How lucky no one reviews bankers, Ewan thought. There was an odd, scolding tone to the prose, which, although he had himself been annoyed with Chae only a moment ago, made him feel almost partisan. He returned to his lively (if unlikeable) narrator.
• • •
By the third hour of the flight everything was boring. I had had my hopes about one of the stewardesses, a perky American blonde. I was sure she gave me the once over as she served my Bloody Mary, but when I asked about the nightlife in Boston, she recommended the aquarium. I blamed Roman’s tweedy suit. In the seat next to me a middle-aged woman was slowly turning the pages of a book called Birds of New England. When her gaze wandered, I decided it was time for a rehearsal. I introduced myself as Roman. I was travelling on my own passport so this was my first chance to use my new name.
“How do you do. I’m Victoria. What an unusual name, Roman.”
“My parents spent their honeymoon in Rome. Needless to say, they claim I was conceived there.”
“Just as well they didn’t go to Bognor.”
Victoria chuckled and I glimpsed what it must really be like to be Roman and hear hundreds of people make this comment, each convinced of their originality. Victoria was visiting a nephew who taught at MIT. Thanks to Roman’s coaching, I was able to nod intelligently. I explained that I was on my way to see an elderly aunt. “I am the nephew,” I said, “but no scientific bent, I’m afraid.”
“What do you do?”
I barely stopped myself saying actor. Roman and I had gone over his relationship with Aunt Helen in mind-boggling detail, but we hadn’t bothered with the rest of his life. “I’m in marketing, for a distillery.”
“Oh,” said Victoria, sounding alarmingly interested. “My nephew and his wife are planning to do the Whisky Trail in the spring. Perhaps you have some suggestions?”
“I’m sure the Scottish Tourist Board can give them all the information they need,” I said lamely.
“But what about your distillery?” pressed Victoria.
“It’s in Perth—not particularly picturesque, alas, but we’re always glad to have visitors.” Before she could ask any more questions, I said I had to work on a report. Frowning, Victoria returned to the greater crested grebe.
The remainder of the flight, now I’d realised half the script was missing, rushed by. I unfolded the table and began to jot down the main facts about my brother. Or at least those I could come up with. For a quarter of an hour I drew a complete blank on the name of his first wife. Finally it came to me, Gretel. She never liked me. And then there was myself to consider. Aunt Helen’s other nephew, I would surely rate some discussion. I decided not to mention my occasional adverts but stress the acting I’d done in schools and hospitals. Who knows, maybe Helen would leave me a legacy of my own.
By the time I got off the plane my head was buzzing. I was glad to have the mechanical tasks of immigration and customs to anchor me. As Helen had predicted there was no problem getting a taxi and the driver said, “Sure thing,” when I asked him to take me to Arlington. Soon we were driving past gas tanks and factories, an industrial landscape not unlike parts of North London. Gradually this gave way to streets lined with wooden houses. But I was in too much of a funk to appreciate the scenery. I kept thinking what would happen if I fluffed my lines. Then we were pulling up in front of a large white house. I was on.
Aunt Helen met me at the door with her walker. She was wearing turquoise slacks, a sweatshirt, and a great deal of lipstick. Her glasses were splendidly thick. “Roman, welcome. Come in, come in,” she said. On the phone she’d sounded American but in person, in spite of her garish clothes, she was every inch an Edinburgh matron. I embraced her carefully and said she was looking well.
“Rubbish. Now you’ll be parched after your journey. Tea is all ready. You have the same room as last time.”
I remembered Roman’s instruction to take the back stairs and found myself in a large plain room with a view of the garden and its own bathroom. I washed my face and hands. In the mirror my skin where I had shaved off my beard still had a pale, unused look and somehow my eyes seemed different too. Smaller and darker, more like Roman’s. Of course it was silly but I ran my hand over my thigh, searching for the dent left by a car that had knocked me down when I was eighteen. There it was, my secret identity mark, and my eyes were my own again. Before I could spook myself further, I went downstairs and made cheery conversation with Aunt Helen about my journey.
• • •
Ewan closed The Dark Forest. So far there seemed little to explain Mollie’s intense reaction to the book. The portrait of her was mostly flattering; even the churlish reviewer thought she was sympathetic. As for the plot, he recognised it from the divinity classes of his childhood. Here were Jacob and Esau, the smooth and hairy brothers, disputing their birthright—a word that reminded him of Olivia. At least she was warm and well fed. He wondered what her real name was. At university there had been a brilliant Indian girl in one of his computer classes. He remembered meeting her one snowy afternoon standing on the library steps, both hands outstretched to catch the snow. Neera, he recalled; she came from Hyderabad. He had not thought of her in years.
Chapter 6
After the phone call, Mollie carried Olivia upstairs to the bathroom. She turned on the taps and sat on the lid of the toilet, watching the long porcelain bath fill with water and the room with steam. As usual after heavy rain, peat had filtered into the reservoir, and the water gushing from the taps was the same golden brown as the mountain burns. Mollie had always taken pleasure in this phenomenon—“Look at the peat,” she would exclaim to Chae, holding up a tumbler—but now the little brown flecks seemed to dance with sinister life, the steam was far from innocent, and even the clawed feet of the bathtub curled with menace. She thought of the ducks, dead by her carelessness; in the silence, their voices were getting ready to denounce her.
Then Olivia gurgled, and Mollie found she did not have to listen to the ducks. Turning her back upon them, she tested the water several times before lowering Olivia into the bath. The day before, Olivia had cooed and splashed in the kitchen basin, but this larger expanse seemed to alarm her. Her mouth opened in protest. At the last moment, however, her expression changed and she welcomed the topaz water, whose colour mirrored her own.
For the first few minutes Mollie struggled just to keep hold of her slippery limbs. Soon she discovered the knack of cupping Olivia’s head above the water with one hand while squeezing the sponge over her with the other. She began to sing:
Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub,
And who do you think they were?
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,
They all jumped out of a rotten potato.
As she sang she thought about the man on the phone: who was he? When he said hello, she’d assumed he was someone from the town, perhaps one of the men Chae used for odd jobs. He had called her Mollie Lafferty, a slip she hadn’t bothered to correct.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said. “You have company.”
“Yes, my brother. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”
“A well-wisher.” He paused. “Somebody wishing you well with your company.”
Mollie’s mild puzzlement turned to acute alarm. “Who is this?” she said. “No, that won’t be necessary.” And put down the phone. Then she went back into the kitchen and made up something to tell Ewan. In her state of agitation, it was astounding she could invent a convincing story. A week ago she’d been afraid to step out of the house, and here she was, deft as Ariadne, finding her way through a maze of crises, unanticipated crises.
But was she, she suddenly wondered as she reached for the soap, finding her way, or losing it? The phrase “unanticipated crises” sounded reassuring, like a large steel cage into which fierce animals could be herded. But this man—she pictured him bare-headed, bare-handed, his skin and eyes like Olivia’s, perhaps a little stocky, wearing an Arran sweater the colour o
f oatmeal—it was not at all clear whether this man could be herded.
How could he have known their secret? No, not their secret; hers. As far as Ewan was concerned, they were waiting for the car to recover. He had no inkling that she had slipped out of the house the night before and loosened the distributor cap. Nor that she was already scheming how to get him to hurry back to London, leaving her to cope with the authorities.
Olivia waved her legs and splashed. “What are we going to do?” Mollie asked. She remembered Lorraine saying that small children, alone in their cribs, often talked to themselves, retelling the events of their day. The theory was that these crib narratives were an attempt at controlling experience. And now Mollie was doing the adult equivalent, trying to work out how to survive the remainder of her brother’s visit, to calm herself, by talking to Olivia.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she continued. “I’ll have to talk to Ewan about Chae, et cetera, et cetera. He’d like us to leave Mill of Fortune as soon as possible. What do you think? Last week the house felt like a prison, but now you’re here, it’s all right.” She tickled Olivia’s toes, and Olivia squealed with glee. If only she hadn’t sent Ewan that mad letter. But that was what had brought him to Mill of Fortune, and he in turn had brought Olivia. As for the man on the phone, briefly Mollie heard him again—“somebody wishing you well with your company”—then his voice, like those that spoke from the taps and the trees, receded.
She wrapped Olivia in a warm towel and carried her downstairs. Ewan was at the kitchen table, pushing buttons on his calculator. “How was the bath?” he said.
“We had fun. Would you hold her while I close the shutters? When it’s windy like this, they make the house much warmer.”
She handed him Olivia and went round the downstairs windows, checking the locks and closing the shutters; they creaked with disuse. Standing in the parlour window, she thought, Anyone could see me. Anyone could be looking in. But even this frightening notion fell far short of the vociferous terrors the darkness had used to hold. She made sure the front door was locked and quietly, so as not to rouse Ewan’s attention, slid the bolt across the back door.
Later Mollie would remember that evening as the pleasantest part of his visit. By tacit agreement they put aside difficult conversations, and after supper settled in over the Scrabble board. At the end of the third game, Mollie emerged the victor by twenty-three points.
On Sunday morning Mollie knew from the moment Ewan entered the kitchen that the time for jokes about “umbrella” and “xylophone” was past. The word hovering over his head like a neon sign, lit by determination and self-reproach, was “talk.” He gobbled up his cereal, then dashed upstairs to fetch his notebook. As he sat down, the notebook open before him, she saw he’d made a numbered list.
“Mollie,” he said, “you know I’m not much use at the Sturm und Drang of love, but I am good at practical matters. We have to figure out your future.” He glanced down at the notebook. “First off, can you tell me the legal situation about the house?”
Before his arrival Mollie had, in her occasional flashes of clarity, dreaded the revelation of what she knew Ewan would regard as massive incompetence. Now she welcomed it as exactly the sort of problem that would distract him from Olivia. Stumbling a little, she explained that everything was in Chae’s name. “It didn’t seem to matter,” she said sheepishly.
“Not to worry. It won’t be hard to establish your right to a share. After all, you lived together for ten years.”
“So you keep saying,” she snapped, and at once, as Ewan tucked in his chin, tortoise-like, found herself apologising. “Sorry. But actually, he doesn’t own the house.”
“He doesn’t own it?” Ewan’s eyebrows rose.
“We had a lease. I don’t know the details, but the Craigs would never sell.”
“Do you mean like a London leasehold, where you buy ninety-nine years for a hundred thousand pounds?”
“No, a regular lease, where you pay rent every month. I’m sorry,” she said again. “Chae took care of all that.”
He crossed off one item on his list. “So do you still have your inheritance?”
“Of course not. That was years ago, Ewan, and it wasn’t very much. I bought a new loom. We put in central heating, paid Chae’s child support, bought a car, and ate brown rice for a couple of years. Neither of us had a steady income; of course the money got spent. Now I feel like an idiot, but at the time it was such a relief to be able to contribute. We were so broke. I hated asking Chae for anything.”
“But didn’t he make money from his books, his journalism?”
Mollie laughed. “Those barely kept us in toothpaste. He got a hundred pounds for a piece in Field and Stream, fifty for a review in The Scotsman. The novels brought in more, though only every three or four years. And you know about my weaving. At that exhibition in Edinburgh last summer, the most expensive hanging went for two hundred and twenty pounds, and it took me three months to make. I tried to tell you the other night.”
Ewan sighed, and Mollie felt the familiar pleasure of baiting her brother. He scribbled a note; she could see him almost visibly retrieve his sense of purpose, as if he were picking a shirt up off the floor. “Well, at least you’re not tied to the house. Or even really to Chae.” He paused and tapped his pen. “Do you consider the separation irrevocable? Are you ready to begin proceedings?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘proceedings,’ but if they involve talking to him or seeing him, I’m never going to be ready. I just want to forget all this. Think of me as someone who’s been hibernating for ten years. Now I’m awake.”
“Hibernating,” Ewan repeated, and, to Mollie’s astonishment, wrote it down. “Where do you plan to be awake? How will you support yourself? I hate to sound like a Jeremiah, but you were very unsteady on the phone, even a few days ago.”
Mollie saw that in the euphoria of anger she had gone too far; she had forgotten that, once more, she had something to lose. “You’re right,” she said penitently. “I do have to move, and I should take a training course. Learn a skill, not just muddle along in shops and restaurants like I used to.”
“Weaving’s a skill.”
“But most people see it as a luxury. I want to do something necessary, like nursing, or carpentry.”
“That’s an excellent idea. Maybe computers? I remember you were good at maths. If you tell me the areas you’re interested in, I’ll make enquiries.” He crossed off another item. I said the right thing, thought Mollie. I sounded sensible, practical.
“Now, about packing up the house,” he went on. “You can put the furniture in storage until you’re ready to make decisions, but there’ll be a lot of organising. How about asking a friend to come and help?”
Her anger flooded back; she cracked her knuckles to contain it. “I don’t have any friends,” she said as calmly as she could. “That’s what I kept trying to tell you on the phone. The people we saw round here, they’re all Chae’s friends. I can’t face them now.”
“Mollie, you’re being Victorian. No one thinks twice about people breaking up these days. I’m certain your neighbours would be happy to lend a hand.”
“Yes, the phone’s ringing off the hook.” She gestured towards the hall. Later she could not understand what had driven her to talk about The Dark Forest except the same impulse that drove criminals to confess: solitude was too painful; worse than being known was being unknown. “You’re reading Chae’s book,” she said.
“I haven’t got very far. I’m a slow reader.”
She stood up, went over to the stove, and pushed the kettle into the centre of the hot plate. “If you read the book, you’ll see that what Chae did is scurrilous. He didn’t make the slightest effort to conceal it. Everyone knows I’m Maudie. Maudie,” she snorted. “It’s not even a proper name, for Christ’s sake.” She came back to the table, her face hot from the stove, and sat down again opposite her meek, attentive brother.
“Of course I can
see some similarities,” he said, “but mostly the likeness is complimentary. Last night I found this review from The Scotsman. The bloke didn’t seem to like the novel much, still he thought Maudie was by far the nicest character.”
“Keep reading.”
Her bitterness had derailed the conversation, but only briefly. Turning back to his list, Ewan said, “It’s April the twelfth today. Why don’t you aim to be out of here by the end of the month? That’s a little less than three weeks. The first of May is a highly auspicious date for starting a new life.”
“All right.” Mollie raised her coffee cup in a mock toast. “A new life on the first of May.”
Again Ewan made a note. “Do you think you might want to come to London?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I was dreading Edinburgh, for all kinds of reasons—Chae, old friends, nowhere to live, no job. London’s just what I need—a new start—and of course you’ll be there, which is essential.” She smiled and, to her relief, saw on Ewan’s face an answering smile. Her agenda had only one item, to keep the peace, though if she was going to move, London, with its famous promise of anonymity, did seem the ideal destination. Here, in the country, she had isolation without a shred of privacy. Everyone knew she was the woman from Mill of Fortune. Her promise of coming to London was, evidently, the last major item on Ewan’s list. He made a final note and announced that he’d check the yellow pages for removal companies.
When he left the kitchen, she suspected him of sneaking off to read another chapter of The Dark Forest. But in ten minutes he was back, saying it was cold upstairs and naming two local companies that advertised both removal and storage. Later, on her way to the bathroom, she tiptoed into his room and looked at the book. The jacket flap was closed in Chapter Five. At least her brother had not succumbed to the propaganda that this was a book you couldn’t put down.
Criminals Page 7
