Angel Harp: A Novel

by Michael Phillips

  I shook my head and tried to smile. I was too choked up to speak.

  “Your music forced me to confront myself,” Alasdair continued. “What I found I did not like. I found bitterness and ugliness inside. Yet, in my aloneness, at the same time something fluttered to life within me. I knew that I had to know the maker of the music. I know it was awkward for you at first. I am sorry. I’m afraid I was not very personable. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. It had been so long since I was with people, especially a beautiful woman. I was nervous, shy, embarrassed even to ask you to see me. I was so afraid for what you might have heard about me. But I had to know you. I had to find out who was the creator of this music that stirred me so.”

  He paused and drew in a deep breath.

  “When I did at last meet you,” he went on, “I discovered that it had not been about the music at all. It was about you. You were the reason all this had happened, not so that I could hear ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ but so that I could meet you. The music began the waking, but you continued it. You watered the tender plant that was my soul and helped it continue to blossom.”

  “But, but what have I done?” I said.

  “You accepted me, you talked to me, you went on walks with me, sailed with me, you laughed with me… you treated me like a human being. I even flattered myself that you might have enjoyed the few times we spent together.”

  “I did, of course, Alasdair,” I said. “I have enjoyed our time together.”

  “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” he said, looking down at the floor with an almost boyishly timid smile. “But for one who has been alone for so long, who has had to enjoy roses alone, with no one to share them with, for one who knows the dreadful things they think about me in the village, your simple kindness meant more to me than I can tell you.”

  “I still do not understand why people think ill of you,” I said. “Why not show them they are wrong?”

  “They would never believe it. Their minds are made up.”

  “But why?”

  “From things that happened a long time ago. There is much about me you do not know, Marie.”

  I pondered his words.

  “If what you say is true,” I asked, “why did you go to church yesterday?”

  “I had to hear you play,” Alasdair replied. “I have to hear your music every chance I get. I knew they would gawk the moment I walked in. Probably the whole town is talking about it, wondering what an old hermit and sinner like me is doing in church. But let them talk. I no longer care.”

  “Why do you and Iain no longer see one another?” I asked. The words came out more bluntly than I had intended them.

  The question obviously caught Alasdair off guard. My words seemed almost like a blast of cold water in his face.

  “It is a long story,” he sighed at length.

  “I have all day, if you want to tell me about it.”

  He stared down at the floor, thinking.

  “I don’t think I do,” he said at length. “I’m not sure I am up to it. It is water under the bridge. We had a parting of the ways—let’s just leave it at that.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t be left at that,” I said. “You heard what Iain said yesterday, about reconciliation between people as well as between people and God.”

  “I heard. But some things go deep and are too entrenched in the past. They are long past healing.”

  “Do you really think that is true?” I asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I leave the religion to Reddy. That’s a world I don’t know much about.”

  “I don’t mean religion,” I said. “What about simple human relationships? I can’t imagine that any relationship is beyond healing, if the people involved want it. I suppose it all depends on that.”

  “I haven’t thought much about it,” said Alasdair. “But I doubt there’s hope of changing things now, after so long.”

  “I hope that’s not true.”

  Alasdair nodded thoughtfully.

  “If I didn’t know better,” he said with a sigh after a moment, “I’d have thought Iain knew I was coming yesterday and had planned that sermon just for me. You didn’t tell him you invited me, did you?”

  I shook my head. “Funny,” I said. “I thought he was speaking to me.”

  “In what way?” asked Alasdair.

  “I’ve been I suppose what you might call estranged from God for a long time,” I replied.

  “You!” said Alasdair in surprise.

  “Why do you say it like that?” I laughed. “You sound surprised.”

  “I am. I took you for… I don’t know, a religious person, a Christian.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose because you played for church, and,” he added with a sheepish smile, “because you’ve been spending a lot of time with Reddy.”

  “Before coming here, I hadn’t been in a church in years.”

  “I would never have known,” said Alasdair slowly. “Why are you playing in church then?”

  “The first time it was just because Iain asked me to.”

  “It sounds as though yesterday was different.”

  I nodded. “It was,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Since coming here, I’ve been changing,” I replied. “Yesterday I wanted to play for myself.”

  “Whatever is going on seems to be catching,” said Alasdair.

  “Maybe it’s something in the air!” I laughed. The sound of my voice seemed out of place. I grew serious again. “All I know is that I am seeing many things in a new light,” I said. “After church yesterday I went for a walk along the shore. I realized that I had never recognized God as a good and loving Father. Once I started thinking of him in that light, my perspective about everything began to change.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because, I don’t know, if God is like that, then everything about life, the entire universe… everything takes on a different meaning.”

  “Do you think God is like that?”

  “That’s what Iain says.”

  Alasdair smiled a little sardonically but said nothing.

  “I do believe it,” I added. “It has taken me some time to get used to the idea of God being different than I have always thought. But I do believe it. I am feeling his love more than ever. Maybe I am, like you say, a more religious person than I had realized. I never thought of myself that way. But I realize that I want to know God. I want to know what he is like. Before now I never tried. I ignored him, which is maybe the worst thing to do. That’s why I felt that Iain’s sermon was for me. I realized that I was the prodigal, or like the prodigal. I needed to go home to God.”

  “How could someone like you be a prodigal?”

  “Don’t you think we are all prodigals in our own way?”

  “I never thought of it like that.”

  Alasdair paused briefly.

  “Do you think I am like the prodigal?” he added.

  His question caught me by surprise. “I don’t know,” I answered. “You and I have never talked about spiritual things.”

  “But you think I should be reconciled with Iain?”

  “Because of what I said a minute ago?”

  Alasdair nodded.

  “I don’t know that either,” I said. “I was just asking. For two men who were such good friends, and who live and work within two hundred meters of each other, never to speak, somehow it doesn’t seem right.”

  “It is a complicated situation.”

  “What about Gwendolyn?” I said. “Did you have a parting of the ways with her, too, like with Iain?”

  If my question about Iain had taken him by surprise, this one hit Alasdair between the eyes like a shotgun. His head almost visibly jerked back as if the words themselves had landed with a physical force.

  “Oh—I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You know, I take it?” he asked after a moment.

  “Mrs. Gauld told me you
are her father.”

  He nodded. “I am. Yes, it is true.”

  “And Mrs. Urquhart?”

  “She is my sister, Gwendolyn’s aunt. I am afraid she harbors great animosity toward me. Olivia is determined to keep Gwendolyn from me. As I said, complicated.”

  “She told me this morning that the separation is because of you—that you abandoned Gwendolyn.”

  Alasdair smiled so sadly I thought I had never seen such a forlorn expression.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I am aware of that. It is the story she has spread for years.”

  “But it is not true?”

  “If the last twelve years have taught me anything, it is that truth is not so easy to define as I once thought. People have to decide what to believe about things, don’t they?”

  “Then what about what she said?”

  “I suppose one might place such an interpretation on the events. It is how Olivia chose to see it and that is the story she spread. Her slant on things is now taken as fact. No one has cared to inquire about my point of view. People rarely do. They eagerly believe the worst.”

  “But you do not see it that way?”

  “I do not,” answered Alasdair softly.

  “Would you like to tell me what happened?” I asked. “I don’t mean to pry, honestly. I am only interested because I care for both of you. If you don’t want to tell me—”

  “No, of course… I do,” said Alasdair. “You have to know eventually. I want you to know.”

  A long silence followed.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Fateful Night

  Mak’ my grave baith lang and deep,

  Put a bunch of roses at my head and feet,

  And in the middle put a turtle dove,

  Let people know I died of love.

  —“Will Ye Gang Love?”

  At length Alasdair let out a deep sigh.

  “Gwendolyn’s mother died in childbirth,” he began. “I don’t even know why Olivia was there. I certainly did not send for her. But she seems invariably to be present at most of the births in the village. Maybe the doctor sends for her, I don’t know. I have my suspicions, but they are best kept to myself. I had not been well, and my wife’s death shattered me. Olivia took the child… Gwendolyn, home with her. The doctor was on hand, of course, and sent for the undertaker. I was exhausted from having been up most of two nights. A funeral was quickly arranged, and the next day I collapsed and took to bed. I have never had a robust constitution and was, in fact, quite sickly as a boy. Even as a young man I suffered from long bouts of fatigue and exhaustion. It all came rushing back and I simply fell apart—physically, emotionally, psychologically. I have no defense to offer—I fell apart.”

  “What happened?”

  “I lay in bed for almost three weeks. How much stress and depression contributed to my physical condition, who can say. Olivia already had concocted a reason to prevent my seeing the child. I should say, what she took as reason for it. To this she added the charge that I was shirking my duty, that I had turned my back on the child in its time of need, that she had whisked her away to her own house for the child’s own good.”

  “Why would she think such a thing if you had collapsed physically?”

  “There had been tensions between us for years. There was always tension between us. The child’s birth increased the conflict all the more. I’m afraid I said and did some dreadful things that only made matters worse. I had a temper back then. When I was able, I went to Olivia to bring the child home. She refused to give her to me, telling me I could never care for a child, saying that I was the cause of my wife’s death. I flew into a rage and went away. I’m afraid I left the country in anger and confusion and frustration. I had lost my wife and took it out on everyone around me. My leaving made matters far worse and I have only myself to blame. I fell sick again when traveling. I did not return to Port Scarnose for a year. By then Olivia had spread the story that I had flown into a rage both that a girl had been born rather than a boy, as well as that something seemed to be wrong with the child, which, as she grew, became more and more apparent. Probably I did say something about her being a girl as Olivia and I argued. I don’t remember—Olivia has always had a way of twisting the truth around, distorting it to something very different from the reality. By then my being gone so long had deepened the apparent truthfulness of her story. In its simplest form that story amounted to my abandoning the child and that I had gone away to another woman on the Continent, and that Olivia, out of compassion for her niece, had taken Gwendolyn in. There was a more sinister element to the story, too, which I did not even know about. I only knew that when I returned people were different toward me. I did not know why at first. But I learned the rest of the story soon enough.”

  “What was it?” I asked, almost timidly.

  “When I returned from the Continent, having been thinking all the while I was gone about what to do, I went to Olivia, assuming that I would at last retrieve my daughter. By then I had reconciled myself to the fact that I was a single father. But I thought, with the help of nurses, and Olivia as well, that I would raise Gwendolyn at the castle. I assumed that Olivia would be agreeable and would come to the castle to help me, and perhaps even that the child would continue to stay with Olivia some of the time. I suppose I did not think of all the implications of caring for a child. But I hoped with the help of others that it would be possible for her to live a somewhat normal life.

  “I was stunned to find people looking at me almost with fear in their eyes, others with loathing, turning the other way, mothers hurrying their children across the street when they saw me coming. The looks, terrible looks on people’s faces. Olivia, too, was changed. She was more cold and hard and haughty than ever before. She looked at me as if she actually believed the stories she had spread. Whether she encouraged people to believe the falsehoods directly or merely by innuendo, allowing conclusions to be drawn, I cannot say. But to my amazement I later learned that Olivia had allowed it to be circulated about that I raped my wife prior to our marriage and forced myself upon her in order to coerce her to marry me when she was actually in love with someone else. Then, discovering that she had given me a girl instead of a boy, the consensus was that moments after the birth of the child I had flown into a rage and hit her violently and was myself responsible for her death. If people actually believed such horrible things of me, they could hardly be blamed for not wanting their children around me. It was thought that my flight to the Continent, as it was viewed, was as much for the purpose of putting myself beyond the reach of the law as from fury at finding myself father to a sickly girl.”

  “Surely the attending doctor would tell what really happened,” I said.

  Alasdair smiled a bitter smile and sighed as he shook his head.

  “If only it were so simple,” he said. “People believe what they want to believe. Truth is often gray. Even the doctor’s story, to one who wanted to believe the worst, seemed to corroborate the rumors Olivia had allowed to run wild during my absense.”

  “How could that be?” I asked. “What did he say?”

  “That he left the room briefly a few minutes after the birth, that he heard a bloodcurdling scream from the open door behind him, that he ran back to find my wife unconscious, a welt swelling on her cheek obviously from a blow that had just occurred, and that he saw me bent over her bed. He said he saw nothing conclusive. But his way of recounting the story was so full of uncertainty that everyone took his story as confirming the worst. Olivia was in attendance but was also out of the room at the moment. She also heard the scream, though she said she heard my wife cry out twice. The two stories together came to be regarded with the veracity of multiple eyewitness accounts. Along with knowing looks and glances and my sister’s persuasive manner, I was damned by public opinion from the start. All the while these and other dreadful rumors were taking root in the community, I was away and unable to counter them.”

  “What really did happen?”
I asked.

  Alasdair drew in a long, deep sigh and exhaled slowly. I was almost afraid to hear what might come next.

  “It is difficult to relive those terrible events in my mind,” he said. “My whole life changed that night. My world crumbled, my fate as an outcast and pariah was sealed. If only I could forget it altogether. Yet it is always with me. In my loneliest moments I even despise myself.”

  I waited, still fearful of what might be coming.

  Alasdair drew in another breath. “The labor was long and hard,” he said. “My poor wife spent what remained of her life getting little Gwendolyn into this world safely. She cried out all through it. What the doctor heard was but one of a hundred cries of an excruciating labor. It was probably ten minutes after the birth. Everyone in the room was resting after the ordeal. Olivia had taken the baby to clean it up and get fresh linens and towels. I thought my wife had dozed off. Suddenly a horrific cry sounded from the bed. My eyes shot open and I jumped to my feet. Her face was contorted in pain. She seemed trying to speak but was obviously suffering too much to get anything out. Her hand was on the side of her stomach. Suddenly she lurched up in the bed in yet greater agony, pushed herself up, shrieked out again, twisted her body halfway round, then collapsed back. As she did, the side of her face slammed hard against the bedpost. By then I was at the bedside as Olivia and the doctor rushed back into the room. The doctor saw immediately that she was unconscious and set about trying to revive her. Within thirty minutes he pronounced her dead.”

  I could not prevent a sharp breath of astonishment escaping my lips. I felt such agony for Alasdair. His eyes were full of tears and pain.

  “I was in such a stupor that I hardly thought to question what was going on. I had no idea that I would later, if not actually be accused of murder, at least by implication find the blame for her death laid at my doorstep. It was not until I tried desperately to piece together in my mind what had actually taken place that I became aware of what Dr. Mair and Olivia were permitting to fester through the community in my year’s absence. By then, of course, my reputation was in tatters and Olivia was spreading tales about me that have persisted until this day. Eventually a family curse came into it, and much from our past—things I had done as a child that confirmed my sadistic tendencies. Olivia has a method of communication that is measured and calm—mesmerizing in its own way.”