by Morris West
Ten minutes later we were snug at Ruarri’s fireside, drinking his liquor and laughing over the comedy.
‘Regalia minora, for God’s sake! How did you happen on that piece of jargon?’
‘I didn’t happen on it, my love. I dug it out this afternoon, just to be ready.’
‘You mean Ruarri planned what happened tonight.’
‘I’m sure he didn’t. But he knew it could happen. He’s a mischief and he likes to score off people. I wanted to be ready for him.’
‘Why didn’t you warn me?’
‘Because if nothing had happened I’d have looked a fool. And I’d rather not look a fool to you, Kathleen oge.’
‘But you think Ruarri would like it?’
‘I know he would.’
‘I’m not flattered by that at all.’ She got up, walked over to the fire and stood with her back to me, warming her hands at the blaze.
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Why?’
She swung round to face me, cheeks flushed, eyes bright and hostile. ‘Because I’m not an object! I’m not a prize you quarrel over and then throw dice for. I’m me, Kathleen McNeil. I love whom I love. I give myself when and where I choose. I’ve been dirtied enough, thank you. Never again.’
I was angry then, coldly and bitterly angry. I stood up, took the car keys from my pocket and held them out to her.
‘If you think you’ve been dirtied because I told you a simple truth, so be it! There are the keys, the car’s yours. I’ll pick Ruarri up in his own vehicle. But before you go, hear me out. I’m no great catch. I’m putting myself together after a crisis of my own, when I thought I couldn’t believe or work or care or love again. I didn’t ask you to mother me like your blasted actor. I didn’t ask you to take me to bed to make me feel better. I asked you to marry me, because with whatever I am, I love you. I’ve lived rough, God knows! But I’ve never bought or sold or shared a woman in my life. I haven’t talked secrets about any woman I’ve known either. Tonight? Ruarri’s interested in you. You know it. I know it. I was warning him off the grass because it seemed there was a hope for us, and you were ready to cherish it too. If that’s an insult, I’m sorry. If I’m the wrong man, tell me now, and let’s be friends at least, respecting each other.’
My vehemence shocked her. Indeed, it shocked me. My controls had worn thinner than I knew. She was very near to tears, but she was too proud to yield to them. For a long moment we stood confronting each other, the keys dangling between us, rattling in my unsteady hand.
Finally she said, ‘I hate quarrels.’
‘So do I.’
‘And I’d rather not drive home alone.’
‘You have a choice of drivers.’
‘I’d prefer the man who brought me.’
Then we were together again, body to body, lip to lip; and for a while it was not Ruarri’s house, but our own place with the world shut out and the fire shared and the hope a little stronger, if not yet wholly secure.
When the time came to pick up Ruarri, I left her drowsing over a book. I was glad to go alone and she, I think, was glad to be rid of me for a while. A quarrel is no bad thing when you can have it out and say all the bad words and then come to the moment when there are no words at all, only the you and the I becoming the we, and the we tumbling into sleep, knowing that tomorrow will be a better day altogether. But until that kind of sleeping comes, it is better to part a while and measure the need against the hurt and come back fresh to each other.
The moon was high now, unblemished by any shadow of earth. The hard land lay silver and gentle under its light. The lochans were bright. The houses were like the dwellings of sleeping dolls, white and peaceful in the hollows. Even the sheep were at rest, grey huddles beside the hayricks and the outcropping rocks. The wind had died. There was no voice of gull or curlew, only the faint susurrus of the sea, stirring around the black rocks and the yellow kelp. It was a place to be calm in, a time to be alone and yet not lonely.
I saw Ruarri first from a hundred yards away, a humped figure against the star line, a cigarette end glowing in the shadow. When I came up to him I saw that he was perched on a bag full of fish, with his nets piled in a heap beside him. He was weary and he showed it. He was a little drunk and he showed that, too, but he still had to make the last grandstand play.
‘Fifty pounds of fish or I’m a Dutchman, seannachie! Six great salmon, three sea trout and pollock to feed a whole poorhouse. You’re dead on time. That’s a virtue I respect. Any trouble?’
‘No trouble. Let’s stow the stuff and be on our way.’
‘Where’s Kathleen?’
‘Sleeping in your living-room.’
‘Ach, the poor, dark woman! Why not stay the night? The pair of you can have my room. I’ll doss by the fire. It’s forty miles back to Rodel and then you have to double the distance back to the lodge.’
‘It’s a kind thought. Let’s leave it up to her.’
We drove in silence for the first mile, then he turned to me with a tipsy grin. ‘Seannachie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re a bastard.’
‘So are you.’
‘But I like you.’
‘I’m a friendly fellow too.’
‘You called me tonight.’
‘You asked for it.’
‘So I did. So I will again, because that’s the way I’m made. I’ll call you on a card or a woman or a money deal. And if you don’t raise me, I’ll have no respect for you at all.’
‘Thanks for telling me. It’ll help next time.’
‘Don’t call me now, seannachie. Don’t fight me. Just let me tell it and believe what I’m telling you is true, even if you never believe me again. I’m a bastard. That’s legal, de facto, with a birth certificate to prove it. I’m a bastard by nature, and you don’t need a document to prove that. So I’m a lone one, like the red wolf at my masthead. You know why I go poaching – and me a trawlerman with a hold full of herring every trip? I’ll tell you. Because I was born poor and I lived poor, and I’m scared of being poor ever again. Tomorrow one of my boys will come and clean all the fish I caught tonight. The salmon we’ll smoke and the rest we’ll shove in a freezer against the winter. And I’ll know I can always eat, without a call on the minister or the social service or the charity of friends.’
‘You make it too rough for yourself, Ruarri.’
‘Rough it was and rough it is. I still wear it. But you know the one thing I miss? A brother… A big brother to curse me out and slap me down and still put me to bed when I crawl home drunk with a busted jaw. That was you, seannachie. That was you driving The Mactire up the Minch, covering for me with Duggie Donald in Stornoway. That was why I sent you the chessman, hoping you’d understand.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘He’s dead, seannachie.’
‘I was damn near dead when I came to the Isles.’
‘But you’re alive now, aren’t you? The sap’s running high. You’ve got a woman you care for. And you’re spoiling for a fight – with me or the next man.’
‘We could have it, any time.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘There’d be bad blood, Ruarri.’
‘Just so there’s blood. I don’t even know where I got mine. I don’t know where it runs either. I’ve spilt seed in a hundred beds from the Piraeus to Port o’ Spain and never cared. Now I’m caring – a little at least.’
‘So lay off my girl.’
‘I’ll try, but I can’t promise. I wish I could.’
‘So what are you asking?’
‘Let’s be brothers as long as we can.’
‘And when we can’t?’
‘Give me respect, seannachie. Just respect.’
‘You’ve got it. So take it easy now, eh?’
‘Anything you say, brother. Anything you say.’ He lay back in the bucket seat, closed his eyes and slept the last winding miles to his house.
&nbs
p; My grandfather, who was a much wiser man than I, used to say that if you wanted the truth about a man you’d find it in the last inch of the whisky bottle. There’s a catch in the proposition, of course – there always is with the Celt, and the sooner you wake up to that fact the better! You’ll get a truth out of the bottle, but you can’t be sure whether it’s the truth the drunk thinks he knows or the truth as it really is. And there’s a world of difference between the two.
Ruarri the poor boy just wasn’t true at all. Not bone-poor the way he told it, not charity-poor, not helping-hand-from-the-kirk-poor. The settlement from the Morrison was one guarantee against it, and his mother’s croft was the second. Humble in circumstance, yes. Humbled by social stigma, yes again. And I didn’t believe the fish-in-the-freezer story either, because I’d seen his kitchen and there just wasn’t room for fifty pounds of anything with all the rest of his victuals. If my guess was right, he’d keep only the salmon and split the rest of the catch among his henchmen to make a big, bold fellow of himself. His need of a big brother? For brother read father and you’d have a more authentic text. The real truth was right down at the bottom of the bottle. Respect – that he had to have. The tragedy was he’d earn it ten times over and then toss it away with some silly roguery before he knew he had it. The remedy? In his furry, fuddled state, he thought I held it. Perhaps I did; but I had no licence to use it, and it might poison him anyway.
We spent the rest of the night at Ruarri’s house, because he insisted on it, and Kathleen McNeil was dead on her feet, and an eighty-mile drive at two in the morning made nonsense in any language. She slept in Ruarri’s bed. Ruarri and I slept on bunks in the living-room. I could not bear the thought of her curled in another man’s sheets, and him grinning at me across the darkness, so I was restless, falling in and out of troughs of sleep, like a boat hove to in a high sea.
An hour or two before dawn I found myself awake and trembling. The house was dark as a tomb, but filled with a sound that chilled the blood: a high unearthly wailing, like the cry of a man tortured to the limit of endurance. It went on and on, a long ululation of intolerable agony. I leaped out of bed, naked and shivering, switched on the lights in the living-room. Ruarri was tangled in his blankets, tossing and squirming and screaming like a man in delirium. His hair and beard were damp and matted. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of terror. His hands clawed at the covers like the talons of a trapped bird.
I hurried to him and shook him, calling his name. On the instant he started up, eyes staring, his hands at my throat, throttling me. He was as strong as a baboon and I almost blacked out. At the last moment I drove my fist into his belly with all the strength I had behind it. His hands fell away. He doubled up, gasping and retching as he woke.
I stood well away from him while he recovered. For a while he stared at me, uncomprehending; then he shook his head to clear away the fog.
‘What happened?’
‘You were having a nightmare – screaming in your sleep. I tried to wake you. You damn near strangled me.’
‘I’m sorry.’ His chest was heaving. His face was running with sweat. ‘I’m sorry, seannachie. But never wake me like that. Stand at my head where I can’t reach you, and press your fingers under my ears. I could have killed you. Get me a drink.’
I poured neat whisky into a glass and handed it to him. He gagged on it first, then managed to get it down. He wiped the sweat off his face with the blanket and laughed unsteadily. ‘It’s the old dream – the bad one. I’m pegged out in a clearing and the women are coming with knives to cut me up and then leave me to the ants. I wasn’t joking about snake charm. Oh brother, I wasn’t joking! When we were camped at night I slept with a pistol under my pillow and a knife strapped to my shin, always an inch from waking.’
‘Will you sleep now?’
‘Give me another drink and I’ll settle down.’
I gave it to him.
He sipped it slowly this time, holding it two-handed to his lips, watching me over the rim of the glass. ‘I’m not crazy, you know, seannachie.’
‘I know. I’ve had nightmares too.’
‘Maybe that’s why you feel like a brother sometimes.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Did I wake the girl?’
‘No.’
‘Thank Christ for that! Go back to bed. I’ll be fine now.’
I crawled back under the covers and watched him as he remade his tumbled bunk. He was as meticulous as a nurse, smoothing out the sheets, turning in the blanket corners as if for an inspection. Then he gave me an ironic salute, switched out the lights and bedded down again. Ten minutes later he was asleep and snoring.
I lay awake until a grey dawn crept over the ghost-ridden countryside. I understood now and was shocked by what had happened to me. Two men and a woman had shown me the secrets of their inmost lives, and I was the last person in the world fit for the burden.
Chapter 5
AS I drove Kathleen McNeil back to her house, I told her of my dialogue with Ruarri and of his nightmare-in the small hours. I did not want to discredit him. I did not try. I wanted her to know, and I believed I had a right to tell her, what manner of man he was and the explosive possibilities of any relationship with him. She was very professional about it – too professional for my taste, because I was frayed and edgy after a sleepless night.
‘…The nightmare is normal – a good sign. In sleep the controls are released, the safety valve opened. The violence we dream is the violence we never do any more. That’s too simple, but you know what I mean. The terror behind it, that’s the sad thing! I feel dreadfully sorry for him. He’s too young for such a load of memory. The brother-need, that’s a heart-cry too. You can’t reject it, any more than I can ignore the call from a patient who has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Even the warning that he will fight you is a plea for forgiveness for what he knows himself to be. He wants you to care. He’s pushing up so high and so fast, he’s scared that the props underneath him will be kicked away and he’ll fall off his perch like Humpty-Dumpty.’
‘Why me for the brother?’
‘Why anybody? Why did you come here when Alastair Morrison offered a refuge? A moment arrives and you have to lean to somebody, anybody, or go mad.’
‘Pick the wrong somebody and it’s a tragedy for both.’
‘That’s the risk of living, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see what I can do for Ruarri.’
‘What he asks. Don’t reject him. Be ready to forgive him.’
‘For anything?’
‘The Bible figure was seventy times seven.’
I remembered she hadn’t been so damned casual about her own mistake. Or half so ready to forgive the fool she married. ‘You practise rough surgery, Doctor!’
‘I think you’re strong enough to survive it.’
‘Thanks for the compliment.’
‘Angry again?’
‘No. I’m admiring your skill in diagnosis. I’ve got one more question for you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘What would it do to Ruarri if he found out who his father was?’
‘How would one know? Is his father alive or dead? Would his father want him to know? Will he find out or be told? For what reason? Reconciliation? Inheritance? To help the father, or Ruarri, or both? I don’t think anyone could answer all those questions.’
‘That’s the problem. I know some of the answers.’
‘Oh my dear!’ The words came out in a rush of penitent tenderness. ‘And I was being so damn bitchy to you. I thought you were making another jealous scene. God, what a mess!’
‘You’re the one bright light in the middle of it. How long are you going to stay in Harris?’
‘Until the end of summer. Why?’
‘So long as you’re here, and so long as you’re happy I’ll stay.’
‘But free, all the time. Please! No commitments yet.’
‘No commitments, young Kathleen. Just to enjoy
.’
The promise was easy to make. It was a new day. Summer was in full flush. The tents of the campers were like bright flowers on the dunes and the children were shouting already over the warm white sands. We shrugged off the memory of the night and drove, singing, along the fringe of a friendly ocean.
When I left Kathleen at her house, I took the cliff road to Tarbert. My time was my own, so I strolled down to the little port to watch the arrival of the mainland ferry with its load of tourists, timber, automobiles, baled wool for the weavers, newspapers, groceries, frozen meat, assorted hardware and homecoming islanders. It was a pleasant, bustling scene, though it lacked the gaiety and confusion of a Mediterranean docking – the shouts, the flailing gestures, the pounding of horns and the shrilling of police whistles just for the merry hell of it. The English took their pleasures soberly and the Scots wore a dour face for their sauciest jokes and the courtesies of a small, closed place must be jealously enforced. As I wandered through the crowd, keeping my eyes open for characters and my ear cocked for turns and lilts of speech – which is a writer’s habit I have never lost – I came face to face with Duggie Donald, the Customs man from Stornoway.