Chapter 14: Schism

Eighteen months ago, there was only one person in the world I really cared about, my daughter Aine. At twelve she had not reached puberty because of pills fed to her by her mother. I would have consigned my wife to the past, but Aine insisted that her Mum needed to be rescued from her supposed father, the leader of a cult of neo-Druids. I let myself be convinced and, as a direct result, I discovered my lost family; I have a half-brother and two half-sisters. It was even more surprising to find my father alive and out of jail.

My mother and father divorced when I was four years old, and she absolutely refused to say anything about him when I was growing up. I didn’t even know they were divorced until I went through her papers after she died of cancer. I was far from the only boy in my class whose father was no longer living in the family home, but I was the only one where mystery surrounded the absence; reasoning that he would be there for me if he could, I imagined him dying heroically or serving a life sentence in prison.

My Mum was an able lawyer specialising in the defence of hopeless cases before the local magistrates. As I got to about ten or eleven, her occupation inclined me towards the prison theory. I imagined my father as the client she couldn’t get off and that it was shame at her failure that prevented her talking about him. It came as a shock to find that they were divorced on grounds of irretrievable breakdown just like most of the mums and dads of my friends. By the time I discovered that I was ordinary it was too late – I had already chosen a philosophy of life appropriate for the son of a master criminal.

The only mystery left was why he had never tried to contact me. It didn’t ever occur to me that he was keeping a promise he had made to my mother at the time of the divorce; it turns out that he was under pressure because his new love was already pregnant with my half-brother James. In the absence of the facts, I developed a theory by the time I was at the end of junior school, which led to me formulating a life-plan. I might have joined a gang, or even started one of my own, but there was Hugh Smith-Eggleton in my junior school who wanted to be the leader in everything. I had neither the words nor the confidence to oppose him, so I chose to cut myself adrift from my fellows, becoming solitary and isolated.

As a result of my plan, I found myself on the beach at Broadford, Isle of Skye with one daughter, the centre of my universe, and a grudging agreement to rescue her mother, my wife, from the clutches of an evil man. She was on an island, and we were directed to a fisherman by an old man mending his nets on the sea shore. He sent us to James, my brother. He at least knew that I existed although he had no idea where I lived – and no interest in finding out.

James and his family took the massive coincidence of my arrival in their stride. He and I got on well together from the outset and he willingly helped me to rescue Emer, my wife. He is a successful fisher for lobsters and crabs with a lovely family and no unattainable goals. To say that he is a rock, rooted in his community may make him sound dull but that is far from the truth; he is both a beacon and a shelter in times of trouble. He seems to me to have the qualities that Jesus recognised in Simon Peter, the rock on which Christianity was founded.

My youngest half-sibling, Becky, accepted me into her family with joy. She runs a boarding house in Broadford and this same simple acceptance of people has earned her friends from all around the world who first met her as guests. She, like James, was untroubled by the coincidence of my sudden appearance in their lives: ‘What’s for you won’t go past you’, is her philosophy of life. My father, his second wife and Aine were all too happy to bother about how the meeting had come about.

That just left me and my other sister Ruth. She suggested that it was no coincidence that I had sought out James when I needed help. In her opinion, the Celtic goddess Danu had intervened on our behalf. Aine and I had thrown the pills she had been taking into a river and Danu had interpreted this as a sacrifice, according to Ruth. Emer revealed that the reason for keeping Aine a child was to preserve her gift for foretelling the future; Ruth interpreted this as further proof that Danu was taking a hand in our affairs.

I found myself in a dilemma: neither coincidence nor the intervention of an ancient goddess can be offered as a rational explanation of the facts. All through history, mankind has been baffled by events and it is common to ascribe them to superhuman agencies until a rational explanation is offered by science. The only problem I can see arising is if you attempt to make logical deductions starting from an irrational base. Until I know better, I’m content to accept Danu as the agency behind the meeting with James and the ability that Aine has to predict future events.

That far I am prepared to go with Ruth, but we disagree on what may happen next. My sister is convinced that Aine is not dealing with Danu in the proper way, but she can offer no convincing proofs. She points to interpretations by twelfth century monks and Victorian revivalists but there is no reason to believe they got things right. What I observe is that Ruth has been worshipping the goddess for years and has made no impression, whereas Aine has been gifted with the power of prophecy; this ability has survived through puberty, which shouldn’t have happened, according to Ruth’s rule book.

My sister is undoubtedly sincere in her beliefs, and I have neither the knowledge nor the eloquence to challenge her. Twenty odd years ago, when she was only fourteen, she was sufficiently convinced to leave her family and join the cult on Pabay Island, adopting the name Aithe. She kept her adherence secret until her sixteenth birthday when she moved permanently to the island. Her conviction took her to the bed of Humphrey, the leader of the cult, and her loyalty to the goddess didn’t waver even when she realised that Humphrey was an evil man.

While she has complete faith in the antique gods, I pride myself on my rational view of things. Until science comes up with an explanation for the coincidence of James and me meeting, I am content to ascribe the effect to the influence of Danu. It didn’t disturb my pragmatic view of the world when the influence extended to my daughter. I could, of course, see that predicting the future would give rise to conflicts but I convinced myself that the prophesies were couched in such a way that Aine would not be greatly troubled by them.

In fact, it took very little effort to dismiss any concerns about the influence of Danu on my daughter. It was an entirely different matter, however, when Ruth ascribed my insights to Lugh, grandson of Danu and another of the forgotten Celtic deities. I deeply resented any suggestion that my mind was subject to control by any entity! My response was equally irrational: instead of working through the problem, I put it out of my mind. I concentrated all my attention on purely practical problems arising in the business and the extended family.

Ruth raised the subject of Lugh as a result of a series of solutions I had found that had escaped the notice of other family members. They had the same facts, but I somehow connected them in a novel fashion that threw a whole new light on the problems. I wasn’t so foolish as to imagine that it made me smarter than the others, but I did have a little ego-boost from thinking that it was all my own work. It shocked me when Ruth suggested that there was a pre-historic god floating about in my consciousness prompting me to reach conclusions.

“I didn’t know who it was exactly,” Emer confided, when I eventually admitted my disgust. “You’ve always had strange ideas, Jack dear, and they had to come from somewhere. Perhaps it’s better that you can blame them on Lugh. The alternative would be to admit that you’re as mad as a hatter!”

We had both been busy and the discussion took place as we were getting ready for bed, the only time we seemed to be able to be alone together. I stomped off and lay under the covers with my back to her while she finished at her dressing table. I wasn’t paying much attention, and it was only when I felt her naked breasts on my back that I realised she had taken off her nightgown before slipping under the covers.

“It really doesn’t matter that much where your abilities originate, you silly man. The important thing is that you have helped to improve the lives of our friends and family. You used to laugh at the psychiatrist for always wanting to label things.”

I turned round and we spent a blissful time gently sharing our passion.

“You’re right,” I told her as we lay entwined in post-coital harmony. “I don’t mind all that much what Lugh gets up to so long as I get to enjoy this part of our life.”

There’s nothing like wonderful sex to improve your outlook on life!

When I resolved to attend secondary school as little as possible, my Mum sent me to a psychiatrist for treatment. She was a really nice lady, and she wasn’t altogether convinced that I was making a mistake in learning from the internet rather than the education system. I was by far the most interesting of her clients and we often spent the entire session discussing some esoteric topic I had unearthed on Google. It was less that she treated me like an adult and more as if she reverted to being a teenager, joining in the often-absurd speculation that formed the basis of our conversations.

Her only problem was that she liked to give everything a classification; I learned many of the psychiatric terms and I can still give a fairly sound rendition of the jargon. I saw her over a period of three or four years, and we had a low-key dispute about individuality and groups that surfaced from time to time. I took the view that lumping people together made it difficult to fully understand their individual needs. I think I was vehement because I was guilty of assigning the people I knew to groups and then using that as an excuse to ignore them as boring.

Her argument was that the process of deciding the group to which people were assigned led to insights into their individuality. She constantly made the point that her task was to improve the lives of her clients, and it was important for her to know what methods had succeeded in the past with similar problems. She certainly did a lot more good than I! Perhaps I also benefitted from her wisdom: in any event, I woke up the morning after Emer spoke, reconciled to Lugh inspiring me to find solutions to problems. The big advantage of developing your own philosophy is that you can tweak it to fit changing circumstances. I concluded that ascribing my insight to Lugh was an acceptable expedient until science discovered what was really going on in my head.

I certainly needed help with a problem that blew up into a major storm shortly after. It began with a zephyr when Hamish, the young lawyer who intended to marry Ruth, phoned for help in diverting her from saddling their pending baby with an almost un-pronounceable name from the Irish legends. The problem is that my psychiatrist would have placed my sister on the autistic spectrum: Ruth is utterly honest and fiercely determined that what she believes is correct. At the same time, she has learned to be considerate of others, although she wasn’t always so careful of tender feelings.

She first met Humphrey when she was fourteen and fell under the spell of his charm; that was not enough for my sister, and she devoted herself to studying the doctrine that he was peddling as leader of the cult. By the dawn of her sixteenth birthday, she knew more of the basis of the cult than he did. On her birthday, she missed the school bus, drew her savings from the bank and took herself off to Pabay, refusing to return home. Her mother and father had no idea that she even knew of the cult, and they still cannot understand why she left a comfortable home and a bright future to become the mistress of a man as old as her father.

At that time, she was unaware of the hurt she caused to her parents and friends; it was so simple, in her mind: she believed in the Scions of Sgathach, and it was necessary for her to declare her faith by joining them. She found it difficult to understand that other people could draw different conclusions from the same set of facts so she assumed that her Mum and Dad would understand her decision.

She looked at the cult objectively and I think she still holds the views she lived by at sixteen; in the meantime, she has learned a great deal about human nature, but it has not shaken her faith in the principles of the cult. Her decision to share the bed of the leader was based on her reading of the oldest material available. She acknowledged that the twelfth century priests and the Victorians suppressed the more earthy aspects of the worship of the old gods but there was enough evidence to convince her that sex, especially with the cult leader, was an important gateway to complete understanding.

She is most reluctant to talk about her disillusionment with Humphrey and many of the practices he instituted. It is clear that she quickly accepted that the problems centred on him and not on the tenets of the cult itself. Before she was eighteen, she had worked out a scheme to distance herself from Humphrey, using the money he had accumulated to form a purer version of the Scions in a remote Welsh valley. I believe her when she says that she had no idea of the source of the money she diverted until after it was spent.

Emer’s mother, calling herself Sgathach, formed the cult on Pabay although no one who knew her believed there was any spiritual basis to her decision. She seems to have lived a life detached from reality, assisted by frequent use of cannabis. She grew enough for her own use and to supply friends and neighbours in the greenhouse on the island. Claude, with his knowledge as a pharmacist, developed a strain of marijuana that thrived out of doors on Pabay. The authorities are struggling to eliminate the weed in the wake of Humphrey’s conviction.

It was his arrival with Bert that resulted in the plant being exploited commercially; he used his underworld contacts in Birmingham to market the product. He had been running from the gangs when he reached Skye, and the supply of good cannabis got him off the hook. It was the Birmingham drug bosses that pressed him to buy a farm in Wales which they planned to use as a distribution centre closer to larger towns and cities. Humphrey convinced them that the negotiations for purchase should be left in the hands of his efficient but innocent assistant, Ruth. It wasn’t hard for her to persuade him to give her power of attorney; her name would be on all the documents if the deal went sour and the police identified the farm as a source of illegal drugs.

After the deal was signed and sealed, she simply refused to hand the farm to Humphrey or the drug barons. She wrote a will leaving the property to her father and defied the hard men to shift her. She is reticent about the threats she withstood but she was stronger than Humphrey and it was he who cracked. Under the threat of being knee-capped, he unearthed his hidden savings and paid off the hoodlums. Ruth offered places on the farm to many of the cult members on Pabay and quickly formed a successful community.

Humphrey was forced out of the business of selling pot and had to find another source of income for the cult. Ruth, at sixteen, had brought her meagre savings with her and this gave him the idea of recruiting heiresses. He used his own undoubted charm to entrap young girls, and he collected personable young men to travel to boarding schools on recruiting drives. Later, he sent these same men to woo Emer, the woman he believed was his daughter.

My sister has many admirable qualities, not the least of which is her ability to learn quickly and adapt her plans to suit. One of the very first things she learned after she moved to Pabay at sixteen was that other people needed a great deal of explanation of things that were obvious to her. By the time she had established herself in Wales, she had adapted to that fact and proved herself to be a decisive and inspirational leader; everyone on the farm knew why they were there and what was expected of them.

She saw no reason, however, to explain the past. She soon recognised that she had treated her parents badly by going away without any explanation, but she would not contact them to clear the matter up. It wasn’t until Humphrey was arrested that our dad discovered the Welsh farm had been willed to him. She was very upset when she discovered that her actions had pained her Mum and Dad, but she argued that a later apology and explanation would do nothing to remove her offence. She was genuinely astonished when she was told that Dad had put the same cash in her name as he did for James and Becky.

Her ability to make rational deductions and coldly accept the consequences seems almost inhuman but she is, at the same time, a warm and generous person, much harder on her own faults than on the faults of others. There are only two instances that I can discover where her logical reasoning has let her down. She was a virgin when Humphrey took her to bed, and she took no precautions to prevent pregnancy; he told her that he was a potent man and that her failure to conceive was because she was barren.

After Humphrey she had one or two affairs when the cult required her to do so but they seem to have made little impression on her. It wasn’t until he was in prison that she met Hamish Smith, a lawyer, who became the first man outside the cult who bedded her. You can’t come right out and ask such a thing of your half-sister, but I have the clear impression that he was the first man she actually desired in her bed, rather than simply to satisfy the wishes of the ancient gods; she openly admits that she didn’t enjoy sex before she met Hamish. She assured him that she was incapable of bearing children and flatly refused to believe that she was pregnant by him.

“Balor wants to take control of the Scions,” Ruth told me when I had been talked into phoning her.

“I called to ask about the name you’ve chosen for your daughter,” I replied in a puzzled voice. “What has Lugh’s grandfather got to do with anything?”

She giggled. Aine is a giggler and even Emer has been known to do so but Ruth does not giggle.

“Are you in labour, taking gulps of laughing gas to take the edge off the pain?”

“I’m not due for another two weeks although Deichtine is attempting to kick her way out as we speak.”

I made her begin again and eventually sorted out what she was talking about. She giggled because I knew that Balor was Lugh’s grandfather; she still considers me an ignoramus on Celtic legends and sceptical into the bargain. The Balor she mentioned is a flesh and blood man who has been her deputy on the Welsh farm since she moved there with over half the cult members.

“You don’t have to tell me that calling my daughter Deichtine will be a burden to her when she goes to school. Hamish is picking a middle name, and we thought we’d let the family choose another so the kid can fade into the unwashed masses if she chooses.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my solemn sister Ruth?”

“I’m just so happy, Jack. Hamish is more than I dreamed was possible in a companion and lover. I always used to dismiss James and Becky – even you and Emer – as lightweights because you made such a fuss about being in love. I thought that my devotion to the Scions of Sgathach was an infinitely superior emotion.”

I had waited until Emer had gone to bed since Deichtine was most active around midnight, so Ruth rarely got to sleep much before one o’clock in the morning. She was certainly in a mood to chat although she would pause from time to time to gasp as Deichtine made a particularly vicious attack on her Mum’s womb. She was relaxed and happy, laughing at herself much of the time.

It was clear that she was giving all her attention to the coming birth, except that, once or twice, I detected an underlying unease.

She laughingly told me that it was her own fault that she would not be married before Deichtine arrived. She hadn’t accepted the result of two separate pregnancy tests, and she even doubted her doctor when Hamish more or less carried her bodily to the surgery for an examination. She convinced herself that she was like Queen Mary, Henry VIII’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon, who had a supposed pregnancy that wouldn’t come to term. Ruth made a joke of it, but I sensed there was an underlying concern that she, like Mary, had an incurable growth.

She was finally convinced by an ultrasound scan showing the shadowy but unmistakeable outline of a baby. Until that moment she had refused all Hamish’s offer sof marriage on the grounds that she couldn’t burden him with a sick woman. After she accepted that she was pregnant, she resisted matrimony on the grounds that she didn’t want him to feel trapped into doing the right thing in the eyes of the world. I admire his patience!

Eventually, Ruth agreed to wed but insisted that she would not do so while she looked like a stranded whale – her description. Hamish enlisted friends and relatives to change her mind but the more you push Ruth in one direction the more she will resist. She was laughing at herself as she told me this during the phone call. Her final argument was to declare that ‘Deichtine Smith’ sounded ridiculous so she would remain single and register the child as Deichtine Cuthbert, her own maiden name.

She began to sound sleepy at that point when the baby quietened down. We had laughed together but I felt that I learned more about my half-sister during ninety minutes chatting than all I knew of her before. Apart from her opening remark, she had made no reference to the cult; as we were making our valedictory remarks before concluding the conversation, I mentioned this omission.

“I feel a bit guilty about Balor to tell you the truth. I’m totally focused on me and the baby, and I can’t bring myself to worry about my people. I intended to ask for your advice, but I’ll wait until Deichtine makes her debut.

“Goodnight, dear brother and thanks for listening.”

“You can have no idea of the pleasure it gives me to have you, James and Becky as my siblings.”

That was the last time I spoke to Ruth before her confinement; it happened several days before the due date and everything went off without any alarms – nothing that troubled those of us on the fringe of the event, at least. Deichtine was born in a hospital in Wales, but she was soon brought to Lincolnshire by her bedazzled parents. Hamish is a rugby player with huge, ungainly-looking hands but he touched his daughter so gently that she didn’t stir. Ruth probably had a theory that she should be out working in the fields the day after giving birth, but she had the sense to keep her opinions to herself for once.

She revelled in all the attention centred on her and her daughter. Ruth had devoted half her life to the Scions of Sgathach but for three months she hardly gave them a thought. She was settled in the guest suite of her parent’s home almost totally focused on motherhood. What attention she could spare from her daughter she devoted to her family, finally bridging the chasm that had formed when she left home on her sixteenth birthday. James and Becky brought their families to visit; my siblings inducted me into their coterie by telling me what happened during the years I was absent.

Hamish spent as much time in Lincolnshire as he could, but his chief role was to establish a family home for Ruth and the child. Their arguments were usually heated and often public, so the family was unable to avoid a detailed knowledge of their deliberations. Hamish proclaimed himself willing to learn to be a lawyer in any rugby-playing country in the world while Ruth surprised us all by announcing that she would live in a hotel in Edinburgh to enable her man to continue with his present career.

Deichtine would wake at almost any noise except for the shouts of her parents as they establish their devotion to each other at the tops of their voices. They eventually settled on finding a rural area on the West Coast of Scotland where Hamish would become, in his words, ‘An ambulance chaser’. By this he meant that he would become a general solicitor taking such work as was offered by his neighbours. I had doubts about his ability to contain his exuberant personality in the face of a life resolving boundary disputes and conveyancing.