by Marie Joseph
Was he, too, suffering from a broken love affair? Was his ready laughter a cover-up for his unhappiness? Why was he taking his holiday alone?
Then I told myself that none of it mattered. I reminded myself that nothing mattered. Nothing at all.
We stopped for lunch, and I was sure that Malcolm would bid us goodbye, but no. As the car wound its way up a mountainside, there he was, sitting up in front with my father, map-reading. Mother, I could see, was very glad to be demoted to the back seat, and was already half asleep, her head lolling back on the orange scatter cushion she takes everywhere with her, just in case.
We were driving through picture-postcard scenery now – deep green glens, towering peaks, and lochs of shimmering water stretching for miles. And the sun had come out.
‘Keep a look out for a place to stay,’ my father said over his shoulder as the first houses of a village came into view, and Mother woke up with a start.
She rejected a farmhouse solely on the grounds that the tea towels blowing on the line were not the required shade of white, and as we drove at a snail’s pace through the village, she scrutinised with infinite care the houses bearing the sign BED AND BREAKFAST on cards in their windows.
The house she finally chose as worthy of our patronage had as many pot plants in its glass porch as any of the hothouses in Kew Gardens, and a Mrs MacDougal, her arms folded over her flowered pinny, told us that she would be glad to give us shelter for the night.
She took it for granted that Malcolm was one of our party, and offered him the bed-settee in the lounge. He accepted with alacrity.
‘I hope your young man will be comfortable down here,’ she told me when I came downstairs after a quick wash in a bathroom so spotless you could have eaten your dinner off the floor, as my mother remarked afterwards.
‘He isn’t my young man,’ I started to say, but there he was standing in the hall wearing a tie. He was minus the awful anorak, and obviously waiting for me.
My parents were already hellbent on investigating the Gifte Shoppe in the High Street for souvenirs for the little white shelves in the sitting room at home, so when Malcolm suggested that we play a round of clock golf on a neatly set-out square of the village green, I agreed readily.
‘Anything rather than search the shops for white elephants,’ I said.
He gave me a shrewd glance from his navy blue eyes. ‘Why the cynicism, Peg?’ he asked as we set off from position one. ‘Are you recovering from a broken heart or something?’
I was so surprised, I made a mighty swipe at the ball, missed, and was only saved from falling flat on my face by his steadying arm.
‘You shouldn’t ask me questions like that,’ I said shakily and he grinned.
‘I’ve had a bet with myself,’ he said. ‘Will she, or won’t she? I’ve been asking myself that question ever since we met.’
‘Will she or won’t she what?’ I asked coldly.
‘Smile,’ said Malcolm, pulling down the corners of his mouth and rolling his eye skywards, so that I had to laugh.
‘That’s better. You’ve no idea how much prettier you are when you smile. Quite passable in fact. But I’m right about the broken heart, aren’t I?’
I pretended fascinated interest in the little white ball lying on the grass at my feet. ‘Are we going to score, or just play for the fun of it?’
He pulled the comical face again. ‘Oh, score of course. Let’s take the whole thing seriously. Life is a pretty serious business all round, as no doubt you’ll agree.’
I concentrated on my game, and he only managed to beat me by ten points or so.
‘I should have had a handicap really, I suppose, as I play golf most weekends,’ he told me, and I said that I didn’t mind being beaten in the least.
‘It just fits in with your mood, doesn’t it?’ he said as we walked off the green together. Then, without warning, he took my left hand, and I knew he’d seen the white mark where my ring had been. ‘Whoever he was, he wasn’t worth it.’
I glared, ‘You know nothing about it.’
We were walking down the road towards Mrs MacDougal’s house and stopped on a hump-backed bridge with a clear mountain stream gurgling away far below. We leant our arms on the low stone wall, and I thought I could see the silver dart of fish.
‘It’s better to find out first,’ said Malcolm.
‘“Rather than wake up married to the wrong man,”’ I said bitterly, quoting Steve.
‘Well, isn’t it?’ asked Malcolm. ‘Think about it.’
We were quiet for a long time, and I found myself doing as he suggested. I thought about it.
‘I had a girl once,’ Malcolm said, out of the blue. ‘She was small like you, and pretty like you, and I liked kissing her, and she liked kissing me. We spent the whole of last winter clasped in each other’s arms . . . and that was all.’
‘How do you mean, that was all?’
‘That was all we had in common. Kissing. When the spring came and the evenings grew shorter, and there weren’t so many dark corners to kiss in, we found that we had nothing in common at all. When we started to talk there was nothing.’
He took a pipe from the pocket of his tweed jacket and started to fill it from a tin of tobacco. ‘I like Tennyson and Frank Sinatra. She liked James Bond and The Whys.’
‘The Who,’ I corrected, ‘and have you never heard of the attraction of opposites?’
He seemed to be having difficulty in lighting his pipe. ‘We weren’t just opposites, we were poles apart.’
I watched as he used up four matches, and then put them carefully back in the box. His pipe going nicely at last, he leaned over the stone wall and stared hard at the darting fish as if he were work-studying them.
I thought about Steve again. Suppose we had married? Just suppose I had woken one day and found that I was married to the wrong man?
The tweed shoulder by my side moved a little. ‘Tomorrow when we reach Inverness, we say goodbye.’
I stopped thinking about Steve.
‘According to your father’s inked-in route, you carry on straight up to John o’Groat’s, but I’m staying on in Inverness for a day to take a train from there to the Kyle of Lochalsh, then a ferry to the Isle of Skye. There’s some of the most beautiful scenery in the whole world up there.’
He turned and gave me a little friendly punch on the arm. ‘Seeing all those hills and lochs that have been there almost from the beginning of time should put a little thing like a broken romance in its right perspective.’
‘Now who’s being cynical?’ I said, and he grinned.
My parents had bought a set of dolls – a full pipe band, complete with swirling kilts and bagpipes at the ready. I knew they would be marching across our mantelpiece the minute we got home.
Mother glowed as Malcolm admired them, and I thought how Steve would have laughed at what he called her ‘pathetic taste’. Pathetic was a word Steve had used rather a lot, I decided.
It had been arranged that Mrs MacDougal would provide us with a meal – a cup of tea, she called it – consisting of steaks of grilled fresh salmon with chips, followed by home-made scones and raspberry jam, warm apple turnovers, and rich fruit cake.
Later Malcolm and I found ourselves alone sitting round a peat fire glowing red from the heart of a modern tiled fireplace, not smoking up through a hole in the roof, as I confessed to him that I thought they should.
I discovered that as well as Frank Sinatra and Tennyson, we had a mutual affinity with potted shrimps, lemon tea, Giles cartoons, and a mutual, senseless aversion to false eyelashes and double-barrelled names.
We talked on late into the evening, and at last bade each other a reluctant good night under the forbidding gaze of the stag’s head nailed above the barometer in the hall.
Later, lying underneath Mrs MacDougal’s green crêpe de Chine eiderdown with its matching spread, I wished a childish wish that Inverness was a whole week’s drive away. I wished that my father had not set his mind o
n achieving John o’Groat’s, but I knew from experience that once he had inked in a route, that was the route we would be bound to take, come wind or high water.
In Inverness the following afternoon, we said goodbye to Malcolm.
Mother settled the orange cushion more firmly in the small of her back. ‘A nice boy . . . and they don’t grow on trees these days.’
I said nothing.
‘Just one of those ships that pass in the night. I wonder if he really will write to us?’ my mother went on.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Holiday friendships never last. You’ve said so yourself.’
‘I could be wrong,’ she said hopefully, then breathed hard on the window before starting her scrutiny of what she considered to be suitable bed-and-breakfast possibilities.
That night we stayed on the outskirts of Inverness with a Mrs MacFarlane, who fed us on ham sandwiches and home-made currant bread with our bedtime cup of tea.
I slept in a room with sweet peas climbing all over the walls, and by the time she tapped on my door to ask me, would I be taking a wee plate of porridge before my bacon and eggs, I could have identified each sweet pea separately.
‘Must we go to John o’Groat’s?’ I asked my father as he helped himself to a third slice of Mrs MacFarlane’s home-made crusty bread.
‘Your mother wants to send a postcard to your Aunt Audrey from there,’ he answered me quite seriously.
I studied the view of Edinburgh Castle decorating the marmalade jar. ‘Would it matter if we stayed on here for one more night, so that we could take a train ride through some of the most beautiful scenery in the whole world? To see hills and lochs that have been here almost from the beginning of time?’
Mother kicked my father underneath the table, and after the third and heftiest kick he responded dutifully.
‘It could mean missing the overnight stay at Pitlochry on the way back, and I thought you girls were keen to see a play there? Do make up your minds!’
Mother smiled broadly, and gave me a wink I chose to ignore . . .
Malcolm and I managed to get seats in the observation car of the train coming back that evening from Kyle of Lochalsh. They were seats designed just for two. There was a technicolor sunset touching the lochs from the glens and the craggy peaks to a fiery gold.
There was a guide, too, I remember, with a soft Gaelic lilt in his voice, telling us the legends of the great lochs.
They were very beautiful legends, I’m sure, but Malcolm and I weren’t paying attention.
It had been a perfect day – the day when Malcolm and I really came to know one another. While my parents pottered happily round Kyle of Lochalsh, Malcolm and I wandered off alone. We discovered deserted beaches, and scrambled over rocks to stand looking across to Skye, the enchanted isle – dominated from this vantage point by the dramatic misty blue Cuillins. It was a day when we laughed together and teased each other, and then were suddenly quiet as he took my hand to help me over the rocks, and then kept it firmly in his.
Now, as we journeyed home, happy, relaxed, the skin of our faces taut from so much sun and wind, Malcolm had his arm around me.
‘Tomorrow I was going to try to hitch a lift to John o’Groat’s,’ he said.
‘I believe it’s a nice place to send postcards from,’ I said, and we laughed.
‘And those were the tales of what happened hundreds of years ago,’ said the guide.
Malcolm’s eyes were studying my face. ‘Who cares about what happened hundreds of years ago? What matters is what is happening now,’ he said.
Then he kissed me.
To Love Again
LAURA THOUGHT ON waking: In two years from today I shall be forty, and what then? ‘What then?’ she said out loud, swinging her legs out of bed and pulling a face at herself in the dressing-table mirror.
‘Not a bad face,’ she told it, running her fingers through her short dark hair, noticing again the threads of silver that seemed to have appeared in the past few weeks. Her teeth were white and even, and her skin was good, especially first thing in the morning when her cheeks were flushed from sleep. Roger had once said – But it was no use thinking about Roger. He was gone, and she would never see him again
It was Sunday, and the day stretched emptily ahead, as empty as the blank pages in the diary that she didn’t bother to write in any more. Once she had filled each day with busy unimportant details. Fetch Malcolm’s suit from the cleaners. Meet Angie after school to get new dress. Buy wastepaper basket for Roger’s room.
But now Malcolm was away at university and planning to go to Canada as soon as he’d got his degree, Angie was married and living in Wales, and Roger – all that was left of Roger was a Richmond address and a telephone number written on a scrap of paper pushed to the back of her dressing-table drawer.
She opened the drawer and her fingers curled round the paper. She stared at it.
Roger, tall and thin, with his untidy brown hair and his grey eyes that could soften with love or grow steely-hard when he was angry with her – and during those last few weeks he seemed to have been angry with her all the time.
Sighing, Laura replaced the paper and walked along the landing to the bathroom, and turned on the taps for her bath.
Over the sound of running water Roger’s voice came back to her, rough with disappointment . . .
‘All right then, Laura. Your husband has been dead for only a year, and it’s shocking that I should have made love to you, and it’s only natural that your children should be shocked, but underneath that soft white skin of yours, your blood is red, and can still flame with desire. For a man, Laura. For me.’
She pulled off her nightdress, and it was as though he were there beside her, holding her hand, then bending his head as he had once until his lips rested in the soft hollow of her elbow. She saw again his thick hair, and the strength of his neck, and the familiar languor of love made her body ache for him.
Never, she knew, in all their eighteen years of marriage, had Miles been able to make her feel like that. Miles had been strong too, and full of passion for her, but it had been a passion without tenderness, and tenderness, she knew now, was a far more powerful thing.
She lowered herself into the comforting warmth of the water, and told herself to be still. But the thoughts went on and on, torturing in their clarity, and getting her nowhere at all.
Determinedly she reached for the soap and rubbed the scented lather down the length of an arm, and immediately the memory of the kiss was with her again.
At the time of Miles’s death she had been numb from the moment the policeman had knocked at the door to tell her about the accident. How kind he’d been, and how young! He’d stayed with her until the children came in from school – Malcolm with his sixth-form seriousness, and Angie, his twin, with her school beret crammed down amongst her books.
After the young policeman had gone, and the awful, necessary telephone calls had been made, they’d knelt by her chair and told her that it would be all right, that they’d look after her, always and always. Malcolm would take over the gardening, and Angie would do everything – simply everything.
Even through her numbness she’d been able to smile at their earnestness, knowing full well that their normal teenage selfishness would soon regain predominance; and so it had. It was perfectly natural, she told herself, drying herself on the big bath towel, and she wouldn’t have wished it otherwise.
At the time everyone had been overwhelmingly kind, Miles’s firm especially.
‘We can’t grant you full superannuation, Mrs Greeves,’ Miles’s boss had said, fidgeting uncomfortably with his horn-rimmed spectacles on his desk. ‘But we’ll do what we can, and if you think of supplementing your income by taking in a paying guest, we can help you there. A lot of our men are with us on a temporary basis, and are only too glad of a good home. Ring me if you decide you’d like us to help in this way.’
His handshake was all solicitude, and when, a month later, she had run
g him, he’d sent a man round to see her exactly as he’d promised.
And the man had been Roger Baynes.
Over breakfast of a coffee and a cigarette, and the headlines of the Sunday paper, Laura remembered the day Roger had first arrived.
‘Roger the lodger,’ Malcolm had said, and Angie giggled, but they accepted him with good-natured tolerance. Even with the extra money he brought, though, the financial situation had eased only a little. Miles had been a good spender – that had always been one of his boasts – and seventeen-year-old twins devoured money as if it grew on trees.
So Laura had gone back to her old job kindergarten teaching, and as the school was only minutes away, she had managed to be in when the twins came home from school and in plenty of time to prepare the evening meal for them and for her paying guest.
‘Keep busy,’ her friends had advised. Work is the only antidote to grief, the motto on her kitchen calendar said. And if she was tired, well, she was doing no more than thousands of other women – working full time, and running a home. It was happening all the time.
And Roger, with his quiet ways and gentle kindness, had become a part of the pattern of the family; so much so that soon she could not imagine a time when he wasn’t there.
He had taken over the digging of the garden, fixed fuses, even painted the garage doors – all the things Malcolm had promised to do. When she thanked him, he had brushed away her thanks with a grin. ‘You can’t do everything,’ he said.
Now Laura washed her cup and saucer, emptied the ashtray, swept the already spotless kitchen floor, took a single pork chop from the fridge, peeled one potato and two carrots, and her work for the day was done . . .
Lighting another cigarette, she stared out into the deserted Sunday avenue.
Four birthday cards, delivered of necessity the day before, stood in a decorous row on the mantelpiece. One from Malcolm, a humorous one showing a mini-skirted female smoking a cigarette in a long black holder, and asking the world at large what did birthdays matter.
One from Angie and her husband Gareth, with their fondest love, and two from friends who had surprised and touched her by remembering. But from Roger, nothing at all . . .
