Bury Her Deep (35 page)

‘You’re getting as bad as Hugh,’ I told him. ‘It’s hardly a classic character reference, darling.’

In fact, the modern farming method angle was inclined to make me suspect him more. I had come across someone in the past who knew rather too much about flora and fauna than was normal and he had certainly been what my sons called, with great poetic economy, ‘a stinker’. And did not some of these advanced types bury hollow horns full of sheep’s wool in the corners of their crop fields, and pay a great deal of attention to the waxing and waning of the moon?

As the November moon waxed fatter and fatter in the tingling cold sky, I readied myself as best I could to face both my public and the showdown Alec and I had planned for afterwards. He was to open with his demonstration of painting and I was to follow up after tea, leaving him time to get to Luckenheart Farm and watch for the emergence of Jockie Christie before the ladies ventured home.

On the night, our plan – or my plan, rather, for Alec was keener on the interception than on the protection of the matrons – was all the better served by the fact that there were a few familiar faces missing from the schoolroom. Mrs Hemingborough was nowhere to be seen, clearly happy to risk missing any of the chicken feather poultices that her last month’s audience might have brought along for her inspection. Mrs Palmer, Mrs Torrance and Mrs McAdam too were notable by their absence.

‘Strange,’ said Lorna. ‘Mrs McAdam never said anything this afternoon.’

‘You saw her today?’ I asked and Lorna looked troubled.

‘She was upstairs in the manse again,’ said Lorna. ‘Doing whatever it is they’re doing. Oh, I hope it’s not a frock, Mrs Gilver,’ said Lorna. ‘The one Nicolette and Vashti have got me is such a dream of a thing. It would crush me not to wear it.’

‘What a write-up, my darling,’ said a drawling voice from behind us and Nicolette Howie bent down and clashed her hot, painted cheek against Lorna’s and then mine. ‘I’m very glad you like it.’

‘Rather thin on the ground tonight, aren’t we?’ said Vashti, looking around the room.

‘We are,’ said Nicolette, following her gaze. ‘That’s to say, the senior members have resisted the programme but there are plenty of girls. Looking rather well turned out too.’ She winked at me.

‘I’m sorry to tell you, Dandy,’ said Vashti, ‘that I rather suspect they are budding artists more than domestic economists in the making, don’t you?’ I smiled ruefully, for I agreed.

At that moment Alec arrived, carrying an enormous canvas that he only just managed to fit under his arm and hold onto with the very tips of his fingers. He was wearing the smock, which produced a terrific hoot from Niccy Howie (the first of many), and the cavalry boots, with bright red woollen stockings pulled up and folded over, and he had a few paintbrushes stuck behind each ear. Miss Lindsay fussed around getting him set up in a favourable spot and spreading waxed paper for him to chuck his rags onto in between wiping his brushes. Miss McCallum sat lowering from under her sandy brows, obviously deploring the skittish air that the presence of a personable young man had brought to the proceedings.

I had been unable to speak to Alec alone since my arrival back at Luckenlaw that afternoon, and now he was trying to communicate something to me here in this crowded room. He rubbed ostentatiously at one eye, opening it and closing it repeatedly – or in other words, winking – and then he put a hand up to his head and quite deliberately pulled out one of his hairs and put it into his smock pocket.

‘I think the poor lamb’s nervous,’ said Lorna, clearly itching to get up and go to comfort him. I thought he would be even more nervous to have heard himself called a poor lamb.

Then Miss Lindsay clapped her hands for order and the November meeting of the Luckenlaw SWRI was under way. First came a prayer for Armistice Day; the motto was: Punctuality is the politeness of princes – chosen rather pointedly after a pair of girls had come in at the last gasp, giggling; the competition was a moth-repeller in worked wool; and the social half-hour was to be filled with an entertainment chosen by  . . .

‘Our new face, tonight and for one night only,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘Captain Watson, what’s your pleasure? Singing, dancing, stories or parlour games?’

‘Is anyone here familiar with Chinese ropes?’ said Alec. There was a bemused silence and then a few murmurs of assent.

‘Never heard of them,’ said Vashti Howie. ‘What are they?’

‘It’s a kind of indoor skipping,’ said Alec, ‘done with rubber bands knotted together to make a frame. It’s something that’s easy to show and very hard to describe  . . . a cross between hopscotch and cat’s cradle, but with a rhythm to it. I have brought a quantity of bands along with me’ – here he dug into a pocket and pulled out a spilling handful of what looked like very thin brown worms – ‘and if I can prevail upon someone with nimble fingers to tie them, I should like the social half-hour to be skipping tonight. Along with all the wonderful old skipping songs, of course.’

‘Well,’ said Miss Lindsay, ‘I call that a grand idea. It’s many a long year since any of us have had a good go of skipping and I look forward to the fun. Now Captain Watson, if you’re ready.’

He was. ‘Tonight,’ he began in a thrillingly dramatic voice, quite different from the one he had used to suggest the skipping, ‘I am going to attempt to show you yourselves
à l’ art sauvage
, by painting in the barbarous style, the wild, the savage style, so eminently suited to the roiling skies of Fife, and the elemental phallic landscape of the Lucken Law.’

Had he really just said that word at the Rural? The Howies and I gaped at one another but either the rest of the meeting were so bowled over by the whole that the details escaped them or they did not know its meaning, for their faces remained as blankly uncomprehending and nervously polite as before.

He sloshed around a great many more long words and a lot of paint too, but I was unable to pay attention to anything outside me and sat instead enveloped in a nauseous fog of foreboding over what was coming after tea. At last, Lorna shook my arm gently and I realised that Alec was in his seat and that Miss Lindsay was by the urn swilling hot water around in the enormous tin teapot.

The canvas Alec had been at work upon was dominated by a huge triangle in every shade of grey – the law – with a threatening dark red sky balanced on top of it like a boater on a bollard, leaving some naked canvas in between.

‘It’s  . . . um  . . .’ said Lorna.

‘It’s twaddle,’ said Nicolette Howie and Lorna’s cheeks blossomed with two small pom-poms of bright pink.

‘Oh Nic,’ said Vashti. ‘Niccy spent precisely six weeks living in a studio in London, while Johnny was working in his father’s bank – just renting the studio, mind, not actually painting – and ever since she’s thought she could be curator of the Louvre. Actually, I quite like it.’

I swallowed a mouthful of tea and felt it fall to the cold pit of my stomach and lie there. What had I decided? Rehearse the first sentence until it is word-perfect and you will have your audience with you. What was my first sentence? ‘In these difficult times  . . .’ or was it ‘Despite these peaceful times  . . .’ or had I decided to go with ‘In times of peace and times of war  . . .’? Oh God. Miss McCallum was collecting the cups. Miss Lindsay was smiling at me, but then  . . .

‘I wonder if I might trespass upon your patience just a little more,’ said Alec’s voice. He stood up and resumed his position by his canvas. ‘I have painted the mighty law, and I have painted the turbulent sky, but in between, around the hill, is the most important element of all  . . . the beating heart of the land. The farms and cottages, the lanes and fields, the men and women who make this place sublime. If Mrs Gilver would be so gracious as to concede the floor a little longer, I could complete my expedition into the savage soul of Luckenlaw.’

Despite the scowls of Miss McCallum and the rolled eyes of some of the others there was no polite way to stop him. The Howies were entertained of course and Lorna was delighted, but even her heart could not have swelled with adoration like mine. On and on and on he droned, saving me.

He was still ladling on paint and blathering about inner space and the echo of the Lucken Law in the warm wombs of its daughters, when Miss Lindsay started to shift in her seat and consult her fob watch surreptitiously. Alec, spying her, immediately began to wind up.

‘Art!’ he declaimed. ‘In the looking, in the seeing, and in the knowing. Here I will leave you. You will be here singing the old songs and dancing the ancient dances and I shall go out into the darkness and know that life pulses inside as we know the beating of our own blood in our bellies.’

There was a humming silence after this, as might well be expected. Lorna Tait broke it.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you staying for the social?’

Vashti and Nicolette brayed like donkeys and a few of the others, fit to burst with pent-up hysteria from the long words and the sepulchral voice and the red socks over the tops of the bootlegs, gave up the fight and shook with laughter.

‘I am not offended,’ said Alec, his eyes dancing. ‘Laughter is the chorus of our humanity. Laughter holds away the pressing darkness and welcomes the stranger. Laughter is the spirit dancing.’ And he threw his scarf over one shoulder, picked up his bag of paints and all of his brushes and swept, magnificently, out.

The meeting was helpless for a good five minutes after he had gone; even Lorna Tait, feeling herself to have been given permission, indulged in a quiet chuckle or two.

‘Aye, you can laugh,’ said a young woman from across the room, ‘but I’ve been sittin’ here knottin’ elastics for his blessed skippin’ all night and he’s no’ even stayed to see it.’ She held up a long, brown, kinked chain of rubber bands and the laughter grew louder again.

‘Oh, let’s do it anyway,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘I hear those children at their skipping every day and I never get to join them.’

There were more titters at that, for who amongst us had not wondered when we were children whether the adults, especially the teachers, were really people like we were or whether they were just the boring grown-ups they appeared to be.

Willing hands cleared the chairs from the centre of the room and willing volunteers initiated the beginners into the mysteries of the Chinese ropes. When we had all gained a little proficiency, the singing began: the couple from the golden city, she of the black stockings with the wart on her nose, even (horribly) the thirteen grave robbers knocking at the door.

‘Or how about this one?’ said a plump young woman. ‘I mind of this one from when I was at the school.’ She stepped onto the taut bands strung between the ankles of the two ladies who were taking their turn at providing the structure, and began to hop and jump, pinging the elastic and stepping into the spaces.

‘Spring a lock o’ bonny maidie,’ she sang. Others picked it up and joined in.

‘Summer lock o’ wedded lady.

Harvest lock o’ baby’s mammy.

Who will be my true love?

Three times twist me,

All that I wish me.

First time he kissed me

He will be my true love.’

Before my eyes, the vision swam again of Alec plucking a hair from his head and putting it into his pocket, winking at me.

‘I’ve never heard that one before,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded steady. ‘Is it a Fife speciality?’

‘Heavens no,’ said Nicolette Howie. ‘That’s a well-known little song.’

She might have been half right: it might have been well known but it was far more than a little song. It was what the stranger was doing. It was the answer. The locks of three girls, three wives and three matrons, in order, in season. It was the recipe for a  . . . there was no other word for it  . . . a spell. I remembered all the women telling me how he had plucked and pinched, ripped off their hats, nipped at their heads. He was pulling their hair out; some of them had even said as much. He was gathering hair, on the proper night and in the required order to make, if the song was to be believed, a love potion.

Jockie Christie. Sorely in need of a wife and unable to attract one. I shuddered. He had fooled me that night in the jail cell with his forlorn look and his ruddy cheeks – there was nothing fresh and ordinary about him at all. On the contrary, he was desperate, pathetic and rather ruthless. Even Molly Tweed, who had no idea who the stranger was, had hesitated before exonerating him; perhaps she had intuited some truth about him that I had missed. I felt a twinge of conscience about Molly. Certainly, she had made up the story of her attack but perhaps Christie had been laying siege to her instead of the other way around and perhaps if I had been subjected to his attentions for five years – I remembered the sickly feeling I had got at his farm and shivered – I should have ended up imagining things too.

And did Mr Tait know what Christie was up to? I had been sure he knew something. Had his patience finally run out when faced with this pitiful and furtive little scheme? I nodded to myself. Mr Tait had decided to stop smiling at the old ways for once, and had turned to me to help him. Accordingly, as the rubber bands were rolled into a ball and the chairs were rearranged, I piped up.

‘Miss Lindsay, I hope you won’t mind me butting in like this. I’d like to say something.’

‘Oh, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘How can we refuse you anything now? Your wonderful talk that you’ve worked so hard on and you never got a chance to give it. We’re going to have to ask you to wait another month, I’m afraid. What a bitter disappointment for us all!’

‘Oh quite, quite,’ I said, thinking that I could certainly summon the strength to bear it.

‘But how can we help you?’ Miss Lindsay continued. ‘Ask anything.’

‘How many of you here tonight are mothers?’ I asked. A good few of them raised their hands uncertainly. ‘I wonder then, if I might prevail upon you to stay behind, just a moment, and listen to something I have to say. And I do apologise. Miss Lindsay – I know it’s your schoolroom, but I really must ask the others to step outside. What I have to say is not  . . . for all ears, I hope you understand me.’