Aunt Phemie stood by the station exit watching the people come off the train. It was the busiest train of the day, having travelled through the night from London to Perth, and now in the late forenoon a frowsy pallor hung about the released bodies and stared from the faces behind the carriage windows. It was a long train and, dodging the trundling trolleys, passengers converged on the exit where the ticket collector busily held them up. Single men, city clothes, commercial travellers—any one of them, she realised with dismay, might be Ranald. A couple of men looked at her questing eyes sharply. Then she saw him (tall, dark, distinguished—Nan had said), saw his eyes on her. She went forward. “You are Ranald Surrey?”
“And you are Aunt Phemie.”
He used her name with the cool ease that saved unnecessary fuss or bother. His handshake was friendly but brief.
“How is Nan?”
“Coming round, thank goodness.”
“That’s good.”
Aunt Phemie felt flustered as if she had been preparing herself to encounter warmth and anxiety, but here was the ticket collector. Ranald gave up his half ticket and followed her out into the station square where her battered twelve-year-old car was waiting. He had no luggage beyond the blue kitbag slung over a shoulder. As they got into the car she said, “I hope you didn’t mind my wiring for you, but—she was really very bad—and—well—it was difficult. She spoke about you so much.”
“What happened?”
Aunt Phemie got the engine going and threaded her way through the cars and buses. “It’s difficult to know exactly,” she said. “She was getting on well—and then she had this relapse.”
“But she is pulling round again?”
“Yes, I think so.” Aunt Phemie did not normally feel nervous or excited and this worried her. She cut in before a lorry too sharply and was aware that he knew it though he showed nothing. Indeed he was looking at the church, the hotels, the street traffic, the shops, observing her county town with a sort of casual thoroughness.
“Farming mostly, I suppose?” he said:
“Yes. Quite a busy place, especially on market days.”
“Do you do much of the business yourself?” He looked at her in an interested way.
She kept her eyes front. “Well, a bit. I have a very good grieve.”
“The man in charge? That makes a difference. So long,” he added with an understanding humour, “as he doesn’t feel himself too much in charge.” He observed the bills in front of the cinema.
“Oh, we manage,” she replied, her tone firming. For she had had precisely that difficulty with the grieve, who was over fifty, married, with six of a family.
“I’m sure you do,” he answered her at once.
“What makes you think so?”
“Just looking at you.”
She felt her face grow hot, for somehow he had got the compliment over very easily.
“You’ll be tired after travelling all night.”
“A bit,” he answered, “but I don’t mind. Did you send for me on your own?”
“Yes. Nan doesn’t know you’re coming. I hope you don’t mind?”
“She must have been pretty bad, then. Nerves?”
“Yes—with temperature complications.”
“Is she in bed?”
“Yes. The doctor said I should get a nurse—we have to watch night and day—but I was afraid of that, of a white stranger, especially at night. We got a woman from the cottages whom Nan knows. She is with her now.”
“The local medical?”
“Yes … Do you think we should have got a specialist?”
He thought for a moment. “Who could you get here, anyway?”
“We could always send for someone. But—just whom?”
“Uhm.”
“The only one I could think of was you.”
He remained thoughtful.
“I felt you must know a lot—apart from anything personal. Things must have happened which I don’t understand,” said Aunt Phemie in a rush. “There’s something troubling her which I can’t get at. At least I think there is. I don’t know.” And after only a momentary pause, she added, “I took it for granted you were fond of her. That’s why I sent for you.”
“It was difficult for me to get away, and you may be sure I wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t wanted to.” He spoke in an easy tone without emphasis, yet with a curious assurance of strength. She knew he was no more than twenty-eight. If he was really this cool casual sort of fish (she thought abruptly), however selfreliant, it would be terrible. She did not know where she was with him, hardly knew what to do. Before turning off the main road, she stopped the car.
“We had better think this out, think what we are going to do,” she said with an earnestness she tried to subdue.
“Yes. It would be better. You did not tell her I was coming because you thought it might upset her?”
“I thought it might excite her,” Aunt Phemie corrected him. “It would certainly have kept her from sleeping unless we dosed her too heavily. She would have been a wreck to-day.” As he did not reply at once, she asked, “Do you think you should see her now?”
“I think I might. If you like, we needn’t say that you wired for me. I have in fact got some business for Newcastle pushed forward, and have come here for three days before going there. If you can have me for so long?”
“Of course!” she said. “That’s fine. That will explain your appearance perfectly.” She nodded, suddenly relieved. “We can go in quietly and I can go up and prepare her.”
“Good.”
Aunt Phemie hesitated. “She has been writing you long letters. I mean you will know all about what she’s been doing or thinking here?”
“Well, she did write me one long letter, about thistledown and a man who appeared—one of her hallucinatory experiences. I suggested she should not give in to that sort of thing and it had a restraining effect. Her letters after that were more normal, like her old self. I thought she was coming along all right.”
“So she was,” said Aunt Phemie, “then something happened. Did she mention anything about an old man being murdered in a cottage?” She felt his eyes on her.
“Yes. But not much about it. Why?”
“Well, naturally it upset her. You know how such a thing upsets us all in the country.”
“I suppose so,” he said thoughtfully. “So you think that’s the root cause of the relapse?”
Should she tell him of Adam? Or leave him to find out from Nan? Her mind went into a whirl. “I think so,” she said, “only I don’t know everything. Perhaps it would be better if you found out from Nan herself. It’s so difficult to know what’s real—or—not.”
“You would rather I found out from Nan; say to her that you told me nothing?”
He had read her mind. “To begin with, at least, I think that might be better,” she answered with an apparently thoughtful nod. “Don’t you?”
“I think so,” he agreed, and it was as if having concluded that bit of business they could now go on. She could not move.
“You mentioned a—a specialist. That’s worried me. I have felt the responsibility. I am very fond of Nan. Did you mean some mental specialist?”
“A psychoanalyst?”
“Well—yes.”
“I just wondered what you thought about it. I suppose I wondered if you thought there was anything wrong with the brain itself. I don’t. And I’m glad you don’t. As for the psychoanalyst——” He gave a small shrug and smiled. “She could have one of them later—but I doubt if she will.”
“Don’t you believe in them?”
“That’s a big subject.”
She was nettled now. “I know it is. But if there is something that’s worrying Nan, something deep, that she can’t quite get or formulate—well, from such simple knowledge of Freudian analysis as I possess, I think it at least possible that she might be helped to free her mind. Or do you not believe in Freud?”
He took out a packet of cigarettes. “Have one?”
She took one, saying she didn’t smoke very often. As he was lighting his own, she saw he looked tired and very pale and was on the point of suggesting they should drive on when he blew out a chestful of smoke. The bones in his face were finely shaped, the nose almost Greek; the eyebrows finely arched, the eyes hazel behind the dark lashes.
“About Freud,” he said, with the lazy air of one habitually used to speaking. “It’s a big subject. He’s done some marvellous analytical, clinical work. But when it comes to his theories about how the whole psyche works, then I don’t quite get him. All the pretty myths he makes up about the Oedipus complex and the Id and the Censor and so on, are to me just—the old bourgeois myths, not science. Ways of explaining the mind, as the Book of Genesis explains the world.” He blew a stream of smoke with a half thoughtful, half-amused expression. “He looks upon the individual as something that sort of grew miraculously—altogether apart from the social conditions which really have made him. To ignore man’s social-economic environment in trying to understand him is like ignoring his stomach when his digestion goes wrong.”
“And you’re sure you’re not being prejudiced by your own political theories—or myths?”
He laughed, quietly stretching his athletic body, and looked at her with what seemed a new interest. “That’s very neat,” he allowed. “It’s a matter, however, of fact, of scientifically finding a cause. We would have to argue that. But about Nan.” He smoked for a moment. “I’ll tell you quite frankly why I encouraged her to come here. As a result of what she went through in London, she had a nervous breakdown. As a result of that, to protect herself, she went back in her mind to earlier, happier conditions. She saw visions of things from long ago, her father working in a field, the security of her mother, attractive bits of scenery, and so on. She was escaping from a world with which she could not cope—a hellish world admittedly—and going back to an earlier security. This is what Freud very properly called an infantile regression. You’ll accept that?”
“Well?”
“But do you?”
“Nan insists she was not escaping.”
“And you agree?” He looked at her.
“We could argue that.”
“You really think it is arguable? For Nan has mentioned your work with children. I should respect your opinion.”
“I am not too sure about it. Nan is herself so conscious of the accusation of escaping that … didn’t she mention it, question you?”
“She did—in no uncertain terms. But then her resistance, the very fierceness of it, surely gives her away. It’s what you expect in an analysis when you touch the real or sore point. Isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. But I am not satisfied. The one thing such work as I did made clear to me was the tremendous difference between children—and between grown-ups, too, for that matter. However, we could go into that again. Just now I should like to know why you thought she should come here—in the condition you believed her to be in.”
Aunt Phemie’s tone was at last cool and firm. She poked some strands of pale gold hair up under the brim of her brown felt hat, brushed and blew cigarette ash from her green jumper and the lapel of a faded-green tweed jacket. She threw what remained of her cigarette out of the window. A sharpening mood from her Continental travel days had come back upon her.
“I thought she should come here,” Ranald explained, “because I reasoned it out that if she did find her early environment she might once again get put together; become well, and so be able to go on. Simply my own idea, for psychoanalysis is—well, an analysis, not a therapy. It doesn’t help Nan much for an analyst to show her the regressive nature of her own particular solution of her trouble if at the same time he cannot provide her with a better solution. And psychoanalysis can’t—at least so far as I know. That’s where it lets so many down. Or perhaps you don’t think so.”
“I think I catch your drift,” said Aunt Phemie.
He smiled and his eyes flickered on her for a moment, but she wasn’t looking at him. “It is complicated, too, when the neurotic’s own solution is known to the neurotic—and repudiated as a neurotic solution. That seems perhaps a bit involved,” he allowed.
“You mean Nan knows the argument.”
“Exactly. And she’s very intelligent. So it’s no good going on arguing with her. She is convinced she knows all about it—and can tell you a few things over and above! Yet the fact is she’s ill, and the neurotic nature of her illness seems only too clear. The only thing you can do then is help her out, or try to.”
“But then, by sending her here aren’t you in fact confirming her in her escape, her infantile regression?”
“Not altogether, because we re-establish the economic aspect—the actual environment in which at one time she did find health. After all, it seems simple to me that her nerves went because of the condition of things outside her. She didn’t become ill because of some internal mysterious affection of the ego. The world broke her. From that cause, certain mental effects followed.”
“You like logic.”
“It’s a hobby of mine.”
“Why did you send her here and not to her own home?”
“I didn’t do all the sending. But I strongly supported her notion of coming here.”
“Why?”
“Because she believed in you.”
“There doesn’t seem much left for me to say, does there?” said Aunt Phemie with a certain sparkle in her eyes, as she pressed the starting button.
As they drove into the cartshed, Aunt Phemie said, “The doctor is here.” She parked her car in a stall alongside two uptilted carts, opened her door and got out smartly. By the time Ranald had his kitbag slung to his shoulder, she was halfway to the entrance. At the entrance, she paused, glanced back at him and went on. When he got outside, she was already greeting the doctor who drew away from his car to meet her. Ranald went on slowly, prepared to stroll by, but she called him and introduced Dr. Baxter, an active man with a full face and dark-grey hair. His small eyes rested assessingly on Ranald for a moment even as he smiled, then he turned again to Aunt Phemie.
“Mr. Surrey is a particular friend of Nan’s,” she explained.
“Is that so?” acknowledged the doctor politely, glancing again at Ranald.
“How is she this morning?” Aunt Phemie’s tone was quiet and searching.
“Well——” The doctor’s reddish brows puckered. “There’s no temperature, but there’s a distinct exhaustion, depression. You’ll have to watch her pretty carefully. I feel fairly sure now there is nothing—physiologically wrong.”
“That’s good, that’s so much.” Aunt Phemie nodded in a businesslike way. There was a pause. “Do you think Mr. Surrey might help to—help her?”
“Well——” The doctor straightened himself, glanced away, looked at Ranald, and then at his own hand as it pulled his waistcoat down. He was distinctly well dressed. “I was going to warn you again against any form of excitement. Too sudden or strong an excitement might be definitely dangerous; would be. I had hoped you would be able to keep her quiet, rest her thoroughly, for at least a couple of days. By the way, you’ll have to get them to stop that dog howling.”
“What dog?” Asked Aunt Phemie.
The doctor looked at her. “I gather a dog was howling over at the cottages during the night.”
“Was there?” Aunt Phemie appeared to think a moment. “I’ll talk to the grieve about it.”
“It might be as well,” agreed the doctor. “I rather fancy,” he added cheerfully, “that it was a real dog.” He looked at Ranald. “You have travelled all night?”
“Yes.”
“I think a rest might do you good, too. Frankly, I would rather she was not unduly excited, not anyway until we see how she is to-morrow. You understand this is a difficult case, and all I am quite sure of is that she needs rest and quiet.”
“I understand,” said Ranald. “Did she have a high temperature?”
“Yes, it ran dangerously high.”
“With no apparent cause?”
“You knew her in London?”
“Yes.”
“Did anything of the kind occur there?”
“It did. The doctor put it down to an all-night exposure. It disappeared, without leaving any traces—except that she was shattered a bit.”
The doctor nodded thoughtfully, as though inwardly now more confident. “Well, I’ll have a look in to-morrow. Otherwise,” and he smiled to Aunt Phemie, “keep on as you are doing.” He drove off.
“We’ll go in the back way,” said Aunt Phemie. At the side gate she paused, her hand on the latch. “We’ll go quietly into the kitchen, if you don’t mind. Perhaps, on the whole, we might follow the doctor’s advice. What do you think?”
“All right,” agreed Ranald in his casual way. “Not that I think they know a great deal about it.”
“Who—the doctor?”
“Well, he is obviously fumbling, hoping for the best.”
“What else can any of us do?”
Her sharpened tone brought the smile to his face. “I am not blaming him.”
He closed the gate and followed her by the foot of the vegetable garden into the kitchen. “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” she said quietly. “Then we’ll have lunch in about an hour. Would that be all right?” The kitchen faced north and in its faint gloom the pallor of his face was very distinct.
“Absolutely,” he said, “and please don’t trouble about me. I’ll make myself a cup if you want to see Nan. Actually I don’t feel hungry.”
“You didn’t sleep last night?” She shoved the murmuring kettle over the fire in the range.
“The carriage was packed, including an ailing child. The proletariat travelled.” His tone was light and easy.
She moved quickly and soon had tea, with bread and scones, on the kitchen table. “Help yourself—and I’ll go up to relieve Mrs. Fraser. Your train was very late.” She went out, closing the door noiselessly behind her.
When he had drunk all the tea in the pot, he sat in the basket chair by the fire. His head drooped before the warmth and his eyes closed. There were whispering voices by the back door, then Aunt Phemie came in. He looked up.
“Would you like to rest?” she asked.
“I am feeling a bit drowsy,” he admitted.
“Your bed is all ready. Would you come now?” She looked at his feet. “Have you slippers?”
“No, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll take off my shoes here.”
She thought for a moment. “Wait.” She went out, drew aside a curtain from a wall shelf by the pantry, and, from a heap of old footwear, fished out a pair of brown leather slippers. Her dead husband’s. She stood with them in her hand, looking out of the side window at an old apple tree between the vegetable garden and the drying green. The apples were small but red, and suddenly she saw them very distinctly. In the kitchen she said, “Try these.” They fitted him well enough. “We’ll go quietly.” She led the way, indicated the bathroom with a gesture, and introduced him to his room. He nodded his thanks as she silently closed the door.
Before Nan’s room, which was three doors away, she listened, then went softly down the stairs and into the kitchen, closing the door behind her as in an act of privacy. Then she breathed.
She walked slowly to the window, staring through it. Infantile regression! she thought. As cool as that! His cool attitude seemed so incredible now that she stood by the sink staring blindly across the field of grain at the elms in the shallow ravine. She felt lost, wandered. She had expected him to be anxious, full of concern, of warmth. The lover; someone she would have to deal with, restrain, but use for Nan’s surprise and happiness.
She could not believe it, did not know what to do, felt queerly helpless. Turning from the window, she saw his cup and plate on the table, brought them to the sink and turned the hot tap on them. The teapot she swilled out more than once, then stood with it cupped in her hands. It was still warm. Carrying it slowly towards the fire, she placed it on the hot metal, slid the kettle over the burning coal and continued to lean on its handle, waiting for the water to come to the boil, in a dumb patience.
The hot tea revived her, lifted her head. There was colour in her face, a brightness in her eyes, a tilt to her chin, as though something had happened to her in a foreign country where she was travelling alone. She would have to deal with the situation. She listened as it were to the sound of it.
Nan wasn’t strong enough to cope with him, she thought. You need intelligence to cope with a man like that. His intelligence is so colossal that he breathes its air, naturally. She had felt like a flustered Victorian hen. Twenty-eight! My God! thought Aunt Phemie, who had ceased thinking in such terms for a long time.
This is the new world, she decided. Suddenly his face came before her again, paler than it had been, strangely pale, distinguished, slightly frightening, like something created in the dusk.
I’ll be going neurotic next! she thought with a touch of spirited humour and recklessly drank her too hot tea. It brought tears to her eyes, and as she wiped them away with her bare hand she thought of Nan.
He would never cure Nan, never! Nan might cling to him, trying to shake what she hungrily needed out of him. Might as well shake a tree at midday and expect the dew to fall. Honestly! declared Aunt Phemie, aware she was going all emotional but not caring. And giving him Dan’s slippers too!
She felt much better after she had wept. So many years had come and gone since she had wept—that last forsaken night in bed at the time of the lambing—that she felt a new woman, emptied and lightened. She got up briskly, put her cup and saucer in the sink, turned the tap on, swilled the teapot, and began washing the dishes. As she dried his cup, her lips twisted in humour, as though she were at last getting the measure of him. Positively ancient in his calm understanding, she mocked. With a woman of her own age—she was forty-seven—she could have enjoyed herself. One would almost think, she could have said, that he had been married to her for twenty-eight years!
Her hands stopped drying, the cup remained poised before her breast, the dish-cloth hanging down, while she stared across the almost ripe grain. Her mouth opened slightly, her features gathered. They have lived together, she thought with an extreme almost paralysing enlightenment. Her breathing stopped.
As she moved quietly about the kitchen, putting things away, wiping the sink, she paused frequently. Then she sat down. This was a new and very important fact. It put everything in a different light. It so altered Nan’s problem, so reflected upon the nature of her illness, that she could not—she could not—get a hold of it. The air now, the air around them, in the house, outside, was still with this enlightenment. And everything was caught in the stillness as in an appalling inevitability.
Could she be making a mistake? Nan showed so much of the élan of the lover, the naïve freshness, the youthful impatience, that Aunt Phemie had genuinely felt that the very unfulfilment of her love, the dreadful happenings which had stopped its natural flowering, was part of her actual trouble. Get these things removed, the horrible fears dissipated, and love would bloom naturally and healingly. The neurotic problem would be solved. Deep in her mind she had been certain of this—and any old Freudian could say what he liked!
It was a different and tougher problem now.
She came to herself with a sense of shock and a quick glance at the clock. The soup pot was quietly simmering. She had got everything ready before going to the station. Perhaps she had better go up and make sure Nan was not awake and “deserted”. After the doctor’s visit Nan had felt drowsy, profoundly indifferent, and wanted to sleep. But she had a habit of waking out of sleep, not knowing where she was, terrified. She should have had her switched egg. Aunt Phemie glanced at the clock again, then went out and quietly upstairs. On the landing she listened to the two bedrooms, aware of the distance between them as empty and unnatural. She would let Ranald sleep on. She wouldn’t go near him. Then she heard Nan’s bed creak faintly. She stood absolutely still, not wanting to go in. At last, however, she tiptoed to the door, pushed it slowly open, and shoved her head in.
“Hallo, had a sleep?” she asked in soft tones.
There was no answer.
“Just a minute and I’ll bring you up your switched egg.” She pulled the door almost shut and went quickly and quietly down the stairs, her heart beating strongly.
In the afternoon, with Mrs. Fraser in Nan’s room, Aunt Phemie went out about the steading and found the grieve and Will in the machine shed overhauling the binder. Harvesting lay ahead and the very sight of the slim wooden arms (“flyers” the men called them) that, revolving, would thrash down the grain over the cutting blades, touched her in an airy way so that at once she felt in another world.
“Did you see Sandy about?” she asked.
Will looked at her and then at the grieve who took a few seconds to finish what he was doing before lifting his head. “Sandy?” he repeated. “No. Did you see him?” and he looked at Will.
“I think he’s gone up to the top park with the stirks,” said Will. “I saw him heading up that way whatever.”
“Oh it doesn’t matter,” she said lightly.
There was silence for a little. The grieve would not question her, not at once. Sandy was the cattleman.
“That young collie of his,” she went on, looking about the shed; “was he howling last night?”
“Howling? No. I can’t say I heard him.”
She realised that they would never hear anything so natural as a dog howling in the night; they slept too hard. She looked at Will.
“No, I can’t say he’s a howler,” said Will slowly. “And it’s hardly likely, because he sleeps in the stick shed with the ould dog.”
“It’s nothing; only my niece was a bit disturbed last night and the doctor insists she needs all the rest she can get.”
“He may have howled of course,” said the grieve. “I’ll talk to Sandy if you like.”
“Well, you could mention it to him—just to make sure. How is the binder doing?” She went forward a step or two.
“Not bad,” said the grieve. “We’re just going to look over it. How is Miss Gordon today?”
“Coming along, thanks. She only needs attention.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said the grieve. Then, after waiting a moment, he added, “I was going to see you last night about one or two things, but I didn’t want to disturb the house.” He left the binder and they slowly went outside.
There had been rain during the night and all morning the sky had been overcast, but now the sun was out and everything was washed and fresh. She saw the bright colours of a cock chaffinch on a willow growing out of the green bank. He was declaring himself confidently as he hopped about the twigs.
She listened to the grieve’s talk of repairs, the blacksmith, the recurrent trouble over the tractor’s magneto and what they said in the garage. He spoke confidently for he had arranged everything, but the accounts would come to her. When he related how he had dealt with others his manner and tone always gathered a consequential air. He was a middle-sized stocky man, who said little by way of reprimand to those under him until he could no longer keep it in, when he said too much. But he was fair, and, in illness, extraordinarily considerate. She always, at the end of their year, gave him a bonus, worked out privately by herself as a percentage. In recent years it had been quite a tidy sum. The farm was as well run as any in the district. Perhaps one hidden factor more than any other kept him now her devoted ally and that was his secret consciousness of lack of schooling. His respect for the way she filled in forms and ran the farm’s accountancy was very deep. She listened to him with her businesslike air and watched the cock chaffinch. A wren came out from the roots of the willow. The physical health and strength of the world had something lovely and sure about it. She said, “That’s fine!” nodding. He said, “Just let me know what he charges.” “I will.” “Some of them are worth the watching,” he added. Then he began talking about one of the horses and she went with him to the stables. The brute was crippled on the near hind leg. He clapped a haunch strongly and cried, “Get over there!” “But isn’t that swollen!” “Ay,” he answered calmly, “there’s a swelling there.” “Have you sent for the vet?” she asked with sharp concern. “Ay,” he answered casually, “I put word to him this morning.” “What do you think it is?” “Who knows, for he can hardly have strained himself. He was aye a lazy brute. It may be a touch of the rheumatics. We’ll see.” He was now treating lightly her concern for animals. She knew this. But he had sent for the vet.
When she parted from the grieve she did not want to go back to the house so walked round to the cartshed and examined a front tyre on her car which had a mysterious slow leak. This morning it had been almost flat, but now it was hard as any of the other tyres. It certainly was an odd business, she decided, pleased, however, that the tyre was holding up. There was no one about and she went and had a look first into the small byre where the four milch cows were kept. But all cattle were out at grass; stalls and cribs were empty; yet the warm thick smell was everywhere, a healthy smell that did her good. This was the main part of the steading and its emptiness was felt, asking for a cry and an echo, but with the pleasant thought back in her mind that the beasts were in the fields. Sandy, returning from the top field, would take the four milch cows with him for the evening supply to the farm house and the cottages. No milk was sold.
At last she left the steading and, going up into the vegetable garden, pulled a plump lettuce, two or three carrots, nipped off some chives, decided she would get a knife and cut a cabbage, laid down what she had already gathered in order to pull up a strong growth of groundsel and weeded for nearly an hour. There was nothing she liked better than working in the earth with her bare hands.
By the time she had made her salad, Mrs. Fraser quietly appeared. She was a small stoutish capable woman, naturally kind and good-natured, and was now going home to prepare her husband’s evening meal. The men knocked off work at halfpast five and her two children would be home from school, though Teenie, at eleven, was nearly as good as a woman in the house. However, they talked for over ten minutes before Mrs. Fraser went. “You should have had a lie down to yourself,” were her last words, uttered in a softly reproving voice.
Before closing the kitchen door, Aunt Phemie listened to the quietness in the house, then—for her night’s sleep had been very broken—she felt not tired so much as the need to sit down. The steading was still about her, the earth, a rough shagginess of strength, and she did not want to lose its comfort. She thought of her husband; as she often did.
This strength, this thickness of living, this comfort and depth of body and hands, had kept her from going back to school teaching when her husband had been killed. Her teaching life in retrospect had seemed thin and washed and pale. Not only marriage but the working of the farm itself had been a new experience, and when Dan began to tell her how he stood with the bank, his desire for a tractor, his difficulties at a time when farming was not doing well, the amount of the mortgage on the farm (he had bought it outright), his plans, the possible switch over to a dairy farm, and all the hundred and one things and personalities involved, she had not only grasped the situation but almost at once had begun to help him. This had been something he had never foreseen, and it astonished him without end. He would look at a page of her writing and figures in her new red -bound account book with a serious air but actually for the secret delight of looking at it. No row of perfectly thatched stacks had ever given him so intimate a pleasure. When he was setting off for market, she would sometimes call him back and fix his tie, fix him up properly and he would kiss her behind the kitchen door. Once, after such a happening, he had met the grieve and demanded, “What the hell are you doing that for?” “Because the damn thing is rotten,” replied the grieve, instantly flaring up. Dan gave the thing a kick. “By God, you’re right!” he said and went off laughing, leaving the grieve to stare after him in utter astonishment. Then his birthday drew near and Phemie decided—she had saved a bit before she married—to present him with a tractor. He had really grown serious at that and said, “Listen to me, Phemie. That’s your money and I’m never going to touch a penny piece of it. You keep it by you, lass. Then he added, for he had been deeply moved, “Who knows but you may need it yet!” “Thank goodness,” she had replied, “tyrant as you are, you cannot stop me doing what I like with my own.” “Can’t I?” “No.” “We’ll see about that,” he said and went off with a man’s laugh. But what he actually did see, on the afternoon of his birthday as he came down from the hayfield in answer to her summons, was the tractor ticking over in front of the cartshed. Phemie herself was in the driver’s seat and the delivery man was explaining to her how it worked. Once out of sight of the hayfield, he had started to run, for he had feared something had happened to her, and he was now breathless. She waved to him gaily, excited as a bairn with a new toy.
He had been killed that autumn by the visiting threshing mill. The driver of the steam-engine had been trying to manipulate the mill through a gate when it got jammed and was in danger of tearing the gate-post and corner of the stone wall away. Dan had shouted to him to back. He had backed but the ground was very soft. Dan decided to go forward and speak to him at the same moment as the driver, on his own impulse, went ahead again. The mill slid, caught Dan against the gate post, and crushed him. The sight of his body had killed the child in her and an ambulance had taken her to hospital.
Before the warmth of the kitchen fire Aunt Phemie’s head drooped, but her eyes were wide open, very wide. Another memory had touched her to-day when she had wept. It now came back like something that explained in some queer fatal way why she had stayed on in the farm.
After convalescence she had returned, intending to wind up all the affairs of the farm and sell out early in the year or by the May term at the latest. It had been a fairly open winter and one January morning—the seventh, for the earliness of the date surprised her—she found that the snowdrops were through, not yet opened but white, folded white on their short green stalks like tiny spears. This had an extraordinary effect on her, piercing sweet, intensifying her loss, her sorrow, even as it pierced through it, and she felt the year opening, the coming of spring, and all the springs of the years ahead.
She had bought numberless bulbs, snowdrop, crocus—yellow and purple, and daffodil, and planted them in the grass, for the house, being built on a slope, had green banks wherever the level ground tumbled over. She was going to have a wonderful show, a transformation, a glory of the spring. And now, behold! the show was beginning, had indeed brought its opening date forward in a press of eagerness as though the given time would be short enough for the full display which the green banks had in mind.
March came in and still she had not made up her mind. She should leave the place but she could not; she was somehow not ready yet. In recent years stock-rearing had been more profitable than crop-growing, and in addition to cattle her husband had a lot of sheep on the ground. The grieve was now completely dependent on her book-keeping.
On a late March afternoon she was busy about a small rockery which she had got Dan to help her to make. Blues were now predominant: grape hyacinth, scillas, and glory of the snow, with aubretia coming along. It was still a marvel to her how fragile these early flowers were. The yellow crocus was a tuning fork out of some sunny underworld, still holding the glow of the note. The snowdrops, full grown, large, in clumps, had but contrived to emphasise their delicate green veining, their bowed heads and nun-like pallor. Marvellous to think that the mature lusty growths of summer would shrivel in weather that gave to snowdrop and crocus a lovelier grace, a deeper colour.
Ah, and here at last some flakes of white—on the cherry tree! Her heart gave a bound. Into the bright cold air of March, the cherry blossom had come! As she gazed at the blown petals, two or three more petals came blowing past them. Snow-petals. Snow! She looked into the depth of the air and saw the flurry of snowflakes, not falling, but swirling darkly in the air. Then they began to shoot past in front of her, all white; to settle on the flowers, her hands, everywhere. A ewe bleated beyond the garden fence; day-old lambs answered in their thin shivering trebles.
In the dark of the night she awoke and heard the fragile voices, crying out in the field. Forlorn they sounded and lost. These particular sheep were Border Leicesters, soft, the shepherd had said, because they were so well bred.
In the darkness the bleating of the lambs was very affecting. And there rose one thin persistent plaint that she knew instinctively to be the crying of a new-born lamb. She thought of the ewes, square market-bred ewes, soft, having their lambs out there in the snow. She wished she could do something for them. A flurry of snow against the window, blind fingers against the glass before the eddy of wind bore them away. Bore them away in a small whining anxious sound into space. Nothing conveyed the idea of space so well as the wind at night. And all the time the lambs kept bleating, and the wind carried away their bleating into the gulfs of space.
To ease this burden, she thought of herself as out in the field, going from ewe to ewe, and saw the lambs with their red birth stains in the driving snow, the mother licking them in the whirling snow, each lick making them stagger. If they weren’t licked dry they might die.
The soft snow-fingers at the window went away, defeated. She hearkened for them with a sense of loss, of guilt. She got up and pulled aside the curtain. The snow shower had passed and the sloping lands lay spectral white under the stars. Something in the whiteness of purity, of virgin austerity, touched her to frightened wonder. She dressed quickly, and in the kitchen went quietly lest she waken the servant girl. Into her long gumboots, her heavy mackintosh, tightening the belt about her waist; then to the back door which she opened carefully.
The snow was surprisingly full of light and this suited her secret purpose, for she could not have taken a lantern. She did not want to be seen. Suddenly it was as if she came alive, as if something which had been holding her had let go, and a bounding invigoration went coursing through her. Some of the beasts, with lifted faces white against their fleeces, which were dark-grey against the snow, looked at her coming and, instead of showing fear, cried to her, taking even a step or two towards her. She was moved to cry back to them.
As the bleating seemed to multiply all across the field, she got into a stir of excitement, and kept speaking brightly, encouragingly. It began to snow again and soon she was wrapped about in the whirling flakes and completely blinded so that she could not see a yard in front of her, and when the wind got into her mouth it roared there and choked her. She stood quite still, her back to the wind, leaning against it. She let her voice cry out on the wind, her spirit lifting away in a wild irrational emotion like joy. Then the wind lifted her bodily along, and she kicked into a ewe giving birth to a lamb.
Ewes should give birth later in the morning as the hill ewes did at her childhood home. But now on her knees she could half see what was happening. She spoke to the beast, sheltered her, encouraged her, eased her with a tender hand, wisely, helping her, using terms of endearment in a practical voice. And as though some of her vitality and encouragement were indeed of practical help, the ewe had an easy delivery.
“Feeling it a bit cold now!” she said to the lamb. “Don’t get excited, you old fool!” she said to the ewe. She would shelter them until the shower passed, and she looked over her shoulder to see if it was clearing. Coming upon her was a smother of yellow light, swinging, growing … at hand. She rose up.
The light stopped and there was a harsh exclamation. Rising snow-white like a ghost above the crying of a newborn lamb in the whirling ebb of the shower, she might have startled a mind less sensitive than the shepherd’s. “It’s all right, Colin,” she cried, giving him time. “It was foolish of me to have come out without a light.”
He came forward and said, “I wondered what you were.” He muttered it, as though suspicious of her. She realised that probably he was suspicious, was thinking in his own mind: What brought her out here?
And she could hardly explain! So she talked in an easy friendly way, evolving the half-lie that she had thought a ewe was in difficulties, the cries had wakened her and she had come out to see if she could help.
He muttered something about having been called away somewhere, but soon, under her natural friendliness, he thawed completely. He came from the north of Sutherland and Dan had had complete confidence in him. Of all the men about the place, she liked him best, liked his independence and a certain loneliness that went with him. He reminded her, too, of the son of a crofter from Western Ross whom she had known at college. His native gift for flattery had been disturbing for a while.
“There’s a ewe over there I’m worried about,” he said when they had at last got to the top corner of the field. She was now all glowing with warmth. The shower gone, what had been halffrightening in the still, white landscape was no longer so.
“We have been lucky,” he said. “But we can hardly expect it to hold.” So that when they came to the ewe that he had been worrying about she was prepared for death. He did everything he could with a strange concentration. When he spoke to her he was really speaking to himself. She realised his deep instinctive skill. The lamb was born but the ewe died under his hands. On his knees in the snow, he looked at the humped body, his hands hanging. He got up and said quietly, “I’ll take the lamb to the bothy. We may have a mother for it soon enough.” He was unmarried and about her own age.
“Come along to the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.” The kitchen, with its hot water, was often of service in the ailments of beasts.
“Don’t you bother, mem,” he answered. “I have the fire on and can get milk for the lamb in no time.”
“Come,” she said calmly. “I should like to give you a cup of tea.” And she moved on.
She did not want to lose him now, did not want to lose the life that had come into her, did not want to lose sight of the lamb. He began tugging at the stiff iron catch of a cross-barred gate with one hand. “Give me the lamb,” she said and took it from under his arm. He opened the gate and let her through.
As they came into the deep shadow of the house, she looked back. “Do you think it is going to be much?”
“No,” he answered. “There is life in the air. But I’ll see about shelter when the daylight comes in.”
“The wireless forecast snow-showers and outlook unchanged.”
“Did it?” he said politely, cleaning his hands with snow.
“Come in.”
He scraped his boots clean. “I’ll make such a mess of your floor.”
Inside, the bleating of the lamb sounded startlingly loud. As he struck a match, cupping it with his hands, she saw the glow of the light on his brown skin and the glitter of it in his dark attractive eyes. He needed a haircut. Then his face cleared and opened as he tilted it up, looking for the lamp. “Here’s the lamp,” she said softly as if she might waken the house. Then she sent him out to the shed next the dairy where there were empty boxes and straw. “Hsh!” she crooned to the lamb, cupping its head in her hand, her fingertips at its mouth. The fragile body butted, the little bones slithering under the thin skin. She saw the discoloured skin and her own hands and wrists. He came in with the box and put it on the, floor by the kitchen range. “It’s a feed he wants,” he said.
She nodded. “I’ll wash my hands and then put on the fire.” She was no longer excited by the crying of the lamb and watched the way he took the sticks Jean had drying over the range and set about raking the embers which were still red under the ashes. He put a wisp of straw over the red, the dry sticks carefully on top, and blew. Up came the flames.
“You haven’t a feeding bottle?” he asked.
She hadn’t.
“I’ll be back in a minute with one,” he said.
By the time he came back she had the milk blood-warm and the kettle over the fire with no more water in it than would make tea for two.
They spoke in quiet tones as she spread a tea-cloth over a corner of the kitchen table and set two cups on it, bread and biscuits, bright plates, butter and knives. “Leave him now and wash your hands,” she said.
She was lifting the teapot to fill his cup when a noise arrested her. The noise drew nearer. She knew it was Jean, but could not say a word, could not move the hand with the lifted teapot. They both stared at the door. It opened—and, her face half-petulant and flushed from sleep, there stood Jean, the servant girl. Her eyes widened as she gazed at Colin and then right down her neck, as she turned her face away, went a deep blush. Dark, wellbuilt, with a clear skin, she was inclined to moods occasionally but was a capital worker. At this moment, in her twenty-fifth year, she looked disturbingly attractive.
“Come in, Jean,” said her mistress quietly. She glanced at Colin. He was looking at his plate.
The emotion between them, whether it had ever been declared or not, was so obvious to their mistress that her hand shook slightly as she poured Colin’s tea. “You’re up very early.”
“I heard the lamb and I wondered,” Jean replied, her back to them, attending to the fire.
“Put some more water in the kettle, because there’s hardly enough tea here for you.” Then she began telling Jean about the experiences in the snow. When she had drunk her cup, she got up. “What’s the time? Nearly five! I think I’ll have an hour or two in bed. There’s no need for you to hurry, Colin.”
She left them and went up to her room.
She was feeling tired now, but when she had undressed and stretched between the sheets, still faintly warm, she experienced a sensation of ease, as though her body floated. A crush of snow, softer than the lamb’s mouth, smothered itself against the window. And all at once she thought of the ewe—that she had quite forgotten—with the head thrown out and back, the neck stretched as to an invisible knife. The snow would be drifting about the body, covering it up … .
Aunt Phemie was startled out of her reverie by the opening of the door behind her. Her heart leapt as she turned with a wild scared expression. Ranald stood there, smiling, his slippers in his hand.
“You gave me such a start!” explained Aunt Phemie, as she got to her feet.
“I came as quietly as I could.” He had closed the door and now put on his slippers.
To have come on his socks was somehow unexpectedly thoughtful of him. “You had a good sleep?”
“Like a log.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you. You must be famished.” She turned to the fire, got a fork and tried the potatoes. She glanced at the clock, “Dear me!” she said, then hurried to pour out what water was left in the potato pan and set the table for their meal. “Sit down. You didn’t hear any sounds upstairs?”
“No. It was very quiet.” He stretched himself in the chair and yawned. “That was a good sleep.” The slow characteristic smile spread over his face; she turned her eyes away as though its self-assurance was still something she could not quite bear.
She had soup, a salad, cold boiled chicken, and potatoes. He got up from the chair and stood with his back to the fire, watching her arrange the table and fill his soup plate.
“You begin,” she said, “and I’ll go and see if Nan is ready for her tray.” She closed the door quietly behind her.
When he had finished his soup, he waited for a time, then got up and began carving the chicken. Before sitting down, he went to the door, opened it and listened, closed it and went on with his meal. He ate a lot of salad with a chicken leg. The lettuce was crisp and his white teeth crunched it audibly. When at last he had finished he lit a cigarette and looked about him, leaning back.
Presently Aunt Phemie entered. She appeared agitated, scared, and, with care, did not quite close the door.
“She heard you,” she whispered.
“Did she?”
She nodded and rattled the plates.
“What did she say?”
“Hsh! her door is open.” She spoke no more, and in a moment went out with soup and bread on a tray. He sucked the cigarette smoke deep and blew it out slowly, his eyelids flickering in thought. When she came back she closed the door. He got up and looked at her. But beyond asking if he had had enough, she paid no attention to him.
“This can’t go on,” she said when she had dished herself some soup. Her tone was level but low.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“She’s so highly sensitised she hears things acutely. I said she couldn’t have heard anyone, unless it was Mrs. Fraser going back for something she had dropped. She said it was someone coming out of Ranald’s room. To prove to her it was no-one I went into your room and back.”
“Did she believe you?”
She supped her soup. “That’s not the difficulty.”
“I see.”
She looked at him. “Do you?”
“Well, if she can’t believe her own senses—where is she?”
She took a couple of spoonfuls and broke some bread on her plate. “What do you think should be done?”
“I think I should go and see her.”
She crumpled the bread, looking out the window. “I wish I knew,” she said, with controlled distress. “She was shaking, trembling, and did not want me to touch her. She turned away, tears in her eyes, but she was not sobbing. She looked pale and alien. I was suddenly frightened.”
“Alien?” he repeated.
“Yes, withdrawn into herself, into some world where I don’t know—where she is alone. Away from us. I got the feeling she knew at last she was going there.”
“I see,” he said, almost coldly. His lids lowered. “Why don’t you think I should see her?” he asked.
“Because of the effect you might have on her. I just don’t know.”
“But something must be done?”
“Are you sure of yourself and your effect?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Aunt Phemie. “Not yet.”
“You have to consider whether you are possibly being too emotional about it—and whether that helps.”
“I assure you I have considered it. There is also the effect of an absence of emotion.”
“I agree,” he said reasonably, as if suddenly pleased with her capacity for direct argument.
She looked straight at him and asked, “Do you know anything about her fear of leprosy?”
His features firmed to a sustained stare as his vision travelled through her. Then he turned and after sucking a last mouthful of smoke dropped the stub of his cigarette in the fire. “So that phantasy has come back?”
“So you know about it?”
“I think I do. But—well—it was merely a fantastic exaggeration of a—of a happening.”
“Don’t you think I should know about it?”
“Certainly. It might take a little time to explain.”
“Do you know anything about Kronos?”
“Kronos?” His brows gathered as he looked at her. “No. Money, is it?”
“I don’t know—but I hardly think so.”
“Who was Kronos again?”
“Kronos was the father who devoured his own sons.” She got up and began separating the thin slices of chicken breast which he had cut.
“Has she some delusion about it?”
“It’s hard to tell. It’s a Greek myth—like the one about Oedipus.”
He gave a dry appreciative smile, then asked, “How did she use it?”
“I don’t know. It would doubtless be a displacement, or transference is it?”
“When she was very ill?”
“Yes.”
“You mean her unconscious used the figure of Kronos—to cover up someone else—even from herself?”
“Possibly. Who can say?”
“She was as bad as that?”
Aunt Phemie put a potato on the plate and the plate on a small round tray.
“Tell me,” he asked. “What did happen to her?”
She lifted the tray, then paused to look at him. “Should you see her now—or should we have a talk first?”
“I think you’re right,” he agreed. “It might be better.”
He turned to the fire and she went out.
Later, when Mrs. Fraser was up with Nan, Aunt Phemie said, “We can talk now. She took some of the soup but wouldn’t look at the chicken. However, she can still drink milk, thank goodness. She thinks I’m seeing the grieve. I try to interest her in what goes on about the farm. I saw her struggle to be interested, to come back from—from where she is. It’s getting a bit dark in here.”
“It’s all right. Have a cigarette?”
“No thank you. By the way, when we do go up to bed you could come in your stockings behind me. Your door is open. You can manage to see to yourself?”
“I have slept in some queer places in my time.”
“You were in the Air Force?” She sat down.
“Yes,” he answered, taking the chair which she indicated.
“Nan told me. You had a nasty crash——”
“Grounded, long before the war ended, so here I am.” He smiled. “They gave me an office job. It was good cover for more interesting work. That’s when I really got to know Nan.”
“You know her very well?”
“Naturally, or I shouldn’t be here.”
“Of course. I was merely thinking of knowing what she is really like. Far as I can gather, she seemed to move in a pretty fast set, and in my experience—it may not be much, but still… you don’t get really to know people in such a milieu, not as a rule.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No. Why, do you?”
“I do. I should say it’s the acid test.”
Aunt Phemie was silent for a few moments. “Acid test of what?” she asked.
“Of sticking power; character, if you like.”
“I don’t see it like that. I may be wrong but it seems to me that every set has its own rules—of behaviour and so on—its own beliefs. To be of the set you must conform. If you don’t behave as the set do, you get broken.”
“But if the set doesn’t suit you, you should clear out. You would clear out, as a matter of fact. You don’t hang on anywhere unless you’re getting some kick out of it.”
“It all depends on the kick, I suppose. Will you give me a cigarette, please?”
When she had it lit, she smiled slightly, taking the cigarette from her mouth with a certain elegance as if it were in a holder. “This brings back some of my remote past; late nights and endless argument. I am not without some small experience. Tell me about your set.”
“There’s nothing really to tell. And it wasn’t a set in that sense. You must understand that. Most of us worked very hard, late into the night often. I fancy Nan has exaggerated all this. In fact, I know she has. She got delusions about it—afterwards.”
“After what?”
“After she broke down. She saw people in the most exaggerated way. She magnified things, gave huge mythical meanings to—to quite simple acts. It was distressing—and very difficult to counter. But we understood it.”
“We? You mean—all of you?”
“Yes, naturally. You may forget that London was blitzed, that bombs fell, that I myself dropped bombs, that human bodies were mangled or blown to bits as the natural order of things. That’s the world we lived in. A mental breakdown of one degree or another was not unknown.”
“I stand corrected,” said Aunt Phemie, trying to tap ash away with an awkward forefinger. “All the same I should like to know more, if you don’t mind. She mentioned, for example, someone named Freddie.”
“Freddie is all right. He’s satirical, with a merciless eye for foibles, but he’s witty. Nan liked him at first. It was only towards the end that she felt there was something disintegrating in him, that beneath his wit there was a real desire to tear people to bits.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Well, we all want to tear something to bits. At least I hope so. And Freddie could work.”
“What did he work at?”
“I was thinking of the work he did after his daily job. He limps from hip trouble so was always a civilian.”
“She mentioned Julie.”
“An emotional creature—purely. That sort of female is always a damned nuisance.”
“In what way exactly?”
“She distracts fellows from their work, embroils them, uses up their energy. She makes scenes. You go to her rescue—as if she were of any account! And the devil of it is that in these circumstances she is the outlet for the instincts, the full libidinous charge, the irrational lure to a fellow to let rip. We’re all going to die soon so what the hell? That sort of deadly stuff.” It was the first time she had seen him moved in any way, not that he gesticulated or even raised his voice much, but his tone did gather a certain merciless precision.
“I rather gather that Nan felt for Julie.”
“Before her breakdown, we had some words about it. I just couldn’t understand Nan then over that, for Nan has brains. And she was always so sensible, so balanced, and—really—gay. Possibly there was too much drink going. Occasional outings, all-night affairs, with illicit petrol and what not. The thing somehow got worked up. Fellows were always coming on leave, chaps I knew often. Their next trip after leave might be their last. All very normal enough, taking everything into account; but I admit it did get a bit hot in the end—and particularly after the war ended.”
“Did these fellows also have your—uh—revolutionary beliefs?”
“Mostly, even if only as sympathisers—at least they were not active then. So it worked in them the other way round. I mean it was a case of—this rotten old bourgeois order needs liquidating, so let’s liquidate and be merry.”
“Eat, drink and be merry——”
“By no means,” he interrupted. “To-morrow we were going to live—and build; what was left of us, that is; but first we had to destroy. That was clear. You have to raze the old building before you build the new.”
“And that extended to beliefs, behaviour, everything?”
“Yes, in so far as they were an expression of the bourgeois order; which, inevitably, meant almost altogether.”
“Revolution?”
“Precisely.”
“There is no other way, no gradual evolution that could avoid destruction, death, horror?”
“Your mind there, if you don’t mind my saying so, is confused. We do have gradual change, in the sense, say, that a thing gradually increases in size or in temperature or in productive capacity. By blowing up a toy balloon you make it larger; but a point comes where it bursts. In everything there is that point of revolutionary change. It’s not a case of whether we like it or not. It’s in the nature of things. In the wintertime you will, if there’s frost about, run the water off your car. Why? Because you know that though water can get colder and colder and still remain fluid water, a point comes where it has a revolutionary change into solid ice and bursts your cylinder block.”
“But I do recognise that and so run the water off.”
“Exactly. In that respect you are a determinist. The point is, do you recognise it in the economic relations which determine our social life? Are you prepared for the revolutionary change there?”
“How do I know that that kind of change is necessary?”
“War, destruction, the concentration camps—if these result from the existing order of things in our society, go on increasing like your toy balloon, should it not be evident that their cause is within the order itself, our bourgeois order? Where else can it be?”
“So you think a bloody revolution is inevitable?”
“Revolution is inevitable. Bloody is as may be.”
She glanced at him. His face was pale in the gathering dusk, and emotionless. It was as if in the last words, grown indifferent before her hopeless lack of knowledge, he had turned a tap off. He lit another cigarette, remembered her, and offered his carton. She took one.
“Nan also mentioned a man—for some reason she would never use his name—Know-all, she called him.”
He glanced at her, a searching glance. “Yes, he was the leprosy man,” he said.
She waited. “You sound as if you were referring to the milkman.”
A satiric breath came through his nostrils, a wry humour to his face. “No, he wasn’t the milkman, as it happened. He was one who reckoned he had got rid of all the illusions at last, all the bourgeois repressions. He fatally attracted Nan. I mean she couldn’t stand him. But by that time her emotions were getting the better of her.”
“You mean she was beginning to go to bits.”
“Exactly,” he said, as if refreshed by such cool frankness. “Emotions work up to an awful mess. That’s the trouble. You have to use emotion, of course. But once let it get out of hand—bloody awful,” he concluded succinctly.
“Tell me what happened?”
“It would need a psychoanalyst,” he suggested dryly, “and long sessions on a couch. However.” He took a chestful of smoke and let it out in a slow hissing fullness. “The thing went on. Things have a habit of doing that—until they burst. One thing reacting on another, a dialectical process. But will folk see it? Not they! Even Fanwicke—or Know-all, if you like—although he is the ablest intellectually of the lot of us, could drive our definition of freedom to a satisfaction of his individual ends that he would not—or could not—perceive was in practice essentially bourgeois or anti-social. It may be—I have long suspected it—that the aggressive instincts are in him particularly powerful. He talked of liquidating institutions and politicians with a relish, that, in our off hours with drink about, was certainly infectious. He has a driving intellectual force, a certainty, a belief in himself that inspires young spirits. Quite an extraordinary thing. He makes you realise how revolutions happen.”
“The need of satisfying his individual ends touched Nan?”
“It would touch anyone. Nan is a very good-looking girl with at times an extraordinarily vivid life in her, as you know. The trouble was Nan couldn’t leave him alone. She always countered him. And in argument of course he flattened her. I give you no idea of a certain flair he has, a sheer brilliance.”
“You imply that deep in her mind she was really attracted by him?”
“Frankly, I could not be sure. She said she hated him, hated the destructiveness in him, and so on. But when I saw that she was deliberately influencing me against him—well, I had to stop her. The emotional mess again, the personal. The awful insidious business that——Anyhow, we quarrelled.”
After a short pause, Aunt Phemie said, “I suppose relations all round were pretty free?”
“Sex relations, you mean? Reasonably free, yes. That kept a lot of frustrations out of the way and let us get on with our work—and our lives.”
“And after your quarrel?”
“We remained friends, but of course I only saw her at intervals. Remember we were all working at our jobs—some of us quite hard. If you really have some notion of a smart set in your mind, forget it. There are loathsome enough things without it.”
“I think I understand. Long and even dreary spells—with outbreaks.”
“That’s about it, not forgetting the long spell of death and destruction. Things come in cycles. There came, as I said, a pretty hot time. The strain of the war was over. I—let out a bit myself. Nan let go. A bit of a smash-up once or twice, with some of the lads in trouble. Then I decided to call a halt; was jeered at, especially by Nan. Julie got a decent young lad into real trouble; he was damned lucky merely to be reduced to the ranks. And so on. With Fanwicke making now a dead set at Nan.”
“And she wasn’t responding quite right?”
“That looked like her game. And she was tough. She seemed set for anything and Fanwicke her high aim. There are beasts, aren’t there—spiders or something—where the female in due course gobbles up the male? After a few drinks, the things Nan could say to Fanwicke left little to the destructive imagination. Fanwicke smiled. He reckoned he knew the symptoms of concealed love. But I need not grow lurid. Julie came gibbering for me one night. It appears there was a taxi crammed with them, pretty late. Did I mention night clubs? Anyway, Fanwicke, it seems, tried to fumble about Nan’s person in the packed taxi and—her arms being pinned—she bit him badly in the neck. A hellish commotion ensued. They had to hold Nan by main force; then got her into Julie’s place and doped her. Fanwicke wore sticking plaster for some time.”
Aunt Phemie sat quite still. His recital of events had a conversational calm that was completely objective. His reference to spiders had been an incidental touch of macabre wit.
“Not a very pretty story,” commented Aunt Phemie, subduing an involuntary skin shiver. She got hold of the poker and stirred up the fire. “Did she suffer much—after?”
“She would let no one touch her—except Julie. She had this leprosy fear; a horror of hands coming near her. I supposed it had something to do with Fanwicke’s attack.”
“You helped?”
“By keeping my distance, yes. I was with her quite a lot of course. It was a difficult time for a bit. She began to find her own solution by going back to early days—to put it mildly.”
“Put what mildly?”
“Her hallucinated craving. However, at long last it brought her here. We were friendly again by that time.”
Aunt Phemie turned from the fire. “It’s getting quite dark. Would you like the lamp lit?”
“As you like. Actually I have never cared much for sitting in the dark.”
“So it would seem,” agreed Aunt Phemie, going towards the lamp.
He smiled. “You have a nice cool voice.”
“You appreciate the absence of emotion?”
“Very much,” he assured her.
Aunt Phemie lit the old Famos lamp and as she gave the mantle time to kindle was aware of a certain unreality about her standing body. She realised that his reference to a nice cool voice was not so much a compliment to her as a relief for himself, yet it used the channel of compliment. He just wouldn’t be bothered being insincere over a small thing like that. She felt herself acting in a play whose words she had not mastered. Going to the door, she opened it quietly and listened. That, too, was part of an act.
“Mrs. Fraser is very good,” she said, coming back to the fire, looking along the mantelpiece, sitting down; “comfortable—and comforting.”
He nodded. “I know the type.”
“Why do you use the word ‘type’? She’s a human being. Would you like some more coffee?” “I would. It’s good coffee.”
“The right bite?”
“Not quite up to the old coffee stall in the early hours. You contrive a civilised smoothness—though doubtless the bite is concealed.”
“You sound as if you had an early experience of London night life.”
“I had. My views were not exactly welcomed at home, even as a college youngster. Not that having views, political or religious—or both—would really have mattered.”
“No?” She stuck the aluminium coffee pot into the fire.
“No. The English are curiously sound in one respect—that’s why they have lasted so long. They realise that action is the acid test of thought. Pure Marxism.”
“And where do you get your Ranald from?”
“Some barbarian addition to the pure stock. A Highland grandmother it was. The family is rather inclined to blame her for having upset the genes. I take after her apparently.”
“Do you? In brains?”
He smiled, switching his eyes onto her. “Brains is hardly considered a breeding point in the best circles. I’m afraid it was more a matter of looks—though doubtless, come to think of it, the looks would also cover my unfortunate aberration.”
She regarded the face critically. “But you don’t look particularly Highland, do you? I should say you were Greek.”
Their eyes met for a moment. “Kronos, you think?”
Aunt Phemie felt exactly as though she had been invisibly stabbed. It was as if some truth, which her mind did not even entertain, which was still formless, had yet stabbed her. She caught the coffee pot handle; it was hot, if not quite hot enough to make her draw her hand away, as she did, swiftly, looking at it for the sting. He offered his handkerchief, but she persisted in finding the old singed cloth grip; then she poured him some coffee and also helped herself.
“I am taking all your cigarettes,” she apologised; “I must get some.”
“You were going to tell me what happened to Nan,” he said, as they blew the first smoke through the silence.
“Yes.” She was having difficulty with specks of tobacco sticking to her lips, got up, and taking down a jar from a top shelf surprised herself by finding a long cigarette holder among some pheasant’s tail feathers. Now she looked more at ease; even her appearance was subtly changed. “Yes,” she resumed, with an objective manner. “There has been some trouble. It is involved, as you will understand, not really because the man matters in any way personally but because of her condition. You appreciate that, of course.”
He waited.
“I don’t know much about the neuroses, not anyhow in a technical way. Nan to me isn’t really or fixedly neurotic. She has certain illusions or delusions, symptoms, and is in a very dangerous condition, but she knows it and is fighting against it. So long as she keeps the strength, the balance, to fight, she’ll come absolutely right, for she has a sound—foundation. When you call this foundation a sort of regression to an infantile security, I don’t mind. I think the words are almost meaningless. In fact they may be, in a certain way, terribly wrong. No, ‘wrong’ is the wrong word. I mean terribly blind. But perhaps that doesn’t sound very coherent.”
“I get some of it, I think.”
Aunt Phemie tapped her cigarette holder once or twice expertly with an extended forefinger. Her features had firmed and her eyes now had the power of veiling emotion. “We might talk of that again,” and though she spoke the words conversationally, they held a suggestion of a deeper knowledge, almost a grim power. She was contemplating the fire, and Ranald’s eyes travelled over her features.
They were good features, with clear evidence of the bone but not really thin. In the lamplight certain fine lines were hardly discernible. There were lines on the forehead but they gave character rather than age. It was an open face, but firm, with something attractive about the blue eyes, which yet were by themselves in no way unusual in colour or size. Her hair must at one time have been a red-gold. Now it was pale as autumn stubble in an evening light, with just that remaining glint in it. There was also that hint of glow in her fair skin. The bone of her jaw, thought Ranald, is there all right.
“For us at the moment,” said Aunt Phemie, “it may be enough if we understand about her fighting. She wants to clean up her own mind, to understand. But in spite of the cynics, a person can at the same time be doing this not only for herself but also for someone else. She might even have the notion, say, that she is doing it for you, in the sense that she fancies she has discovered the enormous fact that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are contained in your philosophy. Or do you think that’s impossible for any human mind?”
There was a breath of laughter as Ranald stirred in his chair. “I get your point, but is not that, too, an obvious illusion? To think you are doing it for someone else is to flatter yourself the more. Isn’t it?”
“So when you think you are going to put the world right for everyone else you are flattering yourself rather enormously?”
“Except for this: that I am prepared to reason the matter logically with everyone else.” This kind of argument would clearly make no impression on him; he obviously liked it as a familiar intellectual exercise. The very way he stretched himself, wanting to cock his feet up on the edge of the kitchen range, indicated whole nights of talk.
“You may flatter yourself that you have a monopoly of logic. That may be your particular illusion. And more horrors are committed, I’m beginning to think, in the name of logic than in any other name.”
“Even God’s—remembering history?”
“Even God’s,” said Aunt Phemie, “and for what it’s worth I took history in my degree.”
“But not perhaps the materialistic interpretation of history?”
“Perhaps not,” said Aunt Phemie, annoyed with herself for feeling she was actively disliking him again, his smiling cocksureness.
“We merely think that history has been taught wrongly, has been misunderstood,” he said lightly, having found the right place for his heels. “Emotion has nothing to do with it.”
“Emotion is the greater part of life, and to ignore it is to—is to make a mess of life.” She was losing grip, couldn’t get the right words now.
“I was talking scientifically, a scientific interpretation. Do you think emotion should influence the scientist in his work?”
“We didn’t class history as one of the science subjects—but then of course our professors probably didn’t know any better,” said Aunt Phemie, sinking deeper.
He seemed to become aware for the first time that she was disturbed and studied the movement of his slipper—Dan’s slipper—with a faint smile. “It’s rather important to me,” he said.
She made her effort at recovery: “If I said that about logic and—and God, I meant that the horrors were committed by the churchmen logically expounding their—their doctrine. It was their logic that drove them to the—to the Inquisition and all the rest.”
“But their logic was based on false premises.”
“Still, it was their logic.”
“And therefore logic is to be condemned?”
“You are jumping to conclusions.”
“Am I?”
His polite restraint felt to her like a superior insult. “Yes,” she said flatly. “I do not condemn logic as a process. If you cannot see my distinction, I can’t help you.”
He remained silent.
“However,” said Aunt Phemie, “I started to tell you about Nan.”
He waited.
She took her time and, not looking at him, began, “She was getting on quite well, was sometimes very full of life indeed—even emotion,” she added coolly. “Then this horrible murder took place in that cottage. It preyed on her mind—no doubt she felt she had left that kind of thing behind. But the war had pursued her—in this case it was the first Great War. The murder was attributed to a man who had what they call here shell-shock from that war. It cast a gloom over the place, particularly as they could not find the man. He had disappeared. They hunted for him everywhere. The police were scouring the countryside. One day Nan set out for one of her walks. As you go up the back out there, you finally come on a moor. There is a burn, and down on the right a steep place with birches. It’s quite a long way from here. In this place Nan met a man who seems to be an artist or poet. She was feeling a bit nervous, no doubt because the murderer was still at large. She only spoke a few words to this man and then turned for home. On the way, there is a pine plantation. The village policeman was lurking there and Nan ran into him. He asked her if she had seen anyone and she said No. That worried her.”
“Why did she say No?”
Aunt Phemie remained still for a moment then looked at him. “You have no idea?”
He blew a thoughtful stream of smoke “Well—I suppose she didn’t want to get involved.”
“The policeman called here,” Aunt Phemie continued, “but as it turned out it was only to return a handkerchief she had dropped. And that incident blew over—at least she was getting over it.”
“Why don’t you tell me why she said No?” he asked.
“That was the question Nan asked me,” replied Aunt Phemie. “I said I understood perfectly.”
“Please go on.”
She took a moment or two then went on, “She had to fight this murder shadow. I saw that and let her go ahead in her own way. She had to clear it off the land. That may sound very irrational, but at least it was real for her. I hope that’s clear?”
“You needn’t rub it in. I am concerned about Nan,” he explained.
“She met this man, this artist fellow, once or twice again. I don’t know him. But he interested her in his attitude to things. I don’t think she cared much for the man himself, but the way he thought of things—of wild things and the way they behaved—fascinated her. I rather think he lay in wait for her.”
“How do you mean,” he asked as she paused, “that he fascinated her—if she doesn’t care for him?”
She met his look for a moment. His face was pale and firm in a logical ruthless way. He was going to let nothing pass now.
“It’s difficult to explain—rationally,” answered Aunt Phemie without any emphasis.
“But even the irrational can be explained rationally. Do you think you can do it?”
Aunt Phemie took her time. “You told me about that fellow—Fanwicke, was it?—who fascinated her, yet she didn’t like him. Or did I understand you properly?”
He thought so concentratedly that he obviously forgot her. “You said something about wild things and the way they behaved. What did you mean?”
“It’s the nature of a hawk to kill a small bird. Something like that was his kind of logic.”
His eyebrows gathered as he looked at her. “What are you getting at?”
“I am simply trying to explain as best I can. I never met him.”
“Where does he live?”
“Somewhere in the town, I have gathered since.”
“Didn’t Nan know?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Not even his name?”
“She knew his first name was Adam. That’s all.”
“What happened then?”
“There was a final meeting. It may have been arranged, but I am not certain. She left the house immediately after lunch, instead of having her usual rest.” Aunt Phemie stopped. “I want to tell you,” she went on at last in a quiet earnest voice as though thinking now only of Nan, “what happened as far as I can make it out. It’s difficult because she was in a very broken condition. Calm for a moment, with staring eyes, then when she spoke a word she lost control and buried her face and grabbed and tore at the bedclothes. She was upstairs when I came in. I had been over at the steading and didn’t see her come in. I realised something terrible had happened. When I went near her, she started away. She shivered violently. I am trying to tell you this calmly. I can give you no idea of what she was like. More than once I thought she was completely—unhinged. It was terrifying, and I was quite helpless.”
He did not speak, did not move.
“I won’t try to describe the sort of night we had. Nothing would keep her quiet long. She was incoherent; would cry out in her sleep and start awake; and the paralysing thing was that what she saw in her sleep—if it was sleep—was more real than what she saw when she awoke; she still fought it—physically—stared at it in horror, cried words like ‘leprosy’; you saw her being gripped, collapsing, fainting. In between times, when she was pushing away from her horror, or had a lucid moment or two, when she was taking one as an ally, someone who might help her, she said things which helped me to see a little what had actually happened. That’s what I’m going to tell you.”
“You did this all alone?” Curiosity and acknowledgement were in his eyes.
“Yes,” she answered simply. “I could not send for the doctor. Mrs. Fraser had gone for the day; she was at this time giving me a hand in the forenoons only. And anyway,” continued Aunt Phemie, “I got the feeling no-one could help me. I even knew, in a way I cannot explain, how dangerous it might be to give her too much sleeping drug. I may have been wrong. But I had a deep feeling of—of understanding. Once, for example, I knew that if only I could get my body between her and what she saw, and cry to her, so that she would know the voice, so that it would be like a cry from someone coming to relieve her—but it’s no good trying to explain. All I can say is that in the desperate moment, it helped.”
Aunt Phemie blew the dead stub of cigarette from her holder. Her manner was still calm, but it now concealed a quivering tension.
“You are going to tell me,” he said, “that this fellow Adam attacked her—as Fanwicke did.” He gathered his heels back against his chair. His words sounded harsh, satiric, but there was something in them that would not let him wait any longer.
“Yes,” she answered, not now put off by him. “Only if that had been all—it might have been simple. It wasn’t all.”
He gave her a piercing glance.
“I told you about the man—Gordie, they called him—who was supposed to have committed the murder of the old man in the cottage. For money, they said. They had never found him.” She stopped, as if she could not go on.
His eyes were fixed on her. She wasn’t looking at him.
“She met this man Adam on that last day. He took her round the mountain, to a place where there are hags, little black lochs. He took her to some certain spot. It’s a wild place. He tried to—he must have tried to make love to her. Remember, in her mind he was in some way part of the shadow, the murder, and he had taken her to this spot. She fought away from him—to the edge of a hag-hole—and there at their feet was the body of Gordie—drowned, bloated, horrible.”
Aunt Phemie swallowed and drew a deep breath. Ranald got up. “My God!” he said.
They both stood, listening to what had been told and to the silence in the house.
“The one thing I am terribly frightened of,” said Aunt Phemie as though all the time this was a secret burden she had been bearing, “is that she will find you in the house.”
“I understand,” he responded.
“What do you think yourself?”
“Are you uncertain in your own mind?”
“If only she could get a night’s sleep. I think I could take a risk on that now—and give her an extra dose. If only she hadn’t thought she heard you. If you were to walk in now … I don’t know.”
“A sleep would strengthen her.”
“Yes. From what you told me—from what she has just gone through—she—she mightn’t want you to touch her. With a reaction of that sort—her exhaustion, from the excitement of seeing you, might be too much. I cannot help feeling that.”
“I understand.”
She wanted to glance at him, for there had been a suggestion, a faint recognition, of his own futility in his cool tone, and none the less so because it had been just perceptibly bitter.
“You now see my difficulty?” she asked almost gently.
“Yes.”
What I have been thinking, since she heard you, was this. To-morrow, if all goes well, after the doctor’s visit, I will get your telegram, saying you’re coming. I’ll tell her. I’ll say I wrote you—and at once you must have wired, saying you were coming. I’ll be glad about it. I’ll tell her, tell her she must be getting the second sight, imagining she heard you before you came. I’ll make a game of it. That would mean you would appear the day after to-morrow. If that’s not too long for you?”
“No,” he answered. “It’s simply a question of the right action.”
She nodded. All in a moment, there was no more to be said. She glanced at his face. It was pale, cold, almost intolerant, but drained.
Then she heard something. Her fingers closed on the cigarette holder; her whole forearm quivered and shook and she lowered it to her side. Going to the door, she opened it and listened. “It’s Mrs. Fraser,” she said on a relieved breath. “She’s coming.”
Mrs. Fraser always returned to her own home before midday to prepare her husband’s meal. Ranald had gone out after breakfast to look around and wait for the doctor’s visit.
Aunt Phemie was busy in the kitchen cleaning vegetables for lunch when she thought she heard a cry from Nan’s room. She listened, holding her breath, and decided she must have been mistaken. Odd enough sounds often came from the steading, and the back door was wide open. But after a few moments she could not go on with her work and experienced what had now become a weakening sensation, warm and melting, for she was suffering from lack of sleep and prolonged anxiety. Last night had been at times an almost intolerable burden; horrible, she thought suddenly, blinding her inner sight.
First there had been these long talks with Ranald. The old analytic method of speech, the assumption of intellectual calm, had seemed to free her, and she was conscious of rising to meet Ranald on his own plane. She had gone right back to the old days before her marriage, to the bright give-and-take discussion on education and the child mind. She had experienced again the sense of distinguished movement, of style. This sharply stimulated intellectual interest, with its mental excitement, had been like a bright armour. She had shown Ranald to his bedroom with a decisive care, covering any noises he might make with her own pronounced movements into and out of the bathroom. At last she was approaching Nan’s door, the smile on her face, the heightening of the smile in her breast, when in an instant she was aware of a new objective attitude towards Nan and her illness, an attitude in which sympathy was lessened to the same degree as her intellectual or analytic interest had been aroused. This induced a feeling of competence, as though by its subtle depreciation of Nan’s importance she herself was objectively strengthened. But in the next instant it aroused a feeling of guilt, for she realised she was now undergoing a withdrawal from Nan. She suddenly perceived the whole evening had been directed to that end. In bed at last (in Nan’s room), with Nan asleep, this began to worry her, and she had resurgences of pure feeling in which, picture following fugitive picture, she visualised the analytic interest as a remorseless white face, like Ranald’s face (there were also certain dismissive gestures of his, slight but now startlingly significant). This white taut face watched until sympathy was slain, until emotion withered. It’s the slayer’s face, thought told her in silence, and she was aware of being between the thought and the face, like a soul in an experiment. Then the really horrible thing began to happen. The figure of King Kronos came alive before her, the father who, in the Greek legend, devoured his own newborn sons lest some day they usurp his power. This, she realised, was the figure Nan saw. And now she was with Nan, looking at the figure, there before her, devouring a child. As the teeth tore at a knuckle—an elbow—there was no blood, as though the child had been boiled like a fowl. The lump of pale flesh stuck in her own throat, choked her, choked down her vomit, and the horrible revolting nature of the experience shook her and blinded her, for she saw more than she could let herself see. But all this was sickeningly complicated by the knowledge that she was at last at the hidden core of Nan’s innermost experience or delusion. For the crowning horror lay in the resemblance of Kronos to Ranald. A quiver of vision, of thought, and the face was Ranald’s, and the shoulders, the stooping shoulders. Ranald was devouring his own son—Nan’s son—before Nan’s face.
Aunt Phemie, turning over in her bed, smashed the abominable vision out of her head, cried to herself that this was a mad delusion of her own, and that, for Nan, Kronos had not been a devouring father in the literal image, but just a slayer of sons, of young men. He was the dictator who purged and killed wherever he saw a threat to his authority. The new multiple-Kronos of the world Nan had experienced in war, in the streets. He stood for the destructiveness which in Nan’s world to-day would, in order to achieve its clear rational aim, coldly ignore emotion (the emotion Nan knew profoundly in her as the very pulse and warmth of creation) and so inevitably and fatally destroy life. To achieve, he would multiply himself and kill.
There followed a still, appalling moment, wherein Aunt Phemie dwelt with the utmost cause, the last dark root, of Nan’s illness: she wanted to save Ranald from becoming Kronos.
Mad—mad as the Oedipus legend—mad as all the legends; but, like them, absolutely haunting. Once a thing like that got a grip of you, Aunt Phemie saw, not as a theoretic or psychoanalytic formulation, but as an actuality, as an emotion, a picture, as something that rose undeniably out of your depths, out of what seemed the very essence of your being, you could only protect yourself by going neurotic, psychotic, and ultimately mad, lunatic.
Fear was the basis, but in Nan’s case not only fear for herself, for her life instincts, but also fear for Ranald, for her love. She had had to break Fanwicke and the others—or get broken.
At this point Nan moved in her bed and instantly Aunt Phemie, as though still in the pulse of Nan’s mind, experienced a sudden shift of anxiety, gripped now by an actual fear. She knew quite certainly that Nan would get up and go into Ranald’s room. She would go looking for him, in a strange dream sense. From that moment, natural sleep had become impossible for Aunt Phemie.
Yet exhausted, she must have dozed, for some time during the night she came fully to herself to find Nan already standing by the small mahogany chest of drawers just inside the door. There was the creak of a top drawer. Aunt Phemie watched, knowing Nan kept her writing materials there. Outside, the moonlight must have been fairly strong, for Nan’s bowed head was solid against the pale-daffodil wall. An elbow lifted; a hand moved in the drawer—paused and slowly withdrew. Slowly she shut the drawer, stood quite still for a little while, then moved to the door. As the knob was turning, Aunt Phemie called her in a low voice, at the same time getting out of bed and going towards her, but not touching her. Nan stood but never spoke. Aunt Phemie had an impulse to get over the moment, to make it easy for Nan, by asking her if she wanted to go to the bathroom. But something deeper restrained her and, instead, she suggested, “Won’t you go to your bed, Nan?” And, as if acting on the suggestion in quite an automatic way, Nan went back to her bed, covered herself with the clothes, and lay quite still.
The whole night’s experience was now in Aunt Phemie as she stood listening, after hearing what she thought was a cry from upstairs. But the cry was not repeated. Yet she could not go on with her kitchen work; she had to make sure.
Before Nan’s room she took a deep breath, noiselessly turned the knob and put her head round the door. Nan was sitting up in bed and stared at her with a steady fixity as if watching what her visitor was going to do next.
“I was wondering if you were asleep,” said Aunt Phemie, smiling, closing the door behind her. After her first look at Nan she cast her eyes about the room as though to make sure the place was tidy, then in a natural companionable way went to the south window and said cheerfully, “The sun is shining.” She glanced about the fields and farther away, but Nan did not answer, did not move. Fear had touched Aunt Phemie with its sickly feather. The look on Nan’s face had gone completely alien.
Turning from the window and still interested, remarking the room could do with a proper tidy-up, she now sat, as though only for a few minutes, on the foot of Nan’s bed, and looked at her patient again to confirm what appeared her obvious impression that everything was going well. “And how are you, Nan?” she asked gently but cheerfully, smiling, with a frank look.
Nan held her look then removed her eyes, though it was indeed as if the eyes themselves had removed, like the eyes of a child who has grown unaccountably serious, who lives in another place and has found there what is outside time.
Aunt Phemie experienced the clutch at the mother’s heart. Nan did not answer.
Aunt Phemie regarded Nan’s face with an unconscious concentration. With its bright chestnut hair, in a wave-broken disorder which enriched its colour and depth, the face took on an arrested beauty that drew Aunt Phemie out of herself so that she was held in a moment of pure wonder. The eyes had grown larger, with the blue a shade lighter than Aunt Phemie’s own blue, but miraculously clear, translucent, the light that no flower ever quite has, nor any sky. The face had a fragile firmness, not pale but cool. The quiet lines ran flawlessly down until they met on her chest for a moment then gathered to a deepening flow between her breasts, to disappear beneath her blue pyjama jacket which was plucked away on one side where the top button had come unfastened.
She was like a plucked flower, like a single daffodil in a vase, whose trumpet hears the quietness of the snow outside, the mysterious quietness that is known to it.
Aunt Phemie’s eyes followed the arms to the hands which lay together on the light-blue satin quilt. The hands were relaxed, but then she noticed that every now and then they tremored slightly of their own accord. As she glanced up, she met Nan’s full regard, which remained on her for quite a time, in a distant silence that yet had in it something of incommunicable speech.
“Tell me, Nan,” said Aunt Phemie, but speaking also through her eyes from the pressure of her emotion, “is there anything worrying you?”
Nan’s eyes went away to the wall behind Aunt Phemie where there hung a framed water colour of a woman sitting with bowed head, as if asleep, before the sea. But the eyes found nothing in the picture and shifted to the blank pale-daffodil distemper of the wall. Then, without movement of the head, they were on Aunt Phemie again, but only for a moment.
“Won’t you tell me?” begged Aunt Phemie.
“I saw him,” she said, quite suddenly and clearly.
Aunt Phemie was so completely taken aback, so instantly confused by the notion that she might have seen Ranald, that she had an impulse to bluster, to say it was quite impossible. Nan’s eyes were on her like the eyes of the child who knows what it has done and is coolly curious, and yet incurious, about the effect.
“But,” said Aunt Phemie, “but—how could you? You were in your bed.”
Nan’s eyes went back to the wall. “I wasn’t,” she said.
Aunt Phemie had now got control of herself. “Where were you?”
Nan did not answer.
“Won’t you tell me?” asked Aunt Phemie gently. “Do tell me.”
The subdued roar of a lorry as it took the brae to the steading came into the room; a lowing of moving cattle; a commotion and stamping movement; the shrill barking of Sandy’s young dog; all was in that outside world, which seemed in a moment even more remote and strange than the world which Aunt Phemie was now in. The noises died away, leaving only the rumble of the engine as it idled over.
“They are moving some cattle to-day,” explained Aunt Phemie, under a sudden heavy weight of reluctance to find out any more.
Nan did not speak, but she stirred slightly, lifted her hand to her breast; but the hand trembled and she laid it down again.
The hand clutched at Aunt Phemie’s heart, weakening her; but more gently and sensibly than ever she asked, “Won’t you tell me, Nan? You know you can tell me anything.”
Nan shook her head slowly once.
Encouraged, Aunt Phemie asked, “Where did you go? Surely you can tell me that?”
“The sun,” she said, staring at the wall.
“Is the sun troubling you?”
“The sun came into the room.”
“Yes?”
“I went to see it.”
“Did you? Where?”
“At the window.”
“But you know you shouldn’t be moving about. You had a high fever and that weakens you and makes you imagine all sorts of things. Besides you might get a dreadful relapse.” Aunt Phemie was preparing for what might come next.
But Nan did not go on.
“And what did you see?” asked Aunt Phemie inexorably driven.
“I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Ranald.” Nan regarded Aunt Phemie with waiting eyes, watching.
“Did you?” replied Aunt Phemie, with the veiled air of knowing quite well that Nan could not have seen Ranald. “Where was he?” She was not looking at Nan, asked the question lightly but quite solemnly.
“He came in sight from the gate. Then he stood by the trees and looked at me. He stood quite still. Then he turned and went away.”
All along Aunt Phemie was afraid that it might have been Ranald. Now she realised he could have been coming back to the house … or perhaps been taking a look at it from an angle that would show Nan’s window, not from any romantic feeling but out of the strange curiosity which at such a moment haunts the very core of human nature. Anyone in the glen, knowing what was going on behind that window, would experience an urge to steal in and have a long look. In Ranald’s case, the matter was profoundly involved. Aunt Phemie could see him, standing there by the trees, and going away.
Overpoweringly she perceived the dreadfulness of her dilemma—and of Nan’s. For Nan, from her whole behaviour, did not expect to be believed. Yet she knew she had seen Ranald. If now Aunt Phemie were to persist that it was impossible for Ranald to have been there in the flesh, then Nan’s hallucination or illusion had at last crossed the border and become for her the reality. Nan would know this.
The idling motor suddenly stopped and the world became extraordinarily still. A cock crew in the distance, an echoing and forlorn cry that arched and fell away over the edge of the world. Then, with incredible nearness, there were footsteps on the stairs. They were steadily mounting, muffled to a choking stealth by the carpet, yet deliberate and confident, a man’s footsteps. Aunt Phemie’s heart turned over in her and the skin of her face ran cold. The footsteps came to the door and paused. A hand knocked quietly. Aunt Phemie could not move. The knob turned, the door opened slowly and a face came round it. It was the doctor’s face, red and smiling in a sort of peep-bo expression, smiling at Aunt Phemie with an amused greeting ready, when the eyes suddenly switched to the bed and the smile vanished. Aunt Phemie turned. Nan was slipping away against the back of the bed, her face deathly pale. She had fainted.
With a poker, Aunt Phemie tried to hurry the heat under the kettle.
“If she really did see him, if he was there,” the doctor said.
“You didn’t see him at all as you were coming in?”
“No.”
“Where on earth can he have gone?” Aunt Phemie’s anxiety and impatience were unconcealed. “I feel something should be done at once.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor doubtfully. “You think that if Ranald could be actually produced, then Nan would be reassured, would be helped, by knowing that she was not absolutely obsessed?”
“Don’t you?”
“Supposing she hasn’t seen him?”
“That will make all the difference. That’s why I wish he would come. You would have thought his anxiety would have kept him at the door,” said Aunt Phemie in an angry rush.
“Wait a bit. We’ll have to go easy. Why do you think it will make all the difference? Does an illusion, more or less, really matter now?”
“In this case, yes. It will make all the difference in the world.”
“How?”
“Oh, it’s difficult to explain, but I know. I don’t care what any authority may say about what happens inside the mind at such a time. If Nan did not see Ranald, then however real and solid he may have seemed to her, yet somewhere deep in her she will know that it may not actually have been him. But if she did see the real Ranald, then the effect on her mind will be quite different, especially if you were to prove to her that it was an illusion.”
The doctor regarded her unconsciously with his professional look. “I get your point,” he said. “It’s a subtle one. I can see I don’t need to tell you that I don’t know a great deal about this. It’s psychiatric. But I couldn’t help seeing a lot of it in the Middle East. I’m not so very long demobbed, as you know. It’s not just always an easy business. Above all it needs patience and time.”
“Time can run short,” said Aunt Phemie.
“You mean there is a critical phase? No doubt. But then more than ever all depends on how you are going to deal with it. A wrong treatment—a wrong step—can tip the balance the wrong way. You saw what happened when I blundered into the bedroom. By the way, I did go first to the kitchen door—quietly, because I thought we might have a few words.”
“I understand,” said Aunt Phemie without relaxing her expression.
The doctor glanced at her. “I think—perhaps—you are overemphasising the difficulty at the moment. We have got to be careful, I mean, that we don’t shove our burden onto that young man’s shoulders.”
“You’re telling me,” said Aunt Phemie, with an impatient look at the fire.
The doctor smiled. “I suppose so,” he said. After a moment he went on. “All the same, when you mentioned how he came into sight and stood by the trees and then went away, I got the feeling of something happening in a dream.”
“You really think he wasn’t there?” Aunt Phemie glanced at him quickly.
“Anyway, he isn’t here yet! But I wasn’t thinking of that. Supposing you had been up there, ill like Nan, and you saw a dream-like happening of that kind, would you be terribly distressed to find it hadn’t been real?”
It was like a blow to Aunt Phemie. She momentarily lost grip and said in a distressed way, “Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“I don’t think you need worry about that. In any case, I shouldn’t like to see you begin to worry.” He smiled quickly, giving her a flashing complimentary glance. “You have been pretty good.”
The compliment did not help her. She was suddenly terrified at the amount of emotion that wanted to burst through. She felt on the verge of crying out everything to the doctor, of letting her choked anxiety have its wild way.
“It’s a very difficult thing to deal with,” the doctor was saying, as he shifted his stance and pulled down his waistcoat. His darkbrown suit was a perfect fit. He looked at once professional and elegant. “And the world is full of it. We just can’t have wars and not expect this kind of reaction.”
“I know,” said Aunt Phemie automatically. She looked frozen.
“It’s getting a bit too common for my taste. Even amongst children, neurotic school children. You would hardly believe it.” He glanced away through the kitchen window. Aunt Phemie turned her fixed gaze on the kettle. It was singing.
“You keep on as you’re doing and Nan will come round all right. It’s been unfortunate that this murder affair on the hill got under her skin, but she is fundamentally sound.” His voice, the movement of his feet, intimated that he was about to go. “I’ll look in again to-morrow.”
Before Aunt Phemie could speak the door opened. She started violently and the blood drained from her face. It was Ranald.
“Hallo,” said the doctor, “we have been wondering where you were.” His manner was courteous.
Ranald glanced at Aunt Phemie and then, in his casual way, said, “I have been out about the farm—talking to some of the men. I saw your car.”
“There’s been some trouble here over you,” said the doctor. “Miss Gordon rather imagines she saw you from the window.”
Ranald’s face steadied. “Where?”
“Did you come into the drive, stand for a moment against the trees and look up at her window?”
“Yes,” said Ranald, watching the doctor.
“You did? Oh.” The doctor’s brows gathered thoughtfully.
“Why? What happened?” asked Ranald.
“She fainted,” said Aunt Phemie in a flat laconic voice. It sounded at once tragic and indifferent. As she lifted the kettle off the fire, both men looked at her back. She began making a pot of tea.
“The problem is this,” said the doctor to Ranald in his professional manner. “Because of her condition—and too much excitement will be very bad for her—should we let her believe that she was deluded, which I fancy would do her no harm, or should you go up?”
“I have said all along,” remarked Ranald calmly, “that I should go up.”
The doctor suddenly looked nettled. “I hope you realise it’s not just quite so simple as all that?”
“Well, I hope I’m not just a simpleton.” There was no sarcasm in his voice; there was even a certain dry humour in his eyes.
The doctor smiled. “I hope not.” But his voice did not sound as if he had been reassured. However, he had to go. “I’ll have to leave it to yourself, Mrs. Robertson.” He glanced at his gold wrist-watch. “I have a hospital appointment and need my time.”
Aunt Phemie turned from the fire. “Very good, Doctor. And thank you for coming. I’ll take up a cup of tea—and prepare her for Ranald’s visit.” Her voice was clear but without warmth, almost without life.
The doctor’s eyes searched her face for a moment. “You think so?”
“Yes. I agree with Ronald.”
“Very good,” said the doctor. “But you needn’t hurry the process.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Right. Good morning.”
Aunt Phemie turned back from the door and began preparing a small tray. She did not look at Ranald, did not speak.
“How could she see me?” asked Ranald. “I thought she was in bed.”
“She got up to welcome the sun,” replied Aunt Phemie, “and saw you. Didn’t you see her?”
“No. The light was on the window, blinding it.”
At last she had two cups of tea and the biscuit box on the tray. “I’ll take this up and try to get her to take something. I’ll tell her I wrote you and you arrived suddenly to-day. You were coming in by the front drive—when suddenly you changed your mind and came in by the back.”
“That’s what happened,” said Ranald.
“That’s fine.” She hesitated. But she didn’t or couldn’t say any more; she lifted the tray and went out. On the top landing she paused, out of breath. A twist of pain passed over her features. Then she went forward, opened the door quietly and entered the room. Nan was lying with her face to the wall. After the doctor had got her round, she had been bewildered and jumpy in a scrambling way, but soon, exhausted, had grown wearily composed and turned her face away from them. Her body had now turned away as well.
As Aunt Phemie was setting down the tray on the bedside table it quivered, slopping a little tea into the saucers. She stood looking at Nan, listening for her breathing. She couldn’t hear it. For a moment she stood very still, then she bent over the bed and was putting a hand out when she saw the faint rise and fall of the bedclothes which Nan had pulled over her shoulder. Aunt Phemie withdrew her hand and sat down on the chair. She felt very tired. She wanted to go to sleep. Several minutes passed and her head drooped.
But at Nan’s first movement Aunt Phemie’s eyes were waiting. Nan stirred slowly, then with a small start, for she could see no-one standing in the room. So clearly she must have heard Aunt Phemie come in. When she saw Aunt Phemie in the chair by the head of the bed, her head dropped back.
“I have brought you a cup of tea, Nan,” said Aunt Phemie in kindly tones. She got up and drained the saucers into the cups. “I’m afraid it’s getting cold. Wouldn’t you like a cup?”
“No, thanks,” said Nan in a remote voice.
“Won’t you let me coax you? Do,” pleaded Aunt Phemie.
Nan shook her head once.
“Nan,” said Aunt Phemie, “I have got some news for you. I have heard from Ranald.”
Nan’s head turned slowly and her wide-open eyes settled on Aunt Phemie.
Aunt Phemie nodded, a restrained gladness infusing her manner. “He’s coming to see you,” she said with some of the archness of a mysterious conjurer.
Nan began to breathe slow heavy breaths, her eyes on Aunt Phemie’s face but not penetrating the face.
Aunt Phemie nodded again and smiled into Nan’s eyes. “He’s coming soon.”
“What?” said Nan, her breathing deepening. “When?” Her arms jerked out from under the bedclothes and she glanced away from Aunt Phemie in a wild bewildered way. But in an instant her eyes were back.
“Now don’t grow excited,” said Aunt Phemie like a wise schoolmistress. “You’ve got to be good and sensible. I wrote him and whenever he got my letter he set out. Wasn’t that noble of him?”
Nan’s breathing, still deep, was quickening as though she couldn’t get enough air. Her hands were knotting in the quilt, the scraping of her fingernails harsh on the satin.
“He’s here!” she said suddenly, not to Aunt Phemie but to herself. Now her breathing became tumultuous, gulping fierce and fast; her body thrust and heaved, while her hands clawed like a dog’s paws tearing at a hole; her eyes grew feverishly bright and terrified.
“Nan! Nan!” said Aunt Phemie, “control yourself now, take a hold!” She caught Nan’s hands, which instantly gripped hers with remarkable strength. Then the hands were away, were wildly up at the chestnut hair, pushing it back, in a half-demented gesture of dressing, of preparing; but in an instant they were gone; she did not know what she was doing; she was half-rising in the bed, pushing herself up.
After a little, Aunt Phemie got her settled back, and the tumultuous breathing slackened, grew longer between breaths. “Where is he?” she asked little above a whisper.
“He’s in the kitchen,” answered Aunt Phemie. “What a surprise I got! He started to come up the drive—then thought he had better come in quietly at the back door. He did not know how ill you might be.”
The breathing began to increase again, to quicken.
“He wants to see you, of course. But I just told him he wasn’t going to be allowed up until you were quite ready for him! So there’s no hurry.” Aunt Phemie had the cool cheerfulness of a nurse, giving out strength, with her subtle sympathy watching.
Nan’s second bout was not so bad as the first, but it left her more exhausted. The great gulps of breath made her shiver from cold; her jaw continuously quivered. Aunt Phemie saw the internal fight reach its climax in a tremoring and writhing that for one awful moment seemed about to break body and mind into bits. She continued her small movements and gestures about the bed, capably, preparing for Ranald as a nurse might prepare for the operation that would presently put everything right. The internal fight broke—and Nan was not defeated, had not screamed out the final negation in flight and collapse. Aunt Phemie smiled at her as she lay panting and with a cold damp sponge wiped her forehead and cheeks. “Yes, yes,” she said, “you can,” though Nan had not spoken. She sponged the corners of the mouth. “You are a very good-looking girl, my dear.” She stood back regarding the face with satisfaction. “Now, I’ll call Ranald, will I?” Nan’s hands began to work, her head gave an indecisive nod, her breathing quickened again. Aunt Phemie went to the door and called in a loud cheerful voice, “Ranald!” Behind her there was a small suppressed cry, but she did not turn round. Ranald came up quickly. “Here he is!” said Aunt Phemie, taking him into the room.
Nan had pulled the clothes right up to her neck. She looked at Ranald, large-eyed with a strange wary brightness.
“Hallo, Nan!” said Ranald quietly, smiling from the end of the bed. “Not feeling too fit?” He might have been there yesterday and the day before.
Nan’s eyes glanced away. She did not speak.
“Look now,” said Aunt Phemie, “I’ll leave you for a minute. He’s starving, Nan; hasn’t had anything to eat since yesterday. So you’re not going to keep him. There will be plenty of time for talking.” She went out.
Ranald sat on the bottom of the bed. “I’m sorry you’ve had another bout. Bad luck. But you’re feeling all right again?”
She nodded.
“That’s good. Though you will go on giving me frights!” His eyes warmed. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“Thank you,” she said, with a breath of spirit.
“That’s more like the old noise! I was beginning to miss it. Quite a few were, in fact. The idea has gone about that you were the life and soul of things.”
“How’s Julie?”
“Julie? Oh—she’s all right.”
Her eyes flashed upon his momentary hesitation, searched his face.
“Still worrying about Julie?” His mouth twisted in humour. “You did reform her—for a bit. But what could you expect?” He was teasing her. “I would much rather hear about yourself. Aren’t you glad to see me, for example?”
Her eyes flashed upon each side. “You know I am.” Her breathing began to quicken.
“You’re tired,” he said, observing the signs of distress.
She shook her head, but not at his remark.
“What’s bothering you, Nan?” There was strong sympathy in his voice. “Something nasty happened?”
She could not look at him. Her distress mounted rapidly. The end of her endurance had at last been reached. Then an extraordinary thing happened. She suddenly looked at him and her features collapsed in a piteous way; she seemed to sink deeper into the bed while still looking at him; then in a wild, deathly withdrawal she brought the sheet up over her face.
He stood quite still. Aunt Phemie came in. The covered body heaved with sobs.
“It’s all right, Nan,” said Aunt Phemie. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Turning, she ushered Ranald quietly out of the room. At the foot of the stairs she paused, listening. “Why didn’t you reassure her better about Julie?” she asked in a strong almost angry whisper.
“Julie is dead,” he said indifferently and, in the grip of his own thought, he walked away from her out of the house.
Ranald got off the bus opposite the town hall and, after looking about him, continued along the main street, a tall slim figure, easy-moving as an athlete, in dark flannel trousers, a grey tweed jacket, hatless, with black hair which waved just perceptibly. His manner was unselfconscious, his eyes curious for the appearance of the buildings, the cars drawn up on one side of the street, the shops, and the people who moved about. Having bought cigarettes and chatted to the girl behind the counter for a minute, he continued his stroll, blowing smoke from his lungs. Near the railway station the main street widened and ended in a region of hotels, banks and other respectable business premises. He had so far seen only one policeman but now as he was passing a short thick queue of people at a main bus-stop he saw a constable at some little distance coming towards him. He continued on his way until they met, when he asked, “Could you tell me, please, where the police station is?”
The constable was even taller than Ranald and as straight, but much more heavily built, with a disconcertingly direct look from light-grey eyes. “The police station? … Yes.” He pointed. “Down there on the right, just round the corner.” Then he considered Ranald again.
“Thanks.” But Ranald hesitated. He looked at the policeman with an easy civilian frankness. “You are stationed here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I am staying at Greenbank, with Mrs. Robertson. Arrived the other night.” He hesitated again.
“I know Mrs. Robertson,” said the policeman.
“Oh, do you?” Ranald regarded him with interest. “You’re not, by any chance, the constable who called there about—Miss Gordon?”
“I am.”
“Are you?” Ranald was pleasantly astonished at the odd coincidence. “You may think it strange of me to speak to you. But—it’s more than just curiosity. Miss Gordon is not too fit.” His eyebrows gathered in real concern. “You can’t ask questions yet.”
“Do you know Miss Gordon well?” The policeman’s interest was aroused. He was a country policeman.
“Very well,” answered Ranald. “I knew her in London.”
“Are you a relation of Mrs. Robertson’s?”
“No. I just know her through Miss Gordon.”
“I see… What do you want to know?”
“I was wondering just what did happen when Adam—uh—what’s his name?—discovered the body.”
“Adam McAlpine. Do you know him?” The policeman’s interest quickened.
“No, I haven’t met him. But I know of him. I understand his home is here somewhere? I thought I might have a word with him. Where does he stay?”
“At a house on the south road: Beechpark.”
“Thanks. If I could help in any way—I am anxious—and Mrs. Robertson has her hands full. Not having a man about the house makes a difference. As far as you are concerned, the whole affair is cleared up now?”
“I am not saying that. Miss Gordon is not yet fit for an interview?”
“No. Heavens, no,” answered Ranald. “But if you cared to tell me—any difficult point—I would pass on to you personally any information I got.” He spoke confidently, his manner that of an educated man who knew the world and a policeman’s job.
“The doctor will let us know when she’s well enough.” But the policeman was now hesitating. He would clearly, country fashion, like to find out a lot on his own. He looked at Ranald. “Do you think she was with Mr. McAlpine when he found the body?”
“That’s one of the things I should like to know,” replied Ranald, showing no flicker of surprise.
“Why?”
“Because it would help us to understand her condition. But surely Adam McAlpine told you?”
“It’s not for me to say what he told—or what information we have got since. But if you find out anything I’ll be glad to hear it from you.”
“Certainly,” said Ranald. “You can understand that we are more anxious than you.” He looked thoughtfully across the square. “I’ll do what I can and let you know.” He took out a packet of cigarettes. After a few more remarks he was able to ask in the light tone of one stating an accepted fact, “You are quite satisfied that Gordie was your man?”
“Satisfied enough—though the absence of money on the body is a difficulty.” He was beginning to accept Ranald, from whom some new clue might come.
Ranald nodded, taking a moment. “That would confuse you on the question of motive.”
“Yes. And everyone knows about the missing deposit receipt in particular. But apart from that, what could anyone know, as I said?” He regarded Ranald.
“And what use would a deposit receipt be to anyone anyhow?”
“Precisely.” The policeman nodded thoughtfully. A bus drew up by the queue. “I’m stationed up at Elver village. You’ll find me there.” Now he looked as if he might say more, but he had to catch his bus.
Ranald walked out to the south road. He had just come from Elver where a casual enquiry had drawn the information that the policeman had left on the last bus for the town. Whenever he had seen the thistledown-grey eyes, he had known his man.
The houses grew fewer, and presently he saw the name BEECHPARK painted on the stone pillar of a main gate. As he walked on, the upper parts of a large house came into view. Shrubs and trees were everywhere, but through a narrow gap he caught a glimpse of the front of the house. He went on for some distance and came back, but still there was no-one to be seen about the house. By the main gate he paused and lit a cigarette, his features drawing together sharply in thought, but he continued on his way back into town. Near the goods section of the railway station he saw the name McALPINE in great white letters spread across the roof of a large shed or warehouse. So Adam was the son of big business as a county town knows it? The notion seemed about right! Only, it was necessary to meet him alone.
Ranald looked into two hotel lounges, went and had a beer in a pub, and continued his walk through the town. He was seeking a man with a green tie. But whether the man was wearing the green tie or not, he reckoned he would know him. You cannot be anything so odd as a poet or an artist, particularly if you have lived in London and abroad, without its being immediately apparent to a discerning eye. Ranald’s thought was of that sharp laconic kind. He was even aware of the glances cast on himself. But though there were some visitors about the streets, in odd enough garments, he was never for a moment uncertain. It takes the young female of the species in her most unconventional or daring holiday get-up to proclaim the real bourgeois or subbourgeois origin; the touch of perversion that reveals; she was being “free”. Ranald didn’t smile at his thought.
Now he was walking along a main thoroughfare with the mountains rising in the distance; but presently his eye was caught by what looked like wooden sheep pens on his right, against the back of the town. As he went along the lane towards them they grew in extent in an astonishing way. A wooden gate was open and he went through it and along a passage between the pens towards a man who was sweeping up trodden manure, his broom noisy on the concrete.
“This is a big place,” said Ranald.
“Ay, it’s the auction mart,” replied the man, pausing to lean on his broom, his knuckles under his chin.
“And how often do you have sales here?”
“Every Thursday.”
“As often as that?” Ranald took out his packet of cigarettes; the man said “Thank you, sir,” and they lit up.
“Big sales?” asked Ranald.
“Oh yes; big sales: too big for me sometimes!” His slow smile brought a humoured glint to his eye.
“Sheep and cattle from all round?”
“Ay, and from more than all round at the big sales.”
“Really? And how many then would you handle in a day?”
“Well now, that’s a teaser!” The man straightened himself slowly and scratched below his ear. Ranald leaned back, stretching his arms along a wooden rail. He looked genuinely interested. Within five minutes he had a fairly accurate picture of the auction mart as the centre of live-stock transactions over a wide area. From large low-ground agricultural farms like Greenbank, from crofts up on the “marginal” lands, from distant hill sheep grazings, innumerable droves of living beasts came to this great junction, to be sold and bought, to be despatched by rail great distances, for fattening, for further breeding, for the slaughter-house. He found out who owned the auction mart, how it was run, what commission the auctioneers got, and nearly—but not quite—what the man himself earned. When the man told a story about how a bull the other day helped a loudvoiced “county” woman with buck teeth over a wooden rail, Ranald tilted his head back and laughed. On his part, he described what happened in Smithfield, London, the early-morning scenes in that immense meat market, who ran it, what wages were paid, and other detail that greatly interested his listener, who took another cigarette and asked a few questions on his own, until Ranald had to tell him that he wasn’t in the meat trade.
“Not exactly,” said Ranald, “though I am interested.”
“Ah, you have an interest in it?”
“No, not that kind of interest, not financial.”
The man looked at him shrewdly. “Now if it is not a rude question, what will you be interested in yourself?” Their talk had become very friendly.
“Well,” said Ranald, “by your age I should judge that you were in the first war.”
“I was, in the Camerons.”
“And I was in this one, in the Air Force.”
“Are you telling me that? … I had a son in the Air Force. He was a gunner.”
Ranald knew by the way the man’s eyes steadied and stared that his son had been killed. But the man said no more. Automatically he gave a small sweep with his broom.
“It’s tough,” said Ranald calmly. “I crashed myself—but I got through.”
“Ay. That’s the way it goes.” He made small sweepings, then paused and took the cigarette from his mouth.
“Some of us,” said Ranald, “are getting a bit fed up with wars. We are beginning to think that unless the way in which things are run is changed we’ll have wars until nobody is left at all.
“I have heard that too. I have a nephew who is a socialist. He has great talk on him whiles. But I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Ah well, I wonder——”
But what exactly was the profound nature of this countryman’s wonder, Ranald did not find out, for just as the man was gathering his thoughts, his eyes hazing slightly as they looked into distance, his expression swiftly changed. “Here’s McAlpine,” he muttered more to himself than to Ranald and started sweeping.
Ranald looked up the lane and saw a dark stout figure of middle height coming towards them. He was wearing a bowler hat, and something purposeful and solid about him as he advanced through the grey wooden maze of the empty pens held for the moment a startling significance. Ranald had an impulse to move away but suppressed it. The sweeper was now paying no attention to him.
The man came right up. He had a pale fleshy face with small quick-moving eyes; perfectly shaved, washed, solidly respectable. He gave Ranald a quick glance and something less than a curt nod, “James,” he said, with a jerk of his head, and went on. “Yes, sir,” said James and followed him, carrying his broom.
Ranald left the pens and went back into the town. He had half an hour to wait for his bus and found the pub he had already been in. Sitting on the narrow wooden seat by the window, his pint of beer before him, he lit a cigarette.
A faint smile came to his face as he thought of the “significance” of the dark bowler-hatted man. What was the dream significance of a maze? Something to do with the intestines wasn’t it, the guts? Not inapt. He blew a stream of smoke and the smile faded. He rarely experienced that dream effect in what he saw. Even now there was something of the stuff of nightmare in the advance of the bowler-hatted man through the grey empty pens. The grey slats and rails had the greyness of wood on a sea shore, the weathered greyness of spewed-up wood in peat bogs. But he did not like this kind of vision and snapped it out by a blink of an internal eye—and instantly the vision of Nan drawing the sheet over her face swam before him. There was a perceptible constriction of his features as he snapped that vision out also.
The trouble was the irrational nature of this kind of stuff. Give in to it and no peat bog had a deep enough bottom for it. It was childish, primitive, and so in a certain way shocking. The child’s shock; and fear. So poets and artists, under the impression that they were “revolutionary”, tried to shock the world. Good God. Regression. The denial of the intellect. To call it revolutionary art—good God. Ranald caught the barman’s eye on him. The barman removed his eye to look at the glass he was polishing. Two countrymen in thick tweeds were talking huskily together, standing, their pints in their hands, confidential. The barman was discreetly listening or Ranald would have gone over and spoken to him. As he removed his glance, his internal eye saw the black-hatted figure again. Father of Adam, the man with the green tie. A pastel shade of light green. The internal eye saw the exact shade and the full length of the tie.
Adam wouldn’t get much shrift from that parent. Probably a mother, dominated by the bowler hat, had made Adam her consolation, her darling boy. Eternal struggle of the weak mother to get cash to slip to Adam. Broke, he would come home. The internal eye saw one or two “coterie” poets who would gladly cut each other’s throat, despising, spitting upon, the success they craved. There was an eternal conspiracy to deny them “achievement”. When they went political, they called the conspiracy a “bourgeois” conspiracy. Ranald reckoned he knew them root and branch from college onwards. After a compulsory session of talk in their noisy midst, how refreshing, how sane, to talk to a barman. He took a pull at his pint, and his features went solemnly statuesque; like a death mask, with something uncommunicably sad about its carven intolerance; the barman was glancing at him again.
As he set his pint on the table Ranald had a sudden thought. Aunt Phemie had said nothing about there having been no money on Gordie when he was hauled out of the water hole. That had come as so complete a surprise that he had almost shown it to the policeman. Who the hell would have taken the money—assuming Gordie had done the foul deed? The one thing all these fellows—and his mind was back on his “coterie” friends again—wanted, would do any bloody thing to get, was money. Money! he thought, thinking of Adam and the murdered man. Christ!
The thought narrowed his eyes. Quite deliberately he decided that Adam could have done it, would have done it, had he got the chance. Ranald had never recovered from certain early prewar experiences at college. There had been a small group of “Mythicals” who rampaged about, full of laughter and splendid unintelligibility in their verse. Finding verbal equivalents for the instinctual impulses of the unconscious or id was, they declared, a poetic necessity postulated by the irrational nature of the subject matter, and it was manifestly, scientifically indeed, impossible to body forth the irrational in rational terms. Hence their verse; which thus was truly revolutionary in that it achieved a new freedom of the spirit, a new synthesis.
Now Ranald had gone over completely to the Socialists and had quite a different notion of revolution, was rapidly becoming adept in the understanding and use of the dialectical method, and in a first notable inter-debate challenged their “synthesis” and, in particular, their concept of “freedom”, which he then proceeded to take to bits as if it were a child’s doll. In fact, he called them “bourgeois dolls” … . And the description had just enough of the irrational in it to achieve a quite furious effect.
This adolescent war continued with gusto—and not without a growing bitterness, particularly in Ranald, who began to believe that “bourgeois dolls” might in fact play a sinister part in the impending collapse of capitalist society. With the strife at its height, Ranald, in a packed debate, was directly challenged on the nature and constitution of a civilised society, was being asked how he proposed to deal in his particular robotised society with the new expansionist forces in human thought and art as represented by pioneering mythicals, when, before the speaker could continue with his mounting rhetoric, he rose in his place as if a direct question had been put to him and said, “Mr. Chairman, the question presents no difficulty to me: I should kill them off.” Then he sat down.
Ranald looked at his watch. Five minutes yet. He had come into town for cigarettes and was bringing back a packet for Aunt Phemie. She had insisted on paying and shown just a momentary confusion when he had raised no objection. The bed, with Nan on it, drawing the sheet up over her face, was there before his internal eye again. He had been avoiding it, refusing to look at it. The thing had seemed too obviously a death gesture. But now he looked at Nan’s face, at that piteous, collapsing, indescribable expression with the eyes on him. Good God, it was pretty terrible. Then an extraordinary sensation of stillness began to advance upon him, to hold him. Hitherto he had accepted Nan’s action as a symptom of her trouble. But a symptom has a cause. Now the stillness had him absolutely, extended beyond him into breathless space. As he stirred his chest slowly packed itself full of air. His reason stirred and he thought: But he couldn’t have raped her—she would have fought?
“Good day, sir,” called the barman, but Ranald, if he heard him, did not answer.
“I think I’ll get out for a walk,” said Ranald who had come down from Nan’s room.
“Very well,” agreed Aunt Phemie going with him to the back door. Mrs. Fraser was scrubbing in the kitchen. “What do you think of Nan this morning?”
“She’s coming on all right.” He spoke with a glance at the day, turning from her. Against the bright light he looked more haggard than ever and Aunt Phemie knew he had slept little, although at breakfast when she had asked him how he had slept he had replied “Not too bad”. There was no penetrating that light dismissive manner; it shut a person up.
“Don’t go too far,” she said.
“Right.” But he did not look back at her.
When she got to the top of the stairs she suddenly found she could not go into Nan’s room and swerved away. She would do up Ranald’s room first. Nan would hear her and that would be all right. From the side window of his room she saw Ranald leaving the cart road and strolling up towards the two Irishmen who were mending the drains in the thistledown field. Now he had stopped and was talking to them. He’s a complete mystery to me! she thought in a fatal way and turned back from the window, for she just could not go on looking at him. Her only hope now was to wean Nan away from him after he had left. Her experiment had failed. There was something between these two that could not be broken down. His coming had in a dreadful, drastic way only emphasised it. Aunt Phemie experienced this so sharply in her nerves that she felt the whole house gripped by it. What Nan felt she dared not let herself think. She lifted his folded pyjama suit off the bed and set to in a flurry of work.
Meantime Ranald was getting a lot of information from the ditchers. They were experts at their job and he admired the neat way in which they cut the turves and laid them beside the opening ditch, the methodical way they dug, the unhurrying sureness of the work. The drains, with their sunken red tiles, were at first like the veins of the field, then, more exactly, they were ducts drawing away the excess of water from its body. When he had grasped the whole underground design, he went on.
Talking to real workmen about what they did always took him out of himself. It had the easing effect upon him of a ritual, in which, because of his beliefs, he participated. They were his brothers and as they extended through all life, in all countries, they were all life. The all-inclusive certainty of this precluded any need for further thought; left an assurance before which doubt was just faintly amusing.
As he looked about the field and saw the countless withering thistles he decided that the farm was not being too well run. But what could you expect? He already knew the agricultural wage rate, plus milk, potatoes, coal, meal, and a free house. Some house! he thought; for he had also found out quite a lot about overcrowding in the farm cottages, with no water laid on, no sanitation. Pretty ghastly, at this time of day. Remarkable that the farm workers should have the interest they did have. And obviously they appreciated Aunt Phemie. He paused and looked about him and away over the broad valley.
It would be so simple to run the valley as a large-scale collective farm, with a real village for all the workers, water laid on and electric light. Aunt Phemie, who was no farmer, running this big farm for her own profit—well! But she would make an excellent secretary for a collective. Then she would really have something to do, something moreover that would deeply interest her, because her life would be mixed up with other lives, would have a concern for them. Her mothering would find an outlet.
It would be so simple to do, too, thought Ranald, going on. As things were, this kind of country life just bored him. Static, so that you went either mindless or emotional. He had had a hell of a night last night, what sleep there was being full of murder dreams. At one point he had borrowed from Nan’s attack on Fanwicke and bitten Adam’s throat out. That kind of stuff. The climbing made his heart beat with some discomfort and he stopped by an elm on the edge of the shallow ravine. There were odd growths on it, like huge warts, right up onto the branches. He examined one of them. It was full of young sprouts, as long as knitting needles, like hairs on a wart. He tried to pull a sprout off but it was flexible and tough as wire. Perhaps each of the warts had once been a bud-point on the tree. Cancerous sex growths? It looked like it. He glanced about the ground and found the same economic basis for all the trees, and the other trees were not cancerous. He smiled dryly, for the explanation would be simple enough to one who knew about trees … and the law of causality. Up in the next field he heard a piercing cawing overhead. But the bird was too big for a crow. Another … and then a silent third. They were like floating kites. Nan’s thistledown letter came back into his mind. Buzzards! He watched them for a time and as the high airiness affected his mind he thought of Nan. He would have to do something about her. But what? As he went on, his mind left the question unanswered, left it alone; he did not want to force his mind to do anything, could not force it. He hadn’t that kind of energy, not at the moment. In front now was the wood—the Dark Wood.
As he sat among the trees, he followed the interstices between their columns to a glade on which the daylight lay. Slender columns because they grew so closely, and, for the same reason, tall and straight. They were silent, very still, and when he glanced by his right shoulder, they closed their ranks as they receded. He twisted further round to look behind him, and again through interspaces saw a flat open mound, with squatting shrubs on green grass, bright as a players’ stage in some antique world. Two legs moved, stealthy trousered legs. But even as he blinked, they vanished. Merely an illusion of movement set up by the turning of his head? He got up and walked onto the mound, slowly but deliberately, around the bushes, pausing to listen, looking for the man. But there was no man. He thought to himself: I could have sworn the legs moved there. Hearkening for footsteps, he heard the silence and, somehow, it mocked him. It had an invisible mocking face. Satire narrowed his own eyelids. The lack of sleep was doing things to him! He sat down on the rabbit-cropped turf; it was softer than velvet, and presently he stretched full length. He stared at the sky for a long time, then closed his eyes and drove his senses from him, but in no time they were back of their own accord, fully alert. They had the notion that the legs might belong to Adam McAlpine. He sat up abruptly and looked penetratingly about him, turning his head slowly. He arose and followed the direction which the legs had taken.
When he came to the far edge of the pine plantation, near the spot where Nan had met the policeman, he stood looking up and down the path that ran by the wood. There was no-one on it and at a little distance on either hand it dipped out of sight. In front the ground rolled upward but only slightly now, with a few stone mounds that were old croft ruins and massed clumps of whin. When he had got through this tumbled ground, he came on a sagging rusty wire fence, beyond which the heather spread far and wide over the moor. He stood for a few moments but saw no-one, then, his eyes lifting about him, continued across the moor until at last it fell away to the hill burn. By the burn he stood, his eyes steady on the distant birches in the gorge. Towards them he went.
The noise of the waterfall grew and, rounding a last corner, he saw below him a man painting the waterfall. The green of his tie was a shade darker than Ranald’s inner eye had seen it. As Ranald approached, Adam looked up at him for a long moment, then turned his back and continued his work.
Ranald stopped behind the painter and glanced from the canvas to the waterfall. Not exactly a representational picture; there was a childish exaggeration of the whirls in the pool, like a childish fear of them, but still there was some resemblance to reality. Immature poet’s work, he decided; a literary subject. The dark-boiling whirls in the pool were designed to suck the shocked eye down. The path had dipped to the flat ledge where they stood so that Ranald was looking back at the waterfall and up to its smooth brow; but the pool was some ten feet below him, rock-bound, with the ledge on which they stood overhanging it.
“Yes?” Adam was staring at him with a penetrative directness, his brows drawn.
“I was thinking,” answered Ranald calmly, “what a waste of potential hydro-electric power.”
The creases between Adam’s eyebrows deepened and concentrated the light that shot from the eyes; then he turned his back. Ranald went to the edge and looked over and around. “It wouldn’t be difficult,” he said conversationally, “to dam this gully and get a pretty hefty head of water.”
Adam, mixing paints on his palette, paid no attention.
“Don’t you think so?” asked Ranald. “Or am I interrupting you?” He smiled.
“I am not an engineer,” said Adam definitely closing the conversation. He did not look at Ranald.
“Neither am I,” replied Ranald, “but it seemed to me the power of water had interested you—if I may say so, not unsuccessfully.”
“Thanks very much,” replied Adam, ready now to go on with his painting.
“Though I suppose, from an æsthetic point of view, you would rather it continued to run what is called free?”
Adam slowly turned his head and looked at Ranald. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“Well, no,” replied Ranald, “I hadn’t thought of that. I did hope it was at least a half-intelligent remark.”
“Well, I don’t. I think it’s just bloody silly.” The last two words were explicit; the eyes flashed, then Adam turned to his canvas.
“Sorry about that.” Ranald’s tone was still casual if now rather coolly amused. “I had wanted to have a few words with you.”
Adam’s head shot round.
“I am staying,” said Ranald, “at Greenbank with Mrs. Robertson.” His eyes considered Adam’s expression. “I perceive you guessed as much.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Not much,” replied Ranald. “But I had hoped we might discuss it reasonably.”
“What?”
“Miss Gordon’s condition is such that Mrs. Robertson and I thought it might help if we got your version of what actually did happen when you and Miss Gordon found the body.”
“You do, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, to hell with you! I hope that’s clear?”
“Quite. Perhaps, then, you wouldn’t mind telling me what happened just before you found the body?”
Adam’s brown eyes concentrated to gleam-points. It was the restraint of one flaming mad.
“I ask,” continued Ranald, watching the face as though its change of expression would tell him what otherwise he need not hope to find out, “because Miss Gordon, in her heightened mental condition, may possibly exaggerate what actually did occur. We are prepared to make allowances.”
Adam’s features constricted further, the jaw stiffening, shooting forward slightly, so that the mouth pursed and the whole expression gathered a rigid intensity.
Ranald studied the face. “She might even,” he continued, “exaggerate an amusing love passage into something like rape.”
“You bastard!” The words, flat and fierce, spat at him.
Ranald studied the face even more thoughtfully.
Palette and brush hit the ground and Adam stood before him. “Get out!” Ranald did not move. “Get out, damn you!” Adam’s fist smashed into Ranald’s jaw.
At the first movement of Adam’s shoulder, Ranald’s head had begun to duck, but the blow was sufficiently explosive to send him staggering back three yards. There he stood, looking at Adam. “I thought you were that kind of sod,” said Ranald levelly, his eyes never moving from Adam’s face. Then he began slowly moving in.
Adam yelled at him again to get the hell out of this and drove at his face, but the face dodged successfully this time and Adam staggered back from a full punch over the heart. Ranald followed him, not swiftly, but with the movement of one who would kill at his leisure, who knew he could kill at his leisure, but needed first to dominate the mind in front of him, to frighten it into gibbering bits.
Adam’s mouth had opened, he was bent slightly from the punch and weakened, but his eyes were on fire, his expression that of the fighting wild thing which is not beaten until its last wriggle is stamped on. An excitement came into Ranald’s face, whitening it.
It was a primitive scrambling fight, with Adam, after the first wild rushes, ready to use his knees, his feet, any weapon he could lay hands on, for it had become unmistakably clear that as a boxer Ranald completely dominated him. But Adam was nimble, extraordinarily nimble on his feet. When, after dodging a tree, he received a body punch that sent him spinning, he was not only instantly up again but had a piece of dead branch in his fist, was out in the open once more, with Ranald following up, watchful of the stick but forcing Adam towards the river, shepherding him towards the ledge. As Ranald stumbled over a shallow outcrop of rock the thrown stick went slashing across his face. Words now came from them thick with abnormal hatred. Blood began to blind Ranald’s right eye. Yet when he got in a blow that felled Adam he waited for Adam to get up. Adam was not deceived. “You bloody swine!” he gasped, for he saw that Ranald wanted to break him, to make him whine before finishing him off.
But they could not keep up the pace, and presently, when Ranald had Adam with his back to the ledge, Adam made no effort to sidestep. Leaning forward slightly, he waited, his eyes wary as a stoat’s, his panting mouth still spitting oaths. When Ranald moved to go in, Adam threw himself flat in a leg tackle and, as he brought Ranald down, tried at the same time, in the same motion, to heave him from off his back over the ledge. He very nearly succeeded, but Ranald just managed a grip on the legs. There was a fierce roll and scramble for a few seconds; then Ranald got the full thrust of a knee between the pit of his stomach and two short ribs which had been fractured in an air crash. The intense pain blinded him, loosened his hold, and Adam, breaking away, got to his knees, to his feet, stepped back a pace—and disappeared over the ledge with an expression of fantastic astonishment, his arms thrown up, his fingers wide.
Ranald lay doubled up and slowly writhing. As the stinging agony ebbed, he got on hands and knees and looked over the ledge. The dark pool boiled and swirled and then ran smoothly out of its narrow tail on the far side, got broken up by some boulders, widened and grew shallow in a short run. There was no sign of Adam McAlpine. Ranald got onto his seat and leaned forward to ease the pain, waiting for the sucking swirls and eddies to throw up the body or empty it down the tail of the pool. The pool was deep; in its depths would be continuous circling currents, hidden ledges. The body might never come up.
Ranald got carefully to his feet and straightened himself. His hands were streaked with the blood he had wiped from his eye. He could not see the whole of the pool because of this overhanging ledge which, down from where he stood, curved irregularly for a short distance with birches growing to its edge. He moved up towards the falls so that he might thus get a view under the ledge right to the foot of the pool on his own side. But he found he could not quite get a total view, though he could see the base of the rock which Adam had gone over and what he thought for a moment was a white handkerchief caught between two stones beyond the bottom of the pool and about a yard up from the water’s edge, close in on his own side. It was clearly not a handkerchief, however, but an old piece of paper.
There was now a need upon him to search every corner and satisfy himself. He looked at the pool once more, saw the outward swirl from the rock that would have drawn the sinking body inevitably back towards the central downthrust from the falls, then walked along the ledge, in among the birches, and, still not completely satisfied after peering over, came out onto the path, intending to go down its short dip and walk in on the pool from below. But already a realisation of his position, a certain wariness, was in the movement of his body, and as he instinctively glanced down the long gorge he saw two men with fishing rods coming up. He saw them only for a second or two where the path curved outward above the river, then lost them in the trees. They were perhaps two hundred yards away. Ranald did not hesitate. He left the path, climbing up through the birches at a slant, away from the pool, back towards the moor. But soon he was completely blown, his heart knocking, and threw himself on his face.
The fight had certainly taken him right out of himself! He hadn’t, he reckoned, enjoyed anything so much for years. God, how people indulged themselves by letting their emotions rip!
It was the measure of him, the sod, with his animal teeth and feet, his bloody knee! He extended the muscles of his stomach trying to ease the pain, which was now dull, not sharp, so perhaps the ribs hadn’t gone. All the time he was listening, with a wariness in the eye, in the pallor of his face, the sharp criminal look of one who knew exactly what had happened—and would happen, if any kind of evidence should point towards him. The anglers should be at the falls by now—if they hadn’t stopped to fish a pool on the way up. They might remain in the gully all day, fishing the deep pools with bait or minnow, hoping for the big trout, the cannibal monsters. They might hook something big enough to surprise them!
His brain now became extremely cunning and lucid. The painted picture would be found intact and he knew a sudden intimate satisfaction in having resisted the impulse to kick the wooden legs from under it as he had followed the nimble Adam. A lucky break! With no wreckage, no evidence of struggle, Adam must simply have fallen over. Not to mention the darker suspicion that would inevitably enter the human mind—of suicide. The whole affair couldn’t have been arranged better had he deliberately framed it! Short of actually having been seen, he couldn’t conceivably be connected with the event. He hadn’t even met the fellow!
He glanced at his watch. It was time he was getting back, for if he weren’t late for lunch, everything would be completely normal. There was this blood on his hands. And on his face, too; he could feel the sticky crust. Before he left the trees, went into the open, he must wash. He looked at his watch again and decided to give himself half an hour before he risked an approach to the burn.
He lay on his back, staring up through the small leafy trees. The high sky was hazed with cloud. Presently a warbler was overhead, amongst the leaves; visible now; song notes fell on him. Bird notes all along the wood; not songs but a few odd notes, now here, now there. Distance gave them a curious echoing quality. He thought of spring woods and Nan. This was Nan. He stirred restlessly; dammit, it was time he was out of this. But he forced himself to lie still. He would leave the farm to-morrow morning. A vague thought about his return ticket put his hand to his breast pocket. It was flat—empty. His pocketbook was gone.
He sat up with flashing eyes. If they found his pocket-book! His hands went over all his pockets, even those in his waistcoat; they were beginning to tremble. His anger, as he swore, gave a vicious twist to his features.
The spasm passed and he began to worm his way down through the trees. He hit the path above the falls and, after careful spying, slid down to a screening clump of salleys by the burnside. There he washed his hands and with every care douched his face. But he started a trickle of blood again. It took him five minutes to stop it, but by that time he had his complete explanation of a fall, for he realised that whatever happened here now, he would in any case require an excuse for Greenbank. The reflection of his face in the water made that clear. After spying and listening, he slipped up the hillside, then moved along it, until he was above the falls pool. The first thing he noticed was that the picture was gone.
He lay flat, watchful, trying to think this out. Anglers wouldn’t have stolen a picture. That was quite certain. They would have removed it only if they had found the body. Nor would Adam have come miraculously up out of the pool and borne it away, not in his sodden condition! On hands and knees, Ranald moved along the hillside until he had commanded two more pools. There was no sight of the anglers, no human movement of any kind; he went back on his feet until he overlooked the falls pool once more. But now he was afraid to go down. The level ground to the ledge was flat-open like a trap whose jaws would spring if he stepped on it. In a blinding moment he realised the hell of a hole he had landed himself in. Actually he hadn’t pushed Adam over, but who on earth would believe that now, with the evidence of the pocket-book containing his personal card not to mention a bloody and bruised face? And he had been looking for Adam—as the policeman of Elver could testify. Not to speak of the girl in the case!
The nausea he had experienced when the knee got him in the stomach came back; but he did not give way to it; his lips thinned against his teeth. To hell with them! To hell with that bloody trap too! He snaked his way down and did not go openly onto the bare ledge but slid noiselessly across the path and in among the trees above the tail of the pool. He leaned over the ledge to make sure nobody was squatting down below. There was no-one, but suddenly he realised that something was missing, and in a moment remembered the piece of old white paper. It was gone. So the anglers had been there.
This knit him together finally. He stood quite still, turning his head slowly. He felt no real pain now. The remorseless mood was on him again; it went down into his hands. He thought not of flight but of what might be met—or overtaken—and destroyed. To be trapped like a rat—over that sod! He moved to the edge of the trees and stood, his eyes flashing swiftly about the bare ground they had fought over. Then they stopped in a concentrated stare. The brown leather pocket-book was lying by the slight outcrop of weathered rock which he had tripped over before getting the stick in the face. He raised his eyes from the pocket-book and looked about him, lips apart, hardly breathing. Then he walked calmly forward, lifted the pocketbook, opened it for a reassuring glance, put it in his pocket, moved up onto the path, left the path, began climbing, quickened his pace, tore upwards, his breathing thick with gusts of laughter, of relief and triumph.
He was half an hour late for lunch and opened the door upon Aunt Phemie, who had just sat down to table, and—what was this?—Nan “Hullo, Nan!” he said with a surprise, a warmth, in his voice and manner which so completely overcame Aunt Phemie that she could not take her eyes from the blood clots on his face. He seemed changed, to have come surprisingly alive.
“Ranald!” breathed Nan, also staring at his face.
“Oh, this!” He touched his brow. “That’s what’s kept me.” He was amused, swayed, gave a short laugh. “I came one cropper up in that pine wood of yours and the branch of the tree got me right across. Doesn’t it look pretty?”
Aunt Phemie got up. “Dear me! What on earth were you doing?”
“I thought I’d climb a tree. Ancestral impulse.”
“Reach down that box,” said Aunt Phemie, pointing to the high shelf as she turned to the hot tap. Ranald brought the box to the kitchen sink and Aunt Phemie, after tearing off a strip of bandage, soaked it with disinfectant and began dabbing the clots.
“Ooh! that bites,” said Ranald, screwing up his face.
“That’s what it’s meant to do.” The nearness of his face with a lost boyishness coming through, so affected Aunt Phemie that her features concentrated and she wiped away smoothly the blood traces below the clots.
“And who brought Nan down?” he asked.
“Herself,” answered Aunt Phemie, studying the clots with businesslike care. “The doctor ordered her up for a little while this afternoon.” But she was not satisfied with her work. “I think I’ll soak away these clots and bleed them clean.”
“You’ll do no such a thing,” declared Ranald. “They’re fine—thank you very much.” He turned. “Hullo!” he said, looking at Nan. “Feeling all right?”
Nan had gone pale, was wavering like one about to pass out. “Fine, thank you.” But she visibly pressed the table with elbows and trembling hands. “What next!” declared Aunt Phemie, rushing out. She came back with the brandy bottle and Nan, though she managed to take a good sip, said, “I think I’ll go up.”
“I should just think so!” Aunt Phemie caught her arm. “Come along. And next time you’ll obey the doctor—or you’ll hear about it! Coming walking in on me like that!”
“Sorry, Ranald,” said Nan, throwing him a glance as she went out.
“Keep your teeth on it,” he said encouragingly, following them to the foot of the stairs. Aunt Phemie now had her arm round Nan, was clearly bearing almost her full weight. “I’ll be up to see you soon,” called Ranald cheerfully.
Nan lay full out on her bed, eyes closed, her skin drained of blood, ghastly, but one hand held on to Aunt Phemie’s fingers. Her breathing began to revive in short shallow gasps. “Oh, I feel such a fool,” she muttered with the tragic weakness that couldn’t even cry.
“A wee drop more brandy,” suggested Aunt Phemie tenderly. But the fingers would not let go. “Don’t hurry,” whispered Aunt Phemie. “Take your time, my darling.” She suspected that the sight of the blood and the change in Ranald had been too much for Nan.
Nan began to stir, to sniffle; tears came from under her lids, wetting the lashes, running slowly down her cheeks. “Oh-h!” she moaned, and her features crumpled like a crying child’s.
“That’s my girl!” said Aunt Phemie. “Now, where’s your hankie? Oh, but yes, yes,” she added as Nan’s head moved from side to side in a sort of utter weakness and negation. Aunt Phemie found the handkerchief under the pillow and began wiping the tears away.
“You’re good to me,” murmured Nan. “You—you know.”
“Yes, my dear. I know,” whispered Aunt Phemie.
Nan’s head lay still; she opened her eyes and saw Aunt Phemie wiping her own eyes.
Aunt Phemie nodded, smiling. “We’re just two silly women,” she said, “but we’re tough!”
Nan closed her eyes again and gripped Aunt Phemie’s hand hard. She was trying to stop a new outburst of tears. Presently a wavering smile came through the tears and she looked at Aunt Phemie. “I can feel the brandy hot.”
Aunt Phemie nodded. “I can see it in your face.”
“Can you?” She lay back completely relaxed, exhausted, but the smile left its ghostly presence in her face. She said after a little in a quiet natural way, “Death comes so near—you feel yourself—sinking back on him.” Then she looked at Aunt Phemie again, with a strange almost shy expression in her eyes. “That was Ranald,” she said.
“Yes,” answered Aunt Phemie, “that was the real Ranald.”
Nan gave a small nod and pressed Aunt Phemie’s hand hard, then drew her own away.
“I’ll bring you up a plate of soup in a little while; meantime compose yourself like a good girl, and no nonsense.” At the door Aunt Phemie turned. Nan’s eyes were on her in a shy gladness, in a veiled tribute. The unspoken was between them. Nan was very lovely when she looked like that. Aunt Phemie made a face at her and closed the door.
Ranald was waiting for her in the kitchen, drying his hands on the roller towel behind the cupboard door. “How is she?”
“She’s come round. But she’s desperately weak. We’ll leave her to herself for a little while.” She saw the brandy bottle.
“Would you like some?” She looked at his face. The brow showed a slight but definite swelling.
“I would, if you don’t mind.”
“Help yourself. I’ll get you a glass.”
He picked up Nan’s glass, poured himself a stiff one, and drank it off. “I could have done with that earlier.” He smiled. “You said the doctor was in?”
“Yes. Do sit down. The potatoes are ruined, I’m afraid. Yes, he was in. After fever, you’ve got to stay in bed for a day or two, but he now wants her up—and interested.”
“Sounds sensible. He seems a reasonable chap.”
“Yes, he’s a good doctor. I hope you like the soup?”
“It’s excellent. I always take Scotch broth in a restaurant. You feel there’s body in it—though never like this.” His voice and manner now had their casual air, but with an attentiveness, a natural warmth of life underneath, that subtly transformed them. She saw that he could, if he liked, be quite charming—perhaps, even, very charming.
She was still moved, too, over Nan. She felt in a completely irrational way that Nan had taken the turn, that something had happened which, as it were, had headed her off. If only—if only—she could be kept in her present mind! If only that awful wind of chance didn’t suddenly blow her again onto the dark course! In her own body, Aunt Phemie had felt Nan’s utter frailty. She was still automatically sending out her own strength as she spoke to Ranald, asking him what had really happened in that tree. And Ranald had his story, embroidered it even with a reference to bird-nesting in boyhood. “Infantile regression,” he suggested with a humoured glance that broke into a short laugh when Aunt Phemie smiled.
“And I was interested in these Irishmen digging those drains. Experts—but why Irish?”
“Because the Irish are experts at that work. During the war—and right up until now—labour has been our difficulty. That field—Nan calls it the thistledown field—it got beyond us. But that was not the only kind of trouble.”
“No?” He looked at her with genuine interest, even curiosity.
“No. Broken-down fences. Cart roads that only the tractor can take now. Over-cropping year after year with grain. Even the moles—didn’t you notice them here and there in immense rashes, the molehills, I mean?”
“Now that you mention it, I did.”
“And rats. Horrible.” She was now wholly concentrated on interesting him.
“Really? You mean they swarmed about?”
“I tried to keep it from Nan. She came here at the tail-end of the last great hunt. She couldn’t help seeing something of it. They were not only in and about the stealing. They were in the grain stacks. Everywhere. Burrowing in the banks like rabbits, actually using the rabbit burrows. Horrible—particularly,” she added, “as a subject for lunch! Have some more potatoes?”
“Thanks. I feel hungry.”
“Perhaps the country air is doing you good?”
“I believe it is.”
“Pity you’re going away so soon.”
“I should really go to-morrow.”
“Must you?”
“I should really.” He ate his stew and potato.
“I’ll slip up with a plate of broth for Nan now, if you’ll excuse me.”
When she came back, she looked cheerful, happy. “I do believe she’s taken the turn. If she could just have a day or two to get some pith back into her!”
“Have a cigarette,” he said. “Between us, we’ll manage all right. Is that coffee? Good!”
“You’re driving me into bad habits again.” She stuck the cigarette in her holder.
“Not at all. One must have a burst occasionally—particularly after killing rats. By the way, how did you kill them?”
“It would take me hours to tell you. I remember one night in the wintertime, about bed time, hearing savage cries and going to the window to see lights rushing about the ploughed field out there. It looked as if some strange beast had got loose in the field and they were after it in a weird death hunt. I got frightened in an awful way. At last I couldn’t bear it.” She smiled. “Some young lads were after the rats with sticks and electric torches. I had told the grieve I would pay threepence a tail.”
He laughed.
“Then there was the time when Donnie fell through the stack. Getting threshed early was a real problem. Anyway, it was well into the spring. The threshing mill was in place between the stacks in the field. Donnie had climbed up onto a stack to begin forking to the mill—when he suddenly disappeared. They had to tear the stack away to get at him. He was nearly suffocated.”
“But how?”
“You know how a stack is built? Anyway, the rats had eaten the heart out of the stack and he had fallen down through it.”
“Good God!”
Aunt Phemie nodded. “That was during the war—when seamen were being torpedoed and drowned taking grain across the Atlantic.”
“I say! You had your war too.”
“We did what we could.”
“But surely the Ministry of Agriculture should have done something about rats. Hang it, they should know about dealing with them scientifically I mean. It’s really pretty bad.”
“I don’t know,” said Aunt Phemie: “I suppose they had their problems too.”
“That’s the worst of it,” declared Ranald with a restless movement. “You’ll all go on excusing them. It’s just damned silly. Clearly, over rats, they just had no plan at all. You make that clear. Don’t you?”
“Believe me, I was angry enough,” admitted Aunt Phemie. “But that doesn’t help. We must try and be fair. Where would the Ministry of Agriculture—though it’s the Department of Agriculture in Scotland—where would they get the men—the rat-killers—in war time to cover all the farms in the country? They just hadn’t got them. In the end we got two men from the Department for ten days—just before Nan came. In bare traps they caught over seven hundred—I made them lock the heap in a shed until they were counted lest Nan might see them. They also used gas and poison. So we’ve got them under—for the time being anyway.”
“But how were they allowed to multiply like that?”
“They weren’t allowed to,” said Aunt Phemie. “They just did in spite of us. Life is like that.”
Ranald shook his head. “I see your point—but I am not being had. You can destroy that kind of life. You must. You must destroy the rat; or the rat will destroy you.”
Aunt Phemie blew away a stream of smoke.
“You’ve got to make a plan, a national plan, to destroy rats and stick to it, ruthlessly. There is no other way.” He leaned back. “However, I suppose you’ll think that’s politics!”
“I shouldn’t mind that. It’s when you actually come to deal with things, with life itself—it’s difficult.” She hesitated. “I know you’ll think that’s vague. But when you have got to get the real work done, the actual grain and calves and what not produced, the land ploughed, and so on, with real human beings working at it—it’s not easy. You’re only a human being, and the other person is a human being, and if you’re going to respect him as an individual with a right to some freedom of his own—it’s difficult to plan him in your way.”
“But surely not—if your plan is the right plan. You may think—I don’t know—that I’m interested in some brand of politics, some new party, as that sort of thing is understood—in the press, at election meetings, and so forth. I’m not. Not at all. We’ve got to get past all that. We’ve got to have some basis for our political thought. Everyone-for-himself, in the old capitalistic scramble, served its purpose in the historic process by smashing up feudalism. But now it in its turn is finished; it’s gone rotten in our hands. It should be buried, or it will rot all life. We need a scientific socialism.” He was in real earnest now, he was alive, not with that air of complacency which had earlier repelled Aunt Phemie but with a driving purpose in him, an obviously deep belief. The intolerant sharpening of the pale features with the dark blood clots held its own warrant. “You mentioned freedom, for example. Everyone, here and in America, and not only the big political bosses, but the writers, the parsons, everyone who thinks he has two ideas to rattle together, shouts freedom—we’ll die for freedom—and yet not one of them has even attempted to define the word.” He stopped abruptly and his features gave an ironic twist. “Like the old woman shouting her blessed word Jerusalem!” He lit another cigarette.
“Perhaps it’s impossible to define?” suggested Aunt Phemie.
“No.” He shook his head as he blew out smoke. “Take your rats again,” and now he was talking without stress. “You reasoned about rats. You determined they were a menace. You took steps accordingly, and now you have won freedom from rats.”
“But human beings are not rats.”
“The same reasoning process applies nevertheless. Only you have to begin by asking how does a human being in fact attain a consciousness of freedom. The notion persists that man becomes more free the more he grows independent of his fellow men, of society. It’s the old Rousseau gag about man being born free and yet being everywhere in chains. It’s just sentimental nonsense. If you left a child in the forest to fend for itself it would, at the best, grow up an animal, a beast forever hunting its food. You know that. It would be absolutely conditioned by the necessity for grub-hunting. It would have no speech, no music, no literature, no philosophy, no religion. All these things it gets from society. You, in fact, taught children these very things. There are no schools in the jungle.”
“I agree,” said Aunt Phemie. “But I still don’t see quite how it gets its consciousness of freedom in society, or what exactly you think freedom is.”
“Let me give a definition of freedom and then we can argue from that. Freedom consists in the act of recognising necessity and taking the best steps you can to deal with it. Freedom, in short, is the consciousness of necessity. When you became conscious of the necessity for destroying the rats, you took the proper steps and obtained freedom from them.”
“I’m afraid,” said Aunt Phemie, “that we haven’t altogether got free of them.”
He gave her a glance and smiled. “You have got free of them to the extent to which your action went. Had it been scientifically thorough—in your case and every other—then we wouldn’t have been bothered any more with rats. Just as we have got free of wolves, though it’s not so very long ago since the last one was killed on your hills.”
“I admit it was a weak point,” said Aunt Phemie. “All the same, I am hazy a bit about your definition, about being free the more I recognise necessity. If I am always governed by necessity—well, I am governed by it, and how I can be free from necessity—from the urgent necessity, for example, of washing up these dishes—by recognising that I have got to wash them—well! I’ll be free from the washing up after I have done it. But I sort of knew that before.”
He leaned back, pushing against the edge of the table, obviously delighted with the way she had caught his argument. “Good! Absolute freedom, of course, is a myth. Because we are animals who have to be fed and clothed and housed. Let us recognise that; let us recognise that economic necessity. Then let us take the next step and say that the greater will be our freedom from economic necessity, the more thoroughly we in common organise our productive resources and distribute the goods.”
“And that’s socialism.”
“Yes. But don’t forget that its aim—its philosophy, if you like—is freedom, freedom from economic fear, from want, from war. Not a vague Atlantic Charter notion, however, but something scientifically determined.”
“We stand on the threshold of man’s next great step forward,” said Aunt Phemie, smiling with an attractive humour.
“We do. Even your friend Freud has become hopelessly old-fashioned.”
“Really?”
“Yes. They literally shock patients now into sanity. Assault and battery by electric shocks. Cures them, too. It’s the new age.” His manner was now alert and friendly with a teasing gleam in his eyes.
She looked into his eyes, shrugged, still smiling, and got up.
He laughed and jumped up. “Let me help with the dishes.”
“No. I’ll tell you what,” Aunt Phemie decided with a confidential air. “I’ll go up first and see Nan. Then perhaps—for a wee while—you might go up. I never stay too long. Whenever you see you have cheered her up, say I’ve got something for you to do.”
He glanced at her with a sly humour. “And have you?”
“Necessity demands,” suggested Aunt Phemie, “that we break some sticks.”
“Nothing but accounts,” said Aunt Phemie cheerfully to the postman the following day as she glanced at the red penny stamps.
He took the string from his mouth and as he wound it round the bundle of correspondence for the Greenbank area and stuck the bundle back in his bag he said, “It might be worse. You didn’t hear about young McAlpine?”
“No.”
“You would know him? He’s a poet or artist or something queer like that.”
“No,” said Aunt Phemie. “I know Mr. McAlpine himself, of course. What’s the young man’s first name?”
“Adam. Adam McAlpine. And he’s not so young. He’s well over thirty. But he’s never done much good. They say it’s the mother. But you know how folk gossip. However, what I’m going to tell you is no gossip, for I had it last night from Jamie Johnston himself and he is one of the two—the other was Andie MacFarlane—the two who found the body at the falls pool on the Altfey yesterday.”
Aunt Phemie did not speak.
“They had taken the day off for fishing. It’s a habit of theirs, for they’re clean daft on the fishing. Always was. Jamie and me have had more than one night in our time. However, yesterday they took the road and left their bikes at the shepherd’s yonder below the gorge—you know, where the road ends—and began fishing up the deep pools with—with a bait they have.” He glanced at Mrs. Robertson and though he realised that his subtle hesitation over the kind of bait was lost on her, yet the absolute nature of her attention flattered him. “In time they reached the falls pool, coming in on it from below, for there’s a gravelly bit where they lie—well I know it!—and if you drop your bait—but never mind,” he said, restraining himself, “for they didn’t drop any bait there yesterday. Jamie said to me he saw the thing as he came in below the rock. At first he thought it was a dead otter, but then he saw it was no otter, it was the head of a man with nearly all the body in the water. He gave a cry to Andie. It was young McAlpine and they hauled the body up on the stones. At first they thought he was dead as a drowned pup—it’s Jamie’s own words, for he was always a cool hand, but then, as Jamie said, he noticed he was kind o’ soft like, and he began working on him. And in time they got a movement of life into him. He had taken in a lot of water, but they got him sort of round. And then the queer thing happened and it’s left folk talking and wondering, wondering indeed if it was poor Gordie who did murder old Farquhar. For you see—but I’m going through my story. As I say, Jamie and Andie always carry a gill apiece—hard as it is to come by—but, as Jamie always says, it’s half the day. When they got some of the whisky down him, he came to in a queer sort o’ lost glowering way, showing his teeth, even after he’d spewed, and they saw he had been attacked. He used a word or two I wouldn’t care to mention to you. But Jamie has them.” He paused in bright-eyed sober recollection. “There just was no doubt he’d been attacked. In fact Jamie sent Andie up on top to see if he could see the man lurking about. But all Andie saw was the picture that Adam had been painting and he brought it down with him, thinking that perhaps it was his picture Adam was wanting. But it wasn’t the picture. No, faith, it wasn’t the picture. He was wanting to be at the—at the so-and-so bastard, if you’ll excuse me, Mistress, and, as Jamie said, he couldn’t have hit a fly he was so weak with the spewing. But he was a little beside himself. They had almost to carry him to the shepherd’s cottage, where they put him to bed. The shepherd himself was out, so Jamie stayed with the wife and Andie set out on his bike for the town. His bike punctured, but Andie kept going on the rim and cut his tube to ribbons though he knew, as he said, that devil the hae-penny would he get from old McAlpine for that. And he won’t!” The postman wheezed. “His mother—Adam’s mother—got into an awful state. She’s a feckless downtrodden body right enough. But the car was sent and Adam taken home.” The postman paused, looked shrewdly at Aunt Phemie out of his sharp face with its close-cut greying hair over the ears, and eased the hard official hat from his forehead.
“When did all this happen?” asked Aunt Phemie.
“In the middle of yesterday, not long after twelve o’clock. And maybe the queerest thing of all has yet to be told. Jamie, though he’s ages with myself—fifty-five—has the eye of a hawk. He always had. I told you how they drew the body back from the rock up onto the stones. Well, when they were taking Adam away from where they’d stretched him on the stones, Jamie noticed a paper. The wet body had flattened it out. Jamie’s eyes caught a figuring on it. He picked it up, read it, and put it in his pocket. He’s a cool customer is Jamie. He gave it to the police inspector when he was telling him the whole story. Do you know what it was?”
Aunt Phemie waited.
“It was the missing deposit receipt in the name of Farquhar Farquharson for the sum of seventy-six pounds.”
“Really,” muttered Aunt Phemie.
The postman nodded, satisfied with her reaction. “It was.”
“And did it—was it—on the body?”
“No, seemingly. For Jamie is quite clear about this; it’s maybe the queerest thing of all. Jamie says he saw the bit of paper as he came up to the pool. It was caught between two stones, he said, as though fixed there by the last spate. And if Jamie said he saw it, he saw it.”
“Extraordinary,” murmured Aunt Phemie.
“Isn’t it? For if there’s one thing that’s clear it is that the man who attacked Adam McAlpine thought he had done him in. Jamie is in no doubt about that. He said they fought on top of the ledge of rock and—as Jamie put it—just as surely as some man killed old Farquhar with an axe so did some man try to drown Adam McAlpine like a rat. And the point now is—was it the same man?”
Aunt Phemie put a hand against the door jamb and stared past the postman’s avid face.
“Ay, it’s a horrible story,” he said, acknowledging the growing pallor of her skin, and went on more quietly, “the inspector and the sergeant went up with Jamie and Andie to the falls pool and they surveyed it from every angle. But beyond making sure that you couldn’t have seen Adam’s body from the ledge itself—which would satisfy the murderer he’d done his fell job—they didn’t get much, nothing at all really. Not so far anyway.”
“But—Adam?” said Aunt Phemie. “Hasn’t he—didn’t he tell them who—it was?”
“That’s what we’re all waiting for. But Adam McAlpine was very poorly last night. I heard he wouldn’t speak. It is to be hoped under God that he will live. The doctor was out and in.” He added, “He may die yet.”
“Dreadful,” said Aunt Phemie.
“Ay, Mistress, it is. It’s all that. But if it brings to justice the real criminal, it will have done something.” He hitched his bag into position.
“Yes,” said Aunt Phemie.
“Ay.” He nodded. “It will that. Well, I must away. Good day, Mistress.” He saluted soberly, and set off in a hurry to catch the time he was forever losing.
As Aunt Phemie turned into the house she heard Ranald’s laugh from Nan’s room. About to enter the kitchen, she paused, then went on through the back door and into the outside washhouse.
Quietly she closed the door behind her and stood very still.
There was no doubt in her mind at all that the person who attacked Adam McAlpine was Ranald. For a long time her mind could hold no other thought; it grew large and empty and witless. Automatically she upended a wooden box and sat on it, for her legs had grown weak. The newspaper and letters fell to the floor and she left them there. Ranald must believe now—in there—with Nan—that he had killed Adam. He must know that. The change in him—the excitement underneath—the smashed face… .
She stirred and a nervous hand began to pluck at the clothes over her heart. Nan—she must save Nan somehow—not let her know—if the police came. If only no-one came until the morning, until she got Ranald on the train. She got up. She was trembling all over, felt sick. She tried to be sick but only brought a cold sweat to her forehead. This is madness, she thought; I must control myself, show nothing. She went to the wash-tub and turned on a tap. She would do a washing. She rinsed her hands in the cold water. She drank from the tap. She pressed a wet hand against her forehead. She hardly knew what she was doing. She would do a washing.
Ranald’s voice called, “Hullo!” from the back door. She stood quite still. She could not face him yet. They would think she was at the steading. Nan would be getting up. She closed her eyes. Presently, with anxious stealth, she saw her way clear to the steading.
An hour later she was back chopping wood. “So there you are!” called Ranald from the back door. “Doing my job!” As he came and took the hatchet from her, Nan stood in the door, frail and wondering, her eyes lifting from Aunt Phemie to the roofs of the outhouses, to the tops of the apple trees showing beyond, to the sky, to things at hand and far away, to the quiet loveliness of the world.
There was something in Nan at that moment, some essence of life or being, that Aunt Phemie knew she loved with a profound and tragic love; the eternal essence, forever sought, embodied for a timeless instant. Nan’s eyes came smiling on her face.
Aunt Phemie’s eyes answered; then in her natural voice, lightly, she said, “I was thinking of doing a small washing.”
She kept on the move through the afternoon and evening, washing, cooking, sending Nan to bed, talking sensibly, going out to the steading, remembering this and that which had to be done, her ears growing sharper as the hours wore on, her eyes a hundred times on the road to the farm. But no-one came. When at last she got into bed, she sank back exhausted.
She was awakened during the night. A murmur of voices. She thought: it has come! Her body was gripped as by an actual nightmare. But she strove to listen, fought for soundless breath, and at last got to her feet, to the door. There she leaned against the wall, dizzy. No-one had come. Ranald had got up and gone into Nan’s room. That was all.
Soundlessly she drew her door open a couple of inches. Ranald could not have closed Nan’s door, for she could hear his voice, low but distinct, as though he were sitting on her bed, talking to her.
“I know,” murmured Nan.
Silence.
“I miss you in London. I’ll miss you more than ever now,” he said, without any emotion. Then, after a moment, “I wanted to tell you that. Whatever happens to me—that’s how it is.”
He got up. Aunt Phemie closed her door without shutting it. She heard his voice again, as though he had walked to Nan’s window, but she could not now make out what he said. She wanted to hear, to hear every word, but her hand, convulsively gripping the knob, drew the door quite shut; as she let the knob go there was a sharp click. They’ve heard me! she thought. There was complete silence in the house. She got back to bed, staggering a little. After two or three minutes, Nan’s door was quietly closed and Ranald went softly to his own room.
For hours Aunt Phemie’s mind turned and twisted, searching into every conceivable argument and impulse, now doubting, now perceiving with an utter clarity, quietening but to stir and think again, until she burned as from fever. She fell asleep—to be wakened by Nan. She was late! They must hurry! “Say goodbye to Nan,” she called, after the rushed breakfast, “while I get out the car.”
There he was coming, tall and pale, Nan’s powder on his wounds, his kitbag over his shoulder. She drew all her resources together, tautened herself.
“Too bad troubling you,” he said. “I had meant to catch the bus.”
“It was I who slept in. However, I’ve got some business to do in town.” She let in the clutch and they were off. She had an impulse to keep on talking, as though she might thus ward off everything and everyone, including the police. Once, during the night, she had thought she would test him on the way, by a chance remark, and be guided by his reaction, so that at the last moment, if he were secretly tortured about Adam’s death, she might relieve him, even on the station platform; but now, in the daylight, in his actual presence, the notion was preposterous, a complication to be absolutely avoided. “I often have some business in town,” she said in a brisk manner.
“I suppose so.”
“Yes. There’s an architect I’ve been meaning to see for a long time.”
“Building?”
“Yes. The farm cottages. It’s an old scheme of my husband’s. It had to be abandoned when war broke out.” What had made her think of that? she wondered.
As she went on talking, she had time to be inwardly and distantly amused at herself, as at a voice in an ironic play. She saw he was interested in the farm workers, of course! She described in detail her husband’s scheme for lifting the cottage roofs and turning each dwelling into a two-storied house, with water laid on, lavatory and bath. Greenbank was going to have been a model farm. She intended to make it that yet, she said. That, in fact, was the main reason why she had stayed on. Her voice rose with the speedometer needle. She was analysing the position in the local building trade and the Government’s attitude to farming when they entered the town. “We have eight minutes—plenty of time,” she said, glancing at the clock in the steeple and easing off.
“All that’s very interesting.”
“I rather think so,” she agreed. “Farming finally depends on the worker. Without a decent house, he won’t stay—at least the girl won’t.” A policeman at a street corner waved her on. Her heart rose. Ranald said something, but she wasn’t listening to him now. “Politicians don’t understand that the basic person on crofts and farms is the young woman. If she refuses to stay and marry because of the house and amenities, it’s all up,” said Aunt Phemie. They were driving into the station square. There were no police here at all. “Well, that’s that,” she said finally taking her hands off the wheel and sitting quite still, as if resting.
“You needn’t come out,” he said.
She sat.
“And thank you very much.”
But she suddenly changed her mind. “Might as well get an early paper,” she decided and slammed the door neatly.
Now they were on the platform, before the bookstall. The minutes got lost among the crowd. The train was on time. Here it came!
“Well, good-bye, Ranald.” She put out her hand. “I hope you have a nice journey.”
“Thanks.”
“It was good of you to come. So long!” She turned smartly away, out through the station, into her car. She waited, upright, until she heard the thresh of steam from the moving train; then for a few seconds she drooped over the wheel, closing her eyes. Limp, all stiffening gone, she lifted her head. Her vision played tricks with her as she fumbled for the self-starter.