Eric McCormack - Cloud

WE THEN CAME to the matter of how I’d discovered she worked at Eildon House. I explained that I’d driven to Duncairn after meeting the curator, partly just to see what the place looked like now. I’d also hoped I might even come across her mother, still living there. I’d found out she was dead, visited her grave, and seen the fresh flowers. Through that I’d learned about her own existence from the owner of the Bracken Inn and decided to track her down.

She sat back, apparently satisfied with my account of myself. “I’m so glad you did track me down,” she said. “Miriam would have been thrilled to know what had become of you.” She sometimes called her mother by her first name, as though they’d been more like friends or sisters than parent and daughter.

I understood — my own parents liked me to use their first names, though for other reasons.

“She might have been surprised at the kind of work you do,” Sarah said. “She seemed to think you had more of an idealistic streak.”

That hurt a little, but I said nothing.

“Did you know she herself was an only child?” she said.

I’d always assumed that was the case. As in other matters, I’d known so little about her.

“Yes, her mother — my grandmother — was a fragile woman with a weak heart who died at home just a few days after Miriam was born, and Grandfather never married again,” said Sarah. “When I was a child, Mother took me on a trip to see her birthplace. The people who owned the house didn’t mind us coming in to have a look round.” She recollected the scene for me. “It was on the east coast, north of Edinburgh — one of the big houses you find on the cliffs with a bow window in the parlour looking out over the sea. There was a huge rock a mile or two off shore, completely covered in bird droppings. When we were there, it was glimmering in the sun like the dome of a cathedral. But apparently the day Grandmother was dying the sky was overcast and the rock grew less and less visible till you couldn’t see it anymore. That was always the sign of a storm approaching the coast.

“After Grandmother died, Grandfather sold the house and rented a rowhouse in Edinburgh. He wasn’t really cut out to be a parent, so he hired nannies to look after Miriam. When she was ten, she was enrolled in a girls’ boarding school in Edinburgh. He wasn’t around much during her childhood, for he was a partner in an export — import business and had to make a lot of voyages back and forth to the Far East. That was where he developed a liking for opium. You knew about that?”

Indeed, I did. How could I forget Miriam’s distaste as she tended the opium pipe for that wreck of a man?

“Eventually,” Sarah went on, “he sold his share of the firm, too, and moved everything to the house in Duncairn, lock, stock, and barrel — yes, there really was a barrel with a lifetime’s supply of opium in it. Who knows why he chose Duncairn? We used to wonder if it was because the sight of the ocean stirred up bad memories for him and Duncairn was about as landlocked as it was possible to be in the Uplands.

“When Miriam was sixteen she left school and went to stay with him. Even though he wasn’t very old, he already needed looking after. The townspeople of Duncairn barely knew him, but they did get to know Mother and they liked her. After she married Sam Mackay, they lived together in the manor with Grandfather. Sam had the kind of temperament that was able to put up with him.

“In the course of time, I was born. I didn’t have much to do with Grandfather. He always seemed only vaguely a member of the human species, inhabiting his corner of the manor, with his strange smells and habits. I was only seven when he died of complications resulting from the opium. After his death I missed him — I suppose it had become normal to have such a weird creature at home.

“A much worse loss occurred when I was fourteen, and Sam died. He looked so big and strong but his heart was never good and it let him down too soon. His death seemed to take most of the zest out of Miriam.

“After I graduated from university, I worked in various institutions like this. Perhaps I was drawn to them because of having grown up with the enigma of Grandfather always close by. When I became director here at Eildon House I tried to coax Mother to come and live nearer to me. But she just couldn’t imagine not being in Duncairn.

“One morning five years ago, she was found by some fishermen at the foot of Tam’s Brig, a place up in the moors. What she was doing up there, I don’t know. She may have fallen off the bridge or she may have jumped. Either way, I suppose it was a good thing: by then she was ready to die. I just wish she’d found a less horrible way to do it.”

I was shocked to hear the way Miriam had died. The owner of the Bracken Inn, tactfully perhaps, hadn’t mentioned it. I’d never forgotten that day long ago when Miriam and I had gone up into the hills and looked down from the ruined bridge into the turbulent waters and rocks beneath. I tried not to think of her crumpled body at the bottom of the gorge.

But Sarah’s narrative was unrelenting.

“The worst thing was that when they found her on the rocks, the birds had pecked out her eyes,” she said. “She used to warn me never to fall asleep in the moors because of them.”

To hear about Miriam’s death and the mutilation by the birds was very hard to bear. The very first time we’d met, she’d warned me about them, too.

“She was buried in the cemetery alongside my grandfather and Sam,” Sarah said. “When she died, I lost my best friend. I loved her and Sam very much and they loved me. It took me a long time to be able even to think about them without crying. I still go to Duncairn from time to time to lay some flowers on Miriam’s grave — and talk to her.”

After a while, perhaps because of the confessional aura of the room, I began to justify myself to Sarah. I made it clear to her that I’d never have willingly deserted her mother, for my time with her had been the happiest in my whole life. The day Sam Mackay told me they were going to be married, I’d rushed straight up to the manor to ask Miriam how that could be possible, to beg her to change her mind. She knew I was there, she even looked out the window at me, but she wouldn’t open the door.

Yes, I was the innocent party — the party sinned against — no matter what Sarah might have heard to the contrary.

“But I didn’t hear anything to the contrary,” Sarah said. “Mother told me precisely what happened that last day when you came to her door, much the same way as you describe it. That moment preyed on her mind and was one of the major causes of her unhappiness all her life afterwards.” She spoke slowly and emphatically. “Refusing to see you was the hardest thing she ever did. But you must believe this: she did it for your own sake. She knew you loved her — in fact, that you loved her too much to give her up. So she took matters into her own hands. She decided to make the sacrifice herself.”

I didn’t understand.

“She’d come to the conclusion that it would be an awful thing for you if she were to inflict herself and her family baggage on you,” Sarah said. “She was aware of how uneasy you were about Grandfather and his addiction. But she couldn’t just up and leave him to fend for himself. And if you’d come to live with her in the manor, would you really have been able to put up with the sight of him every day, year after year? She felt she’d be ruining your life, and she couldn’t accept that. So she just cut you off.” Sarah looked right into my eyes. “She knew you’d be badly hurt, but she was sure you’d be able to recover as time passed.”