The Wicker Tree (25 page)

In the wake of the Queen's escape, they worked as the team they had always been. The Morrisons would hopefully never know of the disaster. The Queen, they fervently hoped, would make for the totally empty town and not know what to do. Beame meanwhile must be patched up as fast as possible. Daisy, wife of lusty Hector MacTavish, Tressock's grave digger and a caber thrower of note, was not a woman to blush or gag at the sight of Beame's mutilated paraphernalia. She at once assembled the time honoured specifics for wounds of this sort; a pack of ice to numb the pain and treat the swelling, raw kitchen salt and alum to staunch the bleeding, brandy and iodine as a disinfectant. A groaning, protesting but nevertheless obedient Beame lay on the kitchen table, his kilt lifted up to his chin, while she ministered with deft hands and soothing words. But Beame urged her on with frantic pleas for speed.

'Hurry! Hurry!' he shouted. 'She'll be making for the village…'

The alum had just been applied and he roared with pain. Then:

'That American bitch! Can you believe the Laird coulda chosen a woman that wicked as Queen?'

'Be still man, will you, you big baby you. She nearly severed one of your googerlies. They say one does just fine. Not that that will comfort anyone here in Tressock right now. This may sting a little…'

Daisy had just applied the iodine as liberally as she might have poured tarragon vinegar into a salad bowl. Beame howled like a dog.

'She'll be making for a phone, Daisy,' he croaked when he got his breath back. 'She'll need money. She's got no money. Where'll she go?'

'They always leave Jack in the village. I don't know why,' said Daisy. 'Mrs Morrison says she's afraid it would send him "right over the edge," whatever that means. He may have seen her.'

Beame was now struggling to stand up. Wincing with pain, he took a few exploratory steps. His face set into a look of intense concentration. His mind was struggling to overcome the matter of his personal pain. He thought at once of taking the Rolls. To drive it for his own purposes would anger Sir Lachlan, if he knew. But Beame was certain that the Laird would be angrier still if he let the Queen get away. He was on his way to the garages when Daisy called after him:

'Mr Beame! You'll no forget she's the Queen. You'll respect that, man. Promise?'

'Oh aye!' he called back. 'She'll be in mint condition for her coronation, I promise you that.'

Beth left the Police Station almost in despair. A notice in the window said that the station was closed and that in any emergency a collect telephone call could be made to the number 999. A glance up and down Main Street showed no public phone boxes. The mobile phone, she'd heard, had all but put the public phones out of business in Europe. So she just had to find some citizen who would let her use a phone. She spent ten minutes running from house to house, and trying even the inn, only to find them all empty of people.

She once again stood still and tried to think her way through what had happened, what was happening around her. Apart from the ravens, which had taken off to fly over the castle on some collective mission, the town of Tressock seemed to have been abandoned. Why? Various explanations occurred to her. Some kind of plague? Maybe something nuclear, since the plant was nearby?

Just as she was thinking this, she heard a human sound, faint at first but, as she walked towards it, loud enough to make out a lyric. It was a couple of male voices singing some old part song about a hippopotamus, accompanied on just a piano, no band, no group. Sounded early sixties, maybe even fifties. It had the unmistakable tone of old vinyl, 78 or maybe 33 rpm? She was amazed that such thoughts were going through her head at this time of total crisis. But the lyric was catchy. It almost made her smile.

A window was open in a Victorian semi-detached house. Lace curtains stirred in the breeze and somewhere inside an old, old gramophone was being played. Beth stopped to listen outside the house. Why did she hesitate, she wondered? Because, desperately though she needed help, she could no longer be sure who was really a friend. The matter was decided for her, however, because suddenly the door opened and there stood the guy she'd seen with the black bird. Only now there was no bird to be seen, which was a relief because Beth was a little frightened of birds, up close at any rate.

'Hi!' she said, trying to sound vaguely normal. 'You're the guy who feeds the birds, right?'

Jack was smiling at her and started taking off his Harris tweed jacket. She gave him the best smile she could manage back, considering her teeth were chattering and her whole being felt suffused with damp cold as she shivered under the skimpy terry towel robe, her sore, bare feet a mottled reddish blue. He handed her the jacket. It was a gesture for which she felt deeply grateful. It also seemed a good omen that, weird though he was, he might be helpful with her other problems. He responded – oh dear Lord, why couldn't he be normal? – in sort of nonsense talk – it could have been verse:

'Am an attendant lord, one that will do,

To swell a progress, start a scene or two

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use…'

Beth interrupted him as politely as she could. But a car was definitely coming from the direction of the castle. There was just no time left.

'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'I just have no idea what you're saying. I just gotta get to a phone. That crazy butler attacked me with a syringe. How can I reach the cops – the police? You do have police?'

Jack seemed to turn anxious at the word police, but he continued from where he had been interrupted:

'Politic, cautious and meticulous

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse:

At times indeed, almost ridiculous

– almost, at times, the Fool.'

The car was visible now at the very end of the road. Beth could bear this non-dialogue no longer. She pushed past a visibly disconcerted Jack, into the living room of his house.

'I am sorry,' she said, as she pushed past. 'But I guess you speak – well, different from what I'm used to. You've gotta have a phone?'

She mimed the use of a telephone for him. Jack fell silent. But she spied it at once, a bakelite rotary phone, coloured green and looking quite as antique as everything else in the room, as if each object had been acquired in a Salvation Army bring and buy sale.

While Beth struggled with the rotary dialling, the first she'd ever seen outside a movie, Jack stood motionless beside his gramophone, watching the front door. The Flanders and Swan vinyl had finished the 'Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud' song and started another number on the same album: 'The Cannibal Song'

A few lines in, the song was forcefully terminated, with maximum aggression, by Beame, who had entered the house like a human tornado. Beth had just dialled 999, been asked to press button A, which didn't seem to exist, and turned to appeal to Jack for help, when she saw Mr Beame, and felt herself seized and thrown over his shoulder.

'So what is this shite song you've been playing, you miserable little prick?' she heard him saying to Jack. Whereupon, she could see him smashing the gramophone with a few hard kicks. Having stamped on the remains, he carried her out of the house. From the moment he touched her she screamed with all the power of her awesome lungs, trained over years to create a huge volume of sound, and this lasted until the car doors slammed outside, the motor revved, and Beame sped away.

Jack remained motionless, staring at the wreckage of his gramophone for a full minute. It is hard to visualise how despair and anger, or joy, registered in Jack's brain. Possibly they were simply negative and positive thoughts. If that was so, an exceedingly negative thought now seized him and he went to the phone.

He looked at the rotary telephone for a moment, like a swimmer contemplating a dive, singing a song to himself, as if to keep his courage up, in a distracted voice:

'I put a nickel in the telephone

To dial my baby's number

Got a buzz, buzz, buzz, busy line…'

Ceasing suddenly to sing this old ditty, he took a deep breath and dialled 0 for operator. When a voice saying: 'Operator! How can I help you?' came on he managed to croak more than say: 'Police! Help! Police.' The operator immediately put him through to the Constabulary HQ in Kelso. He somehow repeated the message and something about his strange voice made the Woman Police Constable, who received the call, take it seriously. 'Stay right where you are, sir,' she said, checking his number on her computer. 'We'll be there. Your address is 67 Main Street, Tressock, right?' There was a long pause, then she heard: 'Right.'

Having taken this step, which he knew meant enormous danger for himself, Jack wondered what he would say to the police. How would he put it? It would not do to simply point to his smashed property, write the guilty party's name on a piece of paper and intone:

'My purpose all sublime

Is to make the punishment fit the crime

The punishment fit the crime
.'

THE KITCHENS AT Tressock Castle were huge. Once part of the dungeons, they still seemed a somewhat sinister place, as if the hooks that hung from the ceiling might once have had a more gruesome load than the hams that now hung from them. A quantity of recently dead creatures did indeed suspend in festoons from other hooks; rabbits, hares, pigeons, haunches of venison, pigs' trotters and calves' tongues.

The great cast-iron cooking ranges, radiating dry heat, were fed these days by Nuada's electricity, where once a gang of little maids and kitchen boys toiled round the clock feeding them with coke and anthracite.

Right now, an array of saucepans single, saucepans double, pans actually dedicated to making sauces, fish kettles, stew pots and frying pans, steamed, bubbled, and sizzled while Daisy, calm and totally in command of her great task of preparing the May Day feast, darted back and forth from her preparing table with chopped ingredients, condiments, spices, cream, butter, olive oil and the eviscerations of fruit and household bats (less pungent than garlic, flavourful and excellent for the liver), a secret ingredient learnt at her late mother's side when she was being taught to ignore every stricture and almost every recipe contained in Mrs Beeton's famous cookery book.

The Lady Morrison of the day, Sir Lachlan's mother, fondly believed that Claudette, Daisy's French mother, was a reliable disciple of Mrs B., the guide and friend of every British housewife. How to fire a footman? Mrs B. had the formula. What to feed a wet nurse? Mrs B.'s advice on this, as on everything else, was as infallible for British females as pronouncements by the Pope in Rome for Catholics. Claudette, however, had considered Mrs Beeton a barbarian and the late Lady Morrison another. She had acted accordingly. Her daughter now did the same. In this way, although Delia might censure her for her 'little weakness for alcohol,' as she saw it, Daisy always took comfort in the fact that she, at least, knew and controlled what the Morrisons were eating – and if that opera buff, Sir Lachlan, had known that
Die Fledermaus
was on the menu he would have been very surprised.

Every now and then Daisy would leave the range and go and play her somewhat reluctant part in the preparation of the Queen for her coronation. Upon a wheeled steel and guttered trestle (the kind to be seen in the morgues of forensic scientists) Beth was laid out. Daisy removed Beth's terry towel robe from her limp, senseless, but still breathing form, leaving her lying on her stomach. Taking a pastry bowl, she poured some olive oil into it and, using a basting brush, stated to paint Beth's back. She peered curiously at the big band-aid on Beth's bottom. An odd place for a wound like that. Perhaps that Steve wasn't as saintly as he seemed…

Beame, meanwhile, was carefully assembling the tools of his taxidermist's trade, which he placed at the end of the trestle, at Beth's feet. Amongst other things were a large bottle of formaldehyde, assorted knives and small surgeon's saws, a bowl containing swabs and an ominous looking pump contraption, as well as quite a lot of Polyfilla.

It was at the moment when Daisy felt that enough of an already stressful day had passed without her having had a little drink, and she was just getting the port decanter out of the butler's cupboard, that Mary Hillier's car could be heard pulling up outside the tradesman's entrance. Daisy put the stopper back in the decanter and hid it behind a soup tureen as her guest entered her kitchen.

Mary was carrying the Queen's May Day dress, on a hanger, very carefully in front of her. The puffed sleeves were stuffed with tissue paper. Separate bags carried shoes and tights, and the crowning garland Beth would wear.

'Good morning Daisy! Morning Mr Beame! Lovely day for it, isn't it?'

'Mary, that is as bonny a Coronation dress as you've ever made. Oh, Mr Beame!' cried Daisy, speaking quite sincerely, 'Will you just look at that dress – isn't that gorgeous?'

'Och aye,' agreed Beame, glancing up at it. 'Beautiful. Not that she deserves it!'

'Mr Beame!' chorused Daisy and Mary Hillier, both deeply shocked at this sacrilege.

'Forget I said that!' said Beame, looking genuinely contrite.

'Help yourself to some tea, Mary. That pot's fresh,' said Daisy, indicating a large brown teapot and some kitchen mugs. 'Poor Mr Beame and I have had a spot of bother with the Queen this morning, but as you can see it's alright now.'

Mary Hillier had gone to hang the clothes on the customary hooks where every year they waited for Mr Beame's work to be completed.

Now, looking at Beth for the first time since she'd arrived, Mary Hillier examined her closely.

'Beth really inspired everybody this year,' she said. 'Such a very lovely girl, and that beautiful voice – what a gift for the gods that is! I've always wanted to ask, why the oil? It's not as if you're going to cook her.'

Beame gave her one of his gaunt smiles.

'No, certainly not,' he said 'It just makes the skin more flexible. It peels better. I could use the analogy of a peach…'

Beame was about to launch into a little lecture on his craft, which Daisy had heard many times before. Enough to make her cut him short.