of one of the Solar’s tall mullioned windows, the wide grey light of this chill November day soft upon her skin. I stopped and looked at her, a hollowness in my chest as though my heart had become a vacuum pump.
Verity: conceived beneath a tree two millennia old and born to the flare and snap of human lightning. Emerging to emergency, making her entrance, and duly entrancing.
Whistling or humming the first phrase of Deacon Blue’s Born In A Storm whenever I saw her had become a sort of ritual with me, a little personal theme in the life lived as movie, existence as opera. See Verity; play them tunes. It was in itself a way of possessing her.
I hesitated, thought about going over to her, then decided I’d best get a drink first, and started towards the sideboard with the glasses and bottles, before I realised that offering to refresh Verity’s glass would be as good a way as any of getting talking to her. I turned again. And almost collided with my Uncle Hamish.
‘Prentice,’ he said, in tones of great import and sobriety. He put one hand on my shoulder and we turned away from the window where Verity stood, and away from the drinks, to walk up the length of the hall towards the stained-glass height of the gable-end window. ‘Your grandmother has gone to a better place, Prentice,’ Uncle Hamish told me. I looked back at the vision of wonderful-ness that was Verity, then glanced at my uncle.
‘Yes, Uncle Hamish.’
Dad called Uncle Hamish ‘The Tree’ because he was very tall, moved in a rather awkward way - as though made out of something less flexible than the standard issue of bone, sinew, muscle and flesh - and (so he claimed, at any rate) because he had seen him act in a school play once, and he had been very, well, wooden. ‘Anyway,’ my dad had insisted when he’d originally confided this private piece of nomenclature, only half a decade earlier, on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, when we’d got drunk together for the first time, ‘he just lumbers about!’
‘She was a good woman, and did little that was bad and much that was good, so I’m sure she has gone to a reward rather than a punishment, living amongst our anti-creates.’
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.