It is old Cranstoun, his face raptured and keen, hurrying along the street with his cane, straining forward to get some sense of what all the commotion is about. He bobs past the stalled coach in a sort of three-legged canter, but then suddenly pulls up stock-still and turns to gawk at the vehicle as if he’s just seen an apparition. For a long moment he just stands there, the milky old eyes taking in the matron, her voluminous mother and the tall fair-haired hero peering out the window behind them. Slowly, degree by degree, the old man’s expression works itself round from surprise to elation, and then he’s hustling for the door of the coach, all the while bellowing like some sort of mental defective with his hair set afire: “Be gad if it isn’t the explorer! It’s Mungo! Mungo Park come home to his people!”
Mungo had hoped to slip into town as inconspicuously as possible. He hadn’t written Ailie for a month. No one knew he was coming. His plan, impulsively formulated, was to surprise her. The work on the abridged version of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa had finally been completed — after a period of protracted torture that seemed Alighierian in its proportions — and he was free to spend the next several months in Scotland, relaxing, fishing, preparing the final version of the book, making love. He was particularly enthusiastic about this last prospect. Since he’d seen the error of his ways and given up the Baroness, his passion for Ailie had grown hotter and hotter. So hot in fact that he’d had trouble sleeping through the misty London nights. Spring came and went. Edwards badgered him. Sir Joseph ruled him with an iron hand. Then it was June. The abstract was finished on schedule and he was on his way to Scotland to lighten his fiancée’s heart.
But life isn’t always so simple.
For one thing, the crowd gathers round the coach so precipitously you’d think old Cranstoun had yelled: “Guineas! Fresh-minted guineas, free for the taking!” For another, the look in their eyes says that they’re not about to let Mungo off with anything less than a full-scale celebration and the good, rousing, whisky-washed, old-time hullabaloo the occasion demands. There is rapture on every face. Wondering hands reach out for the explorer, the matron and her mother look puzzled and offended, old Cranstoun stands at the open door like a footman. “Huzza!” shouts the crowd as a geyser of hats and wigs shoots high into the air, and now Jamie Hume is leading them in “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and Nat Cubbie is calling for a speech.
Mungo steps down from the coach to a roar of applause. He looks every inch the martyred hero, sallow, still a bit gaunt, the imprint of suffering and the indomitable will to conquer etched into his face. If anything, the past few months at his desk have taken more out of him than all the hopeless disease-ridden months of privation in Africa. But who’s to know that? All the crowd sees is their darling, grinning shyly, one of the greatest men Selkirkshire has ever produced, discoverer of the Niger, conqueror of Africa, why they watched him grow up! “Mungo!” they howl. And: “Speech!”
The explorer raises his hands on a roar and brings them down to a hush of expectation. There must be three hundred people in the street and more coming. Old friends, faces he grew up with. Finn Macpherson in a cobbler’s apron, grinning as if he’s just been named next in line for the Crown, Mistress Tullochgorm, Robbie Monboddo in a cleric’s collar, Georgie Scott. He doesn’t want to give a speech. He wants to burst in on Ailie, sweep her up in his arms. He wants to hike up to Fowlshiels and show his mother what her son has made of himself. But here are all these expectant faces looking up at him as if he could change water to wine or raise the dead or something. “All right,” he shouts, and then in a lower voice: “I’ll do my best.”
Immediately a call goes up from the rear of the press. “Speak up, lad: we canna hear ye.”
“I said that I’ll say a few words,” the explorer shouts, already at a loss for what to say next. A hush falls over the crowd. The explorer can hear the hurried footsteps of the latecomers, stifled shouts, doors slamming in the distance. “I–I’m glad to be back home at Selkirk”—a cheer goes up—”among my friends, and I—”
“Tell us about the black nigger cannibals!” someone shouts.
“Aye!” adds another. “Did they torture ye?”
“Cattul!” a powerful voice peals. “Wot sort o’ cattul has they got over there?”
“—I really hadn’t intended to make a speech,” Mungo stammers to a renewed roar, beginning to feel as if he were running for office, “. . you see I’d been meaning to come in quiet like so as to see my loved ones first. .”
“Hoooo! He’s a hot-blooded mon, all right!”
“It’s Ailie he’ll be wantin’ to see, no mistaking.”
The hoi polloi take up the refrain, joyous, mindless, pullulating with excitement—”Ailie! Ailie! Ailie!”—and the next moment the explorer is swept up on their shoulders and carted off in triumph. Through the square and down the street, the crowd swelling, dogs barking, someone strangling a set of pipes and another beating a snare drum. And all the while the crowd chanting “Ailie! Ailie! Ailie!”
Before he can resist or even fully comprehend what’s happening, he finds himself set down before the gate at Dr. Anderson’s house, his bags at his feet, fifty or sixty people cheering at his back. Suddenly the front door swings open and there she is, Ailie, in a bonnet and housedress, sleeves rolled up, staring out in bewilderment at the brouhaha in her front yard. The crowd lets loose at the sight of her, surging toward an emotional orgasm, some primitive hysterical sense of completion demanding that they join the two principals. Arms are raised, the cheers are deafening, the pipes turn to a strathspey and a whole section of the crowd launches into a mad jig.
The gate has been unlatched. There’s an arm on Mungo’s shoulder, someone gives him a gentle nudge and then he’s walking up the path toward her, the cheers like waves breaking on a beach, Ailie tiny, silken-haired, her lips and eyes beckoning like the promise of water at the far end of an expanse of desert. Three and a half years, all those nights of scorching need and seductive dream, his feet on the front steps, something else in her eyes now, some amalgam of recognition, hurt and surprise, something proud and belligerent in the face of the crowd. “Ailie,” he whispers, at the summit of the steps, his arms spread wide.
“Take her up in yer arms, lad!”
“Kiss her!”
The noise is tumultuous, apocalyptic.
He looks into her eyes. They say no. They say Fve waited too long. They say Penelope be damned.
She shuts the door in his face.
♦ THE LONG ARM ♦
He gels drunk that first night back. Stinking, puking drunk. Somebody has to send up to Fowlshiels for his brother Adam to come on down and take him home. The next morning he wakes in the back room of his boyhood home in a welter of younger brothers and sisters. He has a violent headache. His bones feel hollow. He thinks of Ailie and feels sick. Suddenly the door bursts open and his mother swoops into the room and buries herself in his arms, crying over him as if he were a corpse. His brother stands in the doorway, a short, dark-haired figure beside him. For one wild moment he thinks it’s Ailie — Ailie softened by a night’s reflection, Ailie come back to him. It is Zander.
After a breakfast of milk brose, bannocks, fried eggs and rashers, fresh-baked bread, finnan haddie, potatoes, onions, small beer and tea (his mother thought he was looking peaked), he trundles his way down to the river with Zander and settles himself in the long grass opposite Newark Castle. It is warm. The sun hits the river with a slap before it is filtered to softness in the trees. A grasshopper balances on every blade of grass, a butterfly on every flower. Mungo plucks a heather leaf and chews it. After awhile he turns to Zander. They’ve been talking village gossip — who’d married whom, who’d died, got rich, went off to fight the French. Neither has mentioned Africa, or Ailie. “So she thinks I’ve deserted her?”