The Key of the Chest (15 page)

‘
His
sheep,' said the doctor. He looked at Andrew with the detached expression which his profession had made second nature. Andrew began to look back with the expression in which a thought is being born.
Where had
Dougald got the money to buy his sheep?
The doctor heaved his cycle off its stand, straddled it, ‘I'll look in before the day is over,' and pushed off.

The executive committee of the Sheep Club had received Kenneth Grant's report of the October sheep sales and were well content. The price for the cast ewes was the best for many years and the wether lambs had not only done well but had done a shade better than lambs in their own class from long-established sheep farms in the district.

So pleased were Kenneth's five listeners that he went on to describe the auction mart, the press of buyers and onlookers, how some of the old grim dealers began to nod against one another, how Dougald kept the lambs moving in the ring, until the mart came into the attic that looked like an underground den.

Then to the statement of figures, all neatly detailed on a sheet of double foolscap, liabilities on one side and assets on the other, with straight lines drawn at an angle to fill in blanks. Everything for the whole year was there. Heads nodded. Yes, everything was there, straightforward and above board, supported by receipts for expenditure and the auctioneer's statements. In Kenneth's neat writing, it looked a beautiful bit of work.

They agreed with Kenneth that snatching a profit didn't help in the long run. Some of them may not always have agreed with this, but they somehow didn't feel now that they hadn't agreed. Items were expounded and discussed. There was no hurry. Time was a concern only of tides and seasons. This tide in their affairs rose as Kenneth gave his additions and subtractions, and it hung brimming at the full as Kenneth went over his effort in long division and said that in his opinion for every holder there could with safety be a payment of seven pounds.

It was a large sum of money. It was two rents. There were farms on the east side where many a ploughman worked
half a year to get as much. And all for doing nothing! And they were paying Dougald nine pounds in the half year, all of seven shillings a week. If wages were going up, then, as Kenneth said, prices would have to go up also. So that however you looked at it, things were pretty good and shaping better.

Kenneth Grant produced a bottle of Ord whisky. They shifted on their wooden seats. Things were shaping well, indeed!

‘I didn't notice,' said Peter MacInnes, the chairman, ‘that you had this item in the statement of the account.' They all laughed, but softly, out of a deep warmth.

‘The glasses are not in it either,' replied Kenneth, producing six of them where one would have done. A lavish display. And not the glass of ordinary usage, which was a sherry glass, but the neatest half-size tumblers they ever saw.

The cork came away with a loud plonk.

‘Hisht, boy, they'll be hearing you!' said Robbie Ross, a small man with a barrel chest and quiet black eyes.

They laughed again.

Kenneth half-filled each tumbler. Eyes were turned on the chairman, for out of an age-old conception of courtesy no man there could taste the liquor until something had been said about the occasion, and about life, and about the wave of goodness that now flowed around their affairs.

‘There's only one man we have to thank for this,' began Peter MacInnes, ‘and that man is Kenneth Grant.' So literal a statement of the truth delighted them. It was the right note for a beginning. ‘He must have been thinking about it long beforehand, and that's what he's always been doing, as we know this night.'

‘Indeed that's true,' declared Robbie.

‘Foresight was needed,' continued Peter, ‘and patience, but that would have availed us little without the knowledge of business, and that knowledge was given to the Club in a way we all know. We have had a good year and it will bring a blessing to us all, if we have the heart to deserve it. I hope our affairs will continue to prosper, and things be made easier for all those dependent on us. And maybe they will
do that, if we continue to deserve them. But I am not making any speech now.' He paused, took off his cap, and caught the glass. They all took off their caps. ‘Here's good health and long life to our Secretary, and to all those in his household.'

They stood up and with individual expressions of compliment drank off the neat liquor, for to have paused half-way would have been to make a face at generosity.

Faces they did make, but of pleasant wonderment, for they were a people who took the drop only when it came their way, and it was, by individual asseveration, an unusually good drop.

They waited for Kenneth.

He thanked them and said if he had done anything it was in his own interest as well as theirs, ‘but particularly,' said Kenneth, and his eyes came level, ‘in the interests of the place. For I would like to see this place thriving. And we could make it thrive, if we just planned a little bit ahead. Dead we have been too long with all the best lads leaving us, and the young girls, too. But you have heard me on that before! However, I'm not going to despair. I have a few plans in my locker. Thank you again, and fill your glass, Robbie, and pass the bottle round. We can talk then.'

And talk they did. There was a glow of good fellowship, of rich optimism. When the last of the bottle had been evenly measured into the glasses, Kenneth said, ‘There's one man maybe we've been forgetting. It's Dougald MacIan. He's worked well for the Club, if ever a man did, cutting the bracken and making bog hay, when there was no need for him to do either, and many another thing as well.'

‘That's true indeed,' said Peter MacInnes.

Yes, indeed, it was true, they all agreed with solemn expressions and movements. But no one somehow made a toast of it.

‘I was going to have suggested that maybe we might have made him a small present. What do you think?'

There was silence for a little, then Peter MacInnes looked directly at Kenneth. ‘What do you think yourself? He has certainly worked well.'

And Kenneth, despite himself, was at a loss. ‘It's whatever
you say,' he replied, but there was no conviction in his voice. There was enough over after the division to give Dougald a pound, or even two. It was the kind of present that would pay them, for it would give Dougald good heart.

‘I hear he's been buying ewes,' said Donald Grant, a burly medium-sized man with a greying beard. ‘Has he said anything to you about it?'

‘No,' answered Kenneth. ‘But he will. I missed him after the sale was over. I don't know what happened. But I will say this: I'm glad to hear it.'

‘Yes,' came from here and there as a glass was turned thoughtfully in a hand.

‘Perhaps, then,' said Kenneth slowly, ‘we might as well leave it meantime. There's still a little while before the general meeting.'

‘Perhaps it might be as well,' said Peter,‘—if that's agreed?'

It seemed to be agreed.

But the meeting had fallen flat. And this irked them, for they had been in the mood to enjoy making a gesture, enjoy giving. It was the mood they liked being in. Kenneth had always had to guard against it, for in business affairs it meant: let us divide the spoil now, let us do the handsome while the going is good and take no care of the morrow.

Kenneth knew what was in their minds, and saw the shadows stalking in the hinterlands. But the main question remained unuttered: where did Dougald get the money to buy the sheep? They knew Charlie had returned with a new coat on him, a new cap, and a bulging gladstone bag. What had he gone south for? To change foreign money?…
There
had been no key for the seaman's chest
… And next day Dougald had left for the October sales, and returned across the mountains, driving twelve of his own sheep and full of drink.

The lamp with its double wick and bright reflector was on Kenneth's left and shot its light across the statement of accounts and the brown-painted table. Peter MacInnes was on his right and the remaining four in front. He looked at their faces, hardly consciously, for he was also preoccupied with what was in his own mind and in theirs. And their
faces held shadows above the stronger beam of light and were individual and solid and haunted by the dark potencies of life. Robbie Ross's face was round as a turnip, the skin tight on the bone and the small eyes all the blacker for their pin-points of light. Donald Grant's face was solemn and heavy. William Nicholson, the jovial man, looked like one in whom a wild jest had been frozen and the head made small restless movements to keep the throat free of the ice. The fourth was Ian Maclennan, a tall powerful man, dark, who spoke slightly through his nose, and had in the ordinary friendly way a casual snicker on his face which tilted the left corner of his upper lip, and he loved great bouts of laughter. Usually he was forthright. Kenneth now saw him move on his hard seat.

‘I suppose,' asked Ian, ‘he will always have kept up his payments with you?'

‘He's in no debt to me,' answered Kenneth. They waited. But Kenneth did not amplify his statement.

‘In that case,' said Ian, ‘it is no affair of the Club's.'

Peter MacInnes spoke slowly and temperately. ‘I think as a Committee we have gone as far as we need go with that. At the general meeting, I'll say some good things about the work Dougald has done and how much the Club is in-debted to him. I'll say that, if it's in your minds that I should.'

Certainly! Certainly! They leaned back, relieved. Yes, he was certainly entitled to that! Optimism began to rise again and good fellowship.

‘Here's to the very best!' said William.

Here's to it! They drank the glass off. A good drop indeed. And they had money to declare. It was not every day there was a pig to kill.

They laughed, and moved slowly away, and stood, and went on, and faded into the dark.

Kenneth returned to gather his papers and put out the light. He gazed at the account sheet and folded it over. He stared before him as if the faces were still there.

He had gone soft for a little to-night, soft and indecisive. He had meant to take a strong line about Dougald. What
the devil did it matter what Dougald did privately? He was a first-class shepherd. He was a man who did his job with a will, among so many who were well-meaning enough but feckless.

No one knew, as Kenneth did, how much diplomacy and careful agitation, how much thought and sheer labour, it had taken to get hold of the Ros and start the Sheep Club. How often he had been near throwing the whole thing up! The jealousies, the trifling doubts!

But he had done it. And, dammit, he would do more. He would get the mails contract. He would organize the collecting and transport of lobsters in his own vans. And people were saying that some day there would be motor vans, even in the Highlands. He would make money out of this place, and if they did not come with him, the harder he would screw them.

But he must watch that softness in himself, the welling up of the mood, the friendliness that laughed in the moment and for the moment's sake, that weakness.

The faces and the solid bodies, the persistent presences, faded out as he turned away abruptly cursing he hardly knew what, with a spurt of irrational anger against Dougald, whom he would support through thick and thin.

‘Going home, William?' asked Ian Maclennan, as they parted from the others.

‘I am, but I thought first I might look in at Smeorach's.'

‘I wonder what old Smeorach will have to say about it?'

‘He'll have something, you may be sure. Dougald never goes home with his messages without calling on him.'

‘That's true,' said Ian, and he gave a small snicker of a laugh. ‘Begod, it's extraordinary right enough!'

Their voices became charged with humour. The night was dark, but already they were clear of the central cluster of houses and beginning to distinguish the grey surface of the road. As they came to the path which turned off to Smeorach's cottage, they paused, suddenly aware of the sound of the sea. It had been blowing a bit in the early part of the day, and the waves beat with a long heavy roll on the strand.

It was a sombre sound, coming out of a distant dimension of its own, toneless, mindless, blue-green, smothering.

‘God, boy,' said Ian, with a touch of awe, ‘it's a terrible joke!'

They listened to the night, then went down to ‘draw Smeorach out'.

Flora got out of bed quietly and stood listening for a sound within the night. So used was her ear to the wind in the trees, that its seething, like sea-water down a pebbly beach, enclosed the house and made it easier for her to concentrate on the spaces within its walls, its stair-landing, its rooms, its kitchen region below – that well of the house where the housekeeper slept and Fraoch had his basket-bed.

On her bare feet she went towards the door, right hand outstretched, until the finger-tips crawled round the box of the lock and found the knob. The hand closed on the cold brass, gripped hard, and turned slowly. The door came towards her with a tiny protest. She laid her ear against the inner silence of the house.

But the sound she wanted to hear was not there, and with the held breath bursting softly from her, she pushed the door back, but did not close it.

Breathing now like one who had been running, she half-turned and staggered so that there was the distinct pad of her feet on the floor. She held her breath again, then made for the bed. The bed came to meet her so that she hit it near the foot. There was a weighty creak. She groped for the pillows, got under the clothes, and lay listening beyond the threshing of her heart.

If only it had been possible to go out by the window! To go out by the window would be to fly into the night like a bird…. All the time she was listening. Nothing came upon the inner silence. Everything lay waiting as before.

Her father had come up over an hour ago. He made a curious sound when he slept. It was not a real snore. The roots of his nostrils closed against the outrush of breath and there was a soft explosive 'Ha-a-a', easily audible on the landing to an attentive ear.

Around this landing there were five doors. Her father's door was almost directly opposite the top of the stairs and her own was the second from it to the right. A very short passage led on her side to the bathroom. There was no water-closet in the bathroom. The water-closet had three steps going up to it from the last turn of the stairs.

It must be now well after midnight. Even if she managed to slip out, it would be one o'clock before she got near the spot where they had met. Charlie would not be able to understand why she was so late. He would say in his man's mind that she had decided not to come. He would not understand the difficulties. She saw the expression on his face, the satiric expression, the scoffing defeated expression:
so she wouldn't come!
She saw and felt his body turning away.

She did not blame him. It was her problem, the thing she had to arrange and do on her own, never even telling him. But he would have to wait. He must give her time. He mustn't be too impatient.

Her father was everywhere, for he inhabited the back regions of her mind, an imminent deadly menace. But he was her father. Farther back than her first memory, he was there. The relationship was as real as life itself. It was part of life and had its compulsions and its duties. She did not think about these. They were there.

Thus conscience was not something to argue about. If she could have argued about it with conviction, all her behaviour would have been different. Her conscience worked deep in her unconscious life, and whatever it was made of, it had the nature of an instinct. Thus she simply knew that the relationship itself, that which existed behind all moods, all acts, was right.

She had to contend against this, she had to evade it in order to reach Charlie. She had to evade her father. That would leave the relationship intact.

There was tremendous danger in this evasion, because, if discovered, it would bring upon her the menace of her father. And the menace was as real as the deepest stir in her blood.

That menace she would one day have to meet. But she
must meet it then, not evasively, but terribly and face to face, and oppose it and tear it away. She could never afford to be caught by it before she was ready, for if it caught her and beat her down before she was ready, then she might never have the need to oppose it again. She would be finished for the rest of time, and beyond time.

She had been beaten down once already. She knew what it meant.

The wind must have been veering round, for all at once the slat of wood at the foot of the blind rattled against the window which was open a foot. Her head lifted. Her door banged, not loudly, for it had only two inches of a swing. But to Flora the clash cried through the house. She could not move. It clashed again, less loudly. She got out of bed, pulled the door open, and listened. The wind poured through her nightdress. There was a rattle downstairs, a window rattle. Then something fell softly outside. She heard, quite distinctly, the smothered growl in Fraoch's throat.

She shut the door noiselessly and got back to bed. She was trembling and felt slightly sick. There had been no sound from her father's room.

She knew he was awake. That appalling silent wakefulness, not a word spoken; the words of grace before food, the two or three quiet sentences to the housekeeper, but, to her, no word. Nothing but mounting suffocating silence.

If only he had not found her in Charlie's arms! That was the awful thing. That was the thing he could not get over. It was a privacy that no mortal eyes should have seen. Oh, he should not have seen it! The cry came from a profound source, hot and dissolving in its own blind shame. For she knew how it would work on him, how it fed on his silence. She knew it with a profound intuition, so that her flesh of its own accord writhed and contracted in order to crush it out. And all the time she had to deal with Fraoch's growl.

For Fraoch she had seen as the real difficulty. With her father asleep, she could have tiptoed downstairs. Old Johan would be asleep. And even if she wasn't there was the whole depth of the house and three doors between her bed and the
night outside. But Fraoch could catch her lightest step on the stairs. When he heard the outer door being opened, he would whine. He might bark. He very likely would, the anxious thin bark, which he used when he wished to call attention to himself.

She had thought of taking him up to her bedroom, had worked out a plan for doing it after the housekeeper had retired, but had decided against it, afraid of how he might act, both in the house and immediately he got outside. Rabbits occasionally troubled the garden at night. Besides, she wanted to be free, even of Fraoch.

But all he might do would be to come to the kitchen door – she had made sure it was shut – sniff under it, and whine. Should this waken Johan, she would threaten him in a husky angry voice from her bed. Fraoch would then lie on the kitchen floor, his nose to the wind coming under the door, until she returned. Then he would get to his feet again and whine, but when he knew she was in her own room, he would go back to his bed.

She could picture all this with complete clarity. There was a risk. But all was risk.

Time was going on. Charlie would not wait past two o'clock. That was absolutely certain.

All at once, she imagined him at the stile, where she had fallen. Then, as it were, she lifted her eyes and saw him there. She saw his face. She was so distracted that she said, ‘Charlie.'

The distraction turned her on her back. A flush went down her body. Out of the momentary exhaustion came the words:
except that you are more beautiful
.

Of all he had said, these were the only words that needed no remembering.

They had been the shell against her father's silence, permitting her mind its secret freedom, leaving life secretly to live.

They had inhabited not her face but her body, giving it ease and grace of movement, smooth upon the muscles, the long muscles, the round breasts, the curved shoulders, upon the whole body composed in a chair, giving to it all, as if it hardly belonged to her, an enchanting comeliness.

Then she suddenly and clearly realized that Charlie would be at the stile, staring into the trees, waiting for her. He would come to meet her, would not let her walk all that way alone in the dark to where they had had their brief meeting.

To go out and see, and come back, need only be a matter of minutes. Half an hour away from the house would give her time to convince Charlie how impossible it was for her to be sure that she could meet him at night. They would have to arrange something else.

The need to tell him this was of extreme urgency. Nothing else mattered. The whole reason for their meeting became precisely this. She thought of it solely in terms of talking to him about it. Even the need for making another arrangement was only an after-thought, while anything else that might happen (for she knew how Charlie would envelop her) would be a terrible distraction, and utterly dangerous, because if they forgot themselves, even standing together, even for a minute, then the house and the menace would come alive behind her, would come alive in that minute.

All this was perfectly clear in her mind. It simplified her problem, made it practical, straightforward, and placed its execution in so short a duration of time that she could not be overtaken and caught in Charlie's company.

Her eye went back to the stile. He was leaning on the fence, dark body, face invisible, staring into the trees.

Very quietly she got on to her feet and began to dress. She had laid her clothes all ready, but the room itself had taken a slightly different aspect, its orientation had most subtly changed, so that it drew her hand a little beyond where it should have to go before an article of dress was delivered up.

She knew exactly where the dressing table was, with its simple detached mirror. The candlestick with its box of matches was on the rush-bottomed chair by the head of her bed. But the sound which a struck match would make she now dared not risk. She dared not risk a light either for that would be a distraction, a blinding of the senses against the known dark.

She could not find the dressing table. She groped about in the air above a floor which grew in size. She felt completely lost, and helpless. Unless she was very careful something would hit her legs.

She stood quite still, for she knew that it would be dangerous to become more bewildered. She must now be very near the dressing table. Although she had her long brown hair already wound round her head in two twisted plaits, she wanted to feel the teeth of the comb over her brows. She wanted to comb back the roots from her forehead and above her ears. The hard cool teeth would bring her to her more normal self and she would be dressed.

She was not afraid of the room, and as she stood quite still she made a clear mental effort to settle it in its proper position and proportions. As if in answer to her effort, the bottom slat of the blind tapped against the window-frame, tapped in small hard notes, slowly, as if meditatively struck by the toneless mind of the world outside.

At once she realized that the dressing table was not in front of her as she had thought, but to her right hand. She stretched out an arm and let her hand descend. It landed on the comb.

From the dressing table she walked with quiet certainty to the door and at once the long folds of her cloth dressing gown met her fingers. She put it on over her tweeds. In each pocket there was a shoe. Her Sunday shoes, for her weekday ones were in their proper place in the kitchen.

She stood quite still for a moment, then very carefully she began to open the door.

On the threshold, listening, she heard nothing except the noises of the wind about the house. No sound came from her father's room.

She closed the door behind her and walked along the strip of carpet. Opposite her father's door she paused. In an instant its silence gripped her heart as if it were listening and alive, appallingly alive in its inner darkness.

Automatically she began to go down the stairs, and it is probable, indeed certain, that had she not already worked out a plan she would have gone on and away into the night.

But she had thought of the lavatory as an emergency
refuge in the event of things going against her, such as her father's silence, clumsy sounds by herself, Fraoch's barking. She hardly hesitated a moment, went up the three steps, and stood almost swooning in the small place.

The decision to pull the chain drained the last ounce of energy out of her. She was weakened now by the dark menace to a degree that made her gulp oxygen in to her lungs. The rush of the waters was shattering. She got back to her room as quickly as she could, closed the door and fought for a dizzy moment against throwing herself on the bed. She could not wait to take off her dressing gown. Drawing the bedclothes over her, she stopped the cry, the bitter cry against this terrible indignity, this crime against the movement of her life.

A little time after that, she heard, as if she had all the time been listening for it, her father's door being opened. She heard, not the rattle of a knob, but the door itself, which fitted closely, coming unstuck.

Now she knew that she had had no fear that night until this moment. This was fear itself. It was black, and charged with unthinkable power.

Clutching the bedclothes about her neck, she held on to them. Whatever happened, whatever was said, it must not be seen that she was dressed, for that would expose her design, would tell everything. Nothing more final could happen than that.

He was standing now outside her door. Her fingers knotted in the bedclothes. It did not occur to her to ask herself what her father would do. She knew only the awful menace of her father and of his anger. It was of the spirit, not of the flesh. The anger of the unknowable god that destroys.

As the blood was swelling inside her to deafening point, she suddenly heard his footsteps going into the bathroom. There was the distinct clink of a tumbler, the gush from a tap. He was drinking cold water.

Now he was coming back. There was a swishing sound in the night outside, and all at once Fraoch set up a full-throated barking. Something was moving outside.

Her father was going downstairs. She got up on an
elbow. A strong urge to go to the door and listen almost got the better of her, but she resisted it. She mustn't expose herself, not for a moment. Fraoch kept on barking – until her father entered the kitchen. She knew the moment he entered by the change in Fraoch's throat. At once she was out of bed, her door open, listening. She must know if anything happened, if anyone… And her thought stopped on Charlie. The kitchen door lock gave its rusty squeal. Fraoch must have darted out, for her father was yelling. Fraoch, barking madly a little beyond her window, suddenly stopped. There was complete silence. Her father's voice started calling him again.