And she proceeded to sing it in that frail voice. John listened to the evocation of nights on ships, moonlight, masts, exile, and he was strangely moved as if he were hearing a voice speaking to him from the past.
‘I think that will be enough,’ she said to the boy. He switched off the tape recorder without saying anything, put it in its case and took it away, closing the door behind him.
John said, ‘You make it all sound very romantic.’
‘Well, it was true about the peats.’
‘But don’t you remember the fights people used to have about land and things like that?’
‘Yes but I remember the money they collected when Shodan was drowned.’
‘But what about the tricks they used to play on old Maggie?’
‘That was just young boys. And they had nothing else to do. That was the reason for it.’
There was a silence. A large blue fly buzzed in the window. John followed it with his eyes. It was restless, never settling, humming loudly with an angry sound. For a moment he nearly got up in order to kill it, he was so irritated by the booming sound and its restlessness.
‘Would you like to tell me about my mother?’ said John.
‘What about your mother?’
‘Sarah said something when I was speaking to her.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I felt there was something wrong, the way she talked. It was about my brother.’
‘Well you know your brother was fond of the land. What did you want to know?’
‘What happened. That was all.’
‘Your mother went a bit odd at the end. It’s quite common with old people. Perhaps that’s what she was talking about. My own brother wouldn’t let the doctor into the house. He thought he was poisoning him.’
‘You say odd. How odd?’
‘She accused your brother of wanting to put her out of the house. But I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. Old people get like that.’
‘I see.’
‘You know your brother.’
‘Yes. He is fond of land. He always was. He’s fond of property.’
‘Most people are,’ she said. ‘And what did you think of my singing?’
‘You sang well. It’s funny how one can tell a real Gaelic singer. It’s not even the way they pronounce their words. It’s something else.’
‘You haven’t forgotten your Gaelic.’
‘No. We had societies. We had a Gaelic society. People who had been on holiday used to come and talk to us and show us slides.’ The successful and the failed. From the lone shelling of the misty island. Smoking their cigars but unable to go back and live there. Since after all they had made their homes in America. Leading their half lives, like mine. Watching cowboys on TV, the cheapness and the vulgarity of it, the largeness, the spaciousness, the crowdedness. They never really belonged to the city, these Highlanders. Not really. The skyscrapers were too tall, they were surrounded by the works of man, not the works of God. In the beginning was the neon lighting . . . And the fake religions, the cheap multitudinous sprouting so-called faiths. And they cried, some of them, at these meetings, in their large jackets of fine light cloth, behind their rimless glasses.
He got up to go.
‘It’s the blood, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Pardon.’
‘That makes you able to tell. The blood. You could have seen it on my pillow three months ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, don’t be sorry. One grows used to lying here. The blood is always there. It won’t allow people to change.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
He said goodbye awkwardly and went outside. As he stood at the door for a moment, he heard music coming from the side of the house. It sounded American. He went over and looked. The boy was sitting against the side of the house patiently strumming his guitar, his head bent over it. He sang the words in a consciously American way, drawling them affectedly. John moved quietly away. The sun was still on the water where some ducks flew low. He thought of the headland where he was standing as if it were Marathon. There they had combed each other’s long hair, the effeminate courageous ones about to die.
As he walked back he couldn’t get out of his mind an article about Billy Graham he had read in an American magazine not long before. It was all about the crewcut saint, the electric blue eyed boy perched in his mountain eyrie. The Victorian respect shown by the interviewers had been, even for him with a long knowledge of American papers, nauseating. Would you like these remarks off the record, and so on. And then that bit about his personal appearances at such shows as Laugh-in where the conversation somehow got round to Jesus Christ every time! In Africa a corps of black policemen, appointed to control the crowd, had abandoned their posts and come forward to make a stand for Jesus!
Mad crude America, Victorian and twentieth century at the one time. Manic country of the random and the destined. What would his father or his mother have thought of Billy Graham? The fundamentalist with the stereophonic backing. For the first time since he came home he laughed out loud.
7
It was evening when he got back to his brother’s house and the light was beginning to thicken. As he turned in at the gate his brother, who must have seen him coming, walked towards it and then stopped: he was carrying a hammer in his right hand as if he had been working with posts. They stood looking at each other in the half-light.
‘Have you seen everybody then,’ said his brother. ‘Have you visited them all?’ In the dusk and carrying the hammer he looked somehow more authoritative, more solid than his brother.
‘Most of them. Sarah was telling me about the cow.’
‘Oh, that. There was something wrong with the cow. But it’s all right now. She talks too much,’ he added contemptuously.
‘And also,’ said John carefully, ‘I heard something about our mother.’
‘What about her? By God,
