Coronach, page 97
Interlude:
Evesham
There is no time now, there are no seasons; summer comes and does not touch me; spring is devoured by winter. There are no memories of these years, because they are not lived. Time’s only significance is my severance from him.
He would be fifty-five today... he would be fifty-six... time, passing, bears me from him, and across the bitter waste of years he lives: he is alive, vivid, laughing, tender, and passionately beloved. In the present is only his death.
I have touched and been touched on only two occasions, always at the lover’s hour, l’heure bleue, the hour of desolation. I am not the only one bereaved. Mordaunt also mourns, not Catherine but the futility of his life, the remembered wasteland of his marriage, and the lesser failures, the disappointments and the losses, the great gift squandered, the draining away of time. Those who loved him are now dead: the greater, the unacceptable love, has been gently withdrawn, the lover dead and the memories immortal... what was, and never was, and was never written.
Now, in the blue hour, we seek our ghosts: we seek the dead, in the scarred flesh of another woman and another man. There is no peace, there is no ecstasy. These die and are gone forever: dreams die, love keeps its bitter immortality.
1790: THE SUNLIT ROCK
I
The child Margaret Charlotte entered Malcolm’s life in the ninth decade of the eighteenth century. Britain remained embroiled in a bloody and protracted struggle with her American colonies, and was at war with France, Spain and Holland, which supported their independence. Taxes were high; there was agitation in Ireland and, as always, the fear of insurrection, and anti-Catholic rioting had convulsed London in early June of that year.
The child was eight years and seven months old in July of 1780 when she came into the estate office holding her father’s hand, and wearing a short jacket the colour of old roses and a sprigged muslin gown. At James’s bidding she sat obediently in the only other chair, and throughout the ensuing conversation her presence suggested itself only by the occasional thud of a slippered heel against the chair leg, a habit to which, in childhood, James himself had been prone.
Aware of the disapproval in the cold eyes across the table, James said only, “Behave yourself, Margaret,” and the sound stopped.
“I hope this will not become a feature of our meetings.”
“No, no. Assuredly not.”
He examined the returns from the first tryst of the season. In a market fuelled by war, cattle had sold at Falkirk for an astonishing three pounds per head.
“I have never seen it higher than two.”
“You will see it higher yet, until the peacemakers prick the bubble.”
The child slid noiselessly out of the chair, leaving in it the doll she had been carrying, and was standing with her hands behind her back, examining something in the overflowing bookshelves. For one so young, there was a certain ostentation in this, as though she wanted to be noticed or rebuked. Malcolm ignored her, while remaining acutely aware of her, and James seemed oblivious.
James said, “Perhaps this shows the wisdom or otherwise of your dedication to the Linton. You may come to agree that I was justified in not committing myself until I—”
Something fell and rolled across the floorboards: a piece of veined quartz. The child turned with an expression of betrayal and thrust her hands into her pockets.
Malcolm said nothing, controlling the profanity, and she retrieved the stone and put it into her father’s outstretched hand. James said, not unkindly, “If you can’t behave, go into the garden,” and she went, without apology or any other sound.
The doll remained in the chair, forgotten by her and unnoticed by James when he left.
He had an inexplicable dislike of dolls. He had despised for its association with Margaret the old bisque doll she had abandoned, and had smashed its delicately painted face and burned the torso; and in the rainy dimness now some quality in the face of the child’s doll disturbed him and pierced him with some emotion, regret, grief, a desire for what would not be salvaged from the past, and what had never been. The rain, running on the open casement, obscured all minor sounds: the passage of feet in soiled kid slippers, the clamour of memory.
There was movement, and he looked up into her face. A child’s face of heartbreaking beauty, the eyes unwavering, dark blue, the mouth exquisitely shaped and small, and coloured like the doll’s: the rose-coloured jacket had been removed, the muslin was patterned with roses. In the eyes, heavily lashed, unchildlike, he saw his demons. He held them until they faltered, and then he bent his head and wrote illegible, inconsequential words.
She said, “Are you doing lessons?”
“No. My lessons have all been learned.”
She remained in the shadows, a presence as insistent and disquieting as the doll’s. His distrust of children was profound: his own childhood was only another darkened dimension, an existence concurrent with this, into which he could pass without effort, sometimes involuntarily in nightmare or recollection of its horrors, and always with anguish at its betrayals and the savage death of innocence. This and every other child, his own among them, was a pristine film upon which every impression was indelibly recorded. Upon the souls of his own children he had imprinted disdain, lovelessness and violence: and this image of himself, the burning eyes, the scars, the mutilated hand, the brandy he had not concealed, the loaded pistols with their invitation to death, which she had not been forbidden to touch, this, too, would be remembered, and written on her soul.
She said, “This is my doll, and I don’t have to share her with any one. My mama said I should give her to Amelia, but I don’t have to now.” Then, “Amelia is dead, you know.”
He looked up. Her eyes held him, dark in the shadows, in her face nothing of Charlotte or of James.
“Yes. I know.”
“Papa wept for days when she died. My mama wept, too. I didn’t, very much. Do you think that was wicked of me?”
He said, “No.”
“I didn’t like Amelia very much. I didn’t want her. Do you think that was why she died, because I didn’t want her?”
“Death is impartial. Sometimes it takes what we love. It has no discretion.” She was gazing at him, listening intently, perhaps only to his voice and the accent that was not Edinburgh’s. “Your sister died of measles. She would have died whether you had loved her or not.”
Silence; the sound of the rain; the dark, unchildlike eyes.
She said, “Why are people frightened of you?”
He said, “Why don’t you ask them?”
She retreated noiselessly, on the kid-slippered feet. At the door she turned and said, “I’m not frightened of you,” and went out, leaving it ajar.
On September third, 1783, after eighteen months of negotiations, the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending seven years of war. Some thirty thousand had emigrated from the Highlands between 1773 and 1775, encouraged by those who had preceded them and published testimonials to a land once more offering its promise.
Throw off the Yoke of Bondage and the Shackles of Slavery, and Quit the land of Egypt for the land of Canaan. How can I say otherwise, when I never knew what actual freedom or the Spirit of Equality was, until I came to America.
In a world less primitive and less isolated than this, an industrial revolution was flowering, propelled by invention and discovery and expansion: the prosperity that would follow peace was manifesting itself in England. Here, the margin between survival and starvation remained as fine as ever. The cycle of climatic catastrophe which would precipitate another, bloodier revolution before the decade’s end spawned the reluctant spring and cold summer of 1782: in October, a crop which had been blasted by mildew was devastated by frost. Both cereals and potatoes were destroyed.
What relief was offered was belatedly organized by a government preoccupied with America, and dispatched and distributed too late to avert a famine general throughout Scotland. The winter of 1782 had become this silent summer, wherein the starving and the dispossessed drifted toward death on the roads, or clamoured ceaselessly for succour or for pity. Dead and living, they were merely the country of his mind made visible, and he felt neither compassion nor horror. He wrote to James, who was still in Edinburgh, The people are in very poor case, and reduced to eating what herbs may be found in the barren fields. Do not bring your daughter to Glen Sian, and then, after a minute of almost physical pain, he amended it to daughters.
Only death would still these visions, which did not come now in the guise of nightmare but were constant, uncontrollable. The voices of ghosts, the vision of the exquisite, child’s face, the mouth too small to admit the instrument of violation, as his had been too small, the body’s delicate sexlessness, not undefiled virginity but the state of being without sex, without provocation, without knowledge... beyond innocence, in a state of grace, as he had been without sex and without provocation.
Guard your children... guard them, in the absence of God.
The visions persisted, the rape of the child who was himself, the rape of the child who was not, the superimposition of her face over his, like the shattered face of the doll... the visions came and he did not resist them, or punish himself for them. His punishment for his survival was this, was enough.
God... God, deliver me.
The room had been stripped and painted and rehung with silk wallpaper, the couch relegated to the attics, the furnishings, in the modern style James affected, covered with hessian: it was and was not the dressing room where he had witnessed fellatio, these the rooms and yet not the rooms once inhabited by Ewen.
Malcolm... Malcolm, viens... and the fingers, delicately trembling, the taste of semen on his lips. Viens faire un bisou à moi.
The child, the soiled receptacle, the discarded garbage of himself, in this sanctuary, violated anew by one he had believed was an angel.
Peux-tu garder un secret?
The hand caressing him, the involuntary spasm of ecstasy and terror.
C’est un secret.
He had suffered another seizure in this summer of the dead, the brain’s resistance, the body’s fallibility, the visions and the voices and the unremitting pain.
The room, the ghosts, the emptiness of its space blurred, and the tears were burning.
Do not let the people see you weep.
He thought nothing, felt nothing, regretted nothing. There was no fear, and no oblivion: no pain, neither the pain of the living nor the dead, could violate him now.
He had turned war and catastrophe to his advantage, inducing young men to leave the land and join the Highland regiments recruiting north of the Tay at the height of the conflict with America. If their own poverty and the hope of employment and the impossibility of inheriting the barren familial acre did not persuade them to go, he resorted to the more compelling arguments of bribery and blackmail, requiring ‘a son for the land’: no recruit, no renewal of lease. It was a crude equation, but effective in its time.
Famine and the fear of its recurrence, and the fruits of peace so seductively offered by the promised land, America, proved a powerful incentive to emigration. He selected those whom he considered suitable candidates, and cited the prosperity and potential of the new world, to which others had attested, and the Highland communities already established in Georgia and Virginia, the Carolinas, and in Pictou and Cape Breton. To the suggestible he offered payment: for the recalcitrant and the undesirable there were subtler methods, although he had eschewed those acts of violence which had brought him to trial in 1774. He was no less feared for the legality of his actions, and no less hated for the barrenness of his heart. The contempt and the superstitious dread signified nothing to him. A hundred deaths by famine, a hundred emigrants, a decade of warrants and eviction and confrontations, the abolition of the ancient system of runrig and the redesignation of tenancies were nothing in the balance. The imposition of the turnip and the potato and the sowing of rye grass, all initially resisted and now in general cultivation, the annual raising of rents and the acquisition of those leases which had fallen vacant, the massive investment of his own capital in a flock of Lintons now numbering ten thousand, so that his profit alone as James’s principal tenant fed the incubus of debt, the work of a lifetime, in the end, was nothing. The debts remained. The land was an anachronism, afflicted with an incurable malaise: the blood and the vision and the furious dedication had not been enough to cure it. The work of a lifetime was finishing, and yet it was unfinished. And it was not enough.
These were summers, but not as they had been lived before: there were no golden days, nor twilights, no music, no perfume. The golden hour had passed: the night, so desired, never came.
There was no peace, spiritual or physical. With the advent of summer the family returned for its annual sojourn at Ardsian, disturbing the silence of his days and the territory of his ghosts. The orchard and the gardens, where he sometimes walked and observed the turning of the seasons, were inhabited by women, the stepdaughters Caroline and Frances, prone to fits of giggles and blushing coyness when accidentally encountered, and the children, Eleanor, born in 1780, and the infant son on whom James had doted. That child had not survived beyond his second birthday, nor would the last issue of this marriage, another son, born in this spring of 1786.
He avoided them, possessed by a haunting sense of inevitability: that death, the death of the spirit, of innocence, was close; that she, like Ewen, would corrupt him. In the summer of 1786 she was fourteen years old, and the compulsion and the resistance and the loneliness were deepened by the sensation that she, Margaret’s godchild, was Margaret in another guise, that this innocence and vulnerability, the still self-containment, the gravity of the eyes and the spirit, were Margaret’s, and that he was the guardian of that innocence and could without effort end it.
The provocation and the challenge and the obsession of the summer almost physically sickened him: the fierce sexuality of other years, forced by solitude into quiescence, reawakened, and he was alone; the silk of the abandoned wedding gown was the silk of her vagina, a disembodied lover. There was no other mistress, no other whore, nothing but this, days without the sound of a human voice, and the silent, convulsive shudder in the darkness: intercourse with ghosts.
They had spoken but he had never touched her, nor she him. The fantasy and the dread of contact with her became, today, the coolness of her hands, slightly damp and unperfumed, over his eyes from behind in the estate office in the shadowed afternoon.
“Do you know who this is?”
He said, “A very silly young girl,” and the hands were removed, leaving the impression of their dampness on his eyelids.
“I don’t think you think so. Do you?”
They had not met since her arrival with her stepsisters from Edinburgh. The infant heir had died in January and his brother in April, and he sensed dissension and fragmentation in the family, James and his daughter allied against Eleanor and hers. Margaret, too, had been ill, of scarlet fever, and there was frailty and exhaustion in her face: the exquisiteness of the childish features had gone, the candour and gravity, and the knowledge in the eyes, had not diminished. Her mouth, as beautiful as in childhood, was unsmiling.
She said, “Do you?”
“No.”
She seemed to have had enough; she moved restlessly to the door and loitered there, her shoulder half turned, the broad silk sash swaying and then, like her, still.
He said, “What do you want?”
She closed the door and remained there, the half turned shoulder filmed with the lace that veiled her breast.
“Kiss me. I want you to kiss me.”
Viens.... Baise-moi... baise-moi. Plus ça change....
“I don’t want you to come again to my office and say these things to me.”
“Why not? Will you tell my father?”
“No. But you will.”
“And what would he do to you? What could any one do to you?”
He spoke the name aloud which he did not consider hers: he had never before called her by it, and never would again.
“Margaret, go away. Don’t begin something you don’t know how to finish.”
“I do know how to finish it. And I know how to begin it. And I think you want me to. Don’t you.”
He entered her roughly, against the table, losing himself in the closed, dry fist of the vagina: she was only the instrument, not virgin, not human, not an entity. This was not a dominance of the flesh but of the spirit, and of death and of the past, and the blood in her veins and the living ghosts in her eyes.
He withdrew. There was no stain on the torn silk undergarment, neither blood nor semen. She was tearless, trembling, perhaps incapable of speech: perhaps she had expected only what she had offered, the delicate torment of inexperienced lips, the furtive, uncertain fingers.
He said, “I think you had better go.”
Still without speaking, she slid the dishevelled silk from her thighs, over the black silk stockings, and stepped out of it and folded it, let the silk of the overskirt fall with a subtle fragrance to the floor. She seemed to be waiting for something, for some promise or reassurance or endearment. He said nothing, and she opened the door, and the sound of the silk receded and was lost in the darkening corridor.
The rain of hours had ceased, and the evening was drenched with perfume. She had been cutting roses and had come to walk beside him, still carrying them.
