And you could, Helen Riddel knew, staring out of the window. Form and shape had loomed up into their own, with trees but images of themselves carved out in wood, and Soutar Hill more mountainous than in memory, so that were I but child or stranger I could be guided by the hand and so exhorted ‘See afar, Mount Everest rise. See it tilt to strike the skies!’ Even thinking otherwise, I would believe.
On nights like this a man could stand stride-legged between the furrows he himself had ploughed, and yet feel alien. On nights like this you could defy yourself, your small mortality, your monstrous isolation. And meeting one of your own like, lie down together in a nakedness of need. Thinking that darkness hid you from yourselves and from each other; and hoping it might turn out to be the perpetual night of all the world. And half believing that should the daylight ever dawn again, the memory of what you did would fade with darkness.
‘One flesh.’ How exact that was. The fusion of bodies. So that I can never tell whether it’s you caressing me, or I you. Nor does it matter. Nor do I care. One flesh. What does matter is my own knowing that the flesh could have belonged to any man.
Her father would be beyond himself when he knew. But, at this moment, Helen Riddel felt all the thoughts with which to combat his contempt rise up within her.
It was easier for her father and his like. For all the male in him got out, gleamed in his leggings and glinted on the hairs of his hands; strode in his walk, and snapped in his voice. It was inside of him and it was outside of him.
But it was only inside herself. Sometimes, when she caught her father looking at her, she could feel him wonder how a man such as himself ever came to father such a daughter, though, had her outward looks but half the colour of her inner feelings, she could have had a choice of men.
As it was, she had been grateful enough for Charlie Anson. A woman could create her own image of a man, but first she had to find him. And she had found him. Never the ‘bonnie whole man’ her father was always on about. But was there anyone at all bonnie and whole? Was anyone at all completely so?
Maybe, maybe if one was not begotten, but fell out of the sky, a second old, to land on Soutar Hill maybe. Maybe then one might grow up—bonnie and whole, knowing the fundamentals as time went by: hunger and thirst and cold the way the sheep now wintering up on Soutar Hill might come to know them. And loneliness surely! For, though the sheep seek solitude only in the oncoming intuition of birth and death, their bleating through the darkness would make of the world a waste, and of Soutar Hill, a mountain not removed, yet wholly lost.
* * *
James Aiken, the Minister of Caldwell, was approaching Ambroggan Croft with some misgiving. Crofts always did have this effect on him—‘the first and last adventures of the land’. And since risk lies at the heart of all adventure, this was undoubtedly true of the crofts. He remembered the parish of his Induction of forty years ago: a West Island parish, consisting solely of crofting townships, bold whitewashed houses, their windows searching the ocean, like their inhabitants, with an eye always on the sea; being dependent on both the land and the fishing had rendered them curiously independent of either. Nor were their crofts ever crowded out, diminished or put to shame by large, contrasting farms, unlike Caldwell, whose crofts forced themselves up out of the earth in small defiant protest.
The Minister always felt at a disadvantage in a crofter’s house, and always vaguely resentful of the man who could put him in such an uncomfortable position. A farm-worker was an easier proposition. ‘Well, Beel,’ he could say with easy familiarity, ‘I see that the weather kept up till you got in the harvest.’ And to his wife, ‘Just a cup of tea, then, Mrs. Petrie, thank you. No! Not a thing to eat, though I must say that the look of your scones tempts me sorely.’ For it was the tenant farmers’ privilege to bestow supper upon him; a privilege shared by the Misses Lennox, and like ladies of small independent means and large Good Works. Dinner was the prerogative of the gentlemen farmers, the Doctor, and the Vet, and his approach to them all—‘The ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold’, albeit in separate pens—was graded accordingly. But there was no grading of the crofter, no easy overtures, since the crofters were dependent not only on the weather, but on the help of their fellow-crofters to take in the harvest, and no light refusal. ‘You’ll just pull your chair in about then, Reverend, and take a bite with us,’ with all the complete assumption of the landowner.
In all his years of rural Ministry, the Reverend James Aiken had never quite comprehended how thirty acres of land could compensate a man for such a slavery. Unless, unless it was just that—the freedom of equality that the croft bequeathed. Sometimes, though, he thought he had caught the reflection of his own question in the momentarily unguarded eyes of the crofter’s wife; but her guard would slip down again, and answer, when it came, was echo: ‘Yes. Just you sit yourself down, Mr. Aiken, and I’ll be with you the minute I’ve taken this mash over to the cow.’
The crofts in Caldwell sometimes troubled the Minister’s spirit, but Ambroggan Croft always offended his mind. It had lost the dignity of and claim to the title of croft, with the death of Charlie Anson’s parents. Even the two or three lean stirks scratching their flanks against the rotting paling posts were not his own, for his grazing was now let out to more enterprising crofters. The wooden water-butt, long since unnecessary, still stood dark and stagnant outside his porch door, side by side with a discarded butter churn; forgetful now of its original purpose, it stood in abject hit-or-miss capacity under the overflow of the water-butt.
‘Step inside, Mr. Aiken. I wasn’t expecting you, but it’s a real pleasure. Just you step this way, now.’
The Minister’s resentment increased. He suddenly felt that he was no longer paying a call out of his own volition, but was being drawn inside the house by some grinning suction.
‘I’ve just put the kettle on. A man on his own, you know, it’s always the brew. Always the brew. You’ll drink a cup of tea, Mr. Aiken?’
The Minister raised his hand to emphasise his refusal, but felt his vocal cords refuse to co-ordinate with his movements.
‘There’s always room for the cuppa, Mr. Aiken,’ Charlie Anson insisted, scurrying round his kitchen, opening all his cupboards at once, and flinging their contents down on the table. The Minister watched with increasing distaste; for Anson had none of the confirmed bachelor’s swift bare utility of movement, but all the finickiness and frippery of a woman, without any of her tidiness.
‘Apricot jam? Or strawberry jam? Let me see, now.’ He dived under the sink and scrabbled amongst the contents of a cardboard box. ‘Ah. Apricot.’ Holding the jar against the light, he studied it in the manner of Miss Perks, judging preserves at the Summer Show. ‘Nice,’ he pronounced, clamping it down on the table. ‘Just nice. A little walnut cake, Mr. Aiken? Or you’ll try a little bit of blue cheese, maybe?’
The Minister would not have been surprised if Anson had suddenly offered him ‘a fingerlength of sherry; and one of these sweet wholemeal biscuits to which you are so partial, Mr. Aiken’, in the voice of Miss Lennox. But no, he was still urging the blue cheese. ‘Good stuff. I get it sent out regularly from Coll and MacGillvary, you know.’
Coll and MacGillvary. The By Appointment Purveyors to the Royal Family when in residence; and to the professional people of Caldwell the rest of the year round. The Minister felt his gorge rise up inexplicably but definitely.
‘It was the Vet recommended them to me.’ Charlie Anson’s hand brushed the crumbs of cheese off the table on to the floor. ‘Aye.’ He looked up at the Minister, trying to interpret his silence. ‘So you’re admiring my desk, I see. It’s a good bit of work that.’
‘It looks familiar,’ the Minister admitted.
‘It would at that,’ Anson agreed. ‘It’s identical to the one Kingorth’s got. As a matter of fact I had it made by the same cabinetmaker.’
The house, like its owner, had taken its shape from others, the Minister realised, and so had lost
original design.
‘What with the Youth Club and all my Committee Work,’ Anson explained, ‘I got to needing somewhere to put all my papers. It’s just amazing how they all accumulate.’
‘Ah. That reminds me.’ Grateful of the reminder, the Minister straightened himself up. ‘I’m on my way over to see Mr. Gordon of Darklands. He had a word with me the other day. He is most anxious that the farm-workers should be represented on the Rural Council, and I myself share his conviction. Most strongly,’ he emphasised, to reassure himself. ‘He is intending to propose his Head Dairyman, Hugh Riddel, for election. He will have to be seconded, though, by a member of the Council outwith the Committee. I was wondering whether you, with all your—’ the Minister halted, searching for words.
‘You want me to second Hugh Riddel, like?’ Charlie Anson himself filled in the blanks for the Minister.
‘Yes. I thought perhaps—’
‘Just so. Just that.’ Anson again concluded for him, turning to concentrate on the teapot, and measuring out the tea with the concentration of an alchemist sifting gold.
‘He was a great lad, was old Riddel, Hugh’s father,’ Anson observed at last, straightening himself up and planking the teapot on the table. ‘A great lad. Not that I really knew the man myself. Just what you hear tell, of course. Aye! He’s a byword in the parish, old Riddel.’ He laughed, dismissing the parish. ‘As it comes, Mr. Aiken?’ he asked, lifting the teapot.
‘As it comes, thank you.’
‘A rabid Socialist.’ Anson stirred his tea and gazed beyond the Minister. ‘Always agitating about one thing or other. Or so they say. But then, of course, as you know fine, Mr. Aiken, they say everything hereabouts except their prayers.’ His joke fell flat on the Minister’s ears, but Anson continued: ‘Aye. And he could take off his dram, too, could old Riddel. They still tell of how he could drink his cronies under the table.’
‘But about Hugh Riddel himself?’ the Minister prompted. ‘It’s with him we are really concerned.’
‘Aye. Aye, of course. Hugh Riddel. You’ll try a slice of the walnut cake, Mr. Aiken? Just a corner of it, then. A real chip off the old block is Hugh. But you would have gathered that yourself from his Immortal Memory at the Burns’ Supper last week. Too forthright was the opinion I gathered from some quarters of the parish. Mind you, there’s just no pleasing in some folk. Still and on, I thought he went pretty near the bone myself.’
A sentiment with which the Minister was in silent agreement. ‘He dearly lo’ed the lasses O’—a permissible statement about the poet; but there was no need at all to detail the form that such loving took. None.
‘But then, of course,’ Charlie Anson was saying, ‘the speak is that Hugh Riddel has no little experience in that airt himself. Now, Mr. Aiken, you’ll just let me fill your cup up again.’
* * *
That was that, Charlie Anson reflected, as he stood watching the Minister’s car make its way over to Darklands. With just the right touch too. Planting the seed; but so lightly that the soil itself would not begin to feel it till it had taken root.
It was each man for himself in Caldwell. Nobody was more aware of that than Charlie Anson. Yet it only needed face all round. Friendly to farm-workers; not too familiar, though. They would take instant advantage of that, himself being one of them so short ago, and slap him on the back, as if he were one of themselves again; and him of independent means, with twenty grazing acres rented out, breeding Cairn Terriers, and always the odd bit job of carpentry turning up.
The face he turned to farmers, that was more subtle altogether. A casual word about their crops. An opinion tentatively offered on local affairs and fervently beseeched on world affairs. Charlie Anson had long since discovered that his strength lay in gauging his fellow-men’s weaknesses. Sharing the saloon end of the bar with them on market days, and now and then a bawdy story, for nothing bound man to man as close as dirt did.
Not quite accepted yet, though, at their front doors as guest or friend. Still, that would come through time. Oh, but you could be the biggest rogue walking Caldwell, and if ’twas so your Great Grandfather had farmed its acres, that would be remembered in your favour, and much of fault forgiven you for it; or if you were a scholar, for nothing won such respect as a hantle of letters behind your name.
There was a third way, though, and Anson was taking the right and canny road in its direction. A foot in here, a foot in there; Secretary of this Committee, Treasurer of that. Unpaid, of course, but zealous. Zealous!
It hadn’t been easy. In retrospect, it hadn’t been easy. But he would show Caldwell yet. Oh, he would show them all. He had no illusions about the attitude of its Upper Ten towards himself—a bare tolerance, and a shrewd usage. He had even less illusions about the scorn in which its lower orders held him. They never made the slightest attempt to conceal it. Riff Raff! Always resentful of any of their own kind with the ambition to get on. Resentment being overloaded though, and aimed at the particular, was something he had managed to dodge by the ready laugh; the pretence of no offence intended, so none taken. But contempt, a more elusive weapon altogether, was deadlier, and always accurate: aimed at the whole man, it left no part of him unscathed or undiscovered. And none had more contempt than Hugh Riddel.
The grinning mask of habit dropped from Anson’s face. Hugh Riddel would learn yet, the bonnie mannie. For Anson, now as always, tackled his enemies only in their absence. ‘You’ll learn yet that I was at least man enough to take your daughter on the slopes of Soutar Hill. And virgin. And since then, as many times as I’ve got fingers on my hands. And if she isn’t filled by this time, it’s not my fault.’ And now, as always, the blow struck by the imagination left him the victor.
Strange thing, he reflected, as he set out to meet Helen Riddel off the bus; given even a small choice, she never would have been that choice. But, given no other, and all things considered, he hadn’t done too badly for himself. Not too badly at all. She was educated for one thing. A great thing the education! She would be able to fill in the blanks for him in his Youth work. Behind the scenes though! For Charlie Anson’s obsession with women never extended to a recognition of their equality. Under a man always, as nature intended. Remembering all the slights and snubs he had ingratiatingly laughed off from their sex, the only warmth he could ever feel for them was the heat of rising lust.
* * *
Sue Tatt’s uncurtained window cast a pool of light across the road, setting her house apart in an instant isolation. That was another of the injustices of life, Charlie Anson thought, as he drove towards it from Ambroggan crossroads. He knew a farmer—aye, he knew two or three—could draw up at Sue’s door in broad daylight, as large as life, with a sack of tatties or new-killed cockerel as offering, and bide within her walls far longer than the civilities required. The neighbours, ever watchful, might speak about it afterwards, but that was all. Though, Lord, if it was him, there would be such a speak all round the country; he would get shrift that was short enough. The character of a Coming Man must hold no blemish, but once you had arrived you’d get more scope. All the burdens of responsibility before the pleasures of its privileges. Still!
* * *
‘A fine night again, but cold, Sue.’ Charlie Anson slowed down and drew up at Sue Tatt’s gate. ‘Did you happen to notice if the last bus from the Town was on time?’
‘It was about half an hour late,’ Sue Tatt answered without turning to look at him.
‘It was easy half an hour late,’ Fiona enlarged on her mother’s brevity.
‘Late or no, I still seem to have missed it. I don’t suppose you noticed if Miss Riddel got off it?’ Anson asked.
‘Helen Riddel’—Sue emphasised the Christian name—‘got off the bus and got a lift home in Darklands’ milk lorry.’
‘I’ve missed her too, then. My bad luck again, Sue?’ His question was double-edged. But Sue’s reply was single and to the point.
‘Your bad luck again, Charlie. I wouldn’t,’ she confi
ded to Fiona, as they watched Anson’s car disappear round Ambroggan crossroads, ‘let that creature put hands on me. Not for a hundred pounds.’
* * *
It was from the moment he reached the dairy to supervise the first loading of the milk lorry, that last Friday started to swerve off its course for Hugh Riddel. Darklands himself stood in the small office off the bottling shed, fiddling about with the loading orders.
‘There’s a double load, a double run the night, Hugh,’ he said, looking up from the orders. ‘But I see you’ve already noted it down.’
‘Aye.’ The real reason for the farmer’s rare appearance at this time of night puzzled Hugh Riddel. ‘You sent the memo in about the extra run yesterday morning,’ he reminded Darklands.
‘Of course. So I did. But there was something else—Oh, aye! About the General Meeting of the Rural Council the night, Hugh—it’s off. Only postponed, like. Mr. Aiken, the Minister, has just had a word with me about it.’ Darklands pushed the orders aside and came to the point. ‘Do you know anybody in Caldwell, Hugh, that would like to cut your throat?’
‘There’s a two three might like a try,’ Hugh Riddel admitted, smiling, ‘though I doubt if they would ever just go that length.’
‘Not even Charlie Anson? Whiles I think that if the Minister had four feet, he would put them all into it. He asked Anson to second my proposal for your election.’
‘Anson! But I’d refuse to stand at all with yon mannie as my seconder.’
‘But that’s just it, Hugh. Anson’s not going to second you.’
‘You mean—he refused?’
‘Not exactly. He felt—’
‘Of course not. Anson never did anything exactly in his life. He never supped the brose for that.’
Glitter of Mica Page 9
