Encounters

Instinct told her she had to walk each day. Exhaustion brought forgetfulness. It brought sleep and slowly appetite and a suspicion of colour to her sallow cheeks. She would take crumbs to the squirrels and sit for hours beyond the great rock gazing at the sky. She took a sketch book and slowly captured the growing beauty as it fought its way into her consciousness.

Once she saw a small boy looking at her from behind the rocks. When she looked again he had gone and she found herself half-smiling, sensing his peeking eyes. To her he was just another squirrel.

She watched the men with their boats, the tourists with their cameras, the children, shadows of her own past, as they crossed her path, but she stayed silent and withdrawn. In the village store they decided she was some kind of a natural, harmless, lonely, to be watched over with gentle unobtrusive care.

Then came the old man from over the hill. He knocked at the door and greeted her with a grin. ‘How are you, lass? I heard you were here. Would you be the same little Josie Tansley who came in my boat with her dad?’

She looked at him frowning, remembering. Strangers’ faces had gone; only the dead were with her. She grasped for a name: ‘Ruaraidh … Macdonald?’

And he shook her hand the harder. ‘You remember an old man, lass. Tell me. How are your family? Is your father well?’

He alone in all the world did not know, had not heard the thunder clap. ‘They’re all dead, Mr Macdonald.’ She felt her lips speak, as her mind receded from the truth. ‘Killed.’

She turned away blindly, but the old man came on. His arm was round her, his faded blue eyes near hers. She saw his spontaneous tears and suddenly her own came flooding. At last the dam in her heart which had held back all things broke and she knelt, her head on the knee of an old highland man and wept.

He knew about broken hearts. He knew about the loss which is too great to bear. He sat all night, her head in his lap, his eyes fixed on the embers of the fire as they died one by one to white ash. The night came through the open windows almost as bright as day, scented, warm, moonlit. Only owls were abroad. His dog lay on the mat, its ear pricked to the night noises, its eye occasionally opening, watching its master and the girl in her grief.

Then the dawn came; rosy, gentle, feeling with hesitant fingers round the undrawn curtains and she slept at last. He picked her up, laid her on the bed and sat beside her, his lined face sad with the knowledge of generations of death and grief, pondering on the words of comfort he alone must give.

When she opened her eyes at last she lay purged and dreamlike, and she listened to his quiet voice telling the stories of the centuries which console and heal and she smiled at him at last and reached for his hand. The pain had dulled; the scar inside her mind had begun to heal of its own. Sadness there would always be, but he gave her resignation and a little hope that day.

When the squirrels came again she looked round for the little boy and seeing him called out. He came, nervous, chubby, a wicked cheerful child and she ran with him down to the water and watched him throw stones that skidded and bumped on the glittering surface and after a while she tried to do it too. And when her pebbles sank with a plop into the water she laughed.

In the store they noticed the change and were glad for her. People stopped to look at her sketches now and she found she could talk again. The world was no longer hostile, no longer viewed behind a wall of thick black glass, against which she beat with bloodied fists. It was sweet and young and she could breathe again.

Slowly she found she believed once more in the future. She went to the phone box and dialled a friend. Once he had been more. He understood; he bore no grudges; he came to be with her and gently took her hand. He would be the first bastion against loneliness. The first positive step. She accepted too a puppy from Ruaraidh Macdonald and together the four of them, the boy, the girl, her friend and the dog ran on the sands amongst the ribbons of emerald weed.

Each night she cried a little less, each day she laughed a little more. The agony was numbed. Her eyes were learning how to shine again; she was beginning to know hope.

The friend saw that she had fallen to the bottom of a muddy pool wide-eyed and gasping, flailing with arms towards the depths of darkness. Then slowly she had risen, inexorably and involuntarily, the will to survive triumphing over the will to die.

He slept in the bedroom that had been her brother’s. Each day he saw her opening a little, like a flower. But he kept his distance, watchful, afraid lest he overstep some faint invisible line which would drive her once more from the sun. For him she was a sacred virgin, inviolable and goddesslike in her bereavement, with her delicate blue-veined pallor of the skin.

By the great rock he would sit, the width of the rock between them, idly throwing pebbles at the setting sun, while she dipped her brush in the carmine-stained waters of a rock pool and traced the scene on her page.

‘Shall we take a boat to the Island?’ he asked at last after many days, screwing his eyes to watch a cormorant flop from its perch on a weed-draped rock into clumsy flight.

She nodded absently. ‘It could be fun.’ Once her eyes might have sparkled. Now they looked at him with quiet detached amusement. She saw him as an overgrown schoolboy, as playful and as harmless as the puppy.

They hired a boat and he rowed her, pulling quietly with the tide towards the dusky island. Trails of light still crossed the rippled water. The cormorant was back on its perch, its wings outspread to dry.

‘The evening is like golden velvet,’ she whispered, her fingers trailing in the cool. She faced him across the oars, watching his corded muscles contracting and expanding beneath the dark plaid shirt. Beads of perspiration stood on his brow. His eyes were over her shoulder fixed on the distance, the pupils small with the glowing sunset.

‘Are you watching where we’re going?’ He had felt her gaze and smiled without looking.

‘You’re doing fine.’ Her voice still cracked when she spoke from a long silence; cracked and hesitated before it sounded true. ‘Don’t hurry; it’s so beautiful.’ Her toes were bare in the warm greasy water which slopped on the bottom boards of the boat. A strand from the fringe of her shawl trailed in the wet, floated and unravelled, scarlet, unnoticed in the oily black of it.

When the boat grounded on the shingle he let the oars go, dead wings in the heavy rowlocks.

‘Shall we walk or sit and watch the sunset?’ he asked, his voice slightly raised above the rustle of the water on the stones and she stood up for answer, her arms out to balance as the boat rocked and she jumped clumsily to the shore.

They watched the clouds of midges dancing on the dusky water and whirling in columns above the beach. He slapped his neck and arms but her cool skin stayed untouched and she watched him, faintly amused again. There was a broch to see. They looked for it in the gloaming, amongst long dew wet grasses and listened to the lonely wail of a night bird echoing across the water. She held his hand over the uneven ground and to climb a fence and together they untangled the damp fringe of her shawl from the rusty wire. Their fingers touched by accident and she glanced up at his face.

He smiled and she felt the night wind cold about her shoulders. ‘One day I must go back to London,’ she whispered. ‘To the flat.’

‘I’ll be with you, Josie. You needn’t go alone.’

They gazed at the stones which had once formed a great tower.

‘Was this it?’ she whispered. ‘Is this all that’s left?’

‘Josie, please.’ His hand tightened over hers.

She was gazing at the black stones, thinking of the ancient hands which had built it strong and resilient. They were dead too, those men. ‘What’s it all for?’ She sighed and turned away, not seeking an answer and he followed her, his eyes on the ground.

Near the boat she spread her shawl on the short turf and patted it as she sat down. ‘Come. Make love to me now. That’s all there is left to do.’ She smiled enigmatically, the evening star in both her eyes. He knelt and held her shoulders, puzzled. Seeking to understand.

‘You mean it, Josie? That’s what you want?’

Slowly she unbuttoned her blouse and his fingers, gently seeking her breast felt a prickle of gooseflesh as the cool night wind stroked the warm skin. Somewhere an oystercatcher whistled down the strand as the man bent his lips to the small hard nipples.

She cradled his head in her arms and watched the distant loom of a lighthouse in the limpid night. She could still see the outlines of the trees on the opposite shore, even without the help of the silver crescent moon, lying on its back above the hills.

Quietly she slipped down till her head was resting on the ground and the night was eclipsed by the eyes of the man. She was not afraid any more. She was one with the past and the future, the day and the night. The living and the dead both were within her embrace.

They rowed home at last in the cool of the dawn, watching the spreading ripples as fish rose to break the surface and seeing the trails of weed colouring the turning tide’s edge. Already she looked on the world with calm maternal eyes, sure of the seed she had desired. Her cool grey eyes met those of the man at the oars and lingered and at last she smiled, knowing that for her now there was a future.

She did not let him travel on the train. She carried within her a new self sufficiency such as she had not known before and she treasured it with the memories of the silver Appin seas. He stood to wave on the platform, half-guessing what she already knew, that she carried his child and that for now she needed no more of him.

She sat in her sleeping compartment once more quiet and alone listening to the beat of the wheels on the rails, her hands folded on her lap.

In her head she still carried the image of the velvet night in the north and she used it as an amulet against the towns the trains passed through, dense black jungles glowing with lights in the dark. Then came the outskirts of London in the early hours of the morning.

Josie slipped the key into the lock and stepped into her dusty flat, looking round with quiet resolution. The photograph of her broken family still lay face down beside the phone, where she had dropped it, splinters of glass scattered on the carpet. She stooped without stopping to take off her coat and picked it up, piling the glass carefully on to the frame. Beside it was a vase of dead roses. She swept them out, their stems long and dry and threw them in the bin. Then she went to open the windows.

‘Come on, junior,’ she said out loud. ‘Let’s choose which room you’re going to have and then we’ll go out and buy some paint. We’re going to begin again, just you and me, as soon as we’ve unpacked.’

She caught sight of herself in a mirror and smiled gently, staring into her own dark grey eyes. ‘It’s all right, Josie my love, you’re not talking to yourself. That’s not been one of your troubles. You’re talking to a real person; or at least he soon will be.’ She unbuttoned her coat bit by bit and slipped it off, letting it trail from her fingers to the floor. ‘And after you my little one, I have a feeling there may be another little brother to keep you company. I’ll discuss it with your father when he gets in touch.’ She thought of the quiet face on the platform, the wistful hand waving goodbye, and smiled again. Next week would be soon enough to ring him. She didn’t want to hurry things. She couldn’t go any further. Not yet.

Feline Express (#ulink_9f4cffbe-3760-5034-83c3-9cef2ce25d01)

It was one of those smouldering London nights when the air smells strangely bitter-sweet and exciting; a night for dancing on lawns or lying back in a punt and drifting beneath shadowy drooping willows. Those things were just dreams for me though. I was, as usual, at home; and in bed.

I sat up and groped for my clock. It was just after two. I must have been asleep, for the last time I had looked it had been midnight exactly. Cinderella’s hour. I sighed uncomfortably, trying to find a cooler corner on the hot pillow for my aching head. Then suddenly I sat bolt upright, my heart thumping with fear. There was someone moving round in the kitchen next to my room. That must have been what woke me. I strained my ears. Silence. Then, quite distinctly I heard a scraping noise as though something were being pushed along the table.

I looked round desperately for a weapon of some kind to defend myself with. I didn’t have a poker of course; the best I could do was a high heeled shoe. I crept out of bed and reached for my dressing gown, then, with the heel of the shoe held out menacingly before me in a shaking hand, I crept to my door and listened again. The whole flat was silent. Beyond my door lay the tiny hall off which led the kitchen door, next to mine, and opposite them the bathroom and the other room. Sally my flat mate had been sent to Brussels by her firm for six weeks, so I was alone. The telephone was in the kitchen. I quietly turned the handle of the door and opened it a crack. I looked out. The kitchen door was ajar.

Suddenly there was the most tremendous crash, followed by a terrified mewing and a scrabble of paws. I laughed out loud with relief.