On the other hand, Corrieshalloch Gorge was less than fifteen miles from Ullapool and across the sea loch from Ullapool was the Major’s hunting lodge. If Mamma-dearest had not sold it after his death (and why would she?) then that was a striking coincidence. Also, now that my memory was oiled and turning, I recalled a conversation with Hugh, relayed from George at the club, on the subject of this engagement which only came to light after the deaths. There had been some smirking, apparently – fiancée, indeed! – until the thought of the watch and cigarette case turned everyone solemn again.
I stared at the page until the tiny print and the yellowed background began to dazzle and I had to blink several times to clear my eyes again. Was I really going to ask the librarian to ask the porter to bring me Apr to Jun, Jul to Sep and then Oct to Dec, in hopes of another Charles who better fit the bill? I closed the March volume, and left the library, wiping the book dust from my fingers with a handkerchief.
There was no point in telephoning to Pearl again to find out any more, I considered, walking with measured pace along one of Stranraer’s main streets. Most assuredly there was no point in telephoning to Aurora. That left Mamma-dearest. Did I dare? She was a woman of fathomless tranquillity and the thought of disturbing it was unpleasant. Besides, if her other two daughters had managed to keep the news from her that Fleur was missing again, I did not relish being its bearer. There was also the consideration that even at my advanced middle age, Mamma-dearest Lipscott – being one of the most striking characters of my youth and never seen again since then – was still ‘one of the grown-ups’ to me. Quite simply, I shrank inside at the prospect of interrogating her, even gently quizzing her, as though she could still if she chose write to my mother to tell of my shortcomings so that the visit was spoiled with the dread of returning home.
To be fair, though, that had never happened at Pereford. I had not given my poor mother a thought the whole summer long, beyond sending her a picture postcard from Watchet and choosing a hideous commemorative china basket of roses with Dorset written on it in loopy gold writing. I do not think that I picked it out deliberately to offend her taste but when I saw her open the tissue-paper package, in her own sitting room surrounded by her hand-hewn oak furniture and her verdigris obelisks, and saw too the sudden wince as though she had bitten down on a boiled sweet with a bad tooth, I knew my mistake. There was no sign of it anywhere when we tidied her things after her death, certainly.
I could not help but contrast Mamma-dearest’s placid adoration of her own children’s efforts; her almost voluptuous joy in the pipe-cleaner and pine-cone families Fleur made for her, the tears she shed over Aurora’s piano-playing, claiming that she had never heard the Lieder sound more lovely. When Pearl painted her a watercolour rendition of the Major’s last battle, Mamma-dearest shot to her feet and rang a framer in Weston to get it behind glass immediately for preservation. It was a pitifully amateurish picture too, the paper bubbled with too much water and the bloody battle so tastefully toned down that, if one did not know, one would imagine those men in their bright clothes to be having a round of golf on that green hill. Still, the painting hung in her bedroom, the pine-cone family sat on her writing table and Aurora was invited to play Schubert at every party, while Mamma-dearest sat misty-eyed and seemed not at all to notice the other guests squirming.
I had walked as far as the station, and remembering Signora Aldo’s choice of kiosk from which to inform her husband she had left him, I thought I might as well make use of a telephone there. The privacy at the Crown was far from perfect, between the blackmailing widow, poor Enid at her elbow and the sisters Brown. I went to the newspaper-stand to buy a bar of chocolate and get some change (libraries, where even a peppermint is cardinal sin, always make me ravenously hungry) and then stood in one of the kiosks exhorting myself to courage, practising the opening line and casting around with mounting desperation for an excuse to abandon the plan. The tension was beginning to make my head ache (or perhaps I had tied the scarf over my hair too tightly) and when the operator demanded instructions I heard myself asking, instead, for a trunk call to the Horseshoe.
In the five minutes I was told it would take to string together this inordinately long line of connections, I wandered the station, noting the travellers reeling out of the boat train, still rather green about the gills, and the many passengers who seemed to be arriving with great heaps of luggage to cram onto a short train which sat pawing the ground and ready for the off.
‘You getting on the 10.15, madam?’ said a porter.
‘I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I’m in the minority, eh? Busy little train.’
‘Oh, she’s a wee beauty,’ said the porter. ‘Here to Glasgow for the Flying Scotsman.’
‘The Flying Scotsman starts at Edinburgh, doesn’t it?’ I said. This was one of things one knew about the railway even if one knew nothing else. The Flying Scotsman left King’s Cross at ten in the morning and left Edinburgh Waverley at one in the afternoon.
‘She does not!’ said the porter. ‘The Flying Scotsman starts in the fair city of Glasgow. Edinburgh is just one o’ the stops.’
‘Golly,’ I said. I had never known a porter so bursting with pride, and although I had no luggage and was not even boarding, I tipped him for his sheer joie de vivre. Then I checked the platform clock – it was just gone ten and my five minutes’ wait was up – and returned to the kiosk.
‘You sound as though you’re in a barrel of nails, Dandy,’ said Alec’s voice. ‘What a terrible line. Where are you?’
‘Stranraer station,’ I said. ‘Yes, you’re a bit gravelly too. How did it go?’
Alec began a tale which reached my ears as a series of clicks and buzzes with the odd word sticking up out of the noise like church spires in a low fog.
‘No use, darling,’ I said. ‘I can’t hear you. I said, I can’t hear you!’
There were more clicks and buzzes and all I heard was my name.
‘This is pointless,’ I bellowed into the mouthpiece and then some kind of madness came over me, I think. I slammed down the telephone (such an ungrateful wretch after the exchange had put the connection together for me so quickly), glanced at the clock – ten past ten – and went to seek my porter friend again.
By fifteen minutes past ten, I had sent another telegram to the Horseshoe with detailed instructions of what I wanted Alec to do, purchased a ticket, asked the Crown to hold my room and was sitting in the last first-class seat in the only first-class carriage on the little train, with the fire dying down to grey embers in my belly and the list of essential items I did not have with me growing in my head. Hairbrush, toothbrush, underclothes, warm coat, the comfort of knowing that my husband knew where I was and what I was doing, the comfort of knowing myself why I was doing this… What I did have was an almost new notebook, a couple of sharp pencils and hours and hours of luxurious time to organise my thoughts and discoveries so that I could fathom out this maddening case before its waters met over my head and it drowned me.
10
When I stuck my head out of the window at York where we had a half-hour break for tea, Alec hailed me in great high spirits, waving a brown paper bag at me like a backbencher with his ballot papers.
‘What’s that?’ I asked him. ‘Hello, darling.’
‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘Toothbrush, toothpaste and a few delicate garments I got in a ladies’ outfitters.’
‘You went into a ladies’ outfitters and rifled through-’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I just murmured to the girl in the shop – something about my wife’s lost luggage, you know – and she picked everything for you. No idea what size, though. I said you were “average”.’