When the World Was Steady (21 page)

‘That’s a fine plan,’ exclaimed Kenneth Campbell. ‘Because I’d like to show you my boat.’

‘That’s very kind I’m sure,’ said Mrs Simpson, now on her feet. She barely reached Kenneth Campbell’s shoulder, and he was not a big man. ‘We can discuss it in the morning.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean
you,
’ he said. ‘I meant Virginia here. You’re welcome to see the boat in the morning, if you like, but if you don’t mind, I’ll take the little lady tonight.’

This was too much even for Virginia’s new self. ‘It’s a lovely thought for another time,’ she said in her firmest office voice, as if sacking a temporary appointment for the gravest of misdemeanours, ‘but just now we’re both very tired and I think we’ll retire for the evening.’

‘It’s a beautiful boat. Truly. Only a few miles up the road. C’mon.’ He grabbed at her arm.

Virginia let out a little cry as she broke free. ‘No! No thank you. Thank you for the drinks, it was very kind of you, but
no.
’

She and her mother hurried along the pier as fast as Mrs Simpson’s legs would allow, leaving Kenneth Campbell with the remains of his drink and with both of theirs, untouched.

‘What on earth, Virginia? What on earth? Haven’t got the sense you were born with.’ Mrs Simpson was mumbling furiously.

But Virginia, although shaken, felt strangely pleased. Kenneth Campbell had grabbed her arm, and she had broken free. Mrs Simpson had told her not to speak to him, and she had anyway. Although in one way it had all gone terribly wrong, in
another it had proved something. She was proud of herself, and when she looked out of the bedroom window at the bent silhouette of Kenneth Campbell (the light, now, was dimming somewhat), she realized that she liked him for his part in the scene. He had played it just right.

Virginia’s triumph didn’t last long. Melody Simpson, irate, had decided that she was not speaking to her daughter, and let this be known by bangings and crashings and, ultimately, great shaking of her bedcovers—all of which announced to Virginia the impregnability of her mother’s wrath and at the same time demanded her full attention. In this fury of noisy silence, Mrs Simpson snapped off the lamp, and both women courted sleep in the endless half-light, while Kenneth Campbell called out to the sky and threw three glasses one by one into the bay.

The weather on Skye changed very quickly indeed. When Melody Simpson awoke and saw the sun sparkling on the water, she felt a rush of pleasure: her mission would be so beautifully dispatched! It was a mission that seemed to be coalescing of its own accord: it was not born of any conscious reflection on Melody’s part. All it required was her certainty: she had long been convinced of the power of her will to direct the course of events, to control reality. What she saw in her mind’s eye were two beams of light, destined to cross: that of the necessary trip to Skye, and that of the impending but unknown moment of her death. Her mission was to locate their crossing, and Alt-na-Ross, her unthinking but unshakeable conviction assured her, was the place.

Beneath so clear a sky, the ancestral route and her place in it could only be thrown into the most perfect relief. Melody felt eager and, so far as her daughter was concerned, conciliatory.

But by the time they were poking at their rubbery fried eggs (served with a misplaced effort at sophistication by a pimpled youth
in a blue waiter’s jacket), Melody, Virginia and a gangly, drab Dutch couple with whom they shared the table were watching fat drops of rain against the picture window, and the bay had so blurred that it all but disappeared from view.

‘It is very difficult, the rain in Scotland,’ said the Dutchwoman, in a third, wilted attempt to make conversation.

‘Does it rain a lot in Holland?’ asked Virginia.

‘Oh yes, quite a bit,’ said the woman.

‘Not so very much,’ said the man.

‘Not as much as here?’ asked Virginia, with a thin laugh.

Mrs Simpson could not bring herself to look at their breakfast companions. They deflated her further. Virginia was having the same effect.

‘I think my feet have swollen,’ she said. ‘My shoes are too tight.’

‘Maybe you’d like a lie-down, after breakfast?’ said Virginia, in that public, maternal tone which indicates, to non-family members, that such complaints are a recurring nuisance which must be humoured.

‘No need to patronize. I shan’t be napping, thank you.’

The Dutch couple, who were returning to the mainland and driving up to Inverness, excused themselves, and Virginia pushed back her chair as if to get up.

‘Where might you be going then?’

‘We’ve got to go
somewhere
. I thought I’d brush my teeth before we go.’

‘Go where?’

‘This is a bed and breakfast, Mother. It is not an hotel. Whether we like it or not, whether it is pouring or sleeting or snowing outside, we are not invited to stay here for the day. It’s not
done.
’

Mrs Simpson knew that this was so, but decided to keep up her fight. ‘According to
whom
is it not done? We’ve paid for our
room, haven’t we?’

‘Mother, don’t make a scene.’

Mrs Simpson looked around the little room. The pimpled youth was hovering forlornly by the door, hoping they would go away. ‘I just don’t see your point,’ she said. ‘We are paying good money, and quite a bit of it, for that little box with a sea view. And if I choose to lounge around it all day in my underwear, then surely that’s my choice?’

‘Mother, please. It doesn’t even have a chair. There’s nowhere even to sit.’ Virginia was overwrought, Mrs Simpson realized suddenly. Caught up in her own schemes and disappointments, she had quite forgotten her daughter’s precarious state. Although a bit of bullying never did anyone any harm. It made clear the fact that she, Melody Simpson, did not consider her daughter an emotional invalid, a strategy which ought to give the woman some pluck, but never seemed to. ‘You are overwrought. But I suppose,’ she conceded, ‘that I would not want to be cooped up in that horrid little room without even a chair.’

A quarter of an hour later they relinquished their room to a very fat chambermaid (‘Chambermadam, more like,’ scoffed Mrs Simpson) and made their way, beneath a borrowed umbrella, to the Ford Fiesta, the passenger seat of which was completely sodden.

‘I think I’ll have to sit in the back,’ said Virginia, after pressing at the cushion and watching the water rise up out of it, around her fingers. ‘It’s too wet.’

They sat in silence for a time, wondering what to do. After a while Virginia coughed. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘This view of the pier is fine, but—’

‘Fine but what?’

‘We have to go somewhere.’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe there are some Celtic churches we could visit. I know
there are some very old places of worship on these islands.’

‘Isn’t that what your young friend is coming to do?’

‘Angelica? Oh no, she’s helping a young Indian fellow who lives downstairs from her to find his sister.’

‘Wouldn’t India be a better place to start?’

‘She eloped to Scotland. To Skye.’

‘Well I never. I suppose they were married in one of these ancient places of worship you refer to?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Churches are gloomy. Count me out. I’ll tell you what: if we can’t sit in
our
hotel, let’s find another hotel to sit in.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Let’s find a smart hotel where we can have lunch, and where we can sit in the lounge for a siesta.’

‘It may not rain all day.’

‘But I’m not dragging you out to Alt-na-Ross until the weather has improved. Not at least until tomorrow. We need to do something.’

‘We didn’t bring a guide.’

‘We can ask. Now let’s go before I get a crick in my neck from turning to talk to you. I’m most cheered at the prospect of a delicious lunch. Most cheered.’

Virginia was less than cheered. She didn’t see that there were any answers to be found in plush Scottish Tourist Board recommended hotels. She, like her mother, felt miserably cut adrift on this pier, at the end of the earth with nowhere to go. But unlike her mother, thought Virginia, she saw this as a chance to let go, to leap into the unknown—a quest which she fully expected would be, like the day, cold and wet and miserable. Virginia, because she was unafraid of what was ‘right’, was unafraid of misery. She always had been, which was why, perhaps, misery had so often found her. This willingness to be miserable was a quality she prided herself on, the quality in herself she considered
most saintly.

‘Fine, Mother,’ she said nonetheless. ‘Let’s find a comfortable place for lunch. But you absolutely must let me sit in the front seat, to navigate.’

So saying, she slipped out of the car and back in again, squelching her bony buttocks firmly into the cushioned swamp, while Mrs Simpson looked on, appalled. But there were elements of righteousness, thought the triumphant Virginia, that nobody could take away from her.

The man at the petrol station recommended a hotel a few miles west of Portree. ‘Fine food,’ he said. ‘Local specialities. Signposted off the main road just past the junction.’

‘I bet it’s run by his mother,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘Or by his sister, or something.’

‘We can’t go there yet,’ said Virginia. ‘It’s not even eleven o’clock.’

‘You’re so full of what we can’t do. It’s most irritating.’ The car was sitting at the petrol station and the windows were steamed up. ‘What would you suggest then?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Then
I
would suggest we take morning coffee at this hotel. Then, if they have a television lounge, we can watch television. If not, we can read. Then we can have lunch. Then we can see.’

‘And if we don’t like the hotel?’

‘Then we’re not chained to it, are we? Honestly, my dear, you are so lacking in initiative it makes me want to weep.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? What has that to do with anything?’

‘Oh come off it, Ginny, you’ve never had enough initiative to fill up a
day
on your own. You’ve slipped into dreary routines, into a dreary job, into the arms of this suburban God of yours, alongside crackpots and wimps and excitable housewives. And you’ve just stayed there. And now your sun is past its midpoint,
and where are you? Driving around Skye with your mother, for God’s sake, and unable to fill up a bloody morning. What have you
done
with yourself? It’s positively tragic.’ Mrs Simpson’s voice had risen throughout this speech. She couldn’t help it. Her irritation had, after all, proved too strong for her.

Virginia sat rigid, her back straight as a pole. She pulled her hands from beneath her, where they had served, like two planks, to raise her posterior slightly from the puddle. She set them in her lap, where they quivered, raw and creased, like two alien newborns. She wore no rings.

‘I’m not sure I need to answer that,’ she said in a voice like a record playing with dust on the needle. ‘All it makes clear is how very little idea you have of who I am. Do you not think—did it never occur to you—that all these places I seem to have slipped into so easily, that they might be choices? That perhaps I asked, perhaps I wondered what the point was? And He said’—she looked at her mother with a glare Mrs Simpson could only have described as hateful—‘and He said my purpose was to persevere.’

‘Oh Virginia—’

‘Don’t you think it’s difficult to be where I am?’

‘My dear, I’m so sorry. I’ve upset you—I—’

‘And possibly now even that isn’t clear to me. Things happen, Mother.’ Virginia spat this out. ‘Things happen and everything moves and it could be that right now I just don’t have any idea where He is.’

Mrs Simpson, gravely alarmed but above all embarrassed, tried to make light of this. ‘Maybe He’s at the Tarbish Hotel?’ she said, with her best approximation of a rinkly-tinkly laugh.

To her surprise, Virginia slumped in her seat as if punched, and said quietly, ‘Yes, maybe. Fine. Let’s go.’

The Tarbish Hotel was a hunting and fishing lodge by a river, a mile or so down a once-paved road. The Simpsons had been bouncing and juddering along the track, both silently convinced
that a nightmarish ruin awaited them at the end, when the car rounded a bend and they saw a stately Victorian edifice with long rectangular windows and a sweeping drive, set among brilliant close-cropped lawns bordered with flowers. Everything glistened in the wet and, unlike elsewhere, seemed to be more colourful and definite because of it. All around there was the muted, constant roar of the river, swollen by the rain, raging over rocks and threatening its pebbled banks.

Mrs Simpson pulled up under the portico and parked. There were a few other cars, all in the car-park to the side of the hotel, but her comment was, ‘I’m not going to be bothered with that.’

The lobby, vast and panelled, was deserted—something the Simpsons were coming to expect of this island—and its walls were decorated with old black-and-white photographs of the lodge: men in plus-fours and caps, with guns under their arms; anglers nestled proudly up to huge slimy fish; and a whole series depicting the river in flood, or close to it, showing the fury of which it was capable.

‘Your father would have loved this,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘It would have suited his gentlemanly dreams. It looks a fine hotel.’

‘I’ve no doubt the prices are fine, too,’ said Virginia, following her mother into a grand but reassuringly dowdy drawing-room, filled with clusters of overstuffed chintz armchairs. There were piles of magazines on all the tables and, on a small chest by the French windows, a stack of boxed games.

Mrs Simpson settled into a chair with a view of the gardens and rested her arms firmly on the armrests.

‘Should we let someone know we’re here?’

‘Stop hovering, Ginny. They’ll find us in good time, and meanwhile we can enjoy the adventure. Such a grand house, all to ourselves! If I were quicker on my pins, I’d go upstairs and have a look at the rooms. Why don’t
you
go, and report back to me? It might cheer you up.’

‘Certainly not. I’m going to find someone to get us some tea.’

‘Have a spirit of fun, child!’