by Morris West
For me, it was something else: a posthouse on the road to a place of unknowing. I could stay here a twelvemonth and I would be no closer to them than I was now. I had no roots in their clan life. What to them was a poignant folk memory, a familial yesterday, to me was a chapter of history, closed, done, forgotten. They would never close their doors to me, or refuse me bed and board if I needed it; but themselves they would hold private behind the hedge of the old language and the old separatist faith, and their fear of the outsiders who, once and again, had robbed them of their lands to run sheep, and deer for gentlemen to kill in sport.
By ten o’clock I was awash with whisky and sentiment. The piper, drunk as a bard should be, played me out of the bar with the rest of them. But they went home, while I walked back in the rain, climbed three flights of stairs to my attic room and tumbled myself into bed, drunker than the piper himself. That night there were no monsters in my dreams; but with the head I had on me in the morning, I forgot to be grateful for so singular a mercy.
In spite of the hangover I was determined to be early on the road. A sleepy night porter fed me tea and toast and set the course for me.
‘You’ll go now by Glengarry and that will carry you into Glen Shiel. If there’s mist on the mountains – and what with the early hour there might well be – then you’ll drive slow and steady, because the road is high and narrow and there’s many a poor body has tumbled off it into the lochs. When you pass the Five Sisters – they’ll be the hills beyond Kintail – then you’ll come to the Shiel Bridge and then to the Croe Bridge, which is at the head of Loch Duich. After that, the loch is on the left of you always, and there’s no place to go on the right, so you must come to Eilean Donan, which used to be the stronghold of the MacRaes. If you have half a crown in your pocket, then they’ll let you see two rooms of the place, which isn’t worth it, because with that much you can buy a dram at the hotel which is only a spit and a jump away down the loch. After that you come to Ardelve, where there’s nothing worth a look. And after Ardelve there’s Kyle of Lochalsh, and there, if the tourists haven’t swamped it and the Board of Trade hasn’t lifted its licence, you can put yourself and the car on the ferry for Skye. After that it’s Macleod country, and may Saint Donan stand between you and harm!’
Whereupon, as the old chroniclers used to say, I paid the score and pointed myself in the direction of Glengarry. There was little traffic on the road, so I trundled along at a steady forty miles an hour, because I wanted to blow the whisky fumes out of my brain and rest my bloodshot eyes on the greenery, tall pines and feathery birches, and the heather climbing the rock banks, and bracken, knee high in the dells.
I was five minutes past Glengarry, still in the woodland, when I heard a long trumpeting behind me. I looked in the rear-vision mirror and there was a red sports car, coming up fast, with a woman at the wheel. There was a sharp curve in front, so I braked to let her pass. The shock wave slammed into my flank as she swept by. She would have to corner tight if she was going to make the curve. She didn’t make it. Thirty yards before the elbow a truck, loaded with pine logs, rounded the turn. She was forced to swing wide. Her wheels hit the gravelled verge and she plunged straight on down the slope and out of my sight. I heard the crashing as she plunged through the birch grove and then a grinding of metal as she brought up hard against the pine boles. The truck was already gone and I was left to deal with whatever I might find in the hollow.
There was less than I had feared. The birch grove had saved her from rolling and cushioned her impact against the pines. The left side of the car was stove in, but the driver was climbing out, apparently unharmed. She stood for a moment, straddle-legged, surveying the wreck, then she sat down abruptly on the damp turf, her head hanging down between her knees. I scrambled down to her.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so. Leave me be for a moment, please.’ There was a touch of Scots in the voice but more of the English. I could not see her face, but her hair was raven black and her legs were good and she was wearing a skirt of the McNeil tartan. I let her be. I walked down to the car, switched off the engine, unlocked the trunk and took out the luggage, a valise, an attaché case and a small vanity pack. I carried them up the slope and stowed them in my own car.
When I came back she was sitting upright, smoothing back her hair from a pale, oval face. She announced, rather redundantly, ‘I’m a bloody fool.’
‘I agree. So now what?’
‘You don’t happen to have a brandy on you?’
‘No. But I’ll get you one at Glengarry. We can phone a doctor from there.’
‘I don’t need a doctor. I am one. There’s nothing broken and there’s no blood. But I’ll probably get the shakes very soon. Help me up, please.’
I hoisted her up the slope, bundled her into the car and drove her back to Glengarry, where they fed her brandy and strong tea and telephoned the Auto Club to take care of the wreck. She did get the shakes and she was very terse and professional until they were past. Then she asked:
‘Where were you heading?’
‘Kyle of Lochalsh, for a start.’
‘Could you give me a lift?’
‘Of course. I’ll be glad of the company.’
‘And you’re a safer driver than I am. Let’s go.’
We went; but before we went, we had – God help us! – one of those breathless formal introductions. She was Kathleen McNeil, Doctor of Medicine, Edinburgh and London; and, in a nice ladylike way, she was putting bedamned to any thoughts I might be having about wayside encounters and madcap drivers in distress. Come to that, bedamned to her too. Open your mouth, say ‘Ah’, breathe deeply, now cough, once again, please, and don’t think I’m not a good medico because I have good legs and a good figure and I’m not a day older than thirty-two – or is it thirty-five? Well, dear madam, it’s manners not to refuse until you’ve been asked; besides which, if it were the Queen of Sheba herself, I couldn’t be interested at this moment. And, what’s more, you may have the best cure in the world for gallstones and goitre, but you’re a bloody menace behind the wheel of a car!
The mist was still down in Glen Shiel, so we climbed slowly along the flank of the hills, praying no crazy Highlander would come roaring out of the murk, sure that the God of the Free Kirk was holding his hand on the wheel. We were wrapped in an eerie stillness, broken only by the sound of cascading water or the bleat of a sheep, startling as the cry of a lost child.
Then, abruptly, we broke out into a brightness, a morning glory that I had never seen before, or hoped to see. The sky was a pale blue, clear of cloud. The hills climbed into it, royal with purple heather and the diamond-flash of springs and runnels, the shine of grey granite. Below, the land fell away, through peat beds and bogs white with swamp asphodel, to the shining water of Loch Cluanie. I pulled the car into a lay-by. We got out and stood together, the only humans in a primal solitude. The sheep were there, black-faced and shaggy, ambling over the peat mounds. High in the blue, a peregrine falcon planed in a lazy circle. For the rest, there was only the sky and the water and the harsh, alien beauty of the hills.
I remember that I was near to tears at that moment. I understood, very clearly, the impulse of the anchorites to flee the confusion of the ancient cities, their injustices and corruptions and cruelties. I understood the lure of the deserts and the high places, where a man could begin to be again. I found myself wondering how my private terror would end: in an explosive madness of frustration, or a passive imbecility in which I would simply survive, without hope, trapped in a desolation of my own devising?
‘That’s a grim thought you’re having,’ said Dr Kathleen McNeil.
‘It is.’
‘Then you should leave it here and forget it.’
‘I’ll take your advice, Doctor.’
She laughed then; her face was suddenly young and beautiful, and I was glad to have her there. At least we could talk and be easy for the rest of the journey.
‘Where are
you heading?’ I asked her.
‘To Harris. That’s in the Outer Islands. I’m doing a locum for an old friend of my father’s. It’s the only kind of holiday I can afford just now.’
‘I’m for Lewis. I’m staying the night on Skye. Then, if there’s a place, I’ll take the first ferry from Uig in the morning. If you want to save a long bus ride and linger through the landscape, you’re welcome to ride along.’
‘Thank you. I’d like that.’
Looking back now, I marvel at the simplicity of that moment and the violence of the drama to which it committed us both in the end. We were strangers, met by chance in a Highland glen. We were private from one another. Each for a separate reason was determined to remain private. We shared only the casual intimacies of fellow-travellers – the hands’ touch, the moments of common wonder and enthusiasm. We restrained our curiosities about each other. We offered no opinions that might touch the core of ourselves. We talked only of what was outside us, immediately visible, immediately experienced. Yesterday was a closed book because tomorrow would be another day and we would be strangers again. As well that neither of us guessed what Muirgen, the sea-born enchantress of the Celts, was weaving into the cloth of our mutual destinies.
The pattern she wove for us that day was simple and beautiful. If there were spells in it at all, they were all healing ones for me. There was a music of strange names: Morvich and Auchtertyre, Balmacara and Luib, Sligachan and Kensaleyre. There was the black boat beached on a pebble strand, and no man or woman or child within five miles of it; there was the old, old man, knee deep in a trout burn, casting with a ritual grace, as if he were performing a sacred rite; there were the Cuillins, high and magical, spent volcanoes from the age of the cataclysms; there was the golden bladder wrack spread like a carpet on the black rocks below the tide line, and the wheeling of white gulls over the white cottages by the seashore. There was the woman turning the scythed grass and piling it into stooks; there was the shepherd with his Shetland kelpie, herding his black-faced flock, while we halted to give him the rights of the road, which were his due. And everywhere there was the heather and the green moss, and sometimes a pine stand planted by the Development people and sometimes a vast tumble of stones from an ancient glacier.
When we came to Uig, in the long, slow fall of the evening, there was the warm wind from the Gulf Stream with the smell of the ocean in it, and the promise of fair weather for the morning.
At the little hotel there was dinner for the two of us, but only one room with two beds in it, which we could have shared if we were married or looked like it; but we weren’t and we didn’t. So I found myself a room in a crofter’s house where they promised me bacon and eggs for breakfast – with porridge if I wanted it – and guaranteed to wake me in time for the ferry. As for Dr Kathleen McNeil, Edinburgh and London, I wished her good night, hoped she slept well, and truly cared not a tinker’s damn whether she did or she didn’t. I would call for her at eight in the morning, drive her down to the dock and, after that, good luck and good-bye.
That night I lay awake a long time, listening to the faint wash of the tide and watching the moon climb over Beinn Edra. I had never been so solitary in twenty years, and never, never so glad of the solitude. I had a sudden comical vision of Atlas, bone-weary from carrying the world on his shoulders, deciding one day to shrug it off and let it bounce away on its own crazy course. Now he was flexing his cramped muscles and wondering why the hell he had carried the thankless burden so long. What he might do with his liberty was another matter, for another day.
At eight-fifteen we were parked in the first line of cars, waiting for the ferry to Tarbert, the southern port for the Isles of Harris and Lewis. The boat would be late this morning, they told us, because of trouble with the hoists; so we had an hour to kill. Dr Kathleen McNeil was in need of another cup of coffee because she had hurried her breakfast. She wandered off to find it in the little clapboard café on the far side of the jetty. I strolled down to the beach to look at the sailboat anchored in the inner pool. She was a beautiful thing, fifty-odd feet, built sturdy and beamy for the Northern seas, but still with a hull line that promised a close work and good turn of speed with it. The nameplate on her counter said, ‘The Mactire, Stornoway’. There was a dory hitched to her stern and, as I watched, a fellow, with his arm in a sling, came out of the cabin hatch and began hauling the dory alongside. He scrambled into it awkwardly, picked up an oar and began sculling himself towards the beach with the oar over the stern.
He was a big fellow, half a head taller than I, with a shock of bright red hair and a red Viking beard and a chest on him broad as a herring barrel. I offered him a hand to haul the dory onto the shingle, but he refused with a grin.
‘I still have one good hand. But you wouldn’t happen to have a car, would you? I slipped on the deck this morning – fool thing to do – and I think I’ve cracked my wrist. I’d better find a doctor to splint it for me.’
I told him I had both the car and a tame doctor, and he threw back his head and laughed.
‘There’s a providence if you like. Now all I have to do is find a sail hand to run The Mactire back to Stornoway with me.’
It was then that I walked myself straight into the mesh that the sea-goddess had been weaving for me. On a wild impulse I told him, ‘I just might know one at that.’
‘A local lad?’
‘No, myself.’
‘And what can you do?’
‘I can set a sail and hold a compass course.’
‘And where have you sailed?’
‘Sydney and the waters south. The Tyrrhenian and the Greek Islands.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘She’s not my wife. But if I can get her to drive the car onto the ferry and drive it off at Tarbert, you’ve got yourself a sail hand.’
He gave me a long look, measuring me. His eyes were blue and cold as the sea. I read him for a man who could do murder if you crossed him on the wrong day, and yet tear down mountains for a promise made. Then he grinned and held out his good hand. ‘You’re signed on then. And thanks. Now let’s go talk with this doctor-woman of yours.’
So it was done, easily and casually, in the manner of the Islands. So, though we could not know it, the magical square was completed – Alastair Morrison of the Morrison, Dr Kathleen McNeil of Edinburgh and London, the big redbeard whose given name was Ruarri Matheson and myself, the stranger in the land of the Gael.
I wonder still why I was chosen to bring us all together. I have not yet determined how far I am responsible for the moon madness and the epic terror that overtook us all in the end.
Chapter 1
‘WE’LL run up a pennant first,’ said Ruarri Matheson, ‘just to show ’em who we are, then we’ll make sail and take her out.’
He was standing by the wheel, casting a critical eye on my handiwork as I hauled the dory inboard and lashed it to the hatch cover. The pennant was an odd one, a snarling wolf’s muzzle, red on a white ground. I asked him the meaning of it. He laughed.
‘You might call it my own house flag. It’s the name of the boat, you see. Mactire is an old Gaelic word for wolf. It’s also the name they’ve dubbed me with on the island: Red Ruarri the Mactire. I’m not sure it’s a compliment but they’ve laid it on me anyway.’
‘I thought you were an island man yourself.’
‘I am. Though I was away for ten years and only home the last three.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘A little of everything.’
‘What do you do now?’
‘I farm. I have a stake in the sea fishing. I sail this lady when I can.’
I winched up the main, set jib and mizzen, cleated down so she would fall gently away, then scrambled forwards to get the anchor up. By the time I was back in the cockpit, Ruarri had her sailing past the jetty and out into the channel. We had to work from there because the wind was from the west and we had to push her into it to stay clear of the skerries at th
e mouth of the loch, and pull ourselves off the lee shore before we began the long reach northward through the Minch.
When I had tightened sheets, Red Ruarri gave me a grin and a laconic word of approval.
‘Nice work, seannachie!’
‘What the hell’s a seannachie?’
‘Och, the ignorance of the Sassenach! A seannachie’s a storyteller, like you – though not quite like, because he keeps everything in his head: the histories of the clans that go way back, and the fairy tales of the time before the clans, and the histories that hang about the place-names. Sometimes he’s a bard, too, and can sing you the old songs or make you a new poem for a wedding or a funeral. There are still a few of them around the Islands, and may be when you go to a ceilidh you’ll hear one, though you’ll need the Gaelic to understand him.’
‘If I’m staying long, I’ll have to learn it.’
‘And will you be staying long?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where will you be lodging?’
‘With Alastair Morrison over by Laxay. D’you know him?’
‘I know him. I like him. Though I’m not sure he approves of me always – or of what I do. Take the wheel now, and I’ll make us a grog to keep the chill out. Hold her tight into the wind, else we’ll start falling away to Vaternish Point.’
He was paying me a compliment and, small as it was, I was absurdly proud of it. There is no purer or more healing pleasure for a man than to stand helm watch in a fair wind and feel the buck of the sea and watch the white, tight belly of a well-set canvas. After so long an imprisonment in myself and in a society in which I could no longer believe, I felt suddenly liberated, uplifted, free-ranging as the kittiwake that glided with hardly a tremor of wings just above the masthead.
Let me be honest and say at once I am no master mariner. I lack the muscle and the nerve and the nose for wind and weather, and the extrasensory mathematics that make a great navigator. I love the sea, but I fear it too. I fear its solitude and its mystery, the madness of its upheavals, the sinister threat of its calms. And yet I know, in my blood and guts and bones, that if the tyrants came again, with their spies and pursuivants and bureaucrats and manipulators, I would rather hoist sail, slip anchor and commit myself to wind and wild water and improbable landfall than risk the invasion of myself by a hireling man.
