by Alan Warner
‘I would,’ he said.
She tapped on the head of the bed as loudly as she could and her daughter came in.
‘Where’s Hugh?’ she asked.
‘He’s outside.’
‘Tell him to bring in the machine. John wants to hear my recording.’ She turned to John and said, ‘Hugh is very good with his hands, you know. All the young people nowadays know all about electricity and cars.’
After a while a tall, quiet, long-haired boy came in with a tape recorder. He plugged it into a socket beside the bed, his motions cool and competent and unflurried. He had the same neutral quizzical look that John had noticed in his brother’s two grandchildren. They don’t want to be deceived again, he thought. This generation is not interested in words, only in actions. Observation, exactitude, elegance. The universe of the poem or the story is not theirs, their universe is electronic. And when he thought of the phrase ‘the music of the spheres’ he seemed to see a shining bicycle moving through the heavens, or the wheels of some inexplicable machine.
Hugh switched on the tape recorder and John listened.
‘Tonight,’ the announcer began, ‘we are going to hear the voice of a lady of ninety years old. She will be telling us about her life on this far Hebridean island untouched by pollution and comparatively unchanged when it is compared with our own hectic cities. This lady has never in all her life left the island on which she grew up. She has never seen a train. She has never seen a city. She has been brought up in a completely pastoral society. But we may well ask, what will happen to this society? Will it be squeezed out of existence? How can it survive the pollution of our time, and here I am speaking not simply of physical but of moral pollution? What was it like to live on this island for so many years? I shall try to elicit some answers to that question in the course of this programme. But first I should like you to hear this lady singing a Gaelic traditional song. I may interpolate at this point that many Gaelic songs have apparently been anglicised musically, thus losing their traditional flavour. But Mrs Macdonald will sing this song in the way in which she was taught to, the way in which she picked it up from previous singers.’
There followed a rendering of Thig Tri Nithean Gun Iarraidh (‘Three things will come without seeking . . . ’). John listened to the frail voice: it seemed strange to hear it, ghostly and yet powerful in its own belief, real and yet unreal at the same time.
When the singing was over the interviewer questioned her:
INTER. And now, Mrs Macdonald, could you please tell me how old you are?
MRS M. I am ninety years old.
INTER. You will have seen a lot of changes on this island, in this village even.
MRS M. Oh yes, lots of changes. I don’t know much about the island. I know more about the village.
INTER. You mean that you hardly ever left the village itself?
MRS M. I don’t know much about the rest of the island.
INTER. What are your memories then of your youth in the village?
MRS M. Oh, people were closer together. People used to help each other at the peat gathering. They would go out with a cart and they would put the peats on the cart. And they would make tea and sing. It was very happy times especially if it was a good day.
INTER. Do they not do that any more? I mean, coal and electricity . . .
MRS M. No, they don’t do that so much, no. Nowadays. And there was more fishing then too. People would come to the door and give you a fish if they had caught one.
INTER. You mean herring?
MRS M. No, things like cod. Not herring. They would catch them in boats or off the rocks. Not herring. The herring were caught by the drifters. And the mackerel. We used to eat herring and potatoes every day. Except Sunday of course.
INTER. And what did you eat on Sunday?
MRS M. We would always have meat on Sunday. That was always the fashion. Meat on Sundays. And soup.
INTER. I see. And tell me, when did you leave school, Mrs Macdonald?
MRS M. I left school when I was fourteen years old. I was in Secondary Two.
INTER. It was a small village school, I take it.
MRS M. Oh, yes, it was small. Perhaps about fifty pupils.
Perhaps about fifty. We used to write on slates in those days and the children would bring in a peat for a fire in the winter.
Every child would bring in a peat. And we had people called pupil-teachers.
INTER. Pupil-teachers? What were pupil-teachers?
MRS M. They were young people who helped the teacher. Pupils. They were pupils themselves.
INTER. Then what happened?
MRS M. I looked after my father and mother. We had a croft too. And then I got married.
INTER. What did your husband do?
MRS M. He was a crofter. In those days we used to go to a dance at the end of the road. But the young people go to the town now. In those days we had a dance at the end of the road.
INTER. Did you not know him before, your husband I mean?
MRS M. Yes but that was where I met him, at the dance.
INTER. What did they use for the dance?
MRS M. What do you mean?
INTER. What music did they use?
MRS M. Oh, you mean the instrument. It was a melodeon.
INTER. Can you remember the tunes, any of the tunes, any of the songs?
MRS M. Oh yes, I can remember A Ribbinn Oig bbeil cuimbn’ agad?
INTER. Could you tell our listeners what that means, Mrs Macdonald?
MRS M. It’s a love song. That’s what it is, a sailors’ song. A love song.
INTER. I see. And do you think you could sing it?
And she proceeded to sing it in that frail voice. John listened to the evocation of nights on ships, moonlight, masts, exile, and he was strangely moved as if he were hearing a voice speaking to him from the past.
‘I think that will be enough,’ she said to the boy. He switched off the tape recorder without saying anything, put it in its case and took it away, closing the door behind him.
John said, ‘You make it all sound very romantic.’
‘Well, it was true about the peats.’
‘But don’t you remember the fights people used to have about land and things like that?’
‘Yes but I remember the money they collected when Shodan was drowned.’
‘But what about the tricks they used to play on old Maggie?’
‘That was just young boys. And they had nothing else to do. That was the reason for it.’
There was a silence. A large blue fly buzzed in the window. John followed it with his eyes. It was restless, never settling, humming loudly with an angry sound. For a moment he nearly got up in order to kill it, he was so irritated by the booming sound and its restlessness.
‘Would you like to tell me about my mother?’ said John.
‘What about your mother?’
‘Sarah said something when I was speaking to her.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I felt there was something wrong, the way she talked. It was about my brother.’
‘Well you know your brother was fond of the land. What did you want to know?’
‘What happened. That was all.’
‘Your mother went a bit odd at the end. It’s quite common with old people. Perhaps that’s what she was talking about. My own brother wouldn’t let the doctor into the house. He thought he was poisoning him.’
‘You say odd. How odd?’
‘She accused your brother of wanting to put her out of the house. But I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. Old people get like that.’
‘I see.’
‘You know your brother.’
‘Yes. He is fond of land. He always was. He’s fond of property.’
‘Most people are,’ she said. ‘And what did you think of my singing?’
‘You sang well. It’s funny how one can tell a real Gaelic singer. It’s not even the way they pronounce their words. It’s something e
lse.’
‘You haven’t forgotten your Gaelic.’
‘No. We had societies. We had a Gaelic society. People who had been on holiday used to come and talk to us and show us slides.’ The successful and the failed. From the lone shelling of the misty island. Smoking their cigars but unable to go back and live there. Since after all they had made their homes in America. Leading their half lives, like mine. Watching cowboys on TV, the cheapness and the vulgarity of it, the largeness, the spaciousness, the crowdedness. They never really belonged to the city, these Highlanders. Not really. The skyscrapers were too tall, they were surrounded by the works of man, not the works of God. In the beginning was the neon lighting . . . And the fake religions, the cheap multitudinous sprouting so-called faiths. And they cried, some of them, at these meetings, in their large jackets of fine light cloth, behind their rimless glasses.
He got up to go.
‘It’s the blood, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Pardon.’
‘That makes you able to tell. The blood. You could have seen it on my pillow three months ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, don’t be sorry. One grows used to lying here. The blood is always there. It won’t allow people to change.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
He said goodbye awkwardly and went outside. As he stood at the door for a moment, he heard music coming from the side of the house. It sounded American. He went over and looked. The boy was sitting against the side of the house patiently strumming his guitar, his head bent over it. He sang the words in a consciously American way, drawling them affectedly. John moved quietly away. The sun was still on the water where some ducks flew low. He thought of the headland where he was standing as if it were Marathon. There they had combed each other’s long hair, the effeminate courageous ones about to die.
As he walked back he couldn’t get out of his mind an article about Billy Graham he had read in an American magazine not long before. It was all about the crewcut saint, the electric blue eyed boy perched in his mountain eyrie. The Victorian respect shown by the interviewers had been, even for him with a long knowledge of American papers, nauseating. Would you like these remarks off the record, and so on. And then that bit about his personal appearances at such shows as Laugh-in where the conversation somehow got round to Jesus Christ every time! In Africa a corps of black policemen, appointed to control the crowd, had abandoned their posts and come forward to make a stand for Jesus!
Mad crude America, Victorian and twentieth century at the one time. Manic country of the random and the destined. What would his father or his mother have thought of Billy Graham? The fundamentalist with the stereophonic backing. For the first time since he came home he laughed out loud.
7
It was evening when he got back to his brother’s house and the light was beginning to thicken. As he turned in at the gate his brother, who must have seen him coming, walked towards it and then stopped: he was carrying a hammer in his right hand as if he had been working with posts. They stood looking at each other in the half-light.
‘Have you seen everybody then,’ said his brother. ‘Have you visited them all?’ In the dusk and carrying the hammer he looked somehow more authoritative, more solid than his brother.
‘Most of them. Sarah was telling me about the cow.’
‘Oh, that. There was something wrong with the cow. But it’s all right now. She talks too much,’ he added contemptuously.
‘And also,’ said John carefully, ‘I heard something about our mother.’
‘What about her? By God, if that bitch Sarah has been spreading scandal I’ll . . . ’ His hands tightened on the hammer and his whole body seemed to bulge out and bristle like a fighting cock. For a moment John had a vision of a policeman with a baton in his hand. John glimpsed the power and energy that had made his brother the dominant person in the village.
After a while he said, ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘About what?’ said John coldly.
‘About our mother. She went a bit queer at the end. She hated Susan, you see. She would say that she was no good at the housework and that she couldn’t do any of the outside work. She accused her of smoking and drinking. She even said she was trying to poison her.’
‘And?’
‘She used to say to people that I was trying to put her out of the house. Which of course was nonsense. She said that I had plotted to get the croft, and you should have it. She liked you better, you see.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you. Anyway I’m not good at writing. I can dash off a few lines but I’m not used to the pen.’ For that moment again he looked slightly helpless and awkward as if he were talking about a gift that he half envied, half despised.
John remembered the letters he would get – ‘Just a scribble to let you know that we are well and here’s hoping you are the same . . . I hope you are in the pink as this leaves me.’ Clichés cut out of a half world of crumbling stone. Certainly this crisis would be beyond his ability to state in writing.
‘She was always very strong for the church. She would read bits of the Bible to annoy Susan, the bits about Ruth and so on. You know where it says, “Whither thou goest I will go . . . ” She would read a lot. Do you know it?’
‘I know it.’
John said, ‘I couldn’t come back at the time.’
‘I know that. I didn’t expect you to come back.’
As he stood there John had the same feeling he had had with Sarah, only stronger, that he didn’t know anything about people at all, that his brother, like Sarah, was wearing a mask, that by choosing to remain where he was his brother had been the stronger of the two, that the one who had gone to America and immersed himself in his time was really the weaker of the two, the less self-sufficient. He had never thought about this before, he had felt his return as a regression to a more primitive place, a more pastoral, less exciting position, lower on the scale of a huge complex ladder. Now he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps those who went away were the weaker ones, the ones who were unable to suffer the slowness of time, its inexorable yet ceremonious passing. He was shaken as by a vision: but perhaps the visions of artists and writers were merely ideas which people like his brother saw and dismissed as of no importance.
‘Are you coming in?’ said his brother, looking at him strangely.
‘Not yet. I won’t be long.’
His brother went into the house and John remained at the gate. He looked around him at the darkening evening. For a moment he expected to see his mother coming towards him out of the twilight holding a pail of warm milk in her hand. The hills in the distance were darkening. The place was quiet and heavy.
As he stood there he heard someone whistling and when he turned round saw that it was Malcolm.
‘Did you repair the bike?’ said John.
‘Yes, it wasn’t anything. It’ll be all right now. We finished that last night.’
‘And where were you today, then?’
‘Down at the shore.’
‘I see.’
They stood awkwardly in each other’s presence. Suddenly John said, ‘Why are you so interested in science and maths?’
‘It’s what I can do best,’ said Malcolm in surprise.
‘You don’t read Gaelic, do you?’
‘Oh, that’s finished,’ said Malcolm matter-of-factly.
John was wondering whether the reason Malcolm was so interested in maths and science was that he might have decided, perhaps unconsciously, that his own culture, old and deeply rotted and weakening, was inhibiting and that for that reason he preferred the apparent cleanness and economy of equations without ideology.
‘Do you want to go to America?’ he asked.
‘I should like to travel,’ said Malcolm carelessly. ‘Perhaps America. But it might be Europe somewhere.’
John was about to say something about violence till it suddenly occurred to him that this
village which he had left also had its violence, its buried hatreds, its bruises which festered for years and decades.
‘I want to leave because it’s so boring here,’ said Malcolm. ‘It’s so boring I could scream sometimes.’
‘It can seem like that,’ said John. ‘I shall be leaving tomorrow but you don’t need to tell them that just now.’
He hadn’t realised that he was going to say what he did till he had actually said it.
Malcolm tried to be conventionally regretful but John sensed a relief just the same.
They hadn’t really said anything to each other.
After a while Malcolm went into the house, and he himself stood in the darkening light thinking. He knew that he would never see the place again after that night and the following morning. He summoned it up in all its images, observing, being exact. There was the house itself with its porch and the flowers in front of it. There was the road winding palely away from him past the other houses of the village. There was the thatched roofless house not far away from him. There were the fields and the fences and the barn. All these things he would take away with him, his childhood, his pain, into the shifting world of neon, the flashing broken signals of the city.
One cannot run away, he thought to himself as he walked towards the house. Or if one runs away one cannot be happy anywhere any more. If one left in the first place one could never go back. Or if one came back one also brought a virus, an infection of time and place. One always brings back a judgment to one’s home.
He stood there for a long time before going into the house. He leaned over the fence looking out towards the fields. He could imagine his father coming towards him, in long beard and wearing wellingtons, solid, purposeful, fixed. And hadn’t his father been an observer too, an observer of the seasons and the sea?
As he stood thinking he saw the cloud of midges again. They were rising and falling in the slight breeze. They formed a cloud but inside the cloud each insect was going on its own way or drifting with the breeze. Each alive and perhaps with its own weight, its own inheritance. Apparently free yet fixed, apparently spontaneous yet destined.
