Coronach, page 49
“What about my son?”
He searched his memory. The firstborn son, a pimply lout more given to boozing and idleness than was necessary even in these miserable circumstances, who was not at home this particular evening and whose expressed desire for land and marriage was thwarted by the policy of non subdivision.
“It is the same case for him. If I cannot subdivide for others I cannot subdivide for him. Policy binds me as much as the next man.”
You make it; you can break it, the eyes said.
How much dissent do you think your services are worth to me, Diar?
And in his mind the other voice, like the voices whispering in the rain: What is it worth to you, an acre of stones?
He said curtly, “I can promise nothing.”
Diar said, “Then I am your man.”
“You will not regret it, Diar.”
“No, A Mhaoir. No.” But his voice was bleak, unsure: he seemed to expect something more, something binding, perhaps something honourable. When they had shaken hands at the door he seemed satisfied, even reassured. And his wife was already counting the money on the table, so there was no need to take a formal leave of her.
In the weeks before his departure for Kendal he went to the estate office only in the evenings. The house was filling with Charlotte’s relatives in anticipation of an autumn christening: with any luck, he thought sourly, they would be condemned by the snows to a season’s malnutrition in Glen Sian. James, presiding over their expensive entertainment, professed himself disinterested in the imminent purchase of sheep, saying only, “I place myself entirely in your hands, Malcolm,” before returning to the genteel clatter of teacups and women’s voices and music from an out of tune spinet behind a white-painted door.
He rode south. At the end of the Kendal market he had bought a thousand sheep, half a dozen shepherds, eight dogs and a woman, one of the shepherds’ wives, who would later go mad in the brooding silence of An Reithe and hang herself from the crossbeams of one of the crofts. The sheep were Swaledales, a small, active, hardy breed with coarse thick wool, similar to the Blackface but for the lighter mouth: if they throve he would cross them with another breed, Cheviot perhaps. The seller took him by the arm in the mêlée of sheep and dogs.
“Dos knaw owt abaht sheep?”
“Aye. I know something of them.”
“Weel, forbye, here’s summat ye divvent knaw. When they ails, look at their teeth.”
“I’ll remember it— and don’t sell me any broken-mouthed ewes, old man, or I’ll come back for yours.”
Kendal to Penrith, on the familiar packway, with the jaggers’ Galloways coming up through the mist and the bells on the leader’s harness jingling a warning; narrow baskets of coal shouldering through the moving tide of sheep; badgers, wholesalers of farm produce licensed by local government, pushing past with teams of muzzled ponies led sometimes by women, their faces so heavily muffled that they passed unspeaking, like phantoms. Watling Street, avoiding the toll of five pence per score on the sheep that the turnpike would have cost, and always impelled by the weather: the stretch from Penrith to Carlisle became impassable with the onset of winter, and sleet if not snow was almost always a possibility on this roof of England. The sheep moved slowly, the ewes showing every sign of readiness to stand for the rams, so the sexes were segregated and driven sometimes three or four miles apart. He rode from flock to flock, aware that he was only one man with a valuable asset against half a dozen strangers, Borderers, who were entering their own country, not his.
Across the Cheviots, on a track frequented by drovers and criminals, with the welcome pressure of the curving blade in its scabbard beneath his boot. Every night a freezing fog, every morning a white tracery on the ground, like snow where it lay throughout the day: the route sometimes paved with stone, sometimes heavy with mud, visibly deteriorating even as they left Stirling. And then the pass of Corrieyairack: the leaves furred with frost every morning, a constant ache in the bones, the harsh warmth of whisky passed from hand to hand.
The sheep carried him with the inevitability of a tide into Glen Sian. It was the last day of October, his thirty-third birthday, and a bitter snow, the first of that season, had just begun to fall.
On the sixth of November Charlotte gave birth to a son, after forty-eight hours of labour. I saw him when he was four days old, and even to my critical and inexperienced eye he seemed a perfect child. He was christened Henry James Hilaire by a dissipated Episcopalian priest who had accompanied Charlotte’s family, and slept angelically throughout the procedure while his godparents, of whom I was one, shivered in the chapel; then we repaired to the comparative warmth of the house for a christening feast which would have sustained several families for a week, and I suspect that much of it disappeared into the servants’ pockets. A few days later, in fear of a snowfall which would hold them prisoners in Glen Sian until spring, this gay company departed, and on my next visit to Ardsian I missed them: I would have missed them more keenly still had I known what was to follow.
On November twenty-seventh Henry James Hilaire Stirling was three weeks old. On November thirtieth, he died.
My father buried him, with a compassion I would not have accredited to him, and them he was dismissed by James. This left me alone at Ardsian. It was expected that I would stay.
So I stayed, at the hub of a wheel of chaos. I went prepared for a few days and ended by remaining a month. A hellish month, during which gales assaulted Glen Sian, and the frozen ground was littered with wreckage, slates, branches, panes of glass, old bricks, and in the infrequent lulls when rain or snow hurled against the windows I heard Charlotte weeping. James offered her no comfort; she accused him of not wanting the baby and he accused her of neglecting him, as it was Charlotte who had found him dead in his cradle. She still slept near it in the nursery, and I often found her there holding one of his little garments or his carved ivory rattle. James slept wherever unconsciousness overtook him, and his servants collected the bottles.
The sun rose on Christmas morning, giving its light like a gift: snow had fallen in the night, and the wind had dropped. I persuaded James to walk in the orchard, now white with a snow more mortal than that drifting sea of blossom. He had not been out of the house since the funeral, and he blinked bloodshot eyes at the sky and groped and fumbled like Lazarus.
He reeked of drink despite the earliness of the hour, and the bitter air was clean; I supported him and dragged it into my lungs as though I had been dying for it, and so, I think, did he.
Farther on the way was blocked by fallen branches, throwing blue shadows across the snow: the orchard might have been a battleground, the wind had savaged it like cannon. He wandered here and there, picking up twigs and staring at the damage, then he recognized one of the trees and whispered, “My Pomeroy, my Pomeroy....”
It had been split down the middle and lay in the drifts, like something pitifully dead. I turned him away and spoke soothingly of grafting and tying and perhaps saving it. He wept inconsolably, as he had not wept for his son, and, putting my arm around his shoulders, I led him back to the house.
As though he hated the light, he hid from it for the remainder of the day, nor did I see Charlotte, who preferred to be left alone. I never knew how the time passed, or at what hour I went down to the drawing room: no one had attended the fire and my breath hung in the air as I replenished it. I sat staring at the book in my lap and listening to the intensity of a silence in which, for the first night in weeks, no wind could be heard, then the handle on the door dropped and James came into the firelight with a box under his arm. He was drunk and had been crying, and in his shapeless mourning clothes he looked frail and pathetically young.
I said, “What have you there, Jamie?” and he stumbled down onto one knee and upset the box, spilling its contents over the carpet. Lead soldiers, blue and red... I guessed they had been his own.
“They were for him,” he said eventually. “His first Christmas present.”
He balanced one on his palm, gazing at it.
“My son,” he said, “my son,” and covered his face. After a long pause he whispered, “Didn’t you think I knew it was Christmas? Did you think I was as far gone as that?”
“What does it matter, in the circumstances?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? In the end— nothing matters.” Then he said, “I’m going to kill myself... quite soon, perhaps tonight. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I just wanted you to know.”
There was not enough light to read his face, but there seemed no expression in it, as there was no inflection in his voice, or in mine.
“Do you love Charlotte so little?”
“I’ve never loved Charlotte. I don’t think she loves me. I don’t think I can love anybody— no one ever taught me to love.”
“Your father loved you.”
“No. He loved Malcolm more.”
He put the lead soldier down and groped for me.
“Help me up, Maggie.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“You know where I’m going. Help me up, damn you.”
He sat on the carpet with tears running down his face, and I, God forgive me, ignored his reaching hands and said brutally, “Get up yourself, if you must.”
And because he was too drunk to stand, he crawled to the fall of drapery and tried to free the tasselled cord.
“This will do. All I need is this— I know how it’s done.”
The rest is fragmented, indistinct. He put the cord around his neck and a struggle ensued, during which I tried to restrain him and he hit my breast and cheek and scratched me, and then I left him, crawling on the carpet searching for something from which to hang himself. Ill-fed and deathly tired and aching in every bone, I did not think myself capable of running but I remember the sensation if not the act, running as though my feet never touched the stairs. Other fragments: interrupting his valet, who was reading in his own room, moving his finger slowly across the page and forming the words with his lips... the comprehension dawning in his eyes... James slumped on the carpet with his soldiers lying around him, his valet taking the cord from his neck and giving it to me. When he had led him away, James still weeping those soundless tears, I restored it to its hook and drew the draperies with a self-possession I did not know I could command, and picked up the fallen soldiers, and left the box on the table.
And then, having tidied away all the pitiful evidence of human frailty, I closed the door and went out into God’s holy night.
There was a moon for me to see by, pure and cold, occasionally masked by drifts of cloud, and the black sky was pierced with the burning stars of winter, flashing their bitter, jewelled light. There was no wind, and what snow had fallen had been scoured from the icy road. I walked, oblivious to the cold, bareheaded and without gloves, and eventually I came to the place.
I hammered on the door. There was no response and I thought perhaps he was not at home, then it opened a fraction and the light, dim as it was, dazzled my eyes. There was a pistol in his right hand. Strangely, I was not surprised.
He said, “No one visits me at night,” and then, “You had better come in.”
I came in, and stood in the entrance. It was not warm, but the heat of shelter after intense cold seemed to embrace me. I heard him lock the door, then he picked up the candle from the table: it threw a pool of uncertain light over the other pistol lying there.
“What brings you here?”
“I’ve been at Ardsian.”
“I know.” He did not say how he knew.
“I thought I should tell you. James threatened to commit suicide tonight.”
He said abruptly, “Come into the kitchen. I have a fire there.”
The shapes of furniture emerged and were ordinary: a dresser lined with blue and white Prestonpans pottery, creels of turf and potatoes, hanging meat, a fowling piece, not old, over the mantel, with a pair of brass candlesticks and unlit wax candles beneath it. A masculine room, unadorned and vaguely unloved: a room spartan and orderly and, like his person, very clean.
He was lighting the candles: he had left the pistols on the table near the door where, perhaps, they always lay.
“You look like death,” he said.
“The wind keeps me awake.”
“Don’t lie to me— you didn’t come here to lie. I want to know what happened, as if I can’t already guess.”
He seated me on a seise near the fire and splashed something into a glass: it was, as I expected, the harsh local whisky, his elixir. When it had all been said there was silence, and the sound of the flames, like the sound of blowing silk.
He was still standing, staring into the fire.
“Why do you do this?”
“Why do I do what?”
“Stay there watching this little charade. James plays the grieving father and gives you nightmares... don’t you think it would benefit them more if you went home? They won’t perform without an audience.”
“Is that how you regard it?”
“James is a charlatan, and he does things for effect. You saw that at his father’s funeral.”
“I stay out of love, and I don’t consider what I saw tonight play-acting. They need me, perhaps in different ways, and they have no one else who cares for their interests, with the exception of you.”
“I don’t have the influence you suppose. James and I are not close, as you may have noticed.”
“Your acquaintance is a long one— and you serve him.”
“Duty.” He seemed to imagine disbelief in my eyes. “Well, what else should I do with my life? I’ve seen the world, what I wanted to see of it, and what I saw left no favourable impression. Where else should I serve out my time?”
“You loved Ewen.”
“Yes, and maybe I still serve him. But if James dropped dead tomorrow you wouldn’t see me weep, except for lost opportunities.”
“You don’t perceive his intention as real.”
“I perceive it as a bid for your pity, as if you haven’t already fed him enough.”
“Do you believe that?” He said nothing. “Then there’s no need to give you this.” The key to the gun room: I had taken it as I left.
He said, with a disconcerting gentleness, “I could have put a gun to my head a dozen times in this life, and so could you, but never James.”
I put it back into my pocket. He smoked, watching the flames.
“I need not have come, then. You must think me... very forward.”
“I think you’ve had enough. I think your friends are leeches, and you give them your heart’s blood and call it love. I don’t ask that of you. I don’t ask any damned thing.”
He knocked the pipe against the fireiron. In the rush of light as the tobacco burned his face seemed deeply strained.
“What is this attachment between you and James? Were you lovers? Are you lovers?”
“I am not responsible for James’s imagination, or yours, if it comes to that.”
“And Ewen? Did I imagine that, too?”
Brilliant eyes, implacable eyes... that delicate relationship, so pearled in the nacre of grief, was not for his nor any other scrutiny.
“You do not have the right to question me, your own affairs being what they are.”
The wind, so still when I had walked that dark road, was rising, and it was difficult to hear his voice.
“Oh, I see. Was that the poison some one dropped in your ear, when you told me to go to hell in the summer with James for an audience? What did you hear that you didn’t already know, and who was it if not our darling Jamie who whispered it to you?”
Sometimes, in the depths of night, things are done which are regretted, immediately or later, and truths are spoken which otherwise would remain unsaid.
“You have a whore.” His eyes, cold eyes, never left mine. “And children.”
“They were never wanted.”
There was a silence, then he said, “I have lived rather longer than you, and my life and yours are not lived within the same sphere. You were not there.” If he was waiting for some sign of comprehension or acquiescence, I gave him none, and he remarked caustically, “I once said you would believe any ill of me. By God, I never spoke a truer word.”
“People tell me things they hope will hurt me. Usually they succeed.”
“I never pretended to be other than what I was, to you or to any one. Ewen tried: I failed him. Like you, he was easily hurt.”
He bent and tossed peat on the fire, and I sat within its light and drank his whisky; he seated himself in the shadows and smoked, and did not disturb me with conversation I did not want. Time passed, and held me there: whatever the consequences of my coming here I could not change them by leaving now. The room swam in a firelit haze: the wind buffetted the house and tore the minutes of this grotesque Christmas night toward a new and violent day. Eventually he refilled my glass and I talked, of things which seemed to matter then but cannot be remembered now, except that they did not touch the raw nerve of sexuality. I did not notice that he drank uncharacteristically little; I knew only that I needed the illusory strength it gave me, and whatever strange, ephemeral comfort this house and this night could offer.
He had been so silent during my monologue that I thought he had fallen asleep, and it had become so private and painful to me that I hoped he had.
He spoke from the shadows, startling me.
“Listen. The devil is passing.”
The dark, formless violence rushed on: its howl ebbed in the night.
“You didn’t go to the funeral.”
“I wasn’t wanted. James made a point of telling me.”
“It was so pitiful, so futile. Why are children born only to die? What kind of god ordains that?”
“Children die. That is a fact, and some of them are better off. They’ll have another. They have nothing else to do.”
