‘His Glasgow accent.’
‘Yes. It is pretty repellent.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I mean, every time he opens his mouth his audience is reminded of the possibility of being ruled from Glasgow: a fate worse than death.’
‘When he was talking about the beauty of the Islands he mentioned some sands that “sing”. Do you know anything about them?’
‘I seem to,’ said Tommy, not interested. ‘On Barra or Berneray or somewhere.’
‘On Cladda, he said.’
‘Yes, perhaps it’s Cladda. Do you think that boat at Lochan Dhu will last a season or two yet?’
‘Can I go and get the Clarion from Bella now?’ asked Pat, having wolfed four scones and a slab of cake with the neat speed of a sheep-dog consuming a stolen tit-bit.
‘If she has finished with it,’ his mother said.
‘Uch, she’ll have finished with it this long time,’ Pat said. ‘She only reads the bits about the stars.’ ‘Stars?’ said Grant, as the door closed behind Pat. ‘Film stars?’
‘No,’ Laura said. ‘The Great Bear and Co.’
‘Oh. The day as arranged by Sirius, Vega, and Capella.’
‘Yes. In Lewis they have to wait for the second-sight, she says. It’s a fine convenient thing to have the future in the paper every day.’
‘What does Pat want with the Clarion?’
‘The strip, of course. Two objects called Tolly and Snib. I can’t remember whether they are ducks or rabbits.’
So Grant had to wait until Pat had finished with Tolly and Snib, and by that time both Laura and Tommy had taken themselves off, the one to the kitchen and the other to out-of-doors, so that he was left alone with the silent child on the mat, endlessly rearranging her treasures. He took the tidily-folded paper from Pat ceremoniously, and as Pat went away he unfolded it with controlled interest. It was a Scottish edition and apart from the ‘middles’ the paper was crammed with the most parochial of news, but there seemed to be nothing about yesterday’s railway event in it. To and fro he went, through the jungle of unimportances, like a terrier routing through bracken, and at last he came on it: a tiny paragraph at the bottom of a column, down among the bicycle accidents and the centenarians. ‘MAN DIES IN TRAIN’, said the inconspicuous heading. And under the heading was a succinct statement:
On the arrival of the Flying Highlander at its destination yesterday morning it was found that one of the passengers, a young Frenchman, Charles Martin, had died during the night. It is understood that the death was due to natural causes, but since the death occurred in England, the body is being returned to London for an inquest.
‘French!’ he said aloud, and Bridget looked up from her playthings to watch him.
French? Surely not! Surely not?
The face, yes. Perhaps. The face quite likely. But not that writing. That very English, schoolboy writing.
Had the paper not belonged to B Seven at all?
Had he just picked it up? In a restaurant where he was having a meal before boarding the train, perhaps. The chairs of station dining-rooms were habitually strewn with the discarded papers of those who had eaten there. Or in his home, for that matter; or his rooms or wherever he lived. He might have come by the paper in a score of casual ways.
Or, of course, he might be a Frenchman who was educated in England, so that the round untidy script was substituted for the slanting elegant spidery handwriting of his inheritance. There was nothing fundamentally incompatible with B Seven having been the author of those pencilled lines.
All the same, it was an oddity.
And in cases of sudden death, however natural, oddities have importance. When he first came in contact with B Seven he was so divorced from his professional self, so detached from the world at large, that he had considered the matter as any other sleep-sodden civilian would. B Seven had been for him merely the young dead occupant of a whisky-sodden compartment who was being mauled about by a furiously impatient sleeping-car attendant. Now he became something quite different; he became The Subject Of An Inquest. A professional matter; a matter bound by rules and regulations; a matter to be proceeded with circumspectly, with due decorum and by the book. And it occurred to Grant for the first time that his abstraction of that newspaper might be held, if orthodoxy must be pushed to its furthest point, to be a little irregular. It had been an entirely unintended abstraction; an accidental purloining. But it had, if one had to be analytical about it, been a removal of evidence.
While Grant was debating the matter, Laura came back from the kitchen and said: ‘Alan, I want you to do something for me.’
She took her mending basket and brought it over to a chair beside him.
‘Anything I can do.’
‘Pat is sticking in his toes about something that he has to do and I want you to talk him into it. You’re his hero, and he will listen to you.’
‘It isn’t about presenting a bouquet, by any chance?’
‘How did you know? Has he talked about it to you already?’
‘He just mentioned it this morning on the loch.’
‘You didn’t take his side, did you?’
‘With you in the background! No. I expressed the opinion that it was a great honour.’
‘Was he convinced?’
‘No. He thinks the whole thing is “havers”.’
‘So it is. The hall has been in unofficial use for weeks. But the glen people spent a lot of money and energy on getting that thing put up, and it is only right that it should be opened with a “splash”.’
‘But does it have to be Pat who presents the bouquet?’
‘Yes. If he doesn’t do it, the MacFadyean’s Willie will.’
‘Laura, you shock me.’
‘I wouldn’t if you could see the MacFadyean’s Willie. He looks like a frog with elephantiasis. And his socks are always falling down. It should be a little girl’s business, but there is no female child of the right age in the glen. So it rests between Pat and the MacFadyean’s Willie. And quite apart from Pat’s looking nicer, it is right that someone from Clune should do it. And don’t say “Why?” and don’t say I shock you. You just see what you can do to talk Pat into it.’
‘I’ll try,’ Grant said, smiling at her. ‘Who is his Viscountess?’
‘Lady Kentallen.’
‘The dowager?’
‘The widow, you mean. There is only one, so far. Her boy isn’t old enough yet to be married.’
‘How did you get her?’
‘She was at school with me. At St Louisa’s.’
‘Oh: blackmail. The tyranny of auld lang syne.’
‘Tyranny nothing,’ said Laura. ‘She was glad to come and do the chore. She’s a darling.’
‘The best way to bring Pat up to his bit would be to make her attractive in his eyes.’
‘She’s ragingly attractive.’
‘I don’t mean that way. I mean, make her good at something he admires.’
‘She’s an expert with a fly,’ Laura said doubtfully, ‘but I don’t know that Pat would find that very impressive. He just thinks that someone who can’t fish is abnormal.’
‘I suppose you couldn’t endow her with a few revolutionary tendencies.’
‘Revolutionary!’ said Laura, her eye brightening. ‘Now that’s an idea. Revolutionary. She used to be a little on the pink side. She did it “to annoy Miles and Georgiana”, she used to say. They are her parents. She was never very serious about it; she was much too good-looking to need anything like that. But I might build something on that foundation. Yes. We might make her a revolutionary.’
The quirks that women are reduced to! thought Grant, watching her needle nicker through the wool of the sock she was darning; and went back to considering his own problem. He was still considering it when he went to bed. But before he went to sleep he decided that he would write to Bryce in the morning. It would be to all intents a letter reporting his arrival in these healthful surroundings and his hope to be better in less time than the doctor had given him, but in the course of it he would take the opportunity of putting himself in the right by passing the knowledge of the newspaper’s presence on to those whom it might concern.