The Matrix (16 page)

I had been in my new quarters a week when I admitted to myself that it was time to visit Harriet. She had been much on my mind since my return, but until now I had been almost paralysed by my feelings of guilt about Iain’s death. My newfound rationality scattered all such notions, and I now felt greater guilt at having neglected her for so long. I telephoned right away, and this time Harriet herself answered.

There was a long silence when she heard my voice, as though I were someone she had thought lost or dead and never expected to hear from again.

‘I got your letter,’ I said. ‘I rang from Fez, but you were away. Someone else answered; a woman.’

‘That was my mother. She said someone had called without giving a name. I thought it might have been you.’

‘I’m back in Edinburgh. Can I come to see you?’

She paused, and for a moment or two I thought she was about to say no. But I was mistaken. She wanted to see me, there were things she had to talk with me about. Could I come that afternoon?

I took a bus to Dean Village. Harriet was waiting for me with tea and cake, just like the old days. She had just arrived home from school. A pile of dog-eared exercise books sat on the table, ready for marking. A copy of the collected poems of Eliot lay open on the arm of a chair by the fireplace.

She had changed. Physically, her face was thinner, and there were grey streaks in her hair that had not been there before. More striking was the alteration in her manner. The brightness that had once impressed and cheered me had dimmed, and I was left with an abiding impression of sadness. Sadness, and what I took to be anger, not very far beneath the surface. She simultaneously comforted and frightened me.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I knew you would in the end.’

‘I’m sorry, I should have come before this.’

‘There’s no need to apologize. You say you got my letter?’

‘It reached me in Tangier.’

‘Tangier? How very exotic that sounds. I wrote it just before . . . Iain’s death. You were away so long – I had no other means of contacting you.’

‘I should have come back. Seen Iain, talked with him.’

‘No, why should you? It wouldn’t have made any difference.’

She lifted the pot and poured two cups of tea, Earl Grey, in china cups, milk for her, lemon for myself. Thin slices of Dundee cake lay on the plates. Tangier and Fez and Marrakesh, Duncan Mylne and Sheikh Ahmad and the Comte d’Hervilly all suddenly grew remote, components of a world I no longer inhabited, wiped out by the ordinariness of tea and cake.

‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘You said very little in your letter.’

‘There was little enough to say. It started a day or two after Iain went to visit you. He came back that evening quite upset. About what was happening to you, about this man Mylne. He’d asked around a bit more, found out things about Mylne that he didn’t like. Anyway, a couple of days after seeing you he had the most blinding headache. It was gone by the next day, but I was really worried about him that night. Nothing had the least effect on the pain. He was awake all night, and at one point I found him in the kitchen, crying, it was so bad.’

I could see that she was growing upset, reliving Iain’s illness. ‘Harriet, you don’t have to go on. You’ve been through enough.’

She looked up at me suddenly, catching a tear with a finger grown skilful over the past months.

‘Enough? Really? You think there’s a point at which someone says “that’s enough, you can feel better now”? Well, there isn’t, because it just goes on and on, getting worse. It’s not like prison, you know, you don’t have a day or an hour when they come along and say, “that’s it, your time’s up, you’ve done your stretch, you’re free to go now”.’

I looked at her gently.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’

Her eyes widened.

‘I’m sorry, Andrew. I just forgot. You know what it’s like as well as I do.’

‘Well enough,’ I said. I smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter. I haven’t been a very good friend to you this year.’

‘Let’s forget about all that, Andrew. The chief thing is you’re here.’

She looked thoughtful.

‘It is all over, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Mylne and everything?’

I hesitated. I had not really thought about it in such stark terms; but now the question had been put directly, I realized that was just how matters stood.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think so. I’ve decided to break with Duncan. I don’t plan to see him again if I can help it.’

‘I’m glad to hear that. Iain worried about you a lot in the last weeks. His headaches kept coming back, and he started losing weight. They did all sorts of tests, but nothing seemed to come back positive.

‘In between the headaches he wrote a long letter to you. He never let me see what was in it, or even so much as look at it; but he told me several times it was vital you read it.’

‘I see. Was this why you wanted me to come back?’

She nodded.

‘Yes. Iain was very disturbed in his mind, as though something was haunting him. There was a dream that kept troubling him. He would call out in his sleep, night after night. I tried to talk with him about it, but he would say nothing. “I need to speak to Andrew, I must speak to Andrew” – that was all he would say. I thought your being here might calm him down.’

‘I’m sorry. If I’d known sooner.’

‘I don’t think it would have done much good in the end. You couldn’t have saved his life, no one could have done that. Perhaps your being here would have made him easier in his mind, it’s hard to tell. But it might as easily have worsened his condition.’

‘You’ve no idea what was in his mind?’

She shook her head. Her gestures were wooden and somehow charmless. I understood. Grief is not ennobling.

‘What about this letter? Did he finish it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘If he did, I haven’t been able to find it. I looked everywhere after he died, when I was going through his things, but there was no sign of it anywhere.’

‘Could he have posted it to me?’

‘That’s possible. Early on, he was still going out in between bouts of illness. It was only later that he was forced to stay indoors. They took him in to the Royal Infirmary at the end: that’s where he died.’

This time the bonds she had fashioned for herself did not hold. Her hand started trembling, and she put her cup down quickly, spilling tea across the table. I looked on helplessly as she doubled over, huddling against the force of the thing inside her. It passed slowly, as I had known it would, retreating back into its little black lair, gathering strength for the next time, and the next.

‘It was a very painful death,’ she said, without apology. ‘Even with sedation, he suffered a great deal. The postmortem results were ambiguous. Whole sections of his brain were scarred, but they could find no cause for the injuries, no obvious agent. But it’s over now. Knowing won’t bring Iain back.’

We mopped up the spilt tea and I poured a fresh cup for her. Her hand had steadied again.

‘I’ll look for the letter,’ I said. ‘He may have sent it to the department. Or to Tangier. There must be a way of getting it back, if it’s there.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, but I could see that she no longer wanted to talk about it.

‘Have you been to church much since . . . Iain died?’

She shook her head.

‘I went at first,’ she said. ‘I thought it would help: it always had done in the past. But nothing anyone said made sense any longer. I don’t go much now, I don’t feel in harmony with it. My old church friends are shocked, of course. And perhaps they’re right, perhaps I’ll change again.’

We went on talking until the cake had been eaten and the teapot drained. Outside, it had started to grow dark.

‘I’d better be going,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a bus on Queensferry Road.’

As I got up, I knocked the copy of Eliot from the armchair. I picked it up and made to replace it. It had fallen open at ‘The Waste Land’. As I lifted it, my eye caught a passage on the right-hand page.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded . . .

I shut the book and handed it back to Harriet. She had seen what I was reading.

‘That was Iain’s dream,’ she said. ‘A hooded figure luring him to something terrible. It’s what he said in his sleep. He would never speak of it in daylight.’

In the course of our conversation, Harriet asked if I had been in touch with my parents. The truth was that I had neglected them badly, seldom writing, and telephoning not at all. I had sent a short letter from Morocco, but it might as well have been penned by a stranger, so remote was its content from the reality I was then living. Since my return, I had given priority to sorting out my life in Edinburgh and had avoided making contact with home.

Harriet’s enquiry helped me make my mind up. That same evening, I made my way to a call box on Home Street and dialled their number.

My mother answered. I spoke to her in Gaelic, as though it would soften the shock.

‘This is Andrew,’ I said. ‘I’m back in Edinburgh.’

I held my breath. She was the strongest of the cords pulling me back to reality. I needed her then more than I could say.

‘Andrew. It’s wonderful to hear from you. We were getting worried something had happened to you out in Africa.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m all right. I got back a few weeks ago; but I wanted to wait until things settled down before getting in touch. How are you both?’

And so we began to talk of everyday life. Like Harriet’s tea and cakes, my mother’s island gossip chased the shadows further from my mind. Life in Stornoway continued as before, marked only by minor changes: an elder of the kirk had died, a baby had been born to one of my cousins, an Indian family had arrived from the mainland and opened a shoe shop in the main street. That was the most exotic thing, but scarcely unusual nowadays.

My money ran out and she rang me back. No one else was waiting.

I didn’t say much about Morocco, portraying the summer as little more than a mixture of holiday and research.

‘I’m glad to be back,’ I said. ‘I stayed away too long.’

‘I’m glad you’re well, dear,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you soon. Now, I know your father would like a word with you.’

I heard the handset put down, then footsteps and muffled voices. Moments later, my father came on the line.

‘Andrew, it’s good to hear your voice.’

He asked about my job, and I told him I was waiting for something else to turn up.

‘Why don’t you come to Stornoway?’ he asked. ‘You could spend the winter here, save a fortune on heating bills.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’d rather stay on. I need to sort things out here first. Going home would be . . . well, it would be an easy way out. I don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe when I’m more settled. I might be able to get over for Christmas.’

‘That’s a good idea. But, look, would you have any objection to my coming to visit? I have some leave due, I could be with you next week.’

My first impulse was to say ‘no’, but I checked myself. Why not, after all? It would be good for me to see my father. I badly needed his unshakeable scepticism.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like that very much. Why don’t you both come? I can’t put you up, but there are plenty of guesthouses round here.’

I gave him my new address. I was already looking forward to his visit.

‘Andrew, before you go, there’s one wee thing I have to mention. While you were away, a man from Glasgow City Council got in touch. He’d been trying to contact you. I told him you were in Morocco, and gave him your address there. Did he ever get in touch?’

‘No, I had no letter.’

‘Well, I said I’d speak to you as soon as I heard from you. He’d like you to ring him sometime. His name’s Logan, I have his number here.’

‘Do you know what it’s about?’

‘Well, he wouldn’t tell me. But I think it’s to do with Catriona’s grave. I have a feeling it’s been vandalized.’

Jamie Logan worked for the parks and cemeteries division of the council. I rang him the next morning. He sounded relieved when I explained who I was.

‘Dr Macleod, I’m so glad you’ve finally got in touch. I did write to you at your university department and Tangier, but I don’t suppose you had my letters.’

‘No, my father told me you spoke to him.’

‘That’s right. He said he’d ask you to ring as soon as you contacted him.’

‘What’s it about? Father thought it might be to do with my wife’s grave.’

There was a silence of several seconds during which he assumed his official manner.

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice lower now and more solemn, ‘that’s correct. There’s been . . .’ I heard him hesitate, imagined him choosing his words carefully. ‘There’s been some trouble. From time to time we have vandalism in the cemeteries. It’s mostly young louts on a Saturday night out. They’ll be passing by a cemetery, then one dares another to climb the wall. After that it gets a bit out of hand. They kick over a headstone or two, maybe smash some ornaments. Last year we found graffiti on some Jewish graves. Swastikas and so on.’

‘Her headstone’s been vandalized, is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, no. It’s worse than that. Her grave was dug up one night in August. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your wife’s remains have been stolen.’

I took the next train to Glasgow and spent the rest of the day shuttling between the Council offices and the main police station. The incident had taken place on the night of the nineteenth of August. The next morning, on arriving to start their day’s work, grave-diggers had found the grave opened and the coffin gone.

A police investigation had started immediately, but so far they had drawn a complete blank. Grave-robbing was sufficiently rare to leave the entire Glasgow police force perfectly helpless. This was not a crime like drug-pushing or rape. There were no clues, no lists of suspects with previous convictions, no informers ready to spill the beans for a few pounds. The investigation had centred on youth gangs who might have dug up a grave for kicks, a few would-be Satanists, and a student group at the university called the Burke and Hare Club.