She didn’t say it as an accusation, but even so I was about to point out, politely, that it was none of her business when I realised that she must see it as her business, as the matriarch of this small and vanishing clan.
‘I’m not blaming you. It was a wild night and you couldn’t have slept in your own house. Forby, Kirstie likes a man in her bed. I could tell from the shine in her eyes. And why shouldn’t she?’
‘She mentioned a Mr Caligaskill.’
‘Oh him. If he was a Catholic priest that slept alone he might be worth heeding on the subject. But he’s got nine weans, and he’s been told that if she’s ever pregnant again it’ll kill his wife. If he wants other folk to abstain let him show an example.’
‘Kirstie seems afraid of him.’
‘Well, she got pregnant once years ago, before I came here. It seems Caligaskill was after her like a ferret after a rabbit. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him caused her to have a miscarriage.’
These were startling and unsavoury revelations about my last night’s bedmate.
‘She looks strong and of course she is strong, in the back and arms anyway; but she has her weaknesses too. What I’m really trying to say is that she mustn’t ever get pregnant again.’
I knew now who had supplied Kirstie with that little packet.
‘Unless of course it was by a man willing and able to marry her.’
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘though she’s very fond of children I doubt if she’d be any good at bringing one up.’
We looked at Kirstie striding along in front of us in cloth cap and Wellingtons, and smoking her pipe. She had told me that the bargain was woman’s clothes in the house only. It was certainly not easy to imagine her as a mother.
‘I don’t know why you’ve come here, Fergus,’ said Mairi, ‘and I’m not going to ask. It’s up to you whether you want to tell us or not. I will say this, you’re a lot different from what I expected. I don’t suppose you’ll stay here long. Dugald’s convinced you won’t. Of course you’re entitled to leave whenever you want. But please don’t just make use of Kirstie. She’s the kindest, most loyal, and least complaining person I ever met, and she knows every clump of heather in East Gerinish. To me she is East Gerinish, though I don’t suppose you’ll understand what I mean.’
I understood all right.
This morning I had a visitor, and my hands are still shaking.
For some weeks past I have not been going to the public library regularly, but have stayed at home to work at these memoirs. This has not been because of the librarian’s campaign of discouragement— to be fair, it has not been waged relentlessly—or because the sight of the old meek non-inheritors who still timidly frequent it has at last got me down. I have simply felt too unwell to walk the half mile there in wintry weather. Often I feel dizzy and faint. Not long ago I had to be helped into a greengrocer’s and given an orange crate to sit on and a glass of water that had a fragment of lettuce in it.
When the knock came I assumed it was Mrs McRorie and paid no heed. Still in my nightshirt, I was having breakfast and thinking how I could condense the East Gerinish section without losing too much flavour and force. The truth is, I am beginning to be afraid that I may not survive long enough to reach the final chapter, which will have to do with my second and final return to Gantock. If this is not written, and written well, then it seems to me that the whole undertaking must fail. So I was reluctant to drag my mind away from those far-off shining solitudes. Then I heard Mrs McRorie opening her door and talking to whoever was knocking on mine. Soon she was knocking herself, urgently.It must be, I thought, the man come to read the gas or the electric meter. She has a terror about the supply being cut off.
Wrapping my kilt about me, I went and opened the door.
Expecting to see, as well as Mrs McRorie, the cheerful gasman with his book in one hand and his torch in the other, I was taken aback to find instead, on our dull landing, at its dullest that dreich March morning, a creature of not immediately determinable sex, who looked dressed up for Hallowe’en.
His hat, with a brim wide enough for at least four pigeons to land on it, was purple. His cape, which might have served to mesmerise bulls but not to keep out Glasgow cold and rain, was purple too. It came well below his knees but didn’t quite hide his trousers of yellow and black checks. Along with this flamboyant outfit went a pointed beard, long hair, lilac-coloured gloves, a perfumed smell, an upper-class simpering accent, and a cultivated lisp.
If this character read meters, I thought, with a chuckle, they must be those of high-class brothels.
He astonished me by crying, with a strange eagerness: ‘Mr William McTavish?’
‘This gentleman says he has come all the way from Paris to see you,’ whispered Mrs McRorie, much impressed. ‘So I thought it would be a pity if he went away disappointed.’
As soon as she said Paris I knew who he was: my son Torquil. Samuel Lamont had told me he lived in Paris, and was a painter of some reputation.
My immediate impulse was to shut the door on him. This effeminate aesthete was a stranger: he had nothing to do with me. As a small boy, when I had tried to interest him in playing with a girr he had made it clear that he considered me an uncultured oaf. Being not so hard-hearted as his sister, he had done it as inoffensively as he could; but I had been offended all the same.
I thought that Samuel Lamont had betrayed me, and I almost betrayed myself by weeping.
‘Pleath,’ he said, in an agitation that seemed genuine. ‘Pleath don’t clothe the door.’
‘It wouldn’t be very mannerly,’ whispered Mrs McRorie.
I had to let him in. As he stepped past me he drew in his breath sharply, but whether in a sigh of relief that I had not shut him out or in a gasp of dismay at the chilliness and bareness of my living-room, I could not tell.
‘It’s beastly cold in here,’ he said, with a shiver.
I did not ask him to sit down. For one thing, I did not want him to stay long; for another, there wasn’t a chair fit for his dandy behind.
He looked at the muddle of manuscripts on the table amongst the dishes, and on the floor.
‘I think you’ve guessed who I am?’ he said.
‘I have a good idea.’
‘I’m sorry if I have invaded your privacy. It is one of the deadliest sins.’
‘I’m sorry Samuel Lamont broke his word.’
‘No, no, no. Don’t blame him. He has nothing to do with my coming here. A friend of mine while in America saw an article in a magazine by a Professor Wienbanger. He brought me a copy because you were mentioned in it. Wienbanger seemed to indicate that you were still alive, and that he had met you. So I flew to America to see him.’
‘All that way, to find out about me?’
‘Of course. I thought how wonderful if it was true.’
‘The man’s a fool. I damn near kicked him down the stairs.’
‘Oh, I agree. One of those awful Americans who set out to be cleverer than anyone else and end up by being stupider. All the same I feel grateful to him. I can’t tell you how excited and pleased I was when he assured me you were still alive, and that he had actually talked to you. Excited yes, and pleased; but ashamed too, deeply ashamed. If he could find you, why couldn’t I?’
Though he spoke with apparent sincerity the strangeness between us was growing greater every minute, not less. I had far more in common with the smelly, defeated, semi-illiterate old men in the public library than with this gaudy representative from the world of the arts.
After more than thirty years I could find nothing to say to him.
‘You don’t look well,’ he said.
‘I’m well enough.’
‘You wish I hadn’t come? I can see it in your face. You want me to go away again.’
‘You should never have come.’
‘You must come away with me. You mustn’t stay in this horrid place one more day. It would break my heart. You must come with me. Now. The taxi is wa
iting down in the street.’
‘Where to?’
‘Paris. That’s where I live.’
‘What would I do in Paris?’
He smiled, and for the first time I caught a glimpse in him of the small boy who had been scornful of Gantock because it didn’t have an art gallery with Botticellis in it.
‘Dozens of things, I hope,’ he said. ‘It’s a far more significant place for a poet to be than Glasgow.’
Significant was a word I had always distrusted. ‘Glasgow suits me,’ I replied.
‘But it is so dreadfully provincial. And so grim. As I came through those horrible streets I couldn’t help groaning; and the taxi-driver was so rude.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Is it their way of showing manly independence?’
I had once thought the same thing.
He tried to take me by the arm, but I wouldn’t let him.
‘I’ve got absolutely no right to ask why you turned your back on us all,’ he said, ‘but I would very much like to know.’
‘I thought it was you who turned your backs on me. Not that it matters.’
‘But it does matter. It matters immensely. May I tell you how much I admire your poems, particularly the Hebridean ones published in the Atlantic Review?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought their subject matter would have appealed to you.’
Again he smiled, and again was recognisable. ‘It depends on the treatment, does it not? If a painter was good enough he could make a masterpiece out of that old kitchen range.’
I was surprised that he knew to call it a range. Would he understand if I called the mantelpiece the brace? ‘Hail Mary, full of grace.’ Perhaps he still had an atom of Scottishness left in him.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if a writer or artist keeps so far away from the market place as you have done, and never shouts his wares, he will be forgotten; but I assure you I keep meeting people who tell me what a remarkable poet my father was.’
At last the word was out. It did not lessen the strangeness between us: on the contrary, it greatly increased it.
‘I keep telling everyone my father was Fergus Lamont, the poet.’
He pronounced Lamont with the accent on the second syllable. It was a measure of the distance between us.
It had become too much for me. If he didn’t go I would be too confused and might start weeping in self-pity.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I want you to go. I’ve been alone too long.’
‘But I would like to help. I came here to help, if I could.’
‘Well, you can’t.’
‘Money? I hate to mention it, but it is awfully important, isn’t it?’
‘I have enough.’
‘You don’t seem very luxurious here. And it’s beastly cold.’
‘I don’t need luxuries, and one gets used to cold.’
‘You never were one for possessions, were you? Even my mother admitted that.’
He spoke of her with some bitterness. I felt I ought to have rebuked him, but I didn’t. I ought also to have asked him if he knew how she was, but I didn’t.
‘There are a hundred things I want to ask you,’ he said, ‘and here you are pushing me out before I’ve asked any. For instance, am I to tell her you’re alive and I’ve spoken to you?’
‘I doubt if she cares one way or the other.’
I hoped, and dreaded, that he would mention Dorcas who, if she had loved me, would have been my favourite. As Lady Arnisdale she would move in aristocratic circles where he would be as much out of place as I, though for different reasons. Still, she was his sister and perhaps they kept in touch.
‘I’ve made an awful mess of this, haven’t I?’ he cried. ‘You weren’t prepared. But I was afraid that if I let you know I was coming you would have gone away again.’
By this time I had begun pushing him towards the door.
‘It’s not right you should be living in a hovel like this,’ he said, ‘and the rest of us so comfortable.’
He made it sound like an accusation, and perhaps that was how he partly intended it. If he had despised possessions and prestige and reputation as I had he might have been a better painter.
‘After Pennvalla, this must be purgatory.’
‘Pennvalla was a long time ago.’
‘I never knew you.’ Again he made it sound like an accusation, but this time perhaps both of us were being accused.
‘Nor I you,’ I said.
‘Surely it can’t be too late?’
But of course it could. As my grandfather and my mother had found out.
After I had shut the door on him I stood behind it knowing that I had been wrong to reject him, as my grandfather had been wrong to reject my mother; but like my grandfather I did not open the door and shout the forgiving words.
There must have been many moments, with his face against a closed door, as mine was now, when my grandfather had seen himself, not as one of the elect, but as one of those cast into outer darkness.
NINE
How happy those ten years in East Gerinish were, how sad their ending; and how meritorious our labours, though unavailing.
It would take too long, and involve too great an expense of feeling, to describe those thousands of often weary, monotonous, comfortless, frustrating, rain-sodden, and tempest-tossed days, which nevertheless were so inspiring and fulfilling.
There was the Saturday five years after my arrival in East Gerinish when Kirstie came home with a telegram in her pocket.
Though in August with the sky blue it was again a day of strong wind. It came louping off the sea and dealt mighty blows. Heather, grass, bog myrtle, and our hard-won corn flew like legions of terrified creatures towards the hills and away from those mad giants out in the Minch, whose spits flew faster and further than seagulls.
Against my advice Kirstie set out to Cullipool for tobacco. We kept bicycles in a hut at the road-end, but she had to walk two miles to get there, and besides, even on calm days, she was the shakiest of cyclists.
I could have forbidden her to go and she would have obeyed. After all, not being able to obtain good cigars, I had myself given up smoking. But she would have been woe-begone and restless, and would have smoked driednettle leaves with an abominable smell. At that time too our cow was pregnant, and Kirstie was moodily jealous. I would come upon her in the byre with her brow against its swollen side, murmuring to it in Gaelic. I had to be more patient than usual in explaining how a child would not add to our happiness, but would destroy it.
I might have gone with her if I hadn’t sprained my leg the day before digging peats. I rather liked appearing with her in the public bar of the Cullipool Inn, cudgelling with my eye anyone who dared to snigger at her. To be fair to the locals, though, they all showed her respect, though they never really took to me.
She had promised to be home by seven. So at six I set off at a slow hirple, leaning on a stick, to meet her. Laddie, our collie that had taken the place of Djilas long deceased, accompanied me. The sight of her in the distance walking sturdily towards me in that vast solitude was always a joy and comfort.
She had offered to bring me a newspaper. Sometimes I felt guilty because I didn’t know or care about what was happening in the outside world. But I didn’t think there would be any newspapers in the islands that day. The ‘Lochinvar’ wouldn’t have left the mainland.
I was approaching the posting-box on the stob, very quietly, so as not to disturb the hawk perched on it, when I caught sight of her still a long way off, walking slowly, and carrying something on her back.
She had said once that she could think better when she was carrying something heavy, but not too heavy, as her body was steadier then and her mind clearer. Whatever those brighter thoughts of her were I was never told. Only to Ailie and Hector did she tell them, in Gaelic. With me, and with Mairi and Dugald too, she was as shy as a five-year-old child which has drawn pictures at school and is afraid to show them at home lest t
hey be misunderstood and laughed at.
She was staggering a bit, because of the wind buffeting her bicycle, for it was this she was carrying.
I was glad to sit on a bank under the hovering hawk and wait for her to come up to me. Laddie raced to meet her.
‘Why on earth are you carrying your bicycle, my dear?’ I cried.
As she set it down she stared at it in puzzlement, as if she hadn’t been aware that she was carrying it. She set it down too with absurd carefulness, as if it was a boxful of eggs, or a baby. I had seldom seen her look so mournful.
‘It’s got a puncture,’ she said.
‘But it could have been mended at the road-end.’
She took from her jacket pocket the buff envelope of a telegram. It looked as if it had had bloodstains which had been wiped off. This was nothing unusual. The post-office at Cullipool was also a general store that sold butcher-meat.
As she waited for me to read the telegram she picked up Laddie and, somewhat to his alarm, hugged and kissed him.
The telegram was from Sammy Lamont. It said that his father had died on Friday morning at 10.30. It must have arrived yesterday at the post-office, but Mr McFarlane, the postmaster there, would have thought that there was no point in putting the living to unnecessary trouble for the sake of the dead.
Kirstie did not ask what the telegram was about. She might hours or weeks later, or she might never ask at all.
Grief and shame caused me to be a little sharp with her. When she made to lift the bicycle again, like an ant replacing its load, I told her not to be foolish and to leave it lying in the heather; no one would steal it.
‘I want to carry it,’ she said.
There was no use arguing with her in that mood.
‘Please yourself, my dear.’
To feel self-pity in her presence was always difficult: she herself endured so nobly.
‘If we had a child,’ she said, after we had gone about quarter of a mile in silence, ‘I would not wear trousers.’
She often made remarks like that. Reply was impossible. But thinking of John Lamont dead I sighed.
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