Wild Mountain Thyme

  She said, briskly, “Well, that’s that.”

  He said, “They’ve got a good day for a drive. It’ll be very beautiful, going over Struie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to go for a drive, too?” Victoria’s smile froze and became agonized, and he knew that this was what she had been dreading; he was sorry for her and so he was going to be kind to her. He went on, quickly, “I have to go to Creagan, anyway. I have to go to the chemist. I’ve run out of shaving soap. And I thought the newsagent might have a Financial Times. I haven’t seen the market prices for three days.” This was not true, but it was a face-saver, and as good an excuse as any.

  Victoria said, “What about Thomas?”

  “We’ll leave Thomas here. He’s happy with Ellen.”

  “I haven’t taken Thomas to the beach yet. I’ve always meant to take him.”

  “You can take him another time. If you don’t tell him where you’re going, he won’t want to come.”

  She considered this. She said at last, “Well … all right. But I must go and tell Ellen that we’re going out.”

  That was good enough. “You’ll find them out at the back, on the drying-green. I’ll get the car and meet you here in a moment or two.”

  When he returned, at the wheel of the hired Ford, she was back on the steps by the front door, waiting for him. He knew that in Creagan it would be windswept and cold, and she was wearing no sort of coat, but there was a spare sweater of his own lying on the back seat of the car, and he did not want to put off any time. He drew up beside her, leaned across to open the passenger door, and let Victoria get in beside him. Then, with no more discussion, they were on their way.

  He took it slowly. There was no hurry. The more leisurely their passage, the more relaxed he hoped she would become. He said, casually, “How was Thomas?”

  “You were right. He and Ellen are perfectly happy. Ellen’s taken a chair out into the sun, and she’s doing her knitting, and Thomas and Piglet are playing with her clothes pegs.” She added, a little wistfully, “They looked very peaceful.”

  He said, “Thomas isn’t your child, is he?”

  Victoria, beside him, was very still. She stared ahead at the convolutions of the narrow road. Her hands lay clasped in her lap. She said, “No.”

  “I don’t know why, but I always imagined that he was. I suppose Roddy thought he was, too. At least, he never gave me any reason to suspect that he wasn’t. And he looks like you. That’s the extraordinary thing. A bit fatter, perhaps, but he really looks like you.”

  “He isn’t my child. But he’s Oliver’s. Thomas’s mother was called Jeannette Archer. Oliver married her, but then the marriage broke up and she was killed in an aircrash soon after.”

  “How do you come into it?”

  “I’ve been in it for years…” Her voice began to shake. “I’m terribly sorry, but I think I’m going to start crying again.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t you mind?” She sounded surprised.

  “Why should I mind?” He leaned forward and opened the cubbyhole on the dashboard, and revealed an enormous box of Kleenex. “See? I’m even prepared.”

  “Americans always have paper handkerchiefs.” She took one out and blew her nose. “Crying’s horrible, isn’t it? Once you start, it’s like a terrible addiction. However many times you stop, you always start again. I don’t usually ever cry.”

  But this brave assertion dissolved, even as she made it, into tears. John waited peacefully, taking no notice, saying nothing. After a little, when the sobs had reduced themselves to chokes and then to sniffs and she had blown her nose, determinedly, once more, he observed, “If a person wants to cry, I never see any reason why they shouldn’t. I always cried when I was a kid and being sent back to Fessenden. And my father never tried to stop me nor tell me that it wasn’t manly. In fact, he sometimes looked as though he were about to burst into tears himself.”

  Victoria smiled wanly, but made no comment on this, and John decided to leave it, and nothing more was said until they reached Creagan. The little town lay bathed in cold afternoon sunshine, its streets swept and empty of the modest throngs who would fill it later on in the year as the summer season swelled.

  He drew up in front of the chemist. “Do you want to do any shopping?” he asked Victoria.

  “No. I’m all right, thank you.”

  He left her and went into the shop and bought the shaving soap and some razor blades. Next to the chemist was a newsagent, so he went in there and asked for the Financial Times, but they didn’t have one, so he bought a bag of peppermints instead, and bore these back to the car.

  “Here.” He tossed them into Victoria’s lap. “If you don’t like them, we’ll give them to Thomas.”

  “Perhaps Ellen would like them. Old people always like peppermints.”

  “These are toffees. Ellen can’t eat toffees on account of her false teeth. Now, what shall we do?”

  “We could go back to Benchoile.”

  “Is that what you want to do? Don’t you want to go for a walk or something? Don’t you want to go to the beach?”

  “Do you know the way?”

  “Sure I know the way, I used to come here when I was knee-high to a bee.”

  “Haven’t you anything else you’d rather do?”

  “Not a mortal thing.”

  * * *

  The beach at Creagan was divided from the town by the golf links, and there was no access by road to the sands, so John parked the car by the clubhouse. When he switched off the engine, they could hear the whine of the wind. The long pale grasses that flanked the fairways lay flat beneath its blast, and the brightly colored waterproof jackets of a couple of hardy golfers were filled with it, so that they resembled balloons. John pulled up the zipper of his old leather jacket, and reached back for the sweater that lay on the backseat.

  It was blue and very thick with a tall polo neck. She pulled it over her head and the tight, ribbed collar dragged her hair. She flipped it free and shook it loose. The cuffs of the sweater covered her hands, the hem reached below her narrow hips.

  They got out of the car, and the wind pounced on the open doors and it was a struggle to get them shut. A path, a right-of-way, led down towards the sea across the fairways. Wild thyme grew underfoot, and there were hazards of whin and gorse. Beyond the links lay dunes of coarse grass, “bents” they were called in this part of the world, and there was a little caravan site, and small, ramshackle edifices, which in summer would open their shutters and sell chocolate and fizzy drinks and ice creams. The dunes ended abruptly in a sloping cliff of sand. The tide was out. Now there was nothing but white beach and the distant sea. Far away, the rollers creamed in, crested with spray. There was not another soul about, not a dog, not a scampering child. Only the wheeling gulls hung overhead screaming their disdain at the world in general.

  After the soft, dry, sand of the dunes, the beach seemed very flat and firm underfoot. They ran, trying to get warm. As they approached the sea, shallow pools, fed from some mysterious source, reflected the brightness of the sky, and there were immense quantities of shells. Victoria’s attention was caught by these. She picked up one and then another, marveling at their size and unbroken state.

  “They’re so beautiful. I’ve never seen shells before that weren’t all broken to bits. Why aren’t these broken?”

  “I suppose because this is a shallow, sandy shore.” He joined in her ploy, grateful for any diversion that would take her mind off her woes. He found the skeleton of a starfish, the delicate fossilized claw of a miniature crab.

  “What’s this?” she asked him.

  He inspected it. “A sand gaper. And the blue one is a common mussel.”

  “And this? It looks exactly like a very small baby’s toenail.”

  “That’s called a banded wedge.”

  “How do you know their names?”

  “I used to come and collect shells when
I was a boy, and Roddy gave me a book so that I’d learn to identify them.”

  They walked on in silence, and came at last to the sea. They stood, facing the wind, and watched the breakers pouring in. The waves rose and curled and broke and hissed in over the sand, and the water was clear and clean and the color of aquamarine.

  The shell lay, just out of reach of the ebbing tide. John stooped and picked it up, and placed it, wet and shining, in the palm of Victoria’s hand. It was the color of coral, with a sunburst or raised ribs, semispherical in shape, so that if it had still been attached to its twin they would have formed a whole roughly the size of a tennis ball.

  “Now there’s a prize,” he said.

  She was openmouthed. “Whatever is it?”

  “That’s a queen scallop, and what a size of one.”

  “I thought you only found shells like that in the West Indies.”

  “Well, now you know you can find them in Scotland.”

  She held it away from her, taking enormous pleasure in its shape, the very feel of the shell. She said, “I shall keep it for always. Just for an ornament.”

  “And a keepsake, perhaps.”

  Victoria looked at him, and he saw the beginnings of her first smile. “Yes. Perhaps as a keepsake too.”

  They turned their backs on the sea, and started on the long return journey. The sands stretched forever, and the dunes seemed very far away. By the time they had reached the steep cliff of sand down which they had tumbled so easily, Victoria was beginning to flag, and John had to take her hand, and pull her, floundering and slipping, to the top. Halfway up, she began to laugh, and when they finally reached the summit, they were both breathless. In wordless agreement, they collapsed, exhausted into a sheltered hollow, where the sand gave way to a thick, coarse grass, and the tussocks of bents protected them from the worst of the wind.

  Here, there even seemed to be a little heat in the sun. John lay back on his elbows, and let its warmth generate through the thick, dark suede of his jacket. Victoria sat forward, her chin on her knees, still gloating over her shell. Her hair had parted at the back of her neck, and his enormous sweater made her look even thinner and frailer than she actually was.

  After a bit, she said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t keep it. Perhaps I should give it to Thomas.”

  “Thomas wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  “He would, when he’s older.”

  “You’re very fond of Thomas, aren’t you? Even though he isn’t your child.”

  Victoria said, “Yes.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “It’s difficult to know where to begin. And you probably wouldn’t understand anyway.”

  “You could try me.”

  “Well…” She took a deep breath. “The Archers are Thomas’s grandparents.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “And they live in Hampshire. And Oliver was driving back from Bristol, and he passed near Woodbridge—that’s where the Archers live…”

  Slowly, hesitantly, the story unfolded. All the time she was speaking, Victoria kept her back turned to John, and he was forced to listen to the entire saga while staring at the back of her neck. He found this intensely frustrating.

  “… that night you brought me back from the Fairburns’ party, and Thomas was crying—that was the evening they turned up.”

  He remembered that night, the evening before he had flown to Bahrain. The dark windy skies and the little house in the Mews; Victoria with her chin buried in the fur collar of her coat, and her eyes filled with apprehension and anxiety.

  “… and all come away for a little holiday. So we came to Benchoile on account of Oliver knowing Roddy. I told you about that.”

  “I take it you don’t have a job to keep you in London?”

  “Oh, yes I do. But I work in a dress shop in Beauchamp Place, and Sally, the girl I work for, wanted me to take a holiday anyway. So she said I could have a month off, and she’s got a temporary girl in to help out till I get back again.”

  “And are you going back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I may just stay with Oliver.”

  This silenced John. He could not comprehend how any girl could want to stay with that raving egotist. Despite all his original and laudable intentions of keeping a fair and open mind, he found himself becoming slowly more and more incensed.

  She was talking again. “… I knew how worried Mrs. Archer must be, so I said to Oliver that I thought I should write to her, and Oliver was furious because he didn’t want them to know where we were. But I did write, although I explained to her about Oliver being so difficult, and I asked her not to get in touch, but I suppose Mr. Archer got hold of my letter.”

  Now that the telling was safely over, Victoria appeared to decide that the time had come to look John in the eye. She turned to face him, her attitude confiding, her weight resting on one hand, her long legs curled up beneath her.

  “And it was he who rang up Oliver at lunchtime. So now you see why Oliver was so angry.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do see. But I still think it was a fairly gruesome scene.”

  “But you do understand?”

  It was obviously important to her that he did. But for John understanding made things no better. In fact, if anything, a good deal worse, for his most pessimistic suspicions had proved themselves well-founded. It was all in place now, the pieces of the jigsaw slotted together and the pattern clear. A person was selfish. Another person was greedy. Pride came into it, and resentment and even a sort of spite. Nobody came out of it well, and only the innocent suffered. The innocent. A noxious word, but how else to describe Victoria and Thomas?

  He thought of Oliver. From the first encounter, there had been antipathy between the two men. Like dogs, they had circled each other, hackles bristling. John had told himself that this antipathy was reasonless, instinctive, and with the inbred good manners of a man staying in another man’s house, had fallen over backwards in his efforts not to let it show. But the antipathy was obviously mutual and before long John found himself resenting Oliver’s casual treatment of Victoria, his offhand attitude to Roddy, his lack of interest in his child. After a couple of days in Oliver’s company he had to admit that he actively disliked him. Now, after the appalling scene over the lunch table, he knew that he detested him.

  He said, “If you stay with Oliver, will you marry him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you mean you don’t know if you’ll marry him, or if he’ll marry you?”

  “I don’t know.” A flush crept up into her pale cheeks. “I don’t know if he’ll marry me. He’s funny. He…”

  All at once, John was filled with a boiling, unaccustomed rage. Brutally, he interrupted her. “Victoria, don’t be a fool.” She stared at him, her eyes enormous. “I mean that. Don’t be a fool. You have a whole, wonderful life in front of you, and you talk about getting married to a guy, and you don’t even know if he loves you enough to marry you. Marriage isn’t a love affair. It isn’t even a honeymoon. It’s a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they’ve worked at anything in their lives before. If it’s a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it goes on getting better. I’ve seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I’ve seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it’s never one person’s fault. It’s the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn’t a cure, it’s a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider. And you and Oliver already have a child. You have Thomas.”

  She said, “I can’t go back.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “It’s all very well for you to talk. Your marriage may have broken up, but you st
ill have your parents, your job. You have Benchoile, too, whatever you decide to do with it. If I don’t have Oliver and Thomas, then I don’t have anything. Not anything really precious. Not anyone to belong to, not anyone to need me.”

  “You have yourself.”

  “Perhaps I’m not enough.”

  “In that case, you dismally underestimate yourself.”

  Victoria turned swiftly away from him, and John was presented once more with the back of her head. He realized that he had been shouting at her, and this astonished him, because it was the first time in many months that he had felt sufficiently involved or aroused to shout at anyone. He said, gruffly, “I’m sorry,” and when she did not move or speak, he went on, more gently, “It’s just that I hate to see someone like you make such a goddamn mess of her life.”

  She said, sounding sullen as a child, “You forget. It’s still my life.”

  “It’s Thomas’s too,” he reminded her. “And Oliver’s.” Still she did not move. He put his hand on her arm and pulled her around to face him. With an immense effort she met his eyes. He said, “You have to love Oliver very much. Much more than he loves you. To make it work, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  “In that case you’re going into it with your eyes open.”

  “I know,” she said again. Gently, she eased herself free of his grasp. “But you see, there was never anyone else. There was never anyone but Oliver.”

  14

  TUESDAY

  The wind, he thought, was the same wind that blew in Scotland, but in London it took on a different shape. It sneaked from around corners, it tore the first buds from the trees in the park, and littered the streets with torn scraps of paper. It was not a friend. People pressed against it, their faces agonized, their coats wrapped tight against them. The wind was an enemy, invading the city.

  The rain came as the taxi, which had brought him out from Fulham, turned at last into the complexities of Heathrow Airport. It came through tunnels and circled rotaries, a tiny entity in an endless stream of traffic. Lights flashed, reflected in the wet roadways; overhead a jet droned, waiting to land. There was the heavy smell of petrol.