by Morris West
‘Hannah. I love you!’
‘Aye, we all love the preacher with heaven in his hand and not a word about the other place.’
‘I’ll make you a promise, Hannah. You’ll dance at my wedding.’
‘And I’ll make you one. I’ll not buy the shoes till I read the banns! Get about your business now. Go take a walk and put some colour in your cheeks before breakfast. You look like a drowned man dragged up from the beach.’
I went out laughing at her and walked, whistling, into the bright morning. The rain was gone. The sun was on the water and the heather was gold and purple on the hills. All the omens were favourable. The scolding of an old, old woman was a kitchen comedy not to be taken to heart. Besides, there was strategy to be devised. The doctor must visit her patients at the hospital. I would offer to drive her to Stornoway and see a little of the country on the way. We would finish with lunch at the hotel in Tarbert. In the afternoon she would make her house calls, I would fish with Fergus. In the evening…Interesting point. If we were not lovers, or beginning to be, there was precious little to do in the evening but drink in a bar, or sit at home with a good book, or go quietly mad with Scottish television. As it turned out, I was a too-anxious general. The strategy was overweighted and there was no battle to fight anyway. The district nurse had reported a quiet night and no emergencies. The doctor was happy to have my company on her rounds. She was happy to lunch with me. After that I could only pray that she had no better plans for herself than I had.
By nine-fifteen we were on the road to Stornoway Hospital. By ten-thirty the ward visits were all done and we were heading over the moorland to the western shore, where the rollers fetch clear across the Atlantic and break on white sands, with the dunes behind, covered by the sweet green grass of the machair. On a clear day, when the sea is flat – and if you have the gift of faith, which is rare in our time – they say you can look towards the sunset and see the legendary Hy Brasil, the blessed stormless isle where all the men are good and all the women pure and God retreats for a recreation from the rest of us. I have to report, in all truth, that we did not see it because the sexual chemistry was beginning to work between us, slowly at first, but potently, through hands’ touch and the closeness of bodies and the sharing of small wonders: a sculptured rock thrusting out of a sea of glass, an oyster-catcher pecking for shellfish in the sand, the trill of a curlew questing through the kelp beds, a lapwing rising suddenly out of a meadow.
Of all the days of our loving, this I believe was the simplest, the most joyful. We were not children. Neither of us was innocent. Each of us had eaten the apples of knowledge and found them bitter. The moment would come – and we both knew it – when each must explore the other; the tastes of the body, the tangles of the secret spirit. The first declaration of need or love might open a Pandora’s box of fears and guilts and bitter antipathies. On the other hand, it might unlock the gate of a lost Eden, full of bright fruits and singing birds. So by unspoken consent we deferred the risk and surrendered ourselves to the placid pleasures of the morning.
We walked a deserted beach. We visited the black houses’, ancient dwellings of the islanders built of rough stone, raftered with driftwood and thatched with grass. We scrambled up a hillside to stand in a ruined watchtower built by the painted men against the seafaring raiders. We took tea in a weaver’s cottage and watched the making of the tweed. We leaned on a stone wall and watched a shepherd training a dog to the mustering of sheep. Then, as we drove out of Carloway on the road to Breasclete and Callanish, we came upon an activity rare in this isolated place.
There was a long peat slope, four, five acres of it, running down to a small brown lochan. A man on a bulldozer was stripping out the peat in wide, deep swathes and piling the spoil in mounds at each end of the slope. A tip truck was spilling beach sand into the excavations and three brawny fellows were spreading it with rakes and shovels. Two strips were already filled, and on these was spread a covering of dried sea wrack which smelled of salt and iodine. As the tractor came towards us, I saw that the driver was Red Ruarri the Mactire. He was stripped to the waist, his arm was still in plaster, and he drove the big machine one-handed. When he saw my wave, he accelerated and came lurching dangerously up the furrow, pushing a great load of matted rubbish in front of him. Then he cut the engine, leaped down and gave us a shout of welcome:
‘God’s good day! It’s the seannachie – and the doctor-girl come to collect her bill! Stay where you are, else you’ll be muck to the knees! I swore you’d come, seannachie. But the doctor’s a bonus I didn’t expect!’
He was bubbling with pleasure and with pride that we should see his work in the making. He pumped our hands and threw an arm about my shoulder and rattled away ninety to the dozen about what he was doing and how and why.
‘…This is where the money goes and the labour. The peat started to grow here about eight thousand years ago when the climate changed from warm and dry to cold and wet, and the moss ate up the forests of birch and hazel that once covered the land. It grows in a thick carpet, as you see, and the water lies underneath. There’s little oxygen, so the microbes that cause decomposition can’t work. The water washes out the lime, and the land becomes sour and useless. So we’re writing history backwards. We’re peeling off the moss and letting in the air. We’re putting in sea sand and shingle, which is full of lime. We’re laying in kelp for fertilizer, and in a couple of years we’ll have sweet, good grassland …and subsoil building up every year. You can see the challenge of it, can’t you? …But I’m talking your ears off. Drive me round the next bend and I’ll show you where I live…’
This was another surprise. He had taken one of the old black houses, long and low and ruinous, fit only for dwarfs to live in. He had rebuilt the walls, raising them another four feet. He had bought oak timber for the roof beams and ferried it from the mainland in his own trawler. He had laid withy hurdles over the beams and brought in thatchers from England to lay the roof and anchor it solid against the gale winds. He had built a stone enclosure and carted in loam and sand and made a vegetable garden to live from.
Inside, he had contrived, with more art than I had suspected in him, a modern adaptation of an ancient Viking house. At one end were his sleeping quarters, at the other a kitchen, large enough to feed a troop of cavalry and modern enough to delight any housewife. In between was a broad chamber, dining hall and meeting place together, with a stone hearth in the centre topped by a flue canopy of beaten copper. There were deerskin rugs on the floor; the chairs and the benches were upholstered in Island tweed. There were bookshelves and a gun rack and a well-stocked bar and a refectory table to seat a dozen or more. The walls were hung with the spoils of a travelling man: Benin heads and a juju mask, a brace of claymores and a buckler, the fragment of a Norse rune stone clouted to the wall with forged nails, a Spanish guitar, a set of rusted spearheads, a length of carved wood which had once been the tiller bar of a longship, a shelf of glassware fragments and turquoise beads and a golden locket with the skeleton of a tiny snake in it.
‘…It’s mine and it’s me.’ Ruarri preened himself like a schoolboy who had just won a prize. ‘It lives comfortable too. The plumbing works and, though you can’t see it, there’s a heating plant that warms the tiles of the floor the way the Romans used to do it. I’ve slept a dozen bodies here after a late night’s drinking, and no one complained of the cold.’
‘Where did you get this?’ Kathleen McNeil held up the golden snake locket.
‘I found it in an old chandler’s shop in the Orkneys. I think it’s a Viking piece. A fellow in Denmark told me the snake was a charm to protect the owner’s virility.’ He gave her that cocky rogue’s grin of his and added, ‘Since I’ve been home from the wars, I haven’t had the need to wear it.’
It was the old blade’s trick: test a woman with a touch of bawdry and see how she likes the taste of it. If she does, you’re up and away.
Kathleen McNeil did not smile; she looked at him wi
th professional concern. ‘Does that worry you, Mr Matheson – losing your virility?’
Ruarri – give the devil his due! – was bright enough to side-step the snub. ‘Not now. But in Africa it was the thing that scared me most. The local boys were very nasty to their prisoners.’
‘You were fighting in Africa?’
‘I was a mercenary. In the Congo first, then for a while in Nigeria. We were a long way outside the Geneva Convention.’
‘I’ve never understood what makes a man a mercenary.’
‘Money, ma’am. There’s always a market for gun fodder. High risk. High profit. Ask the seannachie here. He’ll tell you. There’s a colony of Scots mercenaries been living in Italy for a couple of centuries, and there’s a branch of the Leslies in Russia since the time of the Empress Catherine. Can I offer you both a drink now to set you on the road?’
I was glad that Kathleen McNeil accepted for both of us. She had humour enough to make her point and grace enough not to insist on a total victory. She gave Ruarri time to recover too. While he made the drinks she moved about the house, admiring his pieces, looking through the books on his shelves.
Ruarri gave me a conspirator’s wink and whispered, ‘That’s a filly with spirit, seannachie. Think you can handle her?’
‘I think so.’
‘She’ll give you a run for your money. Come to that, I might too.’
‘You play in your own backyard, Brother Wolf.’
‘Just a joke. Forget it.’ Aloud he said, ‘So you liked the chessman?’
‘I did. I’d like to keep it.’
‘Good. And there’s things we ought to do together while you’re here. Some night fishing, maybe. And I’ve got my eye on a corrie where there’s red deer that no one can claim. We might go after a buck one day, you and me and a couple of my boys. In the next week or so I’m taking a run up to Norway for business and trawling on the way home. You’re welcome to come along if you like.’
‘Thanks. I’d like to try it all.’
‘I’ll call you at the lodge and we’ll fix it.’ Then, as Kathleen McNeil came back, he added, ‘And when we come back from Norway we’ll have a ceilidh here. There’ll be my boys and their girls and music to dance to. It’ll be a late night, but you’ll get the true taste of the Isles. You’re invited, too, Doctor.’
‘I’ll accept. If I can leave the doctor at home and be plain Kathleen McNeil.’
‘God love the woman! She’s human after all.’ He grinned at us over his glass. ‘Slainte – and good luck to you both!’
Damn his smiling eyes! He had all the dash and style of a circus performer. He could do it all: the high-wire walk, the dizzy swing on the flying trapeze, the death-defying human cannonball. But he was not satisfied with skill; he had to play the mountebank as well: deliver the spiel, have the yokels gaping at the white rabbits and the ribbons, and the port wine pouring out of his elbow joint. The hell of it was he would still have you cheering at the end, while he walked off with the money in his pocket. Kathleen McNeil was no country schoolgirl, but before her glass was empty he had her hypnotized. I knew who and what he was, which was more than he knew himself. I had a commission to keep him out of jail if I could. I resented his quackery; still I had to laugh with him and make a reluctant salute to his talent.
I see it now, plainly, as I saw it then, obscurely: that morning in his house was the beginning of the battle between us. Let me confess it – I was jealous of him. Twice now he had put himself on record as a possible rival for Kathleen McNeil, but my own male vanity would not let me accept him in the role. There were deeper reasons. He was born without an identity. He had built himself one. I had had mine handed to me on a plate, yet I was in imminent danger of losing it. I had worked as hard as he and travelled as widely and made more money and reputation; but the sheer impact of his physical presence, the magnitude and drive of his ambition made me feel inadequate, outclassed at every point, a painted clown beside the idol of the big ring.
‘…I like him,’ said Kathleen McNeil. ‘I’m not sure how far I’d trust him, but I like him. I think you’re probably good for each other. He respects you and what you’ve done. He’s anxious for you to respect him.’
‘I do very much. He’s a maker and a dreamer too. I admire that.’
We had said good-bye to Ruarri and were driving down the winding road to Callanish to visit the place of the Standing Stones. The drink and the talk had relaxed Kathleen McNeil. Ruarri’s enthusiasm had communicated itself to her and she was freer and more outgiving than at any time in our acquaintance. I was uplifted, too, because I had to match her mood and prove myself no less a gallant than our rumbustious host. If he had baubles to display, I had them too. If he had tales to tell, I could cap them – and I did, shamelessly. But Ruarri, the Red Wolf, was hard to evade; he was there loping alongside us as we drove, a presence in her thoughts and in her conversation.
‘…There’s a child in him as well as a man. A naughty child, but very engaging.’
‘Engaging, yes. But a child, never. He’s a mimic. He’ll make himself whatever it suits him to be at the moment.’
‘I thought you liked him.’
‘I do. There’s no one I’d rather drink with, play with, sail with. But if I had something he wanted, he’d take it and walk away smiling.’
‘That’s a hard judgment.’
‘I’ve proved it true, though I can’t tell you how.’
‘Did he really kill for money?’
‘He says he did. It’s probably true. He made big profits somewhere, and it fits the pattern of his thinking – himself the Viking adventurer in the twentieth century.’
‘I’d rather not believe it.’
‘Does it matter whether you do or you don’t?’
‘Of course not.’
She said it a shade too quickly and afterwards was silent a moment too long. It was then that I knew I could not do the simple thing and walk away with my woman on my arm and my pride intact. Muirgen the sea-goddess had woven the last strands in her net. I was snared now. I would not escape until I had done battle with the Red Wolf.
* * *
It was after noon when we came to the place of the Standing Stones, a high grassy hump that falls away southwards towards Loch Roag with its tatter of islets and the black cliffs of Bernera heaving out of it. Even now it is a haunted spot, remote and silent always save for the crying of the gulls and the whisper of the wind through the rank grasses. There are no trees. The hill lies naked to the sky and the great megaliths rise out of it, twice and three times the height of man. There are four avenues of them, north and south and east and west, and, at the convergence of the avenues, a circular burial place and a stone, larger than the others, which faces the sunrise. Of the men who raised the stones little is known except that they were here before the Celts – three thousand years ago – and that this hill and the surrounding countryside was a place of congress where they worshipped the sun as the source of being and plotted their ritual life by its movements. They left no language, no history. Even their burial place was despoiled before history began to be written. But they are still there, frail, tenuous ghosts. We felt them, Kathleen McNeil and I, as we stood hand in hand under the stone of sacrifice and watched a golden eagle fly up and up until we lost him in the glare.
She shivered as if a goose had walked over her own grave. I drew her close to me and kissed her dark hair. Then, because the need was on me and the haunting was on us both, I told her:
‘If it’s too early or too late, I don’t care. I’m not a boy any more and I’m too old to pretend. I love you, Kathleen McNeil. I’d like to marry you.’
Do you remember the happy silliness of your own loving? If you do not, then finish here. Toss the rest of it out the window. Go ask the boys or girls to spell the story for you – four letters to a word, all words in monochrome, nothing else to it but what you can see in any barnyard between first light and first darkness. Any fool can draw two lines on a wall an
d call it love. Any drunk can weep and every half-sober clod can laugh at his tears. Only a poet can show you – and he no more than half – the sweet agony of a man and a woman, hung between heaven and hell, with nothing but the passion of the moment to hold them there. I am no poet, but a seannachie: a teller of tales, shabby and out-of-date as Blind Raftery with his harp or the grey-beard chalking his dreams upon a pavement stone for the rain to wash away at midnight. So I can tell you just the afterwards, when the ghosts had left us and we sat on a stone wall watching the placid sheep, while Kathleen McNeil pieced out her answer:
‘Mo gradh…my dear, my dear, I’m glad you said it. I wanted you to say it. I know you, because what you say and what you do is what you are. But you don’t know me…No! Please listen to me! I like you, want you. Ask me to bed and I’ll go – no questions before, no blame afterwards. But love? I don’t know. I truly don’t.’
‘Love’s very simple, Kathleen oge.’
‘Is it? Was it for you? It wasn’t for me. I’m not sure I want to risk it again.’
‘What happened?’
‘What happened? God! It wasn’t so long ago that I thought every man in the street could read it on me and every woman was ready to laugh in my face. The day after I graduated – seven, no eight years ago – I married…You didn’t know that? You were out of touch. He was the catch of the season. A knight, no less! Films and stage and a bloodline nicely documented in Debrett. We were happy. Even now I can’t deny it. Happy as piglets in a clover patch. He needed a lot of mothering – what actor doesn’t? I liked mothering him. I suppose that’s why I became a doctor in the first place. I liked people depending on me. I didn’t know I was depending on them twice as much. Then, four years ago, I became pregnant. Suddenly life was complete. There was nothing more I could ask for. When I told my husband he was horrified. The child, not even quickening yet, was a rival in the house. He could not tolerate the thought. He worked on me day and night, with tears and sulks and tantrums, until I agreed to get rid of it. I’m a doctor. It was easily arranged. When it was all over I hated him. I hated him for two long years until he gave me grounds for divorce. Ever since I’ve been hating myself. And that, mo gradh, is the woman you’ve asked to marry you…What do you say now?’
