‘It’s only a matter of time, Hugh,’ Darklands was saying. ‘Dave Morrison, the crofter, Wylie, the blacksmith, either of them will second you. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘Aye. Just that.’ Hugh Riddel dismissed the subject and reached for the file that held the next week’s orders. A matter of time. And time has come.
* * *
‘You’ve just missed Helen,’ Isa Riddel informed him when he reached the house. ‘Charlie Anson was in by and took her up to see some Do that’s on in his Youth Club the night. Oh, and there was a man in the train the night,’ she gabbled, knowing that anything she said would be wrong, but always hoping to find something that would be right.
‘Was there now?’ Hugh Riddel spoke without looking at her. ‘Men are still allowed to travel by train. Or so I understand.’
‘But this was the Scholars’ train,’ she explained.
‘Oh! That’s different, then. That would just have been about your mark, wouldn’t it?’ He looked at his wife now; her hands, without immediate task upon them, fumbled forlornly with the strings of her apron, and he felt his anger increasing. ‘Had the man gotten one eye then? Or three legs? Or a wooden cock, maybe? What to hell was so special about him?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing be it then. If there was nothing, let’s just say nothing.’
Isa Riddel watched him go into the scullery and pull his shirt over his head; he slung the towel across his bare shoulders and, turning on the tap, bent over the sink, and stood unaware of the running water. All his attitude and actions that of a man who was isolated within himself. An isolation as complete as her own.
Isa Mavor. Isa Mavor . . .she began, repeating her maiden name to herself. But it made no impact on her recognition. The sound of her own born name never did manage to re-establish her. When that did happen, and it was a rare enough occurrence, it was almost accidental; like the impulse that whiles forced her to let the cows find their own way back to the byre, when May filled Ambroggan Wood with fat clumps of wild primroses; her hands that stuffed them into a jam jar, and set them on the ledge of the porch window, had some ancient surety of touch. Whiles, too, when she took off her stockings, kilted up her skirt, and got down to scrubbing the stone flags of the scullery floor, her bare knees accepting almost eagerly their cold rough pressure, criss-crossed and red and young, in a pattern of some old familiarity. She never saw herself in times like these; but had she found a mirror then, Isa Riddel might for an instant have looked on Isa Mavor.
‘Surely to God you’ve seen a man out of his shirt before!’ Hugh Riddel swung into her vision again. ‘So stop glowering there, and lay out my best shirt.’
‘You’ll not be needing it for the Election, anyway,’ Isa Riddel surprised herself, ‘for God Knows’ wife was telling me that it’s been cancelled.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Hugh Riddel agreed. ‘But then I neither proposed myself for election, nor made up my mind to stand for it if I was proposed.’
‘No?’ Isa Riddel’s brief question was without satire. She knew it was in her man’s nature to reject anything that hinted of patronage. Burns’ Suppers were far more in his line, she reflected bitterly, remembering the Press’s reaction to his Immortal Memory. ‘But no doubt it was the free whisky and coarse songs that was bait enough to lure you to the Burns’ Supper.’
‘Well, no. It wasn’t now. It wasn’t that at all.’ Hugh Riddel moved towards her, towelling himself dry. ‘That surprises you, doesn’t it? But if I hadn’t accepted, Charlie Anson would have jumped at the chance. I thought that Burns would be a lot safer on my tongue that ever he would be on Anson’s tongue. For yon’s the damnedest apology for a man that ever I cast eyes on. Though yon one’s reckoning’s coming.’
‘He’s got a clean tongue in his head at least,’ Isa Riddel defended, knowing she was trapped, and yet unable to resist closing the trap in on herself.
‘He’s got all that.’ Hugh Riddel agreed so quietly that his outburst, when it came, was unexpected. ‘He’s the kind of creature whose eyes are never off the little lassies. Nor his hands either, when he gets but half a chance, patting them where they’re rounding, father-like. But if a woman, full grown and stark naked, was to offer him herself, then yon’s the creature would go flying for his life. The dirt inside him is all bottled up.’
‘And it comes out of you. You’re always there, or thereabout.’
Were he to lay hands on Isa Riddel now, he knew that he might kill her. Though that, he also knew, would be self murder.
‘You have nothing to complain of on that score, for I’ve got better places for it!’
* * *
The anger within Hugh Riddel had broken up, so that by the time he had reached Dave Morrison’s croft, it was outwith him, touching him only at points and in particulars.
‘Well. What do you think the weather’s going to do, Hugh?’ the crofter asked him, searching the sky for the answer to his own question. ‘It’s cold enough for a fall of snow,’ he said when he had found it, ‘but tight enough for the thaw to burst.’
‘You could be right,’ Hugh Riddel agreed. The acknowledgment easing him. ‘You’ve just got down from the hill then, Dave?’
‘And not a bite on it,’ the crofter complained. ‘I’m thinking of moving the ewes down the morn; they’re too near their time for a thaw to panic them, or a storm to bury them.’
‘Unchancy creatures sheep, Dave.’ The smile glimmered in Hugh Riddel’s eyes. ‘If they’re not riving themselves naked on old whin bushes, they’re getting blind drunk on the young broom bushes. And if they don’t panic in the thaw, they bury themselves in the snow. And if it isn’t that, they go falling on their backs and die with their legs in the air, because the creatures haven’t got the balance to get themselves up again. What you should have had, Dave,’ he suggested, his smile sounding in his suggestion, ‘is just a two three Highland stirks wintering away fine up on Soutar Hill yonder. Apprehensive enough creatures by nature, I’ll grant you that. But sober in habit and, most important of all, Dave’—his smile widened into a grin—‘with all yon fine bonnie hair happing their eyes, they see damn all to panic for. It must be a good thing whiles, just to be a Highland stirk.’
‘You can keep your two three Highland stirks. You’re welcome to them,’ the crofter snapped, treating the suggestion with the contempt that Hugh Riddel had deliberately teased out of him.
A true sheep-man, Dave. Just as Hugh Riddel’s father had been a true cattleman. Each guarding his own particular knowledge and contemptuous of the other’s skill, though never of the man who plied them. When shepherd and cattleman agreed on anything at all, it was but on the elements, and on the aspects of the soil that reared their products.
‘If I didn’t know Kingorth had been at the spreading the day,’ the crofter turned his attention to the steam still rising from the newly spread dung on Kingorth’s upper park, ‘I’d swear that they were at the burning of the whins, yonder.’
‘Aye. The whin burning used to be a great ploy with us as loons, before April went out,’ Hugh Riddel remembered, minding not so much on the flame-licked dusks of his boyhood, and racing against the wind in an elemental conflict that always ended in a personal battle; nor on the startled moments when bird and boy met face to face in a flutter of fear, nor even on the lie that echoed round the hill till it sounded true—‘The Pict’s Horse is on Fire! As sure as God.’
It was the width of feeling that was over him then, Hugh Riddel most remembered now, when Soutar Hill stood in eternal time, a keep from whose spy-holes he’d looked down on all the world, knowing fine that he could run its length and breadth before his legs gave out, and certain then that the boy he was would grow much greater than the man he had become.
‘You’ll step in by for a minute, Hugh?’ The crofter’s invitation broke into his thoughts.
‘Thanks. But no, Dave. I’ve got a thing or two to attend till the night. A bottling lever to collect, for one thing. And yo
u know what Wylie the Blacksmith is, for another thing; it’s just catch him as can on a Friday night.’
‘Maybe we’ll see you a bit later on, then, down in the Hotel?’ the crofter suggested. ‘Some of the Union boys are to be there the night, giving tomorrow’s Agenda big licks and short shrift amongst themselves. They say Charlie Anson is resigning as Treasurer. But of course he’s got bigger fish to fry now, what with his Youth Club and District Council. But he’ll be there just the same, with yon long lugs of his flapping on the ground, sniffing out the airt of public opinion.’
‘You think so, Dave?’
‘I’m certain of it.’
‘Well. That being so, maybe I will see you later on in the night at the hotel.’
‘There was a minute the night, yonder,’ the crofter confided to his wife later, ‘when I thought that Hugh Riddel must have gotten sime wind of Charlie Anson and his daughter, Helen.’
‘I wouldn’t be in either of their shoes when he does get wind of that,’ his wife commented doucely enough, but reflectively. For her own passion, though brief-lived, laboured-out and all but forgotten now, still made that of any other person intriguing. ‘The thing is,’ she jerked herself out of contemplation, ‘the thing is this Hugh Riddel has little room to condemn his own, for he has shown them but little example. And it’s ten to one that he himself was on his road to see Sue Tatt when you ran into him.’
* * *
‘It’s Hugh Riddel.’ Fiona nudged her mother excitedly. ‘I told you that he was coming here the night. He’s walking. That’s why he’s so late.’
‘My eyes are in my head, not in my backside,’ Sue snapped. ‘And I must say you’ve taken your time on it,’ she greeted Hugh Riddel when he reached the gate. ‘And you,’ she turned to Fiona again, ‘can just make yourself scarce. Take a turn down to the crossroads for my cigarettes, and take young Beel with you.’
‘There’s no need for that the night, Sue,’ Hugh Riddel interrupted. ‘I’m not biding. I’ve got other business on hand the night.’
‘Surely your business can keep till you’ve had a drink of tea,’ Sue protested, beginning to unlatch the gate. ‘But just you please yourself, of course.’
‘Are you still wanting cigarettes, then, Mam?’ Fiona broke into Hugh Riddel’s hesitation. ‘Because I can easy run down for them.’
‘There’s no need,’ Hugh Riddel answered, turning to her mother for confirmation. ‘That is, of course, unless you really want cigarettes.’
‘I don’t want cigarettes.’ Sue began to lead the way into the house. ‘To hear you all going on like that, you would think that I had nothing else in my head except cigarettes. I don’t care if I never set eyes on another cigarette till my dying day. Now! Does that please you all.’
Following in the flare of her protestations, they reached the kitchen wordless. Its sudden cleanness again took Sue by surprise.
‘Sit yourself down, then, now that you are here,’ she urged Hugh Riddel when the possibilities of the situation had struck her. For never before had he seen her isolated from the darkness of the upstairs bedroom. And all at once she was glad and grateful that herself and her house were both so right for this first objective examination.
The Woman Who Would Have Made A Good Wife For Some Lucky Man. The role presented itself as sudden as that, and began to enlarge in Sue’s mind. Not only A Good Wife, but A Well Preserved Woman For Her Years into the bargain.
Setting the table, she began to combine the roles, and with all the concentration of a small girl playing a game of Statues, each gesture became a deliberate demand for attention, and each question a secret provocation.
‘Cream? Say when?’ Who am I now, then? ‘Sugar? Two spoons or three?’ I’ve got no real name at all. ‘Strong? Weak? Or as it comes?’ Unless you look up at me now and bequeath one on me.
‘Just as it comes,’ Hugh Riddel answered without lifting his gaze from the floor. ‘And stop hovering, woman! For the love of God sit down on your backside and drink up your tea.’
‘You haven’t even poured out your own tea yet, Mam.’ Fiona jumped up out of the silence that had fallen on the room. ‘Sit down, and I’ll pour it out for you.’
‘I’m quite capable of pouring out my own tea, thank you.’ Sue interpreted both the amusement in Fiona’s eyes and the pity in her voice. And it was the pity angered her. It wasn’t fair. No two people should ever have such an intimate uncomfortable knowing of each other. It wasn’t fair to either of them, though it was the unfairness to herself that struck Sue first.
‘What you can do,’ she stood searching her mind for the worst thing to be done, ‘is to take that white blouse of mine off your back, and give your black neck that’s under it a right good scrub.’
Half her life, Sue thought resentfully when Fiona had gone, was spent in taking it out of her daughter, and the other half in atoning for that.
Had you at any other time tried to explain to Sue Tatt that, far from dividing her life, this relationship was one which gave it wholeness, she would have rejected you. But not now, not at this particular moment, when she was dimly perceiving that for herself.
I can easily put myself right off him. Her anger transferred itself to Hugh Riddel. And, true enough, Sue had hitherto always managed to get a man out of her system by concentrating on his worst physical defects. Pot bellies and bad teeth had been godsends to Sue at such times. But not this time. She knew that, absorbing Hugh Riddel with her eyes and remembering him with her body; for he would never have a pot belly—not if he lived to be a hundred.
‘Your bonnet,’ she bent in a pain of pride to lift his bonnet from the floor beside his feet.
‘Aye.’ Accepting the time-honoured symbol of dismissal, he rose awkwardly, taken aback by its suddenness.
‘You’ve got other business the night,’ she reminded him, leading the way to the door.
‘Aye,’ he said again, pausing in the doorway, for some explanation of his other business offered him a more dignified form of exit. ‘I don’t suppose you saw anything of Charlie Anson the night. I’m anxious to have a word with him.’
So there was no fault in herself. His explanation vindicated Sue’s pride, and the relief of it almost overcame her vanity, though not her curiosity.
‘I was wondering when you’d get around to hearing about that little shenanigan,’ she reflected. ‘Though it would never have passed my lips first. I’ve got enough to do to keep my own doorstep clean.’
A Woman of Comparative Virtue—a part such as had never been landed on Sue Tatt before and never would be again, so not to be resisted.
‘It’s been the speak of Caldwell for weeks,’ she assured him. ‘And, as it happens, I did see Charlie Anson the night, but only in the passing. For yon’s a one never managed to win round me. I just happen to be that bit particular, even if I havena gotten a college education. What they’re all beginning to wonder now,’ she went on, undeterred by the look that had come over Hugh Riddel’s face, ‘is whether Anson has any intention of marrying Helen or not.’
* * *
Helen Riddel herself was beginning to wonder.
‘Doesn’t that beat everything?’ was all that Charlie Anson had found to say when she told him that her suspicion of pregnancy had been confirmed.
‘Doesn’t it just take the cake.’ As if it were some achievement on his part, but of less importance than the other triumph that was uppermost in his mind.
‘The County Youth Organiser has promised to take a look in by at the meeting the night. A great pity,’ he added regretfully, ‘just a great pity that I didn’t know that in time to put it down in black and white on the Invites. But then, of course, Mollison’s a busy man, and couldn’t tell till the last minute whether he could fit me in with all his other commitments. Still,’ he reflected, cheering up, ‘it’s a start. Once you get the interest stirring at the top, it’s a start. And at least,’ he observed, as they slowed down at the School Hall, ‘the folkies are all beginning to drift in.�
��
They were, although apprehensively enough, seeking each other out and clustering together in small embarrassed groups, for this particular function had not yet received the seal of Caldwell’s official approval—that seal which could ensure a packed attendance even when it was only old Ag and Fish, the Hen Wife, lecturing on Rhode Island Reds. But then, of course, her presence was always sanctified by the imposing notice that preceded her. Under the Auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.
Still, as Anson had observed, they were beginning to drift in, and in numbers small enough for him to assess them and to conclude that, so far, not one amongst them was important enough locally for him to welcome in his official capacity. A vague general acknowledgement of their presence—‘So you all managed up then?’—would just have to suffice until worthier words of welcome were warranted.
‘And of course,’ as he confided to Helen Riddel on their way through the hall, ‘I just cannot make a move till the Vet’s wife shows up. She promised to take the Chair for me, though she should have been here by this time,’ he protested, examining his watch with an anxiety that informed the observant company he was now a man at the mercy of time and beset by its vagaries. ‘She should have been here long since, to sort out the exhibits of the youngsters’ handiwork.’
‘She might have had to wait for George’s brake,’ Helen Riddel remembered. ‘She was going on about it in the bus. But I can easily sort out the exhibits for you.’
‘All properly named, mind, then.’ Anson accepted her offer dubiously. ‘And set out in their correct age-group categories. The Vet’s wife knows all about them.’
‘So do I,’ she reminded him sharply. ‘At least I know the work of the different age-groups.’
The truth of her claim surprised herself. The small raffia calendars were the work of girls, fourteen-year-olds; they always did tackle something the end of which they could see from the beginning. But, she remembered, fingering the small plastic ladybirds that adorned the calendars, only so that they can have all the time in the world to experiment with their final decorations.
Glitter of Mica Page 10
