The Bass Rock

by Evie Wyld

  She pulled out a thick journal and placed it on the desk in front of her, brushed her hands over the leather, soft and warm, warmer than her own hands. She opened the third drawer, the deepest, and was rewarded with a bottle of whisky. She stood and poured a measure and slightly more into her teacup.

  The notebook was not filled with writing about how Peter missed his dead wife. There were no descriptions of the ways in which Ruth had let him down and disappointed him and how their argument the day of the picnic had confirmed his worst thoughts of her. There were no words, only drawings. She hadn’t known of this interest.

  Pencil landscapes for the most part, some slight, some heavily worked, the pages brittle with lead. Just sketches, nothing too accomplished, but regular and practised all the same. She had never seen him sketch. He had never mentioned even a moment’s interest in drawing, or art. After a few pages of seascapes of the Bass Rock and of the Lamb and Craigleith, there appeared in the sky the head and breast of a seabird, thick-beaked and straight-backed. It was cartoonish and nothing like the rest of the drawings, which had a seriousness about them. There was a feeling that had he drawn the rest of the bird, it would have been wearing lederhosen. It was perhaps an albatross, she thought, having known one from the cover of a copy of the Ancient Mariner. It was rather sweet. She wished he had wanted to show it to her. Further back in the book the drawings grew a little more proficient. The remains of Tantallon Castle, the black impression of the monkey puzzle tree from outside the house. The Law seen from the shoreline, and more cartoonish doodles above the horizon. A silhouette of a cat drawn as a child would: two stacked black circles and whiskers and a tail. A ladybird, a butterfly and a man sitting in a chair facing away. One almost empty landscape – a thin light line on which he had drawn a tree with no leaves, just reaching spiked branches. On the next page, the tree again, but a more focused drawing, as if Peter were bringing something forward in his memory. In the third tree drawing a figure appeared high up in the branches, a black shape, inexpertly drawn, clumsily posed. The next page, closer still, the man was missing his shoes and his feet were white blocks, like a duck’s, and he leaned back in the tree, and when you really looked you could imagine that the man was dead with a branch thrust through his chest. After this drawing, the rest of the book was made up of the same image, of a man, sitting in a chair, facing away. She turned the pages, becoming a little desperate. The drawings did not get better, or do anything, they just sat there, stuck, almost exactly the same. Two hundred, she guessed, or thereabouts.

  Ruth pushed herself back from the desk, hands in lap. She rose from the seat and looked out of the window at the water, the same gunmetal grey as the dead shark. The whole landscape was a giant monster, the sky indifferent, the golf course a wasteland. She knelt and then lay on the floor, folded her hands over her chest. The ceiling dipped in and out of focus. She felt her heart rapping on the wood off the floor, through the back of her ribcage. One, two, three, four, five, six. It seemed that, instead of calming her, her heart’s thud was becoming stronger and louder, knocking a tide of blood into her head, banging against the drums of her ears, and she closed her eyes and felt the floor slope under her. Her body danced with prickles.

  She sat up, hearing someone approaching, frightful to be caught on the floor of Peter’s study, the whisky on the table. But the noise was gone, and once she collected herself, put everything back where she had found it, she checked on the boys and Bernadette and saw they were still engrossed in their activities in the ballroom, while Betty whisked eggs in a large bowl in the kitchen, like nothing had taken place, like no child had been stalked, like no man had been broken.

  Long after Betty had instructed the children to wash, and the boys and Bernadette had gone to bed, Ruth turned in for the night. She had drunk too much while trying to read her book. She switched off the light in the drawing room and walked up the stairs to her bedroom, with her hand on the wall to be sure. She paused at the window on the landing and looked down into the raspberry bushes in the dark. Something moved, a cat or a fox; a black shadow streaked across the lawn and disappeared under the shadow the moon cast against the garden wall.

  ‘Hello, night thing,’ Ruth said to it. ‘Where are you going?’ She leaned her forehead against the cold glass.

  III

  In sleep, Sarah’s skirt has pulled up and the skin of her leg holds perfectly round droplets of water. If you joined them up they would make a small flow. I have a fright when I see that she is no longer asleep and is watching me watching her. I look away, but back again quickly, and she has pulled down her skirt.

  The morning air is thick with wet wood burning. No one has followed us from the village, though it did not stop me waking to every mouse shuffling through the undergrowth, or roosting bird refluffing their wings. Sarah now rests her head against her knees. Father watches.

  The Widow Clements comes to stand beside my father, rests her hands on his shoulders and he touches her fingers. Sarah looks up at her. Her cut lip has healed into a sharp, thin line. Cook nudges me with a foot and hands me a tin of boiled water. I sit up and place it on the floor – it is too hot to hold. She administers her discouraging breakfast to everyone, and all sit and drink in silence. I try and forget the smell of the fire the night before, the crisp, hot sweetness of it.

  ‘Right,’ says my father. ‘Our path is as follows. We head east to the coastline. That is where my people are from, before we moved inland to preach. We will get to the coast and there we will not rely on the land to produce food for us, we will take fish from the sea. We will look for someone who remembers us. There will be someone there, and we can start again.’ Cook makes an approving noise. The Widow Clements dances her fingers over his shoulders. She is staking her claim to him. I look away. And if there is no one? They will all be dead, I am sure of it. People forget quickly when life is hard. I watch the Widow Clements brush something from Father’s hair. She has forgotten her husband. Father has forgotten Mother. And what happens to us once we have fished, once our bellies are full? Will we look for work, disperse into different families, like Cook has? Or will we turn feral and live like this together among the wolves and badgers? I don’t ask these questions. I am not brave enough to.

  I have a memory, from before Agnes was born, when it was just my father and me, and we stood at a stream as he taught me to fish. I was only as high as his waist and he rolled up his breeks and waded in, stood still for the longest time, watching the fast-moving water. Then he squatted down slowly, put his hands in the water and all at once pulled out a trout, sparkling in the sunlight, thrashing in his hands. My father laughed and cried, ‘You see, Joe! If you listen quietly for long enough, He sends his messengers!’ And, still laughing, he waded back to me, the fish frantic in his hands, and he gave it to me to hold. It was huge and heavy in my small arms and it thrashed and thrashed and all of it was like a raw open heart beating, mouth gaping for something I could not give it. I was afraid of the fish. It stilled, alive but accepting of my grasp, the brown back of it holding the cold reflection of the trees and the sky.

  ‘Will we take it home for Mother?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said my father. ‘I only wanted you to hold the beating heart of God for a moment, just so as you knew what to look for, always in life.’ He took the fish back from me and lowered it into the water, let it speed off underneath the glassy surface.

  Father takes a leaf out of Sarah’s hair. Sarah stares straight ahead, as if she has left her body.

  Sarah walks ahead of me, and the fall of her dress on the backs of her knees takes my attention. She has to gather the dress, which is too large for her small frame, in two hands to stop from tripping over the cloth. It looks a little, when she high-steps over a bramble, like she dances.

  We walk all day and find nothing. The woods feel endless, like when you lie on your back and look at the sky and begin to disappear into it. More than once, I spot an arrangement of weeds and saplings that I feel I have seen befo
re.

  Sometimes the woods are dark and dense and our footsteps are necessarily slow, no faster than the tramp of a cow’s heart, and then out we will come onto a clearing. Here we will rest, or, if the day has been long enough, like today, we set up camp, and always, as we do this, the rain starts to fall and falls until morning. No one talks about the strange rhythms of the woods because to speak of it out loud will make it unavoidably real.

  Sarah still talks very little. The main noise comes from the Widow Clements, who is full of good tidings and expects it all to be for the best, this new start.

  ‘We will find a little village just close to the sea, and between us we will get such work that we can secure for ourselves a small house and set up and start again, and this time with fish and eel and whatever else lives in the water. I saw the sea once as a child, and I remember more than anything the smell – so fresh and clean. And water as far as you can see. An island, and a man to row you out to it, where you can find the eggs of seabirds and take a net for herring. Have you eaten herring?’ she asks the group and no one replies. ‘Quite delicious, a little fish, strong and salty.’

  There is a long silence that a lesser talker would take as a mark to be quiet.

  ‘You won’t believe it, even to see it, quite remarkable, quite remarkable.’ The more she talks, the less Father responds. When we walk single file, he makes sure to put Cook behind him even though she coughs and spits often into the brambles, so that the Widow Clements has to talk her ramble at Cook’s back instead. It is only fear, even I know this, but all of us are afraid and manage not to drive nails of irritation into each other.

  That night I hear something move in our camp. I rest a hand on my blunt knife and wait, the hairs prick up on my arms. It is Sarah, and she comes and lies down facing me. I can see the wetness in her eyes. I would like to show her the sacking cloth in my pocket and explain its significance to her, I would like to tell her about everything from the past years and I would like to feel the cold soft flesh of her inner arm against my nose and mouth. Instead I stay very still, watching.

  ‘I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused you,’ she whispers in her strange hoarse voice.

  ‘We were not much liked any more in the village anyway,’ I say. Though in the dark you cannot see the brown of her eyes, I know it is there. My own eyes are open to their fullest as though more can be taken in that way.

  ‘Still,’ she says, ‘I am grateful. I know something of not being liked.’

  My father calls out in his sleep. We are quiet until we can be sure no one has awoken.

  ‘I have also lost my mother and sister.’ I feel a rush telling her, sure she will find a connection there.

  ‘Yes, I know, your father has told me.’ I am deflated and ashamed at my deflation. I wanted it to be something we shared alone. How dare he use this to talk to the girl, it should be my sadness to tell. I do not know why I think this.

  ‘Why did they say you were a witch?’ I ask, because something needs to be said. I see her shrug in the dark.

  ‘They caught me drinking milk from one of their sows. They were angry. They are men and I am a girl.’

  ‘Did you burn down their shed?’

  ‘How did your sister die?’ she asks instead of answering my question.

  ‘I thought Father told you?’

  ‘He told me the woods took her.’

  ‘She wandered away and something got her.’

  ‘The woods don’t take people. There’s nothing to be afraid of in the woods.’

  ‘Something tore out her throat.’

  She shook her head. ‘After. It would have been after.’

  ‘My mother died when she found out.’

  ‘Because she knew.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because she knew what had happened. She knew what happened to her girl.’

  ‘I don’t like this talk.’

  ‘We will stop then.’

  Sarah puts out her hand and touches mine, which is curled in a fist on the ground. I feel it hot through me. When she takes her hand away, I am left with the feeling of her paw, strong, boned and calloused, a hard-feeling hand that has lived around the edges of the woods.

  When I wake it is to the watery green of new leaves and the sound of rain falling. Back home, had the crops not failed long ago, this shower of rain in early spring would have been looked upon with pleasure, fattening the corn ears, watering the cattle and their pasture. And though we are far from that place now, I still think of it, and wonder if it rains there too, if anyone sits affront our old cottage and weaves grasses together, watching the crow-coloured mud writhing and sighing under the touch of rain. Perhaps they have burnt it. It should not matter, there is no returning to that house.

  Father is up, I hear him fart, then piss into the underbush. A trail of wet woodsmoke catches my nose, and I lean up to see Cook has, as she has nearly all the mornings of my life, lit a fire, and is heating water collected from the stream.

  ‘Where is she?’ I ask her, and Cook nods to the south end of the clearing, where Sarah sits, her dress pulled over her feet, her eyes sunken from lack of sleep.

  The Widow Clements is always awake before us, and goes foraging. She returns as the water in the pan starts to boil, and she holds out to Cook the nettles she has picked with the shield of her pinafore. Cook looks them over and shrugs, drops them into the water. Father comes by and stands close.

  ‘Careful – you’ll get done for witchery,’ says my father. He means it as a joke. Everyone looks at him. Sarah starts laughing, and then everyone looks at her.

  After we’ve eaten the nettles, which tasted good at first because of our hunger, but leave a strange fur on the roof of the mouth, we begin to gather our things. Cook likes to extinguish and hide the evidence of a fire, but Father puts his hand up and stills her before she can run it over with earth. He stands atop a fallen log, looking into the dark of the woods in the direction we arrived from. There is a strange gait to him, his chin thrust into the air, like he is trying to catch a scent, his hands in front of him, splayed, lost somewhere in the air in front of him.

  He gets down off his log.

  ‘We go now,’ he says quietly, ‘leave everything, someone’s coming.’

  ‘But—’ says Cook. Father takes her wrist and gives her a wrench in the direction we are headed. She wheezes, covers her mouth with the hem of her dress and coughs pathetically into it.

  ‘We go now,’ he hisses, scoops a hand under Sarah’s armpit to make her stand. The widow fusses with her skirts as she runs. To see Father afraid is unsettling. I catch the mumble of other voices on the air. We run.

  II

  Ruth sat on the edge of the bed as Peter folded two shirts into his overnight case. It was to be, he assured her, the very last bit of work that needed tidying up before the New Year. There was a softness between them. Earlier that morning, Ruth’s dream of being followed by a creature with silent feet had bled out into the bedroom. He had woken her with an arm around her waist, a look of concern on his face, and she had been so grateful to wake up that way, that they had made love almost immediately. He packed his good weekend slipons but no undergarments. Their conversation continued very nicely.

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters very much whether or not one rode as a child, because by now all of those muscles have quite passed on. I’m not sure I could manage even a rising trot in an easy chair.’

  Peter laughed. ‘I should like to see that.’ He turned to look at her. ‘I think you’d make a very fine sight on the back of a horse – quite striking.’

  There was a flattering lightness of spirit to him that Ruth had noticed on the day they met, and for a moment, leaning back on the bed, she wondered if he might make love to her again. But instead he zipped his case closed and moved around to kiss her chastely on the cheek.

  ‘It would be a very good idea to learn a new skill – something to keep busy with.’ He straightened. ‘Who knows, if the boys took to it, we could ev
en think of renting a stable.’ They stayed like that a few moments, Ruth smiling up at her husband, him smiling down at her.

  ‘Darling, why haven’t you packed any underwear?’ It came out quite unexpectedly.

  ‘What?’ he asked still smiling, though she may have witnessed a flicker in his eye.

  ‘I just wondered – you have a couple of shirts but no underwear – no spare trousers either, in fact.’

  ‘I keep some at the office.’

  Ruth continued smiling. ‘Well, that’s that mystery solved then.’