Frances had moved up to the house at Finnerty five year earlier. Before that, she and the boys lived in a small house with a patch of garden in the centre of the market town of Dingwall. She had saved up for this second house, wanting it for a long time. When she inherited some money from her grandmother, the house became possible. Buying it, she felt she had almost regained the status she would have had as a married woman. Two incomes make it easier to buy a good house but she had done it on her own.
It was not that she had kept her eye on any particular house, only on the idea of one away from the town on a hill, with a view of the Firth. The one she found was old and shabby and some of the ‘improvements’ made by the previous owners had to be undone. But it was a comfortable roomy place, and the garden was mature and sheltered.
‘I won’t move again,’ Frances told people who seemed surprised she had taken it on, when the Dingwall house was so ‘handy’ and her boys likely to leave home in a few years.
Finnerty Farm, whose land surrounded her house (the original farmhouse), was owned by two brothers, one of them unmarried. You don’t meet many men as a primary teacher and her friends thought how nice it would be to see Frances fixed up. She deserved it, the married ones said, at least those who did not know Albert Ramsay. None of them knew about Kenny, just then hovering on the edge of her life. She had met him through a hill-walking club she briefly joined in an attempt to get herself away from the narrow circle of teachers.
Kenny did not do much more than hover at the edge even now, her friends observed, wondering if they might live together when Andrew left home. Goodness knows, it would be the making of him.
After Alec left, Frances drove to the supermarket and met there (as you always did in such a small place), half a dozen people she knew, including Christine, her senior teacher.
In the Station Café over a pot of tea and scones, they exchanged Christmas stories. Christine had daughters at the Academy and was Frances’s informant on the habits of teenage girls.
‘You put Don’s sneezing fit over the pudding into perspective,’ Christine said, when Frances had told her about Alec’s and Kate’s arrival on Christmas night.
Frances laughed. ‘Everyone behaved with great restraint. Even my father.’
‘How long is it since you’ve seen your ex?’
‘Five or six years. That was the first time for nearly seven years before.’ France buttered her scone. ‘It was the only time really, after the first year or so, when I tried to do anything about our situation. It must have been when Jack went up to the Academy. I suppose since they were becoming teenagers I thought I had a duty to let them see their father.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing much. I took the boys to Glasgow for a long weekend, to a hotel with a swimming pool and fitness room. The weather was foul so we didn’t do the any of the things I had planned. They weren’t much interested in the Burrell or Kelvingrove anyway. We got tickets for a match at Ibrox, through someone Albert Ramsay knew. I thought if Alec came up and met us, he could take them to that. I saw myself going to the Galleries then, but he didn’t even arrive till the Sunday. Let us down as usual, and me sitting in that hotel room feeling absolutely a fool. Still, the boys enjoyed the game, though I was terrified we’d go to the wrong end or something and get involved in violence. But there was nothing like that. Everyone was so nice, making room for us, lending Andy a scarf, buying them pies at half time. I thought, my God, there are some nice men in the world after all.’
‘So Alec turned up on the Sunday?’
‘He was like a stranger. He was a stranger. He had made an effort, he’d brought them presents and he left them with an enormous amount of cash. But despite all I’d said in my letter, he seemed to have the idea they were younger than they really were and the presents weren’t quite right. Well, Andrew liked Jack’s. I can’t even recall now what they were.’
‘How were the boys with him?’
‘Polite. I felt I’d made a huge mistake and upset my kids for nothing. They were very quiet that night, just watched TV in their room and said they were glad we were going home next day.’
‘Did Alec say anything about seeing them more regularly? I mean, you always gave me the impression he wanted to, you were the one who cut him off. It doesn’t sound like it.’
When Frances didn’t answer, Christine poured fresh tea for them both.
‘That’s what everyone thought,’ Frances admitted after a moment. ‘I let them. After all, there was some truth in it. Anyway, we set off home the next morning, and Jack said, when we were about half way up the A9, he said it’s OK Mum, I’m not bothered about seeing Dad. I thought Andrew was asleep in the back, but he wasn’t, he sat up and said, we don’t know him, do we?’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t bother after that. No contact, nothing. I guess Alex must have felt the same.’
‘So he didn’t – ’
‘No.’
‘Oh well, if that was his attitude, after you’d made such an effort – ’
‘I don’t think it was ever his attitude, to be honest. It was Susan’s.’
Frances was dismayed to find herself talking so much about this, however safe she felt Christine was as a confidant, her oldest friend here, who knew more of her life than anyone but Kenny. She stopped, then just as Christine was about to change the subject, added,
‘Anyway, it appears Kate’s been in a bit of bother at school so he wants her to stay here for the rest of the holidays. God knows what I can do. I’m hoping you can give me a few hints about dealing with teenage girls.’
‘Frankly,’ Christine said with a smile, ‘I’d advise you to have as little to do with them as possible!’
By the time Frances drove up the hill again it was dark. Jack and Kate were watching television; Andrew and his friend Ross McGhee were in his room in front of the computer. Frances put her head round Andrew’s door.
‘Are you staying for tea, Ross?’
‘Yeah, he is,’ Andrew said, not looking up.
‘Would that be all right?’ Ross asked.
‘Fine.’
How polite other people’s children were. Did that mean Kate would be polite with her too? There was something about the girl Frances did not trust. I don’t know her very well, I must try to be fair, she thought. Perhaps what troubled her was the heart-stopping likeness to Susan. Or perhaps it was the impossibility of reconciling this Kate with the infant who had been taken away from her.
When the telephone rang in the evening she assumed it was Alec, who had promised to call Kate regularly, but it was Kenny, just back from spending Christmas with his former wife, her present husband and his grown-up son and daughter-in-law.
‘How are you? Good Christmas? Survived it?’
‘Yes, survived,’ Frances said. How about you?’
‘Missed you. Missed Jock. Calum and Gail don’t give him enough to eat. He’s looking terrible.’
‘Rubbish. That dog’s far too fat. Like you. I expect you’ve put back all the weight you lost on your diet.’
Kenny sounded momentarily gloomy. ‘Oh I dare say. But it’s enough to drive you to it, staying with your ex-wife. My ex-wife, at any rate.’
‘It didn’t drive me to it. Or drink either. I know you’ve been drinking a lot, Kenny, you always do.’
He had picked up her allusion and brushed aside this reference to his drinking. ‘How do you mean? You didn’t spend Christmas with your former spouse, did you?’
‘I did.’
Silence, while Kenny put together all the facts he could muster about Frances’s marriage.
‘What happened?’
‘He turned up on Christmas night.’
‘On his own – or with – ’
‘Oh no, but he had her daughter with him, my niece Katy who’s about fourteen. She calls herself Kate now.’
‘Well, well.’
‘Why don’t I come over tomorrow? Or you come here? We can catch up then.’
‘You come to me. It sounds as if your house is full of people I’d better not meet.’
‘Only Kate, now. She’s staying over New Year but Alec’s gone back south.’
‘Right then.’ He paused, and she could hear his slightly asthmatic breathing. ‘Tomorrow. When?’
‘I’ll come after lunch. We can decide what we’re doing about Hogmanay, if anything.’
‘I was hoping to drink myself into oblivion as usual. Only joking,’ he added hastily.
‘I wish you were. See you tomorrow.’
As usual, he left her feeling an odd mixture of exhilaration and dismay. The dismay, of course, was constant: that she should choose only two men in her life of any importance to her, and both were drunks. Or who, at any rate, she thought, trying to be fair, are much too fond of drink.
The next day, when she came back from Kenny’s at five o’clock, she asked Jack if Alec had called.
‘No, don’t think so.’
‘Where’s Katy?’
‘McGhee’s Dad took Ross and Andy and her up to Inverness. Said they’d get the bus home.’
Frances was taken aback. ‘She won’t know her way around! I hope she sticks with Andrew or he makes sure she knows where to get the bus – ’
‘Don’t worry, Mum. She’s well used to looking after herself, I’d say.’
‘Do you think so? Should I make supper at the same time as usual?’
‘Call Andy and ask which bus they’re getting.’
‘As long as Kate’s with him …’
Jack drifted back to the television and Frances began to prepare the meal, half listening to the radio news, but really thinking about Kate, remembering her as a baby and remembering Susan too. After all this time it was impossible to see Susan straight. None of them knew her now, had not known her for thirteen years. Even then, given what happened, they had obviously not known her as well as they should have done.
Frances felt that old combination of anger and frustration. They could still be prodded into life, the emotions that had created a breach lasting years. Looking back, Frances did not blame her father for his reaction. She had been grateful for her parents’ support after Alec and Susan left, sheared off from the family like branches from a lightning struck tree. She had imagined them flourishing elsewhere, rooted in a different soil, but perhaps they had not. She was beginning to see them differently.
What had happened to Susan? How was she unstable? She recoiled from the word, standing by the sink, her hands in cold water, a potato in one hand, knife in the other. She was lost now to the kitchen and the reasonable radio voices.
She was in the house where she had grown up, she and Susan and Gillian. There, in the comfortable West End of Aberdeen, in a stable home with two fond parents, they had lived through their childhood and adolescence. They had gone out every weekday morning in navy uniforms to walk a mile and a half to the High School. They had come home at half past four to television and tea and homework, to a life so safe and ordinary there were no excuses at all for oddness.
‘It’s because she’s the middle one,’ Frances had once heard her mother say to their Aunt Barbara, a childless schoolteacher. ‘Don’t you find it’s the middle ones that are awkward?’
‘They’re all awkward at thirteen,’ Barbara had answered. ‘In my experience.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Grace protested. ‘Frances was no bother at all. No doubt Gillian will have her moments, but she’s an easy bairn. She and Frances both, easy bairns.’
‘Susan’s like her father,’ Barbara said. ‘Same quick temper.’
Barbara was their father’s sister so could say what she liked about him, or thought she could.
Here was Susan now, the front gate banging behind her as she came up the path, the last one home from school as always, tie undone, beret stuffed in her bag, skirt tucked up at the waist to make it shorter, with her long legs and the blonde swing of her hair as she turned back for a moment to wave to the friend going on up the street without her.
‘She has his looks too, even more than Frances,’ Barbara said, dropping the net curtain and moving back from the bay window as Susan neared the front door. Not that Susan was looking at the window, she was seeing something that was no longer there. Susan the dreamer. That was what her father said, banging his spoon on the table at tea-time, making her jump. Dreamer!
‘Where have you been all this time?’ her mother accused when Susan came an hour after the others.
‘Nowhere – just to the Pelican.’
‘For goodness sake, what’s that?’
Barbara knew. Barbara liked showing how much she knew about what you did after school, reminding them she was a teacher so they couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes.
‘It’s a coffee bar,’ she informed Grace. ‘All the young ones go there after school to hang about.’ She added, as if this made it even more dubious, ‘They drink Coca Cola.’
‘Thank goodness she doesn’t teach at the High, that’s all I can say,’ Susan said as she trudged upstairs behind Frances.
The three of them settled in the room Frances and Susan shared; Gillian still occupied the little nursery bedroom, full of toys and children’s books. The three of them: Gillian on the floor, Frances and Susan on the single beds, facing each other, swinging their legs back and forth, just touching toes. But what had they said to each other, upstairs away from their parents and Barbara, at five and nine and thirteen, or at nine and thirteen and seventeen, year after year in that house?
It was impossible to go back and see it clearly, now that so much stood in the way. When Frances tried, the picture froze, and she could no longer hear the voices.
‘Mum!’
Startled, heart jolting, Frances turned. Jack said, ‘That was Andy.’
‘What was?’
‘On the phone. He wants somebody to pick him and Kate up from the station. They got off the bus there and he said they’d start walking up. You want me to go?’ He was dangling the car keys from one finger.
‘The bus. Yes, off you go. Sorry, I was miles away.’
Miles and years. She put her cold hands back in the cold water, to scrub potatoes.
A little later, Alec called.
‘I’m in the middle of cooking,’ she said, to let him know it was a bad time. ‘We’re just about to eat.’
‘She’s not here,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t come home.’
‘You didn’t expect her to, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry,’ Frances said. ‘I should have asked you.’
‘I just wanted to tell you in case Kate asked.’
‘You’d better speak to her yourself.’
While Kate stood in the hall, hunched over the phone, Frances went back into the kitchen and shut the door. She was shaking. She had not asked about Susan. It was not the first thing she had said. Yet it was Susan she’d been dreaming about. She wanted to say to Alec, you cannot bring the dead to life. Because it was all dead between them, Frances and Susan. Susan and all of them. Or she had thought it was. Now, standing in her kitchen, Alec’s voice reaching into her house, her life, she wondered if she had been wrong about that. Not dead but waiting. She gripped the back of a chair with both hands.
Susan.