Old houses move in the night, attempt to flex tired muscles, creak and crack and moan a little. There is nothing in this, it does not matter; it is even, in its familiarity, reassuring.
Faith woke from a dream she could not catch as it fled. Something of it was left, a taste in the mouth, a feeling of dismay. John still slept, whistling through his teeth. In a moment, he would begin to snore, and she would nudge him over on his side. The house, the room, were very cold. She listened, wondering what had wakened her – the dream, or a child’s cry? If it were one of the children, another call would come, ‘Mummy,’ thin along the landing, and she would get up and go to see what was wrong. But there was nothing. Only the faint crack of a floorboard, the settling of a window frame, a draught lifting the edge of a rug. Cold, she edged nearer to her husband, but could not get back to sleep. After a moment or two, she slid out of bed and reached for her dressing gown. She would check the children, to set her mind at rest.
In the girls’ room, Marion lay on her back straight as a soldier, a curly-haired doll on either side. A gap in the curtains let moonlight in, so the children were visible, but Marion was quite still and made no sound. Faith leaned over the child’s bed, to hear her breathe. How often she had done this, especially in babyhood, those first terrifying nights when the new infant seemed fragile as glass, a whisper away from birth, from death.
Eleanor was curled round tightly, the bedclothes rumpled, books and teddies fallen on the floor. Faith straightened the bed and eased Eleanor’s thumb out of her mouth. A few seconds later, as her mother left, Eleanor tucked it back in, sucking vigorously in her sleep.
In David’s room, the curtains were wide, as if he had got up to open them after bedtime (hoping to catch sight of the fox), and on the edges of the window panes frost glittered. Since falling asleep, David had flung off his blankets and lay at right angles to the mattress, one leg hanging over the side. He gazed at her as she settled him again, dark eyes wide but not seeing. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, ‘go to sleep.’
He closed his eyes, and she crossed to the window to draw the curtains. In the garden, moonlight moved among the trees and over the grass. You could imagine you were seeing things in this clear, bluish light under the thick-starred sky. Shadows moved and separated and a thin figure seemed to float over the lawn. Faith thought of the tinker woman who had appeared a few weeks ago, standing at the back door in pouring rain. She had carried a baby, a strong black-haired boy of a year or so, who pulled away from her arms, and kicked. Despite her thin face and bony ankles, she was clearly pregnant, her belly swelling beneath the cord tied round her coat.
Faith had taken the woman into her warm kitchen, where she had nothing to sell but a few pegs. The boy, set down on the floor, made for the cat, and then the hot oven, ignoring his mother’s whine as she tried to restrain him.
‘Have you somewhere to stay?’ Faith asked, heart sinking as she saw them out, the woman warmed by tea, a half dozen scones wrapped in greaseproof paper tucked in her bag that was made of sacking, and already wet.
‘Aye, we’ve gotten a van,’ the woman said, and made, to Faith’s surprise, a sign of the cross in the air. ‘God bless you, mam, God bless,’ adding some words that were torn away by the wind howling across the yard and whipping up her coat. Underneath she wore a skirt of some thin material that clung to her bare legs. Faith made out only the word ‘bairns’, and nodded, glad her own had stayed in the living room where they were playing, unaware of the tinker woman or her child.
Later, John said Dan Mackie from the Mains had told him the woman passed this way every year. Her eldest child had died of pneumonia, and there was a man with her, who was rough, but did some labouring work on the farms.
‘Dan says he doubts they’re real travelling folk – they mostly stick together. This pair’s on their own.’
‘And she’s having another bairn.’
‘Aye, well, that’s the way of it.’
‘In the town, folk like that …’ Faith hesitated. ‘There are plenty of them, I know. But they don’t come to your door, as a rule.’
‘A fine easy time you had of it,’ her husband teased, planting a kiss on her dark head as he went to get in more coal for the fire. ‘Growing up in the fancy West End of Edinburgh.’
‘Ach,’ she retorted, ‘it was you wanted to live in the country.’
They did not pursue this: they had agreed to leave Aberdeen, at the same moment, and for the same reason.
‘We want to bring up our family in the country,’ they said to all their friends when they sold the house in the city and found Pitcairn. It was not the real reason.
Faith sighed, and pulled David’s curtains together. It was not the tinker woman who had crossed the garden, only a shadow. Or perhaps the fox was there, as David believed. Dan Mackie had said there was one about just now. Thinking of her chickens, she was more afraid of this than any tinker, any ghost. There were no ghosts at Pitcairn. The house had lain empty for a year before they moved in. It had damp, and mice, and a pigeon nesting in the loft, but Miss Sutherland, the last of her family to live in the place, had died in a nursing home, leaving nothing of herself more sinister than a wheelbarrow and an old coat in the shed, and in the pantry a dozen stone jars her nieces had not thought worth removing. Faith and John had bought some furniture with the house, not having the means to fill such a large place at once, but all of it was empty except for a button or two in a chest of drawers. So they had started afresh at Pitcairn, cleaning it all the way through, ready for their family.
Faith turned to look at David asleep and quite still now. She tucked the blankets under him more tightly, then she went out, pulling his door to behind her.
Along the broad landing, moonlight fell from the open doors of the spare bedrooms. If you did not shut these doors firmly, the handles turned of their own accord, the doors moved across linoleum, and stood open. Empty rooms, chill and sparsely furnished with Miss Sutherland’s mahogany and oak, lay behind these doors. Two years after moving, they could not fill this house, or afford to furnish it anew. Faith knew everyone thought it was she who had chosen the place, insisting on a big house. She was the one brought up in an Edinburgh suburb, sent to a private school, a lass with a talent, a future, who had stooped a little, in marrying John Cairns. But John had wanted this house, he had found and chosen it, wanted the ground that went with it, space, quiet, the distance from both their families. She would rather have stayed in the city. Aberdeen was not Edinburgh, but it meant town life; it was prosperous and busy.
She stepped across the landing, moving, as she occasionally did even now, like a dancer, placing the ball of her foot down first, turning out her leg from hip to ankle, the instep facing the ceiling, her whole body controlled. Play acting. She pulled her dressing gown round her, and went back to her own room. But as she reached the door, something caught her eye and she halted, drawing in a fine breath. The shadow again, thin and dark, moving down the stairs into the deeper darkness below, where the hall had no outside light but what slipped through the cracks in the closed doors of the downstairs rooms. It was no more than a movement of the heavy curtains over the landing window, vanished into blackness, lost. I know who you are, Faith told the shadow. You’re too late.
A decision had been made, with which everyone agreed. There was no going back, for the shadow in the garden, or the one on the stair, or for Faith herself. She closed the bedroom door and got into bed again.
Once, when Marion was eleven and Eleanor and David nine and seven, Aunt Mamie and Aunt Alice came to look after them. Their parents were going to be away for two nights.
‘Why do they always appear at the worst possible moment?’ Faith cried, dusting flour from her hands when Marion came to tell her that the Ford Anglia was coming up the drive. It was a new car, but Dad said the gear box would wear out in six months, the way Mamie drove. ‘Go and help them take their bags in.’ Faith was making a pie for them all to have at tea-time, when she and John had left. I’ll be through in a minute.’
Marion and Eleanor went out of the back door and ran round the side of the house. It was mid-summer, and the tubs at the front door were full of red geraniums and trailing lobelia, lavender and white. The breeze that drove thick clouds fast across the sky swept up Mamie’s scarf as she emerged from the car, breathless with the effort of getting the pair of them safely all the way from Aberdeen.
‘Now then, let me see you?’ She stood Marion and Eleanor back to back. ‘What a pair – grown six inches every time! And where’s Davy?’
‘Out with Stanley. Stanley’s his best friend,’ Marion amplified.
‘In the woods I bet,’ Eleanor added.
Mamie had a cream leather suitcase and several other bags, including a hat box. Alice had a brown suitcase, and that was all. There was a pot plant still to come from the recesses of the Ford Anglia, a box of biscuits, a parcel from the butcher Mamie favoured (a little slimy, a drip of blood through the brown paper – Eleanor would not carry this), a Dundee cake in a tin and a box of chocolates.
‘I’ve plenty here for them to eat,’ Faith said, offended, when Marion and Eleanor deposited all this food on the kitchen table.
‘Ach, I’m sure thae bairns eat you oot a house and hame.’ Mamie came into the kitchen and took off her hat. Under it, her fluffy hair had gone flat, so she ruffled it up again, standing in front of the tiny mirror pinned to the wall by the back door. (This was the glass they got on a stool to glance in to see they were ‘tidy’ before they set off for school.) ‘Dearie me, what a sicht.’
‘You’re fine,’ Alice said. She had come in silently, unnoticed in all the commotion. She and Faith looked at each other and nodded, but did not hug or kiss. Alice was not a hugging sort of aunt. Yet the girls were drawn to her and followed her about, watching, listening, asking questions. Davy hung around Mamie, who always had sweets in her pockets. This time, he made off as soon as he’d got his packet of Smarties and chocolate bar, to share them with Stanley, down in their den beyond the apple trees.
Later, all three children stood at the front door with their aunts, and waved as their parents drove away. They too, had a new car, and what the children envied most of all was this journey in the blue Morris Oxford. They had not been further than Sunday School yet.
‘When will they be back?’ Eleanor tugged Mamie’s sleeve.
‘Sunday,’ Alice said, ‘before tea-time.’ David picked up the stick that went everywhere with him, and ran along the side of the house, scraping it on the wall.
Mamie put her arm round Eleanor’s shoulders and squeezed. She smelled of sweet perfume and of the mints she sucked because of her heartburn. ‘Dinna you fret. You’ve got your aunties to look after you – we’ll hae a fine time, eh?’ Eleanor wriggled away, and Mamie popped another mint in her mouth. ‘Oh my, it’s giein me gyp the day.’
‘You eat too fast,’ Alice said.
‘What’s heartburn anyway?’ Eleanor asked, following Mamie along the hall to the kitchen. She imagined Mamie’s heart bursting into flames inside her, then settling down to a deep red glow. No wonder it hurt.
‘It’s my auld enemy,’ Mamie said. ‘Now then, who’s going to be a help getting these dishes done? Where does your mother keep her apron?’
Alice had unhooked it from the back of the cupboard door, and made a start already. Marion stood by with a tea towel, Eleanor behind her to put things away. Mamie sat down at the kitchen table and took out her cigarettes.
In the afternoon, Alice weeded the front borders, showing Marion what to do, and Mamie lay on a deck chair on the lawn, reading The People’s Friend. Eleanor sat beside her, making a daisy chain.
This is the longest one I’ve ever done.’
‘Right you are.’ But when she held it up a little later, to show how she was getting on, Mamie had fallen asleep with her mouth open, and her knees had moved apart, revealing a pink petticoat with lace, and the tops of her fat thighs where the stockings ended. Eleanor tried not to look.
On the first night, Mamie told the bed-time story. David came into the girls’ room and sat on Marion’s bed, leaning against Mamie’s comfortable bulk, rubbing his face on her fluffy cardigan. Her stories, like her conversation, were about herself.
‘Och, I canna mak things up,’ she said. ‘It’s Alice has the imagination for a that. I’ll tell you about when I was married, will I?’
‘Yes,’ said Marion and Eleanor, although they had heard this before. The story was full of descriptions of Mamie’s wedding clothes, and Uncle Tom Marshall, whom David had never met and Marion and Eleanor could not really remember. Mamie was soon in full flight, and did not, fortunately, hear David muttering ‘Not that again.’
Marion kicked him to shut him up, but he moved too quickly. Bored, he rolled off the bed and played on the floor with the dolls’ house. Aunt Mamie got to the part about Uncle Tom’s terrible death (he had been a policeman who was killed in a motor accident), and recalled in detail the funeral, her black coat and skirt, and the hat with the veil. This had happened when Marion was three. It was difficult for any of them to imagine a time before Mamie moved back to Scotland to live with her Cousin Alice, so it did seem, to both girls, quite like a made-up story.
‘Now then,’ Mamie continued, ‘Alice had a very nice flat, but there was no room for all my bits and pieces, was there? So what did we do?’
‘Bought your house beside the park,’ Marion and Eleanor chorused.
‘That’s right, so that two lassies I know, and a wee loon, can come and feed the ducks when they visit their aunties.’
As she spoke, Eleanor turned to see David rocking the dolls’ house violently to and fro. ‘Stop that!’ she screamed, hurling herself off the bed.
David paused, bewildered. ‘What for?’ he asked. ‘It’s an earthquake. All the furniture’s going to get broke, and the people’s being killed.’
‘No, they’re not!’
In the struggle, the house fell over between them, crashing to the floor on its side: a chimney snapped off, the front clattered open and the dolls and their possessions tumbled onto the floor. No one heard Aunt Alice come in, but in a moment, she had made everything straight again, and quiet. Mamie had set off downstairs in search of glue to fix the chimney, and the house was upright, the furniture at least indoors again, if not all in the proper places. David said he was sorry, though not with any appearance of knowing why he should be.
Tell me a story, then,’ he whined. ‘I was fed up, I never got a story.’ But Alice took him off to his own room.
‘Tomorrow,’ she promised. ‘Tomorrow you can have three stories – one each.’
‘Made-up ones,’ he warned.
‘Made up,’ she agreed, tucking him in, drawing the curtains.
Alice knew how to tell stories. She looked ordinary, but her stories were not.
‘We’ll have the first story in David’s room,’ she said, ‘and then he canna cause a rumpus and break a’body else’s toys.’
‘It wasn’t my fault.’
‘No, it was the bad ghost’s fault,’ she agreed. David stopped in the act of climbing into bed.
‘What bad ghost?’
‘Get under the covers,’ Alice ordered. ‘That’s right. Are you settled, girls?’ Eleanor and Marion were tucked in the armchair together. It was a squash now they were so big, but they lay with their arms round each other, Eleanor’s long hair tickling Marion’s chin, and Marion’s rabbit slippers falling with soft thuds from her feet to the floor. They waited for the stories to begin.
‘You said there was a ghost,’ David persisted. ‘Is it in this house?’
‘Everywhere,’ Aunt Alice said, ‘that there’s naughty children. Then, when there’s mischief, some other body can get the blame.’
David looked confused, but he wanted his story, so he leaned back on the pillow, hugging the blue cloth dog, whose ears he had almost chewed off.
David’s was the story of the Tinder Box. This took a long time, and at the end of it, he was almost asleep. Eleanor had her thumb in her mouth, though once or twice, Marion had tried pulling it out with a ‘pop’. Aunt Alice stood up and tucked David’s covers round him. Then she signalled to the girls and put her finger to her lips to warn them to be quiet. They slid off the chair and tiptoed back to their own room.
Aunt Alice did not have a smell, like Aunt Mamie, and she was bony, not soft and yielding. She stood by the window in their room, thin as a pencil in her navy skirt and jumper, while they said their prayers and got into bed.
‘Now then,’ she said, and drew the curtains across. ‘It’s getting late – what about one story tonight, and another one before Mummy and Daddy come back tomorrow?’ But they wanted both of them now. Alice sighed, and began.
Eleanor’s story was about the Little Mermaid. Both girls cried when they heard how her feet were cut to ribbons by the sharp stones, how she had sacrificed herself for love. Later, hearing of this, Faith said, ‘For goodness sake, that horror story! Whatever possessed her?’ Faith liked What Katy Did and Little Women; she thought stories should be about good behaviour, and have a moral. She had no time for fairy tales, and seemed annoyed with Alice. She often seemed a bit annoyed with Alice. This was strange, because in the children’s opinion, it was Aunt Mamie who could be really irritating.
By the time Marion’s story was properly begun, Eleanor too was asleep. Marion sat straight up in bed, feeling special, and determined to stay awake.
‘If you tell me,’ she offered, ‘I’ll tell it to Eleanor and Davy.’ She was afraid Alice would not think it worthwhile to tell a story to just one child.
There was still light outside, and the birds sang on, not knowing it was bed-time. Night-scented stocks and sweet alyssum, filling the borders next to the house wall, floated their fragrance through the open window. Aunt Alice sat in the basket chair and folded her ringless hands in her lap. Her voice was low and seemed to come from far away, from the land where the fairy tales began.
‘Once upon a time,’ she said, ‘there was a princess who liked to get her own way. She was a very hardy wee girl, so that when her mother the Queen said, “Keep your shoes on; wear a coat or you’ll catch cold,” she disobeyed. She went out on the coldest days in her party frock and silver sandals. She was never ill, so she thought she must be right, and her mother wrong.’ Already, Marion could feel retribution must be on the way, and she was not sure if her sympathy was with the naughty Princess or the long-suffering Queen.
‘She used to sit by the river,’ Alice went on, ‘and put her bare feet in the water. Her mother said, “Don’t do that, you’ll catch your death of cold.” But she never did. What happened was, the fishes came and kissed her toes, and nibbled at them, very very gently, and it was tickly, so she liked that.’ Aunt Alice leaned forward suddenly, and lifting Marion’s blankets, touched her toes with icy fingers. Marion drew her feet back with a squeal.
‘Wheesht!’ Aunt Alice nodded at the sleeping Eleanor, and smiling, sat down again.
Then, one dreadful day, a great big fish came along, gliding through the black water, and when he saw the other fish kissing the princess’s toes, he thought she must be something good to eat.’ Marion felt the bad thing coming, and wanted Alice to stop. But she knew the end of the story had to be told. ‘So along came this big fish, swoosh, through the water, and the wee fish swam off, scared, when they heard him. So, do you know what happened next? Do you know what he did, that great big muckle fish?’
‘No,’ whispered Marion. ‘Don’t tell me.’ But Alice did.
‘He nibbled and nibbled at first, gently, then he liked her so much, she was such a sweet-tasting wee lassie, that he opened his great mouth, with all its sharp teeth, and he bit off her toes, one by one, all of them, all the way along her feet. She had none left, not one.’
Marion put her hands over her ears. ‘I told you not to say!’
‘Wheesht, it a comes right in the end.’
Then there was the rest of the story: a search for a wise woman, a Prince appearing suddenly who could carry out the tasks that followed, an adventure, and eventually, a spell to make the princess’s toes grow again. But Marion, trying later to tell all this to Eleanor and David, got confused at that part, and gave it up. Perhaps she had fallen asleep before the end. She was not sure.
‘Anyway,’ she finished, ‘I know they grew back.’
‘Poor Princess,’ Eleanor sighed.
‘She was naughty, though.’
‘I’m a shark,’ David growled, diving at Eleanor’s feet, ‘and I’m going to eat your big toe first!’
‘Well,’ Faith said, coming in, ‘I wish I’d stayed away longer, if this is how you’re all going to behave.’
Marion flung her arms round her mother’s waist. ‘No,’ she cried. ‘We never want you to go away again!’
Faith held Marion tightly in the circle of her arms. She had her own reasons for being uneasy all the weekend away from home. ‘We won’t. Not till you’re much older.’
That night, checking her children before she went to bed, Faith was relieved to see them all asleep and peaceful.
‘What stories that pair have been filling their heads with,’ she said to John as they got into bed.
‘Well, what can you expect? They’ve no experience of bairns.’ For a moment, they looked at each other in silence. Then John said, ‘Ach, put out the light.’ So she did, and they lay down to sleep.