The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  What had the woman in the shop said? “That Napier devil ruined that young girl’s life.” But that had been a much younger Murdo? Was it possible he had outgrown this twisted notion of love Miranda’s journals described in such excruciating simplicity? Was Murdo’s great suffering partly guilt for what his young self had done to Miranda?

  Breasts, Waist, Buttocks. These were Miranda’s measurements at the back of the journal. Could Murdo – her sensual, tragic, contemplative Murdo – have done these things? Perhaps the journal was a fake, produced by one of the children in adolescence, in a fit of pique. Or authored by Miranda, but delusional, the ramblings of a post-partum depression.

  He ruined that young girl’s life. Was that really what she heard? She could hardly go into the village and interrogate the women in the shop.

  I must get away, she thought. Go down to London. Sit quietly in my old room. Talk to Gemma.

  She opened a tin of consommé soup, dosing it liberally with ground black pepper to fight the cramps. Almost immediately she felt better and went upstairs to pack her bag. She decided to take the bus to Edinburgh where she would catch a train. Consulting the timetable, she found she still had a good three hours to spare, even given the mile walk to the bus stop.

  Restless, she wandered the grounds, and found herself again in the overgrown apothecary’s garden. From that vantage point, all she could see of the house was the tower with its triangular cap of slate. She was seized with an urgent desire to see inside it, despite the tacit rule that this was Murdo’s private sanctuary.

  The door at the base of the tower was unlocked. Inside was a winding stair with steep steps of buff-coloured stone. Suzanne started up. There was no banister. Only a thick rope, looped through metal rings set in the thick wall. This she gripped tightly all the way up.

  She emerged suddenly into a well of dusky light. Just above her, she saw where the steps ended, culminating in a solid stone platform. She pulled herself up the remaining steps by the final length of rope, and stood blinking in the thin white light that penetrated the tower’s cruciform windows that were more slits than crosses.

  She was a little breathless. This she attributed to the fact that the windows let in so little air. Just below one of the windows sat Murdo’s telescope. A dull black insect with a particularly long proboscis. She was surprised at how small the instrument was. Each evening, when Murdo withdrew for several hours to the tower, she had pictured him with a machine at least as large as himself, complete with a complexity of knobs and dials. She had imagined too, a substantial desk littered with papers, each bearing those rivers of runic script that were his craft and art.

  Instead, there was a small, plain table, absolutely bare, with the exception of an oil lamp identical to the one Suzanne had used in the outbuilding. The table had a single drawer. She hesitated, then pulled it open. She was fully aware of the irony of her probing – she who had so rejoiced at their mutual sustaining separateness.

  Inside the drawer lay an olive green portfolio. She drew it out carefully and laid it on the table. The portfolio contained a sheaf of oilskin paper, which Suzanne at first took to be untouched. But on closer inspection, she saw that each sheet did in fact bear a faint mark. In all cases, this was a curve, made with a pen so fine-tipped, so unwaveringly applied, as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Each of the sheets was numbered in sequence.

  Inside the back leaf of the portfolio, tucked in a flap, was a list of dates corresponding to each of the numbered oilskin pages. This page was titled “Kirstie.” The writing was Murdo’s. She could make no sense of either the drawn curves or the list of dates. Here at least she had uncovered no damning evidence.

  She tucked the oilskin sheets neatly back into the portfolio and replaced it in the drawer. On impulse, she decided to take a look through the telescope. She was perturbed when she put her eye to the aperture and saw only blackness. She tilted the glass upward and stepped back to check its position. It was aimed truly at the light entering the window. She looked through again and there was only blackness. A cap, she thought. No doubt there was a cap to protect the glass from dust. But when she examined the end of the telescope, she found nothing of the kind. She put the tip of her finger gingerly against the end glass. It was rough, almost grainy, to the touch. Peering closer, Suzanne saw that the lens of the telescope had been painted a flat black.

  She ran down the winding staircase, perplexed and a little sickened at Murdo’s duplicity. All those hours he had spent in his tower, supposedly studying the stars, he had in fact seen nothing.

  In the house she grabbed her overnight bag. She paused only to make sure she had plenty of tampons for the train journey down to London. She did not leave Murdo a note.

  9

  By the Thames

  “Sugar?” Gemma got the word out despite the fact it caused her pain. She could pronounce it only with the greatest difficulty. Even in its apparently less refined forms (brown, demerara) she detested the substance, would not by choice, have it in her house. Honey, yes. Honey was guiltless, whether dusky or translucent. Bees made honey, manufactured it out of their busy communal life, and the workers’ obeisance to their queen was purely instinctual, a demand written into their cells. The humans who collected the honey were not bound to do so, but went about their business cheerfully and lovingly, or so Gemma imagined. Beekeepers moved through that droning and humming and swarming as if through some benign atmosphere. They were patient, vigilant people and the honey derived from their labour shone innocently, like their eyes.

  This was not pure fantasy. Gemma had indeed met several beekeepers, all of whom were gentle taciturn people, with a childlike gaze. So for Gemma, honey sang, where sugar screamed. She could not abstract sugar from its historical burden. She could not look at it packaged in snowy white bags or pristine sealed boxes, without an accompanying vision of black and brown backs split open under the whip, or flesh gouged by chains. She could not even think the word sugar without picturing skin seared by the master’s brand, or workers’ backs roasted as they hung on a spit over a fire, the punishment reserved for runaways.

  For those people who protested that the horrors of the sugar plantations were over centuries ago (“It’s all beet sugar now – European, you know.”), Gemma reserved a particularly nasal braying laugh, absolutely purged of mirth. Did they really believe the evils of the past disappeared just because they wished it so? Were they so naive? Or was it a question of moral convenience?

  Now Suzanne too. Had she really not considered where Murdo’s ancestors got their money? Had she not put the inheritance of a mouldering Scottish mansion together with Murdo’s childhood in the Caribbean? Where there was no doubt another house, also mouldering, also sprawling, with a wide veranda facing a glittering sea and another facing the fields, the stage from which the master commanded his army of black, brown, and mulatto bodies. His property. On whose toil he built his small empire.

  “Sugar?” she asked Suzanne again. She spat the word out, and having to repeat it, grew even more tense.

  Suzanne did not answer. She seemed lost in some meandering thought. She stared at the window, although there was nothing to see but dull night sky and the haze of her own reflection.

  Gemma reached for the bottle of single malt she had set in the middle of the floor. She and Suzanne sat, as they so often had in the past, cross-legged on the carpet, a ring of Gemma’s scatter cushions ranged round them. Just as in days past, Gemma had dimmed the lights and lit a tall white candle, set in a wrought iron holder on the floor beside the bottle.

  This candle had a triple function. The first was aesthetic. Gemma loved to watch the lambent flame play upon the amber in the bottle. The second was emotional, for Gemma preferred a soft illumination, especially when talking with friends. She associated harsh light with the institutions in which she so often did battle: council offices, police offices, courts, clinics, social service cubicles. The candle’s third function was admonitory. If Gemma reached for th
e bottle and the candle wobbled, she knew it was time to stop drinking.

  Gemma had a healthy fear of drunkenness; not so much because of her father, but because getting drunk (in the privacy of her own home) was often so terribly enticing. There were nights when she craved senselessness, to get so benumbed she would not have felt a needle thrust into her thumb. Because she simply could no longer bear thinking of the stinking world she lived in, and of what men did, and of what they made women do.

  From the look of Suzanne, Gemma wondered if it might be a night for simply snuffing out the candle, and drinking herself stupid. Never had she seen her friend in such a state. Suzanne’s usually erect shoulders slumped forward, as though at any moment she might collapse into a self-protective huddle. Her hair, too, fell forward over her face. She was hiding, thought Gemma, a thoroughly uncharacteristic attitude for Suzanne.

  “Suzanne!” Gemma clapped her hands together so hard that her palms stung. Time to break through this torpor, an insidious state that Gemma always feared as infectious. Not a state for any woman to be in, and to see Suzanne succumb was nauseating. Gemma realized she was terribly disappointed. She had wanted Suzanne to come back from that wretched Murdo male, with her eyes blazing in indignation, furious at her own grievous error in marrying. For after all, what other result could there be at the end of the day? Marriage was dangerous to women’s health. Gemma still could not grasp why Suzanne imagined she might be the exception.

  “What? Sorry, Gemma. What were you saying about sugar?”

  Gemma heaved one of her histrionic sighs, and poured herself a hefty shot of scotch. “Suzanne Clelland,” she ordered, in a perfect mimicry of her old school headmistress, lips pursed just so and eyebrows raised in pantomime fury, “If you do not immediately reveal why you have returned so abruptly from your bower of bliss, I will set you the task of plucking ten somewhat past-their-best chickens.”

  Suzanne laughed, which brought about an instantaneous transformation, much to Gemma’s relief.

  “Oh, Gemma. I feel I’ve been away so long.”

  You have been, Gemma wanted to say. You’ve been away too long in some godawful illusory world, shackled to some man unworthy to rinse out your underwear. But it was not yet the moment for provocation, she reasoned. So instead, she handed Suzanne a drink.

  “Can you talk?” Gemma asked.

  “Hmm.” Again, the hesitation was unlike Suzanne.

  “Verbal abuse?” Gemma put the question as tentatively as she could.

  “No... more simple confusion.”

  “About what?”

  “About my predecessors. About the two women he was married to before me.”

  So Gemma heard about Suzanne’s discovery of the marionettes in the outbuilding, of Murdo’s outburst and abrupt departure, and of the contents of Miranda’s post-partum journal.

  “You need to talk to his children,” Gemma said, when Suzanne had told her everything. “I mean, if you really must go back, if you must carry this through...”

  “To its end?”

  “Well, yes. If you will.” Gemma put on her posh voice in a somewhat vain attempt to distance herself from her own annoyance. When really, she wanted to shake Suzanne by her broad, elegant shoulders, and say: Leave him, just leave him. Put this foolishness behind you before he succeeds in sucking the life out of you.

  They drank whisky until the dusky confines of the room dissolved. It seemed that the house was itself a floating world, drifting above the Thames. Time contracted. Gemma and Suzanne found themselves sitting so close together, their foreheads were touching. This was a ritual they had stumbled on some years ago, the elements being plentiful whisky, their penchant for honesty, darkness, and the river. What often came about was an evaporation of barriers between conscious and unconscious, between their separate selves. A kind of scrying through thought and non-thought that could miraculously yield insights fresh and clear. When they woke in the morning, they had sometimes lost the fullness of these revelations (and gained a sick headache), but a shimmering edge would remain, like the bright rim of a crystal glass. So that later in the day, they might be able to retrieve the idea in its wholeness.

  They snuffed the candle out, talked on in the pungent darkness.

  In the morning, this is what Suzanne remembered: Gemma saying that great sex did not necessarily lead to gnosis; that this was Suzanne’s grand delusion. Gemma reading her a poem about a man obsessed with his own suffering, I am the Widower, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine in his black tower. And something more about the Black Sun of the Melancholia. Which was so terribly descriptive of Murdo that to hear these words read aloud had seemed like a personal invasion. You have been seduced by the Hanged Man, Gemma said. By his gloom and solipsism and inverted state in the world. The man who wrote the poem was mad, Gemma told her. He used to walk a lobster on a leash through the streets of Paris, and consorted with prostitutes. Ultimately, he hung himself.

  Likely it was the prostitutes who helped him survive as long as he had, Suzanne thought. Well, yes, she had seen the Black Sun in Murdo’s face. Was it a ploy, his manifest suffering a snare to hold her fast? A ploy that he might not consciously recognize as such, but still and all, a ploy. Certainly, she could not know for sure until she returned to Scotland and succeeded in getting him talking. And undid the silence that had so drawn her to him?

  This is what Gemma recalled in the morning: Suzanne’s description of a portrait of a dark Madonna, hung in a curtained alcove. Shadows outline her face, seep from her neck to her breast, gather in the palm of her outstretched hand. In her other arm she holds the naked baby, his tiny genitalia only just visible behind the foot he has pulled up in front of his body. As if vainly trying to shield himself from what is to come, his inevitable fate that the artist has made manifest in the child’s flesh. For like his mother (who will also suffer), the agony of what is to come is prefigured in the gloom that has penetrated his plump thighs and calves and belly; even his chubby face is dominated by the dark that is his future. The child’s eyes are fixed on the object he grasps in his two chubby hands. Not a toy, but a yarn winder, which looks exactly like an inverted cross. So that even at the age of one and a half, he is fully aware of the end to which he is progressing. The mother gazes adoringly at the boy on her knee. Gemma knows and detests this look, and avoids going to Italy for just that reason. Hundreds of mothers, on trains, in restaurants, on benches, in parks and in museums, gaze down adoringly at the infants in their arms. It is a look they reserve for their male children. Which explains, Gemma believes, a great deal about the nastily swollen ego of the Italian male.

  All men, Gemma is convinced, revel in the idea of the slain god, the self-sacrificing saviour. Some, like Murdo, get fixated on the idea of themselves as suffering. Their agony becomes their art form, their justification for being.

  After all Suzanne had told her, Gemma feared even more for her friend. The dark-browed Madonna and her child might well have something to do with the turbulent spirits whose presence Suzanne had sensed in the house. Or the spirits might be spawned by some old evil in the Caribbean, the preying restlessness of inherited guilt. Then again, the root of the disturbance might indeed have something to do with the way in which Murdo’s first two wives lived. Or died.

  Marriage was so dangerous to the health that it brought many women close to death. Gemma saw proof of this every day.

  She did not plead with Suzanne not to return to Scotland. What had been done must be undone. Suzanne had to learn the truth, or as close as she could come to it.

  The night before Suzanne left, they slept together in Gemma’s bed, lying within the sphere of each other’s body heat, occasionally touching each other, fleetingly and with affection. But without sex. Early on in their relationship, they recognized that if they were lovers, their friendship would be imperilled and likely end acrimoniously. So this was the sacrifice they made, in order to continue knowing each other. When they slept together, they would often dream fragm
ents of each other’s life, particularly in times of emotional turmoil.

  So it was with considerable chagrin that Gemma repeated to Suzanne in the morning the three words that had pushed their way repeatedly into her dreams. Words she knew instinctively were meant for Suzanne.

  “Alone, soiled, and ghosted,” Gemma told her.

  “Nice assonance,” Suzanne replied. Gemma understood from this attempt at flipness, just how tense Suzanne was at the idea of returning to Scotland.

  “Ghosted,” Suzanne murmured, revealing her true state of grave apprehension.

  “Talk to the children,” Gemma said.

  Then they hugged each other, two women with the same three words replaying in their heads.

  10

  A Frugal Meal

  On the train back to Edinburgh, Suzanne leafed through her latest source book on witches – an illustrated treatise on familiars, with portraits of toads in little silk suits which made her laugh. She was grateful for the distraction; anything to take her mind off the looming reunion with Murdo.

  She wanted very much to go back to him naked in a sense, staying true to the momentum of her initial risk in marrying him. Just as he might follow through the urgent energy of an equation as it wrote itself out in time.

  Yet she could not escape the fact that Gemma’s admonitions had fuelled the uncertainty as to who and what Murdo was.

  Gemma was of course the most formidable of opponents when it came to the possible saving graces of the male. There were none, absolutely none, said Gemma. Suzanne knew, however, that her friend did allow the odd exception. But her toleration extended only to those very few gay men, all of whom had been subjected to – and passed – Gemma’s rigorous tests. The slightest hint of condescension, or misogynist innuendo, and the male with the apparent saving grace was immediately struck from Gemma’s good books.