The Dog Who Came in from the Cold (31 page)

Again Sorley had urged her to be tolerant. “But does it really matter if our son’s girlfriend traps particles of food?” He smiled as he spoke. Who among us has never trapped particles of food? Indeed, that was part, surely, of being human; an inevitable concomitant of our imperfection.

At least Barbara Ragg had no piercings. That was noted with relief by Stephanie, who cast a quick glance at the other woman’s tongue when she first spoke to her. Barbara noticed her future mother-in-law looking into her mouth and was momentarily concerned. What was this—a dental examination? Or was it the way country people, many of whom were incorrigibly horsey, looked at prospective members of the family, examining the mouth in the same way that they might look into the mouth of a horse being considered for purchase. Surely not?

She, in return, ran a quick eye over Stephanie. Hugh’s mother was in her mid-fifties, she decided, but had weathered well. She was
dressed more or less as Barbara would expect somebody like her to dress, sporting as she did an olive-green tweed skirt with a navy-blue cashmere top—the sort of outfit worn by legions of country women in comfortable circumstances. Had she stepped out of a station at a point-to-point she would, Barbara thought, have raised no eyebrows. And yet there was something slightly exotic about her, a quality that Barbara perceived immediately, a hint of greater depths than such women usually showed.

This impression was strengthened as Stephanie showed Barbara to her room. “We call this the Cadell room,” she said, pointing to a pair of pictures above the fireplace. “My grandfather knew Bunty Cadell rather well. He gave him these paintings. They used to be in my parents’ drawing room in Montevideo, when we were there.”

Barbara looked at the paintings. One was a small study of a woman in an extravagant hat; the other a picture of a yacht moored in a Mediterranean harbour.

“You lived in Uruguay?” said Barbara with interest. “Hugh didn’t tell me.”

Stephanie stared out of the window. “Hugh doesn’t speak much about South America. Ever since …”

She did not finish the sentence, but instead moved across the room to open the door of the wardrobe. “I’ve cleared this out for you,” she said briskly. “One gets so much clutter, and guests are a good reason to sort it out.” She smiled brightly at Barbara. Clearly there was to be no more discussion of South America.

Barbara found herself wondering about Stephanie’s accent. She had assumed that she was Scottish, but there was something else there, a suggestion of French, perhaps; just a hint. Now she remembered something Hugh had said about his mother—a chance remark that she had not paid much attention to, but now came back. She had been educated in Switzerland, he had said. There had been a school outside Geneva.

But what had happened to Hugh in Colombia? Stephanie had said that he did not like to talk about it, but he had certainly talked to Barbara, although not at great length. She decided that there might not be another opportunity to raise the matter, and so she would ask.

“Did something bad happen to Hugh in Colombia? He once told me—”

Stephanie moved quickly to her side. “Did he?” she asked with urgency. “Did he tell you?”

“Well, he started to,” said Barbara. “He began a story about being on that ranch near Barranquilla. But then …”

“What exactly did he say?” Stephanie was staring at her imploringly. Barbara noticed her eyes. They were a very faint green, like those of a Tonkinese cat. They were innocent eyes, and they now begged for information, their gaze as eloquent as any words.

“He didn’t tell me much,” Barbara said.

Stephanie seemed relieved, and Barbara realised that her relief came from learning that Barbara did not know what had happened. That, she thought, suggested that Stephanie herself knew, but would not tell.

“You know, don’t you?” she asked. “Did he tell you?”

Stephanie turned away. “You must excuse me,” she said distantly. “I have to check on something in the kitchen. I should not like to serve burnt offerings on your very first day here.”

D
INNER WAS SERVED
at seven o’clock.

“We like to eat early in the summer months,” Stephanie said to Barbara. “The evenings here are so lovely—so long drawn out. It gives us a chance to get things done after the meal.”

“Such as going for a walk,” said Hugh. He looked at Barbara invitingly. “Would you like that?”

“Of course.”

He was accompanying her into the dining room, and took her arm as they went through the door. She nestled against him briefly, fondly, almost conspiratorially; she sensed that he was aware of her slight feeling of awkwardness—this was his family, his home, and she was the outsider. No matter how warm and welcoming a family may be, there is always a period of restraint, of mutual examination and testing, before a new member is taken to heart; no amount of social confidence could change that.

Barbara took her place at the dinner table under the stern gaze of a Highland ghillie, caught in paint, gaffing a salmon and, it seemed, looking directly at her as he did so. Was this Hugh’s taste in art, she asked herself—wounded stags at bay, Perthshire hillsides with indolent Highland cattle, impossibly gloomy glens with mists descending? She realised that this was yet another thing she did not yet know about him. They had never discussed art, never been to a gallery together. You’re marrying a stranger, she thought; and for a moment she wondered whether it would be wisest to call the whole thing off. Not immediately, of course; she would wait until the end of the weekend and see how she felt then. No, she could never do that. Never.

The hour or so at the table moved slowly. She was conscious that Hugh was watching her, as if he were trying to ascertain her reaction to his parents. When she caught his eye, he appeared to want to convey something to her—an unspoken apology, it seemed. Please understand, he said. Please understand that these are my parents, but none of us chooses our parents, and I am not the same as them. It was such a common message, one that almost everybody, at one time or another, sends to friends. And the response that comes back is usually one of sympathy and understanding. “Yes, I see what you
mean,” it says. “But they’re really not all that bad, and you should see mine!”

The conversation was mainly between Hugh and his father, with occasional interventions from Stephanie, who made an effort to include Barbara in their exchanges.

“I’m so interested to hear you’re a literary agent,” she said. “I’ve been writing—”

Hugh did not allow her to finish. “Barbara is not that sort of agent, Mother,” he interjected. “She deals with a very different sort of book.”

Stephanie tried again. “But I thought that—”

Again, Hugh interrupted. “For example, she has the most interesting autobiography at the moment. It seems that—”

Stephanie stared at her son. “My own book—”

Sorley cleared his throat. “I’ve been reading the most entertaining—”

And Hugh again: “Please pass the salt.”

Barbara said, “Does Ardnamurchan get a lot of rain?”

At the end of the meal Barbara and Hugh left for their walk. The sun was still quite high above the hills to the west; although it was shortly after eight, at these latitudes, and in high summer, it would be a good two hours before it sank below the Hebridean Sea. “We’ve got time to get to the waterfall,” Hugh said. “Would you like that?”

Barbara looked up at the hillside behind the house. There was a small expanse of cleared grazing and then, beyond that, rough land: heather, bracken, outcrops of granite.

“There’s a path,” said Hugh, taking off his jersey and tying it around his waist. “It’s mild, isn’t it?”

It was. Earlier in the evening there had been a breeze and this had now abated, leaving the air languid, warm on the skin. On impulse, Barbara moved to his side and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’m so happy,” she said. And then, embarrassed at her sudden
show of emotion, “I just am. I normally don’t go round telling people that I’m happy, like some Pollyanna, but I just am.”

“And I’m happy too,” said Hugh. But then he frowned. “Why shouldn’t you tell people you’re happy? Why do people expect you to be miserable?”

“Do they?” she asked.

“Yes, I think they do.” He hesitated, but only briefly. “Sometimes it seems as if people think that misery is the natural human condition. Misery and conflict.”

“For some it is,” said Barbara. “For a lot of people, in fact.”

Hugh’s expression was one of disappointment. “You really feel that?”

Yes, she did; and she explained, “I’m not saying that we
have to
feel miserable—obviously we don’t. But we can’t ignore the real misery of the world. We’d have to bury our heads in the sand, wouldn’t we?”

Hugh defended his stance. He did not ignore the misery of the world, he said, but it did not dominate his thinking. Why should it? What was the point? “You can know all about suffering,” he said, “and you can still smile, and see the beauty of the world, and experience … experience joy, I suppose.”

She touched his forearm. “Of course. Of course, you’re right. And I’m not ashamed by happiness.” She paused. “You’ve made me happy. It’s you. Meeting you.” Which was true. Before she met Hugh she had been unhappy; she had been plain old Barbara Ragg—which was how she thought of herself—tagging after a man who had little time for her, living in fear of his rejection. And now everything was different. It was Hugh who had brought about this metamorphosis in her life.

All this at the start of the walk, before they set foot on the path that followed the course of the burn and then turned off into the fold of the hills; now Hugh took her arm and led her towards the path,
matching his step to hers. “Fine,” he said. “That’s fine, because I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. Ever. I’m not exaggerating.”

She began to say something, but he stopped her, placing a finger against her lips. “We need to start,” he said. “If we’re going to swim, we need to get up there before the sun goes down.”

She shivered. They were going to swim under a waterfall. She looked up at the sky; it was a vast echoing vault of blue, empty apart from a sudden dart of swifts, dipping and swinging on some exultant mission of their own.

T
HEY FOLLOWED THE PATH
along the side of the burn, stepping cautiously over exposed rocks and the tangled roots of gorse. The tumbling water was the colour of whisky—from peat, explained Hugh. “We could drink it if we wanted to,” he said. “I always used to, when I was a boy. I lay down and drank it when I’d been walking across the hills. Lay down and drank like a …”

“Like a snake,” suggested Barbara.

He was surprised. “Why? Why like a snake?”

“Because that’s the image that springs to mind. From Lawrence’s poem. You know, the one where a snake comes to his water trough and sips at the water. You lying on the ground makes me think of his snake.”

He recalled the poem, but only vaguely. “I like Lawrence,” he said. “I like the novels, although I must say that his characters seem to speak so formally.”

He smiled. “Do you think that in real life people have the sort of conversation we’re having? Or do they only talk like this in books?”

She thought for a moment. “No, this is real. This is really how
people speak.” She looked at him and returned his smile. “We’re talking like this, aren’t we?”

“We are.”

“Then there you are.”

The path now diverted from the course of the burn, climbing away to the west, crossing a steep stretch of hillside. The way was rougher there, not much more than a track scoured out by the hoofs of animals. “Sheep use this?” asked Barbara.

“No. Deer. We don’t have sheep any more. Just a few cattle. The deer are more important.”

She asked why, and Hugh explained that the ground was too rough to run even the hardy Scotch Blackface. “They survive all right, but there’s not much grazing, and you can’t make much from sheep these days. People come to do deer-stalking in the autumn—that’s much more valuable. It’s the only money we make, I think.”

That was another thing they had never discussed—money. The house was well furnished enough, she had noticed, but everything was old and could have been bought a long time ago; perhaps there had been money once.

“Can’t your father grow anything?” she asked.

Hugh pointed to the ground beneath their feet. “The soil is very thin,” he said. “Rock and peat. Sphagnum moss. Bog. No, you can’t grow anything.” He looked at her with a playful expression. “We’re very poor,” he said.

Barbara was uncertain what to say. He had travelled; there had been that school in Norfolk, which must have cost somebody something; there had been his year in South America. Poverty was relative.

He sensed her disbelief. “No, it’s true. It really is. There used to be a bit of money, but now it’s all gone. We don’t have anything.”

“Except this.” Barbara pointed to the hills around them.

Hugh laughed. “Of course. But we can’t sell this. We can’t.”

She was not so urban as to be incapable of understanding what
land meant to those who lived on it. “No, of course not. I understand that.”

They walked on, making for a point where the path surmounted a spur. From there a view of the sea suddenly opened up, and Barbara stopped in her tracks, struck by what she saw. Hugh stopped too, watching her reaction. “Yes,” he said simply. “Yes.”

There was another hill between them and the sea, but it was lower than the one they had just climbed, and they could easily see over it. There was an expanse of blue, silver at some points, almost white at others, and that was the sea; there was an island beyond, and yet others further out, strips of land laid down upon the horizon of water. “Coll,” said Hugh, pointing. “And that’s Tiree.”

Coll and Tiree. She had heard the names in the radio weather shipping forecasts; amid all the gales and the squalls and the zones of low pressure that the radio warned about, there had been Coll and Tiree, reassuring guardians against the Atlantic.

Hugh said to her that they should continue. If they followed the path a bit further, he explained, she would see how it swung back to where the waterfall was. And then they could swim—if she wanted to. “It’s cold for the first few minutes,” he said. “And then you don’t notice it.”