The Loud Halo Read online

  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.

  Kirsty was an impressive woman, now in her seventies yet still standing nearly six foot tall. Like her brother she had a pale, fine skin and very large hands but there any resemblance between them ended. Kirsty’s pale grey eyes could have been put in by a glazier. Her mouth was like a tight-drawn thread. Her black hair which one felt had never had the temerity to turn grey seemed only to have rusted at the ends and was clamped to heir head, pancake fashion, and stuck with so many pins It made one think of an ancient cow-pat that the starlings had been foraging in. She was dressed, as always, in black relieved only by a chit of white at the throat on which a jet brooch was pinned with geometric care, and it was this slight adornment, I think, as much as anything else that underlined her appearance of hauteur and made it easy to understand Morag’s reference to ‘flannel-washing’.

  I was about to broach the subject of potatoes when Kirsty gave a faint exclamation of impatience and withdrawing the crochet hook from her work she pushed it between her lips.

  ‘Miss Peckwitt,’ she said, ‘I have what is like a soreness in my teeths here. I believe it must be what they call “the toothache”.’

  I was a shade surprised to hear Kirsty admit to any physical discomfort and was temporarily at a loss for words.

  Erchy came to the rescue. ‘You’ll need to go to the doctor and get it sorted,’ he told her.

  ‘Indeed I will not then,’ she replied with asperity.

  ‘It’ll be much better to get it seen to,’ I murmured. ‘The doctor will surely see to it as you’re so far from a dentist.’

  Kirsty crocheted industriously for a few moments and then she said: ‘The last time I went to the doctor I was twelve or thereabouts. I’d cut my thumb near off on the scythe, for we’d been cuttin’ the corn. Look at that, now!’ She showed us the distorted thumb on her right hand. ‘It was hangin’ right back against my hand, if you can believe it,’ she continued, ‘and my father said I was to go and see the doctor with it. He walked with me himself to the surgery and that’s near fourteen miles, and there I had it put back on and stitched into place. The doctor gave me nothin’ to help the pain and he said I was so quiet about it he’d give me a sweetie to suck to help pass the time while I was walkin’ back home. It was one of them big sweeties, I forget what you call them, but I mind I didn’t feel like eatin’ it until I got nearly home again. When I did put it into my mouth and bit it, it was that hard, I broke two of my teeths on it and my mouth started to bleed like I would bleed to death. My father just turned me round and walked me all the way back to the doctor’s again. I’ve never been near their kind since.’

  At that moment there was a stamping of feet in the porch and Johnny Comic came into the kitchen. He had obviously tramped a long way home and the rain was dripping from his cap and running from his oilskin wrappers. He greeted us offhandedly and went straight to the dresser, took down a cup and taking it over to the fire lifted the teapot which Kirsty had refilled with water from the kettle.

  ‘Where’s the cow?’ Kirsty asked, fixing him with a glacial stare.

  ‘She’s at the moor gate,’ Johnny replied, pouring tea that was like singed water into his cup.

  ‘Then away and get her,’ commanded Kirsty imperiously.

  ‘I’ll take this drink first, I’m thirsty,’ said Johnny with a bravado that we knew was buttressed by our presence.

  ‘You’ll away and get her,’ repeated Kirsty. Her expression did not change, her fingers did not falter over her crocheting but her voice had an undertone that apparently was not lost on Johnny. He put down the teapot obediently, took his stick and was about to go through the door when Kirsty called him back.

  ‘You’ll not be needin’ your stick,’ she told him.

  ‘But the bull’s there with her,’ Johnny began pleadingly, ‘I’ll never get her away from him without a stick.’

  ‘You’ll leave your stick,’ repeated Kirsty.

  Johnny’s face crumbled but he left the stick by the door and shambled out. ‘If he takes the stick I cannot trust him not to lay it across the cow,’ she explained.

  Erchy and I exchanged glances. It was ridiculous for her to suggest that gentle old Johnny would beat an animal. We knew and Kirsty knew that he wanted the stick only for brandishing in front of the bull if the animal was determined to follow, for he was timid where the larger animals were concerned. But there revealed was Kirsty’s one weakness. Her cow. It and it only had found the one flaw in her petrified emotions. It was an odd beast of nondescript breed, swag-bellied, small-hoofed, and with horns that looked like malignant growths but she had reared it from a calf and she still lavished upon it all the care and affection that less eccentric natures would have bestowed upon an only child. She was constantly feeding it tit-bits from the house and it ate them all. Biscuits, chocolate, cake, cheese, bread and jam. ‘Ach, it’s no’ a right beast at all to eat them things,’ people were apt to comment. It did seem, even to a tyro like myself, that the cow was unnatural and many times when I had passed the cottage I had paused in wonder when I saw its great behind sticking out of the doorway, only the narrowness of the entrance and the width of its belly seeming to prevent it from pushing its way into the spruce kitchen.

  So far as Kirsty was concerned the cow could do no wrong. So far as Johnny was concerned it could do no right. If Johnny had been capable of hating anything at all he would have hated that cow. As it was he merely accepted philosophically its domination of the household. He had to cut hay for it, he had to carry water for it, he had to muck out its byre and drive it to and from the moor when Kirsty did not fancy the weather and he did it all uncomplainingly and under a constant barrage of sarcasm from his sister. The only times Johnny became exasperated were when the cow broke into his beloved flower garden. In Bruach, where gardens were invariably feeding grounds for poultry or bone-chewing sanctuaries for the dogs, Johnny’s love of flowers was considered to be just another of his queernesses. It was quite understandable that Kirsty should have a garden, surrounded by a barricade impenetrable even for a cow, where she grew excellent vegetables for sale to the summer tourists, but Johnny’s anthomania they found incomprehensible. It was a pity that the only land he was allowed to have for his hobby was a small plot at the windward side of the house where a few sad blackcurrant bushes brooded over the moulding stones of a derelict shed. Laboriously he
had dug out enough stones to give him a little soil in which to transplant wild primroses from the moors or seeds and plants he begged from the Laird’s gardener; but as soon as the plants grew into a green and tasty mouthful Kirsty’s cow would come and with calculating greed work at his shaky stone dyke until she could break in and devour the lot. Every year Johnny tried, indifferent to his sister’s upbraidings for wasting his time. Every year the cow outwitted him. Not having any money to buy fencing he would scrounge old pieces of wire netting wherever he could and carry shafts of driftwood of formidable size for miles from the shore to reinforce the dyke, but he never once succeeded in keeping out the cow until the flowers came into bloom.

  There was a bellow from outside of a cow demanding attention. Kirsty put down her crochet. Erchy and I got up and started to put on our oilskins. I mentioned the subject of potatoes. She could, it seemed, let me have a bag to ‘see me on’. Much relieved, I took out my purse.

  ‘Are you wantin’ them in a hurry?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve only enough for a couple of days at the most, and I haven’t much else in the way of vegetables either. I wish I knew your secret of getting vegetables to grow,’ I told her.

  ‘They’re too damty scared not to,’ whispered Erchy in a languid aside.

  I really was envious of Kirsty’s garden for in return for all the attention I bestowed on mine it yielded little more than a few weary lettuce, half-hearted cabbage and wind-shrivelled beans while hers seemed to produce near prize-winning specimens with Kirsty doing little else but act as overseer.

  Her thread of a mouth tautened into the vestige of a superior smile. She more than anyone else had always despised me as too weak and incompetent to tackle the crofting life and doubtless my admission confirmed her opinion.

  ‘You’ll get your potatoes tomorrow, then,’ she promised, and then as we were leaving she said with sudden cordiality, ‘You should come and ceilidh with me more often.’

  ‘I would,’ I told her with shocking insincerity, ‘but it’s such a long tramp over the hill.’ I was conscious of a whimsical look from the corner of Erchy’s eye.

  ‘’Tis nothin’ at all,’ she scoffed. And as if to prove her statement she arrived at my cottage the very next day with a hundred weight of potatoes strapped to her back. She had carried them all the way over the hill track because she had promised I should have them and the carrier’s lorry had broken down.

  The Green Halo

  It was a ripe, red berry of an autumn day, bloomed with haze tinged with sunshine and I was busy in my kitchen making jam from brambles which had grown fat and tasteless from the superabundance of summer rain.

  ‘Here, did you hear the news?’ demanded Erchy, standing in the doorway and swinging in his hand a large hammer with which he was expecting to do some repairs to Bonny’s byre.

  ‘About Peggy?’ I asked, for all the village had been laughing yesterday because poor Peggy, who was known to be over ninety and who still worked all the hours God sends, had waylaid the doctor when he was visiting in the village and asked him why she should have become so bent. She never used to be, she told him ingenuously. ‘No, indeed. Not about Peggy at all but about Johnny Comic’s accident?’

  ‘No!’ I said, immediately serious. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He was knocked down by a lorry on the road yesterday an’ they’ve taken him off to hospital.’

  ‘Was he much hurt?’ I asked him.

  ‘The nurse didn’t seem to think so,’ Erchy supplied. ‘But they won’t know for a day or two till they get the X-rays.’ He stayed in the doorway, his sturdy peasant body enclosed by the sunlight. ‘Come an’ tell me what I’m to do,’ he ordered.

  ‘I can’t leave this at the moment,’ I said, glancing anxiously at the full pan which was bubbling to within half an inch of the rim.

  He came over and stood beside the stove.

  ‘You haven’t much freeboard there,’ he commented. ‘I only hope it’ll keep calm for you.’

  ‘If, instead of being clever, you would go and look inside the byre you’ll see for yourself what needs doing,’ I told him with mock severity as I carefully slid the preserving pan away from the heat. He left me to my task and when the jam had achieved a ‘jell’ I poured it into jars, labelled them and put them in the larder and then stood back to admire. I derive more pleasure from a well-stocked larder than from a well-stocked wardrobe, particularly if the shelves are packed with the result of my own labours, but in Bruach I was denied the satisfaction of attaining a really adequate supply of preserves because there was too much wind for fruit growing and rather more than most vegetables can stand. As a consequence they were always scarce and expensive and so it was a matter of making use of the more despised representatives of the earth’s bounty. Elderberries I had already made into jelly and wine and this year the blaeberries which hid themselves in squat leafy clumps in sheltered parts of the moor had been so plentiful that even after the children had sated themselves on them the smell of the neglected berries fermenting in the moss had come to us on a wine-scented breeze. For the brambles I had searched the freckled moors diligently, finding the bushes squandering themselves over and into abandoned peat-hags. Now I awaited the fast-ripening rowan berries, and hoped to outwit the starlings which each evening gathered in the tree behind the house and smacked their beaks over the feast that was to come.

  Morag and the fat and jovial Anna Vic, each with a creel of peats on her back, went past the cottage as I was carrying the preserving pan outside to fill ft with rainwater from the tank.

  ‘Put those down a minute and come and have a wee strupak,’ I called. ‘I’m just going to make one.’

  They lowered their creels on to the stone dyke and came through the gate. ‘My, but your garden is beautiful just,’ Anna Vic observed, and added, ‘You English are the great ones for your flowers right enough.’

  My garden was certainly looking its best now that a spell of calm weather had at last allowed the flowers to bloom unmolested and, though the winds had shrivelled some plants beyond resuscitation and delay had paled the vividness the rest would have revealed had they managed to flower earlier, they nevertheless made an attractive display. There was variety in the colour of the late lupins and in the gold and yellows of the calendulas while large clumps of honesty held out their flat pods to be silvered by the sunshine. The lupins had been sent to me from England. The seeds of the calendulas and honesty too had been purchased from an English firm and yet, though they may be exactly the same variety and from the same nursery, the flowers in a Hebridean garden never seem to achieve the poise and glamour of the flowers in an English garden. Their stems grow stockier, perhaps because of their continual struggle with the storms. The blooms are always either wind harried or rain stressed but when they do burst into flower there is about them a buoyancy and virility which suggest that they too might have shed some of the constraint of English life.

  My two friends sat down and when I had brewed tea I called Erchy to come in for a cup. With him came Donald Beag who had, surprisingly, mislaid the hook that did duty for one of his arms and who had been on his way to the shore where he thought he might have left it.

  Erchy was glancing ruefully down at the bottom of his trousers leg which he had caught on a nail in the byre and torn. He asked whether there were any tinkers in the vicinity from whom he might get a new pair.

  ‘There was one in the village yesterday,’ Anna Vic told him, ‘But he had nothin’ but things for the children except for some nighties.’ Her voice became shrill. ‘He was wantin’ me to buy a nightie from him. “I don’t want a nightie,” I told him. But ah, he kept on at me, “Buy a nightie from me, mistress.” “I don’t want another nightie,” I said, “my drawers is stuffed with nighties.” ’

  ‘Is that what it is?’ interpolated Erchy with a mischievous glance at her well-padded hips. ‘Well all I can say is, it’s a damty funny place to keep your nighties.’

  ‘
You wretch!’ Anna Vic flung at him, hovering between amusement and vexation.

  ‘I’ll bet you bought a nightie from him all the same,’ I challenged her, for her heart was pure gold.

  ‘Ach, well, you don’t like to send them away without takin’ anythin’ from them an’ it was no use me buyin’ children’s clothes.’

  ‘I wish I could hear of the same tink as I got this pair from,’ said Erchy, looking down at his torn trousers again. ‘Maybe he doesn’t look much good now but he was a good trouser when he was new.’

  The talk soon switched to Johnny Comic’s accident.

  ‘However did he come to be knocked down by a lorry?’ said I, thinking of the deserted Bruach road which saw a lorry about three or four times a week at its busiest.

  ‘Ach, the driver says he wasn’t there one minute an’ the next he’s just down in front of the wheel. He thinks Johnny was standin’ up on the dyke beside the road there an’ either a bit of the dyke slipped or Johnny just tripped an’ fell down,’ said Morag.

  ‘It’s a bad business, anyway,’ said Donald. ‘An old man like that havin’ to go to hospital.’

  ‘The nurse said she didn’t think anythin’ was broken,’ Morag assured us.

  ‘If he’s nothin’ broken yet then they’ll break somethin’ for him in hospital,’ said Donald, with conviction. ‘They’ll not have him in there with nothin’ wrong with him.’