When They Lay Bare Read online

  Elliot lowers his head to the cold glass. The knocking has stopped below but his other visitor won’t leave. These last years Jinny hasn’t been vivid, more an old deep ache, a vague willed recollection, but recently she won’t stay away. Since Fiona died, and now this woman at Crawhill … He thumps the side of his head against the stone wall, feels pain and sees some flashes, but the pictures don’t stop. They won’t till his heart does, and by God he hopes that won’t be long.

  *

  She crossed the end of winter fields all pale and scraggy with die-back, ducked under a fence, eyes fixed on the big house in the distance. That way she nearly fell over the remains of a caravan in the middle of some silver birch saplings. She stopped, puzzled, and looked it over. It was derelict, maybe burnt out, had once been blue, had nearly entirely been enveloped by rust and ivy and wild clematis. The door was locked. She stood on a rusted wheel arch and peered in the broken window. Just a strip of ancient carpet, water and leaf-mould on the floor. A bunk bed with a grey mattress growing some kind of fungus. Two tiny doll’s-house-size curtains in orange.

  She winced, jumped down and hurried on. She crossed the river at the bottom of the garden by hauling herself hand over hand under the little bridge. The light was failing fast, the colours were draining and she should be safe enough. She worked up along some trellises, closing in past the rockery on the downside of the driveway.

  She should stop but there always seemed more cover. There was the main house, an extended three storeys of mellow stone, various outhouses, trees hemming it in round the back. A couple of lights on, then a third and curtains drawn. But it was the stone tower at the side she crouched and crawled towards. God it was grim, a squat mass of blackened stone without ornament of any kind. A low rampart at the top and single window on each floor. Elliot’s study, then the landing, then the bedroom, if she remembered David rightly. Only one way up, and a massive door at the bottom that Elliot bolted on the inside when the mood took him. It seemed he virtually lived in the peel tower these days. In the village they’d said he hadn’t been seen for months.

  Taking a chance she ran across an open space and crouched in behind a big clump of bamboo. Now she was right opposite the windows. She wiped the drizzle off her face, hunkered down again behind the fronds and looked up. A pale blur of a face at the middle window, looking her way.

  Sir Simon Elliot, in her sights at last.

  She swivelled, checked behind. Something not right. Just a feeling. She saw nothing but a slight stir in the birch across the burn. Maybe Tat, maybe not. Something must be done about that one.

  She mustn’t be caught here. The time hadn’t come. Keeping low she drifted sideways behind a screen of young willows, pushing up the twigs tenderly as she passed underneath, receiving the drops shaken on her face like blessings. At the gap before the fence, she knelt in the beech-leaves mulch, looked back and waited. Patience. Wet leaves sticking to muddy knees. No one there, no unaccountable movement. Then a yellow light snapped on in an upper room – the study she thought, from what David told her. She should have asked more closely.

  She flowed across the gap and under the fence and was caught by a clutch at her throat. She fell sideways and lashed out with her boot. Hit empty air. Her cloak had snagged on a barb. Giggling and cursing both, she unpicked it, crawled a short way on sodden knees to the short-cut track. Reconnaissance over.

  She stood up in the last light and turned for home, for the fire to be stoked and the night ahead.

  The plates circle high above their story like the hawk that patrols over this dale, implacable, hungry for detail. It hangs above the cottage as dawn comes and in the bedroom a lamp light finally goes out. Then it cants and rides the breeze on the upslopes of the moor for an hour before its shadow flickers again over the rough green pastureland running down from the dyke.

  From up here, the outlines of the past are much clearer. Here are the old field boundaries, there the, darker green marking the forests of oak and elder that used to cover the lower slopes. It was those woods as much as the steep-sided sinuous glens each side of the Border that made it such fine raiding country, an auspicious place to hold an ambush or a secret meeting.

  With an upward flick of a wing tip the hawk drifts equally over the dark circle of a Pictish fort, a longhouse that once had in its hearth the altar of the hammer god, the greener rectangle of an Empire camp where the last remnants of a legion were finally overrun and left for the corbies and this hawk’s ancestors.

  The hawk tilts away from Ballantyne’s Farm because scowling Smiler Ballantyne is already out and about and his rifle is never far from his hands, especially now during lambing. It circles a long time above the brick two-storey house where the Tattersalls live. It drifts unconcerned in and out of Tat’s binocular sights, the two are old acquaintances. Annie Tat goes out back for kindling and on her way scares a frog from the shadows near the pond. Annie goes back in. The hawk side-slips down. The frog turns its head and makes for the pond some four yards away. It never gets there. Then the head comes off.

  That’s what the plates are like. They circle and wait, watch from a distance, then move in.

  A smear of rain on the windows, the fading stump of a rainbow across the valley roots in by the Iron Age fort. A dislocated fogginess in the air, breath on the window, everything indistinct inside and out.

  Right about now, David guessed, if she’s on schedule and her health’s held up, Jo would be starting on the bedroom. But he needs her here. He’s restless and bored. The house is oppressive, even Annie has been giving him funny looks. When they talk his own voice sounds echoey as though bouncing back off the invisible screen between them.

  He must go out, find someone interesting to talk to. He can’t go to the village where there are only more muttered words, eyes sliding away from him, a hint of laughter as he walks past. Not Crawhill. Mary Allan comes under interesting. Make that challenging. But a challenge he could do without. Be frank and say she was irritating and downright peculiar. Yet there’d been moments of ease, of sudden kinship and confidences. He wants to talk with her more, explain his life and discover hers. Her life discovers his, they’re like mirrors facing each other, the other way round but the same. What’s brought her here, how does she live, what about the school for very bad girls, what exactly is her sexuality?

  No. He palmed his own mist off the window and tried to think of something useful to do round here.

  The hawk tilts and side-slips down like a falling sheet of paper away from the big house. It slides until it hits the updraughts rising from the burial mounds. Men and women lie there yet, knees drawn up to the chest, a little jar by the skull facing east in utter darkness. They have waited some four thousand years and the light hasn’t come, except in one where the jar lies broken, and the skull is separated from the rest of the bones. Light came once to this tomb, a spade broke in and a hand jerked a stone amulet from the vertebrae, took fright and was gone.

  The bird’s eye drifts down the burn that runs into other burns. It soars over the red stepped bluff of Creagan’s Knowe and makes another kill there. It wipes its beak on the branch of an old Scots pine then spreads its wings and swings back west until it turns high and silent again over the solitary cottage.

  Simon Elliot reached into the window-seat niche and lit up, thinking about Tat’s report. It wasn’t good. Crawhill Cottage, of all places. Tat had agreed without meeting his eyes, it was not good nor canny, the way she’d appeared and gone straight there, knowing its name. And she was about the right age, Tat admitted, but nothing else was familiar.

  She doesna look like …?

  In no particular.

  The bairn was but wee when she left.

  She’s not familiar, Tat had repeated, that’s all I know.

  If it wasn’t the child, Sim wondered, who was she, and what the hell was she doing moving into Crawhill? And if it was her, what had she come back for, why had she not come to see him? Instead she’d taken up residence i
n the cottage and waited. What did the lassie want with Davy?

  He gasped at a jag of chest pain as he looked out onto the garden where his son was stubbornly hacking out hazel roots, heaving and slashing like they tied him to everything he despised. The righteous prig had been out there half the morning, first howking leeks and now this.

  No, it wasn’t possible. This is paranoia. This is Banquo’s ghost. A thing of nothing but conscience, and you owe it to Jinny to keep your mouth shut to the end. That’s your penance so bear it, man, thole it.

  Just go see her. Go to Crawhill. One look and he’d know, surely. But it couldn’t be her. The administrator for the trust fund was quite clear: she was going to emigrate. She’d cleaned out the fund and was going to the other side of the world. Or so she’d said.

  Sim had another drag and eased the window open to let the smoke out. Not that Annie was so fussed, in fact on occasions he could never predict she would silently reach out as she passed by the window seat, reach out and pluck the joint from his fingers, stand beside him and have a couple of deep drags as a formality of sharing, then tutting to herself she’d carry on up the stairs with it still stuck in the corner of her mouth, leaving him gasping in the vacuum of a woman’s departure before he’d pad after her, calling out for what he’d lost. But she did insist he was discreet, she ran an orderly house, she’d say, we’ll keep your nasty wee habits between ourselves.

  We find such comforts as we can, he thought vaguely. He was looking at his son’s long angry back. How can a back reject so? God knows what had led him to Crawhill of all places. Like Tat said, it wasn’t canny.

  A root snapped and Davy jerked back as if hit by bullets, stumbled and fell among the last of the sprouts. Sim sniggered, then stopped as the boy’s head turned his way straight off, looking up at the very window. Elliot put his right hand to the glass and waved slowly like bored royalty. David Elliot jumped up, whacked the dirt from his breeks and walked smartish out of sight round the corner. A moment later, the back door scraped. Then thumping on the locked inner door to the back stairs.

  Simon Elliot stubbed out the joint and stuck his head out the window but the thumping continued. He felt it in his neck and put his hand there, twisting it slowly. There were words yet to be said between them, and a furious laddie determined to confront a man as good as dead.

  He swung his legs down off the window seat and went down to unbolt the door. It would be best, as always, to start on the attack.

  *

  You might have told me she was deid, boy. Christ, I shouldn’t have had to read it in the papers.

  Mum didn’t want you at the funeral. She had the right to that, so I promised her.

  Sitting facing at either end of the window seat, they stared each other out. It was the first true eye contact since his return.

  You don’t think I have rights and all? Man, she was my wife once.

  Aye, once. You lost your rights when you shagged the Lauder woman.

  His father’s big hand twitched then was still.

  That’s awful coarse, boy.

  I try not to be. He looked away. Ach …

  Silence. Hail rattled like handfuls of tacks on the glass. Brisk footsteps on the stair below that hesitated, stopped, then padded back down again.

  Davit …

  He slid off the window seat and stood looking down at his father.

  I’ll tell you this. He waited till he knew better what he wanted to tell his father. When Jo and I marry, we’ll make a better fist of it. Your lot had everything and laid it to waste because you were greedy. And now I know what I most want to avoid being. You.

  His father’s face was white but David couldn’t stop the words shaking from his mouth like burning dice as he backed towards the stair.

  You’re greedy. Adulterous. Murdering. Unloving …

  His father was on his feet with his arms coming up and mouth red against the whiteness about his cheeks.

  You think I killed her? You daft wee shite, I loved Jinny.

  Why couldn’t you love us!

  There it was, raw and bitter, scooped from the bottom. It stopped his father dead. It left nothing to say so David turned to go.

  What’s happened to your religion of forgiveness? Elliot called.

  At the turning of the stair, David paused and looked back.

  Dad, go and talk to the dead about forgiveness.

  He pushed through the door out of the tower and away. Simon Elliot looked a long while into the smirr of rain. At last he reached a shaking hand under the seat and drew out the remains of his joint. He lit up and drew deep and waited for the smoke to wrap like a duvet about his brain.

  Talk to the dead, son? I’ve never stopped. I see Jinny laughing, turning, frowning, stirring asleep under blankets by the window as I dress and leave the caravan before dawn. I see her helpless with joy in my arms. I see the flash of her anger like a portcullis clanged down between us. I see her look down on me as I rest my head on her belly. Most of all, I see her falling.

  *

  He chapped once at the door then walked in.

  Hi, he said. How’s it going?

  She put a notebook down on the pile of plates then looked up at him neutrally.

  Greetings, Master Elliot.

  She was sitting where he last saw her, bare feet on the stone flags. Her hair, even thicker and darker than he’d remembered, curled in and hugged her ears, brushed by the pale back of her neck as she turned to look at him. He held out the bulging carrier bag.

  I thought you needed some greens, he said. You looked a bit peelie-wally and I was taking out the last of the leeks …

  She opened her mouth. When she smiled she wasn’t so scary, just another struggling mortal.

  Thanks, she said. You’re either a true Christian or a devil for punishment. Sorry I was a bit nippy the other day.

  I was being stuffy, he replied.

  He crossed the room and put the leeks and cabbage in the cardboard box she used for veg. His back was turned but he heard her put the big plates away, the ones his father seemed so twitchy about.

  You could stick the kettle on, she said. Seeing as you’re staying for lunch.

  Got some good news for you.

  She grinned.

  I know.

  *

  In the cool morning kitchen they are telling stories in fragments. The low sunlight comes through the window to lay a bright rectangle across the stone floor. A page of light curls at the edges of the uneven flags as it inches through the morning towards him. The same light falls across his forearm and shows her under the yellow-gold his hair is red. As he cools off, the hairs rise and stiffen. And when he talks and becomes excited, when he talks about another argument with his father, or the lady fair coming soon, those hairs fold and lie back flat along the nap of his skin. His bundle of keys lies on the table by the polished stone disc she tries not to look at.

  *

  Stories in fragments. She is making soup and salad as she talks. Her long fingers pluck and shred leaves. She slices tomatoes, peppers, quick and decisive on a wooden board. He is held by such rapidity, the absence of hesitation as she uses the side of his knife to sweep the veg into a yellow bowl.

  You prepare like a pro, he says.

  She nods. Had a lot of practice.

  Restaurants?

  The knife stops. Her eyes flick to the window as though an out was there.

  Sometimes when I’ve needed the money, she says. But I did a lot of food preparation in the homes.

  The blade flickers and the mushroom falls in slices.

  Children’s homes, she says. Times when I was between families.

  *

  They are telling each other stories. They are tracing the roads that brought them to this pale, cool kitchen high in the dale. The potatoes steam in their pan, she lays out plain white plates and sits across the wooden table from him and waits.

  Homes, he says. Two is one too many, isn’t it? Trying to explain, he puts his hand
flat on his chest where the ribs divide. It leaves a space here.

  She nods, pauses. Was it after the trial your folks separated?

  He stares at her, trying very hard not to fight or flee. He stares till he can see a tiny disc of himself in her pupils. Then she looks down.

  People talk in the village, she says. I’m sorry.

  He could ask whether this is an apology or sympathy. He could ask exactly which from a range of options she is sorry for. Instead he swallows and tries to look across the table at this very pertinent person.

  After, he says. It all came out then.

  I think Not Proven is a very useful verdict, she murmurs.

  Her face won’t stay still to be looked at. It deflects his inspection like a shield reflecting the sun. The light bounces back off her, there’s a constant subtle shifting as he tries to memorise her. Long black eyebrows straight as hawks’ wings. He blinks and she looks young and unlined, scarcely out of her teens. Then her head turns and he sees broad cheeks, dark lines at the drop of her mouth, and he feels like a gangling boy next to her. Her face, even the shape of her head, won’t stay still. It must be the play of light coming in the window. She looks slim then she looks solid and powerful. And he can’t let his eyes settle on her mouth, not after that kiss.

  Were you in many homes? he asks.

  Her face flickers between child and adult as she talks, turned sideways to him, clasping her knee like she’s giving a recitation of some old lesson, and he has to look away from the rise and fall of her chest as she talks.

  *

  The green home. Then the stone home and the brick home and the pebble-dash. The wallpaper house. Single rooms, shared rooms, dormitories. The darkness when the lights went out and the small sounds as she lay awake clutching the metal bed frame. Whispers, giggles suddenly cut off. Someone choking, someone sobbing through a fist jammed in her mouth.