Read Online The Loud Halo by Lillian Beckwith - Free Book Online

to refer to their wives, for in Gaelic it is ‘cailleach’ which is literally ‘old woman’ and they realise that this is not quite acceptable to polite English people.)
    â€˜If she has plenty I’d like some more,’ I told him. ‘I could use it for making wine.’
    â€˜Aye, she has that much of it we could do with throwin’ some of it in the sea,’ he told me. ‘You’d best come up after you’ve taken your dinner tomorrow and get some more.’
    â€˜Not tomorrow I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I’ve promised to go and talk to that woman Janet has staying with her. Janet say’s she’s lonely and miserable.’
    â€˜Is that the one they had out in the boat today to show her the scenery and she just sat with her head bent over her knittin’ all the way so she didn’t see a thing?’
    â€˜It sounds like her,’ I agreed.
    â€˜Ach, well, likely she will be miserable,’ said Dugald. ‘She’s from Manchester, isn’t she?’ he added, as though that explained everything.
    â€˜How’s the parking business going these days?’ I asked him with a grin, to which he responded with an oblique smile.
    â€˜Ach, no’ bad, no’ bad,’ he said with studied offhandedness. ‘Though there’s some of these drivers that comes an’ all they give me instead of a shillin’ is a mouthful of argument.’
    â€˜I was hearing great praise of you from a motorist only the other day, anyway,’ I told him.
    â€˜Which was that?’ he demanded with sudden suspicion.
    So I told him of a driver I had been talking to who had parked on his croft the previous Sunday, and who had gone to the cottage to pay his parking fee only to be confronted by Dugald who had refused the shilling with stubborn piety. The man had been so impressed that as soon as he knew I was not a Gael he had burst out with the story. He had never believed, he had told me, that he would actually meet a man so implacably devout as to forgo his rightful dues just because it was the Sabbath.
    â€˜Ach, that cheat,’ said Dugald, when I had finished. ‘He was English too, I mind.’
    â€˜Cheat?’ I repeated.
    â€˜Aye, cheat, I said. He parked his car here all day from early in the mornin’ till late at night an’ not so much as a sixpence did I get out of it.’
    â€˜But he told me had pressed you to take the money but you refused.’
    â€˜So I did,’ said Dugald virtuously, ‘I explained to him once or twice that I couldn’t take the money from him because it was the Sabbath.’
    â€˜Well, in that case how can you say now that he was a cheat?’ I demanded with a touch of amusement.
    â€˜Could he no’ have left it on the window-sill for me?’ replied Dugald with shattering apostasy. ‘It would still have been there for me in the mornin’.’
    Both Fiona and the midges were becoming increasingly persistent in their demands that we should move and, slapping at our bitten limbs, we fled down the road to Morag’s cottage where Hector and Erchy were enjoying a strupak. This season the boats had swapped partners and now the two friends were happily running the Ealasaid, Hector’s new boat, together. Their greeting to me sounded slightly ironic.
    â€˜You don’t sound too happy,’ I told them. ‘Haven’t you had as good a day as you’d expected?’
    â€˜Good enough,’ replied Hector. ‘But we’re only just back from our last trip.’
    â€˜That was a late one,’ I said, taking the cup of tea Morag was holding towards me.
    â€˜Aye, and we didn’t get paid for it either,’ said Erchy.
    I looked at them searchingly. An unrewarding boat trip so often meant that there had been a climbing accident. ‘Ach, but these English are mean,’ said Erchy with a slow shake of his head, and Morag and Behag shot