Veil of Time (9 page)

With only half the medication in me, I awake the next morning with a nice clarity. A morning cup of tea in my window, watching the river run, makes me hum something from my childhood or my children’s, there’s probably not much difference. I sigh with my head against the top of the chair as my thoughts begin to play with this Fergus character of my dream. I lift my hand to smell if there is any trace of him left. But logic rushes to inform me that dreams leave no trace on the skin.

I feel foolish for conjuring my medieval knight, but it has been a very long time since I longed for the touch of any man. Antiseizure medicine has in my adult life taken its toll on desire. As Oliver was wont to point out. But the choice was between a conscious wife and a randy one, and in the end, with all the demands of being a wife and mother, the sterile one took hold. But in my dream, with my hands on their way to Fergus’s hair, sterile was the last thing I was feeling. For the first time since Ellie died, I caught a small intimation of hope just below the breastbone.

Jim Galvin appears in my window, taking with him my medieval scene. I’m sure I look at him a bit impatiently, because, as I say, I do not possess a face for social
games, a disadvantage for the most part, but I suspect it’s not something Jim cares about.

“I saw you coming down from the hill last night,” he says. “What were you doing up there so late?”

I look at him to size up the possibility of his not thinking I am completely out of my mind if I tell him the truth, but decide I don’t want to tempt fate. “Running around in my underwear?”

He laughs. “Oh, is that all?”

He stands around creating the kind of pause that makes anyone of British origin need to bring up the topic of tea. “Want a cuppa?”

He nods. “Would you warm up the milk, though? I like a really hot cup of tea.”

I laugh. “That’s a new one.”

Winnie the cat arches her back next to the purple lit kettle, and then sidles over to be stroked.

“You’ll never get rid of that one now,” Jim says.

I want to tell him that I don’t want to get rid of her, that I quite enjoy her company, actually, but I can see that I am not fitting in with the country way of looking at cats. I am after all a girl from Glasgow Toun, where cats live in tenement windows among the potted plants.

“She’s all right,” I say, “keeps me company.”

Jim gives me a look as if to say he’d be better company, and no doubt he would, but I am quite sure, desire or no desire, I wouldn’t welcome his hand about my crotch.

I hand him his tea in a white mug with ALBA on it in red lettering. “What do you think they used to drink on the fort when it wasn’t wine?”

He balances the mug in his palm. “Tea?”

I throw him a sarcastic smile. “Very funny. Something else alcoholic.”

When he looks over to the window, I see that he has a good profile. “Oh, you mean
fraoch,
the heather beer.”

That would account for the earthy taste. I laugh. “I expected it to be whisky of some sort. Did that not come up with the Scottish hills?”

Jim shakes his head. “Whisky? No, that came up with the monasteries. They were the ones with the distilleries, you understand.”

I watch him sip his tea, and then swill it around inside his cup, as though he were reading something in it.

I say, “I don’t suppose you know if the sea ever came up to Dunadd?”

He looks at me for a moment. “Have you read that article, then?”

I shake my head.

He clears his throat. “One of the lords of the estate, a Colonel Malcolm proposed just such a thing, that the sea used to come up here. It was in
The Royal Geographical Journal,
I have it back at the house, now that I think of it. He thought that an earthquake some time in the eighth century tilted the land and sent the sea out to Crinan Bay.”

Jim slips back into his slot. “It was way back at the turn of the century, though, and, by all accounts, the man was a bit of a nutter. Nobody took it seriously.”

In my dream, the nutter wasn’t so nutty. From what I saw, he was right on the money.

Jim says, “Why do you ask?”

I shrug. “An earthquake, though?”

“Oh, there were earthquakes, all right. At the time, earthquakes were recorded on the island of Islay and several in Ireland, one even causing a kind of tidal wave.”

I can’t find anything to say as we finish our tea. It’s all too strange, this. After all, I was only in a dream. I suppose the case for the sea at Dunadd is fairly obvious and could have occurred to me anyway.

“Look,” I say, “I have to go down to Glasgow. Would you look out for Winnie for me?”

He shakes his head. “Look out for a cat? If the entire human race were to vanish tomorrow, there’d still be cats scrounging off any cow in the field with a leaky teat. She’ll be just fine courying down between the bales in the barn.”

I’ve had enough of him now, and take his empty mug back. “I’ll be gone for a week to sign the decree absolute on my divorce and visit my son at school in Edinburgh. There’s some cat food in the cupboard under the sink. The door’s unlocked.”

After he’s gone, I shake myself and do what I’m
supposed to do with the correct number of pills to get myself back on course for that drive to Glasgow. I don’t want to see Oliver, but for this last time I have no choice. All he has to do is sign
I Do
, then I sign
I Do,
and then the marriage is finished in the way it was started.

The signature in any case seems perfunctory—it’s not the way marriages really end. The end is something more like a slide from no determinate point that leaves you wondering if you ever loved, if you ever knew what love was. I don’t know now if we ever loved, Oliver and I. Everything was aflutter for a while in the beginning, and the children brought a sort of bond. The rest seemed like a long process of finding out who each of us really was, and I suppose we didn’t like what we found. In the end, losing Ellie was too much for either of us, and it all became just a bog, a numbness, a nothing.

As I step up to second gear just after that stone bridge, something makes me look back over my shoulder, maybe hoping for a glimpse of Fergus? But all I see is a straggle of tourists taking the hike up to the fort in single file, going up to the footprint where the kings were crowned, though not the king of Scotland in my dream. I think the Scotland of my dream is before Scottish kings, before Christians, or else Sula would not be giving counsel to men in fine clothes. The Sulas of that day could not have guessed what was waiting around that historical corner.

After an hour on the road, after stopping at the supermarket
for crisps and Ribena and jelly babies, after a little contact with people at large, I begin to worry about myself. I have never played around with dosages before and certainly never tried to induce a seizure. By the time I hit the traffic along the cement walls and the garages outside Dunbarton, I am beginning to wonder if I should go back to Dunadd. Before I reach Glasgow, I pull off the motorway at a café and sip a latte by means of preparation for the ordeal ahead. May it be quick and easy. May Oliver not engage me in social niceties. May he not say I am looking well.

The Glasgow of my childhood was darker and grimier than it is today. The city council has been trying to pull it up to the standard of other European cities. They have dug the buildings out of their layers of industrial soot and uncovered some beautiful sandstone structures from centuries past that soar against the skyline. Once you get in from the horror of the council estates with their anonymous grey rows of houses, you find the Glasgow that was meant to be: museums and parks, rows of Edwardian houses on tree-lined streets. They have put up glass and modern architecture now, cleaned the river, and declared the city a center of art.

I park the car and sit for a while, because there is time, and because this is, after all, my city, the one that educated me and fascinated me all those years ago at Christmas with the lights around George Square and along the rows of shops. You caught the double-decker
bus into the city center and sat upstairs at the front, feeling the lean of the bus around the corners, the crash of branches, and the giddiness that this was as close to a fairground as you’d get.

I wind the window down, because Glasgow has its own smell, a remnant of the days of coal dust, as though a fine black mist still sat in the air. I watch the Glasgow people, secure in their working-class look, in their dialect, safe in this city made rich from the days of slave trade. They are who they are, the Glaswegians, nothing more, and it makes me wonder why it was never enough for me, why I couldn’t be another head-scarfed woman with my husband and my shopping bag, leaning in against the wet wind that comes off the Atlantic up the River Clyde, where old shipyards lie silent and rusted now, a vestige of former British glory.

Oliver and I meet in the hallway outside the solicitor’s office and stand awkwardly, looking at the opaque glass of the door that bears the solicitor’s name. He looks different without me, not the way he did when we first met, but middle-aged different, trying to hang on to something that has nothing to do with me. He looks a bit balder, more fussed over.

Oliver looks at his watch, one that I gave him for his birthday a few years ago. I look at it and see it in its box. I even see the saleswoman who sold it to me. He sees only the face and the time and the conversation to be made in between.

He says. “I think we’re a bit early.”

I notice how his hair has receded past a mole on his forehead that I didn’t know he had.

He asks me how the thesis is going. I make it sound as though it’s coming together much more than it is. I make it sound as though counting the deaths of witches is much easier than it is. I mention nothing about my trips to old Dunadd.

He says, “Glad to hear it.”

He looks at his watch again. He asks me how life is at Dunadd, only he calls it Duntrune and I have to correct him.

He says, “Isn’t it a bit lonely all the way out there?”

“No. Well, it could be, if it weren’t for the cat. And for Jim Galvin.”

He shifts his feet. “Who’s he?”

“A local historian, quite an interesting man. Do you know the sea used to come up to Dunadd?”

He doesn’t answer, because there’s a pattern here we both recognize—me asking random questions, him seething over the waste of his time. I wonder why he doesn’t mention the operation, since he was always driving me to get it done. But I suppose it has no purchase for him anymore. I’m in this by myself.

We do the deed in the solicitor’s office, and afterwards we shake hands in a thoughtless act that ought to make me seethe. Why I have to wipe tears off my face with a half-dissolved tissue in my car later, I don’t know.
It might be relief. But I do miss our house in Kelvin-grove. I miss that it was safe for a while. We sold it and split the profit. It’s what’s keeping me going at Dunadd these days; though probably like a cat I would be fine “courying” down between the bales of hay in the barn. Fergus’s people would have no argument with that.

One more stop before I leave Glasgow: Dr. Javed Shipshap, my neurologist. The name itself ought to make me laugh, but I have never been close to humor in the lift up to his floor of the medical building nor along the echoing corridor to his office.

He’s jovial. Indian. Always seems glad to see me. “And how have you been, Margaret?”

I expect he sneaks a look at my chart for the right name seconds before I enter. I remind him that I am recently divorced, as evidenced by my visit to the solicitor this morning; that I am no longer Margaret Griggs but Maggie Livingstone; that I have moved away altogether.

He nods. “Just as well under the circumstances.”

But what does he know? He probably had an arranged marriage. It makes me smile to think of him dancing in Indian dress under rainbow canopies. It makes him smile to see me smile.

“You’re looking well, Margaret.”

We run through the medicines, dosage, effects, all that. Everything a rerun of previous visits. He reminds me of the date of my operation. The third of January.

“You’ll barely have time to get over your New Year’s hangover,” he says happily.

I tell him I’ve been having unusual dreams.

He looks curious. “Oh?”

“I mean, I always have had. But these seem more vivid somehow.”

He nods. “Well, epilepsy is really the great unknown. Once the brain goes into overdrive, there’s no telling what it might throw up.”

This is new territory for us. “But what about things that the brain couldn’t possibly know?”

His laugh is a bit condescending. “Ah well, we never know what our brains pick up on a subliminal level—something we heard but didn’t quite register, things we’ve downright forgotten. A lot of clairvoyant claims by epileptics can be put down to this, I think.”

All right, he’s gone as far as he’s going to go. I back off.

“Are you sure everything is all right?” he asks.

I sigh. No, everything isn’t all right, but most of it is out of his expertise. “If living in a fog is all right.”

He places a hand on my shoulder. I can see the very line in his textbook where this is suggested. He says, “Margaret, after the lobectomy, life will be so different for you.”

I hate the word
lobectomy
. I wish he wouldn’t say it.

He bites the inside of his cheek. “You know they have refined the surgery.”

I have heard all this before. “There are no guarantees, though, are there?”

I shouldn’t corner him. He’s only a doctor. There are things he can say, and “no guarantees” isn’t one of them. But I have read the literature. I know this operation works 85 percent of the time. It is brain surgery, after all, and things can go very wrong. I could end up with no speech, for one. But what is almost certain is that I’ll lose my dreams.

He gathers up the leaflets and brochures as though I were about to take a holiday in Spain. “Here. Maybe these will help allay your fears.”

I glance at them over lunch, somewhere off the motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. I have to admit, the thought of never having another “episode” is compelling. But brain surgery isn’t. I don’t like the idea of my brain being tweezered out of my skull by some specialist in brain removal.