The Daughter of Lady Macbeth

by Ajay Close

  Abruptly his head pulls back. Movement down on the first floor, his mother coming upstairs. They wait, frozen, listening to her lumbering tread and the shove she gives the box room door directly below them. Something heavy is shifted. Then, ominously, silence. Filled, as the seconds pass, with the conviction that Mrs S is also listening.

  Lili has a tickle in her throat. Any moment now she is going to cough. Or laugh. She takes a deep breath, but that just makes it worse. He puts a finger to her lips. Each of the lashes framing his black eyes, every whisker on his face, seems drawn by a fine-nibbed pen. His lips kink in a smile. He can always tell when he’s being admired.

  They’re never less than careful, but today they’re supersensitive to every creak of the mattress, every pant of hot breath, every slap of flesh on flesh. No matter how pleasurable the action, if it’s audible they desist. Hearing takes the lead over her other senses, registering the click of saliva, the whisper of the sheets, the sticky smack of his fingers between her legs. And now she, too, feels the urgency. Denied vocal expression, they resort to mime, teeth bared like snarling dogs, their whimpers and cries translated into widened eyes and funnelled lips. His grimace almost looks like pain. They both know the risk they’re running. Any loss of control and they could be discovered, and neither wants that, though on balance, he wants it less, which adds a pinch of malicious provocation to the unstinting pleasure she gives him. In the end he has to stop her, holding her pinioned. She can tell he likes the way she struggles in his grip, her desperation as he brings his mouth to her most vulnerable places. She has never seen him so worked up. When he lets himself go, the headboard cannons against the wall. He withdraws from her, his face a mask of agony, his salt-slicked body gleaming in the yellow light. They wait, ears straining, sweat cooling on their skin. No sound from below. They should give it another five minutes – or, to be really safe, give up, but neither has the self-control for that.

  He lies on his back, watching her above him. When she engulfs him he almost cries out, his eyes squeezed shut, lips stretched tight. She repeats the trick, again and again, even when he tries to take over, their striving made more savage by the limited room for manoeuvre, their terror of rocking the bed. They’re on the home stretch, neck and neck, when he overpowers her, pulling her down, rolling on top of her, his movements faster now, hurting her, not as he has hurt her in the past, heedlessly, or selfishly, taking his climax at her expense. She knows the ricochet pleasure gives his rhythm. This is different, a deliberation that makes each thrust discrete. Harder. Deeper. As if he wants to get to the core of her, the safe, dark place where the incubus is forming. And now she starts to panic, trying to throw him off her, to get him out, away from the baby, but it’s too late. He screams air, his mouth a rictus, the tendons of his neck exposed as if flayed, while his loins grind through the waves of sensation, pushing for the place where life is made.

  Cow

  Paul was the first to notice me hovering in the doorway. The woman sitting at my desk shot him an enquiring glance. I didn’t care for her snake-eyed smile when she realised I was watching. Then Dorothy saw me. Within seconds I was surrounded. Judith, Mary, Iain, Fiona, Maggie, Dymphna, Caroline. The new woman continued tapping at my keyboard for a minute or two, then lost her nerve and stood up, gesturing towards my old chair. I shook my head. She sat down again, and the full hopelessness of the situation was brought home to me. It wasn’t unknown for staff to chase up the address of a sexy job applicant so they could engineer further contact. I’d given one repeat offender a verbal warning. And here I was, intent on a similar crime.

  I sensed a low-level unease in the room. They all had work to do. Once upon a time I would have been reminding them of this.

  I said to Paul, ‘Remember that guy last summer, the one who faked his application form?’

  Snake-eyes was watching, measuring everything she had been told about me against my presence in the flesh.

  Paul grinned, assuming I had some gossip to pass on. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you ever hear from him again?’

  ‘Nup.’

  I imagined saying it, I think he’s my father. The nervous laughter that would follow. The embarrassment when it became clear I wasn’t joking. The panic in their eyes at the half-craved, half-dreaded crumbling of my authority.

  ‘You know Graham Mac didn’t get the Justice job,’ Caroline said.

  And that was that. The conversation had moved on. It was almost noon. One of my organisational achievements had been the introduction of the staggered lunch break. The unit was never unstaffed. I thought of setting off the fire alarm, hiding in the lavatory, creeping back once they’d evacuated the floor in the hope that someone had left a terminal logged on. It wasn’t going to happen.

  We went to the canteen. They suspended the lunch rota in my honour. I ate spaghetti carbonara and they told me how difficult the spads were being these days. Dymphna wanted to know if the baby was kicking yet. When I shook my head, they went back to talking shop. Fiona asked if I missed the unit? I said no, and everybody laughed, certain the real answer was yes. I went back with them to collect my coat.

  ‘Something came for you. I opened it by mistake.’ Snake-eyes, not sounding particularly contrite. ‘I-ah, didn’t have your address in Perthshire.’

  She slipped away to my desk – her desk now – and retrieved an envelope from one of the drawers. The postmark was five months old. Unfolded, the sheet of paper yielded a photocopied snapshot. A young woman standing beside a cow. I turned it over. On the back, in pencil, was an address.

  ‘Someone you’d lost touch with?’ Caroline prompted.

  ‘You could say.’

  I reread the address just to make sure, in case my brain had scrambled the letters, but there was no mistake. All those years of fruitless searching, only to find him a stone’s throw from the spot where chance had led me.

  I studied the woman in the photograph, the sleekness of what was now skin and bone, the gentler gleam to her white-gold hair, the smiling overbite quite uncorrected. So unselfconscious in front of the camera. So obviously in love.

  Sheep

  Five miles past the Roman watchtower, the estate road forked. A wooden sign pointed the way to Shepherd’s Cottage, a two-storey, corrugated-iron house with rust sores breaking through its white gloss paint. The five-mile drive over private land, the faint detonations of a shooting party on the far side of the estate, the loneliness of that tin house under the sodden sky, all of it conspired to put me in the wrong. Call it my dying wish, if you like. I knocked and waited, knocked again. The windows were too dirty to see much inside. Half a dozen hens scratched in the mud. I didn’t know what I was waiting for until it came. A dog’s bark puncturing the stillness, high on the hill above me.

  I ran up that hillside, the heather like tripwire, black bog sucking at my boots under the straw-coloured grass. It was a filthy day, low cloud cloaking the summit, a northerly wind driving the drizzle into my face. I must have climbed a thousand feet before I heard the bleating, then more barking and that Biblical shout, much closer than the afternoon I’d heard it with Kit. A dozen sheep spilled down the hill, circled by a pair of Border collies. It seemed an unequal contest, the dogs’ intelligence and speed against the flustered trotting of the ewes, but one tup managed to break away and, while the dogs were rounding her up, another made her escape. I stood awhile watching the chase before resuming my climb.

  He manifested in front of me like an illusionist from a stage trapdoor. One moment I was alone, the next he was there. A couple of minutes later I saw the dip in the landscape that had concealed him, but it was no less of a miracle: this sudden answer to four decades of longing.

  ‘A bad day to leave the bunnet at home,’ he said.

  How many hundreds of times had I rehearsed this scene in my head, and now I was lost for words.

  Standing so close, he seemed huge to me. Rangy, elemental, not to be judged. He had more hair than I remembered. Those overgrown eye
brows, the thicket in each nostril, the tangle of charcoal and steel wool the rain had half-plastered to his scalp.

  He wrapped his creased palm around my hand as he had that day in Edinburgh. ‘I’d given up on you.’

  ‘I’d have been here quicker if you’d told me who you were.’

  ‘Ach, well.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  He looked at me, his face full of things he couldn’t say.

  We stood like that for several seconds, my chilled fingers warming in his grip, my breath roiling in my chest.

  He roused himself. ‘Are you come to help with the gathering?’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  He smiled. ‘Rounding up the lost sheep.’

  One of the collies arrived, panting noisily, pink tongue at full stretch. It had the same spare build as its master. At a guttural command that was more snarl than syllable, the dog set off again, racing towards a patch of bracken. Two bleating ewes broke cover.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s work to be done.’

  We followed the sheep down by a more oblique route than I had taken up the hill, over rubbery mats of cranberry and blaeberry, and blackened wastes where the heather had been burned leaving the twisted roots exposed like nests of snakes. We crossed a brown burn frothing with cream lace, waded through a bed of bracken down a slope so steep I had to grasp the crumbling stems to steady myself. The dogs raced in front, heading off the wayward sheep, but always circling back to us, making a detour to pass in front of me before returning to their master. He was fitter than a man his age had any right to be, and set a punishing pace, using his crook to probe each footing, while I had to trust to momentum to save me from turning an ankle. I had no breath to speak, and he no spare attention, his gaze raking the hillside, snagging on those distant specks of fleece that I failed to spot time after time. Could he have recognised Kit and me that day? We’d laughed at my misapprehension, but now I wondered. If his voice could carry half a mile and still pack a punch, why shouldn’t his eyes have a similar range?

  He had brought me here, led me through the stations of acquaintance to this place of unmasking. I had no idea where we were going or what would happen next. It wasn’t like me to be so passive – at least, not like the person I had been until then. Charging down the hill behind him, I felt the fatherless years lifting from my shoulders and the birth of another self: the fleet, sure-footed, cheerful child I should have been. When my wellington came off I didn’t cry out, not even in those slow-motion seconds while I teetered on one leg before losing my balance and plunging knee-deep into the bog.

  Looking up, I found him watching.

  ‘All right?’ he called.

  I forced my muddy foot back into the boot and continued down the slope.

  He was waiting for me on the next stretch of yellow grass.

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ I said.

  Alcohol, I meant. It was a joke. He nodded at the ground. I looked down in dismay.

  ‘It’s spring water,’ he said, ‘cleaner than what’s in the tap most places.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘It’ll be the back of three before we’re home.’

  It was the word ‘home’ that did it. I hunkered down and cupped my hands in the icy cold. The water looked clear enough, between the fragments of leaf and root, but what if there was a dead sheep lying upstream?

  ‘I’ve been drinking out of burns sixty years. It’s done me no harm.’

  His will was like a weight bearing down on me. The expectation of being obeyed.

  ‘I thought you were thirsty.’

  I was wearing my quilted coat. He couldn’t have known what was at stake.

  I stood up. ‘I’d rather not.’

  The words came like a smack. ‘You’d best go back then. I’ll see you at the house.’

  The cottage was unlocked, though the door needed a shove over the offcut of carpet that served as a mat. The place was virtually a slum: a wing chair cauled by an ill-fitting stretch cover, a pile of newspapers in use as a side table, dirty plates. I could not imagine Lilias exchanging bodily fluids with a man who doused his cigarette ends in a teacup. Years of burned food enamelled the cooker, adding a meaty depth to the stink of damp and dog and chimney soot. There was more: a curling flypaper crusted with the summer’s kill, a scorch-marked lampshade, a right-angle tear in the faded curtain, heaps of laundry (not all of it clean) on the Dralon two-seater. After a look at the cups in the washing-up rack, I slaked my thirst from the tap.

  It took me seven minutes to search the place, and another ten to work up the resolution to do so. Before getting married, Frankie and I had agreed we would never empty each other’s pockets before taking in the dry cleaning, never read a letter addressed to the other, and even now we held to this pact. But Mr Smith had given me this opportunity. It would have been insulting to refuse – insulting or spiritless, and I had already failed one test. Anyway, there was nothing to find. No photographs (not even the snap he had photocopied and sent to me), no letters in a drawer, no chequebook to tell me his real name. My name, too, it occurred to me now.

  I pictured his days. Rising in the dark to feed the dogs. Porridge and tea with the radio tuned to the farming prices. The daylight hours out on the hill. Back to the house at three for bread and cheese. A seven-mile drive to the Spar shop for a chat with the woman who weighed his corned beef, then home to peel the tatties for supper. Washing himself in the freezing bathroom (mildew spots on the shower curtain, perished rubber mat in the tub). Did anyone really live like this, without opening a can of beer and watching television, or reading a book, or filling in the crossword in that weekly paper? What did he do with his leisure? I pushed through the door into his bedroom and there it was. When I touched the space bar, it jolted into purring life. He hadn’t bothered to exit the site. A satellite image of a Victorian rooftop. Chimneys. A cupola. My mother’s leafy street.

  I turned back the bedcovers and saw the yellowing bottom sheet, found the snot-stiffened handkerchief under his pillow, the matches and sweetie wrappers in the pockets of his only suit. I can’t say what impulse led me to drag the chair from the computer table to the old wardrobe. Clambering up, I had a moment’s unsteadiness, a watery feeling in my legs. The wardrobe had a detachable cornice, a feature useless except as a hiding place. The towel was less dusty than its surroundings, the shotgun wrapped inside not dusty at all.

  I was downstairs when he got in. He touched the cold kettle, glanced at the newspaper still folded on the table, then went outside to check on the sheep he had penned behind the cottage. The whistling kettle brought him back. I watched him stoop to the fridge, saw the fussiness he brought to the pouring of hot water.

  ‘Were you waiting long?’

  I checked my watch. ‘An hour and a half.’

  ‘You’ll have been bored.’ He spooned sugar straight from the packet into a mug of tea.

  ‘I’ve never been in a shepherd’s cottage before.’

  He stopped stirring. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Lonely,’ I said.

  ‘There’s worse things.’ He handed me the mug.

  ‘I don’t take sugar.’

  ‘It’ll do you good.’

  I took a sip. It was hot and strong and syrupy.

  He busied himself at the grate with the same precision I’d observed in his tea-making. It might not sound like much, sitting amid his laundry, watching him take out the ashes and lay the fire, but I can’t remember a time when I was happier. The failing light through the dirty window, the dogs snoring at my feet, steam from the mug condensing on my face. The only sounds were the rattle of the coal scuttle, the scratch of match on sandpaper, the low roar of catching flame behind the sheet of newsprint he held over the fireplace. I searched his profile as thoroughly as I had searched the house. It was difficult to see the young man in him, although it would be another ten years before he was really old. Would his chapped lips be mine one day? Those lon
g ears and canopy eyebrows?

  It might have been that the silence was another test, which I passed, or perhaps the accustomed task relaxed him. He sat in the cauled chair on the other side of the fire from me and we talked.

  He looked after five hundred ewes on the estate. The price of a carcass had risen from the rock bottom hit a few years back, not enough to make anyone rich but, working for a family of millionaires, that wasn’t a problem. He was a cattle man originally but his mother couldn’t manage the farm without him. She’d sold up, and been ripped off. By the time he came back (came back? I wondered) there was nothing left. If you had to work for somebody else, hill herding was as good a trade as any. Leastways, on this estate, with the owners down in London during the week and plenty of excuses to make himself scarce at weekends. The laird didn’t care, as long as the fences were kept up and the freezer well-stocked so he could tell his City pals they were eating his own meat. It was the keeper who had to show a straight face at the brand new tweeds and the twenty-thousand-pound gun.

  ‘How long since you last saw her?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye, she used to change the subject like that when you weren’t talking about her.’ He moved to the table to pour himself more tea. ‘Like mother like daughter.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  I wanted to tell him: she’s never loved me. He was the one person I could trust not to reply all mothers love their children. He had known her well enough to leave her. I couldn’t bear him thinking I was cut from the same cold cloth, but nor did I want him to see the aching need I brought to him.

  ‘Must be twenty years,’ he said, and it was a moment before I realised this was an answer to my question. ‘She shut the door in my face. I wrote her a letter. It came back not known at this address.’