A Dark and Distant Shore (77 page)

The minister’s arm changed direction. ‘And you, Maggie Tosh, with your bairn in your arms and you wed not three months past! Woe unto you, you lightsome woman! The Lord’s eye is upon you, too, and dinna you forget it!’

Mr Gunn’s own eye roved for a moment, and then – while the congregation began to look exceedingly shifty – pounced. This time it was Archie Macpherson, guilty of playing golf on the Sabbath; and then Mary Maginty of the whoreson smile; and Ellie Meikle, who practised abominations with eggshells and mutton bones. ‘Beware the wrath of the Lord!’

Gideon, quite unable to imagine what kind of abomination anyone could possibly practise with an eggshell, turned to Vilia for enlightenment. ‘Fortune-telling,’ she murmured.

It was at that point that Mr Gunn turned his attention to absent friends – in the persons of Magnus Telfer and Edward Blair. He had a fine talent for invective when his heart was really in it, and no nonsense about turning the other cheek when someone offended him. Magnus had offended him considerably. ‘He will not, devil’s spawn that he is, consent to see the light, but clings like a barnacle to yon rotting hulk that calls itself the Established Kirk, yon midden, yon rubbish dump of the carnal-minded and the dead of soul, yon apology for a kirk, wallowing like a sow in the mire of Erastian heresy.’

Gideon, sorely tried, succeeded in keeping a straight face, though he didn’t dare glance at Vilia to see how she was taking it.

‘Idle, impious and parsimonious... cock on a dunghill... offspring of Belial... pride and self-glory that will turn into a reproach and a hissing... Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay!’

With horrified delight, Gideon waited to hear what Mr Gunn was going to say about Edward, but, in the event, it wasn’t funny at all. ‘Five bairns has his wife failed to carry to their full term, and the boy that lived, lived but for ten years in a state of idiocy. There is none to follow Edward Blair but a wee lassie. You would think, would ye not, that the warnings of the Lord had been clear enough? But Edward Blair hasna heeded them...’

Gideon had just turned to Vilia to comment, with distaste, on Mr Gunn’s total disregard for human decency, when he saw her mouth open in blankest astonishment. Then the minister’s voice roared, ‘And that a woman from this impious family should defile the kirk by being here today is a blasphemy against the Lord’s name!’

He was pointing fully at Vilia. Her mouth closed again with a snap, and the hot colour flooded to her cheeks only to drain away as swiftly as it had come.

‘A woman contaminated by contact with sinners like these – aye! But a sinner in her own right, too!’

Vilia’s face was unreadable, but Gideon knew that her mind must be racing, as his was. What the hell did Gunn know? He was hideously well informed. And whatever he knew, nothing was going to stop him telling three thousand people about it. Gideon listened as if all five of his senses were merged into his hearing alone.

The minister started off innocuously enough. ‘It is the duty of a wife to persuade her man against unrighteousness, to lead him into the paths of sanctity. Only that way can she atone for the sins of Eve, yon first accursed woman who led Adam astray, and all men after him. But does Mistress Cameron do any such thing? No! Born herself a child of these parts, bound by her paternity, and by tradition, and by the Lord’s command to cherish her people as if they were the bairns of her own body, yet has she failed them! Failed to persuade her man to see the light. Failed to make him forsake the trimmers, the time-servers, and follow the Free Kirk of the Lord.’

Very gently, Gideon began to let out his breath.

‘Failed to bring him round to the knowledge that the onus lies on him to give to me, the Lord’s anointed, and to you, with whom his bounden duty lies, even a few paltry yards of the Eternal Father’s soil for the building of a kirk for His worship and a manse for His minister!’

Mr Gunn had an axe to grind, and the sound of it was sweet to Gideon’s ears. As long as he was more interested in squeezing a few acres out of Magnus than he was in Magnus’s wife’s personal imperfections...

‘You would think, would you not, that sins like these would be enough for any woman? But are they? No, I tell you, they are not.’

Gideon closed his eyes. He could feel Vilia, beside him, taut as a bowstring.

‘You would think, would you not, that it was enough to fail to lead folks into the paths of righteousness? But this woman, like her sister Eve, beckons them into the paths of evil. There can be –
there can be, I say!
–
no more flagrant proof of defection from the way of the Lord, no more sinful opening of the floodgates of licence, no fouler blot on the pure faith of the Gospels than what this woman has seen fit to lend her name to!’

Vilia’s gasp was scarcely audible. It sounded to Gideon, for a disbelieving moment, as if she had choked back a laugh.

She had. For the next word that the minister bellowed was, ‘Dancing!’ Gideon blinked.

‘Promiscuous dancing! This woman, no more than three weeks since, flaunted her name at the head o’ a piece of paper wanting folks to buy tickets for
a ball
in Inverness! Patroness, she called herself! Patroness of an assembly for that profane and dissolute pastime practised by the Israelites during their base and brutal worship of the Golden Calf at Bethel! Practised by that unhappy lass who danced the head off John the Baptist! Practised by yon perverts of Sodom and Gomorrah before the Lord in his wisdom rained down fire and brimstone upon them as they jigged away to their fiddlers’ tunes! Did the fiddle strings themselves not vanish in flame, and did all those unnatural sinners for a distance of thirty miles around not pay for their iniquities? For the Lord made them fry in their skins! But this woman – aye, you, Mistress Cameron! – this woman lent her name to these selfsame intemperate, lewd and lascivious practices. Take heed, woman! Take heed, for the Lord’s eye is upon you!’

Without moving her lips, Vilia murmured in a tone of hurt remonstrance, ‘But it was a
charity
ball, Mr Gunn, dear.’

And at last the minister’s tone changed, and it seemed he was coming to an end.

His voice flat, and the words contemptuously spaced, he said, ‘There may be some among you who say that, in the past, this woman has done you a kindness. But I say to you that whatever shows like goodness in her or hers, it is nae mair nor the light that shines from a creeping insect on the braeside at night. Bright in the dark, aye! But when the morn comes and the sun rises, you see that it is but a crawling kail-worm after all. Be not deceived by the Philistines and the Pharisees, but see their kindness for what it is – a hypocritical mask on the sour and raddled face of anti-Christ. We will now say the Lord’s Prayer. Our father, which art in heaven...’

Offensive and vulgar! Coming from Mr Gunn, what else? But not damaging. Gideon, feeling as if his nerves had been scrubbed, wrung out, and hung to dry in an equinoctial gale, took a deep breath and, turning to his mother, said calmly, ‘Can we go now?’

It was an index, Gideon realized later, of the tension Vilia had been under for the last few months that her amusement over Mr Gunn’s denunciations didn’t sound convincing. Although her mouth smiled and her brows lifted in mock affliction as she recalled special gems from the minister’s invective, her eyes were dark and opaque. Her son thought drily that, deep down, she was as resentful over the minister’s ingratitude to her – who was on his side – as Magnus had been with less justification.

Gideon’s own mind was churning as he tried to sort out his impressions of the service and the congregation, and his head felt full of words, not only the preacher’s but the ones he himself was going to use in his article for the
Times-Graphic.
He knew instinctively that it would be the best thing he had ever written. The moment they got back to Kinveil, he would have to start getting it all down on paper. And then he remembered, irritably, that Magnus would be suspicious if he sat down to scribble busily after what had supposedly been an innocuous day’s fresh air and exercise in the hills.

It was almost dark when they reached Kinveil, and Magnus took it as a personal affront that they had been out for so long. ‘Never been able to understand what’s so wonderful about struggling up a hill just to look at a view. I ask you, Gideon, do
you
understand these fellows who go in for climbing mountains just because they’re there? Silliest thing I ever heard. Your mother says it’s the challenge, and the mental and – what was it, Vilia?’

‘Mental and bodily discipline.’

‘Oh, yes. That’s right. Mental and bodily discipline. But I don’t see it myself. Fancy putting yourself to all that discomfort when there’s no useful purpose in it. It’s incredible. Beyond belief.’

‘Every man to his taste, my dear,’ Vilia murmured. ‘You’ll forgive me if I go and change.’

Gideon sensed impending trouble all the way through dinner, though Magnus was as impervious as always, prosing on about nothing in particular with the relentless fluency of one who knew that his every word was worth more than rubies. His pauses were traps even for the wary. His voice was inclined to drop at the end of a sentence, making it sound – especially to two people who weren’t listening to him – as if he had finished what he was saying. Sometimes he waited long enough for Vilia or Gideon to open their mouths before cutting them off in mid-breath by resuming his monologue. Sometimes he even went so far as to allow them a sentence or two, before taking advantage of the first opening to go on, reprovingly, ‘So what could I say to the fellow after that, except...’

For the first time, his own equanimity frayed by tiredness and strain, Gideon had a glimpse of what Vilia must have been through in the last five years. Until this evening, he had suffered Magnus with a kind of amused resignation, taking wagers with himself as to what Magnus’s opinion would be on any given subject and, when that palled – as it so soon did, for he was tiresomely predictable – experimenting to see if there were any way of diverting him from his chosen subject, short of getting up and walking out of the room. There wasn’t. Magnus would have made an excellent politician, for he had the born politician’s gift for moving sideways from any question he was asked, in such a way as to enable him to answer the question he would have
preferred
to be asked. With a mental shrug, Gideon had accepted the inevitable and learned how to listen to Magnus while devoting his mind to other matters.

But tonight Magnus was remarkably difficult to shrug off. Although Gideon had noticed, often enough, that he tended to become less blandly assured and more dogmatic as the wine level in the decanter sank, he hadn’t previously sensed the note of petty viciousness. Was the old boy more alive to other people’s moods than one gave him credit for? Yet although Vilia’s nerves were undoubtedly overstrung, she was behaving impeccably. When Magnus declared, idiotically, that these new adhesive postage stamps were damned unhygienic and probably responsible for half the disease in the country, what with people licking them, and so on, she merely said, ‘But only one person licks them, my dear.’ Though her tone was perfectly – indeed, commendably – polite, Magnus snapped back at her as if she had offered him a deliberate insult.

Later, in the Long Gallery, she went to a cupboard for the chess set, and Magnus, perfectly aware of her intention, stayed where he was, blocking her way. With a smile, she said, ‘Excuse me, my dear. I’d like to get into that cupboard.’ He jerked away. ‘Well,
I
don’t know what you’re doing, do I? You might have been going to fetch my newspapers for me. But you wouldn’t think of that, would you? Oh, no!’

Wordlessly, she handed him the topmost of the pile of newspapers that always arrived on Saturdays. It was the wrong one, of course. ‘I’ve read that one. You just don’t think, do you? It’s Wednesday’s I want.’

‘Is it? I’m sorry.’

For a few beautiful moments there was silence, broken only by the almost inaudible sound of Vilia setting up the chessboard and the rather more audible crack of Magnus shaking out the pages of his newspaper.

Gideon studied the board, looking forward to an hour of peaceful concentration.

‘Well,
that’s
something to be grateful for!’ Magnus exclaimed.

Automatically, Vilia responded as he expected of her. ‘What is?’

‘That agitator fellow, O’Connell. The Irishman. You probably don’t know, since you never read the papers...’ Vilia’s lips tightened. ‘...but he cancelled a mass meeting in favour of Repeal of the Union with Ireland at Clontarf last month. It says here they’ve arrested him. Conspiracy and sedition. Splendid! I hope they hang him.’

Gideon, catching his mother’s eye, swallowed his startled objection and turned his attention back to the board again.

Magnus flapped over another page, and Vilia made her opening move. Gideon, recognizing the gambit, grinned at her as he reached for his pawn.

‘Incredible!’ said Magnus. ‘Gideon, you know that fellow Mathews, that priest who was preaching temperance all over London last month? It says here that he gulled half a million people into signing the pledge. It’s outrageous. Shouldn’t be allowed. Fellows like that should be stopped. The government should do something about it.’

‘Yes,’ Gideon said peaceably.

‘Damned dangerous nonsense, this teetotalism. You never know what things like that can lead to.’

‘No,’ Gideon agreed.

‘It’s all these dissenters and nonconformists, you know! A deliberate attack on the whole fabric of the country, trying to undermine the established institutions.’

‘Yes.’

Magnus sniffed, and relapsed into silence again.

After a while, Gideon became aware that his stepfather had transferred his attention from his newspaper to the chess game, possibly – Gideon thought uncharitably – because the chessmen provided a larger and clearer focus for his slightly inebriated gaze.

‘There you are!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘If you hadn’t moved your knight, Vilia, Gideon wouldn’t have moved his.’