My friend’s life has spun her compass in ways I am too sceptical, too off-put by solutions, to embrace. Of course, knowing me, she can read my tired eyeless if not toothless liony head when she lays out her brand-new views, that are working well enough for her.
She voiced an idea that is a common one but whose truth inheres, or so I think that I deeply believe, in its opposite, that she was glad I was doing a memoir as that is where truth lies, not in fiction.
Well, exactly so. It is in a memoir that truth will, if not lie, tell as many versions of itself as there are drops of water in a river. Does anyone who has lived feel that there is one version of their life? There is only the frozen water of story that will melt and retell itself in another shape, there are only the tides and storms, whose drift will be countered, whose wreckage will be rebuilt, in countless ways by the survivor, and the survivors of that survivor.
I was cross because I thought that she was doing two silly things. The first was attacking fiction and the second was losing out on all that fiction by an attachment to biography, as though felt life were confined to a recorded life. This attachment is fashionable. It is based on the idea that ‘life-writing’ is real, where fiction is not. That notion is perilously close to the idea that fiction is interesting only when we find ourselves in it, that identification is more essential than recognition and compassion and the acknowledgement of otherness. Not all biography is gossip, of course, but to assert that you prefer biography to fiction is not, as many now understand it to be, to reveal yourself as a person concerned only with what matters. It is to reveal yourself as a person who enjoys biography. (I’m one, emphatically, by the way.)
My friend will be looking for a trajectory in my memoir, a plot, a lesson learned, a message that can be extracted from the thousands of bottles.
She has as much chance of finding one as I have of returning to their stems the hundreds of cut daisies that lie now among the lines of clippings on the scented close-mown lawn under my window. Some of the clippings have been caught in the bin of the old mower, some have not. It’s over, it was grass, it will be compost, the flowers fall.
I can say nothing more to my friend with her firm view than that it was my life, that it sometimes went too slowly but was over too fast, now that I look back at it. It was all I had. The miracle would be to convey a breath of how it was.
Yesterday…now, yesterday is good and close, perhaps it may be tickled up to life, taken from the stream, and caught before its freckles and the blue shine on it go?
Yesterday was Sunday. It began bright at before six. Yet it did not decline into rain. It grew brighter all day, till by the evening the sea around the island was bright like polished blue metal, and the lochs inshore had the path of the sun across them, blazing.
Katie had promised her mother that we would go to look at the grave of the newly buried man, who had come all those years ago to collect seaweed to fertilise the fields, and who had stayed to live on the island.
The graveyard lies close by a ragged coast to the south-west of the island, away down from the school, where seven children are at present seniors, and two juniors. Katie met the juniors doing a project in the garden at the house, doing a project by the fruit cage. The project was, according to Seumas, who is three, ‘Counting strawberries’.
A skill it seems prudent to master as early as possible in life.
The man in the wilderness said to me,
How many strawberries grow in the sea?
I answered him as I thought good.
As many red herrings as grow in the wood.
The school on the island attains unbroken high standards. It is hard to think of a more concentrated or rich education for small children or of a school more ideally located or staffed to inspire application and initiative or develop native wit. These pupils are as surely made by their teacher, Carol, as are the tutees of an influential don. There has to be nothing she cannot do. This must literally be true, from the more conventional curriculum to the setting of a willow bower, playing the fiddle, telling otter pugs from cat’s paws, and sowing nine bean-rows. Three people from that school have recently graduated from Cambridge.
The closest mainland over that compass point out to sea beyond the rocks beyond the graveyard beyond the school is Canada. The graveyard at Kilchattan is exposed, but very green. The graves are set in two turfy yards, within dry-stone walls. A man came two years ago to repair these walls, and Katie and William and their older daughter, my god-daughter Flora, built a section of the wall under his guidance. He sees the compatibilities in the stones and sets them together so that together they will remain. Katie said that he did it as fast as a man laying out cards, and his stones lay immoveable in the places he had ordained for them, while her wall shoogled. Less, she said, though, than her husband William’s wall.
Because the day was bright and there was little wind, the small inland lochs were blue and bright over their brown as we drove to the graveyard, slowly. You must drive slowly. There are cows and their calves sitting across the road, and lambs taking a rest on knuckly legs, to feel the warmth of the asphalt through their fleece. The tar warms through quicker than the turf.
There are people out for a Sunday drive; there are churchgoers, and tourists. There is the shepherd, on her quad bike, and Angus, the special constable, in his crime-fighting vehicle.
Car accidents do happen, and the nearest hospital for a broken bone is either a ferry journey away, for which you may have to wait for two or more days, or a helicopter dash, with all the drama, expense and interruption that involves, calling the emergency people from the mainland and soothing and loading the stricken soul.
The graveyard is not at the church, which stands on the hill opposite the hotel and bar, looking down at the pier.
The graveyard is a pair of fields of marked places where human beings lie in earth. The stones number perhaps two and a half hundred. Katie and I read every one that afternoon unless the salty wind had worn it back to plain thin stone. The new grave was to our surprise covered with neatly placed flowers, none in cellophane or paper. Whether they had been tidied by a loving hand after the wind or whether the wind had spared them, I don’t know. I feel peculiar about reading the letters and notes that go with flowers for a grave as a rule, in case there be something sticky-beaked about the motive, but we did read until Katie found the flowers from her mum.
A proper measure was returned to friendship and familial ties at that grave. You cannot fret away the ties that exist in a place as small as this. Friendships cannot be consumed at whim or jettisoned as things move along. They must adapt to contiguity. This citiless place makes the true demands of civilisation.
We walked the graves, many of them crowned with the family name of the person below, MacNeill, McFadyen, McConnell, Titterton, McPhee, the beautiful strange surnames Buie and Blue. The Archibalds and Ians, the Hesters, Floras and Euphemias, the one Annabella, the many lost children, the two young men perished in accidents in the late nineteenth century, the gardener at the big house who worked here for fifty-eight years, are joined by many people now whom Katie and I remember, three handsome young men with whom we once danced, dead in their twenties and thirties, a heartbroken father, a man with a hole in his heart whom we hero-worshipped for his glamour and whose grave bears the name of his house and its aspect, ‘Seaview’. He was thirty-four when he died.