Wild Mountain Thyme

  16

  THURSDAY

  It did not take very long to pack for the simple reason that they had nothing to pack. Everything that Victoria and Thomas had brought to Benchoile with them had been lost in the fire. And so they left bearing only a paper carrier containing Thomas’s pajamas and the old wooden engine, which Ellen said that he could keep.

  Good-byes were brief and brisk, for the true Highlander is neither demonstrative nor sentimental. As well, there was little opportunity for prolonged farewells. No sooner had breakfast been eaten in the kitchen at Benchoile than it was time to be off. Before Thomas had finished munching his toast, John Dunbeath was behaving like a family man with a punctuality complex, rounding them up and insisting that it was time to leave.

  For this Victoria was deeply grateful. She even suspected that he was overplaying his role a little. His car was parked and waiting in front of the door, already loaded with his own suitcase, and John himself appeared to have deliberately taken on a new image, for he had abandoned the casual and comfortable clothes in which they were used to seeing him, and appeared at breakfast in the formality of a dark suit and a tie. The different clothes changed him. Not just the way he looked, but his entire manner. He was no longer the amiable, easygoing houseguest of the last few days, but a man used to responsibility and authority. A man to be reckoned with. He was in charge, not aggressively, but comfortingly, so that Victoria was left with the good feeling that nothing would go wrong. They would not have a puncture, they would not lose their tickets, there would be porters and reserved seats, and they would not miss the train.

  “It’s time to go.”

  Ellen put the last finger of toast into Thomas’s mouth, wiped it clean and lifted him from his high chair. He wore tartan dungarees and a blue sweater, chosen for him by Jess Guthrie in the small shop in Creagan that was owned by her sister-in-law, so Jess had got a discount. His new shoes were brown lace-ups. and there was a small blue anorak with red stripes to go on top. Ellen had brushed his red-gold hair flat to his head. She was wanting to kiss him good-bye, but decided not to with everybody watching. Her eyes had a way, these days, of filling with tears at the most inconvenient moments. Running, Ellen called it. “My eyes are starting to run,” she would say, blaming the wind or the hay fever. She never cried. At times of great emotion, like anniversaries or weddings or funerals, she would shake a body’s hand, but nothing more. So now, “There he is,” she said, setting Thomas firmly down onto his feet. “Put your coat on.” She picked up the new jacket, and stooped over him to help him with the zipper.

  They were all on their feet. Victoria gulping the last mouthful of coffee. Roddy standing, scratching the back of his head, but not looking as disconsolate as she had feared he might. He seemed to have recovered with amazing rapidity from the shock of the fire and losing everything he owned. Indeed he was really being quite organized; had spent most of yesterday with the man from the insurance company, and had already started to make a little nest for himself in the big house, sleeping in his brother’s old bedroom and tossing logs as carelessly as ever onto the fire in the library. The library fire was surrounded by a hearth of stone flags and a huge club fender, but still, said Roddy, he would get a proper fireguard. One of those chain curtains. He had seen one advertised. Just as soon as he could find the advertisement, he would order one for Benchoile.

  “We must go now,” said John, so they all left the kitchen and the remains of breakfast and trooped out, across the hall and through the front door. Outside, it was cold again and frosty, but it was going to be fine. It was good-bye. To the garden, the loch, the hills beyond, sparkling in the crystal clear morning air. It was good-bye to the friendly, peaceful house, good-bye to the sad charred remains of what had once been Roddy’s domain. It was good-bye, Victoria knew, to a dream. Or perhaps a nightmare. Only time would give the answer to that one.

  “Oh, Roddy.” He opened his arms and she went to him, and they hugged. “Come back again,” he said. “Come back again and see us all.” He kissed her on both cheeks and let her go. Thomas, with the cheerful prospect of a car ride in front of him, had already climbed, independent of anyone, onto the back seat, had taken his wooden engine out of the paper bag, and had started to play with it.

  “Good-bye, Ellen.”

  “It’s been nice to know you,” said Ellen briskly and stuck out her gnarled, red hand to be shaken.

  “You’ve been so endlessly kind. You and Jess. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Away with you,” said Ellen, brisk and much embarrassed. “Into the car, and don’t keep John waiting.”

  Only John was allowed to kiss her. She had to stand tiptoe in her flat old shoes to receive his kiss, and then she had to fumble up the sleeve of her dress for her handkerchief. “Oh, my, what an edge to that wind,” she remarked to no one person in particular. “It fairly makes your eyes run.”

  “Roddy.”

  “Good-bye, John.” They shook hands, smiling into each other’s faces, two men who had come together through a bad time.

  “I’ll be back sometime, but I’ll call you and let you know when.”

  “Anytime,” said Roddy.

  That was all. They got into the car, fastened the safety belts, John started up the engine and they were away. There was scarcely time for Victoria to turn in her seat and wave a last farewell—scarcely time for a final glimpse of the two of them, Roddy and Ellen, standing there on the gravel sweep in front of the house. Roddy was waving, and Ellen was waving too, her white handkerchief a tiny flag. And then they were hidden, gone, lost behind the curving bank of the rhododendrons.

  “I hate saying good-bye,” said Victoria.

  John’s eyes were on the road ahead. “Me too,” he said. He was driving very fast.

  Behind them Thomas rolled his three-wheeled engine up and down the seat. “Meh meh, meh,” he intoned to himself.

  * * *

  He played with the engine for most of the day, taking time off to sleep, to look out the windows, to be taken down the corridor at decent, regular intervals, to be given lunch, to be given tea. As the train thundered south, the weather, disobligingly, degenerated. They were no sooner across the border than thick clouds rolled up, obliterating the sky, and soon the rain started to fall. The hills were left behind them, the countryside became flat and incredibly dull, and watching acres of flat, wet plough wheel past the window, Victoria’s own spirits sank accordingly.

  She discovered that it was all very well being brisk and sensible about your future when you happened to be eight hundred miles from it, but now, with every moment and every turn of the wheel, it was drawing closer. She felt lamentably unprepared.

  It was not just the distant prospect of the remainder of her own life, which would presumably fall into some pattern of its own. As for Oliver … she was not thinking about Oliver just now. Later, she told herself, she would find the necessary moral courage. When she was back in her own flat, with her own familiar possessions around her. Possessions helped, whatever anybody said. And friends. She thought of Sally. She would be able to talk to Sally about Oliver. Sally’s robust attitudes, her impatience with the vagaries of the opposite sex in general, would swiftly cut the whole disastrous episode down to size.

  No, worse was the immediate and dreaded ordeal of having to hand Thomas back to the Archers; of having to say good-bye to him forever. Victoria could not imagine what she was going to say to his grandparents. Unfortunately, without much difficulty, she could imagine what they might be going to say to Victoria in her role of Oliver’s accomplice.

  There were other hideous possibilities as well. Suppose Thomas did not want to return to them? Suppose he took one look at the Archers, and burst into tears and had hysterics and clung to Victoria?

  He had adjusted so easily to her in two weeks, had been so happy and become so affectionate. She found that she was torn in two opposite directions where Thomas was concerned; one half of her wanting him to need her as much as she neede
d him, the other shying like a frightened horse at the idea of any sort of a scene.

  She looked at Thomas. He was sitting on the opposite side of the first-class carriage, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, his head, tousled by now, leaning against John Dunbeath’s arm. John was entertaining him by drawing pictures with a felt pen on the pink pages of the Financial Times. He had drawn a horse, a cow, a house, and now he was drawing a pig.

  “He’s got a big nose that sticks out in front. That’s for snuffling with and finding stuff to eat. And he has a tail with a curl in it.” He drew the tail. Thomas’s face broke into a smile. He settled down more cosily. “More,” he ordered, and plugged his mouth with his thumb.

  Victoria closed her eyes and leaned her head against the rain-streaked window of the train. It was sometimes easier not to cry if you didn’t keep your eyes open.

  * * *

  It was dark long before they reached Euston, and Thomas had gone to sleep again. When the train stopped, Victoria picked him up in her arms. His head lolled on her shoulder. John carried his suitcase, and the little party stepped out onto the dark platform, into the usual confusion of barging passengers, trolleys, porters, luggage and mail vans. Victoria, weighed down by Thomas’s considerable weight, felt overwhelmed. She supposed they must now trudge the length of the platform, wait in a queue for a taxi …

  But she supposed wrong, and realized that in this supposition she had totally underestimated John Dunbeath. For from the confusion emerged a figure, grey-suited, with a grey uniform cap.

  “Good evening, Mr. Dunbeath.”

  “George, you’re a wonder. How did you know where we’d be?”

  “Had a word with the ticket collector, he said you’d probably be down this end.” With no more fuss, he relieved John of his suitcase. John duly relieved Victoria of Thomas. They followed the neat, uniformed figure down the length of the platform.

  “Who is he?” asked Victoria, having to run every now and then to keep up with John’s long legs.

  “He’s the office driver. I told my secretary to send him to meet us.”

  “Has he brought a car?”

  “I hope he’s brought my car.”

  He had. Outside the station, they were left waiting for a moment or two while George disappeared into the rainy darkness. In no time he was back, at the wheel of John’s Alfa-Romeo. He got out and they got in, Victoria with Thomas still sleeping on her shoulder.

  “Thanks a lot George, that was very good of you. Now, how are you going to get back?”

  “I’ll pop into the tube, Mr. Dunbeath. Very handy.”

  “Well, thanks again, anyway.”

  “A pleasure Mr. Dunbeath.”

  “How nice,” said Victoria.

  “Nice of him?”

  “Yes, nice of him, but nice to be met. Not to have to wait for a taxi, or wait for a bus, or fight your way down the underground. Just nice to have a friendly face on a station platform.”

  “It makes all the difference between traveling hopefully and arriving,” said John.

  She knew what he meant.

  The car sped west down the rain-drenched motorway. Three-quarters of an hour later, they had turned off it, and down the side road that led to Woodbridge. Now, there were little fields and hedgerows, and water meadows fringed with willows. Lights shone, here and there, from the windows of small, red-brick houses. They came over a bridge, and a train screamed past beneath them.

  John said, “That’s lucky.”

  “What is?”

  “Going over a bridge the same time that the train’s going under it.”

  “What else is lucky?” She needed luck.

  “Letters crossing. If you write someone a letter, and he writes you and the letters cross, that’s enormously lucky.”

  “I don’t think it’s ever happened to me.”

  “And black cats and picking up pins and new moons.”

  “There was a new moon the night of the fire.”

  “Disregard new moons, then.”

  At last, the lights of the village twinkled ahead of them. They passed the sign, WOODBRIDGE. The road swung around into a curve, and the long, wide main street sloped away before them. The car idled down to a gentle crawl. There were shops and a pub with a lighted sign. A church, set back behind a stone wall.

  “We don’t know where they live.”

  “Yes, we do. It’s on the right hand side, and it’s red brick, and it has a yellow door, and it’s the only one in the street that is three stories high. There it is.”

  He drew up at the pavement’s edge. Victoria saw the flight of steps that led up to the door from the pavement, the pretty fanlight, the tall lighted windows. She said, “How do you know this is the house?”

  He switched off the engine. “Because I rang Mrs. Archer, and she told me.”

  “Did she sound furious?”

  “No.” He opened his door. “She sounded very nice.”

  Thomas, disturbed by the sudden cessation of movement, chose this moment to wake up. He yawned, bleary with sleep, rubbed his eyes, gazed about him with the confused expression of a person on whom some terrible trick has been played. He still held the wooden engine.

  “You’re home,” Victoria told him gently. She smoothed down his hair with her hand, with some vague idea of tidying him up.

  Thomas blinked. The word “home” apparently meant little to him. He gazed out at the darkness. Then John opened the door and lifted Thomas and his engine up and off Victoria’s knee. She reached around into the back of the car, retrieved Thomas’s paper carrier luggage, and followed them.

  They stood in front of the yellow front door, and John rang the bell. Almost instantly, as though the person inside had been waiting for them, there was a footstep and the door was flung open. From the bright, warm hallway, light poured out upon the three of them, so that they were caught in its beam, like actors spotlighted upon a stage.

  “Good evening,” said John, “I’m John Dunbeath.”

  “Yes, of course.” He looked nice. Sixtyish, grey-haired, not tall, nor particularly impressive, but nice. He did not try to snatch Thomas from John’s arms. He simply looked at Thomas and said, “Hello, old boy,” and then stepped back, and went on, “I think you should all come in.”

  They did so, and he closed the door behind them. John stooped and set Thomas on his feet.

  “I’ll just call my wife. I don’t think she can have heard the bell…”

  But she had heard it. From a door at the far end of the narrow hall, she appeared. She had curly white hair and the sort of complexion that would go on being young, even when she was in her eighties. She wore a blue skirt with a cardigan to match and a rose-pink shirt with a bow at the neck. In her hand she carried her spectacles. Victoria imagined her, sitting in some chair, trying to read, or to do a crossword, anything to fill in the time while she waited for them to bring Thomas back to her.

  There was a long silence. She and Thomas eyed each other down the length of the hall. Then she began to smile. She leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “And who is this,” she asked him, “that Thomas has come home to?”

  Victoria was frigid with anxiety, but she need not have had any worries. For Thomas, after an astonished silence, suddenly realized what was happening. Slowly, his rosy face became suffused by an expression of total, incredulous delight. He took a single enormous breath, and let it all come out in the first proper sentence that anyone had ever heard him utter.

  “It my Ganny!”

  He flung himself towards her, and was instantly swept up, lost in her embrace.

  It was all very emotional. Mrs. Archer laughed, and cried, and then laughed again, and hugged her grandson. Mr. Archer took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. From upstairs, alerted by the noise, came running helter-skelter a young girl, round and plump and pretty as a milkmaid, and when Mrs. Archer could be persuaded to relinquish Thomas, he was engulfed in yet another pair of loving arms. Finally, he was set do
wn and allowed to go to his grandfather, who had stopped blowing his nose, and who, in his turn, picked him up, and jigged him up and down, in a manly sort of way, which Thomas seemed to find wholly satisfactory.

  While all this was happening, Victoria and John could do nothing but stand and watch. Victoria wanted to go, to get away while everyone was still happy and before any possible recriminations could set in, but it was hard to know how to achieve this without appearing rude.

  It was Thomas who finally put an end to the great reunion scene. He wriggled himself down from his grandfather’s arms, and with deadly determination made for the stairs that led to his nursery, where he remembered leaving a number of delightful toys. His grandparents sensibly let him go, and the little au pair girl went with him. As they disappeared around the bend in the staircase, Victoria took hold of John’s sleeve and gave it a tug, but if Mrs. Archer noticed this, she showed no sign of it.

  “I am sorry, keeping you standing there like that. But it’s all just so…” She wiped away the last of her happy tears, and blew her nose on a lacy handkerchief. “You must come in and have a drink.”

  “We really ought to go…” Victoria began, but Mrs. Archer would have none of it.

  “Of course you must stay, for just a moment. Come along in by the fire. Edward, I am sure Mr. Dunbeath would like a drink…”

  There was nothing for it but to follow her, through a door that led into a pleasant, chintz-upholstered sitting room. A fire flickered pleasantly from an old-fashioned grate, there was a grand piano arrayed with family photographs, there were flowers, beautifully arranged, and the sort of cushions that looked as though nobody ever sat on them.

  But it was warm and welcoming and under the influence of Mrs. Archer’s obvious good intentions, her obvious gratitude, Victoria began to relax a little. The men had gone, presumably, to fetch the drinks, so she and Mrs. Archer were to be left alone together for a moment or two. Cautiously Victoria let herself down onto the sofa, and Mrs. Archer did not look disappointed about the cushions being squashed.