‘Cheers.’
He must have looked dismayed because Pete laughed.
‘Don’t worry, they’re tiny. Nothing like those big restaurant rats you get in Glasgow, just a bit cheeky. They don’t seem to realise we’re the superior species.’
He rose and pulled on his jacket. Jinx followed her master to the door, tail wagging. Murray got to his feet too. Standing, the two men seemed to fill the room.
‘I almost forgot.’ Pete fished the tractor keys from his pocket. ‘When I collected your bags, Mrs Dunn said she’d like you to drop by tomorrow afternoon, if you can spare the time. You’ve not reneged on the rent, have you?’
‘No, you can trust me on that score. It might be about her bedroom carpet. I got mud on it.’
The crofter laughed.
‘The whole island’s mud, and worse. Landladies can’t afford to get upset about that kind of thing. Likely she wants to feed you up, doesn’t know about all these gourmet tins of sardines and baked beans you hunter-gathered at the shop this afternoon.’
‘Aye.’ Murray leant down and scratched Jinx between the ears. This time the dog tolerated him. He could feel the warmth of the gas heater still stored in her rough fur. ‘That’ll be it.’
Murray stood at the door staring into the cold night, long after the rumble of Pete’s tractor had faded. There must have been a host of clouds hidden behind the night’s blackness, because the world beyond his door was a trembling mass of dark.
‘Starless and bible black.’
He wondered if he would start talking to himself more, now that he was to be so much on his own; found himself envying Pete Jinx’s company. He and Jack had campaigned hard for a dog when they were boys, but their dad had been adamant in his refusal. Murray had secretly suspected they would have had their way if their mother had lived. When he was very young there had been a point where the desire for his mother and for a dog had seemed equally strong. The two impossible wishes had merged and he’d imagined her up in heaven, a remote and smiling Isis guarded by a noble canine companion, the lost dog they never had.
Murray closed the door, turned off the heater and took a last glass of malt to bed with him, then lay in the utter dark, unsure of whether the noises he could hear came from the next room or from beyond the cottage’s stone walls. Mice or the faerie folk tidying up in return for the dram Pete had gifted them. Either option seemed horrid. He pictured Bobby Robb’s bed, shipwrecked in Fergus Baine’s grubby tenement flat, and ringed by spells. He wondered if Archie had believed in the occult too — interested in the beyond — or if the intelligence which had helped him fashion poems from the rough stuff of words had saved him from that particular delusion.
Murray filled his mind with thoughts of Moontide, the perfect ordering of the poems which made the book not simply a collection, but a composition. He pushed away images of Rachel’s face, Rachel’s body, and started to recite the poems inside his head in the sequence Archie had arranged them.
He woke in the middle of the night from visions of a pink tangle of naked bodies, aware of his own irritating hardness, unable to remember whether his nightmare had been of a holocaust or an orgy. Murray lay muffled under the blankets, waiting for the dawn. He saw the first, grey light creep across the room and watched his breath cloud the cold air. He decided to get up and wash anyway, and then drifted back into a dark and dreamless sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE COTTAGE GREW too small for Murray at around eleven the next morning. He pushed aside the notes he couldn’t concentrate on and pulled on his rain jacket and woollen hat. It was pelting down outside, but he stepped from the cottage and set out with no thought of a destination.
It seemed that he had lived half his life in the rain. Murray pulled up his hood and kept walking, his face lowered against the wind, the raindrops beating a tattoo on his waterproof. Surely the showers should be softer, more refreshing, in the clear air of the countryside, but it seemed to him that this was the same harsh rain that fell on Glasgow. Without the shelter of tenements and pubs the city offered it was free to sweep across the island and seek him out.
Usually such egotism would have made him smile, but now he just kept his eyes down, concentrating on the grass one plod ahead, trying to put Rachel from his mind. It was impossible. She was in the sickness he felt low down in his stomach. He wondered how many more encounters she’d had with other men, wondered if Fergus knew.
Fergus.
For all of his suaveness and learning, he was a cuckold many times over. Murray tried to take satisfaction from the thought and failed. He didn’t give a fuck about Rachel’s husband. It was his own hurt that moved him.
He’d liked her poshness, liked her teases that he was her bit of rough; Murray, the dux of the school. Now he realised she’d considered him gauche, not sophisticated enough to be initiated into her games. She was right, of course. He would have been shocked — was shocked — at the idea of an orgy. His cleverness was of another brand.
It was the sense of specialness he mourned as much as Rachel herself, the belief that she had chosen him above others. His faith had been dented by her marriage to Fergus and her infidelity with Rab, sure. But he had nursed his trust, willing himself to forgive these faults in the knowledge that she had decided to make him her lover. Now he knew she gave her body the way another women might give you a smile, or a touch of her hand; something to be enjoyed, but no assurance of anything. She had made a fool of him.
Had the other men in the photographs treasured her the way he had or had they already known they were one of many? Murray picked up a stick and swiped it through the long grass edging the pathway, letting loose a spray of rainwater.
He wondered how he would ever face her again, and realised that he couldn’t. He would have to look for a new job, though he was working in the one place he had wanted to work since he was a boy. Everything was spoiled. The thought was childish in its intensity. There was nothing for him now, no lover, no family and no job. He would pack up and go home, except there was no home, only a carelessly furnished flat where he laid his head. The only home he had known had been handed back to the council when his father went into residential care. At the time he’d taken comfort in the thought that he and Jack were acting in accordance with their father’s principles, and some new family would be able to bring up their children in its shelter. Now he wanted nothing more than to turn the key he still had in the lock, climb the stairs to the room he’d shared with Jack and lie face-down on the bed.
Ahead of him was an abandoned cottage, a derelict shell of the same design as the bothy he was renting from Pete. This one was missing its roof and front door. Its windows, free of glass, stared. Who had lived there, alone in the middle of nowhere, and why they had gone? Murray shivered. His waterproof was holding up well, but his trousers were soaked through and splashed with mud. It was stupid, letting himself get drenched like this, an invitation to a cold or worse, but he walked on, unsure of where he was going, seeing other derelict cottages and realising that the place hadn’t been the preserve of some lonely crofter or a hermit seeking solitude, but a village.
He looked through one of the vacant doors and saw the grass growing on the floor, the ivy clinging to the walls. How long would it be before the elements toppled these small structures as they had already toppled the broch and the castle? Would future archaeologists dig here, or had records grown so precise every aspect of the recent past would be charted and ready for those who wanted to know? Maybe, soon enough, there would be no one left, no world to chronicle and argue over. All things must end, why not this too? The thought almost had the power to cheer him.