She stubbed out her fifth cigarette. Hugh blew leisurely rings from his pipe.
‘It’s very courageous of you to do the Open University. Very courageous. And in any case if you don’t pass you will have learned a great deal.’
Not pass, thought Hugh, and his face reddened. Of course I’ll pass. No question about it. I once climbed the crow’s nest even though I was trembling with fear. And I’ll pass this too.
‘What I’ll do is leave the record player and the records here,’ she told him. ‘There’s no point in taking them back. At the moment you know nothing about classical music, it’s quite obvious.’ Her honesty disconcerted Hugh. He wasn’t used to it. One was never as direct as this in the islands. And, by gosh, she was a fine-looking woman too if only she would stop keeping pigs and wearing yellow wellingstons.
It was midnight before she left, and the darkness was absolute.
‘I’ll be all right,’ she told Hugh, ‘I have my torch. You listen to your Mozart, if you wish to.’ And in fact Hugh did this, till one in the morning. At that time he went outside. The sky was ablaze with stars, and he even saw some shooting stars, which astonished him. The music seemed strange in the house and he couldn’t make out whether his mother was frowning more than usual or not.
Every evening after this she would visit him, and sometimes she would even come over in the morning. He found himself waiting expectantly for her, and if for some reason she didn’t come he felt disappointed and empty. Now and again he would visit his mother’s bedroom and stare down at the hairpins and meagre jewellery she had left behind her. Stella would hoover the house for him, clean the dishes, say to him,
‘I’m not sure that you should keep that dresser. It looks to me as if it has woodworm. You should get rid of it.’
I can’t believe it, thought Hugh. Here I am doing the Open University and also meeting this Englishwoman every day. It’s all very odd.
He began to wear a tie, which he hadn’t done before unless he was going out somewhere. Stella too began to dress in softer colours. Pinks and yellows were her best colours, blue didn’t suit her.
She would tell him about her husband. ‘He was a chemist, as I told you. But he would have long periods of depression in which he became very cruel. He would hide my things around the house and pretend I had forgotten where they were. No wonder I nearly went mad.’
She smoked heavily; the tips of her fingers were stained with nicotine. She was a compulsive walker about the house. Now and again she would rearrange a picture.
‘That is awful,’ she would say, ‘really awful. I don’t know who painted it, but it’s dreadful. I could bring you some pictures, not of course ones I painted myself.’ But Hugh insisted on some of them as well. One day she put up new curtains for him which she had found lying in a chest. ‘Your mother has a lot of things,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think you changed the curtains since she died.’
She told him about art as well. Vermeer was her favourite painter. ‘His pictures are full of love,’ she said. ‘Love and light.’ He found that he was understanding art and music much better than he had done before, since they were in fact part of Stella’s life. His marks improved. He even earned a B. ‘Why, that’s splendid,’ she said, ‘splendid.’
It was as if he was Columbus discovering a new world.
Alastair wasn’t speaking to him at all, though now and again he would see him staring across from his garden, in the cold wind which had grown between them. Alastair has nothing, he thought, and I have everything.
‘You must, however,’ said Stella, ‘not neglect your own culture. After all, think of that lovely psalm-singing. I have heard it and it’s truly beautiful. Eerie and beautiful. Like the sound of the sea.’
And he began to teach her Gaelic in return for her teaching him about music and art.
She was as apt a pupil as he was himself. One day she made oatcakes for him and he said they were very good, which they were, though he told her that not many people in the island ate oatcakes now. She even made a lovely dumpling.
‘This is my mother’s ring,’ he told her one day.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘You keep it,’ he said. The ring had been removed from his mother’s finger before she had been put in the coffin. He didn’t know why he had agreed when the undertaker had suggested it, but he had.
‘You keep it,’ she said. And she kissed him.
It was then that he realised that he would ask her to marry him. Life was very full and precious. There was Stella and there was Hume and Vermeer and Charlotte Brontë. Images swam about the village from other countries, marvellously unique and costly and beautiful.
Stella’s footsteps could be heard on the flagstones before she came to the door. Their heads were bent over books; she was learning while he played Gaelic music to her; she played Bach and Liszt. The house was a hive of industry, much more so than in his mother’s day. He would find her shawl slung carelessly over a chair and touch it gently. Death is very far away, he thought, death is distant. Why should I think of it, though many others on the island do. Also it turned out that she had a lovely voice and could sing Gaelic songs with feeling.
Alastair continued with his poem about the Open University. He added new verses. The third verse was as follows:
O gach feasgar agus madainn
bha mo liadh ag éisdeachd
ri ceòl anabarrach á Sasunn.
abair thusa céilidh.
An àite Gàidhlig anns an fhasan
bha Eadailtich ag éigheachd
am measg na soithichean ’s na praisean
coltach ri na béisdean.
Every evening and morning
my good fellow was listening
to strange music from England.
What a ceilidh that was.
Instead of Gaelic in the fashion
Italians were shrieking
among the dishes and the pots
just like the beasts themselves.
His dislike of Hugh was now settled, for not only did he have the Open University but he also had a handsome woman who did not spend so much time with her pigs as she had done. Everyone commented on her sudden radiance, on her dress sense: of course she made most of her own clothes. Stella had emerged like a strange flower from the common earth of the village. Alastair seethed and seethed. Why, she would even smile at him and speak in Gaelic. How cunning Hugh was! Of course his father had been like that before him. He had clearly worked all this out with long-term intelligence. He must have seen in Stella what no one else had seen. Of course his father had had the first car in the village. Now he was proud as a peacock and doing well with his Open University too.
Stella insisted that Hugh go to the ceilidh in the village hall. Hugh didn’t want to go, for he sensed that there would be something about himself on the programme. Furthermore, he didn’t see many of the villagers now; they had become very distant. It was a tradition too in the village that any new event was celebrated, usually in a comic song. And certainly the Open University was an unusual and significant event.
Hugh listened to the songs and then saw Alastair stand up. Without looking in his direction Alastair began to recite his poem, which had become enormously long. The audience rocked with laughter. Hugh too smiled, determined not to appear ungracious or bad-tempered. Certainly there were hits against himself in the poem, the rhymes were better than ever, sharpened by Alastair’s venom. Stella asked him what the poem was about and he told her. She too smiled and laughed at the parts which she understood. Alastair did not look at them at all. He was proud and confident. This was one of the best things he had done. There was prolonged and delighted applause when he had finished. Hugh made a point of congratulating him at the interval when everyone was eating cakes and drinking tea.
‘That was a good poem,’ he said, ‘but you should have showed it to me first. There were one or two things I would have changed.’
‘What?’ said Alastair, taken by surpr
ise.
‘Just one or two,’ said Hugh. ‘You’ll have to come to the house and I’ll discuss them with you. This is Stella, by the way.’ Stella shook hands with him gravely. ‘I liked what I understood,’ she said. Others came round and began to talk to them, as if now that the poem was over normal relations could be resumed. It was as if a balance which had been disturbed was now restored. And this was even more the case when Stella sang a Gaelic song which was received perhaps with greater acclamation than it deserved.
After a while Hugh saw Stella and Alastair deep in conversation. He was saying to her, ‘Your pronunciation was not right in places. I’ll have to explain to you.’
When the ceilidh was over, Stella and Hugh went out into the night engraved with stars. Around them was music and also the skies of Constable and Van Gogh. What a vast world this was.
‘I think we should get married soon,’ said Hugh.
‘Of course,’ said Stella.
They walked on in silence in a village that had become huge.
‘I think that Alastair will visit us,’ said Hugh shortly. ‘He will make fun of your Gaelic.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said.
‘And we’ll have to put away our pictures of the Virgin Mary. He thinks I’m a Catholic.’
‘Poor Alastair,’ she said. Poor Alastair, indeed, thought Hugh.
Maybe, he thought, I am cleverer than I thought I was. Maybe I did work out in advance everything that has happened without realising it. He looked up at the intricate forest of stars. Never had they seemed so bright, so challenging, so interesting.
The Boy and the Rowan Tree
Every day I look at the rowan tree. It brings me such joy with its clusters of red berries, and sometimes a blackbird among them or flitting from branch to branch.
The other day, however, there was heavy rain, and a boy came to the door with some trifles or other that he was trying to sell. He was handicapped in speech and we found it very hard to make out what he was saying. The rain streamed down his forehead and down his jacket and trousers.
At first we nearly shut the door in his face. We did not wish to be involved with him, he was so piteous. Someone somewhere out beyond the rain was making a gross appeal to our compassion. However, we did invite him in and sat him down in a chair. He was shivering, and we made him take off his jacket. We thought for a bit and then gave him a dry shirt instead of a wet one. Also eventually a jersey which we no longer needed.
What a piteous site he presented. He had been dropped off by a man in a van and was trying to sell his pathetic trifles – brushes etc. – in the village. Probably most of the villages had shut the door in his face. The bare world confronted him with its rain and wind. We could hardly make out his words but it seemed that he was from Nottingham. There were three other lads with him in the van, though we didn’t know whether they were also handicapped. They were to wait at the side of the road to be picked up by their driver and boss. The boy told us that he got a D in geography in his examinations. He had recently left school. He had, we gathered, some brothers and sisters. His boss had told him and his companions that they were making more money than he was. He had some damp pound notes in his pockets which he showed us.
The boss of course was driving about in the comparative comfort of his van. Through the window as I was talking to the boy, I could see rain pouring from the leaves of the swaying rowan tree.
The pathetic things he was supposed to sell – brushes, recycled envelopes, dusters. He didn’t even have the exotic glamour of the gypsy or the tinker. I imagined him in the midst of a seething family – the father perhaps unemployed. It was difficult to envisage much in such a hopeless drench of rain.
Let me be quite honest and plain about this. The boy caused me concern yet I was trying to justify the workings of the universe. That was why I summoned up the image of the rowan tree, with its red berries. The boy was dripping as was the rowan tree. In the end however, poetic imagery may fail.
The boy talked with great effort as if he had a stone in his mouth. He thanked us profusely for the shirt and the jersey. He asked us if we had ever been to Nottingham. We hadn’t been through, though we had visited Manchester, Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon. But not Nottingham. Though of course we had heard of it. Robin Hood etc. In the green multi-leaved forest.
All of this I may add is true. Every word of it. And while the boy was sitting in the house he was worried that he hadn’t made enough money and that his boss would shout at him. And I thought of Nottingham again. Robin Hood robbed the rich to give to the poor. And this boy walked with his bag through the pouring rain.
Naturally that is what literature is about, to put on the boy a suit of good dry clothes. The shirt belonged to my stepson. And the jersey as well. He was now in the Air Force and at one time, curiously enough, he was stationed near Nottingham in Robin Hood country. We had been at his passing-out parade where he had looked extremely smart: before he had looked quite scruffy – and we had stayed in a hotel in a small town in that area. We had looked out of the window, and there tied to posts, were two fierce-looking Dobermanns. I’ve remembered the name of the town. It was called Newark.
Shall I lead you away with a mention of Robin Hood country so that you won’t see the boy among the green leaves. Shall I bring to your mind stories of your schooldays about Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, etc.: and the warm companionship of those days, even in the dripping wood. If of course there was warm companionship. We tend to romanticise these antique adventures. But I suppose in some sense Robin Hood was victorious, we remember his name, but not that of the sheriff. He is victorious in our imagination.
But the boy is not in our imagination. He is here shivering by the fire, hair dripping. He is quite a tall boy and he is clinging to his bag of rubbishy brushes, heavily overpriced incidentally. For instance, a yellow duster costs a pound. Where shall I get warmth from? I mean for my imagination. In a short while the boy will have to leave. And go out into the pouring rain again.
We have given him some tea and some fig biscuits. It is the case that he has probably been luckier than the others, though one cannot be quite sure of that. He picks at the jersey with pride. It is yellow and quite thick.
I don’t see the blackbird about the rowan tree today. It may be that blackbirds shelter somewhere when there is heavy rain. Yet the rowan tree does appear beautiful with its wide presence of berries. How can one tell the dancer from the dance as one poet wrote.
What sort of man is this boy’s boss? I think that he has a moustache. I imagine him in the dry van seeing his workers off into the rain. He is supposed to collect them at the side of the road. Will some of them arrive in time or will they forget? But of course, he can’t drive into England without them. This boy doesn’t seem to know the value of money. That is what their boss is counting on among other things. It is all so sad.
And yet, when I look at the rowan tree I do not feel sad. It is so brave with its red berries. It is so naturally beautiful. I cannot tell you how much I love the rowan tree.
We tell the boy that he should stand in our doorway rather than out at the side of the road. The van is already overdue according to the boy but he is confident that it will come. It is a white van, he tells us. There goes a white van at this moment but it is not his white van. Even in the shelter of the doorway there is rain blowing in.
What did they do in the green wood on such a day of relentless rain? It must have been difficult to keep themselves dry, they too must have shivered, and yet Robin Hood surmounted all that. He is present on sunny glades. He appears in a guise of green leaves, sun and shadow, and a feather in his cap. Always jaunty. Merry, merry Robin.
We stand in the doorway looking for a white van, the correct white van. Surely his boss wouldn’t have set off without him. No, no, he hasn’t the boy says. The boss will come.
And then quite suddenly I say to myself, I wish he would leave. I feel cold standing in the doorway and the rain is driving in on me. I don�
��t like this at all. Then, this boy really isn’t very interesting, he can’t articulate correctly. I imagine the rain as going on forever.
My rowan tree, I cry to myself despairingly. And it does not fail me. It flares outwards with such abandon, almost waste-fully. All the time the boy is muttering angrily to himself, ‘Why is the driver late? He obviously doesn’t care.’ The boy however seems to know the time. In front of us, on the other side of the road, the sheep are cowering hopelessly in the rain.
My rowan tree with red berries is brave. It protects houses from witches, from evil. And there is the girl who always walks past exercising her two black shiny dogs, who always seem to be leading her rather than she leading them.
Still the white van has not appeared. The driver is now twenty minutes late.
The boy turns to say to me, maybe he has stopped in the village. I make out his words with difficulty. Maybe he should walk to the village, he says. I remain silent though I think I should advise that he shouldn’t go to the village in this rain. He picks up his bag and sets off. I feel quite relieved. Suddenly I think of a tinker who had once come to our cottage door in my island home in the north west. My mother gave her a jersey belonging to my younger brother. It happened that the tinker woman’s son was in the same class in the village school, and when my brother saw the boy wearing his jersey he began to fight with him. This happened a long time ago when my brother was perhaps eight years old. He is now in Australia and we haven’t heard from him for years. He has been an unsuccessful exile: he is not even married.
The boy headed off into the still heavy rain, an arrowfall of rain. He would surely find the white van eventually. I should really wait and take its number and report its driver for exploiting young handicapped people. But then who would I write to or phone. But did I want to wait till the white van passed. And maybe it wouldn’t be the correct white van after all.
The Black Halo Page 73