Beautiful Just! (5 page)

She began to feel hungry but she made herself continue picking until she had a pailful of whelks before she paused to eat the damp crumbs of oatcake which were all that remained of the crisp wedge of fresh bannock she had stuffed into her pocket that morning, and as she ate she saw with concern that the tide was already beginning to creep back, licking at the shore with foaming lips and alerting the anemones to unfold their greedy fronds. Cramming the last few crumbs of oatcake into her mouth she began with renewed determination to heave over bigger and bigger boulders, scrabbling urgently for the whelks beneath as she retreated from the flowing tide and she realized with elation that her eyes, having become accustomed to the selectivity of her task, were quicker at spotting the clusters of whelks among the rocks so that her pail filled more rapidly. By the time the tide had driven her up the shore there was another half pailful to add to the two that were already in her sack. She carried her sack over to where the dinghy was moored. Her mother and the three other women were waiting for her, their tired bodies slumped against the rocks and their faces whipped to a redness that rivalled that of Kirsty's purloined pyjamas. Her mother, Fiona noticed, had picked two full hundredweight sacks of whelks; the other women had each picked more than a hundredweight.

‘My, but you've done well, Fiona!' they complimented her as she dumped her sad half sackful.

She gave them a wry smile. ‘I'll need to do better,' she told them.

It was growing dusk when she and her mother reached home and the hens were waiting hungrily while the cattle crowded around the door of the byre. In the kitchen the fire was out; the lamp unlit. Fiona picked up the milk pail and went outside. The soft milky teats of the cows were like balm on her smarting hands and as she rested her head against the warm comfort of their shaggy flanks great clusters of whelks swam before her tired eyes. When she went back to the house the lamp was lit and the kitchen was full of the smells of peat smoke and hot tea; of boiling potatoes and salt fish. She pulled off her gum-boots and sat on the stout wooden fender, her feet pressed against the metal hob of the grate, and before she went to bed her mother softened home-made ointment in the warmth of the fire and tore strips of clean rags into bandages to protect her hands from the chafing of the rough wool blankets.

Fiona's skill at whelk gathering improved so quickly that by the end of the first period of daylight low tides she had three full sacks of whelks ready to be washed before being carried on her back the quarter of a mile up the steep brae to where the carrier would collect them.

‘You'd best make halves of your bags,' Fiona's mother told her. ‘It's no wise for you to carry full ones at your age.' But though she obediently made two loads of her first sack Fiona was shamed by the sight of her mother and the other women toiling up the brae with their full hundredweights. Rebelliously she roped a full sack to her shoulders and followed in their wake with desperately feigned ease. She was used to carrying heavy loads but the path was boggy and steep; the sacks dripping wet and the whelk shells pressing into her back were hard as pebbles. Before she had covered half the distance her breath was rasping against her hot throat and there was the warm salty taste of blood in her mouth. But every step was taking her nearer the dyke where the whelks would be left for collection and she was too proud to give in and take a rest. Her mother, having deposited the fourth of her eight sacks on the dyke turned and saw her daughter's struggle but instead of chiding her or going to her aid she only smiled her tired, gentle smile and turned away, pretending to examine the labels on the sacks so that Fiona should not see the glint of pride in her eyes.

‘Aye well, that's done for the present,' said Peggy Ruag as she set down her last sack. Pulling back her shoulders she pressed her hands into the small of her back.

‘Till the next time,' Kirsty reminded her.

They leaned against the dyke, gossiping and laughing, trying not to betray the degree of their exhaustion.

At the next daylight tides Fiona picked a further three bags of whelks and estimated that if whelk prices were as good as people were predicting she would, when she had received the money for her six bags, have sufficient to buy not only ‘Janette' but perhaps a new hat also. She noticed her mother darting shrewdly enquiring glances at her from time to time and was careful to quell her growing excitement.

A month went by and the whelk gatherers, who were normally accustomed to receiving payment within a fortnight, began to question the delay. A few days later the explanation arrived in the form of a telegram. ‘Send no more whelks,' it instructed. ‘Market glutted. All buying ceased temporarily. Letter following.' The letter following upon the telegram brought even gloomier information. Their last two consignments had arrived at the height of the glut and as a consequence had had to be dumped.

After the first exclamations of resentment the whelk gatherers, conditioned all their lives to frustration and disappointment, accepted the situation with philosophical good humour. But since it was the first time they had known the whelk market to become glutted they repaired to Peggy Beag's cottage and drank tea while they discussed the possible reasons for the glut and mocked their presumptuous plans with hard-edged laughter.

‘It was that otter,' asserted Anna Vic. ‘Didn't I say at the time that it wasn't a good sign?'

‘Ach, that's nonsense just,' repudiated Peggy Ruag. ‘It's more likely it was those pyjamas Kirsty was wearing that put the ill luck on us.' Kirsty smiled coyly and immediately wiped the smile away with her hand.

‘Or maybe it's just the fullness of the English bellies that's at the back of it,' continued Peggy.

‘Maybe before the next tide they'll be wantin' whelks again,' Kirsty suggested.

‘We'll take good care an' find out whether they do or not before we send them off,' Anna Vic insisted. ‘Gettin' no money for our whelks is bad enough but payin' to send them to London to have them dumped is a terrible thing.'

Fiona looked across at her mother who, having gathered the largest quantity of whelks, would have the highest transport charges to pay and she knew that if the demand for whelks revived that season her first earnings would go not to buy ‘Janette' but to help her mother.

‘Aye well, I'd best be away,' said Anna Vic. She stood in the open doorway looking out across the sea. ‘I was thinkin' maybe with the money from the whelks I would get a bit of waxcloth for the floor,' she told them. ‘What's down now is as full of holes as a cod net.' She giggled. ‘I wouldn't care for ourselves but for my cousin that's comin' from Glasgow in the spring.'

‘Aye, right enough, you could do with it,' Peggy Ruag told her. ‘When folks come from Glasgow they think if you haven't a bit of waxcloth on the floor you're livin' in a pig sty.'

‘We all had our plans, I doubt,' interposed Kirsty quietly.

‘Plans?' echoed Peggy Beag. ‘What wasn't I plannin' to buy? Why, I was for gettin' one of them pressure lamps that gives such a lovely light, an' I was for gettin' some new overalls the way I'd look more respectable when the minister comes. I even thought at one time I might get one of them fancy quilts for my bed.' She bubbled over with derisive laughter.

‘Was the new quilt for when the minister comes too?' Anna Vic shrilled.

‘Oh, the Dear!' remonstrated Kirsty, sucking back a threatening smile.

Neither Fiona nor her mother referred to the subject of the dumped whelks and in her candlelit bedroom that night Fiona stuffed the mail order catalogue into one of the boxes under her bed. She wouldn't be needing that for a while, she told herself and for a few moments she let her body sag with dejection. She looked at the grazed skin of her hands and thought of the hours she had laboured in the bitter cold and of the racking burden of the dripping sacks of whelks as she had carried them up the brae. She leaned her elbows on the chest beneath the tiny window of her room and stared at the dark peaks of the hills where silver ribbons of cloud were stretched tight across the rising moon. She turned away, shrugging her shoulders. Oh well, she told herself. There'll come another season. Another whelk gathering.

‘I'm not claiming I saw a ghost,' I insisted. ‘All I am saying is that I saw a man coming to my house three hours after you say he was dead.'

My assertion brought tolerant grunts from the men and whispers of disquiet from the women who were assembled at the evening ceilidh. Lachlan solemnly knocked out his pipe on the bars of the grate and Ian, with equal solemnity, spat into the fire. We all stared with varying degrees of interest at the glob of spittle shrivelling on the glowing peat.

‘He was dead, right enough,' maintained Erchy.

‘Indeed that's true,' asseverated Morag. ‘Wasn't myself there with Barbac and Murdoch waitin' beside the bed for the last wind to go out of him just. An' didn't Murdoch lean over the bed to say somethin' when his teeths fell out an' slid off the bed down on to the floor. I bent down to get a hold of them before anyone would put a foot on them an' I'd scarce raised myself again when Neilly was gone.'

‘Why had Murdoch got his teeths in?' interrupted Johnny.

‘Ach, to see Neilly off just,' explained Morag. ‘An' the nurse was there straightenin' him out before nine o'clock,' she concluded with emphasis.

‘There now!' said Janet, summing up the evidence. ‘Whoever it was you saw last night it couldn't have been Neilly himself.'

‘It was a ghost you saw, surely,' said Anna Vic.

Of course I hadn't seen a ghost. The man I had seen was flesh and blood and I would have sworn to that. But then I would also have sworn that the man I had seen the previous evening was none other than the dead Neilly. It had been coming up to nine o'clock and a damp chill dusk was beginning to soak into the evening. I had been over to the henhouse to ensure my broody hen was back on her nest and to close up the hens for the night and I was just about to go inside my cottage when I caught sight of Neilly coming along the path. I had no doubts that it was Neilly: Bruach's population was small enough for each inhabitant to be easily recognizable even at considerable distances and Neilly was no more than fifty yards away. I knew him by his gait; by his size and shape; by the peaked yachtsman's cap he always wore and by the fact that he was smoking a cigarette. Though most of the young men in Bruach smoked cigarettes all the old men remained pipe addicts; all that is except Neilly who was the only man of his generation to have acquired the habit of cigarette smoking. As I waited by the open door I saw his cigarette glow bright as if he had taken a strong puff at it and then the next moment he had thrown it aside. In the dusk I saw the red ash scatter over the grass and I was about to call out to him when he had turned abruptly and gone away. After a moment of surprise I had shrugged my shoulders and thought no more of the incident. Neilly had not previously ventured near my cottage except once to bring me a telegram and I assumed that having seen that I was alone he had suddenly changed his mind about coming to see me. Consequently the next morning when Erchy had called out to me in passing that Neilly was dead I was genuinely shocked.

‘That's very sudden!' I exclaimed.

‘Aye, sudden enough,' agreed Erchy. He was on his way to lift his lobster creels at the time so I did not delay him with questions. Nor did I mention that I had seen Neilly only the previous evening so when, at the ceilidh that night, someone mentioned his having died ‘at the back of six' I had immediately disputed the time, explaining that it was impossible for Neilly to have been dead at six o'clock when I had seen him, presumably still hale and hearty, at nine o'clock.

‘I know it was round nine o'clock,' I assured them, ‘because when I went inside I put on the wireless and listened to the news.' I did not know then that Neilly had been too ill to rise from his bed for three days before he died so it was natural that their reaction to my claim to have seen him at any time at all the previous evening should be one of mingled disbelief and consternation.

‘If you didn't see a ghost then who was it you saw?' persisted Anna Vic, who would never have risked hurting my feelings by suggesting that I had been mistaken.

I shook my head slowly. ‘I don't know,' I said. ‘Obviously it wasn't Neilly but I'm blessed if I know who it was in that case.'

‘Then it was someone mighty like,' said Erchy.

‘He must have been or I wouldn't have made the mistake,' I agreed.

‘Ach, but maybe you were not mistaken at all,' speculated Anna Vic.

‘Aye, right enough I believe she might have had the second sight if she'd not been born in a town,' said Erchy, scrutinizing me with much the same interest as a pathologist might scrutinize a specimen in a bottle.

‘I certainly haven't got second sight,' I denied with a smile.

Lachlan spoke ‘You say he was smokin' a cigarette?' he probed. I nodded and they thought for a while, murmuring interrogatively but not, I thought, so much interested in whether or not I had seen a ghost as Anna Vic wanted to surmise but in the more practical question as to who it could have been coming to visit me? Why would he be coming? Why had he changed his mind and gone away again? The obvious answer was that whoever it had been had wanted to borrow something but they could think of no one who was currently proposing to embark on any job for which he might need to borrow tools from me and of course it was unthinkable that it could have been anyone wanting to return something already borrowed. In Bruach when you lent anything you usually had to follow its track round from neighbour to neighbour when you wanted it back.

‘What like of man would go that close to a place an' then turn away without so much as a word?' demanded Adam, the gamekeeper, in a puzzled voice. ‘Nobody from hereabouts surely?'