In The Garden Of Stones (22 page)

They are
halfway along the hallway on the return journey when Grace realises
she can no longer hear Colin trailing in her footsteps. She turns
to see him leaning heavily against the panelled wainscot, rubbing
at his left leg as if trying to massage away a cramp.

“
You’ve had enough,” she says. “We should go. There’s
nothing here worth you hurting yourself for.”

He
pushes himself off the wall. “I’m fine.”

“
You’re not. You’re in pain.”

“
I’ve come this far, I can carry on,” he says. “We have to
keep going.”

“
Why? There’s nothing here.”

“
Only because you haven’t found it yet.”

“
Found what? I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking
for.”

“
Don’t know … or don’t want to?”

“
I don’t know what–”

“
Have you considered that you might have been brought here
for a reason?” Colin says. “That there might be something your
subconscious is telling you that you need to do, or something that
you need to find. It certainly seems to think it’s something
important, and if it thinks I need to be here with you to provide
some kind of moral support, possibly something painful. Look on
this as some kind of test. There is something here that’s been
hidden away for a long time, Grace, buried deep down, almost
forgotten but not quite, something you hoped never to have to face
again, but now the time has come to dig it out and give it another
good hard look and see how you handle it.”

Not a
trace of the Aberdonian Colin McLeod in that exchange. Just pure …
Malcolm Pettit.

“
Fit’s the ma’er wi you?” says Colin, at Grace staring up at
him open mouthed.

She
blinks, closes her mouth, swallows hard.

He didn’t even know what he was saying.

“
Nothing. Shall we crack on?”

Chapter 22

They
continue to explore the maze of rooms, each one as empty as the
last, each one successively gloomier as the end-of-day light
weakens, diffused through a mesh of cobwebs over the windows, their
footsteps and voices echoing off bare floorboards. When they have
finished the right side, they cross to the left.

Over
here is exactly as Grace expects it to be. The hole in the ceiling
of the gallery is still there, as are the pigeons and their pile of
poop. She stops outside the room in which at the Larches proper she
found the dead body, and backs away.

“
D’ye want me ta go look?” says Colin.

She nods
stiffly, eyes closed. “Please.”

She
hears the sound of the door opening, Colin’s irregular footsteps
clacking on the bare boards, followed by a period of quiet. What
has he found? Before she can summon the courage to look and ask,
she hears the door closing again.

“
It’s alright,” he says. “It’s jest as empty as the rest of
them. No bodies.”

“
I’ve had enough,” she says, her gut still stirring with
disquiet at Colin’s Pettitesque reasoning for them being there.
“Let’s go before it gets completely dark.”

“
This is the last door,” says Colin, reaching for the
handle. “Ye canna stop before the last one.”

This
room looks just like the others, gloomy, cold and empty. Except for
one thing. Sitting squarely in the centre of the room is a box. No
ordinary box though, it is an old fashioned steamer trunk, a
portmanteau, and a well travelled one at that if the battered
appearance and scuffed corners are anything to go by. Every inch of
it is covered in yellowed labels, colourful mementoes of ports of
call perhaps.

“
Aye, aye.” Colin strides over to the box and squats down
beside it, his damaged knees cracking like pistol shots. “Something
interesting here.” He runs his hand over it. “Looks like it’s from
the twenties or thirties. Someone certainly has racked up the air –
or rather sea – miles with this beauty.” He brushes away a layer of
accumulated dust and cobwebs and frowns. “Odd.”

“
What’s the matter?”

“
These labels,” he says. “At first I thought they were
travel stickers, you know the sort, the ones with the names of the
places the traveller visited.”

“
And aren’t they?”

“
No. See fer yerself.”

Curious,
Grace edges forward until she too can read them. They don’t detail
the traveller’s trips to exotic places like Istanbul or Cairo or
Hong Kong, instead they carry an odd collection of words, one to
each label, printed in bold capitals – child, lover, spouse,
parent, cook, cleaner, nanny, whore, doormat.

“
Why would anyone put those there?” Colin asks. “Doesn’t
make any sense.”

It does to Grace. Before she can stop him Colin takes hold
of the lock, presses two buttons with his thumbs, releasing the
centre catch which pops open with a soft
click
.

“
Not locked,” he says.

He eases
open the lid and folds it back on itself, creating two identically
sized boxes joined in the centre by a pair of sturdy hinges. Both
matching sides are lined with newspaper, old and yellowed and
fragile, and are seemingly empty. But not quite. In the box making
up the base half of the trunk lies a solitary item - a rough
notebook with a blue paper cover.

Grace
feels a knot tighten in her stomach. It looks very much like the
one she keeps buried at the back of her underwear drawer. The one
in which she writes her most heartfelt, deepest thoughts. The one
she hasn’t seen for … actually, she can’t remember the last time
she saw it. Could it be hers? She picks it up.

“
What’s that?” says Colin.

The
cover looks the same, feels the same, smells the same. She opens it
to see lines of neat, even, precise handwriting covering the page.
It matches hers, down to the last curlicue. The margins are
decorated with elaborate doodles of rabbits, birds and unsmiling
smiley faces. Without a doubt, this is her work.

“
It’s my book,” she says. “The journal I was told I should
keep to record all my feelings and fears.”

“
Fit’s it deein’ here?”

“
I think this might be what we’ve been looking
for.”

“
Can I see it?”

“
It’s just meaningless scribble.” She drops the book back
into the trunk. “We can go now.”

Colin
retrieves it. “I want to see.” He turns each page slowly and
carefully. “Nice handwriting,” he says. “Mine’s like a spider’s had
a few drams, dipped its feet in ink and staggered over the page
looking for the lav.”

She
snatches the book from him. “Put it back, Colin. It’s
nothing.”

Colin
grabs it back. “If it’s nothing, you won’t mind me reading it, will
ye? And don’t ye think I’ve deserved the right to see what all this
to’ing and fro’ing has been about?”

She
shrugs. “Fine. Suit yourself. Don’t say I didn’t warn
you.”

She
makes a derogatory twirling of her fingers by her temple, the
universal sign for crazy, and goes to stand at the window, arms
crossed over her breasts, hands cupping her shoulders.

Colin
reconnects both sides of the trunk, making himself a seat, and
lowers himself onto it, his back to the window so that the fading
light falls over his shoulder staining the page a dull pink. He
begins to read, and as he works his way down the lines, Grace’s
words sound in his head as if she is reading aloud to
him.

“
Once upon a time, an ambitious young traveller set out into
the world, her only possession, a brand new trunk. Both of them
were clean and smart, eager and ready to embark on a journey, a
cruise through life. The trunk was filled with all the nice things
the traveller would need on the trip, all bright and crisp and
unsullied, along with a goodly measure of hope and ambition and
expectation of a safe and happy journey, and all goes well until
the first of life’s ports is reached and the first of many labels
picked up – the word on it… adult.

Naively the traveller affixed this singular label to the
trunk with a sense of pride in displaying it, but as the years and
the travelling went on, more and more labels were added, each
boldly declaring the stage of the journey reached - wife, mother,
carer, gardener, chauffeuse, seamstress, laundress, cleaner, chief
cook and bottle washer, and not always one at a time.

Sometimes they come a whole cluster at once. All too soon the
original label, the trunk itself, is no longer visible, buried,
smothered... as if it never existed at all.”

Colin glances
round at Grace. She hasn’t moved, arms still folded around herself,
staring out through the cobwebby glass to the garden of stones
beyond. He reads on:

“
So
what became of the freedom loving traveller and her trusty trunk?
When the time comes, if it ever does, that she is free to strip
away all those labels, to lift the lid and get a glimpse inside the
old box, what will she find?

The
dreamer in her says that once freed from its suffocating mantle,
the box will still be intact, still serviceable, waiting be
refilled with shiny new things to embark on a brand new voyage
while there is still time, ready to offer her a second
chance.

The
realist in her, however, knows better.

The
realist knows that nothing remains. Below that myriad of
identifiers, piled one atop another, overlapping, touching,
smothering, the trunk no longer exists, rotted away and leaving
nothing behind but a bare metal skeleton held together with cobwebs
surrounding an empty space where life, love and hope used to be,
until, deprived of light and air and warmth, they withered away and
died, dreams and desires; heart and soul crushed and ground to a
dust fine enough to blow away in the first breeze; a space in which
now lodges detritus of no value or use to anyone.

The
realist knows - the journeying is over. There will be no second
chance.”

There is a long
pause before he closes the notebook, gets up and joins her by the
window.

“
I
think that’s possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever read. Do ye
really feel that way? That yer whole life so far has been a
pointless waste o’ time and effort, and ye ken the rest of it will
be too, so why bother going on?”

“
When you look back over your shoulder at the road you’ve
just travelled,” she says, “and all you can see are shattered
dreams, dead hope and strangled ambition, and then you turn and
look ahead and can only see more of the same and know that no
matter what you do, however hard you try, nothing’s ever going to
change, can you think of any logical reason to bother taking one
more step?”

“
Fer
God’s sake, Grace!”

She
takes the notebook, flicks the pages until she finds what she
wants, and reads the few lines of purple ink out loud.

“
We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only
through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the
moment that we are not alone.
I’ve never known real love and have never had any
true friends apart from Alec and Den, so it stands to reason that
when my life is over, it will be as if I have never lived, leaving
nothing behind of any worth, not a footprint, a shadow, not so much
as a dirty stain on the face of the world.”

Colin is
staring at her, open mouthed. “I don’t know what to say to
that.”

She closes the book, shutting the words back inside. “You
don’t need to say a thing.” She tosses the book into the trunk and
slams the lid closed, the
crash
echoing around the empty room. She takes Colin’s
hand and tugs him towards the door. “Let’s get out of here. I need
some fresh air.”

At the
bottom of the stairs, in the vast tiled hall, Grace stops and cocks
her head. “Listen,” she says. “Can you hear that? It sounds like a
clock chiming, or a bell.”

Colin
listens too. “I canna hear anything. Grace! Wait!”

But she
is already on the move, like a terrier tracking a rabbit, ears
tuned to the sound, she sets off in search of it, trotting down the
servants’ steps, along the short corridor and through the kitchen,
leaving Colin to keep up as best he can, calling out for her to
stop.

The sound, a rhythmic two tone
bing bong
, is getting clearer, drawing her to
it, to the back door, now closed although she feels sure they left
it open when they came in. She grabs the handle and wrenches the
door open – to find Alec standing on the doormat, grinning at her,
a manicured finger pressed against the doorbell.

“
I thought you were out,” he said, holding up a stiff white
envelope. “I was going to leave you this.”

She
recoils, falls against the door jamb, her face carrying an
expression of such utter confusion that Alec drops his grin and
puts out a hand to steady her.

“
You okay darlin’. You look like you’ve just
seen–”

She
doesn’t hear the rest of his hackneyed observation of having seen a
ghost, because darkness has already risen up, engulfed her and
dropped her to the carpet in a dead faint.