September

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  After lunch, Pandora and Lucilla had changed places; Pandora had made herself comfortable on the back seat and fallen instantly asleep. She had been asleep ever since, which meant that she had missed the dramatic crossing of the border, the clearing of the sky, and the miraculous excitement of actually coming home.

  They drove through a small country town. “Where’s this?” Jeff asked.

  “Kirkthornton.”

  The pavements were crammed with Saturday-afternoon shoppers, the municipal gardens bright with dahlias. Old men sat on benches enjoying the kindly warmth. Children licked ice-cream. A bridge curved high over a tumbling river. A man fished. The road led on up the hill. Pandora, bundled in mink, was curled up like a child, her head supported by Jeff’s jacket rolled into a pillow. A lock of bright hair fell across her face, her lashes lay black on her jutting cheekbones.

  “Do you think I should wake her up?”

  “Up to you.”

  This had been her pattern, her routine, all through the long journey from Palma, through Spain and France. Spurts of immense energy, activity, conversation, much laughter, and sudden impetuous suggestions.

  We really should see that cathedral. It’s only ten kilometres out of our way.

  Look at that delicious river. Why don’t we stop for a moment and have a skinny-dip? There’s no one to see.

  You know, we’ve just passed the most enchanting café. Let’s turn round and go back and have a drink.

  But the drink would spin out into a long and leisurely lunch, with Pandora falling into conversation with any person who happened to be within earshot. Another bottle of wine. Coffee and cognac. And then…out. Sleep. She could catnap anywhere, and though this was sometimes embarrassing, it meant, at least, that she stopped talking, and Lucilla and Jeff had learned to be grateful for these respites. Without them Lucilla was not certain whether they would have survived the passage. Travelling with Pandora was a little like travelling with an ebullient child, or a dog — entertaining and companionable but quite dauntingly draining as well.

  The Mercedes crested the slope. At the summit, the countryside opened and the views were magnificent. Beeches, fields, scattered farms, grazing sheep, the river far below them, the faraway hills bloomy and purple as ripe plums.

  “If I don’t wake her now she’ll still be asleep when we get home. It’s only about ten minutes away.”

  “Then wake her.”

  Lucilla stretched out her arm, laid her hand on the soft fur of Pandora’s shoulder and gave her a little shake.

  “Pandora.”

  “Um.”

  “Pandora.” Another shake. “Wake up. We’re almost there. We’re almost home.”

  “What?” Pandora’s eyes fluttered open. They stared blankly, disorientated, confused. She closed them again, yawned, stirred, stretched. “What a lovely sleep. Where are we?”

  “Heading for Caple Bridge. Almost home.”

  “Almost home? Almost at Croy?”

  “Sit up and you’ll see. You’ve missed the best bit of the drive, snoring away on the back seat.”

  “I wasn’t snoring. I never snore.” But after a bit she made an effort and did sit up, pushing her hair out of her eyes, gathering her furs around her as though chilled. She yawned again, stared from the window. Blinked. Her eyes brightened. “But…we’re nearly there!”

  “I told you.”

  “You should have woken me hours ago. And the rain’s gone. It’s all sunshiny. And the green. I’d forgotten such greenness. What a welcome. ‘Caledonia, stern and wild, fit nurse for a poetic child.’ Who wrote that? Some stupid old fool. It’s not stern and wild, it’s just utterly beautiful. How perfectly sweet of it to be looking so lovely.” She groped for her bag, her comb; tidied her hair. A mirror, some lipstick. A generous splash of Poison. “I must smell good for Archie.”

  “Don’t forget about his leg. Don’t expect him to come running to sweep you up in his arms. If he sweeps you up in his arms, he’ll probably fall flat on his back.”

  “As if I’d suggest such a thing.” She looked at her tiny diamond watch. “We’re early. We said we’d be there at five and it’s not four o’clock yet.”

  “We’ve made fantastic time.”

  “Dear Jeff.” Pandora gave his shoulder an appreciative thump, as though she were patting a dog. “What a clever driver.”

  Now they were running downhill. At the bottom of the incline, they took the steep hump of Caple Bridge, turned left, and were at the start of the glen. Pandora leaned forward in her seat. “But it’s amazing. Absolutely nothing seems to have changed. Some people called Miller used to live in that cottage. They were terribly old. He’d been a shepherd. They must be dead by now. They used to keep bees and sell jars of heather honey. Oh dear, I’m getting so fraught, I think I might have to stop for a pee. No, of course I don’t want to. Just imagination.” She gave Jeff another thump on his shoulder. “Jeff, you’re doing your silent act again. Can’t you think up one small word of appreciation?”

  “Sure,” he grinned. “It’s great.”

  “It’s more than that. It’s our country now. The Balmerinos of Croy. Really heart-stirring, like a roll of drums. And we’re coming home. We should be wearing feathers in our bonnets, and there should be a piper playing somewhere. Why didn’t you think of that, Lucilla? Why didn’t you arrange it? After twenty years, surely it’s the least you could have done for me.”

  Lucilla laughed. “I’m sorry.”

  Now the river once more ran alongside the road, its banks verdant with green rushes, the pastures on the other side grazed by peaceful herds of Friesian cows. Harvested fields were carpets of gold in the sunlight. The Mercedes swept around the curve of the road and the village of Strathcroy came into view. Lucilla saw the cluster of grey stone houses, smoke rising straight from chimneypots, the tower of the church, the pleasing groups of ancient and shady beeches and oaks. Jeff slowed down to a prudent speed and they passed the war memorial, the small Episcopal church, and were into the long straight main street.

  “The supermarket’s new.” Pandora sounded quite accusing.

  “I know. It’s run by people called Ishak. They’re Pakistanis. Now, Jeff, it’s here…turn right…up through the gates…”

  “But the park’s gone! It’s not parkland any more. It’s all ploughed up.”

  “Pandora, you knew that happened. Dad wrote and told you.”

  “I suppose I forgot. But it does look strange.”

  Up the back drive. The hill reared ahead of them, the tumbling waters of the Pennyburn splashed and tumbled down under the little stone bridge. Then the avenue…

  “We’re here,” said Lucilla, and leaned across Jeff to put the heel of her hand on the horn.

  At Croy, Lucilla’s family filled in the long waiting hours of the afternoon. Isobel was upstairs seeing to the final details of the visitors’ bedrooms, checking clean towels and arranging flowers for dressing-tables and mantelpieces. Hamish had decided to take the dogs for a walk, disappeared after lunch and had not been seen since. And Archie, Lord Balmerino, was in the dining room laying the table for dinner.

  He had been finally forced into doing this. Waiting for anything or anybody was not his strong point, and as the day wore on, he had become increasingly restless, impatient, and anxious. He hated the thought of his loved ones belting up the murderous miles of the motorway, and his imagination had no difficulty at all in presenting hideously detailed pictures of pile-ups, mangled metal, and dead bodies. He had spent much time looking at his watch, going to the window at the faintest sound of a car engine, and was patently unable to settle for a moment. Isobel had suggested that he mow the croquet lawn but he had turned this down because he wanted to be certain of being on the spot when the car actually drew up in front of the house. Retreating to his study, he had sat down with The Scotsman but could not concentrate either on the news or the crossword. He tossed the paper aside and started prowling again.

  At last Isobel, who ha
d enough to do without her husband getting under her feet, lost her patience.

  “Archie, if you can’t sit still, then make yourself useful. You can lay the table for dinner. The clean mats and the napkins are on the sideboard.” And she had gone upstairs quite crossly, and left him to it.

  Not that he minded laying tables. In the old days, Harris used to perform the task, so there could be nothing unmanly about it. And when the American paying guests stayed, laying the table for dinner was always Archie’s job, and he got a certain pleasure from doing it with military thoroughness, knives and forks precisely aligned, and napkins folded into mitres.

  The wineglasses looked slightly dusty, so he had found a tea-towel and was engaged in giving them a bit of a polish when he heard the car coming up the hill. His heart lurched. He looked at the clock, which told him four o’clock. Too early surely. He set down the glass and the cloth. It could not be…

  The blast of the car horn, a long continuous blare, tore the quiet afternoon and his own uncertainty into shreds.

  Lucilla’s traditional signal.

  He could not move fast, but he moved as fast as he could. Down the length of the dining room, through the door.

  “Isobel.”

  The front door stood open. He was crossing the hall as the car appeared, a thundering great Mercedes scattering gravel beneath its wheels.

  “Isobel! They’re here.”

  He got to the door but no further. Pandora was quicker than he, out of the car almost before it had drawn to a halt, running across the gravel towards him. Pandora with that same bright hair flying all over the place and those same long spindly legs.

  “Archie!”

  She wore a fur coat that reached almost to her ankles but that did not stop her bounding two at a time up the steps, and if he could no longer lift her off her feet and whirl her around the way he used to when she was a child, there was nothing the matter with his arms, and his arms were ready and waiting for her.

  Isobel…dear, uncomplicated, hospitable, unchanging Isobel…had allocated Pandora the best spare bedroom. This was in the front of the house, with tall sash windows, facing south down the hill and over the glen and the river. It was furnished much as Pandora remembered it in her mother’s day. Twin brass bedsteads, high off the ground, each wide as a small double bed. A faded carpet patterned with roses and an ornate dressing-table with many small drawers and a swing-mirror.

  The old curtains, however, were gone, and heavy cream linen draperies hung in their place. The refurbishment had probably been planned with American paying guests in mind. They would scarcely appreciate threadbare chintz with sun-rotted linings. For them as well, the adjoining dressing-room had been converted into a bathroom. Not that it looked very different, because Isobel had simply installed a bath and a basin and a lavatory, and left the rugs, the laden bookshelves, and the comfortable armchair where they were.

  Pandora was meant to be unpacking. “Unpack and make yourself comfortable,” Isobel had told her. She and Jeff, between them, had humped all Pandora’s luggage upstairs. (Archie, of course, could not hump luggage on account of his leg. Pandora decided not to think about Archie. His grey hairs had shocked her, and she had never seen a man so thin.) “Have a bath if you want. There’s gallons of hot water. Then come down and have a drink. We’ll eat about eight o’clock.”

  But that was fifteen minutes ago and Pandora had got no further than carrying her dressing-case into the bathroom and putting a few bottles out on the marble washstand. Her pills and potions, her Poison, bath oil, creams and cleansers. Later she would have a bath. Not now.

  Now, she still had to convince herself that she was really home. Back at Croy. But it was difficult because in this room she did not feel as though she belonged. She was a guest come to stay, a bird of passage. Abandoning her bottles, she went back to the bedroom, to the window, to lean out with her elbows on the sill, to gaze at the oft-remembered view and be quite, quite certain that it was not all a dream. This took some time. But what had happened to her own room, the room that had been Pandora’s since babyhood? She decided to go and have a nose-around.

  She went out of the room, went to the top of the stairs, paused. From the direction of the kitchen came cheerful domestic sounds and muted voices. Lucilla and Isobel busy with preparations for dinner and probably talking about Pandora. They were bound to talk. It did not matter; she did not mind. She crossed the landing and opened the door of what had been her parents’ room, and was now Archie and Isobel’s. She saw the huge double bed, the chaise longue at the foot of it with a sweater of Isobel’s flung down, a pair of shoes, carelessly discarded. She saw the family photographs, the silver and crystal on the dressing-table, bedside books. There was the smell of face-powder and eau-de-cologne. Sweet and innocent scents. She closed the door and went on down the passage. She found the room that had been Archie’s, swept and garnished with Jeff’s back pack and his jacket set down in the middle of the carpet. The next room…Lucilla. Still filled with all the cherished flotsam of a schoolgirl…posters thumbtacked to the walls, china ornaments, a tape player, a guitar with a broken string.

  And finally her own room. Her old room. Perhaps Hamish slept here? She had not yet met Hamish. Cautiously she turned the knob and pushed the door open. Not Hamish. Not anybody. Empty of any personal possession. New furniture, new curtains. No trace of Pandora.

  What had they done with her books, her records, clothes, diaries, photographs…her life? All probably swept upstairs to some attic when the room was stripped and emptied, repainted, re-wallpapered, and given that beautiful new, blue, fitted carpet.

  It was as though Pandora had ceased to exist, was already a ghost.

  There was no point in asking why, because it was patently obvious. Croy belonged to Archie and Isobel, and to keep the place going as a viable proposition, every room must be put to good use. And Pandora had given up any claim to it by the simple act of going away and never coming back.

  Standing there, she thought of those last miserable weeks when she had been beyond herself with an unhappiness that she was not allowed to talk about. Misery had made her cruel, and she was cruel to the two people she loved most in the world; snapping at her father, ignoring her mother, sulking for days on end and generally making their lives a misery, too.

  In this room, she had spent hours lying face downwards on her bed with her record player churning out, over and over again, the saddest songs she knew. Matt Monro telling some female to “Walk Away”. And Judy Garland tearing her guts out with “TheMan That Got Away”.

  The road gets tougher,

  It’s lonelier and rougher,

  With hope you burn up,

  Tomorrow he will turn up…

  Voices.

  Darling, do come and eat some lunch.

  I don’t want any lunch.

  I wish you’d tell me what’s troubling you.

  I just want to be left alone. It wouldn’t be any good telling you. You’d never understand…

  She saw again her mother’s face, confused and dreadfully hurt. And was ashamed. At eighteen, I should have known better. I thought that I was adult and sophisticated, but the truth was that I knew less about life than a child. And it took me too long to find out.

  Too long, and too late. All over. She closed the door and went back to her unpacking.

  Dinner was over. They had sat, the six of them, around the candlelit table, and eaten their way through Isobel’s lovingly prepared celebratory meal. If she had not exactly killed a fatted calf, she had gone to great pains to produce a suitable feast. Cold soup, roast pheasant, crème brûleé, and a splendid Stilton, all washed down by the best wine that Archie could bring up from his father’s depleted cellar.

  Now it was nearly ten o’clock, and Isobel, with Pandora in attendance, was in the kitchen dealing with the last of the washing-up — the pots and pans, the ivory-handled knives and vegetable dishes too large to fit into the dishwasher. Pandora was meant to be helping, but after
drying up a knife or two and putting three saucepans into the wrong cupboard, she had laid aside the tea-towel, made herself a mug of Nescafé, and sat down to drink it.

  Conversation during dinner had been non-stop, for there was much to hear and much to tell. The adventure of Lucilla and Jeff’s bus journey down through France from Paris; their bohemian sojourn in Ibiza; and at last the bliss of Majorca and the Casa Rosa. Isobel’s mouth had watered, hearing Lucilla’s description of the garden there.

  “Oh, I would love to see it.”

  “You should come. Lie in the sun and do nothing.”

  Archie laughed at this. “Isobel lie in the sun and do nothing? You must be mad. Before you could blink, she’d be bottoms-up in the flower-beds, tearing at weeds.”

  “I haven’t got any weeds,” said Pandora.

  And then, home news. Pandora was avid for every scrap of gossip. The latest on Vi, the Airds, the Gillocks, Willy Snoddy. Did Archie still hear from Harris and Mrs Harris? She listened with some dismay to the saga of Edie Findhorn and her cousin Lottie.

  “Heavens! That ghoul. Don’t say she’s come back into our lives. I’m glad you warned me. I shall take pains to cross the road if I see her coming.”

  She was told about the Ishak family, exiled from Malawi and arriving in Strathcroy with scarcely a penny between them.

  “…but they had some relations in Glasgow who’d already managed to do quite well for themselves, and with a bit of financial help from them, they managed to take over Mrs McTaggart’s newsagent’s shop. You wouldn’t recognise the place. It’s a proper supermarket. We didn’t think they’d last, but we were all mistaken. They’re as industrious as ants, never seem to close their shop, and business booms. As well, we like them. They’re all so helpful and kind.”

  And so on to the Balmerinos’ slightly grander neighbours, which meant anybody living within a radius of twenty miles: the Buchanan-Wrights, the Ferguson-Crombies, the new people who had come to live at Ardnamoy; whose daughter had married; whose unlikely son had become a money-broker in the City and was coining millions.