The Boggart (3 page)

Emily sensed that Jessup was about to depart from the script, so she squeezed his hand firmly and they went on, perfectly synchronized. “Please let us know if we can answer any questions.”

The man's dark brows drew together, and Emily took a sudden dislike to him.
No sense of humor
, she thought.

“Not a question — a request,” he said shortly. “Go get your mother.”

Before Emily could move, Jessup had swung away from her and opened the door to the back of the house. “Mom!” he called in his clear light voice. “There's a bad-tempered man here to see you.”

Maggie came warily into the shop and found the dark-haired man and her children eyeing each other in chilly silence. He said when he saw her, “This seems an excellent way to lose a good customer.”

Maggie smiled at him. “I do hope you're a good customer. And that we shan't lose you.”

The man pulled a folded newspaper from his jacket pocket. “You advertised a rolltop desk?”

Emily's spirits fell. She had fallen in love with the rolltop desk, which had been in the shop for four weeks now. She had been hoping nobody would buy it, so that her mother might be persuaded to give it to her as a Christmas present.

“Over here,” said her treacherous mother, and led the tall man to Emily's desk. He rolled the deliciously smooth-moving top up and down, poked at the engaging array of little compartments inside, got down on his hands and knees (after first spreading his newspaper fastidiously on the floor) and peered up at the bottom of the desk.

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Maggie said. “It's Victorian — in excellent condition.”

Emily felt more hopeful. Surely no one would pay that much.

“I'll give you a thousand,” said the tall man.

“Twelve hundred,” Maggie said.

“Done!” he said quickly. He stood up. “Will you take a check?”

Emily thought:
Say no. Don't trust him. Say no
.

“Of course,” said her mother happily.

Disgusted, Emily slipped away through the pass door and found Jessup at her side.

“What a creep!” he said.

Emily made a loud, graphic vomiting sound.

Their father and Aunt Jen were sitting together on the back steps finishing the fried rice. Robert looked up, pained. “Please!” he said.

“Well, he's an awful man. And Mom's just sold him that pretty desk.”

“Oh good!” said Aunt Jen. “How much did she get out of him?”

“Twelve hundred dollars.”

“Terrific!”

Emily said with dignity, “I think it's disgusting to have to be sweet and gushy to creepy people just so you can sell them something.”

“Oh darling,” said her father sadly “it's the way of the world. Louise and I will be gushy to almost anyone if they'll give us money to keep the Playhouse alive.”

“Well, I'm not going to spend
my
life doing that.”

“She wants to be an environmental lawyer, at present,” Robert said to Aunt Jen. “I'm going to come listen when she has to persuade some billionaire to finance her saving the whales.”

Maggie appeared on the steps, waving a check. “He wasn't so bad,” she said to her children. “He's a psychiatrist, Dr. William Stigmore. Has an office on Avenue Road. He wants us to find him a bookcase to match the desk.”

“He's a creep,” said Jessup.

“I think you're getting too old for that double-child act,” his mother said ominously. “It's not cute anymore.” Then she grinned at them. “Anyway look at this — Dr. Stigmore left his newspaper on the floor, and look at the ad I found staring up at me!”

She spread the paper on the steps, folded to show a half-page advertisement for an airline. It was full of large black type and exclamation marks. FLY YOUR KIDS TO BRITAIN! it said. And then in smaller print:
ONE PARENT, ONE CHILD FOR ONE ADULT FARE!

“Autumn Special. Bargain flights to London, if you go before November.” Maggie said. “How about it, Robert? Take ten days off before the season swallows you up? Solve the castle problem? Show the children their ethnic background?”

Emily and Jessup stared at her, wide-eyed. Emily said, “You mean you'd take us?”

“Well, well,” said Robert. “See how useful a creep can be?”

     
I
T WAS ONLY
as the big plane rose into the air that Jessup really believed what was happening to him. He felt his body tilted upward, pressed back against the seat by acceleration; he felt a pain in his ears as air hissed into the cabin to balance the thinner outside atmosphere into which they were climbing.

“Swallow,” said his father in his ear, and Jessup swallowed and the pain went away. Outside the window he saw the shoreline of Lake Ontario tilting crazily as the plane banked away from Toronto. He peeked back through the gap between his seat and the window, and caught a glimpse of Emily's face pressed intent against the glass. “Pssst!” he said softly, joyously. “We're going to Scotland!”

“Pssst yourself,” said Emily calmly. “Of course we are.”

But later, hours later, forty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean, she changed places with Robert so that children and grown-ups could each sit with their own kind, and she gazed past Jessup out of the window and whispered, “Look! They're like mountains!” And Jessup too looked at the limitless world of mounded cloud tops below them, glimmering in the last light from the sunset they had left behind, and he knew she was as deeply excited as he was himself. He poked her in the ribs with his elbow, and they grinned at each other.

The half-buried feeling of wonder lasted for a long time, through the airline dinners of which they ate every scrap of their own, and their parents' desserts as well; through a film which they had seen before but laughed at all over again; through sleep broken by an airline hostess offering them orange juice and breakfast far sooner than they wanted them. But they ate and drank just the same, and soon found themselves looking down at a dim-lit layer of cloud dappling the misty green floor that was morning Britain.

Mist was their main impression for quite a while after that. They had dropped into a grey, damp world. A fine rain was falling on Heathrow Airport, where they waited sleepily in line with hundreds of other Canadians and Americans to show their passports at the immigration desk. At length they were beckoned forward as a family group, by an immigration officer with bright red hair and freckles. Jessup felt restive.
We're not just tourists
, he thought,
we're different!
He stood on tiptoe, straining to see over the desk, as the officer surveyed them all.

“What's the purpose of your visit — business or pleasure?” said the officer, to Robert.

“Pleasure, I hope,” said Robert.

“We're going to take over our castle in Scotland,” Jessup said proudly. Emily kicked him, and he kicked back at her without looking, and missed.

The immigration officer looked down at him gravely. “Are you now? Well, just remember that if you take it home you'll need an export license.” He stamped their passports and waved them through.

“He didn't believe me,” said Jessup bitterly, as they went down the stairs to wait for their luggage.

“Didn't you hear his accent?” said Emily. “You dummy — he was
Scottish!
”

I
T WAS
a day and a night before they heard other Scottish voices. Following a plan which Maggie had devised with the help of a Toronto travel agent, they piled their suitcases into a rented car at the airport and drove to a small hotel in London. There, after breakneck visits to the zoo, Queen Mary's Rose Garden and the Royal National Theatre, they spent the night. Next morning they watched the Changing of the Guard, with the shade of Christopher Robin hovering over them, and tried to concentrate on sightseeing, in the old grey city which seemed to have almost as many trees and tall new buildings as Toronto. But all four of them knew that London was only a way station; that their adventure would not really begin until they reached Scotland. Nobody was sorry when in their second afternoon they filled the car with luggage once more and drove to a huge, bustling, echoing railroad station called Euston, where their car was swallowed up inside a railroad car with one end gaping open, like a huge hungry mouth.

Emily and Jessup spent their second British night in a private space which they found entrancing: a sleeping compartment, opening off the corridor which ran along one side of the train. It was a tiny rocking room with a door, a window, a table which folded up to reveal a very small washbasin with hot and cold water, and two bunk beds neatly made up with sheets, blankets and pillows. After a picnic supper in their parents' identical compartment next-door, they tossed to see who got the upper bunk, and Jessup won. Emily didn't mind: it was easier to see out of the window from the lower bunk. She fell asleep very soon, rocked by the rhythm of the moving train and lulled by the traveling song of its wheels. Once, in the middle of the night, she woke up and found the train standing still. Peeking under the blind, she saw the empty, brightly lit platform of a station, with no sign to show her where she was. Emily felt wonderfully detached; the train had taken over her life, whisking her from strange place to strange place in this foreign country. She fell asleep again, and dreamed that she was a bird, flying over cities and rivers and mountains. In her dream she could see the train moving along the ground far below her, like a tiny slow-moving snake, and the sound of the wind rushing by her as she flew was like the song of the traveling wheels. She woke, and found that she was smiling.

And outside the window, the world had changed entirely. The train was carrying them now through dark looming hills, ancient smooth slopes with the glint of water beyond, and the sky behind them brightening. As she watched from her swaying bed, the sun rose, and magically color came into the land, showing her purple-brown hillsides and green fields against a blue-white sky. Emily felt suddenly very excited, as if amazing things were about to happen, and she wanted to wake Jessup and tell him. But instead she was wrapped again by drowsiness, and in the moment that her eyes closed, she heard music. It was the lilt of a single Scottish bagpipe, faraway, plaintive and beautiful, but before Emily could fix it in her memory she had dropped into sleep.

T
HE TRAIN
stood hissing in Fort William Station, in the Western Highlands of Scotland, and they could see nothing for the rain. Water streamed down the windows, and blew all over them as they opened the door, and they scurried along the cold windy platform toward shelter, clutching their overnight bags.

“Welcome to Scotland!” said Maggie, gasping, as they reached the station buildings. “Oh — excuse me —!” She had almost knocked down a small man in railway uniform; he put a polite hand under her arm to steady her.

“It is a wet morning,” said the small man rather unnecessarily, in the soft musical lilt of the Highlands. “Do you have a motorcar on this train?”

“Yes!” said Jessup eagerly. “We're driving to Port Appin!” He shook his wet head, like a puppy.

“Over the other side,” the man said amiably, pointing. “But they will be a little while getting them off. You'd maybe like some breakfast in the refreshment room.”

“Great!” said Emily, and she dragged her brother away before he could begin to tell the man about their castle. She was learning to recognize the signs: the possessive light in Jessup's eye, the breath taken before launching into proud explanation. She felt that if he wasn't careful, a band of jealous Scots, hearing about their bequest, would rise up and throw the whole invading Volnik family out of the country.

“You've got to stop bragging to people about the castle!” she said, as they reached the warm, food-smelling refuge of a cafeteria.

“I never said a word!” Jessup said, injured.

“You were just going to.”

“How do you know?”

“Enough!” said Robert imperiously. He bought them bacon sandwiches and Coke, and coffee for Maggie, and with a noble self-sacrificing sigh he turned up the collar of his windbreaker and went out into the driving rain to rescue their car.

Emily looked out through the wet window at Fort William. It seemed a grey town, bleak and deserted. She said, “Mom, d'you think we should take some sandwiches with us?”

“Oh no, darling,” said her mother confidently. “After all, we're going to our house!”

“Our
castle
,” Jessup said.

I
T WAS
one of those journeys that are taken over by the weather. They were vaguely aware that they were driving beside water, and among mountains, and that the countryside would have been beautiful if only they had been able to see it. But all they could properly see was the rain, running in sheets down the windows of the car, so that the windshield wipers had to flicker furiously to and fro like runners who couldn't quite keep up. Even when the downpour slackened to a drizzle, the clouds hung low and ragged, masking the hills with mist. Robert was hunched over the steering-wheel, concentrating on his left-hand-side driving, and beside him Maggie was intent on the map.

“Through North Ballachulish, and over Loch Leven to Portnacroish — and then you turn left at Appin —”

The names were magical, Emily thought: a different language, a different world. But what a pity it had to be such a wet world. They drove for a long time. Her spirits were beginning to droop in the grey mistiness, and beside her Jessup was very silent.

They were driving along a narrower road now, between hedges and green banks, no longer meeting many other cars. The mist was patchier, more ragged. Sometimes it vanished altogether, and they had a clear sight of water glimmering nearby, with dark mountains beyond.

“That's Loch Linnhe,” Maggie said, checking with her map. “And somewhere in it there's a long skinny island called Lismore.”

They rounded a bend, and came into low-lying land like the flats around the estuary of a river. And suddenly the mist was completely gone, as if it had rolled back toward the mountains across the water, and a few hundred yards away, rising from the glinting grey surface of the loch, they saw a tall square shape set on a lonely rock. It was like a squat grey stone tower, and yet it was not a tower, but had a round tower of its own built at one corner. It had windows like a house, but the windows were very few and very small. It was like nothing they had ever seen before, and though the rock on which it stood was undoubtedly an island, being completely surrounded by water, it was a very small island indeed.

“Is that Lismore Island?” Emily said doubtfully. Maggie's voice was quivering a little with excitement. She said, “I think that must be Castle Keep.”

“I
NDEED YES,
Mr. Maconochie left the key for you,” said Mrs. Cameron. “Though Tommy tells me the lock does not work very well, because it was never used when Mr. MacDevon was alive. Or ever before that, I dare say.”

Emily and Jessup looked at Tommy, who had himself been looking at them and now glanced hastily away. They were all three in that warily inquisitive stage after first meeting a stranger, when if people were dogs they would be walking around one another, sniffing. At the moment Emily and Jessup were mentally sniffing at the news that Tommy was an authority on the lock of Castle Keep.
Their
castle. They weren't sure whether to be outraged or impressed.

Mr. Maconochie had instructed Robert to ask for the key at Mrs. Cameron's shop, but he would have ended up there anyway, for there were only two shops in the whole of Port Appin and Mrs. Cameron's was the only one that sold groceries. All the Volniks had instantly fallen in love with it; there was everything you could want in this shop, from bread to books, from fruit to flour, from nails to knitting needles. One corner of its counter even served as the local post office. It was small and very crowded, and through the window facing the loch you could look out past a neat array of fifteen different kinds of Scotch whisky bottles and see Castle Keep.

“Tommy will take you over in the boat,” Mrs. Cameron said. She was a short, precise woman, wearing an apron that was clearly newly ironed. Like her shop, she looked ferociously clean.

“That's very kind,” Robert said.

“I guess I should do my shopping first,” Maggie said. “We'll be here for five days. I have a list somewhere —” She began fumbling through her handbag.

“You are intending to stay in the castle?” Mrs. Cameron said. She seemed startled.

“You bet!” said Jessup.

Maggie paused. “Is there any reason why we shouldn't?”

“Oh no, no!” said Mrs. Cameron, almost too quickly. “I am just not too sure what . . . I mean, there may not be beds enough. Mr. MacDevon lived there alone all his life.”

“We brought sleeping bags,” Jessup said. “We're used to camping out.” He looked at Mrs. Cameron defensively, and so did Emily; no power in Scotland was going to stop them from sleeping in Castle Keep.

Mrs. Cameron said, as if it were an explanation, “He was a very old gentleman. Very old indeed.”

Tommy said abruptly, in a rather gruff voice, “He kept the place clean as a pin.”

“Oh yes,” said his mother. She patted him gently on the shoulder.

“It was only the dog that smelted,” Tommy said.

“Oh!” said Emily, pleased. “Is there a dog?”

“He died,” Mrs. Cameron said.