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

instead of tea if the well gets much lower. It takes that long to fill a pail now he’s there all day.’ She twitched the flowers into position as an impatient dressmaker twitches at an ill-fitting dress, and then put the jug on the table. ‘Beautiful just,’ she murmured. ‘Come away in now an’ we’ll see is she awake.’
    In the other room a torpid figure, its face covered by a newspaper, lay along the couch beneath a window that framed a picture of islands dozing tranquilly in a wideawake sea that the sun was sowing with stars; of hills that were dreamily remote behind a tremulous haze of heat; of a sky that was blue and white as a child’s chalk drawing, scuffed by a woolly sleeve. The figure pulled itself into a sitting position.
    â€˜Ee, luv,’ she said in a voice that was so coarse it made me feel dishevelled, ‘whatever made you come to live in a godforsaken place like this after England?’
    She said, ‘I think I’d go daft if I had to live here among a lot of strangers.’
    She said, ‘You know, luv, just seein’ you come through that door and knowin’ you’ve lived near Manchester, it’s just like a breath of fresh air to me.’
    Erchy said the next day when I was down on the shore giving my dinghy a coat of paint: ‘Here, I’ll take back what I said about the English yesterday, I’m thinkin’ some of them aren’t so bad after all.’
    â€˜Oh,’ I said, with anly conventional curiosity, ‘and what has changed your mind?’
    â€˜Yon woman that’s come to stay this week.’
    â€˜Not,’ I interrupted him, ‘not surely the woman from Manchester?’
    â€˜No, but the one who’s come to stay with Kirsty. Now she’s what I call a nice woman. We took her for a trip in the boat this mornin’ an’ she gave us a good tip on top of her fare.’
    â€˜Good,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we’re not all to be condemned.’
    â€˜Ach, some are all right, I suppose,’ acknowledged Erchy grudgingly.
    Hector sprackled up to us. ‘Tsat Englishwoman’s wantin’ a boat for tomorrow to take her to see tse caves just by herself,’ he said. ‘She says she’ll hire tse whole boat.’
    Erchy looked startled. ‘Did you tell her how much it will cost her?’ he asked Hector.
    â€˜Aye, I did so, but she just said “money’s no option”.’ Hector rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I’ve never heard anybody say tsat before in my life.’
    â€˜She’s away with Ruari this evening in his boat,’ I observed.
    â€˜Aye,’ agreed Erchy. ‘She told us she likes goin’ about on the water so she’s goin’ to share out her trips between the different boats. That’s partly what I meant when I said she’s a nice woman,’ he explained as he moved away.
    The children came out of school in a rush and with barefooted nimbleness picked their chattering way along the road. The day quietened as the boats disgorged their last passengers and the noise of labouring coaches receded into the distance.
    â€˜Did you get a tip from yon woman that’s stayin’ with Kirsty?’ Erchy called out to deaf Ruari as they were making fast their dinghies for the night.
    â€˜Aye, I did that,’ responded Ruari with all the power of his stentorian voice. ‘I got a whole crown from the bitch.’
    â€˜I do envy you being able to understand the Gaelic,’ said the ‘nice woman’, who had paused to watch me as I put the last touches to my dinghy and who was screened by a rock from the sight of the two men, ‘it’s such a qaint-sounding language.’
    I do not know if Ruari’s voice had diffused the sound so much that she had not been able to distinguish the words or whether she had chosen this way of saving all our faces but when Ruari and Erchy came abreast of the