A Dark and Distant Shore (44 page)

But Charlotte didn’t cool down and Vilia wasn’t invited to Kinveil. Neither did she invite herself.

Foolishly, Luke had a word with his mother during his first vacation from Oxford, and Lucy, who had been racking her brains for a way of reconciling Charlotte and Vilia, promptly gave up the struggle. Fond though she was of Vilia she didn’t want Luke falling in love with her, and from the expression in his eye she could see there was a danger of it. Assuming he would grow out of it, she contented herself with writing to Vilia in her vaguest style, and always when she was able to say, ‘We are off next week on a round of visits’, or ‘We leave for London in ten days, for the Season’, or ‘Isn’t it just like the thing that, when we are at last settled at Kinveil for a few weeks, the roads should be blocked and impassable for everyone except Iain Mor the Post, who manages to struggle through, whatever the weather.’

More than he would have believed possible, Luke thirsted for Vilia’s presence, but for a long time couldn’t think what to do. He couldn’t tell whether she knew she wasn’t welcome at Kinveil any more, or whether she resented it, or whether she even cared. Unable to get her out of his mind, he tried desperately to think of some way of bringing about a meeting that would appear natural, casual, accidental. His dreams were filled with chance encounters, during which he did her some great service that led her to look at him with adoration in those incredible green eyes. His awakenings were bitter. As the months passed, Oxford came to know Luke Telfer as the tall, good-looking fellow with the caustic tongue.

Then, very suddenly indeed, he developed an interest in steam navigation. His mother thought it very
avant-garde
of him, and his fellow scholars, who had no time for the proletarian sciences, very peculiar. It occurred to no one that his interest was entirely purposeful.

Travelling from Oxford to Kinveil by road would have involved a detour of more than a hundred miles to take in Marchfield House, but the London and Edinburgh Steam Packet Company had recently introduced regular sailings between London and the port of Leith. It wasn’t always faster than going by road, but it was much more interesting, more comfortable, and more invigorating. Or so said Luke. It was also cheaper, if he’d cared about that. What really mattered was the rest of the journey. After disembarking from the
City of Edinburgh
or the
James Watt,
Luke had to drive from Leith to Falkirk to catch a Forth and Clyde Canal barge for Glasgow, where he joined the
Comet,
which took him close to home by way of the Caledonian Canal. And just off that convenient stretch of road between Leith and Falkirk lay the village of Clarkstoun, and Marchfield House. It would have been grossly impolite not to drop in on Vilia.

The first time, he arrived unannounced, but when it became a habit he was absorbed into the household like some brother or cousin, whose visits weren’t anxiously awaited but welcome enough when they occurred.

It wasn’t what Luke wanted, but it was better than nothing. He began to live through college terms, and tutorials, and studying, and examinations, and undergraduate junketings, only for those few hours every few months when he could see Vilia. She was a creature more of visions than flesh and blood. In fact, he scarcely even thought of her in physical terms. His sexual needs were perfectly well catered for at Oxford, and even at Kinveil, although Kirsty Macintyre – dear, pretty Kirsty with her agreeable ways, who had taught him most of what he needed to know about his body – had retired a year or two since; to marry and settle down, she had said ingenuously. Her successor, Jinty Macleod, was very different. There was black Irish in her somewhere. Raven hair, deep blue eyes, a pert and vivid face, and a figure that even through all the layers of Highland clothing was blatantly voluptuous. Jinty, though she was livelier in bed, wasn’t always as kind as Kirsty had been, and she was always nagging about the fact that, since Magnus had become laird, he had taken his custom elsewhere. Luke had spent a good deal of expensive time explaining that his father probably thought it was beneath his dignity for all his tenants to know what he was up to, but all Jinty would say was, ‘If Mistress Telfer will not giff him what he needs, she must know that he hass to go to someone else! What does it matter if other folk know too?’ Luke, remembering the effect it had had on his own fifteen-year-old virility when Kirsty had first let it slip that his father was one of her most valued customers, had decided it was time to change the subject.

No, he had no compelling physical need of Vilia. All he really wanted to do was look at her, listen to her, touch her hand, and perhaps – the summit of his ambitions – imprint a chaste, delicate kiss on her lips. It was mawkish, he knew, but there was nothing he could do about it except take good care that he didn’t allow it to show. He suspected that, if he did, he would instantly be given his
congé.

In many ways, she was a stranger to him. Older and a little wiser than he had been, he gradually came to understand that he had no idea of what the essential Vilia was like. Although they had been acquainted for a dozen years, he had scarcely known her except when she was under some kind of stress, whether of bereavement, or elation, or even that special mood that had possessed her in his grandfather’s company, a lifting of the heart, a mischief, a kind of spiritual ease. Now, she was prey to none of these, and what struck him most was her air of complete self-containment. That, and the fact that her tongue had developed a cutting edge.

She seemed quite to enjoy his visits. The two of them, after all, were of the same world and spoke the same language. He was quite successful at amusing her, he thought, in an astringent way, for he had worked hard at developing an elegant, engaging style, and was still retrospectively grateful to Perry Randall for teaching him the rudiments of it all those years ago. Sometimes he even wondered how his uncle was faring in America as a – what was it he had called himself in that last letter to Mungo? – as a ‘drummer’. Not too well presumably, or he would have been home on a visit before now.

They didn’t talk about Kinveil very much at first, because Luke was terrified that Vilia might come straight to the point and ask why she was no longer invited. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but that wouldn’t make it any less embarrassing. And then one evening in 1824, just before the start of the new term, an idea occurred to him. He wasn’t, in general, sensitive to other people’s moods, not even Vilia’s, but on this occasion it seemed to him that, even though she made all the right responses and appeared to be listening to his every word, she was really somewhere else.

‘Back to the mausoleum,’ he had groaned. ‘Oxford has to be lived in to be believed. There’s scarcely a don in the place who wouldn’t cross to the other side of the street to avoid coming face-to-face with a new idea! You know the theologians claim that God created the world in 4004 BC?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there’s a professor called Buckland who’s dated some fossils at four thousand years older than that.’

‘How very inconsiderate of him.’

‘Yes, but no one’s in the least worried! Deacon Keble merely says that, obviously, God created the fossils at the same time as He created everything else! Can you believe it!’

She laughed. ‘I like that. At least it has the merit of consistency.’

There was a tap on the door and the second footman entered with the tea-tray.

‘No Sorley?’ Luke asked.

‘His evening off.’

‘How is he?’ It was a struggle to ask, although Luke didn’t dislike Sorley. No one did. It was just that, where Vilia was, Sorley was seldom far away, tall, thin, and sandy, with the same freckles, the same narrow hazel eyes, and the smile that could still light up the landscape. He seemed to have no other ambition than to serve her as footman, manservant, and slave. Luke knew that it was utterly illogical, but he was jealous of Sorley, jealous because he and Vilia shared so much of a past and present from which Luke himself was excluded. He hated the thought of any other man, even a servant, being closer to Vilia than he was. He was prickly about Sorley, resentful of the hordes of unknown admirers he was sure she must have in Edinburgh, sullen at the memory of her rapport with Mungo, and he hated – God, how he hated! – the memory of Andrew Lauriston. Ludicrously, he was even jealous of her sons.

They were growing up into nice lads, handsome, intelligent, and well-mannered. Luke had been surprised to discover that they called their mother Vilia. She had shrugged and said, ‘It makes me feel like a real person, rather than an assortment of attributes. To the servants I’m “the mistress”. At the foundry I’m “the ironmaster”. To most of my acquaintances I’m “Andrew Lauriston’s widow”. It would be altogether too much to be “mother” as well. I have to preserve my – my sense of identity
somehow.’
Luke, who had never had any problems with his identity, hadn’t really understood what she meant.

He had certain reservations about Theo, the oldest of the boys, who was slender and fair and just a little difficult to handle. It had made Luke feel quite mature at first, when he realized that Theo was developing the same kind of passionate admiration for him as he had felt for Perry Randall when he was ten years old. And then he had begun to wonder if it
was
quite the same. A few terms at an all-male college had taught him more than Greek literature and Latin commentaries and how to deal with dons steeped in port and privilege. Everyone knew that Theo didn’t like being cuddled or cosseted – ‘pawed’, as he put it – but Luke found it disconcerting, when he gave the boy a friendly slap on the back, to have him look up with an excited gleam in his bright, impenetrable eyes. After that, Luke learned to keep his hands to himself, but he remained the recipient of Theo’s confidences and an object of the greatest interest to him. A damned inquisitive brat, if the truth were told, but Luke had a certain sympathy with him, there. He’d been the same himself as a child, and he knew how frustrating it was when no one would satisfy one’s curiosity. So, though his motives might be muddled, he did his best to appear interested in Theo’s current ambition – the oddest one Luke had ever heard – to be at once the best ironmaster and the best poet the world had ever seen.

‘Listen to this,’ Theo would say. ‘I don’t think I’ve got it quite right, do you?’

...
and thine the thews that gleam in furnace glare,

And thine the labour that my love will share,

While molten metal trickles from the flame

And blast pipes shriek the echo of thy name.

Luke hadn’t been able to think of a thing to say, other than a feeble, ‘Yes, well. It sounds very grown up. Scans, too. Keep at it, Theo. We’ll all be proud of you some day.’

But the boy wasn’t satisfied. ‘“Blast pipes” is
wrong,
isn’t it!’

‘Well, it’s not exactly poetic, I admit. You don’t think flowers and trees and things would be easier – just until you get the hang of it, I mean?’

‘Pooh!’ the boy had said, his mobile mouth curling. ‘They’re too
soft
!’

With Gideon and Drew it was easier, although Gideon had an elusive quality. He was quite the most reasonable child Luke had ever encountered, but while he wasn’t negative, he wasn’t positive, either; more like a bundle of unrelated threads waiting to be woven into a pattern. Drew was the opposite, bright, forthcoming, and appallingly opinionated. Luke had been taken aback at first to find the boy looking at him calculatingly, as if he didn’t measure up to some obscure but absolute yardstick. It had been months before he discovered that Drew’s yardstick was Andrew Lauriston, the father he had never known, who had died a hero’s death at Waterloo.

Vilia said, ‘Sorley? He’s well enough, I think.’ She handed Luke his teacup. ‘He’s very adaptable.’

And then for no reason at all, Luke suddenly realized – his mind flashing back through half a dozen visits and a score of guarded conversations – that the only times he had ever been sure of Vilia’s scrupulous and complete attention had been when he was talking of Kinveil, or something or someone associated with it. He had been too taken up with himself to notice before, which hadn’t been very bright of him. He knew how she felt about the place. He wondered if he could manoeuvre her into inviting herself. Magnus had said, if that happened, he wouldn’t turn her away.

He said, ‘You mean he misses Kinveil. As you do?’

She smiled non-committally.

He said, ‘It’s changed since grandfather died. Oh, not in any way you could put your finger on, but there’s something in the atmosphere. You know its moods as well as I do.’ He was careful not to say ‘better than I do’, which would have been the truth; he wanted to persuade her, without quite saying so, that he loved it, too, and wasn’t the ignoramus he had been once. ‘When the weather’s fine, it’s just like a pretty toy in a rainbow landscape, and in winter, when the mountains look like ghosts in trailing robes, it’s no more than a huddle of dark shadows among other shadows. But last time I went home it was one of those calm days that look like a painting in
grisaille,
with the whole world drowning in mist. Except the castle. There it was, looming through the murk, rugged and four-square, and very much a force to be reckoned with.’ He paused. ‘And then I crossed the causeway and walked slam into the most complete and cosy domesticity. I was repelled – really repelled! I don’t think I’d ever quite understood before what you and grandfather felt about Kinveil. I always thought you were being over-sentimental about the past. But that day I was cured. Curtains and carpets and pretty knick-knacks. Flowers in tubs along the sea wall. It was wrong, wrong, wrong! Like harnessing a lion to a governess cart, and tying ribbons in its mane.’

He was pitching it a bit high, in the attempt to impress her; but he
had
felt something.

Ignoring what he had considered to be some rather fine descriptive prose, she said, ‘Yes, your grandfather had a kind of decision and purposefulness that suited Kinveil. Even though he looked the comfortable Glasgow merchant he was, he knew what Kinveil needed. He matched the place.’