The Girl on the Ferryboat

by Angus Peter Campbell

  And I suddenly remembered her, pausing briefly on the stairs as she climbed and I descended the stairs between the deck and the restaurant.

  ‘Sorry,’ I remembered saying to her, trying to stand to one side, and how she smiled and said,

  ‘O, don’t worry – I’ll get by.’

  I wanted to touch her arm as she passed, but I stayed my hand and she left. The rue de Richelieu was filling up with office and shop workers arriving for their lunch, and as I rose to my feet I could smell the jasmine from the street vendor passing riding by on his bicycle, carrying home a splendid bouquet on his saddlebag, for his wife or lover.

  7

  ALASDAIR AND KATE had the time of their lives with the boat. Not only on that great day of the launch, but every day after, whether the boat was in the water or not. All through that fine September and equally fine October, they were out in it almost every day. It was one of those rare autumns which brought long sun and clear winds, and few gales and rain, so that whichever way they went they found safe shelter and a good catch of fish.

  ‘Foghar gu Nollaig, Is Geamhradh gu Fèill Pàdraig; Earrach gu Fèill Peadair; Samhradh gu Fèill Màrtainn.’ autumn to Christmas; winter to St Patrick’s Day; spring to St Peter’s Day; summer to Martinmas, was how old Alasdair still portioned the year. And when the yellow moon of Michaelmas came and went, he began to prepare to take the boat ashore. By the time Hallowmas came, the skiff was secure in the old byre, which he’d opened up from the south gable.

  The long winter was spent caring for the boat: cleaning those parts which had already begun to soil, which had scraped and scratched here and there as they fished, and adding lovely little extras which neither Big Roderick or

  I had time or mind to fix on at the time.

  He cushioned the gunwale, scraped down and repainted the hull, welded new holdings to the keel, smoothed off the garboard, tightened the clinchers and aprons, and spent a good deal of time too on the anchor itself, which most other seamen tended to ignore. It shone, as did the boat itself by the time spring came with its steady winds.

  They relaunched her on St Patrick’s Day, in a squall which suddenly blew up from the west. ‘I should have known better,’ he muttered. ‘Reothairt na Fèill Moire ‘s boille na Fèill Pàdraig – The springtide of Lady Day and the fury of St Patrick’s.’

  But nevertheless he had to balance things out: to cope with that fury or to risk things with the greater danger of not putting the wood into water until after St Patrick’s Day, which was certainly to anger the fates. He knew fine that some cheated, and would just sprinkle the wood with water if the weather was too rough on St Patrick’s Day, but Alasdair thought any god worth his salt would look with disdain at such a notion. Either face the storm, or deny it all. Surely the deities didn’t trade in compromises and deals?

  He treated himself to a smile when the sudden squall passed, leaving the sea blue and still as far as the eye could see. The quieting of the storm. Kate took to the oars and they moved north-eastwards towards Bàgh an Dùin Mhòir where the cockle-strand lay. They anchored the boat there in shallow waters and waded to the shore, buckets in hand.

  The tide was just right: ebbing, and leaving enough visibility into the sand to see the razorfish. You needed a keen, expert eye which they both had from long years of experience. Step by slow step forward, cautiously. The almost invisible movement in the sand, and you bent down quickly to scoop the razorfish up and into the bucket.

  They were now at an age where success blessed them each time they stretched down. They put the contents of their two half-filled buckets into the one and walked round the corner towards the scallop beds. Here too they knew their business, and were soon walking back to the boat with a bucketful of scallops and a bucketful of razorfish.

  They cooked them in butter that night, and the world never tasted better. The spring equinox came, bringing with it the great winds and high tides which made any sailing impossible for days. May brought in beautiful calm weather which made them venture further out to the shallow banks west of the Stac where the mackerel were already plentiful, and when full summer came they could be seen daily out beyond Isle Griomail raising the pretty little green and yellow canvas sail which you could see from miles around, bringing in saithe, and hake and herring too.

  It was the last and only summer. Donald failed to return from Woodstock. He wrote home saying he’d met this girl and was staying on for some time with her. They were going to travel through America and eventually make their way to the south, perhaps down as far as Patagonia and the Falklands, or even further south, and then maybe east on to Polynesia and the Fijis and on to the Far East itself.

  ‘When something was lost,’ Alasdair said, ‘They would send for the cnàimh-luirg, the tracking-bone. Tormod Mòr Mac Iain Lèith had the gift, but he’s long dead now. He would hold the sheepbone firm between his palms and follow its shake all the way to the corpse. Or to anything else you needed to find. But no one else can do it now that he’s gone.’

  I wasn’t sure why the seeming idyll came to an end, but it did. I made some vague inquiries when I heard, but no one really seemed sure. Ill-health, some suggested, though there was no evidence for that since both Alasdair and Katell then lived on for a good number of years once they returned to the mainland. Though I know now that your loved ones’ health frames your life.

  The most likely explanation at the time was that they were missing their children and grandchildren, or that they were missing them. Anyway by the time All Saint’s Day came round once more they’d brought the skiff back ashore again, where she was tied up and made secure for wintering within the stone byre.

  That year, right enough, Hallowmas fell on a Wednesday which was always an inauspicious sign. The proverb put it this way – ‘Nuair as Di-Ciadain an t-Samhain, is iarganaich na dhèidh’ – ‘When Hallowmas is on a Wednesday, affliction follows.’

  The boat remained there, untouched, for no one of course had the right to touch it. It didn’t belong to them. It was secure anyway within the byre, and occasionally one of the villagers would peer through the small chinks in the stone to make sure she was still there, wind and watertight. She was.

  In time the surprise and disappointment diminished, and even the folk who had the shared the glory day of the launch began to forget her existence, hidden away in the old steading. One day, they said, one of the children, or grandchildren, or maybe even the great-great-grandchildren will come for it, and take it out and spruce it up and relaunch it out into the great ocean. Donald might come. Or Andrew. Or Elizabeth or one of the other girls.

  But they all had their reasons. Donald got no further south than Philadelphia when Susan’s pregnancy forced them to stay where they were and forget, in the meantime at least, about Patagonia and the Falklands and Polynesia and the Far East. They managed to get a couple of rooms on the east side of the docklands where Donald got a job as a warehouseman, and when one pregnancy led to another they just stayed on there, largely kept by the monthly money sent to them by Susan’s parents, who were business folk in New York.

  Andrew returned, but had no interest in the sea and settled down in Glasgow, while Elizabeth and all the other girls rarely ventured home either once they started working and married and settled down. The old boat was their parents’ dream, not theirs.

  Someone – I think now that it was my late mother – told me over the phone that Alasdair and Katell had moved back to the mainland, to Aberdeen she thought, though she wasn’t quite sure as they hadn’t really told anyone, and hadn’t left a forwarding address. I didn’t really believe her at first, but she insisted.

  ‘One of their daughters lives out that way,’ she said, ‘and I think they’ve gone to stay with her.’

  I suppose any of us could have made specific enquiries, which weren’t quite so easy of course in those pre-internet days, but then again we didn’t want to seem inquisitive or to be interfering, when they’d evidently made a private decision which didn’t
really concern us. Even though it did, diminishing our lives, further fracturing our already fragile community. Though who was I to comment, being in London in the sweet arms of Margherita by that time.

  In fact, they hadn’t moved to Aberdeen at all, but to Aberdeenshire, which is a completely different thing. Aberdeen, after all, is a sea city, in which I could imagine them finding some solace in the grey sight of the North Sea, but in actual fact they’d moved inland to be with their daughter in the Strathdon valley, which lies about fifty miles west of the city.

  It is of course a beautiful area in its own right, in the foothills of the Cairngorm Mountains, filled with deer and pheasants and grouse and all kinds of wildlife and with the famous River Don running through, and Royal Balmoral with all its history and trappings nearby, but still it was no place for a boat. I still grieve for Alasdair and Katell bound there by land and mountains, and surely – surely – pining for The Blue Dolphin, rotting away in the old Uist byre. O, what’s the point in speaking about what they could have done? Wouldn’t we all alter the universe if we could?

  But they had their compensations, and we were in fact looking at some of the old photographs of Alasdair and Kate with their grandchildren just the other day when we stopped by to see them, completely unexpectedly. We’d spent the night in Aberdeen – the city, that is – ourselves, and decided to drive westwards out through Banchory and on to Balmoral before heading south.

  I knew they’d lived in Corgarff, though I had no actual address, but we stopped at the local Post Office and – for once – found it was still run by someone local who remembered exactly who we were talking about.

  ‘My mother used to be friendly with them,’ she said. ‘In fact two of their grandchildren still live here. One – Katie – is married up at the old farm, and a grandson – I think he’s called Alasdair – lives at the old schoolhouse which you’ll have passed on the way into the village. I’m sure both of them will make you feel very welcome.’

  And they did. Alasdair was a tall thin man in his early forties. He was busy mowing the lawn on one of these large petrol-driven machines when we arrived, and he had no hesitation in inviting us in. He immediately phoned his sister, but was told that she was away for a few days visiting her own daughter who was at university in St Andrews. We explained who we were of course, and he was delighted to meet up with someone who knew the ‘old folk’ as he called them.

  ‘I was so young then,’ he explained. ‘What would I have been now? Four? Five? Six? That kind of age. But I remember them clearly. They were wonderful people. Quiet and gentle but full of stories. I wish I could remember some of them, but of course I was too young to really pay much attention to them at the time.’

  And he went down into the kitchen and returned with an album. And there they were: Alasdair sitting on a garden bench with two young children on his knees.

  ‘That’s me on the left there,’ said Alasdair. ‘And Katie on the other knee. It’s a real pity she’s away, for she’d remember more.’

  Then one of Katell with a golf club in her hand. Alasdair laughed.

  ‘I think Mum and Dad tried to teach them to play golf, but they had no idea.’

  The rest now blur into one – old Alasdair and Kate outside Balmoral Castle; one of them with their own daughter and son-in-law and young Alasdair and Katie at a beach somewhere.

  ‘I think that’s Stonehaven,’ young Alasdair suggested – and one of the two of them standing side by side in front of a waterfall. ‘That’s the famous Slok of Dess on the Dee,’ he said. ‘I think they were really impressed by the force of water on the fall.’

  He was very kind and hospitable to us, insisting that we have coffee and some of his own home made scones, which were delicious. They were straight out of the Aga. He worked as a Social Worker in the district and talked to us for a while openly and honestly about some of the issues he had to deal with, especially amongst young people.

  ‘My own mum had a breakdown,’ he explained. ‘That’s what brought Granny and Grampa here in the first place – to help out. It was meant to be for a while, but you know how things develop… she never really got that much better. I was just newly born when they came. I think I was maybe around nine when they passed away.’

  We visited the churchyard on the way out of the village. Young Alasdair had said we couldn’t miss it. ‘It’s the old church on the left just before the bend after the garage.’

  A slight drizzle began to fall. The graves were on a mound overlooking the strath, with the names faded and difficult to make out through the tears.

  I looked in every direction to see if I could catch sight of the sea, which must be somewhere, but all was land to the far horizons. I had to look up to glimpse water: and there the clouds swept eastwards, gathering pace as they headed out towards the grey North Sea.

  8

  THE SIXTY-YEAR-OLD woman on the train attracted little attention from anyone. Why should she? Once upon a time, a woman of her age would have been considered old, but modernity had made time obsolete. Not through Botox and surgery, but by dress and fashion. How ancient her gran had looked in those clothes, though she would have been no more than fifty at the time.

  As she sat there, Helen remembered how eternally young her own mother had always looked, merely through the elixir of her enthusiasm and spirit. She had basically been too busy to grow old, and became an older version of herself, filled with endless hope and energy even well into her eighties. Even then it was all about planting: the larch and birch wood she planted on her eightieth birthday was in great shape now.

  They were passing the Loch Sloy station where her father had worked. Crianlarich ahead, where the train would split into two, half heading north, the other half heading west. They stopped there for about ten minutes, while the staff uncoupled the carriages. She wanted fresh air so walked around on the platform along with the other passengers.

  A group of students, waiting for the southbound train which the guard had announced would be half-an-hour late, were sitting around on the other platform. One of them, a young fair-haired man, unstrapped his guitar and began playing a tune. She recognised it instantly: ‘The Foggy Dew’.

  She noticed that the girl who was with him had a fiddle case. Could it? She walked over and looked down at the case. Old. Leather. Brown. With that distinctive Italian cross-stitching on the external trim.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could join in with your friend and play a tune? I used to play the fiddle myself when I was younger, and I would so love to hear a good tune again. Out here in the open air.’

  The girl smiled.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘No problem.’

  She unzipped the case and there inside was a somewhat battered old fiddle which wasn’t the lost violin. The girl raised the fiddle to her shoulder, tuned it for a few moments, and joined in her boyfriend’s tune which was now a slow air which Helen did not recognise. Her train was leaving in three minutes. But it was her fiddle case. Of that she was certain.

  ‘How – I mean where did you get the case?’ she asked.

  The girl took it as an innocent question: someone admiring the old leather.

  ‘O. From a neighbour. An old man who has lots of what he calls junk about the house. He was getting rid of it all and asked all his neighbours to take whatever they needed and give something to charity in return. But his junkyard is still as full as ever! I got the fiddle there too. It’s not much good, is it?’

  She jumped on to the train, while the guard raised his whistle at the end of the platform. ‘Have you a card?’ she asked the girl. ‘Sometimes I hold ceilidhs,’ she lied ‘and maybe the two of you could play at it.’

  The girl handed her a card through the window as Helen’s train began to move.

  ‘Julie Stone,’ the card read. ‘Trinity Road, Edinburgh,’ with a website and mobile number.

  The train climbed through the hazel trees on the lower slope of Strath Fillan. She knew the route well enou
gh: the slow ascent to Tyndrum then down through Glen Lochy to Lochaweside, the Pass of Brander and on to Taynuilt and in by Loch Etive to Oban itself. Loch Awe.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Instead of going on to Oban for the night she could stop there and get the next day’s train in for the ferry. Loch Awe where her parents had first stayed when they were first married, under the shadow of Ben Cruachan.

  ‘Cruachan Beann, Cruachan Beann, Cruachan Beann, ‘s mòr mo thlachd dhìot’: the song that old Seonaidh Dhùghaill had always sung at the Dervaig cèilidhs!

  She checked. She had a signal. A quick few movements and she accessed the hotel’s home page. Yes, they had a room for the night: one with a view of the loch, and out towards Ben Cruachan itself. They had a car which could pick her up, free of charge. Which meant, of course, that it was built into the room’s price – but that was fine. Loch Awe here needed business as much as LA there.

  The room was beautiful. The building had originally been built as a shooting lodge for Campbell of Brander but was now owned by a retired MP and her husband, who had renewed and upgraded it into a luxury retreat. They had retained many of the gorgeous old features of the building, including the twin stone lions which adorned the entrance, with a plume of water spouting from their open mouths.

  ‘Victoriana at its worst,’ said Lady Creggan, who personally signed her in.

  ‘At its best, I think,’ said Helen.

  She gazed out over the well kept lawns and the rose gardens which were in full bloom far below. Loch Awe itself was quiet, without any movement. Ben Cruachan still retained banks of snow on its northernmost tops.

  Was it really possible? Of course it was: much stranger things had happened. She would have recognised that case anywhere: it was impossible that another, of that vintage, with that cross-stitching right there, and that tiny dent next the handle still there, could exist. She laughed. As if it really mattered! Which of course it did: the loss had circled her life.