“Schweppes,” murmured Cameron. He’d be damned if he’d be called Scotty for the duration of his stay. If they persisted, he’d have to think up a nickname “that they called him back home.”
“Well, maybe they’ll let you enter the sporting events without the kilt,” said Betty Carson. “Since you’re a real Scot. Is there any particular one you specialize in?”
“Soccer.” He remembered not to call it football.
She frowned. “Not Scottish. The choices are caber toss, sheaf toss, hammer toss, stone throw-”
“Betty won the haggis hurl last year,” said her husband proudly.
Cameron tried to imagine a group of women vomiting suet pudding in a distance competition. That couldn’t be it.
Ice. Americans were really quite demented on the subject of ice, thought Heather McSkye.
While her new husband, Dr. Hutcheson, was conferring with festival officials, Heather climbed into the camper to check on the ice supply. She had filled the cooler before they left, but in this stifling climate it might have melted; and if so, she would have to send Batair to town for more. He would insist on having the other clan chiefs in for drinks tonight, and they would need more ice than a fishmonger to accommodate that crowd.
Usually Heather enjoyed entertaining: sheathed in a black dress to accentuate her blondness, she would glide among the guests, murmuring introductions or offers of drinks, and accepting compliments on the newly redecorated house. Batair had protested, of course-men are such sticks about change-but she had told him she simply couldn’t live with Marge’s old chintzes and cottage oak antiques. She’d wanted to hold a yard sale, but Batair, in an uncharacteristic display of firmness, insisted on sending the old furniture to Marge at the farm. He hadn’t even wanted to readjust the settlement to compensate for it. The divorce agreement had allowed Marge to keep their farm, where she raised her border collies, and Dr. Hutcheson had kept the house in town and most of the stocks and bonds.
Heather would have liked to see more acrimony in the relations between her husband and his first wife, but she was too clever to instigate it. She contented herself with the purchase of some lovely chrome and glass furniture to complement the scarlet settee and the black pile carpet.
Batair seemed to think that, since she was from Scotland, she should be as daft about antiques as he was, but it wasn’t as if she’d grown up in a sodding castle, then, was it? Heather liked new things; in fact, she would have preferred motor racing to Scottish games for entertainment, but the games were not entertainment as far as she was concerned. They were a means to an end.
She had sized up the Scots-Americans and decided that they were the U.S. equivalent of the Sloanes back home: conservative snobs with more money than sense, in search of a bit of antiquity on which to hang their pedigrees. When Heather mentioned her ties to the Scottish nobility, Batair had practically drooled, hadn’t he? If the other Americans’ reactions were as funny as that, it should be an amusing weekend indeed.
James Stuart McGowan hadn’t said anything for quite a long time; but since he was only ten years old, his parents considered that a blessing. Even an ominous silence was better than the leveling remarks that were his usual conversational contributions on outings.
James Stuart, who had the soul of an aging Baptist minister, had been cursed with whimsical parents. They were always trying to drag him off to carnivals and ball games, where they’d buy noxious quantities of hot dogs and cotton candy that they attempted to pass off as dinner; God knows what this cuisine had done to his metabolism. If his parents didn’t get a grip on themselves by the time he reached puberty, he’d probably die of terminal acne. At least he’d gotten them to stop swiping his copy of Nietzsche and replacing it with Paddington Bear, the threat to call the child protection agency had finally done it. He wondered which of his parents had put the sign on his door: Killjoy was here. This latest obsession of theirs, the Highland games, appeared to involve leaving a perfectly comfortable home to camp out like gypsies on the top of a mountain amid bears, poison oak, and fellow psychotics. His mother and father (he steadfastly refused to call them Babs and Stewie) even wanted to buy a kilt for him, insisting how adorable he’d look in the family tartan. James Stuart had countered by demanding to see the family checkbook, and pointing out that $150 worth of cuteness was clearly beyond their means.
Although he felt obliged to radiate displeasure at his parents’ latest escapade, James Stuart secretly felt that the Highland games might prove interesting after all. There should be crowds of people there, so that he could easily give his parents the slip and stay gone for hours. Besides, feeling superior and contemptuous was James Stuart’s favorite pastime, and the weekend promised a limitless opportunity to indulge in it.
Lachlan Forsyth counted the campers in the parking area and decided that it was time for him to set up his souvenir stall. He could afford, at most, a two-drink delay. The opening ceremonies were set to begin at 6 P.M., by which time an assortment of the curious, the obnoxious, and the deluded would be packed three-deep around him, demanding tartan ties, Nessie key rings, and directions to the loo. His answer to all of these queries was: “Right over there on the table.”
Often people would recognize his burr and want to know where he was from, in which case a glance at their tartan was always helpful. He told the MacDonalds that he was from Kintyre, while the Campbells were led to believe that he hailed from Argyll; no one ever knew the difference.
Occasionally a well-traveled soul would try to chat him up about various places in Scotland, but Lachlan, well-traveled himself, could field questions indefinitely. He could always recommend a pub or a bed-and-breakfast anywhere between Orkney and the Borders. He could, with equal ease, recite Burns, tell instantly which tartan went with which surname, and settle arguments about the minutiae of Scottish history. It was all part of his job as a professional Scot. The least agreeable part of this lucrative business was having to suffer fools gladly; but he always managed with a straight face to find a tartan for an Olaffson (MacDonald of the Isles: Viking intermarriage), dredge up a family ghost for any family at all, and listen sympathetically to one more “direct descendant of Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Price Charlie.”
Lachlan began to dust off his Highland games coffee mugs and straighten his tartan scarfs and ties. The new blue and beige ones should go like hotcakes-the Princess Diana tartan, that was. And the Royal Stewart was always a big seller. Never mind that none of the purchasers had the least right in the world to wear the colors of the royal family. It was pretty, easy to find, and usually cheaper than special-ordering the tartan of a lesser-known clan, so it always did well at Scottish gatherings. Lachlan always laid in a generous supply before the festival, and he had never failed to sell out. Between the ignorant and the deluded “descendants” of the Prince, business was always brisk.
“Excuse me,” said a woman at his elbow, “could you tell me what tartan my family should wear? We’re kin to Mary, Queen of Scots, on my mother’s side.”
Lachlan Forsyth smiled. Let the games begin.
CHAPTER THREE
THE Western Virginia Scottish Festival was held each year on privately owned Glencoe Mountain, a high-altitude tourist attraction a few miles outside the tiny community of Meadow Creek. For most of the year, Glencoe offered (for a modest admission fee) nature trails, camping facilities, hang-gliding exhibitions, and a habitat zoo; but on Labor Day weekend, the mountain was packed with kilted visitors, and the overflow was lodged in motels from Blacksburg to Pulaski. The mountain’s owner, Margaret Duff-Hamilton (of Hamilton textile mills), presided over the event as honorary games chairman, and welcomed all the clan chiefs at a sherry party in her summer home. Out of earshot, in the campground, lesser folk had tailgate picnics to the accompaniment of pipe-band practice.