The Key of the Chest (12 page)

As Flora came down the stairs, the cairn terrier started his dance in the hall. Usually she quietened his mad excitement, but to-day she said, ‘Going for a walk?' At this, in one of his wild turns, he collided with the hat-stand. Walking-sticks and umbrellas rattled so fiercely that he lost his head altogether and barked with a rapid splitting sharpness.

The study door opened behind her. ‘Be quiet, Fraoch!' she commanded, turning the knob of the half-glass door, through which he shot as from a catapult. She closed the door carefully without looking round, and walked out.

She was dressed in brown tweed, brown brogues, and a plain brown felt hat with its brim tilted slightly over her right temple. The colour in her smooth face shone flower-fresh in the westering sun. The flush, indeed, seemed to have invaded her eyes, filling them for the moment with too deep a light.

She walked along the pathway that went through the trees directly to the west, and her body had the straightness and grace of a young tree. Her feet were long, like her hands, and she moved with a flowing healthy stride.

A smile of innocent cunning touched her features, for Fraoch had disappeared in the other direction. She was in

full sight now, as she knew, of the study window. Fraoch might rush on half a mile before discovering his mistake. This path that led on to the Ros had been avoided so long that his mistake was understandable. But she did not turn round. She would not turn round until she reached the stile and the manse was hidden.

She knew her father would be standing in his dark clothes looking out of the window. Perhaps standing back a little from the window. Perhaps not. Just as this path to the west had never been expressly forbidden, yet had been forbidde

She heard the rushing Fraoch behind her, saw him shoot past, whirl, come dashing up and whirl once more. She spoke to him and he barked. She kept speaking to him and he barked out of his delirious happiness. He tried the fence recklessly but could not manage it. Afraid he would hurt himself, she ran up. He could hardly wait to be caught. As she lifted him in her arms, he wildly licked her face though he was in a desperate hurry. His tongue was very wet.

‘Foo!' she said, twisting her face away. The two steps on each side of the stile were narrow slats on simple uprights. To save herself she had to let his wriggling body go before she had quite got her leg over. She grabbed wildly at the hand-post, caught it, was swung round off her balance, and fell with a choked cry on the other side.

Fraoch, who had landed on his feet, flattened his front legs, lowering his head over them, watchful for the next move in the game.

Flora sat up and looked about her and back at the trees which screened the house. Pain twisted her face. Slowly she rubbed her haunch bone. A fleck of blood was on her right wrist where it had grazed the fence. She knew there was nothing broken. As the stunning pain ebbed, she sat where she was, suddenly tired, not caring about getting up. Her eyes filled. She began to cry.

Fraoch's head, still on his paws, cocked sideways a little, then slowly lifted. His legs straightened. His tail wagged uncertainly and well down. Once more his head slewed, ears very erect, as he considered her out of his deep brown eyes. Then, nodding, lips curling back, needle-sharp teeth showing in a laugh, he advanced, his whole body twisting unnaturally, towards her knees.

Her left hand lay dead. He licked it. The hand rose and went round him.

‘It doesn't matter any more,' she said, ‘whether we go this way or not.'

She wept now heavily like a beaten and defeated child. ‘It doesn't matter,' she said.

Her words released the flood of tears and her sobs choked her. Fraoch tried for her face and she pushed him away. He began to whine in thin bat-like cries.

‘Nothing matters,' she said, and her long full body writhed slowly, the convulsion moving upward in a wave. ‘Oh,' she moaned, her mouth lifted at last. Her blinded face fell away from the sky. She stuck a knuckle in her mouth, began breathing heavily, choking the next uprush of feeling. Desperately resisting the impulse to throw herself face down on the grass, she staggered to her feet.

For a moment she stared wildly, as at something invisible approaching her, then, gulping and sniffing still, she began methodically putting herself right. There was no one about. There was no need to hurry.

Fraoch gave a small yelp, hardly a bark. She looked at him and a smile struggled into her face. She wiped her eyes and smoothed her cheeks; she wiped her nose and tucked her handkerchief away.

For a little while, as they continued their walk, Fraoch restricted his circling movements, returning every now and then to make sure that all was well, but at last he got a real scent and life found its true purpose in a race with the invisible.

Down on her left, towards the inner end of the wide bay, Flora saw the roofs of Ros Lodge among its plantation of pines. Far beyond and in the same direction lay Ardnarie with its croft houses and small coloured fields. Across the calm air came the rapid barking of a motor-cycle and the slow barking of two collie dogs.

The white launch lay to its red buoy in the unruffled blue-green water, which broke in lazy impacts on the shore. Someone was sitting on the slipway below the boathouse with its dark-green roof. The sun was sliding down the sky and already the sea far to the west was gathering the silver that presently would become a molten glitter.

Flora continued along the breast of the gentle slope. It was going to be a wonderful sunset. The long bands of marmoreal cloud above the western horizon were waiting in their dream for the glory that would descend upon them.

It was a land of sunsets, of a beauty that, dying, could be too much for what is born in loneliness. Yet she loved it, too. It brought in its aftermath the relief – which she now experienced after her storm of tears, a strange detached
relief in which the body lightened and in some way passed out, with its own light-headed gaiety, upon the air. But delicate, too delicate, and vulnerable, yet defiant, too. At any moment, under an uncontrollable waywardness of impulse, it could cry out or cover its head.

Those impulses, those wayward moods, that in the moment of their being were all life, all and everything!

She knew their surge too well, the formless beginning of the wave, its oncoming, that awful suspense of the faculties, the flight of reason, of control, the waiting, the terrible intolerable waiting.

Fraoch shot past with little urgent yelps, his back no higher than the heather. The purple had faded but not completely. She picked a sprig on which the florets were wide open, no longer reserved and bud-pointed but flat open in a starry eagerness, a radiant maturity, a giving-up.

She called Fraoch but he ignored her. No sooner had he rushed one scent to earth than he flushed another. Though normally an obedient dog, in his hunting he seemed actually not to hear the human voice, the cry of command. A thrashing made no difference. Once the scent and himself were joined, nothing could part them short of brute force. But he had no interest in wild game or sheep. Only in rabbits, which he continued to hunt in his sleep.

She so understood this law of his being, that it had become a bond between them. Sometimes she teased him about it, tickling his pads as he dreamt on the hearthrug and whispering, ‘Rabbits!' When he wakened up and found there were no rabbits, she accused herself: ‘What a shame!' and laughed and pushed away his more urgent demonstrations of affection.

The Lodge sank out of sight as the slope curved round upon the wide broken expanse of the Ros. Away on her right lay the inland mysterious region of Loch Geal, full of tales, and some said there was still a ghost. She herself had known its silence in a summer noon.

Mostly these tales had to do with lovers, though there was one, bitter with the harsh violence of murder and the evocation of the murderer's pale face in the night. Her father, in one of his interesting playful moods of long
ago, had tried to explain it all by saying that it was the place between the two coasts of the Ros where folk would go when they had secret things to tell or to do. Thus it had always seemed to her that before a girl would dare the terrors of the night in order to meet her lover here, she must have had upon her the hand of Fate. She would have moved under that curious compulsion which could still be felt in the ballad about her or the song. Even the voice has changed, and her simple acts and her words can be reduced no further and so have upon them the fatality of the end.

Flora did not reason thus about it. Or rather, even while her father had been speaking or the song was being sung, her reason produced its own profound logic in the form of images, visualizations. She saw reason happen, and it had bearing and dignity. This kind of reason permits no shadow of misunderstanding as it moves to its inevitable conclusion.

At the end of the Ros lay Charlie's cottage…

She visioned the inside of the cottage, still and disrupted. Charlie's room gaped in the silence. Things that he had left behind lay twisted.

Dougald might root about like an animal in a den, but the den was not listening to him. Charlie was gone.

She did not ask herself questions about Charlie's going. The why? crying in her mind dissolved about the figure of Charlie who was leaving the Ros, who was walking away into that far world, where neither eye nor cry could follow.

Passionately she had told herself that Charlie had never done the foul deed, the awful unthinkable act. But these were just words crying in her mind. Behind them were the human bodies, the bodies of men, and the minds of men, stalking through the possibility of all deeds and of all crimes. In that dim hinterland they moved and struck out of the compulsion of the fatal mood.

When she herself had disobeyed all the rules, she had not thought about crime. She knew she was doing wrong, she knew she would bring disgrace on herself and on her parents, but these were thoughts that merely tied the feet and the arms; and all the resources of her mind, with an unthinkable calm and cunning, had set about trying to
break clear. She had hoped, of course, that she would not be found out. She had made herself believe she wouldn't. Actually, in a way she didn't understand, she didn't care what happened – once she had broken through and reached Charlie.

How astonished the other girls had been! And some of them so clever, too, that in comparison she was stupid. They had looked upon her as simple, as one with so small an endowment of brains that she could hardly explain in words an obvious affair of history or geography. She had had to learn her school tasks by a process of continuous repetition. True, once the lesson had come alive in her mind, and her voice, which some of the girls so frankly admired, expressed it with assurance, then she was for that moment redeemed even in her teacher's opinion. In this fashion, she had struggled on. In the polite arts, like drawing, she had held her own, though again without facility and therefore in a characteristic manner. In the use of watercolours, for example, the art-mistress always said that her drawing was over-simplified and her use of colour altogether too primitive. She herself had known they were childish. Secretly she was very ashamed of them. But when she tried for shadings and clever perspectives, she merely smudged. So she stuck to her simple lines and her clean colours. And, at least, her colours always had been good. When class work was being inspected by an outside examiner, it was always a certainty that Flora's work, for whatever reason, would command most attention.

But her sole personal triumph among her fellow students in that Edinburgh girls' college, lay in the way she carried her two tweed suits on special occasions. When they asked who her tailor was, she laughed. When they asked where she got the fascinating tweed, she mentioned a remote country weaver. One was a soft green, with yellowish flecks in it when closely examined. The other, a dun brown. But her particular friend, Elizabeth Cameron, a dark stumpy girl, knew why Flora's clothes fitted her so perfectly, because she knew that had she herself been the tailor she would have been inspired by Flora's figure and style. It was
bliss for Elizabeth to walk with Flora along Princes Street at a certain hour on Saturday afternoon.

And on Princes Street she had first met Charlie. She had known him, of course, as a schoolboy at Cruime, but as he had been four years older, naturally there had been no communion between them. None. Charlie had been one of the ‘big boys', and little girls merely talked about their fights or other desperate doings. Charlie had been her particular hero. That was all.

And then there he was on Princes Street, and with him the places which she loved, the Ros, and Cruime, the paths, the little burns, the sea. And Charlie sees that she is all grown up.

Charlie is shy and very polite, so he talks and laughs quite a lot to show how much he is at his ease. They have their college manners, their Edinburgh
savoir-faire
. They are not yet near each other at all. They are laughing across whole wastes of the Ros. The old names are talismans in their speech. She completely forgets about Elizabeth, who is coming behind with Charlie's friend. They are walking along together. And she knows that Charlie, too, has this subtle thing called style. It is all about him, in his movement, in his manners. An easy grace of the body, a flowing on. They breasted Princes Street and felt its passing eyes upon them. Oh, it was exciting!

Fraoch appeared, panting, brown earth on his whiskers and forehead.

‘Where have you been, you rascal?' she asked.

But he made only a half-hearted attempt at laughing. There was clearly no need to propitiate her. ‘What a face!' she cried. She laughed. ‘Come here till I clean you.'

She looked about for a place to sit down. Her own world was now left behind, and the cool intimacy that inhabits lonely places was suddenly with her. Seated on a heather cushion, she called him, but instead of coming, he began ploughing a grassy verge with his head. Then flat on his stomach, tongue hanging out, he looked at her. She admitted he had improved his appearance. At her gentle words, he made all the motions of approach without, however, advancing more than a foot.