The Green Flash

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Not at all?’ I echoed.

  She looked at me then. ‘ But you seem such a typical Abden, if I may say so. Not in looks perhaps, but something in your manner. Forgive me if that seems unpertinent. But is it possible that the exclusiveness was not all on one side?’

  I stared back at her and laughed. She flushed and seemed about to join me, when the door came open and Lucie was on view again. She looked disapprovingly at us both and said:

  ‘Mother will see you now.’

  III

  Lady Abden was a small woman, well upholstered with cushions in a big black chair. She’d been quite a looker; her face broad over the bridge of the nose, which had probably grown more noticeable with age, arched brows still dark over pale stony-blue eyes, very fine-textured wavy hair which was now curled over her forehead; you could see how jolly that had been. She looked older than her late husband’s sixty-nine.

  Did one kiss one’s aunt? (One wouldn’t have minded kissing one’s cousin-in-law downstairs.) Lady Abden came up with the answer by putting out a wrinkled hand on which a couple of diamond rings looked out of place. (The trouble with diamonds is that they’re ageless.)

  ‘So you are Stewart’s son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pray sit down.’ Her voice had just a trace of Scottish accent.

  I took a hard seat. Lucie squatted by the window and looked out, just as she had downstairs.

  ‘So you have come to claim your inheritance.’

  ‘Some people achieve greatness,’ I said, ‘some have it thrust upon them.’

  Big ears for a woman. She shouldn’t have worn the pearl drop earrings because it drew your attention to them.

  ‘Your name is David, is it not? David Kilclair?’

  ‘It is.’ She’d scored 100 so far.

  ‘Are you a Catholic?’

  ‘No.’

  She put out her bottom lip and breathed deeply. ‘Your father was.’

  ‘He was brought up a Catholic but let it lapse; I don’t know when; before I was born.’

  ‘When he married. That’s when he lapsed.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Is your mother still alive?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Not old yet. Remarried, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ You didn’t know whether this meant she ought to have known, or that she would expect nothing else of such a woman. ‘You were the only child by the marriage?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt. Fortunately.’

  Lady Abden frowned. ‘My brother-in-law died in unhappy circumstances.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he was drunk.’

  Lucie stirred. ‘I don’t think my mother wishes to hear all the –’ She stopped as Lady Abden raised a hand.

  ‘You come of a very old and staunchly Catholic family, as you must know. In this area in particular we are rather – an enclave. I hope you may in due course consider returning to the Faith again, for the sake of the family, for the sake of your ancestors and your descendants.’

  I checked my first reply. ‘I doubt it, Lady Abden.’

  ‘I could arrange – we could arrange …’ She looked across at Lucie. ‘We have an excellent priest here, Father Donald; you would not find him without an intellectual basis for his beliefs. You might consider that you owe it to your family to arrange one or two meetings …’

  I said: ‘It’s just not on.’ I couldn’t ask her what the hell she thought I owed her of her family, which had shrunk in horror because one of its sons had married a Jewess.

  Silence for a bit. The colour in her cheeks didn’t look artificial. But there was no warmth in her eyes.

  ‘The baronetcy carries little with it. As I expect you know.’

  ‘That was my impression.’

  ‘You may wonder at the – er – division of the Abden family into two properties some thirty miles distant. But perhaps Mr Macardle will have explained this.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Wester Craig has been the family house of the Abdens since the sixteenth century, but over the years the land we inherited or acquired came to be around the shores of Loch Fiern, so in the late eighteenth century we built this house and moved, keeping the other as a hunting lodge. Then the family fell on hard times, most of the land round Wester Craig was sold and the house was allowed to fall into ruin. Some fifty years later, when our fortunes had taken an upturn, Wester Craig was rebuilt and made habitable again, and that is how it has remained.’

  ‘A family home,’ I said, ‘unused by the family.’

  ‘Oh, indeed not! The eldest son when he married has always lived there – that is, until he inherited.’

  ‘I see. I see.’

  She put her bottom lip out again. ‘There is, of course, a degree of money and property in the family itself. This house, for instance. And we have eight thousand acres, and some other possessions. Had Malcolm succeeded he would have inherited all of it – or most of it, with of course adequate provision for my daughters. So it is very sad for me to see the baronetcy and all that it has meant to us through the generations going to a – forgive the expression – to an outsider.’

  I said: ‘I understand how you feel, Lady Abden. You’ve had two tough breaks. Malcolm could father nothing but girls; and a famous manufacturer’s rotten tyres saw to the rest. Without that you’d never have had to meet me, let alone see me slip undeservedly into the ermine, or whatever one does slip into on these great occasions. But as for being an outsider …’

  She waited. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well – not to split hairs – I am just as much an Abden as Malcolm was … And more so than you, since you married into the family –’

  Lucie was on her feet. ‘Will you please leave! I will not have Mother spoken to in such an insulting fashion!’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Abden. ‘Let us hear him out. I do not suppose you will come here again, Sir David, so you may say what you will while you are here.’

  An odd moment to think of Shona, but I did. It was suddenly as if she was beside me saying once again. ‘Behave yourself, you stupid man!’

  I was swallowing thirty-odd years of spleen but couldn’t keep it all down.

  I said: ‘My dear Aunt, I am not here to insult you, but to meet you. I came up – was nagged into coming up here by Macardle – for the first time yesterday. I don’t much like Scotland or the people in it; I have my own life in London, so whether I shall ever come here again remains to be seen. I shall certainly not trouble you more than I can help – you or your daughters or your daughter-in-law or anyone else. But it’s my name too. I came by it honestly in the marriage bed. This title frolic is nothing I ever wanted or ever should want. But presumably we’ve got to live with it. Don’t you agree?’

  There was a pause while Lady Abden fingered her pearls.

  ‘I understand you are with a perfumery firm.’ She said it as if I was trading in French letters.

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Living with a woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lady Abden wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s all the rage nowadays, I believe.’

  ‘It was when I left London.’

  She glanced at me coldly. ‘We have – we try to keep to – more traditional forms of behaviour in the Highlands.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt there’s plenty of fornication goes on.’

  She sighed. ‘I think you are rather a disagreeable young man.’

  ‘Quite a lot of people think so,’ I agreed. ‘Perhaps it was a bad mixture, the Scot and the Jew.’

  ‘You have said it, not I.’

  ‘I had no choice in the matter. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  She sighed again. ‘At least the mixture did not produce a nonentity. Perhaps it is better to dislike a person than to ignore him.’

  ‘At last, Aunt,’ I said, ‘ we have agreed on something.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I s
aid to Shona. ‘I know you warned me, but practically every conversation went downhill.’

  ‘How unnecessary. Life is so short. Why should one have to quarrel with one’s relatives? A blood relationship should not be a blood-poison relationship.’

  ‘After I left Auntie,’ I said, ‘I met the other daughter, Mary. She was on the landing outside, in a blowsy dressing gown, complaining to the maid. She was as drunk as a tick.’

  ‘Dear, dear. What time would this be?’

  ‘About midday. I must admit she was the only one to greet me with any real warmth. Possibly drink runs in the family.’

  ‘A lot of things seem to run in the family! Did you see your factor in the end?’

  ‘He caught up with me when I was at breakfast yesterday.’

  ‘Why try to avoid him? You had to see him sometime.’

  ‘I wanted to take people on the hop. Not be cushioned by some smooth gent who had arranged it all in advance.’

  ‘And was he a smooth gent?’

  ‘Well, very tweedy. And rather well bred in that way that never quite carries conviction. But all right. He’s agreed to continue to look after Wester Craig for me.’

  ‘What is it you have actually inherited?’

  ‘Well, this house, Victorian of the worst period but with a Tudor core, sizeable but rickety, needing money spending on it; two cottages; about five hundred acres of scrub.’

  ‘Not a grouse moor?’

  ‘Not a grouse moor. Grassy sort of shallow-soil land with boulders and a stream running into the nearby loch. Some trout or a salmon or two, no doubt. Sheep.’

  ‘And beyond?’

  ‘One way the sea and the loch; behind the house moorland going up to mountains. Stags up there and a few grouse, I suppose; but that’s all owned by the Countess of Something-or-other. Abden land is pretty extensive at the further side. Not mine, though.’

  ‘Will it pay its way?’

  ‘What, the property? Oh, no. Nothing like. Maintenance and repairs, caretaker, no shooting or fishing to rent out.’

  ‘But the house might let?’

  ‘It might. But there’s obviously not much demand for such a godforsaken place.’

  ‘You could live there yourself.’

  ‘Do me a favour.’

  ‘You can’t sell it?’

  ‘Yes, I asked Macardle, who looked very pained but eventually admitted that I could apply to bar the entail. I think that’s what he called it. Then it can be sold.’

  ‘And shall you do that?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘It seems a pity. And the title.’

  ‘I shall keep that.’

  ‘What has made up your mind?’

  ‘They have. The other Abdens.’

  She laughed her broken laugh. ‘Can you not think of some less cross-grained reason?’

  ‘D’you know what Alison said? That’s Malcolm’s widow. She thought I was very much like an Abden – not in looks but in character.’

  ‘Well,’ Shona said, looking at me. ‘I think I know what she means. But it need not be something to be ashamed of.’

  ‘She was probably trying to rib me out.’

  ‘I suppose it has never occurred to you to consider taking your aunt’s advice?’

  ‘As to what?’

  ‘Becoming a Catholic to please the family. To preserve a tradition.’

  ‘Shona, you’re joking.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I suppose.’

  ‘Well, either you are or you’re not!’

  She yawned behind her hand. ‘My mother was Russian Orthodox – though she had dropped it all by the time I was born. I am brought up pagan, though I suppose a few of the old habits survived in my mother’s behaviour. By the time I am twelve I am the complete atheist. Communism did its work well, and I have not had occasion to change that since.’

  ‘Very laudable.’

  ‘Is it? Yes, I suppose. We stand on our own feet. That is so good. You are the same.’

  ‘I am the same.’

  ‘But sometimes I read history and wonder what the answer really is. It is not only Russia that has lost its religion, it is the West too. I think so. Perhaps I am stupid. Sometimes I think the human race suffers today not merely from a lack of religion but a lack of superstition.’

  ‘Is there much difference?’

  ‘Oh, I know all the horrors and cruelties that have been perpetrated in the name of religion and superstition down through the centuries.’

  ‘So what are you trying to say?’

  She patted my hand. ‘ I sometimes wonder if the existence of superstition does not have its good side; the sensation of there being something more powerful than oneself, more powerful than – or at least independent of – the state; this is surely a salutary feeling. No? The need to look over one’s shoulder, which may be necessary in the communist states for other and wrong reasons, does not exist in the West for other and perhaps right ones. But it’s good to have a sanction outside oneself. We have all become orphans.’

  I grunted. ‘Maybe yes, maybe no.’

  ‘Yes, because there is no father figure, no day of judgement, no retribution, no expectation or fear of ultimate justice left. We run about like children, don’t we, doing what we like, building what we like, smashing what we like, indulging as we like. There is no one even to rebel against. There is no one to call us to bed.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ I said. ‘ You always surprise me, Shona.’

  ‘That is good.’

  She looked older than I remembered her a week ago. It took me a few days to get used to her again. Perhaps it was Alison Abden with her boyish haircut and her long brown eyes and her elegant legs.

  The usual working day also took a bit of getting into after my trip to Ross and Cromarty – more so than after the break in the West Indies. Then we had plunged in together, Shona and I, reluctant to be back but willing to get stuck in. This was not a holiday, this trip to Scotland, it was a glimpse of a different world, a barren world, a boring world, an irritating world; but after it what I was doing to make a living seemed once again awfully tinsel-smart.

  For instance, arguing with the advertising agency about the position of one of our adverts in some of the magazines – Shona always insisted that our full-page advertisements should be printed opposite the astrology page; she said that was the one page every woman read. For instance, considering again the use of royal jelly, and the claims made for it, and the advantage of the name from a psychological angle.

  Soon after this a minor crisis blew up in the firm. Charisma had come out in the British market with two hundred thousand spent on publicity, and it had gone well. One of the allied products was a foundation cream called Charisma Bio-cream E, and before I left we had had one or two complaints about it. An isolated customer here and there claimed it caused skin allergies, but I didn’t think the number or the style of grievance important enough to do anything about. Then, at one of the weekly meetings at Stevenage, John Carreros unexpectedly showed, looking raddled and old, and attacked me for passing up these complaints.

  I said quietly enough: ‘Oh come. With almost everything we put out there’s the occasional gripe. Isn’t there? I can quote you chapter and verse.’

  ‘With a new product it is different,’ said John. ‘I think the reaction has been bad.’

  ‘What is the proportion?’ Shona asked. She was sitting beside me, her hair in a casual knot. Frock of heavy cream silk, short, with a daffodil scarf, cinnamon-coloured tights, white sandals. She had known about the reports but for once had allowed me to influence her.

  Parker said: ‘The complaints are about two in a thousand.’

  ‘What is the unacceptable proportion?’ Leo Longford asked.

  ‘Two in a thousand I would argue, with a new product,’ said John.

  ‘There’s a spate of orders coming in from the shops,’ I said. ‘Many of these complaints are entirely phoney, as you well know. Some young biddy has spent too much; her husband rais
es hell, so she brings back the cream to the shop complaining that it doesn’t suit her. It’s a good way to get your money back.’

  ‘These cannot all be such cases,’ said John.

  ‘Well, half the girls who buy this stuff really need treatment for acne, not a skin food.’

  ‘That is a risk in our business. But I do not think this is a risk we can take.’

  We all waited. In spite of the growth of the firm, the expansion of its board of managers, Shona still had the last say.

  Presently she gave voice. ‘I’m sorry, David, I agree with John. The whole consignment must be retested. It can be done in a few weeks.’

  ‘By which time,’ I said, ‘the effect of the TV advertising will be entirely lost.’

  She nodded. ‘ It is a difficult decision, I know.’

  ‘Why not let what has been issued go through, while tests are made on the rest of the consignment?’

  ‘I’d agree with that,’ said Leo. ‘It seems a reasonable compromise.’

  Again we waited. ‘ No,’ said Shona. ‘ It must be withdrawn. I think it is a matter of principle. We have set ourselves the highest standard and we must adhere to it.’

  The meeting went on for another hour before we broke for lunch. I was feeling fairly peevish because the countermanding of my orders made me look a ninny. There was a nearby pub which catered very well, but I made an excuse and didn’t join the others. I went out to get into my car and saw that John was also not joining the party.

  He said: ‘Are you going in to London, David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I thumb a lift, as the saying is? I have business at the Hanover Club before I return to Richmond.’

  I opened the passenger door for him without comment. As we started off he said: ‘ I have not had an opportunity to congratulate you on your title.’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  What I did notice was that his hair had gone white these last two years, and that his hands shook.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, noticing I’d noticed. ‘ Parkinson’s disease.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Shona didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Shona does not know. It would make little difference if she did know. She no longer cares for me at all.’