by Anna Larner
Moira said carefully, “I do know about Eve.”
“Oh, okay. Well, like I said, I think she has feelings for you, and—”
“She does have feelings for me, yes.”
“Exactly, so—”
“And Alice”—Moira placed her hand gently on Alice’s arm—“I have feelings for her too.”
“What sort of feelings? Moira?”
Moira didn’t say anything. She quietly waited for the message to sink in for Alice.
Alice looked at the carpet, staring at an imprint left by a piece of heavy furniture that had since been moved.
Moira watched Alice looking at the floor. She looked at her young face, newly creased with a frown, her hair wavy where it had been tied back, falling free against her flushed cheeks.
Moira’s chest ached at her betrayal. The betrayal of the notion of Moira as the woman Alice needed her to be—steadfast, reliable, trustworthy, her compass in life’s storm.
The hotel corridor door banged to, and voices whispered and giggled loudly before fading into the distance.
“Is this what you do then—sleep with women behind my dad’s back?” Alice’s hurt had shaped itself into disgust.
“No, Alice.” Moira shook her head insistently. “I’ve never before, I haven’t—”
“So what you’re telling me is Eve’s the first? You honestly expect me to believe that? To believe anything you say, ever again?”
Moira could see that Alice couldn’t bring herself to look at her. “Alice, please. I know this is a shock to you and I’m sorry—”
Alice climbed back into her bed and turned off her bedside lamp.
Before turning off her own lamp, Moira said, “You need to understand, I’ve hated keeping things from you.”
Alice didn’t say anything. Moira eventually turned off her light.
*
Alice lay awake, staring at the ceiling. The red standby light of the television and the green light of the smoke alarm glinted like dying stars in the darkness of the room. Up to this very point, Alice Campbell’s life had not made sense. She’d always sensed that something wasn’t quite right between Moira and her father. It oddly wasn’t the separate bedrooms soon after they were married or even Moira’s eventual move to the croft. No. It was the unspoken, intangible distance in their closeness, the disregarded absence of the other, physical touch devoid of meaning, companionship in place of feeling. The emptiness of it all made Alice feel insecure and sad. And cross, it made her feel cross.
And now finally the truth for Alice, this confirmation—this missing piece that brought clarity to the confusing fragments of memory that had pierced her past. And in that very moment, in the darkness of the hotel room, the past became indistinguishable from the present, and Alice was ten again, standing in the McAlisters’ dining room, overhearing the whole of a conversation she’d half understood.
“Spring air in the lungs—nothing better.” Angus banged his boots at his door. “Well, Moira Burns, soon to be Campbell.” Angus shook his head. “Let’s get that stove firing for a warming brew.”
“I can’t take her name, it hurts too much.” Moira stood in bare stocking feet in the McAlisters’ dining room, looking at the collection of photographs on the sideboard.
“I’m not sure I understand, Moira.” Angus dropped his scavenged harvest on the dining table and walked over to Moira to find her staring at the photo of Iris resting in her hand. Angus took a deep breath. “It is not unusual, brave girl, for weddings to bring up all kinds of emotions. It’s completely understandable that you should remember your closest friend at this time.”
“I miss her so much.” Moira’s tears dripped onto the polished sideboard, whitening the surface as they dried.
“I know you do, I know you do.” Angus held Moira in his arms. “You need to be mindful though, that it must be particularly hard for John too. You must remember, Moira, when you marry John this weekend, you are taking his name, not Iris’s.”
“I don’t have a problem remembering that, Angus. My problem is that I’m unable to forget her.” Moira closed her fist around the photo, creasing it in two.
Angus took a seat at the dining table and rummaged in his pocket for his pipe. He placed the empty pipe in his mouth whilst he hunted in his shirt, jacket, and trouser pockets for his tobacco.
With a mouthful of pipe, he mumbled, “We have to let go of memories to be able to forget them, Moira.” He lit his pipe and took a deep drag in.
With frustration at the fringes of her words, Moira said, “That’s all very well but everything reminds me of her—the sky, the loch, everything around me. And John and Alice—when I look at them, it hurts.”
“Moira, you have your future ahead of you, you need—”
“You don’t understand, I loved her—”
“They smell funny.” Alice revealed herself then, as if from nowhere, and stood smelling at the leaves on the table, at the same time looking at Moira. A cooling breeze blew in from the open kitchen door.
Angus and Moira looked at each other and then at Alice.
“It’s wild garlic, young Alice,” Angus said, guiding Alice into the kitchen. “And it will make the perfect spring salad. In fact, perhaps you can help me to prepare it.”
Alice glanced behind her to see a distraught Moira smoothing the photo of her mother flat and placing it carefully back into place on the sideboard.
“You loved my mum, didn’t you?” Alice’s words fired out of the dark at Moira, like a sniper’s deadly shot at her heart. “Did she love you too?”
“What? How did? I can’t…I can’t talk about this now, Alice. I’m sorry, please understand.”
“That’s why you took us in, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but please, Alice.”
“You never spoke about her. She was my mum and you loved her, and you never said a thing.” Alice was breathing heavily. “And Dad—did he know? About you—about you and my mum? Did he, Moira?”
Moira gave a muffled, “Yes.”
“I don’t understand. Why?” Alice stared at the blunt shape of Moira. “And Eve? Does he know about her too?”
With a tone empty of everything, Moira said, “No.”
“It’s all been lies. My whole life—”
“It’s not like that.”
Alice gasped in distress. “You’re lying. Is it like that. And now you’ll leave us. You’ll leave us for this Eve—”
Moira turned on her bedside light. The agony of the night etched itself across Moira’s face. “No. I would never leave you. And I wouldn’t lie to you, Alice—”
“But you have lied. You’ve been lying all these years.”
“Please, Alice. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? The only thing you’re sorry about is that you’ve been found out!”
With her face in her hands, Moira released a muffled cry into the room, which reminded Alice of the pain of a wild thing caught in the poacher’s net.
Alice clambered out of bed and held Moira. She hadn’t meant to reduce Moira to tears, but if she was honest she had wanted Moira to feel her pain. But seeing Moira so distraught only served to double Alice’s hurt.
“Don’t Moira. Please, don’t.”
Chapter Nineteen
The week that passed following Moira’s return to Newland was marked with a sense of foreboding. Moira was in uncharted waters, the choking fog of uncertainty shrouding any sight of land. She knew she would need to account for herself, she just hoped she would find the words to say and the breath to speak.
“We need to talk, John,” Moira said with a heavy sigh, as she stepped into the sitting room of the main house.
The spacious room was the shape of a fifty-pence piece. Long elegant french doors filled the space with a dusty light. Rain drizzled down them like tears.
Moira poured herself a whisky and stood at the window looking out at the loch. It seemed peculiarly dark and moody.
Speaking from the doorway, John asked, “What
is it, Moira?”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“You can’t do what anymore?”
“I can’t do us anymore.” Moira turned to face John. “I’m so sorry.”
John awkwardly lit his pipe. He made his way into the room, poured himself a whisky, and sat heavily in the armchair.
He swallowed hard. “So that’s what Alice…I just thought she was being melodramatic.” John’s face drained of colour. “She said I needed to talk to you if I knew what was good for me. She made it sound like you’d met someone.” John looked at Moira, his eyes desperately searching her face.
Moira just stood looking at him, unable to speak, her silence in every way her confession.
Swallowing a large mouthful of whisky, John then broke the terrible silence that choked the room. “I want you to know that I love you, Moira. I’m not sure you’ve ever believed I have.”
“Please, John—”
“From the very first day you walked into the Union bar, I’ve loved you. From the very moment you agreed to be Iris’s S.”
“Don’t, please don’t.” Moira’s stomach turned over. She was back at the bar with John smirking at her and Iris.
John said flatly, “It stood for sweetheart.”
Moira swallowed deeply.
“She thought you got it, I knew you didn’t.”
Moira felt her cheeks burn.
“I wasn’t surprised she fell for you, I was just surprised…” John paused. Moira held his gaze. “I was just surprised you let her go.”
Moira felt weak. She walked unsteadily to the sofa, sinking helplessly into the soft seating, her head resting briefly in her hands. She looked up at John and heard herself ask the one question that had troubled her for too long. “Will you tell me then, why did you go with her, have a child with her, set up home with her, if you’ve always loved me so?” She had wanted to ask Iris that same question.
“When we all lived in town, it was great, wasn’t it? We were all happy, close together, weren’t we?” John drained his whisky down. “I stupidly thought it could last forever, the closeness we all shared. And then when we got our break and decided to tour, and you decided not to come, I thought, that’s okay because you and Iris, well you were inseparable, and whilst Iris and I were in the band together, I would still see you.” John looked into his empty glass.
Moira couldn’t quite take in what she was hearing.
“But then one night, Iris came into my room, we were staying in a shitty hotel in Berwick, the…” John scratched his head, trying and failing to remember the hotel’s name. “I remember it had no curtains, just cardboard against the windows. Anyway, she was upset. I think you had rowed or something. And then, she just undressed and got in my bed, and…well. I thought when we got back from touring it would go back to normal but you had left and Iris wouldn’t talk about it. And then we found out about Alice—we were suddenly parents and things changed, had to change. I knew the right thing was to stand by Iris, to help bring up our daughter.” John wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “But I never stopped loving you, Moira, neither of us did.”
Moira looked at John properly, maybe for the first time since that first night in the Union bar. She watched his greying, receding hairline move up and down as he spoke, the scratch of stubble on his sallow skin. When Moira thought of John, she thought of the young man with shoulder-length hair and full beard, playing his accordion, smoking his pipe. Now sitting opposite her was her companion who had grown old and Moira had not noticed.
Confused, Moira said, “I just assumed, I thought you married me, stayed with me, because it was the right thing to do for Alice, that we helped each other with our grief—”
“Did I? Did I really help you with your grief? I doubt that, Moira. When all you could see was Iris. All you’ve ever wanted was Iris.”
John took a drag on his pipe. He drew in deep, desperate fogs of smoke into his lungs, as if the nicotine offered pain relief. “I wanted you to love me. To look at me the way you looked at her. But you never did.”
“Please understand, I wanted to love you, I tried to love you, John, you know that.”
John gave a long defeated sigh. “I know. I know you did, Moira. And I’ve tried to understand. But that didn’t stop me hoping like a bloody fool for all these years that if I gave you space and time, somehow you would change, grow to love me, in the same way that Iris and I grew to love each other. But you didn’t, wouldn’t.” John’s voice squeezed with the effort of controlling his resentment and hurt.
“Couldn’t, John. I was never the same as Iris. I can only love women. I told you that—”
“Only women or only Iris?” John’s pointed question stabbed at Moira. “I mean, does this new woman of yours know that she’s wasting her time, just as I’ve wasted mine?”
“I never made you stay.” Moira gasped in alarm that John had harboured such thoughts.
“But you never told me to leave!”
“How could I? We were a family—”
“But that hasn’t stopped you betraying us.” John’s voice broke and crumbled away.
“I never meant to hurt you, John.”
“It strikes me that you never mean to do the things you do, Moira. But it doesn’t change the fact they’ve been done.”
John got up wearily from his chair and opened the sitting room doors to the garden. A damp, chilling evening air filled the room.
With a heavy sigh he said, “I’ve stayed too long. It’s time for me to leave.”
Moira swallowed hard. “Where will you go?”
“Town, at first, I suppose. It’ll be easier for work. I might even head further north, catch up with Hamish. He’s always saying he never sees us.” John stopped, seeming to wince at the word us. “My consultancy work could take me anywhere. A fresh start.” Never had those words been said with less enthusiasm.
“And Alice?” The pain rushed at her with the thought of losing Alice. “We’ll need to talk to her, John.”
John shrugged and stood to walk away. “Yes, I’ll talk to her. What you say to her is up to you.”
Sitting in the room alone, all Moira could feel was the sting of the salt of her tears at her lips.
*
Eve had correctly interpreted Roxanne’s advice to keep herself busy as, Come to as many parties with me as possible, get blind drunk, and forget all about her.
“Who did you say was going tonight?” Eve spat her words into the sink along with her mouthwash. “There’ll be lots of hot nurses right, even though it’s a Thursday?”
“Guaranteed. Weeknights totally rock. Everyone pops in for one drink only to leave at dawn, slaughtered and missing a shoe. I’ve invited everyone at the hospital. The only people left on duty will be a junior doctor on the verge of a nervous breakdown and a porter.”
“Great. Thanks for inviting me. You know, I may be getting into this fancy dress malarkey.” Eve completed the final touches to her cowboy outfit in front of the bathroom mirror.
“Fancy a whisky engine starter, Evie Eds?”
“Nah, you go ahead though, Rox—in fact, finish it off if you like.”
“Ta, mate.” Roxanne paused. “Eve?”
“What?”
“What’s that parcel? No, don’t tell me—yet more porn.”
“What?” Eve leapt out the bathroom, drew her water pistol from its holster, and aimed it at Roxanne. “Stick ’em up, Officer Barns, or else.”
Eve giggled as Roxanne slipped her truncheon from her belt and slapped it against the palm of her hand. Roxanne then used the truncheon to point to a discarded parcel, partially hidden behind an umbrella at Eve’s door. “That parcel—you’re not going to open it?”
Eve feigned disinterest. “No, it’s okay. It’s probably nothing.”
Even before looking at the postmark, Eve had known that the parcel she had received two days earlier was from Moira. She had simply dropped the parcel on the floor by the door and blocked out the me
mory of its arrival, just as she had blocked out the memory of Moira standing in her living room, begging Eve to listen. “I was about to throw it away anyway.”
Roxanne picked up the parcel, held it to her ear, and shook it.
“You’re just going to throw away a parcel unopened?” Just as she spoke, Roxanne noticed the label glued to the side of the parcel. “Inverness?” Turning the parcel over, she read aloud, “Sender: M. Burns, Foxglove Croft, Newland, Inverness. It’s from Moira. God, she’s got some nerve. Does she think she can win you over sending you some shortbread?”
“What time’s the party at your place. Eight, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Roxanne knocked back the whisky.
“Let’s go.” Eve patted the thighs of her tan felt chaps and positioned her cowboy hat in such a way that it cast a shadow over her eyes. “I’m a-headin’ on over to them thar nurses’ lodgings. Saddle up, Barns, we’re ridin’ out.”
Roxanne tossed the parcel back onto the floor. “You had a lucky escape there, mate. She had heartbreaker written all over her.”
*
“Best party ever.” Eve hiccuped. “No, wait, I think I’ve lost my hat.” Eve patted her head at the same time tripping up the front step that led into the nursing halls.
“It’s here, tit-head.” Roxanne lifted the hat that dangled from its strap against Eve’s back, and squashed it on her head.
“Oh.” Eve looked completely surprised. “Rox, I’ve got a stitch.” Eve bent double. “You’re walking too fast.”
“Evie, I’m not walking fast, you’re not moving. Now shift your arse.” Roxanne grabbed Eve around the waist and escorted her, almost in a straight line, back to her room.
Eve stood, rocking slightly, blinking at the sight that greeted her. Eve wondered whether Roxanne knew that someone had ransacked her room. Clothes, shoes, and, it seemed, nearly all of what she owned lay discarded on the floor. If there was carpet, you couldn’t see it. If there was a seat, you couldn’t sit in it. Underwear and T-shirts were draped, like bunting, over the open drawers. A pair of trainers dangled out of the window, propped open with a beer can, and a pot plant wilted on the sill.