by Joseph Hone
‘Yes,’ Carse went on. ‘Someone must have stuck to you like a leech the last few days. The KGB, I suppose?’ he said. ‘Must have been them, working through some five-hundred quid lout. There’s plenty about these days.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘The KGB, perhaps.’
‘Well, that’s your business. But I’d get back to London. Back among your colleagues. They can help – give you the sort of cover I can’t very easily manage up here for you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When I’ve seen round Glenalyth, thought out what may have happened to Lindsay that afternoon, then I’ll go back.’
I spoke with a decisiveness, even a bravery, which I didn’t feel just then. I was no real match for hit men. It was simply that I had given my word to Rachel and Madeleine and was determined to keep it. I suppose, too, I didn’t want to fail them again, or be part of a failure, at least, as I had been with them twenty years before. As I have said, cowardice is not so common as we like to imagine; we are just as often brave, way past loyalty, to the point of rashness.
We stopped talking then, going through Blairgowrie, past the white stucco of the Angus Hotel on the corner, opposite the small triangular, railed park, with its soldier war memorial and the round cattle-trough facing the bridge which led out of the town again, going northwards over the burbling stream of the Ericht. When we used to take the trap from Glenalyth to Blairgowrie, almost a day’s trip there and back during the war, the cob had been tethered to those same railings, next the trough, while Madeleine had shopped and Rachel and I had bullied the Angus hotel maids for lemonades in the chintzy lounge before lunch. After the war we had sped through or to the town in the green Wolseley and Blairgowrie had become less distinct to me, a place which had shrunk since the years of early childhood and become simply a brief anchorage without any thrall or excitement in it.
But now, so many years later, seeing it all from the peak of some kind of maturity, the town had become mysterious once more, something vastly remote and tempting where I felt, if I’d left the car at that moment and gone into the hotel, I might have walked straight into my childhood again, though this time starting to tease the barman over a dry sherry.
We crossed the bridge and soon had turned off the main road and were rising steeply through heavy trees, up a single-track lane onto the moors, the sun through the branches dappling the road ahead of us now, the leaves stirred by a summer wind, before suddenly we were out of the shade, on top of a first rise into the bright light. The whole moorland stretched ahead of us – and then, on the higher ground several miles away, I could see the great green spread of the pine forest, a few puffy white clouds running away above the sylvan fortress of Glenalyth.
Glenalyth, originally the site of a medieval chieftain’s castle, had been completely rebuilt in the mid-eighteenth century as a fort house, a domestic stronghold in an early Georgian mood, one of the very few of its kind in the British Isles, with walls five feet thick, a dry moat which ran beneath the huge Doric-columned portico and all the windows on the ground floor placed high above the level of the lawns, so that invaders, however intrepid or skilled with their muskets on the lower slopes, could never do much better than smash the gilded ceilings and the stucco cherubs holding up the corners of the rooms inside.
A renowned ancestor of Lindsay’s – a warlike and romantic Highlander who had survived Culloden – had built the new Glenalyth, this perfect mix of the impregnable and the beautiful, to the plans of an ambitious Edinburgh architect then developing that city in its Georgian phase – and had faced the house southwards down the moors, towards the border, still hoping for the sounds of battle drums from that quarter which, when they never materialised, had forced this incorrigible soldier to take command of a newly formed Scots regiment, in which he served with great distinction under the Crown, the first of many Phillipses who, failing to beat the English, had joined them.
We came round the Hill of Alyth, the highest point in the area, and then for an instant I could see the four tall grey chimneys of the house, sticking up like the funnels of a ship in a green sea, before they dipped back into the trees again as we went down the other side of the hill. The bare moorland gave way to this forest a mile further on, where the road turned sharp right and ran along the edge of the estate. But we drove straight on here, through the first of the white gates, into deep shadow again, running along a bumpy drive beneath a thick canopy of old oaks and chestnuts, the pine forest rising up on either side beyond them. The avenue sloped gradually down towards the loch then, edging past a reed-fringed corner of it where little soapy waves flapped against the shore before we climbed, rising through another gate and along a rhododendron-bordered lane, until finally the house reared up ahead of us, the parkland opening up around it suddenly like a fan, huge copper beeches dotting the meadow. One of them, I could see now, was still there, the tallest of them by the path down to the loch, which Rachel had told me about in London – the tree she’d climbed when she was seven or eight, perched somewhere high up in its smooth branches, where she’d seen her father leaving the house alone that day with the rowlocks on his way down to the loch, only to find him later – in her memory at least – trolling for pike with Aunt Susan. Rachel had such a clear recall of these things, so many more years and memories of this house than I had, that I felt an interloper then, a distant cousin pretending to a great intimacy with affairs which, in reality, I had never had much to do with at all.
Then I saw her. Hearing the car she had come out onto the steps and was jumping up and down on them now like a child with impatient enthusiasm. And for that moment I shared her recall, seeing her waiting for me as the car crunched round onto the gravel forecourt: I felt I’d come home again then. Not at that instant as the car drew up, but thirty years before.
Madeleine had come out into the porch behind Rachel. There was no sign of the other house guests, George and Max, but they’d arrived: I could hear the sound of a furious piano somewhere in the background, the music stopping and starting abruptly, with anger almost, I thought, at my arrival. Miss Dorothy Parker, in the uncertain fits and starts of the lady herself, was edging her way into a musical re-incarnation.
The two women looked at me silently for a moment; my face must have been a swollen horror. Then Rachel, in lieu of any more intimate contact, touched my shoulder briefly with a finger – that way of hers of expressing more emotion than she dared show made conveniently appropriate now by my tender condition. And I thought, for the first time in years, is this what love is like?
Everyone started to talk at once then and we trooped inside to the big square hall, which, in the summer and when there was a large party staying, served as the drawing-room. And I had that unique smell then – a whiff that had always been at the heart of the house for me – of sun-warmed flagstones, I suppose, of old books and wax polish and of long-burnt tree stumps from the huge grate on the far side of the room: the dry, ageless smell of ancient content.
‘You’re in the flower room.’ Rachel had come up behind me. I turned and had to smile at her – though it was agony – for she had her own two cheeks puffed out in a huge breath, which she held for a moment, her eyes little ink spots now in what had become a great puffball of flesh. She came with me upstairs while Madeleine exchanged civilities with Carse before tea.
Turning from the window of the best guest room which gave out onto the flower-garden to the side of the house, she said, ‘You’re not going to get yourself killed looking for Lindsay, you know. You mustn’t.’
I had started to unpack my case. ‘No,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to stop it. It’s ridiculous.’
‘What?’
‘Someone doesn’t want you involved with us. It’s obvious.’
‘Who? George, do you think?’ I said lightly. ‘Do you think he hired the lout?’ I tried to smile but couldn’t manage it this time.
‘Be serious.’
‘Well, he didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms just no
w. It must be him.’
I put my pyjamas out on the bed and got out a pair of socks which I was going to put on before I found a big hole in the toe of one of them. I suddenly realised how few decent clothes I had.
‘Don’t worry about George.’ Rachel picked up the sock, put a finger through the hole and then dropped it from on high, like a bomb, into a waste-paper basket by the bed. ‘We can get some new ones. There’s a new shop in Gowrie that has some great wools and tweeds and things.’ She went back to the window again. The pleasure garden was a rage of warm colour, wafts of heat shimmering over the rose bushes, and the bedroom was like years of summer, as dry as an oven, smelling of sun-baked linen. Rachel opened the window and we heard the piano again now coming from the study downstairs at the back of the house, the same half-formed tune hardly more developed, a repetitive, questioning phrase, an endless hesitancy, like a cornered animal trying to escape out into the light.
‘Part of the overture. And one of the main songs,’ Rachel said leaning out on the sill. ‘Parker’s “Prologue to a Saga” – know the poem?’
‘I only know her one about not making passes at girls who wear glasses.’ Rachel turned and gave the words to the intermittent music beneath us.
‘Maidens, gather not the yew,
Leave the glossy myrtle sleeping;
Any lad was born untrue,
Never a one is fit your weeping.
Pretty dears, your tumult cease;
Love’s a fardel, burthening double.
Clear your hearts, and have your peace –
Gangway, girls: I’ll show you trouble!’
‘Sounds a winner all the way,’ I said. ‘If they can get the music right. It’ll suit Max, too – Miss Parker has already done all the lyrics for him, I’d say: that speechless fellow.’
‘They’re all right, don’t worry about them. They’ve sworn to lock themselves up six hours a day. That’s why they weren’t out to meet you. Drinks at six. That’s when they stop. You’ll see them then.’
‘Thanks. Are they casting yet? Dottie had a lot of lovers, didn’t she? Maybe they could fit me in.’
‘Why not just get on with them, Peter?’
‘Yes.’ I went on rummaging in my case. ‘I can’t find my sponge-bag – all that expensive aftershave I brought up. I must have left it on the train.’
And then, reminded thus of the morning horrors, Rachel took up her first theme again. ‘Exactly – that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you: will you try and forget Lindsay for a while? Can you? Just get better, be here and do nothing. Do you understand?’
‘Not really. I came here to help –’
‘Peter.’
Rachel came over to me now, quietly, with a kind of tip-toeing concern – thin white blouse, linen jeans and a pair of torn sandshoes, someone as light and warm as the sunny room, so much a part of it and of the house: a dark-topped flower, born and nurtured here and flourishing now in her own native soil – which she knew best, where all things could be ordered to the good, if only I would listen.
‘No. I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I meant the hell with helping for a bit,’ she said vehemently. ‘Just live here – be with, do things – with us. Not the past any more or the future, but just now for a while. Don’t you see the chance? Half of life is done with for us. But can’t we start filling the rest of it well now? Haven’t both of us just been thinking about getting by for too long? About not losing, just hanging on. Well, I’m tired of that. I want to win for a bit. Don’t you? Do you see? Because we can. We’ve given up the will to win and I’m fed up –’ She gestured towards the huge landscape outside. ‘I want to go out there – the lakes and woods and walk and walk – or drink or swim or talk. Or anything. And you too – and let George and Max work those bloody ivories to the bone if they want. I’m done with music for a bit, and people trying to kill each other. This morning, you know, when you fainted in the corridor of that train, I thought you’d died – just like that. Someone else gone for no possible reason. And when you weren’t dead I knew we had to be bright – we have to be very bright before it’s too late.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I had a pair of underpants in my hand. I didn’t know quite what to do with them now. Rachel opened a drawer for me. The piano started up again downstairs and someone – George, it must have been – let out a roar, of approval it seemed. ‘They’ve got it right at last,’ I said. ‘What was that line of Parker’s? “Love’s a fardel, something double: Gangway, girls – I’ll show you trouble!”’
‘Well, will you?’
‘Be bright? Yes.’ I closed the drawer and turned and ran a finger down Rachel’s cheek. ‘Yes. I’ll try.’
Now I knew what Rachel had meant when she’d insisted that love slowed you up: the finest thing to share was brightness. Love wouldn’t matter then for it would be implicit, already achieved, and could be put away as ballast for the happy voyage. Yet there was, I felt even then, quite another side to Rachel’s bright proposals: in taking up the good life with her so I might the more readily forget Lindsay’s pain, Lindsay’s absence, which was something – I was certain now – that for some dark reason she wanted me to forget.
*
‘So what did your friend Fielding say?’ I asked George when we had a moment together that evening during the six o’clock drinks, sipping tumblers of single malt and water, Lindsay’s tipple, decanted from a small barrel of it, sent from one of the Western islands, which he always kept in his study.
‘He said he knew you, vaguely,’ George said shortly. He was dressed in what he must have thought appropriate country clothes for someone who yet wished to maintain a few hints of the bohemian life about them: a pair of blue and white striped linen trousers which were far too tight round his bum and a T-shirt with a portrait of Beethoven die-stamped on it. He came out hugely round the middle and tapered sharply at both ends – so that with a cap, and with his ever-boyish face, he would have been the image of Tweedledum. His friend, Max, was Tweedledee on the other side of the hall: minutely smooth in perfectly creased tropicals, a gold chain rattling beneath a cuff and a look of princely boredom on his sallow features. He was talking to Tommy MacAulay, of the whisky MacAulays – the elderly Brigadier and neighbour of Lindsay’s who had been his CO during the war, and had come round among some other neighbours, to share drinks with us that evening – a sharp old dodderer now whose wife, Rachel told me, had crossed Jordan in an alcoholic stupor some time before, freeing him to fight a happy rearguard action on the near bank.
The big double hall doors were open in the evening heat and George and I took our drinks out onto the porch where I could still see a shimmer in the air above the loch and the grass beginning to wilt in the long meadow. They’d make hay from it any moment, I thought, as they had in the old days – or would life go on in any way here as it had before, without Lindsay’s directions and energies? Since we had not evidence of his death it was still possible to stand on the porch then and wonder if he might come up the drive at any moment to join the party, a late guest, delayed three months for some perfectly explicable reason – come, as he had so often before, suddenly, out of the blue in a green car, home from the wars or from some cancelled event in London.
It was then that Rachel’s offer struck me as unreal, for it proposed only one truth, and that entirely at the expense of another: she took her brightness from Lindsay’s absence, while I at that moment, standing on the porch of his house and drinking his whisky, was suddenly aware of his presence – here, quite close to us possibly, so that the hair prickled on the back of my neck as I thought about it and I turned involuntarily, as if Lindsay himself had just come up behind me. Instead I saw his dog, the little terrier, Ratty, who just at that moment had come out from the hall and was standing now on the threshold of the house, looking up at me quizzically, unaccountably shivering.
‘Yes,’ I said, turning back to George, who had put his whisky tumbler on the balustrade with his foot up on an old
cannon ball, and was looking out on the world as if from a four-ale bar. ‘I knew Basil Fielding, vaguely. He was in my section. Mid-East Intelligence. Did he help any?’
‘Not much. Said in fact you’d be more help, especially as you were coming up here.’
‘Did he indeed.’
George looked at me, and then carefully round my swollen face, with an air of provocation. ‘Yes, he said you’d be the one to find him. That you were clever that way. Rather you than I, after what happened this morning. In the sleeper,’ he added derisively.
I could see that it had crossed George’s mind that his suit with Rachel might soon prosper again – with my likely demise, for if someone had gone so far as to try and evict me from a speeding train, other more certain, less exotic attempts on my life must surely be in the pipeline for me.
This was a point taken up by the bibulous Brigadier when I talked to him later, a caricature of an old army man, a little deaf as well, so that I had to speak close to his badly veined earlobes, as if into the mouthpiece of a telephone. Tommy was enjoying his whisky and it struck me I might turn his thirst to my advantage. He had already heard of the morning’s adventures – and heard, too, from Madeleine I suppose, that I had once worked with British Intelligence.