Summer of the Red Wolf Read online

  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil‘s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage..

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1971 by William Heinemann Ltd

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1971

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: iStock

  ISBN 978 1 76029 762 6 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 838 2 (ebook)

  for

  JOY

  with whom I have lived a long time in the love country

  A wolf must die in its own skin

  [George Herbert: Jacula Prudentum]

  CONTENTS

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Prelude

  SUDDENLY I was sick of the savagery of the world. I was sick of the wars and the killing, the rise of new tyrannies, the refinement of old ones, the lies and the politics, the drug culture and the arid pornography, the midden stink of cities, the horror that hung over every tomorrow. I was engulfed in a black despair. I was afraid and ashamed and sad to be a man. I cried for a new birth or at least a baptism into a new brotherhood. I could not have the one or the other. The world would not stop for me. I could only jump off it into a dubious eternity.

  I began to suffer from a recurrent nightmare. I dreamed of monsters, reptilian giants in a landscape of ferns and lycopods and swamps leprous with strange flowers. The skies were black with flapping terrors. The sea deeps writhed with saw-toothed predators. I was there too, wrenched out of time, set back in that vast slaughterhouse which was the reality behind man’s dream of the Garden of Eden. I was alone, shouting my terror among the mindless megamorphs. I cowered from the spectacle of their bloody battles. I ran, witless, through a primeval jungle, deafened by nightmare discords. I would wake, sweating in my tangled sheets, trembling under the impact of so vast an obscenity.

  I became, in the end, a stranger to myself. Even my own hearth seemed a hostile place, as if all the talismans which defined my identity had changed to hostile fetishes. I felt myself cracking into scraps and shards. I knew that if I could not sit down, collect the pieces and put them together again, I might well go mad, or surrender all hope of selfhood by an act of absolute negation.

  Then happened a kind of magical accident, which even today I contemplate with wonder and awe.

  It was a morning in early August. The black mood was on me and I was strolling, aimless, along the Old Appian Way, where the tumbled stones and the marble fragments and the spoliated tombs celebrate the futility of human endeavour. It had rained during the night, and I was poking around the damp earth of the verge, hoping to turn up one of those coins or amulets which sometimes come to the surface of the leached, friable soil. Then a voice called my name and gave me a greeting, in English, with a soft Scots burr to it.

  I looked up, startled and resentful at this intrusion on my childish pastime. The speaker was a tall, muscular fellow, six feet and a half in his walking boots, with a shock of snow-white hair, a ruddy, freckled face and a grin that gave him the look of a satiated goat-god. I stared at him, gape-mouthed as recognitio
n dawned.

  ‘My God! Alastair Morrison! I thought you were still doctoring the heathen in Thailand.’

  ‘I gave it up a year ago – being confused as to who were the heathen and who weren’t. What are you doing in Rome?’

  ‘The same question to you – and a lot of others besides.’

  I was quoting him out of a time remembered. He laughed and so did I. Strange and sad to think I had not laughed in a long time. I took him home with me then and fed him wine and pasta, and we talked of a time when he had been a medical missionary in Chiengmai and I a writer, footloose and feckless in southern Asia. He told me he had retired to his family lodge and bought himself feu-rights and fishing water in the clan lands of the Lews. I told him what I had done and of the strange sickness that had crept upon me in the latter months. He listened, puffing on an old pipe, interjecting a laconic comment or a barbed question. When I had talked myself out, he poured himself another glass of wine and delivered himself of a diagnosis.

  ‘Sometimes a man falls sick of the sunlight itself. He sees everything so clearly that he becomes blind and sees nothing at all. Sometimes he falls sick of reason because the juices which feed his dreaming dry up. It’s time to go then. Time to stick a shell in his hat, pick up the pilgrim staff and take the road.’

  ‘What road?’

  ‘To the place of unknowing.’

  ‘And where the devil is that?’

  ‘A place where you are strange and a stranger and lonely, and because of that, perhaps afraid.’

  ‘At this moment I’m afraid even to walk into the city, and I know it like the palm of my hand. I’m afraid to look into a mirror because I will see the fear in my eyes.’

  ‘You’ve got it bad, laddie.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it bad.’

  He fell silent a while, watching me from behind a cloud of smoke. I remembered, irrelevantly, that even the mosquitoes of Chiengmai were daunted by that foul briar of his. Then he made me the offer.

  ‘Come to me if you like. Long time or short, it doesn’t matter. The place is empty as a barn and you’ll pay your lodging and your liquor, though you’ll have the fishing for free, and a lot more besides.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you.’

  ‘Och, we’re a generous people. Most of the time, that is.’

  ‘Do you mind if I think about it?’

  ‘Don’t think too long, else the sickness will be at you again, and you’ll do nothing. Besides, the air is soft now and the salmon will be starting to run and, if you remember the right prayer, the sea might set calm for your crossing.’

  ‘How will I let you know?’

  ‘You needn’t. I’ll give you the address, and then you’ll either come or you won’t. But even if you take another road you’d better start walking, laddie, else you’ll be like one of those old statues they have here: no ears, no nose, no parts to make love to a woman, no eyes to see the starlight or the sun on the hilltops.’

  It took me ten days to gather my wits and my courage; then I turned my face to the north and set out to find the road to the Isles.

  I left in a state of panic, a man without a skin, all nerve ends and raw tissue. Fiumicino Airport was a horror of harassed tourists and polyglot confusion. London was another; and I drank myself into anaesthesia while I waited for the flight to Inverness. We were packed like sardines into a lumbering Viscount, we climbed into a low overhang of rain cloud and I slept, uneasily, until the touchdown.

  Then a new terror took hold of me. I was born in the sun. I had lived all my life in the bright lands of the Pacific and cities of the Mediterranean littoral. Here was a black runway, shining from the last rain shower, a verge of brown stubble with green pasture beyond, a hillock of black pines whose topmost branches were veiled in ragged cloud. Here was a low sky and a cold unwelcoming light and myself a foolish pilgrim in vain flight from himself.

  I had ordered a car to meet me so that I could move at will – and flee the faster if I needed to; but the car was not there, and I waited half an hour while the tiny airport emptied itself and the old melancholy grew and grew inside me.

  The car came at last. An apple-cheeked girl gave me an apology, a contract, a set of keys and a road map of the Highlands, then left me. I remember that I sat behind the wheel a long time, pretending to study the map, which made as little sense to me as the writing on a rune stone. I was immobilized like a cataleptic, looking and not seeing, knowing and yet unable to direct myself to a single movement. Then the syncope passed. I started the engine, drove out of the gates and took the road to Inverness and the west.

  If I linger over the retrospect of that journey, it is because I understand now that every stage of it was a preparation for what happened to me when I came to the Outer Isles. There were no accidents. Everything was predestined. I was an actor being groomed, all-unknowing, for a drama the text of which he had never read, the dimension of which he could never have dreamed in a lifetime. I, the man of reason, had forgotten how to dream; I, the once believer, had lost belief in destiny, benign or malignant; so I was very ignorant, very open and very, very vulnerable.

  A mile or so from the airport there was a turn-off and a sign: National Monument, Culloden. I was tempted to drive past it. I had no mind to add an ancient sadness to my own very present ones. Then I told myself that this was a folly. I was a pilgrim man and a pilgrim must offer a piety at the shrines along his way, else their saints might turn their faces from him and their demons dog his footstep. I went, therefore, where I did not want to go and embraced a memory which was no part of my inheritance.

  Or was it? Not all a man’s heritage comes to him by will and devising. Once, in Rome, I had lived in the palace where died Henry Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York, brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie, last of the royal line. The Romans, a remembering if not a pious people, had set up a plaque in his honour; and I read it, perforce, at my comings in and my goings out.

  Now I was standing on the field where the Young Pretender had fought the last, tragic battle for the Crown of England. I saw the grave mounds, where, they say, no heather has grown or ever will grow: the grave of the English, the graves of the clans, Camerons, Mackintoshes, Frasers and the rest, the grave of the Campbells of Argyll, who fought against the Highlanders for the German king. I laid a sprig of heather on their mound because, although there is no Scot in me, I am related to the Campbells by a marriage. I rested by the Keppoch stone where Alasdair, sixteenth of the name, died leading the charge of his clansmen. I remembered – how did I remember and why? – the lament that was made for him by his bard:

  …Worthy son of Coll, him of the battleaxes,

  Whom even the Southmen honoured,

  The hawk, bravest of the flight…

  I saw the memorial to the Jacobite Irish, the Wild Geese, the sons of Mileadh, who fell in the rearguard action before Cumberland began his butchery of the Highlanders and their wild, sad hopes. Then I drove away through the avenue of pines, recalling what I had long forgotten: that I, too, was descended from the Wild Geese, who had taken wing in the bad times and flown to the far corners of the world, Australia and Canada and America and all the seaports of China.

  Of Inverness I remember little except the courtesy of the folk who directed me, the English tourists and their prattle in the bar, the cry of gulls, constant over the grey rooftops, the first, unfamiliar lilt of the Gaelic. For the rest, it was a town, busy with people, and I was in flight from busyness and argument and congress and commerce. I was headed westwards to the Islands and the dark ocean. Only nightfall or the weariness of the road would hold me.

  The weariness overtook me at Fort Augustus, the bleak little township on Loch Ness from which Cumberland launched his harrying of the glens. There was a cold wind blowing from the east, and rain in the wind, and the waters of the loch were dark and hostile. The hotel was jammed with the English; but there was an attic room if I could bear the cramp of it, and dinner if I could be ready in twenty minutes, and the night po
rter would serve me a dram any time I felt the need.

  I accepted the cramp and the dinner, stodgy but generous; the dram I could not drink because the lounge was full of the English, little knots and enclaves, some talking softly and some loudly, because they were strangers in a land which their fathers had made desolate and habit had made them too certain or too uncertain of themselves. I was uncertain too – God, how rickety a man I remember from that night! – so I walked out into the wind and the blown rain, looking for a place to drink and be cheerful with it. I found it two minutes away: a tiny stone tavern, with a single bar, and that crowded to bursting, a peat fire, two barmaids, twins of the Earth Mother herself, and an old piper, blowing himself up like a bullfrog with reels and pibrochs.

  I wedged myself into a far corner, ordered a double dose of malt whisky, brown as bog water, and tried to forget who and what I was. Soon I found myself singing – not the words, because they were in the Gaelic and I did not know them; but the melodies I knew, many of them, though I could not for the life of me remember where I had heard them first. Because I sang, my neighbours talked to me; and one tall fellow threw his arm around my shoulder and ordered me to drink with him, ‘to wet the pipes’, he said, ‘because even a thrush canna warble without a dewdrop in his throat’.

  There was a wild and primitive merriment about the place that lifted the spirit. The pipes skirled. The talk rose high, salty and bawdy, Scots burr and Gaelic lilt intertwining, bubbling out of the same thirsty gullet. The girls, buxom as clover-fed heifers, shouted with the rest and poured brown ale into the mouths of their boys. The barmaids bustled and sweated. An elderly crofter did a flailing reel in the middle of the floor while his audience roared and stamped approval. The air was a blue fog of tobacco smoke and peat smoke and damp tweeds and human exhalations. But it was alive. It was a place of union, of warmth and brotherhood, for those who farmed their tiny crofts on the uplands, grazed their sheep on sparse mountain croppings and wondered if the cash and the baled hay would feed them and their cattle through the winter.