A Dark and Distant Shore (108 page)

She laughed a little tightly. ‘Was that why you were staring at me so strangely?’

His smile broadened. He looked very like himself. ‘Strangely? Anything but that. I was merely stunned by the combined impact of recollection and your indestructible beauty.’

‘Thank you.’ Her tone was noticeably dry.

He knew better than to pursue it. ‘I can still see Mungo Telfer standing where you are now, wearing that kindly but suspicious expression that always came over his face when I put in an appearance. I was a sad trial to him, I fear.’

‘Not altogether.’ She bent to stir the logs. ‘He spoke of you when he was dying, you know. Your failings didn’t escape him, but he was fond of you. Dear Mungo. The kindest man I have ever known.’

‘Yes.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘It’s difficult to realize that this is only my second visit to Kinveil since he died. The first time was in ’29, when there was no one here but Luke.’

He was fishing, but he didn’t catch anything except a bitten-off ‘Yes’.

She was reminded, just the same, of Luke’s vicious denunciation of her, in this very room, three or four days after Perry had been here and talked too much, either of intent, or by mistake. Luke had called her a whore, and treated her like one. He had died next day. She had always wondered what Perry had said, and why. Should she ask him, now that it didn’t matter any more? Or let the question lie – for that same reason.

A maid came in with the tea. Another Fraser, Perry wondered? She had the look of it. He said, ‘Is Sorley still with you? How is he?’

‘Oh, well enough. Milk? Lemon? These macaroons are very good. His chest is troubling him. I can’t persuade him to take things easier, and settle down peaceably in his new cottage, and indeed I don’t think I could bear it if he did. He has always been so much part of my life. So he goes on living here, as always, and makes an occasional trip to inspect his cottage as if it were the show piece in some exhibition of domestic design. Quite funny, really, but a little sad.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You know, of course, that a number of your old acquaintances have died in these last few years. Including Drew. Shona must have written to you.’

‘Yes. I was sad to hear it.’ The child of joy, whose birth had brought nothing but pain and tragedy. The irresponsibly begotten son of two unhappy people who had fallen too much in love; the son Perry had known only as a stranger.

He went on, ‘I understand that Shona intends coming to live with you here.’ His mind reeled at the thought. It was thirty years since that incestuous marriage, but time had changed nothing. With Vilia and Shona alone in each other’s company all the year round, it would be so easy for Vilia to make a slip. And if Shona were to discover the truth, Perry thought the knowledge might kill her. It would, certainly, destroy her serenity for ever.

‘Yes. Marchfield is too full of memories for her, and she thinks that Jermyn and Madge and the children – you won’t know yet that they have a new son? – should have the house to themselves. We will be company for each other, and might even rub along quite well.’

‘Is it wise?’

She had never tolerated criticism. Coldly, she said, ‘Wise?’

He shrugged, and didn’t pursue that, either. Foolishly, he had forgotten how many topics had always been barred to the two of them. Everything he thought of seemed to lead back, somehow, to things that couldn’t be spoken of. Their relationship had been so episodic, and each episode had brought its own repercussions. The fateful evening at the Northern Meeting ball, that had brought the rift between himself and Charlotte into the open. That single week in 1815 when they had been wholly in love, and Drew had been conceived. Then the meeting at Marchfield seven years later; he had gone away from that filled with a driving need for success; she had almost married Luke Telfer. There had been thirteen years between the meeting at Marchfield and the idyll at the Chaumière de la Reine, and this time he had left with another need – to cut her out of his heart, and the knowledge of Drew and Shona out of his consciousness. So he had married Sara, who had given him three other children; and Vilia had come home to Scotland and married Magnus, who had given her Kinveil. Since then, there had been only the dinner party in 1851, and Perry didn’t know what repercussions there had been from that, if any. He only knew that, since then, he had never quite stopped worrying about the change in her. He had never seen her like that before, implacably cold and brittle; hell-bent on some purpose he hadn’t been able to identify.

There wasn’t a name he could mention, a subject he could broach, without reminding them both of the troubles they had shared. And yet not shared. That was the real difficulty, that they had been forced to bear what should have been joint burdens, not together, but alone. Only by talking could they drain away the poisons of the past, and yet talk of any real significance was impossible while they remained on such circumspect terms. Later, perhaps, he told himself, when they had spoken of what he had come to speak about – even though, from the moment he had set foot in the Long Gallery, he had become increasingly afraid that she had strayed too far from him. As if it were yesterday, he remembered that same feeling, that same sense of doom, when he had gone to her on a Monday evening at Marchfield in 1822.

Somehow, they carried on a desultory conversation until it was time to change for dinner, and at table they found safe topics in steel, and armaments, and what would happen in world markets now that the Civil War was over. Afterwards, he said, ‘An admirable dinner, Vilia. Thank you. I had forgotten the excellence of the hill mutton hereabouts. May I bring my brandy to the drawing-room?’

‘Of course. You may have whisky, if you’d rather. I’m sure Sorley wouldn’t object to your sampling his own private product. It’s very pale, and quite distinctive.’

‘Bought up the exciseman, has he?’

The drawing-room, nowadays, was in what had once been Mungo’s study, and subsequently Luke’s. Perhaps Magnus’s, too; Perry didn’t know. But he could still hear the breathless, waiting note in Luke’s voice when he had said, ‘Wish me happy, Uncle Perry. Vilia and I are to be married.’

For Kinveil, it was an indulgent, civilized room, with carpets and pine panelling instead of slate floors and rough walls, and there were curtains to shut out the bleak night. The chairs and sofas belonged to no particular period and were notable only for being comfortable. There wasn’t even a family portrait on the walls. Perry took out his spectacles to study a pair of watercolour landscapes. ‘I like these. They have a look of Turner about them, but they’re not, are they?’

‘A young man called MacTaggart.’

He raised his hand to remove his spectacles again.

‘Don’t take them off on my account.’

It was so unmistakably malicious that it broke the spell that had been binding him. He laughed aloud. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And don’t try to tell me you haven’t been stifling an “ouch” every time you’ve had to bend down. A touch of rheumatism, my dear?’ With his glasses on, he could see that she had been adding colour to her face, and not very competently, either.

‘Certainly not. It’s merely that I slipped on the hill the other day, and pulled a muscle.’

‘I see. And you’re using the only comfortable room in the castle because it has sentimental memories of Mungo, no doubt?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ she said, and added rashly, ‘Why else?’

‘I can think of several reasons. I recall Mungo saying that, much though he loved Kinveil, his ageing bones didn’t.’

‘That was Mungo. He wasn’t used to stone walls.’

‘Oh, Vilia! Vilia! Admit it! In another few weeks you will be seventy years old. There’s nothing illegal in a little self-indulgence.’ He sat down opposite her, and leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands clasped, in a way she well remembered. ‘Do you know why I have come here?’

‘No.’

‘Sara is dead, rest her soul, and so is Magnus. You and I haven’t very much time left. For fifty years our lives have been entangled, and the way has never been clear for us. Now it is, and, God help me, I still love you. I came to ask whether, late though it is, we mightn’t perhaps spend our last years together.’

Her eyes snapped open, exaggeratedly. ‘Are you asking me to marry you?’

‘Yes, my dear. Is that so hard to believe?’

She was looking at him as if he were some laboratory specimen under the microscope. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ she repeated. ‘Do you not remember that night at Shona’s? You treated me as if you scarcely knew me, as if all contact between us was dead. I was ill with nerves, and you scarcely gave me a look or a word. It seemed almost as if you were summing me up, and not liking what you saw. For fifteen – sixteen? – years I had
tried
to convince myself that everything was over, but I didn’t want it to be. And then you told me as clearly as if you had said it in words that I was no longer of any interest to you at all.’

He could remember the tension in her, and how he had put it down to Magnus’s recalcitrance because he had been so sure that their last parting had alienated her from him, and that the tension couldn’t be on his account. And yet that wasn’t quite true. While he had hoped that everything wasn’t over between them, even more, he had feared that it wasn’t – because that would be an end of his precarious peace of mind. On that evening in 1851, he had almost wanted to assume that she no longer cared about him, but the assumption hadn’t stood the test of time, and in the years since then he had perversely chosen to treat the memory of that evening as if it hadn’t happened, or hadn’t mattered; had chosen to pretend to himself that the only barrier between them was the barrier that had been set up on their last morning in France. A barrier that – surely – must have begun to crumble by now. If he hadn’t brought himself to believe that, he would not have been here at Kinveil today.

He said, ‘Were we both acting, then? I was trying to protect you, you know. Everyone in that room thought we were only the barest acquaintances, but I had the feeling that Theo was watching us all the time. Perhaps I was over careful.’

‘As far as Theo was concerned, certainly you were. He knows all about us.’ She said it quite casually.

‘
Theo
knows?
All
about us?’ He took a deep breath. ‘And who else, may I ask?’

‘There’s no need to look so thunderous! I didn’t mean “all”. I meant only about our – our involvement in 1815.’ He was staring at her and, astoundingly, she giggled. ‘He thinks you more or less raped me, by the way.’

‘Thank you very much!
Who else knows
?’

‘No one, but Gideon.’ Suddenly, her eyes were hostile. ‘You are wondering why I should have told them? Very well. I told them when Drew ran away with Shona. You accused me once of “letting that happen”. You seemed to think I had made no attempt to stop it, and that hurt me so much that I wasn’t prepared to enlighten you. Well, I will tell you now. I was driven to such desperation when I couldn’t persuade Theo or Gideon to go after them, and stop them, that I had no choice but to explain why it was necessary. It convinced them, but they arrived too late.’ She paused for a moment, and then went on with a shrug, ‘Theo is inquisitive. It’s possible he may have guessed that we met again in France.’

So she had tried, after all. He had never, deep in his heart, thought otherwise. ‘Should I apologize?’

She shrugged again, dismissively. ‘It’s of no importance now.’

‘Isn’t it?’ It had always been a weakness that she couldn’t look into other people’s hearts, except perhaps Mungo’s, and, for a little time – when she was young and loving – his own. He said, ‘I don’t think you understand, even yet, how I feel about you. There have been occasions when I haven’t relished what you have said or done. I still believe you should have insured against Shona and Drew ever meeting in the first place. I still find it totally impossible to understand why you didn’t tell me about Drew when he was still a child, and I came to you at Marchfield. And at Shona’s dinner party I found that, quite simply, I couldn’t watch you goading Magnus in the way you did, a man whose mind was no match for yours. But all those things are quite irrelevant. However much I may disapprove, they make no difference at all to the fact that I love you.’

‘Don’t they? Perhaps you should have told me that before. I saw you watching me when I was “goading” Magnus, as you put it, and your distaste could scarcely have been more evident. And because I thought
you
didn’t care, I went on, just to prove that I didn’t care. What a chapter of misunderstandings our life has been.’ She sat, turning the Kinveil ring on her finger, as he had so often seen her do in the past when she was thinking something over, trying to decide what to say next. After a while, she looked up. ‘I
don’t
care now, Perry. I learned my lesson that night, and I don’t think you can complain if I learned it too well. That was the end, for me. There is nothing left at all now, and hasn’t been for years.’

‘Not even a lingering warmth?’

There was death in his eyes if she had looked, or if, looking, she had perceived it. But, her gaze on the ring again, she said, ‘Not even that. What would be the purpose?’

‘Must there always be a purpose?’

Her surprise was real. ‘Of course! It’s purpose, surely, that keeps one alive. How else can one survive hardship, and misery, and tragedy?’

‘Yes, but...’ Suddenly, a great weariness overcame him, and he felt the familiar tightening in his chest and the fluttering sensation that warned him he must be calm. There was a flaw in her argument, he knew, but it didn’t seem worth making an issue of it. He smiled crookedly, and said, ‘And what happens when the purpose fails?’

‘I don’t know.’

Neither did he – but he would find out, now that his was gone. The end. The bitter end. The end of an old song that had first been sung fifty years ago, when for the space of one brief week they had been wholly themselves, without artifice, in each other’s company.

There were tears in his throat, but his voice sounded normal enough when he said, ‘You don’t know? But returning to Kinveil was always your purpose, and you have achieved that. Is there some other purpose now?’