“I wonder if he’d sit for us?” asked Margot, a rotund frizzy-haired girl from Liverpool. Margot had confessed to Claire that she had taken up painting because the smocks hid her hips.
“We could try asking him,” Claire suggested – Claire with her straight dark bob and her serious well-structured face. Her husband, her former husband, had always said that she looked “like a sensual schoolmistress.” Her painting smock and her Alice-band and her moon-round spectacles only heightened the impression.
“He’s so romantic,” said Margot. “Like Rob Roy. Or Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
Duncan sorted through his box of watercolours until he found the half-burned nip-end of a cigarette. He lit it with a plastic lighter with a scratched transfer of a topless girl on it. “The trouble with painting in Scotland,” he said, “is that everything looks so fucking romantic. You put your heart and your soul into painting Glenmoriston, and you end up with something that looks like a Woolworth’s dinner-mat.”
“I’d still like him to sit for us,” said Margot.
The painting class had arranged their easels on the sloping south lawn of Dunain Castle, just above the stone-walled herb gardens. Beyond the herb gardens the grounds sloped grassy and gentle to the banks of the Caledonian Canal, where it cut its way between the north-eastern end of Loch Ness and the city of Inverness itself, and out to the Moray Firth. All through yesterday, the sailing-ships of the Tall Ships Race had been gliding through the canal, and they had appeared to be sailing surrealistically through fields and hedges, like ships in a dream, or a nightmare.
Mr Morrissey called out, “Pay particular attention to the light; because it’s golden and very even just now; but it’ll change.”
Mr Morrissey (bald, round-shouldered, speedy, fussy) was their course-instructor; the man who had greeted them when they first arrived at Dunain Castle, and who had showed them their rooms (“You’ll adore this, Mrs Bright … such a view of the garden …”) and who was now conducting their lessons in landscape-painting. In his way, he was very good. He knew how to sketch; he knew how to paint. He wouldn’t tolerate sentimentality.
“You’ve not come to Scotland to paint The Monarch of the Glen,” he had told them, when he had collected them from the station at Inverness. “You’re here to paint life, and landscape, in light of unparalleled clarity.”
Claire returned to her charcoal-sketching but she could see (our of the corner of her eye) that the Laird of Dunain was slowly making his way across the lawns. For some reason, she felt excited, and began to sketch more quickly and more erratically. Before she knew it, the Laird was standing only two or three feet away from her, his hands still clasped behind his back. His aura was prickly and electric, almost as if he were already running his thick ginger beard up her inner thighs.
“Well, well,” he remarked, at last, in a strong Inverness accent. “You have all of the makings, I’d say. You’re not one of Gordon’s usual giglets.”
Claire blushed, and found that she couldn’t carry on sketching. Margot giggled.
“Hech,” said the Laird, “I wasn’t flethering. You’re good.”
“Not really,” said Claire. “I’ve only been painting for seven months.”
The Laird stood closer. Claire could smell tweed and tobacco and heather and something else, something cloying and sweet, which she had never smelled before.
“You’re good,” he repeated. “You can draw well; and I’ll lay money that ye can paint well. Mr Morrissey!”
Mr Morrissey looked up and his face was very white.
“Mr Morrissey, do you have any objection if I fetch this unback’d filly away from the class?”
Mr Morrissey looked dubious. “It’s supposed to be landscape, this morning.”
“Aye, but a wee bit of portraiture won’t harm her now, will it? And I’m dying to have my portrait painted.”
Very reluctantly, Mr Morrissey said, “No, I suppose it won’t.”
“That’s settled, then,” the Laird declared; and immediately began to fold up Claire’s easel and tidy up her box of watercolours.
“Just a minute –” said Claire, almost laughing at his impertinence.
The Laird of Dunain stared at her with eyes that were green like emeralds crushed with a pestle-and-mortar. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t object, do you?”
Claire couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “No,” she said. “I don’t object.”
“Well, then,” said the Laird of Dunain, and led the way back to the castle.
“Hmph,” said Margot, indignantly.
He posed in a dim upper room with dark oak paneling all around, and a high ceiling. The principal light came from a leaded clerestory window, falling almost like a spotlight. The Laird of Dunain sat on a large iron-bound trunk, his head held high, and managed to remain completely motionless while Claire began to sketch.
“You’ll have come here looking for something else, apart from painting and drawing,” he said, after a while.
Claire’s charcoal-twig was quickly outlining his left shoulder. “Oh, yes?” she said. She couldn’t think what he meant.
“You’ll have come here looking for peace of mind, won’t you, and a way to sort everything out?”
She thought, briefly, of Alan, and of Susan, and of doors slamming. She thought of walking for miles through Shepherd’s Bush, in the pouring April rain.
“That’s what art’s all about it, isn’t it?” she retorted. “Sorting things out.”
The Laird of Dunain smiled obliquely. “That’s what my father used to say. In fact, my father believed it quite implicitly.”
There was something about his tone of voice that stopped Claire from sketching for a moment. Something very serious; something suggestive; as if he were trying to tell her that his words had more than one meaning.
“I shall have to carry on with this tomorrow,” she said.
The Laird of Dunain nodded. “That’s all right. We have all the time in the world.”
The next day, while the rest of the class took a minibus to Fort Augustus to paint the downstepping locks of the Caledonian Canal, Claire sat with the Laird of Dunain in his high gloomy room and started to paint his portrait. She used designer’s colours, in preference to oils, because they were quicker; and she sensed that there was something mercurial in the Laird of Dunain which she wouldn’t be capable of catching with oils.
“You’re a very good sitter,” she said, halfway through the morning. “Don’t you want to take a break? Perhaps I could make some coffee.”
The Laird of Dunain didn’t break his rigid pose, even by an inch. “I’d rather get it finished, if you don’t mind.”
She carried on painting, squeezing out a half a tube of red. She was finding it difficult to give his face any colour. Normally, for faces, she used little more than a palette of yellow ochre, terra verte, alizarin crimson and cobalt blue. But no matter how much red she mixed into her colours, his face always seemed anaemic – almost deathly.
“I’m finding it hard to get your flesh-tones right,” she confessed, as the clock in the downstairs hallway struck two.
The Laird of Dunain nodded. “They always said of the Dunains of Dunain that they were a bloodless family. Mind you, I think we proved them wrong at Culloden. That was the day that the Laird of Dunain was caught and cornered by half-a-dozen of the Duke of Cumberland’s soldiers, and cut about so bad that he stained a quarter of an acre with his own blood.”
“That sounds awful,” said Claire, squeezing out more alizarin crimson.
“It was a long time ago,” replied the Laird of Dunain. “The sixteenth day of April, 1746. Almost two hundred and fifty years ago; and whose memory can span such a time?”
“You make it sound like yesterday,” said Claire, busily mixing.
The Laird of Dunain turned his head away for the very first time that day. “On that day, when he lay bleeding, the laird swore that he would have his revenge on the English for every drop of blood t
hat he had let. He would have it back, he said, a thousandfold; and then a thousandfold more.
“They never discovered his body, you know, although there were plenty of tales in the glens that it was hurried away by Dunains and Macduffs. That was partly the reason that the Duke of Cumberland pursued the Highlanders with such savagery. He made his own promise that he would never return to England until he had seen for himself the body of Dunain of Dunain, and fed it to the dogs.”
“Savage times,” Claire remarked. She sat back. The laird’s face was still appallingly white, even though she had mixed his skin-tones with almost two whole tubes of crimson. She couldn’t understand it. She ran her hand back through her hair and said, “I’ll have to come back to this tomorrow.”
“Of course,” said the Laird of Dunain.
On her way to supper, she met Margot in the oak-panelled corridor. Margot was unexpectedly bustling and fierce. “You didn’t come with us yesterday and you didn’t come with us today. Today we sketched sheep.”
“I’ve been –” Claire began, inclining her head toward the Laird of Dunain’s apartments.
“Oh, yes,” said Margot. “I thought as much. We all thought as much.” And then she went off, with wig-wagging bottom.
Claire was amazed. But then she suddenly thought: she’s jealous. She’s really jealous.
All the next day while the Laird of Dunain sat composed and motionless in front of her, Claire struggled with her portrait. She used six tubes of light red and eight tubes of alizarin crimson, and still his face appeared as starkly white as ever.
She began to grow more and more desperate, but she refused to give up. In a strange way that she couldn’t really understand, her painting was like a battlefield on which she and the Laird of Dunain were fighting a silent, deadly struggle. Perhaps she was doing nothing more than struggling with Alan, and all of the men who had treated her with such contempt.
Halfway through the afternoon, the light in the clerestory window gradually died, and it began to rain. She could hear the raindrops pattering on the roof and the gutters quietly gurgling.
“Are you sure you can see well enough?” asked the laird.
“I can see,” she replied, doggedly squeezing out another glistening snake of red gouache.
“You could always give up,” he said. His voice sounded almost sly.
“I can see,” Claire insisted. “And I’ll finish this bloody portrait if it kills me.”
She picked up her scalpel to open the cellophane wrapping around another box of designers’ colours.
“I’m sorry I’m such an awkward subject,” smiled the laird. He sounded as if it quite amused him, to be awkward.
“Art always has to be a challenge,” Claire retorted. She was still struggling to open the new box of paints. Without warning, there was a devastating bellow of thunder, so close to the castle roof that Claire felt the rafters shake. Her hand slipped on the box and the scalpel sliced into the top of her finger.
“Ow!” she cried, dropping the box and squeezing her finger. Blood dripped onto the painting, one quick drop after another.
“Is anything wrong?” asked the laird, although he didn’t make any attempt to move from his seat.
Claire winced, watching the blood well up. She was about to tell him that she had cut herself and that she wouldn’t be able to continue painting when she saw that her blood had mingled with the wet paint on the laird’s face and had suffused it with an unnaturally healthy flush.
“You’ve not hurt yourself, have you?” asked the laird.
“Oh, no,” said Claire. She squeezed out more blood, and began to mix it with her paintbrush. Gradually the laird’s face began to look rosier, and much more alive. “I’m fine, I’m absolutely fine.” Thinking to herself: now I’ve got you, you sly bastard. Now I’ll show you how well I can paint. I’ll catch you here for ever and ever; the way that I saw you; the way that I want you to be.
The laird held his pose and said nothing, but watched her with a curious expression of satisfaction and contentedness, like a man who has tasted a particularly fine wine. That night, in her room overlooking the grounds, Claire dreamed of men in ragged cloaks and feathered bonnets; men with gaunt faces and hollow eyes. She dreamed of smoke and blood and screaming. She heard a sharp, aggressive rattle of drums – drums that pursued her through one dream and into another.
When she woke up, it was still only five o’clock in the morning, and raining, and the window-catch was rattling and rattling in time to the drums in her dreams.
She dressed in jeans and a blue plaid blouse, and then she quiet-footedly climbed the stairs to the room where she was painting the laird’s portrait. Somehow she knew what she was going to find, but she was still shocked.
The portrait was as white-faced as it had been before she had mixed the paint with her own blood. Whiter, if anything. His whole expression seemed to have changed, too, to a glare of silent emaciated fury.
Claire stared at the portrait in horror and fascination. Then, slowly, she sat down, and opened up her paintbox, and began to mix a flesh tone. Flake white, red and yellow ochre. When it was ready, she picked up her scalpel, and held her wrist over her palette. She hesitated for only a moment. The Laird of Dunain was glaring at her too angrily; too resentfully. She wasn’t going to let a man like him get the better of her.
She slit her wrist in a long diagonal, and blood instantly pumped from her artery onto the palette, almost drowning the watercolours in rich and sticky red.
When the palette was flooded with blood, she bound her paint-rag around her wrist as tightly as she could, and gripped it with her teeth while she knotted it. Trembling, breathless, she began to mix blood and gouache, and then she began to paint.
She worked with her brush for almost an hour, but as fast as she applied the mixture of blood and paint, the faster it seemed to drain from the laird’s chalk-white face.
At last – almost hysterical with frustration – she sat back and dropped her brush. The laird stared back at her – mocking, accusing, belittling her talent and her womanhood. Just like Alan. Just like every other man. You gave them everything and they still treated you with complete contempt.
But not this time. Not this time. She stood up, and unbuttoned her blouse, so that she confronted the portrait of the Laird of Dunain bare-breasted. Then she picked up her scalpel in her fist, so that the point pricked the plump pale flesh just below her navel.
“The sleepy bit lassie, she dreaded nae ill; the weather was cauld and the lassie lay still. She thought that the tailor could do her no ill.”
She cut into her stomach. Her hand was shaking but she was calm and deliberate. She cut through skin and layers of white fat and deeper still, until her intestines exhaled a deep sweet breath. She was disappointed by the lack of blood. She had imagined that she would bleed like a pig. Instead, her wound simply glistened, and yellowish fluid flowed.
“There’s somebody weary wi’ lying her lane; there’s some that are dowie, I trow wad be fain … to see that bit tailor come skippin’ again.”
Claire sliced upward, right up to her breastbone, and the scalpel was so sharp that it became lodged in her rib. She tugged it out, and the tugging sensation was worse than the pain. She wanted the blood, but she hadn’t thought that it would hurt so much. The pain was as devastating as the thunderclap had been, overwhelming. She thought about screaming but she wasn’t sure that it would do any good; and she had forgotten how.
With bloodied hands she reached inside her sliced-open stomach and grasped all the hot slippery heavy things she found there. She heaved them out, all over her painting of the Laird of Dunain, and wiped them around, and wiped them around, until the art-board was smothered in blood, and the portrait of the laird was almost completely obscured.
Then she pitched sideways, knocking her head against the oak-boarded floor. The light from the clerestory window brightened and faded, brightened and faded, and then faded away forever.
They to
ok her to the Riverside Medical Centre but she was already dead. Massive trauma, loss of blood. Duncan stood in the car-park furiously smoking a cigarette and clutching himself. Margot sat on the leatherette seats in the waiting-room and wept.
They drove back to Dunain Castle. The laird was standing on the back lawn, watching the light play across the valley.
“She’s dead, then?” he said, as Margot came marching up to him. “A grousome thing, no doubt about it.”
Margot didn’t know what to say to him. She could only stand in front of him and quake with anger. He seemed so self-satisfied, so calm, so pleased; like the cat who has swallowed the last dollop of cream.
“Look,” said the Laird of Dunain, pointing up to the birds that were circling overhead. “The hoodie-craws. They always know when there’s a death.”
Margot stormed up to the room where – only two hours ago – she had found Claire dying. It was bright as a church. And there on its board was the portrait of the Laird of Dunain, shining and clean, without a single smear of blood on it. The smiling, triumphant, rosy-cheeked Laird of Dunain.
“Self-opinionated chauvinist sod,” she said, and she seized the art-board and ripped it in half, top to bottom. Out of temper. Out of enraged feminism. But, more than anything else, out of jealousy. Why had she never met a man that she would kill herself for?
And out in the garden, on the sloping lawns, the painting class heard a scream. It was a scream so echoing and terrible that they could scarcely believe that it had been uttered by one man.
In front of their eyes, the Laird of Dunain literally burst apart. His face exploded, his jawbone dropped out, his chest came bursting through his sweater in a crush of ribs and a bucketful of blood. There was so much blood that it sprayed up the walls of Dunain Castle, and ran down the windows.
They sat, open-mouthed, their paintbrushes poised, while he dropped onto the gravel path, and twitched, and lay still, while blood ran down everywhere, and the hoodie-craws circled and cried and cried again, because they always knew when there was a death.
Fortnight of Fear Page 5