‘You said you’d tell me. In the hospital you said you’d let me know.’
‘I didn’t make up my own mind until the last moment, and then I thought you were at Castle Douglas.’
‘I was. Until Mary rang yesterday.’
‘So you’ve only just arrived. You’ve grown your hair.’
‘A little. Do you like it?’
‘I like it any way.’
I took her right up to the bedroom. There was no need for polite talk or will-you won’t-you hesitations. It was as if we’d never been separated.
Afterwards I told her about the perfumery forgeries, the way we had tracked them down and stumbled on something bigger, the flight of the man behind the racket, the scene outside the Lamb and Flag. I had been too tired to say much in the hospital and she had not wanted to approach Shona. Alison had seen the reports of Erica’s death in the papers and swallowed the verdict without a second thought. A tragedy for everyone concerned. I did not mention my father. Only three people knew about that: Shona, my mother and Kenneth Kingsley. It was enough.
At least until I turned Catholic and confessed it to some spotty priest.
She told me what there was to tell in her own life. Catriona was not with her; she had started nursery school in Kirkcudbright.
‘So you will want to go back there soon?’
‘Not soon. My mother is very happy to have Trina. I can stay a week or two.’
So she stayed. Not with me, but she might just as well. You can’t hide something that won’t be hidden. I saw the Abdens a couple of times; their welcome was equivocal. I had just lost my wife in the most tragic circumstances. I’d had a severe motor bust-up – just like their own son – which had crippled me for two months. I was having an affair with their daughter-in-law/sister-in-law and barely preserving the decencies. If eventually I married her – allowing a decent interval following my first wife’s death – it would probably be as good an arrangement for everybody as could be. But this disagreeable modern habit of jumping the gun was not popular in the Highlands and was not easy to ignore. Lucie and her mother guarded, Mary breathily welcoming.
Weather heavy all the time; broodingly dark, enormous clouds blanketing the sky, so that daylight seemed a temporary event; you were always just pulling the curtains back as it appeared over the spiked skyline or drawing them across as the last remnants drained away. The wind howled like runaway dogs. There were no lights outside at night; you peered through black panes that reflected your own face. I wondered if the absolute blackness outside equalled the blackness of my soul.
Cold draughts everywhere, even in the bedroom – draughts like cold thoughts pushing their way into the sham cosiness and warmth of the shared bed. Some fires smoked. Never in the history of the house had there been so many fires burning – even the two in the ancestral hall. Early on in my stay I’d tired of sputtering logs – half the wood round here was resinated – and ordered a ton of coal. Surprisingly it arrived next day, and we burned this with the profligacy of the short-lived. Sometimes timbers creaked as if you were on a ship.
Gulls, sea duck, scoters, blew in flurries across the brief windy daylights, waves on the loch threatened the shaky quay I had repaired, mountainous seas bursting endlessly on distant rocks sent spray up to join the driving mists.
When we were alone together we talked a fair amount and smoked a little and ate and drank a little, and sometimes sat in total silence listening to the quarrelsome gales. We talked of theatres and books and gardens and sunshine and families and fishing and shooting. She said she often went shooting at home with her brother.
‘You enjoy shooting birds?’ I said. ‘Very strange.’
‘Not so strange. Not when they’re bred for the purpose.’
I said: ‘ They say about the English upper classes, don’t they, that when they wake in the morning they say: ‘‘ What a lovely day, let’s go out and kill something.’’ Are the Scots as bad?’
‘You’re one. You ought to know.’
‘A town-bred one. But I think of all the birds that have become extinct in the Highlands in the last eighty years – so maybe the answer is yes.’
‘Animals too: I could mention half a dozen without stopping to think … But yes, I enjoy grouse shooting, pheasant shooting. As I say, they’re bred for this only. So I am only taking away from the countryside what has been specially added to the countryside.’
‘But when you see one fluttering down suddenly deprived of flight, its wing broken, doesn’t that take away from the thrill of the shot?’
‘You mustn’t be sentimental, David. You are not a vegetarian. You shut your eyes to the murdered sheep, the bullock under the axe, the strangled chicken. A shot is usually at least as humane a way of bringing the food to the table.’
For once in her life she’d spoken sharply, and after a minute I said: ‘Touché. Who am I to gag at putting paid to a bird or an animal considering that I seem to enjoy killing people.’
She sat up and looked at me, eyes intent, steady. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Off-colour joke,’ I said. ‘ But you know it isn’t given to every man to stab his wife to death in a fencing duel.’
‘I hope you’re not telling me you found pleasure in it!’
I put my lips to her arm. ‘ Not in those words. But sometimes I wake in the night and think how much I’d come to dislike her. Then I say, why did I not sidestep and parry, why did I just stand and meet her charge?’
‘But you couldn’t have known this would happen! The protective clothing!’
‘No … I couldn’t have known.’
‘Then is there any need to ask such questions?’
‘No. No need. But sometimes they rear their ugly heads.’
‘Don’t let them.’
She slowly lay back on the pillow, her urchin cut, grown longer, feathering about her head.
She said: ‘I sometimes think you don’t tell me the whole truth.’
‘About what?’
‘Your thoughts. Your feelings. Your understanding of yourself.’
‘Nobody can, Alison. There’s no such thing as the whole truth. There’s only ever a partial account of a partial reality.’
‘Sometimes you frighten me.’
‘I – frighten you? Come off it. I’d think that impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you would never be frightened of anything. You’re so stable, so enduring.’
‘That’s not much of a compliment.’
‘It’s meant to be.’ I again kissed her arm, but higher up. ‘But why do I frighten you – always supposing I remotely do?’
She shivered. ‘You’re tickling me.’
‘Never mind. It’s in a good cause.’
‘You seem,’ she said; ‘sometimes you seem not to have your whole attention on what you’re saying. Maybe observing what you should be taking part in.’
Oh God, I thought, was this the same old charge? ‘Don’t say I’m not taking part in you.’
She smiled privately. ‘ No, David, it is not in the big things. It’s in the little things. You are far the best lover I have ever had.’
‘Among many?’
‘No. I was too well brought up. But no man has ever paid me the attentions you do. Physically you are all that a woman could want.’
‘Physically only, I see. My broken ribs have created a mental blockage.’
‘No, don’t joke, sweetheart. But sometimes after it is all over – an hour after when I am driving home perhaps – I wonder if I have been pleasing to you.’
‘I can only answer that, my love, by beginning all over again.’
‘Please do. Now. Please. Please do.’
But already I was beginning to feel there was no future in it for me.
III
She left on the following Monday, after three weeks. Trina was breaking up any day and she wanted to be back then.
We’d never had a cross word, Alison and I, and now never would
. We separated with every evidence of loving regard. I said I was still convalescent – at least that I still felt a sense of shock which would take a time to wear away. I hadn’t even decided whether to leave Wester Craig or to stay over Christmas. But as soon as I’d decided I’d let her know. Of course I’d write often. She said she could bring Trina for Christmas at Lochfiern – or somewhere else if I preferred. I said fine; take care, my love, there’s snow forecast, we don’t want another motoring casualty.
After the little yellow Mini had disappeared round the fold in the land I walked slowly back to the house. It was a rare fine day, with a pale sun shining on white water and black rocks and sugar-loaf peaks and hillsides brown with bracken. Although the battering winds had been so cold, we’d not had a single frost yet.
Coppell was standing in the doorway, shading his eyes and staring up towards the hills.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘I think it is a black guillemot, soor. You see them but seldom now. He’s a lovely little chap. See him there turning into the sun.’
‘Do you shoot birds for pleasure, Coppell?’
‘Oh nae, sorr, not that sort. Of course when Mr Malcolm was alive we had regular shooting parties, but usually they would drive east to one of the grouse moors. Round here I would shoot only the eagles.’
‘Don’t you think they’re entitled to a lamb or two?’
‘McVitie wouldna think so. It is all a ma’er of opinion.’
‘Yes … yes. So much in this world is all a matter of opinion.’
I stayed another week. Physically I seemed absolutely OK after the incident outside the Lamb and Flag. Spiritually (or morally or whatever you like) I was less OK about the incident in the Knightsbridge flat. But my spilled blood had in some way helped.
On the day before I left I wrote to my beautiful mistress:
Dearest, dearest Alison,
This is the most awful letter I’ve ever had to write, and I pray to God I’ll never write another like it. Because it’s to tell you that our love afrair is over. We said goodbye on Monday with loving promises, and that’s how it should be. Because the desire hasn’t gone. Only the reasoning mind behind the desire.
I know I’ll never marry again. Things in my own past, far past, reinforced by the calamity of Erica’s death, make it pretty plain to me that I’m not the one to pass on my own peculiar genes to yet another generation of Abdens. And if I just remained your lover it’d be wildly unfair to you and still more to Trina – who badly needs a father. You’re so beautiful, and young enough to marry again properly and settle into some good Scottish laird’s home and raise a family, become a personality in the district and forget the Abdens of Wester Craig and Lochfiern. It’s not for you to stick around as the mistress of a rackety, unstable and disorderly baronet.
We’ve had a great and glorious time together. You’ve been wonderful to me; your body has been wonderful to me. I shall always remember these weeks with immense delight. Thank you, thank you, dear Alison.
I’m leaving Wester Craig tomorrow and may not come back. It’s impossible to see anything clear at present. Even at thirty-seven, life seems to stretch a hell of a long way ahead. I only know what I know.
And because I know what I know I am writing this letter of goodbye. To you, my dear, all my love and loving wishes for a happier future than you’d ever find with me.
Parts of the letter were a lie, but they were lies in a good cause: trying not to hurt more than I could the feelings of someone I really cared about.
Before I left I gave Coppell and McVitie a cheque for £1,000 each. Said it was a one-off Christmas present to supplement their wages. Before I came back, if I came back, I’d ring or write to them.
I didn’t go to Lochfiern. There was no natural conversation I could carry on with them.
I drove the little hired car to Inverness, checked it out and caught the plane to Heathrow. It was another fine day, and when I got to London the damned shops were already trumpeting Christmas. I wondered why I liked Alison and disliked Erica but had been able to live permanently with neither of them. The answer was clearer in my mind than it had ever been before. It was not Erica’s death that lay between Alison and me. It was not the sword. It was not the iron handle of the Aga. It was not even dislike of passing my own particular genes on to another generation. There was simply the one woman who had ruined any hope I’d ever had of falling in love with either Erica or Alison. Because I’d cared too much for her. But she’d slipped away into the past where I couldn’t ever reach her again. Where I couldn’t reach all of her. Not as I remembered her. Not as she had once been. Not as I wanted her still. Time had taken half of her away. For ever. For ever.
It was seven when I checked in at the Berkeley and bathed and changed. By then the day would be over, so I took a taxi to South Audley Street.
A voice answered the buzzer but it was not Shona’s. When I got up, a small good-looking girl opened the flat door and said: ‘ I’m Cherry. I’m really the daily help but I’ve stayed on this evening to get Mme Shona’s supper, as she isn’t feeling too well.’
Escorted by her I got to the bedroom door, where Cherry discreetly faded out. Shona was sitting up in bed in a scarlet silk bedjacket, her hair tied carelessly back with a scarlet ribbon. She didn’t look much different from when I’d seen her last, her fine pure skin with its yellowish tinge, great eyes slanting at me.
‘David! This is a surprise.’
‘Yes. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Very little, I’m glad to say. But the specialist is trying a course of injections which are supposed to work miracles but do not have a happy effect at the outset. I have to stay in bed three days.’
‘And this is the first day?’
‘The third. I am now already feeling better, and shall be up tomorrow. And you?’
‘I’m feeling better,’ I said.
‘You have come from Scodand?’
‘From Scotland.’
‘To stay a little while in London?’
‘A little while, yes.’
‘Well, do not stand in the doorway, my dear. Let us talk in comfort.’
So I went across and drew up a chair beside the old woman and took her hand.
Copyright
First published in 1986 by Collins
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