The Last Wanderer

by Meg Henderson

  And MacEwan’s Castle was a beautiful house, no doubt about that. It had every modern innovation. The floors throughout were stone-tiled and heated from underneath. There were four bedrooms in the long, low-lying castle, each with its own en-suite bathroom and fitted wardrobes, so that there was nothing out of place; it had, after all, been designed for, and mostly by, a fisherman, someone who understood the need to have everything stowed safely and tidily away. But this was a house, it was meant to be a home, Rose would think, knowing all the time that it was neither: it was Sorley Og’s statement to his reluctant in-laws. The sparkling, hi-tech fitted kitchen led to a splendid dining room that they never used, and in the centre a big, beautiful rosewood table stood day after day, but no one ever sat on any of its eight chairs. Rose was just as lost in the enormous sitting room he had insisted on. Crossing to the big window facing out to sea seemed to take forever; she never quite got over the notion that she was walking onto a stage and that any moment a spotlight might illuminate her and oblige her to do a few numbers and a quick tap-dance. That was what it was for, anyway, to showcase Rose Nicolson MacEwan.

  ‘It’s so, so perfect!’ Rose had exclaimed, when it was finally finished, trying not to catch his eye, and Sorley Og had smiled back delightedly. ‘But will we ever use it all, Sorley?’

  ‘Of course we will!’ he had replied, smiling broadly. ‘We’ll fill this house with bairns; there won’t be room for all of them. One day you’ll be complaining that we didn’t make it bigger, you’ll see.’

  And just in case the number of bairns should run well into double figures, there was a floored loft, ready for conversion into anything they might want in the future.

  Her sister and her family lived a few hundred yards away in a perfectly good kit-built house: they were the two most recently built houses, one a home, one a – well – the MacEwan statement; and they would be the last to be built because there was no more space. Sorley Og had insisted on having an architect to design it, then he had gone over every inch of the drawing and increased dimensions here, changed measurements there, till the architect said, not altogether in jest, that Sorley Og should’ve designed his own house and cut out the middle man. In effect that’s what he’d done anyway, Sorley had treated the architect’s finished drawings merely as a guide to hang his ideas on.

  Everything had to be of the highest standard, the furniture, the fixtures and fittings, and anything he found fault with had to be replaced immediately. Rose had stood back, hoping that his hurt would blow itself out and she would magically be left with a home of manageable proportions, because the reality was that he was building a house she would live in more than he ever would, given that he would spend a lot of his time at sea. She didn’t say this, of course, because that’s not what it was about. The house on the hill wasn’t a functional home for a family, big or small, it was never intended to be. And it was all so unnecessary, that was the silliest thing about it. The Nicolsons didn’t disapprove of Sorley Og himself, but of their Rose marrying a fisherman, any fisherman. She had explained this often enough, but somehow Sorley Og didn’t quite believe it; a reflection, she knew, of the softer side below the invincible MacEwan facade.

  12

  The fathers of Sorley Og and Rose had been friends all their days, and probably their grandfathers too. There were three of them, Sorley Mor MacEwan, Quintin Nicolson and Ian Ross, known all his life as Gannet, because there was nothing he wouldn’t and didn’t eat. They were always together, even as bairns, but for many years now there had only been Sorley Mor and Gannet. Even so, as the older villagers would tell you, the wound left by Quintin’s death had never healed, there was still a space beside the other two that would never be filled; and to those who remembered them as a trio, the image of Quintin would never fade. All the years that Rose had known Sorley Mor, though, there had only been him and Gannet. She had never seen the three of them together, so the two of them – Gannet always a step ahead – seemed entirely normal to her.

  Gannet, Quintin and Sorley Mor had started their lives as fishermen on the same day aboard an earlier Ocean Wanderer, skippered by Sorley’s father. When they first went to sea they had all been fifteen years old, but Gannet, because he was the younger by a few months, had been appointed ship’s cook; that was the tradition. He proved worse at the job than anyone in living memory or even myth, though, serving the crew delicacies like kippers with custard that even the hungriest fisherman refused to eat. Gannet, though, as everyone knew, refused nothing: just like a gannet. He had been Gannet for so long, in fact, that it took a great deal of deliberation for anyone to come up with his real name.

  Everyone looked at the three of them as they walked through the village, everyone talked to them, though mainly to Sorley Mor. He was the extrovert, the talker of the trio, and always lagging behind, engaged in some verbal joust, even then. Quintin was dark, quiet and amiable by nature, but he liked to laugh, so the conversations were between him and Sorely Mor, whereas the thin, lanky Gannet didn’t really talk much; well, not when he was sober anyway. When he was sober he talked in whispers if it was necessary to talk at all, but he was prodigiously well read and wherever he went he always carried a pile of books or magazines – the National Geographic was his favourite. Then, when he’d had a few, he couldn’t shut up. All through her life Rose could remember him visiting Granny Ina when he’d had a few and the two of them talking for hours about books they had read, about solar eclipses and the workings of the human mind, the subjects that fascinated both of them, and sometimes they would sing together, though unlike the Gannet, her grandmother never touched a drop. He spoke in a beautiful deep voice with an eloquence that stirred the blood. In his cups Gannet became an orator, a philosopher who could wring tears from a glass eye with his almost artistic conversations and detailed observations on a whole range of topics. He memorised everything he saw, heard or read, including, it was said, the words of every song ever written, and when he’d had those few he would sing them in a pure, glorious voice that brought a lump to the throat of listeners, though they couldn’t ever explain why. On the whole, though, he just whispered.

  These were the things Rose would think about as she sat staring out of her huge window: the characters in the village, the history of the place, and the part her family had played, the part both sides of her family still played in Acarsaid. There was a warmth in belonging, in being part of the fabric of the place, though at times it could be claustrophobic, too. The incomers felt it mainly, those romantic souls who felt drawn to a culture where they would never belong, but who kept trying anyway, and others, like herself, who had experienced the outside world and come back, for whatever reason.

  The window took up almost the entire surface area of the sitting room wall. It had been put in to give a clear view across the sea to the islands and beyond, to where the sky merged with the ocean, and you could see the boats heading for harbour, tiny dark shapes against the brightness during the day, or little clusters of twinkling light by night. On this day, though, Rose wasn’t watching for Ocean Wanderer or any other boat, she was just standing there, gazing out without seeing, thinking, trying to make sense of her life – if, that was, there was sense to be found in it, and she was far from sure about that.

  All the times Sorley Og had been away fishing she would look out over the water from this window and wonder where he was at that very moment, what he was thinking, how the trip was going, and what the weather was like out where he was. When he called from the boat to say he was heading for harbour she would sit here sometimes for hours, scanning the horizon with binoculars for first sight of the boat. That was what the window was for, after all; the beauty of the view was a secondary consideration.

  Further down the road she knew that her older sister, Sally, would be doing the same, waiting and watching by her big window, though it was nowhere near as big as the one Sorley Og had to have. Sally would be watching for first sight of Ivy Ann, bringing her husband, Alan Guthrie, home. Alan was
originally from Glasgow, but he had left home as soon as his time as an engineer was up and he had his tradesman’s papers, to roam the world, or so he thought. By the 1970s he was in his early twenties and working in the oil industry; he had been on a shore break in Aberdeen when fate had trawled him and brought him to Acarsaid. The oil industry wasn’t as exciting as he had hoped. In fact, it was probably bound by more rules, regulations and routine than the life he had left behind to look for excitement, a fact that Alan was reflecting on that night in a pub by the harbour, when the skipper of an Acarsaid fishing boat had come in, looking for an engineer.

  The Ivy Ann had called in to Aberdeen for emergency repairs a few days before, and the engineer, an Aberdeen man, had taken the opportunity to go on the skite in his native town, eventually being thrown out of the pub he’d been drinking in. After throwing the obligatory amount of abuse at the bar staff he had left somewhat unsteadily, vowing never to return, a threat he carried out by tripping and falling into the harbour, where his drowned body was recovered the next day. Was there anyone, the skipper wanted to know, who could take on the job until the end of the trip in a week’s time? Alan Guthrie, unattached, fed up with the boring predictability of two weeks on an oil rig followed by another two drinking his leave away, was ready for any opportunity for change that came along, so on the spur of the moment he volunteered. He had never been to sea before, except on the rigs, and he enjoyed that first trip taking the boat back to Acarsaid enough to make him sign on for another, then just one more before he left to roam the world. In Acarsaid he met Sally Nicolson, and that, as they say, was that.

  Qualified engineers were a breed thin on the ground in a small harbour like Acarsaid, and when Sorley Mor had taken delivery of the current Ocean Wanderer in 1976, he needed not just one but two engineers, because of the size of the boat. Naturally he had asked Alan if he was interested, because Alan was known to be a good, steady worker, and, now that he was married to a local lassie, he was anchored; if he was not quite a native Acarsaid man, he was as near as anyone not of the blood could get. It had taken Alan a great deal of soul-searching to stay with Ivy Ann rather than join the crew of Ocean Wanderer, because Sorley Mor, even at the age of thirty-seven, was a fine skipper, and everyone wanted to work with him. He had no complaints with his own skipper, though, and the work suited him; the smaller Ivy Ann mainly concentrated on shellfish, so the journeys were no more than a few days at a time, whereas a big boat like Ocean Wanderer could be away for weeks at a time. Reluctantly turning the offer down, he told Sorley Mor that he might have a solution: his cousin, Eric, might be interested, he said. Eric had been an engineer in the Merchant Navy for years, but Alan knew for a fact that he was fed up of going on long trips.

  ‘What age would the man be about?’ Sorley asked.

  ‘A wee bit older than me,’ Alan said. ‘About thirty, I’d say. A good guy, straight as a die.’

  ‘And he comes from Glasgow, too?’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ Alan said. ‘Different part, mind you. I come from Maryhill, Eric comes from the Southside.’

  ‘And that matters, does it?’

  Alan thought for a moment then shook his head. ‘Only if you’re in Glasgow. Would you like to meet him? You’ll like him, he’s dead easy to get on with.’

  ‘Very well, Alan,’ said Sorley Mor grandly, ‘conduct the candidate to the boardroom for his official interview.’

  And so, in due course, Alan accompanied his cousin to the Inn for the usual ‘official interview’, a friendly grilling by Sorley Mor and Gannet over a drink or three.

  ‘Now, Dan,’ Gannet said to the barman, ‘don’t give the skipper here anything to eat, you know that your food gives him the boak. How in hell you can cook like that, and you the brother of Stamp, I will never understand.’

  ‘Well at least I can read and write,’ Dan offered lamely in his own defence.

  ‘Aye, betting lines is one thing, Dan, but it’s obvious you can’t read cooking instructions,’ Gannet replied. ‘Can you not get Stamp to give you a few lessons?’

  ‘He certainly will not!’ said Sorley Mor. ‘Stamp belongs to the crew of the Wanderer, I pay his wages, so I own his cooking. I won’t have him passing on his secrets to a common barman, even if it is his brother! Now, Dan, don’t you go listening to Gannet here, he’s had a few. Just you refresh our glasses and bring me one of your delicious Ploughman efforts like the good man you are.’

  ‘As opposed to a common barman?’ Dan asked wearily.

  ‘Ach,’ said Sorley Mor, ‘was that you said that, Gannet? No, no, Dan, your Ploughman efforts are probably your best attempts at food. Just you bring me one here, if you please, and don’t spare the pickle!’

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ said Gannet. ‘You always are.’

  The door opened and Alan came in. Sorley Mor and Gannet shouted out a greeting then, shocked into silence, stared at the man following him. Eric Guthrie had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling beams. He was the biggest man either of them had ever seen. He stood six feet six in the socks covering his size thirteen feet, which were then encased in gigantic boots that looked as though they could be used as lifeboats in an emergency. Sorley Mor gulped and looked at Gannet, who immediately swallowed another half of whisky to avoid having to make any immediate comment as Alan drew near with his cousin. And Eric Guthrie wasn’t just tall, he was big. He wore American-style, bib-and-brace, denim overalls over a tartan shirt with the sleeves rolled up – probably, Sorley Mor was to say later, because the cuffs wouldn’t stretch around his wrists. Atop his head in what seemed like the far distance, a baseball cap tried valiantly to contain a head of thick, curly black hair, which met up with a full beard that covered much of his face and was of just as lavish proportions. He looked, in fact, like a particularly suspicious, short-tempered hillbilly, or the nearest to it that had ever been seen in those parts. His eyes were visible in the shade of his baseball cap only because they burned with an unusually fierce intensity that suggested strongly that this was not a man to cross, and they seemed to stare right through the two old sea dogs at the bar. Sorley Mor was aware that a quiet hush had fallen on the Inn, so it wasn’t just him and Gannet who had noticed something unusual.

  ‘This is my cousin, Eric,’ Alan smiled.

  Eric stuck out a huge hand. As he watched Sorley Mor’s hand disappear somewhere inside the proffered paw, Gannet decided that he would risk no more than a brief wave and ‘Hello, there’. Eric stared steadily and without any great friendliness at them in a way that made them uncomfortable, so they tried to affect nonchalance, as Alan stood beaming from one to the other, seemingly unaware of the impression his cousin was creating.

  ‘So, Alan tells me you’re interested in working in the fishing?’ Sorley Mor smiled, making a great show of being so relaxed that he could conduct the interview and eat Dan’s Ploughman effort at the same time.

  ‘ ‘Sri’ anuff,’ replied the big man shortly in a big voice, still staring at them solemnly.

  ‘And you’re with the Merchant Navy at the moment?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Sorley Mor tried to dismiss the notion that however short and to the point his answers were, the Inn vibrated every time Eric spoke. He cleared his throat. ‘Had enough of the voyages, then, is it?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Sorley Mor looked helplessly at Gannet who looked away. ‘And you know something of the fishing, then?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And you think you could handle the engines, do you?’

  ‘An engine’s an engine.’

  ‘She’s a big boat,’ Sorley Mor said, not altogether without pride.

  ‘Worked oan bigger.’ And still the stare didn’t waver.

  Gannet having determined to abandon his skipper, Sorley Mor searched his mind for something that would open up a deeper, wider, more convivial conversation. ‘Would you like something to eat?’

  Eric glanced at the skipper’s meal and wisely declined with a shake of his h
ead.

  ‘A drink, maybe? Let me buy you a dram.’

  ‘Naw. Don’t drink.’

  ‘So how do you manage to stay alive?’ Sorley Mor asked, desperately laughing at his weak attempt at humour.

  ‘Ah suck stanes,’ the big man replied humourlessly, his eyes boring into Sorley Mor.

  ‘Aye, well. And you have your papers and everything?’

  ‘Aye.’ Eric dug into the pocket across his breast and pulled out an envelope packed with papers testifying to his excellence and experience as a ship’s engineer and handed it to Sorley Mor, who was so put off his stride that he gave them only the briefest of looks.

  ‘So when can you start, then, Eric?’

  ‘The noo, if ye waant,’ he said, taking the envelope back and stuffing it into his breat pocket again.

  Once outside and on the road to MacEwan’s Row, Gannet berated Sorley Mor. ‘By God, man, but you let him away easy.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me about letting him away easy! You barely looked at him, never mind talked to him! Come to that, I could barely make out more than two words he said,’ said Sorley Mor. ‘Could you, Gannet?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t say more than two words,’ replied Gannet. ‘Which one of them did you actually understand then?’

  ‘Well, maybe it’s not fair to judge him on a few grunts, right enough,’ the skipper said wisely. ‘He is a Glasgow man after all, and they can be hellish difficult to understand at the best of times. I’m sure I remember it was a good two years before I understood young Alan when he came here at first. Whatever he said I’d just smile and say, “The same to yourself, Alan.” Was years before he started to speak properly like us, and I realised he’d been asking if I wanted a dram, and by that time he was so fed up asking and getting no real reply that he’d stopped asking altogether. But with that big man it was more the way he said it and, my God, that look in his eye!’