Fleming was startled. ‘That sounds bad!’
Mason hesitated. ‘Yes – but when I ran a check on it to see what had happened there’d been an ambulance call earlier. I contacted the paramedics and they seemed to think there’s nothing in it, except that my uncle’s had quite a severe stroke. Which is bad enough, of course,’ he added hastily.
His final remark, Marjory noted, was very much an afterthought. ‘Of course. Don’t let me detain you anyway. Keep me in the picture, if you would.’
‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’
Marjory watched him go, her mind distracted from her own problems for the moment. There was no doubt about it, the Masons were a weird lot. What normal son, on hearing his mother has complained of being assaulted, runs a check on it to see whether she’s telling the truth?
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother, he didn’t assault you.’
The relatives’ waiting room at the hospital was fortunately empty, so that Conrad Mason had no need to consider the sensibilities of strangers in giving his reaction.
Brett sat in a red moulded-plastic chair, ignoring the polystyrene cup of pale grey tea placed beside her by a solicitous nurse, with the air of a duchess inexplicably forced to accept hospitality in a pig-sty. ‘Of course he did, dreadful man. I’ve made a complaint to the police so you can see to it that he’s properly punished.’
A muscle twitched in Conrad’s jaw. ‘Can I explain to you the laws of evidence in Scotland? You can’t convict on one person’s unsubstantiated word against another’s. There has to be what’s known as corroborating evidence – the tiniest bruise, perhaps? But there isn’t a sign of one, is there, and as far as Uncle Jake is concerned, he had a stroke, that’s all.’
‘But you don’t understand why he had a stroke!’ Brett cried. ‘That – that creature decided there was something wrong with a couple of the cows and phoned the vet. And now they’re going to come – come –’ her eyes welled up – ‘and simply obliterate your grandfather’s memorial!’
Conrad went very still. ‘Do you mean – foot-and-mouth?’
‘Well, of course. Only he’s so stupid it probably isn’t – and the whole herd, and Jake too, most likely, are going to die because of that man. If you don’t call that assault, what is it?’
The vision came before him of Satan, old and fierce and proud, reduced to nothing more than a tonnage of dead meat, his progeny slaughtered with him so that the line he had perpetuated would simply vanish, tipped on to a pyre or into a pit. Conrad felt sick, dizzy. There seemed to be a sort of roaring in his head.
‘Got to get out of here,’ he said thickly, pushing roughly past his mother who had jumped up anxiously. He hurried blindly past the sympathetic stares of staff used to seeing distraught relatives, and somehow got himself outside into the open air. He lit up, dragging the smoke into his lungs as if it were as necessary as oxygen.
It was some time before he came back. He was pale but calm and when his mother started to fuss round him he shook her off unkindly.
‘Stop pawing me. Now, there’s no point in discussing this. You can stay here; I’m getting back to the authorities to see if anything can be done.
‘But as far as Strachan is concerned, drop it. All you’re doing is making a fool of yourself, and while you’re entirely at liberty to do that I won’t have you making a fool of me as well. You’ll withdraw the charges, and then you’ll keep your big mouth shut. Is that clear?’
Brett’s eyes had been fixed on her son’s face. She began to smile, almost to simper, fluttering her short, stubby eyelashes.
‘Oh, Conrad, you are so like your grandfather! Sometimes I almost think it’s him speaking to me. As long as I have you, I feel I haven’t altogether lost him.’
Before she had finished the sentence her son left the room, as if he were afraid of what he might do if he stayed.
Laura’s phone rang at half-past four. She picked it up, expecting it to be a call from a friend who was arranging theatre tickets; instead she heard Max Mason’s triumphant tones.
‘Laura? I’m just phoning to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye? You’re going somewhere?’
‘Home – I’m going home. It’s the most extraordinary thing. After I’d talked to you, I suddenly thought of the local store where we’d always had an account and phoned to ask. The woman who runs it – she’s a miserable old cow, I could never stand her – just said,’ he put on a comic Scots accent, ‘“You needna’ fash yersel’, he’s in the hospital wi’ a stroke!” I couldn’t believe it – the Minotaur’s had a stroke!’
It was hard to know how to respond. Given the jubilation in his voice, ‘How very sad for you’ was clearly inappropriate. On the other hand, in these circumstances, you couldn’t exactly say, ‘Great news!’ either.
‘Your father? Is it bad?’ That seemed safe enough.
‘Oh yes. I called the hospital, and he’s in intensive care. They’re not even sure he’s going to pull through. So of course I’ve got to head right on back to Chapelton to take up the reins before my cousin gets in on the act.’
‘Chapelton?’
‘That’s the name of the farm. We’ve a thousand acres up above Glenluce. But look, I’m not signing off. We’ll get together soon, OK? Once I’ve sussed out the situation, maybe you could come up and stay.’
Being in close contact with Max and what was clearly a dysfunctional family was almost the last thing she wanted – except losing her only line to Dizzy. ‘That would be wonderful,’ she said hollowly. ‘Thanks very much.’
‘Oh, sure, sure. I’ll be in touch.’ Then he added with a short laugh, ‘You could chat to my cousin about Dizzy – he always fancied her.’ The phone went dead as if he were in too much of a hurry to say goodbye.
Laura set it down slowly, uncertain what to make of what she had heard. She was chilled, certainly, by the callousness with which Max had reacted to the news of his father’s illness and possible death. True, he’d described him as a monster, but in her experience sons in that sort of relationship often suffered abnormal devastation when the object of their professed hatred died. Perhaps Max was covering up his feelings, even from himself? If so, there would be a price to pay later and she could only hope it wouldn’t be any of her business when the bills came in.
There was no knowing how long he would take to get back to her – if, of course, he did. Promises were easy to make and easy to break; she could imagine that Max might well be prey to changeable enthusiasms.
She knew where he lived now, though, and where Dizzy had spent that winter when she was twenty. She got out the road-map again and looked it up; she thought she’d seen the name Glenluce this morning and yes, there it was – over to the north-west in the area that looked almost bare of settlement.
So why should she wait for Max’s unwelcome invitation? Chapelton was obviously a large farm and in a country place like that would be well known; there would be people, too, who had lived in the neighbourhood for years and someone might, just might, if she jogged their memory, remember a pretty blonde who had worked there fifteen years before. In the middle of February, with a foot-and-mouth epidemic raging, it wouldn’t be hard to find accommodation and she could pursue her enquiries at leisure.
And there was another thing, too. Nick Dalton had invited her to come up with another psychological slant on something which would have wide popular resonance. Could anything be more suitable or topical than the impact of a disaster like this on a rural community – and it would give her the excuse, too, to go around and talk to the locals.
Best of all, she wouldn’t be forced into close proximity with Max, or find herself intruding on a household where surely someone must be upset about what had happened to the head of the family.
When the phone call she had been expecting came, it was her friend to say ruefully that she hadn’t been able to get tickets.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Laura said. ‘I’m going to Scotland.’
A small, quiet professiona
l voice in her head was still murmuring about obsession, but she talked it down. By its very definition, an obsession seemed irrational to the person having it and this was entirely rational – wasn’t it?
It was after nine o’clock when Marjory Fleming got back to her parents’ house that night. She’d worked a twelve-hour shift – not particularly unusual, except that this one had imposed an emotional strain which had left her feeling so drained and exhausted that she barely felt able to get out of the car.
Six hours of it had been spent at Bob Christie’s farm, shouting at first through a loudhailer, an operation which had left her throat raw. Eventually, she’d persuaded him on to the phone, then at last got him outside to talk. He was defiant at first, defeated at last after hours of patient discussion. They had confiscated his shotguns, escorted the slaughter team in to do their work, and she had seen the bluff, cheery farmer she had known since he was a cheerful, thoughtless youth – an unreflective man, she would have said – reduced to a sobbing, shivering wreck by the agents of the state, of which she was one.
Marjory hoped her presence had been helpful – Bill, sounding worryingly listless when she spoke to him, had thought on balance that it would be – but feared that Bob would never forgive her, not for what she had done professionally but because she had seen him a broken man.
What she needed now was her own fireside, with Meg the collie asleep on the hearthrug, a dram in her hand and Bill in his armchair on the other side, dispensing his unique blend of sound common sense.
Well, she wasn’t going to get it, was she – not even the whisky, since her father was notoriously abstemious. And sitting feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help either. She had a job she loved which was difficult at the moment, that was all, and she despised whingers. With that thought she found the energy to get herself out of the car.
The hardest part was getting herself ready for the onslaught – the children, uprooted and unsettled, her mother fussing because she hadn’t been home to supper, her father wanting to know too much about what she had been doing all day. Well, she might as well flick the upbeat switch right now.
She let herself into the house, calling brightly, ‘Hello, I’m home!’
There was no reply. The hall was in darkness; Angus Laird did not believe in having lights on when there was no one there to see them, though it would have grieved him to find himself on the side of the Greens. There was only a line of light under the sitting-room door and through it Marjory could hear the sound of voices and laughter.
After a moment’s fumbling for the handle, she opened the door, and four startled faces looked up from a table by the fire where playing-cards were set out.
‘Goodness gracious, is that you?’ Janet Laird exclaimed. ‘I didn’t hear the car – I was just fair away with all this nonsense.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Quarter past nine! I don’t believe it! Cammie Fleming, it’s high time you were in your bed.’
‘I’ll go when we’ve had one more game of Racing Demon,’ Cammie bargained. ‘Just the one.’
His grandfather said gruffly, ‘You’ll do as your grannie tells you. But one more maybe wouldn’t do much harm.’
Cat, who had been tidying the cards into neat piles, said, ‘Hello, Mum! Grandpa’s been teaching us how to play but he keeps winning.’
Marjory stood in the doorway feeling disowned, surplus to requirements. She heard herself saying to her father childishly, ‘You never taught me to play Racing Demon. I didn’t know you could.’
‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know.’ He didn’t even turn to look at her. ‘Well, if we’re having another game, you’d better get on with it, laddie.’
‘And then straight to bed,’ Janet added with mock severity.
‘I’ll just make myself a cup of tea and a sandwich.’ Marjory had deliberately not eaten in the canteen; she hadn’t wanted to upset Janet by refusing the meal that would have been saved for her.
‘Fine, dearie,’ her mother said absently. ‘Oh, now see what your grandfather’s done!’
Upstairs, in the little single bedroom Janet had sentimentally kept as a shrine to her daughter’s girlhood, untouched apart from the poster of Alice Cooper (representative of defiance rather than homage), taken down the day she left home, Marjory set down her mug of tea, a slab of cheese and an apple on the dressing table. Faded photographs were still tucked round the rim of the mirror – old schoolfriends, family pets, a young and improbably tidy Bill scrubbed up for some important event she had now forgotten.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror. There were shadows round her hazel eyes and deepening lines between her brows and on her forehead; her skin was showing evidence of the ravages of time and she was pale with tiredness. It was the face of a middle-aged woman but the mouth – oh dear, she recognised the sullen downturn she had seen in that same mirror so often, so many years before. It was the ‘think-I’ll-go-and-eat-worms’ expression of the misunderstood teenager she had thought gone for ever, long ago.
At her age! And when she had been all prepared to resent the demands and the fussing!
The ridiculous side of it struck her. The drooping mouth in the mirror quirked up at the corners and then she and her reflection were laughing together, laughing till the tears ran down their cheeks in twin rivulets – a little hysterically, perhaps, but with therapeutic effect.
8
It all looked just as it had when he had left the place fifteen years before: the same rolling hills carrying stands of trees on their crests like horses’ manes, the same grey dry-stone dykes with the grey clefts above which were their source, the same scrubby whin bushes lining the roads, mud-spattered by the passing cars. The same weather, even: a blustering wind, squally showers and a heavy sky hinting that worse might follow.
Max Mason floored the accelerator on the beaten-up hired Peugeot, overtaking a sedately driven Rover dangerously close to a bend in the road, as if speed could outdistance memory. He’d left London in a mood of savage triumphalism the moment he could get his hands on something – anything – that would get him up to Scotland; he’d driven all through the night on only a couple of hours’ sleep in the car park of a service station and a cup of black coffee. He’d seen a grudging dawn as he crossed the border but now, on the sweeping road which led to Glenluce and beyond that to Stranraer, he could feel the elation draining away. In its place there was an uneasy churning in his gut and his head buzzed with a confusion of conflicting emotions and uncertainties. He’d forgotten how that felt after all these years in London being his own master, clear-minded, controlled, controlling. Now . . . Families, there was no doubt, were seven sorts of hell.
He needn’t have come. Indeed, he might have been wiser to stay in London and let the unspeakable Conrad run the show until the curtain came down. The best ending for the drama would be the Minotaur dying, leaving Max as his heir with full executive powers and the ability, at last, to pay back a few old scores by telling Conrad to jump. The worst would be Max wasting his time running the farm while the Minotaur lingered inconveniently on, then died leaving everything to Conrad – but, Max recalled suddenly, you couldn’t do that in Scotland. Your children had to get ‘the bairns’ part’ of your estate and frankly, with business the way it was at the moment, anything would be better than nothing. So scrub that. It would be a tragedy if the Minotaur made a full and rapid recovery and young Theseus went back to London empty-handed. Theseus loses again.
The memories Max had so deliberately stifled for years were surfacing now, along with the bitterness, the anger and that hideous feeling of helplessness which was worse than anything. But he’d been here before, often enough, and he knew what to do. He was good at it and it worked, mostly.
Shaking his head as if that could dislodge the thoughts, he turned his mind very deliberately to other things – a bit like steering a juggernaut lorry on a roundabout, feeding the wheel through his hands until the exit he was looking for appeared.
Laura! He’d th
ink about Laura instead. Max didn’t quite know what to make of her. Her likeness to Di was unsettling; perhaps that was what intrigued him – that, and her cool elusiveness. Usually he could be sure of having the upper hand in any relationship he chose to pursue but she’d led him on so skilfully to talk about himself that he only realised afterwards how little he knew about her. And knowledge was power.
Was she in a relationship – married, even? She must, he supposed, be a journalist, and on the phone he’d caught a hint of a North American twang, but that was all he’d picked up. Now she was calling the shots and he was uneasy. He’d have to call her soon, redress the balance. Have her up to stay, perhaps, all being well – or rather, all being very far from well as far as the Minotaur was concerned.
And there was his mind again, swerving uncontrolled back to the prohibited subject. Strange how much easier it was to think of the Minotaur, felled by a thunderbolt from Jove, than about his father, stricken, enfeebled, no longer a worthy adversary in the war of hate . . .
That, thank God, was the Glenluce turn at last. He indicated and moved across into the turning lane, yawning as he did so. It had been a punishing journey and the toughest part of it, dealing with his aunt and his cousin, still lay ahead.
He glanced across the fields as he started on the Glen road and it was only then, with a shock, that he realised what was different, what was, indeed, very, very different. Where were the sheep and cows grazing in the roadside fields? Where were the dots of white on the hillsides, the flocks which were so much a part of the landscape? The fields were empty and great tracts of the hills were bare, a lush, green, uncanny desert.
In London the foot-and-mouth epidemic had seemed irrelevant, the sort of thing you tutted about over a pint before you got back to the serious topic of football. The real world, fast-moving, metropolitan, was where Max belonged now, the world where meat came from plastic trays, not carcasses. It was with a growing feeling of dismay that he pressed on, through the narrow village street of Glenluce where regimented modern houses outnumbered the cottages now, through New Luce with its church and its shop, on over the hump-backed bridge and across the rattling cattle-grid protecting the unfenced road where sheep had right of way because you couldn’t explain to them that they didn’t. Where were they now?
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