Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  Suddenly I did not want to hear any more about this braggart Dugald and his visionary wife. Perhaps I felt too ashamed.

  I rose, belching again, and went to the back door where I pissed out into the rain. To spare the feelings of a feeble-minded peasant woman I was not going to soil my slippers with mud, sharn, and dung, by using the privy in the byre. After all, she herself probably pissed like this at the back-door on stormy nights, though for physiological reasons her posture would be different and she would have to advance a step or two further into the rain.

  Since it was still not seven o’clock I decided to read for a while before going to bed. So, while my hostess was busy lighting a fire in the room I was to sleep in, and warming the sheets with two earthenware pigs, I sat by the fire in an armchair with a sagging seat and grubby arms, and read the Bible.

  It was large and heavy. On the frontispiece were written in faded ink the names of Kirstie’s family since 1829, over a hundred years ago. Between the pages were the remains of flowers. Perhaps Kirs tie as a child had put them there: if, that was, so odd a woman ever had been a normal little girl.

  I amused myself by imagining Kirstie as a woman of the Old Testament. Sarah laughing in simpleness at the Lord? Rebecca carrying her pitcher to the well? Leah stealing into Rachel’s bed? No, she would never have been one of the principals. Her role would have been that of a bondswoman, belonging to Abraham, say, whose task was to rub the patriarch all over with aromatic oil, to keep his venerable limbs active, and particularly his organ of procreation. The lusty centenarian, testing his faculty or keeping in practice, would have bade her lie with him on the smelly goatskins. He would have mumbled no endearments or compliments, and she would have expected none. No likening of her eyes to ‘the fishpools in Heshbon’ or her nose to ‘the tower of Lebanon’.

  I rebuked myself. Making fun of any woman, and especially of my hostess, was not gentlemanly. But I could not help smiling, for as Abraham’s bondsmaid she would have had to do her share of looking after his goats and sheep, and here she was stumping out to feed the horse and cow, and here she was lumbering back in again with armfuls of peat for the two fires.

  She had refilled the cauldron on the fire. Evidently it was her intention to take a bath when I was out of the way.

  Seeing me occupied, she kept quiet, as Hagar would; but when I yawned and stretched my arms, and said I was ready for sleep, she offered eagerly to make me a cup of tea and bring it to me in bed. Fearing no ulterior motive, I consented.

  My bedroom was still chilly, the fire and lamp still smoky, so I was glad when she brought the tea and a home-baked scone, on a tray with a stag and hinds painted on it. No hint was intended: probably it was the only tray she had. She poked the fire. She gave a kick under the bed to let me know there was a chamber-pot within reach. She showed me how to turn out the lamp. She asked if I was warm enough. Like Abraham’s bondswoman, when she had finished her ministrations she did not linger. She did not quite go out of my presence backwards, with her brow low to the ground, but she went humbly enough. She was that most reassuring of creatures, a woman who knew her place.

  When I left in the morning I would give her a couple of pounds; no, three, for she had still to carry my suitcase back to the road-end.

  The tea was too strong, the bap too hard. I drank little and ate less. The bed was lumpy. My bladder, chilled, needed frequent emptying. The chamber-pot, handleless, was not easy to find or use in the dark. I had in front of me a soldier’s night. There was even danger, as well as hardship, for she had warned me that her thatch needed renewing and could fall in any day.

  Between her room and mine was only a narrow passage, and the inside walls of the house were thin. I heard the splashing as she poured the water into the zinc bath, and also her singing.

  Picturing her naked in the bath was something I did not want to do, nor did I at first particularly want to listen to her singing; but the song, a Hebridean lament, was so moving that I had to listen, with my heart chilled with a peculiar anguish, just as my bladder was with sheer cold. The song told, I was sure, of some tragic incident in the history of my mother’s people, and therefore of my people too.

  In tears I felt that I ought to stay here in East Gerinish, use Betty’s money to buy a boat and anything else that was needed, help Kirstie, Dugald, and Mairi to reclaim the old pastures and drain the hill, become their friend and partner, and encourage them whenever their hopes ebbed.

  I knew that as soon as the inspiring song ceased the blaze in my mind would die out, and all the old, dull, cautious, selfishnesses would revive.

  Tears flowed down my face.

  One thing I could do, what I must do, was to apologise to my hostess for the condescension with which I had repaid her kindness.

  I got up, put on my slippers, nearly knocking over the chamber-pot, and crept to her door. From the light under it I saw that her lamp was still lit. But she wasn’t singing any more.

  I knocked.

  She spoke in Gaelic.

  ‘I just had to tell you, Miss McDonald, how sorry I am for treating you so lightly.’

  I could not stop sobbing.

  There was a pause.

  ‘The door is not locked.’

  I hesitated. If she was in her night clothes she might well look so grotesque that my self-reproach and gratitude would dribble away again.

  At last I opened the door, and got the biggest surprise of my life. Who was this tall, strongly built, stately woman in the white nightgown, brushing hair, black as outer space, that came well below her waist? She was Kirstie McDonald all right, with the same wide mouth and longish nose; but though she was still as sadly droll as ever—more so, for she was in tears—she was also beautiful, in a strangely noble way. Beside her all the aristocratic women I had met would have looked common.

  With the men’s clothes she had put off every trace of masculinity. She still looked magnificently strong, but in an exciting, feminine way: thus might the Queen of the Amazons have looked, except that she would have exerted her strength as a menace, whereas beautiful meek Kirstie carried hers like an adornment. Her nightgown was loose and hid her figure. Yet so high and firm were her breasts, wonderfully so in a woman of thirty-five, that they stood out proudly. I remembered Betty’s: for all the massaging (in the early days much of it done by me) and the creams and salves, and the ingenious and expensive corsets, they had lost shape and firmness so that, if let loose, they sagged to her navel. Kirstie’s were like a girl of eighteen’s. Her very feet were strong and lovely.

  FIVE

  Whether or not I would have gone in to comfort her, and to be comforted, if she had been as uncomely in her night as in her day clothes is a matter that like the songs of the Sirens can never be determined. What I can say in my favour is that if she had not been in tears I would probably have taken my amazement and chilled bladder back to bed, after stammering out the apology I had come to deliver. I can also say that in my going in and walking over the squeaky rushes to where she stood with the brush arrested in her hair, there was too much solicitude for there to be any lust: my indicator at that point being still at minimum.

  It would be insulting to her as a woman with breasts and to myself as a man with balls, to pretend that to me then she was only a sad symbol, and that when I was clasping all that muscular loveliness I was thinking exclusively of our ancestors, hers and mine, driven first from their fertile machairs by tyrannical landlords and then from their penitential bogs by the brutality of the earth and weather. I was very well aware (without any need of an indicator) that this was a woman in my arms, and a beautiful, strange, and instinctively artful woman at that, for, with a few gymnastic shrugs that loosened but did not break my embrace, she let her nightgown slip to the floor and, since she wore no chemise or undershirt, stood in front of me as naked as a swan. It took little detection to tell that in the summer time she had not always covered herself in thick men’s clothing, for her arms up to her shoulders, and her legs up to th
e thighs, and her neck down to the tops of her breasts, were still golden. Only her belly was white, but of so splendid and unblemished a whiteness as to remind me of Solomon’s phrase ‘a heap of wheat set about with lilies’.

  Eager to give comfort, I was still more eager to receive it. All the vexations I had suffered, all the wrongs I had endured myself or had inflicted on others (why had I called the children of Lomond Street baboons?), all my crippled and blinded expectations, howled about my soul, as the wind howled about the house.

  It was weeks later before she told me how low-spirited she had herself been feeling that day when she had come upon me sheltering behind the stone at the road-end. She was never good at describing her deepest feelings, at any rate not in English, and I was too old, with a mind not agile enough, ever to pick up enough Gaelic. She suffered stoically, like a beast, but more deeply; and she was happy, not like a skylark that soars but like a corncrake that hides.

  Kirs tie was not what the world calls bright. At school she must have been a dunce. People called her feeble-minded. I called her so myself. All that was true. Yet I found more pleasure in her silences than I ever did in the spoutings of men regarded as brilliant.

  It was not the act of a feeble-minded woman to hope that, if she revealed her unexpectedly beautiful body, a man like myself, a gentleman, possessed of the appurtenances of civilised living, like silk pyjamas and mohair dressing-gown, would be so overwhelmed and confused by admiration and desire that he would be impetuous to do to her what the cockerel had tried in vain to do to the hen. It was the act of a religious-minded unhappy woman who had lived too long alone, and who saw in me her salvation.

  But something else ought to be said, in justification of her willingness to participate in what was soon to take place. She had fallen in love with me. Not having the eloquence to show it by telling me that my eyes were ‘as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters’ or that my legs were ‘as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold’ she had more effectively demonstrated it by carrying my suitcase more than two miles without complaint, by giving me food and shelter, and by singing her saddest songs in my homage.

  Not that night, but one night weeks later, she confessed to me that when she had seen me crouching behind the stone, weeping—had I really been weeping, though, or had she mistaken raindrops for tears and sneezes for sobs?—she had thought me the handsomest man she had ever seen; but she would not have fallen in love with me because of handsomeness alone, she had also thought me the most sorrowful man she had ever seen.

  SIX

  She was not a virgin. This was more of a relief to me than a regret. With her strength it was not likely that any lecherous Hebrideans had taken advantage of her simpleness, so she must have given herself willingly. One of my predecessors was Big Ian of the bus. She told me that, years later, when we heard that he had died, vomiting blood like Major Holmes. There had been a young fellow of about twenty whom she might have married if he hadn’t gone off to the War and been drowned. There had been too the laird, when both he and she were eighteen. (I was always sceptical about her and the laird until he turned up at her funeral.)

  That first night, when we were in bed together, I remembered just in time that what we were on the point of doing, however fondly and innocently, could have bitter lifelong consequences. I panted out a warning.

  If we had had to desist, or be content with, so to speak, half the cake only, I would have been as chagrined as any man in similar circumstances, but I would have borne it more philosophically than most, for to be truthful the suddenness of the situation, the lumpiness of the bed, and the claustrophobic smallness of space, were intrusive factors that I could not help finding irksome.

  However, I had no sooner called halt, than Kirstie stepped out of bed and bounded over the rushes, with firelight on her firm buttocks. From a small drawer in the dresser she took a tiny square packet, the contents of which were easily conjectured. Not giving me time to feel, far less express, astonishment that she should have such a thing so readily available, she returned to bed and gently rolled this rubber protector on to my pintle; which, I humorously reflected, tholed the indignity with the same patience that Floss, a chihuahua once owned by Betty, had shown when being garbed on frosty mornings with a knitted jacket.

  What followed was not a fuck or copulation or even a love-making. There is in no language, not even in Gaelic, which was spoken in Eden, a word to describe a union of male and female bodies, not intended to produce offspring or assuage lust or revenge adultery or prove a theory or explore the subconscious or annihilate the universe, but simply a gesture of comradeship, dependence, and loving-kindness, leaving behind it no sense of disappointment or futility or frustration, only a continuing sense of comradeship, dependence, and loving-kindness.

  That was what happened between Kirstie and me.

  Cynical Betty had accused me of seeking what was not possible: the rose of love without the thorns of disillusionment. What I really wanted, she used to say, varying the metaphor, was not the tempestuous sea of love but the haven of maternal affection. That was why I was such a timid and conscience-stricken lover. I was Oedipus in a kilt.

  I smiled at those taunts as I lay hand-in-hand with Kirstie, listening, without much irritation, to her snores. I had found a new way of life, and a perfect companion to share it with. Deep ancestral longings in me would be satisfied, and I would be a poet again.

  SEVEN

  When I awoke Kirstie was making porridge and frying eggs, amidst sunbeams. She had on her clothes of yesterday. Affectionately, I lay and wondered if I should exercise the influence I had acquired last night to persuade her or if need be command her to wear skirts and dresses in future. In fairness, I took time to consider what were the advantages, first, of the cloth cap: it kept her hair from getting stoury and being blown about by the wind; second, of the thick sweater and trousers: they kept her warm and protected her splendid body from the many dunts it must sustain in the course of a day’s work; and third, of the Wellington boots: after yesterday’s deluge there would be floods and glaur everywhere.

  Other advantages occurred to me. No other man would see her loveliness, and I myself would have it revealed to me every night in a ceremony of surprise, as if I was not only her lover but her high priest too.

  As for her smoking a pipe, how could I object if I smoked cigars?

  Better then, on balance, to let her go on as before.

  I could not see my kilt. Last night it had been draped over a chair in front of the fire to dry. I assumed she had put it out in the sunshine. Then a suspicion struck me. Perhaps, not being as tolerant as I in the matter of what she considered suitable dress for her lover, she had thrown it out or torn it up. She might well share the local prejudice that a kilt was for a laird with an English voice, or for a jessiewillocks. That she was probably as stubborn as a stot might have to be taken into account.

  She dispersed this particular doubt and anxiety by going out and coming in again with my kilt clasped in her arms like a baby.

  Another kind of warning bell began to ring in my mind. She might, this strange simple woman, take it into her head that she wanted me to give her a child. With a woman of normal strength tactics of avoidance could be resorted to, delicately and tactfully, but not with her. Nor would she be able to understand if I were to tell her that, already martyred by fatherhood, I had no wish to be nailed to that cross again. She would comfort me, but she would still demand my unstemmed seed.

  She poured warm water into a basin for me to wash. She kissed my back, saying it was soft and smooth.

  As we ate the porridge (full of rubbery lumps) and the fried eggs (black from an unclean pan) she said that we should flit to my house. It had wooden floors, a tin roof, and rooms upstairs. It had always been one of the best houses in the township. We would live together like man and wife, whatever Mr Caligaskill might say or do.

  Naturally I asked who this Caligaskill was. It appeared he was Free Kirk minister of t
he parish that included East Gerinish. He had once knocked off the head of a cock with his stick because he had caught it treading a hen on the Sabbath. He had just meant to knock it off the hen, but though he was small he had terrible passions in the service of the Lord.

  He had nine children; eleven really, for two had died in infancy. Mrs Caligaskill was always ailing.

  Without having seen this Caligaskill I hated him. Let him come to our cottage and I would break his stick over his head. I would tell him I encouraged my cock to tread on Sundays. He represented that mixture of sanctified lust and hypocrisy which had soiled and stunted the soul of Scotland for centuries.

  Kirs tie gave out information like a hen pecking, a word or two at a time, with many head-tilted thought-suspended silences in between. It was a slow method, and until my own mind learned to creep at the same pace it could well be exasperating.

  Compared to Dugald McLeod’s her speech was garrulous and pell-mell.

  He turned up, with a dog, as I was basking in the sun, waiting for Kirstie to come with my suitcase. She had decided to carry it rather than disturb her old rheumaticky horse; in any case her cart had spokes missing and one shaft was badly spliced with wire.

  I had intended to make myself busy tidying up the precincts, but the sun was warm, the sky blue, and the radiance on the surrounding lochans hypnotic, so that I soon gave up and rested in an old basket chair outside the door, smoking a cigar. Above me geese honked in from the Arctic, and at my feet a robin hopped about. Less than half a mile away the sea’s gentler pounding on the rocks was soporific. There were many things to do, but there was plenty of time in which to do them; even if they did not all get done, or if most of them got only half done or even quarter done, well, what difference would it make in a hundred years’ time? Thus, so soon, was I succumbing to the Hebridean spell.