Then, the list being somewhat short still, or simply because he had the pen in his hand and had not written anything for weeks, he added the names of his parents, the name of a girl from Cerro Muriano he had once been insanely in love with, and the name of his horse, from that time when Spanish cavalry still enjoyed the use of horses.
In the morning he showed the list to Calley.
“We’ll be busy,” said Calley, who could count if he could not read.
“Unless he is on the first,” said Medina.
“First what?”
“First island.”
“Some fucking chance of that,” said Calley.
Medina shrugged. He had not enjoyed the moment as much as he had hoped and was, anyway, distracted by the woman sitting near the window, brown dress, blue shawl, a hat with a feather, her dish of tea untouched. Her face was away from him. She had her hair pinned up and the light lay silver on her neck. Her stillness. What was the meaning of such stillness? Then the noise of a door shouldered open—the butcher’s boy on his way through, half a pig in his arms—and she turned, startled, scanning the room. She saw Medina, or she looked at him, at where he was sitting, the air he occupied. He inclined his head to her but she made no gesture in return. She turned away again, resumed her stillness.
On the Broomielaw they called down to the decks of boats being readied for sea and a short while before ten boarded a vessel bound for the Isle of Arran. Arran, explained the man who had waved them on board, who wrote out each of them a little ticket, fanning the paper in the air to dry the ink, was an excellent place to start a tour. They should go for a tramp up Goat Fell. Views to inspire! Take your sketch books, gentlemen! Your watercolour boxes!
It was early evening by the time they reached the island. They walked from the quay to a hotel, leaned at the bar, stood drinks and brought the talk around to a friend of theirs, a man travelling ahead of them, English, an army officer, perhaps with a fiddle among his things and wanting to hear music. Name of Lacroix, though sometimes, for whimsical reasons, introducing himself as Mr. Lovall.
It was a risk of course, after the business with Captain Browne. One thing to make a man swear on his life, to fill him with the fear, another to be confident your work will last. What news from Dumbarton might have been carried on the boat ahead of them? But no one had heard of any English officer travelling alone with a fiddle, though some took half a bottle to be sure of it.
In the morning they sailed for Islay, and later the same day paid a man to row them over to Jura. In Jura, in a boarding house, they sat out two days of storm, the weather dementing against the windows so that they dared not sit too close for fear the glass would come in. Medina took lessons in Gaelic from the landlord, a large man who appeared always to be dithering at the edge of some hilarity and who, above the crashing of the storm, recited phrases about old battles between people with almost identical names. Medina, swaddled in a tartan blanket, called the phrases back to him, was gently corrected and called again. Calley was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room. He wore his coat and turned the pages of a picture book about the lives of Scottish saints, brawny types who put men’s severed heads back on their shoulders, who befriended lions.
“What’s this?” said Calley, breaking in on the lesson. “What lions? There are no lions in Scotland.”
But the landlord detected the uncertainty in his voice and with a smile, a mild blinking of his eyes, told how his grandfather had once seen a whole nest of them up on the Paps, and that they had turned and turned as though they were boiling.
“Yeah, right,” said Calley, but he looked pleased and went back to slowly turning the pages of the book.
The afternoon of the third day they went over to Mull. The wind had dropped but a big sea was still running. Both men vomited on the journey and on reaching harbour staggered among crab pots, shuddered, felt for stone and could not speak. Once they had recovered themselves a little by sitting an hour, boots dangling over the harbour wall (“the sea,” said Calley, “is a fucking disgrace”), they set off walking between the houses and the boats and came soon enough to a narrow way, a half-open door, the glimmering of human forms, the clink of bottles. They went in. Faces turned towards them like stone flowers turning towards the sun. Medina addressed them with a word of Gaelic. Perhaps it was a greeting; perhaps it was the name of a type of outhouse. “We’re engineers,” said Calley. “We’re having a scout about.”
They sat on a bench. The smell of fish was as strong in the bar as it had been on the front by the pots. It leaked from the men’s clothes, their homespun, their shoes made of bark or sealskin. One man seemed to be wearing birds on his feet and it was hard not to comment on it. A bottle was asked for, a bottle was brought, and though there must have been complicated rules pertaining to hospitality, the offering of gifts, rules stretching back to the time of the brawny saints, the islanders seemed glad enough to forget them in another’s ignorance. Medina topped up tumblers, tin mugs, vessels of horn. He made encouraging remarks to them, sometimes in Spanish.
“Anyway,” said Calley, raising his glass. “We’ve been wanting to hear about a friend of ours. Someone you might have seen . . . ”
The men listened and when Calley had finished those who had understood translated for those who had not. There were glances and nods, then one of the English speakers, a sonorous voice, his English full of strange inversions, unexpected stresses, said there had been an Englishman, though whether he had arrived recently or perhaps during the War of the Three Kingdoms dressed in the armour of Cromwell’s New Model Army, was unclear. There was a long teasing-out of details. Calley could be patient when he needed to, when there was some advantage. Slowly, the Englishman took shape. He had come alone, in the summer, a week or two before the feast of Almus. The fiddle could not be confirmed but the man with the birds on his feet thought there was one, yes, and that the Englishman had played it at the landing place and the bairns had danced to it.
And now?
He has gone to Cola, said another. He pointed to a corner of the bar. Calley and Medina looked there. A wall.
“It is an island,” said the man. “You may go there tomorrow I think.”
“And why did he go to this other island?” asked Calley. “Why did he leave here?”
The question, translated, produced an answer they all seemed agreed upon. One word, a single word, not English. Calley and Medina waited. The word was passed about, flew from mouth to mouth until the most confident of the English speakers, his face in an ecstasy of concentration, suddenly opened his eyes wide, nodded emphatically and said, “Grief.”
They reached Cola the next afternoon. The sea was calmer and they were not sick this time.
On Cola the story of the Englishman thinned out. What on Mull had been plural and feathered became, on the new island, a single voice, thin as a bootlace, the speaker not from the island at all but an official of some sort, dressed like a lawyer and there to collect rents. It was true, he said, there had been a stranger but he had stayed on the island no more than three days.
“He’s gone?” said Calley.
“To Mingulay. If you climb the hill there and look west or somewhat north of west you should see it. On a clear day.” He said it was a hard place to get to and when you got there the effort could not be justified.
“So why would he go,” asked Calley, “when there’s nothing there?”
“I did not say there was nothing there,” said the man. “And the people here did not want to keep him. They are given to superstition. They considered the man unlucky.”
He looked at them, the cool gaze of an appointed man, then, with a final taking-in of the long coats, the packs, the travelled faces, he turned to leave them.
“But someone,” said Medina, “must have taken him.”
“Aye,” said the man. “Neil MacCuish and his cousin. I would not go in a boa
t with them myself but . . . ”
He walked away along the street they had been speaking on. It was, perhaps, the only street on the island. A cow stood at one end, the other end debouched into the air.
They spent the afternoon hunting down MacCuish. They were pointed towards farms, towards cottages, towards sprawls of open ground where the birds flew up under their feet. They stood on a rock and looked west. There was something out there, a hazy complication of islands, stretching northwards. Then a cloud of insects found them and drove them, beating at their faces, back to the shore. Here they came upon a man lifting a pair of ugly fish out of a lugger drawn up on the beach. On enquiry, the man turned out to be MacCuish himself. He was missing three fingers from his left hand, had an odd dent in his forehead. On one forearm he had a mermaid with a tipsy grin and on the other, in uncertain black letters from the elbow, caledonia.
He had served four years in the Royal Navy—he and two brothers lifted out of their boat by a passing frigate, the boat sent back in the care of an old man, who then had the pleasure of breaking the news to their mother. “We never saw her living again,” said MacCuish. He lit his pipe, worked at it a while. “That might be something you know about,” he said.
“What’s that?” said Calley. When he thought of his mother, of the word “mother,” he pictured a gate. High. Locked.
“The king’s shilling,” said MacCuish.
“We’re engineers,” said Calley.
“You’ll be building us a bridge to the mainland perhaps?”
“We might,” said Calley.
The other nodded. He remembered the Englishman of course. The man was drunk when they set out. By the time they landed at Mingulay he had to be carried ashore. But he had paid them what he promised, had been courteous in the way a man three sheets to the wind may still be if he has sufficient breeding. He had a bag with him, his dunnage, but no fiddle unless it was a very small one and inside the bag. Which he doubted.
“He mention Spain or anything?” asked Calley.
“Spain?” MacCuish shook his head. There had been no mention of Spain. “He spoke,” said MacCuish, “of the world’s beauty. And as we carried him up the beach he begged us to remember a woman’s name.”
“What name?” asked Medina.
MacCuish could not remember but then his cousin arrived, coming down the face of a sand dune in three long glides like a skater. He looked much like MacCuish though without the dent, the missing fingers, the tattoos. They talked in their own tongue a while.
“Lucy,” said the cousin.
“That was it,” said MacCuish. “Lucy.”
Calley looked at Medina. In a voice not much above a whisper he said, “That’s the sister’s name.”
An arrangement was made. If the weather held they would go in the morning, first light. Calley and MacCuish walked down the beach to do the money business. The former rating’s rolling gait, the soldier’s bandy legs.
“Fada, fada, fada bho thir,” said Medina to the cousin. It was from a song the old man on Jura had chanted to him, something about the sea (he thought their language, in general, was an endless address to the sea). The cousin listened politely, looked for a moment as if he might offer a response, then went on plaiting strands of marram grass into a slender rope.
They spent the night at a house belonging to one of MacCuish’s relatives. Dark inside and smoky, and with a sweet dungy smell.
“In England—” said Calley.
“I know,” said Medina. “You would not keep your dogs in such a place.”
“Dogs? We wouldn’t keep fucking badgers in here.” But he was in an excellent mood, almost at ease, almost affable. He drank his smoky milk from the bowl, ate his food squatting on a low stool by the fire.
“A week from now,” he said to Medina—there was only an old woman with her head in a scarf to overhear him—“we’ll be on a boat back to Lisbon. And when we get there that cunt Henderson will have something nice for us. I’m going to put in a word for you. Yeah? I’m going to say you did all right. There might even be a medal in it. Imagine someone like you with a medal. A proper one.” He laughed. “Then they can start the war again.”
They slept side by side in their coats on the straw, were woken by MacCuish, his voice in the darkness. On the beach the cousin was waiting by the bows of the lugger. They pushed the boat over the sand until she lay half in and half out of the water. Calley and Medina climbed in with their packs, then MacCuish and his cousin shouldered the boat into the shallows, pulling themselves aboard with little flicks of water from their bare feet. They rowed out until they found the wind, shipped the oars and hoisted their single sail. The lugger, noisy before with the rowing, now fitted herself to the quiet of the morning. At first she hardly seemed to be moving at all, then she heeled, very slightly, there was the whisper of water over clinkered wood, and they were under way, the beach, the bay, the island, withdrawing from them in a kind of smoothing.
It was a long crossing—the longest yet for Calley and Medina, who sat on their packs by the bows feeling beneath them the restlessness and infinite tonnage of green water. MacCuish watched everything. The sense was of making the crossing while the weather’s back was turned. No cloud showed itself at the horizon without MacCuish noting its presence. Medina even saw him pick weed from the sea as if that too carried some message for him. In the early afternoon he pointed casually to the south. “A whale,” he said.
Medina looked. He thought he saw something, a black something in the sea’s glitter but could not be sure. How can you miss a whale? Calley preferred not to look but made a face, a whale-hating face, that lasted several minutes.
The moon rose, a waning crescent in a sky the colour of pearls. As night came on the wind picked up and the boat became jittery, the bows skipping from sea-hold to sea-hold. Calley drooped his head over the sea and conversed with it in a series of groans. Medina was in Spain, al Andaluz, a grove of almond trees in spring, the wind running down slender avenues of trees, the air a whirl of white blossom . . .
He was broken from the dream by the cousin coming forward to crouch at the bows. What now? More whales? MacCuish called out, the cousin called back; MacCuish adjusted their course. Medina, though straining his eyes, could not see what they saw. Or was it what they were hearing? For there was a new sound, a rushing, like the air in a shell. It had not been there before and it frightened him a little. The cousin called again; another shifting of the course. Then, a hundred yards ahead, Medina saw that what he had taken for grey moonlight on the sea was, in fact, the shore. Another call, another response. MacCuish, the shade of him, loosed the sail. An oar tested the water’s depth—then the cousin was gone, sliding into the sea and appearing again, standing beside them in the water. He walked the boat in as you would walk a horse. MacCuish joined him and they dragged the lugger’s nose up on to the beach. Calley and Medina climbed out, tottered on stiff legs over the sand. In the air above them a dog let out a single bark.
“We’ll stay tonight with MacCusk,” said MacCuish. “We were on the Achille together.”
They climbed the dunes then went in single file up a steep path cut into the rock. The dog must have woken someone. A voice hissed at them out of the invisible. MacCuish answered and the voice became the sound of greeting. A minute later there was a patch of yellow light and another voice drew them all to a door and then to a room, small, wood-lined, full of little cupboards and remarkably like a ship’s cabin. A woman was leaning over the fire and blowing sparks out of the dull heart of it. She straightened up as the men came in. Her face was the colour of the copper pan hanging from the beam above the fire, her hair a darker tint of the same, thick curls that had needed no curling iron.
“This is MacCusk,” said MacCuish. “His wife Sara.” To MacCusk he said, “These two men are interested in the Englishman I brought.”
MacCusk looked at them, then he
and MacCuish spoke in their own language. Whatever it was they were saying to each other, the details, the finer points, it was clear from the tone that the interest was not welcome.
The woman brought a bottle and glasses. She put out a loaf of flat bread, unwrapped the muslin from a joint of cold meat. Her gown at the back was not properly fastened. She must have pulled it on at the sound of voices.
“Lo siento por llegar tan tarde,” said Medina, speaking to her under the noise of the other’s talking.
She glanced at him, went on setting the table. He was sure, however, she had understood him.
Calley was watching the to and fro between the old shipmates. Then it broke off and they all sat at the table.
“Well,” said Calley, once he had eaten his bread, “we’re still wondering where our friend might be. As he doesn’t seem to be in the house.”
MacCuish glanced at MacCusk. On MacCusk’s hands two rust-red fish and an angel. Letters across his knuckles. Hold. Fast.
“He went away,” said MacCusk.
“Away where?”
“To the north.”
“North where?”
“He did not say.”
“So you didn’t take him?”
“I did not.”
“Who did?”
“A boat came in. I did not see it.”
“And whisked him off to the north.”
“That is it.”
“Well, that’s not very convenient,” said Calley. “Given we’ve come a long way.”
“You can come back with us in the morning,” said MacCuish.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 26