To the hilt [en]

Zoл Lang stepped closer to the picture for a long inspection, then turned my way.

'The shadows,' she told me, 'the dark places round the roots of the heather, they're all painted like tiny patches of tartan, the red of the Macdonalds and the yellow of the Campbells, little ragged lines of shading. You can only see them when you're up close…'

'He knows,' my uncle said calmly.

'Oh.' She looked from me to the picture and back again. There were glazes of shadow over the hillsides and atmospheric double shadows over many of the tartan pools round the heather roots. I'd felt ill all the time, painting it. The massacre of Glen Coe could still churn in the gut of a world that had seen much worse genocide in plenty since.

She said, 'Where do you want me to sit?'

'Oh.' I was grateful. 'By the window, if you would.'

I got her to sit where the light fell on her face at the same angle as I'd painted her, and I drew the face in pencil as it appeared now to my eyes, an old face with folds and lines in the skin and taut sinews in the neck. It was clear and accurate, and predictably she didn't like it.

'You're cruel,' she said.

I shook my head. 'It's time that's cruel.'

'Tear it up.'

Himself peered at the drawing and shrugged, and said in my defence, 'He usually paints nice-looking golf scenes, all sunshine with people enjoying themselves. Sells them to America faster than he can paint them, don't you, Al?'

'Why golf?' Zoл Lang demanded. 'Why America?'

I answered easily, 'Golf courses in America are built to look good, with lots of water hazards. Water looks great in paintings.' I painted water-washed pebbles in metal paints, gold, silver and copper, and they always sold instantly. 'American golfers buy more golf pictures than British golfers do. So I paint what sells. I paint to live.'

She looked as if she thought the commercial attitude all wrong, as if any painter not starving in a garret were somehow reprehensible. I wondered what she would think if I told her I amplified my income nicely via royalties from postcards, thousands of copies of my paintings for golfers to send to each other from places like Augusta (the Masters) and from Pebble Beach and Oakland Hills (the Open) and even, in Britain, from Muirfield, St Andrews and The Belfry.

She sparred a little more with my uncle. He offered unstinting help with the eagle and smiled blandly to all else. She asked if King Alfred's chalice had turned up, as her friend was still waiting to put a value on the 'glass ornaments' (her words) embedded in the gold.

'Not yet,' Himself said unworriedly. 'One of my family will no doubt have it safe.'

She couldn't understand his carefree attitude, and it wasn't until after she had left that I told him the glass ornaments, if they were the original gems, were in fact genuine sapphires, emeralds and rubies.

'The King Alfred Gold Cup,' I said, 'is almost certainly worth far more intrinsically than the hilt. There's far more gold by weight, and the gems are nearly double the carats.'

'You don't mean it! How do you know?'

'I had it traced to the firm that made it. It cost an absolute fortune.'

'My God. My God. And young Andrew was playing with it on the kitchen floor!'

'Upside down,' I agreed, smiling.

'Does Ivan know where it is?'

'Not exactly,' I said, and told him where to look.

'You're a rogue, Alexander.'

I had put him in great good humour. He marched us into his own room for a 'decent drink' - Scotch whisky - and I stunned him speechless by suggesting that next time Zoл Lang vowed the hilt belonged to the nation he tell her then OK, the nation would lose on the deal.

'How do you mean?'

'Generation by generation - ever since the invention of inheritance taxes - the Kinlochs have paid for that hilt. The same object, but taxed after a death and relaxed and taxed again. It never ends. If you give it into public ownership, the country forfeits the tax. It's a case of kill the goose… Dr Lang never thinks of the golden tax eggs.'

He said thoughtfully, 'James will not have to pay crippling death duties on the castle, as I did. It was my greatest reason for handing it over.'

'One is taxed for giving a big present to one's son,' I smiled, 'but not for losing the same amount at the casino. Nor for winning. Screwy. But that's spite and envy for you. All feeling and no addition.'

'What brought all this on?'

'Thinking about the hilt.'

'Do you seriously think we should surrender it?'

'No,' I said, 'but arithmetic might cool Dr Lang's ardour.'

'I'll try it.' He lavishly poured more gold into my glass. 'By God, Al.'

'If you get me drunk,' I said, 'James will beat me at golf.'

James beat me at golf.

'Whatever did you say to Himself?' he asked. 'Nothing but catching a twenty-pound salmon puts him into such a high mood.'

'He's good to me.'

'The sun shines out of your arse.'

The difference between James and Patsy was that my cousin felt secure enough to make a joke of his father's occasional glance in my direction. James would inherit his title and an entailed estate. He had none of Patsy's devilish doubts sitting bleakly on his sunny shoulders.

As always we went amicably round eighteen holes, laughing, cursing, helplessly incompetent, racking up scores we would never confess to, happy in each other's undemanding company, cousins in the simplest sense, family attitudes and loyalties taken for granted.

We pulled our golf bags along behind us on their little trolleys, and if I were careful replacing my clubs each time, sliding them gently into the bag instead of ramming them home, it was because the handles rested not on the firm base of the bag but in the wide bowl of the grey cloth-wrapped shape within it, the jewelled gold treasure fashioned by Maxim in 1867.

We finished our round lightheartedly, and in the club house I wiped clean my woods and irons and stowed them upright in the bag in the locker, sentinels guarding King Alfred's Gold Cup.

Owing to the rigid divisions at the top of the golf bags, which held the clubs apart to prevent their damaging each other, I had had to buy a bag that could be taken apart at the bottom - for cleaning - and in the castle's drying-room I had undone the necessary screws to take the bag apart, and had lodged the Cup inside. It fitted there snugly: and as a bonus for having to undo the bag to get it out again, it could never be tipped out by accident.

The locker's flat grey doors were uniform and anonymous. Changing my shoes, I put the black-and-white studs on the shelf and closed everything unremarkably away, and with amusement returned with James to the castle.

By mid-morning the next day my life in the bothy had taken shape again, and in greater comfort than before when it came to mattress and armchair. A hired jeep stood outside my front door, the portable phone (with spare batteries) was working, and Zoл Lang's portrait stood unwrapped on the easel.

With a thankful feeling of coming home I set out the paints I needed, feeling their texture on knife and brush, darkening the background again, adding the shadows that had flashed into imagination in my travels, putting a glow on the skin and life-lights in the water-like surfaces of the eyes.

The woman lived on the canvas, as vital as I knew how to make her.

At five o'clock, when the quality of the light subtly changed, I put down the brushes, washed them for the last time that day and made sure that all the brilliant colours were airtight in their pots and tubes, a routine as natural as breathing. Then I lit my lamp and put it by the window, and took my bagpipes out of their case, and walked with them up the rocky hillside until the bothy lay far below.

It was weeks since I'd played the pipes. My fingers were rusty on the chanter. I filled the bag with air and tuned the drones, swinging them along my shoulder and waiting for such skill as I had to reawaken in my ear; and at length began to feel and to remember the fingering of one of the long ancient laments of a time earlier than Prince Charles Edward. The sadness that had enveloped Scotland for centuries before him, the untamable independence that no Act of Union could undo, all the dark Celtic mysteries pulsed in the old elemental endlessly recurring tunes that slowly wove a mood more of endurance than hope.