by Robin Hardy
'What's your name?' she asked.
'Cameron,' he replied. 'Cameron Crawford.'
'I'm Beth. I'm just a beginner. But would you dance with me?'
'You are no just Beth, you're the Queen. It's an honour – I mean, why me? Oh heck, I'm not that good at dancing myself,' he said, astonishment mixed with pleasure. 'So that'll make two of us.'
With which he led her onto the floor, followed by Bella, Chloe and Deirdre, and Danny, Carl and Dawcus. The rest of the hundred or so people in the Grand Saloon watched their first dance, but Delia soon signalled for everyone to join in again. The Scottish dancing soon became more intricate, more energetic, more hectic. Beth was propelled into ever wilder movement as Cameron, Danny, Carl and Dawcus took it in turns to improvise steps with her, while the girls clapped.
Two hours later, she had danced, apart from the Scottish eightsomes, everything from an old fashioned waltz through to that good old American export, the line dance, and even some rather dated disco while the band were getting their share of the champagne. Beth now felt a wave of exhaustion such as she had not experienced since her last major gig. By now the crowd had thinned to about two dozen people. Soon, she thought, I can reasonably say I'm going to bed.
Meanwhile, Delia introduced her to Donald Dee, who was playing the piano. People offered her more champagne, but she waved it aside and gave them the smile.
'I'm just so sorry that Steve cannot be with us,' she confided to Donald Dee. 'That guy just loves to dance.'
'As Laddie, he'll need his rest tonight,' said Donald Dee. 'He has an Olympic-sized task tomorrow. We have a special song for the Laddie. Would you like to hear it?'
'Oh please. For a singer it is such a pleasure just to sit and listen sometimes.'
Delia had just entered with Beame, who was carrying a huge tray with a giant silver coffee pot and cups and saucers. Donald Dee had started to sing. He had a light tenor voice and the soft Scottish lowland accent that perfectly suited the lyric of the song he was singing:
'He will have a horse of the gods' own breed
He will have hounds that can outrun the wind
A hundred chiefs shall follow him in war
A hundred maidens sing him to his sleep
A crown of sovereignty his brow shall wear
And by his side a magic blade shall hang
And he shall be Lord of all the land of youth
And Lord of Niam the Head of Gold.'
'That's real pretty,' said Beth to Donald Dee. 'You must teach it to me sometime. Right now, this little old Queen needs her bed. It's been a wonderful evening and all. So where's Delia and Lachlan?' Beth had risen and was looking around for Delia, when she found her and Beame, carrying his coffee tray, at her elbow. Lachlan, too, now reappeared. He looked rather magnificent, she thought, with what Delia had told her was his dress kilt and the foam of white lace at his throat, right down to some kind of bowie knife in his hose. She'd danced with him earlier and he had performed with a rhythmic elegance which was nevertheless a bit stiff – as if the lessons of the boyhood dancing class came back to him well enough, but were still a bit of a chore. For the rest of the evening she glimpsed him occasionally talking on his phone.
'Delia, d'you mind if I go to bed now?' asked Beth. 'It has been a long day and, for some reason – I think everybody's response – I feel rather emotional. And thank you so much, you and Lachlan, for what you did for us today.'
'Some coffee, miss?' asked Beame.
'No coffee for me, thanks.'
'Would you prefer decaf, tea, hot milk?' asked Delia.
'Hot milk! Could I? You do spoil me, Delia.'
'Take some hot milk up to the guest room, will you, Beame?'
'Good night, dear Queen,' said Lachlan.
Then, as if by some telepathic consensus between the remaining guests, they all seemed to be conscious of her impending departure. They had drifted into a semi-circle by the piano and now they echoed Lachlan's words.
'Good night, dear Queen,' they chorused.
'Good night everybody,' she replied, with a departing wave, and followed Delia up to the guest room that had been prepared for her.
Orlando Takes Up the Challenge
ORLANDO HAD DECIDED that, in his ongoing relationship with Lolly, if it was to be both non-platonic and unsentimental there was no reason why it couldn't be stylish and romantic – like in a movie. If this feeling he had for Lolly was not love he couldn't imagine what love could be like. Maybe her bravado about not being able to love anybody would change if he kept his cool, if he played the games she liked to play. Unlike her, he had no degree in history but the time they had already spent together had served to fire his imagination. He felt, too, that he now needed to take the initiative.
Lolly, when she arrived at the Police Station that evening, was mildly surprised to find Orlando dressed in a black Ralph Lauren shirt and slacks with a gold chain and several medallions around his neck, nestling in the profuse curly hair on his chest (pieces of jewellery inherited from his grandfather and worn, so far, only when on a date with Morag).
The steaks were already cooking on the tiny stove that lived in a small closet-sized kitchenette inside the bed-sitting room. He had left the Police Station door open while he started to cook.
'Hi Lolly!' he shouted, seeing her arrive through the bed-sitting room's open door. 'Shut that door after you please and come and tell me how you like your steak done. There's some Asti Spumante in the fridge, already opened, with some nice cold glasses. Get pouring and we can eat in about five minutes.'
'The steak – rare please…' Lolly said, taking in the Italian costume with a sense of mild relief. He was ready to play. She herself was wearing a red crepe scarf around her neck, a loose white blouse, a leather mini skirt, riding boots and nothing much underneath. Helping her take off the boots would be a useful starting point.
'The new, improved, macho Italian Orlando, I presume,' she said, coming up close behind him and caressing him for just long enough to put him slightly off his cooking. Then she poured the wine and they started their somewhat spartan dinner. Each was sizing the other up; two friendly antagonists anticipating the pleasures of a new game. At least that was how Orlando was starting to see it, hoping it would all lead to something much more.
'Here's looking at you, schatz!' he toasted, trying for Italian.
'Schatz? That's Italian?'
'Wrong language. Sorry! That's German for doll face. It's a line
from The Eagle Has Landed, Ingrid Pitt and Richard Burton. At least I think so. Anyway, quite irrelevant. Listen… pizza, pesto, cappuccino, macaroni, carbonara, tutti frutti. You've now heard nearly all my Italian. Let's talk Scottish shall we?'
'Then you'll know what Rabbie Burns, our national poet, said?' Lolly, having drained her glass, playfully beckoned him by raising a boot in his direction.
'A cock is a cock for all that?' suggested Orlando, rising to tug at the boot, causing a canyon of lovely legs to open before him.
'He very easily could have said just that,' agreed Lolly.
Lolly's boots and clothes lay where Orlando, still in macho Italian mode, had flung them, at the webbed feet of a stuffed snow goose. But she still wore her red crepe scarf. In the first breathless moments that followed she had again challenged him to outdo Caesar Borgia. However, while aiming at all times for historical authenticity, she felt it was unnecessary to imagine the horsemen outside the window, because the current Pope was unlikely to be as intrigued and titivated as his Borgia predecessor. Too transported by Lolly's first moves to think straight, Orlando rashly accepted the challenge.
Now, several hours later, with the score at four, Lolly allowed him a little rest. She had played the convent-bred princess to perfection, praying to St Theresa of Avila and crossing herself repeatedly, a stage direction suggested by Orlando himself from a scene in Visconti's The Leopard, with him playing Burt Lancaster's role. (His knowledge of films scarcely matched her well of historical trivia
, but it came in useful.) He had been Napoleon consummating his marriage to the Archduchess Maria Louisa, his new Empress, in the Imperial coach minutes after she crossed the French frontier. Lolly was not wholly successful, he thought, in conveying a young princess so innocent that even tom cats had been kept from her presence.
Mary, Queen of Scots, ravished by Bothwell, the monarch torn between surprise and pleasure, was very successful. The Roman Empress Messalina dishonouring her husband Claudius Caesar by playing the whore with a barbarian mulateer found Orlando lagging. She tried switching to Thomas Mann's Felix Krull but he hadn't read it. By now he was getting so pissed off with the game that he finally gave a superb impression of a barbarian giving a Roman matron a good deal more than she'd bargained for (or even a rather pleased Lolly had expected). It wasn't that Lolly, the instigator and fantasist of all this, had found her imagination running dry but, being as careful with men as with the horses in her care, she knew when they must be rested and watered if they were to stay the course.
'Does everyone with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History get up to all this?' asked Orlando between deep gulps from a bottle of Kelso spring water. He had been seeking a moment when he could wean her off the subject of sex to discuss the cult and he had waited this long because he didn't wish to alarm her by making her think it was preeminently important to his police work in Tressock.
'Don't suppose so,' she said. 'But you rather like it, don't you? I can tell that, because you're so good at it. Plain shagging – well, anyone can do that.'
'Put like that…' Orlando spoke gently, a smile on his lips. 'Your answer could just as easily have been: Isn't a girl entitled to a hobby? Speaking of hobbies, is that what this cult here was?'
'For some, I suppose,' she said. 'Just as choral singing and church flower arranging was in the old Christian kirk. But now, as then, for some it is probably a sustaining faith.'
'Is – not was?'
'For some. In Soviet Russia, for instance, although atheism was a state-ordained belief for seven or eight decades, Christians couldn't be prevented from having private unspoken faith. When communism was overthrown they came out of the woodwork. People have shared certain ancient beliefs for thousands of years. Some people. Not very many of them in Scotland. Mostly in private.'
'You said you would tell me who is involved in this – you called it "a very secret" cult?'
Lolly was silent for a whole long minute, looking around at the stuffed birds and then at Orlando, who was waiting patiently, trying to concentrate on being, and therefore looking, relaxed.
'Poor old Tom. I think he would like to have mutated into a bird. I certainly hope he has. He deflowered them you know, before he stuffed them.'
The potential enormity of this revelation took Orlando completely by surprise. Who had been deflowered before being stuffed? She surely couldn't mean the birds themselves. But she could equally surely not mean that Tom Makepiece had raped young virgins of Tressock before stuffing them. All in the name of some cult? The notion was so preposterous that this led him to blurt out a single word of disbelief:
'What?'
'Deflowering is taking their virginity from somebody – in this case, young owls.'
Orlando felt the kind of a relief that comes when extremely bad news is delivered, but the recipient has been expecting utter catastrophe.
'I know what deflowered means, Lolly. But you can't be telling me that our Tom, the late Police Constable Makepiece, my predecessor here, an officer with a long service award for excellent police work – that he deflowered those poor innocent birds here in this very room. Is that what you're saying? You have to be kidding me!'
'I am not! I personally never saw him do it, Orlando, but that is what they say. Apparently, in the days before the Atomic Power Station, taxidermy was the local cottage industry. A lot of people still do it – stuff animals I mean – for shooting parties. Of these, only old Tom deflowered young owls. He evidently saw it as a kind of regeneration – put lead in his pencil – a more eco-friendly form of Viagra.'
She was looking him straight in the eyes as she said this. He was waiting for her to break up and howl with laughter at the sheer absurdity of what she was relating. But she stared at him almost beseechingly, as if daring him to disbelieve her.
'Eco-friendly. What about the poor owls? You have to be joking, Lolly. I cannot take this seriously.'
'I never joke about sex, Orlando. Speaking of which – that was only number four. C'mon, let's do it!' She was hauling him to his feet and leading him into the bathroom. The back of her body interrupted his thoughts, his strong doubts that what she had been saying could be anything other than a smoke screen. Later, later he would ask a lot more questions. But what, just for the moment, did they matter, these doubts, when Lolly's body, seen from any angle, was beckoning? The back of her head, topped by gorgon-like coils of hair, damp still from her exertions as Messalina; at the base of her beautiful back two dimples moved like apostrophes atop her freckled butt, the rugger buggers' song come true; her endlessly long legs, almost racing him to the shower; her feet, dancing with excitement as if they were entering the first set of a tennis game.
Generals sometimes survey the detritus of a battle they have won with mixed feelings. This is when they realise that it remains to win the war. In just such a mood, Lolly surveyed the ravaged bed on which Goldie, the marmalade coloured stray cat, now competed with an utterly exhausted Orlando for space. The cat, which she hadn't noticed earlier in the proceedings, had marred their last act by sinking her claws into Orlando's lower back at a moment when Lolly's finger nails were poised to do something similar to his shoulder blades. Orlando was so convulsed with multiple sensations of pleasure and pain that he collapsed on the startled feline, hardly aware of what had occurred. Goldie emerged, screeching and hissing, but clung to the bed even as Lolly tried to remove her.
Lolly carried the protesting Goldie across the room to a cupboard, shutting her in. She then slowly mounted the bed again, kneeling astride Orlando but giving him a little more time to recover. The moment would soon come to use the red crepe scarf she had still not removed from her neck.
Lolly, watching the undeniably beautiful face of her lover, thought how Mediterranean his features were, in spite of his protestation of Scottishness. Her fellow countrymen could be beautiful too, those with Irish or Scandinavian blood in their veins, or the Pictish dark ones with their blue eyes. Lolly knew them, in all their variety, almost as well as she knew horses. But Steve was from a different mould. He had excited in her a tenderness, a passionate gentleness almost foreign to her nature and quite different from the exuberant lust she lavished on Orlando.
Her inspiration, where men were concerned, dated back to a school visit to New York City when she was fourteen. Her class had disembarked from the bus at the United Nations building and was led into the huge atrium where visitors are received. Other school tours were in progress. While they awaited their turn, Lolly noticed an Italian convent school group next to them, being shepherded by a nun. She saw that they were all staring at a bronze statue near the entrance. Her own group followed the gaze of the Italian girls and her teacher, a Scottish woman of the Miss Brodie type, said simply:
'The god Jupiter; Zeus to the Greeks.'
In both groups the statue excited giggles and whispered comments. The father of the gods was depicted as a beautiful man, not old but in his prime. Lolly had thought that this slim hipped, perfectly proportioned man, exuding pride in his manhood, must have been the ancients' ideal. Unlike the Christian depiction of their God as a venerable, heavily bearded man sitting on a cloud, this paternal deity was clearly a lover. His beautiful erect member curved like a scimitar as he strode through heaven and earth – an inspiration to men and a promise to women.
It was as Lolly was thinking this that she heard the Italian nun speaking loudly to her flock: 'Non è bello,' she said authoritatively, referring to the statue.
But one of her charges clearly
disagreed.
'…ma è molto simpatico!' the pretty blonde added.
The Scots didn't have to be linguists to catch the Italian schoolgirl's drift. A murmur of agreement came from both groups. For Lolly, the great god's image was now always to be with her in every sexual encounter she had with a man. He was the ultimate lover she sought and the one she never quite attained.
Orlando's eyes opened once more, his breathing now normal, his member looking less than scimitar-like but trying to make a comeback. He was once more amongst those present and was trying to remember where he had left off his questioning about the cult.
'You're a hero Orlando,' Lolly was saying. 'If we go on like this you'll make seven easily.'
She had untied the red crepe scarf from around her neck and held it out before her in a rather ritualistic way that made him slightly nervous. He couldn't know that she was imitating the pose of a figurine of the white goddess at Knossos. Religion for Lolly was simply the way she chose to live. The liturgy of her paganism was something she tended to make up as she went along.
'For our next encounter you can leave most of the action to me,' she said, noting his anxious consideration of the crepe scarf. 'And you're going to love it. Nothing you have ever experienced before, between the sheets or anywhere else for that matter, was anything quite like it…'
'Do the names of two young Americans, Lucy Mae and Tad, mean anything to you?'
It was a shock tactic, straight out of the book, and it worked.
'What?'
An officer who has caught his interviewee off balance, must press home his advantage at once, the police manual had said.
'Tad and Lucy Mae, two Americans who are thought to have gone missing hereabouts, a year ago?'
Lolly stared down at him, a deep frown puckering her face.
'There were some Americans,' she said thoughtfully. 'Tourists, I think. They came to goggle at the Willies Walk. Stayed at the Grove. One couple said they were off to Istanbul afterwards. But I can't remember any names.'