The Loud Halo

by Lillian Beckwith

  ‘That’s beer!’ he accused. ‘I thought you didn’t like it?’

  ‘I don’t like to drink it,’ I said. ‘But I do sometimes use it in sauces.’

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy beer like that,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Now if it was whisky …’

  ‘There you go again,’ I taunted. ‘You’re obsessed with whisky.’

  ‘No, not me,’ he denied. ‘I like to have a good drink when I have one but that’s only when I have the money. I’m not like these folks from Rudha that has a bottle sent out on the bus two or three times every week.’

  ‘Tell me, Erchy,’ I asked, for he had touched on a subject that had been puzzling me for a long time, ‘how do they manage to afford bottles of whisky two or three times a week? They’re only crofters and some of them even draw Public Assistance, yet they seem to be able to buy drink and cigarettes as much as ever they want to. They don’t seem to go short of anything.’

  ‘No, an’ I’m damty sure they never will,’ said Erchy, looking mysterious.

  ‘What’s their secret?’ I cajoled.

  ‘Well, it was durin’ the war,’ Erchy began. ‘There must have been a big wreck some place out here an’ there was lots of stuff came ashore one night. The Rudha folks got word of it an’ they was all waitin’ to grab it. Trunks packed with money, folks say there was, an’ they hid it all away. There was plenty of corpses too, scattered all over the shore, so when they’d taken as much stuff as they wanted for themselves the Rudha people told us an’ then they told the pollis. Ach, it was a dirty trick,’ said Erchy with disgust creeping into his tones. ‘Anyway, the pollis didn’t come out straight away so as soon as it got dark me an’ Tearlach went over there to see would we find anythin’. All we found was bolls of flour, plenty of them, and corpses, dozens of them too, all over the shore. An’ the moon was shinin’ on them so that they gleamed an’ the tide was washin’ round some of them makin’ their limbs move so that you’d think they were tryin’ to get up. God! We got that scared we just lifted a boll of flour on to each other’s back an’ we ran home with it as fast as we could go. Indeed I don’t believe we stopped for breath until we got to within sight of Anna’s house, an’ we never went back there neither.’

  The path to Rudha was four miles of narrow sheep track along the shoulder of the hill, below which the land slid steeply to the jagged rocks of the shore. Even in broad daylight the uninitiated take one look and either turn back or tackle it quakingly on all fours.

  ‘An then the pollis came,’ continued Erchy, ‘an’ they took away the corpses but they left the bolls of flour. The rest of the folks here just went then and helped themselves.’ He sighed. ‘That’s all Bruach ever got out of it—a few bolls of flour, except for Tearlach’s dog that got a good feed off one of the legs of the corpses,’ he added reflectively.

  I put on the tablecloth. ‘Your mother will be giving you up for lost,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, without much interest and, still havering in the doorway, he turned to look out into the night. ‘Did Hector tell you he has a buyer for his boat?’ he asked over his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ I replied with some surprise. ‘Has he really? Who?’

  ‘Ach, some fellow down Oban way, I believe,’ answered Erchy, turning round again and leaning against the edge of the door. ‘He’s asked me will I sail down there with him on Friday if the weather stays this way.’

  ‘And are you going?’

  ‘Aye. I might just as well. Seein’ we’re goin’ we’re takin’ Johnny Comic to the dentist. The poor man’s near crazy with the toothache.’

  ‘That’s rather a job to tackle, isn’t it?’ I asked. ‘Johnny’s never been away from here before, has he?’

  ‘No, an’ he’s that scared of comin’ with us I belive we’ll have to put a rope on him first.’

  ‘You’ll never get him into the dentist’s chair,’ I warned, suspecting that Johnny’s one idea would be to play hide-and-seek with his companions until they could delay their return no longer.

  ‘Ach, Tom-Tom’s comin’ to hold him,’ said Erchy. ‘An’ there’ll be the two of us if we’re needed.’ I stared at him in surprise. ‘Aye, you can look like that,’ he told me, ‘but gentle as Johnny is he’s a strong man when it comes to strugglin’ an’ he’ll struggle well enough if he thinks he’s goin’ to have somethin’ done to him.’ He edged half of himself outside the door and started to pull it to behind him. ‘Is there anythin’ you’ll be wantin’ us to bring back for you? We’ll likely be doin’ some shoppin’.’

  There was always at the back of my mind a list of things which I intended to ask people to get for me should there be some prospect of their visiting the mainland. Now, confronted with Erchy’s sudden question, I could recall only the relatively unimportant fact that when the previous autumn I had wanted to make use of some small green tomatoes—the grudging produce of a dozen troublesomely acquired and carefully nurtured plants—I had no vinegar to make them into chutney. It was no use even asking the grocer if he stocked it, for the crofters though lavish in their use of salt were as yet not conditioned to, or perhaps aware of, the other condiments. One never saw a bottle of sauce on a Bruach table.

  ‘Would you bring me a bottle of vinegar?’ I asked, still vainly struggling to recall some more needful item on my mental list.

  ‘Vinegar?’ repeated Erchy in a puzzled voice, and then, as enlightenment slowly dawned, he went on: ‘Aye, I mind now what you mean. Vinegar’s the stuff they put on chips in Glasgow, isn’t it?’

  He was outside the door by now and letting in a gently chill breeze that was bringing up the gooseflesh on my sun-tanned arms.

  ‘Hector’s supposed to be bringin’ back a few chickens for Morag,’ he informed me. ‘You’ll not be wantin’ any yourself, will you?’

  ‘That is a good idea,’ I responded with enthusiasm. The only chickens one could get in Bruach were the hard progeny of the inveterate fowls that scratched around every house and corn-stack, flaunting their mongrel feathers with the aplomb of peasants attired in their national costume. I had once tried to get pure-bred chickens sent up to me simply to find out if they laid better, but the length of the train journey coupled with the capriciousness of the local carrier had ensured that none of the chickens had survived. I asked Erchy to bring me a dozen day-old chicks—Black Leghorns if they were available.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he promised, and then perhaps because he remembered he was going in a leaky old boat on an unpredictable sea, or perhaps because he called a previous experience of high life in Oban, he added a cautionary, ‘If the Lord spares me.’ He sounded a trifle embarrassed. ‘I’m away. Good night,’ he called, and shut the door.

  ‘Good night!’ I rejoined and sat down at last to eat my supper.

  There was a clouding over of the sky in the late afternoon of the following day and the next morning the sun, which had shone unrestrainedly for so long, only cocked a sleepy eye before retiring beneath a canopy of grey cloud. It looked as if the spell of fine weather was coming to an end. Friday morning dawned wet and windy with the sea flouncing angrily against the rocks and with grey sweeps of rain being hurried across the bay. When I went up to the village shop to buy paraffin I espied Erchy, Hector and Tom-Tom leaning in various attitudes of disconsolation against the gable of the latter’s house. All were gazing with equal gloom at Wayfarer who was plunging and rearing at her mooring.

  ‘You’re not going off today, then?’ I observed.

  ‘No damty fear,’ replied Erchy. ‘That sea is goin’ to get bigger before it gets smaller.’

  ‘There’s some big enough lumps out there already,’ said Tom-Tom. ‘I don’t fancy it myself.’

  ‘We’re safer where we are,’ agreed Hector with glum acceptance of the situation.

  ‘Well, here’s one who’s mighty pleased we’re not settin’ foot on the sea,’ said Erchy with a wink and a nod towards a hunched figure which squatted miserably beside him. ‘Is that not so, Johnny?�
�� he shouted, and in answer the figure raised a face that would normally be described as being of ‘ashen hue’. However, when one has become a burner of peat as opposed to coal it is a description one can no longer use, for ‘ashen’ would imply the complexion of a Red Indian.

  ‘Poor Johnny Comic,’ I said. ‘Is his toothache still as bad as ever?’

  ‘No,’ denied Erchy. ‘You cannot have toothache an’ be scared out of your life at the same time. You can only feel one or the other.’

  We were joined by Morag who was also on her way to get paraffin.

  ‘So my brave boys has decided it’s too rough for them,’ she said by way of greeting, and the men turned away, discomfited by the derision in her voice. I picked up my can and moved away. Morag walked alongside me, a smug grin on her face.

  ‘It doesn’t look very nice out there, does it?’ I remarked.

  ‘Ach,’ she said disdainfully. ‘They’re not much of sailors nowadays. I’ve seen my father go out in seas three times as big as I’m seein’ out there an’ their boats not half the size either.’ She turned and gestured towards the bay. ‘I’ve known myself be out in more sea than there is now.’

  ‘Morag,’ I demanded. ‘Have you ever been out in a sea big enough to frighten you?’

  ‘Only once that I mind,’ she confessed with a slight grimace of shame.

  ‘Was it rough then?’

  ‘Ach, it was all yon big green beasts that you can see through. Comin’ straight at us they was till you thought with every one of them that the boat would never ride the next. My father made me lie down under one of the thwarts so that I wouldn’t get thrown out.’ She sighed. ‘Aye, we were caught badly that day an’ I believe I was as frightened as I’ve ever been. Mind you,’ she added hastily, ‘frightened though I was, I was never what you’d call inebriated with fear.’ She chuckled. ‘I was younger then, though, an’ I daresay I hadn’t as much sense as I have now.’

  With our cans filled with paraffin we started off for home again, stopping frequently for me to change my can from one aching arm to the other. Morag, who was carrying twice the amount of paraffin, did not put hers down for an instant and only watched my struggles with a tolerant smile. Hector and Erchy were still propping up the end of Tom-Tom’s house but by this time they had been joined by Old Murdoch and Yawn who had doubtless come to offer cautionary advice although at this moment they were engaged in conversation with a young girl who stood, slim and straight, between the two bent old men, like an ‘I’ in parenthesis.

  ‘Yon’s the lassie that’s been stayin’ with Mary Ann over the last few days,’ said Morag in a low voice. ‘You’ll have seen her likely?’

  ‘Only in the distance,’ I admitted.

  ‘She was askin’ Hector last night would she get back to the mainland with him today an’ he had to promise her he’d take her.’

  ‘I should jolly well think he would have promised,’ I muttered as we drew closer. She was quite the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, with huge brown, lustrous eyes, dark curly hair, exquisitely fine bones and a skin of such golden-ness that it looked on this dull day as though it was exuding sunshine. Even I felt momentarily stunned by her appearance. What she did to men I could only guess.

  ‘But, Hector,’ she was saying with wheedling fretfulness as we approached, ‘you promised you’d take me. I would have gone on the bus this morning and caught the ferry if I’d thought your boat wouldn’t be going. I’ve simply got to be back in the office in London on Monday morning or I’ll get the sack.’

  Hector only hunched his shoulders harder against the wall and looked sulky.

  ‘Ach, you’ll not get the sack,’ consoled Erchy. ‘Tell them you got held up by the storm an’ it’ll be all right.’

  ‘I can’t tell them that,’ she retorted.

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Erchy.

  ‘They wouldn’t understand.’

  Erchy grunted his scepticism.

  ‘It’ll maybe get a bit calmer by this evening yet,’ Yawn prophesied, and the girl who, despite the fact that her teeth were chattering, still managed to look ravishing, brightened up visibly.

  ‘Will you take me across this evening then, if it gets calm?’ she coaxed, with a look at the men that should have sent them hurrying to launch any number of boats.

  ‘Ach, no,’ said the usually impressionable Hector, shuffling uncomfortably. ‘Tse tide will be all wrong by tsis evenin’ for gettin’ the dinghy off the shore.’

  The girl’s expression as she turned to me was a mixture of chagrin and disbelief.

  ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘They don’t seem to understand how terribly important it is for me to get back. It’s a new job I’ve landed—quite a good one and I wasn’t really due a holiday yet but they kindly let me have these few days. Will you try to explain to Hector for me?’

  I shook my head, understanding her frustration but by now almost as out of touch with her world as were the rest of the group.

  ‘Well,’ said Erchy with decision. ‘You say you cannot get back to London by Monday morning unless you leave here tonight. An’ you cannot leave here tonight so you cannot do anythin’ else but wait.’

  ‘They’ll not take it so badly if you just explain to them that it was the storm that kept you back,’ soothed Yawn. ‘An’ the tide,’ he added as an afterthought.

  The lassie drooped with dejection. ‘I’ve told you,’ she reiterated. ‘You can’t explain to people in London about things like that. They’ll never believe it,’ she finished with a grim smile.

  Yawn was visibly staggered. ‘They wouldn’t believe you?’ he demanded.

  The lassie shook her head.

  ‘Well, lassie,’ he advised her with great gravity, ‘I’m tellin’ you, you’d best never go back at all to a place like that. If they don’ understand about storms and tides and things they must be a lot of savages just.’

  ‘Miss Peckwitt and Morag! Is it yourselves?’ Tom-Tom’s wife appeared round the corner of the house. ‘Come away in now and take a fly cuppie with me. I have it ready.’

  We followed her inside, and the men, anxious to evade the lassie’s continued importunings, lumbered after us.

  ‘Honest to God,’ grumbled Erchy, as he seated himself on the bench. ‘Some people thinks it’s us that makes the weather.’

  ‘Aye, an’ tse tides,’ rejoined Hector. ‘Some of tsese folks tsat come in my boat, tsey say to me, “Can I leave tsis picnic basket,” or sometsing like tsat. “Will it be all right here on tse shore till we get back?” And tsen when I tell tsem no, tsey must take it up on tse rocks out of tse tide’s way, tsey tsink I’m not bein’ nice to tsem.’ He shook his head sadly.

  ‘It just seems as though they don’t understand about the tides,’ said Erchy wonderingly.

  ‘They know the theory but not the practice,’ I said. ‘They learn about tides ebbing and flowing but they’re not taught that this means the water is always moving up to or away from the actual bit of beach they’re sitting on.’

  Hector gazed at me with serious surprise. ‘Tsey shouldn’t need to be taught tsings as simple as tsat,’ he assured me. ‘Tsey didn’t teach ourselves.’

  As I drank my tea I studied Hector covertly, for I had just witnessed him do a thing which I had always thought him incapable of doing and that was to remain impervious to the charms of a young and beautiful girl. I was curious to know the reason for it.

  ‘Isn’t that lassie a beauty?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Eh?’ said Erchy stupidly.

  Tom-Tom’s wife thought for a moment. ‘I don’t believe she’s so bad at that,’ she conceded.

  Hector looked up from his tea. ‘Ach, what good is she when she’s tsat tsin you could use her for darnin’ a sock,’ he observed with a grin, and looked at the other men for confirmation.

  Tom-Tom’s wife, who had once been described to me as being ‘not fat but needin’ an awful lot of room when she sat down’, chuckled appreciatively. I stared at Hector. He had never struck me
as being particularly figure conscious when selecting his female companions. What then, I wondered, was there about this girl that he should find her so uninteresting?

  ‘She tsinks too much of herself, tsat one,’ he explained, as though I had asked the question aloud. ‘I was down on tse shore tse usser day,’ he went on, ‘and she comes along. She was after lifting tsese coloured stones from tse beach to take back wiss her and when she sees me she drops tse bag and she says: “Oh, Hector, I’m so glad I’ve met a big, strong man to carry my stones for me. Tsey’re awful heavy,” she says.’

  ‘An’ did you carry them for her?’ questioned Morag with a wink at me.

  ‘Indeed I did not,’ responded Hector. ‘I told her if she’d managed to carry tsem tsat far she must be stronger tsan she tsought she was, so she’d best carry tsem tse rest of tse way.’ His blue eyes were impish as he looked at each of us in turn, expecting our approval. ‘You know she was tsat vexed wiss me she hardly spoke to ms all tse way home.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I would have expected every man in the place to be following her. I’ll bet she’s used to plenty of attention in England.’

  ‘Well, she’ll no’ get much of it here,’ Erchy stated flatly.

  ‘And yet she’s what I’d describe as a real beauty queen,’ I mused.

  ‘I’m no’ seein’ it tsen,’ scoffed Hector. He took a noisy gulp of tea. ‘I believe she’s only one of tsese foreigners anyway and she’s queer.’ He frowned down at his cup. ‘I wouldn’t want to take anytsin’ to do wiss her anyway, for no religion has she at all but a bit of wood or stone.’

  All weekend the clouds raced greyly above a shaggy sea but on Monday night there seemed to be a promise of calm in the night sky and on Tuesday morning I woke without the sound of rain on my windows or the wind bullying the roof. In Bruach one’s life was so inextricably bound up with the weather that one got into the habit of waking with an ear cocked for the sound of wind much as, after an illness, one wakes to the expectation of pain. If there was no noise of storm in the morning one waited tensely, hesitating to believe the miracle and then when one had accepted it one would throw off the bedclothes and hasten to get started on the labours of a busy day.