by Morris West
‘For the record, Inspector, it’s an exhibition match to raise money for charity.’
‘I hope you can fence.’
‘I hope Matheson can’t, otherwise I’m in bother.’
‘If there’s an accident, so am I,’ said Rawlings with a grin. ‘When I lose my job, you’d better stage a benefit for me. At least there’s a doctor in the house.’
The doctor was more worried than he was because she knew a little more than he did about sliced tendons and cracks on the skull and what happens when you drive a steel blade through a bunch of muscles. Womanlike, she was glad I had called Ruarri out, but she was angry at my stupidity. She would rather have me shamed and whole than carved up like a turkey and covered with blood and honour. She was right, of course, and while I waited beside her for the room to be cleared and Maeve to record all the bets that were being thrust at her, I knew I was more than stupid; I was stark-raving, motherless mad.
I can fence. I learned it when I was trying to be an actor, for which I found I had no talent at all. However, the fencing I liked and was good at, and I kept it up for a long time with a notable Hungarian of my acquaintance who had more slashes on his bosom, and more girls to lie on them, than you would ever have believed possible at his age. But let me tell you now, plainly, you can’t fence with a claymore. The word itself means great sword, and in the old days that’s what it was, a great, double-bladed, two-handled chunk of bad steel, more useful for chopping trees than men. By the time of Culloden it had been somewhat refined, to a blade with a single edge – though sometimes two – and a big basket hilt, which cut out all wristwork, if indeed your wrists were strong enough, because this was still a cut-and-slash weapon which handled more like a machete than a fencing sabre. But of course, if you got cut with it or pierced with it, or clouted on the shoulder bone, it could make an awful mess of your beauty.
So what was I going to do? It all depended on whether Ruarri could fence. If he could, then he would have the advantage. He was younger, lighter on his feet and in much better condition than I. Given an equal skill, he had to win. If he couldn’t fence, then I could take him because, even with an awkward weapon, the man who knows the moves has the advantages – although he’s always vulnerable to a lucky slash that incapacitates him. Also, as Maeve had said and I knew, Ruarri was a dirty fighter, and there are more than fencer’s tricks for a man with a steel blade in his fist. Inspector Rawlings might umpire by Olympic rules, but Ruarri was going to fight by his own….
He couldn’t fence. He came awkwardly to the en garde, presenting the whole front of his body open to me. It looked ridiculous, but it made me scared. He didn’t know the rules and didn’t care. He was out for blood. What vein he tapped it from made no matter. I would have to attack because my defences were all based on the high and low lines of the rule book. Ruarri wouldn’t worry if he hit the jugular or the Achilles tendon, just so he brought me down. When Rawlings gave the signal to engage, I went in fast, striking upwards, in pronation, going for his right cheek, to scare him. He didn’t parry. He swung away like a boxer does, then leaped away from the line of my lunge and came chopping at me from the left. For a moment it was more like quarter staves or kendo than swordplay, until I was able to pin him in line and attack again, always for the high line because there is nothing more disconcerting than a steel blade slicing near your naked face.
It was like trying to cut a bouncing ball. He was away again, spring-heel-Jack, leaping and turning, then coming in, slashing as if with a billhook. Then I got what he was trying to do. He was working me like a boxer, trying to tire me with his free-for-all tactics until I couldn’t turn fast enough and he could catch me with one, final stroke. Like all orthodoxy, fencing is limited by its dogmas and its rituals. It is a beautiful art, but it isn’t war, and Ruarri was making war, not love.
I needed more than the six guards and parries of the sabre school to save my skin. I changed tactics. I began attacking the low line, belly to breastbone, tempting him to strike for my head. He wouldn’t be tempted. He pulled back from my last lunge and left me short-reached; then as I straightened he did the old, knife-fighter’s trick: dropped on his knee and drove for my ribs. He almost had me; but he missed by a fraction, and because he was immobilized just long enough, I went in on a risky flèche and opened an inch of his cheek with the cutting edge. Then Rawlings stepped between us and the match, if you can call it a match, was over.
We shook hands and made a conventional ceremony of compliment to each other, but the applause was scattered and uneasy. Rawlings took the swords from us and tossed them onto the table. Kathleen came to Ruarri and examined his sliced cheek and took him off to the bathroom to bathe and tape the cut until it could be stitched in the morning. Maeve came over to me and put a drink in my hand and said, ‘You look as though you need this,’ then walked away with no smile and no compliment. I warned you, didn’t I? This was no epic encounter. It was two grown men playing silly-ass with lethal weapons; and drunk or sober, the Lewis men had sense enough to see it.
But the evening wasn’t quite dead yet. Ruarri came back, with a slightly one-sided grin, waving a chequebook. The takings must be counted and his own contribution added and the whole sum consigned to Lachie’s mother by the hands of Athol Cameron. Maeve must pay out on the bets. There was time for one more drink and a dash of lively music to send us home dancing. While the counting was going on Kathleen drew me aside and told me Ruarri wanted me to stay behind and talk to him after everyone else had gone home. I could see no point in it. He had put me through enough, and Kathleen too. I wanted no drunken dialogues at two in the morning; I wanted to be home in bed. The Mactire was out of my system now. The sooner he was out of my life, the better. I was surprised and irritated when Kathleen insisted:
‘I want you to do it, darling. I want you to do it for me, if not for Ruarri. He knows he made a bad exhibition of himself. He feels deeply humiliated. He apologized for what happened after my dinner with him. I think he wants to apologize to you. You can afford to be magnanimous. If you’re worried about me, Maeve or the inspector can drive me back to the lodge. I’ll be waiting for you there.’
I argued with her; but, of course, she convinced me. If she hadn’t, there would have been some other thing to keep me, because that, too, was written on the skin of my hand and a man, like a wolf, must live and die in his own skin.
Chapter 16
WE sat, as we had sat so many times before, together at the bar, with the shambles of the ceilidh spread around us. We had drinks between us, but they remained untasted in the glasses because the time for drinking and the time for playing was over, and now, or nearly, it was time to walk away. Ruarri was calm and direct. The only time he smiled was at the beginning.
‘So you finally called me, seannachie.’
‘You asked for it.’
‘So I did. I’ve been asking for it ever since we met. Tonight I want to tell you why.’
‘Look, it’s late and —’
‘Seannachie. Please do me this favour. It’s the last, because you’re going away and so am I. Don’t say a word. Just hear me out, right to the end. Will you?’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘Thanks.’
Then he began to talk, haltingly at first, then in a steady flow of simple words.
‘... We met on a strange day, seannachie. You were running away from whatever was in your past. I was cruising the Minch, single-handed, trying to make some sense out of what I was doing with my life. Oh, I know! I was always very sure with you. I could see all the rewards hung like baubles on a Christmas tree. All I had to do was reach up and snatch them off. But underneath, and for a long time and about a lot of things, I wasn’t sure at all.
‘Now, if you’re living a life like mine, and all the other lives I’d lived before, you have to be sure. If you’re not sure, you’re dead or rotting in some lousy jail in a flea-bitten country where they don’t have habeas corpus and the British Consul has a short memory and no funds to spen
d on roving rascals. You have to be sure because you’ve only half a second to pull a trigger or duck from a judo chop, or decide whether to tell a lie or risk the truth with a son of a bitch who won’t believe it anyway.
‘On that day, seannachie, I wasn’t sure any more. I had money enough – and even in a legal way, I’d have more. I had comfort enough and friends enough – and though they’re simple fellows, they are good friends, as you saw tonight. I had women enough, too, though from the day Maeve threw me over, there was always the doubt whether I had the brains or breeding to hold the kind of woman I liked. I had some things going, on the edge of the law, like the guns, and wholesale pharmaceuticals that you can buy cheap and sell in bulk for a good profit if you know the market. That didn’t worry me too much. I liked the thrill and I liked the profit even better. But I was beginning to wonder how long I wanted to play games with the law – not for the morals of it, but the comfort really, and being able to sleep at night and walk into a bar without the Duggie Donalds of the world tapping me on the shoulder for a little chat.
‘Then you came along…Now I don’t want you to take it amiss, seannachie, but I want to talk about you for a little while. You don’t talk much about yourself, except in your books, and I’ve read a couple now, though I’ve never told you. But you’ve got some dangerous talents. For instance, you’re always curious and questioning, so that people are flattered to talk to you. They think – and don’t we all like to think it? – that you’re interested in them. You are some of the time. But for the rest you’re interested in what they have to tell you, because it’s grist to the writing mill and sometimes it’s a clinical thing, like a chemist looking into a test tube. I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying what I’ve seen and felt. You’ve got good manners, seannachie, which are part gift and part practice. But when you’re using the practice and not the heart, it shows and it hurts.
‘Also, seannachie, you’re well-read and you have a logical mind, chop-chop-chop like a lawyer’s, but that’s hard to take for ordinary folk who live half by their wits and half by what they feel with the tips of their fingers. You want to reason with everybody, and the only exception you’ll make is with people you’re very close to, and them you’ll love and protect even if they’re the biggest bastards in the world. So you’re a hard man to live with, laddie, easy to be jealous of, and a bloody obstruction on the horizon of someone like me because you stand in your own light and won’t let us get at ours. Another thing, you’re alive and twitching all the time, so whatever you feel communicates itself: fears, doubts, angers, loves and hates too. You won’t – or you can’t – let anyone ignore you. No one can float on the surface with you because you’re not content there either….
‘So there’s you and me on that morning in Uig, each with our separate histories catching up with us, very alike and yet very unlike, and we sail back together into Stornoway. I wonder if you’ve ever understood the real meaning of that day – my meaning? You were trespassing. No man should have all that you have and be able to sail a boat like that. No man should have a nice clear mind, and cheat the law like you were prepared to do for me.
‘Then, when you came to the croft, I saw that in your own way you were jealous of me. You saw me riding the tractor and you were ashamed of your soft hands and the fact that you were a wanderer with no land under his own feet. I saw you when you looked at my house, how you felt the beams and knew how the stones were laid and the joinery done, though you’d never done any of it yourself – or maybe you had, but you’d stopped doing it a long time ago. You’d been a fighter, too – I’ve never forgotten that night when you were all set to take me with a broken bottle. But somewhere along the line you’d given that up. And I wondered why. I wondered about you and Kathleen, too, because when you brought her to my house, I didn’t know what you wanted from her – although I knew you had balls, seannachie, and I thought you knew what they were for….
‘So I started to play a game with you. At least I told myself it was a game, but it wasn’t. I was looking for myself and I thought I might find me through you. You spoiled the game, seannachie, when you brought me Morrison’s news. I had to take you seriously then. You weren’t outside my life any more. You were like a cow tick under my skin. I couldn’t scratch you out or laugh you out. You were there, drinking my blood and itching me day and night.
‘But I had to play out the game. I was the rogue, you were the nice, scholarly gentleman with a well-known name and good table manners and a lawyer’s mind. You couldn’t be as good as you looked just as I couldn’t be as bad as I was painted. I took you poaching. You proved a cleverer rascal than I. We went after the deer, and you made a kill clean as the next man.
‘I made a play for Kathleen and you were in bed with her already. On board the Helen, you told me about Lachie, which meant you could think as well outside the law as inside it. The closer I looked, the more you seemed like me.
‘That’s why I called the play tonight. You couldn’t see yourself, seannachie. You thought I was playing rough – but it was you who drew blood and you who had death in his eyes. I know we’re the same, and I think you do too.
‘And yet there’s such a difference. In a funny way, I think I’ve cured you of what was ailing you. But you haven’t cured me, seannachie. You’ve left me weaker and more puzzled than before. I’m not blaming you. Don’t think that. I’m just stating a fact. The ceilidh was my public statement. This is my private one to you.
‘You made me question everything I did, said, or believed. That’s not a bad thing, except you have to prepare the subject for the experience – and you didn’t do that. It’s just as hard to see yourself plain as it must be to see God for the first time when you didn’t believe He was there at all. You never understood that. You wouldn’t let me have any secrets from myself; but you have to have them sometimes, otherwise you can’t bear to live with yourself. I thought I was doing a good thing when I went to see Morrison. You saw it, and said it, as a total selfishness. Well, part of it was, but not the best part.
‘You thought I was a shit because I told you a lie about my dinner with Kathleen. The lie was to protect her, because I could have taken her, seannachie, and I didn’t. And the insult I laid on her was the only way I could send her home with her pride unbroken.
‘When you told me about Lachie on board the Helen, I was blazing mad. I said wild things – but it was you who read murder into them, seannachie. I know that murder was in the back of my mind. But you pulled it out and showed it to me …made me look at it, made me weigh chances and consequences I’d never thought of, might not have thought of if you’d let me cool down.
‘As it turned out, I did kill him…I chopped him while he stood at the wheel just after he came on watch. I carried him out of the wheelhouse in the fog and tossed him overboard….
‘Don’t look shocked, seannachie. You’ve had the knowledge buried in your own mind ever since it happened. And there’s nothing you have to do about it because all the arrangements are made…No, I’m not going to give myself up, because they’d have me mad and raving after a week in prison. I’m going away, as I told you. How, I’ll tell you in a minute. I’d like you to understand the why, first of all…Lachie’s death was because of the guns. Now my boys were in that and Maeve O’Donnell too. The boys followed me. I have to protect them. And my deal with Maeve was that I would hold her and her organization safe. I want to honour both friendships.
Then there’s Morrison. He’s my father – and you may think it strange, but I’ve started to think of him like that. He’s old and ailing, and I know he’s told a lot of people about me and I won’t have him shamed now. When I’m gone, you’ll have to tell him, and I know you’ll tell him the best, and only so much of the worst as he would guess anyway.
‘I know what you’re thinking, seannachie. You can’t figure out why, if I’m the bastard you know, I don’t stay and bluff it out, because I can. Even what I’m telling you now I can deny in the next breath.
‘It gets back to you and me and the difference between us. I know what the difference is now. You’re a reversible man. I’m not. You’re open to change. You’re open to believing, to disbelieving, to forgiving, to starting again. You’re one of those who can be – what do they call it? – converted. You can believe in a better tomorrow, a better you even. I don’t. I can’t. And I’ll tell you, seannachie, you and those like you had better beware, because there’s a whole dark world full of people like me, and you haven’t seen the half of it yet.
‘I’m programmed, seannachie, like one of those great whirring machines that will soon be used to run the world when men give up trying. My little memory bank, seannachie, is loaded with everything I’ve ever done in my life. And I can’t live with myself any more because I know one day someone else like you is going to come along all naive and respectable and press the starter button and have me spew out another and bloodier answer on the tape.
‘You remember I told you at dinner that I’d wished once I could join the Romans or the Greeks or some old and tolerant religion. You never heard why. It’s because they still raise a hand over you and bless you clean in the name of God and let you crawl away into a desert or a monastery until you grow new and fit for human commerce again. Of course I missed the bus, because I was too proud and stupid to lift my hand and yell for it to stop. That’s where you and I failed together too. We couldn’t forgive each other’s being what we are. It’s a great shame, but there it is.
‘Now let’s talk about my exit, seannachie. It’ll be clean. All the paperwork’s done. The will’s made. The legacies are as just as I can make them. There’s no confession because that would have to implicate my friends. The law will have to be content with what it gets – a closed case and no more. When you leave here I’m going to fire this place. And then I’m going to take the capsule I’ve carried round with me all these years – which will have me cleanly dead in four seconds maximum.
