Boiler suit and safety glasses were now gone.
He was wearing a faded T-shirt and old jeans. His hair was an unexceptional brown, rather long and untidy, swept back from his forehead and curling round his ears and temples. His features, though regular, could hardly be described as handsome. Comparing him with his younger brother, you wouldn’t hesitate to say Fergus was the good-looking one. Alec, though much taller, would blend into the background, ceding the field to Fergus who, as I was to learn, wielded charm and a pair of bright blue eyes with as much panache as his brother handled a sword.
When Alec
saw me, he paused, unsmiling, at the top of the stairs. There was a moment’s awkwardness and I stepped forward.
‘Hello.
I’m Jenny Ryan. I’m here to talk to your father. We might produce a book together.’
‘Ah, the ghost
,’ Alec said, with a faint smile.
‘Yes, that’s me.’
He extended his hand. ‘How d’you do, Miss Ryan.’
‘Oh, please call me Jenny.’ I took his hand
and felt rather than saw that two of his fingers wore plasters at the end. I supposed accidents must be one of the hazards of producing sharp blades. I glanced down at his hand and registered the same extraordinary long thumb joint that I’d seen on the stone carving above the MacNab motto. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, I felt absurdly thrilled, as if I’d shaken hands with history.
Alec
was still looking at me, his head on one side. ‘Have we met before?’
‘
I don’t think so. This is only the second time I’ve been to Scotland.’
‘You look familiar.
Are you famous?’
‘No
, quite the opposite! No one’s supposed to know who I am.’ I was beginning to feel disconcerted by his direct gaze. ‘I mean, that’s the point of being a ghost writer. Anonymity. You should be invisible.’
His eyebrows shot u
p. ‘How d’you manage that?’
‘
Well, my name doesn’t appear in the book and I’m contractually bound not to reveal who I’ve written for. It’s a point of honour anyway that ghosts don’t reveal who their subjects are. If you did, you’d never work again.’
‘So someone else takes all the credit
for what you write?’
‘Yes. That’s what we’re
paid for. But I take a more positive view. I see it as a sort of facilitation job. I enable people to tell their stories – stories which wouldn’t find a reader unless someone ghosted them. Do you sign your swords?’
He looked surprised.
‘
Sign
them? Like paintings, you mean? No, I don’t. But there’s a mark on them that identifies me as their maker.’
‘Exactly. Well, t
here’s a sort of mark – a literary one – in all the books I write. It identifies me as their author.’
‘
Clever. What is it?’
I paused for a moment before saying,
‘I
could
tell you… but then I’d have to kill you.’
He
laughed and suddenly I saw his father, the Sholto MacNab of the early expeditions, grinning as he was hauled out of an Antarctic crevasse.
Timor omnis abesto
. “Let fear be far from all.”
I know I was
n’t feeling faint and I certainly didn’t stumble – in fact my feet felt oddly rooted to the spot – but I experienced a vertiginous sensation, as if the floor was giving way or some invisible force was trying to sweep me off my feet. The past had somehow telescoped, as if Alec, Sholto and the anonymous stone swordsman in the courtyard had become one person. Ridiculous, of course. My imagination was running away with me as it always did – though I have to say, I’m not usually that susceptible to men laughing at my jokes.
Alec looked concerned and leaned towards me.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine
!’
‘
You look a wee bit pale. Did Wilma bring you coffee?’
‘
Oh, yes, I got the works. Coffee and three varieties of home baking. Really, I’m fine. I had a horrible virus recently and I think I’m still not a hundred per cent.’ To change the subject, I pointed down the stairs to the portrait on the half-landing. ‘Who’s the woman in that portrait?’
Alec didn’t turn to look but said, ‘Sholto’s second wife.’
‘Your stepmother?’
‘Aye.
Meredith MacNab.’
‘
I had no idea she was that beautiful.’
‘She wasn’t. A certain amount of artistic licence was employed by the artist.’
‘Did Sholto commission it?’
‘Och, no!
My father has no interest whatever in paintings. We’ve attics full of them. Meredith sat for the portrait, then gave it to Sholto as a Christmas present. She also gave him the bill. That was her idea of generosity.’
I looked down
at the portrait and studied it in a new light, as an expensive exercise in personal vanity. ‘It’s very striking. There’s something about the eyes. They seem to follow you, don’t they?’
‘Aye
, they do. The picture used to hang in the dining room, but after she died Sholto said it put him off his food, the way the eyes seem to watch you.’
‘I believe she died in an accident? A car crash, wasn’t it?’
‘On my wedding day. Meredith always had a wonderful sense of timing.’ I must have looked shocked at the callous remark because Alec apologised immediately. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t sound so bitter. But Meredith died because she chose to drive when she was dead drunk. She hit a tree on a notorious bend. It was a horrific crash and my poor father had to identify her body.’
‘H
ow dreadful… Did she kill anyone else?’
Al
ec stared at me for a moment, then studied the floor, as if choosing his words carefully. ‘Meredith was the only one in the car, thank God. But I’m not sure my wife ever got over the tragedy. It was a hell of a way to start a marriage. With your mother-in-law’s wake.’ The sound of a gong reverberated up the stairs. ‘That’s Wilma summoning us for lunch. I need to get cleaned up. D’you know your way down to the dining room?’
‘I’m sure I’ll find it, thanks.’
‘Turn left at the foot of the stair and cross the hall. Tell Zelda I’ll not be long.’
‘Zelda?’
‘Have you not met her yet? My aunt Griselda. She hates it when we’re late.’
‘
I’d better get going then.’
‘You’
re sure you’re up to it now? Wilma could bring you lunch on a tray.’
‘
No, I’m fine. I’m looking forward to meeting the rest of the family.’
Alec was looking beyond me
now, scanning the corridor as if distracted, then he regarded me again, his grey eyes serious. ‘Go carefully now.’ He made it sound like an instruction, almost an order. ‘The carpet’s worn into holes.’
‘
Thank you. I will.’
He glanced
round the passageway once more, then opened a door and was gone.
CHAPTER THREE
The dining room was dark,
oppressively red-walled and filled with polished mahogany pieces that looked as if they’d been in position for centuries. Possibly they had. It would have taken a small army of men to move them. Fergus was pouring sherry from a decanter for a woman who I assumed must be his Aunt Griselda.
Zelda
– as she was known – was Sholto’s younger sister and had been married in her youth to Jean-Claude Fontaine, a Formula One racing driver. She’d lived a glamorous jet-set life in southern France for many years, but maintained her independence by training as a chef, then running her own restaurant. She eventually divorced Jean-Claude but had never re-married. Zelda had sold up and moved back to her childhood home to help Sholto run the estate after his wife Liz had died. Since Sholto was often abroad on expeditions, sometimes for many months, the management of Cauldstane and the supervision of her nephews’ boarding school education had fallen to Zelda. Even after Sholto re-married, Zelda stayed on while Meredith MacNab pursued her singing career. It seemed she’d turned readily to Zelda for advice and support and they’d become good friends.
Zelda
’s warmth and generosity were immediately apparent when Fergus introduced us. I declined his offer of sherry so he set about carving cold ham at the sideboard where a buffet lunch was laid out. Zelda shepherded me towards the table. We sat down, she at the head of the table and I to her left. Mrs Guthrie brought us soup, then hovered at the side of the room, doing her best to look invisible, but I noticed her eyes scanned the table, making sure we had all we needed. I wondered how often she sat down in a normal working day. Running shoes for travel on stone floors and polished wooden boards now seemed sensible attire. I was beginning to get the measure of Cauldstane.
Zelda
put me at my ease, chatting about books and how busy she was in retirement, running a secondhand bookshop for the Highland Hospice charity. I wasn’t fooled. I knew that, in the nicest possible way, I was being vetted. As I answered her numerous, sometimes probing questions, the writer in me couldn’t help noting that Griselda Fontaine must once have been a beautiful woman. Her outfit was the kind worn by smart countrywomen for the last fifty years: tweed skirt, cashmere twin-set and unobtrusive pearls. Her hair, which didn’t appear to be dyed, was a pale apricot colour, held back from her face by a black velvet Alice band. Her flawless skin was gilded with tiny freckles, so that even without a scrap of make-up, her face glowed, forming the perfect setting for a pair of opal-blue eyes. She was tall, slim and, despite a pair of mannish brogues, elegant. According to the MacNab family tree Zelda was sixty-seven, but she looked at least ten years younger.
I tucked into
ham salad while Zelda played a version of Twenty Questions, trying to wheedle the names of my subjects out of me, working her way through the list of celebrities whose memoirs apparently formed semi-permanent stock in the Hospice bookshop.
‘Now I
do love a good biography but – forgive my being frank, Jenny…’ I doubted Zelda was ever anything else. ‘
Some
of these celebrity books are good for nothing more than lining a budgie’s cage. I mean no disrespect to their authors, whoever they may be. It’s just that these folk haven’t lived! There’s a wee thing, an actress or model, I don’t remember her name now, but from the look of her, she can’t be long out of school. How can
she
possibly merit an autobiography?’
Zelda
turned her attention to her lunch, so I assumed the question had been rhetorical. I asked what kind of books
did
sell at the Hospice shop.
‘Well
, you can’t even give hardbacks away now, not since everyone got those reading devices. In fact I’m thinking of selling them off in sacks for firewood!’
‘Or even kindling,
’ I said, not looking up from my plate. I thought the pun might go over her head, but she whooped with laughter. ‘Och,
kindling
! Very good, Jenny! I must remember that one.
Kindling!
Fergus, did you hear that?’
She
was still chuckling when the dining room door opened. Alec walked in and closed the door quietly behind him. The others had their backs to the door, so I don’t know if they even registered his arrival. He ignored us and headed for the sideboard where he helped himself to soup from a tureen. Zelda and I were talking when Fergus got up and started to carve more ham. I don’t remember now what question I’d just asked her – something about the books in my room, I think – when Fergus spun round to chip in, knocking over a large jar of pickles. It crashed on to the handle of the carving knife which flipped into the air and fell from the table, spinning.
Then
Alec moved. He lunged easily and caught the big knife by its handle just before it hit the floor. It was only as he straightened up that I realised he was still holding his full soup plate and hadn’t spilled a drop. He replaced the knife carefully on the platter and stood the jar upright again.
Oblivious to the side show,
Zelda was barking instructions as Alec approached the dining table.
‘Alec,
come and sit down. Let me introduce you to our guest.’ He set his plate down on the other side of the table, opposite me. ‘Jenny, this is Alexander. He’s always late for lunch because he forgets to eat... Alec, this is J. J. Ryan.
Jenny
. She’s to be interviewed by Sholto this afternoon, so we must all be very kind.’
‘We’ve already met,
’ Alec said softly.
‘You have?’
Zelda looked surprised.
‘That’s why Alec
’s late,’ I explained. ‘It’s my fault. We were chatting upstairs. I was telling him why I’m here.’
He
sat down and helped himself to bread. ‘I hope someone’s warned you about Sholto. He can be difficult.’
‘S
o I gather. Fergus filled me in when he picked me up at the station. I do realise I’m completely the wrong gender.’
‘Only as far as
Dad’s
concerned,’ said Fergus, treating me to one of his winning smiles, which Zelda quelled with a look.
‘
But since I’ve come such a long way, I thought it would be nice to meet him. In a masochistic sort of way.’
A
lec tasted his soup, then ground some pepper into it. I watched and counted the plasters. There were three, all very grubby. ‘Sholto can be rude, I’m afraid.’
‘But
not unkind,’ said Fergus. ‘Or unfair.’
‘T
rue. Just give as good as you get, Jenny. He likes folk to stand up to him. Is that not so, Wilma?’
‘Oh aye, Mr Alec
,’ said Mrs Guthrie as she cleared away my plate.
‘
And she bears the scars to prove it, don’t you, Wilma?’ Fergus added.
‘
Emotional only, Miss Ryan,’ she confided with a wink.
‘Och,
my brother’s bark is far worse than his bite,’ said Zelda. ‘It’s just that he’s addicted to
drama
. He refuses to grow old gracefully.’
‘Or grow old at all,’
said Alec.
Zelda ignored him and continued. ‘
You see, Jenny, Sholto misses the adrenalin rush of the old days, so when he meets you, he’ll likely make a fuss to begin with. Take no notice. He’ll come to his senses, you’ll see. My brother’s never been able to resist a pretty face. More’s the pity,’ she muttered, shaking her head.
There followed a
profound silence, broken eventually by Alec, Fergus and me as we all began to speak at the same time. Embarrassment gave way to more awkward silence until Mrs Guthrie saved the day with a few quiet, deferential words, ‘Will I serve coffee in the drawing room, Mrs Fontaine?’ She pronounced the name without a hint of a French accent.
‘Thank you,
Wilma, that would be grand,’ Zelda said briskly, getting to her feet. She strode towards the door and Fergus followed. Alec remained seated, stirring soup he showed little inclination to eat. When they’d gone, he looked at me, his grey eyes solemn and said, ‘Don’t take this job unless you really want it.’
‘
Well, that’s the trouble. I
do
really want it.’
‘Already?’ That soft lau
gh again. ‘Well, you can’t say we didn’t warn you.’ I stood up and, in what seemed one fluid movement, Alec rose, walked to the door and held it open for me. As I passed he said, ‘I’ll see you later. I hope.’
As I stood in the hall, feeling
slightly bewildered, I heard Zelda’s voice coming from upstairs. ‘Fergus, will you please go and look for Jenny. The poor girl must be lost already.’
Was I?
Lost already?...
~
At half past two Fergus led me to the library on the second floor, knocked, then opened the door. He indicated with a nod that I should go in and I realised he wouldn’t be following. I stepped forward with a nervous glance over my shoulder and saw him mouth the words, “Good luck”.
If it had been Sholto’s intention to intimidate me, he succeeded. The
cavernous library was lit by a log fire and a series of tall, north-facing windows running along one side of the room. The MacNab book collection covered the other walls from floor to ceiling. There must have been thousands of volumes. Sholto sat at an enormous kneehole desk, silhouetted against the windows, so at first I couldn’t see his face in any detail. He occupied a massive wooden chair resembling a throne. Perhaps this was going to be more of an audience than an interview, but I wasn’t one to duck a challenge. It seemed there was little chance of my securing the commission, so I decided to relax and play along with whatever games Sholto MacNab had planned for me.
‘Ah, Miss Ryan! Do come in and sit down.’
The first surprise was the English drawl. I’d never heard Sholto speak, I’d only read interviews and seen film footage of him smiling at the camera through a frozen beard as he dragged a sledge bigger than himself across Antarctica. I’d seen him parachuting out of planes and abseiling down national monuments. I’d even seen him bleeding and unconscious on a stretcher, but I’d never heard him speak.
When Sholto was a boy, a
n English public school education would have been regarded in certain circles, even in Scotland, as an essential qualification for life. I knew he’d been sent to Eton, but it hadn’t occurred to me his Scots accent would have been bullied out of him. It’s easy to forget that, in the class-ridden dark ages, if you wanted to get on, you ditched a regional accent in favour of RP. As old Pathé newsreels demonstrate, even a humble newsreader was expected to sound like a member of the royal family.
As I
approached across threadbare Persian rugs, I savoured the musty smell of old books and lavender polish. A bowl of late, blowsy roses dropped a few exhausted petals as I passed between two wooden globes – one terrestrial, the other celestial. A longcase clock chimed the half hour and Sholto rose to his feet, which I suspect cost him an effort. That was my second surprise – how tall he was, even leaning heavily on his stick. He reached across the desk and offered me a gnarled hand. As I took it I felt an urge to check for the long thumb, but I knew it was important to look my prospective employer in the eye. What was it Alec had said? “Give as good as you get.” So I returned his father’s firm handshake and met his searching gaze.
Sholto MacNab
was a handsome man still, though now into his seventies. His shoulders were a little bowed, but he had the same lean, rangy frame as his elder son and something of his physical poise, an ability to be quite still, as if watching and waiting. He and Alec shared the same high forehead and curling hair, though Sholto’s was much fairer and turning white. I knew he’d been blond in his youth and could see now why the blue-eyed golden boy had been a magnet for women. My research indicated Sholto was still giving his second wife the run-around in his late fifties.
H
e was clean-shaven and his face was very lined, which didn’t surprise me. His skin had weathered a lifetime’s exposure to extremes of heat and cold and Sholto, as a male Highlander, would have been a stranger to sunscreen and moisturiser. His nose and cheekbones were mottled with purple broken veins which might have been caused by hard living or exposure. Both probably.
But
the photos hadn’t done him justice. Parka hoods, rampant facial hair and snow goggles had concealed the man from public view. His arresting face was not merely handsome, it was heroic. Sholto had lived a full and often troubled life. The years were graven on his face, but the deep lines were offset by a liveliness in his eyes, a humorous intelligence that I warmed to immediately. It would be a challenge interpreting him for a general reader, but it was a job I knew I’d relish if only he’d allow me to take it on. I braced myself mentally and resolved to go down fighting.
Sholto released my hand and said, ‘Delighted to meet you, Miss Ryan. Thank you so much for coming. Do sit down.’ He indicated a wing chair, studded with brass, facing his desk. ‘I hope you had a pleasant journey?’