When he sat down there was a murmur of conversation which rose in volume as if to drown the memory of the speech. The girls beside me talked in a more hectic way than ever about their hotels and made disparaging remarks about the islands and how they would never go back. Everyone avoided the bride who sat fixed and miserable at the table as if her wedding dress had been turned into a shroud.
I don’t know exactly what I felt. It might have been shame that the waitresses had been laughing. Or it might have been gladness that someone had spoken naturally and authentically about his own life. I remember I picked up my whisky and laid it down again without drinking it and felt that this was in some way a meaningful action.
Shortly afterwards the dancing began in an adjoining room. During the course of it (at the beginning they played the latest pop tunes) I went over and stood beside the father who was standing by himself in a corner looking miserable as the couples expressed themselves (rather than danced) in tune to the music, twisting their bodies, thrusting out their bellies and swaying hypnotically with their eyes half shut.
‘It’s not like the eightsome reel,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what it is like,’ he said. ‘I have never seen anything like it.’
‘It is rather noisy,’ I agreed. ‘And how are the crops this year?’ I said to him in Gaelic.
He took his dazed eyes off a couple who were snapping their fingers at each other just in front of him, and said: ‘Well, it’s been very dry so far and we don’t know what we’re going to do.’ He had to shout the words against the music and the general noise. ‘I have a good few acres you know though a good many years ago I didn’t have any and I worked for another man. I have four cows and I sell the milk. To tell you the honest truth I didn’t want to come here at all but I felt I couldn’t let her down. It wasn’t an easy thing for me. I haven’t left the island before. Do you think this is a posh hotel?’
I said that I thought it was. He said, ‘I tell you I’ve never been in a hotel before now. They’ve got a lot of carpets, haven’t they? And mirrors, I’ve never seen so many mirrors.’
‘Come on,’ I shouted, ‘let’s go into the bar.’ We did so and I ordered two beers.
‘The people in there aren’t like human beings at all,’ he said. ‘They’re like Africans.’
After a while he said, ‘It was the truth I said about her, she’s never at home. She’s always been working in hotels. I’ll tell you something, she’s never carried a creel on her back though that’s not a good thing either. She was always eating buns and she would never eat any porridge. What do you think of her husband, eh? He was talking away about cars. And he’s got a good suit, I’ll give him that. He gave the waiter a pound, I saw it with my own eyes. Oh, he knows his way around hotels, I’ll be bound. But where does he come from? I don’t know. He’s never ploughed any ground, I think.’
I thought at that moment that he wouldn’t see his daughter very often in the future. Perhaps he really was without knowing it giving her away to a stranger in a hired cutprice suit.
After a while we thought it politic to go back. By this time there was a lull in the dancing and the boy in the lightish suit had started a Gaelic song but he didn’t know all the words of it, only the chorus. People looked round for assistance while red-faced and embarrassed he kept asking if anyone knew the words because he himself had lost them. Suddenly the father pushed forward with authority and standing with his glass in his hand began to sing – verse after verse
