First thing were the vowels – and we all invariably made the same mistake, scratching our way downwards, then stopping, and connecting the other side to the downward slope. ‘No no no no,’ he would say, ‘the aim is to try and make it all the way round with just the one stroke.’
And he would lean over us, his smoky and sometimes whisky breath close to our ears, cupping his hand over ours. ‘Like this – see. Down and round and up. Down and round and up. Down and round and up.’ And eventually most of us got it – dipping the nib, shaking the pen, and away we went a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z.
I’d forgotten none of it. I cased in the nib onto to the pen, dipped it in the green ink, gave it a little shake, and began writing. No – that’s a lie. You never just begin writing. It’s just like these pole-vaulters who spend forever rocking backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, with the pole in their hands looking up and down before they launch themelves into the run which will take them heavenwards.
I think I doodled for a while, and likely went through the alphabet practising my lettering: the vowels first, as taught in that other century by Mr MacPhie, and then the consonants. A E I O U, and then B C D F G H J K L M N P Q R S T V W X Y Z. How different they looked when small or big. Lower and upper case they called it, as in the Indian castes.
Amo, I wrote. Then Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant. Ablative, I wrote, enjoying the sound of that lovely word on my lips. ABLATIVE. Dative, I then wrote. And made a block on the paper and wrote:
Nominative
Vocative
Accusative
Genitive
Dative
Ablative
Latin and Gaelic. The Latin Mass and the Vernacular. Beside Nominative write Porta. Dorus. Door. Then make the block:
Nom: Porta. Dorus. Door.
Voc: Porta. A’ Dhoruis! O Door!
Acc: Portam. Dorus. Door.
Gen: Portae. Doruis. Of the Door.
Dat: Portae. An, ’n dorus. To the Door.
Abl: Porta. Doruis. By/With/From the Door.
That was no story. So I wrote ‘The door was closed. The man walked to the door. ‘O door,’ he said, ‘Open’. But the door did not open. He then saw the door’s handle. The handle of the door. He bent over to the door, inspected it and walked away from the door.’ Not much of a story really, but at least it did take in all the declensions.
I tried it in Gaelic.
‘Bha an dorus dùinte. Choisich an duine chun an doruis. ‘A’ Dhoruis,’ thuirt e. ‘Fosgail’. Ach cha do dh’fhosgail an dorus. Chrom e null chun an doruis, choimhead e air agus choisich e air falbh on dorus.’
It worked more or less the same whichever way you tried it.
What if the door was not closed though? I started again. ‘The door was open.’ No – that wasn’t right either. Maybe it was neither open nor closed – half-open or half-closed, as it were? Now then how would I say that? ‘The door was neither open nor shut’? ‘The door was half-open’? ‘The door was half-closed’? Did they all mean different things? Of course they did. ‘The door was neither open nor shut’ left things – well, undecided. It left all the possibilities open. Or shut. ‘The door was half-open’ suggested that it had been closed and had just been opened. Or maybe that it had been open and had just been half-closed. Or maybe just it had been left that way for a long time. Perhaps even for a long long time. Maybe it was a door half off its hinges which could neither open nor shut properly. Maybe it was a gate out in the yard which, being left open, was a huge danger: perhaps a bull might escape through it. Maybe it had been left half-open by a thief, fleeing in the night. By a murderer in a panic, by a man in a hurry.
I wondered about the door. And also about the man. Was the door more important than the man, or the man more important than the door? Had he just noticed the closed/open/half-open/half-shut door and wondered what lay behind it? Was he just making for the bedroom, to find the door closed in front of him? Was he just walking past when a woman came to the door and opened the door for him? And as for the Vocative! Who on earth would address a door? ‘O door, where is thy sting?’ ‘O door, O door, wherefore art thou.’ ‘Door – open!’ Sesame.
‘It was a long hot summer,’ I wrote. That’s it. That was the idea. The idea was everything. That’s what it was: a really hot long summer. But I didn’t – really – need the really, and for some reason ‘long hot summer’ sounded better than ‘hot long summer’. Maybe simply because it was longer than it was hotter: it was hot in parts, but it felt long. Long in the sense that I’ve never forgotten it. So. It was a long hot summer.
It was a long hot summer. It was the summer which meant everything to me for the rest of my life. The summer by which I measured hope, success, regret, failure. I picked up a book from Helen’s desk. ‘To Janet’ it said on the inside cover. ‘With best wishes. From Robert, Alex and Chris. Xmas 1948.’ I turned to the first story. It read: ‘Christopholus is eight. He is the only man in the family, as his father sailed away to America to make money, and never came back.’
What a fantastic start to a story, I thought. It’s clear, decisive and immediately sets the pace. It was a long hot summer. I looked at other openings. A king once had twelve most beautiful daughters. A poor woodcutter lived with his wife and three daughters in a little cottage on the edge of a lonely forest. The King of the East had a beautiful garden, and in the garden grew a tree that bore golden apples. In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. There was once a King’s son, who had a sweetheart, and loved her much. Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was liked by everyone who met her, but especially by her grandmother, who would have given her anything. 1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. Call me Ishmael. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place. There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills.
Now isn’t that fantastic stuff? A stage for the play.
A frame for the picture. Though of course the play and the picture came first. Island. Country. World. Universe. Past. Future. None of it matters but the imagination.
What I really want to do is to write about Helen, since
I dreamed about her all my life and when I came to know her I never came to know her at all. And these notes and letters and diaries, even if I were to read them, would tell me so little. And I want to write about Margherita, for I recall her standing that evening on top of the stone wall and shouting to me across the abandoned sheep fank to my left, and the mad romance we had and the glory of it all. And I want to include the wife I had, Maid Marion. And the backdrop to all that must be that summer: that long hot summer we spent building the boat. There is a lovely road.
So I began. It was a long hot summer. And then it needed a pause. A colon. It was a long hot summer: one of those which stays in the memory for ever. It was universal – it belonged to everyone. Like this house which I rent and which is not mine but which I inhabit. Who knows who was in it before me, and who knows either who’ll be in it after? And that’s where the idea of the violin came in: something lost, and then found, but only to discover that it belonged to no one in the first place. And the boat: could that beautiful boat be reborn?
I remembered John Gordon of Cluny, who owned everything and ended up in a vault beneath Lothian Road in Edinburgh. And the rest was all imagination: pure, unadulterated truth. There was a gorgeous girl I saw on the ferryboat, and we hunted rabbits, and I gave preposterous lectures, and I watched toy yachts race on a Parisian lake, and jazz played through the morning air, and old men played cribbage, and old women played whi
st and Lachlan went out fishing, and I almost drowned. And she walked down Byres Road and saw that life-changing advert in the newsagent’s window, and cycled off round the bollards across the pier, and played the fiddle, and worked in Madagascar and Peru and elsewhere, and told me the Norse version of Chicken Licken, and all about Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo, and finally held my hand on a still summer’s day at a railway station.
I strove so hard too to give her voice, and failed. How
I loved, she said. And do you remember that time I abseiled down the gorge, and the time I was chased through the New Hampshire woods by a bear, and the time I cried when
I heard Maria Callas sing out in the open air in Athens? I was small, and had freckles like the poppies of the machair and always gashed my knees when playing and they always called me a tomboy, and my favourite thing was to guddle for fish in the little streams down by the Aros Burn on a summer’s eve. And on Saturdays we would go up to Tobermory and spend the morning looking in the shop windows and sampling the dainties which tasted so sweet. And do you remember that time my friend Lyn and I stood outside the cake shop window and right at that moment the cake stand collapsed and old Ernie came running out of the shop shouting at us that we’d hit the window and caused the cake to fall, which we hadn’t? And the time I sat on the pavement and Mrs MacPherson stopped and said to me ‘Don’t sit there or you’ll get dysentry!’ And at first it was an all-girls school, but that changed at the end of my first year when it went comprehensive, and did I ever tell you about the day Mr Guthrie fell on top of the Bunsen burners and almost burnt himself – and the school – to ashes?
I loved him. With all the sweetness of young love. He had a car and on Friday and Saturday nights we would go for runs right across the island. Sometimes we would stop at secluded lay-bys, just to listen to some music and kiss. Luxemburg was all the rage then, because you could get a signal almost anywhere. Even deep in the forest where we sometimes drove when the gates were left open. And then of course we split up over something so trivial that I still remember it: his insistence that I should wear my hair down all the time, while I preferred to tie it up.
We used to go to the Highland Games. Not because it meant anything to us culturally or because we competed or anything, but because it was such fun. Such daft, pointless, wonderful fun. We went as a crowd of course, because these things are no fun on your own. Always girls too – girls together. We would spend the previous night at one of our houses, dressing up and putting lipstick on and trying out all the make-up we had and forever listening to music. ‘No – he won’t be there,’ one of us would say and of course all the others would swear by God that of course he would be for we’d heard him say so the day before. And of course he would be, all dress and swagger, running across the field like a gazelle at the start of the hill race. Some of the fairground things would be there, of course, which were such fun – the helter-skelter and the wheel and, once, a machine which took four of us at a time then fired us all straight up into the air at a huge rate of knots, where we paused for some second before being catapulted down again. The joy of course was having your stomach on the ground as you were high up in the air, and then the opposite: leaving your tummy hanging high as you plummeted screaming to earth. And the day always ended up the same: waltzing along to the village hall for the dance where all the girls danced together until the boys finally arrived, high as kites, after the pub had closed. As soon as they arrived the eightsomes and the strip-the-willows would begin in earnest, and what I remember from then on is merely the sound: swish and hooch and swing.
I would always lie awake that night, the sound of pipe music going round and round in my head.
I mind the moment so well. That moment she found the fiddle. We’d been out in the fields all day, gathering the sheep, getting them ready for the shearing and Mum went into the byre to put something away, and the next thing
I heard this scream and thought she’d fallen on something and rushed into the barn to find her jumping up and down there at the top of the stairs shouting, ‘It was here after all! It was here after all!’ And of course she told me all about it then and made sure I got proper lessons – I went to Miss Smart for violin and to that great local worthy, Duncan Bàn MacGillivray, for so-called traditional fiddle.
And Helen would always stand up at that point and begin diddling – ‘Hai diddly hum di, hai diddly di… six-eight, up-and-down… fiddle ma ri!’ What fantastic old tunes he had – wonderful old Gaelic tunes, many without name, as well as some very fine compositions of his own. It is no wonder that everything seemed lost when the fiddle was stolen.
She told me everything I’ve included and all the things that have been excluded because they didn’t fit the story or the style. Sometimes she told them as conversation, sometimes as narrative, in real time and in recall, as of course did Alasdair and Katell and Big Roderick and all the rest. Their voices inhabit my empty house. Last night as I lay in the bath I remembered Margherita again and even tried to phone her, but there was no response. There is a peculiar loneliness in the unanswered call of a foreign ringtone.
This morning when I got up the mist was lying low over the hills and moving over the loch and then a hare hopped across my garden. The hares were witches and Fearchar told of a man he knew who had shot one using an old sixpence as a bullet, but who then fled to Australia to escape her retribution. Nevertheless, he fell into a ravine once he arrived there. Some claimed he’d committed suicide, and
I thought of the lone grave I’d stumbled across years ago up on the ridges of Meall Buidhe. I asked around and some folk said that it was the body of an English climber, but Bessie MacDonald, who knew about these things, told me that it was the body of ‘a poor demented man who killed himself. A fellow MacRae, who belonged to Kintail but was down here working as a shepherd. He’s buried up there out of sight of the sea.’
Suicides were interred out of sight of water for fear that the fish would abandon the rivers and lochs and ocean if they were within sight. Just as the remains of stillborn infants must be buried before sunrise or after sunset. There is a cure too for epilepsy, said old Bessie. ‘You give the sufferer three drinks in the name of each person of the Trinity, from a running stream, with the skull of a suicide.’
All that is absent. By which I mean everything that is absent, which is not here, which is somewhere else. Elsewhere. The absence of the presence. The emptiness of the skull. The out-of-sightness of the suicide. The negative force which drives the fear. The drowned father. The lost violin. The boarded up boat. Helen. And this tracking-bone through which I write. Eilidh. Everything which makes life worthwhile, balanced, redeemable. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.
The mist rises off the loch. It ascends over the hills. The loch glitters, blue. The hills shine, silver. The boy and the girl on the bike were Helen and I. We cycled fast down the hill, freewheeling it toward the bottom and then jumped off without stopping, leaping on to the grass. We landed in a heap and the cycles themselves carried on, wobbling this way and that for a while, until they crashed off the road near the cattle grid where they lay for a while, four wheels spinning.
We laughed and held hands and raced across the green grass for a while until we reached the sand. There was a rock there and we stood on it, daring each other to jump. We finally agreed on a formula.
‘I’ll say ONE,’ she said.
‘And I’ll say TWO,’ I said. ‘And then both of us will shout THREE!’
‘ONE,’ she said.
‘TWO,’ I replied.
‘THREE,’ we shouted, as we leapt together beyond the seaweed into the clear blue water.
14
OF COURSE IT gets lonely. But an old man is entitled to his dreams and hopes and memories, isn’t he? Like King David, who of us would not like a firm-boned young concubine to cuddle up to in the night, to warm our ancient flesh? So we find her.
Sometimes I go
out in the boat and let the wind ruffle the sail, just for the thrill of hearing the wind in the canvas and watching the way in which one moment I can tack this way, and then – with a slight twist of the tiller – that way. I read thrillers, and am a great admirer of Hammet who in the words of that other great writer, Raymond Chandler, ‘gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.’
I wonder about the reasons too, not just about the corpse, and meditate about the means at hand, which is the giving of clues, signals and gestures. A young man asked a girl he knew, while she was leaning at an open window, if she would go out with him. She replied, ‘I will, as soon as I have lifted the linen, lowered the glass, and covered the living with the dead.’ The young boy despaired at the enormity of the conditions, gave up hope and sailed to foreign parts; and, returning at the end of three years, he heard she was now married to another, but was very unhappy. This grieved him, and on going to see her he asked her why she had rejected him. ‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘All I said was that I would go out with you, as soon as I lifted the linen cloth off the table, shut the window and smoored the fire. That did not take long, but by the time I’d done it, you were gone.’
I think constantly of those who lifted the linen, lowered the glass and covered the living with the dead. Old Alasdair and Katell themselves stranded out there in the glens of Aberdeenshire, and how every Thursday they would take the bus east through the small villages of the Mearns to finally arrive at Stonehaven when they could see the sea. They would lunch at the small Bay Café then walk down by the beach for the two hours they had before the bus returned inland. It’s a fine sweep of a bay with a grand view of the North Sea and they would spend some time looking at the little yachts and skiffs and inshore fishing boats which still used the harbour. It had lovely clear promenades with wonderful breakwaters which gave good shelter to the little boats. After Easter the ice cream vendors would appear and Katell and Alasdair would then buy cones and walk arm in arm round the breakwater walls enjoying the scenes. When the spring and autumn gales came around they would stand in the shelter of the old boathouse watching the waves slapping against the harbour wall then thrashing, as the wind rose, across the barriers, spraying the cars and building with foam. Then in the summer all kinds of shows and sideshows arrived to brighten up the scene: clowns and little Punch and Judy shows and the annual fair with its music and dodgems. They would sometimes take the grandchildren up for the day with them and delight in their delights as the little ones went up-and-down and up-and-down on the dazzling horses on the carousel, and the bigger ones whooped and shouted as the were flung this-way-and-that on the wheels and helter-skelter. They always bought a fish supper at the end of the day and ate that sitting on the harbour wall just before the 6pm bus left to take them back in through the green straths.
The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 17