Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘Did your husband die?’ I asked.

  ‘I never was married.’

  ‘Your parents then?’

  ‘My father died three years ago. These are his clothes.’

  ‘He must have been a big man.’

  ‘He was very strong, even in his old age. This stone we are sitting on, he could have lifted it without breaking wind.’

  ‘I see. You must have inherited your strength from him. When did your mother die?’

  ‘When I was three.’

  ‘So long ago!’

  She chuckled. ‘What age are you thinking I am? Are you thinking I am more than forty?’

  More than fifty was more like it. Still, those absurd clothes would put years on anybody.

  ‘I am thirty-five years of age.’

  Four years younger than I therefore. Yet I believed her. She was as simple as milk. She would always tell the truth.

  She rose. ‘You will be as stiff as a board.’

  That she was right I soon proved, being hardly able to stand. I was shivering too.

  ‘It is not so far now to old Angus’s place,’ she said, heaving my case on to her back again, not, however, without breaking wind.

  THREE

  Since I had already made up my mind to make for Cullipool Inn as soon as I had had a rest, I suffered only slight disappointment when Angus’s place, mine now, turned out to be a small, bleak stone cottage with a tin roof, beside a small reedy lochan with two stoical swans in it.

  A path of pebbles led up to the front door; this was thick, with a lock fit for a jail or castle. It needed all the combined strength of Kirstie’s two hands to turn the key.

  What in God’s name was there to steal, I wondered, and where were the thieves.

  Kirstie murmured that old Angus had been a bit of a miser.

  Rain spouted from a burst rone-pipe. The house would be as damp as a sea-cave.

  I almost wept with relief that I had money to go and buy hospitality in a dry, warm inn. Glancing at my wrist-watch, and finding that it was now half-past two, I felt panicky. I must set off within the next half hour. I would take out of my suitcase what I needed for the night. Kirstie could carry the suitcase back to the road-end tomorrow. I would pay her for it.

  She refused to enter by the front door. Her boots were too muddy. The custom, she said, was for visitors to be let in by the front door only on Sundays.

  She spoke as if the township was still populous.

  A passage with a stone floor led through to the back door; this I found secured by three big iron bolts. I skinned a finger pulling these back.

  The damp in the house could be smelled. I touched a sofa. It was wringing wet.

  Sou’wester in hand, but cloth cap still on head, Kirstie stood sniffing the dampness. Her cap was bulky, as if she had a lot of hair under it. I noticed that she was tall for a woman.

  ‘Welcome home,’ she said.

  At the same time her stomach rumbled.

  Or perhaps it was mine. I felt hungry. She, who had worked so much harder, must be hungrier. I also needed to relieve nature.

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take me to reach the inn at Cullipool?’ I asked.

  ‘It is too late now. You would not get there before dark. I do not think you would get there at all. You would fall in a burn and be drowned.’

  She was right. I had neither the resolution nor the strength to walk five miles in this weather. I was too tired, too hungry, too cold, and too depressed. I was in a trap. If I spent a night in this damp house I’d die of pneumonia. Yet if not in it, where? I had noticed some bits of peat outside, but they were all sodden. It would be impossible to light a fire. Also, what could I eat? Kirstie’s soppy bread? With cold water from the lochan to wash it down?

  I had insanely assumed that there would be a shop in East Gerinish, the kind where anything from firelighters to sausages could be bought.

  Perhaps, though, this other family she had spoken of could put me up for the night.

  Their house is smaller than this one,’ she said. They do not have upstairs. And they have two little children.’

  ‘Good God. How can children survive here? How am I going to survive tonight?’

  ‘Come with me. My house is warm. There is food.’

  I accepted. It was not her fault she was a freak. If I had lived here all my life I would be a freak too.

  Earthy soul that she was, she divined my other, more urgent need, and pointed out of the window at the sentry-box of a lavatory.

  No attempt had been made to hide it behind a tree; there was no tree, in any case. Nor behind a wall, for there was no wall either. In clear weather it must be seen for miles.

  As I hurried over to it, she shouted after me that there was sphagnum moss beside the burn; it was softer than paper.

  The door had to be held shut by hand: there was no lock, not even a bit of wire. There was a board to sit on, with an oval hole in it; it fitted, not too securely, over the pail, which looked unbalanced. The floor was uneven; in fact, the whole thing had a tilt. A kilt proved more of a hindrance than an advantage. In my hand the wet moss looked, and in practice proved, not efficacious.

  All right, I thought, as I stepped out into the rain again, all right, I came to East Gerinish to learn humility. Here endeth the first lesson.

  There would, however, be no more quite so drastic. Tomorrow or the day after I would take the boat back to the mainland. From the most luxurious hotel in Oban I would telephone Betty and warn her that I was on my way home to Pennvalla. She would scream denunciations of me as a liar, a fraud, a breaker of promises, and a worm with no pride. I would retort that she was a monster of cruelty as well as of hypocrisy. She would say that Dorcas would be furious. I would tell her that Dorcas could go to hell.

  FOUR

  I was sobbing as I thought of that telephone conversation with my wife. I did not know I was sobbing until Kirstie patted and soothed me, as if I was an unhappy child.

  She helped me to take out what I needed for the night. Her delight was touching as she stroked my silken blue-and-white pyjamas (not those spewed on), the pigskin case containing my shaving equipment, the two flasks that contained my eau-de-cologne and Parisian talcum respectively, my white mohair dressing-gown, my slippers and my socks. She laid them, carefully, in an old brown suitcase that she found in a cupboard littered with mice dirt.

  I would never have thought that a woman in such uncouth men’s clothing would have roused my poet’s imagination, so long torpid. But she did. I saw her as an old maid grieving that she had never borne a child; and as the ugly virgin in a fairy-tale administering to the handsome prince.

  Quite unaware of these fanciful roles in which I was picturing her, she remained herself, simple as milk, strong as a bear, and as unlascivious as a whelk.

  As her guest I might have to undergo some tribulations, including bedbugs or fleas, but not, thank God, amorous embarrassments.

  She stuffed the small case ‘up her jooks’, to keep it dry.

  Her croft was about half a mile away, nearer the sea, for this could be heard roaring above the howl of wind and hiss of rain. I had not expected her to be a diligent or capable housewife either indoors or out, but even so I was taken aback by the untidiness all round her house. It appeared to be her habit, as it had once been her parents‘ and grandparents’ before her, when getting rid of any household utensil that was no longer of use, to open the door and toss it out, or up, for there was an old frying-pan amongst the nettles on the thatch of the roof.

  No wonder she wore Wellingtons. The mud everywhere was ankle deep: so much so that the old grey collie that came limping to greet us kept lifting its paws to shake them. Its barking, though elegiac, was a welcome sound, as were also the melancholy lowing and neighing that came from a low stone shed (where as well as the cow and the horse the privy was kept, as I was soon to be told), and the crowing of a handsome cockerel that strutted about among the debris, with his harem of hens.


  I had heard that it was almost a ritual requirement in those parts to lift a peat from the stack outside the house and take it in, as a gesture of friendship and goodwill. Whimsically therefore I picked one up. Instantly the cock and his hens, in the hope that I was about to scatter food, darted towards me. When he discovered that it was only crumbs of peat I was dropping he showed his disgust by leaping on to one of his hens, with intent to tread her. She, equally disgusted, threw him off with a flutter of angry wings. Crestfallen, he sauntered off, pretending that he had had his pleasure, like half the husbands in Scotland.

  Djilas’s reaction to my presence was just as dramatic. After a few sniffs at my knees, he lifted his head into the rain and howled, in passionate lamentation. Whatever it was that he thought would bring back to his legs the spring and ease of youth and to his eyes clear vision, or would simply make the sun shine warmly again, I was not it.

  For the first minute or two Kirstie’s living-room appalled me as much as the Orrs’ had done. There was no sick smelly infant asleep on a chamber-pot, but as against that the floor was of earth covered with reeds that squeaked when tramped on, either because they were dried up or because there were nests of mice or voles beneath them. Also, there was no putrid stench, but there was a great deal of peat reek that made me cough and caused my eyes to smart and water. There was no unshaven wife-beater in the set-in bed, but there was a broody hen.

  It did not take me long, however, to appreciate the great difference between this living-room and the Orrs’. This was a home, where after a while the very discomforts would be cherished; yon was a hell-hole of degradation. Here were earth and growth, yonder dirt and sterility. Here a man might become kippered, or have sore eyes, or walk stiffly because of rheumatism, or even grow feeble-minded, but he would always feel closer to old traditional ways of living and his soul would be continually refreshed.

  Naturally these were thoughts in general terms. My own destiny lay far elsewhere. Still, as I sipped the generous dram of whisky that Kirs tie poured for me, into a tumbler out of which a speck of peat or a dead insect had first to be fished by her pinkie, I felt more and more enthusiastic about the dignity of living so close to nature, and more and more scornful of the previous inhabitants of the township who had abandoned it to seek the illusory benefits of so-called civilisation in Glasgow or even, God help them, in Australia.

  Kirstie, who had poured a big dram for herself too, asked if I would like a hot bath. I replied fervently that nothing would please me more. Thereupon she pulled out from under the bed a zinc bath, not unlike the one I had been washed in as a child, only larger and shallower.

  ‘The water in the pot’s nearly on the boil,’ she said.

  So it was, for the scum on top of it kept trembling.

  As an experienced campaigner, I considered the situation. Though I would have to bath in a foetal position, I would be cleaner and fresher afterwards, more able to enjoy whatever repast she offered. There was another room in the house, but it had no fire lit yet, so the sensible place for the bath was right here in the living-room, over by the dresser, say, out of my hostess’s way as she prepared the meal. Modesty would not come into it, certainly not on my part, and surely not on hers either. Though she had taken off her oilskins she still wore the cap, a thick green sweater, the hairy trousers, and the Wellington boots. In any case, the peat smoke would make a screen.

  ‘Where do we get the cold water?’ I asked.

  ‘From the spring. I shall bring it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I did not feel ungentlemanly. It was her house. She knew where the spring was. She had on Wellington boots. It pleased her as a woman to serve me as a man.

  When she went out with the two buckets I pulled the bath away from the hearth. Then I seized the handle of the cauldron, intending to lift it and coup the contents into the bath; but I had to let it go in a hurry, not only because the handle was hot but also because the weight might have caused heart-failure or rupture. Resourcefully enough, I was carrying the hot water in panfuls when she returned. With hardly a grunt she heaved up the huge heavy pot and emptied it into the bath. Next, pushing aside my offer to help, she poured in the cold water, testing with her finger. Soon there was quite enough pleasantly warm if not scrupulously clean water for an adequate bath. Out of a kist she got a towel, rough as a sack but clean. I used my own cake of scented soap.

  Feeling more like a soldier in camp than a guest in a house, I was not a bit squeamish about taking off my clothes, though I did her the courtesy of turning my back. That there were no sexual currents flowing about the room was easily proved, for my indicator of such remained at minimum. In spite of the draughts, and the peat smoke, and the dog that crept in and, apparently in contrition, licked my back, I did not hurry. I took time to do, with decorum, what I had learned to make a practice of during the War, and which I had always done since, with Betty’s approval: that was, wash behind my foreskin.

  More like a batman than a housewife, Kirstie busied herself at her proper tasks, peeling potatoes and boiling them, doing the same with turnips, frying fish, and cutting bread. Whether she ever keeked at me, I could not have said, but I certainly did not catch her at it. Now and then I glanced round at her. That stout sweatered back and those baggy breeks would have been reassurance enough for the most prudish of men.

  By the time I was dried, shaved, powdered, combed, and dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, the meal was ready. An oil lamp had been lit, adding more smoke to the atmosphere. I had wondered if she would ask me to eat first, by myself, while she attended to my wants. If such had been her intention I had been going to urge her to join me; after all, it was her house and her food. True, I was now fit for a duchess’s boudoir, while she, from heaving sooty pots about, was sooty herself; and she seemed determined to keep her cap on.

  As a hostess, she had done her best. The tablecloth was clean enough, though badly scorched through careless ironing. My fork had relics of food embedded between the prongs. The blue delf was heavy and cracked. The table rocked, because of the unevenness of the floor. All the time I had an apprehension of mice running up my legs: reminiscent of the time when, seated on my grandfather’s front steps, I had been afraid of the bumble-bee stinging my pintle.

  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the meal. The fish was plentiful and fresh, the potatoes not too hard, the turnip not too watery, and the sour milk not too sour; but it wasn’t really the food that made the meal so enjoyable, indeed so memorable, it was the knowledge that in that wilderness of moor and loch, on the edge of the stormy sea, with the wind still roaring and the rain lashing, we were as remote as Eskimos from the petty worlds of social pretension and of literary gossip-mongering.

  Why not, I mused, stay here and become a poet again?

  (In Glasgow I had bought a book on how to grow good crops and raise fat cattle in the wet and windy West Highlands. All that was needed were years of back-breaking work, prodigious luck, and lots of capital.)

  During these somewhat wistful cogitations, I did not pay much attention to my hostess. I now hastened to make amends.

  ‘Well, Kirstie,’ I said, belching loudly and picking my teeth with a matchstick, ‘that was excellent fish. I notice you get your bread from Glasgow. Where do you get your fish?’

  ‘I caught them, with Dugald.’

  ‘Dugald? Who is Dugald?’

  ‘Dugald McLeod. He has the other croft, him and Mairi and their two little children, Ailie and Hector. We have a boat, you see, but it is an old boat. If we had money we would buy a better one with an engine, and then we would catch more fish and maybe lobsters and sell them to the hotels. That is Dugald’s idea. Or maybe it is Mairi’s idea. She is the clever one.’

  She spoke earnestly, and looked so dignified, in a primitive kind of way, that in respect I stopped belching and picking my teeth. She was not a lady; she was scarcely a woman, in those mannish clothes; but she loved her native township and this vision that she and the McLeods had of reviving
it, though foolish, was praiseworthy. In a boat she would be very useful. With strength like hers to row what need of an engine?

  ‘Mairi and Dugald said they would want to talk to you if you came.’

  ‘They will have to be quick if they want to do that. I have decided to leave tomorrow at nine o’clock. What do they want to talk to me about?’

  ‘About the boat, and other things. I could tell you better in Gaelic.’

  ‘I’m sorry I do not have the Gaelic, though my grandfather did. Tell me in English.’

  ‘It is a great pity, Mairi and Dugald think, that all the pieces of ground that were once cultivated years ago with much hard work, should be going to waste. They think it could be turned into good pasture again, or crops could be grown. Also they think that if the hill was drained it would grow good grass. In my great-grandfather’s time there were over a hundred head of black cattle in the township. They had their own bulls too.’

  It seemed a pity to douse her hopes, and my own dreams, with a bucketful of cold realism.

  ‘If there was that much prosperity in your greatgrandfather’s time, why did the people subsequently go?’

  ‘Mairi says there were too many people, too many mouths to feed. She thinks six crofts would be the best number. In those days there were more than thirty.’

  I was beginning to feel impatient with this optimistic and opinionated Mairi. Another bucketful had to be poured.

  ‘But surely the abandoned crofts, or at any rate their land, have reverted to the landowner?’

  ‘Mairi says that the laird has never done anything for East Gerinish. Therefore he has no rights.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But that wouldn’t prevent him from ordering you off or demanding rent. He would have the law on his side, too.’

  As the Countess of Sutherland had had, when Donald of Farr’s people had been burnt out of their homes.

  ‘Dugald says he will shoot anyone who comes to order him off or ask him for rent.’