And although that was something Hugh Riddel hadn’t known till now, it was a lesser wonder. But still . . .. ‘I’ll talk it over with the wife,’ he promised. ‘I’ll speak to her about it tonight.’
* * *
‘Darklands has just been having a word with me.’ Now that there was no need of thrust and parry, and words were no longer weapons, Hugh Riddel used them awkwardly. ‘He was thinking that maybe you’d like a change of district.’
Her face averted, Isa Riddel stood by the kitchen window, her hands plucking at the curtains; and her silence, as habitual as her attitude, was not to be misinterpreted.
‘Well, what do you think? Will we give the south a try?’
She shook her head, and it was but the answer he had expected.
‘No,’ she repeated aloud, and it was her emphasis that disturbed him.
‘So you’ve been considering it, then?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No. No, I didn’t consider it.’
‘So you didn’t consider it. But you did think about it, like. Was that the way of it?’
‘That was the way of it.’
The swiftness of her submission took him unawares and left him at a momentary loss, for the value of her admissions lay only in their extraction. ‘What was it made you think of it, then?’
‘It was the neighbours suggested a change.’
‘I see. I might have known that much.’
Nothing, he remembered, ever came out of herself, except her protestations, and these were but contradictions of his own opinions.
‘And I can well imagine the reasons the neighbours gave you. Were you in agreement with them?’
She shook her head again, truth needing no utterance.
‘So you didn’t agree. My, but wasn’t that a wonder now?’
‘Was it?’ She spoke before he could invade her silence, though she no longer needed its protection: grief afforded more, since grief demanded you, and forcing you beneath its dark and heavy self prevented thing or person from taking your attention off it. Depriving you of tears, it yet intensified your need of them, and threatening you, it vowed that never more would your eyes light on other than itself, or smile again. And grief had guile. Clasping you closely to it, it lent you voice for everything except itself, so that you could utter still, without once lifting eye or mind from grief’s own face.
‘They were wrong in one of their reasons.’ Her small immobility setting up its own defence began to thwart him. ‘They were wrong if their reason was Sue Tatt!’ He flung the name that had never been spoken between them, to sound her silence, and waited for the ripples to rise to the surface.
‘It was one of their reasons,’ she said at last. For it had been. But she had long since come to know that, if by a thousandth chance, they shifted to some parish that had no Sue Tatt, the need of her would still be there. You could take the bull to the Castle door but it would still sniff out the byre. ‘Though it just wasn’t reason enough,’ she admitted, as if to something far away and unimportant. ‘Though,’ she remembered, ‘they were only trying to be kind.’
‘Kind, is it?’
The fluttering fragility of her statement impelled its own capture and destruction. She had always tried to protect herself by stating the obvious, under some old illusion that its small surface truths could guard her. To her, it would ‘turn out a fine day now’, when the sun gleamed for an instant in a sky that was overcast for the rest of the day.
‘Kind, is it? Oh, but of course, I’ve noticed their “kindness” these past days, I’ve noticed the way they’ve all been in and out of the house here, clutching their offerings of oatcakes, and their tastes of jam, their eyes skinning the road between here and the dairy to see whether I’m coming or going, and, thinking the way clear, scuttling inside to see what’s to be seen and hear what’s to be heard. The damned curiosity of them! Is that what you call kindness?’
‘It isn’t like that,’ she defended. ‘It isn’t like that at all.’
‘Isn’t it though? All right, then! All right, I’ll tell you what it is like.’
She was listening now; he could tell by the sudden stiffening of her back, for the preliminaries of their communication mattered only in that they led to its conclusion, to that moment of giving and receiving—that instant of fusion when hostility, finding itself at last, dissolves within itself.
‘This is what it was like.’ He restrained the rush and flow of his words, for, loving them, he was loathe to let them go. ‘It was like that day the Angus bull gored Betsy Ann the tinker, in the Nether Park. But you’ll mind on yon day fine. Surely you’ll mind on’t. For were you not yourself but one of them went running in and out of Lil’s house where they took her, with your bits of sheets for bandages, and your pannikins of hot water. Kind folk right enough, from the tractormen who carried her in, to their wives who clucked round her. I wasn’t there. But I know as much about Betsy Ann now as them that were there. And that’s but damned little. Though it must have struck the rest of you as hellish important. What is it that any one of you mind on now, or speak about at all, when you catch sight of Betsy Ann making her way up the road? Damn all! Except that she wears her man’s combinations, and that they’re coal black. What a comfort it must have been to all the wives to discover that what Betsy Ann had gotten under her skirts was dirtier than their own. And what a consolation to their men folk for finding that out too. A fair enough exchange for all their “kindness”.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’ She turned to look on him now, her eyes refusing to be trapped by any particular part of him, such as his hands that grasped the back of the chair till his knuckle bones shone white.
‘And it isn’t like that now,’ she repeated, staring at the whole man. ‘If Betsy Ann had died on the day the bull gored her, not a one would even have noticed what she wore. Not a one would have spoken of it afterwards. All they would remember was just that Betsy Ann had died.’
* * *
‘I’ve just heard about Helen,’ God Knows said when Hugh Riddel caught him up on the road to the dairy.
‘I’ve just heard it myself.’ Hugh Riddel neither slackened his stride nor made room for God Knows to fall in beside him, so that now as always they walked in single file along the track: though a brave new road had been built for them years ago, the windows of the farmhouse stared down its length and breadth, and so they still preferred this old dark devious route that covered both their comings and their goings.
‘There was no need for you to worry about the last loading the night,’ God Knows protested behind him, ‘there was no need for that at all. Me and the Plunger would have managed perfectly for once.’
‘There’s nothing I can do the night that won’t keep till the morning.’ Hugh Riddel’s matter-of-factness surprised itself no less than it puzzled God Knows. Though, come to think of it, man, being animal, was subject to the habit of his body from the moment of its possession. Even the foal that died within an hour of being born could in its final death throe still lash out and image for an instant some long-legged lifetime.
They halted now that they had reached the dairy; for though they walked their world from point to point, their eyes upon the ground, they never once went in out of its night without straightening up for that last look in which to prophesy tomorrow’s weather.
Time out of mind, God Knows remembered, had he stood just so, with Hugh Riddel’s father, in a silence the one had defied the other to break.
‘I’m sorry about Helen.’ God Knows broke it now. ‘I’m real sorry.’
‘Aye.’ Hugh Riddel’s acceptance was as brief as God Knows expected it to be. There were no words for death itself, only for its justification. God Knows stood listening for them now, although he knew their every qualifying adjective by heart—the very old who were ‘better away from it all’; the very young, ‘happier out of it’; the middle-aged who rarely died, bu
t when they did were apt to ‘slip away’, taking their secret word ‘incurable’ with them. Even so, they were the kind of words which had to be uttered by the one and heard by the other. You accepted death, but found the reason for it before burying the body.
‘Still, when you consider how things were—’
‘Just so.’ God Knows implicitly confirmed Hugh Riddel’s reflection. Words which he had heard from the beginning of time, when it was only the brute beasts that died and man was immortal; and, though time in its passing proved that man died too, the words kept their truth: never completed, yet needing no expansion.
It could have been Hugh Riddel’s father who had uttered them just now, as so often he had done, when the ‘shargar’, the ‘runt’, the freak calf, had to be put down. Not simply because as cattleman he recognised it could not add to the strain of the herd, but because its own species, recognising that too, would have less mercy.
‘Just so,’ God Knows assured the father, and waited for his son to speak.
‘It looks as though Dave the shepherd was right,’ Hugh Riddel remembered, for the wind that had been threatening to work itself up into a gale all week had succeeded at last. A fresh gale at that. Soutar Hill was beginning to crackle under it already. By this time tomorrow the thaw would have set in, and hill and element would come racing down together to water the world. But hill would win. Its swift escaping burns, tumbling without restraint, would land as always first at Caldwell’s feet.
‘Dave was quite right,’ Hugh Riddel conceded as they began to move towards the dairy; ‘it looks as though he just managed to get yon ewes of his down off Soutar Hill in time.’
Glitter of Mica Page 12
