Two weeks later, on 23 May, she wrote again to Grigor: “Your Flooer is not just sick now. She’s blown and blasted, a rank weed. Destitute.”
Not so destitute that she had given up entirely on the possibility of love, or the comforts of sex and affection. She resumed her affair with Archie Aitken, who was by then drinking heavily himself and remained unhappily married to Meg, the short-tempered university librarian.
Reeling from this close attention to someone else’s domestic disasters, I hear a gentle knock at the door. I have a visitor. Surely everyone is up the road at the ceilidh. It’s Margaret Mackenzie, sheepishly holding a plastic grocery bag.
“I’ve something for you,” she says, reaching into the bag. “For the museum.”
She hands over a brown paper package. It’s surprisingly heavy. I unwrap it and inside is an irregular rectangle of red and black metal, embossed with letters and a Roman numeral. E II R.
“It’s from the old pillar box, outside the shop. The one he blew up. Or they said he blew it up. McWatt. If you had any interest in it…?”
She smiles uncertainly.
I examine it more closely.
“My grandfather, Donald John the Shop,” she continues hesitantly, “retrieved it the day after the explosion and gave it to my father. After he died on the Morag May it was passed on to me. But if it’s no use to you…”
I turn it over in my hands. It’s a curio. Part of the island story. Following the independence referendum, it has some topicality and would make a good illustrative footnote to Minka Redpath’s timeline.
“We can definitely find a place for it,” I say. “Thank you.”
More valuable to me than this sixty-year-old chunk of shrapnel is the fact that Margaret Mackenzie, my erstwhile stalker, is here in my home and bears no ill will towards me. In fact she wants to help.
“If there’s anything I can do,” she says. “It’s just what the island needs, the museum. There’s so much history in a place like this and if we’re not careful it’ll be forgotten. I’ve seen you working so hard at it. Late into the night.”
I thank her.
As she steps out into the night, bagpipe music, a wild reel, drifts down from the village hall.
“Aren’t you going to the ceilidh?” I ask.
She laughs.
“Och, I’m no really one for the dancing.”
Me neither. Chastened—another case of serious misreading on my part; I’m beginning to wonder if I’m emotionally dyslexic—I get back to the certainties of work and to the unfolding catastrophe of Lilias’s life.
—
“Would you believe it?” Lilias wrote to Grigor. “The Flooer o Rose Street is now a kept woman, une grande horizontale. I’m rather taking to it. Archie’s a funny fellow, carnaptious and daft with jealousy in drink, but it’s a nice change to be the object of, rather than consumed by, desperate passion.”
Aitken had had some financial success co-writing a TV detective series and he set Lilias up in a bedsit round the corner from his house by the Union Canal.
“Note the new lodgings—5a Rope Walk. Smart address, don’t you think?” Lilias wrote. “Perfect for a hangman, or a suicide. In fact you’d be spoiled for choice as a suicide. What’s it to be? The canal or the noose?”
Her letters fill me once more with a creeping sadness. All her life Lilias Hogg saw love where there was none and then, too late, realised her mistake.
I got out just in time. In a fever of passion I bloomed under the intensity of Pascal’s gaze. Only later did I realise he had been staring into my eyes like Narcissus, admiring his own reflection.
Fareweel Fause Loue
Fareweel, fause loue, the howdie o aw whids,
A deidly fae an enemy tae roo,
An eelist loon frae wham aw braibit flaws,
A bastart qued, a tirran birsie baest,
A miskennt paith, a kirk that’s fu o traison,
In aw pasments thrawartlie untae rizzon.
A pushion sarpent happit ower wi flooers,
Mither o souchs an murtherer o saucht,
A sea o grothoes draikin dreichest shours
Bedewing ilka waeful dool that cooers;
A school o slig, a mash o joukerie,
A gowden cleek that hauns a pushiont bait.
Syne yer flums ma callant days begowkt,
An fer ma fegs, unthankitness airts oot,
An syne Ah’ve swithered oan the cutty-stool,
An pruived masel tae aw wha ken a fool,
Fause loue, ettlins an puchritud, adieu,
Deid is the ruit where whigmaleeries grew.
—Grigor McWatt, efter Walter Raleigh, 1980*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
Within a year, Lilias was hospitalised again after a series of falls. She was referred to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed depression as well as alcoholism and prescribed electroconvulsive therapy.
“They’re not sure how it works,” she wrote to McWatt, mustering some of her old cheer after her first session, “but apparently it’s like taking a bowl of porridge, throwing it in the air and seeing where it falls. The hope is the porridge—the brain—lands in such a way that the whole arrangement becomes more congenial. Sunny side up. It seems to work, for a week or two at least, though the memory’s shot.”
She had broken acrimoniously with Aitken after another drunken row. His marriage was back on—he had been diagnosed with kidney disease and his wife Meg was a more capable nursemaid, and certainly a better housekeeper, than Lilias. Meg would also be harder to shake off. Lilias was homeless again and her parents told her they were too old to cope with the burden of her illness and would not be able to offer her a room.
“As if my illness was their burden,” she wrote.
Her sister Dolina, who had “made a good marriage and moved to the prosperous south neuk of Glasgow” was, according to Lilias, “too dour and nebby, too plain embarrassed, to care for her troublesome older sister.”
Edinburgh social services found Lilias digs in Marchmont—“awfie clatty, even for me,” she told Grigor, and, encouraged by a hospital art therapist, she took up painting, covering random pages of old newspapers with smears and daubs of colour. “Mixed media,” was how she described this new enthusiasm in perky letters to Grigor. She sent him an early effort rolled in a cardboard tube, a series of khaki streaks with an emerald swirl painted on the classified ads section of the Scotsman. Island Idyll, she called it.
McWatt was not persuaded. In a letter to Willie McCracken, McWatt wrote: “the painting looked like something she’d cleaned her brushes on—a dispiriting mess. Like her flat. Like Lilias herself, alas.” To her, though, he dissembled. “I always knew you were an artist,” he wrote. “Stick at it.”
But her capacity for adhesiveness was limited. What she did “stick at” was the drink. Although the old crowd of poets had scattered—those who’d survived had become bored by the same old talk and the same old hangovers—and although she was intermittently barred by landlords weary of the sporadic tears and the shouting, Lilias couldn’t keep away from the pubs of Rose Street. Grigor, visiting the city in the winter of 1980, was said to have exited Menzies’ swiftly one Saturday night when she stumbled in, singing. But they continued to exchange letters.
“It seems I have been summoned all along not by Apollo, dreamboat god of poetry, but old red-nosed leering Dionysius, god of bevvy,” Lilias wrote. “And I, his polyneuropathic nymph, limp gamely after him.”
The new landlord of Menzies’, an ex-soldier from Yorkshire, finally lost his patience and called the police after Lilias took a walking stick to the pub jukebox. She was kept in a cell overnight and appeared in court the following morning charged with vandalism. Grigor paid the fine.
“I tried to explain to them,” she wrote. “I was defending the honour of a dear friend and great poet.”
Befor
e she “whacked the lights out of the jukebox,” it had been playing Alex Harvey’s version of “Hame tae Fascaray.”
McCracken, who had moved to the Borders where he was running a bookshop, found himself in Edinburgh on business in late 1981 and called round to see Lilias. “I knocked on the basement door and there was no answer. I waited five minutes then, thinking no one was in, I walked back up the steps to the street with—I’m ashamed to admit—a sense of relief. It was then I heard the door below open and saw a stooped old woman looking out, grey hair awry, leaning on a Zimmer frame. I was about to apologise and say I had the wrong address. And then I realised. It was Lilias.” She had just turned forty.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Bygane Times
Bygane times when Ah loued ye,
Then Ah wis kennt as braw
An they blethered o my guidness
An spake o me wi awe.
Noo the whigmaleerie’s ower,
An naethin bides the same,
An aw aroon they glower,
An there’s anely me tae blame.
—Grigor McWatt, efter A. E. Housman, 1985*
* * *
* From Wappenshaw, Virr Press, 1986. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
McWatt found a new outlet for his energies closer to home when he launched a campaign against the Conservative government’s forestry policy, which was giving grants in the form of tax concessions to investors wishing to plant tracts of fast-growing Sitka and lodgepole pines. Among these investors was Torquil Mere-Stratton, Lord Montfitchett and Laird of Fascaray, and a consortium of his business associates, who brought in English contractors to clear vast tracts of bracken and heather in Finnverinnity Glen and plant a monolithic twelve-acre block of pine trees.
The consortium also had designs on Mammor moor as a suitable site for a lucrative plantation. “It is nothing less than desecration of our land by our Westminster rulers and their cronies, motivated by pure greed,” McWatt wrote in “Frae Mambeag Brae” in 1982. “The moorland west of Beinn Mammor is one of the largest areas of blanket bog in the world, with a unique ecosystem of plants, insect and bird life. It is essential to sustain populations of Arctic skua, dunlin, greenshank, golden plover and other endangered birds. And the laird and his pals would render this landscape dark and silent, sealing it forever under acres of toxic Axminster, carpeting it with those alien, light-excluding nutrient-leeching trees which are of no interest to anyone except tax evaders.”
McWatt’s campaign was backed by most islanders, including the Balnasaig Seekers, although, as he pointed out in “Frae Mambeag Brae,” the Seekers’ support was “somewhat at odds with their decision two years ago to cut down a magnificent stand of Caledonian pines to facilitate the landing of flying saucers.”
The coalition between the islanders and incomers would always be uneasy, but the campaign against the pine plantations proved to be the first salvo in the battle for the soul of Fascaray.
Izzy Wallop, the former administrator at Balnasaig Lodge who had been exiled from the Seekers after her affair with Neville Booth, was now renting Donald and Morag MacEwan’s old cottage in Finnverinnity. She had, according to McWatt in the Compendium, “a freakish appetite for the tedium and intrigue of committee meetings, a small private income and time on her hands,” and nominated herself for the post of secretary of the newly established Isle of Fascaray Residents’ Association.
There were murmurs of dissent among indigenous islanders, echoed by recently settled Fascaradians from mainland Scotland: Wallop was a blow-in, another “white settler,” and an English one at that. But, in her favour, she had no difficulty expressing her views at length in public and seemed to enjoy regular correspondence with Auchwinnie Council, not just about pine plantations but also about rubbish disposal, the need for better access to medical services and for adequate housing, plumbing and sewage systems. Plus which, no one else was interested in taking on the job.
“Any army must accept the assistance of mercenaries,” wrote McWatt in a letter to Lilias dated June 1983, “though we are not obliged to welcome them warmly. Izzy Wallop is a bore, and an English bore at that. But for the moment, as secretary of the Isle of Fascaray Residents’ Association, she is our bore and the hope is that she might bore Auchwinnie Council into submission.”
Within nine months, following representations to Auchwinnie and Westminster—the local Liberal Democrat MP backed his island constituents—and many passionate columns by Grigor McWatt in the Auchwinnie Pibroch, Mammor bog was declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest, along with Calasay and Doonmara cliffs. Montfitchett’s plan for the Mammor pine plantation was scrapped.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
Our woods are so much part of our psyche that the names of the letters of the Gaelic alphabet are taken from trees.
ailm elm
beith white birch
coll hazel
dair oak
eadha aspen
feàrn alder
gort ivy
h-Uath hawthorn
iogh yew
luis rowan
muin vine
nuin ash
oir spindle
peith downy birch
ruis elder
suil willow
teine furze
ura heather
INVENTORY OF THE NATIVE TREES OF FASCARAY, WITH LATIN, SCOTS AND GAELIC NAMES
birch Betula, birk, beith
Caledonian pine Pinus sylvestrus, bunnet fir
hazel Corylus, calltuinn, hizzle, coll
mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia, rowan, luis
oak Quercus, darach, aik, dair
INVENTORY OF THE ALIEN SPECIES INTRODUCED TO FASCARAY BY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH “PLANTING LAIRDS” AND THEIR TWENTIETH-CENTURY EQUIVALENTS
norway spruce Picea abies
Sitka spruce Pinus sitchensis
Percentage of Fascaray’s land covered by native trees in the seventeenth century: 50
Percentage of Fascaray’s land covered by native trees in 1975: 5
Number of insect species supported by native trees: 423
Number of insect species supported by introduced trees: 17
—Grigor McWatt, 1983, The Fascaray Compendium
1 December 2014
My work, the Zen pleasures of systemisation, used to keep me going when all else was falling apart but now, with Johanna’s departure, my editor at Thackeray pressing for more pages of A Granite Ballad, McWatt’s Jean proving so elusory that I’m beginning to wonder whether she was a fictional construct devised to keep Lilias at bay, and the deadline for the museum opening looming, work seems to be the only problem in town.
Today I’m sustained by two things—Agnes, and the decency of strangers. For strangers, read Margaret Mackenzie. This morning she came into my office with a tin of scones she’d baked for us. I showed her around the museum, such as it is. The MacRaes’ junk has been cleared and the cobwebs have been removed but the whole place needs to be cleaned, swept and painted and I’ve yet to fill the clusters of empty display cabinets. There are still letters to go through, choices to be made. Minka Redpath’s frieze is up round the walls and has been wired in, its LED lights winking scornfully at me over significant dates, demanding attention, and the “Hame tae Fascaray” jukebox has been delivered but lingers in a corner, still partially wrapped. The museum now looks dauntingly large, its emptiness a mockery of my own mental void. But Margaret is enthusiastic.
“You’ve done wonders!” she says. “And all on your own.”
“Johanna did her share, before she went away. And Niall Kennedy has been great.”
“But Niall’s away too. You can’t do all this by yourself. You need some help.”
I feel like weeping. Instead I shrug and tell her I’ll be fine. She leave
s and I get back to the letters, attempting to immerse myself in someone else’s problems.
—
Another begging letter to McWatt from Lilias, dated June 1985. She signs off with a tercet that could be read as an intimation of approaching death, or a suicide threat.
If Ah maun dee,
I wull meet mirkness as a quine
An tak her tae ma bosie.
Emotional blackmail was, I guess, the only hand she had left to play.
Pascal too. He proved to be a grandmaster at it. He finally took the blood tests, on condition that I paid for them, and when I phoned him from the street outside our apartment to hear the results he was angry. He was angry.
“You’ve put me through this,” he said. “What do you want to hear? No HIV? That’s what they said. Hepatitis though. Check. Hepatitis C. I got that one. Liver disease. Cancer. Death. Happy now?”
As it happens, I wasn’t. A week before I learned the truth about Pascal, Marco and I had negotiated an uneasy peace. He’d wanted another chance.
He didn’t want to know about my affair.
“Spare me the details. We both know it means nothing, just as my dumb interlude with Kate meant nothing. We’re the main event. You, me and Agnes. Let’s wipe the slate clean and start over.”
He had even used the M-word.
“Stop right there,” I said, palm out like a traffic cop. “I absolutely rule out make-up nuptials. Not now. Not ever.”
Sex, though, was another matter.
I was vulnerable. My financial rescue package for Pascal had failed to rescue our physical relationship. It had been a while. Marco and I raced to the sack and for a couple of heady nights I cheated on my boyfriend with my ex, before I returned to Pascal’s apartment, intending to let him down gently, and found the scorched foil. More terrifying than the possibility that I’d contracted the virus myself was the thought that, since my reconciliation with Marco, I could have passed it on to him. I could orphan our daughter.
Hame Page 35
