by Neil M. Gunn
“We can discuss that when we dine there tonight,” said Colonel Mackintosh, half turning away.
Scott winked to Grant.
“Gu—ga—ga——?” Andie was still in the trench, his face uplifted in wide-open expectancy.
The Colonel turned on him. “What are you hoping to find? Another crock of gold? Get out!”
Scott left pickaxe, crowbar and shovel tidily together, and as they followed the Colonel to the cairn he paused for a moment to feel Andie’s biceps. Mrs Mackenzie resumed her knitting with a smile. She had now eight orders on hand for stockings.
Chapter Thirty Nine
Grant awoke violently and held his breath. His eyes roved. There was nothing in the room, no one on the mat. Something had happened somewhere and he was afraid. The familiar grey of the dawn was in the window. When he reached it, he saw Mrs Mackenzie going down by the little garden wall. She stood by the rowan tree, turned her face and looked at the house. He shoved his head through the window opening; the piece of wood that held the window up fell over the sill and with the back of his neck he heaved the frame higher. “What’s wrong?” he called.
She did not move; her voice was quiet and strange: “Andrew hasn’t come home.”
“Wait for me.” At once the window-frame lowered on his neck. He struggled to draw his head back; as at last half strangled, he jerked it in, the frame fell like a knife, but by good luck his fingertips had slipped and he was clear. He was coming out of the sitting room with his boots on when Mrs Cameron called. “It’s all right,” he answered and closed the front door behind him.
“I don’t know where he is,” Mrs Mackenzie said. Her voice was still quiet but it had a tremor, an under-surge.
“When did he go out?”
“About eleven o’clock before going to bed, as usual.”
“And he never came back?” He hadn’t his watch with him but it must be two or three in the morning.
“No.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”
She did not answer.
“Have you been looking far?”
“Everywhere.”
“You’re sure he’s not back?” He was wondering where to go first. The caves, he thought.
“No. I went home a little while ago,” she answered, “but could not rest.”
“Let’s go this way.”
When they had crossed the footbridge, he kept low, making for the beach. About a hundred yards from the boathouse he saw Martin come out of it. “Wait here,” he said quietly and went on.
Martin had been a good host at dinner, friendly in his impersonal way, and this for some reason had been a relief, until Grant had felt that Mrs Sidbury’s gaiety covered an extra anxiety. She had tried to get him alone but had only had time to whisper that she would like to see him tomorrow (now today). From that moment he had realised that Martin’s extra ease had been the ease, the quiet competence, he had shown in the cave at the height of the storm, with death in the offing.
“You haven’t seen Andie about?”
When his eyes had finished with Grant’s face, Martin said, “No.”
“He’s been missing all night. That’s his mother up there.”
Grant followed Martin’s eyes to the shawled head and still body against the slope. In the grey light it looked ancient and statuesque. He felt a queer hot surge in his breast.
“What I can’t understand——” he said and stopped.
“What?” asked Martin.
“These fellows in the camp—at least two of them were supposed to keep a watch.”
“Two of them were after a salmon in the Sea Pool.”
“Were they?” said Grant in bewildered astonishment. “Did they see you?”
“No.” Martin was still staring at the woman.
“I was wondering if he mightn’t have gone to the caves.”
Martin looked at him curiously. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” muttered Grant, his thoughts rocketing from him like pigeons.
“It was all too much for him,” said Martin, and Grant instantly felt he should have known that.
Martin began to walk up towards Mrs Mackenzie. He did not greet her nor did she him, but they looked at each other for a moment. Then they started up the slope to the cairn.
Nothing was spoken, nothing was said at all, and Grant felt that something was drained away and the moment strengthened. The quest was fatal but it was calmed.
When they came round the cairn Martin stopped and stared. Grant followed his stare and saw that the tall monolith was down. Never before in waking thought had he experienced the certainty, the inevitability, of nightmare. Had it not been down, fate would have been absent from the universe.
Martin was going forward. There was something pale against the dark earth, rounded, like a face, a foot or two from the side of the fallen monolith. A harsh cry came from Mrs Mackenzie. Martin stooped, put his hand on the face, then he straightened slowly and stood quite still, giving way as the woman got to her knees. She put her hands about the face, she cried aloud.
Grant saw that the monolith had caught Andie’s body at the base of the chest and crushed it flat as his hand against the edge of the trench. Instantaneous death.
The woman was now clawing at the edge of the stone, trying to free the body. A wild impulse came on Grant to tear and help. Martin’s hand stopped him. She scrabbled back, her face lifted to them.
“He’s dead,” said Martin clearly.
“Andrew, my son!” she cried. “My son! O my boy!”
“Get the fellows from the camp,” said Martin, and Grant started off running, the terrible keening cries of the mother pursuing him.
As he returned, the lads racing up behind him, he saw Martin move along the stone with the pickaxe in his hand. Mrs Mackenzie was sitting bent over her son’s face, her cries quietened to quivering moans, her head shaking in bouts of sorrow, of negation.
Martin put a hand under the woman’s arm. “Come away, Mrs Mackenzie. We’ll get Andrew out and take him home.”
The young men had never seen lamentation of this kind before; they had only known a decorous grief. They had never seen hands on a face.
She got up and went with Martin. In a few minutes he came back alone.
“We’ll dig away the edge of the trench here,” he said, and drag the body out. The stone is supported fore and aft.”
After clearing a way through to the trench on each side of the body, they began digging under it. One of the lads started to retch and Martin sent him with another to fetch a gate from a field. The bloody squelch that was the centre of the body affected most of them as they drew Andie away until the feet stuck. In a few minutes they had him on the gate.
“Three to each side,” said Martin, taking a grip forward.
Walking behind, Grant observed the averted looks of the white-faced young carriers. He saw Andie’s protruding mouth, the head that swayed with the gate, the bloodsodden mess. He told Armstrong, who hadn’t got a place, to fetch some sacking from the cairn. Armstrong ran at top speed and soon overtook them. “Hold on!” called-Grant. He spread the sacking over the body.
Martin beckoned to Armstrong to take his place and fell behind with Grant. “I think,” he said, “you should go and tell Mrs Cameron.”
“Yes,” said Grant at once and hurried off.
When he reached the door, Mrs Cameron met him, fully clothed.
“Andie is killed,” he said. “The big stone fell on him.”
She stood quite still for several seconds, as though hearing or understanding something at a distance. “Poor woman,” she murmured. “Come in,” she said.
“We wondered if——”
“Yes, I was just going. The kettle is boiling. You would be the better of a cup of tea.”
The running seemed to have sickened him a bit; he was feeling squeamish.
“No,” he said. “Not just now. They’re carrying him to the house.”
“Very well, I’ll be
going. I’ll knock on Mrs MacLennan.” And she set off.
He went upstairs to his bedroom and gulped down some cold water. As he was coming out, Anna’s door opened. She had an overcoat over her nightdress.
“It’s Andie,” he said.
She nodded. She was pale and did not seem able to move or speak. Her eyes looked extraordinarily deep. “Do you need anything?” she asked.
“No, I’ll be off, “ and he went downstairs.
They had reached Andie’s home by the time he got there. Mrs Cameron was going in as the lads came out. Then Martin came out.
“That’s all we can do,” Martin said to Grant. “I’ll phone the policeman in Kinlochoscar and he can get in touch with the doctor.”
Grant thanked the lads and suggested they should go home and brew a strong pot of tea; then he started down the road with Martin.
For a little way there was silence. Grant said, “It’s a pity. It’s a pity it should have happened like that.”
Martin did not answer.
Grant knew there was nothing to say, but still, the human being had to speak sometimes. However things had conspired to happen, he was at the root of them; it was he who had drawn Andie in. Suddenly he remembered that Martin in the first instance had sent him to Andie. Hostility hardened his face and he thought: I’ll keep my mouth shut, too.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Martin said thoughtfully, without a trace of emotion.
“What?” asked Grant, feeling lost.
“Your remark about its being a pity.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s all over for her now.”
“Good God I should think so!”
“Otherwise there was the future,” said Martin in the same voice. “It must have worried her because she was getting on in years.” As a peewit swooped and rose, his eyes followed it.
“You can hardly mean she’s relieved he’s dead—or do you?”
“You’re being obtuse, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
But Martin did not seem interested in the last question. Had he been self-complacent or cynical, one could have been irritated and wholesomely aggressive. The fellow was just nothing human. Like the pervasive light. The sun had not yet topped the mountains. The peewit was a materialised spirit that had lost something and couldn’t rest. The air was an immaterial sea.
“Anyway,” said Grant, “I hope there’s someone to see to the funeral arrangements.” Even to his own ears the words sounded wholesome and solid. They made him feel better.
“Oh yes,” remarked Martin lightly.
“Who?” demanded Grant.
“The neighbours. They may be depended on to bury their dead.”
Grant managed to stop himself asking: aren’t you one of the neighbours? The words that came were: “In that case I don’t suppose she will be pleased to see any more of us.”
“On the contrary,” said Martin in that voice of his which could be so cool and fluent, “it would help her if the whole lot of you turned out to the funeral.”
“With a wreath?”
“Two if possible: large ones.”
Grant shot a look at him, but as he saw the head beginning to turn he looked away. Here was the path down to the cottage. He would have to say something as they stood and parted. Martin simply went on. At the corner of the gable, Grant stopped to get complete control of himself. The blackbird was singing on the rowan tree. The cat came picking its steps through the dew-damp grass, leapt onto the bottom wall of the garden, had a slow look around, its tail twitching to the song, steadied its sphinx-face on the human for an indifferent moment, then leapt down behind the gooseberry bush.
Anna was in the kitchen, fully dressed. He had the extraordinary feeling of going into a predestined place where they were alone. She smiled, inviting him with silent understanding of the tragic moment, remote a little even in her smile, but warm and tender-hearted. His tray was ready and at once she began pouring hot dark-amber tea into his cup.
“I’m just in time!” he said, striving for lightness.
“I saw you coming.”
With a sense of waiting and watching, of service, of being part of the need and the hour, her simple words affected him deeply. He rubbed his hands, turning from the fire, and gave an involuntary shiver.
“You’re cold,” she murmured and glanced at the fire.
“No, I’m fine.”
He would have to watch himself. The moment was treacherous. A few nights ago, after he had heard Sheena play the Silver Bough faultlessly right through, with an incredibly light touch, light as a fairy’s, he had found a part of his mind, as he sat alone, the house quiet and the wind fallen, making a small phantasy on its own. For in fact he had a city flat, an inherited flat. An old woman came in and kept it indifferently clean. His principal meals he ate in a restaurant or at the club . . . . Sheena was obviously musical. She should get piano lessons from Miss Boyd or—perhaps, later, from Old Antonio. Almost the only kind of housekeeper to be got nowadays was the woman with the child. Accepted as normal among his friends. The thing could be done. Anna was young, and there might be a club joke here and there for a time, but it was really quite normal . . . . When his whole mind woke up and got the scheme, he had felt a bit awkward and hot, but laughed. Still, before he was going away, he might say to Mrs Cameron, only to Mrs Cameron, that if Anna ever wanted a job, he might arrange something, and Sheena—it would be a pity if she did not get piano lessons . . . .
He sat down and began to drink the tea. His hand shook and a little slopped over onto the saucer, but she was attending to the fire and did not notice.
“Was Andie—did he suffer?” she asked.
“No. Oh no. He was killed instantly.”
“Was he by himself?”
“Yes. It was the big standing stone. We had been digging there. He must have come out all alone—to finish the digging. He was perhaps wondering what—what we were digging for.” He lifted his cup again and without a word, unobtrusively, she placed a clean saucer under it. “Thanks,” he said. “Thank you. This is good tea.”
“You should eat something,” she suggested politely.
“No, I’m all right. A bit chilly. We got the young fellows from the camp. Across the body it got him. He must have been so keen digging that it tilted over on him before he got clear. He seemed to like that stone.”
“You would often find him there,” she agreed quietly.
“Yes. Anything special about it, any story?”
“No—well—I remember, when I was a child, stories about the cairn being haunted, about a man. It had something to do with that stone, too.”
“Locked himself up in it, did he?”
“Something like that,” she said with some confusion. She brought the teapot and filled his cup again. He looked at her hand. It was a firm capable hand, with fair smooth skin. The fairness was part of her colouring. The hand withdrew.
“Sheena never woke up?” he asked.
“Only for a minute.”
“She’s very musical.”
Anna was silent.
“Don’t you think so?” he asked. “The way she plays—and picked it up so soon.”
“She worships it,” she said, smiling.
“Does she? Who knows—what’s your grandmother’s story?—about leading the owner of the Silver Bough to some wonderful place? I—I am very fond of Sheena. I should like to think it might bring her luck—and you too.” He put his cup down. “I am quite sure it will.” He turned his head.
She looked into the fire, one hand on the mantelpiece. She was shy, but there was something else in her expression, a troubling he did not understand. Had he suggested anything uncanny? He was feeling nervous and excited, confused. He wanted to get up and go over to her. Then something in that troubling reminded him of the foreshore when Martin and himself had been rescued, and he actually felt the quivering, the shake in his arm, ebb away. He stared out of the kitchen window, then got u
p.
With his shoulder towards her, he said, “I owe you a lot, Anna. If ever there is anything I can do for you—or for Sheena—you have only got to ask me.”
As she did not answer, he turned his head. “You know that?”
“You’re very kind,” she murmured, warm and confused but with the troubling now like something obscurely tragic.
The whole morning and its tragedy came upon him. “You’ll go to your bed, won’t you?”
“I’ll see,” she answered. “Perhaps Granny might need something.”
As he got into bed, he thought of how men retired and left it to the women. They would have to take the clothes off Andie. At the end of man’s bloody day, the women stripped the naked body. His inner eye saw Mrs Cameron at her task. Then the women would stand aside, unfitted for the religious words and the nice ceremonial job of committing the body to its eternal home. What tragedy was in Anna’s heart God alone knew.
Chapter Forty
Andie had been very fond of funerals and never missed one. His own would certainly have been a wonderful show for him. Colonel Mackintosh had told the young squad that they must button their shirts to the neck and put a tie on, and they had gone one better by getting black ties cut out of a camera cloth by a woman in Kinlochoscar. They also collected red cottage roses and made a magnificent wreath.
The Colonel said to Grant, “We’ll hand in one from the rest of us. What flowers do you suggest?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“What about something original,” suggested Blair, “say, a small crock of forget-me-nots?”
“You have a macabre sort of humour, Blair,” said Scott.
“Perhaps we can leave it to the hotel gardener,” decided the Colonel. “And I think, as a touch of respect, that we’ll give the cairn a miss for that day.”
The wreaths overflowed the coffin and filled up the hearse. Some obscure feeling of sympathy drew the largest crowd within living memory to any funeral from Clachar.
“If only Andie could have seen this!” said old Fachie sitting in one of the hotel cars, which Grant had privately ordered.
