Chance Developments (5 page)

She came to the house virtually every day. Sometimes he imagined he was by himself, engaged in some activity of his own devising, and then he would realise that she was there, almost as if she had been there all along, watching him, waiting for an opportunity to tell him that he was doing things the wrong way, or should be doing something else altogether.

For the most part, he was happy to follow her suggestions. “We could pretend we were Vikings,” she said. “There were lots of them settled near here, you know. I could be a Viking lady and you could be a Viking warrior.”

He liked the idea, but was uncertain what Vikings did.

“They mostly burn things,” she said. “They travel in long boats—really long—and then they come ashore and burn everything. They carry everybody off.”

“Where to?”

Her answer was vague. She pointed out towards the islands. “Over there. Maybe Skye. They liked Skye.”

“And what did they do to them? Did they kill them?”

She shook her head. “Not always. The Vikings sometimes killed people—if they felt in the mood—but most of the time they just carried them off and overcame them. That was enough.”

He was not sure how people were overcome, and asked for clarification, but she simply shook her head. “I'll tell you later,” she said. “Not now.”

He gathered an armful of brushwood from the woods above the house. They set fire to this down by the shore, the smoke billowing up voluminously. It was a convincing Viking display and he was momentarily awed by what they had done.

“That'll show all the Scottish people,” she said. “They'll know that we're here. They'll run off from the Vikings, but we'll get them sooner or later.”

“And overcome them?”

“Maybe.” She thought for a moment, moving away from the smoke. He followed her; the smoke was making his eyes smart. “Have you heard of Somerled?”

He shook his head. She knew so much more than he did.

“He lived here a long time ago. He was Scottish, although his mother was a Viking. He rose up against the Vikings.”

“Did they kill him?”

“No, he beat them. He showed the Scots how to overcome the Vikings.” She paused. “I learned all that in history. You've got a lot to learn, Harry.”

“I know.”

“Still, you can pick up quite a lot from me. I can tell you quite a lot of what you have to know—just so that you won't seem so ignorant when you go to a bigger school. You don't want them to laugh at you.”

“No, I don't.”

“So you should just listen to me.”

He said nothing. He had always listened to her, it seemed to him, and he would have to continue to do so.

“Let's go and catch some sheep,” she said. “And eat them.”

He stared at her open-eyed.

“We're Vikings,” she reminded him. “Remember.”

They ran towards a bedraggled ewe that had made its way down to the line of seaweed on the shore. The ewe had her lamb at her side—a cold year had made for spindly lambs—and she backed away in panic, the lamb bleating in confusion. For a moment he thought that Jenny had been serious, and that she would fall upon the ewe—would overcome it—but she stopped short of the frightened creature, waved her arms a final time, and watched as it scampered off to a safe distance.

“You see,” she said. “Now we can go back to our Viking house.”

This was a clearing they had made under a particularly thick rhododendron bush. They had brought in two hessian sacks, using one for a floor and one as a curtain. There was just enough room for them both to sit down.

She had brought sandwiches.

“Did Vikings eat sandwiches?” he asked.

“Yes, of course they did. They made sandwiches from the things they stole from the Scots. Then they ate them before the Scots could steal them back.”

He bit into the sandwich. It was thick with the smoked salmon that Jenny's parents' housekeeper, Mrs. Macneill, made in the smoker at the back of her house. She soaked the salmon in rum and honey before lighting the fire, and this gave it a rich, rather sweet taste.

She looked at him. “When are you going away to school?” she asked. “Not in Edinburgh, but that other one—the one in Perthshire.”

“Next year,” he said. “Just before my twelfth birthday.”

She considered this. “You could run away,” she said. “If you don't like it, you could run away.”

“Where?”

“Here. Or you could go to Glasgow, if you like. I know somewhere you could hide in Glasgow. I could bring you food, if you liked. Nobody would know.”

He thought for a moment. “I might like that school.”

She shook her head. “No, you won't. They beat you at boys' schools, you know. On your bottom. They have canes and things.”

“That's only if you do something bad.”

She denied this. “They beat you if they don't like your face,” she said. “My cousin went to a school like that. They beat him because his face was too round.”

“But he couldn't help that…”

“Of course he couldn't. But that didn't stop them from beating him. He hated it and he would have run away, only he was worried that if he ran away they would just beat him even more.”

He was silent. The world, it seemed to him, was a place of dire and constant threat. There were Germans who would shoot you and there were others who would beat you. This made life an anxious, restless business. He wished that somehow it were different; that the world was a kinder, less threatening place. The problem, it seemed to him, was with boys and men. They were the ones who were cruel; they were the ones who made it hard to be a boy. Girls and women were different, and kinder. But there was not much you could do if nature decided that you were going to be a boy. You had to accept it. You had to work out how to survive, so that your chances of being beaten or shot were diminished. He was not sure how to do that yet, but he thought that he might learn.

It was Jenny's mother who realised that he could draw. She was an amateur watercolourist who painted the things that amateur watercolourists like to paint: hazy seascapes, hills covered in purple heather, the moods of the sky. She had a box of oil pastels that she allowed him to use, and the results intrigued her. He had sketched a domestic scene—a table covered with a gingham tablecloth, a teapot and cups, a chair with an intensely red cushion. She could see that he had an eye for colour, but there was more that that: he had composed his picture well.

“But that's remarkable, Harry,” she said. “Who's taught you to draw so well?”

“Nobody,” he said. “Nobody's taught me.”

“I find that hard to believe. Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I like drawing.”

Jenny joined in. “He's going to be a famous artist one day. I can tell that. I've known for ages.”

He was embarrassed. “I'm not. I'm not all that good.”

Jenny's mother brought out a book to show him. “I'm going to lend you this. There are lots of lovely pictures in it. They're all Dutch.”

He opened the book, and ran his hand across one of the pages. There was a picture of peasants at a village feast.

“That's Breughel, I think,” she said. “There were several Breughels—I get them a bit mixed up. Let me look. Yes, that's Peter Breughel, who started them off. What do you think of it?”

He studied the figures. “They're cooking a pig.”

“Yes, they are. It must have been a very important celebration for them to cook a pig. I think they're looking forward to it.”

He turned the page.

“That's what they call an interior,” she said. “The Dutch loved painting scenes like that. And do you see something? You see that open doorway? The Dutch artists loved open doorways—it meant that you could look out of the painting
into
something. Here we're looking into a courtyard. And you see the sunlight. You see how clear it is outside? They liked that.”

He touched the picture, which was reproduced in black and white. “I wish I could see the colours.”

“When you get back to Edinburgh, you can go to the National Gallery. They have paintings like that. You can see the colours then.”

He took the book away. He spent hours studying the pictures and trying to pronounce the names of the artists. “De Hooch,” he whispered, “De Hooch. Hondecoeter.”

He thought the name Hondecoeter was the most exciting name he had ever heard. He would call himself Hondecoeter if he ever had to change his name. He had heard that in Scotland you could call yourself whatever you wanted. He would choose Hondecoeter.

Those summers in Argyll, so long when you looked at them on the calendar, seemed to her to pass far too quickly. They did not see one another between the end of September and the middle of June. She wrote to him and sent him a Christmas card each year, but he did not reply.

“It's very rude,” she said reproachfully. “If somebody writes you a letter, then you should write back. That's the rule, you know.”

They were sixteen now, and July had drawn a mantle of warm air over Scotland. The hills of Skye were shimmering and blue, the sea glassy smooth and reflective.

“Even if you've got nothing to say?”

She laughed. “Yes, even if you've got nothing to say. You write back to the person and say
Thank you for your letter. I regret to say that nothing has happened to me, but I really enjoyed reading your letter. Please write again soon.
And then you finish off with
Yours sincerely
, followed by your name.” She paused. “If you're writing to a friend, you can say
Love from
and then sign your name after that.”

She looked at him. She knew that her words would have no effect. He ignored her; he always did. He looked straight ahead when she spoke to him, as if seeing something else altogether. It was most annoying, but she knew that if she revealed how irritating it was he would simply look straight ahead while she told him off. She had read a story recently where a woman kept closing her eyes and saying to herself
Men!
She felt like doing that now.
Men!

“Besides,” she continued, “you can't really say that nothing has happened to you. I know that you have plenty of things happening to you. Things happen at school don't they? They must do.”

He shrugged. “Not a lot.”

“I don't believe that. You put a whole lot of boys in a school, and things will happen. There'll be fights, won't there? Boys fight a lot. You could tell me about that. You play sports, don't you? Isn't there rugby there? What about fencing? Are you allowed to do fencing? And the food? Don't tell me they don't feed you—you could write to me and tell me what they give you to eat. I'm interested in all these things, you know.”

“The food's horrible,” he said. “They say that the cooks spit in the stew. All of them. They have spitting competitions in the kitchen.”

“Well, there you are,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice. “You could have written to me and told me about the cooks spitting in the stew.”

He shook his head. “I've never seen it myself. I can't be sure it happens.”

“Well, you could have said that you weren't sure. I'd still be interested to read about things that might have happened.”

He lapsed into silence. She watched him. She liked doing that, simply watching him, even if he was ignoring her. Sometimes he would sit there with that sketchbook of his, completely absorbed, and draw while she watched him.

“You could do me,” she said. “If you wanted to draw me, I'd say yes, you know.”

He continued with his sketch of a dove that he had found lying underneath a tree, undamaged but dead. He had stretched out the wing and was drawing the feathers. He thought of how it was such a waste for nature to make something like this, a creature so intricate, and then for it to die beneath the tree that was its home, just like that.

“If you drew me,” she said, “then you could give the picture to my mother. Or I could even buy it. I'll give you two shillings for it—maybe a bit more if you get a good likeness.”

“I'll think about it,” he said. “I'm drawing a dove at the moment.”

She wished that he would pay more attention to her. Since he had gone to that school, something seemed to have happened. Of course he still spent time with her—most days they were together, although she remarked that she always had to come over to see him as he never made the journey to her house.

“You could ride over on your bike,” she said. “It's not all that far, especially on a bicycle. Or you could even walk. I walk over every day, you know. It only takes me forty-five minutes. Or you could ask your father to drive you over in his car. You could do that, you know.”

“Maybe.”

She sighed. “We could go on a picnic tomorrow. I could make sandwiches for both of us. And some chicken. I could get some roast chicken legs. We could have them cold. And cake too. We've got lots of cake because my mother likes baking and we can't eat it all.”

“Maybe.”

Her frustration showed. “Don't just say maybe. What if the Prime Minister said maybe to everything? What if they brought some new law for him to sign and he just said
maybe
?”

“That's not how it works. He has somebody to sign for him. He can't sit there all the time signing papers. He's got plenty of other things to do.”

She shook her head. “You're very wrong, Harry. You're wrong about that—and a whole lot of other things. You still get things wrong.”

He was silent for a while. Then he said, “Do you think there really are angels? Do you think they have wings like this?”

He held out the dove's wing, spreading the feathers.

“I'm not sure about angels,” she said. “I don't think they really exist. People talk about them, but if they existed, then surely we would have seen them.”

“Or they would have found feathers,” he said. “We find eagle feathers, you know. Mr. Thompson found one the other day.”

She had been confirmed in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, at her mother's instance; her father had no time for bishops. There had been talk of saints, but nothing had been said about angels, as she far as she could recall. “Yes, you would have thought that there would be feathers. But there aren't. So, no, I think angels are imaginary—like elves and fairies and so on. Only the weak-minded believe in such nonsense.”

“And God?”

She caught her breath. “You shouldn't ask questions like that.”

He busied himself with his sketchbook. “Surely we would have seen God by now. They've got those big telescopes. Surely we should have seen him.”

“God is invisible,” she announced. “You can't see him through a telescope.”

“But if he's all powerful—and you know that hymn that says that?
Almighty,
invisible God, la, la, la
…If he were so mighty, then he would be able to let people see him and then they'd behave better and we wouldn't have had the Great War, would we? God would have stopped it. God would have stopped all those men killing one another. He would have deflected the bullet that went into your father's leg…”

He stopped himself. She was glaring at him. “I don't know about that. And I don't want to know. My father's leg has nothing to do with it and I don't think you should talk about it in that way. He, at least, was in the trenches…” Now it was her turn to feel that she had crossed some invisible line; her mother had told her it was tactless to talk about who went and who stayed behind. “Anyway. I've got enough to think of, Harry—you may not have anything to think about, but I've got plenty.”

She rose to her feet. “We'll have a picnic tomorrow, right? Up by the waterfall?”

He agreed. He had finished the sketch of the dove and he showed it to her.

The potentially awkward direction of the theological conversation was forgotten. She studied the shape of the pinions, traced with a transcendent delicacy. “You're going to be really famous, Harry,” she said.

“Oh, I don't know…”

“Yes, you are. You're going to be very famous and I'm going to help you. You know that, don't you? You're going to be an artist of great distinction.” She liked the sound of the phrase, and repeated it. “An artist of great distinction.”

He said nothing. He never thought about his own future, which was something that would happen, of course, but could not be guessed at. She, it seemed, was the one who thought about him, who had ideas as to what he would do.

He carried the picnic basket—a hamper with a handle of desiccated leather. He walked ahead, up the rough path that led to the point where the burn tumbled off the lip of a hanging valley, creating a waterfall of thirty feet, a few wisps of white in dry weather but now, after the previous night's rain, a convincing torrent. At the foot of the waterfall was a pool, hollowed out of rock, in which the water lingered before completing its short journey to the sea.

He put the hamper down on the flat rock beside the water.

“I want to climb up to the top,” he said, pointing to the head of the waterfall.

“Be careful,” she said. “Wet rock is slippery.”

He began to clamber up the rocks. Once at the top he looked down through the spray that the wind blew up in thin white puffs, like smoke, he thought. He saw that she was looking up at him, and he waved. He felt light-headed.

He made his way back down to the pool. He felt warm, not just because of the exertion of the climb, but because the sun was high in a cloudless sky. It was noon.

She had opened the hamper and extracted two plates on which she laid out the chicken and the sandwiches. There was a bottle of lemonade, still cool, from which she had poured a glass for him and one for her.

“Lemonade makes me sneeze,” he said.

“It's the bubbles.”

“They get up my nose.”

She laughed. “Hold your nose while you drink.”

He tried, but the lemonade ran down the front of his shirt. “Look what you've made me do.”

She took a napkin from the hamper, soaking it from an upended bottle of water, and then dabbing at the moist patch on the shirt. “Take it off,” she said. “It'll dry on the rock.”

The moisture felt uncomfortable against his skin, and he did as she told him to do. She watched him, but when she saw that he noticed her, she looked away.

“Here,” he said, passing the shirt to her.

He sat down, his arms hugging his knees. “It's so hot,” he said.

She laid the shirt out on the rock. “We could swim,” she said. “The water will cool us off.”

He said nothing.

“Why not?” she said.

“Why not what?”

“Why not swim?”

He bit his lip. His heart was racing; he felt it. He was warmer than he had been before. “I haven't brought my swimming trunks. I didn't think it would be so hot.”

“That doesn't matter.”

His heart hammered within him. “But we can't swim if we haven't…”

She leaned over. She put a finger against his lips. “There's nobody to see us.”

She stood up and he saw that she was beginning to undo her blouse. He stared down at the rock. He was at a boarding school and was used to nudity, but not this.

“What if somebody comes?” he said.

“They won't,” she said. “Come on.”

He stood up and began to unbuckle his belt. He turned, so that his back was to her, and soon he was naked. He did not look at her. He looked only at the sky and the water.

There was a splash. She had jumped into the water, and was calling him from the pool. He kept his eyes on the sky, not looking where he was going. He felt the breath of the wind on his skin and then the cool embrace of the water.

She was beside him. He looked at her and smiled. Her hair was bedraggled. He felt her touch him—her foot had kicked against his inadvertently. The water was shallow and he leaned back, the rock beneath him.

She said, “I feel that I've known you for ever.”

“Well, you have, I suppose.”

She had moved closer to him. “Are you cold?”

“No,” he said.

“Neither am I. When you first get in, you feel cold, but then it goes, doesn't it?”

“Yes.”

That was in late July. By mid-September he was back at school, more senior now in the hierarchy, eligible for the few highly sought-after privileges given to those in their last two years there. He had a study to share with another boy, and he used his half of this as a studio. A sympathetic art master had spotted his talent and was encouraging him. “I see you at the art college in Edinburgh,” the teacher said. “My own alma mater, of course, and I would hesitate to influence you too much but…well, we had the most marvellous fun there, you know. And at the same time we received a very fine education in drawing and painting—every bit as good as what you'd find in Florence.”

He needed no persuading. “That's what I want,” he said.

“Well then, you know what to do…draw, draw, draw. Have your sketchbook with you at all times. Look at the world and see the lines. The world is all lines, you know—lines and shapes. See them; feel them, Harry. Lines and shapes.”

He was drawing when word came that his housemaster wanted to see him.

“Trouble,” said the boy who came to fetch him. “You know how he looks when he's angry? Well, sorry to say, that's how he looks. But double it.”

He searched his memory. “I've done nothing…”

The other boy shrugged. “I'm only saying what I saw.”

He knocked at the door and was called in. His father was there, sitting in a chair by the housemaster's desk.

His heart stopped. His mother had died. That was the only explanation for his father's presence.

“Sit down,” said the housemaster flatly before turning to Harry's father. “Mr. MacGregor?”

His father looked at him but only held his gaze for a few moments before looking away. “Do you realise what you've done?” he said, his voice strained with emotion. “Do you have the faintest idea?”

Harry felt perplexed. He did not know what to say. And then he realised this could be only one thing. Somebody had seen them.

“Because if you don't,” his father continued, “I'm going to have to spell it out to you.”

The boy started to shake. He was unprepared for it, but it took hold of him, starting in his hands. He grasped them together, hoping to stop the movement.