Coronach, page 74
Pity, that terrible crippling disease, distorted everything that had happened, and was happening still; and it was somehow possible to remove my hand with kindness, to be gentle. Perhaps even then I knew we would not meet again.
“My dear, I think you had better go. There is nothing to be gained from this.”
He was crying uncontrollably, in a paroxysm of self-contempt which seemed also to include me.
“Jesus, do you think I came here just to ease my conscience? I came to tell you what I’ve done to him. I have written letters myself. I have written an account of what happened at Bearradh, at my poor bloody cousin’s farm. That day, and later that day. I have written an account of that bloody farce of a trial. Did you know William Morrison was a Freemason, too? And, by repute, the sheriff clerk? That Morrison gave him a sign in court? Did you know that was why no one had me charged, because it was made known to Morrison?”
“Justice is not so corruptible.”
“Oh, Margaret, Margaret. Married to that Machiavellian bastard, and yet so naïve. I could pity you. I could— I could kill him.”
“Please go.”
He let me take the glass and stood. He was very stooped and wasted, almost consumptive. At the door he grasped my hand again, and clung to it with inordinate strength.
“Margaret— Margaret, promise me something, on your holy honour. Give me your word you will never tell him about me. I walk in fear of him day and night. Promise me. Promise me.”
I said nothing. He said with a strange dignity, “I understand. I will not trouble you again. God bless you.”
I wept for him when he had gone, and for all former things.
An afternoon. A morning. A night. On my book of revelation the seals were broken, and the knowledge was terrible to me.
Malcolm was standing in our room with his back to me. He had always indulged in this ritual cleansing upon his return to the house, and lately after ironing his shirts I had laid them in his chest of drawers, perhaps in some stubborn attempt to deny that we no longer truly cohabited, either in this room or in any other sense.
The coat he had left downstairs stank acridly of peat. I carried it up over my arm.
He had stripped to the waist: the shirt and the crushed neckcloth he had been wearing had been neatly folded and placed on the floor. The patient laundress would retrieve them, as she would air this garment until the affront of its smoke had been removed.
I said as much.
He said without turning, “That is endemic in my business.”
“You told me you were harvesting.”
“I did, and I was. I was also within doors for a time.”
“Was one of the doors Grania’s?”
He took a clean shirt from the drawer.
“As a matter of fact, one of them was.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
He put the shirt on and fastened the cuffs. Then he came toward me with that light step, so very light for a man of his height, and took me by the shoulders with no more than a suggestion of his strength.
“Sit down, Margaret.”
“I have things to do.”
“I said, sit down.”
I sat. He sat also, in the wing chair where I would always see him when I closed my eyes and remembered this room.
“I have never justified anything to you. What I do, where I go, what is done in the course of my business.”
“Your business is nothing to me, although God knows I find it repulsive. But if you insult me with adultery, I will not forgive it.”
He said, “Yes, I did go to her croft. Yes, she did invite me to her bed, and yes, I accepted her invitation. It has been a long time, and Grania and I are old friends. Is that what you want to hear? Because I’ll tell you that if it is. It would be a lie but you think me a liar, and you’ve made up your mind to condemn me no matter what I say.”
I said nothing. I could not look at him, although I felt his eyes burning my face. “You’ll never have enough from me, will you? If I cut out my heart and gave it to you, it would not be enough. Not after Grania, not after An Reithe, nothing. You always want more. I hurt you, yes— not once and not twice, but more times than I can remember, and God knows I’ve regretted those times, but you never accept my regret. There always has to be more. Christ, I’m so much in your debt I’ll never be free of guilt, and this last— for this last, I’ll be paying for the rest of my life.”
He got up.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“You just came in.”
“I am going out again. Somewhere I may be sure of a welcome.” He began to knot his neckcloth in the mirror. “If I may trouble you for that?”
I let it fall to the floor.
“Take your coat and go to hell. I don’t care if you never come back.”
He smiled briefly.
“Oh, I will always come back, a ghràdhaich. It’s my house.”
He returned about five or six in the morning. The table was still laid for supper. I had sat in the kitchen all night by a fire now falling into ash: beyond the window, the day was opening with a blue, autumnal clarity.
He came in. If he was surprised to see me, he did not reveal it.
“You went to your whore.” He said nothing. “And now you come back to me.”
“Yes.”
There was a knife on the table, a thing of good steel with a staghorn handle. I picked it up and threw it at him. Then I went out.
He followed me along the corridor without any particular haste. I was at the bottom of the stairs. He took me by the shoulder and wrenched me round to face him. He was holding the knife.
“Don’t do this to me again.”
“I wish it had been a bigger knife. And by the living God, if you go to that bitch again, it will be.”
Something came into his eyes, not anger, not outrage, although I had used him outrageously: something poignant and indescribable, almost respect, almost tenderness.
“At least I can make you feel something for me. I thought that, too, was dead.”
I said, “I have nothing to say to you,” and, almost courteously, he removed his hand.
I walked all day on the hill, in the changing light, in the rain, in confrontation with my soul. He had released me, but he would never let me go.
Night, the good shepherd, drove me home.
The kitchen was dark, the candles unlit, the meal unprepared, a film of dust lay on the furniture, the clothing was unlaundered. The house was no longer mine, and its petty tyrannies were irrelevant.
I passed through the dark corridor and at the foot of the stairs he came from his candlelit study and took me by the forearm. I did not resist: there was no point. This was inevitable.
There was a polished oak armchair in his study, beside the desk. I sat in it, and he knelt abruptly on the threadbare carpet and turned back the mud-spattered hem of my skirt, and took the heel of my boot and began to remove it, something he sometimes did for me. I said, “Please don’t touch me,” and his eyes came to my face and remained there for an intolerable time: then gently he released my foot, and physically and spiritually withdrew.
He said, “At daggers drawn, I see.”
He sat. The usual glass was on the desk, nearly empty: he refilled it and pushed another toward me. I said, “I don’t want it. I loathe your whisky,” and he picked up the glass and set it down near me so forcibly that it spilled.
“It’s good French brandy. Drink it.”
I left it untouched.
“Where the hell were you?”
“I was out.”
“I was out too, and the object of some derision. Do you know why? Because I was looking for you, and people knew it, and said, that poor bastard’s lost his wife. It must have been very amusing.”
“I did not find it so.”
“Nor did I, by Christ.”
“What did you expect me to do, after you came to me still damp from rutting with your whore?”
He reached out from where he sat and slapped me across the face. There was absolute silence.
I said, “If you touch me again, I will kill you.”
The leather case and the glass dish full of ash were on the desk. He took the half-smoked cheroot from the dish and lit it in the candleflame, and sat back in the chair, smoking, in profile to me. Then he said, “I am standing on the edge of a precipice, Margaret, and I am about to go over it and take you with me. In the name of God, stop it from happening.”
“I have no power to stop anything, or to help you, or myself. It is as it is. Isn’t that what you said to me once?”
He turned toward me.
“Is this what we’ve come to?”
“You led me to believe it was inevitable. You said there was no possibility of happiness.”
“So much wisdom. And so much courage, all come down to nothing. What a waste.”
We sat in silence. He smoked, staring with lidded eyes at nothing. I drank the brandy, and allowed it to take me out of my shivering, affronted body, out of the close confinement of this room dominated by his presence.
Eventually he said, “You never wanted the child, did you.”
I thought, not this. Not now.
I must have said it, because he looked at me through the smoke with those cold, burning eyes.
“If not now, when? Shall we put it away and keep it for the future, some twenty or thirty years hence when I might visit you and say, ‘remember the old days when we loved one another?’ So tell me the truth, Margaret. You never wanted my son, did you?”
“No. Perhaps I knew even then that there was no future for him.”
“The experience might have made a woman out of you.”
“Would it have made a man out of you?”
He said, “Vile tongues, vile tempers. We would have made miserable excuses for parents,” and poured another measure into his glass.
“I should like to go.”
“I would prefer you to stay. We may never speak again, and there are certain matters to be discussed. I take it you intend to leave me. Where do you intend to go?”
“To England.”
“I see. The prodigal returns. A certain arrogance, don’t you think, in presuming you will be welcome.”
“I have no choice. I am not welcome here.”
“And if I said I would prevent you?”
“You know what you are capable of doing. I am not afraid of you.”
The cigar had gone out. He lit it again and sat with it, resting his forehead in his hand.
“Do you love your whore?”
“I have nothing to say to you about Grania. I never have had, and I never will.”
“Is she Mairi’s mother?”
He said, very quietly, “Don’t do this, Margaret.”
“She is your daughter, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“Her mother was a prostitute. I was fifteen years old.”
Darkness, and waves of sound buffeting my ears. I was sick and exhausted and afraid that there would be no escape from this room, that he would torture me with this terrible gentleness until I died.
“Have you had enough? Or do you want the whole sordid history, as we’ve begun this conversation?”
I no longer wanted to hear his voice, to share these shadows with him. I made some attempt to rise. He said, “No, I think you should stay. You’ve always quested after my soul. So sit there and feast your eyes on it, and tell me if you like what you see.”
I heard the clock striking: time, the black river. I was drowning. The voice was destroying me.
“Let us talk a little of my mother first. Glen Sian seldom speaks of her, but I think Ewen told you some sanitary story of how she miscarried and died. That was not precisely true. Shall I tell you what I remember?”
And he told me, whether I wanted to hear it or not. He told me how Margaret Campbell had died in my garden, and he spared me nothing. When I covered my ears with my hands he rose from the chair and removed them gently and repeated what I had tried to muffle, and in the silence that followed, the screaming silence, the stark absoluteness of horror, the watch lying hidden against my skin chimed faintly, and he remarked, “Your watch is slow, Margaret. You must have it seen to.” And then he drank the rest of his brandy and said, “Do you know what I thought at Bearradh, Margaret? I thought, this is how death comes. This is how I will die, like my mother, one against so many. And do you know what they were saying to me? They told me they would carve out the eyes from my face, because my eye was the evil eye, and they told me they would cut the heart from my body, to see if I had a heart. And one of them, who was Coinneach Cameron, told me he would cut off my head and put it on a stake and bring it to you. And I believed him, and I was not afraid. And do you know what I thought, Margaret? I thought, I must not die this way, because Margaret would see me. I must not let her see me that way. That was what I thought.”
And then he began to tell me about Mhaire.
In the dead hour of night that followed, his voice was almost a whisper.
“So you see why I don’t sleep with my daughter, although not for lack of invitation. She knows nothing, neither who she might be nor of the filth that spawned her. And neither do you. This dirty little glimpse of my soul is nothing to the shit still lying there.”
“Nothing you could say would surprise me.”
“No? Ewen was your lover, wasn’t he?”
I said, “How dare you.”
“Did you think he wasn’t capable of it? That he could only love with his mind? I’ll tell you something about Ewen. He loved women, and he loved men. He touched me once, when I was very young. He never did it again, and we never spoke of it. And I hated him for it, although I loved him. And I never forgave him.” There were tears in his eyes: he ignored them, as he had always been capable of ignoring pain. “It was James, wasn’t it. Your lover before me.”
“James was never my lover. I never loved him, nor any man but you.”
“Then who was it?”
“I gave my virginity to George Cameron.”
He was still, so still, his hand supporting his forehead, the clean linen fallen away from his wrist. The long scar of the razor was visible in the candlelight, and the hard, slow pulse beneath the skin.
“You’re a liar.”
“Am I?” Still: so still, only the swaying candleflame, a wisp of smoke, the slight trace of our breath.
“You gave that poxy bastard what you denied me.”
“You had abused and violated me. Nothing remained to me.”
“How could you?” No inflection, no emotion, only a terrible deadness. “How could you, Margaret?”
“You forced me to.”
Nothing moved but the candleflame, the light and shadow across his profile, the tears on his face, but they were already cold: with the heel of the scarred hand, not gently, he removed them, the tears for Ewen and for me.
“Well, Margaret, what shall we do with the dregs of the night? Shall we kiss and be friends, or should I go out and find your drunken cunt of a lover and cut his throat? Or should we simply go to sleep, you in my bed and me in your sitting room?” The burning eyes held mine, pitiless, although he was smiling. “Oh yes, another secret. You seemed obsessed by the desire to know. I sleep on your sofa. The room has a perfume of you. It comforts me.”
The light was dying: the darkness was everywhere. I stood: he remained in the shadows. With immense effort I walked to the door.
He said, “Why did you tell me?”
“I wanted to hurt you, as you have always hurt me.”
The shadows opened and received me: the cold dead rooms waited for me, the ghosts, the whispers, the sorrows imprinted on the very air identified now, and silent. The house was dead, a dead shell around me: all things, all hope, all love, all passion, all grief, were dead in me.
I remember that place, and its evocative Gaelic name. It was by this name that Mairi identified it when she told me George Cameron was dead. It might have taken an hour to reach it. The light was strange, subdued, the river here tormented by rapids in its descent from the heights: eternally it is tormented, until it loses itself in the eternal sea.
His body had begun to decompose among the rocks where it had been found: in its removal from the icy water some of the bloated, dead-grey skin had been dislodged from the bones. His eyes were open and hazed with white, the cadaverous face disfigured beyond recognition by purplish contusions. Death’s transformation of him was uncompromising, and I looked for a long time upon its loathesomeness although I had been told that this was not for me to see, and then I allowed myself to be taken away.
We walked in silence, disappointing those who had come to watch. Malcolm offered his assistance as I mounted, and I disdained his hand. The language between us now was eloquent, and I heard the first dissident murmurs in the crowd as I left. He did not follow me.
I took only a change of clothing from the armoire, and a pistol, and my money. All else I disregarded: in the hard country between myself and my destination no sentiment existed. These things were in a portmanteau at the bottom of the stairs when Malcolm came home.
It began then. He asked me where I was going and I told him. He said that he would not let me go, and I said that nothing he could do would prevent me. And then I turned my back on him and left him at the foot of the stairs.
He came up with that light step, not quickly, and found me in our room. I had gone back to do something that seemed necessary and significant: it seemed more civilized to remove my wedding ring and leave it on a table than to dispose of it more forcibly, in a manner that might offend him. But the manner I had chosen was offensive in any case, and it did not now matter what I did: we had passed beyond civility, beyond reason. I struck him across the face with every ounce of strength I possessed, and my strength was enough to disconcert him, and he released me and I ran half way down the dark stairs, where he found me. Twice I managed to free myself with defenses he himself had taught me: I smashed my elbows on his forearms, I bit him, I drove my nails into his hands and clawed his face, trying to blind him. He dragged me with a terrible deliberation from stair to stair, and my life became only second upon second of tearing, biting resistance, and the shadows and the floorboards were my passage to hell, a frieze of grotesque, abortive struggles; and finally, in the room, the injuries I had inflicted caused that deadly embrace to falter, and I fell to the floor and clawed at his boot for the knife he carried and attempted to stab him. He forced the knife from my hand and wrenched my arm behind my back, and in that resounding, pitiless silence, that void, I screamed; and as though the sound were something he could not bear he struck me, with intense violence. And we fought like animals, until I could no longer endure the fists and the teeth and the strangulation and submitted, and he raped me, on the floor and then on the bed. What he raped was inanimate: he would have killed what resisted him. The bed was foul with urine and semen and the blood from beneath my nails, blood from my mouth and my vagina, blood on his penis and face. And then the hands, bloodied, inhuman hands, tore my limbs apart, and he penetrated me again, unspeakably: the pain was unbearable.
