Entry Island

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I was, I think, about fifteen years of age when my father came back from the fishing that year.

In his absence I had been going daily to the moor to fetch the peats we cut in the spring and left drying in stacks called rùdhan mór. It was hard work loading the dried turves into wicker creels to carry the mile or so back to the village, but I had built a splendid stack behind our blackhouse. Peats laid one on the other in a herringbone pattern that allowed the rainwater to drain through. I had taken a great deal of care over it, because I knew my father would examine it critically on his return.

It had been a fine summer, but the first signs of autumn were in the air. And soon the sun would cross the equator, bringing the equinoctial gales that would herald the start of winter.

My father had been away for two months, as he was every summer for the herring fishing at Wick, and it always took him time to settle back into life on the croft. But he was in good spirits. It was the only season of the year when he had money in his pockets, and already it was burning a hole in them. Old blind Calum said to me that morning that it wouldn’t be long before my father would want to be off to Stornoway to spend it. And he was not wrong.

The day was hardly over before my father took me aside and told me to prepare myself for a trip to town in the morning. It was the first time I was to go with him. I knew it would take us a day or more to get there with our old cart and borrowed pony, but I was excited by the prospect. So excited I could barely sleep that night as I lay in my box bed in the dark of the bedroom listening to my sisters beyond the curtains, curled up together in their own bed, fast asleep and purring like cats.

We set off in the morning, a brown pony tethered to our cart and pulling it along rutted and potholed roads till we struck the main north — south highway. It was a touch wider, perhaps, than the roads I was used to, and deeply scarred from so much traffic heading to and from Stornoway.

I sat up next to my father and told him I thought that I could walk faster than our pony. But my father said we needed the cart to bring back our winter provisions, so I should be patient with the beast and be thankful that we had her to bear the load on the road home.

It was the first time I had strayed further from our village than Sgagarstaigh, or Ard Mor, and I was amazed at the size of our island. Once you left the sea behind you, you could walk all day without ever seeing it again. But the land was pitted with wee lochs reflecting the sky, and it broke up the monotony of the landscape.

The thing that amazed me most, though, was the size of the sky. It was enormous. You saw much more of it than ever you did at Baile Mhanais. And it was always changing with the wind. You might see rain falling in the distance from a bank of black cloud. But if you turned your head just a little the sun would be shining somewhere else and there could be a rainbow vivid against the black.

The heather was a wonderful deep purple, punctuated by the yellow heads of the wild tormentil that grew everywhere. At first, as we left the mountains behind us in the south, the land folded over on itself again and again, broken only by the silver-mossed rock that burst through the peat, and the streams and rivers that tumbled from higher ground, teeming with fish.

‘Why is it,’ I asked my father, ‘that we don’t eat more fish when the rivers are so full of them?’

His face set and he glowered at the road ahead of him. ‘Because those that own the land won’t let us take them,’ he said. ‘The fish in these rivers, boy, are only for those and such as those. And if you’re caught taking one, you’ll end up in the jail faster than you can say bradan mór’ — which was the Gaelic for big salmon. And plenty of big salmon there were, too. In just a few weeks they would be fighting their way upstream, jumping the rocks and waterfalls to spawn somewhere up in the hills.

As we got further north the land flattened out, and there was not a tree in sight. You could see for miles across the moor towards the west, and on our right I caught occasional glimpses of the sea. The Minch, they called it, and I knew that somewhere beyond The Minch lay the mainland of Scotland.

As darkness fell we were still some miles from town. My father drew our cart into the lee of a crop of rocks where we were sheltered from the wind and unwrapped the marag dhubh that my mother had sliced and fried for us before we left. Blood from the cow, mixed with oatmeal and a little onion. Black pudding they call it now in English, but we knew it then as famine food. Blood drained from the beast in small quantities so that you got at least some protein without having to kill the animal.

And then we slept beneath a tarpaulin, huddled together for warmth, the canvas pulled up over our heads to protect us from the midges, those wee biting flies that come out in black bloody clouds when the wind drops.

It was fine weather when we reached town the next morning and made our way among the carts and traps that rattled along the length of Cromwell Street. There were whitewashed cottages on one side, and tall stone buildings the like of which I had never seen before, gables and dormers and bay windows. On the other side sunlight caught the wind-dimpled waters of the inner harbour where fishing boats were lined up at the quay. A spit of land crammed with shops and houses separated the inner and outer harbours. And anchored out in the bay beyond them, several tall, three-masted sailing ships sat proud on the high tide.

Away to our right, on the hill that rose above the inner harbour, Seaforth Lodge dominated the skyline, a great big two-storey stone house and outbuildings that commanded marvellous views of the town and harbour and the ragged coastline to the east.

‘Who owns that?’ I asked my father.

‘A Mr James Matheson,’ he said. ‘A very rich man who has just bought the whole of the Isle of Lewis.’ He said he had heard that Matheson paid one hundred and ninety thousand pounds for the island. And I could not imagine so much money. ‘It means he owns everything, and everybody, on it,’ my father said. ‘Just like Sir John Guthrie at Ard Mor owns the Langadail estate, and everything and everybody on it. Including us.’

When we reached the centre of the town my father told me to go and explore while he made his tour of the grocery and hardware stores and the ship’s chandlers, to buy tools and grain, and a little something for my mother and the girls. He grinned at me. ‘And a little baccy for myself.’

I was reluctant at first. I had never seen so many people before, and had no idea where to go or what to do. But he shoved me in the back. ‘Go on, son. Time to spread your wings.’

Of all the people in Stornoway that day, it seemed I was the only one who was barefoot. For the first time in my life I felt self-conscious about it, and wished I had come in my Sunday best. I wandered along the quay looking at all the fishing boats, watching my feet on the nets and buoys. The smell of fish was powerful and I turned up a narrow street that led to the outer harbour. Past alehouses and hostels, and down to what they called south beach, where the big boats berthed at the pier.

Most everyone had their heads covered. The men with top hats or cloth caps, the women with all manner of bonnets tied under the chin to stop them from blowing away. The clack of horses’ hooves, and the metal of cartwheels on cobbles filled the air, along with the wind and the voices of people that were carried on it.

I heard a Gaelic greeting: ‘Ciamar a tha thu?’ A young woman’s voice. But I didn’t turn, because I couldn’t imagine that she was addressing me. Until she said it again, and it seemed as if she were right behind me. I turned and found myself looking into the fine face of a pretty teenage girl, her black hair piled up in pleats, a dark coat open over a long dress that buttoned high up to the neck and trailed almost to the ground. She looked at me with knowing blue eyes that seemed to have a smile in them. ‘Bet you don’t know who I am,’ she said to me in English.

I smiled. ‘Of course I do.’ And I hoped she couldn’t hear the thumping of my heart. ‘How could I forget? My arms are still aching from carrying you all that way.’

It pleased me to see her blush, and I pressed home my advantage.

‘I thought you couldn’t speak Gaelic.’

She shrugged casually. ‘I don’t. But I learned a few phrases — just in case I should ever bump into you again.’

Now it was my turn to blush. I could feel the colour rising high and hot on my cheeks.

She had regained the advantage and smiled. ‘But the last time we met you couldn’t speak any English.’

I felt the initiative swing back in my direction, ‘I took English at school,’ I said. ‘Learned the whole language, just in case I should ever come across you lying in a ditch again.’ Her eyes widened a little. ‘But I haven’t had much chance to use it since I left.’

Her face clouded. ‘You’ve left school already?’

‘Three years ago.’

Now she was astonished. ‘But you couldn’t have been any more than …’ She searched my face, trying to guess my age.

I helped her out. ‘Twelve at that time.’

‘That’s far too young to be leaving school. I’ll be tutored until I’m eighteen.’

‘I was needed to work on the croft.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Well, right now I’m drystane dyking.’

She laughed. ‘Are you still speaking English, or what?’

I smiled back at her, enjoying the laughter in her eyes. ‘It means I’m building stone walls without mortar. Right now, a sheep fank up on the hill above Baile Mhanais. That’s the village where—’

She cut me off. ‘I know where you live.’

‘Do you?’ I was surprised.

She nodded. ‘I came once and stood on the hill and looked down at it. I was pretty sure I saw you on the shore. It looked as if you were gathering seaweed.’

I was excited by the thought that she had taken the trouble to come and see where I lived, but tried to hide it. ‘That’s quite possible.’

She cocked her head and looked at me curiously. ‘Why would you gather seaweed?’

‘It’s good fertiliser. We spread it on the lazy beds.’ I could see from her expression that she had no idea what I was talking about, and I didn’t want to seem like some peasant boy, so I changed the subject. ‘A tutor’s a teacher, right?’

‘A private teacher, yes.’

‘So do you go somewhere to be tutored?’

‘No, I’m tutored at the castle. My tutor has a room there.’

A group of boys pushing a cart at the gallop almost knocked us over, shouting at us to get out of the way, and we started walking along the seafront. ‘It must be amazing to live in a castle,’ I said.

But she didn’t seem impressed. ‘You live in one of those squat little stone houses with straw roofs,’ she said.

‘A blackhouse, aye.’

She shuddered. ‘I would hate that.’

Which made me laugh. ‘They’re not so little. There’s plenty of room inside for folk in one end and cows at the other.’ I knew this would get a reaction and it did.

There was horror on her face. ‘You have cows living in your house?’

‘It keeps us warm,’ I said. ‘And there’s always fresh milk on tap.’

She shuddered. ‘It sounds medieval.’

‘Not the same as living in a castle, I imagine, but I like it well enough.’

We walked on in silence for a short time and I stole a glance at her. She was quite tall. Past my shoulder, anyway, and there was a light in her smile that gave me butterflies in my tummy. She caught me looking at her and her face coloured a little, eyes dipping, a tiny smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

She said, ‘What are you doing in Stornoway?’

‘I came with my father to get provisions for the winter. He’s just back from the fishing on the mainland, so we have some money.’

‘Don’t you make money from your croft?’

I laughed at her innocence. ‘The croft barely feeds us.’

She looked at me, consternation in her voice. ‘Well, where do you get your clothes?’

‘We spin wool from the sheep and weave it into cloth for my mother to make into clothes.’ And I had that feeling of self-consciousness again as she looked me up and down, her eyes coming to rest on my bare feet.

‘Don’t you have any shoes?’

‘Oh, yes. But we have to buy them, and they wear out pretty fast. So we keep them for going to church on Sundays.’

I saw in her eyes that she could not even begin to understand how we lived.

‘What are you doing in town?’ I asked.

‘My father brought us. Some friends who are staying at the castle wanted to do some shopping. We’ll be lunching at the new Royal Hotel in Cromwell Street. And we’re staying over there tonight.’ She seemed excited by the idea.

I didn’t tell her that my father and I wouldn’t be lunching at all. We would eat the last of the black pudding my mother had made and spend the night in our cart, hoping that it wouldn’t rain. We stopped and gazed out at the water washing in along the shore, and I saw a tall ship in full sail tacking carefully into the comparative shelter of the harbour through the narrow channel between the rocks.

‘I asked the staff at the castle, but no one seemed to know your name.’ She glanced up at me. ‘Except that you were a Mackenzie.’

I flushed with pleasure at her interest. ‘Sime,’ I said.

‘Sheem?’ She frowned. ‘What kind of name’s that?’

‘It’s the Gaelic for Simon.’

‘Well, it’s a silly name. I will just call you Simon.’

‘Oh will you?’ I raised an eyebrow.

She nodded quite definitely. ‘I will.’

‘In that case, I’ll just call you Ciorstaidh.’

She frowned. ‘Why? It doesn’t sound that different.’

‘Because it’s the Gaelic for Kirsty, and I’ll see it differently.’

She looked at me with such penetration in those blue eyes that it set my butterflies going again. ‘You remember my name, then?’

Caught in that gaze of hers I felt my mouth go dry and I could hardly find my voice. ‘I remember every little thing about you.’

‘Hey! What do you think you’re playing at?’

The voice shouting so close startled me, and I turned to find myself facing a teenage boy, perhaps a year or two older than me. He had a thick head of gingery hair and was tall, a well-built lad wearing fine clothes and a pair of shiny black boots. A slightly smaller boy with short black hair stood at his shoulder. The bigger boy pushed me in the chest and I staggered back, taken by surprise.

‘George!’ Kirsty shouted at him, but he ignored her, angry green eyes fixed on me.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing talking to my sister?’

‘It’s none of your business, George,’ Kirsty said.

‘Any cotter boy talking to my sister is my business.’ He shoved the flat of his hand once more into my chest. Though this time I stood my ground.

Kirsty stepped between us. ‘This is Simon. He’s the boy who saved my life the day the trap went into the ditch and Mr Cumming was killed.’

He pushed her out of the way, puffing up his chest and moving close so that his face was just inches from mine. ‘Well, if you think that gives you any rights, then you can think again.’

‘We were just talking,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t want you talking to my sister. We don’t associate with tenants.’ He said the word tenants as if it made a bad taste in his mouth.

‘Oh, don’t be such an ass, George!’ Kirsty tried to insinuate her way between us again, but he held her at bay.

He never took his eyes off me. ‘If I ever see you with my sister again, I’ll give you such a hiding you’ll remember it the rest of your days.’

I felt my honour at stake now, and I lifted my jaw and said, ‘You and who else?’

He laughed in my face, and I recoiled a little from his bad breath. ‘Hah! I don’t need an army to deal with the likes of you.’ And from nowhere a big fist swung into my peripheral vision catching me square on the side of my face. Pain and light exploded in my head and my knees buckled under me.

The next thing I knew, the smaller boy was leaning over me, taking one of my hands in his and helping me back to my feet. I was groggy and still a little in shock, and so quite unprepared for the boy suddenly stepping behind me to pull both my arms up my back. George’s pale, freckled face ballooned into view, leering at me, and I was helplessly exposed to the fists he pummelled into my stomach. The other boy let me go and I doubled over on my knees, retching.

I could hear Kirsty screaming at them to stop, but her protests were ignored. George lowered his face to mine. ‘Just stay away,’ he hissed, then turned and, grabbing his sister by the arm, dragged her off protesting, the other boy trailing after them and grinning at me over his shoulder.

I was still on my knees, leaning forward with my knuckles on the ground, when I felt strong hands lifting me to my feet. A fisherman with a woollen hat and a face weathered by sun and wind. ‘Are you all right, lad?’

I nodded, only embarrassed that Kirsty should have seen me humiliated like this. Nothing was hurt as much as my pride.

It must have been an hour or more before I met up with my father again. He looked at me, concerned, and saw how the knees were out of my trousers and my knuckles all skinned. ‘What happened to you, son?’

I was too ashamed to tell him. ‘I fell.’

He shook his head and laughed at me. ‘Damn, boy! I can’t take you anywhere, can I?’

It was just a few days later that I saw her again. There was very little sunshine that day. The wind was whipping itself up out of the south-west and bringing great rolling columns of bruised cloud in from the sea. But the air was not cold and I liked the feel of it blowing through my clothes and my hair as I worked. Hot work it was, too, moving great big lumps of stone up the hill to chip at them with my hammer so that they fit just right in the wall.

My father had taught me how to build drystone dykes almost as soon as I could walk. ‘You’ll aye be able to keep some beasts in and others out, son,’ he had said. ‘Or put a roof over your head. The fundamentals of life.’ He liked to use big words, my father. I think he learned them from the Gaelic bible that he read to us every evening and half of Sunday.

The day was waning, but there were still some hours of daylight left and I was hoping to finish the sheep fank by week’s end when my father would inspect my work and give it his approval. Or not. Though I would have been devastated if he hadn’t.

I straightened up, back stiff and muscles aching, to look down on Baile Mhanais and the shore beyond it, strips of croftland running down the hill to the sea. Which was when I heard her voice.

‘Ciamar a tha thu?’

I turned, heart suddenly pounding, to find her standing there on the crest of the hill. She wore a long dark cape over her dress, the hood pulled up to protect her hair. But still strands of it managed to break free and fly out like streamers in the wind. ‘I’m well, thank you,’ I replied in English. ‘How are you?’

Her eyes dipped towards the ground, and I could see her hands clasped in front of her, one ringing the other inside of it. ‘I came to apologise.’

‘What for?’ Although I knew fine well, but my pride wanted her to believe that I hadn’t given it a second thought.

‘My brother George.’

‘Nothing to apologise for. You’re not his keeper.’

‘No, but he thinks he’s mine. I am so ashamed of how he treated you, after what you did for me. You don’t deserve that.’

I shrugged, feigning indifference, but searching desperately for some way to change the subject. Humiliation ran deep. ‘How is it you’re not with your tutor?’

And for the first time her face broke into a smile, and she giggled as if I had said something I shouldn’t. ‘It’s a new tutor I have just now. A young man. Just in his twenties. He only arrived a few weeks ago, and I think he’s fallen hopelessly in love with me.’

I felt a jab of jealousy.

‘Anyway, I can wrap him around my little finger any time I like. So getting away from the castle is not a problem.’

I glanced down the slope towards the village, wondering if anyone down there had seen us. She didn’t miss it.

‘Ashamed to be seen with me?’

‘Of course not! It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s not normal, is it? The likes of me seen talking to the likes of you.’

‘Oh, stop it. You sound like George.’

‘Never!’ The comparison fired up my indignation.

‘Well, if you’re so worried about being seen with me, maybe we should meet somewhere that no one can.’

I looked at her, confused. ‘Meet?’

‘To talk. Or maybe you don’t want to talk to me.’

‘I do,’ I said a little too quickly, and I saw a smile tickle her lips. ‘Where?’

She flicked her head beyond the rise to the curve of silver sand below us on the other side of the hill. ‘You know the standing stones at the far end of the beach?’

‘Of course.’

‘There’s a wee hollow below them, almost completely sheltered from the wind, and you get a great view of the sea breaking over the rocks.’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘I go there sometimes. Just to be alone. You’d not have to be scared about people seeing us together if we were to meet there.’

It was late afternoon the day I set off to keep my tryst with Kirsty. I made solitary tracks in sand left wet by the receding tide as I followed the curve of Traigh Mhor north, glancing a little nervously across the machair in case someone was watching. But I might have been the last person on earth. There was not a soul to be seen. I had for company only the sound of the sea breaking on the shore and the gulls that wheeled around the rocks.

At the far side of the beach I climbed up through the cemetery, head and foot stones poking up through the long grass, and I trod carefully, aware that my ancestors lay here and that one day I would join them. I stopped and glanced out over the ocean to see the sun starting its slow descent towards the horizon, edging distant clouds with gold and sending shards of light skimming across the surface of the water. What a view it was from eternity that I would share with the folk who had inhabited this land for all the centuries before me.

The standing stones cast long shadows over the machair. Some of them were more than twice my height. Thirteen primary stones that formed a central circle, with a long approach avenue of stones to the north, and shorter arms to the south, east and west.

A movement caught my eye, and I saw a furl of skirt in the wind, half hidden by one of the taller stones, before Kirsty appeared, turning around the edge of it to stand looking down the slope as I climbed towards her. As I approached I saw that the colour was high on her face. Her skirts and cape streamed out behind her, along with her hair, and she folded her arms and leaned against the grain of the gneiss.

‘Did they teach you about the stones at school?’ she asked when I reached her, a little out of breath.

‘Only that they’re about four thousand years old and nobody knows who put them there.’

‘My tutor says if we were able to look down on them from above they would form the rough shape of a Celtic cross.’

I shrugged. ‘So?’

‘Simon, they were put here more than two thousand years before Christ was born.’

I saw her point and nodded sagely, as if the thought had occurred to me long ago. ‘Yes, of course.’

She smiled and ran the flat of her hand down the stone that she was leaning against. ‘I love the texture of the stones,’ she said. ‘They have grain running through them like wood.’ She tipped her head back and looked up towards the top of it. ‘I wonder how they moved them. They must be terribly heavy.’ She grinned then and extended her hand towards me. ‘Come on.’ I hesitated for only a moment, before grasping it, feeling it small and warm in mine. She pulled me away from the stones, and we went running down the slope together, almost out of control, laughing with exhilaration before coming to a halt where the elements had eaten away at the machair and loose, peaty earth crumbled down into a rocky hollow.

She let go of my hand and jumped down into it. I followed suit and landed beside her. Beach grass grew in tussocks and clumps, binding the loose earth and pushing up between cracks in the rock. The wind blew overhead but the air here was quite still, and there was a wonderful sense of shelter and tranquillity. No one could see us, except perhaps from a boat out at sea.

Kirsty arranged her skirts to sit down in the grass and patted the place beside her. I saw her ankle-length black boots and a flash of white calf. I knew she was younger than me, and yet she seemed possessed of so much more confidence. I did as I was bid and sat down next to her, self-conscious again, and a little scared by strange, unaccustomed feelings.

She said, ‘Sometimes I look out and wonder if on a clear day it might be possible to see America.’ She laughed. ‘Which is daft, I know. It’s far too far away. But it makes me think about all those folk who set off in boats not knowing what, if anything, lay at the end of their voyage.’

I loved to hear her talk like this, and I watched the light in her eyes as she looked out over the ocean.

‘I wonder what it’s like,’ she said.

‘America?’

She nodded.

I laughed. ‘We’ll never know.’

‘Probably not,’ she agreed. ‘But we shouldn’t limit our horizons to only what we can see. My father always says if you believe in something you can make it happen. And he should know. Everything we have, and are, is because of him. His vision.’

I gazed at her, filled for the first time with curiosity about her father and mother, the life she led, so different from mine. ‘How did your father get rich?’

‘Our family came from Glasgow originally. My great-grandfather made his fortune in the tobacco trade. But all that collapsed with the American war of independence, and it was my father who eventually restored the family’s fortunes by getting us into the cotton and sugar trade with the West Indies.’

I listened to her with a sense of amazement, as well as inferiority, aware of all the things of which I was completely ignorant. ‘Is that still what he does?’

She laughed. ‘No, not now. He’s retired from business. Since he bought the Langadail estate and built the castle at Ard Mor that’s what takes up all his time. Even if it doesn’t make him any money.’ She turned the radiance of her smile on me. ‘Or so he’s always saying.’

I smiled back, engulfed somehow by her gaze, my eyes held by hers, and there was a long silence between us. I heard the wind and the gulls, and the sound of the ocean. I could feel the pounding of my heart like the waves beating on the shore. And without any conscious decision I reached out to run my fingers back through the silky softness of her hair and cradle the back of her head in my palm. I saw her pupils dilate and felt an ache of longing deep inside me.

I remembered the little girl I had lifted into my arms from the ditch and how, as I trotted the long wet mile to the castle, I would look down and see her gazing up at me.

I found her face with my other hand, tracing the line of her cheek so softly with the tips of my fingers, before leaning in to kiss her for the very first time, guided by some instinct which had been aeons in the making. Lips cool and soft and giving. And although I knew nothing of love, I knew that I had found it, and never wanted to lose it.