Emily (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

    AFTER a fortnight, Rory started getting restless and decided to return to England. We stopped in London and booked in at the Ritz. I must say I did enjoy being rich - it was such bliss not having to look at the prices on the menu.

    We were in the middle of dinner, I lingering over a crępe suzette because it was so delicious and Rory halfway through his second bottle of wine, gazing moodily out at Green Park, where the yellow leaves whirled and eddied away from the wet black branches of the plane trees.

    Suddenly he summoned a waiter:

    ‘I want my bill,’ he said, adding to me, ‘finish up that revolting pudding, we’re going home tonight.’

    ‘But we’re booked in here,’ I protested.

    ‘Doesn’t matter. If we hurry, we can catch the sleeper.’

    ‘But it’s Friday night,’ I said, ‘we’ll never get a bed.’

    ‘Want to bet?’ said Rory.

    We tore across London in a taxi, fortunately the streets were deserted, and reached Euston station just five minutes before the train was due to pull out.

    ‘You’ll never get on,’ said the man at the booking office, ‘it’s fully booked.’

    ‘What did I tell you,’ I grumbled. ‘We’ll have to sleep in a cattle truck.’

    ‘Stop whining,’ said Rory. His eyes roved round the station. Suddenly they lit on one of those motorized trolleys that carry parcels round stations and are always running one over on the platform. It was coming towards us. Stepping forward, Rory flagged it down.

    The driver was so surprised he screeched to a halt and watched in amazement as Rory piled our suitcases on.

    ‘What the bleeding hell do you think you’re doing, mate?’ he said.

    ‘Drive us up Platform 5 to the first class sleeper for Glasgow,’ said Rory.

    ‘You want me to do what?’ asked the driver.

    ‘Go on,’ said Rory icily, ‘we’ll miss the train if you don’t hurry.’

    He climbed on and pulled me up beside him.

    ‘We can’t,’ I whispered in horror, ‘we’ll get arrested.’

    ‘Shut up,’ snarled Rory. ‘Go on,’ he added to the driver, ‘we haven’t got all bloody day.’

    There was something about Rory’s manner, a combination of arrogance and an expectation that everyone was going to do exactly what he wanted, that made it almost impossible to oppose him. Grumbling that he’d get the sack for this, the driver set off.

    ‘Can’t you go any faster?’ asked Rory coldly. The driver eyed the fiver in Rory’s hand.

    ‘You won’t get a penny of this,’ said Rory, ‘unless we catch that train.’

    We gathered speed and amazingly stormed through the barrier unopposed and up the platform. Train doors were being slammed as we reached the sleeper.

    Put the luggage on the train,’ said Rory to the driver, and strolled over to the attendant who was giving his lists a last-minute check. • I edged away, terrified there was going to be a scene. ‘I’m afraid we’re booked solid, sir,’ I heard the attendant say.

    ‘Didn’t the Ritz ring through?’ said Rory, his voice taking on that carrying, bitchy, upper-class ring. ‘Afraid not, sir,’ said the attendant.

    ‘Bloody disgrace. Can’t rely on anyone these days. Expect your side slipped up, one of your
staff
must have forgotten to pass on the message.’

    The attendant quailed before Rory’s steely gaze. He took off his peak cap and scratched his head.

    ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’ said Rory. ‘I’m on my way back from my honeymoon, my wife is quite exhausted. We booked a sleeper and now you’re trying to tell me you’ve given it away.’

    As the attendant looked in my direction, I edged further away, trying to merge into a slot machine. ‘I really don’t know what to say, sir.’

    ‘If you value your job,’ said Rory, ‘you’d better do something about it.’

    Two minutes later an enraged middle-aged couple in pyjamas were being shunted into a carriage down the train.

    ‘I’m awfully sorry, sir,’ the attendant was saying.

    ‘You might have thanked him,’ I said, sitting down on the bed, and admiring the splendour of our first-class compartment.

    ‘One doesn’t thank peasants,’ said Rory, pulling off his tie.

    CHAP’T’ER SIX WE drove towards the ferry which was to carry us to Irasa. I glanced at Rory hunched over the wheel, demons at his back, the beautiful face sullen with bad temper. His black mood had been coming on for several hours now.

    At last we reached the ferry. Under a grey and black sky a mountainous sea came hurtling towards us, thundering, moaning and screaming, and dirty with flying foam.

    ‘Hello, Mr. Balniel,’ said the man on the gate. ‘I wish you’d brought some better weather. It’s been raining six weeks in Irasa, even the seagulls are wearing sou’westers.’

    On the boat the sky darkened noticeably, the temperature dropped and the gulls were blown sideways like pieces of rag in the wind.

    I’m not sure Scotland’s quite me, I later thought disloyally, as we bumped along one-track roads with occasional glimpses of sulky-looking sea.

    On our left a huge forbidding castle lowered out of the mist.

    ‘Nice little weekend cottage,’ I said.

    ‘That’s where Buster and Coco live,’ said Rory. ‘This is us.’

    I suppose it had once been a rather large lodge to the castle - a grey stone two-storey house, hung with creeper, surrounded by a wild, forsaken garden.

    I started to quote Swinburne, but Rory shot me such a look.

    I shut up.

    I decided not to make any flash remarks, either, about being carried over the threshold. Rory was extraordinarily tense, as though he was expecting something horrible.

    He certainly got it. I’ve never seen such shambles inside a house: broken bottles, knocked-down lamps and tables, glasses strewn all over the floor, dust everywhere, thick cobwebs. The bedrooms looked as though someone had used them as ashtrays, the fridge like a primeval forest, and someone had written ‘Goodbye forever’ in lipstick on the mirror.

    The house consisted of a huge studio, a drawing-room almost entirely lined with books, two bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen and a bathroom; all were in absolute chaos.

    ‘Oh God,’ said Rory, ‘I left a message with my mother to get someone to clean the place up.’

    ‘It’s all right,’ I said faintly, ‘it’ll only take a few hundred years to put to rights.’

    ‘I’m not having you whisking around like Snow White,’ snapped Rory. ‘We’ll sleep at the castle tonight. I’ll get someone to come in tomorrow.’

    I looked out of the bedroom window. The view was sensational. The house grew out of a two hundred and fifty foot
cliff
which dropped straight down to the sea.

    ‘I hope we don’t fall out too often,’ I joked weakly, then I saw a cellophane packet of flowers on the bed. ‘Oh look,’ I said, ‘someone remembered us.’ Then I shivered with horror as I realized it was a funeral wreath of lilies. Inside the envelope, on a black-edged card, was written ‘Welcome home, darlings’. ‘How beastly,’ I said in a trembling voice. ‘Who could have done that?’

    Rory picked up the card. ‘Some joker who’s got it in for me.’

    ‘But that’s horrible.’

    ‘And quite unimportant,’ he said, tearing up the card. He opened the window and threw the wreath out, so it spun round and round and crashed on the rocks below.

    Startled I looked into his face, which glowed suddenly with some malice I couldn’t place.

    ‘Come here,’ he said softly.

    He pulled me against him, pushing my head down onhis shoulder, one hand tracing my arm, the other moving over my body. Then he smiled and closed his long fingers round my wrist where the pulse pounded.

    ‘Poor little baby,’ he whispered. He could always do this to me. ‘Let’s go next door,’ and he pulled me into the dusty spare room with the huge window on to the road and began to kiss me.

    ‘Shouldn’t we draw the curtains?’ I muttered. ‘They can see us from the road.’

    ‘So what?’ he murmured.

    Suddenly I heard a scrunch of wheels on the road outside. Swinging round I saw a blue Porsche flash by. In the driving seat was a red-headed girl who gazed in at us, a mixture of despair and hatred in her huge, haunted eyes.

    I enjoyed staying at the castle, living in baronial comfort, and making the acquaintance of Rory’s black labrador Walter Scott, who had been living with Buster’s gamekeeper while he had been away. He was a charming dog, sleek, amiable, incurably greedy and not as well trained as Rory would have liked.

    After a few days we went back to live in Rory’s house (very pretty it looked, after it had been cleaned up) and began marriage proper.

    I didn’t find it easy. I was determined to be one of those wonderful little homemakers putting feminine touches everywhere but, as Rory remarked, the only feminine touches I added were dripping pants and stockings, and mascara on his towel.

    I tried to cook, too. I once cooked moussaka, and we didn’t eat until one o’clock in the morning. But Rory, who was used to Coco’s French expertise, was not impressed.

    I also took hours over the washing. There weren’t any launderettes m Irasa, and then it lay around for days in pillowcases waiting to be ironed; and Rory never seemed to have clean underpants when he needed them.

    After a couple of weeks he said, quite gently, ‘Look, housework obviously isn’t your métier - I’m not sure what is. I’ve hired a char, four days a week, and she can do the ironing and washing as well.’

    I felt humiliated but enormously relieved.

    The char, Mrs. Mackie, turned out to be a mixed blessing. She was wonderful at cleaning, but a terrible gossip, and obviously irritated Rory out of his mind. As soon as she arrived he used to disappear into the mountains to paint, and she and I sat round drinking cider and talking.

    ‘I’ve got a wicked bad leg,’ she said one morning. ‘I shall have to go and see Dr. Maclean.’

    ‘Finn Maclean?’ I said.

    She nodded.

    ‘What’s his sister Marina like?’

    ‘She’s no right in the head, although I shouldn’t say it. The old Macleans never had any money. Dr. Maclean, her father, was a gud doctor, but he dinna know about saving. Marina married this old man for his riches, and it’s dancing him into his grave she is. Perhaps now young Dr. Maclean’s come back he’ll keep her in order.

    ‘Why’s he come back when he was doing so well in London?’

    She shrugged. ‘Irasa has an enchantment. They all come back in the end.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

    IRASA - Island of the Blessed, or of the Cursed. I could understand why none of them could escape its spell, and why only here could Rory find the real inspiration for his painting.

    The countryside took your breath away; it was as though the autumn was pulling out all the stops before succumbing to the harshness of the Highland winter. Bracken singed the entire hillsides the colour of a red setter, the turning horse chestnuts blazed yellow, the acacias pale acid green.

    With Rory painting all day, Walter Scott and I had plenty of time to wander about and explore. The island was fringed with wooded points like a starfish. Out of the ten or so big houses, on one point lived Rory and me, on another Buster and Coco, on another Finn Maclean and on yet another Marina and Hamish. The islanders’ white cottages were dotted between.

    One afternoon in late October, I walked down to Penlorren, the island’s tiny capital.

    Penlorren was a strange sleepy little town, exquisitely pretty, like a northern St. Tropez. Wooded hills ringed the bay, but the main street was an arc of coloured houses, dark green, pink, white and duck-egg blue. In the boats the fishermen were sorting their slippery silver catch into boxes.

    As I walked about I was aware of being watched. Suddenly I looked round and there was the blue Porsche parked by the side of the road: the same red-headed girl was watching me with great undefended eyes. I smiled at her, but she started up the car and stormed down the main street, scattering villagers.

    ‘Who’s that?’ I asked a nearby fisherman, and somehow knew he was going to answer, ‘Marina Maclean.’

    I’d forgotten to get any potatoes and I went back to the main store. Three old biddies were having a yap, they didn’t hear me come in.

    Did you see Rory Balniel’s wee bride?’ said one.

    Pur lassie, so bonny,’ said the second. ‘She might as well have married the divil.’

    ‘There’ll be trouble ahead,’ said the third. ‘Now young Dr. Maclean’s back again.’

    Then they suddenly saw me, coughed, and started taking a great deal of interest in a sack of turnips.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    THE feeling of unease I’d had since the first night of my honeymoon grew stronger. Another fortnight passed. I had to stop fooling myself that our marriage was going well.

    I was so besotted with Rory I wanted to touch him all the time; not just bed touching, but holding hands and lying tucked into his back at night like two spoons in a silver box. But Rory seemed to have no desire to come near me, except when he made love to me, which was getting less and less often.

    I tried to kid myself he was worrying about work. I knew about geniuses, secretive, more temperamental, of finer grain than ordinary mortals, and more easily upset.

    I tried to
talk
to him about painting, but he said I didn’t understand what he was doing and, anyway, talking about it ruined it.

    I was in the kitchen one morning. I had learned to be quiet when work was going badly, the clatter of a pan could drive him mad. He wandered in yawning, rubbing a hand through his hair, looking so handsome with his sleepy, sulky face, I felt my stomach tighten.

    ‘Do you want some coffee?’

    ‘Yes, please.’

    Feeling more like a normal wife, I went into the kitchen, started percolating coffee, and sighed inwardly for the days when Nina and I had lived on Nescafé. I thought of the beautiful, haunted girl in the blue Porsche.

    ‘I keep seeing Marina Buchanan,’ I said.

    Rory looked at me. ‘So?’

    ‘Not to speak to,’ I stammered. ‘She’s terribly beautiful. Shall we ask them to dinner?’

    ‘I’m sure they’d enjoy your cooking.’

    I bit my lip. I didn’t want a row.

    ‘I’m sorry about my cooking. I am trying.’

    ‘Sure you are, extremely trying.’

    ‘Rory, please, what’s the matter? What have I done? You haven’t laid a finger on me for at least four days.’

    ‘You can count up to five? That is encouraging,’ said Rory acidly.

    ‘Most newly weds are at it all the time,’ I said.

    ‘We might be, if you were less unimaginative in bed. I’m surprised all your exes didn’t expect something a bit more exciting.’

    I jumped back as though he’d hit me. Sometimes there was a destructive force about Rory.

    ‘God, you bastard,’ I whispered. ‘If you were a bit more encouraging, I might be less unimaginative. And if I’m no good in bed, why the hell didn’t you say so in the beginning?’

    ‘I was probably too drunk to notice,’ he said. ‘I hate you,’ I screamed.

    I stormed out of the room, rushed upstairs and threw myself on the bed, bursting into tears. Five minutes later I heard a door slam and his car driving off down the road.

    I cried for hours. ‘He’s only doing it to hurt me,’ I kept saying, trying to reassure myself. I got up, washed my face and wondered what to do next.

    I thumbed through a magazine. You could have pulled corks with the models’ hair. I liked music but you couldn’t listen to records all day. I supposed I could put on a deeply felt hat and go for a walk.

    I sat up, dismayed: I realized I was bored. No one was more aware than I that boredom was a mark of inadequacy. People with inner resources didn’t get bored. No; as Rory had discovered, I’d got hidden shallows. I went to the fridge and ate half a tin of potato salad.

    There was a knock on the door. Delighted, I leapt to my feet and rushed to open it. There stood Marina Buchanan, quivering with nerves as if even now she might turn and run. She was lovely, if haunted, in a red coat and long black boots, her shining Titian hair blowing in the wind like a shampoo commercial. Her mouth was large and drooping, her face deadly pale, and there were huge blue shadows underneath her extraordinary eyes. I understood everything my mother had told me about Garbo. I wished I hadn’t eaten that potato salad.

    ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Marina Buchanan.’

    ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’m Emily Balniel.’

    ‘I know,’ she said, ‘Coco sent me a postcard suggesting we should get together.’

    ‘Oh, how lovely,’ I said. ‘Come in and have some coffee or something.’

    ‘How nice it looks,’ she said, gazing in admiration at the drawing-room.

    ‘Let’s have a drink, not coffee,’ I said. ‘I know one shouldn’t at this hour of the morning, but it’s such a celebration having someone to talk to.’

    We had the most tremendous gossip. She didn’t seem haunted any more, just slightly malicious and very funny. She adored Coco, she said, but couldn’t stand Buster. She wasn’t very complimentary about her husband either.

    ‘He’s terrific between the balance sheets, so it means I can have everything I want, but I’m getting a bit fed up playing Tinker, Tailor with the caviar…’

    I giggled.

    ‘Where’s Rory?’ she said.

    ‘Out painting.’

    She looked at me closely. ‘You look tired. Has Rory been giving you a hard time?’

    ‘Of course not,’ I said firmly.

    ‘Don’t get sore, I’m not being critical, just realistic. Rory’s divine-looking, he exudes sex-appeal the way other men breathe out carbon dioxide, and he’s got terrific qualities.’ She paused as if trying to think what they were. ‘But he can be difficult. Where other people make scenes, Rory makes three-act plays. When he’s upset he takes it out on other people, he always has. My brother, Finn, is difficult, but in a more predictable way, and he’s not spoilt like Rory, or bitchy either. Rory’s always trying to send Finn up, but it doesn’t work because Finn couldn’t care less. And although Rory’s always had everything, somehow Finn makes him feel inadequate. They hate each other’s guts, you know,’ she added in satisfaction. ‘There’s bound to be fireworks - the island isn’t big enough for both of them.’

    She got up and wandered round the room. I looked at that wild, unstable loveliness, and wondered what had possessed her to marry an old man when she could have had anyone.

    ‘Why don’t you both come to dinner on Thursday?’ I said.

    ‘That’d be lovely, but you’d better ask Rory first.’ At that moment Rory walked in.

    ‘Hello, Rory,’ she said softly, and then when he didn’t answer immediately, she went rattling on.

    ‘It would be nice if you could learn to say hello sometimes, Rory. With six months’ practice you might even learn to say, "It’s a lovely day".’

    I steeled myself, wondering what sort of mood he was in now, but he turned round, then came over and kissed me on the mouth, quite hard.

    ‘Hello, baby, have you missed me?’

    ‘Oh yes,’ I said, snuggling against him, feeling weak with relief.

    Then he looked across at Marina, and ice crept into his voice. ‘Hello, Mrs. Buchanan, how’s marriage? Still making Hamish while the sun shines?’

    I giggled. ‘We’ve been having a lovely gossip. I’ve asked Marina and Hamish to dinner here on Thursday.’