Infidelities (7 page)

‘You’re right, there’s been a cock up,’ she said to Tim now. ‘It’s an awful house. No wonder it’s derelict. No wonder it’s so cheap.’

‘You call this cheap?’ Tim said. ‘Jesus. I’d like to know what you call expensive. The place is gorgeous, it’s got great atmosphere. I looked in the front, there’s a staircase goes way up to—’

‘Who cares?’ Sarah knew she was being mean. ‘It just has fake grandeur, that’s all. It’s not a real house, not for a real family to live in. It’s just someone’s idea of showing off.’

‘What?’ Poor Tim. He was all confused. All the sleeping with him, all the talking and discussions. All the letting him stay over, letting him do that more and more. Having
him spend weekends, even, getting to know the children, letting him drive her car …

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Jesus, Sarah.’

‘Well, look,’ she said to him, he’d started walking away. ‘Look at this house,’ she said. ‘There is no glen to be head of, don’t you see? Just a bit of a river … It’s flat, Tim, there are no hills here, no glens.’

She was talking to herself, really. Tim had left her to it. He was heading back to the car. ‘There’s no point in staying here,’ he called to her over his shoulder. ‘We’ll have to come back with keys.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Sarah said. The words formed a frosty breath in front of her face, even though she’d spoken so quietly. They’d never be back. She went around the side of the house, still looking in windows, and then to the front. There, true, Tim had been right, the house seemed to regain itself. There was the dining room, a hall, the interior door open so she could see light from a fanlight cast across the parquet floor, the turn of a banister …

‘Oh, you’re pretty enough,’ Sarah said. ‘So why are you so alone?’

‘Because the man I loved left me,’ the house replied. ‘He doesn’t love me and he’s gone away. And I have no heart,’ the house whispered, ‘only empty rooms, and most of them are cramped and dark.’

Sarah turned away from the window and looked over towards the car. Nicky was standing there by the open back door, Elsa huddled inside. The radio was blaring,
awful, awful music with a tinny, electric beat. What were they thinking, her children? Of her? Of this day? Were they thinking about their father, who they loved, or their father’s girlfriend who they had met a number of times and now Alastair was talking about them all going on holiday together, him and them together, and his girlfriend, too? Were they thinking about that, about holidays, or only of this, this cold now, where they were, this minute, this brown, brown earth? Only thinking about nothing at all? At her back, the house waited, like her own shadow. Sarah felt its presence, the poor thing. It didn’t know either. They were both of them just waiting. Sitting there, with their empty rooms but the door shut tight and locked.

For a second, Sarah wanted to turn and go back. Try to find another way in, break a window. Tell Tim she’d found a loose door back there in the scullery and could he force it. Tell him that they could find a way to get into the ground floor through the cellar, maybe, a separate entrance, somehow, someway, so that she could step into that lovely hall, feel the light from the fan window upon her face, let the house admit her. She would mount the wide stairs then, enter all the rooms and who knows, yes, maybe stay there as Tim had talked about, yes, maybe buy the house and live there and maybe Tim would be her husband and Nicky and Elsa, they would have another father as well as Alastair, and Alastair and his wife, in time, all four of them, all four adults could be here together, in summer, the trees in leaf, the fields green, and they would
be having lunch together, all of them here, and the children too, and drinks out on the lawn …

But that was crazy. Everything. What was she thinking? The house – it wasn’t a real house. She’d seen that already, without needing to turn back to it, to check it again, she knew, the house knew. It was a fake. Where was Tim, anyway? They needed to be getting on.

The children hadn’t moved. They were still waiting there by the car, Nicky leaning against it, so tall now, like his father. The music would hold them, Sarah supposed, as long as they wanted it to, they would leave it playing. They were teenagers, after all. What was any of this to them that they should even be thinking about it?

‘I promised you both a nice lunch,’ Sarah said, when she got close to them.

‘Eh?’ Nicky looked up, Elsa turned, unhooked the earplug and let it fall, then leaned forward to switch the radio off. The faint but insistent music from the earpiece still sounded in the chill air, a frantic buzzing, like an insect’s whirr of wings.

‘I promised you,’ Sarah said again. ‘Come on then.’ She touched both of them, her son on the shoulder, her daughter lightly, lightly on the top of her head. ‘You two,’ she said. ‘When Tim gets back, let’s get out of here, shall we? Let me find us somewhere nice to go.’

Comprising four separate narratives that are related: Two sisters and their children, two girls and a boy. More information about this family precedes that which is printed here, and follows it, but those stories do not appear in these pages.

The father said he’d take them down to the beach to go swimming but he never took them. Cassie went into his room three times to see: First time, that he would take them. Second time, to say that they were ready now. Third time, to just remind him that he’d said that he would take them. But all three times the father was asleep.

Seemed all he wanted to do, the father, was stay in that old room and in the dark. Outside it was sunny and Aunt P said they could all get down there to the water on their own. That Bill knew the little sea path over the
cliffs, she said, that he could lead the girls safely on their way.

‘But the father said he’d take us,’ Ailsa said. ‘He picked me up in his big arms and he told me and we all believed.’ Then she started to cry.

Ailsa was just four though. What would she know? That’s what Bill said later, when he and Cassie went down the path alone, their swimming things on underneath their clothes and Bill had a picnic in a bag. ‘If you’re only four,’ said Bill, ‘you believe all the lies that grown ups tell. That father of my mother …’ He swung the bag around and banged it on the grass. ‘He just makes up stories. That’s what I heard my mum say. Your mum said it too.’

‘Did she?’ said Cassie. It was like she was wanting to be certain but seeing in her mind already that of course her mum would be agreeing. Laughing, kind of. It was the way her mum and Aunt Pammy were together all the time, laughing and telling secrets like they were in love.
Go away now
… That was all her mother ever said when they came up here on holidays.
I need time with my sister, Cass. You’ll be the same with Ailsa one day. Your aunt and I have things we need to talk about. Remember? We don’t see each other through the year and now’s our only chance
…

‘Yeah,’ Cassie said to Bill now. ‘I think she did say that. My mum listens to everything your mum says.’

‘My mum says the father’s stroke-y,’ said Bill, heaving the picnic bag from one shoulder to the other. ‘That ever since Granny died he’s gone funny in the head.’ Then he ran down the rest of the hill ahead of her and Cassie saw
him on the little beach where Ailsa and the father also should have been, flinging down the bag with the sandwiches and juice and pulling off his clothes in the light and lovely Highland sun.

Cassie loved it coming up here to see Bill and Aunt P. And her mum did and Ailsa and their granny too when she used to visit sometimes and they would all be together and so it was strange having someone else among them, in their private and special world. They never had people who could be fathers here before.
We don’t do men
… She heard her mother say once, when they were in the village and someone was asking Cassie where her ‘daddy’ was. Truth tell: She’d never had a daddy nor Bill much either. There’d been daddies once, her mum and Aunty Pammy told them, but that was a long time ago when the children were very little and Ailsa was a tiny baby. Though Bill said he could remember his. Still, Cassie couldn’t see a thing when she tried to picture what a father was.

Only here was one suddenly come in among them this summer. Her mum and Aunty Pam’s own daddy come all the way over from the West in his funny car. And he used to be married to Granny all the years from when she was a bride and they never knew that too. No one talking about him, thinking about him. Then one day just arriving, driving up the road that afternoon
out of the blue
… That was the sentence Cassie kept hearing her mother say. Remembering every time she remembers it with a shock the look on her mother’s face when the car came down the little road leading to the house.

Everything felt changed then, from that moment.
Out of the blue
. The way her mother’s face changed, that she put her hands up to her mouth when she saw the funny car like to stop herself from screaming … Then running inside to find Aunty Pam and them both holding each other like they were little girls and Aunty Pam saying over and over, ‘Don’t worry, Susan. We’re grown ups now. We’ll find out what this is all about. Money, probably. We’ll give him something and he’ll go away.’

But that was at the beginning of the holidays, nearly, and now they were halfway through. And nothing had been found out, had it? And he hadn’t gone away? The father just stayed in his room or then in the evening came out and sat, started talking, asking questions like he was waiting for something, a glass in his hand, a bottle on a little table beside him. Bill said the father was an alkie as well as someone with a stroke and that meant he was a strange kind of dad. He’d heard his mum say that, Bill said, when he couldn’t get to sleep one night and he’d heard his mum and Cassie’s mum whispering in the kitchen after the father had gone to bed.

‘He drinks whisky and beer and then he can’t talk any more,’ said Bill to Cassie, next day, after he’d been up in the middle of the night listening at the door. ‘I know everything now,’ he said. ‘Why he’s come. Why my mum and your mum left home when they were little children and never saw him again.’

But what did that mean though, ‘everything’? That’s what Cassie wanted to know. If Bill knew everything, and
the mothers did, then why did everything just stay the same?

In the end no one seemed to know that much at all. Why the father had arrived when they didn’t even know their mothers had a father. Why her mum and her aunt should have a daddy of their own and never tell.

When she asked her mum about it her mum just said, ‘Shhh. Doesn’t matter darling.’ She’d be doing dishes or pinning washing out on the line with Aunty P and talking … Always those two sisters had so much to say. And the father in his room, pretty much all the time but then he came out in the late afternoon and he started talking too, sitting on the sofa in the sunny sitting room, stretching out his legs like he’d been living there all his life. ‘I want around me all my grandchildren,’ he’d say then. ‘What’ll we do tomorrow, eh? Tell me. What would all you little ones like to do?’

So that’s how it had come up, that Ailsa had said would he take them swimming, because in the books about families that’s the kind of thing the fathers do. They take picnics to the cliffs and they walk down from the cliffs like giants, holding the children’s hands and taking bags and tents and things to make fires, all the way to the sea. Helping the children when they fall. Swinging the mighty bags and calling out, ‘This way! This way! Follow me!’ And the father had said that yes he’d take them. And not just any kind of swimming. That he’d take them out to the rock in the sea where the seals sometimes came, that he’d help them swim all that way, and it would be easy too, he’d show them how
to do it, he’d show them the way. ‘We’ll get a plastic bag for a picnic and I’ll strap it to my back,’ Cassie remembers to this day him saying. He’d sat there with them all around him, making shapes in the air with his hands, to show them how it would be. What they’d do when they got there, to the beach and the rock and the cold, cold blue … All the loveliness of the project gathered there in the patterns shaped in the afternoon sun by his thin white hands, in the dream of them all together for that moment, the sun in the room, the two mothers standing in the doorway like they couldn’t quite dare to let themselves enter more fully in but still even they were smiling, they were smiling.

‘I’ll swim with each of you out on to the rock and we’ll stay there all day, make friends with seals and meet a mermaid or two … We might even spend the night, build a fire, have a camp …’

‘And all of that from swimming?’ Ailsa said.

‘All of that,’ the father said. ‘Come here, my darling …’ And that’s when he took my sister up into his arms and made her laugh and swung her in the air. It’s when we believed.

At the end of the garden was a field and we weren’t supposed to play there but we did.

Bill said all the kids from his school played there, that they went there in the afternoon, after tea. First
they scared the sheep away and then they set up forts and made dangerous games with hideouts and dens that the adults would never know about in that field that finished at the edge and had no fence, because it fell straight down where a fence should have been, straight into the sea.

Aunt Pam said we were never allowed to go there. For the way the grass stopped just like that, like God had cut the earth off the edges and let it drop down on to the rocks with waves that made great crashing sounds against them, making their own storm down there, their own mad and crazy weather.

She had lots of rules about staying on the farm. Rules about gates that you had to close and not bothering the cows when they had their calves with them. Rules about being gentle with the sheep because sheep were gentle, and about how long we three kids could stay out on our own without her having to come looking. She said Bill should know better than to go on about that field and how good it was to play there.

As it was, she said, she was having to phone the farmer every day to tell him that he should get a fence built there again, that everyone should know how dangerous that field was without it. There were certain kinds of winds she knew about, that could just pick you up and blow you away; or other kinds that could push you. Then she gave Bill a certain kind of look and he turned away.

‘You should know better,’ she said to him. But he still wasn’t looking.

Aunt Pam knew about weather and the land all right. Even though it wasn’t her farm and she just lived there. Uncle Robbie had been a farmer when he was alive and before Bill became a half orphan then, with no dad of his own. But now she had to phone that other farmer who kept his animals in the fields that she and Bill and Uncle Robbie used to say were theirs. She had to ask his permission for every single thing, as though the three of them had never lived there before with their own sheep and cows to look after. So it was Uncle Robbie told Aunt Pam ages ago, all that stuff about where the north wind came from and what it could do, and he told Bill too – like he knew everything about living up there where they did, about the cliffs and the air and the way there were no trees because the wind had torn them up by their roots, most of them and blown them away.

Bill said that was what came of living in ‘the far north’. That anything could happen there.

‘You girls won’t know about this,’ he said to us, wanting to be the one who was in charge when we were up there on holidays. ‘You girls won’t be aware, but where we live things are different from the rest of Scotland, or Britain even, or England. Because we have things like a dangerous field at the end of our garden, and kids up here know about it – but they’re strong. Like I could take you down that field and we could play there, if you’re not scared. There’s stuff we could do that would be frightening, but exciting too. And if those other kids do it then why shouldn’t you? So do you want to? Do you? Do you?’

In the end, I wouldn’t know what to say. Aunt Pammy put down the rules but she was busy most of the time, that summer we went up there to stay. She had stuff to do in the house, or people in the village to see. I remember her as a person hanging white sheets on the line, or writing lists for shopping, sweeping the floors and I sometimes think all of it, all the business of her day was just missing Uncle Robbie and not talking about it or wanting to cry. Bill said she wasn’t allowed to.

‘Never, ever,’ he said. That was his rule. Ever since his dad was chucked off his horse at the Highland Show once, he said, and his head cut wide open for everyone to see but he didn’t even cry then.

‘Because nobody can change that,’ Bill said. ‘That my dad is dead. So nobody can cry.’

That happened the autumn before though, when Mum took me and Ailsa out of school and we came up to help Aunt Pam and Bill and there was a funeral then and I heard Mum and Aunt Pammy talking and talking, late into the night and it was all about Uncle Robbie and about the farm and something to do with money and how Uncle Robbie had been ‘pushed to the edge’. And now it was summer again. And Bill never said anything else about missing his dad or any of the things I’d heard Mum and Aunt Pammy talk about.

‘Come on,’ he just said instead. ‘Tell me you’re not scared. Let me take you to the field and we’ll do the dangerous game.’

So Ailsa and I said we would, that yes we would go.
Disobey Aunt Pammy and be irresponsible, for that’s what we’d be, she’d told us, that it would be irresponsible and sly to disobey any of the rules of the farm. But still we went with Bill one afternoon when she was gone from the house and it wasn’t sunny that day, but it was warm and grey and there was no wind to push us.

‘Stay with me, girls,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll look after you.’

The game it turned out was no kind of game at all. The minute we got to the field I realised all the time Bill had been lying. About games going on there. About the kids in his class going to play after school. There was no game. We walked out across the grass, going deeper and deeper into the field in the still grey air, and there was nothing about us, nothing. I felt how still it was and quiet, and how in the distance the sheep moved away from us as they saw us coming, looking up and seeing us, staying for a minute and then moving away, making that sound, the lambs did, like a baby crying.

‘Come on,’ said Bill. ‘This is what we do’ – and he led us further and further across the field. Everything by now was getting slower. More distant. The house was at our back and the low slate garden wall and the air was soft and warm and grey and everything had stopped except our walking, getting further and further away, walking across the field and knowing at the edge there was nothing. High up I could hear the curlews sweeping and calling their sad cry but Bill wasn’t talking and Ailsa never said anything much, she just followed me mostly and understood without having to say things – so when
I knew there was no game and that Bill was making it all up, the game of playing in the field, I could guess that Ailsa might know it too, that Bill was doing something altogether different here.