Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories (7 page)

*   *   *

Across the room, Tom and Kitty smiled at each other. Tom said, “Mabel is not the only one who looks marvellous.” Kitty wore a dress so utterly romantic and feminine that she was, all at once, a totally different person. Slipper satin, white and pale blue, with a skirt that rustled when she moved, and a neckline cut low to reveal her delicate shoulders, her vulnerable neck. Her pale, thick hair, clean and shining and very fair, had been arranged in a formal chignon high on the back of her head, and there were pearl studs in her ears and a tiny jewelled watch around one narrow wrist.

“Where on earth did you get that lovely creation?”

“It’s terribly old. I had it when I was eighteen and my mother was trying to turn me into a deb. She sent it to me in a great big box. The poor postman could scarcely carry it.”

Tom smiled. “Come in and shut the door. I’m not ready yet, but I won’t be a moment.”

She did as he said, coming to sit on the bed where Mabel had sat. She watched while he put on his shoes and tied the laces, picked up his jacket and put that on too, did up the buttons, disposed of money and keys and handkerchief in various pockets. She said, “What did you give Mabel for a birthday present?”

“A print of Kinton. She says she’s going to take it with her.”

“Where is she going to take it?”

“To a small house in the village. She’s leaving the castle.”

After a little, Kitty said, “I thought she might.”

“I don’t know whether I was meant to tell you or not. You don’t need to say anything.”

“I’m just full of wonder that she’s stuck it out—living here, I mean—so long. I … I’m glad she’s going.”

“So am I. Like she said, it’s best to leave a party while you’re still enjoying yourself. And she doesn’t want to become ill or infirm, and so an anxiety to all her friends.”

“If she does become old and infirm,” said Kitty, “then I shall look after her.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Yes, I believe you will.”

From below them, the music still played. But now, as well, there was the sound of cars approaching, of voices—Mabel’s friends, forgathering from all over the county to celebrate her birthday.

He said, “We should go down. We should give Mabel some moral support.”

“All right,” said Kitty.

She stood up, smoothing down her skirts as Mabel had done, and Tom took her hand, and together they went out of the room and down the long passage to the head of the stairs. Now the music sounded clearly. “Tales from the Vienna Woods.”

Side by side, they started down the stairs. But as they descended, rounding the curve beneath the beautiful arched window, the hall below them revealed itself. He saw it, candle-lit and fire-lit, the flickering flames reflected in the curved, bubblelike surfaces of dozens of champagne glasses lined up upon a table.

Suddenly, it was a moment so important that he wanted to savour it, to spin it out, to remember it for always.

He stopped, and held Kitty back. “Wait,” he told her.

She turned to look at him. “Why, Tom?”

“There’ll never be an instant quite like this again. You know that, don’t you? We shouldn’t hurry away from it.”

“What should we do?”

“Enjoy it?”

He lowered himself down onto the wide lap of the stone stair and drew her down beside him. She sat, sinking down in a whisper of satin skirts, wrapping her arms about her knees. She was smiling at him, but he knew that she understood. A combination, perhaps, of everything that could fill him with pleasure and satisfaction. The time, the place, and the girl.

Kitty. Whom he had known for the best part of his life; and yet had never known at all. She was part of it all. Part of this evening, part of Kinton. He looked about him, at the painted ceiling, the perfectly proportioned curve of the stone staircase upon which they sat together. He looked into her lovely face, and all at once was filled with joy.

He said, “When are you going to move out of your caravan and into your house?”

Kitty began to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Tom asked.

“You. I thought you were going to come out with something enormously flattering or romantic. And instead you ask me when I’m going to stop living in a caravan.”

“I’m keeping the romance and the flattery for later on in the evening. This is the moment for humdrum affairs.”

“All right. I told you, in about two weeks.”

“I was thinking … if you could wait for a month, I’m due for a few days off. I thought I might go to Spain, but I’d much rather come to Northumberland and perhaps give you a hand with your move. That is … if you’d like me to.”

Kitty had stopped laughing. Her eyes, unblinking, enormous, very blue, were on his face. She said, “Tom, you must never be sorry for me.”

“I couldn’t be sorry for a person like you. I might admire, or be envious, or even be maddened. But pity would never come into it.”

“You don’t think we’ve known each other for too long?”

“I don’t think we’ve known each other nearly long enough.”

“I’ve got Crispin.”

“I know you have.”

“If you did come and help me—and I can’t think of anything I’d like more—and at the end of it you decided you’d had enough … I mean, I wouldn’t want you to feel that I wasn’t able to be on my own … be independent. Do things for myself…”

“You know something, Kitty? You’re floundering.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly.” He took one of her hands and sat looking at it. He thought of Mabel and Kinton. Kinton a ruin, and Mabel and the dogs living in a small centrally heated house and probably warm for the first time in their lives. He remembered Kitty sleeping out on the battlements, stubborn and resolute and brave, and he thought of her son Crispin lying in his bed in Kitty’s new house, and watching, through the window, the sun rise.

Kitty’s hand was ingrained and rough and broken-nailed, but he thought it beautiful. He raised it to his lips and planted a kiss in her palm and folded her fingers over it as though he had given her a present.

“What’s that for?” she asked him.

“Endings,” he told her. “And beginnings. Perhaps we’d better move.”

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.

F
LOWERS IN THE
R
AIN

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.

E
FFIE
M
C
L
AREN

L
ACHLAN
G
ENERAL
S
TORES

P
OST
O
FFICE

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.”