When They Lay Bare Read online

  Yet he is his father’s laddie, however much he kicks agin it. The same cottage. When Ned Lauder came off the brig last century, he went down like the Nixon men from three hundred years afore him, pricked onto the bridge with hands bound then used as targets till they fell or leapt.

  I locked my workroom, picked up my gear and gun and louped past Ballantyne’s Farm towards Crawhill with muckle on my mind.

  Old Elliot knows in his bones it’s not right. She’s called Mary, Tat, he said this morn. So it’s not her. And he’d looked at me like a dog waiting for a clap.

  Mary is a bittie nearby, I said, but not close enough.

  So it’s coincidence, man.

  Yet she asked for Crawhill by name, I said, tormenting him. And she’s the right age.

  Did you recognise her?

  Dinna be daft. Marnie was a bairnie then.

  All the same.

  I shook my head. But he could see I wasn’t right with it, and he speired some more. I admitted there was a feeling about her that wasn’t canny. Maybe it was just seeing her in yon place, standing at the window where Jinny had stood. And the bare feet too.

  Old Elliot went darker then. Bare feet? he says. Like Jinny.

  Aye. And your boy spoke of pattern plates.

  A long long silence in his study.

  It’s not possible, Elliot said at last. You say yourself she doesn’t look right. And why would she stay there and not call on me? Eh? Makes no sense.

  He was right enough there. He should stop fashing himself or throw her out. I told him that to his face. In the old days he’d have bawled me out. Now he shook his head slow like it was a bucketful of mucky water.

  Let her stay, he said. But keep an eye on her. I don’t want her getting closer to the laddie.

  Aye, there’s surely been enough shaggin in Crawhill.

  He came from his chair to swipe me. I shimmied back and he caught thin air. He sat down, panting. The whacky baccy had done for him.

  Before God, you’ve a dirty mind, Tat.

  I didn’t deny it. Nor did I say the lassie had been checking out the big house. The man’s paranoid enough as it is.

  Now the cottage door swung open. I leaned back into the shaw of trees and put the vision on her. She walked to the fence yon braisant upright way, looked about like the place was hers. Then she leaned on the gate. She leant over the gate looking down to the river with her elbows on the top bar and her big hands hanging down loose. Her feet were bare.

  That did it. I stubbed out the cheroot and put away the binocs. I waited till she went back inside then got to my feet, a bit cramped or maybe shaky from minding the summer evenings I’d seen Jinny Lauder hang over that same gate in the same drop-wristed way. This was a strongly built woman, and Jinny a high-spirited midge with her long red hippie hair, but I wasn’t having it. It seemed an insult to her memory.

  Sim Elliot aye said I should use my initiative with regards to the estate and it’s time I was doing just that.

  *

  So, Davy, Annie said as he came in the scullery. The lassie like leeks, then?

  It seems so. And you don’t have to look at me like that.

  If you say, dear. Your fiancée woman will be here soon?

  He stopped and grinned.

  She will indeed. Couple of days maybe. Can’t wait.

  He stroked the brace of pheasants hung from the hook. One cock, one hen. Cold, stiff, beautiful, smelling faintly of coal dust from the shed where Tat always hung them. Whenever he hears the word ‘dead’, that’s what it brings to him – the whiff of coal, the head lop-sided and the black eye empty. What will pheasants know of Resurrection? What will he?

  I’ll be roasting these when she comes.

  She doesn’t eat meat, Annie.

  Oh aye. Her head cocked like she was listening to something, then she bent to the washing machine and began pulling out damp clothes. Sensitive, is she?

  Her hands pulled underpants from the grip of a shirt.

  You could say that. Jo sees a roast and thinks of the animal being slaughtered. She’s got an active imagination.

  That must make life hard, eh?

  He hesitated. It does sometimes. Of course I’ve no imagination at all, so maybe we balance out.

  Annie nodded, her back still turned. He folded his arms and leaned back on the counter, comforted by her presence. He watched her flip socks into one basket, shirts into another. He recognised his father’s shirts, mostly faded and plain. Couple of pairs of jeans peeled apart by her reddened hands. He couldn’t say why that felt odd, watching her hands pick apart the clothes his father wore next to his skin. Her solid hips in stretch pants as she crouched. Something pale, cream-white wrapped round the jeans. Her hands didn’t hesitate, they peeled away the slip and what looked like French knickers and flipped them in with the socks.

  He must have made a sound, something like a laugh.

  The old man’s had a visitor?

  She ran her hand round the drum to check it empty then stood up.

  Times I do some bits and bobs of mine and Tat’s along with Elliot’s.

  Uh-huh. He reached for that basket but she got it first, propped it on her full hip, the other basket gripped by the rim.

  I look forward to meeting her, she said, and for a moment looked him in the eye. Life’s better when you don’t imagine too much, Davy.

  Sit back with the sun glaring in your eyes off the pale plate. When you look around, your surroundings are dim and bleached, much less solid than before.

  So get up and walk around, stretch and make sounds out loud, not meaning anything by it but I exist, I am here. More than ever it seems to you there should be a place where nothing fades and all things co-exist. In comparison everything here is fleeting, narrow and quick as the stroke of a blade over the skin.

  We do not live in that place, she hears herself think, yet we glimpse it whiles. Maybe that’s why we’re so seldom at home here.

  She tilts the plate again, trying to separate the story from the shine off the surface. What colours remain are grey and green, moorland shades. Instead of white doves cooing, we have fell black corbies. No elegantly weeping willows, but pale high twisted birch and beech. In place of a rising bridge over the pretty lake, we have rotting planks strung across a chasm. And the charming summer house is a sparse cottage, yellowstoned, slate roof gripped green by lichen. And in its bare kitchen the young woman is holding a plate, and in that plate a fatal, mysterious young woman grips the plate she stares into as though it were a warped mirror.

  She feels dizzy. Her feet ache on the cold hard stone. Did she have breakfast some hours ago? Share lunch with David Elliot? There is no one here to tell her. That is the hook and danger of solitude, she thinks – no one to correct your stranger notions. The few dishes are clean on the formica by the sink. She cleans up after herself. She covers her tracks. At times she isn’t sure what of her past is real and what she’s invented.

  That’s silly. Of course she knows, if she could only concentrate. She has been here before, to this place out on the edge. She has looked down into that series of drops where the mind can fall. She has looked into it two, maybe three times in her life, and always she has been able to turn away and come back to herself stronger. It has always worked in the past, unless she has just invented that past.

  She is her own ghost. She is shining, empty, a nothing con templating itself. I am not here, she hears herself think. I’m not here.

  The door scrapes open. She drops the plate, grabs for it as it falls but it hits the stone floor and smashes at her bare feet. Widening light as the door is pushed open. She turns, wide-eyed.

  Right, whoever you are – out.

  She stares at him. Blood is tickling her toes where a shard has cut her.

  You’re a liar, young lassie, Tat says. He lays the shotgun across the chair where David had sat. You have no one’s permission. Elliot knew nothing about you, so in my book you’re squatting. The boy’s no the factor of this e
state – I am. And I say you’re out tonight.

  He walks up to her and stands, hands on his hips, exactly at her eye-level. She doesn’t move. She stares back and lets the blood flow from her toes. For a moment, Tat hesitates. He knows what he is afraid of, and this place gives him the creeps. So does this motionless woman who stares into him as if into his secret soul.

  Her lips open with a faint, unsticking sound. Her eyes never waver.

  No, she says.

  In fact, she adds, fuck off back to the organ-grinder.

  She wipes her bloody toes across the hem of his trouser leg and smiles.

  *

  Sim Elliot leaned his forehead on the cool mahogany desk. His head was worse than usual today, whenever he bent forward the pressure slid down over his eyes and the world went dark for a moment. If he kept absolutely steady it could be all right.

  He opened his eyes and looked out the window. At the end of the garden, the line of tall stripped willows shivered by the river in hard light. It was better in summer when they formed a solid screen against the rest of the valley. The original peel tower and then the house had been built on the rise and all the trees for a hundred yards cut down so enemies could be seen ways off. Even as a child that empty ground had made him anxious. He’d rather not know what was coming his way. When he’d inherited the title and the estate descended on him inevitable as a headache, first thing he’d started planting trees in that gap. Without mother or father or siblings he felt exposed and alone, as if there was nothing between him and the enticing, dangerous world.

  How else could he explain his failure of nerve then? Marriage to Fiona Grahame had made him feel more protected. Hedged in. Settled. Dull but secure in his raised position. Like him, Fiona was semi-posh but local. Elliots and Grahames had been intermarrying for generations when they weren’t at feud. She knew the limits and what was owing. When in the course of a fumbling night they became each other’s first lover – he flushes still to think of her wincing silence and his clumsiness as he laboured like a cack-handed safe-cracker to find the right combination to open up her desire – among what was owing was that he married her. And it had seemed to work so long as he kept his head down to detail and accepted he’d now never go to China or design bridges or take part in the riot of pleasure and joy that seemed to have broken out all round them towards the end of the sixties. And then Jinny came stepping through the saplings in bare feet with her man, slipping through the screen like it wasn’t there.

  Surely he must have invented the bare feet. Could she have walked shoeless across Lowfield, then short-cutting through the new willows? That’s not the way to come asking favours of the man whose land you’d parked your rusting caravan on. But it was Jinny’s way, when she was still young and careless of the world.

  Sim almost smiled. It had been from this same window he’d seen them first. He’d been boxing his father’s old papers and weapons, the photos and mementoes of the Malay rubber estate, the kukris and gaudy plaster Buddhas, and wondering if this should be a nursery or his study.

  His life was certain and clear and fortified if prematurely resolved, and he was lifting the heavy blades from the wall when he’d seen the movement by the willows. The girl bold, alert, daring someone to take her up. Long dyed ringleted hair – the first time he’d ever seen henna – vivid green print dress brushing the grass, belt of beads cinched round her neat waist, huge eyes ringed in black. The husband bearded, long dark curls, patched jeans and best sweater, trailing a couple of steps behind her as he looked truculently up at the house. The husband catching up and taking, almost grabbing, his wife’s hand, and she’d turned and pulled him on like this social call was a game, as if living itself was a game, not a burden to be shouldered. She’d put her other hand up on his shoulder and walked backwards like they were dancing, and the young husband had suddenly smiled as if he heard the same music, then arm in arm they tacked across the lawn towards the door of the big house.

  Even then he’d felt a twinge of jealousy. Jealous, he thought, of their freedom, their lack of burden. They weren’t twenty-seven going on fifty with all the major decisions of their lives made and their son and heir already in place. They hadn’t missed out on the sixties in a single-sex boarding school. The girl moved light as blown seed while the husband was a supple jaggy thistle. He’d heard the door open, looked down from the window and saw Fiona, sensibly shod, walk towards them, uncertainly drying her hands. Wee Davy toddled out behind her, stopped and stared at them.

  He’d sighed and put the kukris on the desk. Better go down and do his lord of the manor bit, tell them they had to move on. He’d even help get their ancient Humber going again. Then the young woman had tilted her head from Fiona and Davy and looked straight up at his window, and though she surely couldn’t see him she had smiled as if entertained. And as he went down the stair sucking the finger he’d knicked on the blade, he felt not like lord of the manor but like a man on his desert island seeing with exultation and dread the ship finally sail into the lagoon.

  He blinked and took out his stash from the little drawer. So easy to look out the window and see those ghosts still. Some days, days like today, conditions were such he could see the shadows on their faces, the fate-lines on their palms. Jinny had believed that the past and the future were all laid out just beyond the range of our sight. Like the undulating line of hills on the horizon, from where he stood he could see it all, see how it connected, but when he was there walking he could see only the short strip by his feet.

  Jinny, Jinny. He crossed to the cupboard, reached behind the estate files and pulled out his secret journals of that time. As he blew the stoor off his fingertips, he wanted just to flick through and check if Jinny really had been barefoot as she so often was, as though she wanted to feel the planet close to her as possible, and grip it confidently with her toes.

  Barefoot, Tat had said. And in Crawhill Cottage where Jinny and Patrick had moved to have the baby when winter made the caravan impossible. And David had said something about a stack of plates the woman had with her. It wasn’t canny. It wasn’t possible. The right age, but nothing else fitted.

  Everything disappears but nothing ends, she used to say. It all comes back in time. I certainly intend to.

  Charming nonsense of course, she scarcely believed it herself. It was just one of those kid-ons, a let’s-pretend. Lovers’ talk. Not like the real and powerful magic she could work between her body and her eyes, strong enough to astonish them both at the time, and leave her later shaky in his arms.

  He opened the old blue cover, put his nose down to the page and inhaled a gone time, the only time he’d truly lived. With eyes shut he glimpsed his younger self crossing to slide the bar across the door before settling down to painfully confess to these pages that his world, his title, his morality and his responsibility were not worth saving. That was the worst ghost of all, the young man he’d been before he’d lived or loved or known himself, before the fall.

  Jinny falling away from him, small hand moving away from his outstretched arm, bright head already turned away to look down Creagan’s Knowe, saying nothing as she went.

  He took a deep toke and began to read the old words, the faded ink, the young shaking hand of a man who had always acted right and still knew nothing about anything that mattered a damn, a young man whose life was about to end so it could finally begin.

  *

  For a while Tat gawps at her. His right arm comes up too late. She has grabbed it in both strong hands then leans her face within inches of his.

  I lied, she says. About my name. It’s not quite Mary.

  He blinks. He closes his eyes and the kitchen is very quiet but for the wind outside. The strength goes from his arm. When he opens his eyes she seems to have swollen and distorted as though he was looking at her through glass that has run by reason of its great age.

  I don’t think I have to say it.

  Tat edges back from her. He looks round the kitchen as though seeing it
for the first time. And at last he starts to think. He lays his hand across the shotgun.

  Anyone can say a name, he says. It’s common gossip round here. I kent Jinny Lauder and saw the bairn many a time. You don’t look like either.

  So long as he doesn’t look at her, he can think. He glances towards her then away towards the half-open bedroom door.

  Reckon you’re a chancer, lassie. Out with you.

  His hand is small, sinewy and brown across the shotgun stock. She looks at his shaven averted head, the small runty bones and the quick jerky moves of his shoulders. She’d thought him a sparrow, now she sees he’s a sparrowhawk. She sighs and swoops to pick up the biggest shard. She holds the long fragment in her hand, extended towards him like a blade.

  Now she has his attention. She steps forward carefully over the broken bits, feels blood slippy under her feet. Standing very close to him and looking into his eyes, she smiles and opens her hand.

  In the jagged shard Tat glimpses tall trees, two lovers lying in their shade, a small figure hiding watching them.

  I think you’ll recognise this, she says. My mother must have shown you.

  He nods, unable to lift his eyes from the remains of the plate. Jinny lying on her side in the garden outside the cottage, twenty-odd years back, long red hair tickling across his arm as she talked him through her plates. Family heirlooms, she said, a few hundred years. Teasing him about the lurking watcher, making him red and sweating. But if she had known he’d watched her and Elliot at it, she could never have sat with him like that, surely to God.

  The rest are over there, she says. All seven. She nods towards the press. He can see the pile stacked up. Heh, you look like you seen a ghost.

  He shakes his head till his tongue comes loose.

  I dinna believe in bogles.

  She smiles like she doesn’t either but that’s not the point. Then her smile is gone and she’s looking at him in that distant way that makes him feel one of them isn’t all there.

  What d’ye want?