Chasing Angels (22 page)

‘I see,’ Bunty smiled amiably. ‘You don’t want to talk about it any more!’

‘No, it isnae that…’

‘Och, it’s all right, I’m a nosey old woman!’ she chuckled. ‘Well, I was standing on the top step of the ladders putting curtains up,’ she explained,
‘and I fell. Have you ever heard anything so stupid? Only old folk fall off ladders, I felt so angry for making such a fool of myself.’

‘Well, you’re hardly a teenager, are you?’ Kathy laughed.

‘What a thing to say to a friend!’ Bunty replied severely, feigning hurt. ‘That’s only on the outside, I’m seventeen years old in the inside, and that’s where
it counts!’

‘I think I’m about ten!’ Kathy grimaced.

‘There was such a fuss! They had to take me to the Raigmore in Inverness in an ambulance.’

Angus came in again with his now empty mug. ‘And despite everything I said, they insisted on bringing her back again,’ he said quietly.

‘You couldnae have lasted another day without me, and you know it!’ Bunty replied.

‘I offered them money to keep her for another week,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘or to send her back here and give me a bed there. But they’d had enough of her too,
and as I was the legal owner of the baggage there was nothing I could do about it.’

‘Listen to him!’ Bunty said. ‘Sobbed like a baby all the while I was lying in that hospital bed, the nurses told me, couldnae bear the thought of being without me. “For
God’s sake get up and take him away with you, the place is awash with his baby tears,” that’s what they said to me.’

‘Tears of happiness,’ Angus responded, going out the door once more, ‘I don’t deny it, that were cruelly turned to tears of sorrow when they told me I had to have her
back home or they’d all resign in protest.’

‘Och, get away with you! Look, you’ve dropped a stitch. Away and knit, you great nit!’

Angus wandered off, smiling to himself.

‘What’s he knitting?’ Kathy asked.

‘He’s teaching himself Fair Isle,’ Bunty replied brightly, pushing the gingerbread mixture into the oven. ‘We’ll be forced to wear things we don’t want once
he gets the hang of it. But don’t you worry, he’ll be on to something else soon.’ She eased herself into a chair by the kitchen table. ‘But at least it’s not frogs. I
barely managed to get through his frog phase.’

‘I heard about that!’ Kathy smiled.

‘Everyone in Lochaber heard about it!’ Bunty replied. ‘I know that every living being has a right to life, but I canny abide frogs and things. Everybody’s allowed
something not to like, aren’t they? Well frogs and things is mine. And as for those lizard creatures, scurrying about and turning their heads to look at you!’ She shivered theatrically.
‘Ugh! My son has told me of a few things he’s seen in his travels. Apparently, in India, they have cockroaches four inches long, and they can fly! We have enough trouble with those
damned midgies, but can you imagine those things coming at you? He says they turn and look at you too. And there are fishes somewhere that use their fins to walk out of water! Now that’s not
right, is it? And I bet they turn and look at you too!’ She shivered again. ‘Things that do what they’re not supposed to give me the grues!’

Kathy laughed with her, but she could see that Bunty was tiring. ‘Why don’t you have a lie down?’ she suggested.

‘Oh, I see. It’s heave the old woman into her bed, is it?’ Bunty asked severely, but she was getting up from the chair, leaning heavily on her stick. ‘Well, I’ll do
it, but just to be polite, you understand! Now remember, don’t let my gingerbread burn! Have a look at it in another hour and a half. Stick a knife in the middle, just pretend it’s that
swine of a man you had!’ she chuckled to herself. ‘And if it comes out with nothing sticking to it, take the tray out and leave it on the table there to cool.’

Kathy nodded, giving Bunty her arm to lean on.

‘Och, I don’t know what things have come to,’ she said, ‘leaving an amateur in charge of my gingerbread that’s famous all over the Highlands and Islands! And all
because of a pair of curtains too!’

They reached the sitting room that had been converted to a bedroom and Kathy went through the ritual of settling Bunty down for a rest.

‘On second thoughts,’ Bunty said, ‘don’t worry about it. I’ll likely smell when it’s ready myself.’

As Kathy gradually eased herself into whatever the job was meant to be, she and Bunty established a routine. She would take the older woman a cup of tea first thing in the
morning and leave her to come awake. It was a matter of pride to Bunty that she should wash and dress herself, though Kathy knew it took her a great deal of effort and time, but what did either
matter when she had an abundance of both? It was the way of life in these parts, there was little reason to go tearing around. Time passed slowly and easily, there was no pressure to be
super-efficient and to run yourself ragged. Depending on how Bunty was feeling, she either slept through what in other parts would be considered to be lunchtime, or slept in the afternoon.
Mealtimes were whenever people felt like eating, the clock wasn’t important. And while Bunty slept Kathy would tidy up quietly or explore the house. It was an impressive place, full of
oddly-shaped little rooms and others not so little. In one she discovered a collection of musical instruments, violins, violas, mandolins, all beautifully crafted in wood by Angus during that phase
of his life. They took up the entire room, lying at various angles against the walls and the furniture, as though they had been delivered by mistake and simply forgotten. Lying at the back of the
room were two beautiful dark wooden trunks, their entire surfaces covered in ornate carvings. She looked closer and ran her fingers over the wood, recognising individual scenes on the trunks. She
traced carvings of the house she was standing in, the hills behind, boats on the loch and the wildlife, deer, otters, eagles, all exquisitely worked into the wood. In another room she found
paintings in every style, delicate water-colours and strong oils, and from every school of art. There were some that were clearly influenced by Picasso, others Turner, all done by skilful artists
or, she thought, coming to terms with Angus’s ways, possibly by one. She was lost in examining the canvases when Angus entered the room, his knitting in his hands, and she sprang back,
blushing to her toes at being discovered, desperately embarrassed at being caught snooping. Angus smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

‘It’s your home,’ he said gently. ‘Look where you want.’ He walked forward and picked up a canvas that was clearly influenced by the cubists. ‘Bunty hates
this kind of thing,’ he laughed. ‘She’s a realist, you see, likes things to be as they are supposed to be, hates anything out of place.’

‘Like flying cockroaches and walking fish?’ Kathy said.

‘Aye. She told you that, did she? Our Rory is always writing home with stories he knows will make her grue, she kind of likes it in a funny way!’

‘And do you like the cubists?’

‘Och, it wasn’t about
liking
them,’ Angus replied. ‘It was about finding out how they did it. Once you know that, there’s no point in going on with it, is
there?’

Kathy nodded, but she wasn’t sure she really understood. To have the time and opportunity to do something you liked and did supremely well, that seemed to her a perfectly happy way to
live, but Angus loved the finding out, not the actual doing, and she wondered if there would be a time when his curiosity would have led him in every available direction. What then?

‘When I don’t have anything to find out,’ he said quietly, almost reading her thoughts, ‘that’s when I’ll turn up my toes.’

‘But all these things you have, the books, the musical instruments, the paintings, you must like them or you’d have sold them long ago.’

Angus shrugged again, turning his intense blue eyes on her, almost with disappointment.

‘Why would I bother?’ he asked. ‘Why would I waste time selling the damn things when I could be using it learning something else? They don’t matter, you see. As you said
yourself, they’re things, and things only have the value you want to put on them. It’s knowledge that’s important, the true value is in the knowledge itself.’ Then he turned
to leave, still knitting.

‘The pattern,’ Kathy said, indicating the work on his needles, ‘it’s really beautiful.’

‘Och, aye, I suppose it is,’ Angus replied, stopping and holding it up for examination. ‘It looks much harder than it is, it’s all in the tension really, and having an
eye for what colours go together. It’s not like Aran, mind, you couldnae do this while you were reading a book, you have to keep an eye on it. It’s a bit like tapestry in that
way.’

As he wandered off, she remembered the two carved trunks in the other room. ‘Can I ask you something?’

Angus turned to look at her. ‘Well?’

‘The two trunks. Did you make them too?’

‘Aye,’ he smiled. ‘Took me a bit of time too. That was one of my hardest jobs, but I have to say I was pleased with them,’ he chuckled quietly. ‘They’re for
the Campbell woman and myself when the time comes.’

Kathy stared at him for a long moment before she understood, then she didn’t believe she did. ‘They’re not … you don’t mean…?’

‘Aye.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘They’re coffins. Did you not realise that?’

Kathy shook her head. He had made coffins for himself and Bunty!

‘Och,’ he said softly, ‘you’re not shocked are you?’

‘No, no …’ she lied, aware that her eyes were wide with shock.

‘I see that you are!’ he laughed. ‘It was something I wanted to try and I had to work so hard that I suppose my pride took over,’ he explained. ‘It seemed a good
way of putting it to use. It’s all arranged. When the time comes they’re for Bunty and me, we’ll be cremated in them.’

Kathy was even more shocked than she had been. ‘You’re going to
burn
them? But they’re beautiful! All that work!’

‘Aye, but at the time I was learning an art,’ he explained again patiently. ‘And as I say, they’re only things, aren’t they?’

As he was talking she noticed that he was no longer looking as he knitted, and as he wandered off, leaving her to examine his past artistic experiments, she sensed that his Fair Isle period
would shortly be drawing to a close too, Angus had already worked it out.

He was the most generous individual she had ever encountered. There she was, a stranger in his home, and a Lowlander at that, not a local, and fair enough, he needed her to keep an eye on Bunty,
but he showed none of the irritation the elderly often feel when their routines are disrupted or their familiar territory invaded. In the evenings the three of them would sit together in the big
room at the front of the house, Bunty doing a crossword and swearing at it in that gentle accent that sounded like a lullaby for a baby, or sewing, ‘Though no Campbell could ever sew as well
as me,’ as Angus noted.

‘Shutup, you great fool!’ Bunty would reply.

‘If you have any problems with that crossword, just ask,’ he’d say. ‘You canny expect a Campbell to be literate after all.’

‘Hell,’ Bunty would say archly, ‘will freeze over before I ask for your help, Macdonald!’ and Angus would smile and turn back to what he was doing. He would sit by the
big window in the gathering dusk, reading, or knitting, looking up contentedly every now and again to gaze over Loch Shiel, and Kathy would sit with him, a small table between them, sharing it all,
and still he showed no resentment that she was intruding on his private, quiet moments.

‘The books,’ she said one night as they sat reading by the window. ‘They’re not “just things” then?’

It had been weeks since they had had that particular conversation, but Angus answered instantly. ‘No, no, of course not!’ he replied. ‘Books are different from everything else.
Every time you read a book you find something new in the very same words, a book is never the same twice. You’re always learning with books, you never finish.’ He looked at the book
open in front of her and smiled. ‘Sure, you know that already.’

She was learning from him too, she knew that just as surely. She had never met anyone she was more in tune with, they seemed to be naturally and instantly on the same wavelength. Whenever she
encountered him about the house or on the hills outside, whenever they spoke, she felt a pang of excitement in the pit of her stomach. Angus excited her, his mind, his thoughts, the soft, gentle
way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her. If she hadn’t known him, if she had seen him on the streets of Fort William, she knew she would’ve laughed at him, however quietly. She
would’ve glanced at his kilt, the Tam-o’-Shanter with the enormous feather sitting on top of the long white hair and beard, and made a swift, superficial judgement that he was a bit
weird; people did that all the time, of course, made swift, superficial judgements about each other. But now that she knew him, she realised how much she admired him. No, that wasn’t it. She
loved
this man. ‘
He’s nearly eighty!’
her voice echoed in her mind. ‘
You daft bugger, Kathy Kelly!’
and she laughed.

Angus looked up. ‘What?’ he asked.

She shook her head, still laughing, then to change the subject she said, ‘Nothing. Would you like a cup of tea?’

She loved watching the different lights flit across the loch, with the monument as the focal point. In the early morning there would sometimes be a purple-tinted haze, turning through the
spectrum to gold as the sun slowly broke through. When a shaft of sunlight pierced the cloud, it would suddenly illuminate the green of the ferns and trees and the purple of the heather and
thistles. Where light found rock high on the mountainsides, the seemingly flat surface would break into facets of light and shade, small crystals being uncovered as bright, silvery, reflective
shards. It was like the magic painting books she remembered as a child, where one sweep of a water-laden brush replaced black and white with a few colours. The colours were never as vivid as you
expected or wanted them to be, but that wasn’t the point, it was the magic of the thing that impressed you. But the magic colours uncovered on the hillsides by the shafts of light exceeded
all your expectations, all your hopes, and then they exceeded themselves again next time. In the evening, with the last rays of the sun turning the waters of Loch Shiel orange, the deer would come
down from the hills to graze in the silence. And there wasn’t a silence like it. It wasn’t simply an absence of noise; the silence itself could be heard, it had its own sound. But it
was a sound you didn’t hear exactly, you felt it somehow. Even when it rained there was a gentle, soft grey light about the place, and now and then a bright rainbow, with colours so vibrant
that you couldn’t believe they hadn’t been painted on, would straddle the waters of the loch. There were times when it seemed too perfect, too picturesque, and then you remembered that
Glenfinnan had stood here exactly like this, unchanged for hundreds of years, and even without the monument it had been naturally picturesque for thousands of years.