The Crow Road Read online

  "That's awful kind, Mrs McHoan," Sheena said, wiping her plate with a bit of fried bread. "Are you sure?"

  Totally," Margot said. "Your parents on the phone?"

  "Mine are, Mrs McHoan," Mary said, glancing up.

  "Good," Margot said. "We'll call them, tell them you'll be here, all right?"

  "Oh, that's awfully nice of you, Mrs McHoan," Mary said, and flickered a wee nervous smile at the older woman. Kenneth watched her and the smile ended up, albeit briefly, directed at him, before Mary looked down, and crunched into her toast and marmalade.

  He drove the two girls round the area in the Humber when his dad wasn't using it; sometimes Fiona came too. The summer days were long and warm; they walked in the forests south of Gallanach, and in the hills above Lochgair. A puffer captain let them travel through the Crinan canal on his boat, and they took the family dory puttering over to Otter Ferry for lunch one day, over the smooth waters of Lower Loch Fyne, one windless day when the smoke rose straight, and cormorants stood on exposed rocks, wings held open like cloaks to the warm air, and seals popped up, black cones of blubber with surprised-looking faces, as the old open boat droned slowly past.

  There was a dance on in Gallanach Town Hall that Saturday, the day before the two girls were due to return to Glasgow; Kenneth asked Mary to go with him. She borrowed one of Fiona's dresses, and a pair of his mother's shoes. They danced, they kissed, they walked by the quiet harbour where the boats lay still on water like black oil, and they sauntered hand-in-hand along the esplanade beneath a moon-devoid sky full of bright stars. They each talked about their dreams, and about travelling to far-away places. He asked if she had given any thought of maybe coming back here some time? Like next weekend, for example?

  There is a loch in the hills above Lochgair; Loch Glashan, reservoir for the small hydro power station in the village. Matthew McHoan's friend, Hector Cardie, a Forestry Commission manager, kept a rowing boat on the loch, and the McHoans had permission to use the boat, to fish the waters.

  * * *

  Rory was bored. He was so bored he was actually looking forward to school starting again next week. Back in the spring, he had hoped that Ken being back home would make the summer holidays fun, but it hadn't worked out that way; Ken was either up in Glasgow seeing that Mary girl, or she was here, and they were together all the time and didn't want him around.

  He had been in the garden, throwing dry clods of earth at some old model tanks; the clouds of dust the clods made when they hit the hard, baked earth looked just like proper explosions. But then his mum had chased him out because the dust was getting the washing dirty. He hadn't found anybody else around to play with in the village, so he'd watched a couple of trains pass on the railway line. One was a diesel, which was quite exciting, but he'd soon got bored there, too; he walked up the track by the river, up to the dam. It was very warm and still. The waters of the loch were like a mirror.

  He walked along the path between the plantation and the shore of the loch, looking for interesting stuff. But you usually only found that sort of thing down at the big loch. There was a rowing boat out in the middle of the little loch, but he couldn't see anybody in it. He was banned from making rafts or taking boats out. Just because he'd got a bit wet a few times. It was unfair.

  He sat down in the grass, took out a little die-cast model of a Gloster Javelin, and played with it for a while, pretending he was a camera, tracking the plane through the grass and over the pebbles and rocks by the loch side. He lay back in the grass, looked at the blue sky, and closed his eyes for a long time, soaking up the pinkness behind his eyelids and pretending he was a lion lying tawny and sated under the African sun, or a sleepy-eyed tiger basking on some rock high over a wide Indian plain. Then he opened his eyes again and looked around, at a world gone grey, until that effect wore off. He looked down at the shore; little waves were lapping rhythmically at the stones.

  He watched the wavelets for a while. They were very regular. He looked along the nearby stretch of shore. The waves — hardly noticeable, but there if you looked — were coming ashore all along the lochside. He followed the line they seemed to indicate, out to the little rowing boat near the middle of the loch. Now he thought about it, it was very odd that there was nobody in the boat. It was moored; he could see the wee white buoy it was tied to. But there was nobody visible in the boat.

  The more carefully he looked, the more certain he became that it was the rowing boat that all these little, rhythmic waves were coming from. Hadn't Ken and Mary been going fishing today? He had thought they'd meant sea-fishing, in Loch Fyne, but maybe he hadn't been paying attention. What if they had been fishing from the rowing boat and fallen overboard and both been drowned? Maybe that was why the boat was empty! He scanned the surface of the loch. No sign of bobbing bodies or any clothing. Perhaps they'd sunk.

  Anyway, what was making the boat make those waves?

  He wasn't sure, but he thought he could see the boat moving, very slightly; rocking to and fro. Maybe it was a fish, flopping about in the bottom.

  Then he thought he heard a cry, like a bird, or maybe a woman. It made him shiver, despite the heat. The boat seemed to stop rocking, then moved quite a lot, and then went totally still. The little waves went on, then a few slightly bigger, less regular ones lapped ashore, then the water went still, and was as flat as a pane of glass.

  A gull, a white scrap across the calm sky, flapped lazily just above the blue loch; it made to land on the prow of the little rowing boat, then at the last second, even as its feet were about to touch, it suddenly burst up into the sky again, all panic and white feathers, and its calls sounded over the flat water as it flapped away.

  What sounded very like laughter came from the little rowing boat.

  Rory shrugged, put the model plane in the pocket of his shorts and decided to go back down to the village and see if there was anybody around to play with yet.

  Kenneth and Mary held hands at tea that evening, and said they wanted to get married. Mum and dad seemed quite happy. Fiona didn't seem in the least surprised. Rory was nonplussed.

  It was years before he made the connection between those tiny, rhythmically lapping waves, and that blushing, excited announcement.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gaineamh Castle, home of the Urvills once again, stands amongst the alders, rowans and oaks that cover the northern flanks of the Cnoc na Moine, due south of the carbuncular outcrop that supports the First Millennium fort of Dunadd, and a little north-west of the farm rejoicing in the name of Dunamuck. The castle, a moderately large example of the Scottish Z-plan type, with cannon-shaped stone waterspouts, has a fine view through the trees and across the parkland and fields to the town of Gallanach, which spreads round the deep waters of Inner Loch Crinan like some slow but determined beach-head of architecture somehow landed from the sea.

  The sound of gravel crunching beneath a car tyre has always meant something special to me; at once comforting and exciting. Of course the one time I tried to explain this to my father he suggested that what it really signified was the easy rolling pressure the middle and upper classes thought it was their right to exert upon the multitudinous base of the workers. I have to confess that the entire counter-revolution in world affairs has come as something of a personal relief to me, making my dad seem no longer quite so remorselessly well-clued-up, but rather — if anything, any more — just quaint. It would have been sweet to tackle him on that subject at the time, especially given that Gorby's unleashed restructuring had just resulted in the spectacular and literal deconstruction of one of the age's most resonantly symbolic icons, but at the time we weren't talking.

  "Prentice," rumbled the slightly bloated Urvill of Urvill, taking my hand and briefly shaking it, as if weighing my mitt. I felt for a moment the way a young bull ought to feel when the man from McDonalds slaps its haunch… but then probably doesn't. "So very sorry." Fergus Urvill said. I wondered whether he was referring to Grandma Margot's death itself, her detonatio
n, or Doctor Fyfe's apparent attempt to up-stage the old girl. Uncle Fergus let my hand go. "And how are your studies going?"

  "Oh, just fine," I said.

  "Good, good."

  "And the twins; are they both well?" I asked.

  "Fine, fine," Fergus nodded, presumably allocating his two daughters a word each in his reply. Ferg's gaze went smoothly to my Aunt Antonia; I took the hint, and (like Margot) passed on. "Antonia," I heard behind me. "So very sorry…»

  Helen and Diana, Uncle Ferg's two lusciously lissom daughters, sadly couldn't be here; Diana spent most of her time either in Cambridge or the least touristy part of Hawaii, which is the bit thirty kilometres away from the beaches — four of them vertically — at the Mauna Kea observatory, studying the infra-red. Helen, on the other hand, worked for a bank in Switzerland, dealing with the ultra-rich.

  "Prentice, are you all right?" My mother took me in her arms, held me to her black coat. Still splashing on the No. 5, by the smell of it. Her green eyes looked bright. My father had been at the head of the reception line; I had ignored him and the compliment had been returned.

  "I'm fine," I told her.

  "No, but are you really?" She squeezed my hands.

  "Yes; I'm really really fine."

  "Come and see us, please." She hugged me again, said quietly, "Prentice, this is silly. Make it up with your father. For me."

  "Mum, please," I said, feeling like everybody was looking at us. "I'll see you later, okay?" I said, and pulled away.

  I walked into the hall, taking off my jacket, blinking hard and sniffing. Coming from cold into warmth always does this to me.

  The entrance hall of Gaineamh Castle sports the business end of a dozen or so beheaded male red deers, perched so high up on the oak-panelled walls that attempting to utilise them for their only conceivable practical purpose in such a location — hanging coats, scarves, jackets, etc. on their impressively branched antlers — only exposes them as the venue for a kind of non-returnable sport rather than a sensible amenity. Rather more prosaic brass hooks, like smooth unsuitable claws beneath the glass-eyed stares of the stags, accepted our garments in their stead. My much be-zippered black leather pretend-biker's jacket seemed a little out of place amongst the sober wools and furs; Verity's snow-white skiing jacket looked… well, just sublime. I stood and stared at it for a second or two longer than was probably fit; but it really did seem to glow in the dark company. I sighed, and decided to keep my white silk Mobius scarf on.

  * * *

  I entered the hammer-beamed Solar of the castle; the great hall was filled with a quietly chattering crowd of McHoans, Urvills and others, all nibbling canapes and vol-au-vants, and sipping whisky and sherries. I suspect my grandmother would have preferred pan-loaf sarnies and maybe a few slices of ham-and-egg pie, but it had, I suppose, been a kind gesture of the Urvill to ask us back here, and one should not carp. Somehow the McHoan home, still bearing the scars of grandma's sudden, unorthodox and vertical re-entry into the conservatory following her abortive attempt to de-moss the gutters, seemed unfitting as our post-cremation retreat.

  There! I caught sight of Verity, standing looking out of one of the Solar's tall mullioned windows, the wide grey light of this chill November day soft upon her skin. I stopped and looked at her, a hollowness in my chest as though my heart had become a vacuum pump.

  Verity: conceived beneath a tree two millennia old and born to the flare and snap of human lightning. Emerging to emergency, making her entrance, and duly entrancing.

  Whistling or humming the first phrase of Deacon Blue's Born In A Storm whenever I saw her had become a sort of ritual with me, a little personal theme in the life lived as movie, existence as opera. See Verity; play them tunes. It was in itself a way of possessing her.

  I hesitated, thought about going over to her, then decided I'd best get a drink first, and started towards the sideboard with the glasses and bottles, before I realised that offering to refresh Verity's glass would be as good a way as any of getting talking to her. I turned again. And almost collided with my Uncle Hamish.

  "Prentice," he said, in tones of great import and sobriety. He put one hand on my shoulder and we turned away from the window where Verity stood, and away from the drinks, to walk up the length of the hall towards the stained-glass height of the gable-end window. "Your grandmother has gone to a better place, Prentice," Uncle Hamish told me. I looked back at the vision of wonderfulness that was Verity, then glanced at my uncle.

  "Yes, Uncle Hamish."

  Dad called Uncle Hamish "The Tree" because he was very tall, moved in a rather awkward way — as though made out of something less flexible than the standard issue of bone, sinew, muscle and flesh — and (so he claimed, at any rate) because he had seen him act in a school play once, and he had been very, well, wooden. "Anyway," my dad had insisted when he'd originally confided this private piece of nomenclature, only half a decade earlier, on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, when we'd got drunk together for the first time, "he just lumbers about!"

  "She was a good woman, and did little that was bad and much that was good, so I'm sure she has gone to a reward rather than a punishment, living amongst our anti-creates."

  I nodded, and as we strolled amongst them, looked around at the various members of my family, the McGuskies (Grandma Margot's maiden-family) the Urvill clan, and sundry worthies from Gallanach, Lochgilphead and Lochgair, and pondered, not for the first time, what on Earth (or anywhere else for that matter) had given Uncle Hamish the idea for his bizarre, home-made religion. I really didn't want to go into all this right now, and anyway found the whole subject a little awkward, because I wasn't actually quite as gung-ho for Hamish's personal theology as he seemed to think I was.

  "She was always very kind to me," I told him.

  "And therefore your anti-create will be kind to her," Uncle Hamish said, still with one hand on my shoulder, as we stopped and looked up at the stained-glass monstrosity at the far end of the hall. This showed in graphic form the story of the Urvills from about the time of the Norman conquest, when the family of Urveille, from Octeville in Cotentin, had crossed into England, percolated northwards, swirled briefly around Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and finally come to rest — perhaps afflicted by some maritime memory of their ancestral lands on the seam of the Manche — in what had been the very epicentre of the ancient Scots kingdom of Dalriada, losing only a few relatives and a couple of letters on the way. Swearing allegiance to David I, here they have stayed, to mingle their blood with that of the Picts, the Scots, the Angles, the Britons and the Vikings who have all variously settled, colonised, raided and exploited this part of Argyll, or maybe just arrived at one time and forgotten to leave again.

  The peregrinations and subsequent local achievements of the clan Urvill make interesting history, and would make fascinating viewing if the giant window telling the tale wasn't so badly done. The fashionable but untalented son of one of the previous head Urvill's school pals had been commissioned to execute the work, and had taken the brief all too literally. Deadly dull and eye-squintingly garish at the same time, the stained glass window made me want to grit my teeth.

  "Yes, I'm sure you're right, uncle," I lied.

  "Of course I am, Prentice," he nodded slowly. Uncle Hamish is balding, but of the school that believes long wisps of hair grown on one side of the head and then combed delicately across the pate to the other edge look better than naked sin exposed to the elements. I watched the coloured light from the stained glass window slide over shiny skin and hardly less luminescent oiled hair, and thought what a prat he looked. I inadvertently found myself humming the appropriate piece of music from the Hamlet cigar adds and thinking of Gregor Fisher.

  "Will you join me in worship this evening, Prentice?"

  Oh shit, I thought. "Perhaps not, actually, uncle," I said, in tones I hoped sounded regretful. "Have to pop down the Jac to talk to a girl about a Jacuzzi. Probably go straight from here." Another lie.

 
Uncle Hamish looked at me, the grain-like lines on his forehead bunching and tangling, his brown eyes like knots. "A jacuzzi, Prentice?" He pronounced the word the way the lead in a Jacobean tragedy might pronounce the name of the character who has been his nemesis.

  "Yes. A Jacuzzi."

  That's a form of bath, isn't it?"

  "It is."

  "Not meeting this young lady in a bath, are you, Prentice?" Uncle Hamish's lips twisted slowly into what was probably meant to be a smile.

  "I don't believe the facilities of the Jacobite Bar run to such a thing, uncle," I told him. "They've only recently got round to installing hot water in the gents. The relevant jacuzzi is in Berlin."

  "The German city?"

  I thought about this. Could I have mis-heard Ash and she have been talking about the briefly famous chart-topping band of the same name? I thought not. "Yes, uncle; the city. Where the wall was."

  "I see," Uncle Hamish nodded. "Berlin." He stared up at the violently clashing leaden imagery of the great stained-glass window. "Isn't that where Ilsa is?"

  I frowned. "Aunt Ilsa? No, she's in Patagonia, isn't she? Incommunicado."

  Uncle Hamish looked suitably confused as he contemplated the garish gable glass. Then he nodded. "Ah yes. Of course." He looked back down at me. "However. Shall we see you for supper, Prentice?"

  "I don't know," I admitted. "Just as likely to end up with a kebab, I imagine. Or a fish supper."

  "Well, you have your key with you?"

  "Oh yes. Thanks. And I'll be… you know; quiet, when I come in."

  "Right." Uncle Hamish gazed back up at the crass glass. "Right. We'll probably be off in a half-hour or so; let us know if you do want a lift."

  "Surely."

  "Right you are, then." Uncle Hamish nodded, turned, then looked back with an intensely puzzled expression. "Did I hear somebody say mother exploded?"