Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  I took the dog for a walk before heading up to Paul’s, hoping to burn off some of her frog-hunting energy, but the moment we turn into his driveway, even after an hour in the woods, she is churning around the back seat, waiting for the glorious moment of release when I open the door and she can fly downhill to the lake.

  “She doesn’t waste any time, does she?” says Paul, as we watch her mad, unstoppable flight into the water.

  “Waiting’s not really her strong suit,” I say, following him into the house.

  He’s wearing a different pair of clean, ironed shorts this morning, another immaculate collared shirt, this one a pale yellow. I have on the clothes I wore yesterday. No change at all. Another condition of novel-writing, trying to exist in the world of the book and not the “real” world, so minimizing the choices of that world. When I’m working on a book, I just wear the same clothes day after day, eat the same food with no variation. Novel-writing and depression have a great deal in common, as it turns out.

  “I thought about what you said,” I say, as we descend the basement stairs. “On the phone. About Megan Boyd’s view. I think she was probably looking out to sea most hours of the day for about sixty years.”

  “She was connected to the salmon then, even without thinking about them.” Paul pulls the chair out for me, an unexpected gesture of chivalry that makes me feel awkward.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “The salmon were swimming around, feeding, and she was tying the flies that would catch them in a year or two.” Paul sits down as well. “It’s like time travel.”

  I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, but I like the association. I like to think of Megan tying flies in her cottage while the fish that will die by those flies swim freely in the ocean, months and years away from being killed, with no knowledge of that fact.

  “You’re a bit of a philosopher,” I say, and Paul grins, pleased with the comment.

  “Don’t think that flattery will make this next part of the Jock Scott any easier,” he says.

  I wind a layer of black thread onto my hook, pleased that it goes smoothly today after all the time spent practising it yesterday. Overtop of that, Paul has me wind on some silver tinsel, and overtop of that, a layer of yellow floss. Now I am ready for the first tie-in, which is a small section of golden pheasant feather.

  “Always hard to get one that isn’t twisted,” says Paul, passing me a small section of feather. “This one isn’t too bad.”

  The little piece of pheasant feather is known as the “tail” of the fly. Paul shows me how to strip back a few of the barbs from the base end of the feather, to reveal a smooth section that I can then attach near the hook.

  “Don’t touch the feather too much or you’ll wreck it,” says Paul, watching me try to fluff up the top end of it. “The less you handle the components of the fly, the better.”

  There are many bits and pieces to the Jock Scott. It is a complicated fly pattern, and probably I should have started with something much easier, but I liked the idea of tying a fly that Megan regularly tied, and Paul had suggested the Jock Scott because it is a fly he works on regularly himself.

  It is delicate work to tie a fishing fly, and there are many people who assumed that Megan Boyd was so good at it because she was a woman and her hands were small and adept. But from the photos I have seen of her at work in her fly-tying shed, her fingers were thick as sausages, and her hands looked like a mechanic’s hands, heavy and muscular. They actually looked bigger than most men’s hands.

  Paul’s hands are small, his fingers thin, his nails clean and scrubbed. I like how he pours all of his attention into the tips of his fingers, the care that he takes in winding on the thread to secure his scrap of pheasant feather. He performs the task with both patience and confidence, and I think of how repetition breeds confidence, of how my years of writing have given me a confidence I never had before.

  I have been writing for so long now that I can no longer separate myself from the act of writing. I don’t know where one begins and another ends. There was a time when it bothered me that I had become what I did, that I tended to look at everything in terms of story or image, that while I was experiencing my life, I was also apart from it. But I have made peace with that now because what I know about writing is that it will take everything I can throw at it, and that is a comfort. I can fall into it and it will absorb my sorrow, my ideas, my restlessness. It has become a process for making me whole again whenever the world breaks me down.

  I think it must have been the same for Megan Boyd. She was good at tying flies because she had a knack for it, and because she did it ceaselessly, and the constant work of it and the praise she received for the finished product would have given her confidence. She could tie flies without looking at them. That implies a level of familiarity and knowledge that is enviable, and it would be accompanied by the self-possession that comes from immersing oneself wholly in one’s work.

  9.

  THE REAL JOCK SCOTT WAS A GILLIE WHO worked for a lord with the same family name: Lord John Scott. The former invented the fly for the latter in 1845. It is one of the most complicated fishing fly patterns, with over fifty different components.

  Jock Scott, the gillie, began tying flies around the same age as Megan Boyd, and he first entered the employ of Lord Scott when he was thirteen. The story goes that Lord John Scott met the boy when he was out walking and asked him his name. When he found out that the boy had the same name as he did, he felt it was fortuitous and asked the young Jock Scott to come and work for him. They remained together for twenty-seven years, during which time they formed a strong friendship. Jock Scott was not only a gillie for Lord Scott but also his valet and boxing sparring partner. Their relationship ended when Lord Scott died, at the age of fifty-one, worn out from all his various sporting pursuits, and Jock Scott went on to tie flies for the Earl of Haddington until he died himself, at the age of seventy-six.

  Apparently, the original fly was tied using a lock of Lord Scott’s wife’s red hair for part of the body of the fly. She had what has been described as “titian-coloured” hair. Human hair was sometimes used in salmon flies, as was horse hair. Megan Boyd herself once stopped a small child in Brora who had striking red hair and asked if she could have a swatch of it to use for her flies.

  10.

  WHO DO WE CONFIDE IN? WHO DO WE TELL our secrets to? It matters that we have someone we can talk to, really talk to. Part of the trouble, for me, of having so many people die at once is that most of my confidants have been wiped out, those intimates I could call up in the middle of the night and who would know what I meant if I spoke about how I was feeling.

  Whom did Megan Boyd confide in? Did she ever have a lover?

  She worked solidly for six days of the week, from first light to last light, but on Sunday, she took the day off. Friends say she “disappeared” on Sundays, went off in her car in the morning and returned again in the evening. Often, she went to the beautiful “Glen of the Fairies” in Perthshire. It’s no surprise that she wanted to make herself scarce, to avoid fishermen dropping by her cottage and asking for flies. (Although, to deal with this eventuality, she left a notebook and pen on a bench outside her door so that people could write down their orders, and she would see to them on her return.) The question is, did she go to meet someone at Glen of the Fairies, or did she spend those Sundays alone?

  Glen of the Fairies is a three-hour drive from Brora, a considerable distance for a day trip when there are many other beautiful places to visit that are much closer. So, perhaps the location held a sentimental significance for Megan?

  If she were meeting a male lover, it makes sense that he would be a gillie or fisherman, two professions with which she was very familiar. She might have originally met this man because of her fly-tying. He might be a customer, or a friend of a customer. Perhaps he had suggested meeting at Glen of the Fairies because he lived near to there and wanted to show the place to Megan.

  I
can imagine Megan driving up in her Austin 7 to find her lover waiting for her in the parking lot. What then? A brief embrace? A quick kiss? Then they would walk for a while in the hills, talk over their respective weeks. If her lover was a fisherman, Megan might give him the flies she had made for him, each one lovingly prepared and handed over proudly. He would praise her work.

  “Megan, you spoil me.” And she would flush, because it wasn’t exactly true, but she liked to hear him say it anyway.

  They would spread a blanket on the ground near a beck and have a picnic. It’s hard to imagine that Megan was good at either cooking or food preparation, given her spartan living conditions, so I will have to give these tasks to her lover. Let’s call him Graham. Perhaps cooking was a hobby for Graham? Or perhaps he was married and just brought leftovers from the larder he shared with his family. Or perhaps he picked up the makings of a ploughman’s at the shops—cheese and bread and a jar of Branston pickle.

  They would eat the food, slowly, and Megan would exclaim over it, even if it was the exact same meal that they had enjoyed together last Sunday. Her dog would have accompanied them and would lie a little apart from the couple, facing into the hills, guarding them from possible danger. They would toss the dog the heel of the bread. They would drink tea from a flask, maybe enjoy a bottle or two of beer with their picnic lunch.

  Maybe they made love on that blanket? Certainly they kissed and murmured endearments to each other. It is hard to imagine Megan having sex, but this is because all the photographs of her that I can find have her well into her sixties—matronly and stout, with her hair cut by herself into an Eton crop, wearing a tweed skirt and a man’s suit jacket and tie. I have no pictures of her younger self, of the woman she would have been in her twenties and thirties, even forties, which are the ages at which I am imagining she had a lover.

  If it were a man she was meeting, and she was only meeting him on Sundays, then my guess would be that he was married. That was the day perhaps that his wife visited her parents, or was busy at church, and he could slip away on the pretext of one chore or another. That was also why Megan made the long drive to Glenshee, because their time was limited and, to make the most of it, she did the bulk of the travelling.

  Glenshee, or “Glen of the Fairies,” has a romantic history. It takes its name from a Bronze Age standing stone positioned on a hill and said to be the meeting place for the Glenshee “fairies.” The road climbing to the summit of Glen Beag had two notorious hairpin turns in Megan’s day and was known as the “Devil’s Elbow.” The road was once so steep that buses would off-load their passengers at the bottom and make them walk to the top of the 2,200-foot summit. It would be a very dramatic place to have a rendezvous.

  Did Graham love Megan?

  Yes. Definitely, yes. Aside from the physical attraction, she would have understood him, understood what was important to him. If Graham was a gillie, then Megan would have a real, working knowledge of what he did for a living, and would enjoy listening to his tales of the river he was protecting. If he were a fisherman, she would have advice for him on how to catch salmon, even if she would decline to watch him fish because if he did catch a salmon, it would upset her.

  If he was married, then he was taking a risk in having an affair with Megan, so he had to feel the risk was worth it. Only love would have felt equal to the guilt and dangers of infidelity.

  What attracts people to each other? An open smile. Strong, capable hands. Pretty-coloured eyes. The easy manner with which someone laughs or talks. Kindness. Confidence. A shared understanding of the world, the weather, the crucial aspects of a life. This thing we call “chemistry,” where there is an inexplicable pull between two people, a mix of temperaments and desires that makes something potent of their combined natures.

  The Sunday affair could have gone on and on, running at first on the fumes of desire, and later on friendship and mutual compassion. Nothing need bring it to its close, save for the death of one of the principals, or if the married lover moved away from the area, or if his wife discovered the liaison and put an end to it. At which point, Megan might still have journeyed to Glen of the Fairies on Sundays, but now to visit the spots where she had once met Graham, and to remember what they had enjoyed together in the height and heat of their affair.

  How does all this change if Megan’s lover was a woman instead of a man?

  Some things would change, and some would remain exactly the same.

  One of the striking facts about Megan Boyd was that she wore men’s clothing—always a tie, often a jacket, men’s shirts and cardigans with her tweed skirts. In the country dances, she always danced the male roles. So, was this a question of gender identity or sexual preference, or was it simply because she was her father’s daughter and emulated him, carried on being a man, as it were, after he died? Or were men’s clothes simply more comfortable for her to wear while she was working at tying flies? Her friends, acquaintances and the people of Brora simply said that she was “eccentric,” that she “was just Megan.” But Brora was a very small place, and these were the days before queerness had any kind of mainstream presence, was anything other than hidden, ignored and reviled, so “eccentric” might have been the closest word for what today we might think of as lesbian or trans.

  What do you call something when there is no language for it at the time? And are you justified in applying labels retrospectively?

  Suppose Megan’s lover was a woman. Where would she have met her? Perhaps at one of the ceilidhs that Megan attended in the Brora area, or at a dance competition in Inverness. The woman could also have been a fisher, though, for women as well as men fished in the northern Scottish rivers for salmon. (In fact, the record for the largest salmon ever caught in Scotland is held by a woman. In 1922, Georgina Ballantine, the daughter of a gillie, caught a fifty-four-inch salmon on the River Tay in Perthshire with a rod and reel. The monster salmon weighed sixty-four pounds.)

  Most certainly Megan’s female lover would have been married.

  Megan was an anomaly. Another single woman in the same locale was possible, perhaps one still living with her parents and therefore much younger than Megan. Or there could have been a closeted lesbian who was single and was employed as a schoolteacher or textile worker in town. But the likelihood seems slim that they would have first found each other, and then liked each other. More probable is that the woman was married and met Megan at one of the country dances, which she was in the habit of attending alone as her husband had no interest in dancing. This woman would have come to a country dance and danced with Megan, who always took the male role. Maybe they would have flirted, although neither one might have been entirely conscious that that is what they were doing. Certainly, there was an attraction and a little bit of banter. Then the woman would have visited Megan in her cottage, on the pretense of ordering some flies for her husband, who was an avid fisherman, or for herself, if she also fished. The visit couldn’t have been during Megan’s working hours, for she would have found it hard to take a break, have her mind move away from the stack of orders that waited for her on the workbench. So, it was in the evening, and the woman—let’s call her Evelyn—had come after supper, as Megan suggested.

  Megan made them tea and they took it out into the garden, for it was summer and the light was performing a long fade across the lawn. If Megan was feeling more bold than nervous, perhaps she poured them each a whisky instead and they went out into the dusk to sit on wooden chairs by the flower beds, the North Sea flat and bright in front of them.

  “It’s a beautiful spot,” said Evelyn. Unbeknownst to her, Megan had tried the chairs out in different locations the previous evening, trying to determine where was the exact perfect place to sit in the garden: the position where the scent from the flowers would mingle with the sparkle of the North Sea to maximum effect.

  The women would stay there longer than they should, until the sea darkened and the stars salted the heavens. At first, the talk was general—the village, the
countryside—then they would ask each other questions, not too personal, but Evelyn would inquire about Megan’s business, about the process of tying flies, and Megan would ask after Evelyn’s children. Maybe they would have a second whisky. Maybe they would talk of their childhoods. Perhaps, in the intimacy that darkness enables, one of them would confess her loneliness. It is a troubling thing to admit to loneliness, because by admitting it, the loneliness increases tenfold. So, when Megan walked Evelyn back to her car at the end of the evening, she would only feel this loneliness, and when Evelyn drove shakily down the farm lane, Megan would watch her tail lights until they were out of sight, and when she went back inside her cottage, it wouldn’t look cozy anymore, but empty and a little squalid.

  There would have to be many evenings such as this before anything could happen physically between Evelyn and Megan. In fact, it is hard to imagine how they would ever cross that line and believe that their association was anything other than a close friendship. They each might have lived their entire lives in Brora without seeing or hearing or knowing of lesbian couples. It wasn’t that long ago that male homosexuality was a prosecutable offence, or that the fact of homosexuality within a family or community was considered deeply shameful to all concerned. So, even if Megan and Evelyn had sexual desire for each other, I’m not sure that they would either recognize it or be able to act upon it. To act would be a bold, and perhaps foolhardy, move that both of them might have been too afraid to risk.

  So, there would have been endless nights in Megan’s garden. The flowers would have grown straggly. The bottle of whisky would have been drunk and another one opened. The frustration and loneliness would have increased beyond bearing, and nothing would now be able to happen between them because they had waited too long.

  If their desire was to be acted upon, it couldn’t be there, in Megan’s garden, a place they had both grown too familiar with over the preceding weeks. It would have to be somewhere else, a singular event perhaps, like a village ceilidh.