‘Where are you away to?’ he shouted.
‘I’m taking the beast to the glen,’ I yelled back, as I panted in the rear of the stirk’s exuberant rushes. The echo of a cynical laugh fell upon my throbbing ears.
Over the hill my charge and I tore with heedless abandon, plunging through intimidating bogs, vaulting lightly over ruined dykes and sailing airily over peat hags until I began to feel that one at least of my progenitors must have been a deer. Never before had I been conscious of possessing legs that moved like wheels, but like wheels they worked that day. Round and round they went as though they were jointless and muscleless, until I was doubtful if I could ever stop them from going round and round. It would perhaps have been an exhilarating experience had I been in the mood and training for it, but I was in far too much of a panic about the stabber for there to be the faintest possibility of enjoying myself. To me the trek was a nightmare, though to Bruach it subsequently became an epic: one eye-witness relating that ‘Indeed I didn’t know it was a woman at all he had with him. It looked like some cow flyin’ one of they big kites.’
At length we reached the glen where a motley collection of cavorting cattle were mooing and lowing in every key from double bass to falsetto, and a number of conspicuously idle men squatted in the heather. The stirk, his flanks heaving, stopped dead in his tracks, lumbering only a couple of paces forward when I, having half his number of legs and consequendy less efficient braking power, cannoned forcibly into his stern. Gasping, I collapsed on the ground, my throat feeling like emery paper. Ruari’s thundering voice penetrated my exhaustion.
‘You shouldn’t have set the beast a pace like that,’ he reproved me; ‘it’s bad for him.’
I glanced reproachfully in his direction, too breathless to disclaim responsibility in the matter.
‘Will they be all right here?’ I asked Lachy when I had regained sufficient breath to speak intelligently.
‘Aye,’ replied Lachy, who was always prominent among any loungers. ‘I daresay he’ll attend to it soon.’
I possibly looked as enlightened as I felt.
‘Who will?’ I asked.
‘Why, the vet of course,’ responded Lachy. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve brought the beast for?’
Comprehension dawned slowly and, dragging myself wearily to my feet. I went over to where a knot of spectators were clustered about a belligerent but securely held cow. I had already made the acquaintance of the veterinary surgeon; an Edinburgh man with a keenly developed sense of humour.
‘Is it you who’s the maniac running about “stabbin’ all they cattle”?’ I taxed him with mock severity.
The vet glanced significantly at the hypodermic in his hand. ‘I believe it must be,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘Watch how I do it.’ Clipping a tiny patch of hair from the cow’s neck, he inserted the needle.
‘Testing for tuberculosis,’ he muttered, ‘and dashed high time too.’
Silently I cursed the literalness of Morag’s descriptions. It was by no means the first time they had caused me stress and embarrassment; probably it would not be the last. My landlady herself arrived at this moment, rather breathless and more than a little anxious for my welfare. She too chided me on my unseemly haste.
To save us the tedium of waiting, the vet obligingly ‘stabbed’ our two beasts and, that done to everyone’s satisfaction, he turned to a mangy black cow which was being led forward by a decrepit old man whom I knew as Shamus Beag.
‘He has a nasty cut on his udder,’ I heard Shamus telling the vet, and saw the latter bend down to examine the cow.
‘I don’t like that at all,’ he said as he straightened up again. ‘There’s an awful queer smell about it.’ Again he bent down and sniffed. ‘It doesn’t smell right at all.’ He frowned deeply. ‘Have you been putting anything on it, Shamus?’ he asked.
‘I have so,’ admitted Shamus. ‘Indeed I have the stuff here with me now.’ Fumbling in his capacious pocket he produced a tube and held it out for the vet’s inspection. I did not need to glance twice to recognise the alluring label of a much advertised and highly scented vanishing cream. The vet took a cigarette and clamped it between his twitching lips.
‘Why on earth d’you go putting stuff like that on a cow’s udder?’ he asked Shamus.
Shamus, ignoring the ribald comments of the interested spectators, scratched vigorously at the sparse hair beneath his cap.
‘’Tis all what I could get from the tinks when they was round,’ he explained with grave simplicity. ‘And I do believe it’s been doin’ him good.’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ agreed the vet quickly as he snapped shut his cigarette-case. ‘But look here, Shamus, I’ll send you some better stuff than that for the cow. You can give that scented stuff to your wife.’
Shamus directed a puzzled glance at the speaker. ‘My wife has no cut on her——’ he began.
‘No!’ interpolated the vet loudly. ‘For her face of course.’
‘My wife has no cut on her face,’ replied the old man with a slow shake of his head, and then added innocently. ‘That would be her mouth.’
Laughter gurgled among the onlookers and the vet cupped his hand around the match flame to try and hide his own furtive smile.
Shamus bade everyone an indifferent farewell and plodded away with his cow.
The calm of the morning had by this time given way to a bullying breeze that frisked our hair and tore at our jackets. Leaving the cattle to find their own way home Morag and I retraced our steps across the moors. Mary unlocked the door with a scared face.
‘Everything all right?’ she enquired.
I nodded briefly.
‘Your friend must be awful nervous,’ said Morag in my ear, for naturally she had not heard my parting instructions to Mary.
‘Yes,’ I whispered treacherously, ‘I’m afraid she is.’
Poor Mary! Already she was beginning to think that ‘Bedlam’ was a more apt name than Bruach for the village, but my explanation of the lunatic stabber and a description of my own hectic cross-country flight sent her into peals of laughter.
‘Becky,’ she prophesied joyfully, ‘I do believe you’ll make an Olympic runner yet.’
For the remainder of the afternoon and until late in the evening I lay on the sofa in a lethargy born of exhaustion. Mary was quite content to rest also and as she sat by the window in the growing dusk, sipping her hot milk supper, she said: ‘You know, Becky, I believe your Island does have a certain charm in spite of its uncouthness.’
I grunted sleepily.
All day the wind had been steadily rising and now it had whipped itself into a full summer gale. Mary stared fascinatedly at the rowan trees bowing themselves to its onslaught.
‘I say, Becky,’ she began suddenly, ‘I saw some funny white birds fly past the window then. What could they be?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and reluctantly heaving my aching limbs from the comfortless sofa I went to the door. There was still some daylight left in the sky, for the summer twilight on the islands lingers long—too long. I peered outside and could see no sign of any birds, but even as I watched some white shapes hurtled by me. Calling to Mary I propelled her round the end of the house and down the ‘primrose path’.
‘There’s one sure thing,’ I gloated. ‘I may some day make an Olympic runner, but you’ll never make an ornithologist. There! Look at your “birds”.’
Mary’s eyes followed mine, and we both burst out laughing as we stood watching the ‘wee hoosie’ where the boisterous wind, having sought and found the brand-new toilet roll, was now mischievously whipping it through one of the larger ventilation holes and tearing it into garlands which caught in the branches of the dark trees, making them look like gaunt presbyterian spinsters attired for some stygian ball. Streamers of migratory toilet paper whisked away up the village to festoon themselves around clothes-line posts, chimneys, byres and even on the horns of a perplexed cow. I called to Morag and she, seeing what had happened, skipped
nimbly across the grass, intent on retrieving stray wisps of the precious paper. She came to me offering a crumpled armful, which I accepted only to sacrifice it to the appetite of the storm.
‘My, but that’s a shame,’ Morag reproached me as the last length of the roll, now unwound to its extremity, sailed swiftly towards the hills. But I only smiled at her concern and made a mental note to keep to that particular brand of toilet paper, for the manufacturer obviously gave good value for money—there seemed to have been miles of it.
‘Well, I think it’s spiteful of her then,’ said Morag.
‘Who?’ asked Mary, but a dig in the ribs from me warned her not to pursue the question.
In the privacy of our own room I explained that it was the wind that was ‘spiteful’ for having taken away the toilet roll.
‘The wind is a “she” then?’ asked Mary.
‘It depends who you happen to be talking to,’ I told her. ‘It’s a “she” with Morag; it might easily be a “he” with the next person you meet. They don’t waste time on trivialities like sex.’
‘What a language,’ said Mary.
‘What a people,’ I murmured.
We finished our supper and were going upstairs to bed, pausing to say good night to Morag who was standing just inside the outer doors watching a car with unnecessarily bright headlights tearing up the road.
‘That’s the taxi-driver and his wife and a crowd of other folk goin’ off to the dance,’ she informed us conversationally.
‘Oh,’ I said innocently, ‘then he must have managed to repair the taxi at last?’
‘Not him.’ said Morag serenely, ‘that’s the hearse itself they was in.’
11 Getting Ready for the Wedding
‘In the spring’, sings the poet, ‘a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’ But in the Hebrides that is indeed no truism. In the spring the crofter’s materialistic fancy turns to planting, for though he can contemplate a future without love, a future without potatoes would be unendurable. It is for this reason that weddings, for the most part, are confined to the autumn and winter and, because he is invariably in no hurry for marriage, the terms ‘autumn’ and ‘winter’ are frequently symbolic of the time of life at which he chooses to take the fatal step (except in those cases when, in polite language, the bride finds it necessary to prepare the layette before the trousseau).
One autumn a whisper began to percolate through Bruach that it was to witness a wedding and before the rumour had circled the village three times it had become an established fact. Bruach was indeed to have a wedding; a real white wedding with bridesmaids, hotel reception, and even printed invitation cards. Morag sniffed contemptuously at the last piece of information.
‘Them things is just a waste,’ she said. ‘When my own daughter was married in Glasgow she sent out them cards and she had R.I.P. printed on the bottom of them so she’d know how many was comin’.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘But nobody did—they’re so ignorant about here.’
There had already been two or three weddings during my stay in Bruach but being of the sort just referred to in parentheses they had involved little more than a clandestine visit to the mainland, a few hurried minutes at a register office and, on the return home, had meant nothing more romantic than the addition of an extra pair of hands to the ménage of the in-laws more in need of labour or less cramped for room. In this case however the bridegroom was a doughty young fisherman of not more than thirty years of age and the bride, who was only a few years his senior, an attractive waitress from the hotel in the neighbouring village; a village moreover which boasted not just a church, but a church with a belfry and an organ. The hotel had undertaken the catering for the wedding breakfast and never before had the Bruachites enjoyed such an exciting prospect. From the first spectral whisper until at least a year after the solemnisation of the event weddings, past, present and future were the sole topic of conversation wherever one went.
‘Ach, but weddings isn’t like they used to be,’ lamented the old folk. But Anna Vic, whose wedding had taken place as recently as thirty years previously, spiritedly refuted the criticism.
‘Indeed after my own weddin’ my Uncle Roddy and my Uncle Hamish was missin’ for three whole days,’ she argued firmly. ‘And where did we find them at last but in yon Allta cave. Barricaded themselves in they had, with crates of beer and whisky and them vowin’ they wouldn’t come home till they’d drunk their way out.’
The uncles Roddy and Hamish, their patriarchal appearance betraying no indication of their riotous youth, were present to hear and corroborate the fat woman’s assertion.
‘And we near managed it too,’ said Roddy proudly, turning his flushed face away from the fire for a moment. There was but one full bottle left when you found us.’
‘So there was,’ agreed Hamish, nodding reflectively. ‘And if the beer and whisky was as good today as then, ‘I’m no doubtin’ but what we could do the same again.’
‘Whist, whist!’ counselled some of the women, with doubtful glances at me.
‘And for the three nights it was freezing solid and everyone thought they’d be very near dead with the cold,’ went on Anna Vic indomitably.
‘I never remembered bein’ warmer in my life,’ objected Hamish, directing a satisfied stream of spittle into the glowing peats.
‘I should think not,’ put in the roadman sarcastically. ‘Why, man, it’s thirty years since and amn’t I still findin’ empty bottles in that cave?’
His remark was greeted by a chorus of delighted chuckles which lingered until Lachy was heard asking if anyone remembered the Skean wedding. It appeared that everyone did.
‘Tell Miss Peckwitt about that one, Lachy,’ said Johnny, and Lachy, needing no further persuasion, embarked on his story.
‘This weddin’ at Skean,’ he began. ‘We was all there most of us, and the bride and bridegroom was standin’ nice as you like in front of the minister. Well that bridegroom was as drunk as blazes. He was that drunk it was the best man havin’ to hold him up from behind all the time—and he had a job to do that. Of course the minister he’d been born and reared in the place as you might say, so he didn’t mind at all that the fellow was drunk. “Will you take this woman?” says he.
‘ “I’ll take her for a whiley,” says the man. “Just till I get tired of her.”
‘ “You’re that drunk you don’t know what you’re sayin’,” the minister tells him. “I know your own mind better than you do yourself.” So he carries on with the service without botherin’ to ask the fellow again. Ach well, everythin’ was all right till after about six months the fellow goes back to the minister.
‘ “I’m tired of this woman,” says he. “I’m wantin’ to get rid of her.”
“Man. you can’t do that,” the minister tells him.
‘ “I can so,” says the fellow. “It’s the conditions I took her on and there’s all my friends and relations at the church will swear that I made it plain to you I was only takin’ her on those terms.”
‘ “Man, man,” groans the minister, “I would be thrown out of the Church entirely if it was known I’d married a man as drunk as you were yourself that day.”
‘ “I’m no carin’ what happens to you,” says the fellow. “But I want to be rid of this woman so that I can get a good milk cow. I canna’ afford both.”
‘ “Listen here,” says the minister, “I have the best milk cow on the Island, and if you’ll keep your mouth shut and keep the woman I’ll make you a present of the beast.”
‘Of course the fellow knows that fine, that’s just what he was after. He wasn’t tired of his wife at all and it was just a put-up job between the two of them. At the end of another six months he goes again to the manse and says he’s wantin’ a horse; a bit later on he’s needin’ a good ram, and so on. The Lord himself knows what he might have got with time, but the poor old minister went and died on him. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was worry that killed him,’ finished Lach
y complacently.
Naturally I doubted the truth of the story but strangely enough everyone was well acquainted with the couple concerned and their admiration for the husband’s astuteness was patent.
‘How long ago did all this happen?’ I asked.
‘Ach, not more than twenty or twenty-five years back,’ replied Lachy, ‘and that man’s a rich man now, Miss Peckwitt.’ I was not surprised.
The Bruach wedding, though not scheduled to take place until some weeks after I had first heard of it, managed to interfere with my own plans, for I had decided to pay a prolonged visit to Mary and I was expecting to stay in England until after the New Year. But this wedding promised to be too interesting to miss and consequently I announced my intention of cutting short my holiday so as to be present. Straightway I was deluged with commissions to purchase innumerable articles from the English shops, for, notwithstanding their contempt for the English as a race, the Bruachites were firmly convinced of the superiority of English merchandise. The requests were made diffidently but with a pathetic optimism that made refusal impossible, and my shopping list grew longer with each day that passed. The bride-to-be wanted a pair of white silk stockings, a lacy handkerchief and, blushingly, a pair of pink frilly garters. She had, she told me, already procured her dress, veil and shoes from one of the mail order firms which, to the best of my belief, specialise in supplying outlying places with outmoded fashions at outrageous prices. Giggle and Sniggle, who were to be bridesmaids, wanted head-dresses—blue ones.
‘Very nice,’ I complimented them, for they both had pretty blue eyes. ‘And are your dresses blue too?’ But they didn’t yet know. The dresses were being purchased second-hand from a shop in Glasgow, ‘seein’ as they’ll only be needed the once’, and the colour would depend on what the store could provide. My suggestion that they wait until the dresses arrived before deciding on the colour for the accessories was received with an indulgent smile. ‘Any colour suits blue,’ they told me loftily, and, with a resigned sigh, I entered the blue head-dresses on my list.
The Hills is Lonely Page 21
