A Rope--In Case (16 page)

‘Tea?' I offered, but was glad when they refused.

‘Water's what I want,' said Johnny. ‘Just a good drink of water.'

‘I've got lemonade,' I told them. ‘Made from fresh lemons.'

‘Fresh?' exclaimed Erchy.

‘Well, pickled fresh,' I confessed. We rarely saw a fresh lemon in Bruach but the previous day I had found half a dozen of them washed ashore. They proved only slightly salty to the taste and the lemonade I subsequently made from them was delicious. I went into the cottage and brought out bottle and glasses. They spurned the glasses and shared the bottle between them, literally pouring the liquid down their throats.

‘I could have done with a drink of this last night to cool my whisky down,' said Erchy, wiping his lips.

‘What time did you get home from the party?' I asked.

‘Home? We didn't go home yet,' they said together and winked.

I laughed. ‘You Bruachites astonish me,' I said, shaking my head. ‘You seem to be able to keep going without sleep. I left the party at four o'clock and came to bed. I got about four hours sleep but I've been feeling like a limp rag all morning. That's why I brought the rug out here so that I could have a siesta.' I studied their faces and found no visible traces of their night's excesses. I knew only too well that my own face looked grey and drawn. ‘I wish I knew your secret of going without sleep,' I told them with an unsuppressable yawn clipping off the last word.

‘I don't go without my sleep,' retorted Erchy. ‘It's just that I don't need to go to my bed to get it. I can sleep anywhere, anytime, even when I'm walkin' round.'

I looked at them doubtfully.

‘That's true,' corroborated Johnny. ‘I'm the same myself. Why, I can even go to sleep when I'm riding my bicycle.'

My doubts vanished. Having driven behind Johnny and his bicycle on many occasions his statement only served to confirm my suspicions.

They had finished the lemonade and I willed them to go so that I could laze for another half hour before I had to think about the afternoon's chores. Johnny produced a packet of cigarettes.

‘Sho?' he offered. I refused.

‘What did you do if you didn't go home after the party?'

I asked with simulated interest. ‘You haven't been collecting driftwood all the time, have you?'

‘No, indeed. We went to keep an eye on Duncan Mar.' They both winked heavily again.

I put the question they wanted me to ask. ‘Why keep an eye on Duncan?'

‘Did you no hear what was happenin' then?'

I was suddenly alert. There is nothing like the prospect of a morsel of scandal to banish sleepiness. ‘I heard nothing,' I told them. ‘She hasn't turned him out already, has she?'

‘As good as,' Erchy replied. His eyes looked at me triumphantly through the smoke from his cigarette. He stood up. ‘I think we'd best be on our way,' he said.

‘Oh, come on,' I cajoled. ‘Tell me what's been happening?'

He relented. ‘Well, you'd be after hearin' that Bean Ian Beag said she'd only marry Duncan if he would buy a tombstone for her husband's grave?'

‘No!' I replied indignantly. ‘No-one mentioned a thing.'

‘That's the way of it, then.'

‘I wonder if he'll keep his promise now he's got her,' I murmured.

‘Keep it? Indeed she'd have none of him till the stone was paid for an' delivered to the pier on the mainland. It was not till she'd inspected it that she agreed to go to the registry office with him an' have the service. They arranged when they came out of the pictures for a lorry to bring themselves home along with some whisky for the party an' the tombstone for Ian. They dropped the stone off at the burial ground on the way back.'

Erchy and Johnny tentatively lifted the plank of wood from the dyke. ‘Well, I never,' I said, suppressing a giggle.

‘It's a fine handsome tombstone, too,' said Erchy. ‘One of them that's got a thing like a toilet roll hangin' over the top of it.'

‘A scroll,' I murmured. ‘But,' I went on, ‘surely Duncan's not going to have to erect it for her, is he?'

‘Indeed he's after doin' that right now,' said Erchy. ‘As soon as the party was over last night out came Duncan Mor with his spade an' graipe that he uses for his road mendin' an' off he went to the burial ground.'

I started to laugh cautiously.

‘We went down about an hour ago to see how he was gettin' on an' he was near finished of it,' Johnny took up the story. ‘He had the stone up by then an' he was just stampin' the ground down round it.' He tilted the lemonade bottle to his lips and drained it of its last drop.

‘Come to think of it, Erchy,' he added reflectively, ‘he was stampin' the ground down awful hard, wasn't he?'

Outside her cottage Sheena was swishing potatoes around in a pail of water. I waited until she should notice me. The potatoes had been grown on a thick layer of manure; they had obviously been lifted in wet weather, so that much of the soil still adhered to them. When cooked they would be eaten with their skins but this meagre cleaning was all they would receive beforehand. I had to assume that it was the amount of soil she ate that kept Sheena so healthy. She looked up and saw me.

‘Well, Miss Peckwitt!' she exclaimed and after wiping her hands down her rough apron she pulled me into the dim kitchen, surprising a couple of hens which darted squawking between our legs. She banished them through the open door with a lengthy admonition in Gaelic, cleared her throat once or twice and spat with masculine efficiency.

‘You'll excuse me, mo ghaoil, but I have a wee bobble in my throat,' she explained as she came back inside. She shifted the kettle from the hob to a hook over the pile of peats from which there came only a faint wisp of smoke. I saw her intention.

‘Sheena, I mustn't stay for a strupak,' I said hastily. ‘I'm on my way up to the post office and they'll be closed if I don't hurry.'

‘Ach, closed indeed!' Sheena's voice was arrogant. ‘You can always go round to the back of the house an' get them to open up for you,' she said, poking vigorously at the peats with her work-toughened fingers.

‘But I only want a stamp,' I told her.

‘Is it a stamp? Well, isn't that what they're there to sell to you? Indeed many's the time I've had them up from their beds at night to get just that from them,' she assured me. She looked at me, perhaps expecting to see an expression of approbation. I showed none. I had already heard many complaints from the postmistress as to Sheena's late night demands.

‘I only called in for a minute to say how sorry I am to hear of your brother's death,' I said.

‘Aye, aye.' She allowed her voice to break with conscious emotion. ‘My poor, dear brother's passed on at last.' She dabbed at her eyes with insensitive fingers, sniffed, and wiped her nose on her wrist.

It was three months since Sheena's bachelor brother Farquhar had been taken to the hospital and until then he had lived alone on the family croft inherited on the death of his parents. Alone, that is, except for a pet pigeon which at night slept in a makeshift cage beside the recess bed in the kitchen. Farquhar had been a big, handsome man of porage oats muscularity and had reputedly won prizes for various feats of strength including ‘tossing the caber'. At ‘sixty past' when I had first encountered him he was still a striking enough figure to be bait for romantically inclined female tourists—until they discovered he was nearly stone deaf.

Between Sheena and her brother there had, since the death of their parents, existed a state of tepid antipathy. She would call on him dutifully on the rare occasions when she was near his croft, which was at the opposite end of the village from hers, but her visits, rather than being directed towards his well-being, were more opportunities to upbraid him for not making himself available when she had need of someone to carry up her bolls of meal from the steamer, or had been desperate to gather in the hay before the threat of weeks of winter storms. Farquhar, no doubt aided by his deafness, remained loftily aloof to his sister's taunts and on his part avoided doing more than popping his head inside the doorway of her cottage to bark an abrupt ‘Ciamar a tha?' by way of hail and farewell. Occasionally, if he had caught more fish than he himself could use he would, in passing, tip a few into one of the tin baths or pails that stood outside ready to catch the rain, but join his sister in a strupak or sit down even for a moment in her kitchen he would not. It was accepted in Bruach that Sheena thought her brother should feel excessively guilty because he had inherited the whole of the parental croft while she had got ‘not so much as a scythe-stroke' as she put it. Her attitude towards him they believed was resentment because he displayed no evidence of any such guilt. However, when Farquhar had at last yielded to the illness that the Bruachites had for some time perceived to be affecting him and had taken to his bed, Sheena had attended him as assiduously as could be expected. It was whispered by some that her zeal was increased by a suspicion that the village nurse, who was popularly described as a frustrated spinster, might take the opportunity to make a pass at her brother while he was too weak to resist and thus perhaps gain possession of the croft. Whether or not there was any foundation for this suspicion there was no doubt that Sheena devoted herself to her brother's welfare. When, eventually, it was decided that Farquhar must go into hospital for examination, Sheena had come to call on me. Would she, she asked diffidently, ‘get the loan of a couple of my cushions'?

‘Of course,' I replied and hoped an explanation would be forthcoming without my having to do too much prompting.

Obligingly she had enlightened me. ‘You see, Miss Peckwitt, the ambulance was to take my brother to the hospital but when he heard of it he would have none of it.' She shook her head despairingly. ‘You know yourself how thrawn the man can be an' if he says he'll not do a thing then he won't. Not supposin' I stand on my head to ask him.'

‘How are you going to get him there?' I asked, realising that it was going to be well nigh impossible to get an ambulance or a car across Farquhar's rough and boggy croft at this time of year.

‘Well, you mind a couple of weeks back my brother an' Hamish went shares in buyin' that old lorry from the tinks that were here?'

I nodded, recalling the amused astonishment of the village when it was learned that Farquhar, the least mechanically minded man in the village, had paid good money for a ramshackle vehicle that looked as if chassis and body were trying to shake loose from each other and sounded as if the engine would be relieved if they did.

‘They had this idea they was goin' to make money for themselves out of it, though I doubt all they would make would be firewood.' She gave a derisive snort. ‘Now my brother's sayin' if he cannot get to hospital on his two feets he'll ride in his own lorry to get there.'

‘It might be the only way to get him across the croft,' I admitted cautiously. ‘But surely he's not thinking he can go all the way in it?'

‘He is so,' affirmed Sheena unhappily. ‘That's why we're needin' a few cushions to make him comfortable.'

I had already picked up all the cushions I possessed but Sheena stopped me. ‘We're not needin' them till this evenin', mo ghaoil,' she told me. ‘I'd be feared the hens would dirty them if I took them now. If you would bring them yourself over to Farquhar's house we could all see him away.'

‘Certainly I will.' Evidently Farquhar's departure was going to be something of an occasion. ‘What time?'

‘At the back of four,' she replied and hurried away.

At four o'clock I had started out for Farquhar's croft, carrying the cushions under my arms. When I arrived the lorry was already waiting outside the cottage, an old-fashioned red plush armchair borrowed from Janet sitting in the back. Morag and Janet were among the seven or eight women who had come to watch and to help if help were needed, and three or four of Farquhar's cronies were there to give advice. And of course Johnny and Erchy. The two younger men climbed on to the lorry and adjusted the position of the chair so that it was central with its back supported against the cab.

They stood back and surveyed it with the same care and attention they might have given to the arranging of the village queen's throne on a decorated carnival float. They called to me and I handed up my cushions. Morag also handed up two of her own. The men dumped them on the chair.

‘Not like that!' expostulated the nurse fussily, and gave complex directions as to how the cushions should be placed. She could not herself climb on to the lorry without aid and had shrewdly rejected the men's offer to hoist her up.

Farquhar appeared in the doorway. He had become pathetically weak and thin but he waved aside attempts to help him. We all watched anxiously as, dressed in his best suit which now hung loose on him and sporting a new cap which intensified the sallowness of his skin, he tottered to the lorry. There, he rested for a few moments trying to gain strength to climb up. To the suppressed injunctions of ‘wait now!' and ‘watch yourself, now, Farquhar!' he lifted first one leg and then the other. Then his head went down on his arms as he hung on. There were indrawn breaths of silent sympathy as we contemplated the feeble body that until recently had been so strong. After one or two more vain attempts Farquhar at last allowed the men to lift him aboard, and this they did with infinite gentleness. Solicitously they escorted him to the chair, arranged the cushions for his comfort and draped him with rugs. Farquhar was seen to speak a few words to Johnny and the latter jumped down from the lorry and went back into the cottage to emerge in a few minutes with the pigeon in its cage. Farquhar gave the bird a loving glance. The nurse's face turned bright red.