He slept the deep uninterrupted sleep induced by fresh air and an unsullied conscience, and woke to an immense silence. The silence was not only out-of-doors; the house itself was in a trance. And Grant suddenly remembered that it was Sunday. There would be no post out of the glen today. He would have to go all the way to Scoone with his letter.
He asked Tommy at breakfast if he might borrow the car to go to Scoone to post an important letter, and Laura offered to drive him. So as soon as breakfast was over he went back to his room to compose the letter, and in the end was very pleased with it. He brought the matter of B Seven into the texture of it as neatly as an invisible mender fits an unbelonging piece to the over-all pattern. He had not been able to shake the memory of work from him as soon as he might, he said, because the first thing he had been confronted with at the end of the journey was a dead body. The body was being furiously shaken by an enraged sleeping-car attendant who thought that the man was just sleeping it off. However, it had been none of his business, thank Heaven. His only part in the affair had been to purloin unintentionally a newspaper from the compartment. He had found it among his own when he was having breakfast. It was a Signal, and he would have taken it for granted that it was his own property if it had not been that in the Stop Press space someone had been pencilling a scribbled attempt at verse. The verse was in English and in English writing, and might not have been written by the dead man at all. He understood that the inquest was being held in London. If Bryce thought that it was of any importance he might hand on the small item of information to the relevant authority.
He came downstairs again to find the Sabbath atmosphere shattered. The house rocked with war and rebellion. Pat had discovered that someone was going in to Scoone (which in his country eyes was even on a Sunday a metropolis of delectable variety) and he wanted to go too. His mother, on the other hand, was determined that he was going to Sunday school as usual.
‘You ought to be very glad of the lift,’ she was saying, ‘instead of grumbling about not wanting to go.’
Grant thought that ‘grumbling’ was a highly inadequate word to describe the blazing opposition that lighted Pat like a torch. He throbbed with it, like a car at rest with the engine running.
‘If we didn’t happen to be going in to Scoone you would have to walk to the church as usual,’ she reminded him.
‘Huch, who ever minds walking! We have fine talks when we’re walking, Duggie and me.’ Duggie was the shepherd’s son. ‘It’s wasting time at Sunday school when I might be going to Scoone that’s a fact. It’s not fair.’
‘Pat, I will not have you referring to Sunday school as a waste of time.’
‘You won’t have me at all if you’re not careful. I’ll die of a decline.’
‘Oh. What would bring that on?’
‘Lack of fresh air.’
She began to laugh. ‘Pat, you’re wonderful!’ But it was always the wrong thing to laugh at Pat. He took himself as seriously as an animal does.
‘All right, laugh!’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll be going to church on Sundays to put wreaths on my grave, that’s what you’ll be doing on Sundays, not going into Scoone!’
‘I shouldn’t dream of doing anything so extravagant. A few dog-daisies now and then when I’m passing is as much as you’ll get from me. Go and get your scarf; you’ll need it.’
‘A gravat! It’s March!’
‘It’s also cold. Get your scarf. It will help to keep off that decline.’
‘A lot you care about my decline, you and your daisies. A mean family the Grants always were. A poor mean lot. I’m very glad I’m a Rankin, and I’m very glad I don’t have to wear their horrible red tartan.’ Pat’s tattered green kilt was Macintyre, which went better with his red hair than the gay Grant. It had been part of Tommy’s mother’s web, and she, as a good Macintyre, had been glad to see her grandson in what she called a civilised cloth.
He stumped his way into the back of the car and sat there simmering, the despised ‘gravat’ flung in a limp disavowed heap at the far end of the seat.
‘Heathen aren’t supposed to go to church,’ he offered, as they slipped down the sandy road to the gate, the loose stones spurting from under the tyres.
‘Who is heathen?’ his mother asked, her mind on the road.
‘I am. I’m a Mohammedan.’
‘Then you have great need to go to a Christian church and be converted. Open the gate, Pat.’
‘I’ve no wish to be converted. I’m fine as I am.’ He held the gate open for them and shut it behind them. ‘I disapprove of the Bible,’ he said, as he got in again.
‘Then you can’t be a good Mohammedan.’
‘What for no?’
‘They have some of the Bible too.’
‘I bet they don’t have David!’
‘Don’t you approve of David?’ Grant asked.
‘A poor soppy thing, dancing and singing like a lassie. There’s not a soul in the Old Testament I’d trust to go to a sheep sale.’
He sat erect in the middle of the back seat, too alive with rebellion to relax, his bleak eye watching the road ahead in absent-minded fury. And it occurred to Grant that he might equally have slumped in a corner and sulked. He was glad that this cousin of his was a rude and erect flame of resentment and not a small collapsed bundle of self-pity.
The injured heathen got out at the church, still rude and erect, and walked away without a backward glance, to join the small group of children by the side door.
‘Will he behave, now he is there?’ Grant asked as Laura set the car in motion again.
‘Oh, yes. He really likes it, you know. And of course Douglas will be there: his Jonathan. A day when he couldn’t spend part of it laying down the law to Duggie would be a day wasted. He didn’t really believe that I would let him come to Scoone instead. It was just a try-on.’
‘It was a very effective try-on.’
‘Yes. There’s a lot of the actor in Pat.’
They had gone another two miles before the thought of Pat faded from his mind. And, then, quite suddenly, into the blank that Pat’s departure left, came the realisation that he was in a car. That he was shut into a car. He ceased on the instant to be an adult watching, tolerant and amused, the unreasonable antics of a child, and became a child watching, gibbering and aghast, the hostile advance of giants.
He let down the window on his side to its fullest extent. ‘Let me know if you feel that too much,’ he said.
‘You’ve been too long in London,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘Only people who live in towns are fresh-air fiends. Country people like a nice fug as a change from unlimited out-of-doors.’
‘I’ll put it up, if you like,’ he said, although his mouth was stiff with effort as he said the words.
‘No, of course not,’ she said, and began to talk about a car they had ordered.
So the old battle started. The old arguments, the old tricks, the old cajoling. The pointing out of the open windows, the reminding himself that it was only a car and could be stopped at any moment, the willing himself to consider a subject far removed from the present, the self-persuading that he was lucky to be alive at all. But the tide of his panic rose with a slow abominable menace. A black evil tide, scummy and revolting. Now it was round his chest, pressing and holding, so that he could hardly breathe. Now it was up to his throat, feeling round his windpipe, clutching his neck in a pincer embrace. In a moment it would be over his mouth.
‘Lalla, stop!’
‘Stop the car?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Yes.’
She brought the car to a standstill, and he got out on trembling legs and hung over the dry-stone dyke sucking in great mouthfuls of the clean air.
‘Are you feeling ill, Alan?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No, I just wanted to get out of the car.’
‘Oh,’ she said in a relieved tone. ‘Is that all!’