Wild Mountain Thyme

  Above her, in Roddy’s sitting room, Victoria could hear the murmured conversation of the others. She closed the suitcase and snapped shut the locks. She went to the mirror and combed her hair, gave a final glance about the room to make sure that nothing had been forgotten, and then went upstairs to join the rest of the party.

  Because of the sunshine and the brightness of the day, she found them gathered, not about the fireside, but at the huge window. Oliver and Roddy sat on the window seat with their backs to the view, and John Dunbeath on a chair that he had pulled back from the desk. When Victoria appeared, Roddy said, “Here she is, come along, we’ve been waiting for you,” and John stood up and moved his chair to one side in order to make space for her. “What’ll you have to drink?”

  She considered this. “I don’t think I really want a drink.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Oliver. He held out a long arm, and drew Victoria to his side. “Don’t be prissy. You’ve been beavering around all morning, being domestic. You deserve a drink.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  John said, “What would you like? I’ll get it for you.”

  Still caught in the circle of Oliver’s arm, she looked across at him. “A lager, perhaps?” And he smiled, and went through to Roddy’s kitchen to collect her a can out of the fridge.

  But there was scarcely time to open the can and pour the lager before they were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening, and Ellen’s voice from the foot of the stairs, raised to tell them all that lunch was ready, it was on the table, it would spoil if they didn’t come immediately.

  Roddy said, sotto voce, “Drat the woman,” but there was obviously nothing to be done about it, and so, carrying their various glasses, they all got to their feet and made their way downstairs and across the yard to the big house.

  They found the dining room full of sunshine, the big table laid with a white cloth. A roast of beef steamed on the sideboard, dishes of hot vegetables stood on the hot plate, and Thomas was already installed, hungry and feedered, in an ancient wooden high chair that Jess Guthrie had brought down from the old nursery.

  Ellen pottered to and fro on her unsteady legs, telling everybody where they were to sit, complaining that the roast was getting cold, and what was the point of cooking good meat if folks couldn’t be on time for their meals?

  John said, good-naturedly, “Now come on, Ellen, that’s not true. We were off our backsides the moment you hollered up the stairs. Who’s going to carve?”

  “You,” said Roddy instantly, and went to sit down with his back to the window, as far from the sideboard as possible. He had never been any good at carving. Jock had always done the carving.

  John sharpened the horn-handled knife with all the élan of a master butcher, and got to work. Ellen took the first plate for Thomas, and herself dealt with it, cutting up the meat and squashing the vegetables and gravy into a mess like brown porridge.

  “There he is, the wee man. You eat that up now, pet, and you’ll turn into a great big boy.”

  “Not that we have too many problems,” Roddy murmured when Ellen had departed and closed the door behind her, and everybody laughed because this morning Thomas’s cheeks appeared to be fatter and rounder than ever.

  They had finished their first course and were just starting in on Ellen’s apple pie and baked custard, when the telephone started to ring. They all waited, as seemed to be the custom at Benchoile, for somebody else to go and answer it. Finally Roddy said, “Oh, damn.”

  Victoria took pity on him. “Shall I go?”

  “No, don’t bother.” He took another leisurely mouthful of apple pie, and pushed back his chair and ambled from the room, still grumbling. “What a bloody stupid time to ring up.” He had left the dining room door open, and they could hear his voice from the library. “Benchoile. Roddy Dunbeath here.” Then a pause. “Who? What? Yes, of course. Hold on a moment and I’ll go and get him.” A moment later he reappeared, still holding the table napkin, which he had taken with him.

  “Oliver, dear boy, it’s for you.”

  Oliver looked up from his plate. “Me? Who is it?”

  “No idea. Some man or other.”

  He returned to his apple pie, and Oliver pushed back his chair and went to take the call. “I can’t think,” said Roddy, “why they can’t invent some device so that when you sit down to a meal, you can stop the telephone ringing.”

  “You could always take it off the hook,” John suggested mildly.

  “Yes, but then I’d forget to put it back again.”

  Thomas was beginning to be bored with his pudding. Victoria picked up his spoon and began to help him. She said, “You could always just let it ring.”

  “I’m not strong-minded enough. I can let it ring for just so long, and then I can’t bear it for another moment. I always imagine that someone is waiting to tell me something tremendously exciting, and I go cantering off to grab the receiver from the hook, only to find myself voice-to-voice as it were with the Inland revenue. Or else it’s a wrong number.”

  John said, “If you’re a wrong number, then why did you answer the phone?” which was somehow all the funnier, because he didn’t often make jokes.

  By the time Oliver returned, their meal was over. Roddy had lighted a cigar, and John brought the tray of coffee through from the kitchen. Victoria was peeling an orange for Thomas, because however much he ate, he always liked oranges more than anything. The orange was juicy and the task absorbed her, so that she did not look up when Oliver came back into the room.

  “Good news, I hope,” she heard Roddy say. The last of the peel fell away, and she broke the orange into sections and handed the first one to Thomas. Oliver did not reply. “Nothing serious?” Roddy now sounded concerned.

  Still Oliver said nothing. The silence suddenly caught Victoria’s attention. It grew longer, more strained. Even Thomas was stilled by it. He sat, with a piece of orange in his hand, and stared across the table at his father. Victoria’s cheeks began to prickle. She realized that they were all looking at her. She looked at Roddy, and then up at Oliver. She saw his face, intensely pale, and his cold, unblinking eyes. She felt the blood drain from her own cheeks, and a reasonless sense of doom, like a sickness, knot her stomach.

  She swallowed. “What is it?” Her voice sounded thin and insubstantial.

  “Do you know who that was on the telephone?” Oliver asked her.

  “I’ve no idea,” but she could not keep her voice from trembling.

  “It was Mr. Bloody Archer. Ringing up from Hampshire.” But I told her not to ring up. I said I’d write again. I explained about Oliver. “You wrote to them.”

  “I…” Her mouth was dry, and she swallowed again. “I didn’t write to him. I wrote to her.”

  Oliver advanced to the table, he laid the palms of his hands flat upon its surface, and leaned towards her.

  “I told you not to write to her.” Each word came out like a hammer blow. “I told you you were not to write to her, nor telephone her, to get in touch with her in any way at all.”

  “Oliver, I had to…”

  “How did you know where to write, anyway?”

  “I … I looked it up in the telephone directory.”

  “When did you write?”

  “On Thursday … Friday…” She was beginning to be flustered. “I can’t remember.”

  “What was I doing?”

  “I … I think you were still asleep.” It was beginning to sound so underhand, so secretive, that she was impelled to stand up for herself. “I told you I wanted to write to her. I couldn’t bear her not knowing about Thomas … not knowing where he was.” Oliver’s expression softened not one whit. Victoria realized, with horror, that she was going to cry. She could feel her mouth shaking, the lump grow in her throat, her eyes begin to swim with terrible, shaming tears. In front of them all, she was going to start crying.

  “She knew where he bloody was.”

  “No, she didn’t.”
r />   “She knew he was with me. And that’s all that bloody matters. He was with me and I am his father. What I do with him, and where I take him, is no concern of anyone else. Least of all, you.”

  Tears were now running down her face. “Well, I think—” she managed before he interrupted her.

  “I never asked you to think. I simply told you to keep your stupid little mouth shut.”

  This was accompanied by Oliver’s fist coming down in a massive blow on the dining room table. Everything on it shivered and bounced. Thomas, who had been stunned into silence by the unfamiliar violence of words that he did not know, but understood only too well, chose this moment to emulate Victoria, and burst into tears. His eyes screwed up, his mouth fell open, the remains of his half-chewed orange dribbled from his mouth down onto his feeder.

  “Oh, for God’s sake…”

  “Oh, Oliver, don’t.” She sprang to her feet, her knees trembling, and tried to lift Thomas out of his chair, to comfort him. Thomas clung to her, burying his sticky face into her neck, trying to hide from the shouting. “Don’t, in front of Thomas. Stop!”

  But her anguished appeal was ignored. By now Oliver was past stopping. “You knew why I didn’t want you to get in touch with the Archers. Because I guessed that as soon as they knew where we were, I’d be bombarded with maudlin appeals, and when they failed, threats. Which is precisely what has happened. The next thing we know, there’ll be some black-coated little bastard on the doorstep delivering a letter from some lawyer or other…”

  “But you said…” She couldn’t remember what he had said. Her nose had started to run, and she could scarcely speak for crying. “I … I…” She scarcely knew what she was trying to say. I’m sorry, perhaps, but it was just as well that this final abasement was never uttered, because Oliver was in no mood to be placated by anything. Not his weeping son, nor his weeping mistress, nor all the apologies in the world.

  “You know what you are? You’re a deceitful little bitch.”

  And with this final broadside, Oliver straightened up from the table, and turned and stalked out of the room. Victoria was left, trapped by her own tears, with the weeping, hysterical child in her arms, with the appalled silence of the other two men, with the shambles of the ruined meal. Worst of all, with humiliation and shame.

  Roddy said, “My dear,” and got up from the table and came around to her side, and Victoria knew that she must stop crying, but she couldn’t stop, or wipe away her tears, or even start looking for a handkerchief, while still burdened with the howling Thomas.

  John Dunbeath said, “Here.” He was beside her, lifting Thomas out of her arms and up against his broad shoulder. “Here, come along now, we’ll go and find Ellen. She’ll maybe have some candy for you to eat.” Bearing Thomas with him, he made for the door. “Or a chocolate biscuit. Do you like chocolate biscuits?”

  When they had gone, “My dear,” said Roddy again.

  “I … I can’t help it…” Victoria gasped.

  He could bear it no longer. Streaming face, running nose, sobs and all, he pulled her into his arms and held her against him, cradling the back of her head with his gentle hand. After a little, he reached up and took the red and white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his aged tweed jacket, and gave it to her, and Victoria was able to blow her nose and wipe her eyes.

  After that, things got a little better, and the nightmare scene started to be over.

  * * *

  She went in search of Oliver. There was nothing else to be done. She found him down by the edge of the loch, standing at the end of the jetty, smoking a cigarette. If he heard her coming across the grass, he gave no sign of it, for he never turned round.

  She reached the jetty. She said his name. He hesitated for a moment, and then threw his half-smoked cigarette into the sun-dappled water, and turned to face her.

  Victoria remembered him saying, If you so much as pick up a telephone, I’ll batter you black and blue. But she hadn’t really believed the threat, because in all the time that she had known him, she had never seen the true violence of Oliver’s uncontrolled rage. Now, she knew, she had seen it. She wondered if his wife, Jeannette, had seen it. If that, perhaps, was one of the reasons why his marriage had lasted only for a few months.

  “Oliver.”

  His eyes rested on her face. She knew she looked hideous, still swollen from weeping, but even that didn’t matter any longer. Nothing mattered except that the dreadful quarrel, for Thomas’s sake, had to be patched up.

  She said, “I really am sorry.”

  He still said nothing. After a little, he gave a long sigh, and then shrugged.

  She went on, painfully. “It’s difficult for you to understand. I know that. And I don’t suppose I understood, either, because I’d never had a child of my own. But after I’d been with Thomas for a bit, I began to realize what it was like. I mean, having a little boy, and loving him.” She wasn’t doing it right at all. She was making it sound sentimental, and that wasn’t what she was trying to be at all. “You get bound up with a child. Involved. As though it were part of you. You begin to feel that if anybody hurt it, or even threatened it, you could kill them.”

  “Do you imagine,” said Oliver, “that Mrs. Archer was going to kill me?”

  “No. But I did know that she was probably out of her mind with anxiety.”

  “She always hated me. They both did.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t give them much reason to do anything else?”

  “I married their daughter.”

  “And fathered their grandchild.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “That’s the whole point. Thomas is your son. You’ve told me over and over that the Archers have no legal claim on him. So how can it hurt you to be a little generous to them? He’s all they have left of their daughter. Oh, Oliver, you must try to understand. You’re perceptive and clever, you write plays that wring people’s hearts. Why can’t you come to terms with a situation that should be so close to your own heart?”

  “Perhaps I haven’t got a heart.”

  “You’ve got a heart.” She began, tentatively, to smile. “I’ve heard it beating. Thump thump thump, all through the night.”

  It worked. His grim expression softened a little, as though the situation had, in its way, a wry humor. It wasn’t much, but emboldened by this, Victoria went down the jetty to his side, she put her arms around his waist, beneath his jacket, and pressed her cheek against the front of his rough, thick sweater.

  She said, “They don’t matter anyway, the Archers. What they do can’t make any difference.”

  His hands rubbed up and down her back, as though he were absently fondling a dog. “Any difference to what?”

  “My loving you.” It was said. Pride, self-esteem no longer mattered. Loving Oliver was their only talisman, all she had to hold onto. It was the key to the lock that held the two of them, and Thomas, together.

  He said, “You must be mad.”

  He did not apologize for any of the searing remarks and accusations he had thrown at her down the length of the lunch table. She wondered if he would apologize to Roddy and John, and knew that he would not. Simply because he was Oliver Dobbs. But that didn’t matter. Victoria had bridged the breach between them. The wound of the hideous scene was still open, and agonizing, but perhaps, in time, it would heal. She realized that it was always possible to pick yourself up and start again, however many times you fall.

  She said, “Would you mind very much if I was?”

  He did not reply. Presently he laid his hands on her shoulders and put her away from him. “I must go,” he told her. “It’s time I was going, or I’ll miss my plane.”

  They went back to the Stable House and collected his suitcase, a couple of books. When they came out again, they saw Jock’s old Daimler parked in front of the house, and Roddy and John standing beside it, waiting.

  It seemed that everybody had decided to behave as though nothing had happened. “I th
ought it would be better to take the big car,” Roddy explained. “There’s not much room for luggage in the MG.”

  His tone was quite matter-of-fact, and Victoria felt grateful to him.

  “That’s great,” Oliver opened the back door and heaved his case in, and the books on top of it. “Well,” he grinned, quite unrepentant, even perhaps a little amused by the lack of expression on John Dunbeath’s face, “I’ll say good-bye, John.”

  “I’ll see you again,” John told him. He did not hold out a hand. “I’m not leaving till Wednesday.”

  “That’s great. Bye, Victoria,” he stooped to kiss her cheek.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “What time does your plane get in?”

  “About seven-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there to meet you.”

  “See you then.”

  They got into the car. Roddy started the engine. The Daimler moved away, ponderous and dignified, tires crunching on the gravel. Down through the rhododendrons, over the cattle grid, through the gate.

  They had gone.

  * * *

  He was terribly afraid that now it was all over, now he was alone with her, she would start to cry again. It was not that he was afraid of tears, or would even be embarrassed by them. In fact, he would have almost welcomed them. But he knew, too, that this was not the right time to take her in his arms, to comfort her as Roddy had done.

  She was standing with her back to him. She was done with waving good-bye. To John, her erect and slender back seemed immensely courageous. He saw the firm set of her shoulders under the thick sweater, the long silky tail of fair hair, and was reminded of a colt his father had reared, long ago, on the ranch back in Colorado. Once frightened by a clumsy hand, only the most patient and perceptive of handling had finally brought it back to anything approaching trust. But little by little, letting the colt take his own time. John himself had achieved this.

  He knew that he had to be very careful. He waited. After a bit, perhaps realizing that he was not going to simply melt away and tactfully disappear, Victoria pushed her hair out of her face, and turned to face him. She was not crying. She was smiling. The sort of smile that lights up a face, but does not reach the eyes.