The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  I thought he was other than he is. How many women have made this same lament? We could forge a chain of our cries that would reach back to the beginning of time. I am one of the very fortunate ones. I am free to leave and he has as yet done me no real damage. Except of course, this continuing nausea and yes, I must confess it, an abiding hurt pride.

  Whatever happens, I will not be seduced by the idea I can redeem him. I will not make his salvation my life’s work. I know far too many women who have squandered their talents in this way.

  Yet I must also consider whether my condemnation of Murdo is too hasty. Is the evidence against him merely circumstantial? I have no doubt he would be found innocent in a court of law, except perhaps, for his brutal treatment of Callum.

  It comes down again, as so often, to a question of belief. I believe the children when they speak of what he has done. The pain in their eyes, and in the rigid set of their bodies, is unmistakable. If I had any doubts, Callum banished them. I think of him as my angel of deliverance. But like all angels, he poses great risks. His wings are, I think, made of fire. I cannot dwell on thoughts of Callum now. This is not the time.

  Let me return to my grievous error. How did I go this wrong? I am most guilty, I think, of the sin of projection. I projected my own girlish desires on to a man of clay. I wanted the cataclysmic, burgeoning passion that would lead to the sacred marriage. In Murdo I chose, as we so often do, the exact opposite of what I wished.

  The fault is mine. I was the one who read into his silence the exalted workings of a deep soul. I was the one who saw his suffering as rendering him thoughtfully compassionate. In fact, all these things appear true of Jeremy. Murdo, on the other hand, is apparently callous, wickedly selfish, a pathetic egotist.

  The sexual relation was powerful. Indubitably. But there too, I read far more into it than was on offer. I wonder now if Murdo is simply superbly practised. He is after all, over sixty. He has had plentiful time to learn what gives women pleasure.

  I do not think I could bear the proximity of his flesh ever again.

  I did leap into this marriage. Gemma warned me. Other women friends warned me.

  I think I felt weighed upon by dogma. I have become disenchanted with my own discipline. Feminist study has become a commodity – more, an industry – with factions at each other’s throats. So it has become “divide and conquer.” We lose sight of what matters most in this war of books and theory. We are in danger of becoming our own enemies.

  There is a chilling truth in what Jeremy says. Chilling but fortifying. My books are just pretty picture stories in a sense. Pictures of aspects of the female psyche. The Virgin. The Sensual Woman, so often condemned as the Whore. I saw my books as reclamations of our integrity. Little rafts of hope to bear us up in a world that belittles and maligns us. In the “free” western world, our conditioning is so subtle, so pervasive, that often we are unaware of it. Of course, I am highly sensitized to see misogyny, male condescension, and arrogance where others are blind to them. Some would say I am overly sensitized.

  I have learned to mistrust men who protest how much they “respect” women. Most often, they protest too much. They are in fact the ones most certain of their superiority as a sex.

  What are the roots of misogyny, Ada? This is the abiding question that plagues me night and day. Is it the fact that men cannot control our thoughts? For we do, I believe, perceive and think far differently than they do. Through association and connections, women seem to weave an invisible web that may well be what sustains the physical and spiritual worlds. Or is the root of misogyny because we can produce life, and men cannot? Or cannot, fortunately, to this point.

  Then there are the wrong-headed patriarchal notions that persist over millennia, that hang in the air like vile spore. Aristotle’s notion that woman is an inferior version of man. Or the grimly punitive tale of Eve, whose folly brought sin into the world.

  I am struck hard by the foul language of the two priests who wrote the Malleus Malificarum. Yet here is the justification for the torture and murder of millions of women over three centuries. The numbers are naturally enough in dispute. It is said that we feminists exaggerate; that there was not enough wood in Europe to lay the pyres to burn that many women. This seems to me a facile argument. Where hatred is rife, men will always find a way to kill the object of their hatred. Hanging, for example. James I, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, hung more witches than any other British monarch.

  “What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, an evil of nature?” This from the Malleus, rightly called “The Hammer of the Witches.” It seems to me that these ideas hammer still at all women.

  As a result of my marriage, I find myself now in a country where the “witch craze” was particularly cruel and protracted. Women in Scotland were burned as witches as late as the 1750s. And that same James I (then James VI of Scotland) was obsessed with hunting out and persecuting women thought to be possessed by the foul fiend. His treatise “On Demonology” contains a rationalization of torture that many governments still endorse: “Loath are they to confess without torture which witnesseth their guiltiness.”

  Thus we have: one Agnes Simpson, an elderly woman of good education, who was examined by the king himself and then stripped and shaved to make it easier for her tormentors to seek out the devil’s mark. She was shackled to a wall, with the prongs of the witch’s bridle lacerating her cheeks. An elderly woman of good education. She was kept without sleep. Naturally, she confessed.

  I find I cannot go on with this book I had begun. In part, I wanted to do it for you. But I am appalled and stunned by the sadism and suffering my research has uncovered. My anger threatens to overcome me so that I would be in danger of writing polemic.

  I see the witch burnings now as institutionalized mass murder. Not the blip, the negligible aberration in European history that we were taught in school. This socially sanctioned abuse and murder of women persists. In Pakistan, married women are hacked to death if they are so much as seen in the company of a man other than their husbands. Impoverished women in India kill their own female babies because it is preferable to have a son, because a girl child will some day require a dowry. And how can that poor mother and her husband ever afford a dowry? And so she smashes her own baby’s head against the wall, or feeds her dry grains of rice so that she chokes to death.

  Every day my friend Gemma comforts women who have been humiliated, beaten, left for dead. To blame poverty or alcoholism is too glib. The roots go far deeper. The yin has been torn away from the yang. It is as simple and as deadly as that, and it has been true for millennia. As I grow older, I find this fact no easier to confront.

  I am not yet able to write the book I must write. I am uncertain how to make myself able. You were right. Anger is a potent demon. If I could learn to leash this rage and grief, I might be equal to the undertaking.

  But my own balance is quite thrown off. For now I am weeping again. And to my shame, I am crying in part for myself. And for Miranda and Kirstie and for Callum.

  Yet what if I am wrong? What if the children are wrong? If they misread or grossly misinterpreted what happened because Murdo was an excessively stern and unloving father? What do I know of fathers? Or of how a gulf between a father and his children might spawn hatred, and that hatred colour his every word and deed?

  What if I am condemning Murdo out of hand? Then I too would be guilty of the witch hunt. Or warlock hunt. Seek out the wicked man. You have no farther to look than your own bed.

  And yes, I have the tools of torture. Were I to tell him that I have kissed his son on the mouth, held his head between my breasts, he would suffer terribly.

  Of course, I will not tell him. I could not do that.

  I cannot think of Callum now.

  So I will wait until Murdo comes. And I will confront him finally with what the children have told me.

  His silence must yield. I will listen and I will make my decision.r />
  His silence must yield. If it does not, he will have made my decision for me.

  I will burn this letter to you now, Ada, in the candle flame that is like a yellow pennant fluttering.

  17

  Clarity Must Come

  Suzanne rose at six, bathed, and put on jeans and a long, loose shirt of cadmium blue. On the back of a chair, she laid out a warm sweater and her jean jacket. The night before she had packed her knapsack with a complete change of clothes, a second sweater, a notebook and several pens. Inside the notebook she tucked her favourite photograph of Ada, standing in their backyard in Halifax, laughing into the sun.

  She was ready for flight, if flight it must be. In her back pocket, she had the slip of paper with the phone number Callum had given her. A talisman, she thought. Odd that it should consist of digits, when numbers were apparently one of Murdo’s means for tormenting Callum. “Everything is number,” Murdo had once told her. She had read into that statement his intuition of the mystery of the cosmos, a theurgy even. Instead, he had perhaps meant simply that. Nothing Pythagorean, nothing that alluded to the music of the spheres. Just numbers. Everything terminated where the equation ended.

  She pulled back the curtain and opened the window. Outside, the early morning light was peerless. Everything shone – the flanks of the far-off hills, tree bark and greensward – as if mesmerized by its own essence. When she and Ada walked by the harbour, the light reflected off the sea was sometimes a great wheel, edged with silver. “We love light because we are light,” said Ada. “Let it fill your head and your spine. Drink it down.”

  She realized she was standing at the window as her mother used to stand, her hands planted firmly on her hips. That was Ada at the window, watching the world.

  I am standing at the window, Suzanne thought, just as my mother used to stand.

  Yet here is an essential difference. Ada never married. I did not know my father. He died, she said. He was dark, and of course, handsome. Of Romany extraction. That was all I ever knew.

  He died and I did not miss what I did not know. We were enough. Mother and daughter.

  Ada never married. It was I who married.

  Suzanne heard a car door slam. The sound emptied her head of every thought but one: Now it begins.

  She went to the top of the stair and looked down. He stood in the open doorway, as if hesitating, uncertain whether to enter his own home. His briefcase and travelling bag were propped at his feet.

  Murdo kept his face turned away from her as she came slowly down the stairs. He seemed not to hear her, to be frozen in thought. The slab of outdoor light behind him was pitiless. She saw every seam of his face, the tight puckering of dark flesh beneath his eyes. Never had he looked so old to her, or indeed, so fragile. A stoop in his shoulders she had not registered before diminished his stature. He is an aging lion, she thought. Or did she see him differently now because she no longer looked at him through the eyes of unsullied love?

  As she came up closer to him, she felt a wash of emotion she could not immediately identify. Compassion? Then it struck her it was simply sorrow. A grieving for him and his alienation from his children. And a grieving for what else?

  She fought back the urge to touch him. He looked small and ailing, but she recognized this might well be Gemma’s man nailed to the cross. It is a trick, she thought. A ploy with nails and wood and a suffering face.

  “‘Murdo,” she said. “We must talk.”

  Her voice apparently electrified him. His shoulders squared. His eyes cleared.

  “The gang of three have been working their propaganda, have they? I suppose I ought not to have left you alone with them. But I did think you would have the sense to see through their charades... Yes, yes. By all means, let us talk. I have just travelled from London on the overnight train. I am bone weary. But by all means, let us talk.”

  She refused to lower herself to respond to his sarcasm. “I will make some tea,” she said and strode ahead of him into the kitchen.

  She heard him shut the front door. She heard him sigh, “Ah, yes, tea. The eternal nostrum.”

  In the kitchen, she gave herself willingly to the soothing rote of the tea-making. Fill the kettle. Light the gas. Fetch down the teapot and two mugs. Decant the loose tea into the tea egg, a fiddly process she normally avoided, preferring to plunk two tea bags in the pot. Now, she welcomed any activity that would fill up the time, slow the beat of her own blood. If the situation exploded, she must be ready to ride and steer her own passions. And indeed, her busy fussing with the preparations seemed to be working. Her blood and time itself were slowing down. Time slowed as one approached the speed of light, did it not? And perhaps in mere minutes, some revelation wrested from Murdo would pierce her brain with just that speed and clarity.

  She heard the leather of his shoe soles slide over the flagstone floor, the slight scrape of the chair leg as he sat down. She turned round to find him looking full at her. He appeared completely composed, his hands folded on the table in front of him. In the filtered light of the kitchen, his powerfully sculpted face was beautiful once again. She recalled with some anguish the first time she had ever seen him, across the room at a mandatory university sherry party. The broad cheekbones, the full, sensual mouth. His age and quiet dignity (or so it struck her then), which played upon his features like the last plangent note of an exquisite song of mourning. This mane of burnished hair streaked with grey. She had been drawn ineluctably to this man of tempered fire. And whatever happened, she could not deny that the sex between them had been magnificent.

  Sex is a powerhouse. Approach it with due caution and awe. For misused, it can maim and kill. Suzanne had understood her mother to mean a pathology of both body and soul.

  “Sit down, please, my dear. I shall tell you my side, shall I?” This was Murdo’s usual voice, calm and cultured.

  “Let me say first, that I probably should have prepared you for their poison. And it was somewhat cowardly of me to leave. But as you no doubt learned all too well, my relations with my children could be no worse.”

  “I do recognize that I am in part to blame. Today I would be charged, and perhaps rightly, with what psychologists term a parenting deficit. I held my self distant from them, yes. I was perhaps an excessive disciplinarian. I treated them as my father treated me, and his father before him. If I am guilty, it is there the guilt must lie. I did not make my affection manifest. Then of course, there were the untimely deaths of Miranda and Kirstie. Both struck me terribly hard. I was selfish, yes. I retreated from my own children. This was doubtless unconscionably selfish. I left their care to others. To hired nannies. To boarding schools. Of all this, I am guilty.”

  “I have in the past, earnestly tried for some reconciliation. I have apologized. I have tried to explain that I was conditioned by the strictures of my upbringing. It has been to no avail. With Clara, I have sometimes thought that I made a little headway. But there too, I am ultimately defeated. By the very force of biology. Because Callum is her twin, she is bound to side with him against me. He is quite mad, as you doubtless grasped. He should long ago have been institutionalized, in my opinion. But we live in a mad time. He may well keep company with those who find his insanity normal. Drug takers, prostitutes, perverts of all kinds. God knows what sewers of humanity Callum trawls in.”

  Suzanne’s hands had gone quite numb. Murdo’s disquisition – for so it seemed to her – had the taint of rehearsal. Even for him, the phrasing was frigidly formal, “ I did not make my affection manifest.” Then too, his description of Callum was so widely off the mark, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the young man she had met. She felt again his tender mouth touching hers, his warm breath on her neck. She feared her face might show what she thought. The kettle began to whistle, and then to scream, and she got up, grateful for these minutes granted her to compose herself.

  I feel no guilt about my attraction to Callum, she thought. Absolutely no guilt. What I do feel is a deep perplexity. Murdo i
s talking. This is what I wanted. Yet I do not think that I believe what he says. She poured the boiling water into the teapot. And then sat down again.

  “Murdo,” she began. “They told me...”

  “Please, Suzanne, let me continue. I will tell you what they said. I know their concocted stories quite well by now, believe me. You see, they have done this before. They have attempted to poison my attachments to other women over the years. And often, to my sorrow, they have succeeded.”

  She had not expected this. Once again, she had failed to think of the women who had preceded her. For of course, there must have been others. After Kirstie died, and before her own encounter with Murdo, there might well have been countless others. Was it possible that she was simply the latest in a long line of Murdo’s “attachments” to whom the children deliberately fed disinformation? Yet how to reconcile this possibility with Jeremy’s evident probity, with Callum’s tears, with Clara’s blithe transparency? Could they be so practised at deception?

  “I shall condense what I believe they told you. This brevity is for my own sake. As I am sure you appreciate, I find their lies unbearably painful.”

  “Let us get this over with, then. First, that I was somehow responsible for Miranda’s death. That I kept her on a starvation diet. That I took Jeremy away from her. The truth is she was already ill when we married, although neither of us knew it at the time. Had I known, I should have taken precautions. I would never have let her become pregnant. The birth itself nearly killed her. She could not have coped with the demands of a baby. And Jeremy was an excessively demanding baby. Just as he has grown into an excessively demanding man.”

  “I ask you. How did the children arrive at their interpretation of Miranda’s decline? The twins did not yet exist. Jeremy was less than a year old. Shall I tell you? This tale, like all the others, is manufactured. Admittedly, Miranda’s mother played a role. The woman was a hysteric. It was she who first put this nonsense into Jeremy’s head. She always detested me. Because had I not come along, Miranda would have been a Bride of Christ. What a waste. Oh, my Miranda, what a waste.”