Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  He could bear it. He had borne it. Scotland was to be his reward: weeks ahead, free of Florence and Bobby and Eleanor, the two grandmothers, free of the stultifying obligations, the inane repetitions. Ten days to spend in Scotland to travel with Claire, to sleep side by side for ten nights. He felt in his pocket; yes, there was the small reassuring lump of the ring box, the sapphire solitaire he planned to give her, blue like Highland lakes, blue like her eyes. He had bought it over time at a Bond Street jeweller’s, going there to make payments weekly, like visiting an elderly relative. He had bought her earrings and a pendant and a watch at this jeweller’s, but this ring he considered an anniversary present. Ten years. He would slide it on her left hand, to commemorate, to celebrate all they had come through. And now that anniversary, those ten days, were to be blasted by Sybil Dane and Michael Carson. Ami de mon coeur indeed. Quentin could all but see Michael’s smug smile, his face so like his father’s.

  ‘Damn you,’ he said, not certain to whom he actually spoke. The turbanned man looked up, Quentin shrugged uncomfortably, and stared into the distance. He thrummed his fingers on the pages, picking up the blue from the carbon. Scotland, ruined, laid waste, ravaged. Just as surely as if Michael had been tucked in the boot of the car. As surely as if Sybil rode on the top, her peacock scarves flying out behind her. Or …

  ‘Or … I could …’

  The man in the rose-coloured turban scowled.

  Or he could take Sybil’s typescript back to the office, put it in the safe. No one need be the wiser. He would go to Scotland and say nothing. He need not let Michael steal this precious time. Go to Scotland, he assured himself. When he returned to London he would read Woodlands War Years, and then give the manuscript to Claire. In keeping it from her now, he wasn’t lying. Just a delay. And even if it were a lie, it was the first. Ten years of truth, surely that was an accomplishment. Unless, a small nagging voice reminded him, unless he were to count as lies what he had not told her. He had never let her know that he regretted being party to the fraud that was September Street. He had never let her know he felt the ghost of Frank Carson – sometimes mocking, sometimes distressed, sometimes forlorn – but certainly vivid, present on nights when he worked late and alone at Number 11. He had never let her know the depth of his anger at Michael.

  Well, voleur du temps, he all but whispered now, you won’t steal this time. He smiled to touch the ring box in his pocket. He wrapped the carbon copy back in its paper, and tied the string, and left the London Library, exonerating himself of all wrongdoing in the name of love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

  Inevitably, when Quentin registered himself and Claire as Mr and Mrs Castle, the ruddy landlord or doughy landlady would remark with amusement that Castle was a very good name for these parts, Scotland was famous for its castles. Sometimes the landlord nodded approvingly to see Claire’s Leica III draped round her neck, remarking that some of the world’s great photographers had found their inspiration here. Claire was pleased, but she explained she was a novice, that the Leica, though a professional’s camera, was fairly new (a gift to herself with the money from September Street) and she was teaching herself to see in a new way.

  As the last of the summer rolled out before them like a Scottish twilight, Claire shot roll after roll of film. They tramped the footpaths and climbed the ruins of castles, milled amid ancient standing stones, and looked across pewter-grey lochs to harsh mountains. They rented a small boat and rowed over cobalt waters where Claire snapped pictures, and Quentin, urbanite that he was, made a mess of the fishing pole, nearly losing his glasses into the bargain, and they laughed so hard they frightened all the fish anyway. They lay in the bottom of the boat and watched the clouds waltz overhead.

  The August days were long and often rainy, the nights were short and sweet. Claire and Quentin drank the local whiskies, ate the local food, put their heads together and spoke of plans, possibilities, now that September Street, the last of Frank Carson’s posthumous novels, was published.

  Frank’s reputation seemed settled if not altogether secure: Quentin had come to share his father’s opinion of short-lived literary regard. In these ten years Sydney Thaxton’s star had certainly fallen. But quite apart from all that, Quentin was glad to be done with Frank’s posthumous work. His own conduct with regard to September Street was perhaps unethical and certainly reckless. No one knew but Claire and himself. No one else suspected. All secrets were safe. With that book behind them, Quentin and Claire could move forward. No surprise, she said she didn’t want to be chained to a desk again, not for a long time; she wanted away from literature altogether. The Leica, photography, a pastime that had nothing to do with literature, absorbed her energies, but Quentin slowly came to understand that he had misjudged her: the Leica was a passion, not a pastime.

  Driving from Fort William to Oban on a day of rare undiluted sunshine, they came to Appin, with Loch Linnhe on their right, as Castle Stalker came into breathtaking view. They gathered a blanket and the small lunch they’d brought and took their picnic to the shores of Loch Linnhe with its view of the proud, isolate tower. They peeled off rain jackets and sweaters, and rolled their shirtsleeves up, faces tilted to the sunshine, nibbled the sandwiches and biscuits, sipped the tea. Claire opened her camera bag, loaded her Leica, and snapped dozens of pictures of the tower encircled by the blue waters of Loch Linnhe. Then she turned to Quentin resting on his elbows, watching her, his long legs crossed, and took several shots of him.

  She flung herself beside him on the blanket, kissed him quickly. ‘I think at this moment I can safely say, I am absolutely, perfectly happy. I can’t even imagine being happier.’

  ‘If you are happy, then I am content in all things.’

  ‘Let’s stay here, Appin, for the night, instead of going on to Oban or Glasgow,’ Claire suggested. ‘Let’s find a hotel, stay here and make this moment last even if we have to drive like hell to get back to Oxford tomorrow.’

  ‘We have to be in Oxford when the girls return from Spain.’

  ‘I’ll spell you on the driving, I promise. It’s so beautiful. Please.’

  ‘You convinced me. I’m putty in your hands.’

  Claire let her hand wander up and over his thigh. ‘I wouldn’t describe you as putty at all.’ Her face still had its luminous beauty, though the creases at her eyes had deepened and there were tiny furrows between her brows. The bright honey-blonde hair of her youth had dimmed, darkened to amber. She kissed him, and lay back down at his side, the sun pinking their faces. ‘What are you thinking, Kanga? You’re too quiet. I know you.’

  ‘You’ll think I’m daft.’

  ‘I think that anyway.’

  ‘I’m thinking how nice it is that we can lie here, that you can kiss me, and it doesn’t matter who sees us.’

  ‘Would it matter if I jumped on top of you right now?’ Claire sat up, though she didn’t jump on top of him. She put new film in her Leica. ‘I want to capture Castle Stalker just as it is. I want to have this picture to remind me, no matter how old I get, of how happy I am, how beautiful this place is. This is the best of all the castles we’ve seen, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. They all make me a little uneasy.’

  ‘Why?’ She brought the camera to her eye.

  ‘I can’t help but think of the hands that built them, that lived here or fought here, or died here, and how the ruins remain, but there’s nothing to testify to the people.’

  ‘Of course there is, Kanga! The castle itself testifies to them. That’s what makes them romantic, that’s why I love them. Growing up in Idaho, there was never any sense of the people who had come before you. They didn’t leave anything at all, if there were any people, and there probably weren’t. There was only the land, the forests and mountains, all overwhelming. That landscape leaves you dwarfed and insignificant. Humans are just too paltry to make any kind of mark on a landscape like that. But castles like this one tell you peo
ple weren’t overwhelmed. They made a mark. It’s still here. This—’ She waved her arm around to the blue loch, the ancient stones of Castle Stalker ‘—was what I thought I’d find when I came to England.’

  ‘Instead of a vicious old granny and a lecherous uncle?’

  ‘Now you’re making fun of me.’

  ‘Never.’ He sat up and ran an affectionate hand over her hair. ‘Did I tell you that Enid thought the writing in September Street some of Frank’s best?’

  ‘Too bad it wasn’t Frank’s at all.’

  ‘That’s our secret. Besides, you were so much a part of Frank’s work that the transition is seamless.’ He leaned back on his arms.

  ‘All except Hay Days.’

  ‘Oh, that book. Who cares?’ He thought of Sybil’s wretched memoir lurking like a ghoul in the office safe. He was so glad he had left it there. These ten days had been the best of his life. He revelled in the invigorating sense of change rippling everywhere, certain as the wind rippling the waters of Loch Linnhe, a feeling he had not known since California ten years ago. Expect Great Change. But now he did not fear it. He welcomed it. He had experience, ballast, and a beautiful woman to love. He put a gentle finger to her lips. ‘Do not worry, Roo.’

  ‘What else did Enid say?’

  ‘She called it Tess of Broadstairs.’

  ‘That was catty. She’s jealous that you are doing so splendidly, and she is not. Why did she want to see you anyway?’

  ‘She plans to retire soon, and she asked me to take her authors back. I said I would, of course.’

  ‘That was decent of you, after the splash she made, walking out like she did.’

  ‘It was the least I could do. Let’s walk,’ he said, offering his hand and pulling her to her feet. He flung his arm around her shoulders and they strolled down towards the brilliant blue loch, awash in sunlight. He felt suddenly light-headed as well as light-hearted. ‘Enid Sherrill knows about us. She knew I loved you ten years ago. That night I drove her home from Woodlands.’

  ‘You mean after … Woodlands?’ Claire’s eyes were wide with surprise.

  He nodded. ‘That very night, she asked me if I was in love with you, and I said nothing. Then the other day she asked if I loved you still, and I said yes.’

  ‘That was very unwise of you, Kanga. She’ll spread it everywhere. I told you she’s a jealous old cow.’

  ‘No, she won’t. Enid Sherrill and I understand each other at last. And anyway, I’m not ashamed of loving you.’

  ‘Look over there,’ said Claire, pointing into the distance, a family group, three children, shoes off, wading in the icy loch, the five adults clustered nearby at the water’s edge, the men wearing hats, the women wearing dresses, two of them holding umbrellas. ‘Only the English would use their umbrellas to protect them from sunlight on a day like today! Don’t you want to just throttle them, Kanga! It’s sunshine! Enjoy it! I want to go over there and break their umbrellas over my knee and hand them back in shards, and say, you should be tearing off your clothes instead of cowering under umbrellas! There should be a law against it!’

  ‘I’m sure there is. Some old ancient Scottish law declaring that you must fall to your knees, naked, at the first sign of sunshine.’

  She brought the Leica to her eye and her shutter snapped time and again, a dozen or more shots. ‘One of these ought to be good.’

  ‘What is there to see? They’re so far away, you can’t tell anything about those people.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ she said, putting the lens cap back in place. ‘I’m not interested in their faces. To me they’re just shapes in the distance with the castle as background. It’s the way they’re standing, the way the women’s skirts are blowing, the tilt of the umbrellas. They’re human architecture.’ She smiled, her merry blue eyes deeper than the loch, brighter than the sky.

  Quentin thought his heart might break from a surfeit of tenderness. ‘Marry me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Marry me. Every time I register us as Mr and Mrs Castle, I think to myself, it ought to be the truth. We should get married, Roo.’

  ‘I feel married to you, Kanga. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Not for me. Not any longer.’

  ‘Aren’t we just as married as we want to be?’

  ‘I’m not. This whole holiday I keep feeling the ground beneath me shifting, as though the old ways of being and doing won’t do any more. The thought of going back to the old same routines, I can’t bear it. I’ve changed. I want to change,’ Quentin insisted. ‘I want to marry you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ten years of loving you, isn’t that reason enough?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ She tucked her arm closer to his and they continued to walk along the loch’s mossy edge. ‘I just meant why now?’

  ‘Why not now? Let us take what we can from life while we can.’

  ‘You talk as though we’re dying.’

  ‘I’ve never felt so alive as I have these ten days, but I’m afraid that life will slip away from us, and we will have missed the things we ought to have had, if only we had the courage. I want to grow old with you, Roo. I want my dentures in the glass next to yours.’

  She laughed at first, then stopped walking, and combed his well-known face with her eyes. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re not joking.’

  ‘I am serious. My father died last year. He was seventy-one. I’m thirty-five, you’re forty.’

  ‘What a brute you are to remind me how much younger you are.’

  ‘Not that much.’

  ‘Then you’re a brute to remind me that I’m forty.’

  ‘All I’m trying to say, my point is, half our lives might already be spent. What about the next half?’

  ‘Oh, you’re being morbid.’ She started walking again, away from him.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m being alive.’ He reached out and took her arm. ‘I can’t bear the thought of returning to a life that’s a lie, a stale lie at that. I’ve had these ten days with you, and I want more. It’s that simple.’

  ‘It’s not simple. Think of the scandal.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Claire the brave! Claire the imaginative! Claire the irreverent! Claire who declared her love for a married man! That sounds like an old maid with her head in a tea cosy, like Miss Marr. Scandal? What is there to fear? No, really, Roo. Will I care that Florence’s bridge partners will no longer speak to me? That Rosamund’s gardener will think I’m a cad?’

  ‘I wasn’t speaking of them. A professional scandal.’

  ‘Do you really think authors will leave the firm because I’m divorced? Has there ever been a literary man who didn’t have a messy love life?’ They both thought of Frank, but neither said his name. ‘Louisa Partridge will be overjoyed. She’ll give me the Distinguished Cross. She’s always stirring me on to action of one sort or another.’

  ‘To marriage? That doesn’t sound like Louisa.’

  ‘Why should I live half a life when I am a whole man? With you I am a whole man.’

  ‘Divorce, Quentin, think on it. Divorce will make you look bad. It will reflect on, well, on your honesty.’

  ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t care.’

  ‘Your wife will care. Your mother will care. Your children will care.’

  ‘Florence doesn’t give a damn as long as everything stays put and in place. And it will. I’ll go on supporting them, naturally. I used to feel like a guilty adulterous shit, but now I just feel like a fraud. Living with her, and snatching bits of time with you, like a pickpocket, like a thief. A thief of time,’ he added, bristling.

  ‘What if your father had left Margaret for one of his affairs? How would you have felt? You would have judged him harshly.’

  ‘You are not one of my affairs. You are my one true love, and I am yours. My father could not be faithful to anyone. I have been faithful to you, and you to me. What can I say, Roo? Come live with me and be my love.’

  �
�You speak as if the world was well lost for love, like we were young. We’re not two kids in the back of a market-garden truck on our way to the rest of our lives. We’re middle-aged people and the choices we’ve already made have shaped us.’

  ‘But there’s more to be shaped! We can have a whole life together, not these shreds, these shards of time we’ve been satisfied with. I’m not satisfied. I want more. I want you.’

  ‘And what of the girls? What will we tell them?’

  ‘We don’t have to tell them anything! They know we love each other. I am as much of a father as they have ever had. They know I love them.’

  ‘What of Michael?’

  ‘He’s made his choices.’ He instantly regretted reminding her that her son had chosen Sybil Dane over his own mother. ‘You don’t have to answer to Michael. We’re done with Michael.’

  ‘I am not done with Michael. He’s my son. I can’t ever be done with him.’

  ‘I didn’t mean forever,’ he lied. ‘He’ll grow up and come round one day.’