Иэн Рэнкин - The Flood

She might as well have been asking him for his definition of love. He shook his head and sniffed. His nose was running like a baby’s. He felt his cheeks flush in embarrassment. So much for bravado. So much for the great lover. He was still a fucking virgin baby at heart. He blew his nose angrily. Her hands were on his face. He put his arms around her and slowly pulled her to the floor. They lay still together. Sandy stared at the ceiling while Rian stroked his face and his neck. When she made to sit up he pulled her towards him again and kissed her as forcefully as he could. If he was her boyfriend, then didn’t he deserve it? He drew her in towards him like a twin just before birth. She resisted a little. He rolled over on top of her and, after a moment’s significant eye contact, placed his hand on her tiny breast. She closed her eyes. He moved his hand downwards, watching her face. His hand was as sensitive as the nerve in a tooth. He discovered every ripple in the material of her skirt. His fingers touched her knee. He began to slide his hand upwards again. Her eyes opened like sentries caught napping. She pushed him, rolled away from him, and stood up. She was nearly shouting, her voice a tremor.

‘No, Sandy, not with you, Sandy! I won’t. I won’t.’ She paused, breathing heavily. ‘You have no right.’ She looked away. ‘I don’t mean it like that.’

‘I’ve got some money upstairs if that’s what you mean.’ He thought that a worthy line, like something a film actor would have said. She glared at him and started to walk towards him. He knew, as surely as Robbie had known in the caravan, what was coming. He reeled from her blow. She looked strong now, and vicious. She spat words at him.

‘You can’t talk like that. I won’t let you. You’re just like the rest. You’re like all of them. I hate you.’ She turned, looking for her coat. She had no coat, only his jacket. She walked to the door. He chased after her.

‘Don’t go,’ he said. She stood at the kitchen door, her back to him. ‘I apologise. I didn’t know what I was doing. Please wait. I’ve got a present for you. Will you wait?’ She nodded, her long hair waving. ‘Okay,’ he said.

He ran up the stairs three at a time, his speciality, and went into the cold back bedroom. Had it ever been a bedroom? Yes, for a short time before his grandmother had died he had slept in it. Perhaps for two years. He could not remember. Probably his mother had slept in it too, when Uncle Tom had been too big to share with her. But it was a cold room. He remembered having nightmares in it. He pushed open the trunk and selected one of the many woollen articles from it. It was a beautiful shawl, one of his grandmother’s creations. He closed the lid and hurried downstairs. She had not moved, apparently.

‘Here,’ he said. Still she would not turn. He placed the shawl gently around her shoulders. ‘A present,’ he said. She seemed to examine its corners. Then she turned. She was smiling. They embraced. Her hair was clean like a wet seashore. He stroked it. They stood like that for a while.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve got an idea.’ He spoke in her ear, his face towards the kitchen. ‘Would you like to come and live here with us? I could talk to my mum. She would understand. I’m sure she would. She’s sort of an outsider too, remember.’

‘Oh, I’d like that I think, Sandy. But I can’t leave Robbie. He’d, well, I don’t know what he’d do without me. But...’ Her voice tailed off. He could feel that she was torn between something like familial masochism and freedom.

‘But listen,’ he said excitedly. ‘I’d make sure Robbie was all right.’

‘How?’ Her voice warmed to him.

‘What about if I gave him money, enough to see him through for a while?’

‘Money?’

‘Like buying you from him, but really buying you your freedom.’ His voice was heated. He felt like an old philanthropist. He was acting out a history lesson.

‘Money,’ she whispered.

‘Yes.’ He hardly heard her. ‘I’d give him some money.’

‘How much?’ He smiled at her swift words. He hugged her to him and his eyes gazed like new stars through the door of the kitchen, through the back door, right out into space itself. Anything was possible. Anything.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Maybe thirty or forty pounds?’ she said.

‘Forty?’ His voice was unconcerned.

‘But fifty would be better, wouldn’t it? He’d take fifty.’

‘Fifty?’ It seemed like a great deal of money, but it had to be a bargain.

‘But where would you get fifty pounds, Sandy?’ Where indeed. Schemes loomed in his mind. Anything was possible, but what was probable?

‘I’d get it,’ he said, feeling heroic. She pulled away from him a little, saw confidence in his face, gasped, and kissed him three times quickly.

‘Oh, I love you, Sandy. I really think I do.’ She stroked her shawl. ‘And thanks for my present. It’s lovely. I’ve never been given a present before, honest. I really think I love you.’ She kissed him again. He was chuckling now. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘It’s an old shawl,’ he said. ‘No use here. We’ve got plenty. It’ll keep you warm at night. We don’t want you getting cold.’ He looked at his watch. ‘My God, it’s past eleven! Come on, I’ll see you back to the mansion. You look like a lady in that thing.’ He nodded at the shawl as she pulled it around herself. ‘You really do.’

He switched off the lights pensively, hoping he would have enough time left on his return to clean up before his mother came back with Andy Wallace. Fifty pounds. It was the price of a stereo. The price of ten records. He would get it, but he could not think of a likely source at the moment. That was for the future anyway. For the moment he was happy to be climbing the fence behind his girlfriend, remembering her climbing the drainpipe, leaping into mud and grass, walking heavily through the boggy fields and the drizzle to her castle.

The air was chilled in the manse. Iain Darroch rubbed his hands together as he entered, letting the books under his arm slip noisily to the floor. He ignored them for the moment, switched on the fire in his adequate sitting room, then returned to the hallway, closed the door properly, picked up the books and, his coat still wrapped around him, returned to the faint but growing glow of the fire.

September. The leaves were turning. The summer was over. He looked towards the long winter ahead with morose eyes. In winter the sap really was at its lowest ebb, spiritually as well as physically. He did not relish the prospect. He made some tea in the clutterless kitchen and brought it through to the fireside. He sat down on the sheepskin rug. Sipping the tea, he pulled a book towards him from the small coffee table.

The conversation with Reverend Walker had fired something in him, some need to know his parish as one would know one’s ancestors. He had read several books from Reverend Walker’s collection, and had now brought three more from Kirkcaldy Public Library. Carsden had a strange, fascinating past. Fife itself was notable as a historic county, but it was Carsden that really interested him. He began reading. His notebook lay beside him, a fountain pen hooked over its edge. Fife, he had found, was riddled with superstition. The Church had never been as strong, perhaps, as was thought. Witches had been burned in Fife right up until the end of the seventeenth century, and those figures came from incomplete records. Who could say what might have happened thereafter? Robert Baillie, a Presbyterian minister of the time, had recorded that in 1643 thirty witches had been burned in Fife in a few months. James Hogg had written or procured a lyric ballad called “The Witch of Fife”, and there was also a well-known poem called “The Witch of Pittenweem”. Pittenweem was near to Darroch’s birthplace, and the whole East Neuk appeared to be riddled with tales of witchcraft. Darroch found it all fascinating.