Читать книгу Trouble in the Glen - Maurice Walsh - Страница 7
I
ОглавлениеKate Carnoch hung a full kettle high on the kitchen crook, and built the peats up under it.
“The Bart. will be tired, Lukey,” she said. “Send him to bed early! But why am I wasting breath?”
“A habit we have!” Lukey told her. “Would there be a bit of a lemon anywhere?”
“I saw you looking, and you’re no’ blind. There’s three, and I’ll be needing one the morn. Good night to ye!”
The three men sat in the kitchen at the back of the house, so that their voices might not disturb Alsuin, two rooms away. The kitchen was a low, wide cavern of a place, lit by a peat fire that had not gone out day or night for fifty years. The only light came from that fire of peats and bog-pine; and the warm wavering glow gave a sense of intimate cosiness that was old and self-satisfied.
The window was curtainless, and the black-out blinds had been removed, so that the four panes of glass stood out against the iridescent, pale-blue light of the gloaming. Beyond that ghostly glow, far below, the faint phosphorescent gleam of Loch Easan could be seen in the notch of the black woods.
Gawain sat back in a home-made armchair, and could feel the hardness of a springless seat through a flock cushion. This was like old times—not so old, but at the other side of terrible years—with his slippered feet on the warm bricks, and the hunched shadow of himself and his chair alive on the ceiling and against the dresser of old delf on the back wall. On his right, David Keegan reclined in a long chair that creaked as he moved, a pipe between his teeth, and his artificial leg no longer alive with a discomfort that had toes all its own. Lukey Carnoch was busy at a table below an open cupboard, where glasses clinked and a bottle gluck-glucked. He spoke carefully.
“We could be for the first one cold, I’m thinkin’. It is a quart the Major coaxed off Dinny Sullavan up-by at the pub. We told him you were on the home road.”
“Every day for a week we told him,” the Major put in.
“Try that, Bart.!” Lukey invited. “Small for its age—half-and-half, and plenty o’ water.”
Gawain felt carefully for the glass. He knew the ritual. They would have one good drink now, and a bigger later on, and a full jorum of punch before going to bed. And there would be a spate of talk, if these two got their heads; and he would try to get the talk going in a certain direction. He sampled his malt whisky twice, first daintily and then deeply, put his glass cautiously on the floor at his side, and felt for his cigarette case.
“It is some sort of whisky I would say,” he said judicially.
David Keegan cleared an appreciative throat. “Only two better, but not in this place.”
“We ken—we ken!” said Lukey. “I tried the two, and they have their taste.”
Lukey sat low on a straw hassock at the fire corner, and rammed cut plug into an almost black meerschaum. He smoked only in the evenings and in his own kitchen, and had miraculously preserved that meerschaum, amber mouthpiece intact, for all of ten years.
No one talked for a while. David Keegan, at ease, smoked and sipped whisky; Gawain, his head over the back of his chair, sent smoke rings curling to the ceiling; Lukey lit his pipe with a blazing splinter of bog-pine, and built up the peat sods with a crooked-thighed, long tongs. There was no sound but the soft sibilance of the fire flames. And then, from Lukey’s meadow close by, came the earliest sound of summer, the rasp of a corncrake in the gloaming.
“Ay so!” Lukey lifted a head. “There she goes! Our wee lassie was wondering which would be first—crake or cuckoo.”
Gawain thought he would come in here. He said:
“The young lady you call our lassie was wondering more than that.”
“Not that I heard.”
“But you should know, Mr Carnoch, sir! She was wondering who was the biggest dam’ blunderin’ blunderbuss in Glen Easan.”
“Dom’! She never put tongue to them words!” protested Mr Carnoch, poking a peat sod into sparks.
“Translated into your own brand of language,” Gawain told him. “Someone, but not nameless, got that road out there closed on her—her own road down to Camelot—and she will not have it—”
Lukey sat up and shed something of his melancholy. “Man! did she put one of her Tasks on you?”
“You go and boil your head, Lukey!” Gawain told him warmly. “I’m not pulling any chestnuts out of the fire for you—”
“Dambut! that’s mutiny,” exploded Lukey. “You’re a disciplined man, and orders are orders. They’re no’ my orders.”
“Oh hell! Wait—wait! Will someone tell me why that road is closed at all?” He picked up his glass and cupped it in his big hands. “Go on! I’m listening.” He took a small sip. “You begin, Dave!”
