The Loud Halo Read online

  Now in case any interested farmer should read this account perhaps I ought to mention that Kirsty’s cow lived for seven years after this event had taken place and during that time she produced four good calves.

  As though it may have some significance, Erchy insists that I also mention that the missionary died within two years!

  All Mod. Cons.?

  There was no sound of rain on the roof when I woke but the morning was damp and shot with chilliness, as though winter were already licking its chops. Blessedly the wind had dropped away to nothing so that, released from the necessity of physical combat with it when I went outside, I felt unburdened and relaxed. The cattle who had so long confined themselves to grazing the sheltered corries in the hills had moved upwards during the night so that they now stood elegantly silhouetted along the skyline, a sight which is locally believed to foretell a spell of fine weather. In a sheltered corner of my garden a few bedraggled plants that had waited so long for stillness opened their petals warily in response to the tremors of sunlight that managed to evade the glowering clouds.

  I had planned a busy morning and was outside giving the kitchen mats a thorough beating and shaking when I became aware of the sound of voices and, slipping with typical Bruach curiosity to the end of the house, saw Morag, Yawn and Erchy, each carrying a sack and a pail and looking very workmanlike in their whelking clothes, coming down the path.

  ‘My, but you’re starting the whelks early,’ I called to them.

  ‘Aye, indeed. But they’re sayin’ there’s a good price on them already,’ returned Morag happily. ‘You should be leavin’ that an’ comin’ with us.’

  I detest picking whelks. ‘I’m going to do some washing while the rainwater tank is full,’ I told them. ‘I’ve left it far too long as it is.’

  Morag accepted my excuse without comment. Yawn treated me to a sardonic stare.

  ‘They’re sayin’ we’re goin’ to get the water at last,’ rushed in Erchy consolingly, ‘so you’ll be able to wash whenever you feel like it then.’

  ‘Are we really?’ I demanded. ‘Is it really true?’

  ‘As true as I’m here,’ declared Erchy with an air of misgiving. ‘Did you no’ have the wee mannie round askin’ for your signature on a paper?’

  I had indeed had the ‘wee mannie’ round but he had been almost gloatingly pessimistic as to the chance of the authorities piping water to my cottage in less than five years’ time at least. The main obstacle, he had told me, was that the village was too scattered, thus making any scheme so far proposed too costly to be approved. Also, he had confided, not all the Bruachites considered piped water necessary, some of the more rigid Presbyterians maintaining that the Good Lord made the water to flow where He wanted it and therefore it was not right for Man to try to deflect its course, an attitude that I would have found too preposterous to believe had I not previously come up against it when the draining of a patch of boggy land had been proposed.

  The ‘mannie’ had suggested that it might be worth my while to install a ram pump at the well down by the shore and pipe water to the cottage from it.

  ‘I don’t know if the supply would be adequate,’ I had told him. ‘It’s a very shallow little well.’ Very obligingly he had come with me to inspect it.

  ‘I daresay the supply might be good enough if it was dug out a bit,’ he suggested. ‘But wait, now, till I test it.’ Full of enthusiasm he had hurried hack to his car, returning with a thin metal rod about four or five feet long with which he had proceeded to probe the depth of the well. It went down eventually to about two-thirds of its length.

  ‘Just as I thought,’ he told me cheerfully. ‘You’d have plenty water there if you could get it dug out a bit more. It’s just that it’s all silted up with not being used for so long.’

  I had been grateful for his encouragement and as we walked back to the car he had very kindly worked out for me the probable cost of the installation. ‘Of course, you’ll understand mine’s only a very rough estimate,’ he had cautioned. ‘I don’t really take anything to do with the water department at all. It’s only that somebody’s been badgering the council about getting the water here and seeing I was coming out this way they asked me to collect signatures.’

  ‘You’re not from the water department then?’ I had asked.

  ‘No, no. Water’s not my job at all.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said innocently, ‘I assumed that you carried that rod with you for testing the depth of the wells so that you could advise people as to their suitability for providing a piped supply.’

  ‘This rod? Oh, no indeed. This is a grave poker.’ He wriggled it carefully into position across the seats of his car. ‘You know,’ he explained chattily, oblivious to the tenseness of the moment, ‘there’s a rule now that corpses must be buried four feet down. But they won’t take any notice of it hereabouts if I don’t go round all the burial grounds every so often and prod the graves to see how deep they’ve put them.’

  ‘A grave poker?’ I echoed.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ He darted a suspicious glance at my face. ‘I suppose it sounds kind of funny to you, being a stranger.’

  I agreed that it did.

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ he said brightly, getting back into his car. ‘I’m very pleased to have been able to help you.’

  Back in the kitchen I had fortified myself with a cup of tea—made from rainwater.

  ‘I don’t believe they mean to give us the water at all,’ said Morag, her voice full of scepticism. ‘We’ve been promised it now for twenty-five years that I know of an’ there’s still no sign of it. I doubt I’ll never see it in my time, anyway.’

  ‘Damty sure you will,’ replied Erchy with a surge of confidence.

  Yawn still continued to stare at me with sardonic amusement but as the conversation seemed to have petered out and Morag and Erchy were starting to move away I began to shake some of the mud from my mats. Yawn still made no move to follow his companions, so I grinned at him fatuously, wishing he would say something or else go. A few more moments under his embarrassing scrutiny and I would be driven to asking him what was wrong. Suddenly he spoke.

  ‘I’m thinkin’ you must be one of them arishtocrats.’

  It was my turn to stare. Anything less like an aristocrat than I looked at that moment in my gumboots, soiled overall rubber gloves and with a muddy mat clutched in either hand I could not have imagined. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked in undisguised bewilderment.

  ‘’Tis only arishtocrats that wears rubber gloves to shake mats,’ he admonished me. ‘Next thing we know you’ll be takin’ to cuttin’ your peats with a knife and fork.’ He permitted himself a short grunt of laughter. ‘I knew some people once from hereabouts and they went to live for a time in Edinburgh. When they came back here they was that arishtocratic they put on gloves to eat their salt herrin’.’ Satisfied now that he had made his criticism, but still mumbling condemnation, he turned to follow the other two.

  I continued with my chores, speculating again as to the financial possibility of having my own piped water supply but it was indeed futile speculation for I had already come to the decision that it would cost more than I could afford. I argued with myself that the energy used in carrying water could be so much more profitably spent in doing other things. I had learned to be frugal—water that had been used for my own toilet was then re-heated to wash towels, etc., and then tipped into a pail for washing floors. But it was not just the energy I grudged, it was the time it all took. I am not blessed with singlemindedness so that more often than not when I took up my pails and started to hurry to the well I would catch a glimpse of a strange bird, so that I had to freeze while I tried to identify it. Or, enchanted by the sight of greenfinches feeding on the seeds of the burdock plants that grew against the stone dykes, I would ignore the urgency of my task. Sometimes it was a new flower among the heather that caught my attention, or the particular shades and patterns of a mossy bank. Always there was so much wildness and bea
uty accompanying even the most mundane outside work and I could not bear to let myself pass it by.

  Not for the first time I wished that the powers-that-be would get their priorities in order. It seemed to me ludicrous that electricity, which was well on its way to Bruach, should come before there was a prospect of a water supply, but that was what was happening in other less inaccessible villages so that it was not unusual to see bent old women tottering from a well, which was often no more than the most rudimentary depression in the ground, carrying the full pails of water back to their old-fashioned croft kitchens and there shakily lading the water with the traditional tinker-made dipper into a shiny new electric kettle.

  One or two families in Bruach already had a water supply, but they were the luckier ones who had wells close to their houses yet on higher ground so that it was an easy and relatively inexpensive matter to pipe the water. It is doubtful if even they would have bothered had they not intended to cater for summer tourists. The rest of the crofters, having carried water all their lives, suffered little frustration from the lack of it and though they would agree wholeheartedly, when the subject was mentioned at the ceilidhs, that it would ‘indeed be wonderful to have the watter’, their desire for it was never as fervent as my own. They professed to want bathrooms but more, I suspected, as a status symbol than a genuine need. Their attitude was in fact epitomised for me by old Murdoch who having heard he could get a grant to have a bathroom built on to his house applied for it immediately. Now Murdoch and his niece had been doing very well out of taking in boarders for bed and breakfast—‘nighter’s’ they called them —and the wily Murdoch thought that if he could, without much cost to himself, get another room built on he could offer even more accommodation. He reckoned that once the bathroom was built he would only have to turn round to the authorities and tell them there was no water supply and they would just pay the grant and let him get away with it as an extra bedroom. It was unfortunate for Murdoch that a new inspector was appointed just about the time his so called bathroom was completed and although it was furnished with a bowl on a stand, a pail of water and a towel rail Murdoch found it impossible to convince the inspector that the new building merited the description ‘bathroom’. To the old man’s dismay he was informed that the grant would be withheld until the room was equipped with a conventional bath, toilet basin and W. C. Vociferous with indignation Murdoch grudgingly complied and again approached the authorities, assuring them, no doubt in good faith, that he was willing to sign an undertaking that as soon as piped water was available in Bruach he would have it connected to his bathroom. He naturally did not disclose that in the meantime he intended to store the unusable mod. cons. in a shed and let the room as a bedroom to help pay for them. But the authorities were adamant. To qualify for the description ‘bathroom’ there must be running water. The inspector came to deliver the ultimatum to Murdoch when the old man was perched on a ladder repairing for the third time that season the damage the storms had done to his roof. Murdoch almost exploded. The inspector waited for him to subside and then pointed out helpfully that there was a good well not far away which could supply ample water without a great deal of expenditure. Murdoch, still spluttering with wrath and argument, descended the ladder and faced the inspector aggressively and then in truly Gaelic fashion, he flung out his arms in a dramatic gesture. ‘Look at that!’ he cried, pointing up at the roof. ‘Look at it, will ye! Over fifty years me an’ my father before me has been tryin’ to keep the water from comin’ into this house, an’ now you’re after forcin’ me to take it in.’ He had spat his disgust into the wind, chuckled appreciation of his own joke, and then invited the inspector inside for a strupak.

  So Murdoch had ‘taken in the watter’ and no one was more proud than himself when it was finally installed. He had even announced his intention of taking a bath some day, the first in his long life. It was about six months afterwards that he had sprackied up to me when we were both out on the hill feeding our cattle in the misty quiet of the evening.

  ‘Here, Miss Peckwitt,’ his voice was hardly more than an awed whisper. ‘Did you ever take a bath?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, knowing that if I betrayed the least surprise or amusement I should never know what lay behind the question.

  ‘Well, tell me, when you came out of it did you no’ feel like a herrin’ that’s been stripped of its scales just?’ His blue eyes were anxious and expectant.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said and this time I could not control a slight tremor in my voice.

  ‘An’ did you no’ feel for a week or more after it as though your clothes was full of wee, wee splenters?’ He wriggled with a suppleness that belied his age. I shook my head.

  ‘Ach, well that’s just the way I felt myself after it, Ach, I enjoyed it right enough when I was in but I never want another one the way it left me feelin’.’

  The day stayed calm and patchily bright. After lunch I got out Joanna, having promised to drive Katy, the shepherd’s wife, and her half-sister, Ishbel, to a neighbouring village to visit a friend who had just moved into a newly built house. It had been arranged that I should pick them up at ‘the back of three’ and Ishbel was already waiting for me by the croft gate, dressed regally in her best clothes and carrying a string bag which contained a couple of small parcels. Whenever she visited a house, however briefly, Ishbel always took along some little gift. It was usually something quite trivial, perhaps a hank of darning wool, or a packet of envelopes, perhaps a magazine or even a packet of needles, just some little thing she found she could spare, so that she should never go empty-handed. Nervous, as always, she got into the car filling it with the evidence of her unstinted and relentless combat with the moths which she imagined campaigned against her with a vindictiveness that was purely personal.

  At the shepherd’s cottage we picked up the plump and voluble Katy who seemed to burst into chatter with every bump of the rough road. Ishbel said little and she was too shy even to respond to the convivial knots of workmen we passed, who took their weight off their spades to raise them in excited greeting—which, Katy observed derisively, was probably the most strenuous work they’d be doing that day. Despite the indolence of Highland labourers, however, progress was stalking rapidly towards Bruach, leaving a wake of tall poles which were to carry the electricity to the village. There were more signs of change too, for there was an extremely favourable grant and loan scheme for building new houses to replace the old croft dwellings, and the younger folk, though perhaps exiles themselves, had been quick to take advantage of it. The squat, tiny-windowed old croft houses usually built in the most sheltered corner of the croft, were becoming byres for cattle while beside them desirable two-storey residences with modern steel windows were appearing, looking as exposed and uncomfortable as someone who has just been kicked out of a warm bed. Into these the old people moved reluctantly, complaining of their coldness and temporarily overawed by their comparative spaciousness and by the sight of the bathrooms and up-to-the-minute sink units complete with mixer taps—though of course they still had neither water nor drainage.

  It was beside such a cluster of raw-looking houses that I brought Joanna to a stop and Maggie, a dumpy, merry-voiced little woman with almost no inhibitions, rushed out to greet us effusively. Ishbel presented her gifts—a packet of biscuits and a tin of condensed milk—both of which were opened immediately and offered to us. We sat in the white glossy kitchen and drank tea while Maggie entertained us with a fluent and descriptive recital of all the events that had taken place in the village of recent months. She told us, with many interpolations from Katy, of Padruig Mor, who had been to the mainland to attend an auction sale where he had bought himself an old grandfather clock.

  ‘Ach, it was no bloody good at all,’ said Maggie. (It is not usual to hear a Hebridean woman swear but the fact that Maggie did so unrestrainedly seemed, so far as her neighbours were concerned, to enhance her attraction as a hostess.) ‘Indeed,’ she continued, ‘the works wa
s all gone out of it long since but he brought it home with him on the train as proud as a cockerel.’ I recollected Padruig Mor’s tiny, dark old house, commonly described as a ‘wee but and ben’, and so was not surprised when Ishbel asked: ‘How in the world did he get it into his house?’

  ‘He didn’t to begin with,’ replied Maggie, shrill with ridicule. The ceilin’ was too low, so what did my fine fellow do but dig a hole in the floor till the clock would fit it. It’s daft he is surely.’

  ‘So grandfather has one foot in the grave already,’ I murmured.

  ‘So he has. You should go and see it for yourself. It looks crazy just but he’s that pleased with it,’ said Maggie. ‘Aye, but it was a laugh, I can tell you.’

  Ishbel, Katy and she fell to discussing the rest of the neighbours, politely drawing me into the conversation when it seemed I had been silent too long, although most of the names they referred to I had heard of only vaguely, if at all. Despite the fact that I had not taken off my coat I felt cold, for the room was too large to be heated adequately by the discreet little grate that peeped out of the ultra-modern tiled surround, although Maggie had it piled high with peats. The room was full of such contradictions. The fireplace was flanked by battered pails of peats and the miniature mantelpiece was decorated with imposing silver ornaments that looked as though they might have been filched from a hearse. On the spotless hearth two black iron pans stood and a bundle of hen feathers lay ready for sweeping up any fallen ash. The centre of the room was taken up by a plastic-topped table with metal legs but the solid old croft-house bench was backed along one wall, throne-like in its austerity. Above it a bundle of rabbit skins hung from the ceiling. Everywhere looked scrubbed and clean, the new linoleum on the floor being still smeared with damp from a recent washing and even as I watched a grey-looking cat sidled apprehensively from under the bench and then streaked out through the open door as if it too expected to be picked up and scrubbed.