The Summer of the Bear Page 14

  ‘Oh, tse tse, it’s not just Alick,’ Donald John said, ‘there are many such yarns about the beast. Why, there’s a fellow down south, they say slaughtered a sheep for his own use. It’s illegal to home-kill a sheep now so he’s been telling people that the bear killed the sheep hisself and ate its carcass. Well, that nice Sergeant Anderson took the wrestler along there and they found the sheep carcass hidden away in a back room and now the fellow’s been brought to court and fined.’

  ‘Serve him right, the scallywag,’ Peggy said. ‘That’s what his lies did for him.’

  ‘Maybe you should go out and look for it, Donald John,’ Jamie said. ‘You could get the reward.’

  ‘Oh, boo boo, it would take a lot to tackle that bear.’

  ‘The wrestler fights it all the time.’

  ‘Aye, the wrestler can put that beast down all right, but he’s a hardy man. Why, he’s been out on the hills every day in the wind and the rain dressed in nothing more than his wrestling boots and trunks.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Matheson said. ‘Quite bare-chested. It’s a wonder he hasn’t taken a terrible chill.’ She levered herself slowly to her feet. ‘I must away, Donald John.’

  ‘Right you are, then. Bye for now.’ Donald John helped her to the door.

  ‘Come on, Donald John,’ Jamie said, following. ‘Can you and me take the tractor and go now?’

  ‘Ach, let it be. I’m not gallivanting round the island looking for a bear. If he’s not dead, he’ll be in hiding and I’m quite sure he’s very hungry by now. There’s no taming a wild nature like that.’ He shook his head so vigorously it looked as if his neck was in danger of breaking. ‘Why, if that beast turns renegade, it could be the end of us.’

  38

  Two small photographs had dropped out of the white envelope. Two passport-sized stamps of treason along with East German ID papers. Mechanically, Letty went on stirring the soup. Who was he, the blank face who stared out of them, and what did he represent? A trap? A double agent? Had Nicky owed him or needed him? She grated the spoon against the pan bottom. The split pea and ham soup was burning, but she couldn’t raise the energy to do anything about it.

  ‘Camel breath. Go and put out the flag for Alick,’ she heard Alba ordering Jamie, and she identified the edge of claustrophobia in her daughter’s voice.

  It was nearly three weeks since the bear had run off and everyone was in agreement. The beast was dead. He had drowned in the viscous mud of the bogs or been carried out to sea and despite the repeated offer of a thousand pounds, most people had stopped caring either way. The children were defeated and listless and Letty couldn’t blame them. They’d seen nothing in their searches. Not an ear, or stub of a tail, not one steaming mound of bear poo. And now there was nothing to fill their days except bickering and carping. Whatever suggestions Letty made were greeted with the enthusiasm of death row inmates being invited to sit in the electric chair. She steadied herself against the Raeburn. Summers had been so easy when the children had been small. They’d all potter round the house in the morning, then after lunch there would be an outing – dune jumping, digging for razor clams, a game of boules on the beach with washed-up lobster floats. If the weather was bad, they’d head to the tweed shop, or brave the cliffs of Scolpaig or go to Loch Portain to look for colonies of seals. Afterwards they’d drive home, the smell of damp wool settling around them, while Nicky wiped the rain off his face with one hand and negotiated the serpentine road with the other.

  ‘Now darling,’ she could hear him asking, ‘was it an Arctic tern you thought you saw, or a cockyollbird?’

  ‘You know perfectly well it was a skua.’

  ‘Was it really? How unusual. Are you quite sure you weren’t hallucinating? Oh do look, another car appears to want to share the road with us. Shall I stop to let him pass – what do you think?’

  ‘I think it would be awfully decent of you.’

  ‘I bet he doesn’t say thank you, ill-mannered bugger.’

  ‘Except he’s giving you a wave, look.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re quite right. So he is.’

  ‘A perfectly nice polite wave, too.’

  ‘All right, don’t rub it in,’ Nicky said cheerfully. ‘Although, I daresay he didn’t mean it. Now, that’s a new style of wave, isn’t it? Two fingers raised slightly above the steering wheel. Shall I adopt it?’

  ‘Oh darling, everybody was doing it last year. It replaced the single finger as the fashionable acknowledgement, surely you remember?’

  ‘Nonsense, I’ve never seen it before in my entire life. I think you’re hallucinating again.’ He turned round to the back seat. ‘Children! Your mother’s gone mad! Oh look, darling, here we are at the Callernish Inn. Have I ever mentioned that you can get a very good haddock here?’

  ‘It was perfectly disgusting the only time we had it.’

  ‘Rubbish. I think you’ll find they cooked it the proper way – in breadcrumbs and not batter.’

  ‘It was still filthy’

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry to say you wouldn’t know a good piece of haddock if it stopped you for speeding.’

  ‘Have it your way. Now do concentrate, Nicky, and try not to hit that nice boy on a bicycle.’

  ‘I actually think I might hit him. He’s got a decidedly evil glint in his eye.’

  ‘He’s only about five.’

  ‘Let’s not forget The Omen.’

  ‘Or you could drive a tiny bit slower, maybe?’

  ‘Oh, darling, do stop grumbling.’ And once again Nicky would turn round to include the children. ‘On and on she goes, your mother. Never stops grumbling, it’s quite extraordinary. You’d think there was actually something wrong with her life, the way she goes on.’ Then he would smile secretly at Letty and take her hand in his.

  Letty caught a rogue tear with her sleeve. She had to get through this, she had to, but how, when it was all spinning perpetually round her head? The painting, the missile range, the bleached-out face of the photographs. Why hadn’t he confided in her? When had they stopped talking?

  She was certain now that Nicky had done something wrong and the knowledge felt like a rock in her throat. She drank water, but no amount dislodged it. She stopped eating because it hurt to swallow. She found herself tired all the time, prone to napping at opportune moments during the day. Tom had called twice in the last month, each time getting one of the children, each time sending them to fetch her with a claim of urgency, but she had refused to come to the phone. What was she to say? Fear, suspicion, pride, loyalty, shame. She no longer knew what emotion was driving her. All she knew was that if she concentrated – if she concentrated really hard – she could sometimes pretend nothing had happened, but the feeling of unreality that accompanied her day and night had grown so strong that she thought it was amazing she still existed at all, amazing that she hadn’t somehow cancelled herself out. Maybe this was why her children no longer responded to her. She had become invisible.

  She stole a look at them. Georgie, pale as a piece of silk, her head in a book; Jamie, hunched in his woolly jumper as though it were actually knitted out of tedium. Alba was prowling the room like a caged tiger and the truth hit Letty like a body blow – this might be her home, but it was not theirs. Bonn was their home – Bonn, with its dinky houses and wet, leaf-stained cobbles. Bonn with its endless variety of oppressive weather – the mugginess, the mosquitoes and that infuriating level crossing. Bonn with its forensic politics, its armed police and cavalcades of black cars. Bonn was where their schools were, where their friends lived, and they needed those dreadful crêperies and Currywurst shacks in the same way that she needed the wind and the rain and the call of an oyster-catcher. The island offered them nothing more than a summer holiday. It was just the place where they were forced to live without their father.

  She heard the rumble of the tractor. Thank God for Alick. Without Alick to take the children off her hands, she would have gone mad. Barely a day passed without one of them hanging
their anoraks on the stick fixed into the old stone grinder in the garden. In the past the children had been forbidden to summon Alick for their own amusement. He is not a genie in a bottle, you know! Alick has other commitments besides us! But this year, the anorak wrapped around the stick had been her literal SOS flag. As soon as Alick spotted it, down he raced and whisked the children off on whatever chore he happened to have that day. Cutting the peats, lifting potatoes or rescuing a calf stuck in the bog – God knows, she didn’t care where he took them, as long as he took them away.

  Covertly, she watched them through the window as they piled onto the trailer, Alba and Jamie perched in opposite corners, Georgie, steadfastly attached to her book, swinging her legs off the back. As soon as they were out of sight, she sighed with relief and stabbed a finger at the tape deck. Verdi. Puccini. Wagner. Anything would do. Opera insulated her heart from the chill of other emotions. Men betray their country out of greed, revenge, self-loathing, desire . . . Alick had taken the children and left her with another afternoon of empty hours in which she must try to work out which one of these had killed her husband.

  39

  Bonn

  The afternoon the Ambassadress paid her a visit in Bad Godesberg, Letty had been preparing a dinner party. Eighteen people were coming and she had chewed her finger over possible menus before electing to serve tomato ring followed by a rack of lamb. At the bell, she’d opened the door to find the wretched woman outside, dazzling in a pastel tweed suit, and nervously Letty straightened her shirt. It always seemed as if the presence of the Ambassadress was carefully designed to downgrade her subordinates from ministers’ wives to mice. Moreover, her timing was unfortunate. It wasn’t so much the cooking of the dinner – the caterers would take care of that – as the infinite tedium of getting ready. The straightening of the hair, the choosing of the outfit, the musical chairs of the placement – that subtle art of fusing the intelligent with the self-regarding – Christ, the very thought of it made the pores under Letty’s arm spontaneously open and begin leaking resentment. It was hers and Nicky’s twelfth consecutive evening engagement and she would have given anything for a night of macaroni cheese with the children.

  It could have been so different had she married a banker or a concert pianist. Sometimes, when they played Happy Families, she imagined herself and the children grotesquely caricatured alongside ‘Fleming of the Foreign Office’. She tried to conjure up a different sort of family, but she had only ever loved one man in her life and could not see herself with Bones the Butcher or Grits the Grocer, so she pulled herself together, made Gillian coffee and offered her a chair. The Ambassadress proceeded to interrogate her with grace and ease about the children, their schools, their general health and happiness. Letty waited for the axe to fall, unaware that it had been dropping for some minutes in a controlled fashion towards her neck. ‘And you, my dear, how are you getting on?’ Gillian ventured. As always, her poise, the erectness of her back, even the symmetry of her knees, seemed a tribute to order and self-discipline.

  ‘Oh, quite well, thank you,’ Letty said, but Gillian was not to be fobbed off so easily.

  ‘The welfare of the wives is one of my main obligations,’ she reminded her, ‘and of late I’ve been concerned. I know how isolating it can be for a woman to be shipped from pillar to post with a young family. Unhappiness is not unknown.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Letty murmured.

  ‘Perhaps you should try to involve yourself more in embassy life? Some of the other wives find it terribly rewarding, you know.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ Letty said, ‘but I’d really rather devote my time to Nicky and the children.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gillian said gently, ‘but you see, that’s rather the reason I’ve come to see you.’

  Letty felt her insides cramp with dislike. ‘I’m not sure I quite understand.’

  ‘Letitia, my dear, Nicky is being fast-tracked. He could go far, given the right circumstances – all the way, I suspect. As his wife you have a pivotal back-up role to play. A good diplomatic wife cannot afford to be too needy or distracting.’ Gillian paused to remove a speck of fluff from her stockings. ‘A good diplomatic wife must sacrifice her own desires and needs in order to allow her husband to get on and do his job.’

  ‘And are you saying that I’m not?’ Letty said, more archly than she knew she should.

  ‘My dear, selflessness, self-discipline, are prerequisites of the position. Nicky really must be shielded from the trivia of domestic life.’

  ‘Are you asking me to sacrifice the well-being of my family?’ Letty said incredulously.

  ‘Letitia, a post is coming up in Rome and Nicky’s name has been put forward. Now, I know that you’ll want to do anything in your power to support him,’ Gillian said quietly, ‘so, I want you to understand that you are equally under consideration. Think about what Nicky wants, think about how he would feel if he were passed over for, well . . . for the wrong reasons.’ She stretched out a hand. ‘The truth is, Letitia, a diplomatic wife can make or break her husband’s career.’

  Letty looked at the raised veins on the back of the older woman’s hand.

  She knew exactly why she and Nicky had stopped talking.

  Rome. It was what Nicky wanted.

  It was what she wanted for both of them.

  40

  Ballanish

  Shoplifting was easy and great fun. The first thing Alba stole was a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut. The second was a packet of Fruit Pastilles. As with the chocolate, the Fruit Pastilles had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. One minute she had been staring at them stacked on the shelf, the next they were in her hand and, without a thought to the consequences, she put her index finger to the tip of the green tube and propelled it up the sleeve of her Fair Isle in the manner of a magician preparing a trick.

  The thing Alba liked about shoplifting was how very little justification it required. Stealing put her in a good mood and good moods, for Alba, were rare. And if that wasn’t validation enough, items in this shop had no life or future. God only knew how long they had been consigned to the shelf like over-age orphans, hoping against hope to be taken into a loving home and eaten.

  Then there were the hidden benefits to the crime. Now that the bear was missing, presumed dead, shoplifting was the only viable option for an afternoon’s entertainment. Today, for example, her mother had gone on one of her hateful walks, but Alba had never understood the adult obsession with fresh air – as far as she was concerned, there was far too much of the stuff around. Georgie and Jamie had gone with Alick to the beach to chop up driftwood, but Alba was fed up with the beach and especially the persistence of sand, which liked to work its way into her hair, her nose, the crevices of her ears and even between her teeth. But even had she felt the need to do so, Alba was able to justify her shoplifting on the grounds that she was owed. She was owed for the death of her father and the zombie that passed for her mother. She was owed for the emptiness of her life and a future confined to this damp sponge of an island with nobody but her rhesus monkey of a brother for company. Then there was her sister. At the thought of Georgie, she could almost taste the bile in her mouth. It had been the week before, with everybody scattered to different parts of the island, when Alba, a prisoner of her ugly mood, had wandered round the house looking for something to destroy. She’d opened the door to the sitting room. It had been cold as a church and smelt of burnt ash. It was uneconomical, her mother claimed, to heat the house all day, and the sitting room was ‘kept’ for evenings. But how could peats be that expensive – it was only bloody earth for God’s sake – and if they couldn’t even afford fire, what would they have to forgo next? Food?

  Alba snatched a picture of her parents off the mantelpiece. The photograph had been taken in Greece against a backdrop of ruins. She pressed her finger to the glass. The frame had been kept in direct sunlight and the image faded out in a way that suddenly seemed dreadfully symbolic. She put it back and opened the storage
cupboard at the far end of the room where she found a few half-empty spirit bottles, greasy with neglect. Alba unscrewed the lid of the Vermouth and took a swig. It tasted sour – like medicine gone bad. She swallowed a second shot and grimaced as heat raced through her stomach.

  The slam of the kitchen door sent the third shot circuiting her nose and sinuses. She moaned in pain and shoved the bottle quickly back in the cupboard.

  In the kitchen, Angus Post Office had left a pile of letters stacked on the counter. Alba flicked idly through them before stopping at one addressed to Georgiana Fleming.

  University College London. For a moment, Alba stared numbly at the return address then she switched on the kettle and held the flap of the envelope to the spout.

  Afterwards, she sat at the kitchen table for a long time, the university offer letter in her hands. Why hadn’t Georgie said anything? Why hadn’t she warned her? Two Bs and an A, that was all her sister needed. The whole world was about to open up to Georgie, while she would be left alone. She’d felt like grating her tongue or painting her body with black tar but after a while she had a better idea. She took the offer letter and envelope to the sitting-room fireplace and, shoving them deep into the pit of ashes, set them on fire. When and if the actual A level results came in, she resolved to do the same.

  So now, standing in the aisle of the shop, she pondered her options. It didn’t matter how many packets of sweets she pilfered, they simply couldn’t add up to the debt that life was obligated to pay her.

  The trouble was there was so little to steal. Alba ran her eyes over the cans of cock-a-leekie soup and Crosse & Blackwell stew. It was her turn to cook supper. The cooking rota had been her idea. A response to the disintegrating quality of family meals. Food in Bonn, whilst never inspired, had always been comforting, but ever since her mother had surrendered to this colourless version of herself, it was as though in some alchemical way all taste and flavour had also vanished from her cooking.