The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “Woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.” Suzanne feared that billions of men the world over still believed this unquestioningly, with terrible consequences for the women over whom they exerted their power. She often experienced her rage at misogyny as a physical illness, a soreness of body and spirit that she understood also as an unanswerable shame at being human. At these times, she readily identified with the radical lesbians of her acquaintance, who spoke and dealt solely with other women.

  Suzanne’s closest friend and London housemate, Gemma Tithe, was not quite that extreme. Gemma did have a few gay male friends and she was usually accepting of boys under the age of ten. But for the most part, Gemma viewed any male with cautious scepticism. In Gemma’s opinion, the “new man” was pure invention. A lot of lip service but no fundamental change of heart. It was Gemma’s reaction that had most hurt Suzanne when she told her friends of her impending marriage. Gemma, usually so forthright in her speech, had said not a word. To Suzanne’s horror, Gemma had begun to cry, her brown eyes spilling repeatedly until a great damp patch spread across her lap, darkening the red of her skirt. When Suzanne tried to comfort her, Gemma pushed her away. What she said then hurt Suzanne more than her tears: “It is a terrible waste,” she declaimed. “If you do this thing, it will end badly.” The sound of her voice rendered the message even more ominous. Gemma spoke not in her customary fluting soprano, but in a coarse rasping, from a throat swollen with tears. So alien was this voice, Suzanne felt she was listening to an oracle. This was a prophetess who spoke from underground, half-choked on the sulphurous fumes that induced her trance.

  She and Gemma had almost fought. “You don’t know Murdo,” Suzanne insisted angrily. “You have absolutely no basis for this judgement.” Outside, sunlight suddenly hit the Thames, so that the walls of the room quivered in a pulsing light and shadow. We are in Plato’s goddam cave, Suzanne thought, a flickering unreal place. As if to heighten this unreality, Gemma, who was so seldom still, sat rooted in her armchair, legs drawn up and crossed in front of her, like a compact black Buddha. Her uncharacteristic immobility and downcast eyes disturbed Suzanne as much as had the tears and ponderous prediction. She had left the house then and walked for hours. That night, she and Gemma slept, as they sometimes did, in the same bed.

  “Shall I keep your room for you?” Gemma asked. “Yes,” Suzanne said.

  And so they had simply abandoned their mutual dilemma for the time being. Suzanne knew that Murdo and Gemma could never meet and be comfortable one with the other. For her sake, they would no doubt feign politeness. But she pictured them awkward as the wooden puppets she had drawn out of the wooden chest. Except that in Miranda’s skilful hands, the puppets had doubtless moved fluidly, in an uncanny mimicry of life.

  As she stood in Murdo’s ancient kitchen and poured boiling water into the drip coffee pot, Suzanne recalled again the rasping note of Gemma’s warning. She saw again the unfamiliar Murdo she had encountered in the outbuilding. The memory of his harsh words, the hard eyes, threatened to trigger a most terrible transformation: when love, with appalling swiftness, turns into dislike and even hate. Or if not hate, then an aching void where once love reigned. She had undergone such emotional reversals before, and the absoluteness of the inversion never ceased to amaze her. She was aware she tread dangerous ground, exacerbating what was probably a mere squabble by dwelling on Gemma’s gloomy pronouncement.

  It was true that she had risked much for Murdo’s love, in order to co-habit with his vastness of spirit. She had lost friends. She had – superficially, at least – transgressed her own principles of uncompromised independence. She sipped at the thick black coffee and hoped it would fire her energy, for she felt heavy still, out of sorts. She was tempted simply to go on sitting at the bleached wooden table, to banish thought. Apart from the small upstairs study, this was the only room in the rambling house in which she felt entirely at ease. Here was an enduring domestic simplicity, clean, uncluttered surfaces, the gleaming, monumental Aga, a deep square sink of dark stone, the milky depths of the whitewashed walls and the cool silkiness of the flagstones beneath her feet. For almost four centuries, women had walked across these stones, on countless small journeys from oven to table, or sink to cupboard, or pacing back and forth, soothing a colicky child. Their labour, their constancy, had worked the stone as smooth as would an unending stream of water.

  I thought Murdo was the Fire to my Water, she recalled; then grimaced that she had failed to banish thought. She got up, took a tub of Balkan yogurt from the refrigerator, and spooned it into a bowl. She ate, standing up, leaning against the sash of the kitchen’s sole window. Murdo would not have approved. One ate at table, properly set, or not at all. In the past month, he had revealed himself to be irritatingly, rather than endearingly, stuffy. She had planned a kind of loving assault on his extremely conservative views on how and when one took nourishment. Now, however, the idea of his stringent correctness annoyed her exceedingly. She did not think she had the energy to bring about a shift in his attitude. Indeed, in view of what had happened before his abrupt departure, Murdo’s fixation on ritualized table manners no longer seemed of importance.

  She threw up the window with such force that it stuck half way up the sash. The sky was dark and sullen. The gust of wind that entered the kitchen smelt of rain. Suzanne sensed the urgency of an explosion to come. The air was uncomfortably electric. She heard the peacock’s high-pitched scream, that disturbing cross between a cat’s and a baby’s cry. The cotton curtains at the window belled out, then whipped across her face. Suzanne stood on a chair, pushing down on the raised window with all her strength. It would not budge.

  She must get the window closed. Her anxiety was not so much about the damage the rain might do to the plaster walls. What obsessed her was the notion that the unsettled weather, that force trying to push its way into the house, was somehow associated with her burgeoning doubts about Murdo. Weather made the first gods. Outside, it seemed, her old Watchtowers were in rebellion against her. Earth, Water, Fire, and Air were stirring, shaking, brewing up turmoil. She must keep this force outside for now. At least until she could garner all her resources.

  She went looking for a hammer. A few firm, gentle taps, judiciously aimed, and she was sure she could get the window to close.

  She found no tools of any kind in the kitchen drawers or cupboard, nor in the musty closet under the main staircase. She knew there was no point searching in Murdo’s study, so she ventured for the first time since Murdo had shown her the house, up to the third floor. In fact, he had taken her into only one room on that floor – a room with an excellent view of the Eildon Hills, and otherwise empty, but for a single chair. There were four other doors on the third floor, all of them closed, and all leading to rooms in various states of disrepair. So Murdo had told her that first day. Once, these had been the children’s rooms, he said. A bedroom each, a playroom and a room for the nanny.

  In the first two rooms she entered, Suzanne found absolutely nothing except peeling wallpaper and scattered mouse droppings. In the third, there was again a single wooden chair (identical to the first) and tacked to the wall, a poster advertising a Pink Floyd concert. Also, on the floor of the cupboard, a white enamel chamber pot with a red handle. All this time, Suzanne was edgily aware of the thickening gloom outside and the wind rattling slates on the roof. This wind, with its dense odour of looming rain, seemed occasionally to touch her, even though all the windows on this floor were tightly closed. These gusts, which brushed her face and stirred her long skirt about her ankles, acted like a goad. She was becoming increasingly frantic. Reason told her that there was absolutely no need for this urgent search. She could, after all, simply mop up any water that came in the window. The flagstone floor would be basically impervious, and her original fear about damage to the plaster walls was probably unfounded. As yet another gust of wind belled out her skirt, she began to wonder whether her unconscious had manufactured this task; whether the need for a h
ammer was just a pretext to search the house in its entirety. And yet why would she feel the need for justification to go through rooms that were a part of Murdo’s home? Wasn’t simple curiosity or restlessness sufficient reason?

  Even as she posed these questions to herself, the air about her crackled, as if the gathering point of the storm were here under the slate roof. The back of her neck prickled. She felt she tottered at the edge of a horrendous combustion, and that she must get out quickly. This force, she realized, was a variation on what she had experienced yesterday at the base of the staircase. Once again, she felt she was trespassing, transgressing or interfering in a world not properly her own. But she was alert as well to the possibility that this force was of her own making; that she was projecting some essential discomfort or guilt about her situation with Murdo. Whatever its origin, she knew she must face and go through it.

  She pushed on to the last room. Above her, thunder boomed just as she grasped the brass knob. She opened the door, and was surprised to see not bare floor, but a stretch of blue carpet, patterned with darker blue flowers. Against the wall opposite the door stood a wooden chest of drawers, decorated with bright stencilled designs. The paint looked as if it had been applied by a child, with a determined but unsteady hand. Suzanne found this earnest imperfection charming. She stood a moment, utterly beguiled by the clumsy red hearts, the meandering dots of purple and green, which at a distance made a sprig of lilac, and a pair of slim white arcs, barely joined, which nevertheless caught the purity of winged flight.

  This simple form moved her in some profound way she did not fully comprehend. Suzanne stood looking at the piece of furniture that was so obviously a relic of a young girl’s passage into puberty. What she experienced was a palpable sense of loss, as deeply visceral as the ache she felt on waking after dreams in which Ada was still alive.

  The source of this loss eluded her, although she guessed that this hand-painted chest had probably belonged to Miranda, and that it was Miranda whose wavering hand had applied the paint, in all the heady hope of youth, when everything is yet to come and one’s immortality seems assured.

  But death had come to Miranda far earlier than to most women of her generation and class. Had she lived, Miranda would now be in her fifties, Suzanne calculated. Yet she could not project the virginal girl of the photograph forward through time. That face resisted her efforts to picture it lined or haggard. Miranda was the rose petal preserved in amber.

  She is my predecessor, Suzanne told herself, and, determined to see what lay inside the drawers, she entered the room. Her curiosity made a sharp taste in her mouth. Like blood when you bite your tongue, she thought. And I ought to do just that. Bite back the desire to pry and search out details of these two women who were once joined to Murdo. I am like Bluebeard’s wife, snooping in closed rooms when he is absent. But, of course, I have no expectations of finding cadavers hanging from chains, no shrunken severed heads nestled in gauze.

  She hesitated before opening the top drawer of the chest, and glanced at the window, where her eye was filled by a yellow-white spear of lightning. Still the rain did not come. There was only that tense electric space of yearning. The restless weather seemed to have taken her over, as she had sometimes seen weather take Ada over. Rolling naked in rumpled sheets to the rhythm of a storm. Dancing about the room in movements mimicking the wild surge of wind wrapping the house. For Ada, this was no self-indulgence, but a quest for consonance with the elements.

  Suzanne believed she now moved at one with the turbulence beyond the window; that her own curiosity was pricked into action by the very explosive power of the air. She pulled the drawer open, and just as she lifted out the single object lying there, the rains loosed. They fell like a densely meshed curtain of lead, reinforcing Suzanne’s sense of foreboding, of being swept into a drama against her conscious will. The desire to know something of her predecessors was paramount. She could not leave the two women as they had been, faceless and without substance. They had entered Murdo’s soul. They were an inescapable part of the life she lived with him, and of his being. She walked in their footsteps.

  Of course, it would be simpler and tidier simply to ignore them. Yet the very walls demanded that she know them. The smell of family life that had invaded her the previous day was only the beginning. If she failed to seek some knowledge of Miranda and Kirstie, Suzanne feared the house would expel her. And consequently, banish her from that spiritual union she so desired to cultivate with Murdo.

  One ignores the demands of the dead at one’s peril. One of her mother’s essential precepts. Only a few clues, she told herself, and she could imagine the rest. Construct a remembrance of Miranda and Kirstie, where in fact she had none.

  In the top drawer of the chest lay a small journal. She opened it, briefly surveyed the large, looping script and then shut the covers quickly again. How sacrosanct is a journal when its author is dead? Suzanne’s instinct was to take the little book down to the kitchen, with all its absorbent, comforting surfaces. Miranda would often have sat at the kitchen table, her feet pressed into the known hollows of the stone floor, her hand steady as she spooned homemade vegetable purée into the baby’s mouth. The baby whose picture Suzanne had held.

  It was only then it dawned on Suzanne that there were no pictures of Murdo’s children in the house. Or at least, in none of the rooms she and Murdo had used during the past three weeks. Was this deliberate on his part, a symbolic gesture that only he and she mattered? Or was the absence of the children’s images evidence of his estrangement from his family? His remarks about Jeremy had been anything but loving.

  In the kitchen Suzanne put the cloth-covered journal on the table, and did a perfunctory mop up of the water that had come in the window. The rain had stopped. The air smelled new-washed. Trying the window sash again, she found that it now slid easily up and down.

  She sat at the table and studied Miranda’s signature in the flyleaf of the journal. Her handwriting was a shock, as round and characterless as a very young girl’s first attempt at signing her name. The as were apples; the capitals N and M were toppling mountains. The signature’s sole assertion was the oblique dash underlining the surname, as though to emphasize, or to remind herself, that she was indeed Miranda Napier.

  What entries there were, were sparse, all written in the same childlike hand. Flicking through, Suzanne saw that the journal covered only a few months of 1960 and that most of the pages were empty. She was puzzled by three columns of numbers that appeared on the journal’s final page, headed by the letters Br, W and Bo. As she read, the significance of these columns gradually dawned on her, and she was beset with a disgust and a pity that brought her close to tears.

  May 6, 1960. Murdo says I may see baby Jeremy tomorrow, but for 15 minutes only. He will tire me, Murdo says. Nanny Oliphant has found a wet nurse for Baby. I must be reassured. This is for the best, they tell me. Already, my milk is going.

  May 15, 1960. We have begun the daily measurements. Murdo has bought a new cloth tape measure, pale green and the numbers all glittering gold, like the sparkle on Christmas wrapping paper. I will soon be back to my old self, Murdo says. What a pouter pigeon I have become, he says. I cried with the wanting to see Baby Jeremy, while Murdo was off with his telescope.

  May 27, 1960. My breasts are quite without milk now. While Murdo was in Edinburgh, Nanny Oliphant let me in to see baby. The wet nurse was feeding him. She is a kind, rosy woman. But the sight of Baby Jeremy sucking at her nipple hurt me terribly. A gnawing deep inside. Is this jealousy? He is my baby. He does not tire me.

  June 5, 1960. It is true that the pills stop the gnawing sensation. My sleep is thick and woolly. Sometimes just to lift a teaspoon seems a very heavy thing indeed. Baby Jeremy is well. When I saw him in the morning, he smiled, looking like one of the little angels in the convent chapel.

  Nanny Oliphant is very strict about my time with him. I believe she and Murdo have had words.

  June 7, 1960. I do not lik
e at all when the measurements are done with me in front of the mirror. I do not like to see the truth of what Murdo says, although he tries to be gentle and strokes my hair. I know my breasts droop a little now, and my tummy is not as flat as it was. There are little silver lines that run along the surface of my thighs and on my bottom. Murdo pointed them out to me. We must mark down the measurements each day, he says, so that I can see and be cheered by my own progress. He is working out a special exercise program and diet for me. I want my sweet girl back just as she was, he says.

  June 15, 1960. I dream of running away with Baby Jeremy.

  June 17, 1960. So weary. Nanny would not let me hold baby today. My arms limp like dangling sausages. Like my poor puppets without me to animate them. Cannot animate myself.

  June 25,1960. New pills. When I try to walk, my feet feel as if they are stuck in oozing mud. I want very much to hold baby, but cannot walk to the nursery.

  June 27,1960. I sleep too much now, but cannot seem to stop myself. I do not dream.

  June 30, 1960. Still, I do not dream. Murdo feeds me with a spoon. Is this the nursery?

  July 3, 1960. Who is Baby Jeremy? Did I dream him when I could still dream?

  There was no more. The remainder of the journal, with the exception of the three columns on the back page, was starkly empty. An accusatory blankness, signifying what? Enervation? Collapse? Had Miranda been hospitalized? Was she still alive, locked in a bone-white room, crying for Baby Jeremy?

  Suzanne felt there was a wolf ripping at her entrails. The menstrual cramps were back with a vengeance. She put her head to her knees, dug her nails deep into her thighs. She was sick. She was cold. She was afraid all she had read might be the truth; that this man she had married, with whom she had the unfailingly hot and luscious sex, had been vilely cruel to a young and vulnerable woman. Here was abuse that came just too close to home. Home. She winced at the very word. This damp and gloomy mausoleum was not her home. She had thought Murdo’s body her home. She found she was crying, whether for herself or the young Miranda, she did not know.