by Andrew Greig
She looks around. Still no one on the road. She goes over to the wall and with a grunt lifts off the heaviest stone she can. She staggers towards the sheep and stands over it. Twenty yards off the corbies are still waiting.
She positions herself over the head. She sways, hesitates, then her hands open. Her eyes are shut tight but she hears the crunch. Then she walks past the crows and stumbles on towards the village, unable to see for all this water everywhere.
*
In the big house David takes a bacon roll upstairs and sits on the end of his bed reading Jo’s letter yet again.
So what’s the matter with me? I know you need reassurrances but I just want to tell you things like the latest academic gossip and how there’s bubbles under the wallpaper that I can squeegee around but not get rid of …
You should get out more – isn’t there anyone you can visit?
I want to share things I see, like the tadpoles for Christ’s sake, I want you to see their little legs. I want to update you on the land struggles of aboriginal peoples – is that you? Or are you, historically considered, one of the imperialist oppressors? And are the oppressors themselves oppressed more by the sheer weight of history or by their ignorance of it? Are we?
Oh and I think my eating’s getting better …
The creases of her letter are getting grubby and frayed. His eyes move over the words but fall into the space between the lines.
He puts the letter between the pages of The Screwtape Letters. Someone cares more about him than he’d ever thought possible. He reminds himself of that. God is good. But what if He’s not? What if He’s just a power that moves through everything, the one that equally pushes the cloud across the sky and the woman from the cliff-top?
He cannot afford to think this.
He stands at the window watching the rain. He could take a walk, but there’s only one way he’d end up going. The photo has locked them in the same frame. They’re connected, he feels it down in his belly, like shared breathing. They rise and fall together.
He stands possessed by the certainty that somewhere Marnie is breathing.
He coughs and blows her out of him.
He can hear his father upstairs, walking up and down. He’s singing now. David pushes up the window and sticks his head out. Now he can hear better. Same bloody song as yesterday. And the day before.
I loved a lass and I loved her sae weel
I hated all others that spoke of her ill
But now she’s rewarded me well for my love
For she’s gone to be wed to another …
The house is empty but for the nutter upstairs. Annie’s not due in today. Tat’s off to some carving class in the city.
The clerk of the parish he gave a great cry
If you’ve any objections then please bring them by
And I thought tae masel great objections hae I
But I hadna the wish tae affront her
Great objections hae I. He has had great objection to something since he was tiny. At times even his Faith is mostly quarrel with the world as it is, with himself as he is. But Jo’s illness, her intelligence and courage call out his tenderness. To hold her when she needs it is to be at rest.
But someone has raised tarn-black eyes and leant unasked to kiss him and that kiss has lifted a lade-gate and set the current through him. He feels the great stones clunk and grind in his chest as the wheel turns and he can’t stop it.
The men of the forest they ask it of me
How many strawberries grow in the salt sea
And I answer them back wi a tear in my ee
How many ships sail in the forest?
How he hates daft questions that have no answers. Like why doesn’t his father do something? Why doesn’t he visit his lover’s daughter? What’s he waiting for, why is he frightened?
David pulls the window down and sits to write back to Jo. He stares out at the drizzle. It’s been days now. His hand moves. He writes Rain like love feels forever till it stops.
He stops. He can’t say that.
*
Where is the watcher today? He wasn’t in his usual place at the margins of the scenes. This morning on rising you noticed something odd and different in the top left curve: high ghostly verticals, and between them are many round blobs. Like a basket of eggs you think. No, it’s heads. People in numbers, streaming forward, glancing but not talking. A cathedral spire, a citadel, distant hills.
The city, then. And leaning closer you saw one blob has his back turned away, the crowd parts round him like he was a stone in the river current. You think you recognise this one. He must always be accounted for. Your thoughts follow him as you move through the day.
The ballads are drooned in the city. Streets and pavements, shops and tenements cover the earth, the burns are piped out of sight, the wind is baffled and dies in multi-storey car parks. The only birds are tuneless starlings.
Man, I love it.
One of the scraggie travellers, your modern stoorie-foot, told me the city was inhuman. Did you ever hear such thoughtless blethers? The city is human, every bit of it is our work. It’s the perfect lover, the one that never quite delivers. It’s a drug ten times stronger than anything Elliot kens of. Most of the time I resist it and don’t allow myself to come here often.
Folk know I seldom stir beyond the valley and the village. They assume it’s because I’ve taken a scunner to the city but they’re so wrong.
I turn my eyes from looking out the art college windows, away from the human tangle of spires and wires, roads and monuments, the deep sough of traffic and the people moving like corpuscles in the circulation of the blood. Whiles I’ve felt the city like a breathing body wrappit round me, and my gasps are its own.
But I turn back to the still world, the wee and the cool. Bone, ivory, jade, boxwood and my soft metals. My skeelie fingers poke and prod with blades and rasps, and like my hairt was a charcoal-pit I smoor its fires awhile in this work.
*
You lean over paper, reading and remembering. Sometimes you take notes, for it’s a complicated story with no clear boundaries. One voice side-slips into another, a push becomes a fall when witnesses disagree, lovers become birds, men become women and women are as men. Everything is debatable.
You turn another page and hear the rain shush in the distance like a librarian’s sigh.
You’re too far in to back out now. You dream of clarity and charity, but this could take some time.
By late afternoon the rain had passed over and clear light returned over the town cramped at the meeting of the valleys. She accepted she’d missed the bus back to the village. Carrying bags of shopping and her notes in the satchel on her back, she left the last stone houses behind and lengthened her stride.
Cars passed. Her right hand dangled. One or two slowed, unsure whether she was wanting a lift, interested in a woman walking the road alone. But something about her – the fierce set of her shoulders perhaps, a purpose and indifference in that dark, alert head – made them swerve and carry on.
She walked on, damp squeaking in her boots. Plenty to think about. A session among the back numbers at the newspaper office, glaring at the curious secretary. No photo-copying, so she’d made pages of scribbled notes. The trial had been in the central market town but now the transcripts were held in the city. Still it had been written up in detail, this local sensation. She knew the verdict, had known it since childhood. It could as well be branded across her high forehead: Not Proven.
But the detail was enough to make her hands shake. She stopped, mouth open, outraged when at the last minute the prosecution reduced the charge from Murder to Culpable Homicide. Meaning he killed her but didn’t really mean to. Meaning the prosecution were losing confidence. Their adult witnesses – a man on a tractor, two brothers walking back from the pub that afternoon – were becoming less conclusive. There were discrepancies. It had been a long way off. Drink had been taken. And they had clearly, like most local people, already
made up their minds.
Maybe he hadn’t meant to kill Jinny. Maybe he was trying to persuade her, stop her from telling, asking her to run away with him, and she’d slipped over the edge. If Sir Simon Elliot pleaded guilty to that, he could get off with two to four years. Not bad for a human life.
But he hadn’t changed his plea. Thrawn bastard, or in full denial. Perhaps he knew what was coming next: the stuttery, nervous testimony of the adolescent Kevin Tattersall – malnourished urban reject, distant nephew taken in for the summer, part-time shadow of Sim Elliot, full-time voyeur.
She pictures him in Elliot’s cut-down clothes giving evidence. Knobbly knees, thin white arms, sweating in his pants. She can feel for him as for herself, the outsider dizzy with the power that’s been given. Glancing nervously between Elliot and a catatonically drunk Patrick Johnstone with his daughter clutched in his arms. Tat with one sharp eye on the recent past, the other on his future. Then making his choice. Or maybe just telling the truth as he saw it, frightened into stammer by the formality but refusing to budge.
Sir Simon and Jinny were very close together at the top of the cliff. He had an arm out, she pushed and some earth came loose and she fell. She hit the ledge and got up and fell again, and it was like that all the way to the bottom where she tumbled down broken and bleeding, opened her mouth and died. Did she say anything, Kevin? Did she say if Sir Simon pushed her? Sir, she just said Ah. She said Ah and the blood came out.
It didn’t look much in transcript – patchy, incomplete, but enough to undermine the more distant eye-witnesses. Enough to introduce doubt at the trial, to make the other witnesses hesitate and admit that from that distance they could have misunderstood two figures clasped together on the edge of Creagan’s Knowe.
She splashed grimly along the verge, letting the passing cars spray on her while two new items burned between her ribs. The prosecution began by establishing how long the affair between Simon Elliot and Jinny Lauder had gone on. A few months, Elliot admitted. They had meetings in Crawhill Cottage after Jinny had moved there with her husband and baby. Again, Tat confirmed he’d seen their trysts when he was staying during the holidays. There were no other witnesses, but Elliot’s admission of the affair and Tat’s corroboration had ended that line of questioning.
She slowed and stopped, for the first time wondering just how long …
She stood for a moment at the roadside, letting the possibilities fork and streak down like rain across a pane. Then she took some deep breaths, straightened her shoulders and walked on with only the slightest tremor at her knees. She had to get the story straight before … Well, before whatever action she took.
And something else to be considered – her notes had gone shaky, she’d had to print the few words before giving up – at the end of the pathologist’s report on the deceased: Pregnant, approximately three months.
Sure as eggs are easily broken, defence argued she could have jumped and Elliot had been trying to stop her. They argued no man would deliberately kill his own unborn child. Understanding nothing about Jinny or the times. Cretins. Pregnant Jinny meant divorce, losing the estate in settlement, losing his son. Public and private shame. That was cause enough. But come on: think. If he thought the baby was his surely to God … Then again, if he thought it wasn’t …
Up ahead, a car had stopped. It began to reverse towards her. Battered green estate, mud on the sills. She flexed her free right hand and kept walking past it.
Marnie? Marnie Lauder?
A woman’s voice. She stopped mid-stride. The window came down further. Full open face, weathered and lively.
Uh-huh.
Would you like a lift to Crawhill? I’m going that way and it’s an awfy walk.
She stared at the woman. Plump hands on the wheel, wedding and engagement rings. She wanted to be left alone to think. But she also wanted some normal company and this woman had normal stencilled across her old purple anorak and tartan woollen beret. It was starting to drizzle again, remorseless as a girning child. She’d done all the thinking she could stand. She mustn’t compromise herself. Accept no favours.
The woman tugged the handle and swung the door open.
I stay down the brae from you. Jump in.
You’re Annie Tat. Sorry, Mrs Tattersall.
Got it in one, dear. Put your bags in the back with the dog food.
*
So I fettled up my kit and lowsed early from the class. Anyway I’d been foutering about the last hour, jalousing ways of setting silver into bone but it was aye melting or peeling off. In truth my hand had a tremmle on it as the blade and solder iron moved in and out of the wee smooth valley. I saw the ancient cleft and Elliot’s white shaft sinking in.
Fuck off back to the organ-grinder.
The lassie had shoogled me up right enough, wiping her blood onto my breeks and smiling. She wasn’t natural.
Standing out on the pavement, the West End rush-hour pouring by me, I felt myself a finnock in the burn, waggling its fins to stay still. I should be heading home. But the key to Elliot’s flat was hot in my pooch. I could take a daunder around, maybe see a few kent faces in the part of town I know best, then head off when the traffic had run dry.
I’m a great kidder. I’d no more choice than a bitch in heat nor the dog that sniffs her. So I jumped on the bus wi a fiss in my wallies and my tools and gear for overnight in the bag over my shoulder, then went up front to watch as the driver swung toward the dirty part of town.
*
Consider these ghostly meetings at the circumference. Dogs chasing deer, hawks pursuing doves. Below them, what looks like two women in a clearing. The one with her arm round the waist of the other is strikingly thin, fair-haired. Are they sisters, lovers, dancers? Or perhaps the thin one is a boy, a youth. Really the detail is so faded and corrupted, you can only guess by what feels right. In any case their faces are turned to each other as though in sudden recognition, or they have heard their names called a long way off. But surely, by this long line of ivy that runs from one scene to another, they come later. It’s a foreshadowing. Let it be so.
Hiss of tyres, murmur of radio turned low, the laboured beat of wipers. Warm in the car, windows steaming up, and for the first time in a long time, a safe feeling. Something about Annie Tat’s old blue cardigan under the anorak, or the stretch pants and flat slip-on shoes, or her loud and cheerful voice. Safe. Cuddly. David’s second mother.
Have a boiling, dear.
Annie held out a tin labelled Berwick Cockles. Marnie fumbled inside the tin, struggled to hold onto a sweetie and still get her wrist out. The cockle was striped pink, oval, rough. In her mouth she remembered: mint sweetness puckering the tongue, the kindly woman who once gave her them, another life ago. So many lives …
Did you know her when she lived at Crawhill?
The car swerved slightly as Annie put the tin away.
Poor Jinny? No, I’m not from round here, can’t you tell? By the time I first knew the estate well, your mother was a year dead and all that was left was talk. How they loved it round here.
For a moment Annie didn’t sound very mumsie. Marnie glanced at her, saw the line of muscle under the plump jaw-line.
Remember your mum, do you?
Uh. She sucked sugar through the air pockets of the cockle, rubbed her tongue on the coral roughness. I think she gave me these sweeties. Apart from that and her red hair and a feeling … I mean I was very wee when she was – when she died.
Annie’s hand dropped onto her arm, squeezed.
I’m sorry, dear. And about your father. Terrible that was.
Yes.
The road began to wind down into the village. She sucked then crunched the last of the sweet and felt her fillings dissolve.
It was hard for Tat then too, Annie said. Cos he was a wee city tyke and had nits which didn’t help and a bit stammer from being hit by his dad. After Jinny died, lot of folk had it in for him because he gave evidence for Sir Simon. But all he did was say what he
saw.
What he thought he saw.
Tat has sharp eyes, dear.
He must have been very grateful to Elliot, taking him in and that.
He was grateful to Simon and Fiona. Annie Tat leant on the ‘and’ briefly like a quick peep on the horn to warn an animal off the road. They were both good to him. And – a quick glance her way – he was very fond of Jinny. A quick conspiratorial between-women grin. I think he was a bit sweet on her.
He wasn’t the only one.
Annie Tat said nothing as they drove slowly through the village. It was a place where people looked to check who was in each car. Annie waved a couple of times. Marnie saw the curious glances linger, heads turn towards each other in their wake. She sensed patterns interlocking outside her mind, in the few folk on the street and the bare trees and the shining fields. Something she couldn’t stop now even if she wanted. For all the chill weather, the first hint of green on garden shrubs. Call it spring, the movement unstoppable.
No denying it was a wrong thing they did, Annie went on. Jinny was a married woman for all she was a bit of a hippie. She knew what she was about. Maybe they called it free love in those days.
It cost her life. And … my father’s with the drink.
And the divorce and the break-up of the estate. And Davy – you can see what he’s like about his dad. Sim Elliot’s not a bad man, and he’s paid enough.
Uh-huh.
The field with the dead sheep was coming up on the left. She hummed to herself to drown out the crunch of the stone.
So you were adopted, Marnie? We’re awful nosy round here.
She blinked something away then reached for another Berwick Cockle.
In care, then fostered out after Patrick …
Where did you live?
Here and there. How long have you been at the big house?
She’d only asked to change the subject, but Annie Tat looked at her closely.
I’ve been working at the big house since my kids were old enough to go to nursery.