Maybe that was sufficient, however. Be satisfied with that glimpse, that knowledge, that moment. For where else could it lead, except either to disappointment or satisfaction when she finally traced that old loss down to – what? – a cellar, or a junk room in an old man’s house in Edinburgh? Better to live in anticipation, and all that…
She decided to go for a walk. She would have her bath later. She opened the windows wide and felt the chill, so she put on her thick coat and went outside down into the gardens. The roses were even more beautiful from close up: real authentic old ones which hadn’t been spoilt by the removal of the thorns, so that not only did they look lovely, but also smelt like roses. She recognised many of them – the orange Alexanders with their sweet scent, the salmon pink New Zealands, the bright red Royal Williams with their heady smell, and the wonderfully named Jude the Obscure, with its yellow chalice-shaped blooms.
She was the most unlikely convert. And it had happened so simply too. No great big revelation or angels singing from the heavens, but a quiet Sabbath evening in Chichester Cathedral where she’d gone to listen to the music. Handel’s Messiah was scheduled for 8pm, but she arrived early – around four – and wandered round the building. The light was astonishing, and at its most luminous through Marc Chagall’s window.
She hadn’t really realised that a service was about to begin, but when she heard the opening choral hymn felt that she couldn’t walk out. So she sat there quietly in a side pew. How wonderful the choir sounded, in their long red and white robes. Sancte Deus, Sancte Fortis, Sancte Immortalis, with the sweet young voices rising into the heavens.
It happened to be a visiting preacher – the Rev Dr John Stott – who talked about Mary going to Jesus at the wedding in Cana and saying to him ‘They have run out of wine.’ And Dr Stott simply said one little thing which caused Helen to ‘give her heart to Jesus’ as the evangelicals put it. ‘She only told Him what He already knew – but that turned plain water into rich wine.’
He expanded and expounded, of course, about omnipotence and omniscience, but it was the simple transformation, as it were, that struck her. His mother told him a fact and that truth had triggered the miracle. She looked up towards Chagall’s stained-glass window: practically speaking, small pieces of glass held together by strips of lead and supported by a rigid frame, but in reality a hymn of praise to God. That was the spark. This was not silica with adds of potash and soda and lime and oxides, but life, and life in all its fullness, as the Reverend Stott was declaring. Perhaps Klee’s churches could be unboxed. Black could be white.
She went down through the wicker gate at the bottom of the rose garden, which led on to the path which took her down by the river to the loch itself. Something stirred in the water, though she couldn’t make out what. Likely a salmon or trout, for the loch was famous for both, though you now needed a permit from the hotel to fish for them. Not that she would need one, for it came with the room. Though she wouldn’t use that either. Then she saw what had stirred, as the otter climbed out of the water and disappeared into the reeds beds on the bank. Native American medicine implied that if an otter swam into your life the message was to rid yourself of worry and pain.
How necessary animals were. Ótr he was called in Norse mythology. Ótr the dwarf, the son of King Hreidmar and the brother of Fafnir and Regin. He could change into any form, and used to spend many days in the shape of an otter, greedily eating fish. Until he was slain accidentally by Loki. His father, Hreidmar, demanded a large weregild in return for Ótr’s death – namely to fill Ótr’s skin with yellow gold and then to cover it entirely with red gold. However, when the skin was covered in gold, one whisker was still protruding which ultimately caused the death of Hreidmar and his two equally avaricious sons. One small thing. Surely that wasn’t the fiddle, gnawing away at her soul?
Who stole the baby? She began to hum the song quietly under her breath –
Òbhan òbhan,
Goiridh òg O,
Goiridh òg O,
Goiridh òg O,
Òbhan òbhan,
Goiridh òg O,
Cha d’ fhuair mi lorg mo chaoineachain.
I left my baby lying here, lying here, lying here, I left my baby lying here, to go and gather blaeberries. I found the wee brown otter’s track, otter’s track, otter’s track, I found the wee brown otter’s track, But ne’er a trace o’ my baby, O.
It must have been supernatural. No human being could be so sour as to steal a baby. It was better to blame the fairies than the fathers. Everything else was found – the otter, the swan, the duck, the red-speckled calf, the cow in the mud, the mist on the mountain – but ne’er a trace o’ baby, O. Always the external cause, the criminal from outside.
She rose from the lochside and walked back in to the hotel through the rose garden. She ate alone at the small round table next to the bay window. The food too was exquisite: local lamb with fresh vegetables from the hotel’s own garden, followed by fruits from the orchard. She drank mint tea, and went upstairs. In the bath, she resumed reading the book: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Having read it several times in translation, she was finally getting round to reading slowly through it in the original French.
C’est le dimanche seulement, dans l’après-midi, que je résolus de sonner à la porte des Sablonnières. Tandis que je grimpais les coteaux dénudés, j’entendais sonner au loin les vêpres du dimanche d’hiver. Je me sentais solitaire et désolé. Je ne sais quel pressentiment triste m’envahissait. Et je ne fus qu’à demi surpris lorsque, à mon coup de sonnette, je vis M. de Galais tout seul paraître et me parler à voix basse: Yvonne de Galais était alitée, avec une fièvre violente; Meaulnes avait dû partir dès vendredi matin pour un long voyage; on ne sait quand il reviendrait…
The words made less sense than the meaning.
‘I must still be filtering it through the English versions I’ve read,’ she said out loud. ‘Like everything.’
She put the book down and lay back deep in the bath, covering herself with water to the tip of her nose. Helen. Helen O’ Connor. And how, as soon as people heard her name, they instantly assumed she was Irish. Which she sort of was: half was by genetics, and as for the rest… Helen, the Gaelic Eilidh, the French Hélène, the Greek Eleni. Ah! The great original. Eilidh na Tròidhe. Helen of Troy. And the other great Helen, of Kirkconnel.
She was out of the bath and switched on her iPod, for the great Burns version of the song:
O that I were where Helen lies
Night and day on me she cries;
O that I were where Helen lies
In fair Kirkconnel lee.
She sang with it, pretending too that she had a fiddle:
O Helen fair beyond compare
A ringlet of thy flowing hair
I’ll wear it still for ever mair
Until the day I die.
She let the bathrobe slip off and surrendered herself to the song, her left hand rapidly playing the chords, her right hand bowing the strings –
Curs’d be the hand that shot the shot
And curs’d the gun that gave the crack!
Into my arms bird Helen lap
And died for sake o’ me!
O think na ye but my heart was sair
My love fell down and spake nae mair
There did she swoon we meikle care
On fair Kirkconnel lee…
She lay back on the bed, quiet, reducing the iPod level with the remote to a whisper. All was still except for the voice coming from the machine: I wish I were where Helen lies, Night and day on me she cries, And I am weary of the skies, For her sake that died for me. She would take up her paintbrush again. She slept. Birds were singing. Willow warblers, mistle thrushes and a solitary stonechat: she would recognise its call anywhere. It was a beautiful sunny morning. The iPod must have been playing softly all night: she turned Helen off.
She caught the 9.30 train into Oban, which connected with the ongoing ferry to Mull. It was packed
with summer visitors, most of whom – by their conversations – were heading for Iona. She managed to get a bench seat for herself outside on the top deck and watched the familiar landsights fade behind them: the red granite of St Columba’s Cathedral, the folly that was McCaig’s, the ruin of Dunstaffnage, the flashing lighthouse at Ganavan, the flat green point of Kerrera. They sailed through the channel where the Firth of Lorne met the Lynn of Lorne, and were soon rounding Duart Point with Craignure ahead and the Sound of Mull itself stretching on towards the past.
I had no idea it was her. It was sheer chance that
I happened to be on that particular ferry, for I had originally intended to travel a week earlier, but had been delayed by some stupid visa issues connected with Marion’s ashes. I’d promised to take them up and scatter them on her native Yorkshire Moors. She’d been quite specific about the location – Rosedale on the north-eastern side of the River Severn, where she’d spent many happy days as a young girl.
The mistake I made was telling the British authorities that I was taking her ashes with me: the French didn’t care, but as soon as I arrived at the airport and declared the casket to the airline, they insisted on phoning immigration and this debate ensued about whether ashes were or were not covered by the trans-European right to travel. Of course they were and
I knew that, and they knew that, and we all knew that, but procedures are procedures and it took a week to get official clearance. I was lucky, of course: it could have taken forever.
I got smart after that, and as soon as I rebooked my flight for London I just put dear Marion’s ashes into a tobacco pouch and travelled with her in my jacket pocket. We were frisked at security of course, but they let us through once I assured them that she wasn’t a drug. I caught the train from London to York and then hired a small car so that
I could drive out into the solitude of the moors to pay the last respects. It rained all day and for a while I took sanctuary in Rosedale Abbey, and by the time I came out the rain had ceased and rainbows adorned the countryside on all sides.
I parked the car at the upper end of the Severn and walked up through the dale in the early evening. It was lovely, gentle countryside. A landscape I was more or less unfamiliar with, and so different from both the Scottish countryside and the French terrain with which I had become acquainted. It was good farming land: that was evident from the amount of lush grass on the lower slopes. It got barer, of course, as
I climbed, but the crofters I’d known in my childhood would still have envied the riches of these exposed uplands.
I paused for a good while at the peak, looking all around and sharing that last spectacular view with Marion: the splendour of the Cleveland Hills to our north and west, all the dales running away down at our feet – Bransdale and Farndale and Newtondale and Rosedale itself – and away to the east the North Sea beyond the far lights of Whitby and Scarborough which we could now see sparkling up in the twilight.
We waited until that moment arrived when it was neither quite day nor night: when there was sufficient light still to distinguish earth from sky and land from sea, but not enough to locate anywhere, to differentiate town from city or cattle from people. And at that moment, as the dots on the horizon became all indistinguishable, I let her go, up out of my hands into the air where all was invisible because no stars shone, and no moon had yet emerged.
They emerged as I descended. The moon itself was a full moon, shining with a sudden liquid brightness all over the moors. Things which had been indistinct in the ascent became eerily illuminated in the descent: here was a hidden waterfall, and over there, where I thought I’d seen a stone wall, were the ruins of an old Roman fort. Stars appeared, dwarfing the twinkling earth lights that were spread all around, and I confess I allowed myself to believe that the sparkling one which shone so brightly a bit to the left of the moon was Marion, now liberated from all her pain and cares.
I slept in the car that night as I had forgotten to book anywhere. I had done no forward planning, but the visit back home to Scotland must have been in the back of my mind as I’d prepared to scatter the ashes, for next morning I turned on the car’s sat nav and typed in Scotland and followed the disembodied woman’s voice who steered me all the way through Grosmont and Guisborough and all the other now forgotten places which brought me back up to the border.
I breakfasted somewhere near Hexham I think, and by lunchtime had crossed the Cheviots and was in Jedburgh, where I stopped for the rest of the day. I booked into a little hotel near the town square and slept all afternoon, dreaming that I was back home.
When I woke of course I realised I was: the stuff in the hotel room made it unmistakable. Bonny Scotland pictures all over the place, which I’d been too tired to really notice earlier when I checked in. I had a shower and went down to the bar which was adorned with a marble bust of Sir Walter.
Beside the bar was a scroll on which was written, in rounded calligraphy, his most famous couplet, ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive’. On the other side of the lounge was a matching scroll declaring, ‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land’. The television was on in the corner, showing some pictures of Rupert Murdoch.
The Borders are as good a place as any to decide the future. I really had no notion what to do in the coming days. I had no pressing reason to go back to Paris – in truth, no pressing reason to go anywhere, even though I knew that I wanted to settle things up in Paris and leave. Too many dying memories.
And it had been such a long time since I’d been to Scotland. Been home, if that was the word. For what had this southern place to do with me? Nothing much, going by this unfair analysis from the Borders hotel, with its romantic call still on the walls while a different global empire ruled the waves. Ach! Scoatland sma’? Nothing bu’ heather! How marvellously descriptive. And incomplete. This girning land. I should head tae Dundee! Pa Broon Land, whaur I micht see Oor Wullie. Jings crivvens help ma boab!
So I phoned the car hire company in the morning and told them I’d like to extend the car hire for a month as
I planned to spend some time travelling round Scotland.
I drove north through the lovely forests of Lauderdale and arrived in Edinburgh from the south, via Dalkieth. I took the bypass round Edinburgh itself, past Swanston, spurning its attractions, and marvelled afresh at the great beauty of the Forth Rail Bridge to my right, then took the coast road round Fife, through the pretty little seafront villages of St Monans, Pittenweem and Anstruther and Crail so that I could lunch at St Andrews.
‘Here for the golf?’ asked the barman who served lunch.
‘No. Just travelling. Northwards.’
‘Far?’
‘Dundee anyway,’ I responded.
He laughed. ‘It’s a braw city. Gone all fancy too. Do you know they’re building a new V&A there?’
It didn’t mean anything to me.
‘Victoria and Albert. Art Galley. Dundee’s become the new art capital of the world.’
‘Wasn’t it always the art centre of the world? The Beano and Dandy and all that…?’
‘Good old DC Thomson,’ he said. ‘What did they use to say – Jute, Jam and Journalism? Not much of that about nowadays, eh?’
Some real golfers had entered, so he went off to serve them.
Who can tell – maybe he changed my life? Had he not summed it up so well I might have been tempted to go on up to Dundee, but I decided to leave it, and go west instead. Too many professors everywhere. Back in the car I checked the map from the glove compartment: there were so many options. Could I find a blacksmith anywhere, or a forge?
I decided on the A91 to Perth then the A85 west through Crieff and Lochearnhead. I filled the tank up again and clicked the information into the sat nav and headed for Cupar. I’d forgotten. There it was: Luvians Ice cream shop. Run by the Fusaros. One of their boys, Tony, had been at university with me, and it was now almost
fifty years since I’d seen him. I stopped the car and went in and asked if he was about.
‘No,’ said the young woman behind the counter. ‘Uncle Tony deals with the wine importing side of the business. He’s in Spain just now on business.’
The ice cream was lovely. Home made with the best of products, and just the right consistency and sweetness. Summer’s honey breath. Afterwards, I regretted that
I hadn’t bought one of Tony’s fine wine’s for Helen, but the opportunity was lost.
I spent the night in a B&B at Lochearnhead and left very early in the morning so that I could catch the first ferry.
I planned to go on to Uist later on in the week but thought first I would spend a day or two around the Oban area.
Maybe it was Marion’s death and the holiness of the departure on the Yorkshire Dales, but I had a notion to visit Iona, of all places. Strangely, I’d never been there, despite its reasonable proximity to some of my childhood haunts. I think it’s reputation for ‘spirituality’ had made me pretty cautious about it, and every time I’d thought about visiting, the whole idea of bus-loads of New Age tourists descending on the island had put me off.
And here I was now, one of these very people! Even though I kidded myself that I was different – more or less a local, and not one to be fooled or swayed by spiritual chanting and fragrant candles on an isolated island.
Which, of course, is how I found myself that morning on the very same ferry as Helen, after all these years. Coincidence is a strange thing, for the two of us then researched it, from the Mathematical Coincidences of Dimension to the Computer Simulation of Alignment, ranging from the Jung-Pauli Theory of Synchronicity to Kammerer’s Theory of Seriality, though we preferred Einstein’s famous definition that ‘coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous’.
The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 9
