all the others and had been conscious of a bond between them.
There was no bond between himself and his two older brothers, Adam and Samuel. They were at the fishing, mostly at nights. Sometimes they talked to him: never with him.
Alexander and John worked on Achgammie. Alexander, who was twenty-two and earning as much as he ever would, was thinking of getting married after harvest. John had feed himself to a Newton Stewart farmer and was as good as married as far as his home at the Suie was concerned.
William, having reached the age of twelve, was working a pair of horse on Achgammie: he was so tired when he came home at nights that he took his supper and went straight to bed.
David’s contact with his brothers and sisters was brief and casual. Occasionally his sisters, Bell, Mary and Sarah, who were in service, would come home on a Sunday. But their appearance and talk was that of strangers to him. Only with his sister Agnes did he feel any real bond or blood-tie. But Agnes too was now in service: she had gone at the May term as kitchen lass to the farm of Achnotteroch. David felt her loss very keenly: she had been more to him than his mother – and much more to him than his brother Peter who was only two years older. Peter was dull-witted: and yet he was ill-tempered and selfish. Sarah Ramsay had long differentiated between them. She saw how her husband doted upon David and she saw how closely David resembled his father and his brother Richard. She drew to Peter, the true child of her womb, and revenged herself on her husband through her youngest born.
But David had imagination enough to escape from much of his home influence. He made no demands: he avoided quarrels knowing he would get worsted. And he did his mother’s bidding without any outward show of resentment.
But often enough he felt resentful and rebellious. He disliked washing dishes and stirring porridge. But he could not do everything and Peter had to work too. On the least pretext whatsoever he escaped from the house. Sometimes he would go to Achgammie steading – but that was Peter’s favourite haunt. Mostly he sought the shore – or sought out his father if he were not working too far away. He had no companions for the Suie was lonely and isolated.
David did not mind being alone. He had his dreams and his visions. He had a curious interest in birds and flowers and insects: and he never tired watching the incoming or outgoing of the tide. He was beginning to love the look of the land: to be conscious that he liked it and had an affection for it. Often he found himself standing on the heughs looking across the Loch to the low hills on the Cairnryan coast and the low-hanging clouds that seemed to rest there. Sometimes he would lie down in the lee of a whin bush and watch the clouds, massing, disintegrating, banking up, floating, drifting, sailing … The earth, the sea and the sky: he was beginning to be conscious of them: conscious of their beauty and their rhythm and inexplicable harmony. He began to know every hollow in the land around the Suie: began to know every rock on the shore between Achgammie and Corsewell Point. The high wall of the estate kept him from exploring to his right – and Sir Thomas MacCready’s estate ran down to the beach at low tide – a fence of netting and barbed wire cutting down across the beach to prevent sheep and cattle from straying.
But sometimes through an iron gate in the wall he would watch Sir Thomas’s imported fallow deer feeding in the entrance park to his estate. The deer with their white-spotted tawny coats were timid but not frightened or alarmed at the near presence of a human being. They were small graceful creatures, soft-eyed and sweet-tempered. But somehow, to David, they looked alien – foreign to the land they lived on. But Sir Thomas was proud of them. He was the only man in the Rhinns who had deer in his park: he felt, by this virtue, he was quite the English gentleman.
Sir Thomas sometimes took a stroll with his lady in the cool of a fine summer’s evening and he was always delighted to hear her remark on the loveliness of his imported deer that were so reminiscent of her native Huntingdonshire.
Only once had young David Ramsay seen Sir Thomas and his lady. He had seen them as he had seen the deer – through the bars of the iron grill. He had thought them both much stranger than the deer. Sir Thomas was wearing a very loud-checked knickerbocker suit and a straw hat. By his side was his lady, very slim, her dress, especially her bustle, accentuating the cramped narrowness of her waist: and in her hand she had twirled a bright yellow parasol. Their gait was slow and artificial – a mere purposeless stroll. They passed very close to the gate and though David could not make out what they were saying their accent fell very strange to his ears. Before they actually came abreast of the gate he had fled.
But he felt that, like the fallow deer, Sir Thomas and Lady MacCready were strangers and had no connection with the land he knew and loved. And he felt glad they had an estate in which they could seclude themselves. He experienced no desire to explore behind its walls: it was a reservation for strange animals, strange customs and strange people.
But David’s time for wandering and dreaming was limited. He was sorry when Old Sam closed the school for the summer and he had to go and work on the Achgammie fields for his threepence a day.
There was a shyness and a reserve in him. He did not like the coarse jokes of the men or their coarse swearing; nor did he like the crude humour of his mates on the turnip drills. The boys and girls were quick to sense this tendency of reserve in David Ramsay: they took whatever opportunity they got to tease him. But there was not much opportunity. Always one of the MacMeechan boys worked in the fields with them. Mostly it was James, a thin wiry son of his father: sparing of words, devoid of all humour and much humanity but cunning and greedy and mean.
James MacMeechan did not allow any time for talking. It had always been a puzzle to him what people got to talk about – especially when there was work to be done. For young people to talk was an impertinence – an aping of foolish grown-ups: and this was not to be tolerated.
James MacMeechan worked hard and steadily. When he had occasion to check any one he did so as if checking a dog or a horse – with a curt vicious command. For this reason his father did not like him to work horses. He ruined them, breaking their tempers, making them nervous and almost unfit for any other man to work. But he was excellent for handling the field workers and could work skilfully with a hoe, a heuk or a flail. Moreover, he had a passionless hatred of women: this was also useful. His brother William on the other hand was hot-blooded and lecherous: always looking for an opportunity to satisfy his lust. He had as filthy a tongue as any man in the Rhinns and his swearing was filthiest when there were women and young girls within hearing.
None of the MacMeechans were popular. There was a cruel hard-bitten strain in all of them. There was a meanness and dryness about the father: a frightening lack of humanity that alienated him even from his own family. Many people felt it was a pity for his wife. She had never been known to smile since her marriage. But as no one felt the urge to smile about Achgammie and since she never crossed her husband in the smallest detail her life was, by her own standard, as happy and contented as there was any need for. But she had to work incessantly to prevent herself from brooding too much on her lot.
Throughout the summer David worked in the Achgammie fields. Hay-making succeeded the thinning of turnips – and there was always weeding as a stand-by. Even when he got home, tired though he was, there was always some weeding or other work to be done in the garden.
He resented, even in his early years, when he might not have been expected to know better, the waste of the summer nights. For by the time he was finished in the garden or bringing home water from the well he was too exhausted to do anything else but crawl into bed and sleep.
Sabbath was the day of rest. After church he would escape from the Suie and make for the shore. In his work in the fields he missed the rhythm of the sea: its visible ebb and flow. But his Sabbath visits were different from his week-day ones. The Sabbath was the day of rest and to visit the shore in a care-free mood was in itself sinful. David had listened attentively to Sam MacKitteroch – much more attentively than he had listened to the Reverend John Ross. The minister was remote, austere: he spoke in a harsh voice anent the categorical imperatives of Presbyterianism. But the voice of Sam MacKitteroch was as the voice of Jacob or Abraham: the quiet all-embracing voice of Subjective Spiritual Authority. Sam had spoken of the Lord’s Day in a manner compelling recognition and obedience. David felt that