Also rehashed in all the Scottish papers is the referendum debate. The birthday of the dead nationalist poet has given them an opportunity to air the arguments all over again. Come on, I want to say, it’s over! Let it go! Move on!
I wish I could move on myself with this project but I feel truly stuck. Bonnie Jean continues to elude us, despite Ailish’s efforts. I press on through Lilias’s love letters—arranged chronologically they describe a perfect arc from hopeful youth to embittered age, prefigured by the sour quatrain, written in Scots, that she sent McWatt in May 1973.
Frae goddess tae gargoyle in three easy stages:
One: faw for a fella who aye disengages.
Twa: faw for the joy-juice, which ayeweys says yes.
Three: count on Bitch Time tae accomplish the rest.
A year later she wrote to him again, a single sentence in large red letters, underlined on a sheet of old aerogram paper: “You fake. You ruined my life.” No address. No salutation. Ugly.
I feel a shameful pulse of recognition; some of my later emails to Marco and to Pascal weren’t exactly pretty. No matter how justified, no matter what outrageous treachery has been perpetrated, bitterness always poisons the betrayed rather than the betrayer.
Grievously wounded by Marco’s affair—though he was still living in the apartment, sharing parenting, we had never been more distant—and bent on a mad pursuit of revenge, I was determined to make things work with Pascal. At first I tiptoed round the feelings of my delicate lover. He may have been sick, there was no denying it, and he had a hacking cough to show for it. He was post-virally exhausted and his only response to my most selfless attempts to arouse him was mild exasperation.
After another night of sexless affection, I began to wonder again whether Pascal was gay. Finally, rebuffed once more, I asked him. He reacted with a vehemence that didn’t reassure me and which nearly undid us altogether. What was the point of a sexless affair? I asked. If I’d wanted to do without sex altogether I could have stuck with Marco. As soon as I’d spoken I felt guilty. What could be more unmanning than to challenge a lover on his performance, or non-performance? He was vulnerable and hurt, and had an artist’s susceptibility to depression. Morbus Williamsburgensis, perhaps.
He told me he’d been going through something I couldn’t understand. Try me, I said. So he tried me. There had been problems with the promised recording deal. Money was tight. The manager of their club residency hadn’t paid up in a month. The band was falling apart. He didn’t know how he was going to pay his rent. He wept. So I got out my credit card, comforted him, mothered him, while three miles away, across the bridge in the next borough, my real child sat waiting for me, patiently colouring in until I could find the time to come home with my unmet needs and my resentments.
It wasn’t until it all fell apart, with Pascal, then with Marco again, that I realised the basest treachery was mine. My hunger for sexual love, for intimacy, had caused me to sideline my love for my daughter. Maybe—suggested one therapist I was once talked into seeing briefly—my own mother hadn’t provided such a great blueprint for maternal affection. For this insight I paid $220.
I’ve always believed, unfashionably, that there’s a statute of limitations on blaming your parents and it kicks in at about the age of twenty-one. Agnes still has a few years to run. Bringing her here was partly an attempt to make amends: to have another go at motherhood, resit the exam and maybe scrape a pass this time. Life on a small island in the far north, with no distractions and few comforts, seemed the perfect clinical condition for the experiment. But, as I let my problems with my work overwhelm me, I fear I’m in danger of failing Agnes yet again.
The first serious concerns about Lilias’s health began to sound in June 1973. She had always been a heavy smoker and suffered regular bouts of bronchitis, but early that month she was diagnosed with pneumonia and pleurisy. Against her doctor’s advice she continued to drink while taking prescribed medication. On 15 June she was found unconscious in Thistle Street and admitted to the Royal Infirmary. In a self-mocking note to McWatt written from her hospital bed, she said, “I had followed the unsmiling Dr. Smilie’s orders to a T. No drinking. Thus no tea, coffee, water, milk, Irn-Bru, Cremola Foam or any other liquid passed my lips while I was on the wee blue pills. But surely, I thought, to avoid total dehydration, I was allowed a wee drop of whisky?”
McWatt wrote to Willie McCracken, now teetotal and running a small poetry magazine in Leith, asking him to “look out for our fragile Flooer. Her appetites could be her undoing. She is an unhappy lassie who is looking for some kind of salvation and I fear I cannot provide it.”
McWatt continued to visit Edinburgh but avoided her. It was fortunate for him, and perhaps for her, that she had been barred from Menzies’ after another of what she called “my nights of shame.”
Edinburgh was changing; the old printing and manufacturing industries were failing while the festival and attendant tourism were beginning to rival banking and insurance as the city’s chief source of income. With the annual northern transhumance of bohemian southerners the grey, close-mouthed city metamorphosed each summer into a month-long Mardi Gras of music and make-believe. Even outside the festival, the old poets had been unseated from their strongholds, “replaced,” wrote Lilias, “by long-haired students, lads and lassies dressed like medieval mummers, playing their cat-screech jukebox music and talking not of poetry or national identity but of Vietnam, South Africa, Greece, Thailand. Any damned far-flung place but here, right under their noses. It’s all fashion, not passion, for them.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Ah’m!
Ah’m—yet whit Ah’m nane gies a damn or kens;
Ma pals forhou me like a mindin tyne:
Ah’m the sel-devoorer o ma dules—
They heeze an mizzle in unkennin thrang,
Like shadaes in loues doistert stychelt thraws
An yet, Ah’m, an leiv—like fungit haar
Intae the naethiness o geck an squall
Whaur there is nawtherane sinse o leif or joyes,
But the muckle schipwrak o ma leif’s emprise;
E’en the dawtiest whase loue Ah crave
Are antrin—an mair antrin than the lave.
Ah lang tae be whaur loons hae niver trod.
Whaur sneuterin quines hae nivver dabbed their eyes,
Wi Naitur tae the cantie end Ah’ll dod.
An like a dirrin bairnie doucely nod,
Unfashin naebdy an unfasht whaur Ah lie
Ablo the gress, abuin the vowtit sky.
—Grigor McWatt, efter John Clare, 1973*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
28 November 2014
Just over a month to go before the museum opens on 31 December and Johanna breaks the news that she has to leave the island. Ailsa’s father, an offshore oil worker based in Aberdeen, has been injured in a rig accident.
“I’m so sorry to let you down,” Johanna says. “But Ailsa needs to see her daddy.”
I reassure her, dishonestly, that I’ll be fine.
“Just go,” I say.
I call Gordon Nesbitt, asking for help. As I feared, he cites financial constraints.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to go it alone, Mhairi. Don’t worry. I’m certain you can do it.”
I envy his certainty.
Niall says he would help out but he is leaving tomorrow for a long-planned trip with his boyfriend; a supply teacher from the mainland is booked to cover at the school for the week.
“I can’t undo the arrangements now. It’s a family obligation, took months to clear with the school board. I’d let too many people down if I cancelled,” he says.
Now I’m really alone.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be okay…” I say, lying for the second time t
hat day. “Where are you going anyway?”
“New York.”
New York! My home! Familiar setting of my triumphs and tragedies; Agnes’s birth, friendships, purposeful work, love, and the death of love. I’m felled by an irrational sense of injustice, that he should be going there and I should be stranded here.
“Take me with you,” I say, mocking my real desperation.
He laughs.
“We’ll be back on Sunday week. You can hold on till then. We’ll both do whatever we can. I really want you to meet him, anyway.”
I go home to an empty house. Tonight, Agnes is having a sleepover at the McAllisters’ before Ailsa and Johanna catch the morning ferry to the mainland. Will both girls talk of their fathers, I wonder? What secrets do they share? I hope they don’t talk of their mothers. In any maternity duel, Johanna would win hands down.
I’ve done a bit of nurturing, sure, but not always to Agnes’s advantage. I mothered Marco after a fashion, until we both tired of the arrangement, and I mothered Pascal when he was going through his crisis; I might as well have been Pascal’s mother for all the sexual gratification I was getting. When he told me about his money worries, I paid his rent that month (and the next) and also gave him money to buy food, see off his creditors and get round town. He accepted my offer with extravagant gratitude, told me he adored me, couldn’t do without me, without my life force and my energy and our ancient spiritual connection, and in the early hours of the morning, as dawn broke over the Manhattan skyline, in the cavernous gloom of his apartment, we made love for the first time in weeks. There wasn’t the same savage desire or disabling release but it was tender and honest, or so I thought. Blinded by need, I knew as much as Lilias Hogg about honesty.
She finally found the truth about her lover in a letter; I found it, five weeks after I’d bailed him out, in a gum wrapper. I’d come round to tell him, in the nicest possible way, that our relationship was over. I spared him the announcement that Marco and I were back together, instead wheeling out the usual kindly lies—I need space; it’s not you, it’s me; I’m just not ready. He took the news annoyingly well. Then I went to the bathroom and found the charred gum wrapper resting by the sink. Next to it was the empty casing of a ballpoint pen. Of course. It made sense straight away. Heroin. He’d been smoking it; chasing the dragon. Pascal, my so-called lover, ex-lover, was a junkie. And cool, experienced older woman that I was, I’d never even noticed. Now I understood the crashed libido, the hacking cough, the poor health, the lethargy (he was high, not depressed), the crankiness (he was waiting to get high). Now I understood the money. I’d been subsidising his addiction.
It was “only a small habit,” Pascal told me.
“No more than a bag a day. No big deal,” he said.
Neither was the money I’d lent him to finance this insignificant peccadillo, he insisted, suggesting that there was something vulgar in my line of questioning.
“Look, if it’s money you’re worrying about,” he said, “my folks will give me a cash advance. I don’t like asking them—they’re so anal about money—so I thought it would be easier to borrow from you. A friend. At least I thought you were a friend.”
Now, incredibly, he was sulking.
“Did you use needles?” I asked coldly.
“Oh, so you want all the gory details, huh?”
“I’m asking again—did you use needles?”
He turned away before conceding an answer, defiant as a bratty teen.
“I had a little spike now and again. So what?”
“So what? I’ll tell you so what—how about HIV, for starters? Or hepatitis?”
He was indignant.
“I’m not some street junkie. It wasn’t that often. I used clean equipment. From trusted friends.”
“Trusted friends. Like me you mean? Friends you lie to? Steal from? Those kind of friends?”
He was kidding himself, with his little habit, his trusted friends. But how had he concealed the track marks on his arms?
Then I realised. I hadn’t seen him fully naked, in daylight, for two months. He may have been kidding himself, but in my rush for revenge and eagerness for intimacy, I had cast this empty, pretty boy in a role he could never play. I was the real sucker.
Eariwigged oan a Gullion
Sidhe, sidhe, whit are yer purls?
Haw gless, kelpie. Why dae ye gowk at them?
Gie thaim me.
Naw.
Gie thaim me. Gie thaim me.
Naw.
Then Ah wull yowt aw nicht in the coolks,
crooch in the crochan an yowt fur them.
Kelpie, why dae ye loue them sae?
They are better than starns or wattir,
Better than mirkest nicht’s brichtest gleed,
Better than any loon’s bonnie dauchter
Yer haw gless purls oan a siller threid.
Wheesht. Ah sniggt them oot the muin.
Gie me yer purls, Ah wint them.
Naw.
Ah wull yowt in the jubest hoob
Fur yer haw gless purls, Ah loue them sae.
Gie thaim me. Gie thaim.
Naw.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Harold Monro, 1974*
* * *
* From Kowk in the Kaleyard, Virr Press, 1975. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
The island’s fishermen were, by the mid 1970s, becoming “as obsolete as the old farm horses,” wrote McWatt in The Fascaray Compendium. He also compared them to the “purefinders who, in the nineteenth century, scoured the banks of city waterways for dog excrement, which they sold to the leather-tanning industry. Mechanisation saw off the horses—the infernal noise of Tam Macpherson’s first tractor engine at Balnasaig was their death knell—just as changes in the tanning process, and the first stirrings of the hygiene movement, put the purefinders out of business. It is the urge to modernise, backed by government grants, that has done for Fascaray’s fishermen.”
Loans were given to upgrade the UK’s fishing fleet and, inevitably, as McWatt wrote ruefully, “micht was richt.” Only the big companies benefitted and gradually the steam-driven wooden trawlers were replaced by hulking steel vessels with sophisticated electronics systems. Ships owned and crewed by Englishmen and foreigners began to loiter brazenly in the bay. What chance had Fascaray’s little boats, minnows guided by native guile and serendipity, against these gargantuan whales with echo-sounders capable of pinpointing the slightest movement of a distant shoal of fish?
The three-mile limit was forgotten, quotas were brought in and local marine traditions gradually eroded. Soon, with a new fisheries policy imposed by Britain’s recent entry to the European Common Market, the old way of life, governed by tides and seasons, by an instinctive respect for the capricious power of the sea, would vanish. Young men had to go to the mainland to join the big lads on the big ships or find some other means of earning money. Too often, defeated, they turned to the “broo”—social security—and took their consolations at Finnverinnity Inn where, in bitterest of ironies, the day trippers and weekenders from the mainland and the south would sit in their fishermen’s sweaters singing sea shanties.
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Lilias’s bright pluck was draining away. “I’m sick, Grigor. And afraid,” she wrote in June 1975. “The swallae has done for me. Uisge beatha, the water of life, could turn out to be my water of death.”
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Whan Ye’re Auld
Whan ye’re an auld grey bauchle doverin ower,
An noddin by the gleed, tak doon this beuk,
An huilie read, an dwaum o the saft luik
Your een had wanst, an o their sheddas deep;
Hou mony loued yer glisks, ye gledsome doll,
An loued yer brawness wi loue fause or leal;
But wan man loued yer douce stravaigin saul
An loued your coupon, f
lochtersome or dule.
An bouin doon forby the glowin gleed,
Souch, a wee bit oorie, hou loue fled
An spanged onwart the braes abuin,
An dernt his gizz amang a thrang o starns.
—Grigor McWatt, efter W. B. Yeats, 1975*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
29 November 2014
As Lilias waned, Grigor waxed. His public profile was growing, largely due to his song, which had recently been recorded in a shouted, satirical version by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, whose lead guitarist wore full-face white make-up—“Like that French fool Marcel Marceau,” wrote a contemptuous McWatt. But there were no financial penalties for satire and the record appeared in the singles Top 50 charts, bringing in more cash to Calasay and generating a new interest in McWatt’s writing.
In the evening, after a day of physical labour at the museum broken only by another fruitless online search for Jean, I put the Alex Harvey track on in the kitchen while I make dinner. Agnes gets up from her chair, throwing out her arms, and pirouettes manically around the table, laughing and shouting along with the chorus.
“Hey,” she says, breathless when it’s over, “I kind of like that. Maybe the song’s growing on me?”
She goes to Skype her father in the sitting room while, in the kitchen, I put on Alex Harvey again—his 1973 album, Framed—at full volume and clear away the dishes. Marco might hear the background blare and wonder what the hell is going on. “Giddy Up a Ding Dong.” Improbably, many years ago, in another universe, Dolores Gallagher and Dougal McPhail might have had their first dance to this crazy music at Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow. It’s an unsettling thought.
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