Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  She pours them each a glass of sherry and leads Evelyn down the hallway to her bedroom. “It gets smoky if I light the paraffin lamp in here,” she says. “Seeing that it’s a small room.”

  “I don’t mind the darkness.”

  There is not much light from the window because of the rain and the clouds. Ruth knows her way instinctively across the room, but Evelyn has to feel along the wall, so as not to bang into anything.

  “You have wallpaper,” she says.

  “I just finished putting it in this room.”

  They reach the bed at the same time. It’s a twin bed, narrow and soft, but there is room for both of them, and they sit up against the headboard, sipping their glasses of sherry.

  “What’s on the wallpaper?” asks Evelyn.

  “It’s pink and white,” says Ruth. “The background is white and there are four repeating scenes in pink. There’s a headless church, a fancy stone wall with an urn on top of it, a ruined house, and a war memorial. But each of the objects is covered in flowers and trees.”

  “An abandoned estate,” says Evelyn. “But why is there a war memorial? Are you sure it’s a war memorial?”

  “It’s tall and pointed and sits on a patch of grass,” says Ruth. “It looks like a war memorial.”

  “Yes, but the estate sounds older than the first war.” Evelyn finds Ruth’s hand in the darkness and squeezes it. “I think it’s the steeple,” she says. “From the church. You said it had no roof.”

  Ruth knows that she is right. “I’m so thick,” she says. “I liked that wallpaper because it had a war memorial on it.”

  Evelyn laughs. “Now you can look at it and think of me instead,” she says.

  They finish their drinks and place the glasses on the floor by the bed, then shift down the mattress and turn onto their sides so that they are facing each other.

  “Tell me what else is in the room,” says Evelyn.

  “There’s a wardrobe. One of the doors squeaks, so I only ever open the other door, because I don’t like the sound. There’s a dressing table underneath the window.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “A small wooden tray that was my father’s. He used to put his change into it at the end of every day. Now I put his watch in it before I go to sleep. Also, sometimes buttons that fall off my cardy and that I mean to sew back on.”

  “You’re probably good at sewing because of your fly-tying,” says Evelyn.

  “Well, I never feel like it, so that tray is full of buttons, and no cardigan of mine has a full set.”

  “What else is on the dressing table?”

  “A mirror. A hairbrush. Several tubes of lipstick.”

  “Lipstick. Very posh.”

  “For special occasions.” Ruth squeezes Evelyn’s hand back. “If I’d known you were on your way here.”

  “You’d have put some on?”

  “I would.”

  Ruth traces her fingers across Evelyn’s palm, feeling the smooth, raised welts, like thick worms, from where the fishing lure had once cut through Evelyn’s skin.

  “That’s on my dressing table,” says Evelyn. “In my jewellery box. The Highlander you tied for me.”

  “When you’re dead, Ava will find it and think you liked to go fishing. Or that you once caught a really big salmon on that hook.”

  “Or someone will recognize your handiwork and the fly will be sold for hundreds of pounds.”

  “Ava can go on a holiday.”

  “Both of them can go.” Evelyn moves Ruth’s hand and places it on her stomach. “I’m pregnant again. Dan wants a son. Someone he can pass the farm on to.”

  There is a tightness to Evelyn’s belly and a slight rounding. Ruth pulls back the flaps of the dressing gown and puts her hand on Evelyn’s skin. Her hand is shaking. She hopes that Evelyn doesn’t notice.

  “How big is it now?” she asks.

  “Perhaps the size of a chick or duckling. If it’s a boy, Dan will probably want to name him after his father, Terence. If it’s a girl”—Evelyn puts a hand up to Ruth’s face and runs a finger along her lips—“I’m going to name her after you.”

  Even though Ruth is nervous, she is not surprised that Evelyn is here. She has imagined this moment countless times over the years, and the easy way they are talking with each other suggests that Evelyn has also imagined this. So, it is not a shock that they are together in Ruth’s narrow single bed. This moment has already happened in both of their minds, and now it is simply a matter of their bodies catching up.

  Ruth shifts her body closer to Evelyn’s. They kiss, Ruth’s hand still on Evelyn’s belly. They kiss and press their bodies together. The rain continues. Socks comes into the bedroom and drops with a groan to the floor beside the bed. Ruth can feel the muscles across Evelyn’s back, the sharp wings of her shoulder blades. The smell on her skin is hay and rain, the faint musk of lavender near Evelyn’s collarbone.

  Ruth means to stay awake all night, but she falls asleep with her arms around Evelyn, and wakes to Evelyn kneeling beside the bed, fully dressed, the room slowly filling with light.

  “Ruth, I have to get home for the milking. Can you drive me?”

  They hold hands in the car, when Ruth isn’t shifting gears. At the farmhouse, Evelyn gets out of the car and then comes round to Ruth’s side, knocks on the glass to make her roll down the window.

  “I go to the village on Thursday afternoons,” she says. “Dan drops me off and I take the bus back. I’m there between two and four.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. They should be home tonight, so I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  But two fishermen up from Edinburgh drop by Ruth’s on Thursday afternoon and she can’t get away to go to the village. The next Thursday, Socks cuts his paw on a piece of wire fence and Ruth has to wait for the vet to come out to her cottage to sew it up. So, it is two weeks before she is able to, finally, meet up with Evelyn in Brora. She finds her at the post office with Ava in tow. They duck behind the display of envelopes and exercise books.

  “Meet me at the war memorial after you’re done here,” says Evelyn.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Ruth. “There were these toffs the first week and then the vet last week.”

  Evelyn grabs hold of Ruth’s coat sleeve and gives it a little shake. “I never doubted you,” she says.

  At the war memorial, they sit on the stone wall to the side of the memorial tower. Evelyn gives Ava a packet of sweets, and the little girl cheerfully picks through them, choosing each one carefully and with great deliberation.

  “Dan’s moving us,” says Evelyn. “His mother’s going to give us her house and the farm. He’s been wanting to switch from dairy to sheep for ages. His parents’ farm does better than ours.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as he can sell up here.” Evelyn closes her hand over Ruth’s. It’s shaking. Ruth can’t speak for fear she’ll burst into tears.

  “Barley sugar?” asks Ava, holding out the paper bag of sweets to her mother and her mother’s friend. “You could have two each. They’re my least favourite.”

  Silver Doctor

  THEY ARRIVE BY TAXI FROM INVERNESS, AN extravagance that strikes Ruth as wasteful and a tad objectionable. There are two of them, a ginger and a dark-haired man. The ginger has a camera around his neck and fidgets with it constantly, even when he isn’t lifting it to his eyes to take a photograph.

  Ruth makes them tea and lays out some shortbread and chocolate fingers, but the men aren’t content to sit in her parlour. They roam through the house, touching her pictures and books, peering into the framed portrait of her mother and father on their wedding day. She loads the tea onto a tray and moves them out to her work shed instead.

  “So, this is where the magic happens,” says the ginger when she opens the door and they step into the shed.

  “It’s not magic,” says Ruth. “It’s bloody hard work.” She puts the tea tray down on the bench with the pile of orders on it. “And I’
m always behind,” she says, but they don’t take the hint and hurry along. They poke through her cubbies of skins and feathers, touch her collection of bobbins and the packets of hooks on her work surface.

  They photograph her sitting on her stool, tying a fly, her dog, Patch, sitting on the floor beside her, his head to one side, watching her work. Ruth thinks that he does this because he is intrigued by the feathers. No other dog of hers has chosen to observe her while she ties flies, but Patch considers her workday his own and accompanies her back and forth from the cottage to the shed, as though there is nothing else, even walking in the hills, that he would rather be doing.

  “What is that you’re making?” asks the dark-haired man, who, Ruth suddenly remembers, is called Damian.

  “A Jock Scott. Classic salmon fly.”

  “But what is a Jock Scott?” says Damian. “It’s not a thing.”

  “It was once a person,” says Ruth.

  “Yes, but how will the readers relate to it?” Damian puts his hand up to his head and taps his forehead. “Do you have something that’s more descriptive?”

  “Descriptive how?” Ruth hates to be interrupted in the middle of tying. She’ll now have to start the Jock Scott from the beginning. She is wishing that she never agreed to this interview. Really, the last thing she needs is for hundreds of salmon fishers to read it and beat a path to her door. She’s so far behind on her orders that she’ll be tying flies long after she’s died.

  “Like a colour,” says Damian. “Like, a totally green fly.”

  “There is no Green Fly,” says Ruth. I’m not tying you a Blue Charm, she thinks to herself. “There’s a Silver Doctor. Will that do?”

  “Yes. Perfect.” Damian takes a chocolate finger and then sets it back down on the plate. “It does have a lot of silver in it, doesn’t it?”

  Ruth holds up a bit of tinsel. “The body is wrapped in this,” she says, “so it will be visible in a colour photograph.”

  The men pace the work shed, looking for the best angle for the photographs. The ginger, whose name is Norman, takes some shots close up and then goes outside to photograph Ruth through the shed window. It is disconcerting to look up and see the camera and the face where she usually sees the calm, flat stretch of North Sea, so Ruth keeps her head bowed, concentrating on her work.

  While she is being photographed, Damian asks Ruth questions: how she got started in this business, how many clients she has, what does she think of the new trend to use animal fur in salmon flies, rather than feathers.

  “Many of the feathers you use for certain flies are endangered or protected,” he says. “Why not use squirrel tail instead?”

  “I’m only interested in the classic salmon flies,” says Ruth. “That’s what I know how to do.”

  “So, no substitutes?”

  “If a bird whose feathers I use becomes protected, I simply stop tying that fly.”

  After the questions and the photographs, the men go out into the garden to smoke. They can’t call a taxi from Ruth’s cottage because she has no telephone, so she will have to drive them into the village to make a call from the lobby of the hotel. Luckily, it is Thursday, which is her day for going into Brora anyway.

  The journalists come back into the shed for one last look around, to make sure they haven’t missed something terrifically photogenic.

  “It’s strange to see oaks in Scotland,” says Norman, nodding to the window and the line of young oak trees at the bottom of Ruth’s garden.

  She drives them into the village, leaving Patch at home. After dropping them at the hotel, Ruth fills her water jugs and then goes to the post office to send off some orders. She waits in line behind Mrs. McGrath, who is one of the old ladies that Ruth plays whist with most Saturday nights. Her knees have been bothering her lately, so she doesn’t dance as often as she used to, and now plays cards to try to keep up her social life.

  “Lovely day,” says Mrs. McGrath.

  It is another grey day in a series of grey days, but periodically, the sun bursts through the clouds, so Ruth agrees that it is better than it has been.

  “I thought you’d be interested to know that I was down in Inverness last week,” says Mrs. McGrath, “and I saw Mrs. Munro outside the chemist’s with her two children.”

  “Who?”

  “Evelyn. She is married to Dan. They lived in the farm just down the road from you.”

  Ruth can feel herself flush.

  “Oh, yes, I remember her,” she says, trying to sound casual. “Was she well?”

  “Very well. Nice-looking daughters. Tall and willowy like their mother.” It is Mrs. McGrath’s turn at the window, but Ruth can’t let her go without another question.

  “Do you remember the name of her second daughter?” she asks. “They moved before she had the baby.”

  “Eileen,” says Mrs. McGrath, turning away from Ruth and pushing her pension book across the counter to the clerk.

  Ruth posts her packages, goes to the butcher to get some chops for her tea. On her way back to her car, she sits for a moment on the wall beside the war memorial, watching the traffic swish past.

  She has the door of her car open when she hears a voice calling her name. It’s Mrs. McGrath, hurrying over the pavement towards her.

  “I was wrong,” she says. “You’d think I would have remembered, on account of you.”

  “Remember what?” says Ruth.

  “Evelyn’s youngest isn’t called Eileen. Her name is Ruth Eileen.”

  Ruth drives home, lugs the jugs of water inside from her car boot, stows her groceries in the larder. Then she takes Patch out. They walk farther than usual today, up into the hills that rise behind her cottage. She climbs and climbs, out of breath and panting, her feet slipping on the mud and stones. When she is high enough, she turns towards the sea and looks down the coast road until she can spy Evelyn’s old house. The Munros’ farm was bought by two brothers from Helmsdale, bachelors who barely come down into the village. She can’t tell, from this height and distance, what they have changed about the place and what they have left alone. She can see the house, the dark shape of the barn, the square of the farmyard and the rust-coloured fields tilting into the horizon beyond that.

  Back home, Ruth feeds the dog, makes some tea, carries it across to her work shed. She ties flies well into the evening. These days, she has so many orders that she has broken her own rule of only tying during the daylight hours, and she works past civil twilight, right into the darkness, two paraffin lamps burning on the table either side of her, as though she is a ship at sea.

  The magazine article appears, and for a few weeks, a different fisherman shows up at her door every day, inspired by the interview to pay Ruth a visit and order some salmon flies from her. It is as she feared and just makes her busier than ever. She now ties right up until midnight, whether it is summer or winter, using the paraffin lamps to light up her workspace during the night. She no longer listens to programs on the wireless or does any of her DIY jobs. The wallpaper she has up in her cottage will remain there until the end of her days. She plays whist most Saturday nights, and sometimes on Sundays she will take one or two of the elderly people in the village out for a drive in the country, but she no longer goes for lengthy drives herself, and never goes to Glen of the Fairies anymore. For a long time after her disastrous date with Graham, it was her destination of choice for a Sunday outing. She liked the landscape there, the stark beauty of the hills and becks, the fact that it was far enough away from home that she never ran into anyone she knew.

  Ruth works so much that everything else is just an interruption, and she feels guilty for any time away from her fly-tying desk. There are fewer and fewer fly dressers who are adept with the classic salmon fly patterns, and Ruth would like to pass on her knowledge to an apprentice, but the young men who have shown up at her door wanting to be taught prove to be not very good at it, or too slow, or they make her too slow. In teaching, Ruth realizes that certain things can’t be taugh
t, and that a natural ability exists or it doesn’t, and if it does exist, it can be encouraged and fostered, but if it doesn’t exist, it can’t be learned.

  There is no heir to take over Ruth’s business, so she just keeps going. In her fifties, she is working harder than she did in her thirties, but her body isn’t as forgiving. She has gained weight from sitting still for so long at the vise, and her knees hurt. Her neck aches from the way she bends over while working, and her eyes have started to fail. She now has to use a magnifying glass to tie most flies and has purchased one that clips to her vise so that she can still use both hands in her work.

  She now eats supper late in the evening, gobbling it down before collapsing into bed. When she wakes again six hours later, she can’t remember falling asleep. The sleep is so deep and lasting, it feels like death.

  Patch dies of old age and is replaced by Percy, a scruffy little brown terrier. Ruth can’t manage the big sheepdogs anymore, especially as puppies, but she is unsure whether she will take to a smaller dog. Percy, however, has a large personality and proves to be a worthy successor to Patch. He also likes to watch Ruth work, sitting beside her on a chair with a cushion on it, pawing at her to remind her to take him for a walk or feed him his supper or go to bed. Percy is a stickler for the rules, and if Ruth works later than he thinks she should, he will bark at her sharply until she blows out the lamps, and they cross the lawn to the cottage.

  All through the years, Ruth has held out hope that Evelyn will just show up again one day, but she never does. When Ruth goes into her bedroom at night, she runs her hand along the wallpaper before getting under the covers, looking at the memorial steeple perched on its patch of grass, entwined with roses.

  The oak trees grow into a screen and protect the garden from the winds that tumble in off the North Sea. Each autumn, the trees release a rain of acorns onto the lawn, and Ruth collects a bowlful and puts them on the little table in her parlour, next to the wireless.