Suzanne heard a discreet cough behind her, and turned to see Murdo standing in the doorway.
“I see,” he said, “that you have found Miranda.”
Suzanne registered the chill in his tone. The first wife. So she had indeed been prying.
“I haven’t seen these for many years,” he said, taking the photos from her.
“And little Jeremy, too,” he said, studying the photo with the baby. “Who would have thought such a bonny little boy would grow up into my hair-shirted son? He’s probably in the former Yugoslavia right now, ducking bullets, or mopping up the blood of the wounded with his Greenpeace T-shirt. Or skulking through Cambodia, snuffling up the ordures of Pol Pot. He has a penchant for suffering, has Jeremy.”
Murdo snorted. It was an ugly sound, Suzanne thought. She had never before heard him be so derisive. Her discovery was beginning to take on the uncomfortable grittiness of a bad dream. Do not, under any circumstances, open the box.
“Murdo,” she started, uncertain where to go next. What had she opened? Then: “I had no idea that I was treading on something so personal.”
“Personal? Personal!” He made the word sound distasteful, and his face in the lamplight was one she did not recognize – gloomy, older, embittered.
“These were Miranda’s.” He gestured towards the marionettes. “She had the most beautiful hands. And quick. Like white birds. She made these wooden things live. She’d keep a group of snotty-nosed children in the village hall captivated for an hour and more. She had a voice too, like silver bells.”
“That’s the Queen of Elfland,” he said, pointing to the green-clad lady. “And that one’s True Thomas the Rhymer, poor chap. And that,” he peered into the box, “is Long Lankin, murderer of the moors. Miranda loved the old ballads. She was a descendant of Sir Walter Scott. Did I tell you that?”
“No,” she answered. “You’ve told me very little.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well.” Then shook himself, like a large dog coming in from the wet.
“Look, my dear Suz. I came to tell you that I’m off to London for a few days. Postgraduate student in a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Must just go and hold his hand for a bit. History of bungled suicide. That sort of thing. But brilliant boy. Brilliant.”
“You’ve got the Land Rover if you need to go to the city,” he added. “I really must get off. See you soon, then.”
And he was gone, without even the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
When she got to the house, she noticed the two gouges in the gravel of the circular driveway. Murdo had apparently spun the tires in his hurry to get away.
She was shocked at how relieved she was that he had gone.
5
Beware of Lambs
The confrontation with Murdo, if indeed it had been that, left her unsettled. It was the first time she had genuinely welcomed his absence. Yet as the afternoon wore on, she found this was not an unqualified relief.
She supposed she was upset because she had blundered rather badly. She had been presumptuous, she thought, to open the box like an inquisitive and naive Pandora. The image of the puppet with its haunted face and bloody cloak sprang again to mind. She had opened the damned box and out had come, not evil – but remnants of Murdo’s past. The first wife with her child-pure features and gracile body. A young wife who had died young. How or of what, Suzanne did not yet know. There was only the fact. Twice widowed. A blow of fate that set Murdo apart from other men. At their very first meeting, she had recognized immediately the signs of suffering on his face. Ada would have said: “That one has been through the vale of soul-making.”
Murdo had been through that vale, and then through again. Suzanne had perceived in him no rancour; not even the stoic resignation that is so often just a mask for despair. Rather she had sensed a courageous acceptance so profound as to border on mystery. Here, she thought, was a man who had transcended the quotidian and tawdry by going through the full agony of loss. He had accomplished this, purged of hatred and raw anger.
So she had believed until this afternoon. For Murdo’s cynicism, particularly about his son Jeremy, struck her as quite vile.
Suzanne abhorred cynicism. Cynos was Greek for dog, was it not? She had never understood the connection, unless it had to do with limited vision and a predilection for rolling in the muck. Yet thinking back, Suzanne wondered how genuine Murdo’s negativity had been. His remarks about Jeremy might well have been a defence thrown up to deflect his anger at her. She had unwittingly pried into his past after all, although she could not understand how such treasured objects had come to be left in a mouldering outbuilding.
A particularly unpleasant possibility occurred to her, one in which she immediately felt herself to be implicated. What if it was Murdo’s second wife who had put the two boxes there, well away from the house itself? What if it was jealousy that had prompted her, a desire to wipe her predecessor out? And so she had gone through the house, room by room, exorcising the first wife’s presence. Suzanne had heard of women doing such things, making a bonfire in the backyard and putting to the flame everything that remained of the woman who preceded them: letters, journals, clothing, photographs. Or they might, as appeared the case here, simply store them away out of sight.
Kirstie. That was the second wife. A very Scottish, muscular name. Kirstie. Had Kirstie been jealous of Miranda? Was it an absurdity to be jealous of the dead? Suzanne thought not, especially where the grounds were possessive passion. The absurdity was in assuming that by destroying the dead’s belongings, you extinguished their power. From Ada she had learned to accept the persistence of the spirit after death as a given. “Nothing is ever destroyed, Suzanne. Transformed, yes. Remember, we have the stars within us, and their energy is eternal.”
Ada conversed with the dead. This was not, Suzanne discovered early on, a maternal talent to be bruited abroad. Not at all on a par with pie making or proficiency at bridge. At eight years of age, Suzanne had had her face smacked sharply by a teacher to whom she had babbled blithely of Ada’s midnight colloquies with ghosts. Was it then Ada had first counselled her on the wisdom of silence and the dense potency of the secret?
Outside the house, therefore, Suzanne learned never to speak of her mother’s spiritual companions. Inside, she came to see these ethereal visitors as an integral part of the household.
Suzanne never saw these spirits with whom her mother spoke. Nor did she actually hear their conversations. At most, she might catch a reverberation, not unlike the swell and dip of sea surge. She was never afraid because Ada assured her all the visitors were benign. No evil force could penetrate the hermetic enclosure that Ada had created from their clapboard house. She had purified the rooms with salt and set up her own invisible watchtowers. Suzanne believed in this fastness her mother had made.
She did not believe she had inherited her mother’s powers. Or if she had, she had no inkling of them. By osmosis perhaps, she had absorbed Ada’s habit of compassionate empathy. It was this talent, Suzanne believed, that enabled her to look out of the eyes of women long dead – the Magdalenes, the maidens and the witches. This was not an automatic or a painless process, and it seemed to encompass something more than just imaginative projection. Sometimes, after many hours of silent communing with these women whose images she studied, Suzanne would find herself tugged by an irresistible urge for sleep. When she woke, usually at dusk, she would catch the faintest echo of murmuring voices. Never yet had she experienced anything that made her afraid. Although she was of course apprehensive about the work to come – the inescapable emotional confrontation with witch prickers and the cruel burnings.
Now, for the first time, she had come across an image of a woman long dead that caused her a deep visceral unease. She speculated that this reaction might be an emotional contagion. If she was right, and it was Kirstie who had put the box out in the ancient barn, she might well have been contaminated by the woman’s envy or even hatred of Miranda. Even as she thought this, Suza
nne realized she was dissembling. This jealousy she felt was not absorbed second-hand, but was peculiarly her own. She was ashamed. To be jealous of a dead woman was worse than unworthy. It was despicable. Suzanne made herself relive the moment of looking at the photograph. Seeing Miranda’s virginal face and form had been a profound shock. Was it the girl’s youth that prompted this envy? That tender, unlined state in which Miranda was now locked forever. Suzanne knew Miranda’s skin had been flawless, even given the faded tones of the old snapshot. Her natural scent would be of violets. Whereas she herself was sometimes rank with the smell of sex, or menstrual blood, or sweat.
Stop these ludicrous comparisons, she told herself. Quite out of character, she felt herself teetering at the top of a perilous slide. At the bottom were ignominy and self-doubt. Again, she seemed to sense the presence of an external force that did indeed want to topple her down that precipitous chute. The image of the veil returned to her, the floating whiteness that had haunted her briefly in Amsterdam. Miranda’s? Kirstie’s? Two young brides.
At thirty-four, Suzanne knew she had already lost the pure translucency of youth. She had begun to wonder if it was the accumulation of experience itself that rendered the skin opaque. Rationally, she knew she was still attractive, tall, slim, and strong. The word people most often used to describe her appearance was exotic, for from her mother she had inherited the high, wide cheekbones, full lips, and upward slanting eyes of Romany ancestors. Her eyes were her best feature: virtually black, the iris surprisingly ringed with purple. For years, she had worn her hair in the same style, absolutely straight, chin-length and with a central part. In profile, with her slightly beaked nose, she resembled certain portraits of Nefertiti.
The contrast with the young woman in the photograph could not have been more marked. Dark drama as opposed to fair delicacy. Sensual (Suzanne knew that this was what she projected) against maidenly. All that she and Miranda had in common was slenderness.
She and Miranda. She and Kirstie. Miranda, Kirstie and Suzanne. The realization hit her as forcibly as a slap. Which was, she thought, exactly what she deserved for this astounding omission. Here she was, Suzanne Clelland, self-defined feminist, a writer bound in with the lives of women, past and present. And yet until now, she had not fully recognized the reality of the two women who had preceded her as Murdo’s wives. How could she have been so incurious? And if they had both still been alive? Would she have questioned Murdo about their appearance, character, talents? Suzanne thought not, principally because she saw her union with Murdo as so very idiosyncratic. As if the sun and moon had come together to make a planet entirely new, with a heat that subsumed the raggedness of their respective pasts.
Besides, she had always intensely disliked the pillow talk ritual of documenting former lovers. Such revelations seemed to her a kind of sickly smug voyeurism. She would squirm away, rather than listen to the most tellingly intimate secrets of people she had never met. So it was certainly not that she wanted to broach Murdo on his return, asking for detailed accounts of his life with Miranda and with Kirstie. It was only that she required some meagre idea of the two women, a way to picture them. Until her discovery of the boxes in the barn, they had been only abstractions, wispy clouds woven into Murdo’s circlet of pain.
Now their histories, their habitation of this stone house, were suddenly palpable. She felt their lives as a literal weight. For a moment, she went dizzy and had to grasp on to the newel post at the bottom of the stair. The wooden knob in her hand felt strangely warm as though it still held both women’s bodily heat. The knob would have pressed into their palms – both Miranda’s and Kirstie’s – as they made their way up the stairs at night, weary and heavy with child. Or perhaps they had clung to the post with both hands, pressed their foreheads to the wood, and wept.
As she pictured this, Suzanne became aware of an extraordinary odour; or rather, a succession of smells, each with its own distinctly pungent assault. First, there was the sweet yeastiness of rising bread; she was sure she could detect oatmeal and honey. Then came a waft of a woman’s perfume, darkly fruity, almost overwhelming. Last there was an unpleasant whiff associated with a badly ventilated toilet, or a stopped drain perhaps, or a baby’s diaper left to soak in a washtub. These separate odours then mingled, and the atmosphere of the sprawling house was absolutely transformed. Suzanne understood that what she could smell was the past; the matchless perfume of the family unit.
As a young girl, visiting the houses of friends, she had always been struck how each family made its own peculiar broth of smells distinct as a genetic marker. It was a phenomenon Suzanne was ever after to associate with what she thought of as “classical” families; that is, those with a father, even an absent father, and with more than one child. She could not honestly ever remember envying these households with their powerfully idiosyncratic odours, particularly if there was a strident undercurrent of sweat or blood from a hunting jacket. These potent domestic broths seemed to her a little unsavoury after the rarefied atmosphere of Ada’s abundant drying herbs. There had been a bracing cleanliness about the smell of their home, neither chemical nor detergent, but as if Ada had conspired to bring the most pleasing scents of the vegetable world inside.
The odours that surrounded Suzanne now were not at all pleasing. She was seized by a terrible anxiety. It was as if the house itself were trying to spit her out one of its cruciform windows. The sensation was electric and singularly unpleasant. She had an irrational urge to fight back; to roam through every single room, delve into every cupboard, nook and alcove. She wondered if through this wandering, she might succeed in making peace with the place. For in the month she had spent here, she had to admit that she was still at odds with Murdo’s ancestral home. Sometimes she thought it was the heaviness of the stone itself that oppressed her. Or perhaps it was the blatant waste of its empty rooms that disturbed her, while outside thousands roamed the roads, sleeping in viaducts or under bridges.
In London, she had rented a single room, in the house belonging to her friend Gemma. The walls were gleaming white, and the wide window overlooked the Thames where bright barges bobbed at their moorings. The boats’ bold paintwork, crimson, midnight blue, tangerine, reminded Suzanne of Gypsy caravans, and therefore of her mother.
When she learned of her mother’s death, which had been totally unexpected, Suzanne for some weeks experienced the loss as an excruciating bodily pain. An animal with razor teeth gnawed at her heart.
Twice, that same ferret-like creature had eaten away at Murdo’s heart. Here. In this house. And his pain must have spilled out, she thought, and been absorbed by the walls. And what of Miranda’s and Kirstie’s pain? Was their residual anguish the source of her agitation? Or were their spirits indeed still here, reinforcing this idea of herself as interloper?
The dead, as Suzanne knew well, were often larger and more potent than in life. Kirstie and Miranda had a mythic power that she could never undo. Although she was still loath to question Murdo directly about his first two wives, how else was she to know anything of them? If she did not soon have some sense of them as individuals, she feared dire consequences. Yet what these might be, she had no idea.
Even as she formed this thought, she was aware of a trickle of wetness down her inner thigh and that familiar heaviness in her lower abdomen. She was a week early, which perhaps accounted for her extreme sensitivity to the atmosphere of the house with Murdo gone. She remembered then she had very few tampons left, and decided to walk to the local village shop, rather than drive. The four miles there and back would help her relax and ease the already noticeable cramps.
Surprisingly, the shop had a copy of The Guardian, which she purchased along with an outrageously overpriced box of tampons. Serving behind the counter were two elderly women, alike enough to be twins. Or perhaps they deliberately tried to resemble one another, Suzanne thought, with their identical harlequin spectacles, flowered aprons and fine white hair so tightly permed that the pale pink of their
scalps was visible. She paid and was about to pick up her purchases when one of the women produced a brown paper bag that she flapped in the air. “You’ll be wanting to put your box in this,” she said. Her look was stern, her remark more command than suggestion. Suzanne deferred, rather than transgress the norms and offend the woman’s sensibilities. She had foolishly forgotten that this was rural Scotland. The fact that women bleed must be hidden.
Just as she was going out the door, she heard one woman address the other in an undertone. At first the words made no sense. Suzanne was not yet accustomed to the local accent, but she had found that by silently repeating to herself what she heard, syllable by syllable, she could eventually unravel the meaning. As she came level with the “Beware of Lambs” sign on the road home, the shopkeeper’s words fell abruptly into place. “That Napier’s a devil. He ruined that young girl’s life.”
She had to clutch at the wooden sign as her uterus contracted in a fiery pang, threatening to double her over.
6
Gemma
Gemma Tithe was plucking a chicken, while belting out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The song’s rousing vigour imposed a rhythm on the tedious work. Later, after showering, she would have to use a pick comb to remove the white tendrils that clung to her hair and eyebrows.
She left the words of the song unchanged. She was content enough that it was the Lord who was coming, His truth, His victory and His damned grapes of wrath being trod. Like most Christian hymns, it was an intrinsically male song, a paean to violence and conflict. “His terrible swift sword” was not unlike the cleaver with which she would later behead the chickens and slice through the purplish gristle of their rubbery legs. She loathed the whole disgusting business, and the Battle Hymn was thus the perfect accompaniment. The chorus primed her energy. For every “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!” she could extract a fistful of feathers. Like that other fistful, she thought. Another lean, holstered man, wreaking His vengeance, bringing His truth, His law. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Gemma sang.
The Applecross Spell Page 4