The Crow Road

I nodded, and as we strolled amongst them, looked around at the various members of my family, the McGuskies (Grandma Margot's maiden-family) the Urvill clan, and sundry worthies from Gallanach, Lochgilphead and Lochgair, and pondered, not for the first time, what on Earth (or anywhere else for that matter) had given Uncle Hamish the idea for his bizarre, home-made religion. I really didn't want to go into all this right now, and anyway found the whole subject a little awkward, because I wasn't actually quite as gung-ho for Hamish's personal theology as he seemed to think I was.

"She was always very kind to me," I told him.

"And therefore your anti-create will be kind to her," Uncle Hamish said, still with one hand on my shoulder, as we stopped and looked up at the stained-glass monstrosity at the far end of the hall. This showed in graphic form the story of the Urvills from about the time of the Norman conquest, when the family of Urveille, from Octeville in Cotentin, had crossed into England, percolated northwards, swirled briefly around Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and finally come to rest — perhaps afflicted by some maritime memory of their ancestral lands on the seam of the Manche — in what had been the very epicentre of the ancient Scots kingdom of Dalriada, losing only a few relatives and a couple of letters on the way. Swearing allegiance to David I, here they have stayed, to mingle their blood with that of the Picts, the Scots, the Angles, the Britons and the Vikings who have all variously settled, colonised, raided and exploited this part of Argyll, or maybe just arrived at one time and forgotten to leave again.

The peregrinations and subsequent local achievements of the clan Urvill make interesting history, and would make fascinating viewing if the giant window telling the tale wasn't so badly done. The fashionable but untalented son of one of the previous head Urvill's school pals had been commissioned to execute the work, and had taken the brief all too literally. Deadly dull and eye-squintingly garish at the same time, the stained glass window made me want to grit my teeth.

"Yes, I'm sure you're right, uncle," I lied.

"Of course I am, Prentice," he nodded slowly. Uncle Hamish is balding, but of the school that believes long wisps of hair grown on one side of the head and then combed delicately across the pate to the other edge look better than naked sin exposed to the elements. I watched the coloured light from the stained glass window slide over shiny skin and hardly less luminescent oiled hair, and thought what a prat he looked. I inadvertently found myself humming the appropriate piece of music from the Hamlet cigar adds and thinking of Gregor Fisher.

"Will you join me in worship this evening, Prentice?"

Oh shit, I thought. "Perhaps not, actually, uncle," I said, in tones I hoped sounded regretful. "Have to pop down the Jac to talk to a girl about a Jacuzzi. Probably go straight from here." Another lie.

Uncle Hamish looked at me, the grain-like lines on his forehead bunching and tangling, his brown eyes like knots. "A jacuzzi, Prentice?" He pronounced the word the way the lead in a Jacobean tragedy might pronounce the name of the character who has been his nemesis.

"Yes. A Jacuzzi."

That's a form of bath, isn't it?"

"It is."

"Not meeting this young lady in a bath, are you, Prentice?" Uncle Hamish's lips twisted slowly into what was probably meant to be a smile.

"I don't believe the facilities of the Jacobite Bar run to such a thing, uncle," I told him. "They've only recently got round to installing hot water in the gents. The relevant jacuzzi is in Berlin."

"The German city?"

I thought about this. Could I have mis-heard Ash and she have been talking about the briefly famous chart-topping band of the same name? I thought not. "Yes, uncle; the city. Where the wall was."

"I see," Uncle Hamish nodded. "Berlin." He stared up at the violently clashing leaden imagery of the great stained-glass window. "Isn't that where Ilsa is?"

I frowned. "Aunt Ilsa? No, she's in Patagonia, isn't she? Incommunicado."

Uncle Hamish looked suitably confused as he contemplated the garish gable glass. Then he nodded. "Ah yes. Of course." He looked back down at me. "However. Shall we see you for supper, Prentice?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "Just as likely to end up with a kebab, I imagine. Or a fish supper."

"Well, you have your key with you?"

"Oh yes. Thanks. And I'll be… you know; quiet, when I come in."

"Right." Uncle Hamish gazed back up at the crass glass. "Right. We'll probably be off in a half-hour or so; let us know if you do want a lift."

"Surely."

"Right you are, then." Uncle Hamish nodded, turned, then looked back with an intensely puzzled expression. "Did I hear somebody say mother exploded?"

I nodded. "Pacemaker. That's what Doctor Fyfe was rushing to tell us; told dad in the ambulance. But it was too late by then, of course."

Uncle Hamish looked more baffled than ever, but nodded eventually and said, "Of course," and walked off over the parquet with a startlingly tree-like creaking noise which I realised — with a small but welcome surprise — was issuing from his black brogues.

I made straight for the sideboard with the drinks, but a quick inspection of the casement of the relevant window on my way there revealed that Verity the Comely had gone.

Fortingall is a modest hamlet in the hills north of Loch Tay, and it was there in the winter of 1969 that my Aunt Charlotte was determined to consummate her marriage. Specifically, she wanted to be impregnated beneath the ancient yew tree that lies in an enclosure within the graveyard of the small church there; she was convinced that the tree — two thousand years old, according to reliable estimates — must be suffused with a magical Life Force.

It was a dark and stormy night (no; really), the grass under the ancient, straggling, gnarled yew was sodden, and so she and her husband, Steve, had to settle for a knee-trembler while Charlotte held onto one of the overhanging boughs, but it was there and then — despite the effects of gravity — that the gracile and quiveringly prepossessing Verity was conceived, one loud night under an ink black sky obscuring a white full moon, at an hour when all decent folk where in their beds and even the indecent ones were in somebody's, in a quaint little Perthshire village, back in the fag end of the dear old daft old hippy days.

So my aunt says, and frankly I believe her; anybody wacko enough ever to have bought the idea that there was some sort of weird cosmic energy beaming out of a geriatric shrub in a back-end-of-nowhere Scottish graveyard on a wet Monday night probably hasn't the wit to lie about it.

"Naw, she's great, I mean really really great. I'm in love. I love her; I'm hers. Verity; take me; put me out of my misery. O God…»

I was drunk. It was getting on towards midnight in the Jacobite bar and at my normal rate of drinking that meant I'd had about ten pints of export. Ash and Dean Watt, and another couple of old pals, Andy Langton and Lizzie Polland, had all drunk about the same as I had, but then they'd been home for their tea and they hadn't been swilling back the Urvill's whisky for a significant part of the afternoon.

"So have you told her, Prentice?" Ash said, putting down another set of pints on the pocked copper table we were hunched around.

"Ah, Ash," I said, slapping the table. "I admire a woman who can carry three pints at the same time."

"I said, have you told this lassie you love her, Prentice?" Ash said, sitting down. She took a bottle of strong cider from one breast pocket of her navy shirt, and a glass of whisky from the other.

"Wow!" I said. "Ash! I mean, like; wow! Wicked." I shook my head, took up my old pint and finished it.