Soon, over the round top of the hill, patches of green appeared again as groups started to move down the slopes – slowly at first, still dazed and chilled, then more quickly as they came further down where the grass was smooth. In a few minutes the whole hillside of people seemed to be taking part in a great race to see who could reach the level ground first. Where he sat Shering could feel the urgent beating of the earth under him. Flaps of coats and rugs brushed past his knees in a steady wind of movement, and once a swinging handbag tilted his hat over his eyes. Still he sat on, motionless, his eyes on the ground, feeling the racing current around him grow gradually less and less, until it was no more than a gentle fanning of the air as the last and slowest on the hill went past. Far down below, those who had reached the road were already starting up cars and pulling bicycles out of the hedges. The bus driver was in his seat patiently watching his passengers file in. The nuns, all folded and sober as birds after a flight, were waiting inside their taxi. The hikers were moving purposefully off down the lanes. Determined now to weld themselves to solid earth, nobody looked back and nobody looked up.
The last to leave the hill had been a group of schoolboys who’d waited for the lecture on what they had not, but might have seen. Their spirits were still high. As Shering had watched them race off he saw, halfway down, one of the group break away from the rest and come pounding up again towards the spot where he was sitting. As he came near the boy started to swing about in circles close to the ground. Now and then he pounced and raked the long grass with his toe. Nothing came of the search. His circles grew wider and dizzier, and he was already moving back downhill when there was a shout from above. ‘I have it!’ Shering was pointing to something red a few yards away in the grass. By the time he reached him the boy had fastened the red pen into his pocket and now flung himself, gasping, down beside Shering. ‘A piece of luck!’ he exclaimed when he could speak. ‘I thought I’d never see it again!’
‘It was lucky I saw it,’ said Shering. He was not in the mood to speak of luck. Something about the boy’s red face and the way he rolled himself exultantly on the ground reminded him that he himself had sat on the same spot, cold and motionless, for a very long time. His gloom and silence made itself felt.
‘Why are you still here?’ asked the boy, suddenly straightening up and staring at Shering with interest. ‘Are you waiting for something more to happen? Because it won’t. You’ve had it – probably for the rest of the century.’
Shering’s eyes swept the horizon coldly. ‘Nobody told me,’ he said, speaking to the sky.
‘We’ve known about it for months in our school,’ said the boy. He took out a square of smoked glass, spat on it and polished it regretfully on his sleeve. ‘A lot of use this was!’ he said staring through it at the clouds. ‘I could tell you all the eclipses for years back – totals and annulars. Of course you won’t see a total till August 1999. Well honestly, I don’t think you’ll be around by that time, will you? But of course you might come in for a few lunars. By the way, did you ever hear of Bailey’s Beads?’
‘Never!’ said Shering curtly. He took a quick look into the thick grass.
‘Lots of people haven’t,’ said the boy with satisfaction. He was silent for some time, looking out over the countryside and relishing the widespread ignorance. Then he said: ‘All the same, I wouldn’t have missed that blackout. Did you know that one of the kids from Lower School nearly fainted? Our Maths man, Baker, laid him on his back and produced a bottle of whisky. That would have been a botch-up for a start. Even beginners First Aid know that. Anyway, you should have seen this infant’s face! We thought he’d died. Imagine what a morning that would have been. Eclipse and corpse at one swoop! Well, he wasn’t dead, but he was terribly sick afterwards. All the rest of us looked grey and white at the time. But do you know what colour his face was? It was blue – pale blue with purple shadows. Of course we’ll be getting an essay on this, and I shall put in someone lying dead in an eclipse – and no one looking at him. If you saw it in a newspaper you wouldn’t believe it, would you? You could be lying dead right here in the grass where we are now, and no one taking any notice – just staring at the sky.’
‘It’s too cold to sit,’ said Shering getting up from the ground. ‘As a matter of fact I only came up for fifteen minutes, and I’ve been over an hour. I don’t care to catch a chill on the last day of my holiday.’
‘But the sun’s coming out,’ said the boy. He drew a small flat camera from his gaberdine pocket. ‘I’ve got one photo to get before I go.’
‘What kind of thing do you want?’ asked Shering, automatically taking his pose a few steps back.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind a snap of myself,’ said the boy. ‘That is, if you don’t mind. There’s nothing else to take, is there? I’d like it right here on the spot where we saw it happen. It’ll be unique. And maybe I won’t have the same interest even if it does happen again. I mean you hadn’t been all that interested yourself in eclipses, had you? It goes to show you can’t go on and on feeling excited about things forever.’
‘And I thought boys of your age weren’t all that excited about having their photos taken,’ replied Shering sharply. ‘Did you mean that I would take it?’
‘Of course I would have asked one of the others,’ said the boy. ‘But they were all off like a shot. Anyway there’s nothing in it. It’s the simplest camera out. You simply press that – when I tell you. That’s all there is to it. Wait a second!’ He ran to a flat rock. ‘What about this?’ he called. ‘Am I all right?’ Shering didn’t answer. He held the camera gingerly, bending his head only an inch or so as though over an unexploded bomb.
‘Am I all right?’ came the shout again. ‘Can you see me?’
‘Of course I can see you!’ Shering lifted his head and glared before him. The boy was sitting on the rock with his knees drawn up, his hands clasped around them, and on his face the serious obliquely-focused look of one born to be photographed. Shering experienced a sudden crippling spasm of jealousy.
‘I’ll send you a copy if it comes out!’ called the boy. ‘Press now!’ His lips, Shering noted, scarcely moved.
‘What are we waiting for?’ called the boy again. ‘The light’s all right, isn’t it. Have you got the sun behind you?’
Shering turned and stared in the direction of the sun. It was there where it should be, shining serenely over a quiet hillside. Except for the flattened squares of grass and a few empty paper bags there was no sign that anything unusual had taken place. But the face which Shering turned to the sun was utterly changed. It was no longer that of a trusting man, but rather of someone who can now believe anything of his accomplice – even that day might become night or night day before he can turn his head.
Among the photos which Shering showed to visitors there appeared, from time to time, one on which he made little or no comment. At first sight it was naturally supposed to be a rather dim photo of Shering himself, taken in his schoolboy days. He was, after all, there in every other photo they had seen, and there was even something reminiscent of him in this small figure who sat with averted profile and firmly posed hands and feet. But Shering was quick to correct the mistake. ‘This – of the schoolboy – is the one I took myself,’ he would say in a voice more restrained than usual, and in the silence which followed he would add in a low tone, still more sternly controlled: ‘… The sun disappeared for a time.’ Nothing more was said, and no question ever asked, though during the swift appearance and disappearance of this photo it occasionally occurred to imaginative visitors that the man might even be hiding the fact that he had a son. But Shering, putting it back carefully into the middle of a pack of photos like a man hiding an unlucky card, gave them to understand that this was one snapshot on which, dim as it was, he had no intention of throwing any further light.
Allergy
THE NEW LODGER glanced down briefly at the plate which had just been put in front of him and turned towards the window
with a faint smile, as though acknowledging that the day was fair enough outside, even if there was something foul within.
‘I can’t take egg. Sorry.’
‘Can’t take?’ Mrs Ella MacLean still kept her thumb on the oozy edge of a heap of scrambled yellow.
‘No. It’s an allergy.’
‘It doesn’t agree?’
‘No. It’s an allergy.’
‘Oh, one of those. That’s interesting! But you could take a lightly-boiled egg, couldn’t you?’
‘No, it’s an allergy to egg.’
‘You mean any egg?’
‘Any and every egg, Mrs MacLean. In all forms. Egg is poison to me.’ Harry Veitch did not raise his voice at all, but this time his landlady withdrew the plate rather quickly. She put it on one side and sat down at the other end of the table.
‘Yes, that is interesting,’ she said. ‘I’ve known the strawberries and the shellfish and the cat’s fur. And of course I’ve heard of the egg, though I’ve never met it.’ Veitch said nothing. He broke a piece of toast. ‘No, I’ve never met it. Though I’ve met eggs disagreeing. I mean really disagreeing!’
Veitch was pressing his lips with a napkin. ‘Not the same thing,’ he said. ‘When I say poison I mean poison. Pains. Vomiting. And I wouldn’t like to say what else. Violent! Not many people understand just how violent!’
Flickers of curiosity alternated with prim blankness in Mrs MacLean’s eyes. ‘And aren’t there dusts and pollens – horse’s hair and that sort of thing?’
‘All kinds. I don’t even know the lot. But they’re not all as violent.’
There was a silence while Mrs MacLean with a soft white napkin gently, gently brushed away the scratchy toast-crumbs which lay between them in the centre of the table.
‘Do you find people sympathetic then?’ she enquired at last.
Veitch gave a short laugh. ‘Mrs MacLean – when, may I ask, have people ever been sympathetic to anything out of the ordinary?’
‘I suppose that’s true.’
They both turned their heads to look out onto the Edinburgh street, already crowded with people going to work. There was a stiffish breeze – visitors from the south, like Veitch, used the word ‘gale’ – and those going eastwards had their teeth bared against it and their eyes screwed up in a grimace which made them appear very unsympathetic indeed. On the pavement below their window, a well-dressed man stooped in the swirling dust to unwind a strip of paper which had wrapped itself round his ankle like a dirty bandage. They heard his curse even with the window shut. This sudden glimpse of the cruelly grimacing human beings, separated from them only by glass, gave them a stronger sense of the warmth within. Human sympathy too. Mrs MacLean was a widow. It was a street of widows – some of them old and grim, living at street level between lace curtains and brown pots of creeping plants, some of them young and gay behind high window boxes where the hardiest flowers survived the Scottish summer. Mrs MacLean was neither of these. She was an amiable woman in her middle years, and lately she had begun to wonder whether sympathy was not her strongest point.
In the weeks that followed Veitch’s status changed from lodger to paying guest, from paying guest, by a more subtle transformation shown only in Mrs MacLean’s softer expression and tone of voice, to a guest who, in the long run, paid. They talked together in the mornings and evenings. Sometimes they talked about his work which was in the refrigerating business. But as often as not the conversation veered round to eggs. As a subject the egg had everything. It was brilliantly self-contained and clean, light but meaty, delicate yet full of complex far-reaching associations – psychological, sexual, physiological, philosophical. There was almost nothing on earth that did not start off with an egg in some shape or form. And when they had discussed eggs in the abstract Veitch would tell her about all those persons who had tried their best to poison him, coming after him with their great home-made cakes rich with egg, boggy egg puddings nourishing to the death, or the stiff drifts of meringue topping custards yellow as cowslip. It was all meant kindly, no doubt, yet how could one be sure? After all, he’d never made any secret of it. But people who called themselves human were continually dropping eggs here and there into his life as deliberately as anarchists depositing eggs of explosive into unsuspecting communities.
‘You’d be amazed,’ he said. ‘Even persons who profess to love one aren’t above mixing in the odd egg – just to test, just to make absolutely certain one isn’t trying it on.’
‘Oh heavens – Oh no!’ cried Mrs MacLean. ‘Love! Love in one hand and poison in the other!’
‘That’s just about it,’ Veitch agreed. ‘With my chemical make-up you get to know a lot about human nature, and sometimes the things you learn you’d far, far rather never have known.’
By early spring Mrs MacLean and her lodger were going out together in his car on a Saturday, sometimes to a quiet tea-room on the outskirts of the city or further out into the country where they would stretch their legs for a bit before having a leisurely high tea in some small hotel where, as often as not, Mrs MacLean would inform waitresses and sometimes waiters about Harry Veitch’s egg allergy. Then Veitch would sit back and watch the dishes beckoned or waved away, would hear with an impassive face the detailed discussions of what had gone into the make-up of certain pies and rissoles, and would occasionally see Mrs MacLean reject a bare-faced egg outright. He never entered into such discussions. It almost seemed as though he had let her take over the entire poisonous side of his life. On the whole, he seemed to enjoy the dining-room dramas when all heads would turn and silence fall at the sound of Mrs MacLean’s voice rising above the rest: ‘No, no, it’s poison to him! Not at all – boiled, scrambled, poached – it’s all the same. Poison!’ But once in a while the merest shadow of irritation would cross his face, and on some evenings he drove home almost in silence, a petulant droop to his lips.
‘But you did enjoy your supper, didn’t you?’
‘Quite.’
‘And you didn’t mind me saying that about the egg?’
‘Why should I?’
‘You see, I actually saw them through the door – whipping it up – even after I’d warned them. Even after I’d told them it was actual poison to you. They were whipping it up in a bowl – with a fork.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What do you mean – “exactly”?’
‘I mean your description is obviously correct.’
‘How stilted you make it sound. Why don’t you relax – make yourself comfy?’
‘While I’m driving? You want me to relax into this ditch for instance?’ Very touchy he could be, almost disagreeable at times. But then he was allergic, wasn’t he? A sensitive type.
Before long Mrs MacLean had given up eating eggs herself. She wouldn’t actually say they disagreed with her nowadays. That would be carrying it too far. But how could what was poison to him be nourishment to her? She hardly noticed when the usual invitations to suppers with neighbours began to dwindle under her too vivid descriptions of eggs and their wicked ways. She was too busy devising new, eggless dishes for Veitch. By early summer she and her guest had explored the surrounding countryside and every out-of-the-way restaurant in the city. Mrs MacLean gave him a great deal. It was not only his stomach she tended. She gave him bit by bit, but steadily and systematically, the history of Edinburgh as they went about. ‘You’re standing on History!’ she would exclaim, nudging him off a piece of paving-stone. Or, as he stood wedged momentarily in the archway of a close on a wild afternoon, her voice would rise triumphantly above the howlings and whistlings around him: ‘You’re breathing in History! Look at that inscription above your head!’ He would step up cautiously onto slabs of wintry stone from which famous clerics had declaimed, sit in deep seats where queens had sat, while Mrs MacLean held forth herself. All the teaching experience of her younger days came back to her as she talked, and often when tourists were around a small crowd would gather and ask questions. One or two Americans might jot
down her answers in notebooks and occasionally a photo was taken of her standing in the doorway of St Giles or with one elbow laid nonchalantly on the parapet of the Castle Esplanade. Sometimes Veitch got lost. He got lost for hours and hours, and after much searching Mrs MacLean would have to return home alone. It took a lot out of her. At times History really hurt.
By late autumn Veitch had got his job well in hand. It was expanding, he said. Really bursting its bounds. Mrs MacLean knew little about his job, but she identified with it and she was not one to stand in the way of his work. When he spoke of expansion and bursting bounds, however, refrigeration was the last thing she had in mind, but rather some mature and still seductive woman bursting through all the freezing restrictions into a boundless new life. But she felt a difference. He was not so available now. He worked late and had little appetite for the original eggless dishes she set before him at supper. Worst of all, when a few days of unexpected Indian Summer began, a sudden spate of work took him away from her for longer and longer sessions. He began to be busy on Saturday afternoons, and even on Sundays he found he must use the car to make certain contacts he’d had no time for during the week. Reluctantly, Mrs MacLean decided that until the pressure of work slackened she would simply take a few bus trips on her own while the weather lasted. She set off, good-naturedly enough, on solitary sprees at the weekends – as often as not ending up with tea alone in some country hotel or seaside café where they had been earlier in the year. She still had supper and breakfast talks with her lodger, but mostly it was herself talking to keep her spirits up. She never mentioned History now. Egg-talk was also out. In the bleak evenings she secretly yearned for the buttery omelettes and feathery soufflés she had whipped up in the old days.
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 12
