The Wicker Tree (16 page)

'I believe everything that is in the Bible, Lolly. That's Holy Writ. But, I am sorry, this is just hot water.'

'People don't just bathe in it, Steve. They drink it. Some people say drinking it makes them horny as hell. Others say simply that it makes wishes come true.'

Lolly had now plunged into the river and risen to the surface, breasting the ripples of the lightly turbulent water, gleaming with its salinity.

'C'mon in Steve! It'll make you feel literally out of this world. Are you thinking about Beth? I can let you into a secret. Lachlan wants her to be the May Queen. How would you like to be the Laddie?'

Beth was definitely on Steve's mind. Beth who wasn't there and need never know. He found himself getting out of his clothes as if impelled to do so. As if it was simply the thing to do. Like rubbing noses with the Inuit or smashing your glasses into the fireplace after toasts if you were – who did that – he'd seen it in a vodka commercial – a Russian? And this, in Steve's current case, without the benefit of alcohol.

'If they'd let me ride Prince – hey, I'd be their Laddie in a New York minute.'

He was developing a million goose bumps and it made him shiver.

'Lolly! Are we insane? This isn't Texas. It is cooooold.'

'Not in here it isn't,' she said.

Steve stared at her for a full minute, as if enchanted. Then he plunged in, surfacing a few feet away from her. He stared again, but this time it was no longer a disbelieving stare but a devouring one. She opened her arms to him and they came together.

His embrace was both passionate and urgent. The tiny scintilla of doubt that this was real never entirely left his mind, but she found ways to channel his passion and calm his frantic urgency.

'No hurry, Steve,' she whispered. 'The Goddess is with us. She'll make it last and last so you'll always remember it – till your dying day.'

Enclosing him in her arms, her hair floating around his face, she seemed to engulf him so that they drifted in the misty water like languorous flotsam.

A Tressock fisherman, a retired clockmaker, was walking along the path on the far side from where Steve now lay, with Lolly kneeling beside him, both of them still naked, still steaming, although the day itself was warming as the sun shone fitfully from a mackerel sky. They were hazy figures, seen across the steamy water. He blessed them as he blessed everyone who had shared in the Goddess's bounty. He hoped she would now give him a trout or two in the cooler water just up stream.

Steve, his head comfortably cradled on a tussock, saw Lolly's smiling face and wild, wind-blown hair so close to his that he thought 'now is the moment to remember every mole and freckle, every pore, every golden mote in her hazel eyes, the gap in her strong white teeth. What a face! What a woman! What a place!'

'You were right,' he said. 'I did think it might go on for ever. I guess I hoped it would.'

He had the odd feeling that Lolly too was committing his face to memory, as one might a map.

'I always hope for something I know even the Goddess Sulis cannot give me – a child,' she said. 'And yet I cannot help hoping. If it ever happens – I know it will have been here.'

'My God, a child! Did you say "always"?' Steve had absorbed so many shocks in such a short time that this 'always' seemed to introduce a reality he had not even considered before. How dumb was that, cowboy? He looked hard at Lolly, wishing it not to be so.

'Oh yes, Steve,' she said, her smiling eyes still smiling. 'I am what the Goddess wants me to be. All things to all men.'

The old clockmaker had settled at a point on the river bank where he had noticed another fisherman, a great grey-blue heron, often worked the river. It was a nice quiet place. Peaceful. But that peace was suddenly shattered by shouts from the direction of the loving couple. The man was rampaging about the place as he hurriedly dressed. The woman remained naked, calmly watching him and laughing a wonderful chuckling laugh. Lolly of course. It had to be Lolly.

'All things to all men! Yeah, we got a word for that back in Texas. And it aint purty,' the young man had raised his voice.

The clockmaker shook his head.
All things to all men
– a student of Scottish literature, it made him think of Robert Louis Stevenson: 'You will find some of these expressions rise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and decorative…' But the clockmaker was not a cynic. He had known Lolly since her girlhood. She had become much more than the sum of her lovely parts. He was just congratulating himself for this happy thought when there was a tug at his line. It was a splendid pike and now his poor wife was condemned to making
quenelles de brochet
, a delicious dish but an awesome one to prepare on account of the numerous bones. Happily, the fisherman's wife was French, a cousin of Daisy up at the castle. She would welcome the challenge, he thought fondly.

Meanwhile, Steve and Lolly rode back to Tressock, each silently thinking their own private thoughts. As they entered the town, she put her hand out towards him and, after a moment's hesitation, he rested the reins in the crook of his arm and took her hand and squeezed it. They smiled at each other, two tired people at the end of an unusual journey.

It was when he gently retrieved his hand that he remembered his silver ring. It was gone.

IN THE ECONOMY of Scotland nuclear power is a contentious commodity, as it is in many other nations, big and small. The French have managed to rely heavily upon it and, so far, no disaster has befallen them. In the United States, with its many earthquake zones and its prevailing fear of terror, nuclear has not fared well. The lands of the old Soviet Union have had their disasters and are likely to have more. How Nuada came to be built, using private and public finance, is a complex story in itself, much of it concerned with the fluctuating market in other competitive forms of fuel. That it survived, it owes to past governments not wishing to put all their power-generating eggs in one basket, and to the fact that a hostile Green movement and an ambivalent press had so far found no glaring fault with it.

The presiding genius of Nuada was Sir Lachlan – it was built on his land; lobbied for by him at the local and United Kingdom ministerial levels. He had been unique among the chairmen of atomic plants in Britain in that he had displayed an evangelising zeal for the technology. No one had come nearer to describing the power of the atom as a kind of revelation of the god-head than this Borders laird. Even a much publicised accident at the plant a few years ago had been brilliantly handled with a PR operation personally directed by Lachlan.

As Steve was experiencing several different kinds of bliss with Lolly in the Sulis pool, the Nuada plant hummed with its usual activity. White-coated scientists monitored and measured and noted carefully on their networked hand computers. Engineers in hard hats roamed amongst the giant turbines, inspecting and testing. Bureaucrats and clerks, secretaries and analysts, anchored for the most part to their desktops, communicated with each other and the outside world by telephone, fax, e-mail and even the Royal Mail. Somewhere, few of these people could have told you exactly where, electricity was leaving Nuada for the national grid.

In the huge panelled chairman's suite that morning, a shirt-sleeved Lachlan was manning an overhead projector, clicking from bar chart to graph to carefully retouched photograph to optimistic conclusions written in several eye-catching colours, all part of his PowerPoint presentation. Sitting beside him at the board room table was the portly figure of Murdoch Craigie, area secretary of the Transport and Universal Workers Union, an official who had been born and bred in Tressock. Although his speeches at regional Trades Union congresses were noted for being savagely against the exploiting classes, treacherous landowners and other vermin, he had always known that, in an emergency such as this, his place was at Sir Lachlan's side, ready to repel boarders, as he put it.

The emergency sat on the other side of the board room table in the shape of two journalists from different publications, who seemed to think that there was a cover up going on at Nuada of a story that could close the power station if exploited in the right way. In addition to a telephone book-sized report that had been placed before each of them, two drams of Nuada Directors' eight year old malt whisky had been poured and the decanter unstoppered in case of need. Both their glasses were ready to be refilled.

'What you have before you,' said Lachlan, 'is the report on the work we have done, since the accident, to make the environment completely secure. You will naturally want to study this at your leisure – but I have asked you here to rebut some absolutely unfounded reports in the press… yes, Mr Tarrant?'

Magnus Tarrant, a rumpled journalist with a purple drinker's face had raised a chewed pencil in the air to attract Lachlan's attention.

'I think you may be referring to my story in last week's
Echo
,' he said. 'Thank you for the pretty pictures we just saw. The word is still that you haven't even begun to solve the nuclear pollution problem – people in Tressock are still not able to drink the tap water. Can you deny that?'

'Completely,' Lachlan was calm and precise in his answer. 'You're twice as likely to die of urban pollution in Glasgow or Edinburgh as we are here. The accident was regrettable – due to human error – and it took place ten long years ago.'

'My question, Sir Lachlan, was: Are the people of Tressock drinking the water out of their taps again?'

'Let me answer that for you, Sir Lachlan,' rumbled Murdoch. 'I speak as the Convenor of the TUWU here. Most people who work here are our members and live in Tressock. They clean their teeth in water. They wash their bairns' bottoms in it. They DRINK beer and whisky. But everyone drinks water too. Although I have to say that, like you, Magnus, I am no addicted to it.'

Meanwhile, Lachlan had used the overhead projector to put a largescale map of the Tressock area on to the screen. The River Sulis could be seen running from west to east across the map. The topography was clearly marked. The river split and then rejoined itself, forming King's Island. It then wound through fields and woods till it reached Tressock, passing under a bridge on the main street, and then on, through more fields and woods, till it reached the Nuada Nuclear Power Plant. Beyond that, it joined the River Tweed for a short journey before it reached its mouth on the North Sea.

'The Sulis, life blood of our valley,' Lachlan's hand traced the progress of the river. 'As you can see our plant is downstream from Tressock.'

'He's telling you that water tends to run downhill,' interjected Murdoch. 'Sorry but these technicalities tend to get missed in the press.'

Magnus Tarrant, who was in the act of pouring himself some more of the Directors' malt, glared malevolently at Murdoch.

'The river helps in our cooling process at Nuada,' continued Lachlan. 'It was of course polluted by the accident, but only for twenty-four hours. We cleaned up the Sulis years ago.'

Lachlan looked around as if almost expecting applause, so sweetly reasonable had his explanation been. But his other journalist guest, one Patricia Gow, now leaned forward. In demeanour she was as calm and direct as Magnus had been combative. Her face, slightly raddled now, had once been beautiful, and she spoke in an attractive, persuasive voice.

'Well I quite understand you protesting my piece in the
Ecologist
; naught for your comfort there,' she said. 'However, will you not agree that nuclear power stations have had their day? Too expensive to build? Too costly to run? Too dangerous to live nearby?'

This lit an evangelical gleam in Lachlan's eyes.

'Patricia,' he said. 'The greatest power station in our galaxy, the Sun, is dangerous. It can create deserts, melt ice caps, give you cancer. We've lived with it since, according to Darwin, our ancestors crawled out of the primeval slime. It also brings life to almost everything on which it shines. Respect and understanding of these forces of nature is the key to controlling them. Nuclear is just one of them, but it is in so many ways key.'

'Can I quote you on your slimy ancestors?' asked Magnus.

'Our slimy ancestors,' corrected Lachlan with a smile.

Everyone joined in the laughter. The adversarial tension of the meeting had been broken. Lachlan and Murdoch knew they now lived to fight another day, but that such stories rarely went completely away.

A little later, Lachlan drove Murdoch and himself back to Tressock in his bull-nosed Bentley. They were in a festive mood.

'That Patricia said we're the best double act since Laurel and Hardy,' laughed Murdoch. 'After the accident, the press went on about the danger of a nuclear catastrophe. The lowlands laid waste. A no-go area. Now, suddenly, they start worrying about the water. Funny they never do their homework. A river is a river – but the water table is another thing. One flows. The other is static.'

'Journalists, thank heaven, have the attention span of wet hens,' said Lachlan. 'And that's when they're sober. Sick babies they might notice. Even deformed babies. But virtually no babies – no comment. So far… Hullo?'

Lachlan's mobile phone had rung. It was Delia to say that she was sitting in their bedroom by the window, where she had a clear view of the stables. Orlando, the policeman, was walking towards the stables where Lolly was grooming Prince and talking to Anthea.

'That Orlando worries me,' Delia said. 'He's been seen questioning Jack. He's on his way to the tack room. Lolly will cope, I know. But I wish you'd get back as soon as possible.'

'Nothing wrong with his going to see Lolly,' said Lachlan. 'She's giving him the treatment.'

'I remember when she gave me the treatment,' said Murdoch, smiling at the memory. 'I walked like a duck for a week.'

THE STABLE BLOCK at Tressock Castle was a long, two-storey, redbrick building close to the estate's great gates and at the town end of the Willies Walk. Lolly's quite sizeable apartment was on the upper floor, along with some studio flats for the other stable hands. Apart from Lachlan and Delia's own horses, a number of steeplechase brood mares were stabled there along with their foals.