The Loud Halo Read online

  ‘Are you tired of it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Indeed, I’m no tired of the weather but I’m tired of bein’ short of water,’ she grumbled. ‘My brother’s complainin’ he has time for nothing else all day but going back and forwards to the well for me.’

  It was always the same when we got a nice spell in Bruach. We could not really enjoy it after the first few days because by then we had begun to fret about our water supply.

  ‘I have that many sheets to wash,’ resumed Janet, ‘an’ there’s more visitors comin’ tonight. An’ even when I get the water the well is that low it looks like I’m washin’ the sheets in strong tea.’ She swung her sack of bread over from one shoulder to the other. ‘Indeed: that woman I have stayin’ with me just now came out to speak to me while I was doin’ my washin’ yesterday an’ you should have seen the look she gave to my water.’ Janet chuckled tranquilly.

  ‘Is that the woman from Manchester you were telling me about?’ I enquired.

  ‘It is so, mo ghaoil, an’ that’s what I was wantin’ to ask you about. She’s sayin’ she feels it that strange here an’ she’s just longin’ to meet another Englishwoman. I was wondering would you come over and have a wee crack with her this evenin’ and cheer her up a bitty?’

  ‘I can’t come now,’ I apologised, for in Bruach ‘afternoon’ receives no recognition. It is morning until about two o’clock and then it becomes ‘evening’. ‘I’ve promised to take Fiona for a picnic and I don’t suppose I shall feel much like going anywhere but to my bed when I get back from that.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ agreed Janet understanding, for Hector and Behag’s small daughter was a notoriously intractable child.

  ‘Will I tell her you’ll come tomorrow, then?’ Janet pleaded, and when I agreed she grasped my hand thankfully. ‘She’ll be fine an’ pleased when she hears it, for she’s like as if she thinks she’s among a lot of savages.’ Janet’s laughter bubbled again. ‘Indeed, d’ you know she asked me the other day if there was coal mines beyond the hills because they reminded her so much of the “slack heaps” I think she called them she’s after seein’ in England.’

  ‘Why ever did she come here?’ I asked, feeling vaguely affronted.

  ‘Ach, well, I believe her husband used to come to these parts an’ he was always after praisin’ it up to her so when she lost him she thought she’d best come here an’ see what he liked so much.’

  ‘What a good thing she didn’t come with him and spoil it for him.’ I said.

  ‘That’s just what I was sayin’ there myself to Dugald. The woman’s a right misery to herself because she can’t see a single factory chimney no matter how hard she looks.’

  The sandwiches and cake for our picnic were already prepared and I had only to pack them into a bag and then collect Fiona. She was bobbing impatiently in the doorway and as soon as she detected me she ran towards me, shouting all the way.

  ‘Dugald’s just away and he says you’re to get rhubarb tonight on your way back.’ She tugged at my hand, pulling me round so that we faced in the opposite direction to which I had planned. ‘We’re goin’ this way,’ she announced.

  ‘No, we’re going this way,’ I told her firmly. The trouble with Fiona was that she was so used to getting her own way she was completely deaf to correction. She continued to pull me in the direction she wanted to go but on this occasion I had resolved that I must be equally firm.

  ‘I am going this way, Fiona, and if you want to go the other way you may. We’ll share out the food now,’ It was a risk because she was quite capable of agreeing to go off by herself and I should then have had to trail surreptitiously in her wake to make sure she came to no harm. Her sudden capitulation appeared to stagger her as much as it did myself for she was too speechless to issue a single command while we plodded over the brittle dry moors and picked our way across the beds of dried-out burns.

  ‘Why did you no’ want to go the other way?’ she demanded when she had regained her complacency, and while we helped each other to descend a narrow path that led to a beach which Fiona had never visited before and which I loved for its seclusion I explained to her why I had chosen to come this way. It was really to avoid Bonny, for when I had first bought her and put her out on the hill with the rest of the village cattle she had been friendless and alone for a time and so whenever she saw me she had got into the habit of following me. I had made the mistake then of packing a ‘wee potach’ for her along with my own picnic lunch and had then had to endure her standing over me ecstatically chewing a juicy green cud from which webs of saliva drifted all over my own food. The next time she had spied the lunch bag on my shoulder she had grown impatient for me to open it and had insisted on escorting me so very closely that when I had come to the stepping-stones of a burn and had stood poised hesitantly in the middle she had urged me on so eagerly with her horns in my back that I and the lunch bag had emerged in a wet and sorry state. Her devotion to me was touching and because of it I did not try too much to discourage her until she had progressed from being merely accepted by the other cattle to become the acknowledged leader of the younger set. Then I had to find a different location for my alfresco meals. It was one thing to take one’s own cow for a picnic. It was quite another to take thirty or forty other cows, each one of them curious to discover what it was in my lunch bag that was so attractive to their leader.

  Fiona stared at me expressionlessly as I talked and when I had finished she asserted flatly, ‘See that boat out there,’ as though she had not listened to a word I said. She was looking out across the listless water through which a ringnetter was tearing its way with emphatic urgency.

  ‘She has plenty fish,’ she added with adult self-assurance.

  ‘How do you know she has fish, clever puss?’ I teased.

  ‘Because she has the gulls with her,’ replied Fiona through tightened lips. She did not call me a silly old cailleach as she would have had I been her mother or aunt, but her tone was unmistakable. I stared out at the ringnetter. There was a trail of fuzzy smoke from her galley chimney and in it the gulls whirled and eddied with the sun glancing off their wing tips so that it looked as if the boat had thrown over herself a gauzy, sequin-studded scarf.

  I suggested beachcombing, a pastime which the child revelled in and which I found at least as pleasurable as at one time I would have found a shopping spree in town. It added to one’s feeling of self-sufficiency and independence to gather driftwood for one’s fire and in addition there was always the exciting prospect of stumbling upon a really worthwhile find. Our progress was slow for Fiona demanded my attention for even her most trivial finds and her chatter was incessant. However at last we found for her a brightly coloured ball and then almost simultaneously a coir doormat and a perfectly good plastic pail. She was momentarily overawed by her good fortune until she recollected our picnic.

  ‘When will we take our tea?’ she asked with only partially concealed impatience.

  I waited only to pick up my own finds—a brass porthole with glass intact that I thought would improve my front door and two aluminium net floats which Erchy would halve for me to provide four typically Bruach feeding bowls.

  ‘We’ll have it now if you like,’ I told her. We sat down cautiously on the sunbaked rocks with our bare feet in a warm, tide-washed pool that was floored with pounded shells and studded with sea-anemones, and when we had eaten we played at sailing Fiona’s ball until the sun had moved off the cliff-screened shore and the midges began to work up to their evening appetites. We climbed up to the open moors again, our feet disturbing hundreds of heather moths which fluttered up in front of us like petals chased by a gamin breeze. The sun was still shining with evening-tempered brilliance; the sheep were just beginning to rouse themselves from their siesta; a lamb bleated for its mother and was answered by the frustrated mew of a buzzard planing overhead. Fiona’s fat little legs plodded sturdily beside my own but she had gone very quiet and I suspected that she was tired. I hoped she had forgot
ten Dugald’s message and planned to deposit her back with her mother and aunt before I went to collect the promised rhubard. But of course she had remembered and of course she insisted on accompanying me, although it would add another mile to our walk. I gave in without argument.

  Dugald’s croft ran alongside the road and was recognisable by a large notice stating that it was a ‘Car Park, price 1/-’, a notice which had been erected originally more as a piece of bluff than anything else but which was now appreciably augmenting Dugald’s pension. It had been at a ceilidh one evening that Dugald had been complaining bitterly that the tourists’ cars were ruining his hay and someone had then suggested that the best way to stop the cars from parking on his croft was to make them pay for the privilege. Dugald had thought it an excellent idea and had immediately erected the notice, but to his bewilderment instead of continuing along the road where there was ample free parking space the foolish drivers still came and parked on his croft. For some days Dugald had tried to look as though neither the house nor the croft belonged to him when he saw honest drivers looking for someone to pay their shillings to, but when, from the concealment of his byre, he had watched them go to the cottage and hand the parking fee to his wife, Dugald had been so shaken that, as he put it, ‘didn’t know what to say to myself.’ When he saw how the shillings mounted up he realised that he was on to a good thing and now Dugald was soon out of the house and waiting for his fee whenever a car so much as put a wheel on his croft. Except of course on Sunday.

  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.