I looked back at the pub door, shook my head, and then walked along the side of the square and turned a corner to the street where I lodged. I went to my lodging, ran upstairs and dumped my bag, then downstairs and out again.
Without taking thought, I turned right, in the opposite direction from the station and the square. I crossed a pedestrian bridge over the railway and walked along the road out of the town, past the floodplain of the Carron River and along the southern shore of the Carron Loch. The railway line was on my right, between the road and the sea. The sun was lowering ahead of me, but not yet shining into my eyes. On my left the wooded hills shouldered up. I walked past the hamlet and glen of Attadale, and on beside and beneath the slope of Carn nan Iomairean.
I’d walked about five kilometres before I stopped, walked over the railway line and sat down on a rock on the shore at Immer. The tide was high and the loch was still; I could hear clear across it the fiddler playing at some revel in the wood at Strome Carronach. The Torridonian hills, their rocks older than life, older than the light from the visible stars, loomed black behind the hills of Strome.
In all that walk I’d met no one, and encountered few vehicles. The whole landscape seemed to shut me out, and to remind me that I was a stranger here, excluded from everything but God’s terrible love. A couple of hundred metres away, a man with a scythe was working the long grass of a
meadow, as his ancestors had done and his descendants, no doubt, would do. Merrial had, on Saturday up in the hills, recited a bit of tinker doggerel that meant more to her than it did to me:
The hammer rang in factory
The sickle sang in field
The farmer proved refractory
The hammer made the sickle yield.
No hammer, no factory had stopped this man’s scythe; its rhythmic swing slashed the grass as though the centuries had never been.
Then the man laid it carefully aside, and jumped to the seat of his tractor, and its methane-engine’s fart scared the birds as he lowered the baler and set about raking up the hay.
I laughed at myself, and stood up, and walked back to the town.
She’d left, the barmaid told me, shortly after our quarrel. I thanked the girl, avoided my mates and headed for the tinker estate.
‘She isna here.’
I turned from my futile chapping on Merrial’s white door. A small boy in shorts and shirt, both too big for him, regarded me solemnly from the path. I stepped over.
‘Do you know where she went?’
He was very clean, as far as I could see in the low sunlight, except for a red and evidently sticky stain on his chin, furred with fluff. I resisted the urge to spit on my finger and wipe it.
‘I canna say,’ he told me, with artless guile.
‘Well, can you take me to somebody who can?’
As he shook his head I became aware of the crunching of gravel around me and realised that I need not look far. A dozen tinkers, young and old, male and female, seemed to drift in from nowhere. They gathered in a loose semi-circle around me, none closer than three metres away. Some of their faces I’d seen on my previous visits to the camp; others were altogether strangers to me. All of them were dressed in that mixture of simplicity and artifice which I was beginning to recognise as a peculiarity of tinker garb; it was as though the rest of us wore the cast-off finery of some reduced aristocracy, while the tinkers alone cut their own elegant cloth.
‘I’m looking for Merrial,’ I said, boldly enough; in the silence my voice sounded as startling and thin as a curlew’s in a field.
‘Aye, we know that,’ said a young man. ‘But you’ll not find her here.’
‘And I know that,’ I retorted. ‘So where can I find her?’
He shrugged. Somebody tittered. Finally, and as though with sympathy, an older man added, ‘That’s for her to say. If she disna want you to find her, it’s no for us to help you do it. If she does, you’ll find her soon enough.’
‘So you do know where she is?’ I sounded, even to myself, pathetically hopeful. The only response was more shrugs and a giggle.
‘There’s someone else I want to see,’ I said. ‘Fergal.’
‘Oh,’ said the older man, with a pretence at puzzlement, ‘there are a lot of men by that name. You wouldn’t happen to know his surname, would you?’
‘You know damn well who I mean,’ I said. ‘Let him know I want to see him.’
Everyone took a step closer. The semicircle became a close-packed horseshoe of people who began to move so that the open end was in the direction of the road. I had never thought of the tinkers as intimidating to one of the settled folk—more usually it’s the other way round—but I felt intimidated at that moment, possibly because of their greater numbers. I decided to give way with as good a grace as I could, rather than make them make good on the implied—or perhaps imagined—threat. So I kept my distance as they continued to move forward.
‘Ah, you’d best be off,’ said the young man.
‘I reckon so,’ I said. ‘Good night to you all.’
I turned on my heel and stalked off with as much dignity as I could muster. A stone bounced on the paved road as I reached it, but I didn’t look back, or quicken my pace. Inwardly I was boiling with shame at having been, twice in one evening, faced down by tinkers. I was determined, however, that no one among my friends and acquaintances should know about this—not because of the embarrassment to myself, but because they might feel obliged to engage in some collective counter-intimidation of their own.
It was not a busy night on the square, and I didn’t feel like meeting people and talking. In fact I felt like doing some solitary drinking. I bought a bottle of whisky in The Carronade, for a mark, and ducked out without greeting anyone with more than a wave.
Back at my room I found an envelope pushed under the door. It contained a telegram, which I unfolded and read in the ruddy sunset light by the window.
‘CLOVIS C/O CATHERINE FARFARER MAIN ST CARRON STOP AM V CONCERNED RE MISSING FILES REQUEST RETURN BY SEALED POST TOMORROW TUESDAY OTHERWISE HANDS TIED RE POSS DISCIPLINARY ACTION ALSO INVESTIGATION IMMINENT STOP YOURS AYE GANTRY.’
On my walk along the shore I had concluded that I was a fool to walk out on Merrial, whatever the provocation; and now I felt this even more bitterly. She had warned me at the beginning that loving her would not always make me happy, and she had been right about that. Learning that she could be a member of a secret society made her refusal of confidence more understandable, even as the basis of that society filled me with dismay. My historical erudition had not disabused me of the vulgar view: that the communists had, in their blundering, bloody way, done much to fight the Possession, but that the final victory had not been theirs, and we could thank Providence that there was not a communist left on Earth. I could not bring myself to believe that Merrial really, in her heart, espoused that evil creed.
Any more than the Deliverer had. Perhaps Merrial, and even the other tinkers in the society, used its rituals and phrases for their own purposes, just as the Deliverer had exploited it to found her republic.
On that happier thought I drank a dram or two and fell asleep on the bed.
The following morning Catherine Farfarer, the landlady, handed me two telegrams. One was from the Disciplinary Sub-Committee of the University Senate, suspending me from membership of the University
sine die
, withdrawing all rights and privileges other than representation at a University court, just before the beginning of the academic year. The other was from Gantry, expressing his sympathy and saying that he would APPL THIS OUTRGS DECN.
And it was outrageous—in effect I was being punished before trial, because my chances of sponsorship or patronage were now nonexistent. Even if I were cleared, I would lose at least part of the first year of my project, which as good as meant losing it all. I wired Gantry back, thanking him; but I held little hope that he could do much to help, or that I, with my stubborn closed mouth, deserved it.
Not to my surprise, Merrial was not at work. I got through most of my dangerous day in the arc-lit dark of the platform leg without incident, and was just cleaning my tools (and everyone else’s) at a quarter past four when Angus Grizzlyback loomed out of the dim scaffolding and sat down at the crate.
‘Clovis,’ he said. I looked up. He scratched the back of his head with one hand, and looked away from me and at a piece of paper he held in the other.
‘Something wrong?’
Even then, the thought that leapt on me was that he was the unwilling bearer of bad tidings about my parents, or some such family matter.
‘Aye, I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to let you go. Pay you off.’
‘What for?’ I asked, simultaneously relieved and shaken.
‘Nothing you’ve done here,’ he assured me. ‘It’s much against my own inclination, Clovis; for all I’ve slagged you off you’re no bad at what you do, and you’re a sound man, but—’ He shrugged, and looked down at the paper again. ‘It’s the Society. They’ve withdrawn your clearance to work on the project.’ He looked up at me sharply, a question in his eyes. ‘Some trouble you’ve got into at the University.’
I put the tools down on the rough table and clasped my oily hands to my head. ‘How can they do that?’ I asked, but I knew the answer. The University had fingered me to the Society—of which it was, of course, a part—as a risk to the project’s security. It all made sense, unjust though it seemed.
‘You can appeal, you know,’ Angus said. ‘I’ll back you up.’
I swallowed bile. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind. Of course I’ll appeal it.’
The only reason I could think of to appeal it was that not doing so would seem like an admission of guilt—and, indeed, I was guilty of plenty, none of which I’d want brought out in a work tribunal. Confident though I was that nothing I’d done could endanger the project, others might not regard being madly in love with a stranger as a sound basis for this conviction.
‘Ach, well, I’ll set the machinery in motion,’ Angus said. ‘I’ll tell Jondo and he’ll take it up with the union.’ He forced a grin. ‘Have you back in no time.’
‘Thanks, Angus,’ I said.
‘But right now,’ he went on, ‘I’ll have to ask you to leave straight away. It says here I should escort you off the premises, but I’ll not do that.’
I was very grateful indeed that he trusted me as far as the gate; but as I turned and looked back on my way out of the yard, I noticed his tiny figure on the outside of the platform, and realised that he’d discreetly watched my every step.
I took an early and almost empty bus back to Carron Town, and went to my room. The whisky bottle, at that moment, felt like my only friend. By morning, it would seem false; we’d have had a severe falling-out, but we’d both know it was only a matter of time before we’d make up. I knew all this perfectly well as I sat under the skylight and tipped myself a generous measure of the malt. Its fortifying fire rushed through my nerves, and I could contemplate my unravelling life with a degree of detachment.
I thought about what I’d lost, and what I hadn’t, and determined that what I had left was enough to win me back the rest, if only I could think of a way. So, instead of settling down to some sad solitary drinking, I cleaned up and shaved and changed and went over to The Carronade.
The doors of the pub, heavy with glass and brass, swung shut behind me. After the sunshine the light seemed low. As I walked to the bar my eyes adjusted. At that time, about half past five, it was almost empty. The barmaid was the same girl who’d served us on Monday evening. She was a local girl, tall and thin, with long fair hair bundled up, and strong arms from pulling the pumps. Her name, as I learned in a few minutes of chat as I leaned idly on the bar, sipping at a half-litre of pale ale, was Jeanna Berrymead. She’d grown up on a farm up the glen a bit, at Achnashellach.
Carron Town, before the project had started, was a place where everybody knew everything about everybody else, or at least talked as though they did. Jeanna’s knowledge of my meeting with, and parting from, Merrial was elaborate enough to suggest that local gossip was fast catching up with the influx.
‘That tinker who was in here—’ I said, trying to steer her away from her obvious probing of my side of the story.
‘Oh, aye, Fergal.’
‘You know him?’
She shrugged and made a mouth. ‘To see. He drops in now and again. Bit of an arrogant sod, but he stands his round.’
‘Any idea where he works?’
‘Aye, in the old power-station up at Lochluichart. It’s no’ a power-station any more, you understand. But folk still call it that.’
‘So what is it now?’
She grimaced. ‘Not a place you’d like to go to. It’s said the tinkers make their seer-stones there. I’ve heard tell it feels … haunted. A creepy place. Mind you, I’ve never met anyone who’d been there. Or who’d want to,’ she added pointedly.