Bech Is Back (11 page)

Next day they dared drive left-handedly along the crowded coast road north, through Dingwall and Tain, Dornoch and Golspie. At Dunrobin Castle, a downpour forbade that they descend into the famous formal gardens; instead they wandered unattended through room after paneled room, past portraits and stag horns and framed photographs of turn-of-the-century weekends—the Duke of Sutherland and his guests in white flannels, holding tennis rackets like snow-shoes. “
Its
name
,” Bech read to Bea from the guidebook, “
may
mean ‘Robin’s Castle,’ after Robert, the sixth Earl of Sutherland,
whose wife was a daughter of the barbarous Alexander, Earl of Buchan, a younger son of King Robert II and known as ‘The Wolf of Badenoch
.’ Now there’s history,” he said. “ ‘The barbarous Alexander.’ The third Duke of Sutherland,” he went on, paraphrasing, “was the largest landowner in Western Europe. Almost the whole county of Sutherland, over a million acres. His father and grandfather were responsible for the Clearances. They pushed all these poor wee potato farmers out so they could graze sheep—the closest thing to genocide in Europe up to Hitler, unless you count the Armenians in Turkey.”

“Well, don’t blame me,” Bea said. “I was just a Sinclair.”

“It was a man called John Sinclair who brought the Cheviot sheep north into Caithness.”

“My mother’s branch left around 1750.”

“The Highlanders were looked at the same way the Victorians saw the Africans—savage, lazy, in need of improvement. That’s what they called it, kicking the people out and replacing them with sheep. Improvement.”

“Oh look, Henry! Queen Victoria slept in this bed. And she left her little lace gloves.”

The bed had gilded posts but looked hard and small. Bech told Bea, “You really don’t want to face it, do you? The atrocities a castle like this is built on.” He heard his sore-headed father in him speaking, and closed his mouth abruptly.

Bea’s broad maternal face was flustered, pink, and damp in the humidity as rain slashed at the leaded windows overlooking the North Sea. “Well I hadn’t thought to face it
now
, just because I’m a little bit Scotch.”

“Scots,” he corrected.

“The Sinclairs didn’t order the Clearances, they were victims like everybody else.”

“They had a castle,” Bech said darkly.

“Not since the seventeenth century,” Bea said back.

“I want to see the Strath Naver,” he insisted. “That’s where the worst of the Clearances were.”

Back in the car, they looked at the map. “We can do it,” Bea said, her wifely composure restored. “Go up through Wick and then around John o’Groats and over through Thurso and then down along the Strath Naver to Lairg. Though there won’t be much to see, just empty land.”

“That’s the point,” Bech said. “They moved the poor crofters out and then burned their cottages. It was the women, mostly, who resisted. The sheriff’s men got drunk and whacked them on the head with truncheons and kicked them in their breasts.”

“It was a terrible, terrible thing,” Bea said, gently outflanking him. Her face looked luminous as harsh rain drummed on the roof of their little red English Ford, where everything was reversed. Her country, his patriotism. Her birthday, his treat. How strange, Bech bothered to notice, that his happiness in Scotland should take the form of being mean to her.

The Sinclairs had farmed, and perhaps a few did still farm, these great treeless fields of Caithness whose emerald sweep came right to the edge of the perilous cliffs. The cliffs, and the freestanding towers the sea had created from a millennial merging of those eroded ravines called gills, were composed of striations of gray sandstones as regular as the pages of a book. Down on the shore, vast, slightly tilted flagstones seemed to commemorate a giant’s footsteps into the sea, or to attest to the ruin of a prodigious library. No fence prevented a tourist or a cow from toppling off and hurtling down the sheer height composed of so many accreted, eroding layers;
paths had been beaten raggedly parallel to the cliff edge, leading to cairns whose explanatory legend was obscured by lichen and to, in one spot, an unofficial dump, where newspapers and condensed-milk cans had been deposited upon the edge of the precipice but had not all fallen in. Gulls nested just underneath the lip of the turf and in crannies straight down the cliff face; their white bodies, wings extended in flight, speckled the windy steep spaces between the surface of the twinkling sea and the edge where Bech and Bea stood. The plunging perspectives made her giddy, and she shrieked when, teasing, he took a few steps forward and reached down as if to steal a gull egg. The mother gull tipped her head and peered up at him with an unimpressed pink eye. Bech backed away, breathless. For all his boyish bravado, his knees were trembling. Heights called to him.
Fall. Fly
.

The wind so fierce no trees spontaneously grew in this northernmost county of Britain was a bright May breeze today, setting a blush on Bea’s cheeks and flaring Bech’s nostrils with the scent of salt spray. The Vikings had come to this coast, leaving ruin behind, and flaxen-haired infants. The houses of the region were low, with roofs of thatch or slate, and squared slabs of its ubiquitous flagstone had been set upright and aligned into fences along field boundaries. But the primary feel of this land was of unbounded emptiness, half-tamed and sweet, with scarce a car moving along the A9 and not another walking man or woman to be seen this side of the green horizon, beyond which meadows gave way to brown moors where peat was dug in big black bricks out of long straight trenches, and the emptiness began in earnest. Every cemetery they stopped at had its Sinclairs. Bea was excited to be on ancestral territory, though less ecstatic than she had been in Israel. Bech had felt crowded there, and here, in the
many-pocketed tweed jacket he had bought along Princes Street and the droop-brimmed plaid bog hat purchased just yesterday in Wick, he felt at home. “This is my kind of place,” he told Bea from the cliff edge, his breath regained and his knees again steady.

“You’re just paying me back,” she said, “for liking the Holy Land so much.”

“That was overdeveloped. This is just right. Thousand-acre zoning.”

“You look ridiculous in that hat,” she told him unkindly, uncharacteristically. The wind, perhaps, had whipped a shine into her eyes. “I’m not sure the jacket suits you, either.”

“They feel great. ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’ ”

“They give you that troll look.”

“What troll look?”

“That troll look that—”

He finished for her. “That Jews get in tweeds. Shit. I’ve really done it. I’ve married an anti-Semite.”

“I wasn’t going to say that at all.” But she never did supply what she had been going to say, and it was not until they were snuggled in their bed on the musty third floor of the Thurso Arms that the monsters in the deep space between them stopped shifting. The brown brick city fell away beneath the gauze curtains at their windows like a town in one of the drabber fairy tales. They made love dutifully, since they had been given a double bed. There was no doubt, Bea did resent his taking Scotland so readily—so greedily—into himself. The stones and grass of this place, its pinnacles and cobbles and weatherswept grays, its history of constant, though turbulently contested, loss in relation to the cushioned green land to the south … weren’t the Scots one of the ten lost tribes of Israel? Like the Jews, the Celts had been pushed aside from
the European mainstream yet not thrown quite free of it: permitted, rather, to witness closely its ruthless forward roar and to harbor in wry hearts and pinched lives the unblinkered knowing of Spinoza and Hume, Maxwell and Einstein. Or so it seemed while Bea slept and Bech lay awake relishing the sensation of being, on the northern edge of this so thoroughly annotated Great Britain, in a kind of magical margin, the sky still white though the time approached midnight. From beneath his window arose the unexpected sound of raucous teenage horseplay, a hungry scuffling and hooting that further enriched his mystical, global sensations. For surely, if Bech’s own narrow and narcissistic life was miracle enough to write about, an interlocked miracle was the existence, wherever you went on a map, of other people living other lives.

Except, it seemed, in the Highlands. Often where a place name sprouted on the dotted red line of the road, there seemed to be nothing, not even the ruined walls of a single house. Nothing was left of men but this name on the map, and the patches of brighter green where, over a century ago, potato patches had been fertilized. Otherwise, mile after mile of tummocky brown turf unrolled with no more than an occasional river or lake for punctuation, or one of those purple-green protuberances, neither mountain nor hill, for which the name was “ben.” Bech and Bea had driven west from Thurso above the sea and turned south along the Strath Naver, scene of the most infamous of the Clearances. Atrocity leaves no trace on earth, Bech saw. Nature shrugs, and regroups. Perhaps in Poland there were stretches made vacant like this. There seemed no trace of man but the road itself, which was single-track, with widened spots at intervals where a car could pull over to
let another pass. The game did not take long to learn: when two vehicles approached, the drivers accelerated to reach the farthest possible turnout short of collision. Bea maintained that that wasn’t the way the game was played at all; rather, drivers courteously vied for the privilege of pulling over and letting the other driver pass with a wave of cheerful gratitude. “Do you want to drive?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she answered, unexpectedly.

He stopped the car and stepped out. He inhaled the immaculate Highland air. Small white and pink flowers starred the violet reaches of moor. The clouds leaned in their hurry to get somewhere, losing whole clumps of themselves. There were no sheep. These, too, had been cleared away. As Bea drove along, her chin tipped up with the mental effort of not swerving right, he read to her about the Clearances. “
We have no country to fight for. You robbed us of our country and gave it to the sheep. Therefore, since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you!
” he read, a lump in his throat at the thought of an army of sheep. Jewish humor. “That’s what they said to the recruiters when they tried to raise an army in the Highlands to help fight the Crimean War. The lairds were basically war chieftains, and after the Scots were beaten at Culloden and there was no more war, the crofters, who paid their rent mostly with military service, had nothing to offer. The lairds had moved to London and that nice part of Edinburgh we saw and needed money now, and the way to get money was to rent their lands to sheep farmers from the south.”

“That’s sad,” Bea said absently, pulling into a patch of dirt on the left and accepting a grateful wave from the driver of a rattling old lorry.

“Well, there’s a kind of a beauty to it,” Bech told her. “The Duke of Sutherland himself came up from London to see
what was the matter, and one old guy stood up in the meeting and told him,
It is the opinion of this county that should the Czar of Russia take possession of Dunrobin Castle and of Stafford House next term we couldn’t expect worse treatment at his hands than we have experienced in the hands of your family for the last fifty years
.” Bech chuckled; he thought of his own ancestors, evading enlistment on the opposite side of that same war. His mother’s people had come from Minsk. History, like geography, excited and frightened him with the superabundance of life beyond his dwindling own.

Bea blinked and asked, “Why are you so enthusiastic about all this?”

“You mean you aren’t?”

“It’s sad, Henry. You’re not looking at the scenery.”

“I am. It’s magnificent. But misery must be seen as part of the picture.”

“Part of
our
picture, you mean. That’s what you’re rubbing my nose in. You bring me here as a birthday present but then keep reminding me of all these battles and evictions and starvation and greed, as if it applies to
us
. All right. We’re mortal. We’re fallible. But that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily cruel, too.” One of the leaning, hurrying clouds was darker than the others and suddenly it began to rain, to hail, with such ferocity that Bea whimpered and pulled the car to a halt in a wide spot. The white pellets danced upward from the red hood as if sprung from there and not the sky; the frown within the air was like what the blind must confront before the light winks out entirely. Then the air brightened. The hail ceased, and through the luminous mist of its ceasing a rainbow appeared above the shadows of a valley where a cultivated field formed a shelf of smooth verdure. They had come down from the remotest Highlands into an area where cultivation began, and
telephone wires underlined the majesty of the sub-arctic sky. They both climbed out of the little car, to be nearer the rainbow, which, longer in one leg than the other, receded from them, becoming a kind of smile upon the purple-green brow of a ben. Bech luxuriated in the wild beauty all around and said, “Let’s buy a castle and murder King Duncan and settle down. This is where we belong.”

“We do
not
,” Bea cried. “It’s where
I
belong!” He was startled; fear must have shown on his face, for an anxious wifely guilt blurred hers as, close to tears, she still pressed her point: “That’s so
typ
ical of you writers—you appropriate. My own poor little Scottishness has been taken from me; you’re more of a Scot now than I am. I’ll have nothing left eventually, and you’ll move on to appropriate somebody else’s something. Henry, this marriage was a horrible mistake.”

But the sheer horror of what she was saying drove her, her blurred round face pink and white like that of a rabbit, into his arms. He held her, patting her back while her sobs moistened his tweed shoulder and the rainbow quite faded in the gorse-golden sun. She was still trying to explain herself, her outburst. “Ever since we got married—”

“Yes?” he encouraged, noting above her sunny head that the lower slopes of the mountain, for aeons stark moor, had been planted in regiments of fir trees to feed the paper mills of the south.