by Vanessa Tait
‘Do not say that, Rebe. She would not like you to, if she was your friend. Rest your head, like you always used to, just for a moment.’
Rebecca let herself be drawn in and put the side of her head on his chest so that she could hear the distant whirr of his heart.
‘Why did she die?’
‘An accident, of her own making.’ She said nothing more, and he did not press her. Outside a boy gave a piercing whistle, and then a cry.
‘That lad is awful loud,’ said Gabe. ‘I think he is selling hot wine outside. Shall we get a cup?’
So they went down and bought a cup from him, but the wine sat like vinegar in her stomach and made her queasy. ‘How unlike Edinburgh it is! Everybody seems to want to be somewhere else. Can we go inside, into the coffee room? We could order some supper.’
The other diners at the hotel were men of industry or groups of English travelling up to the Highlands. The waiters danced around, whisking their towels and placing plate upon plate on the white tablecloths. It should have been a cosy scene, but the sickness was upon her, and everything Rebecca looked at filled her with gloom. The men of industry were supercilious, the English were noisy and nasal, and Gabe was looking at her too often, and frowningly.
Even so, she set upon her mutton chop and the potatoes and carrots in butter, and the gravy. When the blancmange came, held up next to a waiter’s ear, she ate up her bowl so quickly that Gabe offered his too. The cream and the sugar and the strawberries together were as good as anything she had ever eaten.
But after she sat back and wiped her mouth with a napkin the awkwardness came back. Upstairs lay the room and its big red bed. But downstairs were the English and the men of industry, drinking wine, growing more grating by the second.
‘Shall we go up?’ said Gabe at last, and Rebecca was forced to say yes.
Gabe waited outside the room for her to undress, and she shed her clothes as fast as she could, leaping into bed and pulling up the sheets to her neck.
‘You may come in,’ she whispered.
He opened the door, an awkward smile hovering about his lips. Rebecca could not bear to see it. She turned her head on its lumpy pillow and stared at the flock paper-hangings. She heard the fumbling of his buttons coming undone and his sigh as he settled himself onto the daybed.
‘You will be cold, Gabe. Your feet are always cold.’
‘I have slept on worse, do not fret about me.’
‘You are kind to come with me. I could not have borne it alone, after all.’
‘Hush now,’ he said.
But his feet and the bottom half of his legs stuck out over the end of the bed and he had only a thin grey blanket to sleep under. Nevertheless, he closed his eyes tight against her gaze, so she reached up and dimmed the lamp.
Gradually the noises outside fell away. Rebecca stared on into the darkness. She longed for her medicine. She longed for it so hard she fancied she could almost taste it. Again and again she drank it, imagined its spreading out, felt every care put away.
And then she longed for sleep, but it would not come. After a while she threw off her covers and went to the window. But it was past ten o’clock, no pharmacies would be open now, even in Glasgow. Her elbows ached with irritation, as if insects were shaking out their wings. She stretched out her arms, and shook them, and shook out her feet. She sighed, once, twice, three times. Her bed, with its tossed-about covers, regarded her balefully. The window rattled and a blast of cold air came through. She ought to stoke up the fire again.
Then a great and sudden racket came from outside, as if something metallic had been knocked from a carriage. Glasgow never really quieted, as Edinburgh did. She went to the window but there was no sign of the carriage. She had half-expected to see ships’ panels littering the road on its way from the railway to the docks.
‘What was that?’ Gabe sat up. Perhaps he had only been pretending to sleep.
‘I don’t know. Something from the railway yard, perhaps.’
‘Let me stoke up the fire.’ He got out of his daybed and crouched in front of the fireplace, his woollen nightshirt stretched over his back as he worked to coax up a flame, the sound of the bellows heaving in and out. One flame leapt up, then another and Gabe sat back.
‘You are still cold,’ he said.
‘No, only … well … I am hot and cold both.’
Gabe came over and rubbed her arms, put a hand to her forehead. Rebecca squirmed away.
‘You have not a fever,’ he said, looking at her with narrowed eyes. The glow from the fire made him look younger again, as he had looked before he left.
‘In Egypt,’ he began, ‘a great deal of hashish is smoked. There is not the distrust of pleasure that there is here. It runs along the same lines as kayf.’
Rebecca stayed silent. She did not want to admit that she had read his letters over and over until she knew every line.
‘I smoked it too, for a while. I think – well, it does not much matter what I think – but at first it made the world so much brighter, and then it became a consolation for – well, for the terrible things that kept me away from home.’ He paused. ‘I had to take myself away from Cairo, into the countryside, much as you are dong now. And then, when at last I gave it up all together, I craved nothing more than another cigarette.’
He had guessed then, at the reason for her illness!
‘But hashish is a great deal easier than, say, laudanum, from what I hear.’
In the darkness, Rebecca’s cheeks grew red. ‘I have been weak. I have ended up like all those other women dreaming their lives away and now I am a slave to it. But my husband has made a new medicine – much greater than laudanum. I did not realize it was the same thing at first. He gives it to me. I expect you will hear of it soon, it is to be sold in every pharmacy round Britain.’ From the next room somebody coughed. As if it was catching, Rebecca raised her hand to her mouth and coughed into it.
‘Are you suffering, Rebe?’
‘Not as greatly as I have done, when you left,’ she said, before she could stop herself.
Gabriel sat with his hands clasped between his legs and his head bowed, pressing the side of his body into hers. Though she willed it not to, she felt herself grow warm where he touched her. She felt the texture of his skin, the warmth of his breath, the spring of the hair from his head, the point of his elbows, the sweep of his eyelashes, the particular width of his thigh – all of it – just there by the side of her, radiating heat, when the rest of her was frozen.
Just as the salts dimmed every pain and quelled every hunger, the lack of them had the opposite effect: her skin was on fire, tears slid from her eyes, she felt melancholy and crazed and hilarious all at once. She hungered, not only for food.
‘You were the only reason I returned,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I would still be in Cairo, and die there.’
Rebecca shut her eyes. Points of flame still danced behind her eyelids. ‘Why did you not take me, then? You knew I would have gone.’
‘I thought I would prove myself, and come back to you better. I thought …’ Gabe sighed. ‘I thought Egypt would be no place for a woman. But everything I thought was wrong. And that is what I have learned.’
Rebecca sneezed, which set up a tingling all over her body. She had not realized that the lack of her medicine would cause desire to flame up all over her.
‘It is what I have longed for these two years, to be with you. But now that you are here in front of me …’ said Gabe, keeping his eyes on her.
The deepest part of the night had passed. A bird, fooled by the burning of the street lamps, had started to sing. Didn’t she know, too, what it was to lose herself – and wasn’t she, too, paying the price?
‘Oh Gabe, I have hated you for so long! I thought I had put you away for ever.’
‘And now?’
Slowly, as if in a dream, Rebecca reached for him and pulled the thin fabric of his nightshirt towards her. His hand came up and stroked the back of her neck. It
set all the hairs on her neck and arms on end and pulled her nipples up into points. She sighed. When she shivered he wrapped his arms tightly around her back and pressed his cheek into hers.
‘I am not in my right mind,’ she said. ‘I feel as if all the skin had been flayed from my body, and my mind feels as raw.’
He said into her hair, without releasing her, ‘We have this. Only this moment. And if I never am to see you again I will remember it.’
‘I have hated you for so long. But now I find …’ She moved forward an inch, then another. Their lips met. Gabe’s were not so full as Alexander’s and she could not get the feel of them at first, not until she felt the point of his tongue come out to touch her own, slippery and alive, and she pulled back, her breath coming hard on his cheek.
When they kiss again it is easier. Lips on lips. Tongue on tongue. His hand comes up to draw her face in, further in, until she grows dizzy, and will drown in it. She takes his other hand and puts it on her breast. The material of her nightgown is so thin that it does not feel as if it is there at all. His rubbing there sets up a line, a connection between her nipple and the place between her legs, tugging at her, pulling at her, until it is almost pain.
She takes his hand and puts it where she aches. His breath catches in his throat. He strokes her, flutters his fingers. Still they kiss but she is breathing so hard she has to draw her lips away.
Now they lie down, awkwardly, not wanting to lose contact, he on top of her, she struggling to free her legs and get them out on either side of his. ‘How heavy you are!’ she whispers into his mouth.
‘And you, and you …’
She wants to feel him inside her. She takes him and puts him at the place. But now he seems to hesitate.
‘Are you sure? You are married, and I—’
‘Oh Gabe, do not stop now! Not now!’ She gets her hands onto his buttocks and pulls him in to the centre of her, and then he does not hesitate any more, but moves against her, and slides, and moves, she is wet and dissolving into nothing but this. She builds to a greater and greater ache, she can feel him breathing into her ear: ‘Oh my darling, my love.’ He moves against her, so sweet, and so sharp until the point tips over and runs out and she is lost.
They lie together then, her breathing coming back, and with it, all of herself, until the weight of him grows too much on her where it presses against the floorboards and she presses him away.
He seizes her nose and her temple and kisses her again on the lips, softly. ‘How I missed you,’ he says.
She shivers, a final time. ‘Let us go to bed now,’ she says. But she cannot sleep, not until the dawn starts to press its way through the blinds and it is almost time to wake up.
CHAPTER 25
It was past noon by the time Gabe handed Rebecca onto the train bound for Inveraray. As he stood at the door he said quietly: ‘People will think we are a married couple – oh, kiss me now before you go!’ They kissed until Rebecca’s heart was beating again, his hand winding into the hair under her bonnet. They kissed until a woman came up behind with a humph! and they had to break apart to let her on.
‘Do you have to go, really? Could you not get better back in Edinburgh?’ he said.
‘At your parents’ house? Sweating and trembling and having to explain why? They know me well enough to see that I am not my right self, and, oh Gabe, I could not bear that! For them to know what I am come to …’ Rebecca let her forehead rest on the collar of his jacket; it prickled, but the prickling was a comfort somehow. ‘It is bad enough that you know how weak and foolish I have been.’
‘You have not been weak! Foolish perhaps. To marry that fiend.’ He rubbed the back of her neck with the pads of his thumbs, she could feel where his skin cracked apart. He whispered: ‘I only wish I did not have to let you go.’
‘Excuse me,’ said a young man holding a leather case, ‘let me past, please!’
‘Go to your carriage,’ said Gabe. ‘I will come to the window. We have a few more moments.’
Rebecca found a coach that was empty save for an old lady in a black cap behind her newspapers. She set down her reticule, pulled down the window and stuck her head through it. ‘Gabe, here!’
He half ran, half skipped to her, snatched up her hand and pressed it to his mouth. Then he grew grave. ‘Can you write to me, from the croft?’
Rebecca put her hand on his face. ‘Yes, Gabe, I will write. And yes, I will miss you, most dreadfully. But I think, I am afraid, that even after last night,’ she blushed and glanced at the old lady, but the old lady did not look up, ‘things cannot be as they used to be between us.’
‘Oh!’ Gabe flushed. ‘I know it. At least, I ought to have known it. I think I hoped … But perhaps I would not have wanted it so, exactly as it was before. I was stuffed full of arrogance and pride.’
‘Oh! The tannery, I understand it now – it is your way of making atonement! Is it?’
‘Rebe, only you would have guessed that! A poor kind of atonement, most likely worthless, but it is good for my humility.’
‘Your humility! Oh Gabe, you always wanted to be humble! And yet concentrating on it only made you more arrogant.’
Gabe flinched.
‘I don’t say you are still arrogant now. I don’t say the tannery is the same, only, do you remember that boy – the boy that was bullied at your school? I forget his name.’
‘I do not see how Fontmell is the same.’
‘You were so proud of those scars, you could not wait to show me.’
‘I know, I know, but it was better, wasn’t it—’
‘That you got the scars rather than the other boy they were aiming at, yes, it was.’
‘But wasn’t it? Fontmell was so small and thin and bullied most atrociously, and those pins thrown at him like that, I think they would have driven him out.’
‘Oh Gabriel, yes, I am sure you are right. And a good deed is still a good dead, no matter what.’
The whistle blew then and the guard began to move along the train slamming doors. Rebecca took up Gabe’s hand again and spoke quickly. ‘Whilst I am gone can you find me a room in Albany Street, where I can look out at my husband’s house? I must get in there whilst Alexander is at the pharmacy. I must find something that my friend Evangeline told me about before she died. Can you do it?’
‘Anything, Rebe, I shall be glad to! And I am happy you are not returning to him, at least! Thank God for it, darling.’
The train was moving now, and he running alongside, twisting his fingers in her own, until the noise and the smoke grew too much and the tips of their fingers were pulled apart by motion.
Then Rebecca leaned her forehead onto the window and cried.
‘Never mind, lass, you’ll see him soon enough, I expect.’ Rebecca started. She had forgotten the lady was there.
‘I shan’t!’ Rebecca let herself say. ‘I don’t expect I shall ever see him again, at least …’ Not in that way.
‘Did you have a row? Every marriage has its arguments. I was married for fifty-five years and we had an argument every day, round about noon usually.’ She wheezed with laughter. ‘And my husband lived until seventy-five!’
Rebecca nodded. ‘Around noon, how did you manage it?’
‘He got hungry then, I think that was the reason. A good argue puts the backbone into a relationship, I’m as sure of it as I am of this strap here.’ She leaned into the leather strap as the coach creaked round a bend.
‘It depends,’ said Rebecca, turning her head to the window again, ‘on whom you argue with.’ Her breath quickly steamed up the view. Her toes were numb. She put her new reticule onto her lap and opened its clasp. Her nose was dripping, but surely Gabriel had not thought to put in a handkerchief.
But there it was! With violets embroidered in one corner – she had seen it up the sleeve of Mrs Parsons often when she was younger, she must have embroidered it herself.
Beneath the handkerchief, she saw it immediately, a letter, made up of sev
eral pages and folded together carefully; Gabe’s writing. He had written lengthways and widthways on the same thin sheets from the station hotel. The words seemed to give them density.
Rebecca tore open the envelope, her hands were trembling so hard that she almost ripped the paper inside along with it.
You are my own, I feel as if I shall die if I can’t have you for ever. But as you lie sleeping here I must hurry to explain, as I could not last night, explain what has kept me from you for so long.
I told you I learned nothing – that was not quite true – I learned that I was nothing. Nobody. But now you are here I am somebody – or – we are somebody perhaps, somebody new. Even for one night.
I must explain. Oh, I lose time just by looking at you, and how fitfully you sleep, and even so, how beautiful you are. It is strange to write this in a hurry, that I have written twenty times or more out in Egypt. Often I got as far as to give it to the boy to take to the post – and then I sent another boy after the first to retrieve him. And the longer time went on, the harder it was to write, until the thought of it weighed me down and I could not even put pen to paper.
She had slept fitfully and had not noticed Gabe writing anything in all the times she had roused herself, but perhaps she had not woken up, only dreamed she had.
‘Bad news, lassie?’ said the old lady. ‘You look awful pale.’
Rebecca put her hand to her cheek. ‘I don’t know if it is good or bad.’
‘Ach well, a visit to the countryside will right that, plenty of wind to burn some colour into your cheeks, right enough.’
I must explain!
I left hoping to make my mark on the world. And in the cause that the Bedouins took me to, the plight of the men at the canal, I thought I had found a way to do it.
Did you hear of the rebellion, did it come to the newspapers here? I think it must have, and you would have read it.
Oh Rebe, it was marvellous! The Bedouin are the most fearsome warriors you ever saw. They lent me a horse, a skinny creature, but fast, fast as a wave breaking. And they lent me a costume to match their own, not like the riders here wear, but light swathes of fabric wrapped all around which seem to blend into the wind. Writing about them again I see them so clearly, as if they are real and Glasgow is not.