Veil of Time (2 page)

I came to this holiday cottage at Dunadd because I used to come here from Glasgow as a child. In those days my seizures were mild and undiagnosed. The nuns at my school used to put me out in the corridor if I had “an episode,” as my mother used to call them. They told her I was just showing off. It took the doctors until I was in my teens to diagnose my epilepsy and then years more for them to bring the seizures under control—more or less.

The holiday cottage was different then, with a musty smell and small poky rooms. New owners knocked down walls, opened up the kitchen into the living room, and turned the windows into sliding glass doors. This is where I sit now with my crumpet and my cup of tea, hurling headlong towards the Day of Lobectomy. I came because I am scared of going forward, and time moves more slowly here. Sometimes at Dunadd time hardly seems to exist at all.

2

T
he man in the other cottage at Dunadd is Jim Galvin, a typical Highlander, a man of wry smile and few words, a man who had a wife, I understand—I don’t know why he still doesn’t. I’ve seen him at the museum in Kilmartin, a kind of relic himself. He nods to me and then looks away.

Whenever I’m on my way up Dunadd, when I creak through the stile by his garden, he looks up, one foot and his large hands on his spade, mulching in fertilizer by the smell of it. Behind him, roses and rhododendrons stand up tall in bushes or creep up the whitewash of his house. Outside my cottage door at Dunadd is an old trough with the remnants of summer pansies. Despite
the cold, a hopeful purple pansy has pushed its face through the wilted leaves towards the sun.

I came to Dunadd just before Halloween and have been content to be nodded at and not spoken to, even by the little old lady behind the counter in Kilmartin’s one tiny shop, which sells everything from cornflakes to Wellington boots. But Halloween by yourself feels a bit sad.

When I first arrived, I carved a turnip with a smile, lit him with a candle, and set him in my window. Still, after a week I would like to talk to someone apart from myself, and I think I should like to talk to Jim Galvin, the man on the hill. But I don’t know how to get around the digging and gardening and the nods that are supposed to tell you what you need to know. I don’t have skills for getting around people; if I had, I would have got around my husband.

I’m not looking for any man, let it be said, least of all some older Highland man who looks at me like I’m to be distrusted for coming from the city. I’m sure he already knows where I’m from. Information here travels on the small waves, like radio talk, and simply gets absorbed. There will have been tuts and sideways glances over me in the Kilmartin shop and even, I imagine, in the bigger town eight miles away. The annals of these people are always being added to.
In the year 2014 of the Common Era, a woman from the city of Glasgow took up residence at Dunadd. She arrived with books and papers and set a lit turnip in her window. To be continued . . .

I don’t even know how to think about a man anymore. Maybe I never did. Maybe that’s why Oliver Griggs was able to take me unawares. But I am only thirty-eight, not that bad looking, I think. I inherited a helpful gene that has so far kept grey from my hair. The color of old rust, Oliver used to say in the days when such things didn’t jar. Lately I’ve had to wear glasses for reading, but, if I wanted, I could still see well enough to add a little liner and shade to my eyes. My mother always said my eyes were my best asset, since my nose was a little broad to be pretty. Green eyes she said came from my great-aunt Ginny. She didn’t say where the epilepsy came from.

I have stacked my books against the wall of my bedroom. Lonely little bedroom, for all that I want to be by myself. I am ill at ease among my own sheets these days. I suppose I could use a man. If he could just come and go; if I didn’t have to look at him over the breakfast table and wonder what he was thinking. But it wouldn’t be Jim Galvin on the hill. I hope he hasn’t woken in the night and thought of me, the only female for miles.

Still, just for the sake of conversation I could make him a Halloween cake; take it over as a sort of neighborly offering, so it wouldn’t seem silly to be stuck in such a remote spot with one other human and only a nod going between the two of us. I used to make Halloween cakes for my children, who would lick their little fingers sticky with black icing and orange trim.

Jim Galvin doesn’t answer when I knock with one hand while balancing the cake on a plate in my other. The wind is brewing circles around me, making me think I should have tied my hair back into something more respectful for a neighborly visit. Along the way back home, when it starts to rain, a scrawny black kitten runs across the path in front of me. I stop and try to call it back, but since I can’t put the cake down on the road, I have to leave the cat in the downpour.

In the bathroom mirror, I gather my damp hair on top of my head so that I look like a feather duster, but at least it gets it out of the way, and it doesn’t look as if I’m going to be seeing anyone today. Except for the cat, which I see now sitting at my window, meowing so faintly against the rain that all I notice is her mouth opening. She comes running when I call for her at the door, and laps hungrily at the saucer of milk I set on the floor by the door. I don’t know if it’s a she, but if she belongs to no one I might keep her and name her Winnie, because it rhymes with skinny and with Great-Aunt Ginny.

She follows me into the kitchen, where I have set the uneaten cake. But cakes have a way of talking, and this one tells me it ought not to be left to go stale. I let the knife sink down into its swirls of chocolate and vanilla sponge and slither a thin slice onto a plate. I am so intent with my fork, separating the brown from the
yellow cake, and I am in any case so unused to anything in my window that I jump when Jim Galvin appears. In a witch’s hat.

I try to smile when I open the door to him.

“Sorry,” he says when I slide the window back. He chuckles. “Didn’t mean to frighten you.”

As he steps in, Winnie runs out and then back in again. As Jim tugs his Wellies off, she uses his free leg as a rubbing board.

I point to the feather duster on my head. “I didn’t mean to frighten you either.”

I think that’s a smile on his face. He says, “Right enough.”

I point to the now incomplete cake, feeling guilty. Guilt comes naturally to me. “Would you like a slice?”

“With a cup of tea,” he says, “that would be lovely.”

I flitter over to my half kitchen and press the switch down on the electric kettle so that it lights up purple and the element begins to roar as though it had grander designs for itself.

He says, “I see you’re taking in the farm animals.”

“She’s not yours, is she?” I ask.

He goes to set Winnie outside. “Not on your life.”

“Oh, just leave her,” I say. “It’s awfully windy.”

Jim smiles his wry smile, as though I must have a screw loose to think a cat can’t survive when it needs to. I do have a screw loose, more than one, I imagine. It would
be funny if that had been the diagnosis after all the years of tests: a screw loose. Oliver would no doubt concur.

Jim has obviously been brought up in an era when men had to be asked to sit in the presence of a female. I let him stand there uncomfortably for a moment, witch’s hat in hand, until the kettle clicks off.

He looks down awkwardly at his woolly socks. “Where are you from?”

I pour the steaming water into a mug over a tea bag. “Milk?”

“Please.”

“From Glasgow.”

He takes the tea, still waiting to be asked to sit. “You’re not far traveled, then.”

I gesture towards the oversized blue couch. He may not sit in the floral seat by the window. That is mine. Winnie follows him and stretches along the length of his thigh as though perhaps he really did like cats.

“Far enough,” I say, taking my own seat. “Have you lived in these parts all your life?”

“Apart from a stint in the merchant navy, aye,” he says. “It does me fine.”

I watch him take a sip of tea, trancelike in the way I get, studying people when I ought to be being polite. It’s part of living in a fog; you have to look hard to see where you’re going.

He says, “I saw you from the bathroom window. With the black cake.”

I jump up, guilty again. “I am sorry, I forgot. Would you like a slice?”

This time, I slide a wedge of the colorful cake onto a plate and hand it over. Back in my armchair, I watch him dab the errant crumbs with the end of his finger before he starts in on the slice.

He tells me his father ran a pig farm to the south of Dunadd. He says he built his house at Dunadd himself when he was still fit enough for levering stones out of the ground and heaving them up for a wall.

He puts his hand flat against the base of his spine. “Fair jiggered the back, though. Now I’m not good for much but digging in the soil.”

I say, “Your garden must be lovely in the spring.”

I want to ask about his wife, but something tells me it can’t be done. So I ask about his children. Two girls, he says, all grown up now with families of their own.

“How about you?”

I clear my throat. The conversation has turned and is heading my way. I can see he has noticed the wedding ring, something so far I haven’t been able to let go of.

“Two.”

Jim looks embarrassed. I’m sure he doesn’t know why, but I don’t have the kind of face that can rearrange emotions and pretend they’re not there.

“I suppose you must be separated,” he says. “Don’t worry, I won’t pry.”

I try to order my face. “Divorced. As good as.”

The question of the children hangs in the pause, so I resort to an expediency well honed by civilized humans: I change the subject.

“Do you know if any witches were burned at Dunadd?”

“Witches?” He shakes his head. “It was the church that burned witches. The fort was here before all that, during a time when your witches were women druids.
‘Ban-druidhe,’
they call them in the old language, the Gaelic. It was about as high an office as you could get.”

I hadn’t even thought of the fact that Christianity was slow and sporadic in its spread across Scotland, that witches once upon a time ruled the roost.

Jim shakes his head. “No, there were no witches burned here that I’m aware of, though it wasn’t that long ago the ministers used to build fires under the Standing Stones.”

Jim is turning out to be more interesting than I thought. “Why on earth?”

“To crack them.” Jim places a hand on his neck and pulls, as though rearranging his spine. “The stones come from thousands of years before any of this history we’re talking about, way back in heathen times. The church saw it all as devil worship. Still does.”

I point at Jim’s witch’s hat. “Don’t they think that’s devil worship, too?”

Jim laughs. “Aye, they probably do, but Halloween
is one of those church affairs that got stuck onto an old pagan festival. ‘All Holy Evening’ used to be the Celtic Samhain, the Day of the Dead, and let me tell you, it was not holy.” He chuckles. “At least not in the Christian sense.”

I am ashamed for having relegated this Highland man to an ignorance he clearly doesn’t deserve.

“I’ve seen you up at the museum,” I say. “Do you work there?”

“I help out two days a week. They don’t pay me because I’ve nothing better to do with my time and because I make up my own mind about things.”

He says he needs to be going, but I’m not sure I want him to. It looks as though he’ll be a good resource of local history. And he’s good company.

After Jim has left, I ring Graeme in Edinburgh. I wait with the phone against my ear, thinking of what to say. But it’s always some other breathless schoolboy grabbing the phone off the wall as he runs by.

“Graeme Griggs?” I ask hopefully.

He shouts off down the hall, “Griggs! Your mum.”

Whatever else they teach at boarding school, it is not telephone etiquette. I don’t know who this boy is, but he obviously knows a mother when he hears one. I am still wondering how I manage to convey this when Graeme’s voice takes a stab at me.

“Hi, Mum.”

“Hello, love. What are you up to?”

“Racing off to class.”

He’s always racing off. Oliver went through that phase, too. Never any time to talk, not until he sat me down one evening and gave me the break-up speech: too much of this and too much of that, too much time, too much worry, too little freedom to be who he was. My too-muches didn’t seem to enter into the equation. But just for the record: too much absence, too much blame, too much inability to cope in the end when Ellie went.

“Just wanted to say hello,” I say, “see how you’re doing.”

“It’s all right, Mum.”

“Yes, I know. Are you eating all right?”

He laughs. Thank God for his laughter. “Of course I am.”

I laugh, too, because it is all so formulaic, and I suppose that’s why the other boy could tell who I was. The mother with her questions. He probably has one of those, too.

I say, “I just made a Halloween cake.”

There’s a pause as the weight moves back in.