Lightly Poached Read online

‘Aye.’ Murdoch smiled roguishly. ‘I’m thinkin’ maybe he would have been drowned a lot sooner in his life if he’d stayed.’ He turned to Trina, one of the village girls who had recently completed a teacher-training course. ‘You watch the Education don’t send you to that island,’ he warned her.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ Trina challenged him with a smile.

  ‘You’d have to teach Papists an’ Presbyterians together, that’s what’s wrong with it,’ Murdoch told her. ‘There’s two religions there but only one school.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that they quarrel about it,’ said Trina. ‘There was a girl from there at college the same time as myself and she said they were as friendly as folks on any other island.’

  ‘They’re friendly enough,’ conceded Murdoch, ‘except when it comes to the schoolin’. That’s when they start their girnin’.’

  ‘Why?’asked Trina.

  ‘D’you not see, lassie,’ explained Murdoch patiently, ‘they have only one teacher an’ the way they’ve agreed is that if there’s more Papist scholars than Presbyterian then the teacher has to be a Papist. If it’s the other way round then the teacher has to be a Presbyterian.’

  ‘That sounds fair enough,’ said Trina. ‘What happens if it’s equal numbers?’

  ‘They keep the teacher they have. But if there’s one more Papist scholar than Presbyterian then the Papists are pesterin’ the education for their own teacher an’ the Presbyterians are just as bad if it’s the other way round.’

  ‘I’m not surprised the women on that island spend most of their time havin’ babies,’ observed Angy.

  ‘I believe once there was a teacher there that didn’t want to leave the place an’ she took a hand in it herself,’ Murdoch said.

  ‘It must be a sort of competition,’ submitted the shepherd.

  ‘It sounds more like a production drive to me,’ said Angy.

  Throughout the evening the door had been opening and closing as more people entered the room and insinuated themselves into the company. Now Tearlaich burst in, full of confidence and wearing a town raincoat and a trilby hat.

  ‘Were you away!’ exclaimed Janet, eyeing his clothes.

  ‘Aye.’ Tearlaich returned her glance with mock surprise. ‘Did you not know I got a lift from the carrier when he was over with Donny Beag’s fencing? I’ve been to the mainland,’ he added.

  Except for me probably everyone in the village knew of Tearlaich’s journey. What they didn’t know was how he had spent his time between then and now.

  ‘Where did you go?’ asked Morag, who reasoned that if people did not wish to be asked questions as to their whereabouts or their activities they would take care that nothing they said or did invited them. Tearlaich’s attire alone positively cried out for comment.

  ‘I went over to the mainland,’ he repeated. ‘The carrier was telling me there was to be a big roup on next week so seeing the train was there I got on it an’ went to have a look.’

  ‘A roup?’ asked Behag with sudden interest.

  ‘Aye, all the furniture and stuff from some old castle,’ replied Tearlaich. ‘I believe they’re going to auction the whole lot of it and the carrier reckons some will go pretty cheap if it’s true what he’s hearing.’

  ‘Did you get to see any of it?’ asked Murdoch.

  ‘Aye, that’s why I went.’

  ‘What would you be after wantin’ with furniture from a castle?’ demanded Morag.

  ‘I’m wantin’ a new bed,’ returned Tearlaich and smiled at the evident surprise his statement caused.

  ‘The bed you have was good enough for your father,’ Murdoch declared. ‘Why would it not be good enough for you?’

  ‘It’s no’ me I’m thinking about,’ said Tearlaich. ‘But what if I was to take home a wife some day?’ He spoke of the possibility of taking home a wife someday as if he might bid for her too at the auction sale. ‘I wouldn’t want her to sleep in the bed I have,’ he resumed. ‘She’d be as well sleeping on a dyke.’

  ‘If you took home a wife she wouldn’t get much chance to sleep anyway,’ Murdoch told him and Tearlaich looked boldly across at Trina who blushed and shook her long hair over her face.

  ‘An’ did you see any beds?’ enquired Morag.

  ‘Hundreds of them,’ answered Tearlaich. ‘Honest! You could have slept an army in that castle with the number of beds they had.’

  ‘They possibly did,’ I murmured.

  There was one bed though that I couldn’t make out at all.’ He turned to me. ‘Maybe Miss Peckwitt knows more about funny beds than us and she can tell us.’

  ‘Why should I know about funny beds?’ I parried.

  Tearlaich went on. ‘This bed was about seven feet long and about eight feet wide and it had two mattresses on it. One was about five feet wide and the other near enough to three feet. Now why would they have two mattresses on the same bed like that?’

  I tried to think of a suitable reason. ‘It could be because a single mattress eight foot by seven foot would be difficult to turn regularly,’ I hazarded.

  ‘But wouldn’t they have the two mattresses the same size then?’ suggested Tearlaich.

  That’s what I should have thought,’ I agreed. ‘No, I can’t think of a good reason for their being two like that,’ I added.

  For the first time that evening Janet’s brother spoke. ‘I’ve seen one of those beds an’ I can tell you the reason for it,’ he offered. We looked at him expectantly. ‘You mind Dolina across on Rhuna there?’ He jerked a thumb towards the seaward wall of the kitchen. ‘Now if Mata had a bed like that the three of them would be able to sleep together, the sister in her part of the bed an’ Mata an’ Dolina in their part. Well, that was the way of it in some of these big castles, only it wasn’t the sister that slept with the couple, it was the old mother just so she wouldn’t be lonely.’

  ‘Is that true?’ asked Janet.

  ‘It’s what I was told long ago, that’s what they did. You see, they had their separate bedclothes so it wasn’t as if they were really sharin’ a bed.’

  ‘That was a funny way of doing things,’ said Tearlaich.

  Old Murdoch took out his pipe. ‘Indeed they do funnier things than that in some of diese old castles,’ he stated profoundly and returned his pipe to his mouth.

  ‘Was there anything interesting at the auction?’ I asked, turning to Tearlaich.

  ‘Hundreds of things,’ he enthused. ‘Furniture and rugs and musical instruments and pails and dishes and bowls, indeed every sort of thing you could mention.’

  ‘A piano?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye, two of them at least. Why, were you wanting a piano?’

  I was about to tell him that I very much wanted a piano when the door was slammed back against the wall and Hector and Erchy came in.

  ‘Well, here’s the undertakers,’ announced Tearlaich.

  Erchy ignored him. ‘We’re wantin’ somebody to give us a hand with the dinghy up the shore,’ he announced. ‘The wireless says it’s goin’ to blow a gale by mornin’.’

  ‘What wireless?’ asked Murdoch indignantly. ‘That’s not what the wireless at the Post Office said. Force four to five, they said, an’ makin’ southerly.’

  ‘It doesn’t agree with what we’ve just heard, then,’ Erchy told him. ‘Force six to gale eight an’ veerin’ westerly.’ He turned to Hector. ‘Is that not right, Hector?’

  ‘Aye,’ Hector agreed.

  ‘Ach, you cannot expect wirelesses to agree all the time any more than people,’ observed Morag soothingly.

  Janet’s brother got up and going over to the barometer rapped it imperiously. ‘The glass is droppin’,’ he reported.

  ‘Well you don’t need to pull your dinghy just yet,’ Janet told Erchy. ‘Sit you down an’ tell us how your trip went.’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Erchy and sat down on the floor as if the request had sapped what strength he had left. Hector smiled at the young schoolteacher and she made room for him beside h
er.

  ‘Knowin’ that family I daresay you got a good dram out of it,’ said Murdoch.

  ‘Not a dram did we get,’ said Erchy. ‘Not so much as a look at a bottle of whisky except for what we had with us in the boat.’

  ‘Oh my!’ Murdoch was staggered.

  ‘An’ the state of that corpse,’ grumbled Erchy. ‘We needed a barrel of whisky never mind a bottle.’ He sighed. ‘I’m damty sick of funerals,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Janet curiously.

  ‘Well, we got to the pier,’ began Erchy, ‘an’ there was the coffin ready for loadin’ but when we went to get it aboard we was near sick with the smell of him. He’d been coffined in one of these foreign places an’ they hadn’t done it properly so he’d gone rotten. The men on the pier agreed with us that nobody was goin’ to carry it aboard like a coffin should be by rights. “Get the derrick,” they told us. So we went to see the man with the crane an’ asked him would he bad it on board for us. “I’m not supposed to lift coffins with the crane,” he says. “Coffins are supposed to be treated with respect.” “Well, we’re no’ carryin’ him,” says I. “He’s too rotten.” Anyway, the crane fastens on to him an’ hoists up the coffin an’ one of the pier men shouts to the crane driver, “Hey, Ronny, don’t tilt him now or he’ll spill out.” ’

  ‘Oh here!’ murmured Janet with a shudder.

  ‘That’s what they said. An’ we had to put the bloody coffin on the stem so that the smell would blow away from us. Ach, it was terrible!’ He gave a snort of disgust.

  ‘An’ did none of the man’s friends come along with the coffin?’ asked Morag.

  ‘Aye, three of them,’ replied Erchy. ‘But they had a good drink on them before they came aboard an’ they just lay down an’ slept all the way.’

  ‘An’ what happened when you got to the island?’ pursued Janet. ‘Did you have to carry the coffin then?’

  ‘We did not,’ said Erchy. ‘Ach, there was seven or eight folks waitin’ there an’ with the three we had there was plenty.’

  ‘Was there no priest?’

  ‘Aye, he was own too, fussin’ around like a hen on a hot girdle, an’ before they’d lift the coffin off the boat he took them all up to the chapel with him. They was there about half an hour an’ they all came back wipin’ their mouths an’ smellin’ of whisky.’

  ‘An’ you didn’t get a dram yourselves?’ interrupted Murdoch.

  ‘None but the smell of theirs,’ reiterated Erchy. ‘Maybe if we’d followed them up to their chapel we would have got one but there’s some things you can’t do even for whisky.’ He looked around the company, confident of their approbation.

  ‘ “Men meet but the hills do not”,’ quoted Murdoch.

  ‘So they unloaded the coffin themselves,’ prompted Janet ‘They did so. An’ there was the priest wavin’ his hands an’ tellin’ them, “Be careful boys, now,” and “Gently, boys,” an’ them afraid would they jolt it an’ have the priest swearin’ at them for bein’ careless.’ He looked across at Hector. ‘Was that not the way of it?’ he asked.

  Hector looked up and smiled wide-eyed confirmation. ‘Indeed it was so,’ he said. ‘Tsey took tsat much care carryin’ it ashore you’d think it was a case of whisky tsey was handlin’, not a coffin.’

  ‘Angy was sayin’ you had to stay the night before you could get your money,’ Morag said.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That was no’ right,’ said Morag. ‘When a job has been done a man shouldn’t have to wait to be paid for it.’

  ‘Why was that?’ asked Tearlaich. ‘They’d agreed to pay what you’d asked, hadn’t they?’

  ‘They had, but when it came to actually handin’ over the money they started sayin’ it was too much.’

  ‘Ach!’ sneered Murdoch. ‘Gettin’ money out of them Papists is like gettin’ butter out of a dog’s throat.’

  ‘But you got it in the end?’ enquired Angy.

  ‘We got it. An’ we told them they was lucky we didn’t charge them extra for the smell.’

  There came a sudden puff of smoke down the chimney. Erchy stood up. ‘We’d best away an’ pull that dinghy,’ he said. ‘That’s the wind on its way already.’ He went out, followed by all the younger men.

  ‘I must go too,’ I told Janet. Behag followed me to the door and we stepped out into a moonlit night with no trace of mist.

  ‘I would like fine to go to the roup,’ she confided wistfully.

  ‘Why not go then?’ I asked, avoiding her glance.

  ‘Would you be thinkin’ of goin’ yourself?’ she enquired diffidently. ‘I hate travellin’ on my own.’

  When Tearlaich had mentioned the pianos at the sale the idea of going to the auction had indeed crossed my mind but it was immediately followed by the thought of haymaking, the arrangements I should have to make before I could leave my cow and poultry and by a mental review of the difficulty of getting a piano over to Bruach and eventually into my cottage. Much as I yearned for a piano I had let the idea slip away into the limbo of all the other ideas I had at times become enraptured with, but Behag’s remark made me think again. Perhaps I could arrange to get to the roup and perhaps I could even bring a piano back with me. ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow,’ I told her as we said good night.

  The sky was clear, wiped clean by wind, and I walked thoughtfully homewards, almost hearing the notes of a Chopin nocturne and aware that my fingers ached to run over the keys of a piano. On reaching my cottage I stood looking up at the full moon tossed in the branches of the rowan tree and the evening star blinking over the hills, and worked out how long I could spare away from the croft and who would look after Bonny and the hens whilst I was away. Morag would, I was certain, but with Behag away also would it be too much for her to cope with? I went to bed and slept on my project. No doubt it would sort itself out by the morning.

  Going to the Roup

  By morning the forecast gale was strafing the village, flattening the uncut grass, tearing at the windows and bombarding the hay already cocked and rough-tied with grass ropes. As soon as I woke I rushed outside to inspect the damage to my own cocks and was agreeably surprised to find that only three out of the nine I had so industriously stooked and tied two days earlier had been ravaged by the wind. I blessed the mist and rain of the previous day which had dampened down the outside of the cocks so that they had settled into snug igloo shapes, trimmed to resist the assault of the gale. As I gathered up the hay which the wind had peeled off and slid into the lee of the damaged cocks I had cause to be grateful once again to Morag for her instructions on how to weave the traditional hay ropes which undoubtedly had been responsible for saving much of my hay. The hay rope was a simple but effective device for securing cocks and it was achieved by gathering strands of grass from the top on the windward side of the cock, twisting them and at the same time drawing in more hay as you worked downwards until with a final twist you tucked the rope in firmly under the base of the cock, being careful that you did not let the wind in so that the whole thing blew away. Then you did the same on the lee side. I repaired the three cocks, tucked in the ropes on the other six more firmly and started back towards the cottage. The sea was swirling white, the horizon a jumble of watery peaks, but although the crofts were being lashed by sea spray there was no rain. I recited to myself the weather lore I had learned in rhyme:

  ‘If the wind before the rain,

  Hoist your topsails up again’,

  which, so the old sailors explained, meant that it would probably be a short blow with the rain coming in later to quell the wind. On the other hand:

  ‘If the rain before the wind,

  Your topsail halyards you must mind’,

  which again being interpreted meant the wind would be strong enough to drive away any threatened rain. In other words, it foretold a long, strong blow. I looked up at the thick grey clouds racing across the sky, unsure whether or not I hoped they would soon burst. If they did it would probably result in th
ere being constant rain for the next few days which would not improve the hay but if they did not and the wind continued unabated I doubted if my cocks would withstand its onslaught. Haymaking was always a worry and because of the malicious weather and the dishevelled terrain it was a worry that lasted a long time. Though cutting might be commenced at the end of July even in a good season it was likely to be well into October before the hay was finally stacked for the winter. I debated whether to take proper ropes and stones to tie and weight down the cocks but if I did that and the rain came the weighted ropes would make neat channels in the hay which would direct the rain deep into the cock, sending it mouldy and rotten. Back at my cottage, I stood in front of my barometer. It had dropped but not dramatically and when I tapped it the needle stayed steady. I decided to do nothing more about my hay until I had talked to some of my neighbours and listened to their predictions.

  The rain came when I was out on the moor looking for Bonny. While I milked her the rain dribbled from her flanks and from the sleeves of my oilskin into the pail so that the milk took on a muddy-greyish look. I smiled to myself, recalling how horrified I would have been in my pre-Bruach days had I been expected to drink milk produced under such conditions. Now I knew that dribble from cows’ flanks, oilskins and even from less salutary sources made no noticeable difference to the flavour of the milk and so far as hygiene was concerned I preferred fresh Highland germs to those that could be expected in the vicinity of a town or factory dairy. I gave Bonny the remainder of her potach, thanked her and sent her away with a gesture—she was too wet to pat—and turned into the wind and rain, making for home. Even with the lid tightly clamped down the milk splashed out as the wind buffeted the pail, lifting it and at times almost wresting it from my grasp; the rain was drumming on my sou’ wester, streaming down my oilskin and running into my boots. It was stinging my face and filling my eyes so that I was constantly blinking to see where I was going and when, after taking advantage of the shelter offered by a narrow strath between two outcrops of rock, I came out again into the teeth of the storm the wind spun me round, whisking away my breath and making me feel like a chattel of the storm, seeing nothing but rain; no sea, no sky, with only occasional glimpses of the moors to help me find my way home.