The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘Looks like the Mallory girl! Just the eyes, of course.’ Every man and woman from the drummer through to Willow were agreeing that they’d never seen her before.

  Alder brought the photograph back to Howie with his discouraging news. The sergeant made a show of comparing Rowan to the girls in the photographs but he knew that none of them was she. Willow meanwhile whispered, with a sudden demureness which Howie could scarcely credit, ‘Your dinner’s ready, Sergeant.’ She waited, her eyes slightly lowered, as Howie glanced at her in surprise. He was certainly hungry, but he had to file away the information about the photographs on the wall before he could permit himself to eat.

  ‘What are these?’ he asked Alder. ‘Thanksgiving Harvest Festival ceremonies in the local church?’

  ‘That’s right,’ confirmed Alder. ‘As you can see there’s one taken at the end of every summer.’

  ‘What happened to last year’s picture?’ Howie slipped out the question as casually as he could.

  ‘I’m afraid it got broken. We’ll have to order another.’ He seemed suddenly anxious to get back to his bar. ‘Willow, show the sergeant to the dining room. His food must be getting cold.’

  If Howie had not known that the people who now stood or sat convivially about the bar, as orderly as a church meeting, had only a few minutes before been behaving like savages, he would not have credited his eyes, or his memory. Even Willow, whose lovely arse had swayed invitingly before him when she had attempted to lead him to his room, now walked before him like a young debutante in a deportment class. But if Willow had become as apparently demure as a Susannah walking away from peeping elders, no equally quick change was possible for Howie. Indeed, now that he had time to distil his own reactions to the game they had played on him he raged. True, he was in control of himself, but he recognized his rage and struggled with it.

  Neil Howie hated their trivialization of sex, the turning of what he saw as its sacred purpose into a vulgar game. It had once been likened for him, this cheap prostitution of the beautiful and the wonderful, to someone dumping a cartful of shit in a room. Inevitably, the comparison had been made by one of his teachers at the seminary but it had never seemed anything but apt to Howie. He knew that Willow had succeeded in stirring his senses and his basest emotions, since he had for a moment desired her, he who in no way loved her. This knowledge made him face the fact that he had contributed in some small way to the pile of shit in the bar. He had allowed these undisciplined, provocative people to drag him, however slightly, for however short a time, into sullying his own sense of the purity of his love for Mary. That fact enraged him. Made him intensely resentful of everyone who had conspired together in the inn to do this thing to him. For a moment he hated them for it. It took the pragmatic policeman in him to make him forgive them for it, to recognize that they almost certainly knew not what they did.

  When Willow came to collect the plate from his main course she found a rather disgruntled sergeant. He was still trying to sort out, with his fork, something edible from the unsavoury mess on his plate. A stringy lamb chop he had eaten, but there remained four or five too-white, identically shaped, clearly canned potatoes. Also a soggy mass of artificially coloured, equally obviously canned broad beans.

  Willow had the grace to look a little embarrassed and wet her lovely lower lip with an enchanting little pink tongue. This was enough, she well knew, to take the mind of most males away from food. But not Howie’s mind. For, in addition to feeling still hungry, he was faced with another puzzle.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ complained Howie, indicating he had had enough. ‘The farmhouse soup was canned, and so are these potatoes and beans. Why?’ he asked quite sharply.

  ‘Well, I don’t think they are, Sergeant,’ said Willow defiantly, allowing her fragrant hair to brush his cheek as she leaned to pick up his plate.

  ‘Broad beans in their natural state are not turquoise,’ said Howie, pointedly holding one bean aloft on the fork. ‘I simply want to know why?’

  ‘Some things in their natural state have the most vivid colours!’ said Willow salaciously.

  ‘Why, in late April on an island famous for its fruit and vegetable produce, am I served canned vegetables? Aren’t there any fresh?’ Howie asked insistently.

  ‘I wonder what you’ll be wanting for “afters”,’ asked Willow evasively.

  ‘Well, I suppose I can’t go wrong with a Summerisle apple!’ said Howie, cheering himself with the prospect of the island’s speciality.

  ‘Sorry, no apples,’ said Willow.

  ‘No apples?’ Howie was astonished.

  ‘I expect they’re all exported,’ said Willow lightly. ‘You can have peaches and cream. They’re nice.’

  ‘Both from a can, I suppose,’ said Howie, and saw in her smile that this was no more than the truth. ‘All right,’ he said, smiling back at her resignedly. He was thanking God as he watched her graceful body go and fetch him some cloying syrupy peaches and some soapy artificial cream that his Mary could, bless her sweet heart, cook. But, as if the landlord’s daughter had divined this thought, she paused on her way to the kitchen, and looking back at Howie with her all-too-fathomable, green eyes, she said, ‘Cheer up, Sergeant. Food isn’t everything in life, y’know!’

  A little later, Sergeant Howie decided to take some air outside the stuffy atmosphere of the inn before going up to bed. No sooner had he emerged from the inn onto the green than he heard the relative quiet of the bar burst into boisterous sound behind him. Wishing to have quiet so that he might further order the impressions of the last few hours, he struck out across the green towards the lights from the houses on the other side. As he walked he heard a voice singing softly in the velvety darkness:

  ‘Ride a cock horse

  To Banbury Cross

  To see a white lady

  On a white horse

  With rings on her fingers

  And bells on her toes

  She shall have music wherever she goes.’

  As the sound of the song died away, Howie became aware of other, different sounds in the darkness around him. Soft sighs and moans and occasional rhythmic laughter seemed to be all around him. Suddenly he found himself falling, having tripped over an identifiably human form lying on the grass. As a puzzled, alarmed Howie recovered himself, the moon slipped out from behind the clouds and illuminated the whole green. A dozen young pairs of lovers were coupling on the grass. It is true that they seemed partly clothed against the chill night air but Howie noticed with a fascinated horror that there was something curiously formalistic about each couple. In every case, the girl sat astride her young man, who lay on his back. The girls’ feet were bare and the bells on their toes tinkled as they ground their young thighs to and fro, to and fro.

  Seeing Howie in the sudden moonlight, they seemed, to the sergeant, like a herd of cows surprised in their field at night, staring but unalarmed. Their sexual rhythm was unfaltering like the chewing of the cud. But in one particular, they were starkly human and quite unlike the simple kine. Their ‘ride a cock horse’ was consciously ritualistic.

  Howie seriously thought for a moment of arresting the lot of them, and the possible charges raced through his mind–‘indecent exposure in a public place’ … ‘a breach of the peace’ … ‘gross indecency’ …

  No sooner had the thought ‘arrest them’ come to his mind than he rejected it. Since every person present on the green, as far as he could see, was copulating there could be no reliable witnesses who could possibly be described as ‘independent’. Nothing in his training had prepared him for such a situation except, perhaps, the regulations for dealing with a riot. ‘Once you’ve read the “Riot Act” to warn the rioters to disperse you’re entitled to arrest the ringleaders,’ his lecturer at the Police College had told him. ‘But if you’re alone, laddie, forget it. Remember, a dead policeman serves no one’s purpose if he doesn’t serve to enforce the law.’ While this mass insult to human dignity and decency, as Howie saw it, coul
d reasonably be described as a kind of sexual riot there was clearly no practical remedy that he could apply to uphold the law of either God or Man.

  In the moment that he recognized his impotence as a policeman to simply enforce the law he persuaded himself to view the phenomenon of what was going on around him with as much detachment as he could muster. He made himself look at the young people around him and recognize the humanity he shared with them in common. But that detachment could not survive the urgings of his own emotions. It made his mind swim to hold in his hate and detestation of what he saw. A virgin himself, he had never imagined that a woman in the throes of the sexual act would look or sound as did these young women.

  The moans, the shrill cries, the unreal laughter, the grunts seemed to him like a barnyard caricature of what, in his attempt to ban in his own mind a puritan fear of sex, he had imagined as something that transfigured a woman, making her ethereally beautiful, making them both, man and woman, in the sanctified instant of procreation, marvellously at one with their Maker. For the second time that night he felt that these people were throwing shit at his dreams and his resentment was as terrible as, he realized, it was partly irrational. After all, he, who had no experience of the sexual act, possessed no patent of how it should look or sound or smell or feel. He, who despised ‘electness’, who knew that Jesus had forgiven and loved the Magdalene just as He loved everyone else, must force himself not to hate these young people for what, he realized, was his childlike, idealized image of man and woman’s unique act. He longed to roar, ‘Stop it. It looks ugly to me. And I was so sure it would look beautiful!’

  Just then, a fair girl who had ridden her lover until the bells on her toes had rattled in a tintinnabulating rhythm, contrapuntal to the huge gasps that shook her body, now collapsed, crying with delight, on her lover’s shoulder, and in her face he saw, looking down at her, unwilling voyeur that he was, a fleeting image of what he had imagined as the ‘love of God’ expressed in the sexual act. To see that look on Mary Bannock’s face, to know that he had put it there, would surely be wonderful. Then, and only then, did Howie identify with the boy whose thrusting body had wrought that look in the happily weeping girl. To hear Mary moan and cry like that and still to drive her on and on was suddenly Howie’s fantasy. But he wouldn’t want to lie like a lummox on his back, like these lads, he thought. No, he would have Mary on her back, a plump buttock in each hand, and he would drive her into a delirium, so he would. He fought down the heavy breaths these images evoked and not without difficulty quelled the stirrings of his own sexuality.

  Howie walked away remembering, for some apparently irrational reasons, ‘those insistent feet’ with which the ‘hound of heaven’ followed the poet ‘down the labyrinthine ways’. Even as he escaped the sounds and images of the young people, who had scarcely seemed to notice him, certainly not to care about his presence, he started to search for some other meaning to what he had just seen. Why had all the women sat impaled upon their lovers? He dismissed, at once, the notion that what he had seen was in any way directed at himself, unlike the teasing song and dance in the inn. For how could they have known that he would leave the inn that night, at that time?

  A small, chill fear beset him as he speculated on the fate of Rowan Morrison. Sex seemed the ruling passion of this strangely fecund island. The kidnapping of a very young girl, the supposed daughter of someone obviously not rich, could hardly have as its motive money. That she might be suffering some form of sexual abuse or bondage seemed, to Howie, more likely than not. He had seen the faces of all the young women on the green and they were certainly mature females, probably all sixteen or over, and their supine lovers seemed about the same age. From past experience he knew that the kidnapper of a child as young as Rowan, who was keeping her for so horrible a purpose, would most likely be much older than the youths on the green.

  There was, now, as he walked almost silently on the soft grass, a new sound coming to him. A girl was weeping, somewhere quite close to him, and a little further away was another sound, so curious that it baffled Howie to identify it.

  He could make out a stone wall in front of him. The dim pile of masonry that indicated the church was still some way away. As he peered over the wall, the sounds he had heard were at once explained by the sight he saw, yet to explain plausibly to himself what he saw was scarcely possible. He could only register it and gape. The wall enclosed the graveyard. A half-dozen people wandered about with watering cans sprinkling the graves, clearly the cause of the baffling sound. Sitting astride one of the nearby graves (a fresh one, judging by the lack of headstone) was a young woman in exactly the same stance as the girls Howie had seen on the green. But there were no bells on her toes. Instead, using a little trowel, she seemed to be planting something between her bare thighs. The bizarreness of the people watering the graves seemed, in the scale of the abnormal that was crowding in on poor Neil Howie that night, almost commonplace. But the girl who sat astride the grave, only fifteen feet or so from the wall where he stood, was quite unconscious of his presence and certainly entirely unaware of the turmoil she had brought to the mind and spirit of the poor sergeant.

  To his horror, he realized, after almost a full minute of watching her, that she was not doing at all that which his imagination had caused him to suppose. He had thought that she was forcing the loam from on top of the grave into her body. Whereas he could see quite plainly that what she was really doing was planting a little sapling in the earth between her thighs.

  Instead of asking himself why a girl should, at this cool, damp time of night, be risking catching her death of cold as, stark naked, she planted trees on graves; instead of that his mind was suddenly obsessed with the idea of earth being the conduit of seed to the womb. A nightmare, Hieronymus Bosch idea he recognized it to be, forced, he supposed, to the surface of his mind from some cobwebby corner of his subconscious. Howie hated the egoism of introspection. He regarded it as self-indulgent, undisciplined, and against God’s good teaching, which was to ignore self and look only to Christ as a means of self-knowledge. For he believed that once Christ was within a man He would banish all devils, and what else were such images as these that his mind kept inventing but manifestations of the ‘evil one’ within him? Each man, Howie felt, must fight his own struggle against the devil inside him. No one else could fight it for him.

  It occurred to Howie, in a moment of quite extraordinary stress and fear, that God had led him to the island of Summerisle, had shown him these terrible but exciting images to test him. That after the night in which he had triumphed over his own flesh and not seduced Mary, when he knew it would have been so easy to do so, God had decided, in His wisdom, to test him further.

  If the obsessive idea of a woman packing her body with earth seemed to linger long after he realized that it was entirely in his mind, and no part of what he was actually seeing, it was a measure, to him, once again, of how the people of this island seemed capable of forcing him to join them in giving vent to inner thoughts and feelings that shamed him, that appalled him, that made him feel covered with slime.

  He longed to escape from the company and sight of these people, to find some trees where the innocent birds slept, except for the nocturnal owl whose clean, uncomplicated instinct to hunt was a law of nature that Howie could understand. He turned and put the disturbing activity in the graveyard behind him. He put away from him too, with some difficulty, the urge to simply find that solitary wood, for which he longed. Instead he walked briskly back towards the inn and his duty of preparing to inquire further into the disappearance of Rowan Morrison.

  Although past eleven o’clock now, Howie was surprised and angered to find, if anything, more people in the bar than before. That they were relatively quiet, almost as if they’d been awaiting his return, was beside the point. He went straight up to Alder MacGregor and demanded an immediate explanation.

  ‘It’s past time, Landlord. Tell them to drink up and get out!’ Howie didn’t even pause for
Alder’s reaction but went to close the barroom door in the usual mainland manner for indicating legal Scottish closing time in a bar. But Alder was ahead of him.

  ‘Sergeant, it’s beyond your powers. We close here when we think fit.’

  ‘You do what?’ asked Howie sharply.

  ‘Licensing laws are under the control of the Justices of the Peace, right?’

  ‘Right!’ agreed Howie. ‘They can give permission for extensions for late closing. What about it? Is this a local holiday? Is that it?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Alder MacGregor, slightly bewildered. ‘The point is that Lord Summerisle is Justice of the Peace here!’ he went on.

  ‘I know!’ Howie was impatient to get to the door for people were still entering.

  ‘He has extended licensing hours indefinitely. This whole island is his property, y’know,’ said Alder MacGregor.

  ‘You mean you can stay open all night if you like?’ Sergeant Howie was appalled.

  ‘Sometimes,’ agreed Alder MacGregor, enjoying the sergeant’s astonishment. ‘It depends how we feel. His Lordship don’t care … as long as everyone turns up for work, on time, next morning, that is.’

  Howie managed to keep his cool. He was getting used to these shocks–storing up a list of things to report to the Chief Constable of the West Highland Police when he got back. They would need to send a task force of police to clean up this island when the time came. Meanwhile he must keep his mind clear for the Rowan Morrison case.

  Alder MacGregor had returned to the bar to pour a round of stiff drams of malt whisky for the little band of balladeers seated in a little room off the bar. They had stopped their music and were being joined now by all the young people streaming in from outside. That here were the young lovers Howie had just seen on the green was clear from the fact that some of the girls were solicitously, shamelessly, thought Howie, brushing the grass from their menfolk’s backs, as they entered the inn. It surprised him that so many of the younger people should crowd into this tiny room, their elders remaining dotted about the main bar. What really amazed him, however, was seeing the lovely Willow giving her father a daughterly goodnight kiss and heading for the staircase that led up to the bedrooms. She said, ‘Goodnight, Sergeant’ to him with only a trace of coquetry. ‘My room is next to yours,’ she added in even tones. ‘Call me if you need anything in the night. Y’know it’s sometimes hard to sleep in a strange room. So, if you need a hot water bottle or a cup of tea, don’t hesitate to call, will ye?’