Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  Betty’s calm was admirable when she saw what they were doing to her car. Inwardly no doubt she was calling them a shower of young cunts. Outwardly she smiled and waved her hand in blessing, as if the contentment of boys and girls with baboon habits was more important to her than any thousand-pound car.

  The crowd, to begin with, was more interested in me. There were shouts of ‘Kilty Lamont!’ I was asked if I had come back to see the house I was born in. In the three or four minutes it took to pay Mrs Blackburn, push aside many cadging hands, dislodge the boys, climb in, and drive away, I recognised two of the women. One was Mrs Blanie, Jim’s mother, no longer so boozily red in the face or so massive in the arms. She stared at me with a mixture of surprise, resentment, and wonder. She had never expected to see me again, so she was surprised. I was still alive and her Jim was dead, so she was resentful. I had once eaten her pancakes, so she was filled with wonder that I had risen so high in the world as to own, for so she would think, so beautiful a car.

  Driving away, we heard a woman yell: ‘If that was Lamont then the woman must have been Betty T. Shields, for didn’t he mairry her?’

  ‘Betty T. Shields!’

  They had all heard of her. She was better known than the Prime Minister.

  All the church bells began to ring. Within a minute the town was reverberating with the ding-dong-dell. I remembered how Smout had told me that when the bells were ringing he used to lie on the ground and press his ear against it. God knew what visions he had seen.

  People in Sunday dress were walking towards the churches. Others rode in cars. They all looked pleased with themselves. They had God mastered.

  If we had been at Pennvalla we would ourselves have strolled to church, across our own grounds, and entered the kirkyard by our own private gate. We would have sat in our own private enclosure.

  We stopped outside the hotel. We had said nothing to each other since leaving Lomond Street.

  Betty took an envelope out of her handbag. ‘Five hundred pounds,’ she said.

  I took it and made sure it did contain a cheque, properly made out, for that amount. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Where is it to be then? Australia?’

  ‘Oronsay.’

  ‘I would prefer Australia.’

  ‘Oronsay.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll send on your things.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘As you wish. No correspondence, remember. No contact of any kind.’

  ‘That suits me.’

  ‘For at least three years. Goodbye, Fergus.’

  ‘Goodbye, Betty.’

  We did not kiss or shake hands. I got out. She drove away.

  I was never to see her again.

  For weeks now I have not been feeling well. Mrs McRorie, the widow who lives next door, has been more importunate than ever in pressing on me her home-made broth, mealy puddings, and septagenarian favours. She waylays me on the landing and stairs, and drops hints how her husband, Alfred, died years before his time because he had given up much too soon the invigorating exercise of love-making. As considerately as I can, for in spite of her dried up whiskery face she is a ladylike old woman who goes to church and reads the Sunday Post, I point out that it has been the consensus of sages throughout the ages that sexual abstinence is more likely to prolong life than to shorten it. I take care not to let dab that if I did have any carnal desires they would be for the cheerful plump-buttocked young woman upstairs.

  Nevertheless it is true that I do feel ill. I have had to give thought to what is to be done after my death.

  Let me say as clearly and humbly as I can that, though I long daily to be reunited with Kirstie, I do not believe in personal immortality and have no hope of ever seeing her again. To resuscitate a body to the last hair and haemorrhoid after it had mouldered into dust is, surely, beyond the powers of God Himself As for reviving us as souls only, which of us would recognise or like the look of his or her disembodied soul if it came floating past? I consider myself a wonderful and unique piece of creation, but believe nevertheless that for the Creator to perpetuate me, even in an improved form, for all eternity, would be an abuse of His powers. He has, I hope, better things to do.

  We linger for a while in the memories of those who knew us: perhaps those who disliked us or were jealous of us remember us longest. If we wish to encourage this remembrance we shall ask to be buried in some convenient graveyard that can be kept tidy and visited after tea on dry Sundays. If we wish to discourage it we will have our ashes scattered any old where, like a tinker’s tealeaves.

  Whenever I feel hopeful of humanity I want to be buried in the kirkyard at East Gerinish, beside Kirstie, because in that case anyone wishing to visit my grave would have to make the journey across the Minch to a place that I loved. I should be bestowing on him a gift more precious than rubies. But when I am pessimistic and feel sure that the human race will destroy itself if not in the next ten years then certainly in the next hundred, I decide to be cremated here in Glasgow and have my ashes dumped into the nearest dustbin.

  Yesterday afternoon I called in to see Mr McSpeug, the undertaker in the district where I live.

  My mood was optimistic. At the public library in the morning I had watched two very old frail men, one half-blind and the other half-deaf, minister to each other lovingly. Between them, after five minutes’ hard effort, they gleaned from the newspaper what the rest of the world already knew: that the President of the United States had been shot the day before. Though the news had disturbed them they had remained far more anxious about each other than about the famous man lying dead in Washington. They had sat at a table and attended to each other like monkeys. I mean great respect by that comparison, for to pick lice off a comrade and eat them seems to me as useful and intimate a service as one creature can do for another, and I once saw monkeys do it at Edinburgh Zoo, with delicacy and love.

  The effect on me of watching David and Jonathan in old age with cloth caps and Glasgow accents was that I felt a surge of confidence in the decency of my fellow men, and wanted as many of them as possible to visit East Gerinish, where their generous feelings would be refreshed.

  I chose Mr Hector McSpeug for three reasons: his premises are within easy reach, in his advertisements he states ‘Distance no object’, and his name interested me.

  I had never heard the name McSpeug before. His was the only one in the Glasgow Telephone Directory. Of what clan the McSpeugs were a sept I could not discover. If it hadn’t also stated in his advertisements that the firm had been established in 1881, I would have suspected that the family had come from Poland or Lithuania dwring the War, with some unpronounceable name that they had had to render into a Scottish form.

  Speug of course is Scottish slang for a sparrow. I pictured him therefore as a small, alert snapper-up of business, in smart but drab clothes. To my surprise I found him, that dull November afternoon, more like a turkey-cock, with red face, tufts of black hair, a dapper grey suit with a flower in the button-hole, and a fragrance of the wildwood.

  A jolly-looking girl in the outer office, in order to prevent my seeing her employer in so unfunereal a condition, was cheerfully telling me that he had gone to supervise the arrangements at a wedding reception, that being a function he combined with undertaking, when he appeared from within, smoking a cigar and beaming like Bacchus.

  ‘No, Maggie, no,’ he cried. ‘Do not turn the gentleman away. All deference, girl, all deference to a man in the garb of old Caledonia.’

  ‘I just thought, Mr McS peug—.’ She could not help laughing and giving him a look that showed how proud she was of his joie-de-vivre, reckless and inappropriate though she knew it to be for a man in his profession.

  On my way into his office I caught a glimpse of stores of coffins in the dim interior of the premises. Shutting my eyes, I could have imagined I was in a forest of pines, after rain. Pinewood, I knew, made the cheapest coffins. Our district was poor and hard-headed: it saw no sense in squanderi
ng on expensive wood money that could be more joyfully spent on providing drams for the mourners.

  ‘Well, Mr McTavish, what can I do for you? You do not mind if I smoke, do you?’

  I was not sure yet whether or not I approved of so happy an undertaker.

  ‘I wish to arrange a funeral.’

  ‘Ah yes. Your dear spouse has departed?’ He said it with a chuckle.

  Was it the wine, I wondered, or had he, in his experience of bereaved husbands, learned that they preferred their loss to be talked about with a little manly jocularity, not out of callousness—well, not out of callousness in most cases—and not out of any inspirational understanding that death to some extent was comic, few men being capable of such an inspiration, but perhaps out of a cagey admission that since the burial was to be Christian, with everybody believing or pretending to believe that the dead woman had gone to a happier land where there was no cancer of the womb, no deaths of children, no drudgery of housework, and no dominance of males, then unmitigated solemnity might well seem, in the Lord’s eyes, ungrateful?

  ‘The burial I wish to discuss is my own,’ I said.

  Not a bit nonplussed, he cried: ‘Do you know, Mr McTavish, what I said the other day to my dear wife? “Rachel,” I said, “show me a man who is not concerned about his remains and I will show you a man who has lost interest in living.”’

  ‘Your advertisements say: “Distance no object”.’

  ‘Do you wish to be buried on top of Everest? It would be the most expensive interment since that of the late King Solomon, but, if the funds were available, it would be done.’

  ‘The place is called East Gerinish. It is in the Outer Hebrides, on the island of Oronsay.’

  He took a map of Scotland out of a drawer. ‘You are a native of East Gerinish? And your dear wife is already buried there?’

  ‘My wife need not be mentioned.’

  ‘As you please, sir. East Gerinish? I don’t see it.’

  ‘It is too small to be shown on a map of that scale. It is in any case a derelict township. No one lives there now.’

  ‘Ah, it is the ancestral burial-ground of the McTavishes! Is that it? Let’s see now. By road or rail to Oban: beautiful journey. Across the sea to Lochmaddy: wonderful voyage. By road to our sad destination.’

  ‘Except that at one place there is no road, only a track across the sands, passable only at low tide and then only if there is no sea-mist or the imminency of such.’

  ‘Mr McTavish, if I am still to the fore when the time comes I shall myself ferry you to your beautiful and remote last resting-place.’

  ‘There is also no road into East Gerinish itself There used to be a cart track, but it will be overgrown now.’

  ‘There would have to be portage then. A common enough practice in the Highlands of not so long ago. Sometimes distances of ten miles and more were involved. There were, I believe, recognised stopping-places where the carriers were changed and drams consumed. How far in this case?’

  ‘About two miles.’

  ‘Since East Gerinish is now derelict, do we recruit porters from places round about, or do we take our own?’

  ‘I think I would prefer you to take your own.’

  ‘Is there a graveyard, a plot of hallowed ground?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Administered by the local authorities?’

  ‘Administered by the wind, rain, and curlews.’

  ‘In other words, abandoned. Do you own a lair? Or does one, as it were, help oneself?’

  ‘There is a particular grave where I would want to be buried.’

  ‘That of your parents no doubt? I do not ask out of impertinence, Mr McTavish. Immense difficulties can arise out of placing remains in graves to which their right is not secure. By the way sir, I have a bottle here, of Chivas Regal, and two glasses. Would you care to join me?’

  I said I would.

  We sipped the good whisky.

  ‘This, Mr McSpeug, is the grave of a woman I loved long ago.’

  ‘But not your wife? My dear sir, Everest might not be in it for difficulty if that dear deceased lady has surviving relatives, who might object to your being buried beside her.’

  ‘She has no surviving relatives.’

  ‘Still, there might have to be a search, just to make sure. We would not want to find a sheriff’s officer waiting for us with a writ, would we? Besides, what of your own relatives?’

  ‘They would not be consulted. They would not even be informed.’

  ‘Hm, hm, hm. There again we could find ourselves in murky legal waters.’

  ‘I would leave you written authority.’

  ‘That would help no doubt, but a determined wife, or a stubborn daughter —I have had troublesome experiences with determined wives and stubborn daughters, I assure you—could make obstacles.’

  ‘It would be all over before any of them knew.’

  ‘All over for you, lucky fellow! You would be well out of it. I, on the other hand, might find myself obliged to dig you up again and rebury you in another place, at my own expense. What of mourners? Friends?’

  ‘There would be none.’

  ‘There again I must warn you, Mr McTavish. As a living man you have a right to demand complete privacy at your burial, but as a dead one you would find that right open to dispute. Determined wives, my dear fellow! Stubborn daughters! You would of course leave instructions as to what form of service was required.’

  ‘There would be no religious service. A poem might be read, a pipe tune played.’

  ‘May I ask which poem and which pipe tune? I am very fond of pipe music myself.’

  ‘A poem written by myself. The tune is one called “Leaving East Gerinish”. It is not very well known.’

  ‘Could you hum me a snatch? I may know it.’

  I hummed a little of that beautiful, haunting, brave melody. I remembered Kirstie singing Gaelic words to it. I shed tears.

  ‘More whisky, Mr McTavish. To East Gerinish.’

  We drank the toast.

  ‘My name is not really McTavish,’ I said. ‘It would be revealed at the time.’

  ‘At the time would do well enough.’

  ‘It is possible I may change my mind and decide simply to be cremated here in Glasgow.’

  ‘I hope not. Tell me, would it not be a good idea if all the bearers wore kilts?’

  I had not thought of that. ‘I would prefer it, yes.’

  ‘It would be done. We must discuss this again, Mr McTavish. You are going to be with us for some time yet, I sincerely hope, but, you know, I haven’t ever seen that lonely graveyard at East Gerinish, but I can imagine it’—he hummed the tune—

  ‘I can imagine the whole scene, the kilted carriers, the piper, the curlews, perhaps a little rain and a little mist. After so many humdrum interments in the city yours, Mr McTavish, is something to look forward to.’

  We were on our third glass and humming the tune confidently together when Maggie knocked on the door and came in to say it was five o’clock and she was going home.

  Part Five

  ONE

  When I wrote that I was not worthy to return to Gantock I had of course meant morally worthy. Too much of the grease and soot of selfishness obfuscated my soul. I needed scouring, like a pan that a conscientious housewife is only satisfied with when she can see her smiling face in it. In me too few people saw themselves smiling.

  Too harsh a scouring though might, with souls as with pans, not only mar the surface but also damage the substance. Therefore, I thought, in the beautiful Hebrides the simplicities of life over a period of, say, a year—I did not take Betty’s sentence of three years seriously, I was too confident of remission—would gradually, day by splendid day, cleanse, sweeten, and purify me.

  Thus I thought, and seeking no one’s advice, set off forthwith. Pledged now to humility, I travelled to Oban in a third-class compartment which was not well heated. I made considerable efforts to speak as an equal to my companions. Unf
ortunately, I could not quite so soon decide what aspects of my upper-class Anglicised accent to shed and with what egalitarian Scotch crudities to replace them. Small wonder then that I found myself at times mumbling morosely to those shivering boors.

  At Oban, where the wind was howling in from the dark sea, I was obliged, through the dereliction of porters, to humph my own case from train to boat through a jumble of fish-boxes. I learned what I ought to have known already: that if one’s arms feel as if they are being wrenched out of their sockets, and one’s fingers are cramped with pain, it is not easy to entertain thoughts of goodwill towards fish-boxes, far less towards one’s fellowmen.

  As I struggled up the gangway I overheard an anxious passenger asking if the crossing was going to be rough. ‘Rough enough’, was the crewman’s laconic and, as we were all soon to learn, criminally understated answer.

  Sharing the cabin with me, and occupying the upper bunk, was a commercial traveller in hotel supplies from Glasgow, the sort of fellow who would have been sent round to the tradesmen’s entrance at Pennvalla. In the hell of groaning, whining, bumping, and banging noises, and of lurching, sliding, rising and falling movements, I had the best of opportunities to show consideration for a fellowman in distress, especially when he vomited over me. Alas, I did not take it. On the contrary, when he moaned that he was going to die, I shouted, The sooner the better, you careless bastard!’

  Crossing the Minch in the dark in a storm on a rolling boat with a commercial traveller’s vomit all over one’s pyjamas is not an experience likely to increase anyone’s store of loving-kindness.

  Nor is disembarking at Lochmaddy pier at six o’clock on a cold, wet, windy December morning.

  Particularly if like me you are on the verge of what is too glibly called a nervous breakdown.

  For those first few minutes after arrival I thought that I must have died without noticing it—I had seen many men die like that—and had been ordered to this corner of hell where it was always raining, and the wind was always blowing, and instead of sunshine there were these feeble lamps, and the inhabitants were black and yellow seal-like creatures who spoke in unintelligible grunts and completely ignored me as if, not yet properly enrolled, I was still invisible to them. In the background all the time were plaintive bleatings.