‘We need to think about the decorations,’ said Nicolette, cutting across her. I supposed there were excesses of snobbery that even the most unashamed social climber could not bear to hear and dropping mentions of one’s grandest forebear really was beyond the pale. I began to wonder about Vashti and Nicolette’s beginnings and then, feeling like Lady Bracknell to be doing so, I put it out of my mind.
‘Of course,’ said Vashti, changing tack smoothly. ‘What are you wearing, Lorna darling? Do you know yet? We need to make sure the whole room is a setting for the jewel that is you.’
‘Like an altar with a bride,’ said Nicolette. ‘Please give us some clues.’
‘Are you holding the party in here?’ I asked, wondering how any decorations could be squeezed in amongst all the furnishings and realising a little too late that I should not have drawn attention to the way they lived, all in one room together like travelling tinkers in their caravan.
‘No, no, no,’ said Vashti. ‘We’re opening up the ballroom for the night. And it’s rather a barn without some frillies. So please tell us what palette we’re working on, Lorna darling, so we can get stuck in.’
‘I don’t want you to go to a lot of’ – I am sure that Lorna was about to say ‘expense’ but she managed to bite her lip on it – ‘bother.’ The subtlety was wasted, however.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Nicolette cried. ‘We’re in funds for once in our miserable lives.’
‘Oh?’ said Lorna, trying not to sound too surprised.
‘We’ve let the cottage,’ Vashti said. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘Ford Cottage?’ said Lorna, faltering slightly over the name.
‘Vash, you are a bull in a china shop sometimes,’ said Nicolette. ‘I’m sorry, my darling, but yes. We’ve found a new tenant at last. At least for a while.’
‘Fella needs his head looking at,’ said Johnny Howie. Having seen Ford Cottage, I had to agree.
‘He’s a painter,’ said Nicolette. ‘An artist. He’s taken it for the light, you oaf, not the fixtures and fittings.’
‘Good luck to him,’ said Johnny, unabashed. ‘Precious little light down there in July, never mind the depths of winter.’
‘The quality of light, you double oaf,’ said his wife. Then she began to talk in a throaty voice, waving a hand in languid circles. ‘The soft light through the bare winter trees, the gentle milky light of a foggy afternoon. Anyway,’ she said, her voice changing back to normal, ‘he’s paid up two months in advance and says he might stay until springtime. So don’t worry about a few vases and tassels to make your party a feast to the eyes, darling Lorna. We can afford it.’ She linked arms with Lorna and shook her gently. Vashti beamed at them and I smiled too. Generosity is always attractive, even such reckless generosity as this was.
‘Oh but what a shame it’s such an awkward time of year for flowers,’ Nicolette went on. ‘We have the most beautiful spring flowers here, Dandy. All the usuals, of course, and a sea of those divine white narcissi with the pheasants’ eyes. It’s utterly drunk-making to walk up the drive in April, isn’t it, Vash?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid the decor can’t be predominantly floral, darling, rent or no rent. Not if we’re to have something to drink too. I declare, the twentieth of November must be the most impossible day of the year to try to dream up a theme for a party. Too late for Hallowe’en – no matter what you say, Niccy.’
‘We could always hearken forward to Yuletide and go all out for evergreens,’ said Nicolette. ‘Oh Vash, don’t look so sneering. It’s close enough. We’ve fudged like this who knows how many times.’
‘Only when we’ve had to,’ said Vashti. ‘And it’s an entire month out.’ Lorna too was shaking her head at the idea.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘It’s unforgivable to lump someone’s birthday in with Christmas even if the poor thing is born on Christmas Day. Out of the question in November.’
‘Pink,’ said Lorna at last. ‘I’m wearing pink. So if you insist, I suppose some pink ribbons would be a pretty touch.’
Nicolette and Vashti looked so aghast at the idea of all their flamboyant plans coming down to a few pink ribbons that it was all I could do not to laugh.
‘Anyway,’ I said, trying to sound natural and probably failing, ‘talking of good fortune and windfalls, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and have a word with your maid.’
All four Howies swivelled their eyes to gape at me.
‘For the household budget talk,’ I supplied. ‘Actually, it’s beginning to look as though it might make a pamphlet. So I thought I’d start by gathering the thoughts of as wide a social sweep as possible. You, obviously, being the first family of the neighbourhood,’ I guessed that a little flattery would do me no harm, ‘and your maid right down at the other end of things.’ That, of course, ruined the flattery completely. It might be true that a girl trying to run this place single-handed was necessarily at the bottom of the heap – and make no mistake, the serving classes have easily as many gradations and nuanced shadings as do we – but it was hardly diplomatic to make such plain reference to it.
‘I won’t, of course, be asking her about her housekeeping budget,’ I said. ‘Nor about her personal wages.’
‘What does that leave?’ said Johnny, frowning at me, and I could see that he had a point. Feeling myself flushing and hoping that the overhang of my silly Beefeater’s hat would hide it, I rose with as much dignity as I could muster and walked away.
‘Ring from the hall for her,’ Vashti advised me. ‘It’s a rabbit warren behind the door. You’ll never get out alive.’ And then her attention was given back to Lorna.
‘Pink ribbons are certainly a start,’ she said.
‘But when you say pink,’ said Nicolette, ‘you surely don’t mean pale rosebud, do you? A good rich fuchsia would be much more propitious.’
‘Let’s start at the top and work down,’ Vashti was saying as I closed the door. ‘The headdress is really the thing.’
It took an unconscionably long time for Molly to answer my ring, with the result that I had just rung again when the door under the stairs swung open. She scowled at me in that way that little boys and sulky girls do when they are caught falling short of the ideal.
‘Molly, isn’t it?’ I said, and she bobbed vaguely in reply, no more than a clenching at the knees and a downward look. ‘I’d like to talk to you, if you please. I’m gathering snippets for an article I’m writing, on household affairs, and Mrs Howie invited me to interview you.’ This sentence contained a number of little greyish lies, not least, I was interested to note, that the talk which had become a pamphlet was now a full-blown article. I wondered in passing if it would end up in three bound volumes with an index.
Molly looked rather cheered at the prospect of an interview, as those with dull daily rounds usually are at anything which promises a break in the routine. This, I am sure, is at the bottom of the taste for excitement which infects the serving classes, and at which their employers are wont to scoff; I am sure I might greet a fire in the attics with gleeful welcome, as did the Gilverton maids a year or two ago, if I thought it might get me out of my five o’clock start and another day of dustpans.
‘I can come back through to the kitchens with you, if you are busy,’ I said, thinking that I should get more from her if she were in her own little kingdom than if she remained standing here, shifting from foot to foot in the hallway. She bobbed again and went back to the door, passing through it first rather rudely but at least holding it open as I followed her.
‘I should have unravelled the hem of my jersey and tied it to the door,’ I joked as she led me through a series of passages, round corners, up and down little flights of steps.
‘Aye, it’s a mess o’ a place,’ said Molly, an original and none too flattering turn of phrase, although spot-on as it happened. There were bundles of laundry, baskets of kindling and flour sacks littered around the corridors, all of which surely should have homes in definite
and separate corners of the household quarters and not be lying around jumbled up together on the floor to be tripped over.
‘But aren’t you ever frightened here on your own?’ I asked as we reached the kitchen at last. The kitchen at Gilverton is no bower, with its monstrous black range and those shiny, brick-shaped tiles from soaring ceiling to stone floor, and I have seen other kitchens in my time just as cheerless, with their requisite north-facing windows and their biblical verses adorning the walls, but the kitchen of Luckenlaw House was unsurpassed. The solitary high window was choked up with cobwebs on the inside and moss on the outside, giving a subterranean feel to the place. The tiles were a nasty shade of orange-brown which clashed with the red tiles on the floor and the work table, dressers and cupboards had all been painted a uniform dull black, even their brass handles slopped over with it. The range was lit but seemed unequal to the task of heating so much as the hearthrug in front of it never mind the room beyond, and the one skimpy armchair drawn up close to the fender was pitiful enough to make one weep. In the seat of this chair the elderly cat I remembered from my first visit was huddled in a tight ball, tail over its paws for warmth.
‘Frightened?’ said Molly. ‘Naw. Fed up sometimes, but what’s to be feart of?’
‘Well, there’s this strange man I keep hearing about,’ I said, thrilled to be given such an opening so early on, but trying to hide it.
‘Aw, him,’ said Molly, and pulled her cardigan tightly around her, holding it in place with crossed arms. The gesture was not self-comforting but rather belligerent, a kind of squaring up. ‘Well, as tae him, madam, he’s been and gone.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, thinking it best to profess ignorance.
‘He’s already hud a go at me and I sent him packin’.’ I looked suitably shocked and impressed and Molly went on, warming to her tale as she did so. ‘Away back in May it was,’ she said. ‘The nicht o’ the full moon. I hud been a walk.’
‘To the Rural?’ I prompted. She gave me a very pert look and only just managed not to follow it up with a snort of laughter.
‘Eh no, madam,’ she said. ‘Marriage stones o’ ancient times and babies’ bootees? No. I wish I’d been there in the summer, mind you, when thon meenister’s wife did her wee turn.’ Molly sniggered and peeped at me out of the corner of her eye. ‘In May, I was just away out a walk mysel’, seein’ it was sich a lovely nicht. He got me on my road back. Jumped oot at me from ahint one o’ they outhouses just in the yard there, whipped the feet oot fae under me, hit me such a skelp over my face I couldna breathe and then well . . . you can imagine, can you no’?’
‘He pinched you?’
Again Molly gave me a look of pity.
‘It was a bit more than pinchin’,’ she said. ‘He was a’ over me, the dirty beast, stinkin’ o’ whisky and pinnin’ me doon.’
‘Whisky?’ I interjected.
‘Whisky, aye,’ said Molly looking at me rather oddly. ‘I mean, that’s to say, I think it was whisky. I’m no’ a drinker mysel’ and my faither nivver touched a drop in his life, but I’ve worked to the Howies long enough to learn what whisky smells like.’
Such insolence could not be tolerated and so I decided to pretend that I had not heard her (and thus escaped having to wonder how, if Molly were typical, the good name of Gilver might be dragged around like a floor-rag in my own kitchen at home).
‘Pinning you down, eh?’ I said, returning to the narrative where I wished I had never left it. ‘What did you do?’
‘I kicked him,’ she said. ‘Hard. And I caught him a guid smack on the back o’ the heid. Then I kicked him again, richt in the belly. The stomach, madam, excuse me. And that saw him off. Up he got and away he went.’
‘I take it you didn’t recognise him?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve been hearing a name,’ I went on, casually.
‘Aye, I’ll just bet ye have,’ said Molly. ‘But I’ve seen Jockie Christie three an’ fower times a week for the last five years and I’d ken if it was him. And it wasnae because he’s a fine, well-set-up laddie wi’ his own big hoose and he’d nivver dae suchlike and anyway it wisnae a man at all everybody says and I believe them.’
Overwhelmed by the ferocity of this, I struggled in vain to frame an answer. What was there to say? Clearly there was a campaign to climb the social scale going on below stairs at Luckenlaw House which was equal to anything the ladies in the drawing room had ever attempted and Molly was not willing to harbour nasty suspicions of a fine, well-set-up young man with the tenancy of a big house, in whose path she had been throwing herself week in and week out for years. I told myself that she must really know it was not him. For even if Nicolette and Vashti had overlooked the dullness of their fiancés in their quest for Highland castles and pipers on headlands, no woman alive could turn a blind eye to such vile habits as the dark stranger displayed. Not for a farmhouse, anyway.
‘So,’ I said. ‘What happened next?’
Molly was only too ready to take up the thrilling tale once more.
‘As soon as he got off me I lowped up and bolted for the back scullery door and I went straicht to thon telephone to get the police. I didna ask “permission” either. And I’d dae the same again tomorrow; I dinna care what anyone says.’
I surmised from this that poor Molly had been given a ticking off for taking matters and the telephone into her own hands.
‘You’re a good brave girl,’ I said, thinking that if a little pertness came along with the courage to kick and slap one’s way out of trouble, then it was a price worth paying. Much better that than milky docility which lay helpless and suffered the worst.
I thought about it again though, on the way home in the motor car. Luckily Lorna too seemed preoccupied, dreaming of her party probably, and so did not seem to resent my silence. Perhaps, I thought, Alec and I were wrong; perhaps Molly’s robust defence of her honour gave the stranger such a fright that he really did take three months to pluck up the courage and venture out again. I tried not to dwell upon a further thought which Molly’s story had started rolling: that the stranger was not content with pinching and frightening after all and had been about to do much worse to Molly until she fought him off. I wondered if Mrs Fraser had kept some of the most upsetting details of her attack to herself, and wondered too just how bad things might have got for Mrs Hemingborough had not young Jessie seen the start of it and charged along the lane shouting.
In the end, though, I decided to press ahead with my search for the three missing victims, and so after luncheon I set off up the lane beyond the manse, meaning to sweep through the village from the foot of the law to the Colinsburgh road and flush out whatever was hiding behind these brightly painted doors. Miss Lindsay had not yet rung her bell for afternoon school and the voices of the girls were, as ever, raised in song. This one I recognised and as I tramped along I sang it myself softly.
‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high,
The snow comes scattering from the sky,
Dandy Gilver says she’ll die
If she doesn’t get the boy with the roving eye.
He is handsome, she is pretty.
They are the couple from the golden city.
Come and say you’ll marry me . . .’
I was singing quite loudly now and I even began to skip for the finale.
‘With a one’ – I gave a little hop – ‘with a two’ – another little hop and a glance out of the corner of my eye – ‘with a one, two, three,’ I finished awkwardly as I realised that, from the gateway of the nearest cottage, a woman was watching. ‘A very good afternoon,’ I called to her. ‘I’m afraid you caught me reliving my youth.’
‘Whit ye dae alane is seen by ane,’ came the reply.
‘Indeed,’ I acknowledged, although I rather thought my immortal soul would survive a little skipping being witnessed by my Maker. ‘I am enjoying watching the girls at play as I come and go. I’m staying at the manse, you know.’ I had not seen this one at the Rural meeting the w
eek before; I should have remembered the face for, even in a land renowned for those complexions upon which harsh weather and harsher living had etched their history, hers stood out and yet her hair was scraped mercilessly back from it as though to promote its clear display. The hands clasping the gate were dried to scaliness and had deep red fissures running between the fingers. She could have been any age between thirty and sixty.
‘Are any of them yours?’ I said.
‘Any o’ whit?’ said the woman.
‘Those delightful little girls,’ I said, hoping not for their sake.
‘Aye, twae,’ she answered. ‘The bonniest flooer oft wilts the quickest, mind.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you why I’m asking. I’m planning a little something for the next Rural meeting . . .’
‘That’s nithin’ tae dae wi’ me,’ she said. ‘They swim in sin, they’ll drown in sorrow.’
‘You’ve never been?’ I said, wondering if I could cross her off my list. Molly, granted, had not been en route from the Rural when she had met the stranger but something told me this woman would not take many moonlight walks by herself just for the joy of it.
‘Cross the step a bride and leave a corp,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve all I’m needin’.’ Of course she did not mean it literally. She would leave her house every Sunday to go to church, but I am sure that what she said was otherwise true.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to keep you back. Lovely to have met you.’ And I scuttled away up the lane heading for the last house. When I knocked and a sweet-faced young woman with a flowered apron tied over her protruding middle answered the door, I could not help blurting out:
‘I’ve just come from your neighbour. My dear, rather you than me.’ Of course, this was very silly. The woman might have been her relation or even her dearest friend, but my outburst was greeted with a sorrowful little laugh.
‘My mammy ayeways telt me to see the good in everyone,’ she said, ‘and Mrs Black keeps hersel’ to hersel . . . mostly.’
Bury Her Deep Page 14
