by Sarah Moss
He watches the rain. He listens to it running on the roof, to the drumming on the southern windows and the tinkle from the gutter and drainpipe. In Japan, Mary says Melissa told her, there are gardens designed to sing in the rain, with bamboo pipes at different heights over ponds and bronze bells set for raindrops to ring. You could make an orchestra of a Scottish valley, or even a holiday park, set up bells and chimes and drive everyone crazy with it. Next door’s gutter is overflowing, dripping onto their metal picnic table. He should have taken care of that, Peter, just because he lets out his cabin all the time doesn’t mean someone else is responsible for looking after it. They’d always agreed about that, on the Management Committee, no need to go wasting money on janitors and caretakers and what-have-you, the men were all perfectly capable of looking after their own properties. Well, some more than others. Always better to leave before things go bad, you’d think David would have learnt by now, you’d think those last years at work would have taught him that at least. He and Mary can still go out, anyway, over to the other loch, a nice drive and then a ride on the ferry. It used to be all right to go out for a drive, just to feel the wheels on the road and see the hills rewind in the rear-view mirror, to play the gears fast up the hills and glide down, before everyone had a carbon footprint, or at least before you kept being told about it. It’s a good road, up that way. Mary will be awake by now, he thinks, or nearly, and he puts down his empty mug and gets up to make her tea.
* * *
Mary makes the breakfast. She doesn’t like him to do things in the kitchen, goes round sighing and wiping the surfaces as he uses them, taking the salt out of the cupboard where he’s just put it and moving it to the shelf, rearranging the knives when he puts them in the block. They eat muesli, which neither of them likes much and can be hard on the gums but it’s good for you and doesn’t generate a mess, with fat-free yogurt and lumpy orange juice that tastes remarkably nasty if you forget and drink it after the yogurt. Then Mary stacks the dishwasher and cleans whatever she wants to clean while he takes a crap. He leaves the window open for her, presumably, to do the same, though since he retired it has crossed his mind that Mary appears not to shit at all. He picks up his book while he waits – one thing about retirement, he’s reading a lot more – and when at last she appears, face done, lipstick, he asks her if she’s still wanting to go out today. Aye, she says, why would we not, we’ll be dry on the ferry and it’s a nice wee café, I can sit in the warm and sketch. That’s what I was thinking, he says, and I’ll take my waterproofs, have a bit of a walk.
She takes his arm as she crosses the threshold, and with the other hand he reaches across to hold the umbrella over her head. She’s nervous, he knows, about the wet wood, though it’s not slippery, and about the three steps down to the gravel. She’s worried she’ll fall, and that when she falls she won’t get up again, and that there will be indignity and pain. Or maybe it’s not that precise, maybe she’s just worried that ‘something will happen’ and there’ll be no help, no cheery paramedics in green. He conducts her to the car, matching her slow steps, swaps hands with the umbrella while he opens the door for her, swaps back while she grabs his arm to lower herself into the passenger seat and position her handbag cat-like on her lap, shuts the door on her, for her, and goes back to lock up the house. Rain blows under the umbrella. Somehow it matters if she gets wet and not if he does. Just walk, he thinks, this performance of frailty became self-fulfilling months ago. Put some proper boots on your feet and stand on them. They’re at the age where you lose what you don’t use, even more quickly than what you do.
He shakes raindrops off his coat, gets back into the car. The windows are already steaming up from Mary’s warmth and although this car clears the condensation before your eyes, like magic, he leans forward to wipe the windscreen with his sleeve. This is what he doesn’t have time for, waiting for a demister, running the engine and not going anywhere. He starts the engine, drives too fast up the gravel track to the barrier. Beside him, Mary sighs, tightens her grip on the handbag.
It’s not too far to the café, not as the crow flies. They used to walk it every summer, sometimes more than once a week; nine miles each way but you can take your time, no risk of running out of daylight this time of year. If you walk the trail up the shoreline to the river, the old road takes you through the woods over to the next loch, to the big house on the shore with the converted out-buildings and the jetty. The café is there, in the old boathouse, one wall made of glassed-in arches where once the laird’s rowing boats would have bobbed. In the sitting room at home there’s a photo of Mary and sixteen-year-old Melissa sun-bleached on the old road, turning back to smile at him – he remembers the tender aftermath of one of those rows between mother and daughter that echoed around that summer like thunderstorms in the mountains, never so far away that you stopped thinking about them – and in one of Mary’s photo albums a whole series of the kids messing around on the shore, you could almost say playing, in a way that they had long outgrown everywhere but the lodge.
But those crows don’t fly any more, not for Mary. He takes the road fast. Well, he’s been driving it thirty years, hasn’t he, knows it the way he knows human anatomy. Mary reaches for the handle above the window and hangs on, inhales as if to speak but says nothing. He changes gear, wonders what will be the last knowledge to leave him, will his neural pathways forget their own directions before he loses their map, will the city that’s been home all his life swirl and blur while he still holds all those medical-school mnemonics? Will he remember his mother’s long-buried face when he can no longer name the Prime Minister? He’s still capable of learning, of course. Keeps up with the BMJ and he’s going to sign up for those Italian lessons this autumn. Might even go to Italy, next summer, if they do sell the cabin, might as well. Hike the vineyards, Mary could look at art. Oops, bicycle. Rather him than me, in this weather. David, for goodness’ sake, says Mary, you nearly hit that poor lad, will you slow down for the love of God.
He accelerates into the next bend, feels the back wheels slide just fractionally as he and she tilt inwards. That’s what ABS is for, isn’t it, and all the other acronyms for which he paid so much? You couldn’t throw this car off the road if you tried. If you won’t slow down, she says, you can just pull over right here and let me out, I’ll walk back.
She won’t.
It’s not us I’m worried about, she says, there’ll be joggers and kids on bikes and all sorts, it won’t do, I won’t have it.
All right, he says, calm down. He can hear Melissa at the back of his mind, bossy undergraduate Melissa who knew everything and had discovered in her first year of French and Sociology how everyone ought to behave under all circumstances. Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. They’ve forgotten, that generation, who gave them equal opportunities legislation, who made space for women in medicine; who treated black and white patients, rich and poor, just the same for the first time ever; who gave women contraception and arranged abortions the first day they were legal. There are worse things, sunshine, than being told to calm down when you’re getting into a tizzy.
The windscreen wipers, which detect the density of rainfall and set themselves accordingly, slow their beat. He indicates, takes the switchback turn for the hairpin bends up the hill, a fine smooth EU-funded miracle of engineering that sees maybe two dozen cars a day, off season. How could the English be so stupid, he thinks again pointlessly, how could they not see the ring of yellow stars on every new road and hospital and upgraded railway and city centre regeneration of the last thirty years?
They’re in plenty of time for the first ferry of the day, and not many cars in the potholed car park. This water is choppier than theirs, ruffled by a wilder wind, and the valley’s cloud is higher though of course still raining. Rings spread in the puddles and he has to pass a few parking spaces to find one where Mary won’t worry about getting her feet wet. He wonders where the weather would have changed if they’d walked over, if they’d been ou
t in it, if he’d been feeling the rain against his face and enjoying the protection of his good waterproofs. Well, he’ll get out a bit, while she’s in the café. He’ll go along the shore where the kids once competed to build the tallest piles of stones and dared each other deeper into unnaturally cold water.
The car detects darkness so all the inside lights come on as he turns off the engine. But it is, he thinks as he gets out, raining less. He stands to tie his laces, bends down with straight knees, feels the stretch in his hamstrings.
He holds the umbrella over her, as if he were the doorman in one of those hotels, as he helps her out of the car, waits for her to stabilise before he closes the door and bleeps the locks. She had a phase of locking the keys in her little car, once. Almost every week he’d come home and have to jemmy the side window with the straightened- out wire coat-hanger he’d started keeping on hand in the garage. It occurred to him only recently, only after all the CPD courses started blethering about post-natal depression, that Marcus was a baby and Melissa a toddler that winter and in that situation he saw enough mothers too tired to think straight if not actually depressed. Unintentional overdoses, silly domestic accidents, the diseases of exhaustion and suppressed immunity. It’s not that he chose to work those hours. That’s just what it was like, then, if you were a doctor. He saved lives, didn’t he? People came to him in their fear and their pain and he made them better, the NHS made them better, over and again without them ever having to think about money. And he gave Mary and the kids a comfortable living, all those school fees and she never had to work, never had to worry, very different from his mum’s life. It was what a man was supposed to do and it wasn’t easy or fun but he did it, he provided for his family. Look, she says, the sun might almost be going to come out, over there. The sun is not going to come out any time soon. You’d think the sun will never shine again, that it’s probably not even up there any more, is drifting away from us in disgust towards another set of planets. He pats her hand where it’s holding his arm, gives it a squeeze, and she looks up and smiles.
She wants, of course, to sit downstairs on the ferry and so, to be fair, do the other presumably hardier passengers, including the couple in boots and waterproofs surely planning to walk whatever the weather. David and Mary always used to go on the top, even when there was a gale howling down the valley, and after the first ten minutes the crew told them to go inside, that it wasn’t safe for the children. He once caught Marcus spitting over the side, and though he told him off he could see why he’d done it. There’s something about fatal drops that makes you want to launch a bit of yourself, just a mouthful, over the edge. I’m going up, he says, only be a few minutes. You’ll get soaked to the skin, she says.
He pulls up his hood as he steps over the ledge in the doorway, this boat apparently designed for the high seas, for foaming waves. He wonders how they got it here, before the EU road was built, a steel ship that can carry a hundred souls plying a loch in a valley five hundred metres above sea-level and more to the point four hundred metres above the nearest main road. He climbs the iron steps to the top deck, his hand on the dripping rail warm and dry in his waterproof gloves. Rain spatters his shoulders and his hood. He leans against the railing, feels his bones begin to throb with the ship as the engines churn and the two teenaged boys in thin jackets with the ship’s name across the backs cast off and coil the ropes. He watches the dark water stretch, the grey hillsides and wet trees pull back. This loch is the best place of his life, he thinks, this double retreat, the valley where he comes from his forest lodge for peace and quiet, and he’s sorry if that’s a cliché, if Dorothy Wordsworth and Sir Walter bloody Scott and Queen Victoria herself felt the same way, but clichés wouldn’t be clichés if they weren’t true.
He goes back down to Mary after he’s wiped rain off his glasses for the third time, and finds her, as expected, chatting, this time to the hiking couple who have spread their OS map across the table. We love it up here, the girl says, one of those English accents evolved to be audible from High Table or the bridge of a battleship or whatever position of command happens to be on hand, and of course the right to roam is fantastic only it would actually be easier if there were public footpaths that were both on the ground and on the map, it’s all very well being allowed to walk anywhere but we seem to spend ages trying to find paths. Well, says Mary, don’t you have some ad or whatever they call it on your whatsit, isn’t that how people do it now? Come off it, he thinks, she knows what a mobile phone is, he had one back in the ’80s, revolutionised being on call. And she does know about apps, what does she think she uses to talk to Melissa? Phone, says the boy, an app on my phone. Yes, well, she says, probably best to carry a compass as well, just in case. The maps come with downloads now, says the boy, and you can sync them with your GPS, but you still can’t find a route when it’s not on the map. We’re hoping there’ll have been enough people up there to make a reasonable path. There used to be one, David says, maybe five years ago. I haven’t been up since but I doubt it’s gone. And if you know where you are on the mountain and there’s enough visibility, you don’t need paths, that’s the point of the right to roam, you can use your common sense and read the land. Mary gives him a look. Oh well, says the boy, we’ll do our best, and if it works we’ll maybe see you on the way back, have a good day yourselves.
There was no need, Mary says, for that, didn’t we get lost often enough ourselves, back in the day? He stands up to watch through the steamed-up windows the vague shapes of pier, buildings, the boys rushing about again. Footsteps run along the deck overhead and the engines lurch and roar. They used to be waiting on deck at this moment, ready to jump onto the jetty the moment the chain was lifted. Aye, he says, maybe we did, but I never blamed Holyrood for it, they could stay in England with their public footpaths and their nasty little government if they don’t like it up here, couldn’t they? Oh shush, she says, help me up those stairs.
He needs the boys’ help to get her over the step between the boat and the pontoon. He can feel her tense as they approach it and she freezes in the gap in the railings, seeing herself fall, catch her foot in the space between the moving deck and the wet logs of the jetty, or confide herself to the wood and find it slippery underfoot, sprawl broken under the gaze of the young men and the couple now consulting their map outside the café. You won’t fall, he wants to say, but his saying so will make no difference. I’ll hold you, he says instead, and one of the boys says, we’ll no let you fall, hen, promise, you just hold on to me now. I can do it, he thinks, she’s my wife, but the boy stands with one leg on the boat and the other on the pontoon, swaying a little from the hips with the water’s movement, and the other one waits with arms outstretched to receive her. Go on, love, he says, you can do it. She mutters something that he decides not to hear as ‘shut up’ and takes the step, received by the young man who then escorts her up the pontoon, almost with his arm around her, almost as if she’s his granny. David meets the eye of the other boy, who is thinking of offering him help, and steps down without lowering his gaze. Bring it on, laddie, he thinks, just you try.
Mary looks up and smiles as they enter the café. It’s one of those indoor spaces that holds more light than the sky outside, its white walls almost luminous, the wooden floor gleaming and the rough grain of the roof beams back-lit. There’s a smell of coffee and wet coats, and a family with a baby in a high chair and two young children gathered around the big table in the window. The children, both in red wellies and muddy trousers, are pressing their noses and sticky fingers on the glass wall, trying to look down into the water at their feet. Smears right across the glass. I’ll go over there, Mary says, out of people’s way and a nice view to sketch. Will you be staying for a coffee or are you off out right away? Off out, he says, if you don’t mind. No, she says, I don’t mind, and he sees that she really doesn’t mind, or rather that she wants him to go, that she’ll probably smile at the sticky kids, let them see her drawing, and strike up a conversation
with the mother, who is holding on to her coffee as if it will save her and staring out of the window while the dad reads yesterday’s paper. The waitress is busy behind the counter. Will I order your coffee, he asks, on the way out? She’ll come over, says Mary, when she’s ready, there’s no rush, you enjoy your walk.
But he doesn’t, really, enjoy it. You don’t live your whole life in Scotland to be scared of the rain, but this weather is odd, too much, the rain drilling the ground and churning up mud. Erosion not irrigation. The waterproofs are all right, they work, but his knee hurts a bit and it doesn’t wear off and the path is so muddy he decides to go the other way, along the road, not that he’s scared of slipping but it’s no fun, picking your way through mud, and it’s not much more fun walking into a driving rain that settles on his glasses and drips off his nose, and between the glasses and the hood and the cloud he can’t see much of the landscape anyway. He should be away at least forty-five minutes, he decides, not to look as if he gave up, and so he walks, hands jammed in pockets, knee aching and pulling, for twenty-three minutes before he turns around. It’s a bit easier, or at least a bit less unpleasant, with the wind at his back. He bows his head and keeps going. She’ll be surprised to see him back so soon, or maybe, worse, she won’t, maybe she knows perfectly well that he’s only taking so long to save face, maybe in her mind she can see his every step. He peers up from under the hood. There is the new hotel now, in the Big House. He thinks it has a bar, thinks he’s seen the menu on the noticeboard by the jetty. Not that he wants to drink before lunch, but they’ll serve coffee, won’t they, and it’s a reasonable enough thing to do, isn’t it, to stop on the way back for a hot drink? They’ll have newspapers, probably, and he can sit there and read and drink his coffee like the bloke in the café only without the disapproval of women lapping around his ankles. It’s a long time since he went to a bar on his own. There might be an open fire, a day like today.