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- Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
Maybe the worst thing hadn't happened yet. You couldn't know the awful things lined up in the future, looming.The last thing Frances wants is a phone call from Alec, the husband who left her for her sister thirteen years ago. But Susan has disappeared, abandoning Alec and her daughter Kate, a surly teenager with an explosive secret. Reluctantly, Frances is drawn into her sister's turbulent life.
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Moira Forsyth is the author of two previous novels, Waiting for Lindsay and David’s Sisters, and a poetry collection, What the Negative Reveals. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in many anthologies. She works in education and is a Director of Sandstone Press. Moira Forsyth lives in the Highlands of Scotland.
Praise for Moira Forsyth’s previous novels
Forsyth writes with warmth and sensitivity, exploring the ways in which an ordinary family is changed by tragedy.
. . . haunting and evocative . . . assured and polished.
At times uncomfortable but never less than compelling, this is a work of near poetic accomplishment.’
[Waiting for Lindsay] is a lyrical and melancholy novel about loss, relationships and passing time, but it can also be read as a Robert Goddard-style mystery.
A haunting first novel.
‘Waiting for Lindsay’ is a confident debut presenting real, difficult lives in a fluid telling that washes out the dark nooks and crannies of loss and love.
An evocative, atmospheric read about a family contending with more troubles than most.
An enthralling read.
. . . written with polish and assured style.
Tell Me Where You Are
Moira Forsyth
www.sandstonepress.com
Editor: Robert Davidson
Copyright © Moira Forsyth 2010
ISBN-epub: 978-1-905207-52-7
Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.
For Malcolm and Esmé
Part I
Not Just the Turkey in the Dream
1
On Christmas Eve, Frances dreamed about the turkey. In the dream it was not yet dead. It had turned itself over, staggered onto drumstick legs, and emerged from the butcher’s white plastic bag. When she went down the garden to the summerhouse, boots crunching on frosty ground, and opened the door, it tottered across the wooden floor towards her, its skin mottled and bluish, but not completely bald: a few tufts of feathers adhered to its body and its head was the head of a live turkey, complete with beak, beady eyes and dark purple wattles quivering on the neck. Its beak opened and closed, and Frances understood that it was talking to her, telling her something. Of course it spoke Turkish, so she couldn’t understand a word.
In the dream she made this little joke and smiled at it, all the while paralysed by dismay which ran underneath her freezing feet like an electric current. For she knew the turkey must, if still alive, have suffered horribly in its journey from farm and butcher to Frances’s summerhouse. Was still suffering. She stood shivering in the dark December dawn, torn between fearful pity and anxiety about what on earth they were to eat for Christmas dinner instead, since there was no longer any question of it being the turkey. Somehow, she had to rescue and rehabilitate it.
Then, with a heavy flap of its naked wings, it hurried past her, down the steps and out of the summerhouse. She must have cried out and her own cry woke her.
The bedroom was dark and cold. Too early for the heating to have come on, much too early for daylight. Frances lay on her back, waiting for the dream to fade.
Of course, the turkey really was in the summerhouse, which was suitably cold and out of reach of the cats. Nothing could have been more dead than that lump of flesh, weighing her down on one side as she walked back to the car, the handles of the bag cutting into her fingers through woollen gloves.
She turned in bed with a sigh, tugging the duvet round her. After a moment, she realised she was not going to get any more sleep, so she flung back the covers and stood up, the bones in her legs creaking. She bent and stretched a few perfunctory times, then put on an old pullover of Jack’s she used as a dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen.
The cats in the basket chair looked up as she came in. The grey tom stretched, paws reaching across the little tabby, so old now she took her time waking and getting up for breakfast. The grey cat jumped down and rubbed himself against the backs of Frances’s legs as she filled the kettle. A few yards from the kitchen window were the woods, and she became aware of an unusual whiteness beyond her own reflection. She switched off the light and looked again. Snow, a fine powdering, the first white Christmas for years. She remembered the dream now, rising up in her with a rush, a taste almost of fear. Soon she would have to go down the garden to fetch the bird. She switched on the light again, and filled the kitchen with reality. The cats mewed round her, asking to be fed.
Upstairs, her sons stirred but did not wake as Frances carried the radio up to the bathroom. She looked in on both of them. Andrew’s room smelled of beer and more strongly of the rank aroma of young maleness. Jack’s room also smelled of unwashed clothes brought home from Halls and left in a heap on the floor. As Frances went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, the water pipes rumbled and the central heating heaved into life. Half conscious that his mother had been there, Andrew turned over, kicking at his duvet, so that the red climbing sock, filled by Frances late the night before (while the boys were in the pub), rolled off his bed and landed on the floor with a thud.
At sixteen and eighteen they were too old for Christmas stockings but still had them, still had a tree with decorations kept since childhood, and the traditional dinner she had always cooked. It would have been the same if they had gone on being a family of four instead of three. Then, they might even have been five or six. She had meant to have more children; she had meant to have a daughter. There you are, Frances thought, vigorously rubbing herself dry, that’s how it goes. She could switch off the past now as swiftly as she turned off the shower: a second’s delay and it was gone.
In his bedroom next to the bathroom, Jack emerged from heaped-up covers, annoyed to find himself awake so early. His feet stuck out, cold at the bottom of the bed. Everything here was too small for him now. It was bloody freezing in this house. In halls, you lived in a fug of stale heat twenty-four hours a day. His mother said it was unhealthy but you got used to it, used to wearing a tee-shirt all year round. No-one wears jumpers he had explained to Frances, going through possible Christmas presents for his grandmother to give him. He pulled up his knees, pretending to be still asleep, in the hope that soon he would be. Then, with a suddenness amazing to him, he realised it was Christmas morning.
When they were kids they were up at four, tearing open parcels. Were there any parcels here? He had his present already, having gone with his mother to buy an I-Pod in Inverness several days ago. There must be parcels though. He kicked to feel the heavy stocking at the foot of the bed, the mysterious weight of it creating an echo of childhood excitement. Something rose in the air, and thrust itself off the bed with a thud. He had dislodged the tabby which had sneaked in, believing, like Jack, it was too early to get up. There was something else; he felt the weight of it between his feet. Satisfied, he turned and settled again. In a moment, the cat jumped back and nestled behind his knees, where she had a quick wash and then, like Jack, sank back into sleep.
Outside, the clear sky paled and the moon faded to a papery hemisphere. Frances went downstairs to light the oven before venturing out to fetch the turkey. The dream skirted the edge of her thoughts but it seemed ridiculous now.
Her breath clouded the air in front of her and the snow sparkled in the light from the back door. The summerhouse was dark, smelling of soil and damp wood. The deck chairs were stacked in the corner and terracotta pots, cleaned out ready for spring, lined one wall. On the potting bench, scattered with dried geranium leaves and a few crumbs of compost, was the butcher’s bag with the turkey inside. Frances snatched it up and went out, tugging the door shut behind her. Usually the bird was stuffed and trussed by this time, indeed, actually cooking. She would never have the meal on the table by two at this rate. She blamed the late finishing of term and the weight of work her new job had given her, that she was so far behind. Not that it mattered, but her parents would fret, not being used to eating at what they called ‘odd hours’.
As she began work in the kitchen, mug of tea and half eaten toast on the table beside her, the telephone rang.
‘I’ve got my hands covered in oatmeal – Jack?’ A rumbling from someone’s room, a stirring, not urgent enough. She wiped her hands on her apron and went to pick up the phone.
It was Gillian.
‘Happy Christmas! You all set? We’re leaving in about five minutes. We’ve got snow, would you believe it – real snow! The folks are in a state of course, fussing about weather forecasts and dangerous roads. It’s not much – a covering. How is it up in the frozen north?’
‘Running late,’ Frances said, ‘so I’m not hurrying you. You really should have come yesterday Gill. I knew they’d panic about travelling on Christmas morning.’
‘I know, but I truly couldn’t get here till last night. Work. Better than letting Dad drive, eh?’
‘We’ve got snow too, but it’s a lovely morning. How are you?’
‘Fine, apart from hating Christmas. The price you pay.’
The price his wife pays too, thought Frances, though she may not know it yet. There was no point in saying this, since it was an old story and when you have only one sister left, there is no sense in falling out with her. So Frances said merely, ‘Go easy on the road.’
About twelve, when she was still in the kitchen, the room redolent of roasting fowl, Jack appeared barefoot in tracksuit bottoms, hair ruffled. He needed a shave and his chin and neck were scabbed with dried out spots. And yet, she thought with an impulse of love, he is a good looking boy. She could not see, as she still did with Andrew, the child’s face shadowing the adult’s.
‘Happy Christmas, Mum.’ He went to the sink and ran the cold tap, filling himself a mug of water and drinking it off. ‘Nice smell. When are we having dinner?’
‘About two. When Gill gets here with Granny and Grandpa.’
‘Who’s driving?’
‘Gill – that’s why they’re so late. She was working till yesterday afternoon.’
‘They’ll make it today then. In about five minutes, probably.’
Frances was amused by the way he had managed to comment on both his grandfather and his aunt in the same breath, but chose to defend her father. ‘Don’t be cheeky about Grandpa.’
‘You’re the one who says he’s lethal behind the wheel.’
‘Gill’s probably more lethal,’ Frances admitted, ‘but I’m sure she won’t terrify them by going at her usual speed. Is Andrew awake?’
‘Don’t know. You want me to chuck him out of bed? Throw cold water on him or something?’ He sat on a stool and stretched out his long legs.
‘Go and have a shower – mm?’
‘In a minute. Cosy in here.’
‘You could light the fire in the living-room.’
‘I could open my presents.’
‘Or wait for Andrew?’
‘Wait for everybody?’
‘You wouldn’t have suggested that a few years ago.’
‘I’m not suggesting it now, I’m still going to empty my stocking first.’ He sloped off upstairs. In a few minutes, she heard Radio 5 Live and the sound of the shower.
Frances made a fresh mug of tea and took it to the living-room, where she set a match to the fire and stood looking out of the window at the bare winter garden. Grass showed patchily through the thin covering of snow, and the weak sun rising gleamed on the summerhouse windows. A robin perched on a clothes pole, his breast bright against the grey and white around him. She was captured by the peacefulness of the moment. There were no tractors out today, no traffic on the road at the bottom of the lane. Then she heard the tha-thud, tha-thud of hooves on frozen ground as John Ramsay came down from the farmhouse at the top of the hill to feed his cattle in the field adjoining the end of Frances’s long garden. If she went up to the back bedroom where her parents would sleep tonight, she’d be high enough to see the black stirks crowding the wire manger, and John in wellingtons and flat cap heading back to his Land Rover. She was grateful every time she paused in this way that she lived here, and was content.
Her thoughts drifted back through the years and she began to think, as she always did on Christmas morning (like touching an old sore), of the last Christmas they had had with Alec.
It was no different from the ones before it, all the years they lived in Northumberland. She and Alec always had the neighbours in on Christmas Eve. It was a sociable street full of young families who went in and out of each others’ houses all the time.
They had mince pies and mulled wine, the house festive with holly and tree and tinsel. At ten they said their goodbyes, ushering excited children out into the frosty air to sweep them off to bed at last, where they would, for once, try to get to sleep. At eleven, she and Chris from next door put on coats and scarves for the walk to church and Alec poured what he called his last drink. As she wound her scarf round, leaving, she said,
‘Remember to get the kittens from next door. Better do it now, before Irene Soutar goes to bed.’
‘Oh, she never goes to bed – sits up with the TV all night.’
‘Don’t forget, Alec,’ she said, going out on this last word.
When she came back an hour later, full of good wishes and the choruses of familiar carols singing in her head, she found him on the sofa, drink in hand. The kittens were still in their basket in Mrs Soutar’s kitchen. Irene Soutar was an elderly widow: she had agreed to take delivery of the kittens for that one evening. Alec was to fetch them in when the children were in bed, to sleep in their basket till morning.
He had become engrossed in an old film or he had dozed off with too much wine. What did it matter? He had forgotten, and jumped up guiltily when Frances, coming in with a breeze of cold air, said, ‘Where are they?’
He had been drinking since lunch-time, so she knew she should have gone herself. It was daft to rely on him.
‘It’s after midnight!’ she snapped, flinging on her coat again. ‘I just hope she’s still up, that’s all. You’ve ruined it – as usual.’
He shrugged his apology, his eyes glazed with prolonged drinking.
‘Aw, hey, I’ll go round first thing in the morning. I’m sorry – c’m’ere, forgive me eh? It’s Christmas, after all.’
Looking back when it had all changed, she acknowledged the marriage must already have been disintegrating. Perhaps what happened only cut short an inevitable end. Still, she did not think he would have gone so soon, left to himself.
In that dark first hour of Christmas morning, the kittens still next door, the boys asleep, her husband contrite but not sorry, she was angry. So she turned on him, not caring what she said.
‘You’re useless, Alec, bloody useless.’
‘I know,’ he said, with a shrug, and filled his glass again, since there was no reason why not, and he needed another drink after all this drama. ‘You love me anyway!’ he called after her, sinking back onto the sofa. He changed channels, looking for something else to take his mind off whatever it was he had to take his mind off.
Mrs Soutar was still up. ‘Come away, hinny – I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.’ She let out a gasp of throaty laughter. ‘Thought you’d landed me wi them for a Christmas present.’
There they were, the black one for Jack, the tabby for Andrew, asleep in a basket by the radiator. They raised their faces to Frances as she knelt beside them, and when she carried the basket into the hall, woke and looked round in surprise, nosing the cooler air.
‘I hope they settle,’ she said, as Mrs Soutar opened the front door. ‘I’m really sorry to disturb you so late.’
‘Nae bother to me.’ Mrs Soutar began coughing. ‘It’s a bitter night. Heh – mind the step now – it’s slippy.’
Frances paused on the path. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.
‘Aye, and the same to you and the bairns.’ Even after the door was shut, Frances could hear the harsh coughing, and music loud from the television.
Alec had had an attack of conscience and was washing up glasses in the kitchen. He began making coffee for both of them.
‘You get the beasties then?’
‘I did.’
‘Told you she’d still be up. Happy now? All your plans in order?’ He grinned at her, and came to see the cats.
They were wide awake. When Frances put the basket down they got out and began tentatively to explore their new place. They were twelve weeks old, and Frances was relieved to find them confident, even – after a few minutes – lively, and ready to play.
She and Alec sat up an hour longer keeping the kittens company, watching them discover the Christmas tree, the heap of presents around it crackling beneath exploring paws, and laughed when one of them was tapped on the nose by a shiny bauble swinging back.
Frances moved away from the window and swallowed the last of her cooling tea. Probably they had ended by making love. Friends again, as of course they had to be for the next morning, the excitement of the kittens, and the whole, long, festive holiday. It did not seem so long these days, slipping past uneventfully. Her break would be over, and Jack back in Aberdeen before she had got used to his being at home again.
She heard her sons’ gruff voices and the sound of wrapping paper being torn. Why on earth had she let old that old stuff flow into her mind? There was no point.
As she began to climb the stairs, the telephone rang. When she picked up the receiver she had no inkling that anything was about to change, none of the premonition women are supposed to achieve, being so intuitive. ‘Frances?’
She did not pick up his voice in those first seconds. ‘Yes.’
‘Hello there. How are you? Sorry this is a bit of a bolt from the blue. It’s been a long time, I know, but I thought you wouldn’t mind, since it’s Christmas. And it’s important, or I wouldn’t.’
In all this polite preamble, he had not bothered to announce his name.
‘Alec,’ she said.
2
Jack came upon his mother sitting on the stairs, half way down. To see her doing nothing was in itself surprising, but there was something about her back, the way her head bent forward, that made him pause instead of rattling past ruffling her hair. Instead he came and sat beside her.
‘You OK, Mum?’
‘What? Fine. Did you open the stockings?’
‘Thanks for the sugar mice.’
There was always some childish sweet in the stockings, as well as socks, after shave, and a satsuma destined never to be eaten, but discovered weeks later, shrivelled under a bed. ‘Andrew’s gone back to bed. Did I hear the phone?’
‘I told you – Gill called.’
‘No, again. A couple of minutes ago.’
A pause. Then she said, her voice carefully neutral, ‘It was Alec. Your father.’
‘Good grief. What did he want?’
‘I really don’t know. He just asked if he could come here.’
‘What, come and visit?’
He had never done that, or Frances would not let him. Jack had seen his father only twice since Alec left. The first time it had been evening, and he and Andrew sat at the top of the stairs in pyjamas, listening to their parents’ voices below. Soon, they knew, Daddy would come up and see them, as he always did after a trip away. When he eventually came up and chased them into bed, he had brought them no coming-home present, not even sweets. He had looked and smelled different. Only later did they realise he had left them for good. Jack had been six, Andrew four, so the memory was blurred.
The second time, years later, Alec had been curiously familiar, like a television actor, and yet a stranger. Jack had no particular feelings about him now. He suspected Andrew was interested; he was more defensive when fathers were talked about. Of course they had missed having a father, Jack supposed, especially when they were younger. There had always been Grandpa, however, and later John and Albert Ramsay, to help out, take them to football matches … whatever it was fathers were supposed to do. People made too much of it, Jack thought.
‘What did he say?’ he asked.
‘Well, not much. Could he come for Christmas.’
‘He rang this morning? To ask – ’
‘He seemed to mean. … He wanted to come today.’
‘He wants to drive up from Newcastle on Christmas Day? I thought Gill was cutting it a bit fine, from Aberdeen. You could keep him some cold turkey, I suppose.’
Frances got to her feet and followed Jack downstairs. ‘Maybe I got it wrong, and he didn’t mean actually today. I was so taken aback I couldn’t think straight.’
‘What did you say – did you say he could?’
‘No, of course not. It would be ridiculous. Awkward, to say the least. I suggested he come the day after Boxing Day, if he really wants to.’
Jack stopped and looked at her in surprise. ‘Right. So he’s coming?’
‘Well, Granny and Grandpa will be away in the morning. They won’t even meet. I’ll change the bed in the spare. … He sounded very keen, as if he needed to talk about something, though I can’t imagine what after all this time. I couldn’t very well say no, could I?’
‘You did before.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s Ok, Mum, it’s cool. Don’t worry about it.’
‘I didn’t think you’d mind, now you’re both grown up.’
‘I said – it’s cool. Maybe he’s come to see Andy and me, maybe he’s been left a fortune and he wants to divi it up with us.’
Frances laughed. ‘He did inherit a bit. It wasn’t a fortune, and I think he got through it pretty quickly.’
‘The swine – and we were eating porridge and using string to tie up our boots.’
Andrew appeared at the top of the stairs in pyjama trousers long outgrown, revealing hairy calves and large feet bruised by rugby. His black tee-shirt had a skull on the front, and the name of a rock band Frances had definitely heard of.
‘What’s going on? Can’t get back to sleep for the racket you two are making.’ He came downstairs two at a time. ‘Thanks for the presents Mum. Happy Christmas.’ He hugged her then headed towards the living-room. ‘You want your presents? They’re under the tree.’
‘That would be nice.’
Jack said, ‘Dad’s coming. He just called.’
Andrew, standing by the tree with a neatly parcelled box, looked blank. ‘How do you mean, Dad?’
‘As in father, blood of our blood, etcetera … person not to be mentioned in front of Grandpa.’
‘What, like, he’s coming for Christmas?’
‘No, no. In a couple of days,’ Frances took the parcel from him, since he looked as if he might drop it.
‘Right. Remind me to go out to the pub or something.’
‘You’re underage,’ Jack said. ‘You’ll just have to stay here and be polite.’
‘Shut up you.’
‘Oh lovely,’ Frances said hastily, unwrapping first the salad bowl she had asked for, then a pair of earrings. Not quite the ones she would have chosen, but pretty, and she knew plenty of mothers whose sons never bought them anything.
She tidied away wrapping paper and directed Andrew to the bathroom. ‘Remember I need to change your bed for Gill to sleep in tonight.’
‘Is there anything I can eat now that’s not part of Christmas dinner?’
‘Help yourself. I must get on.’
She left them standing in the hall. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then Jack said, ‘Don’t ask me. Maybe she’s just in the Christmas spirit or something.’
‘She could have asked us what we thought.’
‘I think she was kind of stunned.’
Andrew turned and went upstairs.
From time to time during the rest of the morning, Frances heard the echo of Alec’s voice in her head. Her whole day was given a nervous edge by that call. She did not say to her sons, ‘Don’t mention it to Granny and Grandpa’; there was no need. She would tell her parents, but not yet.
Christmas Day was easy, if you simply gave in to it: the rich food, the stupefying afternoon in front of the television, the box of chocolates going round too many times. After the meal was over, Frances’s father bore the last of the dishes to the kitchen, determined to do his bit. With difficulty, Frances and Gillian wrested plates from him to load in the dishwasher.
‘Don’t worry, Dad, there’s still plenty for you to do. I can’t put these glasses in, and there’s no room for all the pots.’
‘Right then – clear a space you girls. Let the dog see the rabbit.’ At eighty he was fit and active, his silver hair smoothly brushed, his sleeves rolled up. Briskly the pots and glasses and serving dishes were assembled in their proper order.
‘Now then – who’s chief dryer? Where are those boys of yours?’
They were in Andrew’s bedroom in front of a computer.
‘We can dry,’ Gillian said.
‘Nonsense. Man’s work this. One day in the year, eh?’ This was a tease (you liberated women!) but they suspected he meant it.
Their mother hovered in the doorway. ‘I suppose I’ve to keep out of the way?’
‘You sit in front of the fire with the girls.’
Frances went up to Andrew’s room and leaned on the door jamb, listening for a moment to their discussion of European football, of tactics and players. On the screen was their invented league table. Andrew, she saw with amused dismay, was selling a player he had named Alexis Uselessowski. Have I missed something, she wondered.
‘You’ve to go and help Grandpa with the dishes.’
They groaned.
‘One day in the year it’s men’s work, apparently.’
Jack grinned. ‘Tell him we do it all year round.’
‘I’m not perjuring myself like that. Come on, he’ll only get irritable, then Gill and I will have to do it.’
‘No sweat, Mum.’ Jack rose to his feet and prodded his brother. ‘We’re between games anyway.’
‘You want a walk?’ Gillian asked when Frances came back downstairs.
‘We should keep Mum company – what do you think?’
‘She might come with us.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Oh well. I wouldn’t have minded some fresh air, that’s all.’ Gillian looked sullen. ‘I drove for three hours this morning, remember.’
‘Go out then – nothing to stop you.’
‘Not on my own.’
Frances thought, she wants to talk, and if there’s no new drama (though there usually was) I’ll end up telling her about Alec. ‘I’ll ask Mum,’ she said with a sigh.
Grace had fallen into a doze, the Radio Times askew on her lap. She opened her eyes as Frances came in.
‘Oh dear,’ she murmured. ‘It’s that heavy meal making me sleepy. Lovely, though, dear. Very nice.’
‘Would you mind if Gill and I went for a quick walk before it gets dark? Would you like to come?’
‘No, you go ahead. We’ve all day tomorrow to catch up on the news. The boys are looking well. Jack’s still enjoying the university, is he?’
Frances perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘He loves it. Now Andy can’t wait to get there too.’
‘What is it you said Jack’s doing? A science subject, isn’t it?’
‘Microbiology.’
‘My goodness, what kind of job will he get with that?’ She shook her head, not waiting for an answer. ‘Your Dad thought he should be a lawyer, did you know that?’
‘Mm.’ Frances rose to leave, aware of Gillian hovering in the doorway. ‘We won’t be long.’
Outside, the air was clear and frosty but the light was going already at half past three, the landscape greyish white, misty over the fields.
‘Careful,’ Frances asked, as they began to walk up the lane. ‘It’s slippy in places.’ Gillian was walking quickly, impatient to be clear of house and family.
‘I’m telling myself that next year is the year I’m going to change everything.’
‘Your love life, you mean.’
‘Not just that.’
‘But that too.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You’re going to give him the heave, are you? I seem to have heard that before.’
‘I’m thirty six!’ Gillian declared, as if Frances might not know. ‘I thought I’d have a party next birthday. Well, a sort of wake. For all the hopeless relationships I’ve been in.’
‘You could have married Michael.’
‘It wasn’t ever right.’
‘But if you had, you might have children. Isn’t that what you’re saying you want?’
‘Oh yeah, but not with – anyway, don’t preach, Fran, just because you’ve got everything sorted in your life. You don’t mind being on your own, but I’m not strong like you. If I were, I wouldn’t be saying this, year after year, about changing my life. My God, I’ll soon be forty.’
‘It seems quite a nice life to me,’ Frances commented. ‘A well paid, interesting job, a beautiful flat in a nice part of Edinburgh …’
‘Oh I know.’ Gillian dismissed this with a wave of her hand. ‘But you don’t really understand the feeling of waiting for something to happen, for your sort of real life to begin.’
It was almost dark by the time they neared the house. A car coming towards them stopped in the lane by Frances’s driveway. The headlights dazzled.
‘Visitors?’ Gillian asked.
‘Not today – I wonder who – ’
The engine died, the headlights dimmed and went off, then doors opened and slammed shut. Frances blinked, looked again. There were two people standing on either side of a low silver car. It was the woman she focused on first. Her heart leapt so fast it was like a pain, and she thought, Susan. But of course, Susan was not young any more, not thin, and her hair did not fall straight on either side of her face, as this girl’s did.
‘My God,’ Gillian sounded breathless, but she was not as fit as Frances and the walk had had a good deal of uphill in it. ‘Is that Alec?’
‘Yes.’ They stopped, instinctively side by side, as if Gillian meant to square up to him too. ‘It’s Alec. I think that’s Katy with him. It must be.’
‘Just for a minute I thought – ’
‘So did I.’
Gillian held Frances’s arm. ‘Are you Ok?’
‘Yes. He phoned me this morning.’
Now they were within earshot of the two by the car, who stood waiting for them. Alec moved forward, his city shoes uncertain on the unmade road. He wore a long overcoat and in the almost dark looked still young, though his hair, brushed back, had receded in the five years since she had last seen him.
‘Hi there. Gillian – hello.’
He might have been the host himself, embracing them in turn, Frances stiff in his arms, Gillian giving back a bewildered, hasty hug. The girl stood apart.
‘Sorry, I know we agreed day after Boxing Day, but Kate didn’t want to wait, did you Kate, and I thought … well, thought you wouldn’t mind really.’ A slight dip of his head, as if in apology, was followed by a smile.
‘Come in,’ Frances said. ‘Hello Katy, how are you?’
The girl did not speak, but she allowed herself to be ushered into the house through the back porch, where Frances opened the door to the kitchen, and she and Gillian took off their boots and coats.
The kitchen was empty, everything as neat as if no dinner had happened at all today. Only the turkey carcass and the covered leftovers of the Christmas pudding remained as evidence.
‘Take your things off,’ Frances said. ‘You can hang them here.’
‘Ah,’ Alex breathed, ‘the hallstand,’ greeting it like an old friend. In the light, his face had the worn tiredness of someone who sleeps badly, but he was still lean and well-dressed, a good-looking man.
Gill said, ‘Will I put the kettle on?’
Frances looked from Alec to Katy. She must be fourteen. The girl was as tall as she was herself. She was dressed entirely in black, a fair wraith of a girl, with dark shadowed eyes, pale lips, and rows of ear-studs. Frances glanced at Gillian, flushed with fresh air and exercise, frowning, full of how terrible all this was, and earnestly trying, for Frances’s sake, not to enjoy it.
‘Yes, just put the kettle on. That seems simplest,’ Frances said. She turned to Alec. ‘Well, since you’re here you’d better come through, I suppose.’
Then she opened the living-room door and went in to face her parents and her sons.
3
Alec was awake, stiffly supine on the camp bed, like the effigy of a knight in some medieval church, and almost as cold and disregarded. The boxroom was so small his feet touched a bookcase along one wall, and his head pressed against the one behind. He fancied to himself through the night, not quite conscious, dozing, that this must be what your coffin was like: a limited space, enough but no more, and of course, no room to move. But he was not dead, however lacking in life he had felt over the last few months. He stuck his elbows out to prove it, to remind himself there was at least an armslength on either side, but it was too cold for experiments, so he eased onto his side and curled up a little, in the hope of growing warmer.
Frances had thrown a sleeping bag and rug onto the camp bed with a brisk ‘Sorry, this room has no radiator.’ She turned on a small fan heater. ‘You’ll have to put this off when you go to bed – it costs a fortune to run.’
He did not know if recognising this ancient heater, which emitted a flow of dusty air round his ankles, made him feel better or worse. He opened his mouth to say, ‘Isn’t that the one your grandmother gave us?’ then changed his mind and said only ‘Thanks. Sorry to be such a nuisance.’
Frances said, ‘I’ll put Katy in with Gill and give her the pullout bed. Why don’t you get your things out of the car while I make it up?’
‘We don’t have much.’
‘Then it won’t take you long.’
There was to be no quarter here. He acknowledged it with a suppressed sigh, and went downstairs. He recognised other things in Frances’s house, of course: pictures, a bookcase – the hallstand. In thirteen years she had bought new furniture and pictures and books, and he was interested in her taste. A certain clutter, which she would not have allowed in those early years, seemed to have gathered comfortably around her. The bookcases were untidy, with small heaps of books lying on their sides on top of others. On the kitchen window sills pot plants jostled with china cats given to her by the children, and also with pens, a sheaf of cutout recipes and a fat bulb of garlic. He was curious, and would have liked to prowl about opening drawers and looking in cupboards. The house however was full of people, all of whom must be hostile to the idea of his being there at all, let alone nosy-parkering about in their beloved Frances’s home.
His sons thudded downstairs in stockinged feet. He felt himself whiten, with that pinched feeling round his nose. Frances was flanked by them. He tried not to mind Jack’s guarded coolness, his ‘Hi there’, when Frances said ‘It’s your father’, as if they might not otherwise recognise him. Catching Andrew’s embarrassed flush, he knew there was no question of that. Andrew knew him. Then Frances said ‘Come in,’ and pushed open the living-room door. That was it, the moment of reunion come and gone. The boys followed their parents into the room.
Frances’s family closed like a shield around her. In the warm living-room, with newspapers, chocolate boxes, and unwrapped presents scattered about and a jigsaw just begun on the table by the window, Jim and Grace Douglas sat side by side on the sofa. They looked up in astonishment over the tops of their spectacles, their jaws not dropping, they were too much in control of themselves for that, but taken aback, oh yes. There was a small measure of satisfaction in the utter surprise of his arrival. He could tell Kate did not feel the same and his instinct when the first moment was over, everyone getting to their feet, Jim even shaking him by the hand (his an old, dry hand now, but just as firm a grip), was to protect her. He stepped back to where she hesitated by the door and put his arm lightly round her shoulders.
‘I’ve brought Kate with me,’ he said. ‘Frozen stiff I’m afraid – car heater wasn’t working too well.’
Whatever they might have said to him on his own, they would be nothing but welcoming to Kate, their lost third grandchild whose birthday presents, perhaps they now realised, were always a year or so too young for the age she had reached.
‘Come away, Katy,’ Grace Douglas said, using the name she had when she was removed from them. ‘Get yourself nice and warm by this fire. Would you like a hot drink?’
‘Cold drink would go down well too, I think,’ Jim said, lifting the bottle of malt whisky. His demeanour suggested there were occasions when it was called for. Alec was no longer in any way their responsibility, so they need not mind whether he had a drink now.
In this festive room all green and gold, by a log fire, they might have been old friends having a dram.
Kate huddled silent on an arm-chair, still wearing her black coat, hair falling forward over her face in two soft concealing wings. She’ll think I’ve been lying to her, Alec realised with amusement. I’ve been telling her how much they all hate me. ‘Expect to be met with a shotgun,’ he had said. ‘On Christmas Day?’ she had protested, scornful. ‘Especially on Christmas Day.’
While the whisky pouring was going on Frances retreated with Gillian to the kitchen. Jack eyed Kate but Andrew stared at the floor, glancing up now and again at the little group his grandparents and father made as they talked about the weather and the journey, the state of the roads.
‘Well,’ Grace said, bewildered but determined to keep a conversation going, ‘Are you staying? I don’t know where Frances can put you – she’s got a full house.’
‘The floor would be fine,’ Alec said. ‘We can sort something else out tomorrow – a pub maybe.’
‘A pub?’ Grace raised her fine eyebrows.
‘You’re planning to stay a while, then?’ Jim asked, raising his glass and swirling the whisky round.
Alec gulped his, grateful for the injection of alcohol. ‘No fixed plans. You know how it is,’ he said, realising they did not.
They sustained the evening with remarkable composure. Everyone behaved well. Only Frances had let him see the edge of her anger, if that’s what it was. The boxroom, the cold, the sleeping bag smelling stale from long storage in the loft, her curt ‘Goodnight’. What else could he expect, landing without warning? Frances liked to be well prepared and in control, which was why he had done it like this. Well, he had been left with no choice in the end.
Along the hall, Kate slept in the pullout bed in Andrew’s room. On his own bed, made up with fresh linen but still somehow redolent of Andrew, Gillian lay awake for a long time. Kate had taken the first opportunity to go to bed, disappearing into the bathroom for half an hour, then being found asleep when Gillian eventually retreated from Frances’s room where they had been talking for an hour. Perhaps tomorrow she would have the chance to get to know her niece. At first when she lay down her head was full of what was happening, her reaction to seeing Alec, everyone’s reaction, the keen excitement of the utterly unexpected. She thought Alec had worn well, he was that sort, thin and dark, looking gaunt as they get older but still attractive. It was odd, she reflected, curling herself up cosily in the single bed, seeing Alec again in this objective way. All the old emotion seemed to have evaporated. Not that much of it had been hers, beyond the hurt she had felt for Frances. What she had felt for Susan was more complex. She had only a sense of emptiness now, thinking of her other sister.
Alec was not Gillian’s type, that was one good thing, so she could be objective. Anyway, you didn’t have to see every man as a potential lover, surely to God. She had been telling herself that for years.
She had followed Frances up to bed, and Frances had gratefully welcomed her in so that they could huddle together side by side under the duvet, talking.
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Frances said. ‘I’ll never get to sleep anyway.’
‘Are you Ok? What a shock, eh?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Everybody’s behaving so well, aren’t they? I suppose Dad’s past socking anybody on the jaw now.’
‘It’s a bit late for that. Not that he’d ever have done such a thing.’
‘Mm. He felt like it once. How long is it – fifteen years?’
‘Thirteen. Katy wasn’t even two years old.’
They focused on Kate.
‘Why has he brought her with him, did he say?’
‘Only that he wants to talk to me when you’ve all gone home. I got the impression it was about Katy.’
‘Not. … Susan.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She didn’t come. She hasn’t changed, then.’
‘I said – I don’t know.’
‘So is he staying for a while?’
‘Not with me,’ Frances said firmly.
‘It is a bit much,’ Gillian admitted, ‘turning up on Christmas Day out of the blue. I mean, you couldn’t very well turn them away, could you?’
‘I did think of it.’
‘Not Katy – ’
‘Well, there you are. Maybe that’s why he brought her.’ Frances shook her head. ‘Oh Gill.’
‘You’re not Ok. How do you feel – about him?’
‘Numb.’
‘Do you still hate him?’
‘No, not for years. Just numb, as I said.’
‘He’ll go away quite soon, he’ll have to. Then everything will just go back to the way it was.’
They contemplated the fatuousness of this in silence for a moment. That was like Frances, to leave the idiotic thing you had said hanging in the air. Maybe, thought Gillian with such force it seemed like an insight, she did that to Alec too. Maybe she made him feel inadequate. I wonder if he’s still such a drunk? She stopped, conscious of Frances in blue pyjamas beside her, hugging her knees. Then Frances reached up and began to take the pins out of her hair, so that its dark blonde and silver coil unfolded slowly and spread over her shoulders and back. Her face seemed to alter as she did so and in the lamplight grew softer and younger.
‘I must do something about this,’ she said, pushing her fingers through her hair. ‘It’s all right when I have it up, but old women with long hair … very unattractive.’
‘You’re not old,’ Gillian protested, ‘and your hair is beautiful.’
‘My face isn’t!’ Frances gave a rueful laugh. ‘Oh dear, what does it matter? Usually I don’t even think about that sort of thing.’
‘I do,’ Gillian sighed.
Frances contemplated her darker, slighter sister, the cropped hair and stylish clothes, the pretty, smooth face, eyes mournful and large at the thought of youth sliding away from her. Gillian always wanted to be thought young, and was lucky she looked it.
‘I wonder what he wants,’ Gillian mused, reverting to Alec.
‘Goodness knows,’ Frances said, cool now. ‘Nothing he does ever quite adds up, or it never used to. I doubt if anything’s changed.’
‘What about tomorrow – we were all going up to the Ramsays, weren’t we? Will we take Alec and Katy with us?’
For the first time, Frances looked nonplussed. ‘I’d forgotten all about it. I suppose we’ll have to.’ She laughed. ‘Oh dear, Gill, I’m glad you’re here. Don’t leave me alone with Dad, will you?’
Gillian smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll protect you all day tomorrow, then whisk them away early on the 27th.’ She nudged her sister. ‘Hey, what if we get snowed in and have to stay for weeks? All of us?’
Instinctively, they both turned to the curtained window. Gillian got out of the bed and went to draw the curtain back, looking down into the lane. The roof of Alec’s car glittered with frost, but it was a dry night.
‘No more snow. Panic over.’ She dropped the curtain.
‘You’d better go to bed,’ Frances said, lying back on her pillows. ‘Heating’s off – it’s getting cold in here.’ Gill paused by the door, as if she was trying to say something else. ‘Go to bed,’ Frances repeated. ‘Enough talking for one day.’
Going over this in her head, listening to Kate’s snuffly breathing, Gillian grew drowsy, and fell into dreams.
In the small spare bedroom, which held only bed, dressing table and chair, Jim and Grace Douglas talked in low voices for a long time.
‘Well,’ Grace said in the end, ‘after all these years maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He seems to care for Katy at any rate. And Susan – well, she was always a very strong willed girl.’
‘Ach.’ Her husband turned away from her, preparing to sleep. ‘Are you putting the light out, or what?’
Grace sighed, rearranging her pillows (beds away from home were never quite right) and switched off the bedside lamp.
Alec woke at four, thoroughly chilled, and thought immediately, ‘Frances is still stunning. Still a beautiful woman.’
4
On the morning of the 27th Gillian set off to drive her parents back to Aberdeen. While she packed, Jim went out to remove all traces of frost and ice from the car windows. He refused lock de-icer and warm water (Frances’s usual shortcuts) and it took him some time to get the doors open. The air was misty with cold and Dingwall below was lost in a greyish haze, but overhead the sky was brightening to blue.
Frances stayed outside to help her father. The boys and Kate were still in bed; her mother was nursing a cold; Gill was in the shower. Alex had not appeared, from tact or nervousness.
‘Now then,’ her father said, wrenching the driver’s door open at last, ‘we’ll get the engine warmed up.’
‘What about windscreen wash?’ Frances asked. ‘Maybe we should check that first.’
He paused, thwarted. Instead of answering, he said, ‘So what’s he up to?’
‘Who?’
She had avoided being alone with her father till now. Boxing Day had been eased by the long buffet lunch at the Ramsays, an annual event gathering of neighbours. The Douglases had an old connection with Pat Ramsay’s parents, and felt welcome there and comfortable.
‘Alec. Your once-upon-a-time husband. What’s he up to?’
‘He’s not my anything now, Dad.’
‘He’s here, though. Shot out of the blue, was it?’ He glowered at her, suspicious.
‘Yes. He rang on Christmas morning. I said not to come just yet, but he turned up anyway. Because of Katy, it seems.’
‘What’s wrong with Katy? Nothing a good talking-to wouldn’t cure. Why do they wear black, these girls? You’d think they were forever going to funerals.’
‘It’s just the fashion,’ Frances said. She leaned past her father and released the catch for the car bonnet. ‘I’ll check the water.’
‘But he’s after something, don’t tell me he’s not. When’s he ever made an effort before? Brought Katy to visit you? Never.’
He did not mention Susan, Frances noted. No-one said her name. Even Gillian and she, out of earshot of everyone else, had shied away from talking about her. It was a measure perhaps of the force she still exerted. Or was it like naming a curse, bad luck?
I might have some of that screenwash stuff in the shed,’ Frances said. ‘I’ll look.’
When she came back, her father was polishing the back window, unnecessarily, since he had already cleared it, and the sun was shining now, softening the film of frost on the bodywork. A moment later, Frances slammed down the bonnet and he got into the car. The engine started without protest so he got out, leaving it running. Behind the car, the exhaust emission condensed in the air. They stood side by side, Frances with the bottle of screenwash in one hand, the kettle in the other.
‘They’re good cars,’ she observed. ‘Gill says it never lets her down.’
‘Prefer British made myself. Or French,’ he conceded. ‘Auld Alliance. But not German, not Japanese.’
What an unforgiving crew we are, Frances thought, the irony not lost on her.
‘You take care of yourself and the boys,’ her father said abruptly. ‘You can’t have him waltzing back now. Even if he is their father.’
‘Oh there’s no question of that.’
‘Maybe not. Let me know, Frances, you hear me? Any help you need …’
‘I know, Dad. Thanks.’ She sighed, leaning her head for a moment towards his shoulder. ‘It’s a bit awkward, that’s all. Not for me. He’s like a stranger, thank God. But the boys and Katy. I feel for them.’ She bit her lip. ‘Dad, Susan hasn’t been in touch, has she? With you and Mum?’
‘Not a word. Ask your mother. There’s usually a Christmas card but he signs it. Not her.’
‘You get a card?’
‘Not this year I think. Ask your mother.’
Even this, so small and harmless a thing, gave her a stab of – what – jealousy? Of course not. She wanted Susan to be in touch with her parents. It was Susan who had made contact impossible.
‘Let’s go and see if Gill’s ready.’
‘And when is she going to settle down?’ her father grumbled. ‘Left it a bit late for having a family. Though they don’t care nowadays – wait till they’re middle-aged, some of them.’
This was an old grievance, hardly meriting a response. ‘Oh well,’ she murmured, ‘Gill’s happy the way she is.’ Not true, though.
Dressed but unshaven, Alec appeared just as they were leaving, to shake hands and be polite. As the car crept down the icy lane he vanished into the bathroom.
Frances meant to strip beds and restore her home to order but the house was still full of other people, so she found herself wandering about distractedly, achieving nothing. In the end, she stuffed some towels in the washing machine and abandoned all other pretence at housework. Instead, she made coffee and stood for a while at the living-room window, looking down the garden and across the fields to Dingwall, clearer now in the distance. Behind the long building of the Academy and a scatter of houses on the hillside, rose Ben Wyvis, snow covered. For a while she went on watching this stillness, where all that moved were specks of flying gulls or crows, to and fro across the landscape.
‘You’ve got a great view.’
It was Alec, shaved and wearing jeans and a fine-knit pullover. He joined her by the window at a cautious distance.
