“But still viable.”
In her grate, she had lighted a little fire. On the mantelshelf were a pair of Staffordshire dogs, and over the mantelpiece…
He frowned, moving to inspect the picture more closely. It was an oil painting of a child in a field of buttercups. The field was in shadow, but, beyond the field, the sun shone on rocks and sea and the distant figures of two older girls. The illusionary effect of light and colour had caught his attention, not simply because it hummed with warmth but because the technique, the factual rendering of the three-dimensional form, sprang at him with all the familiarity of a face remembered from childhood.
It had to be. Noel scarcely needed to read the signature to know who it was.
He said, in wonder, “This is a Lawrence Stern.”
“How clever of you to know. I love it more than anything.”
He turned to face her. “How did you come to possess it?”
“You seem astonished.”
“I am. There are so few about.”
“My husband gave it to me many years ago. He was in London. He saw it in the window of a gallery, and went in and bought it for me, not minding that he had to pay a great deal more than he could afford.”
Noel said, “Lawrence Stern was my grandfather.”
She frowned. “Your grandfather?”
“Yes. My mother’s father.”
“Your mother’s…?” She paused, still frowning, and then all at once smiled, the puzzlement gone, and her face filled with pleasure. “So that is how I knew your name! Noel Keeling. But I knew her…I met her…Oh, what has happened to Penelope?”
“She died about four years ago.”
“I can’t bear it. Such a lovely person. We only met once, but…”
They were interrupted by Alexa’s reappearance from Violet’s kitchen, bearing the tray with the coffee jug and cups and saucers upon it.
“Alexa, this is the most extraordinary thing! Just imagine, Noel isn’t a stranger at all to me, because I once met his mother…and we made such friends. And I always hoped so much that we would meet again, but somehow we never did…”
This discovery, this revelation, the extraordinary small-world coincidence, claimed all attention. The picnic and the birthday were, for the moment, forgotten, and Alexa and Noel sat and drank scalding coffee and listened with fascination to Vi’s story.
“It was all through Roger Wimbush, the portrait painter. When Geordie came back from the war, from prison camp, and went back to Relkirk to work, it was decided that, as chairman of the firm, he should have his portrait painted for posterity. And Roger Wimbush was given the commission. He came to Balnaid and stayed with us, and the portrait was accomplished in the conservatory, and duly hung, with some ceremony, in the boardroom at the office. As far as I know, it’s still there. We made great friends, and when Geordie died, Roger wrote me such a dear letter, and sent me an invitation to the Portrait Painters’ Exhibition at Burlington House. I didn’t very often travel to London, but I felt the occasion deserved the long journey, so I went, and Roger met me there and showed me around. And all at once, he spied these two ladies. One was your mother, Noel, and the other, I think, an old aunt of hers whom she had brought to the exhibition as a little treat. A very old lady; tiny and wrinkled, but humming with vitality…”
“Great-Aunt Ethel,” said Noel, because it could have been no one else.
“That’s it. Of course. Ethel Stern, Lawrence Stern’s sister.”
“She died some years ago, but while she was alive she afforded us all an enormous amount of amusement.”
“I can imagine it. Anyway, Roger and your mother were obviously old friends of long standing. I think she had taken him in as a lodger years before when he was a penniless young student, struggling to make his way. There was a great reunion between them, and then introductions, and I was told about the relationship with Lawrence Stern, and I was able to tell your mother about that picture. By now we were all on the best of terms, and we’d all seen all the portraits anyway, so we decided that we would have lunch together. I had a restaurant in mind, but your mother insisted that we all go back to her house and have lunch with her.”
“Oakley Street.”
“Absolutely. Oakley Street. We made noises about it being too much trouble, but she overrode all our objections, and the next thing we knew, all four of us were in a taxi and on our way to Chelsea. It was a beautiful day. I remember it so clearly. Very warm and sunny, and you know how pretty London can be on an early-summer day. And we had lunch in the garden, and the garden was big, and so leafy, and so sweet with the scent of lilac that it felt like being in another country, the South of France perhaps, or Paris, with the city sound of traffic muffled by trees, and everything spattered with sunlight and shadow. There was a terrace, nicely shaded, with a table and garden chairs, and we all sat and drank chilled wine, while your mother busied herself in that big basement kitchen, from time to time appearing to chat or pour more wine, or lay a cloth on the table, and set out the knives and forks.”
“What did you eat?” asked Alexa, fascinated by the picture that Vi drew for them.
“Let me see. I have to think. It was delicious, I remember that. It was exactly right, and delicious. Cold soup — gazpacho, I think — and crusty home-made bread. And a salad. And pâté. And French cheese. And there was a bowl of peaches, which she had picked that morning from the tree that grew against the wall at the far end of the garden. We stayed all afternoon. We had no other engagement, or if we did, we forgot it. The hours just slid away, like an afternoon in a hazy delicious dream. And then, I remember, Penelope and I left Ethel and Roger at the table, drinking coffee and cognac and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, and she took me around the garden and showed me all its delights. And as we walked, we talked, and never drew breath, and yet it is difficult to tell you what we talked about. I think she told me about Cornwall, and her childhood there, and the house that they used to own, and the life that they led before the war. And it all sounded so different to my own. And when the time came to leave at last, I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to say goodbye. But when I finally came home again, back to Balnaid and Strathcroy, that picture, which I always loved, took on an even deeper meaning, because once I had met Lawrence Stern’s daughter.”
“Didn’t you ever see her again?” Alexa asked.
“No. So sad. I so seldom went to London, and then, I believe, she moved to the country. We lost touch. So silly and careless of me to lose touch with someone I liked so much, felt so close to.”
“What did she look like?” Alexa, naturally fascinated by this unexpected insight into Noel’s family life, was avid for detail. Vi looked at Noel. “You tell her,” she said.
But he couldn’t. Features, eyes, lips, smile, hair eluded him. He could not have drawn them had some man put a gun to his head. What stayed, and remained with him, after four years of living without his mother, was her presence, her warmth, her laughter, her generosity, her contrariness, and her maddening ways, her endless cornucopia of hospitality and giving. Vi’s recalling of that long-ago luncheon party, spontaneous and informal but infused with such style that she had not forgotten a single detail of the occasion, brought back the old days at Oakley Street so vividly that he found himself pierced with nostalgia for everything that he had taken so for granted and never found time to appreciate.
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
Vi met his eyes. And then, as though accepting and acknowledging his dilemma, did not press him further. She turned to Alexa. “She was tall and very good-looking — I thought beautiful. She had dark-grey hair, drawn back from her face into a chignon pierced with tortoiseshell pins. Her eyes were dark, very large and lustrous, and her skin smooth and brown, as though she had always lived out of doors, like a gypsy. She wasn’t in the least fashionable or chic, but she held herself so proudly, and that endowed her with a great elegance. She gave off an enormous charge of…enjoyment. An unforgettable woman.” Sh
e turned back to Noel. “And you are her son. Imagine it. How strange life can be. At seventy-eight, you’d think that you’d stop being surprised, and something like this happens, and it’s as though the world had only just begun.”
The loch at Croy lay hidden in the hills, three miles north of the house, and accessible only by a primitive track of great steepness that wound up on to the moor in a series of precipitous hairpin bends.
It was not a natural stretch of water. Long ago, this glen, encircled by the northern hills and the towering hulk of Creagan Dubh, had been a place of remote solitude, the habitat of eagles and deer, wildcat, grouse and curlew. At Croy, there were still to be seen old sepia photographs of the glen the way it had once looked, with a burn running through it, flanked by steep banks where the rushes grew, and by the burnside the ruins of a small dwelling-house, with byres and sheepfolds reduced to roofless desolation and tumbled granite walls. But then the first Lord Balmerino, Archie’s grandfather, with a fortune to spend and trout-fishing in mind, decided to create for himself a loch. Accordingly a dam was built, sturdy as a bastion, twelve feet high or more, and wide enough to allow passage for a carriage to drive along the top of it. Sluice-gates were integrated to deal with any overflow, and when the dam was completed, these sluice-gates were closed, and the burn was trapped. Slowly, the waters rose, and the abandoned croft was drowned for ever. Because of the bulk of the dam wall, any person approaching it for the first time did not see the water until the last rise was crested, when the huge expanse of the loch — two miles long and a mile wide — all at once was there. Depending on the hour and the season, it glittered blue in sunshine, was tossed with leaden-grey waves, or lay still as glass in the evening light, with a pale moon reflected in its mirror surface, broken from time to time by the disturbance of rising fish.
A boathouse was built, strongly constructed, and large enough to shelter two boats, with an extra apartment to one side where picnics could be enjoyed in inclement weather. But it was not only fishermen who made their way to the loch. Generations of children had claimed it as their special place. Sheep grazed on the surrounding hills, and the closely cropped grass that sloped to the water’s edge made splendid places for setting up tents, playing ball games, organising cricket matches. Blairs and Airds, with attendant young friends, had learned to cast for trout from the shores of the loch, and mastered their first swimming strokes in its icy waters; and long happy days had been spent in building rafts, or makeshift canoes, which, paddled intrepidly out into the deep water, inevitably sank.
The overloaded Subaru, in four-wheel-drive, and with Virginia at the wheel, thumped and bumped up the last stretch of the track, its bonnet pointing skywards. Noel, after half an hour of total discomfort, decided that, going back, he would make the journey on foot. Virginia had opted to drive because she said, quite rightly, that she knew the way, which he did not, and Violet — also quite rightly — had been given the seat next to Virginia, with her birthday cake, in its large box, to hold on her knee. In the back, things were not so easy. Edie Findhorn, about whom Noel had heard so much, proved to be a lady of ample girth, and took up so much space that Noel was forced to take Alexa upon his knee. There she crouched, her weight growing heavier by the moment and threatening his thighs with incipient cramp, but as every bump in the road caused her to clout her head on the roof of the car, he felt that it would be churlish to add his complaints to hers.
They had made two stops. One at the great house of Croy, where Virginia had alighted to see whether the Balmerino party had already left. But the door was shut and the house deserted, so they obviously had. The second stop was to open and shut the deer-gate, and here Alexa had let out the two spaniels, who had run the rest of the way behind the slowly moving car. Noel wished that he had been let out to run with them, but by now it was a little too late to make such a suggestion.
For, it seemed, they were nearly there. Violet peered through the windscreen. “They’ve lit the fire!” she announced.
Alexa screwed herself around to look, causing Noel even more discomfort. “How do you know?”
“I can see smoke.”
“They must have brought their own kindling,” said Edie.
“Probably used burned heather,” said Alexa. “Or rubbed two Boy Scouts together. I hope Lucilla’s remembered the boathouse key. You can go fishing, Noel.”
“At the moment, all I want to do is get a little feeling back into my legs.”
“I’m sorry. Am I frightfully heavy?”
“No, not heavy at all. It’s just that my feet have gone numb.”
“Perhaps you’re getting gangrene.”
“Probably.”
“It can happen in the wink of an eye, and then it spreads like wildfire, all through your body.”
Edie was indignant. “For heaven’s sake, Alexa, what a thing to say.”
“Oh, he’ll survive,” Alexa told her airily. “Besides, we’re very nearly there.”
Which they were. The fiendish track levelled off, there were no more jolts, and the Subaru rolled on to smooth sloping grass, coming to a halt. Virginia switched off the ignition. At once Noel opened the door, bundled Alexa gently out, and gratefully followed her. Standing, stretching his aching legs, he found himself assaulted by a blast of light, air, brightness, blueness, water, space, scents, wind. It was cold…colder than it had been down in the shelter of the valley, but so dazzled was he by all that he saw that he scarcely noticed the chill. As well he was impressed, as he had been impressed by the grandeur and apparent magnificence of Croy. He had not thought that the loch would be so large, so beautiful, and found it hard to come to terms with the fact that this immense tract of countryside, the hills and the moors, all belonged to one man. Everything was on such a huge scale, so lavish, so rich. Looking about him, he saw the boathouse, intricately gabled and windowed, the Land-Rover already parked only a few yards away, the roughly constructed barbecue fireplace where smoke already rose into the clean air.
He saw two men down on the pebbly shore, searching for driftwood. He heard a grouse call high on the hill above him, and then, far distant, from some further glen, the crack of guns.
The others were now all out of the car. Alexa had opened the back door and let out her little dog. Virginia’s two spaniels had not yet turned up, but probably would in a moment or two. Violet was already making her way down towards the boathouse, and as she did a girl emerged from its open doors.
“Hello,” she called. “You’ve got here. Happy birthday, Vi!”
Introductions were made all round, and as soon as this small chore was accomplished, everybody set to work, and it became clear to Noel that there was a well-ordered pattern for these traditional occasions. The Subaru was unloaded, the fire built up with sticks and charcoal. Two large folding tables were manhandled from the boathouse and set up nearby, spread with large checkered cloths. Food, plates, salads, glasses were arranged on these. Rugs were spread on beds of heather. The two spaniels, out of breath and with tongues hanging, lolloped over the crest of the hill and headed straight for the water, where they cooled their feet, drank lustily, and then collapsed, exhausted. Edie Findhorn, tied up in a large white apron, unpacked sausages and beef burgers and, when the charcoal began to turn to ash, commenced her cooking. The smoke thickened. Her rosy cheeks grew rosier in the heat, and the wind blew her white hair into disarray.
One by one, other cars appeared, disgorging yet more guests. The wine was opened, and they stood about with glasses in their hands, or made themselves comfortable on the spread tartan rugs. The sun continued to shine. Then Julian Gloxby, the rector of Strathcroy, appeared over the brow of the hill with his wife and Dermot Honeycombe. Because none of them owned a vehicle tough enough to deal with the road from Croy, they had made the journey on foot, and turned up looking distinctly puffed, despite the fact that they all wore walking boots and carried sticks. Dermot had a rucksack on his back, and from this he produced his contribution to the feast, which proved
to be six quail eggs and a bottle of elderberry wine.
Lucilla and Alexa stood at the table and buttered baps, those sweet white bread rolls mandatory for any Scottish picnic. Violet chased wasps away from her cake, and Alexa’s dog stole a red-hot sausage and burned his mouth.
The party was on its way.
Virginia said, “I shall make you a present.” She pulled rushes, one by one, from a clump of reeds that grew on the bank.
“What will you make me?” asked Conrad.
“Wait, and watch, and see.”
With the picnic consumed, and the coffee drunk, they had walked away from the others, along the length of the dam wall, and then made their way up the eastern shore of the loch where, over the years, the winds and high waters had eroded away the peaty bank and formed a narrow beach of shingly pebbles. No one else had followed them, and save for the two Balnaid spaniels, they were quite alone.
He stood, without impatience, and watched her. From the pocket of her corduroy trousers she took a scrap of sheep wool gleaned from a barbed-wire fence. She twisted this into a thread, and with it tied the rushes together into a bunch. Then she spread them, and started plaiting and folding, the rushes revolving like the spokes of a wheel. In her fingers, a little basket formed, which, finished, was about the size of a teacup.
He was fascinated. “Who taught you to do that?”
“Vi. And she was taught as a child by an old tinker woman. There.” She tucked in the last of the rush-ends, and held it up for him to admire.
“That’s neat.”
“Now I shall fill it with moss and flowers, and you will have an arrangement to put on your dressing-table.”
She looked about her, spied moss growing on a rock, tore it loose with her fingernails and crammed it into the little basket. They strolled on, Virginia pausing every now and then to pick a harebell, or a sprig of heather, or a stem of cotton-grass, which were added to her miniature creation. Finally satisfied, she held it out to him. “Here you are. A memento, Conrad. A souvenir of Scotland.”
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