Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘Didn’t we see her from the yacht,’ cried his wife, ‘her and another woman?’

  ‘That other woman, the one without the cap,’ said Dugald, ‘was my wife, Mairi. She and Kirstie went off to make themselves presentable. It is a way women have, you know.’

  They all found that grave remark of his: ‘It is a way women have, you know’ very funny.

  Evidently they had discussed Kirstie, my freak of a mistress, as they thought. No doubt they had discussed me too. Being insiders, they knew that as the husband of Betty T. Shields I had the distinction of having been cuckolded by a woman whose advocacy of chastity and virtue had made her famous and rich. They knew too that I had children who had rejected me. They knew that I claimed to be a Corse of Darndaff. Their view of me must be that I was a clown, for whom a fit mate was a half-witted woman who wore men’s clothes and smoked a pipe.

  Seen at close quarters, Lady Cynthia looked immature. She had a childish habit, whenever she thought she had said something witty, or whenever she made a comic face, of looking round to make sure that everyone was appreciating it. If she had been born in Lomond Street, she would have been told at any closemouth: ‘For Christ’s sake, Cynthie, grow up.’ As it was, born in Fountainbridge House, the youngest of the family, she had been encouraged to remain a pampered child far too long. The result was this immaturity which would last all her life. She was not really pretty, either; her hair particularly, compared with Kirstie’s, was short, drab, and lustreless.

  ‘Let’s have our picnic,’ she cried, and instructed the two sailors how to spread out the cloth and set out the eatables. There were bottles of wine.

  ‘You and your friend will join us, won’t you, Mr Corse-Lamont?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not one for picnics in the middle of my work,’ said Dugald, gravely.

  They thought that remark, too, very funny.

  Lady Cynthia handed Hector a sandwich so thin that he couldn’t hold it in his fingers as he usually did with a piece; he had to let it lie in his palm. When he sniffed it, politely, he couldn’t help making a face. Whatever expensive pâté was spread on it wasn’t to his liking. He would have preferred his mother’s home-made bramble jelly any day.

  Ailie, though, was determined to be as well-bred and dainty as these perfumed and richly-dressed ladies from the big yacht. She nibbled at her sandwich as a vole might at a stalk of corn.

  She was wearing the brooch they had given her. It was really a white button with the yacht’s name, ‘Alexandra’, on it in gold letters.

  ‘We must wait, Cynthia,’ said Lady Margaret, ‘for the ladies.’

  Mairi and Kirs tie were at the moment out of sight. No doubt they were taking their time so as not to arrive flushed and sweaty again. Mairi too would be giving Kirstie advice on how to conduct herself.

  ‘Been writing any more poetry?’ asked Donaldson, not really interested.

  ‘Some.’

  ‘I’ve just had word that my latest, Sweet Smell of Clover, has been bought by the film people. The money will come in handy. Cynthia and I are in the process of buying a house in the South of France. Both of us like sunshine.’

  ‘What’s happened to your Scottish Nationalism?’

  ‘An aberration of enthusiastic youth, Fergus. Let’s whisper it: we Scots need the English, bless them, a lot more than they need us.’

  Those last few words were stuttered out slowly, as if he’d suddenly been paralysed. So he had been, by astonishment.

  I turned my head. Kirstie and Mairi had appeared. He was staring at Kirstie. So were they all, and they were all astonished. So was I.

  I had stupidly forgotten. I had been like a careless whist-player who has not noticed he had the ace of trumps in his hand.

  In a loose white dress, with a white rose in her flowing hair, and with sandals on her bronzed feet, Kirstie could hardly have been more simply dressed, or more beautiful. Dark with the sun, her face, which I had sometimes thought too long and melancholy, was like that of a Celtic princess of legend, with eyes milk-wort blue and lips red as rose hips. Even I who had seen her naked many times gasped at the loveliness of her strong bronzed arms and feet. In her speech, and in her every movement, there was a strong simple grace that had us all enchanted.

  Hector and Ailie were uneasy too. They had seen this Celtic princess before. They were afraid that one day she would replace for ever the Kirstie of the cloth cap and Wellingtons whom they knew so much better and loved.

  The two ladies tried at first to look on her as a peasant woman who had turned out to be rather handsomer than they had been led to believe; but their amused amazement soon gave way, in Lady Cynthia’s case, to dismayed admiration, and in Lady Margaret’s to grim-faced determination not to admire too much.

  The look of delight on Sir James’s big purple face took me back to my boyhood ploy of fishing for treasure with lumps of clay. Thus might one of us have looked if he had brought up a penny and found it was half-a-crown.

  Donaldson himself reminded me of a cow with its horns fankled in a gate. He must have been exercising his wit on the subject of Kirstie, wearer of men’s clothes and smoker of a pipe. Now on the subject of Kirstie, sister of Deirdre, he wanted to be gallant and parade his florid prose in her praise, but he could not, jealousy had a stranglehold on him. His titled wife, the success of his books, his money in the bank, his house in the South of France, and his CBE, all were outshone by my being loved by so superb a woman.

  It was no good his trying, an hour or so later, as he was about to step into the boat, to spoil my triumph by mentioning my daughter Dorcas, then eighteen years of age.

  ‘I suppose you know she got engaged recently to young Jack Pilrig, Lord Arnisdale’s heir?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  His wife peevishly called to him to hurry. She had a headache, she said.

  At no time would she give him the lusty connubial joy that he was so fond of describing, with polysyllabic vagueness, in his novels. Tonight all he would get would be sniffles of complaint for having exposed her to comparison with the most beautiful woman both of them had ever seen.

  As the boat headed for the yacht I stood on top of the cliff, like a Viking chief, hand-in-hand with my Celtic princess.

  TWELVE

  It would be foolishly immodest of me to pretend that the letter from Mr Paul Levanne of New York which found its way to me, and the subsequent printing of twenty of my Hebridean poems in his magazine, Atlantic Review, were not events of note; but they happened at a time when something of greater importance was affecting our little community. Mairi, hitherto staunchest of us all, was passing through a crisis of lost confidence and weakened will. One of her sulkiest gibes then was that our struggles seemed to have only one purpose so far as I was concerned. Bitterly she would protest that neither she nor her children were going to waste their lives in a useless wilderness so that I could write sad poems or that Dugald her husband could grow warty potatoes.

  Yet it was those poems of mine that helped to lift her out of her depression. She admitted it herself.

  In our lonely lives there was a consoling beauty that made the harshnesses and inadequacies worthwhile; and it was in my poems.

  All the same there were times, particularly in winter, when I felt despondent myself. The persistent damp made me rheumaticky. Often I could not lift a peat off the stack, far less hold a pen, so stiff and sore were my fingers. But there were many more times, even in winter, when, in spite of pain and weariness, I felt happy.

  Coming home, day after day, with Kirstie, to our house where the peat fire needed only blowing to come to life again, was a joy that never turned stale. We came home from the sea, from the hill, from the moor, from the fields, from rare visits to Cullipool and rarer visits to Lochmaddy; and always, whether in the sweet clear air of summer evenings or in the chilly damp dusk of winter, the sight of our house lifted the weariness from our shoulders and the doubts from our hearts.

  It was not simply a coming home: it
was a renewal of faith in our love for each other, and in our hearth as the place where that love was most joyfully expressed.

  On Sundays I would go with Kirs tie, whatever the weather, to the kirk and stand there by her side, often with the rain pouring down on us through the broken roof, while she prayed or sang a hymn in Gaelic. Those pilgrimages to the deserted church meant a great deal to her, but for me it was always the return home that was the holier journey.

  THIRTEEN

  One Saturday afternoon, in the first June of the Second World War, I was seated in the small walled garden that Kirstie and I had made, working at a poem in the rose-scented sunshine, when I heard, some way off, Ailie, then ten, shouting tragically to her brother, who was thirteen: ‘Wait for me, Hector, oh wait for me.’

  About two hours earlier they had gone off with Kirstie to take a look at some cattle we had grazing in a green field near the Seal Rocks.

  Unexpectedly here was Hector back, panting, and unwilling to come into the garden although he knew he had as much right to be in it as the bees. He stood looking at me over the dyke.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Have the Germans landed?’

  Since the British Army’s retreat from Dunkirk some weeks before he had been on the look-out for spies and invaders.

  He scowled and shook his head. I understood that I was not to joke about the War.

  Then Ailie arrived, her face as red as her skirt. She was panting too, but where her brother looked huffish and angry she looked tragic and frightened.

  She came right into the garden and stood beside me, getting her breath back.

  ‘You said you’d stay,’ muttered Hector.

  ‘I couldn’t, Hector. I couldn’t. I was frightened.’ Suddenly she was weeping.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he shouted. ‘What’s the good of crying?’

  He threw a stone at some finches marauding in our blackcurrants. I was astonished. Usually he was the first to argue that the birds deserved their share.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  Like most brothers and sisters they sometimes fell out.

  ‘It’s Kirstie,’ sobbed Ailie.

  ‘She’s ill or something,’ shouted Hector, unnecessarily loud.

  I smiled. When she had gone off with them Kirstie had been as rosy-cheeked and vigorous as ever.

  ‘Kirstie’s never ill,’ I said.

  They both stared at me, Ailie sadly and Hector, it seemed, impatiently.

  ‘Sometimes she is, Fergus,’ whispered Ailie. ‘Sometimes she’s in pain. She always said she didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘But this is worse,’ muttered Hector. ‘She couldn’t get up.’

  Even then I was not alarmed. Living so much alone, these children had become over-imaginative. I had seen them not only speaking to stones but also hearing the stones’ answers.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  ‘On a rock down by the shore,’ said Ailie.

  ‘Near Seal Rocks,’ added Hector.

  ‘She wouldn’t speak to us, Fergus,’ whispered Ailie. ‘I think you should go and see.’

  ‘But Kirstie’s like that, isn’t she?’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have to speak to keep you company. You two know that.’

  Ailie put her mouth close to my ear: ‘Hector doesn’t want to say it, but he thinks she’s dead.’

  Hector heard. ‘Well, she’s very funny anyway.’

  Still I was not alarmed. Of course Kirstie was funny, in many different ways. It was what made her so delectable.

  ‘She can’t be dead,’ whispered Ailie. ‘Can she?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you go near her then?’ cried her brother. ‘I did. I went so near I could have touched her. She wasn’t breathing.’

  ‘But you said her eyes were open.’

  ‘Yes, but they weren’t seeing anything.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose I’d better go and see what it is you’re talking about.’

  ‘Good,’ sighed Ailie.

  Hector was still scowling. He shook his head.

  ‘He thinks you should take a cart or something to carry her in,’ whispered Ailie, ‘but he doesn’t like to say it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think there’s any need for that,’ I said.

  ‘She’s just fallen asleep. Sometimes she sleeps with her eyes open.’

  So sure was I that Kirs tie, immortal Kirstie, was just sleeping that as I led the way along the path over the moor towards the sea I wasn’t thinking only of her but also of the disaster that had so recently befallen my old regiment, the Perthshires, a whole battalion of whom had had to surrender to the Germans.

  I was thinking too of my own moral stance in relation to the War. It seemed to me that my duty as a poet was not to take part in the destruction and defeat of the present enemy, but rather by exerting all my imagination and compassion to see hope for humanity, when the War was over and the slaughter of millions was ended.

  I would catch another glimpse of that difficult hope when I came to the shore and saw Kirstie safely asleep.

  The children were unusually silent. They did not race on ahead as scouts and explorers. Hector kept well back. He plucked a blade of grass and holding it between his thumbs made of it a mournful whistle. Nearly forty years ago in McSherry’s Wood I had cut my lip doing that.

  Ailie kept close behind me. Whenever I turned she gave me a quick anxious smile.

  The path down to the shore was steep and rough. I offered to help Ailie but she shook her head. It was as if it was very important to her to be independent then.

  The shore was a jumble of rocks as smooth as seals. Real seals were basking on other rocks not far off-shore. There was a strong smell of seaweed rotting. A few weeks ago it had been washed up by a storm. The morbid would have thought of a battlefield of corpses, the hopeful of fertilised fields.

  Ailie squeezed her nose with her fingers.

  We walked over sea turf and clumps of thrift and wild irises. Some oyster-catchers rose, uttering their shrill cries.

  Suddenly yonder was Kirstie, with her back to us. There was something odd about her posture. It would have been odd if she was just asleep. It would not be odd, though, if she was dead.

  She was dead. I knew it before we reached her. She was slumped sideways, with her head resting on her left arm. Her cap had fallen off and her beautiful black hair was loose. Her feet were bare.

  Though I was sure that she was dead I called to her quietly as people do to wake someone sleeping whom they love.

  Ailie was holding on to my kilt. Hector had come down on to the shore but had halted a good way off.

  I sat down on the stone beside Kirstie and held her upright in my arms. Her face turned towards me with a jerk. Never had she looked more droll or lovable. Her eyes were open. I thought of milkwort, shyest of flowers.

  Flies from the rotting seaweed visited our faces. Ailie and I chased them away. Kirstie did not.

  ‘Is she really dead?’ whispered Ailie.

  ‘Yes, Ailie, I think she is.’

  ‘How do you know? Are you sure? I haven’t got a mirror. Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will this do?’ She handed me a small, smooth, flat, oval stone, the kind used to skiff a long the top of the sea.

  I held it to Kirstie’s mouth. It stayed dry. I gazed at it more intensely than I had ever looked at a stone before. It was beautiful. The sea’s tongue, delicate for all its power, had given it its shape and smoothness. God knew how, millions of years ago, it had got its subtle mixture of colours.

  In spite of this terrible thing that had happened I did not feel surrounded by malignant presences.

  Ailie, though, was not so sure. She took the stone from me, and softly, very softly, breathed on it. It became moist. She looked awed, as if she had just performed a miracle. Then she looked round in search of other living things. As she gazed at the seals, and at some terns skimming past, and even at the flies, her expression was one of wonder, relief, kinshi
p, and love.

  I looked for Hector. He was gone.

  ‘I told him to go and get Mum and Dad,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘No. I waved.’

  So far she had not dared to touch Kirstie. Now she stepped forward boldly and took her hand.

  ‘Oh Kirstie,’ she sighed, weeping quietly.

  If I closed my eyes I might have imagined that it was just another of the sea’s many noises. There was no resentment against anyone or anything in her weeping. She suffered but she accepted. So had Kirstie. What secrets had they told each other in Gaelic?

  Further along the shore a flock of curlews waded in the water. They uttered their haunting melancholy cries. Kirstie had often gone walking in the rain. ‘To hear the curlews,’ she had said, though she had used their Gaelic name, Guilbneachan.

  More and more I was realising what I had lost.

  Minutes passed. Neither Ailie nor I spoke. We were as quiet as Kirstie herself. We heard seals grunting.

  ‘Mum said,’ whispered Ailie, ‘that if one of you went away the rest would have to go too.’

  Each one of us being a pillar supporting the house.

  ‘Well, Kirstie’s gone away, hasn’t she?’

  ‘She has, Ailie.’

  ‘So will you go away yourself, Fergus?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ailie.’

  ‘I think we’ll go to my grandfather’s farm at Inverness. Dad doesn’t want to, but he’ll have to now, I think.’

  ‘Will you be glad to go, Ailie?’

  She took time before answering. She was determined to give as honest an answer as she could.

  ‘Well, I’d like other girls to play with sometimes. Hector’s all right. I suppose he does his best, but he’s a boy. Besides, he’s got to go to secondary school after the holidays. That means he can’t stay at home. So will I, in two years. Yes, I think I’ll be glad to go, Fergus.’

  ‘But you’ll be sorry too?’