The Girl With Glass Feet, page 4
‘Well? Have you heard of him? He’s got a mop of black hair and a thick black beard. Gangly. Bug-eye glasses.’
Midas hung his head. The television news report went to the weather. On the islands’ limited-service television they still stuck card cutouts of clouds to a poster map. He closed his eyes and remembered Henry Fuwa on local TV, something he’d watched on a damp afternoon a few years back. Henry Fuwa crouched on a riverbank, wearing a checked shirt and battered broad-brimmed hat. Dressed and dirtied like a prospector panning for gold, mannered like a bank vole. He’d looked wild-eyed into the camera, his name flashing across the bottom of the screen, and Midas then remembered Nihongo characters written on a bouquet tag. An order for white orchids in the florist. To be delivered. He remembered his shocked and shaking hands as he held, in his left, the inscription and, in his right, the delivery address Mr Henry Fuwa had requested.
The bouquet was to be delivered to Midas’s mother.
‘Well, have you?’
He shook his head quick.
‘That’s to be expected, I suppose. Nobody has. I met him in Gurmton, but he said he lived some miles away. I had no luck in Gurmton, so I thought Ettinsford was my next-best bet.’
‘I don’t think he lives here.’
She sighed. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘Maybe in the countryside.’
‘This whole place is the countryside!’
Midas drew composure back from the four winds, and looked up. ‘To… to someone from the mainland it might look like countryside, but I’ve never, um, thought of Ettinsford like that. It’s town. In the countryside there are a hundred nooks with cottages secluded in them.’
‘But short of driving to every single one…’
‘You wouldn’t even find them all on the map…’
‘Great.’ She tapped her fingers on the table. ‘I’ve nothing else to go on. I’ve got his name, and his smell.’
He didn’t ask her to elaborate, but she did.
‘Of peat.’
Midas’s nostrils twitched and conjured a whiff of it. She’d said it flippantly, but it had prompted… The air that came from opened packages in his childhood. This is the time, he told himself, to finish your coffee and never see this girl again.
‘Well,’ she puffed, ‘this investigation’s going nowhere. Tell me about you. You and your family must be close.’
‘No,’ he wiped his forehead, grateful this conversation was going elsewhere. ‘Why? Why do you ask?’
‘If you’ve lived in Ettinsford all your life. You must have strong roots here.’
‘Well…’ The truth was he lay awake some nights asking himself why he’d never moved away. He normally concluded he was a coward: too much like his father. But once in a while he believed that moving away would be cowardly. He could have left after Catherine’s death, after his father’s death. But ties remained. There remained Gustav and Denver. There remained his mother…
He blinked and the bouquet from Henry Fuwa was waiting as if it were a photo on the insides of his eyelids.
‘I suppose,’ he said carefully, ‘there are roots.’
‘Family?’
‘My mother lives near Martyr’s Pitfall. It’s not a long way away. But I don’t see her.’
Ida raised her eyebrows.
He drank his coffee.
‘The raised eyebrows mean carry on.’
‘Oh. Sorry. Well, it’s straightforward. She doesn’t care much for me: I don’t care much for her. It’s best not to be involved.’
‘That’s awful. How can you say it so frankly?’
‘Because I’m being frank. There was more between us once… But she’s in her own world now. If you were to see her… it would be like watching an animal through a screen at a zoo. Sometimes she regards you blankly. Other times she paces across the room, or loafs in her damned chair.’
He dreaded to think what happened in his mother’s head when she sat like that. You could see from her vacant eyes and silently moving lips that she was reimagining her life.
Ida watched him levelly. ‘What about your father?’
He snorted.
‘Go on. What about him? Do you see him? Does he see her?’
He shook his head.
‘Then where is he now?’
Even after the discomfort of the bouquet memories, he found himself grinning, relishing what he was about to say. He didn’t think he believed in an afterlife but he liked to imagine a little something for his father. ‘Somewhere where he’ll never get used to the heat.’
6
In a hammock of moss the size of a cupped palm, dangling between green-barked branches, a moth-winged bull slept. It had folded back its papery wings and drifted to sleep kneeling on the dank threads of its makeshift bed. Around it the bog stretched to the horizon in every direction, a mottle of glistening peat, ochre grass and trees whose bent trunks formed low archways. In their shadows toads sat alone or piled on each others’ backs, throats pulsing into pink balls. Winter sunlight warmed nothing. Heat came from the juicy soil and the occasional pop of a bubble of foul gas.
A toad croaked and disappeared into an opaque puddle. The bull woke at the splosh, lifted its head and tested its wings. They whirred, a flipbook of blot tests, before it took off with its legs dangling beneath it. It skimmed from tree to tree, jinked through the traffic of droning bluebottles and gliding mosquitoes.
In this way it flew for some time, until gull shrieks pierced the humming of the mere. Stones slick with algae like upturned boats punctuated the landscape, turning the bog into a realm of rock pools and drooling rivulets. The bull paused on one of their granite tops, fanning its wings in the light and lapping water from a pock on the stone. Then it flew onward. The smell of brine joined the recipe of gas. Not far ahead the land dropped suddenly away and the sea crashed against it. Along the cliff top, a man wearing waterproof trousers and wellington boots walked home.
He would introduce himself on occasion as Mr Fuwa, the name he had been called back in Japan, but plain Henry was easier if he were to make a new acquaintance, something that happened so rarely as to make the whole business of names redundant. Similarly redundant were razor blades and shaving foam, hairbrushes, clothes irons and deodorant. None of which meant he was scatty or absent-minded. His glasses were kept immaculate because his line of work required meticulous observation of minute detail. On the rare occasions when he made an acquaintance, that person’s face would be seared in his mind’s eye for months.
The moth-winged bull flew past him.
At first he could scarcely believe it. He clapped both hands to his head and watched it flitter. ‘What are you doing here?’ he cried, instinctively reaching out his palm. It touched down on his skin, light as balsa-wood. It stared at him impassive, stretched its wings and closed them across the tiny blue brand on its back.
They were forever escaping their pen these days, even though he checked and double-checked the locks every morning and evening. They got out if the fierce bog wind swept a tile from the roof or niggled loose a chip of mortar, creating the tiny openings that were all they needed to escape. Nowadays they were flying further afield into danger, be it stray jellies in the sea or curious toads, adders or bats in the bog.
Not far away stood his cottage, on a flat of rock in the mere. He had a kind of garden, a little square of marsh enclosed by a fence, where ground-hugging flowers grew cups of white petals. At the end of the garden was an old slate-roofed shed: his cattle pen.
Looking into the distance, he could see the hump on the horizon where Lomdendol Tor rose tall on westernmost Lomdendol Island. Geologists said it had been a volcano in prehistory, slobbering the islands into being, fire transforming into land.
That metamorphosis was in the rock of St Hauda’s Land. In quarries, blown-apart boulders showed their insides turning to quartz, or revealed fossilized prisoners. The sea gnawed at the coastline, remoulding it with every year. And in nooks and crannies uncatalogued transmogrifications took place…
Henry jogged along the stone garden path that served as a run of stepping-stones when the rain came heavy. He unlocked the pen door and turned the latch, but didn’t open it at once. The moth-winged bull had followed him home, and he offered it his palm again, making throaty noises to set it at ease. It touched down indifferently and he cupped his other hand over it, feeling the drum of its wings as it butted against his palms. He slipped into the pen, kicking the door shut behind him.
In here was a chickenfeed smell from the slop that fed the cattle, and a second door that functioned as a makeshift airlock. He backed into it and entered the pen proper, where a battery-powered lamp glowed in a corner, lighting the many birdcages stacked against the walls or hanging like mobiles from the ceiling. The bulls used them as perches and beds, although they were empty now because the herd was in full flight.
They whirled through the air like a cloud of leaves in a gale. Sixty brown and grey and cream-coloured bodies borne in circles around the pen by glittering, opalescent wings. Henry threw the bull he’d recaptured into the air to join them. Wings humming, it flew back to the door and knocked itself over and over against the woodwork. It always made him smile when they needed his help. He cuffed it lightly towards the herd and it shot up and lost itself among them. Henry sat on a three-legged stool that creaked beneath his weight. A herd of moth-winged cattle on the ground could stand still for hours with all the docility of common cattle in a field, but in the air they delighted in the power of flight, and there was something kaleidoscopic about their movement. You started to see patterns, and before long you’d be hypnotized, your thoughts fluttering in the air around you. You thought how you’d been sitting like this admiring the cattle since you were young (perhaps you had been doing it for too long now).
He took off his glasses and folded them on his lap as he leant back against the pen wall, exhaled, closed his eyes and listened to the drone and rustle of the cattle wings.
He had only ever trusted one person enough to deliberately reveal the secret of the moth-winged cattle, but he could picture the face of the girl who had found out by chance. Ida Maclaird.
She had caught him off guard that time when he smashed the jewellery box and she had dragged him to the Barnacle. On occasion he worried about her and who she might tell. He wished he hadn’t stormed out of the Barnacle. It seemed inevitable to him that she would be out in the wider world telling anecdotes to her friends about the wacko she’d met on holiday. If she had believed in the moth-winged cattle she would be the wacko, and as such might not tell them. He often prayed for her silence, for a revelation to come to her, wherever she was, that the fragile cattle were real, and should remain undiscovered.
7
Young Ida Maclaird.
Carl Maulsen had only had the briefest moment with her. Then he had left St Hauda’s Land as if a tempest blew him. He had forced the clips closed on his crammed suitcase. He had wished her a loud halloo and given her a bearish hug, noticed her walking stick and boots (no time to comment: the taxi honked its horn in the road), deposited the cottage key in her small soft hand, dived into the cab to speed away.
All the time a horrible panic had gripped him, caused by the sight of her alone. As a man proud to shape his own destiny, he found it shameful when events blew him off course. It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.
Sweat had budded on his forehead. His heart palpitated and his cheek tingled with electrostatic from the feel of Ida’s hair brushing his face when he had hugged her. He laughed in open wonder at the uncharacteristic behaviour of his body, which in forty-eight years had only behaved this way around one other woman. With his trouser legs stuck to the leather taxi seat, he finally realized he had forgotten to pack his composure. He had held her figure in his arms, as slight as Freya Maclaird’s had been.
As the taxi rushed under the boughs of the woodland he stared out at the grid of branches and tried to get a grip on himself. The taxi drove out of the woods and down a hillside towards the old stone bridge that crossed the strait between Gurm and Ferry islands. Waves marched urgently under the bridge, headed for the wider sea.
The taxi’s route wound through the vast meres of Ferry Island, where the pools were full of half-ice and bulrushes grew as tall and thick as saplings. The smell of marsh gas filtered through the car’s closed windows. He watched his fists knocking on his knees.
Ida had grown up to look just like Freya. He wondered whether, when people said that women became their mothers, they meant in mere mimicry alone, or whether a girl could really become her mother. Could a woman vacate her girlhood and leave it for her daughter, like a hand-me-down dress? Could a man get a second chance at a girl that way? He thumped his leg to stop it jittering. His ideas had not been this whimsical since Freya Maclaird was alive. He knew it was a ridiculous proposition and tried to erase it from his mind. Still it cropped up throughout the journey, as the road arced around the bogs of the south coast and approached the town of Glamsgallow, stacked up against its docks.
On the ferry he thought of Freya. In the coach on the mainland he thought of Freya. In the hotel lobby, waiting for his keys, he thought of Freya.
In the morning he went to the mainland university at which he was giving his lecture. Afterwards, the professors who had invited him wined and dined him, then went back to their studies and left him to find his way back to the coach stop, where now he waited, alone by a main road, screwing up his nose at the artificial wind from the traffic. He saw his coach approaching, his booked return to the port and from there the boat to St Hauda’s Land. It pulled up. Its doors juddered open. The driver, in a tie and shirt with yellowing collar, peered down at Carl and waited for a moment before rolling his eyes and asking, ‘You getting on today?’
Carl thought about Ida staying in his little cottage. The feeling that had ambushed him yesterday, how in his arms she had brought back his time with her mother, had dulled with the mundanity of a chain hotel, bus stops, lecture halls and microphones testing, on and off, fire-escape signs glimmering green… But it had not vanished. It was burrowed somewhere inside him. He needed to brace himself before seeing her again.
The coach doors closed, and only when the vehicle was moving did the driver flip his middle finger.
Carl crossed the road. A truck honked at him and swerved to avoid collision. On the other side of the road, he sat down on the pavement beside the coach stop, waiting for the bus that went south. Deeper into the mainland.
He had first entertained the idea while he ate lunch, while the literature professor who was his chaperone had droned on and on about the Romantics. He had growled assent to her opinions and chewed the meat from the deep-fried chicken he had ordered. He never intended to find himself blathering to bored students or idolized by eccentric professors. He had stood in that lecture theatre and looked into the vacant eyes of a hundred porous undergrads. His lecture had faltered. He couldn’t think about the classics. He could only think of Freya.
But when he tried to picture her, he thought of her headstone and the boxed bones six feet under. He had to think of Ida’s alive and breathing face to displace them.
The southbound coach arrived and Carl barged to the back, to a seat with little leg room beside a commuter in a khaki trench coat, whose glowing laptop bugged him. He made his discomfort known by spreading his legs and sticking out his elbow.
He had called Ida by Freya’s maiden name when last he wrote to her. Ida Ingmarsson. All my love from Carl. He realized his mistake the moment the letter dropped through the slot in the postbox, then made several unsuccessful attempts to prevent it being sent. Of course it had passed without comment, but it had been there in looks when he next saw her, nearly a year after the event. How premonitory that seemed now.
What love he had possessed he had thought dead a long time back, leaving only remorse and a heart like dried meat. But seeing Ida fully grown had saturated it and made it beat again. This image of his undead love amused him briefly, before the social formula of their relationship returned. She had called him uncle as a girl. Of course he should never have let himself get to know her. He shouldn’t have kept in touch with her mother. As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.
Outside, suburbs and towns repeated. Then came heavily worked farmland, arable acres and fields of spotted cows. Evening came, traffic thickened. They drove through a city of tower blocks with windows lit yellow and so many telephone cables, wires and aerials that the buildings looked caught in a net. The man beside him snored. A dangle of drool strung his mouth to the knot of his tie.
Carl got off the coach in a town communist in architecture. In the distance, hills and a power station cast a protective cloud over the streets. Double-headed lampposts stood tall on street corners. Fences were tagged with unimaginative graffiti in tasteless colours. He found the best-looking hotel he could, which had at least made an effort (if a rather meagre one) by laying a tawdry red carpet in the foyer and hanging chandeliers made of plastic in the lobby. A jobbing student with a wonky black bow tie gave him a room key, and he took the stairs up to the fourth floor to exercise legs that had become nearly numb on the coach. He threw his bag into his room, locked the door again and headed straight back out on to the streets, ignoring his rumbling stomach.
He strode down the roads that led him to the graveyard. He wished there were a florist open at this time in the evening so he could leave Freya her favourite golden irises. In the graveyard he passed a mourner caressing a memorial bench and found his way between the headstones to the white block of stone carved with that strange name that was only half hers. Freya Maclaird.
That bastard Charles Maclaird never even told Carl a tumour was bulging at the top of Freya’s spine. Never even informed him of her death. That was his spite towards him, more hurtful even than his legal ties to the woman. More hurtful even than the idea of the two of them sharing a bed with torturous regularity.
Midas hung his head. The television news report went to the weather. On the islands’ limited-service television they still stuck card cutouts of clouds to a poster map. He closed his eyes and remembered Henry Fuwa on local TV, something he’d watched on a damp afternoon a few years back. Henry Fuwa crouched on a riverbank, wearing a checked shirt and battered broad-brimmed hat. Dressed and dirtied like a prospector panning for gold, mannered like a bank vole. He’d looked wild-eyed into the camera, his name flashing across the bottom of the screen, and Midas then remembered Nihongo characters written on a bouquet tag. An order for white orchids in the florist. To be delivered. He remembered his shocked and shaking hands as he held, in his left, the inscription and, in his right, the delivery address Mr Henry Fuwa had requested.
The bouquet was to be delivered to Midas’s mother.
‘Well, have you?’
He shook his head quick.
‘That’s to be expected, I suppose. Nobody has. I met him in Gurmton, but he said he lived some miles away. I had no luck in Gurmton, so I thought Ettinsford was my next-best bet.’
‘I don’t think he lives here.’
She sighed. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘Maybe in the countryside.’
‘This whole place is the countryside!’
Midas drew composure back from the four winds, and looked up. ‘To… to someone from the mainland it might look like countryside, but I’ve never, um, thought of Ettinsford like that. It’s town. In the countryside there are a hundred nooks with cottages secluded in them.’
‘But short of driving to every single one…’
‘You wouldn’t even find them all on the map…’
‘Great.’ She tapped her fingers on the table. ‘I’ve nothing else to go on. I’ve got his name, and his smell.’
He didn’t ask her to elaborate, but she did.
‘Of peat.’
Midas’s nostrils twitched and conjured a whiff of it. She’d said it flippantly, but it had prompted… The air that came from opened packages in his childhood. This is the time, he told himself, to finish your coffee and never see this girl again.
‘Well,’ she puffed, ‘this investigation’s going nowhere. Tell me about you. You and your family must be close.’
‘No,’ he wiped his forehead, grateful this conversation was going elsewhere. ‘Why? Why do you ask?’
‘If you’ve lived in Ettinsford all your life. You must have strong roots here.’
‘Well…’ The truth was he lay awake some nights asking himself why he’d never moved away. He normally concluded he was a coward: too much like his father. But once in a while he believed that moving away would be cowardly. He could have left after Catherine’s death, after his father’s death. But ties remained. There remained Gustav and Denver. There remained his mother…
He blinked and the bouquet from Henry Fuwa was waiting as if it were a photo on the insides of his eyelids.
‘I suppose,’ he said carefully, ‘there are roots.’
‘Family?’
‘My mother lives near Martyr’s Pitfall. It’s not a long way away. But I don’t see her.’
Ida raised her eyebrows.
He drank his coffee.
‘The raised eyebrows mean carry on.’
‘Oh. Sorry. Well, it’s straightforward. She doesn’t care much for me: I don’t care much for her. It’s best not to be involved.’
‘That’s awful. How can you say it so frankly?’
‘Because I’m being frank. There was more between us once… But she’s in her own world now. If you were to see her… it would be like watching an animal through a screen at a zoo. Sometimes she regards you blankly. Other times she paces across the room, or loafs in her damned chair.’
He dreaded to think what happened in his mother’s head when she sat like that. You could see from her vacant eyes and silently moving lips that she was reimagining her life.
Ida watched him levelly. ‘What about your father?’
He snorted.
‘Go on. What about him? Do you see him? Does he see her?’
He shook his head.
‘Then where is he now?’
Even after the discomfort of the bouquet memories, he found himself grinning, relishing what he was about to say. He didn’t think he believed in an afterlife but he liked to imagine a little something for his father. ‘Somewhere where he’ll never get used to the heat.’
6
In a hammock of moss the size of a cupped palm, dangling between green-barked branches, a moth-winged bull slept. It had folded back its papery wings and drifted to sleep kneeling on the dank threads of its makeshift bed. Around it the bog stretched to the horizon in every direction, a mottle of glistening peat, ochre grass and trees whose bent trunks formed low archways. In their shadows toads sat alone or piled on each others’ backs, throats pulsing into pink balls. Winter sunlight warmed nothing. Heat came from the juicy soil and the occasional pop of a bubble of foul gas.
A toad croaked and disappeared into an opaque puddle. The bull woke at the splosh, lifted its head and tested its wings. They whirred, a flipbook of blot tests, before it took off with its legs dangling beneath it. It skimmed from tree to tree, jinked through the traffic of droning bluebottles and gliding mosquitoes.
In this way it flew for some time, until gull shrieks pierced the humming of the mere. Stones slick with algae like upturned boats punctuated the landscape, turning the bog into a realm of rock pools and drooling rivulets. The bull paused on one of their granite tops, fanning its wings in the light and lapping water from a pock on the stone. Then it flew onward. The smell of brine joined the recipe of gas. Not far ahead the land dropped suddenly away and the sea crashed against it. Along the cliff top, a man wearing waterproof trousers and wellington boots walked home.
He would introduce himself on occasion as Mr Fuwa, the name he had been called back in Japan, but plain Henry was easier if he were to make a new acquaintance, something that happened so rarely as to make the whole business of names redundant. Similarly redundant were razor blades and shaving foam, hairbrushes, clothes irons and deodorant. None of which meant he was scatty or absent-minded. His glasses were kept immaculate because his line of work required meticulous observation of minute detail. On the rare occasions when he made an acquaintance, that person’s face would be seared in his mind’s eye for months.
The moth-winged bull flew past him.
At first he could scarcely believe it. He clapped both hands to his head and watched it flitter. ‘What are you doing here?’ he cried, instinctively reaching out his palm. It touched down on his skin, light as balsa-wood. It stared at him impassive, stretched its wings and closed them across the tiny blue brand on its back.
They were forever escaping their pen these days, even though he checked and double-checked the locks every morning and evening. They got out if the fierce bog wind swept a tile from the roof or niggled loose a chip of mortar, creating the tiny openings that were all they needed to escape. Nowadays they were flying further afield into danger, be it stray jellies in the sea or curious toads, adders or bats in the bog.
Not far away stood his cottage, on a flat of rock in the mere. He had a kind of garden, a little square of marsh enclosed by a fence, where ground-hugging flowers grew cups of white petals. At the end of the garden was an old slate-roofed shed: his cattle pen.
Looking into the distance, he could see the hump on the horizon where Lomdendol Tor rose tall on westernmost Lomdendol Island. Geologists said it had been a volcano in prehistory, slobbering the islands into being, fire transforming into land.
That metamorphosis was in the rock of St Hauda’s Land. In quarries, blown-apart boulders showed their insides turning to quartz, or revealed fossilized prisoners. The sea gnawed at the coastline, remoulding it with every year. And in nooks and crannies uncatalogued transmogrifications took place…
Henry jogged along the stone garden path that served as a run of stepping-stones when the rain came heavy. He unlocked the pen door and turned the latch, but didn’t open it at once. The moth-winged bull had followed him home, and he offered it his palm again, making throaty noises to set it at ease. It touched down indifferently and he cupped his other hand over it, feeling the drum of its wings as it butted against his palms. He slipped into the pen, kicking the door shut behind him.
In here was a chickenfeed smell from the slop that fed the cattle, and a second door that functioned as a makeshift airlock. He backed into it and entered the pen proper, where a battery-powered lamp glowed in a corner, lighting the many birdcages stacked against the walls or hanging like mobiles from the ceiling. The bulls used them as perches and beds, although they were empty now because the herd was in full flight.
They whirled through the air like a cloud of leaves in a gale. Sixty brown and grey and cream-coloured bodies borne in circles around the pen by glittering, opalescent wings. Henry threw the bull he’d recaptured into the air to join them. Wings humming, it flew back to the door and knocked itself over and over against the woodwork. It always made him smile when they needed his help. He cuffed it lightly towards the herd and it shot up and lost itself among them. Henry sat on a three-legged stool that creaked beneath his weight. A herd of moth-winged cattle on the ground could stand still for hours with all the docility of common cattle in a field, but in the air they delighted in the power of flight, and there was something kaleidoscopic about their movement. You started to see patterns, and before long you’d be hypnotized, your thoughts fluttering in the air around you. You thought how you’d been sitting like this admiring the cattle since you were young (perhaps you had been doing it for too long now).
He took off his glasses and folded them on his lap as he leant back against the pen wall, exhaled, closed his eyes and listened to the drone and rustle of the cattle wings.
He had only ever trusted one person enough to deliberately reveal the secret of the moth-winged cattle, but he could picture the face of the girl who had found out by chance. Ida Maclaird.
She had caught him off guard that time when he smashed the jewellery box and she had dragged him to the Barnacle. On occasion he worried about her and who she might tell. He wished he hadn’t stormed out of the Barnacle. It seemed inevitable to him that she would be out in the wider world telling anecdotes to her friends about the wacko she’d met on holiday. If she had believed in the moth-winged cattle she would be the wacko, and as such might not tell them. He often prayed for her silence, for a revelation to come to her, wherever she was, that the fragile cattle were real, and should remain undiscovered.
7
Young Ida Maclaird.
Carl Maulsen had only had the briefest moment with her. Then he had left St Hauda’s Land as if a tempest blew him. He had forced the clips closed on his crammed suitcase. He had wished her a loud halloo and given her a bearish hug, noticed her walking stick and boots (no time to comment: the taxi honked its horn in the road), deposited the cottage key in her small soft hand, dived into the cab to speed away.
All the time a horrible panic had gripped him, caused by the sight of her alone. As a man proud to shape his own destiny, he found it shameful when events blew him off course. It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.
Sweat had budded on his forehead. His heart palpitated and his cheek tingled with electrostatic from the feel of Ida’s hair brushing his face when he had hugged her. He laughed in open wonder at the uncharacteristic behaviour of his body, which in forty-eight years had only behaved this way around one other woman. With his trouser legs stuck to the leather taxi seat, he finally realized he had forgotten to pack his composure. He had held her figure in his arms, as slight as Freya Maclaird’s had been.
As the taxi rushed under the boughs of the woodland he stared out at the grid of branches and tried to get a grip on himself. The taxi drove out of the woods and down a hillside towards the old stone bridge that crossed the strait between Gurm and Ferry islands. Waves marched urgently under the bridge, headed for the wider sea.
The taxi’s route wound through the vast meres of Ferry Island, where the pools were full of half-ice and bulrushes grew as tall and thick as saplings. The smell of marsh gas filtered through the car’s closed windows. He watched his fists knocking on his knees.
Ida had grown up to look just like Freya. He wondered whether, when people said that women became their mothers, they meant in mere mimicry alone, or whether a girl could really become her mother. Could a woman vacate her girlhood and leave it for her daughter, like a hand-me-down dress? Could a man get a second chance at a girl that way? He thumped his leg to stop it jittering. His ideas had not been this whimsical since Freya Maclaird was alive. He knew it was a ridiculous proposition and tried to erase it from his mind. Still it cropped up throughout the journey, as the road arced around the bogs of the south coast and approached the town of Glamsgallow, stacked up against its docks.
On the ferry he thought of Freya. In the coach on the mainland he thought of Freya. In the hotel lobby, waiting for his keys, he thought of Freya.
In the morning he went to the mainland university at which he was giving his lecture. Afterwards, the professors who had invited him wined and dined him, then went back to their studies and left him to find his way back to the coach stop, where now he waited, alone by a main road, screwing up his nose at the artificial wind from the traffic. He saw his coach approaching, his booked return to the port and from there the boat to St Hauda’s Land. It pulled up. Its doors juddered open. The driver, in a tie and shirt with yellowing collar, peered down at Carl and waited for a moment before rolling his eyes and asking, ‘You getting on today?’
Carl thought about Ida staying in his little cottage. The feeling that had ambushed him yesterday, how in his arms she had brought back his time with her mother, had dulled with the mundanity of a chain hotel, bus stops, lecture halls and microphones testing, on and off, fire-escape signs glimmering green… But it had not vanished. It was burrowed somewhere inside him. He needed to brace himself before seeing her again.
The coach doors closed, and only when the vehicle was moving did the driver flip his middle finger.
Carl crossed the road. A truck honked at him and swerved to avoid collision. On the other side of the road, he sat down on the pavement beside the coach stop, waiting for the bus that went south. Deeper into the mainland.
He had first entertained the idea while he ate lunch, while the literature professor who was his chaperone had droned on and on about the Romantics. He had growled assent to her opinions and chewed the meat from the deep-fried chicken he had ordered. He never intended to find himself blathering to bored students or idolized by eccentric professors. He had stood in that lecture theatre and looked into the vacant eyes of a hundred porous undergrads. His lecture had faltered. He couldn’t think about the classics. He could only think of Freya.
But when he tried to picture her, he thought of her headstone and the boxed bones six feet under. He had to think of Ida’s alive and breathing face to displace them.
The southbound coach arrived and Carl barged to the back, to a seat with little leg room beside a commuter in a khaki trench coat, whose glowing laptop bugged him. He made his discomfort known by spreading his legs and sticking out his elbow.
He had called Ida by Freya’s maiden name when last he wrote to her. Ida Ingmarsson. All my love from Carl. He realized his mistake the moment the letter dropped through the slot in the postbox, then made several unsuccessful attempts to prevent it being sent. Of course it had passed without comment, but it had been there in looks when he next saw her, nearly a year after the event. How premonitory that seemed now.
What love he had possessed he had thought dead a long time back, leaving only remorse and a heart like dried meat. But seeing Ida fully grown had saturated it and made it beat again. This image of his undead love amused him briefly, before the social formula of their relationship returned. She had called him uncle as a girl. Of course he should never have let himself get to know her. He shouldn’t have kept in touch with her mother. As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church.
Outside, suburbs and towns repeated. Then came heavily worked farmland, arable acres and fields of spotted cows. Evening came, traffic thickened. They drove through a city of tower blocks with windows lit yellow and so many telephone cables, wires and aerials that the buildings looked caught in a net. The man beside him snored. A dangle of drool strung his mouth to the knot of his tie.
Carl got off the coach in a town communist in architecture. In the distance, hills and a power station cast a protective cloud over the streets. Double-headed lampposts stood tall on street corners. Fences were tagged with unimaginative graffiti in tasteless colours. He found the best-looking hotel he could, which had at least made an effort (if a rather meagre one) by laying a tawdry red carpet in the foyer and hanging chandeliers made of plastic in the lobby. A jobbing student with a wonky black bow tie gave him a room key, and he took the stairs up to the fourth floor to exercise legs that had become nearly numb on the coach. He threw his bag into his room, locked the door again and headed straight back out on to the streets, ignoring his rumbling stomach.
He strode down the roads that led him to the graveyard. He wished there were a florist open at this time in the evening so he could leave Freya her favourite golden irises. In the graveyard he passed a mourner caressing a memorial bench and found his way between the headstones to the white block of stone carved with that strange name that was only half hers. Freya Maclaird.
That bastard Charles Maclaird never even told Carl a tumour was bulging at the top of Freya’s spine. Never even informed him of her death. That was his spite towards him, more hurtful even than his legal ties to the woman. More hurtful even than the idea of the two of them sharing a bed with torturous regularity.
