A Superior Spectre Read online

  I couldn’t imagine fifty years of having to smile politely while people said ‘good on you’ for ‘beating’ the illness, and subsequent illnesses, as though each were an enemy drone. There’s only so much sheen you can take, so much positive spin, so much hope, when the rotting core of it all constantly presents itself to you. Sometimes Faye would see the core; she’d acknowledge it, but she’d move on, tell me not to worry. She’d make small actions: a donation, a political protest. She had cynical days – don’t let me tell you she was black and white, she was (is) a complex human being; we got along well. But her smile was always at the ready.

  I admired her, really. Envied her, too.

  I guess – if I can talk about it – some of the young men I’ve been attracted to, well, they’re on that edge of innocence and being sullied. They’re darkly curious, but untouched, if you know what I mean. Of course you don’t, though.

  Eric had the knowledge in his body but hadn’t used it yet. Some kids are just born with that, you know? At my girlfriend’s eighteenth birthday party he came into the bathroom while I was washing my hands. He shut the door and leant back on it, with such confidence. His black jeans were tight. And he was small, and young.

  I can’t remember how young.

  It was all consensual. He started it, really. When I took him in my mouth he was not a child at all. He put his hands in my hair. His belly was small and chalk white, almost concave.

  He wanted it. Maybe others would have, too, but as I got older and the gap widened, and desire stayed in the same zone, I was stricter on myself. I didn’t want to be a criminal. I wasn’t a criminal.

  I was a schoolteacher, for a few years only. God, the fights I had with myself, about why I chose that career in the first place. When Faye and I got together I decided I was due for a career change as well.

  The thoughts, the young men, the smell of the classroom.

  I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m confronting it. I’m … sick. I’m – but at least there was so much inaction when there could have been action. So little harm was done to others. I didn’t give in as others do, to various terrible urges. Those who display and fondle and rape and murder.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I guess I wasn’t really ready to be alone with my pain and my thoughts. I was so curious about the laird. If I tripped back now, I thought, I might catch Leonora while she was still at Dearshul. I let myself.

  Rowan at the front and here, out the back, elder – a berry squeezed between Leonora’s fingers staining them violet. ‘We’ll take some leaves for your headache,’ she said to the laird, who had his fingers pressed against his temples.

  ‘I apologise again,’ he said.

  She hadn’t been worried, dozing on and off in the big room, picking up her book at intervals, where she would learn about and feel strangely comforted by Humboldt’s contemplations of foreign mountains and ravines, unimaginable plants like bananas and palms – all under the same stars. Eventually Mrs MacMillan had come to fetch her, telling her the master was awake. Leonora had eaten breakfast with him while he sat, sullen and seemingly inadequate for it, looking down at his plate and sniffing at intervals. A cold had snuck up on him over a restless night, he explained. She selfishly hoped she’d still have time with the dog before she would have to leave William in peace, to recover.

  Now there was a still light, filtered through clouds, deepening the greens of the garden. The dog was bounding back towards her, a curly stick in his jaw.

  ‘Roo, you look as though you are laughing,’ she said. She threw the stick again.

  William had a coat wrapped tight around him. The air was still, but there was a bite to it. His hair was thick, like a cap, she thought, hoping it was protecting his head. She moved a little closer to him. His silence was unsettling. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be doing.

  ‘Who do you speak with, Miss Duncan, about your thoughts?’

  Leonora bent to pat Rua-reidh, feeling hot in her ears. Sometimes it seemed as though William intended to test her.

  ‘Thoughts do not always need to be spoken.’ She sounded like her father. ‘But to my dog, I suppose.’ She laughed.

  Then she looked at William and his mouth inched up slightly. His arms were wrapped around himself. ‘Do you mind if we go inside?’

  ‘We should,’ she said, hiding her regret that the quick visit was coming to an end.

  L eonora had helped with the Grants’ wedding, and had attended others, so she had a fair idea of what to do. Aignish was strung with yards of peat-smoked intestines from Sileas, the old cow at Barnsoul. Leonora had kebbucks of cheddar, and she made her fingers sticky filling sponges with jam. The whole cottage carried a creamy, pink smell of fat and sugar.

  The ceremony was held during a cool, dry orangey dusk at the beginning of autumn. Old Mrs Cruikshank, Penuel’s mother, blubbered throughout, competing with the sound of the pipes. Penuel seemed both embarrassed and proud, but Leonora was mostly watching her own father. He had eyes only for his Penny, and his cheeks were ruddy as the jam in the sponges.

  The cottage was warm, full of people, laughter and music. All the furniture had been pushed to the edges of the room. Archibald Cruikshank, who was very short, gave the occasional dissatisfied grunt for being behind the tall and broad eldest Grant daughter and for having his back to the fire. Though it was smouldering it was still hot.

  Hot, too, was the anger in Leonora’s belly. It was not only Tomintoul that seemed to be in her father’s sights, for her. Her father and Penuel had been increasingly mentioning Edinburgh of late. Auld Reekie. Far away, and, in her memory, devoid of light.

  ‘Yer Aunt Ailie is dyin’ to know ye, Lae,’ her father had said one afternoon as they tugged at weeds in the garden. ‘She were in London when we were in Edinburgh. She’s positioned quite well.’ By that he meant that she literally lived in the middle floor of a building in the elegant new town, with one servant and a decent widow’s income. Ailie was Leonora’s mother’s sister, but apparently had had no time to help when Isabella was in peril. Leonora did not remember her well.

  Leonora’s uncle Charlie, a banker, had apparently died mid-sentence while eating a second supper in his favourite armchair by the fire. He had been a corpulent man. Leonora wondered how they had got him down from that middle floor.

  Edinburgh seemed a place where people went to die. A place choked by tragedy and soot.

  At the end of the ceremony, Leonora watched the happy couple share a drink from a quaich – whisky and water – before they kissed. ‘’Tis such a fine thing tae see,’ Mr Anderson said to Leonora, drops of whisky on his own moustache, ‘two people finding love later in life.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Leonora. Though she fought the urge to run out of the house, out into the cool air, to a patch of ground that might shake with the past, with her mother, as it did for Hamlet with his father’s ghost. Couldn’t even one word have been said, during the ceremony, about past love? If her mother hadn’t died, her parents would still be in love. So how could her father love someone else? But Leonora did understand, of course she did, she was just repulsed by it as well. She had thought of her father as full of knowledge and affection, yes, but also a man who may have desired, but did not really need, more than he possessed.

  And then tall William Wink was in front of her, asking her to dance. She accepted, but with a heavy heart, and they danced with backs pressed against other backs, but a fair distance between themselves.

  After two songs Leonora excused herself, moving through the room to the back door and outside. She sat down on the stones by the door, embracing the chill in the air.

  To her surprise, the door opened again, letting out light and noise, and William stood beside her. ‘Pardon me, Miss Duncan, I just wondered if you’d like some company.’

  She didn’t, because she was close to tears and now she would have to hold them back. She was also still confused about his interest, and what he wanted.

  He sat down beside
her.

  ‘Are ye having a nice time?’ she made herself ask, shuffling slightly away so that her leg was not touching his.

  ‘Indeed. I do love to come to the weddings.’ He seemed to move his leg so it was again touching hers. ‘I hope you don’t think me forward,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing it was quite difficult for you, to see your father wed again.’

  ‘I’m all for his happiness, and Miss Cruikshank – Mrs Duncan, now, I suppose – is good for him.’

  ‘I just mean, you must think of your mother, on such an occasion.’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  He went to say more, she saw, but thought better of it, and just sat with her, looking out over a moonlit expanse, down to the darkness of Tom A Voan Wood. Normally she would hear the babbling of Crombie Water, or the bleat of sheep across the ford, but tonight music and laughter drowned out those noises.

  ‘Which is your favourite,’ she asked, ‘an owl or a falcon?’

  ‘Well,’ he smoothed his fingers over his chin, ‘since I am often awake at night, I would say that the owl is a better friend to me.’

  ‘You are very revealing of yourself,’ she said, ‘but ye cannae always expect others to be the same.’

  William frowned. ‘I do not mean to be inappropriate.’

  The sound of a glass smashing and an uproar of laughter came from inside.

  ‘Are you a falcon?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Leonora said, without elaboration.

  ‘Diving quickly and deeply,’ he said, and placed a hand on her leg. Leonora looked at his hand, felt the heat of it. But his face, there was a wobble about it. He was confused by his power, she thought, and by his sadness. There was a depth to his need that seemed like something in which you could easily get stuck, like a foot in a rabbit warren.

  ‘Only when the timing is right,’ she said softly, and stood so that his hand fell away.

  Just then, her father’s joyous face appeared in the doorway. ‘There ye are!’ he said, a hint of worry breaking his grin. ‘Come on in fer cake.’

  William spent the rest of the evening speaking with Rev Moggach, but sneaking glances at Leonora, who felt the twin pulls of reckless plunge – because damn this idea of love and marriage – and the comfort of being good and not a disappointment to her father. Plus, there was a part of her that felt she didn’t want to let William Wink have his way, didn’t want him to think he had any more power than he already had, with his money and his big quiet house, and his status over everyone here. But there was something attractive in his vulnerability. She tried not to think of him at all as she danced with her father and took a dram of whisky herself. She danced, too, with Penuel’s father, Mr Cruikshank, who had rough hands and smelt like fish, and with Mr Anderson, who was gentle and slower.

  At the end of the night, she couldn’t avoid her new stepmother anymore.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said to Penuel, who blinked back tears and pulled her into a hug. Leonora gave herself over to the warmth of the woman’s body. She wondered if she would ever come to calling her ‘Mother’.

  In bed later, she couldn’t believe how quickly it had gone, not just the evening but the courtship, and the preparation. And the way she had become used to the rhythm of her weeks, going back and forth from the inn in Tomintoul to home. There had been a golden era, she realised, between her schoolhouse days and these past months. A time where I lived as I wanted. She felt guilty at the thought. How spoiled you are, Leonora, she said to herself.

  If her father wished her to go to Edinburgh, would she have a choice? She had always respected him, deeply, but then he had not previously demanded much of her. She dreaded, and could barely imagine, being away from where she was.

  Her thoughts returned to William, and his hot hand on her leg. Would it be giving herself over? Or giving power to her own nature? To get close to a man who you knew would not marry you, due to your social standing (and whom you also had no thoughts of marrying); to defiantly accept the challenge set by your own curiosity? To make like an animal? This was a warmer thought than Edinburgh, to take her toward slumber.

  She was heading into autumn and here in the present it had been autumn for some time. The leaves had curled and fallen, so I could see the treecreeper birds, defying gravity in their helical hops up tree trunks, and tell William to record them. For you or for myself, I’m not sure. I had been using the candles, and finding, in the quiet, the ghosts of my past, and past selves, and the lives of others. Because I was Leonora, when I travelled, my mind was open to the possibility that all life, at all times, was going on now.

  I guess I had become a Tralfamadorian, if I am recalling the name correctly, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who perceived time as you might perceive a range of mountains. Here on this peak is Leonora, and on this one – me on the island. All time is existing simultaneously. Yes, that’s how he put it – that we are all ‘bugs in amber’.

  You cannot imagine how long my days were, and are. For whole hours a screen of memory or fantasy slips over my vision: another peak of the mountain. It is so different here to home, to the connected and distracted life, so new – to bathe like this in the mind. But it is only safe in the daylight. I mostly dread night spreading its dark wings over the horizon, dipping down to claw the landscape. I begin to dread it earlier each day. Around 2 pm now I begin to smell its feathers. I defy it with this – sitting and talking to no one.

  Some days in the fine mid-autumn, the sun and salty air took me back to my childhood.

  I am still there, playing in a rockpool in northern New South Wales. I don’t know where my parents are. I am in a rockpool with three other children. This pool is large, at the edge of a headland, and we are in up to our chests. There are rocks and creatures that could cut your feet open. There is the possibility of octopi. There are soft green cunjevoi that you stroke so they spit out the ocean they’ve just gulped. Salt has dried and crusted in my ears. Sunblock has painfully entered one eye. The waves are coming in; they are breaking over us. The pool is filling higher. We laugh with an edge of panic. There is a ringleader. He makes us stay and stay. My foot is sliced open by a rock, or a shell. Blood mixes with silted sand, enters and exits the pool with the waves. I climb out. There is nothing to grip; I slide along the tops of rocks. I am not crying; I am just afraid. I have taken the easiest path and have crossed around the front of the headland to a cove. It is the kind of place where the tide could trap you. There is no one there except a man, or maybe he is a boy. There is no hair on his chest. He is lying on the sand. He has not seen me. He has his penis in his hand and he is tugging, lovingly. His head is thrown back. I have never seen an erect penis before. I gawp, because I am a child. He sees me. A liquid spills, over his own chest. He sits for a moment. I don’t move. He stands, yanks his shorts up, and runs into the water.

  I don’t always trust my memories. In fact, this one seems to have been submerged, beneath the waves of years, until that autumn moment sitting on the grass in front of the house, my senses invaded by salt. As I’ve told you, I thought Eric was the start. But these things do often have their origins in childhood. You’re aware of Freud. It was an epiphanic moment, though. To remember and to realise I hadn’t remembered. Does that mean I’d found the event traumatic? And if so, was it just in the way that a prepubescent body cannot contemplate what it doesn’t yet physically comprehend? (And therefore the young mind feels confusion, and the confusion is traumatic?) The latency period. I guess I can never really know if my tastes as an adult were shaped by such events, or whether there is some genetic component.

  It’s not the kind of thing you can ask your parents. Is there any aberrant sexual behaviour in our family? My parents. Yes, they are still alive. As far as I know. I used to see them about once a year; I’d travel up north or they’d come to Melbourne. Usually by train or bus. They couldn’t hide their sadness, their disappointment, when Faye and I broke up. I wonder if my mum would think to look in Scotland, if the
y were attempting to find me. The family link is generations old, so probably not. Although, by now, my ID would probably have been tracked down to Windermere.

  I’ve probably broken their hearts.

  Neither of them ever became angry. I used to get annoyed about it; used to try to rattle them. I tried to engage my dad in political conversations while he was sitting face forward in his favourite armchair, the blah of a sports commentator coming from the screen, but he was staunchly bipartisan. He’d just get overwhelmed and tell me to focus on the good in the world. ‘Look at the bystanders,’ he’d say, whenever something bad happened, like even on the scale of that bombing in Darling Harbour. ‘Someone always helps.’

  Funny how Faye was a bit like that, too, though more likely to weigh everything up before adding a gloss. Henry, my workmate at Glazen (though, let’s face it, he was in a more important position), was a more challenging conversationalist. I felt, when talking with him, that we got beneath the skin of an issue, whether it was about privacy or resources or feminism or just the latest film we’d watched.

  I’d finished the Caravaggio book. The artist had disappeared, but the exquisite, knowing images remain. You are only an enigma if you have left a trail of crumbs.

  Leonora chose to walk to work on a Tuesday, despite the exhaustion she’d feel later that night, to see the birch trees turned gold and russet beside the burns, and to walk off some of the anger and worry beating in her blood. As she walked, curving her hand around the striped trunks of trees, redwings darted away from their feasts of hawthorn berries. She watched their speckled chests take to the sky, a flash of rust under each wing, matching the turned leaves.