I wondered where Archie was now. Had he joined up? I doubted it.
And if I found you, Chrissie, what was it that I was really hoping for? A new beginning? To restore the years the locust had eaten?
If there was a way to go back and start again, make it right, Chrissie, oh I’d run at it, seize it with both hands.
But for now, all I could do was wait, cooped up in the Paris flat with Angus and the two airmen, endangering the lives of Monsieur and Madame Mercier and their daughter while all around us Paris was held by a cheerful and victorious German army.
We were champing at the bit to start the next stage of our journey towards the Spanish border with the help of another brave passeur, but who this would be or any details of our route, Monsieur Mercier could not discuss with us. ‘It is best to know only what you need to and at the last moment. Once the guide arrives, then you will be told your next destination. Until then, all you need to do is trust us.’
CHAPTER 25
Chrissie
ST KILDA, 1927
When I had checked on the calf in the byre that evening, I went home to the bothy and found my mother weeping. She was folding a newly sewn jacket, stroking the tweed cloth and holding the bundle tight against her chest with great gulping sobs. It was a garment she had been making with great care for a long time. For we knew what was to come. The boat that brought the minister home would take my brother away.
My brother Callum never recovered from the shame and grief of being the man to lose Lachie over the cliffs, he who had always been nimble as a Soay sheep on the rock face since he left school.
Callum was rising sixteen when he’d written to our great-uncle, Alex Ferguson, the year before, to see if he might find some work for him in the Glasgow shipyards. Mr Alex Ferguson had friends among the shipyard managers and he wrote back to say that they were always willing to take in a St Kilda boy since they were known as being hard-working and conscientious.
Mother said he could go when he was seventeen and not before. It was the best she could do to put off his going, but she’d always known the time would come. She’d only hoped he might be a good few years older before he left us.
She’d woven a length of special tweed, though she did not say what it was for. The warp was made from the rare black wool that you sometimes get from our Soay sheep. The weft she wove from the colours of home. The pale ginger of brown sheep’s wool mixed with white, and of the pale gold colour of the dye made from the white rock lichen, and a thread running through it of blue indigo, the colour of the woollen dresses that the mothers wore, as did our mother.
I helped, since the work is long and arduous for every piece of cloth we make. I had climbed the hill to scrape the crotal lichen from the grey rocks with the flat-sided spoon and collected the egg-yellow curls to make the dye. I had sat with the neighbours around the growing pile of carded wool rolls, long into the night, our chairs in a crowded circle as we brushed the wool back and forth till it was fine as baby’s hair while the old ones told their tales, the stories mixing with the fibres of the wool. I took my turn at the spinning wheel, changing the cloud of wool into a thread that grew and disappeared under my fingers. I stood by the three-legged witches’ pot on the grass, feeding the hanks of wool into the water, sometimes yellow sometimes blue.
The weaving itself my mother did not let me help with, for this was a cloth only she was to do, working into the night by the light of a cruachan lamp, its fulmar’s oil filing the cottage with its oily smoke – gone out by the time we awoke, my mother already risen from her small sleep.
I took my turn peeing into the big pot we keep out in the byre and in feeding the newly woven cloth into the boiling ammonia to set the dye, and helped rinse the cloth clean in the stream. Then I sat with the other women around a board and we pounded the wet tweed, grasping and dragging it over to our neighbour, again and again, the length travelling back and forth between us to the rhythm of a song that became stuck to the fibres as we sang. When the loose weave had knitted into a fabric so thick and felted it could endure any rain and shrug off any breeze then it was ready. Our tweed was thick and good, prized by gamekeepers and deer stalkers, though not always by ladies, who claim it is too rough for the skin.
‘This will not wear out, not before it is long out of fashion and you are long tired of it,’ said Mr MacKinnon who helped Mother cut it out and sew it.
I took a piece of the off-cuts to keep. You could spend a long time looking into the different colours of the island woven into that cloth.
You had never seen a more handsome boy than Callum as he stood in the kitchen in his new jacket. The Dunara was in the bay that evening, and in the morning it would leave along with the tweeds for Alex Ferguson to sell in Glasgow and two tons of salted ling – and with Callum.
We had one last evening together, mutton and cheese, and after supper Father took the Bible and made worship. He read from Exodus and we sang a psalm together. Number 23, the one that mothers teach their children to keep them safe from the Devil and his works. Father led us in prayer as we listened to the wind get up in the bay. All day the weather had been getting worse and we knew what the message would be before Ewen Ian arrived at ten o’clock and knocked on our door. It was no longer safe for the Dunara to ride at anchor in the swell and so the rowing boats were going out to load the last of the provisions now and not in the morning. Callum was to get down to the jetty where Finlay Gillies was already waiting, since he too was to travel to the hospital in Glasgow on account of his bad lungs.
His face set, Father went down to help the men.
All in a bother, her last evening with Callum slipping out of her grasp, my mother flitted about the kitchen, wondering what he might have forgotten to pack. Had he the new socks she had knitted? Should he take a cheese? And she fetched three sovereigns that she had saved in a tin on the press and put them on the table for him.
Then it was time to go. Callum stoked up the peats, looked around the room, saying, I will be back soon enough. But we knew it was a long way home from Glasgow. And there might be months before a letter could find its way here.
I walked down with Callum and Mother, though she thought of one more thing she wanted Callum to take. She ran back while we waited, the sea silver and the ring of jagged outcrops along the arm of the Dùn black against a sky empty of all but a pale light.
I felt I had one last chance to stop him going, to turn aside the thing that had made him go.
‘Oh, Callum, won’t you stay? Is it because of Lachie? You know it wasn’t your fault that Lachie died. You can’t blame yourself. You know that no one here blames you.’
‘We were all to blame, taking drink from Archie’s flask. But, Chrissie. . .’ He turned to face me, took my hands. ‘There’s something I want you to know. I can’t bear it if you think badly of me.’
‘What are you telling me?’
‘But first, will you promise to keep this to yourself?’
‘Yes, if you want me to. But whatever is it? Tell me.’
‘It wasn’t me who let Lachie go.’
I knew then before he said it.
‘It was Archie who was supposed to be holding the rope down to Lachie. Archie who let it go. He hadn’t got the rope enough round his shoulders and then it happened so quickly.’
‘Archie? Then why do you let everyone think it was you? Callum, you must say. Don’t you see, there’s no need for you to go?’
‘No. Archie is my friend. I promised him. And I am to blame too. I shouldn’t have let him have the rope like that.’
An anger rose up in me.
‘Archie Macleod is no friend if he will let you take the blame on yourself, let you tell a lie for him. You must say.’
‘Promise now you won’t tell anyone, only I couldn’t bear for you to keep thinking that I could let a man fall.’
‘Oh, Callum, please don’t go. It’s here you’re needed.’
‘I’m sorry, Chrissie. It’s done.’
He ducked his hea
d, picked up his bag, moving away from me already in his silence. Our mother was coming back down the slope with Father, not too quickly, trying to draw out the time. She had a small black book, our grandfather’s Bible. She put the book in Callum’s hands.
‘You will keep up the family prayers, carry on when you have your own bairns. Tell them of us.’ The idea of those children she would not see was too much and she hid her eyes with the edge of her shawl.
Ten o’clock, the last of the gloaming turning to dark. All the village gathered on the jetty. I had so much I wanted to say to Callum still, but he was lost to me as he embraced every last person. Such a wailing and keening from the women as the little village boat began to pull away. I heard a strange voice, my own voice among them, wailing for him to come back. We watched him diminish across the bay and climb aboard the Dunara by the light of a lamp.
‘But what is he doing?’ asked my mother as he remained on the deck and facing out at us, began to make arm movements.
‘It’s semaphore.’
‘Semaphore. You know semaphore, Chrissie. What is it? What’s he telling us?’
‘I – have – left,’
‘Oh no, the sovereigns. They’ll be on the table.’
‘No. Wait. He says, I have left. . . I have left with you my heart.’
Callum stayed in deck holding up the lamp as the boat sailed, and we waved and watched him until we could see the light no more.
I held on to my mother’s hand so that she could know that I at least would never leave her. She winced for I was holding her hand so tightly. It was the anger in me, a cold rage against Archie that he could let Callum take his shame – and so take my Callum.
And yet I had promised Callum not to tell. No one I could speak to, to let the anger out of my chest.
One day, the next time I saw Archie, I was certainly going to tell him what I knew, and how greatly I despised him. I could not go back in the house for I feared my anger would burst the walls.
I climbed up to The Gap where I could sit in the space hung between the two hills, the great cliffs at my feet. And there I saw what I had hoped for: the dark shape of the boat crossing the sea under a night-blue sky, moving towards where the water was polished with a silver glow. I watched until the boat was all gone to light, and then I was left with only my anger.
Archie Macleod, so tall and so handsome with his fair hair like a prince from a fairy tale, the creature I had known since my childhood, how could I not have fallen in love with him? But the real Archie was as flitting as sand in the wind, no substance to him other than what suited Archie Macleod.
I sat a long time looking out over the sea, thinking of the long island and the mainland beyond where Callum was going, and all that wide world where I would never follow.
Which was a problem for me. For as I sat there, I saw one I truly loved. He was not so tall, those deep-set eyes and cheeks that flamed if he was teased, but with a kindness and a solidness and a steady way of seeing you with that bright gaze. And whose lips I would wish to feel against my cheek. And I thought of how Fred would leave here too one day soon, no other way about it. So what would be the use of me ever telling him how I felt, even though the words burned on my tongue?
Fred would leave, and the passing fancy he’d had that he might feel some affection for me would fade away like a shore seen from a departing ship
And it was so great a problem to resolve that for the first time I wondered if perhaps Fred was right, that perhaps God did not arrange all things for the good of those who trust him. For it was clear to me in that moment, perched high on the cliff, that I would rather go to hell with my Fred than go to heaven without him. The damp had crept up on me, the wind turned chill over the dark sea and the darker sky. I felt for the first time how cold it must feel to live in this world without hope of the great being who watches over us. Then I walked back to my mother’s house as cold as if I had lain down in the sea.
CHAPTER 26
Chrissie
ST KILDA, 1927
I told Fred that I would no longer come in each morning, afraid of myself to be alone with him so much. But he swore he needed some aid in the food preparation and seemed so earnest that, in the end, I agreed to help with cooking his food just twice a week and he showed me the courtesy of not appearing in the kitchen until I was about to leave.
Oh, but I loved those mornings, moving around the kitchen doing the small tasks to prepare breakfast, singing quietly to myself for I couldn’t help it. I put wildflowers on the little table, set down the patterned bowl and plate, and stood by the fire stirring the oatmeal. All the while, he was there on the other side of the wooden partition, sleeping or getting up from his bed. This was how it must feel to belong to someone every day, I thought, to share a home and do small things to help each other. I knew I was playing at homemaking, imagining a life that could not be, but those mornings were precious to me.
I think he must have listened out each morning, for the moment I fetched my shawl from the peg he would appear, saying thank you and standing aside so I could pass by. We spoke a little in the doorway, always more to say than the time we had. I loaned him a novel or two from the school library shelf since he had finished all he had brought with him, and sometimes he explained his research and showed me books from his studies that he thought I might understand.
Often he came to our house of an evening to ceilidh by the fire, writing down notes of our customs, asking for old stories, curious to find hints of the ancient ones who had once lived here.
Archie’s excavation inside the old dwelling in the glen that we call the warrior queen’s house was almost finished. He said it might have been the home of a Norse warrior, a very ancient place. And he’d talked of a dark feeling inside there – the whisky, Fred said. He wanted to know if we knew any stories about the house, but all we knew were the times the cows were giving so much milk that we girls slept there and set the cheese, keeping the milk cool inside the old stone bothy that stands on the grass like an upturned stone basket. I found him one morning setting out to examine the place as I was going over the hill to milk the cows and so we walked together.
We walked in silence, the day being one so absorbing in its beauty. Around the slopes of the hill, the sea was finely rippled silk with the glassy blue paths of currents twisting and setting out who knows where. The turf was filled with flowers no higher than a thumb. Pale bee orchids, trumpet orchids in darker pink, yellow lady’s slipper and daisy-eyed tormentil. A flock of bog cotton tufts like bird down caught on the reeds, shivering, shining with light as if lit with lamps. Up on the hills of the glen the sea sounds were quieter, the waves breaking small at the foot of the cliffs. There was little breeze, the smell of warmed peat breathed out from the earth, sometimes the leathery smell of cow dung. The birds peeped and chucked with their distant worries. All was blue and green and dazzle. He walked ahead, carrying the bucket for the milk and my scythe to cut hay from the upper slopes. I had nothing but a handful of dock leaves to carry in consequence, feeling oddly light as I stepped from mossy tuft to rock.
There was no one else there, all far away on the other side of the island with their own concerns. I saw how he walked as if his burdens were nothing. I watched the movement of the muscles in his back, in the back of his calves, sure and steady as he stepped from rock to tuft, how the sun had browned his strong arms, a golden down of fine hairs like no animal I could name. He turned back and smiled, waited for me to catch up and fall in step with him, but the slope was too steep as we descended, and against all my pride in never being the last to climb up or climb down, I found I fell in behind him once again, following his footsteps along the barely visible path through the reeds and grass and moss. And as we descended, the smell of the damper earth came up to greet us in the warmth of the sun, stronger, wrapping us round in its moistly warm blanket, sleepy and enveloping. My forehead and the back of my neck prickling with the sweat.
Fred was the first to sit down. He pull
ed the yellow cloth from round his neck, wiped his face, and surveyed the scene before us, the great bowl of the glen with no one for company but the cattle and the bay that is bitten out by the sea. Four miles away across the water there was Boreray, wandering across the blue with its two smaller calves, misty blue and insubstantial in the haze. I put down the bundle of dock leaves plucked for the cows, for how else should I get them to stop while I take their milk?
I was aware how still he was as he sat beside me, his smell of canvas and soap, the warmth emanating from his body, every detail of his physical presence vivid and near. Even with my eyes shut I saw him. And it seemed to me that the world had faded far away and the knowledge of him near was like the scent of a rare plant on the hillside that cracks its carapace and spills its odour on the wind, saying, it is time, it is time to consider only this one thing. I felt how he moved his hand nearer mine, how the hairs on my arm rose like a fear. I did not move. I felt the warmth of his skin, a little damp, against the sunburned skin of my arm. Then on my neck, so I flinched and shivered, and I turned towards him in one contraction of my body, a kiss that I realized I had wanted for so long.
It was only a kiss. A kiss that split the rocks of the island in two and turned north to south, transmuted the land to sea. I pulled away breathless and we stared at each other, two fighters about to wrestle for their lives as he held on hard to my upper arms.
And I moved again towards him, but there was a resistance, and I realized that his hands held me away, and he said, ‘I mustn’t, Chrissie. For all I want to, it would be to take advantage of you.’
But he kissed me again, worse, and wonderful. Then he was up in one swoop and clamber, so fast and pacing, and he was gone, striding out back over the hill like a man whose house is on fire, and I was left with the scythe and the bucket and the bundle of dock leaves – and the knowledge that he cannot love me after all if he would leave me like this. The burn of his fleeting kiss tattooed on my lips, I saw how my kiss was unwanted and already falling away from him as he grew smaller and left me standing foolish and bereft among the blond summer grasses.
The Lost Lights of st Kilda Page 15
