The Summer Isles (12 page)

Francis leans over beside me.

We could go here, Griff, or here.
His finger is tracing contour marks, jagged intersections of sea and land.
What a lovely name. I’m
s
ure we could manage that in a day…

Scenery rears up around me as I travel north. Ben Nevis’s peak shines with snow. Startled deer run up hillsides towards dark new plantations of spruce and fir. A mother tells her daughter about Robert the Bruce and his famous spider as we share a couch in the curved glass observation carriage and the white Highland sun pours over their blonde hair. Falling into conversation, I tell them the stories I have picked up over the years about the wanderings of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Then, just as everyone else seems to have done over the centuries, I make up a few more of my own.

They are both exceptionally beautiful, this mother and child. Their blue grey eyes rest on me, promising forgiveness and understanding. The little girl’s father, a Black Watch Major who’s risen through the ranks on merit in the way that people only can in real conflicts, is on active service on the ever-troublesome India-Afghanistan border. The mother tells me she sleeps with his and John Arthur’s photographs under her pillow. I smile as their faces shine back at me and wish them a good holiday, all the luck in the world.

I spend my first truly Scottish night at Oban, which is just as it was when Francis and I were here, barring the new school and the new bus station. Here, everything always was neat and clean. The woman in the B&B along Shore Road is so wrinkled that I can’t tell if she’s the same creature who saw to Francis and me all those years ago. Of course, we took little enough notice of her then; our newfound love was just too strong. But these, I finally decide as I inspect my room, probably are the same curtains, the same wallpaper, the same boingey mattress. Everything is so salt-and-sunlight faded that it could have been here forever. But it was no great night of passion for us here at Oban, any more than were many of our other nights at these places. Showing a wisdom far beyond his years in these matters that I found both re-assuring and disturbing, Francis had warned me about keyholes, peepholes, boarding house fingers inspecting the morning’s crumpled sheets. Even then, the penalty for sexual acts between consenting males was ten years imprisonment—more, seeing that Francis was still strictly a minor.
There’ll be other places
, he said, laughing and then briefly kissing me when he saw my face.
Look at that scenery
—
go on, Griff
(his hands on my shoulders, his breath on my face, the miracle, still, of his touching me)—
look out of the
w
indow. It’s all ours!

The train carries me next towards Ballachulish and the end of the Caledonian Line. The track here runs beside sea and mountains between cloud-chasing shadows and glorious sunlight. The conscripts I share my carriage with have flat Lancashire accents and are heart-breakingly young. A fresh pain rumbles in my body as I talk to them about Oxford
(where’s that, then, mate, near London?)
whilst the sea flashes and sparkles outside. They seem to care about nothing but the state of the local NAAFI and the ever-changing moods of their sergeant. They call John Arthur The Old Man; a God-like figure to be admired, feared, obeyed. This scenery, the circumstances of their being up here on some fucking exercise or other—the very fact of their lives. It all passes them by.

Ballachulish always was a nothing-place, greyed with slate quarries and mountainous spoil heaps. We laughed about it, then, did Francis and I; too happy to believe in bad omens. Nowadays, motor traffic rumbles along the main road beside the shore, raising quarry dust on the wind as Bristols and Ladybirds, great tank transporters, troop trucks and green-tarpaulined wagons bearing the ponderous shapes of field guns blunder past through a twilight of their own making. They all seem to be heading south.

The proprietor of the White Forge Garage where Francis and I once hired our bicycles wipes his hands and stares at my papers in his grubby office, squints at me, then stares down at my papers again. I’m certain they’re all in order, with this year’s blue identity card, the initial Oxford authorisations for my journey and the travelling-on-through stamps, sub-passes and clipped-on appendices.

“We don’t get many come to hire a car.”

“But you
do
have one? It
was
arranged…”

He shrugs. He has a thick body, a thick face. A small tuft of hair is growing on the end of his nose. Mae West, faded and ancient, smiles down at us from a poster for
Blue Angel
as I wait for him to rummage in a filing cabinet for the extra scraps of paper he must add to my collection. His skin is rough and pale—he looks like a fisherman deprived of the light—and it’s clear that he doesn’t care much for me with my lowland clothes, my fancy passes, my Sassenach accent. In a nation filled with over-caution, over-courtesy, the sideways look over the shoulder before anything is implied, I find his frank antagonism reassuring.

“You know,” I say, clearing gritty mucus from my throat, “I always wondered what happened to the people who were sent up here.”

“Up
here
?” He turns to me.

“I remember the newspapers about—oh, five years back. They always used to speak of the North West Highlands when they mentioned the Jews. I mean, their relocation.”

His eyes narrow at the word Jews. He shifts his stance bullishly. “The
North
West Highlands, you say? Here at Ballachulish, we’re still what you call the South West. The North West Highlands, they don’t really start until you get up to Fort William at least. Past the Great Glen.”

The correct papers finally found, the necessary rubber stamps extracted from a rattling heap in a desk drawer and supplemented by inky blue fingerprints, I’m shown to my car. I’d expected some characterful wreck, but it turns out to have made the journey up from Oxford, just like me. It’s a black Morris Ladybird, the people’s car.

I sit hunched on the cramped seat as the engine throbs, holding the wheel and trying to affect a familiarity that my few lessons five years before hardly justify, whilst the proprietor leans in on his elbows and points out the controls. It’s the very latest model, with less than 2,000 miles on the clock and the new automatic indicators that flip out from each side. An EA cross points purposefully towards tomorrow on the squat bonnet. The car even
smells
of the future; of plastic and petrol, rubber and metal.

“I’d use those,” says the proprietor, nodding towards the complimentary Automobile Association Road Map of Scotland on the dashboard shelf, then to my old touring map, “not that old thing you’ve got there. This land’s changed a lot since then. New roads. New signs. New names. Places you can’t go…”

I nod. Another quarry truck rumbles by between the petrol pumps and the sea, shaking the dusty air.

“You’ll probably lose them up past Mallaig,” he says; meaning the lorries. “You could try the Duke Of Prussia up there if you’re looking to stay the night. Ross Edwards is a sour old bastard, but he’ll charge you fair.”

The Ladybird’s engine thrums a little harder. Grey powder settles on my face and hands. Licking my lips, I can taste it like soil, like sulphur. I want to get away from here so I work out how to drive this car and find out what Mallaig and all the rest of the Highlands are now like. A grimy place, I imagine Mallaig is now, a mixture of building site and military camp—and the Duke of Prussia is probably a suitably dour location to abandon my Francis memories, my Francis dreams.

The proprietor nods what I take to be farewell, and my hand slides down to feel for the Ladybird’s handbrake. Then he hesitates and leans back into the car again as more of the traffic pours by.

“At least it’s quieter here in the nights now,” he says as I stare back at the little carpet on the end of his nose. “You get to sleep pretty easy. But three, four years ago, I used to hear the trucks go past. Tall things, they were, with slatted wooden sides, like the farmers use to take stock to market—only always at night. One of them got a leak, pulled in here, and some lad with a rifle woke me up and ordered me to fix it. A bad smell came off the truck and I could hear movement inside. I thought it was just animals. But there were voices. And you could see their eyes… Bairn’s fingers poking out of the slats.”

He steps back from the car window. My foot slips, and I stall the engine.

“Petrol cap’s on the right side,” he says. “And if you see Ross Edwards, tell him I sent you…”

I restart the engine and I struggle with the wheel, pulling out close to the maw of another thunderous quarry truck.

Thus I travel north, grating gears, screeching the Ladybird’s dry wipers, passing through waves of time and memory. The new Automobile Association map shows many grey-shaded areas. N
O
P
UBLIC
A
CCESS
. New roads, blue and red like broken capillaries, strike purposefully off only to stop in the middle of nowhere. The Duke of Prussia is as satisfyingly dour as I’d imagined, and the man I take to be Ross Edwards tells me that, no, he’s never heard of this part of the world being called the North West Highlands. At least, not by the people who live here.

That night and other nights, alone in yellow-lit rooms with great empty wardrobes, riding the creaking seas of hollowed-out double beds, I study my maps, both old and new. Somehow, like the ghost-ache of a lost limb, Francis is still there beside me, his chin cupped in his hand and bare feet in the air, laughing at something, humming to himself, twiddling his toes, always at ease and in movement at the same time. Then he lays a hand across me and pulls me closer with a touch that is both warmly sexual and at the same time has nothing to do with sex at all.

Francis had loved the place names as we journeyed across Scotland. Mellon Udrigle. Plockton. Grey Dog. Poolewe. Smearisary. The Summer Isles. He’d run his finger along some impossibly contoured and winding route that the pedals of our basket-fronted Northampton Humbers were supposed to carry us, chosen entirely to include as many of those wonderful names as possible. As is the way in the Highlands, we discovered that the villages and towns were generally disappointing—and that the scenery was beyond our wildest dreams, cast down to stand before us from the craggy glory of some other, better, world.

My eyes blur as I stare at the sheets of these maps and the muffled sound of voices drifts up from the television downstairs in the William Wallace Lounge in—where am I now?—is it Fort Augustus? Or was that yesterday? Swordland. Mhic Fhearchair…The names on that old map dance before me, and I can no longer remember with any certainty where we did actually go. And driving is an effort for me, too, despite the generally fine nature of these widened Highland roads, my Ladybird’s obliging engine.

Something rustles in the corner of the room, and I see that Francis is with me again. He’s sitting reading the
Daily Chronicle
that he insists on buying every day, absorbed as he follows the international posturing that has followed the assassination of some Archduke in Serbia a month before.
This is real history, Griff,
he said to me once when I expressed amazement that anyone should care about what happens in the Balkans.
How can you pretend to be a historian and then let all this pass you by?

I undress clumsily and swallow my tablets with a gulp of dusty water. I climb down into acrid over-starched sheets. Oh, Francis, Francis, why do we even have to
have
history? What possible need does it fulfil? Couldn’t people just live their lives and die when their time comes without all these empires, this newsprint, these terrible marching armies…? And why can’t we still be together?

There were days within those few that Francis and I shared that were yet more perfect: even as we lived them, they stood alone, outside everything, unreachable in their simple sweetness. We rented a cottage miles from anywhere. It was semi-derelict, really, with pink sea thrift flowering on its turf roof, a rough slate floor like something thrown in by the sea, thick walls set with tiny windows overlooking the beach. By then, even the capricious Highland weather had come around to our side, and filled our days with basking heat, white rocks, limitless skies. The nights were only Francis and I.

Soon, I’m with him again, although even in my dreams, it seems, I’m denied a recollection of those perfect days in our cottage by the shore. It feels like many empty years now since I’ve reached them. Instead, we’ve left and have headed south and the weather, looming as if in sympathy with what I imagined was just the finish of a holiday but was in fact the end of almost everything, had turned cold, grey. We’re at the Gulf of Corryvreckan, which, unlike the many wonderfully-named places we’ve talked about but never quite reached, we do at least get within sight of. The waves are roaring and crashing, sending up high curtains of green as we cycle to the end of the rutted track where the tumultuous sea begins, and the sky is low already; dense and angry as the gulf boils and swirls between Scarba and Jura’s desolate northern coast. The boom of water grinding rock—far away and yet deep down; as if it’s part of the earth and the sky and your bones—is like cannon fire, and the high fine spray that rises and drifts is like smoke. A Viking fleet had been lured here and destroyed, or so Francis tells me. An iron merchantman had been torn to shiny talons of scrap. Mere flesh was simply dragged under by the anvil force of these waters, toyed with, stripped of its bones…

Standing there with Francis as the sky darkened and the first heavy drops of rain began to hit our faces with the strength of thrown gravel, I finally realised what Europe was about to be consumed by. And Francis, his eyes fixed on that swirling horizon, his jaw set and the muscles of his neck and shoulders tensed as he leaned against me—he was already a part of it in a way that I never could be. It drew him in. Even the taste of his mouth when we turned and kissed alone in that roaring empty land was strange—or has become strange in my dream. There is caustic earthy taste to my Francis, who was usually so lemony and sweet. A sour mixture of shit and mud.