by Morris West
‘Yes. I haul you out of a wreck in Glengarry. We’re as distant as moon from earth all through the Isle of Skye. And here we are going out to dinner together.’
‘You don’t like the idea?’
‘On the contrary. I’m trying to guess what you’ll say when I ask you to come out with me again.’
‘Why not ask and find out?’
‘Madam, would you one sunny, smiling day, when all your patients are recovering, please come driving with me through these Isles of the Blest?’
‘Thank you, sir. I would be delighted.’
‘You have made me a happy man. Now let’s get the hell out of here or we’ll be late for dinner.’
It was still raining and the twilight was mournful as we drove round the narrow track between the mountains and sea cliffs of the eastern coast. One skid, one incautious turn on an elbow would send us tumbling down two hundred feet into black water. It was a lonely road, haunted by the memories of clan feuds and old piracies and the bitter days of the Clearances. Both of us felt the haunting and the danger of the high crags, and Kathleen McNeil drew close to me so that I breathed her perfume and felt the warmth of her body thrown against me at every turn. There was one bad moment when a wandering ewe bounded across the track in front of us. I hit the brakes too hard so that we lurched dangerously towards the drop. For an instant I thought we were gone, but a jutting boulder bounced us back onto the track and we were safe again. My heart was pounding and my palms were wet.
Kathleen McNeil sat rigid, staring out through the streaming windscreen. When she spoke, it was if she were talking to herself. ‘It always looks like that.’
‘What?’
‘The moment of light when you’re a second away from blackness.’
‘For God’s sake! That’s a happy thought!’
‘In a strange way it is. There’s no fear, no regret. Just a kind of wonder.’
‘If it makes no difference to you, Kathleen McNeil, I was scared witless. And there’s ten more miles of this bloody goat track!’
She laughed then and laid a cool hand against my cheek. ‘So why don’t you pull into the next lay-by and wait till your pulse rate settles down?’
‘On the other hand, it might go a lot higher. And then we might never go driving again.’
‘Is that a warning?’
‘Call it a confession if you like.’
‘Please,’ said Kathleen McNeil softly, ‘please, not yet – not for a long time yet.’
‘Just so you know.’
‘I know, but I can’t play children’s games any more.’
‘Nor I. So let’s be friends, Kathleen oge, and see where that leads us, eh?’
When we came to the lodge, the other guests were already arrived. There were the Macphails, husband and wife, he a new minister of the Free Kirk, she a doe-eyed bride, eager to please and full of small embarrassments. There was Andrew Ferguson, from the coast-guard service, a sturdy barrel of a man with a grey spade beard and beetling eyebrows and Navy written all over him. With him had come Barbara Stewart, schoolmistress from Dumfries, a pert redhead, salty of tongue, with a slightly scandalous humour.
Alastair Morrison presented us with a flourish as ‘a bard and a bonesetter, unwed, unpromised, each a free spirit, the one a Scot, the other a Sassenach, but agreeable enough for a’ that’. Then he shoved whisky into our hands and stirred us about like a cook making a plum pudding. For the first few minutes I found myself anchored with Minister Macphail. He was tall, ruddy and confident, yet so young that I had to ask what had drawn him to the Wee Frees, that last offshoot of dissent in Scotland.
They were a tiny group in Christendom. Their theology was primitive, their ritual austere, their morals rigid. They had no hymns but the psalms. No organ music was allowed in their assemblies. No food might be cooked on Sundays, or alcohol consumed. Blinds were drawn against visitors, and there were those who frowned on copulation – of man or farmyard beast – as a breach of the Sabbath rest. Yet their hold in the Northern Isles was strong and unyielding. Macphail explained it to me with evangelical fervour:
‘…We’re believers, my friend, not doubters. We’re concerned to live the Gospel, not debate it. We stand, simple before God, free brothers in a free assembly. We keep the Sabbath holy because that’s the Scriptural command. Our lot is harsh, our lives plain. We need a plain faith to sustain us.’
‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ Barbara Stewart cut in with a mockery. ‘That’s only half the story, Jamie Macphail, and you know it. You’re a bunch of old-line fundamentalists. Tyrants, too, when you get a chance to be.’
‘That’s not fair, Barbara. Strict we may be, but not tyrants.’
‘No? If I want to drive my car on a Sunday, you scowl me off the road. If I want a drink – which I do – I’m the scarlet woman. Scriptural commands? You pick and choose the ones that suit you. Suppose I wanted to be like King David and dance naked before the Ark. Would you let me?’
‘If you’d lose some weight, they might.’ This with a laugh from Andrew Ferguson. ‘Even so, the climate’s hardly right for it.’
‘You’re a fine one to talk about weight, Andy! Look at you. You’re pickled in Navy rum and malt whisky and you sitting on your backside in a watchtower eight hours a day.’
‘I’m the guardian spirit of sailors, Babs! I brood night and day over the troubled seas, waiting to snatch men from disaster. I’ve got a newspaper cutting to prove it. Written by a woman too.’
‘And what did you pay her for that piece of prose?’
‘Attention. Which is more than I get from you, my girl.’
Minister Macphail turned to me with a grin. ‘You see why they need the kirk in these parts, tyranny and all. Without it they’d devour each other in a week. One of my professors used to say that Gaeldom was God’s private madhouse, so he had to give a special love to the inmates.’
‘Love among the Gael!’ The Stewart was not to be put down. ‘Now there’s a theme for our bard! Scene One. The boy’s drinking himself impotent in the pub on a Saturday night, while his girl stays home to finish the Sunday baking. Scene Two. At eleven he’s knocking on her door, drunk as Chloe, with a bottle of whisky in his pocket. They drive off into the night to dance in a barn. Scene Three. Six in the morning. They’re each in their own beds snoring off a hangover to be ready for church at eleven. Scene Four. The girl gets pregnant in the back of a car. They marry and live happily ever after in a little stone house in the middle of nowhere. Amen!’
She was a natural mime and she made such a comedy of it that even the doe-eyed bride dissolved into laughter. Alastair Morrison embraced her and swore he prized her above all other women in the world.
‘More than that, she’s the sweetest singer of Gaelic songs this side of Inverness. And that’s a precious kind of madness in itself. Be gentle with her if you want her to make music after dinner. Will you come along now all of you, else I’ll get a flea in my ear from Hannah!’
I have to tell you now that it was on this night I first learned the meaning of the word ceilidh. Look it up in a Gaelic dictionary – which is a hard book to come by in this complicated world – and you will find it means a visiting or a sojourning. It is the sojourning which carries the true colour. You come, a traveller out of a bleak land where there is no harbouring for man or beast. You are received with honour because in a place where men are few every human is precious. In the old days in the Isles, Bishop Knox had to promulgate a law against ‘sorners’: shiftless fellows who moved from house to house battening on the hospitality of the poor. You are settled immediately into a security of lamplight and fire warmth and cooking fragrances and respect for the person you are presumed to be. This is the gift of the house to you. But you are expected to offer your own gift as well, however small it be. If you have news, you must tell it. If you have music or story or a special knowledge, then you must dispense it. If you have nothing but opinions, then you must toss them into the argument because one who sojourns in silence is a
blight upon the tree of mankind. If you are lovers and have need of privacy, a ceilidh is no place to find it because your wooing and your bedding will be subject to comment and advice and even the prescription of herbs and spells if you need them. If the sadness is on you, it must be left at the door. If you are drunk, you must be happy and not quarrelsome. If another is drunk, he must be walked to safety lest he freeze on a lonely road. Scandal may be talked, but it may catch you up in another house. If there is a piper or a fiddler, you may dance, indeed you should because dancing is another kind of gift that gladdens the eye and sweetens the blood.
The ceilidh of Alastair Morrison was exactly thus. His guests made at first sight an odd assembly; yet by the end of the soup we were wrangling happily over a hodgepodge of subjects: morals and medicine, the Russian presence in the Atlantic, the missile base on South Uist, Gaelic orthography, the follies of the Tourist Board, the troubles in Ulster and the latest tale of the island dispersion – a fellow from Harris who was trying to recruit mercenaries for the war in Cambodia.
Alastair Morrison stage-managed the affair with opulent good humour. He was the leading man and he played the role with elegance and relish. He was generous with the wine and with himself. He paid extravagant court to the women and to the men an ironic respect. Jack might be as good as his master in London or New York; but here in the Isles blood still counted, and Morrison the Brieve with power of life and death was only a page or two back in history. His performance brought out the best in the company. I had not heard in a long time so much vivid tale-telling, so much breezy, commonsensical debate. In Ireland they could be eloquent about nothing at all. In England they could be inarticulate about the end of the world. At the table of the Morrison each guest must say his mind to prove he had one.
For all the dazzle and the bravura, I could not keep my eyes off Kathleen McNeil. I was head over heels and gone for her, yet I realized, with a pang of jealousy, that I knew next to nothing about her. She was a Scot; she was a doctor; she was a madcap driver; she could weep for a dead child; she had fey moments when the fringe of life touched the hem of death. That was all. Had she been married? I guessed not, but only guessed. Had she a lover, now or then? She had not told me. To what did her heart respond, her body quicken? I did not know. So I watched her, hung on her every word and gesture, plied her with questions, displayed myself like a peacock to attract her interest. All her responses charmed me. She was an intelligent talker and a good listener. She laughed readily and her judgments were tolerant and compassionate. There were hints of a secret woman, too: a surprise politely veiled, a sadness quickly suppressed, an impatience covered with a laugh. I plotted, in fantasy, the private moment when she would drop all defence and say, ‘I am tired now. With you I won’t pretend any more. This is who and what I am. Understand me and be tender.’
We came near to the moment after dinner when Alastair Morrison unwrapped a beautiful violin, lustrous with age, and played accompaniment to the songs of Barbara Stewart. For all her sharp tongue she had a voice high and pure and effortless, like the flight of a bird. The songs she sang I had not heard since childhood: ‘Kishmul’s Gallery’, the ‘Love-lilt of Eriskay’ and that of Mingulay, which is sweeter still, the ‘Lament of Flora Macdonald’ and the chants of the milkmaids in the summer shielings. They lifted us out of ourselves into the dreamtime of yesterday, so that we were like children listening to the same fairy tale, touched by old griefs, glad with the small joys of a life long past. For this while we were not ashamed of our emotions, but acknowledged them to each other with nods and smiles and hands beating out a familiar rhythm. The music was a golden thread binding us all, a small tribe in a lonely place, with the rain outside and the sea cutting us off from the commerce of a rowdy world. Then we sang together, each one calling a tune until we were flushed and breathless and it was time for one glass against the homeward road.
When the last good-byes had been said, the three of us sat by the fire and relaxed in the afterglow of the ceilidh.
Kathleen McNeil put my own thought into words. ‘We’ve forgotten how to enjoy ourselves like that. It’s all so simple. But we’ve forgotten. I wonder why.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Alastair Morrison, ‘perhaps because there’s just so damned much to remember, like taxes and earnings and ownings and wars and revolutions and every salesman on the planet squawking at us every hour of the day. The world is shackled to us like a ball and chain. We never get rid of it long enough to lift up our heads or our hearts.’
‘But we can’t go on like that. Half the patients who come to my office are sick because they’re sick of the world and all its demands on their frailty.’
‘And what do you prescribe for them, Kathleen oge?’ I used the endearment unconsciously, and Morrison gave me a swift puzzled look.
Kathleen McNeil gave no sign that she had noticed it. She answered with a shrug and only the half of a smile. ‘Some loving, to take the weight off. Of course, you can’t buy that in a pharmacy, and there’s not enough to go round, anyway; so we use sedatives and tranquillizers instead.’
‘Yet there was loving here tonight. People gave something of themselves.’
‘There’s a difference,’ said Alastair Morrison. ‘In the Isles we are forced to depend on each other. In the cities we are forced to compete. The quality of life is changed. The quality of people too. But that’s all yesterday for me. I’m here and I’m happy and I’m ready for bed. So I’ll bid you both good night. Sleep well, both of you.’
We were not ready for sleep. So we sat, unwary, in the fading firelight and talked.
Kathleen McNeil seemed puzzled by our host. ‘Can he really retire like that? Can he close the door on yesterday and forget it?’
‘Forget it? No. I think he’s come to terms with it.’
‘But who laid down the terms for him?’
‘Quite a question, young Kathleen. Who mediates between the man I’d like to be and the man I know I am?’
‘Can you answer it?’
‘No. You’re the healer, young Kathleen. Can you?’
‘I wish I could, mo gradh…’ Her use of the Gaelic word was so unexpected and my ear so untuned that I almost missed it. Mo gradh …my dear, my darling – my lover, too, if the heart were so disposed. My own heart missed a beat, but I dared not risk too much on a transient endearment. So I let her talk on because every small knowing of her was precious to me. ‘…Time was when I despised all religion as a tyranny over the ignorant. A man like Minister Macphail with his serene certainties I would have rejected out of hand. People need certainties. Even the certainty of dying is a help to many. The sickness of the mind is a sickness of unknowing and uncertainty.’
‘And the cure?’
‘I think someone has to love you enough, to let you love yourself a little. I’m not saying it very well. But look…’ Suddenly she was eager as a schoolgirl. ‘Two patients with the same constitution, the same sickness. One lives, one dies. Why? In the one the urge to live, the love of living is strong; in the other it is weak. It’s as if – as if life were a gift to the loving. And if you laugh at that, I’ll spit in your eye.’
‘I’m not laughing. I’ve been down in the dark valley myself. I managed to climb out of it and get myself here – with a prod or two from Alastair Morrison.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘I fell in love and out of love – and lost my way in between.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Not tonight.’
‘There’ll be other times.’
‘I know. I’m glad there will be.’
We kissed then, new friends, still careful of the risks of friendship.
Good night, Kathleen McNeil. Golden dreams.
‘Good night, mo gradh. And a word for your own pillow.’
‘Tell me the word.’
She told me. It was an old proverb in the Gaelic and the words were a music to end a gentle day: �
��Is maith am buachaill an oidche …Night is a good shepherd. He brings home every man and beast.’
My night, however, proved restless. I slept fitfully, plagued by erotic nightmares, and woke a dozen times in the darkness itching with desire for the woman who slept only a few paces away and yet was as far away as the galaxies. For too long now I had slept alone. It was a symptom of my malaise that I had felt unready and unwilling to enter into any new commitment. I had nothing to spend but seed – no caring, no concern, no self that would stand a sharing, no curiosity even for a casual encounter. Then, in one day, everything was changed. I was a lover, balked of possession, impatient to be possessed. I was stiff with lust, burning up with the need of the small sweet dying. Had I not been in the house of Alastair Morrison, I might have thrown caution out the window and gone to Kathleen McNeil in her own bed. Would she have taken me? There was one wild moment when I believed she would have. Then sanity came back and I switched on the light and read until the sun came up. When I heard the servants moving about the house I crawled out of bed, shaved the stubble from my grey, pinched cheeks, bathed and went downstairs to cadge a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
Old Hannah made me the coffee, then stood, hands on hips, mocking me while I drank it. ‘So you’ve got thistles in your bed, have you, and a wee bittie birdie perched on your pillow, whistling love songs all night?’
‘Does it show?’
‘Does it show? God save us from the wild winds! Last night you were all sheep’s eyes and greensickness, and you ask does it show! It’s the dark one, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the dark one.’
‘Ach!’
‘What do you mean Ach?’
‘I mean that I’m paid to keep house for the Morrison. And what his guests do with their nights or their days is none of my business. Unless they do it in the house, that is, and scandalize my girls.’
‘Don’t you like Dr McNeil?’
‘More coffee?’
‘Yes, please. But you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I think she’s a good woman with the marks of the wrong man on her. I think you’ll get her if you try hard enough.’
