When the World Was Steady Page 19
‘Stop it. And I just think it’s a shame that on an important day like today she can’t be with us. She would agree.’
‘She’s run so far and she ran so fast to get away that I can’t think she’d be too interested in seeing where we came from. Where is she now, again?’
‘Indonesia, I think.’
‘Precisely.’
Melody Simpson decided to drop the subject. She couldn’t make Virginia understand, and she didn’t like to consider that Virginia might be right: that Emmy might be indifferent to her mother’s last day. Although were that so, it would only show how similar mother and daughter were. You don’t grieve over the inevitable. And Emmy was still her favourite child.
‘I’d better get dressed,’ she said aloud, ‘so we can get down to that nasty breakfast.’
Melody Simpson wore her new Marks & Spencer dress and a navy cardigan. She combed and fluffed her snowy hair. She took her time. She powdered her face and scented her wrists. She wanted to look her best. It would have been difficult to express what she felt, the fizzing of excitement in her stomach, her utter certainty of the rightness of her gesture. But behind the surge of positive emotion, she could sense doubts lurking—little things. Things, perhaps, like the future of the cat: Virginia had never cared much for Bella. And things like what this was, that awaited her, and how this all would end. Such little things, though, that Melody Simpson was not going to listen to herself. The time had come for action. She was not a believer in reflection: it crippled people, weakened them. She relied on simple certainties, and of this mission, of this day, she was absolutely certain.
Over breakfast—shared, this morning, with two effete young men from Aberdeen who seemed to have a most peculiar effect on Virginia—Mrs Simpson suggested a visit to Dunvegan Castle on the way to Alt-na-Ross. ‘To put it in perspective,’ she said, ‘where our people come from. The MacLeods have always run things here. It’s worth seeing.’
Distracted, Virginia agreed. She was at once trying to ignore their two table-mates and to listen to their conversation. Their exchanges, about the probability of sunshine and the suspension of their car, were unrevealing, dull even. Mrs Simpson chose not to let Virginia’s distance bother her. She decided they would go first to the Castle—that way, she reasoned, it would be quite late in the day by the time they reached Alt-na-Ross, which was better. She wanted to end with the day, not before it.
Tired of being a martyr, Virginia sat in the dry back seat of the Fiesta. Her mother was in good spirits; it was Melody Simpson’s day, and Virginia was anxious to help her enjoy it. She forebore to mention the weather.
She was thinking about the two young men at breakfast who had, by the intimacy, the ordinariness of their chatter, intrigued her. It seemed to Virginia an extraordinary thing and made her think of the Reverend, of his own meek, ordinary self, of the fire of his sermons and the unexpected, horrifying fire of his passion: perhaps such intimacy was as ordinary as the weather in its way. Which did not excuse the lies. Or alter God’s teachings. Sitting in the back of the car, watching the misty grey-green and endless water passing outside, it was above all the lies that enraged Virginia, and made her dig her fingernails into her palms.
She endured their trip to the Castle, and even enjoyed their walk around its damp but well-tended gardens, two ageing women amid a hundred or more the same, most in brightly coloured anoraks, blobs of pink and mauve and teal in the grey. Eventually, fortified by lunch in Dunvegan’s tourist cafeteria, she put aside her anxieties and attempted to share in her mother’s enthusiasm.
When Melody Simpson stopped the car and pointed, saying ‘There! There!’, it took Virginia a moment to see what she was talking about. It was still some way in the distance, a speck almost, ahead and below them, practically at the water’s edge.
They proceeded along the narrow, winding road, clinging to the hillside, and from her window Virginia watched the house appear and disappear with the bends, growing bigger. Then they came to the place where they could go no further, where the house was far beneath them, a vast, stony ruin on a tiny, stony promontory, invaded by the grey wind and attacked by the buffeting waves below.
‘It’s been abandoned, of course,’ said Mrs Simpson.
‘You can see why. Miles from the nearest village, on a road that goes nowhere—’
‘Only a couple of miles. Off the road, actually. And it must go somewhere, this road, or they wouldn’t have built it.’
‘No town on the map.’
‘Some habitation.’ Mrs Simpson opened her door to the shrieking winds. ‘Shall we go and have a look?’
‘Aren’t we looking perfectly well?’
‘I’ve come all this way …’
There was a track, or what had once been a track, that went off to their left and meandered uncertainly down to the house. But first, they came to a gate, peeled by the weather but still firmly standing. On it hung a red sign, fairly new, that warned: KEEP OUT. PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
‘So it’s not as abandoned as all that,’ said Virginia.
‘Impressive, though, isn’t it?’
‘Was, maybe. Bleak and miserable.’
‘Do you remember it now? Coming here?’
‘It’s like a house from my nightmares,’ said Virginia. ‘Perhaps I do remember it. It had people in it, though, then.’
‘Yes, do you remember? We went all the way down there and there was a horrid woman who wouldn’t let us in. I tried to explain that it was where my mother was from, and she would have none of it. She shooed at you children as though you were seagulls. So I never saw the inside. Now is the time.’
When Mrs Simpson said, ‘Now is the time,’ she felt a tingling in her hands and feet. Things were starting to seem unreal now; it was coming together. The afternoon, grey as it was, was getting on (although it would lead only into a monotonously grey and interminable evening), and she did want Virginia, who couldn’t drive, to be able to make it back to Portree in time for supper. She wanted to get this over with swiftly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Virginia. ‘That path is far too steep and slippery for you to manage.’
‘Well, I’m going. Stay here if you like. Wait in the car. But I have to see.’ She whisked a plastic rainhat from her purse and tied it under her chin—‘It breaks the wind’—and wound her scarf more tightly around her neck. Virginia stood by, arms crossed, shivering.
‘Last chance, my dear. Want to say goodbye to your old mother?’
‘I can’t let you negotiate that hill alone. But this is the last time I indulge one of your crazy fantasies. I mean it.’
‘It’s the last time I’ll ask. Don’t spoil it.’
The way was longer than it had looked from above, and the flat, marshy distance to be covered was as great as the slope they descended. As they drew nearer, they could see that the house was even more imposing than Virginia had thought. Three storeys of darkness glared at them through the windows, and half the roof was gone.
‘I wonder how long it’s been empty,’ said Mrs Simpson, almost slyly, her plastic bonnet flapping at her ears. ‘I wonder what happened to the people who lived here.’
‘They probably jumped at the chance to get away. I’m frozen. Are you sure you want to go all the way?’
‘Go back to the car, then.’
Virginia clutched tighter at her mother’s arm. ‘Let’s make it quick, shall we? Then we can get tea back at the village. I’m sure I saw a pub.’
When they came to the place where the front garden had been, the house looked more forlorn than frightening. Like a fat old man with no teeth, thought Virginia. It still had a front door, in spite of everything, and the door had an unrusted padlock on it. There was also another KEEP OUT sign.
‘They may not be here, but it certainly belongs to someone. Maybe they’re planning to renovate,’ said Virginia, taking her arm back and wrapping it around herself for warmth. ‘I’m afraid this is as far as we get.’
‘But can’t you see—’
‘Of course I can see! But I haven’t come all this way for nothing—’
‘What are you looking for, exactly?’
Mrs Simpson snorted. She, who never shed a tear, felt very close to it. Her certainty was evaporating with the wind. She stamped her foot. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Damn and blast.’
‘We might as well go back.’
‘Go then, damn it. Stop whining and go.’ She was trying to think. She hated her daughter as much as she had ever hated anyone. Melody Simpson had expected—what? what had she expected? A sign of some sort? A divine manifestation? She was furious with herself. Furious with the padlock. She went up and rattled the door, but it held firm. Whatever she had been so certain about must be inside. ‘Where’s your bloody God when you need him, then? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘Working in mysterious ways, I suppose.’ Virginia was cold and growing bored. It was a house; it was interesting to have seen it; but she wanted to be warm and dry and, like all the wise relatives, like her grandmother, away from this miserable end of the earth. The sea and the wind were loud; she realized she was having to shout to be heard. ‘If you’re so keen to see the inside, why don’t we quickly have a look around the outside and try and see in the windows. And then let’s go back to the car. OK?’
Virginia set off around the side of the house. For the most part, the windows were too high for her to see into, and she was taller than her mother. But on the far side, where the pathway between the house and the rocks was narrow as a footstep, she came to a place where she could stand on a flat rock and look into what had clearly been the kitchen.
The room was large, gloomy and barren, and in its depths lurked the darker gloom of open doorways to further rooms. There were sagging cabinets; there was, perhaps, an Aga in the corner; or perhaps it was just a shadow. The sea, here, was impossibly loud.
‘Mum!’ Virginia shrieked, and then went back around the corner to find her mother, who was looking out towards Greenland, at nothing. ‘Mum, come around here. You can see the kitchen. You’ll see you aren’t missing anything.’
She perched her mother on the flat rock—‘Steady,’ she said, and ‘See?’, as if to a child at a fair. ‘It’s the kitchen.’
Mrs Simpson had an idea. ‘Ginny dear’—she managed a wheedling tone above the din—‘I’ll just stand here a moment and see all I can see, and would you go along and just check if there are any others we can see into? And then come back and help me down, and I will have seen enough. Then, I promise, we can go and get some tea.’
Melody Simpson could see: it was there, the truth was waiting. In the dark of the house she could glimpse a light, as if a candle were glowing in the hallway, waiting to guide her. As soon as Virginia was gone, Melody knew what she would do: she would climb in through the kitchen window. Never mind that she was old and feeble, she would find the strength because she had to. She hadn’t foreseen the call for such effort in her last journey, but she would find it. She would have to, in her flimsy arms and legs, and the cushion of her body would help.
Melody Simpson stretched her arms out towards the window-sill, and allowed herself to fall forwards. With a thump against her foam prostheses, she found herself forming a triangle with the wall and the ground below, her feet on tiptoe on the rock. She looked down at the narrow footpath and up at the wall. The window was higher than she had thought, but at least her hands were there. Now it remained only to haul herself up, by her arms. She would do it because she had to. She had lived all this time because she had to, and in seeing the light she had known it was time for the next thing. She didn’t have time, would not allow herself time, to think: Virginia would be back around the corner within moments. She let her legs go and tried to pull with her hands.
In the split second before she fell, as she felt her palms scraping back across the ledge, Melody Simpson cursed herself for being a fool. She cursed her certainty.
It was not far to fall—less than a foot. But she could not coordinate the straightening of her limbs as she fell. All her little strength abandoned her, and as she landed in the narrow, sandy crevice between the house and the rock, she heard a disagreeable snapping sound in her right ankle and felt a great, sickening wave of pain. She looked at her hands, and her palms were grated and dotted with gravel and blood. This was not at all what she had intended. Not at all. It was no peaceful ending, no justification of anything. She started to cry.
Virginia, who had found a slope on the fourth face of the house from which she could see into the former sitting-room, discovered her mother in a crying, crumpled heap, with her plastic rainbonnet still firmly tied beneath her chin.
‘Mother, my goodness, what’s happened?’
‘What do you think? What does it look like? I fell. Foolish old woman that I am. Damn it.’
‘You should’ve waited. Oh, dear, let me help you up.’ Virginia started to pull and push and pummel at her mother.
‘It’s not going to be so easy. Something has broken.’
‘How do you know? Oh no, how do you know?’
‘Because I heard it, you ninny. Because I can bloody well feel it.’
Together they managed to get round to the front of the house, where Virginia sat her mother propped against the offending door. But it was a painful and slow process of leaning and pulling and hopping, and involved the agonizing use of Melody’s Simpson’s grated hands, while her right foot dangled at a useless and peculiar angle and her ankle, also oddly angled, throbbed and swelled.
When they were at rest, Virginia looked her mother square in the eye. ‘What on earth were you doing? And what on earth are we to do now?’ She herself was exhausted from the effort of moving Mrs Simpson—pencil-limbed but bodily substantial—this little way. And the car, she could see, was like a tiny blue blip at the top of the hill. She didn’t know how to drive it anyway.
‘This is not at all what I intended,’ said Melody Simpson. She sighed, jagged with the pain. ‘I don’t know what we do now. I just don’t know. I wish I could explain—I had a feeling—it’s not what I intended, but I suppose I’ll have to stay here. Outside the house. Just here.’ Maybe that was the ugly, undignified truth of how it would have to be. ‘You go on, Virginia. It’s cold. You’d better go. But remember that I’ve always loved you dearly. And that Bella needs to be picked up when you get home.’
‘Stop this. I won’t have it. There isn’t time.’
Virginia took off her coat and put it round her mother’s shoulders. ‘I’ll hurry. I promise. I think it’s best,’ she added, trying to cover her panic with authority, ‘if you don’t go to sleep. Because of the cold. Stay awake. And move your good foot around, for circulation. Will you be all right?’
Mrs Simpson nodded vaguely. ‘It’s how it has to be,’ she said. ‘I just misunderstood.’
Without pausing to reply, Virginia set off at as close to a run as she could manage.
Angelica could tell that Nikhil was discouraged by the vagueness of the shop assistants. ‘It’ll be all right, love, we’ll find her,’ she said in her breathiest, most maternal voice, putting an arm across his shoulders.
He shrugged; whether in pure disbelief or with the added motive of avoiding her touch, she was unsure. She kept her hands to herself after that. They were standing by the car in the main square of Portree, the wet misery thick and palpable around them.
‘What do you want to do now?’ she asked, jangling the car keys. ‘We can head up this coast, like the woman suggested. Ask around, you know?’
Nikhil turned to look at her and she could see it was a struggle for him to remain civil. It occurred to her that if they had slept together, it would have hastened intimacy and honesty, and he would at this moment have exploded, which would have been fine. As it was, he twisted his mouth into the icy sliver of a smile and said, ‘I don’t know what is best. There is no need for you to be part
of this wild goose chase. Perhaps I could borrow the car?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s an adventure. I want to help. Now hop in.’
They drove out of town to the northern turnoff, and turned. After a while Angelica put on a tape of Graham Kendrick’s evangelical rock songs. Kendrick was only halfway into his first tune when Nikhil asked if they might shut him off. Angelica felt a little annoyed. She was cheered by Graham Kendrick and she had wanted Nikhil to be cheered too.
After passing the Old Man of Storr, the first human site they came across, a couple of miles on, was an isolated croft above the road, looking out towards the sea. Angelica stopped the car.
‘Do you want to go alone, or shall we both go?’
‘Sorry?’ Nikhil was scowling.
‘Well, we’ve got to find out if they’ve seen them. Maybe they even live here. You never know.’
‘Are we going to do this at every house we see? All day? And all tomorrow? And all for nothing?’
‘There aren’t that many houses, Nikhil. Have you got a better idea?’
He shrugged again.
‘Do you want to give up, then?’
‘Of course not.’ He was fidgeting with the glove compartment. ‘I just don’t think we’ll find them. They may be dead.’
‘How likely is that?’ Angelica felt much older than this squirming boy.
In the end they went together up the hill, but it was Angelica who knocked and spoke to the woman who came to the door. No, the woman had never seen any black girls around here. Maybe she’d heard about them—were they hippies, aye?—in which case it would be north of here. She didn’t know how far. She didn’t know for certain whether she knew anything about them.
The morning stretched into afternoon, and everywhere they found the same thing: uncertainty at best, ranging to complete ignorance. One woman peered from behind her curtain and then refused to open the door. Their progress was slow. It was three before they came across a small shop that sold stamps, milk, bread and chocolate, and locally-knit pullovers for the few passing tourists.