A Dark and Distant Shore (52 page)

More than anything, he wanted Vilia to himself, and if he were forced to invent some story to account for the discrepancy in dates, what did it matter? Even a night here alone with him, unchaperoned except by the servants, would be enough to bring a new pressure to bear, to replace the unfulfilled fear of pregnancy that, in his black moods, had seemed to him the only reason why she had even considered marrying him. His own desire for her never wavered, but jealousy had gripped him again the moment she was out of sight, and he couldn’t tell what decision she might have reached, away from him.

By the turn of the year, he had known he would go mad if he had nothing to occupy him but thoughts of Vilia and the undemanding routine of the estate in winter. So he had set himself to a task long postponed. He could still remember the day when his grandfather had first suggested it. Suggested? Ordered, more like. The old man had summoned him to his study on his sixteenth birthday and said, ‘I’ve a wee business proposition to discuss with you.’ Rising, he’d gone to the side table and returned with two tumblers of bitters, the drink made from whisky, camomile flowers, Seville orange peel, and juniper berries that every Highland gentleman took as a stomachic before breakfast and at comforting intervals throughout the rest of the day until bedtime. ‘But first things first. Luke Telfer, on your sixteenth birthday I wish you good health and happiness.
Slàinte mhor!’

‘Slàinte!’
the boy had responded, downing a man-sized gulp. He already knew that it packed a punch, but had thought it politic to say, ‘Whoof!’ in a startled tone. Then he had crimsoned under the old man’s cynical eye. His grandfather had an unpleasant knack of seeing straight through people. Also, he had been in a belligerent mood that day, and before he knew where he was Luke had found himself landed with the task of writing the family history.

It was the most extraordinary idea he’d ever heard, and he’d gaped at his grandfather vacantly, muttering, ‘But I don’t even know anything about
you,
far less your father and your grandfather!’ And Mungo had said, exasperated, ‘I’ll tell you what you need to know about the past, but the important thing’s the future. When I said family history, maybe I should have said family chronicle. I want you to keep a diary. You can pass the job on to someone else when it gets too much for you. The job and...’ he had added cunningly, ‘the annual income from a wee trust I’m going to set up to go with it.’

That had put a different complexion on the affair. Luke knew his grandfather well enough to know that the income wouldn’t be miserly. No more relying on the allowance from his father; no more being called on – when his father remembered – to account for how he’d spent it. Weakly, he had said, ‘Oh!’

Then he had a vision of himself marching bang up to his Aunt Charlotte, and saying, ‘Tell me, aunt. Why did Uncle Perry leave you and run away to America?’ He closed his eyes for a moment and then said, ‘But no one will tell me anything, will they, if they realize I’m writing it all down?’

Mungo had won in the end, of course. Comfortably, he’d said, ‘Och, well, they’ll be protected. They won’t be expecting a laddie like you to write down anything beyond the commonplace, for a start, and when you hand over the job of chronicler to someone else, you’ll send everything you’ve written to my lawyers in Edinburgh, and they’ll keep it locked away for fifty years before they hand it over to whoever’s keeping the record in the 1870s, or 80s, or 90s, or whenever it is. By then, most of the folk you’ve written about will either be snibbed in a mortsafe or past the stage of caring.’

Luke still had no idea why his grandfather had been so set on the idea of the family chronicle, but he had given up wondering. For almost eight years now he had been collecting notes, and they were beginning to get out of hand. Faced with long weeks of boredom and loneliness, he had decided at last to do something about them.

It had been strangely soothing, sorting them, and reading them, and remembering and collating them into some kind of coherent narrative. So many things he had forgotten. So many things that began to appear in a new perspective. Had Cameron of Kinveil had any choice at all, but to sell to Mungo? Had his own parents stayed in London for so long because of his mother’s health – or because they didn’t really like Kinveil very much? Had his Aunt Charlotte been entirely to blame in her dealings with Perry Randall? Luke had almost forgotten that evening at the Northern Meeting ball, when Vilia had mischievously set out to teach Charlotte a lesson, and bewitched Perry into aiding and abetting her. Was Edward quite at fault in turning Glenbraddan over to sheep, when the only alternative was insolvency?

Luke had spent the afternoon and evening of the day before his birthday re-reading what he had written, and recognized for the first time how reticent he had been about his own affairs and Vilia’s, especially after 1822, the year he had fallen in love with her. He had recorded nothing but the barest facts. It bothered him, even while, deep in the recesses of his mind, he knew that he had feared to expose himself – and her – to the clinical appraisal of some unknown descendant half a century on.

He had spent a wakeful night, fretting at the problem, until he had realized that the ‘unknown descendant’ might, just might, be a son or grandson of his marriage to Vilia. It put a different complexion on the affair. Suddenly, he wanted this stranger of the future to know something about the love that had given him life.

He sat for a long time with the fresh sheets of paper laid out before him, the inkstand and the sandcaster newly replenished. His thoughts, he believed, were in order, but there remained the problem of words. How to describe her?

According to one of the seventeenth-century poets Henry Phillpotts had forced him to read, ‘Beauty and beauteous words should go together.’ As Mungo would have said, ‘Aye, well...’

Was there a beauteous word in the language that hadn’t been worked to death?

Graceful, yes. Elegant, yes. Lovely, certainly. But so much more. If he were to convey the reality of her, he would have to do better than that.

Pursuing words, he found himself pursuing truth, wondering why he should be so obsessed by her – he, Luke Telfer, with his sense of property and his passion for sole ownership? When he knew that she belonged only to herself, and to Kinveil. Perhaps that was why he was jealous, because he wanted all of her, not only her body and some small, uncommitted corner of her spirit.

After a time, it became too much for him, and he abandoned the search for Herbert’s ‘beauteous words’ and wrote, ‘She will be here three days from now, and I hope and believe she will agree to marry me, although I am not without fear. Sometimes I think she loves me too little and knows me too well.’ And even that wouldn’t do. Frowning, he struck out the last sentence. It wasn’t something to be put in words, not even to himself.

Strange to think that you, whoever you are, reading this more than half a century on, may be our son or grandson. Stranger still to think that, in the next few sentences, or paragraphs, or pages, you will find laid out before you the pattern of a life that Vilia and I have yet to live. If only I knew what kind of pattern it would be...

Christ! He would have himself in tears, next. He threw down the pen. This was no time to reawaken all the doubts and fears he thought he’d conquered in these last months. Three more days and he would know. Three days and he could bear to confront the future again – or not, as the case might be. He wouldn’t think about that. Perhaps it would help if he tried to live the next three days hour by hour.

The sun had come out. What he needed was a hard, tiring gallop, and then perhaps he would sleep tonight.

There was no real reason why Perry Randall should have dismounted and scrambled down to the water’s edge to gaze out over Loch an Vele, his eyes, screwed up against the westering sun, falling into the creases that had become habitual after long years of scanning the Missouri river or the mountains of Colorado, searching for grizzlies above Yellowstone, or Arapaho in the Great Plains. That period in his life was ended now, but still, instinctively, he stopped when a new vista opened before him. Stopped, and surveyed it with care.

The water was flat calm, the mountains swooping down into it and levelling out again, blue-tinted and softened and two-dimensional, aquatint replicas of themselves. New green merged with the russet of the hilltops and turned them purple-bronze above the intricate girdle of beeches, leafless still, but glowing richly mahogany in the sun, and glittering when the rain lingered on them. Round the shores were great banks of gorse, sharp and sulphurous yellow, and the ditches were spangled with primroses and dog-violets. There had been a dwelling once near where Perry stood, and the stones of it loitered still among a riot of daffodils and lilacs, watched over by an ancient crab apple, knotted and gnarled, its branches curved by the westerlies so that they looked like a woman’s windblown skirts. Another week or two, and summer would be here.

It was beautiful, but Perry found little pleasure in it. It was fourteen years since he had seen it last, and he had thought at first that the circumstances of his life here had been responsible for tarnishing the whole austere and magnificent panorama in his eyes. Impossible, he had reflected, to feel nostalgia for the scene of one’s own defeat. But he wasn’t defeated now, and the Highlands still failed to move him.

Perhaps the landscape and the people were too old, too set in their ways. A thousand years ago, there must have been challenge here, but the landscape had won and the people had resigned themselves to living under its rule. He remembered the emigrants who had sailed with him for the New World, shivering in the discovery that their comforting, age-old fatalism was not going to be proof against the biting wind of independence. There was nothing in the world more frightening, if one stopped to think, than to have to stand on one’s own feet and make one’s own decisions. No conventions, no ground rules, no reassuring pattern to conform to. No one to blame but oneself. But equally, there was nothing in the world more satisfying than to succeed. Perry recognized that, in the New World, he had found his place. Despite its rough self-seeking, its lack of grace, its desperate search for identity, it was the world for him. From out of the past, a light, silvery voice said, ‘You should have been an adventurer, a corsair, a Crusader.’ She had been right in a way that neither of them could have envisaged.

Benjamin Briggs, standing patiently by the roadside minding the horses, saw his master’s lips tighten and wondered, for the dozenth time, what was afoot. They had been two months in England while Mr Randall went about his business, aristocratic and charming when the circumstances required it, brisk and sometimes abrasive when they didn’t. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. Played his cards close to his chest, too. The first Briggs had known about this jaunt to what he regarded as a thoroughly God-forgotten corner of the world had been the day before they set out. No hint of precisely where they were going, or why. Since they had crossed the Border, they’d stayed in one filthy hostelry after another, with nothing to eat, day after day, but oatmeal and potatoes, sour cheese and rancid butter. Mr R. said they’d improved a lot in the last few years, but Briggs had been reminded, with loathing, of his time as a powder boy on the
Shannon;
salt beef, beans, and hardtack, and think yourself lucky. He couldn’t understand why a gentleman like Mr R. didn’t have rich friends to stay with, and when they’d come to the big house at Glenbraddan yesterday he’d heaved a sigh of relief. But Mr R. had stayed well out of sight and sent Briggs to inquire whether the Misses Randall were at home.
The Misses Randall
?
Briggs, dumbfounded, had been as disappointed as his master to learn that the family had left for Edinburgh last week. Mr Blair was expected home in a day or two, but the young ladies anticipated remaining in Edinburgh with Mistress Blair. On instructions, Briggs had then asked whether the butler knew if Mr and Mrs Telfer were in residence at Kinveil. Forbiddingly, the butler had replied that he could not take it upon himself to say. Scaly old twiddlepoop! Briggs had thought.

The landlord at the inn by the Bridge of Braddan had been more forthcoming. Mr and Mrs Telfer, like most of the Highland gentry, had migrated south for the winter and weren’t back yet. What Briggs couldn’t understand was why Mr R. should be trailing along these extra, interminable miles, if there was going to be nobody at home when they got there. He wasn’t the type to waste time on sentimental journeys.

Briggs looked round as a horse cantered along the road towards them, a nice-looking bay filly with a personable young fellow in his twenties astride. The gentleman nodded to Briggs, and then turned to glance at the man on the shore. The glance developed into a stare, and then into stupefied recognition. With a twitch on the reins, the newcomer took his horse slipping and sliding down to the beach, and Briggs heard him exclaim, ‘Uncle Perry?
Can
it be?’

There was a resigned, ironic smile on Mr R.’s long, firm lips. After a moment, he said, ‘Luke, I take it? I don’t think I’d have known you.’

They rode back together to Kinveil, two tall, limber, well-set-up figures. Briggs, looking for some family resemblance, couldn’t find it, although they were alike enough on a superficial level. It seemed to Briggs, who admired his master more than anyone else on earth, that Mr Luke was no more than a callow youth beside him, easy and handsome enough, but with not a spark of his uncle’s astringent vitality. A soft billet all his life, no doubt. He didn’t look as if he knew what the world was about; needed a few lines of experience etched on that high-nosed, slightly sulky face of his.

Words and phrases drifted back to Briggs as they rode, sentences filleted by the clatter of hooves, or topped and tailed by a turn of the speaker’s head.

‘...dealing in guns... some parts they still make better in Birmingham... Black Ball line, twenty-three days New York to Liverpool... steam? Across the Atlantic?’ And a laugh from Mr R. ‘That’ll be a few years yet, I guess.’