Beth and Hamish followed him. The rutted track went steeply upwards and then ran along the cliff top. Below them, massive breakers were thrashing the rocks for dear life. A butterfly made a crazy chalk-blue zigzag across the heather.
‘I’m happy,’ Beth called back over her shoulder.
Tough heather stalks were assaulting Hamish’s ankles. His socks provided no protection from the midges. Already he could feel a blister forming where his left shoe pinched. They reached a solitary white-painted cottage, where Andy pushed open the door, trundled in the trolley and proceeded to dump the contents on to the floor. ‘There you are, then.’ He made as if to walk off.
‘What about heat, light and so on?’ Hamish asked.
‘S’all over there on the notice. Heating’s Calor, spare’s under the sink. Firewood and coal’s in the shed round the back. Ferry goes once a day, ’cept Thursdays. If you need to shop other times, give us a ring. Me mobile’s on top of the notice. Me dad don’t have one but his phone’s on the notice too. Ta-ta for now.’
‘I brought our leftovers. We can have the cold sausages and I’ll do some potatoes. It’s nice, isn’t it?’ Beth asked, willing herself, unsuccessfully, not to plead.
Hamish was staring out of the kitchen window. ‘It feels damp.’
‘A fire’ll soon change that.’
‘It’ll take more than a fire to cure this.’
‘But the view’s fabulous.’
‘If you like unrelieved vistas of ocean.’
‘Are you going to find nothing but fault with the house as well as with me?’ Beth asked.
She walked into the bedroom and began to make up the bed. The sheets were damp. Hamish was right. Her head began to fill with the familiar maggots of despair. ‘What is the point?’ she asked herself aloud. ‘Nothing’s right.’ And nothing will ever make it right, the maggots voicelessly murmured. She looked about for a hot-water bottle and found one in the bathroom. Mentally, she held the warm perished rubber to her belly, vainly hoping to keep the maggots at bay.
‘I’ll put a bottle in the bed to take the chill off,’ she said, sounding to herself like her own mother. ‘Look, there’re games here,’ she said, pulling out a drawer of the dresser. ‘Scrabble and chess and so on.’
‘I hate board games. Have you brought the antihistamine cream? I’m being eaten alive by these bloody midges.’
Beth, who always packed antihistamine, Lomotil, paracetamol, TCP and Savlon, against Hamish’s hypochondria, said, ‘Damn. It was that row about your mother. I forgot to pack it.’
‘Shit.’
‘Why don’t you bring your own bloody antihistamine? It’s you who gets bitten. I’m going for a walk.’
The path stretched beyond the cottage along the cliff top. A little way along, Beth stopped to examine a vertiginous track down to the cove below. A patch of gleaming sand was appearing beneath the irregular recession of glass-green and milk-white waves. Beth thought, He might push me over right here and I wouldn’t care.
‘We could swim there tomorrow,’ she said, as Hamish caught her up.
‘Too rough.’ The waves were punishing the rocks with professional violence. Scotland had been Beth’s idea. Hamish had a hunch that she had tried to reach him through sentiment for his Scottish father – his father lost so long ago that he was at best a regret for an absence of feeling.
Beth said, ‘I’ll go back and put the potatoes on.’
‘I’ll walk on a bit if that’s okay.’
What if it isn’t? Beth thought.
The cottage, as she arrived at the door, looked bleak, its whitewash rusty and discoloured. The pale blue window frames, flaking from the assault of wind and brine, put her in mind of Andy’s sleep-caked eyes. The prospect of the coming evening with Hamish was alarming. Almost she welcomed his mother’s pending presence.
Hamish was up early to be at the airport. He rang Nicky, aware that it was partly to get it over with.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
When did we start saying ‘Hi’? he wondered. Was it the war?
‘You okay, Nick?’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh, why?’ Hamish saw Andy’s contemptuous smile.
‘I miss you.’
‘Miss you too, babe.’
‘Hurry back.’
‘I’ll do my best.’ Though that is never quite good enough for women, he reflected.
The arrival of his mother’s plane was announced as ‘On time’ and against his own wishes he began to feel excitement. It was seven, no, eight years since he had seen her. Only phone calls at Christmas hung between that last meeting, like paper lanterns at a garden party, whose ‘light’ is purely theoretical. She never rang on his birthday. He doubted she remembered it. Very likely, she had chosen to forget it, eliminating her only child’s birthday as a way of ablating her own.
She must be nearly fifty. Beth, when she had first met his mother, said that she looked like his elder sister. But they were polite, both of them, the two women in his life. When they had met last, when he and Beth had stopped on their way back from the Italian lakes and spent the night in Zurich, the two women had performed together as if expertly choreographed, what was unspoken between them creating its own strange bond.
A hand touched his shoulder so lightly that he jumped.
‘Darling.’
‘Mother.’
‘“Mother”, darling?’ The humorous note deputized for reproach.
‘Sorry. It’s been a long time.’
He looked at his mother’s face, trying to find, as he always did on their rare reunions, some clue to the consuming hopelessness she kindled in him. Tall, her hair still its natural colour, naturally blonde, with a few silver threads co-mingling with the gold, in khaki trousers hugging hipbones a teenager would have been proud of, a little silk cardigan slung over narrow shoulders, she still looked – what? He was uneasily aware that had she not been his mother he might have found her desirable.
‘Is this all your luggage?’ He could not yet quite bring himself to use the name she had insisted on when he was a small child. ‘Una, darling, not “Mum”, please.’
‘I always travel light. I take all my luggage as “hand”.’
Her case was light too: a chic Swiss affair with super-efficient wheels. Really, she should be running some multinational company. ‘You should be running ICI or something.’
‘Darling, you are sweet.’
He’d forgotten her knack for turning even an intentional insult into a clever compliment.
As he started the car, his mobile rang. ‘Has she landed?’
Covering the phone, he said, falsely genial, ‘All safe and sound.’
‘How is she?’
‘Fine.’
‘We forgot to bring any wine. Can you buy some?’
He wanted to say, Are you drinking already? But said instead, ‘How much shall I get?’
‘Enough to drown her in preferably. and then me,’ Beth said, and rang off.
‘That was Beth.’ It was probably only in his imagination that his mother’s expression became amused. Her natural set of her mouth was a faint, cat-like smile.
‘How is Beth, darling?’
‘Beth’s good.’ Beth is good, he thought and felt a pang.
‘I’m longing to see her.’ Una lit a cigarette. ‘It’s sweet of you both to ask me to stay.’
We didn’t ask you, Hamish thought. ‘Una, would you mind, only Beth doesn’t like smoke in the car.’
His mother opened the window, made as if to throw her cigarette out and then said, ‘But I mustn’t start a fire. Where would you like me to put it, darling?’
‘Oh, finish it, it doesn’t matter – I can open the windows to air the car.’
They drove in silence. The outskirts of Glasgow gave way to lowlands, which in turn gave place to rolling heights, swathed in muted purple and russet and green. Coming to the gleaming edge of Loch Lomond, his mother said, ‘I hope they never find it.
’
Irritated that he knew what she was referring to, Hamish feigned obtuseness. ‘Find what?’
‘I imagine the monster having some terribly deep lair. Don’t you wish you had one, darling?’
He didn’t feel like explaining that she had confused the lochs. ‘Would you like some music? This is the latest by a new client of mine. Leo Jones.’ The lead singer of the band ‘Pard’ had commissioned Hamish as architect to redo his new house. It was a big contract and, with Nicky’s tastes to cater for, as well as a mortgage, he needed it.
‘Darling, how marvellous.’
It was unclear whether she meant the job or the music, but ‘Pard’ saw them through another fifty miles while Una slept.
She looked older sleeping. She must dread growing old. Hamish wished he could reassure her that it was not the face and figure which counted but the personality, the heart. But that wasn’t so. Or it hadn’t been so for him and Beth.
‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road,’ said his mother, waking suddenly.
Hamish braked sharply, mistaking this for an instruction. Behind them, a lorry’s hooter bellowed a warning.
‘For me and my true love will never meet again/On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond,’ Una continued, singing now. Her voice was a fine contralto, unforced. ‘Of course it wasn’t Ness at all. I was muddling the lochs. Silly of me.’ Hamish was disarmed further when she added, ‘Your father sang that to me the night he died. I say “sang”, though he could hardly speak, poor lamb. But I heard the words.’
‘He was conscious?’
‘In and out. I came here with him, you know?’
‘Where?’
‘Quite near here.’
‘But where near?’ Not, please God, Hamish prayed, to the island. His mother had always had a touch of the uncanny about her.
‘Loch Fyne. They smoke fish wonderfully. We stayed in a tiny hotel with the sweetest people running it. Our bed was diabolically soft and the bath water was brown as mud. Alastair was terribly worried about it, but I told him it would be wonderful for the skin. It’s the peat.’
‘What?’
‘The brown.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Hamish said. A fugitive image of his father dissolved into a memory of Beth on their wedding night standing by a faux-Victorian bath, with taps shaped as swans, crying. ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘The water in the cottage here is brown.’
‘Terrifically good for our skins, darling.’
As they crossed the old bridge, his mother lit another cigarette. Hamish hesitated, then left this unremarked. It was not far now to the head of the island. The ferry would have left and Andy would, if he had followed instructions, be waiting. Hamish thought: I could knock him down and drive the car straight into the harbour. I wonder how long we’d float before we’d drown?
‘Almost there,’ he said cheerily.
Andy was polite in Una’s company. She offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with an almost civil expression of gratitude. He took them across the strait at full lick and dropped them at the landing-stage, promising to return the following morning for any ‘errands’. Hamish, who suspected this was nosiness rather than any desire to help, rejected the offer, but Andy repeated that he would be ‘passing anyway’ so he ‘might as well’.
‘Where do you live, Andy?’ His mother’s voice sounded authentically interested.
‘Round that cove, there.’ He waved a casual lobster hand. ‘Me and me brother lives there. Me dad lives up by the hermit’s.’
‘A hermit? Hamish, darling, how exciting. I’ve always had a faint yen to become a hermit.’
But Andy had started the motor and was maniacally roaring away, either deafened by the boat’s engine or pretending not to hear.
Beth met them at the door, wearing a blue apron covered in ancient bleach spots, which she’d found, she said, hanging in a cupboard in the kitchen. Hamish’s suspicions that this was part of some play act were confirmed when she produced macaroni cheese, followed by apple crumble.
Una, with cries of ‘How lovely, darling!’, pushed the macaroni around the plate, ate two pieces of tomato and made a few dabs at the apple smouldering beneath molten crumble.
‘Would you like some custard, Una? Bird’s best.’ Beth was apparently enjoying playing the part of a substandard cook.
‘Darling, it was delicious. May I look round?’ Una had gone into their bedroom without waiting for an answer.
‘Charming,’ she called to them. ‘Clever things. You have done well finding this.’
Beth, coming into the room behind her, said, ‘You can hear the sea at night.’ She had heard it flailing against the impervious rocks, out of time with her own surging heart.
I hate you, I hate you, Una, she thought. It’s you have made him like this, cowed and cowardly. Aloud she said, ‘If you lean out and twist your head, you can see the sea down to the right.’
‘We joined the navy to see the world/And what did we see? We saw the sea,’ Hamish sang jauntily, joining them. He pushed open the stiff metal-framed window for Una, who leant out. ‘You can almost smell the air doing you good,’ he suggested.
‘What you whispering for?’ Nicky wanted to know.
‘My mother’s here.’
‘What, there now?’
‘I’m just going out!’ Hamish called to a solitary sheep, his hand over the phone. He was crouched, leeward of the wind, behind a rock.
Nicky giggled, encouraged by this apparent display of recklessness. ‘What’s she like, your mum?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, she’s my mother.’
‘Does she look like you?’
‘I’m supposed to look like my father.’
‘Short and dark and hairy?’
‘Thanks for the vote of appreciation.’
‘Little men are sexier,’ said Nicky. From her success in ruffling him, she knew she had recovered ground. ‘They have more testosterone. It’s a scientific fact. I read it in one of the Sundays. When you coming back?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hamish said. ‘If you ring me with some crisis about the house, I can probably swing it to come. What’s the news there anyway?’
When he returned to the cottage, Beth was on her knees trying to light a fire. Seeing her kneeling on the bit of tatty old carpet on the stone floor, patiently feeding the firelighter’s faint blue flame, he felt compunction. He bustled about making a business of collecting wood and coal from the shed, wondering how they were going to fill the time.
His mother lay on the sofa, reading. He envied her tranquillity, the effortless way she ignored the trivia of everyday life. Was it that she had always been pampered, or that she had been pampered because her character enlisted the unquestioned support of any environment in which she found herself?
‘What are you reading, Una?’
‘Kidnapped.’
If she had said, ‘Kierkegaard’ he would have been less surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have reckoned on you as a boys’ adventure girl.’
‘I’m reading all Stevenson. Your father used to read him aloud to me.’
‘Really?’ She could easily be making this up. You could never tell with Una. God knew what story she was going to weave about Stefan, now his earthly presence had finally been removed and with it any corresponding constraints on the truth.
Beth said, ‘Hamish, did you get the wine?’
‘Hell, I forgot. And the antihistamine.’
Later that night, Beth rolled cautiously towards Hamish down the pitched mattress.
‘Not with her next door, Bethy. The walls are very thin.’
They both lay assuming sleep, aware of the vast chasm that opens so easily between the closest physical proximities.
When Beth woke next morning, the sun was spinning a tissue of light through the curtain and on to the glass-topped dressing table. Fragments of sunbeam winked and quavered as the curtain filled in the mild breeze. Beside her, Hamish, in his tartan nightshirt, his cheeks pink and soft
with sleep, resembled a big bristly baby. Observing his pillowed face, she felt none of the usual knives of hatred: no emotion, no passion, no nostalgia. Nothing. How could you feel nothing? She might have had a cardiac lobotomy for all the feeling in her heart.
She eased her hips out of bed, and moved quietly across the room. Una was already in the kitchen, lighting the stove amid the sinister anaesthetic smell of Calor gas. It looked as if she had nothing on under her towelling dressing gown.
‘Were you warm enough, Una?’
‘Snug as a bug, darling.’
‘There are more blankets in our wardrobe.’
Una made a dismissive gesture. Beth noticed that she had shed the diamond rings she had arrived with and was now wearing only a plain platinum band. The hands were Hamish’s – long and brown with clean, well-manicured nails. ‘More blankets and I’d suffocate. I’m putting this on for tea but I’m going for a swim first.’
‘Really?’
‘Come too?’
‘I don’t want to disturb Hamish. My costume’s in the bedroom,’ Beth said, not at all wanting to swim.
‘Don’t wear one. I’m not.’ Una exposed a polished brown shoulder.
‘Oh,’ Beth said. She didn’t want to appear prudish but swimming naked! Scotland wasn’t the South of France. Trust Una. Why did she have to be so different?
‘There’s no one to see,’ Una said, reading her thoughts.
‘Maybe another time,’ Beth said. ‘I’ll make the tea so it’s ready when you get back. You’ll need it.’ And, ‘Be careful,’ she couldn’t help calling out. ‘The path down to the cove looks treacherously steep.’
‘Who are you shouting at?’
‘Your mother,’ Beth said. ‘She’s gone off to swim stark naked.’
‘She always did swim naked if she could,’ he recalled.
‘It’s showing off. This isn’t St Tropez. What’ll the natives think?’
‘What’ll the neighbours say?’
Hamish had once played Dai Bread in a production of Under Milk Wood at university. He trotted out this tired old quote, Beth thought, whenever he wanted to suggest she was being conventional.
The Boy Who Could See Death Page 14
