Wild Mountain Thyme Page 19

  The room was piercingly cold. The curtains had long since been taken down, and the windows shuttered, and the old melodies echoed like cymbals against the empty walls. High above, descendant from the center of the lavishly decorated ceiling, a crystal chandelier of immense proportions sparkled like a cluster of icicles, and scattered facets of colored light that were reflected in the bars of the brass fender that stood before the white marble fireplace.

  Roddy sang songs from before the war. Noel Coward at his most sentimental, and Cole Porter.

  I get no kick from champagne,

  Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all,

  So tell me, why should it be true …

  The rest of the party grouped themselves about him. Oliver, his dramatic senses stirred by the turn that the evening had so unexpectedly taken, leaned against the piano and smoked a cigar, watching Roddy as though he could not bear to miss a single nuance of the other man’s expression.

  John had crossed to the fireplace, and stood before it, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders propped against the mantelpiece. Victoria had found a chair in the middle of the room, draped in faded blue gingham, and had perched herself on one of its arms. From where she sat, Roddy had his back to her, but above him, flanking a centrally hung mirror, were two tall portraits, which she knew, without being told, were of Jock Dunbeath and his wife Lucy.

  With her ears full of the nostalgic tinkling music, she looked from one to the other. Jock had been painted in the full dress kilt of his regiment, but Lucy wore a tartan skirt and a bracken-brown sweater. She had brown eyes and laughter on her mouth, and Victoria wondered if it was she who had decorated this room, and chosen the pale carpet with its swags of roses, or whether she had inherited it from her mother-in-law, and liked it just the way it was. And then she found herself wondering if Jock and Lucy knew that Benchoile was going to be sold. Whether they were sad about it, or angry, or understood John’s dilemma. Looking at Lucy, Victoria decided that she probably understood. But Jock … Jock’s face above the high collar, the golden epaulettes, was carved into an expression of suitable blankness. The eyes were deep-set and very pale. They would reveal nothing.

  She realized that she was slowly freezing. She had put on, that evening, for some reason, a most unsuitable dress, sleeveless and far too light for a winter evening in Scotland. It was the sort of dress meant to be worn with suntanned arms and bare sandals, and in it she knew that she looked thin and colorless and cold.

  You’re the cream in my coffee,

  You’re the milk in my tea …

  Victoria shivered, and rubbed her arms with her hands, trying to warm herself. From across the room, John Dunbeath’s voice came quietly, “Are you cold?” and she realized that he had been watching her, and this made her self-conscious. She put her hands back in her lap and nodded, but made a secret face to let him know that she did not want to disturb Roddy.

  He took his hands out of his pockets and left the fireplace and came over to her side, on the way gathering up a dustsheet, revealing the French rosewood chair that it had been protecting. He folded the dustsheet like a shawl, and bundled it around her shoulders, so that she was swathed in folds of soft, old cotton, very comforting to the touch.

  He did not go back to the fireplace, but settled himself on the other arm of her chair, with his arm lying along its back. His nearness was somehow as comforting as the dustsheet that he had wrapped around her, and after a little she did not feel cold anymore.

  Roddy stopped at last for breath, and to refresh himself from the glass that stood on top of the piano. “I think that’s probably enough,” he told them all. But John said, “You can’t stop yet. You haven’t played ‘Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go.’”

  Over his shoulder Roddy frowned at his nephew. “When did you ever hear me play that old song?”

  “I suppose when I was about five years old. But my father used to sing it, too.”

  Roddy smiled, “What a sentimental guy you are, to be sure,” he told him, but he turned back to the piano, and the old Scottish tune, in the three-four time of a slow waltz, filled the empty, haunted room.

  O the summer time is coming

  And the trees are sweetly blooming

  And the wild mountain thyme

  Grows around the blooming heather.

  Will ye go, lassie, go?

  I will build my love a tower

  Near yon pure crystal fountain

  And on it I will pile

  All the flowers of the mountain,

  Will ye go, lassie, go?

  If my true love, she were gone,

  I would surely find another

  Where wild mountain thyme

  Grows around the blooming heather

  Will ye go, lassie, go?

  12

  SUNDAY

  It was ten o’clock on the morning of the Sabbath. Once more the wind had come round to the northeast, swirling in from the sea, clean and bitterly cold. The sky, overcast with high, sailing clouds, glimpsed through, blue as a robin’s egg, only occasionally, and it was hard to believe that only yesterday they had been picnicking at the waterfall, sitting in the sunshine with pleasant anticipatory thoughts of the approaching spring.

  John Dunbeath sat by the fire in the Guthrie’s kitchen and drank a cup of tea. The kitchen was snug as a nest. A fire burned redly in the stove, and thick walls and tightly closed windows defied the blustering wind. The air was filled with the smell of burning peat, overlaid by the fragrance of simmering broth, and the table in the center of the room was already laid for the Guthrie’s midday dinner.

  Jess was going to church. At the sideboard, she took up her hat, and, sagging slightly at the knees, in order to see her reflection in the mirror, put it on. Watching her, and then looking back at Davey, John decided that of all the Benchoile people, the Guthries had changed the least. Jess was still slim, still pretty, with only a trace of grey in her springy fair hair, and Davey looked, if anything, even younger than John remembered him, with his bright blue eyes and tufty, sandy eyebrows.

  “Now,” Jess picked up her gloves and pulled them on. “I must get away. You’ll have to excuse me, but I promised I’d pick up Ellen Tarbat and give her a lift to the kirk.” She glanced at the portentous clock in the middle of the mantelpiece. “And if you two are going to be up the hill and home again in time for your dinner, you’d better not be sitting here all day, drinking your tea.”

  She departed. A moment later there came a great crashing of gears and the revving of a hard-worked engine, and Davey’s small grey van bounced down the bumpy path in front of the house and disappeared in the direction of Benchoile.

  “She’s a terrible driver,” Davey observed mildly. He finished his mug of tea, set it down on the table and stood up. “But she’s right. We should go.” He went through to the little lobby and took down his waterproof jacket from the peg by the door, collected his deerstalker, his crook, his spyglass. The two golden Labradors, who had been lying, apparently asleep, by the fireside, now sprang into feverish action, scenting walks. They barged to and fro, nuzzling Davey’s knees, tails going like pistons. They were, Jess had told John, Jock Dunbeath’s dogs.

  “Poor creatures, they were with him when he died. And afterwards they wandered about Benchoile like a pair of lost spirits. There was some talk of putting the old one down. She’s nearly nine years old now. But we couldn’t abide the idea. The colonel had been so fond of her, and she’s a great lass to the gun. So they both came to live with us. Mind, we’ve never had a dog in the house. Davey would never have a dog in the house. But these two had never been in a kennel in their lives, and so he had to relent. They could have stayed at Benchoile, I suppose, but Mr. Roddy has his own dog, and Ellen has enough to do without caring for a couple of great babies like these two.”

  Now Davey opened the farmhouse door, and the two Labradors escaped into the windswept, scrubby garden, racing like puppies around the blowing grass beneath the washing line. At their appe
arance, Davey’s sheepdogs, shut up in their pen, began dementedly to bark, racing to and fro in the netted run. “Shut your mouths, you silly bitches,” Davey told them good-naturedly, but they went on barking, and could still be heard long after the two men and the two dogs had gone through the gate in the wall at the back of the house, and started the long walk up through the heather.

  It took them over an hour to reach the march fence that separated the northern boundary of Benchoile from the desolate Glen Feosaig which lay beyond. A long, steady climb, taken at Davey Guthrie’s unhurried pace, pausing only to point out some landmark, to scan the hill for deer, to watch the soaring, hovering flight of a kestrel. The dogs were kept well to heel, but even so, every now and then a pair of grouse would explode from the heather at their feet, and go wheeling away, their flight lying close to the slope of the hill; “go-back, go-back,” they called.

  It was immense country. Slowly, Benchoile sank below them, the loch a long ribbon of pewter grey, the house and trees concealed by the swelling contours of the land. To the north the summits were still snow-clad, and snow lay in deep corries as yet untouched by the low winter sun. As they climbed, Creagan itself came into view, reduced by distance to a cluster of grey houses, a strip of green that was the golf course, the tiny spire of the church. Beyond was the sea, the horizon blanketed in cloud.

  “Yes, yes,” observed Davey, “it is a dreich sort of a day.”

  At the crest of the hill there was not even heather underfoot; only pits of peat starred with strange mosses and lichens. The ground was boggy. Black water oozed up around their feet as they trod upwards, and the hoofprints and droppings of deer were everywhere. When they came at last to the straggling dike, the wind pounced on them from the north. It filled ears, nostrils, lungs; whistled through stormproof clothing and brought tears to John’s eyes. He leaned against the wall and looked down into Feosaig. The loch at its foot lay black and deep, and there was no evidence of human habitation. Only the sheep and the kestrels, and showing white against the distant hill, a pair of gulls, working their way inland.

  “Are those our sheep?” John asked, raising his voice against the wind.

  “Yes, yes,” Davey nodded, and then turned and sat himself down, out of the wind, with his back to the wall. After a little John joined him. “But that’s not Benchoile land.”

  “And this is not Feosaig land, either, but we have many Feosaig sheep grazing with ours.”

  “What happens, do you have a roundup?”

  “We start to gather them in, around the end of this month. We bring them down to the sheep folds in the fields by the farmhouse.”

  “When do the ewes start lambing?”

  “About the sixteenth of April.”

  “Will it still be as cold as this?”

  “It may well be colder. Some big storms can blow in April, and they can leave the hills as white as midwinter.”

  “That can’t make your job any easier.”

  “Indeed, it does not. I have seen myself digging ewes, heavy with lamb, out of the ditches and drifts. Sometimes a mother will desert her lamb, and then there’s nothing for it but to take it back to the farmhouse and hand rear it with a bottle. Jess is a great one with the sickly lambs.”

  “Yes, I’m sure she is, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how you’re going to cope with all this on your own. Roddy’s told me how much my uncle did at the lambing. You’re going to need another man, probably two, to help you during the next six weeks.”

  “Yes, that is indeed a problem,” Davey agreed, not looking in the least perturbed. He felt in his pocket and came out with a paper bag. From this he extracted two large bread-and-butter sandwiches. He gave one to John and began to eat the other himself, munching at each mouthful like a ruminating cow. “But I have spoken to Archie Tulloch and he says that this year he will give me a hand.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Archie is a crofter. He farms a few acres down the road to Creagan. But he is an old man—seventy years or more—and he won’t be able to carry on with the crofting much longer. He has no son. A month or so before your uncle died, he spoke to me about Archie’s croft. He had the idea that he would buy the place from Archie, and take it in with Benchoile. We can always use more land for the arable, and he has a fine cattle pasture down by the river.”

  “Would Archie be agreeable?”

  “Yes, yes. He has a sister in Creagan. He has talked for some time of going to live with her.”

  “So we’d have more land and another house.”

  “Your uncle thought we would maybe take on another man, and put him to live in the croft. Your uncle was a fine man, but after that first heart attack he had begun to realize that, like the rest of us, he was not immortal.”

  He took another mouthful of bread and munched some more. A movement on the side of the hill caught the attention of his blue eyes. He laid down his half-eaten sandwich, drove his crook into the ground, and took out his spyglass. Using his crook and the thumb of his left hand as a steadier, he put the glass to his eye. There was a long silence, broken only by the buffet of the wind.

  “A hare,” said Davey. “Just a wee hare.” He put the spyglass back in his pocket, and reached for the crust of the sandwich. But the old Labrador had already wolfed it. “You are indeed a greedy bitch,” he told her.

  John leaned back against the wall. Awkward stones dug into his back. His body was warm from the hard exercise, and his face cold. Ahead of them a gap had appeared between the racing clouds. A gleam of sunshine broke across the gloom, and lay like a shaft of gold across the dark waters of Loch Muie. The bracken on the hill turned russet. It was very beautiful, and he realized in that instant, with some shock, that the land, for almost as far as he could see, belonged to him. This was Benchoile. And this … he took up a handful of black peaty soil, crumbling it between his fingers.

  He was assailed by a sensation of timelessness. This was the way things had stayed for decades; tomorrow they would be no different, nor the weeks, nor the months that lay in the future. Action, of any kind, had all at once become distasteful, and this took him unawares, because apathy was a mood he had never suffered from. He had made his reputation, achieved a considerable personal success in his job, simply by means of swift and shrewd decision, immediate action, and a confidence in his own convictions that left no room for moral shilly-shallying.

  He had arranged this morning’s expedition with the sole intention of getting Davey on his own, and letting fall the information, as tactfully as possible, that by the middle of next week Benchoile would officially be up for sale. And yet now he found himself discussing its future policies with Davey, as though he had every intention of digging himself in for the rest of his life.

  He was procrastinating. But did that matter so much? Was today, this morning, this moment, the right time to bring to an end everything that Davey Guthrie had worked for? Perhaps, he told himself, knowing that he was ducking the issue, it would be better to hold a sort of board meeting in the dining room at Benchoile, thus protecting himself from the human element of the problem by erecting a shield of business-like formality. He would get Ellen Tarbat around the table, and Jess as well, and Roddy, to lend a little moral support. Better still, he would ask Robert McKenzie, the lawyer, to come from Inverness and take the chair at this meeting. Then he could be given the job of breaking the bad news to them all at one fell swoop.

  The sun went in. It was cold and dark again, but the silence between the two men remained companionable and totally unstrained. It occurred to John that the true Highlander like Davey Guthrie had much in common with the ranch hands who worked for his father in Colorado. Proud, independent, knowing that they were as good as any man—and probably better—they found no need to assert themselves, and so were the most straightforward of beings to deal with.

  He knew that he must be straightforward with Davey. He said, breaking the silence, “How long have you been at Benchoile, Davey?”

  �
��Nearly twenty years.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “It’s the clean living that keeps a man healthy,” Davey told him, without a smile. “And the good air. Do you not find working in London and New York and such big cities that the air is very oppressive? Even if Jess and I have a day’s shopping in Inverness, I cannot wait to get home and breathe the clean air of Benchoile.”

  “I suppose if you have a job in a place, you don’t think too much about what you’re breathing.” He added, “Anyway, if I get to feel too stifled, I usually head back to Colorado. There, the air is so rarified that the first gasp is as intoxicating as a jigger of Scotch.”

  “Yes, yes, that ranch must be a fine place. And a great size, too.”

  “In fact, not as big as Benchoile. About six thousand acres, but of course we carry more stock. Six hundred acres of that is irrigated hay meadow, the rest is known as open range grazing.”

  “And what breed of cattle do you rear?”

  “No particular breed. They vary from fine Hereford and Black Angus, all the way down to what’s known in the West as Running Gear. If the snows have been heavy, and the high meadows are well irrigated and we don’t have a killing frost in the late spring, we can graze a thousand head.”

  Davey ruminated on this, chewing on a blade of grass, and gazing peacefully ahead of him. After a little, he said, “There was a farmer from Rosshire, and he went to the bull-sales in Perth, and there he met one of those big cattlemen from Texas. And they got talking. And the Texan asked the farmer how much land he owned. And the farmer told him, ‘two thousand acres.’”