Wait Till I Tell You (14 page)

‘Miss Dreever, dear, take that cream horn.’ Mrs Dalgleish referred to a sweetmeat on the topmost rung of the cake-stand. The horn was of cardboard pastry and the cream was the kind whipped up from marge and hope and dairy memory, but it was a lavish token. The horn stood for plenty. The sugar on it was hardly dusty. In reverse order of precedence, the ladies took their cakes. Mrs Dalgleish was grace itself as she hung back.

Erna took away the teapot and freshened it in the kitchen at the back. She had torn the sole of her shoe jumping on old cans to flatten them for the dustbin man. She was glad she could get away with just drawing a brown line down the back of her leg to look like the seam of a nylon. All those old ladies had gams like white puds, and then there’d be the darning. With her shade skin anyhow she’d no need for stockings. He said so. She’d let him draw the line once, with her eyebrow pencil, but it got dangerous. Then it was her had to draw the line.

‘Seemingly,’ Mrs Dalgleish said as she distributed the tea, ‘seemingly – though it could be talk, to do with which I will as you know have nothing – Davey’s girl’s father wasn’t all he might have been. In the colour department.’

Miss Dreever wondered, in the instant before she understood, whether this future relative by marriage of Mrs Dalgleish could have worked in a paint shop. Then, clear as in a child’s primer, came the bright image of a pot of tar, and the soft, dark, touching tarbrush. She bit the sweet horn.

A Jeely Piece

‘Never in my wildest would I have, would you now? Would you indeed? Or would you not?’ It was restful to converse with Rhona; the energies that went into the necessary emotions, outrage, offence, dignity, were all hers, but there was an aspect of her talk that was demanding, on this warm day, to Mollie. Something to do with having to keep an eye on the subject, that was apt to change, tuck itself in and rethread with the imperceptible flicker of an invisible mender’s needle.

They had known one another all their lives and soon they would be dead, thought Mollie, undisturbed as a teenager in love by the thought of death, whom she thought of as a friend of the family. Dying, though, was more hard to get on with, she could not fancy that. Her ideal would be to be taken after a morning’s gentle exercise, gardening perhaps, or a turn round the park, something that would tire her out and reward her curiosity with something to puzzle over so that she would be happily distracted when she was taken. Rhona would die talking, of course, ambling around the subject, approaching it, changing it, holding possibilities up to the light like negatives to check them for light and colour and shade.

Sixty years ago they had spent the night together in a plum orchard. If that was the word? Maybe prunery, or
pruníre
? Anyhow, it had been in Rhona’s father’s plot which he had down to plums, and in which he had built a playhouse for Rhona, with a ladder leading up to a wee platform where you could just fit two camp beds. Downstairs there were three chairs about right for porridge-eating bears, a small dresser and a toy cooker that cooked when primed with paraffin. Matches, though, were to be used only under supervision, so Rhona and her friends tended to take things out to the cooker already cooked, insert them and remove them after a while with expressions of relish such as, ‘My word, what a crust,’ and, ‘You must let me have the receipt for that one day soon.’

An indiscriminate archaism was part of the game of the playhouse. Its limitations of scale and equipment demanded further refinements. Especially when the girls began to grow up and to become aware that they were doing so, they worked at setting the playhouse and the games connected with it in times safely past, if they had ever been. The small house in this way became a hallway to expansive ideas and tall dreams.

Rhona was one among brothers, handsome boys with big teeth and eyelashes, who wanted to be lowland farmers like their father. Of course the farm could not be divided, so two of the boys would eventually have to find their own places. They would never go to England, that was a certainty, a place they had been raised to consider the source of all that was not right in their lives, a coward country that, like all cowards, was a bully too. India had been mentioned, and tea planting, if it was not to be Scotland. The number of Scotsmen out there planting the tea was something amazing, it was said, so a man need never be lonely seeking his fortune with the tea.

The timbers of the playhouse were proofed against rot by a protracted soaking in a bitumen tank that was in the woods behind the barn and the byres in a dark grove of ponticum. Over the tarpaulin roof Rhona’s father had laid over-and-under pantiles, curved like letter S’s lying down, tucked one into the next with a snugness whose pattern satisfied like that of the feathers on an ordinary bird. The windows of the house went out on casement latches that curled at the end like creeper trails.

Rhona’s father had an unnecessary streak that made him do things more ornamentally than other men. Her brusque mother was not like this. It could hurt Mollie to see Mrs Gordon overlook on purpose some fillip the farmer had added to the breakfast table, nasturtium flowers in a bowl perhaps, or treacle initials written on the children’s oats. Mollie had seen the farmer’s wife stir these initials to a blur one day before the children came down, her face disproportionately full of something close to vengeance. She made bread on a Saturday and the farmer liked to make a single plaited loaf that he would decorate with seeds halfway through the baking. When it was done he would lift and tap it as though it were a warm instrument of percussion. He sang out of doors; Rhona said that he was an atheist who kept his eyes open during grace, said by her mother. Mollie had several times spent Christmas with the family, when the farmer said grace himself, looking holy as holy and bringing a kind of conviction to Mollie that did not usually assail her, a desire to be seen to be extremely good, more especially in the eyes of Mr Gordon than the terrible eyes of God.

In the First World War, he had been wounded and one time, not meaning to, at the seaside at Gullane on a tart summer day, Mollie had seen the wound. Or rather she had seen through the upper arm of the father of her friend. It was his right arm, white, and when she saw the hole, which he was drying carefully by patting it with a beachtowel as one pats a sore baby, it reminded her of the separate flesh packets, muscles, that composed the drumstick of a chicken. Mr Gordon had spectacles and a temper, he was tall and thin and grey, but the fear Mollie felt for him did not make her want to avoid him. This feeling grew in her when she saw him drying thin air on the brisk beach at Gullane while they sat on rugs among seaholly and thrift and sharp grass watching the sternly inert sea.

The sandwiches had been meat. Mr Gordon had whittled some driftwood into a dragon shape and shown the children how to extract the bitterness from a cucumber by cutting off the tip and turning it round and round on the cut end till all the white gall had been milked out. He then scooped out the seeds, halved it along its length and handed around sweet chunks of the cold cucumber, improved beyond its vegetable self, transformed into fruit.

When the boys were building follies with their composition bricks or sitting up in the copper beech tree’s maroon chambers, Mr Gordon would sometimes join them. The longer he stayed with his sons the more like them he seemed, although to Mollie the boys did not have the charm of their father, being easy to understand. An indirection in him held him in her thoughts more than she knew, although he looked her in the eyes when he spoke to her, encouraging her to flourish in his difficult gaze.

Rhona Gordon nagged her father, who could not do enough for her. When he made little loaf pans for her and crimped dishes for tartlets out of metal he had pressed and cut himself, she told him, as her mother might have, ‘These are sharp for a child, do you not see that?’

The night in the small house was a warm one in late summer. Rhona and Mollie had been awaiting the occasion with a pleasure that had sufficient alarm to it to be interesting. Darkness came at night and who knew what it might contain? Not Germans, after all this time (it was the middle thirties and the two girls were brought up ostrich fashion), but Englishmen perhaps, over the border for a rieving night? Aged fourteen, the girls were children enough to confuse fear and interest.

No one had told them anything more helpful about these sensations than that the male pigeon is moved, when the mood comes upon him, to ‘tread’ his mate. A picture of this obscure conjunction did not help. The she pigeon looked compliant, the he pigeon smug. A pointless attention had been paid to the particularities of their plumage, their iridescence, and so on. It was like being shown how to roll an umbrella when what you wanted, if only you knew it, was a voyage in a hot air balloon.

Rhona and Mollie had done their teeth in the farmhouse. They brought out with them a candle and a drum of matches that were not to be used save in an emergency. Through the garden under the waxy trailing leaves of the copper beech, over the rabbit-netting into the fruit cage and out into the orchard’s long grass they walked as though they had not been there before ever. Each girl wore a camel dressing gown and carried a stone hot-water bottle wrapped in a piece of blanket. They had provisioned the playhouse earlier with apples, bread, butter and splintery-pink rhubarb jam.

Small and burdened the plum trees seemed to gnarl as Mollie walked in the dark between them; they were seemingly changing in shape as though being cooked from beneath, or twisted at the roots. So damp was the grass it was like paddling through wet ribbons as the two approached the playhouse. Mr Gordon had hung a Tilley lamp and shown them earlier in the day how to turn off its light by rolling away the flame.

It was like a cabin inside, warm and close and appointed with no superfluities. The two beds were made up, white as open envelopes.

In bed, the lamp extinguished, the windows opened at a distance nicely judged to take into account both health and marauders, Rhona and Mollie said their prayers and then began to go through the girls in their class, judging who had been kissed. There were seven Fionas in the class so attention had to be paid.

Rhona had not been kissed, in her own opinion, she said. You did not count the Lorimer boy because he did it to everybody. Mollie had not been kissed, although she moaned at her mother’s handmirror sometimes and offered her cheek to it, sometimes even her lips. The girls fell asleep after a satisfactory bout of giggling that came to them as a mercy just as they began to talk about ghosts.

In the aware early sleep that leads to dreams, Mollie instructed herself not to talk in her sleep. She did not know what secret she contained, only that one was there. Although Rhona was the talker when they were awake, Mollie spoke out at night and woke herself often at the height of these dreams of puerile adventure and high colour that did not sit naturally with her quiet waking style.

When she awoke later, it was neatly, as if she were about to arrive at a station. She moved out of the cosy bed in two cool movements, casting a glance she realised was duplicitous at her sleeping friend; walked backwards like a sailor down the steps that led to the childish dining set, unlatched the door with the discretion of luck, and went out among the plum trees in her nightdress. Her feet were bare. The trees no longer appeared distorted but ordered in an abundant pattern full of blue, starry all the way down to the shining grass. She took a plum. In the day they were yellow fleshed inside the glowing red skin. By night under combining stars this plum was blue skinned, white fleshed. Although it was not quite ripe and still clung to its stone, she bit it and chewed. A shiny knot of resin had seeped and settled where a wasp had been before her. She wiped the stiff globule off with her thumb and looked up into the face that was higher up than most of the burdensome fruit.

‘I woke you with my lamp, did I? Are you cold?’ asked Rhona’s father, and her absence of fear completed itself.

Sixty years on, after church, Mollie listened to Rhona and watched her as she nagged at the world and set it to rights.

‘Would you have done that, though would you, Mollie, I’m asking you, would you ever have been so foolish? Would you not have had the presence of mind to run? Or even to try to do the man some reasonable harm? The good men have gone, the men of honour, the men you could trust, the men like, did you know him, Mollie, my poor father who was wounded in that First War and never the same, so Mother and I, it was hard for us, hard, we had to protect him from his own peculiarities. Of course, I recall now you did meet him. And one night when we slept the night through in my garden house, it was blossom time and the trees were white with the blossom, it made its own light like surf, I’m remembering it now, you said his name in your sleep. You said, “Mr Gordon.” It was blossom time, I’ll never forget, and we made jeely pieces before it was light. With plum jam. It was a rare night.’

Mollie contrived to maintain the air of uninterest that was the response most familiar to her old, betrayed, dear friend; there was no need at this late stage to look into the roots of the friendship’s heartwood, a tired man on a night of nights kissing a young girl next to a deep tank of tar, some days before it came to the time of gathering plums.

For After the Trains Have Stopped, a Woman Owes it to the Outside World to Take a Proper Pride in Herself

‘I owed it to myself,’ said the first client of the morning, ‘and to the outside world.’

‘Do you see much of that, the outside world, then?’ asked Diane, who was adjusting the bands and pads and clips that led to the machine.