Whether Bea and Agnes were intended to be chaperones, guests or guides was not entirely clear. Tell me the name of a hotel in Forfar so Stewart can make a reservation, Mrs. P. had said, and Agnes had said, Well, there’s the Royal Hotel, but it’s a bit on the steep— One room or two? asked Mrs. P. One, Agnes said. I used to iron their linens, Bea said. Me and my mum. Mrs. P. looked at her a little queerly, then. Did you, Bea? Would you rather stay somewhere else? Bea had paused, considering. The linens had been delivered by carriage from Pearl Laundry to the Royal, so she had rarely been there; still she could picture the whole thing—red lobby, pale blue bedrooms, white tea room with gold trim. And the boxes in the goods yard marked
ROYAL FRAGILE ROYAL
, and her father recounting the famous people who’d come through—the La-Dee-Das, he’d called them, or the Hoity-Toits—business tycoons and Brazilian horse traders and Parliament men. We could stay there, she said finally. Agnes had guffawed: Oh, could we, Missy? Oh yes we could! Won’t we be coming back in style?
In Glasgow, they went to the People’s Palace, wandered through the university, had dinner in an Indian restaurant where the waiters all wore kilts, walked until their feet swelled, Mrs. P. consulting the guidebook, Caroline stopping to pet every dog she saw, Louisa to look in shops and at her own reflection in shop windows. Bea had a hard time concentrating amid the crowds and traffic, worried that the girls would get lost or wander off—that was part of it—but also she was already on the train, heading into the green, except that when they went to purchase tickets they learned the train had been canceled, or not just canceled, there
was
no train, not anymore, not to Forfar. No trains? Line shut down, said the man behind the ticket window. Permanent closure. How can that be? Bea asked illogically over Mrs. P.’s shoulder. The man looked up from his ledger and caught her eye; he seemed oddly familiar, like someone who might have worked in Goods with her father years ago. Town’s gone, Missus, he said dryly. Canna have a town without a train. Then he winked and slid them the schedule for the coach.
Bea had been back only once before, in 1952, for her father’s funeral—a grim and narrow-visioned little trip, as quick as she could make it, then on to Glasgow where Callum was still living then, with his wife, Kate, and their boy, Ian, an orphan they’d adopted after the war. As her father was lowered into the ground, she had steadied herself on her mother’s gravestone and tried to divert toward her father’s coffin a bit of the raw grief she still felt for her mother, long lying underneath. She’d stayed with her childhood friend Tilly’s sister Laura, who had four children and tended, in a little home nursery, a brood more. Her father’s service had been small, his coffin smaller, as if it held a boy or a dwarf. Afterward Bea had ordered a new, shared headstone for him and her mother, black polished granite of the highest quality, but it was only on this second trip, Agnes at her side, that she actually saw the stone and found, on top of it, a bouquet of faded plastic flowers, which she replaced the next day with a dozen fresh roses, and then, the day before they left, with six more fresh roses and a new, bright clutch of plastic flowers, so well made as to appear quite lifelike and guaranteed on the label not to fade.
As opposed to in Glasgow, she and Agnes did very little in Forfar—walked around a bit but mostly sat in tea shops, visited with people—Laura, Agnes’s sister Beth, Joe the Chemist, who must have been ninety but was still often behind the counter and greeted her—Hullo, Bea—as if no time had passed. She spent time with Callum, who, a pensioner now, had moved back to escape the Glasgow rents and crowds. On the street, several people recognized her, and one woman even recognized Agnes, being from the same nearby village. A comment might follow—
America suit you? Done well for yourselves, have you? I’ve got a son gone off to Philadelphia
—or just a nod of hello and the feel of eyes on their backs as they walked on. Have we aged much? In the hotel room, Agnes wondered it aloud. Not to be vain, she said, but compared to Laura (big as a house), compared to Beth (gone hunchbacked), they’d fared well. It was not having children that preserved the body, Agnes said, that and the kind of life they’d led. They seemed to be shifting into something else here—belonging and yet novel. Polished up. Improved. America felt very far away, and Bea could not quite remember her part.
On their next to last day, Agnes’s sister’s son drove them all out to Eassie, where Agnes was from, knob-kneed lambies everywhere, and the ruined churchyard with its skull and crossbones, and across from it, the tidy cemetery with Agnes’s parents’ graves, and down the lane, there, the house where Agnes had grown up, trikes now in its front yard and a mean dog on a chain. On the way they’d passed through Padanaram, which had the same name as the village where Ashaunt was, and Agnes’s sister took a photograph of Bea and Agnes, arms linked, beneath the sign. Bea liked the look of Agnes’s childhood house—it reminded her of Glamis and her grandparents—but Agnes was quiet and later told Bea she’d rather not have gone. It gave me a peculiar feeling, she said. To think we’ve never been to Skye—now that would have been a holiday!
Agnes fell asleep quickly that night, while Bea lay awake in the Royal with its fine-pressed linens, nibbling on shortbread from the tartan tin between the beds, feeling oddly young, as if she and Agnes were two girls from another walk of life, the sort who regularly slept in a place like this. Agnes was snoring lightly, holding her pillow in her arms.
We’re home
, Bea thought, trying it out, but it wasn’t quite right. The flat she’d grown up in was a world away; her parents were dead. Home was Agnes and the Porters, Grace Park, Janie, Ashaunt. Still. A plate put before her. Callum raising a glass to her coming “home.” He was good and kind, pale and wide in the face, just as he’d been as a boy. He managed well with one leg and had a pension from the office job he’d landed after the war. He was not a drunk or sullen—he’d come round—and she felt it was in some small part because she’d helped raise him. No one inquired as to why she or Agnes had not married nor how much money they had, which was a lot by Forfar standards; they’d saved a good bit, and Mr. P. had spun it into more. You’ve got a new accent, Laura remarked, and you’ve become a bit of a looker! Bea could see herself that what had been plainness in her youth had become a quiet prettiness, not beauty (she could do to lose some pounds), but her skin was unusually clear and smooth for her age, her hair still mostly chestnut brown, and her weight had settled into something less than plump. Each evening, they came back to made beds, more shortbread in the tin, laundered and pressed clothes. They had brought gifts—perfume and soaps for the women, fine-cut Virginia tobacco for the men, newly minted 1970 silver dollars for Agnes’s grandniece and nephews and Laura’s grandchildren.
Their last night in Forfar, Bea went for supper at Callum and Kate’s, along with her nephew Ian and his wife Marcy, who were expecting their first child. Halfway through the meal, Bea—for the first time in her life, she thought—found herself moved to make a toast: “To my new grandniece or -nephew!” And then, to her own surprise again, “I’m starting up a little education fund for the baby.”
They stopped eating to stare. She swallowed hard. “Unless you’d rather—”
“No,” said Marcy, who was a grammar school teacher, though she would give up working after her second child was born a few years later. “That’s lovely, Bea. Spectacular. Thank you!”
“I’m making it a wee cot,” said Callum. “If I don’t chop off my finger in the process.”
“Spoiled brat already, isn’t he?” Ian said. “I’m making him a set of working papers.”
“Could we let the baby be born first?” said Kate. “No use tempting fate.”
“Oh, he’s kicking,” said Marcy. “He hears you!”
“Or she,” Bea said.
“Have you become one of them feminists?” Callum asked her.
“Certainly not! It’s just, we don’t know what it is. It might just as easily”—she could not help hoping—“be a girl.”
Kate got up to place her hand on the slope of her daughter-in-law’s dress, and then Marcy said, “Bea, would you like to—” and Bea placed her hand there too (again a first for her, to touch a woman with child) just for a second, surprised by how hard and firm the mound felt, and then there it was, a sort of tap, a finger-flick against her palm.
“Oh Lord,” she said softly.
After dinner, she rose to clear the plates, but Kate stopped her: Dinner in your honor, your last night, sit. Then, with Kate and Marcy in the kitchen and Ian on a side bench, head in the newspaper, it was just she and Callum left at the round table that had been their parents’. “Short trip, eh,” Callum said. “Aye,” said Bea. “Too short.” Agnes was with her sister that evening. She and Bea had agreed to meet at the hotel by nine to pack and be ready for the morning coach to Glasgow, but now the clock struck quarter past and Bea, never tardy, could not get herself to move.
“I’ve half a mind to come to America with you,” said Callum. “To see that house and ride those horses, if they’d let a lame duck like me on.”
“What horses?”
“You know, in the picture you sent.”
“No. What picture?”
“Of you, planted on a horse.”
“Me—on a horse? I never—”
“Hold on.” Callum clomped off and came back a few minutes later with a photograph of Bea in britches on one horse and (Helen’s) Charlie on another. Dolly—that was Charlie’s horse; suddenly the name returned to her. How the boy had loved that animal, his hands in the photo wrapped in her mane, his eyes joyful (he’d been, early on, a merry, open child, and his hair was nicely cropped so you could see his eyes). On the other, taller horse, Bea sat upright, laughing at something. A shadow was cast across the bottom part of the picture, and she could tell from the angle of the image and the shadow’s shape that it was Mr. P. who had taken the photograph from his chair.
“It seemed unlike you,” Callum said.
“I had a few adventures. What do you call a pony with a sore throat?”
“A little hoarse,” said Callum.
“You know it?” It was the only joke she could remember, and it always got a laugh. “From where?”
“You. Your memory’s gone a bit soggy, has it? You put it in a letter once.”
Outside, the church clock sounded. Bea turned toward the solemn sound, listening through to the tenth and final strike. “I should go. Agnes will worry.”
“Funny to go all the way to America,” Callum said, “to find yourself a Scots wife.”
“Oh, let her be, Callum!” Kate called from the kitchen. “Forever the pesky little brother!”
Then, ignoring Bea’s protests, they all got ready—Ian, Kate, Marcy with her big belly, Callum with his peg leg—to walk her through the night to the hotel.
H
IS PLAN MIGHT
have worked, Charlie would later think. It might have functioned as a sort of self-prescribed rest cure, hibernation, meditation, were it not for several fucked-up forces bigger than himself. If he could only have had, as he did for a time, the place to himself, with a friend or two visiting occasionally and his cousins doing their own thing but essentially leaving him alone, even his parents coming now and then, long enough to say hello good-bye. Mostly, though, the days in their solitude, camera in hand, a diet of pasta and brown rice, beach peas, lamb’s-quarters and sorrel, and now and then a sea bass he caught or was given by one of the men who came to fish off Gaga’s dock, or tuna from Giffords Market, and when he needed it, a Valium, though he hoarded his stash, taking a nibble at a time. He read when he could concentrate and when the print did not morph before his eyes. He took cold outdoor showers behind the Big House (the house more or less empty until August, when Gaga would arrive with entourage), every morning at six. He ran. From the end of the Point to the gate was almost two miles, then two miles back, and he took paths too, and sometimes Little River Road across the marshes, where a snowy egret often stood in the shallows, and if the bird stayed frozen, good luck, and if it took off, bad. Five miles or more every morning, barefoot and bare-chested, no matter the weather. Running and running until his blood filled his temples, bathed his brain. Then blood, just blood and bone.
He slept in the cabin in the low woods between the Big House and the Red House, constructed as a playhouse for him and Will when they were younger, with two built-in beds and paned windows, and he bought a double-burner hot plate at Mars and a dorm fridge at a church sale and did not trim the path that ran down to the cabin, but kept it overgrown and tangled. Involuted.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder/Depersonalization Disorder/Involuted Depression??
he’d seen on his hospital chart, and later had looked up the word
involuted
: 1. complicated or intricate 2. having petals or leaves that roll inward at the edges 3. used to describe a shell whose axis is hidden by tight whorls.
“I have a vaginal depression,” he’d told Rusty one night on the phone, and Rusty had snorted with laughter and said, “Yeah, you and the
Bearded Clam
” (the motorboat they shared with Will, christened by Rusty. Charlie—so young and virginal for nineteen, so old and wracked—wouldn’t learn for a few more years that the boat’s name meant
twat
).
How was it, he would later wonder, that during all those weeks spent wandering the end of the Point, he didn’t notice the surveyor tags? For days on end he must have walked right by them in a kind of necessary blindness, seeing stones and plants and sky and bones, but never this. And so to find out about the land being for sale over drinks in the Red House living room on Memorial Day weekend, as his mother perched on one couch, and his father made gin and tonics, and his relatives wandered in and out, Jane’s baby a round, staring lump except when Charlie bent down and handed her a cracker and then she howled and his mother said, If you’d just cut your hair, Charlie—you’re terrifying—you have no idea! And Jane said, No, she’s just exhausted, she skipped her nap.