The Green Flash (28 page)

Her eyes were cool, sizing up, not unfriendly but non-committal.

‘Are you? …' I began.

‘I'm Malcolm's widow.'

‘Oh … I see.' The Ayrshire heiress. Who, it seemed, had brought good looks as well as siller. ‘I thought you might have been one of his sisters.'

On cue another female showed. Shorter and older than the first, a thick black jersey over a shabby black woollen frock. We were introduced. This was Lucie, Malcolm's sister, sallow-faced, and her lips tight and plump like a closed fist. She looked as if she'd missed her man by saying too many Hail Marys.

‘Do come in,' said Alison at last, and led the way into the drawing-room. ‘Can I get you coffee? Or something stronger?'

‘Coffee would be fine.'

We talked, Lucie sitting by the window staring out and joining in with a few dry crumbs when she felt like it. I reckoned she must have been Malcolm's elder sister; maybe most of the troubles of the family weighed on her.

Alison rang the bell for coffee and the same little maid came in, glancing at me askance before she left. The Sealyham wobbled across and sniffed at my shoes, probably scenting the gun dogs. He thumped his tail and whimpered.

‘You'll be wanting to see Mother,' said Lucie abruptly.

‘If she's to be seen,' I said. ‘Not that it matters if she's not.'

‘I don't think she will wish to talk business,' said Lucie, as if there was a disagreeable smell about it. ‘That is all left for Mr Macintyre.'

‘I didn't come to talk business.'

‘I'll see if she'll see you, then.' She got up and left. When I sat down again I said: ‘I'm a bit hazy as to the number of Abdens in this house. Or even in the district. I never met one until I met Malcolm a few years ago.'

A very still young female, this: her head might have been one of the cameos in the hall.

‘Malcolm's four daughters are away at school. My town … she is out with her nurse. Apart from Lucie and myself there is Lady Abden and – er – Mary.'

‘Mary?'

‘Malcolm's other sister. She is not well and tends to keep to her room.'

‘Do you live here yourself all the time?'

‘Most of the time. Should I not?'

‘I wondered whether you spent part of the year with your own family in Ayrshire.'

‘Kirkcudbright,' she corrected.

‘Sorry,' I said, ‘or is ignorance no excuse?'

She half smiled; very delicate lips, choosy, fastidious. You wondered if Malcolm's extravagant, extrovert style mightn't have jarred on this contained young female.

She said: ‘We spent one summer at Wester Craig. Then after Malcolm's death I was waiting for the birth of my daughter. Then Sir Charles took ill. I have felt it my place to be here …'

Coffee came. The little maid looked so goggle-eyed at me as she served it that I was tempted to pinch her bottom. Just in time she moved out of reach.

‘And you,' said Alison Abden when we were again alone. ‘Shall you make your home here?'

I thought to cough up what I felt about the place, but restraints were growing on me with increasing age. ‘Depends what I've inherited.'

‘I thought Mr Macardle would have explained …'

‘A little. Anyway, I've a profession in London …'

She stirred her coffee. ‘I know. It was you who made a present to Malcolm of perfumes and things – four years ago, was it? More? Yes, well, I've used Faunus ever since.'

‘Bread upon the waters,' I said. ‘As a matter of fact, I had noticed it.'

She did not raise her eyes, which were long and pale-lidded and brown when you saw them.

‘Do you know this part of Scotland?' she asked.

‘I've never been to Scotland before.'

‘I thought you went to the same school as Malcolm.'

‘I don't count schooldays.'

The faint smile again. ‘Don't you like your family?'

‘They haven't given me much cause to.' Then I added: ‘As a Lowlander, you may also have found their exclusiveness hard to bear.'

‘Not at all.'

‘Not at all?' I echoed.

She looked at me then. ‘ But you seem such a typical Abden, if I may say so. Not in looks perhaps, but something in your manner. Forgive me if that seems unpertinent. But is it possible that the exclusiveness was not all on one side?'

I stared back at her and laughed. She flushed and seemed about to join me, when the door came open and Lucie was on view again. She looked disapprovingly at us both and said:

‘Mother will see you now.'

III

Lady Abden was a small woman, well upholstered with cushions in a big black chair. She'd been quite a looker; her face broad over the bridge of the nose, which had probably grown more noticeable with age, arched brows still dark over pale stony-blue eyes, very fine-textured wavy hair which was now curled over her forehead; you could see how jolly that had been. She looked older than her late husband's sixty-nine.

Did one kiss one's aunt? (One wouldn't have minded kissing one's cousin-in-law downstairs.) Lady Abden came up with the answer by putting out a wrinkled hand on which a couple of diamond rings looked out of place. (The trouble with diamonds is that they're ageless.)

‘So you are Stewart's son?'

‘Yes.'

‘Pray sit down.' Her voice had just a trace of Scottish accent.

I took a hard seat. Lucie squatted by the window and looked out, just as she had downstairs.

‘So you have come to claim your inheritance.'

‘Some people achieve greatness,' I said, ‘some have it thrust upon them.'

Big ears for a woman. She shouldn't have worn the pearl drop earrings because it drew your attention to them.

‘Your name is David, is it not? David Kilclair?'

‘It is.' She'd scored 100 so far.

‘Are you a Catholic?'

‘No.'

She put out her bottom lip and breathed deeply. ‘Your father was.'

‘He was brought up a Catholic but let it lapse; I don't know when; before I was born.'

‘When he married. That's when he lapsed.'

‘Could be.'

‘Is your mother still alive?'

‘Oh, yes. Not old yet. Remarried, of course.'

‘Of course.' You didn't know whether this meant she ought to have known, or that she would expect nothing else of such a woman. ‘You were the only child by the marriage?'

‘Yes, Aunt. Fortunately.'

Lady Abden frowned. ‘My brother-in-law died in unhappy circumstances.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘he was drunk.'

Lucie stirred. ‘I don't think my mother wishes to hear all the –' She stopped as Lady Abden raised a hand.

‘You come of a very old and staunchly Catholic family, as you must know. In this area in particular we are rather – an enclave. I hope you may in due course consider returning to the Faith again, for the sake of the family, for the sake of your ancestors and your descendants.'

I checked my first reply. ‘I doubt it, Lady Abden.'

‘I could arrange – we could arrange …' She looked across at Lucie. ‘We have an excellent priest here, Father Donald; you would not find him without an intellectual basis for his beliefs. You might consider that you owe it to your family to arrange one or two meetings …'

I said: ‘It's just not on.' I couldn't ask her what the hell she thought I owed her of her family, which had shrunk in horror because one of its sons had married a Jewess.

Silence for a bit. The colour in her cheeks didn't look artificial. But there was no warmth in her eyes.

‘The baronetcy carries little with it. As I expect you know.'

‘That was my impression.'

‘You may wonder at the – er – division of the Abden family into two properties some thirty miles distant. But perhaps Mr Macardle will have explained this.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Wester Craig has been the family house of the Abdens since the sixteenth century, but over the years the land we inherited or acquired came to be around the shores of Loch Fiern, so in the late eighteenth century we built this house and moved, keeping the other as a hunting lodge. Then the family fell on hard times, most of the land round Wester Craig was sold and the house was allowed to fall into ruin. Some fifty years later, when our fortunes had taken an upturn, Wester Craig was rebuilt and made habitable again, and that is how it has remained.'

‘A family home,' I said, ‘unused by the family.'

‘Oh, indeed not! The eldest son when he married has always lived there – that is, until he inherited.'

‘I see. I see.'

She put her bottom lip out again. ‘There is, of course, a degree of money and property in the family itself. This house, for instance. And we have eight thousand acres, and some other possessions. Had Malcolm succeeded he would have inherited all of it – or most of it, with of course adequate provision for my daughters. So it is very sad for me to see the baronetcy and all that it has meant to us through the generations going to a – forgive the expression – to an outsider.'

I said: ‘I understand how you feel, Lady Abden. You've had two tough breaks. Malcolm could father nothing but girls; and a famous manufacturer's rotten tyres saw to the rest. Without that you'd never have had to meet me, let alone see me slip undeservedly into the ermine, or whatever one does slip into on these great occasions. But as for being an outsider …'

She waited. ‘Yes?'

‘Well – not to split hairs – I am just as much an Abden as Malcolm was … And more so than you, since you married into the family –'

Lucie was on her feet. ‘Will you please leave! I will not have Mother spoken to in such an insulting fashion!'

‘No,' said Lady Abden. ‘Let us hear him out. I do not suppose you will come here again, Sir David, so you may say what you will while you
are
here.'

An odd moment to think of Shona, but I did. It was suddenly as if she was beside me saying once again. ‘Behave yourself, you stupid man!'

I was swallowing thirty-odd years of spleen but couldn't keep it all down.

I said: ‘My dear Aunt, I am not here to insult you, but to
meet
you. I came up – was nagged into coming up here by Macardle – for the first time yesterday. I don't much like Scotland or the people in it; I have my own life in London, so whether
I
shall ever come here again remains to be seen. I shall certainly not trouble you more than I can help – you or your daughters or your daughter-in-law or anyone else. But it's my name too. I came by it honestly in the marriage bed. This title frolic is nothing I ever wanted or ever should want. But presumably we've got to live with it. Don't you agree?'

There was a pause while Lady Abden fingered her pearls.

‘I understand you are with a perfumery firm.' She said it as if I was trading in French letters.

‘Are you married?'

‘No.'

‘Living with a woman?'

‘Yes.'

Lady Abden wrinkled her nose. ‘That's all the rage nowadays, I believe.'

‘It was when I left London.'

She glanced at me coldly. ‘We have – we try to keep to – more traditional forms of behaviour in the Highlands.'

‘I've no doubt there's plenty of fornication goes on.'

She sighed. ‘I think you are rather a disagreeable young man.'

‘Quite a lot of people think so,' I agreed. ‘Perhaps it was a bad mixture, the Scot and the Jew.'

‘You have said it, not I.'

‘I had no choice in the matter. You do understand that, don't you?'

She sighed again. ‘At least the mixture did not produce a nonentity. Perhaps it is better to dislike a person than to ignore him.'

‘At last, Aunt,' I said, ‘ we have agreed on something.'

I

‘I'm
sorry
,' I said to Shona. ‘I know you warned me, but practically every conversation went downhill.'

‘How unnecessary. Life is so short. Why should one have to quarrel with one's relatives? A blood relationship should not be a blood-poison relationship.'

‘After I left Auntie,' I said, ‘I met the other daughter, Mary. She was on the landing outside, in a blowsy dressing gown, complaining to the maid. She was as drunk as a tick.'

‘Dear, dear. What time would this be?'

‘About midday. I must admit she was the only one to greet me with any real warmth. Possibly drink runs in the family.'

‘A lot of things seem to run in the family! Did you see your factor in the end?'

‘He caught up with me when I was at breakfast yesterday.'

‘Why try to avoid him? You had to see him sometime.'

‘I wanted to take people on the hop. Not be cushioned by some smooth gent who had arranged it all in advance.'

‘And was he a smooth gent?'

‘Well, very tweedy. And rather well bred in that way that never quite carries conviction. But all right. He's agreed to continue to look after Wester Craig for me.'

‘What is it you have actually inherited?'

‘Well, this house, Victorian of the worst period but with a Tudor core, sizeable but rickety, needing money spending on it; two cottages; about five hundred acres of scrub.'

‘Not a grouse moor?'

‘Not a grouse moor. Grassy sort of shallow-soil land with boulders and a stream running into the nearby loch. Some trout or a salmon or two, no doubt. Sheep.'

‘And beyond?'

‘One way the sea and the loch; behind the house moorland going up to mountains. Stags up there and a few grouse, I suppose; but that's all owned by the Countess of Something-or-other. Abden land is pretty extensive at the further side. Not mine, though.'

‘Will it pay its way?'

‘What, the property? Oh,
no
. Nothing like. Maintenance and repairs, caretaker, no shooting or fishing to rent out.'