The Girl on the Ferryboat Read online

  Angus Peter Campbell lives in Skye, and has previously published a number of works in Gaelic. In 2001, he was awarded the Bardic Crown for Gaelic Poetry, as well as the Creative Scotland Award. His Gaelic novel An Oidhche Mus do Sheol Sinn (The Night Before We Sailed) was included in The List 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time. As well as being an author, Campbell has also worked in newspapers, radio and film, with a leading role in the Gaelic language feature film, Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle.

  The Greatest Gift, Fountain Publishing,1992

  Cairteal gu Meadhan-Latha, Acair Publishing, 1992

  One Road, Fountain Publishing, 1994

  Gealach an Abachaidh, Acair Publishing, 1998

  Motair-baidhsagal agus Sgàthan, Acair Publishing, 2000

  Lagan A’ Bhàigh, Acair Publishing, 2002

  An Siopsaidh agus an t-Aingeal, Acair Publishing, 2002

  An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn, Clàr Publishing, 2003

  Là a’ Dèanamh Sgèil Do Là, Clàr Publishing, 2004

  Invisible Islands, Otago Publishing, 2006

  An Taigh-Samhraidh, Clàr Publishing, 2007

  Meas air Chrannaibh/ Fruit on Branches, Acair Publishing, 2007

  Tilleadh Dhachaigh, Clàr Publishing, 2009

  Suas gu Deas, Islands Book Trust, 2009

  Archie and the North Wind, Luath Press, 2010

  Aibisidh, Polygon, 2011

  An t-Eilean: Taking a Line for a Walk, Islands Book Trust, 2012

  Fuaran Ceann an t-Saoghail, Clàr Publishing, 2012

  The Girl on the Ferryboat has also been published in Gaelic as An Nighean air an Aiseag (2013), also available from Luath Press as a Hardback and an eBook.

  The Girl on the Ferryboat

  ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL

  Luath Press Limited

  EDINBURGH

  www.luath.co.uk

  Contents

  Author Bio

  Also by Angus Peter Campbell

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Other Books from Luath Press

  First published 2013

  ISBN (print): 978-1-908373-77-9

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-909912-56-4

  The publisher acknowledges the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this book.

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  © Angus Peter Campbell 2013

  for Liondsaidh and the children with love

  Salm CXV111 mar thaing

  ‘Though there be no such thing as Chance in the world, our ignorance of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the understanding, and begets a like species of belief or opinion.’

  David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Kirsten Graham, Jennie Renton, Louise Hutcheson and Gavin MacDougall of Luath Press for their editorial advice and support. To the Gaelic Books Council who supported the Gaelic version of this novel, also published by Luath. My gratitude to all those, such as Norma Campbell of Kingussie and Inverness, Ryno Morrison of Lewis, Dr John MacInnes of Raasay and Edinburgh, Dolina MacLennan of Lewis and Edinburgh, and Angus MacLeod of Rudh’ Aisinis, South Uist, who gave me little snippets which appear here. I am indebted, as always, to Fr Allan MacDonald’s lovely book Words and Expressions from South Uist and Eriskay (Dublin: The Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958). My biggest thanks, as ever, to my wife Liondsaidh and our children for all their love, and for generously giving me the time and freedom to write this book.

  1

  IT WAS A LONG hot summer: one of those which stays in the memory forever. I can still hear the hum of the bees, and the call of the rock pigeons far away, and then I heard them coming down from the hill.

  Though it wasn’t quite like that either, for first I heard the squeaking and creaking in the distance, as if the dry earth itself was yawning before cracking. Don’t you remember – how the thin fissures would appear in the old peat bogs towards the middle of spring?

  A gate opened, and we heard the clip-clop of the horse on the stones which covered The Old Man’s Ditch, just out of sight. An Irishman, O’Riagan, was the Old Man – some poor old tinker who’d once taken a dram too many and fell into the ditch, never to rise.

  Then they appeared – Alasdair and Kate, sitting gaily on top of the peat bags in the cart. He wearing a small brown bunnet, with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth, while she sat knitting beside him, singing. The world could never be improved. Adam and Eve never ate that apple, after all.

  They were building their first boat, though neither of them were young.

  At the time, I myself was very young, though I didn’t know it then. The university behind me and the world before me, though I had no notion what to do with it. I had forever, with the daylight pouring out on every side from dawn till dusk, every day without end, without beginning.

  I saw her first on the ferry as we sailed up through the Sound of Mull. Dark curly hair and freckles and a smile as bonny as the machair. Her eyes were blue: we looked at each other as she climbed and I descended the stairs between the deck and the restaurant. ‘Sorry,’ I said to her, trying to stand to one side, and she smiled and said, ‘O, don’t worry – I’ll get by.’

  I wanted to touch her arm as she passed, but I stayed my hand and she left. My sense is that she disembarked at Tobermory, though it could have been at Tiree or Coll. For in those days the boat called at all these different places which have now melted into one. Did the boat tie up alongside the quay, or was that the time they used a small fender with the travellers ascending or descending on iron ropes?

  Maybe that was another pier somewhere else, some other time.

  Algeciras to Tangier: I think that was the best voyage

  I ever made, that time I caught a train down through Spain, the ferry across to Tangier, and another train from there through the red desert down to Casablanca. Everything shimmered in the haze: I recall music and an old man playing draughts at a disused station and the gold minarets of Granada shining as we passed through.

  The windows were folded down as we travelled through Morocco, with men in long white kaftans bent over the fields. I ran out of money and a young Berber boy who was also travelling paid my fare before disappearing into the crowd. That was in my third year at university, a while before time existed.

  I walked over to where Alasdair and Kate and the horse and cart had now come into sight. ‘There you are, Eochaidh,’

  I said to the pony, stroking the mane.

  ‘Aye aye,’ the old man said as we walked over to the stream to water the horse.

  While Eochaidh drank his world, Alasdair and Kate and I carried the peat bags to the stack. They would shape her later. Kate made the lunch and the four of us sat round the table eating ham and egg and slices of cheese and pickle.

  Big Roderick they called my boss – the best boatmaker in the district when he was sober, who would occasionally go astray before returning to work with renewed vigour, as if the whole world needed to be created afresh. At this time we were at the beginning of creation: all revelation still lay ahead.

  I was just a labourer. Big Roderick’s servant.

  ‘The tenon saw,’ he’d shout now and again, and I’d run and get hold of that particular kind. The one with the thin rip-files for cutting across the grain. That was fo
r the early, rough part of the work before the finesse set in and his ancient oak box with the polished chisels emerged to frame and bevel and pare and dovetail.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ Alasdair asked.

  ‘O,’ said Roderick, ‘no reason to complain. You’ll be launched by midsummer.’

  ‘Blessings,’ said Alasdair. ‘Didn’t I tell them there was no one like you this side of the Clyde?’

  ‘Isn’t truth lovely?’ said Kate.

  She was called Katell at the beginning. Katell Pelan from Becherel in Brittany, but who had now travelled the world with this little man she’d married nearly fifty years ago. Since they’d first met in a house in Edinburgh where she’d been a student but working in Bruntsfield as a servant girl and he cleaning the windows before starting his apprenticeship. A while then in Leith when he worked at Henry Robb’s shipyards, and Clydebank after that under the shadow of John Brown’s, before they went to Belfast and Harland & Wolff and the long years when he was at deep sea and the children came. First the bits of Breton and Gaelic then their mutual English and at last, here they were at the end of the journey, which had come so suddenly.

  Big Roderick and I were caulking the carvel planks with oakum, fitted between the seams and the hull. How simple building a boat was: like a jigsaw. You only had to use common sense. Put one part next to another.

  ‘Logic, boy,’ Big Roderick would say, ‘you just add bit to bit and before you know it you have a boat.’

  Though we both knew fine that nothing was that simple. The difficulty of course was in knowing which bits fitted where, which bits made sense.

  We rested a while by the unfinished stern, looking out west towards the Atlantic. A large vessel of some kind was sailing north.

  ‘So,’ he said then. ‘And did you learn anything of worth at that university of yours?’

  Well, what would I say? That I hadn’t? – the great lie. Or that I had? – the bigger lie. Sartre and Marx and Hegel and all the rest.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘though I’m not very sure what use it’ll do me.’

  He lifted the gouge from his apron. ‘Never tell me that a thing is of no use. You got a chance I never had. With this gouge I can shape wood. But with your education…’

  He stood up, pointing to the vessel which was far out at sea.

  ‘The day will come,’ he said, ‘when there will be no day like this. When we’ll all be strangers and we won’t believe a thing. Keep your education for that day.’

  And we continued shaping the wood for the rest of the day.

  2

  THE GIRL ON the ferryboat was called Helen: she’d been visiting friends in Edinburgh and when she turned round, the violin was gone forever.

  Waverley Station.

  She’d only put it down on the bench for a moment as she searched for her purse, and when she looked back it had disappeared. She had that moment of disbelief: she must have left it at home, on the high shelf at the bottom of the bed above the bay window overlooking the garden, or perhaps out in the garden shed itself, where she now practised on warm summer days. Except it was now November.

  No one in the world noticed, for it continued as before. It was 8.20am, the very middle of the rush hour. Everyone ran. No one carried a violin under their arm. A terrible piper busked over by Platform 17, where the train from Euston was due. An old man, still drunk from the night before, lay slumped on the bench. She wanted to shake him awake, but of course he wouldn’t know.

  She searched everywhere. Beneath and behind and beside the bench. Round every other bench and seat. All over the concourse and in every shop. In the bins and toilets. She told a station guard, who told her to tell the police. The officer on duty added the fiddle to the endless list. ‘Go and try all the pawn shops,’ he suggested, helpfully giving her all the addresses.

  None of them had been given a fiddle, and though she went back to every pawn shop in the city every day for the next three months, the tune was always the same: Sorry, Miss.

  She visited nearby cities, visiting and revisiting all the pawn shops there too, but no one had seen the instrument. She advertised in the newspapers and in shop windows, but no one responded.

  It had been in the family for generations, brought back from Naples by her great-grandfather on her mother’s side sometime in the 1880s. Though it was no Stradivarius, it made a beautiful sound: deep and mellow, yet bright and tuneful.

  ‘An angel made it’, the old people used to say and began to compare it to the famous chanter played by the MacKinnon family, which had been made by the fairies in Dunvegan. Nobody but a MacKinnon could play that chanter, and whenever anyone else touched it, it lost all its music.

  It was given to young James MacKinnon on the way back from the Battle of Sheriffmuir. Wounded just above the left knee he still managed to hirple north, washing himself in the burns and feeding on oats and water. One night as he was crossing the Moor of Rannoch he heard a whimpering noise in the heather. A woman was dying with a child in her arms.

  ‘Take this child home to Skye,’ the woman said to him. And she also handed him a pouch. ‘And if you ever find yourself in desperate straits just use this and all danger will flee. But don’t open it until in real need.’

  As he walked through Glencoe with the child in his arms, a terrible snowstorm fell. Collapsing in the drifts, he managed to untie the pouch to find the silver chanter. Raising it to his lips, he blew and instantly the snow ceased and a beautiful starlit night emerged. The young boy child turned out to be a MacCrimmon from the famous piping dynasty: their magic was also that of the MacKinnons.

  Helen’s great-grandfather was a sailor in the days when ships were made of oak and canvas. Rumour had it that he’d sold a crew member in exchange for the violin, but that was mere envy on the part of those who watched him become a famous musician on his return from voyaging overseas. He became a favourite of Queen Victoria’s, and an iconic photograph of Her Majesty with Scott Skinner on one side and Archibald Campbell on the other can still be found in the vaults of the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

  She herself was twelve when she was given the fiddle by her mother. After Archibald died it was played for a while by his youngest son, Fearchar, but when he died with the millions of others in the trenches, the fiddle fell silent for two generations. Helen’s mother found it one day in the loft of the byre beneath a pile of old straw and had it restored, first of all by George Smith the local carpenter, and then by the London firm of violin repair specialists, Deroille and Sons of Charing Cross.

  Their leading repairer, Vincent Deroille, was so impressed by the violin that he tried to buy it, but Helen’s mother refused, telling him that it was a family heirloom which would never leave the family as long as she was alive. Which of course was something of a reimagined history, given that it had lain uncared for in the byre for nearly a century.

  ‘Not to worry,’ her mother said when she phoned to tell her the news.

  ‘It’s an impossible thing to lose. It may have gone out of our sight, but his eye will still be upon it.’

  This omnipotent eye was her grandfather’s, which still kept a close watch on the fiddle from beyond the grave.

  ‘It will burn in the thief’s hands,’ she said. ‘The instrument will refuse to play.’

  This faith was not an unreasonable thing. Had not everything that had ever been stolen ultimately not turned into ashes? Was it just some kind of strange coincidence that her own sister’s husband had died no sooner than he remarried? And what about that time the minister’s motorcycle was stolen from outside the manse, only for them to find the bike and rider at the bottom of the ravine the following Sunday?

  She was on her way home now to deal with it all. Not the loss of the instrument, of course, but the grief and the story which lay behind all of that. She decided to take the bicycle. Her hands felt safer that way, gripping something solid, pushing it gently along the platform at Queen Street. How beautifully the spokes turned as she wheeled
it along. The red Raleigh badge flashed with each revolution.

  She put the bike in the guard’s van and sat by the window in carriage B, seat number 24. Not that any of that mattered: she just noticed it. Westerton and Dalmuir and Dumbarton Central, then the long familiar curve and climb through Helensburgh Upper, Garelochhead and Arrochar and Tarbert.

  She read Pynchon and stared out the window. The hazels bent towards the windows. They were the best trees too for preventing landslides. Their long roots held in the thinnest of soils, binding the loosest things together.

  Mull was where they’d finally settled, though settled might be too staid a word for it. A croft no less, or at least a smallholding, where her mother had gone ‘back to the earth’ and brought the four of them up self-sufficiently in a heaven of pigs and hens and goats and sheep and cattle and horses, in a paradise of oats and grain and carrots and leeks and potatoes and herbs.

  How gorgeous it was to wake up in the morning to that smell of bread. How you took the cream off the milk and kept it in wooden basins in the shade until the whey separated from the curds and the marvel – the ingenuity! – of that home made churn which slowly transformed it all into butter. The dirtier the potatoes from out the ground the better. She smiled. How sweet the first tiny tomatoes always tasted, and as she closed her eyes she could see the apples and pears falling, one by one, into her sister’s wicker basket. Mull, the lovely Officers’ Mess.

  Her ambition as a child was to be a watchmaker. She was fascinated by them: how the numbers always remained fixed while everything else moved. The hour hand invisibly, the minute hand ever so slowly, the second hand always fast and steady. She would close her eyes and count to sixty, but she could never get it exactly right. As she spoke sixty, the seconds hand would always either be moving towards fifty-nine or just one second past the top.