Ancient songs in which many of the words were all mixed up, one minute singing about a tragedy at sea, the next about a love affair on the heath. It didn’t really matter, for many of them were extempore in the first place, and often composed afresh in each singing.
The launch occasion lasted until early in the afternoon, when folk began to drift off homewards to attend to other things. Roderick asked me if I’d like to go down to the pub ‘for a dram,’ but I knew fine what that meant: weeks on end for him on the bevvy, so I declined.
He’d enter the fairy knoll anyway, whether I accepted or refused. But I took a lift with him back home as far as the pub road end, flinging my bicycle into the back of his pick-up van.
‘So,’ he said, as he pulled into the lay-by at the road end, leaving his engine running. ‘That’s it then. We’ll see you around?’
‘Yes – yes of course,’ I replied. ‘Any time you want a hand, just call in. I’ll be more than willing to learn.’
It was the last time I ever saw him.
I cycled home and decided to go for a walk down on the machair later that evening, after tea. I took the old river path which skirted the disused mill and eventually reached the sea via Loch an Eilean.
The ruins of all the old thatched houses lay on the east side of the loch and I paused there for a while before climbing the rocks which served as a short cut to the machair itself. As I neared the top I heard a shout to my left and looked over towards the abandoned sheep fank, where someone was standing on top of the old stone wall, beckoning to me.
I walked over and could clearly see the nearer I came that it was a photographer.
‘Sorry for shouting at you,’ she said, ‘but you’re the first person I’ve seen down here for hours. The light is just perfect right now, and I thought…’
‘You could do with a prop?’ I asked. ‘A human prop, as it were?’
At least she had the grace to smile.
‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a crofter to pose amidst these ruins for you,’ I said. ‘I’m only a pretend native. Just a student, really.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘because I’m just a sort of pretend photographer. Only joking – what I really need anyway is the silhouette of a figure against the old disused fank.’
I got it. The usual stuff. Some fancy photographer visiting the peasants to do art. Fragments against the ruins: emptiness against emptiness. I decided to be equally facetious.
‘It’ll cost you,’ I said. ‘Five pounds for every snap.’
To my surprise, she agreed. Well, not quite in that way, but she did say,
‘Don’t worry. If any of them are used professionally, you will be paid. The National Geographic always honour their contracts.’
‘Ah!’ I said to myself. ‘The good old NG.’
‘What’s the commission?’ I asked her.
She looked down at me from the shoogly stone wall.
‘The commission is called “From the Lone Shieling”.’
‘Where would you like me to stand?’ I asked.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Right where you are.’
‘Right here? At the centre of the universe, as the old fool put it?’
‘So,’ I asked her afterwards as we walked back across the moorland to her car, ‘you just came today?’
‘Yes. Just this morning.’
‘And why didn’t you bring your own silhouette with you? Or at least arrange one beforehand? We do have telephones, you know.’
‘They’re always best done impromptu. Setting everything up always ruins it.’
‘Bare ruined choirs?’
She asked me if I’d like a lift and I said no – that I was going for a walk down the machair. ‘You can join me if you like,’ I said. ‘As long as you leave your camera in the car.’
She hesitated.
‘Don’t worry,’ I added. ‘No one will steal it. Especially if you leave the car open.’
We walked down through the village and I could of course sense the murmurings behind the curtains.
‘Isn’t that…?’
‘Yes – yes, of course it is, but who’s that woman with him?’
‘I don’t think she belongs here. No, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before.’
‘Och, she’ll be one of his university friends, home on holidays.’
We passed the last house in the village, which also doubled as the local shop, and walked round the edge of the Bull Field which brought us to the shingle road west. The gate was tied with wire fencing so we climbed over it and walked down through the sand by the cornfields which had just been harvested that very day. You could still smell the fresh hay gathered in the remaining stooks which would be taken home the following week.
‘An interesting job, then?’ I ventured. ‘The Hebrides one month, Hawaii the next?’
‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t be better. But I’d really rather not talk about my job. Look at that building over there. What is it?’
‘The old seaweed factory.’
‘Mmm.’
We walked over towards it. A couple of old lorries stood rusting in the yard, and the doors to the former drying kilns were wide open.
‘About twenty locals worked here until it closed a few months ago. I don’t really know why it shut – I suspect artificial fertilisers are more economical.’
We moved down past the factory on to the sandy beach. It stretched for miles both to the north and the south and was completely empty. The evening sun was settling over Orasay.
I hesitated.
‘Your name – Margherita. It’s not – common.’
‘No, I don’t suppose so. It means daisy. Italian. My grandfather was from Naples.’
‘It would be Mairead in Gaelic. That means pearl.’
‘Just call me Daisy.’
We walked, aimlessly enough, for there was nothing to aim for or at. Sometimes together, sometimes she would head off down towards the sea’s edge and pick up a pebble or a shell or a wisp of seaweed, sometimes I would climb up on to the marram strand where all kinds of debris had been washed ashore – corks, old bottles, bits of plastic, canisters of oil, dozens of buoys. Seonaidh Beag would already have gone off with anything valuable. He was always there at sunrise. Once he found a watch inside a metal box: a diamond-studded Rolex which worked as well as the day it was made.
We walked north towards the old settlements next to the Bronze Age roundhouses. Up little dunes and down into sandy hollows. Like running in and out of your mother’s arms. No wonder the little people stayed here, completely safe underground, dancing and playing and making music. Their little round houses were so simple. The door facing East where the sun rose every morning as it does now right there over Ben Mòr. And daily they moved deiseil – clockwise – from kitchen to living area to sleeping quarters to death chamber in the space between sunset and sunrise which never saw any light. Each day they moved that way, sunwise, from morning till night, from birth to death.
We eventually sat on a small grassy knoll at the edge of the machair looking south towards Barra.
‘What else have you planned?’ I asked. ‘While you’re here.’
‘The assignment is for a week. I spent two days in Lewis, a day in Harris, and now here. I fly off on Tuesday morning. The reporter was here two months ago. He gave me a list of things to photograph, and I’m just going through them, meticulously, one by one. Sheep, cattle, eagles, fishing boats, stark Protestant churches, pretty Catholic ones, Marian shrines, empty shielings, single-track roads, old tractors, bicycles, close-ups of marram grass, water lilies, and of course people. The older and more weather-beaten, the better.’
‘And fanks with silhouettes?’ I asked.
She laughed. ‘I got bored. Humanity always makes stone and grass more interesting.’
We walked back.
‘Maybe I could give you a hand while you’re here over the next couple of days? I know all the places, and the people, around here so could
make it just that bit easier for you?’
She agreed, and indeed it did make things much simpler for her in many ways – I took her to see Dr John, the local ornithologist, who led her through the bird sanctuary, and to see Fr Iain who posed with all the golden chalices for her, and young Angus MacDonald who had the best fishing boat in the area and who was pleased to take her out for some lobster-creel shots, and to see a hundred-year-old Peggy in her thatched cottage. Their photographs later adorned the magazine, despite the list that the Washington reporter had given her earlier.
And we got to know each other better. I was infatuated with her: she was beautiful, smart and elusive, though she made it pretty clear that she was not attracted to me in that way.
‘I like you,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to do something with your life.’
And I wasn’t offended at her counsel, partially because I lived in hope. You never know. If you hang in there, all kinds of strange and wonderful things can happen. Miracles can develop like photographs. Look at Deirdre and Naoise, and how initial separation ultimately led to passionate love. Saint Paul hated Christ and came to love him. But that was only after the Damascus road. Can you learn to love?
‘No,’ she said. ‘It takes a miracle.’
I dared to ask her, for I had nothing to lose. Though
I asked it as a kind of joke –
‘What then? What do think I should “do with my life”’?
She answered without any irony, as far as I could make out.
‘Leave here. Come with me to London. Get yourself a job. Live. Then you can come back here if you want.’
‘When I am old and grey and full of sleep…?’ I suggested.
‘Please yourself,’ she said.
So I took her advice. She left me her card when she flew off on the Tuesday.
DR MARGHERITA JOHNSON
PHOTOGRAPHER, CHELSEA
‘Phone me when you get to London,’ she said.
I did. She came out to meet me at Heathrow and we got the train back into town.
‘Not so many silhouettes here?’
‘More than you’d care to imagine.’
She had a spare room, so I boarded there for a while. I think that suited her too for she was so often away on assignments, and it was maybe safer for her flat. She even got me a part-time job as an art technician where she occasionally taught herself, at the Slade School of Art.
My initial job was to prepare and mix clays for the students, and to make sure that the photographic and other equipment were in working order. A mere matter of ensuring that there was sufficient paper and enough chemicals in the darkroom, and plenty bags of clay in the sculpture workshops.
Margherita herself was a Visiting Professor at the Slade and held occasional seminars not only on the techniques of photography but also on the sociology of the art. She persuaded me to send in my CV and argue the case for modules to be taught on The Art of Indigenous Cultures, and I must have been quite convincing in my presentations for they agreed to start a series of lectures in which I taught that it was important – in these emerging post-colonial times – to understand the indigenous non-imperial art of this nation.
I argued that Visual Art (with a capital A) had been perceived and presented in the United Kingdom as the art of the canvas and the gallery, and as the sculpture of the exhibition and the garden, which by definition made it a class-based Art, by simple virtue of the fact that it was only the moneyed classes who had access to these facilities. As a consequence, I suggested, the art of the poor was ignored and marginalised, and an essential part of that mistreatment was the complete disregard for the indigenous art of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I waxed lyrical about the Scottish Gaelic example, presenting myself as an expert on something I really knew very little about, but it convinced many and as I said earlier, kept me in well paid if dishonest employment for decades. ‘Our stories were our canvas,’
I pompously declared.
I had one particular theory which sounded so plausible that even I believed it: which is that Scottish Presbyterianism was essentially a visual art as great as that of the Roman Catholic Michelangelo (and Fra Angelico and all the rest of them) except that it was imagined and expressed through their often austere prayers rather than on canvas or on cathedral ceilings. I thus argued that if we were to even begin to understand the history of art in European culture we needed to completely liberate the parameters of academic discourse, to include sermons, prayers and psalms. It convinced many, and within five years I too became as Margherita, a Doctor of Philosophy.
By that time, I’d long separated from her. We had our moments. We tried. We really did. Or at least I did. She’d been away in North Africa and came back in great spirits, having spent three months travelling with, and photographing, the Yahia Bedouin tribe of eastern Morocco. I went out to the airport to meet her. She looked absolutely wonderful: glowing with health which somehow contrasted so vividly with the sun-baked tan of those returning on the holiday flights.
We made love for the first time that night, and that too was wonderful. Nothing seemed artificial as we lay there afterwards, smoking and talking. They really were wonderful cigarettes she’d brought back from Marrakech. I was convinced they were laced with marijuana, but she assured me they weren’t, and I believed her.
‘No, no, no no,’ she said. ‘I saw the man himself, Attayak Ali, making them and rolling them. Just pure black Moroccan tobacco. The spiced coconut oil is what gives it the zing.’
We had some great times together, made all the sweeter, I think, by our knowledge that it wouldn’t last. Without getting too soppy about it, like one of those lovely sunsets you enjoy simply because you know it’s unrepeatable, and not because it won’t be happening like that again the following night but because you know you won’t be there then, you’ll have caught a flight home, or driven on to the next town, or caught the bus or train back home. You linger, of course, and stretch it all out and open another can of beer on the beach and add a bit more wood to the fire, but once the sun has gone down a melancholy settles too, despite all your efforts at extending the joy. Then folk drift off, and wander away, and the barbecue fire is left to fizzle out as darkness settles.
I try and picture her in the darkness. And I can’t fully recall anything. The shape of her mouth or the colour of her eyes or the incline of her jaw or her height or voice or posture. She was tall and lithe and desirable and moved gracefully and laughed raucously and was full of life but the details are all insubstantial. Maybe they don’t really matter, though I remember how much it mattered then that her cheekbones were so finely chiselled and her figure so sensual. All I remember now is our joy at being young and alive.
We split without much acrimony, and I would see her occasionally and have coffee with her and catch up with things, since I’d moved not that far away – to Parsons Green. I continued my evening lecturing at Slade, and subsidised that with a day job in the White Horse bar. There I daily served a crowd of civil servants and through time they suggested I join the service. The exam was easy enough and with my drinking friends opening some doors I was able to join the diplomatic wing, first of all as a junior assistant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the FCO) and then as a senior officer in the visa and immigration service. This basically consisted of dealing with visa applications and entry clearance procedures, which bored me to death even though my posting was in Copenhagen.
I resigned on a whim and returned to London where I rented a room in Greenwich. Here I was at the centre of the universe. My parents used to listen to the Shipping Forecast. Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight. Imminent. My mother never liked the word. She had three brothers, all drowned in a storm while out fishing. Greenwich Mean Time. The world is measured from here. Longitude 0°. I visited the observatory, of course. Stood on the famous Meridian Line, one foot in the eastern hemisphere, one foot in the western. A guide led us round. ‘Every place on Earth is measured in terms of its distance east or wes
t of this line,’ he said. The building itself is very beautiful. Wren’s. Imagine having built this and St Paul’s. I bought a postcard which said ‘The centre of world time.’ I intended sending it to my parents, but couldn’t bear the lie, so I wrote it out for Margherita, but never sent it.
I went down to the docks instead. Maybe I should add that this was all before the Thames changed into a housing market. St Katherine’s Dock was still in full swing and as I passed the London Seamanship College I looked at the poster in their window. ‘A Career at Sea’ it said at the top and, in smaller letters at the bottom, beneath the beautiful picture of a ship berthed in a bay beneath a cloudless sky, ‘Mount Fujiyama on a June morning’. I entered the building and asked the woman at reception for more information and she gave me a pile of brochures and entry forms about the Merchant Navy, which I took home with me.
There were several options: catering, deckwork, navigation and engineering. I studied the navigation requirements, filled in the forms, and sent them off. I received the letter the following Saturday, asking me to report out to the Sea Training College at Gravesend on the Monday. It was one of those sultry London days. Even the Thames had a bit of colour as if the sun had managed to squeeze something blue out of the slime. The college was still in the beautiful old Gothic building at Chalk Marshes. Despite the heat outside, the huge rooms inside were chilly.
A shoe-polishing machine stood in the corner of the ground floor. I went over and stood there listening to the whirring and the swishing until my shoes shone like a gilded mirror. I could never pass one of these machines from then on without sprucing myself up. Tragically, they have now gone out of fashion. I was led up to the top floor where a man wearing a beautifully tailored captain’s outfit sat behind the desk. He was in his shirt-sleeves, with his cap on the table.
I failed at the first hurdle. He studied the form I’d filled in, then showed me a circular chart and handed me enormous black spectacles. He asked me to put the glasses on and said, ‘Just tell me what colour you see.’
The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 6
