her in every way that a man can want a woman, passionately, urgently, with body and spirit. Laugh at it if you want. It was so wild a thing I would not blame you. Call it whatever name you will – the coup de foudre, mid-summer madness – it happened. It was. I can no more reason it now than I could then. Unfashionable? Out of character? Juvenile? Clownish? All of that. But I see her now, dark hair upswept, cheeks glowing, lace at her throat and wrists. I see myself watching her, knowing with absolute conviction that this was my woman, this was the one for whom I would overturn mountains and hold for my own against all contenders.
Yet first I had to win her and I knew, even then, the game would not be easy. This was no foolish virgin, no light matron either. She knew the game, too, and she played it deftly and with charm. She would be outraged by a clumsy or incompetent suitor. Come the moment of avowal she would be ready – to accept or reject it out of hand. To time the moment, however, was my affair, and I, who had known more than one woman in a lifetime, was suddenly doubtful of my skill. I had a vision of myself, the comic fisherman, tangling his line in the rushes while all the trout in the loch thumbed their snouts at him.
‘Something funny?’ asked Kathleen McNeil.