XXV
When the Stone first appeared Catherine Craigie (Miss Craigie to all but a few) was sixty-two, and though ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis unquestionably the town’s most formidable female inhabitant. She had a reputation for terseness and for intolerance of stupidity and triviality that made Amelia Wishaw seem like a flibbertigibbet. Catherine could utter a word like ‘flibbertigibbet’ straight-faced and still be taken seriously, whereas used by anyone else it would have caused sniggering or outright guffaws. Many admired her, but few professed to liking her. She had left her mark on hundreds of children, through thirty years of teaching at the Academy, and through her involvement in the Local History Association, the Community Council and the Monimaskit Museum Trust. Nobody knew more about the topography, the social history and the archaeology of the area. And – the crowning glory of her reputation – she had published a book. There were three copies of this book* in the public library, and others could be found in the houses of all respectable indwellers of Monimaskit. Most people, finding the material too academic, had given up after a few pages, but this only increased rather than diminished the general awe of the Craigie brain. The book was out of print by the time I came to Monimaskit, but I had acquired a second-hand copy and read it. It was hard going in places, and I said so in an unguarded moment. The news was around the town in no time, and was marked down as a triumph for Miss Craigie. It was pretty obvious that to write a book that just anybody could read – a detective novel, say, or a Mills & Boon – couldn’t be that difficult, but to write one that defeated even the new minister, well, that smacked of real intellect.
I had not, in fact, been defeated by The Ancient Stones. True, I had skimmed some of it, but elsewhere I had become quite engrossed by the subject matter. Of all the abundant archaeological remains to be found in the parish, there is something particularly fascinating about the twelve standing stones. Some of them are prehistoric, some Pictish, but together they seem to make some kind of pattern, to relate some indistinct, fragmented or unfinished story – a story that Miss Craigie’s book tried to tell. I was especially intrigued by her description of how the later, Christianised Picts seem to have incorporated their ancestors’ symbols into their own cruciform carvings.
I must write now of the first time I properly met Catherine. It was the summer after Jenny’s death, June or July, a month or two before Elsie and I had our ‘incident’. After three and a half years in Monimaskit, I was still regarded as being on trial, and the fund-raising activities had annoyed some who thought I wasn’t showing enough decorum as a minister. How little they knew! But my wife had died, and somehow that put me beyond censure, at least for the time being.
I knew Miss Craigie by reputation and soon after my calling to the Old Kirk had seen her, on sticks and clearly in pain, at one or two civic functions, but we had not been introduced, perhaps through design on her part. Since then her physical condition had deteriorated, and she seldom went out. I decided one evening to pay her a visit, to ask her more about the Pictish stones. An ulterior motive was that I wanted to meet her face to face: there was something about her that appealed to me. I was fed up with mealy-mouthed sympathy, with people pigeon-stepping around my feelings; I was frustrated by polite kindness that prevented real conversations; I couldn’t tolerate any more sanctimony about God’s mysterious ways. I knew there’d be none of that from Miss Craigie, for I’d been told that she was Monimaskit’s most outspoken and inveterate atheist. I’d also heard that she wouldn’t donate to any of our fund-raising activities because of my involvement. Whether she approved of other charitable causes I did not know, but for a certainty she didn’t approve of ministers.
Her house was in Ellangowan Place, a long, curving Victorian terrace lined with cherry trees and overlooking the park, with neat front gardens behind low stone walls bearing the marks of cast-iron railings removed during the war. I opened a small wooden gate and walked up a path that needed weeding. My legs were brushed by various healthy-looking shrubs and bushes I didn’t know the names of. There was a small patch of thick grass with a circular rose-bed in the middle, and honeysuckle spreading from under the two bay windows that flanked the front door. The garden looked as if it were on the verge of going on the rampage, but the house was freshly painted and seemed in good condition. One of the storm-doors was open. I pushed the bell and waited.
Nothing happened. Perhaps she was out, or in the back garden. I rang the bell again. I remembered being sent on errands by my mother or father, delivering messages or Communion card envelopes or pots of jam to various houses in Ochtermill, standing on stone doorsteps just like this one, anticipating the stilted conversation I would have to endure if somebody came to the door, knowing that if nobody did I would not be absolved from my task but would have to return later. Scents from the garden, wood-pigeons cooing like stuck records, the buzz of insects: I was almost that boy again…
I became aware of a voice calling and snapped out of my reverie. Through the etched glass of the inner door I saw a shadowy figure moving awkwardly.
‘Just come in, for heaven’s sake. It’s not locked.’
I leaned forward to open the door and noticed a handwritten card taped to the wall of the vestibule: Please ring and enter. If locked go away.
‘Can’t you read?’ the voice said as I let myself in.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I only just saw it. I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted you.’
‘You shouldn’t have rung the bell if you didn’t want to interrupt me,’ Miss Craigie said. ‘I don’t sit around waiting for visitors all day, you know. Oh, it’s you.’
She said these last words not apologetically but with added distaste. It was dark in the hallway, and I could not make out the expression on her face, but the tone of voice told me all I needed to know. I’d been well warned by various members of my flock: Catherine Craigie thought that the Kirk, by and large, had been, was and always would be a scabrous outbreak on the flesh of Scotland.
I was wearing my dog-collar – I was planning to make some other calls that evening – and assumed that this was the cause of her aggravation. I tapped it with my forefinger.
‘It doesn’t make you a bad person,’ I said.
‘Hmph,’ she retorted. ‘It doesn’t make you a good one either. What do you want?’
‘I’ve come to say hello, Miss Craigie. I’ve been here nearly four years and I feel we should have met by now.’ This didn’t seem to impress her. ‘And I want to ask you some questions about the standing stones. I’ve been reading your book.’
‘Well, it’s all in there, so I don’t see why you need to come bothering me if you haven’t taken the trouble to read it properly.’
‘Supplementary questions,’ I said. ‘Arising out of what I’ve read.’
‘I know what a supplementary question is,’ she said. ‘Such as?’
I’d had the forethought to compose something beforehand.
‘Well, it seems to me, in all this debate about pre-Christian and Christianised Picts, that we forget that they were under pressure from two rival Christianities, the Celtic and the Roman – the Scots in the west and the Northumbrians in the south. And I wondered what bearing that might have had on the symbols on the stones.’
During this speech her head inclined towards me like a bird’s listening for danger, or for a worm. Later, I realised that this stance was in part due to her illness, which prevented her from moving her neck very much. She was standing halfway down the hallway, holding on to a tall wooden plant-stand positioned in the middle of a large rug. There was no plant on the plant-stand and it took me a moment to understand the reason for its location: the lay-out of the hall, from the front door to the foot of the stairs and on towards the back lobby, was a kind of domestic rock-face, with hand-holds and rest points along the way, some pre-existing and some strategically placed: the plant-stand, a chair, a table, a stool, a shelf, the banister end, radiators. This horizontal climbing-wall was how Miss Craigie managed to get
around her house.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘You have me at a disadvantage out here. I shall deal with you in the drawing room. But I warn you, Mr Mack, if you have come with the intention of either converting me or extracting money from me I shall be very, very cross. Follow me.’
She launched herself from the plant-stand and began ricocheting from one point to the next like a ball on a bagatelle board, out of the hall and into the drawing room, until she performed a neat pirouette in front of an expensive-looking black leather orthopaedic armchair and landed in it with what was evidently practised accuracy. I, plodding after her like a dog, felt awkward by comparison. She pointed at another chair and obediently I sat in it.
The room was obviously where she spent most of her time. There was an electric fire in front of the open fireplace, a big old sofa covered with rugs where she possibly took naps, a dresser displaying various bottles and glasses, a television and VCR, a stereo system, bookcases stuffed with books and journals, and a large desk covered with paper, pens and an Amstrad computer. On a table beside her chair were remote controls for the electrical equipment, and a telephone.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘my foot is on my native heath, or at least my backside is. Ask me your questions about Christianity and the Picts, and I will answer you as best I can. You must know, though, if you really have read my book, that we know a great deal less about the Picts than we do about Christianity, a circumstance which, in my opinion, entirely favours the Picts.’
There was something in these remarks, from the mild crudity at the start to the dig against my professed faith at the end, that suggested I’d made some progress, although I didn’t know quite why or how. Later I learned that Miss Craigie had numerous visitors, who for the most part came seeking information about the town or out of some sense of duty, rather than because they liked her, and that this was how she maintained a vast and meticulous knowledge of the affairs of Monimaskit. She’d been expecting me to call for months and had always planned to give me a hard time, to see how I would react. Cautiously, I began to talk to her about my understanding, or lack of it, of the Picts and their culture.
Caution, I soon discovered, was not the best approach with Catherine Craigie. She could detect wishy-washiness in the first few words of a sentence and would interrupt to tell you what it was you really meant. Her briskness and impatience should have been infuriating, but I found myself warming to her, to her precision of thought and to the clipped voice that was halfway to being gentrified but carried in it her years of teaching and, still, a good dose of her Monimaskit childhood. She tolerated no prevarication, no ‘whittie-whattieing’ as she called it, and I liked her for it.
‘Don’t tell me, Mr Mack, that you have some romantic notion that Columba and his Iona gang were soft and cuddly while the Northumbrians were hardened criminals. It was all about conquest, military or ecclesiastical, whichever was more effective. There’s a pithy saying that if you have a man by the balls his heart and mind will follow, but the reverse is also true. It doesn’t much matter which Christianity won out in Pictland in the end – the biggest losers were always going to be the Picts.’
Her efforts to offend me amused me. ‘I don’t think you could really survive in the sixth century by being cuddly,’ I said. ‘Columba was a warrior before he was a saint. Whatever you think of his faith, he comes across as somebody quite heroic.’
‘And what do you think of his faith?’ she demanded.
‘I think he was a man of his time.’
‘Don’t equivocate. What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know what his faith consisted of,’ I said. ‘My recollection is that he’d killed someone in battle, and had to get out of Ireland for political reasons. Your pithy saying works for Columba too. His balls took him to Iona and he found something there that satisfied his heart and mind. I think he was doing what most of us do, searching around for meaning. Maybe it was easier and simpler then, but I doubt it.’
Miss Craigie smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least you have an opinion. But you don’t sound very convinced.’
‘It was a long time ago. I wasn’t there.’
‘I don’t mean about Columba. I mean about faith.’
‘I’m not convinced,’ I said. ‘I have huge doubts and misgivings. If you forced me to choose at this point, as to whether I was for or against religious belief, I’d probably be on the same side as you.’
‘Against it?’
‘Yes.’
A look of glee filled her face. ‘Well, what on earth are you doing being a minister?’ she shouted. ‘If that’s how you feel about it, get out!’ I shifted awkwardly in my chair. ‘No, stay where you are, I don’t mean here, I mean out of the Church. Make room for a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite!’ She started to laugh heartily which, judging by the way her shoulders suddenly hunched up, caused her some pain. ‘Actually, on second thoughts, cancel that. You’re a kind of fifth columnist, aren’t you? You’ve been – what do they call it in espionage? – turned. Goodness knows how or who by, but you’d better stay where you are. The whole rotten edifice will come down a lot quicker if people like you stick on the inside. Oh – wait a minute. This isn’t about your wife, is it?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.
‘You haven’t fallen out with God because he took your wife away from you, have you?’
It was an astonishingly crude, even cruel question. For a moment I could not speak.
‘Because if you have, I can tell you, you’re mistaken. God had absolutely nothing to do with it.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ I said quietly. ‘I fell out with God, as you put it, long before Jenny died. But I’m wondering why you take so strongly against him. If you’re an atheist, why does he bother you so much?’
‘He doesn’t bother me in the least,’ she said. ‘It’s you lot that bother me – regurgitating stories about God and heaven and hell and causing endless misery as a result. Anyway, who told you I was an atheist?’
‘It seems to be common knowledge,’ I said.
‘Common ignorance,’ she said. ‘I’m not an atheist, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. How do I know what’s out there and after this? I’m an agnostic. I’m only concerned with what we know, what we can know.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
She stared at me evenly. I thought she might even be about to apologise.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘that decanter on the dresser has a rather excellent single malt in it. Do you drink whisky? Good. Then fetch a couple of glasses and pour us both a drink. Do you mind if I call you Gideon? It’s a hell of a name, but “Mr Mack” sounds like something out of a children’s television programme.’
‘Gideon’s fine,’ I said, and got up to fix the drinks, still somewhat shocked by the way she’d mentioned Jenny, but also struggling not to laugh. Maybe that was a nervous reaction. I did not ask if I could call her Catherine.
When I came back with the glasses she was beaming at me. I seemed to have passed some test. We spent the next couple of hours arguing happily, as John and I had once done, and before we were finished she’d asked me to use her first name. The decanter had been half-full when I arrived, and it was empty by the time I left, quite incapable of any more pastoral duties.
That was my first encounter with Catherine Craigie, and soon I was dropping in regularly, usually on a Wednesday after visiting my mother. My calls did not go unnoticed by the Session. ‘You’re wasting your time on her,’ Peter Macmurray commented. ‘She’s a God hater and nothing you can say will change her.’ ‘Oh, I’m not trying to change her,’ I said. ‘I’m rather fond of her as she is.’ Macmurray’s face sucked in on itself. He said no more about it, at least not to me, but it was another black mark against me.
There was something else about Catherine that Macmurray did not know, that if he had would have confirmed his worst suspicions of both of us: she smoked cannabis. She’d discovered that it alleviated some of her pain, and had used her lo
cal knowledge to get herself a regular supply through a man called Chae Middleton. Chae did a bit of gardening for her, mowing the lawn and pulling weeds, and every month he’d bring her a quantity of cannabis, and she’d add the price on to whatever she owed him for his chores. She smoked the occasional cigarette, so there was no difficulty for her about inhaling: her problem was that her swollen fingers made rolling joints almost impossible. She mentioned this frustrating situation to me a few months after I started going to see her. Although I hadn’t smoked any dope since I was a student, and didn’t want to again, I could roll a joint with ease. It became one of the things I did on my Wednesday visits – make up half a dozen to keep her going through the week. How Peter Macmurray would have loved to see me at work! I can imagine the joy with which he would have contacted the police.
It made complete sense to speak to Catherine about the Stone when it appeared, but her very expertise and knowledge also made me hesitate. She was so incapacitated these days that it was a struggle for her to get down to the shops, let alone into the depths of Keldo Woods, but she had a detailed picture of the locality in her head, she had the Ordnance Survey’s maps and she had her book, and my standing stone wasn’t in any of them. If I tried to tell her about it she would have every right to denounce me as a drivelling fantasist.
XXVI
Another week passed. I went back to the woods in the interim and the Stone was still there. My courage failed me when I saw Catherine that week, but I made a vow to myself to tell her on my next visit. Before that, however, I myself had a visitor. William Winnyford, the artist, called early one morning. We had previously met at a reception for him hosted by the council. He was a small, sandy-haired man who boomed when he spoke.
‘Good morning, Mr Mack. I hope this isn’t an inconvenient moment. Do you remember I said I would call on you?’
I didn’t remember this at all. All I remembered, as soon as I heard him, was his loud, bouncy voice. He’d made a short speech at the reception about how excited he was to have the commission, and his enthusiasm had been painful to witness. I wondered if I was as irritating when I was fund-raising.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 20