The Loud Halo (17 page)

‘Aye?' encouraged Erchy.

‘I'm tellin' you, what spoiled the weather altogether was when that ship the
Titanic
hit that iceberg. The weather's never been the same since that day.' He fitted his pipe back between his lips and took up his netting needle again, indifferent to our varied expressions.

‘Aye?' murmured Erchy politely.

‘Aye?' repeated Morag curiously.

‘Aye?' I echoed faintly.

Erchy changed the subject. ‘Did I hear you sayin' you was goin' to Tornish?' His voice was only faintly interrogative.

‘Yes, I'm going to call on Kirsty.'

‘Ach, that woman!' spluttered Erchy through a mouthful of tea.

It was always the same whenever anyone mentioned the name of Kirsty. ‘Ach, that woman!' would be the rejoinder. The tone might be disparaging, combative, outraged or contemptuous but the phrase prefaced any further comment no matter how her name cropped up in the conversation, and it amused me that the woman should appear to go out of her way to get herself so much disliked.

Sooner or later Kirsty mortally offended everyone with whom she came into contact and yet the strange thing was that she was never ostracised. It would be safe to say, I think, that she was completely unloved but never hated. The women disliked her intensely during the few minutes' altercation she permitted herself to have with them from time to time and from which she always emerged victorious. The men detested her temporarily and mumbled epithets for a few days after she had humiliated them, which she did with great deliberation but without apparent malice. But her acid comments on neighbours were too much relished for enlivening the ceilidhs for there to be any risk of her being ignored for long and her reputation for always providing a ‘good dram' for any man who did an odd job for her ensured that she was well looked after.

A rigid Presbyterian, she had been known to refuse point blank a lift from church in a visitor's car one stormy Sabbath with the words: ‘Some may not care what becomes of their souls but others know what is right from what is wrong.' And when the much discomfited minister had put his head out of the window of the car and assured Kirsty that it was no sin —‘Wasn't he himseif taking the chance of it?'—she had shrivelled him back into his seat with the retort, ‘Maybe it is no sin for you, but I'm takin' no risks with my soul.' The rest of the congregation still within earshot had been quietly outraged. As they said afterwards, ‘Wasn't it a wild wet night anyway for such a walk an' after all wasn't the minister himself only gettin' a lift to Kirsty's own house where he always lodged on a Sunday night because there was no bus back to his village until the Monday morning, poor man.' I have often wondered which of them asked the blessing on the cold supper they would have shared that night.

Erchy stood up. ‘Ach, if you're goin' that way I suppose I might just as well come with you,' he volunteered, setting his cap with the peak at the back in deference to the wild weather. ‘I was thinkin' it was time I went to see Dugan about some rams an' it's on my way.'

‘See and take care Kirsty doesn't get a hold of you,' Morag called out to him insinuatingly as we started off.

‘Hell, no!' returned Erchy. He bestowed upon me what from someone less unsophisticated might have been a leer but from him was only a crumpled smile.

‘You heard about that?' he asked me.

‘No,' I said, ‘tell me.'

‘Well, I'd just done a bit of cementin' for her. That bit of path you mind, down by her shed. When I'd finished she had my strupak ready an' we had a wee ceilidh an' then she poured me out a good dram. She didn't take one herself an' I was sittin' by the fire drinkin' mine down an' feelin' good inside when she said all of a sudden, “Erchie, did I ever tell you about the time I saw a naked man?” God! I near dropped the glass out of my hand I was that scared, an' I was sweatin' that much I thought the drops would run down an' spoil my whisky.' (I should perhaps mention that in Gaeldom there is no age at which a woman ceases to be regarded as a seductress.) ‘Then she went on tellin' me that when she was a girl she was standin' on the shore an' she saw a man come out of the water an' walk up the beach an' he had nothin' on at all! She ran all the way home an' told her mother an' all her mother did was to give her a good thrashin' for not shuttin' her eyes I can tell you,' said Erchy with a grunt, ‘I finished my whisky an' grabbed my coat an' was off out of the house as fast as I could go, an' that old cailleach just stood in the door an' watched me an' she was laughin' that funny way she has, you know? Indeed, I believe she did it on purpose, just to see me sweat.'

We picked our way through the rivulet that was normally a dry sheep-track to the open moor where the wind, still full of the smell of tangle, doubled its strength, threatening to tear the buttons off our oilskins, whipping our clothes against our legs and rattling the rain against our sou'westers, so that all other sound than the plodding of our boots was shut out. With chins tucked resolutely down into our coat collars and gloved hands hooked into pockets (the latter filled with rain too easily to plunge our hands deep into them) we battled to the comparative shelter of the glen where the track was less exacting and I was able to forge ahead of Erchy. Although I never found the prospect of walking the moors in a storm remotely inviting there was at times, I confess, something almost pleasantly hypnotic about it once I had accepted the necessity for my journey and was well and truly embarked upon it. Shut inside oilskins and sou'wester and hearing nothing but the rain, one has the feeling of being insulated not only from the weather but from the world in general. Because superfluous movement would expose chinks in the carefully disposed insulation one limits one's gaze to the path immediately in front of one's feet. In any case there is no perceptible movement to distract one's eye. The ubiquitous rabbits, the busy shrews, the sinuous stoats, are all snug in their secret places. The cattle and sheep, having found a sheltered corrie, lie there, patiently cudding. There are no trees on the moors to be lashed into dervish dances; no tatters of bracken whirling on the wind. Everything that is not securely anchored has been wrested away in the first few hours of the storm. So, one plods on tranquilly, building and rebuilding a lifetime of dreams while one's feet seem to stride without conscious effort over the stiff black heather roots and the flayed grass, so abject in its surrender.

‘Hi!'

I halted guiltily as I heard Erchy's shout, for I had forgotten all about him.

‘My,' he grumbled as he panted up to me. ‘You're a fast woman.'

I smiled at him.

‘Aye, yon can laugh, but folks shouldn't rush like that over these moors. You'll get heart trouble or somethin'. That's why people here live so long, you know. It's because they never hurry.' His face was peony red with exertion and polished by the rain.

Realising that I too was breathless, I slowed my pace and so it was nearly half an hour later than I had reckoned before we started to come down the hill and could see the stone dykes and croft houses of the village.

‘Kirsty's croft isn't a very big one, is it?' I asked Erchy, for now we were in the shelter of the hill and could converse without too much effort.

‘Ach, she's no' needin' a very big one. She only keeps the one cow anyway an' if she thinks her hay's a wee bit short she just helps herself to what's on other people's crofts.'

‘No!' I protested.

‘Aye, she does indeed. My uncle used to have the croft next to her but he gave it up because of her. When he'd go to cut his hay he'd find Kirsty had cut that much of it over his boundary—an' the best of it, too.'

‘But he could have stopped her, surely?'

‘You cannot stop that woman doin' anythin' she's set her mind to,' said Erchy. ‘When he spoke to her about it she just reared herself up the way she does an' told him she'd cut hay wherever she wanted. “But that's my own croft I pay rent for,” my uncle told her, “an' that grass you've cut was growin' on my land.” “Indeed,” Kirsty says to him, “supposin' it was growin' on your own chin, I'd still cut it.” My uncle was that mad about it but there was nothin' he could do except complain to the Land Court an' they wouldn't have been able to stop her from doin' it. They would only have told her not to.'

We came in sight of Kirsty's cottage, easily identifiable by its piebald appearance. Johnny had been directed to cement-wash it during the summer and had almost completed the task when he had discovered a large and beautiful spider's web suspended from the guttering. Unable to bring himself to destroy it he had left that part of the wall uncemented and by the time Kirsty had returned to coerce him the rain had started and it had been raining off and on ever since.

‘Poor Johnny Comic,' I said, for in contrast to the excessive gentleness of Johnny's nature Kirsty was rock hard. She had been twelve years old when her brother was born and perhaps because her mother had never fully recovered after the event and had died less than a year later, it seemed as if she had never forgiven him for the presumptuousness of being born at all. Six years later their father had died and Kirsty at eighteen had been left to cope alone with the infant Johnny. People said that from that time she seemed to have become obsessed with the idea of thwarting his every wish, and though she had fed him adequately, clothed him and kept him clean, his presence in the house had irritated her and thus Johnny's wanderings had begun at an early age. When he returned home he was given his porridge and boiled egg meal and unrelentingly sent to bed, no matter if it was only six o'clock in the evening. He had been so repressed that even when he was a grown man he was too docile to protest at the arrangement and so it had continued for nearly sixty years. He was allowed no money of his own although Kirsty's income, thanks to a small annuity left to her by the ‘lady in the wheelbarrow', was more than adequate for their standard of living. The only indulgence she permitted her brother was a grudging access to the tin of baking-soda in her cupboard, and even this small comfort was hidden away if she considered his consumption excessive.

‘You'd think she'd let Johnny keep a pet of some sort,' Erchy said. ‘It wouldn't do her any harm an' it would be good for Johnny.'

‘Someone did give him a baby rabbit a little while ago,' I said. ‘Wasn't he allowed to keep that?'

‘No, indeed. Kirsty killed it as soon as she could get a hold of it.'

‘She's a real bitch!' I said feelingly, recalling the rapt expression on Johnny's face when be was fondling a cat or a dog and his anguish when he found an injured bird.

‘Look at the way she was last year with that bird's nest,' continued Erchy. ‘While she was away seein' her cousin last spring the birds built a nest in the chimney of “the room”. Johnny was up to it every day on a ladder watchin' it. When the birds was just about ready to fly Kirsty came home an' sees it' an' though I believe Johnny went down on his knees pleadin' with her to wait only a couple of days for them to leave the nest Kirsty just took paper an' paraffin an' lit a roarin' fire in the grate an' roasted the poor wee things to death.'

We opened the gate to the grassy plot that Kirsty kept trimmed so expertly by means of a hay scythe and she herself appeared on the doorstep. Her face expressed surprise but I suspected she had seen us coming. She had in her hand a barometer which she held up in the rain.

‘Look at that!' she addressed it crossly as we came within earshot. ‘Take a good look at it, will you, an' then dare to tell me it's fair weather!' Giving it an admonitory shake before hooking it savagely back on the wall in the porch she turned to us. ‘That thing has a face full of lies,' she said.

Erchy turned and winked at me, while Kirsty, satisfied she had given him a good story for the next ceilidh, bade us take off our dripping oilskins and ‘come away inside'.

The kitchen into which she led us was blatant in its discomfort. The wooden walls were painted a shiny gasometer green and were completely unrelieved by pictures or hangings of any sort except for an embroidered cloth bag which bulged with mail-order catalogues. These, with the Bible and hymn-book prominent on the window-sill, were the only literature Kirsty permitted herself. The linoleum too was shiny and green and sketchily patterned with small dark circles that reminded me of the eyes of a moribund sheep. The table was covered with American cloth, white and new-looking; the big black range gleamed with polish; the cushionless wooden chairs and the bench shone with many coats of varnish. The whole place looked almost sterile in its cleanliness and about as comfortless and uninviting as a fishmonger's empty slab.

Kirsty swung the big kettle over the huddle of peats which were smouldering apologetically in the grate. She next dipped some pieces of driftwood into a can of paraffin that stood in a corner of the room and then poked them carefully between the peats. Bending down she blew with big capable breaths, quickly coaxing them into flame. The kettle began to send forth a subdued spout of steam.

‘I'm sayin' the peats didn't get properly dry at all this year, the weather's been that bad,' Kirsty said.

Erchy and I looked at each other understandingly. We knew that she claimed more peat hags, cut more peats and yet used fewer than anyone else in the village. We knew that the big shed at the back of the house was bulging with dry peats left over from the previous year's cutting and that the complaint of wet peats was only an excuse for the meagreness of the fire.

She set out one of her best cups for me and an old chipped one for Erchy. Let it be said that neither he nor I felt we could manage another strupak coming so soon after the one we had taken with Morag but we sat and meekly watched Kirsty brewing tea and buttering oat-cakes without so much as a whisper of protest from either of us. She poured out a cup of tea for herself but as it was an inflexible rule with her never to eat or drink anything while there was still steam coming from it she took up some crochet work and talked to us with condescending affability while we sipped and ate. She appeared to do a great deal of crocheting although there was no evidence of a finished article to break the austerity of the room. I wondered how she disposed of it as I watched her large male-looking hands weaving the fine threads into intricate patterns of scrolls and scallops with enviable dexterity.