My Life as a Man (24 page)

A pair of parallel lines ran from top to bottom of the opposite bank, just missing a narrow patch of sand, and disappeared at the water’s edge. No more than scuff marks in the grass, they
were very faint. The next shower of rain would rub them away; the marks of a car’s tyres. If I’d sat to one side or the other, I might well not have seen them. When I stood, I lost
them; and turned instead to staring down into the water.

I could see nothing, but at the thought of going in I remembered how deep the pool had been and the soft, clutching mud that had let me go so reluctantly.

‘I’ve something to tell you.’

We stood close together just inside the door of the barn. I searched for words that wouldn’t come. Emotion, lack of sleep, physical weariness, muddled my thoughts. ‘We can’t be
too long,’ I said three or four times, and the need to hurry only made things harder. Somehow I got it said. My hoarse whisper claiming Norman and Bernard were dead carried no conviction,
though, even to my own ears. When I stumbled to an end, I saw not just disbelief in her face, but alarm and something like pity.

We went across the yard in silence.

As I sat down, I saw Eileen look behind me. In the same instant, August put his hands on my shoulders. I twisted round and looked up at him.

‘Look upon this Thy servant Harry,’ he intoned solemnly as he held me, ‘who is grievously vexed with the wiles of an unclean spirit, whom the old adversary, the ancient enemy
of the earth, encompasses with dread.’

The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

‘You should see the look on your face!’ Beate said to me.

Infected by her laughter, August began to chuckle. Sitting down opposite Eileen, he said, ‘I was telling Harry I once saw a priest doing an exorcism. That was part of it.’

‘Did it work?’ Eileen asked unsmilingly.

‘He had a pimple on his nose,’ August said, and he and Beate began laughing again.

It was like a party to which neither Eileen nor I had been invited.

August heaped his fork with potato and fat bacon and spoke with his mouth full. ‘I read up on that stuff in a book. You can find anything if you know where to look,’ he said.
‘I could have done Honours at the university, but I took an ordinary degree and got out.’

‘Do you regret that?’ Eileen asked.

He glanced at her and said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’

It was brutal and casual. At the opposite end of the table from Beate, I caught the glance she gave Eileen. Avid and expectant, her glance, as much as the man’s words, appalled me.

Eileen seemed utterly taken aback. When she spoke, however, her voice was calm and she held his gaze steadily. ‘Why would that be stupid?’

‘Books you find for yourself are what count. That’s how a man learns what matters.’

‘Do you believe that, too?’

Seeking an ally, she turned to Beate, who offered a smile, modest, almost tentative. I had left Eileen undefended. I had found the courage to tell her August might be a murderer, but the matter
of incest had stuck in my throat.

‘Did she tell you she was a reader? If you want the truth,’ he said, and I felt my heart contract, ‘that woman there – what’s the best way to put it? – you
could say she makes things up.’

‘We’ve all been guilty of that.’ Eileen looked from one to the other. Her tone was interested but almost casual, determinedly clinging to some notion of normality. ‘I
know I have. I suppose you have, too.’

He forked in another giant mouthful and, without taking his eyes from her, chewed it open-mouthed, with greedy relish. I couldn’t take my eyes from him. He had never eaten like that in
front of us. If before he had been putting on a show, he had taken off the mask. If he hadn’t, what point was he making? He got the last of it down before he spoke.

‘Have you ever heard of Havelock Ellis?’

‘What a strange name,’ Eileen said. It was as if, having nothing else, she was drawing on some reserve of social skills or habit.

‘Not at all. Nothing
foreign
about it,’ he said. ‘My foot is on my native heath, and my name is Havelock. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t a bloody fool. He
built a whole theory of female psychology on the fact his mother once peed in front of him when he was a small boy. They wore long skirts in those days and he heard it hissing down into the grass.
It never occurred to him she might have needed to pee so badly that it didn’t matter he was there. What do you think? I mean, as a
mother
.’

A strange thing happened then, for I looked at Eileen and knew her thoughts. At that moment, we were one flesh. The horrible part of it was that what I understood was that she had lost all her
scepticism. She knew that Bernard and Norman were dead.

‘I wasn’t a mother for very long,’ she said.

Brother and sister looked at me, then at one another, and grinned. It wasn’t a smile, but a grin, empty-hearted and stupid.

‘I had a daughter,’ Eileen said, ‘but she died.’

The grin faded, not at once but slowly, as if they were reluctant to let it go. If I had been stronger, I would have upended the table on them. But I wasn’t grown into my full strength and
he was stronger than most men. If I’d been wiser or better or braver, I might have found words to defend her. But he was the one who had read all the books.

‘Death is a thing you never get to the end of considering,’ he said. ‘It comes in so many ways. It’s always terrible in a child, but it can be peaceful in an old man. Not
that my father’s death was peaceful. We were all exhausted, and I made the women go to bed and I sat through the night with him. I watched as he fought for every breath, fought till the last
one he drew, and all my love for him made no difference.’ His eyes gleamed as if about to fill with tears. ‘I’ll tell you something silly. He said once that washing your hair too
often weakened it. Not even speaking to me, something I overheard, and thinking of it now I suppose he must have been joking. Yet it’s influenced me all my life – not that my
hair’s dirty, but certainly I don’t wash it often.’

‘I’m glad I wasn’t there when my father died,’ Eileen said, ‘but I didn’t love him.’

Her words took him by surprise, for he blinked and lost his thread.

‘Too soft-hearted,’ Beate said. She was staring from her end of the table, and for a moment I thought she was referring to me. ‘The morning of the day these two came here,
there was a pigeon the cat had caught. It had a wing torn off. But you couldn’t kill it. I told you it had to be done. But it was me that wrung its neck.’

‘Sometimes a thing hits you the wrong way,’ he said.

‘But you admit—’

‘Oh, it had to be done.’

‘And if a thing like that happened again?’

‘Something that had to be done?’

‘You wouldn’t leave it to me again?’

‘Next time,’ August said, ‘I’d take care of it.’

There was a silence no one filled. I ate with my eyes on my plate, putting the food in my mouth without tasting it. When the plates were empty, they were tidied away. Some nights, after the main
course there had been cheese and tea, but there was no offer of them tonight. He talked of the long day and how tired I looked; and so I was made the reason for Eileen having to go to bed,
separated again from me. Before she left, he said to her, ‘In the dark night of the soul it is always three in the morning. I read that somewhere. Death’s only one of the things that
can make us grieve.’

I don’t know if it was three o’clock, but it was dark when I wakened. I couldn’t believe I’d slept. I’d lain down in fear and dropped off the moment I closed my
eyes. I listened to myself panting, and wondered why my breath was coming so quickly. Then I heard it. Someone was coming down the stairs. As the footsteps came into the hall outside the open door,
I closed my eyes and lay still. For certain, someone stood over me, but it was only a change in the air that told me so. Then there was nothing for a moment and after that I heard a second person
coming down. The agonising pause of expectation ended with the distinctive grating sound of the front door being drawn open and afterwards pulled shut.

I got up and dressed, and went upstairs carrying my shoes in my hand. If we were to be saved, this was our chance. I didn’t think about that, I just knew that escape would be achieved
quickly or not at all.

When I opened the bedroom door, I heard her take a breath and understood that she must have been lying awake.

‘They’ve gone for a walk,’ I whispered.

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘If we’re ever to get away, we have to do it now.’

While she dressed, I told her my plan. Provided we could get out of the gate unseen, we could follow the road as I had done the day before. If the crofter and his wife were at home, we could
seek help. If they weren’t, we would try to cross the loch in the boat. It was a poor plan, but I could think of nothing else. It seemed to me our only chance.

Eileen, however, had been doing her own thinking in those hours she lay awake in the dark. I was faced with the result at once; the reasons for it I worked out later. She blamed herself that we
had stolen the case from her husband. If he had been killed for its contents, his death was her fault and there was no way in the world she would accept it being left with August. Moreover, she
knew the case was not under a rock by the pool, for I had told her so. That being so, the likeliest thing was for him to have concealed it in the house.

When, over my protests, she opened the door of their bedroom, we saw the smallest circle of light imaginable thrown on the floor from a little guttering candle acting as a night-light. One of
them – Beate, I suppose – must have had trouble sleeping without it.

There are different kinds of courage. When I whispered that I would go and keep guard, I sold it to myself as a sensible precaution. The truth was it took more nerve than I had to stay and watch
her search, and I had even less stomach for helping her.

When I peeped out into the yard, my heart sank. From the half-open door of the shed beside the barn, light spilled across the gateway like a barrier to block our escape.

I went back up the stairs and into the bedroom. I must have held my breath all the way, for I had to let the air sigh out of me before I could tell her, ‘They’re in the
shed.’

‘Must we go now?’ she asked.

‘If we can.’

The wardrobe doors were open and she had pulled out drawers and must have moved the bed to look under it, for the sheets had slid off and shaped a crouching in the candlelight. She shook her
head, accepting that we had to go, but held out her hands in despair to show me they were empty.

I had taken a step out of the doorway, when I realised what I had seen. I watched Eileen going down the stairs, and ached to follow her but turned back instead. As I went back into the room, I
hoped that I had been mistaken. But it was there above the wardrobe, the shadowy shape of the case’s handle where it leaned against the wall. I was only just able to see it; Eileen
wasn’t tall enough. It was right at the back, forcing me to get on tiptoe and stretch. An awkward clutch knocked it to the side. For a second, until it stuck, I thought it was going to fall
all the way. The wardrobe was solid, maybe too much for me to move on my own. I couldn’t see the handle now, only feel it, and I hadn’t enough leverage to pull it up from where it was
caught. In my terror, I wanted to give up. My heart thundered as if it would burst, but the heart is a tough muscle when you are young. I pulled over the little chest of drawers and scrambled up on
to it. Next moment I had the case and was back on the stairs, rushing to get out into the open air.

When I saw Eileen standing by the door of the shed beside the barn, I felt a surge of rage at the folly of it that was almost hatred for her. There is no rage like the rage of fear. Taking care
to keep out of the path of light that flowed from the open door, I crossed the yard to her, step by cautious step. Between the jamb and the door, there was a gap through which I peered into a space
lit by one lamp set down in the doorway, throwing most of its light out into the yard, and another hanging from a hook above a bench.

It was the interior in which I’d seen a bound thing struggling for life.

Afterwards, I could never be sure of what I glimpsed, whether or not there was a figure on the bench and whether another crouched over it. Eileen took me by the shoulder and pushed me aside. I
might have resisted or tried to draw her away, but let her hold me like that so that I could not see. The scar of narrow light drew itself like a blade down her face.

Out of the stillness and the darkness, I heard a whisper, intimate, anonymous, yet unmistakably the voice of August.

‘How will I start?’

‘Put me out of all this pain.’

‘A little breast meat,’ he said, ‘that’s always the sweetest.’

I had witnessed him kill a pig by cutting its throat, and I imagined the same knife in his hand, blade sharpened to an edge like a razor’s. I had no doubt she was about to die.

‘Do it. Stop tormenting me.’

‘Put your head back for me.’

At the pressure of Eileen’s hand on my shoulder, I almost screamed aloud. She pushed me ahead of her and we moved like that to the far end of the yard and half a dozen steps along the
river path before I made myself stop.

‘We can’t do this.’

‘Come
on
!’

‘He’s killing her.’

‘No, he’s not.’

‘I heard him.’

‘Heard? What did you hear? He’s lying on top of her and she’s in such a frenzy she’s lifting the weight of him in the air. Isn’t that what you heard?’