Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones

by Bobbie Darbyshire

  YOU’RE MAD. SHE DIDN’T SEND IT. SHE’LL SAY NO. IT’LL BE OVER.

  He hammered the table. ‘I’m not. She did. She won’t. It bloody well won’t.’

  It was no use. ‘What do you think?’ he wailed. ‘You’re a woman. What would you do in her shoes?’

  The ghost of his mother, Maggie Jennings, two years dead, beamed at him from her chair by the window. ‘Well, dear,’ she said. ‘We can’t be sure of course, but it looks very much like an invitation. And if it is, then it would be unkind, wouldn’t it, to entice you all that way just to turn you down? But why don’t you give them a ring?’

  Yes. The phone lay on the table. He picked it up and tapped in 192.

  ‘Hello . . . Scotland, please. Inverness . . . The public library . . .’

  He took a note of the number, then a deep breath before dialling again, endeavouring to feel businesslike.

  A friendly young woman picked up. ‘Inverness Library. May I help you?’

  ‘Good morning, yes. I was wondering. The workshop on the eighteenth?’

  ‘Yes?’ Reassuringly matter-of-fact.

  ‘The places, are they limited? Would I need to book?’

  ‘No.’ She sounded perplexed. ‘It’s only a workshop for our book group.’

  ‘Oh dear. I see.’ The blood was rushing in his head. So it was true. Marjorie had sent this.

  ‘Were you wanting to join the group?’

  ‘No. Well yes. What I mean is, I’m a particular fan of Miss Macpherson’s, so I wonder, might I come along, just for the evening?’

  ‘Of course. I’m sure they won’t mind.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you so much.’ The excitement was tumbling out of him. He mumbled goodbye, put down the phone, and grinned through a mist of joy at his mother’s ghost.

  ‘It’s true,’ he told her. ‘It’s really happening, Mother. Marjorie sent this. She’s read my letters. She wants to meet me.’

  Chapter Two

  Elena

  ‘But, Elena – ’

  ‘No, Mikhail!’ Furiously shouting. ‘We will not discuss this more. You are wrong! I am right! Usually it is the other way, but this time, no!’

  It was difficult to speak her frustration in English – she lacked the vocabulary – but with seven languages between them English was the only one they shared. For a moment she saw Mikhail’s eyes blaze, as though he would shout in his turn. But then the fire went out of him. He dropped into a chair and turned his face to the window. The silence grew long as he stared into the gloomy Brussels afternoon.

  ‘I am right, Mikhail,’ she repeated. ‘Only I can know this.’

  Still he said nothing, watching the rain without expression.

  Her fury exploded. ‘Enough! You refuse to understand, then I am leaving.’

  With no time for thought, she was snatching up her coat and bag, yanking the door wide then slamming it behind her, hearing the slam speak her anger more powerfully than words could do.

  She marched towards the lift. He did not follow, his door remained closed. She punched the lift button.

  Spain. He insisted they should end their jobs here and take new ones in Spain. So many times she had said no, yet still he repeated she must do this stupid thing. She hated even to think of Spain.

  She leant her head against the bars of the lift as it went down. The stench of cleaning fluid grew stronger as she neared the bottom. She could not hold her breath long enough to escape it. The hall floor shone wet from today’s mopping and a faint haze of blue smoke hung around the concierge’s open door. Elena ran out and down the steps, muttering, ‘No, not now,’ but it was useless. Always these smells carried her to her aunt’s deathbed three months ago. She turned to walk home, head down against the freezing rain, hugging her shoulders, remembering Spain.

  ‘Tell me, Aunt Marisa. Do not leave me without telling.’

  A complaining wind rattles the shutters. The air is thick with incense and disinfectant. The struggle is over. Marisa’s face is smooth and her eyes grow dim. Her fingers pull at the lace bedcover. Elena takes hold of her hand and pleads. ‘Stay, Aunt. Speak. All my life I have carried this shame.’

  Marisa barely shakes her head.

  ‘I beg you, give me the reason.’

  No sign. No movement. These fingers she holds are so frail, the knuckles loose beneath the skin like sticks. And the dying woman’s features, pale as watered milk, seem unfamiliar sunk in a white pillow above a white nightgown.

  As far back as Elena can remember, her mother and aunt wore black. Shoes, skirts, shawls, scarves. Juanita and Marisa Martínez, old before their time, unsmiling, silent, thin, dressed all in black and covering their hair. Speaking softly as though fearful of being too loud. Kissing her with sorrow in their eyes.

  Elena bends her head, battling to calm herself, fighting the malevolence of the shuttered, creaking house. How terrible to die alone like this. Since she arrived yesterday, no one has come except the priest, and he with lips compressed, offering only the forgiveness of God, cold as the winter sun.

  ‘What was it, Marisa? What was the terrible thing we did?’

  Her aunt’s eyes are closed, her breathing is ragged. She is falling beyond the reach of sound.

  There is no escape; the shame will follow as far as Elena can run and waits always for her here, where she becomes a child again, shunned by the adults who mocked her as children.

  Nothing has altered. As she stepped from the taxi into the square, the hush fell, a gob of spittle landed in her path. And now, behind the shutters along the narrow stone streets, she senses how the villagers mutter and shuffle like vultures. Marisa Martínez is dying. Qué alivio! not before time.

  From childhood, Elena learned to hide her face. With eyes downcast, to keep close to her mother and aunt as they ventured to market or church, or into the mountain vineyard where they worked apart from the other women.

  ‘But, Marisa, it was never so bad for you and Mama as it was for me. You did not have to go to school.’

  The memory sends a chill through her veins. The teacher brusque, the children cruel. Each day for years, shrinking in shadows, fearing their tricks and taunts.

  ‘Your mother is the devil’s whore, Elena. Vale! Where is your father?’

  Her father? The devil? She ran home wailing with fear.

  ‘Alfredo was a good man,’ her mother comforted her. ‘But they punished him for showing care to Marisa and me. The shame was ours not his, ours before he knew us, we could not ask him to share it. And I was thirty-seven, too old to be his bride. He excused himself, he returned to Sevilla, we did not see him again. I did not tell him you would be born. Maybe he heard from others, maybe not. But you must not blame him, little one. Each must think of himself. Es el mundo.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Elena remembers how Marisa sighed, paused in her incessant lace-making with longing in her eyes. ‘. . . yes, but you are a child of love, Elena. At least for one summer Juanita knew love. They vowed that neither of us should have husbands, when their own – ’

  ‘Hush,’ said her mother. ‘Do not let envy wag your tongue.’

  ‘Pero por qué, Mamá? Why should you not have husbands?’

  But no, her mother shook her head. And her aunt sniffed and resumed her work, knotting and twining the slender white threads.

  Marisa’s fingers fidget now in Elena’s palm, picking and pulling, making lace from the air. Elena strokes them, repeating, ‘Tell me, Aunt. What wrong did we do?’

  She was eight years old when she learned her father’s name. Twelve when her mother took fever and died, swearing her aunt to silence. Fifteen when she walked for hours, down into the valley, to board a bus to Seville and knock at her father’s door.

  ‘Nada, papa,’ she whispered as she approached. ‘I want nothing. Only to see your face and to know the reason my family is cursed.’

  Too late. The previous winter Alfredo had died also and his house was sold.

  No answer in Seville. Her mother dead. Th
e village impenetrably hostile. And now, Marisa, the last who might tell her, taking the secret to the grave.

  ‘Have pity,’ Elena cries aloud. ‘All my life, will no one answer me?’

  She clutches the cold fingers to her cheek. The eyelids tremble. The blue lips part and move.

  ‘Aunt?’ She bends her ear to catch the sound.

  ‘There.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  The fingers stir. She lets them go. ‘There.’ The hand drops, then moves again, as if to make a fist, as if to point.

  ‘Where, Aunt. Where?’ She bends her head to catch the dying whisper.

  ‘In the drawer.’

  Henry

  The train reservation was safe in his wallet. Now a letter of confirmation arrived from The Royal Highland Hotel, making his heart pump faster.

  Five days to go.

  The flier still lay in its envelope on the kitchen table. He slid it out with feigned inattention, seeking the thrill of surprise once more.

  Marjorie Macpherson . . .

  Have you ever wished . . .

  Discover her secrets . . .

  Join her . . .

  Suddenly his insides were dissolving with terror. In his mind he was at the door of the Reference Room of the Inverness Library, trying to go in. For the hundredth time he struggled to imagine it. He would arrive last – not first, he’d decided – on the dot of seven. Resigned to his absence, she would be surveying the expectant faces, but as he came in her eyes would meet his. She wouldn’t speak; she would smile barely a flicker. Their gaze would hold as he strode forward to take his place at the back of the tight circle of chairs.

  What would he see? What would she see? Panic still threatened, like a cat waiting to pounce.

  ‘I must decide what to wear,’ he said loudly. He would distract himself with that.

  He liked his best suit. At Mother’s funeral, Peter had sniped that the snug-fitting waistcoat gave him a Mafioso air. But no, it wouldn’t do; pinstripes were far too formal. He substituted moleskins, checked shirt, tweed jacket, the Sunday-pub gear he’d worn in the photograph that even now was lying on Marjorie’s writing-desk. Or beside her bed.

  The thought of the photograph had his heart racing again. He kept a copy among the circulars stuffed in the toast-rack. He pulled it out and scrutinised it anxiously, relieved to see how likeable he appeared, relaxed in a summer garden, smiling to camera. Himself, yet not himself.

  He was breathing more easily. This was the man she would see, the man he would be. And she . . . she would be Marjorie.

  He held tightly to the photograph.

  He’d felt handsome that glorious Sunday last June, briefly confident in the role of romantic hero. He’d caught sight of himself unawares in the hall mirror as he came in from the pub, buoyed by a couple of brandies. He’d seen it could be so. He’d marched down his front path and up his neighbour’s before the mood could pass.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind, Trevor, but I need my photo taking.’

  ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ Trevor had intoned, propelling his Super-Lite chair over the ramps into his back garden. Too vain himself, thank goodness, to think of asking for reasons. ‘Which background would Sir prefer? Roses, foxgloves or whitewashed brick?’

  Was Marjorie perhaps wheelchair-bound like Trevor, Henry had sometimes wondered. It wouldn’t put him off.

  Foxgloves, he’d chosen, and the mock-orange coming into bloom. And deaf to Trevor’s heckling, with courage gathered from the pub and the hall mirror, and the scent of new blossom in his nostrils, he’d smiled into the lens as though straight into his beloved’s eyes.

  The ghost of his mother coughed gently from her chair by the window. When he lifted his eyes from the photograph, she too was smiling. All would be well. He picked up the secateurs. He was due at Trevor’s. He set off along the hall.

  Where he saw in the mirror a nondescript, middle-aged man with fear in his eyes. He called to the kitchen, ‘Please, Mother. You mustn’t be kind. What do you really think?’

  She came to the doorway. ‘You’ve a strong chin, Henry,’ she said. ‘Plenty of hair. Good teeth.’

  He struggled to see himself favourably. Taller than he was wide. Solvent and solid. Nice, damn it. Dependable, decent, a man of integrity. He was in with a chance, surely?

  It was high time he told someone. It would help make it real.

  ‘I’m in Scotland next weekend,’ he said lightly as he drew the bolts on Trevor’s French window.

  ‘You’ll be back to take me for my fitting, I hope.’

  Trevor’s new leg. Henry nodded. ‘Monday. Yes. No problem.’ After all Marjorie lived in London. He carried the stepladder into the garden. ‘Inverness is where I’m off to. I’ve not been there before.’ He set the ladder up on the uneven flowerbed and tested his weight on the bottom step. ‘It isn’t a client I’m seeing.’ He climbed gingerly upwards, unlocking the secateur blades. ‘Actually, it’s . . .’

  How should he describe her?

  ‘It’s a lass.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Trevor. ‘Be savage, for God’s sake, Henry. Be merciless.’

  ‘What?’ The ladder wobbled. He peered through the thicket of wisteria twigs.

  Trevor frowned up from his chair. ‘Prune to two buds it says here. It all has to come off.’

  Elena

  The days were passing so slowly, did Mikhail not feel them the same way? Yet he remained silent. She could think of nothing but Spain and Mikhail, Mikhail and Spain, wanting one, loathing the other.

  How much she was missing him. His strong arms, his kisses, his soft Russian voice. But more than these things, without him she was beginning to dislike herself again, to feel she was a bad and undeserving person.

  She unwrapped and reread the horrors found in Marisa’s linen drawer, praying for release from her burden, but it did not come. It was not her fault, yet forever she must carry the shame, as Jesus carried the sins of the world.

  Mikhail had made her feel forgiven. Gradually she had told him everything, her worst, most ugly self, and still his eyes shone with love. In her whole life, no one had been this way before, accepting her fears and resentments, allowing her to speak her bitterness with honesty.

  ‘This is who you are, Elena. Your suffering is part of you. Always I will understand.’

  She should have known it could not continue. Ever since she had told him her mother’s secrets, he had been seeking remedies.

  ‘For now you can mend yourself, Elena. When you ran, the pain followed you. With the truth you can go home. Together in Spain with me you will find the cure.’

  Wrong. Wrong. Why would he not understand? Nothing had changed. Spain had made her who she was and there could be no cure.

  Spain, and el malo. ‘Urquhart’ – that was the evil one’s name. How to pronounce it? Oor-coo-art? This name was all she knew, and the year, 1937, and the place, her village high in the Sierra Nevada behind the Republican lines. It was not enough information. How many times had she typed words into Mikhail’s laptop, begging the Internet for a clue? So many Urquharts in the world, but none of them el malo. He was dead, almost certainly. If not in 1937, then later. Had he lived, he would be more than eighty years old.

  Mikhail and Spain. Spain and Mikhail. It was no use. She could not sleep or choose. At work her colleagues asked,

  was she all right? She shook her head, not knowing how to answer. How could they understand when Mikhail did not?

  She could wait no longer. She rang his office, but he was not there today, they said. She tried his room, his mobile, she left messages, she waited. Still he did not respond.

  Her anxiety grew. Where was he? Was he still angry? She set aside her pride and ran back through the winter shadows. Braved the stench of incense and disinfectant and rode the lift again.

  Her knock brought no answer. Tears blurred her eyes. She had Mikhail’s key in her hand. She turned it and stepped inside.

  The bed was unmade, today’s n
ewspaper on the table, an aroma of coffee in the air. He had been here, he had heard her messages, but he declined to answer them. His silence filled the room. To stay, to go, it was the same. She was broken and could not be mended.

  The laptop screen flickered, renewing itself. It sparkled through her tears. A game of Minesweeper, lost with only a single bomb to find, the little yellow face, its mouth turned down, inviting her to click and play again. She took hold of the mouse and instead clicked on Google. She typed ‘Urquhart’ into the search box one more time.

  Undiscovered Scotland: Urquhart Castle . . . picturesque ruins, north shore of Loch Ness . . . owned by Historic Scotland and open to the public

  The Clan Urquhart Website . . . Urquhart motto: “Meane Weil, Speak Weil and Doe Weil”

  Angus Urquhart . . . eyewitness recollections of the Spanish civil war . . .

  What? Elena gasped. She double-clicked the site. Read hungrily.

  El malo! It was he!

  Book Group . . . third Friday of each month . . . 7 till 10.

  Today, what was today? She counted Fridays on her fingers as the printer gave her the page. Tomorrow, yes. But time was short. She must visit her apartment, pack, tell her boss, check there was a seat on Eurostar. She headed for the door.

  Then paused. Looked back at Mikhail’s rumpled bed. Returned to the table. Scribbled a note for him.

  I am here and gone, Thursday the 17th. Are we still angry with each other? I leave messages on your mobile. I must speak with you but cannot now delay. I find Urquhart alive! I go to Scotland. I will ring from there. Please Mikhail, answer the phone. Elena.

  Leaning to put the note on the pillow, she stalled. The mattress beneath her hand was warm. She stood a moment staring at the bed. It told her nothing. She turned again and left.

  Henry

  The alarm went off on cue. His bag lay packed beside the bed. He tried not to think; he tried not to be afraid. He was into his moleskins and striding out bravely towards the station, taking deep breaths of the frosty air, head high among the Guildford commuters. Inverness was far away. He calmed himself with thoughts of its being an imaginary city, as approachable as the end of the rainbow.