Beneath the Abbey Wall (17 page)

“It is. And we will see it on Saturday.” He looked at her, and she looked back but could not hold his gaze for more than a fraction of a second before turning away, knowing that her face was growing pink.

“Looking forward to it?” he asked.

“Of course. But I wouldn't count on seeing the mountain. There's so much mist and rain in those parts you sometimes can't see more than a few yards.”

“Maybe. But we'll have fun anyway.”

She looked away. The significance of her decision was completely lost on him. But she was going on this trip, no matter the consequences. A cocktail of guilt, pleasure, excitement, and dread made the skin on her arms tingle, and she crossed them,
hugging herself, telling herself over and over, it's just a harmless day out to the west coast. That's all.

*  *  *  

Joanne had asked Neil to pick her up on the riverbank near the Islands. It was not that she was ashamed, just that she did not want to be seen getting into his car this early on a Saturday morning.

When he drew up in the borrowed car, Joanne felt a flash of doubt. Too late for cold feet, she told herself.

“Right on time.” She smiled as she got into the car. “I thought you hated early mornings.”

“Not hate, more not used to them.” He smiled back. “After years on a daily newspaper where I was lucky to finish by midnight, my body is not used to early.”

They followed the river back to the main road north, crossed the canal, passed through the fishing village strung out between the road, the railway line, and the firth. The sight of a famous battle, Neil told Joanne.

She laughed, saying, “You know more about my town than I do.”

Saturday mornings, the roads were busy in the opposite direction; people coming into town from the glens and the coastal villages to shop. Many came into town from Beauly and Strathconon and Strathglass, from Kiltarlity and Conon for a big shop or for clothes and shoes, new washing machines and televisions. The border of Ross & Cromarty was a mere fifteen miles away, and the people from there went to their own county town, not only to shop but to catch up on the gossip. And Dingwall was fine for Wellington boots and farmwear but not for fashion and teashops and staring at electrical appliances you couldn't afford.

Neil laughed when he saw the first major road sign. “‘North,'”
he read. “Well, that's simple. I suppose we'll meet another sign and it will say ‘West.'”

“Or ‘North-west.'”

“Or ‘North-north-west.'”

The banter lightened the trepidation she was feeling at being on such a momentous adventure. All her senses acute, the air in the car seemed charged with lust—although that was not a word she would acknowledge, as ladies did not feel lust, and besides, lust was a sin.

“The turn-off should be marked Bonar Bridge or maybe Ardgay, or hopefully both.” Joanne had the map and as navigator she was happy to have something to concentrate on.

“Ardgay.” He sounded the name as though it were a spell. “My mother talked of visiting relatives around there.”

“Just past Evanton on the main road, there's a shortcut to Ardgay, but it looks pretty winding and steep—over the hills not around them.”

“Over the hills and far away . . . ” Neil chanted. “The road will be no problem in Countess Sokolov's car.”

“Countess . . . ”

“Mr. Beauchamp Carlyle's sister, Rosemary, married a Russian count in Shanghai in the nineteen thirties, I believe. Although she prefers plain Mrs., I love knowing that I know a countess.”

“How do you know them?”

“I had a letter of introduction from a solicitor. She and her brother have given me access to their family archives. There is such interesting material in it from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . . . ”

Joanne half listened as Neil rattled on recounting births and deaths and marriages along the Fraser matriarchal line of the Beauchamp Carlyle family, feeling altogether inadequate.
Much
too elevated company for me,
she was thinking when the sign for the turn-off appeared and they almost missed it.

“Left,” she called out, “left here.”

With a squeal of tires and the engine moaning, he changed down gears, propelling the car into a much narrower road. Fortunately nothing was coming the other way.

“I'm sorry.” Joanne was shaken.

“I enjoyed it—gave me a chance to show off my driving skills.” Neil was laughing. He reached over and patted her on the thigh. “Not too much of a shock for you?”

Not the driving,
she thought. But the hand on her knee burned her skin, or so she fancied. And once again, she was scared by the momentousness of the journey.

“I'm fine,” she replied, “and the road is really bonnie.”

The minor road wound up over hills, down into glens, crossed stone bridges, climbing higher and higher until they reached an open stretch of moor and forest. The sky was vast and grey. The firth spreading below was a lighter shade of grey, the hills a green-grey and the outlines of mountains on the horizon to the north a deep dark foreboding grey. Only a splash of yellow on a gorse bush next to the roadside, and the sulfur-yellow patches of lichen on the drystone dyke that measured the hillside into quadrants, broke the monochrome of the vista.

They clambered out of the car, pulling on raincoats.

“Well, I see what you meant about the visibility,” Neil said.

“This is nothing,” Joanne told him, “at least we can see. And at least it's not real rain, only a light mist of a rain.”

He laughed. “Only a light mist of a rain . . . I'll remember that when I'm soaked through.”

The journey down to Ardgay and Bonar Bridge was short, so they decided not to stop but to push on up Strath Oykel hoping the weather would clear the farther west they drove.

Crossing the bridge over the narrow end of Dornoch Firth, they crossed into Sutherland. For the length of the glen—a fault line stretching from east coast to west coast—the road was mostly in Sutherland, but sometimes in Ross & Cromarty; the contours of the rivers and history had made manifest the ancient boundaries.

At first the glen was indeed bonnie. Drystone dykes were everywhere. Joanne was counting the miles of them—
Are these Scotland's version of the Great Wall of China?
she was thinking—counting the hours, the days, the years of backbreaking labor they must have taken to build.

They reached the Oykel bridge and the end of the walls, the end of “bonnie.” Now it was a landscape that could well be described as a terrestrial version of the moon, and the higher and bleaker the landscape became, the quieter Neil was.

Joanne did not notice; she was half dozing in the warmth and the leather seats and the comfort of his company, dreaming half-dreams, unable to fall completely asleep—being this close to him, shut in against the weather, the past, the future, being here with him alone on this dreich Saturday in the wilds of Sutherland, made every part of her, skin, hair, heart, and knees, feel she was as enchanted as a faerie princess briefly in this realm to capture a lover.

Neil, feeling as desolate as the land they were driving through, did not take in the dancing white heads of the bog-cotton. He did not see the pattern and color and texture of the lichens. He did not notice the beauty of the tiny plants and minuscule flowers and shrubs on the verge of the road, in the bog, growing in cracks in the rocks, clinging to life as surely as the people had and did. And in the emptiness, in the vast openness not broken by tree or by man, he did not feel the joy of the proximity to heaven, or the heavens.

He felt cheated.

This is what those displaced Scots were longing for; this is what they were devastated to leave behind. Moors are so barren they're pitiable. The leaving of this wilderness broke the hearts of those clansmen and women. It made them, their songs, their stories, their music, this landscape that continues to haunt every generation of the scattered diaspora, the progeny of the Highland Clearances.

Were all my mother's memories exaggerations, falsehoods?

At first he thought it a mirage. Then the shroud lifted and he saw it again, this time for more than a minute. He kept driving. There it was again, no mistaking it. Suilven.

He pulled over. Switched off the engine. Joanne sat up. The mist parted. She saw the mountain, and said nothing. This was his moment.

He stared at his touchstone, his nemesis, his mountain. He got out. Joanne watched him standing, staring, as still as the silence and the air around them. For once the landscape did not echo to the sound of running falling water, nor the frequent croak of carrion crows or the cough of sheep or the rustle of wind—there being nothing to rustle. Leaving space for him to absorb the encounter, she stared at the twin peaks and her heart was glad. Glad for him, but also inspired by the sight.

There is something about that mountain,
she thought,
and like his mother's photograph, it will be forever imprinted on my memory.

But, as he contemplated the sight of his pilgrimage, he found it wanting; too round, too bleak, no color. His sacred mountain was not high enough, not sharp enough.

“It's just as it is in your mother's picture,” she said as she walked over to join him. “Really bonnie.”

“Joanne, this could never be called bonnie. Stark, threatening, menacing, ominous, never bonnie.”

“Aye, you're right, not bonnie, but beautiful and . . .
primordial
.” Joanne was staring into the distance, her back to him. She felt he had been reprimanding her for a lack of vocabulary, but no matter what he said, she saw the mountain as spectacular and yes, beyond bonnie. It was beautiful.

The clouds were not lifting, but the light started to brighten, blue shafts waving through the slipstream like carnival streamers, widening, until there was more sky than cloud.

Suilven, with rounded mountains framing it and thin silver slivers of loch, their beginnings and endings unclear, lay on the horizon shining clear.

Suilven all sparkling; caught in a shaft of light of biblical dimensions, the mountain seemingly growing taller, sharper, the twin peaks revealing themselves as one fractured ridge with deep dark rivulets running like guy ropes to anchor it to the land.

Yet still it did not satisfy him.

Neil shook himself, shivering like a dog shaking off water.

“Let's drive on a little further. See if we can find the exact spot where the picture was taken.”

Over the next few miles, Joanne, sensing his detachment from the surroundings, assumed it was her. She was desperate to please him, searching out the window for some rock some lochan some cleft in the landscape that might please him. Suddenly she saw it. “Neil, is this where the picture was taken?”

“Maybe.”

He got out. He walked towards the shore of the lochan. He lifted his head to stare at the mountaintops, sniffing the wind like a wolf investigating new territory. Now, not only could he see it, he began to feel it, feel the day, the sunlit day.
More likely the sunny quarter of an hour,
he thought,
and equally cold.

He could not dismiss the sensation. He
could
feel it. And he could feel her, the woman he had known as mother, see her raise
her hand to her brow to squint into the camera, laughing, probably saying,
Hurry up, it's freezing in this wind,
to the photographer, a person whose name she said she couldn't remember.

A small cluster of trees bent at the waist by the winds, huddled at the far end of the lochan. Joanne thought she recognized the spot from the photograph—yes, she was sure, this was where the tinker's horse-drawn caravans had stood. The only place of shelter for many a mile, it was a good place to set up camp, make a fire, fetch water, rest the horses, catch brown trout. And the view of Suilven, sitting plumb in the middle, was a marker, a pyramid, a giant standing stone, as spiritual as any in civilization.

Neil looked at his watch. “I'm meeting the elder of the Old Parish Church at Inchnadamph at two, so we'd better get a move on. I hadn't realized it would take so long to get here.”

His impatience brought her down from the mountain to the reality of the car; taking time was what a journey was about for her. “That's because we've been traveling Highland miles, not Canadian ones,” she joked.

But still, she was curious; this should have been his Damascene revelation.
The photograph, his native land, did he not feel the pull of the mountain?

“I'd love to stop at the hotel for a beer and something to eat, but I'm not sure we have time.” Neil was already holding open the car door for her.

“We can have tea and a sandwich at Inchnadamph. I've packed all we need, including gingerbread.”

“You're a marvel.”

It was only three words; the only three words that had ever come near to him saying what she wanted to hear. She had to turn away to hide her blush and her joy and her shame at behaving like a schoolgirl with a first crush.

Neil never noticed. He put the car into gear, and with Suilven still ahead of them, they continued westward, meeting the main road at a T-junction. Through a series of loops and twists the road descended rapidly. The parish church where Neil was to check the records was clear from some miles distant.

They had fifteen minutes to spare. Joanne unwrapped the waxed paper and offered Neil ham or egg sandwiches, hoping they were adequate for a person from Canada. She unscrewed the flask, poured the tea; he didn't say much but was quick enough to finish all the sandwiches plus two scones before a tap on the window broke the quiet of the picnic.

“Mr. Stewart?”

Neil got out but didn't introduce Joanne, even though the elderly man was peering at her with undisguised curiosity. They nodded at each other, both aware of the breach of good manners.