by Peter May
No one touched that old loom after he died. Not until my father retired from his job with the council and took up the weaving himself. He spent weeks restoring it, and it warmed my heart to see and hear the ancient Hattersley brought back to life.
My mother’s brothers were both weavers. They shared a shed at Bragar, just a few miles up the road. When we used to visit, me and my cousins would run in and out of that shed, round and round the looms, until one or other of my uncles would lose patience and shout at us to get out.
My mother was a great knitter. When the weather was bad, which was often, she would spend hours in an armchair loading peats on the fire and knitting me and my brothers scarves and jumpers and gloves, and goodness knows what else. One thing’s certain, we were never short of something warm to wear.
Knitting never much appealed to me, although of course I learned how to do it at an early age—knit one, purl one. But I preferred to sit at the table with a yard or two of fabric and fashion clothes for my dollies. When I started making clothes for myself, my mother would take me into Stornoway to search for fabric at Knit & Sew, or at the occasional fabric fairs that visiting salesmen would organize in the Seaforth Hotel. So it seemed only natural, somehow, that I would excel at Home Economics at the Nicolson Institute, and then go on to textile college on the mainland.
It was blowing a hooley the day Ruairidh got back. It must have been March or early April. And the rain was driving in from the south-west on the edge of an equinoctial gale. The Macfarlane croft was west-facing, a narrow strip of land that sloped right down to the shore, and I watched the rain coming in across the bay. Beyond the headland the sea was rising in great white horses that crashed over black and pink seams of gneiss, teetering atop waves of deep green that rolled in off the Atlantic in slow motion.
When I heard the car I ran out into the rain, and we kissed and held each other, battered by the elements, not giving a damn about the wet, or the cold, or getting blown off our feet. We were laughing when we got inside, soaked to the skin, and I suggested pouring a couple of drams. But his smile faded, and I knew straight off that there was something wrong.
He turned away, avoiding my eye. “I’ve been made redundant, Niamh.” And it felt like the bottom had fallen out of our world. I knew I would have to go back to work. Still, I was perplexed.
“Why, Ruairidh? The oil price has been booming since the financial crisis.” It made no sense.
He shrugged. “Sometimes when business is good companies think they can dispense with people. A rationalization, they’re calling it. It’s not the firm in Aberdeen, it’s the mother company in America.”
“Could Donald not have spoken up for you?” Donald was Ruairidh’s older brother by some years, and high up in management. It was Donald who had got Ruairidh the job in the first place.
Ruairidh made a face. “He did. Or at least he said he did. But I think everyone’s frightened to speak up, or speak out, in case they’re next.”
I remember sitting down heavily on a kitchen chair and looking around me. This miserable place where I had spent the last few months trying to build our future. Coordinating tradesmen, cleaning and cleaning. Endless cleaning. And painting. It all seemed like such a waste of time now. “What are we going to do?”
But I should have known that Ruairidh had a plan. Ruairidh always had a plan. And when I looked up there was a funny, mischievous smile on his face. “Every cloud, Niamh . . .” He flicked his head towards the window, grinning now. “And who should know that better than us, growing up here?” I knew what he meant. No matter how cloudy the sky, the wind was always shredding it, and the sun was always there, somewhere, ready to splash its gold or silver on the sea, and line every torn edge with gilt. He said, “They’ve offered me a very generous redundancy package.”
Which did little to lift my spirits. Money, no matter how much of it you have, runs out very quickly if there’s not more coming in. He saw my despondency and took me by the shoulders, raising me to my feet. His eyes gazed into mine, dark expressive eyes that I had always found so compelling.
“I want to invest it in our future.”
I felt consternation crinkle around my eyes. “How?”
“A wee idea I’ve had for a while now.”
“Oh? A wee idea that you’ve never discussed with me?” I cocked an eyebrow at him and he laughed.
“It was just a dream,” he said. “Never ever thought I could make it happen. Until now.”
I felt a stab of disappointment. “Dreams are for sharing, Ruairidh.”
“Well, I’m sharing it with you now, amn’t I?” He grinned again. “Put on a face and get yourself ready to go out. We want to make a good impression.”
All down the coast to Garynahine the wind battered our car from the west, and then blew us east across the Leurbost road, the great, dark plain on our right fading off to the south, littered with scraps of lochs catching what little light there was, before rising up into the black mountains of Uig, which were almost lost in cloud. The village of Achmore huddled itself along the roadside, lifting towards the television mast, the only settlement on the island that wasn’t on the sea. And all that way Ruairidh remained resolutely silent. When I asked, with growing exasperation, where we were going, he just smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, “You’ll see.”
Beyond Leurbost and Crossbost the land dropped towards the sea at Ranish and the wind shaded off, the bog punctuated by rock that rose silvery grey out of its burned red winter grasses. It was sheltered here from the fierce Atlantic gales, and the road fell in undulations to a jagged shoreline, the sea breaking white on black rock.
Croft houses sat in sheltered hollows with faces turned towards the Minch and a view on clear days, beyond myriad islands, to the dark shadow laid along the horizon by the Isle of Skye. Ruairidh drew the car into a passing place on a promontory and we stepped out into the blustery afternoon. The rain had stopped, but I felt my hair whipping about my face. “Down there,” he said, pointing, and I followed his finger to a whitewashed cottage that squatted between rocky outcrops. A kelp-covered shoreline dipped steeply away below it, a broken old concrete slipway vanishing into black water that would be a luminous blue in better weather. A flaking pale grey fishing dinghy which had seen better days was pulled up high on the slipway and secured by stout rope to a rusted metal ring. Behind the house, a long, narrow outbuilding was a tashed white, with a green-painted corrugated roof.
I turned and looked at Ruairidh across the roof of the car, patience exhausted. “Okay, now you’re going to tell me what we’re doing here.”
His face was flushed pink by the wind, and there was a light in his eyes. “A man called Richard Faulkner lives down there. That’s who we’re going to see.”
“Why?”
He ignored my exasperation. “He retired here nearly twenty years ago, from what by all accounts was a very successful business in the south of England. He taught himself to weave and established a one-man business that he called Ranish Tweed. It’s not Harris Tweed. It’s lighter, and softer. He uses lamb’s wool, and cashmere, and other gentler yarns. But it looks like Harris Tweed, and feeds off its reputation.”
I shrugged and had no idea where this was going. “Never heard of it.”
Ruairidh smiled. “Most people haven’t. At least, not on the island. But it’s achieved a considerable cachet among some of the top tailors in Savile Row. Apparently there is a constant stream of them coming up from London to talk patterns and design with Faulkner, and to place orders in person. And Ranish jackets, it seems, have found favour with the Royals. Which in turn has made them popular with their hangers-on. Who, as you know, are only too keen to ape their superiors.” A sardonic smile reflected his well-worn republican sentiments. “Not,” he added quickly, “that I would hold that against them if it meant I could sell them a few.”
I frowned. “Why would you be selling jackets to the Royals, or anyone else for that matter?”
“Well,
if I were the proprietor of Ranish Tweed, I’d want to sell as much of it as I possibly could.”
I wish I could have seen my own face, because it certainly made him laugh. He rounded the car and took me in his arms, brushing the hair from my eyes.
“Oh, Niamh. Ranish could be ours. Faulkner’s selling. The business and the brand. He’s in his seventies now, and arthritis means he’s not going to be able to work the loom for much longer. But he won’t sell to just anyone.”
“But Ruairidh . . .” I shook my head. “Neither of us weaves.”
“No, but I could learn. And my dad weaves. And yours. My mum used to work as an assistant to the designer at the Carloway Mill.” He grinned. “And, Niamh, you were the best sales and marketing person Johnstons of Elgin ever had.”
Which made me laugh. “I think Johnstons might take issue with that.” But his enthusiasm was infectious, and I felt the first stirrings of excitement. It would be a dream, Ruairidh and I working together. Owning our own company. Weaving our own fabric, a cloth worn by kings and courtesans. “Could we afford it?”
“My redundancy’ll be enough to buy the business. But we’ll have to persuade him that we’re the ones to sell it to.” He paused to kiss me, holding my face between his palms. Then he looked at me, exultant I thought, and said, “And you might just be our secret weapon.”
We heard the loom at work as we climbed down uneven steps to the shed at the back of the house. I knew it was a Hattersley straight away. I had grown up with its distinctive music ringing in my ears. It was the soundtrack of my childhood, and for a time it had all but disappeared as the bottom fell out of the Harris Tweed market, and the famous cloth became almost extinct. On the other side of the island there was new investment now in old mills, and the tweed was about to be reborn. But the old Hattersley looms, which had been weaving cloth on the islands for more than a century, were being replaced by the new, improved, double-width Griffiths machines. Though to me their music was second-rate rap compared with the new romantics of my youth, and I was pleased to know that Ranish was still being woven on a Hattersley.
Old man Faulkner looked up from his machine as we walked in. His collie dog, curled up in a basket by the door, was on his feet in an instant barking at the strange smells the newcomers had brought with them.
“Wheesht, Tam,” the old man admonished, and Tam immediately averted his eyes and reluctantly settled back on to his blanket.
Faulkner’s feet slowed to a halt on the treadles and the wooden shuttle ceased its endless passage back and forth. In the silence that followed you could hear the wind whistling among the rafters. Rafters hung with rope and yarn and lengths of cloth, the wall behind him draped with yet more yarn in multifarious colours. An old bicycle was suspended from metal pegs hammered between the stones, and tools and oil cans and tins of cleaning fluid lay scattered across a wooden workbench among piles of pattern sheets coded in a clumsy scrawl that no one but Faulkner himself would ever be able to read. The floor was laid with flagstones, and I could feel the cold seeping up through it into my bones. It was not a place I would have cared to work. He cast Ruairidh a cautious look.
“So you’re back.”
I glanced at Ruairidh, but he assiduously avoided my eye. “I have the money now, Mr. Faulkner,” he said. “And I thought you might like to meet my wife, and hopefully future partner in Ranish.”
I stepped forward to shake his hand, and his big, callused paw very nearly crushed it. “Pretty girl,” he said. “But what do you know about tweed?”
“I have an MSc with Distinction in Clothing Management, and wrote my dissertation on the marketing of Harris Tweed.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Did you now?”
“I did.”
“There’s a big difference between the theory and the practice, you know, young lady.”
“Oh, I do,” I said and smiled. “I have also sold Johnstons Cashmere in England, Italy and France.”
A smile creased skin the colour of leather beneath a disarray of tousled white hair, and he dragged long thin fingers through a thatch of beard that was like horsehair bursting through a mattress. The palest of grey eyes scrutinized me with amusement before he turned them towards Ruairidh. “Let’s go into the house and have a wee cup of tea.”
The house was as shambolic as his loom shed. A battered old Land Rover sat out front, and Tam followed us inside. The place was cold and smelled of damp, and something else unpleasant that I couldn’t quite identify. The fire was long dead in the hearth, and the worn square of carpet in front of it was thick with dog hair.
Clothes and towels and lengths of fabric were draped over the chairs and sofa of a very old three-piece suite. It seemed more like a squatter’s hovel than the home of a retired successful businessman. Except for the paintings that crowded the walls. Wonderful, colourful evocations of the islands. At sunset and sunrise. In storms, and sunny spring days, the machair alive with flowers. Of boats in storm-battered bays beneath dramatic skies, or tethered to quays and bobbing on turquoise waters. Originals, signed by the artist. Thick paint standing out like veins. Paintings, I was sure, that would fetch big money in mainland galleries.
Faulkner had gone into a kitchen at the back to put on the kettle. “I love your paintings,” I called through to him.
“So do I,” he called back. “The landscape of these islands inspires so much.”
“Even the tweed,” I said as he reappeared at the kitchen door. I lifted some cloth from the back of a chair. “Is this Ranish?” He nodded. It was soft and luxurious and felt almost sensual when I ran it through my fingers. But it was the colours in it that attracted me. “This is beautiful. It makes me think of peat-cutting up on the Pentland Road on a sunny day. All those different hues. The first new growth through winter grasses. Green and red. And the brown of the heather roots, and the blue of the sky reflecting in all those tiny scraps of water.”
When I raised my head to look at him there was a fondness in his grey gaze. “You sound like my wife.” And he nodded his head towards the paintings that covered every spare inch of wall. “She did those.” A moment’s reflection. “She absolutely loved the islands. Accused me of keeping them from her all these years.”
From his use of the past tense, to the sadness that coloured his tone, I knew that she was gone. “What happened?”
“Oh.” He sighed. “The usual. Cancer. We live all these years, we fight to survive, to be successful, to be happy. And it all ends in shit. Like a bad punchline to a long joke.”
The kettle boiled and he went back into the kitchen. Ruairidh and I exchanged glances.
His voice came back through to us in the sitting room. “Isabella died six months ago. Which is what decided me to put Ranish on the market.” We could hear the chink of china, the sound of water pouring into cups. Then he reappeared at the door. “I tell folk it’s the arthritis in my knees. That I have no choice but to sell. But it’s not that at all. I have no will to carry on since Isabella passed. Married just over fifty years, you see. We were one person, really. I am not motivated to keep it going without her.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Niamh wondered where she would find the strength to carry on without Ruairidh. We were one person really, old man Faulkner had said of himself and his beloved Isabella. And in so many ways that had also been true of Niamh and Ruairidh.
Lieutenant Braque spoke for the first time, softly, without accusation or insinuation. But she was watching her, Niamh thought, very carefully. “In the Place de la République you said that Irina Vetrov and your husband were lovers.” Niamh did not feel this merited a response. It was a statement, not a question. That came next. “How did you know that?”
Niamh dropped her eyes to gaze again at her hands, fingers twisting and interlocking now, an outward expression of her inner turmoil. “He . . . we . . .” she began, not really knowing how to say this. “Things had not been right between us recently.”
“In what way?” Braque again.
Niamh lifted one shoulder a little and shook her head. “It’s hard to explain. You are the way you are with someone, then something changes. I can’t give you specifics. Except that to me, he was behaving oddly. He’d started making excuses, leaving me behind when he went to meetings. At first I didn’t think anything of it, then . . .” Her voice tailed away and there was a long silence.
“And?” Braque prompted her.
“There was the email.” She was still looking at her hands and felt rather than saw her inquisitors exchange glances.
“What email?” Martinez this time.
“I got an email from . . . I don’t know who from. A well wisher.” And she thought how ironic that was. No one who sent you an email like that wished you anything but harm. “It said Ruairidh and Irina were having an affair.” She raised her head to meet their eyes. “And that I should ask him about it.”
“And did you?” Braque’s gaze was unwavering.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Just before he left for a meeting at YSL.”
“YSL?” Martinez frowned.
“Yves Saint Laurent. But he didn’t have a meeting there. He had a rendezvous with Irina Vetrov. I saw them together in the courtyard from my hotel room. When I went down to the lobby her car was just pulling away from the door of the hotel.”
Martinez said, “And you chased them across the square.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Niamh wondered how she could tell them what she could hardly even explain to herself. “I don’t know, I . . . I thought that if I let them go, it would be an end to my marriage. No going back. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.” She looked at them as if they might provide her with illumination. “That maybe if I could intercept the car, somehow I could stop that from happening.” She shook her head hopelessly. “Stupid.” And she saw scepticism in their eyes. How could you make sense of the irrational?
