Rose had gone to St Andrew’s University on the east coast of Scotland at the age of eighteen to do archaeology, intending to go on after that and specialize in marine archaeology. But she had only completed the first part of the plan. She had always been fascinated by the stories of lost galleons lying at the bottom of the sea, and by stories of pirates. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to find fabulous treasures, casks of golden doubloons and precious stones, as that she was excited by the idea of connecting with past lives, of piecing together what people were like and how they lived long ago, of bringing things from the sea that had been lost for centuries, giving life again to those they had belonged to. If she went on to do her second course at university, she would become one of a very select band of females working on wrecks all over the world, collecting artefacts from sunken ships from any time in history, understanding and explaining the past. She would join expeditions to find Bluebeard’s flagship, lost somewhere in the Caribbean; she would search off Egypt for Cleopatra’s Palace, rumoured to be lying fathoms deep just off the coast, and she would hunt for the Esperanza, sunk off the Philippines in the 17th century on its way to Mexico when carrying a 500-million-dollar cargo of gold, silver, coins and Chinese tableware. She lived in fear of someone else finding her dreams before she could. So that had been the plan, until she saw Sorley Og on the deck of Ocean Wanderer that day. It was the first thing she looked for every time she came home, the sight of the boat tied up at the harbour, with the figure of Sorley Mor standing on deck, usually with Gannet somewhere nearby. On that day Sorley Mor’s son had been standing beside him, though, truth to tell, Gannet could’ve been there too without her noticing, because the sight of the two Sorleys was all that registered.
And yet Sorley Og had always been there. She remembered him at the village school, an amiable boy a few years older than herself, who didn’t much care for learning, didn’t see much point in it. The teacher, Miss Nairn, had come from Glasgow to teach the heathens (that was how she had thought of it); a small, skinny creature who had heroically risen from a poor family to become a teacher and thereafter hated her roots and anyone who reminded her of them. The people she had lived among were all lazy and stupid, she would tell the Acarsaid bairns; they hadn’t wanted to learn, preferring instead to wallow in their ignorance, but none of her pupils would ever be allowed to do that. Then her gaze would fall on Sorley Og, staring out to sea or up to the sky and, her mean eyes narrowing to slits, she would sneak up on the boy as quietly as she could in the hope of making him jump. The fact that he never did jump, but instead turned to greet her with his slow, friendly smile, reduced her to a screaming heap every time. What, she would screech, was he looking at, a boy like him? Castles in the air? He had no imagination, how dare he conjure up illusions in the clouds, a boy like him, who was destined to be a fisherman, a lowly fisherman just like his forebears, who had as much brainpower as he had imagination!
The judgement was a measure of how little the school-teacher understood of the community that had given her a living. Had there been a hierarchy in Acarsaid, then the Mac-Ewans would have been at the top, and Sorley Og, far from being ‘a boy like him’, would have been the equivalent of the heir to the throne. The tirades never bothered him, though; his dignity remained intact and he kept smiling his easy smile. He wasn’t making castles in the air, he would tell the enraged Miss Nairn, he was looking at the sky to gauge the weather, because his father was still at sea. And Miss Nairn was right, he would tell her, almost congratulating her on her insight, he would indeed become a fisherman, it was all he had ever wanted to be, just like his father, and his father before him, and his. He had no time for school, he would tell her kindly; she should just get on with teaching the others and not bother about him. After all, his mother had taught him to read, write and add up long before he’d started school, and what more could there possibly be to learn in a classroom? Miss Nairn would produce her leather belt and strap him in a frenzy till weals stood out on his hands and up his forearms, but the lazy smile on Sorley Og’s face barely dimmed. Even then, Rose, one of the smart ones, would hold her breath and wonder if Sorley Og’s performance was deliberate, or if he was fully aware that the damage to Miss Nairn’s leaping blood pressure and life expectancy far outweighed whatever pain she was inflicting on him.
His best pal was Gavin, the son of the local doctor, who, like Rose, was also a smart one. They made an odd pair, Sorley Og and Gavin: one easy-going, full of laughter and practical knowledge, and the other a determined scholar who would one day become a doctor and take over his GP father’s practice in the village. Perhaps that was the bond between them, Rose often thought, they were both determined, or pre-determined, to succeed their fathers. The friendship had endured, though, even when Gavin went down to Glasgow University and Sorley Og to sea. When they met up again down the years they effortlessly picked up where they had left off. He wasn’t stupid, Sorley Og, he just wasn’t academically minded. He needed to be outdoors, to work with his hands, to have his own space and freedom, but he had a quick intelligence and a dogged approach to anything that interested him; as his mother said, the house was littered with clocks as his father’s boatshed was with old engines that he had taken apart, ‘to see how they worked.’ He did the same with minds. Nowadays Rose knew that he’d been fully aware of what he had been doing to Miss Nairn way back then, just as he was now. If there was one thing Sorley Og was good at apart from fishing, it was finding where people’s weak spots were located. Rose MacEwan, née Nicolson, smiled. Ask anyone, friend and stranger alike, and they’d tell you that he had the sunniest and gentlest nature imaginable, but she knew that her Sorley could also be a vicious swine if you gave him reason! But these days, too, she knew that other side to him, the gentle side that was easily hurt, the side her family had hit full square.
15
The village store at the bottom of the Brae always stayed open when the fleet was due in, but even if Hamish had closed the door, you only had to think of tapping lightly and he’d come downstairs to sell you whatever you needed. Hamish Dubh he was called, Black Hamish, a tall, exceptionally thin man, and dark, that was how he was inevitably described, in English or in Gaelic. No one could ever say for sure what colour his eyes were, only that they were deeply set and dark. It became one of two trick questions they asked each other in pubs or at ceilidhs. First of all they’d ask, ‘What’s Gannet’s real name?’, and when someone eventually came up with Ian Ross they’d all laugh, because Gannet was Gannet, it suited him perfectly, while Ian Ross suited someone else entirely. Then the second question: ‘So what colour would you say Hamish Dubh’s eyes are, then?’, and the other person would look blank and say ‘Damn me! Would you believe that? I’ve known the man all my life and I haven’t a clue! Not a clue! But they’re dark, that I do know for sure!’
Hamish’s complexion was wrinkled, darkly wrinkled, and his hair, which had remained the same for as long as anyone could remember, was, well, dark. His daytime wear never varied: dark trousers and a cream shirt that had first seen the light of day countless years ago as white, with a green and black striped tie. The tight knot of the tie hung loosely from the crumpled collar of the shirt, which in turn hung just as loosely from the scrawny neck underneath. Over it all was a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover of depressingly dark hues. There was a time, in the 1970s, when to the delight of the village, Hamish’s pullover had become unexpectedly fashionable, and everyone who came into the shop commented wittily on his up-to-the-minute tank top. Hamish would smile back at them, nodding quietly, and muttering some reply in his dark voice, but when fashion moved on Hamish’s attire stayed where it was and always had been.
He’d been in the Acarsaid shop all the years that Rose could remember, all the years anyone could remember, come to that. No one could recall Hamish looking any different. Occasionally someone would come across old photos of the village and pass them round, identifying fishing boats and crews from years gone by or Aeneas Hamilton and the w
orkers at the smokery, and there would be Hamish Dubh smiling quietly in the background, looking just as he always had. Though others had aged, put on weight, gone grey, even gone to meet their Maker, Hamish Dubh remained as he was. Sorley Mor would run his fingers through his own grey locks and look at Hamish. ‘By God,’ the skipper would say amiably to him, ‘but you must have a painting in the attic, Hamish Dubh, except of course that you have no attic and, anyway, it’s difficult to think of a painting looking uglier than you do yourself.’
But it was his night attire that became even more legendary than Hamish himself. Tap on the store door at night and he would appear with his upper half clad in the same clothes that he wore every day of every year, but below the waist, forever being hitched up about his bony hips at the very last minute, he wore ancient brown-and-white striped pyjama bottoms, held at the waist by a fraying white cord and, on his feet, dark, checked slippers, his toes easing through the worn, disintegrating fabric, the rubber soles warped and twisted. There was a horror about those pyjama trousers that haunted generations of villagers, similar to the one about Batty Black Rock’s freed breasts: that one day the cord would finally fail to hold, or that Hamish would miscalculate the last-minute hitch that kept them aloft. In those awful circumstances God alone knew what would then be revealed and, it was earnestly hoped, God would keep it to himself as well. The ever-present fear expressed itself in constant entreaties to Hamish that he should invest in a new pair of pyjama trousers, preferably with an elasticated waist, a belt or braces – or preferably all three.
‘Would you look at him!’ Sorley Mor would say loudly to Gannet. ‘Can you not buy another pair of trousers, Hamish Dubh? For God’s sake, man, you must’ve made enough the way you’ve been skinning us down the years to afford something better than them old things!’
‘Now nobody ever made a penny profit out of you, Sorley Mor, or out of any MacEwan for that matter,’ Hamish would smile back his quiet, friendly smile. ‘The same name and the same money has been handed down through the ages. Sure, everybody knows that “Every penny is a prisoner” is inscribed under your clan crest. There’s not much wanders far from your pocket!’
Sorley Mor would take off the Dylan cap he had bought from Hamish Dubh. ‘Away with you, Hamish, man!’ he’d say in amazement, brandishing it about for all to see. ‘I bought this from you not forty years ago, and look at the old thing! Blue it was then, though you’d hardly know it to look at the pale thing it is now, and look you at how it’s fraying about the peak. Two shillings it cost me, as God and Gannet here are my witnesses, two whole shillings, and look at the state of it!’ He’d slap the cap back on his head. ‘And you say you can’t make enough from poor misguided Highland people like me to buy yourself a decent pair of breeks! Well, I just hope you don’t confess sins that size to Father Mick. I just hope you have the decency to go elsewhere for absolution and not destroy the wee man’s faith in humanity, that’s all I’ll say!’
It was odd how rituals began, Rose thought, those little things that all young lovers think they are the only ones ever to have thought of. For her and Sorley Og it was that, at the end of every trip, Sorley Og would go in to Hamish Dubh’s store and buy her an ice cream. She had no idea how it had started, but it had become their ‘thing’. Silly and soppy it might be, but it meant something precious to them, for all that. It was always one of those big affairs on a stick that he bought, pointlessly covered in chocolate that cracked and fell off in big sheets as her teeth bit into it; always too much, she said, to eat all at once. Rose would cut it in two, putting one half on a saucer in the freezer, feeling his eyes on her, laughing at her.
‘I know what you’re thinking!’ she’d say, trying not to sound too defensive.
‘You do, do you?’ he’d smile back slowly.
‘You’re going to say, “You always do that. I don’t know why you insist on having a big one when you could have two wee ones instead.” ’
‘I am, am I?’ he teased gently.
‘You are.’
‘Sure, don’t I know that size is important to you?’ he’d say innocently, and if her mother, Margo, and Granny Ina were there he’d smile sweetly at them. He was admired by the other in-laws for the way he played his mother-in-law like an old fiddle; sometimes it was all they could do not to laugh out loud at the subtle cheek he gave her.
‘Aye, I was daft enough not to realize that was all there was to you, Sorley Og, your big notions of yourself!’ Rose would reply in a tart stage whisper, her eyes glowing, then she’d raise her voice again. ‘And I’ll say what I always say, that I can have the other half with a spoon later, when you’re not here.’
Sorley shook his head. ‘If you got two wee ones you could still have one later, when I’m not here.’
‘There you go!’ she’d reply accusingly, and the two of them would laugh about – well, about nothing really.
Margo would struggle to contain herself, sitting stiffly in the big house she could never come to terms with, any more than she could Sorley Og marrying her clever daughter. Rose would be the one who would escape this place, she had decided long ago, Rose would justify her own miserable existence caught in the Acarsaid trap – and now a fisherman had caught her, too.
‘You understand nothing, son,’ she would say. She always tacked ‘son’ on at the end in an attempt to make her intervention sound friendlier than it was, because his constant cheerfulness and joking got on her nerves as much as the size of the house. Why did they need this great fancy place with its fitted this and fitted that? Sally and Alan’s house down the way wasn’t like this. It was a perfectly functional house, all that was needed, nothing like this great palace Sorley Og MacEwan had insisted on building. All show it was, just like him, everything overdone, and for what? To impress the little minds of this place? She hadn’t wanted Rose to marry him, but then she wasn’t alone on that.
‘I don’t know what you see in him!’ Margo had wailed when the news was first announced. ‘He takes nothing seriously!’
‘Have you never been in love?’ Rose had protested.
‘Love? What’s the matter with you, lassie?’ Margo had thrown at her daughter viciously. ‘You’re too old to believe in that nonsense! You’re educated, for God’s sake! Love? You know fine well that there’s no such thing! So that’s what you want to do, throw away all your chances and become a fisher-wife, all because of this “love” of yours? For God’s sake give yourself a shake and grow up!’
Margo threw the word ‘fisher-wife’ at Rose like an insult, though it was what her own grandmother, Dolina Polson, had been. Granny Ina’s mother had baited the nets that her husband and sons had used to catch fish, then gutted and salted the fish when they were brought home; sold them too, sometimes, and even helped drag the boat up onto the shore. It was part of keeping her family fed and alive. There was nothing to be ashamed of in that, but Margo obviously looked down on it. Granny Ina listened to the encounter without saying anything. She had long ago abandoned any hope of moderating her daughter’s views, let alone fully understanding how her mind worked, and even when Rose went to her later for support, the old woman was reluctant to take sides.
‘She said there wasn’t such a thing as love, did you hear her, Granny Ina?’ Rose asked. ‘How could she say that? Didn’t she love my father?’
Ina looked at the hurt brown eyes staring at her and wondered what to say. ‘I don’t know, Rose, I can’t answer that question. Maybe not even your mother can,’ she replied quietly. ‘How does anybody know how other bodies really feel? How can we know what love means from one body to the next, come to that?’
‘You must know if you loved granddad!’ Rose said, shocked.
‘Aye, but is what I call love what you call love, lass? That’s what I mean.’
Ina knew that she was dodging the question. Had she loved Aeneas? Now there was a puzzle. There had been none of the passion that she’d read about in the herring lassies’ penny novelettes, that was for sure, but di
d that really exist, Ina had often wondered, or did what you understood as love change from one set of circumstances to the next, from one generation to the next, for that matter? Aeneas had been a good man, solid and steady. She remembered feeling that from the start, that he was a man you could trust, a man who would provide. In her terms, given where she came from, with her experiences of life, that could be love, she supposed. They got on well enough. There had never been a cross word between them – apart, maybe, from the odd remark she might make about how he spoiled their daughter. If Ina had had her way, Margo would have been encouraged to leave Acarsaid when she was young, that was the truth. Margo had too strong a personality for a little village; she had needed to get out into the big wide world. If she had come back later, well then, at least she would not have done so from ignorance, but knowing that other places existed.
Ina knew what it was to have a restless spirit, and she knew Margo had inherited it from her, but Aeneas clung to his daughter, giving her whatever would keep her at home. He had been devastated when she married Quintin, and so had Ina in her way. That was no reflection on Quintin, either: he would have been better suited with someone else and so would Margo; that was all. There had been nothing Ina or anyone else could do about it, though: the surest way to make Margo do something was to tell her not to. Maybe you had to be a woman to understand another woman; maybe you had to have had Dolina as your mother to understand Margo.
The Last Wanderer Page 20
