I half the peace and contentment they had, I would already have had a heavenly mansion.
I know now that the building of the boat was her final token of love. This was the boat that he’d spoken about that first morning they met in Bruntsfield. She was in what was then called the drawing room, dusting for the lady of the house, when she heard a noise and turned and saw a man dangling from a rope outside the window. He smiled and waved and carried on cleaning the windows as she continued to move inside, polishing the silverware on the sideboard, then dusting down the shelves, then moving towards the window where the piano was. It was a frosty morning, and he made a face on the glass: two round eyes, and a fine nose, and a smiling mouth, and she smiled. Since the lady of the house had gone out visiting, Katell instinctively sat down at the piano and began to play.
Outside the window, Alasdair stopped cleaning and swung on the rope in time to the minuet. They both smiled and laughed. Once she was finished, he rapped on the window, indicating she should open. She did. She pointed to his shoes and he took them off and handed them to her, then leapt in through the opened sash. They stood facing each other, suddenly embarrassed, having nothing to say. Formalities took hold – he stuck out his hand and introduced himself.
‘Alasdair,’ he said.
‘Katell,’ she said.
He was immediately charmed by her accent, as she was by his.
‘Breton,’ she said.
‘Hebrides,’ he said.
They both stood still, looking round the drawing room. He almost whistled at the extravagance, but checked himself. On the far side, nearest the door, was a huge painting of a ship.
‘I like boats,’ he said. ‘My grandfather had a beautiful boat. One day I’ll have a beautiful boat.’
They heard a noise.
‘O my God!’ she said. ‘Out! That’s Madame returning.’
She flung him his boots and he swung back out onto his harness and resumed his cleaning. Katell closed the window and began polishing the piano, as the lady of the manor entered. ‘Oh,’ she said, in her best Edinburgh accent, ‘Everyone’s busy! And Mister Alasdair’s here!’ She waved to him through the window, and he gave her a smile and waved the cloth. She left.
Alasdair breathed on the window, which immediately frosted up again. ‘7pm Fri, Canonmills Clock?’ he scratched, backwards. Katell nodded and followed the mistress out.
They were married two months later at the Star of the Sea church in Leith, where the old altar was made out of part of a ship’s prow, and then of course the children came, and the move to Glasgow for work and the call-up and the postwar move to Belfast, then on to Liverpool, back north to Burntisland, and on again to Glasgow where he finished as deckhand on the famous Clyde steamer, the Waverley. Katell bore ten children, all of whom survived, and by the time I knew her she spoke of twenty-eight grandchildren, eight great-grandsons and ‘two darling twin girls who are now six months old and whom I’ve never seen. They live in Australia.’
Life had prevented the boat from being built. At the beginning, in Leith, they had no money. Working day and night as an apprentice ship’s carpenter up there on the Atlantic convoys. Then in Glasgow, as the children came along, they had no time. In Belfast, squashed into an inner-city flat, they had no room, and in Liverpool and Burntisland and then again in Glasgow a million and one other things took priority. Context was all: could he just start building a boat, penniless as they were, in the backyard in Springburn?
Would she, for that matter, start singing an aria from Mozart down at the steamie? Not that ordinary folk would really be bothered, and if they were, so what? But they themselves would be, holding on to the belief that there’s a time and a place for everything. Or, as Alasdair himself always said, ‘Aig gach nì tha tràth, agus àm aig gach rùn fo nèamh’: to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. ‘Agus b’e sin an t-àm a bhith nam thràill-cosnaidh’: ‘and that was the time for me to be wage-slave.’
So the opportunity never really rose until finally, nearing their seventies, they managed to scrape enough together to come back home. At least to Alasdair’s, which by then was all the same. Just after they were married a pal at the shipyard gave him a lend of his motorbike which had a sidecar and so Alasdair and Katell finally managed a belated honeymoon, travelling all over Scotland in that rickety contraption.
‘We spent most of the time pushing it uphill,’ Katell would say, and he would then tell of how they were stopped by a policeman in Stirling as they motored north.
‘Do you have a licence?’ demanded the officer. ‘You realise you need a licence for the passenger as well?’
‘But we two are one,’ shouted Katell, and the covenant vow sufficed.
So the time and the season had come. The days were hazy with heat. I’d become far too accustomed to the ease of Oxford and it was wonderful to reacquaint myself with the daily sharpness of a Hebridean morning, even in the summer. I’d almost forgotten about the clarity of the light and the way in which the salt air inhabited everything, so that as you woke up you could taste the sea on your lips.
And I’d almost forgotten too how quickly things change. The place was so open and exposed that nothing lasted. One moment the sun would be shining, the next a sheet of rain would sweep in from the Atlantic, which would just as quickly be gone. And as the earth dried, the steam would rise from the ground like a mist. Ceò we called it in Gaelic, though there were distinctions to be made between the differing kinds of rain and dew and mist. Toit was the smoke from the fire, driùchd the dew and uisge rain, though my favourites were the ones which contained whole worlds within them, bearing the people’s beliefs on their wings.
‘Marbh-laogh a h-Èill Pàdraig,’ Alasdair would say. ‘A keen biting wind only felt at the vernal equinox.’ ‘Fuaradh froise – that’s a strong gust of wind preceding a shower at the time of Faoilleach’ (January which ran into February). ‘Fadag chruaidh,’ he’d say, always looking westwards. ‘A fragment of a rainbow which is a sign of bad weather when seen either in the west or in the morning.’ ‘Breacadh rionnaich air an adhar, ‘s latha math a màireach – a mackerel speckling in the sky, a good day tomorrow.’ ‘Spadag – a small cloud in an otherwise clear sky.’
Alasdair called a fire not by the common name of teine, but by the angelic name of aingeal. ‘I will not call it teine under any circumstances,’ he said to me, ‘for fire is a dangerous thing, and the flame in the kiln especially so. I always bless the fire that it might cause no harm. And if I say the word teine when near a flame, he will come and put the place on fire. The devil needs no encouragement.’
‘Innis dhomh an sgeulachd ud eile a-rithist, mun teine-bhiorach – tell me that story about the will-o’-the-wisp again,’ and he would always at that point light his pipe and send clouds of toit into the air.
‘There are two versions to it,’ he would say. ‘The teine-biorach, the will-o’-the-wisp, is a cruth-atharrachadh, a metamorphosis, undergone by a girl from Benbecula who went to gather the roots of the “rue” at night on the hillocks of the machair. There was a fine imposed on all who did this, as the hillocks would soon crumble in consequence through sand drift. The mother said to the girl as she went off in spite of her counsel, “Gum bu tig an latha a thilleas tu ‘s na fuiligte tu bhos ‘s na fuiligte tu thall” – “the day will come when you’ll come back and you’ll neither tolerate being here nor there.” Her body was never found except for her plàd, her bent-grass bag, and she wanders the earth as a will-o’-the wisp ever since.’
‘The other story is that the teine-biorach is a blacksmith who lived a bad life and was rejected from heaven and went shivering down to hell but would not be admitted there either as his company was undesirable. He called for an ember of the fire inside to help him warm, and he has been going about with that ember ever since. That’s him you see running eternally when you see the will-o’-the-wisp down on the machair.’
‘And what was that thing about toothache
again?’
He laughed.
‘Och that! You don’t want to hear that old wife’s tale?’
‘I do. O, I do,’ I protested, and he would tell of the great cure again.
‘Well, whenever you get an dèideadh – the toothache – what you do is get a good round stone and go to the nearest loch with it. You then fling the stone out as far out into the deepest part of the loch as you can while saying “May I never get toothache again until I see you again.” I guarantee that if you throw well and deep you’ll never get sore tooth again.’
‘And wasn’t there another way too?’
‘Of course there was – there are always two ways. There are always alternatives.’
He paused, lit his pipe.
‘The other way to fix toothache is to clench a bone taken from a grave between the teeth. Any bone picked out of the mould of an open grave will do, but the finger bone of a child is best. It fits better.’
I cycled to work every morning, taking the old cart road which skirted the shoreline. It was that time of year when the earth was ablaze with blossom – the machairs covered in clover and daisies and poppies and forget-me-nots, and – lest I forget – it was also a time when it was still covered with people working. Here and there in ones and twos and threes on their little patches of croftland, some scything the early hay, some harrowing the corn, some planting potatoes. I can still see them in my mind’s eye, bent figures in the sun and wind, Lowry-like in the distance. And the bees hummed.
Every day too Alasdair and Katell would keep their eyes on the horizon where they could see the village road from afar, skirting round the sandy beach. Anyone who came or went travelled that single-track road, and so they’d now and again announce, ‘That’s Donald the Post on the way,’ or ‘Finlay’s van,’ or ‘Joan’s going down to the cockles.’
They kept an eye not because they were nosey, but because they expected one of their children, who’d been travelling though Europe, to appear any day soon. Alasdair would sit there on the bench of wood placed on the old creel, his eyes on the horizon. When the heat haze came he would see mirages: Donald coming back from Woodstock, Andrew returning from Turkey, Elizabeth coming home from Glasgow. Then the shimmer would clarify – an unknown tourist carrying a rucksack, drunken John swaying home with his carry-out, one of the MacNeill sisters on her way to the shop.
And I have the soundtrack for that summer – Joni Mitchell and James Taylor singing to us of their Californian mornings, offering their helping hand. I still attended mass then, and loved the incense rising from the thurible and the lighting and the extinguishing of the candles and the magic moment when the priest unlocked and opened the tabernacle and lifted out the chalice and the gold ciborium. I loved the permanent glow of the votive light and the dazzling vestments the priests wore – the Chasuble and the Alb and the Amice and the Stole and the Cincture – but I especially loved the people, or more exactly, the piety of the people. They honestly believed, and shamed me with their glowing faith. None of it was artificial or showy, and I greatly regret not being one of them, despite all the later revelations which were not in the least their fault. Love cannot be condemned.
It’s too easy to blame Oxford, with its wine and dreamy spires and ideas, for far greater men have survived – and thrived – there. Cardinal Newton and the two great Wesleys and George Whitfield, not to mention Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis, whose faith was illuminated rather than dimmed at Magdalen and Merton. Their tilley lamps burned brightly like electricity. I have examined myself on the issue, and can find no external assault.
Certainly I came under the influences of the prevailing voices of the time – Ayer was my philosophy tutor and the great pluralist (and atheist) Isaiah Berlin personally supervised my final year thesis – but nevertheless my positions were my own, not theirs. None of them ever suggested that Marx was a better philosopher than Christ (well, pluralists wouldn’t, would they?), nor did they argue that Christ was a better politician than Marx. You read or gathered the evidence as best you could and made your own mind up.
So here’s the evidence, as speckled and as arbitrary as a hen’s egg. Katell kept hens. Dozens of them, ranging free all over the croft. The best layers were the beautiful Rhode Island Reds, with their flash of green feathers in the tail, which laid huge brown eggs that were absolutely delicious. They made wonderful omelettes and soufflés, which were one of Katell’s regular specialities. She had a particular way of making them too – not in a pan as was commonplace, but in a proper ramekin, and not in an oven either but over an open peat fire hollowed out in the middle to encase the soufflé as it baked.
Aside from the normal ingredients – unsalted butter, plain flour, milk, goat’s cheese, eggs and parmesan – she’d add a whole feast of herbs grown by herself, so that as you tasted the dish you savoured all the above (including the peat flavour!) as well as tarragon, chervil, rosemary and thyme.
Her omelettes were equally delicious, briskly cooked in a very, very hot pan specially made for the purpose by MacGregor’s of Inverness, the famous traditional ironmongers, who are sadly no more now either, having gone out of business at the beginning of the millennium.
That’s how we made the boat: as part of that summer. It would have been a different boat another summer, for some of us would not have been there then, and it would have been a different boat too had the weather been wet and miserable. As it was, it was built in warmth and sunshine, and I like to imagine that spirit of brightness (despite Big Roderick’s reservations) settled round the boat. History,
I believe, bears me out.
All through the building of the boat Alasdair wanted to call her Reul-na-Mara 2, and in fact I was halfway through making the name board when he changed his mind.
‘There can never be a number two,’ he declared one day towards the end, as he came up to me from the beach, carrying an oddly shaped piece of driftwood under his arm.
‘So I’m going to call her An Leumadair Gorm – The Blue Dolphin. I saw a shoal of them jumping once, when I was very young.’
He held up the piece of driftwood which, sure enough, was like a dolphin leaping if you looked at it a certain way.
‘See if you can chisel the name onto it for me,’ he said. ‘I could do it myself, but I never learned how to spell Gaelic properly.’
He looked at me and smiled.
‘And make sure it’s right.’
5
HELEN SPENT HER whole life searching for the lost fiddle. Not obsessively or even consciously, but she always lived in the hope of seeing it one day, in a pawn shop in Amsterdam, or a village stall in India, or in one of the pit pubs of the Rhonda Valley where she worked latterly as an environmental advisor to the Coal Board.
Strange how things had worked out. In the choice between music and the environment, neither had really won out in the end. That day back in Mull she could have chosen one or the other. They were both on offer.
‘So – are you staying?’ her mother had asked, once they’d come back in from the orchard. ‘You know there’s plenty to do here of course.’
She really was without guile, her mother. Straight, honest, desiring nothing but the best. Freckles still adorned her youngish looking face, which remained without any make-up.
‘I think… I think, no. I think I’ll go back for my year’s postgrad.’
It was, of course, really just a way of buying a bit more time, before going out there into the big bad world, before being swallowed up by the big bad wolf. She could still have it both ways for a while yet: music at night and the environmental qualification during the day.
‘You can always…’ her mother began.
‘Yes. Yes of course,’ Helen said. ‘I know that, Mum.’
She also had a secret love: painting. It had started innocuously enough. One day she was walking past this secondhand shop when she saw the most extraordinary thing. It was a child’s drawing, of little black vertical scratches with lots of churches insid
e the scratches and a child’s peaked black hills on the horizon above the churches. It was, of course, Paul Klee’s miniature Kirchen am Berg – The City of Churches – and it made a profound impact on young Helen. Could churches – religion – be that frail? And the rectangular blocks round them – were they really blank black canvases?
So she tried her hand at articulating this world, but of course all her early efforts were mere pastiche, very poor imitations of Klee and the other so-called Modernists she came to love. Her scratches were just that, not cosmological truths; her blocks were empty facades without meaning; the relationships between her lines and her circles were false and artificial rather than natural and symbiotic. But she improved. Night classes in drawing skills helped enormously. More night classes in sculpture helped her to understand that everything depended upon everything else. A course in the history of art itself helped her to frame history. But still she lacked that spark. It took almost a lifetime to discover what that spark was. She laid it aside, tossing and turning between music and the environment.
As with all limbos, it was in between uncertainty and assurance, citizened by neutralists and opportunists, halfway between silence and assent. In some ways it was quite a pleasant place, mostly free from any argument or dispute that really mattered, with a splendid view on either side of the glories of heaven and the horrors of hell. A short walk could take you either way, where the best lacked all conviction and the worst writhed with passionate intensity. It seemed quite a safe place, at least in the meantime, until things became a bit clearer. Like having a bath on a chilly day.
She got a part-time job too, in a bar on Sauchiehall Street, which kept all the possibilities open. At weekends she gigged with two different bands, sometimes travelling the country to the various festivals which were being newly established all over the place. She bought a replacement fiddle, though it never truly felt the same: too brittle and bright, lacking the depth and tone of the first, lost instrument.
The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 4