by Morris West
‘You don’t have to be. I’m not sick, seannachie. I’m a man who’s lived twenty lives, all of them violent. They run into one another, and I don’t know which is which. What’s the dream? What’s the real thing? How can a doctor tell me that?’
‘How can I?’
‘You can. Because you’re a seannachie. You live in two countries at once. You know how to keep them separate.’
‘Not always.’
‘But at least you understand the confusion when it comes.’
‘Mine I understand …not any other man’s.’
‘But you write about other men and not yourself.’
‘What do you want from me, for God’s sake?’
‘Nothing. Just to know that you’re there, that I can reach out and touch you and say, “This at least is real, solid, a reference point that doesn’t shift.’”
‘It’s too much.’
‘I still ask it.’
‘Tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘If you knew now, for certain, that you had killed Lachie, what would you do?’
‘Walk up forward with me.’
We left the shelter of the wheelhouse and pushed our way up to the bows with the wind in our teeth and the spray beating against us with every pitch and yaw. Then, as the black cliffs of Sandoy thrust out ahead of us, he told me:
‘If I knew, seannachie, if I knew truly, beyond all doubt, I’d finish whatever I was at. I’d write my log, cast up my accounts, pay my bills, leave everything tidy, call the police and the undertaker and blow my addled brains out.’
‘Why for this and not for all the other things?’
‘You don’t give any change, do you?’
‘Not now.’
‘Then I’ll tell you, and I hate you for making me say it, because I thought you were wise enough to know. When I came home – it was home, and it is, in spite of everything – I said to myself, “This is a new day, a good place. The past is dead and buried. There’s only tomorrow!” But it wasn’t like that. Every man I met, and every woman, put a label on me from the first meeting. I put some on myself too! I’ll say that, so you won’t have to say it for me. But I did want the slate clean…’
‘So you run guns to Ulster! Come on now!’
‘What’s a few guns, for God’s sake?’
‘You put a bullet in the breech. You pull the trigger. The bullet comes out the other end and kills a man. Who’s the murderer – the gun, the man who pulls the trigger, or the man who sold him the gun in the first place?’
‘I didn’t ask for a sermon. I want help.’
‘You don’t. You want to be Ruarri the Mactire morning, noon and night, but you don’t like the price you have to pay for it.’
‘Meaning I killed Lachie?’
‘Meaning you could have and you would have if it suited your book. And whether you did or you didn’t, I don’t have enough blood left to bleed for you.’
‘So you’ll sell me out?’
‘There’s nobody to sell. Nobody to help either, until you tell me who you are.’
‘I’m trying to tell you.’
‘You’re lying, Brother Wolf.’
‘Then read behind the lie.’
‘Why tell it in the first place?’
‘Because it’s the only currency I know, seannachie. It’s the coin I got for my birthday: Morrison’s lie and all the others that were spawned out of it afterwards. After a while the lie becomes a truth, which is the way history gets written – and books like yours, seannachie. You’ll give me that much, won’t you?’
‘Yes. I’ll give you that much.’
‘So now I’ll answer your question. The difference between Lachie and the others? Lachie was a friend, a follower. Maybe I pushed him too far and he turned traitor, but he was still my man – mine! The others were just shapes in a gunsight, shadows against the rising moon, not men at all.’
‘So why do you doubt whether you killed him?’
‘I’ll tell you that, too, big brother. You’re right, you see. Sometimes I’m nobody. I’m the shadow. I’m the shape in someone else’s sights. When that happens, I don’t remember. How can I? Nobody is nobody is nobody… That’s why I do wild things and say wild things, to get myself back again. Do you see that?’
‘A little of it, yes.’
‘So what is it with us – good-bye or come again?’
‘I’ll be back to the Isles.’
‘And we’ll have our ceilidh?’
‘Let’s wait and see. How long now to T6rshavn?’
‘An hour. It won’t be too rough. The Faeroese are pleasant folk. And they understand the way of the sea.’
They couldn’t have been pleasanter. The Customs man gave us a perfunctory inspection and the freedom of the port. The fish broker offered a reasonable price for the catch – just a shade under the odds, to keep the locals happy. The harbour master found a bed for me in his sister’s house. The British Consul – no Britisher, but a Faeroese – came on board and shared a bottle of whisky in the galley while he took our depositions. He was sympathetic, tactful and obviously impressed by Ruarri’s careful logging of the incident. He engaged to airmail copies of the documents to Stornoway, to inform Lachie’s next of kin, to do all else that law and decency required after a death at sea. Then he went home to dinner.
Ruarri collected a cheque for his fish, paid out another for fuel and announced that he was ready to put to sea again. It was still only eight o’clock. He had the long, sub-Arctic night to cruise in, and he wanted to be far away from the islands before the cold front came down. Of his rendezvous with Bollison he made no mention at all. He gave me a note to deliver to Maeve O’Donnell at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen. We wished each other luck. I stood on the dock and watched the Helen II bouncing her way across the choppy harbour to the open sea. I was glad to see the last of her. She had a ghost on board and I did not want to be there when his drowned body came flopping on the deck, shaking the brine off itself at midnight.
Chapter 12
I SPENT a restless night, tossing and turning under a feather quilt that kept falling off the bed while I wrestled with an exotic nightmare. I was searching vainly for Kathleen on a ghostly moorland while Ruarri harried me like a hunter and nameless monsters clutched at me from black bog pools. In the end I lost Kathleen and found Lachie McMutrie, with fishes in his dripping hands and bubble weed where his eyes used to be, sitting in judgment on a black rock. Ruarri was behind me, his hands, gripping my shoulders, forcing me to kneel in penitence and confess myself for a murderer. Then Lachie was gone and Ruarri and Kathleen were lying naked on the rock, making love, while I fought my way through a tangle of sea wrack to reach them. Then they were gone and I was alone, with the gulls wheeling about my head, swooping to peck at me and crying all the time: ‘Lachie, Lachie, Lachie….’ I woke, sodden with sweat, to hear the rain beating on the windowpane and the cold wind whining round the eaves.
At breakfast my hosts told me there was a plane for Copenhagen that left Vágar every day at three o’clock – kanska! Maybe it would come. Maybe, with the bad weather, it wouldn’t. In any case, I should leave a couple of hours before midday, because Vágar was forty-five miles away and it would take me four hours at least to get there. In my fuddled state, I thought I had mistaken the mathematics. I discovered, painfully, that they were correct to the last particular.
First I took a taxi and was driven twenty-five miles across the island of Streymoy: a horrendous, switchback journey in driving rain, over mountain roads with never a guardrail between us and the cliff drops, and no moment at all to enjoy the tiny painted villages and the waterfalls, and the cloud patterns piled over the peaks. Then there was the ferry ride to Vágar, a bouncing, belly-churning passage across a tide rip; then another taxi ride to the airport, which was just a black runway, with a couple of hangars and a passenger office, perched on top of a rain-swept plateau. The aircraft was on its way. It would be half an hour late, but it would come. Not kanska
this time; it had to get in because there was no other place for it to go except Iceland.
I sent a telegram to Kathleen to tell her of my change of plan and settled down with the small group of passengers to possess in patience what was left of my soul. There wasn’t very much and I doubted whether it was worth saving, anyway. I had little to be proud of – much less than Ruarri, who at least had the courage to dare all the indecencies of life and battle, even to bloodletting, for his own foothold on the planet. I was still a running man, chary of small consequences, clinging desperately to a diminishing stock of certainties. I was a poor enemy, who would bluff, but never fight. I was a niggard friend, who doled himself out like alms to the needy. I was a purblind philosopher, who trampled on daisies in his blundering search for half-truths. I was a patchwork moralist with no charity in him at all, at all. The memory of the nightmare was still strong on me, and, though I am no reader of dreams, the message of this one was uncomfortably clear. Also I had a splitting headache and a foul taste in my mouth. I wished fervently that the aircraft would come and haul me out of this God-forgotten hole.
It came at last, forty-five minutes late: a Fokker Friendship settling down like a gannet on the strip, absurdly small in this waste of mountains and dark sea. When we took off it seemed smaller still and very fragile as it climbed precariously through the long gut between the cliffs, into the grey overhang. I looked back at the coastline with its hostile cliffs and its narrow, turbulent bays, and I wondered where Ruarri was, and whether he had met Bollison and trans-shipped his guns and where he would land them, and what kind of homecoming he would have afterwards. I dozed most of the way to Copenhagen, and it was as well that I did because the shock of the arrival was greater than I had expected.
Kastrup Airport was crowded with tourists: Danes migrating to the sun, Germans and French and Dutch and English swarming in for the fleshpots of this happy-go-lucky town. Immediately I was panic-stricken. There was no space to move or breathe. The noise was an intolerable cacophony. I was sweating from every pore, choking with nausea. I was tempted to leave my baggage behind and run screaming into the open air. My panic increased when I realized that I had no hotel booking and no place to go. I stood, in a fever of impatience, waiting for my luggage; I stumbled blindly through Customs and found my way to the tourist office. The girl behind the counter smiled and was helpful, ignoring my boorish manners. I was in luck. Every hotel was full, but they had just telephoned a cancellation from the d’Angleterre. Would I take it? I snatched the slip from her hand and hurried away, jostling through the crowd to the taxi rank. I was halfway to the city before the panic subsided and I could breathe freely again.
Then a new fear beset me. I was not cured at all. I was still a man in fragments, pawing the air to retrieve the little bits of himself. How long could I go on like this? Must I always wander in solitary places, deserts and islands and tiny provinces, because I was unfit for the company of my fellows? If you have never felt this terror, then be glad and thank God, because it is a real madness, and if it goes on too long, there is no cure, not ever.
When we came to the Hotel d’Angleterre I found I had no Danish money to pay for the taxi; so I had to buy it from the cashier, which was a good thing because it planted me back, feet-first, in simple sanity. I registered. A porter led me upstairs to a room the size of a shoe box, right next to the elevator. He apologized for it, took my tip and left me to unpack and bathe and make myself look like a man again. I did it all very slowly, testing each step as if I were walking near quicksands – as indeed I was. When finally I could look in the mirror without fear or shame, I went down to the bar and sat a long time over a large drink, boosting my courage for the call to Maeve O’Donnell.
Her greeting was like a gust of clean air, blowing away the melancholy. ‘Seannachie! God love you! Where are you at?’
‘Downstairs in the bar.’
‘Then come on up. I’m naked, but I’ll be decent before you get here.’
‘I’ll finish my drink and be there.’
‘To hell with your drink! There’s better liquor here – and no charge for it. Come now.’
I went. I rode up in the elevator, whistling ‘The Rakes of Mallow’, which is a tune my grandfather taught me and which has a fine jaunty lilt to it. I knocked on the door; it opened before my fist was off the wood. Maeve dragged me inside and the next instant we were laughing and kissing as though we had known each other a lifetime. Then she shoved me down on the couch and had a drink in my hands before I could wipe the lipstick off my mouth.
The suite was large enough for an army and the general’s mistress as well; but Maeve curled herself on the couch beside me, wrapped her dressing gown round her legs and commanded:
‘Now tell me, seannachie! Tell me all.’
‘Read this first, while I get my breath.’
I fished in my pocket and brought out Ruarri’s note. She frowned over it a long time and then asked me, ‘Do you know what’s in it?’
‘No.’
‘Read it then.’
I read it, and I was appalled.
Dear Maeve,
Your consignment will be delivered on time. I hope your payment will be as prompt, because there’s a certain amount of trouble and I may need ready cash to bail myself out of it. One of my crewmen talked too loud, so the law is sniffing around my doorstep. He’s dead now, which creates another problem; but I think I can handle it. Ask the seannachie for details. You can believe what he says, because he’s a sad fellow with a passion for truth – God help us!
It’s him I’m scared of, because, although I like him and I think he likes me, I doubt whether he’s bright enough to get out of the rain – and the weather’s likely to be uncertain for a little while. See if you can talk, or sleep, some sense into him. You’re good at both.
Love
Ruarri
I folded the letter and handed it back to her. ‘I think you ought to burn that.’
‘I‘ll do it now.’
I gave her a lighter and she burned the note in an ashtray and ground the ashes into powder. Then she faced me and asked quietly, ‘Will you tell me, seannachie?’
‘Anything you want to know.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘You did me a favour. I’d like to return it. And Ruarri’s in a deeper hole than he knows.’
‘Are you his friend?’
‘I don’t know, Maeve.’
‘His enemy?’
‘Not that. Something in between, perhaps. I’ll tell you the facts. Then you’ll judge for yourself.’
‘Before you tell me….’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m not going to talk, or sleep, you into anything.’
‘Forget that.’
‘I wish I could. Tell me now…’
I told her as I have told it to you, hour by hour from the night of Morrison’s dinner to the night of our parting on the dock at Tórshavn. I tried, as an honest reporter should, to separate fact from opinion, sentiment from the thing seen. I exposed my rancours and my doubts and my jealousies, my weaknesses, too, and the dilemmas they had created for me. It was a more honest confession than I had made to anyone – man or woman – in a long time. It was an indulgence and I admit it. But if Ruarri had need of indulgence and Morrison and Kathleen McNeil, so had I, and I admitted that, too, and felt a little better for it – if not more knightly or noble.
Maeve’s comment was completely in character. ‘Ugh! They’re all mad in the twilight! I think you’re a little mad, too, seannachie.’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Do you have any money?’
‘More than I need. Why?’
‘Because you’re going to find me the best dinner in town. Then you’re going to walk me round Tivoli Gardens and buy me anything I crave. After that we’re going to drink with the sailor boys in Nyhavn, and if we’re still on our feet, we’ll say good night to the Mermaid. What do you say, seannachie?’
‘I’
m your man, lover girl.’
‘Then pour yourself another drink while I throw some clothes on…Holy Michael, what a mess of worms! And that Ruarri’s the slimiest wriggler of them all!’
She was just what I needed that night, reckless and rollicking, with the wildest words bubbling out in that oh-so-douce Dublin accent. She was hurt and she was angry – and maybe at bottom she was scared – but she was damned and double-damned if she’d let it spoil her appetite for food, liquor and the soft summer air. So here beginneth the saga of a Jack and his Irish Jill, who didn’t know each other worth a damn, but who had an awkward friend in common and wanted to forget him with a night on this ever-loving town.
We left the hotel arm in arm, because, as the lady said, we’d be coming back that way, so the help should get used to the spectacle. We turned in to Strøget, which is five streets of wonderful shops, where no traffic is allowed except a traffic of people, and they some of the most beautiful in all the world – and some of the weirdest too. Here you can buy everything from a stone axe to an ermine cape, and every purchase comes wrapped in a smile. We bought everything, but decided we wouldn’t take it away, just leave it for other folks to enjoy – porcelain and goldware and silver jewellery and crazy clothes and fantasies in glass and teak furniture and tooled leather. Oh, we did take one thing, a book of poems from a barefoot genius with a Rasputin beard, who printed his books on a handpress and peddled them from a baby’s perambulator. Maeve thought he deserved to succeed, and since we couldn’t read Danish, we’d never be disappointed in the poetry.
We sat in the tiny square, at the centre of things, with flowers blooming about us and watched the come and go of the burghers of Copenhagen and the invaders who were sweetly conquered the moment they arrived: leggy girls and blond, giant boys and peach-skinned matrons and children like beauties out of a fairy tale, a minor prophet in a caftan, preaching love, not war, a gypsy girl who needed a bath but who played sweet rebel songs on a guitar, a sad-eyed youth with beads around his neck and his wrists and his ankles and the smell of hash clinging to his hair, a trio of sailormen rolling arm in arm down the road and calling to the girls in Portuguese. Maeve said we were fools not to live here all our lives, because even the police were gentlemen and wore plain clothes so they wouldn’t spoil the view. I told her I’d buy her a house that very night, but only after dinner, so we wouldn’t be too anxious and choose the wrong one.