When They Lay Bare Read online

  *

  You are intrigued, uneasy. Perhaps you have other things to do, and this story is not quite what you expected.

  Yet it insists as would a lover. Let the watcher and the woman’s arrival fade. Look back again to where she crouches still behind the dyke in the morning light. She is alert to something happening on the old drove road. It is what she, and you, have been waiting for – the young man in ignorance, singing as he travels on. In the silence behind the wind, it’s not hard to hear him yet.

  The wind is strong from the west, and the sound of his father’s Land-Rover and then his voice arrive long before he does. She stays hunkered down behind the dyke. Where have you been my blue-eyed boy, where hae ye been, my darling son? His voice is bold enough but uncertain in tune and accent. She almost smiles to hear it.

  The story runs a cool hand down your neck and turns your head till you hear tyres crunch, brakes squeak, a dog bark. Then the clunk of the door closing, his boots scuffing the dirt, and somewhere a stone slows inside a bowl and rattles to the bottom.

  David Elliot stopped up short of the cottage, not sure why. He swung the keys from their stone disc as Hawk flowed past him and peed up against the wall. The dyke. He’d never wanted to call this dale home, but still the words came back when he did.

  He stood in thin sunshine, not knowing what had brought him here. Through the trees past the cottage was the waterfall, the ravine of the Liddie Burn, the wooden bridge if it hadn’t fallen yet, and the short-cut path back to his father’s house. Up on the moor were the lochans he’d come to fish, he should be on his way there, needing to pass time till the water-glint brought peace for a while.

  He looked down to Ballantyne’s Farm, the Tattersall house below it, and the long falling-off to the river, the Border and the hills rising beyond. Then at the cottage. Not a pretty one, something secretive in the bland way it hunched back into the brae, the dark line of its low roof. It was empty, of course it was, no smoke or washing line, the garden gone back to long grass and bushes though the cottage itself seemed in good enough condition.

  He hesitated. What was to be gained by poking round such places? This was where the dead woman had lived. Let it be, Davy. The dead are too many to take on. But this was his father’s estate, what little of it remained after the settlement, and he could sniff around it if he wanted. His father never mentioned the place, the talk swerved round it. He knew without asking Elliot wouldn’t want him to come here.

  So he called on his dog and began to walk carefully towards the cottage. The name came to him: Crawhill. He took in the raised mound behind of the original building, the tall pale twisted beech trees rising over the ravine – heuch, that was the word – the old privy out the back. He walked so slow now he’d almost stopped, feeling the cold sweep over his palms as the dog circled round him.

  He checked back the way he’d come, another look down the dale, then up on the moor. No one watching. Of course there wasn’t.

  He shook hair from his eyes and let the wind at his back push him on. A volley of rooks exploded through the trees as he put his hand to the little rotten gate and stared at the empty windows either side of the door.

  He did not much like such windows. Without curtains they minded him of his mother’s eyes, open and empty as her last glass on the table by her bed. The furry ridges of her eyelids under his thumbs as he closed them. One would think the dead would close their own eyes, like switching off the lights when you leave the house, but we must do it for them. Someone will do it for me some day, he thought. I hope they will be kind, as I hope my Redeemer liveth.

  He crouched down at the gate, gripping the dog by the collar, reassured by the rough silky warmth on his wrist, its unquestioning affection. No smoke from the chimney, but in the side window was a paint-streaked jar, and pale flowers, daffs most like, leant against the rim. They looked fresh, and the cold sun gleamed on a new padlock lying in the grass by the door.

  He could just walk away. When he’d shaken off the big house that morning, his father’s white face smeared to the window, Annie Tat gesturing him to stay, he’d wanted only silence and clean air, to fish a lochan in the hills till he could face going back. Company he did not need, nor mystery.

  Then the privy’s corrugated roof creaked and lifted, dropped with a little thud and squealed again, and he had it. Years and years ago, when he was wee, before the deaths and changes: a summer picnic, or just a casual visit, he cannot say. The garden well kept with raspberry canes taller than himself, dreels of tatties, roses, some plants like green limbs sticking from the ground, his father …

  Maybe this long overgrown memory is what’s brought him here, if here was where it happened. He cannot say. But as the roof bangs again he glimpses a woman smaller and slimmer than his mother, a long fringed skirt, laughing down to him from long ringleted hair against the sun. He likes her but feels they shouldn’t be here. He senses a wee girl, a toddler, gurgling somewhere off to the right, but maybe he’s made that up. He sees his father’s eyes spark as he lights a long cigarette, bends backwards and exhales with a great phew into the sky. And that’s all and it’s over. Only a background sense of high trees, some corrugated roofing like on the privy here, and a sound of wind, crows and waterfall, suggest it might have been here.

  Let it go, Davy. Walk away. You want nothing of this. Everything you want is in the peaceful flatlands and soft woods of Southern England, in the woman who even now is decorating the house you will both soon live in.

  He looked back at the dead windows, the fresh flowers leaning in their jar. Jo would come soon. They’d do the formalities with Dad as she’d insisted. Make peace of a sort though there was disgust still there, then leave and drive back south to the life that waited for them. Make a marriage, make children, make a life. No more greed and vacillating. No more walking with darkness like it was the only way to be true.

  A red-haired woman with the sun behind her, a toddler gurgling. Not his business. His father exhaling at the sky, glowing with guilty energy, huge with his secret.

  Just one quick look round. See where she lived, where it happened, then let the dying bury the dead. There is nothing to fear here. Actions based on fear are invariably stupid.

  So he reached over the gate for the rusty latch. Then as his hand came down, another hand brushed quickly over his, long and white-fingered as it flipped the gate open.

  Don’t be shy, come on by!

  He birled round like a late falling leaf and she was standing close, her outline dark against the light that burned like new-forged steel over the Border.

  *

  The coffee’s cold but it’s too soon to take a break when you’ve only just begun. Instead let your eyes slide back to the watcher at the edge of the scene. Find his voice behind the wind that oozes by the window frame. Soon he’ll have a name and then you may come to know his part in this.

  Like cloud-shadow over the glimmerin lochans that lie like blades among the muir, my heart grew dark when I saw the Land-Rover stop by the cottage. It had to be the laddie, for Sim Elliot hadn’t come this way for years. My elbows shook on my bedroom sill and jiggled my binoculars as the woman rose from behind the dyke.

  She closed on him by the gate. Leave. Leave, you fool! He seemed to hesitate as though he heard me, then his head dipped and her arms waved like she was casting nets, and he stood back, then she moved closer, and all the while the dog ran circles round them.

  When he bent and dragged the hound to the Land-Rover then came back to her, I put my passion carefully aside on the work-bench, sheathed the tiny blades in rubber, then bent to lace my boots. Not my business, you might say, and I’d agree. But it’s my nature or fate not to mind my own business, and on account of that for many years Sir Simon Elliot’s business has been my own, and so his son’s is too.

  I left a bit note for Annie in case she got back early from the big house, then I was out the door heading up the brae at a lick.

  As he stands at the gate, the road w
inds away over the young man’s shoulder. It kinks round the side of the hill, reappears lower down the painted plate, and you can follow it as it twists past other scenes. In it are the roads that have brought him here. Follow back down them – you have seen her arrival, now it’s time to trace his. And you have time, for this moment of meeting will still be here when you get back. After all, nothing here can start without you.

  Now look until you see and hear him well.

  I watched once a time-lapse film of a small farming village being flooded for a reservoir. The dammed stream rose, thickened, broadened, then the fields flipped from dark to silver. The wind blew and what had been solid went choppy with small waves. Then the road into the valley went under. Next the dykes of the fields disappeared one by one, the lowest first, as though someone was levelling a rule over the valley floor. The people had left their doors open, the water went in and vanished, then began to pour out the windows. Then the windows were gone, debris floated on the water – old cushions, a chair, biscuit tins and newspapers – and then all that was left were three roofs. Then one roof, then its ridge like a dark log, then the waters closed over and it too was gone and the whole valley was water, bonnie enough in the sunlight but empty, empty.

  It came back to me the long day I sat watching my mother die. As she talked and haivered I felt the waters rising in her brain. The fields of her memory disappeared one by one, boundaries and divisions crumbled as she talked and slept then woke and talked more, and all the while the waters kept rising.

  I prayed, of course, and knew my companions in Faith prayed too, but the waters were strong and her liver and kidneys long gone, and by the last afternoon I was praying for something other than her survival. The rank smell must have been because her organs had packed up, and the only way out was through her sweat.

  So when she woke again and asked for drink, I put one in her hand and held her hand to tilt the glass to her lips and she almost smiled and I almost ceased to drown inside. Then all that was left was the last citadel, the roof and chimneys, the core memory she could never let alone.

  Those images will not let me be. Her skin by the end was yellow, her body and brain and spirit made thick and coarse by two decades of cigarettes and alcohol, bitterness and querulous lust. She haivered on and on about my father and the woman who died. She called it Justice, then she called it Murder, and challenged me to read the newspaper reports of that time, but I won’t because the truth is not there. The truth is in our hearts or nowhere.

  Make him pay, she whispered. I stared at the far wall and saw it was not smooth at all. I tried to tell her about forgiveness, the Mercy, the anger that is broken glass in our heart. She muttered some blasphemies. Her eyes were grey but red round the edges, like a sunrise through Borders mist. Her grip slackened on the glass. She dribbled from the left corner of her mouth. For her he’ll pay, she said, and smiled, and let go. Her smile uncreased slowly like a wave smoothing out, and she was away.

  These images will not leave me be, and the reservoir is filled up to my throat, even to my mouth so I must stand a little taller before I dare speak with friends. When I proposed to Jo after the funeral and she accepted, water came from my eyes. Now I can see the way ahead and know it is good. I see the future smooth and shining.

  And yet as I drove north through the flatlands, and then through the industries, all I could see was the flood that will cover it all. And the roads merged and grew wider and spread over the plains through the March rain. Turn-offs came up and receded, the cars flooded round the cities and gushed into their canyons, but I drove on, feeling yet the boundaries, the fields and houses, hopes and harvests drowned within me.

  I would pray but while driving it’s inadvisable, like using a mobile phone. The radio poured static so I switched it off and I crouched forward peering through the segment of visibility that opened and shut with my wiper blades. The rain was coming down in rods. Monstrous trucks in front sluiced mattresses of water into my way, and in my rear-view mirror I watched great walls of metal, blurred and buckling, close on me. Boxed in I drove for miles sandwiched between what was up ahead and what was behind, knowing either could kill me in a flash, and I could not find a holy name when I needed it, only long-forgotten ballads, only Johnny Armstrong’s Last Goodnight and Young Lochinvar, just sweet deadly Barbara Allan and Lord Randall, bawled defiantly as the great current carried me north. They alone kept the waters from closing over my head.

  Beyond the Lakes the deluge stopped, the wide road narrowed and the traffic drained away west and east, and in time I took my own tributary, the one that runs back to my source.

  The road played tig with the railway lines for a time, coming near enough to touch then running away. I sat on that train every school holiday for years with a frozen or heavy heart, on the way to see that stranger my father, or ashamed at my dread of returning to that wearying drunk my mother. I hated holidays. Boarding school was cold, fascistic, stupid, but after my parents it was easy, almost a home. Odd now to see those curves in the river, that hill rising and sinking, the familiar names scrolling back.

  Going home is more than a physical journey, and to marry a Canadian, as my dear Jo points out, is surely an end to history. Let it be so.

  The lands opened like a book ‘I’d read often enough to anticipate what comes next, but not so often as to know exactly what till I see it. The mist clagged in as the road rose higher, but even wrapped in shawls the Borderlands are hard and clean. I stopped at the top of the bar, smelled damp moorland and heard two curlews go pirl-pirling into the cloud, and felt them fly through my chest, as though I belonged here. But really I belong only with Jo and the Mercy, so I walked up and down swinging my arms and from my legs kicked off the feeling.

  I said a brief prayer and felt near satisfied, then got back in the car and descended through thinning mist. In a patch of sunlight a slight woman with tangled red hair stood at the roadside with her thumb held out. She lifted her hand and waved as though she knew me or would like to, but I recognised the mixed motives that made me slow, so I signed to her I was turning off soon and drove on.

  I found the crossroads and the sign, then twisted along the tight curves following the river. Trees bare, land bleached at the end of winter, a scattering of blasted flowers along the edges of mixed woodland. Hard right over the narrow bridge across the river and I know I’ve crossed the Border, though of course it looks just the same as the other side. It doesn’t matter much to me.

  Then onto the B-road, winding ever more obscurely, all hemmed in by banks and branches. Something always happens along this stretch after the village. Signs disappear, everything is a one-off as it is in childhood. Even the air seems to change and distances aren’t the same. Winding up the valley it’s as though I’m passing through an invisible gateway, leaving the known world behind and entering an estate where leaves are sharp-edged, thoughts unpredictable, the few people and houses loom larger like they’re coming out of a mist. Looking in my rear-view mirror, I’m surprised there’s anything at all left behind.

  Then the unmarked turn by the lightning-shattered hornbeam, up the pot-holed drive and I’m home, not that it’s that. Park round the back, switch off and wait a moment. The window frames need painting, the sheds have slumped against each other like drunks, the silver birches are being strangled by ivy.

  Not my problem. I don’t want what’s left of the estate, he knows that. I’ve told him straight yet he doesn’t hear me. He says I have no choice. Hundreds of years, he says. You can’t walk away from that. No one can.

  Watch me, Dad.

  He can give it away for all I care, or will it to Tat and Annie. I have come back one last time to be free of it all. To be free above all of the long hollowed man glowering down through his study window at me like I’m some kind of assassin come at last.

  I get out of the car. Hawk grovels at my feet, I kneel and smooth his head and try to stop my hands shaking. He’s standing at the door. His hair’s greying so fast. T
he ponytail is an embarrassment. For all his height he looks stooped and dark, his very face seems to have darkened and died back to cheek and jaw bone. He’s burnt out. I remind myself to have compassion but ‘I’m glad he looks hollowed out, burned out to his jutting eyebrows, haunted, and I am a young man about to be free.

  He walks from the door, looking round suspiciously as though he believes there’s a rifleman hidden somewhere in the trees. He glances back to the door. I can feel his longing to be back in the safety of the house. He’s no been right since he heard the news about your mum, Annie Tattersall wrote on the card. Best come soon.

  He comes towards me. I stand up straight and we’re nearly on a level. His eye-sockets are craters full of dust, and the hand he holds out is shaking.

  David, he says.

  Dad.

  He still has a grip on him. I slacken my hand and brush the moisture onto my jeans.

  Where’s the fiancée woman?

  Jo will be a few days yet.

  He stares at me. His eyes are moist black rabbit droppings. I think he’s stoned already.

  Wants to keep it short, eh?

  My father looks round for the hidden marksman but there is none except his conscience. Whatever the verdict of the courts, he destroyed three lives, and it’s hard to find the Mercy though we must.

  Bring your gear in, he says, and hurries back inside the house, leaving me with the dog whining at my feet.

  I lug my case from the car. We needn’t punish each other further. I will try to be civil till Jo comes. Then she will charm him, for the old goat still likes women, I’ve seen his eyes swivel the few times we’ve been in the village together and a bonnie one crosses his path. We’ll get his blessing then leave.