The Cone Gatherers (9 page)

In the café they were escorted to the table they liked in the furthest corner by Joe the proprietor, who would not let them sit down until he had flicked chairs and table clean. Having shouted to Maggie their favourite waitress, he stood for a minute talking to them about their job of gathering cones, and telling them a story about a tree he'd once climbed which had a wasp's byke in it unbeknown to him. While they were all laughing at his remembered panic-stricken flight, Maggie arrived. Abnormal herself with her splayed feet, crimson cheeks, and her perennial good nature, she always seemed to look on it as a privilege more than a duty to attend to Calum; Neil got the advantage of the special favours incidentally. She was never satisfied until they had salt, pepper, vinegar, and two kinds of sauce, thick and thin; their portions of fish and chips were always large and steaming hot; and their cakes and bread were never stale. The first time she had showered these kindnesses upon them they had been uneasy, or at least Neil had been. Afterwards he had not been sure whether he should leave a tip, and how much. He had left a shilling under a plate, but next time they had come in she had insisted on giving it back. Weren't they all friends and neighbours now? she had asked. Hadn't her sister's windows in Greenock been blown in by a bomb?

While they were enjoying their meal and placidly tholing the cacophony from the wireless set, they saw the
first of the Ardmore workers arrive in the café. The contrast between his own reception and that given to the three laughing young men made Neil's corner cosier and his chips more succulent: his right to be eating there in comfort, safety, and friendliness now depended on something more valuable than the money he would pay. The newcomers were conscientious objectors.

Neil himself had never any prejudice against them. Indeed, their arrival at Ardmore two years ago had done him and Calum a good turn by accelerating their acceptance into the community. Everybody had united against these outcasts both on and off the hill. Local men, ordered by Mr Tulloch, had unwillingly instructed them in planting, draining, bracken-cutting, and all the other tasks of forestry; but at break-times, munching their bread and drinking their tea, often with rain pelting down, the two groups had sheltered under different rocks. Neil had taken part in this ostracism, not from choice, but because by conforming he won comradeship for himself. Yet he had watched how slowly and imperceptibly, like a tree's growth, the distrust and contempt had been broken down until now the local men accepted invitations to the pacifists' hut for supper and songs. He had seen too how the incomers had refused to admit the feud or be angered by the animosity. They had remained cheerful, and undefeated. Neil had said nothing, but he had learnt that if a man felt he had done no wrong and kept his head high, he would become respected in the end.

Calum had never taken part in the exclusion. At first his non-cooperation had been resented until it was decided that, as a daftie, he must be excused. The truth was, as Neil knew, Calum was too honest, generous, and truly meek. The young men from the beginning had treated him as if he was an adult human being, with his own views and outlook: instinctively he had returned the compliment. There were some among them with university degrees who were glad to listen to him speaking about birds and animals and flowers.

They were still not welcome here in Lendrick, however; and Neil was. Therefore in the presence of the villagers
he did as all the Ardmore men did: he either hurried past them with a nod, or spoke to them as shortly as possible, and behind their backs he condoned the local opinion that they were cowards and scrimshankers. In his heart he knew he was wrong in not speaking up in defence of men whom he worked beside happily for long hours day after day in places of loneliness and beauty. During his lifetime he had suffered so much from neglect that he could not risk being driven from the fold so tight and clamorous but also so warm and secure.

Again Calum was excused; he who spoke to dogs in the street and birds in the sky could speak even to shirkers.

Now in the café the three young men came over to their table and chatted merrily for a few minutes. They gave the news from Ardmore and asked about the cone-gathering. Calum answered them. Neil, mindful of Lendrick eyes watching, nodded or shook his head. Yet, as he heard them say they intended to stay and see the film showing that night, he remembered how not long after they arrived they had come out of the cinema at eleven o'clock on a dark wet winter's night, to find the tyres of their bicycles slashed, so that they had to walk home. Now they still left their bicycles in the same place and no one harmed them. It seemed therefore that hatred could not last but must give way to tolerance. In spite of people the circle of trust widened.

When the brothers left the café and saw the shooting-brake from Lendrickmore big house draw up outside the hotel, Neil found he had no spite against the lady or against the gamekeeper, who was coming out of the car with a parcel under his arm.

Calum, on the contrary, was instantly agitated. He did not want to pass them; he pleaded with Neil to turn and go back the other way.

‘Why should we?' murmured Neil. ‘We've got nothing to be afraid of, or ashamed of either. Come on.'

They approached the car, Calum to the inside with his eyes turned away.

‘We'll just walk by,' whispered Neil. ‘They'll not even notice us.'

He was wrong. Roderick, who was in the car with his sister, saw them and thrust out his head.

‘Hello there,' he cried cheerfully.

His mother turned from Duror to see whom her son could be addressing. When she saw, she gasped in astonishment.

Neil's dignity and composure, proper to a sea captain, crumbled into the abjectness of a peasant. He fumbled at his cap.

‘Good evening,' he mumbled, and could not prevent himself adding, ‘sir.'

Then he hurried away, not waiting for Calum.

Lady Runcie-Campbell burst out laughing; she was still astonished, but she was also fond and proud.

‘Well,' she said, ‘aren't you the complete democrat? But don't overdo it, please.'

‘I wanted to tell them we were sorry,' he said.

Her astonishment sharpened into indignation.

‘What!' she cried. ‘If this is a joke, Roderick, I don't much admire its taste.'

‘It's not a joke,' he said. ‘We didn't treat them fairly.'

She frowned. Foreboding chilled her. Too weak physically to be able to attend school like other boys of his class, was he also, as his father when tipsy at midnight had once dolefully declared, faulty in mind? He did not see things or people as a baronet's heir should. Certainly his tutor could not be accused of corrupting him: Mr Sorn-Wilson was more aristocratic than any duke. Yet there had been a corrupter: her own father now dead; and perhaps there still was one, herself the Christian.

With a sigh she turned again to Duror.

He had been standing respectfully waiting for permission to take his leave.

She found comfort and encouragement in his aloof submissiveness. Surely an order of society in which so honourable a man as Duror knew his subordinate place and kept it without grievance or loss of dignity, must be not only healthy and wise, but also sanctioned by God?

‘Of course he knows you're coming, Duror,' she said. ‘I telephoned him.'

‘It was good of you, my lady.'

‘I'll consider my goodness recompensed,' she said, smiling, ‘when you come back with a good report.'

‘I'm sure I'll be able to do that, my lady.'

‘You'd be a hard man to convince you were ill, Duror. I don't ever remember you being ill.'

‘I have never been ill, since I had the measles at ten.'

She laughed. ‘Touch wood, Duror, touch wood.' She touched it for him. As she did so, she remembered her husband and brother in Africa, where men were killing one another; and she found herself wishing that the ancient superstition had virtue in it. Christ of course would then be banished forever into the darkness.

She shivered.

‘Well, Duror,' she said, ‘you know we're going to the pictures. We'll pick you up here as soon as the show's over.'

‘Very good, my lady.'

‘You won't keep us waiting?' She dropped her voice. ‘I don't want to keep the children up any later than is necessary.'

He knew she was worried about the boy.

‘I'll be here waiting for you, my lady,' he said.

An irrelevant thought occurred to her.

‘How will those two get back?' she asked.

He knew whom she meant. ‘They'll walk.'

‘Walk? Dear me.' She laughed. ‘I wouldn't say they look very good walkers, whatever they're like as climbers of trees. They must be very keen surely to visit Lendrick.'

‘Likely they'll find it lonely in the wood, my lady.'

‘I suppose so.' Admiring Duror for his solicitude, she indulged in a little herself. ‘I suppose they're to be pitied really.'

‘Why don't we offer them a lift, Mother?' asked Roderick, in the quiet voice she had learned to regard as ominous. ‘We've got plenty of room.'

‘Don't be absurd,' she said quickly.

‘I don't think I'm being absurd. They can sit next to me. I don't mind.'

‘Well, I do.' It was Sheila who spoke, rescuing her mother from the predicament of having to rebuke Roderick for naivety, and at the same time trying to preserve his charitable attitude towards his inferiors.

Earnestly he argued with his sister.

‘They wouldn't have to be near you, Sheila,' he said. ‘You could sit in beside mother. They could sit at the back away from everybody.'

‘My dear boy,' said his mother, laughing, ‘this is no time for playing Sir Galahad.'

‘We've carried dogs in the car,' he said.

‘Yes, we have. It's our car, dear boy. We can please ourselves whom or what we carry. You're being too quixotic for words.'

He spoke quietly, in a kind of huff. ‘Human beings are more important than dogs.'

‘Don't be a prig,' she snapped.

Sheila said firmly, ‘Monty's more important to me than they are.'

‘That's wrong,' he muttered. ‘It's wicked.'

‘I don't care if it is wicked,' she retorted. ‘What are
you
talking about anyway?' She was about to cast up to him his rudeness to Duror during the cricket game, but she refrained in time.

There was a silence in the car. During it Duror asked for permission to leave.

His mistress gave it reluctantly. Silly and mawkish though this discussion about the cone-gatherers was, still it worried her, and his presence was reassuring. She had enough experience of handling servants to know that among the working class itself was a hierarchy as jealously observed as that in church or nobility. Duror, for instance, would rightly place himself high above these cone-men.

She called him back. He came at once, quickly, and yet without any appearance of obsequious haste.

‘I know it's ridiculous of me even to entertain the thought, Duror,' she said, in a whisper, ‘but I'd like your opinion all the same. Ought I to offer these people a lift?'

‘No, my lady.'

Roderick said quietly, ‘But you've got a spite against them, Duror.'

Duror gazed in at the boy, his superior.

‘No, Master Roderick,' he murmured, shaking his head. ‘You see, I know that the little one is an evil person.'

There was another silence. Then Sheila gave a gasp, a shudder, and a giggle.

‘I must say, he looks it,' she said.

‘That's a formidable word you've chosen, Duror,' remarked Lady Runcie-Campbell ruefully.

‘I know it is, my lady. I shall explain to your ladyship later why I had to use it.'

‘Yes, later.' She meant: for God's sake, not now, whatever it is, in the children's presence. ‘You'll be late for your appointment, Duror. I think you'd better go now.'

‘Yes, my lady.'

As he walked away, he heard Roderick murmur, ‘I don't believe it'; and he smiled at the rawness of the boy who still saw evil as dwelling only in certain men and women, and not as a presence like air, infecting everyone.

Walking along the road by the harbour, he kept smiling as he thought how Lady Runcie-Campbell's displeasure with the cone-gatherers was as rose thorns to the tiger's claws of his aversion. In a few minutes he would be in the surgery, with the stethoscope cold against his bare chest, and in his ears the old doctor's whiskied satisfied grunts. For of course the doctor would hear the beat of a sound heart and the breathing of healthy lungs: not the snarling of the tiger, nor the roaring of storm through the tree of doom now high and ripe in him. ‘It may be your heart, you know, Duror,' Lady Runcie-Campbell had said, advising him not to cycle but to travel in her car. He had touched his cap, he had murmured gratefully. She had not seen him suddenly grow enormous and loom over her like a tree falling; she had not heard him shout, in a voice to be heard in the heaven of her faith, that in the wood his wife had changed for an instant into a roe-deer and he had cut her throat and tried to appease his agony in her blood. She had not seen this monster in her so respectful, so self-controlled, so properly sub servient gamekeeper. Like the tiger-tamer in his cage, she had again, with inveterate confidence, turned her back.

The doctor's house was the second last villa beyond the pier. At that point, just where the road was about to
end in the wilderness of the shore, the first glimpse of the open sea was got, with the far-off twinkle of the lighthouse.

There Duror paused. Whin bushes, profusely golden in summer, stirred rustily in the breeze. Against the darkling sky he saw in the doctor's garden one of the palm trees grown in this mild northern land; and further off, with even stronger temptation of distance, were stars, so remote, and so oblivious of his infinitely petty existence that for a few moments he experienced rest and hope. Sweat broke out over his body. Gazing towards the doctor's lighted window he thought that perhaps the old man might be able to prescribe some powder or pills to induce not sleep only but an awakening into a life where he could again touch the elm tree before he entered his house.

As the hope faded, and the lighthouse's beam strengthened, he recalled his travail under that elm after the deer drive. The shooting-brake had set him and his dogs down outside his house. The sun had been shining and birds singing. Only a few paces across the white shingle was his gate. There were still some flowers on the fuchsia bushes. Suddenly over the whole scene had dropped darkness, in the midst of which the birds had continued to sing, but without purpose, desolately. He could not move; he was as powerless as the elm beside him; and for those two or three minutes he had felt his sap, poisoned, flowing out of him into the dark earth. His dogs had whined up at him in bewilderment, alarm, and love; they had growled at the enemy persecuting him, which they could sense but not see.

By the whins then, empty of hope, he knew there was one thing on earth he did not want ever again to see: the smile of the hunchback. He swung from it as a pony from an adder. So vivid was his horror of seeing it that he actually shut his eyes there on the darkening road; but there were eyes within him he could not close at will, and these now began to see that smile, and only that smile.

It was the doctor's wife who admitted him. She was
a small white-haired woman in black. The sadness of her face was a joke amongst those patients whose ailments were trifling; others, fearful that their pains might be diagnosed as mortal, saw no cause for smiles in her prophetic dejection.

‘The doctor's waiting for you in the surgery, Mr Duror,' she said.

Crossing to the surgery door, she knocked on it and waited till her husband opened it.

He was, on the contrary, as effervescent as if, a minute ago, he had just discovered a panacea. Duror smelled whisky.

‘I've brought you some venison, doctor,' he said, ‘with Lady Runcie-Campbell's compliments.'

The doctor snatched it and began to dandle it, as if it was new-born baby and he its delighted father.

This, thought Duror, is the man on whom I have to depend for a cure.

Mrs Matheson was not amused.

‘Give it to me,' she said. ‘I'll take it to the kitchen.'

He handed it over with mocking tenderness.

‘A feudal gift of venison,' he chuckled, smacking his lips. ‘It takes one back to the halcyon days of bows and arrows. I wonder,' he added, ‘if your mistress, Duror, knows any Russian generals with caviare to spare.'

This remark, as seemed to be its intention, sent off his wife with indignant sighs. He gazed after her with a momentary blank in his glee.

‘Mrs Matheson,' he murmured, ‘is an incorrigible Scot. Food is to eat to keep in health to work and praise God. Tatties and saut herring are food. Caviare and venison are gluttony. But in you come.'

He ushered Duror into the surgery, and saw him seated.

‘My wife has a sister in Oban,' he said, ‘with a son a lieutenant in the Navy. He goes regularly with the convoys to Russia. If I mention caviare, she thinks I'm dropping a hint that she should write to him to fetch me a tin. Whereas, of course, I merely use the word as a symbol. I am well aware these convoys are dangerous and heroic. I hope you're in no hurry, Duror?'

‘Not really, doctor.'

‘Fine. I hope you don't mind my blethering to you like this? Sometimes I go down to the hotel lounge and say things I rue afterwards. But you're a man of some perception and tact. Did you bike it into the village?'

‘No. I came in the car.'

The doctor brought out cigarettes. Duror shook his head. He lit one himself, with unsteady hands.

‘She's a fine lady,' he said, ‘and still a beauty. Is Sir Colin still in Africa?'

‘As far as I know, doctor.'

‘Things seem to be going a bit better there now. We're stuck here, Duror, with the women, the children, and the old men. Like yourself, I've offered my services. They were turned down. They also serve who only stand and drink.' He laughed. ‘I'd offer you a dram, Duror, but so far you're still my patient. Once the consultation's over we'll become old cronies. How's the girl keeping? Sheila her name is, I believe. She represents the peak of my obstetrical achievement. With the typical confidence of the unborn, she decided to come into this vale of tears before her time. I had to be sent for in a panic. I made an excellent job of her too. She's as bonny and healthy and as stuck-up, I hear, as any baronet's daughter ought to be. Her brother now, he's not been so fortunate: I understand he's unbraw, unhealthy, and diffident. He was an Edinburgh specialist's job too, with fifty guineas at least in the fee. But I can see, Duror, you disapprove of such flippant chatter about your overlord's family.' The doctor switched on a scowling seriousness. ‘I'm in a mood for plain speaking, Duror; which is a good thing for you, because otherwise I couldn't offer you any advice worth a pickled toe.'

Duror missed a breath as he sat, apparently relaxed, in his chair. Was it possible that this old vain gluttonous whisky-tippling talkative doctor should have so soon discovered his secret? It seemed as unlikely as if a man should walk into a vast leaf-strewn wood and point to the spot where, years ago, a body had been buried.

The doctor put on a professional brusqueness.

‘Lady Runcie-Campbell explained over the telephone,' he said. ‘It seems you fainted when you were putting a deer out of its agony. She didn't say just what you were doing.'

‘I was cutting its throat.'

‘Is that the usual procedure? Or was it just an improvisation in the circumstances?'

‘It's often done.'