by Peter May
I knocked on the front door and went inside. Despite the warm summer’s day on the outside, it was cold in here, and still smelled of damp and wet dog hair.
“Mr. Faulkner?” I called out. “Hello, are you there?” A resounding silence was the only response. I went into the kitchen. A mug of tea stood on the worktop by the sink. Barely touched and stone cold. I brushed my fingers against the kettle. It was cold, too. I went back out into the sitting room and called again. Still nothing. And all the while Tam was barking and barking outside.
I went out again, blinking into the sunshine, and followed the wall around to the back of the house and the long stone outbuilding with its green-painted tin roof where old man Faulkner did his weaving.
There was some sixth sense by now telling me that all was not well. And it was with considerable apprehension that I pushed open the old wooden door. I can remember the sound of it to this day. Wood and hinges groaning in the half-light that crept in through tiny windows along the back wall where the hillside blocked out the sunlight.
I didn’t understand at first what it was that I was seeing. Something dark and heavy draped from the rafters along with all the loops of yarn and bolts of tweed that stood leaning up against them. But with the breeze that followed me in through the open door, the hanging shape revolved a half-turn, and I saw the light catch the old man’s profile. His eyes were open, his mouth gaping, head tilted at an unnatural angle, resting against the rope that stretched under tension from the beam above him to the loop of it around his neck. An old wooden chair lay on its side on the floor where he had kicked it away to let his own weight squeeze the life out of him.
I suppose I might have screamed had my voice not deserted me. I could still hear Tam barking, and the sound of the sea breaking gently all along the ragged coast, like the sound of the breath that had long left old man Faulkner. And I was remarkably calm.
His lifeless form held my gaze for several long moments, before my eyes flickered down to the folded sheet of white paper lying on the warp threads of his loom. I moved carefully across the shed, not wanting to make a sound. Somehow death demanded your silence. As if by showing it respect you might one day avoid it yourself. Though only the deluded might believe that.
I lifted and unfolded the note he had left on the unfinished weave and recognized his big, untidy hand.
My dearest Niamh,
Please accept my apologies for inflicting this upon you. But I might not have been found for weeks, and poor Tam would have starved to death. I know you will find him a good home. I live on with you and Ruairidh in Ranish, and I wish you all success. But I could not bear to be parted from Isabella any longer.
Yours,
Richard
The weeks that followed were difficult. It was as if a part of Ranish Tweed had died with its creator, and it was all that we could do to breathe life back into it.
Ruairidh spent days and days with his father, learning the arcane skills of the weaver. There were courses in how to work a loom, but they were mostly now for the Bonas-Griffith double-width loom that nearly all Harris Tweed was being woven on. And we were determined to maintain the uniqueness of Ranish by sticking with the single-width.
Tam found his new home with me and Ruairidh in the half-restored old whitehouse on the Macfarlane croft, and there was something reassuring in his presence. Almost as if he were keeping a watching eye over us on behalf of his master. I’m sure he missed him, but I think he also took comfort from the sound of the Hattersley in Mr. Macfarlane’s loom shed. He found himself a spot there to curl up and sleep while Mr. Macfarlane taught his son how to weave.
It was my job to replenish the diminishing order book. I persuaded my father, who was good with figures, to decipher the codes old man Faulkner had used for his cloth patterns, and he turned them into recipes that we could all make sense of. We cut samples from the bolts of cloth that we found in Faulkner’s weaving shed, and produced a few ourselves from new designs that Mrs. Macfarlane had been working on, and I was sent off to London to solicit fresh orders that would get the business up and running again.
The trip was a disaster.
I had a list of the names and addresses of all of Ranish Tweed’s customers in Savile Row and elsewhere. Tailors, mostly, producing bespoke suits and jackets for exclusive clientele. I had decided not to phone or write to ask for appointments in advance. It is too easy for someone to turn you down at a distance. So I went cold-calling instead. But fashion is a fickle friend. It can change direction and colour and taste in the blink of an eye.
Since Isabella’s death, old man Faulkner had let the business slide. Although there were still orders on his books, he had not gone chasing others to replace them. And this was at a time when Harris Tweed was rising from the ashes of its own demise. Old mills at Shawbost and Carloway, and in Stornoway, were being revived. Fresh capital invested. Suddenly Harris Tweed was in demand again. Which made Ranish a very hard sell for me.
Everyone in London was very kind. They spoke with great fondness of Richard Faulkner. Of their trips to the island to meet him, to discuss patterns and orders over copious amounts of whisky and wild salmon. But they had moved on. Customers were looking for something more traditional, and Harris Tweed had a history and reputation that we couldn’t begin to match. I returned from the Big Smoke empty-handed, and the whole enterprise, along with most of Ruairidh’s redundancy money, looked all but lost.
Then our hopes were raised, unexpectedly, when I managed to secure a place for Ranish on a Scottish Development International trade trip to Japan. I already knew that there was a huge textile market in Japan, culminating each year in the JITAC Tokyo Fair. Hitching a ride with SDI could give me the opportunity to introduce Ranish Tweed to a whole new marketplace. Ruairidh was dead jealous, but we couldn’t afford for both of us to go.
Sadly, it failed to provide the breakthrough we were looking for. I returned from the trip having learned that selling to the Japanese was a long and complex process. If you are lucky enough to establish a relationship with a Japanese buyer, he will only ever kick-start it with the smallest of orders. A gesture. If things go well, eventually he will take you for a drink and the order will increase in size. The next step is karaoke, and at some point you have to get up on stage with a microphone in your hand and sing. Finally, if you are very lucky you might get invited to his home. Which is when you know you have really made it, and big orders will follow.
I returned with a contact book full of names, having sung not a single song, nor obtained a single order.
Ruairidh was waiting for me at the airport in Stornoway. I had rarely been so glad to see him, grabbing his face and smothering him with kisses, while people stood around the carousel waiting for their luggage and trying not to look. Japan had been an experience, but I was more than happy to be home. “I never want to do a trip like that again without you,” I told him.
He grinned. “Don’t worry. I’m not ever letting you out of my sight again.”
But in the car as we drove down Oliver’s Brae to the main road, his first flush of pleasure at seeing me wore off. A dark shadow fell over him and he glanced at me with an ominous gravity. “We’ve got money problems, Niamh,” he said. “We just don’t have enough working capital to see us through to the point where Ranish is even going to start washing its face. And we have no idea how long that might be.”
The optimism I had tried to maintain through all the long hours of the flights home deserted me then. I stared grimly through the windscreen at the slate-grey Minch as our wipers smeared dead flies across the glass with the first of the rain. “So what are we going to do?”
There was an anxiety now in what seemed like an almost furtive glance. “My folks have got a proposition,” he said. “They’re waiting for us at home.”
My heart sank.
The sky was closed, a turmoil of dark clouds gathered low out over the water, sending showers in waves across the bay on the edge of a stiffening wind from the
west. It somehow matched the mood of our little gathering in the front room of the Macfarlane croft house. Gloomy.
I listened in silence, gazing from the window and wishing I was anywhere else but here, as Mrs. Macfarlane outlined their plan. They had an inherited property, she said, in Stornoway, which was currently a letting concern. But she and her husband were prepared to let it go to raise operating capital, since I had failed to bring in any substantial new orders from either London or Tokyo.
I didn’t miss the barb, but clenched my teeth and let it go. I flicked her a look, and supposed that she might once have been a good-looking woman. But her face had fallen with the years, and her downturned mouth seemed a reflection of the bitter old biddy she had become. Hair dyed chestnut was more red than brown, and the silver it was meant to hide seemed always to show at the roots. Her husband was a tall thin whip of a man and said nothing, as usual. He had long ago given up any pretence of wearing the trousers in the Macfarlane household. And it had occurred to me more than once, that this was probably why he spent so much of his time out in the loom shed.
“We have a buyer interested. An offer on the table. All we have to do is accept. But, of course, we’ll want our share of the company in return.”
My eyes wandered towards Ruairidh, but he was avoiding mine. I could see why he was prepared to go along with it. He had invested virtually all of his redundancy money in Ranish. If we let it go he’d have wasted the lot. Although the prospect of sharing the business with his parents filled me with dread, I didn’t see how I could object. Then came the bombshell.
“One other thing we’d have to insist upon.”
When I swung my gaze back towards Ruairidh’s mother, I could see in her eyes a glint of something almost malevolent.
“We can no longer employ your father as one of our weavers.”
I could feel anger burning colour on my cheeks. But she quickly pre-empted anything intemperate that might come involuntarily from my mouth.
“The mill tells us his work is substandard. The darners are spending all their time repairing the flaws in his weave. We can’t afford passengers, Niamh. Not if we’re to make a success of this.”
I noticed how Ranish was now being referred to in the collective ownership of we. As if it were all a done deal. I glanced at Ruairidh again and he shrugged. These were the terms under which his parents would bail us out. If I didn’t go along with them, he and I would lose everything.
This was probably the most difficult moment I’d had with my parents since telling them that I was going to marry Ruairidh. We sat in silence in their little back room, which had seemed so big to me as a child, listening to the ponderous tick-tock of the old clock on the mantel. The smell of peat smoke from an early-season fire filled the room, bringing back mixed memories. Rain, like tears, ran down the window, and the pervasive gloom I had brought with me from the Macfarlanes’ owed more, I think, to the darkness inside us than to the lack of light offered by the day.
They proffered no comment to the news that Dad would no longer be required to weave for Ranish, although I saw spots of red appear on his pale cheeks. I felt so sorry for him. He was at heart a good man, and he didn’t deserve this.
They listened mutely to my explanation of Ranish’s financial imperatives, and no matter how reasonable it all sounded, I knew that everything about it would seem unreasonable to them. When I had finished, my dad slapped his palms on his thighs and eased himself to his feet.
“Ah, well,” he said. “Can’t sit here chatting all day. Things to do.” His way of avoiding conflict or expressing emotion. I watched him walk stiffly to the door, and felt ashamed of myself. When I was young he had always seemed such a big, strong man. Now all I could see was the old man he had become. Diminished in so many ways.
When he had gone my mother looked at me very directly and spoke for the first time. “As if it’s not enough that we lose a son to that family, now we’re losing our daughter to them as well.”
It was then, like a gift from the gods, that Lee Blunt came into our lives.
It was Ruairidh’s idea that we weave what he called pattern blankets. A selection of samples in a single length, each blending one into the other every twenty centimetres. It would make for a unique presentation. Half a dozen pattern blankets, a rainbow of colours and choice. We would take them, he said, to the big international fabric fair in Paris. Première Vision.
I had been spending all morning on the phone, calling old contacts in Italy and Germany from my days at Johnstons, when he came in with the first of his pattern blankets. It looked stunning, and felt like silk to the touch.
“It’s amazing,” I said. Then let reality in to cloud my enthusiasm. “But, Ruairidh, we can’t afford a stand at PV. Not even the share of a stand.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He was grinning, and glowing with that enthusiasm he always seemed able to conjure out of even the darkest moments. “I’ve been talking to some folk at the mill. Apparently there’s a kind of side bar that takes place along one end of the sales hall at PV. Like a fringe fair, just off-piste. All sorts of private deals are done, without any need for a stand.”
“And the organizers are happy about that?” It seemed to me unlikely, since renting stands was how they made their money.
“Ah, well, not exactly.” There was mischief in his eyes now. “We’ll have to sneak our samples in.” And he grinned again. “But what’s life without a little risk?”
And so we ended up in Paris that September, the two of us, staying in the cheapest hotel we could find, and taking the RER to the Parc des Expositions on the first morning of the fair, all of our samples crammed into a couple of rucksacks.
We were nervous as kittens as we followed the crowds from the station along the covered walkways, past the various exhibition halls. Design. Manufacturing. Accessories. Until finally we saw Fabrics, and followed the red path up to a wall of glass doors. We had bought our tickets online, and dressed scruffily, hoping to pass ourselves off as students so that our backpacks wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
We had passed the ticket check when to our dismay a large dark-suited security man drew us to one side and asked us to put our rucksacks on a table. It is hard not to look guilty when that’s exactly what you are, and I was sure that my face would be a dead giveaway. To my amazement Ruairidh was smiling and seemed quite relaxed. He even managed a joke in his bad school French, and the security man cracked a smile for the first time.
Wearing white gloves, he went through both of our backpacks very carefully, laying our samples to one side on the table during his search, and then repacking them when he was finished. Which is when I realized that, of course, he was looking for explosives, not fabrics. He waved us through.
From a mezzanine level with coffee bars and restaurants we looked out over the hall itself. Hundreds, maybe thousands of stands, all closed off by opaque white plastic walls, shimmered away into a breathtaking distance. Each open-topped stand was illuminated by a rectangle of fluorescent light that hovered over it. A long way above that, rows of lights set into the roof illuminated the vastness of the hall itself. It seemed as if we were gazing down on to some small futuristic city, divided and subdivided by streets and alleyways crowded with people, like ants scurrying about an underground labyrinth. It was hard to believe that this was the breeding ground for the clothes that would adorn the models strutting their stuff on the catwalks of the coming winter collections. What we wanted to do was make sure that at least some of those models would be wearing Ranish Tweed.
Along one end of the hall there were coffee shops and restaurants set against the angle of the only windows in the entire building to let in natural light. Tables and chairs ran the length of the wall of stands that backed on to them, and it was here that people sat drinking coffees, making deals and phone calls, cementing friendships and swapping contracts.
Ruairidh installed me at a table with the rucksacks and a coffee to keep me going, while he went off to solicit tr
ade. How he intended to do that I had no idea, and didn’t want to know. I sat for a long time, watching the faces that drifted past, picking up snatches of conversations in English, French, Italian, Japanese. No one paid me the least attention. Eventually I put in my earbuds and turned on my iPod. An hour passed. An hour and a half. I’d gone through three coffees, and was beginning to think I was going to have to find a loo when Ruairidh reappeared, walking briskly through the tables towards me. Following him was a tall young man inclining to plumpness, who looked like a refugee from an art school diploma show. He was wearing a pair of Alexander McQueen bumsters, a torn T-shirt and scuffed sneakers.
I stood up as they arrived at the table. Ruairidh said, “Niamh meet Lee. Lee this is Niamh.” Lee smiled shyly, revealing crooked teeth that were a little too prominent, and shook my hand. His face was unshaven, with the hint of a goatee clinging to his chin, while the sides of his head were cut to the wood and topped by a mess of tousled red hair like fusewire. It was only in that moment that I realized, quite suddenly, that this was the designer Lee Blunt, the new darling of British fashion. I had seen his photograph often enough, but he looked different in the flesh, and much taller than I had ever imagined. It was quite a bit later that Ruairidh confessed to me his certainty that the only reason he had managed to persuade Lee to come and see our samples that day was because Lee fancied him.
But it was Lee and I who hit it off when Ruairidh went to get coffees. Lee sat opposite me and cocked his head a little to one side, casting an appraising eye over me, head to toe.
“Take a photograph,” I said. “It’ll last longer.”
He laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m just dressing you.”
