Wait Till I Tell You (11 page)

Indeed, she had unhooked most of these last people from her own and her husband’s life. It was somehow draughty to be seen and erroneously pitied by their old friends.

‘Like it?’ asked Gavin, not asking, but instructing, his handsome face resting quite comfortably on his chin as he moved around.

Nora couldn’t speak, so she enlarged her pupils. She assumed his question related to the moment.

‘It is a nice house, isn’t it?’ said Gavin. His hair was just turning from gold to silver, thick, bimetallic, glistening. Many things about him were moving from their natural state into silver or gold. He had never felt stronger, more defined.

They were not yet living at Thornshields, but had flown back to the city, which was airless but exciting, like almost being wherever you want to be, off. Tomorrow was to be the day.

Gavin redisposed all the limbs within his reach or power. Now she might speak.

‘Who are you thinking of?’ asked Gavin, which was the question he was wont to ask at such times.

As Nora did, she told not the truth but gave the answer required, demanded by the sort of good manners that make a hedgehog feel good by addressing it as a porcupine.

She was thinking of many things at one time, barely of a person, but she knew whom he admired and modelled himself upon and gave the name, and later, when he was sleeping, she looked at him and felt that routine would bring her to love. In the night he cried and never woke up and she lay awake with worry for him till he cracked open the new Glasgow day with, ‘What’ll we get the day?’

It was an idea, she thought, to purchase a present for the day.

Actually, had she had anyone in mind, it was him alone. But that might have bored him. He wished more for magnification than reflection.

Gavin grew up strong and miserable, tied to ways had helped his father stay upright. He saw the life he wanted and he went to get it, with his hands at first, and then stopping as soon as he could, turning to a more inflated currency than labour, the capacity to sell.

When he saw young Lorne using
his
own hands to get away from that same life Gavin burned for, his centre buckled. It was pathetic. It was lucky Gavin had a feel for personality that is like a feel for ripeness or putrescence. He and Lorne were going to pass one another, slowly, maybe painfully, in their divergent ascendancies, he knew that.

On his borrowed but chosen slot of land in the narrow loch, Lorne looked over the small isles to Thornshields, up at the crook of the sealoch. It was a house he knew too well to give a different skin, even of so friable a substance as plaster.

His past life there would, he now saw, spin out into the rest of his days. He would never, though, not be imagining what went on in the house, its cellars and yard, and the cold merry corridors where light gave way to shadow and comforting nightmares and ennobling dreams lay, and offchance kisses.

He wanted not to own the house, but to know it, touch it all over. Plastering its walls was like watching a beloved skin grow old, and filling that skin once again with youth. He did not need to live at Thornshields to save its skin.

When he turned to his father, Lorne’s small son looked up with bored adoring trust.

‘Can you let me make a mess tonight?’ asked Lorne the youngest.

They went out to the wall where the wind over the garden-sized island was least chill, where there was even a last flag of sunshine on the salt grass.

Lorne equipped his son with a fist of rosy plaster, a flat square to hold it upon and a jittery diamond-shaped knife. Together they set about the soothing of an area of dark drystone wall.

‘No use,’ declared the youngest Lorne.

‘It’s harder with a smoother wall,’ said his father. ‘You can see the problems here. They’re plain to see.’

His son, at seven often seized up by ambiguities, did not reply, but stuffed the juicy barely gritty stuff into deep but tidy crevices, and from time to time made fanning effortful gestures, getting the plaster to lie like icing over baking that has not yet achieved its full distension. Plaster looked as though it would taste good stuffed in to your mouth, but it did not. It sucked up your spit.

The work of the youngest Lorne had a happy temporary look, as though a group of small children was waving through his plastering from within the wall, about to break out with whoops and powder and clatter of burst stones.

Once his son was in bed and asleep, Lorne blew out the last candle in the steading on the small island and got into his dinghy.

He rowed, without his dog, who would have alerted the child, over to the unlocked house, sixteen square stacked rooms looking empty through their pink shell on to samples of land and reaches of sea.

He made fast the dinghy at the jetty under the shadestruck tangled garden. Within the walls of the vegetable patch acanthus rattled. The only birds he could hear were misled by the uncommitted Highland summer darkness, that would settle for barely three hours in the night.

Lorne began to work, Thornshields having electric light, in the room where he had explained that morning to the new purchaser of his mother and father’s house that in order for mobility there must be wetness, until he had made one wall as flat, as poreless, as butter. Before he did so he wrote on the wall in carpenter’s pencil his letter to Nora Cronin, a letter born perhaps of loneliness and too much proximity to one child alone and the similarly incessant demands of the sea, but also of the moment when he had seen her think, after he spoke, that she could move in either direction, that she was as yet fluid enough to do so.

So he claimed his house and made clear what he might husband as his love, a secret warm for himself and helpful too against the tiring, loving interest of his parents.

Seven miles inland but forty-nine miles by road away from Thornshields, Grizel and old Lorne sat down to dine.

‘The rest of the world may now eat,’ said old Lorne. She had never said it for him, in all the three hundred and sixty-five multiplied by forty-three evenings, with the leaping lunar extra days, just as he had never corrected her pronunciation of the word ‘orchestra’, that she spoke with a hard G at heart. By such sharps and flats they made their way. When she looked at him over the table she already missed him. It had been so too when they began.

‘You’ll be reasonably pleased about the news,’ she said, leaving it loose so’s he could respond.

‘Television news?’ he asked, ‘or real?’

‘Lorne’s news.’

‘He rents a bit of land in unpredictable water not his own, how is it we can be sure he has not found a woman just the same type as the house he makes the boy inhabit?’ he asked, pleased with the conceit, not applying the analogy. ‘And I mean inhabit, not live in.’

‘He said he was in love, Lorne,’ said Grizel, ‘And he never tells us anything.’

‘It’s not natural,’ said her husband.

Grizel, who had watched her husband grow layer by layer, who feared for him in case of some ugly demolition or careless exposure of his careful self-restoration, thought of their son’s calling.

He made walls smooth with his plaster, made them themselves again. He sharpened and restored detail unnoticed unless absent. Briefly jealous of the person, whoever she was, in whom her son had settled his affection, she speculated with interest and with a horror of knowledge, and came up with possibilities so conventional that she realised she was herself, in her own eyes as free as a cat, not merely conventional but of historic curiosity.

As an intimate formality, she offered her husband a second water biscuit. In the glass she watched his face, willing him to repeat himself.

‘Do you know, I think I won’t,’ he said, making her happy. So they sightread through their time, virtuosos by now in their marriage.

Gavin Whelan chose his own breakfast and that of his wife to be, who was upstairs in the hotel putting together her day’s appearance.

One of the things suited him about Nora was her unchanging mutability. She looked a new woman every day. It was hard to think of being stuck with a woman who just looked the one way and let time eat her up.

He dealt with the foundations by ensuring that her first meal of the day would set her up without spreading her out.

He gave himself the pleasure, extra heady in a hotel, of referring to Nora as his wife when he gave the order to the waitress: ‘Full house for me with double Lorne sausage and burned tomatoes, skin off the black pudding if you would.’

Senga the waitress saw his handsome head and fine tall body and acknowledged to herself that this was the ideal. A man ate like a man but looked like he did not. She supposed some people were just lucky and burned it off. He gave her the set of his face that had made him an excellent salesman when he’d commenced in animal feeds, a smile just restrained behind the lips and eyes, a smile it was impossible not to feel dawning in answer behind her own skin.

‘My wife’ll take a selection of fresh fruit, a yoghourt shake and six prunes in a glass bowl. Prettier.’

His smile came through on the last word and gave the waitress the feeling here was a man loved women. She left the table writing on her wee pad and feeling she’d received a compliment.

In the kitchen, she gave the order to Callum the griddle chef and watched him cut the slices off the Lorne sausage that was of special catering size, as long and thick as a stocking stuffed with remnants.

‘What meat is the Lorne, mainly?’ Senga asked Callum, pretending to be retying her frilled pinafore while he took a nip out the vodka bottle he kept in the muesli drum that was the size of a cement mixer.

‘Basically, it’s the bloody zoo,’ he said. ‘That’s rare. The bloody zoo.’ He was already on the second stage of his morning’s drinking, the confidence. He’d be tearful by the time the last reek of kippers had been and gone and they were back to salad and Parozone.

Now she looked at the brick of plopped meats, she could make herself see the bits in it, bits of tiger, parrot, cow, pieces from the cage floor, the bits from between the teeth of grinders, old used-up animals and vigorous ones that had succumbed to stress in the modern world.

‘It’s like felt,’ said Callum. ‘Ken, felt, it’s formed out of all the cloth never made it into clothes, ground up and plastered together and rolled out smooth. It’s meat felt, Lorne sausage. Right enough. Felt meat.’

The Smirnoff had made him hungry. He caught a sizzling slice of Lorne sausage up on his spatula and ate it off the smoking metal keeping his lips away from his teeth.

Something made Senga think of horses.

‘You look gorgeous,’ said Gavin, finishing his breakfast with the rich sweet knob of eggy black pud he’d saved. He changed it to a word she preferred. ‘Delicious.’

She looked up at him through her fringe. Today she took her colour from the buttery caramel suit she wore, and the contrast with her rural fresh self of yesterday was like a gift of time to him from her. Today she was a woman poised to spend. He repeated his exciting if idiomatic question of the day’s beginning.

‘What’ll we buy the day?’

‘Poor man,’ she said, finishing her last prune, and raising to him the look she saved up for such moments, when she knew what she wanted so much that she dared not say. He interpreted this look in a way that satisfied them both.

In the tiny plane like an egg whisk that was taking them back to spend their first full night as the owners of the refurbished Thornshields after the day in the city, Nora stretched, her wrists crossed and gold-burdened. In the boot of the aeroplane, it was really no more than a boot, were piles of cloth, silky pink and lime yellow, for their bedroom, where they planned to sleep tonight in the new-plastered room, that should by now have dried.

It was a company plane. Animal feeds were an industry bursting with health just now, Gavin reflected.

He was hungry and full of desire, made legitimate and therefore more lewd by what would be their first night in the big house he could see now out the plane window, floodlit as he’d told young Lorne it should be for their arrival, although the Highland dark was saturated with light.

As the plane came low over his candlelit steading, Lorne looked up at its modest size, pondered its concentrated value, reflected upon whom it held, by what it was kept airborne, expertise and physics and meat and money. He realised that the love letter under the buttercoat was not so much for the woman now over his head like a tinned angel, but for the house that opened itself up to him at the tip of the glistening sealoch, open, wide-faced, entirely known, secret.

A Revolution in China

In China, that day, all seemed well. The customary moves towards communication were made, none going so far as to be built upon for more than one fragile day. The usual codes of conformity and transparent speech were observed. Hierarchy and the understanding that its imperilment would have certain horrible consequences lay behind each move and every word.

A new batch had arrived, kitchen services for cheerful families fond of animal antics.

Unwrapping an oversized mug from the corrugated-card box that the china had come in, Else held it up to show Miss Montanari, who lifted her chin a very little. This meant that the line would move well, but that Miss Montanari would give a sigh as she sold any item from it, a little sigh of disappointment as she took the money or the cheque or the credit card. She was a woman all shades of rose and grey, and her sighing was part of her colouring, like the susurration of a copper beech. Miss Montanari was the china buyer; her skill was for locating designs for which she did not care and being sharp enough to know that what she did not like was what people wanted. No one knew of the revolution that had lately taken place within her.