by Morris West
‘Mine. It’s my party. I’m paying the score. Morrison will be my guest as well. When are you free?’
‘Let’s see now! We’ll be out tomorrow at first light and away for two days. Let’s say Friday.’
‘Friday it is. Seven-thirty for drinks. Dinner at eight. And you’ll be bringing someone?’
‘I will.’ He grinned a little self-consciously. ‘But who it’ll be demands some careful thinking. I’ll let you know. Come below now and I’ll show you what a real trawler looks like. None of those clapped-out drifters for Ruarri the Mactire!’
It was no idle boast either. There was love and money lavished on his craft. The money was in the big diesels and the full panel of electricals: radar, sonar, direction finder, automatic pilot and the rest. The love was in the scrubbed decks and the clean bilges, and the bright paintwork and the fresh grease on the winches, and the fish-well free of stink and garbage, and every piece of gear stowed shipshape, as if it were an admiral’s barge and not a stubby, workaday herring boat. There was power, too, in the skipper who could drive a tired crew to hose ship and chip rust and salt cake after days of hauling their tripes out in the Atlantic swell. Rogue and rapscallion he might be to the sober folk of the town, but in the tight brotherhood of the sea he was measured for what he was: a safe helmsman, a captain whose engines ran clean, whose crew would stand up and fight for him in any bar from Truro to Trondheim.
They didn’t mind the swagger of him, the bawdy, jostling assurance. Age and the clouting of the sea would tone him down soon enough. With two trawlers and a yacht and his croft, he could buy and sell most of them; but he was still a working sailor, which kept him in the brotherhood. He was not one of them damty merchants or bankers who thought that money could buy you, body, soul and breeches, and who’d screw you into bankruptcy if things went wrong. Tough he was, and a bad man to cross; but he would never see a man without the price of a drink in his pocket or a family in distress because a fisherman was sick or injured.
I record these things because I heard some of them and sensed the rest as we clambered over other men’s decks to visit the Helen II. I had, and I have now, small reason to love Ruarri the Mactire. I have still large reason to hate him. But respect he had, and has, and I pay my tribute with the rest.
He had what too many lack in our monotone world, a sense of style and a talent for ritual. The style was a chameleon colour, shifting and changing with the company. The ritual was an instrument of power and he used it with knowing art. The ‘drink with the boys’ was a case in point. When the hotels opened, there was a general migration from the docks to the bars – no panic rush, but a steady, fated swarming, like that of jungle creatures to the water hole. Ruarri, contrariwise, held back. He would not submit himself to the indignity of the first crush at the bar, the first clamour for drinks. He held me in his cabin, yarning over a glass, until the confusion had subsided. Then he strolled me down the deserted dock to what he called ‘my own pub’, a modest stone-built tavern under the sign of ‘The Admiral’s Spyglass’.
We walked into a fug you could cut with a knife and a crowd three deep around the counter; but the crowd parted to let him through, and ten strapping fellows at the far end shouted a welcome and pushed their girls along the benches to make a place for us and had drinks in our hands before we could sit down. Ruarri presented me to the group as ‘a friend of mine, a seannachie well known in other parts, and no bad sailorman either’. Then, as they pumped the hand off me, he added an order: ‘So we’ll talk in English, because there are no secrets between us and he hasn’t had time yet to learn the language.’ I was grateful for the courtesy. There is nothing quite so disconcerting as the Celtic habit – bad here, but worse in Wales – of shutting out the stranger just as the talk gets interesting.
There was a girl for Ruarri, I noticed: a busty blonde with a beehive hairdo and a kissable mouth and a very possessive look in her eyes. I wondered if this would be his guest at the lodge, though I had no doubt she had been his guest more than once at the croft. He sat with his arm around her and kissed her whenever he had the urge and drank from her glass when she offered it. The drinks went down with bewildering speed. Every man had to buy a round, and a glass too long empty brought a sharp reminder to the laggard. The talk was salted with bawdy words which nobody seemed to mind or even hear. This too was ritual – man’s talk in a man’s place and the women could like it or lump it. On the evidence none of them seemed to give a ‘fook in hell’, though some were quite ready to give it in bed and told it plainly.
Ruarri handled himself like an actor, consummate in the role he had created for himself. He matched them drink for drink, joke for joke, and his audience adored him. The boys bellowed their heads off at every story he told, and there was not a girl in the group but would have had her clothes off at the snap of his fingers. Yet, in spite of the clamour, he managed to pass out work: stores to be ordered, papers to be collected from the harbour master’s office, a telegram to be sent, a call to be made to an absent crewman. Ruarri had drilled them well. I noted that every man who received an order wrote it in a pocketbook and that all the books were identical. One hapless fellow who had forgotten his book was cursed out roundly and sent to fetch it. There was talk of the work done at the croft and of the next day’s trawl. Then someone raised the question of the run to Norway. I pricked up my ears at that, but Ruarri quashed the subject with a frown and a swift sentence in Gaelic. However, at that moment the noise was high and one lad missed the warning cue. He gave a bellow of laughter and shouted:
‘What say, Ruarri? That’ll be one in the eye for the fooking Ulstermen…’
What happened then I can tell you only in slow motion, with no true sense of the swiftness of it. Ruarri was out of his seat like a cat. He took the boy’s nose in his fingers, twisting bone and cartilage so that he brought him out of his seat and down to his knees. At the same moment all the group came to their feet, shielding him from view. Then Ruarri slammed his boot into the lad’s solar plexus, driving the wind out of him. Before he hit the floor, two of his friends had their arms under his shoulders, hoisting him up and carting him out of the bar as though he had fallen suddenly drunk. Then everyone sat down again and Ruarri was laughing and shouting to the barmaids:
‘The rest of us are sober, lass! Another round and a double for our friend the seannachie! He’s way behind the rest of us.’
The drill was as perfect as any commando tactic. On-again-off-again-Finnegan; and though you saw it, you didn’t believe it. The boys were laughing and the girls were twittering a second afterwards, and the drinkers at the bar has not batted an eyelid. Ruarri, I knew, was waiting for a comment or a reaction from me; but I was damned if I would give him the satisfaction. I took my drink and toasted the company, and then bought a round to return the courtesy and be free to go.
Ruarri came to the door with me and stood for a moment in the deserted street. ‘Dinner on Friday then, seannachie. Unless you’ve changed your mind?’
‘I’ll expect you, Ruarri.’
‘And I’ll mind my manners.’
‘I never doubted it.’
He smiled then, not cocky any more, but rueful and defensive. ‘It was yourself put the name on me – Lord of the Isles. Now you’ve seen what it might cost to wear it.’
As I drove back to Laxay in the long, heather-scented twilight, I found myself wrestling with a very troubled conscience. The act of violence in the bar had revolted me. What revolted me even more was the sneaking approval I was prepared to give to it.
I hate all bullies. I was bullied myself as a child. I hate brutality. I saw enough of it in the war from comrades and from enemies. Torture is abhorrent to me. I still have nightmares when I read of it, which is all too often in this savage time. I remember my nightly horror during the Pacific war: that I might be captured on patrol and treated like my friend, who had had his heart cut out, alive, by a Japanese surgeon to make him tell where the coast-watchers were hidden. If at the end
of a none-too-noble life I shall have any claim to mercy, it will lie in this: that I have stood at risk against tyranny in all its forms, private and public; that I am on the record for the liberty of every man to say his credo in public and be held safe even by those who dissent from him; that I have never sold my pen to a liar, or my vote for personal advantage.
And yet, and yet… Here I was, indulging myself in a secret and perverse admiration for a calculated act of cruelty. Why? Confused as I was at that time, I still knew that the question was radical for me. Did I lack the sheer animal courage to risk such an act? To that I had to answer yes. I have none of the qualities of a hero. I have had to lead men, but all my leadership was by manipulation, sometimes by superior knowledge, but never by the quality or even the posture of bravery. Was it the discipline implied? The instantaneous decision to protect the group, the family, against the aberrant member? To accept to lead is to accept a trust and to brook no breach of it by oneself or another. Yes, again; but still not enough. There had to be another reason; but I kept shying away from it, like a balky horse, scared of the water jump.
Finally I had to face it, because I had no confidants any more to whom I could gossip the story and let their judgments absolve me. Alastair Morrison was a sick man and I had charged myself to effect a reconciliation between himself and his son, in case death should come upon him unawares. I could not tell Kathleen McNeil lest I demean myself again by the jealousy with which she had charged me.
Jealousy – that was the root answer. Jealousy and the sum of all the personal insecurities that provoked it. I admired Ruarri and I hated him. What I was not, he was. Even his vices overtopped my puny virtues. To restore my dignity, to hold Kathleen McNeil against his clear attraction, I had to oppose him. To oppose him I had to use every tactic, however base. To use it I had to justify it, to prove it was good if only because it was necessary.
That moment of knowing, on the road from Stornoway to Laxay, was the moment of my self-betrayal. The proposition was as clear to me as to any casuist. By all that I believed it was false, base and immoral. Yet I committed myself to it. Once committed, I was calm: calm as a sniper sighting from a treetop, knowing that in the next instant he will kill the image of himself.
Chapter 6
THE Ruarri who came to dinner on Friday night was a man I had never seen before. He was dressed in full Highland rig and he wore it with the flair of the Lord of the Isles himself. From his buckled shoes to his Matheson kilt, to the jabot of fine lace held by a gold pin, he was as glossy and elegant a Scot as ever you saw on an advertisement for fine whisky. Even his manner was transformed and, if you had not known him, you would never have guessed the change. He was soft-spoken and respectful to Morrison, with Kathleen and myself, relaxed and urbane. One trifle more and you would have said it was overdone; but he hit exactly the right note: a compliment to the house in which he was making his first footing.
The woman with him was a surprise too. No country girl this, but an honest-to-God Irish beauty – red hair, green eyes, skin like peaches and cream, a soft Dublin accent and manners to match it. Her name, according to Ruarri’s bill of consignment, was Maeve O’Donnell. She bred racehorses in Eire to win purses in England and France. What she was doing in the Lews and how the devil Ruarri had come to know her were matters left politely vague.
Alastair Morrison was impressed. I was myself. Kathleen McNeil was warm but wary, which I thought was no bad thing for my private interests. It always paid to have another pretty woman on the scene. Even old Hannah was startled into indiscretion.
As she bustled in with a tray of canapés she stopped dead in her tracks, stared the pair of them up and down and gave voice to a paean of praise. ‘God love us and protect us! It’s Bonnie Charlie himself, back from over the water! Your taste’s improved, Ruarri Matheson. I hope you have sense enough to hang onto this beauty!’
That took the weight off us all. We could laugh and begin to enjoy ourselves. I served the drinks so that Morrison could start the talk in his own way. He looked better tonight. He had rested during the afternoon; his colour was good; and, whatever the tension inside him, he managed a calm and courtly attention to his guests. I had not told Kathleen McNeil of his illness. I had explained the dinner simply as a return of courtesy to Ruarri Matheson after our night in his house. I did not doubt her discretion, but the occasion was critical enough without another undercurrent of unease.
Recording it now, I can hardly believe my own temerity in risking such a party: father and son, the one knowing, the other ignorant of the relationship; the son and myself, rivals for the same woman; she, uncommitted to either yet, and myself hugging a secret knowledge for a weapon to win her; Maeve O’Donnell, import from a territory of Ruarri’s life which none of us knew about at all. The prime intention of it was good – I give myself that credit still – but the mixture was explosive, and the wonder was that it didn’t blow up in our faces during the first ten minutes.
We fumbled the first passes of talk, but once we were settled with drinks in our hands and the fire warming us all, we managed to be easy together – at least as easy as folk could be who were acting out a fiction in the hope of a truth at the end. The memory of what was said is vague now, but the faces are still vivid and the attitudes and the tonalities. Morrison leaning back in his chair, his white hair fluffed about his ears, questioning Ruarri about his plans and projects; Ruarri, sober and deferent, explaining them with facts and figures and sturdy common sense; the two women fencing quietly with each other over fashions and travel and the inevitable surprise of having acquaintances in common; myself, withdrawn, only half listening, fingering the locket in my pocket and trying to find words with which to present it. Dinner would be a long meal. Hannah’s food and Morrison’s wine should shake us loose from the formalities. Maeve O’Donnell might help too. If I judged her right, she was too lively a one to sit through the evening in the shadow of another woman. She knew more than her prayers and read something more than the Turf Register and the Sunday supplements.
There was a small problem over the seating for dinner. I was the host, and Morrison argued that I should take the head of the table. I told him it was my privilege to decide the protocol and settled him in his own chair with the women on either side of him. I sat next to Maeve O’Donnell with Ruarri across the table from me. Morrison offered a grace, and I saw that the O’Donnell crossed herself, which gave me the word on her church but no firm clue to her virtue.
Ruarri, to my surprise, managed to turn a graceful compliment. ‘I like that. It’s the first meal I’ve had blessed in a long time.’
Morrison was pleased, and I was glad for him; but Hannah, standing by to offer the broth, made her own privileged comment. ‘More’s the pity, young man!’
Morrison frowned, but Ruarri laughed. ‘Come and cook for me Hannah, and I’ll bless you three times a day.’
She made no answer, but a gleam of approval showed in the dark, canny eyes.
Ruarri, however, added an unexpected comment. ‘It may sound strange, but there are times when I wouldn’t mind having an anchor-hold in one kirk or another. Not the Frees, though, not ever. The Greeks maybe, or the Romans. They seem to have more experience of characters like me.’
Was he making a ploy or a plea? He was so slippery a customer, I could not tell.
It was Maeve O’Donnell who took him up – and put him down. ‘You might do well in Ireland, Ruarri. You’re a good drinker and a slow marrier. Who knows, they might get you for a priest in the end.’
‘Then I’ll hire you as my housekeeper!’
‘The hell you will. I’d as soon peddle myself in Phoenix Park!’
‘At least you’d be a better bargain than that nag you’re trying to sell me.’
‘That nag, Ruarri Matheson, is going to win at the Curragh next June, and then you’ll be crying your eyes out!’
We were in open country now, safe and laughing, and I began to relax. I reminded Morrison of that royal jocke
y club in Bangkok where every race was fixed and you could win yourself a fortune if you knew the right prince on the right day or the mistress of the Chinese merchant who was slated first on the roster. From Bangkok it was an easy stride to Chiengmai; and, when the salmon was served, Morrison was in a full flood of reminiscence about his years in the uplands. I wanted him to talk. I wanted Ruarri to know what manner of man he was and how much of gentleness and concern he had spent in his solitary penitential years.
My good intentions only laid another paving stone in the private hell of Alastair Morrison. Ruarri had been in Thailand too. He had spent six months ferrying opium into Laos with a loon of a French pilot. When his Thai patron was supplanted by a richer one, with a cheaper ferry service, he had to bribe his way out of trouble and head for Hong Kong.
He did not tell the story boastfully but with a kind of wry humour: one of the catalogue of follies of a footloose youth who had found the world was full of bigger bastards than himself. The irony was that Chiengmai had been a staging post for the opium runners and father and son must have been many times within half a mile of each other.
I did not dare to look at Morrison. I tried to lead the talk into safer channels by telling of my own troubles trying to write a book in Vietnam.
This time, at least, I was successful, thanks to Maeve O’Donnell, who demanded to know one good reason why I hadn’t written a book about Ireland. I was ready for her on that. Every Irishman I’ve ever known has offered me twenty plots and a mission to tell the truth about the land of my fathers – although it was my mother and not my father who established the connection.
‘I’ll tell you why not, Maeve. Ireland’s a lovely country. And if all the women were as beautiful as you, it would be next door to heaven. But ever since I was knee high to a tinker’s donkey – which is a phrase my grandfather used till I was sick of it – I’ve had the place shoved down my neck: her saints, her scholars, her virgins and martyrs, Brian Boru, Oliver Cromwell, the Famine, the Fenians, Parnell, Daniel O’Connell, Clarence Mangan, Tommy Moore, Maud Gonne, the Easter Uprising, the Black and Tans and the IRA. Who needs me when you have all that, with Bernard Shaw and Jimmy Joyce thrown in for good measure?’