‘You’re exaggerating. There’s a minibus from Fort William that takes you close. I suppose that was how you were hoping to get there?’
‘That’s exactly what I intended. You know of Glentaragar?’
Her response is to break briefly into the tune of ‘The Road to the Isles’, a lively little number made popular by Harry Lauder, Kenneth McKellar and others. ‘By Loch Glass and Glen Araich and Glen Orach I will go,’ she sings, and those few notes are sweeter by far than anything MacCrimmon has produced in the previous two hours. ‘Yes, I know of it. There’s absolutely no point in trying to get to Fort William tomorrow – you’d never make it in time to catch that bus – but you must have worked that out for yourself, hence the drowning of sorrows. Your best bet is to start walking.’
Something has happened to her voice, or to my hearing. Her words come and go as if spoken by an announcer on a distant radio station – distant perhaps in time as well as space. Her voice is like MacCrimmon’s face – vaguely reminiscent.
‘But it must be miles away,’ I say. Weirdly, my own voice also sounds remote to me. I used to know it so well.
‘About thirty,’ she says, ‘taking all the bends into account. The road from here goes to Oban eventually, and there’s a junction with another road off to the right that’s quite easy to miss, and that goes to Glen Orach, and from there it’s not far to Glen Araich, and then you’re almost there. If you put out your thumb you might be lucky. There’s so little traffic on these roads that if somebody does come along they usually take pity on you.’ Now she sounds like an actress on the not very clear soundtrack of a 1940s movie. I blame the Glen Gloming, and take some more in order to concentrate.
‘And if they don’t?’
‘You just keep walking. That’s how I get around. I find it liberating not knowing how long it might take or how far I might have to walk. And walking isn’t that much slower than driving in second and third gear, which is what that road requires.’
‘Is that how you got here today, by walking?’
‘Yes. And two women coming away from a funeral in Oban stopped for me.’
‘Those tight-fisted crows. Sorry. So you don’t work here?’
‘Oh no. Not officially. I just come for a break now and again.’
‘To commune with nature, Malcolm said.’
‘If there’s any about. Don’t let Malcolm bother you. He thinks he’s smart and he isn’t, but he’s all right.’
‘Hmm. I thought maybe you and he were …’
She laughs uproariously. ‘God, I’d have to be desperate.’ Then, more quietly. ‘Sometimes I have been. That’s why he lets me have the room for almost nothing.’
This is – or seems to be – such a frank admission that I don’t want to think about the implications.
‘I know this is a silly question,’ I say, ‘but have we met before?’
‘Before today? No.’
‘You seem familiar. From Edinburgh, perhaps?’
‘I haven’t been in Edinburgh for years.’ She glances over at the sleeping barman. ‘I pretended you and I hadn’t met when he came in. If he knew I’d been helping behind the bar he’d have tried to get more money out of us. I hope you took a cut for yourself. Did you?’
I hesitate, which is enough for Xanthe.
‘I’m so glad. It was a rotten trick he played on you. He probably went home to watch TV. He’s a lazy sod.’
‘What about you? Did you take a cut?’
‘Bed and board, that’s my reward. Oh, that rhymes.’ She has been drinking her wine fast and now she knocks back the last of it and says, ‘I am trying to get me drunk, incidentally.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not? Would you like a refill?’
‘One more for the road,’ I say. ‘Although in fact I’m probably going to have to spend the night stretched out on this bench.’
‘I have an idea about that,’ Xanthe says. She goes to fetch us more drink. The bard does not stir, nor the barman. The fire glows. Xanthe returns.
‘You can share my room,’ she says. ‘It’ll be much more comfortable for both of us. We’ll finish these and sneak you up there while Malcolm’s snoozing. Or we can take them with us now, if you prefer?’
‘Let’s drink them here,’ I say, hearing myself slurring in the distance. ‘In case of spillage.’
I have a sudden image of the woman I once loved in Edinburgh, or the woman I thought I loved, or the woman I never loved. I forget her name for a moment, then I remember. Sonya. Sonya Strachan and her son and daughter. My happy ex-family. Then I look at Xanthe, just inches from me.
Have I come to Argyll to interview Rosalind Munlochy? I think not! Surely this is the adventure I came for! But is it really happening?
‘Curly-haired men always make me go weak at the knees,’ Xanthe says. Her hand, somehow, is resting on my thigh. ‘Even when I’m sitting down.’
‘I don’t have curly hair,’ I say.
‘I bet you do,’ she says. ‘But I was just making small talk. Shall we go to bed?’
‘Is that small talk too?’
‘We can stretch it out if you want, but why would we do that?’
I put my hand on top of hers. ‘To see if it was just a dream and then wake up from it?’
‘That would be disappointing. Do you have any small talk yourself?’
I ponder this for a minute.
‘Dogs or cats?’ I say. ‘Which are cleverer?’
‘Dogs. Anything else?’
I have another ponder. ‘No. Nothing else.’
‘Come on, then.’
The room upstairs has a coombed ceiling and a dormer window. You can stand up straight in front of the window, pull back the flowery curtains and look out at the stars, but you can’t stand up straight anywhere else because most of the rest of the available space is taken up by a double bed. It has white sheets, and blankets and an eiderdown, and there is a lamp on a table to one side of it. From bedclothes to patterned wallpaper it is all about thirty years out of date. I love it.
Xanthe sits on the edge of the bed and bends to take off her shoes.
To give myself something to do other than watch, I open a cupboard and find that it isn’t a cupboard, though it probably once was. Inside is a tiny handbasin and a toilet. You can’t stand up straight in there to do anything, so I sit down.
When I come back out Xanthe’s clothes are folded on a chair and she is under the covers.
I say, ‘Is this really happening?’
‘I would say so,’ she replies.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I hope this scene ends before we get to the end of it.’
She looks puzzled. ‘Explain that?’
‘Don’t you have a dread of being caught in flagrante delicto? Or even just in your socks with a relative stranger? You just want to bypass the embarrassing bit.’
‘That’s why I’m in here,’ she says, ‘but I’m not embarrassed. And I’m not wearing any socks. Do you want me to turn out the light?’
‘Yes. No. I like looking at you. Maybe if you could dim it a bit?’
‘I don’t think the electrics here can manage that level of sophistication.’
‘Dim your eyes for ten seconds, then.’
By the time she undims them I am in beside her.
We don’t indulge in small talk for a while after that. Then the question of putting out the light arises again. This time Xanthe asks me if I’ll do it. She says she has a sense that somebody or something is in the room watching us. I assure her that we are alone and not to worry about it. She says she’ll be more relaxed in the dark. She seems pretty relaxed already, but she insists.
‘Can you reach the switch?’
‘I’m trying to. I can’t find it.’
‘Yes you can. It’s down there. Oh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise. Just a bit further over. Ah.’
‘Oh. Nearly. Hang on.’
‘Ooh. Not sure if I can.’
‘I’m just �
��’
‘Ah.’
‘Got it.’
‘Ah. Yes.’
‘Better?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes, yes.’
We race the scene to its end. It is a close thing, but the scene finishes just ahead of us.
CONVERSATIONS WITH A TOAD: CONVERSATION #6
Douglas Findhorn Elder woke to the sound of small birds chattering outside his window. It took a few moments for him to realise that it was not, in fact, his window. The flowery curtains were unfamiliar. They were still closed but they were faded and thin, and morning light was doing its best to enter the room through them. City sounds were absent. As memory returned, Douglas reached out a hand for Xanthe.
He sat up. She was not there.
He got up and checked in the toilet that had once been a cupboard but she wasn’t there either. Her clothes were absent. Every trace of her, in fact, was gone, apart from the smell of her body and her perfume in the bed, to which he now returned. Pressing his nose to the sheets and inhaling deeply triggered in Douglas a rush of satisfaction and simultaneously a confused sense of loss. He repeated the exercise several times, like an anteater grubbing around for breakfast, until he felt light-headed. This only partially helped to relieve what was shaping up to be a terrible hangover. He went and splashed cold water on his face, gave himself a cursory wash, and got dressed.
When he pulled back the curtains he found that the window looked down onto the parking area in front of the inn. It was empty. Even the rusty yellow car in which Stuart Crathes MacCrimmon had arrived was away. Douglas wondered if the bard and Xanthe might have left together.
Why had she gone? Where had she gone? Why had she not even woken him to say goodbye?
Bereft. That was how he felt. And a bit sick.
The sky was bright and blue overhead, but to the west and north it was dark and grey. It was in that direction that he needed to go.
He checked his watch. It was ten o’clock. He was late. Not late as in dead: the late Douglas Elder. (He felt at his wrist for a pulse, and found he still had one.) Late as in late. He was stuck miles from where he should be, beside a railway line but far from a station, beside a road but with no transport, equipped with a mobile phone but without a signal, and he was going to be late for an interview.
Both inwardly and outwardly he cursed the bard, the fickleness of woman, and the fates, which seemed to be conspiring against him at every opportunity.
He contemplated abandoning the attempt to reach Rosalind Munlochy, but as this would also mean abandoning his future in freelance journalism and would not solve the problem of his being stranded, he rejected the idea.
Downstairs all was silent, clean and still. The fireplace had been cleared out and reset with paper and kindling, the peat basket had been refilled, the chairs and tables were in place. There was no sign of Malcolm – a small mercy – nor of his bicycle, which would have been a severe temptation. Actually, not a temptation at all: Douglas would have commandeered it in seconds. He went through to the kitchen, rooted about in cupboards and the fridge for the makings of breakfast, and made some. Eating food, he knew, was likely to improve the way he felt, and indeed the worst effects of the night before’s alcohol intake diminished after a mug of coffee, a couple of boiled eggs and some toast.
After that, there didn’t seem much point in lingering. He found his suitcase behind the bar where he had stowed it, and his raincoat on the peg where he had hung it. Then he stepped out of the Shira Inn, as if out of some strange dwelling in a fairy tale where impossible things were possible.
‘Ah, there you are at last,’ Mungo Forth Mungo said.
‘Jesus!’ Douglas said, clutching at his heart. Then, hoping to disguise the fact that, once again, he had quite forgotten about his travelling companion, he added quickly, ‘Good morning, Mungo. How are you?’
‘I’m well, thank you. The quality of insect hereabouts is generally very high. And plenty of them, too. I’ve had an excellent night. How was yours?’
‘Good, thanks.’
‘Sleep well?’
‘Yes, Mungo, very. Did you happen to, er, see Xanthe this morning?’
‘The uncommon woman? No. Missing her already? Or has she just gone missing?’
‘Not missing. Just gone. In fact, everybody’s disappeared.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen a soul.’
‘What about the bard. Did you see him leave?’
‘No. Mind you, I’ve been dozing quite a bit, waiting for you, so he could easily have slipped by me. What’s the plan? Is there a train due?’
‘There may be, but it won’t stop for us. The plan, such as it is, is to start walking and hope for a lift – and a phone signal, so I can let the people at Glentaragar House know I’ve been delayed.’
‘We’ve been delayed.’
‘They don’t know you’re coming.’
‘I’m not happy about getting in a car, you know.’
‘Tough. If you get in my pocket just now, we’ll make a start.’
‘I’d rather stay out if it’s all the same to you. It’s going to rain and I don’t want to miss it.’
‘I can’t go at your pace.’
‘What if I sit on your suitcase as you pull it along?’
‘It could be a bumpy ride.’
‘I’m good at gripping and clinging on. It’s something I do every spring. Do you know what amplexus is?’
‘No.’
‘Look it up in one of your books. Your suitcase shall be to me as a very stout and fertile female toad in the season of spawning. Nothing will shift me.’
‘Well, don’t make a mess.’
‘Don’t be crude. It’s the wrong time of year, and anyway your suitcase is going to get a thorough rinse.’
This was true. The sky was rapidly darkening and even as Mungo climbed aboard the case a few drops fell. At the same time something landed on Douglas’s neck and bit it. He turned up the collar of his raincoat. Mungo turned his face to the sky. They set off down the single-track road.
‘This is the life,’ Mungo said.
‘It’s not much of one,’ Douglas said.
‘Don’t be so negative. What’s the alternative?’
The rain thickened and hardened. Douglas trudged on. He said, ‘I don’t suppose you have any sense at all of what an afterlife might be, do you?’
‘What, after life? Decomposition? Being eaten by something?’
‘No. More life. Life after death. Immortality.’
‘I sort of understand the concept. It’s like one of your myths or legends, isn’t it? Good for illustrating what life’s about to young or simple minds, but unhelpful beyond that. Nobody takes it seriously, surely?’
‘Some people take it very seriously. They’re prepared to die in defence of their own particular version of it – or kill for it, which is worse. Anyway, I had this idea the other day – it popped into my head unbidden, on my fiftieth birthday in fact – that my immortality warranty had run out, or was about to.’
‘Your what?’
‘That was my reaction as well. It wasn’t a phrase I was familiar with, but there it was, in my head. And although I still don’t know what it means, I’m thinking now, suppose something has happened to us. Suppose when we left the train we were actually moving from one life to the next, and that Customer Experience Officer character was some sort of angel or usher, directing us on, and the Shira Inn was a waiting room between lives, and now this is us starting out into eternity. Are you with me?’
‘Physically, yes. Conceptually, only just.’
‘And for me it’s a kind of hell, with constant rain and aching feet and biting insects and a road that goes on and on for ever, whereas for you it’s a kind of paradise, with constant rain and insects and the same never-ending road. And yet we’re going down that road together. Does that make any kind of sense?’
‘None. You are drivelling. It’s a tendency I’ve had occasion t
o remark on before. You should give your imagination less slack. Anyway, where does this immortality-warranty thing fit in? If it’s run out, then you can’t be immortal. You must be dead. But you’re still conscious, still able to imagine things and talk drivel, ergo you must be alive. Toad erat demonstrandum, if you’ll excuse the pun.’
‘Ah well, Mungo,’ Douglas said – the rain was now a steady downpour, and he was growing soggier by the second – ‘I surely couldn’t be having this conversation with you in hell, and I’m damn sure I’m not in heaven, so thank you. I just needed a little reassurance. It’s so bloody wet. I hope a car comes along soon.’
‘I hope it doesn’t,’ Mungo said. ‘We have hope in common, at least. And as somebody once said, to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.’
‘Did they?’ Douglas said. ‘Well, whoever said that was a fool.’
[To be continued]
AN ECSTATIC SCARECROW
The rain falls relentlessly. Mostly it falls vertically but sometimes, if the breeze picks up from the west, it falls horizontally, slapping me about the cheeks and sneaking its way between the buttons of my coat as if it has some kind of slippery, interfering authority to check that the layers of my clothing are comprehensively soaked through. Once or twice it even contrives to fall upwards, by bouncing off the road with such force that it penetrates to my skin from below. Whenever I glance at the sky to see if there is the possibility of a let-up, all I see is a darker shade of black. The road stretches on, twisting occasionally to trick me into thinking that if only I go round the next bend I will come across some habitation, some meagre shelter, or even a sign telling me how many more miles lie between me and Oban or Glen Araich or Glen Orach or anywhere. To discover that it is only a hundred miles to Inverness would be something. It would prove that I am still in Scotland and/or the land of the living. But there is neither sign nor shelter. There is nothing but the road and the rain and Douglas Findhorn Elder marching towards his fate and the trundling rumble of his suitcase behind him.
And then, suddenly and miraculously, there is something else. I mishear it at first as the sound of water hurrying along the road at my heels, a swishing sound, and as my shoes are already drenched I do not bother to turn to inspect the latest torrent that I assume is about to engulf them. But I detect another noise, that of an engine, and with it the thwack-thwack of windscreen wipers working at the double. Oh joy! A car! I stop, turn, let go of the suitcase and stick out both arms, thumbs aloft, like an ecstatic scarecrow. The black car bearing down on me has its headlights on, and I hope the driver sees me in time because if he or she doesn’t I will be flattened. Nothing is going to make me step aside. If the car crushes me, so be it. This, then, is and will be the fate towards which I have been marching – to die an ignominious death under its wheels on an unclassified road in the West Highlands.
To Be Continued Page 21