Dead. It was a terrible word. Like the snap of a pair of scissors cutting a piece of string in two and knowing that you could never, ever put the piece of string together again.
"Did Alexa mind?"
" 'Mind' is not the word for such a time of bereavement."
"But it meant that you could come back to Scotland."
"Yes." Edie sighed and folded her blouse. "Yes, we came back. We all did. Your father to work in Edinburgh and Alexa and I to live at Balnaid. And things gradually got better. Grief is a funny thing because you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life. After a bit you set it down by the roadside and walk on and leave it resting there. As for Alexa, it was a new life. She went to Strathcroy Primary, just as you do, and made friends with all the village children. And your Granny Vi gave her a bicycle and a wee Shetland pony. Before very long you'd never have known she ever lived in London. And yet every holiday, when she was old enough to travel on her own, back she went to stay a little while with Lady Cheriton. It was the least we could do for the poor lady."
Her ironing was finished. She turned off the iron and set it in the grate to cool, and then folded up her ironing board. But Henry did not want to stop this fascinating conversation.
"Before Alexa, you looked after Daddy, didn't you?"
"That's what I did. Right up to the day when he was eight years old and went away to boarding-school."
Henry said, "I don't want to go to boarding-school."
"Oh, come away." Edie's voice turned brisk. She was not about to have any teary nonsense. "And why not? Lots of other boys your own age, and football and cricket and high jinks."
"I won't know anybody. I won't have a friend. And I shan't be able to take Moo with me."
Edie knew all about Moo. Moo was a piece of satin and wool, remains of Henry's cot blanket. It lived under his pillow and helped him to get to sleep at nights. Without Moo he would not sleep. Moo was very important to him.
"No," she admitted. "You won't be able to take Moo, that's for certain. But nobody would object if you took a teddy."
"Teddies don't work. And Hamish Blair says only babies take teddies."
"Hamish Blair talks a lot of nonsense." *
"And you won't be there to give me my dinner."
Edie stopped being brisk. She put out a hand and ruffled his hair. "Wee man. We all have to grow up, move on. The world would come to a standstill if we all stayed in the same place. Now"-she looked at her clock-"it's time you were away home. I promised your mother you'd be back by six. Will you be all right on your own, or do you want me to come a bit of the way with you?"
"No," he told her. "I'll be all right on my own."
6
Edmund Aird was nearly forty when he married for the second time, and his new wife Virginia was twenty-three. She hailed not from Scotland but from Devon, the daughter of an officer in the Devon and Dorset Regiment who had retired from the Army in order to run an inherited farm, a considerable spread of land between Dartmoor and the sea. She had been brought up in Devon, but her mother was American, and every summer she and Virginia crossed the Atlantic in order to spend the hot months of July and August in her old family home. This was in Leesport on the south shore of Long Island, a village facing out over the blue waters of the Great South Bay to the dunes of Fire Island.
The grandparents' house was old, clapboard, large and airy. Sea breezes blew through it, stirring filmy curtains and bringing indoors the scents of the garden. This garden was spacious and separated from the quiet, tree-shaded street by a white picket fence. There were decks furnished for outdoor living, and wide porches screened for coolness and sanctuary from bugs. But its greatest charm was that it adjoined the country club, that hub of social activity with its restaurants and bars, golf course, tennis courts, and enormous turquoise swimming pool.
It was a world away from damp and misty Devon, and the annual experience gave the young Virginia a polish and sophistication that set her apart from her English contemporaries. Her clothes, purchased during mammoth Fifth Avenue shopping sprees, were both sleek and trendy. Her voice held a trace of her mother's charming drawl, and returning to school with her groomed blonde head and her long, slender American legs, she was a source of much wonder and admiration and, inevitably, on the receiving end of a good deal of malicious envy.
Early on she learned to cope with this.
Not particularly scholastic, her passion was the open air and any sort of outdoor activity. In Long Island she played tennis, sailed, and swam. In Devon she rode, hunting every winter with the local foxhounds. As she grew up, young men flocked to her side, pole-axed by the sight of her in hunting gear astride some enviable horse, or flying expertly about the tennis court in a white skirt that barely covered her bottom. At Christmas dances they clustered like bees around the proverbial honey-pot. When she was home, the telephone constantly rang, was constantly for her.'Her father complained but secretly he was proud. In time, he stopped complaining, and installed a second telephone.
Leaving school, she went to London and learned to work an electric typewriter. This was extremely dull, but as she had no particular talent nor ambition, it seemed to be the only thing to do. She shared a flat in Fulham and did temporary jobs, because that way she was free to come and go whenever a pleasant invitation came her way. The men were still there but now they were different men: older, richer, and sometimes married to other women. She allowed them to spend enormous sums of money on her, take her out to dinner and give her expensive presents. And then, when they were at their wit's end with unrequited lust and devotion, she would without warning disappear from London-to spend another blissful summer with her grandparents, or head for a house party in Ibiza, or a yacht on the west coast of Scotland, or Christmas in Devon.
On one of these impetuous jaunts she had met Edmund Aird. It was September and at a house party in Relkirkshire for the Hunt Ball, where she was staying with the family of a girl with whom she had been at school. Before the ball, there was a lavish dinner party and all the guests-those staying in the house and others who had been invited-gathered in the great library.
Virginia was the last to make her entrance. She wore a dress of so pale a green that it was almost white, strapless but caught over one shoulder by a spray of ivy, the dark leaves fashioned of gleaming satin.
She saw him instantly. He was standing with his back to the fireplace, and he was tall. Across the room their eyes met and held. He had black hair streaked with white, like silver-fox fur. She was accustomed to men in all the peacock glory of Highland dress but she had never seen one who looked so easy and so well in his finery, the diced hose and the kilt, and the sombre bottle-green jacket sparked with silver buttons.
"… Virginia dear, there you are." This was her hostess. "Now who do you know and who do you not know?" Unknown faces, new names. She scarcely heard them spoken. Finally, "… and this is Edmund Aird. Edmund, this is Virginia, who is staying with us. All the way from Devon. And you mustn't talk to her now because I've put you next to each other at dinner, and you can talk to her then…"
She had never before fallen so instantly and totally in love. There had, of course, been affairs, mad infatuations in the high old days of the Leesport Country Club, but never anything that lasted longer than a few weeks. That evening was very different, and Virginia knew, without question, that she had met the only man with whom she had ever wanted to share the rest of her life. It did not take very long to realize that the incredible miracle was actually happening and that Edmund felt exactly the same way about her.
The world became brilliant and beautiful. Nothing could go wrong. Dazzled by happiness, she was ready to throw in her lot with Edmund, abandon all common sense and any tiresome principle. Give him her life. Live in the back of beyond if necessary; on the top of a mountain; in blatant sin. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.