‘It’s your home,’ he said gently. ‘Look where you want.’ He walked forward and picked up a canvas that was clearly influenced by the cubists. ‘Bunty hates this kind of thing,’ he laughed. ‘She’s a realist, you see, likes things to be as they are supposed to be, hates anything out of place.’
‘Like flying cockroaches and walking fish?’ Kathy said.
‘Aye. She told you that, did she? Our Rory is always writing home with stories he knows will make her grue, she kind of likes it in a funny way!’
‘And do you like the cubists?’
‘Och, it wasn’t about liking them,’ Angus replied. ‘It was about finding out how they did it. Once you know that, there’s no point in going on with it, is there?’
Kathy nodded, but she wasn’t sure she really understood. To have the time and opportunity to do something you liked and did supremely well, that seemed to her a perfectly happy way to live, but Angus loved the finding out, not the actual doing, and she wondered if there would be a time when his curiosity would have led him in every available direction. What then?
‘When I don’t have anything to find out,’ he said quietly, almost reading her thoughts, ‘that’s when I’ll turn up my toes.’
‘But all these things you have, the books, the musical instruments, the paintings, you must like them or you’d have sold them long ago.’
Angus shrugged again, turning his intense blue eyes on her, almost with disappointment.
‘Why would I bother?’ he asked. ‘Why would I waste time selling the damn things when I could be using it learning something else? They don’t matter, you see. As you said yourself, they’re things, and things only have the value you want to put on them. It’s knowledge that’s important, the true value is in the knowledge itself.’ Then he turned to leave, still knitting.
‘The pattern,’ Kathy said, indicating the work on his needles, ‘it’s really beautiful.’
‘Och, aye, I suppose it is,’ Angus replied, stopping and holding it up for examination. ‘It looks much harder than it is, it’s all in the tension really, and having an eye for what colours go together. It’s not like Aran, mind, you couldnae do this while you were reading a book, you have to keep an eye on it. It’s a bit like tapestry in that way.’
As he wandered off, she remembered the two carved trunks in the other room. ‘Can I ask you something?’
Angus turned to look at her. ‘Well?’
‘The two trunks. Did you make them too?’
‘Aye,’ he smiled. ‘Took me a bit of time too. That was one of my hardest jobs, but I have to say I was pleased with them,’ he chuckled quietly. ‘They’re for the Campbell woman and myself when the time comes.’
Kathy stared at him for a long moment before she understood, then she didn’t believe she did. ‘They’re not … you don’t mean…?’
‘Aye.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘They’re coffins. Did you not realise that?’
Kathy shook her head. He had made coffins for himself and Bunty!
‘Och,’ he said softly, ‘you’re not shocked are you?’
‘No, no …’ she lied, aware that her eyes were wide with shock.
‘I see that you are!’ he laughed. ‘It was something I wanted to try and I had to work so hard that I suppose my pride took over,’ he explained. ‘It seemed a good way of putting it to use. It’s all arranged. When the time comes they’re for Bunty and me, we’ll be cremated in them.’
Kathy was even more shocked than she had been. ‘You’re going to burn them? But they’re beautiful! All that work!’
‘Aye, but at the time I was learning an art,’ he explained again patiently. ‘And as I say, they’re only things, aren’t they?’
As he was talking she noticed that he was no longer looking as he knitted, and as he wandered off, leaving her to examine his past artistic experiments, she sensed that his Fair Isle period would shortly be drawing to a close too, Angus had already worked it out.
He was the most generous individual she had ever encountered. There she was, a stranger in his home, and a Lowlander at that, not a local, and fair enough, he needed her to keep an eye on Bunty, but he showed none of the irritation the elderly often feel when their routines are disrupted or their familiar territory invaded. In the evenings the three of them would sit together in the big room at the front of the house, Bunty doing a crossword and swearing at it in that gentle accent that sounded like a lullaby for a baby, or sewing, ‘Though no Campbell could ever sew as well as me,’ as Angus noted.
‘Shutup, you great fool!’ Bunty would reply.
‘If you have any problems with that crossword, just ask,’ he’d say. ‘You canny expect a Campbell to be literate after all.’
‘Hell,’ Bunty would say archly, ‘will freeze over before I ask for your help, Macdonald!’ and Angus would smile and turn back to what he was doing. He would sit by the big window in the gathering dusk, reading, or knitting, looking up contentedly every now and again to gaze over Loch Shiel, and Kathy would sit with him, a small table between them, sharing it all, and still he showed no resentment that she was intruding on his private, quiet moments.
‘The books,’ she said one night as they sat reading by the window. ‘They’re not “just things” then?’
It had been weeks since they had had that particular conversation, but Angus answered instantly. ‘No, no, of course not!’ he replied. ‘Books are different from everything else. Every time you read a book you find something new in the very same words, a book is never the same twice. You’re always learning with books, you never finish.’ He looked at the book open in front of her and smiled. ‘Sure, you know that already.’
She was learning from him too, she knew that just as surely. She had never met anyone she was more in tune with, they seemed to be naturally and instantly on the same wavelength. Whenever she encountered him about the house or on the hills outside, whenever they spoke, she felt a pang of excitement in the pit of her stomach. Angus excited her, his mind, his thoughts, the soft, gentle way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her. If she hadn’t known him, if she had seen him on the streets of Fort William, she knew she would’ve laughed at him, however quietly. She would’ve glanced at his kilt, the Tam-o’-Shanter with the enormous feather sitting on top of the long white hair and beard, and made a swift, superficial judgement that he was a bit weird; people did that all the time, of course, made swift, superficial judgements about each other. But now that she knew him, she realised how much she admired him. No, that wasn’t it. She loved this man. ‘He’s nearly eighty!’ her voice echoed in her mind. ‘You daft bugger, Kathy Kelly!’ and she laughed.
Angus looked up. ‘What?’ he asked.
She shook her head, still laughing, then to change the subject she said, ‘Nothing. Would you like a cup of tea?’
She loved watching the different lights flit across the loch, with the monument as the focal point. In the early morning there would sometimes be a purple-tinted haze, turning through the spectrum to gold as the sun slowly broke through. When a shaft of sunlight pierced the cloud, it would suddenly illuminate the green of the ferns and trees and the purple of the heather and thistles. Where light found rock high on the mountainsides, the seemingly flat surface would break into facets of light and shade, small crystals being uncovered as bright, silvery, reflective shards. It was like the magic painting books she remembered as a child, where one sweep of a water-laden brush replaced black and white with a few colours. The colours were never as vivid as you expected or wanted them to be, but that wasn’t the point, it was the magic of the thing that impressed you. But the magic colours uncovered on the hillsides by the shafts of light exceeded all your expectations, all your hopes, and then they exceeded themselves again next time. In the evening, with the last rays of the sun turning the waters of Loch Shiel orange, the deer would come down from the hills to graze in the silence. And there wasn’t a silence like it. It wasn’t simply an absence of noise; the silence itself could be heard,
it had its own sound. But it was a sound you didn’t hear exactly, you felt it somehow. Even when it rained there was a gentle, soft grey light about the place, and now and then a bright rainbow, with colours so vibrant that you couldn’t believe they hadn’t been painted on, would straddle the waters of the loch. There were times when it seemed too perfect, too picturesque, and then you remembered that Glenfinnan had stood here exactly like this, unchanged for hundreds of years, and even without the monument it had been naturally picturesque for thousands of years.
The monument, though, dated only from 1815. It was commissioned by a local landowner, Alexander Macdonald of Glenaladale, who, it was said, had been irked by the building of a monument to the English Admiral Nelson on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. A man who enjoyed life to excess and had a leaning towards the romantic and the theatrical, Alexander Macdonald decided that the sacrifice of the Highlanders in the Forty-Five should be honoured at Glenfinnan, though, as was his custom, he omitted to pay the architect, James Gillespie Graham, for his work on the tower. The monument commemorated the day when Prince Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, first raised the Jacobite banner on mainland soil, and proclaimed his exiled Catholic father James VIII of Scotland and III of England and Ireland. Thus the ill-fated rebellion of 1745 had been started, leading eight months later to Culloden and the decimation of the Highlands and the clan system. Kathy, sitting in companionable silence with Angus and Bunty during those evenings, devoured the books in Angus’s private library, discovering a history she hadn’t known existed, because Scottish schoolchildren were deliberately force-fed English history, presumably in case learning of the tragedies in their own country’s past would incite them to rebel again. And being so near to where it had actually started as she read, with living history just feet away in any direction, intensified the impact of what she was learning. Every day she walked on land the Jacobites had walked on, the Prince and his followers had arrived by boat on the loch she lived beside, and they had probably stopped to gaze at the perfection of the changing light playing on the water and the mountains, just as she did. The Prince and his party were rowed up Loch Shiel from Glenaladale on 19 August 1745, arriving at Glenfinnan after midday, and there the standard had been raised, exactly where, some said, Macdonald’s tower would be built seventy years later, or, according to others, on the hillside beyond, below Angus’s land, on Torr a Choit, Hill of the Boat, because it looked like an upturned boat.
If there is nothing Scots like better than romantic myth it is romantic myth that turns out tragically; if St Jude was indeed the patron saint of hopeless cases he must’ve been a Scot. And so the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed adventure would still be bringing tears to the eyes of Scots exiles across the world for generations, whether they knew the real story or not. Some of the finest Scottish songs were written in honour of Charlie and the Forty-Five, beautiful and haunting, as long as you didn’t stop to examine the futility, the tragedy and self-delusion of the events they commemorated. Kathy remembered singing in the school choir when she was a child. The song was ‘The Skye Boat Song’, much beloved of Catholic schools, since had the Stuart dynasty been re-established, Scotland would’ve become a Catholic country. There had been, she recalled, a great deal of effort put in to teaching the children to harmonise, and she had sung the descant, which seemed appropriate, given that she had felt out of tune her entire life. The Young Pretender, a tall, slim, handsome, bisexual Frenchman, drew support from the all-powerful clan chiefs, who pledged their subjects to the Jacobite cause, ordinary Highlanders obliged to die for their chiefs. And die they did, in great numbers, though worse was to come. The Prince escaped five months after Culloden, being conducted from one place of safety to another, often barely one step ahead of discovery and certain execution, and though he was a fugitive with the immense bounty of £30,000 on his head, he wasn’t betrayed. He returned to France by ship from Loch nan Uamh, Loch of the Caves, where he had landed fourteen months before, leaving ‘his’ people to face the terrors of the Duke of Cumberland’s army as it marched north bent on retribution, ‘Butcher Cumberland’ as he came to be known. Cumberland’s men, the very ones who, as Kathy remembered from her school trip, had suffered from vertigo as they marched through the mountains in search of Highland men, women and children to kill. They systematically pillaged and destroyed every village they came to and those who survived, already poor people, were left to starve. The London government passed laws demanding the surrender of weapons, banning the speaking of Gaelic and ‘the wearing of the kilt, tartan, or any part of the Highland garb’. The clan chiefs were stripped of their powers and became ordinary landlords, though they were still strong enough to burn their tenants out of their homes and force them to leave the land some sixty years later, to be replaced by a more prized, lucrative crop: sheep. Generations of families that had survived the endeavours of Prince Charlie and the Jacobites, followed by the attentions of Butcher Cumberland and his men, were herded like cattle on to ships taking them to foreign lands in what became known as the Highland Clearances. ‘Bonnie Charlie’s noo awa’, Safely ower the friendly main,’ went ‘The Skye Boat Song’; yup, the royal personage made damned sure of that. ‘Mony a heart will break in twa, Should he ne’er come back again.’ Aye, but more Highland hearts would’ve kept beating had he stayed put in Paris in the first place. Had she known all this, she mused, she would’ve sung quite another descant to the powerful lament to ‘the King across the water’, she would’ve rewritten all the verses of the song come to that. Something along the lines of ‘Why did ye come here in the first place?’ and ‘Don’t bother comin’ back again, We’ve got troubles of our own, So don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ And of course Charlie didn’t come back, he died a syphilitic, drink-sodden death in Italy, without gracing Scotland with his company ever again. He died, it was said, still thinking of his beloved Scotland and feeling sorry for himself. Oh, well, at least it confirmed that the blood running through his royal veins was indeed Scottish, it was probably near enough 100% proof when he died. She wondered if, like another maudlin, sentimental Celt of her acquaintance, Charlie Boy sang about too much rain falling in his life, or whatever tear-jerking ditty had been popular at the time.
Kathy looked up from her book and gazed down on the monument. The stone figure on top was assumed by most people to be a statue of Prince Charlie, but it wasn’t; it was a representation of all the Highlanders who had suffered in the Forty-Five, a small enough tribute when you thought about it. And to think Old Con sobbed over the tragedies in his little life, she thought with a wry smile. What weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth might there have been had he known the history of the Western Highlands? It would’ve been sackcloth and ashes for life! But Con didn’t regard himself as a Scot, he wouldn’t even have agreed to be called a Celt, come to that. Con was an Irishman in exile, he didn’t belong in Scotland. One day, he knew, he would return ‘home to the ould country’, his fabled Emerald Isle, though he had never set foot there and never would. She hated his sentimentalism, his phoney emotion, yet something stirred in her as she learned of the Forty-Five and looked around her at where it had happened. Sorrow, pity, fellow-feeling, it was all of those things, and anger too at what had become of the people. She didn’t know them, their fates had been played out a couple of hundred years before she had even known they had existed, but the geography had changed little and it was easy to imagine them haunting this place. At least she hoped it was imagination, ‘Or else, dear God! Ah’m turnin’ intae Con!’ she thought with horror.
She rarely thought of her father, or of the rest of the family. Even if Con was a tie, a loose tie that would be there till he died, Glasgow was a long way off, another world away. It was like being reborn; somehow she seemed to belong in Glenfinnan. All through her life in Glasgow she had felt out of place, everything about it was strange, as though she had landed there by mistake. Maybe, she thought, the stork had dropped her down the wrong chimney, and the child
destined for Moncur Street had grown up in the Western Highlands instead, foul-mouthed and angry, raging at the stupid teuchters she had been forced to live among, just as Kathy had raged at the family she had been landed with. In Glasgow she had to keep one step ahead just to survive because nothing seemed to work for her, and the exertion kept her short-tempered and miserable. On the West Coast there was no effort, she just lived happily within her surroundings. It was like a time of renewal, too, after the disasters that had come along, one after another, and she grasped the chance to reinvent herself. Her life in the city was carefully filed away in a secret place in her mind that she would try her damnedest to forget existed. She was no longer who she had once been, she was now who she should always have been. A few months after leaving Glasgow she wrote a note to her cousin, Harry, because she and Harry had always shared a special bond. Not that they established a correspondence, that wasn’t what she wanted, but she was reluctant to let the special link she had with him die. She told him that she didn’t want anyone else to know where she was, that she was never coming back, and had been quite happy when Harry hadn’t replied. He didn’t have to reply, he was Harry, they understood each other. But he had her address, and one day she would be sorry she had given it to him.
10
In Stevenston Street Kathy was preparing herself for the last couple of acts of Con’s departure. Act One was over. After three months that had seemed like three hundred years he had finally died and been carted out of his home, dressed in his HLI regalia and with his Child of Prague collection rumbling about inside his coffin. Act Two had been the Receiving, taking him to lie in St Alphonsus’s chapel overnight, and now all she had to do was get through the funeral mass, then the reception afterwards. By that afternoon she would finally be free, even if there was the small matter of facing Frank McCabe about the missing money. So even though the drama was only halfway finished it felt more like being on the home stretch, and this time, when she got home to Glenfinnan, she wouldn’t be keeping in touch with Harry. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Chasing Angels Page 18
