Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  The fresh air, in bucketfuls, soon revived me. Things became themselves. The pier was busy with the arrival of the steamer. People, wrapped in oilskins, had come to welcome friends and relatives and take them home. They were speaking in Gaelic because it was their native tongue. They paid me no heed for the good Hebridean reason that they did not know me; besides, since I was wearing a kilt, they assumed that I was some English toff come to stay with one of the lairds, and therefore all the more none of their business. The bleatings came from sheep waiting to be put on board. As for the rain and wind, these would surely abate, and the sun would come out.

  I saw my commercial traveller climbing unsteadily into a car which then drove off into the darkness. I hadn’t time to go over and apologise.

  At the agent’s office I was told a bus would be leaving at nine o’clock. It would drop me off at East Gerinish road-end. That was to say, if Big Ian didn’t think it was too stormy to cross the big strand. Was I sure, though, it was East, and not West, Gerinish, I wanted to go to?

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Won’t the weather clear up?’

  ‘Not for the next twenty-four hours, they’re saying. It can go on like this for days, you know, weeks even. You’ll get breakfast at the hotel. The bus leaves from there anyway.’

  ‘How far is it to the hotel?’

  ‘Just a step, up the brae.’

  It turned out to be at least two hundred yards, and the brae was steep, made more so by the buffets of wind. These kept hurling seagulls about the still dark sky.

  I could not help thinking that it might have been wiser to have gone to sunny Australia.

  Other passengers were having breakfast. One was the commercial traveller. He was wolfing into bacon, sausages, and eggs. I felt relieved, not for his sake but for my own. If a peddler of soap and napkins could recover his self-confidence so quickly, there was no reason why I couldn’t.

  My hands, though, kept shaking.

  Only three times in my life had I felt so close to being demoralised. The first time was when I had been told that my mother was dead. I had had John Lamont and Uncle Tam to help me then. Indeed, one of the things I needed to purge my soul of was ingratitude towards those two good men.

  The second time had been when Archie was killed, and the third time when I had seen Cathie Calderwood in the asylum.

  Six other passengers were hoping to take the same bus as I. It stood outside, with dirty windows and bald tyres: hardly a fit vehicle in which to attempt a journey that, according to jocular remarks exchanged, was little short of heroic. No one, however, seemed to think that Big Ian would call it off.

  I expected therefore a stalwart Viking, with fair hair and bronzed cheeks, whose brawny hands would handle a steering-wheel as his ancestors’ had tillers out on the wild, unknown Atlantic. Instead, there arrived, shortly before nine, a tall, thin, pale, hollow-cheeked man, whom I would not have trusted to steer a girr along a sunny level street far less an aged bus across miles of dangerous sands, in a gale, through sheets of rain.

  I soon learned that I had misjudged him. Not only was he the only one to show no surprise when I told him I was bound for East Gerinish, he smiled in a friendly way and said that when I saw Kirstie I was to be sure and give her his regards. He did not mention her second name.

  I had met men like Big Ian before during the War. They too had undertaken arduous and dangerous tasks, and carried them out with unassuming competence. Achilles and Hector could not have outdone them.

  The difference between those small Glasgow toughs and Big Ian was that they had blasphemed often, whereas he was as grave as a priest.

  Often he would stop his bus, in the midst of that drenched gusty desolation, where by the side of the road a woman would be waiting, with a coat over her head and Wellingtons on her feet. He greeted her in quiet friendly Gaelic, like a blessing. If her parcel was too heavy for her he would carry it to her house, though this was no part of his duties and probably her husband was sitting snug in front of the peat fire.

  Every time he climbed back into the driving-seat he was like a father returning home, bringing with him confidence and security, though most of the passengers, including myself, were older than he.

  When we left the hard road and took to the soft sand at the big strand, the old man by my side, feeling me shudder and thinking I was afraid, assured me, in a mixture of Gaelic and English, that I had good reason to be.

  Yess, yess, there were posts marking the way, but chust the same you had to pe knowing where those posts were, pecause pe damn they would not come and look for you if you got lost. If you did get lost you would find yourself heading out for the open sea, as if it was a poat you were in, not a leaky pus, or you would get stuck in sand that was too soft. If you got stuck you would pe well and truly drowned when the tide came in. It did not come creeping in like a cat either, but came roaring in like a pull.

  Put there was no need for me to be frightened. Big Ian could cross blindfolded. It was true, chust the same, that the pus was old and a week or two pack had trouble with its gaskets or some such thing, and might take it into its head to stop, in the prute way that cattle and sheep and puses just stopped. If that happened, well, in his opinion it would be petter chust to sit and wait and be drowned like chentlemen.

  The others in the bus listened with secretive smiles.

  I did not blame them for not knowing that my shudders had nothing to do with fear of crossing the big strand. How could they have known that more terrifying tides than those of the Minch and the Atlantic were threatening me? Admissions of my own blameworthiness, and realisation of the loneliness I had let myself in for in this howling wilderness, were gathering, and soon would come roaring in upon me from all sides.

  We got safely across.

  The old man, with a wink at the others, told me that I’d better relax now. I’d need a good rest if it was really East Gerinish I was going to.

  At the East Gerinish road-end, which had no distinguishing feature such as a gate, a sign-post, a fence-stob, or even a wheel mark, Big Ian set down my case in the inadequate shelter of a stone that, eczema’d with lichen, looked as if it belonged more under water than on land; as did all other stones in sight. Round it grass and heather raced like demented creatures. Wherever I looked, and it needed strength and determination to stand up and look anywhere, I could see only bleak sodden moorland, but not much of it because of swirling curtains of rain, that wasn’t rain either but dispersed sea. My lips tasted salt. Balls of brownish spume kept flying past. The beast from whose back they had been torn was the fierce Atlantic. I heard it roaring. I also heard, in my mind, Betty and Dorcas laughing.

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ said Big Ian, ‘but maybe you’d be better in the Inn at Cullipool, that’s three miles along the road, till it clears up anyway.’

  I thanked him but said I was determined to go to East Gerinish.

  ‘Well,’ he murmured, staring into the rain, ‘she should be along soon. She knows you’re coming. In any case, she’ll be for the bread.’

  He meant a cardboard box which he had put off with my case. It had the name of a Glasgow baker on it.

  Dry and comfortable, I would have found amusing this Gaelic way of muddling the sexes in English. No doubt the carter from East Gerinish was a hulking fellow with hands like shovels. Crouching behind the stone, I could manage only the feeblest of grins, as I watched the bus disappear along the road in a cloud of spray.

  TWO

  ‘Ciamar a tha sibh?’

  The words, and particularly the voice in which they were spoken, roused me from my dwam of misery. Gruff, yet with an odd trace of sweetness, it was the voice of either a virile woman or an effeminate man. Looking up, I saw a bulky figure wearing a long black oilskin coat kept closed by a length of tarry rope round the waist, a potato sack over the shoulders, a yellow sou’wester tied round the chin with more tarry rope, and shaggy crotal-coloured trousers tucked into big Wellington boots. A man, I thought. The face,
as much of it as could be seen, was a mixture of humour and melancholy, with blue eyes, longish nose, and wide mouth. Yes, a man. The cheeks, though, were smooth and tanned, and the lips red. A woman, then. But he or she was smoking a stubby pipe. So a man, surely.

  ‘I was not thinking,’ he said, speaking slowly in what was a language he did not use often, and tapping my suitcase with the toe of his rubber boot, ‘that you would be having so big a case.’

  I wondered if this was the East Gerinish idiot on the loose. I had read that, because of generations of inbreeding, tuberculosis and imbecility were rife in the townships. In Big Ian I had seen evidence of the one, here surely was evidence of the other.

  ‘I am waiting,’ I replied, ‘for the carter from East Gerinish. My name is Fergus McGilvray. (This was the name I had decided to give myself.) My great-uncle, Angus McGilvray, had a croft in East Gerinish. I have come to live in it.’

  My diagnosis was confirmed by the way his top-heavy head (he seemed to have a cloth-cap under his sou’wester) began to sway from side to side in an idiot’s gesture of uncalled for silent mirth.

  ‘I am the only carter there is in East Gerinish,’ she said, for the balance had swung in favour of her being female. ‘My name is Kirstie McDonald.’

  So this was the Kirstie Big Ian had mentioned. It was not, though, a propitious time to pass on his regards.

  She held out a hand as hermaphroditish as the rest of her: long and fine-boned like a woman’s, with the strength of a man’s, and a strong man’s at that. If she had wished she could have squeezed tears into my eyes. For a moment or two it looked as if she would wish.

  If not quite an idiot, she was certainly enjoying some kind of idiotic joke at my expense.

  She took the pipe out of her mouth to spit, delicately. The rain spat much harder against her oilskins. I remembered I was a gentleman. No woman, however peculiar, should have been out in such weather. Her male relatives ought to be ashamed of themselves.

  ‘I think maybe it is better for you to go to the inn at Cullipool,’ she said. ‘Till the weather clears up.’

  ‘Is there no inn at East Gerinish?’

  She laughed as if I had asked a very droll question.

  ‘Well, no matter. I intend to go there anyway.’

  She murmured some Gaelic. I learned later that it meant: ‘God help the man!’ In English she added: ‘You carry the bread. I will carry your case.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a horse and cart?’

  ‘Glas is too old for such weather. He’s twenty-two, and he’s got rheumatism. So has Djilas my dog.’ She laughed. ‘We all have rheumatism. You will have rheumatism yourself soon. I did not think you would bring so big a case.’

  ‘In my letter to McBrayne’s agent I made it clear I would have a fair-sized suitcase with me. However, it is out of the question your carrying it. I shall carry it myself. It can’t be all that far.’

  ‘It’s quite a step.’

  I remembered with a shiver how long the step from pier to hotel had been.

  ‘No more than a mile surely?’

  ‘A bit more.’

  ‘Good God. Well, help me get it up on to my back, please.’

  It may well be imagined with what gnashes of dismay I got ready to take on my back that big heavy suitcase. Since becoming an officer and gentleman seventeen years ago I had hardly ever carried anything heavier than a cane or a thin brief-case.

  Together we heaved the case up on to the stone, on its end. I crouched with my back to it. She lifted it on to my back. My fingers tried to grip. I staggered forward, struck my foot against a small stone, and fell on my face, with the case flattening me into the wet heather.

  ‘Ach, it’s too heavy for you,’ she said.

  ‘If it’s too heavy for me, you glaikit bitch,’ I mumbled into the heather, ‘then it’s too heavy for you.’

  I was soon proved wrong.

  With quick powerful movements she got it on to her back. Shouting to me to remember the bread, she set out along what passed for the road to East Gerinish but which was just a track overgrown with heather, grass, and reeds, littered with stones, and crossed by roaring burns. There was no shelter from wind and rain. Even stumbling along without a burden would have been an ordeal. Soon my feet were soaked, my back sore, and my legs aching. However much I tried to hurry, reeling and gasping and shouting with rage, I kept falling behind. She marched on ahead with witch-like speed and strength.

  I needed a rest long before she allowed me one. Peering into the rain, I at last saw, to my surprise and relief, that she was seated on a stone by the side of the track, talking to someone wearing a red sou’wester. Doubtless he had come to help. I hurried, for there was something I wanted even more than to hand over the box of bread to someone else to carry: this was to talk to someone normal, someone whose sex was beyond doubt, someone who would represent East Gerinish a lot more favourably.

  I was within twenty yards of the person in the red sou’wester before I realised, with incredulity, that it wasn’t a person at all, but a posting-box for letters, fixed to a wooden post, at a place where another track branched off.

  At that junction there should surely have been houses in sight with smoke coming from the chimneys, and people living in those houses who wrote letters and posted them, and who had kettles steaming on hobs. But I saw only desolate moors, interspersed with even more desolate lochans.

  I made out the name East Gerinish on the rusted white plate, and the hours of collection. These were Mondays and Thursdays at 3pm.

  This reminder of civilisation made all the more unbearable the cold, wet, windy wilderness all round.

  ‘Where in God’s name are all the houses?’ I asked.

  She waved her pipe. I noticed how blue, indeed how beautifully blue (milk-wort blue as I discovered later) were her eyes.

  ‘How big is the township?’ I asked.

  There used to be thirty crofts worked once.’

  ‘How many now?’

  ‘Two. Just two.’

  I knew about the depopulation of the Highlands and Islands, and had expected her to say that the number had been halved, but two was the answer of imbecility.

  I reminded myself that not many miles from this place another gentleman had had once to endure rain and gibberish.

  I knew that I ought to offer at least to take a turn of carrying my case. Charles Edward Stuart would not have offered, so I did not.

  We moved on. Soon I saw the first building of the township. From a distance I thought it was a bunch of cattle, but surely not even Highland cattle would be so stupid as to huddle up there, exposed to the full violence of wind and rain. Nearer, I saw it was like a jail, with very small windows.

  ‘The church,’ shouted my companion.

  I saw then the stone cross on the gable-end. I also saw that part of the roof had fallen in. No service had been held there for many years.

  No doubt another church had been built, in a more sheltered spot, with more generous windows and more comfortable pews. Even in East Gerinish religion must have moved with the times.

  I trudged on. We were now in the midst of the township. Every croft seemed to have been abandoned long ago. No dogs barked at us, no cocks crowed, no sheep bleated, no cows lowed, no children laughed. There was only the sound of the wind howling round those forsaken walls.

  Further along Kirstie had put down her load again and was seated on a big mossy stone, as comfortably as if it was an armchair in front of a warm fire.

  She watched me calmly as I struggled angrily past what had been a gate once, formed out of a bed end with one brass knob still attached, and went up a muddy and stony path to the nearest croft house. Everywhere were signs of life past, none of life present. A zinc bucket that once had contained tar. Fragments of wool on rusty barbed wire. The broken-off handle of a spade. An old boot. A chipped tinny. At the door, which was open, was a shrivelled rowan tree, warder-off of bad luck.

  The turf on the roof had fallen in and co
vered the floors. Heather grew inside the house. Among the scorched blackened stones of the fireplace lay a rusty poker. In what must have been the pantry I found a bent spoon.

  Outside again, I easily saw why the people of that house had been discouraged and gone away. There were still signs where the unwilling earth had been cultivated. Backs must have ached here often, and bellies too.

  I plodded along to where Kirstie sat smoking happily, as if the sun was shining. If the exodus had been gradual, over a period of years, she must in her lifetime have seen many families leave.

  The bread will be getting wet,’ she remarked, calmly. ‘But sit down. You look distressed.’

  I sat down beside her.

  We were the only living creatures in sight. Not even a gull or hoody crow could be seen.

  She offered me a puff of her pipe.

  Thanking her, I took out my cigar case. My hands shook. She watched with child-like interest as I lit a cigar. It needed ten matches.

  This, I thought hysterically, was the only way to live with dignity, here or anywhere: be in no hurry, keep calm always, ignore wind and rain, forget soaked feet and aching legs, don’t worry about where you were going to sleep or what you were going to eat.

  ‘So East Gerinish is an abandoned township,’ I said.

  ‘They’ve all gone.’

  ‘Except two, you said. Your own family, I suppose. And what other?’

  ‘I have no family. Just myself.’

  Knowing no better, I felt sorry for her. After all, I was an intelligent man in possession of my right senses, with a cheque for five hundred pounds in my pocket-book; and she was a hermit with the simplicity of a not very bright child, and very little money. It seemed necessary to be sorry for her.