Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  Captain Asher always has a bit of biscuit in his pocket for Socks.

  “There you go, Sergeant Socks,” he says, handing over the better part of a digestive. “And you, Private Thomas, come inside and I’ll make us a cup of tea.”

  It is their joke that Captain Asher ranks the dog above Ruth, but it makes her smile every time. She follows him into the hotel, which looks remarkably unchanged, except for the fact that there are soldiers sleeping in all the guest rooms, and the lounge at the front has become an operations centre, complete with maps and radios. But the front desk still has the hotel register open on the counter, and the room keys hang on the wall behind the desk, just as when Ruth used to sometimes come to deliver flies to one of the guests. When Captain Asher leads her into the breakfast room, there are still stacks of menu cards on the window ledge, flower vases on all the tables.

  Captain Asher pulls out the chair for Ruth and then goes off to fetch the tea. Their table is by the window and looks out to the sea, now trussed up in wire.

  “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” Captain Asher is back with two mugs of tea. He places them on the table. “I used to like to go swimming in the mornings, but it’s difficult to get onto the beach now.”

  “It must have been very cold.” Ruth has never been swimming in the North Sea. She has been into the loch on several very hot summer days, but even that water is freezing.

  “Invigorating.” Captain Asher smiles. “It’s a novelty to be by the sea. I grew up inland, in Surrey.”

  “Oh,” says Ruth, “I’m from Surrey as well.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Walton-on-the-Hill.”

  “I’m just up the road in Claygate,” says Captain Asher. “What do you miss about Surrey?”

  “I left when I was just three,” says Ruth. She pauses, takes a sip of her tea. “What should I miss?”

  “The trees. Most definitely the trees. Oaks that are hundreds of years old. The Beeches.” Captain Asher runs a hand through his hair. “All the woodland. It’s very beautiful here, but there are no trees.”

  Ruth has a memory of the window in her bedroom in Walton-on-the-Hill and the oak tree that was outside it, how the birds settled on its branches, how the leaves rustled in the wind.

  “I’m so used to the lack of trees that I never think about it,” she says. “But now that I am thinking about it, I do remember the oak in our garden.”

  They drink their tea. Ruth hands over the weekly record logs to Captain Asher. He walks her back outside to her motorbike. Socks is lounging on the grass of the front lawn in the sun, sound asleep.

  “I have Sunday off,” says Captain Asher as Ruth is climbing aboard the bike. “Would you take me fishing?”

  They go to the loch, as Ruth is nervous about meeting up with Graham on the lower reaches of the Brora. Captain Asher hires a boat and they row out to the centre of the lake, and then ship the oars and drift while the captain zigs his line across the water.

  “I hope you don’t catch a fish,” says Ruth. “I wouldn’t want to watch you kill it.”

  “And yet you make the most exquisite lures to do exactly that,” says Captain Asher.

  “I don’t do it to kill the fish.”

  “But they do get killed nonetheless.”

  Ruth shifts in the boat, wishing now that she’d never come, or that she’d brought the dog with her for comfort.

  “I like the patterns,” she says. “I like to help the fishermen. And I’m good at it.”

  “All perfectly sound reasons. Here, hold this for a moment.” Captain Asher passes his rod to Ruth so that he can fix his pipe and light it. “Besides, what’s life without a little mystery?”

  “You think I’m mysterious?”

  “Very. I don’t call you Private Thomas for nothing.”

  Ruth smiles, in spite of herself. “You could call me Ruth,” she says, after a while.

  “And you can call me John,” Captain Asher says, drawing on his pipe, the sweet woodsy smell filling the air between them.

  It is surprisingly nice to drift in the boat, even with the alarming prospect of a fish being caught on Captain Asher’s line. Ruth trails her hand in the water and watches the clouds scud by, no two ever the same.

  There are a few other boats out on the loch, but they all keep apart from each other, keep to their own patch of water. Ruth can see the fishing lines arcing out, the flash of the lures before they hit the surface of the lake. From this distance, the movement looks like a kind of dance. She plays a game with herself, trying to guess what the fly on the end of the line might be, given the conditions of the day. Mar Lodge would be the best choice of salmon fly today, she thinks.

  Captain Asher does catch a fish, but he takes it swiftly off the hook and lets it go. Ruth leans over the edge of the boat to watch it shimmy away through the dark water.

  “Let me take you to tea,” he says after they have been drifting on the loch for the better part of the afternoon.

  “I’ve left my dog,” says Ruth. “I can’t be out much longer.” She pauses. “I could make you tea at my cottage, if you like. But it won’t be anything fancy.”

  “I’m very fond of not fancy,” says John, lifting the oars from their resting place on the gunnels of the boat and beginning to row them back to shore.

  Ruth makes them beans on toast and they eat at her little table in the parlour, the one she only sits at when she has company. She is nervous to have Captain Asher in her cottage, nervous that he will find it squalid next to the faded luxury of the Dornoch hotel.

  “Very cozy,” he says when he comes through the front door. “You must be snug here in the winters.”

  He sits at Ruth’s table in the parlour, next to the wireless, and he eats his beans on toast with great speed and enthusiasm. Ruth makes him a second plate, pours them each a glass of sherry. She had meant to serve this before the beans on toast, but she had forgotten her manners. It is easy, when living alone, to neglect the social graces.

  “Have you always lived by yourself?” asks Captain Asher. (Ruth has trouble thinking of him as John.)

  “Yes. I like it this way.”

  “How do you know if you’ve never tried it any other way?”

  “Well . . .” Ruth can’t think of an answer. “Do you live alone?”

  Captain Asher laughs. “Don’t think you’re getting off that particular hook,” he says, pushing his empty plate away. “But yes, I live alone. For now. I have a girl waiting for me down south. It’s a good investment to go into war with a girl waiting for you.”

  Ruth thinks of her father and how he was in France while her mother was pregnant with her, how perhaps the thought of the baby kept him going, the desire to see the baby. Perhaps it was this way for Evelyn’s husband as well, that he made sure to keep himself as safe as possible so he could get home and see his child.

  “What’s her name?” she asks.

  “Sarah.”

  “Will you marry her?”

  “I will. Assuming we all get out of this alive.”

  Captain Asher downs his sherry, holds out his glass for a refill.

  “Now,” he says, “how do you know that you wouldn’t like to live with someone?”

  Ruth pours the sherry. Her hand is shaking a little.

  “This is what I’ve always done,” she says. “I wouldn’t know how to do it differently.”

  “You’re what, twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “‘Always’ hasn’t been very long then.” Captain Asher downs his second glass as well. Ruth pours him a third. “Who would you have been, I wonder, if you had remained in Walton-on-the-Hill? The landscape here has given you an identity, given you a profession, but who would you be without that?”

  After he has drunk his third glass of sherry and left, Ruth sits at the table in the parlour and thinks about that question for a moment or two. But then there are the dishes to wash and there’s still enough light in the sky to go out to the shed and work
on her back orders. She crosses the strip of lawn between the cottage and the shed. The light through the clouds is orange, makes the garden glow as though it’s lit from within, like a lantern. The flowers look pretty. The grass feels soft underfoot. The stool where she sits to tie flies is comfortable, moulded into the shape of her body. The sea, even with its twist of wire across the beach, is soothing. Ruth secures a treble hook in the vise and gets down to work.

  Snow Fly

  THE WAR ENDS. THE BARBED WIRE IS unwrapped from Scotland’s coastline. Dornoch reclaims its seaside hotel. Ruth buys her now decommissioned motorbike from the British Army, and the coastwatching huts are abandoned to the needs of walkers and lovers.

  Captain John Asher returns south and posts Ruth a package a month after he gets home. When she opens it, she finds a handful of acorns and a photograph of him in uniform. She plants the acorns in a row at the bottom of her garden, and she tucks the photograph into the back pages of her fly-tying handbook, the one she thinks of as her “bible.”

  She misses her wartime jobs more than she thought she would, and for a few weeks, she aimlessly rides her motorbike up and down the coast road, past the string of empty wooden huts, then down to Dornoch, stopping briefly outside the hotel and the deserted airfield before turning for home again.

  But business is brisk, and after the war, there are more fishermen from overseas, from Canada and America, coming to try their luck in the Scottish salmon rivers. Ruth, always eager to help the fishermen who just show up at her door, is now getting seriously behind on her orders that arrive through the post. She works with a stack of envelopes on the bench beside her desk, the pile getting higher with each passing day.

  She still dances on Friday or Saturday nights and sometimes goes down to Inverness to compete with other dancers from the area. But what she mostly does is work.

  First thing in the morning, Ruth lets Socks out. Then she sees to her ablutions. She goes to bed each night with a hot water bottle, and in the morning, she uses the now cold water inside the rubber sleeve to brush her teeth and wash her face. Then she makes herself a real breakfast—eggs, toast, bacon and a grilled tomato. She washes this down with a potful of tea.

  By this time, Socks has returned and she puts his breakfast down for him, usually scraps from last night’s dinner mixed with an egg.

  After breakfast, she walks across the lawn to the shed. If it is anything other than summer, she turns on the Calor gas heater when she gets inside, to warm the place up a little. Then she settles herself on her stool and Socks lies down on the floor, and she begins tying flies.

  The sun is just up at this point. Often, Ruth has her breakfast while it is still dark out, wanting to maximize the daylight hours while she is at work. She sits in front of her vise, which is in front of the window, and she looks out over the North Sea while she winds thread and feathers, bits of coloured wool, onto the different sized hooks. If there are no orders on the bench outside her door from local fishermen, she begins working through the orders that have arrived by post, taking an envelope off the top of the pile, then another, and another. The pile is so big at this point that by the end of the day, even if she has been working solidly through the envelopes, it looks no different from when she began.

  Often, Ruth continues right through lunch. This is why she has a proper breakfast before she begins, to last her through the day. There is a rhythm to her work that is hard to interrupt. She ties flies. She looks out the window, still scanning the horizon from habit, then dropping her gaze back to the hook and the vise, the desktop strewn with skins and feathers and bobbins of thread.

  At some point in the afternoon, Socks will whine or pace the floor of the shed, asking to be let out. Ruth will take him for a walk through the fields behind her cottage, and when they return, she will make herself a cup of tea and give Socks his dinner. She will take her tea back to the shed, putting a saucer on top of it to keep it hot while she returns to work, and then drink the tea when it is cold, much later on, after she has forgotten about it.

  In the summer, it is light until almost midnight, and Ruth can extend her working day right up until the edge of civil twilight, when the dark blue of the sky is ceding to black. In winter, she can only tie flies up until four o’clock, as the winter dark comes so soon.

  Twice a week, she gets in her car and goes to town. She brings with her a multitude of empty containers to fill with water from the hotel bar, where she has a friend who works there most afternoons. Ruth also goes to the post office, to send out the salmon flies she has made, and she visits the grocer and butcher and baker to replenish her rations for the week.

  Some of the people who order her flies by sending a letter include the fee inside the envelope. Other fishermen, she has to bill. Ruth has no rule for how she wants to receive and process orders and just deals with what comes her way. If there is money included in an envelope with a salmon fly order, excellent. If she has to bill a client, that is also fine. She never established rules at the beginning, so it seems impossible to impose them now.

  On the days when Ruth goes to the village, she drives past Evelyn’s farm and always looks out the car window at the farmyard, hoping for a glimpse of Evelyn, but has never seen her. Once, she watched Dan leading a horse across the yard, and she saw a young girl, who must have been Ava, running towards the house. But mostly, Ruth drives by and just sees the muddy flat of the yard, the barn and the stone farmhouse, all without anybody nearby.

  Back home again, Ruth will unload her containers of water, carry them into her kitchen and stow them under the sink. She will take her groceries from her shopping basket and store them in the larder. If it is summer, she will go back out to the shed and set to work again. If it is winter, she will make herself supper—always something simple like beans on toast or a boiled egg, maybe a sausage roll she bought from the bakery. In summer, she will eat late, and will still be able to go out to the shed for a couple of hours afterwards. In winter, she eats early and then settles down to listen to the wireless for the evening, or, if she feels energetic, do one of the DIY jobs that she has written down on the master list she keeps on the table beside the wireless. She likes to wallpaper and has been slowly working her way through the rooms and hallways of her cottage, covering all of them in different patterns of wallpaper. She is partial to narrative scenes with animals or birds in them.

  Ruth has no telephone. She has no electricity. She does have running water, but she feels that the source of the water is too near to a sheep pasture and that it is contaminated with waste from the sheep, so she prefers to use water from the village that she collects in jugs. She goes dancing every week. Very rarely, she has supper out at the hotel with a client or friend. She is not much of a drinker and while she enjoys a glass of sherry and, occasionally, a whisky, she never drinks alone. She doesn’t smoke cigarettes, although she likes the smell of pipe tobacco. She seldom drops in on anyone, but she is constantly being visited by fishermen who need salmon flies or who want to regale her with stories about the fish they have caught using her flies.

  At night, in summer, Ruth falls into bed at midnight, sleeping fitfully and waking again to resume work at dawn. In winter, she goes to bed around nine o’clock and sleeps right through until seven the next morning. She never uses an alarm clock, but sleeps with the curtains parted so that she will be awakened by the morning sun slanting in the window. When she lies in bed at night, she listens to the distant hush of the sea falling on the shore. If she dreams, they are mostly panic dreams about not getting through her orders quickly enough. If she is very anxious, she will dream about being chased, or of Socks going missing and not being able to find him. Once, she dreamt about walking with her father into the River Brora, standing in the water and feeling the cold current twine around her legs.

  These are the days and nights of Ruth Thomas, aged thirty-two, and she moves through them easily, bending a little this way or that to accommodate a change in plans, or bad weather, or a favour needed
from a friend. Mostly, though, one day resembles another, so it is startling when one of the days suddenly becomes markedly different.

  It is a winter Tuesday in early December. Ruth has finished work for the day and is in her kitchen boiling a pair of eggs for her supper. Rain is dashing against the windows and walls of the cottage, and there is the noise of water bubbling in its pot on the stove, but Ruth still hears the squeak of the latch lifting on her garden gate. This is followed by a knock at her front door.

  It’s Evelyn standing on the wooden stoop, soaked through from the rain, her wet hair plastered to the sides of her face. When she steps into Ruth’s front hall, water immediately gathers in a puddle on the floor beneath her.

  “You’re not even wearing a coat,” says Ruth, closing the door behind her.

  “Dan’s father died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was a crusty old sod,” says Evelyn. “I mostly tried to avoid him. He wasn’t nice like your father.”

  She leans on Ruth’s shoulder and kicks off her shoes.

  “I sent Dan down to be with his mother in Aboyne. Ava’s gone with him. I said I’d stay behind to do the milking.”

  “When do you have to do the milking?”

  “In the morning.”

  Evelyn’s hand is cold on Ruth’s shoulder, but even so, it makes her skin burn.

  Ruth turns off her pot of eggs on the stove and uses the water to fill a hot water bottle. She gives Evelyn her dressing gown and hangs Evelyn’s wet clothes over the backs of two chairs near the fire in the parlour.

  “I’m awfully tired,” says Evelyn. “It was such a long way to get to you. It seems as though I’ve been waiting years.”

  “It has been years.” And yet the ease between them makes it feel as though no time has passed at all. It is, Ruth realizes, because she has always been thinking of Evelyn, even though they have been estranged.