Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories Page 6

  And so he stood, still holding her hand, and gently pulled Kitty to her feet. Then together, side by side, they went on down the stairs.

  FLOWERS IN THE RAIN

  Through thick, wetting mist and a cold east wind, the slow, stopping country bus finally ground its way up the last incline towards the village. We had left Relkirk an hour before, and as the winding road climbed up into the hills, the weather had worsened, turning from an overcast, but dry afternoon, to this sodden, cheerless day.

  “Aye, it’s driech,” the conductor commented, taking the fare from a fat country woman with a pair of carrier bags filled with her morning’s shopping. And the very word, driech, took me back into the past, and made me feel that I was almost coming home.

  I rubbed a patch of clear glass on the window and looked hopefully out. Saw stone walls, the vague shapes of silver birch and larch. Small turnings led to invisible farmsteads, lost in the murk, but by now I recognized the road, and knew that in a moment we should cross the bridge and draw, at last, into the main street of the village.

  I was sitting by the window. “Excuse me,” I said to the man next to me. “I have to get out at the next stop.”

  “Oh, aye.” He heaved himself out of his seat and stood in the aisle to let me pass. “It’s no’ a very good day.”

  “No. It’s horrible.”

  I made my way to the front of the bus. We crossed the bridge and the next moment were there, halted by the pavement in front of Mrs. McLaren’s shop.

  EFFIE MCLAREN

  LACHLAN GENERAL STORES

  POST OFFICE

  The sign over her door read the same it had read ever since I could remember. The door of the bus opened. I thanked the conductor and stepped down, followed by one or two other passengers who were alighting.

  “Aye, aye,” we all agreed, “it is a terrible day.”

  They went their separate ways, but I stayed where I was, standing on the pavement by the bus-stop. I waited until the bus pulled out; until the sound of its grinding engine had died away, up and around the next bend in the road. The silence filled up with other sounds. The bubbling, watery chuckle of the river. The bleat of unseen sheep. The sough of wind through the pines on the hillside above me. All blessedly familiar. Unchanged.

  * * *

  I and my three brothers had first come to Lachlan, one Easter time, with our parents, when I was about ten. After that the holiday became an annual event. Our home was in Edinburgh, where my father was a schoolmaster, but both my parents loved fishing, and each year rented the same little cottage from Mrs. Farquhar, who lived in what was always known as the “Big Hoose.”

  They were wonderful times. While my mother and father flogged the river, or sat for hours in a boat in the middle of the loch, we children were left to our own devices, running wild over the heathery hillsides, swimming in icy pools, guddling for trout, or hiking, professionally haversacked, to some distant beauty spot. As well, we were absorbed into the local village life. My father sometimes played the harmonium in the Presbyterian church on Sunday mornings; my mother was asked to demonstrate Italian quilting to the Women’s Rural Institute, and my brothers and I were included in school outings and concerts.

  But the best—and this added real glamour to our yearly excursions—was the endless hospitality of Mrs. Farquhar herself. A widow, and quite elderly, she genuinely loved people, and there was always a selection of friends, their children, nephews and nieces, perhaps a godchild or two, staying in the house.

  But only one grandson, the only son of Mrs. Farquhar’s only son.

  We were, from the first, automatically included in any ploy that might have been planned. Perhaps tennis, or a tea-party, or a paper-chase, or a picnic. I remembered how the front door of the Big House stood always open; the dining-room table laid for the next generous meal; the fire in her sitting-room always lighted, blazing and welcoming. I think of daffodils and I think of the Big House at Lachlan at Easter time. Drifts of them in the wild garden, bowlfuls of them indoors, filling the rooms with their heavy scent.

  When I told my mother, over the telephone, that I was coming to Relkirk to work for a month, she had said at once, “I wonder if you’ll be able to get up to Lachlan?”

  “I’m sure they’ll give me a day off. They’ll have to, some time, or I’ll collapse. I can catch a bus and make a visit. Go and see Mrs. Farquhar.”

  “Yes…” My mother didn’t sound too sure about this.

  “Why shouldn’t I go and see her? Do you think she wouldn’t remember us?”

  “Darling, of course she would, and she’d adore to see you. It’s just that I don’t think she’s been awfully well … I heard something about a stroke, or a heart attack. But perhaps she’s better now. Anyway, you could always ring up first…”

  But I hadn’t rung up first. Presented with a day to myself, I had simply got myself to the bus-stop in Relkirk and boarded the country bus. And now I was here, standing like a lunatic in the driving rain and already drenched. I crossed the pavement and went into the post office, and the bell above the door went ting, and I was met by the familiar smell of paraffin mixed with oranges and cloves and the smell of sweets.

  The shop was empty. It always was. It always had been empty, unless there was actually some customer there, buying stamps or chocolate, or cans of peaches, or button thread. Mrs. McLaren preferred to live in her back room, beyond the bead curtain, where she drank cups of tea and talked to her cat. I could hear her now. “Well, now, Tiddles, and who will that be?” A few shuffling steps, and she appeared through the beads, with her flowered pinafore, and her brown beret, worn well down over her eyebrows. We had never seen her without that beret. My brother Roger insisted that, underneath it, she had no hair, was as bald as Kojak.

  “Well, and what a terrible day it’s turned into. And what can I be doing for you?”

  I said, “Hello, Mrs. McLaren.”

  She eyed me across the counter, frowning. I pulled off my woollen hat and shook out my hair and at once recognition dawned in her face. Her mouth opened in delight, her hands went up in the classic gesture of astonishment. “And if it isn’t Lavinia Hunter! What a surprise. My, you’ve grown! However long is it since you were last here?”

  “It must be five years.”

  “We’ve missed you all.”

  “We’ve missed coming, too. But my father died, and my mother went to live in Gloucestershire, near her sister. And my brothers seem to be living all over the world.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father. He was a dear man. And how about yourself? What are you doing?”

  “I’m a nurse.”

  “But that’s splendid. In a hospital?”

  “No. I was in a hospital. But now I do private nursing. I’m with a family in Relkirk, just for a month, helping to look after two children and a new baby. I’d have been up to see you all before, but it’s not very easy to get time off.”

  “No, no, you’ll be busy.”

  “I … I thought I might go and see Mrs. Farquhar.”

  “Oh, dear.” Mrs. McLaren’s cheerful expression changed to one of sadness and gloom. “Poor Mrs. Farquhar. She had a wee stroke, and she’s been going downhill, by all accounts, ever since. The house is changed now, not the way it used to be with all of you running around. Just the old lady upstairs in her bed, and two nurses, night and day. Mary and Sandy Reekie are still there, she doing the cooking and he taking care of the garden, but Mary says it’s a chilling business cooking for just the nurses, for poor Mrs. Farquhar takes no more than a wee cup of baby food.”

  “Oh, I am sorry. You don’t think there’s any point my going up, then?”

  “And why not? She might just be having a good day, and then, who knows the good it would do her to see a cheerful young face about the place.”

  “Doesn’t anybody come to stay any more?” It was sad to think of the big house so bleak.

  “Well, it wouldn’t work, would it? Mary Reekie told me the one person Mrs
. Farquhar wanted to see was Rory, and she told the minister, too, and he wrote to Rory, but Rory’s in America and I don’t know if there was ever any reply to the letter.”

  Rory. Mrs. Farquhar’s grandson. What had prompted Mrs. McLaren to suddenly come out with his name? I looked at her across the counter and tried to detect some glimmer of unexplained Highland intuition. But her faded eyes remained innocent and met my own with an untroubled gaze. I told myself that she could not guess at the pounding that started up in the region of my heart at the very mention of his name. Rory Farquhar. I had always thought of him as Rory, and will write of him that way, but in fact his name was spelt, with Gaelic inconsistence, R-u-a-r-a-i-d-h.

  I fell in love with Rory, one remembered sunny spring, when I was sixteen and he was twenty. I had never been in love before and it had the effect of making me, not dreamy, but intensely perceptive; so that objects, previously unnoticed, became beautiful; leaves and trees, flowers, chairs, dishes, firelight—everything was touched with the magic of a spell-binding novelty, as though I had never known any of these ordinary day-to-day things before.

  There were many picnics that spring, and swimming in the loch and tennis parties, but the best was the idleness, the casual getting to know each other. Lying on the lawn in front of the Big House, watching some person practising his casting, with a scrap of sheep wool instead of a fly to weight the line. Or walking down to the farm in the evenings to fetch the milk, or helping the farmer’s wife to bottle-feed the abandoned lamb who lived by her kitchen fireside.

  At the end of those holidays Mrs. Farquhar arranged a little party. We cleared the old billiard-room of furniture and put on the record-player, and danced reels. And Rory wore his kilt and an old khaki shirt that had belonged to his father, and showed me the steps and spun me till I was breathless. It was at the end of that evening that he kissed me, but it didn’t do much good because he was going back to London the next morning, and I could never be sure if it was a kiss of affection or a kiss of goodbye.

  After he went, I lived in a fantasy world of getting letters and phone calls from him, and having him realize that he could not live without me. But all that happened was that he started working in London, with his father’s firm, and after that he did not come back to Lachlan for Easter. If he did take a few days off in the spring, Mrs. Farquhar told me that he was going skiing, and I imagined rich and elegant girls in dashing ski-clothes and felt sick with jealousy.

  Once I stole a photograph of Rory out of an old album I found in a bookcase in Mrs. Farquhar’s library. It had come loose and fallen out of the shabby pages, so it wasn’t really stealing. I picked it up and put it in my pocket and later between the pages of my diary. I always kept it, although I never saw Rory again, and since my father died and we stopped coming to Lachlan, I had heard no news of him.

  And now Mrs. McLaren had said his name, and I remembered that young Rory, with his worn kilt and his brown face and dark hair.

  I said, “What’s he doing in America?”

  “Oh, some business or other, in New York. His father died too, you know. I think that was the start of Mrs. Farquhar getting so ill. She never lost heart, but she aged a lot.”

  “I expect Rory’s a married man now, with a string of children.”

  “No, no. Rory never married.”

  I said, lying, “I’d forgotten about Rory.”

  “Ah, you’ll have other things to think about with your nursing and your fine job.”

  We talked a little longer, and then I bought some chocolate from her and said goodbye and went out of the shop and set off in the direction of the big house. I tore the paper from the chocolate and bit off a chunk. Eaten thus, in the open air, it tasted just the way it used to.

  I’ll just go and see, I told myself. I’ll just go and ring at the door, and if the nurse sends me packing, it won’t matter.

  A woman was coming towards me down the street, carrying a shopping basket and dressed in the countrywoman’s uniform of headscarf, tweed skirt, and sleeveless quilted waistcoat in that horrible sludgy green colour.

  I can’t come all this way and not just try.

  She stopped. “Lavinia.”

  I stopped, too. It was certainly a day for being recognized. My heart sank. “Hello, Mrs. Fellows.”

  I would meet her. Stella Fellows, the one woman in the village my mother could never bring herself to like. She and her husband, who had been a lawyer, had built themselves a house in Lachlan after his retirement and had settled permanently. He was a manic fisherman and always said “Tight Lines” instead of “Cheers” when he took a drink, and she was enormously efficient and spent most of her time trying to dragoon the village ladies into attending unsuitable Arts Council lectures, or involving them in money-making events for charity. The village ladies were polite and charming, but despite Stella Fellows’s enthusiasm, the events were never very lucrative. She could never think why, and we were all far too kind to tell her.

  “What a surprise! I couldn’t believe it was you. What on earth are you doing here?”

  I told her, as I had told Mrs. McLaren.

  “But my dear, you must come and see us. Lionel would love to have a glimpse of you.” Tight Lines. “Anyway, he’s bored stiff today. He was meant to be fishing, but it was called off.”

  “It … it’s very kind of you, but actually I’m on my way to see Mrs. Farquhar.”

  “Mrs. Farquhar!” Her voice rose an octave. “But hasn’t anybody told you? She’s dying.”

  I could have hit her.

  “Had this appalling stroke a couple of months ago. My dear, nurses day and night. It’s no good going to see her, she just lies like a log. We do what we can, of course, but I’m afraid social visiting is just a waste of time. So sad, when you remember how wonderful she was, and how much she’s always done for the village. But of course, now that the house is no longer a free meal-ticket, none of her so-called friends come near her. And as for her family”—her mouth buttoned—“I could kill that Rory. There he is, sitting in New York, and he’s never been to see her. You’d think, when he’ll obviously inherit the place…”

  I couldn’t bear to listen to any person talking about Rory, and certainly not Stella Fellows.

  I said, “I am sorry. I really must be on my way. I haven’t much time before the last bus back to Relkirk.”

  “You’re going to the Big House, then?” She made it sound as though I was deliberately defying her.

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Oh, all right. But if you have a moment to spare before you do catch the bus, be sure to pop in…”

  “Of course.” I thought of their modern house, with the picture window framing the rain, and the switch-on logs in the grate. “So kind…”

  “Lionel will give you a snifter…”

  I backed away from her, and then turned and left her standing there, gazing after me as though I were mad. Which I probably was.

  I wouldn’t think about Rory, sitting in New York. If he hadn’t come home, if he hadn’t answered the minister’s letter, there was probably some very good reason. I walked, in long, warming strides, on up the hill; along the narrow lane that led to the gates of the Big House. I came to them, and they loomed before me, standing open, and I did not walk up the drive, but took the short cut through the wild garden, through the sodden drifts of daffodils. They were still in bud, closed against the rain, their trumpets unopened. I went beneath the trees and opened the tall gate in the deer fence. Beyond lay the rough grass, the azaleas and the hybrid rhododendrons, and then the lawn, sloping up to the gravel terrace in front of the house.

  Through the mist, the house took shape. The old, ugly red stone house with the conservatory tacked on to one side and the pepper-pot turret over the front door. The outer door stood open and I went up the slope of the grass, crossed the gravel, went into the porch and rang the bell. Then, with the jangling of the bell still sounding from the back regions, I opened the inner glass door and let myself in.
/>
  It was very quiet. Very tidy. No flowers stood upon the table in the hall; no dogs barked; no children’s voices broke the quiet. There was the smell of pine and polish, and as well, a faint aura of disinfectant, nursing, hospitals, so familiar to me that I noticed it at once. I went into the centre of the hall and pulled off my hat. I looked up at the empty staircase. I said, not wanting to call too loudly, “Is anyone around?”

  Out of the silence came footsteps along the upper passage. Not the quick, rubber-heeled tread of a professional nurse, but heavy, masculine footsteps. Sandy Reekie, I decided, upstairs to fill the log baskets for the invalid’s fire. I waited.

  The footsteps started downstairs. Reached the half-landing and stopped. He was silhouetted against the light of the stair window. Not Sandy Reekie, whom I remembered as wiry and stooped, but a tall man, dressed in a kilt and a thick sweater.

  “Who is it?” he asked, and then he saw me, my face tilted up to his. Our eyes met. There was a long silence. Then, for the third time that day, someone said my name. “Lavinia.”

  And I simply replied, “Rory.”

  He came on down the stairs, his hand trailing on the banister. He crossed the hall and took my hand.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, and then he kissed my cheek.

  “I don’t believe it, either. Everybody tells me you’re in New York.”

  “I flew over a couple of nights ago. I’ve been here a day.”

  “How is your grandmother?”

  “She’s dying.” But he didn’t say it the way Stella Fellows had said it. He made it sound rather peaceful and nice, as though he were telling me that Mrs. Farquhar was nearly asleep.

  I said, “I came to see her.”

  “Where from? Where have you come from?”

  “Relkirk. I’m working there, nursing for a month. I got a day off. I thought I’d come to Lachlan. My mother told me Mrs. Farquhar had been ill, but I thought perhaps she would be getting better.”

  “There are two nurses with her, around the clock. But the day nurse wanted to go and do some shopping in Relkirk, so I lent her the car and said I’d watch out for my grandmother.” He paused, hesitating, and then said, “There’s a fire on in the sitting-room. Let’s go there. It’ll be more cheerful. Besides, you’re wet through.”