The Sea for Breakfast (6 page)

‘It was an accident,' retorted Neilac complacently; ‘and anyway, what's it matter if I did kill you; you'd still keep wrigglin' like an eel, there's that much of the Devil in you.'

‘If you killed me first and then stripped the skin off me, my bones would keep on movin',' retorted the Gaffer, who seemed to accept that his body was just a collection of bones laced together with whisky.

Murdoch, an indomitable old man who could always be found where there was money to be made no matter how trivial or how hazardous the effort involved, was perched on a section of up-ended culvert pipe looking at his watch which he took from a tin in his pocket.

‘Yes, what is the time?' Morag asked him.

‘Wait and I'll tell you,' muttered Murdoch, still studying his watch.

‘How that man knows the time with a watch that has the minute hand so short you can't tell it from the hour hand I don't know,' said the Gaffer.

‘Indeed, if I watch it long enough I can see one of them move,' replied Murdoch.

‘That's not what you're here for,' expostulated the Gaffer, jumping up and giving Murdoch a push in the chest that sent the old man buttocks down into the culvert pipe. ‘Get that lorry finished loadin'.'

‘Here, here, man,' remonstrated Murdoch indignantly, ‘I canna' load a lorry with my arse tight in a drainpipe. Have sense, man.'

Laughingly the men pulled Murdoch out of his predicament and sauntered back to their work.

‘ 'Tis five o' clock then,' announced Murdoch as he returned his watch to his pocket.

The men froze animatedly and awaited the Gaffer's corroboration.

‘ 'Tis no more than five to,' he said firmly. ‘Get on with it.' Watch in hand, he urged them on to fill the lorry and as the minute finger touched the hour he took a whistle from his pocket and blew. The men with picks arrested their strokes mid-way; the men loading tilted their shovels so that the chippings slid back on to the road and then they threw down their implements, collected their jackets and bags and hoisted themselves on to the lorry.

‘Look at that,' called the Gaffer caustically. ‘In a big enough hurry to knock off at night they are, but never one of them here on time this mornin'.'

‘That's a lie!' Tom-Tom, an excitable muddle-headed little man, squeaked in protest.

‘That's as true as I'm here,' asseverated the Gaffer.

‘It's a lie, I'm tellin' you,' spluttered Tom-Tom, jumping down from the lorry and confronting the Gaffer with all his five foot nothing of bristling indignation. ‘I was here in good time. I know because I jumped straight out of my bed when I heard the wireless time and indeed I came out in such a rush I left the door in bed and my wife wide open.'

The faces of the men remained impassive and the Gaffer checked a wheeze of laughter before setting his face into a scowl which he bestowed upon the driver who, with one hand in his pocket, was trying nonchalantly to crank his lorry.

‘What like of a man is that?' asked the Gaffer contemptuously. ‘Tryin' will he start a lorry with one of his hands stuck in his pocket.'

The driver put both hands into his pockets and regarded the Gaffer coolly.

‘Who's grumblin' about my hands bein' in my pockets?'

‘I am,' exploded the Gaffer.

‘Well, at least my hand's in my own pocket.' retaliated the driver, the grin plucking at his lips belying the testiness of his voice. ‘You keep your grumblin' till you find them in your own pockets.' He stepped up into the cab and gave a long pull on the self-starter which coaxed the engine into a clatter of activity. The men lifted their hands in farewell gestures that ranged from the sickly to the regal as the lorry jogged away round the bend.

‘Look at them,' commented Morag acidly; ‘wouldn't you think it was to a convalescent home the lorry was takin' them.'

‘Tsere is a tsing,' said Hector appealingly. ‘A tsing in tse shed at tse back of tse house, will mend it. Callum said I would get it if I wanted it.'

I took a deep breath and the key of the shed from the drawer and accompanied Hector to ferret out his ‘tsing'.

Within a few months of having bought the cottage from Galium I was getting thoroughly tired of having his name quoted in exoneration of their actions by those who descended upon me with predatory intent. Callum, it transpired, had hurriedly disposed of everything movable in and around the cottage as soon as I had popped up as a prospective buyer. There had been a useful store of peat in one of the sheds which I had thought would help me through the winter but a week or so after I had settled in when, I suppose, the unmistakable blue of peat smoke had been seen eddying from my chimney, visitors had come in the night with sacks and appropriated the lot. Had I been a Gael I should either have nursed my grievance until there was a chance to retaliate or I should have referred to it obliquely, perhaps blaming the fairies. I did neither.

‘Why did you come in the night and take peats from my shed?' I taxed the offenders.

‘Indeed they were no your peats at all,' they retorted loftily. ‘Callum said we could have them a while ago, but we left them till we would get a chance to move them.'

‘Then why couldn't you have told me and taken them in the daylight instead of coming at night?'

‘Why? Did we frighten you? Ach, we're awful sorry. If we'd known you were going to be frightened we would have come some other time right enough. We just thought we wouldn't disturb you.'

Similar appropriations happened every other month or so to begin with. A pair of wheels and an axle which I had annexed for making into some sort of a box cart were claimed immediately I made known my intention and I had to endure being thanked effusively for having looked after them so long. A boat-hook and a pair of oars were spirited away when it was discovered I was looking around for a dinghy; a sack of fleece which I had envisaged having spun into knitting wool likewise vanished. Always the excuse was ‘Callum said …'. I padlocked the shed eventually and though admittedly the claims decreased they have not ceased altogether during the years, and I am still apprehensive that the massive lump of oak which was once an engine bearer in a boat and is now my mantelpiece will some day be recognized and desired by someone with an irrefutable claim to it, or that I shall wake up one morning to find the cattle breakfasting in my garden because the shafts of a cart which make the gate to keep them out have been requisitioned for their original purpose.

By far the most persistent claimant was Morag's nephew, Hector, who had now returned to Bruach with his wife and child to settle on his aunt's croft. Before his return Hector had been rather a shadowy character, rarely alluded to by Morag or anyone else until he had met with the accident, the alleged effects of which were bringing him back to Bruach. Once it was known he was coming his name was soon on everyone's lips. His transgressions were remembered and related with glee. Hector was the son of Morag's sister who, according to Morag, had married a real bad man, English of course, who had soon left her to bring up their son as best she could. She had brought the boy to the home of her parents and there let him run wild. Morag strongly disapproved of Hector's upbringing.

‘My sister didn't believe in skelpin',' she lamented to me. ‘She used to say you can't knock sense into a lad's head by thrashin' his backside, but I was always after tellin' her that sense can work its way up from the bottom to the top same as everythin' else in this world.'

It seemed however that Hector had not entirely escaped thrashing.

‘Always takin' the day off from school to go fishin' he was,' Erchy told me. ‘One mornin' he went fishin' off the Black rock and he fell into the sea. He was near drowned but for Big Willie bein' out in his boat and pickin' him up in time. He was brought into school. Ach, we thought he was dead right enough, but the teacher turned him over and squeezed a lot of water out of him. By God! The teacher was that mad with him as soon as he came to he lay him across the desk and thrashed him till his pants steamed. That cured Hector of drownin' and of playin' truant from school, I can tell you.'

Hector's main claim to notoriety though, as everyone admitted, was his success with women.

‘Hell, what a man he was,' Erchy told me reverently. ‘Used to carve his initials on every rock he'd taken a women behind, and when we go after the deer in the hills we keep comin' across these “H. M.Ss” chipped all over the place. Makes you feel hot to see them there's that many. Honest, he's as bad as the stags themselves, that man.'

‘Perhaps marriage has changed him,' ventured someone, but from the way the suggestion was received it was obvious that no one really believed Hector could change appreciably.

I naturally expected to meet an Adonis, but when Morag brought him to my cottage I was confronted by a middle-aged man, with thinning black hair and with a pale, marrow-shaped face, carelessly shaven and deeply lined between nose and mouth. He was tall and well made but he drooped despondently over his stomach and jumbled his arms and legs about when he walked. He had, however, a pair of very beguiling blue eyes, a charmingly shy smile and a unique gift for making every woman he paid even the scantest attention to feel that she was someone very, very special. He exerted a little of his charm on me that day and I succumbed immediately, despite all the warnings I had been given. I was soon deluding myself that never again should I have to wait for someone to do for me the little jobs that were beyond my capabilities; that Hector's strong arm would always be ready with help whenever I needed it; that I should always be a welcome guest aboard his boat; that a fish would be procured for me, one way or another, whenever I might express a fancy for one. For hours after he had gone I glowed with satisfaction.

The very next day Hector came and enlisted my help to haul up his boat for repairs.
Wayfarer
was a thirty-two foot motor-boat, heavily built and deeply keeled, and I felt rather as though I were taking part in an ill-matched tug-o'-war when I was harnessed, along with most of the able-bodies in the village, male and female, to a thick rope and exhorted repeatedly to heave. We strained and sweated, our feet shifting and skidding on the shingle, while all the time Hector, who had to keep an eye on a ‘tsing', appeared to do nothing more strenuous than caress the boat's stern.

A few days after the boat hauling I started clearing out my sheds and Hector, who had proffered help, stepped in only to assert his claim whenever I discovered anything useful and to magnanimously bestow on me anything that was not. I soon found that most of what I thought I had paid for had been previously disposed of to him by Callum – even an old log basket which had been woven for me by a friend, but which he confidently asserted was one of his grandfather's unorthodox creels. I found too that while he was not averse to sitting in the kitchen drinking innumerable cups of tea, his capacity for which was even more impressive than his Aunt's, he melted away like the mist when I gave the slightest hint that I should like some help. He would sometimes go fishing if I agreed to row him about while he dangled a line, but it was in Hector's company that I was able to prove that the old fisherman's belief: ‘If a red-haired woman crosses your path when you are going out fishing you may as well go home because you will not catch a fish', is no idle superstition. A red-haired woman once crossed our path and Hector promptly abandoned me and any ideas of fishing and took off in pursuit.

There were undoubtedly times when Hector's behaviour was infuriating, yet I could no more have vented my spleen on him than I could have thrown a stone at a blackbird stealing the strawberries in my garden. He was weak, but he was lovable, gentle, philosophical, and so kind-hearted that the word ‘no' simply did not come into his vocabulary. Sooner than make someone momentarily unhappy by a refusal he would promise faithfully anything at all, without having the slightest intention of keeping his promise. If anyone reproached him he assumed an utterly dejected air, his blue-eyes would open wide and he would start to explain haltingly how some ‘tsing' had prevented him from keeping his word.

Hector could be in turn gallantly attentive, shy and gangling and guilelessly candid. In a moment of confidence one day he whipped up his shirt and showed me the operation scar on his stomach and seemed disappointed when I did not whip up my skirts and show him mine. Though he came to regard my cottage much as a second home and to feel that he knew me too well to address me as ‘Miss Peckwitt', he could never permit himself the familiarity of using my name (Gaelicized as ‘Lilac') or the diminutive ‘Becky' by which I am known to my friends. In conversation he referred to me as ‘she' with a nod in the direction of my cottage or my presence. If he wished to attract my attention for any reason, he would sidle up to me and give me a companionable slap on the behind. This aversion to using my Christian name persisted even when he adopted the disturbing habit of kissing me goodbye. He would lumber across the kitchen towards me, fling his arms around me and, because I dodged expertly, land a kiss somewhere on the back of my neck. It was the utterly simple, warm-hearted kiss of a child, or of a brother or sister, grateful for understanding. At first I had wondered if I should permit it but it was gradually borne in upon me that every time he kissed me good-bye some tool or other useful article disappeared from the cottage on loan. Once it was my nail brush and when it was surreptitiously returned I realized from the smell in the bathroom that it had been used for scrubbing the ‘berries' off ‘berried' lobsters which are not allowed by law to be marketed. Once it was my toothbrush which came back reeking of oil and petrol, no doubt after having been used to clean a ‘tsing' in his engine. Another time it was my paraffin drum because his own had developed a leak. Dusters he collected and stowed away in his boat much as a park attendant collects waste paper and I grew accustomed to seeing my cast-off under and outer clothing wrapping greasy tools or used for swabbing down decks. Though eventually I came to accept this good-bye kiss as pure camouflage, at first there were times when I rebelled at his perfidy and avoided his embrace. Then he would slouch away and not return for several days or even weeks. The last time I had practised such an evasion Behag, Hector's wife, had come to see me the next day. Behag was a fat, pallid voiced, sagging little woman whose only interests in life seemed to be her child, her retinue of cats and the knitting of colourful pullovers for her husband. She was curiously placid and remained completely indifferent to her husband's affairs unless they were right under her nose and even then she evinced only tolerant amusement. I liked her tremendously and thought she deserved so much better than she had got but she was content with the way things were. As she got up to go, which is the time all Gaels reserve for the offhand disclosure of the real reason for their visit, she had asked anxiously: ‘Were you cross with Hector last night, Miss Peckwitt?'