T. Boyle - Water Music

The red-haired woman has taken her hand. Georgie Gleg, distinguished professor and doctor of medicine, is shuffling his feet and looking down at his shoes. “And of course,” Fiona adds, “I’ve enjoyed your husband’s book.”

♦ ♦ ♦

During the next few days, Avis House hums, roars and squeaks with activity, as if someone had loaded it on a colossal wagon and set the wheels rolling. The doors are wide open, the groaning board groaning, and every ambulatory, morally unobjectionable, semi-rational soul up and down both sides of the loch has been invited to pay a visit. Kilted men and women in tartan shawls show up for tea, for dinner, for cards or quoits. The Reverend this, the Doctor that, the Honorable Mister and odd Sir. Ailie can hardly keep track of the faces. There are Macdonalds in the parlor and Dinsdales on the lawn, beaming Camerons come for a look at the Edinburgh physician and the wife of the renowned explorer, soberfaced Ramsays eager to discuss Cave’s Lives of the Father s and Ogden’s Sermons . Evenings are consecrated with vast bowls of punch and cider and bottles of port wine, nourished with mutton, herrings, fricasseed moorhens, beef collops, frothed milk, tongue and bread pudding, and consummated with conversation and tobacco, music, dancing and parlor games. It could be Christmas, Michaelmas, the harvest feast. The whole county seems to have gone on holiday.

Ailie can’t get enough of it. She feels like a girl of sixteen, light on her feet, witty, attractive, appreciated. For the first time in years she’s the center of attention, whether jigging round the parlor with a young buck in kilt and argyles or talking fashion with the ladies or horses and dogs with a cross-eyed country doctor. Despite the odd position she’s been placed in — wife to Mungo, jilter of Georgie — she couldn’t feel more relaxed — or more welcome. She’d thought at first that Fiona’s reference to Mungo was a subtle dig at her — and God knows Georgie’s cousin and mother and all the rest of his clan had a right to resent her — but now she’s certain the remark was innocent, a way of making conversation and nothing more. If anything, in fact, Fiona and Mrs. Quaggus have gone out of their way to foster a relationship between her and Georgie. They’ve taken Thomas off her hands, occupying him with Erse songs and tales of taibhs and goblins and the beastie that lives in the loch, stuffing him with cake, running him round the meadows. And Betty too. Less than an hour after their arrival a young, smooth-faced clergyman sat down to tea with them and hasn’t left her side since. The whole thing is very strange. It’s almost as if the two older women were matchmaking, as if Ailie were truly sixteen, free and unattached, the chosen mate for an exemplary son and sterling cousin. Either that. . or a widow.

A widow. The thought comes to her, cold and insidious, as she’s dressing for tea one afternoon, and it stops her dead for a moment. Do they really think—? No. She’s a married woman, mother of four. . her husband’s gone away for a bit. On business. Like a traveling solicitor or a circuit judge. And then suddenly, as if a wet sheet had been thrown over her, the truth of the matter strikes her. Mungo is out there somewhere, suffering, injured maybe, racked with disease, beleaguered by hideous grinning black faces and howling beasts, and here she is running around as if he didn’t exist, like a schoolgirl or something, like a widow. Widow. The two evil syllables box round her head, insupportable, unacceptable: Ailie Anderson Park, Widow of the Late Great Explorer.

That’s it. That’s what this thing is all about, that’s why old Quaggus and simpering Fiona are knocking themselves out to be so gracious. They’ve buried Mungo already, and they’re softening her up — like a piece of meat — for Georgie. For a moment she just sits there, staring down at the shoe in her lap, humiliated, frightened, resentful of the scheming old biddies, resentful of Georgie. But then she leaps up off the bed and flings the shoe at the wall, as sore and hurt and angry as she’s ever been. It’s not Georgie’s fault — he’s been a saint, a savior — nor Mrs. Quaggus’s or Fiona’s. It’s Mungo — Mungo’s the one to blame. Would she be up here at the loch if he hadn’t deserted her? Would she so much as look at another man if he hadn’t broken his marital vows? No. Dead or alive, he’s made her a widow, condemned her to solitary confinement. Well, he’s asked for it. He has. And she’ll be damned if she’ll sit at home and wait for him till her hair’s turned gray.

Ten minutes later she’s sitting over a cup of tea, laughing till her sides hurt over some little joke Georgie’s made. Her son, barely able to see over the edge of the table, glances up at her with Mungo’s startled eyes and the laugh catches in her throat. There is a moment of silence, awkward, Betty and her preacher, Fiona and an assortment of Macdonalds and Ramsays staring down at their cups, until Mrs. Quaggus shoots out a hand to tickle the boy, and he subsides in giggles.

Fiona is tapping the edge of her saucer with a spoon, grinning broadly. “Ahem,” clearing her throat, fluffing her hair. “If I can get a word in amidst all this hilarity, I thought perhaps you and Georgie might want to take a ride out to one o’ my tenants, Ailie — see some o’ the quaint side o’ Highland life. Very picturesque, I assure you.”

“Yes, let’s.” Georgie meets her eyes, then looks away.

“We’d be more than happy to look after the young gentleman,” Mrs. Quaggus adds.

“To be sure.” Fiona is still smiling, lips drawn back to show her teeth.

♦ ♦ ♦

Outside, the sky presses down on them like a weight. Clouds obliterate the hilltops, mist creeps up the glens. Where before there were early flowers, ferns, leafing bushes, there is now only a low band of fog billowing upward to join earth and sky. Ailie and Gleg lead the way, mounted on a matched pair of chestnuts, while Thomas — he threw a tantrum until Ailie relented and agreed to take him along — brings up the rear on a pony led by Rorie Macphoon, Cousin Fiona’s bailiff. They pause at the top of a rise to watch a lone collie work his flock down the slope, white paws blurred as he dashes in and out of a bank of mist after strays. A big broad-faced ewe, just in front of them, glances over her shoulder like a nervous grandmother, hurriedly tearing up great streaming mouthfuls of heather and grass before the dog can discover her. Georgie, in rare form, quotes from Macbeth : “By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes,” and old Rorie laughs as if his head would split.

The sky has darkened perceptibly and a light drizzle begun to thicken the air by the time they reach the little cottage on the hillside. Quaint, Ailie thinks, oh yes indeed, and then calls to Thomas to hurry and come have a look. The boy wears a rapt expression, awestruck by the romance of the scene, something out of the pages of a storybook. The hut is of turf, with a crude, blistered wooden door and a square cut out of the front wall to serve as a window. A stream courses through the yard with a sound of gargling fish and mermen, the naked black trunks of pines reach up into the smoking atmosphere like great solid beanstalks, there is a delicious frightening cackle of voices mingled with the smoke rising from the chimney. Georgie, riding crop in hand, raps at the door.

After a moment the door swings back and a bewildered-looking old man pokes his head out. He gapes at Georgie as if he’d just dropped down from another planet, inclining his cross-hatched face to one side and squinting an eye shut to get a better look at him. Georgie is holding out his hand, hearty and condescending at the same time. “Gleg,” he says. “Georgie Gleg. We’ve stopped by to pay you a visit.”