Wild Mountain Thyme

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  “You’re talking in hypothetical circles.”

  “I’m not.” But she didn’t know what a hypothetical circle was, and so couldn’t argue further. Instead, she lapsed into silence. But we must ring up Mrs. Archer, she thought. Or write to her or something. Oliver must let her know that Thomas is all right. Some time.

  It was, perhaps, their only quarrel. Otherwise, the entire undertaking, which could have been, and even deserved to be, disastrous, was proving an unqualified success. Nothing had gone wrong. Everything had proved simple, easy, delightful. The winter roads were fast and empty; the scenery, the open skies, the stunning countryside, all contributed to their pleasure.

  In the Lake District it had rained, but they had put on waterproofs and walked for miles, with Thomas, cheerful as ever, atop his father’s shoulders. There had been fires burning pleasantly in their bedrooms at the little lakeside hotel, and boats moored at the jetty that lay at the end of the garden, and in the evening a kindly chambermaid had watched over Thomas while Oliver and Victoria dined by candlelight on grilled trout and rare beefsteaks that had never seen the inside of a deep freeze.

  That night, lying in the soft darkness, in featherbedded warmth, in Oliver’s arms, she had watched the curtains stirring at the open window and felt the cool damp air on her cheeks. From the quiet darkness beyond the window came the sounds of water and the creak of the boats tied up at the jetty, and there had come a distrust of such perfect content. Surely, she told herself, it could not go on. Surely something would happen that would spoil it all.

  But her apprehension was unfounded. Nothing happened. The next day was even better, with the road pouring north to Scotland and the sun coming out as they crossed the border. By the afternoon, the great peaks of the Western Highlands lay ahead of them, iced in snow, and at the foot of Glencoe they stopped at a pub for tea and ate homemade scones dripping with butter. And after that the countryside grew more and more magnificent, and Oliver told Victoria that it was called Lochaber, and he began to sing “The Road to the Isles.”

  “Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber we will go…”

  * * *

  Today Loch Morag. Tomorrow, or perhaps the next day, Benchoile. Victoria had lost all sense of time. She had lost all sense of anything. Watching Thomas, she hugged herself more tightly and rested her chin on her knees. Happiness, she decided, should be tangible. A thing you could take hold of and put somewhere safe, like a box with a lid or a bottle with a stopper. And then, later, sometime when you were miserable, you could take it out and look at it and feel it and smell it, and you would be happy again.

  Thomas was tiring of throwing sand into the sea. He straightened up on his small legs and looked about him. He spied Victoria, sitting there, where he had left her. He grinned, and began to stump unsteadily towards her up the littered little beach.

  Watching him filled her heart with an almost unbearable tenderness. She thought, if I can feel like this about Thomas, after only four days, how does Mrs. Archer feel, not even knowing where he is?

  It didn’t bear thinking about. Basely, cowardly, she pushed the idea to the back of her mind and opened her arms to Thomas. He reached her and she hugged him. The wind blew her long hair across his cheek, and tickled. He began to laugh.

  * * *

  While Victoria and Thomas sat on the beach and waited for him, Oliver was telephoning. The previous night had been the first performance of Bent Penny at Bristol, and he couldn’t wait to hear what the critics had said in the morning papers.

  He was not exactly on tenterhooks, because he knew that the play was good—his best, in fact. But there were always elements and reactions that were apt to take one unawares. He wanted to know how the show had gone, how the audience had responded, and whether Jennifer Clay, the new little actress getting her first big chance, had justified the faith that the producer and Oliver had put in her.

  He was on the telephone to Bristol for nearly an hour, listening while the ecstatic reviews were read aloud to him along six hundred miles of humming wires. The critics from the Sunday Times and the Observer, he was told, were coming down to see the play at the end of the week. Jennifer Clay was on the brink of being swept to stardom, and there had already come interested noises from a couple of important West End managements.

  “In fact, Oliver, I think we’ve got a hit on our hands.”

  Oliver was gratified, but he had watched the show in rehearsal, and he was not particularly surprised. The Bristol call finally finished, he rang his agent, and all the good news was confirmed. As well, there had been feelers from New York about his play A Man In The Dark, which had done so well in Edinburgh a summer ago.

  “Would you be interested?” the agent asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘interested’?”

  “Would you be prepared to go to New York if you have to?”

  Oliver loved New York. It was one of his favorite places. “I’d be prepared to go even if I didn’t have to.”

  “How long are you going to be away?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “Can I get in touch with you?”

  “After Thursday, I’ll be at Benchoile, in Sutherland. Staying with a guy called Roddy Dunbeath.”

  “Eagle Years Dunbeath?”

  “The very man.”

  “What’s the phone number?”

  Oliver reached for his leather diary, thumbed through it. “Creagan two three seven.”

  “OK, I’ve got it. If I have any fresh news I’ll call you.”

  “You do that.”

  “Good luck then, Oliver. And congratulations.”

  His agent rang off. After a little, as though reluctant to put an end to such a momentous conversation, Oliver replaced his own receiver, and sat looking at it for a moment or two, while slowly, relief flooded through him. It was over. Bent Penny was launched, like a child sent out into the world. A child conceived with passion, brought to life in the most agonizing birth pains, nursed and coaxed to maturity, and bludgeoned into shape, it was, at last, no longer Oliver’s responsibility.

  All over. He thought of the production, the rehearsals, the personality problems, the temperaments, the tears. The chaos, the panics, the rewriting, the total despair.

  I think we’ve got a hit on our hands.

  It would make him, probably, a lot of money. It might even make him rich. But this was of small account compared to the easement of his spirit, and the sense of freedom that existed now that it was all behind him.

  And ahead…? He reached for a cigarette. There was something waiting for him, but he wasn’t sure what. He only knew that the subconscious edge of his imagination, the part that did all the work, was already filling with people. People living in a certain place, a certain style. Voices had conversations. The dialogues had a form and a balance all their own, and the words, and the faces of the individuals who spoke them, swam up, as they always did, out of his prodigious memory.

  These first stirrings of life made everyday existence, for Oliver, as intense and dramatic as it is for most men when they fall in love. This, for him, was the best part of writing. It was the same as the anticipation of waiting in a darkened theatre for the curtain to go up on the first act. You didn’t know what was going to happen, but you knew that it would be marvelous and tremendously exciting and better—much better—than anything you had ever seen before.

  He got up off the bed and went to the window and flung it open to the icy morning air. Gulls wheeled and screamed over the funnel of a weather-beaten fishing boat as she butted her way, against the western wind, out to the open sea.

  On the far side of the dark blue water the hills were frosted in white, and below him was the hotel garden and the scrap of a beach. He looked down upon Victoria and his son Thomas. They did not know he was watching. As he observed them, Tom grew tired of his game of throwing sand into the water, and turned and made his way up the beach to Victoria’s side. She opened her arms to him and drew him close, and her
long fair hair blew all over his red and chubby face.

  The combination of this delightful scene and his own euphoric frame of mind filled Oliver with an unfamiliar content. He knew that it was ephemeral; it might last a day or even an hour or two. But all at once it seemed that the world was a brighter and a more hopeful place; that the smallest incident could take on immense significance; that affection would turn to love, and love—that humdrum word—to passion.

  He closed the window and went downstairs to tell them his good news.

  8

  THURSDAY

  Miss Ridgeway, that impeccable private secretary of undetermined years, was already at her desk when, at a quarter to nine in the morning, John Dunbeath emerged from the lift onto the ninth floor of the new Regency House Building and the opulent, elegant offices of the Warburg Investment Corporation.

  She looked up as he came through the door, her expression, as always, polite, pleasant, and impassive.

  “Good morning, Mr. Dunbeath.”

  “Hi.”

  He had never before had a secretary whom he did not call by her Christian name, but sometimes the formality of “Miss Ridgeway” stuck in his throat. They had, after all, worked together for some months. It would have been so much easier to call her Mary or Daphne or whatever her name was, but the truth of the matter was that he hadn’t even found this out, and there was something so strictly formal about her manner that he had never plucked up the courage to ask.

  Sometimes, watching her as she sat there, with one shapely leg crossed over the other, taking down his letters in her faultless shorthand, he pondered on her private life. Did she care for an aged mother and take an interest in good works? Did she go to concerts at the Albert Hall and spend her holidays in Florence? Or did she, like a secretary in some film, remove her spectacles and shake loose her mouse pale hair, receive lovers and indulge in scenes of unbridled passion?

  He knew that he would never know.

  She said, “How was the trip?”

  “OK. But the plane was late getting in yesterday evening. We got held up in Rome.”

  Her eyes moved over his dark suit, his black tie. She said, “You got the cable all right? The one from your father?”

  “Yes. Thanks for that.”

  “It came on Tuesday morning. I thought you’d want to know. I sent a copy through to Bahrain right away. The original is on your desk with some personal mail…” John moved through to his own office, and Miss Ridgeway rose from her chair and followed him. “… and yesterday’s Times that the announcement was in. I thought you’d like to see it.”

  She thought of everything. He said, “Thank you,” again and opened his briefcase and took out the report, and twelve pages of foolscap, covered with his own neat writing, that he had composed in the airplane during the flight back to London.

  “You’d better get one of the typists on to this right away. The vice president will want to see it as soon as possible. And when Mr. Rogerson gets in, tell him to give me a buzz.” He glanced at his desk. “And this morning’s Wall Street Journal?”

  “I have it, Mr. Dunbeath.”

  “And the Financial Times as well. I didn’t have time to pick one up.” She started out of the office, but he called her back. “Hang on a moment.” She returned and he dealt out more papers. “I want the file on this. And if you can, find me some information on a Texas company called Albright; they’ve been drilling in Libya. And this has to be telexed through to Sheikh Mustapha Said, and this … and this…”

  After a little, “Is that all?” asked Miss Ridgeway.

  “For the moment.” He grinned. “Except that I’d appreciate a large cup of black coffee.”

  Miss Ridgeway smiled understandingly, becoming quite human. He wished that she would smile more. “I’ll get it,” she said, and left him, closing the door, without a sound, behind her.

  He sat at his gleaming desk and debated for a moment as to what he should do first. His In tray was piled high, letters neatly clipped to their relevant files, and, he knew, arranged in their order of priority, with the most urgent documents on the top. The three personal letters had been placed in the middle of his blotter. The blotting paper was, as it was every day, new and pristine white. There was also the copy of yesterday’s Times.

  He reached for the green telephone to make an internal call.

  “Mr. Gardner please.”

  He tucked the receiver under his chin and opened the newspaper to the back page.

  “John Dunbeath here. Is he in yet?”

  “Yes, he’s in, Mr. Dunbeath, but he’s not in the office right now. Shall I get him to call you?”

  “Yes, do that.” He replaced the receiver.

  * * *

  DUNBEATH. Suddenly, on February 16th at Benchoile in Sutherland, Lt. Col. John Rathbone Dunbeath, D.S.O., J.P., late Cameron Highlanders, in his 68th year. Funeral Service in the Parish Church, Creagan, 10:30 a.m. Thursday February 19th.

  He remembered the old boy, tall and lean, every inch a retired soldier; his pale glare and his prow of a nose; his long legs striding easily up the hill through knee-high heather; his passion for fishing, for shooting grouse, for his land. They had never been close, but there was still an empty sense of loss, as there must be when a man, bound close by family and blood, dies.

  He laid down the paper and took his father’s cable from the envelope in which Miss Ridgeway had protectively placed it. He read what he had already read, in Bahrain, two days previously.

  YOUR UNCLE JOCK DIED RESULT OF A HEART ATTACK BENCHOILE MONDAY 16th FEBRUARY STOP FUNERAL CREAGAN 10:30 THURSDAY MORNING 19th FEBRUARY STOP WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD REPRESENT YOUR MOTHER AND MYSELF STOP FATHER

  He had sent cables from Bahrain. To his parents in Colorado, explaining why he would not be able to comply with his father’s request. To Benchoile, to Roddy, he had sent sympathy and more explanations, and before he left Bahrain, he had found the time to write Roddy a letter of condolence, which he had posted by first-class mail on his arrival at Heathrow.

  The other two letters waited for his attention, one envelope hand-written, the other typed. He picked up the first and began to open it, and then stopped, his attention caught by the writing. An old-fashioned pen nib, black ink, the capitals strongly defined. He looked at the postmark and saw “CREAGAN.” The date was the tenth of February.

  He felt his stomach contract. A ghost going over your grave his father used to say when John was a small boy and scared by the unknown. That’s what it is. A ghost going over your grave.

  He slit the envelope and took out the letter. His suspicions were confirmed. It was from Jock Dunbeath.

  Benchoile,

  Creagan,

  Sutherland.

  Wednesday,

  9th February.

  Dear John,

  Your Father tells me that you are now back in this country and working in London. I do not know your address, so I am sending this to your office.

  It seems a long time since you stayed with us. I looked it up in the visitors’ book and it seems to be ten years. I realize that you are a very busy man, but if you are able to get a little time off, perhaps you would think about making the journey north and spending a few days at Benchoile. It is possible to fly to Inverness or to catch a train from Euston in which case either I or Roddy would come to Inverness to meet you. There are trains to Creagan, but they are few and far between and involve several hours delay. We have had a mild winter, but I think cold weather is on the way. Better now than in the Spring when late frosts play havoc with the young grouse.

  Let me know what you think and when it might be convenient for you to visit us. We look forward to seeing you again.

  With best wishes,

  Affectionately,

  Jock

  The arrival, out of the blue, of this extraordinary invitation; the coincidence of timing, the fact that it had been written only days before Jock’s fatal heart attack, were intensely disturbing. John sat back in his chai
r and read the letter through again, consciously searching for some inner meaning between the carefully penned and characteristically stilted lines. He could find none.

  It seems to be ten years.

  It was ten years. He remembered himself at eighteen with Wellington behind him and all the joys of Cambridge ahead, spending part of the summer holidays with his father at Benchoile. But he had never gone back.

  Now, it struck him that perhaps he should feel guilty about this lapse. But too much had happened to him. Too much had been going on. He had been at Cambridge, then New York, and then Harvard, spending all his vacations in Colorado, either at his father’s ranch, or else skiing at Aspen. And then Lisa had come into his life, and after that all his spare energy had been spent in simply keeping up with her. Keeping her happy, keeping her amused, keeping her in the high style which she was convinced was her due. Being married to Lisa meant the end of vacations in Colorado. She was bored by the ranch and too fragile to ski. But she adored the sun, so they went to the West Indies, to Antigua, the Bahamas, where John missed the mountains and tried to work off his physical needs in scuba diving or sailing.

  And after the divorce, he had buried himself so deeply in his work that somehow there didn’t even seem to be time to get out of the city. It was his president in New York who had finally read the riot act, and had him posted to London. Not only was it a promotion, he told John, but it would make a vital and necessary change of pace. London was quieter than New York, the rat race not so frantic, the ambience generally more easygoing.

  “You’ll be able to get North and see Jock and Roddy,” his father had said over the telephone when John had called to give him the news, but somehow with one thing and another John had never got around to doing this. Now, it struck him that he should feel guilty about this lapse. But the truth was that Benchoile, though undoubtedly beautiful, held no irresistible lure for John. Having been brought up in the heart of the Rockies, he had found the hills and glens of Sutherland peaceful, but somehow tame. There was fishing, of course, but fishing in Colorado, in the tributaries of the mighty Uncompahgre, which ran through his father’s spread, was unsurpassable. Benchoile had a farm, but again, that seemed small compared to the endless ranges of the ranch, and the grouse shooting, with its rules and shibboleths, its traditions of butt and beat, had left the young John totally cold.