by Morris West
‘Will you think about me when you’re away with Ruarri?’
‘Too much, probably.’
‘I hate your going.’
‘Then I’ll stay. It’s no problem.’
‘No!’ Her smile was grateful and her hand was gentle on mine. ‘You need to go. The days are long for you when I’m not free. I’ve been watching you, dear one, not just as a lover, but as a doctor too. You’re overspent, scraping up resources to live just from day to day. You’re better, but the restoration isn’t complete. The physical things are what you need while the mind lies fallow a while. Come back to me laughing and new.’
‘When we’re married, we’ll take a boat and sail the Cyclades for our honeymoon.’
‘If the time comes, I have other ideas.’
‘If…?’
‘When.’
‘Kathleen oge, I think I’ve made a big mistake.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We shouldn’t have had our first loving in bed. We should have had it in the place of the Stones. Then I’d be sure of you.’
‘Today I’m sure of you.’
‘Why today and not yesterday?’
‘Try to guess.’
‘I haven’t an idea. Tell me.’
‘No.’
‘Can I bribe you?’
‘No. You have to guess. Now you can walk me home and tell me how much you love me.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we’ll have one drink and you’ll be gone before old sour-face comes back from her ceilidh.’
‘No loving while we wait?’
‘I have the curse on me, mo gradh. So it’s just a kiss and a blessing tonight.’
‘That’s loving too.’
It was and it wasn’t. I was too old and impatient for parlour games by lamplight, so I left early and took the long road home: round by the western beaches, where there were more ghosts, but no danger at all of driving over a cliff. Besides, this was the land of the story spinners, where even the frogs were known to be the sons of chiefs laid under a spell in the dreamtime of long ago; where the sands turned gold once in the year, and sometimes you could find the paw marks of the fairy dogs that walked by night when the tide was down.
I saw no fairy dogs. But I did hear the hoarse croaking of the frogs and I was sorry for the poor fellows. I wondered what charm was needed to break the spell and make them men again. It might be a kiss from a compassionate princess. It might be a single word: the answer to a riddle, set ten thousand years ago, never to be remembered, because even the enchantress had forgotten it.
Kathleen McNeil had set a riddle for me; but because I was dozy with fatigue and full of wine and kisses, I didn’t try to answer it. Instead I played a game, trying to turn the riddle into a rhyme in the Gaelic fashion. It took me twenty miles to set it, but I remember it still:
The man I was, the man I am,
She loves them both, but surer is
Of am than was.
I am who am, I am who was. I wish she’d tell the difference.
It was – as the minister said to the actress at breakfast – a pleasant conceit, but it did nothing for me. The riddle was fun. The answer, if in truth it was an answer, was no fun at all.
The only difference between me today and me yesterday was the fact that I had made a killing. Which set me at level pegging with Ruarri Matheson and Dr Kathleen McNeil. If I wanted the lady, she was mine; just so I could be half an inch taller, half a pound heavier and one cut more ruthless than the Mactire.
A madness? Sure! But I have already told you of the day, a million years past, when I stepped out of reality into a dimension of dreams.
Chapter 10
EARLY next morning, while I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, Ruarri called me. Things had changed. He wanted to be off to Norway by one in the afternoon. Could I make it? I damned him to the last circle of hell; but, yes, I could make it. Clothes? He would lend me oilskins and seaboots. For the rest I should bring warm things to work in and something decent for the hours ashore. Money he could lend me, but I didn’t need it. If I needed an hour with my girl – which I did, but couldn’t enjoy – there was time for it; but he’d like me aboard, unpacked and ready for sea duty, at twelve-forty-five. I damned him again and hung up.
I called Kathleen. She was only half awake and irritable, which made me glad to be gone. Then, in a swift somersault, she was tender and solicitous, which made me want to stay. I told her I would telephone her from the mainland. She told me not to bother. The lines were bad and she could be out on a call. I should forget about her and enjoy myself. When I came back – or did she say home? – we would enjoy together. Bless you, my love. Bless you, Kathleen oge. It’s nice to have a woman to leave, because that’s a woman waiting when you come home. I bathed and shaved and packed a bag and went down to breakfast.
Hannah was sure I had gone mad. Why any man with a warm bed and a comfortable house and a beautiful, loving girl should want to take off into the wild, wild ocean, she’d never understand. And with that rascal Ruarri? God save us all from sin and sorrow! Did I know what I was getting myself into? When that sea came up I could break an arm or a leg or my back even, and never be good for a woman again. Or I could be washed overboard, or be so seasick that I’d be crying kiss-me-mother before the night came down. Well…! If I must go, I must, but I’d deserve every single horror that happened to me. Did I have warm clothes now? And shaving things? And money? And clean underclothes? No playing about, remember! No fornication in them foreign ports. Many’s the poor laddie came home with what he didn’t take away and was hard put to explain it to his wife or his sweetheart. I’d stop by to tell the Morrison? Good! There was decency left in me still. She’d seen him herself and he was looking brighter-like, but still not the same as he used to be. I should eat a good breakfast. The more in the belly, the easier it was to keep down, as her father used to say before the sea took him on a winter’s night.
Morrison, on the other hand, loved the whole idea and lavished approval on it.
‘You couldn’t do a better thing in the world, laddie! If the weather holds good, you’ll have a cruise that you couldn’t buy. If it doesn’t, you’ll have an experience to shake the last cobwebs loose from that brain of yours. I’m glad Ruarri still wants you with him. You were made to be comrades. I wish I were coming with you, but they’ve got me chained to this blasted bed, and a woman with snakes in her hair to watch over me….’
So having discharged my pieties on the land, I bethought myself of those I owed to the sea. I needed a gift for Ruarri, to say my thanks for courtesies done and for the hospitality of the Helen. My antiquarian had just the thing: a sextant from the days of the windjammers, set in a teak box, bound in brass and engraved with the initials of some long-dead skipper. Since I looked like a constant customer, he offered me a modest discount and a paper bag to carry the prize. For the crew I decided on hard liquor and went to a pub in search of it. I had still an hour to kill, so I ordered a beer and sat myself in a booth by the window to drink it in comfort and watch the passage of people in the grey, narrow street.
I had been there perhaps five minutes when the bar began to fill with noonday drinkers. One of them was Duggie Donald, the Customs man. He ordered a pint and perched himself on a stool with his back to me. I had no desire to be drawn into talk with him or anyone else at that moment, so I slewed myself round in the booth and concentrated on the passers-by. By the time I had finished my beer another man had joined Duggie, and they were talking in low, animated fashion. The newcomer was the crewman whom Ruarri had assaulted in ‘The Admiral’s Spyglass’. Both of them, therefore, were ten minutes away from their normal haunts. I had nothing to fear from either, but I did feel an odd flutter of unease. I gathered up my parcels and walked out. I drove down to the dock, parked the car for a week in a near-by garage and carried my gear aboard the Helen II.
It was still early, and there was only one man on board: a tall, taciturn fellow who in
troduced himself reluctantly as Athol Cameron. I was to share the skipper’s cabin, he told me. The port bunk was mine; I could go down now. I handed him the whisky and asked him to distribute it to the crew with my compliments. He cradled it lovingly in his arms and decided he would, after all, show me down to my quarters. By the time I had everything stowed shipshape and had scribbled a note to go with my gift, I could hear others of the crew scrambling aboard. I went topside to join them and wait for Ruarri.
I had a small dilemma on my hands. Should I, or should I not, tell him of the meeting which I had just witnessed? If it spelled trouble for him, I had some duty to warn him about it. If, on the other hand, the meeting was innocent of malice, the lad might find himself in needless bother with Ruarri. I was still mulling over the question when the fellow came on board, large as life, with a seabag slung over his shoulder. The greetings he gave and got seemed good-humoured enough, so I was inclined to forget the trivial affair. I knew nothing about the private relationships of Ruarri’s buannas, and a brief flare of violence or rough discipline between shipmates was no rare thing. Certainly it was no cause to dub a man Judas out of hand. The fact that he was still sharing whatever mission Ruarri had in hand was guarantee enough that the brotherhood was intact. So I decided to hold my tongue.
Then Ruarri came on board and called me to the wheelhouse to lay the course with him: a long northward leg, out of the Minch, past Orkney and Shetland, then north-east to Trondheim on the Norway current. The weather? Greasy in a couple of hours, with winds freshening from the east and rain in the blow. After that? Well, there was a cold front working its way down from Iceland. That could hit us just south of the Faeroes, but with luck we might miss it. Time for the journey? Forty-eight hours, more or less. Purpose of the journey? I didn’t know, didn’t ask, and cared not a curse. I was free as a soaring kittiwake and prepared to raise my voice and make ballads about it.
Our Ruarri was a punctual man. At one o’clock he had engines turning, lines cast off, and was easing out of the basin, past the ferry dock towards the harbour mouth. By one-thirty Chicken Head was falling away astern and we were heading north-by-north-east up the Minch, with the gulls screaming and wheeling above us and the overcast creeping in, blown by the stiffening easterly. There was no rain yet because the high hills of Sutherland had robbed the clouds already; but after Cape Wrath we would have the showers, and the wind much harder, funnelling through the Pentland Firth and across the roof of Scotland.
Ruarri handed over the wheel to the lad whom he had kicked in the belly – and who treated him as if he were Lord and Saviour – then took me below for a meal with the rest of the crew. The normal complement of the Helen was five men and the skipper. Ruarri demanded that every man should be able to do every job on the ship: keep the engines running sweetly, stand wheel watch, cook a meal in rough weather or good, handle nets and winches, scrape paint, clean and pack fish, splice cordage and hose decks. He himself could turn a hand to everything, so he would tolerate no scrimshankers on his boat. Every man might say his piece, but Ruarri was the master and there was no confusion about it.
I had met all his boys, boozed and shouting, in the bar. Here, in the ritual family of a small ship, they were different men altogether. They ate hungrily for the cold journey: a soup so thick you could stand a spoon in it, brown stew with a mountain of mash, canned peaches, and tea darker than peat water. They talked quietly, knowingly, of the weather ahead, of the grounds that had been fished out and others that seemed to be promising. The talk swung from Gaelic to English, and sometimes it was translated for me and sometimes it wasn’t; but this I took for a compliment, since I was part of the family and a known friend who could down his drink and keep his mouth shut in an awkward moment.
They did not laugh so much now, I noticed. Their talk was less bawdy. Their jokes were the small, constant cryptic ones that ran from man to man, like the formal patterns in a weave. They were alert always to the rhythm of things, to the beat of the engines, to the sound of the wind, the lift and fall of the hull, the creak and grind and murmur within the body of the ship itself. Even at leisure they were still on watch against the treachery of the sea, an enemy always, however brightly it smiled, loving to be visited, but covetous always of new men to mate with the cold maidens of the deep.
Ruarri was watchful, too, but more of the men, it seemed, than of the ship itself. The men knew the sea as well as he did, better perhaps, because they had spent half their lives on it, while his wanderings had taken him off it and brought him back late. He was the master. But the master must sleep and rest, so there must be eyes to see for him and ears to hear and noses to smell the storm before it hit. Tonight and tomorrow we would be in wild waters, where the currents split and the sea which broke every way and the winds tore themselves into shreds around the island chains of Orkney and Shetland and the Faeroes.
I think I was the only one truly at ease at the table – because I stood in absolute dependence on them all. So I began to define them, one by one, as I had not been able to do in the fog and uproar of our first meeting. I began to hold their names and to establish their peculiarities of speech and attitude.
Athol Cameron, the dour and gangling one, was the mate. He looked like a jointed toy with hands and feet mismatched to the rest of him. His normal conversation was a series of grunts, among which, with a little practice, one could discern negatives and affirmatives. His orders were delivered in monosyllables and never repeated. When Ruarri spoke, he listened, sucking on the foulest corncob I have ever smelled. He assented with ‘Och aye’. He demurred with ‘Hell, no!’ delivered in a sharp explosion like a seal’s bark.
Calum MacMillan, the cook, was a little black bantam, with a strawberry mark on one cheek and a nude woman tattoed on his chest. He was as hairy as a goat and as potent. He had served as greaser on a tramp line and served time as well for some sailor’s delinquency in Port o’ London. But to watch him handle saucepans and kettle and frying pan in a high sea, you would have thought him a professional juggler.
Jock Burns was the fellow for the diesels. He was a redhead like Ruarri, almost as large, with a mass of freckles from cheekbone to chin. But he had an ear like Toscanini for the tuning and a tongue like a whip for any damn fool who borrowed a tool and forgot to hang it on the right hook afterwards. Get him alone, though, with the sea quiet and the shaft turning sweetly, he would tell you tales of the China run that would hold you spellbound. He was the oldest of them all, forty-five or thereabouts, and he was Daddy Burns to everyone so long as they stayed in line. If they didn’t, it was Mr Burns and a bunch of knuckles, scarred and toughened from the spanners.
Then there was Donan McEachern, a big muscular lad from Barra, who had tried for the Air Force but couldn’t make it because of his eyes. He could lift a herring barrel as easily as you or I could a mug of tea. When he spoke English he stammered painfully, but the Gaelic of his home island flowed like a music from his mouth.
With the exception of Jock Burns and Ruarri, they were all under thirty years of age, and the boy on wheel watch, Lachie McMutrie, was the youngest of them all – a stocky, talkative extrovert with twenty-three years, and more than that in women, notched to his belt – if you could believe him.
They would be a rude and dangerous bunch to meet in a brawl, and I made a mental note to stay away from any bars where they might be drinking in Trondheim. But here, yarning quietly in the cramped galley, they were all one breed, visitors to the jealous sea, loving it, hating it, cherishing one another against it, like the old adventurers in their longships.
Ruarri left us after lunch and went to his cabin. I stayed in the galley with Calum to help him clear the dishes. I had no thought of being an idle hand, with everyone tripping over my feet. Afterwards I put on an oilskin jacket and went out to take a turn on deck.
The wind was strong now, coming in gusts and sweeps out of the Highlands, with rain in it, and a lash of spray along the deck from the chopping whitecaps. Most of the gu
lls were gone, but there were still a few hardy ones clinging to the crosstree and the radar antenna, lifting off sometimes, then settling with wings folded against the buffet of the wind. I braced myself against the lee of the wheelhouse and watched the last outline of Lews fade into the rain shower, and wondered what Kathleen McNeil was doing at that precise moment.
I was grateful then for the freedom which she had insisted to have for us both. I saw the reason of it, felt the need of it and was determined to enjoy every blessed moment and come back laughing to claim her. If the wind and the rain and the sea didn’t wash the last black vapours away, I was beyond saving, anyway. Then Jock Burns tapped me on the shoulder and told me Ruarri would like to see me in his cabin – and by the by, the boys were grateful for the liquor; it was a welcome gift, and thoughtful.
Ruarri’s reaction to his gift was oddly poignant. He held it in his hands, unsmiling, and said:
‘I’ve had presents from women, seannachie, for services rendered or wanted. This is the first gift I’ve ever had from a man. I’m touched. I read the thought behind it. It’s like – like a birthday party, which no one ever gave me. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Don’t say anything. Use it sometimes, if the calibration’s accurate.’
‘Bound to be. It’s a beautiful piece of brasswork.’ He closed the box and set it carefully on the shelf above his writing table. Then he turned back to me. ‘I want to talk to you about the trip, seannachie. Something’s gone wrong, badly wrong. I don’t know what it is, but I smell it. I was in town last night. I heard whispers I shouldn’t hear. Hints I didn’t like the sound of.’
‘What sort of hints?’
‘Someone’s been talking my business round the bars.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Christ! Does it matter! It only needs a telegram to Trondheim and we’re all in trouble up to the neck – me, Bollison, Maeve O’Donnell, a lot of others you wouldn’t know, even if I told you their names.’
