Bird of Passage (6 page)

Tonight, with the two Irish boys in tow, they met Nicolas on their way to the loch. He whistled his over-exuberant dog to heel, and wished them a polite good evening, although he looked faintly surprised by their companions.

 ‘Spot of fishing, eh?’ he said.

‘Just a spot,’ said Alasdair and walked on.

‘Nice evening for it.’

‘It is indeed.’

‘Would you look at that?’ said Alasdair to Finn when he had gone past. ‘He’ll be my landlord one day!  May the good lord keep Malcolm Laurence safe and sound.’

Finn just grinned, and whistled through his teeth, faintly embarrassed by the outburst. Francis blushed, as though the slight had been aimed at himself.

‘Don’t you
like
Nicolas?’ asked Kirsty. ‘I think he’s a nice boy. Much nicer than his horrible sister.’ She screwed up her nose at the thought of Annabel.

‘Oh he’s fine,’ said Alasdair, patting her on the head. ‘Don’t you waste your time worrying about Nicolas Laurence, my wee lamb. He doesn’t need
your
sympathy.’

At the loch, Kirsty practised her casting for a while, and then lent Finn her rod, very willingly. It was her great-grandfather’s old rod, in smooth greenheart, with brass fittings. It was too heavy for her to handle, but fine for Finn who – so her grandad said – was  very big for his age, and surprisingly strong. Francis seemed content to lean his back against a tree and watch them. When Alasdair offered to show him how to cast, he shook his head.

‘I’m alright here, mister’ was all he would say. ‘I don’t mind if I watch.’

Kirsty sat in the shade, among the creamy meadowsweet, and watched Finn too. She noticed that he was left-handed, like her grandfather.

Alasdair was being quietly kind to the boy.  

 ‘Come on, lad,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what you can do.’

It was very warm beside the loch. When you breathed in, you could feel the heat in your mouth, a sense of suffocation.  Kirsty judged – with some satisfaction - that Finn wasn’t quite as competent as she. There were tiny green spiders among the meadowsweet, and they scuttled over her hands and legs, and tickled her as they went. She lifted her hand, and watched as one of them dived into space, swinging from its own silk, trapezing from her finger. Carefully she lowered it to the ground, making sure that it landed in a hollow below a stone, not wanting to squash it when she got to her feet. The smell of cut grass drifted across from the gardens at Ealachan and mingled with the musky scent of meadowsweet.

She raised her eyes, and saw that Francis was watching Finn too. Finn was a dark silhouette, obliterating the sun. Her grandad had been showing him how to cast properly. ‘Tick Tock,’ he said, to time the cast.  She was already proud of having a big boy for a friend. She heard the plop as the float hit the surface, and saw the widening rings out on the water as fish rose to flies, but not to her grandad’s bait. Or Finn’s either, for that matter. She felt the nip of the midges on her arms and legs, and slapped at them, but they were persistent. She was afraid that they would have to go home before they had caught anything. Over in the woods beside Ealachan house, she could hear the immense din of rooks beginning to circle, intent on roosting,  jostling for position.

 Seeing that they hadn’t caught anything, Alasdair used ground bait, which he wasn’t supposed to do, and they caught two fat trout in a matter of minutes. He dispatched each fish with a single blow from his  wooden ‘priest’, the weighted cosh which he kept in his fishing bag . Kirsty noticed how Francis flinched when her grandfather hit the fishes. Then they took them home to Dunshee where her mother gutted them, and cooked them in a frying pan on the top of the stove.

Finn gazed around in wonder. The house was warm and cluttered.  The kitchen was home to an old Scots dresser, with a row of small spice drawers along the top and a row of deeper drawers set over the base. The surface was crammed with pottery cows and horses and a collection of lustre jugs, several of them containing bunches of wild flowers in varying stages of freshness.  There was an ancient spinning wheel in one corner of the room. Even now, in the middle of summer, the fire in the kitchen range was burning brightly. The wireless was playing Scottish dance music. It was a big, boxy affair with exotic names like Hilversum and Luxemburg on the dial. In use, it grew very warm, and the cat liked to sit on top of it, with the music spilling out of his soft body.

‘We should likely be getting back to the barn now,’ Finn said, uncertainly. ‘They’ll be wondering where we are.’

Francis, who was looking equally uncomfortable with his surroundings, nodded. ‘I think we should go, sir.’

‘Not at all!’ Alasdair told them, pulling out chairs for them both, and motioning them to sit down. ‘What’s the point of catching the fish if you don’t get to eat them afterwards?’

Kirsty saw that when her mother looked at timid Francis her expression softened. Both boys stayed to eat with them: fried trout and boiled potatoes with scones mixed with buttermilk, and baked in the oven at one side of the kitchen fire.  All the bread and cakes were baked in this oven. Kirsty liked to help, liked to watch her mother putting her thumb-print into each of the big bread cakes or throwing flour into the bottom of the oven. If it burned, the oven was too hot. If it stayed white, the oven was too cool. If it went pale golden brown, the oven was just right. There was something infinitely satisfying to Kirsty about this simple formula although she couldn’t explain why. Sometimes she lay in bed at night, imagining herself as a grown-up woman, in charge of the house, tossing flour into the oven. Trying to get the temperature exactly right.

Finn and Francis sat side by side at the kitchen table. Francis picked at his food, too shy to eat in company. He kept looking over at Isabel who smiled at him encouragingly.

‘On you go, son,’ she said. ‘On you go!’

Finn, on the other hand, ate ravenously, glancing over his shoulder from time to time. He held his arms protectively around his  plate, and forked the buttery fish and potatoes into his mouth, hardly pausing to chew between mouthfuls, burning his tongue on the delicious flesh.

‘Steady, lad,’ said Alasdair, watching him, his brow furrowed into a frown. ‘Steady on. You’ll need a wee pause between mouthfuls. You’ll not be wanting to choke yourself.’

Finn looked up, and Kirsty thought that he reminded her of the farm dogs when they hunched protectively over a bone, casting dangerous, white eyed glances in all directions. Or perhaps he was more like the lonely crows that lurked about the farm, waiting to scavenge dead meat. But she said nothing. She found herself blushing for him.

Francis dug him in the ribs. Finn looked up, and saw them watching him. He coloured up as well, moved his arms away from his plate and slowed down.

Isabel spooned out more potatoes for him, but she snatched the spoon away quickly, as though she were feeding a wild animal.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks very much, missus.’  He looked up and flashed his  sudden, disconcerting smile at her, but she turned away.

‘Have some more potatoes, Francis. You look as if you could do with a good meal inside you.’

‘Are they your only trousers?’ asked Alasdair, when the meal was finished. He had been deep in thought for most of it.

Finn nodded.

‘I think I might have a better pair than that up the stairs. Isabel, you’ll maybe fetch the old woollen trews from the bottom of my wardrobe. He’ll have to roll them up, but they’ll be warmer than what he has on.’

Isabel looked daggers across the table. ‘Those were James’s trousers...’

‘Aye. And he has no further use of them where he is. There’s a couple of tweed jackets as well. They’ll be a wee thing threadbare but there’s a lot of wear in them still. The lads can make use of them, I’m sure.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’

‘Thanks, mister.’ Finn raised his head and looked directly at Alasdair, then dropped his eyes to his plate again.

Alasdair reached out and patted him on the shoulder.

‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘Good lad.’ 

For the first time, Kirsty felt something that she would always feel in Finn’s company. She felt a sudden sense of proprietary pride in him, as though praise of Finn was praise of herself, but it was compounded – as it always would be - by a sharp pang of jealousy. She wanted him all to herself. But she wanted her grandad all to herself as well.

‘Am I not good?’ she asked her grandfather, plaintively.

‘Of course you are. You’re my Cairistiona. My little lass!’ he said, turning from his plate to tug at her pigtails, tying them into a loose knot at the back of her neck. Kirsty was ticklish. She hunched her shoulders and shivered, but still she liked it when he teased her in this way. She caught Francis watching Finn as he ate, and Finn glancing from her to her  grandfather and back again. He looked hungry. That’s what she thought. But how could he be hungry when he was in the middle of eating? When he had eaten so much already?

‘Just eat your tea and stop your nonsense, Kirsty,’ said her mother. ‘And then Finn and Francis had better get back to their friends in the barn.’

 CHAPTER FOUR 

When school was over for the summer,  Kirsty was never very far from the tattie fields, and even the swimming dolls lay forgotten in her bedroom cupboard. She swung on the gate, watching the work. Often, when the weather was fine, she went into the fields and helped out, gathering up the miniature potatoes that were left behind, the ‘pig potatoes’, which were much too good for the pigs. She and her mother and grandad liked to eat them, fried up in butter in a cast iron pan until they were crispy. Occasionally, Finn and Francis would be invited to share the meal. 

When the rain came driving in from the west, Alasdair sent her home although, if it was up to her, she would have soldiered on through the mud. Finn couldn’t help but admire the bossiness of her, the way she laid down the law to everyone, even her grandfather. Finn found Alasdair unnerving. He was always kind to the boys, but there was something uncompromising about him.

‘A better friend than an enemy,’ said Jimsy, and Finn could see that he was right.

Kirsty was not a steady worker. She was too easily distracted by the heron’s long legs trailing behind him as he flew past, or the sight of a boat in the bay. And she sang all the time.

‘Do you know this one?’ she asked Finn:

‘
If I were a blackbird I’d whistle and sing,

and follow the ship that my true love sails in...’

Kirsty had a high, clear voice and the lines made him shiver.

‘Go on,’ he muttered. ‘Sing it all.’

‘I don’t know all the words.’

His mother had sung the same song. But she had smoked all the time, and it made her hoarse. You could hear it in her voice. It brought back into his mind other songs his mother had sung to him: I Wish I Was In Carrickfergus and You are My Heart’s Delight and Russian Rose. The sound of Kirsty’s voice brought an unexpected lump to his throat. He had to cough, to make it go away. Odds and ends of memory thronged his mind. The least little thing, like a daft song, could bring them tumbling in, distracting him, hurting the heart of him, like the sharp pain when somebody kicked you in the chest, bits and pieces of memory that were neither use nor ornament because he could not make sense of them, and he wished they would go away. 

‘What are you like?’ said Alasdair, interrupting his grand-daughter in the middle of her song. ‘You’re a distraction to honest working folk, that’s what you are, Kirsty Galbreath! You’re worse than the midgies, always nipping at people’s ears!’

The older Irish indulged her.

‘Come here to me,’ they said when she sat among them as they took their mid-day meal. They gave her bits of bread and cheese or Victory V lozenges, which she always tried to eat, wishing she could like them. But the pungent sweets made her want to retch, and she spat them out, secretly, into the long grass, so as not to seem impolite.

One day, when they were sitting at the edge of the field, Francis shyly plaited a whip out of reeds for her. Finn wished he had thought to do that, for he could make a whip as well as the next man.

‘I could do that,’ he said to her when the whip was finished. ‘I could make you one of those, Kirsty.’

‘Why didn’t you, then?’

‘Well I will so, next time.’

Finn was filling out, growing stronger, the outdoor work and plentiful food suiting him, but Francis still looked a bit like a reed himself, as though the merest breath of wind would blow him away. He would hardly ever speak unless spoken to.  He was always dropping things, and he still worked more slowly than Micky Terrans would have liked. A weakling. Finn helped him out whenever he could, sometimes doing the work of two to cover up for his friend, but the older men would grow impatient with him and cuff him round the head, casually, if he was too slow. ‘Get that feckin’ basket over here would ya?’ they would say. Once, when a blow caught him unawares, he fell over, and lay stunned on the ground for a moment or two. Micky Terrans came running over, furious.

‘Who the feck did that? Did
you
see who did that, Finn?’