I had learned to play laments - the pibrochs - as a boy, chiefly for the unromantic reason that their slowness meant I had more time to get the notes right. I'd progressed to marches later, but a lament suited my painting of Zoл Lang better, and I stood on the Monadhliath Mountains while the moon rose, and played for her a mixture of an old tune called 'The King's Taxes' and a new one that I made up as I went along. And it was just as well, I thought, as stray squeaks and wrong notes made me wince, that my old army teacher wasn't there to hear.
Scottish piping laments could go on for hours, but earthly hunger put a stop to them usually in my case, and I returned in the dark to the bothy, filled with a pleasant melancholy but with no feeling of despair, and cooked paella in contentment.
I always woke early in the mountains, even in the dark winters, and the next day I sat in front of the easel watching the slow change of light on that face; the growth, as it almost seemed, of the emerging personality taking place before me; and I wondered if anyone would ever again see that gradual birth. If the picture were successful, if it ever hung in a gallery, passing visitors might give it a glance under a bright light and view it as a conjuring trick: now you see youth, now you don't.
When daylight was fully established I still sat comfortably in my new armchair, trying to tap into that courage I was supposed to have. It was one thing to imagine, another to do. And if I didn't do, I would know for ever that I'd failed in courage, even though, as it now stood, the portrait of an unknown woman was complete and workmanlike.
I had ransacked my mother's kitchen for a sharp-pointed knife, and in the end I'd borrowed from her not a knife but a meat thermometer. This unlikely tool had proved to have a spike whose tip was both sharp and abrasive. The spike was for sticking into joints of meat: the round dial from which it protruded measured the inner heat and the state of cooking - rare, medium, well done.
'Of course you can borrow it,' my mother said, puzzled, 'but whatever for?'
'It's scratchy. It's rigid. The dial gives it good grip. It's pretty well perfect.'
She sweetly humoured her unfathomable son.
So I had the perfect tool. I had the light. I had the vision.
I sat and quaked.
I had the pencil drawing of the real Zoл Lang. I'd drawn her at the same angle. It should have been easy.
I had to see the old face over the young.
I had to see it clearly, unmistakably, down to the soul.
I had to play the lament for time past. I had to play the lament as a fact but not necessarily as a tragedy. I had to depict the persistence of the spirit inside the transient flesh.
I couldn't.
Time passed.
When I finally picked up the meat thermometer and stood in front of Zoл Lang and made the first scratch down to the Payne's grey, it was as if I had surrendered to an inner force.
I started with the neck, conscious that if the whole concept were in fact beyond my ability, I could over-paint a fluffy scarf or jewel decoration to conceal the failure.
I saw the outer shell of age as larger than the face within, as if the external presentation were the cage, the prison, of the spirit. I held the pencil drawing beside the painting and put dots of reference at pivotal points: at the outer lines of the eye sockets, at the upper edges of the jaw bones, at the rear extension of the skull.
With almost an abandonment of rational thought I swept the sharp scratching point across my careful painting. I let go with instinct. I drew the old Zoл in grey scratches, as if the flesh colours weren't anything but background; I scratched the prison bars with the cruelty she'd sensed in me, with the inability to soften or compromise the brutal conception.
I left as little to chance as I could. I traced the direction of each line in my mind until I could see the effect, and that could take ten minutes or half an hour. The result might be a sweeping stroke that looked spontaneous and inevitable, but in nerving myself each time to scrape down to the grey I was cravenly aware that a mistake couldn't be put right.
It was a cold day, and I sweated.
By five o'clock the shape of Zoл Lang's old face was clearly established over the inner spirit. I put down the meat thermometer, stretched and flexed my cramped fingers, took the portable phone with me and went for a walk outside.
Sitting on a granite boulder, looking down on the bothy, looking away down the valley to the tiny cars crawling along the distant road, I phoned my mother. Bad reception: crackle and static.
Ivan, she assured me, was at last and slowly shedding his depression. He had dressed. He was talking of not needing Wilfred any longer. Keith Robbiston had paid one of his flying visits and had been pleased with the patient's progress. She herself felt more settled and less anxious.
'Great,' I said.
She wanted to know how the meat-thermometer picture was coming along.
'Medium rare,' I said.
She laughed and said she was pleased Himself had insisted on a phone.
I told her the number.
She was calm, cool and collected, her normal serene self.
I said I would call her again on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, when I had finished the picture.
'Take care of yourself, Alexander.'
'You too,' I said.
I went down again to the bothy and ate the remaining half of the paella, and sat outside in the dark thinking of what needed to be done to the picture to complete its meaning; and chiefly I thought of not muddling the outlines by too many more strong grey scratches but of not going down so deep, not nearly down to the canvas, but only as far as the ultramarine blue layer, so that the wrinkles and sagging areas of old skin would be gentler, though still unmistakable, and I would end, if I could manage it, with a blue-grey mist-like top portrait, so that the eye could see both portraits separately, the outer or the inner, according to the chosen focus, or could see both together as an interpretation of what all life was like, the outward relentless change of cell-structure decreed by the passing of time.
I slept only in snatches that night and dreamed a lot and in the morning again watched the light grow on Zoл Lang, and spent the day with rigidly governed finger muscles until my arms and neck ached with tension, but by late afternoon I had gone to the limit of what I could understand and show, and whatever the picture might be judged to lack, it was because the lack was in me.
Only the eyes of the finished portrait looked blaz-ingly young, whichever other aspect one chose to see. I put suggestions of bags under the lower lids with a few blue lines, and drooped upper lids in faintly, but that unchanging spirit of Zoл Lang looked out, present and past identical.
I couldn't sleep. I lay for a while in the dark wondering what I could have done better, and coming to a realisation that I would probably go on wondering that for weeks and months, if not for my whole life.
I would wrap the picture in its sheet and put its face to the wall, and when I looked at it again, when I'd forgotten the strength and direction and feeling of each individual brushstroke or scratch, when I could see the whole with time's perspective, then I would know if I'd done something worth keeping, or whether the whole idea had been a mistake and beyond me.