Veil of Time (5 page)

I sit on the arm of a leather easy chair that must have come from the era of the wife.

He steps aside from the fire, apparently having found enough warmth. “So, you used to come to Dunadd as a child?”

I ease myself down into the chair. “There was an old lady downstairs from us who came from St. Kilda. When the government evacuated them from the island in the 1930s, they put them all over Argyll to work on the land.”

“They did that,” said Jim. “Can you imagine, island folk who’d never seen a tree put to work in the forestry? They didn’t have a word of English between them either.”

There doesn’t seem to be much Jim doesn’t know, so I let him ramble.

“Of course, the old way of life on the island had disappeared long ago, but they still ate nothing but sea birds.”

My mother paid the lady from St. Kilda, Mrs. Gillies, to mind me after school. I probably knew more about the life of St. Kilda than about Glasgow.

“Mrs. Gillies,” I say, “was the last girl to be married on the island. She was proud of that.”

“Och,” says Jim. “It’s quite a tale, right enough. And did you learn the Gaelic from this Mrs. Gillies?”

“I learned a type of Gaelic,” I say.

“It was the old Gaelic. Those folks on St. Kilda were still living in the Dark Ages. When they were brought to Argyll, even the old folk had a job understanding them.”

I stayed with Mrs. Gillies until half-past five during the school week and often all day Saturday, too. She stepped into the shoes of a granny, of which I had no natural ones. A few summers she brought me to Dunadd, to visit her brother, who lived nearby along the Crinan Canal. I probably picked up more Gaelic during those two weeks at the table of Hugh Gillies in his tiny kitchen than I ever had after school in Glasgow with his sister.

My parents weren’t sure about their daughter learning Gaelic, which they thought of as backwards,
but Mrs. Gillies was “a convenience,” I once heard my mother say.

I look into the fire. “I don’t suppose you have a Gaelic dictionary.”

Jim shakes his head. “No, what Gaelic I know came from my mother, and that was a wee while ago. You got belted for speaking it in the school, so with an incentive like that, you were better to forget. But I’m being rude and not offering you tea.”

If that was a question, he doesn’t wait for the answer, but is off back to his kitchen, where I hear him moving about with a kettle and a match that lights a flame.

I am intrigued by these books, so I pull myself out of my chair and go to the nearest shelf, my eye immediately finding titles:
The Celtic Consciousness; The Druids; Life in Ancient Scotland
. There is clearly more to our Mr. Galvin than he lets on.

“Here, take this,” he says, handing me a mug with a teaspoon in it. “My wife must be rolling in her grave. She’d never serve tea in anything but a proper cup and saucer.”

I sit back down with the hot mug and wrap my hands about it. He drags a stool to the fire and perches himself on it. He slurps when he drinks, something I’m sure his wife would not have approved of. He must have been quite handsome in his day, a nice kind of father to have.

I watch him slurp for a while, until he knows I’m watching him.

“Who were they who lived up on the fort?” I ask.

He takes a deep breath through his teeth before he speaks. It’s a Highland thing. “Well, the history books say it was the Picts until the Scotti sailed over from Ireland.”

“Scotti? Who are they?”

“They’re who we get
Scot
land from. The Scotti were Irish immigrants, though they called their land Erin in those days, not Ireland. The Irish thought, still do, that they were descended from this Egyptian princess called Scotta. Ireland, as you can see from the top of Dunadd on a clear day, is only eleven miles to the west, and there was probably always trade going on between the two coasts. If you ask me, it was always a mix of Pict and Scot hereabouts, sometimes more one, sometimes more the other. The Scots brought the Gaelic with them from Ireland, and by the time of William Wallace, it was the language of Scotland. It’ll no doubt give out in the end, just as the Pictish language did.”

“Have you ever heard the name Sula?” I ask Jim.

He says he hasn’t and shows me instead a list of the kings that ruled from Dunadd, strange names mostly that mean nothing to me, names from the Dark Ages such as Ainbcellaig, Fiachne, and Eochaid.

On my way back to the cottage, rain is pelting against the side of my head. I stop to wade in a shallow puddle,
watching the waves made by my boots wash up higher into the gravel, then fall back and disappear. Entire cultures come and go like this, empires rise and crash. The Picts moved off to the north and left nothing except a few strange words in the English of northeastern Scotland. They’re just echoes, like the Standing Stones and like the druids.

Back at my pages the next day, I’m counting out witch executions, in huge numbers: for the year 1515, more than five hundred witches burned in Geneva; 1518, sixty-four burned in Val Camonica; seventeen hundred Scots burned at the stake between 1563 and 1603. I think about Sula in her hut at the top of Dunadd. She has no idea what would become of her kind in the future. There are no do-good clerics to drag her out of her hut yet, no edicts on the evil of women.

I set my glasses on the desk and go to the window to watch the river. The rain has stopped this morning, and a little way down the bank, I spot Jim Galvin with a fishing line running downstream as though it wanted to get away from him. Since he knows so much, I want him to tell me why the church did this to women. I want to know what he has to say for himself.

I shout my accusation at him across the river, earthy brown run that at least in my dream looked just like this a thousand or more years ago. Jim looks up and shrugs. After a length, he shouts, “Away round to the bridge and less of your shouting.”

It’s not easy going along the bank, semi-marsh as it is, piled with lumps of sedge that turn your foot sideways in your Wellie. As though in solidarity, Winnie the kitten follows behind.

The bridge is an old stone one with a fancy Roman arch for an underside, not that it came out of any great artistic vision, just out of the mud and practicality of the farmer who set it, stone against stone. It’s a beautiful bridge, nevertheless, the mythical drawbridge in my mind that keeps me safe within the shadow of the fort, a recluse with my papers and my questions.

Jim looks up at me from his seat on the riverbank. “What is it you were saying? Quietly now, so you don’t scare the fish, and take that bloody cat away or she’ll be eating them.”

I laugh. “It’s nearly bloody winter. There won’t be any catch, and even if there were, they’d have to be gae small fish for the cat to pose a menace. Is it minnows you’re after?”

He looks back to his fishing. I look down at the dark river, harboring, so Jim hopes, some scaly vestige of life. A seagull lands and hunkers down against the wind. I sigh. Here in the presence of the river, even the burning of witches doesn’t seem worth the noise.

I say, “I was saying nothing.”

I sit down next to him and draw my knees up against my chest. Winnie rubs her back around my legs, as though I had just sat down for her pleasure.

He chuckles. “Sounded like an awful lot of nothing to me.”

“I was just caught up in my work, research.”

He looks at me, as though I’ve handed him a measure by which to gauge me. “Aye, they were saying in the village that you were up to something of the sort.”

The noise comes back. “Something of what sort? What is that supposed to mean?”

He turns back to his line, which is bobbing all of a sudden. “No need to get your knickers in a twist.”

Jim lands his fish, little shriveled thing that he ought to throw back, while I’m wondering about my dream. I can’t put it away, because I want to know what the fire was about and who the privileged few were that made up the cheering crowd. I want to go into that village at the base of Dunadd on the sheep field and see the life there. Suddenly I’m finding myself wondering what effect it would have for me to miss a day’s course of pills and perhaps find myself back in that dream. I don’t know what year of the Dark Ages I was in, or if it even matters.

“Throw the damn fish back,” I say, watching the poor thing writhe, its gills sucking hopelessly. I slide close enough to its tail to flick it with the toe of my boot. Using my foot, the fish bounces itself back into the water.

“Hoi,” Jim shouts. “That was my dinner!”

I hadn’t meant to throw the fish back, but I am suddenly giddy that it managed to do it for itself.

“Nothing to laugh at,” he says. “Now it’ll be beans on toast.”

I say, “You wouldn’t have found any meat on that thing anyway. I’ll get your dinner for you to make up for it. I’m sure the fish will approve. It was probably some poor little shy’s mother.”

“Bloody skinny mother, if you ask me,” he says. “What’ll you make me?”

I hadn’t meant to promise him anything, not least of all more of my study time.

I sigh, “Sardines on toast?” I can’t help but laugh.

“Oh aye, very funny. I’ll be over at six.”

“Fine.” I walk off.

He comes at five to six, and he’s wearing a silly cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. It might have worked when he was courting his wife back in the 1950s, but it doesn’t work on me, and not because the “lady doth protest too much,” just because I don’t want his overtures, plain and simple. I’m thirty-eight, and not so desperate yet I need to ponder some old wrinkled bum.

He’s brought me flowers from the local shop, a few white roses mixed in with fern. “It was the least I could do,” he says, “after you threw back my fish.”

I take them to the sink; the arrangement falls into a pleasing spray in a vase. “Not threw back exactly. Besides,
you should leave the poor fish alone. You can buy a kipper at the shop.”

He shakes his head. “Not the manly way.”

I sigh. “I think we’ve had enough of men and their manly ways. Can’t you just all lay off it?”

He takes a seat at the table and puts his elbows on it in the way I’m sure his mother told him not to. “You’re not one of those ballbusters or whatever the hell it is the Americans call them, are you?”

He has defused the moment. I shake my head and smile. “No, not a ballbuster.”

He nods towards my books and papers removed from the dinner table to a chair. “What’s all that about, then?”

“That’s the ‘something of the sort’ that local gossip has me working on. It’s about witches, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, I see,” he says, looking me over, as though I suddenly make sense to him. I wish I made sense to myself.

I set the vase on the table in front of him. “Did they ever have fires on the top of Dunadd?”

“Aye, they did. Even up into my day, every Halloween we would build a fire up there. We used to jump over it, and that’s a piece of antiquity right there, though we didn’t know it then.”

I go back to the kitchen. “What was it for?”

He shrugs. “A purification rite from Ye Olde pagan times. They used to make their animals go over it, too, to ensure their safety through the coming winter. Most of the cattle, though, they’d have to slaughter, because there wasn’t enough feed to keep both man and animal alive. It would be a lot of meat to salt, and innards, what have you, to preserve for winter, guts and sinew, they used the lot. Anything they couldn’t preserve they’d stick in a sausage, including the blood, which is why we have black pudding to this day. And haggis.”

I laugh. “Would you like to write my dissertation for me?”

“No,” he says, clearly pleased, “I don’t know that much at all, never did go to the university.”

I retrieve the dinner from under the grill and set it down between us.

“Sardines on toast,” he says. “I thought you were joking.”

I shake my head. “I never joke. It’s against my nature.”

I don’t know if he thinks I’m joking now, but I don’t think I am.

He forks a fish into his mouth and follows it with a bite of toast. I remember now half a bottle of red wine in my fridge and offer it to him.

“Could you warm it up?” he says. “I’m not one for cold drinks, right enough.”

I go into the kitchen, pour the unlikely red brew into a pan, and flick the gas on under it.

“Is that what you do over here,” he says, “drink wine by yourself?”

I pour the sizzling red wine into two cups and return to the table with them.

I say, “I would call that prying. How does it taste?”

“Awful,” he says. “Still, it takes the edge off awkward conversation.”

I try my hot wine and wince. “Blah. I didn’t think it was awkward.”

“Not until I started prying.”

“What do you want to know?” I ask. I take another sip of warm wine and try to gather strength.

He leans back in his chair, which creaks a little under the strain. “Well, here you are, divorced and without your children. I doubt the farmers around here are going to be of much interest to you, and you’re a bit young to be giving up on life.”

I’m glad at least that he’s putting himself on the other side of the fence from my romantic interests. Maybe he’s waiting for me to say I prefer older men. But there is too much to explain about my reasons for wanting to be lonely.