‘You think it just eats the sandwich out of good manners?’ said Alice. ‘Like you with that telephone call.’
‘Eh?’ Catriona couldn’t see this link. She would have before Alice had had Fergus. Was it not that the obtuseness more usually settled on the one who had a baby, not her successful friend? So the magazines said.
‘Well, you went to the bell of the phone and accepted a night out.’
‘That doesn’t make me the Muscovy duck.’
‘No it’s him that’s the Muscovy duck. He’s the Muscovy duck, whoever he is.’
‘How d’you know it was a he? Can you sex phone calls now you’re so one with nature?’
‘Easier than poultry, yes I can. So can you. You were styling your hair at him down the phone, Cat.’
‘So why’s he a Muscovy duck?’ asked Catriona, not yet understanding, but suspecting that she was in some category now in Alice’s mind, as, undoubtedly, Alice was in hers.
‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ said Alice baldly, putting Fergus into his netted lobster pot and going to butter the duck’s piece for him. She did one for the wee boy at the same time. Marmite for Fergus, jam for the Muscovy. The duck would do the bread more justice, but Alice could eat Fergus’s bread when he’d mumbled it a bit. He was a big baby and solids weren’t that far off. She wished she could talk to Catriona about this. They had dissected the minutiae of the timings of courtship – when to let him do this or that, when to start calling him, all that – but had not yet been into the delectable curricula of its consequences, weaning, possetting, bottling, burping, changing.
Catriona had kept her face angry for some time after Alice had made her devastatingly stupid comment about the man who’d rung her, Fordyce Succoth from Dysart Graphics, being like that daft Muscovy duck. It was Alice and Fraser’s having moved out here to the sticks that made Alice say these things, she’d nothing to keep her on the ball. She was so dopey with the caretaking of the castle garden, the green fields of grass and sea – and the wean and the coastal views, Catriona thought angrily, that she couldn’t even see when a person was insulted. ‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ indeed, she’d tell Fordyce that later when they were better acquainted. She thought of Fordyce very carefully, leaving off some of the things about him like the holes behind his layered hair on the neck, where the acne had got him, and the way he drove with the backs of his hands laid on the thick thighs of his lower half. The car though was a superb machine, and Fordyce’s work at Dysart Graphics very challenging, Catriona reminded herself. Any road, she thought, I can’t cancel on him now.
For she had begun to think of the skin on the back of his neck, its pitted, red, angry texture pierced here and there by thin bore holes that looked as they could take a wire right in to the body. The skin was like something she would not translate into words from the picture in her head. Dougan the Muscovy duck’s shiny rough bill roofed with pustules, his two dry duck nostrils came into Catriona’s mind and she got more angry. How could Alice ruin her relationship like this? Was she jealous, stuck out here with Fergus and Fraser, one of them saying nothing at all in the house all day, the other doing the same outdoors?
There Fraser was, for example, tying knots in daffodils all morning. Why was that? Was he trying to remember a whole lot of things? ‘Oh deary me, I must remember Alice’s birthday. Let me see now, I’ll just tie back this clump of daffs. Then there’s Fergus’s. Can’t be more than seven months off.’ No, Catriona thought, it was not that, she had to acknowledge it; it was more likely something to do with the way you did things having to change if you lived in a part of the world where tying up daffodils was not just a thing you might as well do because you’d seen it done but a thing it was better never to omit doing.
Fergus was sitting on the ground now, by the coffee table, propped up by cushions. He had pink all around his lips, perhaps from some jam off Dougan the Muscovy’s piece, which seemed to be broken up on the floor indoors, though the duck itself was to be seen eating up its snack on the lawn moving its neck, like a typing finger, again and again, at the sticky white bread.
Alice, big and content, independent and annoyingly incurious about the life Catriona was leading now, that is the life Alice had once led too, was busy in the kitchen chopping, rocking a knife in a pile of parsley on a board. There was a smell of new coffee and mowing. It irked Catriona that she would have to move into the kitchen to talk to Alice. In that room, so securely Alice’s own, she would have to be a visitor, to take whatever conversation Alice considered suitable to her marital kitchen. Apart from Fraser, Alice no longer discussed men, as if the plurality in the noun might imply some wide-ranging sampling on her part that might offend the curtains, spill the water in a blush over the rosy tablecloth. The new, absorbing, potentially plural tribe in her life was babies, whose activities, reactions, characteristics, differences and needs were now of that relevance those of men had been.
Alice reached for two onions, tore off the skins with the noise of a cheap brown envelope being forced, and chopped them with the maddening efficacious calm that she seemed to have discovered for herself. She pushed the onion, chopped and weepy, to one side with the flat of the knife, and took out a patty of what looked like pink clay, socking it into a pyrex bowl and adding two eggs, the parsley, the onion, and a brusque grind of pepper.
‘More coffee, Cat?’ she said. In the old days, when they’d had a clash of mood or taste or will, Alice had been nervous that it was always she who offended her friend, and had spent hours padding up to her afterwards to check if she could make things better, in this way giving Catriona the opportunity to keep her unhappy and docile for a good while after, not relenting till she had negotiated at least one practical advantage, a lend of Alice’s grey silk stockings, or a go of her perfume, maybe even a whole evening of using it right out of her own handbag, at a restaurant or in the cinema.
‘That’s a delicious scent’ her companion might say.
‘My stepmother brings it me from Paris. It’s made up by a Russian,’ Catriona would say, in the very words Alice used when offered the same compliments. She never felt like a liar then, just as later today, in a restaurant, she would not feel badly when she told Fordyce how she had that afternoon at her people’s place in the country cooked a parsley, pork sausagemeat and onion stuffing for a duck that earlier in the day she had seen eat a jam sandwich, after ringing a bell for it.
Fergus sucked on at the heel of Catriona’s candied-rose pink suede shoe, pulling the colour out of it slowly and stertorously, with his milky circling lips, till it was losing colour like a frozen raspberry lolly, all its seductive pink going down the throat of the voracious puller at the ice.
Writing on Buildings
Pushing out from the shingle in the wooden boat, Bill called to the dog, twice, ‘Shona, Shona!’
Shona ran to and fro on the pebbles. Bill heard her nails tap and skid.
‘Come on, girl, come on now.’ Shona was a black collie with a bit of Jack Russell in her. She liked water and hated boats.
Soon she was swimming alongside, when she saw Bill would not abandon his oars.
‘Too late now, girl,’ said Bill. ‘You get along in and go home. Home, now!’ The blur of black in the water turned and Bill saw the reproach in the edges of the bitch’s eyes as she made for shore. When she got back up on the shingle the water poured off her, splashing the grey stones black. She whirled the drops off herself, seeming to keep her white pointed snout still, pointed out towards Bill in his boat as he made for the small island in the middle of the loch.
In the bottom of the boat a plastic bag containing a bottle and two tins rocked between the timbers. There was a clatter under the boat as the centreboard scraped on the rocks around the island. Here it was not shingle but leaning brown rocks. It was an island you could imagine sticking up out of the floor of the loch like a stalagmite, sheer and showing only its short green summit. Built among the dull ponticum and streaming mosses, though, was a house,
fourteen feet wide, fourteen feet deep, twenty-eight feet high. In only one of its seven windows was the glass unbroken. The top window was an oval, under the slate gable; in it was set a lozenge of glass, painted with a standing bird, for which Bill had named the house the Heronry.
Bill pulled his boat close in and tied the painter to a standing rock, where an iron ring had been set. He looked back to the shingle beach and saw that Shona had gone. Up the hill he saw her tail whispering like smoke above the heather. She’d be home in twenty minutes.
When he looked at the Heronry he could not believe that this small house contained all it did, an unbroken confident peace that was like a delay before certain fulfilment of trust. He could not remember in how many places he had looked for what he found here. He took his papers out and the tobacco and made a cigarette without looking, just pinching, holding, folding, licking, rolling. When he put the thin thing in his lips, he looked down the once to strike his match.
The air was so empty the smell of the match filled his stomach like meat. The black loch water promised rain. Bill listened to see if it had reached the hills. He heard the faint interference of distant weather, a premonition between the notion and actual drops on the face. He saw the settling grey cloud with its violent edge of light lie up against the hill and breathe into it. The cigarette drew blue feathers on the air.
In the first house he’d imagined had held all this one did, he’d settled and lived for two years. It had been at the gates of a ruin, just outside the city. He’d lived invisibly, as he liked. The falling big house had been a safari park in its last throes. Bill’s gatehouse was in the shadow of a gigantic placard that read: ‘These may be the only lions between here and Crianlarich.’ It was the uncertainty that charmed the very few visitors to the place, who were diverted rather than disappointed to find the lion-headed red lemurs, often flu-ridden, in the rickety aviaries of the old house. In the hall of the house were two stuffed lions, precariously fighting, at the top of the trembling stone stairs that were covered most mornings with feathers from the pigeons that had got in overnight and battered themselves against the great bland oval skylight in the roof’s height.
By the end of his time in the gatehouse, Bill had developed a touch with the lemurs, golden lion tamarins. He could tell when they sneezed if it was cat flu or worse, and he was horribly pained when their long forearms and small hands had to be folded at the end. Their hair was the glowing golden red of lily pollen. When the last one died he could not stay. The owners of the big house had yet more good ideas as to how to keep the place afloat, on the road, whatever wrong words they used, and Bill could see how each one would end. There were the usual misty fantastic ideas. In the end it was down to a dope farm or an agricultural machinery museum. Bill could see it all, the rusting thresher and the untended hemp in unsuitable pots taking over the greenhouse and then turning out to be entirely legal. He knew too well the uningenuity of the family, their suicidal love of the recessive plaster and subsiding stone.
Moreover, other people had begun to come to his gatehouse, not people he invited, but lovers and other conspirators. He heard them in the night, their voices, and, far worse, their pencils or their knives as they wrote their names, their feelings, their bodies’ intentions on the walls of his house, in the plaster or, with incisions that filled Bill with grief, in the stone. He heard them enact the words they wrote. He heard Jim loves Sandra, and he heard Sandra does not quite so much love Jim. He heard Alan 4 Bruno. Leah and Daniel he heard weekly for one summer and was to a certain extent let down when it changed to Leah is Crazy Over Liam.
Daniel had used words that seemed beautiful to Bill in the summer nights. He heard about Daniel’s feelings and he understood them. For once it did not make him think of the mess, the scribbling mess of it all. With Daniel, Bill could tell, it was romance, with a capital R. Leah loved it and then had had enough of it by the autumn. By the time the days were getting short, she wanted the smaller words and the quicker dates – with Liam – by the gatehouse.
There were boys buying and selling there too. He found the equipment and swept it up with his metal pan and wee wooden brush totted off a skip. The foil went all soft and black but nothing could destroy the plastic bottles and disposable syringes. He threw them out and understood as he never had before his mother’s feelings towards his own unexceptionable private squalor of skins and butt ends, bottles and cans.
In a country so rich in emptiness, you would have thought there would be places to live in that’d not been written on. You’d be wrong. Bill had moved north to the Black Isle, he’d moved west to Ardnamurchan, and he’d tried out Ettrickdale. Always the place where he settled started off unwritten upon, but he began to hear the movements and the breaths and the sighs and then the scratchings and even cutting and he knew that the marks of love or commerce or loyalty to God or football were about to be made, as though people could not act or think or speak without making a record of it in writing, writing that was not especially good to look at nor that ever said much that was new, nor that would be revisited. They wrote, it seemed to Bill, in order to attach their flimsy human selves to something that would last longer than they might. They were weaving themselves into time.
‘Why not write on trees?’ Bill had thought of saying, one night when he heard a man who had grunted for over an hour in the porch of a folly at Achiltibuie saying,‘Ech, Moira, wait till I get my felt pen.’
Buildings had no defence against those who wrote on them. They were bound to hold the record of the visit as an ear holds a note. These were not visitors who wrote one line of verse with a diamond in an upper window, or initialled out of sight a hidden sill. They were writers who did not know more of what they wrote upon than that it was old and might last. The knowledge seemed to spur them on.
Bill’s present home lay up the loch from the Heronry. He lived in the game hut of a shooting lodge. It was, naturally, draughty, but Bill appreciated it by moonlight when the silver came in through the thousand slats and he lay there under the lead bell of the roof like a bird himself, but alive. He hung boughs of fir from the game hooks and slept in the striped and scented green listening to the words of love and then the frustration of the writers when they could find so little flat upon which to inscribe their most recent version of the truth.
The nearest town, Lochgilphead, was a good hitch away. He’d a reasonable living housesitting and was getting a tremendous weekend sideline in marital counselling, the demand for which rose in the winter. From the years of residence in trysting places, Bill had an acceptance of folly that made his clients determined either to surprise him by behaving a great deal better or by trying ever harder to shock him.
Now autumn was coming. Bill had sought a new home throughout the summer but most places he found had been too comfortable, too draughtless, well-appointed, visible, to be shelters for the secret people whose lives nourished his own.
He felt the existence of these people like wiring running through a house or like strings essential to the performance of a puppet show. He loved to know that things were more than what they seemed, that you could never expose it all. It made his own unpromised life feel light and simple as a creature’s. He had Shona, and he had his own ways, and that was it. It was what he wanted.
He had found the Heronry on a walk. He saw it across the water, and wondered at the blue-grey slate gable pointing out of the ponticum. It was so neat and finely finished that he was sure it must be a place that was known and full of confided transactions, written and scratched into it.
He puzzled at first about how to reach the island, but he asked one of his weekend problem-bearers sidelong one Saturday if he knew where Bill might come by a wee boat. The man had a repair yard and hated writing cheques, so the dinghy, clinker-built and trim, was Bill’s, plus oars, if he’d pledge another six months of his advice and leave the boat behind when he left the area.
‘Good enough,’ said Bill. ‘Good enough.’
When he got to
the place that first time, he checked it over, every bit of its stone, and its smooth coved interior. There was birdshit and there were feathers and the light bones of mouse and bird. There was dust and fallen plaster and the odd splint of lath. There were brambles curling in at one of the lower windows and in the doorway there was bracken. Half the egg of a blackbird had been blown behind an interior door. It was as bare as that, a building apparently unwritten upon except by the hand that had depicted the heron on the oval of glass, but even it was not like the words, that had come eventually to disturb Bill at each of the homes he found.
He pinched out the roll-up, took out his army knife and hooked the lid off the bottle of beer he had brought with him in the boat over from the shingle shore. He drank it so slowly that it was never related to thirst, only to the gradual relaxation of his body and the invasion of his mind by a mild forgiving warmth. Bill did not take drink in company. He liked to receive its blessing where he couldn’t be seen, when his unguarded self could come free of the outer, controlled, invisible man.
The rain on the hill had fallen out of the cloud that was now all silver. The black loch was shining blue. The floor of the island around the small house was all red mast and shooting bracken.
There was a grinding, then a clopping, and the resolved sound of a boat being pulled up.
Bill looked around. He was not thinking of where to hide himself – it was clear that he or someone must be here since there was the boat – but of where to hide the bottle.
This took on such significance that he began with his heel to dig at the soft soil with the heel of his boot. He knelt to bury the bottle, after pouring the last of the beer away.
He was arranging leaves tidily over the place the bottle lay when the new arrival came.
Wait Till I Tell You Page 5