He looked as if he was about to argue. Then his face cleared oddly of expression and he sat down, the dogs running promptly to their places round his chair. “Aye. Your mother would have said the same.”
I shifted awkwardly. He had leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, as if seeking relief from inner pain. I’d have touched any other man, asked him what was wrong. How was it that I couldn’t reach a hand to my last living relative? “Granda? Is something the matter?”
He jerked upright. “Aye! It’s half six at night, and I haven’t had a crumb to eat since breakfast. What use are you anyway, if you cannae have dinner on the table when a man gets home?”
I nodded, relieved. “Hardly any use at all, Granda. It won’t be long.”
Backing off, I joined Cam by the sink. “Do you mind,” he asked me in an undertone, “when he talks to you like a downtrodden 1960s housewife?”
I grabbed the peeler he passed me and started work on the potatoes. “Not so much as when he treats me like a serious young farmer and the heir to all his acres. That’s when I’m really in trouble.”
“You don’t fancy it, then—your predestined lot? Ruler of all you survey?”
“God, no.” I shivered. “That was meant to be Alistair’s job. Give me back my study and my student digs. I like—oh, I don’t know. Cities. Bright lights. Raunchy hip-grinding music in clubs.”
“Yeah? Well, we can manage the music for you.” He switched on the radio. “This picks up Radio 1 between bursts of Sheep Shit FM, doesn’t it?”
I shot a furtive glance across the room. Harry was still seated in state by the fire. His back was to us, but I could see the top of his head, the listening tips of his ears. “Better not. His lordship doesn’t care for it.” I raised my voice slightly. “And he only pretends to be deaf.”
But I didn’t switch the music off. Cameron had it down low, and I couldn’t resist the soft beat reaching out to me from London, through all those miles of static and sunset sky. I struggled to identify the track. Long time ago—late ’90s. I’d only been a kid, but…
Cameron’s hip brushed mine. No—a tiny bump, just on the off beat. “A Blur song, isn’t it?” he whispered.
“Oh, yeah.” The dark, insinuating intro rippled over my skin. The pulsing beat came again, and Cam, en route between fridge and cooker, took another dance step, jouncing my hip once more. I chuckled. “That’s right. What are you up to?”
“Blur, ‘Trimm Trabb’. I saw them play it a couple of years ago, at T in the Park.”
Another bump, soft and sly, dead on time. The track got down to its good, scratchy, dirty-rock business, and on Cam’s next pass I intercepted him, stepping round his back, giving him a push with my arse. “T in the Park—what, back in 2009? I was there for that. Maybe we walked past each other in the crowd.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wouldn’t have walked past you.”
My heart turned over. I couldn’t look at him. Grinning, I let him take me by the hand and tug me in a short, sharp diagonal across the flagstones. I was dancing to Blur with a beautiful guy in my own kitchen—maybe island life had something to be said for it after all.
I wouldn’t have walked past.
Still I couldn’t meet his eyes, though I sensed that his were fixed on me. Suddenly the signal cleared and bass and soaring electric guitar blasted out into the room.
I choked with laughter. “God, Cam—turn it down.”
“No.”
I spun round. That was Harry, gruff as the bark of a dog. He hadn’t stirred in his chair, but I saw to my amazement that one of his gnarled old hands was flapping, beating time.
“What?”
“Let yon lad have his music. I’ve heard worse. He’s got better taste than you, Nichol, with your foulmouthed songs about tractors.”
So we proceeded to have supper—me, my grandfather, Cam and Shona’s three farmhands—while the Zane Low show played in the background. I was too astonished to mind the old man’s sudden relenting, even if since my earliest teen years he’d forbidden me the radio, my CD player, even an iPod with headphones on if he thought it was taking my mind off my work.
We were a peaceful group round the table, the lads chatting enough to let me entertain my thoughts in silence. It didn’t take me long to build a little world where Harry, who clearly was already half-charmed, became so fond of Cameron he didn’t bat an eyelid on finding out for sure he was not only
gille-toine
but in love with his
gille-toine
grandson. So fond that Alistair’s shadow vanished from my life, because Harry had a replacement, someone he could care for just as much, and I could drop back into my old accustomed place—second-best, tolerated, never make a farmer of me but that didn’t matter…
“Nichol?”
I blinked and came back to surface. Cameron was watching me, smiling and frowning. “You all right?”
“Yes. Sorry. Woolgathering.”
“Well, you’re in the right place for it.”
I sat up, stretching, stifling a yawn. Shona’s boys were saying good night and gathering their things. I responded politely, told them to come and get their breakfast the next day. If Shona wouldn’t let me pay them, I could at least keep them fed. I saw them out and came back to the kitchen, ready to tackle the washing up. Cameron was clearing the table. Harry was struggling to open the window, whether in reaction to the still-lovely evening outside or a protest against the Aga’s new warmth, I wasn’t sure. I went to help him, and together we pushed up the cobwebbed old sash. Cool, sweet air swept in, rich with sea salt and gorse and the heady-scented thyme that was beginning to spread its cushions on the cliff-top turf.
Harry leaned his elbows on the sill. He said, slowly, as if to himself, “
Bidh am beithe deagh-bholtrach,urail, dosrach nan càrn.”
I picked up a tea towel. If Cam was washing up, I would dry and vice versa, a quiet routine we’d wordlessly established from his first day here. The old man’s words sang in my head. My memory reached out for their sequel, though surely I’d forgotten it. Twenty years or more since Harry had stood me between his knees and read mac Mhaighstir’s poetry to me.
But something remained. It was as deep in me as the urge to join in with Cameron’s dance. It was something to do with red-gold light from the west, the promise it held of longer days, island waters brightening from grey to teal and seal-blue—yes, of
an t-samhraidh
, Gaelic summer, distilled and held safe in a poem like a song.
I smiled, took the glass Cam handed me and said,
“Ri maoth-bhlàs driùchd Cèitein.”
“Wow. What’s that?”
“A poem of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s.
Òran an t-Samhraidh
, the ‘Song of Summer’. He lived on the mainland northwest of here, up at Ardnamurchan. I didn’t know I remembered.”
Harry turned a little in the window. “You do, though, don’t you?
Mar ri caoin-dheàrrsadh grèine…”
“Brùchdadh barraich roi gheugaibh.”
“Aye.” Nodding, Harry limped over to a seldom-touched bookshelf in the corner. He took down a slim blue volume, its cover worn with age and use. As usual when I’d pleased him he was acting like I wasn’t there, gesturing with the book towards Cam. “He sucked it up like a wee sponge, laddie—that and any other
Gàidhlig
I taught to him. Not like his fidgety brother. Nothing stuck in that lad’s head unless it had wheels or wool. Nichol, now—he spoke it better than English by the time he was seven.”
Well, this beat being the focus of burning scrutiny for my sins. To Cam I was still visible, anyway—he was watching me intently. “Could you?”
“Yes, I think so. But I’ve lost it all since.”
Harry banged the book down onto the table. “If ye have, it’s for want of practice. And running away to stuff your head full of every language but your own, as if there’s any call for one man to know so many tongues.”
As if there’s any call for bloody Gaelic.
I bit it back—didn’t want to lob that hand grenade—but other protests rose, resentments I’d thought I’d set aside. “Granda, I’d had a job offer from the UN as an interpreter.”
He stared at me. I’d never spelled out for him—never intended to—the price I’d paid for leaving Edinburgh. What was the point? There’d been no choice. A silence fell, the more dreadful for the sounds of spring twilight drifting through the open window. In a calm frame of mind, I’d have done anything rather than wound him, because to my plunging dismay he did look hurt, his weather-beaten all-year tan washing to an unhealthy grey. I didn’t know how to back down.
Cameron slid the dish he’d been rinsing into the rack. He dried his hands on a tea towel, calm and casual, as if the air in the room hadn’t been about to catch fire. He came to lean on the sink unit beside me. “Really? Which languages?”
I shrugged. I’d heard my ability called a gift, but I’d never been able to see it that way. To me it seemed strange that other people lacked it. “Oh, you name it. The usual stuff—French, Spanish, Italian. I can manage a couple of Eastern Europeans at a push. And Greek. Russian.”
“Bloody hell.”
“It’s not a big deal. I…I wouldn’t have taken that UN job anyway. I was studying linguistics—why languages develop, how they fit together. That’s what interests me.”
“I’m not surprised you lost some of your Gaelic.”
But I haven’t.
That was what I wanted to say to Harry.
I remember every word you taught me, in here with the book and out on the moors and the shore where you pointed to
dobhar
, the otter,
iasg-dearg
, the salmon, the eagle
iolair
whose name you pronounced like the upward yearning of wings—
oh-lia, oh-lia
.
I couldn’t get my mouth open. Instead I went to the table and sat down. I kept a couple of chairs between me and Harry, and I let the streaming sunlight block him out too, a dazzling curtain through my eyelashes. I picked up the book, fingertips easily finding the place for the
Òran
.
“It’s probably more mislaid than lost,” I said—to Cam, not to Harry. Retraction and forgiveness weren’t how we dealt with one another. We snarled like wolves then returned stolidly to our pack life. “I couldn’t forget these poems—not when I was taught them so young.”
“Can I have a look?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He came and sat next to me, close enough that I could feel his warmth but leaving a safe inch clear for Harry’s sake. “Which part did you just say?”
“These lines here. It’s hard to do justice to them in English, but it’s something like the fragrant birch tree is branching over the cairn, damp with soft dew, warm in the sunshine, the fresh young buds on its boughs.”
Cam ran a finger down the page. I wondered if there was something in his blood, as there had been in mine, which let him find in the strange words the shapes of familiar things. Animals, sunlight, trees, sea and sky. A language born when there had been little but these things to describe, and tightly bound up with them still.
“Will you read it again?” Cam asked softly.
“Yes, sure.” There was a feather drifting on the table’s surface—Clover’s work, no doubt, and at some point I’d find the rest of the poor bird. I picked it up and trailed the tip of it along the lines as I read, so he could see where I was. Finishing, I drew the feather back—lightly, as if by accident—over the roots of his nails. “There. Better in the original, isn’t it?”
“Lovely. You do realise, though—there’s not a single letter in all that you pronounced the way it’s written.”
I smiled. Yes, that was Gaelic for you—wrapping you in mists right from the start, from the motorway signs on the border that said
failte
—
welcome
—and were meant to come out of your mouth as
fawl-cha.
“Yes, I know. That’s part of the beauty of it somehow, part of how it keeps its music. It’s not as hard to pick up as you’d think, once you know the sounds.”
Beauty. Music. I still couldn’t look at Harry, but from the corner of my eye I saw that his grip on the chair had relaxed. I couldn’t forget the poems, not when I was taught them so young.
Did you hear me, old man? It’s the nearest I can come to saying sorry.
I turned the page. The summer poem was long, a great cadenced paean to life such as only a man who’d lived through West Isles winters could sing. Softly I began the next verse. Harry stood listening for a few moments longer then quietly walked out of the kitchen, pulling the door shut behind him.
I stopped reading. Reverently I closed the book, and I drew a deep breath. “It’s you that wants to be working for the bloody UN, not me.”
“What?”
“You stopped us from having a fight.”
“Oh.” Cameron made a wry face. He rested his elbow against mine, closing up that safe inch. “Sorry. I meant to be subtle.”
“Oh, you were. I didn’t even realise what you were doing until it worked. Anyway, why are you apologising?”
“You might need to fight him.”
“I do. But I don’t need to hurt him, not over…” I stroked the book’s faded cover. “Not over stuff like this.”
“So you are, in fact, fluent in Gaelic as well as half a dozen other languages.”
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
“God almighty. Why are you hiding all that under your bushel?”
“It’s not that much use to me here. And I couldn’t afford to go back, even if—even if things were different.” I smiled, trying to shake off my regrets. “It was a nice intervention. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
We sat quietly in the gathering dusk. I kept turning the pages of the mac Mhaighstir book, but I wasn’t seeing them anymore. My thoughts drifted. Far off across the moors, a curlew gave the first three notes of a flight song that would soon grow to crescendo and cascade down through the island skies all summer. Cam was pressing his shoulder to mine.
I wouldn’t have walked past you
, he’d said. Any second now, if I turned to face him, he would kiss me. There was no possible reason why not…
“Come on, then. We’d best get started on the late rounds.”
I bumped back to earth. His shoulder had just been companionable. While I’d been thinking how his mouth would feel on mine, he—the monster Harry and I had created—had been worrying about feeding schedules. I got up quickly. Dignity was better than nothing. “God, yes. I hadn’t realised how late it was.”