“They like you, Ian,” the shepherd said. “But they think you’ll no be a countryman. I’m Hector.”
We nodded. Another cousin. Were I the genuine article, I’d feel safe up here, even from Sidoli’s vengeance- seeking mob of circus hands prowling the Lowlands.
“They’re right, Hector,” I said. “What do they do?”
“Best working pair north of Glasgow.” He waited, then explained, “Sheep, Ian. Tessie’s four, Joey two.”
“You bullies.” The dogs grinned and waggled round me, noses pointing up.
We talked about dogs for a minute while Elaine did one of her prolonged smiling stares at me. I felt her attention like a sunlamp, and listened while Hector listed his dogs’
excellences. Dogs are all right but doggy folk are real bores, aren’t they? Hector was confident about some sheepdog trials.
“How do you train them?” I asked. “And what do you feed them on?” Much I cared, but Hector was loving all this in his grim Presbyterian way.
“You must come over and see them do an outrun or two,” he said. “It’s but a short step. Mornings I walk to check the cottage—”
Elaine interrupted brightly, “Och away, Hector. Can’t you see Cousin Ian’s not really interested in your ould dogs?”
“True,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.
We all parted friends, me patting the dogs and seeing them off but thinking, the cottage, eh? Immediately Hector was out of earshot, Elaine said, spinning her wheelchair to accompany me back towards the house, “The cottage is an empty crofter’s place on the fells. We use it for winter shelter. There’s quite a few about.”
It’s that sort of nimble guesswork that makes you give up trying to outthink a female. I plodded along pushing her until she told me to walk beside her.
“Tachnadray must have been a lovely estate once, Elaine.”
“But…?” she prompted.
“It could be developed. Tourists. Fishing. Build huts for nature cranks. Campsites. Tours round the baronial hall.”
She halted. Thinking I’d struck oil, I enthused, “Have your own Highland Gathering.
Tents, pipers, dances, folksong evenings, original tartan kilts, Ye Olde Clan McGunn whisky-making kits. McGunn-brand genuine Scottish bagpipes—”
“And breed hordes of McGunns? Repopulate the Highlands?”
She spoke with such quiet sibilance you had to strive to hear the venom. We’d stopped, her luminescent face white with anger.
“Well, er, not all of it.”
The nervous quip failed. She motioned me to sit on the wall and listen.
“Fall off a horse and lose the power of your legs, Ian. Myths are never the same again.
They stand out with a certain clarity.” She laughed, an ugly spitting ejaculation I wouldn’t like to hear again. “So we should join the great Folklore Industry? It’s the road to insanity. A social mania.”
I said, narked, “I was only trying to help. A little profit—”
She pointed a finger at me. “Don’t interrupt. Just pay heed. Original tartan? There’s no such thing. Listen: Three centuries ago the Grant ordered his entire clan into his standard tartan.” She put on a cruel brogue to mock the words. “And his own family turned up wearing a dozen different. You see? It’s all fraud.”
“But tartan’s—”
A French word, Ian. Tartaine is a material, nothing to do with patterns. But then the Irish were great cloth weavers. The bagpipes? —the only invention ever to come out of Egypt. Scotch poetry?—our earliest indigenous one is in Welsh, for God’s sake. The kilt?—invented by Thomas Rowlandson, an English iron-smelter, in 1730. All tartans indigenous to our Scotch clans?—nonsense; there’s even an authentic Johore tartan.
Didn’t you know? With a royal imprimatur, too!”
“I wish I hadn’t come to see your bloody dogs.”
“We rhapsodize about Robert the Bruce and his spider, conveniently forgetting that he was an Anglo-Norman whose favorite method of murder was a stab in the back while the victim was unarmed and at prayer. Ask John the Red, whom he killed in the Franciscan church at Dumfries. And our fantastic Bonnie Prince Charlie?—a drunken Pole who thieved every penny his loyal followers possessed. And our famous Rabbie Burns.” She rolled her r’s cruelly to mock. “Don’t tell anyone—his famous dialect is pure Anglo-Saxon. Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you pretend it’s a pure something else. When adherents trump up clan loyalties and urge me to ‘develop my clan’s potential,’ I begin to ask what they’re really after. You understand?”
“You mean what I’d get out of it? Twenty percent—”
“Twenty percent’s out of the question.” She’d actually said her first three words in time with my last. Did she guess every bloody thing I thought? “Five.”
“You mean bugger.”
She laughed, clapping her hands, and that terrible vehemence was gone as suddenly as it had come. At an imperious wag of her finger I trundled her obediently towards the ramp. Michelle emerged to see Elaine back in.
“Duncan’s sounding for you, Ian,” Michelle called.
