by Neil M. Gunn
“You know it hasn’t,” said Nan quietly.
“But, my dear, you know it has. We grow up. We cannot go on being sentimental. And to tell the truth, when the dairywoman was off for two months in the early summer, I did all her work, the milking and dividing out and so on, and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you were brought up with it you never quite lose that pleasant something in the smell of cow dung. Quite fascinating, I assure you.”
Nan laughed. “You would give style to a broken wheelbarrow.”
“I might undertake to mend it too. And that’s maybe more to the point.”
“You think so?”
“Well, don’t you?”
Nan’s eyes turned to the fire. Aunt Phemie saw there was no avoiding the talk about Ranald. She would hold it, however, to this practical level; at all costs keep it from degenerating into that softness of sentiment which would soften the very tissues. Hold Nan for the moment as it were in the balance; then as the days went on, head her off Ranald or at least get her to that point where she was capable of judgement.
“I don’t know,” answered Nan. “Style is a queer thing. I cannot tell you how much I was affected, because I knew you would be affected by that cool casual way Ranald has. It was like that at first now, wasn’t it? Confess!”
“I think I see what you mean.”
“It was all right the way things happened—your writing to him, I mean. I couldn’t help that. To have wired for him, as if he had a bourgeois responsibility, that would have been—pretty bad!” She smiled.
“I don’t see that,” said Aunt Phemie.
“No?” Nan’s eyebrows arched. “I bet you do …! Wiring for my young man!” She laughed deliciously.
“Well, and what’s wrong with that?” asked Aunt Phemie with an apparent obtuseness that made Nan sway in her laughter.
Nan stopped laughing abruptly. “That would have been terrible!” The solemn thought of it set her laughing again.
“Why? Isn’t it natural that a girl should have a young man?” asked Aunt Phemie as she tapped ash from her cigarette with an elegant gesture. “Or were you grown beyond all that?”
“We were,” said Nan, wiping the weakness of laughter from her. “We just were.”
“Well, it didn’t look like it.”
“Please, Aunt Phemie, don’t start me off again,” begged Nan. “You know quite well what I mean. A girl cannot become a responsibility to a man, not in that way. It’s not done. That old bourgeois clinging stuff has gone bye-bye for good.”
“Really!” said Aunt Phemie. “I don’t mind betting that the word bourgeois will soon be a slang term that will set all your precious teeth on edge. It will go bye-bye with a vengeance.”
Nan looked at her. “You reminded me of someone just now—I can’t remember who.”
“Echoes,” said Aunt Phemie. “You bring a lot of them back to myself. That’s all.”
“No,” said Nan. “It’s not all.”
“No?”
Nan shook her head. “Oh no. This is not slang. Not now. Not any longer. It’s life—or death. And—it’s mostly death.”
Aunt Phemie remained thoughtfully silent. There had been a lot of death.
“You see,” said Nan, “it’s because of what we have lived through. And yet,” she tried to correct herself, “it’s not so much that as what we have lost. I, too, was brought up with cow dung. Well you know it! But these early warm rich comforts—they have gone. All our early beliefs have gone. That’s—that’s how I could never somehow be at home with them in London, why I kept on struggling.” She looked at Aunt Phemie, who nodded. “It’s lovely talking to you,” Nan added in a quiet charmed voice.
“What sort of beliefs?” asked Aunt Phemie reflectively.
Nan was thoughtful for a little while. “Every kind. It was as if all our beliefs had let us down, had betrayed us. Take God. It’s not just that we knew there was no God. The scientists—and especially your friend Freud—had made that quite clear. We saw how the idea came into man’s mind long ago. So that was all right. But it couldn’t be left there. That was the real trouble. You couldn’t forget it, because of the Church. I mean it was still there like a menace. Do you understand?”
“A sort of superstition that the Church—every Church—kept on reviving, and that was a danger because it wouldn’t let man get free of its primitive evils.”
“Yes!” said Nan. “You put it just like Ranald! And you see,” she went on eagerly, “unless we got free of it, we could never get beyond it, into the new world that Ranald wanted—and not only Ranald of course—but the scientists, the new political thinkers, who would build this new world and do away with awful things like war. And oh! there are some fine men among them, who work and are selfless—sometimes, you know, I think—like Christ.”
“The old belief comes back,” said Aunt Phemie.
“No,” said Nan thoughtfully. “That’s not what troubled me. It’s awfully difficult for me to explain. I wish I could. It’s—it’s what happened next. You see, among the usual crowd it meant that you didn’t just ignore religion, you laughed at it. You made jokes about it, witty blasphemous jokes.”
“And you couldn’t do that?”
“They used to tease me about it at first. I didn’t really mind. Maybe I posed a bit as the Scotch Presbyterian—and held my end up too! But it’s not that I mean either. A fellow like—like Know-all—he watched me and would laugh. He hated religion. Deep down in him he loathed it. It was that loathing. And when you fought back—you saw that loathing in more than Know- all.”
“Do you mean, Nan,” asked Aunt Phemie, “that still, deep in you, you believed?”
“No, no, it’s not that,” said Nan, with a touch of distress. “It’s the loathing. Sometimes it made me feel sick in my stomach.”
“I see,” said Aunt Phemie quietly.
“It put me all wrong. I didn’t mind whether religion was right or wrong. But this loathing——”
“It curdled the milk in you, like rennet.”
“Yes,” said Nan, flashing her eyes gratefully on Aunt Phemie. “And I grew afraid. And you see it was not only about religion, but about other things. You not only laughed at sentimentalism or convention or bourgeois morality, you got a sort of horror of them. There was a certain Indian, for example. He may have been bogus; I don’t know. But the word mystic—you hooted with laughter. That was all right. But when he used the word ‘humility’—there was only one final thing you could do—just spit. You rocked with laughter—and spat, metaphorically or otherwise.”
“And you aren’t by nature a good spitter. I can see it was difficult for you.”
“No, Aunt Phemie. I can’t let myself off like that. It’s—terribly difficult. There was Ranald. The people who just spit, they don’t matter. Not ultimately. I could see that. They are the people you have to work with and use. I was seeing it—from Ranald’s point.”
“He had to go beyond them. And you were afraid of the bleakness beyond.”
“Yes. Only I mustn’t be vague. Where so much depends on it, vagueness is a crime. I understood Ranald in that. He had to be hard and clear-headed. Otherwise—everything would sink back.”
Aunt Phemie nodded. “We talked, you know, a lot about it, Ranald and myself. I see what you mean about the need for being hard and clear-headed. We had better be quite frank about this, Nan. I can understand that you would be a bit sick at the loathing and the horror. Your stomach is made like that. Or we can say, if you like, that your erotic group of instincts are stronger than your aggressive or destructive group. You prefer love and creation to destruction and death. But when you went beyond that emotional reaction to where Ranald was—you grew afraid, not in your body now so much as in your mind.”
Nan looked at Aunt Phemie. “Yes,” she said.
“It’s easy to analyse like this nowadays,” said Aunt Phemie lightly. “In fact we did—quite a long time ago. But now, I agree with you, things have happened to give the analysis a new
terrible reality. I quite understand, my dear. You feel that Ranald—has gone bleak—and may have to be—deadly.”
Nan nodded.
“Tell me,” said Aunt Phemie. “Ranald wasn’t always so—sure of himself?”
Nan shook her head. “I told you how we met first—at that country house. It was a spring weekend and we all fetched and carried. It wasn’t boring or arty. Ranald and I walked. At first he thought I was a bit enthusiastic about the flowers in the woods. You know how some girls can be. Then I think he saw that I really was. I told him things about the North. He told me about a pony he used to ride as a boy. It became exciting, particularly when I kept him at his distance—I mean, when he saw that these things were real to me, the woods and the sky and everything. That seemed to relieve him, so that he became quite himself. And we walked and walked. It was all as simple as that—but somehow terribly genuine—behind all the talk and so on. I felt he was real. I have a memory that we walked awfully fast and laughed a lot.”
There was silence for a little while.
“And only later you saw that there was the other side to him?” Aunt Phemie said.
“Yes. I saw it growing.”
“But it must have been there somewhere all the time.”
“Oh yes. It was like a strength in him, He came to depend on it. He had to. For others depended on it too.”
“And finally it got control?”
“Yes. But it was the control of one who now had control.”
“One who has at last come fully into his faith and will let nothing divert him? I have met it. It’s really religious, I suppose.”
“Once a clever man said that to Ranald. I have never known Ranald more ruthless. He gets pale at such a time and logical in a remorseless way. He deliberately tore the man’s mind into small bits—and showed him the bits.”
“He would,” said Aunt Phemie. “I wonder,” she continued after a moment, “what happens to that early thing you found in him, when you were walking in the spring woods?”
“It’s there! I know it’s there!” said Nan, her voice rising. “It’s just—it’s just suppressed.”
Aunt Phemie did not answer.
“Don’t you think so?” asked Nan with eager concern, her eyes full on Aunt Phemie.
“I suppose so,” answered Aunt Phemie quietly. “Yet I sometimes wondered if the talk about suppression and regression was always right. I don’t know, but I wondered sometimes if what was suppressed mightn’t, to some extent anyway, just wither away.”
“You don’t believe that?” asked Nan in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” said Aunt Phemie thoughtfully. “But perhaps I’m wrong. Yes, I think I am,” she added. “The real deep impulses, the instincts—they cannot be destroyed. But they can find unusual outlets. Perhaps that’s it.”
“Aunt Phemie—why don’t you say what’s in your mind?”
“I am trying,” said Aunt Phemie quietly. “And you mustn’t get upset, my dear. Tell me this. Would it mean an awful lot to you—if you couldn’t find again in Ranald—what you first found in the spring woods?”
Nan’s head fell back against the chair and her eyes closed. “Oh yes,” she said on a deep expulsion of breath. She looked utterly exhausted. Her head moved from side to side and tears came from under the lashes. In the dim light her face was drained and tragic.
Aunt Phemie got up. “You’ll come to your bed,” she said gently. “It’s just the weakness in you, and we shouldn’t have been talking so much.”
But Nan turned her body away and wept. Aunt Phemie waited for a little while, then took her arm. At her bedroom door, Nan threw her arms round Aunt Phemie’s neck and sobbed again. “I found it again in—in Ranald,” she said in a broken voice, “when he came in from—from the Dark Wood.”
“Yes, yes,” murmured Aunt Phemie. “I saw it too.”
2
Aunt Phemie called at a garage and at Shand’s, then she drove out the south road. Some little distance beyond Beechpark she stopped, turned the car, and stopped again. When any vehicle passed she lowered her head as if preparing to start up. After about twenty minutes, she saw a man come out of Beechpark and walk towards the town. At once she set off and, drawing up alongside the footpath, waited for him.
“Excuse me,” she said through the lowered window, “are you Mr. Adam McAlpine?” and she smiled in her most engaging way.
“Yes,” said Adam.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” said Aunt Phemie, “but I am Mrs. Robertson from Greenbank farm and I have long been anxious to meet you. Do you mind? Perhaps I can give you a lift?”
He considered her with a direct steady piercing look, then he said, “Thanks, I don’t mind.”
When he was seated, she said, “To be quite frank, I have been sitting along the road there, wondering if I should call. I didn’t want to trouble anyone, but I am concerned about my niece Nan Gordon. She told me she had met you. She has been very ill.” She left the engine idling.
“Has she?” He spoke in a flat voice.
“Yes. But she is getting on now. Perhaps you didn’t know that she had been recovering from an illness?”
“No.”
“Well, she had,” said Aunt Phemie. “As a matter of fact, it was a mental breakdown. That was the real difficulty. In a condition like that one is inclined to get—to have—delusions of one kind or another.”
In the pause he asked coolly, “What do you want to find out from me?”
“I was wondering,” asked Aunt Phemie, “if you could let me know just what did happen.”
“When?”
“When you and she were together—that last time.”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“That’s the trouble. She was so terribly upset that—I don’t know how far she imagined things.”
“Why do you want to know this?”
“Because,” Aunt Phemie replied, “she is now getting well enough for a police interview. I don’t know whether the police will come or not. But I am afraid, because of the effect such a visit will have on her. And I don’t know what you told the police or really what did happen. My only concern is that Nan should not have a set-back. If you cared to help me in this, I should be very grateful.”
He looked away through the windscreen, his expression closed. “I see,” he said in the same cool voice. He obviously did not want to talk. “There’s nothing much to tell. I reported finding the body to the police. I did not think it necessary to say that Miss Gordon was with me. It seems we were seen, however. The police came back to me, and I said that I had in fact met Miss Gordon by the Altfey burn but did not see any point in dragging her name in, as she had nothing to do with the actual discovery. They seemed to be satisfied with that.”
“Thank you very much. That was very good of you.”
He said no more.
“Just in case they do come,” she added, “for they seem to like investigating, did you tell them that Nan saw the body?”
“Well, yes,” he replied, his features gathering in an irritated way. “I had to tell how we were resting at a certain spot and how I, seeing something in the peat hag, went forward to have a look. I suspected, I said, that Miss Gordon had got a glimpse, though I tried to shield her from it and hurry her away.” As he took out a silver cigarette case, he added in the same tone, “They did not ask me for a chart of the terrain.”
So unexpected was the last stroke that Aunt Phemie laughed in nervous relief. He turned his brown eyes on her and searched her face now in an interested thoughtful way. There was a curious wild-animal restraint about him. She did not actively dislike it though it troubled her. Anything absurd or crooked coming from her would be hit away with a sudden paw.
“That makes everything clear,” she said, “and I am very grateful to you.”
He turned the cigarette case between his finger-tips, looked away through the windscreen, and said nothing. The engine was still running. After the first glance at him she had not d
ared stop it. The least assumption or presumption on her part would, she instinctively knew, have set up an instant reaction. Had she given the slightest indication of settling down comfortably for a sensible talk he would probably at once have shut up and gone away. Even what he would do with the cigarette case was exclusively his affair. She could not ask him to smoke. His eyes dropped to it and he put it back in his pocket. Her hand caught the knob of the gear lever. “Can I run you into town—any particular place?”
He did not respond for a moment, then he turned bodily round and looked at her. “Is that all?” he asked.
She felt the heat coming up into her face. So far, what she had said to him had in some measure been rehearsed. At least she had known that her anxiety about possible police action would seem real and authentic—for indeed it was. But how to go on from that to find out what really did happen by the falls pool she had had no idea, though she had hoped that the conversation would of itself provide a way; for this, of course, was the information she really wanted. After all, if questioned by the police, Nan would have to give her own story in simple truth about the finding of the dead body irrespective of what anyone else may have said. To have Adam’s version would be reassuring—nothing more. When she had put her hand on the gear lever she had realised the impossibility of even hinting at the information she wanted; indeed, with some sense of relief, was prepared to drive away. And suddenly, in a flash, she was cornered, with reddening face and restless glance.
“Well,” she replied, smiling awkwardly, “if you—if you have anything else to tell me—I should be very glad to hear it.” She was aware of his brown eyes on her face like feelers.
“That’s what you really wanted to know?”
Involuntarily she nearly asked: What do you mean? but repressed it in time. Then she brought her eyes to meet his. “Yes,” she said.
He smiled slowly and showed that he rather liked her face. Speculatively he asked, withdrawing his eyes, “How much do you know?”
“Nothing,” she answered.
His eyes flashed on her instantly, and after a moment he said, “So that’s the way?” This seemed to amuse him in a dawning way that ran deep. He stirred. “This is a noisy contraption,” he said.