Pearl Fishers Read online

  ROBIN JENKINS

  The Pearl-fishers

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Other titles by Robin Jenkins

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The manuscript of The Pearl-fishers was found in a drawer after Robin Jenkins’ death by his daughter. It had no title, and it was not clear whether this was a work he had intended for publication, or if he had put it aside because he was not happy with it. Three other versions of this novel are stored in the National Library of Scotland among the rest of the papers he bequeathed to the library, which arrived in a suitcase shortly after he died in 2005. One is the opening chapters of a very early draft, written in a spiral-bound notebook in Jenkins’ tiny hand-writing. In this embryonic, untitled version, there are as many crossings out and alterations as there are untouched sentences, the pages a succession of inky matchstick words and scored-through lines whose meaning only becomes clear when one starts to decipher the miniscule print. The notebook is splattered with tea.

  The two other versions are typescripts, bearing the title The Tinker Girl. One of them appears to be identical to the copy published here as The Pearl-fishers and must be, one assumes, a copy of the manuscript found in the drawer. The new title embraces the whole family at the centre of the story, a group of five weary travellers who make their living from the jewels to be found in Scottish freshwater mussels. The party comprises a dying grandfather, his middle-aged daughter and her three children, two of whom are young, and one, Effie Williamson, who is nineteen.

  The original, politically incorrect title, The Tinker Girl, which focuses on Effie alone, would have been no mistake or slip on Jenkins’ part. As he makes clear from the outset of the novel, the word tinker was an insult, freighted with centuries of suspicion and dislike on the part of those seemingly respectable citizens who mistrusted the travelling people as filthy, thieving, and possibly worse. Along with its overtones of ostracism and prejudice, however, that early title also evokes the almost fairy-tale quality of the story that follows, with its ancient resonances of outcasts trying to make their way in a world hostile to those who are unconventional, or unattractively poor. There is something fable-like about Effie, too, so out of kilter with the rest of her family that she might almost be a creature from another element or world, a selkie, sprite, or the heroine of a Border Ballad rather than a twentieth-century novel.

  Jenkins, however, was not a fanciful novelist. For all his imaginative verve, his eye was firmly fixed on the moral universe rather than on any invisible faerie kingdom. Born in the village of Flemington, near Cambuslang in Lanarkshire in 1912, he was brought up by his mother after his father died when he was seven. He was a school-teacher by profession, and did not become a novelist until he was nearly forty, when he published So Gaily Sings the Lark in 1951. Thereafter, however, he made up for his late start by producing a novel every couple of years from a seemingly fathomless store of ideas. A widely travelled man, he taught in Afghanistan, Spain and Borneo, using these locations for some of his work, although he set more of his books in Scotland than abroad.

  In an output of around thirty books, he attracted acclaim for many of his novels, but two were notable triumphs: the masterly tragedy The Cone-gatherers (1955), about a conscientious objector and his hunchbacked brother, who come into conflict with an estate gamekeeper; and the complex first-person account, Fergus Lamont (1979), his portrait of a sardonic poet, born in the slums of Glasgow, who tries to distance himself from his rough upbringing, yet can never settle in his new-found aristocratic milieu.

  One of the intriguing aspects of The Pearl-fishers is that it shares the same setting – the Ardmore forest in Argyllshire – as Jenkins used in The Cone-gatherers, as well as in his first novel, and takes place only a few years after those unhappy events. This seemingly edenic backdrop offers Jenkins’ characters space for spiritual clarity, a timeless, unworldly environment where the essentials of life can be calmly examined. In the case of The Pearl-fishers, those essentials include an almost holy degree of goodness, and a young woman’s torment on discovering love, but mistrusting not only the motives of the man offering it, but what may become of her – psychologically as well as materially – if she succumbs to her desires.

  The story is told largely from the perspective of the beautiful and courageous Effie, who has brought her family by horse and cart over two hundred miles from Sutherland to Argyll, so her terminally ill grandfather can die and be buried near his own people. Her counterpart in the tale is Gavin Hamilton, already known to Jenkins’ readers as hero of his deeply contemplative novel A Would-be Saint. The Pearl-fishers is thus doubly interesting, introducing the admirable Effie, but also continuing the story of a man with some claim to be the most likeable, if stubborn, of Jenkins’ creations.

  In this new novel, Hamilton is lightly sketched, perhaps too lightly for those who have not previously encountered him. As the earliest handwritten copy of the book shows, Jenkins initially described him at some length, as one of the foresters who ‘spoke least and smiled most’; later he edited back his introduction to this uncompromisingly, almost indecently humane man removing, among others, a sarcastic reference to him as ‘a would-be saint’ and the fact that he gave part of his pay to a charity for the poor.

  When we meet Hamilton and Effie, in the years immediately following the Second World War, Hamilton is a forester in Ardmore forest, where he had worked as a conscientious objector. In A Would-be Saint, Jenkins follows Hamilton’s life, from boyhood in a Lanarkshire mining town, when his father is killed in the First World War. From a very young age, Hamilton showed himself to be different from other children, hating to see anyone hurt or bullied. A clever boy, who would have gone to university had his mother not died, he was also such a good footballer that he might have been signed for clubs such as Hearts or Queen’s Park.

  Widely liked, despite being taunted as a Creeping Jesus for his heart-on-the-sleeve Christianity, he nevertheless had few real friends. When the Second World War broke out, he became a pacifist and, like other ‘conchies’ in Jenkins’ fiction, ended up in Ardmore forest. This was where his story ended, shortly after the end of the war. Jenkins, however, clearly wanted to know what turn his life next took.

  As he intimates in the opening chapters, Hamilton is now planning to become a Church of Scotland minister, and is going to university in the autumn. Already his godly otherness is making some people uncomfortable. He unsettles the foresters’ wives: ‘Though it was in their nature to be hospitable they were always relieved when he left. It was as if they had done something wrong – although they had absolutely no id
ea what it was – and Hamilton felt it his duty to help them find forgiveness.’ As Jenkins later writes, ‘Those who carefully measured their own charity thought he had a damned cheek trying to show himself more Christian than anyone else.’ Therein lies one of the author’s most vexed questions: the dilemma of how to live a charitably honourable life without implicitly or offensively denouncing others.

  What he makes less clear in this novel than in A Would-be Saint, is that Hamilton is not a prig. He is simply – and complicatedly – a good man trying to live out his beliefs. The survival of decency and innocence or idealism in a corrupt world is a common Jenkins theme. It takes a dramatic turn in this novel when Hamilton takes the travelling family into his house. In A Would-be Saint he brought home a pregnant prostitute he had known at school, to the vulgar amusement of the town. The intervention of his outraged girlfriend, who paid the girl to leave, not only ended his engagement but cut short this experiment in compassion. Now he has another chance. Yet idealist as he is, even Hamilton knows that ‘there was no virtue in being kind to people if in doing so you humiliated them’.

  What he has not bargained on is falling in love with the girl. When, within a few days of meeting her, he asks her to marry him, he sets off a chain of complications, the simplest of which are the social implications of this unlikely union. Far more interesting and complex are the psychological and emotional consequences of such a marriage, all of which are seen from Effie’s point of view.

  With typical directness and earthy sensitivity, Jenkins imagines the inner life of a girl in her poverty-stricken and precarious position: ‘Effie’s own hopes of escaping her present way of life were almost extinguished. Who would come and rescue her? No one in the whole world.’ But she is wrong. Here is a handsome young man, who unlike most other men she has known does not want simply to get her into bed, but appears to admire her and to want to care for her, and her young brother and sister. Among the many problems this declaration of love creates is a question of pride. As one of Hamilton’s fellow foresters comments: ‘He’s probably thinking that this is the best opportunity he’s ever had to show what a good Christian he is. She won’t let herself be used in that way.’ In A Would-be Saint, one girl’s father advises her, ‘Better an alcoholic for a husband than a would-be saint.’ This novel could be read as Jenkins’ attempt to address that throw-away remark. Thus a seemingly simple love story becomes fraught with ethical and emotional ramifications.

  The Pearl-fishers could be seen as an account of what happens when a prayer is answered; of what to do or feel when someone, and something, is almost too good to be true. Though it is told in simple, pared-down style, with almost parable-like simplicity, there’s a serious grittiness in this novel. Almost roughly at times, Jenkins addresses the harshness of life for a young woman like Effie, and for her less thoughtful mother’s unplanned offspring. Unafraid to discuss sex, rape, and physical or mental brutality, he allows the suicide of Effie’s grandmother to hover broodingly over the tale.

  Written, one assumes, sometime after the publication of A Would-be Saint in 1978, The Pearl-fishers has many of Jenkins’ usual ingredients: strongly drawn characters who combine a measure of decency with unthinking small-mindedness; a high degree of hypocrisy and moral cowardice among the so-called good and great; and throughout it all, a quest for a spiritually ethical way of life, the whole recounted in a compelling but uncompromisingly pastoral tone, with the author ministering to his readership like a preacher to his flock. The rather appealing period feel of the novel is perhaps a product of Jenkins’ excessive economy of style. While on some levels it is a less sophisticated novel than many of his others, even so, it is a powerfully affecting and memorable tale.

  Jenkins once wrote that: ‘If it was to save itself from being used for evil purposes goodness needed its own kind of cunning and stubbornness.’ The Pearl-fishers sees his hero Hamilton take that credo and begin to live by it. The tantalising question that hangs over this novel is, can he make it work?

  Rosemary Goring

  February 2007

  One

  EVERY SECOND Saturday, at midday, the men came out of the forest and gathered at the hut beside the road to collect their pay. If the weather was reasonably good, that’s to say if it wasn’t pouring, they would linger for a while before cycling off home, most of them in the direction of the little fishing village at the mouth of the sea loch, and one or two towards the remotenesses at its head, where their crofts were. Used to working in lonely places, often alone, they looked forward to those relaxed chats, enjoying one another’s company, joking and laughing, mostly in Gaelic, enquiring after their respective families, discussing their work, mentioning sightings of otters, deer, pine martens and eagles, and making arrangements for the weekend.

  One was noticeably different from the rest. An observer, asked to pick out from among the dozen or so the one who as a sideline took church services when the ministers were ill or on holiday, would without hesitation have pointed to Hamilton. Not just because of his black beard which, according to Deirdre McTeague, the forester’s ten-year-old daughter, gave him a resemblance to Jesus feeding the five thousand as depicted in one of her Sunday school tracts. Even if he had been clean-shaven his remote inward gaze would have set him apart. Our observer if he himself was proficient in Gaelic must have noticed, if a story or joke was being told that needed a little profanity to give it point, that the raciest and most idiomatic Gaelic was used. This was so that Hamilton, whose Gaelic was not so fluent, wouldn’t be able to follow it and therefore would not have to feel offended. His ambition was to be a minister of the Church of Scotland. His workmates didn’t mind so long as he didn’t try to practise his Christianity on them.

  He was seldom invited to their homes. Their wives were never quite at ease in his company. When he visited them it was as the would-be minister and not as the workmate of their husbands. Though it was their nature to be hospitable they were always relieved when he left. It was as if they had done something wrong – although they had absolutely no idea what it was – and Hamilton felt it his duty to help them find forgiveness. They complained to their husbands, who laughed. ‘That’s just Gavin. What do you expect from a man that reads his Bible on the hill and once gave his whole pay packet to a tramp?’

  What made it still more baffling was that the children, even the toddlers, seemed to have no difficulty in understanding him. They even called him Uncle Gavin.

  The two women who had known him best, Sheila McTeague, the forester’s wife, and her friend Mary McGilp, a land-girl who had almost got engaged to him, had often discussed him. They had decided that his agonies of conscience during the war had left him in some way spiritually maimed. He had become incapable of showing love and perhaps of feeling it; except in the case of children.

  Mary had gone back to Glasgow where she had married a man who had served on bomber planes, without damage to his mind or soul.

  But if Hamilton was ever to become a successful minister he would have to have a wife. Miss Fiona, the Kilcalmonell minister’s sister, had offered herself, but she was at least ten years older and very plain, with no figure to speak of. That would hardly matter. They couldn’t imagine her in bed with a man. In many other respects she was entirely suitable, being pious, prudish and virginal.

  Hamilton could easily afford to give his pay packet to the tramp. He had been left quite a substantial amount of money and some valuable property, by the eccentric devout old lady, Mrs Latimer, who owned the Kilcalmonell estate. Her husband and two brothers had been killed in the 1914–1918 war. She had approved of his pacifist principles.

  It was expected that he would soon go to Glasgow or Edinburgh to begin his studies. There he would meet some ladylike woman, perhaps a minister’s widow, with influential family connections and two or three children. These would save him the trouble, not to mention the ordeal, of begetting some of his own, for if it was hard to imagine Miss Fiona in bed with a man it was just as hard to imagine Ha
milton in bed with a woman.

  Two

  ONE SATURDAY, in June, when the sun was blazing on the loch and in all the hedges wild roses were in bloom, the forestry-workers’ confabulation was interrupted by the appearance on the road of two decrepit creaky carts drawn by small shilpit horses, one of which seemed to be lame. On the first cart the reins were held by a grey-haired woman in a red cardigan. Huddled beside her was an old man wearing a hat. On the other cart were two children and a young woman. Her hair was short and raven-black. She was wearing thick dark trousers more suitable for a farm labourer and a black jumper that in itself was not remarkable but rather emphasised a bosom that was. What a waste, was a thought that occurred to more than one of the men, such fine breasts on a tinker girl who was no doubt unwashed and smelly, not to say skelly-eyed and with a mouthful of rotting teeth.

  ‘Tinkers, by God,’ cried Angus, the foreman. ‘Where do they think they’re going? We don’t want their kind here. Human trash, and not so human at that, doing their business behind bushes, like animals.’

  Other comments were not so bitter and contemptuous. But then, their only son had not been killed in the war.

  ‘I believe there used to be a colony of them in Kilcalmonell.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘Their camps nowadays are up in Sutherland.’

  ‘So they must have come a long way.’

  ‘It shows. That first horse is lame.’

  ‘The old fellow looks sound asleep.’

  ‘Or dead.’

  ‘Dead drunk,’ cried Angus. ‘They beg for money and then waste it on drink.’

  There were chuckles. Angus himself was no Rechabite.

  The carts had stopped. The young woman jumped down. She did it nimbly, though she was evidently very tired.

  She patted the horse on its head and bent down to look at its leg. There was a fondness between them.