The Girl on the Ferryboat Page 3

  It was pure chance that I became involved. I had been going to go to America for that final summer, but the visa fell through at the very last minute so I had decided just to come home instead for one final time. The other guys had all gone their separate ways, and already those university days seemed a long way away, like a different world.

  Five of us had shared the flat that final year, behaving like the Famous Five, and now we too were scattered, never to meet again, as I now know. Sheila, who became a doctor and now lives, cared for by her grandchildren, in South Africa. Emily, who was killed in the climbing accident on the Eiger the summer after our graduation. John, who became the famous newspaper editor and personal right-hand man to Rupert Murdoch. Some revolution for the fiery young radical I knew. And Len, who drifted into drugs and who was last heard of heading east to Bangkok just after the war which radicalised us all.

  I too had no idea what lay ahead. I had the usual dreams of course – a career in politics, perhaps, or journalism and writing – and no notion whatsoever that I would end up as

  I am. I don’t suppose anyone has. So in many ways that final summer was a kind of last hurrah, or a first paragraph, if only I’d realised. It has, of course, been a limbo in which

  I have half-resided ever since, and I know full well that here I am again attempting to either break out of – or break into – it. It’s my final chance, because honesty too withers with age and custom.

  I loved her from the moment I saw her, and that love has never wavered. It has encased every choice I have ever made, and I have never done anything in my life which didn’t involve her image somewhere. Her smile has shadowed every other smile; her auburn hair has unjustly covered all others; her freckles have unfairly appeared where they had no right to appear, her eyes been seen when I had no wish to see them. I’m so sorry for it all. For substituting her invisible arm for the arm that embraced me, for touching her untouched arm every time I’ve loved. Though in my defence I will claim that none of it was ever done falsely, as she now becomes flesh before me in my advancing years, as all things dissolve.

  4

  NOTHING WAS EVER more solid than the boat we built that summer. We used oak for the floor and fashioned the keel, stem and gunwale from ash. The planks of the boat we shaped from larch, and made the oars from white pine. Old Alasdair insisted on a single mast with uncomplicated rigging, which was basically a large single dipping lug sail that ran along the length of the boat.

  It was an absolute joy to watch Big Roderick go about his business. For such a large man he moved with grace, and he handled all the tools and materials with a sensitivity which I can only describe as feminine. He never used brute force or mere strength, but always worked with the grain or through the tool rather than against it. He had little patience with humans, yet seemed to have the love of a saint when it came to handling so-called ‘inanimate objects’.

  ‘Everything has a soul,’ he kept saying to me, ‘and don’t believe anyone who argues to the contrary. You don’t have a soul – you are a soul. You have a body.’

  He’d lift a batten of oak.

  ‘What’s this?’ he’d ask.

  ‘A batten of oak,’ I’d reply.

  ‘Daftie,’ he would say. ‘Of course it’s not. It’s the fruit off a tree.’ And he would smile. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’

  And he really believed it – not in a daft (his favourite word!) mystic way, but in a real, practical, down-to-earth fashion.

  ‘Put it this way,’ he would say to me when he relaxed at the end of the day’s work, ‘the world will only treat us as we treat the world. The more we care for it the more it will care for us. The old story, son – we reap what we sow. For what will we eat when we’ve taken the last herring out of the sea, and the last potato out of the earth? Air? Polluted air?’

  And it’s remarkable to think now that this was over forty years before folk began talking about global warming. Dear Big Roderick.

  He knew fine, of course, that trees and fish and crops and all the rest of it didn’t have hearts and souls and minds. What he meant, naturally, was what we’re all now recognising, or confessing: that there’s a connection between the butterfly and the flood, that it mattered which way natural resources were used and handled.

  You could handle a batten of wood with care, or carelessly. You could hammer a nail into a board with brute force or with delicate precision. You could steam and bend a plank patiently and slowly, or do it quickly and harshly with a vice and mallets. Things lasted when done properly. All he did, really, was to treat things with care.

  And slowly, I think I began to understand to do the same. To love slowly. Instead of rushing to saw a piece of wood as quickly as possible, I learned to take my time. To select just the right piece from all the pieces that were on offer. To take time in measuring it down to the last centimetre. To make sure that the cut line was completely straight and with the grain and that the bevel edge was exactly as required. Then to take the saw and work slowly through the pencilled line, listening as well as watching. Hearing that urch-urch-urch-urch as the teeth moved solidly across the line as well as seeing that the perpendicular was held, until the unrequired bit sheared off, leaving the perfection. For when the perfect comes, the imperfect disappears.

  It was the same when planing the wood. The worst sin of all was to be irregular and jerky, like a bad fiddler. The aim was to remove the shreds that were unwanted, until only that which was needed remained. Discovering the angel within the marble. The wood makes the boat – not the other way round. Even now in my old age, I still think there is no sweeter sound than the sound of someone planing a piece of wood to perfection and no sweeter sight than watching the sliced shavings curling off the plane on to the floor. And what meaning does any of it have without that smell? Big Roderick’s workshop always smelled of wood and citronella and oil, and when I now close my eyes and think of that summer, I can still taste the heady fumes in my nostrils and my mouth waters.

  Two things coincided to bring me into boat building for that single summer – Alasdair and Katell lived next door to us, and Big Roderick needed someone to help him. I bumped into him one day in the pub where he stood at the end of the bar drinking water during his sobering-up period.

  ‘I can’t just stop like that,’ he said. ‘I need to wean myself off. A week of water then I’ll be right as rain. For six months at least.’

  He knew me of course – or at least knew my parents.

  ‘How’s your father?’ he asked. ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Well.’

  ‘The finest fisherman around,’ he said. ‘And the best nurse. She’s saved me a few times.’

  He asked me what I was up to, and I said, ‘Nothing. Well – nothing much anyway. Just finished uni and…’

  He didn’t let me finish.

  ‘I could do with a hand. Starting on Alasdair and Katell’s boat on Monday, if you’re up for a bit of skivvying.’

  I told him that I knew nothing about building boats.

  ‘You’ll learn,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a brain, haven’t you?’

  And so that’s how I started.

  Sometimes I got carried away and began to believe that I would do it for a career. What could be better – working with your hands, crafting something beautiful and functional? Building houses, making haystacks, scything the corn, out in the bogs cutting the peats with a spade. Creating things which would keep you warm and sheltered, which you could handle and use, burn or eat. What could be better than making the boat which you then used to catch the fish which you would then fry to sustain yourself?

  To feel the blade of the scythe cold on your hands as you sharpened it with a stone. To feel the wood warm on your hand as you dug the spade deep into the ground. To feel the wet slithery smoothness of the peat turfs as you lifted them out of the bog. The herring scales covering your hands as you gutted them for supper. Though maybe Gaelic aesthetics were different? Maybe here pragmatism mattered more than pleasure, function more than style? Maybe nothing mattered except that which glorified God or served the community: the only things which made life beautiful and useful.

  But in my heart of hearts I knew that the job was temporary. Not because Big Roderick would get rid of me or sack me or because there would be no other work once the boat was finished, but because nothing would last. He’d go drinking again, and nothing would happen for months on end, and anyway, was I really fitted for the steady elegance of this kind of work? Could I really see myself in a year or two or ten or twenty still truly believing that literally making things was worth it?

  For without belief, nothing mattered. I don’t really mean belief in God or in any supernatural deity, but belief in the thing itself, in the thing you were doing, in the boat you were building, in the words you were speaking, in the person you were with, in the language you were writing. I didn’t have any of that: only a temporal short-term belief in the value of the thing at the time, in its existential worth. Value might, or might not, come later.

  And what a glorious existential reality it was! Lapstraking and tapering and transversing and riveting and clenching and all the rest of it, and the wondrous satisfaction of seeing something you have made becoming what you intended it to be as the keel and the hog and the stem and the apron and the deadwoods and the sternpost and the transom and all the rest of the bits and pieces begin to fit and mould together towards completion.

  Though nothing ever is as you really intended, for the garboard is not quite right, and the strakes just not quite as bevelled as you meant them to be, and the keel not quite as balanced as you’d imagined. Even when it finally sailed west on that beautiful blue day, with Alasdair at the halyard and Katell at the tiller, we all knew that i
t could have been better, that it could have been ever so slightly higher in the water, that the sail could have turned that bit easier, and that it lacked a certain brightness for which we’d striven so hard.

  Maybe too hard. No doubt it was what drove Big Roderick to drink and ultimately drove me to this substitutionary life of mine where all these failures are repeated and redeemed in the vain hope that, sometime, words will sing.

  You could see the spirit slowly coming upon Big Roderick. He still worked with the same zeal and tenderness, but gradually, day by day a kind of anxiety, which I can only describe as angst, would come upon him through which you could see that he realised – once again – that the boat was not going to be as perfect as he’d hoped, simply because such perfection was impossible.

  I tried to reassure him.

  ‘My goodness,’ I would say, ‘You’ve made these planks overlap perfectly.’

  He would just look at me and say nothing. Or ‘aye’ if he felt sorry for me. And his work really was perfect: the wood smooth, the rivets flush, the mast a work of art. He too struggled with the same demon: perfection of the life or of the work. And he too was unwilling to refuse the heavenly mansion which I am now building, despite the day’s vanity.

  The tragedy, of course, was that he actually made no choice, but swayed imperfectly between hope and remorse, sometimes believing that the work – this time round – would be magnificent, but then submitting to the spirit of futility at which point he would, once again, begin sipping the other spirit which would then take him into the graveyard for months on end. At least his struggle was public, unlike mine which was secret and thus more devious and damaging.

  And I wasn’t even there when he died, finally trapped underground by the demon. I was elsewhere. At the time sitting on a chat show in Canada, pretending to have it all together as I waxed lyrical about ‘The Music of Emigration’ and about how exiles always inevitably carried their homeland with them in their songs. Abstract guff and rubbish really which earned me a tidy living between the media and various universities which were all fooled into giving me well paid internships in which I gave occasional lectures about the relationship between Gaelic Song and Homeland or – once at a conference in New York – ‘The Power of Paradigm in Pre-Millennial Presbyterian Poetry from a Post-colonial Phenomenological Perspective’. I made it all up and received a standing ovation, mostly because I sang the latter half of the lecture in a canntaireachd stream which I extemporised and invented as I went along. I thought they understood the joke, but from the conversations afterwards I’m afraid that they all thought it was real. Academics who’d had a humour bypass.

  At least Big Roderick knew that that very little of it was, except for the occasional moments when we would all sit and share things round the table. Katell made wonderful galletes, as well as kougin amanns, which was basically a yeasted dough with butter and sugar to which she added almonds and angelica, folded over into what we would call a crêpe. They tasted wonderful, and were especially good after a salty main course such as lamb and potatoes, which was our staple diet.

  Katell herself was a remarkable woman. In many ways she had sacrificed her own life and career to follow Alasdair halfway round the world, but whenever this was implied she would always just say, ‘Love is no sacrifice.’

  As far as I can now recall, she was born on Armistice Day in 1918, and was thus brought up within sight of Verdun and the Marne, though like all the old people over here she talked very little about it, despite all my efforts. I do know that her father was killed at the front just months before she was born and that her mother, who was a doctor, then remarried an Italian medic who was actively involved in the Resistance when the next war came along. By that time Katell was in Glasgow with Alasdair, who joined the 51st Division just weeks before the invasion of Normandy.

  She’d come to Edinburgh in the summer of ’35 to study Music at the university, but had run out of money and taken various jobs in the city to survive. ‘I gutted fish for a season out at Musselburgh, then got a job cleaning the old bottles at the Royston Lemonade Factory, and then worked in some hotels, scouring floors and making beds.

  ‘But the best job I had,’ she always said, ‘was as a pianist in the cinema on Leith Walk. They’d play these silent films, twice a night on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and five times throughout Saturday and I would accompany the pictures. Some of them of course came with music – the more famous ones, such as the Chaplin ones, but a whole number had no score at all. I especially liked playing to the imported Russian films, when the music could be deep and strong and sonorous!’

  Despite her long exile from Brittany and from France, she still retained good traces of her Breton accent by the time I got to know her in the ’70s. Invariably, the last syllable of certain words fell rather than rose, which was the local Gaelic tradition. She was, of course, well aware of that and would overemphasise it one way or the other, depending on which one she wanted to mock.

  She seemed very old to me at the time, though she was much younger then than I am now, and I regret so much asking her so little, for fear that she wouldn’t care to answer. At the time, the gap between youth and age seemed much wider than it is now, and it felt so impolite to begin asking her (this old woman, as I thought) any personal questions over and above what she chose, or happened, to tell me.

  I didn’t know then you had to be as persistent with old people as with young children.

  How much I should have asked! But in between the galettes and the peat-gathering and the frying of oysters I got a picture of a woman in love. And Alasdair would unconsciously fill in some missing parts, such as the number of wounded soldiers she helped during the war and the occasional times she would still sing, being for years now without a piano or any other musical instrument. I never heard her sing, despite my promptings, though Alasdair once asked Roderick and I to stop working and be still so that we could hear her sing.

  We laid down our tools and listened like birds, but nothing came in the wind from down the house, even though old Alasdair stood there beside us, humming the song he was hearing.

  ‘Domé éspais le jasmin…’ he said. ‘Dome made of jasmine…’ and he sang for the only time I ever heard him sing, in a confident baritone voice,

  Dome made of jasmine

  Entwined with the rose together

  Both in flower, a fresh morning

  Call us together

  Ah! let us float along

  On the river’s current

  On the shining waves

  Our hands reach out…

  And he seemed to catch hold of himself, to suddenly become selfconscious saying, ‘Ach – a woman’s song! But beautiful for all that…’ as he walked away back up the hill leaving us to our drilling and hammering.

  But it seemed to have been love at first sight: that

  I gathered. And a love, evidently, which had lasted. I hardly know the details, and they matter little anyway and seem obvious – two young people meet and fall in love and marry. What always intrigued me was the nature of that love, which seemed both natural and reciprocal as if both or either could do what they wanted and whatever they did would please the other. I suppose you could call it freedom, though I think it was more just trust and respect, since freedom is a not a cause but a consequence.

  What I sometimes forget as well is that I am of my generation, as they were of theirs, even though they were from two different countries. Wasn’t she subservient, I ask myself? Forsaking all for his sake, never the other way round. Who knows what the deal was. No doubt she loved him as much for his weakness as for his strength, for all his folly more than for his wisdom. And who am I to speculate how he loved her? For all I know – and I scarcely know that – are my own failings in the matter. I only know that had