A Kind of Grief (24 page)

“But you can't eat it, not with that thing on your head.” Rob yanked off the woolen helmet.

Hec yelled, “Ouch! You pulled ma hair out!”

Joanne smiled, envious of the easy, teasing camaraderie. She missed working, joking, thinking, sharing ideas, worries, front-page scoops, and coups in the cramped reporters' room that smelled of men and cigarettes, the place where she met McAllister, the place where she grew up—finally, at the age of twenty-nine.

She made Hector sit at the kitchen table to eat his gingerbread; she had no energy to Hoover the carpets after his visit. Finished, he washed his hands thoroughly at the kitchen sink. He might be clumsy, but when it came to his professional persona, he was neat and knowledgeable.

Joanne and Rob followed Hector into the sitting room. He stood in the center of the washed-out Persian rug and slowly turned in a complete circle, eyeing the paintings and sketches at a distance, murmuring all the while, “Right. I see. Uh-huh. Och-och.” Then he stepped towards the paintings propped up on the mantelpiece. “Can I?” he asked.

She nodded. “Of course.”

He lifted what she considered one of her favorites, the still life with onions. He turned it around. “Aaah.” He made the sound softly, slowly, and then he put the picture back. The perhaps Picasso he was quicker with. “Mmmm.” He examined all the pictures plus the Bonnard look-alike in the hallway. Back in the sitting room, he said, “I'm pretty sure most of them are studies—really good ones, though.”

“Aye, they'd have to be copies, otherwise that fox Forsythe would have snapped them up at the auction,” Joanne agreed.

“They are not copies; they are studies.” Hec went into lecturing mode. “See, when you study art, you—”

“What about these?” Rob had been half-listening, more interested in nosing around Joanne's manuscript and the books in the boxes McAllister had yet to finish unpacking.

“Don't have enough bookshelves,” he'd replied when Joanne asked for the fourth time when he was going to unpack them.

“Rob!” she called out as he tried to open the writing box.

“It's OK, I won't read your private stuff—well, only a few paragraphs.” He leaned over a page still in the typewriter. “This is good. I like the opening.”

“These watercolors are really skillful,” Hec said. “The page composition an' all.” He was holding the pages by their edges, laying them carefully on the tablecloth. “You need to put acid-free paper between the sheets. It costs a fortune, but I get it on
Gazette
expenses, so . . .” He winked at her. “Then you need to photograph them.” He reached for another illustration, this one of a clump of bog cotton. “I can do it for you if you like.”

“Would you?” She lifted a folder with a selection of Alice's watercolors of the glens and the beach and the cathedral for Hector. The drawings locked in the writing box were what she really wanted to know about but daren't ask. “I'd love to see Miss Ramsay's manuscript published as a memento.”
Of a life ended so horribly
, she didn't say.

“I'm your man.” He grinned at her, that half-boy half-man mad-troll grin, and seeing his enthusiasm, she was all the more determined to see the work published.

“I have to get going.” Rob had had enough of the pictures; fakes, studies, whatever they were they were not genuine, so he lost interest.

“See ya,” Hec said.

Rob shrugged. “Any chance of another slice of gingerbread?” he asked.

Joanne watched him lope down the garden path, bike key in one hand, and a fat slice of gingerbread in the other.

“Hector . . .”

He squinted up at her. He knew that tone; it was the same when his wee sister wanted something but was too shy to ask.

“Hector, there are two wee drawings I think might be important. No one knows about them. I locked them up and hid the key, and . . .”

They fetched the stepladder from the laundry. Key retrieved, she took out the folder and laid it on the table.

He opened the folder carefully. Touching only the top and bottom edges, he separated the drawings, and Joanne felt guilty she hadn't thought to put tissue between the pages. He stared. For almost two minutes, he did nothing but stare, turning his gaze from left to right, from top to bottom. He peered down. He stood back. “Do you have a magnifying glass?”

“Somewhere,” she answered, knowing the only one they had was with Annie's abandoned stamp-collecting project. “I think there is writing on the back.” She went to turn a drawing over.

“Don't touch.” Hector was a man transformed, green eyes shining like a cornered wildcat's, every freckle in his pale face sharp as stars in a clear midwinter midnight sky. “These are special.”

She stepped back. “Sorry.” She blew out a long, deep breath. “Sorry, Hector, it's just I'm scared they might be . . . you know.”

“Real. I know.”

He bent over the drawings once more, examining them through the glass.

Much as a surgeon might examine the insides of a brain, Joanne thought.

Holding a page between thumb and forefinger, he held it up to the light. He put it down. Then sat down, staring not at the drawings but into another time. All he could eventually say was, “Crikey!”

All she could say was, “Fancy another cup of tea?”

“That'd be grand.”

She went to the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she could feel the excitement as a knot, a twist, in her stomach.

They didn't speak until halfway through the first cup.

“I'm no certain. But if I am right . . . seeing yon . . . and . . .”

His eyes seemed wet, but she couldn't be sure. She shared his feelings. “For me, it's cathedrals. I stand in them and am completely overawed.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“McAllister knows about the paintings. But not the drawings. I kept them hidden because . . .” She glanced up at the clock. Her husband would be home soon. “I don't know why I hid them.” Not completely true; she wanted to keep them to herself for as long as possible—to enjoy, to marvel, to feel a pleasure as high and as clear and as uplifting as any visit to a cathedral—knowing that when she told someone, even her husband, she would have to give them up. To whom, she didn't know.

Hector was also feeling covetous of the drawings. “Keep it that way for now. We'll work out what to do later.”

She was flicking a pencil between her fingers, the frustration and the distress over Alice's fate gnawing at her.
All very well for my husband to tell me to let it go, but there had to be a reason for her to kill herself. If in fact she did.
“Hector, why do you think Miss Ramsay killed herself?”

“I've never given it much thought.”

“She was really distressed by the gossip about her before and after the trial.”

“Aye, Rob told me. But what other people say and think is no reason to kill yourself.”

Joanne was startled by Hector's conviction. Her own experience of malicious tongues was partly the reason she was so obsessed with the fate of Alice.

“I'm sure people say things about me, and I know for definite some call ma granny an old witch.”

Joanne smiled. Hec's granny would be a star in a production of
Macbeth
.

“So why bother giving them harpies the satisfaction of gaining a hold over you?” he asked.

“Thank you for saying that, Hector.”

He stared at her. To him it was so obvious.

“I know, sticks and stones and all that. I've experienced how much malicious gossip hurts. Maybe that is why I am . . . why I am so sympathetic to Alice Ramsay.”
Obsessed
, she was about to say but didn't. “Do you think the drawings and these paintings might be connected to her death?”

She watched as Hec, his head cocked to one side like a blackbird listening for a worm, considered the question. Remembering the solid beams and the height of the barn roof, he could visualize the
how
all too clearly. The why was beyond him.

“Sorry, I'm not one for thinking. Images is how I figure out the world. But whatever caused her to do it must have been serious—hanging is pretty final.”

Thanks for the reminder, Hec, she wanted to say. But didn't. His cutting to the quick of an argument or an idea was what she valued most in the photographer. She knew how scatty he could be. And that he suffered from foot-in-mouth disease. But in this, the manuscript, the drawings, the secret, she knew she could rely on him. Absolutely.

The doorbell rang, startling her out of her dwam.

“Mrs. McAllister?” a man with a suitcase asked when she opened the door.

“Sorry, I'm not interested.”

“I have some great household gadgets you might want to take a look at.” Ignoring her, he opened a suitcase in which brushes and mop heads and all manner of cleaning products in bright plastic bottles were neatly arranged. An Aladdin's case of chemical delights. “Let me demonstrate how good this is, best furniture polish ever, and a lovely fragrance.” He began to insinuate his way into the porch, intent on gaining entrance to the hallway. “That mirror, I have just the solution to make it sparkle.”

Joanne said, “Sorry, I have to go. I have guests.”

He stepped back. “Another time. Let's fix an appointment.”

“No, sorry. I've everything I need.”

When he'd gone, she looked at the mirror. It was dusty. In the reflection, Alice's painting seemed to fade to the color of another country. Another century.

“Who was that?” Hec asked.

“A brush salesman.”

“My granny buys from them. Says they're good.”

McAllister came home. They talked about Hector helping Joanne with the manuscript. McAllister said he was delighted. And he was.

Nothing was said about the drawings.

Hector said he had to get going.

McAllister offered him a lift.

He said he'd rather walk.

They trouped out to the hall to say good-bye. The stained-glass door panels were aglow in the last of the sun, a sun that disappeared in late afternoon in the Highland autumn, and the world seemed brighter, washed clean by all the rain.

Hector Bain walked down Stephens Brae, along Eastgate, down the High Street and Bridge Street, across the river. He walked almost the length of Tomnahurich Street—in a complete dwam.

Joanne was much the same. Mostly studies, she was thinking. Mostly. So does that mean one might be genuine? She told McAllister. Yet she kept back the real secret.

He didn't notice; hands clasped behind his back, he stared at the paintings, as though in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, attempting to guess which might be authentic.

“I give up,” he declared—to an empty room. He hadn't noticed that Joanne had gone to bed ten minutes earlier.

A
lice steps into the farmyard and sniffs the wind. “Maybe it's time to move on,” she tells the dog, “but not yet.” She inspects the new roof on the barn. Nods at the excellent result of hard work, much money, and Ballahulish slate.

I've always known I might have to leave. But not yet—I won't give Mrs. Mackenzie the satisfaction of driving me out.

Somewhere warm next time. She smiles to herself, somewhere with a better climate to grow tomatoes and herbs. Basil, I've never been able to grow basil this far north—let alone find the seeds. Up here, basil is a man's name. As for olive oil—you can only buy that in tiny bottles in the chemist's shop.

Maybe I should move to a place where I barely speak the language, then, when the gossiping starts I won't understand what's being said. Or care. I can be an eccentric old woman, lost in her memories. Heaven only knows how many of us there are—widows, mothers, sisters, daughters, bereaved and bereft by two world wars, and the century only a decade past the halfway mark.

She tries to shake the thought. Soon, she tells herself, a new decade will arrive, bringing a new civilization. It should be time to put an end to wars. But she doubts that will ever happen. Like the wind, this new war is cold, invisible, and insidious, penetrating the cracks in our civilized exterior, revealing us for the warmongering creatures we still are.

A blast of freezing air, blowing straight across the ocean from the wastes of Labrador, rattles a loose tile above the porch. She makes a mental note to fetch the ladder and fix it.

“It is indeed a cold, Cold War.” She says this aloud. The dog looks up, head cocked to the side. No “walk” in the sentence, so he drops down on his haunches. And sighs. She mistakes his sigh for a sign of understanding.

“Don't worry, boy,” she tells him. “If I ever leave, I'll find a good home for you.”

She shivers, whether from cold or a premonition, she can't tell. She crosses her arms, hugging herself, before turning back to the warmth of the kitchen and a cup of tea.