A Step So Grave

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Now, the village itself – they call it “the street” – is down there,’ said Donald, pointing into the curtain of rain in one direction, ‘but Mallory’s house is that way, round towards the clachan.’ He gestured again. ‘And someone will be on his way to fetch us. That’s the system, Mother. The skipper blasts his horn and that tells everyone the boat’s here.’

  ‘What’s a clachan?’ I said, feeling a pang to hear him speak of ‘Mallory’s house’ and its habits in that familiar way. I could not help but notice that a cart had come for the four women and that a young lad dressed in oilskins had driven the three sheep away up the hill and yet we Gilvers were still waiting, foghorn blast or no.

  ‘Good grief, Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘Have you learned nothing after all these years? Please try not to be such an out-and-out Sassenach around the Rosses, won’t you?’

  I sighed as loudly as I could manage, although I expected the rain drumming on the tin roof of the coal store drowned it out. I have never understood the one-upmanship of Scots regarding longitude. Why should the most northerly-dwelling Scotsman in any gathering be the top dog? London, Paris and Monte Carlo are all to the south, as is Edinburgh if we are scraping barrels, and the farther one goes from them the worse life gets. I hoped these Rosses would not be the type of Highlanders who would look down on Hugh and Perthshire and thereby nudge him into endless accounts of his grandmother’s childhood on Skye to even the score. For northerliness is only one of the winning cards in the game: an island carries a hefty bonus. Of course, Skye is quite a southerly island and the ferry journey to it is a brief one. If a Ross grandmother had come down from some speck in the Shetland Isles, Hugh would be trounced completely.

  At last I thought I could hear a motorcar engine and the raindrops off to our right began to sparkle as a pair of headlamps shone through them.

  ‘I wonder who it is,’ said Donald, peering at the blurred shape of the approaching motor. ‘I hope it’s Lady Love. She’s a terrific driver, Mother. She’s driven through a mountain pass in the Alps, you know.’

  ‘We know,’ said Teddy. ‘You told us.’ He had taken it very badly to have a brother so besotted he overflowed about his sweetheart’s mother’s driving prowess.

  ‘But it might be Biddy, or Dickie, or Mitten, or Cherry or—’

  ‘Uncle Tom Cobley,’ said Teddy.

  ‘Who’s all that?’ I said. ‘Who are all they, I mean. It sounds like a litter of puppies.’

  ‘They’re Tibballs,’ said Donald, hardly helpfully, as the motorcar emerged out of the rain. It was a Daimler and quite a new one. The driver’s door flew open and a figure in tweeds and sou’wester leapt down.

  ‘Gilvers?’ the man shouted, with grin that showed very white teeth in a very brown face. ‘David Spencer, at your service. Bundle in out of this filthy weather. Never mind the bags, I’ll get them. Go on, in you all get. There’s a flask on the back seat and a few hot water bottles and what have you. What a day!’

  ‘And who’s that?’ I asked Donald once we were squashed into the back seat, hugging the bottles and starting to steam.

  ‘No idea,’ Donald said, sounding a little crestfallen to be caught out.

  ‘Competition?’ said Teddy. ‘He’s a fine-looking chap and looks about Mallory’s vintage.’ This was unfair as well as unkind. The man was much older than thirty. On the other hand, he was the right sort of age for a thirty-year-old bride, unlike poor Donald.

  ‘Shut up,’ Donald said. He had flushed brick red and I did not think it was just the warmth of the bottle or the nip of whisky from the flask lid that had done it.

  ‘Please don’t use that ungentlemanly expression, Donald,’ said Hugh, twisting round from the front seat, where he had taken up position. ‘And Teddy? Please don’t be uncivil to your brother.’

  I boggled at the back of his head as he turned to face the front again. Donald and Teddy had been telling one another to shut up, get lost and much worse since they were lisping it all through their baby teeth. Hugh always left it to Nanny to scold them. If he had suddenly taken it upon himself to hand out etiquette lessons he must be very keen on this alliance indeed.

  Before I could apply myself properly to the puzzle of it, Mr Spencer flung himself back into the driver’s seat, slammed the door closed and we were off.

  ‘It’s only a minute or two round the bay,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You’ll be warm and dry in no time. What a pity though. Lady Love and Lach are so proud of the place and you’re not seeing its best side today. I’m tempted to ask you to shut your eyes and wait till the sun’s out to take your first look around. They said on the BBC it’s to clear up later and be fine tomorrow.’

  I was looking around with great interest already. We had rolled through a gate and were now crunching up a drive of red gravel chips towards a pretty, white house, freckled all over with little windows, topped off with crow-stepped gables and flanked by cottage-like side-wings. A liveried footman with two umbrellas came out as we approached and when the motorcar stopped I could see, through the open door and the lower windows, warmth and light, paintings and flowers, crackling fires and glittering chandeliers. My spirits lifted.

  Inside, the house smelled of daphne blossom, from a great wide bowl of it on the table in the hall. I drank it in as I went over to the fireplace to warm my hands. It was an applewood fire, I thought, from the fragrance, and quite deliciously hot. I turned my back and unashamedly toasted my rear. Nanny Palmer would have fainted and Hugh gave a quick frown, but I looked around at the paintings and ignored him.

  ‘Don? Is that you, darling?’ A silvery voice sang out and a slim figure came skipping down the stairs, landing with a light thump at the turn and skipping down the next half-flight to the ground floor. ‘How did I miss the boat horn? Did Sandy give three blasts? Do forgive me. And welcome, welcome, welcome home!’

  I bristled like a hedgehog, unable to help it, unable to say what was most annoying. ‘Home’ was an outrage, of course. But ‘Don’ was not much better. No one had ever called Donald anything but Donald in all his life. And she did not sound the least bit genuinely sorry that she had escaped having to go out into the rain on such a day.

  ‘My eye,’ I muttered to myself, and scowled at her back as she kissed Donald on both cheeks and then held his two hands in hers and stood back to inspect him. I had never seen such a bumptious young woman in all my days, I decided. Greeting him first and ignoring his parents was atrociously ill-mannered. My heart sank to see how Donald looked at her, with his brows drawn up and his eyes wide, his mouth open and his throat going up and down as he gulped.

  Then she turned round and beamed at me. My first thought was that she had spent too much time out in the sun without a shady hat on. Her face was as dark as a gypsy’s and her hands were the colour of walnut shells. She looked every day of her thirty years and more. Much more, I realised as she came forward. She had wrinkles round her eyes and lines down either side of her mouth. This was not Mallory.

  ‘Lavinia Ross, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, confirming it as she grasped my hand. Her palm was calloused and her fingers were rough with scratches. ‘Excuse my paw,’ she went on, ‘I’ve been pruning.’

  ‘Dandy, please,’ I said. ‘And you remember Hugh?’ I nodded to where Hugh stood, his face a grim mask. He had seen what I had seen, then.

  We do not often commune, my husband and I, but as Lady Love went scampering over to grab his hands and effuse at him, he caught my eye and a question, an answer and an agreement passed between us. If there was any doubt, the arrival of Mallory herself removed it. She came downstairs, skipping just like her mother, although the effect was somewhat more definite since she was twice as heavy and a head taller. They were definitely cut from the same cloth, nevertheless. Mallory’s dark head glinted with the coppery threads that, by the addition of much sunshine, had turned her mother’s as bright as a polished kettle.

  ‘Hello, Donald,’ she said, offering a cheek to be kissed.

  ‘Hell
o, old thing,’ Donald replied, obliging with a peck. His eyes did not widen, nor did he gulp. ‘Here are my olds to meet you. Mother, Father, Ted: my intended.’

  ‘Aren’t they awful?’ said Lady Love, back at my side and squeezing my arm. ‘Olds! Intended! I thought we were slangy in our day, Dandy, but we’re the Shorter Oxford compared with this lot. Let me show you to your room. The bags should be up by now. Would you like help to unpack? I’ll send someone. Are you too travel-worn to notice our Fragonard? Just at the bend in the stairs here. Terribly sentimental, of course, but I’ve always rather loved it and it’s wonderful for masked balls.’

  I murmured about the Fragonard, although I have never cared for those eighteenth-century paintings that look like boxes of sugared almonds. At least, though, it served as acclimatisation for the first floor, where the walls were pink with white swags picked out and the carpet runner had rosebuds on it. Rosebuds. My room was worse: pink striped wallpaper to the chair rail and Chinese silk above depicting a bower of fantastical botanical splendour and lots of little pigtailed gardeners rushing around with wooden rakes and flat barrows. Despite the busyness of this, all the upholstery and hangings were deep pink with enormous white cabbage roses and there were bowls of forced bulbs in moss-pots on the dressing table, bedside table and chest of drawers. Lady Love took a huge breath in as we entered.

  ‘Don’t you just adore hyacinths?’ she said. ‘It smells like heaven in here.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. I had always thought one bowl of hyacinths near an open door was plenty. ‘What a delightful room. Thank you.’

  ‘I shall send up some coffee,’ she said. ‘Come and find me when you’re ready, won’t you? I’ll be in the garden room until lunch at one.’ Now it was my turn to be beamed at. ‘I’m absolutely delighted about our youngsters,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ She squeezed my hands and left me.

  As soon as she was gone, Hugh rapped on the connecting door and marched in. ‘What’s that smell?’ he said.

  ‘Hyacinths,’ I said. ‘They smell like heaven. Fragonard is wonderful and the engagement is marvellous. There doesn’t seem to be room for discussion on any of it.’

  ‘Fragon … What?’ said Hugh, distracted. ‘Dandy, my dressing room is like Madame de Pompadour’s boudoir. Perfectly nice Highland manor house and they’ve got it dolled up to the nines till you can’t see the bones at all. Poor old Ross, living in this. I wonder why he doesn’t put his foot down.’

  I shushed him as a movement at the door told me someone else was approaching. I did not want the Applecross servants to hear us traducing their beloved mistress’s taste as early as this. It was Teddy, however, who came into view after a quick knock. His face was solemn and his eyes looked troubled.

  ‘Ma,’ he said, ‘I don’t quite know how to broach this and I don’t want you to tell me I’m imagining it, but I think there’s a bit of a problem here. With Donald and Mallory, I mean.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And Mallory’s mother.’

  Good Lord, I thought to myself. If the frisson between Donald and Old Mother Dunnoch had penetrated even Teddy’s skull, there was nothing for it.

  ‘Don’t call me “Ma”,’ I said.

  ‘We came up Plockton Sound on the coal boat, Teddy,’ said Hugh. ‘Not up the Thames on a cracker. Leave it to your mother and me. We shall take care of everything. And do not say a word to Donald or I shall revisit some of our happiest memories of your childhood. Just you, me and a slipper. Understood?’

  It was a rare moment for the Gilver family: three of us in accord and Hugh taking charge. I rather liked it, even as the cause of it made me feel even sicker than the wee boaty and chilled me even more than the freezing rain.

  3

  Luncheon made a great many things a little clearer, and a few things much clearer than I would want them. We gathered in the dining room just as the clouds lifted and parted. In fact, a rainbow was laid on for us, stretching right across the bay from the quaint row of village houses beyond the coal store to the quaint little church inside its graveyard wall on the other side. In between, frilled ripples played along the edge of the tide and left the pebbles glittering. It was hard to believe that merry spangled water, so harmless now, was the same expanse that had frightened me and sickened Hugh not two hours ago.

  Lord Ross was rolled into the dining room in a wheeled chair, a shawl on his shoulders and a cat in his lap. He was a handsome man, with a long humorous face and a shock of silver hair, but his eyes had the strained look that comes with pain long borne, and even the blanket over his knees did not disguise the withered thinness of the legs underneath it.

  ‘Hugh, my boy,’ he said, lifting a hand gnarled with scars from its resting place on the cat’s luxurious fur. ‘How long has it been? Whose pheasants have you been shooting all these years when you might have been shooting mine? Oh yes, I still keep a shoot going,’ he added, at Hugh’s look. ‘And I can still pot a few, even from this contraption and even with these trotters where me hands should be. Dickie here – this is my nurse, Dickie Tibball’ – he waved one of his shiny fists at the man holding onto the chair’s handles – ‘wheels me up a paved path to the grouse moor and we all have great fun.’

  ‘Oh, tremendous fun,’ said Dickie Tibball. ‘And I’ve got muscles like Tarzan of the Jungle from the shoving.’

  He sounded like one of us, rather than a medical nurse of any sort, and he was dressed in the kind of ancient country tweeds that only a friend would dare be seen in. An employee of the usual sort would be sacked for them. My hunch was confirmed when Lady Love appeared with another woman, in equally ancient tweeds and with her hair frizzing out around myriad hairgrips, whom Lady Love introduced as, ‘Biddy Tibball, Dandy. My secretary and right hand. And you’ve met Dickie and Lachlan already, I see.’

  ‘So, a paved path to the moor, eh?’ said Hugh, who can always be relied upon to bend towards estate management.

  ‘Unusual, I know,’ said Lord Ross, ‘but needs must. I can cope with sleeping on the ground floor of me own house but if I couldn’t get up to me moor, life would barely be worth living.’

  Ah, I thought. The poor man was banished from the bedrooms and Lady Love had gone berserk with rosebuds in his absence. And as for Biddy and Dickie Tibball? Lachlan’s nurse and Lavinia’s ‘right hand’ were, as I had guessed, a couple of old pals down on their luck who’d been taken in as paid companions, for all they might be called ‘secretary’ and ‘nurse’ to soothe their pride.

  The mysterious David Spencer arrived a moment later and was absorbed into the general sitting down, flapping of napkins and passing of bread – for aside from the footmen carrying in salmon and potatoes, the household shifted for itself. I glanced around, wondering if there was a pained butler in the background somewhere, his fingers twitching at an invisible pair of serving spoons. Our own Pallister would go into a sharp decline if we were ever to begin treating every meal like a picnic this way. I took a sauceboat that Mr Spencer handed to me, slopped some of it over the piece of fish on my plate and handed it on up the table to Lord Ross on my other side. Hugh, opposite me between Lady Love and Biddy Tibball, looked black enough to start the rain again. I noticed that the cat had a seat of its own, a tall stool at Lord Ross’s side. It stretched and stepped off his lap, settling down on the stool and watching the fish plate’s progress with interest. I could not look at Hugh for fear of what I might see on his face now; he who scoffs at me for my dog sitting quietly over my feet, hidden from view by the tablecloth.

  ‘Are you on a visit, Mr Spencer?’ I asked. ‘Or do you live here?’

  ‘Just a flying visit, I’m afraid,’ he said, with another flash of those white teeth. ‘A birthday visit for LL. I’m an old chum of both and I do like to pop up and see them every so often.’ He sent a speculative glance up and down the table as he spoke and I wondered if he had a specific worry.

  ‘Pop up from where?’ I asked, merely to keep him talking. ‘Are you a neighbour?’

  ‘Ha, hardly,�
� said Spencer. ‘I pop up on the sleeper from King’s Cross.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘You are a good friend. That sleeper blighted years of my life. It’s the one drawback of marrying a Scot.’ A quick frown tugged at his dark brows as I mentioned marriage and it occurred to me that the specific worry I had imagined might concern Lavinia’s future son-in-law.

  At this moment, however, Donald was talking quietly with Mallory and I had to admit they made a handsome pair, her glinting dark head close to his fair one and their faces solemn as they murmured softly to one another. Perhaps I was fretting over nothing. I could just catch the odd word if I tried hard.

  ‘… wool prices, you see,’ Donald was saying. ‘These New Zealand sheep farms have the kind of acreage that …’

  My heart sank. Even Hugh had not started talking to me about the market price of sheep wool and foreign competition during our engagement. I leaned forward to catch Mallory’s reply.

  ‘… very modest mixed farming, rather than just sheep, and although they sell the surplus …’

  I sat back, not sure whether I was comforted, alarmed or simply astonished. Before I had recovered and could cast around for another source of chat with Mr Spencer or manage to attach myself to one of the general conversations going on around the table, a tremendous clattering and thumping began somewhere in the hall. Pelting footsteps and ragged breaths reached our ears and then the dining-room door banged back on its hinges. Two people tumbled in and caught each other in an embrace just before they sprawled headlong onto the carpet.

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ said the female part of the tangle of arms and legs. ‘Daddy! Mummy! Dickie! Biddy! Mallory! Donald! Oh! Oh!’