The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘We don’t take the Old Testament literally. But no more do most of you Presbyterians!’ retorted Howie, amused. ‘You all drink like fishes on the Sabbath, behind closed doors, and then go right out and vote for dry Sundays.’

  ‘I do not drink like a fish on Sundays,’ laughed Mary. ‘And I voted for wet Sundays! But then I’m not very religious really, as you know. When we’re married you’ll have to have all the religion for both of us. Are you ever sorry you gave up the idea of being a priest?’

  ‘No, not really,’ said Neil Howie thoughtfully. ‘But it would have been a challenge, here in Scotland, to be a priest of a minority religion like the Episcopalians. Mary, you know I think of the police now as my ministry. It doesn’t rankle any more. That’s the truth!’

  ‘But?’ Mary insisted. She worried that his failure to graduate from the seminary still hurt, even if he himself could believe that it no longer rankled.

  ‘But it was the first, and, I hope, the last time I failed in what I set out to do. Did I ever tell you why I failed?’

  ‘No,’ answered Mary, who had never dared pry into this part of his life. She had sensibly waited till he would tell her about it of his own accord. And she had waited a long time. ‘No, you never did,’ she added simply, waiting.

  ‘It was no any academic problem,’ he said, a bit defensively. ‘I did fine in the Latin and the Greek and all that. It was a matter of attitude. I think today … if I was being interviewed by the bishop today … I’d have passed.’

  ‘Things have changed,’ said Mary consolingly.

  ‘Changed?’ Howie was surprised. ‘No, things haven’t changed. I’ve changed. Being in the police has made me more, more …’ He searched for the word and then he said, sounding still dissatisfied, ‘more flexible.’

  ‘More tolerant?’ Mary suggested as being nearer to what he meant and came directly upon the residual seminarian in her Neil.

  ‘No, you cannot tolerate what is not the truth. Not for yourself anyway. Nor can you really tolerate actions that go directly against God’s word. I can’t do that as a person any more than as a police officer I can tolerate people breaking the law of the land!’

  ‘So what has changed in you?’ asked Mary insistently.

  ‘Och, I used to feel very strongly about the proliferation of daft religions here in Scotland. The “wee frees” down in places like Plockton with their three-day Sabbaths. The Baptists and your lot, love, who both believe they’re “elect of God”. That they’re justified through faith, which would be fine, except that then they add that they believe God handed them out the faith like a club membership. So they’re all members of the Elect Club and close the pubs and stop other people doing a stroke of useful work on Sundays. Daft of course. Harmless, you’d say, except that then they look down on everybody else who don’t belong to their Elect Club, just like some people accuse the Jews of doing. But I say if the Baptists or your kirk of God had produced one man, let alone the Son of God, who could change the faith and the hope of the world, not to forget the course of history, they might have a reason to think of themselves as elect.’

  ‘Was that part of your sermon in front of your bishop?’ hazarded Mary.

  ‘It was,’ said her Neil, smiling ruefully.

  ‘But did he disagree with you?’ she asked gently.

  ‘No. But we live in ecumenical times and he thought I was determined to declare war on the other churches; and so in a way I was.’ Howie laughed out loud remembering what he had wanted to preach. ‘Do you want to hear what I selected as the first goal of my ministry?’

  She nodded, smiling her encouragement at him, waiting for it all to come out.

  ‘I was going to preach that Scotland would be a happier place if it delivered itself into the love of God through the love of its fellow men. Simply that! Forgetting the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament. Forgetting the nitpicking over whether Jesus turned water into wine or grape juice and all that. What kind of a Redeemer can they be imagining, Mary, when they tell us that He came to a wedding where the booze hadn’t arrived so he took the wellwater and turned it into some nutty fruit drink? To tell a tale like that of Him is, surely, blasphemy?’

  ‘You’d have made a lovely preacher, Neil,’ said Mary, ‘but I’m glad you’re a policeman just the same. I don’t think I could have ever lived up to being your wife if you’d been a priest. I’d have felt that I had to help carry on the argument by your side. And it’s not that I don’t agree with most of what you say, but I know that I could never say it with quite enough conviction to convert anybody else.’

  ‘In that case you’d have made the perfect, average Episcopalian, Mary!’ said ‘her Neil’, aware, even as he said it, that he wished he hadn’t.

  Mary fell into a silence that she knew seemed like a sulk but which she could not help, because she was on the brink of tears. She so wanted to be what he required of her. If only she could always know exactly what that was. She didn’t fear that he wanted to change her personality and mould her, although subconsciously she knew it was hard for him to avoid preaching and teaching. She had read Germaine Greer and assumed that the goals of her thesis were the future, but was by no means sure that they worked. Not for her, anyway. She had explained to Neil that she loved his enthusiasms, that they excited her. She had hardly dared to say to herself, let alone to him, that she, as a woman, waited with increasing impatience for some of his passion to be channelled into loving her physically.

  In his car that they had left that morning in the parking lot of the Admiral Cochrane, he now drove her home. She sat beside him remembering the biblical description of how the Virgin Mary ‘pondered these things in her heart’. She did likewise.

  The streets through which they drove were newly washed with rain. Worthy shops, selling no-nonsense goods, stood dark and innocent of neon signs along streets that echoed to the footfall of men wandering home from pubs. A few noisy youths streamed from the bus station after a trip to watch the home soccer team play away. Women were pulling their curtains, shutting in their aspidistras for the night, making private their disrobing themselves of the layers of wool that protected their pale Scots bodies from the uncertain climate. The lights of throbbing downtown Portlochlie were red, green, and amber only and presided over precious little traffic at this already ungodly hour.

  He stopped outside her parents’ detached home with its immaculate, rockery garden glinting in the streetlight. The street was entirely deserted except for a lone jogger. Howie noted this figure, as he noted anyone or anything remotely unusual that crossed his daily path. The eccentricity that caught his eye, in this case, had more to do with the man’s dress than the fact that he should be jogging at all at this late hour of the night. A tall man, he wore a tracksuit, rather garish American-style sneakers, and a woollen balaclava helmet that left only his eyes open to the night air. To jog, to run in a woollen mask, the kind that night watchmen used on building sites in winter, was perhaps what really made Howie register the man. The night was cold certainly, but not that cold. And the man ran athletically, his long legs scissoring in carefully measured paces, using the balls of his sneakered feet. Didn’t the wool curtail his breathing or had it some disguising purpose? Up to no good, Howie thought and realized guiltily that Mary was sitting beside him nursing her hurt at what he had said in the pub, damning her with his faint praise that she’d be an ideal, trimming Episcopalian.

  Her home was already dark for her parents always retired after the ten o’clock news on television. He turned and looked at her face, rather pale in the lamplight, and found that she could not meet his eyes.

  ‘A penny?’ he asked, making an offering for her thoughts.

  ‘Not worth that much!’ she said in a small timorous voice.

  But now she looked up at him and he recognized in her expression something thathe knew to be more than caring and devotion. It was, for him, uncomfortably intense, this look of hers, because he understood it to be adoration, no less. He had a
lways hesitated with Mary, pausing at the brink of what he felt. But now, in an instant of self-revelation, that he was sure was God-given, he realized how cold and mean and selfish he would be if he did not, at once, welcome all her love; if he did not take from her all that she longed to give and lavish on her all the love he was capable of giving. He realized that it was he who was afraid of being inadequate. That this was a kind of cowardice of the soul that he must learn, with her help, to conquer. Neil felt enormously contrite, and tender towards her now. To ‘she’ who didn’t think her thoughts were worth a penny to him.

  ‘Och, that’s not true. Is it, Mary? Not true at all?’ he asked gently, and suddenly, too moved for words, he put his arms around her body and his lips to her downy cheek and kissed her. To her dismay Mary found she could no longer hold back her tears and sobbed helplessly on his shoulder.

  ‘Mary!’ he said very quietly. ‘I cannot bear for you to do that. Is it me that’s making you cry? Listen, I think I know why …’ He stopped what he was saying, realizing he had no right to assume he knew what was in her heart. It was an arrogant assumption. And yet he thought he knew.

  ‘I think …’ he started again.

  ‘What do you think?’ she managed to ask between sobs.

  ‘I think that you think I’m waiting for you to become an Episcopalian before we marry!’ he blurted it out.

  ‘Is that what you think I think?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, feeling foolish, almost certain he had guessed wrong. Then he suddenly felt an altogether uncomplicated desire to kiss her lips, to warm her, to caress her till she was happy and laughing again.

  She gave her mouth to his kiss not opening it too wide, fearful, as always, that if she gave him the feel of her tongue, as she longed to do, he would find her too abandoned and be repelled by her. Sweet though their previous kisses had been for her, this was more exciting than all those that had gone before. He opened her mouth and met her tongue with his. For the first time he seemed to want her in a tactile, sexual sense. His manly bear hug (that she enjoyed mainly because it was all she ever felt of his flesh) was now relaxed, and he was discovering her with his hands, was encouraging her to feel his body. Beneath his raw wool sweater she actually touched his hip and simultaneously felt his hand slide inside her thigh. She was at the point of trying to find the catch of his trousers when she felt his hand exploring upward. She slid her hips forward, opening her legs in encouragement, when suddenly he was quite still, and then withdrew his hand altogether.

  ‘Please don’t ever do that again if you’re going to stop!’ she heard herself saying sharply, involuntarily.

  ‘Mary, Mary!’ he was saying. ‘Listen!’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, pulling herself back from him, quelling a desire to shout at him, ‘For God’s sake take me to bed and make love to me like a man.’

  ‘Mary,’ said her Neil. ‘How soon can we get married? I want to worship you with my body. I want to give you bairns. I want us very much to be husband and wife just as soon as we can.’

  ‘Why? All of a sudden why?’ asked Mary, her eyes shining, but her voice still sharp, in spite of herself.

  ‘Why? Because I love you. That’s why!’ he said reasonably, wondering, as nearly always, what she could possibly now be thinking.

  ‘Och, you great lummox, you! Why could you not have said all that before?’

  He was about to reply but she shushed him.

  ‘The answer is yes. Married we’ll be. As soon as possible,’ she said quickly before he could change his mind or find some new rationalization for delay.

  ‘When?’ he asked, anxiously pulling his raw wool sweater down over his trousers to hide his all-too-evident desire.

  ‘The week after next,’ she said.

  ‘Why not next week?’ he asked, suddenly laughing, a surge of unreasonable happiness coming over him.

  ‘Och, Neil, women have their reasons for these things. When you’re an old married man you’ll understand.’

  ‘I see! Of course, love. Whenever you’re ready.’ He said this shyly, the imminent intimacy of marriage suddenly borne in on him.

  ‘Well, there we are then,’ she said happily, kissing his cheek and opening the car door. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow I’m flying to Summerisle immediately after Communion,’ he said. ‘It’s a serious case by the sound of it. Could take a day or two,’ he added, getting out of the car, about to see her to her door.

  To Neil Howie’s annoyance and surprise the tall jogger seemed to have been standing right behind his car and now darted off down the road. A peeping jogger, thought Howie wryly. Here was a hitherto unsuspected turn in Portlochlie crime patterns. And he dismissed the man, for the moment, from his thoughts as he kissed Mary goodnight.

  ‘Take care,’ she said simply, hating the idea of his flying the police seaplane around the islands, but determined not to show her anxiety.

  As he drove home, he turned on the American Forces Network on his car radio. He liked their late night music and the messages for American servicemen from towns in the United States with fabulous biblical names like Babylon, New York, or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He wondered if they had attempted to install a hanging garden in the former.

  Passing the Bull’s Head tavern he saw that people were still inside drinking. Checking his watch, he found that it was after eleven o’clock, well past the legal closing time for all bars in Portlochlie. He sighed and, stopping his car, went inside the inn. An old man was playing the piano and singing ‘The hole in the elephant’s bottom!’ Everyone else was almost immediately silent on Howie’s entrance and gulped down their drinks (or left them undrunk) and made straight for the door. Howie came up behind the pianist and gently lowered the lid of the piano. The old man withdrew his fingers hurriedly. ‘Long past “time”, Dad,’ said Howie, and closed the piano with a distinct bang.

  ‘That’ll be a summons before the magistrates, Jack!’ he added to the landlord who hurried out from a back room. Howie could see that Jack was a bit drunk, like most of his customers. He didn’t really feel sorry for him. In his opinion drinkers ought never to keep bars. Jack was said easily to drink the weekly profits of his bar.

  Sergeant Howie went home to bed and dreamed of the golden eagle flying higher and higher until he seemed to melt into the sun.

  At about the same time a three-masted schooner was preparing to leave Portlochlie harbour, her throbbing diesel engines virtually the only sound to be heard near the deserted quayside.

  The crew of the vessel moved about the decks preparing the sails for use as soon as their ship should have cleared harbour. One seaman, however, stood by the gangplank as if waiting for some latecomer, peering into the gloom beyond the misty stretches of quayside illuminated by the harbour lights. A pair of sneakered feet appeared in the ambience of the lights, causing the seaman to visibly relax. And while he made his way to the bollards to prepare to cast off, the running man, whom Neil Howie had mentally filed as the ‘peeping jogger’, ran straight across the quayside and onto the deck of the schooner.

  Five minutes later the ship was at sea heading west, her sails filling in a sharp offshore breeze but her diesel engines still running at full throttle. The schooner, whose name Summerisle was painted on her stern, seemed in a considerable hurry.

  CHAPTER II

  Sunday –

  the 29th of April

  HOWIE HAD EATEN THE PRECIOUS BLOOD AND BODY OF His Lord Jesus Christ that morning. He knew, as he sipped the wine and ate the bread that symbolized His Lord’s sacrifice, that the sure knowledge of His resurrection was, for him, the most moving and marvellous part of his faith. No fear attended him as he scattered the gulls fishing in Portlochlie harbour with his seaplane and then eased himself off the bumpy water to join his favourite creatures, the birds, in their own element, soaring high over the town and then heading west for the isles. Howie was happy in the faith that, even if his plane fell from the sky, and he were to be lost and o
bliterated in the ocean, His Lord’s promise of resurrection would ultimately rescue him and give him everlasting life.

  Sergeant Howie loved the islands, although the sight of them from his seaplane always gave him a feeling of sadness. He could see the ruined churches, the abandoned monasteries, and other evidence of the great migrations that had long since taken most of the original population to far-off Nova Scotia in Canada where, he had heard, they still spoke the Gaelic, a language now almost forgotten by the scattered farmers and the struggling fishermen whose clean white dwellings were dotted about below him. The migrations of people, unlike birds, were, alas, nearly always one-way.

  If there had once been trees on the islands very few now remained. The isles were mostly very similar to Saint Ninian’s, covered with heather and bracken on the hills, and peat in the marshy valleys. Sergeant Howie had, a few years before, been given a pamphlet by a local communist agitator whom it had been his duty to arrest for aggravated assault. The tract, which he read in order to acquaint himself more closely with the AntiChrist, contained a reprint of Karl Marx’s famous article in the New York Herald about the Highland Clearances. It had told how the great acreages of common land that had once belonged to the Scots clans in their truly tribal days were enclosed in the nineteenth century for the convenience of the newly imported sheep, belonging to the Scottish lairds and the London bankers who backed them.

  These same sheep were more valuable, by far, to the lairds than their own kith and kin, the clansmen, who had fought for their lordly families for centuries. Bailiffs pulled down the clansmen’s simple cottages, and troops supervised the loading of these poor people onto the ships that were to take them to the new world. Not only the clansmen but the once plentiful trees too had fallen victims to the depredations of the sheep. The islands now were bald and barren save for the baaing of their fleecy inhabitants and the few sad people who had stayed to tend them.

  ‘If Karl Marx had only surrendered to the socialist in Jesus,’ Howie had told the bewildered pastor of Saint Andrew’s. ‘What a glorious mission he could have had! A second Saint Paul!’ enthused Howie, before dropping the unpopular subject.