He was soon out of sight of the pub and slipping into the garden, where the high wall hid him from the whole island. He walked carefully over the flagstones, taking the time to remember the flowers that rose each spring, noting that his mother’s secateurs still lay in the grass by the daffodil beds, neglected, forlorn. Otherwise, everything was as it should be. Pristine. Even after winter, the whitewashed walls of the house remained white, with no flakes to be seen. The windows gleamed back the late morning like quicksilver in prim frames. There were no weeds between the flagstones where he walked, nor in any of the flower beds; the runner beans ran up their canes from a flawless rectangle of peaty brown soil. Were they expecting him, he would have thought that they had spent days preparing the perfect scene for their reunion. But he had given no word about his return.
The back door was ajar and he had only to caress it with his free hand for it to fall open upon the kitchen. Mary did not look up for a moment, as if the presence of another did not surprise her. He cleared his throat, offered a greeting and a smile, and waited for his sister’s thoughts to re-enter her body. Then there were smiles and embraces, and all of the curled and barbed things that both had held so tightly moments before fell away.
‘Sorry, I was miles way. Must’ve been dreaming.’
She ushered him inside, took his bag and was jolted by its weight. Seated now, he watched her pour out tea for the two of them.
‘That’s odd, because I haven’t dreamt at all, not for days. First time since I can remember. Nothing. Not since I got that.’
He nodded towards the bag by the back door. Mary stopped, the milk jug hovering still over a cup, and flicked her head between Fergus and the leather holdall. Her lips quivered and her nostrils flared slightly.
‘You got it? And it’s in there? It’s that heavy? Of course it is. My god, I didn’t even think, I was so happy to see you. Can I…’
She didn’t wait and was on her knees before the question had trailed into nothingness. Clothes and books spilled from the leathery mouth and onto the floor, an unruly setting for this rarest of gems. Her freneticism collapsed into calm wonder. Cautiously, Mary brushed her fingertips across the smooth surface, tracing the ancient cut to the centre of the cross. With an effort she lifted the stone out of the bag and onto the table; she laid her cheek beside her cup and simply watched, waiting for something to transpire.
‘How is he? I couldn’t tell, not from what mum said. But dad, he wanted me to come home urgent. Whether I’d got the stone or not. So.’
The delight creased from Mary’s face and she straightened in her chair. A hand still rested lightly on the stone, but otherwise her full attention was marshalled into answering her brother.
‘It’s not good. He looks terrible. And the sounds. When he coughs it sounds like his body is going to rip apart. The doctor is due over tomorrow again, so we should know more. But I don’t think he’ll last the week, Fergus.’
He’d known, of course. The knowing had borne down on him all week. But that did not slow the tears now. There were no convulsions, just quiet streaks that ran rapidly to his jaw and dropped disconsolate into his collar. Neither spoke until they had dried.
‘I should go up and see him. Take him this. Maybe it will lift him. Give him hope.’
Mary did not join him on the stairs, but stayed in her seat, content to grant him this moment. She heard his heavy tread on the steps, the creaking of the house under the weight of the stone and its favoured son. Once she was sure that he had closed the bedroom door behind him, she pulled on her trainers and slipped from the kitchen and out into the day. The bells from the church began to peal as she pulled the garden gate onto its latch.
Fergus watched his grandfather’s narrow chest stutter under the covers. His face was wan, lifeless, but his eyes flickered under papery lids. The stone became heavy in his arms and, as quietly as he could, he placed it on the wooden chair beside the bed, as if it were the visitor, not he. He waited. Through his socks and the threadbare rug, he could feel the twists and rises of the floor boards, could feel them squirm beneath his toes. All the years that they had lain here, and yet they still shifted, still sought that place of perfect repose.
The bed sheets whispered between themselves and slowly Fingal stirred from empty sleep. Fergus waited until his eyes were fully open and he had hauled himself a fraction up in bed, until he was fully in the world, before greeting his grandfather. The broad smile that he offered in return horrified Fergus, the gums were pulled back so far. Yet he offered his own calm happiness, careful not to reflect his grandfather’s decline.
‘I got it granddad. The stone. I brought it home. For you.’
Kneeling on the floor, between the bed and the chair, Fergus told Fingal about his journey south, about Maltravers and about the break-in. He talked about the new friends he had gained and the old friend he had lost at last; how big were the buildings, how constant the noise and the life of the city; the novelty of snow in April. While he described how they had found it on a table high above the city, he placed Fingal’s hand on the stone: the fingers curled into its curve and brittle yellow nails skated on its skin. Fingal seemed to strengthen, to sit up further, to be more present. He asked questions, and nodded or shook his head at the answers he received. Slowly, the audience became a conversation, such as it ever had been, and the old savoured the vitality of the young, while the young drew deeply on the accumulations of age. Only when the ending of brief laughter by violent coughing reminded them both of the world as it had lately been and as it must be again, soon enough, did Fergus retreat into silence momentarily.
‘Granddad, don’t worry if you don’t, but do you recognise this?’
Fingal closed up the handkerchief trembling in his hand and looked at the pendant turning slowly on a coarse chain. Squinting, he took the small gold block between the thumb and forefinger of his free hand, which trembled at the exertion. As he held it, he disappeared once more, not into sickness but into some other place or time, and only slowly did he return. A pale tongue ran along his emaciated lip, but it gave no moisture.
‘Where did you find it, son?’
Fingal did not look at his grandson as he asked his question, but rather kept his eyes on the pendant. His face had lost again the vitality that Fergus’s return had given him.
‘Mr Duncannon. Before I left. He gave it to me. Said it rightly belonged to me. Gave it me for luck, he said. Granddad, do you know what it is? Is it something to do with grandma?’
‘Duncannon. No, Fergus, I’m sorry; I can’t think what it is. I’ve never seen it before. Bloody Duncannon. Why he has to make up stories like this, filling your head with nonsense. Always a trouble maker, that one.’
The voice contained a ferocity that seemed unlikely to have come from so frail a body. He had let the pendant hang loose now, but had still not looked at his grandson, instead turning his head to the window, to the sky and the world beyond. Fergus wrestled with what he should say next, certain that his grandfather was lying, but unsure whether he should defy him, after all these years, now, today, here on his death bed. The wheezing took the decision from him and he could instead soothe the old man while the coughing wracked his body.
When the convulsions had subsided, Fergus let his grandfather return to his rest. With the pendant in his pocket, he lifted the stone into his arms and headed to the door. Behind him Fingal mumbled something in his incipient slumber, but when he turned around, all was peaceful. He pulled the door to with his foot and started a careful descent of the staircase.
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A murmur of voices leaked beneath the kitchen door into the hallway. Men’s voices too: he had left his grandfather in his bed and since he had heard his father upstairs, making deals with heaven behind the bedroom door, Fergus knew that there must be others in the house. He allowed the cursing stone to bow his spine a little as he exhaled wearily, reconciling himself to what lay beyond, then pushed against the door with his back, sliding it easily from its
worn latch. As the wood gave way, he span slowly into the room. He stood for a moment in the threshold, the stone pulling at its cradle in his arms.
The voices fell silent at his appearance and everyone turned towards his framed form. His mother regarded him with barely contained joy, while the Reverend Drummond and Mary watched with pride. Mr Galbraith stared only at the stone, and Mr and Mrs MacLeod presented their best smiles, lifelessly. Even Duncannon was there, hiding by the back door, his eyes furtive, mobile, fluttering from the boy to the stone to his feet. Fergus looked from one face to the other, but Shona was nowhere to be found.
‘Put that rock down, my love, and give your old mother a kiss.’
Morag patted the kitchen table with her palm and waited impatiently while her son placed the heavy stone onto the table top. Then, as soon as he was free, she pulled him to her. She allowed herself three jolting sobs before releasing him grudgingly to the handshakes and congratulations, which even Mr MacLeod was able to summon up. Galbraith and Drummond wanted to know everything about the journey and about the recovery of the stone, but their enquiries came so fast and were so uncontrolled that their words tied around each other, smothering every question before Fergus had a chance to feel his way towards an answer. Instead he merely looked from one to the other with each new enquiry, his mouth hanging a little ajar, his eyes drifting always to the door. It was in part because of this that, above the commotion and excitement, he found the calm of Duncannon’s face so often. The hermit asked no questions, which was to be expected, but nor did he melt into the fervour of the moment. Quietly, he gazed at the stone on the kitchen table, contemplative, beatific.
‘She’s on her way, hen. She got up late this morning, so wasn’t in church. She’s making herself lovely for you, quick as she can.’
Mrs MacLeod had followed the boy’s eyes to where her daughter should surely appear and she smiled broadly as the concern melted from Fergus’s face. Happy that her putative son-in-law was still more interested in her daughter than the rock, she reached up to kiss his cheek, hands clasped to his broad shoulders. Fergus blushed.
The aimless inquisition continued. Eventually, Galbraith was able to form a solid question and asked it so solidly that even the Reverend paused so that it might be answered. He stood squarely in front of Fergus, his left arm and open hand trailing to where the stone sat behind him. For the first time, his eyes rested solely on the boy and were followed by the eyes of the others, who waited patiently for him to respond to this, the question at the nub of the matter.
‘I didn’t convince him, exactly. I tried, with both reason and righteousness. But Mr Maltravers isn’t a man to deal fairly with someone like me. He did not want to give up the stone, not at all. But I had help. Some friends in London. They were able to help me find a way around his, uh, stubbornness…’
Fergus’s voice thinned to nothingness against the incomprehension and discomfort of the faces before him. Galbraith sought to formulate a more precise question, a direct line to the truth about events in London, but his thoughts were scattered by Mrs Buchanan’s interjection.
‘Mr Duncannon! Might I ask you not to scratch my good kitchen table in that way?’
Morag had been the only one to notice Duncannon. While Fergus stumbled over the description of quite how, after all, the artefact had come to be in his possession, Duncannon had stepped purposefully to the table and had taken the cursing stone between his hands, had begun to turn it slowly, deliberately, passing its bulk from his right hand to his left. The scraping of the first turn had roused Morag’s attention; the second she had seen; by the time her voice had risen to scold Duncannon, the third turn was complete.
Duncannon’s hands dropped to his side and he took a short step back from the table. To everyone’s surprise he uttered an apology, contrition curling into his shoulders. Only Fergus caught the fleeting glimpse of the smile that played about his friend’s eyes. Chastised and satisfied, Duncannon slipped from the garden door into the bright outside even before Galbraith had reached the stone to ensure it remained undamaged. Mrs MacLeod joined Mrs Buchanan in her inspection of the dark varnish that covered the table itself.
It was into this silence that Shona appeared. She slipped in through the same garden door from which Duncannon had disappeared like a ghost only moments before. They must have passed in the garden, but Shona made no mention of the retreating Duncannon. Without regard for anyone else in the bright kitchen, she took three bold strides towards her fiancé and kissed him. It was not a restrained kiss, nor one delivered with shame or embarrassment. For some moments, she hung there from his unmoving shoulders, mouth pressed full onto his, until he pulled away, peeling his lips from hers. She regarded him with confusion across the few inches he had claimed between them, until the kitchen and the world, her parents and the Reverend, returned. Too late, she felt his arms about her, and they squeezed her to him, but it was as an offering, an apology. His weak smile underlined her dejection.
‘Not here, not like this. With everyone looking on. Let’s step into the garden, shall we? Get a little privacy?’
Fergus looked to his mother, as if to ask permission, before slipping his hand into Shona’s and leading her from the house.
The sky was marked with some smears of white, but otherwise blazed blue. Above them, the wind made the day’s only sounds, but behind the high garden wall the air was still and peaceful. The flowers grew unmolested, and only the very tops of the little apple tree swayed gently in the breeze that coaxed the first of the blossom from pink buds. Fergus led Shona to the swing seat by the north wall.
When it had arrived, six years before, Fingal had scorned his spendthrift daughter-in-law. She had persuaded her husband to order it from Fort William and, since the garden was accepted as her domain, Davey had not felt it necessary to mention the purchase to the old man. The boxes that appeared one morning had at first aroused no comment. Even when Davey had taken his tools into the garden, Fingal had assumed that the lengths of wood laid out on the lawn were the components of some useful structure, for the growing of runner beans or the protection of early vegetables.
As the shape became unmistakeable, however, he had flown into a rage, rebuking the waste and the self-indulgence, and berating his son for his cowardice in hiding the purchase from him. That summer, the swing seat had been barely used. At first, Morag would take some moments swinging in to the evening sunlight, when she thought Fingal was not watching; as she grew in confidence and in obstinacy, she made a point of sitting in the seat more frequently, and then at every opportunity.
Her daughter had been first to join her and they would sit with their tea, listening to the whisper of the sea rising from the harbour and to the creak of the seat as it swung gently under their weight. In subsequent years, Davey had also been seen in the seat, either talking with Morag or simply breathing in the still air, once his morning tasks had been completed, or with a glass of beer once the day’s work was done, watching the kittiwakes glide over the village on their way back from the sea.
But this was the first time that Fergus had sat there. The welcome give of the wood, the easing of the springs against their weight brought a small smile, the premonition of laughter. He turned to Shona and kissed her cheek, her forehead, her nose; he let his lips brush against hers, once, twice, and then a third time.
‘It is good to see you, Shona.’
‘Is it? I thought, well, when you didn’t want to kiss me before…’
Shona nodded towards the kitchen window. Something like fear or hurt flickered behind her frown. His absence had been filled with unexpected thoughts, of the possibility of aloneness, of rejection and abandonment; she had not allowed the possible reasons for his enduring loss to stray beyond the back of her mind, but they had lurked there, curled in cruel anticipation, waiting to burst from the darkness, ready to bite. The ambiguity of their reunion had loosed them from her grip; his protestations of bashfulness did little to quell them.
While Sho
na gripped his hand, Fergus recounted his adventures. She winced at the echo of the pain of his bruised ribs and, as he described the break-in at Lauderdale Tower, she hid her excitement beneath plastic disapproval. By the time he had finished describing the long drive north in the cabs of four separate lorries, he had omitted only Ruby from the details of the Stepney housemates. Shona did not press him, instead asking about the streets of Mayfair, the clothes of the women and the height of the buildings.
‘Once we’re married, maybe we should visit London together? I could meet your friends and you could show me the sights. I hear that one shop has a whole floor just of shoes.’
He had never lied to Shona before; he had never had cause to do so. Even now, he was not sure if he was lying. He had anticipated the question, the earnest enquiry or the half-joking suggestion, of being led astray by city women, but it had not arrived, not yet at least. Had it been asked, he had decided to tell the truth, but as little as was necessary and certainly not enough to confirm any suspicions, before taking offence at her lack of faith in him. But there were no questions, only her open face, tilted somewhat towards him.
Their kiss was interrupted by the click of the door. Davey Buchanan appeared, flanked by both Reverend Drummond and Mr Galbraith. He walked with them in the direction of the garden gate, and although his ‘uh-huh’s lacked the excitement of the two men’s babble, they mimicked enthusiasm to a degree. Halfway along the path, Davey saw his son and paused, hanging on the right heel of his tattered garden slippers. Remembering himself, he excused himself and strode towards the swing seat. Fergus rose and extended his right arm to receive the expected hand shake, but instead and for the first time that he could remember, he disappeared into his father’s embrace.
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The Cursing Stone: a gripping mystery and family saga Page 23
