“Good, good. When you’ve finished your whisky, then…”
“Christ,” David said, with a roll of his eyes. “I’ve been up to my ears these past two weeks with exams, ye ken. Three invigilations and heaps of papers to mark. And today, between the marking, I’ve been pounding bloody tent pegs. I’m fair jiggered,” he concluded. “Can you not get Wally to show you? He’s down there the now.”
Peter looked from David’s weary face to mine and back again, then smiled secretively, lifting his own glass to drain it. “Of course, my dear boy. You stay here and relax. I’ll go and have a good look round myself.”
The room seemed smaller, somehow, with only David and myself and the two cats in it. Or perhaps it was only the sofa that seemed smaller, or David who seemed larger, or…
“Just my luck,” he said, in a mild voice. “I finally get you alone in this house and I’m too bloody tired to do anything about it.”
A sharply pleasant thrill coursed down my spine and lodged in the pit of my stomach. There was no reason for it, really—only that I hadn’t known he wanted to get me alone in the house, in the first place. Since the day of the fish auction we’d both been so busy I’d barely seen him, and though he hadn’t exactly retreated behind his polite wall, neither had he given me much cause to hope he shared my own attraction. Until now.
Sinking lower in the sofa, he rolled his head sideways against the leather, to look at me. “You’ve been drinking as well, haven’t you? Damn.”
This time the thrill of pleasure was so strong I couldn’t keep from smiling. “I’m not any easier when I’ve been drinking,” I assured him. “Just more likely to fall asleep.”
“No use trying to cheer me up.” He turned his face away again and sighed, raising his glass. “Ah well, maybe I’ll have a rally once I get this down me.”
I was truly in bad shape, I thought. I couldn’t even concentrate, with him this close. Just watching the man take a simple drink, my senses went on overload. The clean soap-smell of him that blended with the pungent tang of whisky, the way the fabric of his work shirt strained against the muscles of his arm, the one dark curl that never stayed in place—I noticed all of these. And I felt the most appalling need to touch him. Deeply unprofessional, my girl, I reprimanded myself. Doesn’t do to get involved with colleagues.
Still, when David shifted round to stretch full length upon the sofa, the last shreds of my judgment went completely out the window. He lay on his back with his head in my lap, quite as if it belonged there, and balanced his glass with both hands on his chest.
“Is this a rally?” I asked, looking down.
His eyes drifted closed. “I’m afraid not.”
I watched him for a long while, aware of the exact moment when his heartbeat slowed, the lines of strain smoothed gently from his forehead as his breathing shifted subtly to the rhythm of a deep contented sleep.
Then, reaching down, I carefully prized what was left of the whisky from his unresisting fingers. “Damn,” I said, and drained the glass myself.
Fourth Horse
Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
—Tennyson, In Memoriam, IV
Chapter 26
“Men,” said David’s mother, two weeks later, “are impossible creatures. They ought to be shot.”
She meant Peter, of course. It had been Peter’s idea that I should stop in at Saltgreens to deliver the long bulky package wrapped up in brown paper. “It’s nothing breakable,” he told me. “Only a few old photograph albums that Nancy was wanting.”
There were four albums, actually. The old fashioned-type, with plain black paper pages bound between long covers heavily embossed and whorled with peeling imitation leather. They looked out of place here, in the modern common lounge of Saltgreens Home, the sleek pine coffee table seeming to disdain their age and well-loved shabbiness.
I put one hand out now, straightening the edges of the albums so they made a tidy stack. “Peter said you wanted them,” I offered as an explanation, and heard David’s mother sigh hard in the kitchenette behind me.
“Out of the cottage, I said. I just wanted them out of the cottage in case it burnt down or was burgled, that’s all. He didn’t need to send you all this way.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I had to come into town, at any rate. We’re nearly out of soap.”
“Soap?”
I nodded brightly. “Our eighteen students take eighteen showers a day, sometimes more if the work’s very dirty. Peter’s hired a service to supply the towels, but we can’t quite keep up with the soap.”
“I’d have thought they’d have brought their own.”
“Well, some of them did,” I replied with a shrug, “only Peter feels he ought to be taking care of little things like that. You know what he’s like. He’d be doing their laundry as well, I believe, only Jeannie told him our machine wouldn’t stand the strain.”
“Aye, he always did like taking care of people, Peter did.” I heard the reminiscent smile in her voice. “Are you sure you’ll not have a biscuit? They’ve got nice ones this week… chocolate cream.”
“No, thanks.” I turned in my armchair to watch her bustling round the narrow kitchenette.
It was a lovely place, Saltgreens—nothing at all like one expected from a council-run home for the aged. The building itself was modern and smartly designed, all fresh red brick and clever angles and gleaming polished windows. The windows here, on the second floor, showed a lovely slice of sky and sea and harbor, and the sunlight, slanting in between great hanging baskets filled with plants, danced on the gaily covered sofa backs and spilled along to warm the tiled floors.
David’s mother looked completely in her element, bustling round the cupboards while she made our instant coffee.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” I asked.
“Och, it’s just Nescafé, lass. I can manage that yet. The doctors,” she said, as she brought the cups through to the lounge, “haven’t warned me off lifting a kettle.”
I did think they’d have warned her off cigarettes, though, and I couldn’t help casting a questioning glance at the packet set out on the coffee table.
“They’re not mine,” she said, taking a seat on the overstuffed sofa opposite. “They belong to old Harry in room number three. Can’t smoke in the rooms, so he leaves them out here. But he does let me help myself to the odd one, when the mood strikes.” She lit one now, to demonstrate, and settled back against the cushions with an ease that denied any hint of ill health. “If I’m still on my feet, then I’m meant to be living. I’ll not give up all of my pleasures.”
She was a stubborn woman, I conceded with a smile. And incredibly attractive, for all she must be over seventy. In fawn-colored trousers and twin-set, she once again put me in mind of a film star who, having played the headstrong female lead in films of the forties, was aging now with equal flair and class. Small wonder that Harry in room number three didn’t mind if she pilfered his cigarettes.
“It’s only the one a day,” she assured me, with a confiding smile. “I always did enjoy one with my coffee. Is the instant all right for you?”
“Fine, thanks.” I took a sip of the steaming sweet Nescafé to prove it. “Did you want me to take these albums back again to Rosehill, then?”
“Oh, no, I’ll find space. I’ve a dressing table in my room, and a lockable cabinet. I’m sure these will fit somewhere.” She touched one battered cover fondly. “It’s mad the things we worry about, isn’t it? My cottage is jammed to the rafters, and all I could think was that someone might break in and steal my old snapshots.”
I told her I didn’t think her worries were the least bit odd. “After all, you can’t replace photographs, most of the time. And they’re memories, aren’t they? Worth keeping.”
&nbs
p; “Worth keeping,” she echoed. Leaning forward to tap the ash from her cigarette, she glanced across at me with a conspirator’s eyes. “Would you like to see what Peter looked like, when he was a younger man?”
I had known he would be handsome. To see him in his seventies was to know that much. And yet I was still unprepared for the reality of Peter Quinnell, thirty-something, leaning jauntily against a gatepost, with a spaniel at his knee.
His hair had been blond, as I’d known it would be. And he’d been riding, from the looks of things. Wearing a thick-knit sweater over breeches and boots, he stood hatless, laughing at the camera, his long, lean frame propped casually against the five-barred gate behind. It was the same sort of lazy and effortless pose he still struck, out of habit, yet here in this snapshot one had a strong sense of the energy burning behind it, a restless and magnetic energy like that of some great lion poised upon a windswept plain. The edges of the photograph seemed much too small to keep him in. At any moment, I thought wonderingly, he will leap out of this image altogether, and shake his golden hair and laugh, and lead us all off on some glorious adventure.
“He was a handsome devil,” Nancy Fortune said.
“Yes, he was.” I touched a corner of the photograph with one finger, as if to make absolutely certain it wasn’t alive. I’d always found it fascinating, especially with faces that I’d only ever known as being old, to see how people looked when they were young. When I was very small myself, my parents had for some occasion held a costume ball, and I could vividly recall the moment when the pirate I’d been so sure was my father let his mask slip unexpectedly, to show a stranger’s features underneath. Magic, I had thought it at the time. Looking at old photographs was like that. Magic.
I slowly flipped to the next page in the album, and saw Peter crouched in a field, taking notes; Peter sitting on a dry-stone wall; Peter sleeping on a garden bench, hat tipped down to cover his eyes, a book propped open on his chest. It was as well, I thought, that I had only come to work for him when he was old. If I had known him in those days, when he looked like that, I would have fallen hopelessly in love with him.
I wondered how David’s mother had managed to avoid it, and then she said: “That’s me,” and pointed to a photograph, and I saw that she hadn’t avoided it at all. The vibrant, dark-haired woman standing next to Peter in the garden of a big house was looking at him in a way I recognized at once. That could be me, I thought, feeling an instant sympathy for Nancy Fortune. That could be me standing there, looking at David.
“And that,” she said, her finger moving on the page, “is Peter’s wife, Elizabeth.”
An unstable woman, I decided, my eyes already prejudiced. “Is this their son, then?”
“Aye. Young Philip. He’d have been about Robbie’s age, I think, when I took that. Very proud of that pony, he was. Whenever he came for a visit, the first place he went was the stables.”
My brow creased in mild confusion. “When he came to visit? Did he not live at home?”
“Oh, aye, but not in Scotland. Not with Peter. Philip stayed in Ireland, with his mother. Elizabeth,” she said, “wasn’t well. You kent that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Manic depressive, is what the doctors called her. She’d had a breakdown, ye ken. She didn’t like to travel. Philip came to us like clockwork every August and at Easter, but Elizabeth always worsened with him gone, and Peter didn’t like to keep the laddie from his mother. Bit of a mistake, that,” she reflected. “If he’d grown up with Peter, Philip might have turned out differently. Less wild, like.”
I thought of Fabia, and was rather inclined to disagree. Some things, I reasoned, simply ran in a person’s blood. Like Jeannie said, some folk were just born twisted. Keeping my opinion to myself, I turned another page of the photograph album. “So this is Philip as a baby?”
She looked. “Och, no. That’s Davy.”
“Really?” I peered with greater interest at the wrinkled bundle sleeping in its pram. The problem with babies, I thought, was that one looked very much like another. It took a few more photographs before I could distinguish David’s features, roughly formed in miniature—the slanting fall of eyelashes, the broad and sloping smile, the little jaw already growing stubborn. And the hair, of course. One could hardly mistake all those tumbled dark curls.
He looked more like his mother than his father, I decided—assuming that the cheerful-looking chap in fisherman’s clothing who held David in several of the snapshots was his father. I didn’t like to ask. I remembered David telling me his father had died young, and I had no desire to rake up painful memories.
Instead, I opted for the somewhat safer comment that David had been a beautiful baby.
“Aye,” his mother agreed, “he was a bonny wee thing. And he’s not lost his looks, has he?”
I caught the keen, amused edge to her voice and glanced up swiftly, feeling my cheeks begin to redden. “No, he hasn’t.”
“An honest lass.” Her eyes were warmly approving. “That’s rare, these days. No wonder Davy fancies you.”
Radish-red now, I broke free of her gaze and looked down, pretending concentration on the photographs. “And who is this?” I pointed to a snapshot showing Peter with one arm slung round the shoulders of a long-legged younger woman, her dark hair caught back neatly in a brightly patterned scarf.
“That’s Pamela,” said Nancy Fortune, watching my expression. “She was married to Davy.”
Making a convincing show of nonchalance, I nodded. “Oh, right. Jeannie told me he’d been married.”
“Pamela came from London, too.” The shrewd blue eyes stayed firmly on my face. “Not a bad lass, but she wasn’t keen on Eyemouth—didn’t like the quiet life. It bored her, so she took it out of Davy. Broke his heart, she did, in leaving.”
I took a closer look at the young woman in the photograph, remembering what David had said that day on the middle pier, when I’d asked him if the lone swan had a mate. She’d left—that’s what he’d told me. She couldn’t seem to settle down to life inside the harbor.
David’s mother read my thoughts, and smiled. “He’ll have been fighting demons since the day you first arrived.”
“Yes, well, it rather feels as though he’s fighting me,” I said.
“Aye, I believe he said you were a difficult woman.” The smile in her voice was more pronounced. “Though when a man says that, ye ken he only means you have an independent mind. I’m a difficult woman myself,” she confessed, stubbing out her cigarette and settling back against the sofa cushions with the air of one well satisfied. “So tell me, now—I’ve been fair curious, and Peter never tells me anything for fear I’ll drop down dead from the excitement—how is the excavation coming on?”
***
The excavation was, in fact, coming along rather well. In the beginning, I’d found it strange to have so many bodies working round me in the field, but now that nearly a fortnight had passed I could come round the bend in the road by the thorn hedge and not be surprised by the sight of an army in T-shirts and denims, digging away with true militant vigor.
Two of the students had been assigned to me, as finds assistants, and another two were helping Adrian continue his electromagnetic survey of the site. The remaining fourteen wielded trowels under Peter’s watchful eye, like loyal troops that moved according to their general’s wishes. And if Peter was a general, I thought, my mind still playing at the military parallel, then David was his field officer, always on patrol among the rank and file.
Even from a distance, as I walked toward the house, my eyes could find him easily amid his scattered charges. I’d grown accustomed to the little tug I felt inside my chest each time I saw him as I saw him now—a tall familiar figure with a sure, unhurried stride that commanded attention. He was threading his way through the maze of activity down in the southwest corner, but wh
en he saw me turn up the drive by Rose Cottage he altered his course, and came across to meet me at the low stone wall, beneath the rustling canopy of trees.
“You’ve averted the crisis, I see,” he said, nodding at my bulging shopping bags. “We’ll not have to plunder Jeannie’s washing powder for our showers.”
I smiled, hoisting the bags of soap up to rest them for a moment on the wall, giving my arms some relief from the strain. “You look as if you’ve had a shower already.”
“If the breeze was blowing the other way, you’d ken otherwise.” Grinning, he turned his back to the wall and leaned his elbows on it, so that we were both facing in the same direction with our shoulders barely a foot apart. “It’s this bloody heat. I ken it’s the fourth of July, but Christ! It feels like the Costa del Sol.”
It was a warm day. I’d been rather enjoying the weather, myself, but then I hadn’t been slaving away in an open field, under the sun. David’s dark hair curled wet round his temples, and the effort of working had wilted his shirt to the muscled contours of his chest and back.
“How’s it going?” I asked him, looking at the partly excavated corner of the field.
“We’re making slow progress, I’m afraid.”
“Because of the heat, do you think?”
“Indirectly.” His eyes held amusement. “Fabia turned up after lunch, wearing shorts.”
“Ah.” Slow laughter simmered in my own gaze, as I watched the students working. It was generally accepted that every young man working on the dig found Fabia decidedly distracting. She had only to walk across the field to produce a rather comical effect. “It’s a good thing I’m back with the soap, then,” I said. “Your boys will be needing those showers.”
The deep blue eyes, no less amused, came round to rest on me. “Did you buy the soap in Eyemouth?”
“Yes, of course I did. Where else?”
“I thought,” he told me drily, “that you might have walked to Berwick. You were gone a bloody age.”
The Shadowy Horses Page 24