Three Junes (24 page)

I PULL INTO THE DRIVE
at Tealing two hours past midnight. A wholly conscious coward, I’ve spent the day ostensibly “thinking”—doing little more than driving numbly about. Mrs. Munn’s breakfast, which I was the last to consume, was more satisfying than ever, but my mood had changed overnight from giddy and bemused to restless and testy. My dreams, though I couldn’t recall their plotlines, were anxious, leaving an afterimage of David’s face at its most disapproving. Irrationally, I let the image niggle away at my mind, like sand in a shoe you’re too lazy to stop and remove.

I checked out as late as possible and drove slowly around the island with my windows open. Against a flat sea, the gulls’ voices rang out keenly. The sunlight felt mild and buttery, casting few shadows. All this serenity, alas, had little effect on me, and knowing it was time to get back, I took the first afternoon ferry. But leaving Ardrossan, I began to wander again, almost compulsively, taking the most circuitous backroads, feigning an interest in the lakes, unable to keep my mind on the questions at hand. If I thought about them for more than a few minutes, I began to feel indignant, as if I were no more than a pawn in some genealogical scheme. The sky, empathic old fellow, began to bristle with clouds.

For dinner, I stopped in a pub and ordered trout and peas in honor of Dad. While I ate, the rain struck up its clatter; with that as my excuse, I prolonged the meal with a pudding (a trifle which tasted like floral soap). Clearly desperate for further delays, I carried it to the bar and let the barman expound on the O.J. Simpson trial and all the many ways in which it proved that television had ruined America and so, because America couldn’t help meddling in every other nation’s business, would soon finish off the rest of the world as well. (Behind him, the evil telly itself droned on, rehashing the day’s athletic feats.) Before yesterday, I could not have imagined a conversation which would make me much less comfortable than this one, yet I stayed till the barman locked up the till.

“Oh fuck,” I say in quiet disgust as I kill the motor. Because, although the front of the house is dark, light spills from the kitchen windows at the back, illuminating the soft insistent rain that’s nearly blinded me for the past two hours of driving. I long for the kitchen as it used to be in Mum’s time: an almost neglected room, at its most functional when one of the collies was in whelp. A room which, most days, was cool and uneventful as a cloister.

When I open the front door, I can just hear Elton John. “Daniel is travelin’ tonight on a plane. I can see the red taillights, headin’ for Spayeeyayain . . .” A poignance all too predictable.

I’m surprised, though, to find Dennis stationary: sitting at the kitchen table reading the
Yeoman
(in our father’s day, would O.J. have tainted those pages?). Every surface is clear and clean: no pastry makings, no marinating meat. He looks up and doesn’t quite smile. “Hello,” he says simply, neutrally.

“Hello,” I say back. I sit down facing him, dropping the car keys between us as if in surrender. My eyes and my legs, freed from their task of getting me here, are throbbing.

Dennis closes the paper neatly and folds it away to one side. He clicks off Elton John but not the maudlin emotions that gremlin voice always summons from my youth. “Life is looking a little strange in these parts,” says Dennis. He seems to have shifted down from his high gear of the past few days, that breakneck emotionality embracing joy in his work, love of his family, grief at losing our father. Sincere but unapproachably frenzied.

Still, I won’t give him the satisfaction of a reply. I want to punish him a little for lying in wait. He says, “We might have worried about you, but we didn’t. Under the circumstances.”

“Good,” I say, sounding as hostile as I mean to.

“Are you all right? You look a little put out.”

“Put out?” I say with a burst of laughter. “I’ve never felt in such a bind.”

“Some would say they’d never felt so flattered.”

“Some would, wouldn’t they?” Here we go, I think: Enter the vice ambassador.

I am about to tell him to lay off when he says, “So where did you take Dad?”

“Dad?”

“The ashes. Where did you take them?” Now he does smile, but it’s the nervous, crooked smile of someone averse to confrontation.

“Fuck the ashes. The ashes are on the front hall table, and I’d be happy to see them stay there.”

“No,” Dennis says, as if to a child. “None of us has seen them since two days ago, since the luncheon. Vee noticed they were gone when she went to change the flowers yesterday evening.”

I go to the cabinet where my father keeps an extra bottle of whisky. My hands shake as I pour myself a glass. I do not offer one to my brother. I take a gulp and let out an intentionally crude sigh of satisfaction. “Let’s see. Today I wear many hats. I am a patiently awaited refugee, I am a graverobber—no, an ashnapper. Oh, and a sperm bank—second choice! Any other roles you’d like me to assume? Belated godparent to any of your children? But no, that’s right, how could I forget, I don’t even
pretend
to worship God.”

Dennis blinks a few times, as if I’ve shined a torch in his eyes. “Why are you so cross?”

“Why are you so full of assumptions?” I walk out the kitchen door toward the front of the house. My father’s box is not on the table. I take a gulp of whisky and look again. I return to the kitchen. I sit down again.

“You’re right; he’s gone. Any kleptomaniacs on the guest list?”

“You didn’t take him?”

“Let’s see now. Who suspected me first—you or David?”

“It’s just that you’re the one who—”

“I, at this point, am the one who couldn’t care less. I don’t even know why I expressed an opinion. I don’t even know, since Dad’s dead, why any of us would bother to waste any energy over where to dispose of a fucking plastic box of ashes that were probably scraped up from somebody’s fucking barbecue pit because people don’t burn down so tidy and dry.” I am both horrified and thrilled to hear myself possessed by Mal.

“You’re right,” Dennis says quickly. “I mean, it’s Davey who cares the most about this.”

“So let him have his way. I’m sorry I interfered.”

“It’s just that he . . .” Dennis sighs.

“Oh that’s no mystery,” I say. “It’s just that for some reason he has it in for Mum!”

Dennis’s turn to go for the whisky. “In a way,” he says gently, surprising me into silence. I wait for him to fetch a glass and fill it.

When he returns to the table, he says, “Do you remember that little game I told you about, the one where Davey and I used to steal things from her handbag? We’d bet each other how long it would take her to notice the things were missing.”

“The medals,” I say.

“Well, clearly not the medals, if they weren’t Dad’s,” he says. “In any case, we didn’t play the game for long.”

“Mum would’ve caught on too fast.”

“No,” says Dennis, “that wasn’t it. I don’t think she ever did.”

He refills my empty glass and says, “Really, what happened might be pretty trivial, but for Davey . . . or I don’t know, perhaps I was a little dense about things like that. Not thinking about them spot on, the way Davey does about everything.”

“What things?”

“Well this was, I don’t know, we were nine or ten, because you were away by then. I think we’d done it half a dozen times, always replacing stuff before she could suspect us or making it turn up somewhere logical. So we’d stolen things like her change purse, a tin of mints, her lipstick . . .” My mind reverts to my father’s macabre little bequest, a far stranger theft, so I have to lurch back, disoriented, to Dennis’s simple remark. “And then it was my turn and I took this unidentifiable thing which turns out to be a packet of condoms.” He pauses, as if expecting me to interrupt, then goes on. “I can’t imagine what I thought they were, but when Davey saw them, he knew. And I mean, he even knew—or maybe knew, because things aren’t always what they appear, are they?—he was certain of what it meant. That there was somebody other than Dad.”

“Than Dad? Oh get on,” I say, but Dennis continues, ignoring my protest.

“It’s not as if he had to explain the facts of life. I wasn’t that simple! I mean, I knew the mechanics of it all, in theory at least! But Davey had a few older friends, he’d begun to avoid me in school when he was with them, blokes a lot faster than we were. He liked lording it over me, the things he suddenly knew that I didn’t. But this—this time he was upset, and he yelled at me, as if I ought to have known better, and said I had to put it back in Mum’s handbag right away, before she went out again. He wouldn’t tell me what it was for days. He hardly spoke to me.”

How like our grown selves we are as children, I think, imagining the brooding ten-year-old David, a folk art miniature of his ultraresponsible adult self, wearing the face of my recent dreams. Unfairly, I imagine him as a father, rigid and terse. I do not think how loyal to our own father his instincts were. I certainly do not think about our mother, what instincts might have been leading her.

“He started spying on her then. He didn’t tell me that, but I knew what he was doing,” says Dennis. “When she’d go out to exercise or feed the dogs, he’d climb to the foxhole—with a book, as if I’d believe he was reading—and watch her from up there. One day, months later I think, when I’d basically forgotten that business, he told me he’d seen her with the foreman from the farm on that big estate, the man who kept sheep for that Colonel Doodah who moved here about the time we did, the foxhunting chap.

“And I challenged him, So? The man worked his collies with Mum, had an interest in the puppies. By now, I was trying the tough act with Davey, to hide how wounded I was he’d snubbed me in school . . .”

“Seen her ‘with’ him?” I interrupt. “How ‘with’?”

“Oh I asked that too, and he said he thought they must have been kissing from the way they came out of the kennel, and I laughed and started calling him Sherlock. After that, he never mentioned it again. Not directly.”

What if I’d been the brother David approached? Sometimes I wonder at Dennis’s acceptance of the surface, as if the way things appear is enough for him. But I suppose that other, more virtuous mysteries consume him: how cheeses age, how meats roast, why yeast and eggs rise and collapse. I sigh. “So he despises Mum.”

“Oh no,” says Dennis lightly, as if I’ve just asked whether rain’s been predicted. “But he’s sure Dad knew, and
that
he despises.”

Simultaneously, we look at the clock above the cooker. It’s past three.

“But where is Dad?” says Dennis as he stands and takes his whisky glass to the sink, puts the bottle away. “I mean, who would go and pinch someone’s ashes? It’s not the sort of thing you misplace.”

“No,” I agree, though I do remember that my friend Luke’s ashes went astray while being shipped to his mother in Florida, turning up, just fine, in New Orleans. Rumor had it that UPS gave her a year’s free shipping or some other tasteless benefit meant to console her. “We’ll look tomorrow, and I’m sure they’ll turn up.” Mentally, I push back that tomorrow as you would a day you are scheduled for major surgery—this tomorrow a worse one, because anesthesia will not be an option.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I say as we leave the kitchen.

“I nap,” says Dennis. “Little catnaps. That’s my secret.”

Well there’s Dennis, I think, his secrets all harmless and pretty.

MEETING US NOW,
learning the superficial facts of our parents’ lives, you would assume that David had been the closest to our mother. He’s the one who’s happiest out of doors, for whom animals are not just objects of fascination but beings who need respect (for what they give us, hard work or affection; for their pain when they suffer; and simply for their various kinds of differentness). It’s easy to imagine him, side by side with Mum, learning at her knee about whelping and worming, infections, dysplasia, mites and ticks.

But you would be wrong. David loved the dogs, sure, but no more than any boy would. Sharp at all the sciences, he came to his profession in a roundabout way. As a boy, he’d tell grown-ups he wanted to be a geologist (Dad had told him that this was the closest modern-day work to global exploration).

If anyone worked at Mum’s side, it was me. Before I went away to school, I liked to help out with the collies, not their training but their everyday care: feeding them, running them just to wear them out, even mucking their pens. While my brothers’ assigned chores were in the house, mine were mostly in the kennel. Mum kept a chart there, on an inside wall of a cupboard holding feed, medicines, and leashes. On the chart, each dog’s name stood above a column keeping track of inoculations, mineral supplements, teeth cleanings, wormings. After each small task was finished, she’d have me check it off. I loved that job, loved keeping such visible order. I loved rubbing liniment into a sore limb; loved, once a week, carrying out the can of meat drippings Mum reserved by the cooker and pouring it onto the dogs’ kibble, to keep their black coats as glossy as pressed coal. When they saw that can coming, their ears would dart up, their noses prod my hips and legs, their tongues warm my hands.

My mother was an oddball in the world of sheepdogs. She was not a farmer, certainly not a farmer’s wife; this was a vocation of pure luxury, and she did nothing to hide it. Among the craggy types at the trials, she might have been shunned but for her open, raucous personality. Two or three times I had accompanied her to trials requiring an overnight stay, so I had seen how she thought nothing of mixing it up with those men at a pub (my father busy elsewhere, of course), and when farmers came by Tealing to buy a puppy or borrow a dog for stud, she’d take a bottle right out to the kennel. Perhaps this talent of hers—the ability, against all odds, to make herself an insider—was one I had an unconscious need to study. It was certainly one I admired.

Once, there was a pup born with a hernia. Mum’s vet told her that the hernia could be fixed by hand at so young an age if someone was willing to put in the time. So three times a day, before and after school and then again before bed, I’d sit cross-legged at the whelping box and hold the pup in my lap, stroking her ears and limbs with one hand while holding the hernia in with the other. I still recall the sensation of pushing the lump of flesh back through the muscle wall in that taut little belly, using just the tip of my right middle finger. It felt like forcing a marble into an elastic velvet pouch. To the tiny pup, it was painless; she would gaze up into my face, wagging her tadpole tail and smiling with eager innocence.