A Dark and Distant Shore (118 page)

The relief was so great that Gideon almost forgot his quarrel with Theo and spoke to him in the tone he might have used when they were boys. ‘Oh, hell, Theo! You mean Grandfather Lauriston? Don’t be such a bloody fool!’

And then he saw that Theo didn’t know what he was talking about, for after a moment his eyes lit with the old, familiar inquisitiveness and he said slowly, ‘Do tell me, dear boy. Have I missed something?’

It had begun to rain very slightly, the thin, fine rain that the English called a mizzle, and the Scots a smirr. It lay like a beaded net over Theo’s waving white hair, and dewed the folds of his cheeks.

Vilia interrupted acidly, ‘No you haven’t. He was bullying me, and I pushed him and he slipped. Misadventure, pure and simple.’

‘Was Sorley there?’

‘He tried to save him.’

‘Did he?’

Her nostrils flared, but she didn’t answer.

Gideon, aware of being watched by both of them, still could not prevent his confusion from showing. Nothing made sense. Duncan Lauriston didn’t fit, anyway. He wasn’t one of the Kinveil heirs who, in retrospect, had vanished as inexorably as snow in summer. Who
had
Theo meant? There wasn’t anyone else.

Vilia was studying him with a kind of contemptuous amusement on her face, and at last she said, ‘Oh, Gideon! Don’t you know your brother by now? He’s trying to be clever, that’s all. I assure you, I haven’t murdered anybody.’ She yawned genteelly behind her hand. ‘I must go to bed. That new woman of mine is quite Friday-faced if I keep her up. No stamina, these so-called ladies’ maids nowadays. I’d like to have seen Berthe complain about late hours!’

‘Berthe?’

‘Vintage 1812,’ Theo said. ‘And no, Vilia. Gideon doesn’t know me by now, and neither do you.’

Vilia had recognized, as soon as she said it, that she was inviting retribution with that dismissive ‘trying to be clever’. But she didn’t really care. She was eighty-four, and she was tired, and she wasn’t well. Why
should
she care? What did it matter, after all? And Theo couldn’t possibly know anything about the things that really counted. She opened her mouth to say, ‘Have it your own way, Theo! Just help me out of this chair, one of you, so that I can go indoors. I’m getting wet.’

But before the words were uttered, Theo produced his ace. ‘You didn’t murder anybody, no. You didn’t murder anybody because you didn’t have to. Sorley was there to do it for you.’

Gideon dragged his eyes away from Theo and looked at his mother. Her face was grey-white, and her lips almost invisible.

She swallowed, and said, ‘That will do, Theo!’ She had always been able to dominate her sons.

But not this time. Nothing was going to stop Theo. ‘Luke Telfer,’ he spat. ‘There was something going on between you, and you quarrelled with him. Sorley knew. And Sorley killed him. You can’t deny it.
I saw it happen.
’

‘No!’ Gideon exclaimed. ‘You’re lying, Theo. I was there too, remember!’

‘You were there too,’ his brother sneered. ‘
Dear
Gideon, you were standing right outside that damned cottage when the roof tree slipped and crushed Luke’s skull, but it never even occurred to you that Sorley had kicked it!’

The cottage had been cut into the slope of the hill, and there had been a fist fight going on above it, the combatants slithering and sliding no more than inches from the edge. Yes, it would have been easy, Gideon thought. A well-placed kick would have been enough to send the heavy beam swinging. But not Sorley! Dear God, not Sorley!

Theo was still talking. ‘He took a chance, and it worked. And no one noticed except me. Because I was watching. I
was
clever, not “
trying to be
”!’
The venom in his voice made Gideon shudder, but he went on more calmly, ‘I’ve never understood why you allowed Juliana to survive her childhood, although there was that rather mysterious episode at the floating, wasn’t there? But you managed without Sorley for quite a long time, until it came to Ian Barber. You couldn’t handle him on your own. So Sorley had a go at him with his pocket sling, at the Reform meeting. It must have annoyed him when he missed. He always fancied himself with that sling. But he made no mistake the second time. Except staying out in the cold too long the night he tipped Ian off his horse.’ He chuckled, restored almost to humour by the horror on Gideon’s face and the frozen blankness on Vilia’s.

Over a dozen years, Sorley’s dying voice came back to Gideon. ‘Only one... Only one left. I did it.’

This was something that couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be rejected. This time Gideon had to believe what Theo had said, because it supplied the missing pieces of the pattern. It was unthinkable, but it made sense.

He turned to his mother and said, without expression, ‘You knew. You must have known.’

They were all wet through now. He could feel the hair clammy against his neck and the trickles beginning to work their way under his collar. Theo’s cigar, dropped when Gideon had laid hands on him, still lay on the flags, a sodden, disintegrating exclamation mark, with its head of ash neatly in line.

Theo said, with an opulent smile, ‘Of course she knew. They were always close. Too close for decency, if you want my opinion.’

It was then that Vilia raised her stick, and struck him full across the mouth with it. The attack was so sudden that he staggered, and the parapet of the sea wall caught him across the back of the thighs, and he was half over it, backwards, before his scrabbling fingers took hold and he saved himself. After a long moment, he felt for his handkerchief and began dabbing at his lip, where a tooth had caught it. Then he looked at the blood and laughed. Happily. Gideon remembered Mrs Berkley’s brothel, forty years ago. Theo had laughed then, too.

Incredulously, Gideon heard a faint sound beside him and turned to find that Vilia was giggling and shaking her head. And then she gasped, ‘Oh, Mungo! Dear Mungo! If you hadn’t been too heavy, and I too wee, how different things would have been!’ He had no idea what she was talking about.

But she pulled herself together almost at once, and surveyed her sons, the smile dying from her eyes. ‘You make it all sound so tidy! Have you not learned, even yet, what a shambles life is? You scrabble around, looking for bits that fit, and miss most of the things that matter.’

Gideon said, ‘The marbles? You mean that Sorley left the marbles on the stairs, hoping Lucy Telfer would come to grief? You were old enough to marry Magnus if she’d died. Perhaps it was a pity he didn’t succeed. It would have saved a good many people a good deal of sorrow.’

His mother’s lip curled. ‘I wasn’t talking about that kind of thing.’ She eased herself slightly in her chair. ‘You both think you’re so subtle and perceptive, but you understand nothing at all.’

One hand tucked in the small of her back, she succeeded in straightening up at the cost of a few twinges and a grimace or two. Then she looked at her sons again, and they suddenly realized that she was bitterly angry.

‘Sit down,’ she said, ‘so that I don’t have to look up at you all the time. Thank you. Now, you have both had your say, and it’s time I had mine. But let us dispose of one little problem first. You choose to believe that Sorley was responsible for the deaths of Luke Telfer and Ian Barber. If he was, it was by no order of mine. You may be right, but I don’t
know,
and I have never known. What I do know is that Sorley wanted me to have Kinveil as much as I did, and that morality, for him, began and ended with what I wanted. We knew each other for seventy years, and he was the finest friend I have ever had. Dear Sorley! He was very good to me.’

She paused, and Gideon, choking, said, ‘
Dear
Sorley!’

‘Don’t be commonplace.’ The arbitrary green eyes turned on him. ‘Everything has always been too easy for you. You have no conception of what it means to have to fight, because it’s I who have done all the fighting and you who have reaped the benefits. You talk about Theo’s Olympian superiority? But what about your own? I remember that marvellous tolerance of yours, that gave you such a delightful feeling of being raised above the common herd. You lost some of it for a while when you saw people bleed, and even bled a little yourself, but now you have your reputation, and your son, and Amy to pamper you, and you can look down your elegant nose again at anything that offends you.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘Understand me. I said “dear Sorley”, and I meant it. You don’t know, do you, that he saved my life? Not once, but three times.’

And that puzzled them, she was pleased to see. ‘You believe I have never troubled to wonder what my sons were thinking? But my sons have never troubled to wonder about me.’ She shook a dismissive hand. ‘No, no, Theo. I’m not talking about tantalizing little intellectual puzzles, or vulgar inquisitiveness, I’m talking about agony of spirit, about which you know nothing. Three times in my life I was in so much pain and misery that all I wanted was to put an end to it. It happened twice in a few months when I was carrying Drew, and again in France in ’35. On the first two occasions I was so weak that it was easy for Sorley to stop me. But the third time I fought him.’ Her voice quivered. ‘God, how I fought him! He still had the scar when he died.’

Gideon, appalled, remembered it, the long, white, jagged scar he had noticed when he was wrapping the plaids round the old fellow’s shoulders on that last evening.

‘So, why shouldn’t I say, “dear Sorley?” He gave me more than either of you has ever done. He gave me total love and loyalty all his life. Perhaps it was because he forced me to stay alive when all I wanted to do was die, that he felt he had to make up for it by giving me what I needed more than anything.
I will not have you blame Sorley
for anything he did.’

The passion in her kept them both silent. Fire and ice, Gideon thought. Was this what had enthralled Perry Randall for so long? Was this what had captivated Mungo Telfer? Was this what had chained Sorley to her? The fires were as cold now as the Northern Lights. But they must once have been warm.

In the end, he had to say, ‘But it’s a specious argument, you know. Nothing justifies what he did.’

Her chin came up again. ‘You don’t understand even yet, do you? You’ve blood in your veins, I suppose? Theo has bile. Oh, don’t waste your energy contradicting me, Theo! Nothing moves you except your precious vanity and the contempt you have for other people. It amuses you to watch people going to hell in their own way. Just as Gideon is prepared to defend to the death their
right
to go to hell in their own way. Where’s the difference? Neither of you knows how to give.’ Gideon opened his mouth. ‘
No,
Gideon! Elinor is dead, and Lizzie is dead, and you could have saved them both. Am I wrong in thinking that, if you had been a different man, you might have saved Juliana, too?’

It silenced him very effectively.

‘Yes, well. Nature and nurture, isn’t that what they say makes people what they are? I suppose that makes it my fault that you are both such cold fish. My fault that you are both sitting cosily in judgement on your mother, looking down on her for being so crude as to know what she wanted and fight for it. Well, it’s an unkind world, my children, and if I hadn’t fought, we would all be starving in the gutter. But I don’t remember either of you even saying thank you.

‘Not that I ever expected it of you. Do you know who first taught me never to expect anything from anyone? My own father. And then
your
father taught me how deceptive appearances could be. And as if that wasn’t enough, I fell in love with Perry Randall, and he taught me never to depend on anyone. And Luke Telfer and Magnus taught me all there was to know about people who take and take, and never give.’

Gideon could see that, suddenly, she was exhausted, but she wouldn’t give in, although her voice became old and querulous. ‘It can’t surprise you that I rebelled? Why shouldn’t I? I’m human, after all. There have been only three people in my life who have ever given, without reserve. My nurse Meg, who died before you were born. And Mungo Telfer. And Sorley. Everything they ever gave me, I gave back with all the love in my heart. But all anyone else has ever done is take.’

She hesitated, and then resumed more strongly. ‘I don’t mean Perry Randall. But that is something that
I will not have
pawed over in your frigid little minds! Understand this. I do not have to justify myself to you. It took me a long time to learn to be a realist, and until – until 1851 I was still vulnerable. But after that I taught myself that other people’s priorities were not the only ones that counted. Diamond cut diamond. I didn’t see why
my
priorities shouldn’t matter, too. They’ve done no more than provide Theo with entertainment, but if they’ve hurt you, Gideon, I’m sorry. You should have been involved enough to fight back.’

Theo, predictably, was wearing his most irritating smile, but Gideon scarcely noticed. For the first time, he had really seen below the sometimes charming, sometimes autocratic veneer that had, to him, always been the sum and substance of his mother. She was right, of course. He had never really tried to understand her, although – now that they had been shown him – there had been pointers enough that he should have recognized. He had a brief glimpse of the truth Perry Randall had seen – that people and circumstances had conspired to turn her from what she had been into what she was.

And then the veil came down, and he knew that nothing could justify the tragedies that had overtaken his own daughter, Lizzie, and Juliana, his heart’s darling. And Luke, and Guy, and Ian Barber, and even Sorley, in a way. All victims of Vilia’s obsession with this rickle of stones and mortar, and these wide, sour, sodden acres.

After a long time, he rose from his perch on the wall and stood before her, looking down into her eyes – ‘mermaid’s eyes’, Luke Telfer had called them. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ve never done what I should, and it’s time I started. I’m going to try and make some kind of restitution. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to see that young Jay doesn’t fall victim to your obsession. I’m going to see that, somehow, he wins through and comes back here to Kinveil. Because it isn’t yours, Vilia, and you have no right to it. Don’t you see that?
You can’t be allowed to win.
’
He turned to go.