The Loch: A Tale from Scotland's Year of Stories

The island rose, accusingly, from the middle of the loch, and on the shoreline at her feet a boat had been conveniently moored, oars impatiently awaiting hands to pull them, the message clear. Come.

Over the deep, dark water, the mausoleum rose like an exposed bone. Behind its barred windows, a yellow light flickered - a heartbeat smothered intermittently by the thick haar as it stalked the surface of the water.

Corra shifted her feet and felt the shingle dig into her bare soles, as if trying to keep her moored to the shore. She knew now that she would cross the loch. That she had to.

She pushed the rough timber of the boat further into the loch. The inky water drank greedily at her toes, her ankles, her calves - and then the boat slipped free of the shore and she stepped in, took up the oars, and rowed.

Slowly, with each knife-edge slice of wood through water, the shore slipped further into the shadows until, at last, Corra’s world shrank to nothing but the boat, the distant light, and the gnawing fear of what might await her. She closed her eyes and rowed. Her mind wandered.

“It’s more like a small sea,” James said.

She weighed a stone in her hand, running forefinger and thumb around its edge like a rote old prayer. She drew her arm back and threw, watching the pebble skip, tumble and sink. Seven. Not bad.

Corra turned and smiled at him. He was gazing out at the loch looking half a fool and half a god, peering as if the meaning of life could be found beneath its surface.

“It’s deep, too,” she said, taking his arm in hers, “like yourself.”

James turned to her with an almost-hidden smile on his lips.

“And monsters?”

“Oh, no - all the monsters are on the shore,” she said. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. She breathed in the new wool of his greatcoat. It smelled wrong to her somehow.

“Good thing I have you here to protect me then.”

Corra closed her eyes as his lips found hers. In that moment, she wished with every reaching part of her soul for the world to halt its march; for clock hands to stop their turn; for lead shards to cease their wingless flight; for firebombs to hold fast in the heavens; and for lovers’ lips to remain forever locked.

The world marched on.

Her shoulders were burning now. The rough-hewn wood of the oars was rubbing her hands raw. But still she rowed, eyes clasped shut, ragged breath rasping, heart thumping in the emptiness that surrounded her.

I have to, she thought. I have to.

Her father had told her tales of the loch when she was a girl - of kings crowned on ancient stones in the hills above; of sunken ships and treasure in the deep below; of witches who wove spells beneath the cloud-kissed trees all around.

It was a place of magic, he’d said. And madness. More than one man had set out on that water and never returned.

Whether any truth rang in these tales, Corra knew the loch had a power. When she thought of her father, more often than not she saw him here - sitting on a fallen log as smoke from his pipe drifted lazily above him, or fishing for trout that would never grace the dinner table.

She wondered now if her memories had been coloured by the fact this was his resting place. If the cold, bone-grey stone of the mausoleum lay elsewhere, would the loch hold such sway over her memories of him?

The only memory of her father that could compete with the loch was the end. She could still see him - her mother’s good linen browning beneath his broken body. She remembered that she felt she should be learning some mighty truth. All she learned was that no man was immortal and that even the finest sheets stain.

Her father had, in the early years of their marriage, made no attempt to hide his contempt for James, referring to him as ‘the sassenach.’ James, to his credit, endured the barbs and digs with the good-humour Corra loved in him.

They were men of different worlds. There was something of the wild about her father – his eyes were the icy water of the mountain streams that fed the loch; his shoulders, even when slouched in his favourite chair, seemed eternally set for carrying; his hands, rough as a lion’s tongue, were built to build – or to destroy.

James was his native London writ in flesh - almost-impossibly angular features set atop a soaring frame; an oh-so-vogue soot-black stroke of moustache across otherwise-unblemished skin; kind eyes of Thames blue caged behind designer glass.

Of course, there were attempts to breach each man’s borders with conversation – but stock crashes and salmon runs are worlds that don’t often collide, and their would-be chats were forever stillborn.

It would take that most human of binding forces – impending violence – to bring them together. As an Austrian artist ranted and raved of ‘breathing space’ and old men’s dreams ran to the horrors of automatic weaponry and unbroken fields of fire, James and her father found their long-sought common ground.

Corra knew her father had fought in the last war – as a little girl she had found a medal of some sort at the bottom of his toolbox – but he had never mentioned it in her presence. Now, she often found him and James field-marshalling dream theatres of war – second-guessing generals, politicians, and the whims of the Austrian artist.

“This is madness; we have to do something,” James had said one morning as the wireless spoke of German tanks rolling into Danzig. He had spent a summer in the ‘Free City’ managing his uncle’s shipping interests, she knew.

Her father gave the younger man a slow nod before his gaze turned to Corra. He held her eyes for a moment longer than he should have. Even in the dim half-light of an autumn morning, she saw the tell-tale glint of tears.

Conflict, conscription, and chaos followed. The story of Corra’s war was one told in the flowing cursive of her husband’s redacted letters and the clipped, unhurried updates of the BBC. Even in the face of the worst violence man had ever visited upon man, the loch, the house, and the landscape remained unchanged.?

But her father crumbled.

Just days before American-made boots marched into Berlin, Corra knew they had reached the end. There was no grand poetry in her father’s final words to her, no soul-shattering confession – “Be content,” he had told her.

The news reached James as a single gunshot echoed first through a Berlin bunker and then across the world entire. With two ships, four trains, and a borrowed bicycle, he traded the roaring crowds and jubilance of VE Day for the echoing refrain of a lone piper and the unique sadness of small funerals.?

After her father had taken to the loch one last time, Corra and James fell into the long-lost rhythms of domestic life. James took to crofting like he did to all things. One day, as he returned from the hills with a brace of capercaillie draped over his shoulders and a knowing mischief in his eyes, she thought back to her father’s final words. She was.??

James and her father differed in countless ways, but they shared an approach to tales of war. Thankfully, Corra found, modern conflict left a paper trail. The reports said he helped liberate Neuengamme; took a machine gun nest single handed in the Ardennes. ‘Hero’. ‘Courage’. ‘Brutal’. ‘Overwhelming odds’. ‘Hand-to-hand’. The morning after she read the report, she found herself looking at her husband differently.

Corra almost screamed as she was torn back to the present. The boat jolted to a halt as if some unseen hand had stilled it from beneath the water line. She turned and saw the dark pebbles of the island’s shore and, beyond, the spectral grey stone of the mausoleum. She had missed the dock by almost a dozen yards.

The mausoleum stood a short walk uphill. Seventeen steps, she remembered – it was tradition for each man of the house to set down a stone on the birth of his first child. Her father’s was the closest to the shore, his engraving still as clear as starlight – ‘mo h-uile rud.’ She walked.

As she took each step in turn – smooth granite here, schist studded with pitchstone there – Corra thought back to the night the troubles had begun.

She lived with half a man. She’d watched, feigning sleep, as James rose softly from the bed and eased the door ajar, stealing into the dark as if seeking escape in the cool clutches of twilight. Countless mornings she’d awake to covers grown cold and a husband hunched over a strong coffee in the kitchen, her questions met with an uncharacteristic evasiveness and coldness.

One night, as spring snow blanketed the glen, she steeled herself to finally follow him. The footsteps led down to the fallow field – the house’s oldest – and a red gate laid down by men she knew only through wall-mounted moments. As a child, she had avoided this pasture.

“Don’t go near – it’s not fit for playing or planting,” her father had said. As usual, he was right. The closest field to the loch, the soil was barren. The only crop it had ever produced was bare boards and nails on the verge where Ossian, the family’s Clydesdale, finally fell.?

Corra followed the footsteps, dark in the virgin snow, until she came to a figure on the hill. There James stood, chest bare, spade gripped and thrust into the unyielding earth again and again and again.

With each desperate thrust his figure seemed to dwindle until, finally, he fell, weeping upon the bloodied handle. She rushed and held him. They never spoke of that night – or the ragged foxhole that remained – again, but James’ wanderings ceased. For a time.

The news had called it ‘the storm of the century.’ The rain and wind lashed the house with what felt like the fury of a pantheon of vengeful old gods. Glass shattered; timbers ripped; and James screamed and sobbed and rocked in Corra’s arms in the candlelit cave of the basement.

The next night, his twilight wanderings began again. This time, the shadows spoke. She could never get close enough to hear every word, but it was clear he was having a conversation as he roamed the hallways of the deadened house – and that violence was the subject.

Corra had reached the last step before the mausoleum. It was a huge marble slab carved with a single word – ‘tòiseachadh’. The story went that it was part of some Christian altar rescued - or reaved, depending on the storyteller – from a long-forgotten English church.

She stepped up to the door of the mausoleum and placed her palm against the timber. She pushed.

In the yellow candlelight she saw him, sat against her father’s chamber. The brass buttons of his dress uniform caught the half-light like the armour of some forgotten king of dust, bones, and old stone.

“We can talk better here,” he said.

Corra stood silent and unmoving. She saw the revolver in his hand, steady for the first time in years.

She realised she had always known that this end awaited them – since the fires of war burned down to cinders, she had known.

A single gunshot echoed first through the glen and then across Corra’s world entire. The deep, dark water of the loch lay unchanged.