The Bass Rock

by Evie Wyld

  ‘Miss, Sir’s gone – he’s not back till the day after tomorrow. Will you come out and have something to eat?’

  ‘No. Thank you, Jane. I am quite content in here.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I said no.’ There is a pause, and the maid looks about. The poor thing is new and is distressed.

  ‘Can I pass through some supper then, Miss? A blanket?’

  ‘Jane, he will know.’

  ‘But you can’t stay there all night.’

  ‘Please leave.’ The maid stands unsure. ‘Leave.’ She uses her strongest, most angry voice; she hasn’t heard it herself in several years. It hurts her ribs. The maid starts, and hurries from the room. There is a small tinkle outside, the water unbalancing on the tray. The maid is gone, but she neglected to put out the lamp on the side table, and the girl breaks the rules and leans her forehead on the door and stares at it, willing it to go out. The lighthouse makes her bedroom glow again, for just a moment, and then leaves darkness.

  Fidra

  I

  I can’t sleep.

  I’m thinking about how we just sat and waited for him. If the train hadn’t left on time, what would have happened? If it had been even a second late to close its doors, if he hadn’t been minutely slowed by bumping into the old man. Why did we just sit there? We knew something bad was coming. We could have hidden in the toilets, or got off the train and run to the lifts, we could have pulled the emergency cord, we could have called the police. But we waited, just in case we were wrong. What would Dom have done if he had got those doors open? I think Katherine knows. And then I think of the embrace he gave me at Dad’s funeral, how it had felt like the first deep inhalation of breath. I reach down to scratch at my shin, and find the scar has completely gone. When I look there’s nothing more than a light tea stain on the skin. I stare at it a moment. I wonder if I go at it with my nails if I can get it back.

  Vincent has sent a message.

  Are you ignoring me?

  It is the fifth in two days.

  There is a clear and easy version of my life, I can see it. Text him back. It was only a tickle. What does it feel like to like someone? Does it matter? – he likes you. I can see how he would fit into my life. I can see us caravanning, driving to France. I can see us maybe getting married. How did you two meet? She was buying wine and I was buying cheese. I can see it all. A geriatric pregnancy. Some direction. Respond to the text message, always. You owe him.

  I get out of bed and pack clothes for us both, though I can’t imagine Katherine wearing anything I have to offer. If we leave now, we will make it by dawn. Katherine is awake on the sofa, her knees pulled up to her chest. She has been crying.

  ‘We’re going to Scotland,’ I say, and she doesn’t reply, just nods and moves to pull on her socks and shoes.

  In the car she sleeps. A feeling, leaving London, of intense relief, similar to the one we felt as the train left the station. Wolves chase us all the way. Past Leeds I pull into a service station. Katherine is heavily asleep and I don’t wake her, I go inside and eat a blueberry muffin and drink a large, bad coffee. Two more messages from Vincent. One hurt, one angry. It is ending without my input. I turn off my phone and go to wash my face in the toilets. I stare a long time at my face in the mirror. I stare long enough that the different parts start to float away from each other. I am willing a plan to appear, but nothing comes. I should have picked up Mum, too. As long as she doesn’t answer the door to him. I’ll call her in the morning, suggest she comes. They were friends once, her and Dom. He would buy her Christmas presents from him alone, not shared ones with Katherine. I liked that about him. The drip of the tap slows to a steady, calm beat. I whisper, ‘It’s OK it’s OK it’s OK,’ but I don’t know who I am comforting. I pull up my trouser leg and look again at my healed skin. There’s a quiet knocking from one of the stalls behind me, and it breaks me out of my dream. The knocking becomes louder.

  ‘Hello?’ I say. The knocking ceases. Just the pipes. I leave the toilets, pick up an almond croissant for Katherine as well as a milky coffee. I know she finds almond croissants and milk revolting, and I know that my failure will be a comfort to her. The bright lights of the service station feel safe. This place is a constant, a limbo, somewhere no one would think to look for you. A family with a six- or seven-year-old child enters, she is in her pyjamas and is slung over the father’s shoulder, deep in slumber. I shouldn’t have left my sister on her own. If she wakes, how will she find me? I go back to her and she only stirs when I start the engine.

  She blinks. ‘I dropped off,’ she says, perplexed.

  ‘That’s OK.’ I hand her the coffee and croissant. She looks at them a while, still confused and in the grip of sleep.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I’ve been asleep a long time, haven’t I?’

  ‘You could argue we all have,’ I say and it sounds trite and quippy and I’m embarrassed, like I think I’m in a play, but to my surprise Katherine takes the lid off her coffee and nods, blowing on the surface of it.

  By the time the sun has started to come up, we can see Tantallon Castle silhouetted against the sea. Katherine has neatly pulled apart her croissant and laid it out in strips on the paper bag on her lap.

  II

  The slap had only made a very temporary mark, and three days later, the nick in Ruth’s mouth had healed, though she found herself worrying the spot with her tongue often. She felt that perhaps she had not been made like other women, and perhaps her true ambition in life was to be alone. It did not seem frightening to be alone. If Peter left her, there would be logistical difficulties, of course. What of the house? What of the boys? But ultimately these things would be resolved, and she would not mind no longer having to live to the tides of another person’s will. She would become a hermit, she would find a cave and settle in it, begin something there that was not a family, or sewing or planning a picnic. She would eat bread and cheese, she would grow fat and squat and strong, drink whisky and wear gumboots. She would learn to smoke a pipe, and wear a woollen hat so she didn’t have to pin her hair in the wind. Perhaps she could learn to fish off the rocks. The idea appealed to her so much that on her walk she found herself scanning the gullies and clifftops for the ideal place to build a hovel. There was the old shepherd’s hut on the Law that looked over the town – no roof and the wild ponies sheltered there. It amused her very much to think of her mother coming to stay with her divorced fat childless daughter in a derelict sheep house. She would serve sardines in their tins and tea from a bowl.

  It was a particularly bright morning that she decided to go and find the well. She had read about it in a slim volume in among the few books and maps on sale at the grocer’s. It was called Holy Wells of Scotland, and the description of the one at North Berwick read simply ‘small and oval’. It sounded so boring that she had convinced herself there was more to it, and had bought the book which had a line map of where she could find it. She gathered a flask of tea and some cheese and an apple and set out. The air smelled of flint. She walked first along the coast, where she saw the boys and Bernadette eating hot pikelets on the bench overlooking the rocks. They were huddled against the wind.

  ‘What are you fellows going to do today?’

  ‘We’re going to the castle,’ said Bernadette.

  ‘And have a picnic in the ruins,’ said Michael.

  ‘We’ve got apples for the ponies,’ said Christopher. There was something a little too wholesome about it all. But she smiled just the same and wished them a good time. When she looked back, she saw Christopher gingerly take a lit cigarette out of his pocket and pass it to Bernadette. Ought I to feel outraged? she wondered. She found it bothered her not a bit. Christopher was only a year off what she had been when she had her first cigarette, rolled by Antony, and she hadn’t boarding school and a dead mother to contend with. Bernadette, sat in the middle, offered the cigarette to Michael, but he shook his head. Well. There we are, that’s all right then. The children are poli
cing themselves to an extent, she thought. Bernadette passed it back to Christopher and then she stretched out her arms so that they went around the shoulders of both boys and the boys moved in a little to her. Strange and rather beautiful. She walked on, heading inland towards the churchyard. She had felt lightly hysterical when the boys returned for Easter break, she had expected to see such misery from them. But other than Christopher’s nose, which now had a bump on its bridge, they seemed, if anything, more content. The three of them went off all day, apples in their pockets, returned at suppertime with roses in their cheeks, smelling of rock pools and bonfires. She had caught Betty staring out the window at them as they crossed the golf course, ignoring the rules. They walked three abreast and you could hear their voices even through the glass. ‘I hope it’s not a worry to you, madam,’ Betty had said, ‘your boys hanging around with Bernadette? I think she’s been lonely for a brother or sister.’

  ‘I think it’s a good thing, Betty,’ she’d said. ‘Everyone needs someone.’

  ‘Mr Hamilton doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Mr Hamilton does not mind.’ Mr Hamilton more likely had not noticed.

  About half an hour into her walk, sheltered from the sea wind by trees and houses, she turned inland and started across a field. The map in her hand marked the well as somewhere in that same field, but there was no obvious place. A light sleet began to fall, and now she saw that, other than a narrow plank of wood leading to a stile, the field was deeply mudded, with cow prints and pats and water seeping up through the turf. She climbed the stile and as she swung her leg over, her gumboot slipped on the bright green lichen and both legs went out from under her. She fell inelegantly, cracking her back on the second step of the stile.

  ‘Buggering fuck!’ she whispered loudly, and she stayed still for a moment to make sure she was not truly broken. When she rolled over, she discovered that she had fallen into bog water – a leaking cow trough had made a smelly brown pool over which danced a herd of orange flies. From her lower back to her shoulder she was very wet, and now, very cold. She made several angry noises trying to stand up, and her apple rolled out into the mud. This was the thing that made her want to cry most, she discovered, because it seemed suddenly such a sweet and childish thing to have set out for an adventure with a picnic and to have fallen over in the mud. Everybody needs someone.

  A pain in her shoulder brought back how Peter had looked at her with such disappointment, such disgust, how she had not been the person he was expecting her to be, and now he was saddled with her, and how marrying her had been a decision he regretted. It was that more than the slap that she’d found herself replaying often since the fight. She wanted to do more than slap herself, she wished she had fallen harder on the stile, and it ran through her suddenly that she would feel a great satisfaction if she slammed her head into the fence post.

  She sat down on the stile and collected herself. It wouldn’t do to become actually mad. She held her own hand and stroked it, felt sorry for the little hand, all mudded and cold. She took a deep breath and held on for a moment longer, then felt a touch better. She still had her flask of tea and so she poured herself a cupful, and drank it, horrid, but it became rather amusing, as though she had planned this as her picnic spot all along. The sleet continued. She threw half of the tea into the stinking bog water, and the flies rose up. She screwed the lid of the flask back on. ‘Well,’ she said out loud. She might as well continue until she got too cold. She stood and took a step, but her boot had become stuck and her socked foot came out and before she could stop herself she had stepped forward, full weight on top, into the mud. She stood, startled by how uncompromising the mud was. She didn’t laugh or cry, but when she tried hard to think of a reaction other than those none came to her. After she had pulled out the stuck boot, she put her wet and filthy foot back inside it and limped home, the dirty boot making a revolting noise the whole way.

  She opened the back door and stopped halfway out of her coat. The smell of cigarette smoke and the sound of voices that ceased abruptly at the thud of the door closing. She used the scraper to help her get the offending boot off and the stench hit her nose as it did. Peter appeared from the drawing room.

  ‘Oh, hello, darling. That was a quick walk.’ He looked rather ruddy. He stood in the doorway as though guarding something. Her heart beat slowly. ‘You look a little worse for wear.’

  ‘I stepped in mud. I fell over.’ She wanted him to come and help her, to be kind the way he would have been just a few months earlier, but also, she wanted him to stay away. There was the smell coming from her foot.

  ‘Ah. Oh dear. And are you all right?’

  ‘Quite all right. Just hurt pride. Do we have a visitor?’ A terrible thought struck her. Surely he wouldn’t have invited her here? She walked slowly towards the drawing room, one dirty boot still on, a far dirtier sock squelching on the carpet.

  Peter looked at her in a kind of horror. ‘Good God, what is that smell? You’re quite ruining the carpet.’

  She finished taking off her soiled coat and handed it to him, and he was forced to take it. ‘My boot came off and I fell in cow shit.’ A feeling of walking through tar. She heard the sofa complain as someone got up from it, and Peter had no option but to allow her into the room, his wrist shielding his nose from the smell. Reverend Jon Brown was standing with a cigarette and a glass of whisky in one hand.

  ‘My dear Mrs Hamilton!’ he said. The two of them were a little drunk she realised. ‘Goodness me, you appear to have done yourself quite a mischief!’ The fire roared.

  ‘Reverend,’ she said. It made very little sense. ‘I see you’re not here on God’s work.’ She nodded to the fire. Reverend Jon Brown laughed loudly and for too long.

  She turned to Peter, who sprang into action. ‘The reverend just popped over to talk about the boys.’

  ‘Yes,’ the reverend backed him up.

  To accuse them both of lying would have gained her nothing.

  ‘Oh. Again? And is everything all right?’

  ‘Oh, quite all right, yes – we were just drinking to how all right things are.’

  ‘Were you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter. There was a long silence which neither man tried to fill.

  ‘Well. Perhaps I shall go and find Betty.’

  ‘Oh, she’s gone out to find the girl.’

  ‘Bernadette, Reverend, her name is Bernadette.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  There was something disturbing about the way both of them conceded to her. She stood a moment longer in the doorway feeling foolish.

  ‘Well. I shall change out of my wet clothes, I think.’

  ‘Right you are, darling.’

  ‘Reverend.’ She turned to go and behind her Peter closed the door. Their conversation did not start up again. She climbed the stairs slowly, thinking she might hear them rattling on, but all was silent. She had the distinct feeling they were whispering. She poured a large glass of whisky and took it into the bath and stayed there a long time. Afterwards she examined the beginnings of the long purple bruise across her back. She found she still had mud outlining her toenails and nothing could be done to get rid of it.

  Peter came to bed late that night. For some time after Reverend Jon Brown had left, he had locked himself away in his study, and though she had stood outside his door, she felt unwelcome – and something else. She felt a little afraid, like some giant wheel had been set in motion and whatever she did to try and take control would only speed the thing up. She would wait until he came to her. She stayed up with the light on, but it was only after she turned it off that he entered the room. He came in already undressed and slipped under the covers so as not to wake her.

  ‘What was Reverend Jon Brown doing here?’

  She felt him hold his breath.

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. What was he here for?’

  ‘To talk about the boys.’ He smelled strongly of whisky. It felt like a
n advantage she had over him.

  ‘Why was it such a secret?’

  ‘It wasn’t a secret. I suppose we felt rather naughty being caught drinking before three.’

  ‘And what’s the problem?’

  He rolled over and sighed loudly. ‘What problem?’

  ‘With the boys.’

  ‘Oh. Nothing really.’

  ‘What did you talk about all that time then?’

  ‘Am I getting interrogated?’

  ‘You said you thought him a lunatic.’

  ‘Well, maybe I was wrong. He’s actually quite an interesting man if you spend the time to talk to him properly.’

  ‘Peter. What is going on?’ She sat up and turned on the light. ‘What is happening? I demand to know.’

  He placed his hands over his face in frustration.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look.’ He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘Look. Would you agree that we haven’t been getting along all that well recently?’

  ‘Were you talking to him about me?’

  ‘I was asking his advice.’

  ‘And what would he know?’

  ‘He’s a man who’s lived a life. He – he has connections all over the place.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I just. Look, I think you’ve felt under some sort of pressure – maybe to live up to being a mother – and looking at how your sister carries on . . . I feel like that’s been difficult for you, and perhaps what you need is a break.’

  ‘What on earth can you be talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about . . . I’m talking about these ideas you get in your head, about which you are totally unshakeable.’

  ‘About your girl in Edinburgh?’

  ‘I’ll have no more of that.’ His voice built suddenly and echoed in their room.