Читать книгу Sole Survivor - Derek Hansen - Страница 11

Six

Angus McLeod was as happy as he’d ever been. He stirred and thought briefly about pulling his bedcovers up over his head to try to block out Bonnie’s insistent meowing. It was time for breakfast and both of them knew it. The first rays of the morning sun had pierced his window and lit upon his bed, warming and seductively indolent. He had no reason to rise other than his ingrained sense of discipline, but that was reason enough. Angus was one of those dour Scots to whom happiness always carried with it a suspicion of sin and was never acknowledged without due caution.

He followed Bonnie to the door of his refrigerator. The shiny new Kelvinator was one of two additions to a rather primitive kitchen. The other was a new Stanley woodstove imported from Ireland. Only the Kelvinator looked out of place, a proud and incongruous acknowledgment of progress alongside a chipped enamel sink with two brass taps, a kauri countertop, table and chairs.

“Here you go, you spoiled thing,” he said as he gave Bonnie a saucer of fish pieces. “Look at you now, fatter than butter, like a sheep with the bloat.” He slipped a couple of pieces of hakea into the Stanley’s firebox and opened the flue to boost the flame. With nothing to do but wait until the hob had heated sufficiently to boil water for his tea and fry his fish, he strolled out onto his veranda to greet the day. Like so many of his countrymen, Angus had left home with the solemn hope of re-creating it in some other part of the world. It wasn’t until he retired from the New Zealand police force five years earlier at the age of sixty that he finally realized his objective. He gazed over a landscape that was as wild, rugged and inhospitable as his birthplace on the slopes of Mount Conneville on Scotland’s far northwest coast. Of course his bach was a castle compared to the crofter’s hut that had been his home, with its thatched roof, cold stone walls and pounded-dirt floor. And the vegetation bore no resemblance other than that it clung to the poor soil in equal desperation. But he’d found heather upon the slopes, not the true heather of Scotland but a species he’d grown up calling ling. Still, it was heather enough for him to collect and dry and hang in bundles from the kitchen’s exposed beams. It helped make him feel at home.

Angus took advantage of the morning sun to eat his breakfast out on his veranda, where he could look down over the treetops to his boat moored in the bay below. Now that he was up, he was anxious to get to work. Angus had two secrets. The first was that he wrote children’s books. He did his best to conceal the fact because he didn’t think it was a fitting occupation for a retired police officer. It concerned him that others might interpret it as weakness or a softening on his part, and he couldn’t allow that. Nevertheless, his writing gave him great pleasure and satisfaction. If he’d had a chat with Rosie’s father, the psychiatrist would probably have concluded that Angus was compensating for the childhood he’d never had.

He noticed Red’s boat back was on its mooring when a wind shift brought it into view. So the madman had returned. A few years earlier he would have arrested him for indecent exposure or for causing a public nuisance and had him locked away in the Carrington Road mental institution. He didn’t doubt that Red meant well, but equally it was clear all was not as it should be inside his head. Insanity troubled Angus, it was something beyond his ken. He was just about to sit down at his typewriter and return to the story of the boy who tamed the fierce griffin and saved his village, when movement caught his eye. It was the madman and his dog, coming up the trail toward his house. He looked for Bonnie, thinking he could throw her inside before they arrived, but she had also spotted the visitors and run along the veranda rail to greet them. He felt a surge of anger build up as he waited for Red to appear through the tea-tree arch that marked the head of the trail.

“What is it you want this time?” he snapped. “Can you not leave me alone for five minutes?” His eyebrows bristled and his face flushed with indignation.

“We need to talk,” said Red.

“We need do no such thing! Away with you, now. Stop pestering me!”

“Angus, we need to talk.” Red had learned to be patient with the belligerent old Scot, but controlling his temper had not come easy. There’d been a time when his temper had cost him his freedom, when he’d exploded for no reason and could do nothing to control it.

“If it’s about the old man, I’ve nothing more to add.”

“How can you add to nothing?” Red’s hands began to shake.

“Don’t you play smart with me! I contributed to his funeral.”

“You should have contributed to his life.” Red felt his patience slip and his anger flare. He didn’t want to talk about Bernie, but now that Angus had raised the subject there were things that had to be said. Responsibilities that had to be faced. “You had a duty to attend his funeral.”

“I don’t attend funerals.”

“He was your comrade.”

“He was no comrade of mine. He was my neighbor; an acquaintance and distant at that!”

“No!” Red began to shout back, his voice growing shrill. “He was your neighbor and your comrade. He would have stood by you if you’d needed help. Bernie would never have turned his back on you like you did on him. You had an obligation.”

“I have obligations to no man. I did not want him as my friend. I did not want him as my neighbor. I don’t want you as my neighbor and I certainly don’t want you as my friend.” Years as police spokesman had taught Angus how to use words to maximum effect, and his precise Highland accent turned them into bullets. He watched them strike home with satisfaction.

“Like it or not, we’re neighbors, and neighbors carry obligations.” Red stuck doggedly to the beliefs that had been shaped in Burma and had enabled men to survive.

“I don’t want neighbors. Can’t you get that through your thick skull? I don’t need you. Now, would you kindly get off my land and take that mangy animal with you.”

Red took a deep breath to calm himself. He couldn’t leave without raising the matter he’d come to discuss. Angus glowered at him, and he glowered back. Finally Red turned away. He looked at Archie and Bonnie, one purring and the other wagging his tail. How could natural enemies like a cat and dog get along so well while their respective masters were at each other’s throats? “I didn’t come here to discuss Bernie,” he said softly. “I came to tell you about the woman he left his bach to.”

“What!” Angus nearly tripped off his veranda.

“Bernie wrote a will and left his bach to a woman.”

“To a woman!” Angus could hardly conceive of a greater blasphemy. “How do you know about this will?”

“He asked me to witness it.”

“Then you’re a bloody fool, man! A bloody fool!”

“What would you have had me do, Angus? Deny a dying man? Lose his letter overboard? Is that what you would have had me do?”

“Don’t you mock me!” Angus wrung his hands in frustration. “Bonnie, get inside!” Bonnie took no notice. “A woman, you say? Here? At Wreck Bay? Was the old man mad?”

“She sent me a letter. She wants me to pick her up from Fitzroy next Saturday.”

“You’re not going!”

“No choice!”

“Of course you’ve choice, man! Have you lost your senses altogether?”

“Angus, if I don’t fetch her she’ll just pay someone else to bring her. The question isn’t whether I pick her up, it’s what do we do when she gets here.”

“Dear God, a woman here at Wreck Bay!” A thought occurred and gave cause for hope. “She’s not young, this woman? Perhaps she’s one of Bernie’s old flames?”

“From what Bernie told me I’d say she’d be in her mid-thirties.”

“Oh dear God … Married, perhaps, is she?”

“She’s coming alone.”

“Dear God in heaven.”

“Angus, think about it. There’s nothing here for her. We’ve got to stick together and make sure she understands that.”

“Aye, we’d better talk. You’d better come up here. I suppose I should offer you a drop of tea. Make sure your dog stays down there, mind.”

“Archie goes where I go.”

“Ah, suit yourself!” The dog was the least of his worries. Angus walked slowly back into his kitchen to put another hakea stick on the flames and the kettle back on the hob. “Dear God, a woman here! A young woman, at that!” He’d found paradise and peace, a hiding place from the dream that he’d finally accepted could never be. But it seemed the dream had sought him out once more and brought with it all the pain of despair and abandoned hopes that he thought he’d left behind forever. His brain struggled to comprehend the scale of the disaster. He couldn’t allow it to happen. They couldn’t allow it to happen. Whatever it took, they couldn’t allow the woman to come to Wreck Bay.

The two men sat together on the veranda, uncomfortable with their closeness, plotting and concocting schemes neither man was capable of executing. They discussed wrecking Bernie’s bach, but neither man was a vandal. They thought of draining his water tank, but abandoned that idea for the same reason. They thought of laying baits to encourage the native rats to move into the bach, but they didn’t like the idea of encouraging the kiore, either. They decided they could do nothing but allow the isolation and deprivations of Wreck Bay to speak for themselves, confident that they would not so much speak as shriek. Let her face the prospect of hauling four-gallon tins of diesel all the way up the hill from the beach. Let her face the prospect of carrying bucketfuls of soil for her garden over the hills from Whangapoua. Let her face the prospect of taking a boat single-handed around Aiguilles Island in hostile weather to fetch supplies. Let her learn the vagaries of cooking on the decrepit Shacklock Orion slow-combustion stove. Let her suffer the deprivations of life without shops, cinemas, bright lights or a friendly voice. Let her fend for herself. Wreck Bay was wildly beautiful but promised a hard life to anyone who chose to occupy its shores. The two men resolved not to make it easier for her.

They parted not as friends but as reluctant allies, each committed from self-interest to a common cause. Red took the track down to the beach to prepare his boat and set off with Archie for the rise beyond Aiguilles Island to honor his dead mate’s wishes. Angus had declined Red’s invitation to join him and help in the scattering of Bernie’s ashes. Instead he sat unmoving, head in hands, trying to find the strength to confront and dismiss his fears. If any prayers had passed his lips they would’ve been reserved for his own salvation, not Bernie’s.

Angus was not one to admit failure, yet he had failed to accomplish the one thing he believed made sense of his existence. He’d never wanted riches, fame, possessions, nor particularly a wife. He’d learned to expect nothing and to be given less. But it had never seemed an unreasonable expectation to one day have a boy child in his image. A son to indulge as he had never been indulged, to love as he had never been loved, to shape and mold and make beneficiary of his experiences and wisdoms. A son who would love and look up to him. If marriage had been the price, he would have paid it stoically, but there would never have been the slightest doubt as to whom the boy belonged. The boy would have been his, and he felt the lad’s absence from his life as keenly as a blade. This was Angus’s second secret.

Angus had come to terms with his disappointment, and the woman threatened his acceptance. Her presence would remind him of his failure and, worse, perhaps rekindle his hopes. He could not allow it, not allow it! Waves of anguish washed over him so bitterly that he groaned in despair, startling Bonnie, who’d settled on his lap. He looked up at the dense wild bush surrounding him, his home by choice and hiding place from necessity. What would happen when he could no longer hide?