The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  CHAPTER 14

  Fred

  ST KILDA, 1927

  Late afternoon and I still had notes to write up on my survey of the rock formations west of the village. But with a clear view of the bay from the bothy window, my attention had wandered to the whaler that had just anchored. I could see people clustered at the jetty, welcoming the captain like an old friend. Captain Olufson always took the trouble to ask the villagers what he could bring from Harris and he had arrived with a dinghy of provisions. Later, I would understand the debt of gratitude that he owed to the village and get to know the odour of whale carcasses stored in the bay between hunting trips.

  Back to my geological paper and the western slopes’ high preponderance of olivine-gabbro with a small sill of dolerite, the east side being mostly granite. The outlying islands and sea stacs were also a mix of gabbro and dolerite, but scoured out by the full force of Atlantic waves into fantastical dark towers and castles.

  Archie, too, had been making progress of late. Some interesting shards of beaker pottery, possibly of Neolithic origin, had been unearthed with the help of Lachie and Callum, the two boys he was paying to help with the dig, but he had left his notes on the table and headed down to the jetty to see what was afoot.

  The twilight began to deepen. I lit the oil lamp to carry on with my notes. A knock came at the door. It was Chrissie with a message.

  ‘My granny says you should come ceilidh with us, you who are interested in history and these things. They are at all Allie MacCrimmon’s house and she would have you know you are welcome too.’

  I blotted my page and closed my notes while Chrissie stood by the fire, casting a critical eye on the pot hung over it. Even I had to admit the smell of our attempts at cooking did not suggest an appetizing meal. She lifted the lid and jerked her head away from the contents – burned offerings yet again.

  ‘Perhaps your mother might help us with some cooking from time to time,’ I suggested as I pulled on my jacket, my notebook in the pocket.

  ‘I will ask her for you,’ said Chrissie with a shrug. She had moved over to the small desk Archie used to write up his notes on the dig at the fairies’ house. Her hand brushed the curling loops of his writing.

  ‘So who is Allie MacCrimmon?’ I enquired as I tied my laces.

  ‘The oldest person in the village, and she has never left the old place she was born in.’

  We walked out past the graveyard. The soil had been built up inside its circular walls since the island’s natural turf was too shallow for a burial. It was studded with memorial rocks that floated white in the fading light. Most, I had noted on a previous visit, with no names other than in the memory of the people. It was sad to see how many of the rocks were very small and almost lost among the abundant nettles.

  A little way further still, standing quite alone, was Allie’s dwelling, more like the old byres and ancient storage cleits than one of the newer cottages along the street. It was made of weather-worn boulders cut not by hand but by the wind and the sea. It was small and narrow with a roof made of thatch covered by a fishing net weighted round with stones.

  Chrissie paused before the door. ‘Now don’t be surprised by how the whaler captain looks,’ she said. ‘His mother was an Eskimo wife to a Norwegian whaler. His father took his son home to educate him in Bergen but he still bears the tattoos of his Eskimo tribe on his face.’

  She hesitated. I could see she was not wanting to offend me when she began, ‘And I know you have the Gaelic, such as it is, but Allie is not always easy to hear and speaks a very old tongue so I will translate for you. You have but to ask.’

  I was offended. I had learned my Gaelic from Lachlan after I went to live with him on the estate, where most conversations were in Gaelic, and it had been hard won.

  It wasn’t easy to see anything inside the smokiness of Allie’s bothy. The fire was directly in the centre in the old way with an iron chain and a black kettle hung from the rafter. A hole in the thatch was the only chimney. Truly, Allie’s bothy was a form of living archaeology. People would have lived thus in Viking times, before even. How many people, I wondered, had had the privilege of stepping back into antiquity like this? A smoked peaty smell was sharp in the nostrils, the surfaces of everything in Allie’s house covered with a fine ashy encrustation and turned silvery grey, like ghosts of themselves. Grannies MacDonald, MacKinnon and Gillies were ranged along the bench on one side and Captain Olufson, a man in his sixties, was seated opposite on the largest chair, contributing his own small cloud of smoke to the dim atmosphere with his tar-stained pipe. I could see that Captain Olufson had been a striking man in his youth, still well built but now grey-haired, with long cheekbones and dark eyes that slanted in a long stare. In the smoky air I could make out three lines running from his lips to his jawline in a faded inky blue.

  Several other villagers were squashed into the tiny space, on tubs or stools or seated on the floor around the peat embers that never went out. Archie was sat next to the captain, his face flushed by the fire under a tangled fair fringe, the very picture of a handsome man. Chrissie’s eyes, as ever, were drawn to where he sat.

  I’ve never been one to waste time on envy, but I did for that moment wish I were a taller man with the sort of magnetic power that Archie had to charm a whole room. A bottle or two of whisky from Archie’s crate were open on the floor.

  The noise inside was thick, with the three grannies cackling and a fast banter in Gaelic flying around the room like the harsh and inscrutable calls of the fulmars and the gannets.

  I moved myself closer to Chrissie, who was laughing at something the captain had said, and when she had her breath again, I asked her to translate.

  ‘It’s nothing but silliness. The captain has been coming here for years and he and old Allie always have the same joke that she is finally going to say yes and be his sweetheart one day. So now Allie is saying that she would gladly take such a handsome man but she had heard that he already has a couple of wives back in Norway. And he says that for a girl like Allie MacCrimmon he is willing to forget all his wives and run away with her to live on a whaling ship.’

  There was laughter around the room again. Then Allie began to tell a tale, the room quiet and listening as Chrissie whispered the English to me, her breath warm on my ear.

  ‘It’s the story of the girl who was away in the glen milking the cow and churning the butter. She met the fairy there, and he persuaded her to marry him and go away with him to his land. But the girl loved her mother and so she asked the fairy if she could go home for one more night to see her family one more time. So she went home and her sister could see she was troubled and she got the secret off her. As soon as the girl slept, her sister ran and told her mother who went out into the moonlight to find the henbane plant, which is a charm against fairies. So her mother wove a garter and she wove the henbane into it and left it with her daughter’s clothes. And suspecting nothing, the daughter put the garter on and off she went to meet her handsome fairy. She went over to the hill, her arms outstretched as he came towards her, but he stopped. He could come no closer, for there was a magic circle around her that he could not enter, try as he might, and so he turned around and went away back to his people, and she never did see him again though she loved him until the day she died.’

  Old Allie and Mary began to sing, in slow lilting incantations, the song of the fairy lover. The room fell even quieter and almost melancholic. Their elderly voices cracked from time to time and the words were hesitant, but you could see the loveliness behind it, adding a strange longing to a song that was already wistful for things lost.

  In the quiet that followed, the captain tapped his pipe out over the hearth, and began his own story, speaking in slow Gaelic, which he had learned from his long years working from the whaling station in Harris. ‘It’s a story about an Eskimo princess,’ Chrissie whispered. ‘She met the prince of the fulmars with his dark eyes who promised she would live in a tent made of caribou furs and eat t
he finest food if she eloped with him. But as soon as she got to his home the prince shape-shifted into a bird and put her in a tent made of fish skins full of holes, with nothing to eat all day but fish. Try as she might, she could never escape this life she hated and even though she begged her father to rescue her, she couldn’t return to the home she had loved.’

  ‘You see I was well to be careful,’ said Allie. ‘You mark my words and be wise,’ she said, pointing at Chrissie and the other young girls, ‘no matter how tempting the offer, for you don’t want to end up eating fish all day in the land of the great snow.’

  ‘There is the truth,’ said the captain. ‘Never trust a shape-shifter, for they will always belong to the world they come from no matter what they tell you.’

  ‘Oh my soul,’ said Allie. ‘Now he’s telling me he’s a shape-shifter. Don’t they say that when a whaler captain dies, his spirit becomes a fulmar and he glides over the north seas for ever onwards?’

  ‘The sea is the true home of a whaler captain,’ the half-Eskimo man said with a shrug. ‘So a better end for me I could not imagine.’

  ‘You’ve had a narrow escape there, Allie,’ said Archie, toasting her with his raised whisky bottle.

  ‘Oh, but I was tempted,’ Allie said, with a wagging of her chin and its white hairs, her blue eyes twinkling young as ever. ‘We girls are ever so.’

  The children wanted Allie to sing her birdsong then, a ditty in Gaelic mimicking their calls. And as she sang, the fire-lit room echoed with the melancholic brooding noise of the puffins calling their fledgling chicks to leave the cliffs for the cold of the water below, and with the harsher calls of the gannets and fulmars, so that it seemed as though the birds themselves were flying among us. I closed my eyes to ride and hover on the sound, and felt myself a part of the rhythm of the island for a moment, a life dictated not by my own will but by the rhythm of the year and the beating heart of the land.

  Then I opened my eyes. The sooty grey surfaces of the room returned, and the crowded humanity with its warm stink from the day’s work. I wondered if the sip of whisky passed round by the captain had been stronger than I thought.

  And all the while, the heat from Chrissie’s arm radiated into my side. Whether she was sitting back against the wall, or leaning forward to tease the children, I could not stop mapping her presence, aware of her nearness.

  The room emptied and people began to leave in the long June twilight of eleven o’clock.

  ‘Come out to the whaler,’ Archie said, leaning on my shoulder. ‘We’re invited to go back to the boat, carry on the yarns and have a few more drinks.’

  ‘I don’t know, Archie. It’ll mean half of tomorrow will be lost. I’ve a lot to get done if the paper’s to be finished before we leave. And you too, you need to get on.’

  ‘We’ve oodles of time. You don’t need to worry so.’ He tripped a little on the word ‘worry’ as he pulled round to face me, his breath hot and purified with the whisky. His cheeks were florid as apples, hair spiked with sweat. ‘Have it your own way,’ he finished cheerfully.

  ‘And be careful going out in the rowing boat,’ I called after him, his steps not entirely steady. Perhaps I should have gone with him, but the captain was by his side, striding on solid and watchful in his quiet way. I knew Archie would come to no harm other than to fail to progress his paper yet again.

  I walked back home, catching up with Chrissie on the path over the burn where even in summer the water ran ice cold under the flagstones.

  ‘You’re not going with them?’ she asked.

  ‘Not tonight.’

  Above us the pale moon in a dusky sky, a line of light still lingering along the horizon of the sea even though it was almost midnight.

  I thought of the evening’s tales of falling hopelessly in love with a being from another land, and had the mad desire to take Chrissie’s hand in mine, though I was sure it would frighten her if I did. Hopeless too, because I didn’t doubt from the hungry way her eyes had followed every movement from Archie in the dim room that her thoughts were still back in the smoky cottage with him.

  ‘Well, I will leave you,’ she said as we came to her door. ‘No doubt I will see you both in the morning.’

  ‘In the morning?’

  ‘In church. It’s the Sabbath tomorrow. You haven’t yet been to the chapel of a Sunday.’

  A small laugh escaped me. ‘I’m no churchgoer, I’m afraid. Not for a long time. Too many impossible things to believe before breakfast and all that.’

  ‘But what do you believe in then if not in the creator?’

  ‘Logic. The material world. Reason. I tried with the church stuff, but I’m afraid university tore down my last superstitions.’

  ‘I see. So you are telling me that if I were better educated I would understand the foolishness of my superstitious ways.’

  ‘Of course not. I wasn’t judging you. I understand, completely. It’s simply what you’ve all been taught here.’

  ‘So it’s a communal foolishness? Well, you’re not the first one coming here knowing better. We’ve had the tourists at the church door sniggering and laughing at our Gaelic singing before now, saying how it sounds so peculiar and caterwauling. Perhaps it does to them. But we understand what we sing when we raise our voices to God together. And since no one in the village is asking for your opinion, Mr Lawson, I will take my foolish weak mind away to bed ready for another day of my superstitious beliefs. Good night.’

  I stared at her closed door as if it might open suddenly and I could reply. If there was a girl with less in common with me than Chrissie Gillies, then I would like to meet her. And there was something disturbing about that sort of mindset in a girl so young, as if she had decided to limit the entire world to one belief, one place, to make the world no bigger than this island. It seemed a pity. A mind from another time almost, before the war tore everything apart and left us with the task of reassembling a modern word we could live with.

  You had to fear for someone on the brink of life who was so willing to live down a hole like that, refusing to see the future.

  No sign of Archie in our bothy other than the lights glowing from the whaler out in the bay and a thread of accordion music intermittent on the breeze. I shook my head with a smile. Archie had the gift of making friends. Didn’t everyone love Archie?

  I went to bed in the small back room, determined not to think of Chrissie any more. But the impression of the warmth of her sitting close to me remained, disturbing my sleep.

  At dawn, I rose from my bed to watch the black outlines of Dùn Island, a ruined castle or a giant’s jawbone across the bay. As the light gathered, the land began to take depth and dimension, with hollows and outcrops in dark greens appearing in a dark land outlined against a blanched sea. All this I watched, as a realization came to me, something I already knew in my skin and in my bones: I was in love with Chrissie – a love that was as unfeasible and impossible as declaring my love for the cliffs or the sea and expecting them to return it. And it was true that the island was provoking a response that was far more than any ordering and categorizing of minerals and elements. Two loves – the place, the girl – had somehow become intermingled, in a fleeting mirage of something ungraspable. And yet, there it was, love, like a strange bell from the deep that must be answered. And at that moment I would have gladly given up all my ambitions and all my plans had the world offered me instead just this place, this girl.

  This girl called Chrissie Gillies with her narrow outlook, a mind that had never left the island.

  So it is, we fall in love with the impossible, break our hearts pining for a dream. I went early to my desk to finish writing up my finds.

  CHAPTER 15

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1927

  Sabbath morning, and everything had been prepared the eve before, the buckets of water by the door, the porridge and the mutton stew ready to place on the fire. No sounds in the village except for God’s sounds, the birds and the wind, the s
heep calling to their lambs.

  The house still slumbered but I was seated in front of the little mirror on the chest, my father’s tailoring scissors in one hand, contemplating my wayward black curls with vexation. Was it any wonder Archie overlooked me, my old-fashioned hair bun no different from my mother’s or Mrs MacKinnon’s – she who was worn out with her eight children? With a feeling of dread and liberation I held out a hank and began to rasp the blades through it. I was thinking of the girls I’d seen in the journals the reverend’s wife got sent to her. They had short sleek hair, long narrow dresses and pointed shoes, each girl elegant as a gannet as it dives into the sea.

  What I got was hair springing up in its shortness around my head like a black lamb, the fringe a mistake, I could see, but at least it curled itself up to hide the choppiness of my cutting. I put on my new Sunday dress, a length of flowered cloth from Glasgow cut straight up and down in the new way. Chrissie’s flower sack, my brother Callum called it.

  It was no help when my brother began laughing over his bowl of porridge as I came in to the kitchen and sat down at the table. My mother told him to shush but said, ‘Oh, Chrissie, what have you done to your hair?’

  The ship’s bell down by the chapel called out but we were already halfway across the grass, Father holding the Bible, the whole village going with us, the men in their hand-tailored tweed suits that would not shame a laird on his estate, the women with their Sunday turkey-red scarves and polished hair tied down tight. It was a gift of a day, the sun bright on the fresh grass and on the pale, feathery green of the barley and the deep green of the potato rigs, a grey sea that the sun turned to silver and brightness.

  We waited in the chill of the building – my new dress none too warm – the great ship of a pulpit before us. The people who sent it forgot to measure the chapel for size. Mother and I sat with the women on one side of the benches, Father and the boys with the men on the other so I did not have to turn my head much to see Archie a little way in front of us. The minister came in the side door, prayed and then the precentor who was yesterday dipping the sheep on the hill offered up the first line of the psalm in his sinewy voice anguished in its calling, a man drowning in the storms of the sea and calling out to God for help. The people all sang the line back, braiding and embellishing the tune with their many solemn voices as they saw fit, just as the singing of many waves makes the sound of the ocean. Line by line, pleading for the help of our Saviour to save us in one breathing out of song.