The Loud Halo (15 page)

‘Here's your deer!' shouted Erchy appearing momentarily in the entrance and I scrambled up on deck to see a herd of deer, apprehensive and poised for night yet reluctant to leave the kelp on which they had been feeding.

‘I can count three stags and twelve hinds,' I turned ecstatically to Erchy. ‘How many can you see, Erchy?'

He flicked an unenthusiastic glance towards the shore and then huddled back into the wheelhouse with Hector.

‘Erchy!' I reproached him. ‘Aren't you interested in the deer?'

‘The only deer I'm interested in just now is piping hot on a plate,' he retorted with a nod of dismissal.

I returned to the fo' c'sle and my two still-engrossed companions and after about twenty minutes we heard the engine note of the beat change as she was put out of gear.

‘We must be there,' said Morag, so we collected our parcels and went up on deck. There was a swirling of water as the engine stopped and a dinghy, rowed with quick, excited strokes, came out to meet us. There was an exchange of Gaelic as we and the parcels were unloaded into the dinghy but though they were obviously glad to see us their greetings were at first a little strained. It was obvious that the family were much ashamed of having to admit that they had not laid in sufficient stocks of food to tide them over only three weeks' isolation. ‘We've been spoiled with these vans comin',' they confessed after a glass or two of whisky from a bottle produced by Erchy had lessened the slight tension. ‘We just let ourselves get slack but we'll see and not let it happen again.'

It developed into a very convivial ceilidh (whisky was the only form of sustenance our friends had not run short of) and by the time we came out again into the snow it was dark. I was faintly puzzled when I looked up at the full moon to discover that not only had it grown a waist but that it also seemed to have sprouted fuzzy whiskers. I realise with a fleeting sense of shame that the whisky had made me light-headed. Morag and Behag too showed signs of unusual elation and as soon as she had clambered aboard Morag went to lie down on one of the bunks, complaining of a ‘frosted stomach'. I too eased myself down on to an unyielding lump of tarpaulin and stared with great contentment through half-shut eyes at that strangely shaped moon which was now wearing the porthole as a halo. The engine of the boat started; there was a rattle of chain as the anchor came aboard; ‘goodbyes' were shouted.
Ealasaid
dipped gently as she was brought round and with the quickening of the engine the water thumped and swished against the stemhead. The fo' c'sle was full of misty light and only an occasional sniff from Behag broke the steady pulsing of the engine and its accompanying clatter of enamel plates. It was with regret that I heard the home mooring being picked up and the engine switched off.

‘I'm feelin' a change in the weather tonight,' said Erchy as we walked up from the shore.

‘That's not what the forecasters are saying on the wireless.'

I told him. ‘They said only this morning that there was no sign of a break yet.'

‘Ach, I don't care what the forecasters is sayin',' Erchy maintained. ‘I can feel it kind of different an' your feelin's is a lot better than forecasts.'

‘Aye,' agreed Hector soberly, ‘an' tsey feel a lot furszer ahead.'

Two mornings later I awoke feeling that there was indeed a change. The light in my bedroom was sad and grey and there was the old familiar dripping of rain. Pulling back the curtains I saw that in the night the thaw had come leaving the moors as full of tracks as an upturned palm while the hills wept snowy tears. It rained relentlessly the whole of that day and the next day, which was a Sunday, the rain was accompanied by a truculent wind which came at us in great rushes that nearly caught us off balance as we trudged the sodden ground. Work done, I stayed snug in my cottage with a Howard Spring and a box of marshmallows for company and saw without contrition the good folk of the village trailing drably through the semi-dusk to church.

‘I came to bring you this skart,' said Morag on Monday morning. ‘Hector shot it on Saturday so you'll be able to cook it tomorrow.'

I thanked her and, taking the bird from her, hung it behind the kitchen door.

‘An' do you know who lowered himself to come to our church last night?' she demanded with scarcely concealed amusement.

I shook my head.

‘Well then, it was Euan! Him that's been sayin' ours is a dirty old church an' has been takin' to goin' to the other one at the far end of the village.'

‘Good gracious!' I exclaimed. ‘What's made him change back again, I wonder?'

‘That's what I said to him just. “Euan,” I asked him, “why are you not at your own church tonight when you've been, sayin' it's so much better than ours an' that the missionary student fellow is such a good man?” An' do you know, Miss. Peckwitt, he just blinked his eyes at me an' he said: “What would I be doin' walkin' all that bloody way on a night like this? Is it daft you think I am?” '

1. See The Sea for Breakfast.
   

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The nurse was extremely irate.

‘What I don't do for these people here,' she complained loudly in a voice that sounded to me to be permanently pitched to a tone of grievance. ‘And what thanks do I get for it? The way they treat me sometimes anybody would think I was trying to make them worse instead of better,' she elucidated with unwitting accuracy.

Our nurse was a fussy prudish little woman with an occupational flush on her face and a halo of springy white curls that were only partly repressed by the severity of her dark blue felt hat. She must, when she was young, have been extremely pretty. She was still, if you took her feature by feature, a pretty woman but at fifty she had already achieved an appearance of senility by her splayed-foot walk, her habit of peering over the tops of her spectacles and by the looseness of her pouting mouth.

I tipped the pail of shingle I had just carried up from the shore on to the path I was making and invited her inside for a ‘strupak', the resentment I felt at having to leave off just when I was full of energy for my work being somewhat mitigated by the prospect of a couple of hours of indiscreet but very revealing gossip about my neighbours.

Though a Scot, the nurse was, like myself, a ‘foreigner' in Bruach and despite the fact that she had been residing among them for over twelve years she was not perceptibly nearer dispelling the prejudice of the crofters than she had been during her first twelve weeks. Undoubtedly for a stranger the task of nursing Bruachites was a difficult one—they could be testy enough on occasion—but so far as the crofters were concerned the nurse's chief disadvantage was that she did not speak their language: she ‘hadn't the Gaelic'. If they became ill it might be too much of an effort to translate their needs into English, a complaint I felt was justified as it was obvious that however good their English they still thought in Gaelic and then effected the translation. Had the language difficulty been the only obstacle there is little doubt that time would have established a sufficiently cordial relationship, but time had elicited the fact that the nurse's shortcomings included an insatiable curiosity and an incorrigible tendency to gossip, so that despite her assiduous attentions when she was called in many of the Bruachites preferred to keep quiet about their ailments and to recover or die without her aid in either direction.

‘Did you hear what Alistair Beag had the cheek to say to me yesterday?' Nurse challenged me shrilly when she was seated.

I had heard, and like everyone else had been secretly delighted at its aptness but, turning my back to her while I filled the kettle, I professed ignorance.

‘He told me I'd been here too long,' she declared, her voice brimming with outrage, ‘in fact he shouted after me as I was leaving the house so that everybody could hear. “Away back to your bosses,” he yelled at me. “Away back and tell them they should change the nurse here every three years the same as they do the bull!” ' Her rather guileless blue eyes filled suddenly with tears and I felt a great pity for her. It was my impression that she had come to the village originally with the genuine aspiration to become a loved and respected figure—an Alma Mater to whom everyone would unhesitatingly turn in sickness or in trouble. The mixture of tolerance, pity and open antagonism that she had achieved must have been for her a bitter disappointment.

‘I expect he was only saying it in fun,' I consoled. ‘He says the most offensive things to me sometimes. It's just the sort of man he is.' I went on to tell her how a few days previously, having been particularly forgetful, I had been coming home from the village shop for the third time within a few hours when old Murdoch, who had been surveying the life of the community from the vantage point of his storm-damaged roof, had called out: ‘Why, Miss Peckwitt! What are you at? You're here, there and everywhere today, just like the mavis.' Even while I was bestowing upon him a grin of fatuous appreciation the voice of Alistair Beag, who was hidden from me by the stone dyke he was rebuilding, had corroborated chummily, ‘Aye, aye, she's been dodgin' about like a fart in a colander.'

The nurse appeared to be shocked. ‘That's what I dislike so about them!' she exclaimed. ‘They're so coarse! And they're immoral,' she went on. ‘They blaspheme something terrible, and if they get near a pub they drink themselves silly. And then when the missionary comes round they sit there with their bibles on their knees and pretend they'd never think a dirty thought nor use a bad word. They're utter hypocrites!' She paused only while I refilled her cup. ‘Of course,' she added, ‘I see a lot more of what goes on than you do.'

‘Of course,' I agreed.

‘Hypocrites,' she repeated distastefully.

‘Some of them aren't so bad,' I demurred.

‘They're still hypocrites, even the best of them,' she insisted. ‘Look at Anna there. She's what I'd call a really good woman. Yet you know she gets her water from the well out on the moor on Sundays instead of from Murdoch's croft right beside the road.'

I nodded. ‘I know that,' I said.

‘Well, isn't that sheer hypocrisy? She runs out of water but it's wicked to carry water on Sunday. So, sooner than let folks see her, she goes to the well out on the moor.'

I defended: ‘But Anna does get extra water in from the well on a Saturday night. I see her regularly. And,' I went on, ‘there are so many righteous people with nothing to do on a Sunday except just to pop into Anna's and have her give them tea. That's why she runs short of water.'

‘Indeed it is,' agreed the nurse emphatically. ‘But honestly, you'd think the Lord never knew a thing about what these folks do except what the missionary tells Him.' She took two or three quick sips at her tea and continued. ‘You know Willy who I'm having to go and visit six and seven times a day? It's cancer, of course, and he's dying, as I daresay you know?'

I admitted that I knew, the village having diagnosed Willy's illness and assessed his probable expectation of life before the doctor had been called in, so that they were already speaking of him as though they were reading his obituary notice.

‘Well, here's hypocrisy for you,' went on the nurse. ‘Willy's in dreadful pain and there's no hope for him whatever but he's a Seceder and their religion doesn't allow the use of drugs. Every time I get near the door of that man's room his wife waylays me. “Now, Nurse,” she says, “don't you be givin' him any of those drugs. We believe they're wicked.” And then she leans over Willy. “Now, Willy,” she says, “don't be askin Nurse for drugs, you know you'll go to hell if you do.” As soon as she's gone out of the room Willy turns to me with the tears and the sweat runnin' off his face. “For God's sake, Nurse,” he begs, “give me somethin' to stop the pain, I canna' bear it.” '

‘How awful,' I murmured. ‘What do you do?'

‘I give him a shot of morphia,' returned Nurse without hesitation. ‘I'm not going to stand by and see a man suffer unnecessarily, religion or no religion.'

‘Thank goodness!' I exclaimed. ‘It would be awful to think of dear old Willy suffering like that.'

‘His wife came in and caught me at it the other day—and nearly snatched the hypodermic from me.' She gave a dry little chuckle. ‘She told me I was a vile and sinful woman bent on sending her husband to hell. I'd have laughed at her if I hadn't been so angry myself. Instead I told her to calm herself, it was only water I was giving him.'

‘Do you think she believed you?' I asked incredulously.

‘No, I don't think she did,' replied the nurse, ‘but that's what they're like, these Seceders. They just want somebody else to take the responsibility of being the sinner.' She blew her nose to show she was feeling happier.

I said thoughtfully: ‘There must be quite a lot of doctors and nurses who are Seceders. What happens then?'

She gave me a long knowing look from over her spectacles, ‘I've worked for one,' she admitted. ‘And never again, I hope. Of course, if their patients aren't Seceders they're doomed for hell anyway, so they get whatever drugs the doctor thinks they need. It's when the patient is a Seceder I don't like it.' She shuddered.

‘They just let them suffer?' I prompted, hoping for her denial.

‘Well, I'll tell you. Maybe you remember Ian Beg, who died not long after you'd come here? Now he was a Seceder, and so was the doctor we had at the time. When Ian was taken ill with cancer he said to the doctor, and I was there beside the bed at the time, “Now, Doctor,” he said, “I know I'm dying and I want you to promise me that no matter how much pain I'm in and how much I beg for relief you'll not prescribe drugs for me.” The doctor warned him he would probably be in great pain, but Ian was adamant. So the doctor promised. Now I nursed that man till he died and there were times he nearly wrecked the bed in his agony and on a still night you could hear him moaning and crying with pain all over the village. It was terrible for his wife because she wasn't a Seceder, And it was terrible for me. I used to beg the doctor when he came to let me give Ian a shot of morphia but he wouldn't go back on his word. I've known me and lan's wife to bury our heads in the hay in the barn to shut out the sound of his screaming when it was getting towards the end, and the hay would be wet with tears after it.' She sighed a tired reminiscent sigh. ‘Dear Lord, how that man suffered,' she said, ‘but not one shot of anything did he have throughout his illness.'