A History Maker Read online

  Then the teachers ordered disks, paper, pencils, paint; the cooks milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans; the henwife ordered a sack of meal, a sack of corn, a first edition of Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus; the joiner ordered parts for a new orthopaedic bed she was making for Joe; weavers and embroiderers asked for many different colours of yarn and silk. When all were delivered the stalk was flushed rose red, a throbbing was heard from the underground roots and the room was colder, sure signs of plant exhaustion.

  “A light order now,” said the mother. “Granny Tibs?”

  Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty and ordered a doll for her two-year-old great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. It had to be exactly like a doll she remembered playing with herself at that age, a china girl doll with curly yellow hair, blue eyes, a matching silk dress with a big bow at the back. When the diagram appeared she remembered that the hair had not been curly but smooth, and twisted in two long plaits tied with bows at the ends. The dress had also been of a historical kind called dirndl worn by the women of Bolivia or California — that should be a clue — the dress was illustrated in a book called Heidi Grows Up which had been published she thought in the eighteenth or perhaps nineteenth century. The doll was also made of cloth, not china at all. It took a long time to get exactly the doll Granny Tibs remembered and by then the colour of the stalk and temperature of the room were normal again. The children now spoke out. A young jeweller wanted two hundred grammes of silver wire and was persuaded to accept a hundred of copper. A young sculptor who asked for six kilogrammes of clay was told to collect it from Mountbenger where some aunts had a pottery; she said she hated Mountbenger because of a boy there, so was given a four-page geological guide to help her find her own supply of clay. A very young wood-worker wanted a sharp new chisel but the joiner said she would show him how to sharpen his old one. This answer caused outcries which the mother drowned with a blast of cheery sound.

  Finally she faced the men and said, “Cigars, Joe?”

  “I’ve all I need, Auntie,” he answered, blowing a smoke ring. She said, “Wat, you have a wanting look.”

  “Have I? Then give me something that stops memories.”

  “You can have Paxil, Zoloft, or Prozac, Gilbey’s London gin, The Macallan, Courvoisier or a thousand other derivatives of alcohol, opium and cocaine.”

  “I want nothing that changes my chemistry,” he said coldly, “Give me a history book — not a statistical one — a book that reads like somebody talking.”

  “What period?”

  “A period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world.”

  Only the mother looked straight at Wat but a new alertness in the room seemed shared by everyone except the boys, the oldest great-granny, Kittock the henwife and, apparently, Joe.

  “There were many such times,” said the mother. She pressed the organ and a table of names and dates flowed onto the stalk.

  “The foundation of Israel, A.D. or B.C.?” she suggested, “The rise of Islam? Children’s Crusade? Peasants’ Revolt? French Revolution? More books have been written about each than there are brands of alcohol.”

  There was a silence in which Wat reddened with embarrassment. Everyone seemed to be watching him. A calm, monotonous yet oddly sing-song voice said, “Have you read Ten Days That Shook the World, Wat?”

  Kittock the henwife had spoken without lifting her eyes from the novel on her lap.

  “Never,” said Wat thankfully.

  “Well, that’s the book for you.”

  So Wat ordered Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed’s account of Muscovite politics in 1917. The plant substantiated it. A girl gave it to him.

  “Come outside, Wat” said Joe setting his chair in motion, “I need to see some hills.”

  Wat started following but paused when the mother said, “Wat, you have lost a father, brothers, friends. We have lost brothers, lovers and sons in a war we never wanted.”

  “I pity you of course,” said Wat, shrugging,

  “But a circus will be here in a few days. Men will be coming from all over Scotland and even farther. Make the most of them.”

  He strode out.

  On this sunny spring day the projecting eaves of Dryhope house neatly shadowed the surrounding veranda. Joe sat here watching the view with the intense frown of a starving man who cannot quite believe in the meal before him. From under the veranda a flow of pure water fed a series of pools linked by waterfalls. The nearest held trout and cresses and a marble bird table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The second was a play-pool where infants splashed and shouted in sight of two ten-year-old aunts who lay gossiping on a nearby lawn. The third was a fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house. The last was a duckpond from which Dryhope burn flowed down through a glen planted with fruit trees and berry bushes. On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife. A steepening of the hillside hid land immediately beyond but not Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan, reflected also three houses by the shore. Oxcleuch, Cappercleuch and Bowerhope resembled Dryhope: large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet. The summits appeared at cloud level, each a disc of bright vapour from which a line of vapour flowed east with the wind. More than fifty such discs patterned the sky. The remotest over powerplants in Moffat, Eskdale and Teviot, looked like tiny flecks in the wedges of blue air between the hills. Lines of vapour from these and many more in the west ruled the heavenly blue into parallel strips. The lines were more emphatic today, as always after big funerals.

  Joe pointed to the view with his only foot and said wistfully, “There’s a lot of goodness out there.”

  “But ye cannae feel it,” said Wat, who sat cross-egged and reading on a rug beside him.

  “No yet.”

  “Maybe you’ll never feel part of that goodness again. I lost the feeling with my first battle.”

  “Pessimist. I’m no like you. I’ll feel as good as ever when I get back my arm and leg.”

  Joe glanced wistfully down at the crystalline cylinders extending from his right shoulder and right thigh. Tiny atomic motors among the pinkish-brown broth inside were nudging together cells of new limbs, but a month would pass before outlines of bones appeared. Joe sighed then said, “You made them very tense in there. You should keep ill-sounding words for me or the Warrior house.”

  “Dryhope women are stupid,” said Wat coldly,

  “They think I’m mourning the Dad — that daft old prick.”

  “It should be possible for you to mourn the Dad,” said Joe gently, “I’m mourning him and he loved you most, loved you more than anyone because you’re our bonniest fighter and always argle-bargled with him. He liked contention. Are you mourning the bairns?”

  “Rage not sorrow is my disease. Why did our fucking old progenitor con nearly all Ettrick into dying round a pole with a tin chicken on top? Why did he want us to fight after the decent chiefs of Teviot and Eskdale, Liddesdale and Galawater had surrendered? I’ll tell you why. He was past his prime and knew he was fighting his last war. He wanted to take our whole army into the roots with him. Our bairns were slaughtered because our Dad feared age and loneliness.”

  “He made sure we’ll be remembered! The lot of us! Living and dead!” said Joe with a small firm smile, “The bairns too, in fact the bairns most of all. ‘All my fledglings have turned into eagles,’ he said. O he was right. Wee lads of fourteen have never chosen to die like that before — not since the dawn of television. If history wasnae a thing of the past I would say Ettrick made it two days ago. The strategy was the Dad’s but only you had the spunk to get the standard to the cliff top and kill the man you passed it to … What’s wrong?”

  “I’m remembering his face,” muttered Wat after a moment. He had dropp
ed his book and was biting his nails. Joe said softly, “A cigar?” and offered one.

  “No.”

  After a minute of silence Joe said mildly, “You’re wrong about Dad wanting us all to go out with him. He saved me by falling on me when Dodds’s butchers were hacking us both, that was no accident. But nothing you say upsets me, Wat — you arenae normal. You’re a hero. I’m proud of what you did. And I don’t care if all this …” (he waved his only hand at the view) “… never seems sweet to me again. Pride will keep me going, like it keeps you.”

  He looked down at Wat who was reading again, or pretending to. Joe said, “How can a soldier who thinks our last war too bloody forget it by reading about dark ages when men fought wars without rules, and burned bombed looted peaceful houses, and killed raped enslaved whole families of women children and old ones — and boasted about it in their filthy newspapers! I hated history when I was wee. When Granny Pringle showed us films from those days I had nightmares.”

  “I’m reading about folk who struggled to stop all that,” said Wat, “They were the greatest heroes.”

  “Well, mibby, but it was the powerplants that stopped all that.”

  For a while the only sounds were sparrows twittering on the bird table, infant shouts and splashes, a dull distant boom from Oxcleuch where something metallic was being synthesized. Joe said, “How would you like to die, Wat, if not in a battle folk would replay for centuries?”

  “By heart failure while weeding a cabbage patch.”

  “Aye, only dafties despise gardening,” said Joe thoughtfully, “But soldiers like us have no patience for it.”

  Wat pocketed his book and stood up.

  “You’re no fool, Joe,” he said, “You’re also brave, honest and good-natured so you’ll be our next general.”

  “Me? General Joe of Ettrick? Why not General Wat?” said Joe grinning shyly, “You’re our hero.”

  “I’m moody — a Hamlet type — good for sudden sprints and useless in the long run. I’ll go now.”

  “Aye, a ride will help ye relax. Arrange one for me.”

  Wat went down to the lawn, showed the larger of the little aunts his bandaged palms and said politely, “Lend me your hands Auntie Jean, these arenae much use.”

  She jumped happily up and trotted beside him through an orchard with beehives under the trees. They entered a stable with a backdoor onto the common on the far side of the deer fence and went through it, collecting saddle, bridle, sugar lumps and whistle from the tackroom. On the common several horses grazed within sight of a water trough.

  “I need an experienced old pony,” said Wat,

  “Sophia will do.”

  He blew three notes on the whistle. A sedate dapple grey with long mane and tail moved nearer without ceasing to crop grass.

  “I know where you’re going! I know where you’re going!” shouted Auntie Jean excitedly. Wat threw the saddle onto the pony, offered it sugar and held the head while Jean’s strong little hands slipped on the bridle and tightened buckles on that and the girths. Wat inspected the buckles, set foot in stirrup, thrust most of himself over the pony’s back and with some groaning arrived upright in the saddle.

  “I’ll lead you!” shouted Jean skipping about,

  “I’ll lead you to all the randy aunties of Craig Douglas!”

  “You willnae,” said Wat, “Give me those.”

  With a pout of annoyance she handed up the reins. He gripped them clumsily with his thumbs and said, “You don’t know where I’m going, Jean. Clap her and goodbye.”

  Jean turned the pony to face east and downhill and clapped her rump. Sophia, liking her rider, set off briskly although he turned her uphill and north.

  By easy slopes he headed for Hawkshaw Rig but later turned right into a glen between that and Wardlaw, then crossed a fast-flowing burn and descended into woods behind Craig Douglas house, hoping to enter the grounds unseen. He failed. The backdoor in the deer fence banged open as he neared and four boys ran out, jostling for priority in helping him dismount and stable Sophia.

  “If Jean clyped on me she’s a sleekit wee bitch,” he told them. They said nothing. Leaving the stable for the garden he saw all the Craig Douglas children and adolescents standing to left and right of the path, staring. Even babies in the arms of older sisters were gazing at him in silent wonder. He paused and said, “When I last came here you were a lot noisier.” Nobody spoke.

  “Have you no tale for me Annie?” he asked a tall girl with a humorous cast of features. She said faintly, “We’re glad you’ve no come back like our uncles, Wat.”

  He shrugged, went on to the house and found a mother waiting on the veranda. A week before she had been pleasantly plump; now there were dark hollows under her cheekbones and red-rimmed eyes. He said gruffly, “You look twenty years older, Mirren.”

  She said coldly, “You’re the same as ever. Have you come to see your pals?”

  He thought for a moment. The outer walls of the house and most of the inner ones were transparent just now. Only the dark-walled infirmary and the room of the woman he wanted to see allowed no glimpse of their interior. He sighed and nodded.

  And followed the mother inside and across floors where only young women looked straight at him. Grannies, matrons and even a girl suckling an infant ignored him or looked away: this disturbed him far more than the silence of the youngsters outside. He was brought into the infirmary where five big translucent boxes lay, each containing what seemed pink fog with a complicated shadow inside. The mother pressed a stud. The infirmary darkened but the shadows became the well-lit bodies of young, naked, badly dismembered men, each with limbs and organs floating beside their torso and linked to it by threads like cobwebs. Only one body exhibited movement: eyes which slowly blinked in time with a mouth opening and shutting like the mouth of a fish. The face had no intelligence in it. Wat abruptly turned his back on these things. The ceiling went clear and admitted sunlight again.

  “You can mend them?” he asked in a voice shrill with unbelief.

  “Mibby. Perhaps. It will take years but they’re just lads.”

  “Mirren, most of Charlie’s head is gone.”

  “He’ll grow a new one if we can restore the heart. The new brain will have his character if not his memories.”

  “Our memories are our character, Mirren.”

  “Then the mother and sisters who love him will restore his memories, Wat Dryhope. We’ll give him back all the good things the war sliced away, but you won’t be one of them, Wattie! When he starts thinking again we’ll only remind him of what’s harmless!”

  “You’re so maddened by grief that you’re blethering, Mirren. I know it’s a cruel injustice that I’m almost unhurt and your lads are nearly dead, but I’m the man who argued for what would have saved them. They refused it. And have you forgot that bloody Daddy Jardine was born and bred in this house by Craig Douglas women? Our general’s obstrapulous conceit wasnae nourished by the aunties of Dryhope.” “No woman on earth nourished Jardine’s conceit!” cried Mirren, “He got it in the Warrior house. We never scorned him for his wee-ness but other soldiers did until he showed he was spunkier than them and could take knocks without squealing. So they made him their pet, then elected him boss, and after that Craig Douglas never saw him again — except through the public eye — until two days back when the Red Cross gave us his remains with sixteen other corpses and the pieces you’re feart to turn round and see. Women had no part in making a bloody hero of Jardine Craig Douglas. Yes, he fathered weans in half the houses along Yarrow but he only wanted women for one thing. Like all soldiers the only folk he really loved were men!”

  Wat heard this with bowed head then said, “All true, Aunt Mirren, but women arenae wholly innocent of the war game. You don’t take to fighting like we do — the world holds hardly a dozen tribes of professional Amazons — but many girls, aye, and many women are daft about soldiers. I’m a graceless brute so when I came home from the stars few women outside Dry
hope house would look at me — not until I fought for Ettrick and showed some talent.”

  “I cannae be fair to you, Wat,” the mother said drying her eyes, “Go to Nan.”

  He walked swiftly to the other opaque-walled room, looking ceilingward to avoid eye-contact with anyone before reaching it. A teenage girl scampered out as he was about to enter, followed by another. He went in and shut the door by pulling across a heavy tapestry curtain. Then he faced the woman inside and said, “See me Nan! I’m a rare animal now, an Ettrick warrior with nothing obvious missing. But I cannae move my fingers and I feel nine tenths dead and as sexless as a neep. Do you still like Wat Dryhope?”

  She smiled and beckoned.

  Next morning she wakened Wat by prising his arms from around her and saying, “You neednae hold so tight, I won’t run away.”

  She slipped out of bed and pulled on a long loose shirt. He raised himself by an elbow to watch. Playing a keyboard invisible to him she made a clear round window in the wall before her and raised it until it framed a hawk perched on the top branch of a Scotch pine and the summit of Whitelaw against a pale sky. By light from this Nan opened elegant boxes holding the materials of a meal and made breakfast.

  She was nearly forty with short dark hair and a lively, clever face which appreciated everything she saw. While poaching an egg her frown of concentration left a small smile at the corners of the mouth, a humorous look which had been inherited by her daughters. Nearby was a loom where she wove rugs, door curtains, pillows with patterns that made this room different from any other, also the screen she used to design new patterns or play music. She had a talent for every worthwhile art, handling utensils with swift ease which soothed Wat’s mind as much as her fingers had soothed the rest of him the night before. He said, “I want to stay with you, here, in this room, till all the seas run dry, my dear, and the rocks melt in the sun. Can I do it for a week or two?”