Under the covers Tim put his arms closely around her. His skin was warm and faintly moist against her. He kissed her.
“Are you okay?” he asked. His face was close, his high smooth forehead, his wide patient mouth, his kind eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Tim hugged her again, but now briefly. She felt him moving toward his day.
“I’m up,” he said, and was gone.
When he went into the bathroom, Anna threw back the heavy bedclothes. Barefoot, shivering, she walked to the window and drew open the long gray-green brocade curtains. It was still dark outside; the day before her was impenetrable. The windowpanes were black, their lower edges thickly ferned with white frost. Anna pulled the window shut and stood for a moment, huddled over the old iron radiator. Warmth was starting noisily up inside it, flooding into the room. Anna, always cold, leaned into the invisible flow of comfort, trying to store up the feeling of warmth for later. She wanted to prepare herself.
Downstairs, breakfast was laid out on the big mahogany sideboard in the dining room: platters of glistening russet bacon, a basin of rumpled gray porridge, round cottage loaves of bread, stiff golden kippers. Silver racks of cold toast were flanked by clusters of jams and marmalades. Thermoses of tea and coffee stood on a tray. People served themselves and sat down anywhere at the long table.
Tim was already sitting between two of the other men, Otto Carpenter and an older man, Edward Drover. Otto was Tim’s college roommate, and the trip had been his idea. There were eight “guns” altogether, all Americans, all businessmen, all here with their wives for a week’s shooting. Tim and Otto were in their fifties, but most of the others were in their sixties—graying, heavyset, ponderously good-natured. All but Tim and Otto were strangers to one another, but they all seemed members of the same prosperous, comfortable tribe.
After breakfast everyone assembled in the gun room. This was small, low-ceilinged, and stone-damp, dense with the smells of oil, dog, and gunshot. The men clumped heavily across the flagged floor in their high rubber boots. Tweed caps were settled firmly onto heads, gloves tucked carefully into pockets. Beneath the hanging brass lamp, Tim carefully hefted his newly cleaned gun. He squinted narrowly up at the barrel, his face intent. Otto, florid and fair-haired, stood by the bins, scooping handfuls of green shells into his pouch. The men were quiet, frowning in concentration: the serious day lay ahead of them, death held in their hands.
Outside in the courtyard stood the muddy Land Rovers, square-nosed and powerful, with a military air. Field boys, with bright pink cheeks, wearing green quilted jackets, walked briskly back and forth, loading gear. Springer spaniels, with white cotton-fringed legs, whined with excitement. Their hazel eyes pleaded, their stumpy tails quivered. They leapt keenly in and out of the Land Rovers, and were sworn at.
At nine the Land Rovers drove off. The men were packed solidly inside, brown shoulder to brown shoulder. As the cars turned the corner of the stone lodge, the husbands looked back, waving. Anna stood among the other wives on the damp cobblestones, arms folded tightly against the Scottish chill, calling out good-byes. Anna waved to Tim as he vanished around the corner, and felt his warmth suddenly withdrawn from her landscape.
Two of the other wives had gone out with the guns, to watch. Some were going to Edinburgh; others had hired a car, to see the Border Country and to shop for cashmere in the Georgian villages. Anna had been twice to sooty, handsome Edinburgh and had bought several cashmere scarves for Christmas presents. She refused to go out on the shoot.
The other wives gone, the lodge was empty except for Anna and the kitchen girls. In her room, Anna curled up with a book. She sat in an armchair by the window, a plaid blanket over her legs. As the morning waned, the big house turned slowly chill: the heat was turned off when the guns left. Inside, it was entirely silent, and outside there was only the faint brushing sound of the wind.
All morning Anna read, blocking out everything but Trollope. Since they had arrived, on Sunday, Anna had felt the week steadily darkening toward this day. She had a sense of doubled time: the days here in Scotland seemed to be moving, side by side, next to the days of that other week, in America, one year ago. It was as though one week lay somehow inside the other, transparent but still present, the hours in that week giving troubling color to this one. As the hours went by dread pooled inside her like rising black water. Anna felt it approaching and struggled to keep herself above it, out of reach.
After lunch Anna set out across the fields. The house was down in a glen, and the surrounding hills rose sharply up from it, close together, their curves echoing each other. Narrow streambeds, now dry, hurtled down between the hills, into the burn, as they called it here. A wide stretch of shallow black water, cold and wild, it chattered through the flat bottomland and across the shepherd’s wintry fields.
The shepherd wore the hues of the landscape: dull green, brown. His rose-colored cheeks were the only bright spots in the afternoon. Anna stopped to watch his black and white Border collie, bushy-coated, small-boned, quick, bring a herd of mud-colored sheep up the paddock. The sheep, broad-bummed and stiff-legged, jostled wildly up the meadow. The dog shifted like water from side to side. Holding them in a tight, hurtling bunch, he wove himself into a flying fence around them. When a sheep bolted, the dog turned wolflike: ears cruelly flat, a black velvet lip lifted to reveal an ivory fang. His blue gaze was annihilating; he ruled by terror. This surprised Anna. She had imagined a sheepdog to be like a father, wise, tender, kind, but stern. The dog was not like a father but a fanatic.
Anna waved; the shepherd gave her a cheerful jerk of his chin. Anna went on, setting her shoulders against the cold and pushing her gloved hands into her pockets. The wind, even down here, was bitter. This cold was like nothing Anna had known before: deep, ancient, punitive. Anna wore layers for warmth—silk, cashmere, down—but even so, she shivered. It would be not layers but movement, her own blood rising, that would finally warm her.
The path led past the flat-roofed sheep shed and the shepherd’s stone cottage, following the burn’s glittering ribbon upstream. Anna crossed the water on teetering black rocks, then set off on the rutted trail that slanted up Ladyside Hill, passing a solitary tree. These Scottish trees were black and bare-branched, their limbs a fierce, chaotic tangle. The trees in America seemed more orderly.
Anna had grown up in the country, but not country like this. In Connecticut there were rolling fields, boggy cow pastures, scattered woods: mild farmland, not a dour ascetic emptiness like this. Anna had learned the Connecticut landscape with her father. Together they had skirted the plowed fields, laboring along the weedy hedgerows, through the thin scrubby woods. They walked silently and carried binoculars. They were stalking.
“Listen!” her father would whisper, urgent, his forefinger raised. “Hear that?” He would fix Anna in his blue gaze, not seeing her. “Hear it? Hear it? Wood thrush.” He would stay motionless, listening, vibrating with intensity. Anna often missed the birdsong, tangled as it was with wind, leaves, the creaks of branches, their own soft rustlings. She stood silent and watched her father listen. She watched the long, rocky cliff of his profile, his pale, radiant skin, the liquid gleam in his narrow blue eyes. The clean fold of white skin along his eyelid, his small, fine mouth, pursed in concentration. His authoritative finger still aloft, rigid. He was never wrong, her father, not about birdsong or about anything else.
Anna began the long steep struggle up Ladyside. There were no trees at all up here, and the wind was soundless. She began to hear her own breathing; the cold began loosening its grip. The track led through thick ferny bracken, waist-high, rust-colored. She trudged steadily toward the sky, her blood beginning to stir. She took deep breaths; the air was pure and sweet. Vast somber patches of heather spread across the flanks of the hills like the shadows of clouds.
A movement caught her eye on the next hill: a covey of partridge rocketed into the distance. The kitchen gir
ls had instructed Anna to report any game birds she saw, for the shoot. Anna had nodded gravely; she would never dream of doing this. Now she looked away, so as not to see where the partridges had landed. Anna felt guilty merely being here. Her father would never have come to this place, where they killed living creatures for pleasure.
Anna’s father would not shoot birds or any other living creature, not even enemy soldiers, not even to save Western civilization, not even during World War II, a time when enemy soldiers seemed not human but like fiends from hell. His stance had made Anna’s father both famous and infamous—pacifists were widely held in contempt. He had broken the rules of the community; he had outraged his friends, his family. He didn’t care.
All that had happened before Anna was born, but her father’s ferocious pacifism had not ended with the war. As she was growing up, Anna had often heard him holding forth, his neat mouth tight, his pale blue eyes incandescent—dangerously bright, like burning phosphorus. He raised a warning forefinger. “I believe,” he would say, and then pause, for impact. “That killing,” he would say, and pause again, for drama. “Is wrong.” Triumphant, he would fold his lips together, his eyes aglitter, like the sheepdog’s.
Her father was a man of principle; he never wavered. He seized the moral high ground and held it, spurning the gentler slopes of compromise. Nothing swayed him, no argument made him doubt. His blue stare was lofty, implacable.
On Ladyside’s broad crest Anna struck out cross-country, leaving the rutted trail. The vast rounded top of the hill felt like the curvature of the earth. There was nothing now around Anna but sky. The air was still, and each cold breath stung sweetly, deep inside her chest. The hills spread out, repeating themselves into the clear blue distance. She was alone up there. Anna was warm now, from climbing. Her chest rose and fell steadily in the warm cave of her clothes. This was exhilarating: the height, the solitude, the ringing, limitless distances. The austere and glowing day.
On the far side of Ladyside, Anna started down, though she could not find the trail. The ground was rough, the heather dry and springy underfoot. The colorless tussocks of wiry grass showed no usage, no footsteps of any sort. Still, Anna thought she recognized the flat-roofed sheep shed below and began to make her way down the vertical plunge of a dry streambed.
Her father had died of a stroke, one year ago today. The hospital in Hartford had called her at ten o’clock that night. There was no one else to call: Anna was an only child, and her mother had died six years earlier. There had only been herself and her father in all the world, it seemed right then. The nurse said brusquely that it was bad, that he might not last until she arrived. Tim was away, and Anna put on her coat and walked straight out of their apartment.
During the solitary nighttime drive up from New York, with the dead roar of high speed steadily in her ears, Anna began to cry. Tears rose up in smooth swells, over and over, covering her cheeks, sliding down her neck. She was afraid that she would be too late, that her father would be gone when she got there. She was even more afraid that she would be there in time. She was afraid that when he saw her, her father would set his small, fine mouth and, without speaking, turn his face away to the wall.
The streambed went straight down Ladyside. As Anna descended, its slanting walls drew in and it steepened. Anna clambered down clumsily, finally using her gloved hands, gripping the cold turf with her cold fingers. She was no longer sure of the sheep shed. Nothing seemed familiar now, but she continued; she had come too far to go back.
At the time of his death, Anna had not spoken to her father for over a year. She could hardly now remember how their quarrel had begun, but she remembered exactly how it had ended. After her father’s shouting, her own furious stammering response, her father’s imperious gesture, Anna left his living room. She strode across the front hall, grabbing the heavy newel post at the bottom of the stairs, yanking it so hard that she felt the solid shaft give, creaking. She marched upstairs, her blood pounding, and packed.
When Anna came down, her father was still standing in the living room. He was motionless, the newspaper in one hand, trailing on the carpet, the other hand upraised, his finger pointing like a prophet’s at the sky. His blue eyes glittered, triumphant. Anna saw him from the corner of her eye as she went through the front hall. Her coat was on, her suitcase in her hand. Neither spoke. Anna, her face burning, strode out the front door, slamming it behind her.
As Anna climbed awkwardly down the hill, the glen below grew dimmer and dimmer. There were no lights anywhere. The hill became steeper and steeper, nearly vertical. Anna’s footsteps turned cautious and she stepped twice on each hummock, testing it for strength. She could no longer see her way down.
On this night a year ago, Anna arrived at the hospital, her heart racing. After speeding wildly along the highways, she found the slow pace of the local roads intolerable. Each minute was crucial and endless. When she reached the hospital complex she turned frantic, trying to find her way through the maze, searching for the right entrances, the right buildings, the right parking lot. She found, at last, the parking lot, then a space in it, in the last row. The entrances were not marked, the arrows not clear. She entered finally through a service door and discovered inside that it was the wrong building. Minute after minute was lost. She blamed herself. Her panicky heart raced at the delays: she might miss him by a few minutes, by seconds.
Anna reached the bottom of the hill and saw, through the dimness, the burn. She was not lost, then, though dusk was rising fast, and the lodge was still distant. She picked her way quickly across the black, teetering stones, through the fierce dark water. Shadows were filling up the narrow valley. The remaining light, vast and vague, came from high above the hills. The hills themselves now towered above her, black and unknown. The cold had set in with a passion, and Anna could feel it creeping again inside her layers, though she was walking fast. Night was closing in.
At the hospital, swearing and crying out loud, Anna found at last the right building, the right entrance, the right bank of elevators, the right floor, and when she found the right ward, she began to run. She ran down the long, tiled hall, her feet pounding, loud and undignified, past more decorous people. She saw that her father had been right: She was disorganized, ineffectual. But it had seemed, right then, that this was all that was left for her to do for him. This was the last thing she could do: run to him through the tiled hospital halls.
In the darkness, Anna hurried across the rough bottomland, stumbling. She could see the lights of the lodge, but in the dark the way seemed longer. She quickened her steps, the vast cold empty landscape behind her. She kept her eyes fixed on the lights, and gradually they grew brighter. Finally the small steep bank rose in front of her, and with her heart pounding, she clambered at last up out of the fields, onto the paved road in front of the lodge, as though she had made a narrow escape.
Anna pushed open the hall door and stepped inside. Everything was different. The lodge was now expansive, alive. Everyone was back, the heat was on, there was noise and movement in the halls. In their bedroom, Tim’s muddy clothes lay on the floor. He was in the bath down the hall, leaving their own tub for her. She felt a pang of gratitude as she leaned over and turned on the taps. The water began to thunder in, steaming, important. Anna was in the deep claw-footed tub when Tim returned.
“Are you there?” He peered around the door. He was wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, and his hair was plastered untidily against his forehead.
“I’m here,” she said. “Thanks for leaving me the tub. How was your day?”
“The best,” Tim said fervently. His skin was pink, glowing.
“Where did you go? I’ve forgotten.”
“Bow Hill, at the Duke of Buccleuch’s. The country is just ravishing,” said Tim. “The hills go on and on.”
“Lovely,” said Anna. “And the birds?”
“The birds went on and on too,” said Tim ruefully. “Regardless of my efforts. Though I had a couple of good shot
s, good or lucky.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t luck,” Anna said, sloshing slowly in the tub, basking in the heat.
Tim picked up a towel and began working on his hair, rubbing vigorously. “Oh, right, of course,” he said. “I’m sure it was skill.”
“I’m sure it was,” Anna said, smiling up at her glowing husband.
Tim’s shooting had troubled Anna at first. It would not have troubled her father: he’d have seen it very simply. Killing for pleasure is brutal and wrong, he’d have declared. But Anna knew that Tim wasn’t brutal, and that the point of shooting wasn’t killing, for him. What Tim loved was being in the landscape, just as her father had. As to the killing, the birds shot here ended up on the table. Unless you were a vegetarian, which Anna was not, how could you condemn killing for food? And this system was more humane than meat factories and abattoirs.
Anna had reached this conclusion with relief. It would not have satisfied her father, though, and knowing this, Anna felt proudly rebellious. She had escaped the peaks of her father’s convictions. She had abandoned his grim, cold landscape and found her way down to warmth and comfort, accommodation, other people. Here she was, luxuriating in the hot water, smiling at her husband, who had spent the day shooting. She felt daring and successful.
Every evening at the lodge everyone gathered for drinks in the sitting room before dinner. A fire in the iron grate lit up the heavy curtains, the faded rugs, the Scottish landscapes on the walls. For dinner the men wore gray flannel trousers and tweed jackets, the women, ruffled silk blouses and velvet pants. A silver tray on a sideboard held bottles, an ice bucket, heavy crystal glasses. People fixed drinks and then settled onto the vast faded sofas, against the soft, collapsing pillows. It was exactly like an English house party, except that they were all Americans, all paying guests, and almost all strangers.
Asking for Love Page 18