Three Junes (2 page)

“Collided with the ghost,” she said abruptly. “I finally did.”

Paul laughed. “You don’t believe that rot.”

Maureen looked at him with cold sincerity. “Sure I do.” She’d been sweeping the stairs, she told him, when she stepped into a sharp chill on the landing. “Like falling through the ice. Ten degrees’ drop, I’d swear. And Marcus, y’know, he always balks at following me up those stairs.” Marcus was her dog, an arthritic old black and white collie.

Paul ran through all the rational explanations: obscure drafts, trapped pockets of air . . . a wild imagination. Maureen shook her head at each one.

“Poor gal,” she said. “I’da steered cleara
that
man, no mystery there.” The ghost, said believers, was the roaming soul of a susceptible lass seduced by Bobbie Burns, who broke as many hearts as he wrote poems. The Globe had been his lair, and his upstairs rooms were hallowed, their unremarkable knickknacks like relics in a chapel. How predictable, Paul had always thought, that someone would invent a ghost. Another cheap lure for tourists. Maybe he’d write an article on the ghost and its role in commerce.

“Well then, Miss, I wouldn’t want to see you spooked. Shall I run you home?”

“If you don’t mind Marcus along.” She put on her coat without waiting for Paul’s assistance and went behind the bar again. Looking in the mirror behind the bottles of whiskey, she ran her fingers quickly through her hair and smoothed it back over her collar. Then she pulled a lipstick from her pocket and, so deftly he hardly saw her do it, colored her lips. When she turned around, her mouth was a deep, startling red.

While she helped the dog onto the front seat of the car, between them, Paul warmed up the motor. It was a harsh, snowless night, and the streets were empty. “Pity,” said Maureen. “No one’ll half believe I was on the town with Mr. Paul McLeod. Pardon me;
Lieutenant
McLeod, town hero, resident intellect. Lieutenant McLeod the
eligible
.” By enunciating the word, she let him know that she knew she was not in the running.

In front of the house Maureen shared with her mother, Paul turned off the motor and listened to her gossip, never meanly but with relish. He was surprised at how much he enjoyed listening. The car was warm now, and the windows had shed their crystalline frost. Softened by heat, the leather of the seat felt luxurious, as if the two of them sat in a dim after-hours club. The old dog slept happily between them, like a child.

They came to talk about war brides when Maureen mentioned how a girl she’d been friends with forever had gone off to a place called Quaqtaq. She removed a glove and, in careful block letters, spelled out the name in the condensation of her breath on the windscreen. The girl had since written Maureen to tell her what a shock it had been to arrive there. “A name like that, some garbled croak of a place you can’t even pronounce, what would you expect? Every whichway, she says, the land is what’s called ‘tundra.’” Maureen shivered for emphasis. “Snow and blinking ice from September to May. All the creatures white. White bears, white rabbits, white foxes, white owls, white everything you could dream of. As if it was all scared bloodless. Half the year, your eyes just pine for green.” She laughed at her pun. “Well no thank you sir, that would’ve been my RSVP to that invitation.”

Paul watched Maureen extinguish her cigarette on the sole of a shoe and tuck the end into the cuff of a coatsleeve. She was looking out the windscreen when she said, “I for one would never want a military man—the kind, I mean, who lives for that life. Not if he was the Second Coming incarnate.”

“A fierce opinion,” said Paul.

“I’m twenty-six. An old maid, Mum drones on. A cloudy marble. Too set in my ways, she says—that dirge.” She laughed, a sharp summery laugh.

“And what would you trade it for, this independence you so clearly prize?” Paul was twenty-five. He was likely, in a year or so, to marry one of two girls he knew, both daughters of friends of his father, both lovely and suspiciously compliant.

Maureen laughed again and leaned into her seat. She accepted another cigarette from Paul and let him light it. She stroked her dog, her affection absentminded—second nature, guessed Paul. “Leave aside the deserving man? For a big old house in the country. I’d trade for that. For a brood of sons, that too.” She paused. “Five—four would do, four sons. Daughters turn against you faster, that’s what I hear. Boys adore their mothers. . . . And, you’ll laugh, but collies. Not the sheep—or maybe a few, for training the dogs—but just the collies, for themselves. I’d have a kennel, a dozen at least. Grandfather had them on his farm, out by Hawick. Marcus here’s the end of that line. I remember watching those dogs work the herd, back and forth, back and forth, like shuttles on a loom. . . .” Her hands darted to and fro, the cigarette glow a snake in the dark. “But to raise ’em purely for trials, for the competition alone, that takes money.”

“Collies,” he said, to fill the silence. The word sounded as foreign as the name of the Canadian outpost now melting away on the windscreen.

“Well, first ghosts, now collies. Daft, what? My wild imagination again,” said Maureen. “Better commit me, Lieutenant.” She squeezed his arm quickly, opened the door, and dropped her cigarette in the gutter. After stepping out, she leaned down to thank him. Patient and coaxing, she wrapped her long arms around Marcus and eased him down onto his feet.

“RALLY UP, CREW.
Refreshments around the bend,” calls Jack, dismounting from his donkey. He beckons energetically to the stragglers. They have reached the grove after a hot, wracking ride up the mountainside, and even Marjorie, coming in close behind Paul, looks beaten. “You’re a wicked, wicked man,” she says to Jack when she is on her feet. Her white blouse is dusty, with drooping oval stains beneath her arms.

“Said you were a horsewoman, Marj.”

“I believe that means I ride
horses,
young man.”

Jack laughs and puts an arm around her. “No pain, no terrain.” He helps Irene off her saddle, then Jocelyn. Their husbands, Ray and Solly, are halfway to the rest hut. The quadruplets stayed behind to loll about at the beach. “No beer!” Jack shouts after the men. “I want no casualties on the way down!” Paul waits while Jack tethers the donkeys. The grove is smaller than he expected, a cluster of cowering, wind-battered trees. A sad, dessicated little place, hardly worth the climb. Except for two other donkeys drowsing nearby, there is no sign that anyone else has made this ridiculous trek.

“Don’t look now,” says Jack, “but it’s the Andrews Sisters.”

Paul follows his glance, past the table where their group is seated. He sees her hat first, that extravagant hat. The friend, who leads her toward the entrance to the grove, gesticulates wildly. He can just hear the lilt of her voice. “Extraordinary kimonos!” he hears, “. . . inconsolable weeping!”

“Not much of a ‘valley,’” says Paul.

“No, but wait, bucko.” Jack takes a bottle of water from his shoulder bag. He drinks half, then hands it to Paul, who drinks the rest.

Paul follows the flagstone path to the grove, overtaking his companions. As he steps through the gate, he feels instantly cooled. Here is the first small breeze, the first shade in hours: an acute and unexpected pleasure. Where the trees begin, the ground dips down—a modest crater more than a valley—and the brownish leaves make a rattling noise, like wind in a field of maize. He follows a dirt path, turns a corner, and gasps. The rattling comes from a stick with which a short man is beating the branches. Abruptly, the air fills with a scarlet haze, like a cyclone of vermilion confetti, the rain of petals tossed at the end of a wedding.

He thinks of the jungle and its sudden surprises. Years ago, in Guatemala, he stood with his son and a group of journalists, admiring a ruined temple, when someone laughed or raised his voice. Out of nowhere, all around them rose a funnel of color—red, orange, turquoise, violet—a startled swarm of parrots.

Through the red blur, there are flashes of the one girl’s hat, the other girl’s shirt, the man’s arm as he thrashes the trees. Infinitesimal wings touch Paul’s face, the air is alive, but the only sound in all this commotion is the rattling stick. He would have expected noise, the applause of birds rising in flight, but the moths are stone silent. Their color is noise enough. And then, gradually, they settle back onto the branches and vanish. Closed up, like twigs or buds, they are invisible. Again, the place is parched and brown, nowhere special. The short man stands close to Paul, probably hoping he’ll pay for another go-round. At the opposite edge of the clearing, both girls are still immersed in their ecstasy, eyes half closed, faces lifted solemnly, glowing.

HE WAITED,
and Maureen agreed it was only proper, until his father had died. His sisters, both married and settled in Edinburgh, were unhappy—and shocked, they told Paul, at how callously he could dispose of their legacy—but neither was in a position to stake any claim. Their mother, her reticent self, took no one’s side. Within two months the family house was sold, furniture divided, and Paul had found a place for his own family out in the country, half an hour from town. The house was called Tealing. It was skirted on one side by a burn and an overgrown meadow; on the other by a tall hedgerow, shielding another large house, the only one within sight of theirs—occupied, the agent said, by a widow who looked after herself.

Fenno was eight, and the twins, Dennis and David, were six. The three of them roared and clattered through the wide halls and across the lawn playing bomber planes or Panzer tanks—denting banisters, felling chairs, maiming shrubs. They couldn’t wait till they were old enough to fight in a war, like Daddy, to have real-life enemies to vanquish.

Maureen hired a part-time nanny to stay with the boys while she trekked off to Aberdeen, Oban, Peebles—wherever there were sheepdog trials to watch or farmers to meet. Within a year, she bought four bitches, three dogs, and half a dozen ewes. Paul hired a joiner to build the kennel on the lawn out back, behind it a shed for the sheep.

The paper was thriving, so Paul, too, traveled a good deal. He gave lectures at universities, awards to authors, advice to younger editors. The hectic separations and reunions were often renewing for the family, romantic for Paul and Maureen. He was generous with the boys, patient with their wildness. He loved the rare evening together at home, a birch fire in the timber-striped parlor: Paul going over the ledgers, Maureen telling stories to the twins while she brushed out one of the dogs, Fenno assembling a model ship or spreading his arms and careening in circles, quietly strafing the carpet.

Sunday mornings Paul rose early, before church, and took a long walk. Spread out behind them lay woods and fields, partitioned by mossy stone walls. In some of the fields sheep and cattle grazed, but most were vacant, tall with timothy waiting to be hayed.

Along one wall, a dirt path led away from their lawn. Half a mile out it diverged, the left way leading to a farm, the right way to Conkers, the manor house adjoining the farm. Beyond the fork, other trails and tractor lanes crisscrossed the land, and often Paul saw the prints of horseshoes. In autumn and spring, the foxhunt came through. Some Saturdays, from the house, Paul heard the huntsman’s horn in the distance, its monotonous bittersweet warbling; in November, through the leafless trees, he’d glimpse splinters of red as the riders sped past in their vivid coats. If the hounds were on a fresh line, giving tongue, Maureen’s collies would gather against the fence of their kennel and yowl with longing.

The only trouble came from their neighbor. Mrs. Ramage spent a great deal of time maintaining a colorful, highly regimented garden, and as she worked, she would peer through the hedgerow. The Lurker, Maureen called her, amused at the outset. But not six months after they arrived, Mrs. Ramage voiced her dismay as to how they’d destroyed their flowerbeds. Maureen kept up the roses in front, the lupines by the kitchen, but to make room for the kennel she had flattened two plots of peonies, lilies, and hardy, deep-rooted lilacs. The rest of the beds had seeded over with mustard and loosestrife. When Mrs. Ramage pointed a garden glove at the lush purple flowers and told Maureen how their roots would slowly suck all moisture away from the rest of her lawn, killing off the flora one species after another, Maureen answered, “Actually, I’ve always thought them rather gorgeous,” and walked around the house, out of sight.

Nor did Mrs. Ramage approve of the way they were raising their boys. Every so often, she would lean through a break in the hedgerow and ask if the children could please calm their racket. Her own children were grown and gone, so Paul chose to see her meddling as a kind of nostalgic envy. He indulged her with confessions that yes indeed, these lads were spoiled something fearful and there’d be hell to pay down the road if he and Mrs. McLeod didn’t crack the whip a bit more. It was Paul who apologized, herded the boys indoors and hushed them. Maureen could barely contain her rage. After enduring months of complaints, she refused any longer to acknowledge their neighbor with the slightest nod. Following Paul into the house, she would storm, “‘Seen and not heard, seen and not heard’! If I hear that fascist platitude cross her lips one more time, no one’ll see or hear a thing more from
her
!
”

But if Maureen went easy on the boys, she was strict with her dogs. The pups were whelped in the scullery off the kitchen and slept in the house, with their mother, for the first two months. Every day, Maureen took them outside for supervised play. She let the boys fool with them, chase them, roll them over, tickle their spotted pink bellies. But then the pups were sent away to nearby farms for another few months. When they returned, they lived in the kennel and training began. They became obedient yet willful, commanding yet stealthy. Their attention to Maureen, her voice, her hands, was unwavering and intense; Paul wondered sometimes if this was a standard against which his own attention might be secretly held—and found wanting.

She never struck a dog, but her voice when she was displeased became deep and rough, a tone that Paul had never heard in any other context. “I’m a wolf. Ruthless. Unyielding,” she told him. “That’s what they learn.” From his library, upstairs, he could see her on the lawn, putting them through drills, often out there till twilight. Without seeing her face, he might hear her scold a disobedient dog. He would see the dog, even from that distance, looking at her in apparent fear, crouching low to the grass. She commanded this fear through words and gestures alone.