Memory and Straw E-Book

Angus Peter Campbell

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A face is nothing without its history. Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She's a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He's good at his job. Scarily good. He's researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots - non-human 'carers' for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he's forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask. Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, 'uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been'. He returns to England to look after his Grampa. Travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagiarises and invents. But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, which path will he choose? What's the best story he can give her? A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it means to be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlled algorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears' world controlled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

Leseprobe

By the same author:

The Greatest Gift, Fountain Publishing, 1992

Cairteal gu Meadhan-Latha, Acair Publishing, 1992

One Road, Fountain Publishing, 1994

Gealach an Abachaidh, Acair Publishing, 1998

Motair-baidhsagal agus Sgàthan, Acair Publishing, 2000

Lagan A’ Bhàigh, Acair Publishing, 2002

An Siopsaidh agus an t-Aingeal, Acair Publishing, 2002

An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn, Clàr Publishing, 2003

Là a’ Dèanamh Sgèil Do Là, Clàr Publishing, 2004

Invisible Islands, Otago Publishing, 2006

An Taigh-Samhraidh, Clàr Publishing, 2007

Meas air Chrannaibh/ Fruit on Branches, Acair Publishing, 2007

Tilleadh Dhachaigh, Clàr Publishing, 2009

Suas gu Deas, Islands Book Trust, 2009

Archie and the North Wind, Luath Press, 2010

Aibisidh, Polygon, 2011

An t-Eilean: Taking a Line for a Walk, Islands Book Trust, 2012

Fuaran Ceann an t-Saoghail, Clàr Publishing, 2012

An Nighean Air An Aiseag, Luath Press, 2013

The Girl on the Ferryboat, Luath Press, 2013

ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL

Memory and Straw

First published 2017

ISBN: 978-1-912147-08-3 eISBN: 978-1-910324-96-7

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Angus Peter Campbell 2017

For Linzi

1

EMMA IS PLAYING the piano.

The notes rise sporadically, as if they have no connection with each other. There is no obvious pattern. C. Ten seconds elapse and she touches D. Fifteen seconds this time. Twenty. Then E and F in quick succession, as if the order of time has been disturbed. She never practises her scales or arpeggios.

As a child I learned that time was fixed. Wake up. Brush your teeth. Wash yourself. Put your clothes on. Have breakfast. Cereal at the weekends. Bells rang throughout the day telling you that Maths was over and that now you should go to Room Fourteen for French. Then at eleven fifteen a longer bell sounded and you could play. Boys’ games. Throwing or kicking a ball in the winter, hitting it with a bat in the summer.

The periods lasted forty-five minutes and the longest bell of all rang at four pm. The bus arrived at four ten and by four thirty we were home. Half an hour was given for play and at five o’clock we went into the study for an hour’s revision. Dinner at six o’clock. Grampa sat in the old wooden chair at the head of the table. Granma moved between her chair and the kitchen. My sister Aoife sat to my left and I sat at the other end of the table, directly in line with Grampa. It was pleasant enough to be told what to do. I could then think of other things.

Aoife and I were not allowed to touch our knives and forks until Granny and Grampa lifted theirs. We were careful not to eat too fast, so as not to overtake the grown-ups. We would allow them to have two mouthfuls, then we’d take one. It was agony at first, but after a while we became used to it: eating carefully, like an adult.

After dinner, practice time. Aoife played the violin. I played the cello. I loved the deep sound it made, like a tiger growling in the dark, and spent my hours making animal noises with it. Depending on how you held the bow, you could be a lion or a mouse. A tiny frightened squeal at the top of the strings and a deep threatening roar down near the base. If you quickly rat-a-tat-tatted across the strings near the top you had a whole field full of rabbits running towards their burrows, and if you caressed the bottom ones it felt like Primrose the cat cuddling into your neck. Because I spent my practice time playing these games I never made any progress, while Aoife practised her scales and exercises diligently and played for the National Youth Orchestra.

From that, I learned that progress is always specific, never haphazard. If you want to reach a goal, you set targets. I could have been a decent cellist if I’d practised more efficiently. However, when I gave it up, in sixth year, my teacher Mr Henderson said, ‘Your problem is that you don’t love the cello.’

Emma loves the piano. Not for the sound it makes, but for the sounds it doesn’t make. ‘What fascinates me’, she says, ‘are the intervals. The spaces in between the notes.’

We’d just met. It was Maundy Thursday morning, and we went for a spin in the car down to Epping Forest. The sun was shining as we walked through the oak trees. I was telling her that May the 29th used to be celebrated in England as Oak Apple Day when she suddenly stopped and looked up.

‘See.’

I looked. The sun’s rays were shining through the leaves.

‘See.’

‘Yes?’

‘The way the light catches the space between the leaves. Isn’t it gorgeous?’

A light wind was blowing the leaves, enlarging and diminishing the spaces.

She is now playing Gymnopédies, which I like. Things can be irregular, yet have a beautiful pattern.

Clouds for example. What I can’t stand is disorder. The way she leaves her clothes strewn all over the place. It’s not as if we don’t have shelves and dressers and hangers and cupboards for them. I built them myself, from rescued wood from an old school they were demolishing: beautiful old pine which I scraped and smoothed and oiled. The little labelled cupboards I made from stained glass.

They are clearly marked, so really there’s no excuse. Socks. Underwear. Jerseys. Blouses. Scarves. Handkerchiefs. When the sun shines through the roof windows the clothes glitter behind the patterned glass. And then there are the pictures, which she hangs haphazardly on the walls. As if a Picasso could hang beside a Rembrandt. They are of a different order.

‘You’re a bit OCD,’ she says when I raise the issue, so I try not to. Instead, she gave me permission to put things in whichever order I liked, as if it didn’t really bother her.

I spend time going through the house, tidying up her life – moving blouses to where they ought to be, putting the books back on the shelves in alphabetical order, so that next time we can find Graham Greene where he should be, sitting between Robert Graves and the Grimms.

‘It’s displacement,’ she said. ‘External order for internal chaos. The truth, Gav, is that your life is without emotional architecture. Like a room hanging in mid-air. It needs a structure. How do you get to it? Or from it? By stairs? By flying? And anyway, what do you do in that room?’ She spoke like a lecturer.

I used to have a box. A simple cardboard shoe-box which my grandfather Magnus gave me. It was filled with old photographs and scraps of paper. I’d look at them now and again: black and white pictures from another time and place, and all kinds of hand-written notes about gardening and fishing. I had it stored beneath the shoe-rack at the bottom of the cupboard, but one day I returned home and it was gone.

‘I needed a box just that size to send some manuscripts in the post,’ Emma said. ‘I put the stuff that was in it in the drawer.’

As if the box itself didn’t matter.

I’m currently reading Hobbes, who also argued for order. I try to stop myself from quoting him when I speak to Emma, but I can’t help myself. He puts things so well in the midst of chaos. At breakfast, for example, she put the honey spoon into the marmalade jar. I just looked at her and she immediately said, ‘You’re angry, Gav.’

There’s nothing I dislike more than when she is reasonable.

‘It’s courage,’ I said. ‘Hobbes said that sudden courage is anger.’

‘Fuck Hobbes,’ she said.

It’s Saturday, so after lunch we go to the beach, where order is always restored. The waves lap on to the sand and you can watch the rising tide-line until it can go no further. Then it recedes. It takes four hours to come in, and four hours to go out. It’s just science: because the Earth spins on its own axis, ocean water is kept at equal levels around the planet by the Earth’s gravity pulling inward and centrifugal force pushing outward. There’s nothing mystical about it. One thing leads to another. It’s like birdsong: the chaffinch sings the same song eternally.

The beach is quiet. One of the many little coves in the area. An hour’s drive from the town, so hardly anyone ever there.

We have it to ourselves again. Emma is getting ready to swim. She has a wonderful way of undressing. I need to stand up to take my clothes off, but she does it all in one elegant movement standing, sitting, or lying down. It’s childlike in its liberty. As usual, she flings her clothes on the sand. I resist the temptation to tidy them up. Her skin glistens.

‘Swim? Go on, Gav.’

She knows I prefer to lie in the sand sunbathing. She takes my hand and I undress in my usual awkward standing-on-one-leg way at the edge of the sea. We swim out as far as the inner light. She leads the way with strong steady strokes and I follow with equal measures. The initial chill has gone and the further out we swim the warmer it seems to get.

‘The sand bank,’ she calls out. ‘Makes it warmer out here.’

Warm enough to float easily on our backs gazing at the sky. We are weightless, like birds. Perhaps if we remain here, afloat, we will live forever. As the water moves, our bodies occasionally touch. A hand, a foot, the sharp contours of our hips. For a moment she seems like the best evidence for God in the universe. When we touch one another it confirms the fact. We kiss the salt off each other’s lips. Her hands are smooth and the soft down on her arms reminds me of the first time we lay down in the woods, afraid. The moss beneath us was like velvet, and as we looked up we saw a tree as we ought to have seen a tree, for the first time. It got thinner the higher it climbed, until the branches became part of the blue sky.

She suddenly dives into the water and I count. It’s our game: how long she can stay submerged for, and the longer she stays the more difficult it is for me to guess where she’ll surface. I reach ninety and see a stirring in the waters about a hundred metres to my left. She emerges ten seconds later a hundred metres to my right, her hand raised in a victory sign. She has a dazzling smile.

We go home. We usually have a shower then and go for a walk. Down by the boulevard and on to the coastal path that takes you right along the side of the golf course. There are several resting-places along the route, each with its own view. By the edge of the fifth tee you can see all the way out beyond the lighthouse and watch the oil-tankers glide north and south, to and from the terminal. The next bench is at the corner of the twelfth fairway, where we look west towards the low-lying undulating hills which never harness any clouds. And the final resting place is down from the eighteenth green where you have the best view of the town itself, with its splendid spires. We then walk back the same way, sometimes stopping for a beer at one of the beach café-bars, before getting dressed for dinner.

Enrique knows we always arrive there at six, so everything is ready. We have our own corner table. The simple red and white checked table cloth, the single white rose and the solitary iris, a plate of unseeded Greek olives and bread fresh from the oven. And we like the music he plays, which makes you feel as if it will always be like this. My Granma used to say that if you wished for something hard enough then it would happen.

We smile and play the game of choices. When the menu arrives we extend the game by taking ages to go through every option, discussing the possibilities. Too warm for soup of course, so we have the usual discussion as to whether to have a starter and main course or opt out and go for a sweet afterwards. We vowed years ago never to have the three courses except when there are friends there and we extend the meal for hours.

This time we choose a mussel and calamari salad for starters, followed by sea bass for me and quail for her. Each and every morsel of each dish is delicious. The mussels and calamari are just the right textures – firm, but moist and delicate – and the bass and quail perfect. We have our usual light-hearted discussion about the wine, finally choosing the Leflaive, which tastes like nectar. We linger over coffee, watching the evening lovers stroll down the sea side of the street where all the vendors are trading.

We join them for our own stroll. I buy Emma a gardenia which she carefully places in her hair, and she buys me a decorative pop-up striped mini umbrella which I play with as we walk along, singing in the rain, though the sun is setting orange in the west and not a drop of rain has been felt here in months. We end up on the main beach itself amongst the others, sitting on sailcloth chairs which Jamie hires out at ten dollars a time. The sea laps round the edges of the leisure boats which adorn the harbour.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘It’s a big word.’

So big I have no words for it.

‘It’s just…’

‘Yes?’

Tiny beads of perspiration glisten on her upper lip.

‘Shall we walk?’ I suggest. ‘Along to the pier? We’ll get something of a breeze along there.’

She slips her arm into mine and we walk along the wooden decking towards the quay. We stand near the edge gazing at the green light blinking to our left and the red light answering to the right.

‘For those in peril on the sea,’ I sing quietly.

‘Oh, hear us when we cry to thee,’ she whispers in response.

This is it. It will never get better than this.

The breeze is warm on our faces. The best bench, the green one with the comfortable arm rests, is empty so we sit there, side by side. Her finger traces some kind of outline on the back of my right hand which rests on my knee.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asks.

I hedge again.

‘Was that a map?’ I ask. ‘On the back of my hand.’

She laughs.

‘A map? Boy’s Own stuff. Everything’s a map. Don’t fudge things, Gav. What is it?’

What is it? We have settled here, that’s all. After all that. In this beautiful weekend port on Martha’s Vineyard, where the sea is so blue, the sky so clear. It was like coming up for air after holding your breath underwater for days. Like emerging into a sunlit meadow after being trapped in the undergrowth for years. It was a necessary heaven, gifted to us by Fitzgerald.

We’d always dreamed of it. This place beyond chaos, where the headland erases memory, where the permanent lapping of the sea reassures you that everything is in order. Things which seemed miraculous have become commonplace, while the things which were commonplace are now miraculous. We listen, and sometimes hear each other speak.

I remember the first time we flew into the Vineyard with Cape Cod glittering below, so near that you could almost touch it. Like everyone else, I suppose we’d brought our dream with us, but despite that foolishness it did not disappoint. We played Joni Mitchell tracks and danced. It may just be the million to one chance, but I think it was more. I think it was that inevitable thing, where the dream fitted the reality, rather than the other way round. Like when as a child the bit of wood found down by the stream really became the cricket bat which scored all those sixes. Aoife would bowl and I would always ask her to throw the ball gently so that I could hit it over the other side of the river.

It’s always so difficult to cross the river. So damn difficult. For how do you get the fox and the goat and the hay all across safely? The ferryman can only take one across at a time. And, if left alone, the fox will eat the goat, and the goat will eat the hay.

‘So how did he manage it?’

Emma looked at me.

‘He took the goat over first, and left the fox with the hay.’

‘And?’

‘And then he returned for the fox.’

‘And?’

‘And, having ferried it across, he then took the goat back, and left it.’

‘And he then ferried the hay across, which he left with the fox, and returned for the goat.’

‘And took him across?’

‘Correct.’

There was always a solution.

‘What’s higher than mountains, deeper than sea, sharper than blackthorn and sweeter than honey?’ she asked in return.

‘Love.’

2

IT STARTED SIMPLY as part of my work. Technology has developed so rapidly that it’s difficult to remember we grew up without any of this assistance. My dad used to take me fishing, and the best thing was simply making the rods: gathering fallen bits of branches from the forest, then whittling them down by the stove on the Friday evening.

‘Splice forwards,’ he’d say, holding my hand steady as I cut the knife through the wood. ‘And always go with the grain.’

Hazel was best. It was pliable, yet firm. After a while it moulded into the shape of your hand.

I now know that my ancestors had other means of moving through time and space, and the more I visit there the simpler it becomes. For who would not want to fly across the world on a wisp of straw, and make love to a fairy woman with hair as red as the sunset?

The more I discover, the more I like the precision of their world: to dream of your future husband, you pluck a few ears of corn with the stalk and place them with your right hand under the left side of your pillow. Threshed corn will not do. Exactitude is important. Otherwise, the magic won’t work. If you made a clay corpse it had to be in the image of the person you wanted to harm. You pierced the body exactly where you wanted the ailment to strike. Curses, just like blessings, were specific. Once extracted from their native heath and time they don’t work.

I work in nanotechnology, which is where my drive for precision found its home. There is no room here for approximation. As the old divines would have put it, things are either right or wrong. One binary digit equals the value of zero or one, and so eight bits equal one byte and one thousand and twenty-four bytes equal one kilobyte and so on up to my good friend the petabyte which equals 1,125,899,906,842,624. None of it ever varies or hesitates with doubt. It is perfect music.

Over the past two years I’ve been the lead engineer on masking for the care industry. The franchise is owned by a Japanese company, but they’ve subcontracted the work out to our branch here in New York. It’s a growing industry simply because people get older by the day.

I won’t tire you with the statistics, but the demographics look good. In the next decade alone the number of over eighties is due to quadruple throughout the world, with the biggest market developing in the far east itself. My job is to put a human face on the robots who will care for that generation. As a mark of respect for the great man, we call the central machine Albert.

Despite all our technology, humans cling on to their traditions. Old people especially like the familiar. They like routine, a safe process which keeps death at bay for a while longer. Even though our robots can run every care home far more efficiently that any nurse or carer, the residents still want to see a human face in the morning serving them breakfast, and last thing at night tucking them into bed. So we’ve made our robots human; have developed lifelike masks which have deceived even the young in experiments. If something looks human, it is human.

My line manager Hiroaki Nagano put it straight to me the very first day.

‘We’re doing these guys a favour. It’s dangerous out there in the world for them, so far better they never leave their homes. Most of them don’t want to anyway, and the rest would be better not to. Safe from muggings, assault, robberies, terrorism. They’re old, and will never need to leave their houses again. We’ll provide them with the tireless companion who will meet their every need. A cyborg friend who won’t complain, demand better wages or conditions, speak back or abuse them. A win-win for everyone, Gavin.’

It’s not just an engineering problem. The real challenge is aesthetic. Creating mask-bots which are not only lifelike, but lifelike in a familiar, flawed way. For beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Apart from a few perverts and perfectionists, most of the old people we cater for prefer carers as fragile as themselves. If you really study the human face you’ll discover that it’s perfectly imbalanced. Most folk imagine that the nose is halfway down the face: in fact the eyes are the halfway point. What comforts us is human imperfection. A face is nothing without its history.

As a team, we spent some considerable time studying facial characteristics across the world, because the market is now multicultural and global. You’d be surprised how racist many old people still are. Here in the United States, many of the older residents feel more comfortable being cared for by masks of their own colour, though they are happy enough to see black or Mexican faces making their beds or cleaning the floors. Old habits die hard. Our target is to make a composite face which will be universally acceptable.

I stumbled across my own genealogy while doing this research. Because there’s such a big Irish diaspora over here I was tasked with the job of studying Celtic features. I resisted for a while because I knew the word was meaningless – where would I begin or end? In 200BC in Thrace or in 2000AD in Scotland? I recognised the moral uncertainty that ran through the whole project, filtering individual human characteristics and histories down to general traits. But I wasn’t Mengele. At the end of the day, the project was designed to help people, and if some generic features made old vulnerable people feel safe, then surely all to the good? The ends always justify the means.

The clearest lesson I learned during my research was that features on faces are earned, not given. The age lines, the wrinkles, the curve of the mouth, the light – or darkness – in the eyes. These are the consequences of lived lives, not just the DNA. Hurt, pain and joy experienced are all etched there, as if Rembrandt had suddenly caught the moment when joy or sorrow had called.

I stripped naked and looked at myself in the mirror: the slight middle-aged paunch, the stoop of the shoulders, the face that reminded me of a boy I knew once upon a time.

I probably broke some unwritten rule that you never complicate your research with your personal life, but one day as I was idling at the computer I entered my father and my mother’s name, and the day disappeared leafing through their history. Or at least the history that was recorded there, for like all histories, most lay unrecorded. Like those gaps which Emma saw between the leaves, I suppose.

The internet is such a recent phenomenon, but nevertheless it has already harvested the work of centuries, so it wasn’t that difficult to scour genealogical and historic sites. The photographs were particularly fascinating: the further back I went the more difficult it was to find images of my own ancestors, but there were so many historical society sites that it was easy enough to get a sense of the times and places they lived in.

Old men with beards and old women with long black skirts outside stone houses. Sometimes children playing in black and white, with toy wooden boats or prams. Horses and dogs and carts carrying luggage. Hundreds of faces looking down as the ship left the quay.

I showed some of the material to Emma that evening. She didn’t seem greatly interested.

‘Isn’t that what people of a certain age do for a hobby? Start finding their roots?’

‘Well, I never really fancied stamp-collecting.’

I told her a bit about my family tree.

‘You should go to a séance. You could meet them there,’ she said.

What fascinated me immediately were the objects my ancestors had. Ploughs and hand-made saws, clay pots and spindles: things you could see in such fine detail once you digitised the old photographs. Sometime later, on one of Grandfather Magnus’s shelves I found a family photograph of my great-grandmother’s cottage with a bogle leaning against the thatched roof. The bogle was the slim stem of a dead fir, devoid of branches except at the top which was dressed, like a scarecrow, with a white cap and an old jacket. It was set on the ground leaning against the wall and roof overnight, and shifted every morning from one side of the doorway to the other to protect the house and the inmates from harm by the witch.

It was magic. Images were totems which brought blessings or curses. You could sail to success or starvation. I studied the photograph of the people on the emigrant ship. There were of all ages, from babes on the breast to old women in shawls. None of the faces wore masks – fear and hope, sadness and joy were etched on all the faces. I realised that making masks for care work was essentially about tracing these emotions into the contours. The more I understood these emotions, the more effective these masks would be. More people would buy and use them.

I decided to make a test case of myself. To discover how my face worked – what had left it the shape it was, with all the anxieties and hopes that made it more than a fixed mask. The face that I was, beyond DNA, uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been. I travelled. Read. Remembered. Visited ruins and homes. Talked to relatives. Found Grampa’s notes in his old shed, studied the local papers in the Inverness Library Archive, met Ruairidh on the old bridge that takes you to Tomnahurich. Borrowed, plagiarised, and invented things.

‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Emma. But she had her reasons.

‘I’m working on a new composition. And there’s a deadline, Gav. You know that.’

‘The real answer is that you don’t want to go.’

These are the stories I rescued out of the infinity that opened up before me, beginning with my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth.

3

SHE LAY THERE. The first twenty minutes always gave her a chance. To listen. To the sound of the night fading away, or to the river outside. Time to put things in order. First the fire, then the porridge, then the milking and the children. For once he turned over, that was it, and some sweet sleep would come.

Strange how you could see things with your eyes closed. There was Maisie the cow grazing, and when you stood on the distant headland at Rubh’ an Òrdaig you could watch the porpoises dancing far out in the bay. They were there even when she was not. She could conjure them up with a thought. Even things that she’d never seen or heard. Gorgeous plumed birds and spokes that moved and children that grew fat on laughter. You didn’t need to see things to know they were there. They were inside you, like clouds becoming sudden shapes in a dark blue sky.

Sometimes Elizabeth dreamt. Of silk and white brocade and a brooch like Lady MacLeod wore the day she came to the funeral service. Everyone was surprised to see her, but the minister pointed out it was a great honour to the deceased that Her Ladyship was in attendance. Old Morag had, after all, attended to her every need since she’d been a child, and she was now returning the compliment at the last. The brooch was silver and glinted in the pale afternoon sun which shone in over and across the coffin through the church window. Morag’s husband John had made the coffin himself out of driftwood saved for this inevitable moment.

These were daydreams. At night it was just the deep dreamless sleep of exhaustion, until one of the cockerels woke her. There were three of them. Old Thomas, who crawed at the most unlikely hours, having lost all sense of day and night. And the two younger ones, Red and Flash, at the peak of their powers crowing just as the sun rose, summer and winter, spring and autumn. They had instinctive precision, as if the sun rose at their behest and not the other way round. Every morning they heralded the dawn of a new day into this rolling world divided into quarters. For there was east and west and north and south, spring and summer and autumn and winter. Each morning – each season – was like a fresh loaf of bread out of the oven. You couldn’t eat it all at once. You had to keep some for the afternoon. For supper. For tomorrow, just in case. You never knew. Anything could happen, even as the sun shone and while the crops grew.

Calum built the bed so that it was easier for her to slide out first, nearest the door. She could do it all noiselessly, almost invisibly. In one movement, pulling on the woollens before her stockinged feet hit the sandy floor. The latch raised and lowered quietly so that he could sleep on, and the bairns all piled together in the other room. Even the cows at the other end of the house had learned to slumber until everything was ready, warming the whole house with their rich slow breath.

A winter’s morning. She kindled the fire and added the peat and boiled the pan. Outside, the stars twinkled in the frost. She did her morning’s business in the hollow down by the back of the byre. She could hear him coughing as he rose. The damp would be the death of him. He was a good man, though as light-headed as the lark. If it wasn’t for providence they would all have died years ago. As she strained, she minded the day he came to ask for her, going through the ritual of asking for her sisters first, before she was given as the finest filly in the parish.

‘I’m looking for a big horse,’ was Calum’s opening line, and her father told him that the biggest horse was already given to the young minister.

‘Well, in that case, the chestnut mare will do,’ and again how her father told him that Morag, with the beautiful red hair, was already promised to Seonaidh the Miller, and how they eventually agreed on her as the bride.

‘I suppose, then, that the pony will do.’

You never married beneath yourself.

He was sitting by the fire stirring the porridge pot when she came back in.

‘There you are,’ he said.

‘Aye.’

They ate the porridge silently, then Calum put on his big woollen coat and bunnet as she poured out another six plates for the children. The ones who had survived: Donald and Iain and Neil and Mary and Catrìona and Joan. Angus was in the Crimea.

They entered in twos. The eldest, Donald, with the youngest, Joan. Iain with Catrìona. Mary leading Neil by the hand. Poor Neil who’d fallen in the rock pool and damaged his leg. As always, they gave him the warmest stool nearest the fire. They ate quickly and noisily, except for Neil who ate slowly and silently.

Their father was gone. They could hear him coughing outside in the chill of the morning as he tied the cart to the little pony. And then the soft thuds of the pony’s hooves and the thumps of the wheels as father led the horse and cart across the stones by the midden’s edge. The sun would rise shortly. Already, the eastern sky was pink and the stars beginning to fade. Where did they go when the light came and they stopped blinking at one another? One by one they petered out like tallow candles.

He walked westwards, leading the pony by the old heather and marram-grass rope he’d made the year they’d married. One strand of grass to every three of heather, bound so tight that it would last as long as he lived. The animal wanted to graze, but Calum dragged it along. It would get enough grazing later on, once he started on the kelp. Even though it was just after St Bride’s, it was surprising how much the pony would find to eat. Especially if he spoke the charm on the way. Mathas mara dhuit, mathas talamh dhuit, càl is iasg, connlach is feur dhuit. Goodness of sea be thine, goodness of earth be thine, kale and fish, straw and grass be thine. He left the pony and cart in a sandy hollow where there was some grazing and carried the creel on his back down to the shoreline for the day’s work – cutting the kelp and gathering the tangle which would fertilise his small patch of ground.

Inside, Elizabeth was nursing Neil. She prepared the daily poultice to set on his crippled leg. It was basically a cabbage and oatmeal mixture she boiled every morning and then wrapped in an old nightshirt that Angus had brought back from Egypt. It eased the swelling and brought some colour to his cheeks, though the real healing for him was in her touch. For there was so little contact in winter, everyone swaddled in layers of wool all day and all night as the bitter winds swept in from the east. You couldn’t expose yourself to the devouring world. And the miracle of seeing in the smoky dark. You were born into it, accustomed to hearing things before seeing them, so that by the time you were two you could see things before they happened. You acquired second sight. The horse neighing outside was a stranger on the horizon; a thunderstorm the wrath of God. That cough was your father dying.

The blacksmith could see the future, though he said it was just the past.

‘I see time differently,’ he once claimed. ‘You all see it going forward. The only difference is that I see it going backwards. It’s just a different way of looking at things. It’s like sailing from Seal Point to the Stac, instead of sailing from the Stac to Seal Point. You see the same things, but the other way round.’

The children went about their daily tasks. Donald and Joan milking the cow. Iain carrying the water home from the well. Catrìona already sewing in the corner. Mary had gone out to herd the goats. The whey from goats’ milk was the secret to eternal life. They drank it every day.

Elizabeth raked the fire, adding a few bits of peat. She had two kinds of peat: the small hard black stuff from the hill, which burned hot, and the larger softer turf from the corner of the field. That lasted longer, but gave less heat. At this morning time she was economical. The pots merely needed to cook slowly. One filled with clothes, the other with broth and the ever-present kettle on at the back.

The responsibilities were hers. These dear children she’d brought into the world with no real thought of the future but that God would provide from the bounty of the sun and sea and earth. She earned grace with the sweat of her brow.