Fergus Lamont

by Robin Jenkins

  I have mentioned before that Lowlanders in Scotland have a prejudice against Highlanders going back hundreds of years. The word ‘Hielan’ in the Lowland vernacular is synonymous with wrong-headed or bovinely stupid. The Lowlander thinks of the typical Highlandman, fresh from the heather, as beefy-faced, slow-brained, thick-tongued, and huge-footed. This is probably in revenge for the Highlanders’ view of Lowlanders as gallous, quick-witted, belligerent midgets. In reality Highland men, particularly Hebrideans, are usually handsome, in a refined black-haired Celtic way, or in a square-faced yellow-haired Norse way.

  Yet when I opened my eyes, there, glaring down at me was a perfect example of the Cowcaddens idea of a Highlander, except that it was tufts of black hair and not of heather that sprouted from his ears.

  It might appear arrogant of me to call stupid a man who could do so many useful things better than I: handle a boat or a plough, for instance, dig drains, build a jetty or a dyke, sow seed and plant potatoes, milk a cow or fleece a sheep, and—his masterpiece—carve up a carcase; but in spite of all these skills stupid Dugald undoubtedly was.

  It took the form of refusing to admit, or worse still of being unable to see, that there were other skills and qualities more valuable than his own, and that I possessed them. Because he could work fourteen hours a day while I fell exhausted after eight, he thought that he was, not just the stronger man, but the better. When he came to hear that I had published two volumes of poetry his only question was: how much money did they make? On my proudly answering that they had made no money at all he strode off, eyes asquint with the pressure of two opinions: that writing poetry was a job for unmanly fools, and that, even so, I must have been bad at it.

  Though he disliked Caligaskill he really shared his Deuteronomical morality, and believed that a married gentleman who slept with a crofter’s unmarried daughter deserved to be pelted with stones.

  Born in East Gerinish, he had gone at the age of 14 to work in a butcher’s shop in Inverness. After 19 years there he had come back to inherit and work his father’s croft, bringing with him his wife Mairi and his baby son Hector. That had been three years ago. Since then his daughter, Ailie had been born. Mairi’s own forebears were from Oronsay.

  This then was the big, ruddy-faced, ex-butcher glowering at me that sunny morning.

  ‘Eh? Where’s Kirstie?’ he demanded.

  He prefaced almost every utterance with that ‘Eh?’ In reproducing his speech I omit it to avoid tedium.

  I stood up, politely. The ruder he was the more urbane I must be. That was the aristocratic creed.

  ‘Miss McDonald will be here shortly,’ I said. ‘You are Mr McLeod, I presume? My name is Fergus McGilvray.’

  I held out my hand. He looked at it as if assessing its worth as meat. But he shook it, after rubbing his own on the backside of his trousers that were splattered with sharn.

  ‘Fergus? That’s Irish.’

  Others had said so, beginning with Aunt Bella long ago. My mother had liked the name, that was the reason why I had it. I liked it too. It meant, in the Gaelic, supremely choice.

  ‘Not many Ferguses about,’ he added.

  Like many of his remarks, that was impossible to reply to. So I patted his dog’s head. It looked more intelligent than he. At any rate it was treating me with more respect and friendliness.

  ‘So you’re old Angus’s nephew?’

  ‘Great-nephew.’

  ‘And you’ve come here?’

  ‘I’ve come here.’

  ‘What for? You don’t look as if you’ve done a hard day’s work in your life.’

  Again I made a fuss of his dog.

  ‘Working a croft’s hard work.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’

  ‘Are you going to stay here and try and work it?’

  ‘I may do so.’

  ‘A man in Lochmaddy has a boat for sale, made in the Orkneys, with a Kelvin engine. It’s going cheap.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Our boat’s done. It’s not safe. Are you any good in a boat?’

  I had once rowed a boat across Rothesay Bay. That was the extent of my seamanship.

  ‘I suppose I could learn.’

  ‘Did you spend the night with Kirs tie?’

  ‘Miss McDonald was kind enough to offer me hospitality.’

  ‘Kirstie’s not the cleverest woman in the world.’

  ‘Who would want to meet such a creature?’

  ‘What d’you mean? You’ve met her. You just spent the night with her.’

  ‘Not with the cleverest woman in the world.’

  ‘No. Don’t get smart, Mr McGilvray, just because you’ve got on a kilt.’

  I could see that for some time he had been wanting to laugh at my kilt, but laughter, that concession to the humorous side of life, was not something he did lightly or readily. I was so soon to learn that by the time he had made up his mind to laugh the risible situation was well past, and he found himself the only one laughing.

  We saw Kirstie approaching, bent under the weight of my suitcase.

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’ he asked.

  ‘That is my business, and hers.’

  ‘Her father is dead. She has no brothers. She is a woman on her own.’

  ‘I know that, Mr McLeod.’

  ‘She has no men-folk to look after her.’

  ‘Is she not able to look after herself?’

  ‘She is not so like a man as you would think.’

  Had he then seen that beautiful hair and those splendid breasts? No. His leer was sly, not lewd. He would rather be sly than lewd any day.

  Kirstie arrived. She did not set down the suitcase. He addressed her in Gaelic, no doubt discussing me. She replied in the same language. In an attempt to indicate to them how rude they were being I threw a few remarks in French to the two dogs.

  Kirstie gave me a wifely smile and then took the suitcase into the house.

  ‘Sometimes she is more like a child than a woman,’ said Dugald.

  ‘It is a wonderful thing to have the innocence of a child.’

  He sniffed at that like a dog offered meat by a stranger.

  ‘I don’t know about innocence,’ he muttered. ‘But if any man did her wrong I would choke him with my own hands.’

  ‘I should think she could do her own choking.’

  After a long pause—the conversation had been full of long pauses—he grinned. ‘That is true, that is very true.’

  Then, mercifully, we were interrupted by the arrival of his wife and children.

  Apart from Kirstie, Mairi McLeod and her two children, Ailie and Hector, were the reasons why I stayed so long and was so happy in East Gerinish.

  I loved Kirstie, and was more contented in her company than in anyone else’s; but there were times when some of her habits, such as her pipe-smoking and her breaking of wind (admittedly only when out of doors and engaged in strenuous work) caused my heart to sink a little. Also she could be quite aggressively possessive and treated me more like her child than her lover. In those moods she would even try to feed me with a spoon.

  Mairi McLeod was an unmarred delight. Quick to laugh, kind and frank, shrewd to advise, brisk and red-cheeked, she reminded me of Meg Jeffries, except that in Meg there must have been a tragic or unlucky element—why else would she have married McHaffie, a man as dangerous for her as Antony for Cleopatra?—whereas Mairi easily survived marriage to a man without imagination and humour, with her own imagination and humour in no way stifled. Daughter of a farmer, she was the best agriculturist of us all. As a good wife should, and as a clever wife will, she let her husband think that her bright ideas were really his own.

  As for fair-haired cheerful little Ailie and black-haired earnest Hector, they and I were to have many happy times exploring East Gerinish. Because they were so young, and I was a newcomer, we were at the same stage of getting to know and love the place. Dorcas, and to a smaller extent Torquil, had helped to extinguish the poet in me; th
ose two did a great deal to revive him.

  EIGHT

  Handing Ailie to me to hold—Dugald would be sure to let her drop, she cried cheerfully—and encouraging Hector to make a fuss of poor old confused Djilas, Mairi gave each of them a home-baked scone out of a pokeful she had brought, and then went into the house to say hello to Kirstie and help her make tea.

  She was evidently the kind of woman who could make a home out of a wet cave and a feast out of whelks; or, more realistically, out of a single-end and a stale loaf.

  I remembered poor silly pregnant Elsie Wishart.

  What helped little Ailie to become friends with me so quickly was hearing from the house her mother’s laughter, though it seemed to me, not knowing Mairi then, that the laughter was a bit too frequent and merry considering that she had only serious-minded Kirstie to joke with. I couldn’t help suspecting that much of it was provoked by the gentlemanliness of the bedmate that Kirstie had landed this time.

  After drawing back her head and studying me, especially my moustache, for a long minute, Ailie suddenly shoved her scone into my mouth, ordering me, in infantile gibberish, to take a bite. My interpreter was her brother Hector, who was sharing his scone with Djilas and the cockerel.

  Their father had gone over to have a close look at Kirstie’s old grey horse. It stood in a dwam, enjoying the sunshine. I guessed that he was telling it not for the first time, that it wasn’t worth its feed any more.

  Still, it was, all in, a happy scene. The cockerel showed he agreed by fluttering up on to the peatstack and uttering his most triumphant crow of the morning.

  Mairi came to the door and cried that tea was ready. She had taken off her old brown raincoat and was seen to be wearing a pink jumper and yellow skirt. She loved bright clothes. She could be seen coming a mile away. It made the pleasure of her company all the sooner.

  We made for the house, even Djilas and the McLeods’ dog and the cockerel, the last in the hope of a few more pecks at Hector’s scone.

  Mairi had, in a few minutes, tidied the living-room, made the bed, laid a fresh cloth on the table, set out the best china, and instead of the sooty tin teapot with string round the handle, produced a handsome china one with a carriage and pair painted on it. Her most magical trick, though, had been to transform Kirstie, whose hair was now held up by two red combs in Spanish fashion, and who wore a white blouse, black skirt, and black shoes with silver buckles.

  Even Ailie was impressed. She stretched out her arms towards her Auntie Kirstie who lifted and embraced her with a fondness charming to see but also ominous as a warning, for there were undoubtedly maternal longings in it.

  ‘Well,’ said Mairi, ‘I was just telling Kirstie that it’s silly to have nice clothes locked up in a drawer.’

  ‘Nice enough,’ grunted Dugald, ‘but they will not do for lifting stones.’

  Kirstie had explained to me that the job she and McLeod had in hand was the repair of their jetty.

  ‘We may not have very much in East Gerinish to be proud of,’ said his wife, ‘but one thing we do have is the finest-looking woman in the whole Long Island, and it’s a shame if we never get to see her.’

  I waited for her clod of a husband to pay the obvious, and justified, compliment. He did not, so I paid it myself. The two finest-looking women in the whole Long Island,‘ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Me? Och away. I’m like a wee tub compared with Kirstie.’

  Her simile was not only honest, it was also apt. Her own comeliness was domestic. To say that was not to belittle it, for, whatever female emancipators might say, a woman looked her best when busy in her house, making it into a home.

  Kirstie, on the other hand, with her long, lovely, melancholy face, and her unhousewifely habits, was like one of those creatures in woman’s shape that, according to Hebridean legend, now and then came from their other world to live among people, nearly always, alas, bringing doom.

  Those cups of tea, however, were as companionable as any ever drunk. Dugald tried slyly to speir about my past and my plans for the future, but his wife shut him up. I was in East Gerinish, she said, because I had a right to be there, and this was a little party to welcome me. There would be plenty of time afterwards for questions to be asked and answered, or not answered, on both sides.

  There was no doubt that the shrewdest questions would come from her. She seemed to think, judging from smiles I caught her giving me, that I was as much to be pitied as Kirstie, or at any rate to be sympathised with. Her husband lacked the insight to see that. All he could think of was that I was using my advantages as a gentleman to seduce a simple strong-backed woman who, if corrupted by me and my fancy ways, would no longer be useful to him as a lifter of stones.

  After we had finished our tea he wanted Kirstie to go with him to the jetty and get some work done while the sun shone. His wife had a jollier idea. If I didn’t mind, why shouldn’t we all go along to have a look at old Angus’s house and see what it needed done to it to make it habitable. While we were there we could have a look for the money that he was supposed to have hidden away. Of course if any was found it would belong to me, but it would be fun helping me to look.

  After yesterday’s storm I had expected to find the landscape a desert of sodden heathery bogs and swollen reedy lochans; and so it mostly was, but over all its vast extent the light was so radiant that I felt I could see not just for great distances but into time itself. The ruins of crofts, a mile away, seemed so close in that enchanted air that I saw not only the nettles and ragwort round the doors, but the people coming out for the last time: I could even see the grief on their faces. No wonder, I thought, this was the land of the second sight. If I stayed here I would be seer as well as poet. There were few places in the world where a man of compassion and intelligence might prepare to take up, for a moment or two, without sentimentality or vainglory, the burden of all the multitudinous evils and miseries of humanity, and by showing that they could be borne, even for so short a time, make them less incomprehensible and less terrible; but if it could be done anywhere it could surely be done here.

  While the others searched for the money, with the two doors and all the windows wide open, I was more interested in a family photograph of the McGilvrays, taken more than seventy years ago. It was not Angus, my squirrel or miser of a great-uncle who fascinated me—he was an ordinary-looking lad with very short hair and large hands— nor was it my great-grandparents, side by side like Pharaoh and his consort; it was my grandfather, Donald McGilvray, then a child of about six. He sat cross-legged and sailor-suited in the forefront, with a Bible held in his hands in the way that other boys would have held a kitten or a boxful of pet mice.

  Because he was the youngest, had he been given the honour of holding the sacred book, or had he demanded it as a right, since he had already shown himself the holiest of the family? Certainly he looked as if he had already learned to put righteousness before love: horrible in one so young. It was easy to see in him the kirk elder who many years later had hardened his heart against his beautiful daughter.

  What was much harder to see, though, was the lover who in Glasgow Central Station had pleaded with my grandmother’s family, bound for Sydney, to let their daughter Morag stay behind to marry him. I had heard that he had gone down on his knees on the hard cement, but that surely was apocryphal: refusing to kneel before the Lord God, how could he before Mr and Mrs McKenzie, formerly from Borinish in Skye? Doubtless they had pointed out to him, and to her too, that the sunshine of Australia would be better for her health than the rain of Gantock; and that, in any case, her fare had been paid for. She must have added her pleas to his, for her parents, in anguish at so hard a decision, had unexpectedly given in. When the train steamed out of the station she was not on it with them. Instead she had returned with my grandfather to Gantock where she did not have a single relative. They had been married in the Auld Kirk, as soon as possible after the banns were called. Thereafter she had lived long enough to give birth to my mother.<
br />
  Had my grandfather, this smug little boy grown up, never been able to forgive my mother for causing his beloved wife’s death? To the stern Calvinist no one was innocent, not even a new-born baby.

  Like Abraham too had he regarded the birth of a daughter, not as a sign of the Lord’s favour, but rather of His displeasure?

  (I could not help remembering that I myself regretted having so unkind a daughter as Dorcas. But what had that to do with the Lord, or my deserving?)

  Meanwhile the others were enjoying themselves looking for old Angus’s hidden treasure. Under the floorboards were found some banknotes nibbled to pieces to make a nest for mice. In all the amount found was two pounds twelve and sixpence, mostly in half-crowns. I gave it to Ailie and Hector.

  ‘I thought there’d be more,’ said Dugald.

  ‘Maybe Mr McPherson the lawyer in Lochmaddy has the rest,’ suggested Mairi.

  Mairi then proposed that we all go to her house for dinner, meaning lunch. To me she privately whispered that if I didn’t mind she and I might walk a bit behind the others and have a chat.

  ‘I’m going to call you Fergus,’ she said, as we set out, ‘and you’ve to call me Mairi. All we know about you is that you’re Angus’s great-nephew, from Edinburgh.’

  ‘From Gantock really. I was born in Gantock.’

  ‘Mr McPherson is as close as a scallop.’

  ‘Rightly so, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Well no, I wouldn’t, not in this case. He knows how dependent we must be on one another here in East Gerinish. We’ve been anxious to find out if you were likely to stay and work the croft and help with the boat. We badly need another man. Otherwise I’m afraid we’ll probably all have to go and leave the place to the gulls and geese.’

  ‘Would Kirstie go?’

  ‘Kirstie was born here. So was Dugald, but he’s kent other places since. She’s never been further than Lochmaddy in the bus. It’s really Kirstie I would like to talk to you about.’

  ‘I thought it might be.’

  ‘You slept with her last night, didn’t you?’