(Why would the kids be hungry?)
They were very poor. It was during the Depression–that means a whole lot of people were poor, and couldn’t get jobs and didn’t have enough to eat.
(Oh.)
Anyhow, Lazarus had a lot of troubles, but his family never starved. Sometimes he used to go trapping away up Galloping Mountain way.
(Galloping Mountain? Is that a real mountain?)
Sure. Away north of Manawaka, where lots of very tall spruce trees grow, and there’s a lake there, and a lot of your father’s people live thereabouts.
(I’m going there someday.)
Sure, honey. Anyway, Lazarus sometimes went alone on those trips up to the mountain, and sometimes he’d take your dad. Then they’d come back to the shack in the valley.
(And have lots to eat, eh? And tell stories. I wish I’d been there.)
Yeh. Well, there was more to it than that. Lazarus must’ve felt pretty low in his mind, sometimes, looking after all those kids, there. But he kept on somehow.
(What more to it?)
Well, I never knew him that well myself, but I remember the last time I ever saw him. It was at the time of the fire.
(I don’t like that part. Don’t tell it again.)
Okay. I won’t, then.
(He was brave, though, wasn’t he?)
Yes. He was that.
A letter arrives from Christie, saying the winter in Manawaka has been colder than all the shithouses in hell, but he is mostly all right, and how are Morag and Pique. He also asks, joking and not joking, when is Morag going to Sutherland, and isn’t she ever going to get to see where her people came from?
When, indeed, is she going to go? The pilgrimage. Does that word dramatize it beyond what it is? Probably not. Why, then, has she for so long hesitated?
She is afraid that she will be disappointed, that there will not, after all, be any relations. She is afraid that she will feel nothing and that nothing will be explained to her. Or else she is afraid that she will feel too much, and that too much will be explained in those rocks and ruined crofts, or whatever is there, now, these days.
In those days, a darkness fell over all the lands and crofts of Sutherland. And among all of them people there on the rocks, see, was a piper and he was from the Clan Gunn, and it was many of the Gunns who lost their hearths and homes and lived wild on the stormy rocks there.
Morag writes back to Christie and says Soon.
Mr. Sampson has not been so much irritated as alarmed by Morag’s absence, it turns out. He has been unable to keep up with the accounts, and is convinced that penury is imminent. Morag agrees to work afternoons as well as mornings for the next fortnight, although grudgingly. She has done no writing at all during Pique’s illness and now will do virtually none for the next couple of weeks. A month away from it, and getting back inside will be torture. She thinks of writers with private means (of which she knows none) and puts a mental hex on them.
Had she not been working afternoons, however, she would not have met McRaith, who paints in the mornings and does his wandering around in the afternoons.
He has been standing at one of the counters with a large book in his hands for going on an hour before Morag approaches. She does not want to interrupt his browsing; she wants to speak to him, simply because his sexuality draws her. Why should this be? He is not particularly handsome. A man in his mid-forties, he appears to be, a large-boned large-framed man with a shaggy reddish beard, shaggy eyebrows, a head of thick shaggy hair to match, although his hairline is slightly receding.
“Can I help you?” Morag says, immediately regretting the shopgirl cliché.
He glances up, smiles with embarrassment and closes the book, which she now sees is an expensive edition of Klee reproductions.
“I wish you could.” His voice is faintly Scots, but with some kind of difference, a low-spoken and almost formal quality which she has not heard before. “But I can’t afford eight quid for a book, and it seems a bit large to steal unobtrusively.”
“Would you, if it weren’t?”
“I might take it, but the guilt would likely force me to return it. It’s in the background.”
“Presbyterian, you mean?”
“The same. In my case, considerably lapsed, but we are never totally lapsed.”
“I know. It’s in my background as well.”
His name is Daniel McRaith, and he comes from Crombruach, a village in the part of Ross-shire known as the Black Isle. Hence his accent, which is Highland.
“Strange,” Morag says, “that I wouldn’t know one Scots accent from another. Most of the Scots families, where I come from, came originally from the Highlands, but they spoke Gaelic when they first arrived, about a hundred and fifty years ago, and they lost that. Even with the ones who came later, though, the Scots accent in English never lasted into the second generation.”
“We have lost the Gaelic, too, or most of us.”
“And yet–and this was true of Christie, my stepfather, too, at times–there’s something in your speech that sounds almost as though it’s being translated from another language. Christie never had a word of Gaelic. But there was some echo left.”
“That is an appealing thought,” Daniel McRaith says, “but possibly not too accurate.”
“You mean–sentimental?”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Morag says. “And perhaps not.”
McRaith calls himself a painter, not an artist. The word artist seems pretentious to him. He makes enough to live on now, although frugally; in the years when he didn’t, he had spells of working as a hod-carrier in Glasgow, every minute of which he hated. It was not the physical labour he minded so much; it was the ugliness of the smoke-blackened city.
“I used to find, later, when I had gone back home, that I would be painting some of the children I had seen there, and the way they looked–bitter and old at eight or so–would almost make me angry at my own, for being healthy, which was a terrible way to think, I suppose. God knows Crombruach is poor but it is not that sick poverty.”
His own. His own children. Well, so what? Nothing strange about that. She has only just laid eyes on him. Why should it matter that he is married, a natural enough state to be in, for a man of his age.
Mr. Sampson is making angry gestures to Morag. Two customers are hovering vaguely, with books in their hands, looking for someone to take payment, and Mr. Sampson is himself busy with another customer. Morag and Dan McRaith arrange to meet in a nearby pub that evening.
Angie promises to look in on Pique from time to time, and Morag goes out. As usual, with ambiguous feelings. Is she wrong to be leaving Pique alone? What if there were a fire? What if someone broke into the flat? Etcetera. And on the other hand, Pique is no infant, nor is she stupid, and she knows Angie’s phone number. Also, why does Pique always always either create a fuss when Morag goes out, or (like tonight) dawdle calculatedly over dinner and preparations for bed, spinning out simple rituals such as brushing the teeth to about twenty minutes? The answer is, of course, obvious. But unpalatable. Morag cannot say to the child I have to have some life of my own, because that concept will only be understood by Pique many years later, too late to do Morag any good. Nor can Morag afford (although she sometimes does) to lose her temper with Pique, for this merely brings on a severe attack of her own self-reproach and also gives Pique a legitimate reason for yelling, weeping and generally carrying on, all of which results in further delaying Morag’s departure.
The Fox and Grapes is not yet crowded. Dan McRaith is standing at the bar, a pint ale mug held in one blunt-fingered hand. He gets her a drink and they find a table.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“After about three of these,” he says, “you had best tell me to stop, because after three I forget that my capacity is not limitless, nor is my money.”
“Why would I tell you to stop? That’s up to you.”
McRaith looks at her from am
used hazel eyes.
“That’s fine,” he says, “as long as you are not sitting there thinking that I am drinking too much. Bridie never says anything. She sits there thinking it. She is an expert at the eloquent silence.”
“Bridie?” The name seems to have connotations of perpetual bridehood, something childish and affected. “That’s an odd name.”
“It’s a form of Bridget,” McRaith says. “She is, of course, my wife.”
“Yes.”
Morag now prays that he is not about to launch into the boring confessions of one who is misunderstood by his marital partner. He does not do so. Or if he does, it is with some difference.
“There,” he says contemplatively. “I have betrayed her, I think. I do that, sometimes. I don’t think she ever speaks a word of me to anyone.”
“Did you marry young, Dan?”
“Twenty. I’m forty-five now. With seven children. The two eldest are away from home now, thank God.”
“Seven. Why?”
“Bridie believes in large families, and as having children turned out to be her chief interest in life, it did not seem fair to object to it. She has not objected to my painting, although she has sometimes had cause. You have only the one child, Morag?”
A peculiar way for a relationship to begin, a relationship which is plainly going to be sexual, by talking about one another’s offspring. And yet Morag is drawn to him now by both sex and spirit, and senses this is true for him as well. It is as though, both of them, not being young and new and uncommitted, must sound each other out about their areas of commitment. The only alternative is the game, the pretence that nothing matters, the desperation that says moment is all and there does not need to be any other moment to plan for. Morag has played this game, from time to time. But not now. Not any more.
“Only the one, yes,” she says. “It must be difficult to have seven. It’s difficult to have one, though, in other ways.”
“And alone?”
“Yes. That.”
She tells him a little about Brooke, about Jules, about Pique. Even some things about Christie and Manawaka. Is this possible? Is this Morag Gunn, sitting in a pub and talking to someone about these things of which she rarely speaks? Apparently it is.
McRaith tells her that he keeps a room in a friend’s house, in one of the grottier parts of Camden Town, and stays there occasionally when the house at Crombruach becomes unbearably small and noisy. Bridie minds, but does not say. He feels guilty at leaving to come here, but does so all the same.
Morag goes back to his room with him, and they make love. The swiftness of this encounter does not seem strange.
McRaith has been in London for going on two months, and Morag has known him for most of that time. His room, as a place of work for him, is no hell, but it does have a skylight and a fairly large east window. It is sparsely furnished–a bed, a dresser, an ancient and threadbare Persian rug. His paints, brushes and paraphernalia are kept in a scrolled and only slightly rainbow-splattered writing desk with a drop-lid top. The place is scrupulously neat, and the paints are always shut away when Morag arrives. He is very protective, almost aggressively so, about his work. His easel, standing in the wide bay window, is always carefully turned around whenever Morag is here, so she cannot see what he is working on. Finished (or at least temporarily laid aside) paintings are stacked against one wall, but facing inward in concealment. On the dresser there is only one thing–a bowl full of oddly shaped and oddly coloured pieces of rock, from Crombruach. Perhaps they are necessary to remind McRaith of those shapes and textures. Or possibly they are his talismans.
She goes there in the afternoons, most days, which is by no means a perfect arrangement. She works mornings in the bookshop. Dan works mornings at his work. She is supposed to be working afternoons at her work. Pique does not get to bed until after nine, so evenings are not much good for Morag’s work. The choice for her seems to be not too simple.
How to change our hours to suit? What to do, Lord? How to cope with it all? Maybe I should be able to write evenings, late, so as not to inconvenience anyone? Goddamn, why should I not inconvenience anyone? I couldn’t write then, anyway. I am too bloody tired by then.
“Morag?” Dan, on the phone.
“Yes. Oh–”
“What happened to you? I was expecting you after lunch.”
“Right,” Morag says, furiously. “I’ll be right over.”
“You don’t sound very calm, Morag.”
“Really?”
She arrives, walks up the three flights of stairs to Dan’s room. He takes her coat, looking bewildered.
“Why are you so strange today?” he asks.
“I was working on Jonah. I picked it up as soon as I got back from the bookshop, and I forgot about the time. I should’ve phoned you, I suppose. But this is going to happen sometimes, Dan, and I just damn well cannot help it. I’m not on call. I am not. If that doesn’t suit you, then I’m sorry–but that’s the way it is.”
Dan laughs, almost with surprise. Puts an arm around her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Morag–I should’ve realized. I didn’t mean to sound as though I owned you. You know I don’t feel like that.”
“I hope you don’t. Because–”
“It’s all right–I do know. My God, you should realize how glad I am that you’ll stand up to me. That you’ll yell at me if necessary. That’s what’s so bloody difficult with Bridie–oh Morag, love, I’m sorry, I must not talk about her to you. It is not fair to either of you. But sometimes I want to say to her–sometimes I do say–for christ’s sake, woman, don’t sit there looking injured–if you disagree with me, say so. Can’t you see that’s one thing I value most about you?”
“I know. I do know, Dan.”
“Well, you’d better get back to work, then.”
“Now that I’m here,” Morag says, laughing and yet annoyed at herself, “I don’t want to go.”
“I’m glad. But I feel as though I’ve–”
“Conned me? You haven’t.”
Dan shoulders his way across the room like a sailor in a gale. For him, life is full of pitfalls. He lives dangerously, and imagines minor disasters, which in consequence frequently happen. He is a man who can trip, cold sober, in the middle of an empty room. And yet he does not give the impression of clumsiness. His blundering movements are innerly caused, and have their own peculiar grace. Surrounded by mysteries on all sides, he peers at them with suspicion, awe and gratitude.
“We are, of course, out of whiskey,” he says. “But the cupboard contains two small Guinness, if my memory serves me.”
His memory does not serve him. The cupboard contains one Guinness. They split it.
“You bought the whiskey only a few days ago,” Morag says. “Are you preaching, Morag Dhu? If so, please do not.”
Morag Dhu. Black Morag. Because of her hair, not her temperament, or so she hopes. She has asked him how the Gaelic word is spelled, but he does not know.
“I’m not preaching. You don’t drink when you’re working. I would’ve liked the whiskey better than this black molasses, that’s all.”
“How do you know I don’t drink when I’m working? I don’t, as a matter of fact, but you’ve never seen me working. Nor I you, if it comes to that. I don’t seem to be doing much here. I never do. I leave Crombruach, to get away from the loony bin up there, and I come here and paint shit.”
“Maybe you should go back, Dan.”
“Not yet,” McRaith says. “Not quite yet.”
They make love then, the continuation of their talking, the same thing in a different form. They talk interminably when they are talking; when they are making love, they do not speak. None of the hot violent words are needed. It is different each time. Sometimes so swift they are amazed and amused, taken by surprise, taking one another by surprise. Today, slow and gentle, even their culmination.
“One thing I have always liked about you,” McRaith says, as though it had been years, “i
s that you have not yet asked to see my work. Of course, I have not asked to see yours, either, although I cheated to some extent and got two of your books out of the library.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Strange–that it could be you and not you, at the same time.”
“That is just it.” She does not want to talk much about this, but is warmed by the knowledge that he has seen it.
“If you want to look at the ones stacked over there, Morag Dhu,” McRaith says, with a hesitation that is both protection and pride, “go ahead. I brought those down with me–for the dealers, hopefully.”
“It must be hard to part with them, Dan.”
“How often do you read your books, once they’re published?”
“Never. Yes. Okay, I’ll look, but I won’t be able to say. I don’t know, in that territory.”
“For God’s sake. Just look at them. Who asked you to say anything?”
Morag looks. Walking naked and therefore less vulnerable than she would have been if clad, among McRaith’s paintings.
Dark oils, mostly, but not heavy. The colours black-green, a hundred different greys and browns, but the sun’s colours, too, in brief revelations. Some like the rocks of Crombruach, the miniature shore there on the dresser, no recognizable shape nor identifiable form, at least to her eyes. Others bear somewhere within them the forms of fossils and shells, convoluted seashells and rock-fossils of ferns or fish, immeasurably ancient, and behind or through these, the timid angry eyes of humans. Some of the human eyes seem distanced, distorted–no, not distorted; the flesh mirrors the spirit’s pain, a greater pain than the flesh even if burned could feel. A grotesquerie of a woman, ragged plaid-shawled, eyes only unbelieving empty sockets, mouth open in a soundless cry that might never end, and in the background, a burning croft.