Forgive E-Book

Jenni Daiches

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Ruth has lived at Netherburn, her home in the remote moors of Scotland, ever since she was a small child. It's a home with a history, and, having seen her own children grow up and move on, Ruth is trying to make sense of it all. From her Father's death, to her ex-husband leaving and her lack of contact with her sons. But she's not alone with her thoughts: her empty house has become lively once again as various people - with equally complicated pasts - come to lodge at Netherburn, and Ruth finds herself helping them through their pain; some of which won't stay in the past. Forgive is the story of Ruth, and those living at Netherburn, as they live their lives and try to move on. But the question always looms for Ruth, what does it mean to forgive?

Leseprobe

JENNI DAICHES was born in Chicago, educated in the United States and England, and has lived in or near Edinburgh since 1971. After several years of part-time teaching and freelance writing, including three years in Kenya, she worked at the National Museums of Scotland from 1978 to 2001, successively as education officer, Head of Publications, script editor for the Museum of Scotland, and latterly as Head of Museum of Scotland International. In the latter capacity her main interest was in emigration and the Scottish diaspora. She has written and lectured widely on Scottish, English and American literary and historical subjects under the name of Jenni Calder and writes fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. She has two daughters, a son and a dog.

By the same author:

Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, Secker and Warburg, 1968

Scott (with Angus Calder), Evans, 1969

There Must be a Lone Ranger: The Myth and Reality of the American West, Hamish Hamilton, 1974

Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, Thames and Hudson, 1976

Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Edward Arnold, 1976

Heroes, from Byron to Guevara, Hamish Hamilton, 1977

The Victorian Home, Batsford, 1977 The Victorian and Edwardian Home in Old Photographs, Batsford, 1979

RLS: A Life Study, Hamish Hamilton, 1980

The Enterprising Scot (ed, with contributions), National Museums of Scotland, 1986

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Open University Press, 1987

The Wealth of a Nation (ed, with contributions), NMS Publishing, 1989

Scotland in Trust, Richard Drew, 1990

St Ives by RL Stevenson (new ending), Richard Drew, 1990

No Ordinary Journey: John Rae, Arctic Explorer (with Ian Bunyan, Dale Idiens and Bryce Wilson), NMS Publishing, 1993

Mediterranean (poems, as Jenni Daiches), Scottish Cultural Press, 1995

The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, Virago, 1997

Museum of Scotland (guidebook), NMS Publishing, 1998

Present Poets 1 (ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 1998

Translated Kingdoms (ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 1999

Robert Louis Stevenson, (poetry, ed), Everyman, 1999

Present Poets 2 (ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 2000

Scots in Canada, Luath Press, 2003

Not Nebuchadnezzar: In Search of Identities, Luath Press, 2005

Letters From the Great Wall, Luath Press, 2006

Frontier Scots: The Scots Who Won the West, Luath Press, 2010

Lost in the Backwoods: Scots and North American Wilderness, Edinburgh University Press, 2013

First published 2015

ISBN: 978-1-910324-26-4

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon

© Jenni Daiches 2015

With thanks, again, to Faith Pullin, and to Colin Manlove.

Contents

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1

THE WINDOW WAS open. Larry watched her walk slowly, hands in her pockets, while the dog stravaiged in and out of the long grass. He often watched her. It was love, of a kind, but there was no urgency. He poured what was left of the bottle into the squat green glass he always drank from and returned to the window, holding the glass in both hands. It had been a warm day, a little cloudy until evening, when the sky had cleared. Now, after ten, it was still light. Ruth had reached the far end of the track, where it looped round a clump of rhododendrons and brambles, but he heard her voice. ‘Dixie,’ she called. ‘Come here, Dix.’ It was a low voice, slightly breathy, as if something were being held back.

Peter at his bedroom window also watched Ruth and Dixie as they came round the house past raspberry canes and currant bushes. He had just put on a clean shirt. He was going out. Peter often went out at this time. With both hands he smoothed gel into his thick brown hair.

In the kitchen Ros and Emma were making cocoa. Emma was seven and should have been in bed.

Larry hummed. My Dixie darling, my Dixie belle. He had sung it on the doorstep a year ago, a summer evening like this one. ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ he’d asked. He had a pleasant, gritty tenor voice. ‘Okay,’ Ruth had said. ‘You’d better come in.’ Now he heard the sound of Peter’s motorbike revving and a moment later it was heading up the potholed track to the gate. He watched the tail light against the almost imperceptible graininess of the encroaching dusk.

Ruth walked up to the house, white and spectral in the last of the light. There was a new moon just visible, tilted and thin as a pencil line. The green of the garden and the fields beyond was darkening, and the stand of trees by the road was black. Headlights glimmered intermittently beyond them. Sometimes she thought, how often have I done this, how often have I circled the house, watched the darkness creep in? She went into the kitchen and the dog drank from her water bowl. The sleeves of Ruth’s cardigan were pushed above her elbow, showing her tanned arms. Her face was tanned and her short-cropped brown hair freckled with grey. Larry had at once been compelled by her eyes, luminous, almost bronze in colour. He sensed her eyes now, emerging from the darkness into the lit kitchen.

Emma concentrated on the pan of milk on the Aga. ‘We’re making cocoa,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting for the bubbles.’

‘Would you like some, Ruth?’ Ros asked.

Ruth shook her head. She heard the roar of Peter’s motorbike and caught Ros’s eye. They both smiled. Ros looked tired, and the tiny scar on her upper lip was more prominent than usual. Her narrow, oval face never had much colour, and when she pulled back her dark hair, which she did for going to work, she had an enclosed, Victorian photograph look.

‘Good day?’ Ruth asked.

‘So-so.’

Emma squealed. ‘It’s ready, mum.’

‘Okay, pour it in then. Carefully.’

The two women watched the little girl pick up the pan with two hands and pour hot milk into a mug. Her curly hair flopped over her eyes.

‘She couldn’t sleep,’ Ros said. ‘Again.’

‘It will take time.’

‘It’s been five months.’

Emma stirred her cocoa vigorously, dropped to her knees to hug Dixie, who had stretched out under the kitchen table, and then was up again wriggling onto a chair. She took a cautious sip from her mug.

In the attic Larry finished his wine, ran a hand over his scrubby beard and at last moved away from the window. He bought wine by the case when he sometimes had scarcely enough for food. Wine and memories. A restaurant by the ocean watching the grey Pacific rollers under a layer of mist, a Napa Valley cabernet cupped in his hands – he remembered the painting that bought that bottle. A sidewalk and garbage cans bought by a man in black-rimmed glasses and a button-down shirt. He settled in the frayed armchair and picked up the paper of the day before which lay on the floor beside it. News. He didn’t much care for news. At the far end of the long, low room was a half-finished picture on an easel and a bench encrusted with colour and cluttered with brushes and tubes of paint and filthy rags. Sketches and photographs were pinned onto the walls. He had arrived with almost nothing: a few clothes, some tubes of paint, a camera.

Ruth went into the living room, which over the years had mutated into a work room. On her desk was a heap of typescript, which she contemplated for a moment, but no, she would do no more work now. Instead, she picked up a letter. Her boys, scattered. It was inevitable, she supposed. The letter was a rare communication from James, the middle son. On his occasional visits to Nairobi he sometimes phoned or sent an email if he had access to a computer, but he seldom put pen to paper and she had got used to his long silences. She sat in her favourite chair to read the letter again, a commodious armchair with room for books, papers, a pencil case, knitting, sometimes two cats, as well as herself. A dictionary rested on its broad arm. Dixie lay on the rug, her chin on her black and white paws, watchful at first, but then her eyes closed and she seemed to sleep. James wrote cheerfully that he had organised a sports day at the school upcountry where he was teaching, fun but exhausting. He suggested, not for the first time, that Ruth should come for a visit. Come to Kenya and I’ll show you elephants red from the African earth, the Great Rift Valley spread across the continent, Maasai warriors, a pink sea of flamingos. Ruth put the letter down and smiled. ‘Come to London, mum,’ Ewan said when he phoned. ‘Come to San Francisco,’ from Sam. But the house anchored her. She did not necessarily want it that way, but that’s the way it was.

Would she ever go to San Francisco, where Ed and Arlene and their two little girls looked out over the ocean? Ed and Arlene. Once it had been Ed and Ruth here in this house, and all these years later Ed in California with another wife seemed unreal.

She heard Ros and Emma go upstairs, and a few minutes later Larry coming down. Dixie’s ears went up. He’d be making himself his late-night sandwich, while Peter, a dozen miles away, went into the Bailie with his helmet tucked under his arm. The bar was crowded, but Russell was there, his deep brown eyes smiling, and a pint was waiting for him. It was Friday night, but the next day Peter was setting up the lighting for a concert in Dunfermline. One drink and then back to Perth Street, to the flat that Russell shared with two girls who worked for the council. It wasn’t very satisfactory, but it was the best they could do.

Larry held the fridge door open and contemplated its contents. Cheese, tomatoes, German salami, one gherkin in a jar. He longed sometimes for hot salt beef and good rye bread.

There was still a glimmer of light in the sky when Ruth locked up, but the new moon was etched a little more clearly. She opened the door for a moment to catch the smell of the honeysuckle that clambered over the old stable wall. She heard the creak of stairs as Larry returned to the attic. Peter wouldn’t be home until late. How many times had she done that, paused at the open door, looked out into the near-dark, where the ridge beyond the house could still just be made out, and listened for the sound of the burn that gave the house its name? Only when there was no wind could she make out the ripple of water.

They would all hear Peter when he did return, all except Emma, who slept at last. Ruth was already awake, as she often was at three in the morning. Larry was jolted out of a murky dream by the chug of the motorbike. ‘Goddamn bike,’ he growled, but was soon asleep again. Ros had her light on and was reading, trying to blot out the panic that had woken her half an hour before. Sometimes she woke with her skin screaming, knowing that Martin was in the room, watching her. She took deep gulps of air until her heartbeat slowed, but she was wide awake, alert. She was glad when she heard Peter return. She felt safer. ‘I wouldn’t trust Larry in an emergency,’ she had once said to Ruth with a laugh, ‘but I feel safe with Peter around.’

They agreed about Peter, his broad shoulders, muscled arms, strong hands, and a smile that dimpled his cheek. His thick springy hair. Ros imagined Peter and Martin in the same room. She imagined Martin afraid, although that was hard. She ran her fingers over her ribs, the ribs that had been cracked, and tried to forget the mask of her bruises which followed the pain when the side of her face had hit the wall. Most of all, she tried to forget the sight of Emma in the doorway, bloodless, silent.

It was not easy, teaching a class of ten-year-olds when anything more than a shallow breath sent stabs of pain into her chest.

On the phone Ruth Montgomery had seemed brisk and capable when Ros had explained the resource centre needed an editor. She had expected a business suit and shoulder pads, not a slight, small woman in chinos and an orange polo shirt with a shapeless bag slung over her shoulder, full of typescript and notebooks. Without sitting down she had looked at the material spread across the table and said, ‘You’ll need to cut it by half.’ Ros and her colleagues protested.

‘You don’t need me to tell you that you can’t expect teachers to wade through that much stuff. Decide on the essential headings, then we can go through it again and make it as concise as possible.’

They gave her a mug of tea and made room for a plate of digestive biscuits.

‘We have a deadline. It has to go to the printer next week, and we’re all of us teaching. We have to work on it after school.’

‘That’s okay. Make your preliminary selection now, this afternoon. Then we can get together at the weekend to finish it off – that is, if you don’t mind giving up time then. You can come out to my place if the resource centre is closed.’

So it was arranged that Ros would come to Netherburn, but when she arrived she had a child with her and was apologetic. Her husband had had to go out, it was lucky he didn’t need the car. ‘This is Emma, my daughter. She’s brought colouring books and things.’ Ruth smiled. ‘Hi Emma. Why don’t you take the dog and explore outside.’

‘Will she be alright?’ Ros asked anxiously.

‘Of course. She can stay in if she prefers but it’s a lovely afternoon.’ And it was, a warm, hazy late September day.

Emma had loved it all, the house, the dog, the cats, the old swing, the musty stables, the space, the trees. When Ruth and Ros had finished they found her sitting on the gate into the back field with Dixie at her feet.

‘Mum, can I have a dog?’

They picked a bagful of apples to take home.

‘Do you live alone here?’ Ros had asked.

‘Not quite. There’s a flat that I let out, and an artist in the attic,’ Ruth said with a smile, but offered no further explanation.

Emma hadn’t wanted to leave. ‘Come again,’ Ruth had said. And they did, Ros and Emma, they came and took Dixie for walks and raked the leaves. Ros and Ruth talked in the kitchen over mugs of tea, the large, cluttered kitchen, pots and pans, and magazines and letters, recipe books, boots drying by the Aga, animals. Emma knelt on a chair and reached into the biscuit jar and ran outside again into the damp autumn air. And Ros pushed up her sleeve to show Ruth the bruises on her arm, and began to cry. But it was January before they came, she and Emma with two suitcases and a rucksack, in a taxi from town.

‘Of course you can stay,’ Ruth said.

‘Just until I get something sorted out.’

In the morning Ruth drove Emma to school and Ros to accident and emergency. She had given them the bedrooms at the end of the house, with the boys’ posters still on the walls and the drawers still full of old T-shirts and odd socks. The hospital confirmed the cracked ribs and said nothing in response to Ros’s account of falling down the stairs. Ruth had a deadline. She sat on a plastic chair in the hospital waiting room correcting proofs, while the man next to her, with a bloody arm, talked to himself in a low drone. That night Emma gave her a picture, a white house, a green field, trees, two smiling women, two smiling men, a dog, a sign in capital letters, correctly spelt, NETHERBURN.

Ros was told to take a week off work, and every day Ruth drove Emma to school in town, and collected her at three. She felt bad because she could not sit with Ros in the kitchen and talk. She had to get on. Whenever Ros tried to thank her she began to cry. Ruth assured her that she liked having women in the house, as for most of her life she had shared her space with men and boys. She had two older brothers and no sisters. She had three sons, but she didn’t, yet, mention a daughter. She talked of her mother, Dr Fay Cameron, an archaeologist, often absent, and her father, who wrote a gardening column for The Scotsman – the name Andrew Cameron was once well known to people who read gardening columns. He provided childcare, of a kind. In the evenings he made a meal for Ruth and her brothers before opening the whisky bottle.

It was her father’s house. ‘The place was a wreck when I bought it,’ he’d tell the children as they ate their supper of macaroni cheese or sausages and beans. ‘You won’t remember what it was like.’

‘Yes we do, dad,’ said Michael, bored, leaning his chin on one hand while with the other he made his fork squeak on the plate.

His father paid no attention. ‘The roof leaked, the garden was all to buggery. It took years to get it right.’

Andrew Cameron was happy, remembering, but of course the house, which he had bought with the proceeds of a best-selling gardening book, was never right. He was haunted by that first success, burdened by it, and had never written another book. Ruth had been three years old when they moved in, her brothers older, and their father had found jobs for them all in the vast neglected garden. She had lived in the house, with one seven-year gap, ever since. Wherever she went now – if she ever were to leave – the microbes, the smells, the sensations of the house were in her lungs, in her veins.

They all had to do their bit. Even as a three-year-old Ruth was sure she had been weeding, tugging out small handfuls of groundsel. Her brothers painted their own rooms. ‘Happy as sand boys,’ their father said. ‘Happy as sand boys.’ They all had their allocated chores. By nine or so in the evening her father would often be slumped on the sofa, placidly drunk, unless her mother was home. Sometimes her father would read Beatrix Potter to her, later the Just So Stories and Alice in Wonderland. Michael and Alex played cricket on the grass that once had been a tennis court, and her own sons did the same. She had a clear but timeless memory of boys’ voices and the sound of bat meeting ball and bursts of argument. Sometimes she would join in, half-heartedly, knowing her brothers barely tolerated her, although she had a good eye. She played with her sons too, all-purpose fielder with the three of them in a line, bowler, batsman, wicket-keeper, Sam growing tall like his father, with his father’s light straight hair, James with his mother’s eyes, and Ewan behind the wicket, invariably missing the ball.

She was sent out to dig potatoes for supper. There was a light, sweet-smelling summer rain. She came back with her gingham school dress damp and her hands coated in mud. Her mother was at home, in an apron, arranging rolled fish fillets in a dish. Ruth emptied her flower pot of earthy potatoes into the sink. Her mother smiled. ‘Just give them a good scrub, love,’ she said. Her father was in the living room, watching the six o’clock news with a glass of whisky. The children never questioned his dual routine. Two or three drinks before dinner when Fay was at home, half a bottle after supper when she was away. In her damp dress Ruth scrubbed the potatoes, letting the cold water wash the dirt from her hands. ‘Nip out for some mint, love,’ her mother said.

Michael had gone to Oxford and had never come back, except for occasional visits, once with his wife, later with his daughter, then with a different wife. He was unaccountably tall and big-boned, and it was perhaps that awkward height, apparent by the time he was ten or eleven, that made him feel out of place beside his slight, delicate-fingered siblings. Fay said that Michael favoured her father, whom the children remembered as a stooped, shambling man not quite in control of his long limbs.

Alex had, more quietly than Michael, removed himself, though the distance was less. He and his wife ran a second-hand bookshop in Inverness. They had no children. Michael’s were – how old? Lucy was a little older than Sam, but the others, the second family? Ruth had lost track. Perhaps grown up and gone, like hers. That’s what families do, she often reflected, when she found herself dwelling on the absence of her sons. They disperse. The young depart. You couldn’t expect anything else. She had departed too, but circumstances had brought her back. She thought it unlikely that circumstances would bring her sons back.

She enjoyed having Emma in the house, but that, too, would have to come to an end. ‘Just until I get myself sorted out,’ Ros had said. They would go, but for now they were settled, even if Emma often could not sleep. Ros was less weepy now, and looking out for a job that was easier to get to. Emma had transferred to the local school and had made new friends. Ros might, she told Ruth, even consider giving up teaching. ‘Sometimes,’ Ros said, ‘I can’t bear the fact that I’m just carrying on as before. Something should have changed. I ought to be somewhere different.’

‘You are somewhere different,’ said Ruth. ‘Things have changed.’

‘I know, but at school it’s all the same as before. I’ve not told anyone. I can’t. It’s not real, being here. I feel it’s all going to start again.’

Ros came home from work on the bus. It was dark in that first month, and she wasn’t used to country dark. She did not like the long walk down the dim track towards the lighted windows of the house. Occasional cars would pass on the road behind her, and she could not help listening for the sound of a gear change, the sound of a slowing engine, of tyres on a rougher surface. She would look back at the passing headlights. Then the days grew longer, and sometimes Emma and Dixie came to the gate to meet her, and it happened less often that her heart beat so fast in her throat that it made her sick. The daffodils were out, dozens of them in the ragged margins of the gravel at the front of the house. Sometimes she wished she and Emma could stay forever at Netherburn, but she knew it couldn’t last.

One by one Ruth’s boys had left. Ed had gone long since, soon after Ewan’s second birthday. Work was the official explanation, a job in London he couldn’t turn down, but everyone assumed he wouldn’t be back, and they were right. How much did they know, Ruth wondered, and later discovered the answer to be, more than she did. At first he returned for occasional weekends, but spent half the time with his old journalist pals, meeting up in the Flying Scud in Market Street on Friday night, staying over in someone’s flat, appearing off the bus late on the Saturday afternoon. When the boys spotted him sauntering down the track they raced to be at the gate before him, where they hung on the bars calling out as he approached. Over supper they were noisy, Ed as boisterous as his sons, Ruth making no attempt to calm things down. There was no point. The next day Ed would be on the train back to London.

After a few years he moved on, to Chicago first, then to San Francisco, where he married again and started a second family. And now Sam was there too, working on the same paper thanks to his dad, living on Green Street, having Sunday barbecues with his two little half-sisters.

One Saturday night Larry came downstairs with a bottle of red wine and stuck his head round the door of Ruth’s work room. It was early October and Ruth had lit the fire. She was curled up on the big armchair with a cat on her lap and the dog on the hearth in front of her. She wore faded jeans and a baggy black sweater. The firelight intensified the bronze of her eyes.

‘I thought you might like to share a bottle with me,’ Larry said. Dixie thumped her tail without stirring from the hearth. ‘I sold a picture today.’ Without waiting for an answer, he pulled a corkscrew out of his back pocket and drew the cork. ‘That’s a good going fire you’ve got.’

‘I’ll get some glasses,’ Ruth said, matter-of-fact.

She got up, removing the cat, and went to the battered dresser by the French window. The heavy, dark red velvet curtains were pulled. She cleared a space on a low table and set down two wine glasses. Larry poured.

‘I like your working space,’ he said as he handed her a full glass. There was green paint on his thumb. He looked around at the piles of papers and books, the desk at the window with a computer, phone and fax machine, a chipped mug filled with pens and pencils. He sat down on a low chair on the other side of the fire.

Ruth laughed. ‘It’s a mess. I should be more organised but things seem to work quite well as they are. I usually know where everything is. I read somewhere of a writer who said his desk was in a state of enlightened disarray. I like that.’

They were silent for a while. Ruth stared at the fire. Larry watched her, absorbed by her eyes, large and lucent in that thin face, still with its summer tan. On the mantelpiece were photographs of three young men. He got up again to look at them more closely. ‘Your boys, I assume,’ he said. ‘Hmm. One of them looks like you, same shape of face, same eyes, I guess.’

‘That’s James, the middle one. He’s just gone out to Kenya, to teach. Sam’s a journalist in San Francisco, and Ewan’s still at university.’

‘San Francisco, eh? Neat.’

‘My ex-husband’s there. You’re an east coaster, aren’t you?’

‘New York, but I bummed around California for a bit.’

He was still looking at the photographs. Ruth studied the greyish hair curling at the back of his neck.

‘So,’ he said, turning suddenly ‘What’s the story?’

The cat had returned to its position on Ruth’s knee. The other cat was lying in a basket of wool beside Ruth’s chair.

‘Very domestic,’ Larry said, without waiting for an answer. ‘Woman with cats. And dog. And books and knitting and glass of wine. I could paint it.’

‘There’s no big story,’ Ruth said.

‘Oh come on. No big story? This house is crawling with stories, I bet.’

‘But they’re not all mine.’

‘Some are.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Give me one, just one.’

She could not bring herself to talk of her father, not yet, or to rehearse the tale of Ed’s infidelities, the tackiness of it all. She had no wish, she told herself, to protect Ed, but she felt contaminated, as if in some way she had colluded in the whole thing, as if she had knowingly allowed her marriage to fail. ‘I was feeling cut out,’ Ed said. ‘There were you and the boys and another on the way. I wasn’t part of it.’ Then added, ‘I know it’s no excuse.’

‘No,’ said Ruth, but she wondered, had she cut him out? Had she, wanting always from the start to share everything, instead unconsciously excluded him?

‘I know I can’t expect you to forgive me.’

‘No.’

‘We shouldn’t have come here, to Netherburn. It was all fine before we came here.’

‘You can’t blame the house.’ But perhaps it was the house, because it was hers, and contained so much of lives that were not his.

At the kitchen table her father would say, ‘Remember when we first saw the house? Remember the old fellow with the two fat Labradors showing us round, waving his stick? Lived in the house for fifty years, he said. Met his future wife on the tennis court, he said. Had horses in the stables in those days, and staff of course. Staff, eh? Could do with a staff or two, eh, Ruthie?’

Larry showed no concern at her silence. He sat down and swallowed a mouthful of wine with an expression of exaggerated satisfaction. ‘Not bad,’ he said, then briskly, ‘Okay, so you’re going to make me work for it. Q and A. Let’s see. How long have you lived in this house?’

‘Oh, years and years.’

‘Born here?’

‘No. But I was very small when my family came here.’

‘And you’ve lived here ever since?’

‘Apart from four years at university and three years in Aberdeen when Ed worked on the Press and Journal. Sam was born in Aberdeen.’

‘Ed’s your husband?’

‘Ex.’

‘I assumed that, as in two months I haven’t seen him around.’ He was standing by the fire, one hand on the mantelpiece, the other gently swirling the wine in his glass. ‘We’ve all got an ex.’

‘Have you?’

‘Sure. Name’s Fran. Great girl. Took off with a Canadian guy called Terry who had a real job. Took my daughter with her. That was a long time ago.’ After a pause he added, ‘We were living in Toronto at the time, dodging the draft. Funny thing was, Fran didn’t like Canadians…’

‘Where’s your daughter now?’

‘New York, I think.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘We’re not exactly close.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Hannah. After my mother. Hannah Delia Segal. Delia was my wife’s mother. Hannah Delia Segal. Kept everybody happy. Except us, of course, me and Fran. Well, I was happy enough, but Fran didn’t much care for the artistic life. I don’t blame her really. We were living on air most of the time. So she skedaddled. Terry was in pharmaceuticals.’

‘You came to Scotland and Ed went to San Francisco.’

‘There’s a kind of equilibrium there.’

Larry pushed himself away from the mantelpiece and prowled around the room, peering at pictures on the wall and books on the shelves.

‘Interesting,’ he said.

Ruth didn’t respond. Larry returned to the wine bottle and refilled their glasses. The fire hissed. He sat down opposite her.

‘The logs are a wee bit damp,’ Ruth said.

‘I got to Scotland eventually, but it was a roundabout route. I was in Massachusetts for a bit, after the amnesty, courtesy of President Carter.’ He swirled the wine in his glass thoughtfully and eyed the firelight glint. ‘You know how many died? Fifty-eight thousand. And that was just Americans. Three hundred thousand South Vietnamese, twice as many North Vietnamese. “You will lose and we will win,” Ho Chi Minh said. “Pay any price,” Kennedy said. Plus civilians – no one really knows how many. “Bear any burden,” Kennedy said, “in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” That was one burden he didn’t live to bear. And do Americans bear the burden of maybe five million civilian dead? I don’t think so.’

He sat back in his chair and balanced his now empty glass on his knee. Ruth was silent.

‘Met a young woman in Vermont last time I was back in the States. Her brother was a survivor of Desert Storm. Only he didn’t survive – killed himself. Wife and two small kids. Bitter as hell, the young woman I met, waiting tables in a café in St Johnsbury, bitter as hell.’ He paused again, paying no attention to his empty glass.

‘So. Massachusetts after the amnesty. Hitched up with another woman, but that didn’t work out, and the little place where I was, pretty place on the coast, there were too many people there trying to paint. Seascapes. Boats. That’s when I started painting buildings. That’s when I started to see buildings, really to see. Structures, textures. But the stuff people wanted to buy, the summer visitors – waves and boats. I went to Boston for a bit, got restless, back to New York, got to know a guy who runs art trips for tourists. You know the kind of thing. You tramp round galleries, give the odd lecture, visit Constable country and the Lake District. He signed me on as a guide. I’d never been to England, let alone Constable country or the Lake District. But it was a free trip. I did some homework, busked my way through…’

Larry paused, eyed his glass, still on his knee, as if noticing it for the first time, looked up again at Ruth, curled in her chair, smiling slightly, one hand stroking the cat that was now wedged against her hip. Larry’s eyes were deep blue and intense and she was aware of him watching her as he talked, as if gauging her reaction. He ran a hand over the unconvincing growth on his chin.

‘So the following year we extended the trip to Scotland. Only this time I didn’t go home. I jumped ship. Or jumped bus. I was bewitched – couldn’t leave. I was bewitched by mountains, rivers, Highland cows, lochs, cliffs, eagles, islands, clouds, sunsets – and I don’t even paint that stuff, you know. It wasn’t just the scenery. Something about the air. It affects the way you look at things. Even the smell. I found that in New England. The smell of salt, seaweed, outboard diesel, they affect the way you look at the sea. Painters can’t capture that, though.’

‘You can’t see any of that sort of scenery from here,’ Ruth said quietly. ‘No mountains, no cliffs, no eagles. Sunsets, yes.’

‘I know. Don’t matter. I know where they are. Half an hour’s walk across the fields and I’m at the water’s edge and there are hills on the other side of the firth. I’ll paint that bridge one of these days, like thousands before me. But not yet.’

Ruth got up to put another log on the fire.

‘It’s nice here,’ Larry said. ‘I like it.’

She wasn’t sure if he meant the room, the house, the countryside, Scotland.

‘I can’t imagine living anywhere else,’ she said.

‘It must be tough, keeping all this going.’

‘It is,’ she said. He liked that about her, her directness, no messing. ‘Peter helps. That was the deal when he came. He gets the flat for a low rent and does the grass, the hedges, that sort of thing. It seems to work.’ She paused and looked into the fire. ‘But I do find it hard sometimes, now the boys are gone. It was hard when they were here, but harder in some ways now.’ She paused again. ‘I get tired. And the place is falling apart, of course.’ She laughed. ‘It’s been falling apart as long as I can remember. When I was small my bedroom ceiling fell in. The roof was leaking. My dad was pretty hopeless at practical things, apart from gardening, and my mother was away a lot so problems could be neglected for months. We got used to broken windows covered with brown paper and sticky tape, buckets catching drips. It was a way of life.’

Michael hated it. Michael made up his mind to get as far away as he could, as soon as he could. He shut himself up in his room, the room that would become Sam’s, the room now occupied by Ros, and worked his socks off to get into Oxford. He came back for Christmas after his first term, aloof, flinching at his father’s slack smile and the tremor of his hands, avoiding the kitchen where his mother and sister roasted a turkey and simmered a pudding. Alex was unconcerned. Two years younger than his brother, he was still at school. He sat in the living room next to the kitchen, watching TV and strumming his guitar at the same time. He, too, would go to university, and so would Ruth, but not so far afield.

Ruth and Larry sat on either side of the cheerful fire. The wine was finished. Larry offered to get another bottle but Ruth shook her head. Rain rattled on the window. After a long silence she said, ‘This was our living room, when we were small, I and my brothers. And when Ed was here. Over the years it’s evolved into my work room.’ Larry glanced at her desk. Piles of typescript, dictionaries, a thesaurus, Hart’s Rules, Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

‘Tools of the trade,’ Ruth said.

‘You work with words, I work with paint.’

‘I work with other people’s words. Your pictures are your own.’

‘Well, you could argue that point I guess. I’m sure you put a lot of yourself into your editing. And most of what I paint has been made by man. It doesn’t just come out of my own head. I paint what I see. Creativity’s a funny business – you can’t do it out of nothing. All artists are in debt.’

They smiled at each other across the fire. Dixie got up from her rug and laid her head on Ruth’s lap.

‘Time for her walk,’ Ruth said. She got up, and Larry followed suit. ‘Stay here if you want.’

‘Nah, it’s late. Thanks, though. Thanks for the company.’

‘Next time you sell a picture the drinks are on me,’ Ruth said.

‘At least it means I can pay the rent.’ He went out of the room with a wave of his hand, and began to sing in a low voice ‘I’m goin away for to stay a little while.’ Ruth waited for a moment before she followed. The room seemed empty. He had filled the space, his long legs stretched out, his red-checked wool shirt, his gritty voice. ‘But I’m comin back if I go ten thousand miles.’ He wore baseball boots. He must be in his fifties, she guessed. There were streaks of blond in his beard but his curly hair was grey, his eyes an almost violet blue. She shrugged on a jacket and opened the back door. She and Dixie went out into the rain and walked down the track and round the house as they always did.

Upstairs, Larry was at the window. It was kind of peaceful, kind of reassuring to make her out in the moonlit dark, shoulders slightly hunched, her jacket hood pulled over her head, hands in her pockets, walking slowly, the dog crossing and recrossing the track until they both disappeared beyond the dense trees. He shut his eyes so that he could still see them both.

2

THE HOUSE STOOD white and square beyond fields grazed by sheep and cattle. There were gates at either end of the track. Everyone who approached the house had to stop to open and close them. As a child Ruth would watch sometimes from her bedroom window, as a vehicle turned in from the road a quarter of a mile away, negotiated the gate, bumped down the track, stopped at the second gate. Her father might go out to open the second gate, but never in a hurry, hands in pockets, or he’d send one of the boys. She could remember times when the gate was left open and sheep got into the garden.

‘Get the buggers out of my delphiniums,’ her father would shout. The children would laugh as he charged them with a stick and the sheep panicked and bleated and scattered. The stable doors were rotten, the hinges broken. There was still a lingering smell of horse sweat and a couple of ancient grey straw bales languished in a corner. They used the stables as a dumping ground. Bicycles, an old pram, a rusty wheelbarrow, toys, a scooter without wheels. Cricket bats and warped tennis rackets lay in a heap. When her father died Ruth had gone into the stables, where he’d been found, and sat on the dusty straw until it grew dark. She was fifteen. Michael was away. She had come home from school, walking down the track from the road where the bus deposited her, to find her mother just returned from the hospital, sitting with her coat on at the kitchen table. She made her mother a cup of tea because that was what you did, she knew, and went out to the stables, still in her school uniform. How could dad be dead? He was only forty-six. How could he be dead when his own mum and dad still played bowls and dug their allotment in Falkirk?

Ten years later Fay Cameron came back from a dig in Jordan. She told herself that her aching limbs were a sign of age and examined herself in the mirror. Her hair was slate grey now, but she looked tanned and vigorous, as she always did when she returned from a dig. But she had lost weight, the flesh below her cheekbones had fallen away and left dull hollows. She was reluctant even to put into words that her days of sifting dry earth in relentless heat could perhaps be over, that she was slowing down. They had surely noticed, her colleagues, whom she no longer joined in the excited stampede when a find was announced, and had little appetite for spending long evenings poring over the day’s haul. The pain was deep-seated, not like muscle pain, but something that could not be located. She realised, waiting in the passport queue at the end of her flight home, she had felt nothing like it before, and it seemed to shift, to bubble up in different places and scald, like lava.

The house was empty. The two young women who normally stayed in the flat at the back were away on holiday. The man she had taken on to help with the garden had not been doing much. The grass was uncut, weeds flourished among the vegetables, nettles grew tall among the currant bushes. She’d need to speak to him. There were a lot of things she needed to do, but for the first time in her life Fay Cameron felt defeated. For days her suitcase lay open on the bedroom chair, but by the time she had climbed the stairs she had no energy to empty it. Her daughter and elder son were married now, living their own lives about which she knew little. She blamed herself, but perhaps it wasn’t too late to get more involved and take a proper interest in their lives. She was a grandmother now. Perhaps they would come to Netherburn, her son and her daughter with their children, bring their voices to the empty rooms. But she could hardly bear to contemplate the prospect of people in the house, small children running around, footsteps, laughter, quarrels, tears. She wanted no witness to her weakness.

Later that summer Alex drove down from Inverness and stopped at Netherburn on his way to a book sale. His mother was thin, her hands shaking slightly and her skin looked stretched and discoloured. She moved slowly through to the kitchen to make coffee. She brushed off his anxious enquiries – no, she hadn’t seen a doctor. It was just tiredness, stress, she had been overdoing things, the recent dig had been particularly demanding. She spoke briskly, but her hands were clenched on her lap. That night Alex phoned his sister in Aberdeen. Ruth departed for Netherburn with her baby son, two suitcases and the boot of the car stuffed with baby gear. Fay Cameron was admitted to hospital, but after a week she was home again. She said she wanted to die in her own bed, which she did, when the rowan berries were fully red and the brambles ripening.

Ruth would remember these weeks as a strange, out-of-time period, when she occupied a world that was both deeply familiar and shockingly unreal. She knew every corner of the house, every