Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  But that is, of course, ridiculous, and I decided this time, as the car came to a stop on the gravel, that I would ask Mrs McLeish to get a firm of builders to quote for a proper makeover for the house, top to bottom, inside and out. I opened the tailgate and Rupert stirred in his basket, then scrambled out on to the gravel. He wandered over to the edge of the lawn, cocked his leg for a few moments, and then stretched himself luxuriously, sniffing the air in the same way I had done.

  Inside the house, I put my bags down in the hall and shouted for Mrs McLeish. She appeared instantly at the drawing-room door.

  ‘I’ve lit a fire for you, Mikey, and put the hot water on. There’s a venison stew in the oven for your tea; it just wants heating through.’

  Mrs McLeish had known me since I was a small child, and sometimes forgot I was grown up now. She had worked for the Gascoigne family since she herself was little more than a child and was first employed as a maid by my parents. They once told me that she had turned up at the door, looking for work, a few days after the nurse my mother had hired decided to leave, unable to bear the gloom and remoteness of Glen Gala.

  My parents did not spend all their time at Caorrun, preferring to spend the spring and early summer watching my father’s various racehorses running, and the winter in the South of France. Mrs McLeish was my constant companion from almost as soon as I could walk. She cared for me, fed me, made sure I was properly dressed, and otherwise let me do anything I wanted to. She was not a warm or an affectionate person, but I knew that she watched out for me, all the same. I sometimes used to think that Mrs McLeish understood me better than I understood myself.

  Her cooking was famously bad: Elizabeth wouldn’t eat it. I found it quite acceptable, but I knew that if we had people staying for the stalking it wouldn’t do, and we used to get a girl from Dunkeld to come up and cook for us. She was coming up that weekend, because we had the Martins and then Peter and Mary Robinson arriving to stay for a few days. Elizabeth was taking the train up to Perth on Friday morning, because she liked Anna Martin, and it meant she would have someone to talk to. Mary Robinson was, of course, Elizabeth’s oldest friend. Elizabeth and I had met at one of Peter and Mary’s dinner parties. I didn’t know David Martin very well.

  Elizabeth was coming here less and less. It pained me that she disliked Caorrun so much and took so little trouble to do anything to improve the place, or even hide her feelings about it.

  I thanked Mrs McLeish and, knowing my routine, she left me and went back to her cottage. I checked the fire in the drawing room and then took my bags up to the bedroom. The floorboards creaked as I went up the stairs; the thread-bare runner had long ago worn through to its canvas backing. The landing itself was uncarpeted and the air outside our bedroom was chilly. I don’t like warm houses; I can’t sleep in them. I never sleep well in London, because Elizabeth always has the central heating on, except in July and August. Some people complain Caorrun is a cold house, and so I had to put electric radiators in all the bedrooms except ours. Our own bedroom is a cold room, but it has a wonderful view.

  Although it was near dusk, I went straight to the window and looked out across the tops of the trees to the Falls of Gala. A long thread of white shimmered above the trees, and I could just make out the faint hues of a rainbow as the spray caught the last light from the sun. The head of the waterfall was concealed in mist and so it looked, almost, as if the white thread of water was coming straight out of a dark sky and disappearing into the darker trees. I opened the window a little: it was difficult, because the sash cord was rotten, but I managed to lift it a few more inches, and listened until I could distinguish the note of the falls. There was water running off the hill. It must have rained a lot while I was driving up here. I left the window open; I wanted to hear the sound of the falling water in my sleep.

  I started to unpack, and hang up my clothes. A large cobweb had been built inside the wardrobe. I flicked it off and the spider dropped to the floor of the wardrobe and scuttled into a crack. I checked the bed. The linen felt damp, but it would do. The room contained our double bed, a dressing table that had been my mother’s, a wardrobe, a tallboy that held a few things of Elizabeth’s and a couple of old wooden chairs. There was a small rug on the floor on one side of the bed, as Elizabeth complained she got splinters in her feet whenever she got out of bed, but otherwise the room was bare of any decoration. I like bedrooms to be simple.

  I went downstairs to the drawing room. In the firelight it looked quite welcoming. The furniture was old and scuffed, the upholstery almost worn through on some of the armchairs, and the sofa collapsed beyond redemption into a sagging pile of fabric and worn cushions. A few pictures hung on the walls - unashamedly Scottish scenes, mostly Highland cattle beside lochs with their reflections etched in the water, or improbably large stags on misty hillsides. Elizabeth disliked them, but for me they were windows into the world beyond the walls of the house. Then there were a couple of estate maps, and that constituted the entire decor, except for a vast model of a steam yacht that had belonged to a previous Gascoigne and which had been moored at Dornoch, never used, until it sank in a storm many years ago.

  I went to the sideboard and mixed myself a whisky and water from the decanter and jug that stood there, then went and sat at my desk and looked through the post that had accumulated since my last visit. Mrs McLeish dealt with all the bills, and anything that looked urgent or personal she forwarded to the flat in London, so most of the post was junk mail. I noticed, however, that a magazine I had ordered had arrived. I decided to take it into the kitchen and read it while I ate my supper.

  I sat in the kitchen eating a few forkfuls of watery stew and sipping my whisky, while I turned the pages of my new magazine, careful to avoid any gravy getting on to the pages.

  When I had finished my supper, I washed up, and then put the magazine away, out of sight. I have interests that I don’t share with Elizabeth or any of my Grouchers friends: I don’t feel I want to discuss such matters with people who wouldn’t understand.

  I went into the drawing room and picked up some of the magazines I had brought with me from London so that my guests would have something to browse through and wouldn’t feel obliged to talk all the time. I had bought Golfers Monthly, Trout & Salmon, Fly Fishers Weekly, Country Life and The Field. I poured myself a second whisky and water, and glanced at a few pages of Trout & Salmon while the fire burned low in the hearth. Then I stood up and stretched and went outside with Rupert.

  The mist and cloud that had shrouded Beinn Caorrun and the Falls of Gala had gone. It was a clear night, with a full moon rising. The silver light gave the forest an ethereal look and glinted on the rock faces of the mountain far above. The air had a sharp feel to it. I thought we might get a frost that night. In the absolute stillness I could hear the distant sound of the waterfall. Then a fox barked in the wood, and Rupert raised his black head for a moment. I heard a rustling noise. Was that something moving in the trees at the end of the lawn - a fox, or perhaps a deer? But it was only the wind.

  ‘Come on, Rupert,’ I said. ‘It’s time for bed.’

  We went upstairs and I got undressed and climbed in between the sheets. They were damp. Rupert climbed into his basket and began to snore. I lay awake for a few moments, listening for the sound of the waterfall. When my ears had tuned into it, I felt a warm peacefulness steal over me, and was asleep almost instantly.

  In the night I was awoken by Rupert whining. I sat up in bed. A strong wind had got up. I had left the curtains undrawn, as I always did when Elizabeth was not there, and I could see the full moon now high in the sky shining straight down on me. Racks of black cloud scurried across its face, driven by the rising wind. The house creaked like a ship in the wind, and it was easy to imagine that someone was dancing on the bare wooden floorboards on the landing outside. Rupert climbed out of his basket when he sensed my movement, and came across to the side of the bed. I sat up for a moment. Rupert’s restlessness made me feel as if th
ere was something alien in the house. I never locked the front door at Caorrunn. Perhaps I ought to go and make sure everything was all right. Then Rupert nudged my hand with his wet nose, asking for a stroke on the head. I did as he asked, and the gesture reassured us both. After a moment, he went back to his basket and I lay down and sank into sleep.

  In the morning, the wind had dropped, but when I looked outside I could see it had been a wild night, and a cold one too, for despite the wind there were traces of frost on the lawns. The grass was now scattered with leaves and small branches that had been snapped off the trees. Indeed, a branch of rowan with some berries on it had even managed to blow in through the window at the far end of the landing. It lay outside my bedroom door, and I picked it up and looked at it. Rowan leaves and berries are meant to protect you from the spirit world, someone had once told me. No wonder the wind had woken me in the middle of the night.

  I cooked some bacon and made a pot of coffee, and then I heard the sound of Donald’s Land Rover coming down the track from his cottage a few hundred yards away. I went outside to meet him.

  ‘How are you, Donald?’ I asked. Donald was a small, dour man, who could climb the steepest hills like a goat. He might have been about forty.

  ‘I’ve been waur,’ he said. ‘We need a proper frost to get the rut started. There’s a few stags coming on to the hill now, right enough, but we need more.’

  Beinn Caorrun was what they call a hind forest. Most of the time we had far more hinds than stags, but as the autumn went on and the nights became colder, stags started coming in from neighbouring forests. Soon we would hear them roaring in the woods around the house, and then the rut would begin.

  ‘Hell of a wind last night,’ I said, to keep the conversation going while I decided what I was going to do today. There were a lot of chores around the house to get it ready for our visitors, and I ought to go through the estate accounts with Mrs McLeish. But I decided what I needed first was some fresh air and exercise. I felt stale and liverish. I hadn’t been feeling right for some days, since we got back from Ireland three weeks ago. For a moment I almost thought about going to see Alex Grant, for a check-up. He was a good doctor; but there was too much history. Most of the time I avoided him. A day on the hill would do me more good than anything else.

  Donald said, ‘Well, there was no wind with us last night.’ I smiled. Donald had probably hit the whisky bottle, and when he did that, he could sleep through a hurricane.

  ‘Donald, go and get my rifle from the gunroom, please, and if you’ll give me half an hour to get ready, we’ll try to find a stag. Or if we can’t, at least I’ll get a look at what’s on the place before our guests arrive.’

  An hour later we were driving up the bumpy hill road in the Land Rover, with the tracked all-terrain Argo Cat loaded on to a trailer behind us. The road became more and more like a track until it petered out among great boulders. We parked the Land Rover behind one of these and then unloaded the Argo Cat and drove a few hundred yards farther up the hill towards a rocky knoll. Beyond this the land was boggy and strewn with stones, the remnants of an ancient moraine, so we had to get out and walk. First we climbed to the top of the knoll and spied for deer through our binoculars. Donald found a group of about twenty, way out on the western march of the estate, but it looked as if there were only hinds. Then I picked out another group, higher up on the face of Beinn Caorrun itself. I tapped Donald on the arm and said, ‘I think there are some stags in that group.’

  Donald got out his telescope and had a closer look.

  ‘Aye, there’s three stags there. We’ll see if we can get close to them.’

  We set out. Small though he was, Donald was a difficult man to keep up with, and while he might go easy on my guests, he made no concessions for me. I was breathing hard after a few hundred yards, but I was damned if I was going to ask him to slow down. There had been a time when Donald could not have kept up with me; that was long ago.

  It was a frustrating stalk. Twice the stags started moving, but instead of moving into the wind as deer usually do, they cantered downwind, as if something had spooked them.

  ‘It’ll be a hillwalker,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, but I canna see anyone,’ said Donald. The unpredictable movements of the deer meant we had to walk in a great circle and climb about a thousand feet in order to approach them from a direction from which they would not pick up our scent. The wind wasn’t helping, either. One minute it was flat calm, the next moment there was a stiff breeze, now blowing from the east, now veering around to the north.

  We traversed the great screes below the summit of Beinn Caorrun. Below us were ridges and corries that fell away steeply to the bogs and pools on the flats below. The colours were constantly changing: at times everything was grey and bleak, the crags around us dripping with water as we were enveloped in a streamer of cloud; at others the sky was bright and the flats below woven with brown and gold and bright green.

  Towards four o’ clock we spied another group of deer far below, and carefully picked our way down the steep crags until we lay on a ridge above the place we had last seen them. But when we peered over the ridge, they had moved on again.

  ‘What’s the matter with the blasted animals today?’ asked Donald. ‘Something keeps moving them, and I canna see what it is.’

  ‘Is the shepherd out today?’ I asked. But we would have heard the quad bike, or the shouts as he worked his dogs.

  ‘He gathered in most of the sheep last week. There’s only a few left on the hill now.’

  It was not until after five that we finally caught up with the stags we had been following. Donald wriggled forward on his stomach to find a good firing position, set up the rifle and then beckoned to me. I crawled forward, keeping as flat as I could, and raised my head carefully to look through the scope.

  ‘That big black beast that’s just looking in our direction now,’ whispered Donald. ‘He’s an auld animal and a good one to shoot. Quick now, I think they’ve seen us.’

  All the deer that had been sitting down or grazing in a brown hollow about a hundred and fifty yards downhill now scrambled to their feet and looked upwards. They were not looking at us, but slightly to our right. Perhaps we had startled a sheep on our way in but I had no time to think about it. My stag slowly turned until he was broadside on, and then he looked straight at me. I saw his haughty, innocent face gazing at me in the scope, as if he could see every detail of my own face, and read every thought in my head. I breathed out, until the cross hairs were rock steady, and squeezed the trigger. There was a bang, and then a loud smack as the bullet went in.

  ‘Got him,’ said Donald. I reloaded just in case, and watched the rest of the deer take off in flight. The beast I had shot was stone dead. We jumped to our feet and walked down to him.

  ‘About sixteen stone,’ said Donald. ‘Look at the wear on his teeth, he’s an auld stag. He wouldna have been able to feed himself much longer. Wouldna have lived through the winter.’

  ‘Won’t be much good to eat, either,’ I said.

  ‘Ach, the game dealer will take him off to Gairrmany. Those Gairrmans will eat any venison they can get.’

  Donald gralloched the beast, and left its innards on the grass for the foxes and eagles to eat. Then we got the dragging rope out, tied it around the stag’s antlers, and dragged him downhill to a place where we could drive the Argo Cat, then loaded him on to it. It was six o’clock before we got back to the Land Rover. The wind had dropped again, and the sky had cleared. It had turned into a beautiful evening. The peaks of Beinn Caorrun were silhouetted against a rose-coloured sky, and the tops of the trees below, along the banks of the Gala, were turning gold in the setting sun. I had an hour’s daylight left and decided I would walk back to the Lodge.

  How often had I walked these hills as a child, and as a teenager, before circumstances had separated me for a while from this place? Then I had heard the voices of the place in my head, telling me things, teaching me. That was long
ago and I was different now. I was ‘better’. The voices had gone. I had heard in those days - I don’t remember who told me or how I came by the news - that there was a boy in this valley who had been taught, or who had taught himself, to stalk deer. He could approach animals unseen, undetected, better than any stalker of twenty years’ experience: noiselessly, without alarming them, as if he were invisible, as if he controlled the movement of the air around him so that it carried his scent away from their nostrils. Then he killed them with a pointed stick or a knife; I don’t remember now. I had heard all this a long time ago, although the memories lingered faintly in this place.

  It was a beautiful evening and I wanted to be by myself for a while.

  ‘Donald, I’m going to walk back,’ I told him. He nodded, got into the Land Rover and started the drive back downhill, the stag lying in the well of the Argo Cat, his antlers poking over the side. When Donald got back he would have to hang the stag and butcher it in preparation for the game dealer calling. It would be an hour or two yet before his day was over.