I’m glad I wasn’t a servant in the Neilson household, anyway, she thinks. They weren’t exactly pampered, whoever they were.
She leaves the servants’ quarters behind with some relief, and heads back down to the living room. She finds Viola’s wellies and shakes them, in case of spiders or even mice. Only a little dried mud falls out. To her surprise, they are a comfortable fit. The rain has stopped and the sun is shining so warmly that it is raising steam from the flagstones at the sea side of the house. Making her way along this side of the house, she discovers that there is an exterior door to the tower after all. It’s at the far end of the building, and can’t possibly be back-to-back with the one in the kitchen. A private stair? The door looks ancient, its wood bleached by wind and rain, the planks studded with nails. It is firmly closed and possibly locked, but she’s certain that the key will be somewhere on the bundle Mr McDowall gave her. All the same, she decides that she’ll leave it for another day. When she has company. When Cal is here, says the unwise part of her that finds him so attractive.
Beyond the tower, there is another small gate in the exterior wall, already almost obliterated by spring growth. She picks her way along to it, glad of the wellies, avoiding nettles and brambles and low-growing roses, and peers through a narrow iron gateway, into a wilderness of growth, even now in early spring. It will be a jungle later. In search of another, more accessible entrance, she makes her way through the house to where her car is parked and scans the wall beyond the tower on this side. Sure enough, there’s a low stone archway with another worn armorial panel above it. Double wooden gates once barred the way, but one of them has fallen inwards. It lies flush with the ground, weeds and grasses springing up between the joints in the wood. Clearly, Viola had paid to keep the house wind and watertight, but the gardens had not been a priority for her. The other half of the gate is still standing, with a cast-iron handle in the shape of a large ring, held in a clenched fist.
She edges through, but the growth on the other side makes it hard to see the full extent of this walled garden. There are three or four moss-covered apple trees in bloom and what must once have been espaliered fruit trees against the walls. She can make out the roof of a summer house against the far wall, and an extensive climbing rose that seems to have scrambled randomly and unchecked over walls, shrubs and trees and is already showing some tiny buds. There are more of the low-growing and ferociously spiny wild roses in here too. Soon it will all look very beautiful, however untamed. There is a vast, red rhododendron with a cascade of blood-red petals, torn off by the recent squall, and camellias in full bloom, just starting to shed their petals too.
Birds are singing, bees are buzzing everywhere and after this morning’s rain, there are clouds of midges under the trees. It’s early in the year for them, but the damp warmth in here seems to be attracting them. They haven’t yet discovered her, but once they do, it will be an uncomfortable business. She retreats, again overwhelmed by a mounting sense of panic at the magnitude of the task in front of her. Perhaps she should offer the whole place to the National Trust. But she immediately dismisses the idea. She needs the money and besides, she suspects that they are always offered far more crumbling mansions than they have resources to deal with them. She thinks the house is wonderful, but it isn’t exactly a national treasure. She goes back indoors and makes a list of things to do. When it reaches three closely typed pages on her tablet, she sighs, saves it, shuts the device down, and pours herself a small whisky – for medicinal purposes, she tells herself. Garve whisky. It tastes of seaweed and honey and makes her instantly light-headed.
The door is still open, with the curiously shaped stone leaning against it. She can hear the sea, the oystercatchers patrolling down by the shore, the martins flying about the eaves of the house. She sits on the Chesterfield and puts her feet up. Tomorrow is another day, she thinks, just before sleep overtakes her. Unsurprisingly, she dreams about the house and – less predictably – about a ring. In the dream, she has lost a ring and she is hunting for it, searching among the stones and the wild white roses, but it is too small to be easily found, and the undergrowth is much too thick. The spines on the roses hurt her hands. She wakes up with a start and finds that her left hand is indeed hurting. She must have touched something in the garden and now there is a little line of blisters that she has been scratching in her sleep.
Later in the day, she manages to speak to somebody about reinstating the landline. The best mobile signal she can get is upstairs, in her mother’s old bedroom, especially if she leans out of the window facing the sea. There must be a mast somewhere, maybe even on a nearby island. She phones her father.
‘Are you all right?’ he says and she can hear the anxiety in his voice. He is torn between feeling that he should be there, and thinking that she has to stand on her own two feet at last.
‘Yes, I’m fine, Dad. It’s OK here, honestly.’
‘Well, make sure you lock the doors at night.’
This isn’t remotely comforting and she tells him so. He laughs.
‘I know, hen, but I worry about you. You’ll be fine, though. Garve isn’t exactly a hotbed of crime. You said so yourself. Better than the city, anyway.’
Eighteen months ago, she had been mugged in Edinburgh. People sometimes laugh when she tells them, but she generally feels safe in the middle of Glasgow where people don’t walk on by, but can be relied on to help. She wasn’t injured, only shocked and angry. She had been walking from the theatre to stay at a friend’s house in Morningside. She had known one or two of the actors and had made the mistake of accepting their invitation for drinks after the show. By the time she was leaving, the taxi queue was monumental and she had decided to walk. When she was passing Bruntsfield Links, somebody had pushed her hard from behind so that she fell to her knees, snatched her bag and run off before she could so much as scream. The police had found the bag, empty of course, in a bin beside the pathway. She had been unhurt, except for bruised knees, and at least her keys had been in her pocket. But it comes back to her from time to time: the peculiar, random violence of it.
When her father rings off, she thinks once again that it isn’t the non-existent criminal element on Garve that worries her. It’s the great weight of the past that seems to be lingering in and around this old house.
It will be very hard to get to sleep tonight.
*
Later that evening, after a sandwich eaten in front of the television, and a very large glass of white wine, she calls Mrs Cameron on her mobile and asks her about Viola’s grave. It seems that Viola is buried in a graveyard outside a village called Keill, farther along the coast.
‘There are old and new cemeteries. But the Neilsons had a family plot, a lair, up there at the old church, which is just a ruin now. So they opened it up for Viola. The priest came over from the mainland and they had an ecumenical service in the new church, St Columba’s, and then they went up the hill afterwards. Everyone that was able walked after the coffin.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘It was. Your grandmother couldn’t be doing with fuss, but she always came to the island funerals, you know. Anyway, it’s quite a bonnie place, the old graveyard. Perhaps you might like to take some flowers.’
‘I could take some from the garden.’
‘Aye. She’d have liked that. It bothered her that she couldn’t keep up with that huge garden, but she certainly didn’t want anyone coming in regularly either. She liked to keep herself to herself.’
‘I wish I’d known her. I didn’t even know she was my grandmother,’ she says. ‘I mean, I didn’t know I had another grandmother. I thought she had died years ago.’
‘Well, the funeral was a quiet affair, but enough people from the island came. You know, we do look after our own here.’
‘Of course.’
‘We sang “Be Thou My Vision”.’
The melody comes into her h
ead, plaintive and Irish, played on her father’s old fiddle. The words are familiar too. Her parents had sent her to a Catholic primary school while professing not to be very religious themselves, and after her mother’s death it had seemed natural for her to go on to a Roman Catholic secondary school with all her friends. Her father certainly wasn’t a believer, and she remembers having a conversation with him when she was in her teens and fighting against everything that she was being told at school. As ever, Rob had told her to be aware of other people’s feelings, but to follow her heart.
‘How could Mum believe any of this rubbish?’ she had asked him.
‘Your mum was an island girl, Daisy,’ he said, mildly.
She can remember it because he so seldom spoke about her mother’s background, or where she came from. She knew only that Jessica had been born on the inner Hebridean island of Garve, but Rob had always implied that her grandmother on her mother’s side had died soon after he and Jess were married. Other than that, he had managed to avoid talking about her. They had been back to Garve once, when they had climbed the hill and left the silk scarf tied to the tree, but even then, he had been ambiguous about his wife’s childhood home, waving vaguely towards the south of the island. The fabrication had taken root, grown strong and tall like the Clootie Tree. When they had done the ‘Granny Project’ in her first year of secondary school, and they had been told to go home and ask their grannies, if they had them, what life was like when they were young, she had tried to tackle him about it.
‘Most folk have two grannies. Why do I only have one? What happened to the other one?’
He had reiterated that her other granny was long gone, and wasn’t Grandma Nancy more than enough for anyone? For a while she had been satisfied because she loved Grandma Nancy. Then, when religion became such an issue, she had raised the topic again, this time in a roundabout way.
‘Did you send me to a Catholic school because of Mum?’
‘In a way. It was what she wanted.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I don’t really believe in much, if the truth be told.’
‘I don’t either,’ she said, mutinously. ‘So why do I have to pretend I do?’
He was pottering about the tiny kitchen of their apartment, and she was helping. He had a rota of meals that he was good at cooking: chilli, shepherd’s pie, macaroni cheese with added tomatoes for vitamin C, haddock with oven-baked chips and salad. She was becoming more adventurous in her teens and had taken to buying cookery books in charity shops and experimenting. For somebody so good at musical improvisation, so generally impulsive, Rob was a surprisingly cautious cook, reluctant to deviate from any given recipe.
‘Don’t rock the boat, Daisy,’ he said with a sigh, and she could see that he didn’t really believe what he was telling her. He had always been a great one for rocking all kinds of boats and she told him so.
‘I mean, hang on in there. At school. Don’t make a fuss. You’re getting a very good education.’
‘But what about Mum? What did she believe? Did she actually believe in all this body and blood stuff? And guardian angels? And the blessed Virgin Mary hauled up to heaven by a bunch of angels?’
‘We didn’t talk about it much. There were things she just wouldn’t discuss. If you must know, I think she had her own set of beliefs, and she ignored what didn’t suit her. It was the way she was. She was a Celtic Christian, if anything.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Her Catholicism was a bit different from the Roman variety. She believed in a little bit of magic. She had a great love for the landscape. Lots of Celtic Christians found their God in the natural world, and weren’t averse to the odd Goddess as well,’ he added, mysteriously. ‘I think Jess liked that idea.’ He would do things like this occasionally. Just come out with all this mystical stuff. In her teens she was embarrassed by it, although later on, she loved him for it.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’d best look it up,’ he said. ‘But don’t go asking about it at school.’
‘Why not?’
‘They might not approve. I don’t know much about it, but it always seems a bit pagan to me.’
She had asked, though. She had asked one of the Irish nuns, Sister Brigid, who was young and sweet-faced, and who taught them English Literature with wild enthusiasm and a hefty dose of Irish and Scottish poems and stories thrown in whenever she got the chance.
Sister Brigid had waxed lyrical about Celtic Christianity, and Daisy had found that her father was right. The natural world had been very important, as had meditation and setting sail in small boats, and making it remarkably easy for pagan communities to transfer their loyalties to Christ. The impossible, mystical things these holy people believed in seemed somehow more credible to Daisy, even as a girl, than the impossible things she was sometimes asked to believe in by the nuns and by Father McGawn in church. Not that she went very often.
All this comes back to her now, when Mrs Cameron mentions “Be Thou My Vision”.
‘I know that hymn. Dad used to play it on the fiddle. Still does. He loves the melody, although it makes him sad. It’s beautiful. I quite like the idea of God as a hero or as a high tower, even though it’s a bit...’
‘Pagan. Yes. Be thou my high tower. Gorgeous though. How are you getting on there? At Auchenblae. At Flowerfield.’
‘I’m fine. I’ve been doing a bit of exploring. Cooked myself something to eat. Drunk some wine.’
‘Well have another glass before bed. That way, you’ll get a good night’s sleep. And if you get nervous, just give us a ring.’
‘I can’t possibly do that. I can’t wake you up in the middle of the night.’
‘Oh, I’m a light sleeper at the best of times. I’m awake reading more often than not.’
‘Even so. It’s very kind of you, but I’ll be fine, honestly.’
*
When it grows dark, she goes round the ground floor, checking doors and windows, making sure everything is locked, including the door into the tower. She can hear the slight echo on the other side as she turns the key, and she scurries out of the kitchen. She slides the bolt on the door at the sea side of the house, switches off the downstairs lights and is reassured to see that the moon is almost full, a friendly face gazing in at the windows. She takes her phone into the bedroom with her, and the radio from the kitchen, switching it on to hear the familiar strains of “Sailing By” and the shipping forecast, wondering if her grandmother did the same.
She reminds herself that this is a very old house, and that there will be noises as the building cools and settles down for the night. She and her father have always laughed at those haunted house television programmes where people shriek and run away at the slightest sound. Now, it doesn’t seem quite so funny. When she switches the radio off, it’s the silence that’s alarming. In Glasgow, there is continuous external noise, the constant white noise of traffic, fading in the early hours, but still present, the occasional ambulance or fire engine, planes flying overhead, voices in the street outside. Here, the silence seems absolute at first, pressing in on her ears. After a while, she thinks she hears a faint rhythmic drumming sound and then realises that it is her own heartbeat. A breeze blows in from the west and rattles the window panes. She gets up and opens the window. Outside, she hears the high peet, peet, peet of some seabird flying past, a lonely sound. She leaves the window open, aware of the distant and soothing sound of waves on the shore, gets back into bed and dozes.
She is woken by a single distant thud from downstairs. She sits bolt upright, listening. Her rational mind tells her that something has fallen down in one of the rooms. There is something faintly familiar about the noise, but she can’t place it. There is no way she can bring herself to go down to investigate, though. Not right now. She pulls the sheet up to her chin and props herself against the pillows, but every nerve
is tingling. The house is quiet. She is just closing her eyes when she hears a shuffling and scurrying overhead, as though somebody is partying up in the servants’ quarters. She sits upright again and switches on the bedside light. And the radio. The shuffling noise stops, starts again. Her phone buzzes beside the bed, making her jump all over again. She lifts it and sees that it is almost two o’clock, and that there is a text message from Cal.
‘If you get this, you’re still awake. Are you OK?’ it reads.
‘Yes I’m still awake,’ she replies. ‘No I’m not really OK.’
‘What’s wrong?’ he writes, with a sad face.
‘Noises.’
A minute or two later, the phone rings and she answers it. She’s ridiculously relieved to hear his voice, even though he’s miles away.
‘Daisy,’ he says. ‘You’ve got me worried. If I wasn’t in Glasgow, I’d come round.’
‘Nice to hear a friendly voice.’
‘What can you hear? I mean, in the house?’
‘There was a big thump, somewhere downstairs. Sounded like something falling down. And I can hear things up above me. In the servants’ quarters. Shuffling and scuffling noises. It sounds like somebody’s partying up there.’
He laughs. ‘Oh, sweetheart, I know what that will be. I get that in my cottage sometimes. It’ll be mice.’
She’s briefly astonished by the term of endearment. She has female friends who wouldn’t think twice about pulling him up about it. Maybe even punching him on the nose. She can’t help smirking. But she quickly realises that it’s casual and habitual with him rather than condescending. She’s alarmed by the fact that she likes it. Not from anyone else, but from him. Which is worrying.
The Posy Ring Page 11