Chapter 15: Survival

It is almost a year now since I drove away from Sadie queening it in her little Welsh tourist town. I expected to face a storm when I arrived home finding instead that my conclusions had been anticipated. I was the only person, it transpired, who was surprised at the notion that I should seize the leadership of the Scions of Sgathach. My main concern was that I would disappoint my sister Ruth, but she had already concluded that she could not continue to lead the cult.

She was convinced that I was the only person capable of doing so; she insisted that I went through the reasons why I was unwilling to become involved. Emer understood my reluctance, but she was insistent that Ruth and I find a solution that would ease the other cult members back into the main stream of society. She felt responsible to some extent for the irresponsible behaviour of her mother and the man she knew as her father.

Hamish lifted the mists of Celtic mysticism and let in some much-needed fresh air.

“You’re all half-daft. You give yourselves fancy names and then begin to believe the legends surrounding them. Aine is a beautiful girl who somehow thrives despite her parents; she is not some sort of incarnation of Danu. By confusing the two you do both the child and the goddess a grave injustice.

“I’ll grant you that some of Aine’s prophecies are uncanny, but she hasn’t once been able to give me the winner of the Grand National! We all have some part of the gods in us – some part of God, too if we would only admit it. In the end it’s not who we are but what we do that really matters.”

We always had done quite a lot for others but now we binned the philosophy and got down to cases. Hamish and Ruth moved to Pabay taking Claude with them and settling him in his little cottage. I wasn’t alone in being unsurprised by this unexpected move – as soon as they made the decision it seemed right and natural. Almost the first thing he did was to find a marijuana plant overlooked by the public health scientists. Twelve of the Scions, who moved to Wales with Ruth, returned with her to Pabay; some of them were suffering from painful joints, or so they claimed, so Ruth relaxed the rules on the use of cannabis.

She claims to no longer be the leader of the Scions but I’m sure that all the others look to her for guidance. The cult members who remained on the Welsh farms divided into two groups; Balor led six men and eight women for a few months before he was deposed. They took over the recent lease from Ruth, but his followers wouldn’t put in the effort to keep the farm solvent. They made a big effort to attract new members using the methods of Humphrey but either they lacked his charm, or heiresses had learned caution. They dispersed after two of the men were convicted of sexual assaults. The original Welsh farm was taken on by Ethnui and some of the elders; it also looked like failing until Bobby moved in, at the suggestion of Alison. He proved to be a charismatic leader with an eye for sound business opportunities. They were producing souvenirs of better quality and finding a ready market both at home and abroad.

The only total failure was at the farm rented after Humphrey was arrested. Most of the people who settled there were recruited to the cult on Pabay after Ruth left. I puzzled over this for some time before Sadie, inert in her Welsh shop watching the world go by, offered a solution.

“The original cult members joined because they were unhappy with what the world offered them. They wanted a new direction and expected to have to work to reach their goal. Most of the later recruits bought their way in and thought they had paid for a lifetime of doing just as they pleased.”

That struck a chord, and I thought of Bobby: his dearest wish had been to run onto the pitch at Wembley wearing an England shirt. When he discovered that his talent as a footballer fell short of international standard, he settled down to make the best of what he had. He became a competent mechanic, and he blossomed as a delivery driver; he would complain about injuries that stopped him playing but he held no grudges against the opponents who side-lined him.

“It’s all part of the game,” he would shrug. “I’ve been known to put the boot in myself when some sneaky bugger beat me for pace,” he would add, with a grin.

In his personal life, he was a notorious womaniser although he seems to have terminated the frequent affairs without rancour on either side. Now he had found Alison, and they were busily arranging their nuptials. She was brought up on a farm and the move to Wales was instigated by her.

“Ali knows all about agriculture,” Bobby boasted. “I’ll manage Ok because modern farming is as much about tractors as it is about crops and animals.”

Now he was running a farm with a bunch of weirdoes that worshipped archaic gods, and I was sure that he would shrug off their inconsistencies and the vagaries of the weather with the same philosophical restrain he employed on the football field. When Ruth ran the farm the mood, on the only visit I made, was one of contentment but Bobby had made the workers positively happy. Sadie had no doubts about the reason for the change:

“He encourages them to have sex,” she chortled. “He enjoys it so much and encourages all the women to feel desirable and all the men think they’re studs!”

Even Balor had been brought back into the fold. He had been pushed into opposing Ruth but when he won the contest the girl who had been the driving force behind his bid, withdrew her support. She wanted to be the power behind Balor but the people on the original farm would have nothing to do with her. He was finally forced out and was lost sight off for several months. He turned up in Sadie’s shop one morning looking woebegone and begging for a job. Instead of employing him, she contacted Bobby who invited the supplicant to come back to the farm.

According to Sadie, Balor is now wooing Ethnui:

“She’s happy enough to let him back into her knickers when he’s learned to please a woman – that is, if she ever wore knickers.”

Bobby’s group are farming the rented land, but the farmhouse is occupied by a rump of the people who left Skye when Humphrey was arrested. At the latest count there are three girls and one young man; a local solicitor has funds from their parents to keep them alive, according to Sadie. The remainder of that group have returned to their old lives, except for the pair doing time, so far as anyone knows; I sincerely hope that they have learned something from their experience.

Hamish was concerned at first that there would be suicides amongst the kids who were on the island when Humphrey was snatched away. They had spent weeks or months being told what to do and think all day, every day; the rented farm in Wales offered them shelter but it left them without orders. I turned to Doctor Google to get some insight and concluded that the people who had flocked to Humphrey were unlikely to contemplate taking their own lives.

The problem is very complex, of course, but it appears that it is people who believe they will not be missed who consider taking their own lives. The rich young folk who bought their way into Humphrey’s cult seem to me to be altogether too self-centred to consider a world without their presence in it. In return for their family money, they expect society to make them happy and fulfilled. I suppose Humphrey briefly provided that.

I offer one last observation on that evil man. He seduced young girls over a long number of years. Although around a quarter of his followers were men he showed no interest in them sexually; his behaviour to the boy he thought of as his own son seems to have been the only time he showed any tendency to homosexuality. He chose victims who were young and naïve – indeed, he completely lost interest when they reached seventeen or eighteen.

His attentions caused considerable harm as I know from Emer and Ruth, but it wasn’t until I met Ethnui that I was able to stand far enough back to gain perspective. His selfishness left them unfulfilled as women - Ethnui was in her thirties before she discovered that there could be any joy in the company of a man in bed. At the same time, the women appear to have responded by developing great strength and determination. At eighteen Emer founded a successful business while Ruth, at the same age, defied Humphrey and drug gangs to buy the Welsh farm.

Ethnui knew from the outset that her place in Humphrey’s bed was temporary until Ruth reached sixteen and could move in permanently. Much later, when my sister became pregnant it was Ethnui who took control of the situation in Wales. It was the last of his mistresses who latched onto Balor and pushed him into challenging Ruth for leadership of the cult.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation: did his appalling behaviour towards the women induce the feisty response or did he, unwittingly, select feisty women to seduce. In the case of Ruth, it is hard to offer an opinion since her character has strong echoes in James, Becky and me; I think she would have grown into a formidable woman whatever choice she had made. It is different with Emer, however, since she stands alone in her family; her brother Eric is lacking in initiative and her mother was lost in some chemical mist from abusing drugs, while her father Bert is a wonderful lieutenant who wants no responsibility.

When I first met her, Emer was an extremely able executive totally in control of her feelings. It was only when she induced our daughter to take potentially harmful medication that a crack appeared in this façade allowing the warm woman to emerge. She is much more like her father and brother now than she was when she first employed me, a little needier and less sure of her opinions. I have very little doubt that she developed a cynical shell to protect her core from the attack by Humphrey.

Both she and I survived concerted attempts to dominate us when we were children. In my case there was no perversion involved but I lived in the same house as a woman accustomed to getting her own way in everything. Both my wife and I resisted the pressures, she by becoming impervious to human emotion while I withdrew as far as possible from the realities of the world around me. Life is a great deal more complicated now but infinitely more satisfying.