Authors: Candia McWilliam
Logan was humming the song now, stopping to sip something. At one point he made the gasp of satisfaction that beer advertising had taught men to make after drinking.
Elspeth lost the safe thread of the soporific novel and remembered her own first visit to Culloden, where Butcher Cumberland slaughtered the Jacobites. It was the first place she had been to in her life whose air seemed heavy with grief. She was six at the time and did not know much about the battle though it shocked her how numerous was one side and how small the other. She thought battles must be fair. The thought of the big Englishmen on horses and the small Highlanders in their leg-rags and plaids was so obviously wrong that she did not see how the battle had been allowed. Why had someone not, seeing the unevenness in might, called it off? She experienced the ageing realisation that no one can stop things after a certain point. She also thought, and could not remember being told this on that day that she and her mother and father visited the battlefield of Culloden, that believing something a very great deal must kill either pain or fear.
They had driven north to Inverness from Kelso, over roads often not metalled and sometimes blocked by a fall of shale. Her mother drove, looking into the back in the mirror to see she was not getting sick. When she did get sick, which was about once an hour, her mother pulled in at a passing place on the single-track road, held her bent over at a wide angle so that she did not splash herself, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, gave her the water-bottle for swigging, and handed her back the lemon to smell. Every long journey required a lemon. A man off the MTBs in the war had told her father lemons were excellent against seasickness. On that MTB her father had not had a lemon, of course, but even the thought had helped, he assured Elspeth. She loved lemons but the smell had become associated for life with vomiting.
After being sick, the sense of lightness and the airy head were almost worth it. As they drove further north, there were heather and bog cotton and bog myrtle growing in the roadside, and the puddles on the road were full of bright blue sky. She had seen no blue like this blue of the Highland sky, a thin colour without any weight in it and full of wind like a sail or a bell. The country was brown and gold on either side of the road and up ahead where the same road curved back and over at the summit of the lower range of peaks she could see; along huge stretches it was purple, then tawny, and through it off all the slopes cut clefts within which water ran.
Sometimes the sides of the mountains had fallen away and the blue or black or green stone shone in the sunshine or deepened the shadows that rushed over the land. A flash like quartz or mirror glass at intervals shot out, a deep pool of standing peat water catching the sun. Sheep lay on the road and got up on their knees and then their hoof-tips to teeter off. There was blue snow at the heads of the furthest mountains and the air seemed to grow wider all the time.
Rushes in the corner of a bend might indicate a loch to come, a thin forearm of water reaching inside a fold of land, blue-feathered and abruptly brown-feathered again as the light fell. The greater lochs they passed turned to black when you could see their mass, though the rims were brown and a coal blue shone out of them before they seemed like huge clouds themselves to remove all the colours, until Elspeth would suddenly see, against all that flickering deep black, something small and natty, a heron dipping and withdrawing its filled beak, or a clump of yellow flags, blowing with the white bog cotton. Trees save those planted like soldiers for a game of war, battle formations in evergreen, had given up, though around big houses tough windbreaks flowered a washed-out purple, the ineradicable stain of ponticum. In the heart of such thickets a tall house with small eyes and silver towers might wink. Smaller houses clustered together around roadsigns, barrels of old rain at their sides, the daffodils of the second spring she had seen that year just turning to paper. In the borders they had been gone for three weeks, in the South for over six weeks.
The sky even as it darkened over Loch Ness was full of light, right up to when her mother put her to bed at the bed and breakfast in a village outside Inverness.
‘I know what the little one will have,’ said the woman whose house it was, smiling in agreement with something they had begun to see. Into a jelly glass she decanted half a tin of strawberries, purple and loose in the red juice, then sugared them amply and poured on milk from a tin.
Elspeth sat up in bed late with this treat, watching the sky through a window recess two feet deep. When she took the cover off the bed, whitewash rubbed from the wall on to her arm. She rubbed her hands on the wall and transferred the bloom to her cheeks. In the propped dressing-table mirror she saw the good effect tinned strawberry juice and whitewash had upon her lips and skin. The grass and reeds and leaves and rocks outside shone with all the water they held. She watched them through the deep window with her new face. Then she lay down and shut her eyes. When her mother came to see her, she went away leaving her shoes behind so as to make less noise and came back with Elspeth’s father.
‘It’s not what we’d hoped for, Callum,’ she said, ‘but she is beautiful.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ said her father, who may have known fine that she was not sleeping, ‘she cleaned her teeth.’ Elspeth heard him pick up the jelly glass and the spoon off the crochet runner by the bed.
‘Bring your shoes, we’ll go a walk,’ he said to her mother. ‘We’ve two hours of light.’ It was half-past nine at night, she’d seen it on his wristwatch as he bent to look at her and she peeped at him as she had learned to do from watching dogs at work in their sleep.
She woke later, when they came in after their walk, their cheeks that they laid to her own cold in different ways, her father’s like a leather book and her mother’s like a satin cushion that should not have been left out. When she looked out of the deep window she saw the sun’s last whiteness lie so close to the land that all the water held in it seemed to rise and glisten to hold the sun from departing, while its skin of light showed every blade of vegetation sharp and doubled by reflection.
The morning came too soon for a family used to the darker-for-longer nights of a Borders spring, not stretched open by the Arctic Circle.
It was a wet sky. There was little to be seen beyond one’s hand. Such days are not to be trusted. Within half an hour they may disrobe and let the eye pierce the thin air as far as Perthshire.
‘Culloden this morning, I think. Vile weather’s ideal for that.’
‘An open space, no cover, a child.’
‘Ideal. Do you want to honour such a place in comfort?’
The reverence Callum Kerr had towards his own Scottishness came out in his speech, which held on to Scots usages in an accent barely Scots except to the ear attuned to the Borders bite at words. He also wanted to keep the past alive; though his intelligence suspected that much of the tradition owed itself to nineteenth-century invention and a wish in the Scots to be other than the Irish, his heart swelled in a way he could not stop at the old songs and stories. This access to something he could not describe but that filled his heart when he heard, for instance, the word ‘Locheil’ or the talking crackle of heather burning, he wanted to pass to his child. He supposed he wanted her to have those things he could not describe but knew he did possess, loyalty and a sense of place, as a father with faith might show the way to his child. They are things only taught over days and without speeches or set pieces or the child will smell a rat. It is this passing over of things neither generation can easily name that is lost to an absent parent, and lost to the orphan.
Culloden was the day’s destination, then, because it was a place where a horrific thing had happened in the history of Scotland, and because he was a pacifist and hoped that there would never be a need again for his daughter to take that decision, but, if faced with it, to decide as he had, against war. He decided too late, after participating in war; not fear made him see it, but pity. He saw his friends’ faces in the water, merry with terror, already like skulls, baring their teeth in burning water, drowning in and under fire.
Each time Callum Kerr had visited the field of the Battle of Culloden it had not been a place to put you in mind of glory, but somewhere so haunted that you might as well have seen the blood. Now he wanted to see if its effect upon him lay in his knowledge of the place or if his daughter, who, at six, knew nothing but how to please, would feel it too. His wife, he knew by now, would cleave to her scepticism; her principled atheism left her no room for atmospheres, though in this case she did allow for plenty of unacceptable facts.
Their Popular was two-tone, two shades of green like the contour lines on a hillock as shown on an Ordnance Survey map. It had not been what they selected at the showroom but it was undeniable what the attendant had said while he watched Callum write out his unprecedentedly large cheque: ‘A green car in the two shades will fit in wherever you go touring.’ It was a nice car, with a set smile to its face like some tolerant deaf person, and it took them about, no trouble. Like most men of his age, Callum drove in a way he had found out for himself; he was reliant on the brakes and turned round to talk to whoever was in the back with complete trust that his hands and feet would carry on regardless, never mind the whereabouts of his head.
‘Lemon, rug, boots? Raincoats? Sunglasses? Jumpers, headscarf? Kodak, map, knife?’
Callum was poking his head in through the window at his wife and daughter to whom this list was addressed. They did not nod or interrupt until he had stopped entirely mentioning items. Elspeth wondered when these lists would begin to include things they could never need. The lists were the worried voice of domestic concern. Her mother did it back when they each set off to work, she with her music case and warm cardigan: ‘Hat, gloves, coat, pencils, paper, cough candy (if it was summer, Extra Strong Mints), ruler, petrol, keys, galoshes, graph paper, newspaper.’ With that list she could burden him with love, still mentioning only the necessities of his day at the map publishing house up in Edinburgh, to which he caught the train every day of the week.
‘It’s a pleasant journey, right enough. You can never tire of such multiplicative greens. And when you speed along the sea that’s a holiday in itself. Imagine, what a great thing it must be to go to sea in time of peace. The journey gives me time, I always say, not takes it from me; anything I do on the journey has an extra aspect. I think: I’m doing two things at once. I’m riding on a train and I am drawing the riverbed of the Esk, which is gaining new wiggles from the juddering of the train. I am reading Herman Melville and I’m riding on a train.’
The drive to Culloden was slow as they grew closer. A herd of small black cows belted with white walked without interest towards the next part of their day. They did not look to be dairy cattle. The straggler turned and showed the white edge of her eye to the Kerrs sometimes and once, as all cows must when watched intently, she let fall some cowpats without breaking step. The car was warm inside, the cows and the low mist also insulating. The combination of pastoral and comfort did not much suit Callum’s idea of arriving at a place of blood. Elspeth was giggling at the cows’ nonchalance.
Abruptly, the cows were gone, turned after their leader through a gate hard on the road, and hidden behind a dry stone wall now in some yard. All there was of them was a newsy mooing.
In the mist there seemed now to grin a little colour. There was a white centre to it somewhere ahead of them that sent out light. The grey seemed to cook out of the mist, like water out of an ironed sheet. It thinned. What had been solid became layers to be passed through and then swivelled to become layers to pass between, horizontal, lifting, light layers that with no hurry were gone, leaving a day shining like the inner face of an eggshell, exposed.
The yellow shorn glen on either side dried off tawny and began to stir under a wind. The mountains held a blue to their sides near the sun that ran down them where the clefts made shadows. Higher up, they were black and shone where snow was melting at a torrential rush that was from the green Ford Popular slow to invisibility.
Elspeth was not feeling sick. No one had asked if she felt sick, either.
‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked, which was the other way of getting attention.
‘We are.’ Her father shut off the car with the key like a man shutting a cupboard. ‘Put on your overshoes, Elspeth.’
These were thin boots with a flat button. It was like having each foot down the throat of a fat dead fish.
‘Out you hop.’ Callum did not want to influence or load his child’s impression of Culloden. He wanted to know if her skin crept as his first had when taken as a child to Glencoe where the Macdonalds were murdered as they slept, a fact he had not known when he began to shake with cold in that bleak glen in 1934. His sense of evil left behind to float free and reestablish itself was strong; he, at the age of six, had identified his feeling. He felt as though, just out of sight, there were wolves, grey among the rocks, brown among the bracken, furred but not warm, just covered to perfection.
What a dull old place anyway, thought Elspeth. Flat, brown, dull. The sun was out now though the ground was wet. Her hair was taken up and shaken by the wind. There was slapping noise as some rooks got up from a stone some yards away, making it into the air with slow flaps. They were ugly, bald-cheeked birds with a smell like cats’ breath.
The ground, she noticed, was not still. A minute shaking filled it. Something below was stirring or something very close by but silent was passing so close to them as to make the ground tremble. She had not imagined the solid earth might shake. She knew it rotated only as she knew her parents would die one day, as a rumour put about by people who had no proof to offer her.