Eliza writes from her life in southern England to say that their mother has died in her sleep, so Ruth travels down by train, leaving Percy with friends. She sits in Eliza’s front room and makes small talk with her sisters, whom she hasn’t seen in years. They have never come back to Brora, and Ruth has seldom had the time to travel south to see them. Their grown children tower over her at the funeral, and she muddles their names. There is cake, little sandwiches on white bread without the crusts, and large pots of tea at the reception. Many people come to pay their respects, none of them known to Ruth. She stands at the graveside, watching the coffin as it is lowered into its sleeve of wet earth and she feels nothing. On the train northward, she watches the buildings fade out to the Scottish heath and hills and is relieved to be back home again.
Popham
AT FIRST, HE SENDS HIS ORDERS IN BY POST, on the thick Royal stationery with the heavy red seal. When the flies are ready, he dispatches a car and driver out to Ruth’s cottage to pick them up, or she drops them round at the hotel where he stays when he is in Brora to fish. But after a year or two of this arrangement, he begins to come out himself to the cottage, leaving his car and driver to wait in the lane while he visits with Ruth and collects his salmon flies. The Prince likes to sit on the rickety wooden chair in her work shed and talk with Ruth about the different flies she makes. He is a connoisseur of the classic salmon fly, a purist like Ruth, and he appreciates the care and attention to detail that she takes with each one of her creations.
“You are a true artist,” he says. “I would like to bring you to the world’s attention.”
“I have too much attention already,” says Ruth. “I won’t be wanting any more, thank you.”
But the Prince arranges for her to be awarded a medal from the Queen, and they have the presentation at his hunting lodge when he is up for the summer. After the ceremony, Ruth has tea with the Prince and his entourage at the lodge and then leaves for home in her car, stopping briefly at the cemetery where her father is buried.
“Daddy,” she says, standing at his grave, holding the medal above his tombstone, “look what they gave me today for dressing flies.” She knows he would be proud of her, his little Ruthie, now a stout, grey-haired woman in her middle fifties.
The Prince likes the Popham.
“It’s the most elegant of flies, don’t you agree?” he says.
It is a complicated fly, one of the hardest to tie, with a multitude of components. Ruth likes it because it is so hard to make, which she thinks is a tad snobbish on her part, but she also feels she has earned that right.
“It is my favourite as well,” she says.
“Will you show me how it’s done?” The Prince likes to stand beside her while she works, much like her dogs have done, watching as she winds thread onto a hook, deftly attaches feather and hackle.
Ruth clamps a hook in her vise, positions the magnifier above it as she reaches for a bobbin.
“My eyes aren’t what they used to be,” she says to the Prince.
“It’s fiddly work, isn’t it,” he says. “And you are working the way the classic fly dressers did.” What he means is that Ruth has no electricity. The Prince has romanticized Ruth’s spartan living conditions to support his view of her as a true master of the salmon fly.
Summer turns to autumn and the days shorten correspondingly. Ruth is often busiest in the spring and fall. In the spring, the fishermen and the salmon are both excited to be back on the rivers. In the fall, the fishermen are desperate to get as much time in on the rivers as they can before winter puts a temporary stop to their passion.
The Prince returns south and Ruth redoubles her efforts to tie as many flies as she can during the course of a day. It feels harder now to fit in everything else, to make the time each week to go to the village and pick up water, post her packages of flies off to the customers, some of whom have been waiting years to receive their original “Ruth Thomas.” She is always rushing and she always feels constantly exhausted.
But there is an unexpected gift to this autumn, a return to her life of someone from her past.
He arrives at her cottage on a Saturday morning, rapping sharply on her shed window and startling her while she is working. When she opens the door, he grins at her from the threshold, extending his arms out for an embrace.
“You look just the same,” he says when Ruth steps forward into his arms.
“You also,” she says. But they have both aged, and she knows that he notices it as well. He is still dashing in his way, but Captain Asher is balding and barrel-chested now. When he walks across the lawn, there is a stiffness and caution to his gait.
“Fused discs,” he says as they stroll down to the row of oak trees at the bottom of the garden. “Some days, it’s even hard to tie my shoes.” He reaches out and touches the trunk of the nearest oak. “Bloody marvellous,” he says. “Your little bit of Surrey in Scotland.”
“It’s really your little bit of Surrey,” says Ruth.
He takes her for lunch at the hotel, and for once, Ruth puts aside her work and doesn’t feel guilty about it. They huddle together in the snug, eating fish and chips. Captain Asher has a pint and Ruth has a half shandy.
“Special occasion,” she says, raising her glass.
“I knew you’d still be here,” says John (and after all this time, Ruth finally feels comfortable calling him by his given name). “Sarah said I was mad to come and look for you in the last place I’d seen you, but I knew you would stay put, that you would be here for life.” He takes a long swallow of his beer. “Because why would you leave? The biggest reasons to move are love and work. Your work is here, and you’re not the marrying kind.”
“That makes me sound so dull,” says Ruth. “I could have married. There was someone who once tried to woo me.”
“But you weren’t interested, were you?” John puts down his glass. “Because you are an independent spirit and you would have to give up that independence to marry and have children.”
“Well, that’s not really it,” says Ruth. “I just didn’t fancy him. Even though I tried to.” The shandy is going to her head. She has Evelyn’s name on the tip of her tongue, wants to tell Captain Asher that there was someone she did care for, but she is not sure how he will respond.
“Did you really come all this way to see me?” she asks instead.
“And to go fishing. I retired from work this year and this trip is my reward to myself for all those years of mindless toil.”
“Are you going out on the Brora?”
“Yes. I’ve booked a room here at the hotel for the better part of a week. I mean to be out on the river every day.”
“You’ll need a gillie. I could spend afternoons guiding you, if you wanted.”
“I would love that, but aren’t you overworked enough already?”
“I will never be caught up with my orders,” says Ruth. “I’m reconciled to that now. For a long time, I thought that I could catch up, but I don’t think it’s actually possible.” She finishes her shandy, sets the glass back down on the table next to John’s empty pint glass. “So, hang the orders. I would like to go and visit with the Brora again, and to do it with you.”
For the week that John Asher is in Scotland, they fall into an easy routine together. Ruth spends the morning working in her shed, and after a hurried lunch, sometimes eaten in the car while she is driving, she goes down to the hotel to pick him up. They visit a different pool on the Lower Brora every day. Ruth sits on the bank and watches John sling his line into the water. She has seen her fair share of casters and he is not half bad at it.
“You’re in the top sector,” she says.
“Who’s the best?”
“Believe it or not, HRH.”
“Well, he has all the time in the world for fishing, doesn’t he?” John wades farther into the river.
“It’s not that. There are people who spend more time on the rivers than he does. I don’t even think that he fishes that o
ften. It’s more that he’s very precise when he does.” That is what the Prince and Ruth have in common, and what they recognize and admire in each other, a love of, and a belief in, perfection.
A duck has the temerity to cross into Percy’s territory and he races along the riverbank towards it, barking his warning.
“Noisier than Sergeant Socks,” says John.
“Noisier than any of my dogs.” Ruth watches as Percy trots back towards them, his tail held high. “But also a good deal more spirited, so I forgive him his outbursts.”
In the evenings, Ruth dines with John at the hotel. It is a tremendous relief not to be boiling eggs or heating up a tin of beans, slapping a chop in the pan. She orders from a menu, has a shandy with every supper, and John Asher pays for the lot.
“I don’t know who is having the better holiday,” she says. “You or me.”
When she goes home at the end of every day that week, she sleeps soundly and has peaceful dreams. No one chases her through the hills, but rather, she is climbing a hill with Evelyn by her side, and when they get to the top, they look out on the most beautiful view, a cascade of hills with the shiny blue crinkle of ocean in the distance.
On their last day together, Ruth takes John to the Madman pool. The water is lower than usual because of the unusually dry summer, but the pool is one of the larger ones on the Brora and is a good spot for salmon.
John wades out into the water, and because it is their last day on the river, Ruth takes off her shoes and stockings and wades out with him into the current. Percy, who objects to this and can’t follow Ruth into the water because he doesn’t really like to get wet, runs up and down the bank instead, voicing his severe displeasure.
The water is cold, noses up against Ruth’s legs as she moves unsteadily out into the current.
“When we first came to Scotland,” she says, “I walked down to this river with my father and we waded out into it like we’re doing now. All the salmon moving through it made it feel alive, like an animal itself. It was the first thing I loved about this place.”
John flicks his line upriver, lets it drift back down.
“If we’re lucky,” he says, “we get to circle back in life.”
“And if we live long enough,” says Ruth.
At their last dinner together, John Asher orders a half bottle of champagne and they make a toast to old times and absent friends.
“Don’t let another thirty years go by before you come back again,” says Ruth.
“I won’t. And I’ll bring Sarah with me next time. You would like each other.”
“I would love that. And to meet your children.”
After dinner, they stand out in front of the hotel, watching the stars for a moment before Ruth gets into her car and drives home. It is a clear night and the heavens are full.
“It might sound strange because the war was a terrible time for most people,” Ruth says, “but I was very happy then.”
“Yes. Perhaps it was the not knowing what was going to happen next. We were living as I imagine animals mostly exist, which I think is probably a good way to live. On nerves and feelings.” John opens the car door for her. “I will miss you, Private Thomas.”
“And I will miss you, Captain Asher.”
They embrace, holding onto each other for as long as seems reasonable, and then breaking apart abruptly. Ruth gets into her car and slips it into gear. John stands out front of the hotel, a hand raised in farewell. Ruth looks in her rear-view mirror and sees him standing perfectly still in the halo of light spilling from the hotel sign.
She drives the coast road past the turnoff for her cottage, right up to the headland, past the spots where the old coastwatching huts used to stand. They are long gone now, knocked down years ago after first being defaced with graffiti. One was even set on fire.
At the farthest point up the coast road, at the top of the headland, Ruth pulls the car over to the shoulder and shuts off the engine and the lamps. She gets out and leans against the bonnet, looking out across the dark blank of the North Sea, the wind twisting around her body. At first there is nothing, but if she looks hard enough, she can see that far out, there is a single light, faint and distant, moving slowly farther north.
Jock Scott
AT FIRST, RUTH CAN MAKE COMPENSATIONS for her failing eyesight. She stops driving at night. She orders a more powerful magnifier for her fly dressing. Her house is so familiar to her that she can find her way through it instinctively. But increasingly, her worsening vision becomes a problem. She notices at her whist games that she can no longer see sideways out of her eyes, that the card player sitting on her left is effectively no longer there.
“You should have your eyes checked,” says the Prince when he notices her squinting through her new magnifier. “Get fitted for some spectacles. I know a good man in London. I could make the arrangements for you.”
“There’s no one to look after Percy if I go all the way to London.”
“I’ll tell you what,” says the Prince. “I will have my driver take you to the appointment and you can bring the dog with you and leave him in the car while you’re at the doctor’s.”
So, Ruth is driven all the way to Harley Street in London with Percy curled up on the seat beside her, as though they were royalty themselves.
The doctor makes her look through various lenses at faraway letters on a white board. Then he shines a light at the side of her eyes, moving it in an arc towards the front and asking when she can see it and when it disappears.
The room is dark and the chair Ruth has been given to sit in is comfortable. It tilts a little backwards in a most relaxing way. She has to struggle not to fall asleep, even with the helmeted contraption with lenses that the doctor has placed over her head.
At the end of the appointment, the doctor switches on the overhead lights and moves his chair close to hers.
“I’m afraid it’s bad news,” he says. “You have macular degeneration.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re going blind. It’s irreversible. Your sight will gradually disappear until you can no longer see at all.”
Ruth isn’t one for crying, but she cries on the way home in the car, hugging Percy to her chest. When the Prince comes to see her the next day, she tells him the prognosis and is touched that he seems nearly as upset as she is.
“That’s terrible,” he says. “There must be an operation that you can have. I will do some investigating.”
But even with his Royal concern and probing, there is nothing that can be done for Ruth’s sight. She tries to continue on as before, but she knows now that her fly-dressing days are coming to a close.
What she would like is for there to be someone she could pass her business on to, but there are no likely candidates in the immediate area. She contacts her sister Marjory’s son, Jack, and manages to entice him north for a weekend.
He lumbers out of the train station, clutching his valise, which he balances carefully across his knees in the car, waving away Ruth’s attempt to put it in the boot.
“Do you have the Crown jewels in there?” she says, trying to make a joke, but he just glowers at her.
At the cottage, Ruth throws open the gate, leading Jack over the lawn to her shed.
“Is this it?” he asks, peering through the doorway.
For the first day, her nephew sits uncomfortably beside her at her work table, sweat from his forehead dripping onto the little twist of blue feather he is trying to tie onto the hook. He is clumsy and his fingers are too fat for precision. The feather clumps together and the fly looks like it’s already underwater.
That evening, Jack eats two helpings of sausages and mash and then bolts down the hallway to his bedroom. Ruth goes back out to her shed and ties flies by lamplight until she is too tired to continue. When she passes Jack’s bedroom on the way to her own, she can hear him talking animatedly to himself.
The second day is no better, and by afternoon, Ruth has lost patienc
e with the whole enterprise and tells her nephew to go for a walk so that she can get some orders filled.
He disappears and doesn’t come back, but when Ruth goes in to make the tea, she can hear him laughing from behind his closed bedroom door. She watches him intently while they eat together, but he seems perfectly normal, albeit a little surly.
Immediately after he’s eaten, he goes back into the spare bedroom. Ruth stands outside with her ear pressed to the door and can hear him talking to himself again. She opens the door and walks into the room.
Jack is sitting on the floor. He has headphones clamped over his ears and his valise is open beside him. It is not a valise at all, but a radio. There is a microphone on a stand in front of the valise and Jack is crouched over that, speaking into it. He doesn’t hear the door open and Ruth has to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.
“What are you doing?” she says.
Jack pulls the headphones off.
“Talking to PD681,” he says.
“Who is PD681?”
“A man from Holland.”
“Are you a spy?”
Jack laughs. “I wish I was,” he says. “No, it’s just my hobby.” He points to the inside of the valise, where Ruth can see a long list of numbers written neatly across the lid. “I talk to people all over the world.”
Ruth sits down on the edge of the bed. “Let’s have a listen then,” she says.
They stay up late, calling the other side of the world where it’s already morning, the static through the headphones reminding Ruth of the distance their voices are travelling to reach each other.
At the station the next morning, Ruth hugs her nephew and means it.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she says.
“Yes,” he says, hugging her back. “I thought tying flies might be the sort of thing I could do while I talked on the radio, but it’s not like that at all.”
There are fewer hours in the day that Ruth can dress flies now. She needs to save what remaining sight she has for the other tasks of her life, for cooking meals and managing her little household. She still drives her car, because she doesn’t quite know how she’d get by without it, but she only drives in full daylight and is more cautious than she used to be.
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