A Dark and Distant Shore (75 page)

It was just when everything was going beautifully on the estate that things had begun to go wrong with Magnus. First he had taken to complaining, in a kind of paternally reproving tone, about the money she was spending. She had said, ‘But, my dear, once the estate is thriving, it will return the outlay tenfold – a hundredfold!’ He didn’t understand, or he didn’t want to, and for a while she was puzzled by her own inability to convey to him the truth of what seemed to her a perfectly obvious business proposition. Intrigued, despite herself, she had begun to study him more minutely than she had ever studied anyone before.

Until then, she had been too preoccupied with the estate to pay much attention to him. She had made sure that he was comfortable, that nothing occurred to ruffle him, and that she herself was never less than charming and sympathetic in his company. That had been difficult sometimes, because he had an obsessive need to talk and a habit of repeating what he said, not once but several times, as if repetition gave weight to even the most commonplace remark. Since he didn’t even have Henry Phillpotts to talk to now – Henry having resigned precipitately as soon as he discovered who the third Mrs Telfer was to be – Vilia was his only audience, and the steady trickle of platitude soon began to affect her like some Chinese water torture. She had managed, however, to smile and appear to be listening, just as she had managed to show wifely concern whenever he found something to complain of, which was often. But since she had always known that he derived a positive pleasure from complaining, she had paid no real attention at first.

When, at last, she did begin to pay attention, she quickly discovered that he was suffering from resentment, strongly tinged with envy. She had been too efficient, and it hadn’t occurred to her to hide it – which had been a mistake, for Magnus, it seemed, felt that her talents had the effect of diminishing his. It mattered deeply to him that he should feel superior, and she was making it difficult for him. So, true to her promises – to herself, and to the shade of Mungo Telfer – she had set about becoming the kind of wife Magnus wanted. A little queasily, she had resorted to barefaced flattery when he was pleased with himself about something; she had become deprecating about her own achievements, and as unobtrusive as she knew how in everything to do with the estate. She had even begun asking his opinion about it – and
that
had qualified as self-sacrifice carried to its extreme limit. Magnus, who had never before troubled to ask what she was doing on the estate, now never stopped asking, so that she had to expend a great deal of time and energy and subtlety on manoeuvring him into believing that all her ideas had, in fact, originated with him.

It had been worth it, she supposed, for Magnus’s temper, once he felt he was being deferred to, improved considerably.

Except in bed. Vilia hadn’t expected to enjoy that, but neither had she expected that Magnus’s initial, prideful virility would so soon degenerate into impotence. Even at the beginning, she had found him uncongenial; not gross, but flabby, and heavy, and toilsome. She had tried not to let her feelings show, but within weeks it had all become rather embarrassing. Time after time, when he had worked his way conscientiously through the preliminaries that had the effect, not of arousing her but of boring her into the most complete apathy, he had finished by rolling away with a dissatisfied grunt and a petulant plea of ‘tiredness, or something’. She had made all the appropriately soothing remarks about it not being of any consequence, and that these things happened, but it was clear that he wasn’t used to them happening so often. She knew that he blamed her, and perhaps he was right. She would have liked to know how he performed with the girl who had succeeded Jinty in the village, but she couldn’t very well ask. It was a relief when he stopped coming to her bed. But it was also a kind of death.

It was strange, she sometimes thought, how living with Magnus had proved to be such a natural sequel to the years before their marriage, dulling emotions that had already lost their edge, sealing the last chinks in her armour against the world. For ever? She didn’t know. But there were no more agonies now, no more tears, no feelings stronger than acute irritation. She didn’t care about anything very deeply, except that she was back at Kinveil, and that Kinveil and its people were thriving. She still wished that it could belong genuinely, and legally, and for all time to come, to herself, not Magnus. Vain wish! But at least she herself was thriving, too; she couldn’t remember having felt so unequivocally healthy since she was a child. She didn’t feel forty-five, and still found it a little ridiculous that she was four times a grandmother.

Her glance veiled, she looked at Drew, silhouetted against the sea, with the sun rimming his head and bringing out bright highlights in the hair that had become so much darker than his brothers’. She couldn’t explain her uneasy sense of
déjà vu.
It wasn’t as if Drew was particularly like – him – except in build, and perhaps in something about the mouth and eyes. But she wished he would learn calm and tact. It couldn’t be good for him to lose his temper so readily. If he were as choleric as this at twenty-five, he’d be dead before he was fifty. Not like Theo, inhumanly even-tempered, the son who had always been closest to her, and probably knew more about her than she did about him. Though that was partly by her own choice, for she didn’t want to know the details of his life. She had enough problems. It was time he was married, she thought. That, surely, should solve everything.

And Gideon? Her over-civilized changeling, who had achieved at twenty-six a quite impressive detachment. She had once heard it said of someone that he would bleed for a nation, but wouldn’t pour a pot of tea over you if you were in flames at his feet. That was Gideon. A born spectator.

She smiled quizzically at him as the monkey-house re-embarked. ‘Satisfied?’

He smiled back. ‘My God, yes. I can’t believe it. It’s incredible!’

Vilia shuddered theatrically.

By the end of the year, Gideon, Elinor and Lizzie were installed in a charming little house in London, and by the end of the following year Gideon had begun to forget that he had ever been anything but a journalist.

He had been lucky. Armed with a folder of beautifully polished specimens of his prose, he had set out in search of commissions, expecting it to be a long haul. But the very first editor he approached had almost fallen on his neck. The
Times-Graphic
was a new weekly, liberally embellished with woodcuts and quite unblushingly modelled on the scarcely less new, but conspicuously successful,
Illustrated London News.
Fanshawe, the editor, had set the whole thing up rather quickly, and the first two issues had brought an exceedingly surly postbag, full of complaints about inaccurate reporting – especially on the industrial front – and slovenly English. So when Gideon walked in – a man who knew all about iron, and railroads, and the structure of industry; who wanted to be a reporter; and who was not only university-educated but literate, by God! – Fanshawe welcomed him with tears in his eyes.

It was a varied life, and Gideon loved it. Fast bowling versus slow at Lord’s. The Britannic Universal Alphabet for the Blind. The Thames tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping. Her Majesty’s first railway journey, with Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunei driving –
very
carefully. Recent railway disasters, which wasn’t such fun; Gideon hoped that Theo hadn’t taken out a subscription to the
Times-Graphic.
And Mr William Henson’s design for a steam-propelled ‘aerial carriage’ that would take people to China or India in no more than a day or two. Gideon wasn’t sure the idea was quite as exquisitely funny as everybody else seemed to think.

Then, in the spring of 1843, Fanshawe sent him up to Edinburgh, where the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was due to meet. Fanshawe didn’t know much about the Church of Scotland, except that it was a good deal more strait-laced than its English counterpart. But his large, red-veined nose was sensitive to more than the fumes of stale beer, and he had heard there were going to be ructions. What he wanted to know was –
interesting
ructions?

Gideon thought for a moment. ‘Yes, very possibly. The right to choose a minister for the parish has always belonged to the lairds and landowners, and there are a good many ministers of the kirk who hold their appointments because they’re distant cousins of the laird’s bailiff, or hard-up youngest sons of some cousin or other. That means they’re often English or Lowlanders.’

Fanshawe peered at Gideon over his spectacles. ‘So? Does it matter?’

‘It matters all right. From a Highlander’s point of view, it’s little short of blasphemy.’

‘What’ll happen, then?’

‘I think things have reached the stage where half the ministers at the Assembly will walk out. They’ll simply secede from the established church – and perhaps form a new one.’ He grinned. ‘It’s an old Scottish custom.’

‘Using what for money?’

‘That’s the question. The lairds will forbid them to use existing church buildings, and they’ll certainly be paid no stipend. They’ll probably have to preach in the open, and live on voluntary contributions from their congregations.’

‘Will they
have
congregations?’

‘Oh, yes. The people will follow them.’

Fanshawe’s nose twitched, and he emitted the long, squeaky, triple sniff that meant he had reached a decision. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘The Assembly meets on the eighteenth of May. After that, you can go on a tour of the parishes. What we need is some good, meaty stuff. Plenty of drama. Preachers in their wayside pulpits, Bible-reading in the rain, some of those lugubrious psalms of theirs floating up to heaven on the pure Highland air. It
is
pure, I suppose? Good. Let’s have the tears pouring down our readers’ cheeks over the sacrifices people will make to have the right to worship their God in any way they choose.’ He clapped his hands, making a crack like a pistol shot, and then rubbed them together, palm to palm, with the enthusiasm of a glutton sitting down to a banquet. ‘Just the thing, my boy! Just what the paper needs. We’ve been neglecting the Almighty of late!’

John Gunn, minister of the parishes of Kinveil and Glenbraddan, was one of the 451 clergymen who walked out of the established Church of Scotland to form the Free Presbyterian Church on the eighteenth of May, 1843.

Magnus was furious.

Gideon hadn’t been near Kinveil for two years, but it had struck him as a good idea to base his final article about the Disruption on its effects in the Highland parish he knew best. He arrived late one evening in October. It had been wet earlier, but now a three-quarters moon was riding high in a clear patch of sky, gleaming on the fallen leaves so that the ground looked like a rippling extension of the loch. Gusty winds shook and rustled the branches of the wild cherry trees and sent grey, fleecy, silver-edged clouds scudding across the sky. The castle might have seemed no more than a black and silver rock in the black and silver landscape if it had not been for the golden pinpricks of candlelight coming from the Long Gallery and the tower.

He found his mother almost at screaming point. ‘I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry to see you,’ she exclaimed, hugging him shakily. ‘You’re bound to set Magnus off again, and I don’t think I can bear it! He was just beginning to run out of steam. He only mentioned the Disruption five times yesterday, and Mr Gunn’s ingratitude four. It’s been quite awful!’

She was looking tired, and even in the flattering candlelight he could see the lines of strain about her mouth and the heaviness in her eyes. ‘As bad as that?’

She led him over to the fire and said, ‘Sit down and thaw. Betty will bring a tray up for you directly. Magnus has gone to bed – always the perfect host!’ She sighed. ‘“As bad as that?” Worse, far worse. He hasn’t stopped since May, and you know how he goes on!’

Gideon smiled. ‘He doesn’t like to let a subject drop, certainly. But that’s Magnus, isn’t it?’ For better or worse. Most people had irritating habits of one kind or another, and Magnus’s seemed to Gideon to be moderately harmless. He wouldn’t have chosen to live with his stepfather, of course, but Vilia must have known what she was letting herself in for. Gideon hoped the pair of them weren’t at war, because he had no intention of getting involved. ‘I take it he doesn’t approve of the Disruption?’

His mother looked at him. ‘Gideon, dear, are you perfectly well? You don’t have a fever, or anything?
What
a silly question! Of course he doesn’t approve of the Disruption. It might, though I doubt it, have been different if our own minister had stayed with the established kirk. Magnus is always prepared to be tolerant towards troublemakers who make
other
people’s lives difficult, and it would have given him a good deal of satisfaction for our neighbours to be in a pickle, and us not.’

‘That’s not a very kind thing to say.’

‘Kind!’ Vilia almost shrieked. ‘It’s all very well for you. You can afford to be indulgent and superior when you live six hundred miles away. But you’ll see! And don’t think you aren’t going to hear about it, too, at the greatest possible length. Especially since Magnus thinks it’s all my fault. It was
I
who persuaded him to give the appointment to Mr Gunn. He was far and away the best man – stern and saintly, you know the type. Just the kind of minister to appeal to our people. But
of course
he seceded and
of course
Magnus says that if he’d followed his own inclination and appointed young Ellbert – the dreariest man! –
he
wouldn’t have had the gumption to join the Free Kirk and
we
wouldn’t have a crisis on our hands.’

Gideon laughed, and his mother said,
‘It isn’t funny!
Especially as all our tenants and crofters are unequivocally on Gunn’s side. And so am I. But I haven’t argued with Magnus –
not once!
And I haven’t lost my temper. I have been sweet reasonableness incarnate, and it has been a very great strain.’