The Pillow Friend (30 page)

Graham came in with a basket of split logs and kindling.

“Coffee's just—”

He frowned fiercely. “What the hell is that?”

“What?”

“That—electric heater.”

“It's—an electric heater.”

“What's it doing on?”

“I turned it on.”

“Why? I told you we're going to have a fire—I went out to chop wood for a fire.” He glared at her and she looked blankly back, nervous but baffled by his anger.

“Well, fine, we'll have a fire, that's great. But in the meantime, I was chilly and—”

“Oh, well, if you were chilly, then of course you had to get the whole place warm immediately. You couldn't put on a jumper, of course you couldn't.”

“Are you worried about the electricity bill or what? I found the heater, so I put it on. In Harrow you've got electric heaters in every room and you've never said—”

“We're not in Harrow. This is not England, this is not America. When I said I was going to lay a fire I thought you would understand that things are different here. We do things differently.” His voice was still angry, yet the look he gave her was more pleading than anything. He was begging her to understand.

And suddenly she did. This was his special place, the magical home of his childhood, a place out of time, where nothing changed and things were always done in a certain, traditional way, to preserve the magic. She thought of Aunt Marjorie's house and wondered if it had really been poverty which had made her live without electricity. She went and unplugged the heater, asking as she went, “Is it all right to use the electric kettle?”

“Of course. How else are we going to have coffee?”

“Mmmm, I don't know, I guess when you get the fire going we could boil a pot of water on it somehow.”

“If you want to try, I won't stop you. But I'd like my coffee before I die of thirst.”

“Sure. But—what did you do when you were a kid? Before this place had electricity?”

He stared at her. “I didn't drink coffee then.” Then he smiled, grudgingly admitting complicity. “We had a camping stove. The electricity came in—well, actually it came in all along this road in the 1960s, so it was available then, but we didn't bother to get it. My father didn't think it was worth it, for the little time we spent here. It was my brother, when he married, when his daughter was born—I think his wife and daughter wouldn't have come up if there wasn't electricity, so . . .” He shrugged. “The new order. However, part of the deal was that the others pay the electricity bills, so I use it as little as possible. I still wish we were without . . . it makes this place too much like anywhere else. I can hardly conceive of it, but James brings a television up here.” He knelt before the clean hearth and began to ball up pages from a pile of newspapers.

“Well, I guess when you have children you have to—”

“Don't you believe it! The telly's for him. And then he complains about the reception. God knows I watch too much junk; it's a relief to go somewhere I can't give in to the craving. If my brother ever leaves a television set here it goes straight into the loch.”

She heard the kettle come to the boil and switch itself off, and went to make the coffee. When Gray got the fire going they sat before it drinking instant coffee and eating chocolate digestive biscuits, speaking very little. She felt happy and at peace, as glad to be here as she knew he must be, and believed they were in harmony, both enjoying the stillness and warmth after so many hours in the car.

Then he set down his empty cup on one of the stone flags of the hearth and stood up.

“I'm going to go stretch my legs.”

“I'll come too.”

“No, I want to be alone.” He made a face. “Please don't take it personally. I need some time to myself, that's all. And it's something I've always done when I first get here, I have a wee stroll to check things out. By myself. Of course, I'm usually here on my own, so—it's going to take me a while to get used to the new order. I hope you don't mind.”

“Of course. I'll see you later.” She did mind, she minded terribly. Not just that he didn't want her with him, but the way he'd confined her to quarters. She felt like a walk, too, after so long in the car, and would have enjoyed exploring the area, but if she went out now he would think she was following him.

Luckily she liked this house and didn't feel trapped here. There were plenty of books and she always enjoyed browsing. After she'd rinsed out their cups and left them beside the sink she began to prowl among the bookshelves. Except for a few old hardbacks about nature and the history of Scotland, most were paperbacks, chiefly fiction. Many were by authors whose work she knew—Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Dorothy Dunnett—but there were others she'd never heard of, and a lot of green-spined Penguin mysteries which made her tingle with anticipation. In one Penguin,
The Private Wound
by Nicholas Blake, a photograph had been used as a bookmark. She took it out to look at it, and her stomach clenched with shock. She was looking at a picture of herself.

It was an old snapshot, taken when she was about seventeen. She was not aware of having seen it before, but she knew herself. Even in profile, her face slightly blurred, partially obscured by a strand of long, brown hair, she recognized her younger self. That was her smile and the slightly too-round curve of her cheek, those were her old glasses, and she even remembered the orange shirt, bought on an expedition with Roxanne to an import shop which had smelled of joss sticks.

But what was it doing here? For a moment her sense of place deserted her, and she looked around wildly, half-expecting to find herself back in Austin, the past weeks with Gray nothing more than an especially involved daydream. But the fire still burned in the hearth behind her, there was the smell of wood smoke in the air, and the peace of the countryside surrounded it all. She relaxed, secure again, and looked back at the picture, feeling small prickles of excitement.

How had Graham come by it? Was it possible that he had met her aunt in London, that she had given him a photograph of her niece, that he had been attracted, and dreamed over it, even as she had fantasized about his picture in Marjorie's house?

She asked him about the picture as soon as he came in, too excited to wait and pick a better moment.

He frowned and almost snatched it away. “What are you doing with this? Where did you find it? Have you been going through my personal things?”

“It was in a book, on the bookshelf.”

He was still frowning, not seeing her. “Was it? Oh. I'm sorry I snapped at you. It was a shock—I'm not sure why. After so many years it shouldn't matter. It's not as if I ever really knew her.”

“That's me. That's a picture of me.”

Now he looked at her. There was no liking in his eyes. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“I'm not. That's a picture of me.”

“It doesn't look anything like you.”

“When I was seventeen. Those are my glasses, that's my face, I had long hair—look, I know it's me!”

“I didn't know you when you were seventeen, and I'm the one who took the picture.”

She wavered a little, but it was hard to give up something she'd felt so sure about. “Who is it, then?”

“Just someone I met, a long time ago. A girl I met in India. It never came to anything. I thought it might, for a time, but—nothing really happened. I never really knew her. I don't know why I kept her picture for so long.” He hesitated, and then he crumpled it in his hand.

She gave a little cry.

He scowled at her. “What's the matter? You should be pleased. I'm through with my past, with all my old girlfriends. You're the only one I want now; you're all I need.”

She had hoped, indeed she had almost come to believe, that some magic would be worked in the bothy, that they would come together in some final, irrefutable way and she would know, once and for all, that this was the man she had been waiting for, that they would make each other happy.

But real life was not so obligingly certain as her daydreams. They did grow closer during the next nine days as they talked a lot, more frankly than ever before, and they made love more often, with more tenderness and more abandon.

“You see,” he said one night as they lay together in bed, relaxed and sweating with pleasurable exertion, “you see, it does get better when you know each other. It'll keep on getting better.”

“It will?”

“Of course it will, as long as we want it to. As long as we try. We just have to decide we're going to be happy together, and we will be.”

It was what she wanted to hear, wanted to believe. It was time to stop waiting for magic, and to accept what she had. Her wish had come true. She would accept the consequences.

On their way to Gretna they detoured to Stirling to check out a secondhand bookshop Graham had heard about. They were always happy in bookshops; before they'd met it had been a solitary pleasure, but now it was something they could share.

This time he made one purchase she didn't know about until after they were back in the car.

“Here you are,” he said. “Here's a wedding present for you.”

It was a copy of
Agnes Grey,
the first copy she had seen since she'd lost her own. It moved and excited her beyond words. More than that, it seemed to her an omen, a final and compelling reason to marry this man.

“Oh, Gray, oh my goodness—thank you! If you knew how much this means—”

“I think I do, actually.”

“I didn't get anything for you, I don't have a present for you.”

“The only present I want is you as my wife.”

And so, a few hours later, with the reckless, terrified excitement with which someone might leap off a cliff in the expectation of being rescued by angels, she formally agreed in front of witnesses and became the wife of Graham Martin Storey.

On their wedding night, in a dingy hotel room in Carlisle, with her husband on the bed beside her reading the second volume of James Morris'
The Pax Britannica Trilogy,
she began to read
Agnes Grey
. The first page was so unexpected that it made her dizzy. She read it again, her disorientation increasing:

“All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge; I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others, but the world may judge for itself: shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture, and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.”

She turned the pages, reading snatches at random, searching for something she remembered, anything she remembered, without success. Each new thing she read, every familiar name she failed to find, increased her disturbance. It was hard to catch her breath and there was an odd smell coming from the pages of the book which made her feel a little sick.

“What's wrong?”

She waved the book at him. “This—this isn't the book I read, I don't know it at all!”

“That often happens. The books we particularly loved as children—”

“No, it's not the same book, I'm sure of it. I've never read this before. Could there be—there must be—another book with the same title?”

“Not by Anne Brontë.”

“Maybe it wasn't by Anne Brontë, I don't know, I can't remember noticing the author's name on the copy my aunt gave me.”

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Well, I'm sorry. That's the only
Agnes Grey
I know of. Why don't you read it, maybe it'll come back to you. Probably your memory edited out the dull bits.”

She could see he wanted to get back to his own book; he couldn't understand her distress. Anyway, she couldn't think of anything better than his suggestion, and so she again began to read it, for the first time.

The book she remembered was a tumultuous romance with fantastical elements, full of suspense, passion and melodramatic situations. This book, which Gray had given her, was completely different, a prim, dry tale about the daily life and misfortunes of a governess in nineteenth century England. There were no pirates, no wild horseback rides, no fairies, no scenes of low life in London. The only thing her remembered book had in common with this one was its title, the name of the heroine.

By the time she had forced her way to the modestly happy ending, Gray had put his book aside and fallen asleep. Nothing was as she had thought it would be: England, Graham Storey,
Agnes Grey,
true love, her wedding night. And what about marriage? She turned out the light and lay awake in the dark for a long time, listening to her husband sleep and wondering what she had done.

They had been back in Harrow for about two weeks when the phone call came. It was evening, and they had just finished dinner. He leaped up at the first ring and galloped upstairs to his study to answer it.

She imagined him returning immediately, saying it had been a wrong number. When he didn't, she took the dishes to the sink and began to wash up, feeling lonely.