‘I don’t give a monkey’s about nudity, as you know. We’re visitors and it’s just not good manners. I happen to think manners matter.’
‘Is the kettle boiling dry for any special reason?’
They were drinking tea in silence when Una returned, her hair like seaweed, her keen-boned, ship’s-figurehead face flushed from the cold.
‘It was heavenly,’ she said, ‘the water.’
Beth, doubting this, said, ‘There’s tea in the pot.’
‘Darling,’ Una said, ‘how lovely. I’ll have a bath first, if I may?’
‘Now she’s taking all the hot water,’ Beth said, as they heard water run into the bath.
The phone rang, making them both jump, and Hamish answered quickly, assuming a breezy tone.
‘Hello there.’
‘Morning, squire. I’m off over to Seil. Want anything?’
‘Oh, Andy. Good morning.’ Hamish made a face at Beth. ‘Do we want anything?’ he asked, covering the phone.
‘Drink,’ Beth said. ‘Lashings of it.’
‘You talk to him.’
Beth took the phone and said, ‘Good morning, Andy. Yes, thank you, we’re fine. It would be good if you could bring … oh? Well, that’s very kind. Yes, thank you, I’d like to. When should I be there?’
‘I’m going with him,’ she said blithely to Hamish. ‘He’s picking me up at the landing-stage.’
‘There was no need for that.’
‘I know there wasn’t,’ Beth said. ‘I thought you might like some time by yourself –’
As she was leaving, his phone signalled the arrival of a text. ‘Better get that,’ Beth said. ‘Might be your assistant about your new project.’ Her eyes showed the ironical gleam he hated. ‘I’ll let you know when I’m on the way back.’
In her Fair Isle jersey, she looked pitifully young. Hamish had a sudden urge to yell something nice after her but could only think of ‘Hey, remember antihistamine.’
‘Darling,’ said Una. ‘Do stop fretting. I’m fine.’
It wasn’t his mother he was fretting over. Nicky had texted that she would call him in ten minutes. While he could have managed, just about, a dialogue with Nick in front of Beth, a coded conversation in the presence of his mother was impossible. She had, he remembered all too uncomfortably from childhood, a code-breaker’s mind.
‘All right if I go for a saunter?’ he asked.
Una didn’t bother to answer. She was apparently lost in Robert Louis Stevenson.
Hamish walked along the cliff top. The wind hurtling off the sea made his nose run. However could his mother bathe in this temperature? Beth was right. It was showing off. He took the phone from his pocket and inspected it for missed calls. Nothing. He walked on past a cluster of sheep which stood staring after him with mild, incurious faces.
At the head of the bluff, he was about to turn to retrace his steps when he saw a figure just below where the path dipped, and then branched inland. It was a woman wearing what at first looked like a long grey cloak, but, on moving closer, Hamish saw that it was a blanket. It had red stitching round its hem, like the old hospital blankets, and was fastened below her neck with a large safety pin, giving the woman the appearance of some ancient warrior queen of legend.
‘Hi.’ In the light of this impression, the greeting was unexpected. Her voice was soft and youthful, though she looked well over middle age. ‘I’m Pegotty.’
‘Hi, I’m Hamish.’
‘I’m the hermit,’ the woman said. ‘Perhaps they’ve told you.’
Hamish was spared the puzzle of how to reply to this by the bass buzzing of the phone in his pocket. The woman gave him a magisterial nod and walked on.
‘Hi, Nick.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Out. I went for a walk.’
‘Escaping her?’
‘Beth’s not here. It was my mother I was escaping.’
‘Oh,’ Nicky said. She sounded regretful that it was not his wife he needed to flee from.
‘I’ve just met a hermit,’ he said, for something to say.
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘It’s a she,’ Hamish said.
‘You’re joking!’
‘No. She introduced herself.’
‘What’s she called?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hamish said. He didn’t feel like going into the hermit’s odd name.
‘Probably sex starved. Bet she’ll try to get her leg over.’
‘She’s sixty if she’s a day. She looks like Old Mother Hubbard. She was wearing a blanket.’
‘An old hippy.’
‘Probably.’ The hermit, who he had hoped might be a diversion, was proving to be an impediment. ‘How’s the builder?’
‘Not here. No one’s here but me.’
‘Fuck!’
‘I wish.’
‘You’d better ring him.’
‘You ring him,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m just the assistant. It’s the boss has to kick arse.’
The builder explained that his wife’s hip was bad and he was having to mind the kids while she lay down. He was going to send Kevin over later that day with a gang of men to start the job off. They would like Kevin, he assured Hamish. Kevin was reliable. (Here Hamish had to stifle the suggestion that what was conveyed by this was that the builder himself wasn’t.) The builder himself would look in tomorrow, always providing the hip wasn’t still giving the wife gyp, in which case he’d have to run her over to the doctor’s.
Hamish rang Nicky back. ‘His wife’s done something to her leg so he’s having to mind the children. He’s sending someone over later today.’
‘How late? I don’t believe it anyway. What’s the matter with her leg?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hamish. ‘Actually, it’s her hip.’
‘You said leg.’
‘I’ll ring him and ask him to ring your mobile when this other man is on his way.’
‘I don’t want to be here all day.’
‘No,’ said Hamish. ‘I’ll tell him to call. The other man’s name is Kevin, by the way.’
He was coming down a steep drop, thinking that this must be as good for the hamstrings as the gym, when he almost ran into the hermit. She was sitting on the phone-booth rock, looking out to sea. Hamish, not knowing what the etiquette with hermits was, wondered if he should walk by. But she gave a welcoming smile.
‘It’s all right. It’s only other people’s houses I don’t go into.’
‘I wasn’t sure. I’ve not met a … er, before.’
‘Not many have. We’re thin on the ground. Like a Polo?’ She offered him a stub of green-and-silver paper.
‘Thanks.’ Hamish, who disliked mint, but didn’t want to seem churlish, took one.
‘You must be holidaying here.’
‘Yes. With my wife. And my mother.’ He had a sudden awkward vision of the hermit meeting Una and mistaking her for his wife.
The hermit pulled a far from pious face. ‘Brave man. Or perhaps you like your mother?’
‘Not really,’ said Hamish, feeling the pleasure and remorse of honest confession. ‘But my stepfather’s just died so –’
‘She parked herself on you?’
‘I guess.’
‘I long ago decided that guilt is nature’s way of preventing us from killing our parents. I can’t see the evolutionary point of it otherwise. Of course, Freud would say that the causal link is the other way round. A reaction to the wish to bump them off. I disagree.’ She spoke with a careful diction, as if she were delivering a lesson to deaf children.
‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ Hamish said. It wasn’t the sort of conversation he was used to.
The hermit explained: ‘I was a psychologist once.’
‘Oh.’
‘I can’t help thinking about people when I meet them. It’s why I have to live alone. To stop myself.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Sometimes,’ the hermit said, leaning for
ward to rub her shins. She pushed herself up stiffly from her rocky base. Under some mud-stained black trousers, she had on odd-coloured socks, one grey wool, one electric-blue. Her eyes, which were not quite true, were a strange mix of blue and hazel. ‘I’ve got slightly better at it over the years.’ She looked at Hamish with her orthogonal eyes. ‘I’ll see you around.’
Beth felt the cleansing breeze of a reclaimed freedom as Andy raced the boat at full tilt across the strait. She didn’t mind a bit that he was speeding in order to impress her. Hamish had taken a dislike to Andy, so she had decided that she would get along with him.
‘Been married long?’ he shouted suddenly.
‘What?’ Beth’s eyes were busy patrolling the dark grey water for seals.
‘You and hubby. Been together long?’
‘Seven years,’ Beth shouted back into the roar.
‘No kids?’
‘Not so far.’
‘Be coming up to the seven-year itch, then,’ Andy suggested, squinting into the sun with an undisguised leer.
Hamish, on the rock which the hermit had vacated, was fielding calls like flung stones. Kevin had not arrived or rung, the builder was not answering his phone and as far as Nicky was concerned the whole lot of them could go and fuck themselves. She had cut her phone off just as a shadow fell on to the path, and looking up he saw the enigmatic face of his mother.
She smiled down, detached and inquiring, and he said, angry at having to explain himself at all, ‘This bloody job. Trying to sort it from here is driving me mad.’
‘Poor darling,’ said his mother. She continued to look down on him with her ambiguous little half-smile. She was wearing a thin black nylon jacket of a type that only the unsophisticated would imagine inexpensive.
‘It’s my job,’ he said, as if answering a reproach. ‘I’m the architect and he’s paying me handsomely. Very. I’m going to have to go back down to London to see to this mess. It’s urgent, but Beth won’t understand.’
‘Poor lamb,’ said Una. ‘What a bore.’
Hamish had a terrible apprehension that at any moment he might begin to cry. ‘I don’t think Beth’s got any idea how tough it is out there.’ He knew this to be untrue. Beth, while concerned to protect her holiday, was soberly worldly-wise.
His mother, still looking down on him, put out her hand, a gesture which produced an instinctive recoil, though, so far as he could remember, she had never hit him. The hand landed gently on the crown of his head, as if it were conferring an honour or a blessing. ‘Poor lamb,’ she repeated. ‘Shall we walk?’
They walked, his mother ahead, in single file along the cliff top. Sea pinks and strange succulents poked out at right angles down the steep cliff-face to the ragged, foaming edges of the sea. On their other side, thrush-egg harebells threaded the stiff grass. Some shorn, ascetic-looking sheep stopped munching apparently to observe their passage and then resumed their ruminations. A phrase of song drifted to his ears over his mother’s back. ‘Mary, my Scots bluebell.’ She called out to him, ‘Did you know it’s the harebell, darling?’
‘What?’ Hamish shouted back. An untreated childhood illness had left him slightly deaf in one ear. Another reason to hate her.
‘The bluebell, darling,’ said his mother, confusingly.
They had reached the point where the path descended to a fork, the place where Hamish had first met the hermit. He hoped she might show up again now. Walking behind his mother had brought back the miserable anxiety of trotting behind her as a boy. He was always, on his holiday visits to his stepfather’s luxurious and empty Zurich home, supposing he had lost her: in department stores, in parks, in car parks. Once, in the house, he had run frantically from room to room looking for her, and had found her at last, smelling of talcum powder, coming out of the bathroom wrapped in nothing but a white towel. ‘Silly darling,’ she had said, when he explained why he was crying. ‘Not “lost”, just mislaid.’
Hamish had rung Beth. ‘I’m going to have to stay down here a bit.’
‘Oh?’
‘Leo’s making sounds like he’s pulling out.’
‘Oh. Whatever you have to do.’
‘Beth. I need this. There’s slim pickings out there these days. And we have an overdraft.’
‘We?’
‘I do. The business does.’
‘I know that,’ Beth had said. ‘D’you want to talk to your mother?’
‘Not particularly. Is she behaving?’
‘She’s fine,’ Beth said, and rang off.
‘You dealt with the wife, then?’ Nicky asked.
Not liking this turn of phrase, Hamish returned it sharply. ‘Yes, I’ve “dealt” with her.’
‘No need to take that tone.’
‘What tone?’
‘That “don’t speak like that about my precious wife” tone. If you feel like that about her, why are you fucking me?’
Good question, Hamish thought, but aloud said, ‘For God’s sake, Nick, please. I’m worried about the Leo project.’
‘D’you think he’s really going to pull out?’
‘It’s possible. You know these guys, they’re flighty.’
‘We’d better get on to him, then.’
Leo was unaccountably ‘tied up’ over the next few days. Hamish went through a couple of other possible projects, none as lucrative or as likely to attract future custom. Nicky was not reassuring. She made much of Leo’s failure to return calls and was sexually demanding.
One evening, out to dinner, when he should have been enjoying their relative freedom from Beth’s proximity, Hamish received a text.
‘Shit!’
‘What?’
‘Look at that!’
Nicky read out, as if to the restaurant at large, ‘hi, sorry to keep missing you. plans changed. accountant wants me to relocate to ireland. gr8 knowing you and thanx 4 yr help. send yr invoice to martin. cheers leo.’
‘Well, I did say.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said it was mad to go away when you did.’
‘Oh, great. Thanks Nicky.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Paying the bill, he said, ‘Look, I need to go back to the house tonight.’
‘Sure, I’ll come too.’
‘No, Nick. I can’t have you at the house.’
‘Worried what the neighbours’ll say?’
‘No. Not really. It’s Beth’s house too.’
‘Oh, yeah, I get it. Running home to Mummy?’
‘Beth’s not my mother.’
‘You sure?’
But maybe she was right, Hamish thought, lying sleepless in the comfortable matrimonial bed. Beth’s pyjama bottoms were still under her pillow. They smelt reassuringly of her herbal bath stuff. Sweet but not too sweet. Natural. She was natural. And naturally kind. Very kind.
Later that night, when sleep was still avoiding him, in the small hours, when even those with tunnel vision may see over their shoulders, he got up and made himself a cup of Beth’s herbal tea. He had been in the habit of mocking her for these. ‘Teasing’, he had called it when she had rounded on him. ‘Only teasing. Where’s your sense of humour?’ ‘You know what?’ she’d snapped back. ‘That’s what all sadists say. “Only teasing.”’
Was he a sadist? Maybe he was. Maybe he attacked Beth because she was maternal. Because she provided what his mother never had.
On an impulse he rang Beth but her phone was switched off. A wave of shocking loneliness swept through him and he hugged the pyjamas closer. Dear Beth. He almost wept thinking of how kind she had been to him over the years. She had stuck by him faithfully and he had treated her shabbily. He missed her. He would ‘deal with’ Nicky and make it up to Beth. Tomorrow he would go back to their holiday. Take her for walks. Make love to her. With Beth there even the thought of his mother seemed a comforting prospect.
Andy met Hamish with the boat.
‘Been having fun in London, then?’
‘It was wor
k, actually.’ His foot nudged a cigarette end. Lipstick stained.
It had been work. Too nervous to call Nicky to announce his departure, he had texted her with vague words about seeing her on his return and she had responded with predictable venom.
‘How long you been gone, then?’ Andy was revving up the motor with his customary violence.
‘Just over a week.’ More cigarette ends, red from his mother’s smiling lips.
‘More like ten days.’
‘Nine, actually.’
It was possible Nicky might pull some stunt. A ‘suicide’. She had half threatened it once before. Or, worse, tell Beth. Hatred swept over him as he contemplated this. If she did fucking well attempt suicide he could only pray she succeeded.
‘Girls been having fun on their own, I reckon.’
‘I hope so.’ Not too likely. Poor Beth. Stuck with his mother. He would enjoy making it up to her. If only he’d thought to bring her a present. He’d given Nicky so many gifts and grudged Beth even her simple wish to buy new curtains for the bedroom.
Andy winked a canny, red-rimmed eye and nodded at his binoculars. ‘Reckon they have. While the cat’s away, yeah …?’
The cottage, when Hamish reached it – breathing hard with his excitement of getting back and his eagerness to be reunited with Beth – was empty. On the table in the kitchen was his mother’s copy of Kidnapped and beside it a chessboard apparently left mid-game.
He remembered now that his mother had tried to teach him one summer, but he had been too nervous of misunderstanding the rules to learn properly. She had abandoned the attempt with ‘Never mind, darling, you haven’t got a chess mind. Not everyone has.’
But Beth, did she play chess? Not to his knowledge. Never with him, certainly.
He looked into the bedroom. Both beds were neatly made. The house seemed too quiet. The tidy kitchen, the washed crockery on the draining board and the vase of wild flowers on the mantelpiece offered no clue to the whereabouts of any occupants.
A little way along the cliff path he saw the hermit ahead of him. He called out a greeting and she turned and waved cheerily and yelled back something incomprehensible. He quickened his pace, meaning to catch up with her, for, suddenly, he felt in need of a friendly soul, but she disappeared over a heathery mound.
The Boy Who Could See Death Page 15
