The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “Oh, my poor Jeremy,” she cried softly, then kissed his face. “However did it happen?”

  “A camera, believe it or not, my sweet. Our jeep hit a land mine. We were all thrown clear, fortunately. Just a few cuts and bad bruises. My camera flipped up and sliced me, as you can see.”

  “Oh Jeremy.” She hugged him tightly “I do wish you’d get a safer job.”

  “And go mad with restlessness and guilt. No thanks.”

  They stood apart, hands linked, gazing at each other. One might take them for lovers, Suzanne thought. Families remained a foreign land for her. She viewed them still, as she had since a child, through glass. The lighted windows she passed on her way home to Ada. Five bodies ranged on a sofa watching television, seven round a table busily eating. One child screaming at another, while a mother intervened. Even a family of three seemed to her so very many, compared to the two-in-one that was Suzanne and Ada. From the impassioned tales her school friends told of their home life, Suzanne gleaned that families were a mesh of stresses and counter stresses, a world of ever-shifting alliances and nodes of power, where sibling rivalry flared daily or hourly. Where one was arbitrarily assigned a role one must wear though it choked like a dog collar. The Pretty One. The Clever One. The One with the Temper. The Musical One.

  She had perceived that for a family, no transaction was trivial. Everything had import. The spilling of milk, the struggle over a wishbone, a mistimed compliment, the unreasonable demand – anything at all might reorder the ever-changing factions. Families, she thought, shared the instability of tectonic plates. One’s character was fired in that furnace, and with much pain.

  Whereas it seemed to her that she had grown up beside Ada, like a sturdy plant, in conditions her mother fostered just as naturally. All dissension had been outside: the jibes of prurient neighbours or the clucking tongues of the women’s church group.

  If she had missed anything, she thought, it was not a paternal presence, but what she now beheld in the eyes of Jeremy and Clara. Brother-sister love sustained by the bonds of blood. These two shared a father, but not a mother. And where was Murdo? Why had he not told her they were coming? Because Clara also believed her father to be a monster?

  “When did you get in, sweetie?” Jeremy asked.

  “After midnight,” Clara replied. “And you?”

  “Oh, tenish.”

  Suzanne realized that she and Murdo had then been in bed making love. The bed springs squeaked quite noticeably, so that Jeremy might well have been aware that his father was having sex with his new wife. But the most pertinent question was whether Murdo knew that Jeremy was in the house.

  “Did you see him?” Clara asked, her bell-pure tone quavering slightly.

  “No, my dear.” He stroked Clara’s hair. “We skirted each other. Neither of us has lost the ability to sniff each other out at a distance, thank God. He left me a note.”

  “He left you a note!”

  The two women spoke at once. Suzanne was aware that it was she who sounded most surprised. Clara’s tone was in fact far more wry. As if to say, “Well, Murdo leaves notes the way animals leave droppings.”

  As soon as Suzanne spoke, Clara made a little leap into the middle of the kitchen so that she stood equidistant between her and Jeremy. She moved with a balletic grace that was absolutely unfaltering. Yet Suzanne perceived an underlying wilful drama in the young woman’s movements. Clara gestured so liberally with her hands that her address struck Suzanne as artificially staged.

  “Now, really,” she began, “you two must shake hands and start again.” Clara was a pantomime fairy, darting on her toes, now toward Suzanne, now toward Jeremy. An actress, Suzanne decided, for every one of Clara’s gestures seemed hyperbolic, magnified, then held in time those few instants longer than necessary. And the fluting voice, with its flawless enunciation, might well be cultivated through hours of practice, and not simply another gift nature had bestowed on an exquisite young woman.

  Clara flung her arms around her brother’s neck. Suzanne heard her whisper: “It’s not her fault, Jeremy. It’s only that she hasn’t seen yet how truly horrible he is.”

  Suzanne felt a chill ride up her spine as Clara echoed Jeremy’s judgement. Was Murdo indeed the heartless puppet master that Miranda’s journal implied? Apart from a few fits of pique, his behaviour in her presence had never been less than irreproachable. When was this legendary cruelty to begin manifesting itself? Or had it perhaps already begun, in forms too subtle for her to recognize?

  A wave of sick paranoia engulfed her. It took all her concentration to stave off the fear. There was a kind of contamination in the air still, spread by nasty winged things she knew she could banish if she concentrated her thoughts. Visualize, Suzanne. She imagined a wind laden with salt to sweep the room quite clean. The effort made her close her eyes.

  When she opened them, Clara had once again claimed centre stage on the kitchen’s flagstone floor. Again she stood on tiptoe, arms fluttering, her face a bright star. Then, in a twinkling, she was transformed, her animation extinguished, her lithe body apparently slack and formless. A most cunning illusion, reflected Suzanne, grateful to be removed for a second from thoughts of Murdo. But as soon as Clara spoke, she saw she should have realized all too well, just where this latest pantomime was going.

  “I do him sometimes as a gobbling whale.” Claras piping, childlike tone made her cruelly comic characterization of Murdo’s dejection all the more cutting. Suzanne fought the urge to stop up her ears.

  “I’m in a children’s theatre troupe,” Clara told Suzanne. “Itinerant. We have three caravans. One for the costumes and sets and two for us. And sometimes,” she rushed on, “I do him as a greedy lion, swallowing down the sun. He tries to take our light, you know.”

  Suzanne sat listening to this condemnation of Murdo by metaphor, stunned, still a little sick. Would they announce next that she had married a murderer? Even making allowances for Clara’s ingrained histrionics, her sincerity seemed unquestionable. Underneath the strained unreality of this encounter, Suzanne could not evade the deeper questions. If she truly loved Murdo, would she doubt him?

  Meanwhile, Jeremy sat nodding silently at his sister’s performance, smiling beneficently, his eyes crinkling in affection. Suzanne saw two loving conspirators, delighting in a mockery of the man to whom she had bound herself. The problem was that she found herself instinctively drawn to both these people, which made their perception of Murdo all the more perturbing.

  She had a fleeting and ludicrous vision of herself as peacemaker, smoothing out the familial discord as a good housekeeper would tug out the rucks in a linen tablecloth. Yet she sensed their rupture with Murdo was irredeemable.

  She took an almost guilty pleasure at Clara and Jeremy’s startled look when she posed her blunt question: “Why exactly do you dislike your father so?”

  “Oh, please,” said Jeremy, turning on her the deliberately supercilious glare. “Please do not use that wretched word.”

  “We just call him Murdo,” Clara explained. “Or sometimes pater. To call him father implies a bond that is simply not there, you see.”

  “But what is it he does, or has done to you?” Suzanne persisted.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Jeremy snapped. “Stick around and you’ll find out, won’t you. But I’ll give you a clue. He puts absolutely no brakes on his will to power. He has to control everything in his immediate reality. This means you,” he said, pointing a bony finger at Suzanne. “And it would mean me and Clara and Callum if we let him get near us. Then he’d pin us in place on his godawful mathematical grid, or whatever he calls the choking strictures he puts on his world. And, it’s as Clara said, he will swallow your light, extinguish you.”

  “But why on earth do you come to visit, if you hate him so?” What was she hoping to hear, a softening of attitude, a recantation?

  “Oh, we don’t come for him,” Clara announced, with one of her charming little bounds across the floor. “We c
ome for our mothers’ sake. They are both buried here, you see. We come to be with them and with each other. The three of us, you see.”

  “But how do you avoid Murdo while you are here?” Suzanne asked, falling into the fatalism that apparently characterized this family’s relations.

  “Oh,” Clara began and then ceased abruptly, a look of concern momentarily shadowing her features. She came and sat then, close to Suzanne. “He’s never here when we’re here, you see. It’s a kind of longstanding tacit agreement. We come, for a week or so, and he goes. He didn’t tell you, did he?”

  Suzanne was conscious of the purity of Clara’s breath as she spoke. She smelled of almonds and of violets. She recalled another of Ada’s lessons. If you are confused about someone’s true intentions or true character, seek your answer in their breath. At eleven, Suzanne had asked for clarification. Well, you pay attention to the rhythm of the person’s breathing, Ada explained. Does it seem at all caught or forced when he or she speaks? And the smell too. Not, she added, is it oniony or garlicky? But only does it seem right and natural? For duplicity will stink in all ways, Ada said. In this household, Suzanne reasoned, these were instructions she must always be putting into practice.

  Clara smells of almonds and violets. Her concern for my feelings seems quite genuine. But she is an actress by profession – albeit one dedicated to the pantomime and large gestures. And most well-to-do British families had a great penchant for playing games, did they not? Idiosyncratic games that were founded on the strengths and foibles of each player, where a daggered word might be sheathed in love, where you learned the secret code or perished (emotionally, at least). Were these two drawing her into a game for their own amusement? Was it time to play “Punish the presumptuous stepmother?” Or were they simply telling the truth as they saw it?

  “I will leave you two a while, I think.” Suzanne registered the kindness in Jeremy’s voice rather than the actual words. If he and Clara were being cunning, describing a Murdo who did not actually exist, would they have built sensitivity into their little scenario?

  “He is the sweetest man you could ever meet,” Clara said, as soon as Jeremy was out of the room. “Without him, I do really wonder if Callum and I would have survived. You would see Jeremy’s goodness for yourself, if only you had not done this stupid thing.”

  “Clara,” Suzanne began, drawing her spine as erect as possible, so that when she spoke she was looking down into the girl’s face. And why not, she thought. Why not use her six inches of extra height to her own advantage? Why not use anything to help her surmount this situation that seemed to grow more murky and perilous with each passing second? “Clara, what stupid thing do you think I have done?”

  “Why... marrying Murdo, of course. I meant marrying Murdo. I mean, why on earth did you do it? I read your book on the Virgin, you see, and I was so impressed. I mean about virginity being a state of mind and not something men can take from us, or sell, or make us feel guilty if our hymen happens to be broken.”

  “Like those lovely paintings you describe that Bonnard did of his wife, drying herself with a towel, or looking down so contentedly at her own naked body in the bath. He could see that pure girlish aspect of herself that she had kept, despite intercourse and childbirth. We can keep that virgin sense of ourselves, always.”

  “And that idea, I mean, your book, was such a help to a friend of mine who was raped. That’s why, you see, I was so shocked when I heard it was you he had married. We all knew he was bound to do it again some time. Marry, I mean. But I suppose we had all imagined someone rather more acquiescent. I still don’t understand how you...”

  “Clara, Clara, please stop a minute.” Because really, thought Suzanne, you must give me a little space to breathe and think and to look into your eyes and see that – yes, they do seem clear and guileless. “Clara, tell me – specifically -what is wrong between you and your fa... between you and Murdo. He is wilful. He tries to take your light, you say. But what has he actually done to the three of you?”

  “And to our mothers,” Clara said quietly, looking down at her bare feet.

  “What?” Suzanne demanded. “Just tell me, please.”

  Clara leapt up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Jeremy wrote me about what we could tell you, but we decided we must wait until Callum gets here. I mean, we cannot talk to you without Callum because in many ways – apart from our mothers – he suffered the most because of Murdo. So please, wait until Callum comes. And then we’ll tell you everything.”

  The girl was moving toward the kitchen door, obviously anxious to get away. Then she reached out and touched Suzanne’s shoulder. “Callum will be here in a day or two. I’m sure of it.”

  “And until then, you will leave me hanging,” Suzanne said, more vehemently than she intended, for Clara immediately withdrew her hand.

  The young woman took a deep breath, as if readying herself for making some revelation. Or recitation, Suzanne wondered.

  “I can tell you,” Clara began, her words coming slower now, “about an incident with Murdo that involves you.”

  “Go on,” Suzanne encouraged, injecting a confidence into her tone she did not in fact feel.

  “Do you remember about a year or so ago, one of the quality Sunday papers did a profile on you in their magazine section?”

  Suzanne nodded. Her publisher had arranged the interview, and had been pleased with the result. Suzanne had not read the article herself, having too often experienced frustration at how the press twisted or demeaned her work. Gemma had read it, she recalled, and told her the piece was quite balanced. She recalled Gemma passing her the magazine for a quick look. Suzanne had been struck by the photograph of herself, so much so that she did not even glance at the text. For what she saw in the imperious upward tilt of the chin, the gold hoop earring shining against her dark hair, and the strong three-quarter profile, was an image of her mother. Suzanne was not much given to looking in mirrors, at least not for long. She had been blessed with good health and looks that were naturally dramatic, and she was grateful. But she saw no point in hunting her own mirror image for incipient crow’s feet or errant eyebrow hair. She was careful to avoid any such obsessiveness, and thus she had simply been oblivious to how she had changed in her early thirties.

  “Murdo sent me that article about you, along with a horrid little note,” Clara said. “I have a post office box in York, you see. I don’t know how he got my address, but he did. When I saw his writing on the envelope, I really didn’t want to open it. But then I thought, perhaps something had happened to Jeremy, and I hadn’t realized. Because we generally do know what’s happening with each other just through the air, you see, especially Callum and I because we’re twins.”

  “So, foolishly, I opened it and there was this article about you and your books and that glamorous photo and then his nasty little note tumbled out too. – Dear Belle, he wrote – he calls me Belle because he knows I hate it – Have you read anything by this extremely attractive feminist? And mustn’t her sisters with their size 46 dungarees absolutely detest her. I’ll bet she makes the sheets churn and burn. Fancy her for a stepmother, dearest Belle? Shall I inflame the whore in the feminist?”

  Suzanne felt someone had just anaesthetized her. She looked at Clara, who regarded her so very earnestly, and not without pain.

  “You must believe me,” Clara said. “Why on earth would I make it up? And he is that terribly vulgar, you see. Vulgarly dirty-minded. I don’t mean just about sex. But he has to pull everything down to his level, so that he can control you, as Jeremy said.”

  “When?” Suzanne asked. “Clara, when did he send you the note with the article?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Shortly after it came out.”

  “A good six months before I even met him then?”

  “About a year and a half ago, yes.”

  “So you are saying he had selected me as a prospective marriage partner before he even met me?”

  “Not prospective,
no. He had definitely fixed on you as his next coup. He wanted to bring the glamorous feminist to heel.”

  “And then what? Bring me to heel and make me what, Clara?”

  The girl shrugged but without petulance. The gesture was more as if she threw off some fetid piece of clothing. Then she said: “I think it is best if neither of us ever know. You must leave him, don’t you see?”

  Suzanne could take no more. She ran out of the kitchen and down the passageway and out the front door. She ran as she had not run since she was a girl. The words in her head were not her own, for she could find none at that moment to match the turmoil inside her.

  The words were Isobel Gowdie’s, whose trial she had recently read an account of. “I shall go into a hare with sorrow and sighing and meikle care. And I shall go in the Devil’s name, Aye, till I come home again.”

  Poor Isobel, Suzanne thought. Poor Isobel. You wanted to get away from those men who hounded you, the inquisitors, the torturers, the upstanding men of the kirk, and James VI himself who never missed a witch trial if he could help it. You would be a hare to escape their hounding. The Devil had nothing to do with it.

  12

  Mathematical Drills

  Suzanne lay on her back in the warm grass near the outbuilding where she had first lifted the lamp to the picture of the baby Jeremy. She was out of breath from running, her stomach soured by what she had heard. If only Murdo were here to state his own case. She shrugged off the paranoid notion that he had arranged the children’s attack on him as a test of her love. So it had come to this pass, she thought glumly, where her perceptions twisted and clotted, like the mess of knots she always pictured when she heard the word imbroglio.

  She sought solace in the drifting cloudscape, ready as a child to spy out shapes. Here was a massive continent splitting asunder. The skeleton of a fish held the sun briefly in its ribcage, before disintegrating suddenly into wisps of sea spume. Then, there was a dragon, rearing in profile against the blue. She could make out each spine on its thorny back and the dense webbing between its claws.