by Morris West
We gave each other good morning and fell into talk: about the weather and the tourist trade and how I was enjoying my stay in the Isles and the trivial rest of it. As the crowd cleared I invited him to take a cup of coffee with me. He accepted and we walked up the hill to the hotel and sat on the verandah watching the morning exodus of anglers and harassed families making for the beaches in the west. He was a friendly fellow with a shrewd wit and a bright eye for the visiting talent. Also he liked springing surprises. He told me:
‘I hear you were braced by the local constabulary last night – you and a lady.’
‘How the hell did you know?’
He chuckled happily. ‘Don’t let it worry you. A man only has to sneeze and it’s all over the island. There’s little to do but gossip here.’
‘So I’m learning. Morrison said you’d called him about me.’
‘I did. Part of my job. He gave you a good character.’
‘Then you won’t mind telling me what it was all about – the business with Ruarri Matheson.’
‘Well, now! How do I put it to you? I would mind in particular. I wouldn’t mind in general. Our Ruarri’s a wild boy, which is not to say anything libellous. He’ll do mad things for excitement, and some things which he shouldn’t do for profit. I’m keeping an eye on him, and I want him to know it.’
‘What sort of – things?’
‘Why are you interested?’
‘We’ve become friendly. He’s asked me to take a trip with him on his next trawl.’
‘Has he now?’
‘I’d like to go. I’m a writer. It’s my trade to learn how men live. I’d like to know what I’m letting myself in for – if anything.’
‘Why don’t you ask Ruarri?’
‘Because he’s done me a courtesy. It’s courtesy for me to accept it at face value.’
‘Then it’s safer for you to hear nothing, either from me or from Ruarri.’
‘Good advice. I’ll take it.’
‘There’s a rider to it, though. If you did, by chance, find yourself mixed up in an illegal activity, you could be required to disclose it in police inquiries and testify in court. If you refused, you could be charged as an accessory.’
‘That makes it very clear. I’m grateful.’
‘You’re welcome. Thanks for the coffee. When you’re next in Stornoway, drop into the office. I’ll buy you a drink.’
He left me then. I ordered more coffee and let it get cold while I thought my own faraway thoughts. The English were the most practised seducers in the world. They raped the girl first, taught her to love the child she didn’t want, then sailed home to write a bible about it: bonds of Empire, Commonwealth unity, the long tradition of liberty under the law, sell arms to South Africa, boycott Rhodesia, liberate the Maltese, disprize the Americans, build white elephants with the French, bring in the Jamaicans, shut out the Pakistanis, fight the Spaniards for Gibraltar, woo the Portuguese because they’re old colonials, subdue the Celts and turn them into nice competent public servants with a promise of pine forests all over the Highlands and new industry for Wales when the coal runs out and the last miner is dead with his lungs all black.
I didn’t dislike Duggie Donald. He was a bright, agreeable man turning in a fair day’s work for a public servant’s wage. I was none too fond of Ruarri Matheson. He was a monumental liar, more than half a pirate, and I wouldn’t trust him a jump and a spit with my chequebook or my sister. But in a grey world, with order in the streets, and a policeman on every corner, and a rubber stamp needed before you could take a pee or go to bed with a girl – God help me! – I was all for the man with a red wolf at his masthead and his pockets stuffed with free currency. The which being a seditious thought, it was time to go back to the lodge, before I talked it out in a bar and had myself gossiped up and down this very small island.
In the kitchen Hannah poured me a glass of beer and belaboured me with questions.
‘You were away last night?’
‘I was indeed.’
‘And you were poaching with Ruarri the Mactire?’
‘Now who could have told you a tale like that, Hannah?’
‘You’ll swear you weren’t?’
‘I will not. The Bible says I shouldn’t swear to anything – and it’s the best of books!’
‘Where did you sleep?’
‘I didn’t sleep, Hannah. My conscience kept me awake.’
‘As well it might. Did you sleep alone?’
‘If I did or I didn’t, you’d have no right to know. But the fact is, I did. And I didn’t like it.’
‘Try it as long as I have and see how you like that! Did you catch any fish?’
‘I’m told fish were caught, Hannah. But I never put line in water.’
‘A pity! I could have used a good salmon for lunch. Where’s the doctor-woman?’
‘Looking after the sick, which is a godly work of mercy.’
‘I wish she were here at this moment to take a look at the Morrison.’
‘He’s not well?’
‘Ach! He’s as fit as a trout, he says. But I know better. Ever since yesterday he’s been grey around the gills and blue around the lips. I’ve watched him going up the stairs. He can’t make it halfway without a breather. He’s got a little bottle of pills in his pocket which he sent Fergus to buy for him, and all morning, when he’s been reading, he’s had a glass of water and the brandy bottle beside him.’
‘Have you called his own doctor?’
‘He’d have my head if I did. He’s one himself, he says, and why should he pay a guinea for some other fool to take his pulse?’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Resting in his bedroom. But he won’t thank you for disturbing him. You’ll not tell him now that I’ve spoken to you?’
‘I promise.’
‘You couldn’t ask your lady friend to drop by, casual-like?’
‘I could, but a doctor can’t go scuttling round like a poacher.’
‘The master’s worried about something, and that’s bad for him.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘I know it and I don’t know it. You wouldn’t understand that, not having the second sight. But the way it is, I can’t find the words when I need them.’
‘Is it something I know too?’
For a moment she seemed to retreat into herself, then she came back to me again. ‘Yes, it is. At least I think it is.’
‘Leave it then. I’ll do what I can. I’m fond of him too.’
‘If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have you within a mile of him!’
She meant it too. When I looked into those old, dark eyes, I knew she would have a knife in my ribs and me buried in the cabbage patch before I brought a breath of harm to Alastair Morrison. She had handed me a problem, however, and I was at a loss how to deal with it. I was a guest in the house. I had no writ to prescribe for the health of my host. Even as his friend, I had no standing in his private argument with life and death. Yet I did have standing in the cause of himself and Ruarri. This I could abrogate on the grounds of disinterest or incapacity – or could I? Kathleen McNeil had given me an uncomfortable reminder of a thing I would rather have forgotten. All my life, albeit often wrongheadedly, I had battled to maintain the principle that all men were brothers, that an injustice to one was an invasion of all, that a sickness of one member was a disease of the whole organism. I had wearied myself to despair in the battle. I wanted to break it off now, cancel the blood pact, let the rest of the world go to hell in its own basket. This was the meaning of my flight to the Isles; but the battle was here, too, and I was involved again. Would there never be an end to it, a rest and a placid contemplation of follies I had managed to survive?
When Alastair Morrison came to lunch, he looked better than I had expected; a little peaky, perhaps, disinclined for food, a little less lively than usual. Still, he brightened when I told of our night’s adventure, and he laughed uproariously over our encounter with the polic
e. The rest of the story I did not tell him directly, but tried to come at it, crabwise, with the question Kathleen McNeil had put to me.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you asked me to do for Ruarri. There’s something I’ve wondered about. If it’s not my business, tell me so. When you die, does Ruarri share in your estate?’
‘He gets it all, through a trust. It devises down to his children, if he ever has any.’
‘So at that point he knows, doesn’t he?’
‘He guesses, maybe. The way the trust is framed, he doesn’t know for certain. What’s on your mind?’
‘A waste, perhaps. A waste of what could be good years for you and him.’
‘They could be bad years too, laddie.’
‘I know that.’
‘Why raise the question then?’
I told him. I tried not to make a drama out of it, but simply to show him the need that Ruarri had expressed to me, and my own reservations about it, and the options that might be open between the two of them. He listened in silence. At one moment he took out a small comfit box, popped a pill in his mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of wine. When I had finished he sat a long time, with his elbows on the table, chin on his cupped hands, staring into space. Then, slowly and quietly, he began to talk as if he were testing each phrase before he uttered it:
‘I believe in Providence. I always have. The trouble is you never see how it works until the work is done. When you learn enough, you try to cooperate, but then the irony of creation shows itself. You never get the result you planned. Last night, when you were out, I had a warning. Not a bad one, just a knocking on the gate to tell me that the dark watchman was on his rounds and might be calling a little sooner than I expected. I thought of Ruarri then. I thought this was the time when a man would be grateful for a son to lean on when the stairs got too steep to climb alone. But you don’t call in a son you’ve never acknowledged just to make a crutch of him. On the other hand, Ruarri has rights independent of mine. Those rights have been in breach too long. He’s the victim of a conspiracy of concealment. I’ve perpetuated the concealment and called it protection. Now you come along and I bind you in a way I have no right to do… Tally it up and it makes me a very selfish man. Small comfort with evening on me already, and the silent night inevitable afterwards…’
My heart bled for him, but I could not help him. Once, years before, I had had a rude lesson and I had never forgotten it. A friend was stricken with an incurable disease. I went to see him. I was embarrassed for lack of words to comfort him. I offered a well-meant platitude. He cursed me in a cold fury: ‘Goddammit, man! The death warrant’s signed and delivered. Let me walk to the block with dignity.’ I dared not deny the same dignity now to Alastair Morrison. I waited, sipping a brandy, smoking a cigarette, until he went on.
‘Of course, you can indulge yourself in guilt too. You want someone to tell you you’re forgiven. But you’re not – not without a reparation, or the injured one cancelling the debt you can’t pay.’
‘He can’t cancel it if he doesn’t know the name of the debtor. Besides, you’re talking in very limited terms, aren’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All I’ve heard from you is debit and credit, fault and forgiveness. What about love?’
The word startled him. It was almost as if I had used an obscenity.
‘Good God! Do you think that’s possible now?’
‘Yes. Your son’s got size, Alastair – a ruffian streak, too – but size and spirit and a crying need that makes him reach for the stars. Why not have him here and judge for yourself? I owe him a meal. I’ll invite him.’
He did not answer immediately. He turned the suggestion over and over, as if searching for the flaw that would enable him to reject it. Then, with a shrug and a thin, grey smile, he surrendered. ‘So be it then. Invite him. Tell him to bring a woman friend if he wants. And you invite Kathleen McNeil. If you have a taste for irony, it should be an interesting evening.’
‘You could be pleasantly surprised.’
‘God give me good words that night, laddie! Now will you get yourself out of here, before I make a fool of myself?’
I shoved a rod and a pair of waders into the car and took myself off for Stornoway. I had shopping to do, and on the way home I would try a cast or two in one of the lochans over by Leurbost where I would have larks and blackbirds singing to me while I fished. I was glad to be alone anyway. I was beginning to feel querulous again, frayed by too-close contact with a small, enclosed group of intense and intelligent people. After the first exhilaration of space and newness, I was suffering the reverse swing of the island syndrome: a feeling of confinement, of scenic monotony, of exclusion and alienation. For a spirit in disorder there is no lasting Eden, only hints and snatches, elusive harmonies.
My first call was a book shop. I needed a Gaelic grammar and a dictionary. The freckled lass behind the counter gaped at me as if I had asked for a consignment of moon rocks. She spoke the Gaelic herself, of course she did, but she’d never seen a book of it. Maybe I should write to the Education people or take a wee stroll over to the Gaelic Society, whose office might just possibly be open. Gaelic music? That they would have in the television shop round the next corner. She herself wasn’t much gone on it. They played it at the Highland games and sometimes at a concert, but not at the dances. There it was all the new stuff, the Beatles and the Stones and the soul music, that sort of thing, you know? I did indeed, and my knowing seemed to give her some small hope for my sanity.
I did not find the music either; but I spent an instructive half hour with an elderly antiquarian who sold me a gift for Kathleen McNeil – a Georgian locket on a fine chain of woven gold. Business wasn’t bright, he told me. Most of the good stuff went to the mainland, to Edinburgh and London, and there wasn’t the money or the taste in the Lews for fine old things. They were living on the tweed and the fishing; but half the money went back to the mainland in empty beer barrels, and television was making the young ones discontented with their life. Leverhulme had had the right idea, but he was half a century ahead of his time. There was this young fellow Ruarri Matheson who had great notions and talked high, but his past was against him, and though he spent money as if he had a hole in his pocket, he’d never make it. Lews folk were stiff-necked and stubborn – he was a Barra man himself, married into the island – and they resented anyone who was thought to be teaching his grandmother to suck eggs. If I wouldn’t mind paying the little extra, he’d find me a nice box for the locket. Women were quick to notice the little extras, weren’t they now? I paid him his money – none too little, for all the bad market in the Lews – walked out into the narrow street and turned down to the harbour.
There was some excitement here. An ambulance was parked on the stone dock of the basin and a small crowd was gathered round it. A German freighter had reported a burst boiler pipe and two engineers badly scalded in the engine room. The lifeboat had been called to take off the injured men. It was a routine thing, they told me. Just a milk run. There were always accidents at sea. They remembered worse times in the war, when the U-boats were out and never a week passed without some poor devils picked up with their lungs full of oil or their limbs blown off or skin peeled off them from top to toe. The admission book at the hospital had the names of men from every nation under the sun, and some of them had died and were buried on the island, friend and enemy together, made brothers by the bitter sea.
There was a flurry of talk as the lifeboat drew into the dock, then a silence as the men were taken off, strapped to the stretchers, their faces and hands covered with white gauze. The doctor, a stocky fellow incongruous in a tweed suit and yellow seaboots, climbed into the ambulance after them, and the day’s drama was over. As the crowd dispersed I heard one woman say to her companion, ‘At least my Jamie has his scholarship. That’s one the sea won’t get.’
It sounded almost like an invocation. The sea was a hell all women hated. They fought it as t
he missionaries fought the ancient demons, with prayers and exorcisms. Sometimes they won and then found the victory barren when their men turned sour with disappointed hopes and the workless days of winter. Sometimes they lost because the lure of it was too strong: the outcall to men penned too long in too barren a land, the promise of wealth and adventure, the seduction of exotic experience far from the eye of the elders and the kirk. But winners or losers, widowed or waiting, they were all sisters in their hate and their fear. Even the young and flighty ones would tell you they gave no welcome to visiting sailormen. They wanted their men home and safely bedded at nights – with or without benefit of clergy.
I heard a shout, ‘Hey, seannachie!’ and there was Ruarri, his head stuck out of a wheelhouse, signalling to me. He was moored third in line, so I had to clamber across two other decks to reach him.
He thrust out an oil-stained fist to haul me inboard, then handed me a wad of cotton waste to swab my palm. ‘I’m an engineer today. The main bearing was loose. But the boys are nearly finished now. This is the Helen I – so called because she’s the first of a thousand ships – I hope! Iain, who’s up to his balls in grease down below, skippers this one. I run the Helen II. That’s the lady with the new paintwork over there! Where’s Kathleen?’
‘Working. I came up to do some shopping and fish on the way home.’
‘To hell with the fishing! Stay and have a drink with me and the boys.’
‘Fine! I’ve got an invitation for you too. I’d like you to have dinner with me at the lodge. You name the night. Bring a girl if you want. I’ll have Kathleen.’
‘The lodge!’ He gave a long whistle. ‘Och aye! The Mactire moves into society at last! You know I’ve never had a meal at the lodge in my life. Whose idea was this?’