The Loud Halo (7 page)

Dugald was changing the calves' tethers when we saw him and made our presence known. He shouted that his wife was away on the bus but that there was rhubarb for me at the house if I would get it. Fiona and I opened the door of the porch and took the large bundle of rhubarb that would not only provide me with puddings for several days but would also be enough for a couple of jars of jam. I went over to thank Dugald and as he had finished the tethering he was ready and willing to spare a few minutes for conversation.

‘She was sayin' you'd get more if you're wantin' it,' he told me. (Crofters when speaking English never seem to know how to refer to their wives, for in Gaelic it is ‘cailleach' which is literally ‘old woman' and they realise that this is not quite acceptable to polite English people.)

‘If she has plenty I'd like some more,' I told him. ‘I could use it for making wine.'

‘Aye, she has that much of it we could do with throwin' some of it in the sea,' he told me. ‘You'd best come up after you've taken your dinner tomorrow and get some more.'

‘Not tomorrow I can't,' I replied. ‘I've promised to go and talk to that woman Janet has staying with her. Janet say's she's lonely and miserable.'

‘Is that the one they had out in the boat today to show her the scenery and she just sat with her head bent over her knittin' all the way so she didn't see a thing?'

‘It sounds like her,' I agreed.

‘Ach, well, likely she will be miserable,' said Dugald. ‘She's from Manchester, isn't she?' he added, as though that explained everything.

‘How's the parking business going these days?' I asked him with a grin, to which he responded with an oblique smile.

‘Ach, no' bad, no' bad,' he said with studied offhandedness. ‘Though there's some of these drivers that comes an' all they give me instead of a shillin' is a mouthful of argument.'

‘I was hearing great praise of you from a motorist only the other day, anyway,' I told him.

‘Which was that?' he demanded with sudden suspicion.

So I told him of a driver I had been talking to who had parked on his croft the previous Sunday, and who had gone to the cottage to pay his parking fee only to be confronted by Dugald who had refused the shilling with stubborn piety. The man had been so impressed that as soon as he knew I was not a Gael he had burst out with the story. He had never believed, he had told me, that he would actually meet a man so implacably devout as to forgo his rightful dues just because it was the Sabbath.

‘Ach, that cheat,' said Dugald, when I had finished. ‘He was English too, I mind.'

‘Cheat?' I repeated.

‘Aye, cheat, I said. He parked his car here all day from early in the mornin' till late at night an' not so much as a sixpence did I get out of it.'

‘But he told me had pressed you to take the money but you refused.'

‘So I did,' said Dugald virtuously, ‘I explained to him once or twice that I couldn't take the money from him because it was the Sabbath.'

‘Well, in that case how can you say now that he was a cheat?' I demanded with a touch of amusement.

‘Could he no' have left it on the window-sill for me?' replied Dugald with shattering apostasy. ‘It would still have been there for me in the mornin'.'

Both Fiona and the midges were becoming increasingly persistent in their demands that we should move and, slapping at our bitten limbs, we fled down the road to Morag's cottage where Hector and Erchy were enjoying a strupak. This season the boats had swapped partners and now the two friends were happily running the
Ealasaid,
Hector's new boat, together. Their greeting to me sounded slightly ironic.

‘You don't sound too happy,' I told them. ‘Haven't you had as good a day as you'd expected?'

‘Good enough,' replied Hector. ‘But we're only just back from our last trip.'

‘That was a late one,' I said, taking the cup of tea Morag was holding towards me.

‘Aye, and we didn't get paid for it either,' said Erchy.

I looked at them searchingly. An unrewarding boat trip so often meant that there had been a climbing accident. ‘Ach, but these English are mean,' said Erchy with a slow shake of his head, and Morag and Behag shot placatory glances in my direction. I laughed.

‘Goodness!' I said. ‘I seem to be hearing nothing but stories of English meanness today. What has been happening to you two?'

‘It was a fellow we took on the boat this mornin' that went climbin' in the hills. When we went back for him this evenin' we found him sittin' on the shore near crazy. He told us he'd come to a very narrow ridge and the only way he could cross it was on his hands and knees. When he was halfway across his wallet slipped out of his pocket an' fell down the steepest part. He said it had fifty pounds in it.'

‘Didn't he go after it?' I asked.

‘Ach, he was in no state to go after it,' retorted Erchy. ‘He was shakin' all over like a leaf when we found him an' that must have been two hours after.'

‘What happened then?' I prompted.

‘Well, we had our people waitin' on the shore to go back an' we couldn't just leave them there so we brought them back an' him along with them. Then we went back to see would we find the man's wallet.'

‘Could he describe where he'd lost it?'

‘Aye, indeed we knew fine where it was likely, but that didn't mean it was any easier to get. Hector near broke his back tryin' would he reach it an' there was that many stones fallin' down we were both of us in fear for our lives.'

‘But you got it?'

‘Aye, we got it at last an' when we came ashore here there was the man waitin' on us. We waved it at him so he'd know to stop worryin' an' he came runnin' down the shore fast as a deer an' grabbed it out of my hand. Me an' Hector, we waited while he opened it, thinkin' maybe we'd get a bit of a reward or maybe the hire of the boat just for goin' back for it, but all that man did was to take out the notes there in front of us an' count them. When he'd finished he gave us a nice smile. “Fifty pounds,” he says to us. “All intact, gentlemen. Thank you very much,” an' away up the road he goes without leavin' us as much as the price of a dram between us for our trouble.'

Hector shook his head. ‘It was him countin' tse money tsat made me feel so bad,' he said sadly. ‘Just as tsough we might have been after stealin' some of it.'

‘Aye,' said Erchy, ‘but that's the English for you.'

‘Maybe he was that glad to see his wallet he just didn't think to give you anythin' at the time,' interceded Behag.

‘Ach, the man must have no brains at all if he wouldn't think of a thing like that,' said Erchy.

‘He had brains all right,' asserted Hector. ‘The folks tsat came on tse boat with him was tellin' me he was a Doctor of Divinity.'

‘Ach, but you don't need brains to be one of those sorts of doctors,' said Morag knowledgeably. ‘You see, you don't need to have any practice.'

The following afternoon I put on my latest summer dress (made from material purchased through a mail-order catalogue), picked a bunch of flowers from my garden and set off for Janet's house prepared to do my bit towards entertaining the difficult visitor. Janet came out of the gate to meet me and exclaimed delightedly at the sight of the flowers.

‘She's havin' a wee bitty lie down on the sofa,' she told me. ‘Wait now till I get a wee somethin' to put the flowers in an' then I'll tell her you're here.' She found an empty jug and drained the cold contents of a teapot into it.

‘Good heavens!' I ejaculated. ‘Is water as short as that with you?'

‘It's gettin' that way,' she confessed. ‘My brother's sayin' we'll need to drink whisky instead of tea if the well gets much lower. It takes that long to fill a pail now he's there all day.' She twitched the flowers into position as an impatient dressmaker twitches at an ill-fitting dress, and then put the jug on the table. ‘Beautiful just,' she murmured. ‘Come away in now an' we'll see is she awake.'

In the other room a torpid figure, its face covered by a newspaper, lay along the couch beneath a window that framed a picture of islands dozing tranquilly in a wideawake sea that the sun was sowing with stars; of hills that were dreamily remote behind a tremulous haze of heat; of a sky that was blue and white as a child's chalk drawing, scuffed by a woolly sleeve. The figure pulled itself into a sitting position.

‘Ee, luv,' she said in a voice that was so coarse it made me feel dishevelled, ‘whatever made you come to live in a godforsaken place like this after England?'

She said, ‘I think I'd go daft if I had to live here among a lot of strangers.'

She said, ‘You know, luv, just seein' you come through that door and knowin' you've lived near Manchester, it's just like a breath of fresh air to me.'

Erchy said the next day when I was down on the shore giving my dinghy a coat of paint: ‘Here, I'll take back what I said about the English yesterday, I'm thinkin' some of them aren't so bad after all.'

‘Oh,' I said, with anly conventional curiosity, ‘and what has changed your mind?'

‘Yon woman that's come to stay this week.'

‘Not,' I interrupted him, ‘not surely the woman from Manchester?'

‘No, but the one who's come to stay with Kirsty. Now she's what I call a nice woman. We took her for a trip in the boat this mornin' an' she gave us a good tip on top of her fare.'

‘Good,' I said. ‘I'm glad we're not all to be condemned.'

‘Ach, some are all right, I suppose,' acknowledged Erchy grudgingly.

Hector sprackled up to us. ‘Tsat Englishwoman's wantin' a boat for tomorrow to take her to see tse caves just by herself,' he said. ‘She says she'll hire tse whole boat.'

Erchy looked startled. ‘Did you tell her how much it will cost her?' he asked Hector.

‘Aye, I did so, but she just said “money's no option”.' Hector rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I've never heard anybody say tsat before in my life.'

‘She's away with Ruari this evening in his boat,' I observed.

‘Aye,' agreed Erchy. ‘She told us she likes goin' about on the water so she's goin' to share out her trips between the different boats. That's partly what I meant when I said she's a nice woman,' he explained as he moved away.

The children came out of school in a rush and with barefooted nimbleness picked their chattering way along the road. The day quietened as the boats disgorged their last passengers and the noise of labouring coaches receded into the distance.

‘Did you get a tip from yon woman that's stayin' with Kirsty?' Erchy called out to deaf Ruari as they were making fast their dinghies for the night.

‘Aye, I did that,' responded Ruari with all the power of his stentorian voice. ‘I got a whole crown from the bitch.'

‘I do envy you being able to understand the Gaelic,' said the ‘nice woman', who had paused to watch me as I put the last touches to my dinghy and who was screened by a rock from the sight of the two men, ‘it's such a qaint-sounding language.'

I do not know if Ruari's voice had diffused the sound so much that she had not been able to distinguish the words or whether she had chosen this way of saving all our faces but when Ruari and Erchy came abreast of the dinghy and saw her still there she talked them easily out of their confusion and was still talking to them with great animation as she walked between them to the brae.

‘Here,' said Erchy anxiously when I next met him. ‘D'you think that woman heard what Ruari said last night? Honest, I thought she was a mile away or I would never have asked the man.'

‘I don't think she heard,' I assured him.

‘I wouldn't like to think she was offended,' he said, ‘she's such a nice woman.'

Whether or not she had heard the remark it seemed to have given no offence, for she continued to patronise the boats and to tip generously. In return the boatmen greeted her warmly whenever she appeared and even bestowed on her the accolade of an invitation to go with them on the free trips they sometimes ran in an evening for their friends. She confided to me one day that she had never before in her life had such a wonderful holiday and her praise for the boatmen was unstinted. When at length her holiday came to an end she astounded them by presenting each of them with a bottle of whisky.

‘Didn't I tell you she was a nice woman?' demanded Erchy when I congratulated him on the gift. He took the bottle out of his pocket and gazed at it with great reverence. Then his voice changed and he seemed to recoil from the shock of his own words. ‘A nice woman, did I say she was?' he questioned, with another fond glance at the bottle, ‘No, indeed, but I should have said she was a nice
lady!
'

‘Did you get a bit of venison from the Laird last week?' enquired Morag as we were returning from milking our cows one frost-still autumn morning.

‘No,' I replied. ‘Did you?'

‘Surely we did,' she informed me. ‘I thought everybody got a bit.' We parted company for a moment, she to pick her way round one side of a patch of bog while I went round the other. ‘It makes a laugh the way he gives us a wee bitty venison as if he's givin' us a five-pound note,' she continued as our paths rejoined. ‘ “I hope you'll find this nice and tasty, Morag,” says he, thinkin' likely that it's a rare treat for us.' She giggled. ‘An' so it would be I doubt if all the venison we got was when he had a mind to give it to us.' Her face wrinkled in an allusive grin. ‘Indeed, many's the whole stag of his I've eaten if he did but know it,' she confessed shamelessly.

‘Why the generosity?' I wondered.