“Exactly,” came a disembodied voice from above. “That’s what we want to do.”
Antonia left him where he was. Those who climbed trees usually came down from them after a short while, although in the back of her mind she remembered Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, a favourite book of hers. Calvino’s hero, the twelve-year-old Baron Cosimo Piavosco di Rondo, takes to the trees after a row at the dinner table over the eating of snails. He never comes down, and thereafter leads a full life in the treetops, covering considerable distances by moving from tree to tree; impossible, of course, but a very affecting story nonetheless.
Murdo could hardly remain where he was for very long. Cosimo lived in a more forested age; Murdo had only the one tree, with sky on every side.
She returned to call him down an hour later. He was still On the Machair
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there, though uncommunicative, and an hour after that she returned with the eighteen-year-old son of the stockman. “I’ll get him down for you,” muttered this young man, and he promptly scaled the tree, worked his way out onto the bough on which Murdo sat, and grabbed at the young boy’s shirt.
In his attempt to avoid capture, Murdo hung for a moment on the branch and then fell, crashing through lower branches on his descent. Antonia screamed and ran forward to attempt to catch him. She could not, of course, and the boy fell heavily on a grass-covered mound of earth at the base of the tree, winded and unable to cry, but otherwise unharmed. For the next five days, he refused to talk, and turned his face away from Antonia whenever she addressed him.
She had little alternative. The children stayed on the farm with their father and the Dress Shop Assistant. Antonia went to live in St Andrews, which made it possible for her to see the children regularly and also to look after her father. It was an arrangement that seemed to make everybody content, and Antonia, rather to her surprise, found that she was inordinately happy. Even the formal ending of the marriage was amicable, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not her fault. In this state of blessedness, she began to write her novel.
29. On the Machair
The idea of spending several months in Edinburgh appealed to Antonia. Novels – and other works of the imagination – are sometimes best written in unfamiliar surroundings, where the mind can wander without being brought back to earth by the constant interruptions of one’s normal life. In Domenica’s flat in Scotland Street, separated from St Andrews by the green waters of the Firth of Forth, she felt quite free of distraction.
She knew one or two people in Edinburgh, it was true, but she had not told them that she was there and there was no reason 90
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why they should find out. If she walked up Scotland Street, if she wandered about Dundas Street, which was about as far as she intended to go, nobody would know who she was nor have any reason to speculate. Of course there was Angus Lordie, who had let her into the flat. She was not sure about him: she had not encouraged him, but one never knew with men. They could become interested without receiving any invitation, and some of them were very slow to take the hint. Really, men were most tedious, she thought, and a life without them was so much simpler.
When Harry had first gone off with the Dress Shop Assistant she had missed him painfully; but that feeling of loss had faded remarkably quickly and had been replaced by a feeling of freedom.
She felt somehow lighter – it was as if Harry had been a burden who had been lifted off her. And what was there to miss? His physical presence? Certainly not! His conversation? Hardly. And anyway, if one were to miss the sound of his voice, there was always Radio Four, with its comfortable chattiness. How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men . . .
Antonia’s novel was set in that period which interested her most, the sixth century. This was a time when missionaries from the Celtic Church made their perilous journeys into the glens and straths of Scotland, brave Irishmen who lived in windswept settlements on the edge of Scottish islands and who shone the light of their teaching into the darkness. It was a moment of civilisation, she thought; it was as simple as that – a moment of civilisation.
Now, at the desk in Domenica’s study, Domenica’s papers pushed to the side, she sat before a sheet of lined paper, pen in hand, and closed her eyes. She was on the machair of a Hebridean island. The flowers of early summer grew amidst the grass, and there, to either side of her (the island was a narrow one), were waves coming in upon the shore; glassy walls of water which seemed higher than the land, toppling and crashing upon the rocks . . .
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“Here, in this place,” thought St Moluag, “I am under the sea. I am under the water just as surely as that Irish brother who lived under the river in a holy place, who could, miraculously, breathe and live under water as ordinary men live upon the land.” He turned his head to the north. Another man, a man whom he recognised, was walking down the strand towards him, his crook in his hand.
Antonia wrote: “Oh dear,” thought St Moluag. “Oh dear.
Here comes St Columcille. And I’ve never really liked him.”
She lifted her pen from the paper and looked at the sentence she had written. Was there something vaguely ridiculous about it? Would early saints have thought about one another in this way? Would they have harboured animosities? Of course they would. The point about the early saints – and possibly about all saints – is that they were human in their ways. They felt un-charitable thoughts in the same way as anybody else did. They had their moments of pettiness and their jealousies. Had not St Moluag and St Columcille been particularly at odds over who reached Lismore first? And had this not led to St Moluag cutting off his little finger and throwing it onto the land before St 92
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Columcille could reach the shore? By virtue of the fact that his flesh had touched the land first, then it was his – or so the story went. These tales were often apocryphal, but there must have been some ill-feeling for the legend to take root and persist as it had.
Of course, part of the problem, thought Antonia, was that it was necessary to express the thoughts of the saints in English.
If one were to put their thoughts into p-Celtic, or whatever it was they spoke (and Moluag was a sort of Pict, she thought, who probably spoke p-Celtic), then it would not sound so patently ridiculous. He would not have said “Oh dear,” for instance, nor would he have said “I’ve never really liked him.”
No, that was not the problem. It was the mundane nature of the thought; it was the fact that the thought was one which an ordinary person would have entertained, and not a saint. So she scored out the line she had penned and wrote instead:
“The tall man, his hodden skirts flapping about his legs in the wind from the sea, stood on the sand. Another man came towards him, a man familiar to him, a man with whom there had been strong words exchanged. And he reached out to this man, the wind about them, and he gave him his crook, his staff which he had brought with him from Whithorn. And the other man gave him his staff in exchange, and they embraced and then walked off together, and the tall man thought: We must not fight in these times of darkness; for if we fight, then the darkness comes into our hearts.”
Antonia rose from her desk. She walked over to the window of Domenica’s study and looked out. Above the grey slated roofs, the clouds moved high across the sky, clouds from the west, from those airy islands, from the world which she had just been trying to evoke. Somewhere out there was machair, and wild flowers, and the same darkness of the spirit against which those brave, now largely forgotten men had battled. Their enemy had been very real. And ours? she thought.