Winter Tales

by Kenneth Steven

  ‘Nothing is the matter, Dr Aitken.’ Savage didn’t turn round.

  The younger man paused, then bent down and put his hand on Ruary’s right arm. He talked to him quietly; what words they were didn’t matter.

  ‘You are interfering, Dr Aitken, and I told you not to.’

  He came back to himself in the small room, the diving bell. He knew a little and he needed more. Was it ever possible to know everything, to know everything truly about the working of one single mind? And even when you knew everything, did it mean you would find the answer?

  The man with the corn-bright hair sat still in the chair that was his, looking out for ever into what he saw somewhere ahead of him.

  *

  A letter came from a Mr Norman MacLennan of South Uist, saying that he would be coming to Inverness on Friday 14 December. Would Dr Aitken be so kind as to meet him at the Station Hotel? It was written beautifully, the half-page of words, but the address in the top right-hand corner had been smudged and was illegible.

  Savage assured John that if he were to write a card to Mr Norman MacLennan, South Uist, it would reach him without a shadow of doubt. So he did, lacking the faith to believe it had the slightest chance of falling into the right man’s hands.

  But it was good to leave the hospital that Friday all the same. There was plenty of snow still in the higher hills, but sunlight came in sweeps over the Moray Firth and there was a strange mildness to the air that made it feel more like the other side of Christmas. How had Norman MacLennan of South Uist known where Ruary was, far less the name of his doctor?

  Perhaps it was this bizarre Highland world at work again; a small parish where news seemed to spread before it had been properly thought out, and where you couldn’t speak ill of anyone because the chances were you would be distantly related to them.

  The Station Hotel was clouds of white rolls and kippers that morning. There was soft laughter at tables; the murmur of half-heard talk. His eyes circled the corners for someone who might be Norman MacLennan, but the man was already struggling to his feet. There was something in his face that was the same, but he was smaller than Ruary and wider; he had spilled over his edges. Cheeks and hands ruddy and puffed. They sat down and coffee was brought; he allowed himself a white cloud of roll.

  ‘They say he’s gone queer. Is that true?’

  He had to wait until he had swallowed, but it let him think. It was most certainly the war that had done its damage; that was for sure. Something very serious had happened that had affected Ruary. That was why he was being cared for where he was.

  Neither a nod nor an answer; just the look of the two blue eyes.

  ‘Are you related to Ruary, Mr MacLennan?’

  ‘I’m his uncle, brother to his father Sorley.’

  ‘Then why don’t you come to the hospital to see him for yourself? It’s only half an hour out of Inverness . . .’

  ‘No, I had only this morning and I need to be back on the island by tomorrow, Dr Aitken, so this was a chance to hear how he is.’

  He had seen it all before and the signs were classic, textbook. That was fear speaking; the fear of being infected by whatever it was that had affected his nephew. No need to come too close. He had done his duty and could say so; he had abided by the letter of the law. At the table behind they were leaving, apologizing as they began moving great chestnut-coloured trunks. It gave Norman MacLennan the chance to say something else, to escape into laughter.

  ‘May I ask you if Ruary was popular in school?’

  The eyes blinked. As though the question didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Ruary was different. He was brought up on a croft that was right beside the seas. He was out on the water from the age of four and learning about boats. He’s happier on water than ever he’ll be on land.’

  ‘So he’ll be a good swimmer?’

  The face was aghast and the eyes searched. ‘Certainly not. That would be the last thing he would learn.’

  They were like different creatures. He was from the land and this man was of the sea. As though they didn’t quite understand each other, were just out of earshot. Like two men shouting from different cliffs, never catching all of the words, building their answers on what they thought they might have heard.

  He had to try to find a way in, to unlock something. ‘What about his family, his parents?’

  ‘They loved him very dearly.’

  Again the defensiveness, the misunderstanding. He was about to say something and he didn’t, because MacLennan hadn’t finished.

  ‘He was very close to his parents. He learned everything he knew about boats from his father, and he lost him when he was fourteen. They were out on the water together and Ruary came home alone. It would have been around that time he tamed an otter. It went with him everywhere – on the boat, in the house. The otter would only listen to him. He had a way with animals, a great fondness for them. But there’s no use telling you that.’

  He was embarrassed, as if he had said too much. It was as though you could see him closing, folding in on himself having become self-conscious. As though he had betrayed something.

  ‘And his mother, Mr MacLennan. Is she still alive?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. She’s on her own in the croft house.’

  But all at once he had become aware of the time and it was useless, pointless.

  Suddenly John Aitken was on his own outside and a fine sleet was falling in the sunlight. Sunlight was being blown through the town and there was new blue sky up above. He buttoned his coat and began back to the car, still hearing the sea.

  *

  He saw her shadow in the garden as he was putting out the last lights at midnight. He had spent an hour in the little room with its thick window of dark glass, and he had asked himself if that was how he saw the world. He spent an hour there doing nothing but sitting, looking out into the corridor and the fourth of the chairs as it stood there empty.

  But now he saw her shadow in the garden. Crouched there on the edge of the path, at right angles to him now as he stood in the middle of the corridor and its glass roof. For a second his eyes didn’t see her as real; she might have been a carved figure there in the darkness, frozen completely as she crouched, staring straight ahead.

  ‘Joan?’

  She turned round and was real, got up and started over to him.

  He realized he had hardly spoken to her since that Sunday morning when she had had the courage to come to talk to him. He didn’t truly know her, and yet he felt he did.

  ‘Why were you out now? What on earth?’

  ‘Feeding foxes.’

  But the smile was crying. He touched her arm, searching, and they went inside. He shut out the mauve shadows of the trees, the mildness of the night.

  ‘What is it? Tell me.’

  Their voices soft and low in the corridor beyond the wards. Perhaps it helped they couldn’t see each other properly there; they were shadows, their faces were dark shadows.

  ‘Dr Savage,’ she said, and bowed her head, bringing one hand over her face. ‘Dr Savage’s son Michael.’

  ‘I didn’t even know he had a son! What about him?’

  ‘You didn’t know because nobody knew. Well, they knew he had a son, but he was never talked about, never mentioned. He was at boarding school in England and when he came home he shouted at his father, told him he hated him. He went out as an officer the day the war began and his parents never heard anything; he refused to write. Dr Savage wrote to him every week.’

  ‘How do you know all this, Joan?’

  He knew that her face was looking at his; he saw the grey shadows of her eyes and they seemed much bigger in the darkness. He wanted to say something more and he couldn’t; he only stood, waiting for her to speak at last.

  ‘I’d prefer not to say, Dr Aitken.’

  Said in one breath and he
nodded, even though she could not see such a thing. He nodded and it was all right.

  *

  It was the night of the flood. The night that the Deveron burst its banks, the night the Spey overwhelmed Aviemore. It was the night that left the River Ness in spate, and a young boy out taking nothing more than oatmeal to his grandmother was swept away and never found. His parents weren’t even able to grieve over a body.

  He was aware of the rain at first without understanding it. The song of it there, hour after hour, in the stillness of the night. He could not sleep. He was curled away into himself, hearing the soft thud of his own heart.

  Then he really heard the rain, the hammering of it on the roof and its singing from the crow-stepped gables and in the gutters. And for a second he seemed to hear a crying and he sat up, bolt upright, and everything made sense at last. He dressed, quickly and silently, went out into the hallway and put on his shoes, his hands trembling as he tied the laces. He pattered down the steps and made his feet softer on the gravel as he walked, as he went towards the porch and the main hospital doors where the men had arrived all those weeks ago on just such a night as this.

  He went inside and knew he would find Ruary there; he had seen it the moment the rain had made sense. That tall figure in the wicker chair crying as though his heart would break, staring out into the invisible night of the garden as though back on another night, in another place. Except naked now, completely naked as he sat there watching and waiting for something that would not happen.

  John Aitken crouched in front of him so he did not block his view, and he took his hand in his own.

  ‘Come on,’ he said softly, ‘I’m taking you home.’

  Lemon Ice Cream

  If I close my eyes now, very tightly, I can smell everything. The ice cream that my father is scooping into bowls in green-white curves, the little kitchen with its open dishes of herbs and its baskets of vegetables. The windows are open and all of us – my mother, my brother, my father and me – we are all looking out onto the umber sea of the fields, and the scent that is coming in is from the lemon grove.

  I used to get up early in the summer to walk there, just to be there. To lie on my back and listen to the shingling of the leaves and let that scent, the scent of the lemons, fill me completely. And at night when I couldn’t sleep in my tiny room under the attic, I would open the latch of the windows and let in the lemon breath of the dark.

  I was four years old. Born in Sicily under the shadows of the mountains. My father called Mount Etna the blue ghost. And when I was five we left, all of it was taken away as suddenly and completely as a teacher wiping a blackboard. There were little finches my father fed; they came to one of the windows at the very top of the farmhouse and he fed them. Most of the other boys had grown to love hunting such birds; netting them and caging them. But my father had a soft heart; he could not bear to see such beautiful things hurt, and he fed the finches. It was the last thing we did before we left, him and me; we stood there with our palmfuls of seeds, me stretching on tiptoe, the tears on my face. His voice was so soft; those words of kindness he whispered both to the finches and to me. They were for both the finches and me.

  We were leaving for America, for New York. It was a time of new hope, new dreams, and no dreams came bigger than America. And the last thing my father took from that farmhouse, that place that had been home to six generations of our family, was the recipe for lemon ice cream. I don’t know where it had been hidden all that time; it was as though like a magician he snapped his fingers and brought it out from behind his ear. Yet there it was, in an old square envelope, with flowing writing on the front. And his dark brown eyes shone as he showed me.

  We sailed to America. Everything we could carry was stowed beneath us in this great ship ploughing towards the New World. Marco and I ran everywhere – he was nine and I was five. This was our ark; we had set out across the sea for a new world and everything we needed was on board. We went down as deep into the ship as we could, to beside the great engines that roared and shook like angry dinosaurs. We went up to the highest deck and watched the grey swaying of the sea, and the brown smoke fluttering from the funnel.

  *

  And we smelled New York before we saw it. We smelled it and we heard it, Marco and I. Very early one morning when the sea had become a pale piece of glass, we scurried up from our cabin, went on deck and leaned out, and we smelled and we heard New York. It was such a mixture of scents, such a tumbling of things, as though an old bin full of rubbish had rolled down the side of a hill. You tried to catch things at random and always it went on rolling. The bin never stopped tumbling out of control, for ever. Hot smells and sour smells and burnt smells and fresh smells and dead smells and new smells. They made us excited, they set us on fire, but my father hushed us as he leaned out too, for he was listening to New York – he was hearing the city.

  ‘Those are the biggest sounds in the world,’ he whispered to us, and somehow we believed that they must be, that they were. He quietened us with those words, he made us listen, and the smells and the sounds gave us pictures in our heads – pictures in ochre and bright green and orange. But when we came to New York a fine rain was falling, a mist like a mesh of flies that seemed to dampen the scents and the sounds and leave only the great looming greyness of the skyscrapers.

  We came to our new home, four flights above the street. On the other side of the hall were the Pedinskis, and above us there was nothing but the roof space and the sky. The only place we had to play was the stairs, and we made it our train station, the launch-pad for our rockets, our cave system, our battlefield. On four flights of stairs were Jewish children, Polish children, Italian children and German children. We had nothing but our imaginations and the days were not long enough. We ate each other’s food and we never went hungry.

  One Saturday in the hot summer we had been outside, all of us children. We came back panting, full of stories, and sat on different stairs, leaning against the wall. My father came out with bowls of lemon ice cream, his ice cream, and as soon as I bent my head to that bowl I smelled home. I was back in the kitchen, I was up feeding the finches, and I was down in the lemon grove. The tears flowed from my eyes and he comforted me. He rocked me in his arms that evening until I fell asleep.

  He kept the recipe behind the old carriage clock in the living room. That brown, crinkled envelope. Sometimes if there was a high wind in the autumn, the fall, and the draught crept under the front door and through the top of the high windows, I would hear it rattling behind the clock, dry like an ancient seed pod. It was there behind the clock, the clock that never lost a second’s time, that flickered its passing segments of time like hurrying feet. The clock and the paper.

  *

  Then, one spring, my mother fell ill. Everything was beginning again, coming alive, after the long winter, and it was as though she went the wrong way and couldn’t come back. It was as if we kept moving and had to watch her getting further and further away, disappearing into the snow. I remember her waving to me as I set off for school in the morning. The pale oval of her face behind the glass, trying so hard to smile. That is how I saw her; that was the last memory of her every day, that painting of the pain of her smile. I remember going with Marco and my father to pray for her in a little chapel at the heart of the city. I tried so hard to pray but my head was full of the evening traffic, the shouting and laughter outside. I wanted so desperately to guard her and keep her safe from harm in that place, but not even there was there sanctuary.

  My father seemed to grow old in front of us after she died. I remember thinking that one night when we sat together in the living room: the clock and my father are set at different speeds. One night I had a dream, a particularly vivid dream. It was of a field, a great wide field. I could see nothing beyond it; it was the only thing there was.

  And I came on my father in that field and he was planted in the ground. Mad as that sounds now, he w
as planted in the ground. And I began digging out his hands and feet, his ­wrinkled fingers and toes, and all the time I was thinking to myself: this soil is wrong.

  I was twelve years old. Marco had left school and couldn’t find a job. My father, who had worked on scaffolding high above the city, who had sat and laughed with friends on beams the width of a leg half a mile over the streets, he had grown afraid. He had lost the courage to put one foot in front of the other.

  That winter the snow fell and fell and fell. The skies were ­quieter than silence itself and the flakes spun like ballerinas from the sky and buried the world in white. The noise of the city diminished bit by bit; like a great, old animal New York lurched into its own cave and went to sleep.

  The wind fluttered the curtains in the living room. It was six o’clock in the morning and I stood there alone, twelve years old and hungry. My father and Marco were asleep. There was nothing left in the house to eat. The wind came again and I shivered; there was a rattling and it was the old envelope behind the clock, the recipe for lemon ice cream. I felt sadder than ever before in my whole life; it was as though there was only one colour in the world now, the colour grey. And I made up my mind. I felt behind the clock and I found the piece of paper. I put on my shoes and I went out into the grey, sleeping morning with that crumpled paper held tight in my left hand.

  *

  And I sold it; I say no more than that I sold it. I do not even want to think of the people to whom I went, nor the place where that was. All of it still hurts too much; it is like some red sore where new skin will never grow again. It is enough to say that I was paid a bundle of dirty notes. I caught the smell of them as I took them and I felt sick. It was the smell of the subway, the smell of the basement where no light ever reached. All the way home my hands smelled of it too, and I wanted to wash them clean; I wanted to scour them until it was no more.

  Even as I came inside I felt sick, but not only with that terrible smell. I felt sick with something else and I sat by the window; I hunched there and cried and cried and cried.