The Changeling

by Robin Jenkins

  Her wheedling voice reminded him of the hunchback’s. There wouldn’t, he thought, be room in the hut for so large a bed. Here too everything was white and immaculate, whereas yonder everything was dull, soiled, and scummy. Yet he could see, almost as plainly as he saw his wife in heart-rending coquettish silly tears, the hunchback carving happily at his wooden squirrel.

  ‘It was another fine afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘Fine for some folk,’ she whimpered.

  ‘Didn’t you manage to get out into the garden?’

  ‘You know it’s too much for my mother to manage by herself. I just had to lie here and watch the tops of the trees.’ Then her voice brightened. ‘Do you know what I was thinking about, John?’

  ‘No, Peggy.’

  ‘I was thinking of a day at Fyneside long ago. It was autumn then too. I think autumn’s the bonniest season. You put rowan berries in my hair.’

  ‘The rowans are just about past,’ he said.

  ‘For me they’re past forever,’ she cried. ‘I used to love the time when the berries were ripe and red.’

  He saw the appeal in her streaming eyes, but he could not respond to it; once it had sent him away with his own eyes wet.

  ‘Red as blood,’ she sobbed.

  Her mother called from the kitchen: ‘Will I put out your tea, John?’

  ‘In a minute, Mrs Lochie,’ he shouted back. ‘I’d like to wash first. I’ll have to go, Peggy. I’ll come in later, after I’ve had my tea.’

  Upstairs in the bathroom he was again haunted by that feeling of being in the cone-gatherers’ hut. Such amenities as toilet soap, a clean towel, and hot water, recalled the bareness and primitiveness there. The flushing of the cistern sent him crouching in the darkness of the cypress. When he stared into the mirror and saw his own face, he was for an instant confused, disappointed, and afraid. He could not say what he had expected or hoped to see.

  The table was set for him in the little kitchen. The morning newspaper, which usually arrived in the late afternoon, lay beside his heaped plate of eggs, bacon, and beans. Mrs Lochie was glancing over the table to see that nothing was missing. He never grumbled if anything was, but she always took it as a trick lost.

  He thanked her and sat down. He said no grace.

  ‘Any news at six?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of the wireless set.

  They listened for a few moments to the sadness of ‘The Rowan Tree’ played in waltz time. He remembered, with a strange jarring of his mind, his wife’s talk of rowans. For an instant he seemed to see a way clear: the tree within was illuminated to its darkest depths. Next moment darkness returned, deeper than ever.

  ‘It was about Stalingrad,’ she said.

  ‘Has it fallen yet?’

  ‘No. It’s in the paper.’

  He glanced at the headlines. ‘Aye, so it is.’

  Lately she had taken thus to lingering in the kitchen while he ate. Neither of them enjoyed it.

  ‘Peggy’s getting difficult,’ she said.

  It was spoken as if she’d been saving it up for months; yet she’d already said it that morning.

  She laid her hand on her heart. ‘I’m finding it beyond my strength to lift and lay her when you’re not in.’

  ‘There’s Mrs Hendry,’ he murmured.

  Mrs Hendry was the wife of the gardener; she lived next door.

  ‘She’s not a young woman any longer, and she’s never been strong. I don’t like to ask her.’

  ‘There’s Mrs Black.’

  She was the wife of the forester, as devout as he.

  ‘She’s strong enough,’ he said.

  ‘But is she willing?’

  ‘I would say so.’ He thought she was jealous of Mrs Black, who was very patient, kind, and capable; besides, Peggy liked her.

  ‘Every time she’s asked,’ blurted out Mrs Lochie, ‘she comes running, but there’s always a sermon to listen to. My lassie was never wicked. You should ken that, John Duror.’

  He nodded.

  She sniffled grimly. ‘Peggy was not just happy herself,’ she said. ‘She made other folk happy too.’

  He had been one of the other folk.

  ‘What pleasure is it for me then,’ she asked fiercely, ‘to listen to Mary Black making out that what happened to Peggy was a punishment.’

  ‘You’ve misunderstood her.’

  ‘I ken it’s your opinion, John, that I’m just a stupid stubborn old woman; but I’m still able to understand what the likes of Mary Black has to say to me. A punishment inflicted by God, she says. And when I ask her to explain what she means, what does she say then? She just shakes her head and smiles and says it’s not for her, or for me, or for anybody, to question God or find fault with what He thinks fit to do. But I told her I’d question God to His very face; I’d ask Him what right had even He to punish the innocent.’

  He had kept on eating. Not even this impiety was original. God had been defied, threatened, denounced, reviled, so many times before.

  ‘Why argue with her?’ he asked. ‘You only vex yourself. Forby, she means well enough.’

  She pretended to be astonished.

  ‘How can she mean well enough,’ she demanded, ‘when she suggests your wife deserved a punishment worse than any given to bloodstained murderers.’

  ‘Does she not also say there’s to be a reward?’

  ‘If the punishment is suffered gratefully?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘After death?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you believe that, John?’

  ‘No.’

  She glanced away from him. ‘Even if I did,’ she muttered, ‘even if I had a guarantee in my hand this very minute, saying that Peggy in heaven would have it all made up to her, I still wouldn’t be satisfied. It seems to me a shameful thing, to torment the living unjustly and think to remedy it by pampering the dead.’

  ‘This pampering is supposed to last forever.’

  She spat out disgust. ‘I have my own religion,’ she said proudly. ‘I don’t think the Lord’s a wean, to be cruel one minute and all sugary kindness the next.’

  He wanted the conversation to end, but he could not resist asking, not for the first time: ‘Is there an explanation, in your religion?’

  Once she had retorted by saying that not Peggy’s sins were being punished, but his. It had seemed to him a subtle and convincing theology, but she had immediately retracted it: she would not insult God by crediting Him with less decency and intelligence than the creatures He had made.

  ‘You ken,’ she answered, still proudly, ‘I have never found that explanation.’

  Then they heard Peggy shouting. Instead of the dance music a man’s solemn voice issued from the radio: he was talking about the war. Peggy wanted something more cheerful. Would her mother come and switch to another programme?

  His mother-in-law hurried away. He went on with his meal, but suddenly he realised that he was envying the tranquillity and peace of mind in the cone-gatherers’ hut. He paused with his fork at his mouth: that he should envy so misbegotten and godforsaken an imbecile as the hunchback was surely the ultimate horror, madness itself? To hate the hunchback, and therefore to wish to cleanse the wood of his defiling presence, was reasonable; but to wish to change places with him, to covet his hump, his deformed body, his idiot’s mind, and his face with its hellish beauty, was, in fact, already to have begun the exchange. Was this why the hut fascinated him so much?

  A comedian was now joking on the wireless. The studio audience howled with laughter. He heard Peggy joining in.

  Mrs Lochie returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Did you remember to feed the dogs?’ he asked.

  ‘I remembered.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m sorry I was late.’

  ‘Are you really sorry, John? You’re late nearly every night now. This is the third time this week.’

  He thought, afterwards, he would go up the garden to the dogs’ house. Silence and peace of mind were there
too; he wished he could share them. The handsome wise-eyed animals would be eager to welcome him in, but he would not be able to enter. All he would succeed in doing would be to destroy their contentment: they would whine and lick his hands and sorrow because they could not help him.

  ‘You think the world of those dogs,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘I need them for my work.’

  ‘You talk to them oftener than you talk to your wife.’

  It was true: the bond between him and the dogs still held.

  ‘You sit up in that shed for hours with them,’ she said. ‘Fine I ken why. It’s so that you don’t have to sit with your wife.’

  ‘I told Peggy I’d be in later.’

  ‘For five minutes.’

  He did not speak.

  ‘It’s what will happen to her when I’m gone that worries me,’ she said. ‘Who will toil after her as I have done? Nobody in this wide empty world.’

  He let her enjoy her sobs.

  ‘I can only hope she’s taken before I am,’ she went on, ‘though she is thirty years younger. If I went it would be an institution for incurables for her. I’m not blind. I see the way things are shaping.’

  Do you really, he thought, see this tree growing and spreading in my mind? And is its fruit madness?

  ‘Was there any message for me from the big house?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye. It seems the mistress’s brother has arrived for a day or two’s leave before he goes overseas. She sounded excited. He’s younger than she is. Anyway, she wants a deer hunt arranged for him tomorrow.’

  ‘But I’ve got no men for a deer drive.’

  ‘That’s none of my business. You’d better explain it to her when you see her. She wants you to be early: half-past nine. Are you finished here? Have you had enough?’

  ‘Aye, plenty, thanks.’ He rose up.

  She began to gather the plates and cutlery. Out of the window he caught sight of stars glittering above the dark tops of trees.

  ‘You’ll be going in to talk to Peggy?’

  The comedian was still cracking jokes, and the laughter of his audience surged like waves. Peggy would tell him about the jokes he had missed.

  ‘Later,’ he said. ‘I want to have a look at Prince’s paw. He got a thorn in it yesterday.’

  ‘I ken a heart with thorns in it.’

  For a moment he almost gave way and shouted, with fists outstretched towards those stars, that in his heart and brain were thorns bitterer than those that bled the brow of Christ. Instead, he merely nodded.

  ‘I’ll not be long,’ he murmured. ‘I’m frightened the paw might fester.’

  Quick though he had been in his restraint, she had caught another glimpse of his torment. It shocked her and yet it satisfied her too: she saw it, clear as the sun in the sky, as divine retribution.

  ‘A heart can fester too, John,’ she said, as he opened the door and went out.

  Going up the path to visit the dogs, he loitered and tried to light his pipe. It was such a night as ought to have enticed his head and shoulders amongst the stars. But he could not even enjoy his pipe. When he had it at last lit, after striking eight matches, he found that as usual he had been expecting too much from it; it seemed merely a device to exercise his agitation rather than to allay it.

  The air was keen with frost. Tomorrow would be another warm sunny day, ideal for a deer drive. An idea suddenly occurred to him, simple, obvious, likely to be approved by his mistress, yet to him a conscious surrender to evil. It would be easy for him to persuade Lady Runcie-Campbell to telephone Mr Tulloch to ask for the services of his men as beaters for the drive. The forester would not dare refuse. The cone-gatherers would have to obey; and surely the dwarf, who slobbered over a rabbit’s broken legs, must be driven by the sight of butchered deer into a drivelling obscenity. Lady Runcie-Campbell, in spite of her pity, would be disgusted. She would readily give him permission to dismiss them from the wood. That dismissal might be his own liberation.

  All the time that he was ministering to his three golden Labrador dogs, he was perfecting his scheme to ensnare the cone-gatherers: preparing what he would say to Lady Runcie-Campbell to overcome her scruples; planning the positions he would give them during the deer drive; and considering what would be the best setting in which to give them the order to go for ever from the wood.

  The dogs were uneasy. Although he spoke to them with more than customary friendliness, and handled them with unwonted gentleness, they still mistrusted him. They nuzzled into his hands, they thrust themselves against his legs, they gazed up at him with affection; but there was always a detectable droop of appeasement, as if they sensed what was in his mind and were afraid that it might at any moment goad him into maltreating them. He was more and more aware of their apprehension, and saw himself, in furious revenge, rising and snatching a switch from the wall and thrashing them till their noses and eyes dripped faithful blood: they would suffer his maddest cruelty without retaliation. But as he saw himself thus berserk he sat on the box and continued to pat the cringing dogs and speak consolingly to them.

  Several times his mother-in-law shouted to him from the back door that Peggy was asking where he was and when he was coming to see her. He did not answer, and left the shed only when his wife’s light had gone out.

  He was going into his own bedroom when Mrs Lochie opened the door of hers. She was in her nightgown.

  ‘So you’ve come in at last,’ she whispered.

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘I thought you’d like to ken your wife sobbed herself to sleep. I thought if you knew that it might help to soothe you over yourself. I ken you find sleep hard to come by.’

  He smiled, with his eyes still closed. Several times, desperate in his sleeplessness, he had left the house and wandered in the wood long after midnight.

  ‘I think,’ she whispered, ‘you’ll never sleep again this side of the grave.’

  He opened his eyes and looked at her.

  ‘And on the other side?’ he asked, in a voice so mild it disconcerted her.

  ‘If you have deserved mercy, John, you’ll get it,’ she answered.

  Then she closed her door, but not before he had heard her sobbing.

  ‘It’s too late,’ he muttered, as he went into his room and stood with his hand on the bed-rail. ‘It’s too late.’ He did not clearly know what it meant, but he recognised the sense of loss that began to possess him, until he felt as terrified and desolate as an infant separated from his mother in a great crowd.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hailed as Scotland’s greatest fiction-writer, Robin Jenkins (1912–2005) produced more than thirty novels, writing right up to the last. His first novel was published in 1951, and he won several literary awards with his subsequent work, much of which has also been published in North America and Europe, and has never been out of print. In 2002 he received the Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Award for making an outstanding contribution to Scottish life; in 2003 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Saltire Society.

  ALSO BY ROBIN JENKINS

  The Cone-Gatherers

  Childish Things

  Fergus Lamont

  Just Duffy

  Poor Angus

  Lady Magdalen

  First published in 1958 by MacDonald & Co. (Publishers)

  First published as a Canongate Classic in 1989 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books Ltd

  Copyright © Robin Jenkins, 1958

  Afterword copyright © Andrew Marr, 2008

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available

 
on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 463 0

  www.canongate.tv