Bareback

by John Burke

  One day, perhaps . . .

  He reached his own front door and went in, head down.

  ‘You’re late.’

  Hannah Ferguson was not a large woman, but always seemed to fill to capacity any space where she stood. Her eyes might be half closed as if she were plotting some surprise; and then would open wide in an accusing stare. Her fists clenched and unclenched even when there was no argument in the offing. Within seconds her face could flush a mottled pink and purple. He remembered her, years ago, as a strikingly pretty girl before ill temper had sketched spidery lines into her cheeks and jaw. Even now the skin on her arms and legs was smooth and creamy, and there was only the faintest dry wrinkling at her throat; but her complexion suggested she drank too much, which Archie knew to be quite untrue. She might have been more tolerable if she had not been so remorselessly savage and sober.

  She was a prime mover in local amateur dramatics, even though more than half the other players repeatedly said they would never appear with her again, and was forever lecturing them on the importance of voice projection. Now, true to form, she was using her voice to launch words like projectiles.

  Archie said: ‘I was kept late by a client.’

  ‘And who might that be?’

  ‘Sir Nicholas Torrance. We had a few matters to clarify.’

  He tried to edge into the sitting room and head for his armchair. But Hannah was planted in the doorway, seizing on that name just as he had feared she would. She had no more intention of letting him pass than if he had been an impatient motorist driving along the High Street.

  ‘Sir Nicholas? Sir Nicholas? It’s disgusting. Really disgusting. You do realise I could have been living there now? That Kirsty and I ought to be living there? And that I ought to have been Lady Torrance – and Kirsty after me?’

  Yes, Archie did realise this. Or that she believed it to be true. She had told him often enough.

  Knowing he was wasting his time, he said mildly: ‘Not quite, my dear. You’re well aware that the title descends in the male line, and –’

  ‘And isn’t that monstrous? What we have to battle against. If only my David had lived, instead of this young upstart.’

  ‘Hardly an upstart.’ Archie clung to legal precision as his only salvation. ‘A perfectly valid inheritance according to the –’

  ‘Perfectly valid! All neat and tidy, oh yes. Whereas by right everyone knows that I . . .’

  He let her rant on. He knew it all by heart, just as she knew her grievances off by heart. Hannah’s pet project, the creation of the Pictish Guild for discontented matriarchs, might have been due more to resentment over her daughter’s exclusion from the inheritance than to any high moral principles. Archie knew this; but also knew better than even to hint at it.

  When she had reached the end of her usual denunciation of the law and of himself as a cowardly slave of it, he said as placatingly as possible: ‘Unfortunately, as the law stands, that’s how things are.’

  ‘How you could sit there and listen to him . . .! But I can just hear you, sucking up to that trumped-up little nobody.’

  ‘I did what I always do. I answered his questions as accurately as I could.’

  ‘And I’ll bet he needed a fine lot of questions answering. Knows nothing about the place or his responsibilities. So you go and hand it all to him on a plate.’

  ‘As the family solicitor –’

  ‘As the family solicitor, I hope you’ll be charging him plenty. It ought to be worth a packet, feeding him advice you could never be bothered to give me or Kirsty.’

  Drearily he knew that any good advice he offered Hannah would be ignored. She would hear only what she wished to hear. And what she wished to hear was that the death of her first husband could somehow be got round and that she and her daughter could be settled with suitable grandeur in Black Knowe.

  *

  Hannah allowed her husband twenty minutes respite while she went into the kitchen and stomped about putting finishing touches to what Archie thought of as supper but Hannah insisted on calling dinner. There came the crash of a saucepan lid being flung down on a worktop, then the thud of a cupboard door closing. Archie’s first wife had been quiet, like Archie himself. Hannah slammed doors rather than simply closing them, and shovelled knives and forks with a great clatter into drawers.

  When things were presumably bubbling away to her satisfaction, she came back into the room and took up where she had left off.

  Her mouth had a very slight droop to the left and twitched faintly even when she was not talking, as if she were forever tonguing the inner corners of her lips, sucking words silently until she was sure they were ready to be spat out. Now she had built up to the discharge again.

  ‘You’ve got to admit it was unnatural for those deaths to happen in the wrong order like that.’

  Her husband doubted whether deaths could ever be regarded as happening in the right order, at least so far as the deceased might have contemplated them.

  Sir John Torrance of Kilstane, Bt, had sat as MP for Kilstane and Keildale, using Black Knowe as his constituency address but preferring to spend most of his time in London. He had had a younger brother Edmund, and a son David, who married the then attractive Bareback Lass of her year and made her Hannah Torrance. Their only child was a daughter, Christine. It had seemed reasonable to expect that in due course David should inherit and his wife become Lady Torrance.

  David, however, tended to be footloose. He ran a boatyard on the Ayrshire coast, often spending a working week or more in the flat above his boathouse. Further afield, he crewed in a round-the-world yacht race and was seen at regattas around the British Isles and the Mediterranean. As Hannah’s features grew petulant and her voice sourer with dissatisfaction, it was widely supposed that her husband welcomed any excuse to climb aboard any vessel guaranteed to be away from its home port for weeks on end rather than climb on his spouse. Hence there appeared no son in direct line of the baronetage. Christine, or Kirsty, was the sole product of the union.

  David Torrance died not in a sailing accident or a gale at sea, as might have been predicted, but from eating a poisoned mussel in an Ayrshire coast restaurant. His daughter was then five years of age.

  Sir John, otherwise childless, lived on until his granddaughter was nineteen. When he died, his younger brother Edmund would have inherited had he not been killed with his wife in a plane crash on their way to a recital in Vienna.

  Which left Sir John’s nephew, Edmund’s son, to become Sir Nicholas at the age of twenty-five when old Sir John eventually died. Which infuriated Hannah Torrance, who had become Hannah Craig and then Hannah Ferguson. If her first husband’s father had only died sooner, while that husband hadn’t died so soon . . . What a change in her status there would have been!

  If only.

  Sandy Craig had been a sailing companion of David Torrance and had been with him at that fatal meal. He was a noisy braggart with a taste for neat spirits and a contempt for the ‘bloody airs and graces’ which he soon found in his new wife. At first fancying the shape of the youngish widow and feeling vaguely that he owed it to his old mate to look after her, in a drunken fit he had proposed. Within a matter of months he was paying further tribute to that same old mate by imitating his protracted absences. When he condescended to be at home, he made too many jokes about the great old days of their boozy sprees together. In due course he decided that Hannah was not his sort of mate at all, took up with another woman, and quit the region altogether.

  And Archie Ferguson had steered her through the divorce.

  She said: ‘Where do you suppose that girl’s got to?’

  Archie had no idea.

  ‘You’ve got to speak to her.’

  When Kirsty did arrive, it was not Archie but her mother who did the speaking.

  ‘What time d’you call this?’

  ‘You haven’t started eating yet, have you, mither?’

  ‘You’ve been with that young lout again.’

&nb
sp; ‘I don’t know any young louts.’

  Hannah swung towards Archie. ‘You’ve got to speak to her,’ she said again. But even if he had been prepared to, she gave him no time to open his mouth. Instead she was going on: ‘You know what I’m talking about.’ Then – a bit late, thought Archie remotely – she decided to try the loving mother act. ‘Look, darling, you know how much you mean to me. And what this choice as Bareback Lass means to all of us. It’s a great honour. I do know that. I mean, I ought to, oughtn’t I? I was the Lass of my own year. And what a year that was! After all this time, everybody’s still talking about it.’ Sensing Archie’s unspoken comment that he had never heard a word to that effect, she fiercely added: ‘Everybody who’s anybody.’

  ‘Mither, I –’

  ‘And it’s so important to choose the right Callant. For your own sake. For your whole future here. And for your own sake, it’s not got to be that awful Robson lad.’

  ‘I’m the one to choose. And I’ve already made my decision.’

  ‘Not that lout?’

  Kirsty’s plump face was almost as flushed as her mother’s. ‘I was going to nominate Colin Robson as Callant.’

  ‘Going to?’ Hannah looked suddenly hopeful. ‘You’ve had the sense to change your mind?’

  ‘I’ve just been to tell Dr Hamilton. That’s where I’ve been. Not to keep the Committee waiting.’

  ‘Well, and who is it going to be? You do see that you owe it to yourself to aim higher? Before you do something stupid, just tell me –’

  ‘What I was on the way to telling you’ – Kirsty’s voice trembled – ‘is that I’ll be marrying Colin. Soon.’

  ‘But you’ve just said –’

  ‘We’re to be married. Because I’m going to have his baby. And that’s why I’ve told Dr Hamilton I can no be the Lass. Because she has to be a virgin, hasn’t she?’

  It was the first time Archie had ever known his wife speechless. The corner of her mouth worked, but no sound came out.

  Kirsty moved towards the door.

  Hannah found words at last. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘I’m no fancying any supper. I’ll be away to my room for a wee while.’

  Before the door had closed. Hannah turned her wrath again on Archie. ‘Will you not be putting your foot down?’

  ‘I hardly think it’s my place –’

  ‘Oh, it’s never your place, is it? Never up to you to be doing anything.’

  ‘A bit late, in the circumstances.’

  ‘And what is your place? God, when I think . . . I should never have let you talk me into divorcing Sandy.’

  ‘I don’t recollect it quite that way.’

  ‘At least he was a man.’

  Hannah flounced out of the room. Years of amateur dramatics had broadened her skill in flouncing off stage right, or stage left, as the situation demanded.

  Archie wished he could have had the courage to keep a bottle of whisky in the house. It might have soothed the continual hurt. Or given him the courage to do something . . . anything.

  I could murder that woman.

  Chapter Four

  The hastily convened emergency meeting was short of two regular members, away at an agricultural show, but Dr Hamilton ruled that the constitution of the Committee allowed for the quorum here assembled.

  There was no formal agenda to trudge through. The Convenor plunged straight into the only business of the evening. ‘We are informed that Miss Kirsty Torrance has withdrawn from participation in the Common Riding because she is with child.’

  ‘Colin Robson’s, I’ll be bound.’ Jamie Brown tapped the side of his nose and grinned maliciously at Archie Ferguson. ‘How’s her mother taking this, then?’

  ‘I am given to understand they have every intention of marrying,’ said Archie stiffly. ‘But in the circumstances, Kirsty felt that to withdraw would be the only honourable course.’

  ‘Pity young Robson didn’t withdraw in time, eh?’

  Dr Hamilton said frostily: ‘It is therefore incumbent upon us to make another choice of Lass.’

  ‘Before that dreadful woman . . . sorry, Archie . . . before that coven turns itself loose.’

  They settled down to a roll-call of the shapelier and more vigorous young women in the town.

  ‘There’s Jessie McLachlan.’

  ‘She’s nae good on a horse. Remember the Kelso show last year?’

  ‘Och, aye. True. Then one of the Thomson girls?’

  ‘Choose one, and the other’d tear her sister’s hair out.’

  ‘Catriona Douglas is turning into a bonny lass. Takes after her mother.’

  A few rheumy old eyes misted over with memories of desire and a few of consummation. Jamie Brown made a little gripe of derision at almost every name suggested; but then, having arrived in Kilstane with no wife or mention of a wife, he seemed disinclined to look favourably on any member of the opposite sex.

  ‘What about Agnes Carmichael?’ suggested Duncan. ‘A gey fine horsewoman.’

  ‘Aye, but a riding habit’s no her only habit. All along the Cleugh they call her the spare part.’

  ‘Well, being a virgin’s only symbolic in this day and age.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Dr Hamilton intervened. ‘But Kirsty Torrance was honourable enough to give up on those very grounds. After that we can no be choosing a symbol everybody knows has been tarnished every Saturday night.’

  ‘And one or two nights in between.’

  Unexpectedly Jamie Brown stopped sneering and came up with a name. ‘It’s just occurred to me. I know Sally Armstrong hasn’t been in the town all that long, but she’s made herself quite a power in the pony club, and she’d carry off being the Lass wi’ some swagger, I’d say.’

  Archie Ferguson wondered what had prompted this suggestion. Maybe Brown was hoping to sell the girl’s father some insurance, or wheedling him into some investment scheme. Armstrong’s involvement in the new development west of the river was already attracting a fair number of locals with plans for financial tie-ups.

  Ian MacKenzie settled that one. ‘She’s English.’

  They began to scribble further names on the back of their agendas from the previous meeting.

  Professor Makepeace, for once not having enough background information to form an opinion on the merits of local girls and the dangers of family feuds or jealousies, sat in silence until the discussion seemed to be petering out. Then he said: ‘Might it not be an idea to let somebody impartial shoulder the responsibility?’

  ‘Who did you have in mind?’ asked the Convenor.

  ‘Sir Nicholas.’

  ‘The new laird? Now, there’s a thought.’

  ‘We dinna have lairds nowadays,’ growled Ian MacKenzie.

  ‘The whole concept is archaic,’ Makepeace agreed. ‘But as a dispassionate newcomer, yet by inheritance a man of standing in the community, he might well be a suitable arbiter.’

  ‘How can he choose? He’s been here only these few months. Hardly kens anyone yet.’

  ‘Which could be an advantage,’ said Dr Hamilton judicially. ‘No prejudice, so no recriminations.’

  They thought about this.

  ‘But how will he go about it? We canna be taking him by the hand from house to house and asking them to bring out their daughters.’

  Archie Ferguson shuffled the papers in front of him. As secretary, he could not bring himself to regard it as a proper meeting, however short the notice, unless he had a fistful of documents. When he had run through his usual preliminary fidgets he said: ‘There’s the Pipers’ Ball the week after next. Supposed to be held in the Community Centre, just like these last ten years. If we could persuade Sir Nicholas to let it be held in Black Knowe, the way it used to be, and then line the young ladies up and let him take his pick . . .’

  ‘That’s quite an idea ye have there, Archie.’

  ‘Aye. Though we’d have to make sure the right sort got invited.’

  ‘That shou
ldn’t take too much arranging. But anyway, nobody would be blaming us for the choice in the end.’

  There was a pause in which they all contemplated a happy ending, growing more and more convinced that this was the best way to achieve it.

  Professor Makepeace broke the silence. ‘Will you be putting it to him, then, Doctor?’

  ‘If that is the will of the meeting,’ said Hamilton.

  ‘Aye. Let Sir Nicholas choose the Lass.’

  *

  At breakfast Hannah Ferguson said: ‘So our precious Sir Nicholas has deigned to let us have the Pipers’ Ball in his precious tower.’

  ‘Decent of him, at such short notice,’ ventured Archie.

  ‘Decent? The least he could do. And taking it on himself to nominate the Lass. As if he could have the faintest idea.’

  ‘Actually, the invitation came from us.’

  ‘From you?’

  ‘From other members of the Committee,’ said Archie hastily.

  ‘We’ll see about that. I shall have something to say at the Ball. I intend to be there, of course.’

  ‘Aye, of course. Committee members always take their wives.’

  ‘I’m not proposing to go as your wife. I shall attend in my own right. And the least they can do is invite Kirsty there, after disappointing her and making a fool of her in front of the whole town.’

  Archie got halfway through saying, in that insufferable nitpicking way of his, that he thought it was hardly the Committee or the town that had made a fool of Kirsty, but Kirsty herself and her Colin, before Hannah shouted him down. She harried him from the breakfast table to the cubby-hole under the stairs, where he hurriedly washed his hands without making time to have a pee, reached for his coat and briefcase, and fled to his grubby little office in town to nitpick over other people’s misfortunes.

  Kirsty had been sent off early to see the doctor, so that, as her mother explained, she wouldn’t have to sit around during the middle of the morning while other patients’ interviews ran late because of the incompetence of doctors who didn’t know when to shut them up.