Memorybank Movie: The Black Isle
It was three years since Morag first met Dan McRaith. To her, it seems a much shorter time, because she sees him perhaps twice a year, for a few weeks or occasionally a couple of months at a time. In between, they correspond, he in brief scrawls, Morag in lengthy typewritten letters. Sometimes, after he has once more gone away, she thinks of him in Crombruach, with Bridie, and rages. It is a fine arrangement for him–a woman in two camps. But what about her? At these times, lying sleepless, she feels demeaned, waiting here for him to return, furious at herself but unable to do otherwise. She has written dozens of letters to him, telling him she does not want to go on in this fashion, that she doesn’t care a damn about marrying him but she hates feeling like anybody’s mistress, that she is nearly forty and is merely marking time with her life, and so on. She always tears these letters up. She knows that Dan does not view it in this way, that he would laugh at the suggestion of Morag’s being his
mistress
, that antiquated word. Also, she is in fact not marking time with her life at all.
Jonah
is completed and accepted and will soon be published. Morag works much better when McRaith is not in London, of course, herself and her time not then being divided. If he were here all the time, she suspects that she would become impatient with him, resentful of anyone’s constant presence. No doubt under these circumstances, too, she would be expected to make the meals and do the laundry for him as well as for herself and Pique. Dan is accustomed to that pattern, which presumably suits Bridie, but would not suit Morag.
Looked at that way, it’s ideal. Why do I keep on feeling badly about it, then? I hate the fact that Dan’s never even seen Pique, that there is a whole area in my life that he knows nothing about, and that there is another whole area in my life that Pique knows nothing about. And I’m jealous of his children and of Bridie, having so much of his life. Bridie, apparently cloaked in her disapproving silences. They’re not happy together–for God’s sake, why don’t they part? But I can’t say that to him.
Evening, and Pique is reading in bed. The phone rings, and it is Dan. He sounds dreadfully upset. Morag recognizes the symptoms, all too familiar by now.
“Morag, could you come over, right now, do you think? Just for a little while. I really would like to talk to you.”
“What is it? You’re going home?”
“Morag Dhu, I can’t stand this goddamn city a minute longer. Today I nearly walked straight into an oncoming bus. One of these days I will. And I am not working worth a damn. Everything I do here is rubbish. I’ve got to go back.”
“I’ll be over in a few minutes.”
Aid and comfort. She does not resent it very much, because he also has given her aid and comfort, through the writing of
Jonah
. Not, however, about Pique and all that, but then she has never asked for it, there.
Morag very rarely goes over to Dan’s in the evenings, simply because she hates telling lies to Pique, and there is no way she can go to Dan’s without telling lies which grow far too elaborate and intricate, and which make her feel as though she is betraying the child, once for leaving Pique in order to go to Dan, and again for not levelling about it.
“Who was that, Mum?” Pique enquires.
Morag goes into Pique’s bedroom.
“Just a friend,” she says. Then, determinedly, “An artist
called Daniel McRaith–he is going back to his home in Scotland, and he’s having a few people in this evening, and they’d like me to go over for just a little while. Okay?”
Only half a lie. Does that make it better?
“I guess so.” Pique is more resigned than she used to be, about Morag going out occasionally. But she still does not like it.
“I’ll just go up and tell Angie.”
“Okay. Mum–don’t stay very long, will you?”
“I promise.”
Does Pique in some way suspect her relationship with Dan? Why why has Morag been so careful to keep it from the child? If Dan were unattached, then she would not have felt this carefulness to be necessary. But you cannot say to a child
Look, there is this man and he has seven children and a wife in the north of Scotland, and I am in love with him and I go over and make love with him whenever I possibly can, and will continue to do so, however much it might hurt his wife if she knew about it, and I am very much afraid that it would.
Dan is pacing around the room like a racehorse impatient to be off.
“Morag–I am so damn sorry. But I have to go.”
“Yes. I know you do. I don’t understand why, but I know you do.”
McRaith pours them both a whiskey, and she sees his hands are shaking.
“I wish to God I could explain,” he says miserably. “I don’t know–more and more I feel like hell about it.”
“About what?”
“Why can’t I just stay in either one place or another? That’s what is bothering me. I go back to Crombruach, and I can work–I never do anything, really, anywhere else.
And then after a while–look, I do not hate my offspring–”
“I never thought you did.”
“On the contrary, I am normally fond of them, or so I believe at most times. But–”
“Dan,” Morag says, feeling tired. “We have been through all this a hundred times. Go. Just go. But for God’s sake stop trying to explain and justify yourself.”
“I’m not trying to justify,” he says irritably. Then, sitting down at the table, he looks up at her and shrugs. “Yes, probably I am, at that. I wish you would come up to Crombruach, Morag, just once–just to see. Then you’d understand both things–my need of the place, the geographical
place
, the sea and the shore, and also why I have to get away, and did even before I ever met you. Now it’s a hundred percent worse, because I want to come down here and see you, and I also feel more guilty about leaving–well, leaving all of them up there.”
“How could I go to Crombruach, Dan? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You mean–what would Bridie think? Well, the local pub has rooms. You could stay there. You’re always talking about going to Sutherland and you never go. It’s quite a long way from Crombruach, but I could drive you. It would be a reason for going. Bridie would not think anything if you took Pique along with you. That is how her mind works–”
A woman with a child would be likely to be honourable, in Bridie’s book? Bridie herself would, no doubt. Perfidious Morag.
“You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you, Dan? How would you explain how it was you came to invite me up to Crombruach? Or how you got to know me at all?”
“You’re making it too complicated, Morag Dhu. I would tell Bridie I met you a couple of times at parties at Andrew’s.
I’ve quite often asked London friends up there, you know.”
“What if she didn’t believe you?”
McRaith looks suddenly stricken.
“She would, quite simply, believe me,” he says.
“Dan–”
They hold onto one another. But they will not make love this evening.
“I couldn’t go,” Morag says. “I just couldn’t.”
“All right. I’ll write to you, Morag Dhu.”
Early mornings are the worst. Nights, she works late, writing letters, planning a few short stories, drinking wine until she thinks she can sleep. But she wakens with the cold knowledge of Dan’s absence, her flesh clamouring for his, her mind reviewing the things she wants to tell him, to share with him, and then realizing he is not any longer just a few blocks away.
After a month, she asks Pique how it would be for the two of them to go to Scotland during the Easter holidays, and stay in a real hotel, and visit these friends, some of whose children are just about Pique’s age. Pique is enthusiastic. Morag writes to McRaith, who replies by return post.
The night train to Inverness. Morag lies in the lower bunk of their second-class sleeping compartment, listening to the quake and rattle of the train. Is this going to prove to be a vast error of judgement? And she will not be able to touch Dan, not at all. What in hell has made her do it?
Curiosity. Just that. I’ve got to see. I’ve got to know about Crombruach, and Bridie, and why he stays. And if I’m ever to get to Sutherland, it had best be with him.
Early morning, Morag looks out the train window. Small rocky hillsides are sliding past, and fir trees, and white birches.
Brown creeks (here called
burns
?) tumble along over stony riverbeds. A station flashes by. The train does not stop, but Morag reads the sign.
CULLODEN
There is such a place. It really exists, in the external world. Morag feels like crying, but Pique is awake now and the steward is at the door with their morning tea.
Dan meets them at Inverness station. He is wearing his usual brown corduroys and cream-coloured plait-patterned fisherman’s sweater. In London, she now realizes, these clothes looked slightly like what a painter might wear who was trying to look like an artist, although it never struck her like that at the time. Here, however, they look like what they really are, the local garb, worn because warm.
“Pique, this is Dan McRaith.” This seems very odd.
“Hi. Have you got a farm?”
“Hello, Pique. No, not a farm. Our house used to be a fisherman’s cottage.”
“Have you got a dog?”
“Yes. A collie.”
“I have always wanted a dog,” Pique says, giving Morag a reproachful glance.
The drive takes more than an hour, through rolling farmlands and pastures. Morag barely notices the scenery. In the back seat, Pique is chattering happily. Dan responds with appropriate comments. The small car chuffs on. Morag, sitting beside Dan, is aware only that she wants to touch him, and cannot.
Crombruach village is at the mouth of the firth. The greyish pink stone houses rise in tiers up the hillside. The streets are narrow, cobbled with rough stone. The harbour has a
wharf-breakwater and inside this sheltering arm half a dozen boats lie. Fishboats? Not anything like the gillnetters in B.C. These are more like dories, motor-powered but open. Imagine going to sea in those cockleshells.
They go to the local inn and deposit Morag’s suitcases. Then on to McRaith’s house. They draw up beside a row of stone cottages, not even semidetached. Totally attached, a whole string of them, across the road from the windy harbour.
“Here we are,” McRaith says.
The house is low-ceilinged, as he has said, two rooms up and two and a half down. Downstairs, the kitchen which is also the livingroom has as its focus a black iron coalstove. There is also a beat-up table, a variety of chairs in various stages of collapse, two cats, a jumble of anoraks and rubber Wellington boots, books, buckets, cooking pots, rock and shell collections, fishing rods, piles of old newspapers, a sink stacked high with washed but undried dishes, a cardboard box full of broken toys, an aged and yawning collie beside the stove dreaming of sheepherding, a jam jar full of dried grasses and ferns, and another jam jar full of plastic daffodils.
A woman comes down the stairs into the kitchen, accompanied by a couple of copper-haired boys who look about six and nine years old. Bridie. Introductions are made, which Morag scarcely hears, and will later not be able to remember. She is intent upon looking at Bridie. It immediately becomes apparent that Bridie is intent upon looking at Morag.
Like hell she doesn’t suspect, kid or no kid. Oh God. Why did I ever come here? I should’ve known better. Too late now. Have to see it through. With dignity. Come on, Morag. Pull yourself together.
Bridie is only a few years younger than Dan, so she must be about forty-five. She looks older than he does. This seems
unfair, for a start. She is a thin slight woman, her hands rough and red from too much hot water and cold weather. Her features are sharp, and indicate that she must once have been if not beautiful then extremely handsome. She wears her brown hair cropped short. Her brown tweed skirt and brown poloneck pullover are clean and sensible, and her shoes, well-polished brogues, suggest that she has to some extent dressed up for this meeting.
Only now does Morag realize what the real mistake has been in coming here. No longer can Bridie be a fantasy woman. She has become, in this instant, real to Morag. Her drawn, tense, determined face will now forevermore come between Morag and McRaith.
Bridie’s hands reach down for a second, in an automatic gesture, as though she were about to wipe them on an apron which she now remembers she is not wearing. Morag’s heart lurches and she finds herself wanting to say
I didn’t mean to hurt you, if I did hurt you; I didn’t know you were here.
“We haven’t much to offer Dan’s London friends,” Bridie says, in the same low almost formal tone as Dan has.
Morag sees suddenly what she has taken for suspicion, before, in Bridie’s perusal of herself, has not been that at all. It has merely been shyness, a feeling both of inadequacy and resentment, possibly, in the face of Dan’s London friends, people from that glittering world, as she probably imagines it to be, where she herself does not go and does not want to go.
“Would you be ready for your breakfast, then?” Bridie goes on.
“Yes–thanks. But please don’t go to any–”
“It’s no bother,” Bridie says. “I’ll see to it now.”
But there is a faint undertone now, not of apology but of martyrdom. Dan says nothing, but scowls.
After they have eaten, Pique goes out with the two younger boys and the collie, to see the harbour and the shore. Two more young have clattered into the house–a girl of about twelve, and a boy of fourteen. Mary and Robert.
Bridie clears the table. Morag offers to help. Bridie politely refuses assistance.
“You and Dan go ahead and talk,” she says. “I’ve work to do.”
“Couldn’t you just sit down for fifteen minutes,” Dan says to her, very quietly but angrily, “and have a cup of coffee and talk a bit?”
Bridie looks at him as though puzzled, as though trying to figure out what is expected of her.
“Very well, then,” she says.
She sits down on the edge of a chair and sips at her coffee, as though the house were no longer her abode. Morag and McRaith talk–of the proposed trip to Sutherland, which would be shorter by boat but he does not know anyone with a reliable enough vessel here right now. They also find themselves talking about Morag’s forthcoming novel, naturally enough, comparing the gillnetters of
Jonah
to the boats in Crombruach harbour. Bridie does not speak. What is she thinking? Morag turns to her.