In conclusion buy this book, as it will not be published again in a hurry, unless there is a great demand for animadversions on hopelessness.
And finally God bless you all, though the probability is that he will not.
The Wind
It was an autumn of high winds, and the house that he had taken for three weeks was perched on a headland facing the sea. The area was more desolate than he had imagined it would be. There were the straggling houses of the village about half a mile away; and a little shop which sold miscellaneous stuff, and was also a post office.
His father had always told him of the close community that existed in the village, but it was hard to visualise it. During the day the village looked quiet and almost dead: the few children were back in school. ‘Songs and dances,’ his father would say, ‘what we called ceilidhs’: and his face would shine with the memories of them. Of course, the place would look better in fine weather: perhaps he should have come in June or July.
Naturally, the villagers knew he was here, and who he was. But his father’s generation was dead, and the middle-aged people like himself were not hospitable in the old way. Some of the houses were surprisingly fine, indeed impressive; there were of course no thatched houses left, not even their ruins. The fields here and there held wrecks of abandoned cars.
Why had he come here in the first place from South Africa? Sheila naturally wouldn’t come.
‘You can go,’ she had said, ‘but I don’t see any need for all this pseudo-nostalgia.’ One certainly couldn’t call her sentimental. She hadn’t, for instance, gone home when her father and mother had died, with a short interval between them, in Dunoon. She had always travelled light.
Yet he had always wanted to see this world that his father had told him about. It had sounded like a sort of paradise, carefree and generous.
The people cared for each other, helped each other, his father would say. Yet in the post office he had heard them complain of ‘white settlers’, and he had gathered that there was a Dutch family in the village as well as English ones. ‘They come here, and drive the price of property up, and the young people can’t afford to buy a house.’
He had gone to see the croft on which his father had grown up. (‘Plenty of milk and crowdie.’) But there was no sign of the original home, and a large new house had been built in its place.
No one had invited him to visit. He had been able to rent the house he was in for three weeks while the owners were on holiday: they did Bed & Breakfast in the summer, and autumn was the time when they took their break. They had in fact gone to Malta.
It was a nice house with all the modern conveniences that he had in his own home in Johannesburg, except of course that there was no swimming pool. But then who would use a swimming pool in weather like this? In fact, he felt cold a good deal of the time: and he missed the colour of the jaracanda trees. There were no trees here at all, and little colour. The wind swept over desolate bleak moorlands, and the sea looked sullen and strong.
He read most nights or watched television. Certainly he rested, though in fact he didn’t need much rest. He had his own accountancy business, and it was successful enough. Whatever stress he felt was not because of the business but because of what was happening in the country generally. There had been a large number of murders in Johannesburg.
Though his father had been briskly kind to the blacks, he had a profound contempt for them. To him they were stupid, careless, childlike and dilatory. Sometimes he would say that there had been people like that in the village where he had grown up on the island. That was why he had joined the police in Glasgow, and later emigrated to South Africa where he had been manager of a diamond mine.
Angus himself didn’t think like his father: he was much more confused, far less definite in his opinions. He sensed danger and potential chaos: an office not far from his own had been blown up in the middle of the day: buses too had been blown up. The biblical certainties that his father had recognised in South Africa were not so strong among his own generation.
We made this country, his father would say, though he had in fact been an incomer. Still, South Africa was different from Rhodesia, it didn’t have so many fly-by-nights who fled when the going got rough.
What troubled him here was the incessant wind. It had a curious keening sound almost as if it spoke of all the exiles who had left the island. He found it piercing and melancholy, especially when he was sitting at night trying to relax with a book. He had never heard this kind of wind before. It bothered him for some reason that he couldn’t understand.
He had time to think a great deal in this strange and almost alien environment. He thought of his father setting off on the boat to Glasgow. He thought of Sheila handing round drinks to their friends on a fine evening when the sun was setting. Sheila wouldn’t have his father to stay with them when he had his stroke. He must go to a home instead.
‘Can you imagine me lifting him?’ she had said contemptuously. ‘I have more to do with my time,’ though in fact she hadn’t, since she hadn’t worked since their wedding. She had been a secretary in a law firm. Angus had felt guilty about his father, who had for some unaccountable reason reverted to speaking in Gaelic after his stroke: he himself had no Gaelic.
Yet it was probably true that Sheila wouldn’t have been able to cope: it wasn’t so much that, it was the decisive manner in which she had spoken, like his own father almost. There was no hesitation: and in fact she hadn’t visited him much in the Home.
‘I don’t understand that weird language,’ she would say. And that was it, the language thereupon dismissed as having no use and no meaning.
She had a firm belief that there would be no fundamental changes in South Africa. She would remain mistress of her servants: the regime would last her lifetime and perhaps for ever.
Yet he himself knew perfectly well, as an accountant, that this wasn’t right. Businesses weren’t doing well: and even the business community had begun to talk of the harmfulness of apartheid. The blacks had begun to use economic weapons against their masters: boycotts of shops, strikes. The day he had been to Stornoway, a little while after the loss of £23 million in the débàcle of BCCI, he had felt a certain familiarity in the scene. The people looked stunned, disbelieving, angry. The outside world had struck at them savagely. They could no longer be protected by seas and tradition. And anyway what was their council doing dealing with a bank that was connected with drugs? Even their religious feelings had been shaken. Also, roads and schools could not be built now. There would be more poverty, more constriction. Just as in South Africa when the sanctions had been initiated. No one was isolated now: it was all a vast web: if you tugged one part of it the whole structure would vibrate. A minister had preached that it was the will of God. Such complexity, along with such naïvité!
He didn’t think much of Stornoway itself. It was a grey little fishing town and yet for his own father it had been a metropolis. He would say to him, ‘We used to visit Stornoway once a year when I was young. I remember the smell of apples, and the icecream.’
Here the people didn’t seem to care whether he was a South African or not, unlike London where a bearded fellow had suddenly, hearing his accent, lashed out at him verbally. ‘What about your police?’ he had shouted, ‘Fascists, the lot of them. What about the black suicides in jail? Butchers, Nazis, bloody sadists.’ And all the while he himself had remained calm, though shaken by the depth of the man’s hatred. A bearded, literary-looking man suddenly raging at him in a bookstall.
From what he could gather, there was a lot of sympathy on the island for the white South African. Bible-thumping Protestants together?
It was the wind however that troubled him. Sometimes at night he couldn’t sleep because of its high wailing sound. It was almost like the cry of an abandoned child: it seemed to have a human quality. It spoke of an infinite pain, of a tremendous heartbreaking loss. And there was no community here that he could see. Perhaps there had been in his father
’s time. Perhaps it had something to do with the thatched houses that his father had talked about.
He rose from his chair. It was dark outside and the sea was a deep black apart from the light cast by a moon careering among the clouds as if out of control. Now and again the windows of the house would shake. It seemed to him that he could see his father’s white disordered face after the stroke. Of course he had led a very hard, diligent life: he had also been a strict disciplinarian.
‘Why can’t you make up your mind?’ Sheila would shout at him. ‘Why can’t you be more like your father?’ But how could he be like his father? He was not, for instance, religious. But there was an absence that he had become more and more aware of, and that was why perhaps he had come to the island. If only that bloody whining wind would stop!
His health was good and so was Sheila’s, and so was Rosemary’s. Rosemary was doing well as a teacher in a Pietermaritz-burg school: a private school, in leafy surroundings, where she had once been a pupil.
He had bought a copy of the local paper. On the letter page a correspondent had gone on at great length about Sunday Observance: while another gave a religious reason for the financial collapse. There was an elaborate scenario, on a news page, about whether litter should be removed from the streets on Sunday even in the face of a mandatory law. In a curious way it reminded him of South African fundamentalism. Draw back into the laager while the wind howls around you! Hope that the storm will pass!
He remembered a story his father had told him. He had once been home on holiday in the island and he had bought a van for a nephew of his, so that he could sell fish. Earning a lot of money for the first time in his life, the nephew had taken to drink and had smashed up the van. Then he had run away from home, taken a job on the mainland and married his landlady, who was much older than him.
A kaffir, Angus’s father had called him, nothing but a kaffir. Of course the boy’s mother had been angry and had blamed him for the disaster. But it wasn’t his fault: he had only been trying to help. ‘I also bought her a washing machine,’ his father said, ‘but she never used it; she would rather gossip with her neighbour at the washing line.’
On his own on the island, Angus thought about a lot of things. About Sheila, for instance, and her extremely rightist views and her mishandling of the servants. Even his father had complained about her tactlessness. There were some things she was incapable of learning. It was a question of knowing from the inside what to do, what not to do. There was no reason why one shouldn’t be kind to one’s servants, his father would say. But she had always been brusque and contemptuous. And in argument she was the same, ignorant and aggressive, uninterested in finding common ground. Nevertheless she was still beautiful – when he had first met her, astonishingly so: blonde and tall and high-boned, long-legged and blue-eyed, a secretary such as one might see in a television advertisement.
‘There are certain ways of doing things,’ his father would mutter angrily. He didn’t seem to know how to deal with Sheila’s beauty, and her essentially cruel and crude beliefs.
Still, there was no question but that the blacks could at times be irritating. He himself had offered a rise in wages to one of the servants, and the servant had immediately left on the grounds that he had been cheated, that he should have had the money from the beginning. What could you make of such economic thinking?
Really, what was he doing here? He paced restlessly about the living-room. In a bookcase there were volumes by Alasdair Maclean, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth. There were no Gaelic books that he could see, except for a rather old Bible with a black cover. It wasn’t actually all that different from a house in South Africa with its big round globe in which there were bottles of vodka, gin and whisky. On the walls and sideboards there were many photographs, mostly of young children.
‘When we were children,’ his father would say, ‘we would fish for eels in the rivers and pick blaeberries on the moors.’
That bloody whining wind! He was beginning to feel that it was a constant unavoidable universal noise. He couldn’t explain what he felt about it; it was like a ghostly permanent dirge that never stopped, as if it were composed of many voices in concert. A wind at the end of the world, among these ancient stones. It seemed to be saying to him, What are you doing here? You are a stranger, you are an interruption to this wind of death.
He made himself a cup of coffee and sat staring into the electric fire. ‘They sit and stare into the fire,’ his father had said. ‘They say they have all kinds of sicknesses and diseases, but it’s all laziness. They need a good shake.’ And his face would redden with rage and high blood pressure. ‘Our history, they say, what can we do? And they whine and whine. I bought a set of false teeth for my sister Chrissie but she wouldn’t wear them.’
Here I am on the edge of things, he thought, as if I was at the Cape; this house shaky and shivering, and the sea below the headland black as tar, heaving and swelling, and monotonously stormy.
White houses these are known as, he thought, as distinct from black houses; that was what his father had told him. The black houses were the thatched ones: and in them the fire was in the middle of the floor, and it was in them also that the ceilidhs took place.
When people moved into the white houses, it was different, his father had said. Somehow the fire in the middle of the floor made a difference.
That woman in South Africa in a rural area who had found her husband’s head hung in a tree like a strange fruit!
The wind was rising to a shriek, as if it were demented. He couldn’t take much more of this. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea, after all, coming here. My father romanticised the place because it was connected with a relatively carefree childhood. But that was long before they had lost their £23 million, before the intricate outside world had impinged on them, whether they liked it or not. Bloody fools, he thought sourly, from his knowledge of accountancy, putting all their money in one bank like that. Bloody idiots. But South Africa could not insulate itself from the wide world either. The famous treks had probably been sentimentalised too. The Bible-wielding patriarchs would crack as the sea eventually breaks rocks.
And people would hear that whine, they would no longer be able to shut it out. It would shake orange trees, jaracarandas. It would blow and blow, and the voices of the dead would be heard in it: the voices of the dying and the living. Even Sheila would eventually hear it, among her cosmetics and her vodkas and gins. Infinite eternal whining wind!
‘My mother and father died on the island when I had just come to South Africa,’ his father told him. ‘I couldn’t afford to go home at that time.’ And later Sheila wouldn’t go home to her father’s funeral. She had despised him. He had never made anything of himself, and he boasted to the neighbours that she was married to a very rich man. ‘She’s never had to work since she got married,’ he would say, leaning on his stick. He was always whining about what the world had done to him. During the war he had been wounded in both legs. She couldn’t forgive him his bad luck: he had wanted to visit them but she wouldn’t have it.
He looked at a picture hanging on a wall of the living-room. It showed a woman carrying peats in a creel: she was knitting as she walked along.
No, he couldn’t stay here. He would pay for the full three weeks, but he would leave the island as soon as possible. If he couldn’t get a plane he would stay in London, among people.
All night the wind continued, and he could hardly sleep. Sometimes he thought it was a voice trying to speak to him in Gaelic: perhaps his father after his stroke. Sometimes he thought it came from inside himself and that would be the worst of all; that would be madness.
The following day he locked everything carefully behind him and abandoned the white house. The sea was still turbulent and black. The houses crouched against the rocky ground like seashells. As he drove away from the village in the blue car he had hired in Stornoway, he said, ‘Goodbye, Father.’ And, whistling, to keep out that whine, he headed towards the tow
n from which he would get the boat that would take him to the mainland and on the first stage of his homeward journey.
The Blue Vase
When the woman asked for the vase, I remembered the two vases that had been stolen from the wall of our house. It had happened about a month before in the middle of the night. The vases were made of stone, and lion-shaped, and had been cemented to the wall. The thieves, whoever they were, had obviously had a van, and then had somehow cut the vases from the cement and taken them away. Lord knew where they were now. They had belonged to my wife’s people originally and had been on the wall for years and years. She had been shocked when she had discovered the loss two days after it had happened, because in fact she had been so used to their being on the wall that she hadn’t at first noticed their disappearance.
This came back to me when I was at the funeral of my poor brother, who had died on the island. He had lived alone and wouldn’t come to visit us because he had looked after our mother, and I hadn’t. Neither my wife nor myself had liked my mother and so we never visited her, nor had we attended her funeral. My brother hadn’t communicated with me since. However, when he died, we returned to the island, for, in spite of everything, he had made me his heir.
He had never married, and there was a fair amount of money, some of which he had left to the church. In his later years it appeared that he had been a constant church-goer, though I remembered that in his youth he had been aesthetic and free-thinking.
I didn’t like going back to the island and neither did my wife. It was bare and treeless and when the weather was bad it looked like the end of the world. However, the funeral took place on a day in June, and the sea was blue and sparkling. When we arrived my brother was already dead and his body was coffined in the house (on the island they don’t put the body in the church overnight). This had been arranged by a cousin of ours whom I had not seen for a long time and who in fact had phoned to tell us that my brother had died. This cousin had often visited him and had a key.
The Black Halo Page 69
