Gordon McGregor would never have forked out all that money for his wife’s new dress if he’d known she was going to die before she’d had the chance to wear it. But that was something which hadn’t been decided upon at the time.
It wasn’t that he was mean, of course not, despite his Scottish name and ancestry, just that he was careful, and abhorred waste.
‘Bought it early enough, haven’t you?’ he grumbled, reluctantly adding the amount to her monthly housekeeping. ‘The firm’s dinner dance isn’t until September, and it’s only April.’
‘It was too good a bargain to miss, from that new shop off Princes Street in Edinburgh. Surely you don’t begrudge it! And don’t forget, the Brodies will be at the dance,’ Carrie added cannily, knowing that Gordon would never risk being thought niggardly by his boss in the matter of his wife’s clothing allowance. ‘Morag spends ten times this on her clothes.’
Which was probably why Donald Brodie had ulcers, along with his MD’s chair. But Morag Brodie didn’t need to spend money on clothes, she would have looked good in a sack. Even better in the sack, thought Gordon, with a rare touch of humour and more than a touch of envy.
He looked at Carrie, parading around in the new dress—an original model from the twenties, scarcely worn, she enthused—in olive green, beaded georgette, knee-length and with handkerchief points. She did a Charleston kick and twirled the long amber beads she’d bought to complete the outfit. ‘Like it?’
‘Very nice,’ Gordon said, untruthfully. It was terrible. And second-hand! But then, she’d never had any taste. The colour was awful, and it was straight up and down, which Carrie certainly wasn’t.
Sensing his criticism, she added quickly, ‘It’ll look even better when I’ve lost some more weight—it’s coming off very nicely, hadn’t you noticed?’
Gordon looked at her more closely. He knew all about Carrie losing weight; she’d been trying to shed the pounds throughout their married life. But he saw that this time the diet, or whatever, was working, she was indeed quite a bit slimmer than she had been. Though there was still a very long way to go. And the green of the frock did bring out the reddish lights in her hair—or had she had it tinted? Good heavens, she was looking quite—
‘Pretty’ was the word that came to mind, and might have been applicable, had she not just then done another chassis that made the floor shake. No one could be pretty, galumphing around like an elephant in a dress that would only have looked good on someone forty pounds lighter—someone like Morag Brodie, for instance.
He fetched up a sigh. He was a realist and knew that whatever Morag looked like, she wasn’t a good wife for a man. Whereas Carrie—well, it had to be admitted that he was the envy of the colleagues whom he invited to dinner on a rota basis, in the interests of oiling the wheels of good working relationships. To do her justice, she was a capable hostess and kept the house shining and spotless, and she was an excellent cook (this was half her trouble—she enjoyed her own cooking too much). But there was more to marriage than that.
The truth was, he had made a big mistake—one of his few mistakes—in marrying her. They were no longer on the same wavelength, if ever they had been. He enjoyed serious music, whereas it only sent her to sleep; he liked to take long cycle rides out of Edinburgh and into the country, but she was too fat for cycling nowadays; and he read widely, mostly political biographies, for which pursuit she lacked the intellectual capacity. A bit of gardening and bridge every Tuesday afternoon was about her limit; both, in his opinion, a trivial waste of time. And she talked too much, about nothing that was important. She had got into a rut, she could no longer surprise him. But divorce was out of the question, Donald Brodie was a ‘Wee Free’, a member of the Free Presbyterian Church, a religious fanatic who disapproved of divorce.
His reverie was cut short. ‘You’ve been so generous about this dress, Gordon,’ Carrie said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I—I’ve been thinking, maybe we ought to do things together more. It’s not good for you to spend so much time alone. I’ve decided to go with you to the Highlands this year. I could do with a holiday, and the exercise will help me take off a few more pounds.’
He felt as though he’d trodden on a step that wasn’t there.
His twice-yearly solitary walking holidays in the Scottish Highlands were beacons lighting the boring dreariness of his life with Carrie. He pored over maps and planned his routes for weeks on end. He had sussed out a series of small hotels, unfashionable and sometimes remote, but where the whisky was excellent, the food plentiful and hot baths were readily available to soak his pleasantly weary limbs at the end of the day. But often he took a tent in his backpack and slept in the heather, so that he could make long, circular trips over difficult, testing terrain rather than having to walk just so far and then turn back. The memory of the wonderful silence and solitude of the high hills and the deep lochs between, the sense of freedom, was what kept him going throughout the rest of the year. He wanted no companion with him, least of all his stupid, chattering wife.
‘We can stay near Mallaig as we did last time,’ she said with that silly, breathless laugh that got on his nerves. ‘We’ll take the car into Fort William to the shops, I’ll get some lovely woollens, perhaps a kilt . . .’
The thought of Carrie in a kilt nearly eclipsed his surprise at remembering they had indeed once been accustomed to spending their holidays together in the Western Isles. But that had been years ago, when Carrie was more active than she was now—and anyway, the walks they’d taken even then along the lochsides had been tame, without any sense of achievement, compared with the tough, boulder-strewn ascents he now attempted.
He could, however, think of no reasonable excuse to prevent her from accompanying him, which was why, in May, before the midges made life a misery, he found himself duly installed with Carrie at a small hotel with all mod cons, in a double bedroom with en suite bathroom, dressing up for dinner every night, on Carrie’s insistence, though the hotel had a relaxed dress code and he was usually the only man to wear a tie.
The weather, as it so often was during May, was glorious, and every day they walked—walks; however, that were to Gordon so gentle they were little more than a limbering-up. He grew ever more frustrated at wasting his precious holiday puttering about when he could have been covering miles, legging it out to the top of some distant mountain, perhaps in the Cairngorms. Now, it was hardly worth donning his walking gear, his favourite old boots.
There was some compensation in that the hotel faced the sea, and he was able to slip out, blessedly alone, and walk along the shore every evening before bed, while Carrie put up her aching legs and read her magazines and wrote postcards and letters in the hotel lounge. He was happy enough to leave her to those long, interminable letters, while outside, where it was light enough to read a newspaper until after ten, he watched the magnificent sunsets behind the chain of blue islands across the bay, behind Eigg and Rhum and Skye, and thought his dark thoughts. Small brown dunlins and elegant oystercatchers waded at the edges of the glassy-calm sea, brooding cormorants stretched heraldic wings; there was total silence, save for the gentle splash of a wave on the white sands. Occasionally a magnificent stag could be seen on the skyline of the hills that swept down to the shoreline. Once, he caught a glimpse of the round, wet head of a sea otter.
Gordon wondered if he could bring himself to do it.
Towards the end of the first week—another week to be got through, my God!—Carrie played into his hands by deciding she was ready for something more strenuous than the four or five miles a day on the flat which had hitherto been as much as she could manage. They would make a sentimental journey, a round trip, one which they’d made many times in their younger days.
It was a complicated arrangement, which involved Gordon parking their car at a strategic point alongside one of the lochs, and walking several miles back to the small railway station where he had left Carrie to wait. One of the very few trains of the day would then take them to the point where they could board the mailboat which plied beween the outlying homesteads, following the rugged coastline. The next sea loch probed far inland, and at a tiny bay they would be rowed ashore in a small boat, thence to climb over the hill and down to the original lochside. A long walk back to their car ensued. Complicated, yes, but it might suit Gordon very well.
The path they took, after they’d been put ashore, zigzagged and switchbacked up and down to accommodate the lie of the land, but Carrie wasn’t deterred. She set off in fine style as they climbed higher and higher, chattering happily and exclaiming at the blueness of the sky, giggling as she slipped and slid on the rough scree in her light, inadequate boots. ‘Whoops!’
‘Save your breath and watch your step,’ Gordon told her dourly. ‘The path gets gey rough ahead.’ It never took him long to lapse into broader Scots whenever his feet touched Highland soil. ‘And it’s boggy where it turns away from the lochside.’
‘I can see why it has to,’ Carrie said, panting gamely on. ‘You’d never get across some of those rocks. They look terrifying.’
‘You have to cross them at some places,’ Gordon reminded her, ‘so keep your mind on what you’re doing. One slip and you’ll be down in the loch.’
Which was reputed to have temperatures in which no one could survive for long, to be deeper than Loch Ness, and to shelter a monster older, twice as big and three times as fearsome.
‘No thanks,’ Carrie answered with another laugh, ‘I’ll take care. How about a rest and some lunch?’
A rest? They hadn’t been going more than an hour! And they were progressing nowhere near as fast as Gordon thought they should be. In order not to have to keep hanging about waiting for Carrie to catch up, he was bringing up the rear—and what a rear! He averted his eyes from the solid rump in unflattering trousers and bent to drink from one of the bright, narrow streams that gushed down the hillside. He had just cupped a handful of the wonderful, icy water when Carrie turned and screamed, ‘Oh, don’t! It might not be safe!’
‘Safe?’ Gordon gazed at the clear, peaty water trickling from his fingers.
‘You never know, a sheep might have—well, you know—in it, higher up. You might catch something horrible, like liver-fluke or scrapie. Anthrax, even.’
He knew he’d never be able to drink from a mountain stream again.
She had found a patch of sheep-bitten, sun-warmed grass in front of a granite outcrop above a sheer drop to the loch, where they could sit and eat their refreshments, with the sun on their faces. She was blessedly silent as she ate her pot of cottage cheese and an apple, then poured coffee from the Thermos. Presently, she closed her eyes.
Gordon sat with his gaze on the hills opposite, grey-green and treeless, looking smooth and innocuous, but wickedly deceptive as to the reality, with pockets of snow where the sun never reached still lodged at the summit. He’d walked up there, one autumn day, leaving even the sheep behind, up into deer country, where the wind had been so strong it had lifted the liquid coffee straight from his cup. Coming down, he’d walked into damp mist and lost his way, mistaken a sheep track for the path and nearly walked into a bog. As he paused to reorientate and get his bearings, the wind had blown the mist away and the sun came out brilliantly, in the sudden way it did in these parts. And there in front of him was a small, hidden, silver lochan, fringed with reeds, reflecting light from the sky, with a golden eagle riding the high, empty air above. A sight that pierced his heart, never to be forgotten. Och, that was what it was all about . . . How he envied that eagle! If he had no encumbrances, no Carrie, no office politics, no Ian Cameron (his assistant at the office who was just waiting to cut his chair legs from under him) . . . If only. How many times had he thought of giving it all up, buying a croft miles from anywhere and spending the rest of his life here, alone . . .
‘I think,’ said Carrie, ‘I think I should try to find some green one-bar shoes with Louis heels—’
‘What?’
‘To go with my dress. Perhaps I could have them dyed to match.’
People had been murdered for infinitely less.
‘Shall we go?’ He stood up, breathing heavily, repacked his haversack with all the gear he thought it necessary to have with him and slung it on his shoulders, and Carrie did likewise with hers. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Let me adjust that, it can’t be comfortable the way you have it.’
She came and stood meekly with her back to him. He reached out to grab her shoulders, ready to push, and at that moment she stepped sideways. He lurched forwards and, top-heavy with his backpack, began a slithering career towards the edge, his heavy boots offering no purchase on the thin grass. For a moment he floundered, a second later he was gone. There was one hoarse cry, like the sound of a gull, and then silence.
Carrie cautiously approached the edge. Gordon was a big man, his backpack was heavy and his old-fashioned walking boots weighed a ton. The water was clear, right down to the bottom. She could see the outline of the rocks and Gordon lying on them. There was no way she, or anyone else, could get down to help him, even if it hadn’t been too late. The rescue services would have to come in by boat to recover his body, after she had contacted them.
It was a long walk back to the car, but there was no hurry, and she had plenty to think about on the way there. In particular the good news she had to give Ian Cameron when she wrote to him as usual that night. About how easy it had been, after all. About the time it would be prudent to spend as a sorrowing widow. Until the annual dance, perhaps, when she, newly slim, supposedly through grief, would allow herself to be persuaded to accompany him, wearing the olive-green dress that he’d helped her to choose for the occasion.