Coronach, page 61
“You whore,” he said.
He halted at the door, his fist clenching and unclenching; then he turned and cursed me in a soft whisper, with unbearable anguish.
“I would sooner see you married to the devil! I would sooner see you dead—”
His voice broke, and he stared at me with wide, streaming eyes, then he stumbled out. When he had gone I retrieved the brush from the corner and scrubbed the floor where he had stood. It seemed indelibly stained.
The morning of my wedding dawned shrouded in a cold grey mist. My aunt dressed me and lingered, reflected in my wavering glass, as if she would give me something, some final word or token or some trinket of my mother’s. But the moment passed, as all the moments passed in this inarticulate family, and was irretrievable. She rearranged the tiers of lace on my sleeve and gazed at them critically, as though she were embarrassed, then she said, “You will do, so,” and left me. The slow, silent minutes passed, the last minutes of a sour spinsterhood in a room which had never been my sanctuary... I stood with Ewen’s necklace still unfastened in my hand and the knot of white ribbon and white rosebuds at my breast where her uncertain fingers had pinned it, and the reflection of an unknown bride gazed at me: a woman with cool eyes, wearing her composure like a silken garment. The room was cold; my perfume hung here like a ghost, like the memory of my past life... too many memories, too much and too little of everything. Beyond my window, beyond the sea of graves and neglected grass and nettles a slight, brilliant figure lounged with one foot up behind him against the kirk wall, squinting at the clouds: James, who would give me in marriage. Except for the negligence of his stance, he might have been his father.
I prayed to be blessed, as no one else had blessed me, fastened the necklace, and waited for Charlotte.
She came, beautifully gowned in blond silk and laughing breathlessly, pinned the roses more securely to my bodice and gave me the kiss which had been ungiven, then she slipped her arm through mine and together we walked to the kirk. Some one had raked the stony path before my feet in their thin morocco shoes should press it. I remember the unfamiliar hiss of silk as I moved, and her pale, elaborately dressed hair and straight, tightly-corseted back preceding me through the narrow gate; then she said to James, “Here’s our darling Margaret!” and he awakened like some gorgeous marionette from his trance and held out his hand to me. His was very cold and damp, and on his little finger where he had placed it for safekeeping I saw my wedding ring.
Charlotte entered before us, and the murmur of conversation within was silenced. In the sudden lull he whispered, “I wish you well... but if you need me, come to me. I say this in all sincerity. Regard me as a friend.”
“I do so regard you, James.”
“He doesn’t,” he said.
There was no more time: for memory, for intimacy, for apprehension or reassurance. He led me into the dimness, where Malcolm stood with his back to the pulpit, immobile and impassive under the gaze of half a hundred witnesses. My ringless hand was given and received with a cold formality, and I thought of nothing else, except that we who loved had met like strangers: a man who had possessed my body but whose soul was never mine had given me no lover’s welcome, and his eyes denied me the private communion I wanted.
We were married in Gaelic and in English, with the still obligatory benediction upon the House of Hanover at this conclusion of this, as any other religious service. The kirk was so crowded with spectators whom we had been powerless to keep away that it would have been impossible to seat any one else, or so I thought until, toward the end of the brief and curiously unmoving ceremony, a draught stirred the stiff panels of my gown, and I knew the door had opened to admit yet one more witness: my former lover. He was dishevelled and already well gone in liquor, and did not raise his head when we passed.
As we came out there was sunlight, and James, behind us, pulled out a brace of pocket pistols and fired them into the air. I felt Malcolm’s arm jerk in reflex, and the rest was lost in the unexpected outburst of cheers and shouts around us. Petals from the bridal garland scattered over our hair and clothing and young girls scrambled for the flowers, believing they would bring them luck: I remember him holding one of the crushed white roses, although I never knew if he kept or discarded it.
He was unarmed, completely so, for the first time since his youth. It was his attempt to consecrate himself in what little innocence remained to him. In his pocket with that fallen flower he carried Ewen’s silver watch and the rosary from his dead hand: he showed them to me in the first moments of privacy we salvaged from the endless bright hours of afternoon, when the festivities, which had been marked by their decorum, were becoming more raucous with the advent of evening. We had left the table and its stilted conversation and James’s rather too fluent wit and returned to the graveyard, and I was laying the white alba roses I had carried on my mother’s grave. When I looked up I saw that he was holding the rosary, not carelessly but as though it meant something to him.
“I wanted his blessing,” he said.
“I wanted hers. Or theirs.” I saw the cynicism in his face. “I would marry you without a blessing from any one.”
He said, “You have,” and put the rosary back into his pocket. Against the whiteness of the holland ruffle at his wrist his skin was very dark, and his hand with its scars and swollen knuckles seemed to despise the frivolity of its adornment. “I don’t find this very easy. Perhaps you think that strange.”
“I understand it. We are private people in a public place, and for the moment public property. Is that what you meant?”
“My life has always been public property, or so my enemies seem to think. And God knows there are enough of those. You see them all around you.” He smiled faintly, although not at me. “So you see why the role of jovial bridegroom sits somewhat ill on me.”
“Do you regret having done this?”
“I regret— the past. What it made me— what I made myself— things I did, injuries to you. I am not a good man, Margaret. I may break your heart.”
“You’ve broken it before. It mends.”
I thought he would have said something else, but in the street the fiddlers, who would be paid a penny a dance for this evening’s entertainment, were scraping untunefully. I took his hand, making my familiar mistake of presuming upon our intimacy. He said, “no,” so gently that I thought I had misheard, or this was some new idiosyncrasy, some obsession with dignity that my persuasion would assuage. When I persisted he said less gently, “I don’t— so leave it, will you?” and there was a chilling little silence.
“Even for me?”
“No. Not even for you.”
It was no darker: the long light of June would linger until almost midnight, but dampness was rising from the ground. I was cold, and my bridal silk was stained.
He said, “Don’t go. I should have told you.” He had taken the rosary from his pocket again, and the beads were twined through his fingers. “My father danced,” and there was a lengthy pause: what he said was only a fragment of the thoughts and the memory and the life underlying the disconnected phrases. “He thought they loved him for it. I hated him.”
Then he said in a different voice, “Don’t tell James I have this, will you?” and returned the rosary to his pocket. Like the bruised white flower from the bridal garland, it was never seen again.
I danced with James, and with other men who barely dared to touch me, conscious always of their own acrid sweat and of the cold green eyes that watched them: I danced sedately face to face with Charlotte, whose serenity I envied. I danced with my aunt, who kissed me with dry lips like paper and held my hands briefly and secretively, as if emotion were something to be strangled, and whispered, “The house will be so empty now... I will be missing you at the milking.” The shadows lengthened: the tables, planks on trestles that fed celebrants at weddings and mourners at wakes, were cleared of the picked remains of fowls culled from the neighbourhood, oatcakes, eggs, new cheese and old potatoes, casks of rum and whisky and the scraped bones of an entire bullock. Men and women anxious not to give offense, or curious, or merely eager to partake of such general hospitality drifted in from the twilight, from the hills, from the fields, from the shielings where many of the youths and children had been living since May. They ate and drank and threw the planks on the ground and danced on them, and on the grass, and in the street. Young girls fingered the cascading lace and ribbon at my elbows and blushed, and some of the older women kissed me, but none of the men. And Malcolm was always there: in the shadows or on the edge of the light, sometimes seen through the low resinous haze of burning pine torches, sometimes speaking to some one but usually alone, drinking James’s astringent claret and watching me, following me like a guardian, like a predator, waiting until I tired. Occasionally he smiled at me, but I knew that he had already gone, withdrawn himself in spirit from this place and this spurious display of camaraderie with men and women he neither loved nor trusted.
At eleven o’clock I left the noise and smoke and returned to the manse to lay out my riding clothes for my departure. As I walked through the twilight some one who had been standing against the house wall stepped out and took my arm.
“Dance with me, Margaret.”
Only the faint slurring in his voice betrayed him, and drunk or sober he was the last man with whom I wanted to be seen. I tried to ignore him and he shook my arm slightly to command my full attention.
“One dance... you cannot deny me that. Even he can’t deny me that.”
He stroked the silk of my sleeve and the knot of roses at my breast. His hand was as tremulous and uncertain as the fingers of young girls who had never touched silk in their lives: his fingers touched silk with a delicacy and wonder and diffidence they had never shown my skin.
“This isn’t wise— you must know how unwise it is.”
His face was intense, preoccupied with the silk and the knot of roses.
“He has all your sweetness now... is there nothing left for me?” I spoke his name, but he ignored me. “Come and dance with me. One dance. I’ll bless you for it. I’ll remember you in my prayers....”
I removed his hand gently. It was stiff and cold, and his fingers clung to mine.
“Go home, for God’s sake. Go and live your life and leave me to mine.”
He bent his head over my hands and kissed them with a terrible passion.
“My love, my love, only a minute. I will be good. I will be good....”
So we were found, with his lips and tears moistening my fingers and his explicit words of love made incoherent by drink and by a language I alone understood. The man and woman who emerged from the scented night stood staring at us appalled, as though the bride were Babylon’s whore importuning an innocent man; then at a curt nod from the woman Diar Cameron prised his cousin’s clinging hands from mine, and they took him away.
I closed the door and went upstairs to my room and sat shivering on the bed. There was torchlight on the bare wall and reflecting from the mirror, and a plaintive voice in the street singing of an old tragedy until it was drowned out by derisive laughter. Glass shattered somewhere, followed by obscenities: the dancers’ heels thundered on the boards and the music carried them on toward dawn or insensibility.
Perhaps half an hour passed, and eventually he came, as though by the force of my will or my sharp, inexplicable loneliness I had summoned him. He came without sound and without hesitation through the darkness of the house, my demon and my familiar, a shadow a little more substantial than the night’s flickering shadows on the wall.
He had come, ostensibly, to divest me of this bridal silk and clothe me for the saddle, as in so many secret hours he had undressed me lingeringly, like a man savouring some exquisite gift, and clothed me again with regret. He undressed me slowly, and I was still that secret treasure, and that aloof sexuality quickened and burned, and was subtly offered: what I wanted of him now he would give. Then he released me and lit a candle. Its light seemed unbearable.
“Take me home,” I said.
I woke and found myself in his bed. He had gone, and I was alone. A white rose drenched with the rain’s bright tears lay on the pillow, the candle melted, the pearls taken from my hair scattered on the table: the knot of white roses I had worn at my breast, in dying, had perfumed the night.
XIII
Sometimes, in the innocence of dreams, my hand still reaches for him and expects to touch his skin. In the pallor of summer nights, in the firelit cold of winter, in the indefinite hour between darkness and light, sleep and sensibility, the fingers search of their own accord. There is no sound, no presence, no living warmth, no breathing but my own: my fingers touch the emptiness, my waking eyes confirm it. I am alone.
But so it was from the beginning. His absence from our marriage bed was my morning gift, and the rose left lying on my pillow no apology for it. I will not pretend to have understood his behaviour, or to understand it now: whatever knowledge of him I gained as his lover was infinitesimal. At the heart’s core there was darkness, an impenetrability which repulsed any attempt at intimacy, which refused compassion, which was impervious to my own pain, and pain he had always caused me and would always cause me, often deliberately. At the heart’s core, I never knew him. I was endlessly wounded and rebuffed by a mystery, an enigma, an emptiness, and my loneliness that morning was the first and least significant of the injuries this marriage would afford me.
I left the bed, and the memory of the night, and took possession of myself and my house.
At some time throughout its hundred years the room in which we slept had been two rooms, and while he clearly inhabited a small part of it and that aspect was familiar, he had given the rest of it to me and prepared it with freshly whitewashed walls and sheepskin rugs, and furniture: an armoire, an inlaid oak chest of drawers, a screen painted green and white and fancifully adorned with peacocks and flowering prunus, which concealed ewer and basin, and a pair of silver-backed hairbrushes I recognized as my own. Apart from my riding clothes, folded neatly on a chair, there was nothing else of mine.
I went in search of my possessions. Eventually I found them in the room across the passage from Malcolm’s study. It had always been unfurnished, and there was very little in it now except a turkey carpet, my chests, still locked with the keys I had given to Malcolm lying on the top, and my books in a handsome open bookcase. All the furniture appeared French and had obviously come from the attics at Ardsian: some months later I learned that James had sold it to him. In time a writing desk and chairs and a sofa from the same source would come to grace this, my sitting room, and here and throughout the house I would hang heavy draperies and curtains, and lay other carpets, and light fires to drive out the indefinable chill of neglect. On this mantel, as in Ewen’s morning room, I would keep a crystal bowl filled with flowers, and the blue and white candlesticks from my childhood, and my doll, and in this room my papers, my journals and my secrets. But for the moment it was almost empty, and the air was stale and cold. I opened the window with difficulty and unlocked my chests.
My life was here, on this unfamiliar carpet, scented with a rotten pot of dead rose petals and nostalgia, and memory clung like a cobweb to lace and silk and folded letter. Here was the gilded pencil attached by a discoloured cord to the ivory tablet on which the names of my partners had been inscribed at my first and only ball; here was music, yellowing and torn, which played itself in my mind; here the case of childish trinkets, and the keys on the thin brown ribbon which had locked Mordaunt’s secrets into a desk drawer at Evesham. I should have sent them back to him in that letter, so regretted as soon as dispatched. His portrait was hidden in a volume of Ewen’s journals. I thought neither would resent the propinquity.
And my mother’s watercolours, all that I had of her: views of the bridge and waterfall of Sian and a sombre wash of peak and moorland which might have been anywhere in the Highlands. The chill of memory and disquiet and a peculiar nervousness had settled upon me, and only some noisy act of self-assertion would dispel it. I went in search of a hammer and nails and found them among Malcolm’s tools in one of the other rooms upstairs where, with characteristic meticulousness, he kept his stores: lumber, glass, lead, varnish, tar, rope, gunpowder, shot and shot mould, coffee, a dusty rack of claret, candles, quires of writing paper and half a hundred quills, an array of patent medicine bottles which seemed mainly physic for horses, spare tack and saddle, and the greatcoat, boots and sheepskin jerkin worn in colder weather. The room opposite held only household linen, neatly pressed and folded. Small as they were, both had fireplaces, so they had obviously not been intended as storerooms: I wondered if one or the other had been his in childhood, and if he had chosen to obliterate the memory by using them for other purposes. There were two other rooms, smaller still, behind doors which were closed but not locked: they were utterly empty and somehow disturbing. I left them as I had found them, furnished only with the light, and took the hammer and nails downstairs.
I hung my paintings, my small stamp of self, and continued my exploration. With Malcolm’s study I had only a passing acquaintance: his presence was both palpable and aloof, as it was in the estate office. It too had been freshly whitewashed and there was a threadbare carpet on the floor, but it was sparsely furnished, and there were few concessions to comfort. The walls were bare with the exception of a mercury barometer inscribed Spano & Figlio, Napoli and the mantel shelf held nothing but a pot of paper spills and a bracket clock in an ebony case; like the furniture it was French, although it was not old. The chair was scarred and uncushioned, the secretaire also oak: the fall front was open, and the drawers and pigeon-holes crammed with papers. A pewter tankard held a dozen quills and a stiletto. I sensed that it did not function as a paper knife, and I never saw it used for that or any other purpose. I replaced it carefully, and glanced toward the door. There was nothing, of course: the house alone was observing me.
