Wild Mountain Thyme

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  But there came other sounds. The wind in the topmost branches of the pines, the whisper of water nudging against the wooden piles of the old jetty. He looked at the house and saw the comfort of lights in windows. He saw the dark swell of the hills that rose behind it.

  His hills. Benchoile hills.

  He stood there for a long time, his hands in his pockets, until a fit of the shivers made him realize that he was growing cold. He turned back for a final look at the loch, and then, slowly, made his way up the slope of the lawn and so indoors.

  * * *

  Roddy had not gone to bed. Roddy waited still in the library, slumped in Jock’s old armchair by the dying fire. John’s heart bled for his uncle. Of all of them, Roddy was the one to suffer most. Not simply because he had lost his house, his clothes, his books and papers, all the personal and cherished possessions of a lifetime, but because he blamed himself for what had happened.

  “I should have thought,” he had said, over and over again, his usual loquacity overwhelmed by the potential tragedy, by the ghastly realization of what could have happened to Thomas. “I simply never thought.”

  But he had always piled logs onto his open fireplace, carelessly trodden out the random sparks on his old hearthrug, never bothered about a fireguard. “One of the last things Jock ever said to me was that I should have a fireguard. But I never did. Put it off. Lazy, procrastinating bastard that I am. Simply put it off.”

  And then, again, “Supposing Ellen hadn’t had the wit to think about the child. Supposing, John, you hadn’t gone along then to check…” His voice trembled.

  “Don’t think about it,” John had interrupted quickly, because it didn’t bear contemplating. “She did have the sense, and I did go. Come to that, it should have occurred to me to go without Ellen’s prompting. I’m just as much to blame as you are.”

  “No, I’m totally to blame. I should have thought…”

  Now, John stood in the chilling room, looking down at his father’s brother and filled with a sympathy and affection that were, for the time being, of little use to Roddy. He was inconsolable.

  A log crumbled into the dying fire. The clock showed a quarter past twelve. John said, “Why don’t you go to bed? Jess has made beds up for all of us. There’s no point in staying down here.”

  Roddy rubbed a hand over his eyes. “No,” he said at last. “I suppose there isn’t. But I don’t think I could sleep.”

  “In that case…” He did not finish the sentence. He stirred the ashes of the fire, and put on more wood. In a moment the flames began to lick up around the dry bark. Roddy stared at them morosely.

  “It’s over,” John told him firmly. “Don’t think about it anymore. It’s over. And if it helps to lessen your guilt, just remember that you’ve lost everything you possess.”

  “That’s of small account. Possessions have never mattered.”

  “Why don’t you have a drink?”

  “No. I don’t want a drink.”

  John managed not to look surprised. “Do you mind if I do?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He poured himself a small brandy and filled the glass up with soda. He sat, facing his uncle. He raised his glass. “Slainthe.”

  A spark of wry amusement glimmered in Roddy’s eye. “What an old Scotsman you’re becoming.”

  “I’ve always been one. Or half one, at any rate.”

  Roddy heaved himself up in the chair. He said, “Oliver didn’t come back from London.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Why not, I wonder?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you suppose he’s coming?”

  “Again, I have no idea. I simply dumped Victoria on my bed, and after that Jess took over. No doubt we’ll hear about it tomorrow.”

  “He’s a strange man,” mused Roddy. “Clever, of course. Perhaps a little bit too clever.” Across the fireside, their eyes met. “Too clever for that little girl.”

  “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  “Still, she has the child.”

  “I have news for you. Thomas is not her child.”

  Roddy raised his eyebrows. “Really? Now you do surprise me.” He shook his head. “The world is full of surprises.”

  “I have more surprises up my sleeve.”

  “You do?”

  “Do you want to hear about them?”

  “What, now?”

  “You’ve already told me you don’t want to go to bed. If we’re going to sit here for the rest of the night, we might as well talk.”

  “All right,” said Roddy, and composed himself to listen. “Talk.”

  15

  WEDNESDAY

  John Dunbeath, bearing a tray laid for breakfast, cautiously opened the kitchen door with the seat of his pants, and made his way across the hall and up the stairs. Outside a breeze, baby sister of last night’s gale, stirred the pine trees and disturbed the surface of the loch, but already a cold and brazen sun, rising in a sky of frosty blue, was beginning to penetrate the house. Roddy’s old Labrador had already found a bright lozenge of sunshine by the fireplace, and lay there, supine, basking in its frail warmth.

  John crossed the landing and, carefully balancing the tray on one hand, knocked at the door of his own room. From within, Victoria’s voice called, “Who is it?” and he said, “The floor waiter,” and opened the door. “I’ve brought you your breakfast.”

  She was still in bed, but sitting up and looking quite alert, as though she had been awake for some time. The curtains had been drawn back, and the first oblique rays of sunshine touched a corner of the chest of drawers and lay like gold on the carpet. He said, “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” and set the tray, with something of a flourish, on her knees.

  She said, “But I don’t need breakfast in bed.”

  “You’ve got it. How did you sleep?”

  “As though I’d been drugged. I was just going to come down. The thing is, I must have forgotten to wind my watch, and it’s stopped, and I’ve no idea of the time.”

  “Nearly half past nine.”

  “You should have woken me before.”

  “I decided to let you sleep.”

  She wore a nightdress lent to her by Ellen. It was peach pink crepe de chine, much hemstitched and embroidered and had, in fact, once belonged to Lucy Dunbeath. Over this, in lieu of a dressing-gown, was wrapped a white Shetland shawl. Her hair, tangled from sleep, lay forward across one shoulder, and there were dark shadows, like bruises, beneath her eyes. She seemed to John, in that moment, intensely frail. As though, if he were to take her into his arms, she would break into pieces, as fragile as china. She looked about her. “This is your room, isn’t it? When I woke up I couldn’t think where I was. Is it your room?”

  “It is. It was the only bed that happened to be made up at the time.”

  “Where did you sleep?”

  “In Uncle Jock’s dressing room.”

  “And Roddy?”

  “In Jock’s bedroom. He’s still there. We sat up talking till four o’clock in the morning, and he’s catching up on his beauty sleep.”

  “And … Thomas?” She sounded as though she could scarcely bring herself to say his name.

  John pulled up a chair and settled himself, facing her, with his long legs stretched out in front of him, and his arms folded.

  “Thomas is downstairs in the kitchen, being given breakfast by Ellen and Jess. So now, why don’t you start eating your breakfast before it gets cold?”

  Victoria unenthusiastically eyed the boiled egg and the toast and the coffeepot. She said, “I don’t actually feel very hungry.”

  “Just eat it, anyway.”

  She began, half-heartedly, to take the top off the egg. Then she laid down the spoon again. “John, I don’t even know how it happened. I mean, how the fire started.”

  “None of us do, for sure. We were having a drink in the library before dinner. But Roddy says he made up his fire before he came over. I sup
pose, as usual, the logs sparked all over the hearthrug, and there wasn’t anybody there to put them out. Added to which, there was the hell of a wind blowing. Once it started, the whole room went up like a tinder box.”

  “But when did you first realize the house was on fire?”

  “Ellen came to tell us supper was ready, and then she started fussing about Thomas being on his own. So I went along to check on him, and found the place blazing away like a bonfire.”

  She said, faintly, “I can’t bear it. What did you do?”

  He proceeded to tell her, playing down the circumstances as much as possible. He felt that Victoria had enough trouble on her mind as it was, without adding to it by graphic descriptions of the nightmare of Thomas’s smoke-filled bedroom, the collapsing ceiling, the flaming crater, and the inferno overhead. He knew that the memory of that moment would return to haunt him, like some ghastly dream, for the rest of his life.

  “Was he frightened?”

  “Of course he was frightened. It was enough to frighten any man. But we got out all right, through one of the bedroom windows, and then we came back here, and Ellen took Thomas over, and Roddy rang the fire brigade in Creagan, and I went back to get the cars out of the garage before the petrol exploded and we were all blown to kingdom come.”

  “Did you manage to salvage anything from Roddy’s house?”

  “Not a thing. It all went. Everything in the world that he owned.”

  “Poor Roddy.”

  “Losing his possessions doesn’t seem to bother him much. What bugs him is that he feels the fire was his fault. He says he should have been more careful, he should have had a fireguard, he should never have left Thomas alone in the house.”

  “I can’t bear it for him.”

  “He’s all right now, but that’s why we sat up talking till four in the morning. And Thomas is all right too, except that he’s lost Piglet. He spent last night with an old wooden engine in his arms. And of course, he’s lost all his clothes as well. He’s still wearing his pajamas, but this morning sometime Jess is going to take him into Creagan and buy him a new outfit.”

  Victoria said, “I thought he was still there. I mean, when I got back from the airport, and saw the fire. At first I thought it was a bonfire, and then I thought it was someone burning heather, and then I saw it was Roddy’s house. And all I could think of was that Thomas was in the middle of it somewhere…”

  Her voice had begun to shake. “But he wasn’t,” John said quietly. “He was safe.”

  Victoria took a deep breath. “I’d been thinking of him,” she said and her voice was quite steady again. “All the way back from Inverness. The road seemed to go on forever, and I was thinking of Thomas all the way.”

  “Oliver didn’t come back from London.” He made it, not a question, but a statement of fact.

  “No. He … he wasn’t on the plane.”

  “Did he call you?”

  “No. He sent a letter.” With some determination, as if the time had come to put fancies aside, Victoria took up her spoon again and ate a mouthful or two of the boiled egg.

  “How did he do that?”

  “He gave a letter to one of the passengers. I suppose he told him what I looked like, or something. Anyway, the man delivered it to me. I was still waiting. I still thought Oliver was going to get off the plane.”

  “What did the letter say?”

  She gave up the impossible task of eating breakfast and pushed the tray away from her. She leaned back on her pillows and closed her eyes. “He isn’t coming back.” She sounded exhausted. “He’s going to New York. He’s in New York now. He flew out yesterday evening. Some producer’s going to put on his play, A Man In The Dark, and he’s gone out to see about it.”

  Dreading the answer, it took a certain courage to ask the question. “Is he coming back?”

  “I suppose he will one day. This year, next year, sometime, never.” She opened her eyes. “That’s what he said. Anyway, not in the foreseeable future.” He waited and she finished, “He’s left me, John,” as though there could be any doubt still in his mind.

  He did not say anything.

  She went on, her voice inconsequent, trying to make what she was saying of small importance. “That makes it twice he’s left me. It’s almost becoming a habit.” She tried to smile. “I know you said I was being a fool about Oliver, but this time I really, truly thought it would be different. I thought he would want the things he’d never wanted before. Like maybe buying a house and making a home for Thomas … and getting married, too. I thought he wanted the three of us to be together. To be a family.”

  John watched her face. Perhaps the abrupt disappearance of Oliver Dobbs, the paralyzing shock of the fire, had acted as a sort of catharsis. He only knew that the barriers between them, her frigid reserve, were tumbling at last. She was being, at the end of the day, honest with herself, and so had nothing left to shut away from him. He was filled with a marvelous sort of triumph, and recognized this as a carryover from his private elation of the previous night.

  She said, “Yesterday, on the beach at Creagan, I wouldn’t listen to you. But you were right, weren’t you? You were right about Oliver.”

  “I wish I could say ‘I wish I weren’t.’ But truthfully I can’t.”

  “You’re not going to say ‘I told you so.’”

  “I’d never say that in a thousand years.”

  “You see, the real trouble was that Oliver doesn’t need anybody. That’s what’s wrong with him. He admitted as much in his letter. He told me that the only thing that turns him on is his writing.” She managed a wry smile. “And that was a smack in the face. I’d been telling myself it was me.”

  “So what will you do now?”

  Victoria shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know where to start. But Oliver says I have to take Thomas back to the Archers, and I’ve been trying to think how I’m going to do it. I don’t even know where they live, and I certainly don’t know what I’m going to say to them when I get there. And I don’t want to lose Thomas, either. I don’t want to have to say good-bye to him. It’s going to be like being torn apart. And there’s the business of the car. Oliver said that if I left the Volvo here, perhaps Roddy could sell it. He said that I could drive it south if I wanted to, but I really don’t want to, not with Thomas. I suppose I could get a plane or a train from Inverness, but that means…”

  John found that he could not stand it for another instant. Loudly he interrupted her, “Victoria, I don’t want to hear another word.”

  Halted in mid-sentence, astonished at the roughness of his voice, Victoria stared open-mouthed. “But I have to talk about it. I have to do things…”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t have to do anything. I shall see to it all. I shall arrange to get Thomas back to his grandparents…”

  “… but you have enough to think about…”

  “… I shall even placate them…”

  “… with the fire, and Roddy, and Benchoile…”

  “… though, from the sound of things they’re going to require some placating. I shall take care of Thomas, and I shall take care of you, but as for Oliver’s car, it can rot on a rubbish heap for all I care. And Oliver Dobbs, for all his genius and his sexual prowess and whatever it is that turns him on—can rot as well. And I never want to hear that self-centered son of a bitch’s name again. Is that totally understood?”

  Victoria considered this. Her face was serious. “You never really liked him did you?”

  “It wasn’t meant to show.”

  “It did, a little. Every now and again.”

  John grinned. “He was lucky not to get his nose punched in.” He looked at his watch, stretched like a cat, and then pulled himself to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” she asked him.

  “Downstairs to the telephone. I have a million calls to make. So why don’t you eat that breakfast now. There’s nothing more to worry about.”

  “Yes, there is. I just
thought of it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My shell. My queen cockle. It was on the window ledge in my bedroom. In Roddy’s house.”

  “We’ll find another.”

  “I liked that one.”

  He went to open the door. He said, “The sea is full of gifts.”

  * * *

  In the kitchen he found Jess Guthrie, peeling potatoes at the sink.

  “Jess, where’s Davey?”

  “He’s away up the hill this morning.”

  “Will you be seeing him?”

  “Yes, he’ll be down for his dinner at twelve.”

  “Ask him to come down and have a word with me, would you? This afternoon sometime. Say about half past two.”

  “I’ll give him the message,” she promised.

  If my true love, she were gone

  I would surely find another,

  Where wild mountain thyme,

  Grows around the blooming heather,

  Will ye go, lassie, go?

  He went into the library, shut the door firmly behind him, built up the fire, sat at his uncle’s desk, and settled down to a positive orgy of telephoning.

  He rang the office in London. He spoke to his vice president, a couple of colleagues, and his secretary, Miss Ridgeway.

  He rang directory inquiries and was told the Archers’ address and telephone number in Woodbridge. He made the call and spoke, at some length, to them.

  With this safely behind him, he called the station in Inverness, and booked three seats on the Clansman for the following day.

  He rang the lawyers, McKenzie, Leith and Dudgeon. He spoke to Robert McKenzie, and then, later, to the insurance company about the fire damage.

  By now it was nearly midday. John did a few swift time-lag calculations, put a call through to his father in Colorado, dragged that good man from his early morning sleep and talked to him for an hour or more.

  Finally, at the very end, he rang up Tania Mansell, dialing her London telephone number from memory. But the line was engaged, and after waiting for a little, he rang off. He did not try the number again.