We were on the battlements; I faced into the cool north wind. I waited to feel the dizziness of déjà vu, but didn't. Maybe too much had happened, or not enough time had passed.
"Well, whatever the heathen equivalent is," Lewis said. "Will you?"
"Of course," I said. I looked down into the small pink face bundled inside the old family shawl; Kenneth McHoan had his eyes tightly closed and wore an expression of concentration on his features that implied sleep was a business of some deliberation. One of his hands — the thumb so small it could have fitted on just the nail of one of my own thumbs — was held up near his chin; the fingers made a slow waving motion, like a sea anemone in a ray current, and I jiggled up and down a little, cradling the sleeping child and going, "Shh,shh."
I glanced at Verity, sitting beside Lewis, her arm round his waist. She looked up from her son's face for a moment.
"Uncle Prentice, the Godfather." She smiled.
"An offer only a churl could refuse."
"People have their own absorption spectra, Prentice," said Diana Urvill, as she took a Corning turn-of-the-century cut glass plate out of the display case in the castle Solar and — after wiping the plate with a lint-free cloth — handed it carefully to me. We both wore white gloves. I took the plate — like an immense ice crystal with too many angles of symmetry — and placed it on the table, on the topmost sheet of foam. I folded the translucent padding over — thinking how much it looked like prawn crackers — secured it with tape, then found a suitably sized box and placed the plate in the centre, on a bed of small white expanded-polysytrene wafers that looked like flattened infinity symbols.
I lifted one of the giant sacks of the wafers and filled the box to the brim with them, covering the wrapped-up plate, then closed the box and took the little card Diana had left on the table and taped it to the side of the box where it could be read. Then I put the box on a five-high pile near the door; the stacking limit was six, so it completed that column.
"Absorption spectra?" I said sceptically, as we started to repeat the whole process with a Fritsche rock crystal ewer.
Diana, dressed in baseball boots, black tracksuit bottoms and a UCLA sweatshirt, her black hair tied in a pony tail, nodded, and breathed on the ewer before polishing it. Things they get absorbed in. Interests, that sort of thing. If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in — all that sort of stuff — then they'd look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed."
"What an astronomical imagination you have, Diana," I said. "Getting enough oxygen up on Mauna Kea, yeah?" I grinned.
"Just a pet theory, Prentice." She finished polishing the ewer. "Better than believing in," she said, and handed me the elaborately carved jug, "crystals."
"Well, that's true, in a very un-Californian way, isn't it?" I filled the inside of the ewer up with little polystyrene beads from another giant sack, a broad smile on my face as I remembered.
She cried out and the crystal sang in reply.
Later, we exchanged signals.
"Help me fold these sheets, will you?"
The day after all the excitement at Lochgair, I sat at the dining table with what looked like a turban on my head. It was a towel wrapped round one of those sealed liquid containers you freeze and put in cool boxes.
I signed the statement.
"Thank you, sir."
"Davey, stop calling me 'sir', for God's sake," I breathed. Constable David McChrom had been in my class at school and I couldn't bring myself to call him 'officer'. His nickname had been Plooky, but that might have been carrying informality a little too far.
"Ach, second nature these days, Prent," he said, folding the papers and standing up. He looked depressingly fresh and well-scrubbed; joining the police force seemed to have done wonders for his skin condition. He lifted his cap from the table top, turning to my mother. "Right. That's all for now, Mrs McHoan. I'll be getting back, but if you think of anything else, just tell one of the other officers. We'll be in touch if we hear anything. You all right now, Mrs McHoan?"
"Fine, thanks, Davey," mum smiled. Dressed in jeans and a thick jumper, she looked a little dark around the eyes, but otherwise okay.
"Right you are, then. You look after that heid of yours, okay, Prentice?"
"As though it were my own," I breathed, adjusting my towel.
Mum saw him out.
The CID were still in the study, looking for fingerprints. They'd be lucky. I looked out of the dining-room window to where a couple of policemen were searching the bushes near the kitchen door.
My, we were being well looked after. I doubted a roughly equivalent fracas in one of the poorer council estates would have attracted quite such diligent and comprehensive investigation. But maybe that was just me being cynical.
My head hurt, my feet hurt, my fingers hurt. All the extremities. Well, save one, thankfully. Most of the damage came from the central light fixture in the study ceiling. It was part of that — a large, heavy, brass part of it — which had hit me on the head, and it was the shattered glass of its shades which had cut my feet as I'd stumbled around the study. My fingers hurt from the impact of computer keyboard and steel tyre-iron.
The desk drawers had been levered open. The back of the desk's matching chair had taken the full force of a blow with the tyre-iron, the light fixture had been hit accidentally by the same implement and the ceiling rose damaged, the Compaq's keyboard was wrecked and the kitchen door needed a new lock. I felt I could use a new head.
Nothing had been stolen, though I'd noticed that all the papers I'd been looking at earlier that night — and which I'd left scattered round the couch — had been neatly gathered together and piled on one end of the desk, under a paperweight. The envelope I'd left in the desk's top right drawer that morning was still here. The police didn't open it. Apart from the damage, and that one contrary act of tidiness, it looked like our attacker had taken nothing, and left behind him only the petrol and the tyre-iron.
I wanted to phone Fergus; ask him how he was. Good night's sleep? Any aches and pains? But mum had been fussing over me after Doctor Fyfe had said I'd need watching for a day or two and I wasn't being allowed to do very much. Somehow I lacked the will, anyway.
They'd asked me if I had any idea who it might have been, and I'd said No. I didn't say anything to my mother, or anybody else, either.
What could I say?
I was certain it had been Fergus — his build had been right, and even though I'd been dazed, I swear he did hesitate when I spoke his name — but how was I supposed to convince anybody else? I shook my head, then grimaced, because it hurt. I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid, not even thinking that he might try and steal or destroy whatever evidence he thought I had. "Is this something you've read?" I whispered to myself, remembering what Fergus had asked me. "In your father's papers, after his death?"
Jeez. I felt myself blush at my naïvety.
Mum continued to fuss, but I got better through the day.
After the CID boys finished in the study, I photocopied all Rory's papers — though I had to drag a chair over to the photocopier and sit down to do it — then, before the police left, and after much pleading, got mum to drive into Gallanach and deposit the parcelled originals in the bank. She came back with a new lock for the kitchen door. I hadn't been able to persuade her that a little holiday — in Glasgow, maybe — would be a good idea, so while she was away I rang Dean Watt and asked if he and Tank Thomas fancied coming to stay at Lochgair for a few days. Tank was a quiet and normally docile friend of the Watts', two metres tall and one across; I'd once seen him carry a couple of railway sleepers, one over each shoulder, without even breaking sweat.
James — who'd earlier been appalled that he'd only missed the first two periods of school while the police interviewed him — arrived back at four, glowing with glory. Apparently his part in the night's events — which I'd thought consisted largely of sticking his head round his bedroom door and being told to get back in again (and doing as he was told, for once) — had gained something in the translation at school; I suspected the gains involved the single-handed beating-off an attack by an entire gang of ninja assassins while mum and I slept.
I told mum about Dean and Tank, but she wasn't having it, and rang Dean up to cancel the protection I'd arranged. The police had promised to keep an eye on the house over the next few nights, after all; a patrol car would check up the drive. This didn't sound like much good to me, but mum seemed reassured.
Old Mr Docherty, a leathery-faced octogenarian with wispy white hair who was one of our neighbours in the village, arrived at tea-time and offered to come over with his shotgun and sit up all night. "Ah've nuthin tae steal maself, Mrs McHoan, and Ah'd rather make sure you and the bairns were all right. Canny have this sort aw thing going on in Lochgair, ye know. Be Glasgow people, Ah tell ye. Be Glasgow boys."
Mum thanked him, but refused. He seemed happy when we asked him to help us fit the new lock on the kitchen door. Lewis was all set to come up from London when we told him what had happened, but mum persuaded him we were fine, really.
Fretting for something else to do, I rang up Mrs McSpadden at the castle and related all that had happened, and twice told her how I suspected the raider had been after Rory's papers, which I'd copied and deposited in the bank. "In the bank, Prentice," she repeated, and I could hear her voice echoing. "Good idea."
I asked after Fergus and Mrs McSpadden said he was fine. He and his friends had been out fishing that day.
To my own amazement, I slept soundly that night. James said lights came up to the drive twice. I had to go and see Doctor Fyfe that day, and mum insisted on driving me into Gallanach, despite the fact I felt fine. Doctor Fyfe gave me permission to go back to Glasgow that evening, providing I took the train and stayed with friends.
I stayed the extra night instead, and left by car in the early hours, taking Rory's diaries and the copies of his papers with me. I phoned Mrs McSpadden from Glasgow and told her that, too, and discovered that Fergus had gone to Edinburgh for a couple of days. On impulse, I told her I'd remembered something more from the attack, and I'd be going to the police in a day or two, once I'd checked on something.
Back at university, I attended lectures — hobbling a little on my cut feet — and I studied, though I had headaches on the Monday and the Tuesday night. I made sure Mrs Ippot's house was securely locked each night, and closed all the shutters. I rang mum three or four times each day. Mum said Fergus had sent a huge bouquet of flowers to the house, when he'd heard what had happened. He'd phoned from Edinburgh and advised getting an alarm system fitted, and knew a firm in Glasgow who'd do it cost price, as a favour to him. Wasn't that sweet of him? Oh, and I hadn't forgotten she and Fergus would be coming to Glasgow for the opera at the end of the week, had I?
I said of course not.
I put the phone down, numb, my thoughts racing in a kind of aimless short-circuit as I wondered what on earth I was going to do.
And, naturally, I followed the war like a good little media-consumer.
The clichés were starting to come out. It was hardly possible to open a newspaper, turn on a television or listen to a radio programme without having rammed down the relevant orifice some witless variation on the facile adage concerning truth being the first casualty of war; a truism that is arguably a neat piece of propaganda itself, implying as it does that the majority of the military, politicians and media have any interest in, respect for or experience with disseminating the truth even in times of profoundest peace.
I started inventing reasons for not putting mum and Fergus up on the Friday. I would be ill. I would have a bad cold. I would discover that the tenancy agreement specified I couldn't have anybody else to stay over-night at the Ippot house. The electricity had been cut off due to a computer error. A gas leak. Serious structural deficiencies caused by the weight of mirrors and chandeliers. Anything.
I stopped watching the war at Tuesday lunch-time because if I'd carried on the way I had been, the history we were living through was going to stop me getting my degree for the history that had been and gone.
Ash rang on the Tuesday evening. I told her everything that had happened, at the castle and Lochgair. She didn't seem to know what to make of it all; she said maybe I ought to go to the police. She sounded low, and said things weren't too good at work, though she wouldn't be more specific.
Meanwhile, the sound of her voice was pulling me apart; it filled me with elation at the same time as it plunged me into despair. I wanted to shout Look, woman, I think I'm falling in love with you! I am! I do! I love you! Honest! I'm sure! Well, almost certain!… but you couldn't; I couldn't. It wasn't the sort of equivocal thing to shout at any time, and even if I had been completely sure how I felt, I probably couldn't have told her, not just then. I got the impression it wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to hear anyway. She sounded like she just wanted to keep her head down for the moment; keep things quiet, uncomplicated; just cool out. Recently banged-on-the-head nutters raving down the phone at her suddenly declaring undying passionate love for no apparent reason was probably the last thing she needed. I was sure about that. Well, fairly certain.
So it was a desultory kind of phone call. I felt pretty depressed myself at the end of it. I didn't ask her about her love-life.
I put the phone down feeling the same way I had a year earlier, the day I'd been travelling from Gallanach to Glasgow after Hogmanay, and I'd pretended to be asleep when the train stopped at Lochgair. Remembering that cowardice and that shame, I almost picked the phone up again to call Ash back, and my hand reached out a couple of times, and I debated with myself, muttering, my face contorting with silly expressions, and I told myself I was acting like a madman, and I really wanted to make that call and I really ought to, but I was terrified to do it as well, even though I knew that I should… shouldn't I? Yes; yes I should; yes I definitely ought to, it was obvious, clear definite. I should.
But in the end I didn't.
At least there was always work to be done. I'd submerged myself in my studies with a feeling of almost orgasmic relief. The very fact the past can be taken or left made me want to accept it; the sheer demanding immediacy of the present made it repulsive.
And so everything returned to a sort of normality, which didn't last, of course.
On Wednesday, the 23rd of January 1991, shortly after noon, Fergus Walter Cruden Urvill left Gaineamh Castle in his Range Rover and travelled north through the town of Gallanach and the village of Kilmartin, passing Carnasserie Castle and the cairn and standing stone at Kintraw, crossed the thin flood plain of the Barbreck River above Loch Craignish, travelled inland again to rejoin the shore at the cut-off for the Craobh Haven marina development, and then curved past the village of Arduaine, skirting Loch Melfort before passing through Kilmelford and entering the forest that led to Glen Gallain and then down to the shore of Loch Feochan and the twisting road heading for Oban. The Range Rover passed through the town a little before one o'clock and continued north to Connel, waited for the traffic lights to change at the old bridge over the Falls of Lora, then crossed, negotiated some roadworks and finally turned left off the road a little further on, entering the thin strip of level coastal ground that was the Connel airstrip.
Fergus Urvill parked the Range Rover in the airfield car park. He talked to one Michael Kerr, from the village of Benderloch a couple of kilometres up the road from the field. Kerr was repairing the car-park fence; Mr Urvill said he wanted to use the telephone in the Portakabin that served as the airfield office. Michael Kerr said that Mr Urvill seemed in a good mood, and told him that he would be flying out to one of the Outer Herbrides ('the Utter He-Brides," were his exact words), where an old school friend lived. He was going to surprise this friend and take him a bottle of whisky for a belated Hogmanay. He showed Michael Kerr the bottle of Bowmore whisky he was taking with him, in a small leather suitcase which also contained some clothes and toiletries. The only thing Kerr noticed that was out of the ordinary was that Mr Urvill grimaced a couple of times, and flexed his shoulders oddly. Kerr asked the older man if he was all right, and Fergus said yes, but it felt like a couple of ribs were acting up a little. An old injury; nothing to worry about.
Mrs Eliza McSpadden, the housekeeper at the castle, had confirmed that Mr Urvill had complained of chest pains the night before, and had taken some Paracetamol painkillers. He had taken a box of the tablets with him that morning, when he drove to Connel. He had said he would be away for a couple of days, and — apparently on impulse as he was about to get into the car — asked Mrs McSpadden to prepare some of her Cullen Skink soup for his lunch on the Friday. He wouldn't need more as he would be dining with Mrs Mary McHoan in Glasgow that evening, before the opera. The Colonial restaurant in Glasgow later confirmed that they had a booking for two for the Friday evening in Mr Urvill's name.
When Mr Urvill came back out of the airfield office, it was about one-thirty. Michael Kerr helped him check the Cessna aircraft. The plane taxied to the end of the runway, faced into a wind and then took off into a five-knot south-westerly breeze, in good visibility under a five-thousand-foot cloud-base of light overcast. The forecast said the breeze would freshen and veer to the south east that evening, and the following few days would be bright and clear with a steady southerly wind of force three or four.
The Cessna was spotted by the British Army radar base on the island of St Kilda flying into an area that was restricted for missile testing. The light aircraft was flying at an altitude of two thousand feet on a bearing of 320°, which would take it towards Iceland. There was no radio response from the plane, and an RAF Nimrod, on patrol over the North Atlantic, was diverted to intercept.
The Nimrod rendezvoused with the light aircraft at 1516 GMT. It decreased speed and flew almost alongside, a little above and ahead of the Cessna for twenty-five minutes, attempting to make radio and visual contact. The Nimrod crew reported that the single occupant of the plane seemed to be unconscious, slumped back in his seat.
At 1541 GMT the Cessna's engine started to cut out and the plane — presumably out of fuel — began to lose altitude. The engine stopped altogether less than a minute later. The plane pitched forward, causing the pilot's body to slump over the controls, whereupon the aircraft went into a steep dive and started to spin. It fell into the sea, impacting at 1543.
The Nimrod circled, dropping a life raft and reporting the position of the wreck to nearby shipping. The plane sank twenty minutes later, as the sun was setting. There was little visible wreckage. An East German trawler picked up the Nimrod's liferaft during the following morning.
The crew of the Nimrod reported that at no time had the figure on board the light aircraft shown any sign of consciousness.
"Hello?"
"Prentice?"
"Speaking. Is —?
"It's Ashley. I just heard about Fergus."
"Ashley! Ah… Yeah. I heard this afternoon. I was going to call; I don't have your work number."
"Well?"
"Well, what?"
"Do you know any more than what's been on the news?"
"Well, mum went up to the castle to see if Mrs McSpadden needed a hand, and she said she seemed kind of shell-shocked; kept talking about soup."
"Soup?"
"Soup. Cullen Skink, specifically."
"Oh."
"Yeah, well, apparently Fergus seemed in good spirits, but he'd had some chest pains, the night before. Anyway, he drove up to Connel to fly out to the Hebrides to see some chum of his out there, and next thing we know he's dive-bombing the Atlantic and forgetting to pull up. Unconscious, apparently."
"Hmm… so what do you think?"
"Well, I don't know. Mum said she asked Mrs McSpadden who he was going to see, and she said she didn't know who it could have been. The police had already asked her that, apparently; they said they would make enquiries."
"Right. You think it was a heart attack?"
"I don't know. Umm…
"What?"
"Well, apparently Mrs McSpadden said Fergus had a phone call the night before. She took it initially, then handed the phone to him."
"Yeah? And?"
"Whoever it was, they were Scottish, but it was an international phone call; a satellite call. Mrs McSpadden thought she recognised the voice but she wasn't sure."
"Hmm. Recognised the voice."
"Yeah. Did… I mean, did she know Lachy?"
"Yes. Yes, she did. They both worked behind the bar in the Jac, about… twenty years ago, maybe."
"Ah-ha."
"Ah-ha indeed."
I took a deep breath. "Look, Ash, I've been mean — " I heard a noise in the background.
"Shit, that's the door. What?"
The breath sighed out of me. "Ah… nothing. Take care, Ash."
"Yeah, you too, bye."
I put the phone down, put my head back, looked up at the plaster stalagtites that formed the ceiling frieze in the study of the Ippot house, and howled like a dog.
The Strathclyde Police received a telephone tip-off at their headquarters in Glasgow that a drug ring was using Loch Coille Bharr — just south of the Argyllshire village of Crinan — as a hiding place for cocaine, at 1325 on January the 23rd. The tip-off was quite specific, talking of weighted, water-tight plastic cylinders towed behind yachts coming from the Continent and transferred to the loch to await pick-up by dealers from Glasgow. The loch was cordoned off that day and police divers started searching the south end of the loch the following morning, while policemen in small boats used grappling hooks to drag the rest.
No drug-packed cylinders were ever found, but on the second day one of the boats snagged something heavy. A diver went down to free the line from what was expected to be a water-logged tree.
He surfaced to report that the line had hooked onto the rear wheel of a motor-bike which had, tied to it, the remains of a body.
The bike and the body were brought to the surface that evening. The corpse had decomposed and been eaten by fish, to the point of being a skeleton held together more by the clothes it still wore than by the few pieces of connective tissue left. The clothes suggested the deceased had been a male, but the police weren't sure of the skeleton's sex until the body was examined in Glasgow the following day.
What they did know was that the bike — a Suzuki 185 GT registered in 1977 — had been reported stolen by its owner in Glasgow in 1981, after it had been loaned to a friend and never returned. Probably that alone would have led to the police coming to Lochgair to see us, but one of the local policemen with a long memory had already put two and two together when he'd heard the make and model of the bike.
The corpse carried no identifying papers, but dental records matched. We knew then it was Rory.
The skeleton had been found wearing a crash-helmet, but it must have been put back on after Rory had been murdered; according to the pathologist's report, he'd been killed by a series of blows to the back of the head with a smooth, hard, spherical or nearly spherical object, approximately nine centimetres in diameter. He was probably unconscious after the first blow.
And so, after the coroner had released the remains following the inquest in late February, Uncle Rory's bones came back to Lochgair at last, and were laid to rest at the back of the garden, under the larches, between the rhododendrons and the wild roses, at the side of his brother. The stone-mason added Rory's name and dates to the black granite obelisk, and we held a small ceremony just for the immediate family and Janice Rae. It fell to me to read out the words Rory had, apparently, intended to close Crow Road with, by way of a funeral oration.
The passage came from Rory's nameless play, and began: "And all your nonsenses and truths…»
Janice cried.
I remarked to Lewis that the way things were going in our family it might work out cheaper in the long run if we bought our own hearse.
I do believe he was shocked. Or maybe he just wished he'd said it.
Technically the case remained open and Rory's murderer was still being sought, but beyond briefly interviewing mum, Janice and Rory's old flat-mate Andy Nichol, the police took no further action. I never did find out just how good at adding-up that policeman was.
The firm Ashley Watt was working for in London went into receivership in the last week of January. She was made redundant, but remained in the city looking for another job.
The war ended, in a famous victory. Only their young men died like cattle, and there was even talk of the US making a modest profit on the operation.
Verity's baby was born — bang on time — on March the 2nd, in London, in a warm birthing pool in a big hospital. The boy was registered as Kenneth Walker McHoan; he weighed three and a half kilos and looked like his father.
Lewis, Verity and young Kenneth travelled up to Lochgair two weeks later.
The lawyer Blawke read Fergus Urvill's will in Gaineamh Castle on the 8th of March. I had been asked to be present, and travelled down by train — the Golf was in for a service — with feelings of bitterness and dread.
Helen and Diana, solemnly beautiful in black, both looking tanned — Helen from Switzerland, Diana from Hawaii — sat together in the tall-ceilinged Solar and heard that they were to inherit the estate, with the exception of various pieces of glass held in the castle, which — as the twins had already known — were to be donated to the Glass Museum attached to the factory. Mrs McSpadden — sitting hunched and crying with what was, in retrospect, a quite baffling quietness — received the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds, and the right either to live on in the castle, or receive a similar amount if the property was sold or if she was asked to vacate her apartments by the twins or their heirs. Fergus had asked to be buried in the old castle garden, but as they never did recover the body a monument was decided on instead. A memorial service would he held in Gallanach at a later date.
The Range Rover was part of the estate, but the Bentley Eight had been willed to my father. Fergus had changed his will after dad's death — following promptings by the good lawyer Blawke — and so the car and its contents passed to me instead, which came as something of a surprise.
There were various other bits and pieces — bequests to charities and so on — but that was the gist of it.
The lawyer Blawke handed me the keys to the Bentley after the reading, while we were standing around awkwardly drinking small sherries dispensed by a quietly tearful Mrs McSpadden and I was still in a slight daze, thinking, What? Why? Why did he give me the car?
I talked to the twins. Helen just wanted to get away, but Diana had decided to stay on for a while; I agreed to come and help her pack stuff away in a few days time. Fergus's personal effects were going to be stored in the cellar, and of course the glass had to be packed up to be taken to the museum. The twins said they still hadn't decided what to do with the castle long-term, and I got the impression it depended on what Mrs McSpadden chose to do.
I said my good-byes as soon as I decently could. I had intended to take mum's Metro straight back to Lochgair; I'd told Helen and Diana that I'd probably come back that afternoon with mum, to take the Bentley away. But for some reason, when I got out of the castle doors, I didn't go crunching over the gravel to the little hatchback but turned and went back into the Solar and asked if I could take the Bentley to Lochgair instead, and come back for the Metro later.
Diana told me the garage was open, so I walked round to the rear of the castle where the garage and outhouses were. The Bentley sat inside the opened double garage, burgundy bodywork gleaming like frozen wine. I opened the car, wondering why the will had mentioned the contents of the Eight as well as the vehicle itself.
I got in and sat in that high armchair of a driver's seat, smiling at the walnut and the chrome and breathing in the smell of Connelly hide. The car looked showroom-clean; un-lived in. Nothing in the door pockets, on the back seats or the rear shelf; not even maps. I hesitated before opening the glove box. I was just paranoid enough to think maybe there was a bomb wired to that or the ignition, but, well, that didn't seem very Fergus-like, despite it all. So I opened the glove box.
It contained the car's manual — I'd never seen one bound in leather before — the registration documents, and a cardboard presentation box I recognised as coming from the factory gift shop.
I took it out and opened it. There was a paperweight inside, which was what the box was meant to contain, but the big lump of multi-coloured glass was a little too large for the cardboard insert that went with the box. When I looked at the base it was an old limited edition Perthshire weight, not a Gallanach Glass Works product at all.
I left the paperweight lying on the seat and got out, checked the car's boot — carefully, thinking of the end of Charley Varrick — but that was in concourse condition too.
I went back to the driver's seat and sat there for a while, holding the paperweight and gazing into its convexly complicated depths, wondering why Fergus had left this lump of glass — not even from his own factory — in the car.
Then I weighed the glassy mass in my hand, and clutched it as you might a weapon, and took another, evaluating look at it, and realised. It was spherical, or nearly spherical, and probably pretty well exactly nine centimetres in diameter.
I almost dropped it.
I shivered, and put the paperweight back in the presentation case, put that in the glove-box, and — after the car did not blow up when I turned the ignition — drove its quietly ponderous bulk back to Lochgair.
Fergus's memorial service was held a week later, at the Church of Scotland, on Shore Street in Gallanach, mid-Argyll. Kind of a traumatic location for the McHoans, and I wouldn't have gone myself — it would have felt too much like either hypocrisy or gloating — but mum wanted to attend, and I could hardly not offer to escort her.
We put some flowers on the McDobbies" grave, where dad had died, then went in to the church, each kissing the sombrely beautiful twins.
I stood listening to the pious words, the ill-sung hymns and the plodding reminiscences of the good lawyer Blawke — who must be becoming Gallanach's most sought-after after-death speaker — and felt a furious anger build up in me.
It was all I could do to stand there, moving my mouth when people sang, and looking down at my feet when they prayed, and not shout out some profanity, some blasphemy, or, even worse, the truth. I actually gathered the breath in my lungs at one point, hardly able to bear the pressure of fury inside me any longer. I tensed my belly for the shout: Killer! Fucking MURDERER!
I felt dizzy. I could almost hear the echoes of my scream reflecting back off the high walls and arched ceiling of the church… but the singing went on undisturbed. I relaxed after that, and looked around at the trappings of religion and the gathered suits and worthies of Gallanach and beyond, and — if I felt anything — felt only sorrow for us all.
I looked up towards the tower. All the gods are false, I thought to myself, and smiled without pleasure.
I talked to a red-eyed Mrs McSpadden after the service, walking down through the gravestones towards the road and sea, under a sky of scudding cloud; the wind tasted of salt. "Aye," Mrs McSpadden said, in what was for her almost a whisper. "You never think it's going to happen, do you? We all have our little aches and pains, but when I think about it, if I'd just said something when he mentioned a sore chest that night to go to the doctor…»
"Everybody hurts, Mrs McSpadden," I said. "And he had broken those ribs, in the crash. Anybody would have assumed it was just those."
"Aye, maybe."
I hesitated. "Mum said he'd had a phone call from abroad, the night before?"
"Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, he did. I thought I… Well, yes."
"You don't know who it was?"
"No," she said slowly, though I saw her frown.
"It's just that a friend of mine from university who's abroad at the moment had been going to call Fergus, to ask permission to visit the factory — he's writing a dissertation on the history of glass making — and I haven't heard from him for a while; I wondered if it might have been him, that's all." (All lies of course, but I'd tried to ring Lachy Watt in Sydney and found that the phone had been disconnected. Ashley's mum didn't know where he was now, and I did still want to know what had finally driven Fergus to do what he had.)
"Oh, I don't know," Mrs McSpadden said, shaking her large, florid head. A big black bead of glass glittered at the end of her hatpin; a stray strand of white hair blew in the gusting wind.
"You didn't hear anything that was said," I prompted.
"Och, just something about putting somebody up. I was on my way out the door."
"Putting somebody up?"
"Aye. He said he hadn't put anybody up, and that was all I heard. I suppose he must have been talking about people who'd stayed at the castle, or hadn't stayed; whatever."
"Yes," I said, nodding thoughtfully. "I suppose so." I shrugged. "Ah well. Perhaps it wasn't who I was thinking of after all."
Or maybe it was. Maybe if Mrs McS had heard one more word before she'd closed that door, it would have been the word "to'.
"Come to think of it," Mrs McSpadden said, "I'd just been talking about you, Prentice, when the phone went."
"Had you?"
"Aye; just mentioning to Mr Urvill what you'd said about remembering more details of when your house was burgled."
"Really?" I nodded, putting my gloved hands behind my back and smiling faintly at the grey and restless sea beyond the low church wall.
"Canada?" I said, aghast.
"I've got an uncle there. He knows somebody working in a firm installing a system I know a bit about; they swung the work permit."
"My God, when do you go?"
"Next Monday."
"Next Monday?"
"I'll be going up to Gallanach tomorrow, to say goodbye to mum."
"Flying?"
"Driving. Leaving the car there. Dean can use it."
"Jesus. How long are you going to Canada for?"
"I don't know. We'll see. Maybe I'll like it."
"You mean you might stay?"
"I don't know, Prentice. I'm not making any plans beyond getting there and seeing what the job's like and what the people are like."
"Shee-it. Well, can I see you? I mean; I'd like to say goodbye."
"Well, you going to Gallanach this weekend?"
"Umm… Would you, believe that this weekend I was intending to drive a Bentley to Ullapool, get a ferry to the island of Lewis, drive to the most north-westerly point on the island I could find and throw a paperweight into the sea? But…»
"Well, don't let me stop you. I've got plenty of family to see, goodness knows."
"But —»
"But I'm flying out from Glasgow on the Monday morning. You can put me up in this palace you're living in, if you like."
"Sunday? Yeah. Let me think; can't get a ferry on a Sunday, but I can get to Ullapool on Friday, travel over; back Saturday. Yeah. Sunday's fine. What time do you think you'll get here?"
"Six all right?"
"Six is perfect. My turn to take you for a curry."
"No it isn't, but I accept anyway. I promise not to throw brandy all over you."
"Okay. I promise not to act like an asshole."
"You have to act?"
"Gosh, you know how to hurt a chap."
"Years of practice. See you Sunday, Prentice."
"Yeah. Then. Drive carefully."
"You too. Bye."
I put the phone down, looked up at the ceiling, and didn't know whether to whoop with joy because I was going to see her, or scream in despair because she was going to Canada. Caught between these two extremes, I experienced an odd calmness, and settled for a low moan.
I was starting to think that maybe the Bentley wasn't really me. People gave me funny looks when I drove it, and I had already been stopped by some traffic cops on Great Western Road the day I drove the beast back from Lochgair to Glasgow. Is this your car, sir? they'd asked.
With hindsight, perhaps saying, Gosh, I thought you only did this to black people! wasn't the most politic reply to have made, but they only kept me waiting for an hour while they checked up on me and scrutinised the car. I spent the time sitting in the back of the police car thinking of all the worthy causes I could give the proceeds of the Bentley's sale to (I certainly wasn't going to keep Fergus's blood-money). The African National Congress and the League Against Cruel Sports were two names that suggested themselves as fit to spin Ferg's remains up to near turbo-charger speeds in his watery grave. Thankfully the Bentley's tyres were nearly new and the lights, like everything else, were all in perfect working order, so the boys in blue had to let me go.
Anyway, it felt right that it was the monstrous burgundy-coloured Eight I took to the Hebrides rather than the Golf.
I started out on Friday morning and took the A82 to Iverness, then crossed to the west coast and Ullapool. The drive confirmed that the Bentley would have to go. It hadn't been as unwieldly as I'd imagined it might be, but I just felt embarrassed in the thing. There hadn't been anything in Fergus's will to say I couldn't do what I wanted with the car, so what the hell, I'd sell it.
I caught the afternoon ferry to Stornoway. I stayed in the Royal Hotel that night, read history books about ancient wars and long-gone empires, and dipped into our currently interesting times via the television. I stationed the paperweight on the bedside table, as though to guard me through the night.
At ten o'clock the next morning I stood in a strong wind and light drizzle, wrapped in my dad's old coat, near the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis — trying to think of a good joke about that to tell my brother — and wishing I'd brought a brolly. I hadn't been able to decide whether this really was the most north-westerly point of the island — there was a place with the appropriate name of Gallan Head that might have done as well — but in the end I thought maybe it didn't really matter that much, and anyway this headland was easier to get to.
There were some cliffs, not especially high. I had the paperweight in my pocket, and I took it out, feeling suddenly self-conscious and foolish even though there was nobody else around. The wind tugged at the coat and threw light, soaking spray into my eyes. The sea was tarnished rolling silver and seemed to go on forever into the light grey watery expanse of spray and air and cloud.
I hefted the glass ball, then threw it with all my might out to sea. I don't think it would have mattered especially to me if it had hit the rocks and shattered, but it didn't; it just disappeared into the greyness, heading towards the piling, restless waves. I think I saw it splash, but I'm not sure.
I had been thinking about saying something, when I threw the paperweight into the sea; "You forgot something," had been the line I'd been toying with on the drive up, through the peat-smoke smell. But it seemed trite; in the end I didn't say anything.
Instead I stood there for a while, getting wet and cold, and looking out at the waves and thinking of that wreckage, lying out there on the floor of the Atlantic, a few hundred kilometres to the northwest, far beneath the surface of that grey receiving sea.
Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body — whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure — was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere?
I found that I couldn't believe that it was. Neither was dad's, neither was Rory's, nor Aunt Fiona's, nor Darren Watt's. There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn't. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
The belief that we somehow moved on to something else — whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed — might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts — wherever and by whoever expressed — not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.
The waves surged against the cliffs, thudding into the rock and being reflecting. The shapes of their energy charged back into that wild, disturbed water, obliterated and conserved at once.
It seemed to me then that it was this simple; individual life has no momentum, and — just as dad had said — the world is neither fair nor unfair. Those words are our inventions, and apply only to the results of thought. To die as Darren had, and as my father had, and perhaps as Rory had, with what might have been great things still to do, and much to give and to receive, was to make our human grief the greater, but could not form part of any argument. They were here, and then they weren't, and that was all there was. My father had had the right of it, when I'd been so upset at Darren Watt's death; it had been a sort of petulance I had felt towards the world, an anger as well as a sadness that Darren had died so soon (and so uglily, so sordidly; a litter bin, for fuck's sake). How dare the world not behave as I expected it to? How dare it just rub out one of my friends? It wasn't fair! And, of course, indeed it was not fair. But that was beside the point.
Well, the old man had been right and I had been wrong, and I just hoped that he'd known somehow that I would come to my senses eventually.
But if he had gone to his grave — via the McDobbie's — thinking that his middle son was a credulous fool, and likely to stay that way, well, that hurt me; hurt me more than I could say, but there was no fixing that now. It was over.
I turned and left and caught the ferry back to Ullapool from Stornoway that afternoon, drinking cups of styrofoam coffee and eating greasy pies while I stood out on deck watching the beating waves.
We'd seen dolphins following the ship once, coming back this way past the Summer Isles after a holiday, one day many years ago; mum and dad and Lewis and James and me.
But that was then.
I was back in Glasgow six hours later. I slept well.
And so we went back to the Anarkali restaurant on that Sunday night, Ashley Watt and I, and we had a meal that was almost identical to the one we'd had before, on the summer night when dad had died, except we got along just fine this time, and Ashley didn't throw any brandy over me, and I didn't act like a complete asshole, and as I sat there, talking about all the old times and about the future, again I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, because it was so good to see her, but she was going away tomorrow, flying off across that wide grey ocean I'd stood looking at just the day before, flying away to Canada and maybe going to stay there, and I didn't know whether to ask about any men in her life or not — even though I knew from Dean that the guy she'd gone off with at Hogmanay had only been a one-night thing — and I still didn't feel I could tell her how I felt about her because she was going to go away now, and how could I suddenly say I love you when I'd never said it to anybody in my life before? How could I say it now especially, the night before she was due to leave? It would look like I was trying to make her stay, or just get her into bed. It would probably wreck this one precious evening that we did have, and upset her, confuse her, even hurt her, and I didn't want to do any of that. And through it all I knew there must have been a moment when I could have told her, some time in the past, some time over the last few months, when it would have been the right time and the right place, and it would have felt like the most natural thing in the world to say and do, but somehow, in the heat of things, just during the complexity of events — and thanks to my own stupidity, my hesitation, my indecision; my negligence — I'd missed it, and that, too, was gone from me; over.
So I just sat there, across from her, looking into her soft-skinned face all glowing in the candle-light, that long, thin nose rising straight above her small, smiling red mouth as if together they made an exclamation mark, and I felt lost in the grey sparkle of those eyes.
We walked out into the cool March night. It was fair but it had been wet and the pavements shone. Ashley stood on the steps as I put on the old tweed coat that had been my dad's. She wore a black dress and the old naval jacket with the turned-over cuffs I remembered from Grandma Margot's funeral. She leant against some railings, watching me button my coat up, and with her left foot she clicked her toe and heel as if in accompaniment to some song I couldn't hear.
I looked down at her tapping black shoe as I adjusted my collar.
"Morse code?"
She shook her head, long fawn hair spilling over her dark shoulders.
We went arm in arm down the steps. "What was that film that had a dancer tapping out insults at somebody?" I said.
"Dunno," Ash said, click-clicking her feet as we walked.
"Was it Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid?" I scratched my head. I wasn't wearing gloves and I could feel Ashley's warmth through her jacket. She smelled of Samsara, which was a departure for her, I thought.
"Maybe," she said, and then she laughed.
"What?"
"I was just remembering," she said, squeezing my waist. "Mrs Phimister's class. Remember? The French teacher? We were in the same class."
"Oh yeah," I said. We turned onto Woodlands Road.
"You hated her because she'd confiscated a radio or something, and you used to tap out insults in morse code." Ash laughed loud.
"God, yeah," I said. "That's right."
"'Fuck off you old cow', was the witticism I recall best," Ash said, still snorting with laughter.
"Jeez," I said, pulling away from her a little to look into her eyes. "You mean you could decipher it?"
"Yeah," Ash said, with a sort of friendly scorn. "You rotter!" I laughed. "You absolute cad-ess. You cad-ette; I thought that was my secret. I only told people later, after I'd left school, and then nobody believed me."
"Yeah," Ash said, grinning at me. "I knew. A couple of times I almost got detention because I was giggling so much. Nearly wet my knickers trying not to laugh. Got some very stern looks from Mrs Phimister." She laughed again, throwing her head back.
"I didn't even know you knew morse code," I said. "I learned it in the scouts. Where did you learn it?"
"My grandad taught me," Ash said, nodding. "We used to sit and pass messages at meal times by clinking our cutlery off the plates. Mum and dad and the others always wondered what we found so hilarious about yet another helping of shepherd's pie and chips."
"And you never said!" I shook my head. "You rascal!"
She shrugged, looked down at her black, medium-high heels as she did a little tap-dance. "You didn't like me; what was the point?"
"I didn't like any girls," I told her. "In fact I wasn't that keen on any of the boys either. Come to think of it, I felt mostly contempt even for my friends."
"Yeah," Ash said, leaning over towards me so that her grinning face was almost on my chest. "But you didn't break their noses with a boulder disguised as a snowball, did you?"
I stopped in my tracks.
Ash gave a little squeal as she staggered, suddenly losing support on one side. She steadied and turned. She faced me, looking puzzled, from a metre or so away. I just stood there open-mouthed.
"You knew that was me?"
"Course I did." She frowned and smiled at the same time.
"Another secret gone!" I exclaimed, waving my arms. "I've felt guilty about that for years!"
Ash tipped her head to one side.
"Well, not all the time," I said. "I mean, on and off."
She raised one eyebrow.
"Okay," I said, slumping a little. "Mostly off. But I did feel bad about it. I really did. I always felt bad about that."
Ashley shook her head gently and came forward, took my arm and led me along the street. "Never mind," she said. "I never told anybody. And I forgave you."
"Really?" I said, putting my arm round her again, "When?"
"At the time. Well, after it stopped hurting, anyway." We turned the corner into Woodlands Gate. I shook my head. "Why didn't you ever say you knew it had been me?" I asked her.
She shrugged. "The subject never really arose before."
I shook my head again. "Good grief," I said. "All this time. Good grief."
Ashley had been ravenous when she'd arrived at the house in Park Terrace a little after seven that Sunday evening, so she'd just dumped her bags and we'd gone straight out to the restaurant. When we got back after the meal, I showed her round the place. We opened a bottle of Graves I had in the kitchen — after first agreeing that of course we shouldn't — and then walked from room to room while I did my guided tour bit and pointed out the more interesting or valuable works of art, while we sipped our wine and the statues gleamed and the chandeliers glittered and the paintings glowed and the carpets spread before us like gigantic blow-ups of oddly symmetrical printed circuits.
Ashley shook her head a lot. When she saw the main bedroom she laughed.
We went back to the kitchen. She demurred when I offered to top her glass up. "I should go to bed now," she said, pulling a hand through her hair. She put her glass down on an oak working surface. " Take some water in a big glass and get to me bed… " she said. "Do you mind?" She looked at me.
I shrugged. "No, of course not. There's glasses in the bathroom, beside your room." A terrible sadness settled on me then, and I had to swallow hard a couple of times. I drank, to hide it, then said, as matter-of-factly as I could, "What time do you want up tomorrow?"
"About seven should do."
"Right," I said, looking at my glass. "Right. Seven. I'll bring you tea and toast, all right?"
"Fine."
"Okay then," I said.
I looked up and she was smiling. She looked at her watch. "Well," she said, and flexed her brows. "Night-night."
She came forward, put one hand on my shoulder, kissed my cheek.
I put my hand on her hip, let my head nuzzle towards hers a little. She put her arm round my waist and I turned to her, hugged her, my lips at her neck, kissing delicately. She pushed her head against mine, and we started to turn to each other at the same moment, as she put her arms round me; the kiss just seemed natural after that.
It went on for some time. Ashley seemed to loosen and grow more tense at the same time; her mouth appeared to want to swallow mine, her hands grabbed my curls, nails scratching at my scalp. I pulled on her hair, kissed and licked her neck. She dug her nails into the small of my back through my shirt. We kissed again and I kneaded her backside, then pulled the dress up while she wriggled a little to make it easier, and I found skin, stockings, her knickers, and pushed my hands inside, gripping her smooth, warm bum. She pulled herself up against me.
This," she said, breaking off, breathing hard, while her hands stroked the nape of my neck and her gaze flicked from my mouth to my eyes and back again, "this might be better suited to that ridiculous bedroom, what do you think?"
I nodded. "Good idea."
"Bring the wine."
"Better yet."
It was something. On that monumentally ostentatious bed of the late Mrs Ippot's, Ashley and I made love like we'd done it for years and then been apart for years and just met up and hadn't forgotten a thing.
A couple of times, lying there panting afterwards while we trickled with sweat and licked at each other, or were stroking and caressing and thinking about starting all over again, she laughed.
"The room?" I said, first time.
"No," she said, shaking her gorgeous head, all tawny hair and flushed face. "It's just you and me; I never thought this was going to happen."
And, later, when she cried out, I heard the crystal bowl on the table by the side of the bed ring, pure and faint, as if in reply.
It was later still, when we'd put the lights out and had agreed just to cuddle, exhausted and drained, but had not been able to merely cuddle, and so had coupled once more, and I still lay on top of her, inside her, while she breathed and I breathed and our hearts gradually slowed down again, that I did what I'd done before in that situation, flexing whatever muscle it is in the male genitals or the associated support systems that briefly fills the slowly detumescing penis with blood again, sending a small pulse of socketed touch into Ashley's body. She gave a little exhalation half-way between a sigh and a laugh, and then squeezed back with her vaginal muscles, like a hand round me.
There was a pause, and I thought I felt her go very still for a second, and then she squeezed me again; two quick grippings in succession. There was a pause, and I responded, but she dug her fingers into the small of my back as though to stop me, and so I relaxed.
She squeezed again, four times, the second pulse longer than the other three. Another pause, during which I realised — it was morse! Then another four pulses, the second one short and the others long.
I.L.Y.
I had raised my head away from her shoulder while I concentrated on what she was doing in there; now I lowered my face to her skin again. I laughed, very lightly, and after a moment so did she, and then I sent the same signal back, with a single long pulse at the end: I.L.Y.T.
And I swear the sending made the signal all the truer.
And that falling was followed by two more shared fallings, as we fell apart, and then asleep.
I woke and she was dressed, standing by the bed, a beatific smile across her face, which was washed and glowing and framed by neatly combed hair. I struggled to get up on one elbow.
"Ash?"
She put one hand to the back of my head and kissed my lips. "I have to go," she said.
"What? But — you mean to Canada!"
"Prentice, I promised. I have to."
I felt my jaw drop. I rolled onto my back for a second, then sat bolt upright. "But last night!" I said, spreading my arms wide.
Ashley smiled even more broadly and climbed half onto the bed, one black-stockinged knee on the crumpled sheets. She kissed me. "Was wonderful," she said, "but I have to go."
"You can't!" I slapped myself on the forehead with one palm. "This can't be happening! It's a dream! Stay!" I reached out to her, held her face between my hands. "Ashley! Please! Stay!"
"I can't, Prentice. I said I'd go. I promised."
"I'm serious!" I said. "I don't —»
She put one soft hand gently to my mouth, shushing me, then kissed me long and tenderly. "I'm going, Prentice," she said, "but it doesn't have to be for ever."
"Well, how long?" I wailed.
She shrugged, stroked my shoulders with her hands. "You get this degree, okay? If you still want me then, well…»
"Promise?" I said, in what was meant to be a terminally sarcastic manner, but came out pathetically. She smiled. "I promise."
"Oh my God!" I said, looking at the clock by the crystal bowl. "I don't believe this!" Maybe, if I could just stall her…
"There's a taxi waiting," she told me. "It's all right." She smoothed some hair away from my eyes, her touch like silk. "But I was going to drive —»
"You rest," she said. "You probably had too much wine last night, anyway. The taxi really is waiting." She slipped her hand under the covers, held my penis as she kissed me, then slipped away as I fell forward, trying to embrace her, hold her, keep her.
"Ashley!" I said desperately. She was at the door.
"Yes?" she said.
"I didn't dream that… signal last night, did I?"
She laughed. "Nope. Meant every letter; every word. With all my heart." One brow flicked. "Amongst other organs." She tipped her head to one side, eyebrows raised. "And you?"
"The same," I gulped.
She looked down at the floor, then back at me, still smiling.
"Good. Well, we can take it from there, okay?"
"I'll write every day!" I told her. "Don't be ridiculous," she laughed, with one shake of her head. "Just pass those exams."
"They'll be over by mid-June," I said, more to keep her there in my sight for a few seconds longer that for any other reason.
"Then I'll be back in mid-June," she said.
She pulled her black gloves from her jacket pockets and put them on. "Bye, Prentice." She blew me a kiss.
"Bye," I gulped. She closed the door. I flopped back, stunned, staring at the glittering red chandelier.
I jumped out of bed as the front door banged closed; I tore downstairs bollock-naked and waved to her from one of the drawing room windows, which went from about human knee level to giraffe's head level.
She saw me; I could see her laughing. She pushed the window down and waved, and pointed to my groin and made a shocked expression as the cab started away. The driver saw me too and looked amused and shook his head. The cab drove off around the curbed terrace. I opened the window and leaned out, waving, and Ashley pushed the cab's window right down and stuck her head and arms out and blew me kisses through her wildly waving, slip-streamed hair all the way until the cab rounded the corner and disappeared.
I sat down on the parquet, staring at the white gauziness of the huge net curtains, all my muscles complaining, my head pounding, my penis tingling, my flesh goose-pimpling against the cool wood of the floor. I shook my head. I collapsed back, banging my already internally abused head on a Persian rug. The carpet's pile was luxuriously deep however, so it didn't hurt as much as it might.
I looked up at the ornately carved wooden ceiling, not entirely sure what to think. Then I started to laugh, lying there in the enormous room, naked, tummy wobbling, laughing like an idiot and hoping the resemblance ended there.
"Oh well," I said, laughing, to the ceiling. "Here's hoping."
"Good; you're getting sensible," mum said. She walked carefully towards me, the big blue sheet folding and drooping between us. She took the sheet's other two corners from me.
"Getting?" I said indignantly.
Mum smiled, folded the sheet over twice more and put it on top of the tumble drier. I pulled another sheet down off the old clothes pulley that hung under the ceiling of the utility room. We took an end each, stood apart, pulled the sheet taut.
"Mm-hmm," she said, tugging at the sheet again. "I think selling the Bentley is very sensible." She folded the sheet over, hand to hand; I did the same. We pulled it taut again. Mum looked thoughtful. "Maybe we should sell that ancient thing sitting in the garage out there, as well."
"The Lagonda?" I said. We folded the sheet over again.
"Yes," mum said, walking towards me again. "It's just a waste of space at the moment."
"You mean you weren't thinking of going in for classic car restoration after you've finished the harpischord?"
Mum smiled as she took the sheet from me. "Well, actually that had occurred to me, but… " She wrinkled her nose. "No; I don't think so."
"Well, we won't get much for it in the state it's in at the moment." I pulled another sheet down.
"I'm not bothered about the money," mum said. She folded the sheet away, shot me a mischievous look. "And besides, whose fault is it the car's in the state it is, anyway?"
"What?" I said. I stood looking at her.
Mum took the sheet from me and put two of its corners in my hands as she backed off, pulling it tight. She smiled. "It was you who tipped the big dresser down onto it in the garage that time, wasn't it?"
She pulled the sheet; it flew out of my fingers, billowing over the floor of the room like some slow motion wave. I ran after it, catching it. I retrieved the corners, untwisted the sheet and studied the amused expression on my mother's face. She tugged the sheet again and I held onto it this time.
I'm ashamed to admit that it even occurred to me to deny it, albeit briefly. I grinned sheepishly as we folded the sheet over. "Yeah, guilty as charged, but it was an accident." I shook my head. "How did you work that out?"
She walked towards me, took the sheet from me. "Found a bit of broken glass in your underpants when I was washing them," she said, and gave a tiny laugh as she turned away to place the sheet on the drier.
I looked up at the ceiling. "Oh dear," I said.
Mum turned round, standing there in her jeans and blouse, glowing with what might well have been self-satisfaction. She reached up and pulled a last sheet down off the pulley, handing one end to me. "Yes. Well, we'll draw a discreet veil over that little incident, shall we?"
I nodded, pursed my lips. "Might be best," I agreed. I coughed, pulled the sheet taut with her, and with a textbook expression of interested interrogation, asked, "And how is the harpsichord-construction project going, anyway?"
"Well —»
It didn't end there, either. Nobody had thought to tell me, but obviously it was open season on Prentice's ignorance. If you were female, anyway.
"Well," I said. "I think my absorption spectrum must be hazy."
"No," Diana said. "I think it's much like anybody else's." She took a Waldglas beaker out of the display cabinet and glanced at me. She may have seen a hurt expression because she shrugged and smiled and said, "Okay, maybe yours has a few more black lines. You were always interested in all sorts of stuff, weren't you?"
I shrugged. "It runs in the family."
"Fact is," Diana said, breathing on the knobby green glass, "it's probably thanks to you I spend so much of my life fourteen thousand feet above Hawaii looking for I-R stars."
"It is?" I said.
"Yeah," Diana said, smiling at the glass as she polished it. "You remember the night there was Helen, me, you, Lewis and Verity and… Darren? We were up in the observatory?"
"I remember," I said.
"You got really stoned and started gibbering about how fantastic the universe was?"
I shook my head. "I don't remember that," I confessed. "Well, you were pretty ripped," Diana said. She handed me the beaker. "But you were coherent, mostly, and you were really enthusiastic. I mean you even shut Lewis up; you just raved about how amazing astronomy was. You meant cosmology, but what the heck. You were just bubbling with it." She brought a second Waldglas beaker out of the cabinet.
"Huh." I filled the beaker with polystyrene beads, found a box big enough to hold the two beakers and put the first one carefully into its bed of little white infinity symbols. "Well, I'll take your word for it."
"Oh, you were just so fascinated with it all. Especially with stellar evolution. That had obviously really blown your mind. 'We are made of bits of stars! you shouted." Diana laughed a little. "You'd been reading about all that stuff and it just tickled you pink. You told us about how the sun and the solar system were made out of the remnants of older stars that had blown up; how the elements that made up the world had been made in those ancient stars, and that meant our bodies, too, every atom. Jeez, I thought you were going to explode." She handed me the second beaker.
"Hmm," I said. "Well, I sort of remember that, I think." Actually, I wasn't sure I really did at all. My recollection of that evening got very hazy after the bit where Verity had pretended to tell me my fortune.
"'We are made from bits of stars! We are made from bits of stars! you kept yelling, and went through it all: super novae scattering heavy atoms; the debris swirling through space, other novae and supers sending shock-waves through the debris, compressing it; stars forming, planets; geology, chemistry; life." Diana shook her head. She extracted a thin, delicate, old-looking flute of a wine glass from the display case. "And Jeez, you made me feel ashamed. I mean, dad had built the observatory for us; it was a present, in a way. And we hardly used it. We went up there to smoke dope. And here you were, knew all about this stuff, and actually made it sound interesting. You were really gone on the idea that we were stuck down here on this one little planet and still just savages really, but we'd glimpsed the workings of the universe, worked out from light and radiation what had happened over the last fifteen billion years and could talk sensibly about the first few seconds after the big bang — even if the jury has gone back out on that idea nowadays — and could predict what would happen to the universe over the next few billion, and understand it… " Diana held the wine glass up to the light, and cleaned it with the cloth. "You were pretty scathing about religion, too; tawdry and pathetic in comparison, you said." She shrugged. "I didn't necessarily buy that, but you made me ashamed not to have used the telescope more. And so I did, and then I got some books on astronomy, and found out a lot of it was about maths, which I was good at anyway, though somehow the fact astronomy was about numbers and equations as well as stars and telescopes hadn't occurred to me. But anyway, that was the start of it, I was hooked. Been a star-junkie ever since, Prent, and it's all your fault."
She flashed a shocked expression at me and handed me the glass.
I shook my head. "You as well, eh?"
"Hmm?" Diana said.
"Nothing," I breathed, running a hand through my hair. "Shit, I never knew." I looked mockly serious. "This is something of a responsibility, Diana. I trust you haven't had cause to regret your decision."
"Not at all, Prentice." She closed the now empty cabinet, and took off her white gloves. "I mean, maybe I'd have settled on astronomy anyway, without your one-man show. Whatever; it's been fun. Cold at nights and a long way from the beach, and the air's a bit thin… but it's the skies that really take your breath away." She nodded. "You should visit, come see it all some time."
"I'd like to," I said. "People allowed to come and look round?"
Diana folded her arms and rested her back against the display cabinet. "It can be arranged."
"There's somebody I'd like to take there."
Diana smirked. "Yeah? Somebody special? Who's that?"
"Oh… friend of mine. In Canada at the moment."
"Ashley, huh?"
I felt myself blush. "Well, yeah," I said, trying not to grin too much.
Diana nodded, still smiling. "It'd be great to see you both out there. You two sort of an item these days?"
I shrugged, felt myself blush again. "Sort of. I hope so. I think so."
Diana laughed, which was good to hear; I didn't think she had laughed since Fergus died. "Yeah, I think so."
Verity and Lewis brought young Kenneth to the castle that day, so that Mrs McSpadden could go all gooey over him. She did. Diana seemed equally charmed. Kenneth just slept.
Diana broke open a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallen which was older than any of us (well, except Mrs McS, but she'd gone back to the kitchen by then), and an awful lot older than Kenneth.
"Let's wet his head," Diana said.
"Can we go up on the roof?" I said. It just seemed like a good idea.
So we climbed up there, into a bright March afternoon with a keen blue sky and a smell of wood-smoke on the westerly breeze. We sat on the slates and drank our whiskies and took turns holding the baby, who was still fast asleep.
"You having him christened?" Diana asked Verity softly, peering down at the infant's tiny scrunched-up face. She rocked him to and fro.
"Well, I think mum and dad would rather he was, but I'm not bothered one way or the other. Lewis isn't too keen, are you my love?"
Lewis showed his teeth. "Over my dead body, actually." he said.
"See?" Verity said to Diana, who was smiling broadly and holding the boy close, sniffing him. She just nodded.
Verity glanced at Lewis, then said, "Prentice?"
"Yo?"
"We'd like you to be his godfather. Would you be?" She actually looked as though she thought I might refuse. Lewis was grinning at me.
I cleared my throat. "Well… in terms of the actual title, I'm sort of taking a long hard look at my previous statements about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being at this moment in time, re-appraisal-wise," I said, a suitably pained expression on my face as Diana handed the baby to me.
Lewis laughed.
Anyway, it was agreed, and then we thought the little blighter ought to have at least a semblance of a christening, so Lewis dabbed his finger in his whisky and reached over and put a tiny drop of the spirit on his son's head, and said, "There; that's all he's going to get."
"Kenneth Walker McHoan," I said, cradling him with one arm and raising my glass in the other hand.
We drank the lad's health. Then Diana threw her glass away over the battlements towards the woods. Lewis, Verity and I all looked at each other, then followed suit, and heard a couple of the tumblers smash somewhere in the trees beneath. Young Kenneth opened his eyes at that point, looked woozily up at me and let out a small, plaintive cry. I laughed and kissed his tiny nose, then handed him back to his mother so she could feed him.
I stood up then and went to the battlements, and held the ancient rough stones beneath my hands. I looked out over the woods and the plain and the fields; to Gallanach, with its quays and spires and serried streets, and out to the crumpled hills beyond, the brindle of forests to the east and the glitter of waves to the west, where the ocean was. I thought of Ashley, on the other side of that ocean, and wondered what she was doing right now, and hoped that she was well, and happy, and maybe thinking of me, and then I just stood there, grinning like a fool, and took a deep, deep breath of that sharp, smoke-scented air and raised my arms to the open sky, and said, "Ha!"