East Fortune (10 page)

Jack hoped that Krystyna would not be reminded of the funeral. He had not asked her about her faith. He knew that she was Catholic, but did that mean that she believed suicides were denied salvation? If she could make Jack responsible for the accident, or if he admitted some kind of responsibility, would this help Sandy on his way in the afterlife? Krystyna would surely not go as far as this, but Jack could not be sure. Still, he realised, he hardly knew her.

Elizabeth Henderson was certainly making an effort, showing Krystyna to the pew, making sure she had a hymn book, introducing her to the remaining regulars who kept the faith alive.

The first reading was taken from the Book of Genesis: Sarah laughing at the idea of having a son when her husband Abraham was a hundred years old. Jack wondered whether anyone had ever laughed in the kirk. It was such a solemn place.

Afterwards Ian took him aside. He wanted a word in private.

‘I'm sure I can borrow my son for a minute. You'll be all right, won't you, Krystyna?' he asked. ‘You will be with some of the most interesting women in Scotland.'

‘Then I will try to be interesting.'

‘I think you'll do rather more than that.'

Jack and his father turned left, away from the path, and walked to the end of the graveyard. Ian wanted more than a word. He had decided that it was time to choose his burial place.

‘A bit early, isn't it, Father?'

‘Not at all. But I can't talk to the others about this. They're too preoccupied.'

As a child the death of his parents had been the one thing that Jack could not imagine. Other people suffered the loss and yet he felt that his family was somehow immune, his father driving
confidently to and from Edinburgh, his mother giving piano lessons and recitals for charity.

‘I don't know what the hurry is,' Jack said to his father, trying to sound as normal as he could. ‘I'm sure you'll bury us all.'

‘Don't be ridiculous.' He spoke as if his son was six years old. ‘I can't make up my mind about the exact spot but I'm not keen on cremation. I definitely want to be buried.'

‘And here?'

Ian looked surprised. He couldn't accept that his son would doubt him or that anyone could think he might want anything different.

‘Yes. Somewhere here. Definitely.'

Jack thought back to the services of his childhood: the smell of damp linen, old men singing tremulously, shrunken women in their best hats.

Hamish Watson, Fiona Johnson, Angus Nicholson.

‘It seems smaller, don't you think?' his father was saying. ‘It's positively cluttered.'

‘I suppose people will keep dying,' said Jack.

He thought of Sandy, and of Krystyna.

‘I'm in the departure lounge, of course,' his father would tell his friends on the telephone. ‘Although there's a wee while before take-off … with luck, there might even be delays…'

Prostate cancer.

‘How have you been feeling?' Jack asked.

‘Not too bad,' Ian replied. ‘The doctors insist on keeping me alive.'

‘Are you taking all the medication?'

‘Of course,' Ian replied. ‘But I don't think it's doing any good. Johnny McIntosh has to take fourteen pills a day. Although anyone who takes so many can't be that ill.'

They stopped under an oak tree. Jack remembered his father's adage: two hundred years growing, two hundred years standing, two hundred years dying.

He looked back at the kirkyard with its sturdy tower, a Covenanter stronghold,
the graves of the martyrs, the peewees crying.

‘What about the stone?' he asked. ‘What do you want it to say?'

‘I can't decide.'

‘What did your father have?'

‘I think we just had his name and dates. We probably picked
In loving memory.
That's always a safe bet.'

‘I think we have to do better than that.'

Ian was surprised by contradiction. He could still picture Jack as a boy in the back seat of his car on one of their days out, complaining that he always had to sit in the middle. He was the son who played his cricket defensively, who put too much sauce on his chips and who ate his ice cream so slowly that it melted down the cornet and over his hands before he had finished.

‘I want it planned,' Ian continued, ‘so that when the moment comes you all know what to do. I'd like to enjoy it.'

‘You won't be there.'

‘Oh I think you'll find that I will.'

They passed the graves of people Ian had known in the past: Billy McIntyre, the farm labourer; John Maltby, who ran the post office; Hamish Anderson, the session clerk.

The graves surrounded them, chronicling lives, disasters, and the accidents of war. They told of age and of love; of lives lived as bravely as fear and luck would allow.

Jack remembered Sandy's coffin being carried from the kirk to a private cremation. He wondered where the ashes had been scattered and if Krystyna had been back since.

Ian stopped by the headstone of Robert Little, the publican who had always greeted his father with a free dram at weekends.

‘Do you really believe in the resurrection of the body?' Jack asked.

His father paused, surprised by the directness of the question.

‘I believe in the promises of Christ.'

Jack remembered him reading the Lorimer translation into Scots soon after it was published.

Deith is swalliet up in victorie
Whaur, than, O Deith, is thy victorie?
Whaur, than, O Deith, is thy stang?

This would be the moment to talk about what had happened, he thought; the boy in the road, the inevitable collision. As far as Jack
knew, his father was the only other member of the family who had killed a man. It had been in the war and he had been sick as soon as he had realised what he'd done.

‘I kept thinking of his sweetheart back at home.'

Jack could talk to him now. His father would surely understand and be sympathetic. But he did not know how to begin.

‘I think here, don't you? Under the spreading yew …' Ian said.

The decision had been taken while Jack had been dreaming. The opportunity had passed.

‘I'll ask the Minister.'

‘It'll be a bit of a dig…'

‘We'll manage,' said Jack, unable to imagine the day.

‘It's a good spot.' Ian looked down to the river. ‘The waters of life near by. Your mother will like it.'

Jack looked out at the view: the distant fields bordered by the drystane dykes, the thick fields under open azure skies. He tried to recall what it had been like when he was a small boy, with his father walking ahead down the lanes with the dogs, admonishing him to keep up, as the doves circled above the old doocot. He had taught his son the name of every field and stream: Peffer and Pilmuir Burn, Brownrigg and Binning Wood, Fourtoun Bank and Kilduff Hill.

They left the kirkyard and closed the gate. Jack felt the heat of the day beginning to rise. He tried to anticipate the next time he would come here, attempting to inoculate himself against the shock.

They walked back along a road that was dried and rutted with tractor tyres. Jack thought back to the walks they had shared in the past, when his father still displayed some of the army attitudes left over from the war:
If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn't, paint it.
He could smell the wild garlic under the trees.

He expected some kind of acknowledgement of the conversation they had just had but his father was already on to the next thing.

‘I think I'll need my sunhat,' he said.

In the kitchen Elizabeth had been telling Krystyna about the history of the house and how her mother had stocked up on rations at the start of the war.

‘She was hopeless with measurements and ordered a ton of soap – the village lived on it for years.'

They looked up, surprised to be interrupted. Jack could smell roast lamb and hoped they might be able to stay on for lunch.

‘I'm giving you a lift,' Elizabeth said. ‘Krystyna needs to get back to Edinburgh. We've had such a lovely chat.'

‘I told your mother what happened.'

‘Oh,' said Jack.

He could not think what to say. If he had wanted his mother to know he would have told her himself.

‘Why?' he asked

Elizabeth defended her guest.

‘She had to talk to someone, don't you think? Of course I read about the accident in the papers but I never thought that it might have anything to do with you. Or with Krystyna, of course. Why didn't you tell me, Jack?'

‘I didn't know where to start.'

‘And why does everything have to be such a secret? You don't tell people things and then we're never prepared when the truth finally emerges…'

‘Perhaps there were
reasons
why I didn't want anyone to know. I don't see why I have to tell everyone everything that happens to me…'

His mother looked over her glasses at her son.

‘We're your
family,
Jack.'

‘I'm sorry…'

‘I could not pretend any more,' said Krystyna. ‘I saw that you were not going to say anything. You cannot be alone.'

‘I didn't want anyone to have to worry. I didn't want to have to talk about it…'

‘It was very brave of Krystyna to tell me, don't you think?' Elizabeth asked.

‘I can see that. But I didn't want it to become a big thing.'

‘It is a big thing,' Elizabeth said. ‘That's the point. I'm sorry if you're upset with us.'

‘I'm not upset. I thought it was private.'

Krystyna tried to calm him.

‘How can it be private? That is what a family is for. People know something is wrong even if they do not say.'

Jack wasn't sure he needed the lecture.

‘I'm sorry, Mother.'

‘That's all right.' Elizabeth rose from the table. ‘I've told her all about you, of course.'

‘That's all I need.'

‘Don't worry. I haven't given away any
secrets.'

‘I didn't think there were any left to give away.'

He and Krystyna had specifically agreed not to say anything about the accident. It was typical of his mother to get the story out of her. Jack worried how soon the rest of his family would find out what had happened and how much more explaining he would have to do. He knew that there were limits to his mother's discretion.

Ian walked into the room.

‘I hope you're both staying for lunch?' he asked.

‘We have to go back,' said Krystyna. ‘There is a Polish Mass at the cathedral.'

‘But you've already been to church.'

‘I must go once more. Your church does not count…'

‘I see.' For the first time that weekend Ian was silenced. ‘Well, I do hope you'll come again,' he said.

‘I would be honoured.'

‘I'm not sure honoured is quite the right word.'

‘I think it is.'

‘Then I'm flattered. And thank you again for the play. It was very good to meet you, Krystyna. I'll remember every minute of it.'

‘I am not sure about every minute.'

‘Well, perhaps nearly every minute. Now I'm going to take a look at the roses and the bees.'

‘I'll bring the car round,' said Elizabeth. She did not like goodbyes. They always took longer than expected.

When the actual moment of departure came something made Jack hesitate. He realised that he wanted to wait for his father to emerge from the house, to see him one more time.

‘Come on, Jack,' his mother said. ‘What are you waiting for? Get in.'

‘Just a minute.'

He heard a sash window being raised, and he looked up to see Douglas framed above them, shielding his eyes against the brightness of the day. Angus and Tessa came out of the house to wave them off.

‘Here we are,' Ian called. He stopped when he realised that all three of his sons were looking at him. ‘What are you all waiting for?' He was almost irritated.

Jack smiled.

‘Nothing, Father.'

Ian had taken off his jacket but was still wearing a tie. Dark-blue braces held up the trousers of his Sunday suit. He was brandishing an old pair of secateurs and carrying a gardening trug. On his head was a floppy white sunhat that looked too big for him.

Elizabeth started up the car and a flock of starlings flew from the trees. The blossom had fallen with the morning breeze.

She tried to catch her husband's eye but he was already striding away from her. Soon the bees would leave the last of the lavender and the buddleia and travel further, seeking out the wild flowers that grew by the river; white bryony and charlock, dandelion and nettle.

Ian continued walking out into his garden, with his floppy hat and his secateurs, watched by his three sons and the women who were with them, intent on nothing more complicated than seeing to his bees and dead-heading a few roses.

He turned a corner, out of sight. He did not look back.

From the train Douglas looked out at pallets burning in desolate factory yards, rusting track abandoned in the sidings, the distant Kent coastline.

He was on the early-morning Eurostar to Paris. A group of French girls were taking digital photos, laughing as they showed them to each other.

A man in a cheap suit was saying, ‘OK, OK, but we can't guarantee the performance parameters of the fabric abrasionwise.'

The woman across the corridor was telling her companion that she wanted her daughter to become a dentist. It was a good ambition to have, a sensible career. ‘You never see a poor dentist, do you?'

Douglas knew his parents would have preferred him to have a proper job; they would have been far prouder if he'd entered a sensible profession with prospects. He could have become a doctor, a lawyer, or something important in international finance rather than the murky world of television. He certainly wouldn't have been travelling in standard class.