The Posy Ring

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘I’m renovating a piece of furniture. It’s an old Scots dresser with spice drawers along the top. Bit like the one in your kitchen. I’ve got it down at Carraig. But there’s a customer for it and Mum promised it would be ready in a week and I’m nowhere near finished.’

  ‘I’d love to see it.’

  ‘Come down, any time.’ He hesitates. She’s suddenly shy of him, not sure how to pick up where they left off, or even if she should try.

  ‘I’m going to leave Hector with you for a few days. Just till you settle in properly.’

  The dog, who has been lying comfortably in the middle of the biggest rug, pricks up his ears at the sound of his name and sits up, thumping his tail on the floor.

  ‘You’re going to stay here,’ Cal says. Hector wags his tail obligingly. ‘I’ve brought his bed and some food.’

  ‘There’s no need, honestly,’ she says, but he can see that she’s half-hearted in her rejection of the plan. The truth is that it would be nice to have the dog in the house at night. It crosses her mind that it would be even nicer to have Cal in the house at night, but he doesn’t seem willing to take things further at the moment, or even to resume whatever they had begun. Still, he’s willing to leave his beloved dog with her.

  ‘No. I’d feel happier about it. Humour me, Daisy. I know it’s fine in the daytime, when the sun’s shining and the birds are singing, but it’s different at night. Even at Carraig, it’s different at night, and I know every stone and blade of grass down there. But this is a big place.’

  ‘I’ve been leaving the television or the radio on. Or singing loudly.’

  ‘Do you sing?’ He’s intrigued.

  ‘A bit. My mum was the songbird in our family, but Dad says I’m not half bad. Which is a compliment coming from him.’

  ‘What do you sing?’

  ‘Oh traditional stuff. What else, with my background? “The Lea Rig”, “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go”, “A Red, Red Rose”. But I don’t sing in public. Or very seldom and only when I’ve had a few glasses of wine!’

  He fetches Hector’s essentials, his tartan lead, dishes, bed, blanket and a ravaged toy that he says is a favourite. She puts the bed at the bottom of the stairs, the dog food and water dishes in the kitchen. Hector gets into his bed, turns around three times and lies down, but gets up again anxiously when Cal heads for the door.

  ‘You’re staying here for a wee while, pal,’ he says.

  He turns before he opens the door, and as though on a sudden impulse, pulls Daisy into his arms and embraces her, quite brusquely. He kisses her, his hand on the back of her neck.

  ‘Come down and see me at Carraig,’ he says. ‘I really have to get this thing finished but come down soon. Tomorrow if you like. Hector’s fine in the car. He’ll just sit beneath the passenger seat. You won’t need to put him in the back.’

  After he leaves, Hector whines and sniffs deeply under the door, but when she goes through to the kitchen to make something to eat for both of them, he seems to resign himself to his new circumstances and patters after her obediently enough. She has never seen a more amenable dog. She wonders if his owner is quite so amenable and still finds herself doubting it, although whenever her thoughts touch on him now, she feels a little tingle of dangerous desire.

  Later that night, Hector lies at her feet as she watches the television. She finds his presence reassuring, until she sees him sit bolt upright, watching something across the room, his eyes following some movement or other. She comforts herself with the thought that it must be an insect, a spider or moth perhaps. When she peers at the wall, in the direction of his gaze, she can see nothing except the portrait of Lilias, but although he is staring vaguely in that direction, he doesn’t seem to be especially fixated on it. He doesn’t seem distressed by whatever he’s watching either, just interested.

  ‘What is it, Hector?’ she asks him. ‘What are you watching?’

  He looks round at her and wags his tail, putting his ears back in acknowledgement of her question, then cocks them again and carries on watching whatever is absorbing him. He wags his tail, fractionally, now and then, and once or twice lifts and stamps his front paws impatiently, but at last, and greatly to her relief, he settles down and falls asleep, waking only when she lets him out for a late-night pee. She has a momentary worry that he might head off home, but he comes indoors when she calls and settles down in his bed at the foot of the stairs. When she goes up to her own bed, she realises that Cal was right. It is a great comfort knowing that Hector is on guard down below. She falls asleep with no trouble at all, closing her door and switching off the light. In the early hours of the morning, she hears the clicking of his nails down the hallway outside, interspersed with the occasional sniff as he investigates the various doors. Then there’s a thud and a heavy sigh as he locates her room and throws himself down against the door. There’s silence. She drifts off to sleep again and when she goes down to make her morning tea, she sees that he has gone back to bed and is ensconced there, wagging his tail to greet her, and grinning at her, his tongue lolling. He has clearly decided that his change of home is no bad thing. She doesn’t know whether to be glad of his easygoing nature or appalled by his disloyalty. Most dog owners fondly assume that their pets will pine away without them. Not Cal and certainly not Hector.

  *

  In the morning, she suppresses her almost overwhelming desire to phone Cal and decides that she must at least make a start on sorting things out. If she’s not careful, she will simply be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and do nothing at all. Grasping her courage in both hands, she goes into Viola’s bedroom. She brings a couple of big cardboard boxes from the car, sturdy saleroom boxes, and a roll of bin bags, and she works diligently for some hours, chanting ‘keep, chuck, sell, donate’ like a mantra.

  It is only moderately successful, mainly because she keeps finding interesting things: not just the old scents and the costume jewellery and scarves, which all seem very personal, but other more childish and nostalgic keepsakes. In particular, there’s a framed photograph of a leggy, freckled child in shorts and a T-shirt, down on the beach, her hair pulled back into a long ponytail. This reminds her uncannily of herself. There are similar photographs of Daisy, aged eight or nine, on the beach at Ayr, but she quickly realises that she is looking at her mother as a little girl, on Garve. There are old birthday cards with ‘To my lovely mum who is always kind to me, with love from your Jess’ written on them in a careful, childish hand and heartrendingly treasured down all these years. In a drawer, she comes across a trove of precious drawings, again done by a child, presumably her mother. She turns over the pages one by one and sees that her eight- or nine-year-old mother has drawn a series of ‘rabbit tea parties’ in pencil and coloured crayon, with bunnies gathered around a picnic cloth, some on a beach and some on the terrace, with a sketchy approximation of Auchenblae, complete with tower, in the background.

  The drawings are unsigned, but they trigger a remembrance – at once happy and sad – of Jess drawing similar tea parties for her own small daughter, complete with lop-eared rabbits. Jess had obviously loved her mother dearly, so when had that love turned sour? Or was it only that the house and its situation and perhaps even the island itself had begun to suffocate the girl as she grew to adulthood? Back then, it was much harder to leave. Cars had to be winched on and off the ferry. Now even the bin lorry comes over from the mainland. Daisy knows from her own experience with her father that, although he had set boundaries and protections in place, he had always encouraged her to fly.

  ‘You have to make your own choices, Daisy,’ he would say frequently. ‘You have to decide what’s right for you. I can only advise you. But I can’t make those choices for you. You have to make your own mistakes. I’ll always be here to support you. Always be here to pick you up and try to make it better.’

  He had
been as good as his word. When she had been bullied by a group of older girls at secondary school he had visited the head teacher and, although she never knew what he had said, the bullying stopped. He had comforted her and raised her spirits when her university course seemed too difficult, when money was tight, when jobs were hard to come by and when the work in the saleroom seemed exhausting and thankless. Most of all, he had been there when whatever relationship she had embarked on – and there had been plenty of them – had come tumbling down. She and her female friends, women she had been at university with and latterly a close friend called Victoria, a trainee auctioneer from the saleroom, joked that they were the Bridget Joneses of Glasgow. But one by one, as they approached their mid-thirties, they had found partners, while she, Daisy, never seemed to meet the right person. But Rob had always been there, with tissues, wine and sympathy. Bitter experience tells her that Cal probably won’t be the right person either.

  Now, sitting on the soft green eiderdown, sorting through Viola’s things, she wonders if her grandmother had been too quick and keen to make choices for Jessica May, too afraid of losing her. She doesn’t know and has no way of telling. The story of their mother and daughter relationship is all here, but it is almost impossible to pin down the truth of it. It is much too late to ask her mother, and she suspects that her father never really knew, but that – easygoing as ever and very much in love – he simply acquiesced in whatever Jess thought was best.

  All this time, Hector has been sitting patiently on a dusty sheepskin rug beside Viola’s bed.

  ‘What do you think, Hector?’ she asks him. ‘Do you think I should just give up and resign myself to becoming a recluse in my crumbling castle? There’s enough space here for a whole hoard of cats anyway!’

  Hector stands up and barks.

  ‘You know that word?’ she asks. ‘Cats? You wouldn’t approve of that, would you? But you could always go home to Cal.’

  He barks again, goes into down dog, front legs on the rug, back raised, tail wagging. Doggy yoga.

  ‘God,’ she says. ‘I’m having a conversation with a dog.’

  By early afternoon, though, she has filled her boxes and bags to overflowing. She thinks there may be a charity shop along the coast at Keill, so she hauls the ‘donate’ bags down the stairs and puts them in the boot of her car. She leaves the neatly packed ‘sell’ boxes in the most empty of the other bedrooms on this floor, and takes a couple of sturdy bin bags full of old but not vintage underwear, dresses that even the poor wouldn’t want, miscellaneous papers, tattered and torn paperbacks and a selection of old and uninteresting cosmetics, dried face creams and empty toothpaste tubes down to the bins, one for recycling and one for general waste. She drags the vacuum cleaner up the stairs and runs it around the carpet; finds furniture polish and dusts the newly emptied surfaces. She has sorted out the shoes, Viola’s elegant and surely not very practical shoes, into those that can be sold and those that need to be disposed of. She herself hasn’t worn such small shoes since she was about ten and she’s certain her feet have never been this narrow. She has tackled all but the rack of stylish vintage clothes in the wardrobe, but thinks those can mostly be photographed and sold from the island. She strips the bed and throws most of the old bedding and even the stained feather pillows away, although she keeps the eiderdown, and a good linen top sheet. The mattress is surprisingly good too. Perhaps Viola had replaced it quite recently. Two of the pillows look new as well, and she keeps those.

  After this, she thinks that she will reward Hector and herself with a trip to Scoull for a late lunch at the hotel. Maybe they will go as far as Keill with the charity bags. This will mean passing the turn-off to Carraig. She checks her phone, but there has been no message from Cal. All the same, she says to Hector, ‘Do you think we should go and see your master? Do you think we should go and say hello to Cal?’ To which suggestion Hector responds with his usual and predictable enthusiasm. Before they go out, she can’t help checking that the posy ring is still safely in its box, and she makes sure she bolts the back door and locks the front door behind her.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  1588

  Time passed. People rose early to tend to the animals and Mateo went with them to do whatever he could, especially with the horses, since he was not ignorant of their care. Francisco offered, but Mateo could see that they thought him weak and clumsy. Eventually, he suggested that his cousin should take on the instruction of little Ishbel and a couple of other children of the house deemed old enough to learn: Beathag’s granddaughter Annag and a promising young lad called Alan, the son of one of the nearby tacksmen and a close cousin of McNeill. Francisco was charged with teaching them their letters and instructing them from an old Latin breviary that Lilias had found tucked away among her mother’s possessions. It contained brief lives of the saints, including Scottish saints such as Margaret and Kentigern. Francisco occupied himself during some of the daylight hours by trying to render these lives into his version of English and writing them out on the pages at the front and back of the book, as an aid to instruction. He thought, accurately, that the lives of these saints were less dry and a good deal more interesting than the bulk of the breviary. His command of the spoken language was much improved, although his writing of it proved to be a difficult and laborious business, and he was forever asking his more learned cousin for help. Ishbel too was never backward in telling him where she thought he might have made a mistake. Consequently, the pages were full of crossings-out and blots, but they all learned from each other and afforded each other a good deal of harmless amusement during the winter months.

  The wind blew constantly around the old house, wailing and howling for admittance, rattling on the glass where it was to be found, confounded by the shutters. One short winter day blended into another. Mateo had never felt so tired. It seemed as though the lack of light affected him as it affected all of them, so that they became impossibly drowsy. The rush lights and the fir candles that he had dried in the autumn might be lit, bringing some welcome light to the Great Hall, but it made little difference. When darkness fell, they needed sleep and would be yawning constantly. One person had only to begin and a positive storm of yawns would afflict the entire company.

  ‘We are like the swallows that sleep away the winter at the bottom of the loch,’ remarked Lilias. She and Ishbel, Mateo and Francisco had taken the opportunity of a fine, sharp day, without rain or even a cloud in the sky, to walk down to the shore below the house, ostensibly searching for driftwood to make or repair small pieces of household furniture or simply to add to the fuel stores. The two dogs, Bran and Finn, had followed them or perhaps had been sent by McNeill or one of his henchmen as tactful overseers, and were fossicking about along the tideline, picking up pieces of seaweed and squabbling good-naturedly over them. The sea was calm for a change. The sand was white, flat and washed clean, with the occasional piece of salt-bleached wood, a few shells and shiny pebbles deposited here and there. Ishbel ran about, gathering up her treasures.

  ‘Where did you say these swallows go?’ Mateo asked. Francisco was absorbed in the landscape, breathing in the fresh air gratefully. Mateo was absorbed only in Lilias and in pretending to himself and to her that he wasn’t. It was becoming increasingly difficult to dissemble.

  ‘Gobhlan-gaoithe. They sleep in our lochs for the whole of the winter and rouse themselves only in the spring.’

  Mateo raised his eyebrows. ‘Do they? I don’t know these birds.’

  ‘Do you not have them on your island? Maybe they are not fond of the hot days, although they seem to like the sun. They fly constantly and build their nests of mud upon our houses, very cunningly. You must have seen the nests. They come back to them each year and repair them if they are broken down, much like men and women. But they disappear in the winter. They must sleep, surely.’

  ‘I think I know what birds you mean. We have them too. But I don’t know that they sleep
beneath the inland water, for we don’t have quite so much of it!’ He turned to Francisco and explained in Spanish. Paco took up a sharp piece of driftwood and drew a passable pair of swallows on the sand.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Lilias. ‘Come here, Ishbel. See what Paco has drawn! I didn’t know he was an artist.’

  ‘He’s a fine artist.’ Mateo clapped his cousin on the back. Francisco only smiled, blushed a little but didn’t deny the compliment.

  ‘Why did you not say?’

  ‘It didn’t seem a very useful occupation,’ said Francisco, quietly. ‘Everyone here is so busy and so hard pressed.’

  Lilias pursed her lips. ‘What kind of things do you paint?’

  ‘All kinds of things. But my teacher at home was a painter of portraits and that was my first love.’

  She regarded him steadily, shaking her head a little. ‘Francisco, what brought you to our shores? Why are you not at home, painting? Mateo here I can understand, perhaps. He’s fierce enough to be a soldier. But you seem to be such a man of peace.’

  ‘I thought I wanted an adventure.’

  She turned to his cousin. ‘You should not have let him embark on such an enterprise!’ she said, forthright as ever. ‘You may be a bonnie fighter, but you should have had more wisdom where your cousin was concerned. I think you do have more wisdom.’

  ‘Aye, well. Some of it acquired along the way. And a hard lesson it has been for both of us,’ Mateo replied.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be scolding you like this, but if God has seen fit to give somebody a skill that few have, then he should make the best of it.’

  ‘I know it. And if ever we win back to our own island, I’ll make sure he does precisely that.’

  She was silent for a moment or two. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if it would be possible for you to paint portraits of myself and Ishbel, Francisco.’

  Ishbel came dancing up with shells and sticks held in her petticoat that she had kilted up to make an impromptu bag. ‘Will you make my picture, Paco?’ she asked. ‘It would be very fine to have a picture of myself painted like a great lady. Like McNeill of Barra’s wife.’