The Girl on the Ferryboat

by Angus Peter Campbell

  I stayed a month altogether, ushering a number of potential buyers in through the apartment that first week, finally settling on selling it to a young Malaysian couple who were involved in setting up an organic clothing company.

  I phoned Helen and asked if I could come to Mull for a while and she said ‘of course.’ I doubt either of us will ever leave it.

  10

  ‘TO CELEBRATE,’ SHE SAID, ‘I went out with Lachlan on the boat last night, and thought you’d appreciate fresh sea trout after all these snails in Paris!’

  We clinked glasses.

  ‘Slàinte.’

  What a strange thing love is. The notion that there you are, eighteen and head-over-heels, or that after a while it subsides, like a receding wave in the ocean. Those glorious stories once told about Romeo and Juliet and Deirdre and Naoise who, for the sake of love, went to their deaths. Like Christ too on Calvary. What was all this stuff about death and love? Love as Eros, as Philia, as Agape. And how in Gaelic you never really said ‘I love you’ but ‘I like you’.

  Is toigh leam thu.

  ‘Did you hear,’ I asked her, ‘about the Lewisman who loved his wife so much that he almost told her?’

  And she laughed.

  When she laughed, she had a dimple on one cheek. When the sun shone, as it did all that late autumn, freckles spread all over her face, like poppies on the machair. She grew her hair slightly longer, and was forever now flicking it behind her ears. It was just living next to the sea of course, but neither of us really realised how salty the air was until that first time we kissed. And it wasn’t even by the sea, but inland up beyond the old Gruline sheep fank the day we decided to climb Beinn a’ Ghràig.

  We descended in the evening by the western shore of Loch Bà and spent some time standing there looking west out towards Eòrsa, Inch Kenneth and Ulva when we just turned towards each other, smiled and kissed. It only lasted moments, then we separated, and laughed.

  ‘Look at us,’ she said.

  ‘Aye. Just look at us,’ I answered and then we kissed properly, as we wanted to, without caution or fear.

  ‘Saillte,’ I said.

  ‘More salt in the air here than there is in the Red Sea itself,’ she said, smiling. ‘And remember I know – I’m an Ecologist!’

  That night Helen played the violin for the first time in my presence. She tuned it with part of Vivaldi’s Allegro, which I recognised, then played the wonderful Serenata by Stravinsky and finished with a piece I didn’t know.

  ‘The Pavano-Capricho by Isaac Albeniz,’ she said.

  ‘I played it once upon a time for my Grade 8.’

  ‘No one plays like that just from once upon a time. What about any fiddle tunes?’ I asked.

  ‘They were lost with the instrument. Except,’ she said, putting the violin down on the table, ‘that the case turned up a wee while back. Just before you turned up.’

  I raised my hands in protest.

  ‘It wisnae me!’

  There was a thing I never quite understood.

  ‘So,’ I asked her. ‘What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin anyway?’

  ‘One makes music,’ she said. ‘The other plays it. It’s your job to work out which does what.’

  ‘And this one here?’ I asked, pointing to the violin on the table.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Work it out.’

  I raised the bow to the strings and tried to remember the few tunes I’d learned on the accordion as a child, but the scratches I made bore no resemblance to the almost forgotten sound inside my head.

  ‘I’m afraid this one neither makes nor plays music,’ I said. ‘And this fiddle you lost?’

  ‘It was in the family. Belonged to the family.’

  ‘And made great music?’

  ‘Yes. It made great music.’

  ‘And – and are you telling me that you can’t play…

  I mean make… fiddle music on this violin?’

  ‘Yes. At least I can’t.’

  ‘And the case?’

  ‘I saw it at a railway station. Just months ago. Crianlarich Railway Station, to be exact.’

  She walked over to the cupboard by the fire. She took out a card and gave it to me.

  ‘JULIE STONE’ the card read. ‘TRINITY ROAD, EDINBURGH’, with a website and mobile number.

  ‘Of course she was not the one who stole it – my God, it was almost fifty years ago now. But it was the case. Who knows that the fiddle itself might not miraculously appear in the same way?’

  ‘I suppose you asked her?’

  ‘What? If the poor child was playing a once-upon-a-time stolen fiddle? Hah! But I made sure it wasn’t – she was just playing a poor shadow of a kind of thing.’

  ‘But you got her address, just in case?’

  ‘She told me she’d got the case from an old junk man who lived near her. I thought it might be fun one fine day just to go and see him…’

  ‘You want me to phone?’

  ‘No. I’ll email her myself. Tell her I lied.’

  ‘Lied?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted her address so I could then get the old man’s. The only reasonable way I thought of getting it at the time was to tell her that sometimes I held ceilidhs and she could maybe play at one of them…’

  ‘Well we do, don’t we?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes. I suppose we do.’

  We travelled down to Edinburgh on the Monday. Held hands as we walked off the platform: all foolishness was permitted in the city. Julie herself came to meet us at Waverley and Helen just told her the truth: showed her the place where the station bench had been, once upon a time, and how she’d stood and turned, then turned back to find her fiddle gone.

  ‘So this old junk man,’ she said. ‘I thought it might be worth my while seeing him, just in case he had any idea where that case he gave you came from in the first place.’

  Julie gave us the address.

  ‘He’s a wonderful old guy. Completely eccentric. Maybe even mad? But a fantastic musician – can play any and all of the thousand bits of instruments he has in that yard of his. Oh, and he’s a bit deaf too. Or at least pretends to be: sometimes he doesn’t hear the clearest thing you say to him, but then demands silence and asks you to listen and sure enough you too will then hear it – a bird singing somewhere far above his garden. His name’s Isaac. Jewish, of course.’

  He was just off the 23 bus route, down a vennel where a small garage had once operated, which had now been converted into a domestic town house. Iron railings then led down beside the stream which took us to the bottom of his allotment where an old stile opened into the garden. Julie led the way, having been in and out of the yard since early childhood.

  I can’t really remember, but it must have taken us at least half-an-hour to finally find Isaac himself, resting in a hammock swung between his kitchen awning and a lovely old pine tree. On the way Julie stopped us time and again to show us bits of instruments which lay in nooks and crannies all over the place – xylophones and glockenspiels and horns and organs and bits of flutes and piccolos and half a celesta along with a thousand and one other bits and pieces which only God himself could recognise.

  Isaac looked down at us from his hammock.

  ‘Ah! My dear Juliette,’ he said. ‘And you bring visitors?’

  ‘Indeed I do, Mr Stein.’

  ‘Musicians too?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. Of course they are.’

  ‘Good. Good. Tell them to look around. Tell them to take their time. We have all the time in the world.’

  And he closed his eyes and lay back down in his hammock again.

  Inside, the house was just as full of objects as the yard outside. Sets of bagpipes, including Athertons and old Glens and MacDougalls side by side with harmonicas and sections of saxophones. Mounds of sheet music of course as well as old LPs which were a connoisseur’s dream.

  And there it was. Down on the floor, half obscured behind a pile of s
uitcases which were filled with trumpets and trombones, beneath a broken down harpsichord.

  Helen didn’t say anything: just knelt down, removing some of the sheet music which had fallen on top of it: Chanson dans le Nuit, by Carloz Salzedo. Not that it matters, except that it’s one of those maddening details

  I remember, as she flung it aside.

  Her index finger swept all the dust off the scroll and then she just knelt there in silence staring down at the instrument.

  She lifted it, tenderly, and all the lost myths of time were in that embrace. It was the prodigal son and the lost sheep and the lost coin and Jason and the Golden Fleece and Long John Silver with fifteen men on the dead man’s chest. Drink and the devil had done for the rest.

  She laughed.

  ‘Ha! X never marks the spot! O, yes it does!’

  She lifted the fiddle up and brushed all the dust off with a corner of her shirt and laughed again.

  ‘Now all I need is a bow.’

  Julie and I of course bowed down.

  ‘There’s some, over there’ said Julie, climbing over bits of a nickelodeon to where several bows lay in a glass cabinet. She opened the cabinet and took one out and gave it to Helen, who spent the next half hour or so trying to tune the fiddle.

  ‘It needs a new E string,’ she said, so back to the glass cabinets where a whole host of strings were piled on different shelves. She finally found one and the fiddle sounded magnificent. A deliverance was in the air.

  She eventually took it through to Isaac who by now was sitting up in a grand wicker chair drinking tea from a wonderful old urn.

  ‘This fiddle, Sir. Can you remember where it came from?’

  The old man looked intently at the fiddle for a while then said, ‘Could I try it out?’

  She handed it to him and he raised it to his right cheek and began to play left-handed. An exquisite sound came from the instrument as we all stood there listening to the whole violin concerto which he finished with the quietest fioritura any of us had ever heard. He handed the violin back to Helen and said.

  ‘Yours. As a gift.’

  Unfortunately, I broke the spell.

  ‘The lady wondered where the instrument came from in the first place,’ I said to him.

  He smiled and spread out his hands.

  ‘Don’t we all wonder that? It belongs to the whole world. To everyone.’

  He swept his outspread hands round the yard and the house.

  ‘These things. They belong to you. Private ownership has no place in music. No music, no instrument belongs to a single individual.’

  I could have protested. But this fiddle – this violin – belonged to her anyway. Belonged to her family in the first place, to that Archibald Campbell who’d bought it in Naples and brought it here initially. Was stolen from her. Isaac smiled at us.

  ‘Isn’t everything stolen? From God. Our lives are not our own. Will I not restore unto you the years that the locust hath eaten?’

  We accepted his gift, considering the lost years as a thing lent, rather than sold.

  11

  THE TV IMAGES were just too harrowing for comfort. We’d returned from a day out at the Tobermory Games and had switched the telly on to find ourselves back in a world which we’d pretended had ceased to exist. The flies around the swollen eyes always wrenched the heart, and this time, half a century on from Biafra, was no different. That in itself only prompted the conscience.

  Then the email came from the government’s Disaster Emergency Committee – invariably known by its acronym as the DEC – asking if she’d consider coming out of early retirement to lead one of the UNICEF-led water development programmes in the Horn of Africa. They couldn’t as yet tell the exact location until continuing negotiations with some of the local Islamic organisations unfolded, but if that worked out as they hoped, it would be in Somalia.

  I wanted to go with her but she persuaded me to stay at home, forcibly arguing that years of experience had taught her that the worst thing that could happen would be for goodwilled amateurs like me to start interfering in things.

  ‘Just stay near the cash machine,’ she said to me as she left.

  ‘That and on your knees praying. These are two best places from which to send aid.’

  She left at the beginning of our winter. It was one of the most severe winters on record. Snow began to fall in early November, and hardly ceased until the May of the following year. At first we considered it a joke, and the occasional messages we managed to send to each other were peppered with weather references.

  ‘Could do with your snow here in Mogadishu.’

  ‘A bit of that Somalian sunshine would go down just grand here in Salen,’ but in time the reality in both places removed us beyond jokes.

  The brutal combination of famine and heat continued to bring daily death to Africa, while here on Mull the endless months of rain and snow caused landslides, blocked roads, frozen pipes, flooding and a severe crisis which brought its own death toll, with accounts of old folk on the peninsula frozen in their unheated homes.

  Of course we knew that it was all relative, but the death of Lachlan who was caught in a snowstorm out on the moor whilst looking for his sheep made it very real for both of us on both sides of the globe.

  By Easter a reasonable thaw had set in here, while even better news came from Africa: the long awaited rains had finally arrived and a steadiness had set in which gave people hope.

  Helen managed to phone from the local hospital saying that she would now also stay on for the summer as they now had a proper chance to set up a water system in the area she was working in, which should be in operation by the end of September. Rival politicans were trying to talk to one another.

  ‘I’ll be home for the local Mod,’ she said. ‘You know how much the Mull choir rely on my dulcet tones!’

  ‘I think I’ll travel out,’ I said to her, and I let her protest vehemently for a while before interrupting to say ‘I mean travel out to Uist. To see some of the old haunts, for the summer. After all, I’m here on my own, and you won’t be back until…’

  ‘October,’ she interrupted. And the line went dead.

  I travelled west on the first day in July. It was a glorious Monday morning with the sun already high in the sky above distant Ben Cruachan as we sailed out of Oban where my mother had worked in the hotels, as a kitchen maid. The Great Western. The Royal. The Regent. She always prayed that the guests would leave her a tip. Then one summer Kirk Douglas came and stayed for a week. He left behind his slippers and she took them home for us to try them on. They were grey and far too big for any of us and became lost to history. And there’s the old pier where the fish factory was where she shelled the prawns. And the railway station Refresh where we’d wait for the bus while old Dougie sang An t-Eilean Muileach. And old Mrs MacFarlane always gave us a florin.

  I stand up on the foredeck to make sure I can see everywhere. The time since I’d last stood here. At least forty years ago. No. Don’t be such a fool. Work it out exactly. It won’t take that much effort. Just count. Face up to it. Forty-seven years then. Forty-seven years since I’d last stood here as a young student, Kilchoan and Beinn Seilg and Ardnamurchan Point to my right, Sorisdale and Rudha Sgor-innis and Eilean Mòr and Rudha Mòr to my left. What I believed then. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre. Stevie Wonder was on the turntable. The fragrant smell of marijuana as we marched against Vietnam. When everything that was so value-laden seemed so value-free, including J-P himself who turned out, after all, just to be another womaniser hiding his lust behind scholarship.

  I wish I had an Admiralty Chart so that I could track every rock and skerry, every bay and inlet. Look – there’s Rubha Shamhnan and Rubha na Mòine and Rubha na h-Iolaire, and look – over there’s Sgùrr an Easain Duibh and Sgùrran Seilich, and if you look backwards you can just see the peak of Sgùrr Eachainn disappearing over the horizon. But of course I know them more generally, for that – despite the fact that in the mean
time Bombay has become Mumbai and Rhodesia has become Zimbabwe – has not changed.

  See – there’s Moidart and Ardnamurchan and up yonder is Muck and Eigg and Rum and Canna and over by is Coll and Tiree, and ahead of course is Miùghlaigh and Barraigh and Èirisgeigh and Uibhist-a-Deas. Like Mumbai, Moidart is of course Mùideart and like Zimbabwe, Ardnamurchan is really Àird nam Murchain which, if translatable at all, ‘means’ something like ‘The High Place of the Sea-hounds, or Otters’.

  I don’t know anyone on the ferry and, as far as I can make out, no one knows me. How things have changed.

  I look at faces to see if I can see the children of the children of children I once knew, and I suspect I do. Isn’t that Donald the Post over there crouched over his laptop, and isn’t that Catriona, famous for riding her horse bareback across the heather, drinking coffee and yattering away on her mobile.

  I nod at people and they nod back in courtesy.

  We are now in the open seas: that part of the exposed Minch you get once you leave the relative shelter of Tiree and head west. This was always the time in the old days to put the head down and batten the hatches as you lay there battered by force eight winds which flung everything into space. Plates flew and doors creaked and you could hear the anchor chains crying, and then babies bawled and men spewed and someone was always drunk and singing in the bar while an endless accordion tune wailed behind him. You woke in the dark to find the vessel still being tossed about, and surrounded by the stale smell of vomit, despite the efforts of the cabin crew to mop up. I close my eyes now in the calm of the new digitally enhanced ship and can still smell the chaos and the fear.