When the World Was Steady Read online

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

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

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

  ‘She eloped to Scotland. To Skye.’

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

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

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

  ‘Sorry?’

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

  ‘It may not rain all day.’

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

  ‘We didn’t bring a guide.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

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

  ‘And if we don’t like the hotel?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Oh Virginia—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Have a spirit of fun, child!’

  ‘I do. I do. I do have a spirit of fun. Do you want Earl Grey or Assam or China?’

  Mrs Simpson waved a regal hand by way of reply and continued to smile at the gardens. She was pretending, Virginia thought, that they belonged to her.

  Virginia tiptoed to the other end of the lounge and into the dining-room. There, the tables were elaborately set with crystal and silver—two glasses per person—and a fire flickered in the hearth, sending out a warm, peat smell. Aside from the fire’s occasional expostulations, there was no sound. A door presented itself as, most probably, the kitchen door,
behind which there had to be someone, preparing for the lunch to come, but Virginia didn’t want to open it to find out. She crossed back through the sitting-room, past her rapturous mother, to the Great Hall. She felt like Beatrix Potter’s Hunca Munca, a mouse let loose in a dolls’ house. Although she could never have admitted it to her mother, she felt playful and almost happy.

  The bar next to the reception area was empty too, and loud, because it gave on to the river and the water sounded as though it were practically in the room. Virginia could see a little footbridge over the torrents and, on the far side, the forlorn flags of a golf course. She noticed that there was ice, unmelted, in the ice-bucket on the bar. It, like the fire, awaited the invisible guests. She ran her hand across the seat of her skirt: she was drying. She half-hoped, like her mother, that they would remain undetected for some time. She even considered climbing the stairs to wander the passages above, but as she came back into the hall she heard her mother talking.

  ‘—and biscuits please. Something sweet. Shortbread? Perfect.’

  Virginia rejoined Mrs Simpson in time to see the neat black-and-white back of a uniformed maid clipping back to the dining-room.

  ‘Your prowlings succeeded in raising somebody. Pity. But I ordered us up some tea.’

  ‘It will be expensive, you know.’

  ‘We don’t do it every day, after all. And lunch is twenty-one pounds.’

  ‘For two?’

  ‘For each.’

  ‘Mother, we can’t possibly—’

  ‘I’ll take it out of your inheritance. It makes me happy. I’m not long for this world, after all.’

  ‘Nonsense—’

  ‘Fact. Now fetch us the Monopoly board and let’s play a game.’

  For Virginia, the arrival of their tea and shortbread and the spread of the game board signalled an end to the moment of adventure: she would willingly have gone back to the wet car and resumed their island peregrinations. But Mrs Simpson was having a ball, and kept whispering things like ‘lovely’ and ‘wonderful’, unprompted. At one point she looked up and said gleefully, ‘I can’t think of a better way to spend one’s last day, can you?’

  ‘We’re here for a week, Mother. A week. And it’s only just begun.’

  ‘Of course.’ But she was biting her tongue in a secretive manner that did not please Virginia at all.

  They had been playing for the better part of an hour when they heard a car pulling up outside. They did not see it go past, and from where they were sitting its occupants were invisible, but they heard the clamour of arriving guests—doors banging and the reception bell being rung.

  ‘Poke your nose around the door and tell me what they look like,’ said Mrs Simpson.

  ‘I’ll do no such thing.’

  ‘I suppose they’ll have to come down to lunch.’

  Ten minutes later, another vehicle came down the drive. This time Virginia looked out in time to see a small red car with snowy heads inside flit past. Minutes later, a stout matron of around seventy led her wizened spouse to a sofa not far from where the Simpsons sat. She nodded a chilly greeting and eyed the Monopoly with disdain.

  Virginia looked back at her mother, who raised an eyebrow and winked. It was funny, and Virginia could only keep from tittering by turning her attention to the game—a game which Mrs Simpson, ever astute in money matters (although her acumen had never brought her wealth), was winning.

  After that, the clientele arrived thick and fast: a trio of foreigners, clearly, were outsiders like the Simpsons, stopping off for lunch; then came a clutch of local women, prosperous, middle-aged, the Women’s Institute type; and an American couple, of about Virginia’s age, with their teenage son—hotel residents.

  The patriarch was American-sized, a massive man with a vast expanse of pink shirt and an incongruous grey goatee; his wife, of an average size, looked minute next to him, her permanent wave close-knit against her head; and their son, plump and sullen, peered out through his glasses and alternately stroked his head or palpated his fleshy breasts through his garish check shirt.

  ‘What a crew!’ giggled Mrs Simpson, leaning forward to throw the dice. ‘How do they get so fat?’

  ‘It could be a thyroid problem.’

  ‘It could be too many four-course meals.’

  They both turned to stare at the fat man, who at once struck up conversation with the genteel Englishwoman and her invalid spouse.

  Their attention was thus distracted when a high-pitched voice cried out, ‘Virginia Simpson! Ginny, what on earth are you doing here?’

  Angelica, a vision in pink and white, rushed over and tried to throw her arms around the seated Virginia, in what proved a cumbersome gesture.

  ‘Are you staying here? This is too funny!’ Angelica pulled back and her skirt hem scattered Mrs Simpson’s Mayfair hotels.

  ‘No,’ said Virginia.

  ‘We couldn’t possibly afford it,’ said Mrs Simpson.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Simpson, I’m sorry, hello.’ Angelica held out her hand for shaking, but Melody did not take it. She just nodded.

  ‘Are you staying here then?’

  ‘Well, I, I mean we, just arrived.’ Angelica waved over at the door, where Nikhil stood looking odd in a tweed jacket and tie. ‘We’re, you know, in search of Nikhil’s sister.’

  Mrs Simpson turned her head, craning her neck. ‘So you’re the Indian boy? Come over here. I’ve heard a great deal about you.’

  ‘How do you do?’ he said. For him, Mrs Simpson extended an arm, which Nikhil pumped rather gingerly.

  The foursome was not an immediately comfortable one. Mrs Simpson, whose dislike of Angelica seemed suddenly to have flowered, was at her most imperious; Nikhil, perched upright on the edge of his chair, said nothing; and Virginia felt confused, both because her Scottish dream-world had evaporated with the return of such familiar faces, and because Nikhil, she felt instinctively, held some key to her quest, but she wasn’t at all sure what it was.

  ‘How can you afford to stay here?’ Mrs Simpson was asking.

  ‘It’s, um, only for a couple of nights … it’s not so expensive.’

  Mrs Simpson looked at Nikhil, and back at Angelica. ‘For two rooms?… or one?’

  ‘They do a good rate on dinner, bed and breakfast. It’s—it’s what I knew, really. I came here with my parents as a child.’

  ‘I wonder what they would think of it now. Of you coming here now, I mean,’ said Mrs Simpson.

  ‘I always think it’s nice to go back to childhood places,’ said Virginia, from her rather crumpled position at the back of her armchair. ‘Don’t you, Nikhil?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Simpson, for whom the day’s unexpected delights had been thoroughly spoiled, and who was determined to make everyone pay for the fact. ‘That’s tripe. You’ve never looked back in your life. You don’t even remember coming here when you were young.’

  ‘I think it is wonderful as a new experience,’ said Nikhil. ‘This is my first visit, and even with the weather I find it very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Angelica put in, clearly relieved to be back on safer ground. ‘Nikhil was dumbstruck by Glencoe.’

  ‘I can imagine that my sister would find the open spaces and the wildness very—appealing.’

  ‘It’s melancholy, though,’ said Virginia.

  ‘I suppose. But my sister would not remark upon this. She has a very strong spirit and it is important to her always to feel free.’

  ‘Yes. But you think you’re getting away from it all by coming up here and “it” just follows right behind you,’ said Mrs Simpson.

  ‘I think lunch is being served now,’ said Virginia. Distant clinking sounds and voices emerged from the dining-room.

  ‘Does your deal include lunch?’ asked Mrs Simpson. ‘We came for a treat, ourselves. Because of the weather.’

  ‘We thought we’d eat in, for the same reason.’

  ‘Well, we can all have lunch together,’ said Virginia with as bright a tone as she
could muster. ‘What an unexpected pleasure.’

  Everyone looked faintly downcast at the prospect but knew there was no other option.

  There were so many questions Virginia wanted to ask Angelica, but could not; and so many she knew she would want to ask Nikhil, if only she could think clearly. Much as she did not want to share her mother’s ill-temper, she felt it would have been preferable not to encounter Angelica and Nikhil in this way: all opportunities were at once present and thwarted; only the banal was safe.

  In fact, Nikhil proved adept at smoothing things over. He recounted again the loss of his sister, and Mrs Simpson was wholly absorbed by the story, not least because she considered herself, however inaccurately, an expert on Skye.

  ‘Well she won’t be hard to trace now you’re here,’ she said knowledgeably. ‘Indian girls named Rupica—what a pretty name—don’t grow on trees in these parts. And all the islanders, the locals that is, keep up on who’s where. It’s a very—how would I put it? Close-knit community. They help each other out.’

  ‘The question is,’ said Nikhil, buttering a roll with great daintiness (his fingers, Virginia noted, were long and slender), ‘whether they will be willing to help an outsider like myself. I do not know where to begin: the address I have is a post office box in Portree.’

  ‘But they’re outsiders themselves, most of them,’ said Mrs Simpson, blithely contradicting herself. ‘I mean, take that Kenneth Campbell fellow on the docks last night. In some ways, he was as local as you get. But where was he from again?’

  ‘Northumberland.’

  ‘Named Kenneth Campbell?’ said Angelica. ‘How curious.’

  ‘But that’s my point exactly. They’re part of it and they’re not, at the same time. The lot of them.’

  ‘I don’t know, Mother, presumably there are those who were born here, who consider themselves “insiders” through and through?’

  Mrs Simpson shrugged. ‘Inside, outside, so what? I think they’ll help you. They know what it’s like to be bludgeoned and given the run-around, the Scots. They’ll sympathize with you. I’m sure he’s no Scot, this fellow Rupica’s run off with.’