Beneath the Abbey Wall (41 page)

McAllister provided soup, Joanne an apple pie. They stayed in the kitchen, the children in the sitting room, happy in front of the TV set.

“So, McAllister, what are your plans? Are you staying in the Highlands?”

“I'm courting you, remember? We'll talk, spend time together, see how it goes. Is that acceptable?”

“More than acceptable. I've never had anyone I can really talk to—except Chiara. But never a man. I loved it when we used to talk late into the night, when you shared your books; even jazz is beginning to sound more than just a cacophony of cats.”

She was about to ask him if he could really forgive her for the affair with Neil. But she stopped herself.
If it really mattered to him, I wouldn't be here in his house, my children with me.

And ever after, when Neil Stewart's name was mentioned, McAllister would feel a twinge of jealousy, but mostly gratitude to the stranger who had forced him to acknowledge that he, McAllister, who thought he knew most things, was illiterate when it came to the language of the heart.

D
on McLeod had been released on Saturday at mid-morning.

As he walked out into an ordinary street on an ordinary November day, he felt the thaw beginning to melt his heart. He didn't want that; it meant facing the loss of Joyce.

“Can I give you a lift?” Beech's voice was loud and clear and most of the street could have heard him if they took an interest in the prison—which they tried very hard not to do. “I thought perhaps you would like to join us for luncheon.”

“Thank you,” Don said, his voice faint, unused to speaking across a space more than eight feet.

Beech drove sedately down the steep hill to the big house on the river. When they got out of the car, Don glanced at the house next door and shivered.

“Cold?” Beech asked—for it was cold, and clear and crisp with air as sharp as a rapier—or a fish knife.

Don could not reply.

They went into the kitchen, where Countess Sokolov was waiting.

“A cup of real tea would be fine,” Don replied when asked if he wanted to eat.

They were sitting around the table, Don on his second cup, when he said, “I'd like your help arranging a memorial service for Joyce.”

“Consider it done,” Beech told him.

“I would be honored to help,” Rosemary said. “And I'd like to offer you a room here for as long as you want.”

“Thank you. I can't face going home—not yet.” Don couldn't look at them. Their kindness was genuine, and Rosemary had been Joyce's dearest friend, and he knew they wouldn't fuss.
Besides,
he thought,
I've nowhere else to go.

*  *  *  

A severely depleted Monday morning news meeting was about to start. Around the table were McAllister, Rob, Joanne, and Betsy.

Rob was still feeling drained—not physically but from emotion; all he had were a few cuts that hadn't needed stitches and were healing nicely, but the memories of Eilidh were imprinted on his brain, and he would never be so trusting again.

He looked at McAllister. And Joanne. Saw lightness had begun to dawn on faces aged by the past weeks.
I hope to goodness the two of them get together,
he thought,
we could do with some good news.

“Come off your motorbike?” Hector asked Rob when he came in.

Rob laughed. “Hector, read the paper on Thursday, that'll tell you what happened.”

Hector was completely unaware of anything except the dire state of his beloved Clachnacuddin, who, having lost at home on Saturday past, were now in the bottom five of the Highland League.

Then Hector asked, “Where's Neil? We canny do the paper without him.”

They had all been aware of footsteps on the stairs, but it was a newspaper office; it could be anybody.

“Now tell me Hector Bain, why would you be needing some
Canadian when you have me?” Don McLeod was looking at Hector, smiling, and for an instant, Hector failed to recognize him, he was so shrunken.

“Mr. McLeod!” Hector was whispering, his eyes so round he looked like a prehistoric bug, scared the apparition might be Don's ghost, not the real man—now minus a stone in weight, plus ten years added to his age.

“Don!” Joanne jumped off her chair. She hugged him. His face came not much higher than her breasts. He snuggled in, saying, “Now this is what I call a welcome.”

He ignored the questions from Rob,
how, when, why didn't you tell me,
the squeals from Betsy of—
goodness me,
the repetition of
Jings!
from Hector.

He took the cigarette McAllister offered, examined it, gave it back, and lit one of his own.

He lifted up papers, searching, then, scrabbling around in his drawer, he found his wee red pencil, which he tucked behind his right ear. He sat in his usual chair. He did not look at the seat his late wife always occupied, which was left empty in tribute.

He looked around, and said, “Right, front page—I'm upping the font size on the heading. ‘Former Soldier Accused of Murder.' That'll do nicely.”

*  *  *  

It took nearly two weeks before Don could bring himself to return to his house, and when he did, he hated the place. He unlocked the courtyard gate. He walked down the passageway. He unlocked his front door. He stepped inside. And he started to cry. He sobbed huge heaving sobs of pain of grief of loneliness. He went to sit on the sofa to recover and found he couldn't bear to be in the house a minute longer. He ran the kitchen tap, washed his face, looked around, found nothing he needed except
his mother's Bible, which he put into a string bag. He walked out, not bothering to lock up—
If a burglar takes the lot, he's welcome
—and left to catch the bus to the Ferry Inn.

Jimmy nodded as Don came into the public bar. “Don. I was just leaving, but let me shout you a drink.” He did not look surprised to see Don. He did not give the impression that anything of any significance was happening. He looked a moment longer than usual, taking in Don's sobriety, his new suit, his new shirt, and the haircut and the string bag.

“I'm no' drinking, thanks all the same,” Don said. “I'm wondering where I can find your mother.”

Jimmy did not remark on the absurd idea of a nondrinking Don McLeod. And he did not hesitate. “I'll take you.”

He wanted Don to visit his mother. He knew she needed someone to talk to. And her son wouldn't do.

Jimmy took the ferry across to the Black Isle. They branched off the shore road, taking the route that climbed up and along the hillside giving a view of the firth, the mountains at the westerly end.

The fields lying fallow were dark brown—from a distance almost black. The trees were skeletons on the hillsides, marking the courses of burns, lining a driveway to a farm, in all shapes and sizes and in sharp contrast to the ubiquitous pine trees now being planted throughout Scotland by the Forestry Commission.

An abomination,
Don thought,
all planted in rigid rows. What's wrong with bare empty hills?

The car crested the spine of the Black Isle. The northern horizon was filled with the hibernating bulk of Ben Wyvis, now sporting a scattering of light snow, as though the mountain had a bad case of dandruff.

They crossed the bridge over the River Conon, took a right turn, and continued to the McPhees' winter encampment, a place
not far from the distillery and a fine spot to winter the horses.

Don had been here a few times before, but never in the winter. It looked forlorn without the delicate leaves of the birch and the rowan and the hazel to soften the round, seemingly derelict benders, the rusting vehicles, the caravans that looked as though a can opener could easily slice through them, and the abandoned washing machine, the old boiler that came from a tugboat, the scrap metal and sheets of corrugated iron, all piled up in a heap next to the whisky-colored water of the burn, which was now almost wide enough to be a river.

“Afternoon, missus,” Don said when he came into the warmth of the bender.

“How are you keeping?” Jenny asked.

“Fair to middling,” came the reply.

“Tea?”

“Aye.”

They were silent as Jenny made the tea using a huge black kettle but a new-looking gas cooker. Jimmy had left, and it took the two old friends a while to warm up to a conversation.

“So you're out for good?” Jenny asked.

“The sergeant has been charged.”

“Aye.” Jenny sighed. “He was always a bad lot even as a bairn.”

They were sitting either side of a stove made from an old oil drum; the flue had a right-hand bend and poked out through the wall, but the joins were not tight, and an occasional backdraft sent miniature smoke signals into the room.

“I never met the Canadian,” Don started, “but I heard he was a decent fellow. Clever too.”

“Aye. Chrissie did a good job raising him.”

“Does McAllister know? And Jimmy?”

“Aye, they know about Neil. There was no keeping it from them.” She shook her head, and one of the numerous hairpins
that trapped her hair in a bun came loose and fell into her lap. “But they don't know about Chrissie.” Then, speaking slowly, Jenny added, “Anyhow, that's nobody's business but mine.”

“But Neil knows Chrissie was your daughter?”

“I never told him. He knows who his birth mother was. And who his father is. He found the record of his christening in the parish records in Inchnadamph. I saw him one night in the Ferry Inn. He looked at me. I said nothing. But he knew I knew. And that was enough.”

Neil had met Joyce, that Don knew, for she had told him not three days before she was killed. But Neil didn't know then that she was his mother. That was what he and Joyce had been talking about the night she was killed; Joyce had decided they had to tell Neil. Too late.

But after Neil discovered the truth of his birth, he never once made contact with the man he knew to be his father.

So be it,
Don thought.

“It all happened a long time ago,” Jenny continued, “and I could see he's done well for himself. An' that'll have to be enough.” She looked across at him, looking directly at him for the first time. “The woman in the orphanage in Glasgow said our Davey had been sent away, so we'll never know what became o' him.”

Don could feel her pain that had been kept alive over thirty-five years by hope.

“Aye, no one wants a three-and-a-half-year-old, 'specially a wild one who barely spoke English. But your wee laddie, he was that bonnie . . . Joyce told me she always kept his baby picture in her handbag—never went anywhere without it . . . ”

Jenny stopped. She saw how Don had curled up into himself, his arms folded across his chest, holding the pain in tight, in case the genie escaped and destroyed him.

“And our Chrissie, she loved that wee boy. When she was nursemaid to him, thon time when Joyce had to go to hospital when she was no' right in her mind, and you had disappeared off the face o' the earth, baby Neil, he was left wi' Chrissie and he took to her like he never did wi' Joyce. And a fine man he turned into—so it was all for the best.”

She said this like she meant it, but she wasn't sure what she believed anymore. There had been something about Neil that bothered her.
But he's gone and I doubt he'll be back.

“I sore wish Joyce hadn't left me thon jewelry, though, I don't know what on earth to do wi' it now I have no daughter.”

“You sacrificed a lot for Joyce—even your own daughter.”

“And if it hadn't been for him being mistaken for a tinker, the welfare would never have taken your son.”

“So that's why you let Chrissie go to Canada?”

“Partly.” Jenny was remembering the sad wee soul her daughter Chrissie was before Neil came to fill her life. “There was a lad, Neil Hunter—a Dingwall lad, Chrissie never got over him being killed. The last week o' the war it was, and her only fifteen, but she'd loved him since they were bairns and was affected bad by his death. She named the baby after him. And after they got him back, and Joyce was in hospital”—Jenny refused to call it the asylum or the loony bin—“I could see Chrissie was starting to believe the baby was really hers.”

And Jenny McPhee remembered that after a few months, and Joyce still not fit to care for her own child, not even showing interest in him, there was no parting her oldest child, her only daughter—born when she herself was fifteen—from baby Ian Donal Mackenzie McLeod, whom she called Neil. Neil Stewart.

Jenny knew that was why Chrissie barely kept in touch over all the years—only acknowledging the annual bank deposit through the solicitor, terrified Joyce might turn up to claim the
child. But Joyce never would. She had vowed to Jenny that if her stolen child, her wee Davey, was returned, then, and only then, would Joyce travel to Canada to meet Chrissie and the boy.