‘Do you mind if I drive?’ Janet was asking.
He should have said, ‘Sorry,’ and driven her back to the hotel, but he was already mesmerised.
‘I like driving. I’ve got a red Mini at home. I’ve driven on Flodday before.’
They changed places and she set off, with what she would have called dash and skill, but what struck him as luck and recklessness. There was a drain to be cautiously avoided. She rushed over it with a bump, just missing a boulder that would have shattered the radiator. Back on the road, going much too fast in Angus’s opinion, she met another car at a bend and shot past it without braking, her off-wheels an inch or so from a deep ditch. The driver of the other car honked in shocked reproof. She retorted with several mocking toots.
If Angus had been, say, a schoolteacher or clerk, he would have begged her to take it easy. Being a painter eager to dispel timidity from his canvases, he just turned white and hastily fastened his seat belt.
If, he thought, the thousand million to one chance proved to be right and there was an after-life, would it not be galling if they crashed into a stone dyke or telegraph pole, and he, blameless more or less, went straight to the fires of hell, while she, culpably reckless, went to the flowers of heaven? But then he had always thought of hell as a place where good men nursed grievances, and of heaven as a place where villains couldn’t believe their luck.
As they hurtled past the ruins of the ancient priory she remarked, as if talking about the weather, that on a previous visit to Flodday she and Douglas had made love there. She had hoped so hallowed and magical a place would have had an effect on him, but no, he had grumbled about the flies and midges and nettles. He had been wearing a kilt at the time.
Angus had never thought that he could ever feel sympathy for a golfer. Now he did feel a twinge for Douglas.
It was a relief when they left the public road with its stone walls and ditches and took to the sandy track that crossed the promontory. The worst she could do here was get cow dung on the tyres. On either side was machair, lush green grass and innumerable wild flowers. Charlie, the white Charolais bull, and his harem of Friesian cows were not in sight. Sheep were, though, with their lambs now as big as themselves, and rabbits, and little blue butterflies, and bees, and iridescent flies, and larks. On a warm sunny morning like this, Ardnave was Elysium.
‘What a marvellous place!’ cried Janet, as she got out of the car. ‘Miracles could happen here.’
How could he contradict her? Was he not himself waiting for one, the turning of a competent, worthy, striving painter, whose kind were many, into a Master?
4
According to archaeologists, the site of Angus’s house was where the living quarters of the priory monks had been. Their huts, made of wood, had long since crumbled into dust; but possessions of theirs had been dug up, nothing of gold or silver, for they had been poor from choice, but once, a small iron crucifix; this, with the rust of hundreds of years cleaned off, was now in the small museum in Kildonan, along with pieces of crockery. It had been established where their privy had been, a hollow in the bank near the sea. Today sea-flowers like thrift and campion and flag grew there in profusion. Angus had often imagined those peaceful men in their long brown inconvenient robes squatting there, reciting some appropriate prayer. He was sure they had not been without humour. In the gales and downpours of winter, much fortitude must have been needed. In spite of his civilised amenities, like septic tank and comfortable lavatory, he never felt any superiority over those humble, obscure predecessors of long ago. On the contrary he often felt consoled by them. He did not believe in God, and so all those hardships and prayers, in the service of God, had been in his view inevitably unavailing, but he could never think of them as wasting their time. Just as once, in the ruins at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, in a small chamber near the top, he had come upon two Buddhist monks in their saffron robes enjoying fly puffs at the one cigarette, with joss-sticks burning nearby in an Andrew’s Liver Salts tin, and he had felt that, if there really was a God, they would have been nearer to Him than the gorgeously robed bishop he had seen conducting a service with pomp in a crowded church in Manila.
Sometimes, when faced with some moral problem, he would wonder what the monks would have advised. In one respect, however, they could be of no help: where women were concerned. They moved away whenever he was remembering his treatment of Fidelia. He had made use of her and then, when it suited him, he had let her down. He did not even know if he had loved her. He was not sure what love was. Nell too he had made use of, but then she had made use of him, so they had been quits. But Fidelia had given herself to him, though it had been for her a sin that, she knew, would send her to hell. God help him – if an agnostic could use that expression – he had looked upon her agonies of conscience not so much with a lover’s sympathy as with an artist’s curiosity. Only if he produced masterpieces could such colossal callousness be justified. He had produced one, her portrait. Justification, though, was still far from being achieved.
With these thoughts in his mind he watched Janet walking about, with gestures and cries of joy. She was taking possession of mysteries that were his, or was pretending to. In spite of her absurd claims to have psychic powers, she was really a disgruntled suburban Glasgow housewife whose husband was a dull fellow who played too much golf.
She lost no time in demonstrating how she intended to steal from him the magic of Ardnave. Looking down on to the little bay below the house she suddenly pointed and cried, ‘Who are they?’
Dourly he went over and looked down. He saw only shells, three gulls, and some strands of seaweed on the pink sands, and at the far end two rocks covered with seaweed. ‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘Two men. Old, I think. Wearing brown robes, kilted up. They’re walking in the water. They’re carrying their sandals. The tops of their heads are shining.’
‘There’s nobody there,’ he said, crossly. ‘Just rocks covered with seaweed.
‘Rocks don’t walk, do they?’
They did, if looked at through defective eyes or a self-deceiving mind.
He had often felt the presence of the monks, but never would again if this woman’s childish nonsense drove them away.
He went closer to her and saw that she was trembling. She was paler than usual. She looked frightened. Her eyes, bluer than the sea-loch, had gone strange. He remembered her mad aunt. He thought of Douglas, again with sympathy. He touched her hand: it was icy cold. However spurious the apparitions, she certainly believed in them herself.
He noticed another odd thing. Flies did not seem to pester her as they did him. They buzzed about his eyes and ears but left her alone. It could be that she had washed her hair with some shampoo that luckily repelled them. That was a more rational explanation than that they were her familiars and she had some witch-like power over them.
She came out of her trance as quickly as she had gone into it. Once again a suburban housewife, interested in houses like all suburban housewives, she inspected his.
With its steep roof of blue slates and its solid doors painted dark blue, it was sometimes mistaken for a church. Indeed many of the whin stones used in its construction had been pilfered from the priory ruins. There was no man-made garden, but Angus regarded the whole machair, all the way to the precipitous cliffs overlooking the Atlantic where puffins nested, as his garden. No other house was in sight. His nearest neighbour, Mr McCandlish of Ardnave Farm, lived half a mile away, behind a green hill.
‘You’ve got it in very good order,’ said Janet. ‘Did you have a lot to do to it?’
‘Quite a lot. The roof had to be renewed.’
‘Would it be too rude to ask how much you paid for it?’
He was not surprised by her mercenariness. Her Free Kirk upbringing explained that. But where had she got her notion that lovers should be mystical? Douglas, with his crocodile single-mindedness, was more in keeping with the grim theology of Mr McPherson and his brethren.
‘I
paid fifteen thousand pounds for house and school. Repairs cost me another eight thousand.’
‘Twenty-three thousand. It’s worth double that now. Of course, it’s not everybody would want to buy a place so isolated.’
‘It wasn’t always so isolated. There used to be a dozen crofts on the promontory. All derelict now. They must have had a hard time. Once thirty children attended the school. Just before it closed there were only two. I found the logbook in a cupboard.’
‘Are you going to live here all your life?’
‘Yes.’ Even if the miracle did not happen, and, with age, he became a worse and not a better painter.
‘It’s all right now, when you’re comparatively young; but when you’re old it could be difficult living out here.’
‘I have my protections.’
She then came upon one of them. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
It was his shrine. He had built it out of many-coloured many-shaped pebbles, with at the top an inverted scallop shell making a bowl in which every night he placed fragments of food, like the people of Bali, to propitiate demons that might otherwise bring harm to the house. Here, as there, birds or mice ate the grains of rice or crumbs of bread, but who was to say that feeding those innocent creatures was not pleasing to the demons?
Janet listened raptly. ‘I hope you never forget to put out the food. What do you think would happen if you did?’
Nothing, he supposed. Yet . . .
‘Is this another of your protections?’ She meant the sheep’s skull.
‘Yes, though I didn’t put it there. Some local youths did, for a joke.’
She laid her finger on the skull. It was her way of conciliating whatever magical forces were in it.
He opened the door. ‘Here’s another,’ he said.
‘You’re well protected.’
The small vestibule was painted black, giving prominence to the large Balinese mask representing a demon’s head, red, gold, and white, with big black bulging eyes, teeth like tusks, a lolling tongue of red cloth decorated with gold rosettes, and nostrils as wide as Charlie the bull’s when he was pawing the ground.
‘Rather a jolly demon, don’t you think?’ said Angus.
‘It makes a good watchdog,’ she said, and patted its head.
In the living-room was a smell of incense. Angus liked burning joss-sticks. Was it still another way of warding off evil?
Did he really believe that malevolent spirits existed?
Struck by the representations of demons to be found all over Bali, he had asked a professor at Denpasar University why spirits were always thought of as malevolent. The old man had replied that in his lifetime there had been earthquakes, floods, fires, epidemics, crop failures, and many deaths. Only when the spirits relented had there been rejoicing.
It had not occurred to Angus before that he had surrounded himself with so many protections. Even the yellow fire-spitting dragon he had painted on the ceiling could be seen as one, and the various small idols represented guardian deities. Chief of them all was the almost life-sized upright Buddha, in front of which Janet was now standing, frowning anxiously.
‘I was told it was a thousand years old,’ said Angus. ‘To tell the truth, I suspect it was stolen from a museum.’
She was shuddering. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s something about this room I don’t like.’
‘Mr McPherson didn’t like it either. Too many heathen idols. he said.
‘It’s not that. It’s something they can’t stop.’
‘He didn’t like my divans either. He said he liked a chair to have a back and not be so near the floor. I told him you were supposed to sit on them lotus-fashion, with your legs crossed. He declined to try it.’
The three divans were red, yellow, and green, respectively.
‘It’s not your divans. I have a feeling that something terrible’s going to happen here.’ She pressed her hands against her head. ‘I can’t see what it is.’
She caught sight of his next most prized possession, after the Buddha: an authentic headhunter’s blowpipe. It hung on the wall, with a bamboo quiver containing darts on one side and a vessel of bone ‘for holding poison’ on the other.
‘The victim often never saw who had killed him. One puff and that was it. The poison on the dart paralysed him. Then he was stabbed to death by the spear-head at the end of the blowpipe. When it came to cutting off the head it was done with great reverence. It was a religious act, you see. The head was an offering to the gods.’
‘Is it a real one? Has it ever killed anyone? I mean, it’s not a fake made for tourists?’
‘Look at it. It’s at least a hundred years old. I bought it from an old chief. It was his father’s. He had hundreds of heads hanging in his house.’
‘It could still kill.’
‘As a spear, I suppose it could. But the poison’s all dried up.’
‘I think you should take it down and hide it somewhere. Or burn it. Or throw it into the sea.’
‘It’s harmless now. The people it killed are all safely dead, thousands of miles away.’
‘Nobody’s safely dead,’ she murmured.
He could have retorted, ‘Not with you about.’
She picked up the book with the illustrations of erotic sculptures that Mr McPherson had found interesting. She opened it at random. There, looked in stony copulation, were the prince and his apsaras: on both their faces smiles of Nirvanic bliss.
‘Do you know what Douglas would say? He would say if she’s not careful she’ll break her back.’
Well, considering he had the imagination of a crocodile.
She noticed writing in ink on the frontispiece: To Angus, with love, Fidelia.
‘Who was Fidelia?’
‘A colleague.’
‘At the College?’
‘Yes. She taught English.’
‘But she wasn’t British, with a name like that.’
‘She was from the Philippines. She spoke excellent English.’
‘Fidelia what?’
‘Gomez.’ Should he have said Dias, her maiden name?
‘Sounds Spanish. Was she black?’
‘No, she wasn’t. A beautiful brown.’
All the same, she had kept out of the sun for fear of getting darker.
‘She must have been more than a colleague for her to give you a book like that. Were you lovers?’
‘Ask her yourself. She’s upstairs in my bedroom.’
She was startled. ‘I thought you lived here alone.’
‘In a painting.’
‘Oh. I’d like to see it.’
‘All right.’
The staircase was wooden, painted white. He had amused himself decorating it with birds and butterflies in brilliant colours.
‘You must have been feeling lonely,’ said Janet the seer, stepping on butterflies. ‘Which is your bedroom?’
He indicated it.
She opened the door and at once drew back, with a gasp. She was staring at Fidelia. ‘My goodness!’ she said, sounding like the suburban Glasgow housewife.
He still found it hard to believe that he had ever been able to find the boldness and panache to express in paint that vibrant sexuality. After all, he was at heart a puritan. Who born on Flodday could avoid it? How had he managed to hit upon the right shade of brown, rich and glowing, like a polished chestnut! All the colours were vivid. The breasts large, round, and firm, as they had been; the belly round; the thighs plump; the waist too slender for the rest of the body, but that was how it had been; and the legs long and shapely. Among the sparse black pubic hairs a vertical red slash: a masterstroke. A hundred times, quailing, he had wanted to paint it out. The lips, full not thick, were the same eye-catching red. The hair long and jet-black. The eyes brown, honest, and sad. Where had he found the sensitiveness, let alone the skill, to paint those eyes?
It all amounted to a miraculous likeness.
‘If it was in an art gallery with fifty other pictures everybody wo
uld look at it first,’ said Janet. ‘I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.’
She went a little nearer. ‘I feel I know her already.’
Outside a flock of oystercatchers flew past with shrill cries.
He could easily imagine Fidelia’s soft worried voice, but could not think what she would have to say to him.
‘Why have you made her so sad?’
‘It was her nature.’
It was true that she had been prone to melancholy: a consequence, some said, of her headhunting ancestry. True enough, those wrinkled little black men, drunk with tapai, in their jungle huts adorned with many heads, could not have been very jolly.
‘It would do Douglas good to see that picture,’ said Janet. ‘The women he has affairs with are all boring golfers with muscles. They talk golf all the time, and I mean all the time. Isn’t making love supposed to be more spiritual than physical? Isn’t it that which makes us superior to animals?’
She was being unfair to animals, thought Angus, or at any rate to Charlie the bull. He might lack spirituality but was always affectionate and attentive to his sweetheart of the moment, and never attempted her without making sure she was ready and willing. If he misjudged and was walked away from making him look foolish, he took it philosophically, apologised in his own way, and began all over again, with exemplary patience.
As for Douglas, what did Janet expect him to talk about to show that he was being spiritual? The works of St Thomas Aquinas?
In that activity silence was always safest. It was often just as well that the one participator did not know what the other was thinking.
Janet had picked up the photograph by his bed, of his parents and himself when he was about nine.
‘That’s you, isn’t it? You were not sure of yourself even then.’
He let that pass. ‘My mother was ill at the time.’
‘Yes, she looks it.’
‘She died not long afterwards. My father’s dead too.’
‘I can see he loved her very much.’
Yes, but there was no evidence of it in the photograph. His father was looking grim and anxious, not loving; but it was true, nothing was ever truer, he had loved her very much.
Poor Angus Page 3