Coronach, page 37
It rained at Whitsun: the rain changed to snow. The roses he would have given me, the Rose du Saint Sacrament, offered their small pink flowers in a gnarled display against the wall of his garden, where they were beaten and blown by the bitter wind until they died. So tenacious was the grip of this terrible winter that snow lay on the fields until late May, and in sheltered, sunless corries and on the high ground it was visible throughout the summer.
There was rain for the next month, sometimes violent, with sullen thunder, sometimes caressing, drifting like mist through the long hours of daylight. Undeterred by the appalling reluctance of the land to give them sustenance, the people pursued the timeless rhythm of their lives. In April they cut peat, in May they drove the staggering, infirm cattle to the summer pastures, and ploughed and sowed their stony fields, their backs bent to the rain. I could do nothing here, neither sow nor harrow: this was masculine work and my presence was not wanted. And the women’s world of the shielings was a private one, from which by language and by breeding I was subtly barred. So I watched from the back of my horse, always the spectator, always the intruder, and the pattern of the year unfolded, and the grudging warmth coaxed life from the soil. The yellow and blue flags bloomed, the deer moved like shadows on the land, the grain showed green in the warp of the fields. The rain ceased: there was sunlight, sometimes. My aunt, as taciturn as ever, walked one afternoon to the summer pastures to deliver a child at the shielings, and was absent for three days: she did not invite me to accompany her, and my father, whose resentment of me possessed him like a fever, watched me with reddened eyes over the table during our meals, speaking as little as possible. The responsibility for all domestic tasks during my aunt’s absence devolved upon me, and I hated both the enforced proximity to my father and the curbs upon my freedom: he would lift no hand to help me, even to empty the chamberpot beneath his own bed. On the Sunday he walked five miles to Glen Sian, where he preached on alternate weeks; his congregation there was small, for the inhabitants of that shattered village, which unlike Glen Mor had never recovered from its devastation, were mostly Catholic. He was from home all day.
I went out on horseback, Sabbath-breaking. I returned about nine in the evening. The kitchen fire, that cherished flame so superstitiously venerated and so ritually extinguished and rekindled at Beltane, was dead, cold ashes, and there was no supper ready laid, and MacNeil had come home.
He had walked ten miles, he was in pain, and he had been drinking. I blamed that for what occurred, and perhaps he regretted it; he drank noticeably less for a time. But we had violent words, and I remember telling him that even Christ had not indulged in such pride that he would not feed himself and his followers.
I turned my back when I had said this, and was pouring water into the sink when I felt his hand on my shoulder, then he slapped me on the ear and across the cheek. My nose began to bleed.
“You godless, idle, slothful bitch, is this what they taught you in England?”
Our shared blood, which we so despised, spilled between my fingers. I felt as though every bone in my face had been broken.
He slapped me again, with his knuckles toward my face.
“Honour thy father, you arrogant slut! Honour him, honour him―”
And then my aunt was standing in the doorway. Only her hand, at her breast in the folds of her shawl, moved.
“O mo Dhia, am bheil thu mearanach?”
Her voice was without inflection, but he heard it and thrust away from me, and stood blindly, stupidly, shaking his head like a man awakening.
I reached for the edge of the sink and raised myself. He was watching me with eyes like reddened glass.
I said, “You are not worth the honouring.”
It was still raining the next morning, when I went to Ewen.
We sat in a room hung with yellow silk: on the table between us a bowl of white roses, marked by the rain, shed their exceptional fragrance. The windows overlooked his garden, and through the gloom I saw the rose bushes, bowed with rain, covering the ground with a confetti of fallen petals.
He said, although we both knew it was unnecessary, “Who did this?”
“My father.”
“Why?”
“He finds me indescribably offensive. I am not submissive— and I am not a Scot.” It was raining more heavily than ever: it fell like steel bars. “Did you know my mother?”
“Yes. Not well.”
“What do you know of her?”
“She was Manx... she was very young... I thought her... rather beautiful. I gave her roses. She was fond of them.”
“When did she die?”
“In July, of ’46.”
“How did she die?”
He said, “This is a long story, and a painful one for me.”
“I should like to know. I should like to know what I am being blamed for.”
So he told me.
We walked in the house, and its benevolence and its peace fell like scales from my innocent eyes, and its rain-shadowed rooms were peopled with the dead.
“It was a Saturday evening: it had been raining. They came to this house about nine that night. It was the twelfth of July.”
The rain had stopped. We walked in the rose garden, and his ghosts walked with us; we walked amidst the petals and the fragrance and he paused, examining the dishevelled heads and describing the poisoned brew of Scottish politics which had produced this horror; we sat on the stone bench amongst the lavender and he spoke for the first time of his wife Elspeth, and the sun was briefly, almost blindingly hot. He sat, his hair silvered in the sunlight, his right hand where the roses had scratched it studded with blood, and spoke, unconsciously now in French, of the officer who had arrested him, sequestered him in irons in a tiny, squalid room and given him wine, and then, by the light of a single candle, beaten him, arousing himself to a sexual frenzy.
“Il était très jeune... vraiment un pervers. Je ne connaissais pas son nom....”
I should have known that he had not needed to cough, that his eyes were not watering: but I was obsessed, and I could not spare him.
“Vous vous souvenez des autres? Les noms des officiers? Le nom ‘Mordaunt’?”
“He was not— that man.”
“Do you remember him?”
He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief.
“I am sorry. I regret. I should not say these things to you. I told you— it is difficult for me.”
He sat staring into the hot sunlight. There were bees in the lavender: he reached down and pulled one of the greyish stalks.
“I miss the roses of my childhood... the sun of France, the lavender. This is not the same.”
“Tell me about my mother.”
“Why do you ask these things?”
“Because no one else will tell me.”
“She was shot. By no one, by any one. No one saw, no one knew. Those who saw and knew were also dead.”
I may owe you explanations, but not the privacy of my soul. Grant me that much dignity.
He was stripping the buds from the stalk, inhaling their sharp, nostalgic fragrance, then he scattered them on the gravel.
“I was told... many months later, as Inglis was told. He had been away since August of the previous year. He did not return until October.” Then he said, with difficulty, “You understand that he apportions blame, where blame cannot be laid.”
The sun had gone. He looked up at the cloud, as though surprised that his hand cast no shadow.
“Come. I will cut you some roses, and then I will take you home.”
He said it as though the inexplicable had been explained, the unforgivable forgiven. But he could never take me home.
He cut me roses and sat me down to a dinner neither of us wanted, and an hour later he rode with me down that empty track, with the bracken lashing our stirrups, in a fine haze of rain. At the bottom he hesitated, then he pointed with his crop.
“That is Glen Sian. Do you wish to see it?”
Like most Highland settlements it lay untidily grouped within the depression of the river, its strips of cultivated land weed-blown and neglected. There were newer crofts, far-flung on the crumpled slopes, but here the houses were roofless, plundered for wood and stone: subsequent years of wind and rain had finished what the army had begun. Much of it had been burnt, and in the reeking shells there was no movement. We dismounted and walked, the rain drifting like smoke, and once he stopped and laid his right hand on the wall of a nondescript building, and said, “I was held prisoner here.”
He did not seem to feel the rain: his profile was utterly calm.
“I was here... two days, I thought, although it might have been more.”
“What do you remember of the officers?”
“There were two senior officers. They never spoke, neither to me nor to each other.”
We were driven to extremes of behaviour....
“What happened here?”
He shrugged.
“What you see. Only the commonplace.”
“What happened amongst them?”
“I do not know. I know only what happened to me.”
The rain fell on the stones, on the coping of the well, on the weeds growing at our feet. The hooves startled echoes from the walls, which bounded and rebounded in the street.
We left it, and the rain obscured it; and the fragments of conversation from another life were similarly obscured, unanswered and inexplicable. And at the heart of their enigma, as surely as among those ruins, dwelt that enigmatic ghost, discoloured scarlet and gilt tarnished with verdigris, whose eyes, offering me their impenetrable riddle, watched me now: would always watch me.
Where flags had bloomed, curlews nested in the marshes; the horizon shimmered in a haze of late summer heat. On the high ground there were eagles, and red deer, and the dappled fawns which had been born the previous month. On the lower, clouds of midges hung in the humid air, tormenting any flesh exposed to the luxury of the sun.
On a hot afternoon in early September I sat among scabious and butterflies, watching the wind move like water across a field of barley. Within a fortnight the reapers would work in echelon over such strips, cutting and binding and stooking in the fear of rain and the hope of a substantial harvest, for on it the mere fact of our survival depended.
I closed my eyes, the red heat beating on the lids, and opened them again. A man was walking amidst the barley, and at the edge of the field a black horse stood, with a coat like polished stone. And in the grain the man, the sun bleaching white on his shirtsleeves, pulled what must have been several spikes: at this distance I could not see whether he had sniffed or tasted them. There was no sound, only the rushing of the wind; a cloud passed over the sun, and I was cold.
Then he mounted and rode on, and the field lay under the empty skies and the sun, disturbed only by the wind.
We harvested from sunrise on the thirteenth of September until Wednesday the twenty-first: others worked well into October. The grain was damp, and would be carried to drying barns before it could be flailed and winnowed.
As the light strengthened the heat increased. I sweated and my back ached, my thighs were trembling with the strain of the steps of this primitive dance, the necessary curtsey to the earth with every gathering of sheaf, every cutting twist of straw and every binding.
The work was uninspiring and relentless: there was little communication among the reapers, and only occasionally a few words of encouragement from my aunt. The wind blew, the sweat streamed from my neck and armpits, the dust and stubble worked beneath my gloves and clothing. The other women had kilted their coarse blue skirts up to their waists in the wet grain. The gaunt youth who led us cut a last swath and paused, sharpening his scythe; in other parts of the field other men were doing the same. The women rested, calling to one another; there was raillery, rivalry, a sleeve drawn across the face, a kerchief retied, a neck rubbed. The scraping of the stone on the long curving blade ceased.The terrible monotony of labour was resumed.
My mind drifted. My tongue was parched with thirst, the sweat ran stinging into my eyes, cramp clawed my hand on the sickle, the scythes whispered and glittered. The sky darkened: a little rain fell. A sigh ran over the field. The rain passed. Somewhere a voice sang, and the others took it up.
’S a’ Mhaire ’g am bheil a’ ghruaidh chiatach
’S glan am fiaradh th’ann ad mhalaidh….
I asked Deirdre what they were singing.
She shaded her eyes. Unlike mine, her palms were neither blistered nor reddened.
“A love song. I will show you how to stook, so you may rest your back.”
Gun chuireadh air mhisg le d’ ghaol mì,
’S mear, aotrom, a’ ghaoir atà ’m bhallaibh….
“What does it mean?”
“It means I am mad with passion,” she said; then she gestured sharply at the youth, who had stopped and was leaning on his scythe looking back at us. “Stiall ort!”
“I delay you, Aunt.”
She was binding unhurriedly, her face unsmiling.
“It is not a day’s work. You are fast enough for me.”
They sang of lifting their hearts with song, although their work was heavy, and heavy it certainly was. I stooked with indifferent success until midday, then we sat in the stubble, and the women picked ticks from their legs and the men lay on their backs, and we all ate bannock and cheese and butter and honey, and drank water and the potent local uisguebaugh. I tied up my hair with the stock from my throat, a spotted lawn I had been given in that vanished life, ever receding, increasingly unclear... the last swallow of brackish water from the stone bottles, the last moment of leaden weariness on the ground, and then the scythe’s silken rustle began the dance, and all the reapers followed.
On the second morning I went stiffly, in my stained shirt and stubbled skirt, into the wet cut furrows, following the scythe once more, and in the chill of evening stumbled back to MacNeil’s house and my bed. On the third morning, my aunt brought me salve for my hands and offered me clean clothing of her own: a drugget blouse and a skirt of the now familiar local weave, a coarse woollen cloth dyed with indigo, which repelled water as if it were oiled. Then she tied a kerchief over my hair, and I felt that some obscure rite of passage had been performed, and I had gained in stature in her eyes.
We walked in the soft light of the mornings to the fields and joined others walking, who now greeted me shyly as I had learned to greet them, with the blessing of God on the day: we walked back from the fields in the long shadows of evening, when after a day of bending beneath the sky all I wanted was to lay my head on a stone and sleep. The fields varied in nature, configuration and altitude, and in some the work was uphill, and the grain had been flattened by wind and rain. There was little privacy for bodily functions. The skin on my forearms was scarred from the stubble: the blisters broke and bled inside my gloves.
On the fourth day Ewen rode up to the field where we were working, thirty reapers among the hundred who were harvesting in that area, and my heart gave a curious leap of pleasure and anticipation. Deirdre saw me and said, “He will be thirsty. Take him water from the bottles.”
“I, Aunt?”
“Go on, so. You will be his friend— do him the office of a friend.”
I crossed the stubble, between the standing sheaves: the sun was in his eyes and he did not recognize me until I came up to his horse and pulled the kerchief from my hair.
“Good morning, sir.”
He peered down from the saddle, and if I had ever seen astonishment in any man’s face, I saw it now in his.
“My God. What are you doing here?”
He dismounted, and I thought he would have taken my hand, but seemed to reconsider it.
“How can any able-bodied person refuse?”
He took the stone bottle from me, and for a moment his fingers touched my glove: then he drank and gave it back to me, staring over my shoulder into the hard light.
“You are not my servant, nor even my tenant. And the harvest scarcely warrants it.”
Again the image of a bleached white sleeve, the outflung arm scattering grain.
“Does it not satisfy you?”
He said gently, “I am grateful for what there is. Will you come to see me when this is over?”
“If I may, sir.”
“I have missed you,” he said. “And I wish you would not call me sir.”
Insects rustled in the dry stubble at our feet. From the higher field the melancholy song of the reapers drifted down on the wind like the crying of gulls.
“I must go. I gather it is some disgrace to fall behind, or to be last.”
“I do not expect this of you, Margaret. I dislike it. It is not right.”
I said lightly, and with great affection for him, so great that I thought I could tease him, “Perhaps I am confronting the life I was born to,” and his vehemence startled me.
“You were never born to this. And I do not want you to... confront it.”
They were watching us. I had stayed too long with this cherished man, for whom those I worked among had a love so deep it verged upon the superstitious. They would think I presumed, by my familiarity with him, that I had no modesty.
“I must go....”
He said, “You are the only person I can talk to, the only one to whom I can open my heart. A woman once said to me... my cousin in France... did I fear I was dwindling into a Scot. I do fear it now, for you.”
Then he took my hand and kissed the damp, scarred glove: the intimacy seemed to surprise him as much as me, and he flushed. He turned his back and thrust his boot into the stirrup.
“Good-bye, my dear. Thank you for my drink.”
“Good day, sir.”
He looked down from the saddle, with those grey, familiar eyes.
