18
I hammer on Jim’s door, my eye on the bare finger where my wedding ring used to be. I bang my knuckles hard against the wood. When he opens up, I walk in without comment.
“You were asleep on the couch for hours,” he says. “I tried to wake you.”
I walk to the oven, then back to him. “Will you make me a cup of tea?”
He nods. “What’s the matter with you?” He peers into my face. “You don’t look well.”
He turns away to fill the kettle.
Before I speak, I have to catch my breath. “Was the Stone of Destiny ever at Dunadd?”
He goes to his kitchen door and lets Winnie in. “So they say. But it ended up in Scone in Perthshire, where the seat of the king was moved, away from the marauding Vikings. There, away in and sit by the fire now, and I’ll bring you your tea.”
I can’t help myself; I grab Jim by the arms. “I couldn’t just have dreamed that.”
He looks a bit worried. “Aye, but it’s not an unknown fact.”
“It is to me.” I am almost singing it. “At least it was unknown to me until I sat on the bloody thing up there in the queen’s house!”
Jim is sort of squinting at me, as though if he waits I might come into better focus. “Go and sit down. I’ll get the tea ready.”
He pours enough boiling water into the teapot to make the tea bags float at the top, and then he carries the tray into the living room and sets it down on the table by the fire. I start to speak again, but he shushes me so that he can pour the tea and offer me a biscuit from a rose-patterned plate. The astringent scent of tea competes with the acrid smoke from the fire.
He takes his cup to his chair. “Now,” he says, “what is it you’re blethering about?”
I set my cup by my feet and the biscuit beside it. “It’s not blether, Jim; you have to grant me that.”
He takes a noisy sip. “Do I now?”
“You do, and here’s why: I asked Marcus the slave how long Murdoch had been in power. He said two years. That makes it 735, right? They are carving the foot into the rock even now, and, guess what, it’s a woman’s foot and has nothing to do with crowning kings.”
He sets his cup in its saucer. He’s interested now. “What does it have to do with then?”
“The lesser lords paying fealty, putting their foot in it, so to speak.”
Jim chuckles. “Swearing allegiance to the king in it.”
I sigh. At last he is on my side. “Did you already know that?”
He shakes his head. “No, but they took the custom over to Perth with them. There’s a mound called Boot Hill there, where they did the same thing.”
I am breathless. “So do you believe me now?”
He shakes his head, as though it could save him from making such a wild leap. “Did you really see the Stone of Destiny?”
I have to laugh. “I got invited for dinner by the queen, and I was sitting on this stone by the fire until I realized that it was the Stone of Destiny, for God’s sake, just sitting there by the fire.”
Jim takes a deep breath. “Have you told any of this to your Fergus brute?”
I shake my head. “What am I supposed to say, that I am come from his future and know how all this plays out?”
Jim takes a sip of tea. “Suppose not. But he’d better get himself out of there. You’d better get yourself out of there, too.”
I sit back in my chair. Jim’s right, and I had better get back there to warn Fergus and Illa that they have to leave. I don’t care if history needs them dead. I want them with me in the land of the living.
Jim says, “Your cat’s drinking your tea.”
I pick Winnie up, stroking her back until she purrs.
“Not to mention, there were monks there,” I say, “which is another fact I didn’t know. They’re trying to get the queen on their side, leaving her Bibles, and another book called Vita Colum something by Adam somebody, something else I’ve never seen.”
Jim jumps up and goes rummaging on his shelf. “Saint Columba’s biography. Vita Colum Cille by Adomnán.”
He hands me a copy of this selfsame book, only this one is bound in glossy paper, not cloth and hide like the one I saw. I take the book and hold it against my chest. “Sula doesn’t like the monks.”
Jim chuckles a little. “I’m sure she doesn’t. I’m quite sure the monks don’t like her, either.”
I get up and look out the window. “In 735 that one standing stone out there belongs to a complete circle.”
“Well,” he says, placing his cup and saucer on the hearth, “it’s a lot to swallow.”
When I turn back, he smiles. I don’t know whether he believes me or not. I don’t know whether I believe myself. It is a lot to swallow, and every bleeding psychiatrist who ever built on Freud is laughing his head off. But then, these were men dedicated to the march of reason. There is nothing reasonable here. I am strictly in nonreason territory.
“Fergus has a young daughter called Illa,” I say.
Jim looks away. “Well, he’d better get her off Dunadd, too. It’s not just the Picts you have to worry about. Don’t forget the earthquake. You may not have much time.”
I kneel by his chair and take his hand. “Thank you, Jim.”
He taps my fingers, and at this moment I can tell he will believe anything I want him to believe. We finish our tea and stack the cups in their rattling saucers, stare at the uneaten biscuits.
I take myself home, still jumping around inside, walking meekly along the path that I recently walked with Sula. I stop by the circle of Standing Stones, at least by the one the Presbyterians left. More than a millennium separates the me who is here from the me with Fergus, and it shows on this stone with its grooves and the top that is no longer square. I lay my cheek against its lichened surface, as if it might talk to me and tell me all that it has seen and what the outcome is to be.
When it gets dark, I lie down and sleep heavily for a while. Somewhere in the night, I find myself awake, caught between my life with Fergus and this other life hurtling me along its corridor to a hospital bed. It is merciless in facing me with a choice I cannot make. From the doorway of the cottage, the field seems lit by a strange light. The outlines of hares move among the sleeping sheep, their feet in a sort of haze rising from the grass. Who’s to say that this is where I belong, that this is any more real than my life in the heyday of the fort?
For the next few days I scribble on my notepads and take walks, but always in the background is the urgency to get back to Fergus. I worry that the events of ancient Dunadd are scurrying along without me, though I have no evidence that they do. I want to know what happens next in the story of Fergus and Maggie. But most of all, I need to get him out of Dunadd. I stand by the sink with my bottle of pills and know I can’t keep taking them. I need to get back now.
But nothing happens. Only the rain. Each morning when I get up, the rain persists under low grey cloud. I go back to my thesis and read over my descriptions of the witches who were tried, how they were made to admit all manner of foolery about ice-cold devil penises and having their blood sucked and flying through the night on brooms. It strikes me then, with my reading glasses pushed onto the top of my head, my back hard against the chair, that maybe witches flying through the night is what I have been doing. What Sula is doing when she throws her stones onto the floor is flying through the night on her broomstick.
I don’t see Jim for a couple of days, so I leave my pages and get into my car to find him at the museum. As I drive past his house, I pass a couple of rain-hardy travelers in sou’westers and knee-length raincoats, struggling against the wind. They wave at me as though I might rescue them from their decision, but I am only rescuing myself today.
I find him with a group of schoolchildren in the interactive displays. He throws a handful of grain into the top hole of the quern and shows them how to use the stick to turn one stone against the other to make flour.
When he’s done, Jim takes me
to the hanging gardens of the museum coffee shop for scones. Through the large window by our table, we can look out on a full circle of standing stones, and in the distance more. The rain runs rivulets down the glass and patters off the roof. But it is a well-lit and exotic place, this little eatery, at odds with the damp dark places it represents.
I look around at the other patrons, tourists or more permanent imports. The locals don’t drink coffee and don’t walk around museums even when full of artifacts fashioned by their ancestors. They still live in the dark and damp, and it’s what they know, not that much different from the people in the village at the base of Dunadd. They have bigger houses, and some may have central heating, but they are still driven like the rain. They are elemental, as people always were, until they became dispensable.
“You’re quiet,” Jim says. “Not like you.”
I shake my head. “Actually, very like me. You’re just used to seeing the excitable, far-fetched me.” I laugh. “You don’t know what to make of me, do you?”
He shrugs. After a while he says, “Now, I don’t know much about physics. As I say, I never did go to the university. But I was reading in the dentist’s office the other day that yon fellow Einstein had a few things to say on the subject of time.” He taps his finger on the back of my hand. “It seems to me he was saying time is relative, just like you were telling me. So maybe you’re not just crackers.”
“I wish,” I say, “that I could introduce you to Fergus’s mother. She’s the queen and quite good looking.”
He tuts. “She’ll not be looking for someone of my station.”
I tap the back of his hand with my finger. “She would be lucky to have you. Any woman, say, over the age of fifty-five, would.”
He tries not to look embarrassed. “Are you going to pay for these scones or what?”
I laugh, though I don’t feel it. “Jim, if I did warn Fergus about what’s to come, would it upset the outcome of history?”
He shrugs. “It might. We might end up coming from Pictland instead of Scotland. Perhaps we would be speaking Pictish now instead of English.”
“Then maybe he should stay.”
“No. He should leave. What if he gets himself slaughtered?”
I can’t imagine the thought of getting rid of Fergus is too displeasing to Jim, but he’s being kind. I pay the waitress, counting out change without thinking about it.
I am not happy to wake the next morning and find myself in a white house, which is what Mrs. Gillies used to call any house with windows. I wake to find myself in the pitch-dark, but not the kind of dark out of which Fergus emerges. I wonder why I was ever taking pills in the first place if I can’t induce a seizure when I need one.
I spend my time at the computer, surfing through theories about time and its workings. I find out that traveling through time is not actually ruled out by Einstein’s theory of relativity. I learn that a group of scientists, who worried about having their very serious discipline being transformed into science fiction, got together to prove that time travel is not possible. They have been trying, but they still haven’t been able to prove this.
I rub my eyes under my glasses, push my desk away from the computer, and take a walk to the top of Dunadd, looking up at the configuration of stars in their slow sweep of the sky. It strikes me that the constellation Orion with his belt and tunic actually looks like Fergus in his cloak and belt.
But what if this is the end of traveling for me? What if this is as far as the story goes?
Off and on and without enthusiasm I push my cart around what passes for a supermarket in these parts: narrow aisles of enormous bottles of pop, whisky, and endless sliced bread. The checkout girls chatter to one another in an almost undecipherable accent but talk to me at a speed reserved for the mentally challenged. I come from Glasgow, after all. Glaschu.
I sit on my blue couch after a dinner of rarebit, with Winnie asleep on my lap, turning my bottle of pills over in my hand. Do not exceed the stated dose. No fear of that.
Jim knocks on the window and rescues me from my dilemma. I don’t know why he has come. He doesn’t say when he lets himself in.
“I’d offer you a cup of tea,” I say, “but I can’t move on account of the cat.”
He sees to the kettle himself, but he is quiet.
He sits beside me with his tea, a little too close with the side of his thigh. I don’t know what to make of him tonight. Winnie arches her back and stretches.
He picks the yellow bottle of pills from the table. “What are these?”
“They regulate seizures. I haven’t been taking them, but it’s still two weeks since my last one.”
“Maggie,” he says, “maybe you’re not going to go back.” He picks up my left hand. “I see you’re not wearing your wedding ring anymore.”
I take my hand back. If he only knew where my wedding ring really was.
“Look,” he says, “I know I’m a bit older than yourself.”
“Are you angling?” I ask.
He says, “A wee bit. But we get along like a house on fire, don’t we? The way I see it: we’re two lonely people who need not be lonely.”
I take his cup. “I already have someone.”
He leaves, and I feel lonelier than I have ever felt in my life. I am lying on my couch with Winnie on my chest when I first notice the heat in the soles of my feet. The world narrows down, first to the patterns on the wallpaper and then to the particles of wood that went into making it. The particles swirl, then spread apart until I am looking down into the atomic, subatomic world, and everything is getting heavy, and at last, at long last I am falling through.
19
My movement in time doesn’t match up exactly this time, and I find myself back with Illa beside the fire on the floor of Fergus’s house, waiting for him to return.
That was two weeks ago, and I am dying for his shape to fill the doorway, to get close to his smell of moss again, the drape of his hair between my fingers, the texture of the woven cloth on his arms. I want to place my cheek against his again and breathe against his ear, feel his chest expanding against mine.
Illa brings to me a little wooden bowl with a carved top. Inside is a handful of what look like old sixpences, but which on closer examination turn out to be Roman coins. I tip them into my palm, heady with the realization that not all that long ago, these pieces were being exchanged at the Roman marketplace. Perhaps Illa has stolen into her old home at times to play with this shiny booty. I tip them back into their little bowl, smiling at the pleasure Illa has found in sharing her secret with me.
I touch her arm and bid her come close. She nestles against my side, and perhaps being back in her old place permits her something I’m sure she wouldn’t do in front of her father: a few tears make dirty paths down her cheeks. She doesn’t resist when I pull her against me and the tears turn to sobs. Perhaps no one else has held her since her mother died. I play with her fingers like I used to play with Ellie’s, tracing the spaces between hers. She laughs when I tickle the palm.
I study Illa’s face, trying to extract from it Fergus’s features to get at the mother. But there is not much of Fergus here, not even the hallmark nose. I am looking straight at my competition. She slips her head into my lap. From time to time I reach out and prop up the pyramid with more kindling. Almost automatically I start to sing the bedtime song that Ellie liked: Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, / Smiles await you when you rise. / Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry, / And I will sing a lullaby. We had it on a Beatles record, too, and Ellie preferred the jazzed-up version, but not when she was going to sleep. Illa’s eyes close. She is after all just a baby. I have no idea how long I stay by the fire with the weight of my daughter’s head against my thighs. It feels like all I ever wanted.
I notice the spot on the floor where Fergus and I slept the night before and, as I have so often over the last two weeks, replay that scene. The blanket he laid under me is tossed against the wall. I set Illa’s head on the dir
t for a moment while I reach for it, and fashion a makeshift pillow for her head with another from the pile of blankets that must have come from the wife.
I begin to wonder if Fergus aims to return to me tonight.
When I open the door, Marcus stumbles in. He has obviously been set guard, and thankfully so, because I am able to ask him for aqua, and when I do a little play illustrating the need to wash, he goes off in the direction of the spring and comes back in a while carrying water in a pitcher with designs of black horizontal and vertical lines.
I leave him again at the door, take a sip of the water, then get out of Illa’s line of vision and strip off my undergarments, made up as they are now of stretchy knickers, string, and ancient leg wraps. The water is icy, but I am able to do a decent job, first with a splash to the face, and then, in the absence of a sponge, with a cupped hand to my nether regions. I dry off with the dusty corner of one of the blankets and feel ready, should Fergus ever come back.
Illa sleeps on, so I take the extra blankets outside, past the sleeping guard, and shake them out. One on the bottom is a tapestry of a man and a woman, but not this woman. I think I had better keep that one out of sight. Back inside, a little way off from Illa, I set it on the floor as a pad and stretch out under the others. They smell of mold and years of sitting by themselves in an abandoned stone house.
Fergus doesn’t come and doesn’t come. I can’t sleep because of wondering about Fergus and because I fear I am hoping for too much here. The fire burns to embers, and I begin to doze. When I come to, Fergus is standing over me, only I see as he moves into the light of the fire that it is not Fergus but Talorcan. I feel his body come close and kneel beside me; in the shimmer of light sent up by the flames I follow the pattern of the boar across his forehead. His fingers close around my arm.
Veil of Time Page 18
