The Complete Short Stories (29 page)

I am no fool, and he
knew it. He didn’t know it at first, but he had seven months in which to learn
that fact. I gave up my job in Edinburgh in the government office, a job with a
pension, to come here to the lonely house among the Pentland Hills to live with
him and take care of things. I think he imagined I was going to be another
Elaine when he suggested the arrangement. He had no idea how much better I was
for him than Elaine. Elaine was his mistress, that is the stark truth. ‘My
common-law wife,’ he called her, explaining that in Scotland, by tradition, the
woman you are living with is your wife. As if I didn’t know all that
nineteenth-century folklore; and it’s long died out. Nowadays you have to do
more than say ‘I marry you, I marry you, I marry you,’ to make a woman your
wife. Of course, my uncle was a genius and a character. I allowed for that.
Anyway, Elaine died and I came here a month later. Within a month I had cleared
up the best part of the disorder. He called me a Scottish puritan girl, and at
forty-one it was nice to be a girl and I wasn’t against the Scottish
puritanical attribution either since I am proud to be a Scot; I feel
nationalistic about it. He always had that smile of his when he said it, so I
don’t know how he meant it. They say he had that smile of his when he was found
dead, fishing.

‘I appoint my niece
Susan Kyle to be my sole literary executor.’ I don’t wonder he decided on this
course after I had been with him for three months. Probably for the first time
in his life all his papers were in order. I went into Edinburgh and bought
box-files and cover-files and I filed away all that mountain of papers, each
under its separate heading. And I knew what was what. You didn’t catch me
filing away a letter from Angus Wilson or Saul Bellow in the same place as an
ordinary ‘W’ or ‘B’, a Miss Mary Whitelaw or a Mrs Jonathan Brown. I knew the
value of these letters, they went into a famous-persons file, bulging and of
value. So that in a short time my uncle said, ‘There’s little for me to do now,
Susan, but die.’ Which I thought was melodramatic, and said so. But I could see
he was forced to admire my good sense. He said, ‘You remind me of my mother,
who prepared her shroud all ready for her funeral.’ His mother was my
grandmother Janet Kyle. Why shouldn’t she have sat and sewn her shroud? People
in those days had very little to do, and here I was running the house and
looking after my uncle’s papers with only the help of Mrs Donaldson three
mornings a week, where my grandmother had four pairs of hands for indoor help
and three out. The rest of the family never went near the house after my
grandmother died, for Elaine was always there with my uncle.

The property was
distributed among the family, but I was the sole literary executor. And it was
up to me to do what I liked with his literary remains. It was a good thing I
had everything inventoried and filed, ready for sale. They came and took the
total archive as they called it away, all the correspondence and manuscripts
except one. That one I kept for myself. It was the novel he was writing when he
died, an unfinished manuscript. I thought, Why not? Maybe I will finish it
myself and publish it. I am no fool, and my uncle must have known how the book
was going to end. I never read any of his correspondence, mind you; I was too
busy those months filing it all in order. I did think, however, that I would
read this manuscript and perhaps put an ending to it. There were already ten
chapters. My uncle had told me there was only another chapter to go. So I said
nothing to the Foundation about that one unfinished manuscript; I was only too
glad when they had come and gone, and the papers were out of the house. I got
the painters in to clean the study. Mrs Donaldson said she had never seen the
house looking so like a house should be.

Under my uncle’s will I
inherited the house, and I planned eventually to rent rooms to tourists in the
summer, bed and breakfast. In the meantime I set about reading the unfinished
manuscript, for it was only April, and I’m not a one to let the grass grow
under my feet. I had learnt to decipher that old-fashioned handwriting of his
which looked good on the page but was not too clear. My uncle had a treasure in
me those last months of his life, although he said I was like a book without an
index —all information, and no way of getting at it. I asked him to tell me
what information he ever got out of Elaine, who never passed an exam in her
life.

This last work of my
uncle’s was an unusual story for him, set in the seventeenth century here among
the Pentland Hills. He had told me only that he was writing something strong
and cruel, and that this was easier to accomplish in a historical novel. It was
about the slow identification and final trapping of a witch, and I could see as
I read it that he hadn’t been joking when he said it was strong and cruel; he
had often said things to frighten and alarm me, I don’t know why. By chapter
ten the trial of the witch in Edinburgh was only halfway through. Her fate
depended entirely on chapter eleven, and on the negotiations that were being
conducted behind the scenes by the opposing factions of intrigue. My uncle had
left a pile of notes he had accumulated towards this novel, and I retained
these along with the manuscript. But there was no sign in the notes as to how
my uncle had decided to resolve the fate of the witch — whose name was Edith
but that is by the way. I put the notebooks and papers away, for there were
many other things to be done following the death of my famous uncle. The novel
itself was written by hand in twelve notebooks. In the twelfth only the first
two pages had been filled, the rest of the pages were blank, I am sure of this.
The two filled pages came to the end of chapter ten. At the top of the next
page was written ‘Chapter Eleven’. I looked through the rest of the notebook to
make sure my uncle had not made some note there on how he intended to continue;
all blank, I am sure of it. I put the twelve notebooks, together with the sheaf
of loose notes, in a drawer of the solid-mahogany dining-room sideboard.

A few weeks later I
brought the notebooks out again, intending to consider how I might proceed with
the completion of the book and so enhance its value. I read again through
chapter ten; then, when I turned to the page where ‘Chapter Eleven’ was
written, there in my uncle’s handwriting was the following:

Well, Susan, how do
you feel about finishing my novel? Aren’t you a greedy little snoot, holding
back my unfinished work, when you know the Foundation paid for the lot? What
about your puritanical principles? Elaine and I are waiting to see how you
manage to write Chapter Eleven. Elaine asks me to add it’s lovely to see you
scouring and cleaning those neglected corners of the house. But don’t you know,
Jaimie is having you on. Where does he go after lunch?

—
Your affect Uncle

I could hardly believe
my eyes. The first shock I got was the bit about Jaimie, and then came the
second shock, that the words were there at all. It was twelve-thirty at night
and Jaimie had gone home. Jaimie Donaldson is the son of Mrs Donaldson, and it
isn’t his fault he’s out of work. We have had experiences together, but nobody
is to know that, least of all Mrs Donaldson who introduced him into the
household merely to clean the windows and stoke the boiler. But the words?
Where did they come from?

It is a lonely house,
here in a fold of the Pentlands, surrounded by woods, five miles to the nearest
cottage, six to Mrs Donaldson’s, and the buses stop at ten p.m. I felt a great
fear there in the dining-room, with the twelve notebooks on the table, and the
pile of papers, a great cold, and a panic. I ran to the hall and lifted the
telephone but didn’t know how to explain myself or whom to phone. My story
would sound like that of a woman gone crazy. Mrs Donaldson? The police? I
couldn’t think what to say to them at that hour of night. ‘I have found some
words that weren’t there before in my uncle’s manuscript, and in his own hand.’
It was unthinkable. Then I thought perhaps someone had played me a trick. Oh
no, I knew that this couldn’t be. Only Mrs Donaldson had been in the
dining-room, and only to dust, with me to help her. Jaimie had no chance to go
there, not at all. I never used the dining-room now and had meals in the
kitchen. But in fact I knew it wasn’t them, it was Uncle. I wished with all my
heart that I was a strong woman, as I had always felt I was, strong and
sensible. I stood in the hall by the telephone, shaking. ‘O God, everlasting
and almighty,’ I prayed, ‘make me strong, and guide and lead me as to how Mrs
Thatcher would conduct herself in circumstances of this nature.

I didn’t sleep all
night. I sat in the big kitchen stoking up the fire. Only once I moved, to go
back into the dining-room and make sure that those words were there. Beyond a
doubt they were, and in my uncle’s handwriting — that handwriting it would take
an expert forger to copy. I put the manuscript back in the drawer; I locked the
dining-room door and took the key. My uncle’s study, now absolutely empty, was
above the kitchen. If he was haunting the house, I heard no sound from there or
from anywhere else. It was a fearful night, waiting there by the fire.

Mrs Donaldson arrived in
the morning, complaining that Jaimie was getting lazy; he wouldn’t rise. Too
many late nights.

‘Where does he go after
lunch?’ I said.

‘Oh, he goes for a round
of golf after his dinner,’ she said. ‘He’s always ready for a round of golf no
matter what else there is to do. Golf is the curse of Scotland.’

I had a good idea who
Jaimie was meeting on the golf course, and I could almost have been grateful to
Uncle for pointing out to me in that sly way of his that Jaimie wandered in the
hours after the midday meal which we called lunch and they called their dinner.
By five o’clock in the afternoon Jaimie would come here to the house to fetch
up the coal, bank the fire, and so forth. But all afternoon he would be on the
links with that girl who works at the manse, Greta, younger sister of Elaine,
the one who moved in here openly, ruining my uncle’s morals, leaving the house
to rot. I always suspected that family. After Elaine died it came out he had
even introduced her to all his friends; I could tell from the letters of
condolence, how they said things like ‘He never got over the loss of Elaine’
and ‘He couldn’t live without her’. And sometimes he called me Elaine by
mistake. I was furious. Once, for example, I said, ‘Uncle, stop pacing about
down here. Go up to your study and do your scribbling; I’ll bring you a cup of
cocoa.’ He said, with that glaze-eyed look he always had when he was
interrupted in his thoughts, ‘What’s come over you, Elaine?’ I said, ‘I’m not
Elaine, thank you very much.’

‘Oh, of course,’ he
said, ‘you are not Elaine, you are most certainly not her.’ If the public that
read his books by the tens of thousands could have seen behind the scenes, I
often wondered what they would have thought. I told him so many a time, but he
smiled in that sly way, that smile he still had on his face when they found him
fishing and stone dead.

After Mrs Donaldson left
the house, at noon, I went up to my bedroom, half dropping from lack of sleep.
Mrs Donaldson hadn’t noticed anything; you could be falling down dead — they
never look at you. I slept till four. It was still light. I got up and locked
the doors, front and back. I pulled the curtains shut, and when Jaimie rang the
bell at five o’clock I didn’t open, I just let him ring. Eventually he went
away. I expect he had plenty to wonder about. But I wasn’t going to make him
welcome before the fire and get him his supper, and take off my clothes there
in the back room on the divan with him, in front of the television, while Uncle
and Elaine were looking on, even though it is only Nature. No, I turned on the
television for myself. You would never believe, it was a programme on the
Scottish BBC about Uncle. I switched to TV One, and got a quiz show. And I felt
hungry, for I’d eaten nothing since the night before.

But I couldn’t face any
supper until I had assured myself about that manuscript. I was fairly certain
by now that it was a dream. ‘Maybe I’ve been overworking,’ I thought to myself.
I had the key of the dining-room in my pocket and I took it and opened the
door; I closed the curtains, and I went to the drawer and took out the
notebook.

Not only were the words
that I had read last night there, new words were added, a whole paragraph:

Look up the Acts of
the Apostles, Chapter 5, verses 1 to 10. See what happened to Ananias and
Sapphira his wife. You’re not getting on very fast with your scribbling, are
you, Susan? Elaine and I were under the impression you were going to write
Chapter Eleven. Why don’t you take a cup of cocoa and get on with it? First
read Acts, V, 1—10.

—
Your affec Uncle

Well, I shoved the book
in the drawer and looked round the dining-room. I looked under the table and
behind the curtains. It didn’t look as if anything had been touched. I got out
of the room and locked the door, I don’t know how. I went to fetch my Bible,
praying, ‘O God omnipotent and all-seeing, direct and instruct me as to the way
out of this situation, astonishing as it must appear to Thee.’ I looked up the
passage:

But a
certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession.

And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and
brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to
the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the land?

I didn’t read any more
because I knew how it went on. Ananias and Sapphira, his wife, were both struck
dead for holding back the portion of the sale for themselves. This was Uncle
getting at me for holding back his manuscript from the Foundation. That’s an
impudence, I thought, to make such a comparison from the Bible, when he was an
open and avowed sinner himself.