Читать книгу Household Ghosts: A James Kennaway Omnibus - James Kennaway - Страница 19

ELEVEN

THE WEATHER HAD changed for the worst. The snow lay two or three inches deep on the causeways and in the wynds, and it was still falling. But there was nothing sleety about it now: each flake was a feather and the flakes fell thickly, with a silent perseverance. Above the yellow street lamps it was pitch dark, and people abroad that night wondered what would happen were it never to cease to snow. No footsteps rang on the pavements, and even voices were muffled and lost in a white felt world that was lonely and eerie. Echoes were suffocated by the same snow that falls each year and that fell so long ago, when the first Jacobites, routed, savage and afraid, retreated, burning the villages as they came. The women then – their lips moving and their voices lost – the women and the children escaped from their houses into this same white winter, and waited, moaning. Snow in those parts is altogether different from the Christmas-card showers in the South. It is more serious and more sinister. Snow once meant suffering and poverty, and even starvation: it brought sorrow, not Christmas. The conditions have changed, the storm is no longer a danger; but the memory of something that was experienced generations before lingers like a superstition. Snow comes not as a friend.

And of all men Jock was the most superstitious. A flake or two fell on his eyebrows so that he pulled his bonnet over his eyes and turned up the collar of his coat. He did not wear one of the short greatcoats that fashionable field officers wear: he wore the regulation officer’s greatcoat. It was long and the two rows of heavy brass buttons ran parallel up to the waist, then flung apart from each other, wider and wider, so that the top buttons were shoulder breadth and the lapels folded across the chest.

He walked down Seaton Street, across the corner of the park to the footbridge. Its surface is cobbled and as it is steeply humped he found it difficult to walk there without slipping. But at the crest he stopped in one of the bays in the stone walls and leant over to look at the black water swirling beneath. By the light of a single lamp he could see where the snow was lying on a foot or two of ice that curved in from the bank of the stream. And although there was nothing heroic about Jock’s face, the figure standing there in the long greatcoat had a splendour. The same figure had moved from platoon to platoon when the snow was falling on a flatter, duller land: in every war, back and back, in every siege and trouble that same figure existed and exists: the anonymous commander in the long coat moving through the night, alone. He is the guard.

Anxious, because it was a time for anxiety, he walked on towards his home, to see Morag. He always felt a little guilty when he returned from visiting Mary, but when he found the house empty, he stopped still in the hall, suddenly convinced that something was wrong. He reached out a hand and touched the coat-stand, then took a pace forward to switch on the lights.

‘Morag! Morag! Morag!’

He glanced behind him, as always when afraid, and seeing the door ajar, closed it with a brave bang. Then he went swiftly to the kitchen, and finding it neat and orderly, tidy and cleaned, with a little note propped up on a cup on the bare table, his shoulders dropped with relief, and he opened his coat with a smile of shame. The note read:

Father,

Gone out with Jenny. Back by eleven.

Morag.

It was written in a sane and slanting script, and was firmly underlined. Jenny was a neighbour, and a friend of Morag’s. Nothing could be more secure. Jock looked about the kitchen, and the larder. He looked in a tin and ate a biscuit, then he knew he could not bring himself to make some supper, so he buttoned his coat again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets and retraced his steps down the wynd over the bridge and back into the town. He decided to call into a small hotel which had long ago been one of his haunts but which he had not visited for a full year. In the hall he was about to sign the book on the table as a bona fide traveller – between London and Thurso – when the proprietor appeared, ferret-like and inquisitive.

‘Eh, Colonel Sinclair?’

Jock had never liked the man.

‘Eh, you’re travelling are you, Colonel?’

‘I am.’ The proprietor pushed his face into the book. ‘Eh, is this right?’

‘Aye, it’s right.’

‘You’ve come fr’ London?’

‘No,’ Jock said solemnly. ‘From Thurso.’ ‘Dear me, Colonel …,’ the proprietor began. ‘It says so there doesn’t it, for Christ’s sake?’

‘I’m only doing my duty, Colonel Sinclair.’

The man fidgeted defensively. He was nervous of Jock. ‘It’s no right you should come in if you’re no a bona fide.’

Jock spluttered. He had always thought it a stupid law and he had no intention of taking it seriously.

‘For Christ’s sake, all the law says is that we’ve got to sign the book. That’s all you’ve got to carp about. All right?’

‘Colonel, it’s important that …’

‘Well I’ve signed the bloody thing. O.K.?’

‘There’s still a question.’ ‘There’s no question. I’ve signed it, haven’t I?’ ‘Aye, you have that, Colonel.’

‘Well for Christ’s sake get out of my way.’

Jock clenched and unclenched his fists as he pushed open the inner door, with his shoulder.

The pub was patronised almost exclusively by the more senior members of the band. No piper would dare to go to the private bar until he was invited there, and after that first invitation he would hardly ever go to any other pub. Not that there was anything special in the way of entertainment. An upright piano was as much as it boasted. But business had been good and since Jock had last called the room had been redecorated, in brown and cream, and it had been filled with new furniture in the shape of pink and green wickerwork chairs and round glass-covered tables. The proprietor had bought these at the sale of a seaside hotel the other side of Portobello. But the bar itself had not changed: it still had the coloured glass screen protecting it from the open part of the house – the public bar, and the saloon. A sergeant was stooping to order two beers and whisky chasers and he grinned, rather embarrassed, in reply to Jock’s nod.

Jock himself ordered a whisky from the waiter, and not just a wee one; but it was a whisky that was never to be drunk. As he started to unbutton his coat again he glanced round the room and observed that there were five or six pipers there, mostly non-commissioned officers, in their kilts and spats, their sporrans swung round on their hips, all prepared and all dressed up to get drunk. From the corner of his eye he was surprised to see that there was a dark girl with a pale face in the lounge: there were not often ladies present. Then perhaps almost instantaneously – but this realisation was characteristic of the movements that followed, in that it seemed to him a long time before he understood – he saw that the piper with the girl was Corporal Fraser. He also looked pale and he was rising to his feet, seemingly disturbed. A second glance lasted for a split second, but the picture was so firmly impressed on Jock’s mind that it seemed ever afterwards to have lasted for minutes. Morag was sitting with her hands on the table: she was very tense, and pale and her fingertips were pressing on the glass. She put her hand out to hold Corporal Fraser back for she must have known then what was going to happen. Jock advanced on them. With anger, with that blind rage that is always born of fear, he drew back his right hand, and his fist was only half closed as if he were holding a big stick. Then with a back-handed downward blow he struck the Corporal, just as he was finding his voice to give an explanation. Morag’s fingers went up to her lips, and she gave a whimper rather than a cry. The Corporal knocked against the table and upset the glasses. Everybody in the room stood up, uncertain whether to interfere or to hold back, and Jock’s voice came clear: ‘You bastard’ – with the same short a, but no joke for Charlie this time, ‘You bastard …’

He would have struck the Corporal again, this time with a closed fist, and Morag had already given out a warning cry, when a voice behind him called out sharply:

‘Colonel Sinclair.’

It was Mr McLean, standing absolutely still, just inside the door. Jock turned and saw him, and came to his senses. With a sinking agony he saw what he had done and his jaw dropped, his face blank like a man awakened to the sound of guns. Suddenly all was noise around him. Chairs and tables were pushed about, the proprietor was there, somebody was looking at the Corporal’s eye and Morag was in front of him whiter still, crying, ‘I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed.’

He must have said something, protested, demanded; but it was the Pipe-Major who was in command and Morag went home to his house. When an officer strikes a ranker it is time for someone else to take command. The others paid up, moved out, gathered coats and chattels like citizens alarmed by war, and Jock found himself sitting in a chair with a stern-faced proprietor telling him to pull himself together and away out of here. The proprietor’s face had a lot of lines on it and he looked like a lawyer’s senior clerk; like that, or like a wolf.

‘Away out o’ here: I’m no having carryings on in this house. You must be out o’ your senses. And still with your bonnet on.’

Jock nodded, and nodded, and the proprietor disappeared. He sat motionless for a few minutes, stunned by it all, appalled by what he had done, by what one blow had cost him, alone in a nightmare silence that was like the long high notes of a lament.