The Crow Road (37 page)

The dawn came up dull at first, then the clouds cleared from the west and a bright blue day was there. Ashley left a note for Gav and Janice, helped me pack a bag - I couldn’t decide on anything - then we left. The old 2CV, freshly pillar-box red after its latest re-spray, puttered through the near-empty streets of the bright and silent city, and rocked and rolled its way back down towards Gallanach.

The weather was perfect, the new day glorious. I talked incessantly and Ash listened, sometimes smiled and seemed always to have a kind word.

We arrived at Lochgair about breakfast-time, with the sun shining through the trees and the birds loud in the garden. Ashley stopped the car at the opened gates at the end of the drive where it entered the courtyard. ‘I’ll drop you here, okay?’ she said.

‘Oh, come in,’ I told her.

She shook her head, yawned. Her long fawn hair shone in a beam of sunlight coming through the car’s open side window. ‘I don’t think so, Prentice. I’ll get home, get some sleep. Give me a call if there’s anything I can do, okay?’

I nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Promise?’ She smiled.

‘Promise,’ I said.

She leaned over, put one hand behind my head and kissed my forehead. I heard her take a breath, like she was about to speak, but then she exhaled, just patted my head. I put one arm round her, held her for a moment, then pulled away, reached into the back and got my bag, opened the door and got out. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘It’s okay, Prentice,’ she said.

I closed the flimsy door. The car revved up and turned round, one skinny front wheel poking out alarmingly from its wheel arch. The little Citroën clattered off down the drive. Ashley stuck one hand out of the window and waved; I raised my arm, and held it there as I watched the car head away under the trees through the dappling light. It paused at the main road, then turned away, its noise soon lost in the background of bird-song and wind-ruffled leaves.

The cool morning air smelled clean and fresh; I took a deep breath and rubbed my smarting eyes, feeling spaced-out from lack of sleep.

Then I picked up my bag and turned to the house.

 
 
 
It was a well-travelled country, dad told us. Within the oceanic depths of time that lay beneath the surface of the present, there had been an age when, appropriately, an entire ocean had separated the rocks that would one day be called Scotland from the rocks that would one day be called England and Wales. That first union came half a billion years ago. Some of those rocks were ancient even then; two billion years and counting, and shifting and moving across the face of the planet while that primaeval ocean shrank and closed and all that would become the British Isles still lay south of the equator. Compressed and folded, the rocks that would be Scotland - by then part of the continent of Euramerica - held within their crumpled, tortuously layered cores the future shape of the land.

By a third of a billion years ago, that part of Euramerica lay on the equator, covered by great fern forests that would be buried and folded and pressed and heated and so turn to oil and coal, in the future that was yet to come. Meanwhile the mass of rocks, afloat on the molten stone beneath, were heading slowly northwards, and sundering; the climate became hot and the rains sparse; the great dinosaurs, tree-tall and house-heavy, tramped slowly through a semi-desert while a new ocean opened to the west. After the dinosaurs had gone, and while the Atlantic still grew, the volcanoes erupted, smothering the old rock on the surface under their own vast, deep oceans of lava.

The land then held mountains higher than Everest, but they were worn down eventually by nothing harder than wind and water, until, much later still - now that Scotland was level with Canada and Siberia and the earth cooler - the glaciers came, covering the rocks with their own chill, inverted image of the old and weathered lava plains. The sheer mess of that frozen water etched the mountain rock like steel engraving glass, and pressed the roots of those fire-floating hills deeper into the dense sea of magma beneath.

Then the climate changed again; the glaciers retreated and the water they had held filled the oceans, so that the waters rose and cut what would eventually be called the British Isles off from main-land Europe, while the scoured, abraded hills to the north, set free at last from that compressing weight of ice, rose slowly back out of the earth, to be colonised again by plants and animals, and people.

On walks, on day trips and holidays, he found and pointed out the signs that told of the past, deciphering the symbols written into the fabric of the land. In Gallanach, we saw the bright seam of white cretaceous sandstone that had provided the Gallanach Glass Works with raw material for a century and a half. On Arran, he showed us rocks folded like toffee, ribboned and split; on Staffa, the even, keyboard-regular columns of cooled lava; in Edinburgh, the rubble-tailed stumps of ancient volcanoes; in Glasgow, the black, petrified remains of trees three hundred million years old; in Lochaber, the parallel roads that marked the shores of lochs dammed and un-dammed by glaciers, millennia earlier; throughout Scotland we saw hanging valleys, drumlins and corries; and in the Hebrides we walked the raised beaches where the ocean swells had crashed until the land rose, and touched rocks two and a half billion years old; half as old as Earth itself; a sixth of the age of the entire universe.

Here was magic, I remember thinking, as we drove north towards Benbecula one day, looking out at the machair, gaudy with flowers. I was just old enough to grasp what dad had been telling us, but still young enough to have to think about it in childish terms. Magic. Time was Magic; and geology. Physics, chemistry; all the big, important words dad used. They were all Magic.

I sat listening to the car’s engine, as we drove; mum at the wheel, dad in the passenger seat, shirt-sleeved arm out of the Volvo’s window, Lewis, James and I in the back.

The car engine made a steady growling noise, and I remember thinking it was funny that those long-dead plants had been turned into the oil that had been turned into the petrol that made the car growl. I chose to forget the absence of reptiles in those carboniferous forests, and imagined that they had been populated by great dinosaurs, and that they too had fallen into the ooze, and made up part of the oil, and that the noise the car made was like the angry, bellowing growls they would have made while they were alive, as though their last dying breath, their last sound on this planet, had been saved all these millions and millions of years, to be exhaled along a little road on a little island, pushing the McHoan family north, one summer, on our holidays.

I looked out of the open window; the machair lay dazzling under the midsummer sunshine to our left.

‘Prentice! Prentice! Oh, Prentice; pray for your father!’

‘Hello, Uncle Hamish,’ I said, as Aunt Tone ushered mother and me into the bedroom where my uncle lay, propped up, splendid but demented in a pair of blue cotton pyjamas and a red silk dressing-gown decorated with blue dragons. The room was behind dim closed curtains, and smelled of apples.

‘Mary! Oh, Mary,’ Uncle Hamish said, seeing my mother. He clasped his hands together, holding a black handkerchief. His hair was a bit mussed and he had a stubble shadow; I’d never seen him look so disarrayed. In front of him there was a huge tray with short legs, partly covered by a quarter-completed jigsaw puzzle. I walked up to the bed and put my hand out. I clutched Uncle Hamish’s still clasped hands, held them briefly, squeezed and let go.

Closer inspection revealed that Hamish was putting the jigsaw puzzle together upside-down; every cardboard flake was grey, turned the wrong way up.

Mum gave Hamish a brief hug and we sat down on a couple of chairs on either side of the bed. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ Aunt Tone said, and quietly closed the door.

‘And biscuits!’ shouted Uncle Hamish at the closed door, and smiled broadly at first mum and then me. After a moment, though, his face seemed to collapse and he looked like he was about to weep.

The door opened again. ‘What’s that, my dear?’ Aunt Tone asked.

‘Nothing,’ Uncle Hamish said, the mouth-only smile suddenly there again, then fading just as quickly. The door closed. Hamish peered down at the jigsaw puzzle, toyed with a couple of the pieces, looking for a place to fit them into what he had already completed. The squint bottom edge of the puzzle, some small spaces between joined pieces, a few tiny flecks of cardboard - half grey, half coloured - gathered like dust along the raised edges of the tray, and a small pair of collapsible scissors lying on the bedspread near the pillows, indicated that Uncle Hamish had - not to put too fine a point on it - been cheating.

‘Thank you, both, for coming,’ he said, absently, still fiddling with the grey pieces. He sounded bored, like he was talking to a couple of factory workers summoned to his office for some formality of business. ‘I appreciate it.’ I exchanged looks with my mother, who appeared close to tears again.

Mum had done pretty well till now; we’d both cried a bit when Ashley had deposited me at the gates of the house at Lochgair, but since then she had coped pretty well. We’d visited the good lawyer Blawke that first day, and the next day he’d actually made a house-call, a concession which, extrapolating from the attitude of his secretary when she rang us up to tell us the sacred presence was on his way, we ought to have treated with the sort of awe and respect the average person reserves for royalty and major religious figures. I was a little surprised he didn’t kneel and kiss the door-step when he unfolded himself from his Merc.

The undertaker had been dealt with, a few reporters fended off, Lewis - in London - reassured that there was nothing he could do up here for now, and told not to cancel his gig dates, and James, on a school trip in Austria, finally contacted. He would arrive the day of the funeral; one of his teachers would come back with him.

Dad’s study proved to be a wilderness of papers, disorganised files, chaotic filing cabinets, and an impressive-looking computer that neither mum nor I knew how to operate. The afternoon I got back mum and I had stood looking at the machine, knowing there might be stuff in it we’d need to look at, but unable to work out what to do with the damn thing after switching it on; the relevant manual had disappeared, mum had never touched a keyboard in her life and my computer expertise was confined to having a sound tactical sense of which alien to zap first and a leechlike grip on continuous-fire buttons.

‘I know just the person,’ I said, and rang the Watts’ house.

Twenty-four hours before the funeral, Aunt Tone had rung and said could we possibly come and see Uncle Hamish? He’d asked to see us.

And so here we were. Mum sat on the far side of the bed, her eyes bright.

I cleared my throat. ‘How are you, Uncle Hamish?’ I asked.

He looked at my mother, as if he thought she’d talked, not me. He shrugged. ‘Sorry to drag you out here,’ he said. His voice was flat, emotionless. ‘I just wanted to say how, how sorry I am, and I want you all to forgive me, even though I didn’t ... didn’t encourage him. He insisted. I told him not to do it.’ He sighed and tried to press one of the cardboard pieces into place on the puzzle without success. ‘We were both a little the worse for wear and,’ he said. ‘I did try. I tried to stop him, tried to talk to him, but ... but ...’ He stopped talking, tutted in apparent exasperation and took up the little scissors. He trimmed a couple of finger-nail sized bits of cardboard off the piece and forced it into place. ‘Don’t make the damn things right any more,’ he muttered.

I began to wonder at the wisdom of leaving Uncle H with a pair of scissors, even small ones.

He looked at me. ‘Headstrong,’ he said brightly, then looked down at the puzzle. ‘Always was. Good; liked him; brother after all, but ... there was no sense of God in him, was there?’ Hamish looked at mum, then me. ‘No sense of something greater than him, was there, Mary?’ he said, turning back to mum. ‘Proof all round us; goodness and power, but he wouldn’t believe. I tried to tell him; saw the minister yesterday; told him he hadn’t tried hard enough. He said he couldn’t force people to go to church. I said, why not? Did in the old days. Why not?’ Uncle Hamish took up another piece of grey cardboard, turned it this way and that. ‘Good enough then, good enough now; that’s what I told him. For their own good.’ He grunted, looked displeased. ‘Idiot told me not to blame myself,’ he said, staring grimly at the puzzle-piece, as though trying to pare bits off it with just the sharpness of his stare. ‘I said I don’t, I blame God. Or Kenneth for ... for goading ... inciting Him.’ Uncle Hamish started to cry, his bottom lip quivering like a child’s.

‘There, Hamish,’ mum said, reaching out and stroking one of his hands.

‘What exactly happened, Uncle Hamish?’ I asked. Sounded to me like the man had cracked completely, but I still wanted to see if he could come up with more details.

‘Sorry,’ sniffed Hamish, wiping his eyes then blowing his nose into the black hanky. He put the hanky in his breast pocket, clasped his hands on the edge of the tray holding the jigsaw, and lowered his head a little, seeming to address the centre of the puzzle. His thumbs started to circle each other, going round and round.

‘We had a few drinks; we’d met in the town. I’d been at the Steam Packet, meeting with some people. Showed them round the factory in the morning. Just paperweights. Man from Harrods. Nice lunch. Thought I’d look for a present for Antonia’s birthday, bumped into Kenneth coming out of the stationer’s. Went for a pint; bit like the old days, really.’

‘Here we are,’ Aunt Antonia announced from the door, appearing with a tray full of crockery. There was a pause while tea was poured, biscuits dispensed. ‘Shall I stay here, dear?’ Aunt Tone asked Hamish.

I thought she looked worse than mum did. Her face was drawn, there were dark shadows under her eyes; even her brown, bunned hair looked greyer than I remembered.