Isabel. “The movement, the noise.”
Jamie looked through the window of the car to the hills of Jura on the other side of the sound. They rose steep from the shore, without the normal decency of a cultivable plain, and then became stretches of heather and scree, sweeping up to a feminine curve of skyline at the top. The heather was that characteristically Scottish mixture of soft greens and purples, colours washed and washed again in Atlantic squalls of salt and rain.
Against a growling of engines and a churning of water, the T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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small ferry docked at the other side to let the three or four cars which it had borne across now drive up the ramp onto Jura.
There was a single road, and it led in only one direction.
“That’s our road,” said Jamie, adding, “I think.”
Isabel smiled. “One road,” she said. “One hotel. One distillery.”
“One hundred and eighty people,” said Jamie. “And how many sheep and deer?”
“Numerous,” said Isabel. “Thousands of deer. Look.”
The road had turned a corner and a stag was gazing down from a bank a few hundred yards away, his legs obscured by bracken, antlers branching upwards sharp and naked, like a tree that has lost its leaves for the winter. They slowed down and he looked at them briefly with that tense mixture of alertness, defiance, and fear. Then slowly he turned away and trotted off into the bracken.
“We’ll see him again,” said Isabel. “Him or one of his brothers.”
“I love this place,” said Jamie suddenly, turning to Isabel.
“Already. I love it.”
She glanced at him and saw the light in his eyes; the car swerved briefly.
“I fell in love with it too,” she said. “When I first came here, I fell in love with it as well.”
“Why?” asked Jamie. “Why do places like this have this effect on people?”
Isabel mused for a moment. “There must be all sorts of reasons. The hills, the sea, everything really. The dramatic scenery.”
“But you find that elsewhere,” said Jamie. “The Grand Canyon’s dramatic. And yet I don’t think that I’d fall in love with it. I’d be impressed. But it would remain platonic.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“I’ve actually seen the Grand Canyon,” said Isabel. “Years ago. And, no, I didn’t fall in love with it. I suspect it’s rather hard to fall in love with a canyon.” Oddly, she thought of lines which said the exact opposite. She did not turn to Jamie, but mouthed, half whispered them anyway: “Love requires an object, But this varies so much, Almost anything will do, When I was a child I loved a pumping engine, thought it every bit as beautiful as you.”
Jamie frowned. “ ‘Pumping engine’?”
“That’s Auden’s point,” said Isabel. “We all need to love something. Anybody can fall in love with anything, or anyone: love requires an object, that’s all. Even an island will do.”
They were silent for a while. They passed a set of stone gates and a high stone wall, the garden of one of the handful of large houses on the island, houses which stood at the centre of the huge landed estates into which Scotland had been carved.
Such places were largely innocuous now, Isabel thought; not much more than outsize farms which were trying to make a living on the sale of sporting rights and various agricultural enter-prises. Many had passed into distant hands, so that the lairds, the local gentry, had effectively disappeared, to be replaced by owners who flew in and out for brief periods, or did not even bother to come. There was so much wrong with Scotland; such unfairnesses, pockets of such poverty and desperation, that were so hard to eradicate, no matter what the politicians in Edinburgh might try to do; it was as if they ran with the land, were written into the deeds that gave Scotland to human ownership. And there had been such injury to the soul, too, leaving scars that went down from generation to generation.
They were now close to Craighouse, the only village on the island, and fields of ripening hay, yellow in the afternoon sun, T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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fell away to the east, to the cliffs’ edges. Isabel noticed a ruined croft not far away, one of the small stone-built houses that were at the centre of a smallholding. The lichen-covered walls were still standing, but there was no roof, and the window spaces were dark gaps.
She pointed to the croft. “If you love this place so much, you could restore somewhere like that and live here. You could write music, maybe give bassoon lessons to the islanders.”
“I just might,” said Jamie. “I’m sure that I could be quite self-sufficient. Doing a bit of fishing. Catching rabbits for the pot.”
And Isabel thought, Well, if he did that then there would be no place for me, nor for Charlie, but she did not say anything.
They were now coming into Craighouse, and she saw the small hotel on the right, opposite the distillery, with its friendly white-washed buildings and its row of bonded warehouses immediately behind.
“That’s us,” said Isabel, as they came to a halt outside the hotel.
Jamie wound down his window; there was light rain now and the sky had suddenly clouded over, as it could do, so rapidly.
