The Cone Gatherers (3 page)

‘No, Peggy.'

‘I was thinking of a day at Fyneside long ago. It was autumn then too. I think autumn's the bonniest season. You put rowan berries in my hair.'

‘The rowans are just about past,' he said.

‘For me they're past forever,' she cried. ‘I used to love the time when the berries were ripe and red.'

He saw the appeal in her streaming eyes, but he could not respond to it; once it had sent him away with his own eyes wet.

‘Red as blood,' she sobbed.

Her mother called from the kitchen: ‘Will I put out your tea, John?'

‘In a minute, Mrs Lochie,' he shouted back. ‘I'd like to wash first. I'll have to go, Peggy. I'll come in later, after I've had my tea.'

Upstairs in the bathroom he was again haunted by that feeling of being in the cone-gatherers' hut. Such amenities as toilet soap, a clean towel, and hot water, recalled the bareness and primitiveness there. The flushing of the cistern sent him crouching in the darkness of the cypress. When he stared into the mirror and saw his own face, he was for an instant confused, disappointed, and afraid. He could not say what he had expected or hoped to see.

The table was set for him in the little kitchen. The morning newspaper, which usually arrived in the late afternoon, lay beside his heaped plate of eggs, bacon, and beans. Mrs Lochie was glancing over the table to see that nothing was missing. He never grumbled if anything was, but she always took it as a trick lost.

He thanked her and sat down. He said no grace.

‘Any news at six?' he asked, nodding in the direction of the wireless set.

They listened for a few moments to the sadness of ‘The Rowan Tree' played in waltz time. He remembered, with a strange jarring of his mind, his wife's talk of rowans. For an instant he seemed to see a way clear: the tree within was illuminated to its darkest depths. Next moment darkness returned, deeper than ever.

‘It was about Stalingrad,' she said.

‘Has it fallen yet?'

‘No. It's in the paper.'

He glanced at the headlines. ‘Aye, so it is.'

Lately she had taken thus to lingering in the kitchen while he ate. Neither of them enjoyed it.

‘Peggy's getting difficult,' she said.

It was spoken as if she'd been saving it up for months; yet she'd already said it that morning.

She laid her hand on her heart. ‘I'm finding it beyond my strength to lift and lay her when you're not in.'

‘There's Mrs Hendry,' he murmured.

Mrs Hendry was the wife of the gardener; she lived next door.

‘She's not a young woman any longer, and she's never been strong. I don't like to ask her.'

‘There's Mrs Black.'

She was the wife of the forester, as devout as he.

‘She's strong enough,' he said.

‘But is she willing?'

‘I would say so.' He thought she was jealous of Mrs Black, who was very patient, kind, and capable; besides, Peggy liked her.

‘Every time she's asked,' blurted out Mrs Lochie, ‘she comes running, but there's always a sermon to listen to.
My lassie was never wicked. You should ken that, John Duror.'

He nodded.

She sniffled grimly. ‘Peggy was not just happy herself,' she said. ‘She made other folk happy too.'

He had been one of the other folk.

‘What pleasure is it for me then,' she asked fiercely, ‘to listen to Mary Black making out that what happened to Peggy was a punishment.'

‘You've misunderstood her.'

‘I ken it's your opinion, John, that I'm just a stupid stubborn old woman; but I'm still able to understand what the likes of Mary Black has to say to me. A punishment inflicted by God, she says. And when I ask her to explain what she means, what does she say then? She just shakes her head and smiles and says it's not for her, or for me, or for anybody, to question God or find fault with what He thinks fit to do. But I told her I'd question God to His very face; I'd ask Him what right had even He to punish the innocent.'

He had kept on eating. Not even this impiety was original. God had been defied, threatened, denounced, reviled, so many times before.

‘Why argue with her?' he asked. ‘You only vex yourself. Forby, she means well enough.'

She pretended to be astonished.

‘How can she mean well enough,' she demanded, ‘when she suggests your wife deserved a punishment worse than any given to bloodstained murderers.'

‘Does she not also say there's to be a reward?'

‘If the punishment is suffered gratefully?'

‘Aye.'

‘After death?'

He nodded.

‘Do you believe that, John?'

‘No.'

She glanced away from him. ‘Even if I did,' she muttered, ‘even if I had a guarantee in my hand this very minute, saying that Peggy in heaven would have it all made up to her, I still wouldn't be satisfied. It seems to
me a shameful thing, to torment the living unjustly and think to remedy it by pampering the dead.'

‘This pampering is supposed to last forever.'

She spat out disgust. ‘I have my own religion,' she said proudly. ‘I don't think the Lord's a wean, to be cruel one minute and all sugary kindness the next.'

He wanted the conversation to end, but he could not resist asking, not for the first time: ‘Is there an explanation, in your religion?'

Once she had retorted by saying that not Peggy's sins were being punished, but his. It had seemed to him a subtle and convincing theology, but she had immediately retracted it: she would not insult God by crediting Him with less decency and intelligence than the creatures He had made.

‘You ken,' she answered, still proudly, ‘I have never found that explanation.'

Then they heard Peggy shouting. Instead of the dance music a man's solemn voice issued from the radio: he was talking about the war. Peggy wanted something more cheerful. Would her mother come and switch to another programme?

His mother-in-law hurried away. He went on with his meal, but suddenly he realised that he was envying the tranquillity and peace of mind in the cone-gatherers' hut. He paused with his fork at his mouth: that he should envy so misbegotten and godforsaken an imbecile as the hunchback was surely the ultimate horror, madness itself? To hate the hunchback, and therefore to wish to cleanse the wood of his defiling presence, was reasonable; but to wish to change places with him, to covet his hump, his deformed body, his idiot's mind, and his face with its hellish beauty, was, in fact, already to have begun the exchange. Was this why the hut fascinated him so much?

A comedian was now joking on the wireless. The studio audience howled with laughter. He heard Peggy joining in.

Mrs Lochie returned to the kitchen.

‘Did you remember to feed the dogs?' he asked.

‘I remembered.'

‘Thanks. I'm sorry I was late.'

‘Are you really sorry, John? You're late nearly every night now. This is the third time this week.'

He thought, afterwards, he would go up the garden to the dogs' house. Silence and peace of mind were there too; he wished he could share them. The handsome wise-eyed animals would be eager to welcome him in, but he would not be able to enter. All he would succeed in doing would be to destroy their contentment: they would whine and lick his hands and sorrow because they could not help him.

‘You think the world of those dogs,' she said accusingly.

‘I need them for my work.'

‘You talk to them oftener than you talk to your wife.'

It was true: the bond between him and the dogs still held.

‘You sit up in that shed for hours with them,' she said. ‘Fine I ken why. It's so that you don't have to sit with your wife.'

‘I told Peggy I'd be in later.'

‘For five minutes.'

He did not speak.

‘It's what will happen to her when I'm gone that worries me,' she said. ‘Who will toil after her as I have done? Nobody in this wide empty world.'

He let her enjoy her sobs.

‘I can only hope she's taken before I am,' she went on, ‘though she is thirty years younger. If I went it would be an institution for incurables for her. I'm not blind. I see the way things are shaping.'

Do you really, he thought, see this tree growing and spreading in my mind? And is its fruit madness?

‘Was there any message for me from the big house?' he asked.

‘Aye. It seems the mistress's brother has arrived for a day or two's leave before he goes overseas. She sounded excited. He's younger than she is. Anyway, she wants a deer hunt arranged for him tomorrow.'

‘But I've got no men for a deer drive.'

‘That's none of my business. You'd better explain it to her when you see her. She wants you to be early: half-past nine. Are you finished here? Have you had enough?'

‘Aye, plenty, thanks.' He rose up.

She began to gather the plates and cutlery. Out of the window he caught sight of stars glittering above the dark tops of trees.

‘You'll be going in to talk to Peggy?'

The comedian was still cracking jokes, and the laughter of his audience surged like waves. Peggy would tell him about the jokes he had missed.

‘Later,' he said. ‘I want to have a look at Prince's paw. He got a thorn in it yesterday.'

‘I ken a heart with thorns in it.'

For a moment he almost gave way and shouted, with fists outstretched towards those stars, that in his heart and brain were thorns bitterer than those that bled the brow of Christ. Instead, he merely nodded.

‘I'll not be long,' he murmured. ‘I'm frightened the paw might fester.'

Quick though he had been in his restraint, she had caught another glimpse of his torment. It shocked her and yet it satisfied her too: she saw it, clear as the sun in the sky, as divine retribution.

‘A heart can fester too, John,' she said, as he opened the door and went out.

Going up the path to visit the dogs, he loitered and tried to light his pipe. It was such a night as ought to have enticed his head and shoulders amongst the stars. But he could not even enjoy his pipe. When he had it at last lit, after striking eight matches, he found that as usual he had been expecting too much from it; it seemed merely a device to exercise his agitation rather than to allay it.

The air was keen with frost. Tomorrow would be another warm sunny day, ideal for a deer drive. An idea suddenly occurred to him, simple, obvious, likely to be approved by his mistress, yet to him a conscious surrender to evil. It would be easy for him to persuade Lady Runcie-Campbell to telephone Mr Tulloch to ask for the services of his men as beaters for the drive. The forester
would not dare refuse. The cone-gatherers would have to obey; and surely the dwarf, who slobbered over a rabbit's broken legs, must be driven by the sight of butchered deer into a drivelling obscenity. Lady Runcie-Campbell, in spite of her pity, would be disgusted. She would readily give him permission to dismiss them from the wood. That dismissal might be his own liberation.

All the time that he was ministering to his three golden Labrador dogs, he was perfecting his scheme to ensnare the cone-gatherers: preparing what he would say to Lady Runcie-Campbell to overcome her scruples; planning the positions he would give them during the deer drive; and considering what would be the best setting in which to give them the order to go for ever from the wood.

The dogs were uneasy. Although he spoke to them with more than customary friendliness, and handled them with unwonted gentleness, they still mistrusted him. They nuzzled into his hands, they thrust themselves against his legs, they gazed up at him with affection; but there was always a detectable droop of appeasement, as if they sensed what was in his mind and were afraid that it might at any moment goad him into maltreating them. He was more and more aware of their apprehension, and saw himself, in furious revenge, rising and snatching a switch from the wall and thrashing them till their noses and eyes dripped faithful blood: they would suffer his maddest cruelty without retaliation. But as he saw himself thus berserk he sat on the box and continued to pat the cringing dogs and speak consolingly to them.

Several times his mother-in-law shouted to him from the back door that Peggy was asking where he was and when he was coming to see her. He did not answer, and left the shed only when his wife's light had gone out.

He was going into his own bedroom when Mrs Lochie opened the door of hers. She was in her nightgown.

‘So you've come in at last,' she whispered.

He closed his eyes.

‘I thought you'd like to ken your wife sobbed herself to sleep. I thought if you knew that it might help to soothe you over yourself. I ken you find sleep hard to come by.'

He smiled, with his eyes still closed. Several times, desperate in his sleeplessness, he had left the house and wandered in the wood long after midnight.

‘I think,' she whispered, ‘you'll never sleep again this side of the grave.'

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

‘And on the other side?' he asked, in a voice so mild it disconcerted her.

‘If you have deserved mercy, John, you'll get it,' she answered.

Then she closed her door, but not before he had heard her sobbing.

‘It's too late,' he muttered, as he went into his room and stood with his hand on the bed-rail. ‘It's too late.' He did not clearly know what it meant, but he recognised the sense of loss that began to possess him, until he felt as terrified and desolate as an infant separated from his mother in a great crowd.

Next morning was so splendid that as he walked through the policies towards the mansion house despair itself was lulled. The sky was vast and bright; the withered leaves underfoot were iridescent with melting frost; the very air glittered. As if in contrition for last night's mistrust in the dim shed, his dogs showed him how to enjoy such sunshine as they ran here and there, giving holiday sniffs and yelps, and barking up at squirrels as tawny as themselves darting along red pine branches. It was a morning that seemed to beguile the mind with recollections of a time of innocence before evil and unhappiness were born.

Peggy and her mother had been asleep, and the stars still shining, when he had slipped out. He had taken no breakfast and hadn't shaved.

He walked under the squirrels, gun under his arm, smiling.

When he came near the house he heard cries and the crack of ball against bat. They must be playing cricket on the lawn. Young Roderick would have coaxed his uncle to play with him. The boy was useless at games, as far as Duror could judge; his awkwardness, physical and mental, prevented him from being proficient no matter how zealously he persevered. Duror had watched him once kicking a football for an hour; at the finish he had been clumsier and keener than at the beginning. Perhaps because he was like his father outwardly, with startled deer's eyes and hare's teeth, he was his mother's favourite, although his sister Sheila, two years younger, was beautiful healthy, courageous, and as assured as any lady. Roderick from birth had been weak in body and complicated in mind. He had had to be removed from school, and now was tutored at home. He had never liked Duror,
and when little had not hesitated to say so. His mother more than once had had to apologise for him.

Duror was early. He stood behind a thick holly to watch the players on the lawn; his dogs sat at his feet. Roderick batted; his uncle bowled; and Sheila was supposed to field, assisted by her dog, a small short-legged terrier called Monty. Roderick was very earnest as he faced up to the ball, swiped out at it, missed, and shouted an explanation for his miss. He immediately ran behind the wicket to retrieve the ball and throw it back to his uncle so that the whole thing could be repeated as soon as possible. Once he struck the ball, and began to race between the wickets as if those runs would mean the winning of a Test Match. His uncle called to him laughingly that there was no need for such hurry. Roderick paused to glance towards where the ball had flown. He was obviously displeased to see that Monty had it in his mouth and was playing a game of come-and-get-it-if-you-can with Sheila. Roderick shouted to his sister that she was spoiling the game; but his uncle, still laughing, came down the pitch and put an arm round his neck. He was a tall almost bald man of about thirty-five, in peacetime a lawyer from Edinburgh, where his father, Lord Forgan, had been a judge. Duror knew him as a quiet, pleasant, considerate man, with his only vanity a moustache as black and glossy as a snail.

Duror came out from behind the holly and walked respectfully along the path by the side of the lawn. His dogs too recognised the presence of superiors; when Monty came scampering along to sniff and yap insolently at them they endured it with glances up at their master as if to make sure he was noticing their forbearance.

Captain Forgan waved his hand; then, as if that gesture had not been cordial enough, he came striding across the lawn.

‘Good morning, Duror,' he cried.

‘Good morning, sir.'

Forgan smiled up at the sky and held out his hands as if to catch some of the benison dropping from it. His face, ruddy but hardly military from open-air life in army
camps, beamed with gratitude as if he thought this spell of magnificent weather was being provided in his honour.

‘This is a real honey of a morning, Duror,' he said, ‘and no mistake. Air like champagne.' He breathed it in deeply and gratefully. Although he was smiling he was serious: in two or three weeks he would be in an African desert.

‘Well, is there going to be a deer drive?' he asked.

‘I think we'll be able to arrange something, sir.'

‘Good man. I knew I could rely on you.' He bent down to pat the dogs. ‘Handsome creatures,' he said, with zest. ‘Why do we talk about a dog's life, Duror? What right have we to feel superior to these chaps?' He glanced up at their master with a smile. ‘They have no wars, Duror.'

‘No, sir.'

Forgan rose up and laughed. It was a comprehensive laughter, at the fine scenery, at his sentimental envy of dogs, at the forlorn wickets on the lawn, at Roderick with bat at rest like a sentinel, and at himself in well-creased khaki trousers.

‘We were playing cricket,' he said.

‘Yes, sir.'

Forgan gazed all round. ‘It's really a beautiful place,' he murmured. ‘I'm glad I could come. It'll be very pleasant to have these memories so fresh. You know, Duror, I envy you your life here.'

Duror did not smile back.

‘If you'll pardon me for saying it, sir,' he said, ‘I'd prefer to be going with you.'

The captain was taken by surprise; his smile turned foolish, and he did not know what to say. These days he tried to think like a soldier, and often reached no conclusion.

‘I'm too old, sir,' said Duror. ‘They won't have me. I've tried three times.'

Forgan thought he had hurt the keeper's pride as patriot.

‘No, no, Duror,' he cried, shaking his head. ‘When I said I envied you I wasn't meaning that you were lucky to escape the big and bloody war.' He laughed. ‘Not in
the slightest. I was just carried away by the beauty of the morning. We all know you're more than willing to do your bit. You're a stalwart of the Home Guard here, aren't you?'

Duror would not be appeased.

‘I'll try again, sir. Perhaps they'll be glad enough to have me yet.'

The captain twisted his snail-black moustache with rueful whimsicality.

‘You mean, when all the young cock sparrows have been shot off the tree?' he asked.

‘I hope not, sir. May I be allowed to wish you a good journey and a safe return?'

‘You are allowed, Duror; you are allowed, as the kids say, with knobs on. But I see Master Roderick glowering at me like a sergeant-major. Jove, he wanted us to start before the frost was off the grass. How glorious to be young! When d'you think the drive will start?'

‘About two o'clock, sir. After I've seen her ladyship, I'll let you know where I think the best place will be.'

‘Thanks, Duror. It's all in your hands, as far as I'm concerned. Just show me where to stand. I hope I get a kill.' He smiled wryly. ‘It's a funny thing, Duror, we moan about the vast amount of killing going on in the world, and here I am thirsting for more.'

‘Deer are vermin, sir. They must be kept down.'

‘I suppose so.' He hesitated, and cast a glance at Duror which seemed to the gamekeeper to be a prelude to a rebuke about his unshavenness; there had already been several of these glances. But he was wrong.

‘And Mrs Duror? How's she keeping?'

Duror smiled. ‘Not too well, sir.' He flicked his chin. ‘I'm afraid we had a disturbed night. I see I've forgotten to shave.'

Embarrassed, Forgan looked away: he had never seen Mrs Duror, but had heard about her from his sister. He remembered he had said he envied Duror. He remembered too unshavenness was a military offence.

‘Don't worry about that, Duror,' he said. ‘Well, I'll get back to my cricket.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

Touching his cap, Duror walked on. His dogs followed, glad to escape from the tyranny of Monty.

As he made for the servants' entrance at the back of the house, he realised that by lying to the captain about Peggy he had in some way involved him; and in a few minutes, by persuading Lady Runcie-Campbell to conscript the cone-gatherers, he would involve her too. His tragedy was now to be played in public: it must there-fore have a crisis, and an end.

Out of sight round the corner of the house, he paused. They were talking about him on the lawn. Roderick had said something shrill and petulant.

‘Be quiet, Roddy,' cried his sister. ‘He'll hear you.'

‘I suggest we get on with this manly game of cricket,' called their uncle.

‘Oh, all right, I'm sorry,' said Roderick.

‘That's more like you, old chap,' said his uncle. ‘Now I think it's my turn to bat.'

‘But I'm not out yet,' protested the boy.

Smiling, Duror walked along to the door, tied up his dogs, and entered.

Mrs Morton, the cook-housekeeper, was alone in the kitchen, preparing the silver tray for the family's morning coffee. She was a widow of about his own age, cheerful, shrewd, pink-faced, bonny and buxom. She was one of the few regular visitors to his wife. His mother-in-law had recently insinuated that the housekeeper's interest was in him, not in Peggy. He had dismissed the insinuation, but later had found himself wondering whether he wished it was true. To a man she liked, she could no doubt bring joy and oblivion; but, though neither religious nor prudish, she had a sense of fairness and a quick reliable judgment. He knew she was attracted by him, but she was genuinely sorry for Peggy and would not readily betray her.

This morning, as she welcomed him into the sunny kitchen, he thought that surely the next step in the drama should be his involvement of her.

She had no apprehensions of evil. Round her plump
neck, indeed, like a talisman protecting her, was a gold locket on a chain: it contained the picture of her twenty-year-old son Alec, who was in the Merchant Navy.

‘You're just in time for a cup of tea,' she said.

‘Thanks, Effie.' He sat down, smiling at her deft ministrations, like a proud husband. ‘I'm due in the office at ten.'

She glanced at the clock on the dresser.

‘Plenty of time,' she said. ‘And how's Peggy?'

Still smiling, he milked and sugared his tea, and stirred it.

‘Peggy?' he murmured. ‘There's no change in
her
.'

She offered him a plate heaped with scones freshly baked. He took one, and contrived to make the offering and his acceptance seem significant.

‘You're my favourite baker, Effie,' he said.

She laughed but turned pinker.

‘Och, I'm sure Mrs Lochie's as good as ever I could be.'

‘At baking?'

‘Aye, John, at baking. What else?'

For a few seconds he did not answer. Apparently composed himself, he noticed she was a little flustered.

‘When I said there was no change in Peggy,' he said, ‘I was really hinting there
was
a change in somebody else.'

‘I guessed as much.'

‘Maybe I ought to say no more, Effie. You see, you come into it.'

‘Me, John?'

As he nodded, it never occurred to her that he was lying. She had always thought that suffering had brought to him distinction of body and mind. With his black hair now thickly powdered with white at the sides, and his lean brown meditative face, he seemed to her a more distinguished man than Sir Colin himself. Never had she heard him say an indecent or false word. Several times she had found herself, deep in her own mind, regretting that his ordeal seemed to have purged him of passions. She had also indulged in the supposition of Peggy's death
and his freedom to remarry: if he asked her, she did not think she would refuse.

‘Aye, you, Effie,' he said. ‘But maybe I should change the subject. There's something else I want to ask you.'

‘But I'd like to know how I come into it, John, whatever it is.'

He laughed. ‘Och, why not? You're a sensible woman, Effie, and not likely to let silly tittle-tattle upset you. Somebody has got it into her head you and I are too fond of each other.'

She seemed more agitated than indignant.

‘Mrs Lochie, do you mean?' she asked.

He nodded. ‘I don't think she's really got a spite against us, Effie. It's God she blames, but where's the satisfaction in slandering him?'

‘I was aware she slandered you, but I didn't think she'd started on me.'

‘Don't blame her, Effie.'

‘I'm certainly not going to be sorry for her either, if she spreads dirty slanders.'

He chuckled. ‘So it's a dirty slander, Effie, to say that you and I are fond of each other?'

She was blushing; her throat was aflame, and perhaps her breasts.

He leaned towards her.

‘I didn't think that was what she meant,' she said hoarsely.

‘It wasn't, Effie,' he whispered. ‘She made it plain enough what she meant. She accused us of being in bed together; but she put it more coarsely than that.'

‘My God!' she cried, and made to rise.

He put his hand on her breast and gently pushed her down.

‘She's an old woman, Effie, crazy with anxiety. She sees I have difficulty whiles in showing affection for Peggy; which is the truth, I'm sorry to say. She thinks then I must be showing it to somebody else. It doesn't occur to her I might be empty of affection altogether.'

She stared at the table.

‘I hope that's not true, John,' she said, still hoarse.

He wondered if he could risk kissing or embracing her. Were her scruples sufficiently annulled by desire for revenge, or by lust, or even by genuine affection for him? To his own destruction, and the cone-gatherers', ought he to add hers?

He sat still.

‘I think we should drop this subject in the meantime, Effie,' he said, at last. ‘I see I've just got a minute or two left to ask your advice about a different matter altogether.'

‘It would be a mistake,' she said, in such a low voice he could scarcely hear, ‘to let affection die in you altogether.'

He stretched out his hand and laid it on hers.

‘Given the circumstances, Effie,' he whispered, ‘I could blossom again like a gean-tree.'