Such an Air (II)
THE SEA AIR, the sea spray, the unbearable cabin, the long hill of the island growing ever closer, rearranging levels, changing shape, becoming itself. Its upper slopes sooty-black like the colour in Nolde, in the book Janet gave him that Christmas. And the other landmarks that appeared now as if summoned from the Rousay place in his heart. Trumland, the big house; the tidy wee—peedie—cottages and their patches of fields; the pier and its signature crane. And suddenly too its signature crowd, in their jerseys and overalls, swarthy, well-set. Tractors lined up like a toy shop window.
He saw Big Jim, "Steebly", an oar of a man, new-married, ducking out of the door of his mother's shop.
He spotted Girlie, over at Daisy Cottage, out among the hens and the bedsheets, a genre scene, waving a tea towel in welcome, just as when he’d left. Touched, he waved back.
They’d all know he was coming, including the passengers gathering around him on the deck, but after his few days in Kirkwall he felt ready enough.
Jock was with them too on the pier, and the Shapinsay road boys, swarthy and shining, one last job before they headed off for the weekend.
Ian's luggage was swung ashore, someone passing him down by hand his rod and tackle, and all into Jock's “iron horse”. Home-made, two wheels with an engine and trailer. And up the hill they went. As easy as that.
And there stood Girlie out at the road now, corralling hens, as they puttered along past Wychwood, her guest house. Marion had taken it for the winter that first time, Ian following her later. He’d left and gone home early too, when the islands were sparkling, snow-covered. It hadn’t helped, and his writing was already stuck. No ideas had come to him here.
Marion had spent the fine, short days drawing, painting, walking, while much of it he was inside, depleted and displaced, trying to read. Neither had been here before, and she not since, though she knew how to pull his strings from afar.
Everyone would remember: Wychwood was only wooden, after all, and no distance from Daisy Cottage and Veira View. Calm nights under the Merry Dancers, scenes within.
Girlie had named the house after the novel by John Buchan, but with a fancier spelling. Born just along the road, she’d lived here all her life. She loved her trinkets and laughter, her books and any gossip, community concerts, was famous for her baking. But shrewd with it, and witty.
She gave him a wee hug. A peedie hug. She was glad to see him. He’d explained things often enough in his letters, and no one said anything. It had worried him, but it was all a worry.
Jock too was cheerful, bantering and friendly. They’d said in letters they'd be glad to put him up till Millburn was ready, a few miles away in Sourin. They had no children—either, he shuddered—though relatives of all ages came calling, cousins and endless neighbours. Liked visitors. The spare room had a comfy double bed. Gave him space for a few days. They were both around 50: still in their prime, as Aunt Tot might have said, who'd often looked after him in her posh flat in St Andrews.
What she would make of all this—or his mother—besides Och, it’s just Ian... But his father would like it here, who’d chosen the Bahamas and then thrown everything into farming or whatever it had been in Florida. A wee croft would have suited him better; and he’d surely prefer Rousay to West Partick. They never spoke about it, not that he saw them or wrote terribly often, but he had happy memories of that earliest island life, the schooners, the sponge boats, the grand airy houses, Highland Nana, and even the hurricane, its amazing aftermath.
Far away...
Unreal? But not the sense of warmth, of family love. The times out fishing with his parents, the boats and the islands, and his mother reading to him in the evenings, letting him play with her paint box, encouraging him, kicking a ball with his dad, helping him go over the football pools.
The view from his room here was just as he remembered it. The yoles like fixtures in the Sound, fishing boats and creel boats, and the pier still swarming around the steamer. MacKay the doctor's new car was being craned off: a sensation.
Across the Sound lay Wyre: Muir’s island, Ernest could be forgiven for having reminded him, and that beyond it “the massed islands rolled in mist away”. Perfect in expressing the child’s perspective, both familiar and reassuring—with his parents at the farm below—and beyond, the “unseen straits”. A special poignancy in the present circumstances.
Ernest had told him one day how he'd taken Muir, on what would be his final visit to Orkney, to meet after fifty years a boy who’d grown up over there with him on Wyre. How overwhelmed he had been by a view one evening, asking “Where would you find words to express that?” And, “Where could you go in all the world to find anything as beautiful?” It was his valediction, Ian.
They were all in mourning. Last month when he met him in Edinburgh George had described him as the greatest Orkneyman of the century.
Muir’s family had gone from here to the city, a “stupidly wretched” move, where Ian’s own parents too had wound up, but carrying all this with him, as they with them had carried their own broken Eden. The post-War transit camp near Sennelager came into his mind. His own transitory life, his need for a centre and for definition, on his own terms. The difficulties and misunderstandings that assailed him.
Back then he also had responded to all this, visually, but the place itself had interested him much less, and he’d been appalled when the social circus started up at Hogmanay. Home-brew and whisky, tractors like wayward slow-motion Keystone Cops going round and round from house to house. Too much.
But the tranquillity that had wearied him overall was what almost immediately made him long to return, when his own disaster struck. He could have stayed on in Stromness, harder-edged than here, among the piers and the fishermen, had they been able to find a place, an attic even, or a hut. But failing that he’d needed his Perthshire myth, till Marion, daring him to give in, finally pulled it all apart.
Jock, a blacksmith and quarryman, was from Wick. An outsider too, therefore, a ferrylouper—but a character, well-enough respected, and resourceful. As well as his iron horse, and a diesel-powered electrical supply to both cottages, he’d drilled their water supply from a spring by the shore, through solid rock, and built a pump house that served both too. But mainly he worked (or “wrought” as in “rout”) as foreman of the island road squad, drilling, setting the dynamite at Blossom Quarry.
There was plenty of work this year, with a mile or so of peat track to be metalled and tarred. Girlie was putting up the Shapinsay boys in Wychwood, and Ian was to join them and the rest of the squad—to start with, anyway. Like the peat track, the quarry was over on the other side, at the highest point of the circular road. “Go round one way,” they said, “and if you get tired of it, go round the other.”
He and Marion had once circuited the island, clockwise, with help from a passing farmer, here and there. (In the right mood, she was a pleasure to be with. “Och, that’s terrible,” he’d say, and she’d reply, “Just terrible.”) It was a weary ascent, but tremendous views, and he remembered the place, and the curious name.
Girlie had Marwick’s Place Names on her bookshelf, and Ernest had looked it up for him: “The Blossan: ‘the blown or windy moor’”. She had put her copy of The Sea-Bed there too, and didn't mind speaking about it. Was it himself in the stories? And in A Broken Engagement? “What a sad turnabout, and a right peedie scamp,” she said. “He came off nicer in the others.”
He agreed, pleased that she’d read them. Sat down to his tea.
Part III [to follow]
