The Wicker Tree (3 page)

   'No one, Beth. No one I can think of,' said Bill.

   'Right, except the Lord. I'm doing this for Him,' said Beth. It sounded melodramatic but Bill recognised that it was true.

Brother Kenny was about to start his address when she sat down just behind him on the stage next to Steve. The band had left their instruments behind, but Holly had already seated herself at the piano. The collection was in progress: two women passing black ten-gallon hats down the rows of worshippers. Beth reflected, not for the first time in this church, that the pastor ought to get up one day and ask the Lord to help him put the whole congregation on a diet. Most of the men out front were dressed in cowboy clothes; boots, silver-decorated belts and hats which they wore on their heads, except of course during the saying of the Lord's prayer. Beth loved them. These people were, for her, the salt of the earth. Good, kind, God-fearing people. Her people and Steve's people. But she thanked God that he was a real cowboy, not just a suburbanite dressed up.

Brother Kenny took the microphone from its stand by the lectern and started to stride across the stage.

'Lord,' he said, 'this is a special day for this church. Because two of our young people, Lord, will go forth from here to do Your work. Like St Paul in the olden times they are goin' forth to preach Your word, Lord…'

Beth only half listened to what Brother Kenny was saying. She, herself, was trying to get used to talking to the Lord as if He was a next-door neighbour, chatting over the hedge from his back yard. Brother Kenny was good at it. But for her it had never been easy. She tried to think of the friendly approachable Jesus, but the vengeful Jehova of the Old Testament tended to materialise. Now, however, Brother Kenny was referring specifically to her and to Steve. She focused her attention on his pacing figure, his slightly theatrical but effective gestures, his lean, expressive face under his cowboy hat.

'We are gathered today to say Godspeed to two of our Redeemers who are going to give a year of their young lives to Jesus,' he was saying. 'They are going to bring His message to the poor people of Scotland. This is the second year the Redeemers Choir have been over to their Christian Music Festival. But I got to tell you folks that our Missionaries, going door to door to bring the good news – they've found it real tough going. Some of these dear Scots don't even believe in angels, and some are hardcore atheists.'

Brother Kenny had stopped by Beth's chair and placed a hand on her shoulder.

'Beth,' he went on, 'I want you to know we are all real proud of you, because we all know you only gotta raise your little pinky to go right on being a truly great singin' star. Steve, you take good care of this lovely lady, d'you hear? You are one lucky son of a gun to be goin' with her, but you know that. God bless you both and bring you back safe and pure to us here, and we will give you the wedding of the year. And that's a promise. Amen.'

The church was suddenly filled with the noise of cheering, clapping, stomping people, which only subsided as Beth stood and signalled to Holly to start playing. A hush fell almost instantly as Beth handed a slightly surprised Brother Kenny the redundant mike, stepped forward to the edge of the stage, and started to sing.

'My soul does magnify the Lord

And my spirit does rejoice

In God, my Saviour

For He has regarded the lowliness Of his handmaiden

For behold, from henceforth

All generations shall call me blessed

For He that is mighty has magnified me

And holy is His name.'

The piano, underscoring her voice, carried the melody that Johan Sebastian Bach had written for this canticle more than two hundred years earlier. But, even he, who must have heard some of the greatest singers of his age, could not have failed to be moved, exalted even, by this wonderful instrument that was Beth's voice.

'For He has shown strength with his arm He has shattered the proud

In the imagination of their hearts

He has put down the mighty from their seat

And He has exalted the humble and meek

He has filled the hungry with good things

And the rich He has sent empty away.'

 Steve, who had never heard her sing like this before, was dazed by the beauty and wonder that she had created in the church. He applauded along with the congregation, who not only had never heard a sound like hers before, but had never heard a hymn (let alone a canticle) without the backing of guitars, drums, accordions, xylophones and the like. Steve guessed that Brother Kenny, applauding with the rest, was relieved that Beth's magnificent sound was not going to disrupt the church's traditional cowboy music. At least not for another year.

The bus carrying the Redeemers Choir to the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport stopped to pick them up from the melee of fans and wellwishing members of the congregation. As they emerged from the church, Steve saw his pa being interviewed by Buz Dworkin, a reporter for one of the local TV stations.

'So it's your boy, Steve, is it, going with Beth?'

'Sure is,' said his father proudly. 'They been promised since eighth grade. His ma, she found them playin' "I'll show you mine, you show me yours". Made them promise. Wait till they're wed. She's gone now, rest her soul. Still, before she went, she had them make a commitment. They're members of that – they call it the Silver Ring Thing. The ring says they won't have no screwin' around – just no sex no-how – till the day they're wed…'

Steve was more embarrassed by this revelation of pa's than was Beth. Sitting next to each other on the plane, with the twenty-strong Redeemers Choir all around them, Beth and Steve held hands. Both were lost in their own thoughts as they took off, bound for Great Britain. But both of them were thinking pretty much the same thing. The commitment they had made to avoid sex until marriage had worked pretty well as long as they were both living apart and taken up with their separate busy lives. Now they were going to be together, day in, day out, and all the time they must keep to this commitment. Beth thought it would be very hard. Steve was afraid it would be impossible.

As for the dangers that Big Bill and many others had warned them about in Europe, they had long since discounted these. In addition to service to God, this was an adventure. And what was adventure without some element of risk? People they knew had been to Europe and returned with nothing worse than astonishment at the price of everything.

Pretty soon they slept.

SCOTLAND'S SPRING COMES later than England's, but on the Borders between the two nations it is well advanced by mid April. The kitchen gardens in little towns like Kelso, Coldstream and Tressock are already full of fruit blossoms, and the rough winds that blow across the bare, heather strewn countryside do not wait for the darling buds of May but are already scattering a torrent of petals around the sturdy stone houses of these borderland Scots.

Tressock Castle rises like a cliff face from a rocky promontory where the River Sulis, a tributary of the Tweed, provides it with half its moat. Its towering stone flanks are surmounted by an odd jumble of turrets, mansard roofs, domes and pinnacles. It is a Scottish baronial collage of a building. Somewhere its innards are mediaeval, sometime courtyards long since enclosed as great airy Adam-decorated rooms and everywhere, on the lower floors, huge windows have been punched into the cliff-face walls, to let in the precious light, work done in the seventeenth century when the possession of lots of valuable glass was a mark of conspicuous consumption.

On the dry side of the castle, as it were, lawns and parterres, reflecting pools and fountains, immaculate glass houses and a wellstocked, walled kitchen garden all attest to this being the home of people who care about their surroundings and can afford to do so. Only the topiary, which forms a kind of honour guard from the castle's porte cocher, past its stables, to the great gates that lead to the little town of Tressock, is so unusual as to be condemned in local guide books as 'odd'. Foreigners, unused to British English, do not always realise how severe a censure this adjective implies, for the carefully pruned yew trees that parade along each side of the drive suggest rows of jaunty phalluses.

On the comparatively rare occasions when the sun penetrates the grey, purple cloud cover over the Tressock hills, it waits until it has risen high enough for its warmth to seep through, casting pale shadows on the castle's lawns. But just occasionally it surprises by rising clear and bright over the heathered hills at dawn.

On such a day, Sir Lachlan and Lady Morrison found themselves awakening in their Tressock Castle home to great shafts of blinding sunlight coming through the windows of their bedroom and penetrating the half drawn curtains of their huge four-poster bed. Four broad-bosomed, bearded hermaphrodites, carved in ebony, supported the canopy above the awakening couple. Lady Morrison closed the bed curtains hastily, shutting out the sun, and thought, perhaps for the thousandth time, how she hated the hermaphrodites and how extraordinary it was that Lachlan admired them.

She watched her husband slowly awaken. In the fifteen years of their marriage she had become accustomed to the unexpected from Lachlan, save in a small number of foibles and habits where he was as consistent as a well-oiled chiming clock. Unusually for a Scot, he never took a bath, subjecting himself to freezing showers instead, and he shaved with a cut-throat razor that had belonged to his greatgreat-great-grandfather, Sir John Morrison (VI of Tressock), who had served with the Coldstream Guards at Waterloo under the Duke of Wellington. It lived, this razor – actually there were several – in the long-dead soldier's leather travelling kit. The sound of it being sharpened on its stone slab always put Lady Morrison's teeth on edge. So she had bought Lachlan a state-of-the-art electric razor as a May Day present. He thanked her with his customary civility and suggested she use it on her legs.

But now he was completing what, for him, was the ritual of becoming totally awake. His eyes stared at her, unblinking, unwavering for at least thirty seconds – a long time, at any rate. It was as if some battery inside him was slowly activating and then, suddenly, startlingly, he was again the vivid presence that filled her days, her life. He was speaking to her, speaking urgently.

'Delia, I want you to be ready to go to Glasgow tomorrow early,' he was saying. 'This wretched concert is so late this year it gives us very little time to do what must be done.'

'But I've still got the feasts to plan,' said his wife a little plaintively. 'Unless you think we could persuade everyone to celebrate May Day a little later… well, people do it with birthdays.' She had seen the expression on his face and knew at once the absurdity of her suggestion. 'I'm joking, of course,' she added hurriedly.

At breakfast, Lachlan's mobile cell phone rang repeatedly. Beame, a tall, corpulent butler with a mincing walk poured coffee while Lachlan fended off a series of business calls. Delia took the phone from him so he could finish his breakfast. It rang again almost at once and she answered it.

'This is Lady Morrison. My husband is having breakfast, Mr Tarrant.' She put her hand over the phone and looked questioningly at Lachlan. He scowled and stretched out his hand for the phone. By the time he spoke his voice was quietly composed:

'If you want a statement from me in reply to your article – in the Echo was it? Yes… you can have one. Call my office and make a time to come in, Mr Tarrant. It's Magnus isn't it? I am always anxious to be completely open with the press, you know that… Well you should. I'm away for a few days. But as soon as I get back… I look forward to it, Magnus.'

Lachlan has been studiously polite with a journalist whose hectoring tone could easily be imagined by Delia, who had met the man more than once.

'Does all this fuss they're making over the water worry you?' she asked.

'No. Why should it? Every nuclear power station in the country, probably every one in Europe, has the local press cooking up stories about dangers to the local population. If it's not radiation, it's the hazard of some terrible accident. Nuada is no exception. Our accident was quite a while ago, and it wasn't as serious as it might have been. They never seem to quite accept that.'

'Well it affected those fish in the river,' said Delia

'They only ever got to photograph that one mutant fish out of the Sulis. But what real damage it has done they simply can't figure out. Listen, they'll keep on trying to get another story out of it. And we've got to keep on showing we've nothing to hide.'

Beame had meanwhile reappeared.

'The Glee Club have arrived, sir,' he announced. 'I've shown them into the music room. Coffee is already there, ma'am, so if I may be excused?'

For a moment Delia looked puzzled. Then she remembered the task for which Beame needed to be excused.

'Of course, Beame,' she said.

The sound of the Glee Club singing drifted through the open doors of the music room, up the marble Jacobean staircase with its heavily carved balustrades and into the room where Delia was putting the finishing touches to the public uniform worn by most Scots women of her kind: sensible shoes and a heathery tweed suit over a pale purple cashmere jersey, a string of good pearls and a brooch of enamel and gold, framed in modest sized diamonds, in this case representing the arms of the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment to which a former husband had briefly belonged before she left him for the far more interesting and, it must be said, challenging Sir Lachlan.

Delia lifted the house phone to call Daisy, the cook, but got no answer. She knew that Daisy, while unusually good at cooking anything but vegetables and a conscientious member of Alcoholics Anonymous, tended to fall off her wagon as the heavy responsibility of preparing the May Day feasts approached. Delia was about to hurry down to the kitchen when she was detained by her mirror (a seven-foot-high Victorian looking glass which reflected the whole six feet of her), not simply to confirm that her lipstick was on straight or that her tights showed no wrinkle at the ankle, but to check that the Lady Morrison face and figure, celebrated in paintings by Hockney and Annigoni, had not somehow faded away overnight.