Lightly Poached (2 page)

The delighted smiles on the faces of the Bruachites were swiftly erased as Davy's mother turned first on Flora and then on the rest of us a look of concentrated venom that changed even as we watched to confusion as she realised that, isolated as Bruach was, it was not too isolated for us to be unaware of the poor reputation of the boarding house she kept in the city and that lodgers who had once endured her hard beds, scanty food and high prices never stayed long. Calling her son with an asperity that startled him into obedience she hurried him away.

‘He's a wee monster, that one,' Anna Vic had said severely.

‘An' his father before him,' observed someone else.

Old Murdoch took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘As the old cock crows, so the young one learns,' he had declared fatalistically.

‘I'm thinkin' it's wastin' your time you are, mo ghaoil, cleanin' your potatoes when there's showers about. You're no' givin' the weeds a chance to die.' Morag was standing by my potato patch assessing its chances of survival with much the same expression on her face as if she were standing by a deathbed. ‘You should get at them when the ground's good and dry.'

The thought that much of my day's labour might have been in vain was a little deflating but I rallied when I remembered I had carried away most of the uprooted weeds to the dung heap behind the byre where they could revive or perish without harming my potatoes. Nevertheless it was with relief that I abandoned the hoe.

‘Me an' Flora,' continued Morag, ‘was thinkin' we'd go down to the shore an' see maybe will we get a wee bitty dulse. The tide's right for it now.'

We looked down at the sea-deserted, weed-covered rocks, assimilating the prospects of dulse picking.

‘Oh, yes. It's pretty low tides this week,' I agreed, confident now of my knowledge of the sea and its movements.

Flora gave me a kipper-coloured glance. ‘D' ye like yon?' she asked with a vigorous nod towards the sea.

‘Dulse, do you mean?' I was constantly being nonplussed by Flora's haphazard ‘yons'.

‘Aye, yon.'

‘No,' I confessed. ‘I've never managed to acquire a taste for it.'

To me dulse tasted like strips of rubber steeped in water that had been used for washing fishy plates.

‘Och, yon's good, yon,' she commented ecstatically.

‘Erchy brought us a skart just the other day and Flora has a fancy for a wee bitty dulse boiled along with it,' explained Morag.

‘He gave me a skart, too,' I told her. ‘He must have been feeling generous.'

‘Generous?' echoed Morag. ‘Did you not notice he's lost his teeths an' canna eat them himself?'

‘Oh, of course,' I admitted, remembering Erchy's gummy embarrassment when he had come to bestow his gift and his subsequent hasty departure in spite of the tea I offered.

‘It will be six months he'll need to wait till the dentist comes again unless he goes up to Inverness himself to get a new set,' Morag announced. ‘An' six months is a long time to be without your teeths once you're used to havin' them,' she added.

‘He told me he'd lost them overboard when they were fishing,' I said.

‘Indeed it was the truth he was tellin' you,' agreed Morag with the flicker of a smile.

‘Well, I wouldn't wish Erchy discomfort but they say it's an ill wind,' I said lightly. ‘And it seems a long time since I last tasted skart.'

‘An' had he yours skinned for you?' asked Morag.

‘Oh, yes,' I replied. ‘I doubt if I could have done that for myself.' A skart or shag is prepared for cooking not by plucking but by skinning it like a rabbit and then the thick red meat can be cut from its breast like steak. There was normally so much meat on one that, casseroled, a bird would provide me with four good meals and there would still be stock for soup. ‘It was last Tuesday he gave me mine and I'm just about at the end of it now,' I told her.

‘Aye, I believe it was Tuesday we got ours,' agreed Morag. ‘I mind him sayin' he got three that day.'

‘And you haven't cooked it yet?' I asked. It was now the following Monday and as Bruach boasted no such conveniences as refrigerators I doubted whether in such sultry weather a shot bird could be kept so long.

‘But we've had it buried,' she retorted in a voice edged with compassion for my ignorance. ‘Put in a poc an' buried in the ground a skart will keep for weeks. Surely you knew that, mo ghaoil?'

‘Oh, I knew about burying them but never more than for two or three days. I wouldn't have expected it to keep as long as this,' I replied.

‘It keeps,' asserted Morag. ‘An' likely it will be tender enough when we come to eat it. Did you no find yours a bitty tough on the teeths, eatin' it so soon?'

I was about to deny that I had found it tough when Flora gave me a searching look. ‘Ah, but yon's gey teeth, yon,' she asserted positively. ‘Yon would crack bones like a dog, yon.' She was looking at me as if she expected me to confirm her assertion.

I smiled. ‘I haven't been hungry enough to try,' I told her. ‘Yet,' I added.

‘We'd best away for our dulse, then,' Morag said.

‘Oh, stay for a cup of tea,' I urged, starting to gather up my treasury of weeds. ‘I'm so dry I could drink a potful.'

‘I'm as dry as a crow myself,' confessed Morag. She treated the shore to a Canute-like glance. ‘The tide will keep a whiley yet, I'm thinkin'.'

‘The kettles's been at the side of the fire all afternoon so it won't take long to boil,' I told her.

‘Ach, then I'll away to the house an' fuse the tea while you finish your clearin'. Flora will give you a hand.'

Flora gave me a hand, accompanying her labours with such loquacious unintelligibility that I had to judge from her expression or intonation where to smile or to nod or exclaim. It appeared to suffice. As we turned to go back to the cottage she paused and with both arms full of weeds contrived to jerk an elbow towards the still unweeded part of my potato plot.

‘Yon's filthy, yon,' she commented with powerful disgust. I nodded rueful agreement. It deserved no more generous a criticism.

It was good to see Morag pouring out the tea as we entered the kitchen and while I rinsed the dirt off my hands with a dipper of cold water and emptied the earth and grit out of my shoes, Morag, who was as much at home in my kitchen as her own, unwrapped the tea-towel from the girdle scones I had baked that morning, spread them with butter and jam and placed one on top of each steaming cup. In Bruach where all water had to be carried one never used more crockery than was absolutely essential. A cup required no saucer; a scone could be balanced on a cup until it was taken in the fingers. It might mean slops on the table or crumbs on the floor but rough wood is soon mopped clean and hens are good gleaners.

We sat down, Morag on a hard-backed chair near the open door so that she should not miss anything that was happening; Flora on a coir boat's fender which I had found on the shore and now used as a pouffe, and I in my usual armchair.

‘Tell me, did you have yon mannie to see you?' asked Morag, slewing round in her chair.

‘Was it a man?' I countered with a chuckle. ‘I wasn't sure what it was.' I turned to Flora. ‘This figure,' I explained, ‘just came to me out of the blue and asked, “Do you love the Lord?”

Flora brayed with laughter. ‘Yon's mad, yon,' she declared.

‘It was sluicing with rain,' I went on, ‘and the figure was in oilskins and sou-wester and it had a high-pitched voice …'

‘An' long hair,' interrupted Morag. ‘Though the Dear only knows why a man would want to grow his hair long unless he had a disease or somethin'.'

‘It was a “he”, then? Are you sure?'

‘Indeed, I couldn't be sure what he was myself unless I turned him upside down,' replied Morag. ‘But no, mo ghaoil, that wasn't the one I was meanin'. There was another one came.'

‘Was there? No, I didn't see him.'

‘They were sayin' he was one of these Yanks.'

‘A Yank? Oh, no, I haven't had any Americans calling on me,' I told her. ‘Just the hermaphrodite.'

‘Oh, is that what he was?' enquired Morag. ‘I wondered what religion he had to make him grow his hair as long as that.' She threw a crumb of scone to a straying hen.

‘Well, if you didn't have the Yank callin' you missed somethin', I'm tellin' you.' She wiped away a smile with the back of her hand. ‘He was wearin' a kilt that near reached his ankles an' short white stockings an' a straw hat an' them dark glasses so you couldn't see if he had eyes or spider's webs behind them.'

Flora shrieked appreciation, and the laughter lines ploughed deep on Morag's wrinkled face.

‘What did he want?' I asked.

‘Am't I tellin' you?' reproved Morag. ‘He comes to my house an' when I go to the door he asks will I take him into the cow byre an' show him my antics.'

‘Your what!' I ejaculated.

‘My antics,' she reiterated and seeing my expression added: ‘He offered to pay me, true as I'm here.' She reached over to the table and put down her cup. ‘I told him, says I, “A few years ago if you'd come then to me I could have shown you plenty of antics but ach, not now. Those days have passed.”

‘What sort of antiques was he after?' I enquired soberly.

‘Why, crusie lamps an' steelyards an' quern stones an' goffering irons—even the worm we had for the whisky he was wantin'.'

‘I know what happened to the worm,' I said. (Morag had once told me that after receiving warning of an impending visit by the Customs man all the village's whisky-distilling apparatus had been dumped into the deepest well.) ‘But did you find anything else for him?'

‘I did not, then.' She rose and helped herself to another cup of tea. ‘The quern stones I had right enough till Hector broke them up to use for his lobster creels, the wretch, an' the crusie lamp disappeared when he was short of some-thin' to oil the engine of his boat.'

‘But the goffering iron,' I reminded her. ‘Your mother's goffering iron was still in the byre when I was with you. I remember your bringing it out to show me.'

Morag gave a snort of disgust, ‘Indeed, mo ghaoil, but since Hector an' Behag's come to live with me what can I keep my hands on save my own breeks an' it's tight I have to hold on to them sometimes for fear Hector will snatch them for cleanin' his engine,' she complained bitterly. ‘No, but didn't Behag take the gofferin' iron first for liftin' the crabs claws out of the fire when she'd toast them—as if she couldn't do that with her fingers—an' then the next I see is Hector's got hold of it an' usin' it for stirrin' the tar to put on his boat. The Dear knows where the iron is now,' she went on. ‘I doubt it's at the bottom of the sea along with the boat he tarred.'

‘What a pity,' I murmured. ‘I remember your telling me how you used to love watching your mother sitting by the fire
and
crimping the lace on her bonnet with the hot iron.'

Morag stared reflectively through the doorway, a gentle smile hovering around her lips. ‘Indeed, I remember it like yesterday,' she said with a wistful sigh.

Down on the shore Morag and Flora wrested brown dulse from the wet, limpet-stippled rocks until their bag was full when they came up to the tide's edge and joined me in the collection of driftwood. No matter how adequate one's store of driftwood might be it was impossible to resist taking home bundle after bundle rather than leave it for the tide to take away again. Morag looked up at the sky, assessing the degree of light.

‘If we don't start back they'll be thinkin' the “Each Uisge” has got us,' said Morag. ‘An' there'll be no milk for the tea if I don't away to the cow. Hector's awful heavy on the milk,' she explained.

We made our way towards the heather-fringed burn where a relatively easy path led up towards the crofts. By now it was time for the evening milking and we could hear, though we could not yet see, the milkers calling for their cattle over the echoing moors. From closer at hand came the bawling of frustrated calves which, recognising the calling and the clanging of milk pails as a portent of supper, would be cavorting within the limited circle of their tethers.

Beside the burn Erchy was working at his dinghy, gouging handfuls of thick yellow grease from a tin he had found washed up on the shore and ramming it between the gaping planks. Like all Bruachites he had a sublime faith in grease and tar for keeping out the sea.

‘Are you gettin' good fishin'?' enquired Morag, surveying with unusual interest the floorboards of the dinghy which were speckled with fish scales.

‘Aye. There's plenty of fish about now,' he admitted. ‘The sea's hissin' with mackerel.' With his elbow he gestured towards the outlying islands. ‘There's a bit of herrin' too. Tearlaich an' me, we brought home a nice few herrin' last night.' He and Morag exchanged wary glances.

Flora, still carrying her bundle of wood, leaned over the boat. ‘Yon's no herrin' scales, yon,' she stated flatly. ‘No, nor mackerel either.'

‘Indeed they are so,' argued Erchy but with dwindling defiance as he realised he was confronted by an expert. He glanced again at Morag but she had turned away, elaborately disinterested.

‘Yon's salmon, yon!' accused Flora.

‘Be quiet!' returned Erchy with a challenging gleam in his eye but seeing Flora's conspiratorial smile he went on: ‘What if they are salmon, anyway? It's pleased enough you'd be if you found one waitin' for you in the mornin', I doubt.'

‘I would too,' agreed Flora with unusual lucidity. ‘There's nay harm in yon.'

‘The Lord puts the salmon in the rivers like he puts the berries on the trees,' said Morag piously. ‘They're there for all of us, no' just the laird.'