by Paul Torday
We arrived in front of the Lodge and Anna got out of the car. I saw her put a jolly smile on her face, bracing herself for the worst. In fact, once inside, the house was much warmer than I had expected. Fires were lit in the drawing room, the hall and the dining room, which made the whole house feel more welcoming. Upstairs our bedroom was, as usual, like the dormitory in some spartan nineteenth-century boarding school or, indeed, workhouse. But when I opened the bedroom door to show Anna where she and David were sleeping, Mrs McLeish had managed to create an illusion of cosiness in the guest bedrooms.
Once Anna and I had unpacked we went downstairs again to the drawing room, and drinks. Then I noticed that there were vases everywhere filled with rowan branches, still rich with red and yellow berries.
‘Did Mrs McLeish do those?’ I asked Michael, thinking that they looked very odd.
‘No, I thought they might brighten up the place a bit,’ said Michael.
‘Oh, how sweet!’ cried Anna. ‘It would never occur to David to do anything like that.’
We heard the sound of a car pulling up and went outside. It was David, in a bright red BMW. Anyone else would have hired a Fiat Panda for a journey of sixty miles, but not David. He was standing by the boot unloading some cases when we came out, and immediately roared, ‘The beautiful Elizabeth, how wonderful to see you!’
I allowed myself to be embraced in a tight hug, and became conscious that the atmosphere had rather more gin in it than a few moments ago.
‘And my own dear wife,’ he added, as Anna gave him a cold look.
He kissed her, and she said, ‘You’ve been drinking on the plane.’
‘Of course I have,’ said David. ‘Gascoigne! How are the stags! Fit and well?’
‘Welcome to Beinn Caorrun,’ said Michael, rather stiffly.
David is about six foot, quite large and meaty looking, with tight, curly blond hair that is beginning to go grey. He has the watery blue eyes of someone who wouldn’t say no to a bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a very loud voice. He’s not without charm, though. Not altogether.
Once inside David handed me a box of After Eights, which I loathe, and a bar of soap I think he had picked up at Body Shop in the airport. He gave Michael a litre of Bell’s whisky, saying, ‘Small contribution, old boy, hope it’s the kind you like.’
Then, instructed to help himself from the drinks tray, he poured a good two inches out of the same bottle into a large crystal tumbler and splashed it with soda.
The evening passed without excitement. The combination of the gin on the plane, and then the whisky, and then quite a lot of red wine over dinner, made David soporific rather than noisy. After dinner he sprawled in an armchair next to the fire, a nightcap clutched in his hand, trying to stay awake. In the end, he took himself upstairs before the Robinsons arrived. That was close to midnight: they had been stuck in a tailback on the M74 for an hour, and by this time all they wanted to do was go to bed.
The next morning there was a leisurely start to the day while the men made plans. It was decided that David would go up on the hill and try to get a stag, while Michael and Peter would play golf. Anna and Mary and I would go shopping at the House of Bruar, an upmarket department store just off the A9, north of Pitlochry. It was very much like most other visits to Beinn Caorrun. The men golfed, or killed things; the women shopped. It was at dinner that evening that we departed from the usual script.
David Martin had enjoyed an easy day’s stalking on the hill, got his stag about three o’clock and was back at the Lodge by five. He had a bath and then probably grew bored waiting for us all to return. By the time we came back, and Peter and Michael had returned from their game of golf over in Fife, I think David had already had one or two sharpeners.
When we came down from our baths, we all slumped into armchairs and chatted for a while. My legs ached with weariness: I might not have been up on the hill, but men don’t understand how physically tiring shopping can be. Then Clare put her head around the door and announced that dinner was ready.
The dining room at Caorrun is, I find, always a challenge to one’s appetite. It is partly the colour scheme: crimson flock wallpaper of a pattern once much admired by Chinese restaurateurs; gold-fabric-covered chairs that are so heavy they are almost impossible to move, with black mahogany feet and arms; a dining-room table that would have fitted in well at Stonehenge, also dark mahogany and massive. Around the walls are more pictures of stags. I have tried to persuade Michael to redecorate, but he won’t. He says that his parents liked those colours and they have a period feel. That’s one way of putting it.
At dinner we first had to listen to a detailed account of David’s day on the hill; and then a few amusing anecdotes from the putting green, related by Peter, although the amusement was mostly to be gained at Michael’s expense. This was acceptable: Michael was rather flattered to be the centre of any story, even if he was being teased. Tonight he smiled and even laughed at Peter’s jokes about how he had sliced the ball, and how he found the water hazard, but I could see that he was making an effort. However he said very little, and it was perhaps in a misguided attempt to liven him up that David said, ‘Now then, Gascoigne, what about this Patel affair?’
‘What “Patel affair”?’ asked Michael. I knew from his tone that he hadn’t the slightest idea what David Martin was talking about, and was somewhere off in a world of his own. So David Martin helpfully reminded him.
‘You know, the Sooty that Robinson here has decided to put up for membership of Grouchers.’
There was a deathly silence. I think David realised he had gone too far, but men of that sort, when they get themselves into a hole, generally keep on digging. Anna giggled nervously. Michael looked up from his plate, where he had been chasing a prawn about, and Peter Robinson said in his most icy barrister’s tone, ‘I wish you would use less offensive language, David.’
‘Don’t take me so seriously, old boy. And don’t be so politically correct. The fact is, he’s a different colour to the rest of the members. We’re all what you call white Anglo-Saxon British. He’s not. Might make it a bit awkward for him, don’t you think?’
Michael put down his knife and fork and said, ‘But if you are, as you put it, British, the chances are that very little of you is Anglo-Saxon.’
Everybody looked at Michael, but before anyone could comment he returned his attention to his plate, as if he had just settled the argument. I glanced over at my husband, impressed that for once he was managing to change the subject and defuse a rather tense moment. But David continued.
‘I don’t follow you, old boy. That’s what we are if we’re British: Anglo-Saxon or Norman French, with a few odds and ends thrown in.’
Michael shook his head. ‘No, David. The Romans, and the Saxons, and the Danes, and the Normans were just colonists. Their influence on the genetic make-up of the population was relatively slight. They didn’t kill all the local inhabitants when they arrived. They weren’t ethnic cleansers like Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane. They colonised and, where they could, they ruled the locals, and to a small extent they intermarried with them. But the chances are that your true identity is not Anglo-Saxon, but something else. Your mitochondrial DNA, your maternal genetic inheritance, most probably resembles that of the ancient Britons who originally populated this land at the end of the last Ice Age.’
‘My what?’ asked David.
My mouth had fallen open. Everyone else around the table was staring at Michael with varying degrees of surprise. I had never heard Michael speak about anything remotely like this. Michael talked about golf, and bridge, and stalking, and sometimes, if he was feeling very adventurous, the iniquities of the Scottish Executive and the Land Reform Act. To hear him talking about DNA was like living with someone for ten years you thought worked in a tobacconist’s shop, and then finding out that he was a nuclear physicist. It wasn’t just what Michael had said: his expression had suddenly become combative as he spoke, quite different from his usual style of
avoiding argument whenever possible.
I said, ‘Darling, that’s riveting, but isn’t it a very heavy subject for dinner?’
‘No, no,’ said Peter Robinson. ‘This is good stuff. Let him go on. I’ll put up a white flag if it gets too much for me. Michael, where did the aboriginal inhabitants of this country come from? I thought they were Celts?’
Michael shook his head. He spoke again, this time in a trance-like tone that, for some reason, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
‘Yes, the Celts were here before the Angles and the Saxons and the rest of them. But there were others here before the Celts. Long ago, a wall of ice came south from the polar ice cap. It covered all of Britain as far south as central Wales and the Midlands in hundreds of feet of ice. As the ice moved south, it absorbed so much fresh water and seawater that the ocean level dropped, opening up land bridges between Ireland and Scotland, northern Germany and eastern England, Cornwall and Brittany. Everything for hundreds of miles south of the ice wall became polar desert. Life, for the few humans that existed there, was impossible, so they fled south, or east across the land bridges to refuges farther south, where a few humans survived.’
Michael stopped, as if he had run out of words. There was a silence. David Martin had shown signs of becoming irritated by this conversation, which was quickly turning into a lecture.
‘Old boy, I’m not sure I am following your every word, but it sounds like complete bollocks—’
‘Then listen!’ shouted Michael suddenly, and his tone was so savage that everyone fell silent. I had never heard Michael raise his voice like that before. It was as if a completely different person was sitting at the head of the table, someone I didn’t even know.
‘The main refuges were cave systems in the foothills of the Pyrenees. A few humans survived there. Then, ten thousand years ago, after a final advance, the last ice walls retreated. That was called the Younger Dryas Event, which preceded the last great episode of global climate change. The first sign was a carpet of white flowers, the Dryas flower, that sprang up in the polar desert. As the planet warmed up, the ice retreated back towards the polar ice caps, leaving barren earth where before there had been hundreds of feet of ice. The plants returned: first lichen and mosses, then grass. Then the animals began to move north again. After them came the hunters, also migrating north to colonise Britain.’
I think that by now we all knew something was very wrong with Michael. David, big though he was, had been intimidated by the ferocity with which Michael had curtailed his interruption. He sat looking sulky, with his head down, giving an occasional ostentatious glance at his watch. I knew I had to do something, but I was paralysed by a mixture of embarrassment and concern. There might be dining rooms in Britain where this sort of conversation was the daily staple of life, but not at Caorrun, and we all knew it. At Caorrun we talked about golf, and stalking, and gossiped about our friends. We did not talk about global warming or mitochondrial DNA. Only Peter had the presence of mind to keep the conversation moving, knowing that Michael would have to reach his conclusion sooner or later.
‘So where did we come from, Michael?’ he asked gently.
Michael, still in the same tone of voice that so worried me, said: ‘The first humans to come back to these lands were all the genetic descendants of a woman who lived, probably in a cave, somewhere in the Pyrenees. She is a principal ancestor of the people who arrived in this country at the end of the last Ice Age: a woman from the Mesolithic era. These were the aborigines who first populated our country, and as the ice melted and the sea rose again, they became insulated from subsequent migrations for thousands of years. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings made little difference. Her blood is our blood. Our brains are her brain.’
Michael then said to David, ‘Now we are entering another period of climate change, and the migrations have started again. From Africa, from eastern Europe, from Asia. There’s nothing the membership committee of Grouchers can do about it.’ He speared the prawn he had been chasing around his plate, ate it and then gave a smile that was both unsettled and unsettling. ‘So you see, David, if we took a sample of your blood or saliva and identified your Y chromosomes and your mitochondrial DNA, we might find you were more Ancient Briton than white Anglo-Saxon.’
David had no reply to offer; he remained staring down at his plate.
Michael had finished speaking, and put his knife and fork neatly together on his plate. In the silence that followed, I realised why convention requires that we talk to each other at dinner parties. It is a preferable alternative, however tiring the effort may be, to a deadly silence broken only by the scrape of metal on china, or the intimate sounds of one’s neighbour chewing.
The next morning, after breakfast, which was just like any other breakfast, David cornered me in the drawing room while Michael was out getting the rifle from the gunroom for Peter.
‘That was an extraordinary outburst of old Michael’s last night,’ he said.
It was difficult to disagree. After Michael’s little speech about DNA and cavemen, the evening had ground to a halt. No one had wanted to do very much after dinner, and our guests had disappeared upstairs as soon as they decently could. Michael had also disappeared outside with Rupert, and didn’t come back until after I had put myself to bed. I lay there waiting for him to come upstairs, wondering what on earth it had all been about. Was my husband having a nervous breakdown? A mid-life crisis, whatever that is?
Outside it was quiet, except for the sighing of the wind in the trees. Then I heard a sound, like a long, low, sobbing roar from the woods, not a hundred yards from the house. The strange noise ended in a husky cough. I sat up in bed, wondering what it could possibly be: then I realised that it was probably just a stag roaring somewhere among the trees.
Later, Michael came upstairs, just as I was drifting off into an uneasy sleep. As he climbed into the bed beside me I touched his hand. It felt icy cold.
I said, ‘Darling, are you OK?’
He grunted in a way that might have meant ‘yes’, or it might have meant ‘no’. Then he said, in a low voice, ‘They used to speak to me when I was a child.’
‘Who did, darling?’ I whispered.
‘The hunters who lived in the forest, among the pine, and the birch, and the rowan. I used to see their voices.’
There was a silence while I tried to work out how to reply to this. Then, for some reason, a question popped into my mind.
‘Darling, what is Serendipozan?’
But Michael said nothing, and after a while his breathing, at first heavy, became light and regular, and I knew he was asleep.
I wondered whether I should creep downstairs and try to get hold of Alex Grant. He might understand what was going on here. It might have happened before. Then I wondered what I would say if Michael woke and found me on the phone or, worse, what he would say if Alex simply turned up. I knew I couldn’t face it.
At last I pulled the sheets over my head and tried to go to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, with my eyes wide open. I felt a new feeling that at first I could not identify. Then I knew all at once what the feeling was. I was scared.
Now, confronted by David Martin, who obviously wanted to talk about last night, I said, ‘Michael was just changing the subject. He thought you and Peter were going to have a row about that man, Mr Patel. He simply started saying the first thing that came into his head.’
‘A pretty odd thing to come into one’s head, isn’t it?’
I was nettled. ‘Well, David, if you don’t like it, you should think about how other people might feel about your racist remarks.’
David groaned. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I’m no more a racist than you are. I just like winding people up sometimes.’
‘Well, this is what happens when you do,’ I said sharply.
‘Yes, I’m told that I’m really a caveman.’ David sighed.
‘Are we going to make a threesome at golf, you, me and Anna?’
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‘If that’s what you want to do, then yes.’
David nodded and said, ‘All the same, keep your eye on Michael. It might be worth getting him to see someone. You know, it wasn’t just what he said last night. It was the way he said it. It just wasn’t like Michael at all.’
I didn’t reply, but he was right. It wasn’t like Michael at all.
6
Strangers on a Train
I sat staring out of the window of the train at the Northumbrian coast. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the white crests of the waves sparkled in the sunlight. The train ran past Bamburgh Castle and headed south for Newcastle.
Elizabeth was going to stay behind at Caorrun, a triumph of duty over reluctance, to close the house up for the winter with the help of Mrs McLeish. On the way south she planned to stop with her mother in Gloucestershire for a couple of days, so she was going to drive the Range Rover down, with Rupert in the back. Our parting had been strained. I appeared to have broken her code of behaviour by trying to hold an intelligent conversation at dinner. At least, I thought it had been intelligent. Peter had understood what I was trying to say, and it had been better than descending to the schoolboy conversation about Mr Patel that David had wanted us to have. On the other hand, I had always known it would be a mistake to talk about subjects that were of great interest to me, but not, apparently, to anyone else.