Brond

by Frederic Lindsay

  I sat beside her on the bed and put my arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Her name’s Maisie,’ I said. ‘An older woman with an Irish accent.’ And trying to help, ‘Maybe it’s just that he knew her a long time ago – in Ireland. She’ll be a friend.’

  Jackie shook her head.

  ‘No. She was young. Just a girl. And very nicely spoken.’

  My golden girl. I had lain with her on the bed in the next room. In an hotel room, I had sat on a bed – and they had yelled at me that a man had died in it – too suddenly for me to evade it, Kilpatrick’s poor dirtied corpse lolled out from under the sacks.

  ‘I’m so frightened,’ Jackie said. ‘I’m supposed to go away with him tonight.’

  ‘You don’t have to go anywhere with him. If we can just get out of here, I’ll look after you.’

  I meant it. Sitting on the whore’s bed, I could have been in love with her. I touched her cheek with my lips and she did not move away.

  Above her head, I saw the bed and squalid room reflected in the mirror, and her in my arms. I feel he’s watching me, she had said. Kennedy was watching us. Gently I put her away from me, and getting up went to the mirror, close against it – so close my own face blurred into eyes. The cold glass touched my skin.

  ‘Don’t be upset.’ In the mirror, she held out a hand to me. ‘There’s not anything you can do.’

  A dark line drawn behind her on the bed turned into the stick I had been given by Brond. I had not brought it into that room. There was no time to warn her, perhaps there was no need, as the door came open. Like children, we stared at the shining weight of the gun in Kennedy’s hand.

  ‘Oh, you impossible bitch,’ he said. It was a voice full of love and rage and hopelessness.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to hurt him.’

  I went towards her. Even now I believe it was because I misunderstood which of us needed protecting.

  ‘You cowardly bastard!’ he shouted and I realised he could not fire because I was too close to her. I think he called me a coward again, but all my fear had left me. I picked up Brond’s unlucky stick and a turn shook free the blade.

  He was coming towards me, trying, I suppose, to get some safe angle from which he could fire but Jackie kept turning with him. I even had time – I was in such control – to realise what Brond had brought about in giving me the stick; by death or guilt both Kennedy and myself were to be silenced. He knew my fatal temper and he had given me a weapon with which I could kill or get myself killed, but I would laugh in his face. He knew my temper but not the speed of my mind or the athlete’s strength in my body. I was young and nothing was impossible to me, and as Kennedy came forward I took him with the sword point on the wrist. He was to be disarmed and no great harm done. That was a thing impossibly exact, but I was mad with confidence and the gun fell out of his hand.

  Brilliantly coloured blood came out of him in gusts as he tried to kill me with his hands. The heart, that tough muscle, becomes its own murderer when an artery is cut. Untended or if there were no natural defences, it would empty the body. He came at me and I did not understand what had happened. I even had a moment of terror that the blood was mine. I had nothing to defend myself for as he went for me a shock went up my arm and the stick was snatched out of my grasp. The bed took me behind the knees and I went back with him on top. He might have strangled me but it was my fortune that the nerve in his wrist had been cut so that the four fingers of his right hand would not close. I rolled and carried both of us off the end of the bed. As we landed I came down on him with all my weight and it seemed to stun him. With each heartbeat blood spurted from his outflung wrist. All I wanted was to save him. I knew that a tourniquet above the elbow might stop the blood but that the arm would at once begin to die. I did not lack knowledge. As he lay still, I pulled down the wadded sheet and pressed with all my strength on his wrist. The sheet soaked and I gathered more and pressed. The curtain of blood over my eyes put a drench of scarlet over walls, roof, bed, everywhere. The only bloodless thing in the room was his face, like a white parcel emptied and thrown aside. I thought I had saved him until I heard a whisper under the mingled thunder of our breath. On the white front of his shirt there was a small unremarkable shape like the lips of a child opening on a sigh.

  At last I had to look up at Jackie. In the mirror of her eyes – not Jackie but Val, Michael Dart’s wife – I saw a man of blood on his knees beside a corpse.

  SEVENTEEN

  I had nothing to do with Peter Kilpatrick’s death and for it I had been arrested and interrogated and put in the shadow of imprisonment. I knew less than nothing about the assassination and I had fallen into the hands of secret police and been threatened in the hotel; the impress on a bed of the man haunted me and with it a dead face from under a pile of sacks. I had killed Kennedy; I had stabbed him and he had spouted blood; I had stabbed him and he drowned in a cupful of it; and that night I was returned to my father’s house and woke the next day in the bed I had slept in as a boy.

  The window rattled in its frame. In any kind of wind, it had done that ever since I could remember. I had never noticed before how it sounded like hasty footsteps. Everything familar looked strange that morning. This was my bedroom, Jess, my sister, had the tiny room across the landing; downstairs, the kitchen was the only other room in the house and my parents slept there in the bed set into a recess in the wall. The ceiling of my bedroom sloped and bumped to fit under the roof; Jess’s room was even worse. Her bed was unmade and clothes and schoolbooks lay in a casual archipelago; at her age I had been forced by my mother to be tidy. With a small shock, I recognised the clock on her bedside table: the alabaster lady. Jess must have persuaded my mother to let her take it from its pride of place downstairs. Green marble and on top of it a woman in white drapery, Grecian, flowing – the alabaster lady I called her to myself: the word was like an incantation – alabaster, alabaster. Her breasts were bare and nothing else like that was ever allowed in the house. For years it puzzled me until I decided that probably they had never noticed. Once when I was about seven I went down in the middle of the night and took her back to bed with me. I held her between my legs and fell asleep, but when I woke she was gone. I was terrorised by shame but neither of them ever mentioned it.

  I put out a finger and touched her cheek and two little breasts of stone.

  It was always dark in the kitchen. The ceiling was low and the wooden beams seemed to pull it down towards your head. There was a small window at either end, but the back one looked out on a bank of earth and the tree that hung its branches over the house. Even on sunny days I wanted to put on the light. When I did, my mother would put it out: we could not afford it. She had spent her married life in this room.

  ‘Ten o’clock. I slept in this morning.’

  I had always to apologise for sleeping late. With the hours my father worked, it seemed indecent to lie in bed.

  ‘This morning,’ she said looking up at me from where she knelt. She was wiping round the hearth. ‘This morning. Well, you’d an excuse.’

  I tried to keep my back to her while I cut and made a sandwich of cheese.

  ‘There’s an egg.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘This is fine.’

  I poured milk into a glass and chewed looking out of the window as if there might be something new and surprising to see. The sandwich tasted like cardboard.

  ‘Who was he?’

  I remembered her face last night as she tried to see past me to where Primo bulked in the dark at the end of the path.

  ‘Just a friend. He gave me a lift home.’

  ‘You told us you had a job.’

  ‘I had a job.’

  ‘How could you be here if you have a job?’

  Her voice was thin and querulous like an old woman’s. I put what was left of the sandwich wastefully back on the plate hoping she would not notice.

  ‘My friend’s a kind of doctor. He advised me to stay here for my
health.’

  ‘Just a kind of doctor? And what does that mean?’

  ‘Till classes start again. I’d like to stay till it’s time for next year’s classes.’

  ‘Something’s wrong.’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said without looking round at her. ‘I’ll walk up and see Dad. He’ll be up past the brig?’

  Turning from the window, everything in the room was dark.

  ‘I’ll not be long.’

  But she followed me to the door.

  ‘You’ve spoiled your chance.’

  ‘What?’ My voice cracked like an angry child’s. It was as though she were laying a curse on me.

  ‘Tell him your lies. You’ve spoiled your chance.’

  She closed the door in my face.

  Beyond the bridge were fields of crops. On our side of the burn, there were cattle and some sheep. I walked slowly in the warm sun. The bridge was three broken planks wide. Even since last summer, it had got worse. It would be made to last, though, till it rotted into the water. On the other side, sparrows balanced on the feathery heads of barley. They rippled into the air as I went by, resettling as the wind stroked the yellow swell back and forward. I heard my father before I saw him.

  Crouched over, the canister strapped on his back, he swung the nozzle like the blade of a scythe. The spray hissed and stopped, restarted and hesitated like an asthmatic breathing. I had come round by the far end to find him. He was very methodical, making his way towards me as if the big farmer in the sky oversaw his efforts. In shop windows sometimes in Glasgow I would glimpse myself slow plodding as if mired in the glaur of a farm lane; then I would put back my shoulders and march away from the sight picking up my feet as I went.

  ‘Hold it! You’ll have me sprayed as well.’

  He straightened, blinking in slow pleasure.

  ‘Aye, son.’

  Easing the straps, he set the load down off his back. After a stretch luxurious as a yawn he fished with two fingers into his shirt pocket and fetched out a tattered pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Want one?’

  ‘You know I don’t.’

  He grinned, pleased with himself. The blue smoke paled from his lips. It was warm in the shelter of the hedge watching the wind move through the barley. After a minute, he eased up one leg and let air go.

  ‘Pardon. I thought you’d have picked up some bad habits by this time.’

  ‘Like farting,’ I said.

  He gave the unexpected laugh that took him sometimes like a giggle when you surprised him with a joke. He was a small man, not up to my shoulder – broad though, a good worker.

  ‘That wouldnae do, if your professors heard you saying that.’

  ‘All some of them are worth. It’s a great thought – yon big lecture hall and right at the climax, just when he makes a point – “Shakespeare’s father was fined for his dung heap” – a whole year, hundreds of us, up on one side and giving him a blast.’

  ‘No’ easy tae get the timing right,’ my father reflected and we laughed and fell into a comfortable silence.

  ‘A bit o an overlap, mind, wouldnae matter,’ he said and laughed again. He was fond of jokes like that.

  ‘Decent o that chap giving you a lift home.’

  I looked at him thinking he was probing, but that was all he meant. Whoever had given me a lift home had been decent.

  ‘He was passing this way.’

  ‘Still . . . Some car. Cost a bob or two.’

  ‘It was a big car.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re making that kind of friend.’ He cleared his throat, and gazed intently at the patched blanket of fields thrown across the little hills in front of us. As always, he would never look at you when he was saying something serious. ‘It’s with you being at the University. In my day . . . See, in our day, you never had a chance. You’d no chance.’

  I clapped my hands and flights of little birds bickered up into the air.

  ‘What was that about?’

  ‘Ach, I got tired o them bobbing up and down and stuffing their stupid faces.’

  My father laughed.

  ‘Auld Robertson’ll never miss what they eat. He can afford it . . . It’s good to have you back. You’re needing the rest.’

  ‘I’m not staying.’ I didn’t know till that moment that I had decided. ‘I’ll really need to get back. I’ve work to do.’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘I’d think twice about that, son. It’s up to yourself, of course. You’ve been ill, remember. I mean if it’s the money . . .’

  ‘Not that kind of work. Nothing heavy. Not real work, just studying. Playing on my backside.’

  Still without looking at me, he wondered, ‘Could you not do that at home?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have the books. They’re too dear to buy. I can work in the library – at the Mitchell or the University. It’s a good time to get the books, being quiet in the summer.’

  He sighed out a breath.

  ‘Aye, well, the studying comes first. I can see you would need tae get back.’

  Back. To my good friends with the big cars.

  EIGHTEEN

  The car rolled to a stop and he said, ‘I leave the main road across there, but you’ll have no bother getting another lift.’ I climbed out and, to prove his truthfulness, he signalled carefully right, turned across the three lanes and slipped out of sight under an arch of branches.

  About it being easy to get another lift, he had made a mistake. Cars came fast and showed no inclination to stop. A cluster of three went by like that and then a big Ford trundled along sedately. The driver, an elderly man in glasses, leaned forward to hold my gaze until at the last moment he gave me two fingers and accelerated away.

  After that, the entry under the arch of branches on the other side of the road seemed cool and secret. I looked at it while cars snarled past, and then crossed over. Beyond the arch there was a narrow lane sloping sharply down. Under the big intermingled screen of beeches, it would have been easy to miss. In the still air, under the dappled light, it was like going down a tunnel, except that fields showed between the trees on either side, unpleating over little hills. Half way down there was a patch of waste ground and a young couple beside a car making apologetic noises to a tall stooped man with the look of a farmer. As I walked down, they disappeared into the car and began to edge it back and forward trying to turn. I stood aside to give them room and at last they beat a retreat up towards the highway.

  ‘They didnae understand a word.’ The farmer shook his head at me.

  ‘They were German,’ I said. ‘At least that’s what the plate on the back said.’

  ‘Ah couldnae make them understand there’s a bit ground on the far side o the brae would’ve done them fine. They were settan up a tent here – but there’s nae water and God’s plenty o midges.’

  Tumbled stones of a ruined but and ben cottage were almost buried among chickweed and dandelions.

  ‘I’ll sleep here,’ I said. ‘If it’s okay with you.’

  ‘Ye’ll be eaten alive.’

  ‘I’m immune to midges.’

  The farmer laughed and as he walked away a black dog that had been crouched in the grass sprang up and followed him, looking back at me over its shoulder. When he had gone, I walked up the brae until I found a good site. I unrolled the sleeping bag and lay listening to the burn and eating the last of my chocolate; over and over in the trees behind me, a chaffinch did his run-up-and-bowl song; it sounded sweeter than the ones at home, but like people chaffinches have different dialects; I thought about that and then I thought about sleeping and then I told myself it didn’t matter as long as I rested. A fox barked. Waves kept running up the shore and I came properly awake and it was traffic on the main road and I was out of that night into another day.

  ‘Ye changed your mind then.’

  It was the tall stooped farmer. His face was brown with deeply scored lines in the cheeks.

  ‘That’s right. I decided against t
he midges.’

  He walked at my side back across the long field.

  ‘This is the life,’ I said, ‘We could be a million miles from anywhere. We could be on an island out in the middle of the Atlantic.’

  ‘An island . . .’ He spat into the grass. ‘Ah canna bear the sea. Ah’ve bided here all my days. Except the one time. And ah got all the travellan ah’d ever want oot o that. In a khaki uniform tae the other side o the world. The Japs took us the same day the auld “Prince o Wales” was sunk. This place does me fine – ah’ll no leave it a second time.’

  At the top of the slope, we were ambushed by the main road. Container lorries in convoy shook the air and left an ache of silence. ‘Ah don’t regret going. It was a thing that had tae be done. Mind ye,’ he finished with a serious nod, ‘thae three years ruined me.’ I had no answer to that, and he walked back through the washed early morning light with the black dog at heel.

  Later in the afternoon, I was going through a village when I heard my name called. ‘This is me at home,’ Donald Baxter said, picking seeds from the pouch of his lower lip. I had thought he lived in an armchair at the Men’s Union, the oldest student in captivity. Despite the plaid shirt open at the neck, his concession to countryside and summer, I suspected the woollen underwear would still be there and all the way down to his ankles. Clutching a bunch of black grapes, he had appeared from a dark little cave of a village store and stood blinking in the sunlight. ‘Back to the big city? Why not?’ he pondered. ‘Any excuse for a party.’ He came back in a clapped out Marina, one wing punched in and gaping from a past collision. As he braked to a violent stop, flakes of blue-daubed rust detached themselves from the injured part. ‘Auntie’s car,’ he said, and somehow that explained what ‘home’ meant and in getting away from there I knew he was doing himself a favour. It was nice not to have to feel grateful. A day-old copy of The Herald was lying on the front passenger seat; as I shifted it to make room for myself, I saw a banner headline telling of murder and a picture of the old politician who had died in the Riggs Lodge Hotel. Glancing, Donald Baxter said, ‘Full of years and dishonour. A treacherous old bastard from a long line of them going back to Flodden. In any decent country of self-respecting Christians, he would have been assassinated long ago.’ Driving one-handed, he groped on the shelf and produced as in a way of celebration a bottle of whisky. We passed the bottle back and forth.